​Chapter 23

The free cut follows from no prior cut and institutes sides where there were none. Asking what it comes out of cannot be answered by naming a cause or by saying "nothing," because "nothing" occupies a side of the distinction between something and nothing. The same trouble attends any answer. Whatever is named as the source has been cut out of a ground to be named, and arrives too late, being a product of the operation it was supposed to precede. The cut cannot be born from a thing or a domain, since each is bounded by a cut; it is not chaos, as chaos is disorder that negates order, and both lie on the axis established by ordering; it is not emptiness, which is a container found unoccupied.

Tiamat names what the cut is born out of. Marduk draws the first cut, and she becomes sky and earth: a ruled world, a field of differentiated things, above and below. The cutting leaves a body divided into predicates, which is what a world is. A subsequent grasp repeats the stroke: it divides the ground into this and not-this. The ground is Tiamat again, the undivided, and the grasp kills her in the motion that opens her, converting what was there into a distinction, a word or a nature. The killing is not a misfortune to be regretted or avoided. It is what cutting is, and a cut that left her intact would not have cut. She is not a beginning that once occurred and is now behind us. She occurs wherever a cut is drawn, as what the grasp divides in the drawing.

Not/One marks Tiamat at the level of writing. Not-one, with a hyphen, stays inside the opposition it was meant to leave. A negated term depends on what it negates: not-A is defined by A, cannot be understood without A, and remains on the axis where A sits. Calling Tiamat not-one keeps unity as the standard and marks a deviation from it. The hyphen binds; it is a small bridge, and what it joins stays joined.

Not/One does what the hyphen cannot. The slash holds the two apart without joining them — it is the interval between the negation and what would be negated, at a place where neither operation has yet been performed. Not has not become an operator, as an operator requires something to operate on and the slash withholds it; One has not become a predicate, as predication requires a subject and none has been established. The meaning lies between the terms, the only place where writing can set such an interval down​^[3].

Tiamat is Not/One: not the Whole, not All-Unity, not the Absolute installed in the seam. Not many: not atoms, not a scattering, not chaos as a heap of discrete things. She precedes the "not," since negation cuts what it denies from what it leaves standing, and she precedes the negation of that negation as well. She is before one and before many, before counting, before the question of how many can arise, since counting begins once things have been cut out as countable. The slash is Tiamat in writing. Frank takes the One and Nāgārjuna the Not. The interval is what both are cut from, and neither reaches back to it. The Dao that can be named is not the constant Dao, and the nameless is where heaven and earth begin: the same interval before the cut, and the traditions of the One reach it repeatedly. What differs is who cuts. There the Dao divides — the ten thousand things issue from it, and a man's part is to stop obstructing. Here the cutter is born in Tiamat and cuts on his own account, so that the interval yields an author along with a world.

Frank gives an ontology of the Whole, in which the cut is a mode of the One. Nāgārjuna gives a therapy of positions, in which each cut fails under examination and the failing is the point. This account gives the geometry of the birth: the cut arising in a gap, with the Not/One before it and the word after it. The tetralemma operates on cuts and shows that none of them holds; the present account concerns their birth, while the grasp has not yet taken form and the ground is not yet ruled. Four doors, and behind each door there is no room. The room is in the threshold, where the door has not yet been set into the wall, and the threshold is neither door nor wall nor some third thing beside them. Nāgārjuna showed that behind the doors there is nothing. What is left is sitting on the threshold — and this is not a position, not a therapy, not an ontology, but the Not/One for as long as it lasts, before the first word kills it by naming.