the promise of time

THE PROMISE OF TIME

SAITYA BRATA DAS

Th e Promise of TimeTowards a Phenomenology of Promise

INDIAN INSTITUTE OF ADVANCED STUDYRASHTRAPATI NIVAS, SHIMLA

First published 2011

Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced

or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the written permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 978-81-7986-091-5

Published by Th e Secretary

Indian Institute of Advanced StudyRashtrapati Nivas, Shimla-171005

Typeset at Sai Graphic Design, New Delhiand printed at Pearl Off set Pvt. Ltd., Kirti Nagar, New Delhi

ForMy dear father

Who fi rst taught me to loveTh e love of wisdom: philo-sophia

Acknowledgements

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

What does it mean to be thankful, and to say thanks? Th is question, which is at the very heart of an essential thinking, of language and of our relation to the others, is what has always been a matter of thinking for me, as if, as it were, to think itself is to thank, to be thankful for the arrival of thinking. Th erefore, thinkers like Martin Heidegger see the connection, nay, discover at the very heart of thinkingfor thinking too has its heart, it too has its tears and ecstasythe light of thankfulness: to think is to thank, to be thankful, thankful for the advent of thinking, for the event of thinking coming to us. Th erefore, a thinker does not possess thinking, even less knowledge: thinking is what is gifted to the thinker for which he says, simply, thanks. Th ere lies the dignity and nobility of thinking itself.

So I thank, not only for the gift of thinking coming to me, for this mournful joy of the experience of thinking, but all those and all that who inspired me have continued to inspire me to open myself to the joyous coming of thinking; all those who shared the ecstasy and tears of my thinking. Th ere is Franson Manjali, under whose inspiration I have written from the day I met him, and I will write in the days to come, whatever will come to me as gift, this event of thinking. Th ere is Soumyabrata Choudhury, my loving brother, from whom I have learnt so much, learning never to lose myself in despair and hopelessness. Renowned French Philosopher Grard Bensussan, who was my mentor during my stay at Universit Strasbourg and at

Maison des Sciences de LHomme, Paris where I was a post doctorate fellow during 2006-2007, the one who has never ceased to be my mentor, my philosopher and teacher for all these years. From him I have learnt a great deal, namely, to philosophize. To him I acknowledge hereby my deepest gratitude. Th anks to the advent of Sarita, my beloved wife, who has inspired me to live my life anew; from whom once more I have learnt to see the open sea and the blue sky. Th ese people have had hopes in me and this manuscript recounts, in its own way, the story of such a hope contra all hopelessness, and the necessity of such an affi rmation.

Th anks to this beautiful Shimla and this wonderful Institute that have both soothed my wounded soul at a diffi cult period of life; all the lovely people with whom I lived, joyously; all the local, lovely friends I have made at ShimlaMridula and Pankaj above allwho gave me company in my lonely hours, away from home and away from Delhi. Th e Director, Professor Peter Ronald deSouza has inspired me in his own peculiar way, without words, silently, whose language I felt I understood. I wish to thank hereby Dr. Debarshi Sen for his patience and professional effi ciency with which he brought out this book in so little time. Mr. Ravi Shankar, the typesetter, has made this book look so beautiful; thanks goes to him as well!

Th ere is my father who gifted me this life, whom I now gift this book, which has already been given to me by him. And thanks goes to the loveliest and sweetest mother of mine, and my siblings who have silently inspired me all these years, to whom I can return nothing but love and my infi nite gratitude. And, lastly, thanks to this manuscript itself, which henceforth will have its own life, which will now onwards live without me, outside and away from me, forget me and leave me without a name. Th is book, for some intimate reason, is dear to me, for somehow in it I have sought to translate the language of my own soul. But since now it is going out to the world, its language is no longer the language of my soul but I hope it will become the language of the world-soul where human beings live, suff er and hope for redemption.

viii Acknowledgements

Beginning at the moment of deepest catastropheTh ere exists the chance for redemption.

Gershom Scholem

Th e following chapters have been published previously

1. Th e fi rst chapter of the fi rst part Th e Open originally appeared in Kritike http://www.kritike.org/journal/issue_6/das_december2009.pdf

2. An earlier version of the second part Th e Lightening Flash appeared in Philosophical Forum (Willey Blackwell, fall 2010) vol. 41, issue 3, p. 315-345.

3. Th e Abyss of Human Freedom is published in Journal of Indian Council of Philosophical Research, October-December 2010, vol. XXVII, no 4, p.91-104.

4. Of Pain is published in Journal of Comparative and Continental philosophy (New York: Equinox Publishers, May 2011), vol. 3: 1.

5. A revised version of the chapter Th e Metaphysics of Language is published as Th e Destinal Question of Language in Kriterion (Spring 2011, issue 123).

6. Th e Commandment of Love: Messianicity and Exemplarity in Franz Rosenzweig is read as paper at the 6th Annual Philosophy Conference at Athens Institute for Education and Research, held at Athens, Greece, held during 30 May - 2 June 2011.

7. Fragments in Epilogue section is read as paper called Of Fatigue, Of Patience Finitude, Writing, Mourning in a seminar on Levinas Blanchot: Penser La Diff erence, organized by UNESCO, Paris from 13-16 November 2006.

Contents

Acknowledgements vii

Foreword by Grard Bensussan xv

Premise 1

PROLOGUE

Th e Promise of Time 5To Come/Th e Claim of Redemption and the Question of History/Truth beyond Cognition/Existence/Messianic/Th e Lightning Flash of Language/Wandering, Th inking/ Confi guration Saying

Radical Finitude 20Th e Immemorial/Th e Mournful Gift/the Logic of the World/Mortality/Introducing this Work

PART I CONFIGURATION

Th e Open 39

Judgement and History: 51Of History/ Metaphysics and Violence/Th e Passion of Potentiality

Transfi guration, Interruption 76

Th e Logic of Origin 87Of Beginning/Madness/Astonishment

Repetition 108Repetition and Recollection/ Moment

Language and Death 119Th e States of Exception/Th e Facticity of Love and Th e Facticity of Language/Th e Gift of Language

Confi guration 132Caesura/Th e Star of Redemption/ Discontinuous Finitude/En-framing, Revelation/Lightning, Clearing/ Constellation of Temporalities/ Transfi nitude

PART II THE LIGHTNING FLASH

Th e Language of the Mortals 161Th e Presupposition//Kierkegaards Indirect Communication

Pain 175Work and Pain/Th e Melancholic Gift/ Naming and Overnaming/Th inking and Th anking

