Logos. The Language and Thought of Man and the World

We have made logos the beginning, the supreme principle and power, the arche leading to cosmic nature and, through it, to human and world history, which develops the discourse that grasps the logos and expresses it.

What precedes language and thought remains the crucial problem.

Every genealogy of the logos leaves vague its own genealogical origin. To be brutal: where to situate the origin of the logos?

If the logos is there from the start of the game, how does it develop and become logos properly speaking?

The relation human-and-world, ‘preceding’ each of its two terms, only finding the terms of their language in this co-presence, is this ‘dialogue’ that confuses its partners. There is neither primacy of language and the thought of the human, nor of language and the thought of the world; language and thought start, so to speak, from the outset at the second power, detach themselves from the first unity and the first cut, raise their voices and emit signs, made and unmade from a ground that escapes - what one can call the play that provokes all plays.

There is not thought and world, but the thought of the world.

From the start of the play, it is at the broken heart of the human and world and world and human dialogue that thought arises, since it has fallen like a catastrophe upon a particular species of beings, human beings, who think, think themselves and think the being of the world.

The broadest binary relationship, which involves all the others, binds human and world.

The logos - speech and thought of the world and of the human in a ‘dia­logue’ that surpasses any dialectic - appears as the very first moment and - chrono-logical - and topological - place, where and from which is said and thought what gives and withdraws itself from language and thought. The logos is, however, only one of the instants and spaces of that which would remain mute without it.

For the world to become thought, was it not necessary for it to already be?

What becomes thought that does not become world?

For a logos to be imposed, it must be codified in technique. Another sort of logos circulates underground and opens other horizons.

Logos has been made the divine light of physis, the language and the order of the world. We have made it one and God, Idea, Spirit. We have envisioned it as one and as the faculty of the human, progressively acquired. We have made it into a complex secretion or an evolved product of matter. We are currently reducing it to a gigantic network of informa­tion and communication, with several stages, inputs and outputs, in a combinatorial circuit. But who or what produces the logos so that it can be so reduced?

The world ‘precedes’ the thought that thinks ‘it’ and thinks inner-worldly things. All thought is preceded by a sort of belief, which never ceases to accompany it. The intertwining of belief, thought and knowledge is infinitely more tight and complex than we believe, think or know.

Everything does not begin with the logos, although it is only from it and through it that one can speak - even of what precedes it, accompanies it as an alterity or as a (illuminating) shadow and surpasses it.

Are there ‘things’ outside of logos?

Logos is the generic and detailed assemblage, the reunion and, more so, the unity of all approaches; it is itself the target of various and varied approaches and interpretations.

Logos is the violence and weakness of the Occident.

Whether it tries to think itself or tries to think what it is not and also what contradicts it, the logos remains always at the heart of the supreme tautology, the Same, respecting the princely and governing principle of non-contradiction, even under democratic and socialist forms: for it is impossible for the same to belong and not to belong, at the same time, in the same way, and under the same relation. It is this Same, which maintains a very troubled relationship with the like­wise and the identical, the different and the other, which also demands surpassing.

Would the logos of the human and the logos of the world constitute - in and through analogy and homology - tautology par excellence, the Same? In an open equation?

Every primordial ontological logic, even if it is dialectical, exposes the frames of what is (thoughts and things) before the Creation - Hegel recog­nised this - although it only makes itself known afterwards, at the end of a development.

By deploying itself, a language deploys the world.

For two thousand five hundred years, all that is and becomes appears in the light of the logos: through logos and as logos.

Very quickly the logos forks: in the direction of words and speech, tongue and language (supported by grammar and syntax, rhetoric and logic, litera­ture and phonological and semantic linguistics) and in the direction of fig­ures, numbers and (geometric and mathematical) relations.

Logos is a verb-word, while grounding and exceeding its becoming-verb.

The exigency of logos surpasses in fullness and depth the logos itself.

Can the logos only remain imprisoned in the logos?

What is stronger than the logos?

The thought. This does not exist.

The play of thought aims at the invisible world power.

Every logos delivers many contradictory and confusing messages.

Logos is at once concentration, recollection, and dispersion, bursting.

Logos separates in binding, binds in separating.

Through the logos, the same is said and resaid in other words and in many ways, samewise and otherwise, and even the ‘same’ things are said multiply.

Is all logos monologic? Only the logos speaks, but does it speak alone?

The logos can also move at the limit of two or more territories, between day and night.

Logos thinks and speaks being, beings and things with all its being. That is, with cosmic forces, the body and the perceptible, emotions and affec- tivity, images and schemas of representation, social and historical powers, words, intuitions, notions, concepts, speculative entities and abstracting thoughts. How to establish a hierarchy in all this? Receptive, affective, imaginative thought, conceptual and speculative thought - individually and socially - go together and recognise articulations, jump over and fall apart because they are equally disarticulated.

More than symbols, signs and signals, messages, metaphors and metony­mies, the logos operates analogically.

style='font-size:10.0pt;line-height: 112%'>Who speaks? To whom is it speaking? From where does it speak? When and how does it speak? What does it say? Why does it say it? These are the questions awaiting their surpassing, for that which will suppress them and surpass them, abolish and elevate them to a ‘superior’ power.

Avoid getting to the big words too fast.

Null and nothing seem to be at the origin of discourse as a whole.

Do we know, can we speak? How to say this question?

How to say that of which one does not speak?

What does this mean: what exceeds everything that can be formulated (of it)?

Strictly speaking, one does not comprehend perfectly what one says.

They want, it seems, to bring all to language. Where then was all that is before?

Logos circulates just as much in vague and imprecise words as in those that want to be decisive and precise.

All legends, all messages and all information transform in the course of transmitting.

Does whoever speaks, in the entanglement of symphonic and cacoph­onic words and voices, suddenly take power and are they for a moment the strongest?

The language of thought fails to liberate itself from the power and weak­ness of images.

It is overwhelming, but that’s how it is: the word, words, are succes­sive and not simultaneous; thought and gestures seem to escape this limitation.

From the time - past - of the original common language - hypothetical - will we be led, through the problems raised by time and language, to the time - future - of a universal language?

More and more one can say whatever; and one does not deprive oneself of it.

Many parallel discourses are articulated, apparently without much rela­tion between them, all aspirated by the whole of what is said, which does not entirely cover what there is to say.

The play that links a group of sounds and a word or concept - a sign - is purely conventional.

What lesson will ever tell the play that connects sound and sense?

Every word pronounced engages the whole course of the game.

Does not all that is - as such, grasped - have a name?

What passes through the meshes of all nets, the radically other, remains nameless.

How can we know what we are unable to name?

Words are not things and things are not without their names, that is to say, they are not stated and called, named and said.

Call things by their name, we often hear said.

Were words ‘concrete’ before becoming abstracting and ‘abstract’? What is then the concretion of the verb and the substantive to be?

Words change sense in the course of the ellipse that draws our life - individual and generic.

Words freeze experience; but it implicates them and they ‘explicate’ it.

What do useless words indicate?

Are not all words as if already burned?

All the words in the dictionary are in great need of being explained and thought.

size=2 color=black face="Times New Roman">An intelligent Indo-European dictionary of all grouped keyword-concepts would be highly desirable for the planetary and disoriented Occident and for the shaken Orient.

At most, one can shed some light on the central words which we use.

Words explain each other.

All the words of the language have become extremely difficult to employ. They lack definition and contours: they are used-up and cliched, emptied of their (?) sense and full of misunderstandings. No thought, however, can thematically elucidate all the words of language and its language. Anchored and adrift, the words, all together and altogether, are fixed and errant. A new lexicon or dictionary that would historically and systematically scrutinise the sense and senses of each word, giving at the same time relational and ques­tioning definitions that would indicate the relations and fit into a hollow mould, would be more than necessary and would close and open many debates. But it equally manifests the need for a new grammar, examining and ventilating language formations, attentive to time.

The whole history and system of grammatical time demands to be clar­ified. Grammar and syntax in general require a different formalisation and approach.

Very often we have the impression that we lack words that would be apt to express certain fluid and elusive, mixed and multiple states.

It is more experienced than expressed and said. It is not about converting the lived into words, but making it speak.

‘One’ can only speak with the other about what they can comprehend.

In leaving the era of the word to enter that of the sign, does the escapade of speech and writing know a change, a transformation, an evolution, a revolution, a mutation?

It would be necessary to take a sentence and analyse it ‘completely’ - right up to the exhaustion of the analysis, if not the sentence.

Practical works: take a sentence - whatever it may be - and analyse it from the angle of the greatest possible number of ‘points of view’, term by term and in its ensembles. Complementary exercise: how to halt, finish a speculative sentence, where to finish with the elucidations?

Every thinking utterance says and takes back what it says. It speaks with­out contradicting itself, nevertheless making a sign towards another direc­tion. It is perhaps the same, but not the one we thought.

