1

A Prelude to a Kiss: Outlining the Terms for a Metaphysics of

Difference and Relation

By: Collins I. Aki

MTS Thesis
2016
Vanderbilt University
Divinity
First Reader: Dr. Paul De Hart
Second Reader: Dr. Laurel Schneider

Acknowledgments
I would first like to acknowledge my dear brother and mentor, Father
Matt Boulter, assistant rector of St. Stephens in Tyler, Texas, and
doctoral candidate in philosophy at University of Dallas under the
supervision of Dr. Phillip Rosemann. Ten years ago he gave me a copy
of Pierre Hadots Philosophy as a Way of Life and told me to read it,
cover to cover, even if I didnt understand what I was reading. He
promised me, so long as I read closely what I didnt understand, in
time I would come to understand. It is because of him I finally stopped
reading on my own and decided to pursue master studies in theology
and philosophy at Vanderbilt.
I would also like to acknowledge my fellow classmates at
Vanderbilt, Desmond Coleman and Chance Woods, whose constant
conversations have challenged the arguments I have attempt to
propose in this thesis. If not for the relationships they reciprocated
with me, my arguments would hardly be coherent, and certainly far
from as developed as I now hope they will show themselves in this
thesis.
I would like to acknowledge the various professors who have
allowed me to pursue the areas of interest that I came to Vanderbilt to
explore. Many have challenged my arguments while I was here, some

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have dismissed them, but all have enriched my experience as a
student and as a thinker. But I should especially acknowledge Dr.
Laurel Schneider and Dr. Paul Dehart. Not only do I appreciate their
willingness to supervise this thesis, but I appreciate their trust in my
efforts and their guidance in my research. This thesis is a combination
of what I have learned in their seminars and what I have read in their
books. While I am certain my argument will not survive unscathed
under their review, I am grateful to them that my argument was
allowed to present itself in earnest. Under their guidance it can only
get better.

Table of Contents
Introduction: Difference and Relation: A Problem of Proportion or
the Proportion of Problems?

A World of Difference Told Two Ways: The Analogical World

View and the Analytical World View

Part I: Analytical Difference: Evaluating Five Proposals of Being

and Presence that are not Analogical: Univocity, Equivocity, Univocal
Equivocity, Dialectic, and Metaxalogical
The Proposition of Being as Univocal: Presence as Access
The Proposition of Being as Equivocal: Presence as Absence
The Proposition of Being as Univocally Equivocal: Presence as
Success

Multiplicity in Deleuze

The Proposition of Being as Dialectical: Presence as Progress

Desmonds Hegel: Wholeness as Latent Univocity

Relation in the Dialectic

The Proposition of Being in the Middle: Process as Excess

Relation in the Middle

Part II: Analogical Difference: Metaphysics as Relation of

Difference
The Proposition of Being as Analogical: Presence as Resonance

Analogy as a Metaphysics Beyond Oneness

Analogy of Being as the Unity of Contradictions

Part III: The Upshot of an Analogical Metaphysics: Difference,

Desire, and Dance
The Desire for Relations

Desire as Knowledge, Knowledge as Relation

The Principle of Knowledge in The Intention of Universality:

Knowledge as the Relation of Difference in Thomas Aquinas

Knowledge as Movement: In Thomas Aquinas
Difference Known Organically and Specifically
Difference as Inspiration: The Music of Being
Being in Love and Love in Being
The Romance of Being: The Call and Response of Beauty and
Love

Conclusion: From Difference and Relation, to Inspiration and Desire,

to Beauty and Love
Infinite Dance: The Romance of Being in Love Without Security

Introduction
Difference and Relation: A Problem of Proportion or the
Proportion of Problems?
Difference, as the matter of the act of existence, can only makes sense
relatively speaking. This is because, as this thesis will propose,
difference only makes sense relatively-being, that is to say, difference
is the relative-act of being. But the richness of difference as the
matterand not merely the formof being prevents an immediate

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reference, which, if it were immediate, would preclude any act of
referral at all.1 Therefore, as pre-ferring its relation through
mediationfrom the middledifference initially appears as a problem
of existence, but, as it shall be demonstrated, the appearance of
difference as a problem of existence is only the unmediated instance
of the act of difference as a proportion of existence. What appears
immediately as a problem2 of existence barely-secured, that is,
difference immediately thrown before us, actualizes itself through
acts of relation (i.e., mediation) as a proportion3of existence alreadyshared. This is to say, that difference is always already existing in a
kind of4 relation to us. However, this is not the only way philosophers
1 We will demonstrate that referral or reference, as a kind of return
of signification doesnt simply mean a singular going-back or regress,
but rather, as the prefix re ultimately implies, referral means a
mutuality within an act or of an act. However, the etymology behind
the words reference and difference appears to present a kind of
contradiction of being as a relative-differential act, which, shall be
demonstrated in this thesis, is actuallythat is, in its actthe very
possibility of non-contradiction. While the etymology behind reference
and difference means, respectively, to carry back (from the Old
French referer or Latin referre carry back, from re- back + ferre
bring) and to carry away [or forward] (from Old French deferer, from
Latin deferre carry away, refer (a matter), from de- away from +
ferre bring, carry) the mutuality of carrying and bringing shared
between the two different modes of being (back and forth), doesnt
necessarily imply a contradiction of modes, but rather, a reciprocity
(from Latin reciprocus based on re- back + pro- forward) between
modes: a doubleness of being. (All definitions are from the New Oxford
American Dictionary, unless stated otherwise.)
2 The word problem from the Greek, proballein put forth, from pro
before + ballein to throw.
3 The word proportion from the Latin proportio(n-), from pro portione
with respect to (its or a person's) share.
4 Kind of is italicized to connote the idea of to some extent. A kind
of relation confirms two chief points: 1) The certainty of a relation, and

7
have defined difference. Indeed, difference has increasingly been
defined in the reverse, and the upshot of this reversal has increasingly
divided the potential for various relations.
This thesis will give an account of two prominent modes of
approaching a philosophy of difference, and from the account given, it
will be demonstrated how each approach provides significantly
different terms for difference and relation. These two approaches can
be contrasted as either defining difference as a problem of proportion
for reconciling difference, or defining difference as the proportion of
problems for politicizing difference. The former, we shall call the
analogical model, the latter, the analytical model.

A World of Difference Told Two Ways: The Analytical World View

or the Analogical World View?
This thesis defines as analytical, the kind of philosophy of difference
that seeks to define difference without a relation, that is, to define
difference without a reference or antecedent. The word analysis
comes from the Greek analusis and from analuein, which means to
unloose (from ana- up + luein loosen.). And so the analytical model
of difference, if it is to define difference, is to try to define difference
on its own terms: a pure difference, an immediate difference. In most
cases, such philosophies define themselves as post-structural, or anti-

2) the possibility of specificity for the relation.

8
representational, or a-theological, which all amount to a position in
one way or another as non-metaphysical. The idea is to attempt to
simply analyze being as it appears, and bracket or simply reject any
notion of reference or relation beyond or before the object of analysis,
since that could distort or cause to forget being as it appears. But
this analytical model for difference has a social upshot to which we
must also come to terms. Defining difference on its own terms, that is,
difference loosened or liberated from an antecedent or a prior
relation, proceeds under the auspice of emancipating difference from
a generalizing identity, from an identity that is prior or originary,
which would subject difference to a secondary status or a
representational status of a prior identity. The social translation of
this philosophy of difference that seeks to liberate difference from a
prior relation takes the form of resistance. In this sense, difference is
the resistance from identity, or the disruption of the totality of
Oneness, also called the unity of Being. This negation of the unity of
being or a resistance from a general identity (an identity that would
generalize difference) is socially operationalized as politics, or the
political. It is from this we see that the analytic of being is socially
actualized as the politicizing of being: to be is to be political.
To be, as being-politcal, is to translate, on social terms, the
negative character of being that is defined as a problem into an
affirmative character of negation that is defined as politics: a positing

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of negation, which imagines itself as the irreducible negativity of
difference that makes it the political retention of identity (as politics).
And while this resistance model of being in its social manner has
defined itself as difference, or multiplicity, or bare existence, in
definition and act, it will be proven that the very contrary is the case.
This thesis will propose the terms for an alternative view or
philosophy of difference, namely, the analogical model of difference.
In contrast to the analytical model of difference, which, as we saw
even in the etymology seeks to unloosen the object of analysis from a
relation or an antecedent, the analogical model reveals in its
etymology, the very mode of proportion. A short word study of analogy
shows its Middle English sense of appropriateness, correspondence,
which comes from the French analogie, the Latin analogia,
proportion, which comes from the Greek analogos proportionate.
The ultimate factor, as we shall see, which distinguishes the
analogical model of being as a proportion of a kind of relation of
existence (a share), from the analytical model of being as a problem of
a kind of negation of existence (an unloosening),5 is the notion of
transcendence that makes appropriate that science of metaphysics
and the social imaginary of religion (or theology). As Graham Ward

5 Let the reader note the genitive for of existence is in the objective
sense. It is not that difference is to negate existence, but that
difference is the property of existence as a manner of negation (from
the prior unity or identity of existence). Thus existence is the existence
of negation.

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writes in the opening of his book, Cities of God: An analogical worldview is, necessarily, a theological world-view. For the analogical
cannot pertain to value and meanings which are only immanent. The
analogical, to be ana-logical, requires a transcendent horizon
analogy is an index of participation.6
This thesis will provide the terms for an analogical model for a
philosophy of difference that one can call theological, and it will even
draw language and orientation for these terms from theological
language. However, these terms will not reduce the analogical
worldview to theology (onto-theology) but rather reduce the
theological world view to analogy (metaphysics).7 As the ana- of
analogy is defined as up, back, and again from the Greek ana which
means up, the science of an appropriate metaphysics does not
artificially divide being (ontology) from believing (ideology), nor does
it make an ideology of ontology (e.g., essentialist metaphysics or
existentialism). Therefore, to propose an appropriate metaphysics,8
6 Graham Ward, Cities of God (London: Routledge, 2000), p.ix.
7 Because of space constraints, I have opted to not attach, as an
epilogue to this thesis, my essay, The Church as Romancing the
World. In the essay I argue for the heterodox move of reducing
theology to analogical metaphysics which defines the Churchs relation
to the World as Pseudo-partitive. Salvation doesnt offer another
ontology, but as an act of reconciliation to Being, it is a mannermore
appropriate mannerwithin Being. This is what it means to be born
(again) of the spirit: to be in-spired towards a more appropriate relation
in Being.
8 Here the adjective appropriate bears great importance. Appropriate
metaphysics is a metaphysics that is suitable or proper to the
circumstance. But one may quickly think derisively of circumstantial
as purely relative. However, this would be to fail to think of it as merely

11
which is an analogical model of philosophy, would be to, in the words
of Charles A. Hart:
[Retain] the unity of metaphysicsby refusing to make the
artificial division of the subject into so-called general
metaphysics of finite being (sometimes called ontology) and the
special metaphysics of Infinite Being (natural theology or
theodicy)In this way we aid the mind in properly
understanding the subject matter of metaphysics. That subject,
the act of to be, is indivisible.9
By maintaining a unity between the act of being with the potentiality
of the Infinite Act of Being (i.e., that infinite act from where the
possibility to be Is-infinitely), the metaphysics of an analogical model
of being, otherwise known as the analogy of being, seeks not to define
difference on its own terms, nor does it imagine a pure or immediate
difference as the object of its judgement, but on the contrary, the
analogy of being defines difference as an act of differentiation that
was potential from a prior infinite act of even greater difference

relative. To quote Charles A. Hart on the finesse of a Thomistic

existentialism that doesnt follow the strained project of Sartres Being
and Nothingness: being is faithfully reflected in the analogical
predication of the transcendental notion of being in the mind. This
reflection thus constitutes further cogent evidence of the power of the
human mind correctly and adequately to represent reality in its most
profound aspect, in as much as reality itself is considered the primary
cause of the manner in which the intellect thinks.The essential
soundness of [] Thomistic existentialism in reporting being simply as
beingthat is, essences as existing, and thus abstracting from their
changing temporal charactermakes this report always contemporary
in every age, always timely because timeless. Charles A. Hart,
Thomistic Metaphysics; an Inquiry into the Act of Existing (Englewood
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1959), p.13.
9 Charles A. Hart, Thomistic Metaphysics; an Inquiry into the Act of
Existing (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1959), p.ix.

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(indeed, the greatest difference possible, as we will demonstrate).
Therefore, the key ontological move of the analogical model of
differentiation as a metaphysics of difference is that it is both a
difference and a relation of difference in act, and as such, the act is
not pre-determined or produced as Heidegger will critique it, but
determined relationally as Aquinas and Erich Przywara will all define
an analogy of being. This radical-relational10essence of the analogy of
being is a contrast from the analytical model of a negation
(unloosening) of the unity of being and yet it still evades conscripting
being to a secondary status of re-presentation of the One (only) Being.
But in its terms it portrays the relationship of act and potential as the
radical multiplication of a radicalized relation (or communication).
Therefore, since the analogical model of difference conceives of being
as relative and participatory, it does not operationalize this relativity
on political terms, but on conciliatory terms. This means that to-be is
to be relative and conciliatory, and instead of politicizing being, this
thesis will offer terms for reconciling being, or, as it will be fully
developed in the end, terms for romanticizing being.
What will follow from here will be three sections in which a review of
six propositions of being and presence will be evaluated, and their
respective terms for difference and relation will be compared and
10 Radical is a significant adjective for relation that will be
demonstrated as what distinguishes a metaphysics of a participatory
presence (analogy of being) from a meta-morphisms of a presence as
process (process pan-logism).

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contrasted. The first section will be composed of a presentation of
first five out of the six propositions of being, which are not specifically
analogical. In the section section, the sixth proposal for being and
relation from a fully analogical model will be presented. In the third
and final section, the social upshot of analogical metaphysics will be
proposed.
In the conclusion, the case will be made from both an
analogical metaphysics and an analogical social ethics that reciprocity
between difference and relation is the resounding reality of existence.
And that, while politics may attempt to respond globally and
decisively to the challenges of difference, it is only a practice of
conciliation on a local and gratuitous basis that actually embraces the
relations of difference as acts. Against an abstract oneness of
difference or totality, an analogical metaphysics of the resonance
shared between the acts of relations of differences affords the grace
and articulation needed for an open communitarianism that outwits
pure capitalism and war.

Part I
Evaluating Five Proposals of Being and Presence that are not
Analogical: Univocity, Equivocity, Univocal Equivocity, Dialectic,
and Metaxalogical

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In Christopher Ben Simpsons Religion, Metaphysics, and the
Postmodern, an evaluation between two approaches to religion and
ethics is made between the work of two of the more prominent
contemporary philosophers of religion, William Desmond and John D.
Caputo. Simpson reviews the work of Desmonds renewal in classical
metaphysics and post-Hegelian dialectics reworked for postmodern
sensibilities and the work of John Caputo, who proposes a religious reworking of Derridian post-metaphysics and Heideggerian ontology,
which he calls radical hermeneutics. Caputos case, as Simpson
describes it, is a response to the broad consensus within
contemporary continental philosophy that is committed to a kind of
post-metaphysical orthodoxy.11 Regarding the current ethos in
philosophical thought, Simpson continues, [i]t is taken as given that
metaphysics is no longer a live option for serious thinkers today, and
that the task of thinking about religion relative to metaphysics is to
learn to think God and/or do religion without or after
[metaphysics].12
As we have asserted in the introduction, thinkers of a
hermeneutics of being (whether on religious terms or
ethical/epistemological terms) like Caputo represent what I have
described as the analytical model for an ontology of difference: an
11 Christopher Ben Simpson, Religion, Metaphysics, and the
Postmodern: William Desmond and John D. Caputo (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2009), p.1.
12 Ibid.

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immediate difference as emancipatory event, loosened and liberated
from, as Roland Faber has described it in Whiteheadss terms: the
metaphysical sublimation of God in the realm of power as it suffers
from the Platonic doctrine of subordinate derivations.13 This model,
as presented in thinkers like Caputo, places the accent of being (or
the being of difference, for our purposes) on the singular event and
repetition of singularity (or externality). As a science of being qua
appearance (or event), Caputos radical hermeneutics, as Simpson
notes, largely takes its meaning from Heidegger as an examination of
human facticity and the groundless play of Beings comings and
goings.14 The groundlessness of Beings repeated events, as Caputo
frames it, inherits the rhetoric of emancipation from the
representation of a metaphysics of presence that is the work of Jacque
Derrida, whom, as Simpson notes, Caputo labels the philosopher of
the flux par excellence.15Caputos science of the being of difference
as a singularity of event to be interpreted, admits to being a a
minimalist metaphysics that does not overestimate the status and
scope of knowledge but is concerned only with the finite facts as
the appear, if indefinitely, on the surface of experience.16 In a manner
of speaking (and thought), such a practice of minimalist

13 Catherine Keller and Laurel C. Schneider, Polydoxy: Theology of

Multiplicity and Relation (New York: Routledge, 2011), p.39.
14 Simpson, Religion, Metaphysics, and the Postmodern, p.10
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid.

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metaphysics, according to Caputo, utilizes a version of the apophatic
tradition introduced by Maurice Blanchot and Jacque Derrida, as the
logic of the sans. As such, thought and talk about reality or being, as
Simpson notes of Caputos claim of a metaphysics without
metaphysics must always reduce itself to or frame itself as the
negative or ambiguous metaphorics of flux, fluidity, movement, free
play, instability, events, and happenings17 The post-metaphysical
move by Caputo, from the infinite potential of the act of being to the
infinite events of a subject after the fact, echoes the turn in
philosophy from the doer to the deed that draws its ultimate
inheritance from Nietzsches allergy to interiority. We see this in
Judith Butlers admission in Gender Trouble, that: The challenge for
rethinking[outside] of the metaphysics of substance will have to
consider the relevance of Nietzsches claimthat there is no being
behind doingthe deed is everything.18
In what follows, we shall review, what I have gathered as the
terms for the five prominent rhetorics for proposing being and its
implications for the notion of difference and relation. The first three
will represent the analytical model for a philosophy of difference and
presence that are either emblematic of post-metaphysical thought or
non-appropriating metaphysical schemes. The fourth and fifth

17 Ibid.
18 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of
Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), p.33.