Apollos Lightning Strike 201Th e Lightning Flash/Th e Divine Violence

Revelation 210Th e Argument/Synthesis without Continuum/Language as Revelation in Schellings Philosophy of Freedom

PART III EVENT

Of Event 225Th e Question of Event and the Limit of Foundation/ Freedom, Time and Existence/Origin, Leap, Event

Love and Death 243

Th e Sense of Freedom 251

Th e Irreducible Remainder 267

Th e Abyss of Human Freedom 291Th e No-Th ing of Freedom and the Finitude of Man/Causality as a Problem of Freedom/Philosophy as Strife

xii Contents

PART IV MESSIANICITY

Th e Commandment of Love 305Exemplarity of Translation/the Aporia of Love/Revelation of Love/Th e Th eologico-Political

PART V ON PHILOSOPHY

Erotic and Philosophic 343

On Philosophical Research 354Th e Th ought of Death/ Philosophical Research/Notes on this Work

EPILOGUEFragments 381

Notes 399

Bibliography 407

Index 415

Contents xiii

Foreword

Between End and Beginning: The Time of Speech

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

It is under this double and confl icting exigency according to which an object commands a writing that messianism as such, and

especially its very paradigm, the messianic as the index of time comes to be of help in the most lively part of this work (I am thinking particularly of the fourth part of the book) and brings it relief with its counter-dialectical resources. For this phenomenology of the promise is necessarily a phenomenology of the event and, therefore, a phenomenology of the impossible, which is not far from signifying (but that would indeed be a point that could be discussedas we used to do together in Strasbourg not long ago!) an impossible phenomenology. What is really an event if not an aff ectivity preceding its own possibility? How, then, can such impossible, impossible before being real, allows it to be thought, and furthermore, phenomenological thought? Satya Das does this according to the time of the end and the time of beginning and he does it again as well on the basis of language.

Th e author here explains in particular that the event bears together and supports the end and the beginning in a monstrous coupling which would signify something like a logic of the world. Th ere is, in fact, between the end and beginning a complex pairing that the messianism alone can achieve to determine it without elucidating it, according to a causal knowledge. Th e end promises. Th e beginning begins only from a kind of impossibility; because it promises the promise. Th us, what messianism names fi rst and foremost is an experience of temporality of the awaiting and of the decision, and of the relation to the expected event and its reversal. Th us, messianism would be an irremissible impossibility of thinking whatever is referred to as the origin. Th e origin will always be older than the objects we want to genealogize by retracing them to their point of departure. It forbids or interrupts the possibility of linking the beginning and the end as two moments, two given points of time that are indiff erent and interlinked by virtue of their being having qualitatively similar presents. Formalized representations of time force us to consider that what happens in the present at a given point of time could also happen in an other present having the same quality of presence, at a given point of time that is anterior and similar. It is against these representations that messianism has its signifi cance. And thats where we grasp its fundamental diff erence in relation to teleology, eschatology, progressivism and all types of fi nalism. Freedom, existence and experienced time from then on appear as the very

xvi Foreword

endurance of the unexpected and unconditional of the messianic arrival and it is Satya Das own style of working with this messianic paradigm that I on my part have tried to elaborate as a novel thought of the event.

To say that the beginning promises the promise is to say that it puts it ahead of itself. Th e beginning is the diff erence, altogether the coming of the promise (without beginning, theres no promise) and the projection that dismisses its very appearance (without beginning, the promise would always be accomplished ipso facto). It is the promise itself that is promised and it is time itself which is structured like promise.

As the title Th e Promise of Time suggests, this promising structure of time is co-originarily associated with the question of language, a paradisiacal language in which the spoken language of naming is restrained and reserved. Here the inspiration comes from Rosenzweig who was able to link time and the waiting for language and the alterity of the other man, who is speaking and awaiting. Th e delinking, or in the fi nal analysis, redemption itself commands the never ultimate of the relation to the other, of the speech addressed to him, of time and of the absolute indetermination of the Messiah. Rosenzweigs never ultimate intends an arrival but without ever leaving for the assured departure of a language to be translated. Such is the fi ne line along which all speech moves. We always counter pose the ceaseless overcoming faced with absolute confusion (as many languages as there are subjects to speak) and the uncertain promise of absolute comprehension (one language for all subjects). Speaking is thus caught in the momentum that proceeds from an impossible origin to an event promised but not yet happened. Th is promise of speech, this Versprechen has nothing to do with belief, with values, with an intention or a reference. It is speech itself, language itself, das Versprechen spricht, the promise speaking. And as Derrida says in Monolingualism of the Other, where I see a certain proximity to Rosenzweig, it is not possible to speak outside or without that promise.

Language is, therefore, the rare singular power of aff ect and of time. It exceeds itself; it is not adequate to the beingness of its object, and even less to the being that it intends. Th is power is its impotenceor rather, simply the opposite: it does not know that

Foreword xvii

it is power-less to know, that it is the very fragility that gives it the power to say that it can not say, not what she can not say, but its very ineff ability. Language is self-transcendence par excellence.

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

xviii Foreword

as much as a remembrance of the future. Th e weakness of the past waits for a possible rectifi cation, to come, promised by time. Th e present is thus never contemporary to itself, purely adequate to a full presence, heedless of the past and headed for the future. If all that happens happened in the pure present, time would never be a surprise, a grasping of the subject. But time is precisely this dispossession of mastery, the subject seized in the moment. Between the two allegories, namely the Angel of Benjamin, and Nietzsches Postern, there is a kind of repulsive affi nity, both challenging and diffi cult.

It seems incontestable to me that the ethics of fi nitude according to Satya Das cannot be anything other than an ethics of the temporality and of the temporalization magnetized by the ever impossible fulguration of the ethical moment. I see in this one of the richest areas of this beautiful book and I hope it will have numerous and diverse readers.

Grard Bensussan University of Strasbourg

Foreword xix

Premise

Th is mortal called man is an open existence, exposed to mortality and free towards the coming that is revealed to him in lightning fl ash. Free towards the ever new possibility of beginning, the mortal is endowed with the gift of time, as if an eternity that remains beyond his death, a time always to come. In this messianic remnant of time alone lies redemptive fulfi llment for the mortalsin the possibility of the ever new beginning in the time to come.

