With the sharp wits of someone who is overtired, Antigone has an overview of her fate. She accepts that she has to die. It costs her less than living without having loved with this kind of passion which is equally madness and crime. Completely absorbed with herself and [more]

Philosophy is restless. It is without measure and without rest. It does not find any end. Its desire accelerates into the infinite, is unstoppable and excessive.

What does intensity mean? When do we use this word? Francois Lyotard, for instance, has defined intensity as an incommensurable energetic value. This enables him to identify the “production of concepts” in a representative discourse with an “attenuation of intensities.” Intensity is what resists being channeled. It defies [more]

Jacques Derrida calls différance a difference that does not belong to the system of identity-difference. The différance is not the negative that helps a positive to a mediation with itself. The thinking of différance is neither negative nor dialectical, nor speculative. It refers to a game that withdraws [more]

It is part of the subject’s normality to transcend normal circumstances. That is the meaning of Kant’s formula about metaphysics as a “natural predisposition.”/”Naturanlage” We may also say: perversion against nature as naturalness or abnormality as normality. We move within the precinct of the “human,” but this is [more]

We expect thinking to lead from darkness into light. That is the self-conception of the enlightenment. Whether in philosophy, in art, or in the sciences: the twentieth century has begun to complicate this imperialism of light (one name for this complication is deconstruction). Not in order to slide [more]

Giorgio Agamben writes: “How it is we do not know something is no less important and perhaps even more important than our ways of knowing.” An “art of ignorance” would open the subject up toward the sphere of the incommensurable Agamben calls the “zone of ignorance,” and he [more]

Art is an opening to contingency. To assert a form means to make chaos precise. The mode of being of art, Cornelius Castoriadis says, lies in “giving form to chaos”. Art is a “window on chaos” by trying to give it a form. To give chaos a form [more]

In his Logic of Scientific Discovery, which first came out in 1935, Karl Popper lays out the foundations of his epistemology of the modern natural sciences, as the subtitle of the first edition of the German original indicates. Important sections concern the principle of falsifiability of empirical-scientific theory [more]

To love belongs blindness, because it exists only as a vector into the uncertain. The subject accelerates towards a void the placeholder of which is the loved “object”.

Narcissism is a form of self-refusal which aims at neutralizing the contingent portions of the self. It is clear that such a neutralization cannot succeed because the self is nothing but the placeholder of contingency. It exists only above the abyss of an inconsistency which is the ontological [more]

“To be a philosopher, to be a mummy,” writes Nietzsche in Twilight of the Idols. The philosophers — ancient and present-day philosophers, which he distinguishes from the future or coming or new philosophers — operate with “conceptual mummies”, they “kill, they stuff”..Their morality lies in the flight from [more]

To switch from the petulant gods who populate the Homeric world to the one Christian God already amounts to a sort of reduction of complexity. All thinking remains a form of reductive violence, and that violence is fueled by the phantasm of absolute controllability: of controlling the gods, [more]

Christian monotheism stages the double suicide of God in the form of his incarnation and his death on the cross. The infinite God is finite; his resurrection will be the call to men to unite in a community of subjects without subjectivity (i.e., without God). The incommensurable is [more]

In the aphorism titled “Love and Duality” in the second part of Human All Too Human, Friedrich Nietzsche concludes: “What else is love but understanding and rejoicing that another lives, works, and feels in a different and opposite way to ourselves ? That love may be able to [more]

“We Hyperboreans” is how Friedrich Nietzsche headed a fragment from his unpublished works dated November 1887. A few months later he wrote The Anti-Christ. We Hyperboreans, we who live in the “hyperborean zone”, in inhospitability or uninhabitability itself, the exterior. The “hyperborean zone that is far removed from [more]

Philosophy was never anything but the mediation of the immediable: of reason to non-reason, of the finite to the infinite, of being to becoming, of the sayable to the unsayable, of knowledge to unknowing, etc. Wittgenstein’s theory of language-games and forms of life insists on the originary embeddedness [more]

Where a collective forms or begins to form, there is already a minimum of shared order, a minimum of consistency of shared hopes and projects; there is also the shared betrayal of the non-existence which ultimately constitutes the collective. If there are no binding criteria regulating the dynamics [more]

The dimensions of a radical passivity and a hyperbolic activity intersect in the subject. The subject is the scene of this intersection. Translated into categories of ontotopology, this means that the subject is the place where the future intervenes in the past and the past determines the future. [more]

