The Boy Without "ex nihilo"
The problem with the event and the anticipation of its arrival.
Screenshot from Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Cuarón 2:01:14).
The third part of the Harry Potter saga reads like the moment in which childhood gradually begins to crack. The Prisoner of Azkaban is no longer just a book about potions or flying brooms; rather, it’s a story about how the past shapes us—and how we learn to free ourselves from it. Through an escaped rat, a mysterious professor, and a fugitive prisoner, this text undertakes a profound analysis of coming of age.
Everything begins with Sirius Black, who escapes from Azkaban—the gloomiest Guantánamo Bay of the wizarding world. The mere fact that a prisoner can breach those impenetrable walls sets off panic at the very start of the story. But there is more at stake: Sirius isn’t just hunting anyone—he’s after Harry. Suddenly, it becomes clear that Harry’s own history is tied far more deeply to this criminal than he could have imagined.
Hogwarts is different this year too. Remus Lupin, the new Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher, initially seems like a walking patchwork coat: friendly but strangely exhausted. Behind his furrowed façade, however, hides one of Harry’s most important mentors—a werewolf who can only keep himself under control with Snape’s foul-smelling potion.
And then there’s that damned map! The Marauder’s Map, which Harry receives from the Weasley twins, is far more than a wacky toy. It shows hidden passages and alerts Harry to potential discoverers while he’s sneaking around—and among the names that pop up on it is “Pettigrew.” But why on earth is he still alive? He should be dead, because, as far as Harry knows, his godfather Sirius murdered this man. Harry instinctively feels that the map is a key to finally unraveling the murder of his parents.
Driven by the desire to find the truth, Harry eventually goes after Pettigrew to get answers.
The scene in what is called the “Shrieking Shack”—a dilapidated house on the outskirts of Hogsmeade—is the moment when the curtain falls. Once it’s revealed that Scabbers (Ron’s pet) is actually Peter Pettigrew—a human who has hidden in rat form for twelve years—everything is thrown into turmoil. Pettigrew is the one who betrayed Harry’s parents to Voldemort and then pinned the blame on Sirius. This plot twist not only shatters Harry’s world; it fundamentally calls into question everything we thought we knew about guilt and innocence up to that point.
Sirius, torn between madness and despair, wants revenge for the lies he has endured for so long. Lupin appears and takes on the role of an old friend of Harry’s father. Pettigrew, by contrast, turns out to be a coward, having sacrificed his friends—among them Harry’s parents—to Voldemort just to survive. Here it becomes clear: growing up doesn’t mean always being strong. Rather, it means dealing with broken promises and disappointed expectations.
When Harry prevents Sirius and Lupin from killing Pettigrew, he displays a maturity that even the adults find astonishing. But as so often in the Harry Potter series, good intentions are not enough to avert the worst.
While Pettigrew is meant to be handed over to the Dementors as planned, Lupin accidentally catches sight of the full moon and transforms uncontrollably into a werewolf. His human side disappears, and he becomes a wild beast. There is no time to lose, because an attack from him could be deadly. On top of that, there is another urgent reason for haste: the true traitor (Pettigrew) is still at large. In his rat form, he tries desperately to escape—and, unfortunately, he succeeds. It’s precisely here that one senses the powerlessness: sometimes such moments tear holes in what we take to be destiny, holes that can never again be patched.
Sirius tries with all his might to stop Lupin’s transformation—but fails. So he shifts into his Animagus form and turns into a large dog. A fight ensues between Sirius and the wild werewolf Lupin. At the very last second, before Lupin can kill Harry’s godfather, a howl from the forest rings out. Lupin instinctively follows it, for werewolves respond to the call of their own kind.
Without hesitation, Harry and Sirius follow him to prevent Lupin from dying in his werewolf frenzy. From Harry’s perspective, we find ourselves by a lake, where they are surrounded by Dementors.
Sirius is on the brink of death at the hands of the Dementors. Harry tries desperately to push them back with the Patronus charm (Expecto Patronum), but the sheer number makes the situation hopeless. Then, suddenly, a colossal Patronus appears and saves Harry and Sirius. Harry suspects that his father cast the spell. He’s not certain, though, because he immediately loses consciousness. When he wakes in the hospital wing, Hermione tells him that Sirius is still alive, but he has been arrested.
