Ruinance, Responsibility, and Khōra

Rafael Fernández
Texas A&M University

Volume 16, 2024

In this paper, I think through Alberto Moreiras’ elaboration of Philippe Lynes’s idea of a Heideggerian general ecology, focusing first on the concept of “ruinance” as elaborated on by Martin Heidegger in his 1921-22 lecture course, Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle. In the first section, I reflect on ruinance as “the lack” always at work in life, a lack that is not to be understood in substantial terms, as the lack of something, but instead in its evental or verbal sense. In the second section, I explore the possibility of an ethical responsibility from and for the constitutive lack of life, that is, an experience of responsibility understood as an exposition of the constant expropriation of life as ruinance. To do so, I draw on Heidegger’s notion of “originary ethics” and rethink it as the place of the constitutive lack of life, or the nothingness of facticity. However, in the third section, I problematize this very sense of responsibility by asking whether, in light of Teresa Vilarós’ sense of khōra as the forgotten substratum of life and death, we should not perhaps rethink responsibility beyond the limits of responsibilty from and for the lack of ruinant life, that is, a responsibility from and for a pre-originary ethics, a space anterior to ruinance. Hence, I consider an experience of responsibility that places ruinance always already beyond itself, namely, open to its own lack as ruinance. In the conclusion, I draw on Humberto González’ idea of “an intensification of the infra of infrapolitics” (“The Infrapolitical Dream of Khōra and Its Legacies” 9) to conceive of khōra as the overlooked materiality of life and death that conditions politics infrapolitically, opening it to the ruins of an impossible legacy.

I. The Ruinance of Life

In his 1921-22 lecture course, Heidegger introduces the notion of “facticity,” signifying the process of actualization and maturation to which life is constantly subject. As François Raffoul notes, the facticity of life is not a “brute fact” but is the form of its coming to be or its very event (Thinking the Event 173). Another key term in the 1921-22 course is “ruinance,” which describes the coming to be of life as a form of “falling away” from life itself, a taking distance from it that introduces or inscribes a permanent or constitutive lack within life. Describing this lack, Heidegger writes: “In ruinance…what becomes validated is the fact that somehow or other something is constantly lacking in factical life itself and indeed in such a way that at the same time there is also lacking a determination of that which properly is lacking.” (Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle 129). In this sense, ruinance is not a lack proper, but the “that it lacks,” or lacking itself, of life.¹ In Raffoul’s words, “The lack is not a temporary situation, and even less an accident, but rather what is ownmost to life.” (Thinking the Event 182). As such, the lack involved in ruinance refers to a general structure of expropriation, which “constitutes the very eventfulness of life, life’s own motion and possibility” (182).

This structure of expropriation manifests a logic of negation conditioning life through and through. As Alberto Moreiras notes, quoting Heidegger, this logic has “an original primacy over any ‘position-taking’” (“Ruinance and General Ecology” 8), thus throwing life into “a constant moving-away from itself (Abfallen), a constant fleeing from itself” (Raffoul Thinking the Event, 183), that is, into a movement of negation where life never comes to rest upon itself and never takes a grounding position. Life is thus always already thrown in the “unrest” of its own “not”—it is taken by the restlessness of “the nothingness of factical life” (Heidegger Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle, 108), its own unaffirmable lack or “rest,” the “restance” that “res(is)ts” life itself (Lynes Futures of Life Death, 78). Philippe Lynes thinks the Derridean term “restance” as a remainder that is never survived by life, which he identifies with “time, alterity, and death” (78). “What shows…here,” Heidegger writes, “is a resistance that lives and exists, in its own way, within the very movedness of factical life.” (Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle 115). This res(is)tance attests to the fact that the lack of life is not to be understood in relation to something, as the lack of something. Instead, the lack has an evental and verbal character. As such, the lack is not an accident, an isolated fact that life can deal with at a point in the course of its movement, but rather it refers to the constant countermovement of life itself or, in Raffoul’s words, the unevent of the event of life (Thinking the Event 183), the movement of negation that directs the course of life against itself.

