pukka pukka

To seek reality is both to set out to explore the injury inflicted by it—to turn back on, and to try to penetrate, the state of being stricken, wounded by reality—and to attempt, at the same time, to re­-emerge from the paralysis of this state, to engage reality as an advent, a movement, and as a vital, critical necessity of moving on. It is beyond the shock of being stricken, but nonetheless within the wound and from within the woundedness that the event, incomprehensible though it may be, becomes accessible. The wound gives access to the dark­ness that the language had to go through and traverse in the very process of its “frightful falling-mute.” To seek reality through language “with ones very being,” to seek in language what the language had precisely to pass through, is thus to make of ones own “shelterlessness”—of the openness and the ac­cessibility of ones own wounds—an unexpected and unprecedented means of accessing reality, the radical condition for a wrenching exploration of the testimonial function, and the testimonial power, of the language: it is to give reality ones own vulnerability, as a conditional of exceptional availability and of exceptionally sensitized, tuned-in attention to the relation between language and events.