In Front Hermitage Quignard

S y m p o s i u m : Uns o c ia l T ho u g ht , Unc o m mo n L i v e s, Pa r t 2
IN FRONT OF MY HERMITAGE
Pascal Quignard
Translated by Ann Jefferson
The passages extracted below from Les Ombres errantes (Wandering Shades) by Pascal Quignard are those that most closely concern the themes of this symposium. There is a life older than the life of ambition or even than ones love life, a solitude before social life, Quignard has said in an interview: Today, more than ever, I am embracing that life. I am extricating myself from my fellowman as I have extricated myself from my motherland. He has added that, in Les Ombres errantes, I make clear my determination to create a hermitage within the modern world where I praise insecurity of thinking, while the societies in which we live advocate the opposite. The title In Front of My Hermitage is a phrase appearing in chapter XIII and is not the title given by Quignard to any section of the original text. Chapter numbers in this selection are as they appear in the original and are provided to indicate where ellipses occur. Les Ombres errantes, for which Quignard received the Prix Goncourt in 2002, appears here in English translation for the first time. Editor
Common Knowledge 12:3 DOI 10.1215/0961754X-2006-008 2002 Grasset and Fasquelle
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I Cock crow, dawn, dogs barking, the light spreading, men rising from their beds, nature, time, dreams, lucidity there is ferocity in everything. I cannot touch the colored cover of certain books without there mounting within me a sensation of pain. A body preferred them to me. A young German woman looked after me until I was two. The fact that she used to read by my side removed me from the delight of being close to her. Because it felt to me that she was not beside me. She was not there. She had already departed. She was elsewhere. Reading was a sojourn in another kingdom. My throat tightens suddenly as I recall those hours when I could not yet speak. They conceal another world that will always elude my quest. A sort of dry sob would choke my upper body. I could no longer swallow. I could not bear a fork or a spoon to come near my lips. The nature of the attraction that books exert upon me will remain all my life more mysterious and more imperious than it might appear to other readers. Quickly I put the old book with its bright colors back in the place I took it from. I turn aside from the booksellers display. I can no longer speak. As in the past. I dare not try. I hurry along the pavement. I walk away toward the shadows of the town and melt into them.
A piece of the original apple has remained stuck in the middle of my throat.
Old bilingual Latin-French books in the Garnier series that have acquired a downy feel from use, age, sunlight, and dust. I read in one of those old books published by Garnier that in order to store the scrolls of pornographic pictures that he used to collect, the Emperor Tiberius insisted on having cylinders that were yellow all over and bore no titulus so that nothing betrayed the curiosity by which he was obsessed. He wandered about the empire from which he was fleeing. A disgraced emperor, like a wild wolf, loathing the cities, who did not want the empire, who killed God, and who fled Rome itself. He preferred to live in the highest spot on Capri, in the shadow of the rock that overhung the sea.
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Unsocial Thought, Uncom mon Live s: Pa r t 2
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Living hidden late as Lucretius said. Larvatus, in Descartess word.
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It happened that in 1618 the Chevalier Le Cerf, being then more or less of an age to leave his childhood behind him, enlisted in the kings troops as a volunteer, with the aim of traveling throughout the world. He went to join William the Taciturn at the Siege of Breda. He stayed for thirteen months. They became four friends. They started as four barrack-room companions. Taken in order of their enlistment, they were: Monsieur de Jaume, Ren Des Cartes, Nathan Le Cerf, and Isaac Beeckman. On the day of the barricades, 27 August 1648, Chevalier Des Cartes left for Paris earlier than planned and so was not able to meet either Le Cerf, who went by the name of Abraham, nor Jacques Esprit. He leaped onto his horse. When he arrived in Leiden he said that he would never return to France. On 31 March 1649, Chevalier Des Cartes wrote to Chanut: I have grounds for believing that they want me in France only in order to show me off as if I were a panther. He confesses that he is homesick for the little house near the church on the western canal (in den Westerheerckstraet). This was the year he renounced the sexual favors of Frantsinge. But one cannot deduce from a life that becomes entirely hidden that it is any more innocent.
XIII The golden light pours like liquid from the depths of the sky onto the Yonne. In front of me, on the river, in the darkness, the outline of a flat, empty boat coated in light; the boat, which looked empty, was moving fast and passed downriver in silence. Am I disturbing you? He was in front of me, holding onto the riverbank with his yellow oar. Give me the chain, I said. He handed it to me. I tied it to the little wooden landing stage that rocks about in front of my hermitage. My friend stepped onto the bank. You looked so preoccupied . . . I was waiting for you. No. You werent waiting for me. I could see that you were thinking about something else . . . I was floating along the river.
XV In 1933 Tanizaki published a short text where he says that he missed the shadow. I think that these pages are among the most beautiful ever written in any society that has sprung up over the course of time societies fragmented by different natural languages in the general history of this world. His regret was all the keener for being provocatively argued. Tanizaki expressed his nostalgia for the dimly lit lavatories of old Japan. These lavatories were no longer tolerated by most of Japanese society, which had suddenly been seized by a general desire to excrete in the puritanical, imperialist, American dazzle of neon lights, into an immaculate porcelain pan, surrounded by hygienic, gleaming white tiles, amid an odor of fake flowers.
Junichir Tanizaki said that he missed paintbrushes, which made less noise than pens; metal objects with a tarnish; opaque crystal and clouded jade; streaks of soot on brickwork; the slow disintegration of paint on wood; storm damage; a broken branch, a wrinkle, an unstitched hem, a heavy breast; bird droppings on a balustrade; the insufficient and noiseless light from a candle to dine by or from a lantern hanging above a wooden door; the freer or more bewildered or vacillating thoughts that arise in a human head when it escapes into the shadows, and the soul is borne closer to the boundary of the teeth; the lower and more hesitant voice that accompanies the glow of a cigarette on which the eye comes to rest; the taste of what is eaten lingers longer, and the impression made by the shape and color of food becomes less obsessive as one gradually grows older and meals are progressively connected to the darkness inside the body into which they are absorbed.
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XIV Black clouds in the sky, and as they parted, the blue vault appeared suddenly in a state of nudity that it is difficult for me to convey. The blue was fresh and shimmered in the depths of the dark sky.
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In the kitchen the most beautiful things are the Leftovers whose reign never ceases. The fate that haunts the prey that has been eaten constitutes its shadow. It can be felt everywhere. We are surrounded by its deathly odor, or the smell of the manner in which it met its death, beyond the remains of fish bones or carcass.
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Junichir Tanizaki was seized by retching at the sparkle of steel; nickel; chrome; the invention of aluminum; the excessive and irrepressible whiteness of paper from the West; all earthenware and all spectacle frames.
He loved the shadow that tea spreads in its hot and liquid world. And the colors that the tiny furled leaf releases as filaments into the water before they blend into it. And the reddish, and in some respects autumnal, residue that gradually comes to settle in the bottom of the porcelain bowl.
He loved the hunters hide linked to the dark and to the floating expanse that the darkness brings with it. He loved clothes with beautiful dark colors in browns and grays. He used to say that the density of thought in obscurity was extraordinarily close to the intensity of excitement in shame. Shame both invades and vanishes, leaving the soul behind and invading the body which tenses in response to it.
He regretted the passing of art, by which he meant the original link that art had forged with craftsmanship, which is to say with the uniqueness of the objects that it adds to the world. He loved obscure bowls. He loved walls of sand.
He did not distinguish between shadows and traces of the past. He missed dust on boxes, as well as rust on knives, nails and flat-headed screws. He missed the moon when it was the only light at night in mean dwellings; the undergrowth and its terrifying animals; the thrilling patch of shadow that moves and retreats beneath trousers and robes; listening to music while snuffing the lamps. Throughout his life the aesthetic position of Junichir Tanizaki was resolutely antinaturalist. He never yielded an inch on the deceitful character of ideas and narratives. Language is a form of lying. Pluto was called the king of the shades. The writer is language as it devours itself in the man devoured by the lies that constitute his very core.
There is no liar who does not conceal the fact that he is lying. The novelist is the only liar who does not conceal the fact that he lies.
Secrets are the only link between individuals in the shadow of society, or the half light of sexuality; they search each other out, since that which claims not to be concealed is nothing more than show.
There is in reading an expectancy that does not seek to come to an end. To read is to wander. Reading is wandering. (Beware of wandering knights! Beware of novelists!) Chrtien de Troyes named the group of Those Who Go to Strange Lands in Search of Strange Adventures.
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He loved the paucity of light on the body of a woman who removes the linen covering her smooth belly and her bare breasts only to entrust them to the half light; her perfume is stronger; her skin softer and more naked; her features, being more ghostly, are more feminine; she has returned from the past; she is not out of harmony with the darkness of her vulva which parts, and she is a reminder that this is the old abode.
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(Beware the knights errant! They seek adventure; they are drawn to misfortune.)
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Lies and metamorphoses are both engaged in an endless struggle against reality, against the way things are, against the selling of men, animals, and objects, against the commands of language and the tyranny of the roles required for groups to function. Tanizaki regarded the position of the individual at night as being at the opposite extreme from the national order of the Levant under the sign of the sun.
I must at once add some lists to the ones to which Tanizaki had recourse. The lists of Li Yi-chan and the cruder, more shameful ones of Marcus Aurelius. The lists of Sei Shnagon or Lord Shaftesbury which are more refined and more puritanical. The lists of Memor which are those of the shadows projected day after day by life.
XVIII There is in the thought of Monsieur de Saint-Cyran a conception of inner freedom so intransigent that it would have devastated any society. At least this is what Richelieu instantly felt when he received him in the Palais du Louvre. Richelieu took fright. And this is what prompted him to have Monsieur de Saint-Cyran arrested without pretext on 14 May 1638. Theological problems were invoked only after his imprisonment. These were just so many doctrinal excuses designed to conceal an intuition whose first manifestation was simple fear. Saint-Cyran cast such an absolute gaze on his century that he seemed to be condemning all activities in the world. He denied the legitimacy of all family ties in God. He cursed professional activities. He scorned political duties. He dismissed all ties that are merely human, merely collective, or merely universal. He preached a way of life that removed its adherents from the world with a radical violence. He violently affirmed the paradox, outside the enclosure of Port-Royal des Champs, of a Society of Solitaries.
The man became a distant figure who addressed all others formally so as to avoid them. Just before withdrawing forever into divine reading.
