In the history of philosophy, chaos has many names. It is the divine, the noumenal and the sublime, the untimely, the uncanny, nothingness or freedom, the infinite, becoming or the exterior, contingency and pure multiplicity, the dimension of the ethical, of the mystical, of the miracle and the unspeakable: the incommensurable, the heterogeneous, the impossible: pure facelessness and namelessness. So many names for the one namelessness. I think that they are so numerous and so contradictory (why should contingency and freedom belong to the same arrangement?) because they refer to the conflict-ridden fundamental assertion of Western thinking that the beyond of the world of established realities can only be thought as something impossible and unliveable. The difficulty lies in the fact of having to concede its incompetence in the act of touching the impossible. Thinking is a thinking of the unthinkable; otherwise it would not be philosophy. The positive concept of the subject comprises an openness to the non-positive and untouchable. Agreement with its ontological incompetence would be an act of self-affirmation of a subject that refuses to capitulate to nothingness. Nothingness is the philosophical name for this abyss of the untouchable which Hegel calls the “night of the world”, the emptiness implicit within the subject, absolute negativity. Therefore it is sensibleto insist on art and philosophy as appearances ex nihilo because they are effects of touching the untouchable, of touching nothingness. It has to be understood that the fact that nothing comes from nothing does not represent any contradiction to truth ex nihilo because what is here called nothingness, as in Hegel’s “night of the world”, is both total emptiness and excessive richness. Hegelian thinking knows of a certain equivalence for this overly abundant nothingness: that is the incommensurable, still undetermined substance. The fact that “substance is essentially subject” means also that substance marks the abysmal ground of the subject, the infinite inherent within it which articulates itself in the form of the subject. A subject is what helps substance, nothingness come to being, to appearance. The sphere of substance is not the universe of the universalia underlying its ontic-phenomenological manifestation. It is, like the night of the world, a zone of ontological tornness, a chaotic space of acosmic indifference.