Public Enemies (25 page)

I must remind you that it was Baudelaire, no less, who described this program best with the two new entries he proposed
to add to the list of human rights: the right to contradict yourself and the right to leave …

I would also like to point out that this strategy I’m talking about is the one recommended by antiterrorist police to those who, like my friend Salman Rushdie, have been objects of death threats. Bodyguards, police protection are all well and good, but they all say that the best tactic of all is movement, running forward, staying in your place or in one position for as short a time as possible, the art of swerving, taking detours, surprise effects …

So Baudelaire and Rushdie were caught up in the same struggle? But of course.

Finally, the pack is never entirely a pack. Moreover, you know this. You yourself mentioned Bourmeau, Beigbeder, and others who, come hell or high water, have never stopped defending you from those vicious dogs, which must be as different from your nice dog, Clément, as, according to Spinoza, the “barking animal dog” is different from the “celestial constellation dog.” And I too could name my antidogs, my comrades in guerrilla literature, my fellow chess players, without whom I could never have emerged intact from thirty years of debates, fights, blows given and received, the clashing of swords.

To mention only the dead, I’m thinking of my kind Paul Guilbert, whom I met thirty-five years ago when the
Quotidien de Paris
was starting up and who wrote about my books—all my books, including those like
L’Idéologie française
, which he wasn’t sure he agreed with. But he knew there was a pack; after a childhood under Vichy he was able to recognize its characteristic smell. And like one of the great musketeers, with his helmet of golden hair that turned white with age but right up to the end never lost its gleam, as a writer without books but who was brilliant and had decided to let his life’s
work be absorbed into that of his friends, he simply decided, immediately and once and for all, that what I was doing should be defended.

I’m thinking of Dominique-Antoine Grisoni, also dead, who died so young, even younger. His work was barely started, he had his books, his disciples, his women who took up his time, his Corsica that he loved, as did Jean-Toussaint Desanti, known as Touki, the mathematical philosopher who taught us both. He led an unusually intense life full of joy, despair, sensuality, suffering, frenzied anxiety, a taste for war and erudition, sarcasm and admiration, multiple and mingled temporalities, lucidity, passion, something of Artaud’s madness poured into a mold with a rigor to rival Althusser’s. Until the end, that man took the time to provide me secretly with ammunition, information about the enemy camp, wise advice, invaluable suspicions, rescue plans, castles in the air, articles supporting me, critical readings of my manuscripts.

I’m thinking of all those nameless people who write to me when my books are published or when I appear on radio or television or even for no reason, without any particular occasion, just to encourage me, to talk to me, to tell me that they liked such-and-such an article but they didn’t like some other one as much, but that I must continue, not give in, stay the course. I remember Elsa Berlowitz, a woman without position but not without qualities. I ended up eagerly awaiting her faxes after each of my contributions (the day when a handful of friends went to scatter her ashes in the rosebushes of the Jardin de Bagatelle, I felt I had lost a support as mighty as Bernard Pivot or Josyane Savigneau,
^*
just to give you an idea!). I remember another woman—I never met her and all
I knew was that she was called “A,” perhaps Aline—who wrote to me every day, literally every day, for twenty years, just to comment on my acts and gestures or to say a few words about a page in one of my books, to send me a laundry note, a four-leaf clover, or an article she had cut out. (Once, on my return from a vacation, and already cursing the pile-up of thirty or forty letters that would be waiting for me as at the end of every year, one for each day, I didn’t find a single one. A little later, I learned in a message from someone close to her that she was dead. And that death of someone I had never seen, whose first name I hardly knew, the only thing about whom I knew was their written voice, got me down as much as the death of a friend.)

And since you mentioned the Internet, isn’t there for you as much as for me an entire region of the blogosphere that refutes the unkind image of those who see in it the world’s garbage can? There’s the Australian blogger who sent me a quasi-thesis on my Baudelaire that I wrote twenty years ago. Or those students at Hofstra University, on Long Island, who, with their professor, have been keeping an archive of all my speeches that for decades have been cast to the four winds. Or the Chinese guy who kept the notes of the seminars I gave on April 12, 1986, at the Institute of Foreign Languages in Beijing and who woke up today to discuss them on an equal footing. That fan of Romain Gary who listed the occurrences of his name in my texts. That defender of Sarajevo under siege who recognized himself in a shot of
Bosna!
^*
and then began to read my works … That unknown community of allies who have appeared from nowhere and everywhere, those friends who save our lives, that little army of light and shade, reading a line here and there and then another and another. And in
the end it all adds up, and I can assure you that it outweighs the pile of shit that our enemies would like to bury us under. It too can give us courage, can restore our confidence. And it’s the ultimate reason for the responsibility we have, you as much as I, not to stay alive but to win. War again. Chess. I don’t know how you see it, and yet …

So there you go, Michel. I realize that, despite having said so much, I didn’t reply to your question about evil, its philosophy, its coils, and how we can escape getting stuck in the wrong track. (If I had, I would have told you first that I don’t believe it’s possible to “break the unlimited chain of the causes and effects of evil” and second that, instead of using your image of the coils, I prefer that of the Möbius strip where, even if you have the impression that you’re getting away and rising, you never escape from the surface, the plane, the continuity of evil. Third, what’s at stake is not to “undo” evil but to “make do” with it and to limit its power—all propositions to which I may return the next time.) But I felt like telling you these little things without losing any time. Perhaps I’m naïve or overemotional. But there was a tone in your letter and especially a couple of words that made my blood turn cold, and that’s why I wanted to reply right away. There’s no reason to be afraid. I really believe that. You know the story of Hobbes, don’t you? Do you know the joke that all-round champion used to make to his friends about fear and its effects? That unrivaled theoretician of fear, the man who founded his theory not only of states but also of societies on it, said that he believed his affinity with fear came from the fact that his mother had given birth to him prematurely as the result of a shock. So you see, another story about a mother. Really, there’s no getting away from it … But there’s no reason to be afraid of our mothers, or of fear itself.

