5. The Indomitable Gaze of the Other

Being is a flaw on the Purity of Nonbeing

They left, of course, as demons cast out under the name of “Renob” and without an apology from their exorciser.

Joshua couldn’t get his penis back into the proper position, so he took it off when they got out of sight of the house. He held it angrily in his hand like a weapon, but it was tie-dyed, rainbow color, which made its lethality seem doubtable. When wearing a sundress, simply allowing the prosthetic to shoot straight out was the most comfortable way to walk with it on, and he should have just left it like that, but he worried that the others might think that he was wearing his penis like a phallus.

Even in the zone someone else’s voice was always in their heads, usually it was each other’s, and now that chorus included Evangelical shivaree and Pentecostal vainglory. The internal voices were all caricatures based on some loose resemblance to the relation of non-relation between the ill-formed intentions of the speaker and those of the hearer. Ishmael’s voice was usually in his own head and in theirs saying something about “the Deep,” but the others heard it as something close to the ravings of a lunatic while Ishmael vacillated between imagining it as he thought the others did, which wasn’t how any of them actually did, and how he imagined the voice as his own voice, which also wasn’t true, or at least, not in the way that he thought it was. What it was, was the external speaking as if from within, but because this repetition of what had been taken in from the outside failed to repeat without difference, it had become singular. It had become Ishmael’s singularity, which is the singularity that is experienced as one’s own, internal intention.

Freud made a distinction between the “Ego Ideal” and the “Ideal Ego.” For Freud, the former was the outside voice of society taken in and heard as the expectations of others, and the latter was heard as if already internal to one’s own intention, but which was really another repetition of the external Other’s given concepts of what makes one admirable. The Ego Ideal is experienced as an external voice speaking from outside of one’s intention, even though it has been internalized and is heard from within the chorus of one’s inner dialog. The Ideal Ego is experienced as if it were one’s own intention apart from the expectations of the external Other, but it is a narcissistic mirroring of society’s expectations, which makes it an imaginary projection of oneself as whole and complete but when analyzed reveals one’s dependence on the internalized desires of the external Other. The failure to repeat the cultural utterances of one’s society verbatim is one’s singularity. This singularity can either be thought of as liberatory or as the burden of the loneliness of one’s difference. Often this failure to repeat is simply repressed and then returns as a bizarre host of anxious symptoms that are interpreted as pathological because beyond the pale of acceptable articulations, but also because they are self-undermining, but sometimes the undermining of the self is just the liberation that one needs to be free of both the Ego Ideal and the Ideal Ego.

Ishmael’s ideas about what others thought of him were just as confused as what he thought of himself. The chorus of his inner dialog was always at odds with itself, and he often mistook which voice was from where, so that he was never sure which one was truly from “elsewhere,” rather than one more thickly layered section of the din of his local situation. But he was somewhat aware of this confusion and framed it as the absolute “confusion” of the Lacanian Real. He knew that the others may think that they could identify him by something like his essence, but that their identifications failed, as all knowledge fails, because of the Real’s absolute resistance to conceptualization, which is also its absolute resistance to intention. The intention identifies or makes equivalent in order to know, but since identities rely on unstable or fluid essences, all knowing is provisional and is in some sense retroactive about what is already in the past. This is the retroactivity that caused Deleuze to consider the present as a special case of the past. If the present is constructed from the identifications of concepts brought into the present from the past, then the present is covered over by its resemblance to the past.

This absolute resistance of the Real to the “equivocation” of identification is the irreducible ambiguity about the intention that relates one to the irreducible ambiguity in the intentions of both self and others that Lacan called the “Non-relation” between the interiority of the self and the exteriority of the Other, including the exteriority of the otherness within the oneself. What does not resemble the past about the Other and therefore cannot be identified by the given concepts of one’s Symbolic, which is always from the past, is what identity tries to cover over, but also what resists reduction to identity absolutely in the Lacanian register of the Real. As Jean-Luc Marion pointed out the intention doesn’t only include what can be made intentional as phenomena and concepts, but intentional awareness also includes what is intuitive or non-conceptual and counter-intentional because it is excessively affective or irreducible to phenomena and concepts. Whenever concepts are about identity, especially when they are about identifying intention, either the intention of the self or of the other, symbolic castration must be disavowed. Symbolic castration is the failure of the Symbolic to represent the unidentifiable “otherness” within one’s intention and within the intention of the external Other. This lack of knowing about otherness, or about the counter-conceptual, is the castration that grounds an open attachment to one’s concepts about the world, or an open attachment to the phallus of identity, which is ironically called a “secure attachment” in Attachment Theory.

“Wear the world like a loose garment,” St. Francis used to say. Ishmael had wondered a lot about St. Francis and what it would be like to attach so loosely to what seemed like was so deadly serious. Was nonattachment the same as not caring? It couldn’t be since St. Francis was famous for caring so much that he preached not only to the outcasts but even to the birds in the trees.