The lack is then what Heidegger calls the constant “privation” of life. Life, he writes, is “still in privation (tendency and motive to fall into decline)” (Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle 66). The “still” marks the ruinant tendency of life, which does not mark an extraordinary moment in life, but the ordinariness of life in the state of privation that cannot be left behind, overcome or survived. Life is then permanently “still in privation.” Privation is, as Heidegger notes, “the basic mode and sense of the Being of life” (68). In this way Being is what opens life up to its own unevent and exposes it to the nothingness of facticity. In other words, the Being of life is the unrest of its lack, the eventfulness of its own uneventing, which reveals a certain structure of iteration or return to the rest that life cannot survive; a structure of res(is)tance where life always comes to be against itself, always comes back to its own unsurvivable ruinance. That is the ruinance of life “as” death, or, perhaps we can say, applying Derrida’s terminology, the ruinance of life death.

The non-oppositional logic of life “as” death, or life death, reflects the fact that, as Raffoul notes, the “ex-appropriative event is its [life’s] own happening” (Thinking the Event 185). In other words, ruinance names what is most proper to the event of life. Hence, we can say that ruinance manifests life as being, in Moreiras’ words, “in an anticipatory exposition of radical Dasein-expropriation” (“Ruinance and General Ecology” 8) which manifests “an irreducible passivity that will not be transcended” (8). This passivity is the Being of life itself, the lack that res(is)ts and remains as the unsurvivable remnant of life “as” death. It is on the basis of this passivity or “powerlessness” (Lynes Futures of Life Death, xliv), that Moreiras suggests the possibility of thinking Lynes’ notion of “general ecology” in a Heideggerian vein,² that is, an ecology exposed to the expropriative lack of life as its proper mode of Being. In the next section I will use such a general ecology as a basis to explore an experience of responsibility from and for the constitutive lack of life, a responsibility that emerges as an acknowledgement of life as an expression of absolute expropriation.

II. The Responsibility of Ruinance

In his book The Origins of Responsibility, François Raffoul notes that, for Heidegger, responsibility happens “from out of the facticity of existence, and for it” (268), that is, it is conditioned by facticity understood as an event of expropriation. According to Raffoul, such responsibility must therefore be approached as a letting life be determined by its ruinant occurrence—its coming to be on the basis of its own lack or inappropriable ground. In this sense, responsibility is “the essential exposure of human beings to an inappropriable that always remains “other” for them” (268-269), namely, an openness to “a radically finite existence having to come to itself, and to itself as other, from an inappropriable (and thus always “other”) ground” (269). It is from this other ground, which remains at all times groundless, that an ethical side to the Heideggerian ecology can be developed.

It is important to stress that, for Heidegger, responsibility does not stem from a set of ethical values floating “above factical existence” (Raffoul The Origins of Responsibility, 224).³ It is not a matter of being answerable to something higher, a metaphysical debt of ethical values imposed upon life. That is not to say, however, that such responsibility does away with ethics. Rather it is related to a different form of ethics, which Heidegger, in “Letter on Humanism,” calls an “originary ethics.” Originary ethics occurs, as Raffoul writes, “outside of reference to both ground and utility, from out of the useless.” (230). Uselessness reveals the unoccupied originarity of ethics, a place of subtraction and irreducibility, which we must think as the ethōs or abode of life,⁴ namely, a hollow space or, in Heidegger’s terms, the “emptiness in which…[life]…moves” (Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle 98). For Heidegger, “emptiness” is the place where factical life unfolds following its own logic of negation, or the restive course of its “not.” In emptiness, life is then kept within the dis-placement of the nothingness of facticity, never coming to rest fully upon itself, but remaining in the very unrest of its own unevent, subtracted from itself and thus constantly “infracendent.”⁵ The infracendence of life names the “unaccountable” nature of emptiness, its hollow or groundless place; the place of the negation of place, or the non-constitutive place of life from which life itself is exposed to the subtractive course of its being, that is, to the lack of ruinance.

