3. A Phallic Economy of Time

Of Matricides and Patricides

As observed, the temporal scale of climate change is so great that it escapes our cognitive capacities. Transcendence offers shelter against this notion of time by establishing a mechanism that regulates temporal vastity by circumscribing it or, better, by shooting it through with the presumed emergence of nothingness: that which preexisted the beginning, that which will save us from death, or, if you don’t believe in the afterlife, the nothingness into which we all turn sooner or later. In Western thought, this conceptualization of time originates with Eleatic philosophy. It is the result of a separation between the corruptible reality of earth and the superior and abstract world of transcendence. Adriana Cavarero writes that in Parmenides, we encounter a philosopher who “abandons the world of his own birth in order to establish his abode in pure thought, thus carrying out a symbolic matricide in the erasure of his birth.”2 An otherworldly being becomes the realm of truth because it persists eternally in its immutable essence, while the becoming-other of the physical world brings into existence nothingness or nonbeing. Here the problem is not so much transformation and multiplicity as it is death, because, Cavarero argues, this is where “nothingness, into which what is finally disappears, manifests itself as the destination of becoming, and at the same time as its substance.”3 Cavarero is quick to notice that Plato’s famous patricide of Parmenides, which introduces the idea of difference to save reality from annihilation, is only an apparent solution because it is based on a split between the sensorial and illusory dimension of life and the true and universal realm of ideas. In conclusion, “the disavowal of the world’s reality in the name of Parmenides’ not-being continues to exert its power.”4 By so doing, Western philosophy takes up a nihilistic stance that, by devaluing reality, also makes it expendable or cheap, as Jason Moore calls it.5 We will see how this conceptualization is the result of symbolic matricide, that is, a continuous disavowal of the form of life we inhabit—this worldview understands birth as the coming-into-being of something from nothing. That nothing, which philosophy needs to understand the concept of origin as creation ex nihilo, is, in fact, the persistent gesture of erasure of the mother.

To gauge the effects that this belief in nothingness has on time, let us turn to the philosophy of Emanuele Severino, particularly to his analysis of what he calls the three great discourses of Western civilization: myth, philosophy, and technē (technology). This periodization begins with a mythologeme, common to all ancient tales, that perceives becoming as a marker of destruction. Severino writes that to shield themselves from death, “primitive people find a way to coexist with the defunct by considering it another mode of being alive. To those who survived, the corpse has the appearance of that which has been subtracted from the visible.”6 The mythical relationship with death is based on a form of permanence of all that exists; what changes is its visibility. The dead are still with us; they are just less visible. They are spirits. In the myth of Chronos, for instance, the father of the gods does not put an end to his children by eating them, because he vomits them right back into the world so that they keep on living.7 However, even this type of nonfinal death produces suffering, which, in turn, requires a response in the guise of some saving mechanism. The story of Genesis updates the mythical template by attesting to how mankind attempted (unsuccessfully) to defeat God. Adam’s and Eve’s eating of the apple is an example of divine cannibalism, which signals the will to replace God. But this effort fails. Hence, Severino writes, “after having killed the divine in order to live, mankind is urged to strike up an alliance with God so as to find a remedy against the anguish of death.” At this point, mankind begins to imagine transcendence “as the supreme power . . . as the dimension where everything must return to find salvation from death and its anguish.”8 The divine beyond turns into the substance that guarantees permanence and thus offers relief from the transformation of reality into nothing.

