The Sorrow of Being

Nicola Masciandaro
Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences, Volume 19, Number 1, Fall/Winter 2010, pp. 9-35 (Article)
Published by University of Nebraska Press

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The Sorrow of Being

nicola masciandaro

The root of all pure joy and sadness is that the world is as it is.
Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community

Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

We now know the location of this narrow passage through which thought is able to exit from itselfit is through facticity, and through facticity alone, that we are able to make our way towards the absolute.
Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency

Whan I saw His shewing continuid, I understod that it was showid for a grete thyng that was for to come . . . But what this dede shuld be, it was kept privy to me.
Julian of Norwich, The Shewings

The Is-ness or the Existence of Light is Darkness . . . That is, Darkness is the body of the Is-ness of Light.
The Intelligence Notebooks

Such a lot the gods gave to meto me.

H. P. Lovecraft, The Outsider

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Double Sorrow is double.1 The doubleness of sorrow is more than its manifestation, like everything else subject to duality, in alternate forms of good and bad, pleasurable and painful, healthy and unhealthy, and so forth. Rather, it has to do with a deeper ambivalence within the structure and experience of sorrow itself, such that the task of dening sorrow seems inherently to demand distinguishing between opposite forms of sorrow. Sorrow is never simply good or bad, but always good or bad in a way that involves the possibility of its opposite. This doubleness is especially evident within the medieval discourse on sorrow, which, rooted in St. Pauls distinction in 2 Corinthians 7:10 between tristitia secundum Deum (sorrow according to God) and tristitia saeculi (worldly sorrow), both celebrates sorrow as a spiritual virtue and obsesses over its dangers to a degree that modernity does not. Where modernity views sorrow by and large as a problem to be xed, even as premodern, and/or the inverse, as its own general condition, medieval culture typically understood sorrow as a task to be faced, a work of mourning to be taken up, and therefore also a labor under which one could not only collapse, but fail.2 Today these people would be treated in hospitals. But Dante considered them sinners, comments Curtius on the sullen damned: Fitti nel limo dicon: Tristi fummo / ne laere dolce che dal sol sallegra, / portando dentro accidoso fummo (Inferno 7.12123) (Fixed in the slime they say: We were sad in the sweet air which is gladdened from the sun, carrying within ourselves the slothful fumes).3 On the one hand, sorrow, in the form of contrition, is an absolute necessity. Only contrition can crush (contritio, from conterere, to crush, grind) the hardness of will that constitutes sin.4 On the other hand, excessive sorrow is itself sinful and may lead to despair, a transition traditionally gured as being swallowed by sorrow.5 As these metaphors suggest, sorrows ambivalent power is all about its blurring of the boundaries between being and affect (the wordplay of Dantes fummo), its belonging to a mysterious dimension of extreme desire where how one feels and what one is intersect in the wills utmost self-constituting and self-dissolving negativity.

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This ambivalence is contained in an essential way within the medieval denition of contrition as the greatest of sorrows on the basis of its relationship to the wills nal end.6 Contrition, as perfect sorrow, is governed by the paradox of being a maximum intensity that requires moderation, a kind of an emotional volume control that must be turned all the way up without blowing the system. This paradox could be resolved intellectually by distinguishing between the rational aspect of contrition, which has no proper limit, and the sensible aspect of contrition, which does.7 Yet from an experiential perspective, this distinction, which runs the risk of reducing contrition to a kind of subjunctive act or deferrable possibility of itself, only accentuates the paradox in that it requires sorrow precisely as an unbounded disproportion between the intention and the expression of sorrow, between its innermost reality and its outer manifestation.8 How many tears are enough? How many are too much? The impossibility of positive answers here, of measuring intrinsically sorrows proper bounds, only points back to the fact that sorrow is all about the unquantiable, that it concerns a dimension of experience that is fundamentally incommensurable with representation and expressiona fact that is played out in the familiar rhetoric of tears, circling forever between the one and the many, between the immeasurable signicance of the nearly insubstantial single tear and the never sufcient ad innitum of unstoppable, innumerable tears.9 One tear is already too much. Many tears are never enough. Denition Sorrow seems universally related to the principle of evil or privation. This relation is expressed most absolutely in the variety of ancient traditions for which the former derives from the latter, for instance, in Genesis 3, where sorrow apparently enters the world via sin, or in the Buddhist concept of dukkha, the fundamental disease, original to desire, through which the rst of the Four Noble Truths, all life is sorrowful, is true. More locally, sorrows of love, of loss, of pain, of disappointment, of conscienceall are barely thinkable without reference to some problematic object, the nega-

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tive thing that one sorrows over. This referentiality is exemplied in Augustines denition of sorrow as counter-volition or refusal: cum . . . dissentimus ab eo quod nolentibus accidit, talis voluntas tristitia est (sorrow is the wills disagreement with something that happened against our will).10 And yet this denition, which would give us what sorrow is, only does so by exposing its essential relationality, its being nothing other than a volitional intensity of the negativity of difference. Emil Cioran, philosophical intimate of sorrow extraordinaire, says: We dene only out of despair. We must have a formula, we must even have many, if only to give justication to the mind and faade to the void.11 So in Augustines denition of sorrow we can peer into the problem of being revealed as a cross-section cut by denition as an act of sorrow. Note how the denition, after all, throws me back into my own disagreeableness, toward the irresolution of my acceptance or refusal of my own will, into the problem of my being. This problem (beings being a problem for itself) concerns above all the split between quiddity and haecceity, the what and the that, as the irresolvable terms through which being both appears and remains inconceivable in itself or as a whole. Heidegger explains:
The distinction does not happen to us arbitrarily or from time to time, but fundamentally and constantly. . . . For precisely in order to experience what and how beings in each case are in themselves as the beings that they are, we mustalthough not conceptuallyalready understand something like the what-being [Was-sein] and the that-being [Dass-sein] of beings. . . . We never ever experience anything about being subsequently or after the event from beings; rather beingswherever and however we approach themalready stand in the light of being. In the metaphysical sense, therefore, the distinction stands at the commencement of Dasein itself. . . . Man, therefore, always has the possibility of asking: What is that? and: Is it at all or is it not? (FC, 357)

