It is the nature of great revolutions not to be limited to the sphere of the phenomena from which they are born. Their effects spread over everything… - Michel Henry

The magnitude of an artwork only results from subjective forces. If these forces happen to be lacking, the edifice will crumble. The colossal works of fascism, socialist gigantism, and, in our eyes, the syncretism of the post-modern era are all the unfortunate testimony to this inner void. Because the exaltation of the powers of life can only be produced in life, life can do without these pretentious manifestations. The size of the material means does nothing for it. This can most surely be found in the small but very precise experiments where Kandinsky puts the elements of one single art or two different arts into relations of belonging or internal reciprocity. This is how he illustrated the stories of the Russian poet Remizov and composed his 'Sounds' collection, an admirable example of 'synthetic' work in which he decorated some of his own poems with coloured wood and other ones in black and white.

Art will rediscover its way in a different type of nature (from the Galilean nature). The sensible qualities of this nature are not reduced to external features, as mere signs that are limited to 'representing' a foreign reality. These qualities are modes of life: impressions, tones and tonalities. This is what I mean: by tearing colours and linear forms away from the ideal archetype of meanings that constitute the objective world and by taking them in their non-referential pictoriality, Kandinskian abstraction does not depart from nature but returns to its inner essence. This original, subjective, dynamic, impressional and pathetic nature -- the true nature whose essence is Life -- is the cosmos. A dazzling claim from The Blaue Reiter Almanac, highlighted by Kandinsky himself, defines the Arche (or the Origin) where Art and Cosmos are identical: 'The world sounds. It is a cosmos of spiritually affective beings. Thus, dead matter is living spirit'.

To see what ought to be done without possessing the power to do so, to see what ought to be done while finding oneself deprived (in and through this seeing, in and through this commandment) of the ability to execute it – this is the dramatic and desperate situation in which the Law has placed each person, despite the fact that it is addressed to him from outside as a transcendent Law. A Law that defines the infraction and the crime, that opens before people the gaping possibility without giving them the power to avoid either, is a cursed Law. An absence of Law would be better, a state of innocence in which the possibility of crime was not every moment within sight. The Law, on the contrary, curses all those who do not put it into practice – in fact, it curses everybody, since it gives nobody the power to follow it. The Law multiples crime, as the Apostle says in a striking phrase: “The law was added so that trespass might increase” (Romans 5:20).