From Word To Word

A friend and I have agreed to read Giorgio Agamben’s Potentialities together, so we went this past Sunday to a pub to discuss the first of the essays in that collection.  the paper is entitled “The Thing Itself”, and it discusses Plato’s Seventh Letter, examining the significance of the phrase “the thing itself” in what Agamben describes as Plato’s “final and most explicit presentation of the theory of the Ideas.”

Agamben proceeds by looking closely at a lengthy quotation from the Seventh Letter, in which Plato distinguishes three things by which knowledge of a being is acquired (its name, its definition, and its image), a fourth thing, which is the acquired knowledge itself, and a fifth thing, which he initially says “must posit the thing itself, which is knowable and truly is.”  Agamben then goes on to argue that a textual variant provides reason to reconsider how this “thing itself” should be understood.  The variant implies, according to Agamben, that the thing itself  is “that by which the object is known, its own knowability and truth,” and that which appears “in the very medium of its knowability, in the pure light of its self-manifestation and announcement to consciousness.”  This thing itself, therefore, while possible only in and by virtue of language, in some way transcends language by virtue of its self-manifestation, becoming “precisely the thing of language.”

Earlier, however, just shortly before he quotes the passage from the Seventh Letter, Agamben summarizes what is at stake in the idea of the thing itself with the question, “What is the thing of thinking?”  The formulation of this question is similar enough to Heidegger’s famous question,”What is thinking?” that I can only read the one as being in relation to the other, though Agamben never acknowledges any such relationship. It is possible, therefore, that I am reading Agamben very much against his intentions when I suggest that his insertion of the words “the thing” into Heidegger’s formulation of “What is thinking?” in fact parallels the final argument of Agamben’s essay, that the task of the coming philosophy is “to restore the thing itself to its place in language.”  After all, there could be no better place to begin returning the thing itself to language than in the very question of thinking that Heidegger posed to thinking and to language, no better way to insist on the coming philosophy’s task than to ask after the difference between what is thinking and what is the thing of thinking itself?

One of the attributes that a good thinker should possess, but that I habitually lack, is consistency and discipline with terminology. I am always using a word or phrase in one context and then discovering that I have been using it in a different sense elsewhere or that I have been using several terms to describe essentially the same idea. A friend recently brought one of these terminological difficulties to my attention. We were talking about encounter, and she noted that I sometimes speak about actively encountering the other, and sometimes about being passively encountered by the other. When I returned to some of the posts I have written on the subject over the years, I realized that this was true of my writing as well as my conversation, and since this point is significant for me, I will try to clarify it as best I can.

I do not believe that we encounter others in activity, but that we are encountered by others in passivity. Activity can open us to the possibility of encounter, can prepare us for encounter, but the encounter itself must always and in every case be experienced in passivity, because any activity of ours that would try to create the encounter would always predetermine the other according to our own intentions and impose ourselves on the other in ways that would prevent us from ever receiving the other as such. The only way to receive the other is in passivity, before we even recognize the other as an other.

Our task, then, is not to manufacture encounter with the other, but to be actively open to the possibility that we will be encountered, that we will be moved in our bellies by the approach of the other. though this encounter will certainly not be from any activity of our own.

How is it that I encounter you here, in this space, or in those like it, in the spaces that we construct for ourselves and for each other on our screens?

I have, as almost everyone has by now, come to know some people exclusively through the media of the interwebs, through the mediation of our monitors and our applications and our processors and our infrastructures.  I would even consider some of these people friends, though I have never seen their faces, never heard their voices, never taken their hands in greeting, never been face-to-face, and I wonder how these friendships differ from friendships of the face-to-face.

Now, let me make clear that I am not naively representing the face-to-face as an unmediated relation, since it too is clearly mediated, both through the purely physical mediation of the senses and through the cultural/technical mediation of language.  We are never able to escape these things, and thus we never have an unmediated relation of any sort.  I recognize all this.

