The impossible survives us all

“The theater restores us as our dormant conflicts and all their powers, and gives these powers names we hail as symbols: and behold! before our eyes is fought a battle of symbols, one charging against another in an impossible melee; for there can be theater only from the moment when the impossible really begins and when the poetry which occurs on the stage sustains and superheats the realized symbols.”

Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double, 1938.

“The symbol of Nature’s eternal war for the impossible equilibrium between spirit and matter; the symbol, also, of Time, which is but the illusion in which eternity clothes itself; forever putting on and forever putting off new garments of matter.”

Thomas H. Burgoyne, The Light of Egypt, Volume II, 1889.

“…le signifiant est unité d’être unique, n’etant de par sa nature symbole que d’une absence” (“…the signifier is a unit in its very uniqueness, being by nature symbol only of an absence”)

Jacques Lacan Ecrits, “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’”, 1956.

“Life, the Universe, the Void have no value for thought when it is completely free. The only thing that has value is Meaning — that is, the moral concept of the impossible.”

René Magritte, Selected Writings, “Thought and images”, 1954.