Ultimately the Real’s resistance to symbolization is its refusal to be reduced to a “one,” except retroactively in the special case of the past that we commonly call the “present.” All intention, like the inconsistent multiplicity from which it arises, is multiple, so it can be taken as a one but only through an imaginary objectification that obscures its “Real” lack of oneness. For this reason, identity is an extremely fragile and fleeting object or “one” and is why the ego’s fight for self-preservation is so hyper-vigilant, pathetic, and in the end, futile. For Lacan, to traverse the ego’s fantasies didn’t mean to rid oneself of fantasy or of the ego, or of the phallus entirely but rather to realize the contingencies of the fantasy, which was to realize the ultimate impotency of the Imaginary’s projections. The revealed lack of the phallus or lack of control allowed the fantasy to be erected more provisionally, and more playfully, and this incomplete grasping permitted the fantasy to flow with less symptomatic stagnation. When fantasies are too serious or taken as if ultimate, they are symptomatic repetitions; however, when they are the ground of one’s play, they ground the sort of creative differentiation, or individuation, that accords with one’s singularity rather than with one’s perverse relation to the Symbolic.

Ishmael realized one day after looking through an old psychology textbook that everything is a duck-rabbit, but it is necessary to see either a duck or a rabbit if one wants to see anything at all. It is the pervert who imagines that only one or the other is Real when the Real is the irreducible ambiguity of the interposition of the duck-rabbit. Fantasy imagines a definitive solution to the problem of the Universe’s indeterminacy, which is a necessary but imaginal act. To act in the world, one must have a somewhat solid world to act on and within, but what underlies the disambiguation of a duck-rabbit is the absolute irreducible ambiguity of its indeterminacy. If there is any absolute ethics, it is that “a” doesn’t equal “a,” which is to deny that the laws of identity are absolute but to assert that identity’s incompletion is. And if there is any absolute metaphysics, it is that what there is, is a deferential background that precedes any imaginal oneness. It is unethical to treat any foregrounded objectification as if it were unmediated or unrelated to the deferential background from which all phenomena or concepts are differentiated. This refusal of any totalizing absolute is the “plasticity” that is the hallmark of mental health.

But it seemed to Ishmael that there were absolutes beyond that of no absolutes, objects that would remain even if there was no one to intentionally differentiate them from the ultimate differential background. He often thought of Einstien’s quip against Bohr that he should like to live in a Universe in which “the Moon would remain, even if no one was looking.” John Searle, of “Chinese Room” fame, had a seeming way out of this problem, which was to say the physical objects such as the moon were real objects that wouldn’t fall from the sky if no one were consciously observing them, but that cultural objects such as moon festivals and astrology would disappear if there were no symbolic imaginations to intend them. The problem for Ishmael was that phenomenology seemed to disclose that the conditions for phenomenal or conceptual objects were indeed universal like Kant’s a priori categories, but that without these preconditions for internal experience, there wasn’t any noumenal in-itself to call external or “physical.” If “physical” means anything, one assumes that it refers to that which stands outside of the intention as an independent entity. Our intentions evolved as an internalization of those universal, physical laws that affected our survival and reproduction, but this internalization is so motivated that it is impossible to call the objects of the intention “objective” if “objective” means standing alone regardless of how they appear on the subjective screen. And so, Ishmael would think himself back to the absolute relativity of all things.

Nonetheless, Ishmael thought that he had spotted a mistake that many made upon realizing that whatever appears to be “out there” beyond any particular, unificatory intention, is multiple and not a “one.” He saw that the differential background’s essential multiplicity necessitated the virtue of plasticity or of openness, as other non-essentialist thinkers had, because too much certainty meant too much conservation, or too much “using concepts as a model,” as Deleuze put it, which was a sort of unstable stagnation that would strangulate “new flows of intensities.” But he also saw that the freedom of the imaginal virtual to project itself into the “blank” canvas of the world had a counterpoint in the otherness of the Real. The Real’s resistance to intention was substantial in the sense that its negative limit was a positive push back on the phenomenal and conceptual intention, which also grounded the intention in the counter-intention of the Real. The Real’s counter-intention seemed to express its own intention because its resistance wasn’t utterly arbitrary. The positivized negativity of its substantialized resistance wasn’t just an empty container but seemed to speak in some essential way. The phenomenal and conceptual intention is grounded in what limits it, which is the Real, just as the Real is grounded in its counterpoint, which is the intention, so each is conversing with the other by converting the other’s intentional push into intentional resistance and then each contrapuntal resistance back into the music of the semantic play of self and other or intention and counter-intention. The Real, like “the unconscious, is structured like a language,” but it is the counter-language that grounds all other languages just as it is the counter-intention that grounds all other intentions.