17
proporsals will be considered appropriating metaphysical schemes
that still fail to articulate robustly terms for difference and relation.
Since space will limit our capability to give full-fledged readings on
these concepts, the aim of this evaluation will be to isolate the general
terms and modes of each proposition of being best articulated in the
work of a representative thinker of each proposal. First, we will start
with the univocal proposition of being.

The Proposition of Being as Univocal: Presence as Access

Much of tradition, writes William Desmond, is defined by an
oscillation between univocity and equivocity.19The proposition of
being as univocal, means, literally, being has one voice. This is to say
that being has only one way of making sense, or can only be
legitimized one way, or in one form, and thus, the the thought of being
is common and identical with all who truly think being.
Often times the univocal model will emphasize the minds
thinking of being as a manner of conformity, sometimes under the
auspice of unity sometimes out of the outright demand for uniformity.
All forms of thought that do not conform to the one voice of being but
insist in their different thoughts or predications of being are
considered transgressions and false predications of the proposition
of being as a univocal truth.
19 William Desmond, Being and the between (Albany: State University
of New York Press, 1995), p.47.

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What this means for presence, or the proposition of being to
consciousness, is that reality offers the mind a certain access to being.
This access may be thought of as a redemption for difference (a
redemption for being different), an access to return to identity (or
receive the only true identity). In a proposition for the univocity of
being, to make sense out of being, requires that the mind conform
to the one, singular sense for being. As Laurel Schneider has stated in
her prosecution of Oneness in theology: the reducibility of reality to
simplicity, or oneness, effects a negation of difference as a basic tenet
of reality itself.20 The proposition of being as univocal is materially
simple and formally exclusive, it admits no difference, no change, no
variation: being has only one voice; all other thoughts reflecting that
must be identical or negated. For the religious thinker who
conceptualizes Being as a form shared by God and creation, however
infinitely different in degrees, the proposition of being as univocal has
direct implications.
Thomas Williams, in his aggressive rebuttal to Catherine
Pickstocks well-known critique of John Duns Scotuss doctrine of the
Univocity of Being,21 attempts, in his essay, The Doctrine of Univocity
is True and Salutary, to argue that the doctrine of univocity is true.
So even if the doctrine has unwelcome consequences, we ought to
20 Laurel C. Schneider, Beyond Monotheism: A Theology of Multiplicity,
p.88.
21 Catherine Pickstock, After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation
of Philosophy (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), pp. 122-139.

19
affirm it anyway.22 We will evaluate Williamss defense for the
proposition of the univocity of being and demonstrate how it negates
the being of difference and the relation of being to mind.
Despite Williamss slight suggestion to play down the
ontological argument of univocity of being, he presents a sound
defense for the semantics (and logics) for univocity of being that
nonetheless underlines the doctrine of the univocity of being as an
ontological proposition.23
Quoting Scotus, Williams writes: Notwithstanding the
irreducible ontological diversity between God and creatures, there are
concepts under whose extension both God and creatures fall, so that
the corresponding predicate expression are used with exactly the
same sense in predications about God as in predications about
creatures24 As the quote from the Subtle Doctor makes manifest,
there are concepts of God and creation the two come under and from
which a univocal (same sense) can be predicated. This is one of the
reasons why Catherine Pickstock writes, Thus God is deemed to be
in the same univocal manner as creatures, and although God is
distinguished by an intensity of being, He nonetheless remains
within, or subordinated to the category of Being (which now becomes

22 Thomas Williams, "The Doctrine Of Univocity Is True And Salutary,"

Modern Theology 21, no. 4 (2005): p.575.
23 Ibid.
24 Williams, The Doctrine of Univocity, p. 578

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the sole object of metaphysics).25 Despite Williamss quarrel with
Pickstock, let us consider Williamss defense for the semantics of the
univocity of Being.
Williams sets up an example that compares what is said of God
with what is said of a creature, for example, Socrates:
Let us consider two predications:
(GW) God is wise.
(SW) Socrates is wise.
The question is whether wise has the same sense [in both
predications]. Three answers seem like live options. First, we
might say that it has altogether different senses in the two
predications [equivocity]Second, we might say that it is being
used in different but related senses [analogy]. And third, we
might say that it is being used in exactly the same sense
[Univocity]. I will argue that these three options in fact reduce
to two: either unintelligibility or univocity.26
Explaining the case for an equivocal predication as opposed to a
univocal predication, Williams asks, Can we, in a similar way, identify
the altogether different sense that wise has in (GW) [from (SW]? If
the answer is no, we, [from the standpoint of (SW)] literally do not
know what we are saying when we say that God is wise27 To make a
statement about two things that appear to say the same thing about
different things without, as Williams says, a way to identify the
altogether different sense leaves us with two equivalent statements
that are altogether un-relatable: equivocal predication.

25 Catherine Pickstock, After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation

of Philosophy (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), p.122.
26 Williams, The Doctrine of Univocity, p.578
27 Ibid.

21
Williams then explains, that in order to overcome such a
distance between differences that maintains itself against immediate
identity as an impasse of intelligibility (not between the two but from
the two to the other), one would have to find a substitution of some
expressionthat we take to have the same sense as wise has in
(GW).28
If the substitution for (SW) now has the same sense as wise
has in (GW), according to Williams, we have arrived at univocal
predication.29 But if that substitution failed, and remains
unintelligible to the statement of (GW): we have fallen into
unintelligibility [again]. And so, Williams states:
This regress in substitution expression must terminate
somewhere, or else we have into an infinite stutter and thus,
again, into unintelligibilityif there is in principle no end to
this, then I quite literally have no idea what I mean by God is
wise, which is another way of saying that I mean nothing by
God is wise And clearly only univocal predication will
terminate the regress, since equivocal predication always
introduces either unintelligibility or an additional, putatively
equivalent expression.30
Williamss equivocal/univocal comparison of his example of two
similar statements of two different things (God is wise and Socrates is
wise) leaves the relationship between the two either, utterly
unintelligible as two actual differences that demonstrate equivocal
predications, or the dissimilarity is resolved by a substitution that
28 Ibid.
29 Williams, The Doctrine of Univocity, p.579
30 Ibid

22
replaces the meaning of Socrates is wise with a meaning that has
the same sense as God is wise, which would then terminate the
regress of difference between the two into one voice, the univocal
predication.
But Williams is well aware that there is another way to
overcome un-relatability that claims to not terminate the regress of
difference into univocal predication: But someone will here object
that my conclusionignores that via media so beloved of my fellow
Anglicans: analogical predication.31 So then Williams gives his
explanation of how analogy resolves the difference of two similar
statements:
Suppose we say instead that the sense of wise in (GW) is
different from, but related to, the sense of wise in (SW). We
must then ask: are we able to state explicitly either (i) the sense
that wise has in (GW) or (ii) the relation that the sense of wise
has in (GW) has to the sense it has in (SW)? [if neither, we have
equivocity] (For if we have neither an intrinsic nor a relational
grasp of the sense that wise has in (GW), we have no grasp of
its sense at all. Granted, the denial of univocity does entail that
we always know of one relation that holds between the two
senses, namely the relation of non-identity. But to know merely
that the sense of wise in (GW) is not identical with the sense of
wise in (SW) is not to know what the sense of wise in (GW)
actually is.32
The non-identity that always holds as the relational share between
two different things that do not terminate their respective differences
in univocity, according to Williams, still results in an inaccessibility to

31 Williams, The Doctrine of Univocity, p.579

32 Ibid. italics in original

23
what a statement actually is. Williams therefore explains that, for
analogy to actually deliver intelligibility of relation, a statement must
either, substitute [again, but with] a composite expression for wise
in (GW) that will include the sense that wise has in (SW) plus some
relational expression[which, according to Williams must have]
exactly the same sense in the rewritten version.33 If this composite
expression with some relational expression can find a way to have
exactly the same sense then, Williams concludes: we have now
rewritten (GW) using univocal predication, with no loss of
meaning34
As we can see, for Williams, analogy only works as an exact
substitution that does not lose any meaning and as such ends in
univocal predication anyway. As Williams summarizes his review of
equivocity, univocity, and analogy: [W]e come in the end always
either to univocity or to unintelligibility.35
The proposition of being as univocal, although explained in
semantic terms, asserts ontological language. Williamss defense of
Scotuss concept as semantic with or without his admission, reveals
itself of Scotuss concept as ontological.36 Whether we can actually
33 Ibid., italics mine
34 Ibid
35 Ibid
36 To quote a line from Catherine Pickstocks After Writing regarding
Scotuss univocity of Being: This unity hovers halfway between the
logical and the actual, for it refers to the way in which the substantive
properties of a thing subsist in exactly the same manner as the totality
of the thing since, at the level of ontology, they all equally are in the

24
quantify being or not (which we cant), we can and always are making
existential judgements of being as we act (which is the only way to
quantify being beyond abstraction). These judgments draw from
terms, whether equivocally, univocally, or analogically, in order to
make sense or put in to words the sense of being they have
composed. Therefore, semantics are a certain ontologics, and
according to Williams, the univocal predication does not find a
relation between differences, it only offers an access to terminate the
difference and substitute it with a more superior identity. Thus we see
that the proposition of being as univocal and a metaphysics of
presence as access (from regress) excludes difference and exchanges
relation with substitution. It is from the exclusive and oppressive
nature of being proposed as univocal, the proposition of being
proposed as equivocal finds its exigent point of departure.

The Proposition of Being as Equivocal: Presence as Absence

To propose that being is an equivocal act, is to ultimately propose that
being has no essential relation in it, that is to say, being as equivocal
is being as equally different (as opposed to being as equally the same
univocal being). The reason we use the word equivocate to mean

same fashion (126). While the appeal of a univocity of Being seems

alluring in theory to some, in actuality the idea of the Divine sense and
the sense of creation as identical is as oppressive as it is impossible.

25
ambiguous37 language that attempts to conceal the truth of the
matter, is because an equivocal predication can mean the same thing
for one thing as it can for the other: meaning has no actual meaning,
or said another way, all meaning is equally different and as such
equally unrelated. This is why one might describe the proposition of
being as equivocal as a proposal of being in co-incidences, individual
incidences of being that are equally different and merely coincidental. The notion of being as equivocal, writes William Desmond:
puts the accent on sheer difference38
Comparing the social upshot of a univocal proposition of being
to the equivocal, Desmond states: Whereas the univocal relation
sees the self and the other as absolutely the same and hence as
having no unifying relation other than that of identity, the equivocal
relations sees them as absolutely different and hence as having no
relation whatsoever.39
While the proposition of being as univocal presented presence
to consciousness as offering an access to Being for substitution of
difference or for representing Being instead of the difference that
constitutes the subjectivity of the conscious actor, the proposition of
being as equivocal, as being wholly different of itself, without any

37 Ambiguous literally meaning both ways, from from ambi- both

ways + agere to drive) + -ous.
38 William Desmond, Desire, Dialectic, and Otherness: An Essay on
Origins (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), p.6.
39 Desmond, Desire, Dialectic, and Otherness, p.6.

26
prior relation, acknowledges no presence for mediation or intention of
relation, but in the absence of such a presence equally different
incidences are free to be. The proposal of being as equivocal afforded
thinkers the notion that actual difference was always only the infinite
deferral of essential relation that defined presence or truth as
actually the true acts of infinite supplementation made possible by
absence. In a certain sense, the proposition of being as equivocal
would prove itself to be the anti-metaphysical proposition par
excellence. This proposition has normally gone under the name of the
critique of a metaphysics of presence. One of its most well-known
defenders was Jacque Derrida, and his signature lecture for this
argument was, Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the
Human Sciences. We shall now turn to Derridas prosecution of a
metaphysics of presence in his lecture, and evaluate his argument
regarding difference and relation.
According to Derrida, structure, or rather the structurality of
structure is not a real thing. This to say, structurality as such, is not
natural or a given, but actually implemented by a process by which,
things are assumed to have a center ora point of presence, that
claims to be a fixed origin.40 While Derridas lecture addressed the
shortcomings of Structuralism, particularly the work of Ferdinand de
Saussure, it provided the terms for post-structuralism to find its
40 Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1978), p.278.

27
position against the metaphysics of presence (which was mostly the
social science of Structuralism) that would culminate in the event
of deconstruction. But what Derrida had to prove was that presence
was not only false and absent, but as a false presence asserting itself
as natural and metaphysical, a certain metaphorical displacement of
the truth of language had been manufactured.
The false point of reference to which all difference was assumed
to naturally (or originally) be related, only deployed itself to organize
the structure, which ultimately meant a way to limit what we might
call the play of the structure.41 But reality, or history, as Derrida saw
it, did not show itself as the drama of differences in various relations
the structurality of structure, but as the free play of substitutions
that a so-called Center would always try to restrain.42 This restraining
Center, that tried to make substitutions impossible, claimed to be the
re-presentation of coherence itself, the condition of the episteme as
philosophy or science, but really, the coherence the Center claimed
to afford reality was contradictorily coherent. And as always,
coherence in contradiction expresses the force of a desire.43 Since
difference was the evidence of the equivocity of being, any relation
between difference before the fact of difference or essentially as the
fact of difference (or as the act of differenceif we consider the act of

41 Derrida, Writing and Difference, p .279

42 Ibid.
43 Ibid.

28
language in Saussures scheme) preventedbarred before the event
the free play of signs as event, and attempted to constitute this
manner of play on a fundamental immobility and a reassuring
certitude...44
This fundamental immobility of play by the Center that
reassured its certitude as a coherence of contradiction, as a forced
togetherness of equivocal dictions, was the very classical, Western
metaphysics of presence that presumed to define, totally, the matrix
for being. Giving to play beforehand (the pre-position of being) a
relation to the Center was ultimately a de-termination of the freedom
of play, in both senses: to define plays conditions for play and thus
its identity, and to terminate the play of difference for infinite
identities (recall Williamss termination of equivocity in univocity).
This termination of the play of difference or difference as the free play
of being, according to Derrida, went under the many names of:
the determination of Being as presence in all senses of this
world. It could be shown that all the names related to
fundamentals, to principles, or to the center have always
designated the constant of a presenceeidos, arche, telos,
energia, ousia, (essence, existence, substance, subject) aletheia,
transcendentality, consciousness, God, man, and so forth.45
But Derrida wished to announce a revolt or a moment for language
that appeared as a rupture from the Center, a rupture from the
metaphysics of presence, a liberation of play from the unity of Being,
44 Ibid.
45 Ibid. pp. 279-280

29
the singularity of event from even the meaning of history. And so
Derrida announces that,
it became necessary to begin thinking that there was no center,
that the center would not be thought in the form of a beingpresent, that the center had no natural site, that it was not a
fixed locus but a function, a sort of nonlocus in which an infinite
number of sign-substitutions came into play. This was the
moment when language invaded the universal problematic, the
moment when, in the absence of a center or origin, everything
became discourse46
Without a fixed center determininggiving beforehand, or
determining the terms oflanguage, discourse, according to Derrida,
was now free to freely happen in the form of an infinite number of
sign-substitutions. This was not the representation of language from
a classical thesis of the inexhaustible field of meaning, but the free
play of substitutions made possible by the absence of the fixed
arresting center.47 Now that language, as the play of equal
differences for infinite supplementation, was made free from a center
or origin that claimed a natural or ontological relation, play was
allowed free and infinite play. The free play of signs as the discourse
of the sign proved itself as the disruption of presence.48And here,
Derrida announces, the Nietzchean affirmation, that revealed a
world of signs without fault, without truth, and without origin which is
offered to an active interpretation proved itself to be the very

46 Ibid.
47 Ibid. p.289.
48 Ibid. p. 292

30
equivocal nature of being that determines the noncenter otherwise
than as a loss of the center. And plays without security...49
This is not the space where we will evaluate the accuracy or even the
coherence of Derridas argument,50 for the moment we will simply
take note of the terms of a proposition of being as equivocal and mark
its implication for difference and relation. As elaborated in the
argument of Derrida, in the very manner of an analytical model of
difference, being is signified as equivocal play, the play of nonrelation: absence of relation; a play that disrupts presence, that
reveals an absence of presence, that gives the terms for difference as
the play of infinite substitutions and supplementations of finite
(singular) events and signs. While Derrida defines presence as
arresting, he does so in order to define difference as individual, if only
privative (or negating) of presence. This is where the logic of the
sans, by which John Caputo articulates his minimalist metaphysics,
which, as still a hermeneutics, is a way of reading texts negatively.
However, this minimalist metaphysics of the sans, this ab-sent
difference that imagines the absence as as a way to present (or invent) infinite supplements as a performative diffrancethe
combination of a deferral and an act to differis qua substance not an
affirmation of difference in itself, and as such, for some thinkers who
49 Ibid. p. 292, italics in original.
50 In my paper, Free-Construction: What comes after PostStructuralism, I attempt a close reading of Derridas questionable
thesis of a metaphysics of presence.

31
imagine being as more than a performancebeing per a formbut a
materialized thing that affirms, the proposition of being as negative is
not robust enough. It is from here we now consider two versions of
what might generally be called process thought: the mannerism of
being as proposed in the work of Gilles Deleuze, and the teleology of
being as proposed in the narrative of the Hegelian dialectic. First, we
will consider the ontology of Gilles Deleuze, and his thesis of
difference and repetition.

The Proposition of Being as Univocally Equivocal: Presence as

Success
Alain Badiou, in his controversial work dedicated to the thought of
Gilles Deleuze, proposed three general principles to the thought of
Gilles Deleuze, which Badiou claimed were true to the spirit of the
thinker but downplayed in the pedagogies of his followers: 1) It is a
philosophy that is organized around a metaphysics of the One, 2) It
proposes an ethics of thought that requires dispossession and
asceticism, and 3) It is systematic and abstract.51 For the purpose of
this thesis, we will draw the terms for difference and relation in
Deleuzes articulation of a philosophy of difference in his work
Difference and Repetition, and evaluate the upshot of his proposition
of being as univocally equivocal.
51 Alain Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2000), p.16.7.