When we speak a thought, another trots through the head.

Does not all that is said demand to be resaid? In which language?

Does one ever hear all the harmonics of a sentence simultaneously?

What matters is not only what I say, but also, if not equally, what I do not say.

Frankly: what does or can it mean to speak frankly?

Language as information and as an expression presupposes pre-existing content. Also we commonly speak of language without knowing what speak­ing can say.

Midas can only want to tell his secret in order that it be known.

The most fertile speech, the most agile thought, the most subtle under­standing, the most vigilant consciousness, emerge on the compact and frag­ile ground of the untold, unthought, unknown, unconscious.

The logos in us aspires to be said - spoken and written - in many ways and simultaneously. Who would not want to be able to speak with several mouths at once, write on several lines at once, as on a musical score, with even more possibilities?

The signs of every language - verbal and non-verbal - benefit and suffer from this radical - and thus arbitrary - contingency that mobilises them in the games of language (in the interior of the game of the world) and the games of writing (in the interior of the game of language).

Does language double the world which without it would not be spoken and said?

Language is constrained to think its saying, and to say.

The mistakes of language, the errors of the tongue, pose a brutal and del­icate question, and can introduce us to a general and specific problematic. It would be necessary to let them play, in view of a richer development of language possibilities, for a finer articulation of the combination of sounds and senses.

Are you looking for the word that carries the decisive moment? You know, however, that everything comes too early or too late. What is then the right time?

Is the need to speak stronger than that of saying?

In all verses and controversies are at play language mechanics, stereo­typical articulations, metaphors and comparisons, tics and cliches, non­transparent grammatical, syntactic and semantic structures.

Alliterations are parts of the play - and traps - of speech and thought.

It is not only a matter of saying definite things, but of saying what there is between and around definite things.

Is there some discourse that knows what it says?

The discourse founded on itself has the limits of its own will and above all: of its power.

Dialogue is a useful and futile verbal play. Within it are clashing and always confronting methodological abstractions, which express ontological particularities, necessarily unilateral arguments, parting and partial points of view. In any case, it tends towards its abolition.

Should thought aim less at the ‘dialogue’ than the echo?

The play of thought engaged in speech consists of taking up positions and retaking what surpasses any discussion, any dialogue, any controversy, any dialectic.

We also need to learn to unspeak.

Not speaking can constitute an effective weapon.

But do not neglect - when necessary - to cleanly break the dialogue.

What can the saying and thinking of untranslatable words and locutions do?

With the translation from Greek into Latin begins the great history of uprooting in relation to language.

A decisive thought can pass into all languages, by crashing into them.

When, where and how does the proposition manage to express itself at the propitious moment: apropos? Because at the same time it also speaks of something else: always apropos.

Theoretically and practically, one always lacks the a-propos. Good ideas and good words generally come after. By taking the service staircase.

A tongue and a language, reaching their peak in a historical epoch of the life of people and having offered up poetic and thinking possibilities, the keys of speech and their possible combinations, don’t they then find them­selves exhausted, imitated to emptiness, restored and modernised, exploited, decomposed?

Even in the desert, speaking is preferable to preaching.

They hear most often the loudest and not the most decisive voices.

How to measure the utility and futility of words?

Some, if not most, voices become more and more neutral, sinister, slow yet hasty, often interrupting themselves.

Language also marches towards its self-destruction.

All our language - lexicon, grammar, syntax, logic - is impregnated by a history that it has equally impregnated. The destruction rises upon those buildings which make it possible. This is why major destructions give the impression of destroying each other.

It is henceforth a matter of hoisting language off its hinges.

Saying everything is impossible. Saying as much as possible is possible. Saying what one usually hides, and what tries to make a, if not its, path, can be, if it becomes relevant, necessary.

How does discourse even manage to surpass categorical fragmentation without becoming for all that this univocal message of theories and practices of information and communication?

To hear also the tone in which what is said is said.

Modernity passes more and more - antiquity pursued the same path - from the reign of ideas (idealism) to the reign of words (rhetoric and various formalisms).

The sign is much more indication than expression.

Language has so much or so little importance, we hear peremptorily stated. Since logos speaks and is silent, takes place in language that annihi­lates itself, it is as chiaroscuro that speech emits words and chatter. Situated on several planes, it can be high and clear, but, as if its own altitude was untenable to it, it rather often crawls or flies off in abstract clouds in the course of everyday language.

Everything can also be treated as language, which one does nowadays by remaining in the orbit of a metaphysical logos, which one imagines sur­passing, by making science succeed philosophy. The reign of metaphysical philosophy is no less strong where it is most unapparent.

We do not succeed in clarifying the obscurities of ‘internal’ thought, the not said, the interior monologue, the unfolding of thought not spoken aloud and not written.

The light that illuminates a word comes from another word.

Language is and remains metaphorical - whatever it does.

The pertinent word - continuous and fragmentary - knows how to be impertinent and conclusive and open.

Word games make the game of the world speak.

Everything is discussable, since it renders discussion possible.

The nagging impression of the already said does not leave us easily.

Analysing or completely elucidating a sentence or a proposition would come down to - through the play of references - analysing and elucidating all that is.

Sonorous signals emitted and captured by speaking beings can appear as a language that passes through loud- and low-speakers in a network of transmitters and receivers.

The word says at most more or less what links the unnameable and the unnamed to the named.

The bearers of a thinking and poetic speech of high flight cannot have a victoriously happy face.

That of which we speak is also what acts.

It is as if we always speak and write a foreign language.

Gestures and ‘signs’ preceded speech and thought, reflected ‘then’ in and by them.

Beings, things and signs of the world can only be said and resaid.

Everything is in turn subsumed under a word.

The speech that orients is neither rebellious nor established: vigilant.

The dominant figure of all rhetoric - and not just rhetoric - is it repeti­tion? Is there discourse without redundancy?

In any keyword or concept, one can detect an ontic-ontological sliding, that is to say, a back and forth between what is more or less empirical and visible and what is more or less speculative and invisible.

Suddenly, certain things become perceptible, speaking, sayable.

Examples are at once the crutches and the infirmity of thought.

What signifies having - to be possessed by - too much or not enough of speech and thought, what do slow rhythms and fast rhythms signify?

The genealogy of concepts, their archaeology, their teleology: always in transition (whether they are regulative or constitutive or both at once).

How can one learn what somehow one already knew? Isn’t all cognition a recognition? The circle that links thought and experience, given and pro­jected, a priori and a posteriori, is decidedly infernal and vicious.

How to operate cuttings in the flow of the spoken, the thought, the written?

No question is only terminological, although everything is said with the same and other words, in the same way and otherwise, and no speech - attentively heard - is uniquely necrological.

Nobody doesn’t know it: the game of thought wants to engender, and sometimes does so, positive knowledge. And then problematise it.

The method is a path, a route and a routing, an extremely precious instrument of orientation, discovery and invention, thanks to which one finds what one was seeking, thanks to which one re-searches for what one has already found. Methods must be crossed with each other and reversed to generate new results, no methodology alone opens the royal road; we have to go back to their presuppositions and also practise the method devoid of method - or surmounting the method. Knowing that there is always an implicit method - and that a method never succeeds in dismantling the machinations behind the scenes and setting of the world’s theatre, which change with the new - and the same - play.

We want, you want, they want a method, a methodical logos, a meth­odology, a route and a routing, to approach, situate, examine and solve problems. For method is an effective weapon and there are, indeed, armed methods; it wants a sure direction, precise discipline, fertile orientation, productive exploration. The various existing methods prove their validity and demonstrate - to the prudent - their ambiguities and their infirmities, combat and combine with each other, rule and are replaced. What can we, what can you, what can they think and do with a questioning and interrog­ative, problematising and combinatorial, multidimensional and self-critical, holistic and fragmentary new method?

The method of research and labour possesses an extremely productive and reductive force generates results, provokes discoveries and inventions, but remains a double-edged sword, usable in multiple ways, that can be turned against itself because, in this domain as well, there is no absolute and total weapon.

Because in the game of thought, not only does the result count but just as much, if not more, the path, the route, the routing, the methodos.

There are also more hidden, veiled methods, which one must know how to discover, themselves seeking to discover the hidden, the veiled, all methodically.

Yet there is no sovereign method. Each of the methods is apt and none of the methods are apt to illuminate their quarry, as hunter and quarry are inti­mately linked. Of course, there are always and momentarily more efficient methods than others. In the clattering of opinions, points of view, argu­ments, ideas and theoretical constructions, it is not about opposing truths to other truths - or errors - but about putting into question, interrogating, destroying the certainties by recognising them, by knowing how to stay in the absence of an answer, daring to give up a certain armour for thinking and speaking better. Why do all this? In view of an interrogation conducted oth­erwise, of another taking root and another horizon, of a different proximity and distance. Since all points of view and all theses and hypotheses destroy themselves, one against the other and, above all, each against itself, since abstract negation has no other import and every fixed position is ridiculous, so that thought finally dares to play its own play and that of the world, with extreme flexibility and finesse, with the most rigour and the most vigour. Recognising with humility that, neither in theory nor in practice, there is no supreme instance and no contesting power is indisputable, thought could perhaps set out towards a very problematic and tense, weary and kaleido­scopic wisdom.

