Daniel Heller-Roazen has written a mesmerically lucid book about a disturbance at the interface of logic and language. The tremor is perceptible across the surface of the Western philosophical tradition, from Aristotelian syllogistic theory to logic’s transcendental refashioning and onward to the present. This is the disturbance effected by the negative particle—in English, the non—and by the act of tracing a limit that the particle makes possible. Non-man touches everything excluded from the species. Non-seeing is the attribute of whatever, existent or inexistent, does not see. Non-mortal names a restricted yet inexhaustible domain of conceptual possibility. The indeterminate reference of such designations has garnered them the title “infinite” starting with Boethius, who called them nomina infinita. Infinite names might have remained a largely untested reflex of grammar, if not for the systematic bent of logical and metaphysical theory. After Aristotle’s introduction of them, philosophers have periodically returned to plumb the difference that the non makes, and Heller-Roazen tracks their efforts.

One of the pleasures of No One’s Ways is the contrast between the topic’s delicate austerity—a minor and glancingly understood philosophical theme—and the book’s virtuosic ranging through the plural traditions of Western logic and metaphysics. It is the work of a scholar singularly possessed of philological and conceptual brilliance, the clarity of whose prose becomes ever more spectacular as the complexity of the ideation mounts. This will not surprise readers of Heller-Roazen’s previous titles for Zone Books, each of which traces a particular topic across an array of discourses while turning exacting details toward the revision of our accounts of language, consciousness, the human, and form’s power. Similarly, No One’s Ways pursues its subtle quarry, the indeterminate name, through the various regions of philosophical understanding.

As a scholar of medieval thought and an enthusiast of philosophy more generally, I read No One’s Ways with uninterrupted delight. As a scholar of literature, I found the promise of the book’s first chapter tickling the edges of my concentration during the rest, the fourteen chapters wending through their eclectic way over the breadth of the Western philosophic tradition. But the first chapter is different. It retells Odysseus’s escape from the Cyclops Polyphemus, “a brute who killed his guests and ate them raw” (7). The wily hero famously tells his captor, “Outis is my name. My father and mother call me / Outis, as do all others who are my companions” (7). Once Odysseus and his men manage to gouge out the Cyclops’ eye and flee, Polyphemus calls for help. But at this point, the name’s “two syllables fall apart,” and “Oūtis, in the Cyclops’ mouth, becomes oú tis, ‘no one’” (8). The term cancels and nullifies the assertions that Polyphemus rages to make. Heller-Roazen unfolds several meanings for the hero’s self-canceling name to arrive at “the most literal, if barely grammatical, sense, as the refusal of the indefinite article ‘a’ or ‘one’: as ‘not-any,’ ‘not-one,’ or ‘non-one’” (9). Heller-Roazen continues:

Everything follows from this act of language, which constitutes the most minimal and extreme of affirmations, as well as the most far-reaching and excessive of negations. . . . This act is simple yet profoundly perplexing in sense and effects. In it, an entire company of linguistic shadows comes loose. They are the most indeterminate of spoken beings: meanings more tenuous and more fleeting even than that of being “a” or “one,” for that, precisely, they are not. (9)

Odysseus’s self-naming is the tactical, not systematic, activation of a possibility of language, deployed to survive, to keep his and men’s bodies from becoming meat. Or: the poet uses it to glorify speech over brute strength and to carry out the weaving of poetic narrative. Are the “company of linguistic shadows” this name unleashes the same shadows that Heller-Roazen tracks through the philosophic tradition?

Yes and no, the final chapter of No One’s Ways suggests. The ultimate chamber in the book’s architecture is stocked with the “grammatical” interest, or the fully connotative and cultural implications, of the first, in contrast to the philosophical restraint of the rest. In concluding, Heller-Roazen takes the step of formulating something not stated outright in philosophy’s corpus of indeterminate names, although, as he says, it “remains obstinately audible from text to text” (253). This is the idea that “the ‘infinity’ of non-’s sense is our own” (253). And so the first Aristotelian example of the indefinite name, “non-man,” is decisive. It marks the distinctly “human possibilities of non-being, inexistence, and privation” (254, my emphasis). It is here that No One’s Ways points toward the future for which it has been prolegomenon. What Heller-Roazen calls “our speaking nature” “has still not received the attention it demands” (255). The central matter, he urges, lies less in our faculty of understanding than our faculty of naming, availing ourselves of language, and doing so necessarily without having first traversed the sense and entailments of what we say. The possibilities of infinite self-naming “have hardly come into focus in the philosophical investigations of infinite naming,” and the philosophical tradition “fails to confront the crucial question that it raises,” especially through its examples and illustrations (257). “Today,” Heller-Roazen writes, the “non-subject” of Aristotle’s first foray into infinite naming “calls for our study” in other domains—in “literature and law, in anthropology and mythology, psychoanalysis and linguistics,” where “No One’s masks”—Odysseus’s ruse no doubt among them—“demand to be examined, one by one, in their disquieting force” (257–58).

Another such domain may be disability studies, or critical scholarship on how corporeal and cognitive variation become stigma and impairment. Having myself worked in the history of medicine, the “history of the body,” and historical disability studies, I wonder about nobody, non-body, and the corporeal possibilities for the logical language of absence and cancellation. “Disability,” after all, is a term that tarries with the negative. Its particle “dis-” refers to what is parted, sundered: “Latin dis- was related to bis, originally *dvis = Greek δίς twice, < duo, δύο two, the primary meaning being ‘two-ways, in twain.’”1 Etymologically, what is disabled is parted from capacity, from its suitability to purpose, from fitness, aptitude, proficiency. The current meaning of disability has arisen from a two-step historical process: first, the social-scientific invention of “normality” and “abnormality” starting in the late eighteenth century and, then, disabled persons’ activist reclamation of the category from the 1970s onward. Studying disability in earlier periods entails finding its synonyms, which together constitute a catalogue of negative particles: what is infirm, unnatural, misshapen, deformed, disfigured, invalid, diseased, abnormal, nonfunctional, deviant, disordered, inoperative.

In terms of Aristotelian logic, these terms are privative. As Heller-Roazen observes, Aristotle uses three kinds of logical terms for “three conditions of non-being” (34). The first is simple negation—“A is not B”—where the “not” modifies the copula “is.” The second condition is privation, and to explain this, Aristotle uses the example of sight: “Privation and possession are spoken of in connection with the same thing, for example sight and blindness in connection with the eye.” True privation concerns “whatever the possession naturally occurs in. . . . For it is not what has not teeth that we call toothless, or what has not sight blind, but what has not got them at the time when it is natural for it to have them.”2 The logical category depends on knowing what “naturally” ought to be present and the “time when it is natural” to possess whatever attribute.

