open sets

"Michel Foucault finds in Raymond Roussel's works and days an entire cosmos, whose principle of unity is the principle of the threshold, which is also the principle of the parenthesis. The Rousselian cosmos is replete with thresholds, microscopic and galactic. It is itself the vastest parenthesis, forever posed between the radical originality of a birth to which it owes its existence but can never authentically produce and the silent infinitude of a death that it ubiquitously foreshadows but can never encompass. Its cosmogony must remain something of a mystery as a consequence. So, too, its teleology. It is nevertheless, clearly divisible into two parts, two phases.In its youthful phase, it glows with the light of a radiant and sovereign sun.It is a place of relentless spectacle, of sheer visibility, but of a luminocity so intense that it can be disorientating, even blinding. It is thus a place in which what is most fully exposed has perhaps the best chance of remaining secret."