Quotes About Presence

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

There is no universal clock, but local histories take form beneath our eyes, and begin to regulate themselves, and haltingly are linked to one another and demand to live, and confirm the powerful in the wisdom which the immensity of the risks and the consciousness of their own disorder had given them. The world is more present to itself in all its parts than it ever was.

True nothingness is not the nothing that noths, but a something always on the horizon,the positive determinations of which are the trace and absence.

There is a self-knowledge that is not knowledge and is not self-consciousness; there is a presence of the past that is not in fact given in it, but also not what I will in the instant; and there is a doing that is not the fiat of a closed signification.

This phenomenology, however, is always on the horizon, because it is the will to exhaust the things themselves, which are inexhaustible. What makes it already be there--never there--is its radicalism, which gives way to an impassioned fermentation.

Trace: presence of an absent: experience of an absence.

Signification arouses speech as the world arouses my body--by a mute presence which awakens my intentions without deploying itself before them. In me as well as in the listener who finds it in hearing me, the significative intention (even if it is subsequently to fructify in 'thoughts') is at the moment no more than a determinate gap to be filled by words--the excess of what I intend to say over what is being said or has already been said.

I am receiving and giving in the same gesture.

Another person, for us, is a spirit which haunts a body and we seem to see a whole host of possibilities contained within this body when it appears before us; the body is the very presence of these possibilities.

To be conscious is, among other things, to be somewhere else.

Thus the problem of Einfühlung, like that of my incarnation, opens on the meditation of sensible being; or, if you prefer, it betakes itself there. The fact is that sensible being, which is announced to me in my strictly private life, summons up within that life all other corporeality - It is the being which reaches me in my most secret parts, but which I also reach in its brute or untamed state, in an absolute of presence which holds the secret of the world , others, and what is true.

Love is a hollow in us, not the presence of the other.

Inasmuch as there is figure, there is also inarticulate background, inasmuch as we have being (figure), we don't have it, and inasmuch as we don't have it (background), inasmuch as we let it be without thinking about it, that's when we have it.

What there are, are totalities that 1) are not a fortuitous gathering of parts, 2) are not prior to all causal conditions. The totalities are exactly as perception offers them: imperfect and incomplete or less perfect totalities...Gestalten...The thing is...a hollow plenitude: presence, but absence. Its content is infinite, it is essential to it to present itself through adumbrations, therefore always to be beyond.

Perception...is not the confrontation of an ob-ject. The ob-ject only speaks to me laterally, i.e., it doesn't affect me frontally, but from the side by awakening complicity in me, its presence is obsessive because it is exogenous and endogenous . I.e., it "solicits me" (Valéry)...due to a kind of postural impregnation whereby I crystallized an entire order of nascent significations on this twig.

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

There must be a presence of the past which is absence.

The sensible order is being at a distance--the fulgurating attestation here and now to an inexhaustible richness.

Meseems I feel his presence. Is he dead? Death is a word. He lives and grander grows.

Por eso, yo contesto a esta presencia popular con las mismas palabras del 45: a la violencia le hemos de contestar con una violencia mayor. Con nuestra

Until 1943, when Stalingrad and bombing began to change everything, most German civilians save those who lost loved ones found the conflict a numbing presence rather than a trauma.

Where silence is, man is observed by silence. Silence looks at man more than man looks at silence. Man does not put silence to the test; silence puts man to the test.

I confess that everything I oppose, so to speak, in my texts, everything that I deconstruct—presence, voice, living, voice and so on—is exactly what I am after in life. I love the voice, I love presence, I love…; there is no love, no desire without it. So, I'm constantly denying, so to speak, in my life what I'm saying in my books or my teaching….

might not this "something else" be the living address of the Word of God spoken and responded to in faith, which is indeed present in, experienced by, and celebrated in the liturgical act, but in no way bound to that act but bound instead to the Spirit of God?