continent.

Cumposition:
Theses on Philosophys Etymology
Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei

continent.2.1 (2012) 44-55

 hilosophers are sperm,

P
poetry erupts sperm and dribbles,
philosopher recodes term,
to terminate,
A. Staley Groves1
 here is, in the relation of human languages to that of things, something that can be approximately
T
described as overnamingthe deepest linguistic reason for all melancholy and (from the point of view
of the thing) for all deliberate muteness. Overnaming as the linguistic being of melancholy points to
another curious relation of language: the overprecision that obtains in the tragic relationship between
the languages of human speakers.
Walter Benjamin2
Prologue.
Any text with an inflection of the word thesis in its title risks closing the borders of what is posited in it.
However, perhaps it would be possible to think this act of defining in a way that is less, so to say, definitive.
I would like to recall the opening line of Aristotles De Interpretatione, a constellation of theses, if anything.
First it needs to be posited [thesthai] what a noun and what a verb [is].3 Upon closer inspection, the
definitions of the noun (onoma) and verb (rhma) do not at all appeal to any notion of strictly borderingoff, but are merely captured in a movement toward definition, establishing their own horizons.4 It is
therefore not a coincidence that Aristotle deploys the aorist medio-passive infinitive thesthai to describe
this process. It is an infinite, self-instigating movement, without proper horizon or telos.5 It is this sense of
thesis in relation to the basic components of language, that I will attemptperhaps in what may prove to
be a gesture of what Walter Benjamin called overnaming6to posit as cumposition, the composition of
philosophical discourse that is conscious of the abyss of language in which it moves.7
1 A. Staley Groves, Poetry Vocare (The Hague/Tirana: Uitgeverij, 2011), 86.
2 Walter Benjamin, On Language As Such and the Language of Man. trans. Edmund Jephcott, in Select Writings. vol. 1,
1913-1926, eds. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 73.
3 Arist. DI 16a1.
4 If only because already the translational issues with these two words are in themselves breaching the constraints of sound
definition.
5 Giorgio Agambens work has focused extensively on this mode, see for example Potentialities, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 234-5.
6 Walter Benjamin, On Language As Such, 73.
7T
 his is not to say that philosophy only resides in certain language games, as Wittgenstein would have it, but that negotiating
the limits of those gameswhich, etymologically speaking, already carries in it the com- of philosophys composition as the
morpheme ga-, cf. Gothic gaman, participation or communiondetermines to a large extent how much liberty philosophy
is willing to grant itself in placing certain truths inside or outside its domains.

ISSN: 21599920 | This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei (45)

1.
In her essay When Philosophy Meant the Love of Wisdom, Avital Ronell evokes the following question:
What if philosophys love for wisdom has gone bad? The perversity of philosophys love not only appears
in its recursiveness as the love of love for wisdom, first presented in Platos Symposium, but also in all its
brutality, especially when its set against literature and poetry.8 Philosophys love is a brutal one, perverse.
Indeed, Immanuel Kant famously described the scene of metaphysics as a battleground of endless
controversies,9 and destined for exercising its forces in mock combat, and upon which no combatant
has ever been able to gain even the least ground for himself by fighting.10 Because of the many modalities
of love from the onset of philosophy onwards, Ronell signals the difficulty of addressing in any universal
way the question of love in philosophy, unless she would consider it in its essentially sado-masochistic
dimension.11 As Heidegger already remarked parenthetically in his Introduction to Metaphysics, polemos
as war and confrontation is the same as the logos.12 Philosophy has always been a polemical discourse.
2.
At the same moment, however untimely this moment may be, love has been conspicuously absent from
Heideggers work. Nevertheless, Giorgio Agamben has been able to tease out Daseins love as a passion
of facticity.13 Agamben develops from out of Heideggers war-struck logos the following definition of love,
which will allows to proceed to a reading of the origin of philosophy itself as the love of wisdom, a relation
that in itself may hide a kind of original fetishism.14
 hat man introduces into the world, his proper, is not simply the light and opening of knowledge but
W
above all the opening to concealment and opacity. Altheia, truth, is the safeguard of lth, nontruth;
[] Love is the passion of facticity in which man bears this nonbelonging and darkness, appropriating
(adsuefacit [ereignet]) them while safeguarding them as such. Love is thus not, as the dialectic of desire
suggests, the affirmation of the self in the negation of the loved object; it is, instead, the passion and
exposition of facticity itself and of the irreducible impropriety of being. In love, the lover and the beloved
come to light in their concealment, in an eternal facticity beyond Being.15
Truth as altheia, unhiddenness or unconcealment, which has in recent times again gained a special
prominence in certain regions of philosophical discourse, is thus the ultimate expression of Daseins love,
even if, for the philosopher, the beloved is love itself.
3.
In Platos Symposium, Socrates famously introduces the philosopher as a figure in love with wisdom. But
also Love himself is a philosopher, a lover of wisdom; he is an interpreter (hermneuon),16 a hermeneutic,
a messenger between the gods and men. He organises all intercourse and dialectic interaction between
them.17 Platos definition starts with Socrates invoking Diotima of Mantineia, who had instructed him
8A
 vital Ronell, Fighting Theory, trans. Catherine Porter (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 1.
9 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans./eds Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1998), 99 (Aviii).
10 Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, trans./ed. Gary Hatfield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2004), 143 (Bxv). Cf. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 109 (Bxv).
11 Ronell, Fighting Theory, 2.
12 M
 artin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven: Yale University Press), 65.
13 Giorgio Agamben, The Passion of Facticity,in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, 202.
14 Ibid. 196.
15 Ibid. 203-4.
16 Plat. Sym. 202e.
17 Plat. Sym. 203a. Philosophy as the love of wisdom is therefore recursively defined. Here we could perhaps trace one of the
origins of philosophys auto-immunity that Ronell has commented upon on several occasions. She signals the so-called end
of philosophy as one of the tropes characterizing the developing auto-immunity in the body of philosophy, and while at the
same distancing herself from this trope she insists that we continue to interrogate the figures used to designate the end, and to
recognize the difference among such terms as closure, finality, terminus. (Ronell, Fighting Theory, 3)

Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei (46)

in eroticism.18 Diotima inseminated Socrates with the seeds of philosophy, taught him how to love. We
can imagine young Socrates paying his first visit to her, seeking affection and pleasure in her maternal
body. What then, we hear Socrates asking, may love be? And here we find Diotima answering his
call: the love of the good is always to its own [auti einai aei]. Socrates answers: that is the very truth
[althestata],19 or, as Heidegger would translate it, the most unhidden.20 So already in this primal scene
of philosophys love we find the intimate relation between love and unconcealment.
4.
If Love is a philosopher who practices the love of the good as the highest truth, an abyss opens: what is the
truth of philosophy itself? Necessarily, this must be a truth outside the logic of (un)concealment, outside the
logic of the Ereignis or the event, if it doesnt want to fall into an infinite regress. Some have argued that there
is no such thing as philosophical truth, yet this truth has appeared, albeit marginally, in another discussion
of love, as the etumos logos, true discourse.21 This was already pointed at by Michel Foucault,22 and later
commented upon by Christopher Fynsk: the exigencies to which Foucault answered in seeking his truth,
[etumos] [] are linked to an exigency met in any consequent meditation on the essence of language.23 Any
consequent meditation on the essence of language, perhaps a meditation as it takes place within philosophy
on its own language, will have to arrive at a certain truth, even when as unstable, incoherent, and assaulting
the borders of finitude as etymology may be. Etymology is the truth of philosophical discourse.
5.
Our meditation on the relations between philosophy, love and truth means in no way to move toward a
philosophy which would take Desire as its transcendental signified, distributing different desires for
truth through different discourse levels, nor discard it as an extra-philosophical affect. A position such as
would be assumed by any philosophy of desire is ferociously attacked by Jean-Franois Lyotard in his
book Libidinal Economy, but in doing so he hits upon afor him despicablecondition of the philosopher,
the one who is nothing but thought, the one with whom we tend to sympathise; the condition of the as
if. This is philosophys meta-ontological mask. Philosophys love is the love of the as if: [A]nd so, to be, I
have only to place myself as well in the circumference, turn with the intensities, act as if I loved, suffered,
laughed, ran, fucked, slept, shat, and pissed, I, thought.24 Even though Lyotard wishes that this supreme
effort of thought die,25 we, in our turn and not so afraid to die, may now also perhaps define etumos
as truth as if altheia; the former makes an appeal to the latters affect, but is not the real thingor
wherever the quotation marks need to take hold to stabilise our discourse.
6.
Even a philosophical discourse as self-asserting and sanitised from any affective overtones as Alain
Badious does not escape this condition. In his work, the philosopher is a figure of circulation, someone
who, at the end of the day, can only act as if. This typology of the philosopher is first hinted at in Being
and Event, when Badiou claims that, philosophy is not centred on ontologywhich exists as a separate
and exact disciplinerather it circulates between this ontology [], the modern theories of the subject
and its own history.26 Philosophy is thus in the first place separated from ontology and therefore merely
circulates along it. Beside ontology, which in Badious work appears as a fully atonic axiomatization of

