DOCUMENTING THE FUTURE
What is the future? What is documentation? What are philosophy and art?
1. The most universal definition of the concept of future is: The future is what is beyond presence. Beyond presence and past as former presence. I call the future the absence in itself. The future simply doesn't exist. But not to be, not to exist, is not the same like being without any effect and even power on our being and thinking. There is something like the EFFECT OF THE NOTHING in the very center, in the pure heart, of the subjects DESIRE and THINKING. The philosophical desire is precisely that: to get in CONTACT with the boarder of the established ontological order, to touch the limits of the reality space. You can say that this contact is the very condition of thinking. It means the tangency of the INCONSISTENCY of the reality self.
2. Documentation is the will to give form to this inconsistency. It is the DESIRE OF FORM. To give form means to give a measure, to give a presence, to give a name to what is INCOMMENSURABILITY, ABSENCE and NAMELESSNESS itself. Documentation means to transgress the universe of the facts in order to make the experience of the FUTURE as the REAL in its irreducibility to these facts.
3. Philosophy and art do not assert any facts. They constitute truths which corrupt the order of facts. The place of truth cannot be located in the universe of facts. That 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 place that is not registered in this register and the topology it represents. Truth is the name for the collapse of systems of truth, of institutions of truth and archives of truth which look after the administration of factual truths, of knowledge. Truth is an excess. Truth is the future itself. It transgresses naked knowledge. It marks the point of extreme restlessness. The touching of truth which the desire for truth in art and philosophy achieves is restless touching of the untouchable. Philosophy and art exist only as this EXCESS. Art and philosophy exist only as the experience of loss of self, as extravagance and radical surrender to the exterior. The subject of extravagance affirms itself as the subject of its pain. Pain opens up the subject to its truth. The truth of the subject is absolute freedom. It is not the subject that is absolute, but its truth. Truth cannot be grounded. Philosophy neither grounds truth, nor is it grounded in truth. And philosophy has nothing to do with establishing, grounding or knowing. Philosophy begins with the experience of the limit of what can be grounded and known. Nevertheless, it is not under any circumstances mysticism or obscurantism. Philosophy refuses the ESOTERICS OF FACTS and also the OBSCURANTISM OF THE IDEAL. Pain opens the subject to the limit of both the illumination and darkening of knowledge. In pain, consciousness breaks down as the identity of self-consciousness. Pain drives the subject into the truth. Truth is the name for the immeasurable. Truth marks an infinite limit. Truth is nothing other than the conflict between opening and closure. Heidegger calls it the primal strife between lethe and aletheia. This is the word for the compossibility, the monstrous simultaneity or contro-versy of world and earth, the clearing and hiddenness. Truth is not grounded by philosophy and art. Truth can only be asserted. Truth eventuates when the subject alienates itself from the symbolic order, its socio-cultural integrity and the phantasmagoria of the imaginary. Truth exists at the moment when philosophy and art (apart from other forms of assertion such as the sciences) touch the impossible (pure virtuality or FUTURE) in risking a TRANSGRESSION OF THE HORIZON. Philosophy and art have to assert this touching which is itself a touching of truth. They realize this movement and they defend it. Philosophy and art are forms of realization of truths which do not pre-exist. It is not a matter of finding, discovering or deciphering truths. It is a matter of inventing them, of producing truth. "'Truth' never exists 'in itself' or of itself," so that it could be deciphered, "but comes about through conflict," says Heidegger. Such a truth, insofar as it is the product of an assertive subject in conflict, is therefore not relative in the plainest sense of the word. Philosophy and art assert truth — art asserts truth through asserting form — by evading the relativism of factual truths and the regime of truth and argumentative assurance to which facts are subordinated. The DIMENSION OF TRUTH is the dimension of what is unfamiliar or monstrous: the FUTURE AS SUCH. That truth exists means that knowledge and its certainties are limited. Truth is the name of this limitation.