In order to save Sirius from Azkaban, Professor Dumbledore points out that Hermione has a way to set events straight: the Time-Turner. This enchanted amulet, which Hermione had been given to attend multiple classes at once, now becomes their lifeline. Here unfolds a particularly magical sequence, because suddenly the familiar story becomes “disenchanted.” Harry and Hermione travel back in time to save Buckbeak the Hippogriff from execution and then to help Sirius.
Back at the lake, the past Harry is fighting off the Dementors. Dementors, those dreadful wardens, are not just monsters—they symbolize the shadows of the past that catch up with Harry. Anyone who’s ever been haunted by memories understands why their presence is so paralyzing.
Meanwhile, the future Harry suppresses his own despair—he has to watch his younger self fail at conjuring the Patronus, on the brink of disaster. Hermione urges him urgently: “Harry! Don’t you see that you’re both going to die?” At this moment, Harry recognizes himself—his younger self and Sirius lying on the lakeshore, while the Dementors threaten to kill them. He doubts whether his younger self will really be saved by his father’s Patronus. The Dementors move ever closer, and his younger self collapses. The worst seems inevitable.
But in that instant, Harry realizes that only the here and now matters. He understands that his father James is not going to appear to save them. Harry has no time for a sudden summoning. No event will intervene; he has to turn the crisis around himself by surrendering (aufgeben*) his hope.
Deeply moved, he watches himself in the past desperately trying to fend off the Dementors. He takes a breath, raises his wand, and calls forth the Patronus. A blinding beam of light bursts forth, and a silver stag appears. It gallops across the surface of the lake without leaving a trace, driving away the Dementors with a single blow.
Thus, the Patronus becomes a symbol of self-empowerment. Rowling shows that our greatest battles aren’t fought against dark forces out there, but rather that it’s about recognizing the doubts we harbor within ourselves. And sometimes, we need a glimpse into the past in order to move forward. Exactly at this moment, Harry realizes that he alone is his own savior—and only finds out (mitbekommt*) after the fact.
The Prisoner of Azkaban is, in this sense, not a book merely about magic. It tells how we deal with the stories of our past—and how we don’t have to be defined by them. Anyone revisiting the plot today can clearly see: the arrival of an expectation is not the victory over one’s own story but rather the defeat in the form of a counter-narrative. All the more so does a view of a “fluid world” open up—one that can offer something in opposition to our overly rigid understanding of history, through an ideal type, if we are unwilling to stop clinging to our self-narration within a gridlocked social order—just so the coziness of our expectation can keep working.
This is precisely why we must approach Harry’s story in a fundamentally different way here. For after Harry and Hermione have re-experienced these events by diving anew into time, Harry was still blinded by the event and believed it was his father who had rescued him and his godfather. Far off the mark, if we look at the rescue from our perspective and Harry’s: there is the incredible dimension between a Harry who “enters in” (acts) and the passively observing Harry (our position), who, so to speak, is just clinging to his identity through an ideal type in the future—as a third person—expecting that soon he will indeed receive his salvation, because the framework of the event is determined to arrive as such.
From the standpoint of expectation, the content we expect is deceptive, because the appearance only allows one framework that neglects other possible sequences of events; it offers us a predetermined, fixed world—here the ideal type is taken as congruent with reality. And specifically, Harry’s expectation of his father is his event-as-obstacle! Precisely because of that, Harry deceives himself—with the truth—for how could we blame him for upholding precisely this self-narration? In this sense, a truth can take on the form of an event and hinder people from going beyond that course of truth. Precisely because the dream of expectation seems more real than the fluid world itself—this is why the imposed obstacle feels more real than reality.
