)Blame and Ethics: a)Guilt and Anger as Intimate Violence: When we examined the way in which discourses characterized meaning's duplicitous play of difference, the adjectives they chose to capture the dynamics of meaning's relation to itself as presence and absence, pleasure and pain, and other such dualities of effect, marking the possibility of making sense, we were able to note in their terms a certain relative neurosis, an unreduced substantiality of presence-absence. Such moments of an always re-invented ethical development or `affective desubstantialization evince a certain constipated, polarized ploddingness of play. Let us use something like guilt as an example. We could draw up a sketch of the way that guilt might be articulated across a range of discourses: we could link it to such ideas as culpability and blamefulness, wherein we are said to feel guilty for letting someone down, shirking our responsibility, personal negligence. It has been said that we can't look the other in the eye in guilt. We don't have to be accused by another to feel we have failed her or him. The other need not be disappointed in us, nor even be aware of our failure at all. Guilt as self-blame would be the realization of our failure to behave in the way we expected of ourself, the hurt and disappointment we feel when we are not quite what we thought we were. It would originate in a being-other-than what we expected, the sense of missed opportunity, of a mourning of a better fork in the road not taken. Guilt would register a sense of seeming self-regression or decadence in the momentum of one's experience. What, preliminarily, might we comment concerning the structure we've just sketched of a `twinge of guilt, the feeling of `letting oneself down? Let us at first locate the peculiar edge of guilt, as we have described it above, as its `I ought to have, should have, could have way of thinking, our awareness that we failed to do what we were capable of, what we assumed we would. The proximity between that which one expected of oneself and ones apparent failure to live up to that standard would mark guilt as a gnawing, teasing puzzlement or surprise. Our falling away from another we care for could then be spoken of as an alienation of oneself from oneself. When we feel we have failed another, we mourn our mysterious dislocation from a competence or value which we associated ourselves with. It follows from this that any thinking of guilt as a `should have, could have blamefulness deals in a notion of dislocation and distance, of a mysterious discrepancy within intended meaning, separating who we were from who we are in its teasing gnawing abyss. Guilt and sadness would seem to represent a plunge into the darkness of separation. As we have seen, for Derrida there would be guilt as an always implied within-trace effect determined by the origin of every event as other than itself in the instant of being itself. This within-trace sense of mourning would be an irreducible quasi-transcendental condition of experience. One disturbs and disappoints oneself in a certain sense at every moment. Then there would also be for Derrida the possibility of guilt, sadness and mourning as a momentum of between-trace relation marking our stumbling into experience marked by a sparse density of change. This disappointing, guilty field of eventness could be the death of a friend one should have spoken to more often or better, or the encounter of a repressively authoritarian regime that one should have or could have resisted, or done so more effectively. Just as we can fall away from the relative contentment of an intimate experience of self-motility and progress, we can seem to find ourselves recovering from our slide into the relative regressiveness of interruption. Wherever this disappointment is thought via a language of alterity, violation and guilt, recovery seems to imply the justice and violence of resistance, condemnation and punishment. Philosophies which believe, to various degrees, in meaning's moody self-distancing would seem to be not only a thinking of guilt and despondency but also a thinking of anger, recompense and forgiveness. Anger would be a commentary on guilt, on the proximity we perceive between what was and what should have been. Anger would act on the `should have, could have of guilt as an accusation of culpability. What does such a judgement imply? Anger would proceed from the recognition of a blameful proximity between a thematic unfolding of experience and that which fails that thematic. The other who interacts with us (and this other can be ourselves) can respond in such as way as to fall afoul of our expectations; they (or we) `should have known better than to do what caused our pain. We don't become angry when we believe another had no way of knowing, could not have been expected to know that his actions would be responsible for our distress; in such a case our prior expectations of them would not have been violated. But when we believe that the object of our wrath shares a certain empathy with us or with himself which appears to have been breached, anger wants to remedy and resist that breach. The other who `knew better than to do what disturbs us is seen, via our anger, as herself hostile, annoyed or irritated with us, as wanting to punish us, as believing we were deserving of her disrespect. When we believe we were in fact deserving of the others hostility, we become guilty. However, when we believe ourselves to be undeserving of the others rejection, we turn their hostility back at them. Our anger acts to promote guilt and blame in the other; it remedies, resists, wants to transcend. Anger is a faith in the ability to minimize the abyss of blame. Anger would be a confidence, an insight into how to remedy guilty, disappointed experience. Hostility as a