Translated from the French. Read the original.
De l’amitié — Selected Excerpts
René—who is a restaurateur by trade—eats at any old hour, any old thing, listens to music, reads detective novels, writes, goes in for sports (jogging, tennis), and loves a woman.
Michel—who is a philosophy teacher—always eats the same things in the same place, writes, reads L’Équipe (as René does, for that matter), goes in for sports (jogging), and loves no one but himself.
Domi—who is an auxiliary teacher—does not eat, reads, listens to music, loves a woman, and is active in politics.
Me—who am a journalist—I am on a diet, write, listen to music, love a woman.
These biographies, in their dryness, deserve a gold star: they say everything! Still, some explaining is in order, if only for the pleasure of amusing oneself with this exercise in style.
René, then. Restaurateur. A commercial function that might seem disconcerting, given everything one has just read. How can a restaurateur come into play at this conceptual level? In that he is self-taught. He made himself on his own, and our friendship accelerated a process of coming to class consciousness. Where there is a contradiction is in the fact that he cannot manage to be a good businessman!
A musicologist every bit as much as Louis, René is, by choice of personality, a dilettante. A companionable man, somewhat careless, he now has to provide for his own needs, and this bores him. More eager to listen to Parker, read a Série Noire, watch a France–All Blacks game, or go for a jog than even to write a book or reflect at the drop of a hat on this or that concept. Fantastically indifferent to drawing-room manners, he resists in his own way by plunging into love affairs of disarming complexity and by maintaining with the whole world relations in which kindness is the primary component. For René is good, wants to be, remains so, come what may. That is his function among us: he is mercy! He is a haven of peace amid hatred!
One has to understand that he got to know Louis, that I got to know Domi, that he introduced me to Louis, that I introduced him to Domi, who knew Michel, that I got to know Louis thanks to René, that René got to know Domi thanks to me, that Michel got to know René and Louis thanks to Domi. All that, more than twenty years ago now.
Adding that René is my brother. But that matters little here. Blood kinship has no affective significance at the level of the concept. Louis and René make a pair. The same pronounced taste for music. Both live in the same region. Self-taught. Tradesmen. The difference: money. One has it, the other does not. But as we know, a capitalist does not shudder before human misery, and Louis gives in to René’s requests only in extremis. Their game on this level is rather obscure, and I do not know exactly whether they themselves know where they stand.
René’s worth lies essentially in that strange fascination he can exert through his sheer availability. He is the man you can call for help and who will come. This function of a subjective rapid-intervention squad—we, for our part, do not call on it. But we know that he often answers when those around him need him, and nothing would surprise us more than to learn that he is not in the thick of the action. His objective function is certainly to serve as mediator between the various class strata, which come to frictions, always inevitable ones. He is the man of political conciliation, by way of the affective and of détente. He is the one who will know how to overdetermine a situation of rupture, by bringing peace, harmony, and reconciliation to bear.
He has had failures because his systematism mirrors the nature he has created for himself: phlegmatic and supple. All in all, it is a rather banal role, yet a remarkable one, insofar as neither he nor we are fooled by his social-democratic character. René will want no part of a relentless class struggle. And yet he knows only too well that it is inevitable. He dresses the wounds of individuals in this fight, he soothes hatreds, he absorbs conflicts, doggedly. He is good, in the Christian sense, the primary one. That is how he is. He must have kept from his Sartrean readings a firmly rooted hint of existentialism.
Michel is another matter. A formidable individual. Sociology teacher. Author of three books. Former sprinter. Former study-hall monitor (13 years, I believe). A broad Tarn accent. Excess in philosophy as in life. A fierce solitude. A village in the southwest where—shut away with his mother—he nurses, with metaphysical obstinacy, gigantic rages against social democracy. Kept at arm’s length for years in a grayish Paris lycée, he became “everything”—as he says himself—that is to say, a docteur d’État. From his purgatory he has kept a little nobody’s pointillism, an irritating stinginess, and the certainty that he will one day be an associate professor. Broken one fine morning—pneumothorax—by a chimerical Latin Quarter love, he harbors a justified hatred of women and an atrocious terror of never having managed to be a coxcomb. Having lost his body at the end of a 200m in which he fell (it was in L’Équipe, for he was the favorite), he has made a religion of his physical fitness, which he keeps up through relentless jogging and strange diets. He has set up his offices in numerous cafés, where he writes with the tip of a ballpoint pen on the pages of graph-paper notebooks. In Paris, he lodges in a hotel at 23F a night, where he finds silence and the awestruck regard of the landlady, who calls this white-haired gentleman “the philosophy professor” and knows him by no other name. He reads L’Équipe assiduously, France Doit so as to miss nothing of the ambient sociology, and Le Monde to keep abreast of the moods of the bourgeoisie.
