A Note: This post is the beginning of an experimental stage for the RMC Book Club—less formulaic posts that are nevertheless somewhat more traditional and rigorous in their argument. I hope you enjoy it.
According to Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, Leir of Britain was buried in an underground shrine of Janus in the 8th century BCE. For reasons unknown even to the mythologist, he was buried there by Cordelia–his last and best daughter. Shakespeare’s titular King Lear died in prisoner rags atop the body of Cordelia–his last and least daughter. In a way, Janus, the two-faced Roman god of doorways, figures as an ontological overseer for the mad king: a cohering force offering an image of Lear’s split image (myth and tragedy; king and fool) blasted through by madness, then made posthumously sane through the allegorization of that force which drives madness: nothingness as doorway. Such an allegorization may have saved Lear from himself. But the king would not have settled for such a half-measure. The tragedy of Shakespeare’s King Lear is fundamentally driven by the titular king’s all-consuming desire to access nothingness without any of its mediating forces. I intend to track the various economies of nothingness into which Lear enters throughout this play toward an understanding of the play’s tragic ending: one in which Lear gets precisely what he’s wanted all along.
Before getting into the play itself, it would behoove us to lay some theoretical ground–after all, there are many kinds of “nothing.”
Just one such nothing is that of Epicurean philosophy as articulated by Lucretius in De Rerum Natura in the first century BCE. For the Epicureans, “nothing” is a practical impossibility, as all of the universe is made of substance and, ostensibly, substance can only beget and be begotten by substance: nothingness plays no active role in the material workings of the universe. This belief stems from a kind of early atheism, as seen in De Rerum Natura:
This terror, then, this darkness of the mind,
Not sunrise with its flaring spokes of light,
Nor glittering arrows of morning can disperse,
But only Nature's aspect and her law,
Which, teaching us, hath this exordium:
Nothing from nothing ever yet was born.
Fear holds dominion over mortality
Only because, seeing in land and sky
So much the cause whereof no wise they know,
Men think Divinities are working there.
For the Epicureans, both the persistent myth of nothingness and its concomitant anxiety arise from an imaginative impulse seemingly inherent within mankind through which the silent behemoths of our world–too immense to be insignificant or derivative–are reimagined as having been manufactured and, if something like the sky is, in fact, originary, must necessarily have been manufactured from nothing. Therefore nothingness operates as a fallacious imagined pre-consciousness, an everlasting and existent repository of the void, that, despite its practical nonexistence, exercises enormous influence over the lives of men.
The greatest influence of nothingness within the Epicurean model is exercised upon a generalized fear of death: the “undiscovere'd country, from whose bourn/ no traveller returns” becomes just another immensity to be imagined as touchstone of the void, and thus death begins to be imagined as an eternal presence within nothingness . Regarding this fear, Epicurus makes an interesting and relevant maneuver:
Accustom yourself to believe that death is nothing to us, for good and evil imply awareness, and death is the privation of all awareness; therefore a right understanding that death is nothing to us makes the mortality of life enjoyable, not by adding to life an unlimited time, but by taking away the yearning after immortality. For life has no terror; for those who thoroughly apprehend that there are no terrors for them in ceasing to live. Foolish, therefore, is the person who says that he fears death, not because it will pain when it comes, but because it pains in the prospect. Whatever causes no annoyance when it is present, causes only a groundless pain in the expectation. Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not. It is nothing, then, either to the living or to the dead, for with the living it is not and the dead exist no longer.
In his Letter to Menoeceus, Epicurus positions nothingness as a purely rhetorical force, therefore removing it from the realm of immanent existence and placing it within the realm of language. His repeated use of the qualifier “to us” ensures a constant sense of the relative, thus relieving nothingness of any objectivity. In one sense, this maneuver contributes to Epicurus’ greater ataraxic project: if nothingness is only nothingness “to us,” and operates as a fundamentally rhetorical force, then one can philosophize their way out of the anxiety it births.1
But is this the whole picture? Do we buy that rhetoricization necessarily inverts the power-structure of world-and-mind, permitting the individual thinker to free themselves from nothingness? In the all-language world of literature, the meta-cosmos of King Lear, this continued anxiety will be constitutive of one economy of nothingness: that of rhetoric, authority over language, and its presumed power to dominate nothingness.
