Quotes About Existence

The invisible is a hollow in the visible, a fold in passivity, not pure production.

The The distinction between the real and the oneiric cannot be identical with the simple distinction between consciousness filled by meaning and consciousness given up to its own void. The two modalities impinge upon one another. Our waking relations with objects and others especially have an oneiric character as a matter of principle: others are present to us in the way that dreams are, the way myths are, and this is enough to question the cleavage between the real and the imaginary.

Reflection only fully grasps itself if it refers to the pre-reflective fund it presupposes, upon which it draws, and that constitutes for it, like an original past, a past that has never been present.

My life is made up of rhythms that do not have their reason in what I have chosen to be, but rather have their condition in the banal milieu that surrounds me. A margin of almost impersonal existence thus appears around our personal existence, which, so to speak, is taken for granted, and to which I entrust the care of keeping me alive.

The complete man, the man who does not dream, who can die well because he has lived well, and who can love his life because he envisages his death is, like the myth of the Androgyne, the symbol of what we lack.

The 'associations' of psychoanalysis are in reality 'rays' of time and of the world.

Theology recognizes the contingency of human existence only to derive it from a necessary being, that is, to remove it. Theology makes use of philosophical wonder only for the purpose of motivating an affirmation which ends it. Philosophy, on the other hand, arouses us to what is problematic in our own existence and in that of the world, to such a point that we shall never be cured of searching for a solution.

In my opinion the word 'existence,' in the sense that I have in mind, contains the following inextricably bound ideas: we are in a circumscribed environment and cannot know the whole, and if we refuse to take this whole into consideratiom, we mutilate ourselves,

What allows us to center our existence is also what prevents us from centering it completely, and the anonymity of our body is invariably both freedom and servitude. Thus, to summarize, the ambiguity of being in the world is expressed by the ambiguity of our body, and this latter is understood through the ambiguity of time.

Every memory reopens lost time and invites us to again take up the situation that it evokes.

Sedimentation is: trace of the forgotten and thereby a call to thought which depends upon itself and goes farther...It is the experience of a resumption which is not totalization, and which precisely for that reason is able to open another development of knowledge.

We must recognize the indeterminate as a positive phenomenon.

According to Hegel, one attains the absolute by way of a phenomenology (the appearance of mind; mind in the phenomenon). This is not because the phenomenal mind is on one level of a scale, after which one moves on to the absolute, but because the absolute would not be absolute if it did not appear as absolute. Phenomenology is the whole truth from a certain point of view.

We must define 'organism' as everything that has defined norms, an a priori that governs what happens.

Philosophy turns towards the anonymous symbolic activity from which we emerge, and towards the personal discourse which develops in us, and which, indeed, we are.

I never rejoin the other's lived experience. It is in the world that we rejoin one another.

One does not love a person, one does not love a body, one loves a life established in a body.

The perceived world is a world where there is discontinuity, where there is probability and generality, where each being is not constrained to a unique and fixed location, to an absolute density of being.

Before being reason, humanity is another corporeity.

Ambiguity is essential to human existence, and everything we live or think always has several senses.

There is passivity right there in activity...And there is activity right there in passivity.

All flesh, and even that of the world, radiates beyond itself.

The phenomenal layer is, literally, pre-logical and will always remain so.

By returning to phenomena, we find, as a fundamental layer, a whole already pregnant with an irreducible sense.