No method can therefore be fully codified. With the same method, one reaches very different results, as one can achieve similar results from differ­ent formulations.

Can a methodological question be answered by throwing a pebble into a lake?

The most open, the most inquisitive, the most adventurous thought must also be the most solid, the most articulate, the most rigorous.

Effective thoughts move on rails, effecting passages and going to rest in garages, from where we take them - sometimes - to restart them, renovated.

What intuition urges is later often observed, and this observation crea­tively and retroactively strengthens the premonition.

Renouncing to regain everything results from a gift and an apprenticeship and is not easily given. Above all in a time that does not leave much time for meditation and is often content with summary, sophisticated and sen­tentious thoughts.

What is this power that maintains the power of logic - so fissured?

Metaphor plays the game of metaphysics. Both hold impregnable power at the heart and in the course of language.

Thought never manages to think anything to the end - if end there is. It is even strictly impossible to think and push a thought to its extreme consequences. It is equally impossible to comprehend completely a deep and ample thought, to keep to its height, to follow its depth. Thoughts that follow and are inspired by a great thought can hardly prevent themselves from undermining their movement by promoting their own direction.

Anxious to establish and explore the ultimate foundations, all thoughts stop short before a so-called first - and last - foundation.

Thoughts fanatically focused on determinations forget to interrogate the foundations of determinations.

Formulated thought does not die with the individual human; its message continues to be transmitted and captured.

In every logical and dialectical edifice, there are ruptures of level, changes of plan, discontinuities, leaps.

The relations between the logic called formal and the logic called dia­lectical are almost inextricable, and the second possesses no formalisation. Do these relations effect a junction in the disjunction? Which of the two encompasses the other, when we have reached the threshold of a ‘meta­dialectic’ language? What to make of the principle of non-contradiction, which was charged with founding the possibility of discourse? Can we only conserve it by surpassing it? Must we annihilate it as a principle, to respect effective contradiction? Is it possible for us, however, to not also respect it in discourse? Undoubtedly all thought is inscribed in a ‘system’ without which we can say neither words nor things, which nevertheless elude us. But is it about thinking the dialectic or thinking dialectically? Thus arises the question: can we think non-dialectically, if dialectics is the rhythm of language and thought? What does it nonetheless say about the rhythm of the ‘real’ and the relation of logic and the real? What dreams and realisa­tions, constructions and destructions, sayings and resayings, backtrackings and forward steps! What efforts to say the same otherwise! What torments to surpass and not dodge or resolve the contradiction! Contraries, oppo­sites, contradictions pass into one another. Do they also surpass themselves in a third - excluded in principle - that occurs in and through breakage, as much as, if not more than, through and in unity? What terms define the relation between inclusion and exclusion? How to see clearly into the relations of inverse and complementary powers, and how to face the very light in which bathe all these edifices and their reversible and irreversible deconstructions?

Antagonism and reconciliation, contraries, contradictions and media­tions, opposed in a mutual conjunction, do not realise a synthesis in a third surpassing power, but adjoin themselves in a certain unifying presence, at the heart of the tearing that makes them exist and coexist and that mortal- ises each of the struggling positions and their juncture. Need for tension and relaxation goes together.

There are thoughts expressly open to negation, made for the negative, assuming the full weight of affirmation, proclaiming the identity of identity and of non-identity.

Every interpretation is at least ambivalent, ambiguous, equivocal, dialec­tical, everyone signifying itself and its contrary which inhabits it.

The system of contraries, opposites, antagonisms and contradictions is to be shaken from the ground up by a language and a thought attentive to the common presence of the axes of the world.

All oppositions are symmetrical and proportionally inverse: they are both oppositions and poles of a unity. In the famous unity of contraries, one must capture both the unity and the contraries, without forgetting, however, how all harmonies are warlike, for it is in spite of itself that a term fuses with its contrary.

The junction, the accord, the complementarity, the antagonism and the reversals of contraries and contradictories, of opposites and radical differ­ences, all play to lead to the unity and the struggle of opposites as well as to the - reassuring and irritating - fact that everything also signifies its contrary.

Usually, contraries - unilateral - wear out each other, and apparently antinomic themes unite in the same imbrication.

There is much more to the ‘surpassing’ of contradictions than their reso­lution or synthesis.

A very large number of couples of opposites is destined to leap.

There are contraries which stay calm, as there are acute antagonisms.

size=2 color=black face="Times New Roman">To surpass - to conserve and to suppress - the ontological principle of non-contradiction can mean: to recognise and respect, to integrate the effective contradiction, and to recognise its surpassing power.

The most extreme form of the transformation of an entity into its con­trary, of negation and effective contradiction, is annihilation.

We function with oppositions which we cannot do without and which we cannot credit.

Every unity dislocates itself, every position tears itself into dominant and secondary oppositions, each of which generates new positions and opposi­tions. In theory and in practice.

The complementarity of opposites will never be sufficiently comprehended.

Do you want to remain attentive to the contrary poles without reduc­ing them to one another or rapidly effectuating their assumption into a third synthetic power, do you want to respect each negating possibility of the other without losing sight of an ultimate convergence, do you want to pose the question asking if the solution of an internal contradiction is internal or passes through an external mediation? Do you want to accept not only dialectical reversals and harmonies, but the reversibility of all aspects?

Contraries unite and struggle with each other. Above all, they play with each other and in others and with their premises and their results.

Where does the ‘solution’ of a conflict come from? Which power vouch­safes it?

When one says pompously: of two things one, it is the third which is established.

Let us try to maintain the two terms of opposition as well as their common origin and destination.

Let us exercise ourselves to ask for more and more precision from thought.

In any discourse, except in strictly formalised discourses (and again), one can add and subtract.

As you know well: everything explains itself after the fact, once realised and nearly collapsed; then one finds all the reasons that constitute its weave and explain our explanations.

To the multiplicity of theoretical formulations of a question corresponds its unfolding on several planes, on which we think and live.

Thought can put into motion - because actioned by it - the terrible power of negativity capable of denying all, and not only ‘in thought’.

Thought creeps and flies over, picks up and sweeps. It always has to relearn the overview without overview, the sweeping without sweeping.

Getting used to bringing explanations and interpretations back to their implicit unstated principles.

How far can we succeed in not becoming prisoners of our formulations?

We have to admit it: a certain stupidity is, for individuals and portions of world history, fascinating.

Let’s get accustomed to perceiving almost imperceptible phenomena.

Are there messages that pass neither in the epoch nor in the world?

If one does not first raise the problematic of the thing to a status of the question putting itself into question, one cannot study anything.

It takes multiple tools, simultaneously put to work, to grasp the different prisms of all that is and is done.

The concept struggles to triumph over intuition; but, finding again the immediacy that does not precede intuition but succeeds it, after a long course, thought reacquires the character of intuition.

From precategorical thought we pass - little by little, through jumps, evolutionarily and revolutionarily - to the categorical phase. Bravo!

The more one works also with the unconscious, the more one reaches a wide and deep result.

The locution: ‘hardly equivocal’ is itself equivocal; it says: very little equivocally and rather equivocally.

Thinking thoughts are linked to each other, not through - so-called free - associations, but through variations and combinations.

Being against does not shake what holds, and does not advance.

In their turn all refutations are refutable. Do we then refute whatever is?

If we don’t recapture what is given to us, we lose it.

Increased lucidity is linked to the dynamic of designification.

Since Epimenides the Cretan said ‘All Cretans are liars’, we henceforth don’t know whether he tells the truth or if he is lying. The logical paradox becomes paradoxical logic, discourse turns against itself and loses its ‘truth’. The act of speaking thus enters into errancy - don’t we also call habitual processes errors - adorned with all the distinguished artifices, etc.

Logic instructs and destroys according to premises and conclusions that it presupposes and that escape it. But - particular reading of thought - it is not only a formalisation of the frames and arrangements of an implicit and prior discourse. Logically, it perfects a work of edification and annihi­lation. Logically. What a paradoxical adverb. Paradoxical. What a logical adjective.

Reason, rationality and rationalism, which corner all, leave their pre­suppositions and their conclusions in emptiness and vagueness, and keep their eyes closed before their shadow: irreason, unreason, the absurd, irrationalism.

Like the ‘I think’, the ‘why?’ mutely accompanies all our thoughts and actions.

Disposing of cases and rubrics to classify materials is highly necessary for every recording and forecasting enterprise.

Informatics and programming open the way for what will be distorted and outplay the forecasts.