The work of Martin Heidegger offers a slightly different conception of nothingness, though undoubtedly indebted to Epicurus, articulated most profoundly in his 1929 speech-turned-essay, “What is Metaphysics?” Heidegger questions the unspoken presumptions beneath metaphysics as a whole–namely, those terms (cogito, ergo, sum, etc.) and -centrisms (humanism as anthropocentrism) that have gone largely unaddressed in the the history of Western philosophy. Regarding metaphysics, the most profound presumptions regard nothingness and the process of thinking. The former, at least according to Heidegger’s view of the metaphysicians, seems to have been entirely accounted for by Epicurus: “For a long time metaphysics has expressed the nothing in a proposition clearly susceptible of more than one meaning: ex nihilo nihil fit–from nothing, nothing comes to be.” The latter, that of the process of thinking, appears to render nothingness noetically inaccessible to mankind, therefore offering one explanation as to the underdevelopment of nothingness as a concept within metaphysics: “For thinking, which is always essentially thinking about something, must act in a way contrary to its own essence when it thinks of the nothing.”
But Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics and its apparent limitations does not lead him to believe that nothingness is inaccessible or, a la Epicurus, functionally non-existent. Nothingness, rather, would simply require a reassessment outside of the givens of metaphysics. Heidegger begins by defining the term: “The nothing is the complete negation of the totality of beings.” A sufficiently platitudinous assertion, to be sure. But it nevertheless lays the ground for Heidegger to move the phenomenological field from noesis to aesthetics–from thought to feeling–through the total rejection of the specificity necessary to ordered thought. His totality is not unlike that of the land and sky Lucretius cited in De Rerum Naturum (see above).
So at which dell upon that aesthetic field, in which home within the clearing, does one confront nothingness? As an entirely aesthetic experience, anxiety becomes the aperture through which one can perceive nothingness:
All things and we ourselves sink into indifference. This, however, not in the sense of mere disappearance. Rather, in the very receding things turn toward us. The receding of beings as a whole that closes in on us in anxiety oppresses us. We can get no hold on things. In the slipping away of beings only this ‘no hold on things’ comes over us and remains. Anxiety reveals the nothing.
Heidegger’s assertion is not unlike that of Søren Kierkegaard who, in The Concept of Anxiety, imagined a self-perpetuating relationship between nothing and anxiety. Unlike that of Heideigger, for whom nothingness remains a kind of immense transcendental repository of Being, the aesthetic accelerant of Kierkegaard’s nothingness is a sense of infinite potential through the ontological imperative to strive against a self-othering darkness:
Innocence is ignorance. In innocence, man is not qualified as spirit but is psychically qualified in immediate unity with his natural condition. The spirit in man is dreaming… In this state there is peace and repose, but there is simultaneously something else that is not contention and strife, for there is indeed nothing against which to strive. What, then, is it? Nothing. But what effect does nothing have? It begets anxiety. This is the profound secret of innocence, that it is at the same time anxiety. Dreamily the spirit projects its own actuality, but this actuality is nothing, and innocence always sees this nothing outside itself.
I offer Kierkegaard’s reading alongside Heidegger’s so as to emphasize precisely how quickly nothingness becomes a hermeneutic locus while retaining its seemingly transcendental permanence (or at least stubborn fixity).
The differences between the Heideggerian and Kierkegaardian constructions are not mere disagreements, but reflections of the tendency of nothingness to resolve into subjective experience: both infinite freedom and total confinement are possible within nothingness. Therefore, nothingness may manifest, in ordered language, as a kind of madness: a double-faced Janus speaking out of both mouths. Therefore, madness is yet another economy of nothingness in Lear: the attempted total evacuation of meaning in an utterance (an attempt to embody the polyphony of nothingness-in-speech) in an attempt to access nothingness.
