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CHAPTER 13: Nature Denatured by the Origin
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C HAP T E R 13 Nature Denatured by the Origin “When I preach it is my wont to speak about non-attachment, and of how man should become free of himself and all things. Secondly, that one should be re-imaged back into the simple good that is God. Thirdly, that one should remember the great nobility that God has put into the soul, so that man may thereby come marvelously to God. Fourthly, I speak of the purity of the divine nature, for the brilliance of Godʼs nature is unspeakable. God is a word, a word unspoken outside.” (DW II,528f.; S II,151 {W I,177}) —Meister Eckhart In these four points, Eckhart outlines as many strategies for thinking otherwise than in the name of nature. The group is obviously less than systematic. But on each point, the principle of continuous integration loses its power of univocal legislation, a loss due to the intrusion of an occurrent sense of being. In the exhortation to non-attachment , this descriptive event signifies “becoming free.” The points that follow this first one develop its implications. The content of non-attachment is to be “re-imaged”; its terminus, “coming to God”; and its logic, the neutrality of a “word unspoken outside”—that is, as we will see, of a word uttered within. There is a neutrality to this fourth point since it is the only one where Eckhart does not state that something “should” happen. Understood on its own terms, apart from any protreptic interest, non-attachment thus leads to an event already thematized by the other points, but more obliquely, an event that happens (the birth of the Word within), that is described in the middle voice, and which—as the goal of that peculiar great work—renders us indeterminate even as it singularizes us. These counter-strategies exclude us from nature. To summarize these just as briefly, they dissolve the correlative theses by which the fantasm had maintained its hegemony , the theses of a certain possession of self, of an image measurable against its model, of an intra-psychic order organized according to nobility, that is, to rank; and lastly, of an intra-divine order serving as the eternal law for nature. Thus not only the magnetic pull exerted by a city that was or will be slips away, but so does the teleology of an order through gradations of subjection. Eckhart seeks to think an ultimate authority traversed in its very position by a nominative-infinitive dissension (in the word ursprunc one could then hear “originary fissure” just as well as “originary upsurge”). On each of the four points, the slippages of theticism due to a verb in the middle voice injure the sovereignty of the noun. Thus there are dissensions between the proper end and ‘detaching oneselfʼ (abescheiden), that is, ‘becoming freeʼ; between the a priori order and ‘re-imagingʼ (înbilden); between a certain 320 PART TWO: THE LATIN HEGEMONIC FANTASM mimesis and ‘piercing throughʼ (durchbrechen); and between nature and ‘utteringʼ (sprechen). These pairs, which donʼt really pair up, help render more explicit the double bind under which the principle and the origin place us. The origin is indeed best spoken of through verbs in the middle voice, each of which thematizes the verb “to be.” “Detaching oneself”: against the appropriation of ends “Detach yourself”: One would be hard pressed to find in the history of philosophy an imperative that enjoins more clearly to return from tragic denial. The imperative strikes the principial regime in its originary condition. The denial, it will be recalled, accounts for and will always account for the force of the natural metaphysician in us. Denying that there is dissension in the ultimate authority is a hard blow by the metaphysician. He strikes a name endowed with authority as one strikes a plaque; and he strikes out of existence any allegiance not hailing that plaque. He sustains his fantasm through strokes of incorporation and exclusion. He—who exactly? The man of the law who severs what is proper from what is inappropriate because it is inappropriable under the name. In the face of these regulative strokes and these regimental cuts, to detach oneself would mean to receive the improper that does not bring with it the hegemonic blow. The man of non-attachment is not a friend of the man of law; but both of them are me. Similarly, expropriation is the enemy of appropriation. But both of...