Maurice Blanchot describes the experience of emptiness as a “feeling of happiness” that assails the subject as a “ravaging joy”. Joy of an opening that opens toward its closure, so infinite is this emptiness that contains not the least positivity. An emptiness that closes the space of the beyond. The event of this closure coincides with, as Foucault puts it, “an absolute opening through which language endlessly spreads forth, while the subject—the ‘I’ who speaks— fragments, disperses, scatters, disappearing in that naked space” (Michel Foucault). “This is what is at stake in an ‘atheism,’” as Jean-Luc Nancy puts it in an essay about Blanchot, “that owes it to itself to deny itself the position of the negation it proffers, and the assurance of every sort of presence that could substitute for that of God—that is, the presence of the signifier of absolute signification or signifiability.” The emptiness is not there in order to be filled, the empty heaven not so it can be peopled with humans who replace God by switching roles with him. In this play, God would be the ens creatum of a man who conceives himself as creator, one who knows to keep a distance between himself and his creations. He would be Nietzsche’s higher man, who can neither laugh nor dance, so heavy is the burden he inherits from the dead God. The play to which the absence of God calls us cannot consist in the inversion of erstwhile certainties (and be they certainties of belief), because inversions, as Heidegger states, “never bring anything into the open.” This is the dialectic certainty of philosophy: that inversion itself becomes inverted, that negation must be driven beyond itself, exported to a nowhere which is fully of this world and yet marks a blind spot in it, or a hole which in Sartre’s thought appears as a “hole in being”, in the psychoanalytic theory of Lacan and Žižek as a “hole in knowledge”/”hole in the heart of the symbolic” and in the mathematical ontology of Badiou as the “hole of the event” (as perforation of the texture of the factual). It must be affirmed instead of denied, because it is a name of the inexistence of God or, speaking with Hölderlin, of “Gottes Fehl”, the absence of God, which transforms man into a subject circling around his absence, a subject which experiences all affects – whether they encourage to think, act or love – from this absence. It is here that one of the most important distinctions that philosophy has proposed for its own defintion situates itself: the difference between truth and meaning, which names the rift between certainties of fact and their incommensurability. The rift which, instead of dividing the finite here and now from the infinite beyond, runs through a world without a beyond while injecting it with an inconsistency marking its non-closedness or indefiniteness. Blanchot connected this indefiniteness in Le livre à venir (1959) to the motif of an empty origin, an origin “yet without being” (“sans être encore”), which inscribes itself into the “present universe, into a world defined by its limits” as restistance or absence. There exists only a world without transcendence, yet it is neither closed nor teleologically determined. It is not in accordance with any absolute disposition, so that the subject living in it finds itself restricted by the “horror of the non-determined”, the horror vacui, which it can experience as happiness.