No Reign May Be: Infinite Unsaying in Clifford Duffy's 'around'

response to Clifford Duffy's poem, by Corry Shores
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All images are screen-shots of Duffy's work, from:
http://recalltopoetry.blogspot.com/2011/04/around.html
May I thank Clifford Duffy for sharing his creations.

No Reign May Be:
Infinite Unsaying in Clifford Duffy's 'around'

Without words, without things: so, what else would remain? Heidegger famously wrote, "where words break off, no thing may be." If we did not have the word-meaning for 'beside', would our world have things one-beside-another? If we cross-out all our word-meanings and grammatical functions (like predication, 'The tulip is a flower, is yellow,') can anything in our world remain? Not only would all the namable things be crossed-out, so too would the possibility of making designations; for, to designate something, we need to differentiate it from other things in its context or against which it would be counter-defined (we might need 'dark' to know 'light'). But without grammatical-functions like predication, negation, and prepositional relation (dark lingers before light), can we even begin to have a world of things?

How might we further this line of thinking? Regarding the sentence, "where words break off, no thing may be," let's draw our attention to no thing. We could think of it as nothing, or perhaps as a 'no-thing.' What would a no-thing be? It is not a thing, but it is not nothing, either. And from this sentence, we would assume that a no-thing appears when words 'break off'. It could be that the no-thing was there even while there were words, but we only notice it when the words break-off and leave the no-thing standing by itself.

Such observations might be of interest when we consider the mechanics of language. When driving and we see a stop signal, our feet hit the brake without a second thought. It is as if there is no need to translate the meaning of the sign: the same way that one gear need not think about another gear in order for them to turn one another, our bodies too are like gears that react automatically to the signs we see. But first recall when we initially learned how to drive. When we saw the red, we did not automatically stomp our feet without hesitation. There were so many possibilities available. Where exactly is the brake pedal? We have to hit it without looking for it? But is not the gas pedal right next to it? If we hit the gas accidentally, our situation could become unpredictably catastrophic. Our body does not yet have the word-thing 'red means stomp on brake'. Instead, we have something much more interesting. But after we learn the meaning of the sign, there is no longer anything there. We hit the brake without the red, the stomp, or the stopping entering our attention. These are all very concrete real things in our world, and they are so much a part of our world that we do not notice them. But before they existed, before we had the word-meanings for these parts of our world, they were so much more, they were infinitely more, they could have been anything! Red could very easily have meant catastrophe as much as total safety and orderliness. In this case, words broke-off, but there was not nothing, nor was there a concrete something. Rather, there was a no-thing, an infinite non-something, a something = x to the power of infinity, or we might say, a thing = x to the nth power.

Recalling again us first learning to drive, we had to learn a new language, of sorts, the language of traffic signs, both customary ones, like traffic-lights and official street signs and signals, and also contextual signs, like seeing a fluid on the road and knowing this signals to us to slow down so not slip-off the road. But when first acquiring this 'vocabulary', we learn that the language-meanings we already know do not always help. We need to learn the new language, yet we are lost at first because we try to apply the languages we already know. Perhaps we first considered those mechanical reactions we knew from the language of bike-riding, but back-peddling or gripping the steering wheel does not brake the automobile. So when first learning to brake the car, we exhaust all the 'words' we have in the 'languages' we know, running through all the things already in our world. That does not mean only nothing remains! There is an infinity at the edge of these limits!: catastrophe or safety from death, happening by so many unforeseeable ways. When we exhaust the words of our language and the things of our world, what remains is infinite no-thingness.

So let's not interpret this no-thing as an absence. It could hardly be so! How is something infinite also something absent? This means then that when Heidegger speaks of 'saying,' which is also an 'unsaying,' we need not think that language (in how we feel it immediately) has anything to do with something missing from it. When first learning how to brake a car, it is not that we face a nothing or an absolutely foreign otherness. Language becomes exhausted. All its possibilities have run-through and run-out. At last!: the birth of the full and immediate no-thing, the absolute thing = xⁿ. Please note the difference between thing = x and thing = xⁿ (or no-thing = xⁿ. Also consider the formulations sign = x and no-Sign = xⁿ.) An extensional meaning refers to the things in the set it refers to. Oedipus, recall, married his mother. So 'son of Jocasta' and 'husband of Jocasta' refer to the same thing, the same object in a set, which in this case is a set with one member, the thing we also call Oedipus. But what happens in our minds and bodies when we say to ourselves, 'The son of Jocasta is the husband of Jocasta'? This does not give us the same feeling as when we say 'Oedipus is Oedipus' or 'Oedipus is Jocasta's son', for example. This is because even though both 'son of Jocasta' and 'husband of Jocasta' extend into the same meaning-reference (Oedipus), they do not at all intend the same meaning. The words and propositions in our language have intensional meanings as well as extensional ones. It is hard to define what an intensional meaning really is, but we might think of it as the impulses and tendencies for a meaning to want to reach-out into different suggested or 'virtual' implications. It is implicit rather than explicit, and in a way, it is inexplicably implicit, because it is difficult to formalize (those with superb analytical philosophical skills can in fact formalize this, as for example the remarkable contributions Roger Vergauwen has made to formalized intensional logic and semantics). So 'thing = x' might suggest that there is an unknown thing, or an empty set; in the case of sign = x, we might at first think of it as an empty reference, or we may even regard it to indicate that at the core of all signification there is absence, in the sense that absence is always a prerequisite condition for representation (for otherwise, if the thing were present, it would be mere presentation and not representation). But this is to regard 'x' only in an extensional way. When however x is to the nth power, this means that while no extensional meaning is designated, there is an infinity of virtual intensional meaning. It is not just that the x is an empty place-marker meaning that it could be filled by anything, but rather that it virtually is tending with infinite power to mean a great variety of things, like how the no-thing/no-sign of learning to brake a car virtually implies so many meanings, ranging from utter disaster to complete safety to so much else that it may prove itself to mean.

