PROLOGUE7INTRODUCTION 11Task of the Philosopher – Quest for the Impossible – Thinking the ImpossiblePART I: FRAMING THE FRAME 29Epigraph – Introduction – The Frame – On the Episteme – Discourse, Paradigm, Weltanschauung, World – Language – Badiou’s World and the Event – Apparatus and Gestell – Concluding the Frame – Framing Myself – Being as being-thrown in the world – Framing the Question – Questioning the Question – Desiring the Impossible – World to End the FramePART II: DESPAIR AND THE ILLUSIONS OF TODAY 95The Pause – Desire – Illusion – Despair – Control/Follower – Change/Consumer – Illusion of Revolution – Illusion of Thinking Change – Illusion of Progress – AcceptancePART III: FACING THE IMPOSSIBLE 127Introduction – Possible Impossible, the End of a Dichotomy? – Undoing the World – The Aporia, the perhaps/maybe – The Mystical – Principle of Failure –Un-answering, Un-questioning, the Void – Reaching the Impossible – The Experience of Art: The Status of Poetry – Problem of Language – Possibility of Language: Poetry – Becoming Human – Becoming is not Actualising the Impossible – Being Human as Experiencing the Impossible – The Other, Autrui – To Witness… – To Answer… – Conversion-Touching – Violence – Madness – Concluding the breakCONCLUSION219Madness of concluding – Speaking of the impossible – Incentive – Choosing our own suffering – Beyond the mechanicsBIBLIOGRAPHY232Philosophy ultimately searches for what lies beyond the possible. This question is what makes us human. We ask about the limits of language, the framing of the world, and how by breaking with what always already is we invite a madness that makes further understanding impossible. This is a call to withstand the normalcy that presents itself as continual variations of the ‘new’. To face the illusions that clutter reality and to engage in asking the final question that is left for us to answer, to un-answer, to suffer again and again. The question of the necessity of the impossible.