Public Enemies (16 page)

There is a sixth and final advantage to this scheme. It takes account of that dimension of intersubjectivity on which Epicureanism (and Leibnizianism too, for that matter) founders. Why? That’s very simple. Since the individual is this mixture and this process always under way, the border between what is inside and outside is constantly shifting, redefined by the battle waged without respite by rival individuations against one another and the rest of the world. Thus, we can deduce that what is in one today will be in another tomorrow, that by the end of our exchanges that which forms part of my essence at the moment of my writing to you may perhaps have entered yours. In short, there are as many bridges as chasms, worlds shared as worlds at war or in debate. And it is in that experience of sharing, that obvious fact of a conflict that is also always an embrace and an exchange, it is in the flesh of a world that is at the same time both shared and disputed that the real refutation of that sense of solitude imposed by the atomist philosophers can be found. And that is the only foundation, ontologically speaking, for a politics and ethics that can draw the subject out of an egoism that would otherwise turn its hard-won singularity into a prison or a shroud. There too, the Bible can help, and Spinozism with its symbolic/carnal
spaces. Levinas too, of course, who by decentering his subject, through the way in which he makes it actually cross the border in order, like shadows or like the soul in certain dreams, to peel away from itself, to float above its own name and find a way of entering into the neighboring subject, makes two fundamental contributions. He corrects the egoistical side, the vital, moving force of Spinozism. And this makes him
the
modern philosopher who has contributed most powerfully to making accessible the mystery of what makes the ego the “hostage” and the “debtor” of the other.

We all, dear Michel, have the philosophy of our insomnia.

But in my insomnia there are two things that recur and that terrify me.

The void, naturally.

Like everyone else, the void.

But even more so, a surfeit of being, even where it is the fullness of this confident, self-sufficient being, puffed up with pride and independence, which Sartre called the bourgeois, the mere thought of whom made him nauseated and that ultimately is nothing more than the moral—or immoral—version of this stone-subject.

Well, I have cobbled together a philosophy of resistance to nausea.

First without Sartre, then much later with him, I put together a complicated construct, whose chief virtue is that it can help whoever wants it (obviously beginning with myself) to ward off the double specter of being nothing and of being nothing other than yourself, of having no place in this world and also of having one, but one that fills you with an even more biting embarrassment and shame.

A Jewish monadology.

A monadology not only without God but without Leibniz.
^*

Or, if you like, with a Leibniz reconciled with Spinoza, so all in the shadow of Sartre but also of another major but unrecognized contemporary of his, Levinas, without whom, I must repeat, Spinozism would be nothing more than a form of antihumanism of the worst kind.

For the moment, I’m pleased with it.

I may not have reformed the French economy.

But I’ve made myself clear to myself.

And above all I’ve explained to you the other reasons, metaphysical this time, for my being this “committed” intellectual who in order to exist needs to feel accountable to the other.

Philosophy isn’t sorcery.

It’s a way of coming to terms with your fears and perhaps escaping them.

It’s a way of not giving in to the
tohu
(in Rashi’s
^†
translation, the paralyzing “stupor”) or
bohu
(in the same translation, a depressing and desperate “solitude”).

It’s a “montage” that allows you to continue the war that Kafka spoke of and to try not to lose it. Here is your armor, there’s a combat machine, over there a way of strengthening your position or recovering another, or digging out your trench more effectively. It involves strategy, tactics, calculation, and, fundamentally, survival.

I’m being quite sincere about this.

Now it’s up to you to play.

The region of Shannon does not, in itself, have any particular character. A large, sluggish river empties into the Atlantic Ocean. It is surrounded by low hills covered with a patchwork of fields. But sixty-five miles north, you come to Connemara, which is to say you enter into a different world, with a light—alive, almost physical—that it is hard to believe can truly exist here on Earth. If you continue along the road, you go through the landscape, often shrouded in mists, of County Sligo, then one comes to Donegal, with its harsh scenery reminiscent of the Scottish Highlands, where the light is already that of the North. If one decides to leave Shannon and head south, in less than an hour’s drive you come to Killarney on the banks of Lough Leane. The banks are so beautiful that, on a state visit, Queen Victoria permitted her servants to get down from their carriages to admire the scenery at a spot that has since been known as Ladies’ View. From Killarney, it is easy to visit the jewels that are the Dingle Peninsula, Iveragh (though the Ring of Kerry is to be avoided in July and August), Beara, Durrus, and Mizen Head, the southernmost point, which closes the ring.

Shannon, in short, is an ideal point of departure for exploring the west of Ireland—a series of landscapes that to
my eyes have no peer anywhere in the world and that it is unimaginable to think I will ever tire of. So I decided to leave County Dublin and, giving in to a surge of optimism (for if in theory I am a pessimist, in practice in my day-to-day life I demonstrate an enthusiasm, a naïveté that is often surprising), I moved my boxes of books into a house that is not habitable just yet and won’t be for several months, maybe until the end of the year.

Here I am, therefore, utterly powerless to respond to your letter in like terms. To be frank, I haven’t read Levinas and I’ve never really managed to take Sartre completely seriously. But I could, I should, be able to dig out what Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, or Nietzsche had to say on the subject. I am not sure I entirely understood these philosophers, and the meaning of monadism, for example, has always seemed to me somewhat obscure. But the others you mention, I agree, have sometimes given me the impression of an additional clarity; like turning on a light in a darkened room.

I happened to be in Paris to promote this film you haven’t managed to get to see when I got your letter. After a moment of panic, my first reaction—symptomatic—was to rush to a bookshop and get a copy of Pascal’s
Pensées
.

