RafaelFajardo

Great philosophers are great stylists too. Style in philosophy is the movement of concepts. This movement’s only present, of course, in the sentences, but the sole point of the sentences is to give it a life, a life of its own. Style is a set of variations in language, a modulation, and a straining of one’s whole language toward something outside it. Philosophy’s like a novel: you have to ask “What’s going to happen?,” “What’s happened?” Except the characters are concepts, and the settings, the scenes, are space-times. One’s always writing to bring something to life, to free life from where it’s trapped, to trace lines of flight. The language for doing that can’t be a homogenous system, it’s something unstable, always heterogeneous in which style carves differences of potential between which things can pass, come to pass, a spark can flash and break out of language itself, to make us see and think what was lying in the shadow around the words, things we were hardly aware existed.