ONE

Introduction

The Question Concerns Ethics

“And thus we are bound to grow day-by-day more questionable, worthier of asking questions, perhaps also worthier—of living?

—Nietzsche

On the Genealogy of Morals

The title of this book could just as well be The Question of the Ethical Subject as The Question of Ethics. The prepositional object (ethics) is far less important than the noun (question) modified by the prepositional phrase, for the book’s issue is how questioning can occur in a manner that puts in question the body of values that led to the questioning. The reader will find that the question of ethics arises out of ethical concern as well as out of conflicts within structures of value, that ethical concern and suspicion of ethics qualify one another. The suspicion is ethical because it is motivated by a desire to recognize and mitigate certain occasions of human suppression and suffering. The suspicion held by ‘the question of ethics’ is that ethical concern has a pathogenic dimension and is composed of values that occasion human suffering in the pursuit of human well-being. And of course this question itself, as an expression of ethical concern, may be as pathogenic as the system of values that it questions. That is the reason why self-overcoming and recoil in the movement of thought are central to the book’s purpose.

This could have been a study of the development and formation of ethics as we know it today. Indeed, the book’s orientation calls for that kind of study, for a careful accounting of the genesis of ethics in Western thought and practice, an accounting that would find its own genealogy in the subject of its study. But the question of ethics has arisen more recently and is not broadly recognized. It comes out of the dialectical thought of the early to mid nineteenth century, but finds its most effective early expression in Nietzsche’s writing. That is because in Nietzsche’s thought both Western subjectivity and reason are put fundamentally in question, and that destabilization of thought concerning subjectivity and reason is essential to the development of the question of ethics. So we begin with Nietzsche in order to see how the self-overcoming movement of his thought recoils on his own values and, in the context of his account of the ascetic ideal, both reveals the role of the ascetic ideal in Nietzsche’s thought and prevents the formation of a normative ethics in his thought. For our purposes, the question of ethics takes its departure from this movement.

Foucault adds considerably to the formation of the question by the manner in which he puts in question ethical subjectivity. We shall also find that the movements of self-overcoming and recoil characterize his thought and give his genealogies an import that goes considerably beyond the specific claims that he makes. The question of ethics unfolds as his own values lose their power to provide axiomatic certainty or to play a constructive role in the formation of a new kind of ethical subject. By treating the question of ethics in relation to Foucault I am thus able to carry the Nietzschean theme to our contemporary world. For us the question of ethics is Nietzsche’s question, and Foucault is one of his most apparent heirs.

But neither Nietzsche nor Foucault embodies the problem of the question of ethics with the disciplined power or the revealing ambiguity that we find in Heidegger’s thought. I say ambiguity with care. I mean that in Heidegger we will find the question of ethics functioning with exceptional force—so forcefully that many commentators have confused his early work with nihilism or a stance that is indifferent to ethics. They fail to see that Heidegger is working from within the values and thought that he puts in question and that he recognizes that the question arises from within the values and thoughts, not from outside them or by virtue of the originality of his own thought. But we shall also find that one of the major formations in Western ethical thought and practice, which Nietzsche described under the name of the ascetic ideal, functions unquestionably in Heidegger’s thought and leads him to weaken considerably the question of ethics. He reinscribes a quasi-ethical piety within ‘the rule of being’—hence, the ambiguity.

The fifth chapter, “These Violent Passions: The Rector’s Address,” provides a major focus for the book. After showing how the question of ethics is developed and moves in the thought of Being and Time and “On the Essence of Truth,” I turn to Heidegger’s Rector’s address of 1933. Like the chapter in which I discuss it, it is short. But it poses a bevy of problems. In the first place, it is an ethical work in which Heidegger’s values, commitments, and passions override the question of ethics that he had developed with such care. In the second place, his commitments place him in companionship with National Socialism, although in the address he avoids racist language and argues for the university’s independence of state authority. The early version that I read in 1959 ends nonetheless with “Heil Hitler,” and Heidegger’s admiration for Hitler is as unmistakable as it is badly informed, naive, and chilling. He violates in the address many of the values that I most likely share with you, the reader: He is dismally authoritarian and offers no quarter in his opposition to academic freedom; he is opposed to democracy as a form of government; he wants to mold the university by one overriding interpretation of the history of philosophy; he values institutional control more than free exploration; and his Germanophilia is virtually boundless in spite of a strong critique of German culture. It is an address that intensifies ethical opposition and argument and addresses the question of ethics only by antiphrasis.

