Novelists From France

"Science as such has no relation with culture, because it develops outside of its realm. We sought to establish this situation in the preceding chapter, and on its own it does not justify any pejorative evaluation or condemnation that would lead to the disqualification of science. The philosopher has the duty to intervene only when the domain of science is understood as the sole existing domain of true being and subsequently leads to the rejection of the domain of life and culture into nonbeing or an illusory appearance. Once again, it is not the scientific knowledge that is in question; it is the ideology joined to it today which holds that it is the sole possible knowledge and that all other ones must be eliminated. Amidst the collapse of the beliefs, that is the sole belief that persists in the modern world, the previously encountered and universally echoed conviction that knowledge means science."

"The fact that the use of living work is reduced to almost nothing means that everything that humans once did can now be done by robots. But, the robot does not "do" anything; it is only the trigger and release on a mechanism. The only real action -- the action that exists in the feeling that one acts and that is coextensive with this feeling -- is the act of pushing a control button. From the beginning of the industrial era and as one effect of the gradual replacement of the "force of work" by natural energies, it was possible to anticipate the reduction of the activity of workers to the work of oversight. This signifies an atrophy of almost all of the subjective potentialities of the living individual and thus a malaise and growing dissatisfaction."

"The life that we are speaking about cannot be confused with the object of scientific knowledge, an object for which knowledge would be reserved to those who are in possession of it and who have had to acquire it. Instead, it is something that everyone knows, as part of what we are. But how can "everyone" -- that is, each individual as a living being -- know what life is, except in the respect that life knows itself and that this original knowledge of the self constitutes its own essence? Life feels and experiences itself in such a way that there is nothing in it that would not be experienced or felt. This is because the fact of feeling oneself is really what makes one alive. Everything that has this marvelous property of feeling itself is alive, whereas everything that happens to lack it is dead. The rock, for example, does not experience itself and so it is said to be a "thing". The earth, the sea, the stars are things. Plants, trees, and vegetation are also things, unless one can detect in them a sensibility in the transcendental sense, that is to say, a capacity of experiencing itself and feeling itself which would make them living beings. This is life not in the biological sense but in the true sense -- the absolute phenomenological life whose essence consists in the very fact of sensing or experiencing oneself and nothing else -- of what we will call subjectivity."

"After the diagnosis of Barbarism, the phenomena of self-destruction have seen an enormous and violent intensification. This is not only visible in the streets. The nihilistic attack against all values, the defense of everything that is against nature and against life, expresses this even more. With violence, it is the development of technology outside of any norms that takes to the extreme this substitution of blind processes for the benefit of effort and the joy of living."

"The abstraction made by science is thus twofold. First, it is abstraction that defines the scientific world as such. Sensible qualities and the affective predicates that belong to them a priori are put out of play from the being of nature so that they only retain the forms capable of giving them an ideal determination. This nonconsideration of the subjective features of every possible world is indispensable from a methodological point of view, inasmuch as it allows for the establishment of procedures such as quantitative measurement that permit types of knowledge to be obtained that otherwise would be inaccessible. But, the infinite development of this ideal knowledge can only be pursued legitimately inasmuch as it remains clearly conscious of the limits of its field of investigation, limits that it has drawn itself. It cannot escape the fact that the setting aside of the sensible and affective properties of the world presupposes the setting aside of life itself, that is to say, of what makes up the humanity of the human being. That is the second abstraction made by science in the current sense: the abstraction of Life and of what alone truly matters."

"The change that perverts individual subjective praxis does not simply involve its reduction to stereotypical and monotonous acts. Along with this narrowing and impoverishment that already indicate the fall of culture, another phenomenon occurs that pushes this process of enculturation to its culmination: the activity of these meaningless acts reverts to a total passivity. It is the objective device in its various organizations and uses that dictates the nature and type of what little remains for the worker to do. It is true that the capacities of the individual at work, and especially the bodily capacities, cannot be entirely abstracted. This is because Bodily-ownness (Corpspropriation) remains the hidden and inescapable foundation for the transformation of the world, in its technical age just as much as in any other age. It just so happens that the force of the Body has been replaced by the objective network of the machine, and the body is only taken into consideration to the precise degree that the device requires the intervention of the individual, however modestly. This amounts to the derisory role that is still conceded to life and its knowledge, that is to say, to culture. The most complex computer ends with a keyboard that is easier than a typewriter. The information age will be the age of idiots."

