Opening. The Great Powers and the Elementary Forces of the World

magic, myths (and mythology), religion,

poetry and art,

politics,

philosophy, sciences and technology.

They open us to the world and open it to us, constitute it for us and form us for it. It can be that they manifest themselves simultaneously, pro­ceeding from the same source - which? - as is the case for the great epochs of world history. It also happens that one or many of them are lacking, by retreating so to speak from the increased and stifling power of the other or other powers. But none of them alone exhausts the being in becoming of the totality - no more than their ensemble exhausts it. None is sepa­rately the first foundation and none is the servant of the other. Without being autonomous or separate, even though specific, each referring to all the others, impregnating them, implicating them more or less explicitly but without artificial symmetries, the great powers - dimensions, openings and routes - all emerge from the same problematic centre. Their saying and their making are penetrated by the being of all that is; they make it be and call it. Particular and total totalities at the heart of the totality, each is a total aspect of the totality of the world, a constituent of the totality.

The great powers of the world, born from the original violence of the architectonic logos and poetic praxis, emanating from a common centre - a working totality composed not of levels but of domains - are carried and supported each time by great humans and great peoples and give the meas­ure of historical time. They are not always all present. For the sacred to become religion, for speech to become poetry, for phenomena to become art, for the community to become political, for thought to become philosophy and science, there must be the decisive contest of the great powers. Once constituted - they do not form simultaneously - they are all at work, but sometimes one slumbers, sometimes the other awakes. When one or more of them do not manifest, others take over. During very great epochs they are all present, proceeding from their unnameable and unique source. Very often, however, more vague and original movements substitute for the great form­ative and formed powers: for what inspires religion, poetry and art, politics, philosophy and the sciences does not always deploy itself as religion, poetry, art, politics, philosophy, science. Sometimes we can even go so far as to sus­pect that divinity, poeticity, plasticity, the organisation of the community, thought and research are withdrawing.

If all the great powers derive from the same centre, what is and where is this centre? It is easier to delineate it negatively than positively. This centre is not the spirit of an epoch, a people, a society or a time, for where would this spirit arise from? It does not reside in economic and political history, the development of the productive and structuring forces, for where would the source of this dialectical movement reside? It is not the idea or absolute or historic spirit, nor cosmic matter or the material of human labour, without being for that the junction of spirit and matter, idea and reality.

The great powers form a totality in progress, without centre or focus, origin or motor, source or kernel, foundation or principle that would limit the play of their structure. This non-centre - non-existent or non-disclosable, if the question follows this formulation - is not a lack or a loss, but the play itself that also plays in the search for the centre.

Is the centre of every epoch that conceals itself in the suspension of the epoche something like a cause of the structure of the whole - an absent cause?

It is that or who that is closest to a centre that is at the same time that or who which is furthest away from it. The philologist is as far away from poetic and thinking speech as the philosopher is from thought, and the man of the Church from the sacred; the physicist is no nearer to nature than the psychologist is to the human soul, and the historian to historicity; a ditch difficult to cross separates the politician from the city, and the technician from the secret of technology.

Must everything enter into ‘its’ time so that it can enter into time? And all that one epoch cannot assume and rejects, others take up and make resound.

Being of its time, of its epoch? Being it [L^,etre]. - Being of its time, of its epoch? Not being it. - Being of its time, of its epoch? How not to be it?

What is that which is in the air?

The defenders of yesterday and those of tomorrow are always embarrassed by today.

It is the epoch that belongs to the principle that dominates it more than the principle belongs to the epoch, and this also concerns our epoch - epoch of compromise. At the same time, this epoch cannot find its dominant con­figuration, since we are already marching towards a beyond of figuration.

Relationships know [connaissent] a history, even when they misrecognise [meconnaissent] it, erecting a comprehension into an absolute norm: our relationship to the Greeks, for example, our comprehension of the Greeks, is very different from the relationship they had with themselves, their com­prehension of the - and their - world.

Tradition resides at once in the transmission and the forgetting of origins.

Maintaining and cultivating the heritage bequeathed by tradition, play­ing at the relay race, is part of the highest habits.

What marks, regarding an epoch, a break introducing a future approach, can precisely not be captured by the epoch, epochally insensitive to this rupture.

What is highly revealing is not such or such great power, its forms, con­tents and works, but what is revealed and produced through each, through its mediation.

Every great work contains its own critique.

Magic, or what is very problematically called such, opens the cycle of great powers and - before disappearing as such - passes into them.

The mask is the face of the magical, mythical, mimic, cultural and litur­gical game: it figures the simulacrum, mobilises prestige, provokes trances, fixes and unchains vertigo; it makes the revelation pass - masked.

Does all that is profound advance masked?

The play of primitive, savage, archaic masks provokes phenomena of possession and dispossession, panics and ecstasies, with the help of spells and enchantments, in a demonic universe that one tries to exorcise by demonic means. Later the mask will become face and uniform, mimicry will become politics, sorcery will become knowledge and power, the cultic play cultural play.

Throughout the millennia, the human plays not with but through the mask.

Long before dualism, the magical, mystical, cultic and cultural game uses the mask, the double, duplication, duplicity.

The animist conception, supposing an agent behind every event, has a hard life. It is only much later that one understands that behind the mask of the world - persona - there is no one.

The magical and mythical, poetic and artistic, political, juridical and technical, are in their beginnings one. They function with formative and restrictive rules.

What remains, among other things, of the magical attitude is the tempta­tion and the practice of conjuration, exorcism, spells and enchantments, up to and including superstitions.

The technique of the scapegoat survived primitive magical practices.

Magic - repetitive and inventive - as a source of art - an initiatory, col­lective and ritualised, occult and occulted source - has ceased to be.

Magic - collective phenomenon - will have already disappeared when the democratic and tyrannical reign of the individual, which will be suc­ceeded by the socialist collectivity, manifests. Neither the individual nor the socialised can be called magical.

Have myths above all been - and are they still - in the powers of the imaginary, overcompensations for actual weaknesses, for theoretical and practical powerlessness, or imaginary projections announcing technical real­isations? Is not this reading, already and again, a little mythological and technological? For myths only later became mythology, while technique [technique] always awaits its technological [technologique] deployment, which is not exempt from mythological elements.

Myths are a sort of primary presence that is already veiled, because when we believe we find ourselves in their presence, they have already gone through an elaboration, have become mythology: we only deal with mythologies.

All that, which is, is mythologically invested.

The myth is a saying that recounts and orients an action, a legend, almost inseparable from what is designated by the term ‘reality’, since it inhabits it.

The myth states a story. The rite reproduces it. The liturgy celebrates it, that is, plays it.

In all myths, does not a playful propensity intervene?

In the mythical universe, the lot of the human is bound by spells that fix the part play.

The myth prefigures and condenses what will effectuate and monetise it.

Behind us, in us, before us, sparkle mythical - that is, mythological - constellations, like nebulae or galaxies, in which our ideological constella­tions take part.

Our future is taken with a nameless mythology in which it is caught and lost.

To religion belong the speaking or silent games of mystical interiority as much as the spectacular and cultic games of ecclesiastical exteriority. Each of them is inseparable from others. Thus, religion can play unitarily on both tableaux.

Religion both hides its game and shows it: it plays on and with the presence-absence of presences, of absences and representations.

Religion justifies and confirms the existing order, denies it and refuses it. It fights on the side of the strongest and appeases the weak. So, it plays on two tableaux at once.

Is the origin of play cultic? Is the origin of cult ludic? What is their common root?

In the cultic play, the play becomes sacred and the sacred finds itself played.

Magical, mystical, cultic action - ritual play - is participation in the demonic powers and reaction against them, in human play and as divine play.

The original cult play, playing the tragicomedy of the play of the world, becomes tragic play and comic play.

Does not every religion imply awaiting the miracle and salvation? Is not the human always in search of supreme rescue, of a redemptive denouement?

It is on all levels that we await the miracle (more prosaically: the very exceptional).

Did the saints propelled by historical legend exist? Did they expose them­selves to mortal propulsion? Soldiers of the divine being, did they not betray Being and, by leading the (divine) word into victory, did they not betray the logos? Their doing, finally, was it not ‘too’ crystallised?

Mystery possesses a strongly attractive power.

Mysticism turns around sex and death. Which does not stop the mysteries of mysticism from being highly mystifying.

The sacred is particularised in the sacrifice.

lang=EN-US style='font-size:10.0pt;line-height: 112%'>A great power emanates from the one who sacrifices. Even greater than the one who sacrifices themself.

Every religion that presents itself as sacred - or as profane - and every secondary religiosity have their heretics: those who announce that the promise did not take place; those who denounce imperfect realisations; those who are overthrown by the orthodoxies of power; those who can raise something in some future.

Belief and doubt refer to each other, mutually condition each other, drink from the same source whose current they channel.

A very subtle play connects belief, credulity, deceit, in all kinds of ceremonies.

Religion is already an alienation of faith.

Was it only after a certain usage of beings and things, when these and those were overused, that the sacred began to prevail over the profane, becoming a sphere and a particular activity? That time preceding the dis­tinction between the sacred and the profane and the banalisation of the course of life, did it exist otherwise than in the eyes of our nostalgia for a golden age, a lost paradise?

The sacred is inseparable from the prohibitions it enacts and its delim­itation regarding the profane. Will the era which would like to be post­Christian be able to stop the human from needing any more prohibitions, if only to have the pleasure of violating them? And how will it manage celebratory rites?

Faith and belief determining intellect and thought - with or without conflict - characterise not only religion but all the great powers, practised more or less religiously.

How convenient and touching the distinction that saw in religion hope and faith, and in philosophy and science knowledge.

Already the primary form of knowledge is sacerdotal.

Religion, which has forbidden knowledge [sαvoir] as sin - preaching dis­tance from the tree of knowledge [connrnssαnce], sin being knowledge - does it succumb to knowing [sαvoir], even though it belatedly strives to integrate the knowledge [connαissαnce] that suits it?

Everything becomes secular and the centuries become drops in the ocean of time.

The desire for a sort of community of lay monks, living and thinking the transformation of the sacred into the profane in relatively protected places and moments, is more tenacious than one imagines.

Art and politics, philosophy, the sciences and technique do not only carry religious elements that themselves carry magical, mythical and mythological elements, but also constitute the religion of art and an artistic religion (or a reli­gious art), the religion of politics and a political religion (or religious politics), the religion of philosophy and a philosophical religion (or a religious philos­ophy), the religion of science and a scientific religion (or a religious science), the religion of technique and a technical religion (or religious technique) - up to the irreligious religion of everyday banality and the search for sensations.

Is poetry the secret and the creative force - poetic - of any art? But in what sense of the term ‘poiesis’? And in what web of relations with logos, praxis and techne? Impossible to exit the initial confusion, prolix in distinctions. One separates the theoretical (and contemplative) from the practical (and active), without specifying whether this communicating separation is itself principally theoretical or practical, or even if each of these two powers, their opposition and composition, arise principally from the theoretical or practi­cal. One then separates the practical and active (the praxic) from the poietic (and creating) - subordinating in value poiesis to praxis (especially political), while placing poiesis at the summit from which it falls into the city to let itself be more or less excluded, since it does not theoretically say the truth nor prac­tically act, but poetically makes up its own with fabrications and fictions - as if practice were not equally creative and the poietic active, not to mention the metaphysic-logic-politic-aesthetic fixation of the true and the good and the beautiful. Finally, one leaves technique powerful in shadow, which is skilled at making, art and fabrication, process and expedient. From this will result the later confusions, the subtle distinctions and the gross separations between art and artistry, creation and production, fabrication and action, in the theoretical, practical, poietic and technical melee.

Poetry and art, that is to say poetry and prose and all the arts, do they oper­ate principally by means of an intuition more or less sensible or noetic? To pose the question in a striking manner comes back to knowing what intuition is.

Poetry, does it fit into the prose of the world like an enclave, or is it prose that is part of poeticity? The language of prose, dominant language, imagi­nes that poetic language is vague and imprecise, ambiguous and equivocal, prevents communication: as if prosaic language effected it. It could also be that prose and poetry are a bifurcated language. This does not solve the problem of the links between thought and poetry.

The profound kinship between art and play has often been noticed. But it is not only art that is of play.

For a long time there has existed an aspiration - fairly mythical - for a complete and total work of art, integrating all the arts and integrating itself into life. All realisations, however, remain partial. It is another aspiration, for a poetry and an art made by all. Is it less mythical?

Each work and each type of art is a proposition of life, a behaviour and a gap.

Every artistic work - and every work at all - contains a bit of imposture.

Politics does not take precedence, as think those for whom politics is the destiny; nor is it simply an affair of organisation and institutions, administra­tion and agitation. Politics is what institutes and constitutes the polis, that is to say the city or the empire, the State or universal history. When it is great. Great politics is more and something other than the putting-into-action of thought; it is like the master of its domain; and the greatest thinkers cannot be the greatest politicians, any more than great persons of action are not the greatest persons of thought. Politics is not only the art of governing humans and administering things; it is what permits the world to reveal itself to humans, social beings, by permitting them at the same time to reach it and to bring it violence, living and working in community and in struggle, fight­ing, building and demolishing.

The place of politics is the State and the revolutionary movements aiming at power. The poetry of the seizure of power then grapples with the prose of the government and the administration.

Politics realises a governmental synthesis between the polis and the police.

The bonds of the ethical and the juridical are woven so that they can be torn from each side, while remaining a single fabric with various and inter­twined threads.

Determined by economic and political technique, and overdetermining it, every established right is conservative, and every call for a revolutionary right becomes it.

The organisation of laws, rights and justice tightly depends on economic and political necessities, while masking them. By the way - by where? - no society can do without repressive organisms.

The juridical is there to supplement the ethical.

Can the game of politics not override restriction, planning and compro­mise, even when it exceeds tactical manoeuvres?

All politics is tactical. It is the total, unveiling and falsifying half of a totalising totality, although always partisan and partial. Thus even the pol­itics that proclaims ‘anarchism’ as final goal cannot do without, along the way and in every order, repressive power.

Can politics avoid the lie? Is the question itself political?

The apolitical contributes to the adventures of local and world politics.

Institutions tolerate very well the refusal of institutions, assimilate this refusal, and can go as far as establishing the institution of refusal.

Institutions and what transgresses them as institutions, and which is only their transgression, are part of the same game. As for the transgression of transgression?

Knowledge as well as power cannot do without solid organisation, which is however liquefied.

Once upon a time, saints and heroes made believe that the combat was already won in heaven or on earth.

Philosophical thought, coming after the formation of the other great powers, often flows into their moulds and borrows their language: it is thus sometimes above all religious or poetic or political thought. In its high places it is ontological (logical and metaphysical) thought. Subsequently, it becomes above all scientific and technical thought.

Philosophy is not the whole of thought. When it thought this, it locked itself into its closure whose era is closed.

Inextricably mixed with non-thought, the thought that dominated under the name of philosophy, later called metaphysics, purported to account for what is and lost itself in this enterprise of accounting.

