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In affirming separation we are not transposing into an abstract formula the empirical image of a spatial interval which joins its extremities by the very space that separates them. Separation must take form outside of this formalism, as an event that is not equivalent to its contrary as soon as it is produced. To separate oneself, to not remain bound up with a totality, is positively to be somewhere, in the home, to be economically. The 'somewhere" and the home render egoism, the primordial mode of being in which separation is produced, explicit. Egoism is an ontological event, an effective rending, and not a dream running along the surface of being, negligible as a shadow. The rending of a totality can be produced only by the throbbing of an egoism that is neither illusory nor subordinated in any way whatever to the totality it rends. Egoism is life: life from…, or enjoyment. Enjoyment, given over to the elements which content it but lead it off into the "nowhere" and menace it. withdraws into a dwelling. So many opposed movements —the submergence in the elements which begins to open up interiority, the sojourn, happy and needy, on the earth, time, and the consciousness which loosens the vice of being and ensures the mastery of a world—are united in the corporeal being of man—nakedness and indigence, exposed to the anonymous exteriority of heat and cold but recollecting in the interiority of being at home with oneself, and hence labor and possession.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-009-9342-6_11

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