Stained glass – Healing in France – Signature
Stained glass
You can die of either heat or cold. Although it is the most beautiful object produced by human hands and even has something of the sacred about it, a boat is nothing but a metal shell, its exterior set ablaze by the sun, which makes a fiery furnace of its interior. In the middle of the port of Djibouti, or along the axis of the Red Sea, not far from Cape Guardafui, west of Aden, at the height of the hot season, even dawn is oppressive and night gives no respite. What’s more, bread has to be baked on board, and working at the boilers down in the hold, or next to the oven, suffocates you. Outside it is no more comfortable. In the fifties, when a ship reached land, at least one sailor a day would be taken to hospital to be rehydrated; we had to separate those who, intoxicated by fire, fought each other with knives. How were we to cool down? Sea water or water from the hold would burn our skin. Yet if we visited American liners, we caught bad colds from the air-conditioning. We despised such luxury and bodies ignorant of the terrible conditions of the world. The real is so highly prized that those who live in comfort, however powerful they are, cannot imagine the disdain in which they are held by those who live in harsh conditions. Lethargic officers in the cool air of the wardroom would leaf through geographic periodicals as they consumed iced drinks and glanced absent-mindedly at the brick-red land beyond the scuttle. This was how the new world came to visit, a cosy shelter for fragile skins.
The keen, constant, implacable wind combs the Canadian plain beneath the motionless winter sun, the immaculate dark-blue sky. The snow brings clemency. Or lacerating knives: ear-piercers, nose-shapers, cheek-slashers. They cut right to the skeleton, bones separate, the body falls: cold, death; death, cold.
In temperate regions, where the sea currents have a warming effect, there are sensations that affect the epidermis; others go straight to the muscles and exert pressure on them, and still others disturb the nervous system, dilate veins or shrivel them with cold; the most fearsome of them attack the last citadel: the skeletal structure. You have to have been cold, even beyond your bones, deep into the axis of the spinal cord, to know that this is not merely a figure of speech. The hard turns to liquid, you fall, the mounted police pick up what’s left. On days of wrath in Quebec, a public warning imprisons everyone indoors – wherever they are – to avoid certain death outdoors. Here and there, on roads and around villages at dawn in Siberia, cadavers block the path: from the hard drug of alcohol, taken to forget the drug of politics, they go straight to being frozen solid – humiliated bones in the valley where tears themselves freeze.
How were our ancestors able to survive, from Labrador to Wisconsin, with only wood fires to keep them warm? All the children born at the beginning of autumn died. On James Bay, the base of the foundations for the dam to be built on the Grande Rivière – a wall so heavy that it makes the earth shake – revealed the remains of Indian dwellings, almost as ancient as the Neolithic. Our skin, now so sensitive to the cold, prevents us from understanding those naked bodies in animal skins, battered by the blizzard. The ancient world, from which we fragile creatures are sheltered, is revealed anew when we contemplate these ashes.
Heat inspires fear; cold, pure anguish. At sea, fewer deaths are caused by water than by the chance wind that whips it up – one can freeze to death in it; but before you fall over in one last shudder that shakes you to your very roots and makes you lose your grip, fear comes and kills you. It precedes ice and signals its coming. At high latitudes, in the dreamy grey of the Arctic, long whaling ships have been found with fixed, stiff, open-eyed corpses, still sitting on their thwart, their hands on the oars, poised to row hard, the sides of the skiff piled high with supplies and furs – everything was going well on board; dead with fright, the ghosts glide on the calm sea, shipwrecked through sheer terror. I shall die of cold, I am frightened of white, I love winter.
I have been agonizingly cold when going no further than the mountains of Auvergne. One of my books, written at that altitude, died there of the spring: my hands numb, shivering under seven layers of rough blankets, my feet hard and lifeless, a hastily knitted bonnet on my burning head, in a room without heating, in the bitter April rain mixed with snow and the harsh North wind. A book on Plato’s mathematics and philosophy was turned to stone after three hundred pages, like a succession of statues, beneath the frozen, trembling immobility of all my senses. There is nothing in the mind that has not first of all been set free by the senses. If they become rigid, then that’s the end of mathematics. Mental rigour requires a back that is not shivering. That spring, the sun was hiding behind the mountains that stopped me seeing my loves, beyond the realm of being. Who can talk about Plato in the cold? The condition for intellectual work, as far as the senses are concerned, is to be found in a warm room, the transcendental glows red in the stove – I learned this from my humiliated bones.
Hot-cold. Sitting hunched over the burning bricks, with my arms around my legs, naked, covered in sweat, motionless, near suffocation; calmer, adapted to the furnace, feeling as though I were swimming in its water, as if wrapped in a shroud, with my eyes shut; deep in a damp torpor, listening distractedly to the desultory conversations of my companions, drowning in the heat, but far from sleep; suddenly, after a freezing shower, diving into an ice-cold swimming pool, my skin is objectivized: comes unstuck, detaches itself, floats in the water like a coat, separated, at a distance from my body; the subject curls up within, anxious but calm, dense like a small black diamond in the centre of the plexus, leaving all the rest to become, independently of it, an object there in the world – stable, motionless, relaxed, pliant, blissful in the liquid.
We left paradise for the tree of knowledge; because of knowledge and in imitation of God, we shall never again enter the garden on the river’s edge. All night long, night after night, on the plain of the mid-Garonne, an area with a temperate environment, at a little less than forty-five degrees latitude North and a little more than the Greenwich meridian in longitude, the temperature is so moderate, after the prune and peach trees have lost their flowers, that bare skin cannot tell whether the weather is hot or cold, or even mild, cool or warm. The body does not seek to clothe itself, it passes, like an angel, in the dark. Only when the breeze traces on it a pattern like watered silk does it notice that it is running out of doors. Why did we leave the garden where the water murmured?
Awakening takes place in a bath of skin and bed; you are buried in a double thickness of flesh and wool; the sheet is a continuation of the epidermis, the body spreads into its soft pockets and folds. A tip emerges from the shadow, heat and strangeness, the end of a journey under water, the swimmer bumps against the bank, carried there by the current. Bones and tendons inside the calves and thighs; the small of the back thrusts forward in a satisfying stretch; weightless food passes the solar plexus; a calm symmetry settles there. The interior, lived, explored and discovered in the blindness of sleep, folds in, invaginates to leave room for the exterior; the soft, now outside, will have to strut its stuff on the stage, pretending to be hard.
To fall asleep is to acquiesce, waking tends towards refusal. To dive is to consent; to drag oneself up on to the rocky coast. To be born each morning with the day. Joy.
The body is far from behaving as a simple passive receptor. Philosophy should not offer it to the given of the world in its recent repulsive manifestation, sitting or slumped over, apathetic or ugly. It exercises, trains, it can’t help itself. It loves movement, goes looking for it, rejoices on becoming active, jumps, runs or dances, only knows itself, immediately and without language, in and through its passionate energy. It discovers its existence when its muscles are on fire, when it is out of breath – at the limits of exhaustion.
It breathes. Breathing, both voluntary and involuntary, can take different forms, transforming itself by working like the bellows of a forge. After the piercing cry of a baby’s first breath, its first sigh, the body begins to enjoy breathing, its first pleasure. It enjoys it so much that it tries to lose its breath and get it back again – like a desired woman who flees and reappears – enjoys getting its second wind and beginning again, so as to achieve, through successive, breathless stages, a new rhythm, another world, a space in which everything becomes easy. There is nothing wider than a generous thorax. The first utterance of Genesis, at the dawn of the world, above the hubbub, says God, ruagh, a hoarse, alliterative breath, on the soft palate, at the back of the throat, before language, in front of the root of the tongue, where the gasping intake of breath acknowledges the divine; ruagh, breath, breathing, wind, breeze of the spirit, at its last gasp, dominating the wild beating of the heart.
The precursors of death are suffocation and choking, and the precursor of those is the kind of anguish that takes your breath away.
Jumping, first of all an elemental part of running, constitutes the second bodily pleasure after breathing, after the rituals of early childhood and the joy of our first steps. The animal makes itself as small as possible, crouches ready to spring. The build-up for the standing or running jump brings together the conditions for potential flight, the zero point at its apex, the decision to jump, hoped-for success, anxiety – the momentary loss of balance. The build-up, more pleasurable than the actual jump, thrills the muscles more intensely than does the jump itself – as if the force of the potential, on the ground, outweighed that of the act, in the air – the promise of intoxication being more intoxicating than the ecstasy itself. In a long race, ecstasy, strictly speaking, comes at the end of the sequence of small repeated jumps, low to the ground – it is the rapid intermediary leap; or the throwing of the ball into the basket, the goal keeper’s flying catch, at the top corner of the net; but most especially the slow marriage of the stomach and back with the taut wire in the jumping pit. Have you ever seen an angel with your own eyes? Tradition defines an angel as a body that can instantaneously do everything that the mind conceives, projects or desires. If the angel thinks, for example, that it is alighting in a particular place, then it is immediately to be found there. The archangel I saw was named Tracanelli – the name is significant and if he is reading this, I greet him and, for once, it is not an angel doing the greeting. A spiritual being, he flew, with no apparent effort, over the fine, slender, flexible bar, and his arms, which had just let go of the pole, sprouted wings. When he launched himself and in his flight, there was no evidence of gravity, the universal action of which seemed for a moment to be suspended: a seraphic miracle. No effort, no sweat, we were surprised when he fell back down again. You could say that in that moment an angel passed – you could have heard a pin drop in the stadium.