I am, however, representing the face-to-face as being mediated in decisively different ways than the kind of relation that is mediated by our various teletechnologies, and I am wondering whether teletechnological relation is able to produce the kind of relational encounter that I have described elsewhere.  My concern, in other words, is that the increasing predominance of the teletechnological relation, while enabling an increase in connectivity between people, is reducing the possibility for the kind of encounter between people that I believe is necessary to living ethically in the world.  I might pose the question something like this: Is it possible for teletechnological relation to move me in the belly, to move me to compassion, to make the other appear to me as my neighbour, even while remaining absolutely other?

The trouble is that I arrive at two different answers, depending on whether I am thinking theoretically or experientially.  In theory, at least, I can see no reason why the signs of the other, even mediated by our teletechnologies, should not be able to move me in the belly, to make me respond to the other as my neighbour.  My experience, however, tells me that this happens only very infrequently, that far more often the teletechnological relation hides the other from me in ways that prevent true encounter, that prevent the advent of the neighbour, that prevent ethical relation. It is not that technological mediation hides the other from me in essence, not even that my use and abuse of these technologies hides the other from me most often in practice, but that these technologies become I way for me and the other both to hide ourselves behind the layers of avatars and profiles and monitors and processors.

It is not that the other cannot be encountered throught teletechnological mediation. It is that most of us do not wish to be encountered, and technological mediation provides us with the means to hide ourselves away from any real anounter, far more effectively than the strategies that we use to hide ourselves when we are face-to-face, when we must rely on our capacity to lie and dissemble, when we run the risk that others will see through our deceptions, no matter how practised they may be, when we may find ourselves encountered despite everything we might do.

The question becomes, then, not whether it is possible for me to enocounter the other in cyberspace, but whether I can allow myself to be so encountered, whether I can find ways to be open to the other through the mediation of my technologies.

In The Transparency of Evil, Jean Baudrillard insists that for hospitality to remain hospitality it must give up every attempt to understand the other, every attempt to reduce the other’s foreignness.  We exist, he says, “not to be known or recognized,”  but “solely to be received and to receive,” and so we must “seek the other’s cruelty, the other’s intelligibility, the other as spectre; constrain the other to foreignnness; violate the other in his foreignness.”  The task of hospitality then is not to reduce the other’s foreigness through understanding, but to maintain the other’s foreignness, to receive the other precisely as the entirely foreign, apart from any knowledge. 

Yet, I wonder how this hospitality of pure reception might actually appear in the world, since every reception of the other, even the purest reception of the other as entirely and in every way foreign, would immediately become the occasion of a kind of knowledge, however illusory this knowledge might be, and the act of hospitality would come to know despite itself, falling irresistibly into inhospitality.

Baudrillard seems to account for this problem by suggesting that the other’s foreignness must be continually maintained over against any understanding of the other that we might obtain, that we must continually set aside whatever knowledge we have of the other and receive the other only as foreigner, as stranger, as unknown.  In this sense, we may certainly relate to the other with respect to our knowledge of the other, must in fact relate to the other in this respect, but this relation is not hospitality as such.  Rather, we are hospitable only to the degree that we are able to set aside our knowledge of the other, with all the relations that attend it, and receive the other apart from this understanding, receive the other simply as other, beyond all understanding, knowledge, and relation.  Hospitality, then, becomes defined, perhaps, as a relation without relation, as a relational gesture that precedes relation as such, that precedes even the possibility of relation, that appears in advance of relation. 

The ethical imperative to hospitality, therefore, in the most practical terms, becomes an imperative for me to recall at all costs the insufficiency of my knowledge to account for the other’s foreignness, and to receive continually the foreignness of the other, the incomprehensibility of the other, despite whatever understanding that I might think I have.

