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Gentleness is an enigma. Taken up in a double movement of welcoming
and giving, it appears on the threshold of passages signed off by
birth and death. Because it has its degrees of intensity, because
it is a symbolic force, and because it has a transformative ability
over things and beings, it is a power. The simplicity of gentleness
is misleading. It is an active passivity that may become an
extraordinary force of symbolic resistance and, as such, become
central to both ethics and politics. Gentleness is a force of
secret life-giving transformation linked to what the ancients
called potentiality. In our day, gentleness is sold to us under its
related form of diluted mawkishness. By infantilizing it our era
denies it. This is how we try to overcome the high demands of its
subtlety-no longer by fighting it, but by enfeebling it. Language
itself is therefore perverted: what our society intends to give the
human beings that it crushes "gently," it does in the name of the
highest values: happiness, truth, security. From listening to those
who come to me and confide their despair, I have heard it expressed
in every lived experience. I have felt its force of resistance and
its intangible magic. In mediating its relation to the world, it
appears that its intelligence carries life, saves and amplifies it.
Gentleness is an enigma. Taken up in a double movement of welcoming
and giving, it appears on the threshold of passages signed off by
birth and death. Because it has its degrees of intensity, because
it is a symbolic force, and because it has a transformative ability
over things and beings, it is a power. The simplicity of gentleness
is misleading. It is an active passivity that may become an
extraordinary force of symbolic resistance and, as such, become
central to both ethics and politics. Gentleness is a force of
secret life-giving transformation linked to what the ancients
called potentiality. In our day, gentleness is sold to us under its
related form of diluted mawkishness. By infantilizing it our era
denies it. This is how we try to overcome the high demands of its
subtlety-no longer by fighting it, but by enfeebling it. Language
itself is therefore perverted: what our society intends to give the
human beings that it crushes "gently," it does in the name of the
highest values: happiness, truth, security. From listening to those
who come to me and confide their despair, I have heard it expressed
in every lived experience. I have felt its force of resistance and
its intangible magic. In mediating its relation to the world, it
appears that its intelligence carries life, saves and amplifies it.
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