Question: If terms like punishment and condemnation point to a momentum of desubstantialization, of increasing proximity and intimacy with the other, of reducing the fat contentfulness and violent distance of the other from us, then why would retribution seem to want to degrade the other, to inflict pain and destruction? Why would the infliction of pain on another be desirable to us in revenge, and what would the desiring of another's suffering even mean? We have to remember that for now we have allowed that there would be two ways of thinking desire (we will reduce these later). Firstly, there would be desire as within-trace play, desire as nothing but eventness itself; the twofold mechanics of momenting not as sequence but as simultaneity. If an event is a self-exceeding, it is in the same breath a self-decadence. If we say that the origin of desire, need, craving, affectivity as the duplicity of a singular event is the preferring of presence over dislocation we do not capture a sequential order. To find oneself wanting is to experience at the same time two poles, but it is not to be able to say which came first and which came second. What seems to be a `moving toward is more originally a `having both , an equivocal-singular awareness that is in the same `instant both the better and the worse. That desire `wants the depowering minimization of distance is only to state a redundancy. Words like desire, prefer, privilege, precedence, minimization and order fail to do anything more than remind us of this a-sequential twofoldness of motive that structures each event within itself. The goodness of proximity and the undesirability of effacement would not reveal anything about each other besides the fact that they occupy the same space in each moment of experience. If proximity is good and separation bad, they are good and bad for no reason besides the fact that without this minimal dyssymetry between a having and a losing there would be no world. Being informed that the goodness of possession is that feature we prefer contributes nothing further to our understanding since an instant of preference simply reinstates the dual poles presence-absence. To ask the question `the presence or absence of what? is to fail to understand that the object or content of a moment experience can never be isolated as anything more substantive than `this particul ar event which is a new instantiation of presence-absence. To prefer is only to state that one exists in transit. We don't choose to be motivated. We are already motivated because we are already in motion. Another way to understand desire, quasi-transcendentally co-essential with the previous account of desire as within-trace, is as a between-event trope or thematic expressing the variable rhythm of repetition of events. Since we are in motion before we could ever choose to motivate ourselves, the variability of motive resides in the relative coherence of the movement of our experience, event to event. In coming back to itself moment to moment as non-self-identical but nonetheless integrally, unsubstantially self-similar, desire can continue to reaffirm `almost exactly what it wants, and it can make progress toward or find itself being distanced from what it wants, even as the very basis of that objective is gently re-invented in each intended instantiation of it. Because we find ourselves choosing rather than controlling our choice, what desire chooses has already altered us before we can duplicate and recover what we choose. It would always be a new sense of desire and progress or disappointment of desire that return moment to moment in the unfolding of experience. Nevertheless, in its non-self-identical journey, desire can find or re-discover itself (rather than simply willing itself) making progress toward the furthering of itself, its culture, its world. We can only intend to welcome the Other who saves us from chaos; we intend to reject the Other who offers the oppression of incommensurability. Freedom from incoherence implies a sense of liberation, whereas freedom from the order of intelligibility and intimacy implies a sense of subjection. We always have desired to welcome, give ourselves to, sacrifice ourselves for the intimate Other, and always disliked, `chose against the incommensurate Other. We only `want to escape from that which is indoctrinating, repressive, and we only know such conventions in these terms to the extent that we are alienated from them, disconnected, impoverished, deprived. What is repressive to us is what we cannot establish connection, intimacy of relation with. What is `boring, stagnant and redundant in what we label as totalitarianisms is what refuses us, keeps us at a distance, leaves us in banishment. Boredom is always a symptom of dislocation and incipient incoherence. As counterintuitive as it may seem, repetition of experience is only perceived as redundant to the extent that such `monotonous experience disturbs us by its resistance to intimate intelligibility. Boredom and monotony herald the failure of comprehension rather than its success. To choose to love the impossible, the unforeseen and unpredictable is to prefer that aspect within unforeseen experience which is foreseeable, which offers us the hope of avoidance of the abyss of violation and disconnection. To the extent that we can say that we look forward to the unknown, it is only to that degree that we ANTICIPATE the unanticipatable that there is the h ope of godliness, love, intimacy in that otherwise meaningless unknowable. We cannot get beyond this link between the lovable and the recognizable without losing the basis of any ethics, which is the ability to distinguish between, even if without yet defining, what is preferred and what is not. What would it mean to attempt to circumvent the structure of preference