Philosophy has been, throughout its course, both a questioning and a justification of what is.

Philosophy and aphilosophy, problematic and aproblematic, confront each other and interpenetrate.

Philosophical thought is born from the play of the enigma for which life and death are at stake, and tries to pose the enigma of being, without daring to grasp it as a game. To formulate the supreme enigma, to which no one can answer, is that the game of supreme wisdom?

As for the exploration of the sources of philosophical thought, we have hardly advanced.

Philosophical thought - almost always torn between its poetic and pro­phetic tendency and its professorial, logical and scientific tendency - is made to distinguish three phases and levels in life and knowledge: first, a pre-philosophical mode, naive and mythological; second, a philosophical and scientific mode; third and finally, an absolute mode, somehow metaphil- osophical, more or less positive, rather more than less, assuming negativity, marking an end and inaugurating a beginning.

The history of philosophy, in its ensemble and in its moments, which in flashes gives ‘free’ course to thought, is constantly left to rethink produc­tively and await integration into a vaster history of thought. The thought which precedes, traverses and follows philosophy, at equal (?) distance from intuitive poetry, completed philosophy and conquering science and in dia­logue with them, can begin again, and begin to think, by accepting its ‘non­grasp’ on the world governed by the technicised sciences and by tirelessly pursuing its questioning in the direction of the opening of a horizon. (This thought must not be confused with the various theories that amalgamate all sorts of contributions, with the different critiques, social, literary and oth­erwise, with the multiple discourses that only monetise it - insensible to its exigency and its rigour -, vulgarise it, or render it precious.) The technicised sciences which, emerging from philosophy, render effective the continuous end of philosophy and relay it, have to come up against their own successes and limits and will thus become perhaps a little more problematic, that is, thinking.

In the indistinction between the history of thought and the history of philosophy, the common understanding and the professorial understand­ing unroll the scroll: oriental thought or philosophy: thought dawns in the East - especially in India and China - and it then passes to the West to constitute occidental thought or philosophy which knows great epochs: the first of these ‘epochs’ bears the archaeological title of ancient thought or phi­losophy (Greek, Roman, Hellenistic) and goes from the Presocratic to the Neoplatonists. One does not know well where, how and when the second begins: with the Old Testament and the Jews, with the Gospels, with the Fathers of the Christian Church (Greek and Latin), with Saint Augustine? In any case this epoch is called medieval thought or philosophy and prin­cipally embraces occidental Christian thought, with some references to Byzantium, to Jews, to Islam. The third epoch is formed by modern European thought or philosophy that goes from the Renaissance to our days; to try to see a little more clearly what, before their eyes, is happening, historians call the very last episodes of this third epoch: contemporary thought or philoso­phy. So everyone is supposed to be found again and to find themselves again. Rare are those that suspect the irony of thought and its history.

The being of the world having been thought of as physis-logos, by the Greeks, as god-logos, by the Judaeo-Christians, as subject, by the Moderns, the thought of the planetary era is in search of a thought that would think the unitary and combined play of all ‘that’ in the direction of a play that would assume and exceed it.

Thought or rather philosophy is subdivided into ‘disciplines’: propaedeu­tic or ontological logic, formal, dialectical or formalised, theory of knowledge and science, methodology and epistemology; first or general philosophy, met­aphysics, ontotheology: theology; cosmology; anthropology, pedagogy, ethics, psychology; philosophy of history, social and political philosophy, sociology; poetics and aesthetics. Rare are those who know how to read this articulation.

Entire centuries live on a great thought that they retell and contradict in developing it theoretically and practically.

The great thinkers of a certain tradition constitute through their march the history of philosophy; the history of ideas is a vulgarising version.

The system of the history of thought, even of the history of philosophy, cannot easily be established without reductive schematisations.

The nascent philosophy, born and accomplishing itself as a play of youth grappling with old age, as both leisure occupation and school exercise - schole - unfolds itself in a mixed space composed of sacred elements, playful and pedantic systematisation. It succeeds mystical wisdom and the games of sophistry, namely prophetic, visionary and thaumaturgical, poetic and hier­atic language, and rhetorical competition and emulation in the agonal play of antagonistic arguments. By succeeding the magician, the priest and the ‘charlatan’, the philosopher moves into the dimension of the enigma - the adversaries capture each other in a net of discourse - the play of questions and answers, of controversy, of dialectical play.

Philosophy is born in Greece, tied to pederasty. Philia and eros, which are coextensive with it, give birth, in a sort of tragic joy, to the children of thought and of humanity. A genesis and a youthfulness are united with a maturity at the gates of old age.

Homosexual - pederastic or lesbian - eros is also an instigator of the search for Being through being-with. Numerous are the great thinkers, great poets and great artists who were explicitly homosexual. The greatest wom­an-poet was lesbian. Rather numerous are the great religious types and great politicians and warriors who were implicitly homosexual.

Philosophy appears from the outset as stillborn; domineering and eva­nescent, since its Platonic foundation, it is the light of a shadow. When it speaks of reality, it is an ideally elaborated reality that is in question, according to a metaphysical model that puts to work the terrible spiritual power - and not only spiritual - of the negative, which then turns against the ontological wheel to reverse its movement. Materialism as a philo­sophical doctrine possesses its own truth and remains grounded by the same torture.

Metaphysical philosophy or ontotheology, that is to say, Platonism, its contradictors, its avatars and its reversals: sophistry, sensualism, empiricism, scepticism, and all that flows from the mainstream.

Idealism and materialism are the two streams of philosophy, that is to say, of idealism.

Even after the collapse of idealism and dualism, the reign of ideas and duality survives: ideas become pieces of ideology and ideals; all that, which is, remains at least double.

Philosophy existed in - and as - a vicious circle: it posited logos, thought, spirit, dialectic, at the start - reign of the beginning ruling the development - and it (re)found them at a certain end. Is it, however, only philosophy that succumbs circularly to this vice?

With Descartes and Pascal, the destiny of modern philosophy plays out right from its beginnings and before its consequent completion. Both try, grappling with Christian theology, to reconcile reason and faith, thought, science and religion, human subjectivity and divine transcendence. The first puts to work the reason of understanding that aims at the mastery and possession of (external) nature and (internal) human nature, and transforms doubt into certainty. The second puts into action the reason of the heart, listening to interiority, aspiring, too, to a beatific certainty. With Hegel and Kierkegaard this play is resumed, closing modern philosophy. The first wants to think in its totality the world-historical spirit, the second tries to make individual existence speak in its paradoxical particularity.

The motto of Descartes, herald of rationalist modernity, was Iarvatus prodeo.

All Pascal’s research, the rearguard of theology and avant-garde of modern mysticism, aimed at Deus absconditus.

To see in Hegel only Christianity put into concepts and in Nietzsche a lamed Antichristianity is correct but denotes short-sightedness.

If philosophical thought had only been - at its high points - the con­sciousness that the culture of an epoch has of itself - as common sense and beautiful souls represent it - it would have been only the servant of cultural affairs, not to mention the fact that the consciousness that an epoch has of itself bathes in the epochal unconsciousness of withdrawal. It certainly comes historically after an epoch: ‘As thought of the world, it only appears in time, after reality has accomplished its process of formation and has completed itself. What the concept teaches, history shows with the same necessity: it is only in the maturity of reality that the ideal appears before the real and after having grasped the same world in its substance reconstructs it in the form of an intellectual empire. When philosophy paints its grey in grey, then a form of life has aged and with this grey over grey it does not let itself be rejuvenated but only recognized. The owl of Minerva only takes flight at dusk’ (Hegel). But at the same time, philosophy that thinks is an anticipatory thought that thinks ahead, not only what has been accomplished, but above all what will be accomplished, because prefigured. It is not for that ‘prophetic’, except in the sense that it speaks ahead. Hegel’s philosophy is thus at the same time a completion and a thought - in advance - of what will unroll after it, under its aegis or against it. It continues to prefigure what ‘thought’ and ‘reality’ have yet to accomplish - even through the Marxist schema that wants to invert it.

For great philosophy, learning to die and learning to live are one. What it wasn’t able to do: learn to play.

The great Greek and German idealistic systems - ontological and epistemological - have something definitive about them.

Alongside the great masters, mobilised by the great powers, there are the little masters, and to these geniuses and great talents are added, celebrating them, denigrating them and vulgarising them, the pack of scholars, jour­nalists, professors. Not to mention epigones that operate eclectically in the survivals and variations, maintaining thus certain currents of tradition.

The professor of philosophy, the writer and the journalist are the servants of the unthinking and unthought thought that darkens into specialised and general culture.

The nineteenth century experienced the unfolding and collapse of German idealism and romanticism and the entrance into the epoch of anti-idealism with great thinkers. But the next century could not support this tension and this level, and engaged, without listening to some great voices or by banalising them immediately, on paths located on several levels lower and much flatter, fascinated by positivism and logical, psychological and sociological neo-positivism.

Since the historic-systematic completion of philosophy, in Hegel’s system of knowledge, all thought (post-Hegelian) is reactive, while another style of thought seeks its way, a way that must not lead ‘only’ to a system of knowledge.

Every great thinker thinks - and misses - the sense of the totality of the world (which founds and exceeds the problem of the ‘natural’ and ‘histor­ical’ world), and advancing a one- and multidimensional thought, deploys a range of major themes linked among themselves and referring to the central core of their vision, and breaks finally against their own conquest. Nietzsche’s thought has a centre: the death of God, the murder of transcend­ent, spiritual and eternal significations, the reversal of the super-sensible and Christian world by temporal mortals, instruments of the will to power that aim to render humans masters of the planet, opens the way - after a long march through the desert of nihilism destined to spread - to the enigmatic superhuman (this Caesar with the soul of Jesus) knowing how to say yes to the eternal return of the same - so also to negativity - and daring to experience the innocence of becoming, since the world of non-total totality, being insep­arable from nothingness, has no ground, ‘is’ play.

Academic philosophy, after a long period of silence, journalistic liter­ature and political ideologies (of national socialism, democratic socialism and bureaucratic socialism) - all that Nietzsche loathed - seized upon it. By rendering it scholarly, literary, reactionary, progressive. The purpose of this was to put an end to disquieting interrogations, the putting in question. Nietzsche, however, will begin to be present to whoever will want and will be able to hear his voice saying that the answer to the fundamental why is lacking in the modern world - an era of the beginning, transition, exhaus­tion? - and cannot be granted technically or ideologically.

If Hegel marks the end of a very great stage of philosophy (infinitely more than occidental) and announces the overcoming of philosophy in favour of absolute knowledge, if Marx advocates the suppression of philosophy by its realisation in total technique and practice, Nietzsche, obsessed with Christianity, went to war against metaphysics - Platonic and especially Christian, Cartesian, Kantian, Hegelian, and against the world issued from it - even though motivated by it. His thought is much more than a reversal of Platonism-Christianity, which it also is. He radically questions the reality and thought of the Christian and modern world, world without thought and thought without world. He puts truth and error face to face, up to their fusion and confusion. He exposes the crisis of modernity thrown into a pre­carious and conquering march. Without any doubt, modernity, if not every epoch, is perpetually in crisis and in a state of passage. Nietzsche, with all his own misery and biographical naivety, deepens the crisis, renders it even more serious and derisory, discovers the abysses, goes back to the founda­tions, interrogates the future. Beyond the crisis of the contemporary world - bourgeois and socialist, individualist and collectivist - he preludes the crisis of the future world.

Before the nineteenth century there were particular kinds of knowledge - the sciences - that had to justify themselves before the systematics and methodologies of speculative thought, that is to say of philosophy, to con­stitute and integrate themselves. Since then, it is thought that must justify itself before the sciences - mathematics, physics, biochemistry, psychology, sociology - that nevertheless depend on it, function with concepts borrowed from it, but want to leave the cut soil from which they have grown. It is for thought, therefore, to recover itself and put them back into question, that is to say metaphilosophical thought which knows how to renounce a circular and too harmoniously articulated system of the totality of knowledge.

On the basis of concepts elaborated by forgotten and/or parenthesised philosophical thought, a terminological tower of Babel is erected, a concep­tual confusion and imprecision that wish to operate with a vague precision, babbling about the rigour of the concept, innocent of the problem of the enlargement and fluidification of concepts, if not of their destruction.

Philosophical thought explodes and is expressed in the sciences: logico-mathematical, physico-chemical, biological, psychologico- sociological and historical. The world no longer needs it because it impli­cates it, whereas the sciences explicate it. And the sciences think less than they operate. What formed the trunk and branches of philosophy - ontological logic and the theory of knowledge, ontology (general meta­physics), theology, cosmology (philosophy of nature) and anthropology (the three branches of metaphysica specialist, the latter as a psychology and philosophy of history, ethics, poetics and aesthetics - all are taken charge of and sublated by the various techno-scientific activities, which, starting from them all - by taking their departure from them and leaving them - bring them before the democratic-scientific tribunal that wants to possess its own laws and judgements (without being free from prejudices). Through - and throughout - this process there manifests the need for a thought that is grounded and questioning, historical and systematic, flexi­ble and firm, for a metaphilosophical thought that with rigour and vigour interrogates all the logical, ethical, political, etc., criteria, both to show their governmental character and to put them into question. And the answers? Doesn’t the very rhythm and style of an accepting and transgres­sive thought open a horizon to answers?

In philosophy, one can always advance a replica, pertinent or not.

All the theses and hypotheses, all the options and opinions, all the points of view and all isms - both theoretical and practical - are collected and pre­figured in the history of philosophy, from which one takes them from time to time, combining them, updating them.

Thought - and even more philosophy - accommodates itself to the world as it is, far more than it puts it in question.

Has philosophy been the search for the first and ultimate reason, the attempt to account for it, the major totalisation? Was it not also worked up by untenable suspicion?

In its starry hours philosophy was also the bad conscience of its time.

‘Philosophy reveals lacks, a decentred being, the expectation of an over­coming; it prepares, without necessitating and presupposing them, posi­tive options. It is the negative of a certain positive, not some nondescript void... The negative has its positive, the positive its negative, and it is precisely because each has in itself its contrary that they are able to pass into each other and perpetually play in history the role of enemy brothers. Is it forever?’ These thoughts of a good intelligence, why are they not radical enough?

The philosophy that wanted to be establishing and contestatory is now contested as justificatory.

Was the instrument par excellence of philosophy the concept, its funda­mental function a tribunal pronouncing judgements, did its principal task consist in reasoning? It is reassuring to represent things like this, whether to praise or blame.

Law and philosophy manifest a latent and manifest agreement, interro­gating, interpreting, judging, justifying, acquitting and condemning accord­ing to the rules of an almost common tribunal in which disagreements do not fail to erupt.

Philosophy walks on its head in the eyes of those who themselves walk on their heads, trusting themselves to naive consciousness. At the moment where the task is fixed: making it walk on its feet, it is already beheaded.