I did not choose Hermes as my totem, emblem or theorem for speculative reasons alone. Nor with the historical foresight, necessary in philosophy, that made me say a quarter of a century ago that we were at the beginning of an era in which Hermes would occupy the dominant position over Prometheus, although the latter had held sway over our world and thinking for more than a hundred years. I took him for my ensign also because he flies, the first angel, with wings on his feet. Hermes precedes all other angels, just as they leave traces of Hermes in their wake.
He should always be depicted with wings on his feet: the lower limbs launch flight. What a mistake to attach those vast wings to the back! Ecstasy builds up in the dark core of the lower muscles, quivering and trembling before bursting forth. Death comes as a collapse, you fall, the tension in your legs, your life support, is released.
You who profess to speak – professors, actors, solicitors, all kinds of rhetors – you whose daily activity uses song, who must make your voice carry outside your body to fill a space stretching as far as the back wall and who have to lift a vibrating column, concentrated sounds and exquisite inflections, like a whirlpool of fire above your throat, be aware that everything comes from your base, positioning and posture on the earth, from your balance, from your instinctive gripping of the ground with the soles of your feet, from your grasping hold of long roots with your toes; be aware that a mysterious, burning spring comes from a mysterious chthonic current and rises along the muscular columns of the legs, thighs, buttocks and abdomen; that this voice that shouts or speaks or signifies owes its deep inspiration to these foundations, and that today, this evening or tonight you resemble the ancient prophetess, Pythia, who could not say or signify except when above the vapours emanating from the depths of the earth; you can tap into them with the lower limbs: the voice takes off if the wings of the word sprout from your ankles; you will observe that you can speak, sing, incarnate the word in your body, thanks to the knees and metatarsals. Music and meaning, like ecstasy, are products of these forces. The soaring voice comes from the earth, through the intermediary of the volcano-body. The soul is a life-sized wind instrument.
Nothing is more fun that jumping on a hard, bouncy bed. All children have enjoyed doing this until the mattress collapsed – a bad memory. The double ecstasy of the muscular effort in the thighs and calves, a powerful, almost metallic leap, a pause in the air that seems eternal, during which the body assumes positions and performs.
Nothing brought my brother and me closer to each other than this pleasure enjoyed together. We had never laughed so much in our lives. Do you remember? We made faces at each other mid-air. Coming down, we rarely hit the bed in unison, one of us would collapse, losing momentum, while the other, in the air, opened out like a star. A delightful lesson in circumstances.
Civilization sometimes makes minor progress: does there exist on the earth any object more marvellous than the trampoline, has human technology ever invented a device more divine? Pity me, young people, pity the man unfortunate enough to have missed, because of the burden of his years, a trampolinian upbringing.
Two beautiful, statuesque women, with narrow waists, jutting breasts, firm bottoms and strong legs, in strict navy-blue one-piece swimming costumes with the national coat of arms (they belong to the Olympic diving team), are training on the trampoline. They train as they do every day: they jump together, facing each other, just like my brother and me all those years ago, slowly assuming positions at the apex of their flight and carefully breaking up gestures and postures into their component parts, glancing sideways at each other, symmetrically, as if they were imitating each other, as if a mirror were separating them.
As everything – spins, jack-knife and swallow dives, or somersaults – follows on in a sequence governed by habit and their virtuosity, they become bored with this mechanical exercise, however difficult it is, and talk. I don’t know what about, but they appear interested, involved and chat to each other – indifferent to their bodies, as though nothing were happening. A dialogue more than two metres in the air, where speaking bodies are flying, immobile in acrobatic and natural positions, demonstrates how angels speak. They were chatting about love, confidently, happily, like little putti laughing and skylarking.
This is where speech comes from.
There still exist, thank God, those simple merry-go-rounds with small seats, suspended from chains, which carry a single person. Around you, you can sometimes count twenty-five of these hanging armchairs. The machine spins like a top, the chains fly outwards through centrifugal force, like a crown, around the merry-go-round, and seek the horizontal; anyone riding on it loses his gravity. He has the impression he is flying, weightlessly. He has exchanged one force for another, he weighs differently, a false flight, a second chain, flight-footed.
The real begins when my friend sitting in front of me, and within my orbit, allows herself to be drawn into my arms, or pushed with my feet: she takes off in an epicycle and, in return, I move backwards or regress, aberrant planets in the sunny, circular system. I become weightless and, instead of a simple centrifuge, the movements seem to me to come from both my friend’s strength and mine, from our special relationship: she pulls me, throws me, catches me, intercepts me; I leave her, find her again, fragile and dishevelled, hardly corporeal; I fly if she wants me to, she flies if I want her to, we fly at will, effortless, eye to eye, toe to toe, weightless, our interconnection alone creates our ecstasy, we alone are responsible for our existence, the rest has disappeared. Here is seraphic love.
We were a band of six or seven kids, in search more of amusement than study, the merry-go-round was set up on the gravelled area between our houses and the Garonne. Off we went, off we flew. In groups of three or four, we stuck together, we let go of each other, we burst apart like a bomb, one suddenly leapt up on all fours, another slid along on his back, this one rolled like a ball, that one, a jumping jack with his arms outstretched, did the splits; all together in a row, separately or opposite each other – star jumps, back flips, festoons, whizzing around frenetically on the spot – we were like angels, putti skylarking in the clouds in groups or laughing clusters. It was much more fun than jumping up and down in the morning on your parents’ bed, alone – a rather dismal activity.
I saw this merry-go-round again forty years later in a mountain village in the valley of Livigno, where Latins laugh, dance and mingle in close proximity to the frosty morality of Swiss Germanophone Upper Engadine – a Romansch mixture. Six or seven kids were playing at chasing one another; two lovers, like serious cherubims, were flying. I knew then that I was born of a group of skylarking angels, occupying the clouds, going past in a crowd or suddenly, as a joke, bursting forth in a single ornamental orbit. Now over the age of fifty, seeing this spectacle again, all my knowledge of astronomy enters my body, and the adult returns to his childhood, when he was a planet. The child, becoming serious, provides the adult with a new, levitating body – living, archangelic love.
Counteract weight with another force, so as to do what you wish at last, by means of a weak third force – that is what spirit is.
Walking creates rhythm, accompanies the voice with cymbals, drums – a whole percussion section; walking also gives rhythm to silence. The double beat of the foot and heart, of walking and blood. We can never know our bodies unless we take them miles away from their birthplace. Look at statues dating back three centuries or more: wide feet, solid thighs; we are forgetting how to walk, an activity which used to give us a nobility of gait and carriage. The world has given up walking, our forebears from Asia crossed the Bering Strait and distributed themselves all over America; one great-grandfather of mine, a grenadier in the Imperial guard, marched from Granada to Moscow. Aeroplanes, it is said, have shrunk the world; on the contrary, all means of locomotion have increased its size out of all proportion to our footsteps. Our feeble legs no longer seek to cross space.
But it is better to walk in the mountains so that our legs become almost like arms, our body imitating the quadrumane; climbing up steep gradients and feeling our feet gripping the ground, to a certain extent the lower limbs enjoy no longer having to carry us, and discover another function. Feet make the best hands and hands the most reliable feet. The lowest muscles always aim highest: pillars, launching pads, towards the spiritual part. Hermes always has wings on his feet.
Running: a third pleasure – a combination of breathing and jumping. When the wheels of a train pass over the expansion joints that occur at regular intervals in the rails, the shock makes a sound which, at the beginning, is a rhythmic accompaniment to the progress of the train; as the train gathers speed, it appears to fly silently over the gap, the journey becomes smoother. It is the same thing with our foot on the ground. Those who are not used to running imagine that those who do so regularly touch the ground with their feet, and in fact, they are not far wrong: the foot fleetingly strikes the ground. The runner does not perceive it in this way, but has rather the same experience as the passenger suddenly riding smoothly in the train carriage. At a certain moment during his run, he could swear that his shoes are no longer touching the ground, he flies through the air, parallel to the horizon, his lower limbs have melted into silence or absence; both sprinting and long-distance running project him into the new world of birds, which skim along the surface of the track, high and low. Running does not speed up walking but rather generalizes jumping. What the supporting elements of the body, the lower limbs, those moving forces and columns of life, are able to achieve differentially in jumping, is fully integrated in the act of running. They work without drawing attention to themselves, they carry but are absent. Like the subject that thinks but is not there. They do, without being. This is what the wings on your feet say – this is the message of Hermes the runner.