Aristotle returns to the example in the Metaphysics where he differentiates the sightlessness of plants, “which would not naturally” have vision; the sightlessness of the mole, whose species was thought to lack eyes “in contrast with its genus”; and the sightlessness of the blind man, “in contrast with his own normal nature.”3 The unnaturalness of the privation, its character of deviation and violent loss, is meant to grow over the trio of sightless animals, and it is the blind man whose sightlessness is privative in the strict sense laid out in the Categories. To clarify the point, Aristotle’s early commentator Alexander of Aphrodisias introduces the rather strange example of a sightless wall. The negative predicate “does not see,” Alexander writes, “is true both of a blind man and of a wall, which is not at all receptive of sight; for the negation is true of an indefinite number of things.” However, “blindness is not this way: for it is only true in the case of things that have been deprived of sight.”4 Later, Alexander resumes: If “a wall and plants are said to be deprived of sight,” then “a privation of this sort would be equivalent to a negation.”5 As Aristotelian logic is taken up by Arabic philosophers, the elaboration of privation in corporeal terms continues; Averroes lists the attributes “bald,” “blind,” “naked,” “poor,” “squint-eyed,” and “cripple-bodied” as privative.6

The logical category of privation, then, demands adjudication between absence and loss, between the regular unfolding of natural form and its failures. A statement may be grammatically affirmative—“She is blind”—while still being privative in meaning. In the often exquisite abstraction that logic enjoys, it is startling to come across a basic classification that depends so completely on the contingent determination of normalcy. As Heller-Roazen notes, language “furnishes no unequivocal criterion for deciding whether a given word expresses a negative or a privative attribute” (35). The decision for privation comes not from the grammatical makeup of the sentence but from the social norms that undergird the semantics of language.

And yet there is a third condition of non-being, signaled by what Aristotle calls indefinite terms, and it holds out other possibilities. When Aristotle characterizes indefinite verbs in the Categories, he turns again to the body: “‘Non-recovers’ and ‘non-ails’ I do not call verbs. For though they additionally signify time and always hold of something, yet there is a difference—for which there is no name. Let us then call them indefinite verbs.”7 As Heller-Roazen writes, “Were one to hold to the philosopher’s example of ‘seeing,’ ‘not seeing,’ and ‘blindness’ to designate respectively a property, its negation, and its privation, a correspondingly indefinite expression would take the form of an attribute such as ‘non-seeing’ or ‘non-blind’” (35). To call someone non-seeing or non-recovering is to affirm a predicate itself constituted by drawing a limit, by excluding sight, excluding healing, and the domain of affirmation is itself unlimited. Heller-Roazen writes of the indefinite name, “Whatever the domain of the things that one refers it to, be it massive or minute, real or imaginary, the nomen infinitum in the Aristotelian-Boethian sense inscribes its cut in it” (72). Non-seeing “does more than evoke an indefinite expanse of signification. It also fractures it” (72–73).

Thus, it is not only to impugn the negative particle’s semantics of “deflation and deprecation” that disability studies might turn to it, not simply to parry the specter of the disabled non-man, a “ruined man, or the ruining of ‘man’ as such . . . an individual perilously close to man: a failed or ruined man, who by misfortune or fault, has somehow proved himself to be unworthy of his own name” (256). There are also poetic possibilities in the philosophical exercises Heller-Roazen gathers, something for the poiesis of disabled self-naming and world-building, in terms of an infinitized disability. The mole, the plant, the wall, the man: all fall within a sphere of non-seeing. The infinite name provides a rhetorical alternative to the currently favored figure of posthumanism, the list or “Latour litany” as Ian Bogost calls it: “floodlight, screen print, Mastercard, rubber, asphalt, taco, Karmann Ghia, waste bin, oil stain. The Latour litany gathers disparate things together like a strong gravitational field.”8 Such a list “reveals a few unfamiliar corners of being’s infinity through naming.”9 But infinite naming does something different, operating not through metonyms of “being’s infinity,” but via a predicate that traverses being by making its cut. If at the end of No One’s Ways Heller-Roazen wishes to seek out further archives of “non-man,” one might also pursue novel occasions and ways of saying “non-seeing,” “non-recovering,” “non-able,” “no-body,” that is, of taking an infinitized disability into our speaking nature. What is fractured in infinite names is not natural form, or the arc of regular biological development, but the unsorted domain of entities, real and merely possible. The bracing abstraction of logic may have something to contribute to the radical poetics of corporeal variation.

In closing, I note another moment in No One’s Ways when the body and its determinations come to the fore. Perhaps the most “disability studies” moment in the corpus of G. W. F. Hegel occurs near the end of the section on “Observing Reason” in the Phenomenology of Spirit, when reason is at “its worst,” Hegel says, as it endeavors to apprehend the human via psychology, physiognomy, and phrenology.10 This nadir is also where Hegel’s protagonist, Spirit, confronts the “infinite judgement,” or the category of “sentence that ‘collapses into itself,’ expressing the ‘complete incommensurability of subject and predicate,’” as he explains in the Encyclopedia Logic of 1830.11 The infinite judgment is where Aristotle’s indefinite names have arrived by the nineteenth century, on the twisting course that Heller-Roazen tracks. Judgment meets its collapse in the opposition between simple physiological determinism and the self’s mobile responsiveness. This takes the form of antagonism between expert and embodied subject, doctor and patient; as Hegel ventriloquizes the phrenologist: “I regard a bone as your reality.”12 But it also takes place as an unsustainable contradiction in thought itself. The collapsing proposition is exemplified by the claim that the “being of spirit is a bone.”13 To think, or to undergo, such an infinite judgment, on Hegel’s account, entails not only a rejection of diagnostic authority, but a rejection of the very form of judgment, which “seeks to define the thinking self by means of the duality of subject and predicate,” as Heller-Roazen explains (188). For Hegel, Spirit’s fundamental power lies in its imaginative criticism of the present as part of the emergence of the future—which is to say, in negation. In the end, “Observing Reason” does not by any means reject embodiment, but it dismisses the idea of the body as an inert and unyielding fact. Hegel insists that far from being defined by static materiality, this self delivers “a box on the ear” to would-be experts and recalls in the very failure of the infinite judgment its power to “produce itself by its own activity.”14 Disability studies’ rejection of the “medical model” of the embodied self is here the figure and means to a new form of speculative thought.

The non, the dis, the infinite judgment, the indefinite name: these may be means for speaking new corporeal personae into existence. No One’s Ways captures the strange speculative power of such terms. These may turn out to be good for eluding danger, evading contemporary vignettes of shipwrecked precarity and physical fear, where the cleverness of knowing one’s way around no body’s ways might produce surprising escape.

