#60
 
 

OBSCURANTISM OF REASON

by Marcus Steinweg

We can speak of a subject once the willingness appears to substitute for the esotericism of the quest of self-discovery a self-invention; that is to say, once a little of the courage to address oneself as something other than an object comes into play. With the death of God, the subject loses orientation yet at once also gains new leeway, understanding itself as a player-subject whose future is more contingent and hence more unpredictable. It opens up to happenstance and indeterminacy. It gains access to its realities as products of universal indefiniteness. The indefinite is what is not limited without therefore being eternal in the theological sense of that word. That is the concept of infinity in the horizon of the discovery of finite subjectivity: that nothing seems absolutely determined. There is nothing that might not also be different. Once again it is the relation to the obscure and unthought that, raising the question of contingency, calls on us to define it. Reason itself is obscure; the subject reaches into the dimension of subject-enclosure. The logos has long—has always already—opened up to the alogon, as Jean-Luc Nancy puts it: “It is the alogon that reason introduced with itself.” Now we need to “let the obscure emit its own clarity.” And that is what it means to think.

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