refrains of slow will | Nicolas Alzetta

If philosophy is hermeneutic and does not serve a naturalistic project, the boundary between philosophy and poetry can no longer be drawn in principle. Whoever denies themselves the poetic dimension of interpretation imposes a limit on that interpretation before it has even begun.

Imposing a principled barrier on oneself hinders growth in the name of a principle that might well have proven outdated had that growth taken place.

Private thinking is writing in a slow dialectic, incomplete and fragmentary. The incompleteness and inadequacy of the counter-thought has become a point of departure, but the reduction of this dialectic has consequences. Any claim to generality must be entirely abandoned. Argumentation has become strictly local. A subjectivity that contradicts itself, no more, but also no less. Thesis and antithesis have become expression, carriers of affect, or rather: that which has allowed affect to appear. And yet this writing is by no means mere expression. Its function is, first and foremost, transformative. The affect that manifests itself through language in order to modulate itself in the process.

The greater the contradiction of values at the core of a person, the greater the desire to grant one of them total victory. This usually translates into a grand aim, which will attempt to undermine the opposing values with unrelenting intensity.

A vocation is not an act of will, as the term suggests.

The first step is to see thought as action; the second is to grant it a similar weight and to recognize that it inscribes itself just as inextricably into the larger fabric.

A pure form does not impose itself. It is imitated.

The singular mind and the monster have in common that their deepest claim is misrecognized by those closest to them. The former does so out of pride, while deliberately calling forth disappointment about their person; the latter acts out of shame, in order to ward off ultimate disappointment.

It is not liberation if one has to show that it is.

Perhaps you are not yet capable of being sufficiently disappointed in your actions or in what they produce to truly be proud of them.

Total surrender to pleasure, in whatever form, leads to disintegration. Sublimation is therefore not optional; it is unmitigated preservation of form.

To be able, at any moment, to unfold everything one has ever done or thought, to cast it outward and draw a new reality inward.

The poetic mode is not an option, but a condition of transformation.

To be a demiurge of contingency: to reduce each phenomenon to its elementary components in order to recreate and thereby integrate it.

With objects and facts as with people: one can consider them as abstractions, as types, or as irreducible singularities. Both perspectives have their place, but if one wishes to reshape the contingency of one’s environment, abstractions are of little use. Only by seeing the singular in its irreducibility can one truly work with it.

Not what does this billboard do, but what can this billboard do for me?

Every word too many costs you twice: in disappointment at your lack of control over form, and in diminished reception by those you address.

I have no goals, only desires. The goal is deformed and therefore deforms. It is normalized, incorporated into what is acceptable, what is feasible. This does not mean that desires are pure or unmediated expressions, but they show us something more original. The goal fixes and is therefore always limiting. It is always the product of a limited imagination and perspective. It structures a temporal field and creates an anticipatory mode. Even when a goal lacks a precise temporal anchor, it becomes an anticipation of what is not yet, of what is yet to come, without further specification. But anticipation works affectively as relief and thereby partly releases one from concrete action.

For the sovereign, youth ends on the day they justify themselves to another for the last time.

In a triangular relation, repeatedly complimenting one person is often primarily a way of getting rid of the other.

Whoever uses interactions to compete has already lost them.

The most radical autonomy is not totalitarian. It recognizes its limits, the limits of its control. Not defending oneself when affected by another’s suffering is also a form of control.

It is an illusion of the expansive will that opening oneself to the suffering of others would hinder that expansion.

To be both the warmest and the coldest person.

Creativity as highest principle does not require the rejection of a moral ideal as a fundamental limitation. On the contrary, the moral ideal is both the aim of creation and its condition of possibility. No imposition of form without form, albeit a dynamic one.

The strength of one’s competence lies in the part of it that remains inexpressible.

To remain skeptical, for safety’s sake, when it seems that one has cast off one’s overgrown skepticism.

Perhaps indulgence (in the broad sense) is the strongest driver in developing a superior imagination.

To celebrate human exceptionalism is to limit it.

He showed himself in his deepest vulnerability. She could only confirm it. The shame he has felt since, he continues to hold against her, which translates into a forced, haughty distance.

Too little abstraction makes one sink into the multiplicity of the situation. Too much strips it of its characteristic properties. The task, then, is to find the functional optimum in each situation — but that optimum is as variable as the situation itself.

He invoked a right where he could have granted a favor, thereby committing injustice twice: toward the other and toward himself.

If only I could erase the traces, undo the grip of his immutability, she said, unaffected. She wants to preserve what will later quietly discourage her, a life as a child, a child’s life, as full of promise as a sunrise that refuses to settle into too much anticipation. Oh, I hear you say, calm down now. Submission is only at stake when it is half-hearted, and yet this is the rest I now wish for you. Stylized as always, her discouragement is concise. Pariahs live by grace of the majority.

Her wisdom consists in surrounding herself with people who ask her questions to which she has no answer.

A politician is someone who sacrifices their imagination to their “sense of reality.” They usually have little of the former, as it would require too much willingness to sacrifice.

Antipathy must never be an obstacle to considering someone an ally.

The old becomes all the more steadfast when the new is adopted with too much enthusiasm.