In a letter to Thomas Mann dated August 1, 1950, Theodor W. Adorno—anticipating his conception of negative dialectics—described the “writer’s dilemma” in words that apply to the dilemma of art in general: “One either defers to the tact of language, which almost inevitably involves a loss of precision [more]

The truth of love is experienced rather than known. „It is in the deepest part of the lure that the sensation of truth comes to rest“ (Roland Barthes). A feeling which relies on the absence rather than presence of the other, on the distance between the two lovers, [more]

In a lecture during a colloquium at the Collège international de philosophie dedicated to Jean-Luc Nancy in 2002, Alain Badiou called for the distinction of his and Nancy’s thought: a distinction which differentiates between a finite thought of the finite a finite thought of the infinite. Ultimately it [more]

Let us recall the famous sentences Michel Foucault wrote: “It is no longer possible to think in our day other than in the void left by man’s disappearance. For this void does not create a deficiency; it does not constitute a lacuna that must be filled. It is [more]

A collective, in my terms, is a community whose members are bound by nothing but the absence of an objective or absolute bond. The collective is perhaps nothing other than the community without community evoked by Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot (although in different ways). The bond that [more]

The dead God is the only God with whom the modern subject can live. It is once God has died (or seems to have died) that he becomes relevant to man. The inexistence of God is the condition of the possibility of the subject. Because this is a [more]

Let us take the definition of nihilism Jean-Luc Nancy proposes. Nihilism, he writes, is nothing but “the final incandescence of sense,” “sense taken to its point of excess.” When sense is driven to the utmost it is extreme sense, external and hyperbolic acumen. Acuminated sense negates itself, hollows itself [more]

“Why,” Ludwig Wittgenstein asks, “should the language-game rest on some kind of knowledge?” We must obviously distinguish between knowledge (the established systems of knowledge) and the language-game. The language-game sustains all knowledge without being knowledge itself. Language-game is Wittgenstein’s term for this purely functional plane that marks the [more]

Theodor W. Adorno thinks the social mediacy of art as an interruption of its solipsistic self-deceit, which consists in its existing entirely for itself. Society transcends the immanentism of the work, prevents it. Immanentism would here be synonymous with autonomy, society one name of the heteronomous that has [more]

Emma Bovary is but one example in modern literature, in which the narcissism of the protagonist exemplifies itself in her phantasies drawn from books, all of which copy a tragic paradigm of love, a passionate moaning and deliquescence: “… she rejected as useless all that did not contribute [more]

In What Is Called Thinking? (1951/52), Heidegger says of man that he points into the withdrawal in that what must be thought eludes him. That that is so means that the event (Ereignis; the belonging-together of Being and beings, or of Beyng and beyngs) shows itself at the [more]

Evidently the definition of the human being, which lies in his not being ontologically defined, is still in the tradition of the onto-zoological definition of the human being as an animal rationale (or irrationale), as zoon logon echon, as a living organism defined by the logos, the ability [more]

Friedrich Nietzsche’s definition of the human subject opens the subject up to a logos, which does not simply confront non-meaning as its opposite. Nietzsche says: The subject has the logos as the essentially undefined, his capacity for language and meaning is the opening-up to non-meaning and the margins [more]

Deconstruction — the procedure to which Jacques Derrida has given this name, which is irreducible to a law, a principle or a method and is therefore always a singular procedure — has always appeared as self-deconstruction, as deconstruction of the selfness of the self and the same by [more]

Reality is a promise of consistency which is not kept.

The question of the subject – “Who am I?”, “What is a human being?” – is always flanked by the question as to meaning, the sense and origin of human existence. Philosophy lives from the phastasm of the prescriptive securing of the essence of the subject in a [more]

Art exists only as an assertion. Every assertion is headless, blind and exaggerated. To assert headlessness itself demands of art a kind of breathless precision.The subject of art is a subject of this self-assertion. It asserts itself as a subject of breathlessness which leads it to the limit [more]

À bout de souffle / Breathless is first of all the title of one of Godard’s films. Apart from that, this phrase links at least the two moments of subjectivity and flight. The subject is essentially a breathing subject. Strictly speaking, subjectivity comprises breathlessness. The subject does not [more]

The subject of art is an infinitesimal subject. It articulates its infinite nearness to the infinite. So nearness instead of distance. The work which it brings forth can be called an infinitesimal because it expresses the distance separating it from the incommensurable.