The framework of his own improbable event has thus, through its (ideal-typical) structure, subordinated reality itself, so that reality has effectively bent over to take only that direction. In the process, Harry enjoyed the comfortable position of that framework, which indeed allowed him to remain passive. This is the reversal that occurs if we stop only at the ideal type—and indeed Weber urgently warns us not to view the world as purely rigid and not as fluid.[1]
It is tempting to assume that the world will take care of everything automatically without our intervention, simply because institutions have not “called” on us to act—but the vocation of a thing does not simply follow from the assigned position of hearing the call. As Weber puts it, one writes oneself into it through one’s own initiative.[2](Precisely the casual attitude of defining oneself purely through institutions leads, as Weber points out, to the professional politician—and introduces an obstacle to radically questioning one’s position or the institution, since the professional politician would risk losing that position. Yet that position is not the be-all and end-all of a politician; rather:
[…] Politics means a strong, slow boring of hard boards, carried out with both passion and judgment. It is perfectly true, and all historical experience confirms it, that what is possible would never have been achieved if people had not time and time again reached for what is impossible. But anyone who can do that must be a leader and not just that but also—in a very plain sense—a hero. And even those who are neither must arm themselves with that steadfastness of heart that can cope with the collapse of all hopes—right now—otherwise they will never be able to accomplish even what is possible today. Only those who are certain that they will not break down if, from their point of view, the world is too stupid or too base for what they want to offer it, and who can say ‘nevertheless!’ to all that—only those have the ‘calling’ for politics.[3]
And this “nevertheless!” is precisely the framework of truth that keeps the content open; precisely this exists only in a radical sense within the subject. That is why the ideology of the subject is to be distinguished from others in that it enables us to tear apart even its own framework—to destroy its own content—in order to grasp itself as the open framework. Let us briefly turn to Hegel, who offers a fitting description of this:
In being-for-itself (Fürsichseyn), qualitative being is completed; it is infinite being. The being at the beginning is without determination. Dasein (there-being) is sublated being but only immediately sublated being. Hence it initially contains only the first immediate negation; being is likewise preserved, and determinacy is only boundary. The movement of Dasein consists in shifting this boundary from its externality into itself. In being-for-itself, this reversal is complete. The negative as in-itself and the negative as boundary, as otherness, is posited as identical; being-for-itself is the negative referring to itself, the absolutely determinate being.[4]
My interpretation of this passage is:
In the subject, this qualitative determination as position is completed; it is the undetermined finite narrative. The narrative of the beginning is indeterminate. The being in this something is the sublated narrative, but only as the undetermined, mediate sublated narrative. Hence, at first, the something initially contains only the first indeterminate, mediate shortcoming; the position in the narrative remains preserved in or as the same case (identical with the shortcoming), and the definiteness of its shortcoming becomes its boundary only then.
The process, the history of the being of the something, consists in understanding this boundary, which had been placed externally (i.e., the subdivision of history), as placed within itself. In the subject, this reversal is complete. The emptiness, the absence of this boundary, is given as an “in-itself” (the focal point), and thus even the boundary is absent—and here alone lies the limit: as something non-identical, the subject is thereby posited as identical with itself.
In short, this means the subject no longer has any boundaries; it is not trapped in a schema of self-narration or in a preconceived design, because it is determined by no story—everything falls into its framework of subjective experience, which it discards. The subject is to be understood as absent, referring back to itself, and thus as a detached being.
Ex nihilo is to be understood in this way: there is no story of myself, no position where salvation lies in wait, but—just as in Harry Potter—the incantation on “expecto” should be grasped as expecting oneself, so that the framework of expectation remains empty. From this despair, Harry can only call upon himself, independently of any social apparatus. Precisely because he is nothing in that position—unsure of what to do—he proceeds to risk inscribing himself in that danger. By neglecting his posture of expectation and complementarily experiencing open social action in the future in himself, it follows: There is nothing to interpret but only this necessity, which must be turned around through action.[5] For this reason, the event is not necessary, since the self is already present—if you wait too long for the self, you expect nothing!
But if the self identifies with this appearance-as-appearance, the essence of the paradoxical beautiful, then it conceives for itself a supposed end-story. At that moment, the only boundary laid down by the subject is the notion that it must take that single path, convinced of its own infallibility.
