Chapter 21

Abstract

Now in the next piece you’ll see — naturally I saw it first, but it took me some time too — that I am beginning all over again. I have forgotten everything — ‘everything’ in quotation marks, of course (as in ‘everything’ is pertinent and ‘everything eise’ vanishes — the pertinence of ‘everything’ of surrender). It’s not that I have not begun before — we are no longer on page one. But, as you will read, while I thought that the title ‘Sociology, Phenomenology, and Surrender—and—Catch’ gave me a program to follow, the venture turned out to be not nearly as discursive as that idea of the title’s role and thus of the nature of the essay anticipated. In the writing I forgot about the title—more accurately, I held it in abeyance, suspended it; I distrusted its imposed conceptualization, even though it had been imposed by no recognizable source other than myself — just as I had distrusted the imposed conceptualization of ‘culture patterns’ in Loma (13). I ‘opened up’ to the occasion, a process turning out to be integral to my enterprise;hence I could not alter this birthmark here either.¹ It must be the continued thinking and writing about surrender that accounts for the changed meaning of ‘beginning’ here, for its ‘more beginning beginning’ — or, to put it more formally — that accounts for the deeper and more comprehensive suspension of received notions even than in ‘Beginning: In Hegel and Today’ or ‘On the Cunning of Reason in Our Time.’