32
While Deleuzes work will always be considered a variation of
process thought (some of his more well-known monographs are on
Spinoza and Henri Bergson), his overall project is a culmination of
Nietzsches call for a joyous will-to-power into a philosophy of a
substantive affirmation of difference (unlike Derridas performative
negation as diffrance). This thesis will define the preposition of being
to the consciousness and mind of Deleuzian affirmative-difference as a
presence of success: difference relates itself successfully. We will
show that, unlike the univocal proposition that presents being to
consciousness or mind as an access to true identity, or unlike the
equivocal proposition that presents being to consciousness or mind as
an absence for truly in-venting infinitely equivalently different
identities, the univocally-equivocal proposition (one voice of many
equal differences), as a form of process thought, doesnt present being
to consciousness or mind, but rather, from the extremity of mind and
consciousness being follows as the successor: being succeeds mind,
because the mind doesnt think being but rather being is the thought
of mind.
Deleuze makes himself out to be the premier philosopher of
difference, the philosopher who, contrary to the majority of
philosophers [that] had subordinated difference to identity or to the
Same, to the Similar, to the Opposed or to the Analogous, he wished
to not merely reach a conceptual difference for philosophy to identify,

33
but rather to demonstrate a concept of difference for philosophy.52
Philosophy, according to Deleuze, hasnt thought difference,
philosophy has only thought of identity differently. Or, if philosophers
thought difference, it was as if they identified a problem or an error of
logic that need to be reconciled to identity or classified as a derivative
of a more general concept. But Deleuze aimed to rescue difference
from its maledictory state as a leader of the project of the
philosophy of difference53
In order to think difference of itself and to devise a philosophy
of difference that rejects the old philosophy of representation,54 as
Deleuze and all other readers of Heidegger and Nietzsche imagine
metaphysics, Deleuze sets out to define difference in a number of
ways that propose difference as immediate, extreme, determining,
and autonomous: Difference is the state in which one can speak of
determination as such; Difference is the state in which
determination takes the form of unilateral distinction; We must
therefore say that difference is made, or makes itself; The rising
ground is no longer below, it acquires autonomous existence55
Difference as such, is the determination of itself in itself by itself
for itself. And as such, Deleuze wishes to show difference is the true

52 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (New York: Columbia

University Press, 1994), p.1.
53 Ibid. p. 29
54 Ibid. p.262
55 Ibid. pp.28-29

34
affirmation and that which makes being as opposed to being making
difference, which difference should reconcile with after the fact.
Deleuze then lists the four shackles of mediation by the
undetermined Being that always compromises (or adulterates) the
pureness of difference:
There are four principal aspects to reason in so far as it is the
medium of representation: identity, in the form of the
undetermined concept; analogy, in the relation between ultimate
determinable concepts; opposition, in the relation between
determinations within concepts; resemblance, in the determined
object of the concept itself. These forms are like the four heads
or the four shackles of mediation. Difference is mediated to the
extent that it is subjected to the fourfold root of identity,
opposition, analogy and resemblance56
The Aristotelian scheme of Being as the undetermined genera of all
things specifically-different (the Unmoved Mover), which, as
undetermined, can determine determinable things differently and thus
different things only represent the determination of that
undetermined determiner. This, according to Deleuze, makes the
difference of difference only the difference determined of a greater
identity. In other words, difference is not different (or not-different)
because this so-called difference is related (or determinedhe makes
the two actions equivalent) as a specific determination of a general
determiner. So Deleuze aims to imagine a different scheme for
difference in itself that is not merely the negation of the determiner

56 Ibid. p.29, italics in originals

35
(or the One who relates) that we find in Derridas scheme: enter the
idiosyncratic language of univocal equivocity.
Deleuze wants to not only make disruption eventful (which is
Derridas move), he wants to make it ontological (which is why he is
an undeniable metaphysician). Therefore, in order to make disruption
more than an act of an event but the nature of ontology he must
transform the cosmos of absence into a cosmos of equally present and
equally divergent simultaneous successions: a chaosmos:
When we speak the univocal, is it not still the equivocal which
speaks within us? Must we not recognize here a kind of fracture
introduced into thought, one which will not cease to widen in
another atmosphere (non-Aristotelian)? But above all, is this not
already a new chance for the philosophy of difference? Will it
not lead towards an absolute concept, once liberated from the
condition which made difference an entirely relative maxim?57
Here we can see that what Deleuze is attempting to show is more
substantive then Derridas performance of the sans. For the sans, as
we know, is the doctrine of the no, of the without, how could
negation be if it only existed as a resistance? Therefore, drawing from
a Spinozistic notion to conatus (Latin for effort, endeavor, impulse
the innate inclination of a thing to continue to exist and enhance
itself) Deleuze wants to keep presence as being but not to make it
the object of thought, but rather, to make the presence of being the
production or the success of thought as subject. Therefore,
subjectivity as thought isnt merely an un-relatable performance in the
57 Ibid. p.33

36
proposition of being as equivocal, but rather there is only one subject
that is indifferent and as such its many individuations (equivocity) are
freer than mere un-relation but relatedly indifferent. And here we see
Dun Scotus return to our conversation. For as we saw how Thomas
Williams in the first section proposes being as univocal, and that the
difference of thought was offered access to the one identity of Being,
Deleuze draws from Scotus as well, and proposes alike that being is
univocal but as opposed to Williamss example, the univocity of being
is indifferent, and thought doesnt find access to being (since it is
indifferent) but rather being confirms its indifference by its many
different thoughts. This is why Deleuze states, There has only ever
been one ontological proposition: Being is univocal. There has only
ever been one ontology, that of Duns Scotus, which gave a single
voice.58And this single voice, raises the clamor of being59
The way in which Deleuze is able to characterize being as equal
(univocal) and characterize the thought of being as equally different
(or differently indifferent) is the immediacy of difference that he
wishes to propose: [E]qual being is immediately present in
everything, without mediation or intermediary, even though things
reside unequally in their equal beingnone of them participates more
or less in being, nor receives it by analogy.60 By highlighting that

58 Ibid. p.35
59 Ibid
60 Ibid. p.37

37
things receive being immediately and equally indifferently makes
Being the abstraction and difference the reality: this again is
Deleuzes move to re-imagine the cosmos as a chaosmos: Univocal
being is at one and the same time nomadic distribution and crowned
anarchy.61
But now we must consider how this proposition of being as univocally
equivocal explains difference as such, and its implication for relation.

Multiplicity in Deleuze
Instead of the enormous opposition between the one and the many,
there is only the variety of multiplicityin other words, difference. It
is perhaps ironic to say that everything is multiplicity, even the one,
even the many.62 Deleuze has been counted on to provide content and
direction for many current philosophies and ethics of multiplicity.
Roland Faber draws extensively on Deleuze in his essay The Sense of
Peace, when he writes,
Multiplicity is, as Deleuze muses in The Fold, an irruption of
incompossibilities on the same stage. It names the
incompossibility of a divergent series (of events) in the same
world without a pre-established unity. It neither constitutes a
One nor many already constituted ones. It is a harmony only
through a crisis that leads to a broadened chromatic scale, to
the emancipation of dissonance63

61 Ibid
62 Ibid. p. 182
63 Polydoxy, p.41

38
Laurel Schneider, in her work Beyond Monotheism, also draws heavily
from Deleuze to assist her theology of multiplicity:
Rather than tracing the ontic signifier Is, I follow Deleuze in a
more fluid direction toward the multiplying, connective And. In
this way, multiplicity is not the opposite of oneness, just as
water is not the opposite of ice. Multiplicity is limitation and
possibility co-constituted, not opposed.64
And it is not surprising that content for multiplicity can be found in
the work of a thinker who brings together the univocity of being with
the equivocity of difference. However, while Deleuze is certainly a
thinker of multiplicity, or at least the simultaneous divergences of
differences, it is a harder to sell to imagine harmony or
connection in a thinker that advocates the clamor of being as the
crowned anarchy of difference in the manner of unilateral
determination as such. But to dismiss the usefulness of Deleuzes
thought up front would be a great mistake. His sophistication unveils
its ingenuity at a further remove.
Deleuze does, as Badiou stated, ironically propose a kind of
dispossession and asceticism in his thought. But it will be
demonstrated that what is actually dispossessed is beings relation to
thought (since being is only thoughts succession, thoughts
production), and that the asceticism of Deleuzes thought is the
practice of non-relation for the promotion of full affirmation: that is
the bold exhortation that he wishes to give form. We see this when he
64 Schneider, Beyond Monotheism, p.137

39
writes, In its essence, difference is the object of affirmation or
affirmation itselfAt this point, does the philosophy of difference not
risk appearing as a new version of the beautiful soul?65 Therefore,
what are the implications for difference and relation in scheme of
multiplying determinations?
The first thing we must recall, again, in Deleuzes metaphysics
is that the univocity of Being is essentially indifferent, this is the
whole point. And as such, the many voices of Being (immanently)
proceed equally indifferent from Being even though they are
differently unequal among themselves (here is where Deleuzes
asexual theory of the rhizome brings together Spinozas modal
metaphysics and the concept of haecceity in Scotuss univocity of
being in a way that affords the extremities of difference as the
intensities of indifferent individuations from a concept of immanence
of self-generation). Drawing from Scotuss Opus Oxoniense, Deleuze
states that the Subtle Doctor taught that being is understood as
univocal, but univocal being is understood as neutralindifferent to
the distinction[therefore]in order to neutralize the forces of analogy
in judgement, he took the offensive and neutralized being itself in an
abstract concept.66
Now by reminding ourselves that what is univocal of being is its
essential indifference, we are better equipped to approach Deleuzes
65 Deleuze, Difference, p.52
66 Ibid. p.39

40
concept of multiplicity with more handle on his sophistication. If what
is common to Being is its indifference, then what is common to
differences, the individuations of Being, is equally indifference. But
this then is not multiplication of a One but the multitude of division
from a One. In fact, as we shall see in Deleuzes words, this is more
than a multitude of division, but the very substance of division as
such. Writes Deleuze: We must first of all distinguish a type of
distribution which implies a dividing up of that which is distributed: it
is a matter of dividing up the distributed as such.67 And he continues:
[This] completely other distribution which must be called nomadic, a
nomad nomos, without property, enclosureis no longer a division of
that which is distributed but rather a division among those who
distribute themselves68Here, we should now see, the baroque
upshot of Deleuzes argument. What he is proposing, is in fact, a
multiplication, but only a multiplication of indifference, this is where
he differs from Scotus. Scotus made Being indifferent to difference in
order to capture the identity of being as a concept for abstraction to
difference, Deleuze makes being indifferent to relation in order to
release difference from any concept of identity for individual
affirmation. This may multiply indifference, but the geometry of this
distribution is not relation but division, hence again, Deleuzes words
of dividing up the distributed as such. And so as truly indifferent,
67 Ibid. p.39, italics mine
68 Ibid. p. 36, italics in original

41
difference has no property but what it can affirm in its ex-tremes (the
extremities of difference); it is a nomad with no home, no name, no
root, because it has no relation to being because being is essentially
indifferent; and it needs no object of desire because, as rhizomatic, it
produces itself.69 And here is now how Deleuze substitutes relation
and difference with the second aspect of his project for a philosophy
of difference, namely, the practice of repetition:
Returning is the becoming-identical of becoming itself.
Returning is thus the only identity, but identity as a secondary
power; the identity of difference, the identical which belongs to
the different, or turns around the different. Such an identity,
produced by difference, is determined as repetition. Repetition
69 The rhizome, so lauded of Deleuze and Guattari, appears to provide
to post-structural thinkers a way to imagine rootlessness as a way of
relation, but they do not follow both the metaphysics of Deleuze
(univocal equivocity) and his theory of erotics (desiring-machines) to
understand that the rhizome, while implying rootlessness in a kind of
nomadism, is ultimately a manner of tautology that is non-relational as
a-sexual erotics. We see this rhizomatic advantage to reproduce the
self (self-repetition) even in the evolution of the rhizome stem: When
the early vascular plant evolved, an explosion of different kinds of
plants occurred. The first vascular plants likely retained the growth
habit of the earliest of plants, residing in wet, riparian areas. The first
stem evolved, which was the rhizome. This new organ allowed plants
to spread and asexually reproduce and to withstand environmental
changes overwinter. The ability to withstand such changes came from
the rhizomes ability to store starch...
(http://www.plantrhizome.org/about/evolution.html). For a better trope
for rootlessness, I refer the reader to Eduard Glissants Poetics of
Relation (pp.12-18). His trope of errantry reclaims nomadism as an act
of relation from imperialisms traveling roots: Rhizomatic thought is
the principle behind what I call the Poetics of Relation, in which each
and every identity is extended through a relationship with the Other
but one cannot infer from this that rhizomatic thought has the
capacity to overturn the order of the worldbecause, by so doing, one
reverts to ideological claims presumably challenged by this thought
[It is] the tale of errantry [that] is the tale of Relation

42
in the eternal return, therefore, consists in conceiving the same
on the basis of the different70
As it may now seem clearer, Deleuzes theory of multiplicity is not so
much an ethics of space shared among a tenuous we,71 but the
claustrophobic implications of different un-mediated extremes coimplicated by limits of the they and the extremities of
determinations of the ones. As Deleuze wonders towards the end of
his book, how many differences and singularities are distributed like
so many aggressions, how many simulacra emerge in this night which
has become white in order to compose the world of one and they.72
Thus we see, in the proposition of being as univocally equivocal, or
equally indifferent, relation is determined or suffered by repetition
and the cosmos is found to be a revelry of excesses for the more
ascetic actor to take advantage of and make the most out of (or rather,
make the most for). As Deleuze famously concludes his book: a single
clamor of Being for all beings: on condition that each being, each
drops and each voice has reached the state of excess73
Presence as process in Deleuzes model of difference is not for
the progression of mind towards being, but the reverse, the

70 Ibid. p. 41
71 To quote another process thinker, Mary-Jane Rubenstien: And so
our unity is not oneness, but something like a tenuous we. A
crowded, haunted collection, folded into the God folded into us,
interrupted and undone Polydoxy, p.123
72 Ibid. p.277
73 Ibid. p. 304

43
succession of being from mind as the many caricaturizing
epiphenomena of the indifferent phenomenon of reality. For Deleuze
the process was equally of individually unequal selves, but there is
another version of process that we will now consider regarding the
proposition of being. This is the proposition of being in Hegels
dialectic.

The Proposition of Being as Dialectical: Presence as Progress

As we have seen, the two previous propositions of being as equivocal
(Derrida) and univocally equivocal (Deleuze) are ontologies (or
metaphysics, whether minimalist or baroque) that are fundamentally
un-relating. As true analytical models for difference, they both
imagine the presence of being as either disruption (Derrida) or
disparate (Deleuze). Derrida imagines the nature of difference as a
loosening-act from presence and Deleuze imagines the nature of
difference as the determination of presence by the freely affirming
act. In both case, difference has no relation to relation, whether that
matter be as a result of absence of relation for free-play or as a result
of a presence of indifference for the power of determination. This
makes both examples essentially privative ontologies which constitute
Being, or the ethos of beings as one of many differences that are
individually and irreducibly-different, identical to themselves only, and
in this sense, without any real relation in any aspect. This of course

44
is an obvious rebuttal to the bland proposal of the univocity of being
by Thomas Williams which presents being as an access to difference
to substitute its difference-as-regression (or transgression) that
would, without access, contradict Beings identity or simply be
unintelligible to Being.
In the variations of ontological equivocity that many have called
theories of the ethics of multiplicity (which we have demonstrated
from their own arguments as not actual multiplicities) an ethos of an
analytical difference, that is, difference on its own terms, without
mediation, allows difference to affirm itself (or resists not-affirming
itself), and as such, the ethos of pure difference could never imagine
difference as a transgressions of a specific identity, for there is no
one-form to transgress, but rather, the ethos recognizes an
aggregation of different identities as the pan-aggression of many unrelatable forms.
William Desmond considers the equivocal and the univocal
propositions of being as the spheres of the privative, that is, with
regard to the other they are a negation: either difference negates
identity, or different identities negate relation. While war attempts to
make negation absolute, and politics attempts to redeem negation as
negotiation, and capitalism attempts to make negation cyclical, the
dialectic, as Hegel would propose it, attempts to make negation a
correlation of negotiated self-determinations.

45
The proposal of being as dialectical and presence as progressive
corrects the privative nature of pure equivocity (a-relationality) and
univocity (a-differentiality), and tries to imagine the ethos of being
more than merely relatable and more than merely differentiating, but
in fact, as absolutely whole (ab-solute, in this sense, has the double
meaning of open and total). For this thesis, since space and the
proscribed parameters limit the breadth of the argument, we will take
the convenience to turn to the work of William Desmond for the
evaluation the next two proposals of being. This will be a convenience
not simply because of space, but because Desmond, who is the former
president of the Hegel Society of America and the Metaphysical
Society of America, is one of the foremost readers of Hegel. And while
his critical reading of Hegel is contested by followers of Hegels
thought, it is nevertheless widely regarded as a thorough reading.
Moreover, after the proposal of being as dialectical, the following
proposal of being as the metaxalogical, will be William Desmonds
own thesis, which he has crafted as a metaphysics beyond Hegel.
Therefore, in what follows, an evaluation of William Desmonds
reading of Hegel (Desmonds Hegel) will be carried out in order to
locate specifically the terms for difference and relation in the proposal
of being as dialectical, and afterwards, we shall evaluate Desmonds
metaxalogical metaphysics beyond Hegel for his equivalent
implications for difference and relation.

46

Desmonds Hegel: Wholeness as Latent Univocity

The wholeness of mind and being (subject and substance)
progressively accomplished in Hegels dialectic, takes us, writes
William Desmond, beyond the privative sphere, by claiming that self
and other are neither entirely the same nor absolutely different.74
William Desmond has dedicated his career to re-thinking the
metaphysical problem of identity and difference that Hegel had
seemingly assumed into his system of dialectic.75 As the problem of
difference and relation remained confined under the hold of Hegels
dialectic system: The metaphysical coup de grace was...otherness
[was subsumed] within a dialectical Aufhebung, yielding diversity
within unity, difference within identity, otherness within sameness.76
Under Hegels dialectic, otherness [seemed] to be saluted and
domesticated within a larger, overarching totality.77
But the dialectic wasnt always meant to overcome otherness, it
was merely meant to overcome contradiction, or at minimum, the
opposition in contradiction.78 According to Desmond, Hegel
articulated the dialectic in a way that held the dynamism of becoming

74 Desmond, Desire, Dialectic, and Otherness, p.6, italics in original

75 Ibid. p.1.
76 Ibid
77 Ibid.
78 William Desmond, Ethics and the between (Albany: State University
of New York Press, 2001), p.124.

