Fecundity

Abstract

The profanation that violates a secret does not “discover,” beyond the face, another more profound I which this face would express; it discovers the child. By a total transcendence, the transcendence of transsubstantiation, the I is, in the child, another. Paternity remains a self-identification, but also a distinction within identification—a structure unforeseeable in formal logic. Hegel in the writings of his youth was able to say that the child is the parents, and in Weltalter Schelling was able for theological needs to deduce filiality from the identity of Being. Possession of the child by the father does not exhaust the meaning of the relationship that is accomplished in paternity, where the father discovers himself not only in the gestures of his son, but in his substance and his unicity. My child is a stranger (Isaiah 49), but a stranger who is not only mine, for he is me. He is me a stranger to myself. He is not only my work, my creature, even if like Pygmalion I should see my work restored to life. The son coveted in voluptuosity is not given to action, remains unequal to powers. No anticipation represents him nor, as is said today, projects him. The project invented or created, unwonted and new, emanates from a solitary head to illuminate and to comprehend. It dissolves into light and converts exteriority into idea. Whence we can define power as presence in a world that by right resolves itself into my ideas.