It is this question of time to come, the affi rmation of a redemptive future that is pursued in this work. It occurs as and in a confi guration of questions, which is not a system but rather, lets say, a gesture or style of pursuing a thought which is repetitively and, therefore, discontinuously seized as questions. Th ese are the questions of mortality and temporality, of the lightning fl ash of language that reveals man, beyond any predica-tive historical closure, his fi nitude and the Openness where man fi nds himself exposed to the event of coming, to the redemptive fulfi lment in this coming itself, which he anticipates in an existential attunement of hope. All these questions are introduced in the movement of confi guration, or constellation that affi rms the coming time, and feels the requirement of redemption in hope, beyond all that is given to our historical existence. Th ese exercises of thinking are to be called: confi guration thinking.

Prologue

Th e Promise of Time

To Come

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

6 THE PROMISE OF TIME

if politics and history is not to be mere reductive totalization of this promise in the name of the task of an immanent negativity (since it must already presuppose the originary promise of their redemptive fulfi lment), then it will be necessary here to think another notion of history and politics outside this given sense of these concepts that means, outside their ground in metaphysicshistory that opens itself up to the intensity of the messianic fulfi lment, to the redemption of the violence of history itself.

What is to think to come, understood in the verbal resonance of the infi nitive to? What does it mean now or, what is this now?to think this to come again, to think of the promise and the gift of event, to think again the remnant of time after the end of time, after each end and after each completion, after each after, this hope for an infi nite after only because it is already an infi nite before? Is it necessary now, more than ever before and more than ever after, precisely here and now, with an urgency of the moment, which is also urgency of each moment and each place, to be borne with the principle of hopeas Ernst Bloch (1995) names this principletill and beyond, till and after death when the large-scale devastation and devaluation of all values seemed to have been accomplished, and seem to be accomplishing all the time? What, whence, is the necessity of hope now when all hopes seemed to have vanished from life, and life appears now more unredeemed and damaged than ever before, and yet whose claim of redemption has remained, precisely because of its utter impoverishment, undiminished, whose distant light is not yet extinguished?

The Claim of Redemption and the Question of History

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

Th e Promise of Time 7

politics and history, not to take side of death against life, nor to take side of life against death, but to take side of future, to take the side from future which is always coming. Th is necessity of an after after every after, this not yet that must remain not yet is a necessity of another faith, of another promise and another thought of revelation. Th is faith is the one that is not satisfi ed merely being attached as an appendix to reason, nor merely with positing another being as a transcendental object somewhere in a transcendental world beyond this world. It is, rather, a thought of promise in the not yet which is rescued from the womb of the damaged present; it is to gather together again those sparks after the vessel is broken once into thousand pieces.

Th is thought of the affi rmative, which is perhaps the most urgent task of thinking that we call philosophical, demands that the metaphysical foundation of our history and politics be made manifest and un-worked so that thinking can inaugurate another history which is not satisfi ed merely with grasping what has happened on the basis of its apophansis, but one that ecstatically remains open to the immemorial and to the incalculable and the unconditional arrival. Th is is to envisage an ecstatic history without monuments or monumentality whose the historical task of inauguration must accompany the un-working of the closure of immanence of self-presence. In this sense, this historical task of rescuing the redemptive possibility of the advent from any immanence of apophantic closure is inseparable from the question of the possibility of truth, truth that releases in philosophical contemplation that element of the immemorial from the violence of cognition.

Truth beyond Cognition

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


be saturated with the knowledge of the phenomenon presently given, is only rescued truth, wrested truth. It is truth that momentarily advents in the midst of existence, like what Benjamin says of profane illumination that makes its sudden apparition felt when dialectics comes to a standstill (Benjamin 2002, p. 10). Th is truth, in contrast to the categorical cognition of given presences, calls forth an entirely diff erent notion of temporality and historicality, an entirely diff erent notion of phenomenality: not the phenomenality that is categorically grasped in the apophantic judgement but a phenomenality when the unapparent in a lightning fl ash makes itself felt, that dispropriates us, that takes away from us the foundation of language and judgement and exposes us to the openness of time, opening to the immemorial and to the Not Yet. Th is open is not a topological or ontological site but the monstrous site of history where event arrives as an event, the coming comes into presence. Th is coming cannot be predicated on the basis of what has come, or what would come to pass by. It is a coming that moves history or better inaugurates history out of a fundamental fi nitude of our being.

What, then, does it mean to come? Lets say, to come is the occurring of the truth of existence, the truth of the occurring of existence, the truth of the occurring itself, or still better, the occurrence of truth itself. It is this occurring, this event before anything that has occurred is the true and genuine notion of the historical. In this sense truth is essentially historical, but more originally understood, no longer as that is assimilable to the periodic breaks belonging to the accumulative gathering of truth, but truth as this epochal break itself, which for that matter is to be thought as historical before history, before memory and before monumentality.

Existence

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


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


What is to be thought is presencing namely presences.

A new diffi culty arises: this is clearly a tautology. Indeed! Th is is a genuine tautology: it names the same only once and indeed as itself.

We are here in the domain of the unapparent: presencing itself presences.

Th e name for what is addressed in this state of aff airs is: which is neither being nor simply being, but :

Presencing presences itself (Heidegger 2003, p.79)

And little later, again,

I name the thinking herein question tautological thinking. It is the primordial sense of phenomenology. Further, this kind of thinking is before any possible distinction between theory and praxis. To understand this, we need to learn to distinguish between path and method. In philosophy, there are only paths; in sciences, on the contrary, there are only methods, that is, modes of procedure.

Th us understood, phenomenology is a path that leads away to come before and it lets that before which it is led to show itself. Th is phenomenology is a phenomenology of the unapparent. (Heidegger 2003, p. 80).

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


calls irreducible remainder, a not yet of a past, an irrecuperable past that continuously exposes existence to its inexhaustible outside, to its un-predicative past of promise. What renders existence an irreducible remainderits originary non-closure is nothing but its inextricable mortalityits radical fi nitude that refuses to be lifted up unto thought completely. Th is fundamental incompletion of existence, its originary un-accomplishment and non-work refuses Hegelian Aufhebung, the consolation of the concept, and the concepts false promise of infi nitude and Absolute. Th e coming is the advent of time itself cannot be thought within any reductive historical-metaphysical totalization, or within the immanence of a self-presencing Subject. It is the positive beyond any immanence of negativity. Such is the presencing of presence.

