Nov
11
“Closeness and the power to communicate depend upon the force of separation; to become a true relation–one that leaves the other on another bank speaks to him from another shore–the relation must be broken; for only the foreignness of that which can never be held in common can found the community. An idyllic community which erases all trace of discord, of difference, of death, which pretends to rest on a perfect harmony, a fusion conferring immediate unity, can only a fictional community, a beautiful (psychotic?) story. The law of the story and its economy is to bury all strangeness with the Stranger, to disguise the fact that the return of the Stranger in the night, like a ghost passing through all cracks in the house, far from bringing about its destruction and collapse, can alone provide a true foundation for the idyll. The affliction of the story, intrinsic to its Apollonian happiness, is that is deceptively conceals Dionysus in all his glory.”
Sarah Kofman, Smothered Words, part III.