Responsibility has its source in such a lack, in the emptiness of originary ethics as the infracendent ground of life. In this way, responsibility acknowledges life beyond utility as being always already part of the course from and to its “not,” namely, as radically finite. It names an essential exposure to life “as” death, that is, an exposure to life as the abode of its own unsurvivable lack, its inappropriable other. Hence, responsibility happens as the essential passivity or powerlessness in the face of life as an event of expropriation, or as the very anticipatory exposition of radical Dasein-expropriation.

To be responsible in this sense opens up a dwelling in constant anticipation of life as ruinant—as arrested by the lack or the privative character of ruinance.⁶

III. Pre-originary Ethics and Khōra

Infracendence marks an emptiness that has been identified with the abode of factical life, the unsurvivable lack that life is always already grounded on. But what if we were to rethink such infracendence as the place of an ethics beyond or anterior to originary ethics itself, as the abode of an emptiness whose originarity remains untraceable?

We can think of such infracendence, in Teresa Vilarós’ words, as “that domain that isn’t, that domain of non-space and non-time” (“Khora and Gardens” 3), that is, the inapparent domain of khōra. Following Vilarós’ more graphic description of khōra, infracendence would be the vessel containing the forgotten “spills of life and death that had reeked from the old abbatoir” (3) or the material remnants lying in the substratum of the park at La Villette. It would be a place, then, of “material res(is)tance” (Lynes Futures of Life Death, 120), of that which is insofar as it rests without taking (a) place in presence; a place that acts as the mark of the forgotten materiality of life and death, the mark of their material sub-cess.

In this sense, the infraendence of khōra is the place that retains the spills of the immemorial debt of life and death; an abode anterior to the course of ruinance, anterior, that is, to the subtractive course of the rest or lack of factical life. The anteriority of the infracendence of khōra speaks of the interiority of earth as a site of absolute disentanglement in Nigel Clark’s sense (“Molten Praxis”), namely, a site of radical non-relation that remains unreachable by factical life and thus unoccupied; a certain nothingness of life and death beyond facticity or what might be called, borrowing Werner Hamacher’s expression, an infra nihil (“Other Pains” 974).⁷ The infra nihil would then be a nothingless nothing, a nothing that, as Heidegger notes in his text On Inception, antecedes the event of being (99) or the ruinance of life. Hence, a pre-ruinant nothing, a nothing “more lowly than lowly” (Hamacher “Other Pains,” 974) that keeps the secret traces of life and death in earth. Such secret traces would call for a responsibility based on a pre-originary ethics, a responsibility from and for a pre-originary state of ruinance.

To be responsible in this sense would be to open facticity to what precedes facticity itself, to the secret sub-cess of earth, or, in Clark’s words, to the “unreachable” and “unliveable” region of the “Inner Earth.” (“Molten Praxis” 5). It would be an exposure to a region that remains unrelatable to factical life, the region of life and death before life as factically exposed or responsible from and for its own lack. This exposure to the immemorial region of life and death might be understood in terms of what Derrida, according to Lynes, “reads in Heidegger’s concept of Verlässlichkeit in “The Origin of the Work of Art,”…a pre-originary engagement, gift, credit, debt, and duty anterior to any social or natural contract” (Futures of Life Death 120). Responsibility would then arise on the basis of a pre-originary debt whose spills pervade the interior of earth or the site of absolute disentanglement: the untraceable site of an ethics placed in the unplaceable lack of khōra.