When we think that we think, without thinking, we stop ourselves half­way up the backstairs.

It would all the same be revealing to discover the naivety and the ruses of the notions, concepts and schemes with which we think or believe we think.

A new myth speaks and says: surpass the myth of depth, clear it from the surface of planet earth. The hidden depth of superficiality and platitude still remains to be discovered.

How does sense come to humans?

Thought questions all authorities, but it cannot take off without relying on the authorities.

All depth becomes supposedly and actually measured.

The work of embarkation can only be done by a thought that retrocedes, actualises, anticipates.

The hidden force of logical aporias, dilemmas and paradoxes resides in the traps of a logos trapped from the outset of the play.

Just as logic is only an interpretation of thought - incontestably the most governing - all sense is only a reading of its components within a system, a structure, the system of systems or the structure of structures, having no more sense than it lacks. In this sense, please, note the dominance, but do not be blinded by it.

It is the cold-bloodedness and the heat of attack that are important for thought and not pretended objectivity.

It is hardly enough that things are; they must be recognised to be known.

The path of knowledge is not the same as that of the order of the appearance of phenomena.

Everything can receive multiple and contradictory explanations and interpretations amongst them. All explanations and interpretations that would give themselves as objective are selective. Some - or sometimes, and for a moment, one of them - particularly impose themselves and show themselves as operative and active.

Inscription is not transcription.

Sincerely: have you ever seen a primordial signifier at work?

Knowledge is not free of all morals.

First plane: unproblematic adherence. Second plane: challenge. Third plane: adherence or accepting questioning.

Signposts and reference systems always contain a personal equation within the historical and global orientation table.

How sinuous the path of thought which tries to untangle the skein of implications and explanations.

Does the route of thought lead from metaphor and symbol to abstractions and signs?

Each discipline tends to be doubled by its metadiscipline. We are attracted by the metadiscipline of all disciplines, as by the metalanguage of all metalanguages.

One apprehends and comprehends in some way only what one already knows. Bizarre knowledge [sαvoir].

Every theory of knowledge as reflection - even when it would be materialist - remains a prisoner of the Platonic theory of the reflec­tion, thus enclosed in the cave and inverting only the relations of shadow and light. It is however this shadow-light dichotomy that is the problem.

What do symbols symbolise?

To make the bases of what is solid tremble a little. Is this still a utopian programme?

If the morning sobers up [degτ⅛e], the owls of Minerva see clearly at evening.

The rational is built on the non-rational which is not irrational.

Whenever someone gives you an example to illustrate a rule, look for the contrary example.

To be flat-out right is often less productive than erring.

Unconscious are those who do not see how their concepts float.

Every message is transmitted by a code establishing a system of communications and instituting an order of permutations. Thus receiver and transmitter are linked together. Will this completely over­turn consciousness as presence to self, will it open the era to the icon­oclasts, will it take charge of the perceptible, the imaginary and the speculative?

Will synchronic thought, mathematically structured, and its formalised schemas, as well as diachronic, anthropological and historical thought with its schemas of movement and change, fuse - under the aegis of the one? the other? in a synthetic and ramified unity? - leading then to the unification of knowledge?

One neither comprehends nor explains oneself, and yet one ‘communicates’.

Every great thought is at once island and empire.

Breaking the habit of wanting to comprehend could well constitute one of the next habits.

Theoretical matrices dilate. We can get everything into grand systems and large structures, and treat everything specifically. Theoretical matrices contract.

The methodological plane and the plane of what methodologi­cally effectuated the seizure are neither identical nor separated by an insurmountable distance. They fuse momentarily in what is seized each time.

One thinks neither in all times nor in all places and one does not think of everything and of the all.

Thinking consists as much in watching and seeing as in hearing and listening.

All that is, whether we like it or not, letting itself be compressed, clas­sified, subsumed under types, is put to the test by various typologies, them­selves being put to the test. If ‘reality’ does not correspond exactly to our schemas, it does not any more exist for us outside every schema and the ensemble of schemas.

A thought with a fine and piercing point, clear and sharp as the blade of a knife with a massive handle, is a disarming weapon which will also be disarmed.

The logistical logos leads with - or rather without - mastering operational research and informatics towards the non-mastered mastery of heavens and earth.

By interrogating the errant truth of the lie, of dissimulation, of false con­sciousness and bad faith, of unconsciousness, subconsciousness and precon­sciousness, we are caught in the very nets with which we hoped to capture the true error.

One can only formalise a knowledge by holding it accomplished, provisionally.

In all sorts of analysis, diagnostics, critique, calculation, prognostics, let us also calculate the personal equation - the coefficient - however impersonal it appears.

A certain opacity exerts its attractive force.

A current of ideas does not necessarily carry thoughts.

How many denials are only affirmations disguised as their contrary.

Rest assured: no one supervises everything.

The difficulty consists in this (and the novelty): attacking from another angle.

Even the most daring critics and analysts do not apply their research to their own ideals.

The free spirit: the truth of the alienated life that forgets itself.

It is on the high plateaux of the uncertain that doubts and certainties settle.

What carries the name of consciousness risks its life to be recognised by the other consciousness as being more than this life that it risks. No particu­lar satisfaction can appease it, nor can it, once launched on its course, find appeasement by denying itself.

What one recognises only intellectually is very little. It does not touch us, we do not touch it.

Terms - designations and limits - are assigned to beings and things as a share (moira) and not as destiny. This lot, this fate, constitutes, however, their destination.

Thought does not always know very well how to separate contestation, interrogation, doubt, uncertainty, hesitation.

Everything perceived detaches itself from the ground of the unperceived. In a flash, certain ‘things’ become visible.

What is surpassed does not necessarily remain presupposed.

What happens to that which is supposedly surpassed without having been attained and exhausted?

We are novices in the knowledge of the functioning of the ‘mechanisms’ of thought.

All sectors of thought, and what it is not, communicate and are supposed to be separated by thresholds.

If a method, interpretation, explanation were not fragmentarily total but exhaustive, it would exclude others or include them in its unity to itself. It does this too, but by letting itself be equally encompassed by others.

If all that is and is told, in one way or another, did not possess a kind of logical - axiomatic and internal - coherence, it could not be - even fictitiously - probable.

The risk of a too-negative intelligence is to be compensated and surpassed through an incisive and decisive - productive - contribution.

Everything is a sign of what?

It is in and through the clouds, the nebulae, the galaxies of thoughts, which, in density and rarefaction, order and clear themselves chrono-topo-logically, that thought ‘must’ try to orient itself.

Rationalism, even rationality, would they not be surpassed by a thought that would burn its bridges?

All that is relativised by scepticism does not cease for that to be equally maintained.

And all the knowledge prior to the recognition that we have of things?

Burn the necessary stages? Is this feasible?

Sometimes two incompatible signs are both effective.

In which direction points the fact that we can feel without knowing?

The imaginary, its theoretical seizure, remains the stumbling block of any theory and criticism of ‘reason’: it disturbs - and is disturbed by - the sensible and the abstract, their duality and their unity.

How nourishing the imaginary can nonetheless be.

Ingenious thought also proceeds through enormous simplifications.

How many ‘things’ are hidden in a sort of semi-consciousness, already ready to emerge, almost known, repressed, without yet cropping up, neither conscious nor unconscious, more and less than preconscious.

What we miss in any case: the word of the beginning, the word of the end.

The game of explanation must be played at least in two senses: explaining - illuminating - the superior through the inferior and vice versa.

The most fugitive vision remains vision and fugitive.

Proximity does not help us see better. Distance, not necessarily either.

We recognise things above all by their aura.

Persuasion in the domain of thought is not the only resort of thought: charm and violence, suggestion, interests, schemes, etc., play their role.

Thought never prevails in ‘realising’ itself fully with the human and in history.

If thought, recognition and knowledge absorb everything - is this possible? - what remains for the rest?

Doesn’t everything depend, not on the point of view, but on exigency and possibilities?

This or that also. But not only.

All interpretations become more and more possible in the gap of the opening where diverse individuations arise.

After the ruin, which persists, different isms do not go on to forge a new one: problematism.

Thought cannot, because hindered by the wind, fly into the void.

Since Greek thought we know that humans can be ignorant of what they know and pretend to know what they are ignorant of.

In the varied games of diverse explanations, each explanation can explain - situate and explicate - the others, and be explained by each of them.

Is synthesis always governmental?

Does not thought remain much more rapid than language and all the rest?

To approach things without prejudice or better: without a preliminary project that encompasses us as much as them - this is hardly possible. From the outset, it is in a sort of hierarchical vision that beings and things are perceived.

Aim a little less at pseudo-consciousness and a little more at thought.

Do we ever comprehend how ‘things’ have happened, are happening, will happen?

Those who think concrete thinking generally move in the abstract. Only abstracting thought assumes and thinks the concrete.