Young people find it easier to run than to walk. As you get older, you think rather than acting instinctively, or you learn how to throw away your crutches and legs.
It is commonly believed that porterage turns people into slaves. Indians crushed by bales of jute or Chinese doubled over under their yokes – have you ever been a porter? We are losing the habit of carrying. You do not know your body if your pectoral girdle has never been subjected to weight and been under pressure.
A piano produces sound, but bends under the constraint of several tons, hard and soft. This philosopher pays homage to the master with the sensitive hands, but also to the builder, and to the removalist as well.
If you ever have to carry someone on your shoulders from the top of a mountain, down to the valley, you will think at first that you are dying, the torture endured by muscles that do not know how to work when walking down a slope is unbearable; then you get your strength back, as is always the case, a second wind and addiction to this new labour, gradually and for the first time previously unknown muscle fibres, unaccustomed angles, slumbering joints, zones of silence in the middle of your flesh make strange yet familiar music, never before heard yet immediately recognized, the mobile, non-homogeneous porterage column separates into its component parts, a whole world comes to life within it, arranges and adapts itself, redistributes its responsibilities under the implacable, crushing weight; the body becomes an architectural structure, moving masonry, a ship; the skeleton becomes a firm framework, with tie-beams and rafters; the muscles form the wall and partitions, a whole fluid network of flexible woodwork; the tendons, changing their angles through time, supply supple, pneumatic, almost liquid, foundations, running the risk at any moment of toppling over; the body becomes a tripod, armchair, sedan chair, hammock, triumphal arch, cathedral, boat, cradle and tower, a strong and solid foundation for a building, a fluid support for a ship or ball; the body, then, throws itself underneath, sub-jects itself, knows suddenly what one must sub-ject, and how to do it, recognizes itself as thrown beneath – sub-jectus, subject. I carry therefore I am.
Porter, ensign-bearer, voice tube: bearing a burden, an ensign, a voice.
How happy you are when transporting your dancing partner or beloved, flying is nothing if you cannot make others fly, ecstasy is completed by the static moment of ecstasy, the call to flight. Gravity brings a couple together.
He who lays down his burden grows taller.
Weighed down for so long by sciences and books, great authors with immense corpuses, weighed down by so very many fathers, living and dead languages, hard science and soft knowledge, weighed down for so long by memory and history; when the burden is at last laid down, at our feet, we become children again. Immediately happy in the sensible world.
I took a girl, my child, to the summit of the mountain covered with ice, all the way down to the valley where the mountain streams sing.
This incorporated educational duo does a pas de deux in the happy valley.
Male, weaker sex, do you know how to carry? Only women have this knowledge, and on occasion, experience incorporated porterage when two ages are added together.
The ruagh was uttered from the depths of the throat in breathless gasps before the latter thought of speaking; like fire and wind the thorax escapes from its lake of tears; each leap is torn out of the belly of the earth; walking is in cadence with the rhythms of the heart; running cancels out the lower muscles that launch you on your way; the body acquires bearing when it lays down its weight of knowledge and self-awareness and begins to dance, a compendium of all the primary pleasures – total elation. Joy inspires, quivers, dances. Life dances like a curtain of flames, death stiffens; intelligence dances; stupidity, repetitive, stands still; intuition dances, logic and memory merely programme robots; words dance at their birth and collapse into stereotypes; desire dances, indifference sleeps.
Dancing, the music of the body, reigns before language. It measures the beginning of time: runs and jumps to a repetitive rhythm, becomes redundant, makes the same movements again, takes new steps, rolls up into a ball and from time to time surprises you with a sudden attitude, the body inventing a new figure; dancing sows the eternal return of rhythm with the seeds of the unexpected – this is the beginning of time.
A body is not born until it has danced.
The lift for which, in your usual form of locomotion, the sole of the foot alone is responsible, is distributed over the whole surface of the skin when we swim. The responsibility for porterage, in a medium that would offer no resistance to weight if it were concentrated on the banal polygon, is transferred to the body which suddenly, in its entirety, becomes a foot. Sandal, in Turkish, means a boat. The head, above water, in the lighter air, sits on a skin, the leather of the submerged shoe. Thus the skin rejoices and negotiates, one area at a time, the weak support provided by the fluid, integrating all these small impressions, each of which relies on the others for overall flotation. Swimming involves the whole skin, every tiny part of it, and all at once. A baptism that takes us back to a time before we were born. Should we, conversely, rethink the feet as scale models of the whole body, providing it with floats when fluid becomes hard? Freed from any obligation, the whole skin will touch, differentially, not carrying any weight, complete in itself. Therefore tattooed.
It could be said that standing and walking, because of gravity, impose on us the axial symmetry that sculpts our form and appearance, linking us all to the centre of the earth. Swimming in water and dancing in air release us from this commonplace, and replace the straight line with a point in that indeterminate place, constituted by passing through the birth scuttle, that I previously called the soul. All our symmetries change. Breaststroke, glissades, jetés, diving, transform us into radiant beings – or rather radiolaria. If we lived in the water for several million years, would we become starfish? We’ve all seen dancers whose torso disappeared as they moved. Cylinders set on the ground, eyes and knees as symmetrical as backs and breasts: the solid imposes a heavy architectural angularity, whereas we become spheres around a point in the voluble fluid which naturally inclines towards roundness. Everything that decreases gravity, or nullifies it, leads back to this centre that comes out of the earth and is incorporated in our autonomy, that is encircled by our movements in the water and controls jumping. The head and tarsi on the axis lay claim to centrality, but there they are on the periphery, neither base nor summit; everything is reordered in relation to the solar plexus, not far from the sexual organs: if we were to float or dive for a million years, would we become a little less rational – emotive and tender?
So, curled up, slowly swimming in the mother’s womb, the fœtus is wrapped around the same point; curls around its soul before birth, determines it at the moment of birth, rediscovers it when swimming or dancing, in the magic of a thousand spherical symmetries. Don’t swim overarm, don’t dogpaddle, don’t obediently maintain the competitive and proud posture of axial symmetry; coil up in the liquid you remember from your embryonic days, in search of the buried soul – it is there that true progress is to be found.
Attentiveness bends the body into a convex arc that places this point at the focus, or centre of the circle. The point leaves me and goes to seek its fortune in the world.
The point of spherical symmetry, around which swimming, diving or dance unfold their flight, and the existence or soul of which is revealed by birth, or by passing through the crack opened up in the side of the burning boat, moves outside the body as a result of positions, movements, exercises. From our fœtal origin, we have known how to move around this pole, we know how to bring it into existence outside ourselves. We are born, we give birth. My soul, a pole of subjectivity; soon to become a pole of objectivity.
A clumsy person plays ball by moving it around himself, an aberrant planet receiving its law from the subject sun; discordant, rigid, wilful, controlling, he will never learn anything. He does not know how to bring things into being. He refers things to himself. A statue, a robot. The ball, on the other hand, plays with the clever players as they pass by, wandering planets around the small new sun, harmonious, flexible objects around the ball-subject. These players will be able to learn everything because they have abandoned their own law and given up controlling things in order to adapt, becoming submissive, and therefore subjects in this new sense to the law of what is fleeting, and already far away, and in which they recognize their former soul. A soul that is soft to the touch up close; visible, sonorous and sometimes perfumed from afar. These players have given birth to the relationship and the object. The almost-subject point becomes an almost-object, a relationship and soon, a thing. These players know how to give. As a result, they know how to receive the given. Clever and attentive, quickly catching on.
To know how to be born and to bring things into being, to recognize a place of schizogenesis, in the body, around which the subject is organized, and which leaves the body and becomes relationship and object, my inner core suddenly taking up position a certain distance away, absenting itself from my generous self in whom the totally alien and remote can, when it wishes, also receive shelter and lurk nearby and inside . . . The space of the five senses constructs the distances around it into a set, close to taste and touch, far from hearing, perfumes and sight, within which this place moves and gets it bearings.
If you ever played team sports in your youth you will be familiar with the personal state in which your body suddenly becomes angelic and succeeds in everything it undertakes: without fatigue, without experiencing any obvious effort, you can jump higher, go everywhere, run tirelessly and reach every goal. I remind you again of the tradition according to which angels can immediately bend their bodies to their will. So you will remember having been given an angel’s body for a few seasons, having passed without knowing how into another world, into a space without error or weakness, where the craziest plans were effortlessly successful, precise gestures, subtle movements, delicate and always accurate decisions – life lived a metre off the ground, in a state of levitation. The ball itself pulls the arm to the goal. Music composes for the author without his doing anything.
