ART AS AN ASSERTION OF FORM FOR JULIE MEHRETU
Julie Mehretu
Katalog zu den Austellungen vom MUSAC, Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Castillia y Leon, Kunstverein Hannover und Louisiana Museum for Moderne Kunst, Humlebaek
Herausgegeben vom Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2006
mit Texten von Lawrence Chua, Cay Sophie Rabinowitz, Augustin Pérez Rubio und Marcus Steinweg
28,6 x 28,6 cm, Leinen
208 Seiten, 216 Abbildungen
Englisch/ Spanisch
Katalog zu den Austellungen vom MUSAC, Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Castillia y Leon, Kunstverein Hannover und Louisiana Museum for Moderne Kunst, Humlebaek
Herausgegeben vom Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2006
mit Texten von Lawrence Chua, Cay Sophie Rabinowitz, Augustin Pérez Rubio und Marcus Steinweg
28,6 x 28,6 cm, Leinen
208 Seiten, 216 Abbildungen
Englisch/ Spanisch
2. In order to be an assertion of form and truth, art and philosophy have to refuse the "order of making politics". This is the order of what is possible, of pragmatism and its practical wisdom, of situational intelligence. It is the order of phrónesis, as Aristotle says. The dimension of diplomatic reason. Aristotle calls phronesis intelligence in particularity, in unfreedom, intelligence which operates in relation to the situation in which it decides and acts. It is, as Gadamer tirelessly insists, the principle of hermeneutics: reason that considers and weighs and balances. This brings it close to the pragmatic estimation of doxa, of sound common-sense. Art and philosophy include an absolute resistance against doxa and phrónesis because they force the subject to slow down, to put the brakes on itself, to renounce violence. Philosophy and art want to erect the subject as a power of assertion that resists defusing by doxa and phrónesis. Properly speaking, the subject only decides and acts by neglecting its situation, ignoring and transgressing it by puncturing the texture of facts. The subject is nothing other than the name for this puncturing and hyperbolé which it necessarily represents. Hence the mistrust directed against the subject of such a self-authorization because it resists its defusing by the spirit of facts.
3. Neither in philosophy nor in art is it a matter of proof or opinion. It is a matter of positing, of assertion. Assertion is distinguished from proof and opinion by having to make do without certainty. A philosophy of assertion is philosophy in uncertainty. It surpasses and transgresses the modalities of conventional thinking such as reflection, argument, grounding and criticism. It is a matter of the subject touching a truth in uncertainty and giving this contact a form, a language. Truth is the name for the limits of the world of facts. Philosophy exists only as contact with this limit as an assertion that withdraws from the imperatives of facticity. In touching truth, philosophy has to resist the certainty of opinion and the obscurantism of facts in equal measure. It is a touching of the untouchable and makes of this touching a life-form.
4. Philosophical life is not a life of knowledge because it remains related to truth rather than knowledge. It is not a matter of knowing but of experiencing the limits of what can be known. This experience demands and implies knowledge but it is not exhausted in any security of knowledge. An experience of truth breaks with the securities of models of certainty. As a subject of truth, the subject inhabits the zone of contact between knowledge and truth. Whereas knowledge can be described as its possession, truth is by definition incapable of being possessed. To possess what cannot be possessed is what I call the touching of truth as a form of life. It is the experience of a perfect lack of property. In going through this experience, the subject does not even possess itself. It comports itself like something alien and stands in for itself as if for something that is elementarily unfamiliar.
5. The subject of truth is neither a subject of certainty nor of knowledge. It is a subject of the limits and is itself a limit by touching the limits of the universe of facts. Touching this limit cannot be called epistemological because it is the experience of the limits of theoretical knowledge. Philosophy is not epistemology; philosophy is a form of life which describes the limits to the possibilities of knowledge without being secured in a kind of higher knowledge. Philosophy reaches beyond the knowable and is therefore more than merely establishing a capacity for knowing. Philosophy is not anámnesis; it begins with the experience of the collapse of memory. The subject of a philosophy may be a seeking subject, but it does not know what it is looking for. Searching is not the truth of philosophy because touching truth means ceasing to search. Ceasing to search means not enclosing oneself in a certainty. It means gaining insight into the senselessness of such an attempt to enclose oneself. This insight, however, cannot be described as knowledge or as a fact. It becomes the subject of an assertion that hovers above the grounds of facts. A philosophy of assertion includes this hovering. The subject of assertion hovers between the spheres of ground and abyss; it maintains contact with the naturalness of naked facts and also with the super-naturalness of mere ideas; it inhabits a third dimension. This is the dimension of the limit, of the indistinguishability of the limit from its beyond, zone of indeterminacy, of terror, of hope, of becoming, of sadness and of happiness. Heavens of ideas can be inhabited like spaces of facts, but the world of indeterminacy is uninhabitable because it is not even a world.
