It is imperative to be nothing, all you need to think is to be nobody. The hygiene of thinking, the asceticism of thinking, comes down to gymnastics. Gymnastics means one seeks nakedness. Not that it is a question of taking off one’s clothes. One can remove one’s clothes, that isn’t the point. Gymnastic or gymnosophic or gymnopedic nakedness is very close to the absence that thinks. Nakedness goes back to the undetermined. To dismiss every opinion from one’s mind, every idea, every hate, is to level off the contours of opinionated determination, it is to find the bare and barren plain. The unwritten wax tablet has lost, forgotten its determinations, with no writing, it is un-differentiated. Opinion is stable, it is stiff, it is singular, it defines someone through hates. The opinionated person is differentiated like a lobster’s claw. Inventive thinking is unstable, it is undetermined, it is un-differentiated, it is as little singular in its function as is our hand. The latter can make itself into a pincer, it can be fist and hammer, cupped palm and goblet, tentacle and suction cup, claw and soft touch. Anything. A hand is determined, accordingly. So what is a hand? It is not an organ, it is a faculty, a capacity for doing, for becoming claw or paw, weapon or compendium. It is a naked faculty. A faculty is not special, it is never specific, it is the possibility of doing something in general. To talk about the faculties of the soul is a great misnomer, when we are differentiating between them: the soul is also a naked faculty. It is nakedness. We live by bare hands. Our hands are that nakedness I find in gymnastics, that pure faculty, cleared up by exercise, by the asceticism of un-differentiation. I think, un-differentiated. Thus I am anyone, animal, element, stone or wind, number, you and him, us. Nothing. Nobody. Blank. Bare. Our body comes down time, it comes down the valley, the thalweg of difference. It runs fatally along determination. Cracking with rheumatism, gnarled, arborescent, daily inured to one gesture and only one, the hand becomes a mere terminal, either technical or bestial. Old Renoir’s hand is the organ of the painter species. Difference is our old age. Metamorphosis, metempsychosis, tragic moments when our body altogether collapses into kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, and genus. These aren’t fables, or myths, or tall tales, this is the regular and physical march of time toward the determined. The beast difference cries help in the direction of beauty undetermined. La fontaine, the fountain of indifference invents fables with stable forms … The joint loses - as they put it in mechanics - a certain degree of free play, it ends up with only one drift, its difference. The hand becomes a mere clamp, the body a mere animal, and thought becomes a mere opinion. They have lost their freedom. Gymnastics does not require that one get naked to exercise freely. Quite to the contrary, it freely exercises in order to rediscover nakedness. It is a practice for going back in time. It undifferentiates the body, it seeks to put it into the state of a bare hand. It turns the body into a hand, a subject, a pure faculty. It turns the body into a faculty. It turns it into a capacity. It turns it into a possibility. Gymnastics bleaches the body. There it is, in the abstract.
It has become the naked body of nobody.
I think naked and I am nobody.
I dance naked, I am nothing.
— Michel Serres: Genesis, p34