Individual ecstasy leaves an imperishable memory – of sport and one’s body, of the intellect or emotions – it is the best thing that happens in your life. You can even spend your time collecting such highs – a good and fruitful existence; ecstasy à deux is rarer and through modesty I leave it to your imagination. Do you know that a seraphic state can suddenly alight upon a whole group?
I shall remember until my dying day the two times this bolt out of the blue happened: to five of us and a round ball, and to fifteen and an oval ball. I remember particularly the dense silence in the narrow, compact space in which we danced together, a certain deafness or blindness as we entered the world of miracles. Usually, when the ball is passed – and it flies quickly so as not to be intercepted – it moves from one pair of skilful hands to another; acute, vigilant glances are exchanged, often preceded by a call, word, cry, brief interjection, vowel and even a coded hand gesture. The ball runs with them, after these signals, at the same time as they do, along the network of fluctuating channels that they trace out. Suddenly the ball takes their place, all other signals are extinguished. The whole team enters a box, a dim cave, the clamour of the spectators becomes distant like the far-off seashore, the opposing team dances like a group of shadows without strength, ghosts; it is at that moment that my body positions itself at the point where the ball will pass, I throw it into the vacuum that another cherubim will fill, immediately and unquestionably, we no longer look at each other, no longer hear each other, no longer speak to each other or call to each other – our eyes are shut, our mouths closed, our ears blocked, we have no language, we are monads – we know, anticipate, love each other; we anticipate each other at lightning speed, we cannot go wrong, the whole team cannot go wrong, it is playing: not me or my partners but the team itself. I move to the right, I know that another player knows that I have done so, that the ball will await me. The ball is travelling so fast that it weaves between us bonds of unassailable certainty; as this certainty is seamless, the ball can travel around even more rapidly, and as it travels more rapidly it weaves . . . No-one who has not experienced such ecstasy can know what being together means. I have the impression of knowing from the inside, as if by intuition, how a part or element of an organism must live. But in the case of the latter, where does the ball go, and where do balls come from? And again, what is a ball in a collective that does not play, and where does it go? And who, unlike angels, is blabbering on?
Sublime dancers are encountered rarely in one’s life. Who can express the wordless ecstasy of what is always a little like a pas de deux? How is it that one raised hand immediately encounters the other’s raised hand, that legs bend at exactly the same moment, that one foot anticipates the other’s foot, that the supple body joins in with precision, that the two bodies conspire – speechless, silent, unprogrammed – eyes lowered and abandoning themselves to the pleasure of harmony, rhythm and music: music has taken over both bodies, has invaded them and the dancers, seraphic, have become music-made-flesh. But when they make love in so many exact and tacit encounters, tell me, where does the ball go, where does the music come from?
Wordless God of perfect harmony.
There is nothing to equal a great philosophy because it opens up a grandiose landscape, leaving on it a gaudy, moiré surface – the miraculous exhilaration of achieving better understanding expands the dwelling of those who sleep in average rooms and suddenly creates for them a palace the size of the world; there is nothing to equal an elegant proof, that combines subtlety with reason; an intuition that makes the body fly at the speed of thought which seems to us swifter than light; deep meditation, altitude, slowness, the serene plain of wisdom; there is nothing to equal trying or waiting, and if I am mistaken I will at least not have hurt anyone, and if I am not, we will exult joyfully; nothing as good as a piquant, incisive, off-centre idea, attaching its movement to the long, crooked chain of ideal grains winding their paradoxical path through the air around us; most valuable of all is apt expression, literal language, the calm and transparent water of style, a diamond with a hard but diffuse sparkle, the life of the intellect gives you the opportunity to be totally joyful, those who enter its temple fall on their knees and no longer wish to leave.
But the deep-blue, autumn sky, as grave as someone who has few days left to live and is not wasting them; but the coppery light of the last fine afternoons, trembling timidly in the red trees, the crunching sound of feet dragged through the leaves intermingled with the still-green grass, the indeterminately cold or cool breeze, the very last hot days or the first signs of winter; but opened and still bitter walnuts with their membranes, rotten grapes, prunes cooked six times, caramelized on the racks taken out of the oven, the acrid harshness of new wine, almost as blue as skin, almost as green as grape pulp; but the high forest in Auvergne in the glory of October, grapes harvested in low-lying areas, the supernatural peace of the countryside at the end of September, a plenitude in which divinities, tangible, come down to earth, between the not-yet and the already-over – dense minutes when the body understands more than the mind does – is there any sentence to equal the delights of the given?
The knowing subject dilates and extends itself over the whole body; the previous subject was condensed into a simple abstraction, existing somewhere, but in the background, unknown, in a transparent place, leaving the rest of the body in shadow; the body, now knowing, becomes a hyper-complex spirit, leaves ancient, forgotten knowledge to its brutal simplicity, takes it as read, and travels towards a totally new conquest: I know or understand through my skin, as fine as any iris or pupil, and they in turn as fine as intuition, in a bath of sounds or noises, anharmonic. I understand or know through sapience – taste finally has the name it deserves, that of art and wisdom – and through sagacity, intuition at last regaining its cognitive dignity; but I apprehend and conceive also through my muscles and joints, my bones becoming transparent, my stance off-balance in the hurly-burly of the world, an attentive and flexible posture – the rhythm of my heart and the tunic of my arteries beating against its rocky obstacles. Through assimilation and inspiration, through running and jumping, walking and dancing, love, the knowing subject at last occupies its house, its true house, its entire house, the whole of its old, dark, black box. By what idiotic cruelty was it reduced to this absent hole, why was it excluded, without home or hearth, exiled from its body, evicted from its home? Why, in short, was it forced to detest its ancestral territory and to bring about its inevitable destruction by reason and science? The knowing subject, the prodigal son, returns home after travelling at length through the empty world and abstract spaces. The house is decorated with white tablecloths and flowers in the vases, garlands on the walls, burning torches, lavender-scented sheets on the beds for the feasts of the Prodigal Son’s return, the knowing subject occupies the entire body – the luxurious headquarters of broad and complete knowledge – founded and based on the sweetness and competence of the senses, knowledge attuned to its limbs and to the world, toned-down and pacified, ready to agree, delivered from resentment, consenting, a luminous, transparent, vibrant, spiritual, flexible, quick, lively subject body – a body that thinks.
Healing in France
France has rarely produced an empiricist philosophy: entirely given over to sensuality, it had no need. Those who are living don’t talk much, those who talk don’t act. Traditionally, French culture is one of taste, it busies itself at tasting and works hard at tasting. This still life of cheeses, wines, game, pastry and cooking is its identity card. On the sparkling cloth, transparent glasses and carafes, wines with ruby legs, a table runner and conversation. The latter emerges from the most exquisite taste. Is there any culture or agriculture, except for that of China, that has to such an extent and for so long worked on refining its taste? Neighbouring cultures are more hesitant: amazed or disgusted. When you condemn those who live to eat, you who speak of eating to live, have you worked out why you are living?
Is there any culture that has, to such an extent and for so long, worked on refining perfumes? Strong, heavy fragrances in the past; subtle and evanescent ones more recently, rose has replaced musk. Perfume is to aroma what forgiving is to giving or what per-fect-ion can be to fact – quintessence. If what is given to our bodies is reduced to language, what does the forgiven person say? The bouquet, a composite, brings together taste and smell – French culture excels at creating it.
The ebb and flow of conversation fades away. The bouquet does not produce language, but brings about conversation – the consummate, perfumed art of the ephemeral, fleeting, indestructible spirit. It is lost, floats and disappears into the air; in ruins, tattered, it sometimes returns in a lightning flash, in the way that blinking lights do. Paradise lost is rediscovered in snatches. Dialogue is obstinate, struggles making its dialectical clickety-clack audible, as stubborn and stupid as a couple of goats locking horns; conversation awakes and languishes, begins, fades, murmurs on, expresses living intelligence, like a thin mist in space.
There is nothing in conversation which has not first been in this bouquet. Fireworks which temporarily streak the night with shimmering and stripes.
Language is preserved in dictionaries, knowledge in encyclopædias, money in safes. Written signs remain. Conservatories or museums are the haunts of the arts – precious pieces: paintings, busts, stones, icons, shut away in boxes, protected from thieves. Theory is interested in what remains. In the invariant. There is nothing in the intellect that has not first been in the senses: something of the sensible remains. Although it has undergone a transformation, there is something of the invariant in it. In general we are only interested in what remains, in what survives of the sensual in the intellect. The word flies, the written remains. The bouquet does not remain, neither does taste or perfume; the supreme human art, conversation, which derives from them, drifting over lovers in clouds of signs, is lost in the air. All of that fades away, nothing is preserved or exchanged for long, nothing of it is compared or reduced to money, everything vanishes when inflation strikes. There’s no interest, so goes the theory, in counting on interest from capital which is concentrated in specific places, or in our heads.