In the third place, reading the address now brings to a head our revulsion in the face of National Socialism and makes difficult our reading it as a serious work of thought. Some of the work now coming out on Heidegger and political issues either largely ignores his thought in the pursuit of biographical information or treats the topic of Heidegger’s politics with such limited knowledge of his thought as to place in jeopardy the value of the work. My intention, in the context of this book, is to show how the question of ethics functions or fails to function in certain parts of his thought. I intend to show that when the question of ethics governs a discourse, certain types of suppression and pain can be perceived with a depth and range that is not possible in ethical thought. These are issues that find their expression in the way in which thoughts are formed and words are used. Since they are issues of thinking and language, my effort is to follow the language and thought, to think them through, and to develop the question of ethics that arises from a major aspect of our tradition, an aspect that had the effect of overturning the tradition that has raised that question. Our first obligation is thus to be clear on what happens in the Rector’s address, and our second is to understand the address in relation to the question of ethics. I believe that Foucault is right when he says that fascism expresses a basic tendency in the formation of Western subjectivity and power, that Western ethics and fascism are far more closely aligned than we want to believe. And I believe that Heidegger is right in saying that the question of the subject is one that we do not yet know how to address fully and critically. To find out how ethics and the ethical subject fall into question is to find as well how fascism falls into question in a fundamental way. Hence, to examine the ethical stance of the address is, in the context of this book, part of the process of questioning the fascism of German National Socialism as well as that of many of its critics. The question for us in the process is how to raise the question of ethics without reinscribing—as Heidegger does in the address—the totalizing thought that the question suspends.

National Socialism, world hunger, destruction of the environment—these and other horrors press upon us and drive us to find the values that will address and defeat the major dangers and causes of suffering. This book, however, is based on the hypothesis that one must suspend consideration of the practical application of an ethical position if one is to be able to follow that position in its most characteristic movements, which are occasioned by the conflicts that invest and structure its values. I have adopted this hypothesis because the perceived application or ‘ethical relevance’ of an option will have as a dimension of its structure the values that the given option puts in question. We can easily be fascists, for example, in the manner we apply or extend nonfascist values. If one applies an option to everyday life in order to see what it ‘means’ without putting in question the values and histories that constitute the application and its motivation, the practical move of application is vulnerable to all manner of countervalues that constitute it. If, for example, one wants to find out what Nietzsche’s account of the ascetic ideal means in our lives in order to judge its ethical merit, one foreshortens Nietzsche’s critique of the Western desire for meaning and the inevitably ascetic structure of Western judgment. Then there is virtually no chance that one can appreciate the full range and import of Nietzsche’s account. Our strategy is to suspend the practical move, to put it in question throughout this discourse, in order to see whether that very practical movement may be characterized by problems that compound suffering and tragedy. Our normal esteem for commitment and passionate concern may well be among those attitudes that produce values opposite to the values that we intend to cultivate.

I am taking ethics to mean the body of values by which a culture understands and interprets itself with regard to what is good and bad. In this usage, ethics is not sharply distinguished from morals, since it refers to a group of principles for both conduct and value judgment. I have used ethics in order to emphasize the operation of these principles in knowledge and theory as well as in nontheoretical conduct. Assent to ‘right’ principles and interpretations of these principles are not, I believe, finally separable. Their function within a given ethos will ordinarily be operative in evaluations of them within the ethos. Rather than separating thought from the elements in a people’s character that determine their feelings of right and wrong, I assume in my use of ethics that thought is one kind of conduct that is formed by and subject to the values that determine both the ideals and the operative character of people in a given ethos. The ‘question of ethics’ indicates an interruption in an ethos, an interruption in which the definitive values that govern thought and everyday action lose their power and authority to provide immediate certainty in their functions. They continue to function in a person’s life and thought, but they become optional rather than axiomatic to the extent that they are in question.

To say that ethics is in question is also to say that the complex structures of thought and action that fall under the category of ethics comes to be questionable. Ethics, as the body of values by which a culture understands and interprets itself with regard to what is good and bad, is interrupted. We shall find in those discourses in which the question of ethics takes place that the status of moral judgment, the axiomatic quality of given values, and the polarity of good and bad are also in question. The guiding suspicion is that the self-determination of our culture makes inevitable the suffering and destruction to which it is insensitive not only by virtue of its specific values, but also by virtue of the manner of self-determination that we broadly call ethics. The issue is obscure because we are thoroughly a part of the process and structures of values that fall into question. If it is the case, for example, that the ‘other’ in its simple occurrence is unthinkable in our heritage, or if some of our characteristic satisfactions that occur under the influence of the ascetic ideal include or make inevitable certain kinds of suffering, the obscurity that accompanies the interruption of ethics will also affect the medium in which we must think if we are to consider the question of ethics. When obscurity replaces clarity of valuational judgment, we can expect anxiety. We shall ask whether an intensification of this kind of anxiety allows disclosure of aspects of our shared lives that are made obscure by the very clarity that characterizes ethical commitment and thought.