So let's consider a Deleuzean reading of Heidegger's philosophies of language, rather than one that follows a more post-structuralist leaning (I tried that here). Perhaps we see such an approach suggested in Deleuze's essay, 'An Unrecognized Precursor to Heidegger: Alfred Jarry' (may I thank Miguel Paley for bringing this text to my attention and for offering his research on it). A closer analysis is forthcoming. For now, let's look at the final line:

The thing is the limit of language, as the sign is the language of the thing. When a language is hollowed out by its turning within language, it finally completes its mission: the Sign shows the Thing, and effectuates the nth power of language, for
"where word breaks off no thing may be." (98d)

Let's return to this for a deeper explanation another time, after we conduct a closer reading of the article. For now, I suggest we turn again to Clifford Duffy's works in our effort to understand language in a Deleuzean way, in this case, what might be a poetic unsaying to the nth power.

Duffy's poem, 'around', says to us things about rain. But consider when we watch rain falling on a puddle. It has a chaotic pattern of falling. In one way, it is completely redundant, because it's just drop drop drop, every time. But also, its chaos makes it continually unique, which can entrance us, much like how this happens when we watch the dance of fire tongues, always repeating, while always unique and singular. Rain, in a way, is continually exhausted, having done the same thing in seemingly every possible arrangement and combination, and yet also somehow always uniquely this particular fall of drops. Rain, like fire, can give us this experience of the no-thing = xⁿ. Having seen so much rain in our lives, we have exhausted all possible words to give what we witness. And yet, that does not mean we stop noticing the raindrop patterns. They keep giving to us something infinite, lying at the limits of language.

The falling of rain is cyclonic cycling, one that is as wild as a cyclone but cyclical in its self-exhaustive repetition, like the variational rhythm of these lines above, and the rhythm of space-text temporalizations, the breaks which make our eyes fall from line-to-line, word-to-word, in a rain-like way. This is rhythm in an intensive sense, as a something creating the feeling of motion by acceleration-changes. We do not feel motion when our train or car maintains the same speed. It is only when the speed changes that we feel ourselves move forward or backward. There is no such thing as a steady rhythm, at least it would not be a rhythm with any intensity.

The no-thing is not these gaps, nor would it be a sense that something is being left-out of these poetic lines. Where the words break-off is not the empty spaces. Those are words too, don't forget! Rather, the words here are in a continual state of self-breaking, of being cracked and self-differentiated. 'rain to rain' and 'rain on rain'. It is rain raining upon itself, as different unto itself. The word/thing 'rain' is self-broken from the beginning of its utterance/appearance. Rain unsays itself with each drop. That's how it keeps being rain. Something that repeats without changing has not actually reappeared. Something can only reappear if its next appearance is self-differentiated, so that it may stand-out from itself. This is not as simple as rain at time1 being different from rain at time2. Rather, rain1 and rain2 are found in time = 0; which is to say, rain varies from itself from the beginning and before any time has passed, and it is only on account of the tension, the intensity, of an imcompossible combination of differences between a self and itself that we get the power to create the motion of time. If there were no paradoxes right now, no contradictions, no things being themselves and not themselves, then everything will have stopped! There would be no power, no tension, no force for change. 'Becoming' is not a process of something moving from being itself to not being itself; no; rather; 'Becoming' involves something already from the start not being itself, and on account of that, it has the cause, reason, ground, motivation, and power to change itself.

Duffy's 'rains' here, are becomings: each is a self-difference upon itself; it is 'rain to rain' and 'rain on rain', where each rain is itself self-differential. And it is at least partly because each moment differentiates from itself that there is intensive rhythm and the unsaying of no-things to powers n-infinite (or put more simply, true becomings).

Following that first part is something like a pause in the rain or a calm before a storm, if you will. During such moments, we do not at all feel a lack, a lack of rain and storm. In fact, these are the moments we feel the weather most acutely, when it announces itself in its infinite no-thingness, in those moments we would exhaust all words to describe it, and instead just have a direct immediate affectual connection with the weather itself.

Now consider the raining of words to come.

Our eyes rain rhythmically down the text, again in self-differential repetitions. The poem goes through words we have that might exhaust the meaning of rain. It is a god, a faucet, a reigning, a goddess, a goddess raining by reigning /and/ reigning by raining, over the earth.

Loves have secret loves. Why is it each dropping is a repetition but self-differential? Like when watching fire, we love not just what we see, but the motions that continue arriving. We did not expect them, so the next moments we did not previously know that we loved. They are secret loves of our loves, and by giving to us each time these ever newer and newer secret loves, the rain repeats in a delightfully differential way.




Clifford Duffy. 'around.'
http://recalltopoetry.blogspot.com/2011/04/around.html

Gilles Deleuze. 'An Unrecognized Precursor to Heidegger: Alfred Jarry.' in Essays Critical and Clinical. Transls. Daniel W. Smith & Michael A. Greco. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.

