The Human in the World

The human has been defined - which apparently defines everything - as extremely fragile being and as a terrible existent, as the measure of all things and as rational animal, as imago Dei and as (subjective-objective) foundation of objectivity, as body-soul-spirit (by emphasising sometimes one side, some­times the other, by synthesising or seeking unity), as subject, as social and political animal, as generic worker and socialising being, as person and existence and as being where goes the being of the world, as distant being and almost as human-problem.

We are obliged to track and follow the traces - traces that mix them­selves and lose themselves - that link - with continuity and solution of continuity - the human to the non-human.

How does the human manage to enter in any case into the dimension of the logos, to ‘dialogue’ with what it is not?

By becoming anthropology, metaphysical philosophy becomes not only an interpretation of the human being: all the interpretations and all the beings find themselves reduced, by this reflexive philosophy - anthropology - to the human, who is supposed to be the secret of the essence or the existence of the being as such and in its entirety.

At the moment when philosophy becomes the philosophy of subjectivity to begin to finalise itself in anthropology, the human appears as the last figure of the absolute.

If the absolute is the ensemble of human relations, it is then precisely not ab-solute.

Plaything of dust, emerging from earth and becoming dust again, the human plays for some time with it.

Although without models, the human ‘imitates’. What? It aims to get as close as possible - to what?

Different from animals, does the human have a - near or distant - relation with itself and the - near and distant - world?

Pursuing an inquiry on several planes simultaneously, the human fails to find the keys opening dead languages, and rusty or brand new instruments fall out from its hands. However...

‘Subjectivity’, in its fluidity and its fixity, keeps grappling with cosmic and physical imperatives, with the flashes and the eclipses of thought, with the slowness and the difficulty of the work of history, with its own human and anthropological problematic (anthropology and its derivative, psychology, not lacking strengths and especially weaknesses), with prose and poeticity. Aspect of all that is, look, word, gesture and action, it is com­prised in a larger movement that comprehends it, even when it believes to comprehend it. It wants itself as something like the first and the last word. It is only a link.

The human is almost the question posed to the world and to itself, the question mark in the All.

Is the human a sick, thinking and working animal? Is it a terribly rarefied composition in the cosmic void? Is it a resonance chamber?

Whatever it does, the human must accord itself with alienation, strangeness.

Through where do the lines of force that constitute the human being pass? Don’t they cross the ensemble formed by hereditary factors, the terrain and constitutional temperament, the dramas of childhood and the family constel­lation, the educational formations, the socio-cultural milieu and the orienta­tions, the relations and the roles that it implies and suggests, the incidents, the accidents and the encounters of all kinds, the configurations of ‘chance’ and those of ‘destiny’, the dispositions, the identifications, the ideals of the self, revolts and projections, the fixations and mobility, the subconscious pressures and the unconscious powers, the phantasms and voluntary efforts, the repet­itive comportments and inventive behaviours, the historical epoch and the interpretative schemas of self-consciousness, the erotic life and professional activity, lifestyle, the style of thought and the style of death? However, in this entanglement of convergent threads, interwoven and mobile, visible and concealed, often exchanging their colours, entanglement demanding an at once hierarchical and multidimensional, synthetic and operative approach, grasping at once the play of the ensemble and that of each part, sector, factor, plane or level influencing the others and the whole, how to clear the most salient lines and most important elevations each time, how to foster opera­tive inventions, how to indulge in a necessarily schematising comprehension and action, but by trying to be as little schematic as possible?

Do not all the particular structures emerge within a global structure, certainly in movement, but as previously given? Where? When? How? To whom?

It is evident that after the dominion of the subject, we will see the rise of many systems and structures without subject that will not know what to do with it, after having eliminated more than thought and surpassed it.

The structure holds the human and yet the latter transgresses it. In favour of another structure?

Where lies for the human the ‘right milieu’, or better: the centre, between exaggeration and lack, profusion and scarcity, in a world where centre and circumference have become elusive.

On a planet among billions of others, existing for four billion years and probably not that again, the human, who appeared a million years ago in the world, with a prehistory that does not count more than forty thousand years, a history that counts five thousand and an almost world-historical history that only counts twenty-five hundred years, poses itself questions: where does it come from? who is it? where is it going? Concerned with big ensem­bles and details, concerned with fruitful and reassuring answers, the human, every human and the humans - they are three and a half billion on earth and their number is increasing - never know exactly how and on whom to count.

Personal and impersonal pass into each other. Every individual is unique, irreplaceable and yet universal and replaced.

The human fails to solve the problem of solitude. Neither alone, nor with others. Because beings, and not only human beings, come closer and move away.

More than revolutionary, the human is revolutionised.

Immer fehlt etwas [Always something is lacking].

All that, which is, is only - as a problem - through the human, and yet the human exists only mediocrely and mediated through what it is not. This is the major paradox.

It is at once the known and the unknown that attract us.

The force of social coercion that the individual internalises through its super-ego is extremely powerful.

Flat finding: the youth with rich potentialities and undecided future has all the chances to overtake the ranks of more or less conventional adults and the stale elderly.

The shaky force of the modern human comes from the fact that it dares to assert a position: it poses from itself, through itself and for itself, what produces it and what it produces.

Dualism maliciously survives: so the human now looks at its double, feeds itself on its phantom.

Humanism places the human at once too low and too high.

Was there in time - does what has been in time not continue to be there? - an order in the world, in which it was possible for the human to accord with its existence? Did not human nature - and the creature - have its place in cosmic nature - creation? Cosmic world, historical cities, human lives, did they not obey - with harmony and dissonance - the same laws and the same penalties? Did not all have its place in the great All? Birth, education, family life and civic life, procreation, creations, death, the worship of the dead thus inscribed themselves in a global rhythm. Then the human wanted to be a free subject, in a dead nature and under an empty sky, wanted to dictate its rules to the universe and to invent its own acts. The stars of heaven no longer indicate any road. The human wanted to assert its certainty - its science and its conscience - on itself or tried to project into history an action and a hope to replace the powerful radiation of the order considered eternal. But both the individual human and the march of history withdrew from the hopes that had been founded on them. Then came the epoch of anxiety and boredom, in an organised and planned world, administered and manufactured from one end to the other. The era of apparent obscurity and gratuitousness. What will be the next step?

From the most remote times to the present day, yesterday and tomorrow, sages and saints, tribunes and heroes, leaders and educators want to wake up humans, always considered to be asleep. Wake them and awaken them for what? Since those who sleep are workers and collaborators of what is becom­ing in the world, as a future thinker will one day say.

The human has no necessary complement.

We other humans, grappling with this little planet that is the human, without being able to distinguish very well the powers that are ours and others’, traverse the sky of the earth like meteors.

Navigare necesse est, vivere non necesse! loudly proclaimed the Hanseatic motto of humans who took to sea.

Are needs deeper and more elemental than desires and these more than wishes? And what about the desire of desire?

This is why the self also desires, if not above all, what it does not want and cannot.

Fatigue can rest.

One is chosen more than one chooses. That is to say, a choice works through us.

One continues to live ‘very well’ despite the misfortune of others. An entire continent engulfed underwater would not prevent us from going to the movies at night or watching television.

Everyone plays a match against all and against the other matches.

The mother (or her substitute), the father (or his substitute), the child (and the infantile situation) - the fundamental triangle, ceaselessly reactivated.

Not to lose the love of the mother, to conquer and to assure it, to return - in all ways - to the mother, this is the point still central to the affective life of the humans.

In leaving childhood and before falling back into it, the child-human goes through the same steps as its father (or its mother).

Everything happens as if the precocious infantile frustrations of needs more than desires were the source of all subsequent conflict.

The temptation of infantile regression endures the whole so-called adult life and finds a certain recognised satisfaction in the senile phase.

The human will advance less into a landscape burned by lava than into a metallic land.

Whether they pass like comets or settle themselves down, humans remain always polyphasic and out of phase.

They begin to experience it: satisfaction does not satisfy.

The human being was divided in two, body-soul (and spirit), and in three, body-soul-spirit, its tri-partition following, in the Platonic-Aristotelian tradition, an internal tri-partition, in which the ‘soul’ would be desiring (and bodily), volitive (the heart) and thinking (and spiritual). Into this bi-partition and these two kinds of tri-partition, no one has ever yet seen clearly enough.

In the midst of the types of all kinds, the atypical arises and troubles.

New Roman">Is the search for glory able to rise above glory?

Glory is a temporary victory over death.

More than a person of private law, more than existence demanding a sense of life and floored by the absurd, the individual is still to be redefined.

The human of exasperated egotism, waiting to be broken, tries to fly with its broken wings covered with mechanical wings, and succeeds.

Are most human efforts developed to escape ‘real’ or ‘imaginary’ dangers? In any case, all the efforts try to escape an appalling distress.

The human cannot fall back on the human and find contentment.

What one experiences is more than what one expresses.

To different individual and social evils certainly correspond diverse rem­edies: medications, reforms and even revolutions. The global ill, general malaise, are impossible to cure.

