The Outside of Thought // Carlos

It is not only that attempting to write while lacking a certain degree of sensitivity is not possible at all. But that writing is, we may say, a sensitivity event.

Yet there is no sensitivity but towards the Other – for sameness moves, instead, to recognition.

Now, showing sensitivity towards anything means to let it come forward – that is, to make room for it. In other words, something always arrives to our sensibility – but precisely then, it arrives to it.

And the same applies to our thought: what arrives to it is always a problem or problems – one or many.

No longer the night, the rain or the desert, nor such or such bodies pierced by the desert, the rain or the night… but a problem that draws a question mark where an opinion or a certitude earlier reigned.

Problems and knots, and knots as enigmas: they all point to the Outside. In other words, every problem points to that which lies beyond what was formerly thought. (Variant: it is in the form of problems that Otherness arrives to our thought, and challenges it.)

Thus the writer’s and the philosopher’s “frail health” (Deleuze), which opposes the “fat health” of those incapable of feeling but what they have always felt and incapable of thinking but what they take for granted.

Ultimately, then, even if they obviously need of intense work and concentration, literature and philosophy cannot be exercised in gymnastic terms – they can only be suffered, since Otherness always appears in the horizon of the Same as… excess.

Therefore, philosophy must not be confused with logic, which has to do, instead, with making order in the house of Sameness.

Hence also Spinoza’s and Nietzsche’s banners. “Not to mock or lament, but to understand…” (Spinoza), that is, to constantly make room for the unthinkable. “Was life this? – Why, good then! Let it come again!” (Nietzsche), or the will to eternally greet Life beyond the lived and the livable.

Thought too, then, as what I have called a sensitivity event. And, thereby, as the trace of the Outside…