18 P
 lat. Sym. 201d.
19 Ibid. 206a.
20 M
 artin Heidegger, The Essence of Truth, trans. Ted Sader (New York: Continuum, 2002), 48.
21 P
 lat. Phaed. 244a.
22 M
 ichel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, The History of Sexuality, vol. 2, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 235.
23 Christopher Fynsk, The Claim of Language: A Case for the Humanities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 65.
24 Jean-Franois Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant (New York: Continuum, 2004), 13.
25 Ibid. 13.
26 A
 lain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (New York: Continuum, 2006), 3.

Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei (47)

set theory,27 philosophy circulates through the theories of the subject, which, under the procedure of
poetry, are subtractive of ontology, thus allowing for the appearance of a truth as an event (Ereignis as the
unconcealment of concealment) and subjective fidelity, and the history of philosophy itself: its discourses
and the story of its limitless love of wisdom. For Badiou, the right of philosophy is the right to cite its
conditions, the right to cite their truths. The text of philosophy is the text of citation.28 The philosophical act
thus is an act of second thought.29
7.
If, as Plato suggested, the love for the good is the highest truth, the bursting forth of this truth as event
happens outside philosophy. Either as the ultimate idea that is sought or as uncounted inconsistency
exploding into maximum existence, registered on philosophys seismographs, this truth as event remains
tightly bound to a philosophical desire for truth. Mehdi Belhaj Kacem even claims that the event [] is the
ontological structure of Desire,30 and Desire wants the event.31 Superlatively (perhaps: most truthfully),
The event has the structure of rape.32 Although we should place a number of question marks in the
margins of Kacems philosophical project and his rapid conflation of multiple textual registers, he does
point out a certain sedation of philosophys love of wisdom in Badious work. However, that philosophy
would be a place to house multiple truths, circulating among them, again opens us to the perversity of
this love that Ronell pointed out. Philosophy cruises truths.
8.
How does philosophys second thought arrive, if ever? Philosophys lovely circulation through what
is already presented by mathematics, theories of the subject and its own history is first conditioned by
a sustained belief in the possibility of formalisation. But what if this formalisation itself is bound to fail?
What if we deny formalisation, or at least point to the discomfort we experience of such forcing to formal
appearance such as painstakingly described in Witold Gombrowicz literary oeuvre. Jacques Derrida
already pointed out in reference to Husserls final appeal to geometry, that the institution of geometry
could only be a philosophical act.33 Similarly, we could criticise that the act of formalisation on which
Badious citational appropriation of mathematics, and therefore the circulation of philosophy, rests: As
soon as we utilize the concept of formeven if to criticize an other concept of formwe inevitably have
recourse to the self-evidence of a kernel of meaning. And the medium of this self-evidence can be nothing than
the language of metaphysics.34 At the end of the same essay Derrida sketches out the consequences this has
for philosophy, which, however, strangely resonate with what Badiou proposes as philosophys circulation.
O
 ne might think [] that formalityor formalizationis limited by the sense of Being which, in fact,
throughout its entire history, has never been separated from its determination as presence, beneath
the excellent surveillance of the is: and that henceforth the thinking of form has the power to extend
itself the thinking of Being. But that the two limits thus denounced are the same may be what Husserls
enterprise illustrates[.]

Thus, one probably does not have to choose between two lines of thought. Rather, one has to
meditate upon the circularity which makes them pass into on another indefinitely. And also,
27 That is, the Zermelo-Fraenkel axiomatization, explicitly including the axiom of separation which does not allow for any
inconsistent multiplicity, i.e. the appearance of the event. Nevertheless, ever since Richard Montagues dissertation
Contributions to the Axiomatic Foundations of Set Theory (Berkeley: University of California, 1957), we know that set theory can
never be finitely axiomatized.
28 Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei and John Van Houdt, Circulating Philosophy: A Note on Two Apparent Misquotations in Alain
Badious Logics of Worlds, Theory and Event 14.2 (2011).
29 Alain Badiou, Conditions, trans. Steven Corcoran (New York: Continuum, 2008), 290, fn. 4.
30 Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, vnement et rptition (Auch: Tristram, 2004), 208.
31 Ibid. 209.
32 M
 ehdi Belhaj Kacem, Laffect (Auch: Tristram, 2004), 93.
33 J
 acques Derrida, Edmund Husserls Origin of Symmetry: An Introduction, trans. John P. Leavey, Jr. (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1989), 127.
34 Jacques Derrida, Form and Meaning: A Note on the Phenomenology of Language, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 157.

Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei (48)

by rigorously repeating this circle in its proper historical possibility, perhaps to let some elliptical
displacement be produced in the difference of repetition: a deficient displacement, doubtless, but
deficient in a way that is not yetor no longerabsence, negativity , non-Being, lack, silence.35
In many ways this resounds with what I have stated above. Although Badiou radically separates the
thinking of form and the thinking of Being to respectively the meta-ontological/philosophical domain
and the ontological/mathematical domain, the remainder within philosophy itself appears as this circle
in its proper historical possibility. And indeed we may have traced a deficient displacement which is
not yet or no longer an absence as would be the truth subtractive to ontology: the as iftruth36 of the
etumos as truth in philosophy itself, the truth of philosophy as love of wisdom.
9.
We may want to ask whether the two lines of thought theorised by Derrida and again separated by Badiou
both exhibit this circularity. If that would be the case, this would allow us to consider their intertwinement
more in depth. What Derrida calls the thinking of Being and Badiou refers to as ontology is thoroughly
unbound by what is commonly referred to in an economic discourse as capitalism. The sudden insertion
of a materialist trope may seem infelicitous here, however, capitalism has, as Badiou put it succinctly, also
a properly ontological virtue.37 The logic of capitalism, even though it operates in the most complete
barbarity,38 has an ontological virtue of its own, namely the destruction of the One as viable metaphysical
point of departure. The barbarity of capitalisms destructive character operates by brute force, but also
sometimes by, as Walter Benjamin put it, the most refined39 one. In any case, it unbinds all. As Lyotard
stated in one of his seemingly unending sentences:
Capital is not the denaturation of relations between man and man, nor between man and woman, is
the wavering of the (imaginary?) primacy of genitality, of reproduction and sexual difference, it is the
displacement of what was in place, it is the unbinding of the most inane pulsions, since money is the
sole justification or bond, and money being able to justify anything, it deresponsibilizes and raves
absolutely, it is the sophistics of the passions and at the same time, their energetic prosthetics; [] it
has certain anti-unitary and anti-totalizing traits [...]40
Thus capital and capitalism are figures of unbinding and circulation. We find ourselves here in the
metaphorical domain of philosophy that both in Lyotard and Badiou has its recourse to an economic
discourse. Derrida has addressed this tendency at length in his essay White Mythology,41 and in a
different register I will attempt to address it below, acknowledging that indeed philosophical language may
be a fund of forced metaphors.42
10.
How is it that truth emerges from the ontological wasteland of capitalism, to be captured by philosophys
love of wisdom? What is this love responding to and how is it that philosophy refuses to turn the other

35 Derrida, Ibid. 172-3.

36 Or, if you like, the false truth. See for an indictment of etymology along these lines Jean Paulhan, La preuve par ltymologie
(Paris: Minuit, 1953).
37 Alain Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, trans. Norman Madarasz (Albany: SUNY Press, 1999), 57.
38 Ibid. 57.
39 Walter Benjamin, The Destructive Character, Selected Writings, Vol. II.2, 1931-1934, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1999), 541-2.
40 L
 yotard, Libidinal Economy, 135.
41  In signifying the metaphorical process, the paradigms of coin, of metal, silver and gold, have imposed themselves with
remarkable insistence. Before metaphorand effect of languagecould find its metaphor in an economic effect, a more general
analogy had to organize the exchanges between the two regions. Jacques Derrida, White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of
Philosophy, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 1982, 216.
42 Ibid. 257.

Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei (49)

cheek to reality? Perhaps a beginning of an answer to this question may lie in the way in which Marx
parenthetically defined capitalism: the universal relation of utility and use as universal prostitution.43
which includes everyone:
Prostitution is only a particular expression of the general prostitution of the worker, and because
prostitution is a relationship which includes both the person prostituted and the person prostituting
whose baseness is even greaterthus the capitalist, too, etc. is included within this category.44
It may prove fruitful to read general prostitution here in the logic of unbinding and circulation, following
Benjamin, who speaks of an erotology of the damned.45 Benjamins work on the German translation of
Charles Baudelaire must definitely have influenced his work on the destructive character of capitalism.
The tropes of prostitution and destruction already appear in his note on the poem Destruction from
Les fleurs du mal. The bloody apparatus of destruction, Benjamin asks himself, where is this phrase
in Baudelaire?46 In Baudelaires poem, the demon of destruction takes on the most seductive form of
women, and seduces the visitor to the planes of Boredom, where he is introduced to the filthy clothes
and open wounds and the bloody apparatus of Destruction. Is it from these planes of Boredom,
profound and barren47 that philosophy gleans its truths.
11.
If philosophy thinks ontology as prostitutional, whom does it cite? Although to some authors, it would
suffice to use the indicative quality of language as such to open such an ontology,48 we should perhaps
focus here on the atonic desert where the prostitutional machinery is blithely at work as captured in the
work of Pierre Guyotat. He opens up to such an interpretation when he states that his novel Tomb for
Fifty Thousand Soldiers is, in spite of everything, metaphysical; a metaphysics of history, certainly not
religious; it is also a somewhat ontological.49 Several philosophers that I have addressed above refer
to his work; for example Badiou, who refers to the neo-classicism of Guyotat as a resurrection of the
cosmological aim of grand literature hearkening back to Lucretius.50 Guyotats prostitutional universe,51
which reduces all vital norms to the immediate commercial potentials of the body.52 On the other side of
the philosophical spectrum, Lyotard digs deeper, describing the actual jouissance of the worker submitted
to the capitalist machinery, the machine of the machine, fucker fucked by it.53 And he continues:
And lets finally acknowledge this jouissance, which is similar [] in every way to that of prostitution,
the jouissance of anonimity, the jouissance of the repetition of the same in work, []. Jouissance is

43 The exchangeability of all products, activities and relations with a third, objective entity which can be re-exchanged for
everything without distinctionthat is, the development of exchange values (and of money relations) is identical with universal
venality, corruption. Universal prostitution appears as a necessary phase in the development of the social character of personal
talents, capacities, abilities, activities. More politely expressed: the universal relation of utility and use. Karl Marx, Grundrisse:
Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus, New York: Random House, 1973, 163.
44 Karl Marx, Private Property and Communism, Karl Marx Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1977), 90.
45 W
 alter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999),
347.
46 Ibid. 256.
47 Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal, (Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 1999), 161.
48 For example, Jean Pierre Brisset, Le grammaire logique, suivi de La science de Dieu. Paris: Tchou, 1970, pp. 155ff. But we
could equally point to the work of Jacques Lacan or refer to the intimacies between sexual and ontological differentiation as
investigated by Jacques Derrida.
49 Pierre Guyotat, Lautre scne, Vivre (Paris: Denol, 2003), 45.
50 Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds: Being and Event 2, trans. Alberto Toscano (New York: Continuum), 76.
51 Alain Badiou Guyotat, prince de la prose, unpublished lecture (Paris: 21 October, 2005), n.p.
52 Ibid.
53 Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, 109.

Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei (50)

