Prelude

There is no impassable abyss separating the thought of the great sys­tematic thinkers - Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Marx, who each determine an epoch in the history of thought and, altogether, the course of the world thought - from the thought of the great fragmentary thinkers - Heraclitus, Pascal, Novalis, Nietzsche, who, with their aphorisms, pass like meteors between heaven and earth.

The discursive - the continuous - is nonetheless also fragmentary, and the aphoristic - the discontinuous - is equally total, provided that we do not confuse aphorisms and sentences.

When can one then say that a book - after multiple readings - is com­pleted, achieved, finished? Wanting - essaying - to put into the world a thought that is neither simply (and illusorily) systematic nor aphoristic, neither total nor fragmentary, but encyclopaedic and elliptical, the author incites the reader to a reversible and polyscopic, relational and combina­tional, permutational and productive reading with many entrances and exits, and invites the reader to this work - to this play - where the book writes and reads itself, in the becoming of time, through the author and readers. So each fragment of the open totality requires multiple connections and applications, because the ensemble of the fragments does not constitute a chaotic and arbitrary mixture, but is coherent, leaving open the question of contingency in the combinatory play of writing and reading, consequently opening itself to mobile and aleatory readings.

In the centre of typhoons, there are zones of calm, where movement and rest gather.

There are books which are written above all to be written, and there are others which before all offer themselves for reading. The book explodes. The book, which was the guarantor of the tradition and the prototype of intelligibility, has already exploded, although it continues to haunt us.

One nevertheless continues to write. For what? To the search of the author corresponds the search of readers, and to the assimilations are opposed the differences. The book of all books, the total book, does not exist and cannot exist. The dream of an automatic and global writing which would quasi-simultaneously say everything, which would unroll the whole film of thought, the course of thought saying the course of the world, and would construct the whole pyramid of what is, remains a dream for awakened sleepers. Every book obeys a structure, an ordering, in its ensemble as in its details, partakes in a rootedness and deploys itself on the horizon, contains what one could say, what one has said, and what is grasped by its readers. It implicates all the undertones and the misunderstandings, the provocation and the encouragement to read between the lines, to enter into the circle that opens and breaks itself. The end of readers is not yet consummated.