XIX Monsieur de Pontchteau had made his hermitage in the Granges de PortRoyal. Previously Monsieur de Pontchteau had collected miniatures before books went to his head. From the instant he began to take pleasure in reading, he lived only for books. The words he had read in the Imitation of Christ were always on his lips: In omnibus requiem quaesivi et nusquam inveni nisi in angulo cum libro. (I have searched everywhere in the universe for peace and found it nowhere, except in a corner with a book.)
To live in a corner in angulo of the world.
In the dead angle by means of which the visible ceases to be visible to sight. In the dead space where the two rhythms of human life (cardiac and then pulmonary) fasten onto each other and around which they create an ecstasy of sound and perhaps music, and, on the basis of music, time.
Such is Lake Avernus, and such the gates and the baying that lie beneath Tartarus. Such were the lakes sought by the ancient Etruscans bearing the decapitated and reconstructed heads of their ancestors on pikes. Such were Cerberus and boiling pitch: the visible does battle with the invisible. But only the visible shines. Only the victory of the visible can shine, since even its defeats are brilliant.
One must give thought to this point: the victories of the invisible do not shine.
One April day in the year AD 30, Jesus was led from Caiaphas to the praetorium. It was morning. The sun was rising. The governor Pilate entered the praetorium and asked Jesus:
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Your own nation and the chief priests delivered you to me. What have you done? Jesus replied: Regnum meum non est de hoc mundo. (My kingdom is not of this world.)
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The living are not shades. They are perhaps the dead wrapped in clothes and shining. Henceforth they sacrifice, their eyes gleaming, dressed in the same manner, before the same screens, with the same longing. Demagogic, egalitarian, fraternal are words that all designate the same attitude: murderers observing each other out of the corner of an eye. They share the same aversion to all forms of superiority. They huddle up to each other, gripping their anxiety as tightly as if it were a penis that was about to be removed from them, begging for further protection, prohibition, chains, or medicine. This terror in the face of independence and desire turns naturally into a hatred of those who demand a little shade with the intention of concealing their keenest pleasures from all eyes. For them freedom is an insurrection. They are afraid if they do not sleep.
At the beginning of the last century, Walter Benjamin wrote that the inventions of photography and cinematography had introduced an absence of shadow into the very heart of the things that they had created.
Two arts extinguished the living aura of the play of light and shade deep inside nature. Alongside techniques of lighting, and in addition to the word shot, photographers used the word definition to refer to the sharpness of the outline of the creatures inside their negatives. Shots were a predation that ripped away the veil of shadow running over the surface of flesh for all men who imagined it. It thinned the blur of distance surrounding flesh as it is laid bare. A shadow that the body could calculate more or less as it prepared for love, undressing with discretion or shame, before finding release in the shadow that contains its delight.
Pluto is the god of the other world. He is He who sees in the shadows. Shakespeare wrote: And moody Pluto winks while Orpheus plays. Ploutos in ancient Greece designated fortunes that shone in the night, fortunes in silver and gold. Ploutn was the god who concealed treasures buried under the earth. Plutarch ploutarchos in Greek meant the master of buried riches.
The Latin vulgus translates the Greek demos. Our souls are vulgarity: the vulgar language. Our breath (psyche) echoes the language of the group (vulgus). The inner life, familial and linguistic, is becoming ever more homogeneous, civilized, and collective: heterogeneity is not mans destiny. Human destiny is a cultural and historical homogeneity. The destiny of art is a natural and fundamental heterogeneity. Fragmentation is the soul of art. The equal and interchangeable creatures of democratic regimes were once matched by the unforeseeable individualities of the world of novels. The stips was opposed by the littera, the vulgus was opposed by the individuum, and a democratic negotium was opposed by an aristocratic otium.
There is a world where one age is not equal to another, where the sexes are not undifferentiated, where roles are not equivalent, and where civilizations are not confusable. There is a world where the ignoramus is not the equal of the scholar, where speech does not have the same voice as writing, neither the vulgus the same one as the atomos, nor barbarians the same one as civilized beings. There is another world.
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It is impossible to establish a counterweight to the universal dominance of luciferousness without sacrificing to its reign. It is impossible to build containing walls or dikes against it without its capacity for expansion instantly breaching them. This ocean is devoid of shores. Everything is submerged. Fish still rise to the surface. Taking a gulp so as not to die. That gulp is reading.
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There is a world that belongs to the bank of the Lethe. That bank is memory. It is the world of novels and that of sonatas, that of the pleasure of naked bodies that prefer the half-closed blind, or that of the dream that prefers it pulled even lower until it feigns the darkness of the night or invents it. It is the world of magpies on tombstones. It is the world of solitude required for reading books and listening to music. The world of tepid silence and the idle half light in which thought roams and suddenly thrills with excitement.
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Where flesh either stiffens or parts. We are viviparous creatures. We lived before we were born. It so happened that our hearts beat before we drew breath. Our ears heard before our lips discovered the existence of air. We swam in murky water before our eyes opened and were dazzled, then blinded, then saw, before our throats dried, and then choked for an instant, then consumed air, and then imitated words whose intonation seemed reassuring.
God pushed aside the amphora containing the thick, dark wine. He rose suddenly from the table, laid aside his outer garments, unfolded a towel with which he girded himself, fetched a pitcher, poured some water into a bowl, kneeled down, washed the ankles, washed the feet, washed the toes of the young men around him, and washed the toenails of each of his disciples. He wiped their toes and he said: Si de mundo fuissetis, mundus quod suum erat diligeret. Quia vero de mundo non estis, propterea odit vos mundus. (If you were of the world, the world would love its own. But because you are not of the world, therefore the world hates you.) Then he turned to Peter who protested his love and his loyalty and with some irritation said to him that he, who claimed to be his friend, would deny his existence three times before the cock crowed to announce the rising of the sun in the sky of the following day.
They razed the houses they had inherited from their fathers. They no longer put up tombs for them. The treasures that the fathers had intended to bequeath for the delight of their sons were placed in attics, in cellars, behind railings in parks, inside museums, in the strongboxes of banks, for, because they had ceased to notice their
beauty, intelligibility departed from them. Even rhetoric, which, by the tip of the tongue, can loosen the tie that strangles the soul of each of us with the language of the group, was thrown on the trash heap. Even death, whose attendant rites used to lighten the weight of family tradition, has been tossed aside like detritus from another era whose presence makes us uneasy and whose smell and decomposing shape must no longer be inflicted upon us. Even nature, the wild animals of the past, the predators, the forests, and the monsters have all been eradicated by us in massacres, or corrupted by domestication on our farms, or made to be the heroes of our zoos. The old demands with their names, the exorbitant pleasures practiced with such discretion, the proud schemes with their creations, the terrible fears with their songs, have all begun to lose the names that hovered around our lips. With the arrival of time, trash, and rubble, as palaces crumbled, as men and their cities covered the earth with mass graves and flattened the ruins, it was disappearance itself that vanished. The tyranny that comes with the absence of complex human language was exercised without encountering any obstacle to luminous fascination. Images, artificial dependency, universal clothes, and industrially produced objects became the idols that were yearned for by all. The few who made the difference between the majority and the totality have been crushed (too weak and too divided to protect themselves). Beauty, freedom, thought, human language in written form, music, solitude, the second kingdom, deferred pleasures, stories, marks of favor in love, contemplation, lucidity, these are merely different words to name a single thing, a single manner of implicating a subject, reality, and language. The names do not matter. Their memory has vanished so utterly that nostalgia for them no longer causes suffering to those who were born after they disappeared.
As the world grew older, it retreated in time. As the past retreated in time, so its loss appeared more irremediable. The more irremediable the loss appeared, the more inconsolable were those who had been abandoned keeping an uncertain memory of it in their heart. As the loss compounded the abandonment, so nostalgia became the greater. The more nostalgia spread, the more anxiety weighed. The more anxiety weighed on the heart, the more the throat tightened. The more the throat tightened, the more the voice was wound to a pitch, and this is the first dawn and the first sight of the sun.
XXIX Han Yu was born in 768, obtained his doctorate in 792, and abominated Buddhism. He did not bow on the arrival of a bone from the Buddha in Chang-an. He expressed his indignation in writing, which is to say dangerously: against the
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prestige that surrounded a bone. He wrote short treatises in tough, concentrated prose. One day he spread the five fingers on his hand. He said enigmatically that he still had the shadow of the first dawn between each of his fingers. He perfected the style of so-called ancient prose (gu wen). Well-defined syntax, lexical precision, repetition of grammatical particles, and clearly formulated statements are the characteristics of this style. He said: Grass that grows grows. He loathed ellipsis, religion, looseness in rope knots, laxity in the morals of the inhabitants of cities, slackness in the embrace of lovers. He loved the path in the shade of the evening, the thick mist before the full light of day, the wind when it gusts. In Shan shi he writes: Let me be bound to the shade and to a companion! We shall all three live to a very great age and never return. He was banished twice. He died. Buddhism and flaccid prose outlived Han Yu.
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To a nun who asked him whether it would be useful for her to speak inwardly in her prayers, Monsieur de Saint-Cyran replied: No. Men are playthings. Our lives, prisons. When we deploy language, we are raising ruins on dead leaves and moss. Art is the least leaf. The weakest leaf because it is the smallest of the leaves that grow. It is always the newest and thus always the smallest. It is a residue of nature in the heart of culture. It is birth. In each and every thing birth seeks new life. Art knows only rebirths. Nature is origin. Art is never greater than the tiniest of springtimes whose white gum buds afresh at the tip of its branches.
How to fuel the resolve of three or four against the empire of all? These three or four are hidden; they create fragile secret societies; they are forced to pretend to espouse the jovial ways and aggressive gestures of the barbarians; they show themselves in their cities, their temples, and their amphitheaters. But in a hidden corner, which is to say in angulo, in the shelter of the shadows, in secret, they exchange, not sectarian promotional pamphlets, nor national leaflets (that is to say, not banknotes), but, in the manner of pornographic photographs, works published in nine copies, or memories of books, or transcriptions of the ancient books themselves which, among all the goods that are for sale, have nothing whatsoever to sell.
The gray photocopies of these pages, images without any image, are holes punctured in time.
There is only one empire now, and the sole medium that extends throughout it is no longer even a linguistic meaning but a monetary equivalence. They put the Vikings in charge of the conservation of Rome; they put the Spanish in charge of the conservation of the temples of the Aztecs; the Portuguese in charge of the Edo Bay; and the Sun King in charge of a razed Port-Royal.
