Immanence is awful

(Jean-Luc, The Unsacrificeable* Yale French Studies, No. 79, Literature and the Ethical Question (1991), pp. 20-38 )

But if sovereignty is nothing, if the “obscure God” is only the obscurity of desire ecstatic in the face of itself, if existence arranges itself only towards its own finitude, then we must think apart from sacrifice. On the one hand, what is at stake since the beginning of the Western sublation of sacrifice should definitively be acknowledged: strictly speaking we know nothing decisive about the old sacrifice. We need to admit that what we consider as a mercenary exchange (“Here is the butter…”) sustained and gave meaning to billions of individual and collective existences, and we do not know how to think about what founds this gesture. (We can only guess, confusedly, that this barter in itself goes beyond barter.) On the contrary, we know that, for us, it is absolutely impossible to declare: “here are the lives, where are the others?” (all the others: our other lives, the life of a great Other, the other of life and the other life in general). Consequently, on the other hand, it should be definitively acknowledged that the Western economy of sacrifice has come to a close, and that it is closed by the decomposition of the sacrificial apparatus itself, that bloody transgression by which the “moment of the finite” would be transcended and appropriated infinitely. But finitude is not a “moment” in a process or an economy. A finite existence does not have to let its meaning spring forth through a destructive explosion of its finitude. Not only does it not have to do so; in a sense it cannot even do so: thought rigorously, thought according to its Ereignis, “finitude” signifies that existence cannot be sacrificed. It cannot be sacrificed because, in itself, it is already, not sacrificed, but offered to the world. There is a resemblance, and the two can be mistaken for one another; and yet, there is nothing more dissimilar. One could say: existence is in essence sacrificed. To say this would be to reproduce, in one of its forms, the fundamental utterance of Western sacrifice. And we would have to add this major form, which necessarily follows: that existence is, in its essence, sacrifice. To say that existence is offered is no doubt to use a word from the sacrificial vocabulary (and if we were in the German language, it would be the same word: Opfer, Aufopfertmg). But it is an attempt to mark that, if we have to say that existence is sacrificed, it is not in any case sacrificed by anyone, nor is it sacrificed to anything. "Existence is offered" means the finitude of existence. Finitude is not negativity cut out of being and granting access, through this cutting, to the restored integrity of being or to sovereignty. Finitude utters what Bataille utters in saying that sovereignty is nothing. Finitude simply corresponds to the generative formula of the thought of existence, which is the thought of the finitude of being, or the thought of the meaning of being as the finitude of meaning. This formula states: "the "essence" of Dasein lies in its existence.22 If its essence (in quotation marks) is in its existence, it is that the existent has no essence. It cannot be returned to the trans-appropriation of an essence. But it is offered, that is to say, it is presented to the existence that it is. The existence exposes being in its essence disappropriated of all essence, and thus of all "being:" the being that is not. Such negativity, however, does not come dialectically to say that it shall be, that it shall finally be a trans-appropriated Self. On the contrary, this negation affirms the inappropriate as its most appropriate form of appropriation, and in truth as the unique mode of all appropriation. Also, the negative mode of this utterance: "being is not" does not imply a negation but an ontological affirmation. This is what is meant by Ereignis. The existent arrives, takes place, and this is nothing but a being-thrown into the world. In this being-thrown, it is offered. But it is offered by no one, to no one. Nor is it self-sacrificed, if nothing—no being, no subject—precedes its being-thrown. In truth, it is not even offered or sacrificed to a Nothing, to a Nothingness or an Other in whose abyss it would come to enjoy its own impossibility of being impossibly. It is exactly at this point that both Bataille and Heidegger must be relentlessly corrected. Corrected, that is: withdrawn from the slightest tendency towards sacrifice. For this tendency towards sacrifice, or through sacrifice, is always linked to a fascination with an ecstasy turned towards an Other or towards an absolute Outside, into which the subject is diverted/spilled the better to be restored. Western sacrifice is haunted by an Outside of finitude, as obscure and bottomless as this "outside" may be. But there is no "outside." The event of existence, the "there is," means that there is nothing else. There is no "obscure God." There is no obscurity that would be God. In this sense, and since there is no longer any clear divine epiphany, I might say that what technique presents us with could simply be: clarity without God. The clarity, however, of an open space in which an open eye can no longer be fascinated. Fascination is already proof that something has been accorded to obscurity and its bloody heart. But there is nothing to accord, nothing but "nothing." "Nothing" is not an abyss open to the outside. "Nothing" affirms finitude, and this "nothing" at once returns existence to itself and to nothing else. It desubjectivizes it, removing all possibility of trans-appropriating itself through anything but its own event, advent. Existence, in this sense, its proper sense, is unsacrificeable. Thus there is room to give meaning to the infinite absence of appropriable meaning. Once again, "technique" could well constitute such an horizon. That is once more to say, there must be no retreat: the closure of an immanence. But this immanence would not have lost or be lacking transcendence. In other words, it would not be sacrifice in any sense of the word. What we used to call "transcendence" would signify rather that appropriation is immanent, but that "immanence" is not some indistinct coagulation: it is made only from its horizon. The horizon holds existence at a distance from itself, in the gap or the "between" that constitutes it: between birth and death, between one and the others. One does not enter the between, which is also the space of the play of mimesis and of methexis. Not because it would be an abyss, an altar, or an impenetrable heart, but because it would be nothing other than the limit of finitude; and lest we confuse it with, say, Hegelian "finiteness," this limit is a limit that does not soar above nothingness. Existence alone breaks away from even itself. Does this mean rejoicing in a mediocre and limited life? Surely such a suspicion could itself come only from a mediocre and limited life. And it is this same life that could suddenly be exalted, fascinated, by sacrifice. Neither pain nor death are to be denied. Still less, if possible, are these to be sought after in view of some transappropriation. At issue, rather, is a pain that no longer sacrifices, and which one no longer sacrifices. True pain, doubtless, and perhaps even the truest of all. It does not efface joy (nor enjoyment), and yet, it is not the latter's dialectical or sublimating threshhold either. There is no threshhold, no sublime and bloody gesture, that will cross it. After all, Western sacrifice has almost always known, and almost always been ready to say, that it sacrificed to nothing. That is why it has always tended to say that true sacrifice was no longer sacrifice. Yet henceforth it is incumbent upon us to say—after Bataille, with him and beyond him—that there is no "true" sacrifice, that veritable existence is unsacrificeable, and that finally the truth of existence is that it cannot be sacrificed.