We should […] deny our We and draw from this, not foreseeable dissolution, but a burst of refounding lucidity. We need to confront its defeat because it is formed in exaltation, and, each time, in forgetting that it is highly perishable, which does not mean that it is illusory. We, here, fall into silence and contemplate an abyss. We close our eyes and clench our teeth in order to avoid having to uselessly pronounce: Who am I? We know that it would destroy that for which it asks. We think that our We should choose collective union in despair, but can we make despair a combative bond?

Bernard Noël¹

And, after Solon’s speech denouncing what is taking place and criticizing his fellow citizens, the Council replies that in fact Solon is going mad (mainesthai). To which Solon retorts: ‘You will soon know if I am mad … when the truth comes to light.’

Michel Foucault²

But we are probably speaking at cross purposes and it will take centuries before our differences are settled.

Sigmund Freud to Ludwig Binswanger³

Μή, φίλα ψυχά, βίον ἀθάνατονσπεῦδε,

τὰν δ ̓ ἔμπρακτον ἄντλει μαχανάν.

Pindar⁴

Now you ask nothing more because you have nothing more…

apart from what you remember.

Derya

(at the slam workshop held in the Glacis housing project, Belfort, and led by Dominique Bourgon)

Notes

  1  Bernard Noël, Monologue du Nous (Paris: P.O.L., 2015), pp. 9–10.

  2  Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth (The Government of Self and Others II): Lectures at the Collège de France, 1983–1984, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 77.

  3  Sigmund Freud and Ludwig Binswanger, The Sigmund Freud–Ludwig Binswanger Correspondence, 1908–1938, trans. Arnold J. Pomerans (London: Open Gate Press, 2003), p. 212.

  4  Pindar, ‘Pythian 3’, Pythian Odes, lines 61–3, available at: https://www.loebclassics.com/view/pindar-pythian_odes/1997/pb_LCL056.257.xml. See ch. 7, n. 17.