[I]n that this (the beautiful) directly brings with it a feeling of the promotion of life and is therefore compatible with charms and a playful imagination, whereas the other (the feeling of the sublime) is a pleasure that arises only indirectly, namely in that it is produced by an immediate inhibition of the vital forces and a subsequently even stronger surge of them, and thus, as a stirring, seems to be no play but earnestness in the occupation of the imagination.[6]
But the question arises: if both positions (the beautiful and the sublime) coincide—that is, if all beautiful facts and narratives “empirically” align, yet the solution does not lie in succumbing to the beautiful, because the scapegoat dynamic is still enacted in relation to someone else—then at first the ideal type in reality seems assured, but only at the price of sacrificing the other. In the end, a painful pleasure remains, transforming itself further into carrying out that pain in a sealed chamber, where no one can scream, because even this pain no longer brings pleasure.
We come back here to Weber’s “nevertheless!”, which explicitly warns us that in the “fluid world”[7] there is no ideal type in itself. Precisely for that reason, the subject wallows only in its comfortable position to resist the inhibitions posed by contradiction, thereby creating an (indirect) object behind the curtain of history. It is ready to sacrifice a scapegoat so that it can remain with the negative (the absent) of its self-narration, believing that somehow things will get better just because something is sacrificed—this sacrificing only serves the sublime, the treasure the identity refuses to lose because the unbelievable is framed in the self-narration.
»The sublime is that in comparison with which everything else is small.«[8]
Accordingly, the sublime is an object such that, by referring to it, all else appears small—like a smaller object that only mobilizes and makes that claim possible in relation to it. The paradox of this object lies, as Kant noted, in the fact that it appears all the more beautiful the farther away it is, whereas its closeness destroys the previously mobilized sense of the beautiful.
Our task here is to understand the course of history such that there is no salvation behind the story; rather, the reading of salvation must be postponed so that we don’t lapse into repetition. There is no guilt to be atoned for. »The past is past and as past is no longer to be mastered—at most violently distorted in uncritical fashion.«[9] Precisely for that reason, any atonement only resides in striving to excel in and for oneself.[10]
So if people whine about not being this or that because some vulnerable institution does not summon or call upon them, they do so only because they are telling themselves this story so they can adopt that framework as a scapegoat. What people do is simply displace that sublimity externally instead of recognizing: “Those particular folks also just boil water like anyone else.” “Do you want to become it only so that others will see you as such, because you are not sure who you are?” “Or do you do it for its own sake?”
That is why the task of German Idealism is precisely to strive for this insane infinity in a material-ideal sense for itself. Our ability to be “for a future” in the now without being materially determined—that is, if the subject does not exist, it thrusts its own boundary into its own wound with a spear, then heals its wound itself. If the future had a certain being assomething, the subject would be not merely for-something (thus a complete object having a pre-established place), but also a “natural” limit would lie before it objectively.
For this reason, it is also the wrong question in the European tradition of thought to ask who the next great philosopher will be. It asks it precisely in order to articulate that it cannot guarantee from a past reading of history that this is indeed the case—and the senseless folly is to identify oneself with a particular tradition of thought by means of institutional history proclaiming: “You belong here!”
The blind pirates choose one among them to be pirate king—it is done methodically.
Precisely the disregard of the non-belonging allows a seemingly secure position that is, however, inconsistent. It has to exclude a radical part over and over again to maintain itself—a typical fascist tactic. Radical ideas do not arise in common sense; they emerge by bending common sense from another position. But since we have no position from the future, we can only attempt to read it from the past again—yet this reading takes place in the “now,” which is why with each interpretation we change it ever so slightly.
The fact that I call myself a Hegelian paradoxically only proves that I do not occupy this position—for the very reason that such a Hegelian position does not exist. The content is missing, and the shortcoming is what remains as the framework.
Thus we ought to act like Harry Potter and save ourselves—living out, as people say, communism now: being thinkers, revolutionaries, merciful ones, and so on, right here in the present. If we wait for the call and structure our self-narration in such a way that someone else will save us, we’re just fodder for the cats because the Pied Piper has us already. In the process, Mama Cat no longer recognizes her own kittens as they devour the rats.
Or, in Deleuze’s words: »If you’re caught in someone else’s dream, you’re screwed.«[11] But that other is only oneself, who offers oneself the other’s story as a self-narration, just so one doesn’t have to surpass oneself—a crucial missing puzzle piece that Deleuze did not see in Hegel. But we have to be lenient with Deleuze, because his opponents—the so-called “dialecticians” of his time—did not see that either. And he—without Guattari—comes closest to the wonder child of German Idealism in his Logic of Sense.