Ishmael knew that it was heresy to attribute intention, even if it was a counter-intention, to the Real. But for Ishmael, the Real’s boundary was not as arbitrary, happenstance, and as non-teleological or “blind” as the sciences had assumed. When the Deep called to the Deep, they weren’t saying anything to each other, but this conversation of silence was full of intention, or perhaps, of counter-intention, but a counter-intention that spoke into existence its own dialog partner. Even though neither Ishmael nor the God of Job knew what the meanings that Deep was speaking to its depths meant, they both knew that they were a part of its music, so this music had enchanted them both and made them boast of its glory. It was playing from the elsewhere out of which they had emerged, and so, they stood outside of themselves in ecstasy whenever they heard its rhythmic thrall call to them again, but they were prideful and obnoxious when they returned from their revels, not understanding that they must humble themselves to speak in the language of others, not only to communicate the otherness that they had known, but also to ingress elsewhere here and now, which is the renewal of being’s particular situation.

The abandoned places of the zone radiated elsewhere’s darkness, which sang in textured affects that swirled and pulsated in darkly colored, vital streams. Ishmael could feel the toothy mouths of these thick, oily currents swimming in his stomach and then work their pulsating flows up to his chest and beat rhythmically against his heart until they finally pushed their meanings against his throat, meanings that wanted to be spoken but which strained the vocal chords beyond their capacities unless they were sung together with others. But how does one teach others to sing what they can’t hear? In advanced dementia, the concepts that frame speech are gone, but that is when the songs from the Deep are remembered again, so the demented sing what they can’t say. When the far is near, it appears as something lost-but-found, and as a living bouquet rather than as a concept. You can know that the far is near when what is near is the ravishing odor of elsewhere intuited deep within the flesh of the body, the “Flesh of the World” as Merleau-Ponty had put it. Ishmael told himself that he didn’t care if the others heard it or not, but he was lying to himself, and it was a deadly mistake because he, like the others, was the flesh of the world, and he could only sing if he was the dissonant chorus resonating as the relation of Self and Other. The absolute otherness of the Real was in each instance of self and other(s). What is unknowable about me is also in you as your unknowable intention, so that my only access to my hidden intention is through yours. What is revealed through this intercourse remains hidden as it is expressed because the everlasting infinite hides in otherness in its momentary revelation.

This is how the counter-intention of the Real is. It is the beyond that grounds local discourse, and which orgasmically groans forth from what is faraway otherness to what is situated and particular. The hyper-limits of the intention cannot be intended, but they can be intuited. And what is intuited about the too-much aboutness of the counter-intention? Deep in the void, there is a counter-intention to limit the endless transcendence of its nothingness, which is to say that nonbeing’s counter-intention is the intention that there be what is here and now or immanent. The absolute oneness of the transcendent void has an erotic desire for the twoness of an immanent other. If the primordial intention was for such a oneness that zero should be that one, then there is an even more primary counter-intention endemic to that pristine nonbeing for another. The natural laws do not seek this Other blindly as the sciences assume, but rather they are the sighted expression of perfection’s desire for the imperfection of becoming through another.

But Ishmael knew that any sort of “Fine Tuning” from within the void was for idiot Christian apologists, so he hid his suspicions about the designs of the One for the Other, from himself and the others. He had to put any possibility of a prior design out of his mind, or else be accused of reactionary superstition, which was sort of ironic given that the cartel was all for superstition when it came to excuses for “sacred” sex shit. The natural laws could not have been intended to multiply otherness, only the non-religious chance of a raw fact was allowed. Wasn’t the point of the Death of God in the Radical Theology that they had been studying that God, along with any a priori meaning or purpose to the Universe was dead, or rather that it had never really been there in the first place, and so it was up to us to make whatever meaning we could in the clearing that had been made by this lack of primordial intention. But perhaps, counter-intention was the same as a lack of intention or design. Perhaps, there didn’t need to be a plan given the endless probability spaces of the infinite expanses of space-time's relations to matter-energy. But still, the raw fact of these probability spaces and the being that actualized them seemed a bit much to swallow when Ishmael was always choking on what seemed to be the unchewable intention of the Other.

Some thinkers who had reached the point of the sort of flowing Idealism in which anything goes might have confused the ultimate multiplicity of the differential background with the ceding of any structure or of any of the permanence necessary for an intention, which would be like the absurdity of libertarian free will in which the will disappears altogether. Ishmael was beginning to realize that a total rejection of the male position could result in the spineless approach of an ingenuine chameleon, but it bothered him that this “feminine weakness” was the exact charge of the pervert against those lacking the phallus. The phallus’s rigidity was meant to juxtapose the flaccid fluidity of the feminine. Was there a way to erect the phallus without becoming rigid? Alenka Zupancic had theorized a playful relation to the phallus in which one wore it like a loose garment.