Images are depictions of nothing. Without language they have no meaning. What do the scenes that you see on the walls of Paleolithic caves mean? Without the mythic tales that they prefigured or of which they were a condensation, we shall never know. Images are prehuman. They go back to a time before natural languages in human mouths. I shall advance the following thesis: that which was invented by dreams among certain animals has a fascination that is prior to all meaning. Writing rendered useless, signifier without any signified, money is the third-party in desires that feed on mutual envy.
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The market can say: That will sell, that wont sell. What more could the market say? And the crowd of spectators at the games, piled onto the terraces, squatting on the steps, their eyes already gleaming at the spectacle of the death that is being prepared, applaud and stamp their feet. In times past they used to read, they listened, they touched, they talked. They did not say: I toe the line, I buy, I applaud, I stamp. They used to say: This enlightens me. Or: This moves me. Their thought was to add beauty to the world, and to deepen their understanding of an earth created by time, and not: to ensure that day-to-day sales advance in the here and now so as to increase obsolescence. Thinking farther, feeling freer, making the mind work more swiftly, more independently, more lucidly, this was what they loved, and not: ensuring that trashy goods or a jug from Soissons find a buyer one second before they are destroyed.
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Georges Batailles The Accursed Share is one of the most beautiful books about the shadows. Human societies seek out chance and death. The entire world provides the basis for the generalized exchange that once used to be called war. The single market has a single goal: which is itself. The market sought to expand and fill all available space. It has achieved this. The available space is now the earth. As a result, the earth has entered into competition with itself. Competition, expansion, and profit are rational only in a limited and dualist state. On a larger scale, from the moment that the propensity toward growth finds nothing to oppose or against which to compete, it becomes like the whirling of a shaman before he prostrates himself in the dust that the weight of his body throws up as he falls.
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XXXI Rock is hardened mud. A cave is made of hardened mud. I seek neither rock nor anything hard. A white horse is not a horse. I seek mud. This much should be understood: my hermitage is not solid. Nothing can be built on what I write. The hand that writes is like the hand terrified by the storm. The cargo has to be thrown overboard when the ship begins to sink.
XXXII He left just as he said he would. And left again. Moved to Endegeest. There he settled in a large house with two wings and a long garden at the far end of which there was a little orchard. All around were meadows without end. On the far side of the meadows and the fields, on the edge of the horizon, at the tip of the tufts of grass, there rose the tiny spires of the churches of Leiden. The temples where God and his saints dwell mingled with the pistils of the flowers. The weathercocks that surmount them looked like the spines that grow on thistles and prick.
XXXIII Of the Calvinist maxim Post tenebras lux, all I have retained are the first two words.
We do not know when the clean and the dirty were separated in the societies and conscious minds of men. When did corpses appear and the anguished need to remove them from sight? Burial existed before Homo sapiens. Art is one of the most ancient prehuman practices, far more ancient than the money into which nothing within the realm of art can be converted. Art is the eternal concurrent of a dissociation to which it is not subservient. It was born before the disjunctive, proliferating genealogies became fixed between man and beast, the social and the asocial, order and disorder, adornment and repulsion, the celestial and the infernal, life and death, form and nonform. The sacred, the unclean, that which defiles and needs to be set apart (or hidden from view) are not distinct. The sacred has never been more omnipotent than in modern societies. People have never cut themselves off to such a degree from corpses, monthly blood, spit, snot, urine, feces, belches, scabs, dust, and mud. We are all fanatical priests in our kitchens. We are mad tyrants in our bathrooms. It is difficult to disentangle the notions of hygiene, morality, sacrifice, deliberation, racism, and war. We are on the watch for what is other and unclassified in social or sensory terms, parasites, mice, saliva, dropouts, creatures that inhabit cracks (spiders and field mice or scorpions are never wholly inside or out), autodidact academics, mammalian fish, Christian Jews, unmarried mothers, nondrinking water, the inhabitants of frontier zones (whether of national territories or of the body), sperm, safety pins, nail clippings, sweat, phlegm, ghosts, phobias, fantasies (which steal across the wall that divides sleep from waking). Art is a parasitical production. Whoever conjures up what previously did not exist belongs to the realm of the improper. He is out of place. This is the very definition of dirt: something that is in the wrong place. A shoe is clean on the floor. It is dirty as soon as it is put on the tablecloth among the flowers, the silver, and the neatly arranged glasses.
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Something that does not dazzle illuminates those who were engendered by sexual means and who developed in the half light. A little knot of men whispers: Post tenebras. On the edge of the terraces, along with the blackbirds, we are preserving something that is not black in the dark but that is not light in the day.
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Money is a ritual of speculation on the future. It is a shared faith whereby valuations proliferate within a system of equivalences. Art, in its asystasis, is the Other of all that takes form within the system. All works of art are at war with this more recent facile, gullible, and competing means of representation. The creator represents a danger for this new sect, which has spread its fanatical beliefs around the globe: the creator plays with symbolic objects. He cannot manage life within this new order, he does not share its creed. He is a deceptor. Shopkeepers do not like creation, which burgeons and complicates exchange; and bankers are leery of the creators impiety, which threatens to dissolve the medium of trade. The creator has no designs. He goes he knows not where. Corporate tribunals do not enjoy the tricks endlessly played on them by Reynard the Fox. The anxiety of investors is religious: what if men ceased to believe in the exchange value of money? Having overrun the earth, the banks in their grand edifices would become so many temples of Angkor Wat among the liana and the cries of the jungle, with no trace remaining of the faith in equivalent values that human beings once possessed.
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Nowadays those who are called creators are overvalued. Works are undervalued. Strangely, while the res publica in its entirety has become profane and venal, time, alterity, nature, History, the sacred, and even language, or at least linguistic representation, have become a res privata.
Renan was reluctant to accept the money due him from the sales of the first of his books. He could not see any means of commensuration between expression of thought, an abandoned faith, and hard cash. His sisters had to intervene and point out to him that although the absence of a common measure did not entail acceptance, it also was no basis for his decision to refuse. Similarly, mile Auguste Chartier used to write short notes in the Dpche de Rouen without accepting payment. He said that he was a teacher and that this occupation provided for his needs. He chose the barbarian name of Des Alains as a pseudonym. In January 1911 he agreed to sign a contract with the publishing wing of the ditions de la Nouvelle revue franaise on the express condition that he receive no royalties on the books he published with them.
I regard as contradictory two classes of being that are held in the hand: the page of a book covered in black letters that signify things, and a banknote which is the price put on those things. At all events, the hand lays hold of them. Using the terms of bygone times, I oppose the volumen (a written scroll) to the stips (a bronze coin). On one side, the man who knows his letters, the litteratus, the well-read man; on the other, the person who is the object of the stips: the stipendiary, the prostitute. The Roman opposition between classed (classicus) and unclassed citizens, between littera and slaves, between otium and negotium, constitutes one and the same distinction.
Moneta was a monitory temple. Language has only our bodies for shelter. Homo is defined by this alone: he is an animal with language. In the Roman world, Moneta was the temple that distracted man from language by warning him of the omnipotence of the gods. The templum of Juno Moneta was filled with noise from the hammering of smiths. Money, like the silent exchange it introduces, like images, wishes that language would leave us. It is true that written language is not a defining characteristic of the human species. It is a definer of civilizations that gather around older languages deprived of human bodies to speak them. Dead languages, like Sumerian for the men of Akkad. Like the unpronounceable, so-called literary language that was in fact a transliterating one, for the scholars of China, Korea, and Japan. Like Hebrew, for the Jews when Cyrus
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An increasingly rapid obsolescence is affecting those products favored by the commerce of individuals, images, and things: journalistic, promotional, audiovisual, industrial, or political. It is a ghostly return of the channel-hopping of the imperators. The princes of ancient Rome took pleasure in consecration only in order to experience the sadistic and omnipotent delights of instant deconsecration with their thumb. The imperial finger is a manifest. To be more precise, manifestus is the Roman word for being caught in the act. The Roman world imagines the murderer seized by the hand of the accuser. In the Latin language something is manifest when it reveals a crime. The law of the ancient Fathers was founded on the mancipatio: that on which the hand has laid hold.
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the Messiah authorized them to return from Babylon, and whose everyday use they had forgotten. Like Latin, for all the countries of Christian Eurasia.
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There are bodies capable of containing other bodies known as antibodies. These are without image. And without echo. No dreamer dreams them. No world contains them. It is said that they write.
XXXIV It is said of certain men that they are lost. Perditos. They are like holes burned by acid in the familiarity of social life.
XXXV At the end of the interview between Antoine Arnauld and Saint-Cyran in Vincennes prison on 8 May 1642, Monsieur de Saint-Cyran concluded by saying to Monsieur Arnauld: One must go where God leads and do nothing in a base or halfhearted manner. After May 8th they communicated no further. They never saw each other again.
XXXVI The mysterious sermon by the no less mysterious Barefoot Reader (Barfusser Lesemeister) begins with these words: Tenebra Deus est. Tenebra in anima post omnem lucem relicta. (God is darkness. He is the sudden darkness that invades the soul after all light.)
XXXVII Ludwig Wittgenstein was the theoretician of the disappearance of language. Sprachlosigkeit is the name that was given to the 1914 18 war in Germany. The unspeakability in words of what was lived at the front not to mention the propaganda that circulated behind the lines. Language ceased to be a bridge between the Ego and the Cosmos. The desire to speak was lost in the trenches.
In 1936 Thierry Maulnier founded Combat. There Robert Brasillach reported these words: When I hear people talk about culture, Goering exclaimed one day, I take my revolver from its holster. Claude Orland (who had not yet become Claude Roy) considered that the warmongers were not Mussolini, Hitler, Salazar, or Franco, but Blum, Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill. Maurice Blanchot published a long article in the journal under the title Terrorism as a Method of Public Safety. Terror is an eighteenth-century word. It is that centurys final message to us. Then came 1871. Within two years Paris was under siege by the Germans, and then under siege by the French. In one week 35,000 men, women, old people, and children were executed. More men were deported to the colonies and into penal servitude than during the entire history of the Republic. In three days the Thiers government created more victims than the Terror in three years. Between the beginning of the First World War and the end of the Second, 70 million human beings were massacred. The word terrorism belongs to criminal law. Society defines it as a political crime that does not seek to institute or to reestablish public order, but to disrupt it in a spectacular fashion. The word has only rarely been invoked by actors in history: French revolutionaries and the fascist Right in Europe before 3 September 1939.