When we humans learn that there is no sovereign solution or supreme salvation, but only problematic solutions (for neither individual solutions to collective and individual problems, nor collective solutions to individ­ual and collective problems solve the problem of the world, of history, of the human), will we know a certain pacification, will we accept more calmly the gap between what we desire and want, and what we obtain and what we are? Will we comprehend that there are no forms of a funda­mentally satisfying life? Will we stop claiming an impossible transparency and renounce abstract impossibilities? Will we live in a nuclear unity, a life beyond life, a life that watches, integrating the prodromes of our own disappearance?

The individual is a system of singularities.

In the encounter with others, one seeks oneself and the other.

Is not humanity a somewhat failed experiment? Without experimenter.

What to do with needs and demands that are not justified?

Humans desire at the same time that everything lasts as long as possible and rejoice at the prospect of rapid ends, loving to quickly consummate and consume, to feel the completion approaching.

They seem to have been playing for a very long time an endgame that ceaselessly restarts, ceaselessly recasts them.

Human disquietude, curiosity and desire for exploration always push them forwards: called by the emptiness of what they believe they have already attained, exhausted by what they have rejected and what has rejected them.

Since we are a - in - treatment waiting for us to become cure.

Since Being itself is thrown into contingency, how would it be otherwise for the human being?

In trying to constitute the human, one dissolves it always further.

The adventure throws us in advance of ourselves.

No one puts themself entirely into a work.

The humane is as here and beyond the human. Above all, do not be fooled by objectivism: it is the extreme point - ready to break - of subjectivism.

Mixes, mixtures, amalgams, compromises, intermediary solutions, arrangements and inconsistencies predominate and dominate us.

After youth, one has interests and principles to defend.

One is always part of a part.

Madness ‘must’ also find its account. It finds it, at least, in the most benign form, in the small and sweet generalised madness of humans.

Captains without crew and crews without captain do not necessarily meet.

If one puts oneself completely out of reach, assuming that this was possi­ble, one could not reach anymore.

The modern human requires an impressive number of crutches to walk. This human, who believes they know how to advance, has yet to learn the art of beating a retreat.

The mutation of the human is awaiting, remaining for the moment wait­ing and not a walk towards.

With vertiginous beings, there is more world.

Force and weakness are temporary constellations, polar contraries that constantly pass into each other by exchanging their masks and dis­guises. Every force overcompensates for weakness, every weakness hides a force.

Action is in general - and in particular - a residue of diverse transactions.

Everyone considers themself a tiny bit exceptional, for their part.

Communication between beings becomes an obsessional problem for this century. Because it is envisaged from the side of the human and not from the side of the world.

The human who has been posited as subject, existence, collec­tivity, will have to experiment on itself like a planet pursuing its eccentric path.

It is not only the life sciences that are becoming experimental, because we are experimenting with life itself, which transforms itself into an experience.

Even those who live or pretend to live alone are no less assisted.

How to effectuate what in any case happens: being close and inside and already far and outside?

Neither people nor history know what human type it is a question of rais­ing when there are no more types.

It is always up to us to learn to give up. Can we go so far as to give up giving up?

Beings come closer and move away: they each take a look at the other and lose each other from view.

Is the source of all anxiety the primordial anxiety of the loss of love?

The knights of the celestial abysses are followed by the pedestrians and voyagers of terrestrial and extraterrestrial spaces.

To want somebody or something ‘too much’ indicates that one ‘will’ not ‘have’ it.

In relation to the imaginary, everything finds itself displaced.

In the same situations different attitudes may correspond. But there are changes of mentality and changes of structure.

Not letting yourself be imprisoned by anything is impossible.

To show a ‘new’ landscape that does not ‘exist’ and which, however, works.

On the basis of a moment, human things find themselves considered and attacked from a psychopathological angle. This is normal.

Will quantitative changes lead to a qualitative change, something like a biochemical moulting of the human?

One demands from life what one demands from a fire: ablaze and enduring.

The secret of what is frontal lies in its backside.

The reign of the person and private property are coextensive.

The human was eventually reduced to be the producer and the product of the worker, the attacker and the defender, the pupil and the teacher.

Will the human little by little reveal itself as the metaphor of the Same?

What does not offer itself fully but withdraws attracts us.

To live extraordinary things comes to those who overstep the cult of the evident and the problematic.

To access sovereignty and not coldness, serenity and not indifference, detachment and not withdrawal, are there many who wish it?

All that is done is known.

Between a system and its rigorous application, there is a world and many intermediaries.

Stupidity progresses too: the old stupidity is replaced by a new stupidity.

Certainly, the choices that impose themselves on us are concrete, circum­stantial, determined, precise; thus everything is both ontologically and onti- cally justified: both on the plane of the being of the world and on the plane of the being of the human.

To blame the other - the partner and the adversary - is part of a misdi­rected attack.

Guilt, this feeling of being the author of the disruption of an order, has archaic sources and far-reaching consequences. Whose fault is it?

Holding on to success is as difficult as standing up to adversity. So do not be frightened by success. It will also pass.

For the moment the continuous creation of human by human continues.

Once life finds itself ‘demystified’ - always imperfectly - how is one to live it?

One commonly believes that fortune or misfortune will always last.

Can we always distinguish dead ends from paths?

They both move, all the same, in the midst of phantasmagoria. Under the pressure of needs and desires, fears and anxieties.

The human does not belong. No person belongs to another. (Personne already names someone and no one.)

Life offers so many possibilities of which so many are blocked.

Humans are - or seem to be - at once more and less stupid, wicked, ugly and weak than they are.

What compels us to redo what we feel as a future regret?

Changing the world. Changing beings. Changing things. Changing words. Tasks always renewed, not on the edge of the abyss, but on the edge of the future.

All the paths humans follow are detours.

It is not easy for beings to find their style.

The eagle and the serpent remain two animals to which the human can be compared.

Many beings try to live, love, produce and die clearly beyond their means.

Individuality resists and succumbs.

Is there still a thought of the individual to elaborate?

Every human being needs help. Especially in the era of progressive neurosis.

The search for the centre and for balance keeps us running.

Renunciation seeks its place between acceptance and demand.

Lived experience surpasses simple knowledge and representation, plung­ing us into the-interiority-and-the-exteriority of life that is not always lived.

Raising humans, creating orders, establishing hierarchies: necessary and problematic tasks.

To become an adult, is it to discover oneself vulnerable?

One does not necessarily identify with oneself.

The problem of human relations - whose ensemble does not constitute the absolute - remains crucial and crucifying.

The weak point of the human system has not yet been sufficiently exposed.

For certain humans the question poses itself, although the answer does not depend on their free arbitration: pass like a meteor in the heaven of the earth or found earthy dwellings?

The joy of living and the difficulty of being - the former rarer than the latter - assail our unity, duality, trinity, namely our psychosomatic structure, our psyche and our soma, our body, our soul and our spirit - discomforted that we are in our being unique, double, triple, because we do not manage to regulate the fate of the components that constitute our being - both in the

actual experience and in the imaginary and the symbolic, as diverse phases and diverse moments and movements also assail us - that we also fail to decompose - in the course of stagnation and renewal, progression and repeti­tion, elevation and falls that hold us in their power and grant us movement.

Sobriety and drunkenness can both seduce us like extremes or ‘contraries’ that seduce us, in, with or for their different aspects.

The ambushes of needs, desires and wishes cannot be easily avoided because they have two or many sources.

The involuntary holds itself firmly and trembles behind the voluntary.

The chance of birth lets the human enter, randomly, into the play of the world.

Chance and merit spur or handicap the contestants in the game of life.

Those who participate in the game, mainly by proxy, by procuration, by delegation, wish to avoid the risks and still give dynamism to their monot­onous life thanks to shows, auditions, readings, amplified by the press, the radio, the cinema, television.

Humans adore to burn what they have adored.

Going to the end of anything is impossible.

In the civilised human slumbers the wild human. The civilised human sometimes learns this. The wild human?

Everyone searched to find and to flee themselves.

Let’s always be ready. For what?

In the chiaroscuro of everyday life, nothing ever goes to term, foreseen or not; everything unfolds according to mixed rules, blurs, matures in its incompleteness, without neat outlines. It is only then, and in the discrep­ancy, that all is theorised and stylised, said and fixed through thought and art. Sincere and radical, coherent, consistent and self-critical critique, atten­tive to ideological shifts and mythological travesties, by saying the split and the union of theory and practice, of private life and public life, has not yet started. Will it be able to stay halfway, frightened of its discoveries?

The (modern) human can only cease to be; to become...?

Beings that give an impression of mystery are - often ‘unjustly’ - more attractive than others.

Its limits circumscribe human being.

Offshoots of stars, humans are themselves shooting stars.

How to reconcile the search for decentring enthusiasm and for the famil­iar centre?

The will to avoid repetition does not prevent us from succumbing to it.

The figure of the desperado, who does not wait for anything - or who stays, because they are fundamentally waiting for something - is half of a figure.

