​Chapter 10

A rat works its way toward the bait. It approaches, retreats, approaches again, and the hesitation is real: the animal has not settled what to do, and then it seizes the food and runs. John seizes the money and runs too. On the account given, an author arose in the settling — and nothing said so far marks the two cases apart.

The comparison may be offered as an insult and is not one. No hierarchy of creatures has been assumed here, and freedom has not been made a dignity raising its possessor above the animals. Whether an author arose in the rat cannot be answered for the same reason it cannot be known for John: no observation reports authorship, and refusing the rat by pointing to what a rat is would appeal to nature, disqualified as a ground. The rat might be free.

What the case does is press for the form of the postulate, since two conditions have been running unnamed.

John performs the act. He takes it as his in performing it, and the deed is not transferred to the circumstance, to the character, to the passion, or to the state he was in because the taking enters the performance instead of arriving after it, which separates it from the retroactive appropriation. Remove this and no free deed remains.

Performing does not yet distinguish John from a man carrying out what was settled long before he sat down. The second condition is that nothing dictates the answer. Not the character he had formed, not the rules he had taken on, not the hunger or the fear of the cell — all of them are at the table, and none of them rule the case. The ruling is done in the settling. What John decides may coincide with what such a man usually decides, but what matters is whether the answer was in force before the case arose.

The determinist takes both conditions and loses nothing. The sense of doing it himself is one more state arising from the states before it. The break with nature is one strand of a formation prevailing over another — hunger outweighed the prohibition, and no nature was broken. He is not wrong on his terms, and none of this was placed against him. It gives the postulate content and no evidence.

A man snaps at his wife because he is quick-tempered. The deed is his, nobody performed it for him, and it was dictated by the man he had become. Raskolnikov brings down the axe and watches himself doing it, present at the killing as a spectator of his own arm. Pathology carries each of them to its limit. The anarchic hand reaches for what its owner had decided against and pursues an aim with every appearance of purpose; he watches it, and sometimes restrains it with his good hand the way one restrains a dog. The man checking the lock for the eleventh time knows the lock is shut, says so, and checks it — he goes to the door himself, and the answer was in force before he reached the landing.

If the author arises in the free act, then he arises with each free act; then John before the theft and John after it have no author in common. Every settling constitutes its own author. Between them nothing passes — no substance holding the acts of one man together, since a substance is a nature and would deliver the verdict in advance. A person becomes a sequence of unconnected flashes, each with its own momentary owner, and asking whose life it is has no answer.

In Sartre's The Transcendence of the Ego the I is no inhabitant of consciousness and no pole from which acts issue: consciousness encounters it out in the world alongside other objects, constituted in reflection after the fact. Assembly of that kind is appropriation given a longer run, and appropriation was refused where the doing already had someone doing it. A unity arriving afterward looks back at the deeds from outside, which is the position of anyone who reads a character off a record, and an author is not to be found there.

The bill is the account's own. Agent-causation carried a persisting substance and received identity across time as a gift, thrown in with the power to act. That substance was refused, and refusing it removes the gift. Whatever holds a man the same across his deeds has to be bought separately, and the only currency the account has left is the act.

Something holds him the same in any case, and it is furnished without anyone's help. The same body carries both, the same memory delivers the one to the other, the same name is on the documents, the same habits of speech and appetite and fear persist through the interval. Most lives are held together this way and held together well. The connection is real, and what supplies it is nature — the settled formation running on, joining the man to himself in the operation by which it produces most of what he does. A line runs through the deeds and nobody is walking it.

Free acts do not extend that way. An author arises in the settling and the settling ends. Nature goes on stitching the bearer, which was never in question; what it does not stitch is authors, since the whole point of the free act was that it did not come from the formation. Free settlings therefore sit scattered through a continuous biography, each with its own author and no thread between them.

Something would have to take those authors as one, and it cannot be anything they share. Whatever they shared would belong to the nature. Nothing is available for the work except another act: the Name. A man may settle freely without ever performing it. Each settling then has its author, while nothing institutes the authors of different settlings as one. The bearer remains continuous through body, memory, habit, and record; authorship stays local to the act. Most lives are conducted without it, and nothing in them is defective for that.

The scattered flashes are real, and the objection would go wrong in calling them impossible. A man of fifty may speak of the man he was at thirty as somebody else, and mean it precisely — no amnesia, the record intact and available. That man settled things for himself and this one does too, and they are two authors, since nothing was ever done to make them one.