Conclusion: A Note On (Pre-/Post-) Ruinant Life

In the title of this final section, I have placed the prefixes “pre-” and “post-” in parenthesis in order to indicate that ruinant life is never ruinant life alone, but that it is determined by a domain both anterior and posterior to the temporal and spatial domain of factical life. Ruinant life is thus always already fixed, or, if we attend to the PIE root of the verb “fix,” “pierced” by what comes before and after it. In other words, ruinant life is pierced or shot through with its very outside as ruinant life. Therefore, we can say that ruinant life is thrown beyond the thrownness of life into ruinance, beyond the event of the unevent of life. This thrownness points to what Heidegger, in On Inception, calls “the not-yet and no-longer begun inception of being as event” (99), “the pre-inceptive and post-inceptive” (99), which manifest “the innermost nihilating of being itself…that it is not in itself only concealment and refusal but rather, as receding, is disappropriation.” (99). Disappropriation is the receding course of being toward its own outside as being; a nihilating tendency always at work in being that gestures, in Vallega-Neu’s words, toward “a time outside of time, a suspension of history” (“Heidegger’s Reticence” 21),⁸ namely, a time “before a clearing of being is appropriated, i.e., before Da-sein!” (20). Disappropriation thereby names the “twisting out” or “disentanglement” of being from being (21), a form of radical expropriation that ruinant life, as pre- and post-ruinant, is always already undergoing. As such, disappropriation is not the expropriation of being as nothing or of life “as” death, but opens the latter to an anterior/posterior nothing that we have identified as the infra nihil of khōra, the pre-/post-originary ethics of the unplaceable lack of life and death.

One would think that disappropriation overrides expropriation understood uniquely in relation to ruinant life. However, I think that disappropriation opens ruinant life to a deeper sense of expropriation, which reveals life as being always already pre- and post-ruinant, pierced by the anterior and posterior domain of being as the inapparent domain of khōra, an unlivable and unreachable region. It is on the basis of this other expropriation that it is possible to think an experience of responsibility from and for a pre- and post-originary debt of life and death; a responsibility that opens ruinant life to the domain of its own lack as ruinant life. Hence, following Lynes’ application of Derrida’s view of Heidegger’s Zusage, (pre-/post-) ruinant life would always consent to its own disappropriation as ruinant life, that is, to the receding course of disappropriation from and to the originary abode of ethics before originary ethics itself. Ruinance would thus let itself be beyond its movement within the nothingness of factical life, and affirm itself as contained by a space unaffected by ruinance. Ruinance would then become an affirmation of infracendence below the groundless infracendence of originary ethics, namely, an affirmation of the inner space of earth as the vessel of the forgotten spills of life and death. Therefore, we can say that the place of ruinance, its abode or emptiness, would be displaced toward that other space, receding toward a more originary place, which is the pre- and post-inceptive place of khōra.

I would like to conclude by briefly considering the possibility of thinking such infracendence as “an intensification of the infra of infrapolitics,” as Humberto González writes in his paper “The Infrapolitical Dream of Khōra and Its Legacies.” The intensification of infracendence as the pre and post-inceptive place of khōra would point toward that which underscores politics, or lurks underneath the surface of political life. It would be the impolitical ethōs, or the abode of the ruins of life and death sitting underneath the polis. An infrapolitical lack or rest that remains before and after politics—a res(is)tance beyond the lack of ruinance that ruinance itself is inevitably displaced toward. It is this displacement that might guide the infrapolitical step back that Vilarós mentions at the end of her paper, which we can think of here as a form of thinking against politics that does not seek to nullify politics, but instead reveals politics as being infrapolitically conditioned by the ruins of an impossible legacy.

