Quotes About Interconnectedness

Philosophy: circles that include one another.

We situate ourselves in ourselves and in the things, in ourselves and in the other, and at the point where, by a sort of chiasm, we become the others and we become the world.

What exists are not separated animals, but an inter-animality.

There is already a kind of presence of the other in me.

The relation of the human & animality is not a hierarchical relation, but lateral, an overcoming that does not abolish kinship

We are in the world, mingled with it, compromised with it.

There is an adherence, a strange kinship between the human and the animal...of the animal as variant of humanity and of humanity as variant of animality.

To say "Hell is other people" does not mean "Heaven is me." If other people are the instruments of our torture, it is first and foremost because they are indispensable to our salvation. We are so intermingled with them that we must make what order we can out of this chaos.

Production: not a tree, but bushes of several roots mixed together.

There is not identity, nor non-identity, or non-coincidence, there is inside and outside turning about one another.

What do I bring to the problem of the same and the other? This: that the same be the other than the other, and identity difference of difference.

The world and others become our flesh.

Not only parallel problems: vision and its signification, speech and its signification--but a single problem: the visible and poetic signified are intertwined; poetry, speech of things (Valéry)... This is not to lose interest in the world; it is to find access through intermixing, through an imaginary within us that welcomes it and makes it at home. In a sense, it discovers it.

The nature in us must have some relation to Nature outside of us; moreover, Nature outside of us must be unveiled to us by the Nature that we are.

The unity of the object does not lie behind its qualities, but is reaffirmed by each one of them: each of its qualities is the whole. Cézanne said that you should be able to paint the smell of trees.

I bring the match near, I light a flimsy piece of paper, and, behold, my gesture receives inspired help from the things around, as if the chimney and the dry wood had been waiting for me to set the light, or as though the match had been nothing but a magic incantation, a call of like to like answered beyond all imagination.

I am receiving and giving in the same gesture.

We are the parents of a Nature of which we are also the children

There is no absolute 'in-itself,' and no absolute 'for us'—for the same reasons, i.e., their reciprocal relativization, their 'mutual coincidence.' -From Philosophy and Non-Philosophy Since Hegel

Human beings are also trundled-human being--if we could open us, we would find all the others, as in Russion dolls, or rather less well-ordered, in a state of indivision.

In a soap bubble as in an organism, what happens at each point is determined by what happens at all the others.

The world, in those of its sectors which realize a structure, is comparable to a symphony.

We do not keep the world, or situations, or others at the length of our gaze like a spectacle; we are intermingled with them, drinking them in through all our pores.

In this transgression, one does not know who is engulfing and who is engulfed.