The given can arrive in fits and starts, the art that derives from it is fleeting; language remains, like money. A flow without reserves in the first case, circulation with capital in the second. If the given, therefore, is reduced to language, then data banks are easily constituted. It is not possible to set them up for the ephemeral. Knowledge, science, languages can be put into data banks, but not the sensual, by nature evanescent. There is nothing in the intellect that has not first been in the senses: this means that the intellect has collected what has remained of the senses, that it therefore becomes a memory, a reserve, a data bank. Conversely, any data bank is quite precisely what classical philosophies have always dreamed of. Now what do we call someone who, in the place of intelligence, carries such a data bank in his head, constructed like a beehive with labelled cells? A perfect fool.
There is in the sensual a delicacy that does not remain, a bouquet, a conversation – a joy that does not linger. All the finer and more intense for being transitory; crude when it comes to rest. Is there any culture lighter than mine, that has attracted more accusations of levity? Weightless, priceless, doubly graceful. Grace passes by, too modest to assert itself. The intellect does not register, does not recognize graceful sensuality, nothing of which can be put in the bank. Hence the contempt in which my culture is now held. It does not produce any theoretical, social or pecuniary interest, but speeds along on its capricious path. Our culture is made up of what our graceful senses do not leave behind: the capricious, the light, the transitory; what does remain of the senses is accumulated like money, the venal theory of knowledge accumulates and calculates. The latter, an epistemology devoid of pleasure and grace; the former, a gift of sensuality. So the given slips through language and there is no such thing as a data bank, there is never anything but banks of money, even in the realm of theory. I do not know of any culture lighter, more attractive, less abstract than mine, less calculating.
Even the French language has a certain piquancy, especially when speaking about what does not concern it. It calls given what comes from the world to the body, it calls perceived1 what is apprehended by us as coming from the world. We take what is given to us, it says. As if we were demanding, as if we were perceiving – in the manner of tax, through a levy – what is free, what is simply on offer. A strange paradox. What is the use of levying, collecting the given, what is the use of making grace pay tax? Furthermore, why would we bother?
We have covered over the given with language; the world, bought out, is hidden beneath its price. We must now tax priceless, gracious, gratuitous data.
Coming after sensation, perception remains at an economical distance. The former registers grace, the latter pays for it with language. French expresses and teaches us this, having quite precisely perceived the relation of language to the world.
Generous are they who give themselves over to what passes, forgetting to count, ignoring the bank, taking their time, and taking pleasure in the ephemeral. The given passes by, gratuitous because it is instantaneous. Pleasure, a differential of time, lasts a moment. The fleeting sensorial contains the infinitesimal eclipse of time. Æsthetics gives brilliance to the moment or sets it on fire, brings together all the inchoatives. It does not know how to totalize them, it is incapable of integrating or retaining them. The bank retains them, language retains them, but while apparently successful, both in fact lose them. Time accumulates in data banks, but you never find the time you’ve put into them. We believe that we are grasping at least a sub-total of time, a sort of total, when in fact we are deep in the chaotic ebb and flow of its inchoatives, of its fragmentation. Æsthetics confronts this cloud, or noisy sea. The intellect, language and data banks attempt pseudo-integration of small sensorial, non-integrable, perceptions of time. Has any culture ever come closer to this cloud, this pleasure – the instantaneous? Has any culture ever left time?
Courageous are they who give themselves over, in abandonment, to this chaos, who dive into this mixture. Fear, horror or economics urge you to distance yourself from it, to enter the bank. Accounting wants to triumph; avarice is intellectual vice. The intellect has a horror of the extravagant senses. But it miscalculates, like all misers. If you want to waste your time, attempt to save it; if you want to save time, be prepared to waste it. You will never find in the bank all the time that you have put into it. It is there, but has frozen into signs. Whereas the bouquet, perfume, shade, conversation which are lost in the air subtly marry themselves to the disappearing differentials of time; they flow, pass, fade away, return, blink and percolate. The senses play hide-and-seek with time, which is lost, found again, recovered at an unexpected moment. Absent from the place where you believe it to be, missing from where you put it. I know of no culture less miserly than mine, less fearful and less horrified. There is nothing in its mind that does not move or adapt as if it were a sense. There is nothing in the intellect that is not as rapid, gentle, vigilant, capricious as a sense. The senses are models for the mind, which, without them, risks understanding nothing about time.
All wisdoms have celebrated the instant, the wise man leaves aside memory; he has few projects, makes himself at home in the present, inhabits its differential. Is there any culture more sapiential than mine, light and immersed in the evanescent? Æsthetics, the pleasure of the senses, refinement, beauty of fleeting forms, flight of time, opportunistic life, all laugh at the morals of history. The wise man, living in the moment, knows no bank.
Is there any culture that has to such an extent, and for so long, refined the art of love? This loving has been ruined by theoretical bombardment, by the attack from clichéd language; behold three generations whose fleeting encounters with love are pitiless, and who have abandoned its bouquet for a sick language; the flowers of yesteryear have disappeared into the black box of the word. Nothing in the unconscious bank has ever enjoyed the briefest encounter with the senses. The wise man forgets in a moment the long memory of his sad childhood. I have never known such a loving culture, one so free of ponderousness.
This is a people that cannot help being lighthearted. Even though we weigh it down with knowledge or money, overload it with history, bore it to tears with wooden language, this nation, incapable of boredom, has kept on, and will keep on laughing. It smiles and will keep on smiling, it mocks. It doesn’t care for power, loves the moment, the everyday. Irredeemably lighthearted, with a culture that is mobile, frivolous, delicate, trivial, flighty – even superficial, lively, relaxed, vague. We are not deep, serious, logical or abstract, we prefer the bouquet, the slight lingering odour; we prefer shades to colours; to comfort, elegance; to truth, wit; harmony is hidden beneath the grace of appoggiaturas, construction is buried beneath swags of leaves. Charm passes before pleasure, taste before judgement, life above all the rest, the cheeky little duchess in old rose before the black-clad, unattractive scholar; we have the superfluous, why would we need the necessary?
If we happened to become burdened with an embarrassment of riches, power, knowledge or reason, we would modestly hide the fact, frivolous to the end. Women – as light here as intelligence, and intelligence here as light as a sense – have a velvety touch, a subtle sense of smell, a delicate palate, acute hearing, an eye that matches a skirt with a scarf, as light as the soaring dove, augural, carried by wind currents in the clear morning sky: in short, our tongue must be used in a light, lively repartee, moments of immodesty; so hide your heavy publicity-laden science – our feminine tongue, muffled and veiled, is studded with mute vowels.
A people such as this cannot help being woman, its culture reveals the modest femininity of the world.
Sites organized around public speaking, built to serve speech, and surrounded by places for listening, usually favour monologues: the pulpit raised for sacred eloquence in the middle of the nave, the rostrum of the specialist scientist at the front of the amphitheatre, now a stage with microphones and cameras. Silence, he is speaking. He speaks, and in order to be understood, obeys rules of logic and rhetoric. At the very least to please the audience and not to contradict himself.
We have all known places where dialogue flourished: two people in search of the truth struggle to exclude the noise between them that prevents their hearing each other, and try to include in their midst the meaning born from the intersection of their vocabularies and the interlacing of their good will. Dialogue is played out between four people, the two who appear to speak, plus the excluded third, their demon, plus the included third – their hope – the god who descends into their midst.
In Paris, there were salons presided over by certain women. No-one made speeches, there were no couples in dialogue, they were places of conversation. No announcements, no thundering prophecies, no teaching, much less discipline – none of this took place, on pain of desperate boredom. The women of that time did not tolerate boredom in their houses. As far as I know, philosophy, in spite of its brilliance in the French XVIIIth century and its diet of conversation, never applied a methodical term to this multi-polar networking, as it did for discourse, choosing the terms logic and rhetoric, and for dialectics, choosing the term dialogue.
Conversation must be understood as it is said or written – or better still, practised, under the courteous ægis of women – as the set of conversions and frequent repetitions of the bodily, verbal and theoretical repositionings of its participants. It resembles the configuration of the famous non-integrable problem of n bodies: the arrangement of a cluster of stars obeys the law of gravity, minute after minute. Nothing is more complicated, since each one is influenced by the gravity of all the others and each responds to the gravity of the others. Conversion, rare and simple in the case of sacred eloquence and in scientific lectures, is frequently repeated here in a complex fashion: multiple, rapid, instantaneous. We have never conceptualized the hyper-Platonic state of conversation: a set of applications, translations, interferences, communications, passages and distributions which would draw its fluctuating map, sometimes its labyrinth, its metastable network, its becoming, when Hermes passes.
