Cuts Without Knives: 2 Why Separation Is the Wrong Image

When we speak of cuts, we almost always invoke separation. A cut separates this from that, inside from outside, self from world. We imagine a space divided, a whole fragmented, a line drawn sharply across an ontological landscape. We rely on separation as if it were the natural consequence of distinction.

It is not.

Separation is the wrong image. Not merely inaccurate, but misleading. It carries hidden assumptions about the world: that things exist first, whole and pre-formed; that differences are pre-inscribed; that boundaries precede perspective. Each assumption is a subtle act of smuggling realism into thought. It convinces us that distinctions are about slicing what is already “there,” when in fact distinctions co-actualise what they attend to.

Consider the metaphor in its everyday guise. We say, “I am separate from the world,” or “we must distinguish A from B.” Both statements presuppose that A and B exist independently, ready to be segregated. But closer inspection reveals the illusion: A and B are patterns actualised through the act of distinction itself. They do not preexist; they emerge in relation. The “cut” does not carve the world into pre-formed pieces; it takes place within the relational field of what can be construed.

The problem with separation is that it demands space between. Space implies a void, a gap, a remainder. But the field of potential is continuous, unfragmented, and relationally saturated. There is no space to separate into; there is only the ongoing tuning of possibility through perspective. To imagine separation is to superimpose a false geometry onto relational reality.

Separation is seductive because it is familiar. It feels safe: we can imagine ourselves stepping away, slicing away, securing our edges. But in doing so, we limit our understanding of what a cut really is. Cuts do not isolate, they highlight; they do not remove, they actualise; they do not fracture, they clarify relations. The knife is a fiction. What remains is the cut — a luminous trace of perspective without violence.

In the next post, we will begin to reconstruct distinction itself. We will see that distinction does not presuppose difference, that multiplicity does not require parts, and that perspective is not limitation but an ontological act. But before we can build, we must abandon separation. Only then can the cut reveal its true form: a gesture of relational actualisation, not a scar of division.