At some point you’re ready to start working on it. The publication of what you’ve worked at for so many years. But rereading the prologue, I feel I’m finally ready to part with it. It has taken some time, some distance, it has taken writing another book in the meantime. But I’m ready to look into the long and arduous road of publishing The necessity of the impossible…

Here the prologue for your consideration: (And publishers are welcome, of course!)

“By choosing to write about the desire to reach the impossible and the closely related illusion of change, I have chosen to fail. To fail in life. And synonymously to fail in thinking.

I know that as a person, yes even as a philosopher, one is supposed to be part of this grande illusion of radicality, of revolutionary change that keeps the world in its clutches, that keeps it moving, that keeps complete nihilism and relativism at bay as long as possible. Change as such is a necessary illusion that keeps us human beings sane. It creates the idea of control and belonging. And by trying to undo this mask, behind which there is not truth but merely another mask, as Deleuze already warned us, or even by trying to merely point at it, there are only two options left: either one goes insane, as did Nietzsche when he realised the necessity to re-valuate everything from the ground up; Or one dies knowing to have fundamentally failed. At least, this is what one is made to believe, when studying philosophers within a world that measures value economically.

However, what can one do when faced with this choice, failing or going mad? One can try to run away from insanity and failure by becoming a politician, a critic, a commentator or even a novelist. In other words, one can choose to cloud the reality that one is doomed to find when one scratches the surface of the paradigms humanity has so masterfully created in order to remain content with their lives. But then one looses the right to call oneself a philosopher.

It is because of the inner calling to reach for a new that is unrelated to the present, for that which lies beyond the realm of the possible, that I started out on this path and will continue to do so, in order to search for some form of truth while facing evidence that truth does not exist, to search for meaning in a meaningless world, to search for change in a world that is nothing more than eternal repetition.

This search that will fail to give a definite answer is not only the only thing left for me, and for humanity, to do. It is also the beginning of all that is human.”

From: The Necessity of the Impossible, PhD dissertation Nicole des Bouvrie, European Graduate School, 2015 (not yet published)