In the salons, a mechanist, doctor, composer, duchess, economist and diplomat could all converse together. Let us call conversation the activity whereby the doctor, speaking to the mechanist, is obliged to speak of the man-machine and immerse his knowledge in that of the other; but that conversely or vice versa, the mechanist will dream of extending his knowledge into physiology, while the economist describes circulation in terms of hydraulics and so forth. Conversation is the set of applications of a body of knowledge into or onto another, the set of their conversions. These applications multiply rapidly, excluding none, bringing all possible variations; this swift movement or multiplication, not the discipline, becomes the object of thought.
Sacred eloquence institutes, the specialist scientist instructs, both emit without receiving; the salon is not a place of instruction and has no discipline. It produces an object of thought: this set of passages. And its condition is tolerance. A condition and an object unthinkable within the academy.
The epistemology of conversation died, I believe, when the great universities took the place of the myriad churches. Academies presuppose disciplinary territories, sectarian conflict, in which the exclusion of heretics begins anew, through either words or ideas.
Can we integrate this multi-planet problem? Yes, under the name of philosophy. The philosophy that we despise called French literature.
I am delighted at the extent to which French writers shun learning. They are frightened of pedants, fearing their anger and resentment: as a result, they are quick to make fun of those who correct manners, bodies, words and reasoning. The non-correcting writer encourages freedom. I have spoken sufficiently about literature from a scholarly point of view to enjoy putting on a different hat and listening to the words it uses when describing the learned. It riddles them with arrows. Rabelais makes fun of them, Montaigne is suspicious, Molière ridicules them, Marivaux sends them packing – our literature, or rather our culture fears teachers. Observe the long sequence of doddery and hateful, argumentative and bossy idiots: Janotus, Marphurius, Honorius . . . Blazius is called Wetwhistle by the immortal Labiche. The Latin names make it clear that their language is dying.
Hear the names footnoted in scholarly quotations. Footnotes point to the fossilization of language. The writer of French laughs at these proper names because he’s frightened of them; despotic, they dominate, devour, destroy, deface and appropriate texts, sucking the life out of them. In displaying your knowledge, you censor your language. Beauty and elegance in a work is the result of a joyous liberation: getting rid of dead wood, paring down. Write a text in plain language and you will begin to live freely.
How I should like to describe, turning things inside out like a glove, the perspective that opens up for literature, philosophy and art when the pedant leaves. When weighty knowledge is laid down. When clichés are cast aside. If the prison of language opens. Free at last, free to speak as we wish, without harsh rules or canonical references, to think at ease, light, unencumbered by prior dogma, or interminable criticism, to write gallantly, away from that heavy presence. To write for a woman, never again in order to please a proof reader.
I have learned more, working the earth beside my father on the edges of the Garonne or on his barge, I have learned more at Pinara, under the cliff with its five hundred burial places, or at the theatre of Epidaurus, alone; flying over the Yukon or the Mackenzie, or in a fierce storm in the south of Crete, between two distress calls, on the cliff of the bird-man on Easter Island, facing the Pacific, with my back to the volcano; I have learned more, thirsty for knowledge about the world, when on a slow walk through the meadows of Auvergne or the forests of Brazil than in any book I have ever read. No, I do not despise books, I love them so much that I have devoted my life to them. I love my language so much that I have given it all my time, but we cannot bring a culture, a philosophy, to life without feeding it with what it is not. Language is closed on the language side, shut in on its qualities of exactness, precision, rigour; on the world side, on the other hand, it opens out. Inchoative and inexact, undecided but full of promise. Professors, critics, theoreticians and politicians live on the closed side, the writer takes up residence on its outskirts, in the open, facing things that are sometimes hard.
Æsthetics comes into play on the open side of language, overlooking the garden.
I have learned more by working the earth as a peasant boy, in road and construction works, as a labourer, mason, road-mender, I have learned more on boats, as a sailor on fresh or salt water, and in salons in the company of the last real duchesses; in huts in the forest speaking to old Bambaras whose language I did not speak and who did not know mine; beneath the gilded panelling of palaces at the side of those in temporary power, amazed at their customs; in hospitals with those who suffer, before altars with those who pray; in gun turrets or facing missile launchers with those who are going to kill or to die; playing in teams, where the balls move quickly without anyone speaking; in theatrical performances where all applaud, in front of deathbeds where eyes implore; with children who do not yet speak; I have learned more during my tacit voyage in the social body or human-kind, I have learned more amongst the poor, the simple-minded and the humiliated than in any book I have ever read, in any learned discourse.
Language is born in the emotion of the encounter, words are born when you don’t expect them. I have learned more with you than in all the books of philosophy, you who gave me my body, to whom I offer the last words of this book, humbly, in return.
Language has taken the place of the given, science is taking that of language. What does the word ‘place’ signify in this exchange?
The history of science is finally catching up with the avatars of literary interpretation, another interpretive discipline; it is merely a matter of changing texts. It has its more or less pure historians, internal and external, its schools of interpreters, its world-famous stars, its theatre. Likewise for epistemology, at least in the old French sense of the term. A single discipline is created, criticism in general, the objects of which vary. You can at least be certain that you are doing history and philosophy of science if you remain in the sciences, if you consider them as objects.
I confess that I have never enjoyed this certainty. I had a sort of intuitive certainty that I was working in this field, yet I was sure that I was not in it. The unanimous judgement of my peers, also, led me to think that my practice lay elsewhere. Where? I did not know.
This is the space that the Greeks began to map, through definition and exclusion – let none but geometers enter here – that the European seventeenth century recognized and even strove to define, the space of science. We have been fascinated ever since, by the following judgement: this belongs to science and that does not, this inside, that outside. Inclusion, exclusion, the strategies of schools of thought, but originally a religious gesture: just as the haruspex carefully divided up the holy ground, marked out its plinths. This is the profane, that is the sacred. Science and non-science do not mix their respective terrains any more than the civil and the religious, to avoid risk of defilement. Yet the frontiers of knowledge shift about, philosophies of knowledge suffer and are transformed as a result of these changes. It is a simple fact that things foreign to science will be embraced by it tomorrow and that things that are a part of it today will be expelled. Time cares naught for dogma or the excluded third.
Schoolchildren, academics or priests can be recognized by this sign: they all ask the question of proper place – they ask: where? In what place does a certain discourse attract a certain consensus? Orthodox, heretical, anathema – choose. Where do you live?
The space of science fascinates us: and for this reason it is compared to a temple, to the zone meticulously outlined by the priest using a ritual baton that no-one may touch. Here is the object, here is the thing that must command our maximum attention. A whole group yields to this fascination, agrees to this objectivity.
Our age has not yet been able to distance itself from science, is not yet secularized in relation to it. The space of science preserves our ultimate values; it exercised on our fathers, and still exercises on certain of our contemporaries, the pull of the sacred. The whole thrust of the epistemology or history of science can be read in this light. We are still feeling the repercussions of the astonishing appearance amongst us of exact knowledge. This gives rise to interpretation, just as the divine word did.
For more than a quarter of a century, I have taken a secular position on this point. I never consider science as an object or as an exterior space to describe, analyse, judge, justify, a town to defend or a place to occupy, a temple to protect from all impurity – I suppose it. Not only do I suppose it as acquired, admitted or known, but I suppose it, in absolute terms. The place of objects is in front of us. We are surrounded by a space into which we can immerse ourselves. But to suppose science puts it in the position of subject.
We know science in quite a different way. First of all we encountered it. Then we found ourselves immersed in it. Now it is immersed in us. It thought outside us, it thinks in us. We had made our dwelling in it, it now has its dwelling in us.
Let my reader suppose that this author is the most knowledgeable possible; the author knows that his reader is the most knowledgeable possible. To display or show one’s knowledge indicates a failure of secularity, or a digestive problem. I therefore do not work on science, in my texts it is science that is at work. Science could work on science: it does so in scientific texts, that philosophy can copy, that it can also consider useless to copy, as a matter of redundancy or honesty. In my texts, science works actively, on things other than itself.
A profoundly secret revolution that has no name: supposed, objective knowledge has taken the place of the subject. This transformation gives rise to a new world, to new texts, to another form of thought.
We know science in a new way: we have digested it. In the past, an instance foreign to it conceptualized it as object. It has taken up residence in this instance. And so we use it as the basis and subject of thought.
We use it as we do language. Language does not constitute an ordinary object, it lives with the personal or collective subject, but plays at disappearing from the object side of the equation.
Language has taken the place of the subject since the dawn of humanity, since the dawning of philosophy, and the beginning of religions, since the philosophy of today. We have taken thousands of years to understand the appearance of language amongst us and in us, our thought is still undergoing the repercussions of its astonishing advent. Language has taken the place of the subject since the dawn of the subject.
Our religions and philosophies speak of this coup.
We had put science in front of us, as one object among others, exceptional only in its behaviour and performance. Likewise, we had put language in front of us as one object among others, exceptional only in its sweetness and transparency.
