"What Questions Fascinate Me?" "What do I Want to Know?"

The Question of Fascination: Oedipus asked too many questions for his own good. That much we already know. It follows, therefore, that the questions that fascinate me are not necessarily related to "what I want to know," since fascination already betrays an essential passivity to "the question," which fascinates me only to the degree that I want to know nothing about it.

"Bad Faith": Likewise, there are questions that are posed only to avoid asking other questions; for example, in intimate relationships, we talk around the question we really want to ask. These parasitical questions are like the small fish that nibble at the carcass of a drowned man.

The Oyster and the Shell: It has often been observed that the question-answer form is itself already the symptom of the subject's aggressive relation to an environment populated by objects and other subjects, a relation that in a certain sense has been identified with the legacy of "the West." Of course, aggressivity is historically disguised as a special faculty belonging to the interrogative subject, or as an energy for opening things up, which gives the question a tool-like character (as has already been observed by Heidegger). The oyster knife, for example, pries the shell apart enough to slip into the body of the oyster and sever its membrane attached to the interior wall, thereby killing the oyster; likewise, the question already predisposes a "destruction" of a prior state of things in order to open the being-in-question to other possible states. As Sartre writes, "'Destruction' presents the same structure as 'the question.'" (39). And yet, in destroying an earlier state of things or affairs, by revealing the nothingness that acts as their membrane, the question "destroys nothing" in actuality, neither does it present an image of the state to follow. Therefore, the question is not transformative (as some would believe), but purely destructive. It is odd to see a transformative value attached to the question, which does not naturally belong to it. Rather, I would say that this beneficial value is purely the expression of belief—we believe that all questioning leads to a better state of affairs—although this is something of a blind faith, and here we touch on what could be called an ideological dimension that belongs to the question in our critical age. The fact that most questions do not result in a peaceful or calm state of affairs is evidence of their destructive capacity, which, interestingly enough, threatens to become indiscriminate and to strike against the questioner also. Anxiety before the question is common, and for good reason. This is because sometimes I am the oyster.

"How are you Today?" The question"How are you today?" does not seem to belong to the same order as other questions such as "What is the origin of the art-work?" or "How does language determine sexual difference? Or does it?" or even "What is the future of the brain?" And yet, there is a contamination of these modes. In questioning, I expect or anticipate a reply, even if the answer is "no" (or, as in the parable by Kafka, "not just now"). ¹ It is because of this contamination of interrogative modes that the world is, in some sense, anthropomorphized by the question. Thus, it only appears as if nature does not answer, or that the universe remains closed (for example, stubbornly tight-lipped concerning the question of its origin). It is this simple property, one might say defect, that belongs to the question that is the origin of a common plot in science fiction: a race of intelligent beings arrives on earth one day with all the answers. This is a "fiction" that originates from a modern scientific worldview. Of course, after Freud, we know very well that the true origin of this fiction is the ideal figure, that Father who had an answer for everything and whose knowledge of...