by a sacrifice of intention? What would we be effecting in `choosing to welcome without knowing what or whom we welcome; in acting so that our left hand does not know what the right hand is doing? As long as we speak of a volunteeristic `choice or `act of sacrifice of desire, of generosity, selflessness, or even of choosing not to intend at all, neither as benevolence or malevolence, we are still in-desire. To attempt to do what we don't want to do, or to act before we understand why we are acting, is still to prefer, and preference is always the finding of ourselves in a movement of desubstantializing intimacy. In desire's progress, in re-inventing what a progress would mean, desire is always a same-different movement away from destruction and suffering for itself and `deserving others, a minimization of the pain of incoherence and absence. One wants to destroy only the `undeserving; one prefers to prefer against disruption, that which threatens with greater perceived harm. Thus the instant of motive is as a minimization-depowering of perceived harm and violence. To punish would be in the first place to act for the sake of a faith in the metaphysics of the foreign or the mysterious, but to minimize the force and substance of that gulf of alterity and disturbance. It would be to transfer our pain to the other in order to achieve the others remorse and repentance. We want him to identify with our suffering because, more centrally, our anger wants to coax him to understand that relational intimacy of experience which was disappointed and damaged for us via his actions, that which we mourn but which he apparently has failed to understand in the first place and thus does not appreciate was destroyed. It is not his suffering we want for its own sake but his understanding, his contrition, his desubstantializing movement toward what we deem he should have thought and felt in the first place. Whereas in our own guilt we discover ourselves seemingly regressing from or disappointing the intimacy of our remembered, preceding experience, our anger is the transcendence of this momentum of apparent deceleration and reversal. We deem that the target of our indignation should have known what he failed to act on; we insist that he used to acknowledge the importance for us of what he now apparently disregards in his thoughtlessness. Our anger wants to rekindle this spark, to move him to a recollection of the consideration we believe he once had for us or our concerns. But why would we want to inflict punishment if we assume he already knows of our distress, already empathizes but chooses to ignore or forget this empathy? Our indignation wants us to reinstate for the other the pain we believe he didn't feel keenly enough originally. The angered wants to teach the guilty party a lesson, remind him, shame him, make him feel the guilt he inexplicably failed to feel as a result of his regressive actions. Why do we say the criminal should suffer what the victim suffered, get a `taste of his own medicine? If he really knows the ethical rigor of what was lost to us in our disappointed suffering, we think, then he may see the error of his ways and return to what we believe he knew all along. Our hostility wants to provoke the others pain only in order to gain the opportunity to ask "How do YOU like it?" and hear him empathetically link his pain with ours by linking his thinking more intimately with ours. The angry accuser believes the accused knew his actions were responsible for the accuser's suffering. The accuser's anger, then, depends on an unanswered question concerning the perpetrator, which is the same question the guilt-ridden person asks himself: `Why did he fail to do what he knew he should do? The accuser wonders:`Why does the perpetrators hostility put the victims thinking into question when it is the perpetrators assessment of his relationship to the victim which needs to be interrogated and forced to a more intricate and desubstantialized space?`Why does the perpetrator not feel guilty? According to the indignant persons original axes of understanding, the very contemplation of the sort of nasty behavior he or she is presently witnessing should have produced a sufficiently amount of guilt in the perpetrator as to have prevented the translation of those vindictive plans into action. After all, thinks the angered party, "Ive been tempted by that sort of indulgent acting out, too, but Ive controlled myself." Unable to come up with any workable alternative explanation of the nonconformists actions, the offended person attempts to inculcate the other with the feeling of remorse that the indignant one initially assumed the offender should feel, but inexplicably fell short of. The goal of angers punishing intent is not to destroy but to return the other closer to ourselves, to save him and us from his decadence, his falling short of a more condensingly depowering thinking which would allow him to see our behavior not as an obstacle to his movement but as a precipitation of it. Our anger wants to prompt him to an indication of insightful empathy with the pain he knows we feel and knows he was responsible for in his need to punish us. The others dest ruction will not satisfy angers urge for the perpetrator to bridge the taunting abyss between what he did and what he `knew better than to do. Our anger only begins to dissipate to the extent that we believe the other directly identifies the `retaliatory teaching we inflict on him with the suffering he was responsible for in us, and more fundamentally with our thinking he failed to embrace. Angers gesture, as any instant of desire, is the preferring of what we indulge ourselves in preliminarily referring to as a depowering minimization of otherness. But since we dont know why he violated our expectation of him, why