Sorrow and denition trace contrary movements across this fundamental distinction. They toss, with symmetrical trajectories, the same coin of this always possible double-sided question. Where

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denition gives the what of a that (the bird is a robin), sorrow experiences the that of a what (the robin is dead). Accordingly, denition entails a kind of sorrow, elicits a refusal of something that happens against our will, namely, of the substance of the denition that, however proper, we disagree with as not providing the thing dened. That denitions are habitually critiqued as empty is from this perspective simply the actualization of the voidal aura that surrounds all denition. All these philosophical explanations, writes Meher Baba, are creations of the mind that has never succeeded in passing beyond itself.12 Similarly, sorrow is denitional, a feeling constituting a statement about the nature of a thing that provokes, often through the impulse to console, contrary denitions and/or new perceptions of the indenable. Kaspar Hauser: Well, it seems to me . . . that my coming into this world . . . was a terribly hard fall! Professor Daumer: But Kaspar! That . . . No, thats not . . . How should I explain it to you?13 Or, I weep over my imprisonment, but a woman with burning eyes, more penetrating than those of ordinary men, appears in my cell and convinces me I have wandered, indeed driven myself from my homeland.14 Let us stray, then, into the place where sorrow and denition perfectly meet, purely intersect. This place would be at once an absolutely sorrowful denition and an absolutely denitional sorrow, the site of a denition of sorrow so sorrowful that it provides the one who understands it with a sorrow dening his or her very being, a sorrow, in other words, that coincides with ones understanding of its denition so purely as to constitute self-understanding. In light of the what/that distinction, this denition can only be fullled by a sorrow that is simultaneously a kind of empty or contentless or undetermined sorrow, a sorrow over a pure that, and a sorrow over an absolute what, a something so unmistakably unfortunate, so plenitudinously negative, that it cannot be countermanded from any outside or external perspective, by no god or emperor. Only thus will we arrive at the intersection of a most sorrowful denition and a most denitional sorrow, the denition of a sorrow our sorrow for which gives us the sorrow it denes as our own being: in short, a sorrow as inconceivable as it is inconsolable, a sorrow of being.

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In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant explains that properly philosophical work concludes with denition, produces it as its end, rather than beginning from denition in the manner of mathematics. The reason: philosophical denitions are brought about only as expositions of given concepts, but mathematical denitions as constructions of concepts made originally. . . . mathematical denitions themselves make the concept, whereas philosophical denitions only explicate it.15 I want, contrarily, a denition of sorrow from which philosophy can properly and poetically begin, a denition of sorrow that makes its concept and produces philosophy by means of its explication. Not a denition of sorrow for the sake of an ultimate understanding or study of sorrows nature, but a sorrow for the sake of the ultimate denition of our own. A mathematical denition of sorrow that is philosophically poetic, as it were. Into the Void Is there a form of sorrow that remains or emerges when all possible objects of sorrow are taken away, when there is nothing left, or ever was, to sorrow over? In the context of the tradition of philosophical thought experiments known as the ying man or man in the void, in which the reality of a rational essence is logically demonstrated by imagining the self-awareness of a human being created in empty space, this would imply that the ying man might weepsomething the thought experimenters are not concerned with, that is, how this oating being feels about being. For Avicenna, as Daniel Heller-Roazen explains in The Inner Touch: Archaeology of a Sensation, the speculative experience of being in a void produces the certain perception of ones own existence as something independent of any corporeal determination or content. Incapable of feeling anything other than the existence of his own being, the man in a void is a being who cannot avoid the reality of his spiritual essence, the knowledge of himself in the mode of a soul.16 What does it feel like to be soul, to be purely oneself, alone prior to all aloneness, without any other content or relation than the fact of ones own being? To acknowledge a sorrow of being in

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this context is to allow that the ying mans self-awareness would primordially include, or only be possible through, a negation or refusal of his own existence, that he would only know his being by not being it in some fashion. Floating safely beyond all sensation and specic experience, the voidal creature would yet be the subject of a certain dis-ease. And in the strongest sense, for lacking consciousness of any object outside of himself, he would necessarily himself be this negativity. In the comparable context of Descartes cogito ergo sum, the reality of such sorrow would require a fundamental counter-support or ying buttress for this philosophical phrase, a kind of gothic supplement: ego sum ergo doleo, I am therefore I sorrow. Not an extension or second-order deduction from the fact that I think, but an equally essential component of consciousness or beings being before itself, as if the two phrases were inscribed in one ambivalent string around the boundary of every entity. In fact this makes perfect and plenty of sense if we remember the deeply negative context of Descartes realization of rational self-certainty, if we do not divorce it from his own articulated experience:
And nally, considering the fact that all the same thoughts we have when we are awake can also come to us when we are asleep, without any of them being true, I resolved to pretend that all the things that had ever entered my mind were no more true than the illusions of my dreams. But immediately afterwards I noticed that, while I wanted thus to think that everything was false, it necessarily had to be the case that I, who was thinking this, was something. And noticing this truthI think, therefore I am was so rm and so assured that all the most extravagant suppositions of the skeptics were incapable of shaking it, I judged that I could accept it without scruple as the rst principle of the philosophy I was seeking.17

Being part and parcel of a will to know that is grounded in the negativity of existence, the cogito is here realized only through the negation of all experience. The self-certifying procedure is the product of a fundamental disorientation, the thesis of a being happening against its will. The problem is how this against, this relation to

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something exterior or otherwise, is present inside being from the beginning. Thinking Descartes cogito as expressing rather than dispelling this problem brings its afliation with its Augustinian precedent (si fallor, sum) into relief. Jean-Luc Marion writes,
Saint Augustine does not use the certainty of Being that thought assures in order to set up the mind as a ground, but to convince it that it bears the traces of a prior image, the sole ground, one that is intimately other than it. Certainty refers the mind to a distant ground, far from setting it up as a principle subsisting in itself.18

