3M
PARTISAN REVIEW
coins, are no longer able to convey their meaning to us with any
force, we are accustomed to calling this process: thinking, medita–
tion. But these expressions hide the most surprising thing in the
phenomenon: man's power of virtually and provisionally with–
drawing himself from the world and taking his stand inside him–
self--or, to use a magnificent word which exists only in Spanish,
that man can
ensimismarse.
Observe that this marvelous f culty which man possesses of
temporarily freeing himself from his slavery to things implies two
very different powers: one,
his
ability to ignore the world for a
greater or less time without fatal risk; the other, his having some–
where to take his stand, to be, when he has virtually left the world.
Baudelaire expressed this latter difficulty with romantic and man–
nered dandyism when, asked where he would choose to live, he
answered: "Anywhere, so it were out of the world!" But the world
is the whole of exteriority, the absolute
without,
which can have
no other without beyond itself. The only possible without to this
without
is, precisely, a
within,
an
intus,
the inwardness of man, his
self,
which is principally made up of ideas.
Because ideas possess the most extraordinary condition of be–
ing nowhere in the world, of being outside of all places; although
symbolically we situate them in our heads, as Homer's Greeks
situated them in the heart or the pre-Homeric Greeks in the dia–
phragm or the liver. Observe that all these symbolic changes of
domicile to which we subject ideas always agree at least in situating
them in a viscera; that is, in the imlermost part of the body,
although the
within
of the body is always a merely relative
within.
In this fashion we give a material expression- since we can give
no other-to our suspicion that ideas are in no place in space,
which is pure exteriority; but that, in the face of the exterior world,
they constitute another world which is not in the world : our imler
world.
That is why the animal has always to be attentive to what
goes on outside it, to the things around it. Because, even if the
dangers and incitements of those things were to diminish, the animal
would perforce continue to be governed by them, by the outward,
by what is
other
than itself; because it cannot go
within itself,
since it has no
self,
no
chez soi,
where it can withdraw and rest.
