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AFTER TAU / WHERE ENDINGS BEGIN Wir schälen die Zeit aus den Nüssen und lehren sie gehn: die Zeit kehrt zurück in die Schale. Celan, “Corona” 156 5 In the end, we come to where one cannot come except by not-coming, the manner in which many have come before and others will come after. We arrive at the terminus delimited as the limit always yet to be delimited, the limit beyond which there is no limit, and hence the limit of what cannot be delimited. Death, Jean-Luc Marion perceptively remarked, is “a phenomenon that can be phenomenalized only in its coming to pass, for outside of this passage it cannot properly be; it appears, then, only to the extent that it comes to pass; if it didn’t, it could never be.”1 In the receding advance of the forward retreating, the inscripting of death’s erasure, truth is laid bare. Disclosing that erasure is a matter to be written from the evasiveness of the end that comes-to-be as the future that is always stillto -come, the time that is measured by différance, the deferral of meaning that can be apprehended only in and through the endless play of interpretation. “Time,” wrote Paul Claudel, “is the way offered to all that will be to be no longer. It is the Invitation to die, for every phrase to decompose in the explicative and total concordance, to consummate the speech of adoration addressed to the ear of the Sigè the Abyss.”2 In its incessant passing, a necessary corollary to its interminable coming, time exemplifies something elementary about the nature of life as discerned from the (non)event of death, the “possibility of impossibility ,” in Heidegger’s formulation.3 Human time-keeping is indebted to death as the signpost at the beginning of the end that illumines the way back to the end that was the beginning, the gathering of what will be scattered in and from the abyss of silence resounding in the sound of silence. But how does one speak of what cannot be spoken? How does one write of what comes to pass by pulling away? How does one inscribe death, crossing the line of the coming of one’s time—as in our saying “one’s time has come”—commemorating the absence of presence in the presence of absence, the sudden, unexpected, albeit altogether anticipated effacement of the face?4 Surely, by the sign of the end must one finally be re/signed to the end of the sign. In this matter, we can find our footing in a zoharic text that correlates death and truth through the insight that tau, the last letter of the alphabet, seals both the words mawet, “death,” and emet, “truth.”5 This mark perforce serves as a re/mark, marking again what has been marked before, the remarkable that brings to mind truth obscured in the correlation of truth and death—the truth of death invariably linked to the death of truth—not because it has been forgotten or occluded but because it is inherently unknowable, mysterious to the core. Even the typically enigmatic Heraclitus, according to a citation of Clement of Alexandria, addressed the mysteriousness of mortality unambiguously, “What awaits men at death they do not expect or even imagine.”6 Death’s impenetrability , however, is not to be explained solely by appealing to its unpredictability . On the contrary, from another vantage point death is eminently (if not immanently) predictable, indeed, it is the most certain aspect of our finite existence, a measure of stability in a field of impermanence and fluctuation. Yet inevitable though it may be, death persists as the mystery that disrupts abruptly. The veridicality of death is inseparable from its cryptic character as an occurrence that is technically non-sense. Death—the end that comes not at the end, for the end comes not except as the end to come, the silence that lingers between notes played in the middle—opens consciousness to the moment that escapes objectification and thematization, a moment that may be rendered poetically as con/frontation with the face, which is most fully visible when it can be seen no more. In this encounter, at the intersection of being and nothing, truth as the wholly other is disclosed, albeit in the concealment of its disclosure. Levinas has expressed the matter by insisting that death is an “affectivity without intentionality” that evokes a disquietude of...

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