The death of philosophy was celebrated for a very long time, by philoso­phy institutionalising and ritualising itself, organising and technicising itself and by trying to bring back to it every thought that had already surpassed it. Thus ‘philosophy’ presents itself for today and tomorrow, in its dominant closure, next to the history of philosophy, as a combination of logistics and epistemology, of psychoanalysis (more or less Freudian) and sociology (more or less Marxist).

All the great philosophers wanted to inaugurate, found, begin to properly speak philosophy and put an end to it. Philosophy, like the Phoenix, was reborn from its ashes and recuperated even thoughts that were not prop­erly its own. Will it continue to be so? Philosophy - essentially Platonic - thought - in the metaphysical or anti-metaphysical dimension - the whole of being, of becoming, of the world, in fixing its being, its foundation, its sense - logico-ontologically - as an absolute, leaving it nonetheless unthought and making of it a being. At the same time, it circumscribed the different domains of beings and opened the field to regional ontologies: nature, humanity, history, etc. Under the yoke of the true, the good and the beautiful, configurations of the unitary and signifying absolute, philosophy lived until Hegel, who historically and systematically reprised its realisations, its principles, its possibilities. Then, through the efforts to reverse Platonic, Christian and Hegelian philosophy - Marx, Nietzsche - and despite the epigonal uprisings, the brilliant, talented or vulgarly professorial attempts, we entered the terminal stage, the continuing death, the continued end, the non-perfect completion of philosophy. What passage is then effectuated and imposes itself on us? What passes with philosophy? Firstly, philosophy is gathered into the history of philosophy that we constantly have to take up again to disengage in it what had been thought and left unthought. Secondly, a horizon opens to the thought that precedes, traverses and follows philoso­phy, a thought that is differently open, adventurous and rigorous, that no longer justifies the world, but questions it. Thirdly, philosophy breaks out in technicised sciences, in scientific techniques, made possible by it, but that deny the philosophy which is at their base without being able to totally reject it. These three aspects of a single passage offer themselves as a decompo­sition and an assembly and do not exclude overlaps and interpenetrations. Philosophical thought takes shelter in the history of philosophy, gives birth to a metaphilosophical thought that restores the juncture with pre-phil- osophic thought, generates the - logical, linguistic, logistical, semantic, physico-mathematic, biochemical, anthropological, psychological, histor­ical, sociological and cultural - sciences-and-techniques that take it over. The love of wisdom does not become absolute knowledge, as Hegel claimed, but structural and effective knowledge and power. It is above all the human sciences that take charge of this succession, that is to say the sciences and the techniques of the human, who leaves for the technical and scientific conquest of their natural and social milieu, of the universe and of the place occupied by the human, who collectively wants to govern all according to the science of government or cybernetics. Thus, humanity, whose being and becoming reside in a social and socialising activity - theoretical and practical - although crushed by the production that produces it and that it produces, remains, if not ontologically, at least anthropologically and meth­odologically, the decentred centre of the sciences and human sciences that also prepare its overcoming.

The putting into question of metaphysical philosophy poses the problem of the thought that succeeds metaphysics, the problem of the succession of philosophy, the problem of what exceeds it. If pre-philosophy and phi­losophy thought being in the dimension of eternity, on metaphilosophy is imposed the play of time.

Its children and its close relatives progressively abandon philosophy: first mathematics and the natural sciences, next the human sciences, psychology and sociology, and, finally, logic (mathematics). Of its old organism only the history of philosophy subsists - that ever more scientificises and technicises itself - and the remains of general philosophy, to which must be added the philosophy of this or that domain: politics, morals, art, etc.

The language of philosophy also perpetuates itself in foreign lands.

To lead back to philosophy (metaphysics) the attempts that attempt to escape it or that forget that they arise from it.

Metaphysics escapes both the cut and the continuity between the so-called banal life and the so-called superior life.

To unite the contribution of metaphysics and the contribution of anti-metaphysics is a programmatic task to accomplish.

Metaphysics still governs where one pretends to surpass it; the most outrageous tendencies aiming at transgression still relate to it; it reigns in a rather inapparent manner over what wishes to exceed and succeed it; it is necessary to know how to bring back to it what believes itself to be escaping it. Philosophy, in exiting itself, effecting an exit outside itself, still remains determining in its (alleged) heirs and successors. The outside of metaphysi­cal philosophy or ontotheology roughly repeats its inside.

Throughout all the extraordinarily long reign of the succession of metaph­ysics, it cannot be a question of returning to something less than metaphysics.

Metaphysics sacrifices physical life, people always say. As if physical life could do without it.

The suspicion is persistent: is metaphysics part of the physis of the human?

To what extent is metaphysics, posing the real as the sensible, and ide­ality and the ideal as the non-sensible (the supersensible), and provoking all the anti-metaphysical turnarounds and reversals, part of the nature - of the physis - of the human, since it is also in human nature to change this nature and thus to deny metaphysical negation?

Actuality no longer knows where to go: resume and relearn the classics or promote its own modernity?

Surpassing of philosophy (= metaphysics) signifies above all a productive recovery of the thought of the great thinkers, a profound ‘comprehension’ of their thought (because we treat them with an arrogance that is matched only by our inability to surpass them).

Metaphilosophical thought tries to engage in dialogue with pre- philosophic thought, while listening to philosophical symphonies.

Also the surpassing of philosophy-metaphysics remains highly problem­atic. It is not about surpassing the gains but, at most, about the effort aiming for the surpassing of the metaphysical mode of thinking.

If art intuits, religion represents, philosophy conceptualises - which is already not so certain - science operates, constructs, connects, decomposes, scaffolds, what, in any case, it does effectively.

Between thought and knowledge, science and consciousness, bridges are thrown and abysses lie. One cannot pass these by walking but by jumping - and by breaking one’s neck.

Knowledge, critique and science techno-scientifically replace religion and philosophy, wanting to monopolise the One-All and the One-Multiple, accomplishing glorious conquests and wishing their praises always to be sung louder and more often.

Science is based on the metaphysical and anti-metaphysical faith of Platonism, Christianity and their reversals: it believes in the truth that, from the divine, has become human.

It was only on the basis of Greek philosophy and Christian theology that science could be built.

Not less than philosophy, and even more, since it already implies it, ‘the’ science draws a good part of its directing schemas and evidence from reli­gious and theological myths that constitute its implicit underpinnings.

So the sciences continue to speak the language of metaphysics even when they pretend to overflow and overstep it.

There is no science: there are particular sciences and a scientific approach characterised by its language, its theory, its methodology and its ideology - always unilateral, particular and partial, even when totalising and totali­tarian. When someone affirms to you: it’s scientific, retort: relative to what science?

Each science delimits a field, traces its method, fixes its objective (and not its object) and its aim, on the basis of a segmentation previously worked out by thought. So ‘it constitutes itself as a perspective and operation’ on and above all in the world, not grasping the world, but an aspect of all that is. Even the ensemble of sciences does not grasp the world in its ensemble. The hidden resource, and now making itself visible, of science is technique, which manages to upset the world from top to bottom - from mathematical technique to the technique of the imaginary.

The sciences do not elucidate their (philosophical) presuppositions, the content of their concepts, nor even their operative approaches.

Science and the sciences only do business - in a delimited field and with relatively precise aims - with relationships. Highly problematic, even in their constraining experiments.

The sciences refer always to a tomorrow.

Science - the product of the will to science - lives in incessant incompleteness.

In turns, and often competing with others, one knowledge pretends itself science of sciences.

Everything has already become the material of science: the sciences of nature and/or the sciences called human.

Much stronger than science, its research and its results, is the scientific - techno-scientific - method, which dominates the sciences and not only the sciences.

Science, that is, its attempt and temptation to scientific explanation, dangerously brushes, that is to say plainly, against scientism.

The methodological properness of the sciences - their methodological properties - means they cannot pose questions which overstep their jurisdic­tion, not being their responsibility.

In science, questioning necessarily stops within the limits of scientific activity, which therefore blocks the incessant interrogation in the name of better answering its limited fields of questions. The ensemble of the sciences does not know anymore what to make of problems that it can neither pose nor solve. The scientific constellation remains partial and partisan.

The theory of science is not itself scientific.

Science must also be, if not principally, comprehended in the manner it comprehends itself, that is to say, less according to what it is than according to what it believes itself to be. It presents itself as...; we must therefore also take it for what it presents itself as.

Science is a manner that becomes more and more decisive, in which all that, which is, presents itself, is provoked and transformed - scientifically. From Greek and occidental, European and modern, it becomes planetary.

Scientific rigour fails to suspect the rigour of thought and the content of the non-concept of rigour.

Thought can only ever learn to think again in the midst of the sciences, without mistaking itself in them and without despising them, without con­tempt for its own task, and without letting itself be intimidated by the con­tempt shown it.

As there is a thought that precedes science, which opens horizons and fields to it, there is a thought that comes after science.

Progressive, victorious, conquering, glorious science also nourishes thought.

There was the time of magic, myths and mythology, there was the time of religion, great art and philosophy, there was the time of politics. All these powers are still active. The course of time - the course being only the most grossly visible aspect of time - leads us however to the era of technics, in which our world enters belatedly and with difficulty.

Everything seems henceforth to require a technical, particular and gen­eral solution. In everything, there is technical progress to be made.

Is technics something like thought solidified-yet-fluid, or does it inti­mately inhabit thought itself? Do we interpret technical production reflex­ively or productive thought technically? What kind of play connects thought and technics?

Technics is almost ready to replace politics; at most, politics still proposes, while technics disposes. Technics is getting ready to administer the globe, to promote and manage the world economy in the framework of a capitalo-so- cialism of State and bureaucratic collectivism, in the name of moralism and in a generalised petit-bourgeois and planned style. The difference between democracy and autocracy is becoming more and more inexistent in totalitar­ian democracy, as are many other differences. What will happen next? Let us look first at what is happening before our eyes.

Technics far surpasses every instrumentalism and every technicism, even technicity.

More than an instrument of the human marching towards the mastery of the world, technics makes the human the instrument of a process which is expressed through technical and technological development.

If humans let themselves be dominated by the play of technics and techniques - the techniques of technics and the technics of techniques - they could then back up to take a better jump.

Within the techno-scientific set-up that seizes the world, there is no longer the sovereign good, nor even the happiness of humanity, its well­being and comfort. Humans have and will have to live and die without com­prehending what is happening, why it is happening, how it is happening.

Are accidents in the world of technics not destined to multiply? The peaceful more so than the warfaring. How important, for example, are a few thousand deaths around the world during peaceful car trips on week­ends? How could it be that auto- and hetero-mobiles not also transport death?

Dominance henceforth belongs to - theoretical and practical - techno- scientific activity (which carries out the fusion of science and technics under the impulsion of technics) and to technocratic and techno-bureaucratic power (which carries out the fusion of economy, administration and politics under the impulsion of technics).

If the struggle for the technical domination of the world can take place in the name of doctrines of philosophical origin, this is due to the fact that philosophy, extinct, had already, with infirmity, named what comes.

By logos becoming technics, logic becomes technics, cosmology cosmo- technics, biology biotechnics, psychology and sociology psychotechnics and sociotechnics. And technology?

The technics of the imaginary are also technics of usage.

Technology and ideology are enemies and allies. The era of triumphant technology corresponds to militant and suffering ideology.

Thought, theory, consciousness and knowledge contain ideological ele­ments, that is to say camouflaging and non-revealing, which reverse the relationships of force rather than render them transparent. Nevertheless, any critique, which denounces the ideology in the other, also itself contains as many ideological elements and does not make its principles, its starting points and its aims explicit. In its turn, reversed reversal, it succumbs to thought.

It is the titles, uncontrollable appellations, isms and slogans that today form the fabric of ideologies and worldviews. Intellectuals are their dealers.

Contestatory ideology is now englobed in certifying and dominant ideology.

Science and technics are not exempt from ideology. Their rationality, even their rationalisations, denote the connection between knowledges and transformative practices, pressures and dominant interests.

With technics seizing everything, will it also seize its putting-into- question, by technically reducing it to silence or making it speak only technically?

Unhinged machines reveal a part of the horizon.

For the moment, the stopping of techno-scientific development is not foreseeable.

The metatechnological zone is still far from opening up to us.

The priest and the artist, the politician and the philosopher, the scientist and the technician are the servants of the great powers, ruling - and ruled by - those who speak and think, work, love and die, struggle and play.

In saying of religion - whether brought back to the religare or to the religere - that it is extended towards the divine, and that cult, prayer and sacrifice are the signs of this tension, in saying that poetry speaks of the world, life, love, combat and death, in saying that art represents in a per­ceptible manner what is presented to it, in saying of politics that it consists in the government of humans and things, in saying that philosophy was the thinking search for being, in saying that technics grasps and transforms what

is, in saying all this and by putting all these sayings into communication, we have still hardly said anything.

What matters is not the religion but the problem of the sacred. It is the voice and the silence, the light and the shadow of beings that are more important than poetry and art. What matters is not politics but the historical destiny - or the metahistorical play - of humans. It is thinking utterance that is more important than philosophy.

The great powers fix the errancy of the world and propose the rules of the game, construct dwellings and edify works, consolidate institutions and build worlds, traversed and shaken by the elementary forces that channel and overflow them. Families and cult games, Churches and works of art, States and parties, Universities and techno-scientific set-ups are the forts that mark out the maze of the world and succumb to their weaknesses, while the human travels the labyrinth of the game, seeking forms and norms to be able to pose and repose, adhering to them and taking off; every maximal approximation complying to the greatest common denominator and none­theless remaining allusive.

Violence is the removable spring of great powers.

The genius being ‘all’ world, they let themselves be penetrated by the human - even the too human - and connect the world and the human and not the human and the world. They thus grasp the world in the dimensions of logos and of being in becoming, the divine and the cosmic, the human and the historical, the poetic and the artistic, in all that transgresses these dimensions.

Hidden in the ‘depths’, another ingenuity can be at work and open and propagate what opens to it. This ingenuity, of a reckless modesty, unable to be situated within or beyond established openings, would not lead to directly vis­ible works. There are - among others - inspiring geniuses, who themselves put ‘nothing’ ‘into work’, but rather set in motion those who will put into work.

The most brutal and vociferous ingenuity never ceases to implicate the silence of the unspeakable.

Relating apparently distant reference points is what is proper to the productive genius.

The genius comes to suspect that totality is not totality nor fragments fragments; being becomes evasive without nothingness becoming a point of support.

Ingenuity relates what would remain separated without it (at the level of the said).

Grasping prophetically the past, living the contemporaneity of what has been and continues to be, existing in the present and being caught by the future, letting oneself carry and be carried away by this movement that grabs the attention and feeds the tension, finding oneself precipitated into the break: all this supreme effort of donation and abandoning is in no way bearable for effective talents or for humans who are only out of the ordinary.

For humans to be able to say and to do something great, there must be a greatness and misery to what interpellates and affects them vitally and mortally. What corresponds to this call must be for them a question of life or death. When they cannot say and do otherwise, their winged free­dom coincides with levelling necessity. Every genius is striking because thunderstruck.