One may wish an enchaining and enchained love, an enchaining and enchained state, an enchaining and enchained thought, etc. It is the right of people and every human. It is not opposed by the cries of those who call for a free love, state, thought, etc.

It is the burned diamond that has a ‘thousand’ facets.

Too bad that one cannot positively rejoice in the absence of a negative, an ill: an injury, a toothache.

The problem that poses itself to the human, how to succeed, that is to say how not to waste their life, does not pose itself in these terms. Particular individuals carried away by the wave of the species, itself carried away by cosmic flux, how can they pose themselves the question of renewal and rep­etition, of insertion and detachment, of the multicoloured and dull, move­ment and rest?

The nostalgia for the immediate that works on them, pushes them into the maze of mediations.

Everyone - with a little luck - is victim of a style.

To cut a Gordian knot, it is necessary that I must have a sword and that there must be a knot; or that we have a sword and that the knot be. As everyone knows, since Rimbaud at least, ‘it is wrong to say: I think. One should say: One thinks me. Apologies, for the play [ jeu] on words. I is [je est] another.’ I-we, knot-sword? What about today’s I and we? The ego and its collectivisation, are they not precisely the knot that the future must cut - with or without sword?

Without a mass of real good, one often prefers a volume of hope that makes the inexorable gears of an airy and sharp humanity bearable.

One flies backwards, forwards, as well as towards the present.

Sceptics and mystics apprehend the end - which is also a commencement - of the great game, the end of the ‘fundamental’ illusion, that of existence, early glimpsed.

Walking on the edge of the roof, the sleepwalker does not fall.

There are quite a few people who would like to be both island and empire.

It is not bad to have hidden weapons ready which we do not use.

Beyond hope and despair many riches can be rediscovered that are not situated only below.

For the moment - only? - the human comedy cannot be thrown overboard.

The nuclear age - for the moment the extreme point of human subjectiv­ity that wants to appropriate and master external and internal nature, indi­vidually, collectively and objectively - brings to its climax and crushes the individual (atom), massifies individuals and atomises the human masses and others, renders the totalities atomistic, lets the atoms burst, raises a great dust.

The human hopes in forgetting. Namely, hopes on a foundation of forget­ting and hopes in forgetting.

The superficial life feeds itself on the texture of the multicoloured world.

What is designated under the name of destiny does not fall on us from the outer or does not emerge from our inner depths. What is destined for us, that to which we are destined, assigns us a part of the totality, or, if you want, a lot or a fate that is not distributed or rewarded by a lottery.

The human, the being through which the question of Being is posed, the only existent that interrogates existence - not seeming to possess itself any natural or historical ‘essence’ - does it exist and will it continue to exist? Obviously, it is dissolving and disappearing - but as what? Here resides the much more ontological-anthropological and historical than epistemologi­cal question. What passes, is it the human or the concept of the human? And what concept? Is it not the human, who declares the concept of the human illusory and its consciousness inconsistent, calling for other opera­tional concepts - or what else? Change and permanence take hold of the human and its problematic essence and existence. Is it being surpassed? Not as - decentred and eccentric - subject, but as space-time of the encounter of what is out of the human and what ‘is’ the human, as space-time of the game. Humanism glorifies the human - rather ridiculously. Antihumanism dissolves the human - rather flatly. In the course of surpassing - or being surpassed? - shouldn’t the human still be ripe - despite and because of anthropology and human sciences of all kinds - to pose the problem of the human?

The great conquests and the little exploits, the great and the little noth­ings that compose every human endeavour, make the human both a con­quistador and a derisory surveyor.

New Roman">To be only a nuance is little.

Would any human activity be an activity of replacement?

The difficulty of being meets with the sadness of not being...

A base is always necessary - although problematic and problematised - from which departures take off.

The simple, do we seek it, does it seek us?

Joy, it is sometimes remarked, is much more exceptional and profound than pain.

We can neither separate the head from the body nor the body from the head, neither make them walk together, nor walk on the head or with the feet alone.

To traverse life in a rather light and sometimes even happy way by find­ing pleasure in it, or in a rather heavy, sad and unpleasant way, amounts to letting oneself be traversed by one or the other of the two currents united in their source and then diverging, though they intersect.

The analysis of finitude, though finite, seems without end.

In a certain manner, the human can only adapt, revolutionise (which is another kind of adaptation) or perish. The epoch rejects all that does not suit it.

Compromise is not - as is commonly thought - a second-order reality, a second-best.

The play of multiple and multiform, biological, psychological, social, cultural and ideological determinations must be, that is to say ceaselessly, explored and re-explored.

The private generally feeds on the public.

The impossible collides with the human.

Does human life remain below its possibilities? And yet here and there. ..

There are even some examples that help us and enlighten us.

At moments the human can find life beautiful and worthy of being lived.

One can educate oneself not to succumb to the terror of one’s own terrorism.

Our unconscious comprehends more than us and comprehends us.

Were they only the interpretations of a dream, they would lose themselvesindefinitely.

It is not in the power of the human, in the era of subjectivity, to behave subjectively, in one way or another.

Sometimes one has to stay there like a rock that is not particularly friendly or tender.

It is rather little by little that one becomes like everyone.

Concentration and recollection are constantly grappling with dispersion and scattering.

Stability and lability characterise all the formations recorded by the human.

Life and civilisation are not possible without suspension of life drives and death drives.

After the era of nature, battled and dead, and that of the absent God, killed and dead, we enter the epoch of homo absconditus.

With regard to what proposes itself and imposes itself on us, what is the position of our freedom? Its presupposition, its supposition, its position and its positivity can easily be denied, undermined, situated, envisaged as motivated, conditioned, determined. What we call our freedom provokes a whole scaffolding of explanations, comprehensions, interpretations - in general negating. Its structures can be dismantled and forecasts can be for­mulated. So what is with our dear - proud or illusory - freedom? It does not seem to support the demonstration of its existence and it rebels somewhat when its non-existence seems to be demonstrated. It has also been con­sidered as a recognised, accepted, assumed necessity, but do we know the necessity of what moves us? And do we not also accomplish what we would like to flee? No scholastic or pedagogical exercise, even high-flying, no scholarly dissertation on the theme of determinism and free will can decide whether and to what extent we choose, or we are chosen. What decides through us, can it be deciphered both in terms of necessity and in terms of freedom, two sides of the same coin? Is free-fall so free, since it obeys laws? Would we be free for totally indifferent acts and less free for acts that are necessary for us? Besides, is not a certain indifference a certain proof of a certain freedom? Be free! is a prescription full of - involuntary - humour and irony, unless it should lead to the experimentation of necessities. All the passages to the limit withdraw themselves: neither a freedom eman­cipated from all causes nor a non-freedom engulfed entirely in causes is conceivable. In the second case, one would be dealing with a psychopatho- logical case, of mental alienation, which would let us see negatively what the complete absence of freedom is. In the same way, liberty - an impure and ideological political concept - is shrunk until it disappears into a totalitarian and tyrannical regime, which brings the political alienation to its climax, and it can manifest itself a little more in a liberal regime. To acknowledge the human with a little freedom, a partial freedom, is this what it is about? Certainly not. So? So how can we be held responsible regarding ourselves and regarding others for a freedom that we do not have? Does it have us at least?

Causes and mechanisms, structures and determinisms, partly support and explain the proper functioning of high activities: biocosmic, physico­chemical, neurophysiological, psychosocial, historical-cultural. What cannot be reduced to one or all of these orders, does it follow freedom? Or does the positivity of freedom reside in its negativity so much that it, by freeing itself, counteracts what opposes it: constraints, causalities, destiny? But even so, does it not obey a determination and conditioning, as high as one wants to place them and whether they are metaphysical, ethical, ideo­logical or feed on the source of the imaginary? For freeing oneself from one series signifies subordinating oneself to another. The distinction between external constraint and freedom and internal constraint and freedom does not let us advance far. Once again: we can prove neither the emergence of freedom - actual or possible, existing or postulated - nor the unfolding of necessity; like the human, freedom is what is not what it is, and what is what it is not. We therefore have to test the two registers of the same order and to conceive the errant ‘freedom’ as that which leaves and gives play to diverse necessities.

What does it signify to be free within the limits of the rules of the game?

Because human freedom seems to consist in doing what diverse laws permit. Would freedom be interstitial?

No doubt we have no freedom, but an experience of freedom - of liberation.

To the human the anxiety of what appears at times like its freedom is unbearable.

The foundation of freedom could consist in freedom towards and for the foundation. But if there is no foundation?

Does human existence henceforth find itself freed from any foundation?

Frustration makes us protestors. We are all frustrating and frustrated.

Everything seems to indicate that one struggles to regain what one never had.

The forces that contain and maintain life resist many shocks.

If only its history can teach us what the human is, this same history can also unlearn it and can itself be unlearned.

Everyone hides a disability.

To what point are particular human beings interchangeable?

We will only hope to live, more than live, as long as we live for... and not in... and with..., far from ... and without...

Open yourself to the world, it will open itself to you.

