We expect thinking to lead from darkness into light. That is the self-conception of the enlightenment. Whether in philosophy, in art, or in the sciences: the twentieth century has begun to complicate this imperialism of light (one name for this complication is deconstruction). Not in order to slide into the esoteric and irrational but in order to initiate a thinking that accounts for the blindness of the subject with a more precise conception of enlightenment, subjectivity, and reason. “If enlightenment does occur, it does so not through the establishment of a dictatorship of lucidity […],” Sloterdijk writes. Neither of lucidity nor of opacity, since all knowledge remains after all dependent on ignorance as lucidity is dependent on opacity and meaning on its absence. “It is not enough,” Nietzsche says in a fragment unpublished during his lifetime, “that you understand in what ignorance humans as well as animals live; you must also have and acquire the will to ignorance. You need to grasp that without this kind of ignorance life itself would be impossible, that it is a condition under which alone the living thing can preserve itself and prosper: a great, firm dome of ignorance must encompass you.” The philosopher of active forgetting turns out to be an apologist of active ignorance, which we must not rashly confuse with a reactive irrationalism. Nietzsche seeks to contain the naïve traits of the religious belief in reason and knowledge; he insists that knowledge is not everything, that ignorance is not in opposition to it, that the subject must muster the willingness to integrate its blind components into an enlarged conception of itself. An enlargement that conciliates it with its inconsistencies, with its ignorance as well as the limitations of its consciousness, with itself as a subject of blindness, before psychoanalysis finally studies the conception of a subject complemented by its unconscious and the attempt to describe it in its openness toward an entity that speaks within it as it speaks and decides for it before it can appropriate its own decisions. The topics of ignorance as well as the unconscious (which are by no means identical: the unconscious is the knowledge of which I do not know, whereas the ignorance Nietzsche speaks of is to be the object not only of my knowledge but also and even of my will) evoke a certain expropriation of the subject, a sort of ontological poverty that limns its outlines as naked life or empty cogito, or in brief, as a subject without subjectivity. The subject of idealism defines itself by its partaking in a universal we-subjectivity; the subject of Christianity knows itself to be the ens creatum of a creator; the subject without subjectivity, by contrast, is an originarily decapitated subject. Open to the above as well as the below, without telos or foundation. Its hyperbolism marks this openness, which makes it border the infinite. At all historical moments, philosophy confronts itself with the infinite components of the subject until—in the phase of its development that is the critique of metaphysics—it finally holds out the prospect of a conception of enlightenment expanded by this infinity: a new enlightenment, as Nietzsche puts it, a new subject and a different reason that acknowledge their hyperbolism. A thinking that retains its opacity as it enacts the conflict of the “night of the world” with the “light of reason,” of closure with opening, Slavoj Žižek writes.