To upset and illuminate the average, the mediocrity and the greyness, the honourable and dull successes, beautiful accomplishments and bloodless conformisms, to darken the superficial illuminations, usual and gloomy or flashy and brilliant - that is one of the tasks of the genius. Why, however, is every poetic - namely, creative - genius profoundly sad?

We speak of ‘great humans’, of famous humans whose glory indicates a permanence in time. Their own being is part of the historical becoming of humanity of which they are the summits. Every great human is either a great human of religion, or a great artist, or a great politician, or a great thinker, or great sage. Are there other great ones? Who would not be captured by one of these grandeurs? Who would convey what? Can the movement of saying and doing be expressed brilliantly without going through major mediations? Is there a totally great human, that is to say, being of the opening and not of one of the openings?

The great powers and the elemental forces return to the - double? single? - play of myth, of logos, of theoria, of speech, of thought, and of poetic and creative praxis, of action, of production; they return to the play of saying and thinking (logos) and of making and doing (praxis) that pass into one another, all theorising and all activity being speaking and active, the saying and the doing forming the modalities of all language and all production; the saying-and-doing of the great powers seems to return to the great power of the play of technics - theoretical and practical.

If the great powers emerge more and more from the power of technics, the elemental forces which command them emerge from the play of the human - for which technique is only the dominant constellation - which itself emerges from the play of the world.

The great powers, returned to saying and thinking and to making and doing of the play of technics, join again the elementary forces - still more powerful - from which they derive and that, also, reside in a saying and a doing, returning to the polymorphic play through which the play of the world unfolds among humans.

Elemental forces and great powers do not stay immobile. They moult.

The great founding powers rely on the elemental forces that they express, organise, channel and regulate. Elemental forces, much more primordial than the great powers, are called:

language and thought,

work and struggle,

love and death,

play.

They reveal and shape - equally shaped by it - the being in becoming of the fragmentary and fragmented totality of the multidimensional and open world, whose most fundamental approaches and major approximations they form. Each of them is tied to all the others and illuminates them, integrates them, penetrates them. Each of them may appear to englobe the others, which it also does, in making itself equally englobed, but none of them, separated from others, although necessary, is sufficient to constitute the play of the human and the world, which makes them appear and that they make appear.

Each of the great powers and elemental forces maintains a decisive rela­tionship with all the others, and concerns all that is, in its parts and its whole. All together form a multiple unity - in various positions. Because they need one another.

Great powers and elemental forces demand to be studied for themselves and with reference to what they themselves are not.

Each of the great powers and elemental forces of the world served as a model to form conceptions - or visions - of the world.

Although overdetermined by the great powers, elemental forces - themselves decomposable? - animate them and make them explode.

The great powers manifest themselves either by their presence or by their absence, that is to say, by the combined play of presence and absence. The elemental forces of the world that work them - and of which they constitute the elaborations - seem to need these major mediations. The human is a being of mediation. The great powers artic­ulate the being of the human on the being of the world, while ‘alien­ating’ both the being of the human and ‘Being’. The elementary forces accord with the great cosmic rhythms, model human actions, passions and omissions, are modelled by historical, social and cultural structures, become the play of language and action, in the play of this discordant accord.

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Elemental forces are based on links and ruptures.

Undoubtedly less composite than the great powers, the elementary forces are nevertheless not in a bare state: mediated, they enclose us in their system of mediations.

All the great powers reduce language, thought and writing, work and struggle, love and death, and especially play.

Is language the driving force of thought?

We speak the language that speaks us.

Words work: on whose account?

Words guide the thought that guides them.

Language is almost the possibility, always limited, through which the totality, unlimited and unspeakable, speaks fragmentarily.

Language speaks. It speaks us. We speak it.

Language already thinks in itself and through itself. Then we think - it - it that thinks us and passes us by, that is to say we think in itself and through itself, without being able to pass it by. This does not solve the problem of thought and - or ‘and’ - language, identical and not identical, in any case said and thought in the same language.

It is the play of the structured ensemble that, out of phonic elements, makes words.

Words are said in a proper sense and a figurative sense. What obliteration do they know at the times when they are about to decline figures?

One has first to learn to read and to speak in a language that one will have to forget.

One can think of one thing and say another. Who then realises this non-coincidence? Its individual bearer?

One does not necessarily think thoughts at the moment one speaks them.

Anyone who tries to think and say the strength and weakness of speech and of thought succumbs to the same power and impotence.

Between spoken language and written language lies a profound difference. Although both obey specific structures, words, syntagms and rhythms remain different. Would it be possible to write as one speaks and speak as one writes? If spoken language is rather spontaneous and flowing, is not written language more concentrated and elaborated? In any case, the difference between the two languages does not cease to be a problem, a problem that encounters and overlaps with that which concerns the language of the everyday and of everyone and the highly articulated language of great moments. Here too - despite and with all the attempts of juncture - is the fault insurmountable? For even pre-philosophic and metaphilosophic language, language which does not separate in a trenchant manner thought and poetry, remains sep­arated from everyday and trivial language that its great spokespeople them­selves speak in everyday life.

The verb can go so far as to recognise and say the devaluation of the verb.

There is hardly any full discourse; in every discourse there are voids.

Language is, in the strong sense of the term, limiting and hierarchical.

It is only by pursuing a discourse and an experience for a long time that one has a chance of success. Indeed.

Speech transforms into a legend all that it transmits and without which it would not exist.

More important than speech and actions, inhabiting them, revealing and hiding them, gestures remain. Learn - as far as possible - to control them - yours and those of others.

What complicity connects conjuring, knowing, calling, engendering, in the course of rounds of hide-and-seek and brilliant successes that burst under our noses?

What to do with the anodyne saying that comes in floods, what to do when beings have nothing more to say to each other and with moments when there is nothing more to say?

Often words resound in a world without an echo.

Is it the discourse or the violence that separates and unites discourse and violence?

How often do we speak and act with an almost perfect somnambulant assurance, which passes by the disquieting abyss and troubling problems?

Speech seems to pass from the adult and mature man, individual, white, conscious (or supposed to be), sane, civilised, and more or less linked to the dominant classes, to the proletarians (or ex-proletarians), to the peoples of colour, to the colonised and dominated (or ex-), to the masses, to children and adolescents, to women, to the unconscious, to the neu­rotics and the insane of all kinds (psychically, mentally, racially, ethni­cally, religiously, socially). Thanks to this dialectical reversal, as they say, those who have not yet spoken speak and enter into action. Is it however speech they take, from where and from whom do they take it and to say what, in the theoretical and practical mixture that is in the process of universalising itself?

The place of the word and thought, where is it? It is not the school or the university - it once was - it is only very partially the book and writing. The language of thought pursues its non-topological march.

It is in the labyrinth of the world and in the maze of language that the enigma arises, the word of the oracle and initiatory ordeal at its origins, rites of passage, pronounced to be divine and requiring divination, speculative problem and then philosophical question, innocuous board game and proof of aptitude for exams at last.

Did the Sphinx that grasps not already know that there is no word for the riddle?

Often that which presents itself at first sight as a riddle, is not one.

Does the riddle find its transient solution in a flash or short circuit of thought?

The word of the riddle found, interrogator and interrogated imagine themselves no longer enchained by the question, having posed the question and replied according to the rules of the game. Because it was not the game itself that was in question.

The solution of riddles becomes enigmatic again.

Who poses the questions? Who answers? In the tremor of indecision appears the ‘fundamental’ and ‘superficial’ ambiguity of what breaks itself and breaks us, poses and imposes itself, leaving death unexplained.

The thought that poses questions should all the same also propose answers. Undoubtedly. However, without isolating them from each other.

If all certainties refer to interrogations, all the interrogations refer to certainties.

Thinking poses questions and proposes responses. These correspond to and miss each other. Thought concludes and opens. Each thought, con­fined equally in a present. Words and sense are filling and emptying, con­vincing or not. Words can change sense and their senses say otherwise. In the round. Partial significations are imposed and collapse; the signification of the whole, although often proposed, no longer imposes itself. This does not prevent the whole, strangely connected to its parts, from subsisting and wishing to continue. If a thought appears to you too questioning and interrogative, call for another, more affirmative and positive - and vice versa.

Thought is interrogative and questioning, because it is put in motion and into question by that of which it is the thought.

To great questions correspond questioning answers.

Humans encounter great questions by trying to avoid them or by believ­ing them soluble.

Many problems depend on a previous question. Every question and every problem encompass in their fullness the ensemble of the problematic. They pose themselves each time as the ensemble itself.

Most often the answers precede the questions. Neither the question nor the answer has an absolute beginning; each drifts, by successive differen­tiations and thanks to leaps, from earlier questions and answers; step by step and with the help of mediations, we go back to the enigmatic start that we know - or suspect - only through the development by which it took place.

On the fields of language and thought there are quite a few questions without answers and answers without questions.

Often the answer has a different content than the question.

Humans suppress problems rather than resolve them (when problems do not suppress their bearers).

Does putting into question and into action not also signify putting into peril?

Yet the contestation is far from being ineffective. Because the interrogation - the putting into question - can combine itself with the put­ting into action.

The putting into question is both forward-looking and precocious, con­clusive and tardy. It arises too soon and everything seems to postpone it until much later. The usual answers do everything to avoid it.

The putting into question must not be separated from the putting into action. The doubt, the uncertainty, the fluidity and the contestation of one are not so far from the certainty, the fixity and the construction of the other. Rivals, they are each the condition of the other.

What answers can be offered to children, the young, crowds, trapped in crepuscular questions and opening interrogations?

How far can humans push the power of interrogation?

For everyone to verify: before every burning problem everyone flees.

Most great problems are cancelled and bypassed, pass into other problems, without being resolved.

It often appears that the answer (by the way impossible) is not even desired.

Demanding the other make demands.

One never questions radically enough. It is only later that one remembers the questions that one should have asked at the time. This moreover con­cerns not just questions.

Certain apparently stupid questions are often the best.

Let’s learn to pose questions coming from an unexpected horizon and on a terrain that discomforts what or whom is questioned. Let’s practise questioning on all terrains.

Advance in life by advancing affirmations that implicate questions. Stepping back towards the answers to jump better.

Most often solving the problems and the difficulties consists in making them disappear, revoking them.

Frequently the questioner is put into question by the questioned.

Undoubtedly the habit of asking questions may very well be lost.

Trigger the counter-questions following the questions.

The human doesn’t like too often to ask why, nor too often to give answers. It wants both to calm and to excite itself.

Being cured from the question, no longer seeking the absolute, this is not easy, because it is impossible to forget.

Don’t settle into questioning, interrogation, don’t make the problematic and problematisation a kind of absolute principle.

Putting into question even basic principles does not stop being trou­bling, disturbing. This is why this provocation never goes far enough.

What follows the putting into question?

Thought - that is not necessarily arid - likes to lean on a more passionate youth and beauty.

Passing through a school is inevitable, ‘therefore’ desirable.

‘Wisdom’ gives the impression of seeking youth, youth seeking to be edu­cated by what it imagines to be wisdom.

There are always several apprenticeships to do and redo and return to the point. There are also a lot of things to constantly unlearn.

Learning to learn is a late acquisition. Learning to teach is unfort­unately not done in the ardour of youth, but in the renunciation of maturity.

Students will become teachers to educate, as they say, other students, who, in turn, will become teachers. The teachers who were students educate students aspiring to become teachers. Whoever administers to the other a teaching - due to administering it or due to the teaching? - sows among those that it fecundates and to those it bears violence an ironic contempt that does not always come to light.

By what means can one meet a formative master in this polycentrism of the explosion that dissimulates its unity?

size=2 color=black face="Times New Roman">The master questions and formulates responses. The student demands and waits for responses. They can in their turn become a master when they learn to pose questions.

Teachers should be able to self-criticise their relationships with those being taught.

The master can only learn to also disappoint their student.

That the disciple leaves the master must be foreseen by the latter.

At certain times and in certain places, thought settled into propitious places. The Presocratics grouped around them students and disciples, but none of them formed a school: in the shadow of temples or at the heart of the city they spoke their thoughts. The sophists, the first who sold thoughts as masters of thinking and acting, dispensed their teaching in the midst of the agora; their place remained open. Socrates disdained teaching and writing and, interrogated by his demon, he interrogated. Plato and Aristotle inaugurate the era of philosophy and are the first and most brilliant teach­ers of philosophy, founding schools, the first schools of thought. A long history begins with the Academy and the Lyceum, where total knowledge is organised on the basis of philosophy, ramifying into logic, physics, ethics (and politics). Nevertheless, in all Greek thought - including Scepticism, Stoicism, Epicureanism, Neoplatonism - the polis remained the place of thought, the place where being in becoming (πέλειν) goes, the place of the gathering of the thinkers and the poets, priests and politicians, artists and athletes, hetaerae and ephebes. The polis, however, turned towards the Empire and cosmopolitanism: teachers and writers succeed the thinkers. Until the theologians, mystics and doctors of the Church emerge. Christian and medieval thought develops within the place formed by cloisters, places of religious communities. From this situation universities gradually develop. The university is and remains - until further notice - a medieval edifice: an edifice embracing in knowledge the whole pyramid - the sum - of knowledge and of the being; this knowledge is universal and ramified. Theology, art, law, medicine grow like advancing branches, ready to become autonomous. In the pyramid of the existent in its totality and located in the light of God-Being, to the theological summa, to the cathedrals and to the Divina Comedia the Universitas corresponds. Nascent European modernity (renaissance, one says, without knowing of what) had nothing to do at the beginning with scholastic universities, bastions of what it wanted to take by storm, even though it still moved on the same rails. The first thinkers of this third epoch are quite simply thinkers and not professors or doctors. They explore the world, established or wandering. This goes on until the French Revolution, which finally took by storm, in a certain way, what it wanted, what it could take with its own badly chipped forces. The bas­tion taken, the ‘medieval’ tradition of the university was resumed, and the universities - secular - shone - some of them - in brand new and worldly brightness. A new universality embedded in the old began. Philosophy became again - albeit differently - a matter of teaching, the foundation of all teachings: it affirmed itself as total knowledge, encyclopaedia, criti­cal system. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, philosophical thought found in universities its place and its formula - although it did not lack for mavericks - in those schools which linked masters to students. Almost the whole movement we so flatly call German idealism organically inhabited the universities as places of the universal and meditated more and more on the nature of the academic institution. The fall of this empire of spirit rendered many things problematic and displaced centres. Hegel, who had already understood himself as the last philosopher, conceiving his philosophy - historical and systematic - as the - historical and systematic - culmination of philosophy, is akin to Plato and remains the last great phi­losopher professor of philosophy, by closing - as the Aristotle of the modern world - a great epoch. Those who succeeded Hegel turned away from the emptied universities: Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche... Universities continue however to exist, bourgeois or socialist, in the Occident and in the Orient, and more are ceaselessly being created. All these universities dispense thought and culture, cultivate language and literature, study his­tory, the sciences, the arts and techniques. They form the future elites of countries - of all countries. No one can ignore them and they do not want to ignore anything, assimilating their opponents. From them all teach­ings depart, towards them all information converges. Each in its ‘totality’ organises into a system - quite decentred - the totality of knowledge, by erecting the historical course and the encyclopaedic edifice. However, unity is lacking, and the universe of the universality can no longer be built as sum by universities. Philosophy is still taught in these universities until its different ‘disciplines’ leave its corpus by making themselves autonomous. The current university - factory and cemetery - seems (still?) unavoidable. It is the school and the university that make young people fit to earn their living, theoretically or practically. The university, by falling under the juris­diction of technics, functions technically, operates technically, produces technicians of all kinds. There is no doubt that thought still circulates in universities - in privileged moments and places - but thought no longer feels at ease, and thinkers, those displaced (άτοποι) par excellence, are no longer at their place in the alma mater, without being elsewhere. Deprived of high places, must they think everywhere and nowhere, for everybody and nobody? Or have they even lost their consistency as displaced beings, in the places and during the hours that do more than trouble the bonds of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’? Insults and curses, polemics or sighs of dissatisfaction, con­formisms, compromises and reforms can do nothing to solve the problem since they do not even pose it. It remains, however, posed. Nothing pre­vents us from dreaming of other forms of communities or colleges, schools or institutes, where masters would confront students. What would their practical and public utility be? A question that poses itself, if these insti­tutions cannot be satisfied with setting up chapels or retreats. This dream apparently does not unblock. But dreams follow their course. If thinkers are not simply employees of the universal, enlightened or amateurs, they could tend towards a ‘place’ - a place of questioning and problematic teaching - without fear and without cowardice, without aggressiveness and without pusillanimity, without wanting to replace or imitate the other schools. A place that would be extremely attentive to the noise and fury of the powers of the world without succumbing: is such a place something else and more than an unrealisable dream, struck with inanity? For the moment, and not only for the moment, thinkers stand up as topologists of the non-place.

