THEORETICAL OBSERVATORY

At the Root of the Possibility of Saying — Ontological Determinations 1991

Preface

Ontological being is not an answer. It is a coordinate. A logical stratagem, not a truth, not a certainty, but an instrument constructed by man to give name and form to what does not allow itself to be grasped. It functions as a unit of measure not because it delimits the real, but because it allows one to orient oneself within what the real does not yet explain. Every conceptual system religious, scientific, requires a fixed point from which to calculate the distance from the unknown. Being could perform this function: it does not reveal, it refers. It would be the means by which uncertainty is rendered sayable, if not comprehensible. Many philosophers have used the term being as though its existence were an established fact. But no one can say so. And this doubt is not a limit of human thought, it is the point of departure.

Description

There is a gesture that man performs without noticing: he looks at things and sees nothing. He classifies them, measures them, buys and sells them, transforms them into commodities or tools, but does not see them. He does not see them because he does not stop long enough before them to ask the question that would nonetheless be inevitable, if only one stopped: why does this thing exist? It is not an academic question. It is the most radical question a human being can address to reality. And it is a question that remains open, because the answer does not lie in things: it lies in the relationship between things and what renders them possible. It lies in the difference, which Heidegger called the ontological difference, between the entity and being. The entity is the concrete thing: the piece of wood, the nail, the wire, the stone. Being is that without which none of these entities could exist, not a thing among things, but the condition of possibility of every thing. It cannot be seen, cannot be touched, cannot even be defined or placed within discourse: it can only be intuited. And yet it is more real than any entity, because every entity presupposes it. The discourse on being is the simplest that exists, and precisely for that reason it is the most difficult: our intellect is equipped to manage complexity, to distinguish, classify, hold together millions of concepts and judgements. But here there is nothing to classify. There is only being. The paradox one must reckon with is this: we arrive at being always and only through entities. There is no other way. Philosophy is not an activity conducted in the abstract, it is born from contact with real things, those that can be touched and seen. First comes the piece of wood, in the sequence of sensory experience, in the order of time. Being comes after, as an intuition that arises slowly, laboriously, from the prolonged and stubborn frequentation of entities. But logically being comes first: it founds every entity, precedes it, renders it intelligible. Without the possibility of affirming being, we could say nothing about anything, neither that this is a nail, nor that that is a wire, nor that this is a glass. We have arrived at the root of the possibility of saying: at the point from which every assertion, every judgement, every word becomes possible. This gap, between what comes first in experience and what comes first in logic, is exactly the space in which thought becomes necessary. Not useful, not comforting: necessary.

The series of sculptural installations, conceived in 1991, begins here. A hand holding an object. A different entity for each work, a nail, a wire, a hair, a fragment of glass, a root, a coin, a bone. A stone is worth as much as any other entity. The project requires no rarity or particularity: it requires presence. It is precisely this indifference toward the type of object that renders the series potentially infinite. The choice not to intervene aesthetically on the structure is programmatic. The work aspires to neutrality. Any refinement exceeding the necessary would constitute a distraction, a displacement of attention from the entity to the shell that supports it. Imperfection is not a residue of the production process, it is a methodological condition. The hand does not interpret, does not valorise, does not hierarchise. It holds. It is a pure device of presentation, reduced to its minimal function: offering the thing to vision without mediation, without narrative frame, without commentary. Wittgenstein wrote that whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. This series takes that proposition seriously and transforms it into plastic form: it is silent about everything except the presence of the entity. It lets it be there, exposed, irreducible to any interpretation that does not begin from the simple fact that it is. The title of each work coincides with the object the hand holds. Because every entity is a determination of being: being that has narrowed itself, that has become precise, that has assumed form and matter and duration instead of remaining in the indifference of the indeterminate. But note: the entity is being, it is not the being. Being manifests itself in entities without ever reducing itself to any of them. This is why the works have no definite number and cannot have one. Each work approaches without arriving. And this impossibility is not a failure. It is, if anything, the very condition of thought. The works resolve nothing. They are not conceived to reassure or to conclude, and they offer no coherent and consoling vision of the world. They are conceived to produce in the viewer that specific unease which arises when a simple thing is withdrawn from the automatism of everyday perception and returned to its own absolute singularity. To look long enough at a piece of wood without thinking about what one might do with it is an act that is nearly impossible for anyone living within a society that measures everything in terms of utility. And yet it is precisely from this impossible act that thought begins.

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