Je mehr wir uns der Gefahr nähern, um so heller beginnen die Wege ins Rettende zu leuchten, um so fragender werden wir. Denn das Fragen ist die Frömmigkeit des Denken.

Die Frage nach der Technik ist die Frage nach der Konstellation, in der sich Entbergung und Verbergung, in der sich das Wesende der Wahrheit ereignet.

It is comforting, however, and a soUrce of profound relief to think that man iS only a recent invention,  a figure not yet two centuries old, a new Wrinkle in our knowledge; and that he will disappear agaIn as soon as that knowledge has discovered a new form.

laDgUage loses its privileged position and becomes, in its tUDi;a~lllstorical form coherent with the density of its own~past. But as things become increasingly reflexive, seeking the principle of their intelligibility onlrin their own development. and abandoning the space of -representation; man enters in his turn  and for the firs time. the field of Western knowledge.

Perhaps knowledge succeeds in engendeImg”lrnowledge. ideas in tt:msforming themselves and actively modifYiDgcone~aIiotller (but how?- historianschave uotyet enlightened iIs-oifiliiS pOllit); one thing, in any case, is certain: archaeology,addressing itself to the general space of knowledge, to its configurations, and to the mooe’ofbeing of the things that appear in it. defines sYstemS of simultaneity; as o well as the series of mutations necessary and sufficient to circUmsCribe the threshold of a new positivity.

Thus, between the already’ encoded’ eye and reflexive knowledge there is a middle region which liberates order itself: it is here that it appears, according to the culture and the age in question, continuous and graduated or discontinuous and piecemeal, linked to space or constituted anew at each instant by the driving force of time, related to a series of variables or defined. by separate systems of coherences, composed of resemblances which are either successive or corresponding, organized around increasing differences, etc. This middle region, then, in so far as it makes manifest the modes of being of order, can be posited as the most fundamental of all: anterior to words, perceptions, and gestures, which are then taken to be more or less exact. more or less happy, expressions of it (which is why this experience of order in its pure primary state always plays a critical role); more solid, more archaic, less dubious, always more ‘true’ than the theories that attempt to give those expressions explicit form, exhaUStive application. or philosophical foundation. Thus. in every cultUre, between the use of what one might call the ordering codes and reflections upon order itself there is the pure experience of order and of its modes of being.

Order is; at one and thes same time that which is given to things as their inner-law, the hidden network that determines the way they confront one and another, and  also which has no existence except in the grid created by a glance, an examination, a language; and it is only in the blank Spaces of this grid that the order manifests itself in depth as though already there, waiting in Silence for the moment of its expression.

There would appear to be, then. at the other extremityof the earth we inhabit, a culture entirely devoted to the ordering of space, but one that does not distribute the multiplicity of existing things into any of the categories that make it possible for us to name, speak. and think.

I use that word ‘table’ in two superimposed senses: the nickel-plated, rubbery table swathed in white, glinmng beneath a glass sun devouring all shadow – the table where, for an instant, perhaps forever, the umbrella encounters the sewing-machine; and also a table, a tabula, that enables-thought to operate upon the entities of our world, to put them in order. to divide them into classes, to group them according to names that designate their similarities and their differences – the table upon which, since the beginning of time, language has intersected space.

 Where else could they be juxtaposed except in the non-place of language? Yet. though language can spread them before us, it can do so only in an unthinkable space.