Flow & Phenomena: Motivation and Horizon in Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze

by Corry Shores
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howstuffworks.com
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Flow & Phenomena:
Motivation and Horizon in Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze

What does phenomenal motivation got to do with any of us?

Our attention is constantly being turned this way and that. It seems like each turn is initiated by something we want to know more about by exploring it further with our awareness of it. Looking at a thing, we see a flash in the corner of our eye, and we turn to see what caused it. Could it be, then, that our attention is being driven by lacks, by lacks of knowing, by something mysterious or concealed that we want uncovered? In that case, we would be constantly dragged toward voids or ambiguities in our awareness; we sense something missing somewhere, so we turn to it so that it fills our awareness of it. But then upon becoming aware of it, we again sense something else in the periphery of our awareness that now pulls us somewhere else. Under such a view, we would regard our awareness as getting pulled around in certain directions by our curiosity.

Or perhaps at any given instant, our attention is pulled in every direction. And this would not be because we are missing knowledge of everything, but because what we are attending to now is already different from everything else. But for one reason or another, some of these other differences jump out to us more than others. What this means for our everyday living is that we need not feel like our attention is constantly being pulled around by one continuous string of movement. We can realize that our attention has every reason to turn in any possible direction. We are never reacting to what is missing in our attention. Everything is already fully there, because all we can attend to are differences. So we can instead go about our lives realizing the full range of possibilities to what we attend to next. The movement of our attention need not be mindless and automatic; it can be adventurous and fun.

Brief Summary:

The way we perceive something is conditioned by contextual factors that motivate that particular way things are appearing at that moment. Also the turning of our attention is motivated by other elements in our awareness which lie just at its current boundaries on its 'horizon.' For Merleau-Ponty, there is something concealed and curious on our awareness' horizon that serves to pull our attention in its direction. This is always the case, so there is continually a flow of new phenomena that rearrange how we are organizing the relations of our world.

Points Relative to Deleuze:

But for a Deleuzean phenomenology, our horizon is unlimited; our attention could go any which way whatsoever. The motivation is not determined at all: the way we turn our attention might be conditioned in part by chance factors or unforeseeable influences. And because phenomena result from instantaneous flashes of difference between incompatibilities in our awareness, there is not a flow of phenomena, but rather phenomena are given in durationless instants where time does not pass.



We will look at Merleau-Ponty's concept of the flow of phenomena that we experience, which results from our attention being continuously motivated to see new parts of the world and see the organization of the world in new ways.

This entry will pick-up after our previous discussion on the child's first experiences of color. Merleau-Ponty wrote that the child first sees colors not distinctly but indeterminately. The more determinate forms that they later learn are originally only on the horizon of their awareness. However, after the determinate form enters their awareness, they no longer see the colors in their previous indeterminate way.

We will now discuss the how 'motivation' factors into this process, and that will lead us later to the idea of phenomenal flow.

We find reiterated in the following passage the idea that the new phenomenal organizations and structures of our awareness were only pregiven as horizons of our attention. The new configurations 'overthrow' the older ones.

To pay attention is not merely further to elucidate pre-existing data, it is to bring about a new articulation of them by taking them as figures. They are preformed only as horizons, they constitute in reality new regions in the total world. It is precisely the original structure which they introduce that brings out the identity of the object before and after the act of attention. Once the colour-quality is acquired, and only by means of it, do the previous data appear as preparations of this quality. Once the idea of an equation has been acquired, equal arithmetical quantities appear as varieties of the same equation. It is precisely by overthrowing data that the act of attention is related to previous acts, and the unity of consciousness is thus built up step by step through a ‘transition-synthesis’. The miracle of consciousness consists in its bringing to light, through attention, phenomena which re-establish the unity of the object in a new dimension at the very moment when they destroy it. (35b.c / fr. 54-55)

The new organization was originally given in an indeterminate horizon. It was not fully there, but on the verge of being there, and somehow being called-for prior to its being made explicit. So there will be something in our attention that we find ambiguous. Let's see if we can make an example with color acquisition. Consider the child seeing color indeterminately. She sees what is a red apple and a green one. Both of them have colors, but the color difference between them is not distinct. The child takes a bit from each. The flavors are different. Here is an ambiguity: 'how can two things whose appearances I do not distinguish also have very different tastes?' The child then in a holistic way organizes her world and its relations in a new way, where green apples and red apples are different, and the colors are what visually indicate or 'mean' this difference in flavor. So at first the colors were indeterminate, but there was a phenomenal ambiguity. The contrary properties involved in this ambiguity were then explicated, leading to a new form of awareness, one that now sees red and green as determinately different colors.

The ambiguity of the distinguished flavors from undistinguished colors calls the child to reexamine the color variations more closely. So this horizonal phenomenon motivates the child's act of awareness to turn toward certain details and rearrange the holistically integrated network of relations in her world.

Merleau-Ponty also offers the example of seeing the moon as enlarged when it lies near the sky's horizon. If however we look at it through a card-board tube, it will cease to look so large. The reason it looks larger when seen on the horizon with our bare eyes is because all the other elements in our field of vision motivate us to see the moon as larger. If you can, please see this interactive pictorial demonstration of the size constancy phenomenon. It has us move the little man back-and-forth up-and-down the hallway. The whole time, the image of the man remains the same size. But he appears to shrink when we draw him nearer, and expand when we move him backward.