Jeder geht an etwas zu Grunde [Everyone breaks down at something].

Those who were determined to flee stay forever in the world.

The dream of a clear life does not attain the full play.

The constellations are much more powerful than the protagonists.

One often counters one’s own deep desire, since it is ambivalent.

size=2 color=black face="Times New Roman">We are not condemned to err: we are the errant ones. We are not con­demned to play: we are the players and the playthings.

To agree with the fact that what one is and what one does will disap­pear and survive transformed, already indicates an advance on the path where control and non-control of the self are themselves controlled by the uncontrollable.

The human was the voice that escaped a broken flute played by an absent god.

Are we moving towards something or inside of something?

If the other is in us, we are in the other. Even to recognise and misrecog­nise it - and us.

Without suffering, no remedy.

The secrets of the different ages of life are scarcely yet pierced.

All our life we remain goaded by the engine of childhood curiosity: the search for the mystery, the secret that is happening somewhere.

Doesn’t the unconscious know the no?

The non-human, the inhuman, the superhuman are part, for us other humans, of the human.

Neither the solitary life nor the life with the other are entirely suited to the plant, the animal and the human that is the human.

What becomes of the dreams and repressed anxieties of our hearts?

This vitality, this dynamism, that we wish for must be maintained and cultivated at least physically, psychically and intellectually. By which appropriate exercises?

Pharmacodynamic drugs will always be called upon to reinvigorate the human machine.

The march towards an appeasement accepting the generous sadness is demanded of us.

Broken pins can pierce the heart of dying eagles that fly low.

The distinction between what depends on us and what does not depend on us is a bit specious.

One can very well experience two - or more - opposing feelings at the same instant.

Dear friend, you are not alone in taking decisions.

All the participants in the human comedy are each right about the others, but not all in the same manner.

The integral transparency of human relationships is a childish myth.

A terrible and silent force emanates from certain beings.

Whoever through whom the scandal happens is only a pretext that ‘puri­fies’ the diverse expurgated texts.

Those who explore certain quarries can appear to others as hard as stones.

The role is not so external to the personage.

You do not elucidate, you forget.

What we do to ourselves and what is done to us corroborate and contra­dict each other.

Rare are the flashes that tear the horizon.

Sometimes what leaves you moves away.

The central problem of human life: to last, to endure hard and to live duration (and in it) is accomplished in and gets erased by duration.

style='font-size:10.0pt;line-height: 112%'>It is less and less about being and more and more about enduring. It is less and less about living and more and more about surviving.

Can detached attachment be obtained through spiritual exercises of meditation and concentration, even practical?

Our steps lead us.

Some lives, some deaths, remain definitively ambiguous.

We never go back to zero.

Bizarre destiny of humans. They are glued like shellfish to their rock and are nonetheless migratory birds.

Often a fragment of our being possesses a knowing - more or less obscure - which escapes the other fragments.

The human moves in the world with a strange and estranged familiarity.

Those to whom the maximum is allowed, who allow it, do they go far enough, since the too-far usually threatens disaster?

Among beings, things, signs - and between signs - men, women and chil­dren comprehend only what concerns them. And even then.

What one does not ‘want’ happens.

Every human is like all humans, is like someone, is unique.

The multiple motives and results of an action, its means and its aims intertwine so inextricably that only very rare gleams can illuminate some of their moments and aspects.

It is not only the human who is question without answer.

From time to time, a thinking and poetic meteor traverses the lives of humans, who move in their own orbits - which move them.

Desire moves in the midst of masked phantoms.

Curiosity is harrowing.

Solitary crowding and being isolated are in the lure.

Contributing to ‘creating’ beings, changing beings, producing situations, is very tempting and can impose itself as a task.

The human, whatever it does, walks and jumps by limping, by leaning on crutches.

The human must get used to bearing extreme visions.

The erotic and familial problem, the professional and social problem, are the two most tangible aspects of the insertion of the human into the world of humans.

Logos, God, the human arrange the diverse elements and ensembles of the great whole, until - they themselves and the elements and ensembles, fundamentally disturbed - they aspire to a new arrangement.

The will to power - and, even more, the will to will - that seizes humans, mobilises their being, pushes them towards surprising conquests, gives the impetus to their becoming and breaks them calmly and brutally. Does it survive them?

Impatience goes with boredom. One and the other often prevail. We share the secrets of ridicule and illusions, without being able to pierce them. Lucid blindness takes us. It would be necessary to know how to wait for the turnarounds.

Sex, money, glory is what is most commonly sought.

We can even learn to join violence and tenderness, hardness and deli­cateness, regarding beings.

From far away everything looks more beautiful, fuller: the life of the creators of the past, a lighted window, a couple kissing, a group at the restaurant...

It is humanism that needs the human and not the other way around.

Surpassing humanism requires us first to become deeply and thoroughly human.

The vitality, the energy, the radiance that certain beings require are pre­cious gifts.

Those with no sense of humour and who cannot bear irony also succumb one day to the humour and the irony they refuse. Sometimes after their death.

The human can never succeed the coup of the world (after the model of the coup d’etat). Its world - the world of the human in general and the world of every human - does not cover the world.

Laws, norms and rules impose themselves on the human, who neverthe­less plays them away. Can humans ever say, without drivelling: this is not a play?

Will the melancholy thirst for the ideal always remain unfulfilled?

The human enters into the play of life, inserted and englobed in already established structures that compel it to speak and to think, to act and to dream according to their rules, without first asking for its opinion; only later can it, always contained in the system, contest them. Concerning the - first - origin of structures and systems pre-existing each particular human, it is another history that gets the human grappling with history.

The force of active patience is enormous and it dissolves many reactive powers.

To reach and to abandon or to surpass is better than not to reach or to remain here, if one moves at all on this orbit.

The human actualises itself by losing possibilities.

Integrating with one’s world and the world - both familiars and strangers - is the central problem for the human.

Does the more than problematic eudaemonia remain the goal of human life, project rather than progress?

Very often, the human appears to the human as a being of addition.

Offering a flower, even if it should get trampled or go unnoticed, illus­trates a sign of openness.

Catching many flies at once? Who doesn’t do that?

At the moment of disenchantment, a star obscures itself. Not succumbing to charm signifies not having a star.

The soul of the body and the body of the soul still maintain the cut too much.

Reach three generations in a human life.

Question, less naive than it seems: since in any case life is ‘short’, why so much fear of crossing this little bridge?

When you feel very alone and very unhappy, think, my child, that there are several million beings in your situation.

Proponents of the influence of the milieu, entangled in their trivial chatter, do not open their eyes to the full extent and depth of the action exercised by the milieu and the environment - of all kinds - on the human, always encircled.

The hereditary powers, natural and social, the constitutional forces, and the importance of temperament are far more decisive than they appear at first glance, even if such a glance unfairly favours them.

It is so tempting, and not even so stupid, to make the human the product of its temperament and its milieu.

Living comprises both the impetus and the lassitude of living.

What one does in sight of a more distant goal is also what one does for a nearer goal: one does not like someone just for their social role, but also, if one can say, for themselves.

Does every force result from the overcompensation of a weakness?

The human is like a tree that is both revolving and inverted: its roots carry it towards the earth and towards the sky.

How to achieve a more relaxed relation with all that is, when one usually wants the contrary of what one has?

When everything seems perfect, everything appears sad to us. The momen­tarily completed is there, between the prolegomena and the epilegomena.

That which one omits, which one leaves aside, continues to play.

To win on two contrary tables, is it not impossible for the human who wants to win on all the tables at once? Nobody can be fulfilled everywhere, no emptiness can be filled to the brim - and without overflowing.

Wishing to escape an individual or social vice, one usually falls for the opposite vice.

This is so since everything includes an aspect recognised as normal and another envisaged as pathological.

Being born; growing; reproducing; ageing; dying. This is the most elemen­tal scenario of life - not only human.

As if compensations were not enough, there are also overcompensations.

Does one ever know a human being? Does one ever know oneself? If rela­tions to the other are at the same time relations to oneself (and vice versa), how to establish the results of the inquiry that ends in verifying retroactive assumptions?

If ‘style is the man’, this style is at once spontaneous and cultivated, nei­ther cultivated nor spontaneous, appearing to vivify and to mortalise.

Age realises in a curious and insidious way the dreams of youth.

Should we also be what doesn’t stop starting?

To be, to become a legend and a myth is part of what is assigned, when it is assigned (where? by whom? how? why?).

There are glaciations that include all thaws.

Since it is what is not what it is, and what is what it is not, the human remains without necessary complement.

Both our words and our actions surpass us.

The intimate kinship of satisfaction and death escapes the living and funeral negativity which traverses needs, work, enjoyment and semi-recognition.

It is with individuation that existence starts, and all that constitutes it; it is with the entry into historical times that human - individual and social - existence prepares its completion.

As long as we do not arrive at a unifying conjunction, because unitary and united, of the psychological approach and the sociological approach, which is more and something other than a simple interpretation or a flat psycho- sociological synthesis of the two interpretations, we will not say anything of worth for the individual human and human society.