So it is with Rosenzweig. If the concept, the Absolute Concepts promise of infi nite and immortality is a false, vain consolation for the mortal beings, it is because philosophy, as the cognition of the All presupposesat the same time denying this presuppositionthat death is Nothing for the mortals if it cannot be made into work for the sake of the universal. In this way, the multiple singularities of mortal cries will not be heard in the universal pathos of the One Absolute, for Absolute can only be One and be One only. What would the value of a system be, a system of philosophy (for it is question of value and not of knowledge) for the mortal beings who are individuated and singularized by its mortality, and yet this morality is foreclosed in order to make possible of a system of categories? Since existence, which is fi nite and mortal, is not enclosed within any philosophical discourse of totality or is not consoled by the vain consolation of the concept, existence is thereby granted the gift, in its mortality, of a time to come which Rosenzweig thinks in a messianic manner as redemption that is beyond the concept and beyond any closure, which is an eternal remnant of time, or a time of remnant that is to arrive eternally. It is always to come because it is the event of coming itself.

Schelling, Heidegger, and Rosenzweigin their irreducibly singular mannersare thinkers of coming and of mortality, of promise and of fi nitude, of future and of the gift. One can name them as the thinkers of fi nitude.


Messianic

Th e messianic affi rmation of the coming has nothing of the theological messianism about it, at least in the given recognizable form of a religious tradition. It is, to say with Jacques Derrida, a messianicity without messianism, a messianicity that affi rms unconditionally the promise of the other, or opens itself, outside totality or system, to this promise of the other who is always to come in each hic et nunc. In his Monolingualism of the Other or Prosthesis of Origin, Derrida writes about the untotalizable promise of future and its prosthetic origin:

But the fact that there is no necessarily determinate content in this promise of the other, and in the language of the other does not make any less indisputable its opening up of speech by something that resembles messianism, soteriology, or, eschatology. It is structural opening, the messianicity, without which messianism itself, in the strict or literal sense, would not be possible. Unless, perhaps, this originary promise without any proper content is, precisely, messianism. And unless all messianism demands for itself this rigorous and barren severity, this messianicity shorn of everything (Derrida 1998, p. 68).

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

All movement of totalization seeks to denude the future of its sense and to rob our mortality of its aff ection. It does not know


true mourning, and knows not the movement of hope. In order to counter this movement of totalization that is permeating in all aspects of our lives to such an extent that such a totality today does not know any totality that has limits, territory or locality, it is necessary to introduce another movementwithout thetic, positing dialectical violence of conceptthe redemptive movement of unconditional promise and the gift of time where time itself times, or presencing itself presences, a promise of coming outside violence of immanence of self-consuming presences.

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


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

The Lightning Flash of Language

In what sense has the tragic-heroic pathos of reconciliation today lost its redemptive meaning if not in the sense that the immemorial promise and gift is only thought within the notion of an epochal totality? When the notion of promise is appropriated and is sought to be mastered by inscribing it into a categorical conceptual apparatus, then languagebereft of remembrance and promisereifi es what has become of presence, the given presence, and forgets the immemorial promise given in the language of naming, in the dignity of the name. Th en the categorical task of cognition, its labour of predication robs language its linguistic essence, that of welcoming the advent to arrive that lies outside the predicative proposition. Th e movement of confi guration that outside the cognitive categorical totality rescues the promise in saying and welcomes in a messianic hope the advent to come without violence is what Rosenzweig calls language-thinking (Rosenzweig 2000, pp. 109-139). What arrives in philosophical language, according to Rosenzweig, is not the universal essence of the One, but the linguistic essence of the fi nite singulars which is the multiple singulars exposure or abandonment to their singularly irreducible fi nitude. Th e linguistic essence of the fi nite beings, who are irreducibly multiple and singulars, is in this intrinsic intimacy with those beings pure exposure to their fi nitude.

Similarly for Heidegger too, the phenomenology of the unapparent has an essential relation to the naming the language of man who is essentially this fi nite being. Th inking too, insofar it comes


to us and that we never go to thinking and is a gift from a site wholly otherwise than man, arrives on the basis of our fi nitude that demands that it is to be thanked. Th e dignity and nobility of thinking lays in this recognition. With this thankfulness there is receptivityin so far our fi nitude renders us, like an open wound, being receptivewelcoming the advent of coming, or to the presencing of the presence. Language, even before it is categorical cognition of given presences in apophansis, is the naming-saying that welcomes the unapparent apparition, i.e., the letting being as such to appear. With thankfulness and gratitude, mortals welcome the coming and receive the future. Th is promise of future is what the wanderer-thinker, in his path of thinking, contemplates and is intimated at during sudden lightning fl ashes, for the advent of which he must be ready to take a leap, and open his soul to the future of thinking itself, without making a system out of it, without totalizing it. Language is this exposure, or this abandonment to the excessive light of the sudden apparition of the otherwise that in the lucidity of the coming blinds him with its brilliancy.

In traditional messianic religions, the coming of Messiah is something like violence. It is violence unlike any other violence, violence without the violence of law, of what Benjamin calls divine violence as distinguished from law-positing and law-preserving violence. It is such a lightning fl ash that the poet Hlderlin speaks as the strike of Apollo: in relation to this momentary apparition of the unapparent, the poet-wanderer or the philosopher is always belated. Hence he must arrive beforehand, like the Nietzschean philosopher of heralding, announcing the unapparent apparition, implying the presencing that itself presences, the coming itself that comes, and not like the owl of Minerva taking its fl ight at the dusk of history.

Wandering, Thinking

In philosophy, there are only paths; in sciences, on the contrary, there are only methods, that is, modes of procedure.

Heidegger (2003, p. 80)

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


joining of those mountain paths. Th ese joints are co-junctions of the disjointed without any prior principle. One may call such an experience a constellation or confi guration of thinking. Th e experience of wandering on the path of thinking refuses gathering, or collecting into unity, even if it is unity with diff erence. Th inking moves in pathways and not in methods, i.e., modes of procedures (Ibid.). It is tempered with its own dispersal and fragmentation, and thereby refuses to have to do with the unity of a thesis. Th e temporality of the wandering is like relation to a time that has already happened, occurred to which it is joined as a heterogonous assemblage, a constellation of paths, or a confi guration of discontinuous ways. What is to come must have happened, already always, at a moment of lucid darkness wherefrom time itself begins its journey, and spacing emerges. Th is is to say: presencing itself presences. Unlike the dialectical-speculative process of a history leading straight to the Absolute, wandering is not succession of instants though, because of his fi nitude and mortality, the wanderer relates to himself as a point in-between. To exist is to fi nd oneself in this in-between which is, for that matter, absence of times presence and absence of spaces presence, the in-between that opens itself on both sides to the indefi nite, incalculable lengthening of time, as if time stretches out without beginning and without end. Th inking, philosophical thinking is this exposure to this time before time that advents as lightning fl ash where the immemorial presents itself as unapparent apparition.