Size Constancy Phenomenon, by How Stuff Works

(Thanks howstuffworks.com)

This could help explain the phenomenal motivation for seeing things differently. The visual context of the man in the front motivates us to think that he is small in comparison to the walls, but when he is further back, he looks larger in comparison to the walls. In the case of the moon, the visual elements around it for some reason motivate us to see it as larger.

Thus attention is neither an association of images, nor the return to itself of thought already in control of its objects, but the active constitution of a new object which makes explicit and articulate what was until then presented as no more than an indeterminate horizon. At the same time as it sets attention in motion, the object is at every moment recaptured and placed once more in a state of dependence on it. It gives rise to the ‘knowledge-bringing event’, which is to transform it, only by means of the still ambiguous meaning which it requires that event to clarify; it is | therefore the motive and not the cause of the event. But at least the act of attention is rooted in the life of consciousness, and one can finally understand how it emerges from its liberty of indifference and gives itself a present object. This passage from the indeterminate to the determinate, this recasting at every moment of its own history in the unity of a new meaning, is thought itself. ‘The work of the mind exists only in act.' The result of the act of attention is not to be found in its beginning. If the moon on the horizon appears to me no bigger than at the zenith, when I look at it through a telescope or a cardboard tube, the conclusion cannot be drawn that in free vision equally its appearance is invariable. (35c-36b/ fr. 55)
When I look quite freely and naturally, the various parts of the field interact and motivate this enormous moon on the horizon, this measureless size which nevertheless is a size. (36d / fr. 56)

We now turn to another sort of illusion. Consider a person whose eyes become paralyzed. Yet still she sees some scene before her. Normally her eyes would move around the scenery for some reason. So forgetting her eye cannot move, she intends to move her eye. What she sees is the scene moving to the left, even though her eye does not move. This is because the scenery does not lose it motivating factors, which in this case motivate her awareness to move perhaps to the right (so that the scene moves to the left.) So in the case of the size changes with the hallway-man or the moon, our perception alters on account of the contextual motivating factors. Hence it should only be expected that even a still image will alter also given its phenomenal motivating factors. The part that is doing the motivating is already there in the scene. It is sort of like something concealed but present to the attention. Because there is always this motivating concealed part of every phenomenon, there is a flow of phenomena resulting from a continual alteration of motivation.

A subject whose oculo-motor muscles are paralysed sees objects moving to his left whenever he believes that he is turning his eyes towards the left. (55a / fr. 74)
the phenomenological notion of motivation is one of those ‘fluid’ concepts which have to be formed if we want to get back to phenomena. One phenomenon releases another, not by means of some objective efficient cause, like those which link together natural events, but by the meaning which it holds out—there is a raison d’être for a thing which guides the flow of phenomena without being explicitly laid down in any one of them, a sort of operative reason. Thus the intention to look to the left and the fact that the landscape remains stubbornly fixed in one’s gaze bring about the illusion of movement in the object. To the degree that the motivated phenomenon comes into being, an internal relation to the motivating phenomenon appears; hence, instead of the one merely succeeding the other, the motivated phenomenon makes the motivating phenomenon explicit and comprehensible, and thus seems to have preexisted its own motive. (57-58 / fr. 76)

Let's wonder now how these concepts would appear in a Deleuzean phenomenology. In the first place, we would consider everything appearing to us to be made entirely of differential relations; they are microperceptions of imperceptibly small differences [see this entry on differential perception]. Consider the example of the scene observed by an immobilized eye. From the Deleuzean perspective, every part of the scene differentially relates to every other part. Our eye will want to go to the part that is the most different, the part that stands-out the most, that is, the part that most catches our eye. But since everything is differentially related, our eyes are pulled in all directions at once. However, for reasons that vary for each instance, some sets of differential relations will pull our eye more strongly. That does not absolutely determine our eye motions. There may be internal forces of the body which resist phenomenal forces or which create motivational forces of their own. And perhaps some of the motivation is not determined by anything other than chance factors, like the chance operations that our brains naturally make. The point is that at any moment, we really cannot say what the motivation is. After the fact we might be able find some cause for why our attention turned to its new direction. But at any moment, the turning of our attention is not determined at all. In Deleuzean phenomenology, this would be motivational freedom. Our awareness can take any of an infinity of different and incompatible turns. What is on the horizon is not what comes to be made phenomenally explicit. What is on the horizon is every possible variation in our attention and resulting change in the world. In Deleuzean phenomenology this would but limitless horizonality, or maybe universal horizon. It is not that these other things in our awareness are concealed. They are fully there, because they are what is creating the differential relations that are pulling our attention. The phenomena are not the things we are now looking at and will look at. Rather, the phenomena are the differential relations between them; that is to say, the Deleuzean phenomena are all the microperceptions between every infinitely small part of our awareness, creating a full field of nothing but differences.

So let's summarize the distinctions we are making between Deleuze's and Merleau-Ponty's phenomenal motivation: for Merleau-Ponty the horizon contains something vaguely or ambiguously, but for Deleuze the horizon contains everything implicitly. And for Merleau-Ponty, the motivating phenomena on the horizon determine where our attention turns. Yet for Deleuze, nothing is determined, rather there are a competition of forces with the outcome decided partly by chance factors.

The next difference between them is that for a Deleuzean phenomenology there would be no flow of phenomenon. Each phenomenon is instantaneous. It is like a flash of difference. When something just catches our eye, the phenomenon is not that other thing or the thing we currently look at; rather, the phenomena are the differential relations between the parts of each which cause both sets to resonate and shake from the shocking difference communicated to one another. This resonance we experience as the shock-wave of differential disturbance shot through our bodies [see this entry on Spinoza and rhythm for more on these continuous variations of affection].



Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Transl. Colin Smith. London/New York: Routledge, 1958.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phénoménologie de la perception. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1945.


Images from:
http://www.howstuffworks.com/question491.htm
(Thanks howstuffworks.com)

Heidegger’s Mysterious Omission: William Desmond’s Critique of Heidegger’s Origin of the Work of Art

by Corry Shores
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The following is an old paper I wrote for a course. (May I just note this was before I began reading Deleuze). I present it here now only because in another posting I will refer to certain parts of it. The beginning subsections are new, however.

What's William Desmond's Critique of Heidegger's Origin Got to do With You?

We exist insofar as we are original. For otherwise we would be no different from something else, and thus have something else's being, and not one of our own. But should we see ourselves as being original because there is always something lacking in us, and because there is always something about us that must remain hidden from us? This having something lacking from the picture could explain the dynamics of the changes we and the world undergo. It would be like a gas filling a vacuum because of the pressure differences. So maybe a fundamental lack pressures us to grow into some absence. And by filling the always present absence, we are continually creating and being original. But yet there could be a problem with this line of thinking. The pressure or force driving us towards the supposed absence is not a negative thing. Pressure is not a lack of force. We still have not explained the power of our drives and desires. These forces of desire are full and evident. And what they seek is not absence. Their strength comes from their expressing their power, not from their expressing a lack of power. In other words, we need not think of ourselves as changing and being original because we lack something. And our desire to change need not spring from our wanting to be someone we are not. Rather, we are beings whose powers want more power, whose self-expression wants more expression, whose desire wants more desire. It is not because we already lack power. It is because we have too much, and we need to express it, to give it. Our will-to-power is not an expression of an ego-centric destruction of other beings. It is an expression of a community-oriented shared giving of the goodness of our powers.

Brief Summary

Heidegger has a theory for how things originate in the world. It has to do partly with an erotics, a movement into absence. Desmond argues that this presupposes a more fundamental overabundance of giving.

Points Relative To Deleuze:

Difference is not at all whatsoever fundamentally a matter of absence. Difference is a positive creative force. The tensions between different things is not evidence of a negating process. It is rather a testament to the presence of the power that differences create.

[William Desmond.
Thanks Centre of Theology and Philosophy]

[The old text]

Heidegger’s Mysterious Omission:

William Desmond’s Critique of Heidegger’s Origin of the Work of Art

Abstract

Although Heidegger begins his “Origin of the Work of Art” with the word “Origin,” Ursprung, William Desmond’s critique questions how deeply into the issue of origin Heidegger was willing to take his inquiry. Desmond advances this exploration further into the “power” at work in this originating activity by proceeding into theological territory. First I outline the originating and perpetuating features of the work of art that Heiddeger gives in his “Origin of the Work of Art.” I then provide Desmond’s critique and reconfiguration of this ontological structure, which he discusses in his “Art and the Self-Concealing Origin: Heidegger’s Equivocity and the Still Unthought Between.” I will try to argue that Desmond offers a better account: Desmond is right to note that an overabundant origin that remains always other, and whose overdeterminate being is responsible for transcendence, is the more original origin of the originating activity of the work of art. And as well, it is the more original origin of the giving force that lends to the perpetuation of the originating activity of the work of art.

The Originating “Work” of Art

In “Origin of the Work of Art,” Heidegger begins with the question of the origin of the work of art, and by origin he means, “that from and by which something is what it is and as it is” (Heidegger 17). Thus what are included in his pursuit of the origin of the work of art are ontological concerns, namely that “from which” (its originating source) and that “by which” (its perpetuating source) a work of art is “what it is” (its constitution) and is “as it is” (its activity). So Heidegger will be looking at the originating and perpetuating source of the constitution and activity of the work of art, which itself is a source of origination, as we will find out. In the following I will trace through the passages that lend to Heidegger’s account of this originating and perpetuating feature of the work of art.

Heidegger’s ontological concerns about the work of art lead him to his consideration of its “thingly character,” a consideration that brings him to the topic of the equipmental character of things. This then leads him to an example of such equipment, a pair of shoes, an example he finds to be well exhibited in Van Gogh’s painting of the peasant shoes. He finds the traits of equipmentality in this painting, and notes that because the painting revealed the thingness of the thing, that the “art work let us know what the shoes are in truth.” For, “what is at work in the work” is “the disclosure of the particular being in its being, the happening of truth" (35; 38). This initiates a discussion of truth in relation to the ontological features of the work of art. He explains:

[t]he art work opens up in its own way the Being of beings. This opening up, i.e., this deconcealing, i.e., the truth of beings, happens in the work. In the art work, the truth of what is has set itself to work. Art is truth setting itself to work. (39)

Now having indicated a relationship between the activity of the work of art and the truth of beings, Heidegger moves to a discussion of two ontological features of the work of art he sees as elemental forces involved in the active and dynamic constitution of the happening of truth and origination in the work of art.

