​Chapter 25

Another's clearing is reached only through his act. The interval does not present itself as such, since freedom offers nothing; what exists is an act where the not-yet-hardened shows. The meeting therefore occurs in action on both sides: the other appears in the cut he draws, and so does whoever meets him.

What happens has the shape of a failure: the other does something that the image of him did not contain, the image scatters, and no replacement arrives, as a replacement would be another image. What is left is not an image at all. He is held as the author of what he has just done, and holding him so sorts him under nothing — the deed occurred once, and its author came into being in it. Anyone waiting to understand will wait past the moment.

No mark identifies the clearing: freedom is singular. Nor is it inferred from behavior, which is sediment and trace. The clearing is not a window into an interior, since a window presupposes a wall divided into inside and outside. The recognition in the encounter is enactive, like the taste of salt, and pre-logical: logic works on the differentiated, A is not B, while the clearing is before A and B, before any is. To speak is to have left it; no word can be contemporaneous with the clearing.

Buddhism and philosophies of the Whole read the encounter as a disclosure of unity: beneath the separateness there is a common nature, the boundaries are constructions, all of us are one. This closes the very thing it appears to open. If both are modes of a single ground, then nobody meets anybody — the Whole is engaged with itself, the two are internal distinctions inside it, and the positing has nowhere to occur, since to posit something is to not be it. This is Frank's error at the scale of two wills. What dissolves separateness dissolves the positor.

The encounter is neither one nor two. There is no common substance in which the two are dissolved, no ground of which each is a mode, nothing beneath them that makes their difference merely apparent. Nor are there two finished entities with a relation running between them, since neither is exhausted by what has been drawn — each appears as a clearing only in the birth of a further cut, and that is not an entity. They are before the count. The separateness is the condition of the encounter rather than the obstacle to it, and unity abolishes the encounter by making it the Whole's private business.

Two clearings meeting are under no obligation to accept each other. This is neither agape, which loves what is there because it is there, nor the universal benevolence that follows from a doctrine of unity, where injuring another is hurting oneself and the ethics falls out of the metaphysics. Here the metaphysics yields no ethics at all. Two wills meet through their acts. The acts may collide, and each will remains what it is — a place where a cut can be drawn that the other did not draw and cannot predict. What passes between them is neither guaranteed to be love nor presumed to be anything.

Doctrines of unity suppress the will and direct it toward the same end. Such a doctrine cannot survive genuine encounter, because two wills that actually posit can differ in what they posit, and no higher harmony follows from their freedom. So the will is made into the problem and called pride, selfhood, or the illusion that keeps you from seeing the truth. Dissolve it and the difficulty disappears, as nothing remains that could differ. Uniform direction is required for the doctrine to hold, and it is achieved by removing what would have made the direction anyone's.

A relation also leaves a deposit: a shared history, the roles each has taken on, their habits toward each other, the accumulated shape that makes a long connection what it is. The deposit begins to hold the wills instead of the wills holding the connection — the roles issue orders, the history explains in advance what each will do, and the relation runs itself. From this, it may be inferred that whoever wants to be free should be bound to nobody.

Deposit is not the enemy; deposit that commands is. Without it a relation has nothing to appear through — no established manner, no form within which an act can occur — and cutting away all deposit removes the soil along with the wall, leaving a will with no material. What is refused is the dictation, not the bond. A relation held rather than obeyed keeps the sediment visible: this is what we made; what was made can be unmade, and it carries no force of necessity.