Twilight Idyll

From Giorgio Agamben, The Idea of Prose--

The Idea of Light

I turn on the light in a dark room: naturally the lit room is no longer the dark room; I have lost it forever. Yet isn't it the same room? Isn't the dark room the only content of the lit room? That which I can no longer have, that which infinitely flees backward, and likewise thrusts me forward is only a representation of language: the dark which light presupposes. But if I give up the the attempt to grasp this presupposition, if I turn my attention to the light itself, if I receive it -- what the light gives me is then the same room, the non-hypothetical dark. That which is veiled, that which is closed in itself is the only content of the revelation -- light is only the coming to itself of the dark.