Philosophy marks a shift from mythical thinking because it formulates the doubt about the credibility of the ancestral belief in persistence—this is the second moment of Severino’s periodization, which begins with early Greek civilization and ends with Hegel. The discourse of philosophy consists in understanding and thus assuming the full power of becoming via a series of different intellectual structures or epistemologies that explain and thus control how reality mutates.9 Modern epistemologies embrace the idea that “the beings of the world (wholly or in part, all or some aspect of them) issue from and return to Nothing—passing from their nothingness to being a not-Nothing and vice-versa.” Hence, Severino concludes, “the supreme evidence of Western civilization consists in the purest and most abysmal alienation—the conviction that Being is nothing.”10 There are different degrees to which this belief is held, but at its core, nihilism proves to be the shared foundation for Western thought. All monotheistic religions follow the general template of this form of knowledge. Professing the eternity of the soul and the belief in the afterlife, Christianity, for instance, is firmly rooted in Greek epistemology because it believes in a depreciated version of this world. God is said to have created the world ex nihilo. Creation, thus, becomes the locus of transition from being to nonbeing; it is the domain where things disintegrate. For Severino, philosophy capitalizes on the idea that something is and, at a certain point, ceases to be. Fully immersing itself in the transformation of things, the age of philosophy wants to control and direct the process of things’ becoming-other (i.e., annihilation). In effect, divine perfection raises problems in the earthly domain because it precludes any possibility for human transformative intervention in it. For humanity to act and dominate the world, divine omnipotence must vacate that world and relinquish its omnipotence.11 This is why Severino maintains that “the void of nothingness is necessary to becoming, that is, to the supreme evidence of creativity . . . hence there cannot exist any immutable entity filling that void with its presence.”12 The belief in embracing the annihilating truth of becoming (the nonbeing of being) offers the only protection against the ancestral dread of death.

At this juncture, technology takes over philosophy by producing a new discourse that subsumes both myth and philosophy, while embracing the open-ended nature of becoming. Modern technology claims the status of God and demands to preside over creativity and the transformation of the world. It does so by erasing God’s overdetermining knowledge and replacing it with the full mobilization of reality. Technology declares that “any existing limit (or law) is only factual, historical, provisional, and contingent” and that its apparatus “can and must extend its dominion over things indefinitely” and deploy “its capacity . . . to avert death.”13 As an impersonal will to transform, dominate, and thus alienate reality, technē now rules the world by drawing on scientific potentiation. Severino’s critique of the discourse of the West is too vast to summarize here, particularly his critique of nonbeing on the basis of logics. Suffice it to say that Severino discloses the inconsistency of hypermodern society, which seems to believe that only a higher dose of nonbeing will save us from nonbeing.

There are alternatives to this thanatological scenario. For Severino, eclipsing nihilism means contemplating the idea that beings are eternal—an idea that can be further explained by feminist thought. The case of the trace can help us better understand Severino’s idea of time and movement according to what he calls the structure of Appearing. A trace expresses not the nothingness of a particular thing but rather its disappearance, the fact that something is not visible any longer. Something may be a trace of the past without attesting its dissolution. Through examination, recollection, or simply autonomously, as in the case of an ancient ruin, the past presents itself and reappears. Naturally, as it manifests in its particularity, the memory of an event is not the whole of that event. As Alessandro Carrera writes, “what is never gone and remains ‘missing’ in the present and out of our hands, is precisely the ‘unpastness’ of the past . . . which is entirely hidden from us for the simple reason that we can only interpret as ‘past’ the signs the past sends us through its monuments.”14 When applied to the future, this example is more intuitive: a trace of the future is something that, although not appearing, has already a certain undeniable wholeness to it. We should think of the multiplicities of eternal beings analogously to how we perceive the future, something that is not yet visible but that keeps on coming. In effect, anything that appears, even in the present, must do so through a partial image, while that very partiality must also be tied to a totality. Past and future are traces of totality. According to Severino, what we perceive as the passing of time is simply the appearing and disappearing of a portion of reality that exists as a landscape of instants beyond time.

Appearing Is an Immanent Scene

Diffusing the trap of death as nonbeing is crucial for an understanding of time that does not contribute to the devaluation of the world and its consequent exhaustion. However, construing becoming as the movement of appearing and disappearing of a thing is equally problematic. In Western thought, appearances are notoriously inaccurate, whereas truth is imagined as a solid thing that exists beyond exterior manifestations. But isn’t the split between a transcendent eternal being (i.e., truth, God, etc.) and the world (i.e., becoming as the nonbeing of matter) precisely what inaugurates the nihilism of Western discourse? To clarify this point, we need to turn to Hannah Arendt and her insistence on the phenomenality of the world, which we should read as a commitment to demystifying any transcendent position or, to use wording more in tune with her conceptual vocabulary, any “source that stands outside history.”15

