HISTORY
Interpretation, Theory, and Reason
● “Reality as I encounter it—true reality—is already interpreted and
responds to an idea of human life. Life is intrinsically historical
and social, and ‘Adamism,’ so far from representing a higher
degree of strictness, is an abstract error.”
Empirical Structure
● “Man is not nature, but he has nature; if you like, he has to come
to terms with a nature which surrounds him and which, in that
sense, is his. But none of its contents is in principle immutable,
though it may be stable and lasting. There are no ‘historical
constants’ but acquired historical determinations, though their
duration, at limit, may take in the whole of history from Adam to
the Last Judgment.”
The Vectorial Structure of Life
● “The forms of installation are, therefore, forms of happening; or,
if you prefer, forms for happening, inseparable from happening,
without which they would lack meaning and reality. This means
that installation has a historical character, for it is itself affected
by a ‘level’ on which it finds itself in each case.”
Worldhood
● “For man, nothing is merely physical, or even biological, but also
historical and social. Even those determinations which appear to
be linked with man’s very condition as a living being transcend
physics, geography, or biology.”
● “Human history is, in one of its dimensions, the history of that
reabsorption, the projection upon the naked circumstance of the
concrete projects which are going to make it, in each case, world.
And that is why a singular ‘history of the world,’ as history of the
different ways in which the world has been world, is possible; a
history of worldhood or of the worldlike structure of life.”
Corporeal Installation
● “Anatomy and physiology have gradually explored this reality of
the internal body and have attained a scientific knowledge which
today is superimposed on the knowledge we possess vitally, but
for centuries or millennia man has clung to a repertory of
fabulous or mythological interpretations of the inside of his body
and its functions. Magic, war, sacrifices, cannibalism,
interpretation based on animals’ bodies, all this has left a residue
in humanity of a number of ways of understanding the body.
These are essential ingredients of man’s reality, his mode of
installation, a residue with a social and historical aspect. Think of
 the distinction that has been made between ‘noble’ and ‘vile’
parts of the body, of the establishment of a hierarchy of organs
and functions, of the covering or adornment of the body by
means of clothing, of the way in which the body itself—that is, the
naked body—has become exceptional.”
● “The human body, because it is a living body, has that structure
which we have called vectorial. In the first place, the body
‘happens’ as a whole, it is like a biological projectile which
moves forward from birth to death, throughout its life. That is, it
moves in one direction and in conformity with a specific and
historically foreseen trajectory. It is not merely a question of the
‘mean duration’ of life; in man it is, rather, life expectancy, a
quite different concept. The statistical length of men’s lives is
one thing, and what they can normally (barring ‘accident’)
expect is another. This expectancy is what defines the trajectory
and determines its tension.”
The Virile Figure of Human Life
● “[V]irility is neither a biological nor simply a ‘natural’ quality, but
a historico-social one. That is, not only does the significance of
the general term ‘man’ vary from one society to another, but also
the significance of the words ‘man’ and ‘woman’.”
Vital Reason: Masculine and Feminine
● “What we call ‘things’ are primarily interpretations of reality;
most of them are social, and therefore historical. ‘Things’
depend, of course, on the human perceptive apparatus which
makes us consider a stone, a tree, or an animal, or each grain of
sand as a thing and not as each of its cells or molecules; but we
do not consider a star as a thing except in a very special
perspective, the astronomical perspective.”
The Amorous Condition
● “One proof of the personal quality of human needs is that most of
them are historico-social, and among such needs are almost all
the nutritional ones. I need a certain kind of food, and prepared
in such-and-such a way, because I belong to a particular social
unit. Think of the three great cultures of wheat, rice, and corn,
and the difficulties which have had to be overcome in India in
order to satisfy nutritional needs with wheat when rice is not
available. Naturally the difficulties did not arise from the Indians’
organism, but from Indian persons.
Love and Being in Love
● “[L]ove happens; it is a dramatic, a plotlike reality, which has a
history—and can be narrated, imagined, anticipated,
remembered. It is a “state,” but it is not “static,” because it is
neither a thing nor a determination of anything. Its permanence
 is that of the person who is living, who is arriving with and
toward another person, with whom he is making himself.”

The Temper of Life

● “Human life as such possesses a temper; true tempers pertain to

man as a structure of biographical life. They are rooted in each of
his installations—or in the dimensions of installation—thus, they
appear connected with corporeality, the sexuate condition, social
structure, and historicity, not separately but in their multiple
interlacings.”