Vertigo towards the ‘high’ and the ‘low’ makes the human stagger in the march, which they would like to be firm and during which they wish to regain everything.

The individual, who emerges within the totality, the human being, who becomes what it is inside the being in becoming, the human and its world in the world - totality, being in becoming, world, not containing any individ­ual, human being, world of every human, like a superb vase contains flowers or a bin rubbish - appears and disappears in the process of individuation - that far precedes any individualism, any subjectivism, any egoity - through the fragments of the totality of being, beings, emerging from being, in which they find themselves immersed anew. ‘Do they succumb’ because they left it? What did Anaximander understand, when he - mythologically and speculatively - said in the very first fragment of occidental thought: ‘The boundless is the origin of beings. Wherein beings get born, therein the same they, as it must, get destroyed; for they do justice to each other and pay pen­alty to each other for their injustice, according to the order of time.’

To the general and theoretical combinatory corresponds all the particular and practical combinations.

It is not originality that is decisively important, but the return to the ori­gins, the exploration of the past to come and the descent into the to-come as an anterior future. The past is never simply surpassed; future times transport it, and it, like them, constitutes a passage. We are always on the road.

Often we believe we are latecomers, twilight beings, humans, who, by going to conquer the stars, have no star. Sometimes however the feeling of being on the eve of a change in the dialogue between the human and the world surprises us. But neither the epoch nor the individual truly and simul­taneously knows what it completes and what it prepares and inaugurates. And too often one surpasses what has not been fully achieved.

Is there a point of no return?

Would the end of the human signify: end of a certain type of human?

Do our agitation and our movement - what agitates us and moves us - only aspire to rest?

Since the - individual and generic - human already knows that they are only a drop - or a teardrop - in the ocean, why does their life have so much difficulty flowing?

Between motivations and results, conditions and eclosions, lies a ditch and a bridge is established.

Who of us wouldn’t wish at once for the passivity and the protection of the child and the activity and the freedom of the adult?

One continues to live on the basis of outdated definitions.

At every moment, in each situation, the star of a constellation shines, it seems, stronger than the others.

Does human hope - retrospective and prospective - succeed in alleviating the difficulty of being? In any case, the human needs projects to bear life and face their survival.

More original, more powerful and more surpassing than the being of the human is the ‘being’ that plays itself through the human.

Humans who move as if they came from elsewhere. Like Martians. Visitors of the earth. Passionate about mechanisms of all kinds, including human mechanisms. Wresting everything from its ‘initial’ reason for being, finding it again and transforming it.

In progressing, the human takes one step forwards, two backwards.

Even if humans do not do what they want, they are held responsible for their actions and can only take them for granted.

Often they pass each other without suspecting the suspicion of the other.

The human is also the stammering of the unconscious.

Humans without qualities are looking for qualities without humans.

Transhumance is not only proper to humans.

When humans cannot and do not want to live how they were vegetating, they open themselves to suspicion.

Since the world is world, the human cannot do without the rules of the game and the system of play. Always playing a double and triple play, cheating and bluffing, conforming to forms and transgressions suggested and permitted.

The human is this perpetually hunted and hunting being: without rest, they throw themselves from one being to the other, because beings fall upon them.

What is the momentum or the motor that pushes the human always ‘for­wards’? Needs? (Which ones, the natural, the produced and the ‘others’?) Inquietude? Desire? The will of power and will? Dissatisfaction and unsat­isfaction that redouble after any obtained satisfaction? The gap between aspiration and realisation? The difference that governs all that we are and do, since we are moving forwards through differing?

Life and work set upon each other, intimately linked through their enmity.

Each refuses the anxiety of the other.

A very great number of inhuman things can only be accomplished by human beings.

This is why it is so difficult to simultaneously show strength and tenderness.

To lose oneself and to find oneself, to recollect oneself and to disperse oneself, provoke eddies that disturb the search for a tranquil authority, for a pacified sovereignty.

The sublime certainly pushes its roots into the psychic and social elementary; its constructions are not confused with its materials, although they depend on them. The elements of sublimation are in the unconscious and the social texture, but the creative synthesis is not located there.

Rejection is just as significant as, if not more than, admission.

In their diverse enterprises, does the human ever know how far they can go?

Humans! Get used to offering, granting, yielding victories over yourself to your human partners and opponents.

An extremely effective tactic consists in giving up, by letting the oppo­nent shatter against their own force.

To experience ‘vanity’ - vacuity - affecting what one did not perceive at first, is the beginning of sagacity. Yet it is also the vanity of the human that lets them feel all that they are and all that they are not, as if stamped with the seal of vanity.

The need for the double is permanent and devious.

Every human is, globally comprehended, the whole of the human and a total part of the world.

The limits of the human limit beings and things. Even though the human is the open ensemble of their possibilities.

We have the need for fire and place (still?): family, homeland, friends, profession, etc.

No one can foresee all that turns against the one who throws it - like a boomerang.

The world empties itself and fills itself. Is it this tonality of totality - this sensation, this feeling, this impression and this expression - that deserves the names of joy and sorrow, fortune and misfortune?

A divergence is not possible without a minimum of diversion of inertia, namely movement in a straight line.

Both in individual life and in historical life, differences are flattened with age.

How will the human - the prey of a total and human adventure - move in space-time beyond the human?

Some still seek - but in vain - to catch up with the centre of the - mythical - direction of a large organisation with which they would like to associate themselves.

Is it from the secrets and impulses of childhood that the great quest - attracted by movement and immobility, by anxiety and ecstasy - takes its origin?

Is it not by fleeing a threat that the human achieves each time a conquest?

Everything becomes for the human more and more insufficient. Without them knowing what is enough, too much or not enough. Not to mention the measure that has no more measure.

Dehumanisation still follows human schemas. Other is the play of what, with the help of the human, surpasses the human.

Existing does not go without saying. Sometimes one has to prepare to shout loudly to show that one is not dead.

What binds and unbinds beings is also what they do not say - themselves.

Is not a certain disappearance of the human necessary to ensure a certain uncertain communication?

What tempts us the most: the impossible.

The child that sleeps in the adult wakes up much more often than one believes - as much in diurnal life as in nocturnal life - and this child - ambivalent - aspires to omnipotence, to win, and even more to be chased, taken, punished, desiring to lose.

If the exercises are not continuous, the benefits they provide are lost progressively (although there are no exercises that only yield benefits, and although losses also hide gains, and so on, every proposition can be disarticu­lated, said and read in many ways, comprising many versions, inversions and perversions, since several instances must be respected - they withdraw in the penultimate instance - as the last and supreme instance does not ‘exist’).

Psychic and psychological, social and sociological intuitions cannot do without institutions.

The task of the human is to surpass the psychological and the sociological, while maintaining them.

Is it the human who makes the human? And who - or what - unmakes them?

A supremacy and a dignity has been given or given back to the human which they do not know what to do with.

The committed or omitted acts, which we regret, accompany us like little shadows.

The human does not exist so much as coexists.

Does not one always attain something other than what one was aiming at, since the active aim remained unconscious?

What does one want, when one does not know what one wants? What about what one wants without knowing that one wants it?

The urges and their urges can counteract: so, one can have an urge for having an urge and, at the same time, have an urge for not having an urge. In any case, it is not the humans who have urges, but the urges which have humans.

There where the human imagines itself walking, it is led. There where it believes to transcend, it is transcended. There where it thinks to choose, it is chosen.

Do humans like things by planning to do them, by doing them, or having done them?

Isn’t it as difficult to welcome what comes to you - comes against you - as to separate from what leaves you - to separate from... and against...?

No one can open an abyss and stay close.

The human ‘is’ in discordant accord with the world and in discord with itself. Perpetually living in a waking dream and a dreamed awakening. ‘In them’ the world plays itself, like a throw in a match.

The human seeks to be delivered from itself.

For a long time, the human lives and dies in giving itself to representa­tion: to others and to itself.

Where does the central point of an action reside? In its intentions, its modalities, its results, its interpretations? Or rather in the play that collects it and scatters it?

Obscured beings are afraid of what they call, in their so-called clear language, obscurity. It would enlighten them more than they could bear.

The directing idea of the human seems paradoxical: its only great possi­bility is the impossible.

For a long time, humans believed they think and do what they wanted, wanting - involuntarily - to say: what they could do.

There was a moment when the human had been crushed and surpassed by the machine, without either knowing it.

Among the most difficult things in human relations we find precisely the extreme difficulty of human relations.

The stopping of a functioning leads to biological death. The stopping of an integration to psychological death. The stopping of a role to sociological death.

The human, neither fortune nor misfortune, is thrown into the vertigo of the game. It bears both fortune and misfortune with diffi­culty, worked by anxiety, and neither can - nor know - accord with accord.

Attracted by the game and fearful before it, the human tempts chance without wanting - or being able - to recognise it.

Chance and will complement each other, exclude each other, compete.

The human is also something like the contrary of the human.

As you know, without guessing its full significance, all the advantages lead to drawbacks.

