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What is the relation between quantification and the mysterious question of identity? What order of quality is proper to the inexplicable fact that one is oneself? Starting with an examination of the ontological blind spots of counting, this essay investigates the priority of quality over quantity, in connection with the spiritual nature of life understood as the spontaneous and infinitely evolving question of itself. It argues, in face of the forces of quantophrenia and numerocracy, for the importance of recognizing the essentially serial and apophatic structure of identity, the existential sense that all entities are the living question of themselves. As such, no individual may be considered as merely a part of reality. Each is, no less, the totality.

According to the Cloud, the ground of such magical contemplative mutation of the pessimal into the optimal is the brute, inescapable fact that being simply is a sorrow to itself, a sorrow cosubstantial with its own unearthly material: \"but most specially he feels matter of sorrow that knows and feels that he is. Where melancholy is, to borrow Cioran's phrase, \"the unconscious music of the soul,\" a movement of being that stays within the circuit of the self-world correlation, mystical sorrow is the soul's conscious music, a movement of being that escapes being's correlativeness by crucifying it to itself, by ceasing to call oneself with the names of doing and desisting to flee the torture chamber of one's own existence.40 Being the actual commotion of a sorrowful universal passivity, the crucifixion darkness is the real manifest image of this music.

Friedrich Nietzsche2 The fruit of faith [is] understanding, so that we may arrive at eternal life, where the Gospel would not be read to us, but he who has given us the Gospel now would appear with all the pages of the reading and the voice of the reader and commentator removed. \"12 To find eternal gold in the auri sacra fames [sacred hunger for gold] of the text's unending weird glow (like [lik- \"body, form; like, same\"] the other gloss from ghel- \"to shine\"). \"17 ( )loss: abandonment of the specular place of images, of the third zone between subject and object, of the independent living reality of the sensible. [...]there is a truth, without the possibility of transmitting it; there are modes of transmission, without anything being either transmitted or taught. … perhaps no other epoch has been so obsessed by its own past and so unable to create a vital relationship with it.

A coincidence of bodily and linguistic dislocation (dismemberment, disarticulation) connects Angela of Foligno's mystical experience and its Orphic parallel, the death of Actaeon. We explicate this intersection in order to interpret sanctity as dislocation with help from Foucault, Lyotard, Agamben, Meher Baba, Wittgenstein, Derrida, Pseudo-Dionysius, Bachelard, Levinas, Certeau.

This dissertation investigates Middle English representations of work. Most previous scholarship has approached medieval work through autonomous disciplinary channels. I examine several kinds of evidence for late medieval attitudes toward work in the context of both socioeconomic conditions and intellectual traditions. Chapter 1 demonstrates how the structure of the Middle English vocabulary of work (travail, labour, swink, werk, craft) is related to status and class, to late medieval society's broad awareness of the processes of work, and to contemporary conceptions of the relation of work to life. Chapter 2 examines three accounts of the history of work—the history of masonry contained in the Cooke MS (British Museum, Add. MS. 23198), John Gower's history of work in Book 4 of the Confessio Amantis, and Chaucer's Former Age—in order to show how the history of work was a site of ideological contest. Chapter 3 surveys late medieval concerns with the subjective dimension of work and reads Fragment VIII of the Canterbury Tales as Chaucer's investigation of work as a subjective necessity, as a requirement not only of life's objective conditions, but of human nature itself.

[...]revelation of a how as what becomes intelligible only in its having been experienced, only by being pursued and passed through, participates in the essential lesson formulated near the volume's end, namely, that historical consciousness, which is constituted by \"access to the present for the first time, beyond memory and forgetting, or rather, at the threshold of their indifference,\" is achievable only in the archaeological mode of a future anterior or 'will have been' (106-7). Like the phantasmal topology mapped in Stanzas, a khoral place \"more original than space\" providing the where of poetico-philosophic realization, the site of such historically redemptive knowledge (the arche of this logos) belongs to a level of reality that exceeds the terms of modern experimental science which \"has its origins in a unprecedented mistrust of experience as it was traditionally understood. [...]as with anthropogenesis, which is supposed to have taken place but which cannot be hypostasized in a chronological event-the arche alone is able to guarantee the intelligibility of historical phenomena, \"saving\" them archaeologically in a future anterior in the understanding not of an unverifiable origin but of its finite and untotalizable history ... the human sciences will be capable of reaching their decisive epistemological threshold only after they have rethought, from the bottom up, the very idea of ontological anchoring, and thereby envisaged being as a field of essentially historical tensions (110-1). [...]is the substance of the signature: \"Signatures ... are ... that which marks things at the level of their pure existence ... that pertain to beings by virtue of the very fact of existing\" (66).9 Tracing this mysterious and quintessentially actual level of reality across a constellation of topics, The Signature of All Things is suffused by the logic of the third, of the between, of the both and/or neither, above all in its ongoing dialogue with the work of Michel Foucault: \"The astute reader will be able to determine what in the three essays can be attributed to Foucault, to the author, or to both\" (7).