Noun terms in language refer—and yet sometimes it seems they do not. It is difficult to explain how reference happens; how a speaker’s utterance, coming from “inside,” manages to pin down an object “outside,” even in the very simple positive cases, such as “The apple on the table is wholly red.” The problem of how to account for reference when negated terms are involved, for example when the term “non-thing” is substituted for the variable X in the proposition “Any X is not a man,”1 and beyond that the problem of how to treat judgments involving such terms, has always been, and remains, highly contested.

In No One’s Ways, Daniel Heller-Roazen tracks the philosophical career of the particle “non-” from its beginnings in the logical literature of the classical period to its treatment by the language philosophers of the twentieth century, when a certain essential, language-sensitive, philosophical discussion around the metaphysics of indefinite terms2 went, in Heller-Roazen’s view, to ground.

It is a history of an idea, the idea of “non-man”; but at the same time, it is a chronicle of a deep, long-lasting and largely unresolved puzzlement, if not outright confusion, over how to treat negated or indefinite terms in language, terms that cause language to rupture and collapse. And there is no therapy in view. In that sense what No One’s Ways draws out for us is how the workings of a single particle, “non-,” throws the speaking self into view, as well as into its own view.

Speakers following the rules of grammar wander easily into these unworkable linguistic domains. “This sentence is false” is syntactically correct and yet it has no truth value, being neither true nor false. The sentence “All unicorns are white” has the same form as the sentence “Every non-thing is not a man,” except that now the filament-like term “non-thing” is slotted into the subject position (where one expects to see an existent) and the predicate appears in negated form. Should a general theory of propositions treat these sentences in the same way?

What is the negation of the sentence “Ten men rowed across the lake”?3 Nine men rowed? Nobody rowed? It is difficult to frame a theory of the proposition when what we can say so very often outstrips our capacity to make sense of what was said. “Philosophical analysis must go further than grammar,” Heller-Roazen observes (38). And indeed, if nothing else the language of negation is a tremendous source of philosophical opportunities, perhaps one of the greatest that has ever presented itself to the philosopher.

No One’s Ways is an astoundingly rich and multifaceted work, but I will confine myself here to Heller-Roazen’s treatment of the discovery of infinite names on the part of Aristotle’s fifth-century commentators, namely their realization that the infinite is buried in ordinary language in the form of terms such as “non-man.” Specifically, they noticed that the range of the term “non-man” is infinite, including “absolutely all things,” with the exception of “man.” The discovery appears at the end of the shift in focus from Aristotle’s analysis of indefinite terms towards a more expanded framework designed to handle all propositions involving such terms. In particular, an indefinite term such as “non-man” is now thought of as a name:

Aristotle himself had not explicitly treated the question of whether a term such as “non-man” signifies “the particular existence of any thing” or a “non-existence.” . . . Recalling the distinction between the implications of negation and privation,4Ammonius resolves an old problem by a single gesture: he sets infinite names among negations. He then introduces a new specification. Whereas an ordinary negative term merely denies a certain quality, a “transposed” designation . . . has a double function. By its “non-,” it first “destroys one thing.” Then, from that initial elimination, it “introduces” a panoply of non-existences: “everything beside the definite thing” that has been evoked. For Ammonius, an indefinite name thus un-names and names at once. . . . “Non-man” . . . can then designate “absolutely all things,” with the exception of “man.” (39–40)

Heller-Roazen points out that (contrary to appearances) Ammonius viewed the range of the name “non-man” as restricted to the genus of which man is a species: thus, including “horse, dog, goat-stag and centaur,” but not pear, spoon, or piety. It is precisely here that the problem with “non-man” emerges, the problem of whether the term should indicate the full “contrary” (as I will discuss below), or whether “non-man” should indicate a class of things nearby, so to speak, while still not falling under the predicate “man.” Boethius went further in attaching a genuinely infinite object to the name “non-man”:

With a terminological decision whose consequences were to resonate in Europe for centuries, Boethius forges a single Latin expression for Aristotle’s “indefinite” words. . . . Boethius translates the Greek aoriston, “indefinite,” by the Latin infinitum, adding, by way of explanation: “for it signifies many things, indeed infinite things.” (41)

It was an innocent move, made in passing, but it had monumental consequences, to wit: the infinite comes into view, simply through an idle running of language, the language of indefinite terms. “To utter an infinite name” such as “non-man,” Heller-Roazen writes—a “double act of meaning” that both annihilates and resurrects in a single act of thought—“is . . . both to refuse a finitude and to arm the infinitude that exceeds it” (43).

Boethius makes an interesting distinction at this point. The term “non-man” can be admitted into grammar; but because it fails to “signify definitely,” because the term fails to possess a “well-delimited meaning” (est circumscriptivae significationis), “definitely” signifying whatever it is that it designates” (41), “non-man” fails to be a name for the philosopher.

This view keeps together what would nowadays be separated into two separate theories of reference, the descriptivist (possessing a “well-delimited meaning”) and the causal (“signifying definitely”). According to Boethius the utterer of “non-man” is in no position to have knowledge of the particular of which “non-man” is a name—if “non-man” denotes a particular at all. In that sense he did not stray very far from the more or less empiricist view of these things laid down by Aristotle, and which remains influential:

To understand a name for a particular the only thing necessary is to be acquainted with that particular.5

It is interesting to track the troubled emergence of the mathematical infinite against the narrative of No One’s Ways. Of course, mathematicians have always been deeply engaged with the infinite. But it was only in the 1870s that infinite totalities were introduced as numerical entities, as numbers in the usual sense. This step was taken by Georg Cantor and it was met with a virulent response at the time, and indeed the status of the mathematical infinite remains controversial among mathematicians.

No One’s Ways leads straight into the mathematical controversy. Following Boethius centuries later, Cantor introduced infinite names into mathematics, reviving the fifth-century debate over whether or not objects with infinite names are legitimate objects of the, now, mathematical proposition.

