This great factory operated upon a mysterious system of production costs: taking no account of the economic dictum that capital investment should produce a return, it was dedicated to a monstrous nothingness. No wonder then that each morning the workers had to recite a mystic oath. I have never seen such a strange factory. In it all the techniques of modern science and management, together with the exact and rational thinking of many superior brains, were dedicated to a single end-Death. Producing the Zero-model combat plane used by the suicide squadrons, this great factory resembled a secret cult that operated thunderously-groaning, shrieking, roaring. I did not see how such a colossal organization could exist without some religious grandiloquence. Mishima Yukio, Confessions of a Mask1 Nothing is further from Eros than possession. Emmanuel Levinas2 In his short but volatile, perhaps even tremulous, 1809 treatise on The Being [Wesen) of Human Freedom, Schelling made the bold claim that sin is not the experience of an individual will, of the discrete movement of human desire, but that it is that by which individuality per se is born. The individual will is born from the movement within God that gives rise to creatures, that is, from the moment within creation in which creatures, in order to be creatures, must be refused the plenitude of divinity. The particular will, the creaturely [kreaturlich), is born of divine disequilibrium, of the wish of absolute ground for die Ungleichheit, disequilibrium, for the self dif ferentiation necessary for it to feel [empfinden) itself (I/7, 381).3 The ground of creatures, therefore, "necessarily reacts to freedom as the super-creaturely [das Uberkreaturliche] and awakens in it the desire [Lust] for the creaturely" (I/7, 381). Within freedom, then, there arises the creaturely will, the will for the creaturely, the tendency of the creaturely to of firm and demand itself as such. This awakening of the conatus, of the endeavor of the creaturely to preserve itself, of creaturely desire, of ipseity and Eigenheit, is reactive. It shuns the abyssal freedom of its birth, although, Schelling continues, its anxiety before the Good sacrificed in order to make possible the creaturely is audible vertiginously as if to one whom "seized by dizziness on a high and precipitous summit, a secret voice seems to cry out that one jump." It is like that "old fable" (The Odyssey) in which "the irresistible song of the Sirens ring out from the depths in order to attract the passing sailors down into the whirlpool" (I/7, 381). Schelling made this argument long before Kierkegaard defined the demonic in The Concept of Anxiety (1844) as "anxiety about the good."4 He made it before Martin Heidegger in Sein and Zeit (1927) argued that Angst, the mood of uneasiness and uncanniness that projects itself upon no particular future object, was the clue to being unto death, being unto an ultimate, non-relatable possibility that cannot be overtaken, but which places Dasein anxiously in question about its own nothingness. For Schelling, the inevitable loss of divine freedom (the condition for the possibility of the creaturely), the sacrifice of the pure fire of absolute freedom, marked not only the creature's proclivity to egoism, but when lost freedom, the irreducible remainder in every effort of the conatus to take possession of itself, returned, it sung vertiginously of freedom as a call to one's own death, as the temptation to leap from the very height upon which the human creature had attempted to elevate itself above all other creatures. The freedom of the creature's ground is to each particular will "a consuming fire" (I/7, 381) and the particular will is anxious before the Good, which, if encountered in itself, is the death of the creature, a continuity that in its pure form is like Elohim's fire, ready to consume all that is discrete, all that is creaturely. It is a fire before which all creaturely self reflection and self possession is exposed as idolatrous. …