These two elemental features of the event of truth and being found in the work of art are earth and world, which are both oppositional to each other while at the same time providing for and accentuating each other. The world is the “self-disclosing openness of the broad paths of the simple and essential decisions in the destiny of an historical people,” and the earth is “the spontaneous forthcoming of that which is continually self-secluding and to that extent sheltering and concealing” (48). The two “are essentially different from one another and yet are never separated,” for “the world grounds itself on the earth, and earth juts through world;” but, they do not cancel each other out (49). Rather, their striving to overcome each other carries on continuously: the world, “[a]s self-opening it cannot endure anything closed,” while the earth, “as sheltering and concealing, tends always to draw the world into itself and keep it there” (49), and these opposing aims never seem to find resolution in the work of art. However, their strife is mutually beneficial, even if antagonistic, because, “[i]n the struggle each opponent carries the other beyond itself” (49). The art work’s role in this strife is its “setting up a world and setting forth the earth” and thereby “instigating” “this striving” (49). Heidegger then asks how truth happens through this striving of world and earth, which returns him to the topic of truth.

In this part of his treatment of truth, Heidegger reminds us of the Greek term aletheia, which he takes to mean the unconcealedness of beings (51). However, Heidegger extends this definition of truth to include the concealing of beings that necessarily accompanies the unconcealing (53). In fact, there is a double concealing in the concealing/unconcealing activity of truth, because that very act of concealing is concealed (54). Heidegger then brings together the features of earth and world with concealing and unconcealing, saying that “[t]he nature of truth is, in itself, the primal conflict” and that the “[e]arth juts through the world and world grounds itself on the earth only so far as truth happens as the primal conflict between clearing and concealing” (55). He then draws in the notion of art again, about which he says that its “work-being” is one of the ways “in which truth happens” (55). Thus, through the work of art, the constituent activities of truth, unconcealing and concealing, happen through the strife of the unconcealing, opening, and broadening world feature of the work, which is productively in conflict with its concealing, closing, and grounding earth feature. This account of the truth activity of the work of art explains the “what it is” (its constitution), and the “as it is” (its activity); and in the following, we will look at that “by which” the work of art is “what it is” “as it is,” which we are taking as its “preserving,” “subsisting,” or “perpetuating” feature.

The art work’s subsisting, preserving, perpetuating feature is a concern throughout the text. He explains that “[n]othing can be discovered about the thingly aspect of the work so long as the pure self-subsistence of the work has not distinctly displayed itself” (40), which indicates that an essential ontological feature of the work of art is its perpetuating. He traces this self-subsistence to the productive strife of world and earth, saying of them that “[t]hey belong together” “in the unity of work-being,” and that “[t]his is the unity we seek when we ponder the self-subsistence of the work and try to express in words this closed, unitary repose of self-support” (48). Put another way, the interaction of world and earth, and thus of unconcealing and concealing, is responsible for the subsistence of the work of art. I take this to mean that, because their strife is never resolved on account of the mutual dependence, and mutual provision, of the striving forces, that the work of art, which is the “arena” of their striving, persists so long as the striving persists. In this configuration, it seems, the persistence of the concealedness of truth and of ontological happening, which must always be there for the unconcealedness of truth and of ontological happening, is what always makes room for further movement of the play of unconcealing, which itself has its own concealed. Thus, inherent in the ontological structure of this ontological happening through which truth happens is an always necessary continuance, because there is an always necessary lack that always seems to be in the process of being filled, while at the same time, this filling creates another lack, a process that seems to perpetuate on account of its structural “instability” or “dynamic constitution,” if these terms would suffice. (In Desmond’s critique, as we will see later, this structural feature is considered “erotic”).

It is through this dynamic, oppositional and productive activity of strife through which truth occurs that Heidegger accounts as the originating feature of the work of art. He explains,

[t]he establishing of truth in the work is the bringing forth of a being such as never was before and will never come to be again. The bringing forth places this being in the Open in such a way that what is to be brought forth first clears the openness of the Open into which it comes forth. Where this bringing forth expressly brings the openness of beings, or truth, that which is brought forth is a work. Creation is such a bringing forth. As such a bringing, it is rather a receiving and an incorporating of a relation to unconcealedness. (62)

From this passage, we see that the work of art itself originates, because it is through its unconcealing/concealing, striving activity of world and earth that beings come to be and are created. Heidegger later moves to discuss the poetic nature of this event, saying, “[t]he nature of art is poetry. The nature of poetry, in turn, is the founding of truth” (75). Here we see him speaking of originating in terms of a “founding,” about which he takes in a “triple sense”: “founding as bestowing, founding as grounding, and founding as beginning;” but, founding “is actual only in preserving. Thus to each mode of founding there corresponds a mode of preserving” (75). Thus, art is poetry, in that it enacts the unconcealing/concealing event of truth and is something through which humans may have a hermeneutic relationship with this event; also, this event “founds” truth, in that it is a bestowing, grounding, and beginning, which seems to be language evoking the originating activity of art; as well, this passage also indicates that inherent to this originating is a preserving. Heidegger explains further that “[f]ounding is an overflow, an endowing, a bestowal” (75). From this sort of language, we would expect that Heidegger will give a more specific account of this overflowing of giving in the originating event; however, as we will see in the next part of our treatment in where we look at William Desmond’s critique, Heidegger mysteriously leaves out this part of the configuration.

The Origin of the Originating of the Work of Art

William Desmond is also concerned with origins and art in his “Art and the Self-Concealing Origin: Heidegger’s Equivocity and the Still Unthought Between,” much in the same way that Heidegger is; as Desmond puts it: “I am interested in the otherness of the origin and what art might communicate of it, and how this challenges ways of philosophical articulation” (Desmond 210). However, it is in regard to this otherness of the origin, and what art communicates of it, where Desmond differs from Heidegger. In the following, I will look at passages in Desmond’s text that offer his critique of Heidegger’s ontological configuration and that offer Desmond’s reconfiguration; and, throughout, I will give my best explanation of his terminology, where appropriate.