"Here let us call upon the founder of modern rationalism -- Descartes. In the eyes of one of the greatest philosophers, it was sheer absurdity to claim that colour is external and that it would be spread out in the external world and belong it. If I put my hand on a wall exposed to the sun, I think, 'The wall is hot'. But that is false. To be hot means to experience heat and to experience oneself as being hot. Only what experiences itself, only life, can experience heat and know what it is to be 'hot'. The same goes with pain. I think, 'My arm is in pain'. But, as an extended outer reality, my arm would not be able to experience anything whatsoever, not even pain. In an exteriority that is outside the self and does not touch or feel itself, nothing can be experienced: no pain, no suffering and no joy."

"What is true about heat and pain is also true about colour. The rock is no more red than it is hot or painful. It can only have a colour -- red, blue, yellow -- in the invisible life where the colour is felt, on the basis of 'feeling oneself' (se sentir soi-même). Life's feeling of itself and its feeling of colour is a pathos. Colour is not linked to a tonality through an external and contingent association that would vary with individuals. In the phenomenological substance of its flesh and being, colour is a sensation and subjectivity; it is this affective tonality and inner tone."

"Painting does not use language. Abstract painting teaches us this, and this is what gives it its power of expression. If colour does not relate to the feelings of our soul through an external relation but finds its true being in them – as a pure sensation and a pure experience – then it does not even need to translate, through a means, the abstract content of our invisible life. It coincides with our invisible life and is its pathos: its suffering, its boredom, its neglect or its joy."

"If communication takes place between the artwork and the public, it is on the level of sensibility, through the emotions and their immanent modifications. It does not have anything to do with words, with collective, ideological or scientific representations, or with their critical, intellectual or literary formulations, in short, anything that is called culture. It is totally independent from that type of culture. This is why it is addressed to the group of people who ‘lack culture’. It is popular in the sense that it leads to what is most essential in each human being: one’s capacity to feel, to suffer and to love."

"The media of the technological age have very different characteristics. Their content is the Insignificant, the "news". Tomorrow it will no longer have the least interest. There is even good reason to believe that there is no interest at the time of the event. The medium is the televised image, instead of the permanent to which one must return in order to grow on one's own. It continually falls into a nothingness from which it will never be able to leave. The media world thus does not offer a self-realization of life; it offers escape. For all those whose laziness represses their energy and thus always leaves them discontent with themselves, it offers the opportunity to forget about their discontent. This forgetting recurs at each moment with each new rise of Force and Desire. Each weekend, students from the Parisian suburbs spend an average of twenty-one hours in front of their televisions, just like their teachers. At least they will have something to talk about the next day."

"It is not at all paradoxical that this popular painting would stand in total isolation today, that there would be practically no audience to view or understand these masterpieces of the one who Argan says 'determined the fate of contemporary art', that the admirable rooms of the Lenbach villa would remain empty all the time or even that the Beaubourg half of the collection donated by Nina Kandinsky would stagnate in the reserves where no one can see them. It just so happens that people today are no longer popular, spontaneous, instinctive, real or alive. A mediation has separated people from themselves. The media has replaced the free play of life and its sensibility, with the substitute of an unreal, artificial, stereotypical, consumer world where life can only flee instead of realize itself."

"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."

"Quand ce qui ne sent rien et ne se sent pas soi-même, n'a ni désir ni amour, est mis au principe de l'organisation du monde, c'est le temps de la folie qui vient, car la folie a tout perdu sauf la raison."

"There is no longer any more room to challenge the omnipresent objectivism of modernity. After the unilateral objectivism of science, there is the media which tears the human being away from him or herself. At every moment, it produces the content that comes to occupy the mind, thereby authorizing an unprecedented and unlimited ideological manipulation that prohibits all free thought and all "democracy". It condemns every interpersonal relation to be reduced to external manifestations, for example, love is reduced to the objective movement of bodies and to photos."

"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."

"By putting out of play not only the lifeworld but, more seriously, life itself or what we are, the play of knowledge is laden with significant consequences from the outset. If the auto-transformation and growth of culture is the business of life, what we have only glimpsed now appears with a striking clarity: since science has no relation to culture, the development of science has nothing to do with the development of culture. At the limit, one can imagine an extreme development of scientific knowledge that would go along with an atrophy of culture, with its regression in some domains or in all domains at once and, at the end of this process, its annihilation. This image is neither ideal nor abstract. It is the actual world we live in, a world which has just given rise to a new type of barbarism that is more serious that any that have preceded it and from which human beings risk dying from today."