6. At the limit of the world, at this edge of the world, the subject experiences itself as a limit. The limit is a possible name for its subjectivity. For this reason it can be called a subject without subjectivity, because the limit continually closes the substantial concept of subjectivity for the singular subject. A subject is what opens itself to this closure. It is the ek-static subject of a primordial openness, subject of this ontological nakedness and poverty, nothing but a subject of emptiness, of indeterminacy and lack of essence. This subject cropped up in the thinking of the twentieth century as the subject of unhousedness (Heidegger), as the subject of the unspeakable and the miracle (Wittgenstein), as a subject of the exterior (Blanchot), as the subject of freedom or nothingness (Sartre), as the subject of ontological lack or the real (Lacan), as the subject of chaos and becoming (Deleuze/Guattari), as the subject of desubjectivization and care of the self (Foucault), as the subject of the other (Levinas), as the subject of différance (Derrida) and as the subject of the universal or truth (Badiou). It is a subject whose subjectivity seems to coincide with the dimension of non-subjectivity: a subject without subjectivity.
7. Philosophy and art move as radical forms of assertion unsecured by any universal principle beyond the order of feasibility, not in order to be more removed from the world or reality than politics within the order of making politics, but in order to situate the intensity of its assertion within another horizon, in an horizon of infinitude and impossibility in which the subject resists absorption by mere interests and inclinations, as Kant puts it. Art and philosophy are forms of the self-acceleration of a desire to assert which breaks through the consensual horizon of discussion, argumentation, of communication, explanation, justification and reflexive securing of the self. Art and philosophy exist only as this breakthrough, as a power that surpasses and transgresses the horizon, as the power of assertion of a subject of a decision, of a decision which punctures the horizon of what is possible through to the dimension of the impossible which is the dimension of truth.
8. Truth is the name for breaking into the systems, institutions and archives of truth which look after the administration of factual truths, of knowledge. Truth is an excess. It surpasses and transgresses naked knowledge and marks the point of the most extreme restlessness. The touching of truth performed by the desire for truth on the part of art and the philosophy is the restless encroaching upon what cannot be encroached upon. Philosophy and art exist only as this encroachment. This encroachment demands of the subject of art or the subject of philosophy that it traverse the space of the possible which is the space of doxa, of mere opinion and of the factual truths established by it, and for the moment in which the work is posited — the art work or the philosophical assertion — that it suspend this space.
9. Art as the assertion of truth through an assertion of form is only possible and necessary in the dimension of real unfreedom which is the order of facts, of symbolic and imaginary imperatives. Art exists only in relation to that which irreducibly restricts, negates and endangers art. Objective unfreedom is the element in which the subject of art erects and holds itself as the subject of freedom.
10. There is a misunderstanding concerning the concept of form. People think that form creates clarity. This is wrong. Form is clarity which produces disorder, chaos. For this reason there is the widespread awe, in both art and thinking, in view of form. Hence the all too common decision in favour of diffuseness because diffuseness co-operates to provide a clear and orderly overview, whereas the assertion of form risks a clarity that does not betray the extent of factual lack of a clear and orderly overview.
11. "If the place I want to reach could only be reached on a ladder," Wittgenstein states, "I would give up trying to reach it because there where I really have to go, I should, properly speaking, already be". To be already there where one wants to go — that is the formula for a thinking that can be described as a thinking of immanence, of an immanence which succeeds in integrating transcendence (its beyond) into itself. Wittgenstein's thinking is such a thinking which drives the immanence of the already or the earlier to its limit in order to make out a constitutive unfamiliarity amidst the evidence of familiarity with a form of life, the presence of that which can only be present as an absence. Wittgenstein referred to his work as being a "work of clarification". Does this mean that his aim was to create clarity? Not necessarily, when one considers that the product of clarification is clarity but that there is no clarity that is not disturbing.
