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.

An enemy only becomes truly troublesome when we act wrongly because of them. Correctness is not only a sign of respect, but also a means of defense against a bad conscience.

Imposing a principled barrier on oneself hinders growth in the name of a principle that might well have proven outdated had that growth taken place.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

But where is that subject, that self, that “I,” that petrified being on its island of heavy isolation, seat of the will, bearer of intention, shaper of its experience? Whoever has searched for it has never found it; whoever has thought about it has unmasked it. But absence and unmasking are no match for the persistence with which it endures and will continue to endure. Attempts to dissolve it into structures or systems have had no durability, not even for those who carried out the operation. The “I” resists; it asserts itself, and rightly so. It performs an incantation: by speaking itself, it comes to life and becomes directive. Yet it falls prey to its own performative magic. In the hall of mirrors it has constructed to sustain itself, some mirrors become windows, and thus it forgets its origin, its entanglement. Its outside becomes purely inside. A causal source without external origin. Thoughts, actions, perceptions show the opposite. It practices itself in spiritual traditions with the sole aim of breaking its own reification. It commits itself, without closure, to collective enterprises, not least science, which contradict and unravel its isolation, yet the amnesia is almost complete as soon as it returns to itself and reclaims its boundary: this is me, origin and end, bearer of will, incomparable form that makes its uniqueness its highest principle. And it is rewarded for it as well. Its uniqueness is celebrated, imitated. The species has no use for its kind; it wants singularities, if only to give direction to the species and thus sustain it. But whoever imitates them proves to be of the species and never becomes singular. And whoever has become singular knows that they are, first of all, of the species. They have not only succeeded in constructing the most impressive hall of mirrors; they have also ensured that those mirrors could at times become windows. To think this duality as a cyclical alternation between mirrors and windows, a narrowing helix driven by reciprocal shifts in perspective, as the general manifesting itself in a singularity, as a node in a causal weave that takes itself to be the first mover, is decisive. Duality is the child of a limited perspective. The will to overcome it is therefore a metaphysical call that seeks to resolve an epistemic impossibility. But alternating between perspectives renders one reflexively partially blind, with all the dangers that entails. The transition from one to the other is not an act of will either, but occurs by grace of inner and outer conditions. The task is to accept that grace in order to better steer it. We will likely never be freed from this duality, yet we cannot but think beyond it and develop an integrating perspective. But rather than integration: making the need for it redundant, thinking the particular in its entanglement, the point in its extension.

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.

A principle can be both a boundary and its transgression. Both are necessary, but not at the same time.

If there is no fear in performing a certain act, it will contain no liberating potential.

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.

In the age of AI, to want to live meaningfully requires developing a form that cannot be copied.

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.