In these terms the cogito is possible only through the presence of an absence, an essential negativity or darkness that, precisely by being constituted by nothing in particular, hangs over everything. From this more essentially aporetic and open perspective, according to which one exists only on the grounds of a vertiginous exposure, where one actually is the question of oneself (Augustines quaestio mihi factus sum), the man in the void experiment works, not merely as an inductive mechanism, but as a truly speculative reality, a total image in the mirror of intellect of what it means to be. That is, by placing my being in a void I arrive at the perception that I really am, in both senses at once, namely, that I do in fact exist and that I exist in a void. The image actualizes the sense in which an entity is essentially something suspended, something whose being only happens through immersion in a strange dark space. This in fact is the denitional perception with which Heller-Roazens study of the ying man experiment through its more body-centric post-medieval permutations concludes. Here we arrive, via Maine de Birans embodied feeling of existence (le sentiment de lexistence), similar to what Jean-Luc Nancy calls the cave-body . . . the space of the body seeing itself from within, at our modern animate being as reincarnation of Avicennas ying man:19
this unlimited expanse is the element of all sensitive existence. It is the invisible air that every animal always breathes, and on account of which even the most terrestrial of creatures may always nd itself, within itself, much like the medieval man: suddenly suspended in an unknown and impenetrable space. (IT, 236)

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Might this inner sense already be, or be something becoming, a form of sorrow? It turns out that de Birans discovery of this sense was intimately bound to what Michel Henry identies as his conscious[ness] of his own life as one of a malevolent fate.20 Of this de Biran writes: The power of fate, which is one of our most powerful dramatic motives, is perhaps only the expression of the fact of the intimate sense which manifests at the very foundation of our being a sort of organic necessity opposed to moral freedom.21 And as Merleau-Ponty explains, the movement of de Birans thought from the concrete to the reective, from the For Us to the In Itself, is a movement into a spiritual substance known through the essential negativity of the fact of being: This belief in the noumenal self represents . . . the excess of our existence over what we know of it, the fact that we are given to ourselves, and that we did not create ourselves ex nihilo. The noumenal self is certain, precisely because it is unknowable.22 Following so much contemplation of this intimate sense of being, de Birans last work, Nouveaux essais danthropologie (182324), becomes mystical, taking aim at Labsorption en Dieu, la perte du sentiment du moi (absorption in God, loss of the feeling of self). Do we have other words for what happens to a being that feels as far as possible the fact of its being, that does not only consider, but actually nds in the real space of its substance, or as this substance itself, the fact of its existence? Somehow, somewhere, such an entity has realized the identity of what and that, touched where they touch. For Bataille, such impossible touching, or touching of the impossible, is ecstasy: THE OBJECT OF ECSTASY IS THE ABSENCE OF AN OUTSIDE ANSWER. THE INEXPLICABLE PRESENCE OF MAN IS THE ANSWER THE WILL GIVES ITSELF, SUSPENDED IN THE VOID OF UNKNOWABLE NIGHT.23 That is: Being is dying by loving.24 Being in a Cloud The idea of a sorrow of being, a sorrow at once over and belonging to being itself, seems both obvious and absurd. Existence both absolutely is and totally is not the ultimate something that hap-

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pened against our will. This is interesting. It involves me deeply, implicates me in something I do not know, that I am able to sense in one stroke the inevitability and the impossibility of such a sorrow. What does it signify that we do? What is entailed or followed in the exercise of this faculty that sinks so lightly, with no mass at all, within the inescapable gravity of such profound refusal? A pure sorrow, a perfect sorrow, a sorrow whose meaning is innite? The denition of sorrow I desire, the one that works, is not found in a void, but in a cloud. Nor is a cloud not a void of its own. Or that is exactly what a cloud is, a void of ones own. A cloud is what we are already being in by imagining the man in a void. The man in a void himself, itself, that utopic self-aware thing, is not in anything at all, not in place, which Aristotle beautifully named the innermost boundary of what contains (Physics 212a). He is rather precisely the being from whom this boundary, like the subtlest skin, is peeled away to the point of never having been, not by any hand, but by his total unending dip in nothingness. And not even peeled away, which is still to think from the outside, but born into a situation he does not touch. And not even born, which is still to think the event of being as a form of emplacement. Void is what one can never get into, whether by universal subtraction from the outside or ontological air-drop from the inside, because the moment one is in it it is no longer void, but something substantial, a darkness, a cloud. Void is like the ungraspable principle of the Heraclitean river into which one cannot step twice, an empty thing evoked and elided in every touch, the merest imagination of which already shapes into the face of the deep (Genesis 1:2), or gives to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name.25 Here we chance upon another channel to deep tears: the sense that things never really touch. This sense exceeds, but also fullls, the problem of touchs radically poetic subjectivity, the truth of the mistake of Pygmalions caress, which confounds the softness of his own esh for the statues, for hers: He didnt know whether she was alive or dead. Softly he took her in his hands; he thought that she was like putty, that the esh gave way under his touch, but it was only his hand which pressed her.26 The sense that things never really touch, or its twin, that things only excessively and su-

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percially and constantly touch, goes into the deeper impossibility of two bodies being in the same place, to the unrealizable essence of gravity, or love. So Averroess commentary on Aristotles denition of place as a non-portable vessel (Physics 212a) suggests an originary relation to eros: place is that towards which something moves or in which something rests. If something were to move toward a term which is itself in movement, the thing would be moving in vain.27 The strong feeling of such vain movement is a form of sorrow, the sorrow of ux, of beings passing each other and themselves by, incapable of stopping. NoMeansNo has a good song about this named The River on the album Why Do They Call Me Mr. Happy? (Alternative Tentacles, 1993):
When I speak the words I repeat Are lost within this roaring And when I call your eyes turn to me But what are they exploring? ... Mothers tell your children the truth Dont hide the fate thats waiting When youre born you start to drown Theres no help, no safety First a gift of love is given Then the winds rise, the sails are riven On the river.