Each time a tone - or a set of tones - predominates.

size=2 color=black face="Times New Roman">One can opt for one or the other, for one and the other, for neither one nor the other.

The thinker ‘is the tip of a spear’; they take charge of pointed thought, the point of thought; or rather, ‘it takes charge of them, picks them up and throws them... to pierce the horizon’.

How to retain too-fleeting thoughts?

Great thinking does not directly touch every point of the world. It touches the world above all, so also all its points.

No thought can effect, as you have been taught, regression to the ‘infinite’. It necessarily halts.

In turn and simultaneously, each person is judging and judged.

Great thought remains for a long time without definition. At the end of the development of thought in which one believes, one no longer believes in it.

A certain drunkenness helps to think better.

From where, from when, can logos say the repetitive and differentiated becoming of the Same?

The explosion of significations could show us that there are many - and none of them.

Future thought presupposes and implies other pre-existing thoughts.

Since individual work is failing, should we not resort to interdisciplinary and synthetic teamwork? That teams are constituted as such or that diverse researchers meet, empirically or otherwise, matters little, if all are working in the same direction.

In some way, and so to speak, everyone obscurely feels and knows everything.

Deformations accompany forms and formations.

Innovative thinking - recognising the necessity of the adverse, the extremes calling to each other and also to a centre, the decentred centre provoking the extremes - will not be a mother, nor a sister, nor a wife, nor a mistress, barely a friend who will accompany us, since a friend of the world.

The wisdom of nations does not retreat from banality or contradictions. This is why its limited view is often right, though insufficient, if not domi­nant, on the flat plane of current triviality. Common sense, being common by definition (and not universal), good sense - ‘the power to judge well and distinguish truth from falsehood’ - is entirely correct in the belief that it is the most shared thing in the world.

Can a thought manage to criticise itself, to give thoughts and not contrary arguments?

It is in the power of thought to proceed by striking shortcuts.

Behind and in the absurd hide the networks of reasons.

Humans are not masters of their thoughts and their thoughts fail to master them.

A thought of extreme flexibility and plasticity. Constantly performing jumps and collecting the places and times from which it jumps, to which it jumps, without being forgetful of the jumps themselves. Wouldn’t you want it?

How to take charge of or leave alone neither the unconscious, repressed and censored, which doesn’t reach the light, nor the preconscious that only asks to come to consciousness despite all the resistance, but the non- conscious, the extra-conscious? Doesn’t the play of muscular and nervous structures intervene in the formation and execution of our movements and gestures without being either conscious or repressed?

There is scarcely any possible statement of a decisive judgement recog­nised as conclusive.

All thought is prismatic, all experience polyphasic.

The facts themselves are fabricated: without sorting and interpreta­tion (from which they are inseparable), they provide no explanation or comprehension.

The mutations of thought are much rarer than one thinks.

All thoughts proceed through the slippage of sense.

style='font-size:10.0pt;line-height: 112%'>How, in the ensemble of the game, do and will these things play: intu­itive thought, originally giving and visionary, speculative thought that far surpasses the reflection of understanding, dialectical thought rich in antagonistic mediations, formalised and codified thought, techno-scientific thought?

A certain intelligent and dissolving functionalism could make everything appear in the play of diverse functions that everything fulfils in a multiple way, which would not be so bad, even and especially if it went as far as to establish and break the moulds of the various functions and prototypes of functionalism itself.

What we least comprehend: what does comprehending signify?

Could the logic of each ‘regional ontology’ and of each particular sci­entific discipline constitute itself in a specific panlogic, by encompassing special logics as in the case of species? Like the pangeometry that embraces Euclidean geometry and the others? Thus a pancosmology, a panbiology, a panpsychology, a pansociology would form, unitarily containing the differ­ent methods, approaches and doctrines. Could the union of these different particular and total totalisations lead to a universal and differential panlogic, by totalising the fragmentary totalities in a global, detotalising and open, unifying and multivalent manner?

The enormous power of this vast reservoir that is common opinion - usual theories and practices, that is to say, errant, habitual processes - has never yet been fundamentally dismantled.

It remains to promote diagonal thoughts, which would traverse several types of thought.

In the processes of thought and consciousness, the roles of sensible or visionary intuition, of representation, of analytic and reflexive understand­ing, of synthetic and dialectical reason, and of speculative thought, can only be analytically distinguished, even though a certain type or style of thought is, in general, dominant and thought is rare.

Thought unfolds itself on various planes and comprises several degrees. One can bring everything back to each plane - linguistic, semantic, biocos- mic, psychophysiological, unconscious, affective, historical, socio-cultural, etc., seeking to establish correlations between several planes, without being able to establish - supposing that one ever is - a theory of the whole. In the same way, thought thinks, more than it reflects itself or speculatively speculates, at diverse degrees, by being able to pass from the first degree to the second, to recover the third - even without the obsession of the thesis, antithesis, synthesis - up to the nth degree.

Is all ‘consciousness’ necessarily and as such linked to lack and negativ­ity, therefore ‘unhappy’? What about this aspiration towards a beyond of unhappy consciousness?

Hard-hitting thinking proceeds by breaking and entering.

The games of the intuition of games are very subtle.

The human mind - and not only its mind - always seeks both identity and alterity.

From the reserve or the ‘system’ of the totality of principles, each princi­ple emerges anew with its specific development.

Intermediaries play a fairly important role. They are links in the chain, transmission belts, means of transport.

Each question, each problem embraces the ensemble of the problematic, of the question. They are each time the partial-total ensemble itself.

Every call for fidelity towards a thought must foresee ‘treason’.

The result is generally achieved before the completion of the whole process.

Between individual stupidity and world-historical stupidity lies a ditch surmounted by a bridge.

What happens in our ‘head’ before we fall asleep deserves supplementary attention.

Everything is also a question of terminology.

The recognised is rarely known.

Does not every thought begin in and by the cut, since the constituted which it wants to (re)constitute precedes it?

The unthought and the thought illuminate each other under the domi­nance of the unthought.

A thought transcribes itself, translates itself, multiply.

Every theory meets its ruin when it is pushed to its ‘term’. Then it abol­ishes itself.

Thought, and not thought uniquely, functions with unclear evidence, erecting itself on unfounded foundations.

In the facts of the most decisive empiricism, interpretations already hide.

Every logical edifice, logic itself being only one of the constructions and interpretations of thought, even though its dominant constellation, in the form of the thought of thought, presupposes a philosophical orientation.

Thought obeys a sort of balancing: it is sometimes thought cantered on the totality (of the world), sometimes thought cantered on the human (empirical or transcendental, individual or collective).

Thought always keeps grappling with what it is not and with non-thought.

Every thought comprises a reductive power.

Speculation and positive knowledge, speculative recognition and positive science coexist and succeed each other over time, when the excesses of one call the other.

Nothing is posed or resolved once and for all.

A reversed proposition continues to maintain the inverted position.

A thought ‘must’ not start from too many presuppositions, silently con­sidered as evident.

One tends to forget that principles - hypotheses, axioms, postulates - do not demonstrate themselves, they serve to demonstrate.

There where the system does not immediately appear in the open, it is necessary, without too much system spirit, to know how to unblock it patiently.

The imaginary opens doors to us through which we cannot pass.

The same problems comprise different aspects: a thought characterised by its elasticity knows how to recognise this - without despair and without hope - by exploring the links between everything.

No thought is the measure of all thought.

Transformed sensations and neurophysiological energy, affects, needs and fears, desires and prohibitions nourish the most abstract speculations.

Alternating coordinates constantly come into play, with diverse param­eters, on diverse planes, caught in the nets of logical rationality, even if we do not consider logic and reason as the only interpretation and exposition of thought, however militant and triumphant they may be.

Often, through thought, the suppression of all thought is aimed at, said, realised and annihilated in language and action. Yet absolutely anything can be a pretext to thought, from a wall poster to a tune of a song.

There is implicit thought in all that is and is done. It becomes thought, properly speaking, when it is made explicit.

All lucidity is insufficient. To enlighten, it is necessary that lighting receives its enlightening and shattering force.

Most recognitions are obtained through a sort of osmosis.

The unthinkable comprises many aspects.

All our modes of reasoning that we hold imperious - intuitive and/or syllogistic - so often presenting themselves to us as tacit conventions, do they not offer the framing and the rules of the game for knowledge to grapple with ‘the’ rules of the game of the world? All innovative thinking cracks the old frames and overturns accepted rules to propose others.

Every logos seems to demand, and we seem to demand from it, a proposi­tion that would be more than logical.

‘The’ thought and the thoughts dispose of a great number of points of view, types of interpretation, explicative models, reference systems, coordinate axes, marker points, sets of operations, schemas and methods, readings of the inter­nal correlations of a problem and correlations with other sets, by aiming at the theoretical and practical comprehension, explanation and transformation of everything. This does not prevent certain questions from slipping through all these grates. Usually one isolates one or several models by opposing them to others, as if every step were necessarily selective. Intricacies hide them­selves quite well in and between the different networks. Following the same method, varied interpretations, adaptations and results can be established. Methodology and epistemology are therefore not rigorous sciences, and even the cybernetics of thought cannot avoid offering its flank to critique.

