Segundo Aristóteles, homens e mulheres partilham o destino de habitar no cosmos inferior, abaixo do círculo da lua, sob a eclítica do sol. Por isso estão sujeitos a períodos de fertilidade e de frigidez, de genesis e de phthora, os arrebatamentos do tempo finito. Considerados como indivíduos, homens e mulheres não duram para sempre. Só quando são vistos como um “genus” que “gera” uma semelhança de si próprio é que o homem e a mulher participam na perenidade. O fato de serem moldados no molde do amor é simultaneamente um sintoma da incapacidade da sua ascensão para durar para sempre e a constatação irônica da forma como são para sempre. Aos olhos de Aristóteles, essa forma possui uma grandeza que se irradia até às bordas das estrelas e se reflete de novo. Por que razão e como, no desenvolvimento da ontologia cristã, essa visão deve mudar, por que razão Hegel deve, no final, ridicularizar a geração como schlechte Unendlichkeit (Enz, secção 370), por que razão Eros deve ser envenenado e, em vez de morrer, degenera em vício (Nietzsche, SII, 639), por que razão as formas do homem e da mulher deve se reduzir à “figura decomposta da humanidade”, são questões que ainda têm de ser colocadas. Responder a elas pode exigir um novo tipo de pensamento, um tipo que apenas posso sugerir aqui.
Yet how would it be if, for all our talk of Eros and Thanatos, the single Schlag of love and death has not yet come home to us? Such a question is not meant as an invitation to reduce one to the other, as traditional ontotheology has always done, love being the kiss of death, and death the kiss of peace; it is meant as an injunction to let the innate power of both coin our thoughts on man and woman. One thing is certain: as long as “man” remains the shuttlecock of metaphysics, batted back and forth between animalitas and ratio, such thinking cannot succeed. Neither can it succeed by means of the anthropological sciences which in their effort to emancipate themselves from metaphysics forget the origins of their most beloved presuppositions. Nor finally will it succeed at some popular level where the sciences of man carry no weight and philosophy and poetry are scorned: our cemeteries sprawl far from town beyond the outermost tramline and our loves in photo mags with staples through their bellies.
What is that? What is the distance that keeps us safely out of reach of both?
Perhaps it is time to take a second look at the forgotten sources of our thoughts on man and woman, in texts such as the following:
Of beings, some are forever and are divine; others harbor being and non-being. The beautiful and divine, according to its own nature, is always the cause of what is better in whatever harbors it; whereas what does not harbor that which is forever shares in being (and non-being) and in the worse as well as in the better. . . . Since the nature of such a genus (that is, the Schlag of living beings) is incapable of being forever, what is generated is always the only way it can be. . . . Hence, there is forever a genus of humans . . . , and since the source of the genus is the male and the female, it is for the sake of generation that male and female are in the respective beings. . . . And male comes together and mingles with female in the work of generation; for this is something that concerns both in common. [Aristotle, On the Generation of Living Beings, 11, 1 (731b 24-732a 12)]
According to Aristotle, men and women share the fate of dwelling in the lower cosmos, below the circle of the moon, under the ecliptic of the sun. They (175) are hence subject to periods of fertility and frigidity, genesis and phthora, the raptures of finite time. Considered as individuals, men and women do not last forever. Only when they are viewed as a “genus” that “generates” a likeness of itself do men and women partake in the lasting. Their being cast in the mold of love is both a symptom of the incapacity of their upsurgence to endure forever and the ironic realization of the way they forever are. In Aristotle’s eyes that way possesses a grandeur that radiates to the rims of the stars and is reflected back again. Why and how in the development of Christian ontology that view must change, why Hegel must in the end deride generation as schlechte Unendlichkeit (Enz, section 370), why it is that Eros must be poisoned, whereupon instead of dying he degenerates to vice (Nietzsche, SII, 639), why the shapes of man and woman must dwindle to the “decomposed figure of humanity,” are questions that still need to be asked. Answering them may demand a new kind of thinking, a kind I can only hint at here.
At the outset it may be enough to dwell on the fact that for all our readiness to confront Eros and Thanatos we have virtually nothing to say to them—whereas they have a long tale to tell us. Let our response to them therefore be coined in Gelassenheit, a kind of thinking that combines traces of twofolds so as to form a third, “foreign” strain, itself beyond the dialectics of activity-passivity, willing-notwilling, advancing-waiting. Little wonder if the foreign strain that wrests phenomena from concealment solely in order to grant their inalienable obscurity and that strikes a critical pose before every monument of traditional wisdom while resolving to remain open to it should wear a lunatic aspect; children who have abandoned their innocence gladly, suspicious of their own preparedness to cloak all things with words but encouraged to let suspicion be as well, children of the long night, but under stars. At the end of their nocturnal conversation about Gelassenheit the teacher says, “For the child in man, night remains die Näherin der Sterne” (G, 71), she who lets the stars, inconceivably remote, grow near.
Sterne suchen nachts, Karfreitagskind,
Deinen Stimenbogen.
Good Friday’s children have by now become the children of care (Kar-, cura), the generation struck by love and death.
In the preceding chapter I suggested that the principal effort of Heidegger’s Being and Time and of much of his later work is to let death be. Schlag des Todes. Now I am asking whether the same kind of thinking may induce men and women to let one another be. Schlag der Liebe. Men and women—let one another be? Should they turn their backs on one another? That was tried before, (176) Aristophanes says, and not even Zeus could make it work. For men and women Gelassenheit means something else, something like “a gentle confluence of the twofold,” befitting mortals of both molds.
Now, supposing Hephaestus were to come and stand over them with his tool bag as they lay there side by side and suppose he were to ask, Tell me, my dear creatures, what do you really want with one another?
And suppose they didn’t know what to say, and he went on, How would you like to be rolled into one, so that you could always be together, day and night, and never be parted again? Because if that’s what you want, I can easily weld you together, and then you can live your two lives in one, and, when the time comes, you can die a common death and still be two-in-one in the lower world. . . .
We may be sure, gentlemen, that no lover on earth would dream of refusing such an offer, for not one of them could imagine a happier fate. Indeed, they would be convinced that this was just what they’d been waiting for—to be merged, that is, into an utter oneness with the beloved. [Symposium, 192d—e]
Men and women, joined as mortals, give one another whatever “man” can be. If not a minor theme after all, it is still in a minor key. Its dominant tone is no heroic coupling by which desire would be drained utterly and the Other appropriated once for all. No preestablished harmony, no dream of perfect complementarity, no oblativity, no fraud. For the ancient mode is tragic. And tragedy is “from the dawn.” Though generations may banish these intimations of mortality, both Trakl and Heidegger, untimely contemporaries, try to relearn them. They inscribe them in an ancient genealogy—“In ein altes Stammbuch”—in the disconcerting neutral form:
Wieder kehrt die Nacht und klagt ein Sterbliches
Und es leidet ein anderes mit.
Again night comes, something mortal keens,
And an other shares the pain.