I have been reading Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Muses, which includes an essay called “On the Threshold.”  This essay makes a close reading of a painting by Caravaggio called The Death of the Virgin, arguing that this painting locates the viewer on the threshold of death, the world, existence, and suggesting that art generally functions in this way, not so much representing the world as presenting it, locating us in the impossibility of the world, of existence.  Given my preoccupations with the idea of the threshold (see “On the Threshold of My Death” , “On the Threshold“, “The Door, the Threshold, the Between“, and “On the Scaffold“), this essay has obvious interest for me, but there are other less obvious ways that I found myself responding to it, not all of them closely related.  Rather than try to force connections between these things that do not exist.  I will simply list them.

1.  I cannot make myself like Jean-Luc Nancy.  Though I often appreciate his work, I find something cold in him, something that I more sense than understand.  In contrast to Derrida’s posture of a certain joy and a certain dance, which I respect but cannot emulate, and in even greater contrast to Heidegger’s posture of thinking thankfulness, which has become increasingly definitive for me, I find in Nancy only a posture of distance and reserve, the very posture that I dislike most in myself.

2.  The painting that Nancy analyzes, The Death of the Virgin, is one of three paintings that have long been significant to me, the other two being Rembrandt’s Return of the Prodigal Son and Caravaggio’s The Conversion on the Way to Damascus.  The Return of the Prodigal Son is a very famous picture, made still more famous in modern religious circles by a book of the same name by author Henri Nouwen, but I identified myself with it long before I read Nouwen, particularly with the figure of the prodigal’s elder brother on the right hand side.  Nouwen’s book, though insightful in many ways, fails to account for my identification with this figure, portraying the elder son’s distance as primarily one of jealousy and self-righteousness, while it always seemed to me that his distance was the distance of reflection, of thought, of consideration.  Rembrant’s elder son looks neither proud nor angry, only thoughtful, distant.  He is unable to let himself be undone enough to throw himself at the feet of his father like his brother does. The figure of John in The Death of the Virgin occupies a similar position.  Physically separated from the other apostles, his head resting on his hand, deep in reflection, he also is too occupied by his thoughtfulness to fully participate in the work of mourning that is going on around him.  He is separated from it by his thinking of it.  He is reflecting on his grief rather than being undone by it.  All of this is why Caravaggio’s The Conversion on the Way to Damascus is my favourite painting, because it represents my desire, which is the complete undoing of this reflective, thoughtful, contemplative distance.  Most representations of this scene depict a Saul who is kneeling or sitting in a halo of heavenly light, blind and fallen but still dignified and self-possessed.  These Sauls still manage to keep their distance from what they are experiencing, but not so Caravaggio’s Saul.  His Saul is lying on his back, in the dark, beneath the very hooves of his horse, his arms thrown up in fear or blindness or acceptance or sheer instinct or who knows what.  This Saul is undone, and though I fear that I am too often in the posture of the prodigal’s elder brother, my desire is to be undone in the way that Caravaggio’s Saul is undone.

3. The National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa is currently holding an exhibition of Caravaggio’s work, until September 11th.  Though my two favourite pictures are not in the exhibit, I would very much love to go.  Unfortunately, I have neither the time or the money to make the trip.  Here is a link to the list of paintings that are on display.

4.  I am intrigued by Nancy’s argument that art locates us at the threshold of the world, of existence, perhaps even as this threshold.  I will quote him several times, at length: 1) “So, we have entered there where we will never enter, into this scene painted on a canvas.  All at once, there we are.  We cannot exactly say that we have penetrated there, but neither can we say that we are outside.  We are there in a manner older and simpler than by any movement, displacement, or penetration.  We are there without leaving the threshold, on the threshold, neither inside nor outside – and perhaps we are, ourselves, the threshold.”  2)  “This is the ordinary command or demand of painting: very simple, very humble, even derisory.  See the invisible, not beyond the invisible, nor inside, nor outside, but right at it, on the threshold.”  3)  Painting paints the threshold of existence.  In these conditions, to paint does not mean to represent, but simply to pose the ground, the texture, and the pigment of the threshold.”