and how he failed to do what our blameful anger tells us he `should have according to our prior estimation of his relation to us, this guilt-inducing process is tentative, unsure. It is precisely the interruptiveness and intermittency of the `knowing what to do of anger which is potentially manifested as explosiveness, violence and destructiveness because the behaviors associated with these terms represent the limited repertoire of responses which mark the incipience of angry insight. Angers impulsive, potentially explosive character would mark it as a delicate confidence, an ambivalent insight. Anger would be ambivalent in its force; a composition of vulnerability, tentativeness, questioning, a residing with alterity even as it attempts to desubstantialize its effect. Forgiveness as Acknowledgement of Transcendence: The dissipation of anger is closely tied to forgiveness, seen as the faith that our intervention may have succeeded in moving the other's thinking depoweringly closer to himself and to us. Considered in this way, we can only forgive a trespass of the other to the extent that we recognize a sign of the desubstantializing transformation of their thinking. Ideals of so-called unconditional forgiveness, of turning the other cheek, loving one's oppressor, could be understood as actually conditional in various ways. In the absence of the other's willingness to atone, we may forgive evil when we believe that there are special or extenuating circumstances which will allow us to view the perpetrator as less culpable (the sinner knows not what he does). We can say the other was blinded or deluded, led astray. Our offer of grace is then subtly hostile, both an embrace and a slap. We hold forth the carrot of our love as a lure, hoping thereby to uncloud the other's conscience so as to enable them to discover their culpability. In opening our arms, we hope the prodigal son will return chastised, suddenly aware of a need to be forgiven. Even when there is held little chance that the sinner will openly acknowledge his sin, we may hope that our outrage connects with a seed of regret and contrition buried deep within the other, as if our `unconditional forgiveness is an acknowledgement of Gods or the subliminal conscience of the others apologizing in the name of the sinner. As the forgiving one, we are proud of our `courageous and `compassionate response, but the important term here is response. To forgive is to acknowledge willingness to change ones attitude of condemnation only in RESPONSE to and acknowledgement of indications of potential repentance, at a conscious or unconscious level, on the part of the sinner. Perhaps the simplest kernel of forgiveness, then, is a mere experience of relieved awareness on our part, prior to any volition or declaration of intent to forgive, of the others renewal of intimacy with themselves and us. In any case, our forgiving renewal of relationship with the other never succeeds in fathoming the other's initial disappointment of our experience, their apparent `forgetting of the intimacy of their previous relationship with us. The `resolution of our anger in successfully achieving the others transformation, in moving them depoweringly and desubstantializingly closer to us and to themselves by reminding them of what they should have remembered, is an ambivalent progress due to its failure to understand why and how the perpetrator surprised us and fell short of our expectations in the first place. Repentance cannot ameliorate the mystery of this seeming forgetting; the others sense of culpability is their internalization of this same mystery. They become angry with themselves to the extent that they fail along with the accuser to penetrate the violent mystery of their self-disappointing `sin. Let's look at anger and forgiveness in the context of deconstructive thinking. Anger, beyond the within-trace tension intrinsic to every event, is tied to a particular momentum of between-event experience, reinventing itself subtly differently instant to instant. In general terms, it belongs to the precipitant recovery from regions of experience, from texts which disappoint in their tarrying with tropes of programmatic ideality. Deconstruction can be angry in its need to resist a thinking which it sees as violent, oppressive and destructive in a misguided faith in a purported institutional stasis of history. But as we have seen, anger may be said to be more specific in its effect than this general response to the other's regressiveness. We don't find ourselves angry with any and all texts which tarry with polarizing language. We condemn the other who more or less irritatingly disappoints our prior expectation of them. Our anger acts to remedy a rift in a certain intimacy of relationship with the other; it acts to remind in cases where it would seem the other has subtly forgotten, fallen just short of, a former proximity-density of contact with us and with themselves. This exquisitely teasingly, gnawingly subtle delay of movement would express a `could have, `should have quality of blame. What presumably has been forgotten or interrupted is not a specific content but a momentum of self-deconstructive change. For Derrida, it would never be a question of returning to a supposed self-present conceptual scheme, but of precipitating back into movement a self-deconstructive iteration which had stalled or suffered paralysis. And in saying that it is a momentum of transformation rather than a content which is being recovered, we must add that for Derrida this shift from `less to `more depowering movement which decon struction wants to coax is not a simple oscillation from one template to the other but a returning differently. Experience gathers and disperses itself, modalizes itself as more or less each time via a differently reinvented