EE Quotes

EE p 52

In the night, where we are riveted to it, we are not dealing with anything. But this nothingness is not that of pure nothingness. There is no longer this or that; there is not ‘something.’ But this universal absence is in its turn a presence, an absolute , unavoidable presence” (52).

EE p. 55

To be conscious is to be torn away from the there is, since the existence of a consciousness constitutes a subjectivity, a subject of existence that is, to some extent, a master of being, already a name in the anonymity of the night. Horror is somehow a movement which will strip consciousness of its very ‘subjectivity.’ Not in lulling it into unconsciousness, but in throwing it into an impersonal vigilance, a participation. . . (55)

EE 56

[Horror is] a participation in the there is, in the there is which returns in the heart of every negation, in the there is that has no exits. It is, if we may say so, the impossibility of death, the universality of existence even in its annihilation. (56)

EE 62

We are thus introducing into the impersonal event of the there is not the notion of consciousness but of wakefulness, in which consciousness participates, affirming itself as a consciousness because it only participates in it (62).

EE 63

In this anonymous nightwatch where I am completely exposed to being, all the thoughts which occupy my insomnia are suspended on nothing. They have no support. I am, one might say, the object rather than the subject of an anonymous thought. (63)

EE p 83

the event by which the act expressed by a verb became a being designated by a substantive. Hypostasis, the apparition of a substantive, is not only the apparition of a new grammatical category: it signifies the suspension of the anonymous there is, the apparition of a private domain, of a noun. On the ground of the there is a being arises. (EE 83)

EE p 85-86  To reach for the other, he says, involves:

on the ontological level, the event of the most radical breakup of the very categories of the ego, for it is for me to be somewhere else than myself: it is to be pardoned, to not be a definite existence. (EE 85-86)