A primary image suggests itself to anyone who wishes to assert that every society exfoliates in several ways, such as in technics, organization, the sacred, the recreational, the beautiful, etc. all in one movement which is simultaneously both differentiated and integral. This image is of a fan, whose stems diverge from a center and are linked in the one unfolding; but another assertion immediately intervenes, claiming that this picture is over-optimistic: it is the assertion of the disparities between these ways, (...) or domains, which disrupt the pattern of the whole by modifying its aspect and which can alter its meaning. If one wishes, one may call these the contradictions. (shrink)

Among the Arabs, wijdân means a particularly rich and moving relationship between essence and existence (and vice versa). In recent periods of their history it has been interpreted as mass movements, emotional violence, and the impulse to change life. Is this but one aspect, one of several effects, or is it the substance of revolutions? Does the concept “to change life” have a value by itself, or is it only a symptom or corollary of more hidden movements which justify such (...) an abstraction?Etymologically thawra in arabic means “effervescence.” Moreover, it does not just partially include, but surpasses our understanding of revolutions. We have become accustomed to defining them as changes in class relationships. The exercise of a secret logic can be seen which would determine, in the end, the fortunes of production relationships. This is, at any rate, what Marxist doctrine maintained, until recent studies revealed more shades of meaning and completed it. This is not the place to take up in our turn the debate about genesis/structure, structure/superstructure, the predominant factor and its consequences or effects, or “superdetermination,” which is the contingency to use ruses. (shrink)

Unlike him who said: “Man is something that must be gone beyond,” I shall have the temerity to say: “Man is something that must be opened out.” But this opening out presupposes a statutory plurality of the person, society and the world. It is because it ignored this plurality and broke away from it that the industrial era is experiencing what have been called contradictions.