unbearable.54 This is what Guyotat so admirably expresses in his work, and is also professed by
himself. The same logic as Lyotards clearly appears upon reading a few sentences from his seminal essay
Langage du corps (Language of the body).
 ut on reflection, what spectacle is more brutally exciting than that of a child wanking with his left hand,
B
in this system, and writing with his right. In the resultant disarray. There must be seen one of the terms
of this contradictory pulsional will, being at the same time seen and voyeur (seeing), pimp and whore,
buyer and bought, fucker and fucked.55
Lyotard described thiswithin a philosophical discourse that isas a superbly capitalist dispositif,56 a
mode of writing-masturbating in which production and consumption coincide, truly a bloody apparatus
of destruction. This logic equally distorts the clear distance that is regularly maintained by writers
and nearly always by philosopherstoward their own work. To me, the most concise formulation of
this contracted distance can be located in the neologism that Guyotat coins in his novel Prostitution:
nhommer, ringing with both homme (man) and nommer (to name). For example in the otherwise
untranslatable sentence: ma e srencl chuya se lml le nhomme, lui prend la fess o lui frott la
mostach.57 Nhommer is therefore an en-hommer, an insemination of a man, life-giving and naming, as
well as an nhommer, its own negation and undoing. This is echoed by Benjamin when he says that in the
Bible, the Let there be and in the words He named a beginning and end of the act, the deep and clear
relation of the creative act to language appears each time.58 Nhommer is a creative act philosophy cannot
accomplish but only approach. The writer always n/mam/nes, the philosopher may only cite, at the risk of
introducing prostitutional logic, the shortcuts between naming and creating, creating and exploiting the
fabric of philosophy.
12.
Prostitutional ontology, materially captured by the bloody, short-circuiting apparatuses of capitalism, can
only be cited by philosophy, acted out, at the risk of unbinding the whole of philosophical discourse itself.
The events and miracles on the atonic planes of boredom may not affect philosophy itself. This could be
one of the reasons that sex and sexual difference have largely remained outside of the realm philosophy.
Derrida has already done a considerable amount of work on this curious lack, especially in two essays
entitled Geschlecht on Heideggers work and Daseins sexuality. In Geschlecht 1: Sexual Difference,
Ontological Difference, Derrida investigates the role of sexuality in Heideggers definition of Dasein, and
his general silence on the topics of sex and gender. It is as if [] sexual difference did not rise to the
height [hauteur] of ontological difference. [] But insofar as it is open to the question of Being, insofar as
it has a relation to Being, in that very reference, Dasein would not be sexiferous [sexifre].59 The material
that I adduced above might give us a frame in which to interpret this repression of Daseins sexuality
in Heidegger. In philosophy, sexual difference is cited as ontological difference. Prostitution is cited as
the unbinding of Being. However, the unbinding or separating force, hailed as the virtue of capitalism
and eagerly imported into philosophical discourse, perhaps even brought to the height of ontological
difference, is also always already at work in philosophy itself, be it as a separation between ontological
and theological domains in Aristotle or the separation between a truth procedure and the citational
dispositif of philosophy in Badiou.

54 Ibid. 110-1. Lyotard formulates a position here parallel to Lacans analysis, which argues that the slave can accept to work for
the master and give up jouissance in the meantime. (Jacques Lacan, crits, trans. Bruce Fink, New York: W.W. Norton, 2006,
259) This renunciation of jouissance founds the obsessive subject that I will discuss below, in an extension of the prostitutional
logic developed by Lyotard.
55 P
 ierre Guyotat, Langage du corps, Vivre (Paris: Denol, 2003), 24. Translation quoted from Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, 139.
56 L
 yotard, Libidinal Economy, 139.
57 P
 ierre Guyotat, Prostitution (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 90-1. In relation to his work we would also do well to recall the Lacanian
dictum that Punctuation, once inserted, establishes the meaning. (Lacan, crits, 258)
58 B
 enjamin, On Language As Such, 68.
59 Jacques Derrida, Geschlecht 1: Sexual Difference, Ontological Difference, trans. Ruben Bevezdivin and Elizabeth Rottenberg,
in Psyche, vol. 2, eds Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 8.

Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei (51)