Such an author dies with the deed or gets handed to somebody else. "I did it, and I am not that man now; I don't know what came over me" — the one who acted is spoken of as vanished, which he is, no Name having taken him up. "The devil tempted me" puts an author in his place, and the substitution is what makes the excuse attractive: the deed keeps an owner and the speaker is not him.

Where the Name occurs, it lays down no character, requires no consistency, and forbids no departure. Any such content would become another nature and rule on the next case from behind. The Name takes the authors arising in separate settlings as one singular, without deriving their identity from anything they share.

A title, an initiated identity, or a description assumed and worn does not accomplish this. Each supplies a formation by which a man may recognize himself. The Name is a free act, and its taking receives its force from nowhere outside the taking.

A man performs the Name and no deed of his is thereby required, forbidden, or predicted. The record shows what it showed before, and he behaves as he behaved. An act with no consequence in conduct looks like a word doing no work.

The emptiness is the condition. Whatever determines the next deed is a law, and an act that determined anything would install one — the Name would rule from behind like the character it was meant to be free of. It takes the authors and leaves them unencumbered, which is the only way authors can be taken as one without a nature being made of them.

Something does change, and it lies outside conduct. A man who has performed no Name may say of a settling ten years back that another man made it, and the statement is exact. Where the Name has been taken, that sentence is unavailable to him: the author of the old settling is the author of this one, and what was done there is his to answer for here. No deed follows, none is barred. The Name fixes the ownership, and emptiness of content leaves ownership untouched.

The Name is a settling that has a case before it. What lies on this table are the authors who have arisen, and the question of whether they are one. The case grows urgent through a man's reluctance to scatter — that he does not want the one who acted last year to be somebody else. Reluctance is just a ground that settles nothing: wanting to remain oneself is delivered by the formation like every other want, and a man who wants it has thereby done nothing yet.

Which makes the Name an act performed on acts. The first-order settling closes a question about what to do; this one closes a question about who did the closing, and the same operation runs at the higher level. No second primitive is needed for it.

An open case can be closed the other way. A man may take the authors as one, and he may decline to, and declining is not the same as never having raised the matter. Most lives never raise it: the authors arise and go out, and nothing is refused because nobody asked. Refusal asks and answers — these are not one, let them stand apart — and dissolution of that kind is a deed rather than a subsidence. An author arises in it, as in any settling, and no Name takes him up. Traditions that dismantle the self and hand back a deeper one arrive at a different place by a route that looks similar from outside. Here nothing is handed back.

The Name does not occur alongside the settlings or between them. The settlings have dates; the Name has none, cutting across authors rather than along time. It does not carry an author forward through time. It institutes the authors arising at different points as one.

The rat can be answered here. What the Name takes is what reflection turns up every time it runs: not the matter under review, which differs from case to case, but the process of reviewing it. The loop that opened the first chapter yields nothing else in common — everything else it finds belongs to the formation. A rat may have an open case and settle it. What does not happen is the second turn: the animal never comes round to the one who did the settling. Nothing is left over for a Name to take. It is not lower for that — free acts may be scattered through its life as they are through John's, with no author of them ever taken up as one.

Can a Name take up authors arisen in different bodies? Nothing was said to pass between the settlings it joins.

Delivery is what a body supplies, and it is not identity. The Name is performed and takes up what is present to be taken: an earlier author reaches this table by the formation that carries the case forward. Another body receives none of it — no memory, no desire that made the case urgent, no skill developed in the doing. It lacks the material for the act. Two men who close the same question the same way are two authors. Sameness of outcome never counted. Traditions that practice invocation claim the material is detachable. The practitioner acts as the continuation of what has no body here, and the form invoked delivers what memory offers in the ordinary case — a case to be taken up, and a manner of taking it. Whether that delivery occurs is not settled here. The limit on Names across bodies is a limit of resources, and where a tradition claims to supply the resources otherwise, the dispute is about the supply.

Dissociative identity divides a nature, and a nature is the kind of thing this account leaves divisible. The parts run apart — one set of memories, manner, and fear kept from another, each stretch stitched to itself and meeting the rest as strangers. Dictating is what a nature does, and here it dictates severally. How many authors have arisen in that body is untouched, no case of this kind counting them, and the continuity of a nature was never the mark of one.

None of which the determinist needs to concede. Two trained systems in one brain, two sets of states, the whole picture translated as before. What has been set out is the content of the postulate: an author constituted in the settling, and a Name by which authors constituted apart are one.