Very often arguments cannot be proved; contrary arguments neither.

All that, which is, is done, allowing itself to be deciphered, implies an ensemble of entangled, often contradictory reasons, which one tries to make explicit, explicate or comprehend, while privileging some of them more or less, the others remaining in shadow. No reading and no operation can account for the ensemble of connections.

All thought proceeds through cuttings, analyses, and by totalisations, syntheses. The ensemble of thoughts wants an almost complete apprehen­sion of almost all differentiations. The classifications and the establishment of hierarchies are necessary for the operating and operational approaches that mount and dismount structures, ordinances, armatures. At the same time, speculative thinking, scientific research and technical action con­struct coherent ensembles and want to play the constituent elements and determining factors through a comprehension and a practice as global, rela­tional and multifunctional as possible. Division and specialisation increase efficiency; otherwise, all remains in all and vice versa. Nevertheless every logos and every praxis, relational as desired, escape many displacements and inversions, implications and reversals, causes and consequences, passages and mixtures, mixtures and incoherencies.

What presentiment and prospective thinking foresee in chiaroscuro real­ises itself effectively, clearly and obscurely, with gaps. But, as you well know, one cannot foresee and imagine in detail what will come, even if one organ­ises it carefully.

Knowing that one does not know what one knows is a non-negligible result that one can achieve after hard work.

Launched in its errant course as a will for truth, the logos doesn’t stop carrying error, lie and unconsciousness, dissimulation, disguise, bad faith and false consciousness.

What can the most advanced thought take on, before it is, professorially and journalistically, brought into line, to use it partially and partly, to make it a philosophy and a commonplace thought?

Anchored and innovative thought is neither traditionalist nor avant- gardist. It is neither for the people nor for some elect. (Often extreme, yet fecund with futurity, thoughts give the impression of being reactionary, right-wing, because of their criticism of all aspects of the present time and their lack of faith in progressivism.) Does the hour approach when thought will be made by all, will become collective? Happy hour!

There is no longer any new principle. This ‘absence’ of principle is pre­cisely the novelty.

Logicism, rhetoric and epistemological rage. Scientism: naturalistic, phys- icalist, structuralist and, above all, technicist. Psychologism. Historicism and sociologism. Aestheticism. Behold what begins to replace philosophical thought, dead to its supreme destination, but continuing to drag, prop­agate and generalise the sound and fury of its bloodless existence. What will become of thinking speech, the permanent interrogation, the incessant question? Planetary thought recording the decline of sages and master think­ers, and daring to recognise the fundamental and global errancy of truth and truths, how will it make its way through governments and oppositions fastened to what they combat?

Logicism, intellectualism and methodological shambles, as well as dialec­tics and logistics, cybernetics, ‘thinking’ machines and electronic brains, will extend their great but leaden power over the entire surface of the planet and will enter, conjointly, into the phase of what will overcome them. Yet the wasting away is extremely slow.

Are not machines and devices (of any kind) logically what necessarily go haywire?

It is not enough that affectivity tends towards thought; it is also necessary for thought to traverse an affectivity able to support it.

The concept is the residue of what?

Does sense occur to the human, in the intertwining of affirmations and negations, propositions and critiques, or does the human consider as sense what escapes them in alphabets and syntaxes, rules and codes?

The ‘point of view’ does not clear, as such, any view.

Thinking implies thinking what is and its inverse.

Consciousness dies its death, killed by thought and the world.

New Roman">All analyses, all interpretations, all schemas are in some part correct, but remain insufficient.

We, you, they - in a personal, collective and neutral manner and accord­ing to all modes and times - are in search of the system of all systems, on the quest for the interpretation of interpretations, eager for genealogy and evolutionary logic, no less eager for logical structures and articu­lated ensembles always already present, struggling with the inside and the outside, doing things and making up theories about things, unable to decide where and how things and theories coincide or separate, shaken and fatigued by the - problematic - movement and inertia of the world, put into play as much by dominant structures and differential histories as by differential structures and dominant histories, mobilising - and mobilised by - our sensibility, our intuition, our imagination, our reflection and our thought that make us participate in the play, while also keeping us out of play.

All speech, all thought, are said and thought in a preliminary frame, a structured ‘system’, plunged into historical becoming and forming it.

The system of all principles and all viewpoints is theoretically and practically edified: what remains is to tweak its combinatorics.

One usually thinks inside schemas already produced.

The force of the system - in everything - is enormous: it is an ensemble of powers and relations that maintain and transform themselves as independent of the beings and things they reunite.

Do we know how we know? Do we recognise the systems and processes of our recognitions? Do we all think ‘our’ thoughts? Are we conscious of the articulations of our consciousness?

The absolute schema of all thought assails us and steals away.

Logos becomes technology. Logic becomes logistics. Computing machines, electronic brains, intelligence models will function according to organisations and automatisms more and more advanced, planned, programmed, cybernet- ised. Information and decisions obey a calculus - at once logical and laughable, integral and disintegrating - and operationally govern in the horizon of another kind of language and thought, by obeying a particular and total schema. The usage and the will to power of the old logos generate the will of will and the use of combinatorial logistics of today and tomorrow. So everything ceases to be signification and becomes a message to codify, to decode, charged by the process aiming at programming, global domination. Adjustments and compo­sitions instituting an arrangement of a new type will not fail to correspond to malfunctions and decompositions of an antique and future type.

Without any doubt, until now, organisms and organisations have developed themselves, vitally, logically and historically, albeit with necessity and under the blows of chance, according to one possible type among others. Don’t other possibilities and systems, in part calculable, also ask to be developed in the finite synthesis of all potential combinations? But even they, or the whole of their complex network, will play only one part or a larger, total and partial arrangement of the play of thought. That ‘the’ play of thought can be included in the arrangement of various types of communications does not disturb it.

Each thought feeds on other thoughts.

Never can the integral chain of signifiers be decomposed.

Thoughts develop themselves less according to successive periods and platforms than in often superimposed phases, to proper epochal dominants that do not exclude overlaps and recurrences. The question of the intertwining of global structure (now of simultaneities) and dia­chronic history demands a common ground on which it could be posed.

Every thought thinks at once historically - according to the thread of a tradition - and systematically - according to the order and aspect of problems. So every great thought takes up all the successively given interpretations and takes a position regarding the articulated ensemble of questions that are given it. All thought is fragmentary - making only dark and clear cuts into what is to be thought - and at the same time global - since saying and aiming at what is in its ensemble. All thought is simul­taneously interrogative - putting into question what is - and affirmative, naming it. The thought which dares to grasp truth and truths as trium­phal forms of errancy, planetary thought, multidimensional and worldly thought, the thought which can comprehend all interpretations and her­meneutics - historical and systematic, fragmentary and global, questioning and positive - as past-present-future constellations of the game, broaches a way from which all or almost all the ways depart and towards which they converge, especially if it knows that all the ways and the way will be put into question - the same and other figures of the game.

Everything can be thought in many ways - up to mental vertigo. All available or created points of view, all schemas and all their combinatorial liaisons as well as interpretations of interpretations offer unlimited - but not infinite - possibilities for grasping whatever there is. Multidimensional interlacings, interpenetrations, stackings, pyramidal edifices, analyses and syntheses, reductions and totalisations - we need all these and many other perspectives and connections to think the simplest of phenomena. It is rather the labour that consists in isolating the most determining factors that is the most difficult. An enormous volume would not be enough for a simple bouquet of flowers to be grasped multifocally. Neurophysiology, optics, botany, psychology of the conscious and the unconscious, the soci­ology of human work, aesthetics, mythology and history of religions, literary history and art history, lexicology, etc., etc., would not be sufficient; not to speak of all the crossings: the psychoanalytic interpretation of the bouquet in such a picture and then the sociological interpretation of the psychoan­alytic interpretation and so on, indefinitely. To grasp totally, that is to say through all the means at our disposal, a simple little flower, would be equiv­alent to the comprehension of the entire universe. This is why research makes the task much easier.

Neither the logos of generalists nor the logoi of specialists manage to recover everything.

Neither voluntarily nor involuntarily, semi-voluntarily semi- involuntarily, thought discards what troubles it.

Humans often think, omit and act with a somnambulistic certitude.