We always take a long time to understand what it means to understand.
We have taken a long time to digest language. Coming amongst us and into us, the word inhabited a world into which no-one had invited it. Its light shone in the darkness and the darkness comprehended it not. Before the word penetrated our flesh, became our flesh, space preserved the divide between blindness and clarity. Before the word became subject, the luminous sacred was separated from the profane darkness, unpenetrated by light. Now we have received the word, we have eaten and digested it; it has arrived in our midst, into us, and has become us – a subject. Philosophies and religions have been resounding for the last three millennia with the repercussions of this long incomprehensible event, this reversal that traverses and creates our history, or even better, our hominity.
An equally significant phenomenon has been evolving slowly from the time of the Greeks to that of our fathers, speeding up suddenly in recent times. We have at last been receptive to science. We have digested it. It no longer designates an exterior space, a stage set with light and darkness, a battlefield or sacred place, horror or attraction, expulsion or welcome, as if the Age of the Enlightenment had rehearsed for it the tragedy of the birth and death of the word; it enters us, comes amongst us, becomes collective or individual flesh, the subject of conditional or reflexive thought.
In me, sharp, active, hard-working, vigilant; in us and amongst us, saturating the objective world and that of our relationships. Those who were subjects endowed with language become new subjects endowed with science. The known becomes our unknown, the latter is structured like knowledge.
Religions and philosophies of language still construct our age-old dwelling. All that remains now is to construct the house of today.
It is not a matter of a cultural or historical state. To be sure, we all have a smattering of science, just as everyone, in the Middle Ages, no doubt knew something about Christendom, lived immersed in it, even if he didn’t walk every day in the shadow of Jumièges Abbey; to be sure, we live immersed in science, just as the Greeks in the Vth century no doubt carried in themselves, as fragments of memory, the sung stories of Homer or the myths of Olympus. But these comparisons could be counter-productive.
Seeing our knowledge outside ourselves, learning it in snatches, living it in the objects that are born of it, we forget that it lies within us. That, without it, we could not learn it. We forget more and more that we are forgetting it.
For the passerby in the Middle Ages, Christendom, present, remained in his memory; for the Greek of the Classical Age, the pantheon of Gods remained impossible to ignore. But language is ignored by everyone. When I am aware that I am speaking in a foreign language, I speak it badly or don’t speak it at all. I only ever really manage to speak it when I don’t know that I am doing so. Whereas it rarely occurs to me that I am speaking in my mother tongue. This state of awareness or memory is a thousand times more fundamental and obvious when it is no longer a question of one’s own tongue, but of language, by the very fact that we are speaking. We almost always forget that we are speaking. The subject is defined by language without memory, however high or low our level of culture, at whatever moment we are living in history.
Science, in turn, is losing its memory today in the same manner. The subject is defined by forgotten knowledge. We live and think now through science, not as we thought or lived as Olympians or Christians – we are becoming subjects of science as we have been subjects of language ever since we became human.
To speak a language other than the one to which our fœtal skin would quiver when our mother’s voice used it, remains a cultural or historical event; our skin begins to vibrate differently. The transition to science cannot simply be reduced to a change of language, but should be more broadly thought of as the acquisition of language when, in our unformed state, we had none, our skin trembling for the first time. Science has never had, does not and will never have the dimensions, weight or status of a culture: to impose itself it has set aside cultures or set up its influence beside them; science does not have the status of a language, but that of language itself: it transforms evolution rather than history and affects the process of hominization. Universal in space and for every culture, this transhistorical sweep also marks its universality in time.
These processes that shape the speaking or knowing subject lie in a more deeply forgotten past than that with which history daily satisfies its hunger.
Socrates asked a slave child to demonstrate simple reasoning to him using a geometrical figure and concluded that the ignorant person remembered knowledge that was presented to him. That kind of memory is only the first stage of knowledge: when I remember what Socrates said and demonstrated, I mobilize a school child’s knowledge. Afterwards, we blissfully forget and true knowledge begins. We would otherwise be as burdened with our remembrances as the boat that has just hunted down two whales and that, having secured them on the port side and starbord side, still thinks it can get home faster if it rows.
Speaking consists of forgetting that one knows how to speak, implies that we leap naked into meaning, or the object, or reasoning, into totally forgetting that we are using language as a medium. True eloquence cares nothing for eloquence, not because it finds the rules and discipline of oratory useless and derisory but because, listening to silence intensely, it immerses itself in the living reservoir of what it can find to say. Swimming supposes that we ignore that we can swim; likewise for walking, jumping, making love, thinking. Culture can be reduced to this amnesis: learn codes of social behaviour so as to behave naturally, was the advice of the duchesses of yore, learn everything possible so as not to display it, the only gaps in your culture will be the vulgarities that you remember, that encumber your language. Quotation is the mark of an uncultivated person, delayed digestion, the flatulent burp of the dyspeptic afflicted with aerophagia.
I think if and only if I am speaking in my own name. Knowing demands that one forget oneself. Thought cares nothing for these memories. Science loses consciousness in the consciousness of the scholar-subject and, through this loss, the latter thinks and invents.
This is what I have sought passionately: that knowledge and science be forgotten in my books, written so that their very loss might elaborate new objects, so that their loss might bring into being a new subject.
The question of philosophy today could therefore be formulated thus: what do we think when we know? What can we think when we know as we speak, when we know science in the sense in which, active and alive, it blends into thought, in the sense in which, having learned it, our flesh has incorporated it?
Not: what is there to think in science? Objective or collective science, as far as I know, answers this question by its very nature.
Not: what is there to think outside it? Or, if science is dismissed or reduced, what is there to think?
That would again suppose a partitioned space, an interior and an exterior, the old inaugural ground that the haruspex marks out with his stick; and that we can easily sideline science or leave it out of the loop, a simple gesture when we knew nothing.
Either we ask the questions that were valid before the dawn of our era, and have been ever since, eternal until this morning – as if science had never been thought of: the royal road of metaphysics.
Or we consider science as an object, without ever evaluating the knowledge of the person practising it, we question knowledge and understanding, their basis and functioning: the royal road of epistemology.
In the case of both of these royal roads, practice, we observe, is designated by a prefix: beyond or above. Somewhat haughty or grand. Epistemology or metaphysics: beyond physics, above knowledge. How we admire the altitude of such scholarly and profound sites, always remote, higher up than all our houses, hanging over vertiginous drops.
Or alternatively, we acknowledge that science constitutes what we know, that it is now becoming what language became in us at our birth, and we ask, humbly, with no thought of surpassing it: what remains to be thought?
We are well aware that everything remains to be thought, reassessed, that there remains a world to construct. We can clearly see that everything remains to be done. What are we going to do, we who know, and who are actively engaged in the thinking that depends on science?
We have said over and over again that science is transforming the world and our bodies; we say, considerably less often, that it is becoming our destiny even more than our history, or the sum of our hopes; we have not yet said that it is displacing languages, and worse still, language, by replacing it with true algorithms. We can no longer speak the common language. Precision and rigour have definitively abandoned it to emigrate towards knowledge with its countless disciplines; it has been robbed of its charm and enchantments by the gigantic machines of communication and show business. Crushed and sandwiched between the Babel of scholarship and networks of information, humming with noise, language is dying, my book celebrates the death of the word.
And yet since we have been men, we have not been able to grow to adulthood without feeding on the word. In days gone by, the greatest of us became the word through having glorified it. We have lost, without recourse, the memory of a heard, seen, perceived world, experienced by a body devoid of language. That forgotten, unknown man became man by speaking, and the word has moulded his flesh, not only his collective flesh of exchanges or perception, use or domination, but also and especially his corporeal flesh: thighs, feet, chest and neck vibrate, dense with the word. This stable period of hominization – note that I don’t say of history – is drawing to an end. Tomorrow, we speaking beasts will no longer see the world or the powers at work in it in the same way.
Science uproots language after having shaken it, this event disrupts our bodies, the collective and the world. Our flesh dense, no longer with language but with science, we begin to see, to hear a world – our body knows more than it says, it used to speak more than it knew. It knows, forgetting that it knows, just as it used to speak, forgetting that it was doing so. In both cases, it is flesh, transparent and obscure. And knowledgeable, in the case of those who barely or imperfectly know that flesh spoke for the timid, inexpert, dumb, or tongue-tied. As the deepest level of the subjective, the collective and the carnal, a substitution takes place, in which science eradicates language – this explains our time.
This brutal diminution of the word, this loss or death have given us a fleeting glimpse of the world and each other, as they could doubtless have been seen before language was incarnated in us. Between two reigns, a rapid lightning flash illuminating the five senses.