Th e wanderer-thinker therefore constantly exposes himself to his non-condition. It is in this sense that Heidegger speaks of Dasein as the placeholder of nothing (Heidegger 1998, p. 91), the placeholder of the outside. It is like the caesura of a resonance, which in resonating, inscribes an interval in the pathway of thinking. Th inking is this great caesural resonance that astonishes the wanderer-thinker as he moves along in the great winding paths of solitary mountains. Wandering, the poet-thinker makes the movement, the movement of infi nity outside the dialectical thesis and anti-thesis. Th erefore, wandering is non-dialectical movement par excellence. Th is wandering, which itself is caesural resonance, repeats itself and through this repetition brings something new that in its advent astonishes him, surprises him, throws him outside of himself, unto the open, unto that site of encounter with the advent. Repetition here never mimetically


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

Configuration Saying

Th erefore, the necessity: to repeat the truth of the advent, to repeat the advent of truth, repetitively, to be seized by the advent this is coming and always remaining to come. Th ere is always something like a universality of thinking, not the universality of the concept but the universality of the singular each time. Language of thinking bears this singularity of the universal through its multiple repetitions. Th e task, through this diff erential repetition, and universalizing the singular presencing of presence, is to preserve each time anew the excess of this event of unapparent apparition without reducing it to any immanence of predicates and presently given presents. Th erefore, there arises the necessity to say, again and again, each time anew, in the poetic naming-language of mortals that lets the unapparent appear, without reducing it to the universality of the categorical cognitive grasp. Since the advent of the coming in its momentary apparition discontinues, suspends, interrupts itself, it does not belong to any discourse of totality or system. It does not fi nd itself as to its own ground and condition. Such an advent that resonates in every poetical saying says the whole and yet remains outside of any totality. It is what the present writer shall call confi guration saying, which is not a method, for it does follow any ism as such but a gesture, a sonority, a resonance of saying that says over and over again, which is at each moment fi nite and new, something that heralds rather than gives the result of a process in the form of predicative propositions.

Th e confi guration saying is an attempt to think the whole without totality, repetition without recuperation, and universality without universalism. Each coming is a coming singularly universal, a coming itself which is promised as gift given to beings mortal and fi nite. It is a gift complete, a completed gift in itself and therefore there is in it a universality whose completeness completes our speech. Silence is the beatifi c recognition of this completeness of speech, a silence which is not


defi ance nor recalcitrance of speech but the completeness of speech itself wherein consists the dignity of the language of the mortals. It is not the silence of the mythic-heroic tragic man as defi ance because he is superior to the God in his mortality, because of his capacity of death can defy even the God. Th e divine mourning that resonates in silence is the remembrance of the immemorial gift, remembrance of the immemorial promise, that is, the promise of the unthought that is already always given to man as a gift. Th erefore, in silence language itself, at its limit, as it were mourns, or mournfully remembers the immemorial promise, because it fails itself to name the name. Th ere is, therefore, always certain mournfulness in silence and a silence in mournfulness, which is distinguished from the silence of the tragic-mythic heroic man who asserts at the face of his own death his solitude and his self denuded of contingent features of his character.1

What follow in the following pages are confi guring of sayings of what the wanderer-thinker is exposed, in his path of wandering, to the appearing of unapparent, the coming itself. What kind of appearing is this which is appearing of the unapparent? What kind of phenomenon is this whose phenomenality lies in its un-apparition? What is this coming, which is not any this or that coming, which is not exhausted in anything that has come to pass, that has appeared to disappear and that has become a phenomenon so that it no longer appears to us anymore? Is there a coming that is the appearing of the non-apparent and phenomena of the non-phenomenal? Th e wandering the poet-thinker, wandering in his solitary winding path of a mountain, is seized by the perplexity, or aporia of this question. If there is an essential thinking, or if thinking is to attain the essential, then thinking must not shy away from this aporia, but rather must allow this aporia to move thinking itself and in this pathway of thinking, attain the essential. All philosophical thinking is essentially fi nite and incomplete. Out of this essential incompleteness, the poet-thinker repeats himself here and there, as the wanderer must renew his leaps, because repetition always arises out of an essential fi nitude of thinking itself.

What is presented in this work is nothing but the wrested truth, spoken in a confi guration that emerges out of the experiences of wandering. Th erefore, no claim here been made that the truth is to be presented as completed truth. Once such a claim is made, the


truth no longer remains the truth but becomes an imbecile, castrated cognition of given phenomenon commensurable with a settled mode of existence. Truth is only to be wrested, seized in its movement, in its becoming by going under, in its point of beginning or starting, but not at the moment of settled result. Th at, however, does not mean that truth in itself is always incomplete, but only the claim of saying the truthbecause of the fi nitude of the mortalin its absolute completeness remains only a false claim. Truth in its absolute presentation and arrival as an event is the destruction of a language. It ruins language and abandons it to fainting murmur, or to the lament of music. Th erefore, the attempt to say the wrested truth can only be a regulated form of divine madness which must constantly be solicited to. Th ere is always the possibility, not merely by going astray, but of madness itself as far as truth is never of settled mode of cognition but that which when once seizes the philosopher, it makes him into what Plato calls a horsefl y.

Truth in itself is never only a totality of the successive moments of gradated cognition. In other words, there is no method in philosophy but only constellation of paths. Constellation is an assemblage but never a totality, a whole that makes sudden, momentary appearance that in its lightning fl ash seizes the thinker. It is only on the basis of this prior seizure, the thinker can seize and wrest truth, for truth is not property of the mortal called man but man belongs to truth, is claimed by truth and makes him fi rst of all what he is, the one who seizes and wrests truth from the immemorial that founds him and dispropriates him in advance. Th is is the promise of thought itself, insofar asto speak with Heideggerwe never go to thinking, thinking comes to us (Heidegger 2001, p.6), in its sudden advent, like a lightning fl ash.