Arendt’s The Life of the Mind begins with this lapidary sentence: “Being and Appearing coincide,” a maxim that resonates with Severino’s analysis. Although couched in a common understanding of life as death and becoming, the basis for an idea of being that cannot include its absolute negation emerges precisely through what Arendt calls “appearingness.”16 Arendt notes that the superior truth that lies behind exterior manifestations “is conceived only as another appearance” because “our mental apparatus,” ultimately, “remains geared to Appearance. The mind, no less than the senses, in its search . . . expects that something will appear to it.”17 The ontological quality of appearingness allows Arendt to deploy a lexicon that avoids nonbeing, thus conceiving of birth and death as movements in and out from the scene of the world: “We are of the world and not merely in it; we, too,” she glosses, “are appearances by virtue of arriving or departing, of appearing and disappearing.”18 Other indications regarding the continuity of existence emerge when she considers the difference between the absolute time of Newtonian physics and the natural time of the world, where “the world has neither beginning nor end, an assumption,” she concludes, “that seems only natural for beings who always come into a world that preceded them and will survive them.”19 The propensity for positive determinations offered by the point of view of birth produces an overflowing that constantly appears (rather than freezing) on the horizon. The noun beginning corresponds to the gerund form of the verb to begin. (A gerund expresses an ongoing action.) To put it simply, beginning is not a singular event but rather perpetuates itself endlessly. To begin is, by nature, to keep beginning.

As in Severino’s philosophy, plurality, multiplicity, and eternity are key elements for Arendt’s definition of appearingness as a relational configuration. Not surprisingly, Andrew Benjamin argues that the structure of Appearing in Arendt is based on the notion that “Appearing is always that which occurs with others. Thus, Appearing is always relational.”20 Benjamin also clarifies that in addition to relationality and the place, the other characteristic of Appearing is that it is anoriginal. There is no principium, because Appearing is always emergent. Appearingness is the anoriginal because “it precedes. It precedes in the exact sense that it is an ever-attendant possibility.”21 The reason for this is that only a true discontinuity may mark the initiation of beginning. But this break cannot represent what we usually imagine. In fact, the concept of the beginning of all beginnings is simply modeled after transformations we witness every day: an incessant process that has no origin. In this sense, ontological proofs for the existence of God, such as Thomas Aquinas’s argument, simply put a stop to the logical regression by saying that God is the uncreated. By installing a father (not a mother) at the top, the chain of reproduction comes to a halt. But because beginning is rooted in the process of life, which is always plural and feminine, the need of a transcendent origin withers away.

Arendt articulated the concept of appearingness under the category of political praxis, most famously in The Human Condition, in chapters where she considers power, action, and politics in the Greek polis.22 In this text, we encounter a broader understanding of this structure, which is in tune with her notion of birth as a plurality of beginnings. In the same passage in which she writes that our political life “is like a second birth,” she also points to a nonanthropocentric space of appearance. She writes that “the new always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability. . . . The new therefore always appears in the guise of the miracle.”23 The nascent force of life produces the miracle of actualizations that fall into the sphere of Appearing. The miracle of life does not appear only to humans, nor does life appear to some imaginary divine entity. Appearing happens among the multitudes that populate a place. We have two elements at play here: relations between gazes and a place and the scene as the pure presenting of an open system. This is why appearing always involves the other: “Only the spectator, never the actor, can know and understand whatever offers itself as a spectacle.”24 This theatrical reconfiguration of appearingness bears testimony to how the subject is not in charge, nor does it fully possess its identity. In Arendt, the plurality and multiplicity of the scopic are vivified through the notion of the many others that are part of the scene, while the subject loses its centrality in terms of identity and self-actualization. With Arendt, we begin to perceive a form of time that is emergent and immanent. Using Severino’s language, phenomenality ultimately means that eternity is appearingness: the appearing of a scene that leaves behind other parts, which in turn may emerge at the expense of others.