Life and thought: each perpetuates and kills the other.

Thinking, isn’t it like holding oneself back from living? However, there is hardly human life without thought.

The inequality of what is lived and said and thought makes reconciliation difficult.

Do not look for agreements and disagreements between writings and lives. This is inappropriate and you will be blamed.

The application of theories, their uptake in life as assumed and lived theo­ries, constitutes a highly problematic task. Can one speak and think, act and write unconsciously and on purpose at the same time?

Living one’s thoughts and thinking one’s life does not come by itself. Extremely rare are the thinkers who live their thoughts and people who think their lives.

Thinking the most profound, loving the most living, is yet another way of manifesting the differentiated unity of thought and being.

The verb is also an action, the logos is also praxis, the verb is the action word. And all action is passion.

The different pieces of the planetary play - the play of the world - cannot be thought by detached thoughts but by thoughts attached to what gives thinking - even if the theoretical status of speculative and theoretical ‘discourse’, non-formalisable and non-conceptual, cannot be fixed for the moment - what gives thinking nevertheless remaining the least thought, if not the unthought.

Every experience contains thought and all thought experience. Nothing comes only from experience or only from thought. The same goes for theory and practice, and does not go differently for logos and praxis, speech and action, saying and doing. Nevertheless the problem remains whole, although or because it is already cut in two. The two constituents of the totality are neither one nor two; and one and the other, neither one nor the other, succeed in constituting themselves and constituting their co-belonging. The very distinction between theory and practice, logos and praxis, entangled with poiesis and techne, does it derive from theory or practice or above all from a technical interpretation of theory and practice? Is it about abolishing the distinction between theory and practice - by surpassing it, of course - theoretically, practically, in theory, in practice or on another neutral terrain, at once single and double, on which one advances hesitantly? Usually, one juggles very skilfully with the concepts (?) of theory and practice, with all their possible combinations, their unity and their differences. Holes, breaks, inadequacies and incoherencies however do not cease to manifest themselves - theoretically and practically - in the interference of the ‘empir­ical’ and the sensible and the ‘transcendental’ and the intelligible. For it is in the light of the intelligible and the transcendental that the sensible and the empirical appear, fall into sense, enter into the meanderings of sense, and it is in the course of an empirical and sensible progress that the transcendental and the intelligible are developed and fall apart.

The relationships - in whatever manner one establishes them - between the theoretical and the practical are extremely embarrassing. Do both - their unity and their separation - have a common root - which? - that determines them together much more than each of them determines the other?

Is it possible not to sacrifice the vita contemplativa to the vita activa, nor to flee from the one to the other, but to participate in both, each requiring nonetheless a specific, if not exclusive, orientation?

Sometimes the theory is adjusted to account for facts, sometimes the facts are fiddled with to justify the theory. Thus, without distinguishing the var­ious plans, it is quite easy to be right, either at the ‘right’ moment, or, as is the most frequent case, too early or too late, in the multiple prospectives and retrospectives. Regarding an article in the New York Tribune, Marx wrote to Engels on 15 August 1857: ‘Perhaps I rendered myself ridiculous. But one can always get away with a little dialectics. Naturally, I have presented my opinions in such a way that, even if things turn out differently, I will be right.’

Practicism is only the completion of logicism.

Can the thought and activity of humans rigorously assemble, with knowl­edge and know-how, all the combinatorial possibilities whose realisation is offered to theory and practice?

Who most misrecognised the aforementioned concrete reality? The the­orist or the practitioner?

To speak and to act requires that we privilege only certain aspects.

Doing the thing and its theory requires two different times.

Very often the force of a thought, of an action, resides in its advance in a single direction.

Every action comprises its corresponding omissions.

Action presupposes a stubborn, limited and certain will, with the mini­mum of humour and distance, a compact adherence. The moment of action seizes all forces and silences all oppositions, striving towards its goal that, once approximately reached, will reveal the weaknesses of the action, already revealed in the eyes of a clairvoyant thought.

Consciousness - a certain consciousness in any case, even if strongly tinged with unconsciousness and ideology - is necessary for action. A slightly too full consciousness risks being paralysing at the decisive moment.

Humans and societies detest applying their theories to their practices, to explore somewhat the full play of contradictions inherent in their theories, their practices and even more so the relationship between the two. They detest even more applying to themselves the irony they exert towards others. Even when they recognise this, they do not practise it and denounce as a scandal those who strive for this exploration and denunciation.

To reach an end, if not its end, action unfolds with more violence than elegance, and it mobilises a certain fanaticism to thwart, during the heated hours, any questioning that surpasses urgent tasks.

There is not on one side logos, thought, language, poetry, theory, sight, hearing, knowledge and, on the other, praxis, action, touching, production. We can say at the most that these are two streams deriving from the same source and flowing into the same ocean. The problematic unity - and not the identity in the indifferentiation - of saying and doing has nothing to do with all the words - how derivative! - that speak the language of spiritualism or materialism, idealism or realism. The conquest of the earth and the march to the stars, the terrible and often almost silent action of speech and the power of creativity manifest this poetically productive unity, at the heart of which prosaic forces do not cease to surge.

Is every theory grey compared to the verdant tree of life? Does this colour­ation concern the forest itself, where life and theory intertwine, both bushy, and, against a ground of greyness, joyous with lightning?

The logos does not prescribe us to say: 'Εν άρχη ήν ό λόγος [In the beginning was the word]. Praxis does not make us say: Am Anfang war die Tat [In the beginning was the deed]. The logos is inseparable from praxis and praxis is said by the logos.

What in theory is glimpsed, contemplated or even clearly conceived still has a long way to go until it is practically accomplished by wind­ing roads, with struggles, relapses and approximations. This is why the world, humans and societies give us the impression of still having so much to do.

If abstract knowledge ends in failure, then what does concrete doing do?

What is said, what is thought, what is done... How to disentangle them, attentive to their specificities and their differences, their relatives and their dissimilarities?

Could we not subordinate praxis to poetry without reversing their ‘rela­tionship’? Would it be possible not to decide which of the pathways of speech-and-action - poetic, thoughtful, practical - is the most decisive? Would we accept not cutting the mystery and mechanics of interiority, the mechanics and the mystery of exteriority, to try to surpass - in what direction? - their dialectical link? Would we be ready to stop seeing in the poem the place of poetry, by finding our rhythm according to the poetry that breaks into the world - the poeticity of the world - but without experiencing it as a perpetually given mode of being? Would we support no longer under­standing poetry as a meteor that traverses the sky to fall on earth, without wishing to make it our daily bread? Do we already sense how little original and future is the distinction between (fixed) installation and (vagabond) errancy?

What does experience prove, grasped in the combined play of prolegom­ena and epilogomena?

Is it foreseeable to think and say that perhaps one day the protean force of language and doing will take over, after the internal exhaustion of reli­gion, poetry and art, politics and philosophy, after the full accomplishment of their possibilities? At this level humans would speak and sing, meet, create, manage and think, without passing through these mediations that are open to them so that they open up to what exceeds them (humans and mediations).

An act of faith, most often implicit - act and faith - is at the base of every act of thought, of any act in short.

Thought cannot cover everything: other powers and forces that precede or accompany it are also uncovering and covering. Nevertheless, thought thinks the game of being in becoming of the totality of the world, or does almost nothing.

The force of thought penetrates what is, inhabits it, until it becomes inseparable from it.

It is only at rare moments that thought becomes a behaviour assumed in its own right.

In short, the thought responsible for itself, assumed, explicit, bathes in a vague, general, implicit thought.

The origin of all great thought is lost in time.

How to think the thought that does not yet think itself, wild thought? Is it already the thought itself as an other?

To find the initiatory, aristocratic, buried lodes is one of the duties incum­bent upon us.

It is today essential to go and interrogate the ancient magical, mysti­cal, occult and esoteric traditions and make them talk. Taking up again, after the passing of leftism, the old secrets of dexterity. Revolutionarily. Continuously.

Accepting and shaking the heritage and tradition from which our thought proceeds is a task always to be accomplished.

Traditions and orders cannot be shaken like the dust of a rug so that humans, or rugs, get a new look. Animated by the great powers and informing elemental forces, the intertwining of old-and-new traditions and orders command the words and actions, the thoughts and passions, the games and omissions of homo faber, homo sapiens, homo ludens.

Thought emerges from the depths of immense anonymous symbolic activ­ity and becomes the discourse of this or that thinker, before going to die, like all the particular rivers, in the great ocean.

The theme of the common structure of the human spirit and the rela­tively reduced number of its themes demands to be specified.

We are looking for the diversified unity of the human spirit.

Will we ever succeed in constructing the typology of development and the universal and differential manifestations of thought?

All thought remains suspended in the mythological tremor of sense.

Since most of those who are presumed to be adults are presumed to be specialists in particular domains, is the thinker the specialist of presumed universality?

The thought of a thinker is offered both as a whole and in its evolution.

There are people who have played a great role in the history of thought without actually making themselves part of it.

Every thought inscribes itself into a pre-existing history and system­atic. As we cannot think the absolutely initial and primary thought, we are always in the presence of thoughts that follow one another. The history of thought, punctuated by great thinkers (who always end up as postage stamps), encompasses the history of philosophy, if one understands by philosophy - equally metaphysics - the move­ment that calls itself that and goes from Plato to Hegel. The history of thought, continuous and discontinuous, offers a succession of emer­gences, without one being able to tell whether they are or are not ‘dia­lectically’ linked. The history of thought begins with ‘pre-philosophical’, poetic and mystical forms, and continues with metaphilosophical thoughts. Properly speaking, it only begins with the logos that names and names itself.

It is very disconcerting that the history of thought forms neither a rigorous dialectical concatenation nor a free and arbitrary march.

Behind and between the glittering stars that dominate the visible scene of the theatre of thought, evolve less visible stars that often benefit from the glitter of the former.

The logic of the history of thought is unique and multiple.

Every great thinker thinks a great central thought, alone and encom­passing. This is exactly what the thinker leaves unthought (and which is, perhaps, unthinkable). The question it poses is not in them, although one could make the latter enter into it.

Through lightning flashes and moments, thinkers succeed in grasping what is - or seems to them - contrary to their thought.

size=2 color=black face="Times New Roman">What the author meant to say surpasses them and surpasses the commen­tators, who offer angular interpretations.

No thinker can say all their thought, still less those who follow them.

We can no longer represent what old thoughts and lives represented; we live the closure - the end and the continuation - of representation.

Even so, the transmission of texts in the history of thought has been made with remarkable continuity.

Hinduism and Buddhism. Taoism and Confucianism. Prophetism. Zoroastri­anism (which survived in Manichaeism). These are the great ‘visions of the world’, mystical and ethical, which ruled the Orient and Asia, sometimes fertilising the Occident - if only by the Bible - and shattered against it. Around 500 âñ, history begins to become global. In all the high places of the planet voices emerge. In India, after the Vedas, the Upanishads and yoga, the Buddha. In China, Lao-tzu and Confucius. In Palestine, the Prophets. In Persia, after the Gathas of the Avesta, Zoroaster. In Greece, the tragic poets and Presocratic thinkers. Different voices, simultaneous but appar­ently without an actual link between them, seem to converge, even when divergent. Do the parallels meet or not meet each other? At the heart of the Same?

Orphism and Pythagoreanism are like a hub connecting Orient and Occident. Then it will be Christianity’s turn.

Between Heraclitus and Parmenides ‘something’ remained in suspense.

Nothing great is done without a certain cold passion.

Nothing great is done, it seems, with humour and irony. Yet Socrates...

Since then, it is incumbent on us to constantly put to work the frank play of a dissimulated and midwifing Socratic irony.

To burn passionately with the least possible signs of passion indicates an excess of force, a faculty of concentration.

Thought seems to imply a certain humour and a certain irony, humour and irony that depend neither on certainty nor on uncertainty, nor on consciousness nor on unconsciousness. This irony and humour would be corrosive to other thoughts and to themselves.

There are also those who want to generalise ‘correct thought’, who are deprived of any sense of humour and persuaded that the ‘truth’ has a single face, no one having the right to move away from it.

The humour and accuracy of thought do not have to solve all the enigmas of the world.

No one is yet initiated into the play of an extraordinarily ironic argumentation.

Irony requires that certain words and actions must be at the same time - without apparently being under the same relation - ironic and not.

An ‘excessive’, that is to say, insufficient and presumptuous, dose of humour can prevent living as well as thinking.

Could we push the irony to the point where it would go unnoticed?

The great thinkers who interpellate us are few and are called: Heraclitus and Parmenides; Plato and Aristotle; [Augustine and Thomas]; Descartes, [Spinoza, Leibniz], Kant, Hegel; Marx and Nietzsche.

Platonism. Aristotelianism. Christianity (sometimes platonising, sometimes aristotelianising). Cartesianism. Hegelian-Marxism. These are the great visions of the world and the attitudes towards what is - which rule the history of the Occident and Europe, and the tendency for global expansion. Will we finally begin to comprehend that these thoughts became visions and realities of the world, -isms and ideologies, blazons of an eclectic, syncretic, ecumenical and planetary confusion, that all these types of thought are dead, although strongly surviving, for us to give in to a planetary thought which, more than nostalgic or backward-looking, modernist or contemporary, anticipatory or futuristic, will be thought?