How many attractions without attraction are not manifested in the human.

Desiring the desire of the other and desiring always ‘something else’ - in the constant expectation - the being of the human, ruled and mortified by the desire and by the other, can neither accept the world and its world, nor totally refuse them.

Desire remains in general unavowable for its momentarily subjective bearer, who, moreover, does not readily avow it to others.

Life and work. Two twin sisters and enemies, each feeding and devouring the other. Where ‘finally’ circulates more genius: in the one, in the other, in their composition, or in their exclusives?

Is the root of curiosity ‘sexual’?

Are we willing to let some kind of peace fall on us?

The question is: who or what are we?

Adolescence and the beginning of middle age, that is to say, youth, seem to offer more ‘idols’ than completed maturity and old age.

From what does the human die?

It is necessary to know how to rely on the weakest points, those that offer the strongest resistances.

In a certain manner and on many points, everyone is like-every-one. Exceptions number in general millions of similar cases.

Humanity cannot bear elevated and hyperextended efforts for long.

Like a landscape, a face uncovers itself and covers itself.

It is not easy to live alone or to live with others. The human must go through the hard apprenticeship of both loneliness and coexistence, if it wants to live and survive.

If, in the sensation taken as such, one element predominates although the contrary element announces itself discreetly, the desire seems to be funda­mentally ambivalent.

Humanity seems to be condemned to flee forwards.

The human cannot live without a project that carries and supports it.

Let us open ourselves to what is stronger than the self in us, to what in the human is stronger, more radical and more distant than the human.

The choice that one makes of facts is always tendentious.

Happiness is an obsessive idea - fundamentally bourgeois? - which one cannot get rid of either by abandoning or by realising it.

All humans are crazy without being completely so. The whole life unfolds, in general, in half-tones.

What did they want to achieve with their confrontations? The surrender of the other, partner-adversary, without conditions?

All in all, the human seems to need a guide - who knows how to go astray.

Nostalgia and anticipation are extremely tenacious forces. It is when one has lost ‘something’, or when one does not have it yet, that one appreciates it the most, under the pressure of a tendency for possession, at the heart of a present which one rarely experiences as bringing presents.

The great power of driving moods, thymic dispositions, affective tones that colour the world like this or otherwise, is yet to be explored.

A certain uncertain serenity, saying both yes and no, a certain equa­nimity, also agitated and knowing ups and downs, a play between accept­ance, renunciation, integration and effort demanding transformation could provide us with some uncertain contentment, a peace founded in war, a relaxation supporting the effort.

Is it not the force of psychoanalysis to envisage the ambivalence of all significations, everything symbolising everything, everything being able to signify its opposite, desire implying fear and love hate? Under the condition that their keys - or even their master key - are opening and do not open only open doors.

In the fray, everyone is the pawn of someone and something else.

Being awake and being asleep compete for the being of the human, focus­ing and shadowing all that is.

Being healthy means approximately (elementally and roughly said): being able to eat, drink and sleep, love and work, talk and think, play. Illness, affliction of one or more organs or functions, prevents ‘necessary’ satisfactions, indicates major maladjustments, manifests intolerance to inevitable frustrations. It affects the diverse levels of integration, more or less separately or globally: organic, psychic, mental, social. Health and illness, the normal and the pathological, maintain without con­test a strange dialogue both between them and with the attempt of ther­apeutic intervention (psychosomatic and socio-cultural). Does health reside in an acceptance of - and adaptation to - biocosmic and psy­chosocial rhythms or in a successful effort to transform the given? Is the illness only a deregulation, and can it not also manifest an open­ing? Remedies, medications and one-, two-, three- or four-dimensional treatments (physical, psychological, mental, social), violent or peaceful, inscribe themselves in the therapeutic effort, whose supreme axiom is the conservation and prolongation of life, healing of damage, ill health, illness, accommodation of the entire organism to itself and its milieu, the preservation or restoration of health and of what is considered normal, that is to say, tolerable by the individual human being and the society of humans; there, where it cannot heal, this effort aims to help, to relieve. If one demands from it too much, it turns out to be ineffective; demand­ing too little is excluded, because suffering demands help. Conforming with the structure of the illness and the social and mental structure of each epoch, always battling with the problem of integration and disin­tegration, the therapeutic effort deploys itself and continues with vague precision.

Every illness opens a breach through which necessary fluxes flow in and out, particular illnesses being signs of a much more general illness, neither particularly psychical nor particularly somatic, not allowing themselves to be reduced to psychosomatic suffering and medicine. Every clinical theory and every experience are surpassed by those sufferers who are part of the state and historical process. Consequently health and illness, normality and abnormality, require a differently attentive approach, if they are even distin­guished. Which does not mean that they are identical. From where and with what is human madness judged and treated?

The differentiated psychosomatic unity, in other words the organism and the psyche, seems to need to be sick somewhere, because illness is not only a lack but also an opening.

The nervous system of the human greatly needs to be strengthened again. Can pharmacodynamics succeed in playing this regulatory role which it is forced to play?

To accept finitude, anxiety, limitation, old age, death. To accept the sadness of the world, its boredom. To accept the fundamental strangeness - more than alienation - of the human. Beyond hope and despair. Without primary indifference. Attentive to time. Is it too much to ask? If one main­tains the maintenance of life as the supreme axiom, is it not necessary to consolidate it with ‘forms’ and ‘forces’, and to tolerate the inevitable frus­trations? Contestation, interrogation, questioning are not enough. It takes problematic consent to life and death for them to be bearable. Certainly, without excessive reconciliation.

Do not be insatiable. Bear the frustration and the contradiction. Open to thwarted drives: libidinal and aggressive. Programme of wisdom for outdoor music.

To the nervousness which so shakes and overwhelms occidental human­ity, and to the panic which grabs it, could follow not the belief in an abso­lutely privileged solution or escape, but a certain panic acceptance - a little more relaxed - of the available totality.

To live detached from and reconciled with human opinions and agita­tions, without hypercriticism or joyousness, bitterness or disappointment, like a kind of - worldly - monk; is this a lifestyle?

If the human had - hypothetically anyway - a kind of super-health, what would it do with it?

The bio-logical functioning of the human, its psycho-logical apparatus, its socio-logical roles, its ideo-logical constructions, its techno-logical machi­nations, do not help it to live without any reason to live.

The affective charge disappears, diminishes and is considerably trans­formed in all verbalisation of the lived.

We could ‘think’, and no doubt are in the course of ‘thinking’, that a certain type of Institute of the Human would create the framework within which one would study in a multidimensional and pluralistic, con­crete and coordinated, theoretical and practical manner all the problems, aspects, elements, factors and levels relating to this absolute, which is sup­posed to become the human, its character and its destiny. And the tech­nical and scientific study of what the human is would not allow itself to be disjointed from the anticipation of what it can be, if necessary through the help of directed mutations. Biologists, physicians of all branches and psy­chologists of all kinds would attack its genealogical family tree, hereditary antecedents and constitutional aspects, familial world, somatic, psychic and then psychosomatic constitution, namely its organism, temperament and its character, its life and its dreams, intelligence, will, determining accidents, incidents and events. Educators would pedagogically attack this human and its offspring. Then would come the sociologists, who would seize the questions concerning its social milieu, the influences and orientations, whose subject (that is to say, the object) was, is and will be subject (that is to say object), and they would throw a lively light on its professional activity and on the social and historical context. But it is useful that others join these specialists of fractions and totality of the human that are capable of carrying out astrological, graphological, physi­ognomic and chiromantic analyses. Finally, parapsychologists could grasp ultrafluid and metapsychological phenomena to let nothing escape. The human would thus be comprehended, analysed, reconstituted, healed, guided, relieved, directed, accommodated, normalised. Every human would become like-all-the-world. The obscure forces of heredity, its body and soul, its constitutional structure and its reaction structures, its partial structures and its structure encompassing its different structures, struc­tural variants and differential deviations and structural constants and invariances, health and illnesses, its unconscious and conscious (even its spirit), education and family, social environment and its own activity, evolution, involution and dissolution would be scrutinised. Its lifestyle and style of death, the powers of love and death, even the unexpected and contingent factors that have acted on it, would find their proper place. When all these aspects, elements, sectors, levels, factors and prob­lems are related with each other and each one with the whole through all kinds of interactions and interdependencies, what would remain to be done? Will this pedagogical and socialising, biochemical and psycho­therapeutic medicine, this psychosomatic and socio-cultural, open and versatile, dynamic and holistic research finally not arrive at surpassing the burden of the ‘original sin’ and opening the field to the advent of the ‘truth’, that is to say the neither true nor not true errancy of the planetary human?

How to succeed in loosening or cutting the knots that grip unconscious and preconscious, displaced and repressed, censored and scotomised, traves­tied and unavowed, lies and concealment, bad faith and false consciousness? How to clear oneself an access path and to clear a path to what moves between many waters?

The immense capacity of humans to deceive themselves and to repress - to erect even unconscious defences against repressed drives - to simulate and to not recognise, is not averted by being said and denounced.