Our third theoretical locus offers less of a distinct category than a rhetorical riposte (manifesting dramaturgically as punitive response) to the presumed freedom of madness. Jacques Derrida’s “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” a lecture given in 1966, is ultimately an argument concerning the nature of philosophical writing: an assertion that “every discourse is bricoleur,” in the sense that all critics and philosophers must necessarily borrow concepts from a shared heritage. This truism problematizes those philosophers for whom nothingness becomes both a central concept and a methodology (like Heidegger’s “Destruktion”). Consider the following quotation from “Structure, Sign and Play,” which gestures toward the impossibility of true discursive destruction:
But all these destructive discourses and all their analogues are trapped in a sort of circle. This circle is unique. It describes the form of the relationship between the history of metaphysics and the destruction of the history of metaphysics. [...] there are many ways of being caught in this circle. They are all more or less naïve, more or less empirical, more or less systematic, more or less close to the formulation or even to the formalization of this circle. It is these differences which explain the multiplicity of destructive discourses and the disagreement between those who make them. It was within concepts inherited from metaphysics that Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger worked, for example. Since these concepts are not elements or atoms and since they are taken from a syntax and a system, every particular borrowing drags along with it the whole of metaphysics. This is what allows these destroyers to destroy each other reciprocally—for example, Heidegger, considering Nietzsche, with as much lucidity and rigor as bad faith and misconstruction, as the last metaphysician, the last "Platonist." One could do the same for Heidegger himself, for Freud, or for a number of others. And today no exercise is more widespread. (2-3)
Just as Heidegger’s critique of discursive givens gave us the potential for madness–pure phenomenology–Derrida’s critique, similarly grounded, gives us a sense of inevitable order within any given discourse by virtue of its discursivity. Even the promise of madness is “trapped in a sort of circle.” Madness is always madness against some kind of sense. We can imagine, then, that the discursive processes by which one attempts to sublimate nothingness into existence (even mere philosophical coherence) will ultimately fail.
Therefore, the final theoretical vector regarding our present discussion of King Lear has something to do with inevitable failure to resolve nothingness within language: an important distinction within the literary-dramaturgical realm within which everything is both word and action: utterance and écriture: stage direction and diegetic action. How do the processes between thought and nothingness, thought and word, and word and action fail?
Now, with some theoretical pre-consciousness here revealed, we can continue with a relevant reading of King Lear.
Lear opens with a discourse whose subject is nominatively practical but methodologically abstract. The old king is dividing his kingdom between his three daughters: Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia. The breadth of each daughter’s inheritance will depend upon the degree of love they hold for their father: “LEAR. Which of you shall we say doth love us most,/ That we our largest bounty may extend/ Where nature doth with merit challenge” (1.1.56-58). Naturally, the only way each of them can communicate their love is through words.
The two eldest daughters each communicate the insufficiency of language to represent their love–Goneril in a romantic key; Regan through middle-child mimicry: “GONERIL. Sir, I love you more than word can wield the/ matter…” (1.1.60-61); “I am made of that same meddle as my sister/ And prize me at her worth” (1.1.76-77). Neither sister is actually embodying the impossibility of speaking their love, but fetishizing the idea of said impossibility as a way of gesturing toward its immensity. Here, we can consider the Epicurean rhetoricization of nothingness, in which “nothing” is reduced to a repository signifier–“not here.” The fact that their strategy manages to convince Lear of their love for him displays the king’s willingness to toy with nothingness: to flatter himself with its inaccessibility.
