Essayists From France

"Dancing on a tightrope requires that one maintain an equilibrium from one moment to the next by recreating it at every step by means of new adjustments; it requires one to maintain a balance that is never permanently acquired; constant readjustments renews the balance while giving the impression of ‘keeping it’."

"The oratorical talent of Eric Zemmour, whom everyone recognises, could appear to some voters as something that Marine Le Pen does not know how to do, or no longer knows how to do."

"The only difference between Eric and myself is that he is Jewish."

"Marine Le Pen continues to have the support of working-class categories, especially precarious, young working poor voters, whereas Eric Zemmour, for the moment, is rather a candidate supported by men with rather bourgeois socio-economic positions, certain fringes of business circles, craftsmen, shop owners and older voters"

"I would add that Eric Zemmour is rather largely what one calls a declinist, that is to say, the idea that France was better off before and that the power of France, the support and respect that France inspires abroad, its influence in international relations have only declined. And that without a surge of national spirit, France is poised to disappear."

"Whether you share Eric Zemmour's beliefs or not, by sponsoring his candidacy you are contributing to the return of pluralism."

"Very clearly, he is someone who is very much to the right of the political spectrum, both on the socio-economic axis and on the cultural axis."

"The choice for all those people in trouble, including the Yellow Vests, is between not voting or a protest vote. You should not underestimate the non-voters, that was very strong. And that opens up for Éric Zemmour the possibility that people who don't believe in voting anymore say: finally a candidate outside the system and anti-system, so let's try it."

"The first problem is France's destination and demographics. The invasion of migration. We have a big problem and we absolutely have to solve it, otherwise France in 20 years will no longer be France, but an area like Lebanon with communities fighting each other."

"What else should we call the beheading of Samuel Paty a year ago or, say, the policewoman who had her throat slit in her own office? The sixteenth-century wars of religion also started little by little. It took fifty years for the struggle between Protestants and Catholics to erupt on Bartholomew's Night in 1572."

"Eric Zemmour is a man from the right who has never belonged to the extreme right, or to Mrs. and Mr. Le Pen's party. But he is someone who has the ideas of Geert Wilders about Islam and migration. We have the paradox that Marine Le Pen, who has been called the far right for the past 20 years, is being overtaken by someone who is much harsher and more pessimistic."

"The question of who is allowed to stay on French soil is a political issue par excellence that should not be left to "an oligarchy of national and European judges. The French should be able to decide that for themselves.""

"I still can't go of course. But if I didn't go, I would disappoint a lot of people. One would consider it desertion. As betrayal. And that also counts in my decision-making. I will choose the moment myself. And it will be there soon."

"A French first name shows that you really want to belong. The family name refers to the civilization of the country of origin that is left behind. The French first name refers to the future."

"To call your child Mohammed is to colonize France."

"I am aware of the enthusiasm that my potential Presidential candidacy can evoke. That enthusiasm exists because the French people do not want to die. It is there because there is hope."

"Demography determines our destiny."

"The brightest representatives of the Islamic diaspora have long figured out how to use this liberalism to blow up the remnants of the nation-state, free themselves from the weak authority of the republic, and establish the law of Allah in their own enclaves."

"Islam is a civilisation incompatible with the principles of France."

"Thierry Baudet I met him once. A very likeable man. He wants the Netherlands to remain the Netherlands. Just as France has to remains France."

"I want France to be in Europe, but I want France to come before Europe... With me the European flag will never fly without the French Tricolor."

"Our commitment is that France will never come to resemble the abandoned Calais of today."

"Eric Zemmour became a television celebrity for his ability to debate. He is a polemicist who's renowned for his extensive culture and his very good ability to defend and communicate his ideas. And he first had the reputation of someone who has a passion for oratorical jousting."

"Eric Zemmour is a writer, a journalist who, for twenty years, has been alerting the public opinion and our leaders to the fact that our country cannot cope with a completely deregulated immigration like the one we have known for decades; that security is the first of freedoms; that figures for petty crimes, attacks on property and people are skyrocketing and that soon, in France, we will have a serious problem with that."

"I think Les Républicains should give their support to Eric Zemmour in a very formal way, because Les Républicains voters have long been waiting for someone like him on immigration, justice and security issues."

"Zemmour, as an individual, has never campaigned on the far right. He was never a member of the National Front. He calls himself a Gaullist."

"Eric Zemmour is not a politician. Eric Zemmour is someone who talks about the country, its difficulties and its future. And he is very successful, precisely because he speaks about the reality of our country without using the doublespeak of our politicians."