12. In going through the experience of truth, what is self-evident and familiar in the life-form is lost. Therefore it can be said that in every form of life the dimension of what is familiar combines with a fundamental unfamiliarity. Truth is what disturbs and interrupts the purity and the simple functioning of a form of life. Touching the truth is what I call this experience of interruption. In contact with a truth, the evidence of the life-form is lost. The subject loses its context. It keels over into a kind of exterior without being able to react at all to the loss of evidence, without being prepared for it. The experience of truth includes the suddenness of its appearance. Something resembling truth only exists as an event of truth, as the intrusion of the impossible into the dimension of possibility. That would be a second definition of the form of life: a life-form constitutes the living space of the possible. And the limit of this living space, the interruption of the current, of the stream of life means that a truth has occurred. It means that the subject is touching the limits of its possibilities and its life.
13. What happens with the subject of this touching? What does it mean to experience a truth? The subject of the life-form lives its life as a life of possibility, as a form of possibility. It glides almost without resistance through the space of the indubitable. One can say that it lives means here, in this space of the life-form: it functions.
14. To live the unliveable, to give death a place in the midst of one's life is what I call touching a truth. And I believe that the crack which allows the experience of the life-form to become a conflict between the experience of what can be experienced and the experience of what cannot be experienced is part of the question concerning ethics in general. In his 1929 Lecture on Ethics, Wittgenstein insists on the incompatibility of the mere facts with the ethical sphere in order to characterize ethics as "super-natural". The supernatural character of ethics can be related to the dimension of miracle and its character as event. The "miracle of the existence of the world", the "world as miracle" kept Wittgenstein in suspense from the beginning of his life up to his death. Everybody knows the statement from the Tractatus, "Not how the world is is what is mystical, but that it is". (6.44)
15. The question I pose for myself is to what extent the subject's swimming in the stream of life, to what extent its sojourn in a life-form does not necessarily confront the subject with this crack, with the miracle, with the event, with the truth, with the ethical dimension and with death; thus, to what extent in the experience of familiarity and evidence and everydayness of the life-form the night of non-evidence comes through, the unfamiliar, the uncanny itself. "Evidence" or non-evidence which, as Wittgenstein says, "would make what is most secure [evidence as such] incapable of being assumed".
16. The form of life means at first the reality shared with other subjects. The life-form is the shared horizon. The horizon is not primarily the phenomenological horizon of seeing, of integration and imagination or knowledge. It is the horizon of life, life-horizon. In the concept of life-form there is already a reference to the community of subjects and the common, communal aspect of the subject.
17. The subject shares a world with other subjects. The world of facts. In the world of facts, the subject is not alone. The world of facts is the zone of community. It is the zone of participation of participating subjects, who are the common participants of their evidence, convictions and uncertainties. The zone of facts is the space of language, of the shared logos, the socio-symbolic space.
18. In the Tractatus Wittgenstein says, "The subject does not belong to the world but is a limit of the world". This means that the subject cannot be merged with the language community, the shared life-form and its symbolic imperatives. The subject does not merge. It is the limit of community, limit and resistance. It lives its life in divided horizons. But it does not disappear in the community. It protrudes from it. Although the subject stands on the shared ground of the shared forms of life, it protrudes out of these forms as this lonely resistance. It breaks through the shared horizon and marks its limit. It is the horizon of the horizon.
19. What is the sense of a touching of truth? What is truth at all? What does touching truth mean as a form of life? I call truth the space of this limit. The experience of truth is a touching of the limit. The subject as a subject of this touching is the subject of truth. By touching on a truth it also touches itself in an unmistakable way, a self which, strictly speaking, does not exist. It comes into contact with an (impossible) beyond.
20. In a gesture that is perhaps no longer simply Nietzschean, I call subject that which assumes responsibility for its innocence. Toward whom? Not toward itself as long as this self and its reflexivity mark features of identity because here subject means the beyond of identity, and its identity, whose situational place-holder the subject is, is what I call truth. The subject assumes responsibility for a truth and over against the truth of its situation. It is clear that this truth does not belong to the situation itself. Recall Plato's determination of the idea tou agathou as epeikeina tes ousias: the idea of the good, the truth means the constitutive beyond of an ontological connection. That is the blind spot in each and every constituted and established system. What would be gained if the objection of 'idealism' were made here? Truth is what refuses knowability, the idealism of facts! And courageous high spirits would be the willingness to integrate such a resistance, the unknowable itself, into one's life.
