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spirit’s relation to self, (2) as the circular path of a return to self. And in the description of the spirit that returns to itself through its own proper product, after it lost itself there, there is more than a simple rhetorical convenience in giving to the spirit the name father. Likewise, the advent of the Christian Trinity is more than an empiric event in the spirit’s history.

“. . . thereby break his immediacy and naturalness.

“The root (Wurzel) of human nature is that man can think of himself as an ego (Ich). As a spirit, man does not have an immediate existence but is essentially returned-home-to–self (in sich Zurückgekehrtes). This movement of mediation (Vermittelung) is an essential moment of the spirit. Its activity consists in transcending and negating its immediacy so as to return upon itself (Rückkehr in sich); it has therefore made itself what it is by means of its own activity. Only the retumed-home-to-self is subject, real actuality. Spirit exists only as its own result. The example of the seed (die Vorstellung des Samens dienen) may help to illustrate [or clarify: zur Erläuterung] this point. The plant begins with the seed, but the seed is also the result of the plant’s entire life, for it develops only in order to produce (hervorzubringen) the seed. We can see from this how impotent life is (die Ohnmacht des Lebens), for the seed is both the origin and the result of the individual; as the starting point and the end result, it is different and yet the same, the product of one individual and the beginning of another. Its two sides fall asunder like the simple form (Form) within the grain [of wheat: Korn] and the whole course of the plant’s development.

“Every individual has an example (Beispiel) even closer to hand in the shape of his own person. Man is what he should be only through educarion [formation, culture: Bildung] and discipline (Zucht); what he is immediately is only the possibility of being (that is, of being rational, free), only the desrination (Bestimmung), obligation. The animal’s formation is soon complete (fertig); but this should nor be seen as a blessing bestowed on the animal by nature. Its growth (Wachstum) is merely a quantitative increase in strength (Erstarken). Man, on the other hand, must make himself what he should be; he must first acquire everything for himself, precisely because he is spirit; in short he must throw off the natural. Spirit, therefore, is its own proper result.” Dialectical paradox: natural living being, life as nature devel-ops by itself without freedom insofar as its self-mobility is finite. It does not go out of itself, it does nothing but develop the germ: the quantitative increase without interruption, without relation to the outside and the absolute other. As natural necessity following its

Derrida, Jacques. Glas. University of Nebraska Press, 1986.

And translate that The Flower, which signifies (symbolizes, metaphorizes, metonymizes, and so on) the phallus, once caught in the syntax of the cuttable-culpable, signifies death, decapitation, decollation? Anthologos signifying the signifier signifying castration?

That would be to arrest once again, and in the name of the law, of truth, of the symbolic order, the march of an unknown: its glas, which is in action here.

To try once more to arrest it, as in 1952, when, at the exit from prison, the ontophenomenologist of the liberation

liberation – under this title, first and at the least, must be thought the avoidance of psychoanalysis and Marxism in the name of freedom, of the “original choice,” and the “existential project.” “Such is the case of the child Genet. . . . It was, I think, Genet’s optimism that kept him from adopting this conclusion in reality [to kill himself like that “punished child who chastizes his mother by depriving himself of dessert”]. I mean thereby to designate the very orientation of his freedom. . . . He has chosen to live; he has said, in defiance of all, I will be the Thief. I deeply admire this child who grimly willed himself at an age when we were merely playing the servile buffoon. So fierce a will to survive, such pure courage, such mad confidence within [au sein du] despair will bear their fruit. Twenty years later, this absurd determination will produce the poet Jean Genet. . . . But when a systematized, hardened sulking holds out (or ten years, thirty years, when it is at the root of the most singular, the most beautiful poetic work, when it changes into a world system, into an occult religion, then it must singularly transcend the level of a simple childish reaction. a man’s freedom must be thoroughly involved in it. . . . If we want to understand what he is today and what he writes, we must go back to this original choice and try to give a phenomenological description of it.”

insisted on handing back to you, right into

Derrida, Jacques. Glas. University of Nebraska Press, 1986.

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