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 the attempt to instrumentalize it as well as any limited economy. Like Georges Bataille’s heterogeneous, it marks the point of resistance that needs to be affirmed by a thinking that allows itself to be enraptured by it into experiences from which it cannot emerge unaltered. Intensity drives thinking to excess, it renders thinking itself intense, headless and precipitate, precise and blind. The dream moves to imagine an intense theory, intense concepts. It is the dream of a language and a thinking that are no longer the antagonists of life and the libidinous intensities by slowing them down and stopping them as they confine what is incommensurable in them into concepts—thus the reproach that was, all too simplistically, leveled against Hegel. Instead of being reproductive like the Owl of Minerva, this thinking is to be productive, hyperbolically turned toward an uncertain future without abdicating as thinking, without renouncing concepts and the rigor of their disposal in more or less consistent constellations. The dream of intensity is the dream, itself intense, of a philosophy that would be different from the one that exhausts itself in reproductive commentary and professorial paraphrase. The dream of entire generations of philosophers who attempt to wrest philosophy from its history, the forever recurring dream that threatens at any time to jolt thinking out of its academic slumber in order to lead it to its critical point. Intensity disrupts historic filiation, destroys the great continuities to which people ascribe causal necessity, which they consolidate into unified blocks that construct coherencies and identities at the price of reductive simplifications in order to offer pedagogical assistance to the subject, promising it orientation by providing it with consistencies. These consistencies always serve to reinforce the fabric of fact, just as the experience of intensity begins to unravel it. Intensity offers resistance to the terror of the doctrines as well as the dictatorship of tradition. It opposes what Heiner Müller calls the “total occupation by the present,” which implies an “effacement of the past” and an “effacement of the future.” That is Müller’s version of the critique or deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence and its conception of time, which subordinates everything to the primacy of the given and elevates any contingency (including that of the past) to the status of a necessity, that is to say, of something against which resistance will inevitably be futile. Gilles Deleuze has given “intensity” an ontological turn. He relates it to Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence and to the chaos or abysmal ground, which is to say, to the indifference-value of reality. Intensity points to a momentum that defies reconciliation or balancing. It is disparity and difference; it indicates “the unequal in itself” (G. Deleuze). As such it designates (in Lacanian terminology) the real of reality, the precarious point where it defies internalization. We can think Deleuze’s difference of intensity in conjunction with Derrida’s différance and Heidegger’s ontological difference. It marks the rift that is part of the constitution of reality, like Lacan’s lack, like Adorno’s non-identity. Though these philosophical and psychoanalytical registers are glaringly divergent, though their temperatures (negative, diagnostic, affirmative, etc.) differ widely, they obviously agree in pointing out a universal boundary or void, a resistance that remains their shared vanishing point. Being open to possibilities is one thing. But being open to the ruin of the optional texture demands that the subject approach a resistance that can easily trip it up by evoking that subject’s truth (its real), the ontological inconsistence of its reality. Opening toward closure is opening toward an inconclusiveness that propels the emergence, amid the possible and the familiar, of the unfamiliar or impossible or differently possible. Possible beyond the possibilities, so unexpected that it is experienced as danger rather than opportunity. True opening is opening toward unfamiliarity and absence. It is the act of breaking through the optional texture toward its implicit outside. Not opening toward the world as it is as a world of fact, but opening toward its pure existence. The subject extends itself toward this outside, which opens up its possibilities by delimiting them. It is nothing but this self-extension.