21. The realism of philosophy is the loving realism of a subject that refuses to choose between the alternatives of a vulgar realism and a dreamy idealism. Insofar as philosophy desires truth, it desires what is actual and real. Philosophy is not a flight from reality. It may represent a movement of flight, but what it flees is not reality. Philosophy flees the substitute for reality that polls itself reality. Philosophy is realism, the desire for reality in this sense.
22. What is true can never be certain. Certainty is due to leaping over the category of truth. Certainties are invented to prevent truths. The subject of certainty is the subject of the reality of facts.
23. The subject comes into contact with the nameless. As Bataille, Blanchot, Sartre and Lacan have shown, the experience of what is heterogeneous, of the exterior, of contingency, of the real, a borderline experience that tears the subject out of its interior security. The subject loses itself as the subject of self-control and world-control. It plunges out of its essence and this experience is the terror of an absolute disconcertion and disintegration.
24. The becoming of the subject describes the subject’s confrontation with its unconscious, which is a touching of the limit of the order of consciousness.
25. The question concerning the touching of truth must be extended to the question concerning the subject. The subject lives as a subject touching truth. To be a subject means to make a pact with a truth.
26. Something resembling a subject exists only as a subject of truth. The subject neither speaks the truth, nor is it in the truth, in the accessible openness of being, as Heidegger calls it. A subject is that which experiences the limit of the opened-up truth and the limitedness of the truth of propositions.
27. The experience of the limit and of limitedness (of delimiting what is actual as a factual truth) is what I call touching the untouchable. The subject performs this touching in the moment of its decision in favour of a truth which does not pre-exist as such. It outlines and constitutes the object and target of its affirmation by identifying itself with it.
28. The subject's identification with a truth is an act of self-obligation, of loyalty, as Badiou calls it. Identification with a truth is a surpassing, transgressing and suspension of the model of facts constituting identity. There is identification only as suspension of the principle of identity. The subject of identification touches the impossible. It coalesces with the ungraspable and casts itself toward the indeterminate.
29. The subject of this casting-toward is an Icarian subject of the sun. It will not be able to be acquitted of a kind of constitutive structural hubris. Gadamer speaks of the "Icarus flight of speculative philosophy," which makes of the subject an Icarus who accelerates beyond the determinacy of facts and the paternal logos. The subject of truth is an Icarian subject that overflies itself and the facts. In its flight of truth it overflies the untruth on its, and the world's, reflexive determinations which constitute identity and are therefore external, superficial. It moves away from its cosmic factual status to define its self as an acosmic dissociation from the self, as a distancing from its alien factual components.
30. Can there be a touching of truth only for a singular subject of the monstrous, for the subject of the desert? Or is there a promise to open up the singular experience of truth to the truth of experience in general that is associated with the concept of truth, with the universal truth as a singular assertion? To open up to a truth which, although it can only be asserted singularly, has universal validity? There are doubtless subjects, and there are probably many of them, who exclude truth for themselves. Truth, however, is that which does not deny to anybody access to it. Therein lies the inexorability of every truth, that it does not omit anybody, that it does not forget anybody (see Kafka's Law).
31. A touching of truth happens when the subject is forced to accelerate beyond its actual self, when it loses itself in contact with what cannot be contacted in the ocean of undecidability.
32. Truth is what is too much, what remains, what the subject cannot eat.
33. Truth is not grounded by philosophy and art. Truth can only be asserted. Truth cannot be grounded. Truth eventuates when the subject alienates itself from the symbolic order, its socio-cultural integrity as well as the phantasmagoria of the imaginary. Truth exists at the moment in which philosophy and art (apart from other forms of assertion such as the sciences) touch the impossible, pure virtuality, the real or chaos by risking a transgression of the horizon. Philosophy and art must assert this touching, which is itself a touching of truth. They realize this movement and defend it. They are forms of realization of truths that do not pre-exist. It cannot be a matter of finding truths, of discovering or deciphering them. It is a matter of inventing them, of producing truth. "'Truth' is never 'in itself', never present-at-hand of itself," and as such decipherable, "but is struggled for in conflict," says Heidegger. Such a truth, insofar as it is the product of a subject of assertion involved in conflict and strife, is therefore not relative in the plain sense of the word. Philosophy and art assert truth (art asserts truth by asserting form) by withdrawing from the relativism of factual truths and the regime of proof and argumentative assurance. Philosophy and art to do not assert any facts; they constitute truths that corrupt the order of facts. The site of truth cannot be found in the universe of facts. This is the Utopianism of truth, that it is as such deranged, somewhere else, that it bursts the register of facts, that it insists on another site that is not registered in this topology.