Radical Finitude

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

The Immemorial

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

Radical Finitude 21

succession of empty instants (Benjamin 1977, pp. 251-261) which, like the leaves of trees, appear in Spring only to disappear in Autumn and return in Spring, or like the infi nite nameless waves of the Seawithout hope, meaning and promisebringing to us nothing but the eternal murmur of what is already become fi nished, accomplished, when each moment is like any other moments, an eternal Now, like the eternal Now of the waves, if there is no not yet to become, no not yet to come, and no hope for the not yet to accomplish? If the great Hegelian dialectical-historical time is none but this eternally un-redemptive, eternally boring return to the same, without any ecstatic outside, without the redemptive advent of future outside, then how despairing and desolate our existence would be? What would the meaning of our existence, and our being with others, our politics and our ethics, our mortality and our natality, the meaning of our history and our fate be if mortals in its history appear only to earn his recognition through violent life and death struggle and through a sacrifi cial, negative relation with other mortals, if not such a history but be an eternal, eternally unredeemed melancholy, like sighs of Abraham if he is to lose his faith (imagine Kierkegaards sighs too!), or the melancholic wind of this vast desert of history which has become of our existence? Our relationship with us, with other mortals, to the divine and the rest of created existence would only have the meaning of an un-redemptive negativity.

It would then be necessary, if the sense of mortality of the mortals not to be exhausted by the meaning that negativity gives to it, to open up this metaphysically-negatively determined closure of dialectical-historical time to another notion of a temporality which remains as a time of hope and fulfi lment, of a positive outside negativity, of an infi nity outside totality. If the great metaphysician of the West thinks the historicity of history as the work of negativity, then one wonders further: Is the historicity of history for the mortals, who as mortal existence is in need of a redemptive future, exhausted in the meaning of history that the dialectic of negativity gives to it? What would the human and the meaning of being human be if he is only the product of his own death and death of the other mortals, he whose consciousness of his own existence and that of the Absolute is nothing but his own work of death (Hegel 1998, p. 270), accomplished by deaths negative labour? Can the meaning of


being human exhaustibly be determined on the basis of death alone, death which is nothing but negativity? What would the meaning of his mortality and meaning of his existence be if the mortal were not open to his own mortality and other created existence, in so far as the meaning of mortality consists in opening to other mortals, to the divine and the elemental depth of the sky and to the animals and the earth and being exposed to the ecstasy of his coming to existence? Would it not be necessary, then, that the negativity of death to be opened up to the open which fi rst of all places man in relation to himself, to the divine, to nature and to the rest of created existence? What would the meaning of a historical task for a historical man be if he is not the space which is the space of opening and the beginning of his own historicity and its destinal fate which, for that matter, exceeds any closure that is earned through his work of death (Ibid.) and through the labour of his negativity? Th e negativity of death, and the meaning of history which the negativity of death gives to it, would neither be the originary meaning of mortality, nor be the originary meaning of history. If the sense of mortality for the mortals is exhausted in the negativity of his death, then death would leave to nothing of a time to come for him beyond this death. Th ere would not be then the advent of future outside an enclosed dialectical historical totality; nor there will have redemption of what remained unredeemed in the world? Th ere will only be an incessant laments of unfulfi lled hopes and of a past whose injustice is not yet rectifi ed.

Th ese are the questions opened up by Franz Rosenzweigs Th e Star of Redemption. Th ese are also our questions here. Th ere is good deal of reasonand one does not need to evoke the empirical facts of history hereto suspect with Rosenzweig that the dialectical-negative time of history, instead of affi rming a redemptive future, is content to enclose the event of coming into an immanent totalizing process. Th erefore, it would be necessary here is to renew the question already implicit in Rosenzweig, which is, that of rethinking the question of fi nitude.

Th e thought of future and the messianic, redemptive fulfi lment is always a question of fi nitude, which is, mortals radical openness in respect to his ground, condition and possibility on the basis of a freedom which is granted to him in advance, as pure gift, as

Radical Finitude 23

pure off ering. Th is gift is without any economy of equivalences and without any possibility of measurement, the immeasurable par excellence that dispropriates him in advance, and that lies as a kind of abyss, an inscrutable, unfathomable secret which, in so far it is secret, makes at all possible something like manifestation of the world. Th is revelation of the secret is that phenomenon of the unapparent that opens the world for the fi rst time. Th e presencing that itself presences is not an originary presence that can be apophantically traced back. It is the spacing that is before any presence-absence; it is what exposes the mortal to his truth, to his human temporality and inaugurates history. If the mortals understand anything like what exists in the world on the basis of temporality, this temporality must already always be revealed to him in advance so that he understands his being as being, his existence as existence. Th is revelation is not the revelation of a given presence, but a coming to presence which while appearing, conceals itself. It is this that we call secret.

Th erefore we have this strange feeling within us that we always existed from eternity. In relation to the coming to presence which, while being unapparent, opens to us the worldor, the world is opened for us where for the fi rst time temporality makes itself manifestin relation to this originary presencing-presence, it appears as if our existence is always belated, as if in relation to our existence there always precedes an immemorial past which cannot be appropriated in our self presence. Schellings Th e Ages of the World (2002) an eternal past which has never been present, an immemorial origin is seen precisely as the source of divine mournful joy that fundamentally attunes a fi nite existence. An eternal past which has never been present opens the world to the mortals, as if for the fi rst time, a past that can never be appropriated and recuperated in the mortals historical memory only because it is the condition of memory as such. What opens the world for the mortals is that of an originary forgetting before any memory since this opening has never come to pass as a passed presence. Hence, it is the groundlessness of our past, like our mortality, that opens the pure futurity for us, and makes human history as such possible. Th is mortality, beyond the immanence of self-presenting negativity, is more originary promise of futurity to


which existence is exposed or (to say with Heidegger) thrown. It is this exposure to this abyss of forgetting or to the immemorial, this peril of existence fi rst opens the world and the temporality in its pure advent makes its unapparent apparition.

In his Th e Unforgettable and the Unhoped For (2002), Jean Louis Chrtien attempts to think this gift of the immemorial that fi rst opens existence to truth, and makes human temporality as such possible. It is to think that the originary loss that already always departing founds the world by exposing us to the peril of being (Chrtien 2002, p. 22), sending us forward to what is yet to come. Th e peril of being is at the same time a sending to the pure future, a loss that founds us.

Forgetting is the dimension according to which being sends us, calls to us, and promises us, throws us forward...there is indeed a loss that founds us, and this loss only gives and gives us (Chrtien 2002, p. 37)

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

Th e already always is this immemorial gift which is also the forgetting of other origin. Our fi nitude is not an immanent fi nitude

Radical Finitude 25

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

The Mournful Gift

Mortality is not that which serves as a work of negativity that the mortals appropriate as the metaphysical foundation of history and his politics, but an originary opening of time for the mortals on the basis of which alone something like history and politics make manifest. Th e task of philosophy is to open the sense of our history and politics outside its metaphysical closure to the open-ness of time, to the originary revelation and disappropriating manifestation of our ground and condition. In other words, the philosophical thinking as originary opening to our non-conditional condition is also an originary opening to the originary gift character of our existence, to the presencing of presence before any immanence of self-presence, to the immemorial excess that founds us, which for that matter never cease disappearing us, departing from us, for it has already always departed while giving us and exposing us at the same time to the peril of existence.

