But darkness is not the mere absence of light. It is the product of some of our cells. Darkness exists. Being contemporary in one’s own time means therefore seeing the constitutive darkness. Likewise astrophysics teaches us how the intervals of darkness which dot the sky and divide one star from another, are nothing more than the wait for a light which still has to arrive, that of very distant stars.3 Being contemporary means therefore being aware of awaiting something which hasn’t arrived yet, but which is already here through the anticipation of its darkness. It’s being early for a meeting which will never arrive but of which we perceive the sense, the idea. The contemporary is therefore a fold, certainly, an alteration regarding our normal faculties of seeing and understanding the outside, the things. Nevertheless it is there, it is a constitutive part of man and his experience. It is a paradoxical situation which in its very being opens, perhaps imposes another possibility of thought, in a certain sense of desire. Another way of living. And of desiring.
Lecture by Matteo Cavalleri, “A monument to the possible”, Research week, 30.10.2010