5.  I would like to hear Nancy in dialogue with Jean-Luc Marion on the subject of the relationship between art and religion, particularly with respect to the role of seeing and visibility.  I wonder whether Marion’s idea of the crossing of the visible might speak to Nancy’s concern that the religion requires of art  incarnation or reincarnation, while art requires of itself only carnation.

6.  I recall first seeing The Death of the Virgin in art class and being told that Caravaggio had used as a model for Mary a drowned woman who may have been a prostitute and may have been his mistress.  I remember thinking, while the class discussed the sacrilegious and iconoclastic nature of this choice, how profound a truth Caravaggio had thereby managed to portray.

As readers of Jacques Derrida’s Of Hospitality, we are from the very first confronted by the question of how to receive the text.  How is such a text to be read?  Should we first read Anne Dufourmantelle’s essay, which she labels an “Invitation”, and which appears on the left-hand pages, always visually preceding Derrida’s own words on the right-hand pages?  Or should we first read Derrida’s lectures, which were delivered first and to which Dufourmantelle’s “Invitation” responds?  Is it possible that we might read the two together, one alternating with the other, page alternating page?  How, in other words, are we to receive this singular text, how do we make a reception for it, keeping in mind the connotations of hospitality that these words ‘receive’ and ‘reception’ bear with them?  To read Of Hospitality, therefore, is to involve ourselves in the question of reading as hospitality, in the question of how to receive what Dufourmantelle and Derrida have written.

When I take up a text to read it, any text, I extend an invitation through it, not an invitation to the author in person, of course, except perhaps in certain exceptional senses, but an invitation to what the author has written, or, in the case of Jacques Derrida’s Of Hospitality, to what has been transcribed on behalf of the author, but in any case, to the words beneath which the author’s name has been signed.  The act of reading opens the reader to this text like the act of invitation opens the home to the guest.  It makes the reader available, attentive, receptive, concerned with the text, puts the reader in the position of the host.  To read is to host what arrives through the text as a guest.

In this sense, Of Hospitality imposes gravely on my hospitality as a reader, not only in the ways that every guest always imposes on any hospitality, but because my hospitality, my invitation, which was extended to Derrida, to whom my invitation has been extended so many times in the past, becomes also, though I did not bargain for it, did not account for it, an invitation to Dufourmantelle as well, whom I do not know, to whom I would never have made my invitation had she not come in Derrida’s company, had she not arrived with him as his guest.  I invited one, but this other came to claim my hospitality also, this one who now becomes my guest through my guest, whom I am forced to receive as the guest of my guest.

This arriving-with makes all the difference.  Dufourmantelle does not arrive before Derrida, does not arrive in a preface or an introduction or a note on the text.  Nor does she arrive after him, as a postscript or an envoi or an epilogue.  She arrives at almost precisely the same moment, she on one page, he on the other, her text interpolated with his.  For this reason she is not merely a stranger who happens to arrive before or after Derrida, a stranger who might still require my hospitality, who might even demand it, but who could in either case be extended hospitality in her own right.  She is instead a stranger who arrives with Derrida, with an already invited guest, and her arrival presumes on an invitation that was never hers, assumes a hospitality, not in her own name or her own right, but in the name and the right of another.  She does not receive her invitation directly from the host, from me, but only indirectly, through the invitation that I extend to another.  She is not my guest.  She is the guest of my guest.  I am not her host.  I am the host of her host.

This relation between the guest-of-the-guest and the host-of-the-host arises because of the one who first received the invitation and then extended it to another, because of the guest who presumed to offer an invitation on behalf of the host, because of the guest who takes the place of the host.  This guest-host is invited, but also invites, stands between his host and his guest, offers his host to his guest and his guest to her host in a way that is necessarily an imposition on them both, even if this imposition is in some cases a welcome one.  The host is imposed on the guest just as much as the guest is imposed on the host.  My hospitality is imposed on Dufourmantelle, just as her arrival is imposed on me, and this is the case even when the guest-host extends the invitation unwillingly, even when he does not extend it at all, for even if Dufourmantelle has merely seized upon Derrida’s text and written herself into it without his assent, my invitation to hospitality, extended through Derrida, is as much an imposition on her as her arrival, enabled by this invitation, is an imposition on me.