This study emphasizes the complexity of elements and their conflicts within the values that we often take to be clear and simple. Nietzsche’s account of the ascetic ideal will give us one focus for this emphasis. Foucault’s study of the ethical subject gives another. Heidegger’s account of propriety and authenticity, a third. The issue is not only one of ambiguity. It is one of genealogy and heritage, of the multiple factors that form a value complex, its identity and powers. Values carry with them their formative processes. Undertows accompany their forward movements, and conflicts often define the harmony that they offer. The ascetic ideal, for example, embodies both life-affirmation and life-denial. The ethical subject embodies both autonomy and subjection. Authenticity embodies both self-realization and self-deconstruction. No identity defines a value structure in its range and complexity. The question of ethics indicates this complexity, the insufficiency of the idea of identity in relation to values, and the importance of keeping to the fore the counterforces that constitute the processes whereby we seek both clarity of judgment and consistency in action.

One purpose of this book is to show how and why our dominant manners of evaluation have fallen into question. Since the question of ethics is a question of knowing and thinking as well as of choosing and everyday action, our subject matter concerns the ways by which we customarily establish bodies of knowledge and patterns of reflections, our ways of producing and maintaining certainty, and our styles of good sense. The writers who shall receive our attention—Nietzsche, Foucault, and Heidegger—all devote their primary attention to the Western philosophical canon. Their own movements of thought are derived from the ideas and logics that constitute, whether consciously or unconsciously, the mainstream of our philosophical heritage. Their originality is found in their turning these concepts and logics on themselves, a turning that we shall generally call self-overcoming recoil, and in their elaborating by means of the turning ways of thinking that their heritage makes possible, but which are traditionally avoided, resisted, or suppressed. They all find the possibility for their own thought in their philosophical heritage and take their departures from the suppression or avoidance that traditionally accompanies it.

I shall have less to say about the canon than about these departures from it and within it. My intention is to follow the ways in which our primary sense of rightness is transformed in the discourses of Nietzsche, Foucault, and Heidegger and to make this transformation the moving thought of the book. The self-overcoming recoil in these readings of our tradition defines also the movement of my own discourse regarding them. The question of ethical thinking takes place in this process. It is a process that maintains the question rather than the values that have governed our traditional senses of rightness. In this process the violence and oppressive anxieties that are constitutive of the values by which we have organized our thought and lives become apparent. As ethical thinking recoils with the oppositions and resistances that constitute it, different ways of thinking emerge and different thoughts develop in which our ethical, pathogenic violence and anxiety are more difficult to overlook. The anxiety that accompanies the transformation of thinking confronts the suppressive anxiety in our ethical heritage that has resisted transformation. The consequent lightness of mind that develops in the discourse that we shall consider, while giving less customary satisfaction, produces questions, criticism, and uncertainty in those regions of conviction that harbor those inevitabilities of suffering that are closely connected to the ways we go about maximizing our well-being. The continual deferral of ethical certainty allows a decomposition to take place in the aggregates of value and sensibility that are opposed to a self-overcoming genealogical investigation of the heritage.

Questioning is privileged in this study in order to contaminate the ‘neutrality’ that traditionally provides the mood and presumption of skeptical enquiry. Ordinarily a philosopher questions because he or she doubts or wants to cultivate doubt regarding certain beliefs and practices. One wants to maximize a distance regarding what is questioned. One adopts a questioning stance before a claim, belief, or practice and finds enough freedom in the stance to consider alternatives to, or to find weaknesses in, the given claim. This traditional neutrality of investigation, however, is invested with the values associated with breaking the power that the claim exercises and with finding alternative and better claims. This stance is itself contaminated with nonneutral elements, such as powerful epistemological assumptions regarding perception and mental synthesis, desires for autonomy and truth, and those values that direct one to attractive alternatives and goals. Neutrality traditionally produces truths and standards for conduct that are not subject, within their discourse, to the questioning that produced them. They compose a nonneutral position.