Moral fashion is always suspect, not because it is necessarily bad, but because, as fashion, it inevitably reduces the multiplicity of a moral question and thereby ignores the truth of opposing positions.

She places her intelligence on a pedestal, yet suffers from having less of it than she would like, and this insecurity undermines her sovereignty. At the same time, it is the primary condition of her growth.

“Perhaps you do not have enough shame in you to become great,” said the old woman.

Nothing is more readily available than the humiliations one has suffered. They are the primary signposts.

Whoever seeks to share their quest with others has usually found little.

Small pain irritates; great pain paralyzes. So it is with evil in the world.

Thinking is often most therapeutic when its object has nothing to do with the cause of the need for therapy.

As soon as she tastes something of the highest quality, she wants to assure herself that similar heights have been reached elsewhere, as if to guarantee the inexhaustibility of what has been tasted, while it is precisely its singularity that defines it.

Embracing something new almost always requires a certain naïveté, if only to allow the act of embracing itself to succeed. Critical adoption is a contradiction. The critical always comes later.

Coarse natures often announce in advance the discomfort you will experience through them, as if such honesty were to diminish the rudeness.

Seeking the banal in everything remains the surest way to escape it.

To make what is nearest the subject, only to feel remorse for not having gone further.

His small victories please him too much to pursue a great one.

Willed seriousness is always less serious than we would like.

“I am today…” A crude summary of all my actions, thoughts, attitudes, feelings, each of which constitutes a system configuration with a certain probability. The question is thus how one bends the statistics of one’s own system to one’s will. “By placing it within the right surrounding system,” the other would say.

A writer must not reproduce life; he must deepen it, intensify it. Every frivolity in his writing is therefore the negation of this task, a mimesis of the superfluous.

How lightly the past is used to distance oneself from a supposed former self, as if the intensity of the rejection of who one once was marked the degree of rebirth.

How many dimensions one attributes to a phenomenon depends less on the phenomenon itself than on one’s willingness to grant them. A moral question, therefore.

One person derives dignity from the respect others have for him; another calls that a lack of dignity.

One tells oneself that naïveté will one day cease, but it only becomes more cunning and assumes ever new, more difficult-to-recognize forms.

Now that there can no longer be an ontological or religious ground for morality, positing the superiority of reason over the affects, or vice versa, is either a matter of taste, or a concession to a prevailing sense of duty toward the community, whether or not on prudential grounds. In both cases, a matter of character.

To hold that the unpredictable event is as unavoidable as all others, only within a different register of probability.

The total absence of legitimation with regard to others is, as far as I know, the strongest form of legitimation.

Strange optimism, you silence my doubt and thereby render my moral hygiene suspect.

The bird declares itself willing. “I have much to say to you,” it says. Maintes belles choses ne se laissent approfondir impunément. Perhaps this explains my reluctance to keep less distance. Thirst is best quenched, after all, by drinking just enough. But to renounce excess here would be criminal. People begin to doubt themselves if they are not affirmed. In this they do not differ from us. Very well then, trickle your kindnesses into me. Those who stand upright are above all those who have never leapt, while the ideal they wished to guard renders its own ground void. Prudence is antithetical to vitality and is therefore rewarded only by anemic souls.

An intelligence does not make itself the object of its own inquiry unless it is uncertain. This is why almost all intelligent people lack genius; they have never experienced their intelligence as a problem and have therefore never felt the impulse to let it rise beyond itself.

The limits of perseverance are the limits of the capacity for servitude and boredom.

Borges says somewhere that the feeling behind a text is at least as important as the text itself. A maxim for philosophers, it seems to me, for nothing better masks smallness of feeling than “conclusive” arguments.

It is no elevation if it does not make you beautiful.

A mental state is often labeled unpleasant because it stands in the way of another. Once one lets it exist in itself, this negative character disappears.

The commonplaces circulating within elites (including intellectual ones) are usually used by their members as part of a mechanism of distinction vis-à-vis outsiders, but they remain commonplaces nonetheless, whose defining traits will always be laziness and conformism.

In more than one noble nature, the inability to think strategically is nothing more than a moral reflex that cuts off any attempt at it.

Small pride allows ambition to quench its thirst. Great pride prevents it from drinking too quickly.

For the conscientious, respect in interaction is at least as much a matter of conserving energy as it is an intrinsic duty.

Reasonable in every respect, yet completely lost.

The systematic in thinking deprives it of much subtlety.

However elevated, the principle invoked for self-justification always leads to a diminution of the self.

Nothing can better harmonize mental life and action and guarantee activity than a great goal that suddenly makes its entrance. Yet it almost always appears as the product of a needy pride, in an attempt to satisfy it on credit, which deprives it of durability. This need is usually so totalizing that it drowns out all others, leading to a far-reaching deregulation of mental life and a regression of capacities.

Who speaks here of self-hatred? Love is the condition for self-contempt, but it is unfortunately also love that softens our judgment as the reasons for contempt increase, until we ultimately cease to despise. Therein lies the greatest danger.

Greatness is too singular to serve as a model.

Education teaches one to respect fixed forms; scholasticism clings to them artificially.

If you make the same mistake every time, it may be best to stop seeing it as a mistake.