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Abyssus abyssum invocat: A response to Kearney John D. Caputo A year or so after Against Ethics appeared I received a letter from a former student who, having absorbed its last chapter on suicide and worms inching their way to silent graves was moved to asked me whether something had gone dreadfully wrong in my life! Not to worry, I said. I have always been fascinated —or hounded—by the abyss, an abyss, some abyss, from the Abgrund of the Godhead in Meister Eckhart, the abyss of Being in Heidegger, the il y a in Levinas, to Derrida’s khora, abyss calling to abyss (Psy. 42:7), as the psalmist says, ceaselessly it seems, wherever I turned. Such flirtation with the abyss was trouble enough on its own but it was bound to buy me still more trouble from my readers, to expose my hide to the exquisite needling of the sort to which I am subjected by Kearney, Westphal, and Ayres. But this is important needling, because the work that the abyss does, or un-does, cannot be ducked. Abysses are tricky things, stretching as they do the all way from the khora in the Timaeus “up” to the mystical abyss of the Godhead beyond God, and they sometimes fall into a “possible confusion” with one another, as Levinas says. There are two tropics of negativity, Derrida said;1 “at least,” I would add. Consider that when you say “the rose is without why,” you might mean that love or the gift is without why, which has all the makings of a lovely and benign abyss, or you might mean a Nietzschean play of forces, the great cosmic stupidity, which sounds downright nihilistic. So the abyss, if there is one, repays reflection. But I do not think there is one, only one. The troubling thing about the abyss is precisely that this phenomenon lies at the outer limits of our experience, while our phenomenological powers function best with the medium sized things of quotidian life, in the temperate zones between the opposite polar regions. But the abyss lies at the outer limits, above or below, au-delà de l’être or au dessous, like the agathon or khora, or like God or khora, where there is, following Levinas, a possible confusion, or, following Derrida, a certain undecidability. Like God or khora: that is the precise point of insertion for Richard Kearney’s pointed blade. Richard Kearney, from whose brilliant “poetics of the possible” we have all so greatly profited, is worried about monsters. Good 123 friend that he is, he is worried about me, worried that I am left by this undecidability to twist slowly in the winds of indecision, one more despairing destinerrant deconstructionist wandering in the desert, a lost an-khor-ite sans faith, an anchorite sans anchor, not a desert father but a stray son. Richard Kearney does not want to be consumed by monsters. Who does? But he tends to run together very disparate phenomena, like madness, terror, il y a and khora/différance, which are hardly synonymous. They variously point to an underlying stratum of anonymity that inhabits and disturbs our world from within, but in very different ways. Richard tends to single out the most extreme states of madness, misery, terror, torture, depression, and desolation , like the nightmare of a prisoner trapped in the ground or a child crushed by rubble. But these phenomena would certainly need to be differentiated from différance, the play of differences in virtue of which we make any distinctions or differentiations at all. Différance, while maddening enough at times, does not constitute a state of madness, insanity, or terror, let alone of torture or imprisonment, but rather of the inescapable “spacing,” the play of traces, within which we constitute or “forge” our beliefs and practices, some of which are quite cheery, sane, and wholesome. Différance is that condition in virtue of which whatever meaning we constitute is made possible, but also impossible, that is, the quasi-transcendental condition which sees to it that a meaning is a temporary unity that is forged from the flux of signifiers or traces and that lasts just as long as the purpose it serves and the contexts endure in which it can function. It is in virtue of différance that whatever we can do with words can also come undone. That is at times awfully annoying, but it is hardly madness, torture, desolation, or imprisonment. Khora, Derrida...

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