"The real question is whether [Zemmour's rise in the poll] is a media bubble which is linked to his overexposure in the media -- an overexposure which is likely to continue -- or if it is a real, deeper phenomenon which sees Marine Le Pen losing voters due to a fatigue after her party repeatedly failed to conquer power"

"For my ancestors, the arrival of the French was an enormous progress. The door to culture, freedom and emancipation opened, they were no longer second-class citizens."

"Trump has forged a coalition between the workers and the patriotic elite. I strongly believe in the coalition that has brought Trump together. Just like Boris Johnson. That, I think, is the political axis of the future."

"Much of France has been abandoned. That screamed his anger in 2018 and now feels recognized by Éric Zemmour."

"And now I salute thee with awe, with veneration, and wonder, ancient India, of whom I am the adept, the India of the highest splendor of art and philosophy. May thy awakening astonish the Occident, decadent, mean, daily dwindling, slayer of nations, slayer of Gods, slayer of souls, which yet bows down still, ancient India, before the prodigies of thy primordial conceptions!"

"Parce que la pratique est subjective, la théorie qui est toujours la théorie d’un objet, ne peut atteindre la réalité de cette pratique, ce qu’elle est en elle-même, sa subjectivité précisément, mais seulement se la représenter, de telle manière que cette représentation laisse hors d’elle l’être réel de la pratique, l’effectivité du faire. La théorie ne fait rien."

"Le marxisme est l'ensemble des contresens qui ont été faits sur Marx."

"Comment le capital trouve sa substance et son essence dans le travail vivant, de telle manière qu’il provient exclusivement de lui, ne peut se passer de lui, ne vit que pour autant qu’il puise à chaque instant sa vie dans celle du travailleur, vie qui devient ainsi la sienne, c’est ce qu’exprime à travers toute l’œuvre de Marx le thème du vampire. « Le capital est du travail mort qui, semblable au vampire, ne s’anime qu’en suçant le travail vivant et sa vie est d’autant plus allègre qu’il en pompe davantage »."

"Inasmuch as the essence of community is affectivity, the community is not limited to humans alone. It includes everything that is defined in itself by the primal suffering of life and thus by the possibility of suffering. This pathos-with is the brosdest form of every conceivable community."

"La communauté est une nappe affective souterraine et chacun y boit la même eau à cette source et à ce puits qu'il est lui-même – mais sans le savoir, sans se distinguer de lui-même, de l'autre ni du Fond."

"This pathetic community does not exclude the world but only the abstract world, which is to say, the world that does not exist and has put subjectivity out of play. But community does include the real world -- the cosmos -- for which every element -- form, color, and so forth -- exists ultimately as auto-affective. That is to say, it exists in and through this pathetic community. "The world", Kandinsky says, "sounds. It is a cosmos of spiritually affective beings. Thus, dead matter is living spirit." This is why painting, for example, is not the figure of external things but the expression of their inner reality, their tonality, or what Kandinsky calls their "inner sound", an experience of forces and affects."

"Marx certes était athée, « matérialiste », etc. Mais chez un philosophe aussi, il convient de distinguer ce qu’il est de ce qu’il croit être. Ce qui compte, ce n’est d’ailleurs pas ce que Marx pensait et que nous ignorons, c’est ce que pensent les textes qu’il a écrits. Ce qui paraît en eux, de façon aussi évidente qu’exceptionnelle dans l’histoire de la philosophie, c’est une métaphysique de l’individu. Marx est l’un des premiers penseurs chrétiens de l’Occident."

"The task of material phenomenology is immense. It is not simply to be attached to another order of phenomena that remained neglected up to now but to rethink everything, if one can think reality. Every sphere of reality must become the object of a new analysis that goes back to its invisible dimension. And this concerns material nature as well, which is a living cosmos. Since material phenomenology implies the revival of philosophical questioning in its entirety, it offers a future to phenomenology and to philosophy itself. At the same time, it discovers a new past."

"Material phenomenology is able to designate this invisible phenomenological substance. It is not a nothing but rather an affect, or put otherwise, it is what makes every affect, ultimately every affection, and every thing possible. The phenomenological substance that material phenomenology has in view is the pathetic immediacy in which life experiences itself. Life is itself nothing other than this pathetic embrace and, in this way, is phenomenality itself according to the how of its original phenomenalization. Life is thus not a something, like the object of biology, but the principle of every thing. It is a phenomenological life in the radical sense where life defines the essence of pure phenomenality and accordingly of being insofar as being is coextensive with the phenomenon and founded on it. For what could I know that could not appear ?"

