Lucas Mattos’s Reviews > The Space of Literature > Status Update

“Existence is authentic when it is capable of enduring possibility right up to its extreme point, able to stride toward death as toward a possibility par excellence. It is to this movement that the essence of man in Western history owes its having become action, value, future, labor and truth.”

“What is this time when poetry can only say: what use are the poets?”

"In the work man speaks, but the work gives voice in man to what does not speak: to the unnamable, the inhuman, to what is devoid of truth, bereft of justice, without rights. Here man does not recognize himself; he does not feel justified. No longer is he present, either as a man for himself, or before God, or as a god before himself."

"Why, instead of dissipating in pure satisfaction, the joy afforded by lovely objects, or in the frivolous vanity of an escapist ego, has the passion of art ... become absolutely serious? Why has it become passion for the absolute? Why [do the names of poets signify] that in the poem a possibility subsists for which neither culture nor historical effectiveness nor even the pleasure of beautiful language can account?"

"This transformation (of the work's "intimate life") is produced to the extent that the 'empty' movement takes on content, while the work, momentarily or definitively losing its force and the intimacy of its constant genesis, unfolds as a newborn world where the values are at stake and where these values call for arbitration by some criterion or contribute to the advent of such a standard, such a truth."

“[Death] is that which happens to no one, the uncertainty and the indecision of what never happens. I cannot think about it seriously, for it is not serious. It is its own imposter; it is disintegration, vacant debilitation—not the term, but the interminable, not proper but featureless death, and not the true death but, as Kafka says, ‘the sneer of its capital error.’”

"If the poet is truly linked to this acceptance which doesn't choose and which seeks its starting point ... in the indeterminacy of being[,] then he can well say joyfully that he takes his point of departure in things: what he calls 'things' in no longer anything but the depth of the immediate and undetermined, and what he calls the point of departure is the approach toward the point where nothing begins."

"There is something I must do to accomplish [my death]; indeed, everything remains for me to do: it must be my work. But this work is beyond me, it is that part of me upon which I shed no light, which I do not attain and of which I am not master."

"To sustain, to fashion our nothingness—such is the task. We must be the figurers and the poets of our death."

"He who kills himself is the great affirmer of the present. I want to kill myself in an 'absolute' instant, the only one which will not pass and will not be surpassed. Death, if it arrived at the time we choose, would be an apotheosis of the instant... And surely because of this, suicide retains the power of an exceptional affirmation. It remains an event which one cannot be content to call voluntary."