47
and the unity of being together, this was a way to maintain the truth
that was in the univocal model and the equivocal model:
First, the univocal way highlights the variety of guises in which
the overdtermination of the ethos is subjected to determination.
Second, the equivocal way opens up significantly indefiniteness
by attuning us to the differences. Third, and this is now the
issue, the dialectical way mediates, in some measure, the
interplay of difference and sameness. Passing into the
determinate, and thence into significant indefiniteness, the
dialectical way approaches the overdetermined ethos in terms of
self-determination. If it is to be good, here to be good is to be
self-determining. We are pointed towards an ethics of autonomy,
but also beyond.79
While Hegel found Kants autonomy indifferent to difference,
Desmond finds Hegel self-determination greedy for difference. But
understanding why Hegel ridiculed Kant and wanted to collapse the
antimonies that Kants analytic maintained, is to understand what the
notion of relation meant for Hegel. As Gillian Rose noted in her study,
Hegel Contra Sociology: Hegel does not criticize Kants philosophy of
consciousness because it grants too much importance to
representation, perception or the manifold of intuition, but because it
grants them too little importance.80
Relation is, to Hegel, the evidence (and mot merely the access)
of and to infinity, which Kants transcendental method downplayed (to
later reject in variations of Neo-Kantian thought). We can see this in
William Desmond masterful rehearsal of Hegels move beyond Kant:

79 Ibid. p.117
80 Gillian Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology (London: Verso, 2009), p.47.

48
The transcendental approach, such as Kants, vacillates between
a formal condition of possibility and an active source of being,
the synthesizing self. And yet the negative definition of the
transcendental is implicitly dialectical in that what is negated in
the definition is tied inseparably to what is defined, and vice
versaTo make the transcendental ego determinate is to
connect it dialectically with the empirical egoBoth are the
same, yet different: sameness and otherness must be connected,
for each without the other makes no complete sense. To
recognize this is the insight of dialectical thinking.81
And while, as Desmond notes, Hegel is able to make the move beyond
the Cartesian dualism of subject and object, the dialectic that Hegel
re-characterizes as immanent in this dualism, which proposes a
togetherness deeper than the opposition, is still influenced by the
privilege of self[and so] the every present danger of devaluation of
the other is not decisively overcome.82 And it is here we must now try
to locate precisely how the dialectic rehearses, not simply a
devaluation of the other, but a failure to create a relation with
difference.83

Relation in the Dialectic

There is initial indeterminacy of freedom, for Hegel, writes
Desmond, But this freedom from is not true, concretized freedom
[according to Hegel]; it is set over against the otherTo be concretely
free, it must realize itself; it must give itself over to determination.
81 Desmond, Ethics and Beyond, pp.119-120
82 Ibid. p.142
83 Desmonds overemphasis on the other, we will show, reveals the
ultimate weakness in even his thesis, along with all the others, namely,
the lack of importance in the act of significant relations.

49
This means it must come into the domain of the particular and the
limited.84 Relation for Hegel, just as it will be demonstrated with
regard to desire, is always for the self (or the absolute: open and
total), as a progressive movement: a movement of pro-gression. This
should immediately strike one as obviously problematic. However, as
it will be shown, the notion of presencethe preposition of being to
consciousness or difference to samenessif not properly articulated,
affords the dialectic of Hegel to reign supreme, as it has, William
Desmond notwithstanding. But we are getting ahead of ourselves.
Hegel opposed, as Desmond writes, a Kantian-style autonomy:
an empty self-determination that keeps itself aloof from everything
other.85 This was viewed as the empty romantic cult of self-feeling
that plumes itself on being superior freedom when, in fact, it risks
being most in bondage to its own emptiness.86
However, one must follow closely the implications of a so-called
bondage to self-emptiness. Since Hegel wishes to value the difference
otherness provides to the self as a way to overcome the bondage of
emptiness the lone self is, he consequently devalues the otherness of
difference for itself. This, we see, is the tricky psycho-logics of
intersubjectivity that either over-values otherness at the expense of
the self or commodifies otherness as a consumption for the self. In

84 Ibid. p.144
85 Ibid
86 Ibid

50
both cases, the dialectic is at work, because what is missing in the
progressive act of dialectical desire is either the subject of desire (a
role Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari fill up with desiring-machines)
or the object of desire (Hegels articulation of Fichtes trieb and
Platos lack that will allow him to declare that consciousness is Desire
in general). And so we see as Desmond observes in Hegel:
The determination essential to freedom is such that in giving
ourselves over to the other, we begin to come round to
ourselves, we come to ourselves in the other, and through the
other. Why? Because we discover that the other is self, just as
we are: it is the sameness of self and other that is truly
discovered in determinate forms of being. Hence the relation to
the other serves self-realization, coming back to self in
determinate forms. What looks like the loss of autonomy in a
heteronomous situation is not a loss but a discovery of the
heteros as auto, and so a recovery of auto. Hence there arises a
more inclusive auto-determination or self-determination in and
through the other.87
As we can see, this proposal of being as dialectical and presence as
progressive can be argued, as Desmond does, as ultimately still a
proposal of being that is ultimately univocal (or identical to the
same/self): [T]he self [or the same] can traverse external difference;
yet it can also return to itself and be self-possessed and so achieve
some degree of self-identity, unity, and wholeness.88 Socially
speaking, a Hegelian externalization of the self, or the movement of
identity towards difference as an appearance of relation actually
reveals itself not as a relation but a sublimation of difference in
87 Ibid. p.144, italics in original
88 Desmond, Desire, Dialectic, and Otherness, p.6

51
identity: the objectification of identityachieving its wholenessvis-vis an absorption of difference. In this sense, difference relates to
identity only as identitys lack, or even more capitalistic, difference
relates to identity only as identitys resource (its re-source), identitys
commodity. As we have demonstrated, while Desmonds reading of
Hegel describes a presence that is not privative of difference like the
univocal model of difference as access to being, or the equivocal
model of difference as absence of being, or the univocally equivocal
model of being as success of in-difference, the dialectic of a presence
for difference as the progress of being doesnt, in a manner of
speaking, eliminate difference, but in a manner more imperialistic
than privative, difference is, at best, commodified, and at worst,
colonized. William Desmond has understood that to give presence a
teleology is to make it progressive in a way that uses difference
without creating a relation with difference. Therefore, in order to
rethink metaphysics in a way that does not deny difference nor
relation (univocity and equivocity) nor the relation of difference
(Deleuze or Hegel), Desmond offers a proposal of being as
metaxalogical: being in the middle.

The Proposition of Being in the Middle: Process as Excess

The metaxological, as William Desmond has described his neologism,
is composed of the Greek words metaxu (in between, middle,

52
intermediate) and logos (word, discourse, account, speech). The
metaxological relation has to do with a logos of the metaxu, a
discourse concerning the middle89 Desmond compares this to the
dialectical relation in as much as this may involve dialogue (dialectic
as dialegein), but unlike the dialectical relation, Desmonds theory
does not confine the mediation of external difference to the side of
the self. It asserts, rather, that external difference can be mediated
from the side of the other, as well as from that of the self.90
Desmonds theory of a metaxu relation of being that asserts the
mediation of difference from both sides, and in a sense, erases any
stability (or likeliness) of identity appears to resolve any aggression
between difference and identity, and any division or solipsism between
mind and being.
If univocity, declares Desmond,
stresses sameness, equivocity difference, dialectic the
appropriation of difference within a mediated sameness, the
metaxological reiterates, first a sense of otherness not to be
included in dialectical self-mediation, second a sense of
togetherness not reached by the equivocal, third a sense of rich
ontological integrity not answered by the univocal, and fourth a
rich sense of ontological ambiguity not answered for either by
the univocal, the equivocal, the dialectical.91
Presence, or the preposition of being to difference, according to
Desmonds thesis, doesnt merely offer access for true identity, or

89 Ibid. p.7
90 Ibid. p.7
91 Desmond, Being and the Between, pp.177-178

53
prove an absence for true infinite supplementation, or reveal itself
as the success of the repetitions of differences truth, nor is it a
progress towards a fuller account of being. In our fifth proposition of
being, in the work of William Desmond, we find that presence is, in a
kind of way, the reverse of Deleuzes univocal equivocity: being is not
the success of difference but difference is the generous excess of
being. And this generosity has no telos nor agenda for progression but
rather generously fills the in-between space of its given and the living
of its given: the luxurious middle. As Desmond states, a logos of the
metaxu [is] the happening of the between.92
However, the geography of being is only half of Desmonds thesis.
Being indeed happens in the between, the metaxu, but it happens in
the between in a manner dynamically, if even excessively.
In a series of definitions, Desmond describes the charge at
play in the middle of being that spills equally in a way that defies
teleology because its archeology (its beginning) is good enough,
indeed, more than good enough:
Being is given. Its givenness reappears over and over, redoubled
in excess of any dialectical reduction to a monism of selfmediation. The excess redoubles itself in the origin, in the
middle, and in the end. It is to the pluralization of the mediation
of givennees that the metaxological sense speaks
[Being is] an overdetermination of being, of an original
dynamism of being that cannot be finalized or fixed.

92 Ibid., p.178

54
the metaxological sense reminds us of the resurgence of excess
beyond complete determination. The transcendence of being as
other resurrects itself again and again. And there remains
excess in the origin, in the between, and in the end.
What can it mean to say that beings are showings of excess? It
means they are concretions of the transcending power of being
that is not closed off in its concretion but radiates beyond even
its singular contractions.93
As we can see, it is an over-determination, dynamism, excess,
resurrection (return), doubling, and transcending power that is
behind the goings-ons of the charged middle that defines the presence
of being for difference. This is what Desmond also describes as the
hyperbole of being, the throwing over of being as existence (to stand
out). For Desmond, this throwing over is the lavishing of being that is
the generous offer from the over-determining Origin. And as a lavish
giving of being, there is nothing else it ontologically-needs or must
progress after, for it is made originally and ontologically good; richly
and infinitely good: Aristophanes puts the whole in the beginning,
Hegel in the endBy contrast, the beginning in the metaxological is
an agapeic plentitude; hence difference is not a fall from the one, but
the generous giving of otherness as other to the other94
But we must now critically read the implications for relation in
Desmonds thesis. For while he has made a case for the excessive

93 Ibid., pp. 177, 179, 180, & 182.

94 Ibid. p.217

55
generosity of to be, we must locate how this being connects or relates
with difference.

The Relation of the Middle

Metaxological metaphysics, states Desmond, contests [the
dialectical] way of thinking communityBy contrast, metaxalogical
metaphysics goes towards the other as other95 In other words,
while Hegels dialectic goes towards the other for the self, Desmond
offers a way to go towards the other for the other. However, while
Desmond is keen to not fall for the Hegelian trap of lack (and he is too
dignified to accept blindly the Deleuzian trap of rhizomatic drives),
Desmond appears to rely too heavily on excess as reason or even
means for relation. This excess for good appears to combine the
missing subject of Deleuzian desire with the missing object in
Hegelian desire, and instead of the desire of difference as the
production of desire in the former, or the lack of desire in the latter,
the surplus produces the desiring-subject and the desiring-object.
Here we can see the trouble Desmond falls into when he so overdetermines the middle that he makes it either redundantfrom the
word, redoundor a pure parity: The overdetermined good is not a
lack that seeks its self-realized form in the end. It is itself already
good; it is out of its being already good that it gives the good of the

95 Ibid. p. 197

56
between and its different possibilities. This overdetermined good is an
agapeic good: out of its surplus it communicates96Agapeic being,
which is the ultimate level of being in Desmonds system, is
articulated to correct the dialectic and provide a movement from the
self to the other that is for the other.97 This agapeic being happens
because, community, as Desmond defines it, reveals the mystery of
ontological generosity.98
It is not easy to speak critically of Desmond because the problem this
thesis finds with him is slight, if possible only technical. Desmond,
unlike Williams, Derrida, Deleuze, and his reading of Hegel, does not
propose terms for difference and relation that are ultimately
indifferent to difference or relation. Desmond is correct to reject
Williamss take of terminating difference for univocity: presence does
not merely provide an access to the Truth of being. Desmond is
correct to reject Derridas terms for terminating relations between
difference for equivocity: the truth of our freedom doesnt depend on
the absence of beings presence. Desmond is correct to reject
Deleuzes terms for terminating the relations of difference for a
univocal equivocity: being doesnt succeed from the affirmations of
(in)difference, nothing could be more tautological. And Desmond is
correct to read Hegels terms for defining difference as the resource

96 Desmond, Ethics and the Between, p. 9

97 Desmond, Being and the Between, p. 253
98 Ibid. p. 199

57
for identity: being doesnt determine difference for its own progress.
However, Desmonds offer of the excessive goodness and generosity of
being as agapeic, does not only hyperbolize existence (I dare say,
idealize it), but in a certain way, he makes the act of relation
superfluous. The opposite side of absence is fullness. And while
Desmond certainly does not mean to advocate a certain
embarrassment of being in which difference finds a generous
advantage, he still has not provided actual terms for the relation of
difference that are significant of existence. To simply say relation is
for the other does not define relation. Or to simply say relation is a
result of the momentum of being, again, does not define relation. Nor
does defining relation as the evidence of intersubjectivity make it
significant, although, from that hypothesis it makes it equally as
necessary as Hegels dialectic. Relation is reciprocity, and reciprocity
is the exchange of mutuality, and the repetition of exchange is always
significant, but never superfluous.99 In other words, the aspirations for
exchange or relation that is the desire of difference is always an
inspired act. We now arrive at the end of the first section of this
thesis. Now, in the second section, we shall propose the final
proposition of being as analogical and presence, not as access,
absence, success, progress, nor excess, but as resonance.
99 One might even say that generosity is not the reason for the
exchange in relation but the effect of the reason for the exchange in
relation. To define the reason for relation will be the order of the next
section.

58

Part II
The Analogy of Being: Presence as Resonance
In the first section of this thesis we compared the analytical model to
difference with the analogical model to difference. The former was
transcendental and sought to define difference on its own terms
without reference to an antecedent or a prior or even present relation.
The analogical model defined difference as transcendently-related in
its essence. We stated that the first model was an operationalization of
a negation, and as such, the ethos of being was political: organizing
existence as the proportion of problems.
From the previous section we located the terms for difference
and relation from five propositions of being and presence and
demonstrated that all five failed to provide ontological terms for
difference and relation that were appropriate to the relations between
differences. None of the accounts provided terms for the relations of
difference.
In our current section, we will present terms for difference and
relation from the sixth proposition of being and presence that will
attempt to demonstrate an appropriate account for the relations
between differences, from the act of being to the act of consciousness,
from the act of consciousness to the act of knowledge, and from the
act of knowledge to the act of relation. It will be demonstrated that

59
the reciprocity between difference and relation is not founded on lack,
or affirmation, or progress, or generousness, but simply on relation.
And since relation cannot re-late to itself or alone, the foundation of
relation is difference, which is essentially relative. Therefore, the
activity most intimate to and of existence, which we identify as
reciprocitythe back and forthbetween difference and reference
that takes the name of the act of relation, is articulated most faithfully,
we shall argue, in analogy.

Analogy as a Metaphysics Beyond Oneness

If ontology is to serve theology, writes Laurel Schneider, beyond
the logic of the One, it clearly calls for a logic of multiplicity100
However, we have demonstrated that the mere multiplicity of
equivocity or univocal equivocity does no one good but oneness. But
the case Schneider brings against Oneness, specifically of the
univocal and dialectic nature, is a case this thesis also wishes to
prosecute. But our case is not merely against the Oneness of
Monotheism, but a theism of Oneness.101 Just as Schneider wishes to
pursue a version of ontology that would imagine a logic of multiplicity
together with a being-with oneness, this thesis equally agrees that

100 Schneider, Beyond Monotheism, p.140

101 Catherine Kellers theopoiesis as God-making is not too far from
this divinizing tautology. See Cloud of the Impossible, pp.306-308

60
an absolute disavowal of any kind of oneness, is not the goal, but
rather a more mature (and skeptical) intimacy with it102
However, the argument we have been making is that the
relationship between difference and relation that Schneider prefers, is
best articulated with metaphysics, and particularly the terms for
difference and relation in the analogical model we shall articulate
below. Philosophically, the analytical model fails to be able to provide
what Schneider describes as a relationship between communal
understanding of divinity and lives shared in community,103because
without metaphysics no such relationship is allowed coherence (in
some cases, there is no such relationship at all). Additionally, the
process model wherein God and creation are equally the objects of an
indifferent creative energy progressing together through time and
space, equally fails to foot the bill of love Schneider desires, for if God
and creation are inseparable, they are not in a relationship, they are,
well, inseparable.104 This is why ethics and law often appear to be the

102 Schneider, Beyond Monotheism, p. 139. Of course we do not agree

with skeptical intimacy, such a thing is not possible together: if one is
intimate they are not skeptical and if one is skeptical they are not
intimate. We would offer the word discriminating instead.
103 Ibid. p.194
104 I am grateful to my dear friend and VDS colleague, Desmond D.
Coleman, for raising the question of the difference between bonding
and bondage. Indeed, one must distinguish the difference between the
two and the temptation to con-fuse that difference. Bonding is an act
and bondage is a state, but the act can easily turn into a state.
Togetherness differs radically from the non-separable difference that
such process thinkers like Catherine Keller espouse (See Cloud of the
Impossible, pp.224-225).