sense of more and of less, of forgetfulness and recovery. Where it finds a text slipping into a hostile, forgetful mode, its anger concentrates itself as a response to the specific parlaying of this forgetfulness into a weapon of violence and punishment. The other who grieves has in a sense forgotten the previous intimacy of their motile comportment with experience, but our engagement with this mourning is empathetic rather than hostile. But this is not quite true. It is not that we are less empathetic in our hostility toward the accused than in our consolation of the mourner, but that, from our vantage, the accused has lost less depowering momentum than the grieving one. There is less to remind and recover in the case of the guilty party than in the case of the mourner. Our helpless incomprehension in the face of another's depression and grief distances us more from the other than does the comparatively minor puzzlement of our angry disapproval of those we accuse. Anger is nothing but an intimate, aggressively and ambivalently confident reminder to the one who we believe is so close to his/her prior momentum (with which we empathize) in their present waywardness that a push in the `right (desubstantializing) direction may do the trick. Consolation of the grieving, on the other hand, is a process of reminding and recovery that has farther to travel in order to repair the gaping, fat rift between the prior other and the mourning other who sits in their place. In setting a `stubbornly exhausted thinking back to work, deconstructions anger expresses itself as an accelerated momentum of desubstantializing change, a release from relative paralysis toward a greater density of inventive eventness. Deconstructive anger, at the same time as accelerating momentum of change, does not hav e any better way to understand the forgetful text it wants to precipitate back to work than via accusations of abusive, plodding, repressive, thinking. As a result, the deconstructive response to a text seen this way is necessarily violent in the minimal extent that it `resists, `intervenes and `forces the text back to work. We mentioned that anger accompanies or effectuates the recovery of a certain thematic intimacy which has been breached by a guilty perpetrator. It might seem, though, that it is precisely the attempt at a concentrated gathering which is being resisted by a deconstructive response. Isn't it the attempt to turn experience (in myriad ways and degrees) into a fortress of self-identity which is being resisted in the name of an otherness keeping itself free of conceptual imprisonment? In other words, isn't a certain violence being encouraged here, a violence in complicity with putting a stalled and paralyzed thinking back to work? Yes, but remember that according to our reading, what characterizes a text in need of deconstruction is not that it lacks any internal movement, but rather that as a certain naive deconstruction of itself, it represents, moment to moment, a peculiarly lugubrious, inefficient, weary, and thus intrinsically polarizing and violent form of self-transformation. To this sickly progress a deconstructive intervention contributes acceleration; in rendering the stalled moments fluid, it converts programmatic violence into a more (differently) intimate and in an important sense a lesser violence. Deconstructive anger fights to precipitate a thinking both more intricately thematic and more radically critical than that it questions. But why is this relationship of deconstructer to deconstructed hostile? The hostility asks a question it cannot answer: Why and how does anyone fall short of a more rigorous deconstructive thinking? Of course a quick answer is available. We need only explain that deconstruction is, like all writing, historical; it is born of specific conditions implicating a complex intersection of theological, ethnic, political, economic and social influences, among many others. Deconstruction as an overtly articulated activity depends, then, on conditions available only in a certain cultural interval. But, as we pointed out, we don't become angry at the text which doesn't understand itself overtly in deconstructive terms. Our anger responds to the other's surprising but subtle disappointment of our expectations of them, regardless of what those original expectations entailed. In order to address our question, then, we need to probe more deeply into the way in which historical circumstances and conditions iterate and transform themselves. Specifically, we need to examine the more fundamental terms of the general dynamics of the unfolding of the textuality of experience instant to instant. Deconstruction is hostile to the extent that experience as iteration of differance doesn't trust itself. To ask why one fails more or less to think deconstructively is to ask how deconstruction itself fails to think deconstructively, which is to say, how meaning wanders from itself in the act of instantiating itself within and between moments. Experience is doomed to be always (each time differently) more or less disappointing, more or less infuriating, more or less deviant and disturbing. Deconstruction is in this way constantly disturbed by and forgiving of itself and others. Attempts to transcend this deviance within us and between us via politico-ethical or therapeutic analysis will run up against a universal limit of conciliation. Derrida believes that to forgive is always to forgive the unforgivable, that is to say, to be obliged to respect the secret of radical evil which remains inaccessible, which no amount of reconciliation and attempts at mutual understanding can alleviate. The origin of this radical evil is the dehiscence within the Derridean trace, determining an event's play of absence and presence to be dominated by a certain