Writing is thoroughly political. Vercors: Between the occupier and the writer there can be envisaged no exchange, no words, no contact, no pay, and no communication. I do not try to adhere to the rule decreed by Vercors. Someone who writes is someone who is seeking to redeem what has been pawned. To disengage language. To break a dialogue. To desubordinate the domesticated. To extricate himself from brotherhood and fatherland. To unfetter all religious bonds.
Once it has become a song, the appeal contained in a cry ceases to be addressed to anyone. The arts are not destined, as History is, to organize oblivion. Nor to give meaning to what is Other to meaning. Nor to defile and devour the bygone days of the earth. Nor to abolish on the spot the Elsewhere of time. Nor to proscribe the languages that precede all natural languages. Nor to wall in the Open. Only a Nazi could think that art is a decorative lie. Only a bourgeois liberal could think that art cheers. It is only in totalitarian regimes that art is conceived as a means of aestheticizing subjection, of creating legends out of the past, and of distorting at every turn the hour that comes and then passes. The artist cannot take part
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in the functioning of the human community in the instant when he is seeking to distance himself from it. It is not for him to receive wages in exchange for his work. He is closer to mourning than to pawning. Less forgetful than voluntary memory. Less interested than money in exchange. It is not the function of art to deny what is Other to the social.
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The individual is like a wave that rises to the surface of the water. It cannot completely disconnect itself. It soon falls back into the supporting mass that engulfs it. It always sinks into the irresistible movement of the tide that bears it along. But why not rise again, and again, and again?
XXXIX After being released from his imprisonment in the year 1643, Monsieur de SaintCyran would describe the worlds vanities in terms of the way that painters had become used to portraying them in their pictures: glasses half-filled with wine; red and brown lutes; tallow candles and playing cards with a whitish tinge; lemon peel drooping off the edge of a table; mirrors with reflections; mirrors without reflections. He would say that he had done quite comfortably without these objects in the dungeon. You can live even without the image of what you do not have. Dreams suffice to provide a substitute for all the things of which the body is deprived.
It was also in prison that Monsieur de Saint-Cyran wrote the following page: For after the coveting of riches, honors, and worldly pleasures has been turned to ruin, there arise from those ruins, within the soul, other honors, other riches, and other pleasures that are not of the visible world, but of the invisible one. It is terrifying to think that, after ruining the visible world and all its trappings within us, so far as it can be ruined on earth, another world is instantly born, one that is invisible and more difficult to destroy than the first. Saint-Cyran describes the vanity of books that are no more than books. Of gods that are no more than fantasies. Of ideas that are no more than desires. At the heart of eternity, there are three restrictions, he added, beyond the
We knew life before our eyes were dazzled by the sun, and in it we understood something that can be neither seen nor read.
The definition of modern art was given by Pierre Guillard on 11 August 1932. Pierre Guillard had studied science; by profession he was an engineer. He hurled himself at Millets Angelus. He stabbed the canvas several times with a knife. He was restrained by the gallery attendants. At the police station, where he was taken by the attendants from the Louvre, he declared: At least people will talk about me. Self-promotion, refusal of subjection, hatred of everything that had been associated with the notion that this once was: these constitute the triple thesis of modern art. An allergy against dependence, a discrediting of all that has gone before, an eradication of time was, such are the theses of progress. He wounded the peasant in his trousers and the bowed woman in her arm. The sky was beyond repair.
It has never been so cold on this earth as in the century when neoteny was brought to a halt. Larvae even ceased to metamorphose. The universe is seething with phantoms or with poorly tinted and poorly dubbed reflections; as they age, the colors bleed; little by little the ancient languages are becoming desynchronized on the flesh of my lips.
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one concerning the number of elect. He had experienced these in the dungeon where the king had put him. Before being in jail, I used to think: behind the visible world, there is another world. Now that I have emerged from the shadow where the king placed me so I could rest my eyes, here is what I think: behind the invisible world, there is another world, and it is the only real one. Beyond the arts of the senses, there is the art of language to which all symbols return, because they are invented by language. And behind language, what precedes it is not silence which is merely the opposite of natural language and thus coeval with it, but the kingdom that lies behind the invisible one.
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It is possible that the beauty of the arts, as art, began to die in the eighteenth century while terror was being born. The sublime according to Kant was in the human mind. The sublime according to the inventor of the sublime (Longinus) was in nature. Nature ceased to harbor its own strength. Man began to contemplate himself like a Narcissus who loves himself to excess and to the point of disfiguration.
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It is not certain that works of art have ever been awaited. When any of them happen to be greeted with favor, it then emerges that they were not the objects to which the hospitality had been extended. The Fables of La Fontaine found as much instant favor as they were met with misunderstanding; they could be learned in chilly classrooms only as long as their painful meanings, full of religious impiety and a wariness of society, were left unremarked. It sometimes happens, too, that vehement hatred and outright proscription comprise the welcoming committee. Indeed, however tiny it is, a work of art adds to what is something that until then scarcely existed. Things that should not normally have occurred cause embarrassment. Even the return of a tradition can be an intrusion and, so to speak, a disruption. Another aspect makes art a source of embarrassment: while augmenting the unforeseeable, it also loathes death. Artists are murderers of death. Given which, it is understandable that they are punished by those whose business is to administer death, or else to promote it.
Mimeticism roams through nature and is the fruit of a prehuman fascination through which the eye seeks to devour what it loves. Carnivory is fascination in action. Symbolization attempted its earliest prototypes in this ferocious fascination. Even between butterflies and flowers this ferocious exchange lingers, divides, hovers above its own form, departs, returns, and finds its fit. Desire is always subordinated. St. Thomas used the word abalietas. He wished to demonstrate that all human creatures, born of another, founded upon others, taught by others, could function only ab alio, in accordance with, and at the mercy of, an irreducible alterity. We are nothing more than derivates; language, identity, the body, and memory are all derivatives in us. The foundations of the ego within us are much more fragile and much less substantial than our origins in others, ab alio: everything that is passed on by the family, our social education, customs that have been
That which is thought, noetically, philologically, or etymologically (I am referring to a perception that is not completely imaginary) becomes unimaginable. And that which has become unimaginable seems no longer to exist.
It is the dominant morality that defines what counts as marginal. A morality in which what was once symbolic has become imaginary (an image on paper or on screen, or an image in fantasies and dreams) has no place in its system of representation for forms without images (literature and music). The marginalization of writers and musicians is indubitable and set to last. The promotion of painters, architects, models, film stars, politicians, compres, preachers, men of violence, deaths on live TV, goes unquestioned, and has been attested since 1933. There are no grounds for persisting in a battle on a front that has been lost. All we can do is transform social marginality into dissidence. All we can do is transform a marginal status into a diriment anchorism.
Those who try to come to some arrangement will be turned into images. They will be bleached white. They will be bleached as suddenly as photographs exposed to the sunlight on the breakfast table. And are curled and baked before noon. Useless tatters when the dew falls at night and heralds a new day.
Time was, in the classical civilizations one of which invented democracy and the other, in opposition, the republic human speech and action were so closely bound together that the world was deemed to be governed by language. Regina rerum oratio. Nowadays when the forum has become a templum a contemplum of moving images the world is thought to be governed by twitching imagery. Regina rerum imago.
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handed down, moral religion, and linguistic obedience. Fascination precedes identity. There is much more of an internalized socius within amour-propre than there is any kind of subject position. Nowhere has there ever been very much of the love of self that is so often preached. Amour-propre is always the imprint of a fascination. A spell to ward off the evil eye the ascription of a name, a mothers gaze, an ancestor reincarnated, and the like. There is no self-similarity.
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It is true that the desires that drove Caesar and Antony were depraved. But Cleopatra was a living object. Caesar dragged Cleopatra around in his triumphal marches, mounted on an ox-drawn cart. Vercingetorix followed behind, pulling on his chain. A banner portrayed a dying Brutus modeled in wax. And last of all, a giraffe preceded only by the lictors tramping along the streets and bearing the fasces.
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In ancient Japan the palanquin was called the silhouette box.
The guards push the men into the blood-soaked arena which is suddenly filled with light; comments are passed on the habits of the animals and the raping of the Christian women; there are whispers of regret for the flamens and the augurs; there are reports of the commendations by the imperial deputies; there is applause for the prowess of the mercenaries. They talk, but they are only pretending to talk: they are watching for the moment of weakness. They all rejoice at the kill. Lions confront gazelles; raptors confront lizards; cats confront mice; and so on.
A half-dead Narcissus rules. An ancient reasoning that was once local and mercantile but is now global and without purpose governs his gaze. His reflection is the sole preoccupation of his thoughts, if one can still speak of thought in his case: it is a gaze, a screen, a reflection. His gaze seeks the reflection. The reflection seeks the screen. The screen seeks the gaze.
The gaze of all fixed on the reflection of no one.
XLII After the death of Louis XIV in 1715, Mademoiselle de Joncoux scoured Paris, seeking to secure the release of the Jansenists who had been locked up in the Bastille and persecuted by the dead king. She knocked at every door; regardless of where they were; in the corners of church porches, beneath the colonnades of palaces; in the antechambers of lords; deep inside the private apartments of ministers of state.
She always wore dresses the color of tree bark, as dark as possible. A brown scarf on her hair was her only concession to her appearance, and she called it her pch mignon. She was skinny. On arriving at her destination, she would extend a bony hand into the drab, pale air that is peculiar to the French capital. The man pushing her would take hold of her hand and pull. A black woolen garment would be seen emerging from the box. It was Port-Royals last surviving soul who placed her shoe on the cobbles and teetered in the mud, while carefully holding her book in her hand.