Even across many centuries their arguments turn on the same sort of issue: determinateness, acquaintance and the question of what constitutes an object of thought. Albert the Great had asked whether infinite names signify “any particular substance with quality” (55), that is, whether such names ought to be admitted into logic; and the thirteenth-century philosopher Simon of Faversham argued against admitting infinite names on the basis of their indeterminateness:

Note that the infinite name and the infinite verb are excluded from the consideration of the logician because the name and verb which the logician considers should be parts of the proposition. But infinite names are not parts of the proposition, because everything that can be a part of the proposition must signify some concept of the mind, for the proposition is principally for the sake of truth. But we cannot have truth except through that which expresses a definite concept. For [the infinite name and verb] are said indifferently of being a non-being; they are therefore neither verbs nor names for the logician, and thus they are not his concern. They are not, however, excluded from the grammarian’s consideration. (Simon of Faversham, cited in No One’s Ways, 55)

Meanwhile, Cantor argues for admitting infinite names into mathematics—or something very much like them—on the basis that they do determine clear and definite constituents of our thought:

We may regard the whole numbers [e.g., ω, JK] as “actual” in so far as they, on the ground of definitions, take a perfectly determined place in our understanding, are clearly distinguished from all other constituents of our thought, stand in definite relations to them, and thus modify, in a definite way, the substance of our mind. . . . In the introduction of new numbers, it is only obligatory to give such definitions of them as will afford such a definiteness. . . . As soon as a number satisfies all these conditions, it can and must be considered as existent and real in mathematics.6

To put it concretely (in the case of numerical infinities), the question was whether an infinite set such as {0, 1, 2, 3 . . .}, to which Cantor gave the name ω, ought to be interpreted as a “completed” as opposed to a “potential” infinite. The distinction turns on whether an object like ω is transparently visible to thought or intuition qua object, as Cantor thought, or whether the set {0, 1, 2, 3 . . .} is simply (or only) indefinitely extendible, so that for any number (belonging to the set), one can name a larger number. The Aristotelian view that ω ought to be regarded as only potentially infinite was dominant among the mathematicians of the nineteenth century and persists (somewhat) to this day. The term “ω,” in this view, would then be not so much the name of an object as shorthand for a kind of call and response.

The crucial point here is that instead of simply taking the term “infinite” to mean “non-finite,” as was the convention among the mathematicians of his time, Cantor saw that the term “non-finite” effaced a vast, ramified hierarchy of infinite names. Thus, in a single act, the various ontologies that philosophers had associated with indefinite terms, the oversupply of interpretive options urged on them by the natural language cases, were fused by Cantor into a single, massive ontology, that of the transfinite.

The great theme of No One’s Ways, the philosophical problem that naming is a form of reification, was thus not only not solved by Cantor (or for that matter by any mathematician who followed him), but also advanced—albeit with a change of particle from “non-” to “trans-.”

A positive definition of the term “infinite” was given by Richard Dedekind in his 1874 Was sind and was sollen die Zahlen?: a set is said to be infinite if it contains a mirror image of itself (in one of its proper parts).7 But “non-man is too uncanny to be avoided,” Heller-Roazen remarks (256), and indeed Dedekind allowed himself to be lured into attempting a proof of positive existence, of even a single infinite set, which led to a disaster, mathematically speaking. The “theorem” appears in the now notorious paragraph 66 of Was sind and was sollen die Zahlen? and is stated as follows: “My own realm of thoughts, i.e., the totality S of all things, which can be objects of my thought, is infinite.”8

Dedekind’s proof goes like this: He posits the thought of his own ego; let us call this thought E. He then considers the thought of E, and then the thought of the thought of E, and then the thought of the thought of the thought of E, and so on. David Joyce speaks for most mathematicians when he says of the proof:

Dedekind’s so-called proof of this statement leaves much to be desired. It’s worthwhile quoting, but as it has no mathematical merit whatsoever, it’s not worth discussing. The statement should be an axiom, not a theorem.9

Cantor was wise to sidestep any proof of existence—though of course he argued for it—and this is the way the existence question is handled by mathematicians nowadays: they adopt the existence of infinite sets as an axiom, as a principle beyond proof. Just as the early descriptivists once excluded infinite names from logic while allowing them into grammar, so mathematicians deny the existence of infinite objects the status of a theorem while allowing them into their own grammar with the phrase façon de parler—a term of art in mathematics that is often used to refer to the infinite.

As for the transfinite hierarchy itself, which Hilbert once defended with the statement “No one will expel us from the paradise that Cantor has created for us,”10 it has been vastly elaborated by set theorists, even in the face of the somewhat ubiquitous use of the phrase façon de parler. In fact, for the set theorist, “non-finite” turned out to be the key to the kingdom.

The magnificent problem posed by No One’s Ways is that “man” and “non-man” cannot coexist, in the sense that the act of prefixing a term with the particle “non-” eliminates all trace of the negated object. One might call this the Outis Problem, after the passage in the Odyssey with which Heller-Roazen opens his work. There is a sense in which the Outis Problem was overcome by set theory: the finite is not only not obliterated in the passage from finite to transfinite, it is always there—it is the way in. Other instances of this retention of the negated object in contemporary logic might begin with Boethius’ observation that “non-man” has an infinite range, an idea that can now be expressed in infinitary logic.11 This logic was introduced by D. Scott and Tarski, and its idea was to eliminate the vagueness associated with the existential quantifier by replacing existential statements of the form “There is an x with property P” with an infinite disjunction, over all names.12 For example, the sentence “There is a number which is not even” then becomes “Either 1 isn’t even or 2 isn’t even or 3 isn’t even or 4 isn’t even . . .” Note that all the numbers are mentioned, including all the even numbers. Infinitary logic is the focus of very active logical study nowadays.

A final logical point: Heller-Roazen remarks at the end of his book that philosophers have ignored the rich possibilities “non-man” offers, and this is astutely observed:

Although multiple, conflicting and arresting, such possibilities have hardly come into focus in the philosophical investigations into infinite naming. Only rarely, and as if unaware of themselves, have philosophers drawn close to a troubling possibility of logical determination, which none, however, has dared to state. It is the possibility that “non-man” names not the “contrary” or “complimentary” class of man, as Boole and others naïvely assume, but a shadow that belongs to man and to him alone. Were this to be the case, the indefinite state of being “non-man” would pertain solely to “man.” The obscure power of the “non-” would inhere to the very essence to which it is tied. Some non-being would “be” enclosed in it. (257)

Boole was working at a time when logicians did not really understand the concept of definability in logic, the idea that an object can be uniquely described in a logical language. Logicians understand definability better now, and this may bring us closer to what Heller-Roazen is asking for here. For suppose a proposition φ defines a unique object m. Then ¬φ names the contrary of m, while still indicating m in the form of φ. Moreover, we can recover the object m from ¬φ by adding a second negation, because ¬¬φ and φ are equivalent in classical logic. Heller-Roazen is correct, though, that logicians have not yet devised systems in which terms are negated directly, as in ¬m.13

The call for a new analysis of the Outis Problem is very interesting. It would be truly sublime to develop a discourse of “non-man,” but with “man” inside. I do see logic giving way—but perhaps there are new ways of thinking about definability, and this will save us from the wreckage.

As for pure philosophy, the distinction philosophers once drew between infinite names that may be considered as legitimate objects of grammar and those that are legitimate objects also of logic went underground in the analytic philosophy of these matters for a while, as Heller-Roazen notes of the broader discussion. The doctrine of ontological commitment due to W. V. O. Quine, for example, which has influenced generations of philosophers since its introduction in the 1950s, conflated the scientist’s theoretical and natural language discourses, such that all noun terms are now to carry ontological commitments tout court.