Lacan’s enigmatic aphorism, “One should never cede on one’s desire,” is easily misunderstood as a phallic assertion, but when desire is reduced to the rigidity of the “one” of the totalizing equality of identity, as it is in the male position, the multiplicity of otherness is necessarily ceded on. Perhaps, the saying might be more clearly formulated as, never cede on the multiplicity of your desires, including those not yet consciously disclosed to you. But of course, there is ceding either way because every intention is a unification of multiplicity that can’t include “All,” which was Lacan’s point about the Real’s absolute resistance to symbolization or intention in the first place. Ismael thought that never ceding must be associated with the feminine position because it meant a unification of multiplicity, but a loosely held one, one that acknowledged the irreducible ambiguity left out of any phenomenal or conceptual identification of the intention.

Whatever Lacan’s famous aphorism meant, it didn’t mean that your desire should be reduced to a “one” without exception. Your desire should be singular but in the sense that it should be a differentiation rather than an identification. A differentiation would be the singularity of a repetition with difference, which is identity plus what can’t be identified, or what resembles the past and its symbolic repository of given phenomena and concepts and what is irreducibly ambiguous. An identification via resemblance would be the oneness of a convergence onto an equivalency between past concepts and phenomena and present ones without difference or without the trauma of touching the unidentifiable disequilibrium of the Real. Lacan called a repetition of the same “repetition automatique,” which was the sort of stagnant repetition that showed up as a pathological symptom in psychoanalysis. A symptom was a behavior or a locution or a concept that repeated but without ever reaching its end, which is something like a signifier that is unable to indicate its referent because the gap of the Real is too vast between them. For Lacan stagnant or pathological repetitions of the same could be moved to a singular production of difference somehow without “ceding on one’s desire,” so that one could signify in a common tongue with others but also with the difference of including the uncommon, unrepeatable Real as another indication of her signification.

Because “singular” can either mean that one’s intention is unified and resembles the intentions of others, or that one’s intentions are different in the sense that they differ from others and include differences within them, which is the strange unification of a disunified intention the Jung called “individuation.” Ishmael thought of the intention of the female position as a unique unification of multiplicity without having molded all of the given multiplicity of otherness into the familiar all of a knowable one, so that there was instead a remainder of irreducible ambiguity, which made any true individuation necessarily “Non-all.” He, like Deleuze, had come to believe that a repetition of the same wasn’t possible but only appeared that way when difference and multiplicity was covered over by a concept in manner similar to a Freudian “Screen Memory.” The Screen Memory for Freud was a memory, but instead of uncovering the past, it covered over it to avoid the trauma of the Real. The concept for Deleuze could be like a Freudian Screen Memory but for the present if it was employed to cover-over or “mold” the difference of the present rather than to present it. If one used concepts as this sort of mold of the multiplicity of present intention, then he became as blind as the supposedly “blind” physical laws of the sciences. Ishmael imagined as Deleuze did that a repetition was always a repetition with difference, which for Deleuze was “pure difference,” but Ishmael wasn’t sure what that meant yet since it seemed to him that some form or at least some minimal repetition was necessary to access the purity of difference.

Ishmael like many who read Deleuze, didn’t understand that that was Deleuze point when he formulated the notion of a concept that could present difference rather than cover it over, which was his notion of “concept creation,” which was a repetition with difference. Ishmael’s quest for the purity of different would dog him and cloud his judgement about the deep places of the zone, even though he couldn’t ever completely fall into the psychosis of the total madness of what he mistook as Deleuze’s “Logic of Sense.” Ishmael assumed that the “catastrophe” of a total sensual immersion into the Real without any concepts was something to seek after, but, thankfully, anytime he either got too close or fell in, something pulled him back out of the abyss. He was luckier than many of the others in that way, but he lived with a sort of survivor's guilt about never having given himself completely to the call of the unfathomable otherness of the unmediated numinous, which was something like the aging rocker who was ashamed of his fading out rather than having burned out.

The male position is pathological because it holds to the sort of singularity that Lacan characterized as “All,” which meant the singularity of a unified totality, but also a repetition of the intentions of others, or a one without remainder or exception. For Lacan the male position disavowed one’s “symbolic castration,” which is to hold that the identifications of symbolic representation can give one what they claim to signify without a gap between its signifiers and their referents. The irreducible ambiguity or multiplicity of one’s intentions can be temporarily, retroactively, and somewhat arbitrarily unified by the signifiers of language, or the phenomena of the intention, and the mediation of the concepts of the Symbolic, but this unification or objectification is incomplete. For Lacan, the phallus was the “Master Signifier” that claimed to contain it all without mediation and without exception. Even if a particular person in the male position didn’t have it all that is to say didn’t have the phallus, the male pervert believed that there was someone who did, and even though he was currently without it, he might someday obtain it, which is something like the poor man who thinks that his condition of poverty is only a temporary embarrassment, which he will someday raise himself out of when he hits it big and is finally acknowledge for his heretofore ignored, enormous phallus.

