I saw in a wildlife documentary about interspecies adoptions that behind the heartwarming image of a lioness adopting a young gazelle, there is always, beforehand, a heartbreak, a trauma. The loss of a lion cub or the separation of the fawn from its mother. Indeed, for someone different to take the place of the original parents, there must first be a loss, on one side or the other, often on both. To move into a house, one must move out of another. Change, whatever form it takes, is inevitably accompanied by a kind of rupture; it is a displacement, a necessary transition.

In this process of fragmentation, something intriguing emerges. The being simultaneously divides and multiplies. Rupture creates both a « being of before » and a « being of after, » coexisting. As the fragments scatter, a new fluidity arises. Like the countless threads of fabric, life itself seems to expand further when it fragments. The fabric, when split into numerous threads, finds the flexibility necessary to embrace the body’s contours. The more something fragments, the more it seems to embrace the variety of experiences, becoming more adaptable, more malleable, more fluid, but also more precise. Take an image. Divide its surface into pixels, equal square parts. The more pixels there are, the sharper the definition. The frame rate in an animation or film is essentially the extent to which the movement of the image is fragmented: the higher the fraction, the smoother the motion. The same applies to language, which fragments into words and letters, dividing to multiply the number of possible combinations, capturing the richness of our emotions, ideas, and concepts.

Letters, in their vegetal stillness, can better conceal the invisible movement they carry when their legibility diminishes. They then become tangled knots, scribbles, or lines with a mysterious organization. Conversely, in the level of legibility in which we encounter them most often in daily life, this movement is almost impossible to stop, piercing almost instantly through the materiality of their ink or light to gain momentum and meaning, transforming into poetry, injunctions, appeals, or prohibitions. They organize and reorganize over time, influenced by the customs and cultures that nourish them. The evolution of letter organization in a given language can be seen as a perpetual recomposition of the world, a way of redrawing the surroundings, which themselves are constantly changing—paraphrasing what anthropologists and plant ecology researchers Aurélie Javelle, Dusan Kazic, and Jacques Tassin wrote about plant growth. The etymology of a word, the archaeology of its recomposition, often allows us to understand its full scope more profoundly. Finding meaning in origins. The etymology of the word « etymology » is composed of étymos, true, and lógos, word, literally: the study of the true meaning of a word.

According to the Académie française, the presence of a circumflex accent often marks the ghost of a once-present letter « S, » as evidenced by the pairs forêt/forestier (forest) and hôpital/hospitalier (hospital). The word île (island) is no exception. The spelling île has been used since the 18th century, but isle was used until the 19th. This Old French term itself comes from the Latin insulatus: isolated, without contact with the outside.

Indeed, behind this word with idyllic connotations lies another with a far more dramatic tone and less coveted meaning: isolated. The island is, therefore, a piece of land cut off from other pieces of land by an expanse of water that surrounds and defines it. It is within this self-surrounding that the true nature of the island appears. It is not simply a geographical location but a state of being.

Its isolated nature is, in fact, that of any being, any organism (living or not) that withdraws from the external world and contains itself entirely. The shoreline that connects the outside to its island serves as its spatial boundary. For an organism, this would be its skin, its membrane, acting as its shoreline. This boundary is flexible to allow it to evolve over time. It is sensitive so that it can understand its surroundings and the activity occurring there. Clearly and paradoxically, it is what separates that connects: the membrane isolates the organism while linking it to its environment. This isolation, this initial rupture, is what enables the possibility of communication.

Continental, insular lands, or tissue-like islands, the boundaries of our cellular, administrative, or oceanic membranes become the starting point for dialogue. Antonio Damasio, in The Strange Order of Things and The Feeling of What Happens, traces the biological origins of our feelings and human cultures in the world of the living. From the birth of life, it was the ability to sense its environment that determined the survival of organisms. In other words, it is their capacity to understand their surroundings and respond to them that has endured across all living beings to this day. Thus, solitude, far from being a prison, becomes the catalyst that stimulates the essential need for dialogue. The island and the living body develop a relationship with the outside through their boundaries, with expressions multiplying and diversifying as infinitely as the combination of letters and as long as time allows.