Being too much of one’s own person, or being too dependent on it, is not the making of a great ‘personality’. A very luminous star can be well centred, matching the vibrations of the world which surrounds it, ordering itself into the system to which it belongs, without wasting energy. Another - as luminous or even more so - can be characterised by an axis that does not pass exactly through its centre, by wasting forces on eccentric movements that trouble it and trouble its world.

Beings evolve and remain the same. How to leave this banal circularity?

The rising superhuman is only a figure projected by the declining human.

It happens that misfortunes and ills, remedies and medications meet.

Will they be capable of traversing deserted regions with metallic lines and reliefs without being panicked?

The human is prevented from realising even those of its desires that it ‘knows’.

To unlearn the human, to unlearn history, is it a task that falls on the human and on the humans?

Does not the end of the human also signify: the end of the human as an end? At the same time, doesn’t it stop being a start? Does it remain as a middle term?

The human likes to manipulate, and one manipulates it - whether it likes it or not.

The human retreats from its own destiny, by passing with difficulty from accepted destiny to assumed destiny.

The human cannot be reduced to a unity - corporeal or psychical or intellectual (or spiritual) - nor to a duality - somatic and psychic - nor to a trinity - body, soul, spirit - nor to a multiplicity - of biocosmic, neu­rophysiological, psychosocial and historical-cultural forces, each of these forces itself multiple - nor to a totality - integrating all its aspects and all its dimensions - because it is at once unique and double, triple and multiple, total and fragmentary.

Why do you insist so much on believing that there is an interior human and an external world?

Fascination and despair are closely linked.

More than what they do, the circumstances and the ways in and with which they do it appear important.

Changing rests, it seems.

Humans simultaneously want to have what they already have and what they have not yet had.

The ego passes into egocentrism, culminates in exasperated narcissism and then moves towards its dissolution. Will egoism and individualism conjointly and in parallel turn into altruism and socialism?

The particular, the individual and the intimate - through which the universal necessarily passes in manifesting itself - possess a warmth, a clarity and a charm, blazing for an instant until they are consumed by the flame and the fire, according to the order of time.

In the midst of other games of skill and chance, boys and girls play their own destiny, present and future, active and passive, by playing with soldiers and dolls.

Often one plays a game because unable to play another.

Ethics, liberty, humanism launch themselves into the battle on dead horses. Which change themselves into mechanical devices.

That happened a long time ago, around the twentieth century. Humanism perished much more from the arguments of its defenders than beneath the blows of its adversaries. At that epoch, it was still living and surviving through all the chitchat, whether naive and scientific (by researchers in the human sciences, as they were then called, scientific researchers, if there were any) or literary and free (applied writers and somewhat delirious writers). One spoke, at that time, of the end of the idea of the human, of its immersion in a much more global structure, etc., etc. Humanism even took its revenge, triumphantly and flatly anthropomorphically - humano-scientific anthro­pology inheriting from theology -, where one declared, to have the right tone and without knowing what was said, that thought preceded the human, and one continued in the rest of the conversation (no: of research) to employ the sacrosanct adjectives (no: prehuman, human and post-human, in any case scientific): true, real, objective, etc. There was also a lot of fear and pacifism: humanists and non-humanists held stubbornly onto existence and had a great fear of the little toy that was called the atomic bomb or something like that; that is to say: one did not want to put an end - with an incomparable epistemological and methodological clarity, and on the foundation of an ontology become formalised logic, with a true, real and objective clarity - to the human and its illusions, to the exploitation of the human through the human (who raged in capitalism until socialism realised exactly the opposite), to the alienation of the human and to intelligent and/ or stupid theorisations concerning them.

Puppets and actors, marionettes and bottle imps, heroes and great char­acters, mad and wise, are mixed and set in motion in the course of the

human comedy that often forces them to exchange their roles in the pious masquerades.

The human walks zigzag: whether wanting to explore the landscape in all its width or whether wanting to go on a path in depth. What kind of bond binds these two temptations and attempts?

All that is human remains so foreign to us, and what is not human demands a more relaxed approach.

Entangled problems are inextricable: do humans believe or not in what they do, do they do what they believe in or do they act as if they believe in it? One can launch into commentaries, indefinitely, play the little games of consciousness and unconsciousness of self and others, try to decipher intentions and actions, accidents and premeditations, omissions and consequences, succeeding sometimes by reading foreign languages.

Does the distinction between the authentic and the inauthentic itself relate to the authentic, the inauthentic, or a different terrain?

Does what they in general leave behind, and what did not take place, await its hour?

It is the complex arcana that render us perplexed.

No one can live more dangerously than they can bear. And what one calls life is not a work of art or a literary enterprise. The aspiration to a poetic life hits against hard limits.

All desire realises itself with deviations.

It seemed that humans wanted to do what they wanted. So what did they want?

Provided with maximum harmony, the human could arise in the assumed opposition almost anywhere in the world.

From a power unequal to the waking current of life, flows another kind of life.

‘Must’ feelings be shared? Aren’t they instead always mixed?

The dream covers an enormous surface and, allied with dreaming and revery, governs all the depths and all the alibis.

The human material is already tired enough.

To live, to carry life and not only to bear it, does it require a certain naivety or rather a certain cunning?

Can the generic human open to time ever say: the plays are played, rien ne va plus? The last words of Dostoevsky’s Gambler, ‘Tomorrow, tomorrow, all will be finished!’, will be put into the game, which, ceaselessly, starts again, indefinitely.

Can one act without worrying about the consequences? In any case, one is acting by ignoring them.

The ‘human’ as a deadline is a question falling due. It is the putting into question of what is, of what it is. Conjugating all modes of putting into question, it remains without answer. But one retreats behind the deadlines.

If succeeding is - voluntarily or involuntarily - to solve a problem, failing denotes another type of relation with the question posed to the human and, secondarily, through the human. Provided that one could distinguish success and failure in concrete cases or even in the analysis of summits.

To the failing human, the movement of life becomes intolerable. Difficulties cannot be overcome by effort alone.

There is no lucidity without fault, plenary. It is impossible. Its very possi­bility would destroy, burn all that it claims to illuminate.

Finally they reached the other shore, to realise obscurely that there is neither river nor another shore.

Humans generally imagine themselves to be in relation to what is in a relation of externality. They almost always consider beings, others and things as if they were external to them.

color=black face="Times New Roman">Contrariety, as long as it remains bearable, is stimulating.

You can only practise refusing, or better, renouncing, or better, accepting; you can only practise claiming, or better, revolting, or better, revolutionis­ing, even with and against revolutions.

People aspire to peace, rest, relaxation, well-being, happiness, while feel­ing and knowing how problematic these hours are.

What the human desires - moved by its desire, which it does not yet know and which always disguises itself - is also what it dreads - without really knowing what it fears - as needs and fears express themselves most often through reversed traits.

For the compulsive game forces us very frequently to repress what attracts us and to abandon ourselves to what we dread.

One does less what one wants, than what one can and what imposes itself.

Is serenity an hour of the evening?

Can they not be anthropocentric, not interpret and construct the world anthropomorphically?

What has been rejected and abandoned returns, and one returns to it.

The present and future task: to surpass humanism and the human, leaves the question in suspense: what will become of the human?

Between sought satisfaction and obtained satisfaction lies deferred satis­faction and, still more, difference.

How do the somatic, the psychic and the mental function, bind and unbind within the same unity?

Life continues with each new day, and what appeared as intolerable is integrated or rejected, bypassed, in the movement of propulsion. Millions of children enter each year into the vivifying waters and build while playing with sand castles; millions of teenagers and millions of young girls enter life seeking their star. These young people yet do not know the ‘distinction’ between those who have a star, and those who do not.

Behind us hide the prefigurations of our hopes.

Humans search for the way out in hope, in the chimaera, in the impasse, in the struggle, in the encounter.

Does every human summarise all humanity, and every society all societies?

Your intuition tells you: the first movement is the ‘good’. Should one be cautious? Wasn’t it reconstructed afterwards? Plus: it plays tricks on you.

The ties of kinship that unite and separate the vital, mortal and symbolic functions of the living being which is the animal and the living being which is the human, still escape us greatly. Neither the nostalgia for lost animality, nor the fanatic struggle against animality, nor the claim of animality as a formal abstraction, nor the humanistic translation of the still undeciphered language of animality facilitates our comprehension and experimentation of the play, which adjoins and disjoins original powers and conquered powers.

We have a childlike predilection for commencing and closing.

Coming to love the decline. Playing its death.

The human never definitively leaves the stage of the world. Even in dying. For the dead who inhabit the necropolises do not cease to maintain relations with those who live in metropolises or provinces. Only the radical and definitive extinction of the human species would abolish all presence of the human in the world (on the plane of what is called consciousness), if not the world itself (as a question). The end of the individual human - individual death - and the end of the human - collective death - therefore remain distinct.

The human bears with difficulty time, duration, perhaps more difficult than stopping, death. Ancient, contemporary and future oracles say it: being born, being and existing, living, is much more difficult to bear than not- being, dying.

