There seemed to be an affinity between deconstructive practices and sort of spiritual discipline because of their undoing of the transcendent underpinnings of stable identity. If the boundary of the classroom was easily breached then so was the boundary of the body and the self. The transcendent was replaced by an endless transcending. The self that was newly being dismantled and then reconstituted in the abyss of its immediate predecessor was always a demonic self, a sort of cutting-edge parasite or self-conscious eddy on the silent energy of the veritable self. There can be no definitive evidence of this latter, it doesn't enter into the game, but it is intimated in the experience of the sublime as larger and heavier than the world. It is not feeling or knowing but the original of feeling and knowing, what these functions strive towards but can never reach. To have some awareness of it is to understand that what has always been there, unchanged is impossible to know in the usual way since all such knowing derives from change. By contrast, this timeless presence that is not presence is complete identity, is one in an unimaginably concrete way. No question of identity is possible in the sense in which such a question, being the possibility of difference, or even the possibility of such a possibility, is at the origin of being. But how can there be talk of being aware of this essence before being? The adventurer in time, this animula vagula, cannot attain a truth that is by nature unattainable, yet it also cannot delimit the range or possibilities of its knowing. It is as little the author of its littleness and want of power as it is of their opposites. It cannot map its own trajectory or know the space through which it passes. It appears as what it is due to a certain declension over which it has no control, and it can neither tighten it nor release it - but neither can it resist such events should they arise.