These are Cratylean beings who fail, in the very medium of shared presence, to touch or talk. Cratylus is the radical uxist who, as Aristotle explains in the Metaphysics, nally did not think it right to say anything but only moved his nger, and criticized Heraclitus for saying that it is impossible to step twice in into the same river; for he thought one could not do it even once (1010a). Heraclituss antique epithet, the weeping philosopher, is built upon the Platonic dialogue in which Socrates, conversing with a still-speaking Cratylus, criticizes his teachers ux doctrine by comparing its followers to people with catarrh, a condition whose symptoms are a owing nose and weepy eyes. Thus Heraclitus, his theory, and fol-

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lowers, explains Ava Chitwood, are all humorously dismissed, likened to men crying.28 The joke brings to a barb Socrates broad dismissal of philosophers who subject the world to their own disorientations, those who, in their search after the nature of things, are always getting dizzy from constantly going around and around, and they imagine that the world is going round and round and moving in all directions (Cratylus 411b). The critique also works to police the boundary of the reality of tears and the world seen through them, to dene a veil/vale on the other side of which sit pathetic dissolving creatures, some once talented philosophers, who now only point at the world and cry. As if to say: it cannot be that tears well up perpetually and de profundis (Psalm 129:1); if they appear to, that can be cured. The same is now argued about St. Franciss unstoppable weeping. We might distinguish, then, between a being that would grasp itself before the clarity of void, be certain of itself, and know its bearings before nothing, and a different kind of being who sees that void is another kind of cloud, maybe even an especially dangerous kind, because it demands delity as an absolute term of unreality, poses as not a cloud, with nothing to hide, being nothing. More suspicious than God are the not-Gods that denitions of God set up. The distinction runs parallel to that charted in Agambens essay Bartleby, or On Contingency between the theologians for whom the nothing out of which the world is created operates as a limit on divine potentiality and the mystics for whom the obscure matter that creation presupposes is nothing other than divine potentiality. For the former, the nothing, as the implacable place of origin of all that is non-eternal, works like a negative guarantor for God as a regular operator of being, ensuring that his own will and being are absolutely without potentiality (i.e., God is bound by his own will and being). For the latter, the nothing is the pure potentiality out of which God creates the world and himself, or the illusion that sustains Reality. Where the former sense of nothing functions within an observational frame of knowing, the latter is bound to the experiential sphere. Only when we succeed in sinking into this Tartarus and experiencing our own impotentiality, Agamben writes, do we become capable of creating, truly becoming poets.29

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The history of the ying man thought experiment might be traced across this distinction as an increasingly haptic recognition of the void as cloud, as a movement into the substantial and dark space of potentiality within which the event of self and world takes place, the impossibly actual site where being itself is put to the proof. The voidal experiment points, on the one hand, toward ever more complex forms of theoretical clarity, more and more detailed mappings of the spaces of being, and on the other hand toward more concrete realizations of radical unknowing, of facing the deep and being in a cloud. That is where Maine de Biran, after his books, nds himself, pointing to an absent point: Time carries away all my opinions, engulfs them in a perpetual ux. . . . And now, here I am, already well on in years, but still uncertain and vacillating in the way of truth. Is there a point of support, and where is it?30 The moment of apophatic indication brings us to a threshold where the experiment of thought restores itself to experience, the laboratory re-becomes life, and more specically, where the subtractive procedures of rationalist discourse (denition of terms, isolation of subject, theoremic demonstration, etc.) bottom out in a total situation of unknowing. Now we are close to the twilight Cioran embraces in Tears and Saints:
The only interesting philosophers are the ones who have stopped thinking and have begun to search for happiness. . . . They are more comforting than religions because they free us from authority. . . . The twilight philosophersso full of shadows that they no longer believe anythingembrace you like a sea cradling your drowned body.31

And if this marine embrace feels akin to sorrows self-cradling, its ways, evidenced in so many gestures of incommensurability (e.g., head in hands), of touching across the boundary of what we are and are not, then we are close to the strange feeling I am following. That One Is The forty-fourth chapter of The Cloud of Unknowing describes the nal, deconstructive act of the work of contemplation, wherein

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self-awareness, the nakid wetyng and felyng of thin owen beying, is destroyed (44.154348).32 Having treed alle doun ful fer under the cloude of forgetyng (43.152021), that is, having forgeten alle other creatures and alle theire werkes, ye, and therto alle thin owne werkes (43.153839), this is all that remains betwix thee and thi God (43.1539), a singular remnant of consciousness, the simple something that is left, or one is left with, when everything is taken away. How is this irreducible remainder to be erased? Not without a ful specyal grace ful frely goven of God (43.1546), which requires a ful acordyng abilnes to resseyve this grace (43:1547), and this abilnes is not elles bot a stronge and a deep goostly sorow (43:1549). The object of this spiritual sorrow is nothing less, or more, than the fact of ones own existence:
Alle men han mater of sorow, bot most specyaly he felith mater of sorow that wote and felith that he is. Alle other sorowes ben unto this in comparison bot as it were gamen to ernest. For he may make sorow ernestly that wote and felith not onli what he is, bot that he is. And whoso felid never this sorow, he may make sorow, for whi he felid yit never parte sorow. This sorow, when it is had, clensith the soule, not only of synne, bot also of peyne that he hath deservid for synne. And therto it makith a soule abil to resseive that joye, the whiche revith fro a man alle wetyng and felyng of his beyng. (43:155461, my emphasis)

The very to-be-destroyed self-consciousness separating the individual from God thus becomes, via the autodeictic magic of that, the means of its own destruction. The affective action that unmakes the experience (knowing and feeling) of ones own being has no other cause or object than the facticity of that being. Yet what is the content of this facticity, this that one is, other than the experience of ones own being? It is as if beings experiential actualization, its having of itself as the object of that, that is, the experience of the acontextual fact of existing, what Heidegger calls thrownness (Geworfenheit) and the Cloud calls the gift of being (43.1575), is not only the means of but is itself the selfs own erasure or emptying. Perfect sorrow, sorrow at the limit of sorrow, appears here as a kind of auto-catharsis whereby self-consciousness

