"Annihilation is an absurdity in terms"
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“Annihilation is an absurdity in terms” is the kind of line that sounds like a chilly philosophical axiom until you remember who’s talking: Bernard Palissy, a Renaissance-era inventor and obsessive experimenter who lived in furnaces, kilns, and failures. Coming from a maker, the claim isn’t abstract metaphysics so much as a practical insult to sloppy thinking.
Palissy is pushing back on the easy drama of “total destruction.” In the workshop, nothing really disappears; it changes state, breaks down, gets reused, re-fired, reformed. Matter is stubborn. So the phrase “absurdity in terms” reads like a craftsman’s eye-roll at language pretending it can erase reality. He’s policing vocabulary because vocabulary steers belief, and belief steers policy. If you can declare something “annihilated,” you stop asking where it went, what it became, who paid the cost.
The subtext is moral as much as material. Palissy lived through religious violence in 16th-century France, where people spoke casually about wiping out enemies, heresies, whole communities. Calling annihilation “absurd” deflates that rhetorical fantasy. It suggests that attempts at total eradication are not only brutal but conceptually incoherent: the consequences persist, the residues remain, the world remembers.
What makes the line work is its compression. He doesn’t argue, he diagnoses: the problem isn’t just cruelty, it’s category error. It’s a Renaissance inventor’s version of fact-checking, aimed at the most dangerous kind of claim: the one that pretends there will be nothing left to answer for.
Palissy is pushing back on the easy drama of “total destruction.” In the workshop, nothing really disappears; it changes state, breaks down, gets reused, re-fired, reformed. Matter is stubborn. So the phrase “absurdity in terms” reads like a craftsman’s eye-roll at language pretending it can erase reality. He’s policing vocabulary because vocabulary steers belief, and belief steers policy. If you can declare something “annihilated,” you stop asking where it went, what it became, who paid the cost.
The subtext is moral as much as material. Palissy lived through religious violence in 16th-century France, where people spoke casually about wiping out enemies, heresies, whole communities. Calling annihilation “absurd” deflates that rhetorical fantasy. It suggests that attempts at total eradication are not only brutal but conceptually incoherent: the consequences persist, the residues remain, the world remembers.
What makes the line work is its compression. He doesn’t argue, he diagnoses: the problem isn’t just cruelty, it’s category error. It’s a Renaissance inventor’s version of fact-checking, aimed at the most dangerous kind of claim: the one that pretends there will be nothing left to answer for.
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| Topic | Deep |
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