What practical use do we have for these considerations regarding the eternal dimension of Appearing? How do they inform our urgent need for political action? The answer for Arendt is to move from the plurality of appearingness to the concept of glory. Drawing on the work of zoologist Adolf Portman, she reformulates appearingness from the standpoint of a biological, or sexed, matrix. It is life’s particular tendency to manifest as a scene that strikes Arendt as a profound political idea. She writes, “Whatever can see wants to be seen, whatever can hear calls out to be heard, whatever can touch presents itself to be touched”; in other words, life must “fit itself into the world of appearances by displaying and showing, not its inner self but itself as an individual.”25 Appearingness is thus tied to a necessary sensorial dimension, a staging before others who concur to produce a subjectivity. This subjectivity is different from the (universally male) Cartesian subject. As Cavarero glosses, “the fact that the category of personal identity postulates another as necessary” for somebody to appear “has the merit of exemplifying the reason for which an identity constitutively exposed to others is also unmasterable.”26 The self is a mirror house of gazes. Among dazzling reflections, an authentic individuality emerges as a response to how a selfhood has come to see itself through the eyes of others. Owing to the priority of visibility and the constitutive role of the others for subjectivity, Arendt discovers an alternative option to the secluded contemplation of the high truth pursued by the thinking subject of classic philosophy.27

Crucially, the concept of glory culminates the scopic plurality of appearingness. Recall that an economy of rank is rooted in “the pleasure of eminence, of having the superior position with the other who is in awe of me.”28 Therein glory functions as a two-step process that involves the other. The first step is an agonal situation in which the other is constructed as the opponent; the second step, after the hero’s victory, forces the other into the role of the spectator who pays homage to the winner. If Arendt’s early understanding of glory falls along Girardian lines, Peg Birmingham writes that, later, she called “for a transformed notion of glory, no longer rooted in sovereign, sacrificial violence, but instead, in a conception of political responsibility charged with the task of bearing the world.”29 Great art achieves this kind of glory, according to Arendt. However, this shift gains a relevance that is greater than art once glory is reframed in terms of gender. For the symbolic dimension of men, the worthy (but ultimately obsequious) opponent is ultimately the woman. As Carla Lonzi writes, the role of the woman is of one who “implicitly contrasts the history of his supremacy; since she does not fully impede the latter, she also validates it, enriching it with pathos.”30 This is why we argued that masculine desire is about a symbolic position. This subject never encounters a specific feminine individual but rather encounters a type that conforms (more or less) with the expected agonal entity. Arendt attempts to resignify this masculine characterization of glory. Glory thus becomes the plural space of appearingness that stages the possibility for the endless proliferation of the uniqueness of each individuality. Glory shines in the sensory interplay that takes place in the exposing of a singularity.

In effect, there is a hint of glory in the distinctiveness of every individual being. In The Human Condition, for example, Arendt connects plurality and singularity via the notion of action when she says that “plurality is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live.”31 The singularity of each individuality displaces the masculine attempt to reduce this inner flame to the dark night of sameness. Therein we find a path to the glorious deed. Insofar as individuals and life in general exist to show themselves, glory means to be one with that singular ontological dimension, so that said singularity appears as such to others. This is how Arendt puts it: “Because of its inherent tendency to disclose the agent together with the act, action needs for its full appearance the shining brightness we once called glory, and which is possible only in the public realm.”32 Glory thus entails a communal space of recognition for the deed to emerge. The adherence between the deed and its doer culminates in the brilliance of the scene. Again, I want to stress that this glorious deed is different from a heroic feat fueled by the prodigious will of larger-than-life men. What ignites the flame of glory is the interplay between the doer who reveals herself or himself to the others without completely understanding her or his identity because “the who which appears so clearly and unmistakably to others remains hidden to the person himself.”33 As Alison Martin writes on the glorious scene, “the main protagonist is a doer of deeds but not their author.”34 The communal quality of the scene produces glory.