Question, as I use the word, does not suggest neutrality or skepticism, but the thorough enmeshment of opposing values in the lineage of ethics within which both the question and what is questioned take place. A way of life, for example, makes problems for itself as it attempts to establish its ideals because of opposition to the ideals that is in its own makeup. Our attempts to evaluate and establish a hierarchy of values include forces that run counter to such an effort, forces that put evaluating and hierarchizing in question in the midst of the evaluating process. That does not make evaluation wrong or bad, but it functions as a caution to evaluative processes, suggests limits to the processes, and puts them as a whole in question. One is oneself in question as one questions and makes judgments. When Nietzsche finds, for example, that his work of transvaluing values is constituted by the values that he attacks, he can find no haven in neutrality or authority that will establish the value of his claims beyond question. He finds that his being is in question. When Foucault discovers that the objectivity of his genealogy is within the lineage of disciplines that he finds to be passing away, he finds that his knowledge of their passing away is in question. When Heidegger comes to think nonessence and counteressence in essence, his own thought falls necessarily in question. In such instances, an ethos—a way of communal living, and not only the individual’s way of life—is also put in question by the countervalences that constitute it and make possible Heidegger’s judgment and thought regarding it. The questioning stance is put in question by the stretch of question’s privilege. It is a privilege that opens to the question of being as well as to the question of an ethos’s standards of good and bad. Hence, the subject of the book has to do as much with the questionableness of putting ethics in question as with the questionableness of ethics. The question of ethics does not lead to a new ethics.

In the question of ethics, the emphasis falls on a continuing process of thinking that diagnoses, criticizes, clarifies by means of questions, destructures the components of meaning and power that silently shape our lives together, and also questions the values and concepts that have rule-governing and axiomatic power in our culture. The emphasis does not fall on the possible complete systematic accounts that prescribe definitive solutions to problems, ‘right’ structures of value, originary or utopian visions of preferred types of personal identity. Thinking and writing, rather, take place in the questionableness and the problems that arise in the constellations of belief, knowledge, and evaluation that constitute us and set the parameters for what we may legitimately desire and the manners in which we normally relate to people and things. The question of ethics does not arise outside of ethics, but from within it. Its thought is disciplined by efforts to maintain questionableness, by learning how to ask questions in given settings, and by finding its own heritage and its problems. Learning to name things anew, to become alert to exclusions and to forgotten aspects in a people’s history, to overhear what is usually drowned out by the predominant values, to rethink what is ordinarily taken for granted, to find out how to hold itself in question: these are aspects of the thought of the question of ethics. There is a subversiveness in such processes vis-à-vis the normal and ordinary, a subversiveness not unlike that of poets and philosophers who are routinely excluded or silenced by totalitarian regimes. But subversiveness is neither a goal nor an ideal for the question of ethics. Its goal is to rethink, rework, rewrite, to listen again to the cultural inevitabilities that make us who we are and to affirm the transformative process without sense of origin or teleology. That subversion of ordinary rightness, be it a totalitarian state or a democracy, is a regular consequence of the question of ethics and is one of its miseries in the midst of our normal obsessions for rightness, universality, and security beyond the level that human temporality can provide.

What is questioned is not abandoned. Questioning, as I use the word, is not a matter of indifference and ignorance, but a way of relating to something that holds its fascination or importance while it loses a measure of its authority. What is in question returns in the question, returns without elevation and without the power to produce heroes, returns without being a totality that is protected against the exposure of its limits and the fittingness of its mortality. I am speaking of a disturbed return, one fraught with worry, a sense of danger, ambiguity, and, as we shall see, mourning. When the questioned returns, still in question, no text is the text, no tradition is the tradition. A body of writing accompanies the questioning return that moves within and away from what is in question. Here, a recoiling movement undercuts the questioning text as well as the questioned one. The difference of this movement from that of self-establishing thought gives rise to the question of ethics without reversion to an ethics of the question.

The present essay also arises from a body of ethical passions that include anxiety in the face of the possibility that ‘right’ and ‘good’ are human conveniences. It takes its departure from a desire to give focus to a history of suffering that has had a force of destiny, but one that now appears to have lost enough of its force to allow it to be questioned. I am aware that I want to avoid this destiny and to inscribe within it an alternative. But the alternative that I shall develop moves away from the ethical interest that motivated the search for an alternative. Does this search for an alternative remain the book’s desire and goal? Does it return to an ethical identity that promises a new manner of constituting the self? Does it suggest a new spirituality that places spirit beyond question? Or does it allow an ‘other’ to traditional ethics to come forward, whereby the destructive dimension of ethics is apparent and the ‘other’, although without name, tempts thought beyond what it can now think? Does it recoil beyond what is questioned? Or does it give ethics a new commencement?