In the reality of isolation and rupture, a surface of communication is created, through which the existence of a self and another becomes visible. Separation hides a part of the world, like a veil, depriving us of its complete and omniscient experience. Indeed, we see only through our own perspective, like in a tunnel, unaware of what composes the perspective of the other.

This separation creates a distance, a hiding place, a concealed part of the other, conducive to the emergence of dialogue necessary to bridge this distance, or at least reduce it. The desire to create a new connection, to uncover a bit more of this hidden facet, becomes the engine—no, the raison d’être—of the surface. And one must never confuse surface with superficiality: the surface is a space of sensations, receptivity, and exchange. What we call depths are the repercussions of these sensations, like an inverted earthquake: the tremors whose meaning is born from the surface of sensations.

The best symbol for this surface of communication born from the void and distance created by isolation is the line. It is secant, unforgiving, dividing, cutting, piercing, shouting in silence, separating. But each of its points, invisibly connected, is in contact with the rest.

The line is a surface seen in profile.

Like the shoreline of an island, it can encircle.

Like skin, it can contain and imprison me, make me live and breathe.

My skin contains and imprisons me, makes me live and breathe. Other skins contain others and imprison them, make them live and breathe.

Exoticism is derived from the ancient Greek exôtikos, foreign, whose prefix exo means « outside. » What is outside me is foreign; the veiling isolation has insinuated itself between us. Victor Segalen, in his Essay on Exoticism, develops the idea of the exote: a being perfectly isolated but paradoxically perfectly open to the discovery of the other. In his conception, exoticism finds its root in the recognition of the existence of another outside oneself, just as real as the self can appear to itself.

What may seem exotic, in its more common and pejorative definition that Segalen seeks to dismantle, is what may appear eccentric, that is, distant from the center. But where is the center? If the center is the point around which the line encircles and encloses, then each object, being, or isolated entity possesses at least one center from which it can perceive others as « eccentric. »

Can the center shift, decenter itself? Just as one can feel foreign within one’s own home or mind? Can one feel isolated, separated from oneself? How far can fragmentation go?

So far, it has been questioned on a horizontal level, between entities physically, materially separated in an obvious way or between elements of the same surface. On a vertical level, within a single entity, fragmentation reveals a complex intertwining of scales, identities, isolations, and surfaces of communication. This superposition of layers and isolation conditions—and therefore surfaces of communication—leads to a vast chain of messages between the exterior and the self-perceived center of the entity. Not its physical center but its center as perceived by itself, which can be described as the perceived location of its consciousness—the origin of its thoughts. For a human being, for instance, this might be between the ears, just behind the eyes. In the flow of these messages in both directions, we can find the sensation of self through the other, the exterior, the exotic.

In the word « circulation, » we can hear the word « circle »: indeed, it originates from the Latin circulare, meaning: movement that invariably returns us to our starting point. In our limited vision, veiled by isolation, we can see through our surfaces of communication—for example, sight, speech, touch. But it would be impossible to read a text all at once in the same way we can see all its characters displayed on the page simultaneously, or to hear or say all the words of a sentence at the same time and understand them. Our perception must, therefore, move to advance, to always see a little more, like in a tunnel, or like a spotlight following the subject of attention on a stage.

Thus, it is through fragments that we apprehend and experience the world and the other, everything external to us. This fragmented experience of time and space, of which we are the common denominator, passes through our physical and immaterial communication surfaces, which, in an elegant paradox, are also our own boundaries separating us from the rest—our shoreline. These circular movements between the exotic and the exote, the center, the communication surface, and the exterior, form the experience of the other, which brings us back to our own experience of the self, just as the blank page makes the black lines of characters exist.