qualitative otherness. Whether in frightened surprise, guilty mourning, angry resistance or joyful furthering, moment to moment experience depends on and perpetuates a minimal violence. Answering the Question:Before the Ethics of Disturbance: How would we answer this question which we say deconstruction cannot: how do we conceive disappointment emanating from experience with others or ourselves as less-than-blameful, less-than-angering, less-than-deviant? When the shifting fortunes of experience are burdened with the heaviness of alterity, the momenta of moods etched by expansions and contractions, disappointments and recoveries could never escape the implications of hostility and guilt. To think of a mysterious rift between my own need and that of another, and within myself, is precisely the origin of the possibility of such a thing as blame, anger, guilt, as well as a certain fatness of pleasure-joy. To want, to desire, to mean would involve an inherent self-distancing or otherness, a bastardization which would limit my reconciliation with myself or with another. Justice would be cruel, as Nietzsche says. To feel cruel is to feel blamefully responsible, culpable, guilty. If we inhabit different social worlds, if our own `individual world is itself an endless iteration of differential cultures of self, then we must say that desire itself can only want to further one of an infinity of different realms, in asymmetric contradiction to the others. To think this way is to believe in the perversity of want. As distinct as Nietzsches notion of will to cruelty may be from metaphysical concepts of evil and divine righteousness, he has in common with such tropes a faith in the possibility of my obliviousness to anothers suffering. If meaning repeats itself as a trace of moody affirmative-negational difference, then to say that my hostility and desire to punish is the attempt at bringing the other closer to me is to also imply the dislodgement or violation of the others desire. A world of suffering, anxiety, guilt and contempt is implied by a philosophy w hich sees moody otherness at the origin of meaning. All philosophies and psychologies which allow quality to dominate the essence of meaning are in a fundamental sense philosophies of blame, to the extent that to blame is to grant to meaning the fundamental power of mystery, which underlies the force of suffering. Levinas' notion of the Other, Heidegger's primordial anxiety, Derrida's differance, and any thinking which depends on faith in otherness as meaning's double core, maintains a remnant of blamefulness. Levinas writes: "God does evil to me to tear me out of the world, as unique and ex-ceptional-as a soul(TE182)...Suffering qua suffering is but a concrete and quasi-sensible manifestation of the non-integratable, the non-justifiable. The `quality of evil is this very non-integratability...In the appearing of evil, in its original phenomenality, in its quality, is announced a modality, a manner: not finding a place, the refusal of all accomodation with..., a counter-nature, a monstrosity, what is disturbing and foreign of itself. And in this sense transcendence!"(TE180) The thought that, as Levinas characterizes it, thinks beyond what it thinks, beyond thematization and being and negation, older than consciousness and intentionality, nevertheless relies on, and in fact is centrally defined by, a certain substantiality of mood which demands a justice imprisoned by its blindness. Heidegger says: Understanding is never free-floating, but always moody. Having a mood brings Dasein face to face with its thrownness...not known as such, but disclosed far more primordially in `how one is(BT339-340). He argues that a primordial anxiety is the authentic mood of Dasein. Fundamental anxiety, he says, is not anxiety in the face of this or that `thing. It reveals the nothing, the indeterminateness of that for which we feel anxious. This mood is `older (ontologically), more primordial than all other moods. And what is the quality of this feeling of fundamental anxiety? Heidegger says it is pervaded by a peculiar calm. It is an anxiety "of those who are daring", and "stands in secret alliance with the cheerfulness and gentleness of creative longing". Desire seen as alterity is a boundary of mystery and secrecy, of the alien. It is the seed of contamination and disturbance which projects a world of violence and injustice as well as the hope of redemption and conciliation. It is at the heart of terms which speak of a willful, forgetful, repressive `knew better than to,`could have, `should have. The unjust or pathological other is that which is the opposite of my understanding and desire, that which opposes me, thwarts me, makes me suffer. The criminal or pathological act is another name for that which subverts our desire, that which causes our suffering. Thoughtless, lazy, selfish, inconsiderate, contemptible, greedy, cruel, guilty, evil, dishonorable, condemnable, decadent, conscienceless, malicious, ungrateful, psychopathological, misbehaving, erroneous, unadaptive, violator, criminal, deviant, abusive, arrogant; these names would have in common a measure of the undermining or repressing of desire. When we are thwarted, surprised, our anger is the impetus of our moving past and resisting the repression. Rehabilitation, punishment, Nietzschean cruelty and revenge, therapy, subversion and emancipation, justice are some names for the impetus of recovery from violation and hegemonic repression. Recovery maintains the mysterious senselessness which a violation of desire marks, just as a feeling of joy preserves the mysterious senselessness of a despair which it would be a recovery from. Guilt, blame, punishment, apology and forgiveness implicate each other as the movement through a culture of irreducible otherness. A possibility