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evaporates in the heat of its own gaze or literally exhausts itself in self-mourning. The wholly sorrowing being, having being itself, its own being, as the exclusive and pure object of sorrow, appears as nothing other than sorrow. Is this ontologically out-of-bounds? Surely the sorrowing self remains as subject and witness to its own sorrowful self-experience, just as the ravished self, joyfully blind to its own being, still touches itself, if only by feeling what takes it beyond itself, remains as that most unique and privileged witness to its own self-blinding? It is intellectually more responsible to say, following the pattern of Heideggers understanding of the unconcealment (aletheia) of being as truths event in The Origin of the Work of Art, that the sorrow that one is unveils or presences the being of the sorrower by concealing it.33 The negativity that one is is something one passes away into only to become, paradoxically, more present. The relevance of Heideggers unconcealment of being increases in the context of the Clouds consistent understanding of contemplation as work, the work that is the original and ultimate task of human being: For this is the werk . . . in the whiche man schuld have contynowed yif he never had synned, and to the whiche worching man was maad, and alle thing for man, to help him and forther him therto, and by the whiche a man schal be reparailed agein (4.34043). The work of contemplation is not only a practice but a making, a contemplative production, in the ancient sense of techne and poiesis as a bringing into presence.34 The work that refashions the human to its original divine likeness is the work of pro-ducing God, of causing the appearance of the divine. What passes away into this work, what withdraws into concealment in the presence it makes, is the individuated being of the worker, who is, so to speak, the material out of which God is produced. As a relation between creature and creator, a working for which the human is made, or which is the proper work of human being itself,35 the work of contemplation thus appears as the production (or presencing) of the unmade via the destruction (or concealment) of the made, as if the creature, subtracting from itself the fact of its own createdness, its ex nihilic that, is restored to an originary co-presence with the

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creator. What makes this self-restoration possible is precisely an identity or intersection between being and work, between the being of the contemplative worker as divine work and the work of contemplation that works on that being. Here being works, does what it is worked to do, so that its working is itself its self-restoration, or even self-creation, in the sense of a making of itself as it is created, as it primordially is. But a being works this restoration or return exactly through a forgetting or concealment of its own createdness, the dark concealment that reveals whatever being is, being as such, that is, as neither possible nor impossible, wholly beyond the fact that anything is happening at all. Here being works, not to unbe, but to be without its being worked, to undo the being-with-itself that is its gnawing actuality.36 The Clouds perfect sorrow thus offers the prospect, at once simple and impossible, of a non-dualistic real experience in which the distinction between subject and object is undone, where something like the place of the original identity of I and me, the one who sorrows and the one who is sorrowed over, is found and found to be the place of God. In terms of the texts sources, this moment corresponds to the description in Pseudo-Dionysiuss Mystical Theology of the contemplative nding of that here, typied by Moses ascent of Sinai, where, being neither oneself nor someone else, one is supremely united by a completely unknowing inactivity of all knowledge, and knows beyond the mind by knowing nothing.37 And this moment can thus also be understood as an ultimate escape or breakout from the prison of individuated being, following Levinas, who writes:
escape is the need to get out of oneself, that is, to break that most radical and unalterably binding of chains, the fact that the I [moi] is oneself [soi-mme]. . . . It is being itself or the one-self from which escape ees, and in no wise beings limitation. In escape the I ees itself, not in opposition to the innity of what it is not or of what it will not become, but rather due to the very fact that it is or that it becomes.38

So we are returned, like failed escapists, to the power of that as a deixis of being, something that points not to a thing but to a things

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existence, its esse. What nger points to being? What eyes see it? How does being point to itself? And why does it cry? The Point The most beautiful thing about the Clouds denition of sorrow, the part that catches my eye, is that it gives itself as an object of sorrow. It is a denition one sorrows over, sorrows toward, a denition of sorrow that sorrow recognizes: And whoso felid never this sorow, he may make sorow, for whi he felid yit never parte sorow. A singular perfect sorrow is named, standing above all others, but standing so wholly open that to perceive it is already to participate. This element of the denition is what Roland Barthes calls the punctum, a term designating a prick or puncture, as on a page, but also deeply associated with sorrow, for example, com-punction, prick of conscience, and so forth: it is this element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me.39 This is the tiny opening of the space of response, the piercing nothing wherein the text calls me to sorrow that I am and sorrow over my lacking this sorrow, where it gives its signicance as its readers missing of it, and thus paradoxically presents itself, even its very textuality, as most inviting object of mourning. Not a mourning of something lost, but a mourning excessively available, the too close to see. On the one hand, the sorrow that one is is perfectly obvious and accessible, an existential negativity so basic it only needs pointing to, requires only the elementary distinction between what and that. On the other hand, the very availability of this sorrow, our being prepared (and so unready) for it by simply being, presents us with the spectacle of our own blindness to it, points to a fact seemingly impossible to face. The meaning of the Clouds sorrow has everything to do with the irreducible tension between these two dimensions of it, the intersection between its inevitability and its impossibility. This tension is inherent not only to the nature of the sorrow being indicated but also to the essentially negative nature of indication itself as the form of signication through which language to the utmost degree both means beyond itself and means itself:

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[T]he signicance of the This is, in reality, a Not-this that it contains; that is, an essential negativity. . . . The problem of beingthe supreme metaphysical problememerges from the very beginning as inseparable from the problem of the signicance of the demonstrative pronoun, and for this reason it is always already connected with the eld of indication . . . Deixis, or indication . . . is the category within which language refers to its own taking place.40

The autodeixis or self-pointing through which one sorrows that one is is coincident with the self-pointing of the language of the sorrower. Sorrowing that one is is not only sorrowing over something that may be signied in language, but sorrowing at the living intersection of languages and beings taking place, in the that that constitutes language as the very means and content of beings experiential having of itself, which is precisely what sorrow, as a taking of that to its ontological limit, here works to erase. Deixis is this intersection, in the sense of being an instance of language as wholly constituted by what is outside of it, in other words, language emptied of any intrinsic what and therefore signifying most fully and purely its own event, its being/coming-to-be. In these terms, sorrowing that one is is also sorrowing over the very faculty whereby one does sorrow that one is, or rather such sorrow is itself the intensication in consciousness of this faculty, the strong feeling of the foundational self-disagreement within individuated being that language in every instance enacts, the non-originable I am of the being who occurs without its will. In a correlative fashion Agamben denes metaphysics as that experience of language that . . . in all speech, experiences above all the marvel that language exists (LD, 25). Here and elsewhere, the text of the Cloud revolves around the wonderful/terrifying encounter with actuality that language does not merely allow but in a fundamental way always is, above all within those elemental spaces of language, what the Cloud calls the lityl schort preier of o litil silable (37.1386), where words are endlessly, heartbreakingly close to being what they say. In the space of the word, there is no longer any question of which reader you are, the one who feels this sorrow or the one who does not. Here it is impossible not to be . . . both.

