Excerpt from ‘Surrounding the void’

When I concentrate on A, and therefore make A into a centre, I discover B; when I concentrate on B, I then discover C. The centre moves in a continuous adultery of thought. Thought turns from concentration to movement without end.

Thought is the mobility of that concentration. In as far as thought has to do with truth, the truth is never separately available in the sense that it can be met in some steady centre somewhere: it is situated in the mobility of thought itself. And this in turn starts with the denial of a centre. The motion of thought itself, the road surrounding the things, is thought. Method here is a question of choice in a multitude of prepositions. Thought is a movement around or from a random, perhaps illusionary centre, in which the concern is the movement itself. The centre is the mythical feeding ground of thought, to which it owes its tension. It indeed concerns the being or not being of the things, for what is, is a centre and what isn’t a centre, is not. Thought rushes from one midpoint to the next, it is a circular movement with a skipping midpoint, in which every previous midpoint is mythical with regards to the next. The frontier of thought is that the things completely evaporate into space. Thinking about, surrounding them takes away the identity of the things. One is being sacrificed for the other, being equated with it. Thought starts as an explosion of an identity that has suddenly been percolated as banal. An intense presence evaporates. Thought presupposes non-identity. As long as identity is valid, love and speechless contemplation, care and dedication can play their part, but thought can not get going. The first principle of thought therefore is not the principium identitatis (A=A), but the principium non-identitaties (A≠A). ‘The poverty of thought is the identity principle: A is A.’ (Leopold Flam, Thought and Existence, p. 144) The principium identitatis is an invitation to stop thinking, to jubilantly and while watering the flowers say that what is, is, and to be happy with this indeed grandiose discovery, but it is not an engine of thought. Only when I assume that whatever the things might be, they are not identical, then I can think. Whatever A may be, it is not A; when A=A, the world shrivels down to an eroticism-free, drift-free, amorphous mass of banalities. It is only when we pass through the negation that we can be speechless contemplators of the great Presence, for which we live. God can only exist for those who have absolutely no vested interest in him. Love kills and conquers death.

Editor’s note: 58 years ago today Cornelis Verhoeven obtained his doctorate from the University of Nijmegen for his thesis ‘Symbolism of the foot’. He’d celebrate this day every year; this translation is a continuation of that tradition.