“Human being, in the regime of the ‘power of life’, is a slightly sad animal, who must be convinced that the law of the body fixes the secret of his hope.”
“We admit therefore that ‘what there is’ - what composes the structure of worlds - is well and truly a mixture of bodies and languages. But there is not only what there is. And ‘truths’ is the (philosophical) name of what thus comes to interpolate itself into the continuity of the ‘there is’.”
“His [Descartes’] own axiom can in fact be stated as follows: ‘There are only (contingent) corporeal things and intellectual things, except that there are (eternal) truths.’”
“Seventhly, a truth is both infinite and generic. It is a radical exception as well as an elevation of anonymous existence to the level of the Idea.”
“A truth takes place among the objects of a world. But what is an object? In a sense, what we have to do, is to find a new definition of the object and it is in fact my most complex and innovative argument. Because, with this new conception of objectivity, it is possible to clarify the paradoxical status of the existence of a truth. It is absolutely impossible to give here an idea of this very hard project, which has confronted me with the great attempts of Kant and Husserl. It is a synthesis of mathematical formalism and of descriptive phenomenology.”
“The language I propose to illuminate the process of a truth is that of the points in a world: by formalizing a new body, a subject-of-truth treats points of a world, and a truth proceeds point by point. Of course, we still need to have a clear idea of what a point is, on the basis of the rigorous data of appearing, the object and the change. A point in a world is something like a crucial decision in existence; you have to choose between two possibilities. The first one is completely negative, and will destroy the whole process of a truth, by destroying the new body. The second one is completely affirmative, and will enforce the new body, clarify the truth, exalt the subject. But we have no certainty concerning the choice. It is a bet. A point is the moment where a truth has to pass without guarantee.”
“The philosopher is nothing else than, in the intellectual field, a poor night watch-man.”