Through

Is speech a captive of `language'? Once becoming a structuralist object of science, the linguistic reality is methodologically constituted in autonomy. The axiom 'there is language' is quickly substituted for the assertion 'man speaks'. This slip, apparently inoffensive, makes however an attempt on man if it substitutes scientific methodology for philosophy. And this slip occurred rapidly. Speech brought back and reduced to language. Language brought back and reduced to structure. The 'other' finally brought back and reduced radically to the 'same'!

Curious flirt with nothingness! A sign of a time where man cannot survive any more after having broken the ontological bonds, after having lost the signified essentials and proclaimed the decline of the absolutes, of the sense and of the values. A sign of a time where man has to die after having made God die… Remains a naked and foolish meaning turning in a vacuum. When one resigns of man, when the sense of man is lost, you get ready to prostitute yourself with the ideological residues of a simple method. Here the loss of faith in man finds its alibi in the structural neutrality. When the possibility of man on man does not any more exceed that one of the tool, you take your methodology for an absolute and you buckle it on itself as your ideology.

Between the lines. Between the words. The animal Eros tends always towards a 'something' already given. The human Eros tend also towards where there is nothing yet. As if the essence of the world were in the interstices of the world. As if the main part of the things were between the things. As if the essence of the text were were to be read between the lines. A world articulable, dis-articulable and re-articulable ad infinitum according to infinitely new significances becomes available ad infinitum, in what it is and in what it can be, in its immediate materiality and in the opening of this materiality as symbol and sign.

The human essentials pass through. To speak is to cross the symbolic system field infinitely. The animal does not reach the word because the sign remains prisoner of the thing, of the situation, of the bonds… Man speaks thanks to the released sign, in the exodus out of a world buckled in his compactness. Essence passes through the structures and the constructions to emerge through their gaping.

To speak is also to cross unceasingly the language itself. Because language is only the tool of the speech. A marvellous tool, but only a tool. The true word speaks against the language.

Whereas the animal lives in a interconnected world where the items are given tied together by univocal bonds, man gives himself a world in rupture of bonds. And in this world with broken bonds every thing can be connected in a new way. This capacity of dis-structuring and re-structuring, of dis-articulating and re-articulating, is the possibility as much manual than intellectual of man himself as a spiritual matter and amaterial spirit. A game is playing interactively between the gesture and the idea in the unit of creative work. A play of hide-and-seek… The presence on bottom of an absence, the absence on bottom of a presence, where 'what is not' can arise in gaping of 'what is'.

Where branch and liana are too much present, the arc is first absent. However it must already haunt this absence to be able to impose its relevance where initially it is not. Without this absent presence, it would never be. To manufacture an arc, it is necessary to deny the branch and at the same time recover it like wood. It is necessary to deny the liana and at the same time take it back as a cord.

Always recover and include on an 'other' level. It is the even possibility of the significance. The significance is the specifically human possibility to deny the 'same' present at the profit of 'other' absent, and to return this absent present. Thus appears the indissociable connection between new 'stucturing' and new 'significance', between 'homo faber' and 'homo sapiens', between science which deciphers the world and technology which restructures the figures thus released, each significance in walk calling new structuring and each acquired structuring de-structuring itself and restructuring itself for new significances… Ad infinitum.

The intelligence proceeds through antinomic significances. The recourse to the schemas of double antithetic tables can thus appear fertile. It is not a question, obviously, of a dichotomisation of reality and even less a question of a dualism. By releasing the antinomic significances, one wants primarily to release the opening of a dialectical space of tension between antithetic polarities. Consequently the essential is not on each side where the terms are marked as polar ideas in their exclusive, but between the two, where nothing is marked and where the essential is played, the place of dialectical confrontation.
 

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