Taking stock of the centrality of the communal dimension in the concept of glory, we begin to grasp a different kind of social and thus temporal dimension where, as Arendt writes, “people are with others and neither for nor against them—that is, in sheer human togetherness.”35 Plurality and difference characterize this condition together with the liquidation of the pretense of willed intentionality, or the will to dominate reality through processes of creative destruction typical of our societies. This is for Arendt an inherent political trait of life, because “the smallest act in the most limited circumstances bears the seed of the same boundlessness, because one deed, and sometimes one word, suffices to change every constellation.”36 Glory is the appearing of an action that is impersonal, not self-serving, and fully immanent in its extensiveness of the boundless space of the communal. If Severino shed light on the illusions of nihilism reconstructing a transcendental framework for an immanent totality where being and Appearing signify the fullness of eternity, Arendt enriches that totality by including political action and the plurality of the different life-forms of others.

The Economy of Gazes in a Gendered Eternity

As observed, the nihilistic logic of the West pierces through the continuity of reality by othering it, that is, by assigning not-being to being, a mechanism that impacts our relationships with ourselves and the environment. As illustrated in the case of the agon, one usually finds the woman hidden behind the other both as worthy opponent and tributary entity. In a more constructive vein, Arendt revealed the positive role of others and their world-forming function that defines the idea of glory. I want to conclude by returning to Cavarero to offer a broader elucidation of the temporal fullness of reality from the vantage point of life.

Reflecting on Arendt’s idea of visibility, Cavarero notices that “self-showing and reciprocal exhibition” to the other have their roots in the mother, as she is “the other to whom the existent first appears.”37 This is another reason why identity is exposed to the other from the beginning and cannot be completely owned by the subject. This symbolic origin—that is, the beginning that keeps on beginning—is constituted by the child–mother complex. As Luisa Muraro writes, this symbolic structure provides access to language and its immanence, that is to say, “the certainty that words are in relations with being and not with nothing.”38 The maternal order mirrors the structure of Appearing, particularly its world-forming capacity that reverses the discontinuity of male thought by disclosing a permanency that moves backward and forward in time.

Cavarero develops the scopic side of this relationship, thus returning the transcendental category of Appearing to the sexed dimension of life: a chain of births as structured through the mother–daughter continuum. She calls this form of visibility the gaze between mother and daughter. Her seminal text In Spite of Plato develops this economy of gazes, especially through a rereading of the myth of Demeter. Her analysis unearths the interdicted foundation of Hesiod’s Theogony, which establishes the agricultural myth of the cycle of the seasons, by demonstrating that Hades’s abduction of Demeter’s daughter Kore (or Persephone) produces a blockage in the structure of reproduction. In other words, Hades’s violence prevents the actualization of the reproductive power lodged in motherhood, signaling a change whereby “death replaced birth as the fundamental paradigm” of the symbolic order—one that “reigned unchallenged in the age of Plato.”39 Referring to the interpretation of this myth by Luce Irigaray, Cavarero adds that this symbolic dimension, “having separated philosophy from embodiedness, being from appearance, . . . turned this dichotomy into the philosophical systems of all systems.”40

In the myth, the pain of Demeter turns the earth sterile. Only Zeus’s intervention saves humans from starvation. The compromise he strikes with Hades inaugurates the agricultural cycle: Kore can return to her mother for part of the year (the fertile periods of spring and summer), while remaining in the underworld for the rest (fall and winter). Cavarero is interested in the crucial role played by vision in this narrative. She notes that because it is “the mother who stops generating when the daughter is snatched out of her sight . . . the maternal power to generate is coextensive with the reciprocal visibility of mother and daughter.”41 The reciprocal gaze is thus the missing link in our journey from the cosmic order of eternity to the earthly dimension of life. It conjoins Arendt’s idea of birth and Severino’s perspective on the eternity of being(s). The gaze is the pillar for a symbolic dimension that displays the positivity of reality. Naturally, it does so via a partiality. But this partiality does not negate the plural configuration of reality. This is not the image that appears in phallic discourse, which is based on a rhetoric of imposition and distinctiveness guaranteed by symbolic status—quite the opposite. The economy of gaze shows all the elements of Arendt’s glory: the symbolic dependency on the other(s); the singularity of the individual, which is granted precisely by various projections of identity that grow out of that dependency; the lack of an essentialized subject who believes that he can possess (and thus destroy) reality; and ultimately, the full consistency of being as an immanent plane.