The American appropriation of Continental thought is sometimes characterized by a pragmatic and almost casual use of one or another of the major twentieth-century European philosophers. Such use is frequently made in a context that is foreign to the heritage of the appropriated thought. That can be an acceptable thing to do—unless such use is assumed to interpret what takes place in Continental thought and is taken to be what these philosophers do in their own context. One major issue in Continental thought, and an emphasis in this book, addresses the intimacy of language and thought. The appropriation is superficial and destructive, for example, if Heidegger is read, not in the movement of his own language and thought, but in the context of a Deweyean liberalism and optimism. Similar displacement takes place when Foucault is read in a context of subjectivity and ethical relativism, or if Nietzsche is read in a context of ethical relativism and propositional analysis. In such displacements, the thought of these Continental thinkers is made to appear exotic or oblique to a set of problems that they are not designed to address. The structure and history of those kinds of reading are, in fact, put in question and lose the basis of their appeal in Heidegger’s, Foucault’s, and Nietzsche’s thought. If one wishes to follow their thought, one must get inside it, allow it to mold the questions and approaches, and to hear its moods as the moods take place. I have thus followed the question of ethics as it develops and unfolds in specific texts by Nietzsche, Foucault, and Heidegger. My purpose is to allow the question of ethics to have a full impact on my discussion of it, to undergo its movement, to heed the thought and language in which it arises as well as the thought and language that it helps to form. Once one has gone through this discipline, one may wish to think in a different discipline—not to say askésis—to hear and read differently and without the question of ethics. But one will know that for the question to arise and intensify, one must think within the tradition that yields it, because the question of ethics arises from within a certain constellation of values and thought, and does not constitute a quasi-neutral reflection on ethics.

The primary conflict that gives rise to the question of ethics concerns the relation among the differences of value within the given heritage. Do these differences compose many different constellations that form larger dynamic and unstable confederations of meaning and practice? Or are they parts of a unifying, self-realizing reality, something that pervades the gaps among the differences and provides a life fundamental to all differences, one that is unthreatened by the unstable confederations? The question of ethics takes place as the thought and meaning of transcendent presence weakens in the tradition of Western metaphysical thought and as the specific interests and intentions that compose the thought of transcendent presence are exposed in a way of thinking that is not under their control. The differences among values appear from hence in their fragmented juxtapositions, ‘other’ appears without transcendent connections, and the imposition of transcendental presence appears to be an option that has produced specific kinds of problems that might now be avoidable. One of the questions of this book is whether under these changed circumstances a way of hearing and thinking emerges that, while not prescriptive, is alert to the dangers embodied in our traditionally axiomatic values and forms of valuation.

The question of ethics arises as the following idea loses its discursive power: Although all finite things in their orders are fragile, never absolute, and mortal, and although language and thought in their finitude can never grasp or comprehend anything absolute, we can nonetheless be reasonably certain that there is a positive connection between finite orders and something ultimate, whole, and capable of bestowing meaning. As this thought comes into question, the utter finiteness of all orders seems reasonable. The divisions within unities that define their finiteness become cues for a sense of mere absence without the primacy of either being or life. All values that have in their history the ideas of ultimate order and the ontological privilege of meaning are experienced as questionable. Thought that has been formed in this heritage is equally questionable. Yet we live by the values and thought that are also questionable. How are we to live in their questionableness? How are we to organize ourselves with the sense that organizations mean no more than their specific values? What is the difference between affirmation with a sense of ultimate meaning and affirmation with the sense of the mortality of meaning as such?

In the final chapter I show that Heidegger succumbed to the temptation of letting the question of being turn toward a piety of thought. That move on Heidegger’s part may derive from his awe over the range and disclosure of thinking. But there is so much that thought cannot do: it cannot replace or adequately imitate nonthinking life, that is, most of life. And yet philosophical thought is able to recoil, create, adjust, intensify, die away, and to know itself in these and its many other ways of being. The philosopher’s privilege is rare. He or she can doubly reflect, can undergo the life of mind, and, in addition, can reflect in and on that process. The privilege’s danger is found in philosophical thinking’s otherness and difference vis-à-vis everything that it is not. The more it intensifies, the stranger it becomes, the more alive it seems to itself, the greater becomes the likelihood that philosophical thought will look for itself and find itself everywhere, and the greater the difficulty becomes of returning to other-than-thought and finding the elimination of thought. How is thought to allow—to think—this elimination whereby it is put so radically in question? Perhaps a way of thinking will do that takes its measure from what it cannot think. One may let the boundary of thinking come to bear in a thinking activity. We may interrupt thought in its very process or strategically violate the movements that have become normal for it by desystematizing or destabilizing the systematic and stabilizing activities as that activity goes on. Or one may skillfully undercut signification and meaning in the process of signifying and meaningful expression. Lacan, for example, thinks through the breakdown in signification as signification happens, and Derrida writes an unthinkable and inarticulatable difference to literalization.

