The Method of the Void

I have written on several occasions about the myths of separation and the fall. In popular readings, the separated one usually appears as an exile, a cursed figure, an abuser, a criminal, or a murderer. The rejected figure thus becomes associated with a prior guilt: a punishment is received and considered legitimate, because the one who expels is a god presumed to know everything and therefore incapable of injustice. The dominant narrative always articulates the same thing: separation is not only a consequence, but a moral necessity, an action that must make the guilty suffer. The parallel with the logic of the modern prison is evident.

However, when one observes the myths closely, a persistent feature appears that unsettles that reading. In the stories that share the same structure of separation and fall: Lucifer, Adam, Cain, Prometheus, and other related figures, a constant emerges that is difficult to ignore: in the original versions of these myths, return is impossible, there is no return to the point of departure. Separation does not function as a temporary episode or a correctable detour, but as a structural condition. Lucifer falls without reconciliation and does not return to heaven. Adam is expelled from Eden and does not return. Cain is exiled and condemned to wander. Prometheus descends from the sky and remains chained to the earth. The myth does not describe a pedagogy of return, but the establishment of a definitive distance.

The fall implies, in every case, a transformation of the protagonist. The punished one not only loses a place of origin, but changes in status, function, and meaning. Adam becomes bound to labor, time, and death. Prometheus becomes a technical mediator between gods and humans, but is condemned to an endless martyrdom. Lucifer comes to embody absolute separation in hell, sovereign of a kingdom that does not reconcile. This permanence of the fall signals a different relation to the world and, especially, to time: when the idea of an origin that must be restored is abandoned, history ceases to be oriented toward repair and unfolds as an irreversible condition.

This intuition is not modern. It already resonated, in an underground way, in the last centuries of Neoplatonism, when ancient philosophy was beginning to exhaust itself. If classical Neoplatonism, in the third and fourth centuries, still preserved the promise of a return to the One, to the original light of creation, in its final formulations that expectation collapses. In Plotinus, distance from the One is still thought as a possible reorientation, as a movement of return through the Nous. In sixth century thinkers such as Damascius, by contrast, the One becomes so radically ineffable that return is no longer even thinkable. Distance no longer appears as a problem to be solved, but as an insurmountable condition. There is no final return. The world exists precisely as the consequence of a separation that does not close.

Simone Weil, fifteen centuries later, takes up and radicalizes this gesture in another register. In her thought, God participates in the event of creation, and then withdraws. Creation is not a continuous expansion or a sustained presence, but a renunciation of further intervention. This act of withdrawal is not a negligent abandonment, but the very condition for something other than God to exist. In this view, it is not for the human being to occupy the vacant center left by God. It is for the human being to endure that absence humbly, without demanding it be filled.

Humility, in Weil, does not consist in morally lowering oneself or submitting to another. It consists in renouncing the occupation of the place of the absolute. The error is not to affirm oneself, but to install oneself as the origin of meaning. When the ego places itself at the center, it does not affirm life: it deforms it. But replacing the ego with an other does not solve the problem. A center occupied by an other reproduces the same structure. The subject’s ego does not disappear: it places itself underneath. Then servitude appears, imaginary self denial, the idolatry of the neighbor. The center, in order not to produce domination or submission, must remain empty.

In Lacan, this same logic appears formulated in another way. Lack is not an accident to be solved, but a structure. It is there from the beginning of psychic life and will remain until the end. There is no Other that guarantees meaning or answers the ultimate question: Che vuoi? what does that want from me? Trying to occupy the center, to fill it with something, or to become it, is useless, because lack persists. Filling it with objects, roles, or recognitions does not eliminate the existential void.

Neurotic drift does not reside in the desire for an object, whether a word, a person, or a thing, but in the demand that something or someone fill the lack. In that demand, the subject places itself as a receiver of meaning, waiting for the world, an other, or an institution to return a confirmation of existence. It is not a matter of wanting, but of demanding that lack disappear.

Weil arrives at a nearby conclusion by an even more uncomfortable route. The problem is not the question itself, but the assumption that there is an ego to which one must respond. The subject cannot tolerate the blank, not knowing, waiting. It interprets to protect itself, because ignorance exposes. Thus knowledge, of oneself or of the world, seals the void, not because it can inhabit it, but because it occupies it with an imaginary sense. That sense does not withstand duration.

That is why Weil insists on leaving lack uncovered. It is not covered or repaired. It is endured. At that point she coincides with Lacan. But Weil goes a step further. When the demand of the ego as center ceases, when lack is left without demand and without appropriation, something she calls grace can appear. It is not a reward or a guarantee. It is only the name of something other, not produced by the ego, and that can occur only when the place of the origin of meaning is not occupied.

