Starting from difference

We would not speak if we were full. We would not speak if we were only what we are. The animal is too full with animality and with itself to be able to speak. The indifference does not speak. The speech starts with the distance and the difference. Speech starts with a refusal. Nature can only say an unconditional 'yes' to itself. It is 'no' which opens the possibility of the logos. Then, an infinity opens through this 'no'. Thinking is primarily a critical act. It starts by distinguishing, i.e. by refusing the limits and the enclosures. “All was mixed, said Anaxagoras, but then came the understanding which separated every thing to put it in order.” With the Book of the Genesis, it is the Spirit which plans on the hurly-burly… To separate. To create. Thus the logos is made poietes - creator - of infinite innovation.

The indifference can only be absolutely silent. Try to imagine it, you can't. The smallest thought is begins with the difference. Neutral indifference - ne-uter, neither one nor the other - can thus be imagined only in extreme thinking. How can you try to think indifference if not on bottom of difference? Before speech there is only hurly-burly. The speech starts with the negation of nothing. It makes the being emerge, singular and plural, as at the origins of the world.

The indifference is sterile and unimportant. The indifference tends towards sense zero. Sense can only emerge through difference. The stronger the difference, the stronger the sense. At the same time the sense provokes tirelessly new differences. Without it, absolute equivalence would reign in the world.

Man speaks through difference. No significance can be born without breaking and ruptures. Meaning makes differences emerge in the middle of indifference, that is to pose and therefore to oppose, signs and symbols. Sumbolon, sumballein, to put together. Two dispersed halves of a broken shard which, put together, correspond, becoming sign of recognition. Rupture, dispersion and meeting. Deployment and recovery. Distance and gathering. Difference and meeting in identity.

To speak is to make emerge a presence through its absence. To speak is to express sense through signs. The sign is primarily something open to its other one. Symbol in the original meaning of the word. The sign is not by itself, in its enclosure. It is only in and by the intention to mean. Lieutenant of the 'other' one. Lieutenant in its absence.
To speak is to translate significances intentionally and for that to articulate through the space-time mediations the possible meaning to become active meaning. That is what the animal cannot do. It does not reach the language because the sign cannot be released. It remains prisoner of the thing, the situation, the bonds…
To speak is to cross infinitely the field of the symbolic system. Language is the infinite tool system of this crossing.

Man speaks in the exodus of a world buckled in his identity. The specific human possibility is only starting from the difference and spreads itself only through the difference. Man is opened to make be the different one.

A symbol is initially a 'something' taken out of the middle of nature. It could be any item or even any part of it. Every thing in nature has 'vocation' to become symbol. But it is necessary to break it. The object has to become 'useless', just good to be thrown away. But it is then that it becomes interesting for man! Isn't this a strange behaviour - foreign to nature - to thus give value to a broken object? But this value is elsewhere. It is new. It is different. And this difference is significance. In the rupture of 'what is' , something else becomes possible. This particular stone, here, is broken and becomes, once burst, a tool. And at the same time, it can become any tool or any tool system ad infinitum. An infinite possibility!

All cultures, all philosophies and all religions of the world function on radical and essential differences. Just some examples. For the prophetsof the Bible, infidelity and idolatry faced with Covenant. For Buddha, the universal suffering of karma faced with the certainty of a possible release. For Blaise Pascal, the misery of man faced with his greatness. For Plato, the lapse of memory faced with the remembrance of the innate eternal ideas. For hermetism, the salvation of the soul faced with its fall in a material body. For Marx, liberation of man faced with his alienations.

A culture generates more and more differences. But already it is constituted starting from a concentration of differences. At the origin of the multiple historically appeared cultures there is the necessary although non sufficient condition of something like an 'oasis' of human density, along a feeder river, for example, or in a fertile plain. Any culture is inseparable from an agriculture which settles an increasing human concentration. No great culture was constituted without a cereal, this miraculous concentrate of carbohydrates, proteins and lipids with its rock salt and its vitamins…

This concentrated human environment integrates a maximum of personal differences, since man is the only species where individualities are strongly different and are all the more strongly different as they form a greater community. It is such a community embracing a maximum of difference which becomes a source of outstanding culture. Such a community concentration induces a whole series of other diversifications and other intensifications such as for example the differentiation of the tasks or the more intensive production of subsistence.

It is always a concentrated difference, at the same time as a differentiated concentration, which makes this provocative exploding mixture of humanity.

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