I lean over you, your equal, offering you a mirror for your perfect nothingness, for your shadows which are neither light nor absence of light, for this void which contemplates. To all that which you are, and, for our language, are not, I add a consciousness. I make you experience your supreme identity as a relationship, I name you and define you. You become a delicious passivity.
Interpretation
This quote explores the nature of identity and consciousness through relationships.
In this quote, Maurice Blanchot reflects on the profound connection between self and other, suggesting that our identities are constructed through relationships and interactions. He emphasizes the role of language and consciousness in shaping our understanding of ourselves and others, hinting at the interplay between presence and absence, and how we perceive our existence in relation to others.
In practice
During a philosophical discussion in a classroom about the nature of self and existence.
Every artist is linked to a mistake with which he has a particular intimate relation. There is the mistake of Homer, of Shakespeare — which is perhaps, for both, the fact of not existing. Every art draws its origin from an exceptional fault, every work is the implementation of this original fault, from which come to us a new light and a risky conception of plenitude.
To see was terrifying, and to stop seeing tore me apart from my forehead to my throat.
If nothing were substituted for everything, it would still be too much and too little.
A writer who writes, ''I am alone''... can be considered rather comical. It is comical for a man to recognize his solitude by addressing a reader and by using methods that prevent the individual from being alone. The word alone is just as general as the word bread. To pronounce it is to summon to oneself the presence of everything the word excludes.
Secrecy is for losers. . . . It is time to dismantle government secrecy, this most persuasive of Cold War-era regulations. It is time to begin building the supports for the era of openness that is already upon us.
The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedoms.
People were excited by violence. What, after all, was the sexual act but a voluntarily endured assault, a momentary death?
A good society is characterised not just by liberty but by mutual respect and responsibility. When this breaks down it takes a lot more than police officers to put things right.
It would be my greatest sadness to see Zionists (Jews) do to Palestinian Arabs much of what Nazis did to Jews.
It was a catch-22: If you didn’t put the trauma behind you, you couldn’t move on. But if you did put the trauma behind you, you willingly gave up your claim to the person you were before it happened.
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