To tell the other one

Before the word there is only confusion. With the word the other one emerges. The word starts with the negation of nothingness. It makes arise the being, singular and plural ones. As at the origins of the world, the logos continues being a creator. What would be the being of the world, if it remained prisoner of silence? To reach the word, the eternal silence of the world has first to be broken. And this rupture is done through the emergence of man. With him every thing starts talking. And all in him, gesture, hand, look, posture, attitude, walking, rhythm, becomes speaking. Humanity means a deployment of a space where it is speaking.

All speaks since all can be symbol. All can become sign; all can make sign. To say the other. To haunt elsewhere. To make sign to the sign…The unvoiced wants to be said. What is said calls for what cannot be said. Through a rupture and through the going beyond the rupture another thing is said. Signifiers unceasingly break and stick back together, they move away and embrace again each other, so that signification emerges. The symbol, thus, says an infinite. But it says it only in the nostalgia of its other half.

There does not exist any word which does not remain affected by materiality. Even the most abstract terms stick to the ground. Their etymologies testify of their tangible roots. As, as for example, the spirit, which means originally air, breathing, breath, wind… But at the same time it means a lot more. Only one half is concerned with air displacement. The other half, released and available, 'symbol', breaths from elsewhere and signifies the 'other' one.

Man is not only that one by which the symbol arrives, he is itself alive symbol. A symbolic half which searches for the other half. Without this other half he cannot get a self-comprehension of himself. The human reality can only decipher itself through the embrace of the other half.

The specific human nature, through rupture and distance with the simple nature, does not exist out of a symbolic space. How can you explain such a space of the 'no' in the middle of the large 'yes' that nature repeats unceasingly with itself? All the naturalisms of the world would like to find the reasons starting from this even 'yes'.

The other half... Just as two halves of a broken shard, by showing the perfect correspondence of their crack, can be sign of recognition, that is symbol in the etymological meaning: sumbolon, sumballein, to put together. None of the two halves is sufficed for itself. Each one takes sense only with the other one. The visible one with the invisible one.

Isn't this an astonishing experience to meet the other half of the symbol and to discover how the vertiginous fracture of the world sticks together?

A symbol is initially anything. Every thing in nature has 'vocation' to become symbol. For that the object has to be broken and become useless. Good for the trash can? No. It is just now it takes value.

Isn't this a strange behaviour? Giving value to a broken object? Which value? This paradoxical value is elsewhere. It is new. It is different. This difference is called significance.

The simple transparency of the world is only of surface. Behind the scientific obviousnesses, and in another light, the world is divided in two halves. A present one and an absent one. The world feels achy by the half it misses. All the philosophies of the world do nothing but stammer this gaping.

Between the lines... Nothing exists concretely which is not 'built', from the atom to the most complex form of life, from the burst stone of the prehistoric man to the prowness of the advanced technique, from the first babbling of the language to the most sublimes poetic or mystical words. All is articulated, structured-together, built. However the basic essentials passes through every construction and emerges through its gaping. Like the beauty of the Parthenon. Like the look of a face. What is specifically human precisely. What is in continuity and in rupture. What emerges from the open one. The other one.

The sense expressed by the symbol points between the lines of the articulating language. Because the symbol says the other deeply, it returns beyond itself. The symbolic function is primarily metaphorical. In Greek: meta-phorein, to carry beyond, to transport, to transpose. When, for example, a word in a sentence takes a different meaning from which it has in the everyday usage. When, for example, the metaphorical narration in the form of allegory or parabola 'transposes' in an easier way of access and through a gaping a teaching which carries far.

When the wise man points to the moon, says a Chinese proverb, the imbecile looks at the finger. A prophetic word says the sense through the symbol, in a deep agreement with the other dimension of the human reality.

Hope meets in the other half. Your word can say; your word can also shout despair. It is your word which decides on you at the same time as you decide on it. Where elsewhere would you seek freedom?

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