By the time Cordelia speaks, we’ve already heard her murmuring thoughts: “CORDELIA. What shall Cordelia speak? Love, and be silent” (1.1.68); “CORDELIA. Then poor Cordelia!/ And yet not so, since I am sure my love’s/ More ponderous than my tongue” (1.1.85-87). We know that she loves her father and wants to give him a good answer. But, unlike her sisters, she literalizes the game, revealing the silent tacit center to the discourse Lear opened at the play’s beginning:
LEAR. ... Now, our joy,
Although our last and least, to whose young love
The vines of France and the milk of Burgundy
Strive to be interesse, what can you say to draw
A third more opulent than your sisters? Speak.
CORDELIA. Nothing, my lord.
LEAR. Nothing?
CORDELIA. Nothing.
LEAR. Nothing will come of nothing. Speak again. (1.1.91-99)
No doubt can be cast on the fact that Cordelia’s retort is the inciting incident of the entire play, but it’s not due to her lack of love for her father–or even a youthful unwillingness to participate in the game he’s laid out. In fact, Cordelia sows strife in Lear’s court by giving him the purest form of what he’s asked for: nothing, without qualification or self-interest. Rather than instrumentalize nothingness, she simply utters it to be passed back and forth between father and daughter like a sutra. “Nothing,” as pure utterance, is the radical operator within this cosmic drama. “Nothing,” rather than being a container for some mode of transcendence, is, rather, merely a recursive signifier. “Nothing will come from nothing.”
But the play is not free from representations of transcendental nothingness. Take Edmund, the bastard son of the Earl of Gloucester and de facto villain of the play. Edmund’s opportunistic ladder-grabbing positions him as a force of chaos through the persistent negation of the play’s variable social givens: his move from bastardy to heirship negates Edgar’s legitimacy by bloodright; his affairs negate the political and sexual sanctity of the houses of Albany and Cornwall; the simultaneity of these affairs negate the facade of monogamy out of which the play arose (consider the removal of Cordelia’s dowery). More importantly, Edmund is aware of himself as a force of negation. Consider the following from his infamous soliloquy:
EDMUND. … why bastard? Wherefore base?
When my dimensions are as well compact,
My mind as generous, and my shape as true,
As honest madam's issue? Why brand they us
With ‘base’? with ‘baseness’? ‘bastardy’? ‘base,’ ‘base’?...
… As to the legitimate. Fine word, ‘legitimate.’
Well, my legitimate, if this letter speed
And my invention thrive, Edmund the base
Shall top the legitimate. I grow, I prosper.
Now, gods, stand up for bastards! (1.2.6-23)
This proposed inversion of the social order is but one inflection of what Heidegger called “nihilation”: “... the repelling gesture toward the retreating whole of beings, it discloses these beings in their full but heretofore concealed strangeness as what is radically other–with respect to the nothing” (Heidegger 103). Edmund’s repetition of “base” and its variant forms, as well as “legitimate,” mark his process of estrangement: marking both concepts as radically other, thus revealing the essential nothingness at heart of each concept.
I can comfortably refer to Edmund’s negative essence as a process of nihilation because it does not stop with the bastardy/legitimacy binary: he operates across multiple ontological and social determinations. Consider the following, from a soliloquy in which Edmund reflects on his simultaneous affairs with Goneril and Regan:
EDMUND. To both these sisters have I sworn my love;
Each jealous of the other, as the stung
Are of the adder. Which of them shall I take?
Both? one? or neither? Neither can be enjoy'd,
If both remain alive. (5.1.63-67)
One kind of negation that occurs with his simultaneous affairs have to do with social custom: the matter of multiple infidelity being a negating (bastarding, perhaps) force against the political and sexual systems of legitimacy upon which Lear’s world is constructed. But, in taking them both as mutually exclusive lovers, his process of nihilation consumes Goneril and Regan, as well, thus maintaining an ontological vector not necessarily present in the ontic realm of social custom.
