“How to enable ourselves to look squarely at our gaping lack, our confrontation, not in order to sink into it, but in order to draw from it, despite everything, the strength to confront ourselves: first, with utter awareness; then, in such a way as to really scrutinize ourselves- without which scrutiny the confrontation is nothing but an indistinct and blind shoving match?
The challenge of this duly acknowledged, to look squarely at a gaping chasm and to confront oneself with an intense gaze are not without grounds for comparison, if the other’s gaze never opens upon anything but the unfathomable: upon absolute strangeness, upon a truth which cannot be verified but which must nevertheless be clung to.”
Jean-Luc Nancy
La communauté affrontée, 2003