"The idea of community presupposes the idea of something in common as well as the idea of community members who have in common what is held in common. [...] Perhaps there is only one and the same reality, one and the same essence, of community and its members. Let us give a name right away to this single and essential reality of the community and its members: life. So, we can already say that the essence of community is life; every community is a community of living beings."

"The question of phenomenology, which alone confers a proper object to philosophy, is what makes it into an autonomous discipline -- the fundamental discipline of knowledge -- and not just a mere reflexion after the fact on what the other sciences have found. This question is no longer concerned with the phenomena but the mode of their givenness, their phenomenality, not with what appears but with appearing. The invaluable contribution of historical phenomenology is to become aware of this appearing and to analyze it in and of itself. This is its theme. Again, this must not simply be the repetition of the traditional philosophical problem of consciousness or the greek aletheia. For the illusion of common sense, science and past philosophies is to understand the being of the phenomenon always as a first putting at a distance, the arrival of an Outside in which everything becomes visible, a "phenomenon", in the light of this Outside."

"To radicalize the question of phenomenology is not only to aim for a pure phenomenality but to seek out the mode according to which it originally becomes a phenomenon -- the substance, the stuff, the phenomenological matter of which it is made, its phenomenologically pure materiality. That is the task of material phenomenology. Prior to this being-toward-the-outside in which everything is properly speaking placed outside of itself and in which every reality is a priori emptied and dispossessed of itself and thus becomes its contrary, an irreality, and prior to the abandonment and undoing that is called death and that would be unable to exist on its own, material phenomenology is devoted to the discovery of the reign of a phenomenality that is constructed in such a surprising way that the thought that always thinks about the world never thinks about it. To the internal structure of this originary manifestation, there belongs no Outside, no Separation, no Ek-stasis. Its phenomenological substance is not visibility. None of the categories that have been used by philosophy since the Greeks at any rate, are appropriate for it."

"Life is given in its own way, in a completely unique way, even though this singular mode of givenness is universal. Life is given in such a way that what it gives is given to itself and that what it gives to itself is never separated from it, not in the least. In this way, what life gives is itself. Life is self-givenness in a radical and rigorous sense, in the sense that it is both life that gives and life that is given. Because it is life that gives, we can only have a share of this gift in life. No road leads to life except life itself. [...] Life is absolute subjectivity inasmuch as it experiences itself and is nothing other than that experience. It is the pure fact of experiencing itself immediately and without any distance. This is what constitutes the essence of every possible community. Again, what is shared in common is not some thing; instead, it is this original givenness as self-givenness. It is the internal experience that brings to life everything that is and makes what is alive in this experience become alive in and through it alone."

"Aucune abstraction, aucune idéalité n'a jamais été en mesure de produire une action réelle ni, par conséquent, ce qui ne fait que la figurer."

"What then is culture? Every culture is a culture of life, in the dual sense whereby life is both the subject and the object of this culture. It is an action that life exerts on itself and through which it transforms itself insofar as life is both transforming and transformed. "Culture" means nothing other than that. "Culture" refers to the self-transformation of life, the movement by which it continually changes itself in order to arrive at higher forms of realization and completeness, in order to grow. But if life is this incessant movement of self-transformation and self-fulfillment, it is culture itself. Or at least it carries it as something inscribed in it and sought by it. What life are we speaking about here? What is this force that is continually maintained and grows? It is not in any way the life that forms the theme of biology and the object of science. It is not the molecules and particles that the scientist tries to reach through microscopes and whose natures are developed through multiple procedures in order to construct laboriously a concept of them that is more adequate but still subject to revision."

"L'affectivité a déjà accompli son œuvre quand se lève le monde."

"La souffrance forme le tissu de l'existence, elle est le lieu où la vie devient vivante, la réalité et l'effectivité phénoménologique de ce devenir."

"Thus the Christian ethic presents itself from the start as a displacement from the realm of the word, meaning also of thought and knowledge, to the realm of action. This displacement is decisive for three reasons. First, it leads the world’s truth back to Life’s. Second, dissipating all the illusions that traditionally link the truth to representation, to theory, and to their ecstatic foundation, it unequivocally relates Life’s Truth to the process of its self-engendering, to the power of an action. Third, in life, it is precisely no longer the ego’s power, the I Can constitutive of its will and freedom, that is at issue, but the “Father’s Will,” or the process of absolute Life’s self-engendering. Now the ethic can link the two lives, the ego’s and God’s, in such a way that it assures the former’s salvation in practice. To do the Father’s will designates the mode of life in which the Self’s life takes place, so that what is henceforth accomplished in it is absolute Life in its essence and by its requirements."