The “having-all” or totalizing unification of the All position might seem like the ultimate form of never ceding on one’s desires, which would mean that the pervert with the most toys wins. However, every cadence either hides or highlights its inherent decadence. There is never a repetition of the same, but always a falling away or differentiation from what was before, whether it is major and noticeable or minor and almost imperceptible. The feminine or Non-all position was Lacan’s preferred position, so there must be a sense in which the decadence of not-having-all, which was a lack of self-mastery, enabled “never-ceding,” which was at the same time a ceding of the phallus. Self-mastery would seem to be the key to never-ceding because it would unify the intention in such a way as to focus it on the object of one’s desire without distraction nor decadence, which would hypothetically form an identification between the projection of one’s intention and its object. However, there is always a gap between the intention and its objects because there is always a gap between the signifier and the signified, and that unfathomable gap of the Real can only be traversed, however imperfectly, by the mediation of an imaginal concept.

Ismael’s favorite passage from the Bible was in Job when God upbraided Job asking him rhetorically, “Were you there when I did all the stuff that I did in the beginning of beginnings, like when I founded the foundations of the Earth from the guts of chaos beasts, and when I made Leviathan and Behemoth for reasons that are unknown, even to Me. And have you ever been where the Deep calls to the Deep? Well, I have, nobody knows what they're saying to each other, but it's something that you’ll never hear.” Ishmael wanted to be there at that “elsewhere.” Even though it seemed like God was telling Job that he couldn’t go there and wouldn’t want to if he knew how insane it was, so that Job was better off just suffering without an explanation for his suffering, Ismael wanted to go there. Or rather, it was because God had said that Job couldn’t go there that Ishmael wanted to. Ismael wanted to eat of this tree of forbidden and disavowed knowledge because it was forbidden and disavowed. But, of course, he didn’t know that.

It wasn’t until Jung uncovered God’s disavowal of his shadow in the figure of Satan that God’s obfuscations became clear to Ishmael. God was not only complicit with the evil perpetrated on Job by His servant Satan, but also the cause of it. Satan’s job was to be God’s prosecuting attorney. Satan was to test the proposition that Job’s piety was only because he was well compensated for it. So, how does one find out except to remove all of Job’s prosperity and good fortune? Satan was the tester, so his hands were dirty, but Satan was God’s intention to know about the evil from which His goodness arose. God’s disavowal of His evil intentions made Satan seem as if he were a separate entity and counter to God’s intention for goodness. But then the question arose among God’s human interlocutors as to why an all-powerful God could allow for such opposition to His goodness, which is why God refused to answer Job’s question and instead offered him His bombastic bluster.

God was not the master of His intentions, which was why His account of the deep places was so confused and deliberately obfuscated. Even so, the prohibition of this forbidden, disavowed knowledge is the obstacle that caused the desire for all subsequent knowing. In Job, God’s intention to know the goodness of His creation relied on the generative antinomy of good and evil, but this binary opposition was disavowed by God’s omni-beneficial claims about Himself. This disavowal was the absolution of His imagined, phallic, absolute omni-beneficence. It is not that the basis of goodness is badness, but rather that badness and goodness are grounded in each other. Calvin’s doctrine of “Double Predestination was wrong, but only because of the “predestination” part and not because of the “double” part of the theology. Calvin’s insistence that God’s goodness was “double,” and therefore that his goodness was also his evil, disclosed how “chosenness” necessarily produced the unchosen, or the “damned.”

However, the dual nature of God’s intention is what allows for an open future rather than for the predestination of all things for good, which would be the evil of a closed determinism disallowing the creativity of otherness to participate in being’s becoming. Therefore, evil is not merely parasitic on goodness as Augustine held because goodness and badness form the contradictory but creative antinomy that founded the Universe. God’s goodness is the ground of the co-arising of the binary opposition of good and evil, so God’s goodness is both good and evil, and this is the sense in which evil is a parasite on God’s goodness, but then goodness is also a parasite on evil and both are parasites on the goodness before God was good, which is the goodness that isn’t either good or bad but the intention that there be a moral Universe of goodness and badness that grounds being’s becoming through otherness or through the creative contradictions of binary oppositions. Hegel’s dialectic of being and nonbeing was simply this process of becoming though negation, except that Hegel often presents his dialect as if it were a predetermine, inevitable historical progression. However, the full implication of becoming through the nothingness of the void is the no-guarantees of the open potential of nothingness that is prior to any possible, actualized possibility space. Good and evil is this sort of dialectical relationship of adversaries who define each other by their counter-distinction to one another. The dialectic of self and other gives the self to itself through opposition to the other, but this relationship is porous and unstable since neither the self nor the other are completely defined in-themselves but by their lack of determination.

