“But perhaps the most salutary effect of invisible art lies in the chameleon-like array of meanings which have cloaked it over the past half century. Rather than simply serving as a static limit defining the no-go zone of artistic practice, it has alternately appeared under the guise of the Sublime, of social idealism, avant-garde aggression, personal humility and ironic commentary. No single artist has been able to possess invisibility as a signature medium, and its wayward history gently yet pointedly mocks our waning belief in the cult of originality. It suggests instead that art doesn’t begin and end in a physical frame or a singular context, but lives on in the potentially endless process by which we make use of it.”

“This bullet is an old one.In 1897, it was fired at the president of Uruguay by a young man from Montevideo, Avelino Arredondo, who had spent long weeks without seeing anyone so that the world might know that he acted alone. Thirty years earlier, Lincoln had been murdered by that same ball, by the criminal or magical hand of an actor transformed by the words of Shakespeare into Marcus Brutus, Caesar’s murderer. In the mid-seventeenth century, vengeance had employed it for the assassination of Sweden’s Gustavus Adolphus in the midst of the public hecatomb of battle.In earlier times, the bullet had been other things, because Pythagorean metempsychosis is not reserved for humankind alone. It was the silken cord given to viziers in the East, the rifles and bayonets that cut down the defenders of the Alamo, the triangular blade that slit a queen’s throat, the wood of the Cross and the dark nails that pierced the flesh of the Redeemer, the poison kept by the Carthaginian chief in an iron ring on his finger, the serene goblet that Socarates drank down one evening.In the dawn of time it was the stone that Cain hurled at Abel, and in the future it shall be many things that we cannot even imagine today, but that will be able to put an end to men and their wondrous, fragile life.”

“In one of his last novels, the poet Aragon quite appropriately mentioned the idea put forward by a few isolated linguists of the century concerning the intermittence of recollecting and forgetting in the development of language, and the historical role of oblivion which is compensated for by verbal creativeness.Over the centuries, the science of language has more than once addressed the question of ellipsis which manifests itself at different verbal levels: sounds, syntax, and narration. One must admit that for the most part these questions, too, have been elaborated only episodically and fragmentarily. A technique which today receives even less consideration is that of elliptical perception, by which the listener fills in (again on all linguistic levels) whatever has been omitted by him as listener. We have also failed to appreciate properly the subjectivism of the hearer, who fills in the elliptic gaps creatively. Here lies the heart of the issue of disambiguation, which has been the object of considerable debate for the past few years within the science of language.From this angle one of the essential differences between spoken and written language can be seen clearly. The former has a purely temporal character, whereas the latter connects time and space. While the sounds that we hear disappear, when we read we usually have immobile letters before us and the time of the written flow of words is reversible: we can read and re-read, and, what is more, we can be ahead of an event. Anticipation, which is subjective in the listener, becomes objective in the reader, who can read the end of a letter or novel before reading the earlier parts.”

“Among ellipsis theorists there are two popular ideas about what an ellipsis is made of. On the one hand, it is a garden-variety phrase, similar in all respects to an overt phrase, but not interpreted phonologically. On the other, ellipses are a specialized sort of silent word, maybe along the lines of the silent pronouns that languages like Japanese or Italian are thought to have. This second “proform” approach is appealing as it makes sense of the similarities ellipses have with overt pronominals in finding antecedents from their contexts. If proforms are defined as having denotations that make use of contextual information, then analyzing ellipses as proforms explains this fact about them. And to the extent that the way in which pronouns access contextual information is like the way that ellipses do, we have evidence for equating them.”

“If philosophy is the continuous creation of concepts, then obviously the question arises not only of what a concept is as philosophical Idea but also of the nature of the other creative Ideas that are not concepts and that are due to the arts and sciences, which have their own history and becoming and which have their own variable relationships with one another and with philosophy. The exclusive right of the concept creation secures a function for philosophy, but it does not give it any preeminence or privilege since there are other ways of thinking and creating, other modes of ideation that, like scientific thought, do not have to pass through concepts. We always come back to the question of the use of this activity of creating concepts, in its difference from scientific or artistic activity. Why, through what necessity, and for what use must concepts, and always new concepts, be created? And in order to do what?”

“Mathematics does not grow through a monotonous increase of the number of indubitably established theorems but through the incessant improvement of guesses by speculation and criticism, by the logic of proofs and refutations.”