Public Enemies (21 page)

I don’t know, maybe I’m just a bit pissed off at the moment.

Dear Michel, I’m back in New York, in a hotel room, which at the moment is the place in the world where I feel best (nothing can be truer than Proust’s saying about hotels, in Cabourg and elsewhere, being the only places where you don’t get “jostled”).

I am thinking about your last letter and how to reply to it, as I do each time.

I don’t know how you do it.

We don’t talk, so I have no idea how you go about it.

When I receive your letters, I always take a day or two.

I read and reread them.

I look for a way in, a handle.

I watch out for the things that connect us, the things that separate us, the things that appear to connect but that in reality separate us—our “correspondences.”

I wonder ultimately what characterizes someone the most, what they show or what they conceal, what they say or what they don’t say, which may not, after all, be the most interesting thing about them.

I try to anticipate as far as possible how you will reply to my reply and how I’ll respond to that.

In other words, I wonder what will tighten the exchange
without constricting it, refine the game without closing it off, what will allow me to go forward while allowing you to bounce the ball back and move forward as well.

I’ve already mentioned that I’ve played a lot of chess.

But—and I don’t think I’ve told you this—I’ve played a lot in just this way, by distance, what we used to call “by correspondence,” as opposed to games said to be played “by the clock.” I was a member of a club associated with my high school, in the days long before Internet and e-mail. You would ponder your move, put it in an envelope, and wait for your partner’s move by return post. The games went on for weeks, sometimes months. Marcel Duchamp, who liked nothing better than playing this way, was involved in games that might go on for years, and at that time I was lost in admiration for everything Marcel Duchamp did. (In the last period of his life as an artist, he sent his “readymades” from New York, also by correspondence, with instructions to Suzanne, his sister, who still lived in Paris and assembled them for him. And it was the same with chess! He battled out his best games, some of them with Man Ray, Henri-Pierre Roché, Francis Picabia, like this, without any contact, apparently not touching, another way to avoid being jostled.)

In short, I loved those games of distance chess.

I loved them the way, I believe, Duchamp saw them: less as a match than a game, less of a competition than a way for two people to invent and produce together a work of the mind, with questions, answers, frustrated passions, sudden revivals, shared or hidden flashes of understanding, virtuoso performances, the setting of traps.

I think there’s a remnant of that in the pleasure I derive nowadays from our correspondence. Naturally, there’s also the enjoyment of debating, confessional writing, and the way we push each other to rummage through heaps of secrets.
There’s the secret side to this adventure, the fact that up to now we’ve managed to stay in disguise and that nobody knows what we are up to. (By the way, as an aside, in connection with this stealth, about what I was telling you the other day, that practicing secrecy can be equated with the occupation of writing, about this “taste for dressing up and disguise,” which our dear Baudelaire made the core of his literary ethics, I rediscovered a poem by Brecht, written toward the end of Hitler’s rise to power, entitled “Praise of Illegal Work.” It’s about covering your tracks, hiding, multiplying identities, forgetting, losing everything, even your name, and, as if that were not enough, like a literary Mr. Arkadin,
^*
going so far as to recruit paid biographers to discover the last witnesses to a life that can only be misunderstood and must therefore be erased.) Of course, all this counts, but in the growing happiness our correspondence gives me, in the pleasure I experience in reflecting, each time, on my next “strike” and then my impatience in waiting for your “counterattack,” I also have the feeling of going back to the old times of those interminable chess games, which were some of my greatest thrills as a child and adolescent. Their champion in all categories, Jan Timman, a Dutchman, described them as a form of “mental boxing,” but a form of boxing—he insists—in which you confront only yourself and the limits, constantly being pushed back by your ruses.

I have your last letter in front of me and am in the middle of going slowly through your arguments one by one and wondering where I can find a point of entry.

Perhaps a way in would be the question of a “religion
without God,” although that is not at all what I am calling for. At best that would be Voltaire, at worst Maurras. In any case, it’s not me.

Or perhaps your vision of Kant who you say never left the rarefied, sublime air of Königsberg. First, that’s not true. It’s a legend invented by Germaine de Staël in the pages she devotes to him in her book
De l’Allemagne
[
On Germany
], which are, to say the least, rather inaccurate. It’s not at all the case in fact, since even in his youth, when he was a tutor at the home of the pastor Andersch and later the Keyserling family, he went to live in Judtschen, near Gumbinnen, then Osterode,
^*
and then lived in other places. What’s more, this image of Kant as immensely uptight, as regular as clockwork, frozen in his discipline, with his obsessive austerity, his corset of imperatives and abstractions, leaves out a whole dimension of turmoil, madness, even schizophrenia. This was just as much a part of him and explains, or is one of the explanations for, this need of his to lock himself up in a cast-iron system of thought. The “categories of understanding” are also a verbal straitjacket, a bastion against his spiritual tempests, the antidote to the theosophy, occultism, and spiritualism that—we tend to forget—were the first temptations to beset the young Kant. Indeed, he spent the rest of his life trying both to allay his obsessive fear of them and to avert their return.