XLIII There are ways of speaking that cause people to tremble. And others that wound. There are ways of speaking that continue to cause wounds in the memory long after the death of those who uttered them. Those voices and their intonation compose what one may call a family. There are ways of speaking that breathe intoxication into dead or muffled voices. But these echoes do not emanate directly from the dead. Their origin is in a breath that is not a direct forbear. They assail the throat with a secret voice and a form of speech that is more concealed than vocal resonance, lower than a murmur, and makes you want to weep. I am speaking of books. The whole corpus of books (excluding those volumes in which spoken language and society have not been sacrificed) constitutes the thing that can be called literature which is an unfamilial, not strictly genealogical family and an asocial society.
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On these unflagging errands she did not use a coach; nor even a sedan chair. She sat herself in a brouette. People used to say: brouette, berouette, vinaigrette. In those days people used to chant. The minute she was seated, Mademoiselle de Joncoux would start to read. A man who faced her or at least faced her open book pushed the brouette in which Mademoiselle de Joncoux sat as comfortably as she could on a folding stool fixed to a floor made of two slats of wood that had been screwed in an arc over the single wheel. Mademoiselle de Joncoux did not once stop reading in more than ten years. She had a gray roof installed.
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Inner is a comparative for all things that are inward. Intimate is the superlative. The voice is so intimate that it cannot be carried even on the air. It is no longer of the same order as the breath in ones body.
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Books that have supposedly been touched by the reflection of a sun of which they are unaware are even more silent than purely literary books. They are like the name of a person whom one loves and cannot utter, for then his children would learn who their true father is, though he himself does not know.
Books without images have become like the inauguration Masses of the past. The pious would pay while they were still alive for services to be said in perpetuity after their death in order to ensure their afterlife. During their lifetime they would deposit purses full of 1640 gold louis with their lawyers. Or they would advance the cost of reciting these offices against estates that were still active and left at the disposal of an ecclesiastical living (or else, provided its income). Services were sung for nobody present. Celibate men dressed in black robes earned this money from the hands of corpses, then from tiny bones taken from skeletons, then from the dust of hands that had ceased to have existence anywhere. Just as the priest would say Mass into a void, just as the organist would climb up to his loft for a memory that no longer had living relations in our world, so a book is directed at a gaze that the person composing it cannot see.
These fabulous revenues from time past in its purest form declined abruptly with the beginning of the eighteenth century. Ransoms paid by the dead provided less and less foundation for time past. They are a continuation of the first human burials. A piece of good fortune that has already happened is once again approaching in silence. We must welcome its burgeoning ruin, its ruinous generosity, its halo of trembling and invisible fervor. Caesar devotes a brief page to the warriors of Gaul. He writes: All that they think was agreeable to the deceased is borne to the fire. The Melusinian taboo on language is the most beautiful of all subjects. A Medusan beauty is the only beauty, the beauty that forestalls the worlds of men, the beauty that fascinates and is recognized by animals suddenly rooted to the spot.
To experience as thought something that is trying to find expression before it reaches knowledge is undoubtedly what the movement of writing is. On the one hand, writing with the word that is forever on the tip of the tongue, and on the other hand, with the whole of language that slips between your fingers. This is what one calls burning, at the dawn of discovery. I burn! I burn! Kindle all that follows to the pitch of things at their beginning.
Emerge from the night which is prior to all things. Set the lost alight with loss: this, strictly speaking, is reading. Procure the colors of the eleventh hour for everything that is fading. Discovering the dawn everywhere, and everywhere, and everywhere is a way of being alive. Reconstitute birth in every autumn; hail the lost figure in the irrecoverable; raise the incessant and unforeseeable Other in the eruption of the first time, for there is no other. Be born. Language that is still touched by silence is a nest. Just as dreams are the visible touched by darkness. Then literature is the letter that points in silence to the lost song; and behind the lost song to what the ancients heard and has been lost. Then painting is the cave that reproduces involuntary or celestial images as if they were still dreams. The darkness of the cave is the dream become mountain. Its walls are human skin on the inside of the eyelid. And the nest is made of little twigs snatched one at a time from all around and of bits of string that misfortune hoards in order to survive; it occupies all the space inside the human head while it is still inventing, just before words come to it. While it is thinking before it remembers in time. When it finds more than when it knows. When it writes more than when it recognizes. When it thrills more than when it writes. When it desires more than when it thrills. Literature is contained entirely within this silent prelude. Within this nestbook. In this primal scene filled with images that no one dares speak. Written books are the secretariat of the secret.
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For melancholics, aphasics, mutes, for those being born, children, dreamers, true musicians, erotophiles, for the phantasmagorical, for writers, lovers, and for the dying, it is the sole reality.
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The two great inventions are the cave in the mountain and the book in language.
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For it is caves that founded skulls. It is monasteries that saved the West. Humanity owes more to reading than to weapons. In India too. In Tibet too. In Japan too. In Iceland too. In China, the reading of what is written is the very foundation of civilization. When everyone has ceased to read, then literature will once again be prized. That experience will recreate hermitages, so true is it that no other human experience can compare with this. It is the most unsocializing experience that ever was. The most anchoritic. So much so that its history never transited from country to country but passed from monastery to monastery. From monk to monk. From monos to solos. From one solitary to another.
XLIV On Monday 9 October 1989, I left Bergheim. Secret societies of free men are set to become tinier and tinier. They are reduced almost to a single individual. My friends are dearer and dearer to me, and fewer and fewer in number. Ammianus Marcellinus records that when the emperor offered liberty to the empire, it was regarded as a fatal trap. The people said: He is offering us freedom in order to destroy us. The chief citizens gathered their clients together and announced: Liberty is a strategy that Caesar has found as a means of enslaving us. So great was their yearning for tyranny, so strong their desire to maintain the ascendancy of the gods and preserve the authority of the family bond, that not a single man could be found who was willing to turn to advantage the chance to desire and to take, to hide, to move, and to live, as a bird flits, pecks, hops, and turns its head to every side. They all refused to be free.
Liberty had been a maximal value in ancient Rome. It was so unconditional and nonnegotiable a value that, under the kings and all through the republic and the empire, fathers were forbidden to deprive their children of it.
When Yao governed the state, Po-Cheng Tsu-Kao received a fief from him. Yao passed the state to Shun who passed it to Yu. So Po-Cheng Tsu-kao resigned his fief and took up the plow. When Yu went to visit him, he found him busy plowing his field. I love these encounters where time and space take no account of each other. Yu respectfully went up to Po-Cheng Tsu-Kao and said: Master, Sovereign Yao gave you a fief. Why do you now wish to give it up and plow your field? I am not proposing to give it up. I have given it up. That does not really alter the question I am asking. Why? Yao no longer rules. You rule. I do not think it is good to answer me in this manner, murmured Yu. I do not know what is good in what must be said, retorted Po-Cheng Tsu-Kao. Plowing fields has gone to your head, Yu suggested. I do not know if plowing my poor field has gone to my head, but I have the feeling that in Yaos reign people scarcely gave him a thought. Now you hand out many rewards and many punishments, but the clean is not separated from the dirty, nor man from woman, nor good from evil, nor strangers from brothers, nor names from things. This is the beginning of a disorder that will last a long time. Why do you not depart? Leave me in peace! Leave me in peace! I beg you not to interrupt my work.
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The envoys from the Senate found Cincinnatus, arms bare, digging on the four acres of land that he owned on the banks of the Tiber. With a woolen rag he wiped away the sweat that coated his brow. He stripped naked on the earthen floor of his cabin; he rubbed off the mud that had dried on him with some straw; he wrapped his toga around his thighs and his torso. He stepped outside. He climbed into the boat that took him to the forum. He defeated the Equites serving under Minucius. After sixteen days, Cincinnatus abdicated the dictatorship and returned to his spade.
Fathers had rights of life and death over their children. But even when they handed their children over to others, even when they sold them, even when they banished them from the family fold, even when they exposed them, and even when they cut their throats, they could not take away their liberty.
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On Tuesday 10 October 1989, I closed up the Stuttgart apartment. On Wednesday 11 October 1989, I left Karslruhe where I had been reading in the yellow park. I arrived in Frankfurt. Between the solitude of the person who writes and the solitude of the person who reads there is a very close bond. A fair where only checks are read, this is a festival of intermediaries. While the animals wail at the knackers yard, the stock breeders count the blood money. We are the primary sector in their industry. I murmured: Dont interrupt me! More and more quietly I whispered: Dont interrupt me! I wrote. We are cattle.
Why, one day in April 1994, when the weather was fine and there was dazzling bright sunshine, did I suddenly hasten my step as I left the Louvre? A man walks quickly as he crosses the Seine, observes the water beneath the Pont-Royal covered in a sparkling white sheen, sees a clear blue sky above the Rue de Beaune, runs up to a large wooden door in the Rue Sbastien-Bottin, pushes it open, and resigns from all the posts that he holds.
It is impossible to be both a prison warden and an escaped man.
This is the first argument. Benedictus Spinoza called the Dutch the last of the barbarians (ultimi barbarorum). This is from Letter 50: The soul, to the extent that it employs reason, pertains not to the state but to itself. Spinoza opposed the crowd, the vulgus, to the friend, the carus, as two contradictory extremes. He used to say: We do not expect liberty from those for whom slavery has become their principal commerce.
or to his contempt; or to solitude.
All communities pursue recognition, a sign that originates from farther afield than the adjacent space, farther than the air in the atmosphere, and prior to birth: a sign of belonging. Bears, larks, women, homosexuals, the sick, wanderers, musicians, painters, writers, and saints: do not identify yourselves to any political power. Do not demand the right to justice or to meaning from the State. Here is the second argument: the State is by definition foundationless, like the law itself. It is founded on a violent death, just as the god is created by an emissary victim. And the tyrant is created by the martyr. And Denys is created by Damocles.
Those who refuse membership in society have always been condemned in the eyes of every human group. This condemnation is the basis of every myth. Like the passion between lovers that breaks the codified and hierarchical exchange between members of the group designed to ensure its reproduction. Homer said: An individual who is apolis is a civil war. By that, the ancient bard meant that any man without a city is a seed of civil war. Herodotus wrote: No isolated human individual can suffice unto himself. Word for word: . . . cannot be autarkes. The Bible says: Woe to the solitary man! A solitary man is a dead man.
