A certain kind of isolation–which doesn’t coincide at all with the solipsism of the individual ego–is rather that solitariness in which each human being first of all enters into a nearness to what is essential in all things. Existence, in other words, cannot be declined except in the first person plural: we are. — Roberto… Continue reading Roberto Esposito
We children of the future, how could we be at home in this today? We feel disfavor for all ideals that might lead one to feel at home even in this fragile, broken time of transition. The ice that still supports people today has become thin; the wind that breaks the thaw is blowing; we… Continue reading Friedrich Nietzsche
(The unconditional is not opposed to the neutral. It is its radical essence, condition of unconditionality, and unconditionality of all condition. It is the perfect condition of neutrality at the heart of unconditionality or of condition, of full life, of absolute place: it occupies the place that death occupies in life.) — Edmond Jabès, The… Continue reading Edmond Jabès
Inconspicuously compliant is the thing: the jug and the bench, the footbridge and the plow. But tree and pond, too, brook and hill, are things, each in its own way. Things, each thinging from time to time in its own way, are heron and roe, deer, horse and bull. Things, each thinging and each staying… Continue reading Martin Heidegger
We must learn from things; we have everything to learn from them. How to let things make themselves known by themselves, before any translation… — Hélène Cixous, Coming to Writing and Other Essays (Harvard University Press September 1, 1992) First published January 1, 1986.
Hope is reactionary: it cocoons actuality in the gossamer of the tolerable, dulling the thirst for change. Despair is revolutionary: it grinds the knife-edge of the intolerable against the whetstone of actuality, sparking the will to change. Whoever tolerates the present will never risk everything to change it. Only those who… Continue reading Ray Brassier
[A] point of pure passage: a language without discourse, a speech without sentence, without syntax, without parts, without grammar, a language of pure effusion, beyond the cry, but short of the hinge. — Jacques Derrida, The Derrida Reader: Writing Performance (University of Nebraska Press January 1, 1998)
Do not, however, make the mistake of thinking that all desire is yearning. ‘We love to contemplate blue, not because it advances to us, but because it draws us after it,’ wrote Goethe, and perhaps he is right. But I am not interested in longing to live in a world in which I already live.… Continue reading Maggie Nelson
This house, as I see it, is a sort of airy structure that moves about on the breath of time. It really is open to the wind of another time. It seems as though it could greet us every day of our lives in order to give us confidence in life. In my daydreaming, I… Continue reading Gaston Bachelard
Any and all water is the colour of drowning. — Emil M. Cioran, All Gall is Divided: Aphorisms (Arcade Publishing August 25, 1999) First published January 1, 1952.
The Vale of Soul-Making 