What the intellectual really does is the contrary of Durerian melancholy, seen (by Freud and since) as an out-most form of mourning. It is quite the contrary, experimentation with things yet to come. This is the condition of return to the desert and thus the condition of access to the hatch of ‘illo tempore’.
Many things indeed are about and ‘yet to come’: peoples and communities to come, minor languages and literatures, and also me as intellectual, the nodal point of potentiality. In Irenaeus there is a curious and useful idea of recapitulation, a kind of anty-Sisyphus: Christ as summing up the humanity in order not-to-fail, as a kind of Adam who repeats exactly the same way and doesn't slip. I also start da capo in order to eliminate a mistake. It’s not the simple repetition: usually we repeat the whole process striving to achieve – at last – the fugitive goal and we fall into the same traps. This is a common madness, a secret too easy to guess, standing behind our incapacity of change. In order to recapitulate, we need to pull ourselves up to a new level, a degree higher.
