Components and exponents

Such a differential typology indicates a major opposition in the centre of the human project. It will thus operate something like a division of the spirits in face of the achievement of human essence. Two different designs for totality. Two different visions of man, two projects of humanity and two human types. Two spaces for what is thinkable and possible. Two 'essences' crossing history and dividing the spirits. Their meaning is antithetic.

This differential typology is not descriptive but provocative. Its simplification forces the features giving rise to thinking on the side of the mental dynamics with their symbols and their conscious-unconscious dimensions.

These polarities or polar-concepts which signify while being opposed are not labels covering fixed and definite contents. They are rather open concepts which aim beyond towards an 'essence' which is gradually specified. To bring out the essence behind the concept 'adventurers of eschatology', for instance, a whole of phenomena, dimensions, projects, prototypes, and so on, a whole family of concepts, are called reciprocally to converge towards this 'essence'. The same applies to the concept of 'builder of the ideal city'. The essence of each antithetic family is thus released while gaining at the same time 'comprehension' and 'extension'.

Consequently the essence does not appear on the side where its terms is marked in its exclusive, but BETWEEN the two. A very remote 'essence' and at the same time a very close one which plays hide-and-seek and which invites us to play with it.

This opposition of discrepancies is not for cutting reality in dichotomy nor for fixing it in dualism. Releasing the antithetic significances is primarily for opening a space, a dialectical space of tension between antithetic polarities. Such a space is for dialectical intelligibility.

There is indeed no intelligibility but through difference. In this differential polarization of the cultural project, the vertical axis marks certainly the essential difference. It is in relation to it that it plays the most relevant difference we see between CLOSED and the OPEN. On one side, the project, wanting to make the economy of the tension, tends to be enclosed and made entirely safe. On the other one, it assumes a maximum of tension to be dialectically confronted with in an infinite exodus.
 
Any cultural project fits always in such a dynamic space. However it insists differently in this or that direction and has tendency to privilege this or that area for occupying it. Each human project thus particularizes the fundamental unit of the constituent semiological continuum in different constituted spaces.

The Occidental cannot understand itself if it ignores the gigantic differences which confronted each other and were made pregnant to give it birth. It was not born by parthenogenesis! It was born from father and mother. His mother is a pagan. His father is a Judeo-Christian. From his maternal heritage, he holds his 'components'. From his paternal heritage, he got his 'exponents'. You can try to murder the father periodically and ritually, you can do nothing against this first obviousness.

goto