"Let us consider a biology student who is reading a work about the genetic code. The student’s reading is the repetition through an act of her own consciousness of the complex processes of conceptualization and theorizing contained in the book, or those that are signified by the printed characters. But, in order for this reading to be possible, the student must turn the pages with her hands as she reads. The student must move her eyes in order to cover it and collect the lines of the text one after the other. When the student becomes tired, she will get up, leave the library, and take the stairs to the cafeteria where she will get some rest and something to eat and drink. The knowledge contained in the biology manual that was assimilated by the student during her reading is scientific knowledge. […] The knowledge that made possible de movements of the hands and the eyes, the act of getting up, climbing the stairs, drinking and eating, and resting is the knowledge of life."

"The ontological revolution occurs when action ceases to obey the prescriptions of life and it is no longer what it was at the beginning, that is, the actualization of the phenomenological potential of absolute subjectivity. Moreover, it seems that action has deserted the site that was always its own in order to take place in the world henceforth: in factories, dams, and power plants. It is now wherever there are pistons, turbines, cogs and all kinds of machines that fire away all the time. In short, it is the immense mechanical system of big industry, which can be reduced to the electromagnetic currents of supercomputers and other high-tech machines of "techno-science". This points to the crucial event of Modernity in the passage from the reign of the human to the nonhuman: action has become objective."

"Let us just say here that if science is capable of making the slightest material modification to nature, this is only insofar as a real action cannot be reduced to a merely theoretical relation between a knowing subject and a known object. In reality, it always takes the unperceived detour through Bodily-ownness (Corpspropriation). Only someone who has hands and eyes in the sense of a radically immanent power of grasping and seeing, only a being originally constituted in oneself as a subjective and living Body -- only the scientist not as a scientist but as this kind of being -- can turn the pages of a book and read it. Likewise, only such a person can carry out a scientific operation of any kind: handle a tool, press a button, follow the results of a change on a graph, and then understand the results of a sophisticated experiment. These results are ultimately offered as sensible givens, and they are only accessible in that form. The same goes for experimentation properly so-called. The conduct or handling of it always refers back to and presupposes an action of the original Body."

"Technology is nature without the human being. It is abstract nature, reduced to itself, delivered over to itself, exalting and expressing itself on its own. It develops in such a way that all the virtualities and potentialities within it must be actualized, for them and for what they are, for their own sake, so that everything is done that can be done, that is to say, everything that nature can become. It is a matter of making gold, going to the moon, building self-guiding and self-monitoring missiles that can decide on the moment to self-destruction – and destroy us. Technology is alchemy; it is the self-fulfillment of nature in place of the self-fulfillment of the life that we are. It is barbarism, the new barbarism of our time, in place of culture. Inasmuch as it puts the prescriptions and regulations of life out of play, it is not simply barbarism in its most extreme and inhumane form that has ever been known – it is sheer madness."

"Where is a self-revelation of this sort achieved? In Life, as its essence, since Life is nothing other than that which reveals itself – not something that might have an added property of self-revealing, but the very fact of self-revealing, self-revelation as such. Everywhere that something like a self-revelation is produced there is Life. Everywhere there is Life, this self-revelation is produced. If, then, the Revelation of God is a self-revelation that owes nothing to the truth of the world, and if we ask where such a self-revelation is achieved, the answer is unequivocal: in Life and in Life alone. Therefore we are in the presence of the first fundamental equation of Christianity: God is Life – he is the essence of Life, or if one prefers, the essence of Life is God. Saying this we already know what God is, but we do not know it through the effect of some knowledge or learning – we do not know it through thought, against the background of the truth of the world. Rather we know it, and we can know it, only in and through Life itself. We can know the essence of God only in God. But this observation is premature."

"The essence of media communication is television. What media communication communicates is itself, in such a way that the form of this communication becomes its content. This is why something can only be real, if and only if it enters into this communication. What matters is the number of journalists, the number of cameras gathered around what will come into being in and through them: the event. In and through them, the event does not only derive its importance but its existence. The media world thus determines its nature. For what claims the title of an "event" and thus to exist must be such that it can be televised; it is and must be created, cut, limited by this inescapable demand whose essence we have recognized: the news (actualité). This refers to what is there now in its most extreme punctuality and superficiality -- a superficiality and punctuality derived from its ability to be televised and from being televised -- for the time that it will exist and after which it will fall into nothingness."