The mother–daughter continuum is the space where Appearance is directed toward humanity. In Cavarero’s phrasing, “the female gender . . . demands that gender itself be a common horizon of recognition for every woman, so that birth, which has already happened, can (but does not have to) happen again.”42 Notice the emphasis on appearance as an emergent structure. As every other organism, the human species is part of the space of appearance. The patriarchal order has foreclosed that filial continuum, thus producing the need for transcendence in the guise of the Father, whose authority usually rests on further forms of transcendence: Truth, Blood, God, and so on. By bringing procreative power into focus instead, we reinstall humankind in the murky infinity of life. In so doing, we also liquidate the problem of becoming as the annihilation of being. There is no creation ex nihilo, because we are inhabitants of infinity. In the plane of immanence, Cavarero explains, “the women stage a deployment of prehuman, infinite maternal power, indicating that the divine does not reside in the hierarchical end point of the process of hominization . . . but at the earliest point, at the origin, in the animal innocence that holds onto [sic] life without reflection.”43

Properly decoded, the myth of Demeter illustrates how the famous enigma of not-being is simply the appearing “of nothingness onto the stage as birth-no-more.”44 This form of nothingness is not a thing in itself but a negation of the positivity of the maternal continuum. Nonbeing is simply the inhibition of said continuum. The world lodges “the possibility of stopping the process of regeneration inherent in maternal power” or, as Cavarero explains, “no longer becomes nothingness, a nothingness that is not beyond this world. It is not the nothingness of male philosophers who identify it with death. . . . It is rather the nothingness of birth,” because “far from being a coming from nothing, birth is a coming from a mother.”45 In this sense, Severino similarly remarks that the truth of nothingness does not exist, that there is always the truth of something, as in the case of birth-no-more.46 This is the nothingness that the myth of Demeter reflects: a mythical nonbeing that philosophers fantasize ending up in various illogical dead ends.

In Plato’s Theaetetus, however, Cavarero finds a form of speech that “carries within it despite its intentions . . . some type of feminine word that the text itself conveys while failing to comprehend.”47 The anecdote she examines is that of Thales, who, absorbed in his astronomical observation, falls into a well. A young, beautiful maidservant from Thrace laughs at him, declaring that “the things around you, at your feet, are hidden from your sight.”48 As in the case of Parmenides, Thales’s philosophy splits being from appearance: Truth resides in the elsewhere of the sky, while the world teems with errors, shadows, and death. No wonder he misses the well. Confronted with the unfortunate accident, the girl’s laughter represents not the scorn of the uncultivated person but rather the wisdom that deconstructs the nihilism of Western discourse. By bringing into focus the significance of the phenomenality of the world, the maidservant discloses a metonymic relationship to the world. Recall that the elsewhere of transcendence constitutes reality by submitting it to its universality, which, as I indicated, asserts itself by subjecting every particularity to the sameness of its logic. In contrast, the metonymic chain is built through adjacency of singularly unique elements. The maidservant lapidary sentence flashes this contiguity out: “Things that are near you, at your feet.” Not the elsewhere of (male) sameness but rather the vicinity of life and its appearances discloses the totality of beings. It is the empirical presence of these singularities that, according to Cavarero, attests to the fact that life “is always gendered” and “renewed at every birth.”49 The maidservant sheds light on Appearing as the logical truth of motherhood. As observed, the mother–daughter nexus reveals a fullness in which the new life can be understood only through the relation with the other. This other is the mother (or whoever takes her place). Her symbolic order enables the first form of visibility, which will grow through self-exposition to others. But this economy of gazes is never identical; on the contrary, it lives of and produces uniqueness. This is the glory that comes forth: the singularity of natality.