How many dead or imaginary personalities do not keep us company.

Words and the dead [Mots et morts] accompany us. On our path which constantly demands liberty without really wanting it.

Can we let the dead bury their dead, let dead souls rest in peace or make war in exhaustion, to jump - like the horsemen of past times, when their horses died in the middle of the battle - on a thoroughbred horse, a being of the cavalry?

If the human no longer believes in survival, why are they so concerned about what will become of other humans and themselves after their life?

Certain lives are lived as if they were posthumous.

Time is the constant, though often unconscious, obsession of the human, and the human is perhaps the passing obsession of time. The human desires and wants all that is, and especially itself and all that it does, to endure as long as possible and leave traces which will endure as long as possible (years, centuries, millennia?) in the visible and sensible course of the world and the course of time collected in memory - but also collected in oblivion. All glory wants to persevere in being, to conserve the radiance of appearing (δόξα), to be enthroned in the midst of memory in refusing disappearance and non­being, and imagines triumphing over its adversaries, whose negating action it positively provokes. Sic transit gloria ‘mundi’. But also: Sic transit gloria dei and Sic transit gloria homini. Yet all passage, all surpassing and all transition can only remain within the play of the world, where glories shine and tar­nish. What is and is done finds itself measured in duration, although the human is (or because it is) equally a being of rapid consummation, of usage and usury, of consumption.

At birth, the human enters into life and the world: it works, speaks, thinks, loves, fights, plays and dies, leaving ‘the’ world with a desire for sur­vival and even for eternity. The living celebrate and fete the dead until they are consumed in time, into oblivion. The survivors - each time - are always grappling with a double temptation: the mystical cult of the dead or their annihilation; it is as if they aspire to make them live and make them dead a second time. In general, it is in a mixture of the two tempting attitudes, also manifesting as a pendulum movement, that the survivors keep in contact with those who have ceased to live, to survive: they bury and resurrect them several times, according to the diverse futures of the past, because it is always the living who speak of the dead, even when the latter call them.

From the depth of the ages, as one says and as it happens, myths and religions, metaphysics and ethics, works of art and technics, want to ensure and build the survival more than the lives of humans, defeat death through immortality, by humans and cities retreating from immortal death. This type, this promise of survival and immortality, is what must also give mortals a reason for being and living, by protecting them from menacing non-being, since the human has not yet learned - if it ever learns - to play its life and its death. So God, liberty and the immortality of the soul were and remain the three major themes of onto-theo-logy, and especially its anthropological and humanistic version, as well as the metaphysically informed life and the movement effectuating, in mixture and confusion, the destruction of met­aphysics; it is less important whether one believes in these three themes or whether one denies their existence by falling into another kind of faith and piety, depending on what is reversed and inversed. For all psychological and sociological interpretations and analyses of profound aspirations, as enlight­ening and demystifying as they can be, remain rather obscure about their inspiration.

What can life beyond the grave mean in the beyond of the world? What can survival mean, beyond life among the living - but the dead are also present-absent among the living; what can death mean flowing into immor­tality? Does every birth provoke rebirths and every death resurrections? Do rebirths and re-deaths not correspond? In what space and what time? According to the dead and the words of what language, according to what modes of affection? Within what cycle englobing what cycles?

There is a genealogical survival: individual and member of the species, the human wants to survive through its descendants, no matter here whether it wants to recognise itself individually in its children, by conforming with the principle of private property, or whether by prolonging the part of universal life towards the future. There is, let’s say, a cosmic survival: that which con­stitutes the human being and its bodily and sensitive frame is reintegrated, after its death, into the cosmic cycle from which it is somewhat separated in individuating itself. There is a theological and anthropological survival: the soul or spirit - supersensible - of the human survives it after death in an elsewhere, so that this aspiration can take the extreme form of the beatific belief in the resurrection of the dead and the body. Whether it is about the survival of the individual soul or the survival of the fraction of the soul of the world, which, after the death of its individual carrier, joins again its universal origin, can only remain secondary. There is a survival of inverted ontotheology, a historical and human (quite humanistic) survival: words and actions of the human survive it in time, with individuals and in societies, by leaving behind perceptible traces and others, which merge together, are taken over by memory - and overwhelmed by oblivion. Finally, there is a project - and a dream - of techno-scientific survival, which would like to posi­tively assure a kind of immortality or amortisation to humans, without really knowing what it understands by that.

Whether in an energetic and materialistic, idealistic or dualistic, unitary or monistic, individual or universal way, whether in another reality or in a space-time of the imaginary and memory, is manifested, in every way, a call for survival, a desire for eternity, a wish for immortality, a will to defeat finitude and temporality. It is striking to see how often - bourgeois and Marxist - atheists and positivists speak of eternity and immortality, even if they are historical-humane. The human being does not want to and cannot accept its finitude and even less the finitude of the being of the world. Yet it is in and from the network of finitude that the idea of infinity is projected. Everyone aspires to an extendable temporality like rubber, more infinitely than indefinitely, and this infinite elasticity is supposed to be the eternity that masters temporality. Almost no one dares to assume both the limits and the unlimitedness that insert us and surround us in their play. The time of a being or a thing, the duration of traces and memories can be more or less long, but always stop ‘somewhere’ at a ‘certain moment’. To return transformed into the future? Where will gather what ceases to be what it was - in time? And what is lost - also in time? The radical contingency of the being of the human ‘and’ of the being of the world constitutes the play within which we try to juggle like clumsy magicians, while believing, moreover, to manage to get away with and hide our play of hocus-pocus and plays of hide-and-seek, all at once victims of our own play and of the play of the world, which remains our own and foreign to us. Anthropo-morphism and-centrism blinds us, even and especially when we crucify it on earth, to let it shine in the glory of heaven.

According to the customs of a very old carnival, mortals and immortals invert and exchange their roles and characters; according to an ancient dialectic, in the cycle that binds life and death, life is in death and death in life. The human, always effectuating a passage and remaining a passenger, enters the world, lives, produces and reproduces, chain of the chain that chains generations, degenerations and regenerations, speaks, struggles, plays and dies. Is it leaving the world, by dying? Where was it before it came to the world? If the world is not one of the spheres of what is, but the open totality of time, to come to the world can mean to be born as individuated being, and to die, to rejoin the universal cradle and tomb. Everything that appears, is and disappears, appears, is and disappears in time, because nothing founds or surpasses the play of omnitemporality. Time is as much instant and moment as duration and flow, as much creation, production, progression and deterio­ration as repetition and rotation. It allows us to apprehend it so or otherwise. It is the residence of what is, what passes, passes away and passes over, and it does not let itself be immobilised.

Is there any survival, any immortality, for us other mortals? Any answer in the form of yes, maybe or no avoids the question that has been posed to humanity, precisely because it could not solve it, and remains corroded by irony. All dogmatism and all agnosticism are invalidated by the very praxis of thought, of life - and of death. Everything passes and is thought in the vagueness of consciousness and under the pressure of unconscious needs, memories and figures of memory remain, too, troubled and confused in fading, while the powers of fascination maintain in the human both mythi­cal nostalgia and utopian anticipation, as the human aspiring almost at the same time to momentous life and to restful death, to survival, to immor­tality and to return to a previous state - that is also a latter state - to life, from what it has been separated, and what will mark for it a solution and a dissolution. Life and death, each one singular and universal, hold us and draw us into their circulation, into their circularity: each one contradicts itself and contradicts the other, and this effective contradiction conjugates the opposing and complementary powers by maintaining them more than suppressing them; neither one, nor the other, nor a third synthetic and dialectical term is the last word: there is no true life, no living life, no total life without death, and death, if it became total, would cease to be lived and told.

The conjugated play of life and death takes hold of every kind of sur­vival. This play, we play it tense. According to the logos of a legend, the Presocratic thinker Anaxagoras demanded, towards the end of his life, that children’s parties be organised on his grave on the anniversaries of his death. It seems that this custom conserved itself. The plays of children would thus perpetuate the plays of thought trying to think the play of the world. Now, we do not know very well what to do with our dead, whose errancy corre­sponds to ours, but do we know what to do with our lives and our desires for survival?

Who survives whom and what, for whom and how? Is it only or princi­pally the human? Does not what bears the human also survive it? Let’s be a little more humble and attentive. A modest pair of shoes leaves its life traces behind it. A pair of large peasant shoes lets itself be ‘immortalised’ by Van Gogh: it survives as a canvas. The schoolgirl, with her first young girl’s shoes, goes to meet her first love perhaps heavy with the future. Old slippers are thrown into the trash and from there are reintegrated into the cycle of the cosmic elements and the fabrication of technical objects, without forgetting the traces that they leave in the imaginary that they too, dying in forgetful­ness, are rejoining that in which the movement of time reposes.

When the human dies, gets re-posed, it leaves behind survivors, who will continue, prolong, destroy and ruin what it was and what it did.

What effectuates the ascension of the human? World history, evidently.