Tag: distance

spiritandteeth:

The possibility of confessio […] opens when the utopia (I no longer
have place for myself, I no longer give a place to myself, and I do not know
from where the place of my desire comes over me) is no longer fixed in
itself, no longer closed on itself, no longer withdrawn as aporia, but itself
becomes the response: when the not-here appears as an other place, or
rather an otherplace, an alteration that displaces the place outside itself,
outside even the self, in such a way as to open the over-there as my place.
“Sed ubi manes in memoria mea, Domine, ubi illic manes?” (But where
do you reside in this memory that is called mine, O Lord, where do you
reside over there?) – Jean-Luc Marion, In the Self’s Place

istmos:

(…)We must give up trying to know those to whom we are linked by something essential; by this I mean, we must greet them in the relation with the unknown in which they greet us, as well, in our distance. Friendship, this relation without dependence, without episode yet into which all of the simplicity of life enters, passes by way of the recognition of the common strangeness that does not allow us to speak of our friends, but only to speak to them, not to make of them a topic of conversations (or articles), but the movement of understanding in which, speaking to us, they reserve, even on the most familiar terms, an infinite distance, the fundamental separation on the basis of which what separates becomes relation. Here discretion is not in the simple refusal to put forward confidences (how vulgar that would be, even to think of it), but it is the interval, the pure interval that, from me to this other who is a friend, measures all that is between us, the interruption of being that never authorizes me to use him, or my knowledge of him (where it to praise him) and which, far from preventing all communication, relates us to one another in the difference and sometimes the silence of speech.(…)

Jacques Derrida, “Politics of Friendship”, p. 386-387