"The magnitude of an artwork only results from subjective forces. If these forces happen to be lacking, the edifice will crumble. The colossal works of fascism, socialist gigantism, and, in our eyes, the syncretism of the post-modern era are all the unfortunate testimony to this inner void. Because the exaltation of the powers of life can only be produced in life, life can do without these pretentious manifestations. The size of the material means does nothing for it. This can most surely be found in the small but very precise experiments where Kandinsky puts the elements of one single art or two different arts into relations of belonging or internal reciprocity. This is how he illustrated the stories of the Russian poet Remizov and composed his 'Sounds' collection, an admirable example of 'synthetic' work in which he decorated some of his own poems with coloured wood and other ones in black and white."

"The media of culture -- mosaics, frescoes, engravings, books, music -- usually had a sacred theme; in any case, their theme was the growth of life's powers up to the exalted discovery of its own essence. The medium was art, namely, the awakening of these powers with the aid of the sensibility that carries all the other ones. The ideal aesthetic image -- whether visual or sonorous -- was the object of contemplation. It was that which remained and that to which one always returned in the repetition of transcendental processes that led to its creation. To become their contemporary is precisely to reproduce these acts and increased powers of life within oneself. It is to reach them in and through the exaltation of the Basis (Fonds). Culture was the set of brilliant works that enabled and gave rise to this repetition -- culture was the set of signs that human beings gave to one another through the centuries in order to surpass themselves."

"Le spectacle de la beauté qui s'incarne dans un être vivant est infiniment plus émouvant que celui de l'œuvre la plus grandiose."

"I do not intend to ask whether Christianity is “true” or “false,” or to establish, for example, the former hypothesis. Rather, what will be in question here is what Christianity considers as truth – what kind of truth it offers to people, what it endeavors to communicate to them, not as a theoretical and indifferent truth but as the essential truth that by some mysterious affinity is suitable for them, to the point that it alone is capable of assuring them salvation. We are trying to understand the form of truth that circumscribes the domain of Christianity, the milieu in which it spreads, the air that it breathes, one might say – because there are many sorts of truths, many ways of being true or false. And we are also perhaps trying to get away from the concept of truth that dominates modern thought and that, as much in and of itself as in its multiple implications, determines the world in which we live."

"Life confers a value on things -- they do not have any value by themselves -- inasmuch as they are suited to it and satisfy its desires. But this spontaneous evaluation by life is only possible, in turn, if life experiences itself, even through its most humble needs, as what it is and must be, as an absolute value. The fundamental values have no other content than what is implied in life's first experience of itself; they are the proper content of this life."

"The second mask worn in the refusal to take into consideration the cultural specificity of the tasks and the condition of the university is the argument of utility. This one is dear to parents. Don't studies serve the purpose of getting a job? Truly speaking, as the development of the potential of individual subjectivity through repeated practice and the transmission of knowledge, teaching helps those who benefit from it to become suited for a certain number of activities, for perfecting their abilities as well as acquiring new ones. It is evident that the more the level of this teaching is raised, the greater are the choices and the number of "outlets" provided. The idea, to the contrary, of limiting knowledge to what will actually be put into practice is both criminal and contradictory. It is contradictory due to the fluctuation of demand in an evolving world and thus to the necessity of constant adaptation. This ability to adapt is a function of one's degree of intelligence as well as the extent of one's mastered knowledge. It is criminal because it signifies the stoppage of the individual's potential development. It is the deliberate reduction of one's being to the condition of a cog in the techno-scientific machine."

"This is the miracle of abstract painting: it constructs the unlimited monumentality of a work that no longer has a foothold in the visible world, that ignores its rules and does not seek anything from it, neither aid nor sanction, and that emerges with the pure force and infinite certainty of life. Withdrawn from the weight of things and from the inertial systems in which things are held and have their limited possibilities circumscribed, the work of art proceeds from the imagination. To imagine is to posit something other than what is and what is there right in front of us -- something other than the world. To imagine is to posit life."

