Thinking, The Heart

This wonderful quote by the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy stands at the center of this part of my book, perhaps as a sort of mirror, or better yet, as an absence or a break that addresses the very thought of community. It evokes the ideas of community and apostasy in a strange way, but one that is very appropriate to what I have written in the past few posts and what I will write in the upcoming ones. I hope you enjoy it.

“The heart is not broken, in the sense that it does not exist before the break. But it is the break itself that makes the heart. The heart is not an organ, and neither is it a faculty. It is: that I is broken and traversed by the other where its presence is most intimate and its life most open. The beating of the heart – rhythm of the partition of being, syncope of the sharing of singularity – cuts across presence, life, consciousness. That is why thinking – which is nothing other than the weighing or testing of the limits, the ends, of presence, of life, of consciousness – thinking itself is love.”

Jean-Luc Nancy