PLOT
The Vectorial Structure of Life
● “Human life,” I wrote in Our Andalusia, “is always organized
from a specific assumption, from an expectation, and this means
in a direction which gives it a ‘plot.’ The things of life arrive one
after another, they come out to meet us, and are grasped and
received by us within an extremely precise vital orientation. This
is why things have a slant.” Language frequently employs the
expression: “Things have taken this or that slant…; because only
when they take such a slant—that is, when they initiate a new
slant and change the old one—do we become aware of it; but, of
course, before taking this particular slant they had a different
one. This inclination or obliquity displayed by life comes
precisely from our inclinations, which impose a particular slant
on everything we find in it.
“We must take care not to understand ‘inclinations’ in the
merely psychological sense; psychological inclinations exist
because life as reality is structured into a number of vectorial
orientations which aim in different directions, and with differing
intensity. The idea of ‘slant’—never used by philosophy as far as I
know, and more important than it seems—is the counterpart of
those orientations. It is what permits life to have, in its dealings
with things, a plot. ‘Slant’ is the manner of being of things when
they are realities lived from a vectorial structure. Further, it is
the dynamic version of ‘aspect’; I mean, the way things have of
‘turning about’ when the perspective in which they are found is
not simply ‘perspective,’ an intentional or visual relationship, but
an active and directed pressure, an executive behavior in regard
to them. Things take a “slant”—always a dramatic one—when
they are struck by the vectorial arrows of biographical projects.”
Sensibility as Transparency
● “Sensibility makes the world ‘transitable’; it has a depth into
which one can enter; it can offer paths which may be opened and
followed inside it. The ‘plot’ in which human life consists, and
which is creatively unfolded in the world, takes place in sensorial
form and allows the exercise of sensibility in different directions,
at differing pressure, with greater or less resistance, with
pleasure, indifference, or pain.”
“Sensorial plurality introduces mobility and ‘plot’ into the
world itself, not only into life as such. Things are rendered
present by means of a sense, but they are also accessible through
another sense or senses. What I see from a distance can be
touched at closer range; sound tells me what I can see or touch;
smell promises the pleasure of taste, or warns of the immediacy
of something repellent; what is given to me in the dark proximity
of touch can be ‘recognized’ by the distant light of vision. Even
though neither I nor the thing move at all, the diversification of
sensibility makes each perspective multiple, and means that in
 that sense it is constantly taking place. Human perception is
never simple, nor passive, nor instantaneous, because in each
case it is surrounded by the halo of the other possible modes of
perception, either anticipated or remembered or simply
convergent.”
The Figure of Woman
● “That living-together, unlike all inert coexistence, is plotlike:
sexual attraction is only one specific form of the mutual interest
felt by man and woman, which permits each of them to project
toward the other.”
The Amorous Condition
● “Man and woman rarely fall in love, normally do not fall in love,
● “Each of my needs, biographically and not merely biologically, is
personal because I am a person. Compare a personal need with
the “same” organic need. For example, my organism needs a
certain amount of salt and sugar. If I put the salt in a cup of
coffee and the sugar on a couple of fried eggs, there is no
problem—that is, no problem for my organism—but there is
certainly one for me, because I, as it happens, need salt on the
eggs and sugar in the coffee. I need a space which is not the
space occupied by my body, and a perceptive horizon beyond the
one demanded by my organism, and a ‘plot’ for my biographical
time which is not derived from my biological functions […]
“[W]hen we are dealing with need of a person, the question
‘what for?’ cannot be answered instantaneously and
permanently, but in an intrinsically biographical or ‘plotlike’
way. If I am asked why I need air, I can answer that I need it to
breathe; similarly, I need food to nourish myself, light to see, a
dwelling place to shelter myself from the weather. To the
question ‘Why do I need a person?’ I can answer only with a
story, with a significant portion of my biography, or with all of it.
And when I need someone for something that is instantaneous or
passively constant, without a ‘plot,’ this means that I do not need
him personally but that I need what the person possesses or
brings with him of a ‘thing’—that which can never be; I need his
body, his physical strength, his skills, his social prestige, his
properties, his support.”
but their reciprocal encounter takes place in the ambit of that
possibility, unlike personal encounter within the same sex,
which lacks polarity and mutual projection and which for that
very reason is not intrinsically ‘plotlike’ and in need of a concrete
and particular plot in order to come into existence and be
consolidated […]
“In a room full of people, on a busy street, in a public vehicle,
one’s glance slides in a passive and indifferent way over persons
of the same sex, unless there is some special reason which
introduces what I have called a ‘plot’ relationship: the policeman
looking for a criminal, the fugitive who fears to be discovered by
a policeman or an enemy, the man who has an appointment with
 someone, the photographer, the observer in search of
picturesque types, the foreigner for whom everything is new and
who wants to orient himself.”
● “Then need is not only active—a doing—but dramatic and
plotlike. Not only owing to the character of the person—that of
never being given, but ‘arriving’.”
Human Time
● “Daily life, by its repetition, creates an illusion of eternity: that
which we do ‘each’ day makes us feel as if we could do it ‘every’
day; that is, forever. At the same time, variation and innovation
impress the ‘plotlike’ quality of life upon us. And from this arise
all the concrete forms of sensation in relation to time:
expectation, waiting, hope, despair (which becomes the
experience of ‘this can’t go on’), hopelessness (expressed in the
melancholy experience of ‘things can go on like this
indefinitely’).”
● “On the other hand, if we attempt to understand in a concrete,
non-abstract way, not in the sense of pure measurement, the
meaning of the finitude of life, of the limited time of its duration,
we must regard it dramatically. Human life does not ‘last’ a
longer or shorter time, like a building or a utensil, not even like
an organism, but has a ‘plot.’ In the phrase ars longa, vita brevis,
the brevity of life depends on the longevity of art. Life is short
because it is not long enough for the art which must be learned
and executed; that is, for one’s projects. Human time is not a
mere quantity, but is always the time there is not enough of—or
too much of.”
● “When there is too much time, that tremendous situation we call
boredom occurs, and then we say that we have to ‘kill time.’
There is not enough when the ‘plot’ of our life needs more time
than is available. Man frequently complains that he ‘has no time
for anything,’ but then he usually discovers that he ‘has nothing
for time,’ and his life takes on the form of tedium.”
Happiness, A Necessary Impossibility
● “In the name of the lost Paradise, he allows possible happiness in
this world to elude him. This is why there has usually been a
static and non-dramatic idea of happiness, rather than a plotlike
one. Happiness, in this world—and, I believe, in the next world as
well—must be dramatic and plotlike; not a ‘state,’ but an
installation from which one projects vectorially. That is why I
said that happiness occurs: it is not simply ‘there’ nor is one in it,
nor, strictly speaking, can one ‘be’ happy, but one is in a state of
being happy, especially when one is about to be happy.”
Human Mortality
● “‘Man,’ the empirical structure of human life, is a closed
structure; but my life, that is, I as a person, is an open structure.
To live is to project, imagine, anticipate; it means to go on
 projecting, imagining, and anticipating. I am inexorably future-
oriented, given over to the future; there is no intrinsic reason
whatsoever why the plotlike projection of my life should be
exhausted (what is exhausted is the ‘story line’ of my biological
and psychophysical life when it reaches the last age).”

Death and Project

● “The empirical structure of human life—what we call ‘man’—is

‘closed,’ and leads to his mortality. The projective and future-
oriented structure of biographical life as such is ‘open’ and
plotlike, and in this sense postulates its permanence, its
indefinite and unlimited persistence. If ‘man’ is intrinsically
mortal, ‘my life’ consists in an aspiration to eternity.”