And precisely at the point of belatedness of a still-to-come call of expectation in our social action in the now, i.e., in the future, if we neglect that, we can simultaneously hope for radicality as something new because this new is only a repetition of the old. Radical is precisely old wine in new bottles, to decline what has existed so far. In contrast to the extrapolation of what’s expected: the subject reads its past anew and acts accordingly without any guarantee of necessity. Exactly then the call follows—that there never was a call, no owl rising at dusk, but solely an illusion of a self that one relinquishes in order to gain oneself fully.
The matter of Hegel’s owl is only the introduction of a position by imparting (Mitteilung*) an old idea in a new way, in order to include the side that was previously neglected. In this sense, there is no immediate radicalism, but it only emerges in relation to the other—i.e., there, where the “I” is not or is not yet. It stands right before it in the immediate realm, while time is needed for weaving the moments of our reconstructed timeline of “history” as radical. Therefore, any radical act, once carried out, is never apparent as radical.
Hence it is necessary to read the concept of “event” in such a way that this event has already taken place—or as Koselleck remarks:
We therefore have to learn to deal with the paradox that a history which is only generated in the course of time is still a different one from that which, retrospectively, is declared to be a ‘history.’ Moreover, this difference breaks open again and again. For every history once reconstructed scientifically remains a projection onto imperfection, because real history continues.[12]
And the paradox of this impossible demand of history is that the event has already and constantly been there: the subject is the paradox that continuously takes place, attempting to set itself as that boundary. It is not about actually wanting something; it is about acknowledging the necessity of our future self’s imperfection and undertaking the well-considered risks—which the contradiction in ourselves forces upon us, i.e., requiring us to tell ourselves a story in a certain way. The story of finding some place in the world is our self-deception so we don’t go insane—but we already are insane!
In that sense, what remains is my own infinite speculation, if we radicalize Koselleck’s statement and invert it:
[No one escapes this] dilemma, not even those who in utopian fashion project themselves into the future, which seems conformable to consciousness, because its historical substrate cannot be experienced.[13]
On the one hand, we should fully agree with this sentence, and on the other hand, give it an opposing determination through an intervention of “nevertheless!”; for if no change can be enabled by envisioning the future, then it is precisely because the dimension of change lies on another plane:
Reinterpreting the past in order to change the future. »For every history once reconstructed scientifically remains a projection onto imperfection, because real history continues.« Hence every interpretation of history re-negotiates the current history (i.e., the future).
The contradiction in ourselves, which we repeatedly renegotiate, becomes the whole ideal type if it is pushed far enough into the future without continually seeking a scapegoat—only then do we truly find peace.[14]
This is precisely why we should reject the widespread pro-Palestinian position that claims one need not take responsibility for the crimes of others’ past and that one is content to be proven correct about fascism in the end by placing all blame on the ruling powers alone[15]—merely to bear one’s own self-narrated “pleasant” misery more easily. This position is also that of the “beautiful soul.”[16]
Yet the fact is that in so doing, one does not actually convince other leftists or find ways out of the madness politically—thus the migrant left’s lament over fascism likewise contributes to fascism, because the stars do not align properly for each splinter group.
You don’t end a genocide by expecting the enemy to accept the accusation—that viewpoint is not only naive and blind, but historical experience specifically shows there has never been a genocide that ended through the perpetrator’s concession!
For this reason, there is no such redemptive narrative for the migrant left either—and there is the task of finding new space together, or perishing in one’s own ignorance and self-narration.
To cling to a simple redemption narrative is not heroism, no matter whose side one is on—only as a unity is salvation possible.