61
only recourse to the divine in existence when metaphysics is
bracketed or divinity is assumed without reserve105 (which is not to
say all metaphysical systems are ethical).
But we shall try and demonstrate that Christian metaphysics
founded on an analogy of being can propose a rhetoric that is not so
unlike her theory of divine multiplicity, and yet it is thoroughly
metaphysical. Just as Schneider states, towards the end of her book,
that Love is a synonym, therefore, for incarnation, just as both are a
synonym for divine multiplicity,106it will be proposed at the end of this
thesis, that it is actually beingthe act of to bethat makes possible
the potential of love, which inspires the desire for relation, that is at
all times and at all place, the aspiration of being.

Analogy of Being as the Unity of Contradictions

Despite the circumstantial technical name originally given to the
philosophical science we know as metaphysics, the reason for the
appropriateness of the name is nevertheless revealed in the term,
Meta-physics. As Erich Przywara notes, Meta-Physics, accordingly,
means a going behind into the back-grounds of the being proper
105 We see this divine enclosure in the materialist theologies of Mayra
Riveras Poetics of the Flesh, when, relying on Merleu-Ponty, she
states: In the incarnation, God is externalizedthe transformation is
complete. The incarnation is a divine emptying without reserve. God is
no longer in Heaven but in human society and communication
(p.62). Here she exchanges the participatory givingness of incarnation
with a total externalization of divine materialism.
106 Schneider, Beyond Monotheism, p.207

62
to physics, whose highest instance is psyche. What is at issue, then, is
the formal question of this ground and end and definition in itself,
which poses itself here from the question of being as being.107
We will show, through the arguments of Christian metaphysics, that
the analogy of being proposes presence to difference as a resonance
of relation, not unlike a romance for a dance. This is to say that the
preposition of being to difference isnt simply a spatial positionbefore, but rather, relationally speaking, presence is be-fore
difference: courting a more intimate relation with difference. This
metaphysics of difference and relation, a metaphysics of the act of
relation and not an abstract totality presuming relation, is
demonstrated in the analogy of being.
Early 20th century German philosopher, Erich Przywara, argued
against both Karl Barth and followers of Martin Heidegger for the
recovery of the Thomistic metaphysical system, by then known as the
analogy of being, for a mode of thinking that combined seamlessly,
philosophy and theology, in a way beyond essentialism and
existentialism.108It is from his framing of the metaphysical problem we
find our point of departure in earnest.
But already, writes Przywara, with the posing of this question
we discover the first formal problem of such metaphysics. This

107 Erich Przywara, Analogia Entis: Metaphysics: Original Structure

and Universal Rhythm, p.120.
108 Ibid., pp.317-347

63
question, that normally takes the name of the question of Being,
according to Przywara, is already a metaphysical question. As he sees
it, the question
poses itself in the questioner with regard to the questions
object: my act of consciousness interrogates being regarding
its ground and end and definition. And it is a matter of
indifference here whether I say, My question is the selfexpression of Being, which questions (as does Heidegger) or
My question is the question of consciousness concerning
being (as does German idealism) [or] whether I say (along
with the whole of modern philosophy, from Descartes and Kant
on through Heidegger), My question is more originally the
question concerning being in the consciousness that
questions.109
But in all these ways in trying to frame the question of being, the
question betrays any immediacy of being: For prior to either
approach to the issue lies a neutral duality between the act of
cognition, which questions, and the object of cognition, at which its
question is directed.110 And it is this obvious duality that is not a
contradiction nor even a representation, but the evidence, in the very
form of the most essential form of existence, that a relation of
difference suggests a coherence. It is the practice of this coherence
that is the science of metaphysics.
Clearly, continues Przywara, if consciousness and being are
thus connected to one another in the problems both of act and of
being, then the final problem of metaphysics must be just this mutual

109 Ibid. p.120

110 Ibid

64
belongingthis to one anotheritself (which is to say, the structure
of the world, which subsists in this to one another).111
The world consisting of mutual belonging that was reflected in
the correlation of thought and being, the act of knowledge (noetic act)
and the act of being (ontic act), was the very object of metaphysics:
being qua being. But because the notion of being qua being could not
be captured existentially in a concept (except for the essentialist
efforts of Saurezs appropriation of Scotus112) nor did its individual
acts reveal a total indifference as its cause (unsuccessfully declared
by Sartre), being had to be judged relatively, that is, it had to reflect
the equal unicity and the unique relativity of its individual acts of
existence. What this meant was, the definition of a being was not
attributed to it from an abstract concept of being, but articulated
through existential judgments, that is, reasoned analogically.
Therefore, while to be was always in one way different and in one way
the same, it was always in every way specific and in every way
ontological (existentially objective). This is what Przywara means,
when he explains the existential becoming of an objective being: But
this becoming, which is proper to the back-and-forth relation [the
back meaning essence, the forth meaning essence acting
existentially], is none other than the venerable Become what you are:

111 Ibid. p.123

112 See Piotr Jaroszynskis lecture on Aquinas Metaphysics versus
mythology, ontology, and ideology. https://youtu.be/g3zMK2CVhdw

65
the thus towards which becoming proceeds already is at the same
time the there of that which becomes113 To say it another way: who
we come to be is both who we have come to be (being in time114)
and because of who we are as we come to be (the time of our being).
In this sense, Przywara wants to understand a reciprocity between
essence and existence so intimate the two are as-one.
Not only does Przywaras concept of analogy demonstrate that
essence and existence are correlated in the same way as thought and
beingthey resonate in presence: going back and forthhe also
demonstrates how the intimate rhythm in existential objectivity
overcomes the principle of identity that claimed itself as the reasoning
behind the principle of non-contradiction. Przywara makes the case
that the back-and-forth relationship of analogy is the very reasoning
behind the principle of non-contradiction, and any reasoning
otherwise is an abstraction.
Prosecuting the Cartesian principle of pure logic, Przywara
states that only analogy preserves the principle of non-contradiction
(from here out, PNC) in the form in which it is given as what is most
fundamental to the activity of thought as such.115 As he continues,
It is proper to the standpoint of pure logicthat it takes the
PNC simply as a form of expression of the principle of identity
(what is [valid], is [valid]). In this, it is guided by a genuine
113 Ibid.
114 Time here is in quotes because time is only the acts of being in
quotation (the acts of being as quoted for reference).
115 Ibid. p.199

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intention to gain an initial foothold. But the very intensity of
the striving for this basis tempts one to treat it as absolute.116
But if the PNC is isolated and objectified and turned into a thing,
logically it is indistinguishable from the principle of identity117
As Przywara acknowledges, the logic of oneness, which is the
principle of identity, is not the same thing as the PNC, which is the
minimum ground of thought.118 But what then is exactly the PNC that
reveals itself in its fullness as analogy?
Przywara states that the PNC as thoughts minimum ground is
immanent to this thought
precisely insofar as it journeys towards (material) truthThe
principle of non-contradiction thus stands or falls with this
unity. Detached from the journey towards truth, it becomes a
thing and is thus transformed into the principle of identity.
Detached from the principle of non-contradiction, the journey
towards truth comes to be the site of truth, and so the (noetic)
principle of identity appears once again.119
As Przywara wishes to show, the PNC must only lead, or journey
towards a unity with truth, which is to say, truth is neither an
identity nor a will, but a unity: the act of differences that appear to
contradict, or even certainly contradict, reconciled in a unity of

116 Ibid
117 Ibid p. 201
118 See L. Schneider, Beyond Monotheism, as well when she says,
Unity and oneness are cognitive limit thresholds, useful partialities
that human minds produce for the purpose of organizing work and
life. p.201
119 Przywara, Analogia Entis, p.201

67
truth.120 Hence, the principle of non-contradiction cannot be an
abstract truth to which the validity of things must appeal, but rather,
it is a movement of relation as relationunity towards a truthby
which contradiction is made relatable, hence, the act of noncontradiction.
Now that place where contradiction is made to-not contradict,
Przywara, like Desmond, states happens in the middle. But this
middle isnt merely to lounge in excess, which our reading of
Desmond hedged at, but rather, this middle is for movement. But not
just any movement is apropos of the middle, because, short of a
vicious circle (Deleuze) or infinite deferral (Derrida), a progressive
movement brooks no middle (Hegel), therefore, the movement of
analogy is a relationally form of movement, a movement more truer to
the dialectic that is better described as the (reciprocal) rhythm of
dance: The middle is not something fixed, howeverbut, rather, the
basis of a movement, albeit now a movement that is directed, and as
such, rest in motion.121

120 What is truth? one will ask. The answer is at once impossible and
fundamental to thought. For its apparent impossibilityits appearance
as impossibledefines the question (no one questions what they
already know), but its fundamental appearance nonetheless appearing
impossible in its possibility is what determines the conditions for the
question (no one questions what they dont know to question).
Therefore, in between the difference to knowledge and the knowledge
of difference a relation is intimated, courted, and embraced, which is
the journey towards truth that Przywara describes of analogy.
121 Ibid. p.206

68
Przywara states that non-contradiction isnt overcome randomly
or generously, but that there is a potential that is activatedI reach to
say, courtedin the difference encountered, which allows the previous
contradiction to unifyor create relationas an act of noncontradiction. Describing more specifically what this rest in motion
looks like, which could only give the imagination the image of a
romancing dance, Przywara states: In their inner relation to one
another, however, actuality and possibility bear witness to an
oscillating rhythm, back and forth, which Aristotle directly designates
as analogy122
However, if the reader only imagined this analogy of dance, a back
and forth implicated only socially, they must be reminded that this
rhythmic, resonating, way of things is the very romance that is
presented to difference in being:
This, at the same time, designates what is ultimate: the positive
reciprocal relationship between the two analogies. Just as the
differences between them [God and creature] were found in the
back-and-forth (of the end-directed, moving middle) that they
formally have in common, so too it is here that we discover their
positive reciprocal relationshipIt is a unity, however, not an
identity, and thus expresses its components in this unityThis
intra-creaturely back is thus, in a special way, the site of the
manifestation of the forward of the relation between God and
the creature123
And so, not only does the analogy of being imagine a rhythm that can
resonate between local differences, this same rhythm defines the very
122 Ibid. p. 208
123 Ibid. p.217, first italics mine, second in the original

69
nature of being on theological terms: it is a genuine relation
insofar as it expressed the fundamental alterity of God with respect
to the creaturely. At its peak, the positivum of relation reveals itself
as the negativum of alterity.124 And here we can see the genius of
Przywaras analogical thought: the not-I that is the other (negativity in
the difference to knowledge) reciprocates with the plus-You that is
relation (positivity in the knowledge of difference).
Beginning with the recovery of Thomistic thought in the work of Erich
Przywara, the terms of difference and relation explained
metaphysically not only avoid a logic of oneness or identity or
univocity that would present presence to degrade or exclude
difference, but on the contrary, in this short survey of an analogical
metaphysics, the very principle of non-contradiction is made to serve
analogy, made to serve relation. And as we see, the difference of God
and creation is maintained while the relation between those
differences is afforded a rhythm for relation:
As this primordial dynamic, analogy is a rhythmjust as,
according to Pythagoras, the cosmos vibrates with a resonant
rhythm,, and just as, according to Plato, God is the measure of
all things and all actions. Only in the sense of such a rhythm
and such a measure is analogy a principle. Ontically as being
and noetically as thought, it is principally the mystery of the
primordial music of this rhythm125
Part III

124 Ibid. p.232

125 Ibid. p.314

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The Upshot of an Analogical Metaphysics: The Desire for
Relations
But now as we approach the conclusion we must recall the beginning.
Why a prelude to a kiss? Why not just a kiss? Or why even a kiss at
all? It is here we connect the analogy of being in its metaphysical
argument with its phenomenological upshot: not the movement of the
absolute (like Hegel) but the rhythm and intimacy between the acts of
relations of differences. For while Hegel was correct to think beyond a
Kants synthetic analytic, and Desmond was correct to pause at
Hegels teleology of being, we take Przywara and re-interpret Aquinas
to argue beyond merely an excessive middle of Desmond, but a
musical and romantic act in the middle: a middle of muses and
intensities.
This brings us to the question of the act of knowledge and the
philosophy of desire. However, unlike Platos account of desire as
lack, and Hegels account of desire as self-consciousness of negativity,
and unlike Deleuzes rhizomatic account of desire as production,126 we
126 The tautological philosophy of Deleuzes difference and repetition
is fully resolved in the rhizomatic activity of desire as production. As he
and Felix Guattari state in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia:
If desire produces, its product is realDesire does not lack anything;
it does not lack its object. It is, rather, the subject that is missing in
desire, or desire that lacks a fixed subject (p.26). And as such, they
declare: To overturn the theater of representation into the order of
desiring-production: this is the whole task of schizoanalysis. (271). Of
course, as historians like Thomas Frank have been able to show, both
in the 60s and the 90s, such production of desire supposedly
exhorted to outwit Capitalism only played more into the hands of the
Ad-men, who made obsolescence generative for hyper-Capitalism. See

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propose desire as knowledge, which, according to the theory of the
intention of universality in particulars, is only a knowledge-ofdifference-for-relation.
But to propose desire as knowledge within the intention of
universality requires a double move that is best articulated by
analogy: the reciprocity between difference and reference. If
difference, as we have been arguing all along, is always referential
(which is not the same as representational), then we are back to the
question of preposition as presence. As we stated earlier, preposition
of being to difference isnt simply a spatial position-before, but,
relationally speaking, presence is the before that is be-fore difference:
courting a more intimate relation with difference.
And now we can reveal a new fullness of the pre-lude to a kiss
for a metaphysics of difference and relation that is the aim of this
thesis: it is the intimate play (lude) in the fore or before (pre) a kiss
(embrace), which is none other than the foreplay (the act of intimacy
as intimating potential for relation) of being to consciousness (or
Gods communication of relation to creation) as the music (the muses)
of difference (inspiration) for being towards the romance and rhythm
of (the desirous acts of courting and embracing and habituating)
difference in relation: the music of being for difference in relation is
the romance of being between the differences in relation.
Franks work on The Conquest of the Cool and To Commodify your
Dissent.

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Desire as Knowledge, Knowledge as Relation

We cannot define desire for relation without a cause no more than we
can define desire without a goal. But the usual cause for desire as
lack, has, as we noted in Desmonds argument, placed the matter
between Aristophanes (return) and Hegel (progression): Aristophanes
puts the whole in the beginning, Hegel in the end But, we have also
hedged at Desmonds excessive (or generous) middle: By contrast [to
Aristophanes and Hegel], the beginning in the metaxological is an
agapeic plentitude127 As we implied earlier, generosity out of excess
or excess out of generosity is not the actual reason for exchange, of
course we know of many examples of those who have plenty that are
not generous and those who have little to nothing who are generous.
Fullness (Desmond) and emptiness (Derrida) are equally liberal of
direction. The reason for relation as we said earlier is simply for
relation as such. But the act of relation (reference) is made possible
by the nature of difference as relative: difference doesnt know itself
as difference without relation, for without relation it is simply
sameness. Therefore, if we are to think of desire in an analogical
model, we must think of it in light of the doubleness that is
difference and relationthe difference to knowledge and the
knowledge of difference, which is to say desire has both a cause and

127 Desmond, Being and the Between, p.217

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goal, which are both related in being: desire is inspired by difference
(the difference to knowledge), and inspired desire aspires to a relation
with difference (the knowledge of difference). To understand how this
works in principle and form, we shall turn to Thomas Aquinass
explanation of the intention of universality in intellectual cognition,
and how he argues that this principle takes form in the movement of
knowledge (or, knowledge as movement).

The Principle of Knowledge in The Intention of Universality:

Knowledge as the Relation of Difference in Thomas Aquinas
In Part I of the Summa Theologica, replying to the first objection in
Article three of Question 85, Thomas explains the doubleness between
the universal and individual in intellectual cognition:
The universal can be considered in two ways. First, the
universal nature may be considered together with the intention
of universality. And since the intention of universalityviz., the
relation of one and the same to manyis due to intellectual
abstraction, the universal thus considered is a secondary
considerationSecondly, the universal can be considered in the
nature itselffor instance, animality or humanity as existing in
the individualin this way the more common comes first128
(435)
We must first consider in Thomass reply that the nature of what is
considered universal is double in how it is thought (we say double
even though, for example, in his fourth objection, he explains it more
as conversely: since at times through sensible causes we become
128 S.T. Part I Q.85 A. 3

74
acquainted with unknown effects, and sometimes conversely. We
maintain the possibility of the con-verse act is the doubleness or the
reciprocal nature of the act). Secondly, if we take this converse-ability
of knowledge to mean a doubleness or reciprocity as the act of
knowledge, then we are better able to appreciate the consideration of
the universal nature with the intention of universality that Thomas
offers. For this intention that is in the nature of things is the
potential for the relation of one and the same to many. But this
potential is realized, as he said, in the converse nature of knowledge
of particular things as the individualizing of the universal, or, as we
will say, as the appearance of individual things with potential for
universal relation.129
But while Thomass answer reveals the doubleness of the nature of
knowledge to know things by relating things previously unknown with
things known, he makes sure to not presume relation into knowledge
which would not make the knowledge of relation an act but a process
the concept of act and potential allows act to be imagined radically

129 Here is not the time to defend my definition of the universal as

communal. I have pursued that in two other papers. I need only say for
the moment, universality thought of metaphysically as opposed to
globally (or politically), is both beyond the global and more concrete
than the political: it allows for the transcending beyond to incarnate
the local body and allows for the local body to transcended
(transfigure) concrete limitations (this is what I call bricolage
soteriology). Again, I have addressed this in two essays: Why The ParaAltern Can Always Speak: On the Re-Insistence of Black Lives, and
After Difference: The Liturgical Reconciliation of Speech, Space, and
Time.