Th is gift character, the originary donation-character of existence haunts our mortal life, like the spectres of a more ancient past which does not allow itself to be thought on the basis of the metaphysics of presence (Derrida 1994, p. 74). Since only the mortals hear the echoes of the past haunting the presence, like the spectres of an


immemorial being haunting our life, it is to such a mortal being existence comes as gift, as a donation before memory and before time . Th is mortal man is not the origin and end of his own existence, but his existence arises as an unsaturated gift from a destination or origin which is elsewhere, which is not yet human and not yet being. Th e thought of the originary gift and the radical fi nitude of the mortals, which in so far is gift is outside mans power of appropriation, can only be thought at the limit of the metaphysics of presence (Ibid.). For the divine, uncreated being, his existence is not gift, because the God spaces himself at his own space and times himself at his own time. Th erefore, God is understood to be that being in whom his essence coincides his existence, and, as the medieval theologians tell us, his existence is pure actuality without possibility. Only the mortal whose existence lies in pure donation is belated in relation to his own ground, his condition and his past; only in the mortal, the excess of his existence lies in an immemorial gift or in the gift of the immemorial. Th erefore, man has something like a past which is a past before any passed past, an immemorial past beyond memory that unconditionally deprives us the foundation of our own being on the basis of its own self-grounding. It is in this sense existence is inextricably, in the innermost manner, is fi nite. Yet it is only on the basis of the originary fi nitude mortals are open to something like the incalculable arrival of future and to his immemorial past, as if here time itself lengthens itself to the infi nity outside any immanence of self-presence.

Th e task of the philosophical thinking is, to open us, outside any metaphysical totalization, to the sudden lightning fl ashes of the pure arrival of the future and to the immemorial past without mastery and without appropriation and to attune ourselves to that beatifi c joy inseparable from an attunement of a fundamental mourning, which Hlderlin speaks as Grundstimmung (1980). In a certain text, Schelling too speaks of this in-experienciable experience of mortality, which is the non-conditional condition of experience, itself as the occasion of the birth of thinking:

He who wishes to place himself in the beginning of a truly free philosophy must abandon even God. Here we say: who wishes to maintain it, he will lose it; and who gives up, he will fi nd it. Only he has come to the ground of himself and has known the whole depth

Radical Finitude 27

of life who has once abandoned everything, and has himself been abandoned by everything. He for whom everything disappeared and who saw himself alone with the infi nite: a great step which Plato compared to death.

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

Th e beatifi c joy of this divine mourning that Schelling speaks of is not the joy of cognition but participation in the Infi nite, a partaking of the divine joy in the mode of philosophical contemplation without yet being damaged by the violence of cognition. It is a partaking in the immemorial from where knowledge itself arises, and yet to which no knowledge attains its self-fulfi lment. It is participation with an absolute past which only comes to us from an incalculable, an equally eternal remnant of future, and an eternal remainder of time. Th is possibility alone is redemptive when on the basis of an originary dispropriation mortals partake of the eternity and infi nite in an unsaturated gift, in an excess of promise given beforehand, beyond being and beyond any time of presence. In a letter after the death of Caroline, Schelling speaks of this divine mourning as what existence in its inextricably mortal condition is aff ected with, attuned with, that is a fundamental attunement, an essential aff ection: I now need friends who are not strangers to the real seriousness of pain and who feel that the single right and happy state of the soul is the divine mourning in which all earthly pain in immersed (Schelling 1975).

Philosophical contemplation, instead of evading the thought of mortality, must allow itself to be seized by it, to be dispossessed by it, to be abandoned by it, to be tempered by it, for only then, at the limit of thinkability and cognitive mastery, thinking opens itself to the non-condition, and to the unsaturated excess of the gift. Th erefore, philosophical thinking is always a thinking that, in a necessary manner, by a logic innermost to it, is tempered with its own impossibility that forever haunts the philosophical contemplation. It is in the pure state of exception, in pure abandonment, in the nudity of an abandonment where being is exposed to its peril that something appears that strikes the philosopher, claiming his entire existence. He then loses, as Hlderlin speaks, his tongue in a foreign land, where lightning strikes him, separates him from himself, throws him outside of himself, rather than this lightning belonging to him as possession. Exposed, abandoned, denuded, the mortal is the un-accommodated,


bare being. One remembers here King Lear in Shakespeares great Storm scene of his great play where being stripped of his veil of false being-as king, Lear is exposed to the pure humanity of the human who is none but a perilous being (Chrtien 2002, p.22), whose being essentially is this exposure to the peril. For us, to say with Chrtien again, all truth is exposed to the peril of forgetting and we relate to it only in and through this same peril. A human being is not only a being in peril, a perilous being, but also the peril of being, that in which being risks itself (Ibid.).

Th e philosopher or the poetwhom Aristotle (1971) calls the melancholic spiritswhose task is to articulate the opening of the world and the polis is, therefore, also the being who is the most a-polis. He is of all beings the most perilous being, who losing his tongue in a foreign land, must articulate on the basis of this loss what is always to come and what is already always the immemorial. He is thereafter thrown into the search for that which constantly eludes him, to which his thinking fails to attain, for it has already always lost in an immemorial time. Th is failure is not a failure like any other, but that bestows upon thinking a feeling of sublime awe. It is the destiny, or fate of thinking, if it seeks the essential that it must constantly fail to think the unthought of the immemorial, for it is what is the excess of thought, and for that, is the beginning of all that is thinkable. Immanuel Kant calls this experience awe that elicits from the thinker respect (Achtung). Th is experience, in its sublimity, is a gift bestowed upon the thinker, which is for that matter never a possession. Heidegger calls this gift as the gift of the unthought, the unthought itself as the gift that thinking bears as its essential failure, in the sense that it is already always departed from each and every measurement of thought. It is the immeasurable of the unthought that is the immemorial past of all thought, and thereby is the beginning of thought, of opening thought to being and being to thought.

