Become a director and actor at ones

The question of why it is necessary to encounter our existential environment by drawing faces, bodies, animals, plants, landscapes and urbanity is directly related to the question of sense at all, that is, the meaning of what we do and are as such.

Here is an invitation to follow an image of thought that has become a perspective on what we do and who we are that could lead to fundamental change. 

Imagine that we are a kind of human registration machine, equipped with the tools of our perception to objectify, deconstruct, formalize and compose what we are, using the given objects in the midst of which we exist: faces, bodies, animals, plants, elements of landscapes or urbanity. 

We can call this process the encoding of our own being.

If we follow this line of thought, there are two questions we need to address. How do we use the tools? What is the content reference?

The answer to the first question is easy to give, but harder to follow. To use the tools of our perception, we write and draw. To do this, we must learn to see and speak by asking what we see and what we can actually say and do. This is something quite different from simply following given definitions and opinions.

The answer to the second question follows from the first. What to do according to what we see, what has an effect on us, what we turn into a code according to which we act involuntarily, presupposes the encounter with the other. Without the experience of togetherness, we remain blind and mute. Togetherness is therefore the inevitable reference for how and for what we use the tools of our perceptive apparatus.

The image of thought that we are talking about commits you to becoming at the same time the director and actor of your own compositions, that is, the encoding of the score according to your being unfolding in time and space. This image of thought has a tradition that goes back to prehistoric times, later it took on a religious connotation as the Book of Life.

The Fractured Book of Life:
From Sacred Text to Improvised Form

Throughout the history of Western thought, the "book of life" has served as a profound image of existence, inscribed either by divine authority or by the silent forces of history and power. Yet the stability of this image erodes over time: what begins as a heavenly register in Augustine transforms into a tragic, almost unreadable world in Simone Weil, and finally disperses into the fields of assemblages and theatrical improvisations in the philosophies of Deleuze and Agamben. This essay traces that arc, showing how the "book" shifts from sacred structure to fractured performance.

Augustine: The Book as Divine Record and Memory

In Augustine's theology, the "book of life" exists both cosmologically and existentially. Cosmologically, it refers to a heavenly ledger in which the saved are inscribed, anchoring human life within a divine judgment. Existentially, Augustine's Confessions reveal a deeper, internalized sense: human memory itself becomes a library or archive, storing all acts, sins, and graces. Life is to be read through recollection, a process wherein the soul searches for traces of God's silent writing upon it. The reading of the "book of life" thus becomes an act of spiritual recovery, aligning one's own story with divine meaning.

Simone Weil: The Broken Book of Affliction and Grace

Simone Weil inherits the notion of life as a sacred text but profoundly fractures its optimism. For Weil, the world is indeed a book — but one written largely in the language of necessity, gravity, and suffering. Reality appears as a text that is not written for human consolation. Rather, it reveals a cosmos where affliction is often random, and grace interrupts but does not erase the violence.

In Weil's thinking, to "read" the book of life is to attend to suffering without seeking to rationalize it. It demands an extreme passivity, an emptying of the self (décréation) to allow reality to appear without distortion. The ambivalence is crucial: while the book can contain moments of luminous grace, it remains fundamentally a record of a world abandoned by divine immediacy. Thus, Weil's vision is both mystical and tragic — a sacred text whose divine author has, out of love, withdrawn.

Foucault: Life as Historical Inscription

Michel Foucault transforms the metaphor radically. In his archaeological and genealogical methods, the "book of life" ceases to be a divine or natural text and becomes instead the product of historical systems of power and knowledge. In The Order of Things, he explores how earlier societies saw the world as a network of resemblances to be read, but modernity replaces this with structured disciplines — biology, psychology, sociology — which "write" life according to scientific norms.

Life becomes a field of inscriptions managed by institutions; subjectivity is an effect of these invisible writings. The question is no longer how to read the book faithfully, but rather: who is doing the writing? Who controls the scripts we inhabit?

Deleuze: Against the Book, Toward Assemblage

In Deleuze’s philosophy, especially in A Thousand Plateaus (with Guattari), the very idea of a "book" becomes suspect. Traditional images of thought — including the book of life — imply hidden structures awaiting interpretation. Deleuze rejects this: there is no hidden text behind appearances. Instead, life is a rhizomatic assemblage — a network without beginning or end, without hierarchy.