The father’s and mother’s symbolic orders are in stark opposition. As Muraro illustrates, the masculine schema is generally hypermetaphorical: It synthesizes everything under the purity and immobility of the idea; that is, it subsumes particularities into sameness.50 The feminine genealogy instead understands difference as the necessary condition of the movement of the continuum. Severino’s move is to bring eternity back into the empiric by way of phenomenality. Naturally, eternity does not denote singular everlasting life. Likewise, the eternal glory of the continuum is not based on some empirical immortality. This form of eternity is logico-symbolical. When it is impossible to cancel out a relationship, as is the case for the idea that everybody is of woman born, these relationships are actually eternal.51 Every birth reenacts in difference the mother–daughter continuum. The structure of Appearing has the form and rhythm of a metonymic series.

Natality functions somehow like a trace of past and future events. Unless, of course, the gaze is interrupted, natality allows us to touch permanence. Death as the destruction of being or nothingness, in fact, vanishes in an eternal plenitude that looks at the past not as a sequence of deaths but as “an infinite procession of births in reverse.”52 In this sense, the true remedy against death resides in the secrets of natality, not as in the patronymic ploy to ensure eternity but in the interconnected composition of gazes of the many glorious scenes each singularity contributed to form. As for the future, here, too, the masculine craves a form of eternity that is misplaced. It is the infinite gestation of life that most closely resembles the virtuality of the space of Appearing. As Cavarero glosses, the feminine understanding of Appearing has “no beginning and therefore no nothingness, since the beginning has always initiated, generating both backward and toward infinity, within the horizon (adequate to the observer) that contains it and continues to be repeated and confirmed every time a woman gives birth.”53 Birth as a continuum is the glowing of Appearing. Through the maternal structure, the inherence to the emergent (i.e., the true nature of reality) exposes the collapse of the fantasy of temporal transcendence as both beginning and end. This is a different economy of time based on a type of relationality that connects the eternity of instantaneous scenes, which nobody masters. This is an idea of time that allows for a meaningful relation with alterity (based on noncoincidence) and the full appreciation of the life-sustaining capacity of the social infinity we inhabit. The demise of the third pillar of transcendence breaks the fever of a phallic economy of time. Through the smoke of its ruins, one discerns a temporal infinity that values the permanence of endless regenerative relations.

Notes

1. 1. I borrow this term from Luce Irigarary’s Speculum of the Other Woman (Cornell University Press, 1985), 245.

2. 2. Adriana Cavarero, In Spite of Plato: A Feminist Rewriting of Ancient Philosophy (Routledge, 1995), 38.

3. 3. Cavarero, 44.

4. 4. Cavarero, 43.

5. 5. Jason Moore, “The Rise of Cheap Nature,” in Anthropocene or Capitalocene?, 78–115 (PM Press, 2016).

6. 6. Emanuele Severino, In viaggio con Leopardi: La partita sul destino dell’uomo (Rizzoli, 2015), 62.

7. 7. See Emanuele Severino, Il muro di pietra (Rizzoli, 2006), 19–22.

8. 8. Severino, In viaggio con Leopardi, 63.

9. 9. Severino writes that this trait is already manifest in Aeschylus, who “thinks that truth is the supreme remedy against suffering, anguish, and death.” Emanuele Severino, Il mio ricordo degli eterni (Rizzoli, 2011), 121.

10. 10. Emanuele Severino, The Essence of Nihilism (Verso, 2016), 276.

11. 11. The actual infinity of God overflows space and time, reducing reality to the domain where the simple mechanical execution of his will occurs. Hence, Severino writes, “from the Christian God one cannot pull the knowledge of a single breadcrumb because if one eliminates God’s awareness of it, that breadcrumb ceases to exist.” Emanuele Severino, “Le radici del nichilismo: Una questione aperta tra metafisica Cristiana e modernità,” Divus Thomas 100, no. 3 (1997): 97.

12. 12. Emanuele Severino, Immortalità e destino (Rizzoli, 2006), 13.

13. 13. Severino, 13, 14.