Eliminating the ego is impossible. But a displacement is possible. To observe from where one speaks, from where one interprets, from where one loves. Since Descartes, Western culture has tended to place certainty and existence in the affirmation of the subject, reinforcing the demand for identity and the continuous signature of being in the world. Weil’s method does not propose fleeing that world, but refusing to organize it around an imaginary center.

The need for existential validation manifests in everyday life in multiple forms: in the couple demanded as completeness, in the artist who seeks in recognition the proof of existence, in the child who craves confirmation, in politics that promises to restore a symbolic center to wounded communities, in work turned into a certificate of value. In every case, the demand points to the same place: to seal lack, individual or collective. But that sealing is not possible. Disappointment is not an accident of the process, it is its necessary consequence.

Neither the couple, nor society, nor the father, nor politics, nor work, nor diplomas, nor money, nor friends confirm an essential value. They guarantee nothing. They sustain nothing. They cure nothing. They function as precarious supports, as momentary screens in front of the void that runs through existence. They offer an illusory support, brief and interchangeable. When one falls, another takes its place.

The moral reading of myths interprets the fall as punishment. But here lies the fundamental misunderstanding. Expulsion does not sanction a fault: it inaugurates a condition. For all exiles, it is not a matter of having left the center, but of having discovered that there is no center to return to, no homeland and no form to restore. Life, like entropy, does not point toward return, but toward transformation, always forward.

Even the Odyssey confirms it. Odysseus returns to Ithaca, but does not attain fullness. He finds a home taken over by suitors, a corrupted order, a wife put to the test, an aged father, a son who grew up without him. Nothing awaits intact. The return restores nothing. In later versions of the myth, Odysseus sets out again. The movement continues.

In the story of Oedipus this logic goes one step further. Hearing the prophecy that he will kill his father and marry his mother, he does not return to a transformed home, but discovers that the origin itself is uninhabitable. To avoid that fate, he flees the city where he believes he was born. But the flight does not save him: in trying to escape, he fulfills it.

Oedipus arrives in Thebes as a foreigner, solves the riddle of the Sphinx, and is rewarded with the throne and with Jocasta. He becomes king, husband, and savior of the city. He seems to have reached the center. But that center holds only as long as the truth remains hidden. Order, homeland, and identity depend on a fundamental ignorance.

When knowledge breaks in, as in the story of Adam and the serpent in the Garden of Eden, no restoration is possible. The magic shatters. The symbolic homeland to which one would have to return disappears. Origin ceases to be refuge and reveals itself as catastrophe.

Oedipus does not commit suicide. He blinds himself and goes into exile. Blindness is not a moral punishment, but seeing too much. Exile is not penance, but withdrawal. He does not occupy another place. He does not replace the center. He subtracts himself. The center does not shift: it dissolves.

From this perspective, the separation Weil proposes is not a misfortune, but the condition of a non appropriative relation to the world. Not occupying the other. Not occupying the work. Not occupying the instant with immediate interpretation. Weil proposes attention as a response. Attention is the gesture of giving the world time and listening without immediately returning it to the ego as reference: remaining before what appears, letting it be, accepting its opacity, without turning it into an object of meaning, judgment, or possession. Attention is not raising something to the center, but keeping the center free, allowing subjects to orient themselves without occupying it.

This can be understood as a method, but not as a results oriented technique. It is a method by subtraction. It does not add practices, it withdraws functions. It does not promise transformation, but it can produce it. It changes the way of looking. It changes the way the world presents itself. It even changes the position from which others perceive us, not because that effect is sought, but as a consequence of the center no longer being occupied by the ego.

I propose a simple experiment. Go through a day avoiding saying “I am,” “I do,” “I think,” observing each time language tries to reinstall us as the center: when it asserts, when it explains, when it justifies. Not to correct it, but to see it. When the ego is displaced, the world does not collapse. Meaning does not disappear. But it stops revolving around a fixed position.

Adam, Lucifer, Prometheus, Oedipus, Odysseus, and Cain are not condemned to be outside, but to live without a guarantee of return. The true expulsion was not from the garden, from heaven, or from Olympus, but from comfortable certainty.

Weil’s method does not teach how to arrive. It teaches how not to occupy. It offers no consolation and no closure. But in that renunciation a different relation to time, to others, and to life can open. Not as a promise, but as a fragile possibility.

Perhaps the only fruit of the Tree of Knowledge worth keeping is this: knowing that there is no center and that it is not necessary to invent one in order to live.

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