of creativity in the arts is thus just another face of the very contemporary fact that conversation is now impossible. In everyday conversation, it’s exactly as if the direct expression of a feeling, an emotion, or an idea had become impossible because it’s too vulgar. Everything has to pass through the distorting filter of humour, a humour that of course ends up being empty and turning into tragic silence. Such is both the story of the all-too-familiar idea of ‘incommunicability’ (it should be noted that the repeated exploitation of this theme has in no way prevented incommunicability from spreading in practice, and that it remains more than ever topical, even if we have become a little weary of talking about it), and the tragic history of painting in the twentieth century. The course of painting thus clearly represents, admittedly more by an analogous atmosphere than by any direct approach, the course of human communication in the contemporary era. In both cases, we slip into an unhealthy, fake, profoundly derisive atmosphere – so derisive that it ends up being tragic. So average passers-by walking through an art gallery must not pause too long if they wish to maintain their attitude of ironic detachment. If they do so, after a few minutes they will be overcome, in spite of themselves, by a certain confusion; at the very least, they will feel numbness and discomfort; their capacity for humour will slow down to a worrying degree.
(The tragic occurs exactly at this moment when the derisive no longer manages to be perceived as ‘fun’; this is a kind of brutal psychological inversion, which expresses the individual’s irreducible desire for eternity. Advertising avoids this phenomenon, which flies in the face of its own objectives, only by an incessant renewal of its simulacra; but painting retains its vocation to create permanent objects endowed with a specific character; it’s this nostalgia for authentic being that gives it its painful halo, and that willy-nilly make it a faithful reflection of the spiritual situation of Western humanity.)
In contrast, we can note the relatively good health of literature during the same period. This is very easy to explain. Literature is, profoundly, a conceptual art; it’s even, strictly speaking, the only such art. Words are concepts; clichés are concepts. Nothing can be affirmed, denied, relativized, mocked without the help of concepts and words. Hence the astonishing robustness of literary activity, which can reject itself, destroy itself, declare itself impossible without ceasing to be itself – which resists every mise en abyme, every deconstruction, every accumulation of meta-levels, however subtle they may be, and which simply gets up, shakes itself down and gets back on its feet, like a dog coming out of a pond.
Unlike music, unlike painting, and also unlike cinema, literature can thus absorb and digest limitless amounts of derision and humour. The dangers that threaten it today have nothing to do with those that have threatened and sometimes destroyed the other arts; they are much more closely related to the acceleration of perceptions and sensations that characterize the logic of the hypermarket. A book can only be appreciated slowly; it involves reflection (not mainly in the sense of intellectual effort, but in that of looking back); there is no reading without pausing, without reverse movement, without re-reading. This is impossible and even absurd in a world where everything evolves, everything fluctuates, and nothing has permanent validity; neither rules, nor things, nor human beings. With all its strength (which was great), literature opposes the notion of permanent topicality, of the perpetual present. Books call for readers; but these readers must have an individual and stable existence: they cannot be pure consumers, pure phantoms; they must also be, in some way, subjects.
Undermined by the cowardly obsession with ‘political correctness’, dumbfounded by a flood of pseudo-information that gives them the illusion of a permanent modification in the categories of existence (we can no longer think what was thought ten, a hundred or a thousand years ago), contemporary Westerners no longer manage to be readers; they no longer manage to satisfy the humble demand of a book laid out in front of them: the demand that they simply be human beings, thinking and feeling for themselves.
Even more, they cannot play this role in front of another being. And yet they ought to be able to do so: for this dissolution of being is a tragic dissolution; and we all continue, moved by a painful nostalgia, to ask the other for what we ourselves can no longer be; to seek, like a blinded phantom, this weight of being that we no longer find within ourselves. This resistance, this permanence; this depth. Of course, everyone fails, and the loneliness is excruciating.
The death of God in the West was the prelude to a formidable metaphysical soap opera, which continues to this day. Any historian of mentalities would be able to reconstruct the details of the stages; let’s just say that Christianity succeeded in this masterstroke of combining a fierce belief in the individual – compared to the epistles of Saint Paul, the whole of ancient culture seems to us today curiously civilized and monotone – with the promise of eternal participation in the Absolute Being. After the dream had faded, various attempts were made to promise individual humans a minimum of being – to reconcile the dream of being that they carried inside them with the haunting omnipresence of becoming. All of these attempts so far have failed, and unhappiness has continued to spread.
Advertising is the latest of these attempts. Although it aims to arouse desire, to provoke it and to be it, its methods are basically quite close to those that characterized the old morality. It sets up a harsh and terrifying Superego, much more ruthless than any imperative that has ever existed, one that sticks to the individual’s skin and keeps repeating: ‘You must desire. You must be desirable. You must participate in competition, in struggle, in the life of the world. If you stop, you no longer exist. If you fall behind, you’re dead.’ Denying any notion of eternity, defining itself as a process of permanent renewal, advertising aims to vaporize human subjects, to transform them into obedient phantoms of becoming. And this skin-deep, superficial participation in the life of the world is supposed to take the place of the desire for being.
Advertising fails, depression spreads, distress increases; however, advertising continues to build the infrastructures for the reception of its messages. It continues to perfect ways of getting around for people who have nowhere to go because they are nowhere at home; to develop means of communication for people who have nothing more to say; to facilitate the possibilities of interaction between people who no longer want to enter into a relationship with anyone.
The poetry of arrested movement
In May 1968, I was ten years old. I played marbles, I read Pif le Chien;3 life was good. Of the ‘events of ’68’ I have retained only one memory, albeit a quite vivid one. My cousin Jean-Pierre was then in his first year of high school in Le Raincy.4 High school then appeared to me (my later experience of it was to confirm this first intuition, while adding a painful sexual dimension) as a large and frightening place where older boys knuckled down to study difficult subjects in order to secure their professional futures. One Friday afternoon, I don’t know why, I went with my aunt to wait for my cousin after class. That same day, the high school in Le Raincy went on an indefinite strike. The schoolyard, which I expected to be filled with hundreds of teenagers dashing about, was deserted. A few teachers were standing around aimlessly between the handball posts. I remember, while my aunt was trying to gather some scraps of information, walking for long minutes across this yard. There was total peace, absolute silence. It was a wonderful moment.
In December 1986, I was at Avignon railway station, and the weather was mild. Following various sentimental complications too tedious to relate, I absolutely had – at least so I thought – to get the express train back to Paris. I was unaware that a strike movement had just started across the entire French railway network. Thus, the operational succession of sexual relations, adventure and weariness was suddenly shattered. I spent two hours, sitting on a bench, facing the deserted railway landscape. Express rail coaches stood immobile on the sidings. You’d have thought they’d been there for years, and had never even gone anywhere. They were just there, motionless. Information was passed in hushed tones from one traveller to the next; the mood was one of resignation, of uncertainty. It could have been war, or the end of the Western world.
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