The French Notebooks (1994 - 2025)

For the Generations to Come

1994

“If there is no law of God to tell me what I must and must not do, then there is the law of men. If there is no law of men, then there is the law of governments, telling me what I must do and how I must do it. If there is neither the law of God, nor of men, nor of governments, then what everyone calls ‘common sense’ tells me what to do, how to do it, and whether to do it at all. And if there is no God, no upright men, no governments, no common sense to tell me what I must do and how I must do it, then there is my superego: telling me not only what to do and how to do it, but also that to do anything not permitted (by God, by men, by governments, by common sense) is a crime, redeemable only by an inner death.

All this, until one realizes: there is no legitimate God; there is no human law that isn’t merely human; there is no state with any rightful paternal authority; there is no common sense, only conformity; and there is no superego that cannot be killed (as one must kill every parent who damnably brought us into the world). In that moment one discovers that freedom is nothing but a conceptual category. Because to be truly free one must be without God, without borders or homeland, unafraid to make a revolution, and lucid enough to walk one’s own path (whatever it may be) head held high, never once looking back.”

Boris Curto

Note

The writings, images, and books gathered on this site are not a portfolio. They are a substantial fragment of a life: more than forty years of research and artistic utterance, accumulated as one accumulates scars, light, and evidence.

This is not a formal inquiry, nor an academic one. It is an investigation chosen in defiance of those protocols, and paid for in full: with labor, with persistence, and with innumerable errors whose weight has never been negligible.

Time has loosened the grip of many certainties. And what it has demanded of me is not merely the revision of the concepts that, year after year, have sedimented in my mind, but the slow, difficult growth of a braver posture: the acceptance of myself as a fallible creature, and as one who is, by nature, deeply inconsistent.

It is precisely here, in this praise of inconsistency, that one of my most hard-won achievements resides: the clear knowledge of the singularity and value of my thought, and of my art.

Numquam sine intellectu iudicabo.