the gift of human language

death as a means can be recognized in every relation in which man is born into the life of history. This is the only life that endures and is true, since it is transmitted without being lost in a tradition passed on from subject to subject. It is impossible not to see how loftily this life transcends that inherited by the animal, in which the individual fades into the species, since no memorial distinguishes its ephemeral appearance from the appearance that reproduces it in the invariability of the type.  (263)

events explode, phenomena flash, like thunder and lightning

Once communication between heterogeneous series is established…Something ‘passes’ between the borders, events explode, phenomena flash, like thunder and lightning… A pure spatio-temporal dynamism, with its necessary participation in the forced movement, can be experienced only at the borders of the livable, under conditions beyond which it would entail the death of any well-constituted subject endowed with independence and activity. Embryology already displays the truth that there are systematic vital movements, torsions and drifts, that only an embryo can sustain: an adult would be torn apart by them. (118)