It is not necessary, therefore, that either the guest-host or the guest-of-the-guest intend to impose on the host’s invitation or the host’s hospitality, because the imposition takes place quite apart from any intention, in the very structure of the relationship between the three parties.  The imposition is structural and insuperable, even when it is not unwelcome.  It arises essentially in the asymmetry between the invited guest and the uninvited guest, between the expected guest and the unexpected guest, between one kind of hospitality and another.  The host, extending an invitation, expects to receive the guest in a certain way and to be hospitable in a certain way, but discovers that there is expected of him another kind of reception and another kind of hospitality, an unexpected hospitality that arrives like a parasite on the expected.

This figure of the guest-of-the-guest is a risk that is implicit in every invitation and every hospitality.  Anyone whom I welcome across my threshold, whether a complete stranger or my spouse, whether my friend of my child, may extend an invitation to others to cross my threshold also, may extend an invitation that is not mine but that my hospitality is nevertheless obligated to recognize and to respect.  Any of those who enter my home, whatever their relationship to me, may be accompanied by another, may arrive with another, and this other must be received as a guest, or better, as the guest-of-my-guest.  This risk only grows as I extend an invitation to the hospitality of my home more often, since each such invitation bears in it the possibility that it will be extended to another, that my guest will arrive in the company of one or more that I did not expect.

The invitation that I extend, therefore, whether to my friend or to the words of Derrida, always implicitly invites the possibility of the guest-of-the-guest.  It does not merely accept this possibility, but in fact invites it in the same act of invitation that it extends to the guest, since the guest always implies the possibility of the guest-of-the-guest.  The first is not possible without the possibility of the second.  In the very act of opening the home to the guest, the host opens it also to the guest-of the-guest, not necessarily in person, not as such, but always in possibility, in potentiality.

This is one of the senses in which I read Derrida’s declaration that “the right to hospitality commits a household, a line of descent, a family,” because the hospitality that any member of the household might extend to another always commits the whole of the household to receive a guest that it did not in fact invite, and commits them to receive this guest as though she were invited, as though the household as a whole had together extended an invitation to her.  In this way, a member of the household is never able to extend an invitation to hospitality on his own behalf only, but is always necessarily making his invitation on behalf of the entire household, asking the household to host both his guest and himself as the host of his guest.  The household becomes the host-of-the-host, and the guest becomes the-guest-of-the-guest, in every case.

This figure of the guest-of-the-guest, this figure who is in this case embodied in the “Invitation” of Dufourmantelle, imposes on the hospitality of the host, on my hospitality, precisely because it blurs the boundary of the threshold, or, to be more precise, because it blurs where the guest-host stands in relation to this threshold.  The guest who extends my invitation to another and thereby acts as a host in my place bears an ambiguous relation to the threshold of my home, stands on both sides at once, straddles this boundary and therefore obscures it.  Likewise, the member of the household who extends an invitation on behalf of the household and thereby makes of himself a guest in his own home also straddles the threshold in this way.  Yet, as Derrida says, “any reflection on hospitality presupposes, among other things, the possibility of a rigorous distinction of threshold or frontiers: between the familial and the non-familial, between the foreign and the non-foreign, between the citizen and the non-citizen.”  The guest-host, standing with one foot in the home and one foot without, obscures these thresholds, these definitions, these categories, and therefore also prevents a clear reflection on the very idea of hospitality.