of justice that depends on a fulcrum of deviation or decentering at the heart of meaning drives the `should and `could of responsibility and projects, in innumerable degrees through different discourses, a world torn by suffering as well as by a peculiarly heavy, indulgent joy. When anothers intent is seen as grossly inconsonant with mine, he is my enemy. My enemy is a threat I have no choice but to protect myself from. I need to overcome, censure or escape the evil in the other or myself, to depower a harm. Murder and genocide name acts directed at me which seem to be behaviors of destruction, but similar acts directed from me are heroic attempts to lessen the harmful abyss of incoherence. The harshness of my protective efforts will be a reflection of the severity, that is, the substantiality, of this threat. Our desire to minimize deviance, separation, loss implies the punishment, condemnation, reconditioning, violation and subversion of the culpable other. The criminal, the inflicter of genocide, the murderer, the rapist, the torturer, the psychopath: these labels depend on faith in a break or separation between them and us. What kind of understanding no longer needs to think of meaning's inhabiting different worlds from event to event, no longer needs the thinking of `should have, of blame and alterity, of qualitative disruption, of hegemony and subversion, of regimes of language and their mutual incommensurability, of moody deconstructive resistance and dissemination? The radicality of thinking is evidenced most precisely by its penetration beneath the affective substantiality of a range of thinking of blame and anger (and equally implicated in those discourses' treatment of joy and pleasure). The moodiness of these terms, thought in various and particular ways, hide within themselves a more insubstantial mark or move, which has little room for affective appellation. To be a thinking of blame is to have faith in any of a variety of notions of Otherness, but my actions are more insubstantial, and therefore, in a certain peculiar sense more ordered with respect to me and my world than is overtly understood by philosophies, psychologies and aesthetics which fail to reduce the metaphysics of qualitative alterity (which locates blame in meaning's self-distancing) to a structure of radically unformidable linkage. Such a reductive thinking undermines the feelings of alienation and anger (as well as from too-substantial notions of joy) which accompany our conclusion concerning the alterity of the other, the irreducible manner in which we and `they do not belong, feelings which betray our reluctant failure to penetrate beneath this assumed alterity at the core of experience to the double edge of a gentle intricacy which preserves its gentleness even as it is instantiated as the wild contingency of all possible senses-moods. When the dynamic space of choice, desire, need, motive is seen as a mark which barely exceeds itself, which in fact is itself only as an impossibly inconsequential iteration of twoness, then a social world no longer has the power, and never did, to project deviance and violence, punishment and condemnation, psychopathology and therapy, error and correction, incommensurability and hegemony, the tensions of power. If a choice does not have the power to violate then it is no longer a deliberation. Desire without the passion and disruption of mystery needs nothing. Responsibility which does not risk failure to anticipate is no longer a response. A more radical thinking does not move beyond but within the thickness and remoteness of relation which the blameful `could and should have of anger, guilt and forgiveness convey. If the effect of desire is a subliminal linkage of moments of meaning, if the moment of meaning is itself defined as a barely registering dissymmetry less formidable than duality of subject-object or presence-absence, then morality and justice can no longer be understood by reference to violence, polarity, contamination, paradox. To recognize the genesis of a phenomenal world as an exquisitely variating desubstantializing gesture is to locate the origin of the arbitrary, the accidental, the repressed, the forgotten, the chaotic, the painful and tragic, in an infinitesimal dichotomy which never did have room for the affective fatness these terms imply. Any way of thinking which expresses a residual `fatness of mysterious content finds a remnant of irreducible suffering in the world, the qualitative negation or disturbance of understanding. But to know that in the same instant we point to a `this, an entity, an edge, we have moved beyond-within it in the most impossibly imbecilic and intimate way, is to see the meaningful edge of experience not as a suffering alterity but as (almost) a no longer affective-sensate gesture, a venue too insubstantial for pain and pleasure except as these terms are now understood as mere ghosts (but not hauntings) of an asymmetry almost too small to measure, the preservation of an extraordinary thread of linkage. This thread has no room for the breakage and alienation of despair and darkness, or the heaviness of substantial joy and happiness, except as these terms reveal within themselves an impossible richness and density of relation which are too intricate to suffer or celebrate. To render a social world of discordances, deviances, violations between-within people, to believe in anger and guilt, is to fail to penetrate beneath a certain mystery masking a radical intricacy inhering in the self-transforming motives of self and other. Such terms as legal, social and individual codes of justice and forgiveness reveal themselves variously as faiths in the other's redemption from the void of difference, but retribution's impetus, in thinking itself the remedy of a violation, a deviance, the