He has only one constantly avowed objective: at last (after so many years as a monitor) not to work, and to publish his books. His determination on this last point is colossal, and in Paris he does the work of an ox to get there. A catalyst—through his ideas and his gift of gab—of the group’s ideas, he has with each of us distinctly typed relations, in which his roles are vague and his objectives unavowed. He must have kept from his peasant origins a countryman’s wariness, and the city-dweller repels him. Very close to each of us, he has had idylls with each of us, then fallen out, except with René, whom he calls “PéPé” and masters with a great deal of softness, thanks to that softness. Entrenched in himself, by himself, for himself, he remains anchored to emotional life with us, the way a good swimmer sometimes likes to find a beach—but one who can go on to the next. Hot-headed and furious, he blasphemes against the human race, and misanthropy makes him lose himself even against us. He is grandiose and laughable. With René, he has sport in common (René was a very good swimmer, a champion of France). Otherwise, with the others—and even with René—he has nothing in common, except the concept. He himself is a pure product of conceptual friendship. It chains him, padlocks him, puts him in irons, and rivets him. Since it is his daily bread, only our class complicity can make him feel secure.
It is a good thing we are here, for otherwise he would be dead. With me—apart from practical disagreements: “the salt,” at the table—he has conceptual disagreements that will mark our future, for I know him to be a metaphysician and am wary of it.[22] But perhaps, after all, he is right. Then our complicity will be definitive. We have kept a tremendous past in which we spent whole nights searching for the objective determinations of intersubjectivity, which we partly found, and which he elaborated and wrote up. On which I am still working.
There is no worse city-dweller than the rural petty clerk come to Paris who—a marvelous Stalinist—finds himself the butt of the social-democratic derision of the Latin Quarter. For that alone, he deserves the best. Above all, one must not deny him that extraordinary humor and a human warmth he knows how to give to those he likes.
Finally, one will grant him—among heaps of other things—the extraordinary power of immediately decoding immediacy. Only class hatred can make one understand that. We understand.
Domi next. He is unquestionably our biggest worry. Of frail constitution, he hunts down life the way some hunt wild beasts, and he does not come out of it the physical winner. Gifted, highly gifted, torn from quietude by disquietude, thunderstruck by Hegel, East Germany, and music, he has fits of vertigo in existence that throw us into a panic. An auxiliary teacher, when he is a sublime pedagogue, capable of dictating texts for two years, if need be, to fourth-graders, without ever opening a book, because he knows them by heart. He knows all of Parsifal and all of Wagner, the second movement of Mozart’s K524, and the capital of any country. Orthodox in his communism, he should have been writing at 18 and did not because of Rimbaud, that vile ultra-leftist bastard whom I personally detest and who ought to be replaced in school textbooks by Vallès, for the content, the poetry still being worth taking. So, since writing draws no thought out of him, he rummages through his daily life to spit fire, and he spits out his lungs and his guts along with it.
Is he lonelier than the loneliest of us? It is possible, because we have all contrived a social status that suffices, whereas he has been swept away by a gust of wind, in which he does not take the time—he is wrong not to—to look for support. What a waste of talent he is, all by himself, giving five classes a day, on every subject, and carrying dazzled students along in his wake. Today he runs from lycée to lycée, and his son Youri—like the Russian—trembles at loving him so much, so much does he himself tremble at being in the world!!