Much of what Derrida has to say in Of Hospitality is concerned with the relationship, both of conflict and collusion, that exists between the absolute law of hospitality and the conditional laws of hospitality.  He argues that “there is an antimony, an insoluble antimony between, on the one hand, the law of unlimited hospitality, and on the other hand, the laws, those rights and duties of hospitality that are always conditioned and conditional.”  He goes on to say that, between the law of absolute hospitality and the laws of conditional hospitality, “there is distinction, radical heterogeneity, but also indissociability. One calls forth, involves, or prescribes the other.”  Thus, the law and the laws of hospitality are both opposed absolutely and involved absolutely, which is one of the reasons that Derrida describes hospitality as the impossible and even as being defined by this impossibility.

This impossible relationship between the law and the laws of hospitality is, I think, critical to understanding the figures of the guest-of-the-guest and the guest-host as I have been describing them.  This is the case, not only in the most obvious sense, where the law of absolute hospitality requires me to receive both the invited and the uninvited guest “before any determination, before any anticipation, before any identification,” while the laws of conditional hospitality require me to receive them precisely as they are determined, anticipated, and identified.  It is also the case in the sense that the laws of conditional hospitality by which I receive one guest are being used to invoke the law of unconditional hospitality and to impose on me, as the host, a further conditional hospitality that I would not otherwise have extended.  In other words, the guest-host is making use of the impossible relationship between conditional and unconditional hospitality in order to manipulate the rights and duties of my hospitality against my will and my choice.  If I refuse to receive the guest-of-the-guest according to the expectations of the guest-host, then I am seen as having transgressed against the law of absolute hospitality.

Yet, as I have already argued, the risk of this guest-of-the guest, the risk of this manipulation of my hospitality through an appeal to an unconditional hospitality, is inherent in every invitation and in every hospitality.  In every invitation to hospitality that I extend, I also invite an imposition on my hospitality, a manipulation of my hospitality, a turning of my hospitality against my will.  The hospitality that I offer is always potentially the means to impose on me a hospitality that I did not offer.  Hospitality always, at least in potentiality, imposes on hospitality.

The implications of this imposition of one conditional hospitality on another are not insignificant, because they are deeply ethical in nature. As Derrida says, “The problem of hospitality is coextensive with the ethical problem.  It is always about answering for a dwelling place, for one’s identity, one’s space, one’s limits, for the ethos as abode, habitation, house, hearth, family, home.”  The ethics of the home are at stake here, are bound up in the impossibility of hospitality, in the imposition of hospitality on hospitality.  If it is the case that the guest-host imposes a hospitality on the host, then the hospitality of the home, the ethics of the home, are always in fact, at least in part, determined from beyond the home, apart from the home, by the one who enters the home and extends its hospitality beyond what it has in fact offered.  The hospitality and the ethics of the home are never what they offer themselves to be, but are always imposed upon, distorted, made other than they would choose to be.

This is the situation in which Of Hospitality places me, in which it places all of its readers.  Derrida’s text, to which we offer a conditional hospitality, appeals to the law of unconditional hospitality on behalf of Dufourmantelle’s text, imposes on us a hospitality that we would not otherwise offer.  It imposes a hospitality, already also an ethics, for which the dwelling place and the family and the home and the reader as self will be made to answer.

In Part II, Lecture III of What Is Thinking?, Martin Heidegger notes a possible philological connection between the words ‘think’ and ‘thank’ rooted in the Old-English word ‘thanc’, which refers to a grateful thought or the expression of such a thought.  This connection drives him to ask, “Is thinking a giving of thanks? Or do thanks consist in thinking?”

His initial answer to these questions is that, “In giving thanks, the heart gives thought to what it has and what it is.”  In this sense, then, “Original thanking is the thanks owed for being,” and this “thanks alone gives rise to thinking.”  Here Heidegger is noting how the act of thanking, at least in its most original form of giving the thanks that owed to being, is essentially a giving of thought or a giving rise to thinking.  It is the proper response of the heart to what it has and what it is, the proper response of the heart to being.  In fact, he goes on to say that “Pure thanks is that we simply think – think what is really and solely given, what is there to be thought.”  Proper thinking thus arises out of pure thanks, where “the heart in thought recalls where it belongs,” and so proper thinking has the posture of thanks.  It is a giving of what the heart owes to being.

