Fordham University Press

Miraculously, it would be the opposite of neurosis whose trademark move is to capture the future in such a way that our present becomes modeled on past experiences, leaving no room for the effraction of the new, for the displacement, albeit minimal, that opens a horizon line

Would it not suffice less dramatically to think, with Spinoza, what makes us persevere in being? To think patience instead, this measure of time that, in the face of urgency, cauterizes wounds . . . The patience of being—a subtle, forgotten, uncolonized art of the self, in which emotion is entangled with thought, the cuisine of all creation. But it would have to be a patience neither in the service of waiting, nor especially in that of depression, compromise, or fatal renunciation. This risk—the risk of being—cannot be envisaged or evaluated

our anxieties or our fears sometimes restore us to this newborn’s body at the mercy of hunger, thirst, cold, waiting, pain, and the unknown. The sensations that we experience during the first weeks of life are still there, intact, and a particularly strong wave of melancholy is enough to conjure up this body and bend our adult body back toward it