Do aspirations and realisations intersect more than they counter each other? Let us accustom ourselves to record all the brilliant discoveries of Marx and Freud - revealing particularly and partially almost all social and individual determinations - to record and situate them within a larger think­ing and thought, lived and alive, active and acting whole.

size=2 color=black face="Times New Roman">Marx, Nietzsche and Freud will remain the masters of suspicion as long as we do not begin to suspect them themselves.

The case of Freud is extremely embarrassing. Without being a great thinker, Freud upsets mental structures and discovers omnipresent motiva­tions and themes, releases forces of the unconscious, shows the driving role of life drives and death drives, demonstrates certain mechanisms of eros and thanatos, tries to unmask the face of the disease under the mask of health. Psychologist and doctor, certainly, social critic in his moments, he is more than all that and, although a great man, he is nevertheless less than a great thinker.

Every thinker and author also creates their readers and detractors.

The great so-called classical texts offer an inexhaustible resistance and always inspire new explorations and interpretations.

Every text offers itself to readings and interpretations, additions and retrenchments, as a pretext.

To the writings of great thinkers are joined the writings of interpret­ers and commentators. In the becoming of the thought marked by the great thinkers is superimposed, juxtaposed or opposed the whole history of their great and small interpreters and commentators. Every thinker is encircled by commentators who open paths to them and obscure them more, always make them speak again and conceal - that is, disguise - their thought. All these works accomplish a role, perpetuate a tradition, exhaust a mission.

Even the exposition of the work of great thinkers, the exposition of their thought in a ‘systematic’ manner or the most authoritative commentaries of their texts most often transform them into superb cadavers ordered in a vast cemetery.

One never restores the thought of a thinker as they thought it (they thought it, moreover, unitarily but multiply).

We can no longer represent what ancient thoughts, historical lives and constellations represented, and this is consistent with the continuous end of the area of representation.

The great thinkers were hardly functionaries, studious professors, school­masters (they were also that, but it is another aspect of the same history). They erred greatly.

Systems of thought can be reduced to the personal life of their authors and to the different totalities of the epoch.

The biography of thinkers, the historical conditions of their appearance and social context, explored historically, psychologically and sociologi­cally, have the disadvantage of not exposing us to the danger of a ‘dialogue’ with their thought, to the possibility of an encounter. The life of a thinker cannot be so easily grasped. What is living? What is thinking? Biography covers up life as schoolchildren cover their notebooks; the immense misery and the parcel of grandeur that hides in it would shake too violently those who pretend to establish the balance sheet of an existence, which, how­ever, also demands to be considered. Sociological explorations, as impor­tant as the problem may be that touches them, habitually stop short or drown in evidence and banalities.

Very schematically, the three phases of the expansion of a thought can be described thus: the thought is ignored, fought, trivialised.

The great historically determining thinkers leave behind a summary por­trait, a coin circulating in public, a bust for parks in front of which children play and the elderly rest.

The great thoughts which rule the world can only act through misunderstandings - in a banalising and unilateral way or in many confused and eclectic multilateral ways.

Every thought transforms preceding thoughts into a prelude to its own play: by distorting and illuminating the history of thought.

The most massive thoughts are those that carry historically.

It is not enough for thinkers to be great; they must promote a direction of the world.

However, in the domain of thought also sometimes the task is: to take power (very problematical by the way).

With each thought, old and/or new, the question is posed and poses itself again: what to make of it and with it - in thought and in action?

In the vast reserve of planetary doxography we find all the defended opinions - each ‘point of view’ seems to encompass all the others - which means we still have to combine them. Because all were ‘true’. But we, having finally arrived on the other coast to indiscriminately recognise that there is neither a course of a river nor a shore, we still have before us a good number of combines and combinations.

At the height of the time of planetary technique, disturbing in itself, will a planetary thought of the play of the world succeed in deploying its poly­phonic and atonal, precise and stochastic rhythm, speaking the planetary era and circumventing the uncircumventable?

Two thousand five hundred years after the first polycentric blossoming of a prefiguration of the world thought, are we capable, by disarming the rivalries between belief and faith, knowledge and thought, action and practice, and with all the techno-scientific armature, of acceding to a planetary thought?

The planetary thought of the play of the world should also elucidate, in and through praxis, the relations between theoretical knowledge and effective action, relations that are extremely complex and in general rich in contradictions and counterfeits.

Planetary thought, speaking the play of errancy and opening itself up to the planetary era, can only attempt to be at the highest poetic and think­ing point - surpassing even what could be the alternative - archaeological and retroceding, historical and observational, prophetic - namely, speak­ing forth - and pre-emptive. Nostalgic, contemporary and, even more, anticipatory, this thought will essay itself as a globalisable and encyclo­paedic thought, in dialogue with the sciences, animating practices and being fertilised by them; a systematic and at the same time fragmentary thought, an overview and grasp of details, it may be able to connect parts and totalities, in the thinking words, the deciphering reading and the problematising writing, affirming and questioning, proving and testing, provoking and troubling, relaxing and soothing, serenely and harmoni­ously; it will endeavour to relate contraries to their unity, to their reciproc­ity, to their wavering, to their oscillation, to their struggle, and to their connection, by recording the simultaneities, the breaks and the displace­ments of equilibrium; without privileging absolutely one plan in relation to another, since each great centre constitutes a point of departure, liquefying everything - and the All out of nothing - and, scrutinising its enigma, it will butt against the unnameable and the unplayable - always a sketch in development - constrained to assume its successes and to accept its failures, touched by the suspicion that the unsuspected is escaping it and not even suspecting it.

The planetary thought of the play of the world does not tend to create a (more or less closed) system but aims at the elaboration of an open (coherent and exploded) systematic, a methodological (polyscopic and unitary) prob­lematic and not a doctrine; it opens itself to all questions and, questioning indifference, it encounters difference.

Trample on planetary thought. You are planetary thought.

It is when it becomes a question of life or death that thought thinks.

How could thought liberate itself, not only from philosophy, but also from thought - to think wider, deeper, closer and further?

When thought thinks it is at the same time, while being neither one nor the other, governmental and oppositional, central and marginal, accepting and transgressive, visible and invisible.

Rivers disappear into the sea. The thinker - liberated - in ‘the’ thought.

The thinker is this displaced (atopos) being who addresses themself to everyone and no one.

Does not the thinker who is in accord with the world that transforms itself - but what is the secret of the mix that engulfs acceptance, renuncia­tion, resignation, revolt and revolution? - let themself be overtaken on the left? On condition that they are extremely vigilant and thrown into the future.

Isn’t it a kind of unconscious collective thought, mythological and technological - individually and world-historically - that seems to lead the world?

If thought were and remained ‘consequential’ and anticipatory, nothing would be constructed: not churches, not revolutions, not states, not families, not systems. The thought that kills the lucidity that kills, can it be founding and foundational beyond the foundation?

How to make coexist what cohabits anyway: critique and acceptance?

Thought recedes before what would render it impossible, humanly and socially.

Those who let themselves be manipulated by thoughts then manipulate explosives themselves.

Does the sacrifice that is presently required of thought aim at an augmen­tation of resistance to a new test?

Thought retrocedes, tramples, advances.

Work begins by being this productive and producing, positive and concrete negativity, which extorts nature by using mediations and instruments, which is necessary for the production and reproduction of human life. It tends to become an abstract negativity in and through which humans exteriorise their life by alienating it and gaining it by losing it. Taken as a quasi-autonomous dimension, it builds works that the human, tool-fabricating animal and worker, produces and consumes, by covering the world through the network and scaffolding of its technical fabrications. Being a species of play right from the start, could work - beyond the distinction of working time and free time, interested activity and leisure - become a hard game?

How do needs - natural and produced - move humans, how do they open to them dimensions and orientations (or are opened by them) and how do they enter, as soon as the human enters the world, into the world of the productive work of the world?

In original and elementary work, know-how, knowing and doing already coincide and separate.

To be moved by a work, an orientation, a goal, a task, passes for necessary, so it is necessary to know that one cannot pass it by.

Work resides in a production that involves reflection.

We work so we can rest, and we rest so we can work.

Marx departs from a radical analysis of the alienation of work and workers to bring his critique into the vision of a completely non-alienated society. Without explicitly asking himself whether this prediction itself is not part of alienation, he recognises that ‘the suppression of self-alienation follows the same path as self-alienation’ and that ‘communism is not as such the goal of human evolution, the form of human society’. ‘This movement,’ he adds, ‘that in thought we already know as self-suppressing, will traverse in reality a very hard and extensive process. But we must consider as real progress that we have, from the beginning, acquired an awareness as much of the limited character as of the purpose of the historical movement, and a con­sciousness that surpasses this movement’ (Political Economy and Philosophy). Practical materialism wants to be materialistic and practical; it makes eco­nomic motivation the predominant motivation of all human history; does not his theory and action aim at liberation from reigning materialism and the liberation of the human as material of work? ‘The reign of liberty begins in fact only where work conditioned by necessity and external finality ceases; it is therefore, according to its nature, beyond the sphere of material production... The shortening of the working day is the fundamental condi­tion’ (Capital). Thus opening the doors to a ‘beyond of the sphere of material production’ - although this beyond was always characterised, for the whole history, history of alienation, as an idealistic and ideological complement - doesn’t Marx advocate a kind of work, that has never yet existed, permitting the generic human and worker to ‘find pleasure in the play of their own bodily and intellectual forces’ (ibid.)?

In short, is not the ideal of workers idleness and play?

Will the noblest creations of the human spirit, as they are pompously called, born in leisure and superabundance, moult and be reborn in a post-industrial civilisation of abundance and leisure? To pose the problem in this way is to rather artificially dissociate work and leisure, abundance and indigence.

Production no longer imitates prototypes or models, no longer creates according to them. It produces - not without fluctuation - beyond realism and idealism, forms or the formless, modes of being and exploiting, ‘objects’ of any kind, momentarily frozen and fundamentally unpredictable. In gen­eral, moreover, there are no more evident frameworks for human activity.

That creations, productions and games can surpass and subjugate crea­tors, producers and players remains always and again to be relearned and experienced.

Why does the human, each human, want to dominate?

Do all interhuman relations remain relations of force? Based on the strug­gle that aspires to power?

The ‘dialectic’ that opposes and unites force and weakness - strong and weak - gives victory to the strong worked by the weak, to the weak that possess immense force.

Very frequently two partner-adversaries mutually intimidate each other.

Letting go can constitute an excellent offensive and defensive weapon, prompting the other to advance into the desert to break against its own force.

The human has not only to struggle against others, but also against itself.

All the combats of humans are destined to satisfy insatiable and generally unacknowledged desires.

Both defenders and attackers are bound to the same game. Of two adversaries in presence and struggle, both can partially and partly reveal the game that holds them through their dialogue and their contradictory combat. Nevertheless, each party does not simply bring to light a part of the total game.

Combat and struggle, polemical and agonistic, aim at power over the other, an acknowledged victory, engage in a competition that respects and breaks the rules of the game, appeal to the public and come crashing against their own success.

The master-slave couple confront each other, under different names, throughout universal history, on the terrain of work and power, manage­ment, direction and execution.

To recognise the warlike beauty of the enemy army that is advancing against you and that will bring you down, or that you are going to bring down, is not given to everyone.

There is never and nowhere an absolute winner and a definitive victory.

Imbeciles believe themselves victorious after every debate or combat.

One triumphs over an adversary - if one ever triumphs - not by leaving them outside, as an independent power, but if one succeeds in dissolving and assimilating the adverse force by transforming it.

What we elude takes its revenge and then eludes us.

Being for or being against someone or something means staying riveted to the same power that sometimes demands, with a particular insistence, to be defended or fought - attacks always supposing defenders and the defences of the attackers.

The play of unleashed violence and one-upmanship, the fanaticism of the new, the maximalism of the most and the ultra, the precipitation and haste permit what must arise by arising in breaking what enchains it; once arisen, it will become a link in the chain.

The play of the most fatalistic passivity, the fixation on what appears unchangeable contribute greatly to the provocation of the contrary, although they accomplish the role of the guardian of what is, guardian who helps to transport what they have to guard to somewhere else when the house is about to collapse.

Do all ‘consciousness’ and all ‘will’ aim at the death of others? Others that we need so much?

If your defence system is limited to a single side, woe to you.

Offensive and defensive are inextricably combined, every struggle need­ing both, for frontal battle and guerrilla warfare.

The desire for vengeance keeps the human turned to resentment and avenges itself even where one believes to have overcome it.

Declared war is the most exoteric - and often anecdotal - aspect of the much more elemental and powerful forces of struggle and conflict, antago­nism and combat.

The law of the strongest and that of the weakest are interwoven into one another.

There is never a full settling of all accounts.

Does single combat, in or ‘out’ of the general melee, and ‘total’ conflicts, seek above all glory?

The struggle for prestige is one of the most stubborn struggles.

Culpability and aggressiveness are connected by a common play.

To govern, it is necessary to be possessed by an active and extroverted force, to be inhabited without too much questioning by goals and ends to be realised - through compromises and approximations - by being turned towards success, not repudiating any means - especially violent ones - for imperfectly achieving it.

The contestation of all that is and revolt, negation and revolutions, the questioning and the dreams of an alterity, cover a surface and advance into depth, and, without departing from a certain naivety and certain illusions whose need dwells in humans, moved even by the propellers of utopia, pos­sess their ‘truth’, ‘beauty’ and ‘goodness’.

Love-eroticism-sexuality remain caught in the net of a finite combinatory.

It is to the totality - in all its forms - that sexuality, eroticism and love, as well as their children and their children’s children, aspire.

Nowadays the need for tenderness seems more frustrated than that of sexuality.

It is necessary to recognise: the association of calm tenderness and violent desire is dissociative.

Without the movement of tenderness and its corollary, aggressive move­ment, two people could not encounter or love each other, not even make love.

Love feeds on the fundamental contrariety that opposes and binds.

In all small and great adventures, in the small and big world, there will be availability and its loss, accomplishment and privation, fixation and renewal.

Love itself is stronger than the person loved; however, it needs a polariser and a catalyst.

Love is not deceptive because it does not keep what it promised. As we hope, wait, always watch for love, it disabuses us and forces us to experience it as sexual violence, affective tenderness, fraternal friendship, separating opposition. It is it and the situation to which it compels us that are much stronger than the characters who meet and separate.

For a human encounter, friendly, erotic, to be liveable and, in time, dura­ble, it must be based on a common language and practice and inscribed in the perspective of the future.

With each new love one retells and reshapes one’s life.

One must know not to sacrifice too much to the myth of total transpar­ency between the members of the couple.

Having the generosity to give the other the attention they deserve.

To open oneself to love, one has to overcome self-love a little.