Heidegger describes this kind of thinking that arises out of thanks as devoted thinking, and he emphasizes that it is not “something that we ourselves produce” in order to repay the gift of being with a gift of our own.  “Such thanks,” he says, “is not a recompense, but it remains an offering, and only by this offering do we allow that which properly gives food for thought to remain what it is in its essential nature.”  The key here is that devoted thinking does not seek to establish an economy of giving through which it might repay its debt to being once and for all.  Rather, it offers itself precisely as an offering, offers itself as thanks.

It is interesting to me that Heidegger identifies this posture of proper thinking in relation to the question of being, and that he does so, not in terms of nausea, as many others had done and were doing, but in terms of thanks.  Though he had read Nietzsche more thoroughly than perhaps any one before or since, he does not follow Nietzsche with respect to the idea of nausea, as Sartre and the existentialists do.  He is certainly willing to open the question of being, but he refuses to be driven by nausea into simply closing it again, into merely reversing its traditional terms.  Instead, he insists on a posture of thankfulness that does not attempt to determine being in any direction, but only to think what being gives, to recall where it belongs, to allow it to remain what it is in its essential nature.  Rather than closing or determining the question of being, therefore, proper thinking occupies this question in a posture of thanks.

This posture, this attitude, this stance, this thankful thinking, it is a powerful idea for me personally.  I too try to occupy certain questions in their openness, the question of being not least among them, and I often find that I am doing so with a terror and an anxiety and a nausea, and though I have taken much from Jacques Derrida, his own posture of “a certain laughter and a certain dance” has always seemed too irreverent to me.  The posture of thanks that Heidegger describes here, however, is the posture that best reflects my own experience when I am thinking properly, when I am thinking what there is to be thought as properly as I can.  When I think in this way, I fall into this posture of thankfulness, a thankfulness that needs to give thought to what it has and what it is.

Dave Humphrey has written on the idea of seeing several times, and it is a topic that comes up frequently in our conversation, so I thought that I would share with him, and with all of you as well, a passage from Ernest Hemingway’s True at First Light that speaks very directly to the nature of seeing and does so in relation to birds, which is another subject of great significance to Dave.

The passage begins with Hemingway describing how he has been so focused on tracking the big game that he has failed really to notice the local birds in the way that his wife has.  He says, “I realized I had only paid attention to the predators, the scavengers, and the birds that were good to eat and the birds that had to do with hunting.  Then as I thought of which birds I did notice there came such a great long list of them that I did not feel quite as bad but I resolved to watch the birds around our camp more and to ask Mary all about the ones I did not know, and most of all, to really see them and not look past them.”  This is a nice passage all in itself, with its exhortation really to see and not look past things, but he then goes on to say, “This looking and not seeing things is a great sin.”

This phrase, I think, sums up very nicely what Dave has described in his own writing on the act of seeing, and I think that Dave would agree with his next comment as well, that “we do not deserve to live in the world if we do not see it.”

In exploring the question “What is Called Thinking?”, Heidegger differentiates between two senses of the verb ‘to call’.

He first notes the most common usage of ‘to call’, which “simply means to give this or that a name.”  In this sense, the title question of the book could be rephrased something like, “What is it that we name thinking” or “What thing do we label as thinking?” or as Heidegger puts it himself, “What idea shall we form about the process to which has been given the name thinking?”  The act of calling in this sense has to do with defining and labeling.  The agency in this calling is the thinker, and thinking is its object.

Heidegger then notes a less common usage of ‘to call’, one that he says is more originary and that bears the word’s “real signification.” In this originally habitual sense, he says, ‘to call’ means “to set in motion, to get something underway.”  Calling in this sense is “not so much a command as a letting-reach.”  It means to “instruct, demand, allow to reach, get on the way, convey, provide with a way,” and can best be  approximated with the verbs “invite, demand, instruct, direct.”  When the question “What is called thinking?” is reconsidered in this light, it might better be read as asking, “What is it that invites or instructs or directs us into thinking?” or in Heidegger’s own words “What is it that appeals to us to think?” or “What is it that enjoins our nature to think, and thus lets our nature reach thought?”  In this formulation of the question, the thinker becomes the object of the action, the one who is invited into thinking, and the action is less about defining what thinking is than in discovering how it is that the way into thinking is opened for us.