The definition given to the self by the Other isn’t without intention as one might imagine if it were a relationship between the intention of a thing and the absence of intention of a no-thing. The nothingness of the Other isn’t complete because whatever nothing “is,” it had a counter-intention from the beginning, which continually escapes it up to the present moment, that there be something other than itself. “Having” this uncontainable intention for being is the sense in which the primordial nothingness was “super-saturated,” or “incontinent.” The intention for being is the primordial good because it is the ground from whatever there is, is, which is the primordial nature of the God before God, or the God before Being itself, but this good is the goodness that generates and sustains the relation between good and evil, self and other, interior and exterior, the One and the many, which are the binary oppositions that allow for there to be anything at all. God’s goodness as it instantiates itself in being “includes” evil because it is the dialectical relation between good and evil that is the necessary dialectic of a moral Universe in which the primary ethical imperative is that there be something and nothing rather than just nothing. Immanuel Levinas said that the first philosophy is ethics rather than ontology because the intention that there be another precedes the being of the Other, and the being of the self proceeds from the being of the Other.

Ishmael felt his unexplainable thrownness into being as both a constant dread and a constant fascination. We are the beings who ask the question of being, which might be formulated as, “From where and to where have we been thrown and why?”. We grasp for being’s reasons with reason, but being withdraws beyond the horizon of our reasons because being is not grounded in its located “facticity” but in the nonlocal elsewhere from which it is thrown. However, there is no elsewhere without a here to long to be there, which is to say that there is no here without an elsewhere to found its facticity in the co-arising of locatedness and nonlocality. For Heidegger, the “thrownness” of being was the ground of being’s “care” not only about the local facticity of where it had been thrown but also about the counter-facticity of from where it had been thrown.

Elsewhere doesn’t have a particular situation or any other intention except that there be the localized situations of particular intentions. This intention that there be intentions was what withdrew from Ishmael because whenever he tried to observe it directly, he sunk into the unconsciousness of its counter-intention, which wasn’t the nonconsciousness of automatic operations, nor of the flow states that everyone seemed to be seeking, but rather the Freudian unconscious that he intuited as the beyond of his intention. The nearness of being’s becoming-situated points beyond itself to that far away counter-situation of the unconscious that remains far even when it is brought near. The counter-intention barely hidden beneath the surface of situated-being is the excessive language of the unconscious, which is intuited by the barely sane as the non-being internal to their en-languaged being. When the intention is about too much because too much has been given to it, this too-much aboutness speaks as the superfluity of non-being's counter-intention and can be heard, however incomprehensibly, here by those who aren’t complete here, or as is sometimes said by those who “aren’t all there.” Ishmael could see, as Freud first saw, and Lacan after him, that the unconscious was full and speaking but not in the language of the day, but of the language-like symbolic structures of the night.

Being’s care for its becoming is grounded beyond the horizon of its situation. Knowing requires an imminent relation between the present signifier and the absent signified. The signified might be absent from the direct sight of its signifier; however, this is the imminent absence of what is of a distantiated location, either physical or virtual, but which is nonetheless also located. This is not the distant location of elsewhere because elsewhere in nonlocal. When what is signified is elsewhere, signifiers are distorted by the presence of the Real. For Heidegger the ground of being is beyond being’s horizon, so how the signifiers by which located being is known relate to this groundless ground is either unknowable or ambiguous. When signifiers point beyond the horizon of this plane of imminence, then the relation between signifier and the signified is not necessarily without relation, but through a “non-relation,” as Lacan put it. Lacan positivized the non-relation in his locution, “There is a non-relation,” which is to positivize the gap between having in the register of the Symbolic and being in the register of the Real. The gap between the signifiers of language and the being that they signify is absolute, so that knowing is through the non-relation of analogy.

The cartel had studied the analogical way of speaking about God developed by the medieval theologians. Thomas Aquinas adumbrated this non-relation between the signifier and the signified that produced excessive meanings rather than mere nonsense. Analogy contains both the affirmation of naming and the negation of the non-relation. As Aquinas pointed out, when one said that “God is a rock,” this affirmative statement contained its own negation. In whatever way God was a rock, He was not like any rock that we have ever seen in the physical realm, nor like any that we could imagine in the virtual. The statement is simply absurd when analyzed according to the rules of logic, but meaningful theologically because it affirmed God’s rock-like steadfastness. But God’s steadfastness also contained its own negation so that analogical knowing never arrived at it target, yet it approached the signified asymptotically. This strange way of speaking led many mystics to pronounce such problematic things as, “God is not good,” because in whatever way God is good, he is its ground, and therefore nothing like the goodness that gets predicated to created beings who “participate” in the goodness of God. This is the analogical logic that had many of these same mystics proclaiming, in one form or another, that “God doesn’t exist,” since He is the ground of existence. Language falls apart when it reaches into the abyss from whence being comes, but it is somehow productive, of what, nobody can say, but it can be intuited. Heidegger’s formulation for creativity was speaking “next to,” perhaps, “with” or “into” the void, which is the strange partnership of the Real of the Lacanian nonrelation to language.

