muss es sein?

Right , so... right!
..for what it's worth - a quick and perhapssomewhat trite analysis/reflection of what I gathered from Wilmot's Upon Nothing.

Wilmot's grappling with the notion/question/issue of a foundational ontological bianarism, the sense and meaning of nothingness as either the absence of being, or as property towards which one can sort of bend an intentionality.... Nothingness as absence of a 'thisness' or of nothingness as a particular 'thisness' which we can think of as an ontological state or an object property.

Wilmot describes his sense of nothing as elder brother even to shade, ( or as we might conceive it - the absence of light, or an empty space), and stipulates that it had being before the world was made, and that - having no fear of temporality - possess a kind of immanence. This kind of makes me think of the invocation to the muse (read: holy spirit) in P.L Bk I... and of the vast abyss that was made pregnant.

Also of interest, this sense of nothingness being impervious to time and place (ln. 4) , and primary to the great united "What" from which all proceeded, seems to suggest or connote a sense that it occurs outside discourse, or if you like - outside of dialect, before self and other, beyond good and evil or in a realm of some kind of totalistic conceptual singularity... we could correlate such a conceptual singularity occuring outside of discourse with a notion of, capital L, Love; power, mediation, discourse, etc. being things which proceed causally from that initial, will endowing, dasein engendering, Satanic utterance of "What".

--- This kind of ties into my position with the major theme/question of the course, that though Love (synonymous with singularity, unity etc.) may occur in some vital sense as primary to, and above & beyond discourses of power, because we are sensory beings and because as Blake put it - the 5 senses are the chief inlets of the soul in this age - power becomes the rule of our worldly experience.. and wordly instances of love as such, can be understood in terms of discourses of power.
Our phenomenological experience begins which each sentience identifying the foundational structural distinction between self and other: it sees that it is a self, and that it occurs in a world where its intentionality is bent towards objects that are other - and it is only in virtue of the otherness of the other that our sense of self can have any meaning, form or content... what follows then is the Hegelian Dialectical Idealist conception of dialectic... an perpetual discourse between a self that identifies otherness, subjugates or appropriates that otherness.. and/or defines its concept of self as contrary to that otherness...

as Nietzsche said, and as Milton's Satan quite rightly implies:
"This world is a Will To Power, and nothing besides."

We can all glean and appreciate from Christian theology that Christ died for our sins, in order to redeem us etc. but it seems few people appreciate the sense that, by the same token - Satan fell for you.

I know what you're about to say, Satan fell out of his own ambition and his own will to power. But given the Christian notion of immanence: that all times occur simulteanously to god & his plan/design permeates all being, - given that notion of immanence ... we have a portrait in which God designs & knows of the fall, knows of the temptation of man... and purposes it in some sense so that we may have knowledge of good and evil (from the apple) and so that we may have a free will to make our virtue meaingful etc. ...
So god purposes it, Satan however - is more akin to man... perhaps he knows god's omnipotence, but he has a will and purpose that is seperate - that answers "thou shalt" which a tragic and beautiful "I will".
In this sense I would position that we are all as human beings, as sovergn "wills towards" something, more akin to satan, and moreso of his lot than of god's... we simply have more in common.

Also, while Blake said that milton was of the devil's lot without knowing it, in class we didnt touch upon the basis on which Blake makes that claim, the first clause of that sentence - that Milton being a true poet, was of the devil's lot. Here we have a sentiment of the association and connection between the capacity to create and the prerequisite utterance of defiance... tying it back together with Wilmot's theme, and the Nietzschean notion that all creation must be preceeded by a destruction, by a wonderful and pregnant violence..

anyway - i realize this entry has been all over the map, overly verbose and needlessly cluttered... but it's late, and I don't sleep much these days... so for what it's worth - there's my two cents, or 83 cents as it were...

a la prochaine,