The truth, as Anne Dufourmentelle put it in her book on sex and philosophy, extracted from the torture
chamber60 of philosophy is that this separation is always already sexualized.
If etymology is not the key to Bluebeards seventh door, it at least opens up a little skylight in the
chamber of horrors. In Latin, sexus means separation. The Church Fathers to whom we owe the
development of the Latin language thus anticipated by several centuries Lacans too famous remark:
There is no sexual relation.61
The truth of Lacans statement that there is no sexual relation, in the precise sense that the term sex
derives from separation and vice versa is only etymologically validated within philosophy. The power of
its truth only appears etymologically as philosophical truth.
13.
Literature does not need to prove this point. It immediately participates in the circulatory logic of sexuation,
without the need to distance itself from it through citational checkpoints and border patrols. It allows
language to derange freely, as literature often reminds us of. Dufourmentelle clarifies to us once again,
illustrating Guyotats point that I cited above.
 he act of writing is performative: writing and thinking are acts. What philosophy cannot tolerate is
T
the nonresponse to which the enigma of sex refers it. No philosopher can bear up the boudoir. What
philosophy does not succeed in conceptualizing is the traversal of a disaster. [] It may be that
traversing the impossibility of the relation to sex is what founds philosophy. The black sun of thought
about sex. Sex is what leads to traversal, to exile; it orients and disorients. From this exile, literature is
born. Literature is the other, hidden guest at this blind date in the boudoir.62
In her introduction to Dufourmentelles book, Ronell even goes as far as suggesting that certain regions
of philosophy may be coinciding with the realm of obliterature, a space of thoughts disavowal of sex.63
Indeed, sex induces in philosophy an anti-Platonic black sun of thought, that is, following Julia Kristeva,
melancholy, when the words dont come: Recall the speech of the depressed: repetitive and monotonous.
Within the impossibility to link up, the phrase interrupts itself, depletes, halts.64 To refer ourselves to
Aristotles first thoughts on properly philosophical language with which we opened this text, for Aristotle
the mind suddenly halts the moment it hears a noun or verb that is not well inflected, not properly
disseminated into language.65 Already the minimum of grammatical failure is enough for the philosopher to
fall into a stupor. The unworking of grammar is the melancholic condition of philosophy.
14.
We need to find the language in which philosophy writes, a writing that organises the elliptical
displacement of philosophy blindly circulating through its conditions, perhaps even a language of
decentering, or a dispositif of acephalic writing.66 But as Ronell has brilliantly argued in her reading of
Freuds case of the Rat Man, The Sujet suppositaire, the circulation of philosophy should always be read
through a lexicon of intervention and insemination which she calls an Oedipedagogy,67 a mode of
60 Anne Dufourmentelle, Blind Date: Sex and Philosophy, trans. Catherine Porter (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 56.
61 Ibid. 57.
62 Ibid.,101.
63 A
 vital Ronell, The Stealth Pulse of Philosophy, introduction to Anne Dufourmentelle, Blind Date: Sex and Philosophy,
trans. Catherine Porter (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007), xv.
64 J
 ulia Kristeva, Le soleil noir: Dpression et mancholie (Paris, Gallimard, 1987), 45.
65 Arist. DI 16b20.
66 A
 lain Badiou, Logics of Worlds: Being and Event 2, trans. Alberto Toscano (New York: Continuum), 545.
67 Avital Ronell, The Sujet Suppositaire: Freud, And/Or, the Obsessional Neurotic Style (Maybe), Finitudes Score: Essays for
the End of the Millennium (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 108. Cf. also: As mere reversal, this maintains the
intervention of which Lacan speaks in its classic column, still following the marching orders and route traced out by the
commanding symbolicity of male homosexuality whose structures, in place since the time of Plato, continue to assure the
paradigm of the transmission of knowledge. (Ibid., p. 106)

Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei (52)

obsessional neurotic thinking, that is, a mode of cir-cul-ation: around the arse, around the riddles of the
sphincter.68 As a mode of what Ronell calls with Freud the obsessional neurotic style, a style of punning,
the cir-cul-ation of philosophy rests on paronomasia, that is, the domain of paronomy and etymology. This
is however not without scandal.
In some circles of truths closure, pun has remained the name of an indictment, an accusatory
identification of that which takes too much pleasure, disarranging academic languages, promoting a
rhetoric of looseness within the parameters of a recreational linguistics, valuelessly succumbing to
the most indefensible copulations of meaning, related [] to the temporal succession of shame over
pleasure, incriminating the grammar of some strict order of things, and so forth.69
That punning and its avatars of paronomasia and etymology are already present in one of the most
philosophical grammars of a strict order of things provides us with a clue that in composition of
philosophical language itself, something may be indefensibly copulating.
15.
In the opening paragraph of Aristotles Categories, otherwise a work of remarkable philosophical rigour
and properly purged language, we may track down the elliptical displacement or acephalic writing of
philosophy. This is not to be found in the first two semantic relations described by Aristotlehomonymy
and synonymy, or the grand metaphysical concepts equivocity and univocitybut in the third one, largely
neglected in the corpus of occidental philosophical discourse, or so it seems. This relation, or perhaps
more felicitous, movement in language, is called paronymy, and is defined as follows: Paronymous are
called those which, differing from something through case, have an appellation according to the name [of
those], like grammarian [grammatikos] from grammar [grammatiks] and courageous-man [andreios]
from courageous [andreias].70 Paronymy, which is regulated through case (ptsis), the way in which
words fall into a sentence, is addressed to the form of the word, the manner of its signification, and not its
meaning.71 Case is also the driving force behind ontological differentiation, regulating the formal aspects
of Being falling into beings. What is regulated by case in philosophy is regulated by the supposedly
unrestrained punning and paronomasia in the process of sexual differentiation. Paronymy and case
offer philosophy a window to peek into modes of discourse it does not like to associate itself with. But
at the same time, philosophy is already contaminated by paronymy, which introduces the problematic of
formalisation itself, the form of the name and of language at the heart of many metaphysical issues. The
glorious theories of accident and substance, subject and object, Being and beings, and so on, cannot be
inserted in the philosophical discourse without the lubricant of paronymy.
16.
Paronymy, moving from form to form, is not without its methodology. Aristotles logic of the paradigm
closely mimics the movement of case, neither from particular to universal, nor from universal to particular,
but from particular to particular.72 We are confronted here with what Agamben calls a paradoxical type of
movement,73 a movement that moves along itself and away from the doxa, the rule, and which should only
be deployed when other means of deductive of syllogistic reasoning are no longer available. The paradigm
signifies an insufficiency of properly philosophical thought. It should therefore not surprise us that the
paradigm finds its modern inflection in what Lacan calls the signifying chain, where no signification can
68 The anus can be said to mark a locus of privileged transaction between at least two gendered entities. It organizes a space
from which rental agreements are negotiated, leases are taken out by one gender to permit the other gender provisionally
depending on the terms of the agreementto occupy its space. The other of genital sexuality, determinable neither as masculine
nor strictly speaking as feminine, anality nonetheless constitutes a sexuality, a shared space that is often vaginized. (Ronell,
The Sujet Suppositaire, 108) One could, and perhaps ought, to read Guyotats Prostitution, as exactly a constant negotiation of
this sort, where language itself succumbs to this logic of indefensible copulations. (Ibid., 110)
69 R
 onell, The Sujet Suppositaire, 110.
70 Arist. Cat. 1a12-15.
71 Cf. Pierre Aubenque, Le problme de ltre chez Aristote (Paris: PUF, 1962), 184, fn. 3.
72 See Rhet. 1357b26-30 and APr 69a13-16.
73 Giorgio Agamben, The Signature of All Things: On Method, trans. Luca DIsanto with Kevin Attell (New York: Zone Books, 2009), 19.

Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei (53)

be sustained except by reference to another signification.74 Metaphor is here the name for the effect of
the substitution of one signifier for another in the chain, nothing natural predestining the signifier for this
function of phoros apart from the fact that two signifiers are involved, which can, as such, be reduced
to a phonemic opposition,75 whereas at same time it is the sole serious reality for man.76 It is here that
Lacan explicitly chooses the reality of the etumos, the material cause of psychoanalysis, over the revelation
altheia. We might therefore interpret psychoanalysis as the only inflection of philosophy that insists on
etumos as the sole source of truth.
17.
If it the case, again according to our teacher Aristotle, that all meaningful philosophical discourse is
essentially composed in an organised manner, we may insert in the composition of that word itself, in its
philosophical circulation, a foreign element. Perhaps this also means that I insert myself in a lineage of
paranoia and obsessional neurosis, but then again, as Guy Hocquenghem remarked, homosexuality itself
is commonly associated with paranoid persecution mania,77 the apparition of the word curiously drives
a cascade of lapses, or at least of the interpretation of common words as lapses. There is no innocent
or objective position toward homosexuality, there are no situations of desire in which homosexuality
doesnt play a role.78 So why would I pretend otherwise? As Ronell adds, and I should have warned
you before, neologisms are much more common in persecution mania patients than in others.79 In
recognition of what composes philosophy always remains in circulation, no matter whether approached
from an ontological or linguistic perspective, no matter how meta the separation machinery drives
us, it is circulation itself that justifies the term, if it is one, cumposition. In naming the decentering force of
philosophical discourse thus, I not only intend to stress the with (cum) of the philosophical sum-plok or
com-positio, that is present in it already since Plato,80 but also the position of philosophy itself, whenever it
will have arrived or cum, shooting for the stars of wisdom on the metaphysical firmament.

74 L acan, crits, 415. A similar idea, originating from a different perspective, but with a similar foundation in Aristotle, can be
found in the work of Paul de Man: The convergence of sound and meaning [] is a rhetorical rather than aesthetic function of
language, an identifiable trope (paronomasis) that operates on the level of the signifier. (Paul de Man, Resistance to Theory,
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1986, 10)
75 L acan, crits, 756.
76 Ibid., 758.
77  Psychiatry supposes in general an intimate relation between homosexuality and paranoia, but gives it often the following form:
the homosexual frequently suffers from persecution paranoia. (Guy Hocquenghem, Le dsir homosexuel, Paris: Fayard, 2000,
32)
78 Ibid., 59.
79 R
 onell, The Sujet Suppositaire, 117.
80 S
 ee Plat. Soph. 262c.

Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei (54)

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