Lux lucet in tenebris

“The unconscious is not a demonic monster, but a thing of nature that is perfectly neutral as far as moral sense, æsthetic taste and intellectual judgement go. It is dangerous only when our conscious attitude towards it becomes hopelessly false. And this danger grows in the measure that we practise repressions. But as soon as the patient begins to assimilate the contents that were previously unconscious, the danger from the side of the unconscious diminishes. As the process of assimilation goes on, it puts an end to the dissociation of the personality and to the anxiety that attends and inspires the separation of the two realms of the psyche.”

“…literature as a thought-practice, or a practised thinking, a poem-thought or novel-thought, not limited to the conceptual realm alone but traversing the sensual, corporeal, linguistic, visual and rhetorical aIl at once. Herein lies Badiou's fundamental optimism with regard to the capacities of language: ultimately, poetry and prose after the age of the poets testify to the possibility and even the necessity that we do not remain silent about that of which we cannot speak.”

“It is not true that the more you love, the better you understand; all that the action of love obtains from me is merely this wisdom: that the other is not to be known; his opacity is not the screen around a secret, but, instead, a kind of evidence in which the game of reality and appearance is done away with. I am then seized with that exaltation of loving someone unknown, someone who will remain so forever: a mystic impulse: I know what I do not know.”

Maldoror can be taken as a pretext for understanding what a work would be if it were somehow to tear away from ordinary existence and welcome that other life which must be designated by a contradictory neologism as an unlivable life. Here in fact is a work born not from the observation of others but not exactly from the observation of oneself either. Before being observed it was created. It has no goal yet is an action. It has no plan yet is coherent. Its language is not the expression of a previous thought. It is the expression of a psychic force that has suddenly become a language. In short it is instant language.

(... ) These are small, miscellaneous details, quite suited, in fact, to one who was violently ravaged by literature; the worst of all perturbations after his having spent many long, slow, studious hours on benches or in libraries, now master of a style that was perhaps premature but sure of itself, intense and exciting, spurring him to tackle unprecedented subjects—in search of “new sensations,” he insisted, “not known,” and he flattered himself that they could be found in the bazaar of illusions vulgarly known as big cities; in which the demon adolescent did discover, one evening, a grandiose vision, prolonged by drunkenness alone.