I do not wish to underestimate these and other recent accomplishments of thought. In them thought has achieved originality and set in motion a way of thinking that has made this book possible. But in their accomplishment, I also find a certain insistence—even obsession—with thought and language that may give us pause. The volubility of our thinking, our cultivation of strategies and styles, the subtlety of interruption and, in the case of this book, the discipline of the question—these are all indications of thought recoiling back to itself and returning to itself as it finds its other. If what I say in this study is accurate, the other to thought takes place as thinking takes place. Its boundary is not at the end of a process but is everywhere in the process, and our opportunity is to think—allow? express? themetize? articulate? write?—the boundary as it takes place when we move in the continuity of our thought. Then in allowing the boundary, the truth of thinking will be found in a way of thinking that is other than thinking the accuracy of its claims.

And yet, the disclosure of other, in relation to which I will use the metaphors of space, horizon, and dying, occurs in and through thinking, and the mere otherness of no thought will be tinctured by thinking as though thinking could go on and on, always bothered and interrupted, always outside of the possibility and immanence of self-realization, but always nonetheless. Perhaps thought is infinite in always being bothered and in question. The upsurge of thinking appears to protect this always in the obsessions of writing, reading, thinking, and questioning. If I had chosen not to introduce this book so as not to indicate a completed thing with a beginning and an end, or if I had chosen to deconstruct this book by way of an introduction that refused to be a beginning, I would be no less captured by thinking. And if I succeed in giving priority to question in the way this work unfolds, that priority will include the question of thinking and will unsettle the sameness of thinking that persists through questioning. I will not have escaped the sameness of thinking by means of its interruption. I might defer this sameness, not by finding its mysterious upsurge, which seems to enshrine the sameness of thought, but by allowing the play of other-to-thought in thought. The avoidance of piety-with-mystery is then given words and movement and thought; other in its disclosure is interrupted by thinking and given a certain thoughtful expression in the style and movement of the book. And once again the unthinkable is covered over by thought. That covering over is itself an ethical ‘problem’.

At the core of ethics is the question of affirmation. Heidegger and Derrida, in their different ways, think of affirmation as an ‘it gives’ that comes with thought and language, but remains uncapturable, that remains thought’s given unthought and unspeakable. Foucault thinks of affirmation as beyond positivity and hence beyond the grasp of genealogy and knowing disciplines. Nietzsche thinks of it as joy outside of reason and the circumference of meaning. I am less certain of the priority of affirmation, even when, as in the case of these writers, affirmation is never conceived as an unambiguous bestowal or as something like self-positing. Perhaps Levinas’s language of other-beyond-affirmation is closer to the point in spite of his reversion to a piety of troubled apology and prayer. Perhaps the issue is one of thought’s depth and range, its nearly overwhelming power and beauty within its own territory, its impulse to release things for thought, even its trickery which is part of its poiesis. Perhaps thought can hardly doubt its own act and disclosure, the affirmation that yields it and that it yields as things come to thought and are there, inexplicably, to be thought. Perhaps affirmation is neither the first nor the last word, but is part of thought’s compulsion to be . . . thought. And perhaps there is other-to-thought without affirmation or denial, and in its absencelike nonpresence we conspire to free thought to the closure of thought’s own revelation as though we were always on the verge of affirmation.

What then? Then affirmation is not sufficient to put thought in question. Everything might be in question except thought’s affirmation, and thought’s affirmation leads to an ethics—a piety of thought—in which thought is privileged even in its difference to the systematic structures of expression and grammar. Then neither disclosure nor self-realization is the issue. Thought, rather, finds itself in its interruption without affirmation, without essence or counteressence. And if I am right, that is the point at which its obsession with being begins again, as though eternally again, and one thinks again of being, searches for affirmation in the interruption, and looks for another grouping of concepts or a new art to affirm the affirmation that must be there.

No affirmation. Obsession with being. And yet another turn to ethics?