[other] maledictions
We owe the quasi-totality of our discoveries to our
violences, to the exacerbation of our disequilibrium.
Even God, insofar as he intrigues us, is not to be
found in our most intimate depths, but rather at the
exterior limit of our fever, at the precise point where,
our rage coIliding with his, a shock results, an encounter
that is equally ruinous for him and for us. Stricken
with the malediction attached to acts, the violent man
does nor force his nature, does not go beyond himself,
except to furiously re-enter, as aggressor, followed by
his enterprises, which come to punish him for having
raised them. There is no work that does not return
against its author: the poem crushes the poet, the
system the philosopher, the event the man of action.
S ome form of self-destruction, responding to his
vocation and accomplishing it, is at work in the core
of history; only he saves himself who sacrifices gift s
and talents in order that, disengaged from his quality
as a man, he is able to strut into being. If I aspire to
a metaphysical career there is no price at which I am
able to protect my identity, however minute are the
residues that remain, it is necessary that I liquidate
them; just as, on the contrary, if I adventure into a
role in history, the task that I take upon myself has to
exasperate my faculties to the point where I splinter
with them. One always perishes by the self that one
assumes: to bear a name is to claim an exact mode
of collapse.