and CD: For example, would it be possible to adapt your novel for the cinema?
MH: Yes, absolutely. The scenario is basically quite similar to Taxi Driver; but the whole visual side would need changing. Quite different from New York: the setting of the film would mainly consist of glass, steel, reflective surfaces. Landscaped offices, screens; the world of a new city, crossed by efficient and successful traffic. At the same time, the sexuality in this book is a succession of failures. Above all, any erotic magnification should be avoided – it’s the exhaustion, masturbation, and vomiting that should be filmed. But all as part of a transparent, colourful and cheerful world. Diagrams and graphical representations could be introduced, too – the rate of sex hormones in the blood, salary in thousands of francs … We mustn’t hesitate to be theoretical; we must attack on all fronts. The over-injection of theory produces a strange dynamism.
J-YJ and CD: You often describe your pessimism as just a passing stage. What might come next?
MH: I’d like to escape the obsessive presence of the modern world; move to a Mary Poppins-type world, where everything’s fine. I don’t know if I will. As for the general development of things, it’s also difficult to comment. Given the current socio-economic system, especially taking into account our philosophical presuppositions, humans are clearly rushing towards imminent disaster, under atrocious conditions; we’re there already. The logical consequences of individualism are murder and unhappiness. The enthusiasm that’s driving us to this destruction is remarkable; really very curious. It’s, for example, astonishing to see the cheerful shrug with which people have jettisoned psychoanalysis – which admittedly deserved it – and replaced it with a reductionist reading of the human being, based on hormones and neurotransmitters. The gradual dissolution over the centuries of social and family structures, the growing tendency of individuals to perceive themselves as isolated particles, subject to the law of shocks, as provisional aggregates of smaller particles … all this, of course, makes any political solution inapplicable. So it’s legitimate to begin by clearing away the sources of hollow optimism. Returning to a more philosophical analysis of things, we realize that the situation is even stranger than we thought. We’re moving towards disaster, guided by a false image of the world; and no one realizes. Even neurochemists don’t seem to realize that their discipline is advancing across a minefield. Sooner or later they’ll tackle the molecular bases of consciousness; then they’ll collide head-on with the ways of thinking resulting from quantum physics. We’ll be forced to redefine the conditions of knowledge, of the very notion of reality; we should start to become aware of it on an emotional level, right now. In any case, as long as we’re stuck in a mechanistic and individualistic view of the world, we will die. I don’t think it’s wise to stay in a state of suffering and evil any longer. The idea of the self has been centre stage for five centuries; it’s time to take off in a new direction.
Notes
1 1. Whatever is the English translation by Paul Hammond (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1998) of Extension du domaine de la lutte (Paris: Editions Paul Nadeau, 1994), which more literally means Extension of the Domain of Struggle. The other works mentioned are Houellebecq’s essay Rester vivant (Paris: La Différence, 1991) and La Poursuite du bonheur, a collection of poems first published as part of the same volume. His study of Lovecraft has been translated into English as H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, translated by Dorna Khazeni (London: Gollancz, 2008).
2 2. In a standard English translation of this work, Kant refers to potential suicide in these terms: ‘a nature whose law it would be to destroy life itself by means of the same feeling whose destination is to impel toward the furtherance of life would contradict itself and would therefore not subsist as nature’ (Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, translated by Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 32)).
6 Art as peeling
Monday, the art school in Caen. I’ve been asked to explain why kindness seemed to me more important than intelligence, or talent. I did my best, I struggled; but I know it was true. Then I visited Rachel Poignant’s studio, which uses casts of different parts of her body. I came to a halt in front of long thongs covered with the cast of one of her tits (the right one? the left one? I can’t remember). In their rubbery consistency, and general appearance, they definitely looked like octopus tentacles. Still, I slept pretty well.
Wednesday, the art school in Avignon, for a ‘day of failure’ organized by Arnaud Labelle-Rojoux. I was supposed to be talking about sexual failure. Things got off to an almost cheerful start, with a screening of short films brought together under the title of Films Without Qualities: some hilarious, others strange, sometimes both (I think the tape is currently running in different art centres; it would be shame to miss it). Then I saw a video by Jacques Lizène. It’s haunted by sexual misery. His penis protruded from a hole made in a plywood sheet; it was encircled in a noose by a string used to activate it. He moved it slowly about, jerkily, like a soft puppet. I was very uncomfortable. This atmosphere of decomposition, the sad fuck-up of contemporary art, ends up by suffocating you; sometimes you miss Joseph Beuys and his generous-minded propositions. Nonetheless, this witness to our age has a relentless precision about it. All evening I thought about it, and was forced to accept this observation: contemporary art depresses me; but I realize that it’s by far the best recent commentary on the state of affairs. I dreamed of a rubbish bin overflowing with coffee filters, peelings, meat smothered in gravy. I thought of art as a kind of peeling, of the bits of flesh that stick to the peels.
Saturday, a literary gathering in the north of the Vendée. A few ‘right-wing regionalist’ writers (it’s easy to see they’re right-wingers: when they talk about their origins, they like to point out a Jewish ancestor four generations back, so that everyone can see how broadminded they are). Otherwise, as everywhere, a very diverse audience: the only thing they have in common is that they like reading. These people live in an area where the number of shades of green is endless; but, under a perfectly grey sky, all the shades of green fade away. So what we have here is a faded infinity. I thought of the orbits of the planets after the end of all life, in an increasingly colder universe, marked by the gradual fading of the stars; and the words ‘human warmth’ almost made me cry.
On Sunday, I took the TGV back to Paris; my holidays were over.
7 Creative absurdity
La Structure du langage poétique meets the academic criteria of seriousness – not that this is necessarily a criticism.1 Jean Cohen observes that, compared to prosaic, ordinary language, the sort that is used to transmit information, poetry allows itself considerable deviations. It constantly uses irrelevant epithets (‘white twilights’, in Mallarmé; ‘black perfumes’, in Rimbaud). It does not resist the pleasure of the obvious (‘Don’t tear it up with your two white hands’, in Verlaine; the prosaic mind sneers – could she have three hands?) It doesn’t shrink from a certain inconsistency (‘Ruth was musing and Booz dreaming; the grass was black’, in Hugo; two juxtaposed notations, underlines Cohen, whose logical unity is difficult to see). It delights in redundancy, proscribed in prose under the name of repetition; a borderline case would be García Lorca’s poem, Llanto por Ignacio Sanchez Mejias, in which the words ‘cinco de la tarde’ [‘five o’clock in the afternoon’] occur thirty times in the first fifty-two lines.
To establish his thesis, the author undertakes a comparative statistical analysis of poetic texts and prose texts (the height of prosaic being for him – and this is highly significant – the writings of the great scientists of the end of the nineteenth century: Louis Pasteur, Claude Bernard, Marcelin Berthelot). The same method allows him to observe that the poetic gap is much wider among the Romantics than among the classical writers, and increases even more among the Symbolists. Intuitively, we probably suspected as much; still, it’s nice to see it established so clearly. Once we’ve finished reading the book, we’re certain of
