Life & Wisdom Quote by Alfred Jarry

Jarry drops a theological grenade in the language of geometry, and the blast radius is the whole modern urge to make metaphysics sound like math. A “tangential point” is contact without entry: the line touches the curve and immediately escapes. That’s the move here. God becomes the instant where human thinking grazes the absolute, not a cozy father-figure but a conceptual boundary condition. “Zero and infinity” are the two poles that break ordinary sense-making: nothingness and boundlessness. By placing God as the single point that touches both, Jarry turns divinity into a limit, a paradox, a teasing piece of notation.

The subtext is Jarry’s pataphysical wink. This is the author of Ubu Roi, the patron saint of cultivated absurdity and the “science of imaginary solutions.” The quote borrows the prestige of precision to expose how easily big spiritual claims lean on rhetorical sleight of hand. It reads like a proof, but it’s really performance: a deadpan formulation that makes belief look like an elegant, untestable shortcut between extremes.

Context matters: late-19th-century France is saturated with post-Catholic skepticism, Symbolist mysticism, and the rising authority of scientific discourse. Jarry doesn’t pick a side so much as sabotage the battlefield. If God is only the tangent between zero and infinity, then theology isn’t a system of answers; it’s the fleeting moment when language touches what it can’t contain, then slides away, smiling.