subversion of a dominating hegemony, the countering of a discrepancy, an incommensurability, a parology, lingers with violence in its response to perceived oppression. In coaxing the perpetrator's contrition and conformity to expectations, contempt and condemnation is a success which represents a progress in the insight of the accuser and thus for him a desubstantializing gesture, but in relation to a more rigorous thinking it is exposed as a perpetuation of the blameful violation it resists. The very faith in `resistance or subversion, projects the world as a fundamental battlefield of tensions of various sorts. In poststructuralist accounts such as that of Foucault emancipation is no longer naively thought as a correction of error or progress toward or of the good;it is the movement, incessantly occurring in any span of culture, from one to another region of temporary stability, an island of relative coherence with no moral justification outside of this tentative, historically contingent belonging to local practices of language. Desire is no more that a pole of attraction belonging to the intersection of forces of domination. Knowing my `self as a mere strategy or role in social language interchange, I can know longer locate a `correct value to embrace, or a righteous cause to throw my vehemence behind. The only ethics that is left for me to support is the play between contingent senses of coherence and incoherence as I am launched from one local linguistic-cultural hegemony to another. To the extent that I know what such a thing as guilt or anger is beyond the bounds of local practices, these affectivities would have resonance as my experience of relative belonging or marginalization in relation to conventionalities that I engage with in discourse. I am always guilty, blameful in the extent to which I am a stranger in respect to one convention or another, including those that I recall belonging to in the past. I am always guilty in existing as a dislodgement from my history. Even in my ensconsement within a community of language, my moment to moment interchange pulls and twists me away from myself, making me guilty with respect to myself (my `remembered self) and my interlocutor. Similarly, I am always hostile in my engagements with others in the sense that I coerce (not willfully but prior to volition) another into my orbit in interchange. The non-directional vector of my desire, as the minimization of the distance between myself and the other, necessarily commits the violence of tearing him away from his past, which is in some measure a mystery to me. Because moment to moment interchange implies a mutual subversion of language, this is true in some small fashion even when we move within shared commitments. As we have seen, experience viewed from Derrida's deconstructive vantage already contains the basis of both hegemony and its subversion in each moment, radicalizing the schematic basis of a Foucaultian poststructuralism . Even this deconstructive discourse which refuses to allow a trace of meaning to be simply present to itself so as to be recognized as either organized or disorganized, perpetuates blameful justice of a minimal sort. A Derridean `psychoanalysis would move within the margins of a Freudian thinking as a less consequential and severe justice than that which would deal in an empirically punitive language of neurotic and psychotic pathology. Such a thinking would also find lingering assumptions of ontological self-presencing in the texts of Heidegger. Nevertheless, the relentless Derridean equivocal decentering of presence and absence itself protects a remnant of blameful otherness at meanings double core, invoking its own psychoanalysis of culpability and justice. For Derrida, justice implies non-gathering, dissociation, heterogeneity, nonidentity with itself, being unequal to the other, endless inadequation, infinite transcendence. It is that which is always reinvented in a singular-equivocal situation. The impetus of justice, then, is none other than the impetus of the deconstructive trace of meaning itself. Derridean justice is not one value among others, not that which would be opposed to injustice, but the very affirmational-negational tension that infest's meaning's origin as writing. If justice as Derrida understands it no longer reveals a self-present particularity, a `this thing which would be just, it shares with other philosophies a reliance on a certain moody remoteness of distance as its very basis. The irreducible play or tension which founds a world is necessarily cruel, guilty, and indignant as well as joyful and loving. Even as these affective terms do not locate themselves as preservable (non-deconstructed) senses, they would be tied to the modalizing repetition of a general-specific effect, the disseminative mark as always more or less just, more or less forgiving, more or less disappointing. Desire, throughout its various fortunes and misfortunes maintains itself for Derrida as the tension-play of an ought, a should, an obligation, responsibility, guilt, a risk. To think a text further as a subliminal edge of moreness is to effect a most gentle continuation-alteration, an engagement of familiar anticipation and predictiveness which no longer feels its movement (and never did) as incorporating the mystery of blame and guilt. A thinking of meaning's double site as this moreness is a notion of difference so insubstantial as to precede any sense of blame as the expression of a rift or distance between we and they, between me and myself. It is a notion of content so minimal as to barely repeat itself as `two more names. As we will soon show, it is less consequential than even the minimal stability of names such as presence and absence, structure and genesis, positivity and negativity, distance and proximity.