The so-called “linguistic turn” in philosophy inaugurated by Russell, Frege, and Moore in the beginning of the last century channelled philosophy towards the development of formal languages and the project of unearthing the formal, logical skeleton of all that we do in language. But Heller-Roazen’s remark, at the end of No One’s Ways, that “the doctrine of infinite naming silently spirals back, time and again” (255), applies as much to the discourse of indefinite terms as to philosophers themselves. Philosophers have returned to natural language in large numbers.14 They see now that what happens in between the logic of our discourse matters, too; that becoming attuned to the odd contingencies of language, to its linguistic residue, is as revealing of what we do even in our scientific languages as is their putative structure. Heller-Roazen seems to call for precisely this at the end of his book, and just as he sets this down it has indeed materialized.

I.

For Adorno and Horkheimer, the cunning escape of the Homeric hero from Polyphemus marks a fundamental shift in “the historical position [Standort] of language.”1 Whereas mythical fate does not know the distinction between word and object, Odysseus discovers the difference and exploits it accordingly: the wily hero identifies himself as Oūtis, and just as he had hoped, this false name becomes, upon repetition, oútis, or “no one.” By means of this linguistic trick, the man known to be “turning many ways” (polútropos) is able to extricate himself from the mythical sphere in which word and object are one. In a surprising twist of their own, Adorno and Horkheimer link Odysseus’ ruse to modern mathematics and symbolic logic. If one describes, with Carnap, the variable as a sign that designates “something indeterminate” (etwas Unbestimmtes), it becomes easier to see, however, why Adorno and Horkheimer would want to associate Odysseus’ ploy with what they characterize as the “formalism” of these disciplines: not unlike the variable in modern mathematics and symbolic logic, the pseudo-name Oūtis refers “to all sorts of contents, both to nobody and to Odysseus himself.”2

Heller-Roazen assigns hardly less significance to Odysseus’ ruse than do Adorno and Horkheimer. In his reading, however, the wily hero saves himself “by a single act of speech: adding the particle ‘no,’ ‘not-,’ or ‘non-’ (ou) to the indefinite pronoun ‘a,’ ‘one,’ or ‘someone’ (tis)” (9). Everything follows from this grammatical analysis of oútis. Where Adorno and Horkheimer compare Oūtis to the functioning of a variable, Heller-Roazen transitions from oútis to a discussion of indefinite names. And where the former diagnose a radical continuity from Homer to Carnap, the latter detects a no less radical discontinuity. As Heller-Roazen argues, it is, precisely, the formalism of logic in Carnap and others that brings about a fundamental change in “the historical position of language.” To be sure, Heller-Roazen does find instances of a philosophically relevant use of the negative particle in later thought; among other things, he highlights the importance of the non-identical in Adorno’s Negative Dialectics (241). After the arrival of modern formal logic, however, “a detail of grammar such as the possibility of affixing non- to a word” (237) no longer becomes an object of sustained philosophical reflection. In what follows, I will not so much challenge Heller-Roazen’s claim as highlight the significance of another story, one that can be found in the margins of his book. From the beginning, if not in Homer, then in Aristotle, the peculiar indeterminacy of the variable accompanies, perhaps like a shadow, the “linguistic shadows” (9) that come loose in indefinite names.

II.

Although Heller-Roazen insists on the morphology of oútis, it would be a mistake to distinguish his analysis from the one proposed by Adorno and Horkheimer in terms of a fixed contrast between grammar and logic. To the extent that Heller-Roazen tracks efforts to circumscribe the effects of indefinite names, his book is also a history of the distinction between these two disciplines. His critical intervention on modern formal logic towards the end of No One’s Ways needs to be seen against the backdrop of this history.

Indeed, the first philosophical attempt to address expressions of the form “not-” or “non-X” already demonstrates the difficulty of accounting for them. Using “the queer term ‘not-man’ or ‘non-man’ (ouk anthrōpos)” (18) as an example, Aristotle examines the relation of such expressions to forms of negation and privation. One thesis of his, in particular, would prove to be momentous: guided by the grammatical distinction between “S is not a man” and “S is a not-man” in Greek (37), Aristotle holds that the corresponding sentences mean different things (19, 28–29). As Heller-Roazen points out, Aristotle initially hesitates to categorize an expression such as “not-man” as a noun or name (onoma) (19). Once he does so, however, he introduces a technical term that gives an indication of what may have given him pause in the first place: by calling these expressions “indefinite” or “indeterminate” (aoriston) (33), Aristotle hints at the fact that they present a stumbling block for his logic, which construes the assertion as consisting of, precisely, two well-defined terms (horoi) linked by the copula “is.”

If Aristotle says very little about the meaning of indefinite names on their own, this will change with his commentators, as Heller-Roazen shows in the first half of his book. In particular, Boethius interprets Aristotle’s “indefinite name” (onoma aoriston) as “infinite name” (nomen infinitum), arguing that an expression such as “non-man” negates one definite meaning, while introducing an infinite array of existing and nonexistent things (40–41). In one respect, however, Boethius is just as cautious as Aristotle. According to the Roman philosopher, expressions of the form “not-” or “non-X” may be regarded as names in grammar, but not in logic and philosophy (41). As Heller-Roazen explains, there are good reasons for this attempt to legislate on the use of infinite names: once attaching the negative particle to a word is understood as an act of “infinitation,” the possibility of producing expressions of this form is bound to clash with the order of philosophical terms that already “contain everything” (62). Heller-Roazen pursues this difficulty with a particular focus on the term “thing” (res), culminating in Kant’s reflections on the concept of an “object in general” (102). The second half of No One’s Ways begins where the first half left off, with Kant, but instead concentrates on his account of so-called infinite judgments. Heller-Roazen shows that assertions such as “the soul is non-mortal” (118) were to have an important career in post-Kantian thought. But however much thinkers such as Hegel (172–73.) may have pushed against Aristotle’s analysis of predication, they remained in its “shadow” (220).

The same cannot be said of Frege. As Heller-Roazen argues, philosophical reflection on the infinite name—and, by extension, the infinite judgment—is contingent upon the Aristotelian theory of the predicative statement: S is P. Frege, however, introduces a new analysis of the assertion, one that breaks it down into function and argument, rather than subject and predicate, which for their combination require the copula. Of course, Frege’s “conceptual notation” (Begriffsschrift) does account for statements such as “x is not a man,” which it analyzes as ∃(x)[¬f(x)], or “There is an x, such that not f(x).” Yet there is, among the formation rules of his logic, none that would correspond to the grammatical rules that make it possible to produce, in many languages, statements such as “x is a not-man.” Surveying discussions surrounding the development of modern formal logic from Frege to Carnap, including Carnap’s altercation with Heidegger, Heller-Roazen concludes that with the shift towards the function-argument analysis of predication, the infinite name disappears from logic and most of philosophy (220–21). Accordingly, his call to think “with languages, and not only in them, and against them” (251), is also a protest against what Quine once described as “the Procrustean treatment of ordinary language at the hand of logicians.”3

III.