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What individuals are searching for when they feel solidarity with the collectivities in which they work is fusion with a larger body. They discover the ancient joy of abandoning themselves to a containing vessel. They renounce the subjectivity to which the apprenticeship into language introduces each of us, and they forswear the problematic rights that go with being identified by a proper name. They give themselves up to the desires of others; they enjoy the numerous, repeated, fetishistic, obsessive, perennial delights of the masochist. To repeat the words of Ammianus Marcellinus: They prefer to restore a tyrant they know (who humiliates them within the bounds of laws decreed by them to minimize undue injury) either to unpredictable anxieties; or to the absence of a father figure;
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But all this is false. It is what society always says. In all oral literatures the storyteller is society. Every myth declares in every part of the earth: There is no happy love. In this way genealogical alliances are preserved, as is the system of exchange from clan to clan. But the claim is false. For there have been forbidden lovers who knew happiness. For there have been solitaries, hermits, wanderers, marginals, shamans, people who flee the center, those who live alone, who were the happiest of beings.
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In all times there have existed individuals who have broken with the family to which they used to be affiliated or with the clan to which they once belonged. The decision to withdraw from the rest, the choice of the periphery, emerges with the first family unit to appear in animal groups.
From the dawn of time caves were haunted by springs and attracted viviparous creatures who took shelter in them. The creatures returned when the glaciers had hewn out the caves as they retreated.
XLVI Here is what we must think: the hunter is dead. Man is just prey. Secession has become total. Men of letters can no longer stand alongside vassals. The Brahmin no longer speaks to the rajah. For the first time, the form of a society is opposed to the existence of literature. Neutrality about the manner in which a society might be organized must now be added to the tally of impossibilia. Neuter in the strictest sense means depolarized. Once depolarized, social polarity is civil war. No longer even a religious civil war, nor now an insurrection of princes. A State that is no longer a civil war it has more or less restrained is no longer a state. A market that has become a single market is no longer a battle between markets but a market without an opposite pole. An exchange without polarity, an international system of finance with no referent and with no alter, are impossibilia.
Freedom of conscience was not among the baggage that was transported on the Mayflower. Democracy never crossed the Atlantic. But then how could the ideas of the Aufklrung and the French Revolution have been hoisted aboard a ship in 1620? What the puritan Fathers who landed in Massachusetts Bay brought in the chests they stacked one by one on the muddy bank was: sin; a ban on tobacco; big stovepipe hats; disapproval of novels; the eradication of all inner life; the prohibition of playing cards; wide-topped boots; black clothing; firearms; a ban on jewelry; a ban on perfume; a ban on ribbons and on lace; a ban on obscene pictures; the missionary extermination of prehistoric and post-Siberian tribes that had arrived 8,000 years prior through the straits discovered by Vitus Bering; the Bible; a ban on the wearing of gloves; their fat, grave faces; a hatred of the body; bare, white hands; racism; slavery for Negroes bought on the coasts of Africa; witch hunts; Senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin, public controller of individual thought; Texas magistrate Kenneth Starr, son of God.
On Saturday 10 October 1998, the United States Senate unanimously passed the International Religious Freedom Act. The text runs as follows: Sanctions, whether commercial or financial, will be imposed on any country guilty of religious persecution, an independent commission having responsibility for monitoring the ravages of atheism. On Sunday 11 October 1998, Michael Horowitz saluted a great victory over the worldview inherited from the Enlightenment (Hudson Institute).
In 1637, Pre Joseph said to Richelieu: When I turn my eyes to the cities, to the forests, to the seas, and to the glaciers, I start to believe that the world is a fable and that we have lost our reason. In Paris Richelieu called his lutenist and asked him to play the chaconne entitled The Last Kingdom.
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There are two values extolled for the past 500 years by the former English colonies that made their home on New World soil: puritanism and optimism. These two values may be reduced to one: a disquieting joviality. Respect for money, industry, profit, fertility, reproduction, women, health, light, children, education, winning, baseball, vitality, is the credo. It corresponds to nothing that the old Athenians sought to designate 2,400 years prior when they invented the name democracy.
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Then he played the Ombres qui errent, whose principal theme was reused by Franois Couperin under the title Wandering Shades in his last book of pieces for harpsichord. At the same time George Fox was setting up his Society of Friends. The Augustinus appeared.
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One day Richelieu said of Saint-Cyran: The man is Basque, as you can see from his fiery temperament and airy notions.
It so happened that it was at Louvain that Saint-Cyran met Jansenius. They climbed into a post chaise and settled together in Bayonne, in Saint-Cyrans residence at Camprirat which faced the beauty and the violence of the Atlantic Ocean. They nurtured the dream of a tiny society that would revive the origins of Christian thought under Neros empire. They played shuttlecock by way of recreation and became virtuoso players. Madame de Hauranne said she had seen them play 3,223 shots without missing a single one. Jansenius said to Saint-Cyran: We are saltpeter that burns and leaves no residue. The earth is an arena where power and desire confront each other head on. We withdraw into gardens that have eighty different aspects. The God whom we adore has an embrace that is becoming ever narrower. It is the year 300. You are Metrodorus, I am Epicurus, and I burn. I am looking for the daughter of Metrodorus. To which Monsieur de Saint-Cyran made a point of replying: The shuttlecock is all of the present rising toward the accumulated air which gives it its depth and its color. There is a shadow that those who run the fastest do not cast on the ground.
Our societies, fleeing suffering, negativity, fear, impatience, tragedy, melancholy, silence, the half light, the invisible are deserting civilizations that were sublime. They take fright before the most vertiginous cliff faces and in the heart of the deepest jungle. They reject the joys that bring the greatest anguish, contain the greatest desires, are the most beautiful, and always carry a risk of loss and death.
Just as Cincinnatus had only one thought in his head, which was to return to his field: so the hermit to his desert; the fish to water; the reader to his book; the shadow to its corner.
XLIX The king of the Franks finally settled in Paris, which he had made the seat of his kingdom on his return from the war in Aquitaine. It was there that he died. He loved the rustic appearance of the abode, the fact that it had been the choice of the Emperor Julian whose descriptions of it had been reported to him, the beauty of the river and the Merovingian curves of its course. The meanders of the Seine bring irresistibly to mind the curls in the hair of the Frankish kings whose likeness the sculptors of the time offered up to the son of God.
A list for Clovis: he loved the forests, the surrounding vines, the fertile fields, the softness of the sky, the extreme pallor of it all.
He resided in the former palace of Constantius Chlorus on the left bank of the river, facing the island of Lutetia, along the Roman road that leads to Orlans. The vast palace gardens were bounded to the east by the mountain, the
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We must remain beside the gushing spring. Praesentia. The Latin prae is the French prs, close, beside. Everything becomes a path when intimate proximity approaches. I should always be suspicious of anyone who says we at the point of orgasm. Without solitude, without the test of time, without a passion for silence, without excitement and containment in the entire body, without stumbling in fear, without wandering in shadow and invisibility, without memory of animal life, without melancholy, without abandonment in melancholy, there is no joy.
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River Bivre, and the Roman hot springs; to the west by the village of SaintGermain and the shrine of Diana. They contained trees that dated from the time of Camulogenus. There are two dates to be remembered from Cloviss reign: when he planted the fig trees and when he planted the almond trees. He remained faithful to the war ax of the Istevons and to the uncut hair that consecrates strength. He forbade any Roman name to spoil the names in his family tree. He would not suffer anyone to speak in his presence of the last king of the Romans whom he had had executed in 486. Clovis died at the age of forty-five. On 1st December 511 his body was sealed in a trapezoid stone sarcophagus.
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I laud the Frankish idea of the right to asylum. The idea that there were intermediate zones in space that were free of human domination. Places where private revenge was halted and where state revenge was forbidden. Places in nature where not only was humanity proscribed but where even the domination of the gods ceased to hold sway. The Franks did not know that these inviolable places were also hermitages, a horse harnessed in its stable, a kitchen, the taciturnity of the printed page.
The fascination exerted by the sexual organs when they are stripped as bare as works of art which are themselves a means of laying bare is due to the possibility of rekindling, across a distance of several millennia, a nostalgia for things that no longer exist. These are so many attributes, shards, or aftereffects of a mysterious island from which we all have come and on whose shores no one ever now sets foot lost in increasing distance, irreducible difference, age, the passing of time, death, and submission to an inflexible language. Art is the equal of gestation, of parturition, just as sexuality and passion provide a link to the past. This is the paradox of Kong-Suen Long. It is the case that the finger pointing at the thing vanishes not only in the monstrance but already in the name stammered for the first time by the mouth of the child trying to identify it. Every work of art is language at its source, which is to say a world that has become the past. It is impossible to separate a defense of works from the past from the defense of sexual pleasure, written language, or art.
A substitution of letters for images. The gods (images of wild beasts, and then images of the heroes who subdued them) are turned into language. In 312, for the first time in its history, in the West, on the plain at Saxa Rubra, before Pons Milvius, humanity willingly renounced images and devoted not just its life but all of its dreams to litterae. To literature. This literary episode lasted from the twelfth year of the fourth century until the fourteenth year of the twentieth century. Then the image flashed again, began to fascinate once more, and regained all its hypnotic power in the cranial cavity of human beings.
Solitude, chance, indocility, the risk of death, disintoxication, lucidity, silence, loss, nudity, anachorsis, excessus, gifts, immediation, fear and anguish, excitement, are all inviolable values. All inviolable values are secret. A blind spot is preferable to blinkers. Inviolable means asocial.
Bishop Gregory of Tours began his History of the Franks as follows: Decedente, atque immo potius pereunte ab urbibus gallicanis liberalium cultura litterarum. . . . With the culture of letters on the wane, or rather perishing in the cities of the Gauls, most of them cried out in lamentation, saying: Vae diebus nostris, quia periit studium litterarum a nobis, nec reperitur in populis, qui gesta praesentia promulgare possit in paginis! Woe to our day, since the pursuit of letters has perished from among us and no one can be found who can set forth the deeds of the present on the written page (gesta praesentia)!
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The inviolable zone or liber asylum. There are two accounts of Emperor Constantines conversion to Christianity when he was obliged to open battle at Pons Milvius in 312. Either the emperor saw a letter that looks almost exactly like the letter tau: a cross drawn over the sun. (In Eusebius.) Or the emperor had a vision in a dream of two letters. In this second version the dream enjoins the commander of the Roman armies to mark the shields of his soldiers with the letter chi crossed with the letter iota. And so the army would draw its sword (iota) from the first letter of Christos (chi) and win. (In Lactantius.) The transformation brought about by Constantine was simple: he decided that there would be no more images on shields and banners.