Were we to accept Edmund as mere character–as considered only through his diegetic life–we could call his nihilating essence just literary nihilism: another early entry in the legacy of Chaucer’s Pardoner and Shakespeare’s own Iago. But Edmund’s nihilative consciousness necessarily floats above and without the play, manifesting itself beyond the bounds of content and diegetic sense through the rampant use of soliloquy. Of Shakespeare’s tragedies, King Lear may have the fewest soliloquies. There appears to be some scholarly disagreement as to the exact number but, by my count, there are five: one delivered by Lear and the remaining four delivered by Edmund. With an eighty–percent stake in the play’s apostrophic life, we may see Edmund as a fundamentally transcendent force: more capable than any other character of exiting the immanent confines of the play. It can come as no surprise, then, that his subterfuge is responsible for the play’s great dramatic movements, from the framing of Edgar to the execution of Cordelia. The bastard Nothingness, as a pure Heideggerian ideal, haunts Lear like a spectre.
But Edmund’s plans for political domination fail. His transcendence doesn’t promise worldly success. He loses a duel with Edgar and, importantly, he uses his last moments in the play to confess to his crimes, expose his nihilation, and attempt to repair what he’s done by pardoning Lear. In the middle of his confession, echoes of Derrida can be heard:
EDMUND. What you have charged me with, that have I done,
And more, much more. The time will bring it out.
’Tis past, and so am I…
Th’ hast spoken right. ’Tis true.
The wheel is come full circle; I am here. (5.3.195-209; emphasis mine)
Just as Derrida used the circle as a metaphor for the impossibility of true destruction in philosophical discourse, Edmund invokes the circle as a metaphor for the inevitable order of causality: a process requiring a positive element: a circle in which pure negation is revealed to be impossible. But, perhaps, in some way, by achieving some kind of “reformation” in his final moments, Edmund has actually enacted his ultimate nihilative act: the nihilation of his own nihilative essence: an unveiling of his own nothingness. Perhaps death opened into aletheia: the lonely Da-sein. It calls to mind a poem by Pound: “An Object”:
This thing, that hath a code and not a core,
Hath set acquaintances where might be affections,
And nothing now
Disturbeth his reflections.
Forgive my reverie. As a means of summary: Edmund operates within King Lear as a kind of allegory for the transcendental articulation of nothingness: that which Epicurus denied and Heidegger embraced: an all-encompassing nihilative force working its each-and-all process of estrangement upon the world of the play. But Edmund does not ultimately come to represent the peculiar power of the play’s tragic fall–just one important player within it. To complete the circuit, we must return to Lear.
Following Cordelia’s banishment from Lear’s court, the old king is cast out by both Goneril and Regan for his unwillingness to do away with his retinue of knights. It’s worth mentioning that, at this stage, Lear’s kingdom is effectively operating without a sovereign–which may have something to do, at least symbolically, with the rampant chaos and violence ensuing in the drama’s backdrop. A king is, perhaps even more than a political figure, an organizational principle for a kingdom: a structural center. With Lear now homeless, we can consider the ontological implications of his absence. For this, we can turn to Brian Sheerin’s “Making Use of Nothing: The Sovereignties of ‘King Lear.’”:
At the heart of modern democratic sovereignty is what Agamben calls ‘the ability not to be,’ and here at last we come full circle. For in this zone of potentiality and nothingness, the sovereign exists not as a being but as a giver and as a gift. As Agamben summarizes, ‘[A]n act is sovereign when it realizes itself by simply taking away its own potentiality not to be, letting itself be, giving itself to itself.’ What this sovereign is giving away is not land but ontological stability; but this abandonment itself constitutes a giving-back of something even more versatile, namely a liminal state of pure ‘potentiality.’ (811)
Lear, as a politically impotent sovereign, has, through his absence, wrought the Kierkegaardian nothingness of “pure ‘potentiality’” upon his kingdom. But, importantly, this potentiality is also the liminal state into which he enters: now, no longer king, who is King Lear? The old king poses the question himself, to be answered by his fool:
LEAR. Does any here know me? This is not Lear.