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Postscript In the nal scene of After the Fox (1966), starring Peter Sellers, criminal mastermind Aldo Vanucci, aka The Fox, escapes prison disguised as a doctor, also played by Peter Sellers, whom he leaves tied up in his cell. A crucial element of Vanuccis disguise is a fake beard. After clearing the prison gates, he tries to remove it, but it will not come off. He, whoever he now is, exclaims, My God, the wrong man has escaped!
Notes 1. These opening remarks duplicate some of my comments on the ambivalence of sorrow in Eros as Cosmic Sorrow: Locating the Limits of Difference in Julian of Norwichs Divine Shewings and The Cloud of Unknowing, Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures (forthcoming 2010). The concept of a double sorrow is traceable through Chaucers double sorwe of Troilus (Troilus and Criseyde, line 1, The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson [Boston: Houghton Mifin, 1987]), Dantes doppia trestizia di Giocasta (The Divine Comedy, ed. Charles S. Singleton [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973], Purgatorio 22.56), and Augustines description of his grief for his mothers death: I was very much ashamed that these human emotions could have such power over me . . . and I felt a new grief at my grief and so was aficted with a twofold sorrow [duplici tristitia] (Augustine, Confessions, 2nd ed., trans. F. J. Sheed [Indianapolis: Hackett, 2006], 9.12). This suggests that the trope of double sorrow (cf. for a twofold grief possessed them, and a groaning of the memory of what had occurred, Wisdom 11:12) is grounded in the way sorrow is factically folded by its own refusal, i.e., the way sorrowing is always also sorrowing that one sorrows. This is analogous to what Heidegger discovers in boredom: we may not make boredom into an object of contemplation as some state that arises on its own, but must consider it in the way that we move within it, i.e. the way that we seek to drive it away (Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995], 91; hereafter cited as FC). 2. The proverbial causelessness of modern melancholiaSorrow . . .

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without any evident cause (Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Holbrook Jackson [New York: New York Review Books, 2001], 389)is the perfect index of this difference, causelessness being the reverse of instrumentality. In modern thought every effort is made to overcome melancholy by rationalization. That is, by nding its cause and dening its lost reality, an attempt is made to assimilate it to the otherwise endlessly interlinked eld of representations. But the reverse, in fact, has taken place. . . . For modern society, indeed, melancholy alone has depth, and it is its presence which lends expression to the profound unease within, if not disease of, existence (Harvie Ferguson, Melancholy and the Critique of Modernity: Sren Kierkegaards Religious Psychology [New York: Routledge, 1995], xiv). The medieval denition of sorrow that this essay will become concerned with, by contrast, provides a specic, determined, and wholly functional sense for existential sorrow. 3. Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harper & Row, 1953), 596. 4. Contrition implies the crushing of something hard and whole. Now this wholeness and hardness is found in the evil of fault, since the will, which is the cause thereof in the evil-doer, sticks to its own ground, and refuses to yield to the precept of the law, wherefore displeasure at a suchlike evil is called metaphorically contrition (Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province [New York: Bezinger Brothers, 1947], Supplement, Q.2, Art.1). Cf. OE thr stednes. Hereafter cited as ST. 5. As Aquinas explains, those who are sorrowful fall the more easily into despair, according to 2 Cor. ii.7: Lest . . . such an one be swallowed up [absorbeatur] by overmuch sorrow (ST, Pt.2-2, Q.20, Art.4). Cf. Now cometh wanhope, that is despeir of the mercy of God, that comth somtyme of to muche outrageous sorwe (Geoffrey Chaucer, Parsons Tale X.692). The intersection between excessive sorrow and despair is exemplied by Judas, in whom, as a limit case for the ever-present opportunity to repent, the proportion between the severity of sin and the degree of sorrow over it is maximized to the point where the sense of proportion between them becomes lost. In Aquinass commentary on Judass despair, this loss of proportion is gured as Judass reception of extra sorrow provided by the Devil: Origen: But when the Devil leaves any one, he watches his time for return, and having taken it, he leads him into a second sin, and then watches for opportunity for a third deceit. So the man who had

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married his fathers wife afterwards repented him of this sin, [1 Cor 5:1] but again the Devil resolved so to augment this very sorrow of repentance, that his sorrow being made too abundant might swallow up the sorrower. Something like this took place in Judas, who after his repentance did not preserve his own heart, but received that more abundant sorrow supplied to him by the Devil, who sought to swallow him up, as it follows, And he went out, and hanged himself. But had he desired and looked for place and time for repentance, he would perhaps have found Him who has said, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked [Ezek 33:11] (Thomas Aquinas, Catena Aurea: Gospel of Matthew, trans. William Whiston [London: J.G.F. and J. Rivington, 1842], Matt. 27:15). 6. According to Augustine (De civ. Dei, xiv. 7, 9), all sorrow is based on love. Now the love of charity, on which the sorrow of contrition is based, is the greatest love. Therefore the sorrow of contrition is the greatest sorrow. . . . there is a twofold sorrow in contrition: one is in the will, and is the very essence of contrition, being nothing else than displeasure at past sin, and this sorrow, in contrition, surpasses all other sorrows. . . . The other sorrow is in the sensitive part, and is caused by the former sorrow (ST, Supplement, Q.3, Art.1). 7. Contrition, as regards sorrow in the reason, i.e. the displeasure whereby sin is displeasing through being an offense against God, cannot be too great; even as neither can the love of charity be too great, for when this is increased the aforesaid displeasure is increased also. But, as regards the sensible sorrow, contrition may be too great, even as outward afiction of the body may be too great. In all these things the rule should be the safeguarding of the subject, and of that general well-being which sufces for the fulllment of ones duties (ST, Supplement, A.3, Art.2). 8. On this paradox, Margery Kempes boistous sobbying is instructive. Not only can it not be kept in, but the more that sche wolde labowryn to kepe it in er to put it awey, mech the more schulde sche cryen and the mor lowder (The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Lynn Stanley [Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University, 1996], ch. 28, lines 161112; hereafter cited as MK). In effect, Margerys handling of her sorrow (which includes but also exceeds sorrow over sin) both fullls and destroys (like the new law to the old) the authority of the contrition doctrine. Adherence to the principle of measure in expression of sorrow breaks the principle. Hence the reception of Margerys sobbing as slander by some persons: ower mercyful Lord vysytyd