But first I have to tell you about the language course I took in Germany. No, no, I’m not trying to sidestep or evade the subject; in fact, I am just
putting it back in its context
.

At the age of fifteen I was, surprising though it may seem, a pretty well-adjusted teenager. My education at the Lycée de Meaux was going peacefully (after a disastrous start when I stupidly drew attention to myself by getting ridiculously high marks, I quickly worked out that, to be popular with my classmates, I had to temper my enthusiasm; I therefore did very little work, got acceptable results, and easily graduated from one year to the next). I didn’t smoke, I had never touched a
drop of alcohol. I was even, to some extent,
sporty
. (Several times staying with my father on holiday, I cycled up to the Col de l’Iseran, half a mile above Val d’Isère, and I scored a number of fine goals for my school football team.) I was listening to
cool
and
trippy
music like Pink Floyd. Girls, for the most part, found me
cute
. Of course, there were a number of worrying signs (prematurely reading Baudelaire, a chronic inability to watch animals suffer), but very few, to be honest.

My grandparents and I probably imagined Germany to be a country constantly shrouded in winter mists, so I set off wearing an anorak, suitcase full of heavy sweaters and thick socks; I think I even had a woolly hat and mittens. In fact, it can be really hot in Bavaria in the summer (and the course was held in Traunstein, in southern Bavaria, practically in Austria).

This was not only my first time in Germany; it was the first time I had ever been abroad.

That summer the weather was exceptional. One radiant sunny day was followed by another just as radiant and sunny. After a morning spent studying German, we had our afternoons free. We could cycle through the half-empty streets of the little town or meet up in the shade of the trees in the park, lie on the grass, or swim in the Chiemsee, which was close by. And the young German girls were—how can I put it?—not very shy.

The upshot: I spent most of the trip, which could have been idyllic, holed up in my room devouring Pascal’s
Pensées
.

This, I am aware, may seem surprising, but adolescence as we know is a dangerous and turbulent period; some teenagers
spend their afternoons alone in their bedroom listening to
heavy metal
(and in the worst-case scenario then go out and shoot twenty of their schoolmates with an automatic weapon). And Pascal, if one takes into context the original violence of his writings, can produce a greater shock to the system than even the heaviest of heavy metal groups. The famous phrase “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me” is too well known and has lost its impact, but it must be remembered that I was reading it for the first time, with no safeguards, no advance warnings, and I took it
full in the face
. The terror of infinite, empty space into which one tumbles for all eternity. Pure terror. Let’s take fragment 199.

“Imagine a number of men in chains, all condemned to death, some of whom are daily slaughtered in the sight of the others; and those remaining see their own condition in that of their fellows, looking at each other in distress and despair, await their turn. This is an image of the condition of men.”

It goes without saying that there must have been some
secret flaw
in me that I tumbled, feet together, offering not the least resistance, into the abyss that Pascal opened up beneath my feet; but I don’t want to psychoanalyze myself, it bores me rigid, I just want to note that Pascal was, for me, the first instigator, the first tempter (because I think that I read Baudelaire before without really understanding, captivated by the pure, plastic splendor of those verses, which remain, to my eyes, the most beautiful things the French language has ever produced).

After Pascal, all the suffering in the world was ready to surge into me. I began to close my shutters on Sunday afternoons to listen to France Culture radio (whereas beforehand, I was more top forty on RTL), to buy records by the Velvet
Underground and the Stooges, to read Nietzsche, Kafka, Dostoyevsky, and soon after, Balzac, Proust, all the rest.

There was another thing, too, and here my story becomes a little curious. At the time I had a friend named Jean-Robert Yapoudjian; we were actually very close, and since second form we had always sat together in class. I knew he was a Christian (and more than just a common or “garden-variety” Christian, his father was a general in the Salvation Army and ran a center in Villeparisis that took care of social cases). With the greatest possible tact, he had always refrained from talking to me about his faith, which, he knew, was completely at odds with my family upbringing.

That year, when we went back to school in September, I asked him to tell me a bit about Christianity. He gave me a present of a Bible in which he had copied out a passage from the Letter to the Corinthians on the flyleaf for me to read. I still have that Bible. I read and reread it for years, whereas I never even opened
De natura rerum
.

Things, in fact, went a little further than that, and I can remember myself—the memories are strange, floating, almost surreal—attending the optional religious education classes at the Lycée Henri Moissan de Meaux. I can see myself later, hanging around with a “Christian discussion group” at the Institut National Agronomique; I can even remember going on a pilgrimage to Chartres with them. (Here the memory is more precise; I remember, for example, that we spent a night away and had forgotten to bring a sleeping bag; I was therefore in a position to judge that famous “Christian charity” on actual evidence.) Mostly, I can picture myself on many Sundays
going to mass
, something I did for a long time, ten years,
maybe twenty years, wherever I happened to be living in Paris. In the midst of congregations of BCBGs
^*
and even aristocrats in the Seventh Arrondissement; in the midst of almost entirely African congregations in the Twentieth; with all of these people I exchanged the
sign of peace
at the appointed moment in the ceremony. And I prayed—prayed?—what or who I was thinking about I don’t know but I tried to behave in an appropriate manner, so that “our sacrifice may be acceptable to God, the almighty Father.” How I loved, deeply loved the magnificent ritual, perfected over the centuries, of the mass! “Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and I shall be healed.” Oh yes, certain words entered me, I received them into my heart. And for five to ten minutes every Sunday, I believed in God; and then I walked out of the church and it all disappeared, quickly, in a few minutes of walking through the streets of Paris.