[1] Weber, Max. Zur Logik und Methodik der Sozialwissenschaften: Schriften 1900–1907. Herausgegeben von Gerhard Wagner, Mohr Siebeck, 1988, S. 218
[2] Weber, Max. Zur Logik und Methodik der Sozialwissenschaften: Schriften 1900–1907. Herausgegeben von Gerhard Wagner, Mohr Siebeck, 1988, S. 218
[3] Vgl. Weber, Max. Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus. Die protestantischen Sekten und der Geist des Kapitalismus. Schriften 1904–1920. Herausgegeben von Wolfgang Schluchter und Ursula Bube, Mohr Siebeck, 2016, S. 398
[4] Weber, Max. Wissenschaft als Beruf 1917/1919 – Politik als Beruf 1919. Herausgegeben von Wolfgang J. Mommsen und Wolfgang Schluchter, in Zusammenarbeit mit Birgitt Morgenbrod, Mohr Siebeck, 1992, S. 251f.
[5] Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Wissenschaft der Logik. Erster Band. Die objektive Logik (1812/13). Herausgegeben von Friedrich Hogemann und Walter Jaeschke, Felix Meiner Verlag, 1978, S. 86
[6] If the Germans had waited after the Second World War to have to train as bricklayers or study architecture with their bombed-out cities, i.e. if an institution had first had to tell them that they could rebuild everything, then no prosperity would have been possible at all - as soon as you are nothing, no institutional appeal prevents you from doing the things that are necessary. And whining about a better life doesn't help either, but working on it leads to a comfortable position - so if the usual methods of a system don't work, then it's the system's fault.
[7] Kant, Immanuel. Kritik der Urteilskraft. Herausgegeben von Heiner F. Klemme, Felix Meiner Verlag, 2009, §23
[8] Ebd., §25
[9] Koselleck, Reinhart. Vom Sinn und Unsinn der Geschichte: Aufsätze und Vorträge aus vier Jahrzehnten, Suhrkamp, 2010, S. 32
[10] Weber, Max. Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus. Die protestantischen Sekten und der Geist des Kapitalismus. Schriften 1904–1920. Herausgegeben von Wolfgang Schluchter und Ursula Bube, Mohr Siebeck, 2016, S. 331
[11] Deleuze, Gilles. What Is a Creative Act? 1987. YouTube, hochgeladen von SEMIOTEXT(E), 20. Sept. 2011,
. Zugriff auf Minute 22:32–23:47
[12] Koselleck, Reinhart. Vom Sinn und Unsinn der Geschichte: Aufsätze und Vorträge aus vier Jahrzehnten, Suhrkamp, 2010, S. 19f.
[13] Ebd. S. 44
[14] Vgl. Weber, Max. Verstehende Soziologie und Werturteilsfreiheit. Schriften und Reden 1908–1917. Herausgegeben von Johannes Weiß, Mohr Siebeck, 2010, S. 482
[15] In a foolish gesture, Mera25 from Germany is trying to place the responsibility for the Nazi crimes solely on the Germans, although Yanis Varoufakis has clarified the matter: »I think that the shame of the Holocaust must be borne by all of us. The Holocaust was preceded by centuries of anti-Semitism in Europe. My grandmother told me that there was a day in November when ‘the Jew’ was burnt in the village. This figure was an equation of Judas with the Jews. Then my parents told me about the Jews of Thessaloniki. I am ashamed that we in Greece act as if we cannot be held accountable because we are not Germans.« For this reason, as someone with migrant roots, I am ashamed when supposed leftists see the solution in simply blaming someone else. If my parents had acted like that during the misery in Vietnam, I probably wouldn't have been born. See also: Köster, Elsa. ‘Yanis Varoufakis: ‘We have a duty to stop every war crime’.’ Der Freitag, 8. Mai 2024, https://www.freitag.de/autoren/elsa-koester/yanis-varoufakis-wir-haben-die-pflicht-jedes-kriegsverbrechen-zu-stoppen.
[16] »Whoever merely remains at the level of thought in the good is an empty, unworthy person. This disposition can indeed take on a form that has something beautiful about it; in this sense, one speaks of ‘beautiful souls.’ Such individuals believe they sully themselves by engaging with the particular and the actual. They smolder and are extinguished in their longing. All that remains is a mere yearning, because reality is lacking.« Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Vorlesungen über die Philosophie des Rechts I: Kollegien der Jahre 1817/18, 1818/19, 1819/20. Herausgegeben von Dirk Felgenhauer, Felix Meiner Verlag, 2014, S. 400 Fußnote