To begin with a thinker who remained always attuned to the du-plicitous nature of beginning requires candor. There is a thetic dimension to every beginning, and we will do well not to deny it here. Rather, let us begin by attending to the things Reiner Schürmann himself said about beginning: “A starting point,” he wrote, “that neither abandons ordinary experience nor trans-substantiates it into the extra-ordinary will have to be looked for in something everyone is familiar with, however poorly ....”2For Schürmann, the ultimate traits of everydayness with which we are all familiar, though poorly, are the irreducible phenome-na of natality and mortality that condition our human existence. But perhaps in pointing already at the outset to these ulti-mate conditions, we have stepped back behind ordinary experi-ence too quickly. Perhaps we ought to return to an experience of a beginning, to the place and time of my first real encounter with Reiner Schürmann, to a memory dimly recalled, yet poign-ant and delightful — like the man himself. Early in the fall semester of 1991, my first as a graduate student at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research, a group of us found ourselves closely packed into a rather large room in the Cardozo School of Law. We had come to hear Jacques Derrida, who was to speak on a panel organized by Drucilla Cornell for a conference entitled, “The Politics of Transformation and the Limit of the Imagination.” But what I remember most clearly from that day was Reiner Schürmann. The content of the paper he delivered was largely lost on me; as a new graduate student in the heady intellectual world of New York City, I was barely treading water. Years later, quite recently in fact, I came to realize that the paper Schürmann presented entitled, “Conditions of Evil,” had been adapted from what was to become the final chapter of his magnum opus, Bro-ken Hegemonies.We will return to that paper and to the final chapter of Broken Hegemonies in a moment, for it too has something to teach us about beginnings.