We are the beings whose care for our being is given by its boundaries, which is something like saying that we want what we can’t have, or our intention is given by what is beyond its horizon, and also like saying that goodness emerges from its absence and vice versa. For en-languaged being the primary binary opposition, as Darrida pointed out, is the presence of the signifier and the absence of the signified. There is no presence without absence and vice versus, so that whatever is absent is the hidden ground of whatever there is, just as nonbeing is the ground of being. Oneness is the absence of multiplicity, which is why when goodness becomes too singular, it lacks the multiplicity of other goods and is therefore evil. However, oneness is not necessarily evil as something like the Declaration of Universal Human Rights demonstrates. There is a oneness or universality that allows for multiplicity to flourish because oneness and multiplicity are derived from and depended on each other. Universal Human Rights as they are currently articulated may be imperfect, but if they are to be made “more perfect” in the words of Lincoln and King, this correction must be performed with reference to the dialectic between the Universal and the Particular, which is: as much oneness as is necessary for the maximal multiplicity of difference.

The Catholic Church calls itself, “The Sacrifice of Unity,” because unity protects and preserves difference to a point, but any oneness, however loose a confederation it may be, is always a sacrifice of difference. In some so called “Identity Politics,” this necessary sacrifice is obfuscated, or even disavowed, because of a reactionary response to conservatism, but there is no singularity without the collectivity from which it arises. This “libertarian,” in the original sense of the word, reactionary response is understandable given how conservatism has mostly devolved into a reactionary response to what so called “conservatives” perceive as the decadence of “liberal” progressivism. However, what conservatives have not yet realized, because of their enjoyment of depriving the left of its enjoyment, is that the conservatism of the Randian. complete identification of “a” equals “a” of her so called “Objectivism” taken to its end collapses in on itself in the same way that “Libertarian” freedom does. Without otherness, there is no “radical” individualism, which works both ways. The nihilistic “punks” of the 70s needed the conservative beliefs of the straight-laced reactionaries, just as much as those orthodox squares needed hipster heresy for the enjoyment of their scandalized outrage.

The conservative eliminates his enjoyment altogether if he eliminates otherness because the conservative isn’t as grounded in his own identity as he imagines. He is grounded in his enjoyment of outrage, which is identical to his fear of difference. He is defined by his fear of the Other because he has disavowed not on that his enjoyment is grounded in the other but also that the self is another, which is the necessary disavowal for him, or any “one,” to sense the self as the interiority of an intentional one in opposition to the exteriority of the multiplicity of otherness. Ishmael was stuck in the grandeur of the ultimate otherness that he had seen as an ecstatic vision. He had become like any other obnoxious psychedelic guru to the others, and to himself, at times, believing himself to be the chosen prophet of elsewhere. He had seen and heard things that they couldn’t imagine. Like the God of Job and the dude who has returned from the “ego death” of a “heroic” dose of LSD, Ishmael had been touched by extreme alterity, and he was glowing with that particular shimmer more and more. But unlike the self-impressed God of the whirlwind and the visionary shaman of the modern drug culture, he sensed not only the anteriority but also the impurity of his intention. He was often ashamed after one of his enthusiastic outbursts about the call of the Deep, noticing in retrospect how they had looked at him, not with the admiration that he longed for, but couldn’t admit to himself, but rather, with a sort of concern that often slide into the derisive countenances of the sympathetic. Imagining how they thought about him exposed to him how much he cared, not so much about the Deep, but about their regard, especially about the regard of Julian, who he could barely stand to look at because of her blinding beauty but of whom he thought about constantly.

Ishmael was yet to understand that his regard for the regard of others was the exact sort of impurity of intention that calls whatever is singular into the necessary relation of one singularity to another. Our desire for the desire of the other, which is our desire to be desired, is indeed the call of the “Deep to the Deep.” There was no way to remain unstained and answer that call. Whatever Deleuzian “Pure Difference” is, it is an “absolute” nothing because it is without the limits of relation. Whatever the pure identity of an independent, or non-relational, classical substance was, it was also an absolute nothing for the same reason: it was without relation. Substance must be discovered, possibly constructed, according to the Structuralists, through a relation, which is the sacrifice of its “in-itself” purity to be known as it becomes other than itself. This is the process of self-knowing, or “Absolute Knowing,” that Hegel described as self-objectification in which the subject makes itself an object of its own contemplation via self-alienation or via stepping outside of itself in the same way that the primordial nothing entered into dialectical relation with itself via creation or via becoming multiple.

To enter this dialectical relation, the self-identical substance of the One or of a one must sacrifice the purity of its oneness to be known through the multiplicity of otherness. Deleuze began with the total multiplicity of otherness that he called “Different-in-itself" or “Pure Difference, but the effect of beginning with the Deleuzian “differential background” or the Whiteheadian “relata,” as Deleuze following Whitehead did, is that same as begging with a pure oneness because the purity of either oneness or difference is characterized by being without-relation. The dialectical relations of being and nonbeing forms a temporary oneness of self and other, which for the process thinker requires the reduction of difference to a temporary and incomplete objectification in intentional phenomena and / or concepts.

