​Chapter 24

Everything said so far has been said by negation. Say the pre-differentiated often enough and a primal medium takes shape: an ocean that was there before the world, waiting for Marduk, existing in its own right. A purely negative account inevitably gives Not/One the outline of a substance. Tiamat requires a positive account of what occurs under that name.

Not/One is the instituting break: the event in which prior determinacy ceases to be inherited and new determinacy arises. More densely: the becoming of difference where difference is not yet given. She does not hold possible differences in reserve. She is their birth, and that is what separates her from the three categories she would otherwise collapse into.

A substance lies beneath change and persists through it, which is what makes it a substance — the same thing, differently disposed. Tiamat lies beneath nothing and persists through nothing. She is actual only in the event where a prior order comes apart and a new one is instituted, and outside such an event there is no hidden ocean waiting to be discovered by anyone who looks in the right way. The clearing does not exist before the cut as ready ground.

A being possesses some determinacy of its own, even if that determinacy is beyond comprehension — a hidden face, a will, a god, an inner content that would be there whether or not anyone could reach it. Tiamat has none. She does not act, does not desire, does not give birth in the manner of a character in a story. She is not the agent who performs the cut. She is the cut's lack of a form fixed in advance, which is a very different thing from an agent.

The apophatic god is a concealed positive fullness: unspeakable because he exceeds every predicate, with the excess counting in his favor, so that what cannot be said of him is the measure of how much there is. Tiamat conceals no super-being behind the predicates. She is unsayable for the opposite reason — that a statement produces determinacy, and she is the moment of that production. The god of negative theology remains what he is behind the silence. Tiamat does not remain anything behind the word.

Castoriadis coined a term to resist the temptation named above. The magma is what will not submit to what he calls ensemblist-identitary logic — the logic of sets and elements, of determinate members and relations, which is the only logic inherited philosophy has for saying what something is. A magma is not a set of possibilities, since a set has members; it is not indeterminate in the sense of being a vague something, since vagueness is a deficiency in the description of a determinate thing. It is what any determination is drawn from and what no determination exhausts. The social-historical world, on his account, is not produced by combining given elements and not created out of nothing — the imaginary institution of society is creation in a sense that neither of those alternatives covers, as what is instituted is a new form, neither a rearrangement of old ones nor something conjured from a void.

The restriction to the social-historical is his and need not be kept. Nothing about a set of laws, a vocabulary, or a table of elements makes it the shape the world comes in. Each of them is a body of cuts made in a world that admitted the making; a man handed the finished body has been given the sediment of a great many settlings. Ensemblist-identitary logic is what schooling teaches as the whole of thinking. A student learns to apply a rule to a case, to derive a consequence, to sort an instance under a heading, and competence at this is what gets called intelligence, in a physicist as readily as in a philosopher. The competence is real. It relies on distinctions that were drawn before he arrived, and drawing one is not in the syllabus — no examination could test for it, an examination being the subsumption of an answer under a criterion fixed in advance, so that a candidate who withdrew the criterion would be marked wrong.

What such a man has is a nature, worked to a high finish. He can extend the scheme, catch its inconsistencies, and do all of it faster than anyone around him, and all those operations are the repetition of a form he holds. Put him where the form breaks — where the case will not go under any heading he has — and the apparatus idles. He looks for the rule that covers the situation, and the rule is what is missing. That the rubric was laid down, and by someone, and can be withdrawn, is the thing his training left out; a distinction he did not make and cannot unmake presents itself to him as the way matters stand.

Castoriadis refuses both a set of pre-existing possibilities and creation out of nothing, but leaves institution without an author. For him the instituting imaginary is anonymous and collective: society forms itself, significations arise without an author, and the radical imagination of an individual works within what the collective has laid down. The magma is the right shape for the gap and the wrong account of what happens in it.

Nicholas of Cusa names the coincidence of possibility and actuality possest, from posse and est: can-is, a word welded so that possibility and actuality do not come apart inside it. It is no potency later actualized through a passage between two states; it is their coincidence before the division has been drawn. The term is assembled from two verb forms, carries no subject, and names no thing that would then possess properties. Alongside it stands the coincidentia oppositorum, where opposites converge at the point where distinction has not been drawn, and the docta ignorantia, which states exactly where the apparatus stops instead of prescribing reverent silence. In his last work he called the summit posse ipsum, possibility itself, and said he had spent his life looking for it under other names.

For Cusanus, possest is God, and the coincidence is a maximum — what can be, already is, because in God possibility and actuality are the same. That is fullness with its distinctions taken up into it, and from fullness nothing can arise, since there is nothing that is not already there. Creation becomes a problem to be handled by unfolding: the world is explicatio, the drawing-out and display of what was enfolded. Whatever unfolds was implicit; the unfolding adds nothing, and the world becomes a block being read out.

Tiamat is determinacy unsupplied and not yet born: nothing is settled. Where an order is running, the inherited has stopped answering; where nothing runs, the absence is total. Not "everything is already there," but "nothing is yet settled." For Cusanus the coincidence is the ground, eternal and self-maintaining, and the world follows from it. Here the coincidence is what gets cut, and it goes out in the cutting. His possest is the maximum and cannot produce anything for it is already everything. Tiamat produces nothing either, and for the opposite reason: she is not a producer at all but the openness in which a production has not been decided. The producer is whoever draws the cut, and Tiamat is the absence of a form the cut must take.

Openness and freedom must remain distinct. Tiamat is the break in inheritance. Freedom is the authored resolution that creates a new determination. The early universe requires no person before the act. Its author arises in the institution, and the cosmological name of that will is the demiurge. Marduk becomes exact on the same terms. He does not hack apart a pre-existing Tiamat, which would require her to have been there in advance as a body. Tiamat and Marduk are two aspects of a single event: Tiamat is the pre-cut, and Marduk is the cut once it has become sky and earth. More precisely, Tiamat is the birth of the cut; Marduk is the settled cut.

What has been said here of Tiamat is a cut; the cut converts the Not/One into a trace and hands it to the reader. Within language, the interval appears as the failure to say it. The clearing in a text is not what the text contains; it is where the text tears — where the sentence closes on nothing and the reader is left in the slash between Not and One, without support. The oldest word for freedom names a return to the mother, and the mother is this.