75
and radical.130 Thomas, like Przywara, wishes to distinguish a
difference between the ontic act (the act of existence as being) and
the noetic act (and the act of knowledge of the existence of being) in
order to make real the act of their relation:
The universal, as understood with the intention of universality,
is indeed, in a way, a principle of knowledge, in as far as the
intention of universality results from the mode of understanding
by way of abstraction. But what is a principle of knowledge is
not of necessity a principle of existenceWherefore the
universal thus considered, according to the opinion of Aristotle,
is neither a principle of existence, nor a substanceThus it is
that the ultimate intention of nature is to the species and not to
the individual, or the genus131
Here we see the prodigious nature of Thomass thought, which we
must be careful to use wisely: universality is not the principle of
existence (perhaps existence as such) nor even a kind of substance to
secure, but, in a way, it is the principle of knowledge. And yet, it is
only a principle of knowledge if by knowledge we mean the act of
understanding by way of abstraction. Now, of course, the way of
abstraction always makes post-modern thinkers nervous. The fear is
that abstraction denies the integrity of the individual. But if we follow

130 Act as a radical thing and a thing-radically relates the radical

nature of the act of innovation (from in- into + novare make new
from novus new) to the root (radix) of things potential for innovation.
In other words, an act happens in a kind of way out of nothing (without
necessarily being an act) and in a kind of way out of something
(necessarily being in potential to an act): life is neither purely random
nor purely necessary: while it happens to be, it must be to happen.
131 S.T. I Q.85 A.4 Reply 4

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closely Thomass argument we will find little to no difficulty drawing
wisdom for it.
To understand by way of abstraction as the act of knowledge
according to Aquinas, exists as an intention in an act (a potential from
an act) and not a substance as such, and this intention as such, is
ultimately towards neither the individual (pure subjectivity) nor the
general (pure abstraction), but the species. The most general way to
define species is simply in how it defines itself as the relation
between what is general and what is individual. As a point in fact,
species is the only real thing that provides knowledge (since to
understand something purely individual isnt possible, nor is it
possible to understand something purely universal). And so the
principle of knowledge as the relation of things different for
understanding reveals that principle of knowledge to us as reciprocal.
This prepares us to make the second move of defining desire as
knowledge: understanding knowledge as infinite movement.

Knowledge as Movement: In Thomas Aquinas

Now life is shown principally, Thomas states, regarding the manner
of the human soul, by two actions, knowledge and movement.132 In
Thomass account of the human soul as the principle of intellectual
operation, a schema is presented with regard to the operation of

132 S.T. I Q.75 A.1.

77
knowledge and movement that will allow us to make our next move
from knowledge to desire which will reveal that desire is knowledge.
This mode of operation, with regard to knowledge and
movement, is what we shall call the response-ability133 that constitutes
subjectivity (the ability to respond). From this mode of the subject as
a responder in (and to) things perceived, we will demonstrate in
Thomass argument, a mode (or form) of encountering difference
(perception and sensibility) that disposes the self for embracing the
truth difference discloses (relations), and how that embrace repeats a
reciprocity of entertaining134 the togetherness of relation. To trace this
schema in Thomass argument, we must first distinguish the nature of
subjectivity for knowing, which, in Thomass account is defined as the
capacity of the human soul to understand; and then we shall articulate
the two-fold mode of knowing and movement in order to prepare the
argument for the form of knowing as the mode of desire.
In part I of the Summa Theologica, Q.75 A.6, Thomas establishes first,
that knowledge must precede movement. This, we will ultimately
show, is another way to say, difference inspires desire (or the
knowledge of difference inspires the movement of desire to difference-

133 In this play on the word, responsibility, I wish to connote both

the ability to respond and the responsibility for responding.
134 I use the word entertainment here, or to entertain, to connote from
its etymology, a certain perdurance of relation between differences.
From French entretenir, based on Latin inter among + tenere to
hold. The word originally meant maintain, continue, later maintain in
a certain condition, treat in a certain way, also show hospitality.

78
known; as he also says: borne towards the thing desired135). Once
Thomas establishes that knowledge precedes movement, he then
explains why this is the order of the two-fold mode.
Thomas will use the terms incorporeal and corporeal as a mode
for reciprocal exchange. To translate what he means for post-modern
sensibilities, we might compare the corporeal to concrete things, or
things identified concretely, and incorporeal to speculative things,
or things speculated (from specereto look) pre-concretely.136 The
human capability to know corporeal things by virtue of the
incorporeal and subsistent soul, is how Thomas sets the terms for
human knowledge by defining the conditions of knowing: [W]hatever
knows certain things cannot have any of them in its nature.137 Now
this does not imply that the mode of knowing (and later, desiring) is
premised on (or caused by) a lack, as a kind of lacking in the knower
that must be claimed or recovered in knowledge, nor does it mean,
even more extremely, that knowledge of difference is an utterly
spontaneous cognition of a purely other object. Again, difference and
relation share a doubleness: a reciprocity in being. Therefore, in
contradistinction to the notion of lack or absence, we must follow
135 Q.81 A.1
136 Another way I would compare and contrast these two would be the
idea and the idea identified. An idea being the thing not concretized
yet (from identifiedfied, as in the making (facere) of an idea, that is,
a making offroman idea.). Something that is pre-concrete as in it
the potential for the act of concretion. Again thought and being are in
relation but never immediately related or identically related.
137 S.T. I Q.75 A.2, emphasis added.

79
Thomas when he continues explaining the terms of knowing that
provide a way of thinking knowledge that is besides lack or
production. Continues Thomas: because that which is in [the knower]
naturally would impede the knowledge of anything else. Now to
understand how knowing in this mode is not about lack nor
spontaneous production, we must tarry for moment on the importance
of what Thomas means when he says the knowledge of anything else
that would be impeded by a natural sufficiency of knowledge (or mere
knowledge of the same).
Earlier, in Q.6 A.3 on the question of the Goodness of God,
Thomas explains the three-fold nature of the perfection of a thing. The
third and final fold of a thing perfected, consists in the attaining to
something else as the end.138 The human attains knowledge from
without, but that is not because its soul lacks knowledge within (as if
it is created impoverished of knowledge), but that, to use the word
play on poverty (poor) with porosity (pore) that William Desmond
makes, the in-corporealitythe potentiality of the concrete as preconcreteof the soul is a matter, actually, of the porosity of the soul
and not its poverty: the soul is the passage-way for receiving many

138 The full statement is: Now a perfection of a thing is three-fold:

first, according to the constitution of its own being; secondly, in respect
of any accidents being added as necessary for its perfect operation;
thirdly, perfection consists in the attain to something else as the end.
We can imagine the first as the integrity of the subject, the second as
the multiplicity of the subjects integrity, and the third as the
relationality of the subjects multiplicity with difference.

80
bodies of truth (concretized ideas) than a poverty of lacking them.
Or said another way: the soul as a composition (an act of a body), is
itself a composer, and thus the heart of the reciprocal nature of being
as it is composed and composes itself.
Here we can now see a new way to imagine the difference of
speculation and concretion: a reciprocity between ideas and
makings of ideas (identifications). Another way to imagine this
relationship between the actual and what we call the factual, is, as
Erich Przywara states:
the explicitly metaphysics of the world, which would seem to
entail a morphology of the concrete world. For the world is
concrete not only in that it exists (and thus essence and
existence concresce: literally grow together), but in that it
exhibits, even in its most universal structure, a certain
correlation of particular beingswhich is to say, their having
grown-together (con-crescere) into a world.139
The relationship of knowledge to the knower is not an identical one
(i.e., the same, or self-produced: a mono-logy or auto-logy), but rather
a proportional one (i.e., in relation to the object: analogy; more on this
below). Therefore it follows that knowledge is not a matter of
consolidating or repeating an identical nature of the self (again,
Derridas auto-logic of supplementation, and Deleuzes tauto-logic of
repetition), but rather, knowledge of difference, or anything else.140
This proportional mode of knowing is only possible due to the
139 Przywara, Analogia Entis, p.140
140 Else meaning in addition; beside different; instead, I simplify
take to mean difference.

81
incorporeal and subsistent nature of the human souls principle of
intellectual operation, as Thomass answer explains later in Q.75 A.2:
[I]f the intellectual principle contained the nature of a body [That is,
if it were not metaphysical: a correlation between the ontic and the
noetic] it would be unable to know all bodies. To say it another way
more palatable for our post-modern sensibilities: because the
intellectual principle is not a body [it is speculative], and in a certain
sense, has no corporeal-identity141 [its terms are not already
identified, but as an idea it pro-vides terms for identification, and
many at that], it is capable of knowing all bodies that are corporeal,
and all the knowledge they identify and disclose. In other words,
imagining the subject as interiorly related beyond itself (the ana[upwards] of analogy), we are able to imagine knowledge as
something unlimited beyond ourselves: that is, the subject stands in
the middle of and grows together (con-crescesces) with reality,
141 It is from this Thomistic explanation of the intellectual principle of
the soul that I have developed the concept of No-I.D. The concept
doesnt imply that No-I.D. means no idea, but the contrary, No-I.D.
allows for the determination(s) of free, personal, and specific/local
ideas. In my paper, Flowers of which No Forests Know, I
demonstrated the ultimate upshot of this metaphysical principle as a
manner of social being that transcends the limitations and
categorizations of identity politics which operate not unlike a
transcendental presumption of persons into historical categories as
opposed to the No-I.D. social metaphysics that correlates histories of
experience with the existentially-open experience of the persons
history (and story). Here again, metaphysics prevents an enclosure on
reality (reality without reserve) by imagining the substance of realityexperienced (existence) as a participation with reality-related
(essence). In this sense, being isnt just a given (concretized), but it is
a giving that keeps giving (difference in relation).

82
reciprocating its difference in relation as after difference from which
it is related and after difference to which it will relate. But now
understanding that the mode of knowledge does not proceed out of
lack nor production but out of reciprocity, a reciprocity that is
repeated on terms of relation, we now turn to Thomass argument for
the mechanics of this reciprocity: the manner of the exchange.

Difference Known Organically and Specifically

Thomas describes the object that is known, as initially, the sensible
object. This is a very accurate way to define difference as it comes to
be known: difference as first sensible before intellectual. This allows
for us to think of difference first organically (sensibly), before we
understand it rationally (intellectually). This means that
discrimination or distinction of difference must first be sensed in the
body (realized organically) before it is articulated in the mind in order
to be intimated, as it were, in the soul (but these actions happen in
a certain way simultaneously, but at a minimum, reciprocally).
The object (i.e., difference) that is known in the temporal
process of knowing (the sensible object) is what encounters the
knower. Now, sense, Thomas answers in Q.78 A.3, is a passive
power, and is naturally immuted142 by the exterior sensible. Wherefore

142 Immutatation means to alter, an archaic word for mutation. We

might also think of it as the potential for inspiration, which we shall
reach for in our final theory of knowledge as desire.

83
the exterior cause of such immutation is what is per se perceived by
the sense [] Before the human soul can understand intellectually
(know), the bodily organ must be encountered by the exterior
sensible, or a sensible object in the world (sense). And yet, this
passive sensing of encountering the world isnt entirely passive. The
extrinsic object (again, difference), Thomas recalls in Q.78 A.1, is in
a way already united to the soul (we prefer to say related to the
soul). Thomas answers, Now, since whatever operates must in some
way be united to the object about which it operates, it follows of
necessity that this something extrinsicmust be related to the soul in
a two-fold manner.
Here again we must note that difference and referral have a
doubleness that doesnt make them the same (repetitive) nor entirely
other (random): because the knowing subject isnt inspired (i.e.,
immuted) randomly or generally, but rather, relatively and specifically:
differences are related specifically and specific things are related
differently. This is how Thomas will hold the passive and the active
sense together in a reciprocal relationship: we are passive in the
sense that we dont determine what inspires us (what could be more
un-inspiring?) and we are active in the sense that we are not inspired
undeterminably (there are terms and ways that inspire us most
intimately, most personally). And so we see, Thomas then explains
how the soul itself has an inclination and tendency to the something

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extrinsic, which is manifested in both the the appetitivein respect
of which the soul is referred to something extrinsic as to an end,
which is the first in the intention and the locomotive powerin
respect of which the soul is referred to something extrinsic as to the
term of its operation and movement.
And so we see that it is an encountering of difference that
stimulates knowing, and it is knowing difference (relating difference
as knowledge) that inclines the mover (or that which is moved to
desirefrom where we get the word e-motion). Therefore, since this
knowing is for the reciprocity of relation and not for lack or the
extension of production, Thomas explains that it is a knowing that can
extend to infinity (the repetition of reciprocity in relations), or, as we
will see, it is a knowing the doesnt have an end (it is infiniteunfinishing, again, reciprocalback and forth). Here Thomas compares
knowledge as the relating of particulars with universals to that of
finite creatures entertaining an infinite knowledge of God, which is
another way of saying that to know God who is infinite (and the
greatest of difference to which creation finds itself in relation) is to
experience infinitely, in the world, relations of the many differences
created and related. From encountering the sensible world (how
differences organically engage our sensibilities), the [t]he intellectual
soul as comprehending universals, has a power extending to the

85
infinite.143 This superior inclination of the human knower, Thomas
explains, which extends to the infinite as if to approach to a likeness
to God, is nevertheless in relation to the world in a way that unites
the finite with the infinite (or entertains the finite infinitely). And as
knowledge of difference is followed by movement of knowledge, we
are now prepared to make the case that it is desire that is knowledge,
and what is desired is the relation of differences that makes
knowledge possible.
As we make this move from analogical metaphysics to an
analogical epistemology, it must be recognized that between these two
terms of philosophy, on analogical grounds, no separation is needed.
For again, as Przywara stated of the fundamental analogy of
metaphysics, it is the science of the correlation of the act of
knowledge (meta-noetics) with the act of being (meta-ontics). And as
Przywara had stated that the genitive in the question of being must
be understood in both respects, that is, the objective sense (a question
about being) and the subjective sense, (a question as the act of
being), the act naturally assumes an acting subject (even if the
incompletion of the question equally assumes the incompletion of the
questioner). But while the notion of the question of being seems to
define the quest of being as the search for the answer of that
question, and hence, being is ultimately about knowing, we have

143 S.T. I Q.76 A.5.

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been working through this thesis to propose terms that offer a
different ultimate characteristic of being. Here we see that we have
prepared ourselves to make the move that not only goes beyond the
premise of being as existing to be-freed (the analytical model of
difference), we also make the move beyond the premise of being as
exiting to be-knowing, or needing to know an answer to an ultimate
question. We accept the premise of being as knowledge, as we have
demonstrated just above, but as we indicated, the knowledge of being
is for the relation of difference. Therefore, we lay the proposal once
again but now we reveal another depth: more than being to be free,
and being to be knowing (or known), we propose that being is to berelated, that is, beings live for relation, and as such, in the infinite
repetition between relation and difference (reciprocityback and
forth), beings live infinitely.144 But this infinity is not an abstraction but
rather the very substance of existence: the non-identity of existence
that intimates freely, specifically, and infinitely, differences for
relation. It is now, at this moment of the thesis, difference and relation
144 Infinitely here, (in the adverbial sense) merely means
communicating openness, or communicating openly. This is simply to
say that the repetition of relation is not the repetition of the same
(tautology) or the same relation repeated (security). As we can see,
tautology and security implicate a lack of care in the act (a lack of
care for difference). For tautology is to make necessary what is the
same, and security, from its etymology securus, from se- without +
cura care, is to make a relation out of what is necessarily the same.
The lack of care corresponds to the lack of difference. The infinite as
open is always never completed, but while never completed can mean
as much incomplete as continuous, as a relational act it is
fundamentally reciprocal.

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reveal themselves at a more profound level, that of inspiration and
desire: difference inspires the relation sought by desire. And from
here we pursue the understanding of Beings musicthe muses of
Being.

Difference as Inspiration: The Music of Being

The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line
the relation of the darker to the lighter races.145 These words of
W.E.B. Dubois are well known, and yet one could argue their fullness
has somehow been missed in the simplicity of the words. While many
have focused on the problem of the color-line as a problem of racism
and the inequality of power between races, not as many have focused
on the problem of the color-line as a problem of color-lines. As we
prepare to transition from knowledge of difference to the inspiration
of desire by difference, that is, as we articulate the correlation of the
act of knowledge of difference with the act of being-as-difference, we
shall consider the social aesthetics of W.E.B. Dubois and Charles
Baudelaire as a way to describe difference as inspiration and how this
can be characterized as the music of Being or the music for being.
One of Duboiss most potent lines in The Souls of Black folks, is
the closing lines of his chapter on Of the Training of Black Men,
when he imagines himself, a black man who doesnt think twice to
145 William E. Dubois, The Souls of Black Folk (Mineola: Dover, 1994),
p.9.

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sit with Shakespeare and [and see that] he winces not. Across
the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where
smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From
out the caves of evening that swing between the strong-limbed
earth and the tracery of the starts, I summon Aristotle and
Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with
no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above
the Veil146
The color-lines or the Veil that Dubois wrote about correspond to
the analytical model of difference we have highlighted that
operationalizes itself as the negativity of politics. As the ontological
argument was demonstrated in the various proposals of difference
and presence, only an analogical proposal offered terms directly for
difference and relation. Again, as we noted earlier in the words of
Graham Ward: analogy is an index of participation. And if we
imagine the world as a matter of participation, then difference is not
the proportion of problems, but the problem of proportions. It is a
problem in the sense more as an astonishment or marvel (to use the
words of William Desmond), but it is minimally a novelty, a difference.
But this surprise or astonishment as difference, whether unsettling or
threatening, doesnt have to be seen as inherently problematic or
divisional (think of Foucaults romanticizing of war as Being147), it
146 Ibid., p.67
147 Foucault: The problem is at once to distinguish among events
From this follows a refusal of analyses couched in terms of the
symbolic fieldand a recourse to analyses in terms of genealogy of
relations of force, strategic developments, and tactics. Here I believe
ones point of reference should not be the great model of language
(langue) and signs, but to that of war and battle. The history which
bears and determines us has the form of a war rather than that of a

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merely implicates the mediation (relation) potential in the immediacy
of difference. This potential of newness in difference and different
newness in existence is the very inspirationthe inspiring (an
encountering of the entreating spirt) that makes up the world of
difference.
Charles Baudelaire, in his essay, The Painter of Modern Life,
writes, The child sees everything in a state of newness; he [sic] is
always drunk. Nothing more resembles what we call inspiration than
the delight with which a child absorbs form and colour.148 Baudelaire
compares the genius that inspiration offers to that free intoxication of
amusement that catches the childs eye every time an object is
presented before it, whether as a new object or in the amusement of
the objects envisioned novelty.
And while this amusement of difference shows itself in us even
in our infancy, Baudelaire gives another analogy of the amusement of
difference, in the person he had defined as the painter of modern life:

language. History has no meaning (Michel Foucault and Paul

Rabinow, The Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984),
p.56.) This way of thinking, Judith Butler criticized earlier in her career
as [where] we can see that Foucault has elevated the scene of bodily
conflict to an invariant feature of historical change, and it makes sense
to ask whether war itself has not become romanticized and reified
through this theoretical move. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble:
Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990),
p.237.
148 Charles Baudelaire and Jonathan Mayne, The Painter of Modern
Life, and Other Essays (London: Phaidon, 1964), p.9.

