Language, Violence, and History

The questions that fascinate me are also the ones over which I agonize the most—those that seem quasi-insoluble, which one never ceases to ponder, which one never finishes traversing: the living together of mankind, the difference between the sexes, physical violence and its causes, generations and history, the body itself, language, the abyss-like difference between each of us, which is sometimes glaring, sometimes invisible…

On no matter what subject, these are the questions I ask myself, and it is my own anguish, my own aporias, that I mobilize in order to think and write. If not, what’s the point?

But I’m not sure that I want to know anything. No, in fact, I don’t believe that there is anything to know. I even think that we should renounce the idea of knowing.