The montage of games and decisions, strategies and tactics, the revers­ible linkage of elements, the management of hazards, the devices of cyclic structure, the ensembles where all possible liaisons - within the given programme - are arranged as a function of the operating schema and the goal to be achieved (it is only in conforming to it that one can pose accepted questions), the efficient calculations arranged in the most eco­nomical manner, the models of demountable and demonstrable behaviours, the matrices of the game, the frames of conduct, questions and answers, tasks to be accomplished and regulations, are built at the heart of a gigantic scaffolding - which they equally build - where biological and logical, math­ematical and mechanical, cybernetic and economic automatisms, organ­isms, organisations and regulations are combined. The mechanics of logic and the logic of mechanics join in this programming and these behaviours. Thus, once the axioms and initial and non-contradictory postulates deduc­tive process and processes, which must also be non-contradictory, have been positioned and constructed, in other words, once the givens of the game, which one will - or with which one will - play, are set, a game with defined rules, a lot of problems can be solved, many questions can be dealt with, a large number of operations - with statistically blocked probabili­ties - can be accomplished. What remains in suspense is the problematic character of the problems themselves; what leads to another game is the problem as problem.

Does all ultimate knowledge lead to mediated and meditated ignorance, to non-knowing thought?

As I write this or that, what becomes of all that traverses my sensations, my sensibility, my perception, my imagination, my memories, my thoughts? How is all this included and/or excluded? And what happens when you are reading this or that?

Each thought, by articulating itself, plays other thoughts.

Almost nothing is less rigorous than the ‘concept’ of rigour.

A preliminary orientation guides all research. By searching one almost already knows what one is searching for, and then one finds it, therefore one had already found it, but not yet discovered or invented. The relation of the questioner and the questioned does not link two separate things, for it precedes, so to speak, as relation, what is brought together and differentiated in its play.

Thought draws its strength from the opposition.

Rationality and irrationality of the ensemble, irrationality and rationality of the detail correspond to and counteract each other.

In regard to everything, immediately the whole fan of human opinions opens - contradictory among themselves - often then to be revised, which pronounce and drop judgements: very good, good, very bad, bad, without forgetting all the middling assessments. Which gives rise to ardent and tire­some discussions where only points of view clash.

The love of wisdom - or the search for wisdom - can it not lead to wisdom itself?

Any judgement is based on clues.

To repudiate the alternatives is very tempting. But insufficiently decisive if another way is not open.

Disjunction and reunion, conjunction and intersection, negation and complementarity are unmastered operations of thought, which does not know how to relate each to each other and to their common core.

Basic banality: thought being thought of being in becoming is itself a constant unfinished becoming.

Tactical thought orients itself through the games in the world, strategic thinking aims at the game of the world.

Let’s learn to welcome unthinkable thoughts.

Specialisation is called to generalise.

size=2 color=black face="Times New Roman">Are not natural, sensible, immediate, evident recognitions, as it were, mediated from the outset, long before their theoretical elaboration and formulation? At the same time, recognitions passing for certainties, do they not impose themselves almost naturally with their specific procession of the sensible, the sane, the insane and the supersensible? A rigorous order cannot be established, all being held in the play between levels of analysis and those of reality. For all evidence implies - with or without evidence - its putting in question.

It is absolutely consequential that completed thought (skepsis) completes itself as scepticism completing itself.

A logos allying meditation and contemplation with psychic exercises and disciplines and physical training could mobilise and stabilise thought-heart- body and avoid some of their dark dysfunctions.

What is maladroitly called a symbol can very frequently be much more real than what it symbolises and what one calls real.

How to distinguish what is metaphorically, conceptually, ontically and effectively confused?

‘Consciousness’ is maimed and murderous.

In the generalised methodological jingling, everything can be said mul­tiply, and says itself amphibologically, points of view reversing, arguments clashing; while we deduce from the general concept what is implied in the particular case and we try to climb back up from particular exemplifications to the universal formula, specificities and generality intermingling under our illegitimately amazed eyes.

Entirely definable concepts do not exist.

A single dialectic links shooter and target.

The explanation and the explicable change into their contraries.

They have known it for a long time: analysis never exhausts the concrete and the particular.

Open and multidimensional hermeneutics, polyscopic and with several variables, binding as much as possible everything with all relations, inter­preting everything multiply, would provoke an unbearable mental vertigo. That is why one fixes certain explanations and interpretations, one fol­lows rules, one consolidates mechanisms, one establishes signalisations, one builds circuits, one blocks roads, one throws certain bridges. Woe to those who are blinded by lightning tearing the sky in every direction - and none.

All expressed thought escapes whoever conceived it, gets caught in the nets of aleatory interpretations and escapes them, as it has already escaped its own author.

Between the initial project and the final result lies a chasm crossed by a walkway. The initial project, however, makes the first step.

It happens that thought is drunk from sangfroid.

From intuition to knowledge, which, without being identical, pass into each other with a constant back and forth.

Different thoughts, which appear distant and isolated from each other, join each other, thought a little further, differentially and tangentially.

Productive thought - observational and contestatory, accepting and trans­gressing - is never simply programmatic; it seeks the - solid and mobile - pivot points to launch itself forwards; it seeks to be integral, so more and other than totalitarian, and differential, able to think specifically this or that; it knows how to recognise all the power of traditions and permanence and opens itself to the call of fertilising novelty. Knowing that posterities are multiple and contradictory.

Thinking signifies thinking ‘onto-logically’ and beyond; epistemol­ogy is the thought of the poor. Theory is, generally, a para- and pseudo­philosophy, more or less correct and dogmatic; when it is not theory, it is thought.

How many theoretical debates, which excite curiosity for a moment, are - and with less poetry - only storms in a children’s pool.

Even though thought is worldly, it seems that everyone has to do it for themselves.

It is always attempted by a sole and total thought. Although nothing can be thought and done only according to it.

The camels of culture, the - replacement - runners who relay, those who manage and those who are the transmission belts populate, often use­fully, the overcrowded, ideological, technological, cultivated and cultural desert.

Does not the logos also remain mytho-logical?

Is the logos the quest, foundation and legitimation of sense? Seeking the signification and the direction of the great All and of all, we only encounter signs.

If one dismantles and ‘demystifies’ the reasons of reasons, does one find the nothing?

Thought that runs ahead must be of a terrible sobriety, keeping in poetic exaltation all its sangfroid.

The thought to come will have to shake from top to bottom the entire grammatical and syntactic, logical and dialectical structure of the language of thought to better grasp the game of the world. The verb ‘to be’ is des­tined to be surpassed as copula and judgement, auxiliary verb or substan­tive. To be/being will rejoin becoming in time, ceasing to be not to become something or to sink into empty nothingness. The becoming of being will have the world as horizon, and the world will hardly imply any immanent or transcendent sense without being, for that, senseless. And the invisible world will contain the visible world.

The thought to come must also think platitude, conventions, cliches, ste­reotypes, superficiality, insignificance and imbecility (whose wingbeat does and will do more than pass over the foreheads of humans), present and future forces, in their daily and official, individual and collective, journalistic and academic, talkative and silent, light and erudite forms. Since everything progresses, how could it be that platitude does not progress too? Humanity - including its avant-garde - seems to have a great need for the force of inertia and gravity.

The most distant perspectives are in general - and in particular - here. It is enough to grasp what ‘is’. The hypotheses concerning the future already hide themselves in the thetically given present, a present full of antitheses. The past and the future exist only in the movement of the always negatory present. It is not the unbridled imagination that can construct images of future times. (Except if the imaginary proved to be the privileged place...) Time is futurition and it dislocates all images, all idols and all ideas. It is not about hovering above what becomes, but about attentively flying over fields like the birds - children of heaven and earth.

The totality of what is, the sense of being in becoming of the totality of the world, lies fragmented and its fragments fail to close over their wounds. However, the world becomes planetary: plain [plat] and plane [aplani], planned [planifie] and errant, engaged in the shucking of an incessant rotation; with­out centre and without circumference, our little planet errs in space and time, knowing neither for-what nor towards-what. How to think it and say it, live it and act it, in and through a poetic and praxic logos, itself taken up in the planetary, namely errant course? Because planetary also signifies (as masculine noun and according to the dictionaries): a kind of technical mechanism, a special gearing.

Is thought the enemy of victory?

How do humans pass from one thought to another?

To grasp the extreme and decisive importance of constraining circum­stances and conditioned conditionings, positive and negative determina­tions and encompassing situations, always remains a crucial task for the play of thought - and that of action.

How and why bind - chains and links being themselves also produced and liquidated - the production and the product?

What constitutes the gestures capable of saying and doing planetary thought, open to the poetry and prose of the Sphere, engaging with the labyrinth of the world, without being imprisoned in the Circle and while recognising it? What would be its place and time and play?

A thought that maintains suspicion in the project, tension in the build­ing, that exposes itself methodically, that explores the structure of all struc­tures, that accomplishes and betrays its programmatic declarations, that announces and renounces, that feels, knows and ignores; a thought that plays with principles, that opens itself to aggression - triggering it and undergoing it - aims at a certain harmony of opposing tensions, supports its contradic­tors; a thought that moves according to the always moving and remaining possibility of thought: to think what offers itself to thought by withdrawing from it - it is in this that the tasks - never completed and accomplished - of planetary thought could consist.