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The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of
fishes. His passion and his profession are to become one flesh
with the crowdit is an immense joy to set up house in the
heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in
the midst of the fugitive and infinite. To be away from home and
yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be
at the center of the world149
Baudelaire then goes on to call this lover of life who makes the
whole world his family the one who enters into the crowd as though
it were an immense reservoir of electric energy. Or we might liken
him to a mirror as vast as the crowd itself; or to a kaleidoscope gifted
with consciousness, responding to each one of its movements and
reproducing the multiplicity of life and the flickering grace of all the
elements of life150
The word kaleidoscope used by Baudelaire is a very helpful term to
introduce into our thesis. Etymologically, it means the scope
(formingfrom looking) of kallos, which is Greek for beauty.
Baudelaires painter finds a home in the crowd, indeed, makes the
element of his being out of the differences of the crowd that hosts him
and which he hosts. In a certain sense, all is public, there is no
privacyin the sense of a privation of differencebut the open space
as the space for personality, specificity, relations; an openness to
behold, distinguish, and discriminate.151 Here we see how difference
149 Baudelaire, Painter, p.10
150 Ibid. pp..9-10
151 We are not here ready to define differences as distances that
localize themselves in a kind of separation or a specified community of
relations (which we will ultimately only define as localization). Being is

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inspires the painter, and how the painter forms beauty in the crowd he
finds as home. And how his painting is a kind of relation of the
difference, a beholding of it, not a consuming of it. Here we see that
desire is not to consume but to behold: we are inspired by difference
to desire a relationship with difference that aspires to an infinity of
that relationship (infinity in the reciprocity of relations). And this is
why we are ill-served when we imagine desire as need (for
consumption), when we have the infinity of desire here for us as
reciprocity of relation. This infinity of difference that is everywhere
before us that knows existentially no-lines but only openness: this is
what we call the music of being, the a-muse-ment of difference for
relation. This is the very matter of existencedifferencethat gives
form to existencerelation.152 This is the dance of difference in
relation to the musicthe amusementof difference repeating
relations. That movement in the middle that is not merely idle nor

actualized locally.
152 Can we not say that in the story of the Garden of Eden, that the
prohibition on the tree of knowledge of good and evil was not to keep
humanity ignorant nor was it to make knowledge a bad thing, but that,
to eat from that tree was to consume knowledge at once rather than
receive it as an inspiration for relation, and inspiration of relation?
(Recall Thomas states Original Sin is only the loss of the harmony of
Original Justice or Rectitude.) Can we not call the truth of the serpent
as the very reason for the fall: For in the day you eat of that fruit you
will be like God And perhaps the fall of humanity was not for
knowledge but for an identity without relation (substitution,
supplementation, succession, absoluteness, redundancy): humanity
was with God, that is, in relation with God, but they fell because they
fell out of relation with God, in wanting to be like God, another god,
and no longer in relation to God and the muses.

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overwhelmed, nor is it a dialectic to determine beyond the middle, is a
dance in the middle, of a rhythm made from the middle, out of the act
of non-contradiction, the act of relating differences in rhythm, in
dance, in relation, in being.
And here, from Baudelaires introduction of the kaleidoscope,
we are now prepared for the final revelation of our terms: from
difference and relation, we have uncovered the terms to mean
inspiration and desire, and now from inspiration and desire, we can
finally reveal the foundation of the thesis of difference and relation as
ultimately a thesis for the potential of beauty and love.

Being in Love and Love in Being

To say difference and relation are more profoundly revealed as
inspiration and desire, which again, are more profoundly revealed as
beauty and love, is not necessarily to imagine a hierarchy of or even a
distinction between the terms. It would be better perhaps to imagine
all of these terms as analogous, terms of the analogy of being. And
when we started from the existence of the act of being, to the music
for the acts of being in relation, we now find ourselves addressing the
terms for the romance of the acts of being in love. As it was stated in
the beginning, we would conclude, unashamedly, proposing terms for
romancing being. And here we find ourselves, from the prelude to the
kiss, from the foreplay to the embrace, from the romance to the

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conception: difference in relation is Being in love. But if we move too
fast we might miss the depth of this truth. Do we mean being in love,
as in the act of being is in the form of love, or is Being in love, as in
the act of love reveals the form of Being? Because if love is the form of
being, beings have their existence as in-love, but if being is the form
of love, then beings have their existence as be-loved. But of course,
we shall demonstrate the reciprocity of this circle that brings our
metaphysics all the way around: Being is in love with beings, and
beings that are beloved by Being love fellow beings out of that love.

The Romance of Being: The Call and Response of Beauty and

Love
Jean-Louis Chrtien begins his book, The Call and the Response, with
the question: Can we think of the call as the origin of speech?153
Chrtien proposes to make a case for speech as an act that comes
before the sign as a certain phenomenology for the givenness of
being. Using his argument to show that original speech is a response
to a prior original call, we will show that Chrtiens argument is
thoroughly an account of an analogical metaphysics, and from the
evidence of speech we should see very clearly the doubleness of
difference and relation which we propose is fundamental to existence
evidenced in speech.
153 Jean-Louis Chrtien, The Call and the Response (New York, NY:
Fordham University Press, 2004), p.5.

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Chrtien connects speech with hearing as a kind of reciprocity in the
difference that call introduces and the hearing of the the call that
provokes a response: together with what calls us to speak, we are
with speech already and inhabit speech. And again he says, we
must hear it, and hearing it requires that we be joined and co-joined
in advance by speech. And once more we follow his pursuit:
Convocation, in all its forms, presupposes, lest it be void of meaning,
a direction and a destination, a prior provocation, to which indeed it
responds.154
In these three passages, we see Chrtien recognize a correlation
between calling and hearing and speaking, and a correlation between
hearing made possible by calling, and a correlation between speaking
made possible by hearing the call. But all of this is made possible
because, as he says, we are with speech already.
I call this a phenomenology of analogical metaphysics, because,
as his theory observes the traces of provocation in evocation, it
reveals in that trace the logic of a transcendence that is in relation to
the appearance of the trans-action: it is certainly an ana-logic of what
appears, a logic of response. Thus, Chrtien writes: We are entangled
in speech as soon as we exist, before we have ever uttered a word,
and in this sense we have always already listened and obeyed155

154 Ibid.
155 Ibid. p.28

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And so we see, first, that being as a response (even if we term that
response a questionit is still a response), presumes 1) an ability to
respond, and 2) a hearing or seeing of something else. This something
else we have called difference, which, the response to this difference,
we have called desire. Therefore, if desire as a response is not
possible without first a call, then call, as that to which desire is a
response, is what inspires desire. And if that call is the other to which
the response is directed, then call as difference defines difference as
what comes first, and thus difference and not lack, is defined as what
inspires desire as a response (again, desire is inspired, not required).
And yet, even after we have demonstrated the inspiration of desire by
difference, we shall pursue Chrtiens argument further, as he helps
us to reveal that the inspiration of difference as a call, which the
relation of desire is the response, is ultimately the call of difference as
beauty, which inspires the response of desire as love.
Drawing on the etymology of beauty, kalon, Chrtien connects it
with the etymology of call, kalein: Beautiful, kalon, is what comes
from a call, kalein, which continues to call through it and in
it.156Here, Chrtien wants to trace in the meaning of beauty the act of
a thing that calls. Turning to a commentary on Platos Phaedrus,
Chrtien notes how beauty and call, again, reveal a relation to the
point of similarity: Dear is beauty indeed, since it is what calls to

156 Ibid. p.7

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itself (kletikon eis heauto) and converts. This is why beautiful, kalon,
describes the act of calling lovers to oneself (kalein eis heauto).157
What is considered beautiful, Chrtien wishes to show in the
etymology, is a revelation of itself not for itself but for calling out a
lover: relating itself, or through itself inspiring the love it desires as a
relation with the other (the in of inspiration, denotes the giving and
offering of spirit, spire). Beauty, as it manifests itself is expressing
itself, and as expressing itself, it is calling out its lover, it is calling out
for love in the form of the act of relation: To draw us to itself as such,
to put us in motion toward it, to move us, to come and find us where
we are so that we will seek itsuch is beautys call and such is our
vocation.158
As our vocation, our act of being, if you will, is to heed the call
of beauty, read the signs of beauty, which is none other than to be
open to difference like Baudelaires man of the crowd, or painter of a
modern life: the kaleidoscope with a conscience. But it is also beautys
(pro)vocation to inspire us, to extend its love to us as relation which is
to extend its relation to us as love.159 As Chrtien notes in the word of
157 Ibid. p.8
158 Ibid. p.9
159 Here, it cannot be taken for granted that love is the act of relation,
and so to court love is to extend an offer for relation as relation. We
can find this same imagination of love in #7 of Rilkes Letters to a
Young Poet, when he writes: Loving does not at first mean merging,
surrendering, and uniting with another person (for what would a union
be of two people who are unclarified, unfinished, and still incoherent?),
it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen; And this more
human love (which will fulfill itself with infinite consideration and

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Proclus: [B]eauty is what provokes love. The sentence goes on to
specify that this call is an awakening.160
But this awakening, this call, is not a mechanical automatic call,
it is not a demanddesire is never required. And so, by drawing from
Procluss research on the etymology of beauty, Chrtien proposes that
the call is also an act of charming: Etymologically, whether the
beautiful is called kalon because it calls to itself (kalein) or because it
enchants and charms (kelein) the beings who turn their gazes to it, it
is by its very nature worthy of love: this is why we say that love draws
the lover to the beautiful.161
Now we take the difference of the call that we have connected
to beauty to bring it back again to beauty as a call, which shares the
same etymological roots of charming. Thus, a call we call beautiful is
not merely beautiful in and of itself, but it is relational in its beauty,
and in the relating of its beauty it is charming in its call. Here we see
the call of beauty as better imagined as a romancing as relation or a
relation as romancing. Here we see that beauty is not merely
expressing its beauty for its own sake, but it is expressing its beauty

gentleness, and kindness and clarity in binding and releasing) will

resemble what we are now preparing painfully and with great struggle:
the love that consists in this: that two solitudes protect and border and
greet each other.
160 Ibid. pp.9-10
161 Ibid. p.12

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for relational-sake, it is charming in its call: Charm is only a form and
species of the call, kelein of kalein162
And so the call that is beauty, that is the beautiful call that
charms, is the charming call that inspires the response to it, it
inspires the desire for its extended relation as relation. But this call
that is beautiful which charms, is both the otherness of difference to
the one it calls and the relation to difference in the one it calls:
Moreover what is novel and indeed unheard-of in this recall is
precisely that it must call us back, convert us, and turn us towards
what we have in fact always/already seen.163 And here Chrtien
completes the circle for us that this thesis sought to demonstrate: the
reciprocity between difference and relation, inspiration and desire,
beauty and love, is how beings ultimately know themselves as an act
of love (Being communicating its relation to being), and how beings
ultimately express themselves in the form of loves act. We see this
essential relationality in being shown in speech: a response to a call, a
call of love, a being of exchange: The speech of mortal beings never
lies in itself, it lies in its relation to the speaking of language and is
nothing but this very relatedness. The ability to hear presupposes that
we belong to the call164

162 Ibid. p.12

163 Ibid. p.10
164 Ibid. p.28

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Conclusion
Infinite Dance: The Romance of Being in Love Without Security
And now we finally arrive at the end. At what appears as a journey but
yet we are still present, still at the same place. And we are certainly at
a place, for this presence is not absent, it is not an absence, but this
presence is also not simply the same. This presence is not the success
of the individual nor the progression for a whole, nor even the excess
of all others. It is a presence that is forever present that is forever
both differentiating and relating. It has more rhythm than a dialectic,
more relationality than uniformity, more intimacy than excess. But
how can we make this more than just ideal? How can we romanticize
being in light of the division and war that appears everywhere to
dislocate being and aggravate difference? How can we be realistic
about being, if we dare to be romantic about being? Is this not only a
blindness about being as we know it appears? But here is where we
boldly offer our terms for difference and relation with gracefulness yet
without security: the only difference between blindness and boldness
is seeing, and the only difference between seeing the differences of
being as fractures and seeing the differences of being as discoveries
the openness of beingis transfiguration:165this act of vision is what
165 I must here acknowledge my good friend and colleague at
Vanderbilt, Chance Woods (Doctoral candidate in the English
department) for his insightful suggestion that before the resurrection
there is the transfiguration. And before one can imagine pursuing life
beyond death (or in the face of death) ones vision must be
transfigured. I use his suggestion with the practice of anagogy to see

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we see in the resourcefulness of the bricoleur, or the imagination of
the artist, or the organic dedication of the artisan, or the work of
making-with and making-of by the poet, or the care-taking of the
lover. All of these acts find and make infinity in and with the finite,
they discover (the removal of a cover), that in the reciprocity of
relation, infinity is in the finite, that the finite is the giving of the
infinite: specifically, intimately, locally, openly as infinitely. Being as a
reciprocity of difference and relation means that being is
fundamentally a community of openness. And as open, fundamentally
open: it has no security, it offers no security, for security, as we
demonstrated earlier in the etymology, presumes a lack of difference,
a lack of care. But the insecurity of Beings opennessfrom in- not +
Latin securus free from care, reveals that being is fundamentally
not free from care, for difference is fundamentally about relation, and
relation is fundamentally about caring about the difference it relates,
caring about the reciprocity it returns: turns again and again,
mutually. And this eternal re-turning, a turning of mutuality, with
regard to care and the muses of inspiration, which is eternally turning
of a togetherness as togetherness of difference, is the orchestration of
Being, the romance of its choreographyfrom the Greek khoreia
dancing in unison (from khoros chorus) + -graphy. This is the very
in reality (the visible) the relationship of the in-and-beyond (invisible).
Or said another way, to see the potential of what is not seen as a way
to not limit the fullness and infinity of what is seen: the factual never
captures all of the actual.

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dance of being to the music of Being which we have called the
romance of Being: difference as the potential of desire, desire as the
potential of love, love as the potential of dance, dance as the potential
of infinity.
So how now this being in love without security? To which we
only reply: indeedin the very act as deed: for without security is how
we love (loving through care), and for our relations with differences is
how we have our being (being as reciprocal). And the act of being, as
we have demonstrated in analogical metaphysics, reveals the ultimate
demonstration of the greatest relation between differences: The
Loving One, the One, who, in the first-person plural (the I who is the
We), communicates, without security, a relation through Being for
beings, to communicate, without security, the relations of their beings
with fellow beings. And in the enchanting warmth of the ultimate
prelude to that ultimate kiss, the charming presence of that
anticipation saturates infinitely all of our kisses, all of our embraces,
as a participation of that infinite kiss and embrace. And infinitely the
music romances us, and infinitely we dace to those romances, and
infinitely we repeat our beingour being in love.

Postscript: Metaphysical Sketches

This thesis was only the beginning of an unwelcomed response to the
ongoing debates between conservative and liberal thinkers regarding

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justice and equality, difference and relation, ethics and liberty. The
proposal was both classic and contemporary, progressive and
conservative, religious and agnostic. But what tied all these various
implications together was the analogical method of metaphysics. This
thesis attempted to propose terms for an actual philosophy of
difference, or a philosophy of an actual difference, and made the case
that such an attempt could best be done (perhaps only be done) first,
metaphysically, and secondly, analogically: that is, analogical
metaphysics, or the analogy of being, provided the most robust
method of evaluating existence as such, and from that vantage point,
proposed a rhetoric, ethics, and aesthetics for such an account of
existence and its potential for infinite relations. Below I have
submitted a handful of fragments that did not make the final draft of
the official thesis due to time and space constraints. They show, if
anything, my attention to aspects of the problematic that I wasnt able
to mention in this thesis. From what will follow below in certain
fragments, I have submitted my discussion of difference and
resistance, the principle of identity in analytical philosophies of
difference, the subsidization of power by existence, and philosophies
hatred of being in the form of politics. If there is anything this thesis
wishes to challenge, it is the politicization of being, which has
inflamed the existence of beings and their relations. We are currently

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living in world set aflame by politics. And we are fighting fire with
fire.

Philosophys Hatred of Being

Philosophy doesnt love being. It has become entirely too needy for
security (and power)166 to love being. It discovers in being its own
insufficiency, because being, as the act of existence, reveals
simultaneously to philosophy its possibility and impossibility: being
evades objectification of mind and subjectifcation of value. As a result,
the philosophy that currently monopolizes our discourse draws its
rhetoric from a protest of being, perhaps even a dare to depose being,
if only to presumptuously reduce the acts of being to the so-called
facts of history (as those facts are determined). This martial turn in
philosophy, from thinking being to contesting being, has terminated
philosophical-thoughtthe love of wisdominto political-tactic: the
strategy of the indivisible. The rhetoric (or tropological orientation) of
being in a growing number of philosophical programs has defined the
act of being as an (ideological) act of resistance (to being).
But the previous slouching of philosophical thought that has now born
itself roughly anew as the bellicosity to being in thought is not without
its reason. The strategies of resistance and emancipation from
166 We will demonstrate that being has no security. This play on the
word in-security comes from the etymology of the word security,
which, from the medieval Latin insecurus unsafe, from in- not +
Latin securus free from care, or from in-1not + secure.