Heidegger goes on to argue that what calls us to think, what opens the way to thinking, is actually the call itself needing or wanting to be thought. “That which calls us to think in this way,” he says, “presumably can do so only insofar as the calling itself, on its own, needs thought.  What calls us to think, and thus commands, that is, brings our essential nature into the keeping of thought, needs thinking because what calls us wants itself to be thought about according to its nature.  What calls on us to think demands for itself that it be tended, cared for, husbanded in its own essential nature, by thought.”   Heidegger is here locating agency, not in the thinker, but in that very thing which calls us to think.  It is the desire of the call to be thought that in fact calls to us into thinking.  The call needs to be thought, wants to be thought, demands to be thought, and it is this that invites us to think.

All of this is quite interesting to me, not only because it relates closely to the questions that I was asking of Heidegger several chapters earlier, but also because the idea of calling has been very important to me over the years, first in an explicitly religious sense during my childhood, and then as a way to describe the function of writing in the world, and most recently as a figure for the gesture that draws us face to face with one other. The domain name for this site, vocamus, which derives from the Latin verb ‘to call’ and means ‘we call’ or ‘we invoke’, is a product of my interest in this idea, and it too can be used in both the senses that Heidegger identifies, as naming or designating, and also as calling, summoning, invoking, or inviting.

There is a third sense in which it is used, however, one that Heidegger never makes explicit but that I would suggest is everywhere implicit in his argument, that is, calling in the sense of bringing about or putting into a state or a condition.  The call to thinking, it seems to me, and I think this is consistent with what Heidegger is arguing, is less a call to a certain kind of activity than it is a call to a state, condition, or way of being.  To be called, invited, invoked, directed, or drawn into thinking is to be presented to thinking, not to act upon it, but to be in relation to it.  It is in this sense that I would read Heidegger’s claim that the call “does not just give us something to think about, nor only itself, but it first gives thought and thinking to us, it entrusts thought to us as our essential destiny, and thus first joins and appropriates us to thought.”

I am discovering more and more frequently a confusion in how our society conceptualizes work.  The confusion arises, not between vocation and occupation, as most people and every conceivable self-help book seems to assume, but between work and labour.

Work is performed is the task performed within the context of an exchange.  It is dominated by the considerations of wages and costs and production and contracts and hours and benefits and pensions and vacation days and retirement packages.  Whether it is performed by a CEO of a major corporation or a chattel slave on a banana plantation, work is always about doing a task to earn recompenses or to avoid reprisals. It is always a matter of economy.  Work is therefore not natural.  It is the product of a certain kind of human culture, and it requires the idea of the contract, even if this contract is only implied.  Work is not a matter of instinct or of nature.  It is a matter of human culture and technique.

Labour, however, is made up of the tasks that we perform out of relation to family and to friends and to community.  It is what we choose to do in order that we might live better with others, so that we might live with more conviviality.  It is the cooking we do to feed our families, and it is the driveways we shovel for our elderly neighbours, and it is the children we watch for our friends, and it is also the contractual work that we do, when we do it in the proper spirit, as a way to provide for those around us.

Labour is not primarily concerned with economy and exchange, though it may sometimes participate in these things of necessity.  It is primarily concerned with giving and service.  Labour performs the task, not because of what it will receive in return, but because of what it can give.  It is the task that we undertake, not necessarily because we enjoy it, although we may in fact enjoy it, not necessarily because we will gain something in exchange, though we may in fact gain something in exchange, but merely because it allows us to give more fully to others.  It is the everyday task offered as a gift and as a sign of love.