The Logic of the World

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

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

Th erefore, mortality and fi nitude is essentially historical in a more originary sense than dialectical-speculative essence of history constituted by the labour of the negative. Th e pure facticity of mortality is not a historical fact which is arrived as a result of the dialectical historical process at the end, which is also the process of predication. Th is facticity, a positive more originary than negative, and more originary than predication, cannot be sublated into pure thought bereft of language in the conceptual cognition, but that


already adheres in language in its infancy. Language is our exposure to the immemorial donation, to the peril of the unapparent apparition that fi rst of all opens being to language on the basis of which alone the mortals speak. In speaking this naming-language, the mortals are touched by the tremor of the unnameable, the immemorial loss that founds unconditionally the ground of our existence. Th is pre-predicative opening of the world in language that hears in speaking the trembling of the unground is more originary than the language of negativity and judgement that founds dialectical historical totalities. Similarly if the notion of the historical is to be opened to a far more originary sense than the speculative determination of the dialectical, then it must be seen as opening to the immemorial: a history, as facticity of spacing that keeps to itself the promise of the immemorial, that keeps to itself the secret of forgetting, that keeps to itself the gift of the unapparent. Th is is the memorial task of history: not to remember a lost origin that has come to pass by, but to remember the immemorial that has never come to pass by, that has never been present, that has never been memorial.

Our world is never contemporary with its immemorial origin. Th at there is this world is only basis of the originary separation from its immemorial origin to which the world never returns, but which always comes to it from a future incalculable. Th e coming into existence of the world is also a moment of separation, or an inscription of a partition or division that erases itself, that it does not belong to the world, for it is the worlds condition of its coming into existence, for it is the founding of the world, or the world presencing itself to its own presence. Th e world is born, and has come into existence in a partition of itself and its immemorial, unapparent ground that is already always departed, diverted from all memory and lost from all appropriation. It is because of this worlds departure from its own origin as its condition of existence that the world cannot be wholly the world of works, even if it is deaths supreme achievement. It is rather mortalitys pure gift which is inscrutable and is unfathomable.

What is thought in the thought of fi nitude and mortality is the opening of the world, its originary logic of origin, its event of coming to presence which cannot be thought in terms of the existing predicates about the world, or in terms of the being of the

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world understood in its nominative, which, as such, exceed all our reductive metaphysical totalization. Th e fi nitude of the world, or rather, the worlding of the world, and its attunement of mourning for a non-appropriable, non-totalizable, absent, excluded, expelled, separated, partitioned, departed origin, makes our history and politics essentially fi nite and non-totalizable, which, in so far it is non-totalizable, is at once tempered with the possibility of a redemptive joy, because this fi nitude is the condition of the worlds coming into existence.

Hope and melancholy are not two opposite attunements of the world. Th ey attune the world in its coming into presence, in the event of existence as fundamental moods or attunements, bearing the gift and promise of its coming to come, presencing to presence. Th is coming is not a progressive realization of the past in a successive manner, nor a kind of result of a process that lifts, elevates unto itself this process. Th ought historically, that means non-dialectically, the world is to be attuned to melancholy as possible mood of its existence. Th e verbal infi nitive of the possible is the not yet of the world, which in its infi nitive is an infi nitive not yet. Th e eternal remnant of the not yet demands infi nite, joyous affi rmation of the world that affi rms the advent of future. With the possibility of mourning, joy is too given at the same time, at the same time when time times and space spaces, when past, presence and future come together in a momentary presentation that illumines all that has been, all that is and will be. Th is redemptive illumination of the moment that presents eternity in a momentary, sudden apparition falls outside any reductive totalization achieved by the negative labour of universal history. Th e moment when the unapparent appears, and the ecstasy of eternity monstrously couples with temporality: this moment does not belong to any self-presentation of dialectical historical instant, nor is it accomplished as the absolute concept of universal history. It remains as the eternal remnant of history that keeps in remembrance the messianic promise of the advent.

Melancholy and joy are not understood here as psychological states, nor they are to be anthropologically understood. Th ey are the fundamental attunements of the world and existence to its own condition and coming into presence. Th erefore one can say: as there


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

Mortality

A thinking that confronts this mortality, its own mortality, ecstaticallyfor thinking itself is fi nite, disruptive, interruptive of itself, a fi nite thinkingmust go beyond the closure of dialectical-speculative philosophy. If thinking has to open itself to its outside, which is other than the thinkable, to open itself to the advent of coming into existence, then the transcendence of this advent has to be thought otherwise than the deaths immanent negative product, but in relation to a radical fi nitude as a gift and a promise. Th is gift is not a product and, therefore, it does not belong to the economy of the universal history. Th is gift is rather the gift of the immemorial.

At the heart of existence, at the depth of the world, thousand melancholic voices cry out, the cries of an abyssal mortality which cannot be appeased in a world that is constituted by the negative work of death. It can only be addressed by keeping open the inaugurating

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promise, which has always already opened the world, by transforming the past of the inauguration unto the future yet to come, by keeping the promise of the future alive, by constantly renewing that opening in an ever new present. Th erefore, the immemorial promise needs to be renewed at ever new present as the endless, interminable presentation of this promise, at each moment, here and now, not so that one day there will some one come or something will come to pass, but that at each here and now we affi rm there a yet to come. Th is radical fi nitude, this groundless presencing of the presence that is beyond any concept and any cognition, whose imminence ecstatically exceeds any predication, which by tearing asunder the historical depth of our existence, it is this radical fi nitude that welcomes in its lightning fl ash that which transforms our historical existence into its messianic, redemptive fulfi lment.

Th is fi nitude is that which is beyond the capacity to be or not to be of man. In each of the mortal existence, in each of a mortal beings work, there lies, in advance, a non-work that exposes the totality of our existence, as a whole, to its outside, to its transcendence. Because the fate of the works transcends these workslike Oedipus destiny whose fate befalls on him despite the result of his works for him is supposed to evade this fateso the historical destiny of the mortals transcends the accumulated labours of the world and the mortals. What comes to the world opens in an immemorial transcendence that can never be enclosed in the immanence of self-presence, for it can never be the result of the work of immanence of negativity. It is what Schelling calls the un-pre-thinkable, the possible, which is the potency of the world as the worlds incalculable becoming of itself. One can, therefore, say: the world is possible or existence is possible insofar as the world is fi nite and mortal; or, the world is possible because the possible belongs to mortality. It is the immemorial promise that incessantly calls us to transform our historical existence by placing us unto that opening, that inauguration where the future comes to us incalculably. Th ere lies t

the promise of time

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