14. 14. Alessandro Carrera, “Every Child Is a Severino Scholar: The Stubborn Persistence of the Past and the Contradiction of Being Born in Time,” Eternity and Contradiction 4, no. 7 (2022): 65.

15. 15. Dean Hammer, “Hannah Arendt and Roman Political Thought: The Practice of Theory,” Political Theory 30, no. 1 (2022): 128.

16. 16. Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (Harcourt, 1978), 19.

17. 17. Arendt, 24.

18. 18. Arendt, 22.

19. 19. Arendt, 21.

20. 20. Andrew Benjamin, “Being and Appearing,” Arendt Studies 2 (2018): 224.

21. 21. Benjamin, 223. Similarly, Benjamin notes that “the space of appearance is characterized by a foundational irreducibility.” Andrew Benjamin, “Thinking Life: The Force of the Biopolitical,” Crisis Critique 9, no. 2 (2022): 72.

22. 22. Arendt agrees with St. Augustine, who differentiated the beginning (initium) of human life from creation (principium), that is, the beginning of the world. See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (University of Chicago Press, 2018), 350n3.

23. 23. Arendt, 157–58.

24. 24. Arendt, Life of the Mind, 92.

25. 25. As Arendt writes, “the criterion for vision is only the quality of everlastingness in the seen object” (139).

26. 26. Adriana Cavarero, Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood (Routledge, 2000), 21.

27. 27. The phenomenality of the world is already the space for political action she calls vita activa, which contrasts Plato’s priority assigned to contemplation as “the human activity par excellence,” where “to see rather than to act is what . . . renders men human.” Adriana Cavarero, “Regarding the Cure,” Qui Parle 10, no. 1 (1996): 4.

28. 28. Peg Birmingham, “Arendt and Hobbes: Glory, Sacrificial Violence, and the Political Imagination,” Research in Phenomenology 41, no. 1 (2011): 7.

29. 29. Birmingham, 12.

30. 30. Carla Lonzi, “La donna clitoridea,” in Sputiamo su Hegel (et al. Edizioni, 2010), 100.

31. 31. Arendt, Human Condition, 8.

32. 32. Arendt, 180.

33. 33. Cavarero, Relating Narratives, 21.

34. 34. Alison Martin, “Report on ‘Natality’ in Arendt, Cavarero and Irigaray,” Paragraph 25, no. 1 (2002): 38.

35. 35. Arendt, Human Condition, 180.

36. 36. Arendt, 190.

37. 37. Cavarero, Relating Narratives, 20, 12.

38. 38. Luisa Muraro, “On the Relations Between Words and Things,” in Another Mother: Diotima and the Symbolic Order of Italian Feminism, ed. Cesare Casarino and Andrea Righi (University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 121.

39. 39. Cavarero, In Spite of Plato, 58.

40. 40. Cavarero, 59.

41. 41. Cavarero, 61.

42. 42. Cavarero, 64.

43. 43. Cavarero, 112.

44. 44. Cavarero, 60.

45. 45. Cavarero, 61.

46. 46. See Emanuele Severino, “Il destino,” posted by Diotima Quattroduetre, October 18, 2013, YouTube video, 21:26, https://youtu.be/KUoh_F8i0bo.

47. 47. Cavarero, In Spite of Plato, 50.

48. 48. Quoted in Cavarero, 56.

49. 49. Cavarero, 55.

50. 50. Luisa Muraro, “To Knit or to Crochet?,” in Another Mother, 92–93.

51. 51. I borrow this argument from David Graeber, who, speaking about total prestations in Mauss, writes that these relations “between individuals and groups” are “permanent precisely because there [is] no way to cancel them out by a repayment. The demands one side could make on the other were open ended because they were permanent; nothing would be more absurd than for the member of an Iroquois moiety to keep count of how many of the others’ dead each had recently buried, to see which was ahead. . . . Most of us treat our closest friends this way. No accounts need be kept because the relation is not treated as if it will ever end.” Graeber, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value, 218.

52. 52. Cavarero, In Spite of Plato, 112.

53. 53. Cavarero, 112.