In Heller-Roazen’s history of the infinite name, the arrival of Frege’s conceptual notation thus acquires epochal significance. For Frege himself and for thinkers working in his wake, becoming clear about the defining characteristics of modern mathematical logic requires, in turn, the consideration of another way of indeterminacy: the variable. As Russell writes, “[t]he variable is perhaps the most distinctively mathe­matical of all notions; it is certainly also one of the most difficult to understand.”4

In order to approach the problem of the variable, it may be best to take another look at Heller-Roazen’s construal of the changes brought about by Frege’s conceptual notation. To begin with, if it were only a matter of illustrating the contrast between ordinary language and modern logic, Frege’s function-argument analysis would no doubt be a good case in point. The disappearance of the infinite name from logic, however, has a more specific reason: for Frege and the majority of logicians after him, “not” applies to entire propositions, rather than individual terms. Invoking the law of excluded middle, Russell, for example, argues that the negative particle can never be taken to qualify a predicate.5 The resulting syntactical rule “not-p” (where p is a propositional variable) takes leave of grammar and excludes the infinite name from the purview of modern logic. Heller-Roazen alludes to this fact when he links the vanishing of the infinite name from logic not only to Frege’s function-argument analysis, but also a more general shift from a logic of terms to a logic of propositions (221–22, 239). While Łukasiewicz was among the first to emphasize the contrast between these two strands of logic and situate them historically, Heller-Roazen draws on another distinction made by the Polish philosopher in order to deepen the comparison of traditional and modern logic. If anywhere, it is here, in Heller-Roazen’s admittedly brief discussion of the “formalistic” (221) nature of modern logic, that he approaches the fundamental change in the “position of language” highlighted by Adorno and Horkheimer.

As in Dialectic of Enlightenment, the determination of this shift turns on the question of meaning. Following Łukasiewicz, Heller-Roazen points to the use of letters in Aristotle’s syllogistic and maintains that traditional logic was already “formal” (221). By contrast, modern logic is “formalistic” inasmuch as it constitutes, in Heller-Roazen’s words, “a code of writing in which the sense of every expression is determinable on the basis of its form” (ibid.). What is surprising about this gloss on Łukasiewicz is the manner in which Heller-Roazen links form and meaning. For Łukasiewicz, the defining characteristic of a fully formalized logic is the fact that it allows one to confirm the validity of a proof “without referring to the meaning of the terms used in the proof.”6 The modern paradigm of such a system is the one set forth by Frege in Conceptual Notation: it consists of axioms from which the theorems of propositional logic can be derived by means of a small number of rules of inference. This system is “formalistic” in Łukasiewicz’ sense insofar as its axioms and rules of inference are syntactically specified. Thus, there is no need to refer to the meaning of particular terms when verifying the correctness of deductions; the only thing that matters is the logical form of the theses, which can be brought out by a combination of variables and logical constants such as and, or, or not.

If the variable thus takes center stage just as the infinite name disappears from logic, there are good reasons why Heller-Roazen would touch on the history of the variable at various points in his book. Drawing on recent research, Heller-Roazen is careful not to identify the use of letters in ancient geometry and logic with the role played by the variable in modern times (13–14, 221). Close to the arithmetical center of his book, moreover, he introduces the “unknown quantity” of algebra in his discussion of the “thing” (res) in the early modern period leading up to Kant (93–94, 105). Heller-Roazen’s subsequent discussion of the variable in modern logic, however, once more cites the “algebraic x” (222). The issue is not just that Frege, along with the concept of a function, borrows his use of the variable from analysis, rather than algebra. More importantly, the concomitant reflection on the relation of the variable to its values prevents one from assuming, as Adorno and Horkheimer do, that the formalism of modern logic must necessarily issue into “nominalism.”7

For Frege, who provides Łukasiewicz with the prime example of modern “formalistic” logic, the axioms and theorems of logic are neither tautologies that do not say anything (Wittgenstein) nor empty schemata awaiting a model-theoretic interpretation (Tarski). Rather, they are very general descriptive statements that are true for all possible values of the variables involved. Russell has a very similar understanding of the statements of logic. The question remains, however, how to conceive of the so-called free variable: that is, the “x,” “y,” or “z” that is not bound by a quantifier such as “all”. Under the auspices of what the early Russell calls a “term”—which is “anything . . . that can be mentioned” and as such “has being”—he interprets the variable “n” (which is assumed to range over the integers) as denoting “any number.”8 Whatever a free variable such as “n” denotes is, accordingly, not one definite term; but a term, albeit an indefinite one, it nonetheless is if everything that can be mentioned is indeed something that is. Russell describes this strangely indeterminate term as “any number,” and were it not for purely grammatical considerations, one would have to hyphenate this phrase and precede it by a definite article; for this any–number is the one thing, the term, that the variable “n” denotes.

By contrast, Frege argues that while “1,” “2,” or “3” are certainly names of particular numbers, a variable such as “n” is not the name of an indefinite or indeterminate number, for the simple reason that there is no such thing.9 In his explanation of what a free variable is, Frege concentrates on the variable in the context of a function. Given his logical extension of the latter, expressions such as “x² + 3x” and “x is a man” are both signs of functions. One gets a value for a particular argument of these functions if one replaces “x” by a proper name; viz., a numeral, the name of a human being, or the name of any other “object” (Gegenstand). The “x” itself, however, is not a name. According to Frege, this letter simply marks “the places” (Stellen) in the expression of a function where “the sign for the argument must go in.”10 In other words, “x” is merely a placeholder. Properly speaking, it “designates” (bezeichnet) nothing at all.11

After cursorily describing the variable as a sign that designates something indeterminate, Carnap, for his part, reiterates Frege’s view. Presumably, Carnap’s assertion that variables do not “mean” (bedeuten) anything was one of the reasons why Adorno and Horkheimer concluded that modern logic is nominalist.12 Remarkably enough, however, Frege also characterizes the variable as a sign—without, however, inadvertently assimilating it to a name, which would then necessitate the kind of ontological interpretation one finds in Russell. For Frege, the variable is a sign that does not designate. Moreover, the “x” does not only not designate a “meaning” (Bedeutung), it also does not express a “sense” (Sinn).13 Accordingly, it is not only unlike a numeral or a name such as “Socrates,” which, in Frege, have both a meaning and a sense; it also differs from a name such as “Odysseus,” which, assuming that Homer’s epos is a work of fiction, expresses a sense, but does not designate a meaning.14 In short, if the variable is a sign, it is a sign sui generis. As a sign, however, the “x” is not without semantic function. According to Frege, the “x” “indicates” (andeuten) objects such as numbers or human beings “indeterminately” (unbestimmt).15 With this seemingly minor adjustment, Frege displaces the question of indeterminacy from a “what” to a “how.” In the case of the variable, indeterminacy does not qualify a signified, but a mode of signification. Or, to cite a grammatical distinction that Frege employs at this point, indeterminacy enters the picture as an adverb, and not an adjective.16

IV.