He brought us Hegel and a conception of music, not to mention a sagacity in reflection that bursts out at machine-gun speed. His Hegelianism is quite decisive for understanding the federation we form around the concept. Granted, Michel was already a Hegelian. But René’s Sartreanism, Louis’s empirio-criticism, my Kantianism did not hold out long against the Hegelo-Marxism of Domi and Michel. It is without any doubt thanks to their stubbornness that things moved forward for us. What is more—an enormous advantage—it allowed Michel to read nothing of Hegel, since Domi had done so. I remember that extraordinary remark, one fine evening when Michel picked up—as if inadvertently—the “Phenomenology of Spirit,” grudgingly skimmed a few lines of it, then exclaimed, as if astounded, in his broad accent, from Tarn et Garonne: “But this confirms what I am saying!” The just return of this world’s inversions. Now, that is thanks to Domi. He would no doubt need a patron who would skillfully provide for his thirst for reading and for music, as well as for women, with whom he must be kept supplied like any mortal. He would thus be much more in harmony with reality, which seems—because of capitalism—to keep him at a distance. If what binds him most to Michel is the abstract, faith in the USSR, and the love of nature (Domi has a car, he drives Michel around), he is bound to René by the kindness René gives, and even more to Domi, whom he loves as the Christians (the ones with the lions) could probably love one another. Music brings them together, of course, and the fact that René is a refuge. That is Domi’s salvation. Louis and Domi: the pooling of talent, the one produced, the other still virgin. Music, certainly, and as Domi is a pedagogue, it is Louis who learns, since he is self-taught.
As for me, my morbid pathos separated us, at a time when my demonism was being exercised on my idiocy, and since then the reality of our conceptual truths has tended to bring us closer, without our being able, however, truly to find each other again, for I am a beast of burden, and that keeps away from me what in him is an ontological dilettantism. Let that pass. Finally, me. A doctorat d’État in sociology under way at the Hautes Études. A master’s in philosophy, editor-in-chief of a professional journal intended for professionals. I grew up in the fear of having nearly been an idiot. That marked me. At first I witnessed, in stupefaction, the arrival of the concept and the formation of this gang of five. In fact, I was the first to know Domi, in a lycée schoolyard, where I ruled the roost because I was the local thinker. I introduced Domi to René, who introduced him to Louis. Domi pulled Michel out of the Old Navy for us, on his own initiative, the way one pulls a folklore out of a hat. The synthesis yielded us. I did not know much back then. But I learned. And the terror I have kept of having nearly been a moron still whips me on, so much so that I flog my brain and my pen until I drop. I do indeed write a terrible amount, since this text will be the fourteenth book I have produced, all unpublished, for I fear publishers like the plague, being convinced that they are there only to keep people like me from writing.
I am the poet of the gang, for I believe in poetry and I have already written 6 collections, some of which are very beautiful, I know it. Music, of course, like all of us. I have undertaken to record all of Mozart on cassette (thanks to France Musique). I am getting there. I have just decreed 1981 a Mozart year for myself. I will write a book about him. Sports, of course, like each and every one of us, and perhaps—owing to my obstinacy in being a poet—a more pronounced taste for women, and more particularly for the one I love.
One dependent child. I am a divorced father. Like René. But René entrusts his to others. As for me, I carry mine single-handedly. To each his own technique, and that is no reproach.
Incapable of accepting my petty-bourgeois condition, I have kept from Sartre an unhappy consciousness, which I smother in appalling excesses. I once drew (in “Mot à Mot”) a portrait of myself that I had better give again, for it has the undeniable advantage of stressing the faults: “Himself, I tell you! Made of flesh and blood, of errors and hatreds, of glories and dissimulation, of darkness and brutal awakenings that pierce the pale whiteness of children’s truths; himself, surly, shaggy, and ugly in his soul, a frenzied gnawer of bourgeois quietude; himself, avid, excessive, and content, carrying his cries of revolt into the future, an insurgent in the evening, voracious in the morning, preoccupied with sex, gluttonously amorous in bed, breaking the silences, with piano concertos fit to knock the horns off music! Master of every house, puerile and rebellious, a disarming smile, the tactics of a professional of intersubjectivity, lying and generous, like hundred-franc whores, a vodka drunk, in bed by eight. Himself, reckoning his future, at full tilt, frenzied, at the end of his rope, accelerating himself every day.”
For the others, I am certainly the strongest dynamic synthesis (which partly explains this text). Indeed, on the Poujadist side, I own a newspaper, and the fishmonger and the restaurateur (Louis and René) understand that. But I am also an intellectual. The pedagogue and the researcher (Domi and Michel) have to acknowledge it. Finally, I express and I catalyze, obstinately, with a labor power no one suspects.
Michel said one day, on the sly, that I solved political problems through the affective. In any case, I hold it for certain that my writer’s pathos is worth its weight in gold for the five of us. Not to mention the 650 pages of “Subsistances et Populations,” the hyperrealist counterpart (as an exemplification) of “L’Être et le Code.” There is nothing pathological about it; on the contrary, it is very academic.
[22]. I have written about him an introduction to “L’Être et le Code,” entitled “La logique du concret,” which already says this. It is unpublished.