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Couperin died in 1733. In 1731 Couperin wrote in his last will and testament: As almost no one has composed more than I have done in several genres, I hope that my family will find in my portfolios something to inspire regret at my passing, if regrets can be of any use to us once our life is over. But we need at least to hold on to that idea if we are to seek to merit a chimerical immortality to which nearly all men aspire. Few beliefs have ever acknowledged such a degree of unbelief. Even Stphane Mallarms deeply moving testament does not possess such lucidity. Franois Couperin, despised by all and having lost even the company of his last pupils, would drink a little wine when evening had fallen. He sat in a white upholstered duchesse. He would say to himself: I fought many years ago in I no longer know what battle in the region of Soissons or Belleu. I asked the shades for a part of their shadow. I resisted the Franks as best I could. I composed the Chemises blanches and the Wandering Shades.
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LV I have not told of the death of Sofiius, secretary (notarius) to the last of the Romans. It is true that we know nothing of his end. And so I shall invent it. On the day that followed the Battle of Soissons, when Syagrius fled before the army of Clovis and Ragnacaire to reach the Visigoth court at Toulouse, Sofiius waited for his master. He guarded the library with scrupulous care. In the evening he took out a boat on the River Aisne passing beyond the marble arch; then, as night fell, he rowed back upstream toward the alabaster castle. When the population of Soissons learned that Clovis had had Syagrius executed after first shaving his head, and when they found out that as he expired he had uttered the enigmatic words, Where are the shades?, they turned to Sofiius. But Sofiius said nothing. The crowd withdrew. He waited. One day he saw a man of learning whom he knew arrive from the court of Alaric. He invited him to sit down on the window seat in the library and sent for some wine and a piece of dried bacon. It was the turn of the man of learning to report the words that Syagrius had uttered as he died. He questioned him in turn as to what these umbrae (shades) might signify. The shades, replied Sofiius, are those out there. And he pointed his finger out the window. To the west one could see two ancient cultivated oaks that filled the castle courtyard with shade. He explained that the Roman kings pleasure each evening in the summer when he emerged from his burning hot bath was to sit in the shade of the oak tree
with him and with others, just as Virgils shepherds used to do, and rest, or drink cool red wine, or recite the old poems. They fell silent. They looked through the window at the oak trees and at the little children playing with a rag ball in the courtyard. Sofiius the Notary continued: When you feel restored we can go and have a look at those damp shadows if you wish. The learned man from Toulouse nodded his head and drank. They got up, left the room, and went down into the courtyard. They said to each other: Nothing is more pleasurable than to take a stroll when evening falls. It is not only the vault of the sky that is darker but the head too, and ones legs are stiff. I have no money. Would you be willing to make me the donation of a few bronze coins? Sofiius the Notary said that it would be done. The scholar from Toulouse had used the old word stips. He continued: I shall go to Treves. It would be better that you did not stay here and that you came with me. I think as you do. King Clodovecchus has chosen Soissons as his capital city, and he will be returning. He does not carry the old temples in his heart. He prefers basilicas. He loves the shape of the cross. And vases. It is said that he loves vases. The world has changed. They had reached the oak trees, and they sat down on the moss that grew in their shade. There were bees that buzzed. What is the purpose of these bees which poison us and sting us in the cheek? the scholar from Toulouse asked all of a sudden. To make honey, replied Sofiius the Notary. And what is the purpose of trees that are so tall that when one looks up from the very bottom to the top, as I am doing, it makes one truly dizzy? asked the scholar from Toulouse. To give shade, replied Sofiius the Notary. They are so tall that they could damage the courtyard. And it would be impossible to chop them down without endangering the walls that enclose it. That is why they continue to grow. They will go on growing forever. They will knock down the walls, and the stones will be broken apart and fall in ruins. Trees that cannot be used by lance carriers, makers of stockades, chariot
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builders, lute makers, or boat builders know the exuberant usefulness of useless things. Virgil took refuge in their shade, as did the cool of springtime, the bees that bother you, those who do nothing, letters, those who touch each other when they have drunk a little, the dead, fruit, children, frogs, snails, the arts, you, and I. If the dead are no more, the living have scarcely more existence, murmured the man from Toulouse. All they require, more or less, is a bowl of gruel each day, a spot by a wall, a little light, and a book. The dead would find you ungrateful. And my master will think that I lack perseverance, said Sofiius the Notary. You say too many foolish things. You shall go to Treves alone. I will make my way to Paris. When night had fallen, they reached the palace. Sofiius counted out some bronze coins and the scholar left beneath the light of the moon. Two days later Sofiius himself set out. On his departure he took four books in the form of scrolls: De rerum natura by Titus Lucretius Carus, the novels of Albucius Silus, the books of the Metamorphoseon by Publius Ovidius, and the annals of Tacitus. He followed the River Aisne as far as the Oise where he took a boat and reached the hills of Paris. He rented a little house on the edge of the forest where he overlooked the city and the temples of Julian. He had a table for reading, and he lived off stewed fruit. He planted a vine which he abandoned. He read out loud. He had a hunter make a sloping roof under which he placed a vat to store rainwater. The inhabitants of Paris used to climb up to see him. Citizens would ask him to teach their children how to form the shapes of numbers and draw the old letters. He taught two little girls and eight little boys. In exchange for the lessons that he gave to their children, the parents would offer him pieces of game, fish, old amphoras of wine to which he was partial. He had ten years of peace. One night, in the year 497, the man from Toulouse knocked on his door. Sofiius lit a candle. He let him in. He embraced him. He poured him a bowl of old wine. Ah! there you are, you old chatterbox! he said to him. The man from Toulouse, in a breathless voice and with his beard all awry, warned him that the king was searching for him. All memories of Rome were to be scattered. The language itself was to be destroyed because, having been the language of the pagans, it had become the language of demons. Sofiius already knew about the oaths that the Merovingian king had sworn at the Battle of Tolbiac. He set down his earthenware bowl. He mentioned the name of Constantine, the dream that he had had and interpreted so curiously. All the ills had come from that dream which had made so much of the Greek letter tau. The letter chi, said the man from Toulouse.
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the violent sadness of his death. Talking of the old days makes people very sad, said Sofiius. We should think of a way of going back. Will you come with me as far as Rome? It gives me no pleasure to contemplate ruins. I am not a philosopher. I am seeking to live out my days and to enjoy the pleasures of the passing hours. I shall go to Rheims. You are crazy. The Franks are looking for you. Life has tired me. The light has burned my eyes. I used to enjoy talking to Syagrius. To feel death close is perhaps to be more alive than in a lifetime spent fleeing it. I should have liked to give the last king the old ritual of the ashes that are borne on the air and blend with the translucence of the element that bathes our faces and in which cries and infants are born. It is in the eye of the storm that one sometimes finds the bosom of peace and gentleness. I no longer want to be endlessly on the move and to hide my life away. I fear languor and anxieties. I have cast aside the tablet and the stylus as the little butterflies do when they emerge all fresh and quivering from the casing of their pupa. There will not be a single wise man left in the universe if all the wise men are running. If all the wise men flee, how can the temples follow them? I shall place the mask of the approaching cloud over my face, because the other side of the cloud is always in the sun. What use is it to be afraid? What use is it to gallop like the barbarians who have invaded this land that has already been invaded a hundred times over? My body will be a small book of fragments that my breath will read as it departs. The shadow will preserve a memory of my dreams, and it will lengthen. My box of medicines and the memory of beauty will keep me company. I shall take hold of a boy or caress a woman in silence without sullying my lips with words from the Upper Rhine. When the enemy is lying in wait for me, I shall unbend my knees and go to the kitchen to pour myself a plate of wine which I shall set to warm on the stove; I shall dip my crust in it.
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The letter iota, said Sofiius. I am leaving for the south, the man from Toulouse told him. I am going to find the sun on the far side of the sea which is in the middle of the earth. Sofiius shook his head in the negative but did not say a word. The man from Toulouse declared that his back and the joints in his fingers could no longer tolerate the climate of the Gauls and that now he had been gripped by fear as well as by a longing for the sun. They recalled the names of the men of letters from former times and they quoted anecdotes that filled them with joy. The scholar from Toulouse who had left Treves had known an old woman, when he was himself very young and learning his declamations, who boasted of having felated Augustine in Milan, in the days when he was still a pagan. The scholar had also known Olybrius and praised his gravity and his virtue, as well as
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Sofiius made a gift of his books which the man from Toulouse, white with fear, refused. He confessed that he was afraid he would be killed if they were discovered in his baggage. Christians were not to be trifled with. They said goodbye to each other, because they knew that they would die without seeing one another again, and clasped each other by the arm, as was the habit of the men of long ago who lived on the banks of the Tiber and had a horror of servitude. When the man from Toulouse had departed, Sofiius burned the books belonging to Syagrius that he had brought with him, after reciting each of them twice to himself. He then did as he had said he would do. The king had banned all memory of the pagans, so he masked his face. He transformed himself into a monk. He arrived in Rheims. In the basilica, during the service, he joined his fingers together, and deep inside himself recited the adventures of Orpheus anxiously climbing back up his stony path with his gaze fixed ahead. Or the legend of Echo turned into rocks. His expression was reserved. He had a prominent forehead. His liberty was indomitable. He never opened his mouth, and nothing could give him away. His brothers said he was so close to God that he forgot to cross himself. They did not come near him and surrounded him with silence and evasion. He drank a jar of wine a day. Then two jars. His counsel was much heeded for he never opened his mouth, confining himself to a bow of the head. He had no sorrows. He breathed gently, inhaling and exhaling without a sound. He was regarded as holy and modest, and kept his eyes perpetually downcast. He did not like to look upon the idol that hung on the wall and made him think of death; he found it hard to understand how a people that boasted of being free could choose a tortured and suffering slave as an image of omnipotence and bliss. He would go into the courtyard and squat against the trees, keeping his eyes open in their shade. His lips could sometimes be seen to move. He was still alive when Theodoric had Boethius executed. Sofiius died in 533, at Rheims, in the enclosed meadow surrounding the basilica, under the shade of an elm tree. He collapsed suddenly, having fallen asleep on his feet as he came out of the kitchen. He was mourned by his brothers with chanting. The pontiff Remy outlived him by twelve days.
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S y m p o s i u m : Uns o c ia l T ho u g ht , Unc o m mo n L i v e s, Pa r t 2