Today we are living through an acute crisis of languages. Once held to be treasures, they are falling into disrepute, everyone pillages his own, as we do the earth. Our peasant ancestors, whose letters we sometimes discover, expressed themselves with greater elegance and clarity than the dominant class of the day. In moving from agriculture to academia, where clichéd language abounds, I rather seem to have lost some of the verve of my story-telling and my delight in finding just the right word. The most famous of our scholars don’t know how to write, and publishing houses rewrite their books. The media broadcasts hundreds of words and deliberately uses ungrammatical or vulgar language to show it has the common touch. Poets are losing their ear for language, the intelligentsia has long since driven them away. Teachers find twenty dunces in groups in which, once, there would only have been two or three – by dunces I mean those who cannot be taught to read or write, however hard the teacher tries. The crafting of language is becoming rare, no-one is inclined to take the trouble. Those who say, or believe, that they hold our fate in their hands have never appeared so barbaric – by barbaric I mean those whose utterance consists of belching and stomach rumbling, usually the sound of a dominant language.
You are not reading the same old lament here, I am making a precise diagnosis. In this age of science language, even more than languages, is collapsing; our relationship to the world and others, and to ourselves, no longer passes preferentially through language.
An example. If we use the word star, we designate a luminous point amongst those that vibrate above our heads on bright nights. Connoisseurs, we called the largest Sirius, in Canis; the blue star, close to the zenith on long summer evenings, Vega; the head of Medusa was the name we gave to Antares, the unstable star in the middle of Scorpio, that even changes colour. We guessed that the confrontation with Mars, God of War, was responsible for these two names for a face over which so many storms pass. We have abandoned that category, as vague or arbitrary as a baptismal name; night has lost its giants and animals. But, as practitioners, we knew their position, in order to determine ours, at twilight, using a sextant; we had to predict the place where they would become visible, early, when all the others were still eclipsed by the sunset, and to observe the visible horizon and the new light all at the same time. Satellites have extinguished these ancient signals. Exact and precise, faithful to things, we now call Rigel, which lies at old Orion’s foot, a blue supergiant; the star that overwhelms us at midday, approaching its nova, a yellow dwarf. Still more rigorously, we write equations. The thing once called a star is classified, distinguished and divided into new families, or assembled into gigantic galaxies; is in any case designated by a corpus of codes or catalogues, by a collection of calculations and theories. Stars as such, or things simply called stars, hardly exist any more, astrophysics is no more concerned with them than is the biology of life or the physics of matter. They have disqualified these words, by making these things disappear. Life, matter or star belong less to philosophy or history than to the old language abandoned because of the demands of precision and the dynamics of objective knowledge. RR Lyrae variables and dwarf galaxy NGC 1036 are no longer part of any language and are detached from language as are the formulae that are discussed in connection to them.
Those who use the word star abandon exactitude or focus on the thing in itself. Calculations and codes are replacing terms. All that is left of them are shapeless and empty carcasses, slowly sinking into obsolescence. We and our ancestors spoke of life, or stars; voices we shall no longer hear, of naive lovers carving into the bark of trees.
If we speak of grass, insects, gladioli, fuchsias or emeralds in the same way . . . the same logic asserts itself. Scientific codes gobble up our old languages, harness the aspects of them that are the beginnings of coherence or faithfulness to the real; all that remains is a shapeless tatter. We shall no longer find, in the woods, what our fathers and mothers meant by ‘grass’ or ‘insect’, we shall no longer visit the woods from which species are disappearing. Science has not only changed the depth of the world or the relationships between men, through fertilizers, motors, aspirin or the atomic bomb, but has also derealized the things designated by language: we can no longer speak. We would have difficulty in finding matter where we speak of particles and nuclei, in finding life where we speak of acids or enzymes, in finding grass or wheat where clones or mutants of a given stock, produced by genetic engineering and resistant to a given constraint, proliferate. The new farmers of this new Neolithic create new forests in their laboratories by the branching of possibilities, the woods in which plant cuttings are encoded are the only ones we shall visit from now on.
Since the beginning of our history, the global and local world – from the glory of the heavens down to its smallest details and folds, furrows, marshy places and small pebbles – has slumbered beneath the waters of language, inaccessible and swallowed up like the great cathedral. No-one could go to the object without passing through it, just as no-one gathers seaweed, without, in some unimaginable space, getting his arm wet.
Likewise everything today is swallowed up by the scholarly avalanche, nothing escapes the control of science. Nothing. Neither grass nor the word grass, not stars nor the word stars, nor our connections: our emotional relationships, our collective obligations, the withholding of information or confessions, the humble terms we exchange without too much concern about their meaning. Love, abuse, gift, speaking, war, tax, devotion, here again are objects of science subject to transferences of language, where we move from rhetoric to a sort of algebra. When they work on our relationships, the human sciences uproot language by going behind it – as do the exact sciences with objects – replacing it with a true algorithm. Language itself is subjected to equations or formulæ. To conclude, the self, in times gone by, the thinking self, and more recently the speaking self, is now forgetting that it knows. The result is this: language had under its control the subjects of the world, the connections between them, the relationship between subjects and objects, as well as the solitary subject itself and, no doubt, the collective we. It enunciated the totality of the world that we can still call historical and in which no-one could grow up without living intimately within his language. But now science controls all these subjects or objects, as well as their exchanges, as well as the language that controlled them.
The elderly speaker of exact and correct language finds himself crushed between the monstrous growth of true algorithms, which have robbed him of his precision, and the monstrous growth of the remaining mediatized tatters, which have robbed him of his charm.
Why have I written about the five senses in a language long disqualified by so many true algorithms: without biophysics, biochemistry, physiology, psycho-physiology, acoustics, optics or logic . . . depriving myself of the long series of experiments, formulæ, models, schemas, analytical calculations? Why write about an object that is disappearing, in a language that is dying?
Or, why not write in the din of the circus?
The three powers of today, unopposed, have robbed language of its constituent parts. Science has seized its true relationship with reality; the media have taken hold of its seductive relationship with the other; and administration has taken on its performative power: what it says or writes, exists and imposes itself, precisely because it writes or says. These three new powers occupy space and the only opposition they encounter is one or the other of the two others.
There are three sorts of books that remain to be written in these components of language – if you love power over things or men.
My beautiful, strong, relevant old language has lost its power to science, has abandoned its charm and enchantments to the gigantic information and entertainment businesses, leaves its utterances to those who dictate facts.
All that is left of it now are tatters. This phantom in rags retains a vaguely æsthetic function. Æsthetic?
So let it talk about the five senses, let it celebrate the beauty of the world.
The adventure of philosophy is beginning anew, in exactly the same place from which it has always sprung.
Present or absent, sciences are forgotten in the subject, who now knows. He knows, and therefore does not need to display his knowledge. He knows the addresses of the data banks he can mine, if he wants to remember. We are no longer living in the age of rare libraries. Information, available everywhere, makes forgetting possible. It circulates through the air we breathe. What is the use of quoting or copying a list of disciplines or articles that anyone can procure in an instant? Why burden an already long list with a new item that includes the list itself all over again? When memory becomes objective, the thinking subject becomes forgetful. When access to knowledge encounters no obstacle, the status of knowledge itself changes. When language is transformed, all is transformed.
Memory and language are set free. The first, by machines and networks – we shall no longer write theses. We are going to think, directly, light-heartedly, freed from references stored in the bank – out of the text, out of the body, out of the subject.
And language leaves behind its main components, three times.
You could have said that it was dead – or you could say that it is free. Released from its obligations at last.
Each time an organ – or function – is liberated from an old duty, it invents. Freed by the standing position from the weighty duty of support or locomotion, the paw or hand changes, apprehends and finally fashions tools; freed by our verticality from the vital necessity to grasp, the mouth, jaw or maw begins to speak words. Memory is liberated three times: at the advent of writing, by the discovery of printing, now with computers. Who can tell what the invention of geometry owes to the first, the coming of experimental science to the second, or what will emerge from our third forgetting?
And to what new use our regenerated language will be put.
I am seeking to release the book that I am writing and he who is writing it from objective lists, from mechanical memory, from specific algorithms, in order to give them to a new subject or to relaunch the adventure of philosophy. To the new thinking subject, both free to forget and knowledgeable, equipped with artificial intelligences and stores of information, with screens and software, arranging them and depositing them far from himself, therefore detached by a new distance from his former functions surrendered to artefacts or algorithms, I give the first object at hand: the given.
Once the primary object of traditional philosophy which claimed to construct knowledge from it, the given is now a primary object for us, because a remnant of the competence of what remains of language when it has lost everything – an exterior abandoned by our memories when all the data has been dealt with. Primary, therefore, today because it is the last remaining thing – we no longer have the same ambitions. Crumbs from the feast of language which is taking place elsewhere.
The subject, forgetful, detached, immerses itself in the unforgettable world.
The five senses, still on the verge of departure towards another adventure, a ghost of the real timidly described in a ghost of language – this is my essay.
I should have liked to call it resurrection – or rebirth.