#cf.alterities

it is only on these terms that reconciliation is thinkable—guilt is universal and the whole world must shatter—and yet guilt remains singular, asymmetrical, and nontransferable. “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive others

The confessant "expects that the other will" will seal the deal by answering confession with confession, and it is this expectation that initially seems to dignify the transaction: it protects the confessor from debasement or degradation, at least in his own mind (§§666).

The will clings to itself..  ..In nietzschean terms, the reflexive circuit of the will-to-will replaces the aggressive extroversion of the will-to-power.

Anxiety teaches us how to mourn in advance. To “stare the negative in the face,” ..I confront a death that through my own gaze acquires a face, a shape, a human countenance, thus reflecting back the image of my own freedom.

The will no longer seeks external objects to which to apply itself, ..a destructiveness so pure it has no need of anything to destroy. radical loss thus congeals into the sublime acquisition of a subject who finds self-possession in its dispossession.

in my zeal to see through appearances, to render the world transparent, i have all the while been staring beyond it: what i have been gazing at with such fascination is the virulence of my own denunciatory desire.

Mirabeau’s letter to the king, less than a year into the revolution: ..“the modern idea of a single class of citizens on an equal footing” should help provide a smoother surface on which royal power might all the more easily apply itself.

With the installation of mass sovereignty as a sovereignty of immediacy the die is irreversibly cast: reading Rousseau in 1789 is already enough to commit you to an “endless reversibility of democracy and dictatorship” within a fellowship of terror