Translated by Ann Jefferson

Common Knowledge 12:3 DOI 10.1215/0961754X-2006-008 2002 Grasset and Fasquelle

Unsocial Thought, Uncom mon Live s: Pa r t 2

Living hidden late as Lucretius said. Larvatus, in Descartess word.

Unsocial Thought, Uncom mon Live s: Pa r t 2

Unsocial Thought, Uncom mon Live s: Pa r t 2

To live in a corner in angulo of the world.

Unsocial Thought, Uncom mon Live s: Pa r t 2

Unsocial Thought, Uncom mon Live s: Pa r t 2

Unsocial Thought, Uncom mon Live s: Pa r t 2

Unsocial Thought, Uncom mon Live s: Pa r t 2

Unsocial Thought, Uncom mon Live s: Pa r t 2

Unsocial Thought, Uncom mon Live s: Pa r t 2

Unsocial Thought, Uncom mon Live s: Pa r t 2

Unsocial Thought, Uncom mon Live s: Pa r t 2

Unsocial Thought, Uncom mon Live s: Pa r t 2

In ancient Japan the palanquin was called the silhouette box.

The gaze of all fixed on the reflection of no one.

Unsocial Thought, Uncom mon Live s: Pa r t 2

Unsocial Thought, Uncom mon Live s: Pa r t 2

Unsocial Thought, Uncom mon Live s: Pa r t 2

It is impossible to be both a prison warden and an escaped man.

or to his contempt; or to solitude.

Unsocial Thought, Uncom mon Live s: Pa r t 2

Unsocial Thought, Uncom mon Live s: Pa r t 2

Unsocial Thought, Uncom mon Live s: Pa r t 2

Unsocial Thought, Uncom mon Live s: Pa r t 2

Unsocial Thought, Uncom mon Live s: Pa r t 2

Unsocial Thought, Uncom mon Live s: Pa r t 2

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