Signs

NEAR THE CRITICAL INDEX FINGER THAT POINTS TO THE LACK OF THE NATION'S imagination—a lack that is not definitive but the absence of a projection or an impulsion through more splendid zones—it is necessary to continually yield up forms that surpass this disintegration. If this pointing is essentially critical, its remedy will have to overflow with creation and images. That is to say, it will have to avoid falling into a crude Manichaeism of signaling what is bad and the occurrence of Malignance. It will also—this is what we assign to ourselves and demand of ourselves—have to situate us within what Plato called erotic knowledge. Valery already underlined that European intelligence has been always very superior to European politics, and that that has been Europe's salvation. The Romantic tradition of intoxication and dreams was intertwined with, was opposed to—and bore witness to—the other, Goethean tradition of clarity and serene happiness. And thus always within the expected causalities in which the state forms became rigidified, European man showed together with the infinite spiral of his knowledge the possibilities of other adventures, where man would be able to rescue his double essential destiny: a knowledge of the other and of the multiple, remaining at the same time incessantly tempting and obscure

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