You could not find a time more proper than this to step out of your silence and delight me with your everyday words - they become everyday at the expense of a strong bond in fragility. Many thanks to you for providing me with the contact details of Alex, I will proceed to contact him shortly. I do hope to come to Vienna to meet all kinds of old friends, even the ones already forgotten and that no longer bear an imprint in the heavy suitcases that I carry along through the world, the fragments of incomplete pastnesses, the Zerrissenheit, the broken spell of a dialogue going on between me and others, the intensity of language applied to life. There are those moments that I can already throw into the infinite past, the absolute past, the past previous to all experience and to all thought, to all experience of truth and reality but on whose basis everything is construed, it is the pre-condition to enter the world.
My pain at the moment is irrational, it is the most radical leap of it I have reached ever since we met, it is an absolute turning point where separate ideas -love, experience, the world, become intertwined to be lost once again, I am impressed at the fragility of human bonds, at their very possibility, you can sometimes knock on the door of a human person, and sometimes not. First there is everyday contact (this contact is Messianic), then it is followed by casual contact (this contact is always the refinement of a question posited before) and then at last comes the fragile, so fragile, human bond. It is the most unfulfilled promise of our age to be able to create a world of our own in which it is possible to trascend this fragility in the same way that European revolutions attempted to trascend social structures (this aim in mind is what we call radical needs), precisely what German Jews never succeeded in, in "emancipating" themselves as a group and not merely as individuals. The human bond is like the dialectics of love in Hegel (and in Adorno and Gillian Rose, basically in Plato most of all) when he speaks about master and slave - there´s no equality in love, there´s only mercy, they can be merciful or either they can be merciless... The mercy of everday contact is the retaining of an image, cutting it out of reality back into the sources of the infinite past, in casual contact there´s mercy in curiosity, in being curious even if in detachment yet, from the person himself... In the fragile human bond there´s no mercy... Then some other things come... Love shatters the present because it is bidimensional... The desire to obtain this love throws everything into the future, and the fear of losing it refers us in some orientation toward the inifnite past, the memory, the remembrance of the original image of the human bond, of love, that pre-condition us always. It is universal in that it contains all your dimensions, except the present, the emotionally abstract present and the concretely present present... The essence is maintained in every instance of love, it is preserved, it is the same original image, the Urbild, but existence is always an image "immediately indeterminate", to use the terminology of Hegel.
I understand so well this of feeling safe with a certain person, those are the only safe moments, not because there´s no abyss before you, but in that the whole space of the abyss is what you turn yourself into. Everything else always stands right before that safe moment of the fall. But in order to fall, we can return to Arendt again, she said once at the Gaus interview that for her the choice of philosophy was to choose between either studying philosophy and understanding or throwing herself into a river. Certainly all of us in this world yet, have chosen philosophy over the river and have come to think that it was preferable to choose the river, but what when you are yourself the river? It is a moment for a big jump, and the jump must always have a particular moral character, and because this is so very difficult we often drown in the river... We drown because the moral jump is often confused with the aesthetic jump, and the only consolation for the aesthetic jump is not our lived life, but only death (and this is all about Heidegger´s politics). At the same time we try to hold, to hold on, to what is on the banks of the river, but we can´t return unless they jump to. We have to take those bonds and those moments and throw them into the line of time, in order to grab them once again, and we have to be sure that this is going to happen, no matter in the eyes of which person or th e hands of which bond. We have to make sure that nothing is lost, but that the recollection is resultless quantitatively, it only bears fruits as the quality of something else derived from one same source.
María Clara and Santiago also studied at the Lycee Francaise in Bogotá and have been through the bourgeoisie, but in very different but equally radical moves, have stepped out of it. You can´t imagine what this means for their own world-politics, quite different from us. The refinement of the fine characters, ah? There´s some classical pattern about this all. So much we still need to say. In the last month all my thinking about the present has advanced so much, for the first time it has become something real for my own experience. But you are definitely missing as a partner in conversation. We will all meet in Paris this year and no later. María Clara spoke to me about you last night and after my stories she realized that you were for me the Sabina painter of Kundera´s book, she has such clarity of ideas about your elegant melancholy, your curiosity, your humour, it was a moment of revelation for me. I don´t know either where to find the money for myself, so necessary, for drinking and living, so useful for love... But something will come. About the drawing or small painting: I need it so much, I need it like I need air or smoking, I desperately need it, it is the only way left for me to get hold of an image whichever in order to be able to go on with my work. I don´t think I can tell you much about the character, but imagine yourself or me when we were younger, when we were in England for example.
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