The fact that the variable remains on the margins of No One’s Ways is of course no accident. However one may want to characterize the relation between the histories of the infinite name and the proverbial “x,” their trajectories can never be said to merge into one. Even when abstracting from differences of usage, their ways of indeterminacy remain distinct inasmuch as an expression of the form “non-man” is logically complex, while a variable is not. Only the former, but not the latter, involves a logical operator.

However, the presence of a logical operator does not affect the question of whether or not an expression is a name. The question is, then, whether an expression should be analyzed as a name if it lacks a determinate meaning. In this regard, the comparison with the debates surrounding the variable at the turn of the twentieth century may be instructive, the differences between indefinite names and variables notwithstanding. Russell’s analysis of the variable pro­duces difficulties that are both logical and ontological. As his notion of a term indi­cates, these problems are exacerbated by the fact that he tends to blur both the sign with its sense and its sense with its meaning. Yet even if one does take these distinc­tions into account, it is difficult to see how one could avoid asking what a vari­able refers to if one regards it as a name. It is no doubt for this reason that Frege de­velops a compet­ing ana­lysis of the variable, one in which the “x” no longer func­tions as a name. In general, Frege does of course not shy away from making far-reaching ontological commitments. When it comes to the variable, however, the entire thrust of his analysis is to avoid positing indeterminate meanings (Bedeutungen). His analysis is certainly not without cost: it forces Frege to suspend, in the singular case of the vari­able, the semantics of sense and meaning and revert to the grammatical, rather than logical, distinction between adverb and adjective. If Frege is willing to pay this price, it is because the variable, unlike expressions of the form “not-“ or “non-X”, cannot be ex­cluded from logic.

To the extent that Heller-Roazen charts the career of the particle “not-“ or “non-“ within a largely Aristotelian tradition, his book remains, as its subtitle indicates, An Essay on Infinite Naming. After having circumscribed the closure of the logico-philosophical formation in which expressions of the form “not-“ or “non-X” were analyzed as names, however, Heller-Roazen announces a sequel to his investigation, one that will turn to fields such as law, literature, and linguistics. The new volume will take Aristotle’s example of “non-man” as a paradigm for the examination of the human being in relation to language—or, more precisely, his or her “voice” (12, 258, et passim). One may surmise, however, that even after philosophy it will  remain a question for thinking whether there could be, with regard to the twin conception of “man” and “non-man,” an avenue for the development of a notion of indeterminacy that is, if not adverbial, then non-adjectival. Maybe Heidegger can be seen to gesture in this direction when he defines, in the text that was to become the target of Carnap’s polemic, the human being as “the placeholder of the nothing” (Platzhalter des Nichts).17 For what is perhaps most significant about Hei­deg­ger’s formulation is not his reification of “not” (nicht), for which he was duly criticized by Carnap, but his use of the term “placeholder,” which only gained prominence in logical discussions after Frege.

This work recalls in multiple ways Ann Smock’s incomparable What Is There to Say? Not only does this phrase capture my sense of inadequacy before such a magisterial revisioning of the history of philosophy as the history of the “non-” in its negative, positive, privative, and infinite variations, but both works arrest us at the juncture of speech and non-speech, logical agility and inertia. No One’s Ways is a stunning intellectual history of the trajectory of the grammatical and ultimately logical particle “not” or “non-,” from Aristotle and Scholastic thought to the early decades of the twentieth century, with a major focus on Kant and thinkers like Salomon Maimon and Hermann Cohen who revisited Kant’s structural frameworks, and concluding with the divergence between logical positivism and phenomenology. The connection to Heller-Roazen’s earlier investigations of linguistic forgetfulness, sensation, and number is palpable, but this work stands apart as something of a culmination and synthesis of the sequence. Its discussions of predication, transcendentals, the thing (res), and Kantian thought are mesmerizing and exceed the tight focus of the “essay.” The recurrent terms and motifs—unity and disjunction, positive and negative, even the true and the false—are presented for the most part in a manner that is neither oppositional nor dialectical, but according to a different and less categorizable logic of nominatory exposition. Indeed the mode of this essay’s presentation echoes something of the concluding formulation a propos of Heidegger that “we are confronted with the question of Being and non-Being not in understanding . . . but in naming” (255). Without naming itself as such, this unorthodox study presents a transhistorical lineage of Western epistemological encounters with, or predications of, the ontological.

In overcoming a certain speechlessness, and a wish to linger on Heller-Roazen’s intrepid forays into the heights of Scholastic predication, I am drawn above all to respond to one of the concluding challenges, that these investigations be extended to other domains such as anthropology, law, psychoanalysis. . . . To cut to the chase, while in no way engaging directly with psychoanalysis, this work has grasped and offered, with more lucidity than I have previously encountered, the ostensible key to Lacanian ontology, as it is lodged in the particles ne and mē. This might be simplified to the question of how non-being appears in language.

Such an ontological problematic strikes this reader as difficult to reconcile with the work of the psychoanalytic clinic, but in any case it is the small particles of non-being that, more than anything else, raise these Lacanian stakes. They might be termed particles of negation, a term used by Freud (Verneinung) and commonly applied to Lacanian psychoanalysis. But it is Heller-Roazen’s coup de grâce to delineate, at both linguistic and logical levels, why a seeming negation may not be one—it may be privative, indefinite, or even affirmative, but is generally not “lacking” in any straightforward sense. And this same formulation can be made, albeit more contentiously, for Lacanian thought, if not psychoanalysis more generally.

