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La implantación en un paisaje, el arraigo al Lugar sin el cual el universo se volvería insignificante y apenas existiría, es la separación misma entre autóctonos y extranjeros. Desde esta perspectiva, la técnica es menos peligrosa que los genios del Lugar.

La técnica suprime el privilegio de ese arraigamiento y del exilio que a él se refiere. Libera de esa alternativa. No se trata de volver al nomadismo, tan incapaz como la existencia sedentaria de salir de un paisaje y de un clima. La técnica nos arranca al mundo heideggeriano y a las supersticiones del Lugar. A partir de allí surge una nueva posibilidad: percibir a los hombres fuera de la situación en la que se encuentran implantados, dejar relucir el rostro humano en toda su desnudez… Lo admirable en la hazaña de Gagarin no es su magnífico número de Luna Park que impresiona a la multitud; tampoco lo es la performance deportiva realizada al llegar más lejos que los otros, batiendo todos los récords de altura y velocidad. Más importante que todo eso es la apertura probable a nuevos conocimientos y a nuevas posibilidades técnicas, son el coraje y las virtudes de Gagarin, es la ciencia que ha hecho posible la hazaña y todo lo que todo esto a su vez presupone en términos de espíritu de sacrificio y de abnegación. Pero quizás lo que cuenta por encima de todo es el hecho de haber abandonado el Lugar. Por una hora, un hombre ha existido fuera de todo horizonte -todo era cielo alrededor suyo o, más exactamente, todo era espacio geométrico. Un hombre existió en lo absoluto del espacio homogéneo.

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"Bergson is hardly quoted now. We have forgotten the major philosophical event he was for the French university and which he remains for world philosophy, and the role he played in the constitution of the problematic of modernity. Isn’t the ontological thematization by Heidegger of being as distinguished from beings, the investigation of being in its verbal sense, already at work in the Bergsonian notion of durée, which is not reducible to the substantiality of being or the substantivity of beings? Can we continue to present Bergson according to the alternative suggested by the banal formula in which the philosophy of becoming is opposed to the philosophies of being? Do we not find, moreover, in Bergson’s last works, a critique of technical rationalism, which is so important in Heidegger’s work? Creative Evolution is a plea for a spirituality freeing itself from a mechanistic humanism… Bergson is the source of an entire complex of interrelated contemporary philosophical ideas; it is to him, no doubt, that I owe my modest speculative initiatives."

"The totality in which a thinking being is situated is not a pure and simple addition of beings, but the addition of beings who do not make up one number with one another. This is the whole originality of society. The simultaneity of participation and non-participation is precisely an existence that moves between guilt and innocence, between ascendancy over others, betrayal of the self and return to the self. The relationship of the individual to the totality, which thought is, in which the / takes into account what is not itself and yet is not dissolved in it, assumes that the totality is manifested not as a milieu brushing against the skin, so to speak, of living being as an element in which it is immersed, but as a face in which being faces me… Things as things derive their original independence from the fact that they do not belong to me—and they do not belong to me because I am in relation to the men they come from. Hence, the relationship of the / with the totality is a relationship with human beings whose face I recognize. Before them, I am guilty or innocent. The condition of thought is a moral consciousness."