Prelude

Summary

There is no impassable abyss separating the thought of the great systematic thinkers – Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Marx, who each determine an epoch in the history of thought and, altogether, the course of the world thought – from the thought of the great fragmentary thinkers – Heraclitus, Pascal, Novalis, Nietzsche, who, with their aphorisms, pass like meteors between heaven and earth. Today we take the former as ‘classical’, logical and more settled, and envisage the latter as intuitive and more tortured, even ‘accursed’. The former is considered more discursive, even scientific, the other more elliptical and poetic. What however escapes this classification are the intimate bonds that always unite, in an open and fragmentary system, continuity and discontinuity, all the thoughts delimiting the horizon with boundaries and limits, marching and jumping on the path they follow because it imposes itself on them. Open to the blows of death, all the thinkers, guided by and guiding words, tend to approach a language that would englobe all languages, yet do not arrive at noting, lifting, recording, classifying, cataloguing, coordinating and elucidating everything in their words and in their writings. Partial-total moments of thought, they give themselves to the word, to thought and to writing, and appeal to past, present and future interlocutors and readers. The question for whom does one write? remains suspended, and, although governed by and obsessed by the here and now, we envision a future. Which does not mean that we write for the pleasure of a restoration which would be happy to discover you in x years. In this work of the discursive and accomplished and the aphoristic and elliptical, the two streams join again and compose a unique course, the perceptible [sensible] finding itself passably sacrificed, only managing to emerge with great pain.

The discursive – the continuous – is nonetheless also fragmentary, and the aphoristic – the discontinuous – is equally total, provided that we do not confuse aphorisms and sentences. The illusions of the systematic and the aphoristic – separated from one another – prevent us from comprehending the secret of the aphoristic systematic, always exploded, neither systematic nor aphoristic, and both systematic and aphoristic.