The silence of art: Bataille’s babbling sacrifice
A map, of sorts
Part One: Life’s Grave Traces
The clarity of method and its demands
Truths of displacement
Aristotle and the trace of phenomenology
Encompassing flow or receding deformation
... a first tracing
The formal force of presence
The creative force of form
The force of an impotent demand
Limitation and light: creatures of the possible
The intellect moves as the necessity of exchange
The trace as the force of the absent
The trace and the gravity of words
The trace as the absence—and the motion—of the intelligible
Affirmation and absence
Part Two: The Sense of a Gesture
Deformation of one hand rather than another
The difficulty of gestures
The subject as the site of the representation of possibility
The unity of the place of a doubled reflection
The displacing and transcending logic of the power of
representation
On the place of the subject
The beginning of the subjective
Movement and method
Belonging to the necessity of the element
The divine task of beginning
The necessity of the hand
Part Three: The Difficult
Gesture of Abandon
The presence of an object—the force of a gesture
The black box
The vanishing compulsion
The philosophical stakes of aesthetic form
The dark gestures of the hand
The presence of the frame ... and its gestures
The originality of trust
The silence evoked
Notes
Index
Review
What would it mean to doubt that the sun was here before we
were? Would it simply be to carry out another Copernican
turn of the Kantian type? Or does such a turn fall short of
the question by representing our fundamental task as one of
orientation? Did Nietzsche’s madman come closer when he
asked if we were moving "away from all suns"? Or is this
too—despite all appearances—another form of Neoplatonism? Is
there another way to "doubt that the sun doth move"? To
think the movement of—nothing? Touching Difficulty
does more than touch on these difficult questions, inviting
us to think of the sacred as nothing like the sun.
To say that the book is "brilliant," therefore, doesn’t do
it justice. It is nothing less than a complete rethinking of
the history of metaphysics from Plato to Derrida and beyond.