Does Lear walk thus, speak thus? Where are his
eyes?
Either his notion weakens, his discernings
Are lethargied—Ha! Waking? ’Tis not so.
Who is it that can tell me who I am?
FOOL. Lear’s shadow. (1.4.231-236)
The fool’s answer is poignant but goes unacknowledged. As far as Lear is concerned, he never gets a fitting answer.
As he stomps across the heath, his fool at his side, Lear comes across the faux-mad Edgar, now calling himself Poor Tom. Tom’s mad diatribe is both poetic and nonsensical–importantly, its primary force for both is that of nonspecific speech. He speaks of “the foul fiend” always at his back; his imagined traitor is but “his own shadow” (mirroring the fool’s answer to Lear’s self-interrogation); all directives resolve into “there–and there again–and there”; of greatest importance, he breaks into babbling song: “Tom’s a cold. O, do de, do de, do de” (3.4.55-66).
This non-specific speech permits infinite interpretation. Even the speaker’s position is destabilized through the mixing of first- and third-person pronouns. Tom’s madness here, then, is a total evacuation of fixed meaning from his utterances, even to the point of words giving way to phonemic songs. His madness is a kind of nothingness: a silence: a repository of all meaning and no meaning.
Naturally, Lear fetishizes Tom: to the old king, the mad beggar seems to represent the human condition itself:
Lear: Thou wert better in a grave than to answer with
thy uncovered body this extremity of the skies.—Is
man no more than this? Consider him well.—Thou
ow’st the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep
no wool, the cat no perfume. Ha, here’s three on ’s
are sophisticated. Thou art the thing itself; unaccommodated
man is no more but such a poor, bare,
forked animal as thou art. (3.4.108-115)
Tom, like Lear’s love-game, is but another hubristic attachment by the king to an imagined locus of real nothingness–“the thing itself.” After spending the night in Tom’s tent, he brings the madman along as part of his retinue. He later refers to him as his “philosopher” and a “learnèd Theban” (3.4.162-165). But, much like the game of asides as they worked with Cordelia’s answer in the love-game, the play is playing a trick on Lear: the audience knows that Edgar is feigning his madness. Therefore, even madness, as it reflects nothingness through the simultaneous phenomena of total meaning and meaninglessness, is but a ruse: insufficient in Lear’s search for “the thing itself.”
Unfortunately, Lear eventually gets that for which he’s been searching: apprehension of true nothingness. After having been imprisoned and sentenced to death, alongside Cordelia, he alone is spared by virtue of pure chance: Edmund’s pardon does not arrive in time to save Cordelia from the hangman. He emerges onto the stage, his dead daughter in his arms:
Howl, howl, howl! O, ⟨you⟩ are men of stones!
Had I your tongues and eyes, I’d use them so
That heaven’s vault should crack. She’s gone
forever.
I know when one is dead and when one lives.
She’s dead as earth.—Lend me a looking glass.
If that her breath will mist or stain the stone,
Why, then she lives. (5.3.308-315)
Death, as the prime permanent fixture among the manifold manifestations of nothingness, becomes Lear’s final confrontation with “the thing itself.” Yet Heidegger’s nihilation still haunts the play, coloring Lear’s speech: despite his assertion that he “know[s] when one is dead,” and averring that “she’s dead as earth,” he turns toward some confirmation of life: some evidence of breath. In this way, Lear attempts to negate that most profound of negations: death itself.
As Lear holds Cordelia’s body, the Duke of Albany restores the old king’s status as sovereign: ostensibly restoring his ontological stability and, perhaps, then, removing him from the game of nihilation and the pursuit of pure nothingness. But Lear is uninterested. He doesn’t even respond. His last words are spent on the poor Cordelia and, naturally, mark a kind of generative conclusion to our exegesis:
LEAR. And my poor fool is hanged. No, no, no life?
Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life,
And thou no breath at all? Thou ’lt come no more,
Never, never, never, never, never.—
Pray you undo this button. Thank you, sir.
Do you see this? Look on her, look, her lips,
Look there, look there! [He dies]” (5.3.369-375)
This moment brings two images of importance. Firstly, there is the final gesture to look at Cordelia’s lip in which there is, in fact, no thing being pointed out. He does not mention movement or breath or any other sign of life, though one may presume that’s what he sees. Syntactically and practically, he is pointing out nothing. Metaphorically, he is also pointing out nothing. This gesture without a clear object stands as a metaphor for Lear’s tragic nature: a pointing toward nothingness that marks its withdrawal and eventual absence.2
Secondly, it bears remarking that, after thirty-four uses of “nothing” throughout the play, Lear’s lamentation turns toward the temporal: the repeated “never.” Its repetition, like Edmund’s repetition of “base,” operates as both a function of importance and estrangement, asking for both our attention and our nihilation: to recognize the nothing, and therefore the something, of “never.” Heidegger is, again, useful here in elucidating just what this movement does: “Beings are grasped in their being as ‘presence’; that is to say, they are understood with regard to a definite mode of time, the present” (70). Thus nothingness achieves its actuality through the negation of presence as “never.” Time becomes the field upon which the search for nothingness takes place, and both past and present disappear at its appearance.3
Having witnessed unmediated nothing in the body of his daughter, Lear himself steps out from that field into a sea of timelessness: “[He dies]” (5.3.375). Given that the entirety of the play saw Lear searching through a sea of signifiers and mediators for “the thing itself,” Lear’s final stage direction must give us pause: it’s écriture (for the reader), utterance (for the director), act (for the character), and biological event (for Lear). Language, then, beyond the language of the mad, remains, perhaps, too unstable a field for the apprehension of true nothingness. Even literary language–fundamentally contingent upon the faith that one is capable of apprehending transcendent phenomena–is insufficient. Perhaps only death can give us such a view. But then, of course, it would no longer matter.
One evolution of Epicurean logocentrism would be something like the 11th-century Five Ranks of Dongshan Liangjie in which nothingness operates along an eternally recursive axis between language and immanence: being subtly perceived in the world, meditated upon in language (through the use of kōan or other generative paradox), which then influences one’s perception of the world. This process ultimately resolves in a kind of unity between word and eye. Nothingness manages to exist at the moment of this unity, as seen in the last of Donghan’s Five Ranks:
Falling into neither form nor emptiness
Who can join the master
While others strive to rise above the common level
He unites with everything.
and sits in the ashes. (Dongshan’s Five Ranks)
A note to the footnote: I am acutely aware of my occidental bias as I invoke Epicurus in the main text and relegate Dongshan to the id of marginalia. I could justify this decision by gesturing toward King Lear as an origin of this paper, and thus its function as an organizing principle: why not situate a Western play in Western philosophy? But this is an ultimately flimsy line of reasoning. I have no answers. But this anxiety reflects other questions… where is the rest of the world in this grand discussion of nothingness? Here, at least, at the margins.
Regarding thought: “To the extent that man is in this draft, he points toward what withdraws. As he is pointing that way, man is the pointer.” (Heidegger, What Calls for Thinking?)
This calls to mind the final chapter of Donald Barthelme’s The Dead Father, which sees the past (“who has dug”) and the future (“what is to be builded”) resolved into a single utterance: “Who has dug this great hole in the ground? asked the Dead Father. What is to be builded here? Nothing, Thomas said.”
Beautiful ending. When you first posed the question about why it continues to fail, I kept thinking, maybe that's the whole point. Death being the thing that all other things are trying to avoid or explain.
You know it's funny because Deepak Chopra has used "pure potentiality" as a major part of his literary success. It is one of his Seven Spiritual Laws of Success (1994) and he cites it again throughout his other work. Anyway, I found that funny.
Well done! Thanks for sharing!