"The imagination brings into being what has not yet taken place in being: hitherto inexperienced tones, impressions, emotions, feelings and forces. The imagination is indeed creative, even in a radical sense that gives it a positivity that was not glimpsed by classical thought. Art's creative imagination does not give us decoys to contemplate, for example the depth of a third dimension where there was only a flat surface. It has ceased to be, according to Kant's famous definition, the faculty of representing a thing in its absence. It has become the magical power of making something real. What type of thing is it then? Where and how does the imagination bring it into existence? We have already answered this: it gives a thing life, as a modality of life. What it creates is in fact this new modality. The movement of the imagination is thus nothing other than the movement of life, its internal becoming, the tireless process of its coming into itself, an arrival in which it is felt in ever more vast, differentiated and intense experiences."

"Art will rediscover its way in a different type of nature (from the Galilean nature). The sensible qualities of this nature are not reduced to external features, as mere signs that are limited to 'representing' a foreign reality. These qualities are modes of life: impressions, tones and tonalities. This is what I mean: by tearing colours and linear forms away from the ideal archetype of meanings that constitute the objective world and by taking them in their non-referential pictoriality, Kandinskian abstraction does not depart from nature but returns to its inner essence. This original, subjective, dynamic, impressional and pathetic nature -- the true nature whose essence is Life -- is the cosmos. A dazzling claim from The Blaue Reiter Almanac, highlighted by Kandinsky himself, defines the Arche (or the Origin) where Art and Cosmos are identical: 'The world sounds. It is a cosmos of spiritually affective beings. Thus, dead matter is living spirit'."

"We gaze petrified at the hieroglyphs of the invisible, as they too stand motionless or only slowly change against the background of a nocturnal sky. We watch forces that slumbered within us, waiting stubbornly and patiently for millennia, even from the beginning of time. These forces explode into the violence and gleam of colours; they open spaces and engender the forms of the worlds. The forces of the cosmos are awakened within us. They lead us outside of time to join in their celebration dance and they do not let go of us. They do not stop – because not even they believed that it was possible to attain 'such happiness'. Art is the resurrection of eternal life."

"I am the sort of writer who needs another form to tell me who I am and what has happened to me…I think all my novels are self-portraits, but there’s no one character who resolves me, or catalyses me, or is me."

"What distinguishes an argument from a play upon words, is that the latter cannot be translated."

"I began to think about its double nature: on the one hand you have an organ in your body and on the other you have a symbol of love. From that time I started to pursue the image of a heart crossing the night from one body to another. It is a simple narrative structure but it’s open to a lot of things. I had the intuition that this book could give form to my intimate experience of death."

"A strange rage this modern mania to give a common manner to all minds and to destroy individuality."

"There is no reality for me but pure thought. Minds alone are interesting."

"Young men in meetings put in common nothing but their mediocrity."

"So the novel is a race, and I can see the finish line from the first sentence: it’s an intuition that magnetizes the entire text. The closer I get to the goal, the faster I want to go. There’s even a sense of urgency, of hurrying, as though I was out of breath and had to, at all costs, finish before I ran out of strength. So I find that my endings are often too quick, not unfolded enough, not majestic enough…"

"Tout livre a pour collaborateur son lecteur."

"L'individu n'est rien, la société est tout."

"I love when a crucial novel leaves a trace in my memory. In this, its ending plays a significant part—creating a wake effect that is never erased."

"Reality, it cannot be repeated too often, varies with every one of us."

"Even if I hated my childhood, I am nostalgic for it. How can it be possible? Probably because the past is—in a way—settled. I think that childhood is a moment where the world is growing every day. Every day the world is bigger, reality is bigger, reality is deeper. When you become an adult, everything shrinks. You realize that the world is smaller and smaller, and people's minds are not as big as you thought."

"I want to be a writer of violence…I think the more you talk about violence, the more you can undo violence…"

"Since the rape, it has felt like I’ve faced an unimaginable battering – first in going to the police, being in front of officers who don’t understand you. Then when you say it publicly, there are people who don’t believe you, who mock you. Or there are people who believe it but say it’s your own fault. Before this, I had heard a lot of women talking about the fact they weren’t believed. And when History of Violence was published, I realised the full extent of what those women had gone through."

"We also have a fundamental right to not carry a pain that we did not choose. Whether you’re born black or gay or a woman or Jewish, you didn’t choose it. You have to be the person in charge of it saying your story, again and again. When it is something you are forced to recount, there’s something violent about it…"

"Religion as a whole is but a form of loyalty to the interests of English property."

"Lesbians are not women."