Seduction is more and different than a little psychological game.

Man and woman join and disjoin, struck by the powers of eros and than­atos, forces that are much more than human, joining peace and discord, harmony and war. The search for being, however, only encounters beings.

The desire of the other being aims at the suppression of a lack of being.

Copulation unites the members of a couple, makes them be together, is the is of the couple, the copula that proposes itself. Every being is infinitive and transitive. The sexual act, coitus (synousia), union in the ‘presence’, tends to become a doing and an affair of representation in the face of absence.

Eroticism wanders/errs: for a long time, the class struggle has encountered the struggle of the sexes. Today, woman is becoming more and more virilised and man is feminised. It is the woman who seems to be at the forefront of the contemporary world. Will the play of the sexes lead to a community without sexes, to the introduction of the androgynous (bisexual), the establishment of a neutral being (asexual), or the reign of ‘gynaecoid’ beings?

Marx, the thinker of historical nature becoming technics, went so far as to consider love as a form of labour; according to him ‘the division of labour was originally only the division of labour in the sexual act’ (German Ideology). Marx advocates the sublation of work and the division of work as they have existed; the biological future of humanity should therefore be ensured by other activities; sexuality, too, can only be surpassed.

Love has become a doing centred on representation. It surpasses all pres­ence. The reproduction of the species falls under the blows of the general rhythm of production. It is to be expected that production - producing ‘mate­rial’ goods and ‘spiritual’ goods (good being inseparable from bad, as well as the material from the spiritual) - will also extend to the production of human beings. Eros and eroticism seem surpassed. After the disintegration and liberation of the energetic kernel of ‘matter’, the artificial production of ‘life’ must - that is to say will - come. Technical production will take charge of the reproduction of the species. Technics - which may not be a simple human creation - will technically create sentient beings endowed with reason. Will they be metaphysical animals?

Women are still a means of communication between men.

Girls with sad eyes and slightly heavy thighs still attract non-chivalrous knights on the quest for the Grail.

The Don Juanian quest, marked by its different components - ‘impotence’, ‘homosexuality’, etc. - is at once nostalgia for distance, decentring, renewed ecstasy, and hope for the encounter of a close partner, in the constant change of partners. In any case, it is grappling with the masks of death.

What unites a couple? Sexuality? No. Affection? No. Intelligence? No. The three together? No. So?

What ties and unties beings [les etres] escapes them completely.

So man and woman managed not to hate each other too much, in their joining uniting them with the world that separates by uniting.

Will a kind of complicity in duplicity, a certain warm friendship, a tender and certain companionship, succeed in surmounting love-passion and the marriage of reason, by surviving them?

Friendship, harmony in philia, is much less a nostalgic tension than eros.

Instead of dreaming of an unparalleled couple, is it possible to construct a couple - a way of ‘sharing’ the world - slowly and efficiently? Since the myth and the fabric of love-passion tend to be surpassed by love-friendship, love-companionship.

We are always seeking the realisation of unrealisable erotic and sexual figures.

We would aspire to externalise our most secret desires, were it not...

The call for erotic follies does not eliminate the contrary decrees.

It is always an inaccessible imaginary that we pursue erotically that pur­sues us.

The first contact with a woman or with a city is filled with trouble and enchantment. Attraction can also take on other aspects.

Desire is always inscribed in a hollow mould: it wants to repair a lack and lacks it. One wants what one no longer has or not at all, and one misses it.

This derision that strikes the sexual is part of its game.

It is as a wonderful misunderstanding that love is understood to provoke agreement and disagreement.

Love remains torn between unity, duplicity, multiplicity.

As no being can be the whole of being - being in its entirety, the whole of the world - all people - all beings - encounter only partial beings, parcels of being, which leads to the erotic combinatory which demands new games, especially today, where new rules of the erotic game are waiting.

Does eroticism exceed human forces?

Exercise of anxiety and exercise of sexuality feed off each other.

Sexual anguish gives us wings and pulls the rug out from under our feet.

Humans don’t only seek out sexuality, almost all also flee and avoid it.

Prostitution, under the guise of the most wanton mercantilism, conceals the powers of exchange and of gift; what is exchanged is hardly love for money: the prostitute does not give herself, she refuses herself.

In the sexual act, desire is liberated and ‘one’ liberates oneself.

The peaceful coexistence of two beings who have surpassed their nerv­ousness can constitute a fertile terrain for their blossoming, or even the blossoming of their divergences.

Once women have surmounted this phase of revolt, they will become open partners.

Life is bigger than love. The world is bigger than life.

Every erotic point sends us back to a counterpoint.

The separated halves hopelessly and hopefully seek each other.

Eccentric love can also, for a greater or lesser period, turn around a central pivot.

No man - no woman - can love all women - all men - a single one of them - at the same instant.

Woman possesses, namely is possessed by, that chasm where every erec­tion will perish victoriously, in tumbling downwards.

Woman transports and supports in the heart of her body the nourishing and murderous opening. She wants to be more actively masculine. Man advances and penetrates: his prominence is forceful and fragile. He wants to be able to abandon himself to female passivity.

Man is forced to confront within his own being his own femininity, the woman her own masculinity.

Desire being maddening, it is dammed up.

So many embellishments of need, desire, envy. Not that they are perfectly superfluous.

In erotic life, as elsewhere, one can only lose possibilities, occasions.

Erotic discomfort causes this trembling and these inhibitions that fuel erotic life, this accomplishment of always delayed desire. Awaiting the sur­prise and a better tomorrow.

They were seeking excitement insofar as it was tolerable to them.

Can love realise desire remaining desire?

Within the movements of sex lie the section and the separation.

Even two beings who believe they love each other do not know what passes between them, through them.

Love, eroticism, sexuality, while seeking the exception, fail to escape the ordinances of seriality.

We are all torn between nostalgia and the attraction of home (unifying, stable, secure and sometimes stifling) and the anticipation and the attrac­tion of adventure (fluid, opening and often dispersing and spreading).

Home and adventure can both become moving and emotional [mouvants et emouvants], escape or routine.

Love, relation between private persons, appears most often antagonistic towards public things.

Could man and woman meet and live erotically and amicably as brother and sister? But how would the other attractions of the woman play out: the mother and the little girl, the lover, the prostitute and the comrade?

Do they stay with the same partner until they have found ‘better’?

One always marries into the family: the man marries his mother, his sister or his daughter, or a combination of them.

Sex appears as the last refuge of adventure and convenience - all in all - opening. Even when it bores us, it forces us to pursue it, without us knowing what rules agree with its game.

It is in the course of time that love must be born and die and be reborn in other forms. A shared love dies: of satiety? Does contrariety permit ful­filment and saturation? An unshared love dies too: of starvation? Is not contrariety also nourishing?

The couple has become the fanatically problematic preoccupation and obsession of the modern world - an abstract and mediated, if not inverted world, in relation to what base? - it has become a small world of problems opening and closing the partners and adversaries whom it unbinds and rebinds - really and imaginarily, more or less passing or enduring, by centring and decentring them - to the problem of the world, vitalising them and stifling them. But another constellation has not yet emerged.

The couple often wants to be a kind of fortress protecting them against the world, underestimating the fact that the two flanks that form its bastion reinforce and weaken it. As if there could be bastions that could withstand the world. The world animates and mines from the inside more than from the outside - if this distinction can still be made - all the fortifications, rein­forces and weakens their defenders and their attackers, who are all as much inside as outside of strong castles - castles of cards.

The couple and little family suffer modern instability, disquiet, dissatisfac­tion and at the same time constitute the refuge against this instability, this disquiet, this dissatisfaction.

style='font-size:10.0pt;line-height: 112%'>The familiar and the obscene attract us equally.

Each member of a couple wants to affirm itself at the expense of the other.

The difficulty for the couple - relative remedy for massive solitude - consists of being free with and not against the other.

Confrontation, the ordeal fortifying and weakening the couple, subjects it to the attraction and control of the elsewhere.

The couple ‘redeems’ its coupling if they do something together.

There is no prototype of a successful couple, no paradigmatic couple.

Social and societal, socialist and communal forms that can offer refuge to love-eroticism-sexuality have not yet been found.

Sexuality - the weak point of the human structure - does not aim so much at a positive satisfaction as to liberate itself from a need, to abolish a state of tension.

Is curiosity the precious instrument - of high precision - of eroticism? Goaded by and goading this inextinguishable desire that we do not know and yet we hope to accomplish.

Erotic errancy, pursuing its sexual and imaginary quest physically, psychi­cally and mentally, manifests a need for dazzling sensuality, mollifying ten­derness, communicative speech. By experimenting with barriers and barred roads on which barred subjects engage.

The child as well as the man and the woman desire to possess the phallus. But no one is or has the phallus. Because it is not empirical.

Love is stronger than us: in attacking and withdrawing.

Sex and corporality in general have multiple equivalences.

Often one wants to do everything with a particular being.

Jealousy is one of the forms of excitement and homosexuality.

There is a part of exoticism in eroticism.

Is there a normal sexuality?

Erotic investigations are also a matter of vocabulary and syntax.

Can a man, a woman, a child bring salvation? They can in any case con­tribute, in time, to the unstable equilibrium, in a moving system of complex coordinates.

Is woman the central problem for man and vice versa

If man is the problem for woman and woman for man, it could lead us on the path to another confrontation of the sexual problem.

The ballet steps of the erotic game are strictly regulated. When one advances, the other moves back, and vice versa.

One loves love as one wants the will.

Life does not stop at the number two.

Loving also means helping.

The obsession with death incites the sexual obsession that makes it momentarily forgotten. Arrhythmic erotic practices leave a taste of ash.

In love beings wait to attain what they are and, even more, what they are not. Love denies limited beings. Death will render them into brutal nega­tion, to the unlimited void, skinning them.

The greatest power of love implies the greatest power of death.

The quest for faith becomes religion and church, creativity work of art, revolution party and state, questioning thought system, amorous conquest family. What becomes of the movement of death?

Love desires totality and stumbles against particularity. Death makes par­ticularity and totality coincide.

style='font-size:10.0pt;line-height: 112%'>The place of love is the couple, the family, the adventure. What is the place of death?

Death can never be looked in the face. Doesn’t it have one?

Tons of toneless things were written about death. To hold what is dead is otherwise difficult.

What to think and what to say about death, which remains unthink­able and unsayable - once one were not content with the generalities and particularities by approaching it from the angle of exteriority, of otherness - snatching us from every directly living, speaking and thinking dwelling, to plunge us into a dwelling from which others live and die, speak and think?

Even death aims for survival. The cult of the dead and of memory are its forms.

It is less death that preoccupies us than the time that leads to it.

Life is only possible by destroying what destroys the appetite for life.

The human being, once born, aspires to life: it seems to desire and want to conserve and propagate it. Carried away by vitality. Hunger and love lead to the production and reproduction of life, binding, through the play of ambivalent love (attraction) and hate (repulsion), each human to others and to other humans, in the agreement and the antagonism between self­conservation and conservation of the species. So manifests the drive - or the drives - of life. The human, however, also aspires to return to a state anterior and posterior to life: drawn in by death, it also aspires to it. Carried away by mortality. Aggressiveness - already bound to the effort of the con­servation of life and accompanying love - leads to the destruction of other lives and the destruction of the human by itself. So manifests the drive - or the drives - of death. The human is consequently seized by the desire to be and to persevere in being, and by the desire not to be and of non-being, these desires combining and also falling into their opposite: fear, refusal. Is the human, then, crossed by two - or two groups of - drives, one vital and conservative, the other mortuary and destructive (Freud), plaything of a bipolar play? Or is the self- and hetero-destructive drive only the reverse, the negative, the wounded result of the conservative and positive drive, life itself turning against itself? (Conservative, moreover, they both are: progres­sively moving forwards, they are no less reactionary, effecting a return to what precedes and follows the deployment aiming at the satisfaction of the need - either the need posed as vital, or from need tending to rest in death - that is to say, a return to the lack of need and the tension it creates.) We can admit the duality of drives or seek to establish their unity - ramified and circular - or try to subsume each under the other. We can see life and death; we can grasp the unifying process, the closed circuit, life-death-life, etc. (life being in death and vice versa); we can comprehend life, which includes death and continues stronger than it, or death which includes life and con­tinues stronger than it. Is it not better to try to elucidate the junction and the difference, the agreements and the antagonisms, the combinations and the reversals, the fusions and the complementarities, the action, the reac­tion and the interaction of life drives (which also signify their contrary) and death drives (which shake the living), inextricably entangled - though often differentiated - within the organism, the psychism and organisation of signs that constitute, vivify, mortalise and kill the human being?

Whether the death drive is an autonomous drive, or an opposing and powerful derivative of the life drive, is ultimately secondary, since it power­fully manifests itself.

To privilege only the surging of presence, the compact, the solid, the ascending current, appears as playing the game of life, without for that escap­ing death. To privilege the rupture, the crack, the break, the fault, appears as playing the game of death, without ceasing for that to belong to life. It’s up to us to extract the necessary learnings and lessons. It is up to us to link the different aspects and the multiple functions of the unique game - with several variants - which links life and death.

Quite often one would not want to be. In any case one could not be nothing.

Nostalgia for prenatal life and life close to the mother’s breast, the desire to fuse with the One-All, the desire for the extinction of all desire, the abo­lition of tensions, the obtaining of a state of serene saturation, the solution of all disquiet and all struggle, in quietude, in peace and in salutary dissolu­tion, the anticipation of future absorption in being-nothingness, move the double-and-unique play of life-and-death.

Everyone would like to die to rest and be reborn regenerated. Like the Phoenix.

Dying without dying so as not to have to live and to die resolves strictly nothing.

By bringing the hatred of the world against oneself or self-hatred against the world, one opens the door to suicide.

To a certain point it is necessary to kill in oneself life and desire to con­tinue living. By avoiding killing oneself - ‘existentially’ - to no longer risk living and dying. Death as protection escapes just as much as life.

By desiring, the human desires to suppress its desire, to abolish tension, to find satisfaction. The desire for omnipotence is by far the most tenacious, and aspires equally, but very obscurely, for its annihilation.

It may be that the attachment to life becomes gradually a little more problematic.

Humans do not choose their entry into the game. Can they decide to leave it, if they cannot endure the hardness of existence? Must every human live? Without being able to answer the question: for what? Is there only one - philosophically and more than philosophically - serious problem: suicide? This one, who claims however to surpass life, can they not also be surpassed? Do they not remain too attached to life, do they not show too much disappointment and greed, do they not remain a prisoner of the vicious and infernal circle by which overvaluation and devaluation, appetite for and fear of life and death join, complementing each other and cancelling each other out? Don’t they hypostasise hope and despair at the same time? For serene suicides are extremely rare, after a life lived with its fullnesses and emptinesses, at the moment where lassitude takes over and where any future is blocked. To quit life voluntarily without extreme tension can be a high possibility after a trip on the high seas, as a deserved rest. But this type of chosen death is not yet on the agenda. The days that we have to live, no one can actually live them as living among the dead or as dead among the living, for our experience of death is ‘infinitely’ more approximative and illusory than that of life. Even aspiring for a prenatal and posthumous life - sucked up by them - we are still prisoners of life. Even when living upside down. Every human being can only experience - like everyone else, or almost - the difficulty of being, passing ups and downs, trying to overstep one’s unhappy consciousness and assailed by one’s unconscious. Would it be better to learn to live - and die - without reason to live? In this case, it would not be a ques­tion of affirming or denying existence, of supporting it or not, but of being carried away by it.