Although Desmond appreciates Heidegger’s dedication to the question of being, as well as his sense of the mysteriousness of the truth-giving and being-giving activity found in the work of art, Desmond also senses that something is missing from that configuration. He notes that Heidegger “shows some finesse for an elemental equivocity of being, itself inseparable from the creative power of the aesthetic, and the generative power of sources of being beyond univocal determination” (235); by which I take him to mean that he appreciates Heidegger’s treating being as something that cannot be given a fixed, stable, self-identical determination, but instead as something that is dynamic rather than stable, and also as something that cannot be pinned down and fully captured in a description or definition. This feature of being’s lacking, that brings about the strife and dynamic development, Desmond calls an “erotic” origin. Desmond’s configuration includes such an erotics in the happening of origination, but his configuration goes further to account for this erotic feature of origination. As he explains:

Heidegger’s polemos is the struggle of erotic sovereignty, modeled on an agon, not on creation as an agapeic giving of an other as other. If there are hints of something like the second, Heidegger does not make clear the difference of this erotic struggle of earth and world, and the agape of creation as giving (as) giving. (Not thought thinking thought, or will willing will, or writing writing writing; but giving giving giving—this is the hyperbole of the agapeic origin.) (246)

For Desmond, “erotic” means more than just sexual eros; it “refers us to the inordinate restlessness of the human being as desire without determinate limit, restlessness in finite being that shows the sign of its own infinity” (“Caesar with the Soul of Christ” 39); and “erotic sovereignty,” then, for him “is connected with the expression of power in its highest representatives, with the overcoming of the lack in our desire, with the activating of our energies as self-transcending and towards their fullest affirmation” (38). Thus, if we apply this definition to the case of strife, Desmond seems to regard the struggle between world and earth not only to be one of strife, but one of desire to overcome lack, which in this case may be the mutual lacking from the mutually exclusive but mutually dependent relationship between world and earth.

Yet, this ontological lack in Heidegger’s configuration, according to Desmond, is not just inherent in the dynamic struggle between opposing forces of world and earth, but also this lack must come from an original lack. He explains in Being and the Between in the chapter “Origin,” that

the beginning of eros suggests the opening of the sense of lack. I desire something here because I lack that something; eros seeks what it lacks in the origin; its vector of transcendence towards the other and beyond itself is with the view of overcoming the lack of the beginning. (249)

Yet, Heidegger seems to want two incompatibilities in his configuration of the originating event of art: he wants there to be an ever unfolding dynamic interplay of opposing forces that never find resolution and persist endlessly in their creative, originating activities, and he also wants there to be an inherent lack from the beginning that remains throughout the unfolding of the originating activity. This is a problem, as Desmond points out, because through this struggle comes a giving whose source is a lacking, and we may wonder, from what source comes the giving, then? As he puts it, “[i]f the nothing is all that there is to give the background to the finite foreground, then there is nothing about it that could originate or create in the properly ontological respect that is required by the situation.” “Since Hiedegger is talking about creation, and hence a coming to be, this possibility cannot do either” (“Art and the Self-Concealing Origin” 250). Thus, Heidegger’s maintaining an exclusively “erotic” origin runs counter to his description of its overflowing, endowing, and bestowing, because there is no account of that original source of the overflow.

Which is not to say that Desmond rejects the erotic origin. On the contrary, he understands it as a facet of the “equivocal” nature of being, which is among three other senses of being. The first is the “univocal,” in which stability and sameness are emphasized; the second is the equivocal, where irresolvable differences are given greatest weight; the third is the dialectical, where differences are mediated, except too often in self-mediation, which does not respect the otherness of the other; and the fourth is the metaxological, which is mindful of the previous three: it respects the consistencies we find, as well as the differences, and also the mediation and transcendence, except in the metaxological configuration, the mediation is towards the other which remains other, which is unlike the self-mediation of the dialectical in where the other is a means to arrive back upon the self, and thus is not truly taken to be an other. In this dialectical configuration, the self transcends to the other but is really transcending towards itself. However, in the metaxological configuration, that transcendence is towards an other that remains other, and thus the transcendence is of a self that moves past its own determinate bounds towards the other and into the between space of proximity with the other.

To better account for this metaxological orientation that underlies Desmond’s critique and reconfiguration of Heidegger’s ontology in “Origin of the Work of Art,” I will speak briefly in regard to the ontological features of this metaxological configuration. Desmond takes being to be overdeterminate, which means that it is in such great abundance, that, although it wells up from within determinate beings, it cannot be contained within those determinate bounds, and thus issues from out of the determinate beings to other determinate beings, which themselves are also issuing forth overdeterminate being. One way we as humans come to know of this overdeterminate being is through the “aesthetics of happening;” for example, when seeing a work of art or a beautiful person, we get the sense that there is something more than what is determinately there that is being communicated to us. In these instances, our senses discover a “too muchness” issuing forth to us. When we become “porous” in the sense of letting our determinate bounds be more open to the exchange of overdeterminate being with other determinate beings, we better allow ourselves to transcend to an other that remains other, which moves us more into that between space of proximity with the other as other. An ethics of gratitude and generosity would be a way of being porous to the other so to let the overdeterminate being more freely exchange between the self and other. Yet, not only is the determinate other always other, so too is that source of overdeterminate being that provides for the community of beings brought together into the between space of proximity. As well, the source is “agapeic,” which means that it is always giving its overabundance. We cannot but regard this overabundant giving of being as good; and, because it is good, abundantly giving, and other to us, it communicates something from beyond that we would be inclined to ponder as God. Just as we may transcend toward the other into the between space of proximity with it, we may wonder if also we can transcend toward this ultimate other into the between space of proximity with a divine origin.