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this creature wyth plentyuows teerys of contricyon day be day, in so mech that sum men seyden sche mygth wepen whan sche wold and slawndered the werk of God (prologue, lines 3134). Furthermore, Margerys volume points to an important aspect of sorrow, namely, that its intensity is not only a relation between the will and what displeases it but also a relation between that displeasure and its expression, an expression that experiences and an experience that expresses. In other words, there is a phenomenal place in sorrow where pain and the expression of pain coincide, where the holding-on of the will to its missing or violated object meets the holding-in of the voice of that will. Hence the otherness of sorrows voice, on which see Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, The Becoming-Liquid of Margery Kempe, chapter 5 of Medieval Identity Machines (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 15487. 9. For example, in Dantes Commedia, Buonconte di Montefeltro is saved, as a devil complains, for una lagrimetta (one little tear) (Purgatorio 5.107). The power of the single tear was a motif frequently employed by medieval preachers. As Giordano da Pisa put it, Or vedi grande cosa! Or ti vo mostrare la virt de penitenzia come passa tutte le virtudi dei tutte le cose di questo mondo, che non si potrebbe dire: non dico mare, no, ma una sola lagrima di dolore del peccato, che venga di buon cuore, sola una, vedi vert chae? (Now see a great thing! Now I want to demonstrate to you how the power of repentance surpasses all the forces of worldly things: not a sea, no, but a single tear of grief for sin, that comes from a good heart, only one, do you see the power that it has?) (Quaresimale orentino, 13051306, ed. Carlo Delcorno [Florence: Sansoni, 1974], 80). Of the endlessness of tears, St. Francis provides a good example: Truly, even though he had attained purity of heart and body, and in some manner was approaching the height of sanctication, he did not cease to cleanse the eyes of his soul with a continuous ood of tears. He longed for the sheer brilliance of the heavenly light and disregarded the loss of his bodily eyes (Bonaventure, The Minor Legend of Saint Francis, 3.3, Francis of Assisi: Early Documents, ed. Regis J. Armstrong, J. A. Wayne Hellmann, and William J. Short, 3 vols. [New York: New City Press, 2000], 2:695). In these terms the unquantiability of tears belongs to their being a inverse relation between inner and outer sight. Cf. Than had sche so meche swetnes and devocyon that sche myth not beryn it, but cryid, wept, and sobbyd ful boitowsly. Sche had many an holy thowt of owr Lordys passyon and behld hym in hir gos-

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10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16.

17. 18.

19.

tly syght as verily as he had ben aforn hir in hir bodily syght (MK, ch. 78). Derrida explains this inverse relation as an unveling of eye itself: Now if tears come to the eyes, if they well up in them, and if they can also veil sight, perhaps they reveal, in the very course of this experience, in the coursing of water, an essence of the eye, of mans eye, in any case, the eye understood in the anthropo-theological space of the sacred allegory. Deep down, deep down inside, the eye would be destined to weep. For at the very moment they veil sight, tears would unveil what is proper to the eye (Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993], 126). De civitate Dei, ed. Bernard Dombart and Alphonse Kalb, 5th ed. (Stuttgart: Teubner, 1981), 14.6. E. M. Cioran, A Short History of Decay, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Arcade, 1975), 48. Meher Baba, Beams (New York: Harper & Row, 1958), 7. Werner Herzog, dir. 1974. The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser. Haec dum mecum tacitus ipse reputarem querimoniamque lacrimabilem stili ofcio signarem, adstitisse mihi supra uerticem uisa est mulier reuerendi admodum uultus, oculis ardentibus et ultra communem hominum ualentiam perspicacibus . . . Sed tu quam procul a patria non quidem pulsus es sed aberrasti; ac si te pulsum existimari mauis, te potius ipse pepulisti (Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy, [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973], I.15) Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996), 681. See Daniel Heller-Roazen, Of Flying Creatures, chapter 21 of The Inner Touch: Archaeology of a Sensation (New York: Zone: 2007), hereafter cited as IT; and Richard Sorabji, Infallibility of Self-Knowledge: Cogito and Flying Man, chapter 12 of Self: Ancient and Modern Insights about Individuality, Life, and Death (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). Ren Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998), 18. Jean-Luc Marion, On Descartess Metaphysical Prism: The Constitution and the Limits of Onto-theo-logy in Cartesian Thought, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 132. Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus, trans. Richard A. Rand (New York: Fordham, 2008), 67.

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20. Michel Henry, Philosophy and Phenomenology of the Body, trans. Girard Etzkorn (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975), 154. Hereafter cited as PP. 21. Maine de Biran, Essai sur les fondements de la psychologie, quoted in PP, 154. 22. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Incarnate Subject: Malebranche, Biran, and Bergson on the Union of Body and Soul, trans. Paul B. Milan (New York: Humanity Books, 2001), 8384. 23. George Bataille, The Bataille Reader, ed. Fred Botting and Scott Wilson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 45. 24. Cf. Being is dying by loving (Meher Baba, Discourses, 6th ed., 3 vols. [San Francisco: Susm Reoriented, 1973], 1:29). 25. William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Nights Dream, 5.1. 26. Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Romance of the Rose, trans. Charles Dahlberg (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 342. 27. Averrois Cordubensis, Commentaria magna in octo libro Aristotelis de physico auditu, lib. IV, summa prima: De loco, cap. VIII, comm. 41, quoted in Pierre Duhem, Medieval Cosmology: Theories of Innity, Place, Time, Void, and the Plurality of Worlds, trans. Roger Ariew (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 142. 28. Ava Chitwood, Death by Philosophy: The Biographical Tradition in the Life and Death of the Archaic Philosophers Empedocles, Heraclitus, and Democritus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 67. 29. Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 253. 30. Cited from Harriet Waters Preston, The Gospel of Defeat, Atlantic Monthly 54 (1884): 28. 31. Emile M. Cioran, Tears and Saints, trans. Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 50. 32. This and subsequent citations are from The Cloud of Unknowing, ed. Patrick J. Gallacher (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1997). References are to chapter and line numbers. 33. In the midst of beings as a whole an open place occurs. There is a clearing, a lighting. . . . Thanks to this clearing, beings are unconcealed in certain changing degrees. And yet a being can be concealed, too, only within the sphere of what is lighted. Each being we encounter and which encounters us keeps to this curious opposition of presence in that it always withholds itself at the same time in a concealed-