The most general of Gilles Deleuze’s projects is to introduce into art as well as philosophy the concept of the infinite. Deleuze appears to follow an equally classical as well as hypothetical evidence by connoting art with the bringing-forth of something new, with an act of creation. Art [more]

While the subject of narcissism – incapable of loving, because it loves nothing but itself or what it thinks is its self – grinds itself up in the conflict between its objective being and its ideal image, playing out this conflict as singular tragedy, the subject of love [more]

A thinking after the death of God must take its beginning from the impossibility of man, from an originarily evacuated subject, a primordially splintered cogito, whose task will henceforth be to confront this void and fragmentation rather than strive for a substantial beginning and a reasoned finality.

Jacques Lacan: „Un homme et une femme peuvent s’entendre, je ne dis pas non. Ils peuvent comme tel s’entendre crier.“

One could read Hegel’s entire project as a movement of resistance against the narcissism of the unhappy beautiful soul, against the narcissism of interiority. The subject erected by Hegel is the subject of emptiness, but this emptiness is abundantly rich, a kind of positive exterior, a desert of [more]

The artwork neither articulates its intimacy with nature and the origins, nor does it declare its solidarity with the Zeitgeist. Art exists only as a conflict with its time.

The non-existence of God indicates the inexistence of a program which would prescribe, whereto the subject moves and where it comes from. In the space of this inexistence it emerges as the agent of self-innovation, maintaining contact with the objective unfreedom (its status as determined subject), without completely [more]

Friedrich Nietzsche, Gilles Deleuze argues, is by no means the “inventor of the famous phrase ‘God is dead.’ On the contrary, he is the first to believe this phrase to have no importance whatsoever as long as the human occupies the place of God. Nietzsche was trying to [more]

In a review of Michel Foucault’s Les mots et les choses (1966), Gilles Deleuze, responding to the analytic of finitude elaborated in that book, brings a thinking into focus that “would of itself be in relation to the obscure.” A thinking after the death of God, it investigates [more]

We know that Maurice Blanchot, rather than making the subject disappear, thinks it as the scene of infinite self-deconstruction, so that its new way of existence [referring to Nietzsche and Foucault]  is that of “disappearing.” By undelimiting it toward the outside, he renders it the subject of the [more]

Art was never anything other than an agreement with the fragility of its time. Art does not come from a stable situation; it is the experience of the instability of instituted reality. Art exists only as the experience of the porosity of the system of facts.

By self-assertion I denote the transcendence in immanence (not of immanence) characterising the subject qua subject.

To love Antigone means to love this lie of love for which her name stands in the history of literature and theory. This love is itself literary. It produces its own singular law which is not binding for society in general. To love the lie of love is [more]

In a letter to Roger Laporte dated September 24, 1966, Maurice Blanchot describes his scène primitive as the experience of a depopulated sky, confronting an infinity, which he outlines as an empty infinity: “I was a child, seven or eight years old, I was in an isolated house, [more]

What I call the subject stretches into the depths of an insubstantiality, which proves to be the transcendental form of the subject. The subject delineates the scene of an elemental emptiness and, in relation to it, every ontic-empirical subject experiences its reification – as if life means asserting [more]

A theory of art has to make a connection with a theory of the subject, because the subject has the status of something made, of a construction. The subject asserts its subject-form, among other things, through the assertions of form which are artworks.

The subject’s world is not a universe of familiarity into which it were inserted like an object. The subject is not in the world like water in water. It articulates a distance from its world by remaining irreducible to its world-horizon. Therefore, one must insist on its artificiality [more]

Do we have to lie to understand Antigone? Can we avoided stepping into the domain of destroyed certainties in order there, at the border to this domain and in daring to step over the border, to come across Antigone about whom we know that she turned a lie [more]

It is not the human subject that is infinite, but death. But this infinity only exists for a finite subject.

The human subject has never been anything but a specter. The rift that divides it cuts through it from the very beginning by making it teeter on the cutting edge between presence and absence, infinity and finitude, ideality and reality. That man disappears “like a face drawn in [more]

Thinking is critical when it abandons the ground of certainties and starts referring to a truth beyond its consistencies. It escapes the temptations of idealism by subjecting its irrationality to a certain reflexive inquiry. Apparently thinking can neither be reduced to the idealism of rationality, nor to the [more]

“When philosophizing,” Ludwig Wittgenstein writes, “one has to climb down into old chaos and feel well there”. In philosophizing, the human subject touches chaos, the non-ground. It maintains an at least problematic contact with it. To feel well in chaos can mean nothing other than to integrate the [more]