More generally speaking, there is this “philosophy” about which you say you “don’t know much” but that you are able to make free with in a way I really envy—this way of saying with such assurance “Schopenhauer thinks that …” or “Nietzsche replies that …” or “Spinoza’s argument about this or that is,
in my view, irrefutable because …” It would be unthinkable for a professional philosopher to express himself in this way. It’s difficult for an old fogey like myself, trained in the idea that philosophies are systems, coherent and closed entities, and that there is nothing more perilous than to take a piece, isolate it, give it its own particular destiny, appropriate it, in short quote it! This was Jacques Derrida’s first lesson when he met with the new arrivals at the École Normale, who, as in the army, were called “conscripts.” Without being at all facetious, I would pay to unlearn that lesson of no floating philosophemes, never any philosophical utterances uprooted from their page of origin! On principle, never say “Hegel or Heidegger or Heraclitus says that …” because, unmoored from its context and, still worse, from its original language, this statement no longer has the same meaning and sometimes no longer has any meaning at all! (You may object that this is exactly what I did myself the other day when I was putting forward my flimsy, labyrinthine construct inspired by Levinas and Spinoza, my monadology without a monad, my concept of the subject. Yes and no. I was tinkering about with something, piecing together a contraption of my own. In doing so, I’m afraid I was skating within the forced patterns of compulsory figures. Whereas quoting freestyle is quite a different approach … It’s utterly different, in fact, being the phenomenal power of someone who sees the field of philosophy as an expanse of divorced utterances and a game of free association … And I repeat, I really wish I could dare to seize that power.)

Then there’s Auguste Comte, who seems to really fascinate you, whereas I’ve always been not only suspicious of his “we’re going to reconstruct society using science” side but was never actually interested in him. (Well, no, I’m mistaken there. As I said that, I realized that there is a bridge between
Comte and myself or, to be more precise between my generation and that of Comte, and that this bridge is Althusser. Althusser, who in his famous text
For Marx
, in which he denounced the “lamentable history of French thought in the hundred years following the revolution of 1789,” found only one name to exempt, that of Auguste Comte, describing him as “the only mind worthy of interest that French philosophy produced.” In the “fury” that was always directed at Comte, Althusser sees proof of the “incredible lack of education and ignorance” that is forever “our lot.” And then there’s the other Althusser, who particularly resembles Comte, Comte the man, in so many of his characteristics—his madness; his high doses of neuroleptics; his analyst, Diatkine, counterpart to Comte’s doctor, Esquirol; his stylish and frantically penned books without notes or readings … There’s religion too—that early religiousness and again at the very end, after the death of Helen for Althusser, that of Clotilde de Vaux for Comte. There’s their inability, even greater than Kant’s, to move, to travel, and then the flow of their correspondence, all those letters—feverish, on edge, paranoid—to the great minds of the time whom they considered to be tormented souls awaiting the true, positive faith. Death in life, books as a prison, scientism as another straitjacket … If there’s anyone Althusser resembles it’s obviously Auguste Comte, the inventor of the law of three phases. How was this not noticed at the time? How did we, his disciples, manage to overlook the evidence?)

Finally, there’s your misanthropy … There’s this idea, which is very close to me but which I nevertheless find repugnant, of “drawing up a statement of account” for mankind—which, you say, we should dare to write “from the point of view of bacteria”—as to whether or not the “experiment” has
succeeded, whether or not it deserves to be “continued,” if it’s all that it’s made out to be, if being human has such a proud ring about it.

What’s repugnant about it? Well, I don’t need to spell it out. You can well imagine that, particularly presented like this, your question is bound to make anyone uneasy who has spent their life attending to the fate of the Bosnians, the shattered memories of the Afghans, or the minuscule victims, lost without a trace, of Africa’s forgotten wars.

How is this idea close to me? That’s a bit more complicated. What I mean here is that there is a culture that believes profoundly and takes to its limits, indeed to frenzied, absurd lengths, this idea that humanity is a failed species and that we should consider making a fresh and better start on other bases, using the same materials but put together in a truly new mold. That is the culture I came from, the one that shaped me when I was twenty years old. To be more specific, it’s revolutionary culture in general and Maoist in particular. It’s that whole body of thought, inspired by Althusser, no less, whose project was to “split history in two,” to “change man at the deepest level,” “aiming right at his soul,” in other words at the core, to “correct our aim,” as you put it, to subdue our grotesque, slimy “ontological pretensions,” to envisage nothing less than the “disappearance” of mankind as it has been understood up to now. What has caused this idea, once so close, to become distant? What caused people like me to turn our backs on this idea after envisaging it in a concrete form? (And when I say concrete, I do mean concrete, not only out of a kind of dandyism and as a literary experiment; I really did wonder, in Bangladesh, faced at every step with unspeakable poverty, whether it was worth being a human being in this way and whether the Naxalites, the local Maoists, might not
be right with their project—which was crazy, Cambodian before the event but radical—of sending it all to the laboratory and bringing back out in test tubes a product that was a little improved.) Maybe that was the point at which to take up the debate. Maybe that was the real question. That’s what I was just thinking—that this was the right angle, the right mix of philosophy and biography to kick-start the discussion around what Karl Kraus called “the last days of mankind” in his endless play of the same name, which inspired me to write
Le Jugement dernier
[
The Last Judgment
] two weeks ago. And just then, they brought me in
Le Monde
(there’s a new system in the American hotels that allows you to get the French papers in real time on lovely, brilliant white paper that doesn’t mark your fingers), and on the third page I saw that crazy article about your mother and the book she’s apparently about to publish.

My first reaction, I must admit, was to think the whole thing was too crazy to be true. I thought, this is just not possible. It’s some trick of Michel’s. He was the one who instigated this farce with his mother or some extra that he’s passing off as his mother. The ultimate hoax. Gary/Ajar times ten. Without saying so, we all, especially since Gary, dream of the ultimate mystification, the one that will render speechless those of our contemporaries who have been the least deceived and will allow us, poor clowns tired of our own comedies, to be reborn in a new guise, a new skin, another family novel, another novel period. And then the mother strikes. It’s the maximum provocation, the most outrageous audacity. After all, isn’t the mother question the most central one archaeologically for every writer? Isn’t it true that the moment someone becomes a writer is that moment—and not an instant sooner—when they find the correct distance
between their own language and the source, or matrix, that is,
the mother
of that language? It had to be done. He did it! You’ve got to hand it to him …