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Being167 are the new fortifications of the gathered fragments of so
much oppressed thought and body from under the foot of an austere
center that had determined to hold captive the manifold acts of being
in order to monopolize the legitimacy of beings ethos. But that center
could not hold. And in the eventual outbreak from (and exposure to) a
universe of emergent multiplicities, philosophys moment to allow the
mind and bodythe life of the soulto embrace beings manifold acts
of existence lost itself in a counter-attack on the ideology of oneness
and structure, and ontologized that aggression as the (de)meaning of
being: a being of no meaning. As it stands now, philosophy without
being deploys the differences of its thought as fragments seeking
political forms: thinking is for negation and negotiation. And from the
strategical viewpoint, the distances that map the differences of
thought are translated into the separation of differences, and the
separation of differences are stratified as the division/solidarities of
differences, and these divisions and solidarities of difference return to
thought as the definition of the being of difference: the negation of
beings unity: the politics of identity. This thesis will sketch an

167 We will show that the capitalization of being as Being in the

majority of post-modern polemics has been half-justified and halfmalfeasant. There has indeed been an attempt by a hegemonic way of
thought to capitalize on being in a way that has been found wanting
(the univocity of being), and there has indeed been an attempt by a
greedy polemic to decapitate the head of a hyperbolized notion of
being in order to eliminate being entirely.

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alternative definition of the being of difference, namely, the desire of
relation.

Deconstructing Protest and Resistance

Jose Medina, in his work, The Epistemology of Resistance, makes the
case for a
democratic sensibilities we need to cultivate to work toward
epistemic justice are sensibilities that enable us to appreciate
the epistemic value of dissentAn epistemic model of
democracy that gives centrality to the ever-present possibility of
dissent and contestation is what I call a resistance model of
democracy, which is superior to the consensus model of giving
us a powerful rationale for valuing the mutual engagement of
diverse perspectives.168
We have made the case that difference has a doubleness that is
reference not resistance. In fact, it is resistance that is the negation of
exclusivity of oneness that many post-modern philosophers hang their
critiques upon. However, as we have shown in Derrida, Deleuze,
Williams, and even Hegel, difference exists to relate, because it comes
to exist as a relation. Therefore, we challenge Medinas notion of
resistance model. For we agree with what his thesis desires at heart
(the inclusion of difference), but we disagree with the form he gives
this thesis (difference as resistance). The epistemic value of dissent
he locates is only an act of the epistemic value of difference, as we
have demonstrated in the terms of desire as knowledge of difference

168 Medina, Epistemology of Resistance, p. 10, emphasis in original

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for relation. As we maintain, difference and resistance are
contradictions. Or said another way, difference is the diction of being,
resistance is the contra-diction for non-being. For models that wish to
give form to difference against oppression, it is crucial to understand
that form against oppression not as a resistance to oppression but as
an insistence of difference in the face of oppressive resistances.
Difference is, resistance is-not.
When we consider the etymology of resistance, from the
French rsistance, which comes from the Latin resistentia, we find the
verb resistere: to hold back; moreover, from the root word resist, we
see how the Latin resistere comes from re- (expressing opposition) +
sistere stop (reduplication of stare to stand).169 Of course, a
standing or a stopping is contrary to the perpetuation and motion
implied in the notion of difference (difference, itself coming from the
Latin, differre, from dis- from, away + ferre bring, carry.

170

).

Therefore, we can initially state that difference and resistance appear

(etymologically at least) contrary to each othercontradictions in the
truest senseand as such, difference doesnt resist. Rather, it should
be stated, that it is the identical that resists, that is, it is that manner
of proposing being (perpetuating personhood(s)), whether univocally
or equivocally, that resists difference (whether formally, or
relationally, respectively). And it is the resistance from a univocal
169 NOAD
170 Ibid

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manner of proposing the plural forms of being, or a resistance from an
irreducibly equivocal manner of proposing the relations of the forms
of being, that difference meets its oppression or persecution. That is,
from the univocal model, difference is a transgression of identity (it
betrays the prevailing one-form), and from the equivocal model,
difference is the pan-aggression of different171 identities (each form
is a negation of the other form). And thus, from both privative
models, the relational-quality of difference is always resisted.
But the purpose of deconstructing resistance is not to disregard
movements of resistance by the oppressed or on behalf of the
oppressed, or merely even to reverse the subject of resistance as the
oppressoreven while this move is crucial towards our final purpose
Deconstructing resistance as a manner of difference, in order to
re-trace in the etymology of resistance the manner of oppression of
difference by the identical, can, as we shall argue, re-characterize
movements of justice on behalf of groups like #blacklivesmatter,
trans-gender folk, certain religious communities, various folk
protesting hate and indifference, into a focus and practice of
empowering the contest of the re-insistence of the significance of
those marginalized groups. However, despite our notions of the re171 Here we are stating that the equivocal model of irreducible
difference is not a real difference in the qualitative sense, for difference
qua difference, as Graham Ward has noted, makes no qualitative
sense, but is merely a difference in the quantitative sense: different
things irreducibly identical to themselves, and thus, not the identity of
difference, but different identifies.

108
insistence of difference, we cannot disregard the real matter of
incongruity of difference qua resistance that happens. In fact, the
initial effect, and foundation of oppression from the resistance of the
Centers identity to the significance of an individuals instance of
difference (or distance from an identity with the Center) is the feeling
of incongruity, the pressure to justify ones difference in relation to
the resistance of the Center, rather than the initial distance from the
Center. To justify ones difference negatively as opposed to
relationally, especially if the difference is of a greater dissimilarity
from which an inextricable similarity remains, requires a strenuous
pressing against the ethos for distance that gives the name of
oppression (from medieval Latin oppressare, from Latin oppresspressed against, from the verb opprimere ).
But we shall demonstrate that this incongruous intention of
difference as resistance that requires (or facilitates) oppressionand
not necessarily tension, seems to be based mostly on two basic
(problematic) conditions within an ethos: 1) Personhood requires
power for freedom, and 2) Personhood requires recognition for
power. While these presuppositions commonly reflect the burden and
benefit of a theory of inter-subjectivity, they multiply the burden and
rarefy the benefit by certifying (absolutizing) the terms of these
two conditions. If being is to be recognized totally, then relations
cannot be specific nor organic. But we have offered above that being

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as relational is not total but local and not determinate but
determinable; and intersubjectivity is a dialectical misnomer of
personhood, it fumbles the point of personhood. Personhood, as
essentially relational, is formally open (it is not pending a closure or a
determinate form), and as existentially objective is materially actual
(its form of non-closure is the very matter of its definite act). This
means that, to be, has no determinate-form but a determinable-form,
that is, its definite form is determinably open, because it is essentially
relative.

Existence, Power, Philosophy, and Politics

The allure of power is indirectly subsidized by the generous
interminability of existence. This truth perpetuates philosophy and
politics, respectively. But this is a truth that also affords a great
mishap. For existence doesnt depend on power, power depends on
existence (and it is hardly apropos to existence); and philosophy
doesnt depend on politics, politics depends on philosophy (and it is
merely apropos to philosophy). And yet the modes of our intellectual
enterprises increasingly draw from the reverse case: power and
politics as determining the conditions of existence and philosophy.
And in the mishap of this reversal the challenges of our times remain
inflamed and barely embraced. For existence will persist nevertheless
and it will not be mastered, and it will continue to multiply its acts

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and intensities. And when wisdom of its persistence and
multiplications (philosophy) falls behind or beside the presence of its
being forever-present,172 force takes the name of power (politics) as a
form of recourse toas opposed to discourse withthe rich
interminability of existence.
Time inflamed is the subject of war, time embraced is the
subject of love, and in between the politics of power that reforms the
extreme of the former and the philosophy of existence that relates the
radical nature of the latter a rich ambiguity of existence retains its
invincibility through life and death. But the richness of the ambiguity
of existence brooks no premium, its currencyits durationis
nonpareil, its acts are equally-unique. And this equality and unicity of
existence dramatizes an experience of reality that is neither chaotic
nor total; its suspension between these two extremes makes possible
philosophy, and as a result, politics. Out of the ambiguity of
existences simultaneous equality and unicity the phenomenon of
difference is disclosed in the problem of universality and particularity,
which reveals itself, at all times and all places, as forever the question
of existence, or said another way, forever the quest of existence.
In American politics, between the so-called Left and the Right,
the problem of universality and particularity finds its political form in
the debate of emancipation and liberation: the freedom of body and
172 Being as the verb or act in and through space as opposed to the
thing mere space represents or is reduced to.

111
business.173 This shared theme between both sides of a kind of ethics
of deregulation (or deregulation of ethics) exposes the limitation of
both camps political resolve: Politics alone cannot afford coherence to
the multiplicitous acts of being, indeed, we will show later, politics is
predicated on a fortification against beings multiplicity for the
irreducibility of the indivisible. When political philosophers (or
political economists) attempt to reduce the problem of existence to
political terms (or disregard the ontological stakes at hand), what we
see is only the existence of politics as a terminology of problems.
Politics takes existence for granted for it is determined by existence,
and like, as Charles Hart has noted of the sciences and mathematics,
[they] assume the existence of their data and therefore do not
consider existence as such.174 This doesnt mean that politics is
useless, but that politics is supported by philosophy just as philosophy
is supported by metaphysics. Metaphysics, which claims to be the
science of the act of existence, doesnt need to take the place of
politics (no more than politics should desire to take the place of
metaphysics), but rather, it must always be the foundation for

173 The irony of this debate is that the accomplishment of one sidess
goal requires the cost of the other sidess loss (bodies want people to
mind their own business, and businesses want people to mind their
own bodies, but bodies need businesses to mind the business of their
bodies and business needs bodies to mind the bodies of their
businesses).
174 Thomistic Metahphysics, viii, emphasis added

112
reconciling action with relation, relation with thought, and thought
with being as the act of existence.
This thesis will not deny the viability of politics with philosophy
and yet it will hedge at the proposal of the form of power as
appropriate to the act of existence. This will be a philosophical
rejoinder to the political recourses taken by the Right and Left that
make so many forms out of the same principle of deregulation and
negation. More than enough has been said about liberation and
emancipation, and more, nonetheless, is still yet to come. And yet
politics continues to exacerbate voices of dissent to the point of
commodifying those voices into talking-points and support for
incumbency (or insurgency).175
At the time of the writing of this paper, just two days separate
these words from the greatest single-manned massacre in world
history. A man with alleged ties to ISIS gunned down nearly 50 human
beings in a gay club on Latin music night. The allure of eliminating
such a tragic possibility is tempting but the practice of affording a
more virtuous coherence of the multiplicity of existing is more
realistic. Our times require better answers to our questions, even if
those answers are not solutions to our problems.

175 One only needs to read the work of Thomas Frank.

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Difference in the Crosshair of Philosophy: The Act of Difference
or the Different Acts of the Same

In what was attempted above, a discussion of the problem of

universality and particularity was pursued as another way to conceive
of the classical problem of the One and the Many. We attempted to
show how the analytical model for difference eschews a metaphysics
of difference for a politics of difference without metaphysics. This
move beyond the metaphysics of difference translates the problem of
the One and the Many (Universality and Particularity) into the politics
of power (or play) for universalizing the particular. The alternative
view, that is, the analogical view, proposed a reconciling of the
differences of being only as a metaphysics of difference that doesnt
reduce being to politics but rather communities. The case for
analogical terms was an attempt to translate the classical problem of
the One and the Many (Universality and Particularity) into the
mannerism of cultivation (articulation) for particularizing the
Universal.
We attempted to demonstrate how the preposition of the
particular to the universal (or the universal to the particular)
distinguished the analytical emphasis on the tactics of non-divisibility
that determine the individual (the affirmation of negativity) from the
analogical emphasis of the habits of in-finity that constitute the

114
personal (the reciprocity/repetition of relation). Preposition, as it was
rhetorically used in this thesis, relied on its grammatical and
etymological meaning: pre-position as the place before or at the fore
of a subject/object, and preposition as a word [logos] governing, and
usually preceding, a noun or pronoun and expressing a relation to
another word or element in the clause This way to philosophically
think of preposition, was, as we tried to demonstrate, a form of the
philosophy of presence.
The two parts of the essay evaluated the classical problem of the
One and the Many and the Particular and the Universal as a problem
of presence or preposition that defines the transcendental condition of
difference and relation (i.e., the conditions for a relationship of
difference). It was argued that the notion of preposition (the
conditions for a position) in the analytical model of difference without
metaphysics subjectifies (or rejects entirely) the notion of preposition
to difference (and thus, presence), and as a result, objectifies
difference as such, and from this pure externality (or materiality) of
difference, relationality was rendered either artificial or
commercial.176 This objectification of difference as such coupled with
the subjectification of value (otherwise known as hermeneutics) for
that condition as a matter of form, reveals the philosophy of difference

176 Relationship as either an artifice or commerce offers the act of

referralthe act of a relationas either a parody (play) or a product
(force).

115
without metaphysics to be ultimately a counterfeit philosophy of
difference: a counter work to identity: a philosophy of identity-ascounter.177 We tried to demonstrate that this philosophy of difference
is the amalgamation of philosophical thought from the neo-Kantian
inheritance of Kants transcendental philosophy (conditioning being in
ethics and science), Heideggers project of onto-temporality or
temporal ontology for the destruction of metaphysics (temporalizing
being in hermeneutics and histrionics178), and Jacques Derrida,
Michel Foucault, and Giles Deleuzes post-structural critique of the
metaphysics of presence (externalizing being in politics and
idiosyncratics179). We tried to demonstrate that whether presence
was re-articulated as absence of relation (Derrida and Foucault) or
process of indifference of negating negations (Deleuze or Hegel180),
both articulations complete Nietzsches half-correct allergy to
essentialist metaphysics of representation and Suarezs inheritance
from Scotus, which culminated his ultimate project of will to power:181
the determination of the self to self-determinate (power). The tactics
of the will to power that is formalized as being-political is the
ultimate principle of identity: the mono-logic (logic of the one) for
the determination of an auto-logic (logic of the self), that, we shall
177
178
179
180
181
a

See William Desmond

Define:
Define:
Define my inclusion of Hegel here.
In my paper for Jay Geller, I demonstrate how Nieztche goes from

116
show, determines itself tauto-logically (the logic of the same, or, as it
is defined in logical terms: A statement that is true by necessity or by
virtue of its logical form.). At the conclusions of the presentation of
the analytical model for a philosophy of difference without
metaphysics, we hoped to make clear that a mono-logic for being (the
affirmation of negation) operationalized socially as the politics of the
identifications of differences (a.k.a., identity politics182) terminates in
either war or capitalism. Either differences must be eliminated or
differences must be made profitable.
The second and third parts of this thesis we attempted o re-imagine
the same problem of the One and the Many, the Particular and the
Universal, as a problem revealed as the proportion of the presence of
relation in preposition for being that defines the transcendental

182 Identifications of differences is how the principle of identity is

smuggled back in to a philosophy of difference. By making the act of
identity the prerogative of the subject of difference (identification),
the principle of relation, which is the only alternative to the principle of
negation (the inverse act of indivisibility or counter-act of exclusion) is
converted into an artificial principle of relation determined by identity
that reorganizes the co-incidences of different negations as the
contests of negotiations of differences, which founds the ethic and
myth (and hope) of democracy. What will be shown is that the act of
identification by difference as a politic is actually the different acts of
identity as the spatializing of a micro-totality. The co-incidences of the
spatializing of micro-totalities in limited space terminates either in the
bloodshed of war or the virtual attrition of capitalism, politics is only
the strained euphemism of this bleak destiny. The only the hope for
actualizing the myth (and ethic) for democracy must be founded on the
habits of open communities repeating the localization of relations.
Totality of any kind (whether evil or theoretically good) is evil, because
it either presumes the infinite act of reference to a totality (a
transcendental logic) or it refuses any contrary act of reference.

117
condition of difference and relation. As the proposed alternative to the
analytical model of difference, we attempted to demonstrate that the
analogical notion of preposition (the conditions for a position) of
difference for relation as a metaphysics of difference in relation,
objectifies (or romanticizes183) the notion of the preposition to
difference, and as a result, subjectifies difference as relation, which
choreographs or uni-versalizesturns in unisonthe respective
differences between the subject and object into a respective relation
of togetherness of the two as one: the space of presence as a
preposition to difference presents itself as the intention of an infinite
act of universality for the potential of particular relations and opposed
to a notion of presence as the retention of a totalized universality as
the negation of potential particulars. If presence is then imagined as
183 While this thesis has no qualms with the notion of romanticizing,
it is not deaf to the usual allergy to such a notion. As the common
definition of the word usually connotes a certain idealization or
unrealism of a thing by the knower, this thesis maintains this
connotation with a slight alteration: elevating the freedom of the idea
from the fortifications of identity (idealization), and imagining the
infinite reality of realism as such, infiniteun finishedin its reality,
and as such, rendering only a dogmatism of finitude (totality) as the
only unrealism. By objectifying existence romantically, the knower
acquiesces to a relation of a thing beyond itself on terms that can
transcend itself, and as such, further differentiate itself. This same
understanding of the impossibility found in an expressed as the
possible is what we also call art. Hence, to romanticize being is not to
think of it as something that is not real, or think of it on terms that are
not real, but to think of it in terms that relate differences in ways that
are radical and reciprocal. This is how this thesis employs the term of
romance. (This way of a sweet, new, style is not unlike the higher
anagogical courting of the Beloved that was the mark of the 13th
century Italian Humanism of Arnaut Daniel, Petrach, and to a certain
extent, Dante).

118
the potential of the particular to not universalize itself (which might
be the Hegelian move of subject as substance) but rather to
universalize its relations, then to reject presence and its pre-position
as the condition for relations is to reject relations, and thus, again, we
see that the critique against the metaphysics of presence is always a
critique against the universal potential of relations particularized in
differences. This thesis hoped to provide terms for an analogical
model of a metaphysics of difference that determines the conditions of
being only on (radically) relational terms. The analogical model of
difference and relation exchanges the tactics for the power of
different identities (for the purpose of constituting the Subject) with
the habits of the power of different relations (for the purpose of
constituting relations of persons): again, being is related locally as
opposed to negated universally.
These terms were to demonstrate that a metaphysics of
difference and relation can be proposed through a translation of
presence as the preposition of the intention of universality and not its
retention. The potential of relation in difference has always been the
essence of existence. This relation in difference that is truer of the
human spirit than any lack or production usually takes the name and
form of love. The preposition of the potential of relation that is the
condition of difference and its acts of relation can be reimagined as a
position in the fore for relation, or said even more charmingly, as the

119
foreplay of presence towards our being in love. Before every kiss,
there is always a prelude, a play, a radical act, before the embrace.

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