34. Human being is defined by the tendency to touch and violate and transgress the limit. Obviously, human life includes a relation to the unliveable, just as human speaking includes a relation to the unspeakable. It is this relation, this tendency and this running up against the limits of language which Wittgenstein calls ethics. The site of ethics is not life or the world. It is this limit, the zone of contact between the world and its beyond, between life and death. The site of ethics is a problematic site.
35. The human subject inhabits this site as a subject of this expectation or willingness, as a subject of tendency. It is in this sense an ethical subject, a subject that touches the untouchable, a subject of self-transcendence, a problematic subject because it is only a subject through its willingness to transgress and surpass itself as subject. Ethics exists only as a relatedness to what is unrelated, only insofar the subject reaches into the dimension of the world-closure and subject-closure. The subject's reaching into this dimension turns it into an ethical subject surpassing and transgressing the space of the world. This transgression is prescribed for its subject status. It is primordial. There is something resembling a subject only as contact with what is non-subjective. The non-subjective dimension is not the objective the world because the objective world is always already my subjective world: "I am my world". The non-subjective dimension is the sphere of an immeasurably higher unfamiliarity than the world or objectivity. To reach into this unfamiliarity amounts to the experience of transcending the world, but this transcendence is incomplete. It does not protrude into existence. It does not open up to what is already open. It is an opening to a closure of world. In transcendence the subject experiences a limit which opens up to nothing. Transcendence is a touching of this limit and closure, an experience of absolute immanence.
36. Touching the limit is a surpassing and transgressing because there is no beyond of the limit. There is nothing but a limit which in being touched can be transgressed. Toward what? Toward the dimension of an absolute closure which coincides undecidably with transcendental freedom. What is philosophy if it is not the experience of this freedom and closure? Instead of surrendering itself to the opinion that philosophy should be close to life and restrict itself to what is possible, the task is to defend the "aggressive character of philosophy" which distinguishes itself from the postulate of a closeness of philosophy to life by conjugating the subject with the impossible, the unliveable, with absolute freedom as a burdensome infinity. In a certain way philosophy is concerned with removing the subject from mere life, of defining it as something essentially different from an animal existence. Whereas Wittgenstein opens up life to the closure of life, to death, to the unliveable and the miracle, Heidegger, too, seems to define the problematic contact of human existence with the dimension of what is super-subjective as the subjectivity of the subject itself. A subject is what is more than a subject. A subject exists only as a transgression of its functions as subject. Only the subject that opens itself to closure and death can rightly be called a subject, a subject of an originary self-transcendence.
37. Chaos is a name for the truth which shows itself to the subject of the touching of truth as an open abyss or opened closedness. Chaosmotic ethics relates the subject to this unrelated dimension, to this limit which keeps it in contact with chaos. Nothing more can be demanded of ethics and the concept of ethics: that it demand the permeability of the subject for the impermeable so that the subject recognizes itself in its complete unprotectedness and loneliness.
38. Touching the untouchable demands a certain degree of courage of will. The subject of touching is the subject of freedom to alienate and transgress itself. Instead of enclosing itself in its self-image, it must gather courage to activate another self. It is the subject of a necessarily auto-aggressive self-elevation through which it transfers all responsibility to itself.
39. The subject of self-transgression which tears itself away from itself and touches the limit, is a finite subject of infinitude. It is a subject of truth insofar as truth is the name for a "primordial inner conflict or emptiness". It is a subject opened up to the nothingness of a pre-originary 'origin', an ontological subject whose truth belongs neither to the ontological order of being nor to the ontic order of beings. The truth of the subject of truth is an opening to the area of conflict between being and beings, to the strife (éris) or war (pólemos) between openness and closedness, to the... ontological difference. As subject of truth, the subject that touches truth is a subject of the experience of the difference between léthe and alétheia, earth and world, darkness and light. In relation to this difference, to a conflict that is inscribed neither in the register of the knowable nor in that of the unknowable (it describes the monstrous compossibility of knowledge and non-knowledge), the subject must assert a form which would be equally a form of truth and a form of life, a form which corresponds to formlessness itself.
