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Chapter 7 The Myth of Repletion A hole invites repletion. Or rather, as Sartre would amend, this invitation is issued, not of itself, but in virtue of transcendence. “An incomplete circle does not call for completion unless it is surpassed by human transcendence. In itself it is complete and perfectly positive as an open curve” (1971, 136). To “transcend,” in this peculiar sense, is to surpass the positive in the direction of the possible: the possible positive. Vacuity cannot be intuited as such were it not the site of possible suffusion. Were we incapable of envisioning the positivity which, counterfactually, could be there instead, our world would own no holes—nor would there be even the surface of an indentation . There would be no “negative space.” And in fact, to press Sartre beyond himself, inasmuch as the concavity of an open curve is constituted by the imaginary solid which would fill it, even the curve is not, in itself, purely positive. Given imaginary repletion—positivity in the mode of the possible—the hole does, however, appear as the welcoming occasion for a filling. To say that it can be filled up is to say (at least) that we can imagine it filled. Filled, however, it is no longer a hole. Indeed, filled, “it” is no longer at all. For the hole, repletion is annihilation. If the hole were its filling “in the mode of identity, the ensemble would become an in-itself” (Sartre 1971, 147). “Its” identity is constituted precisely by its lacunary openness. Thus the hole exhibits a curious ambiguity. The hole is open. It “invites” filling. It is not that which would fill it. But in Sartre’s frequent idiom, it has to be this fulfillment. It exhibits a certain impatience, a certain appeal, for repletion. The hole seems to exist for the sake of being filled up—as if its own deepest desire, its destiny, were to concretize the imaginary presence which, while satisfying 155 its inner passion, would, at the same time, effect the destruction of the hole as a passion for positivity. Yet as Kierkegaard advises, “the ultimate potentiation of every passion is always to will its own downfall . . .” (1985, 29). And desire, represented as just such “a lack of being” (Sartre 1971, 137), is the invocation, sustained by a passage to imaginary repletion, of that which would fulfill/annul it. The vacuity of desire is, however, selfreferential . Desire desires itself as desiring (cf. 137), and resists its annihilation through fulfillment. It desires the repletion of the in-itself without loosing itself as for-itself. There is no authentic [satis]faction, no makingfull . Or rather, satisfaction would not satisfy the desire of desire to be desire. As Sartre attests, “that coincidence with self which is satisfaction, where thirst knows itself as thirst at the same time that the drinking satisfies it, when by the very fact of its fulfillment it loses its character as lack while making itself be thirst in and through the satisfaction” (154). Consciousness desires to be God. And indeed, “the aim is the thirst passed on to the plenitude of being, the thirst which grasps and incorporates repletion into itself as the Aristotelian form grasps and transforms matter; it becomes eternal thirst” (154). The fragile for-itself, a frangible vessel subject to the unpredictable upheavals and vicissitudes of conditions which could swamp it, fill it, absorb it remainderlessly into the lifeless in-itself, seeks not merely to moor itself to its object, but to secure its being against the ever-grinning specter of mortality by becoming its own foundation. The agonizing irony, however, is that, per impossibile, were this project to be realized, and were the for-itself actually to become, and thus, finally, to be, its own foundation, consciousness would be extinguished. Death attends the project of averting death. In a word sharpened to indignity, “it is metaphysical to struggle against oblivion . . .” (Lyotard 1983, 132). Being-unto-death is ineluctable. And paradoxically , we authentically live only to the extent that we abandon the project of securing our life by becoming causa sui. In Loy’s transposition of the Platonic dictum, “life-and-death are the ‘moving image’ of nirvana” (1988, 234). The envisionment of consciousness as a lack, an occasion of possible repletion , assumes what we have called the “Anaxamandrian” distillate of Sartre’s unstable conception(s) of the in-itself. For a being which refuses penetration, which is absolutely dense, absolutely plenary, and which...

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