‘Voluntary’ death, suicide, is the example of the extreme point of the unity of contraries, the strongest ambivalence towards life and death, fears and desires. Would the suicide have desired not to have to die? But could they desire the desire of life?

If one were totally, that is to say as much as possible, ready to die, one would also be ready to live.

Strange, this feeling that conquers humans: to live and to cease living are experienced as imaginary solutions, existence being elsewhere. What is called life imposes itself and withdraws. The human can neither live nor cease living.

Memento mori is a call launched to be often forgotten.

One dies already, before dying for good, in a provisory manner, per­forming as a test, in this play of repetition that precedes the play played for good.

Convinced that we experience life, how then do we experience death?

Life watches over death.

The prestige of those who will die soon exists.

The point where life coincides with death is always fleeting.

It exists as a contemporaneity of the living and the dead.

The dead being is not nothing or rather it is something with which we maintain a relation.

Was it principally death and the dead that fuelled the dreams of demonic revenants?

Death kills both the particular as well as the absolute, and lets wounded life continue its course.

Death is a closure of chance, although it can present the very opposite of misfortune.

There were soldiers in the old days who went on the attack, in the oppos­ing camps, to the cry of: Viva la muerte!

The point of view of life on death and the point of view of death on life communicate.

By losing it, it’s not just about earning a living but also death.

Behind and in all powers and forces stands, disguised, death.

The already dead can die once again, if not several times, and resuscitate in different ways.

The living and the survivors believe they are right and take revenge on those who are no longer alive, the dead take revenge on those who are not yet dead.

Great powers and elemental forces are not born as play, nor of play, but in the play.

From games of language to human games, games of love and death, from natural games to political, bloody and boring games, from sacred games to artistic games, everything signals to us ‘the’ game.

The play of each game of elemental forces and great powers is regulated - up to and including its transgressions, except perhaps those that are extremely rare and unheard of -, conforms to typical structures, likely to be classified within a coherent structure that underpins all games, constitutes an ensemble of conventions and a combination of possibilities. Also, language and thought, work and struggle, love and death, as well as special games, all of them, as well as magic, myths and religion, poetry and art, politics, philosophy, science and technology, rules and openings of games that are played through them and above all the game which contains them and which slips away.

The game plays itself, through the diversity of acceptations of this term, in ambiguity. What is its specific difference? Precisely its globality and its multivocity, since it embraces all the great powers and all the elementary forces of the world. With radicality, steadiness and flexibility, the style of the game, its general look, can be graspable by an oriented and methodical thought that accepts experiencing it, as an ensemble composed of several elements, multiple combinations; to carry it to articulated language it is necessary to grasp it as a whole, without neglecting its parts and its aspects, its faces and its backs.

The place and the time of the game are not only situated on the lands and locales of the games, at the level of all the particular games, but are placed and glide through the world and, still more precisely, give site and rhythm to the game of the world, commanded by ‘it’.

To play also means to move, to function easily: the key plays well in the lock, what does not join exactly: the woodwork has play.

There is no common Indo-European name for designating the game. Among the Greeks, culture, education and training - paideia - and child’s play - paidia - were associated and not only as the highest leisure activ­ities of free humans. The play was first called ludus - training for study, combat, competition - among the Latins (see ludic, allusion, illusion, collusion), to follow the drift of lightness and to be supplanted by jocus - play of words, joke - which gave the French jeu - game. In the group of Germanic languages, Anglo-Saxon knows the words plega and spelian: see English play and German Spiel. The word ‘game’ and the game itself imply a very large semantic multivalence and an immense field of appli­cation, transposing and transcribing themselves on several, on all regis­ters, obliging us to take into consideration and to keep in sight all the play of the game and games, all the collusions, everything that unfolds, everything that can unfold and is conceived as unfolding as a game, that is, everything.

The play of the same word, which names two contraries, is frequent: schole signifies in Greek school (studious) and leisure (idle), ludus designates the play and the school.

Play is not the inverse of work, the other of the serious; it encompasses both.

The game is a struggle for and representation of, struggle and representa­tion can be combined, the game containing every struggle and every rep­resentation and surpassing them, being at the source of every combat, every production, every reproduction.

Children imitate adults and adults children. So everyone enters the game: by illusion (in-lusio)?

It is through play that the child - the father of the man - is individualised and socialised. Play is the work of the child and could become that of the human. Animals also play, but our decoding of their play is still very crude.

Is not all education a formative process in which the child is taught what games it can or should play and how?

The play of the child possesses at the highest point spontaneity and exuberance, fantasy and gravity, creative impulse and destructive force, poe- ticity and artistic gifts, intuition and sense of questioning. Few know how to safeguard and develop these qualities in banalised, socialised adulthood, without falling into infantilism.

Children’s games are similar to those of time, or rather time plays as chil­dren play, which Heraclitus already knew. The play is also related to the fire that can be lit, extinguished and lit again. Children play forbidden games. In playing they are afraid and love to be afraid. They believe in their games without believing entirely. They take them seriously, adhere to them, and at the same time they mock them, make fun of them, remain distanced.

Children and humans - little humans and big children - open their play­things to see what is inside, break them, break themselves and mature in incompletion.

Children are irresistibly drawn to forbidden games.

It is not only children, lovers, fighters, poets, artists and thinkers who know the starry hours. Even those without star participate in the play that connects us to the stars and provokes disasters.

The child who plays is not necessarily infantile. Infantilism is a trait of big children and adults, which our epoch accentuates with a mortal seriousness, both in banter and in fanaticism.

Play involves sociality and cooperation and reinforces them.

Simulation is one of the components of play.

The balance of justice and the balance of chance distribute shares and fates, rights and wrongs, ruled by laws.

Play involves persons ‘and’ masks, masquerades and disguises, roles and functions, imitations and models, simulacra and scenery, intrigues and rules; it does not distort the play of reality: it plays it.

Civilisation is a ritualised and codified game. Certain games predominate and are epochally imposed.

Sacred at its origins, the play establishes little by little its own sacredness.

The game is not only expenditure: it is above all productive.

Does not playing come back to betting on a piece of hope?

All societies regulate games, encouraging some, tolerating or banning others, themselves obeying a gaming system.

All play aims for more, to obtain and lead to less.

The game - agonal and polygonal and bringing out agon and agonia, struggle and anguish - mixes, to their confusion, the superfluous and the necessary. The threads that connect the players, the springs and the secrets of the game, put them into play and into question and no one can withdraw from the play. And does not every play imply feint?

In play, spontaneity and organisation are inextricably linked at the heart of a governing code.

The game is a trial.

To take the wrong role is part of the play. Whatever one does, one plays.

Mischance only consumes chance.

Is play necessarily a fast action, circumscribed in space-time? Is it not rather a rhythmic, rhythming and rhythmed movement?

The game can conjugate the tensest effort with the greatest indifference.

All institutions function as a game. All the gears are playing.

Game wreckers are only playing an ‘other’ game.

Not respecting fair play, distorting the play, is in the eyes of communities much more forgivable than breaking the play, namely a play.

We do not renounce any game; we exchange one game for another.

The game plays with the difference of the worthy and the unworthy by confusing their roles; it even plays on their specificities and, recognising them, confuses us, that is to say, strikes us with astonishment.

There are socially accepted games, tolerated games, provided they are not played in public, and forbidden games; the latter, played to their final conse­quence, end catastrophically.

One can also play inside a play.

Competitive and sporting games, games of chance and skill, games and festivals based on the simulacrum, games that dominate vertigo and the call of the void - these games can be combined - are the most broadly visible forms of games and play.

The game is most often considered a secondary power. But compared to what primary power?

The play unites partners and opponents, the cautious and the reckless, and often confuses them.

Isn’t one playing to risk rather than to win? One certainly wants to win, but at the same time one loves to be around the danger of losing. Play is oriented towards success and fascinated by failure.

The game unites what counts and what does not count.

The game embraces wisdom and stupidity, ‘true’ and ‘false’, ‘good’ and ‘bad’, ‘beautiful’ and ‘ugly’. From the outset, it transcends logic, ethics and aesthetics, by implicating them.

In the play that keeps the players tied together, they try to calculate their chances, provoke destiny, while waiting for the deadline.

The collective humanity of tomorrow will principally have to play five games: the cybernetisation of thought, the domestication of atomic energy, the artificial creation of life, the biopsychic restructuring of the human, the fitting out of the planet. With much back and forth - setting in motion the play of reactive formations — the big children will con­tinue to play with technically exploited thought and natural powers, with life, psychism and historical societies. Who will be able to say if it is playing with fire?

How do chance and necessity meet? A throw of the dice and a great number of dice throws, don’t they at once follow chance [hasard] - a word that comes from the Arab name for dice, an-zah - and necessity? For if each throw is completely independent from the next or from the previous one, in the long run all possible cases appear the same number of times, all chances tending to equalise according to the - probabilistic - law of large numbers.

Primally, many future [futur] games served to predict the future [avenir], the game of time. Initially divinatory, these activities only then became games, in the restricted sense of the term, by which one tries to predict the aleatory flow with the calculation of probabilities.

Play a little - until exhaustion - with the possible combinations of search­ing and finding, not searching, not finding, etc., etc.

Those who contemplate the wheel of fortune, and those who base their hopes on it, generally ignore those calculations of the calculation of proba­bilities that are called the theory - mathematical - of the ruin of the players.

Games of skill and chance, tactical and strategic games, codified, obeying rules - where one can trick, bluff and even cheat - rely on an exchange of information and aim for a gain. The calculation of probabilities and aleatory combinatorics can seize them, their offensive and defensive combats can be measured and to some extent predicted, any approach to games remains nevertheless stochastic, that is, conjectural, and every decision aleatory. Thus, what depends on the players and what does not depend on them, meets and intertwines, to form the knot of the game. Certainly, one can build machines that would play certain games against any adversary and win through calculation. But if one complicates the rules of the play to the extreme, one would checkmate the calculation.

In every play there is an aleatory partition that can sometimes be calcu­lated mathematically.

The game or rather the games are supported by the calculation of prob­abilities, which studies the possibilities and combinations using matrices, vectors and permutations. The games, if not the game, are equally taken charge of by the strategy that studies and calculates the chances of games, fair or not, determined or not. These two kinds of calculation, one calculat­ing, the other calculated by the adversaries who use it, aim to block chance as much as possible, to control the aleatory: they thus play to dominate the games, dominated by the game which shows and hides itself, dwells and passes.

After having played so many effective games, parents of children will perhaps be able to devote themselves to some fictional games.

Believing, desiring and most often wanting to win, humans, deprived of the hopes that they believed well founded, do not know, when they lose, to whom to impute their bad luck and imagine that there was a misdeal in the distribution of cards. Winning also makes you lose your head and losing makes you stupid (the inverse is not totally excluded).

Playing ball and bowls, with balls and balloons, on the surface of the sphere, in the air and in the water, making hoops spin, children playing adults and adults playing children experience the cyclic power of the round and the ring and are knotted by the same knot of the coiled strap that grips them in its play.

To see only play is to play badly, that is to say, very little. To see only error is to err greatly, that is to say, meanly.

Luck plays itself - loses itself and wins itself - in the play.

Every human activity is not pure play but impure play.

Among all the fascinations, the fascination of the game is particularly fascinating.

In the game is not only manifested the desire to win but also, if not more strongly, there emerges a need to lose. Because if one plays for a long time, the chance of losing one’s winnings increases, and the loss relieves the player.

What manifests as free must be rooted in a much larger network of games.

The player respects and despises conventions. With a tense casualness.

Not content with the given or the product, the game claims the excessive.

For the play to be thrilling - if it has to be - it has to be almost equally aleatory for the parties involved. In this sense, bullfighting is an unequal play, a rigged spectacle where the human - with minimal risks and without being able to lose in general - puts the beast to death in a cowardly way.

Winning on two, if not on several, tables at a time strongly tempts humans.

Are there plays more serious and decisive than others? Those that directly concern life and death?

The decision serves the play which also serves indecision.

Chance escapes will and knowledge. It is what is not (yet).

Nobody can pull the pin on the game - killing game.

The play also includes disillusion, disenchantment.

Combining calculation and chance, expectation of luck and conjuration of bad luck, the play, whether played with passion or coldness, aims to win - and it happens to lose - parts and totalities.

In the game of life, rules, moves and ripostes are much more confused than in other - more codified - games.

Almost as much as bad luck, luck is hard to bear. Would the place of play be the interweaving of forgetting and waiting, the suspense?

The thirst for risk throws us into the play that provokes always ‘new’ feelings.

When there are nine chances out of ten to miss, one can count on the tenth.

Prestidigitators and fairground juggles also participate in the play of the world.

After the era of creation and genius came the era of production, reproduc­ibility and suspicion; will the era of play come next?

Religion and poetics, politics and ethics, logic and ludic rules claim to normatively govern what pertains to them - and the rest - demanding the subjection, freely agreed, to the application of the system.

If we do not learn to read the play that connects the effective and fictive, useful and futile, we will understand nothing about the play of the human, partner of the play of the world. Not only is play neither - uniquely - a particular activity - playful, ludic - nor is it - principally - a particular modal­ity of every human activity, which it also is. The tendencies that engender it in the human and that are read biologically, psychologically, sociologically, etc., demand a broad and deep comprehension, envisaging the players as a function of play in all the varieties of its deployment. If the play is a regulated activity having its end in itself, then it is only the play of the world that fully deserves this definition, commanding all the particular species of the play that essay to join it. And if you think that the seriousness is otherwise dramatic, remember, please, that dramatic play is part of the play.

Humanity plays the order of nature, the birth and death of the divine, its own destiny, its future succession.

Certain games will go by losing their precise rules.

The world of the game is only a prelude to the game of the world.

New Roman">The great powers and elemental forces hold each of their plays in the partition of the whole and support the whole of the play that holds them.

Each of the great powers and elemental forces - whose plays with all others are to be explored and re-explored - each of the great words, great thoughts, great actions, great operations and great constructions propose a formative reading, a regulation and an edification of the play of the world, readings, regulations and edifications remaining inner-worldly, whatever they do, never being able to fly over, regulate or edify the world itself. For even their totality does not manage to exhaust the play of the world.

All human works - are there any that are not? -, passed and situated behind us, have their future in front of them, constantly remade by those who come in contact with them to form and transform them. In this sense, they are all open.

Who above all makes the great powers and elementary forces speak?. The play of logos, obviously.