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ness. The clearing in which beings stand is in itself at the same time concealment (Martin Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art, in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter [New York: Harper & Row, 1971], 53). 34. Agamben explains: meant for the Greeks to cause to appear, and meant pro-duction into presence; but this production was not understood in connection with agere, doing, but with , knowing. Conceived in a Greek fashion, pro-duc-tion ( ) and praxis are not the same thing. . . . In other words, the way the Greeks thought of production and the work of art was the inverse of the way in which aesthetics has accustomed us to think of them: is not an end in itself and does not contain its own limit, because it does not bring itself into presence in the work, as acting () brings itself into presence in the act (); the work of art is not the result of a doing, not the actus of an agere, but something substantially other () than the principle that has pro-duced it into presence (The Man Without Content, trans. Georgia Albert [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999], 73). 35. In the Book of Privy Counselling, the ability to experience the actuality of ones being, that one is, is an excellence of rationality, but not an absolute distinction of the human vis--vis animals. Reason thus appears as a perfection of a more general, rather than a unique, kind of consciousness. And this goes to ensure the universal availability of this work: For I holde him to lewyd and to boistous that kan not thenk and fele that himself is, not what himself is bot that hymself is. For this is pleynli proprid to the lewdist kow or to the moste unresonable beest (yif it might be seide, as it may not, that one were lewder or more unresonable then another) for to fele the owne propre beyng. Moche more than it is proprid to man, the whiche is singulerly endowid whith reson aboven alle other beestes, for to thenk and for to fele his owne propre beyng (English Mystics of the Middle Ages, ed. Barry Windeatt [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994], 80). 36. This struggle against actuality from within it may also be traced from the concept of work itself, as the German word for actuality, Wirklichheit, would suggest. Actuality, which takes the intellectual form of the fact that something is and the perceptual form of the presence of something (such that it can be indicated, deictically, as that), coincides with work in the sense that to work is to make something actual, both works material, which working must engage with as it is, and works product, which working realizes or makes present

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through its material. Whence factum (something made) becomes the word for something recognized as true or real. Wirklichkeit (actuality) is similarly rooted in work and is accordingly used by Heidegger to explicate the scholastic concept of existence as a concept of being grounded in enactment: Being is actualitas. Something exists if it is actu, ergo, on the basis of an agere, a Wirken, a working, operating or effecting (energein). Existence (existere) in this broadest sense . . . means Gewirktheit, enactedness, effectedness, or again, the Wirklichkeit, actuality, that lies in enactedness (actualitas, energeia, entelecheia) (Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988], 87). Caputo explains, As a translation of the Latin existentia, Wirklichkeit refers to the fact that a thing is. This in turn is distinguished from what a thing is, which is a mere possibility (John D. Caputo, Heidegger and Aquinas: An Essay Overcoming Metaphysics [New York: Fordham University Press, 1982], 83). Put simply, being, as existence, is labor, work, action, prior to but also necessarily through any and all specic forms of labor, work, and action that existence involves. The distinctions Hannah Arendt draws between these categories in The Human Condition may be appropriate to the phenomenal, symbolic, and social differences between them, but to divide them ontologically, with regard to their being, does violence to the actuality of human existence. Against such divisions, which serve to uphold and exploit the alienation of labor from life, should be set Bruno Gulls demonstration that labor is to political and social ontology (or poetic metaphysics) what being is to pure ontology, which arrives at an understanding of a foundational relation between work and actuality from within the concept of labor (Labor of Fire: The Ontology of Labor between Economy and Culture [Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005], 1). For Gull, labor is essentially living labor, something that has life as the most essential constituent of its what, of it substance, which means that labor is real labor in the same way in which, in Scotuss metaphysics, the concept of being is real being and not a logical universal (2). In this real universal sense, as a production that spans the range of human activity from economy to culture: a poetic praxis, a practical poiesis, labor is the actuality that makes doing being and being doing, or as Gull says, labor is being as sensuous human activity (11). This understanding of labor points back to the place where work is known not as something added to being but as an unfolding of beings actuality. Work is

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37.

38. 39. 40.

not merely something beings do because they have or want to. Work is the playing out in intentional action, the enactment, of the having or wanting of itself which is the very structure of being as actual existence, in short, an enactment of actuality. Explicating a similar relation between work and being, Levinas derives labor from embodiment as dwelling, as the having of body that is consciousness: Labor comes from a being that is a thing among things and in contact with things, but, within this contact, coming from its being at home with itself. Consciousness does not fall into a bodyis not incarnated; it is a disincarnationor, more exactly, a postponing of the corporeity of the body. This is not produced in the ether of abstract but as all the concreteness of dwelling and labor (Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Innity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis [Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969], 16566). So the negativity of labor should be situated not merely in labors affects, nor in its social structures, but in the situation of beings having of itself as an imposition, as the burden of having to be, of not being at home with itself, the situation of being as originless exile and self-refusal. Derrida passes through a similar point: Mourning always follows a trauma. . . . the work of mourning is not one kind of work among others. It is work itself, work in general, the trait by means of which one ought perhaps to reconsider the very concept of productionin what links it to trauma, to mourning, to the idealizing iterability of exappropriation, thus to the spectral spiritualization that is at work in any tekhne (Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: the State of Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf [New York: Routledge, 1994], 97). Mystical Theology, 1.3, my emphasis, cited from Pseudo-Dionysius, The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid and Paul Rorem (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), 137. Emmanuel Levinas, On Escape, trans. Bettina Bergo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 55. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wand, 1982), 126. Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death: The Place of Negativity, trans. K. E. Pinkhaus and M. Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 1425. Hereafter cited as LD.