With this metaxological configuration in mind, we may better see Desmond’s concerns with Heidegger’s ontology in “Origin of the Work of Art.” For, he explains, that if the origin is not agapeic and we create from nothing, then our powers of creating

do not qualify the nothing, but are themselves qualified by the nothing. Hence every effort of ours to be more than nothing, and in a new and original way, is itself qualified by a constitutive nothingness that simply is inherent in the being of finitude as such. The original gift, as much as this ontological qualification by our nothingness, always means that our creation cannot but be in the gift of the more original power of being as other to us. (253)

Thus, the origin of origination must be agapeic and other to us, because if it were but an erotic lack, then when we are self-creative, we cannot actually create anything of ourselves. In terms of the origination of the work of art, if the origin of that origination is not giving but instead lacking, then nothing is being created. And not only would it be impossible for the origination process to originate without an agapeic origin, it would also be impossible for it to subsist; for he says,

[w]hat we call the between is an ontological given. The origin of the given happening might be called a giving giving; not just a giver, but a giving for the giving, hence not just a once off univocal act, but a continuous origination, where continuous does not here mean the continuity of time but something more like the constancy of eternity, and not a nunc stans, if by this we mean to contract this giving giving into a univocal and merely static eternity. (259)

Thus, not only does Desmond’s configuration seem to better account for the art work’s originating activity, it also seems to better account for its persistence as well.

Implicit in Desmond’s critique and reconfiguration are theological concerns. He is aware that Heidegger abandoned his religious beliefs after a serious read of Nietzche, but Desmond wonders if Heidegger’s religious beliefs may not themselves have been concealed in his writing, because it would seem as though a further development of his ontology would reveal his theological presuppositions, especially if the ontology were developed much in the way Desmond develops his, which seems to follow from what Heidegger has willingly put forth. Although Heidegger does make oblique references to the divine in such passages as “[t]hrough Being there passes a veiled destiny that is ordained between the godly and the countergodly” (“Origin of the Work of Art” 53), he never seems to adequately explain these references to the divine, which is curious considering that they may have better accounted for his ontology. Desmond takes Heidegger to have developed a “metaphysical paralysis” that prevents him from regarding the ultimacy of transcendence as other. “Great art seems to wake us from this paralysis” (“Art and the Self-Concealing Origin” 262), Desmond writes, but it seems Heidegger, even before the peasant’s shoes of Van Gogh or the Greek temple, fought back at its waking power with a willful resistance to becoming “porous” to its overabundant giving.

Thus, I hope to have adequately described the ontological features of Heidegger’s configuration of the work of art for the purposes of incorporating Desmond’s critique and reconfiguration of Heidegger’s ontology. We saw that Heidegger’s configuration is one in which the conflicting forces of concealing and unconcealing, through the elements of world and earth, are at work in the work of art, and it is through this process that truth happens. Through this event of truth in the art work, beings come to be what they are in truth, and thus the work of art is an originating activity; and from the unresolvability of the conflicting forces and with the help of human participants, the work of art subsists in its originating activity. We then turned to William Desmond’s critique and reconfiguration of Heidegger’s ontology of the work of art. From his critique, we came to see what is missing from Heidegger’s ontological configuration, namely, an agapeic origin of overdeterminate being that enables transcendence toward an other as other, and this source itself remains other despite our transcending toward it into the between space of proximity with it. Heidegger’s origin is erotic, in that it supposedly comes from, and perpetually engenders, a lack; however, we found that such an originary lack is insufficient to account for the always originating and perpetuation activity of the work of art. Thus, we may be inclined to prefer Desmond’s configuration on these grounds. Although Desmond does not want lose the mysteriousness of the origin that we find in Heidegger, Desmond does want to be more honest about the theological implications of the sort of ontology Heidegger offers us; and, we found that Desmond’s reconfiguration maintains this otherness, because the agapeic origin remains other to us, and despite our transcending toward the between space of proximity with it, we never fully arrive there, and thus, as with Heidegger, it remains in mystery, except one that, according to Desmond’s quotation of Jaspers, “does not leave us with empty hands” (263).

Works Cited

Desmond, William. “Art and the Self Concealing Origin: Heidegger’s

Equivocity and the Still Unthought Between” Art, Origins, Otherness: Between Philosophy and Art. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2003.

Desmond, William. Being and the Between. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1995.

Desmond, William. “Caesar with the Soul of Christ: Nietzsche’s Highest

Impossibility.” Tijdschrift voor Filosofie, 61/1999, p.27-61.

Heidegger, Martin. “Origin of the Work of Art.” Poetry, Language, Thought.

Transl. Albert Hofsadter. London: Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc, 1971.

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Thank you Centre of Theology and Philosophy

http://theologyphilosophycentre.co.uk/2009/12/19/william-desmond-to-give-2010-aquinas-lecture-at-the-university-of-dallas/