By the Late John Brockman

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seem curiosities, a masquerade.” 64

     
    Metaphysical I: of whom I know nothing. I don’t know who I am. There is no signifiable
     reality. No one truth, no essence. It’s slippery: there’s nothing left to hold on
     to. We are completely deprived. You are totally denied. And I: I don’t know who I
     am. “It has not yet been our good fortune to establish with any degree of accuracy
     what I am, where I am, whether I am words among words, or silence in the midst of
     silence.” 65

     
    I: words among words or silence in the midst of silence. The final answer will be
     in the transcendence of all categories, of all names: the death of the word. But this
     can’t be so: there is no transcendence: no answer. World is finite: there is no distinction
     between observation and its object. Not reality, but realization. Transcendence belongs
     to the real, infinite world: reality. But there can be no transcendence of realization:
     no distinction between observation and its object. No differentiation: there was never
     anyone but me talking to me of me. And me: I go where the words go: nowhere. There
     is no final perfection, no answer. No one.

     
    “Our kind of innovation consists not in the answers, but in the true novelty of the
     questions themselves; in the statement of problems, not in their solutions.” 66 What is important is not “to illustrate a truth—or even an interrogation—known in
     advance, but to bring to the world certain interrogations . . . not yet known as such
     to themselves.” 67

     
    A total synthesis of all human knowledge will not result in fantastic amounts of data,
     or in huge libraries filled with books. There’s no value any more in amount, in quantity,
     in explanation. For a total synthesis of human knowledge, use the interrogative. Ask
     the most subtle sensibilities in the world what questions they are asking themselves.

     
    The words have no author. “There are words better without an author, without a poet,
     or having a separate author, a different poet, an accretion from ourselves, intelligent,
     beyond intelligence, an artificial man.” 68 The words have no author. The book is a lie. It’s a performance: by a reader. Reader
     is a comfort word and the author has no intention of its meaning. Author is a comfort
     word and the author has no intention of its meaning.

     
    An accretion from ourselves, intelligent, by an intelligence, an artificial man. Unreal
     realization: “freedom is like a man who kills himself each night, an incessant butcher.” 69 Artificial man’s not himself: unreal realization. He is revealed, secularized as
     a thing, an object. “He has lost the whole in which he was contained.” 70 He has shed his human clothes.

     
    Just as the ancients peopled the universe, we have set out to empty it of all life.
     It’s a finite world of words: there is no life in man, there is no existence in things,
     there is no evolution in nature. Man is dead: “drowned in the depth of things (of
     himself), man ultimately no longer even perceives them: his role is soon limited to
     experiencing, in their name, totally humanized impressions and desires.” 71 But there is no depth in things. Words are what count: the word must be the thing
     it represents. Words are finite: there can be no depth, no interiority.

     
    There’s no perfection in humanity. Man was considered the perfect center in a world
     of infinite things, infinite depth. But man has been rooted out of his human home,
     disallowed his humanistic habit. Man is dead: he is “thinged,” he is artificial: he
     mocks his own meaning, he’s not to be believed.

     
    But humanism attempts “to recover everything , including whatever attempts to retrace its limits, even to impugn it as a whole.” 72 No matter what: there is man and his nature. And “a common nature must be the eternal
     answer to the single question of our civilization—only one possible answer to everything:
     man.”

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