Notes

We must understand such a lack, which is not “a” lack, as the “haziness” of life itself, and thus as a debt that we can never uncover. “The haziness is indebted to life itself: the facticity of life consists precisely in holding to this debt, ever falling into it anew.” (Heidegger Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle, 67). In this paper, the notion of the debt will not be presented until the last section, where I will address the nature of a debt of life and death that is anterior to the lack of life as ruinance to which ruinance itself is exposed. ↩︎
For a definition of Lynes’ notion of “general ecology,” see Alberto Moreiras’ “Ruinance and General Ecology.” ↩︎
Raffoul refers to what Heidegger says about values in Being and Time: “In Being and Time, Heidegger clarifies that no “values,” no “ideal norms,” float above factical existence, precisely because there is nothing above factical existence! There are no ideal norms above existence to which one can refer.” (224). ↩︎
In “Letter on Humanism,” Heidegger rethinks ethics from its Greek etymological root, ἦθος, which means “abode.” In this sense, Heidegger says: “If the name “ethics,” in keeping with the basic meaning of the word, ἦθος, should now say that ethics ponders the abode of the human being, then that thinking which thinks the truth of being as the primordial element of the human being, as one who eksists, is in itself originary ethics.” (271). Thinking for him is ethical insofar as it is concerned with the abode or place of being human, the place of eksistence. ↩︎
Infracendence is a term coined by Alberto Moreiras in his book Uncanny Rest. It is the dimension where existence remains subtracted from thinking every time existence is thought. “If I think it exists, I’ve already lost it. It only exists in infracendence.” (113) It is the non-place of existence, or the place where existence cannot be placed. ↩︎
We might also consider such a responsibility through Heidegger’s concept of “waiting in privation” (Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle 139), or “a factically ruinant mode of “waiting” (139). This refers to dwelling in constant anticipation of life as ruinant, arrested by the privative character of ruinance itself. Heidegger observes that this waiting is paradoxically “an inability to wait…; yet precisely…waiting” (139). This kind of waiting entails an impossible anticipation, akin to the anticipatory exposition of radical Dasein-expropriation. It is a form of anticipation in absolute privation, demanding an acute sense of responsibility that acknowledges its own inability—its non-anticipatory anticipation. ↩︎
The expression “infra nihil” was coined by Werner Hamacher in his text “Other Pains.” Infra nihil refers to what he calls an “anontological” form of pain, a pain anterior to any ontological articulation of pain. It is thus, he says, “more lowly than lowly, softer than soft, more formless than formless: an infra nihil that withdraws from formation, regulation, and binding” (974). Here, I am using Hamacher’s expression infra nihil to refer to the infracendence of khora as the immemorial vessel of life and death, a certain nothing that is anterior to the nothingness of factical life, a nothing below the infracendence of factical life, namely, a nothing below the below of infracendence. ↩︎
This exteriority represents facticity’s exposure to itself as (pre-/post-)ruinant. Such a condition reveals that factical, “ruinant life, “has no time,” because its basic movedness, ruinance itself, takes “away” time.” That is a time which can be taken away, and factically ruinant life, for itself and in itself, does take it away. Ruinance takes time away: i.e., ot seeks to abolish the historiological from facticity. The ruinance of factical life possesses this sense of actualization: the abolition of time.” (Heidegger Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle, 104). Ruinant life does not appropriate time but nullifies it, thus casting itself outside the bounds of time itself. ↩︎

Works Cited

Clark, Nigel. 2023. “Molten Praxis: Infrapolitics and the Inner-Outer Earth Juncture.” In Culture Machine (22), Anthropocene Infrapolitics.
González, Humberto. “The Infrapolitical Dream of Khōra and Its Legacies.” Paper delivered at Derrida Today Conference, Athens, Greece, 2024.
Hamacher, Werner. “Other Pains.” Trans. by Ian Alexander Moore. In Philosophy Today (61), Issue 4, 2017.
Heidegger, Martin. Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle: Initiation into Phenomenological Research. Trans. by Richard Rojcewicz. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001.
—. “Letter on ‘Humanism,” in William McNeill (ed) Pathmarks. Trans. by William McNeill. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
—. On Inception. Trans. by Peter Hanly. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2023.
Lynes, Philippe. Futures of Life Death on Earth: Derrida’s General Ecology. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018.
Moreiras, A. Uncanny Rest: For Antiphilosophy. Trans. Camila Moreiras. Durham: Duke University Press, 2022.
—. “Ruinance and General Ecology.” Paper Delivered at Derrida Today Conference, Athens, Greece, 2024.
Raffoul, François. Thinking the Event. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020.
—. The Origins of Responsibility. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010.
Vallega-Neu, Daniela. “Heidegger’s Reticence: From Contributions to Das Ereignis and toward Gelassenheit.” In Research In Phenomenology (45), 1–32, 2015.
Vilarós, Teresa. “Khora and Gardens: Derrida, Gaia, and Bosch (Hieronymus).” Paper Delivered at Derrida Today Conference, Athens, Greece, 2024.