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C HAP T E R 7 The Singularizing Contretemps “Nondescript is the figure of pure singularity. Nondescript singularity has no identity, is not determined in relation to a concept . . . ; the nondescript is a singularity plus an empty space.”48 —Giorgio Agamben “How did the one not remain in itself?” (En. V, 1 [10], 6, 6). Even though this question seems, by all rights, a source of insoluble perplexity, Plotinus nonetheless answers. The treatise which gives the answer—and which in turn has all it needs to perplex the reader—is entitled: “On the Freedom and the Will of the One” (En. VI, 8 [39]). How did the one, immobile beyond eternity, not remain in itself? Here is the disconcerting answer: “It alone is in truth free” (ibid. 21, 31). To the law of the one, and within it, is added another law: that of a free willing. The reader encounters formidable difficulties here. At the levels of being inferior to the one, freedom signifies the productive act of an essence which communicates itself. Consider the essence of the Intellect. It produces its reflection—its “idol” (eid ôlon)—and its essence lies within its act (energeia, En. V, 2 [11], 1,12). The act is a principle of formation and, in this sense, free. The Soul thus owes its form to the freedom that is communicative of the level of being which it imitates: to the freedom of the Intellect. Psychic form results from a noetic act that endows it with essence. In the architectonic of the world, freedom thus manages the abundance of formal communications. If Plotinus advanced from the Soul to the Intellect and to the one, as if from the small to the great and to the greatest—if his universe held, without rupture, by a formal anagogic continuity—many problems would vanish. To speak of the freedom of the one would then amount to speaking of the act by which a hypothetical greatest essence would discharge itself outwards. At stake in the treatise on the freedom and will of the one would be the essence of the world, the idol of the one. Plotinus would give his solution to a problem for which others had recourse to the demiurge or the creator. But Plotinus denies that there is an essence (and with it, any ontological issue ) in the one. As a result, freedom will not serve to answer the question (which in any case is not Plotinian): How did the world appear? Freedom does not thematize communication. The freedom of the one does not produce anything which “goes outside,” neither form nor reflection, neither copy nor idol. Neither does it produce anything which “remains within,” like a turning back on oneself. The willing of the one is not modeled on reflexivity. If it were, to unite would mean to think, and this would be a confusion between hypostases which would render the reading invalid. The free willing of the one is inscribed entirely in rupture with the noetic and psychic 162 PART ONE: THE GREEK HEGEMONIC FANTASM freedoms. For marking this rupture—the second transcendence of freedom—one will profit from keeping in mind the key formula: “An act is free, in the pure sense, which is not subjected to essence” (En. VI, 8 [39], 20, 18). The free willing of the one—it is not the attribute of a subject, and yet it is an act. But it is a non-communicative and non-reflexive act. It is an inessential and yet— because of that—pure freedom. How should this be understood? In the one, there is some sort of temporalizing occurring in the one that disconcerts hegemony.49 One had believed to have found a solution by declaring the Enneads a collection of diverse teachings brought back from Alexandria, intended to show to the Emperor Gallian how to successfully manage an aggiornamento of paganism, or even a patchwork where optimism struggles against pessimism. . . . The commentator who delivers these noteworthy insights50 adds, moreover, that in the end with Plotinus, optimism won out over pessimism. Now, if what one calls optimism depends phenomenologically on the trait of natality in us, and what one calls pessimism depends on the trait of mortality, then their struggle remains rather unresolved in the dying man who says: “I strive to make what is divine in me rise towards what is divine in the whole.”51 Unresolved, because—the cited statement says it in all...

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