Rather than reading life, Deleuze advocates composing with it. Thought is not about uncovering latent meanings but about producing new connections, intensities, and becomings. The "book of life" gives way to a field of experimentation, where meaning is immanent, provisional, and creative.

Agamben: Life as Improvised Theater

Giorgio Agamben extends and nuances this trajectory. He revisits the theological origins of the "book of life" to show how it became a technology of inclusion and exclusion — a paradigm for how sovereign power defines who is inside and who is abandoned. Yet he also proposes an alternative image: life not as a finished book but as an improvised theatrical play, akin to the Commedia dell’Arte.

In Commedia dell’Arte, actors inhabit fixed masks but improvise their actions. Similarly, modern subjects are given scripts by societal structures, but their life consists in how they play, interrupt, or rework these scripts. Life becomes an open form, a performance that resists closure. In his later works, Agamben even suggests that true ethical living involves "inoperativity": a use of forms without being fully captured by them, inhabiting the book without being entirely written by it.

From Reading to Improvising

From Augustine to Agamben, the "book of life" migrates from a sacred text inscribed by divine hand to a fractured, open field of performance and assemblage. In Weil, the book is already breaking under the weight of affliction; in Foucault, it is an artifact of power; in Deleuze, it dissolves into multiplicities; and in Agamben, it becomes a stage where life is played but never fully scripted.

Thus, the task today may no longer be to "read" life correctly, but to compose, interrupt, and improvise — to inhabit the fragments of the book without seeking a final inscription, living not as readers of a closed text but as co-creators of an unfinished world.

Lyrical Reflection – 1st version

Once, life was imagined as a book —
its pages inscribed by unseen hands, its words flowing from eternity.

In Augustine’s dream, each soul was a letter in the ledger of salvation.
Memory itself was a sacred library:
to live was to turn the pages inward, to search for the script of grace written across the folds of one’s own heart.

But already, the ink was fading.

In Simone Weil’s hands, the book shatters.
Its pages are torn by suffering, by gravity’s indifference.
To read life is no longer to understand — it is to endure, to bear witness without defense.
God’s voice has withdrawn, leaving behind a text written in silence and luminous wounds.

The book splinters further in Foucault’s archaeology.
Here, life is an inscription managed by unseen authorities.
No longer a divine story, but an endless filing of names, norms, disciplines.
We do not write; we are written.

Deleuze arrives with fire in his veins, scattering the fragments.
There is no book, only a field of becomings.
No secret text to unveil, only networks to compose, connections to spark.
Life is a rhizome: tangled, proliferating, free.

And Agamben gathers the ruins, turning them into a stage.
We wear masks given to us, but we play —
not in obedience, but in improvisation.
True life is not scripted; it is lived in the trembling pause between lines,
in the refusal to be entirely captured by the roles we inherit.

The book of life has not ended.
It has become a scattering of pages, a trembling theater, a field of infinite rehearsal.

We are not its readers anymore.
We are its unfinished co-authors.

Lyrical Reflection – 2nd version

Once, life was a book — sacred, sealed, inscribed beyond our reach.
Augustine read it in memory; Weil saw it broken by sorrow;
Foucault found it rewritten by silent powers;
Deleuze scattered its pages to the winds;
Agamben turned its ruins into a stage.

Now there is no single script, only fragments.
No eternal author, only the trembling improvisations of those who dare to play.
We no longer read the book of life —
we inhabit its broken margins, we scribble in its blank spaces.

To live is not to decipher an ancient code.
It is to compose in the ruins, to breathe between the ruins,
to create where no final text remains.

The book is unfinished.
And we — we are its living, unbound lines.

Lyrical Reflection – 3rd version

once,
life was a book.
holy.
sealed.
written somewhere we could never reach.

augustine said:
read your memory,
god hides there.

simone weil:
no—
the book is written in pain.
the pages tear as you turn them.

foucault:
you’re not reading,
you’re being read.
every label, every law, every breath
already scripted.

deleuze:
forget the book.
life grows sideways,
wild, rhizomatic, untamed.
stop looking for meaning.
start composing.

agamben:
the book fell apart.
we’re players now,
wearing masks,
stumbling through unscripted scenes,
forgetting our lines,
inventing new ones.

today,
there’s no page to follow.
no last chapter waiting.
only fragments.
only breath.

you don’t read the book of life anymore.
you live inside its ruins.

you build with broken pieces.

you speak in half-lines,
unfinished,
open.

you are
the unwritten.