Dear Bernard-Henri, your letter this time led me to a long period of unproductive thought, as usually happens when I try to think about issues of strategy (I would love to have been fascinated by Sun Tzu and the game of Go; or at least by chess and Clausewitz; sadly, when it comes to games, I never got much further than
belote
, Mille Bornes, and Tarot
^*
at a push; I don’t know where I get it from; it’s strange given that I liked math, I was even good at it).

To tell the truth, I suspected that you were probably pretty experienced on the subject of slander; but I only
suspected
as much, and that bears out your success, but also its limitations. What I knew was that various unpleasant rumors had circulated about you; but I would have been incapable of recounting a single incident (although I have been known to read the newspapers in recent years).

So, you’re right, they are crap; they can’t even make up a memorable story, something even a third-rate novelist can manage. But it still leaves a trace, a taint; and it works, you know it does, and you have been a
natural target
for considerably longer than I have. Someone has a little bile, a little
sad passion
they need to vent? Well, there are people you can dump on; Bernard-Henri, for example. And Houellebecq, yeah, not bad, a lot of people are dumping on him these days.

When we started this correspondence, it occurred to me that I was likely to make new enemies—yours. Then, emboldened by your example, thinking to myself that it probably would be useful to “know my adversary’s position,” I went back to Googling myself. And gradually, but increasingly plainly, I realized a fact, a small but significant fact:
we already have the same enemies
. This is much more obvious on the Internet, where people rail against everything without any sense of decency, where everything is exaggerated, insulting, crude. But aside from the additional vulgarity (and after all, it’s probably normal that, in creating a “global village,” the Internet has brought back some of the cheerful brutality of village morals), it has to be admitted that the Internet adds little in comparison to the traditional printed media—in fact, it’s depressing the mediocre use humanity makes of this extraordinary tool.

Among our most constant and most bitter enemies are first and foremost all those Web sites (bakchich.info, for example) that adopt the same editorial approach as
Le Canard enchaîné
^*
or of
Voici
(I am unable to find any significant difference between those two magazines; the only thing that might be said is that when Frédéric Beigbeder was literary editor at
Voici
, it was a lot better than
Le Canard
). I regularly read pieces about myself in sections like “Indiscrétions,” or the “Téléphone Rouge,” the sort of gossip columns that have sprung up in most of the papers in recent years; these pieces are generally untrue, sometimes grotesquely so. But the prize
for barefaced lying in any medium goes to
Le Canard enchaîné
. Not once have I read an accurate story about myself in
Le Canard
. And more often than not, it wasn’t even a case of exaggeration or a biased reading of the facts, but out-and-out fabrication. It’s staggering, when you consider that the people who read
Le Canard enchaîné
think they are reading secrets that most people don’t know, unearthed through hours of patient investigative work. It’s much simpler than that: they just make it up, they write the first thing that comes into their head, pure and simple. It’s also staggering the impunity these people enjoy, and go on enjoying: justice has the reputation for being complicated and slow, and very few victims (apart from politicians and those who have legal teams to deal with such things) take the effort to sue. And of course, no one wants to turn everyone in the media against them; it’s simpler and more sensible to
keep your mouth shut
. To which one might add the shame one feels from constantly having to justify oneself to people you despise …

Among our most constant and most bitter enemies are the Web sites, the loathsome, terrifying proliferation of far-left sites that might model themselves on
Le Monde diplomatique
or
Politis
but which, in keeping with the maximalist logic of the Internet, go much further and, where people like us are concerned, almost go so far as to call for us to be killed. It’s here that you realize that the unholy collusion between the far-left and radical Islam is not a fantasy dreamed up by Gilles-William Goldnadel, but is something that is increasingly becoming a reality. I leave the accountability of those who find excuses for Islam because it’s the “religion of the poor,” or who look for points of agreement between Marxist thought and Sharia law, but I will say that every anti-Semitic attack or murder in the French
banlieues
owes something to them.

•    •    •

When all this has calmed down, long after we are dead, some future historian will be able to draw some great lesson from the fact that we both, and at much the same time, have comfortably fulfilled the role of
public enemies
. I don’t feel able to expand on the idea, it’s just an intuition, one that still seems strange to me: but I believe that the person who manages to work out why the two of us, so different from each other, became the chief whipping boys of our era in France will, in doing so, understand many things about the history of France during this period.

The fact remains that, right now, while we are still more or less alive, the situation is difficult. I’m grateful that you haven’t tried to persuade me that “things will get better.” Because things won’t get better; so what is there that can help? Well, the most crucial are the encounters with anonymous readers (anonymous or famous, it doesn’t really matter, what matters is that they are
readers
), whether on the Internet or in the street. Such encounters are neither self-conscious nor awkward. The readers know there are many of them and they assume (rightly or wrongly, it depends) that I have a hectic schedule so they need to
get straight to the point
.