At more than one juncture, Lacan broaches the ontological function of the pleonastic “ne,” the addition of a seemingly unnecessary negative particle after certain expressions of fear or doubt. The example he returns to is “Je crains qu’il ne vienne” (I’m afraid he will come), which takes a solo “ne” without the usual accompanying “pas,” and in this fashion introduces no negative meaning to the phrase. In The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Lacan at once highlights the “negative” dimension of the particle “ne” and at the same time its non-negating function:

The negative particle “ne” only emerges at the moment when I really speak, and not at the moment when I am spoken, if I am on the level of the unconscious. And I think it is a good idea to interpret Freud in a similar way when he says that there is no negation at the level of the unconscious. Given that immediately afterwards, he shows us that there is indeed negation. That is to say, in the unconscious there are all kinds of ways of representing negation metaphorically. There are all kinds of ways of representing it in a dream, except, of course, for the little negative particle “ne,” because the particle only belongs to discourse. (64)

Not unlike the vicissitudes of the “non-” in No One’s Ways, here the “ne” takes on a unique affirmative quality precisely because of its status as a discursive entity. It also provides the alibi for Lacan’s persistent non-renunciation of Freud. On the one hand, Lacan affirms Freud’s oft-cited proposition that there is no negation in the unconscious. Then he counters that Freud himself shows negation to be present, albeit metaphorically (Lacan will emphasize to great effect in his anecdote of the sardine can in Seminar XI that he is “not speaking metaphorically” [95–96]). Furthermore, it is possible to represent negation in a dream, but the dream can not represent the particle “ne” per se, which rather counterintuitively escapes negation by not allowing metaphoric approximation. In this sense, the “ne” alone approaches a non-negatable reality, “the moment when I really speak, and not . . . when I am spoken.” Perhaps we could say the pleonastic “ne” exists with no useful grammatical function but more nearly an ontological one, as something like a being-particle. This would seem a non-Kantian reformulation of what Heller-Roazen recounts as eighteenth-century German Scholasticism’s “two determinations of a ‘thing’ (res): ‘reality’ (realitas) and ‘negation’ (negatio)” (111). In Lacan, however, rather than being distinguished categorically, the real and negation find a rare coincidence in the pleonastic “ne.”

Lacan’s emphasis on the expressive aspect of Freudian negation seems compatible with Heller-Roazen’s demonstration that articulating negation in language paradoxically undermines the being of negation as such. “Thus the Verneinung, far from being the pure and simple paradox of that which presents itself in the form of a ‘no,’ isn’t just any old ‘no.’ There is a whole world of no-saying (non-dit), of interdiction (interdit), since it is in that very form that the Verdrängt, which is the unconscious, essentially presents itself. But the Verneinung is the most solid beachhead of that which I would call the ‘intersaid’ (entre dit) in the same way we say ‘interview’” (64–65). Heller-Roazen has uncovered in the history of philosophy something like a whole world of no-saying, which to be sure is not any old no. But does the “no” in No One’s Ways operate in the same fashion as the Lacanian unconscious and its unique access to being’s particles? Perhaps the two approaches are most proximate when Heller-Roazen evokes the “zero of affirmation” as a “thinking beyond judgment” in the beautiful passages on Maimon (151). We might ask if this is something akin to what Jacques-Alain Miller famously identifies as the zero representing the “not-identical with itself” which the “discourse of logic summons . . . and then rejects as the pure negative . . . in order to constitute itself as that which it is” (99, my emphasis). Like Heller-Roazen, Miller emphasizes the logical process, the effective vanishing of the subject in the field of the signifying chain. Yet what would it mean to refocus our attention on the ontological constitution, that being is positively named in quite absolute terms through this process of exclusion or suture?

The preceding psychoanalytic examples share with the series of thinkers and works surveyed in this extraordinary intellectual history the fact that in almost all cases, except possibly Hegel and Frege (for opposing reasons), the negating particle is not fully a negative but retains something of the affirmative by dint of its very enunciation or naming. This distinction pertains in the brief discussion of Cohen’s use of the ancient Greek particle mē, as the “qualified” negation in contrast to the definitively negative ou. Lacan both echoes this and takes mē in a quite different direction.

The Greek mē is central to Lacan’s analysis in the Ethics seminar of the self-willed vanishing of Oedipus at the end of Oedipus at Colonus. At issue is an ever-proud Oedipus unreconciled with the son who Antigone will later try to bury, and empowered to bestow blessings and curses on Athens and Thebes. Beyond this, his power extends to an inexplicable ability to absent himself from the world, escorted only by the Athenian king Theseus: “But by what doom / Oedipus died, not a man alive can say, / only Theseus, our king. / No blazing bolt of the god took him off, / no whirlwind sweeping inland off the seas, / not in his last hour. No, it was some escort / sent by the gods or the dark world of the dead, / the lightless depths of Earth bursting open in kindness / to receive him. That man when on his way, / I tell you, not with trains of mourners, / not with suffering or with sickness, no, / if the death of any mortal ever was one, / his departure was a marvel!” (lines 1779–891, p. 381). It is in fact the Chorus at an earlier moment that pronounces the confounding term mē phunai [μὴ φύναι], “not to be,” rendered in its assessment of Oedipus’s inhuman fate: “Not to be born is best” (line 1388, p. 358), and which Lacan perceptively if incorrectly attributes as “Oedipus’s last word.” He further connects the mē in mē phunai to the pleonastic “ne,” characterized as “the remains [in French] of that which means μὴ in Greek, a word that does not signify a negation” (Lacan, Ethics, 305–6). Notably both not being born and Oedipus’s dis-appearance are something other than the general negation of death.

But here the something other is at once the splitting that for Lacan constitutes the subject and a subjective excess that allows for both terms of Blanchot’s non-coincident first and second deaths (the death I will and the death that comes over me from the outside) to coincide in the final choice of Oedipus. Lacan highlights both the absoluteness of death’s negation and the excess that doubles it: “That’s the choice with which a human existence such as Oedipus’s has to end. It ends so perfectly that he doesn’t die like everybody else, that is to say accidentally; he dies from a true death in which he erases his own being. . . . It’s a beautiful attitude, and as the madrigal says, it’s twice as beautiful on account of its beauty” (306). We might ask whether this “true death,” this perfect and excessively beautiful negation heralded by the mē, is still on the order of the Aristotelian “non-man” with which No One’s Way’s begins its riveting story of the indefinite name that is not a negation (18–19). Is there an outside to Heller-Roazen’s system, and does Oedipus mark a form of definite naming that is a pure negation?

Works Cited

Blanchot, Maurice. The Space of Literature. Translated by Ann Smock. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982.

Heller-Roazen, Daniel. No One’s Ways: An Essay on Infinite Naming. New York: Zone, 2017.

Lacan, Jacques. Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960. Translated by Dennis Porter. New York: Norton, 1992.

———. Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1981.

Miller, Jacques-Alain. “Suture.” Translated by Jacqueline Rose. In Concept and Form, vol. 1, Selections from the Cahiers pour l’analyse. London: Verso, 2012.

Smock, Ann. What Is There to Say? Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003.

Sophocles. The Three Theban Plays. Translated by Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin, 1982.