In principle, has human thought reached its limits? Has it deployed its pos­sibilities? Is its horizon unlimited, but finite? Will it be forced to say and to say again, to do and to do again, to pass and to pass again all along a spherical or spiral trajectory? Will the combinatorics of connections and interpretations know boundaries? And how will thinking humans meet their borders?

In the midst of the ruins abandoned by the various thoughts that were deployed, we have to elaborate, while continuing their work and inno­vating, a thought of continuous flexibility, fundamentally, amply and pro­foundly aleatory, all at once methodical and visionary, assuming the general banality that is at play and problematising it, a thought confronting the agony of a world that trembles on its bases, itself agonic, firm and fluent, also knowing how to isolate a point as well as to plunge it into the spiral of the totality, multiplying the equivocations and permitting certain of them to lift, maintaining and liquefying unity, totality and difference, playing with the opposed terms, at once maintained and abolished.

A childish aporia: What is reflected in the mirror when nobody looks into it?

The hermeneutic circle turns too round. How does it manage to always isolate an interpretation - sometimes actually effective - in the rich and complex network, and propose it for interpretation?

It may be that the - that is to say a - thought manages to grasp facts and interpretations stochastically, to encompass the largest ensemble of points of view, recurrent plays, to disassemble the mechanisms of causes and effects, to make - with humour, irony and toughness - a trip around the world, that is to say a world. What then remains for it to think and do?

We would like at the same time to be able to trigger the movement of thought, control the unrolling of thought and know how to stop the activity of thought so we can rest.

Sometimes we want to talk without really knowing what. Sometimes we think, without really knowing what. Often we want to write, without really knowing what. Sometimes we want to live something, without really knowing what. Often we want to play, without really knowing what and for what.

Today - but only today? - distinctions between systematic language-and- thought (more or less open or closed) and fragmentary language-and-thought (more or less coherent or aphoristic) tend to be erased. Beyond systems of all kinds, having existed or still existing, by surpassing them, that is to say by preserving them, by suppressing them and elevating them to a multidimen­sional level, it is a matter of elaborating an articulated and open, liquefying and problematising, questioning and interrogative language and thought, able to grasp and transform poetic, literary and artistic, political, scientific and technical, lived and dreamed activities, in short, the style and the pace of the planetary epoch, namely itinerant because of the erring.

The essay and the aphorism seem better suited for contemporary thought, provided that they are structured as a (holistic or totalist) synthetic ensem­ble and polyvalent combinatory, embracing fragmenting and fragmented ensembles, without succumbing to complacency and literary mannerism.

Starting from our situation, this is the inevitable journey of thought that goes back far into the past and the future anterior, to insert itself into an actual present, but not immediately consumable, and working for the future. By starting from - and leaving - what is ours and is not. We are a passage, we are already and not yet past.

Any position of a problem - therefore this one too - is and remains ambig­uous, and its ramifications leave us unsatisfied. Reasons assail us, impose themselves on us and withdraw themselves. Any power and any challenge, any why? and any because... cannot have the last word, because all the words said and unsaid enter the networks of misunderstanding, thanks to which the game of the world accomplishes and misses itself.

The play of writing - prepared through the play of grammar and logic becoming language - inscribes itself immediately into the world of the play of technique.

For two thousand five hundred years, humanity has been living with the obsession of the Book. Book sacred and profane, book of laws and poems. Everything comes from the book, everything goes towards the book. Words, thoughts, lives exist, so to speak, through it and for it. Doesn’t everything find itself written down in books and continues to be so? Would not one want to have written and read all the books - the great ones - each book being able to be comprehended multiply according to this or that grille of reading? The tension, the agreement and disagreements between word, thought, writing and life inscribe themselves into writing and emanate from it. Logos and praxis, poetic and thinking word and constituting action, deci­pherings and readings of the book of the World are engulfed in the world of the Book. Books animate the world and are nourished by it. Books enter into the course of beings and things, are part of it, and want to monopolise it. Bookish worlds and worlds of life get confused. The civilisation of books and print generalise themselves in it, at the same time preparing for the surpassing of the book as well as for a certain cultural formation. When the whole world reads, writes and prints, a threshold will be reached. The book itself will be transformed. Computational and combinatorial machines will open other possibilities of games with writing. Will we begin in this respect to be unbooked?

How to effect the reading of every book between the lines? Like the saying that speaks in half-words?

The two words and lives that most profoundly marked the Mediterranean- European and, by this, world history: Socrates and Christ. They did not write. They lived and died their words, which then were transformed by the disciples into books.

In every book, provided it is productively read, there is some good. For the book requires the collaboration of the reader. Just as one does not know what one is going to say, think and write, except in saying it, thinking it and writing it - despite and because of the generally distorted interferences between intention and realisation - so also the result remains in an incompleteness - appealing to several levels of reading - in the con­junction of involuntary dissimulation and voluntary publication. What one writes and the way one writes it - this unity of style - encounters rigid and open readings - different styles of reading - that make the book a completed and never fully finished work. The greatest density of writing - and reading - calls for diverse times.

A singular history is that of the book, and for whoever writes it, and who­ever reads it. What does writing a book signify? Each book can be added to and subtracted from. The total book that haunts every author does not exist: no book can say everything, although the greatest say everything fragmen- tarily. By means of erasures and additions, the book would become like that painting of the Balzacian Unknown Masterpiece: a painter wanted to paint the absolute painting and showed no one his work: it was indeed a painting so overloaded that it offered the spectacle of a shapeless shambles. What does drafting a text that gives itself as a work signify? And rewriting the ‘same’ book forever? What does reading a book signify? Does one ever read a book from page to page by comprehending it? Is it possible to follow all its lines and also read between them? Every text disappears under the light and weight of the interpretations it arouses, becoming a pretext for other texts.

Writers like to measure others by their acts and ask for themselves to be measured by their suppositions and projects.

For whom do we write? For oneself and for others, for the worlds and the world? For those who by miserable means - erotic, religious, political, artis­tic, poetic, philosophical, scientific, technical and mainly unseen - have playfully shaken, shake and will shake the plane and plain surface of the little planet? For those who are and will be everywhere and nowhere: for everyone and for no one?

The total writing which we hoped to achieve does not exist.

For what generation do we write? For that which, plunging its roots into the past and jumping over the present - how passing and obsessive - will be born in the future?

Even so: nothing is exhaustive and everything is selective. In the era of the end of readers one writes for writers.

Habent sua fata Iibelli, the enchanted and disenchanted fabricators of books always think.

A simple daily newspaper implicitly contains several treatises on philoso­phy and something else.

Written thought is only thought if it advances, if it sees ‘its’ century from afar. In this sense, it must be more than speculative, a little liberated from the speculum, and without mad hopes of traversing the mirrors. One lives, one speaks, one thinks and one writes among one’s contemporaries. Without question. But in dialogue with one’s predecessors and in addressing oneself to future generations.

Sometimes, the impression of the already said, the already written, arises obsessively. One could imagine children, adults and the elderly taking books by chance from the bookshelves of a library and copying passages - indefinitely.

On every word of a book, there are books.

The astonishment before the thaumaturgy of speech and writing is only like the disenchantment with regard to the said and the written.

The logos is and remains the speaking face and the concealing mask. Metaphysics - ontotheological - reduces language to writing and that to continuity.

On the one hand, thought is supposed to precede the speech that trans­lates it by betraying it, and speech the writing that translates it more or less imperfectly. On the other hand, and conjointly - by a counter-action - writing is, that is to say, has become, the mould of thought and speech.

It may be that a book offers itself less to the comprehension of the reader than it helps the evolution of the thought of the (productive) reader.

The book tends to contain the counter-book.

The community of speech and silence which we inhabit can be neither clearly said nor silenced.

The links between language and thought ultimately remain as inextrica­ble as those that unite speech and silence.

It is the logos that speaks silence. Let’s listen to ‘them’: both logos and silence.

The moments when humans have nothing left to say and to say to themselves - nor, consequently, to do together - do not necessarily coincide with silence.

It is indispensable to know how to respect the moments when one has nothing more to say to each other.

Silence speaks too. And one can make it speak.

That the logos takes refuge in the silence of the world and the world in the silence of the logos is not surprising.

At the very moment when everything becomes language, silence extends its domination.

In the course of the logos we meet silences that speak and speeches that are silent.

For a very long time and undoubtedly forever, the logos says in being silent, and is silent in saying.

And all that one keeps quiet, forgets, betrays, leaves aside, does not express and does not imprint, all that one cannot assume or take charge of.. .

In any case, we will have to learn to let a certain silence hover.

How does the logos comport itself in regard to its own eclipse?

Without too much chattering about errancy and play, about oneself and silence, and by uttering words and sayings that carry, what does the logos think and say? The play of That.