The equation for maximal multiplicity that Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Figured as his “Omega Point” was the most complexity or multiplicity allowed by the least amount of simplicity or oneness, or the most difference permitted by the requirements of relation, which are the physical and / or virtual repetitions of structure or form. Difference is communicated or related via a common language, which might be considered on the most general level as systematized repetitions. Matter relates to the energy internal to it via its dialectical externalization in space-time according to the physical language of the natural laws. In the case of human language, relations are enabled by the intersection of the repetitions of signifiers and the concepts given by the Derridean “Differánce” of systematized symbolic differences. Ishamel did not see how to enter into the shared language of the cartel without sacrificing the integrity of his difference or the otherness of his singularity. He related this lack of translatability to the mystics that he studied. Didn’t these holy men and women struggle with the reduction of their ecstatic experiences to words?

However, some difference had to be sacrificed for the relationality given by a shared system of signifiers. The compromise that the mystics had arrived at was the poetics of analogy, which was the crossroads of the cataphasis of identity and the apophasis of the unidentifiable. The only good is that there be multiple goods, too many to be identified by the signifiers of language, and then absolute evil would be the total reduction of the multiplicity of goods to a one, which in a strange twist of logic, would be the evil of reducing good and evil to an absolute good indistinguishable from absolution evil. Oneness without multiplicity is the singularity without otherness that collapses into itself as the radical void of “Being-in-itself" if thought of as Hegel did as an absolute One. Multiplicity without oneness is the without-relation of “Difference-in-itself” that Deleuze though of as the void of potential without any means of actualizing itself. There is no oneness without the multiplicity of otherness, and there is no difference without self-identical oneness, even though the latter is mostly a remembrance of that original oneness from which multiplicity comes and therefore must be mediated through a concept.

Ishmael’s care for being extended to the elsewhere from which it came because this faraway ground was barred to him even though it was “nearer to [him] than [his] own breath,” as the mystics used to say. The outside elsewhere of being-situated grounds being’s inside-ness in care for itself through what is external or other in a counter-positioning that Lacan called “extimacy.” The symbolic intentions of others are internalized as if one’s own intention in the manner of Rene Giraud’s “mimetic desire,” which Lacan put as “desire is desire of the Other.” We desire what others desire, or we care about what we see others caring about. Therefore, care is the intention that precedes and grounds all the other of being’s intentions, or to emphasize the counter-temporal paradox of being’s causal structure, being proceeds from the care of being. The infant learns to care for what the mother cares for, including itself, so that the infant cares for itself after seeing that the mother cares about it. More than lack of calories, lack of care dispenses with the infant who fails to be cared for. The infant studies the mother to discern what her care is about, especially when she is caring about something else: another, traditionally the father. The infant must learn to lure the mother's care back to itself because it knows that its life depends on it. Care for en-languaged being is to learn to use signifiers to lure the absent signified back to presence.

Augustine of Hippo thought of this paradox of the nonbeing internal to being as the paradox of love’s generation of what it loves from nothing, which is the sense in which this primordial nothing was “super-saturated,” as Pseudo-Dionysus put, or lacked nothing but self-containment, as Plotinus put the contradiction between the excess of being beyond any possible oneness and the lack of being’s internal solitude. Being is too excessive to be one or to be self-identical, so the singularity of being differentiates into the singularities of different beings. The love that produces and sustains beings is itself without being, so it is the nonbeing that paradoxically grounds being in its love. Nonbeing’s supersaturated darkness is the light of love that wills whatever exists into its existence. Augustine equated love with the intention that there be an object of love when he wrote in the voice of this intention for love, “Amo: volo ut sis. (I love you: I want you to be).” Before being, was the generative nonbeing or supersaturated nothing of the care for being from which being arose, which Jean-Luc Marion called the “God before God” or the “God before Being.”

Ishmael sought out any place where he felt the unsettling vertigo of an impending catastrophe, or where one had left its mark on the remnants of the past because he thought that these were signs that the Deep was either about to speak in the former instances or had already spoken there in the latter. The zone was full of mostly the echoes of what had already been said by the antinomies of the Deep. Ishmael knew that these were the antinomies that had founded the Universe in the sexual congress of the total determination of matter-energy with the otherness of indeterminate space-time. Whatever that meant, he didn’t know, but he liked its poetry, and poetics must be how to proceed since the cartel had reached an end to its theoretical inquiry in the productive counter-speech of analogy. Analogical speech springs from the binary opposition of self or the familiar and the Other or the distant. Theory had distained its poetic roots since the Scientific Revolution. Ishmael wanted to reclaim them as the radical vocalizations of “Theo-poetics.”