40. To touch a truth demands of the subject that it expose itself to the quaking of a pre-originary disorder, to adapt names to its concussions, a form. And yet, the self-transition of the subject of certainty toward alien truth is nothing external to the subject. The subject loses its consciousness of facts in this problematic contact. This is the "contact with a pure exterior" that marks the touching of the untouchable, the experience of an absolute limit.
41. The subject of the love of truth is the subject of self-transcendence to the dimension of a truth which is irreducible both to the sphere of knowledge and the sphere of non-knowledge and faith. The "process of the universal or a truth," Badiou says, marks the break with established knowledge. "One could also say that a truth does not have any relation to knowledge and even that it is essentially unknown." Truth is not a truth of knowledge, faith or facts. Truth marks the limit of the light of knowledge, faith and facts.
42. The thinking of light has to assert itself as a thinking of darkness. Like the subject of the experience of the other, of the impossible, of absolute future or the propriating event, the subject of the affirmation of light affirms an originary darkness as the ground which enables its experience. As a thinking of the possible it is subject to the experience of the impossible. It decides, as Derrida has tirelessly repeated, in the night of undecidability.
43. What distinguishes the love of truth from the faith in truth is that the subject of love does not presuppose truth as substantially given. Truth only constitutes itself in being touched. It is another name for nothingness.
44. Philosophy, insofar as it represents a European event, the event of a culture of logos that has lasted two and a half millennia, associated itself from the outset with light (with the platonic sun, the Christian lumen, the enlightenment, the Lumières, the Husserlian evidence and the Heideggerian Lichtung). It was ignited at its origin as a metaphysics of light, from Heraclitus' all-steering lightning, Plato and the Neo-Platonism of Plotinus, Proklos and Porphyry, via Augustine up to Robert Grosseteste, Roger Bacon, Bonaventura and Albertus Magnus in order, from the declining Middle Ages, to dominate the entire modern age, the metaphysics of cognitive self-transparency, the search for incontrovertible certainty (certitudo), of the self-grounding or self-founding in the evidence of self-consciousness. As if the Western subject from its very dawning had stood under the dictates of a light that condemned it to articulate itself and its world in the concepts of what is obvious, of clarity, of visibility and openness, that is, of a certain logical evidence. "For two and a half millennia everything that is and becomes appears in the light of the logos: through the logos and as logos."
45. And yet it is clear that a component part of the subject of light is the contact to a darkness which darkens the light of evidence. The subject of light is accompanied by the threat of its darkening. It experiences the efficiency of this darkness in all its stirrings and acts. Thinking exists only in relation to the limit that indicates the impossibility of thinking. Touched by non-sense, every thinking must bring itself to assertions of sense. Only in touching non-sense do freedom, reason, responsibility make sense as a condition of possibility of self-elevation.
46. To think the childhood of philosophy, Greece, means not much more than pointing to the Mediterranean and to the peoples which triumphed over it. Of the philosopher it can be said what Hegel said of the Hellenic people: that they are at home on the water of the sea, that the "nature of their country" (Deleuze and Guattari speaker of Greece's "fractal structure: every point of the peninsula lies so close to the sea, and the coast is so uncommonly long") induced them into an "amphibian existence" which caused them to spread out "freely over the land", that this "out to sea from the restrictedness of the soil" gave the Greeks are kind of Mediterranean ecstasy by giving them the "idea of the indeterminate, unlimited and infinite" and that whoever tries to become at home in the "most dangerous and most powerful element" has to struggle with the deceptiveness of oceanic illusion. The philosopher puts his hopes and passions, his "property and life itself in danger of being lost". He is exposed to the constant incalculability of oceanic powers. As long as the subject is afflicted by the unconscious, the contingent and any kind of darkness, the body of concepts slouches and relaxes in the thalassic element. Nothing is more certain than this water, that there is no beyond to the water, and no secured shores, no land spared flooding. Each and every shore must be invented, and even when such inventions succeed, the oceanic chaos encloses the individual concept like an island threatened with imminent subversion again by the next tide.
Translated from the German by Michael Eldred