To Be as a Conjunctive Verb

Abstract

Things are still more complex when it is a question of the subject. Either this is an impersonal and abstract mechanism—a sort of technical device—to and through which all appears or reappears from a timeless and unchanging definition by the logos—through Being?—or the subject corresponds to a living being and the one it is, and even what it wills, in the present. The status of the being ‘apple tree’ but also the status of the subject who looks at it are different in the two cases, as well as that of their relation to ‘to be’—or to Being—and being and their articulation. If the subject as the being that he or she meets, place themselves, or have to be placed, in relation to their status in the logos in one case, in the other case they always are and are met for the first and sole time, and each must be perceived, but also created, in the present in accordance with the meeting. At least it goes this way for the subject as long as he or she remains living and responsible for the becoming of their life, and more generally for that of life itself. In that sense, two living beings can appear to one another on the condition that they gather themselves together in the invisible intimacy of their beings. What they let appear of themselves is necessarily accompanied by the maintenance of each in the invisible of the one it is. The meeting between the two is always a sort of dawn where they unveil themselves to one another for a first and sole time. What language provides us with such saying? And if it tries to emerge, how not to cover it again with a logic or a syntax which takes no account of the gathering of each in the particularity of its being?