What distinguishes humans from animals, and why is this lack the source of their richness?
In this conversation with Aliocha Allard, Dominique Pagani starts from cave art and the jazz of Thelonious Monk to consider how humans emerged from animality. He reads Genesis as the symbolic story of this passage, through knowledge, shame, and the knowledge of good and evil. In his view, humans are defined by a lack rather than by intensity, and by a desire that nothing natural can satisfy. He defines progress as the passage from a more constrained state to a freer one. He then discusses Freud, Kleist, Proust, Hölderlin, Baudelaire, Deleuze, and Rousseau, ending with the mourning that, in his view, gives human joy its value.
Translated from the French. Read the original.
Aliocha Allard Everything would lead you to believe that these primitive artists in the caves, like children who haven’t yet achieved absolute mastery of their art, could only have made things that were a bit shameful and clumsily done, but that’s not the case—we find masterpieces.
Dominique Pagani When you listen to Thelonious Monk, and some of the greatest jazz musicians, you find that paradox of primitivism again. You get the feeling they’re children daring to say pee-pee and poo-poo. Monk, often—and he’s never more fascinating—you get the feeling he’s slipping, as in “Epistrophy,” “Well, You Needn’t,” or “Thelonious,” like a turnstile spinning idly. You don’t know where he’s going with it. Kids, you see them doing that all the time, starting over…
AA A whirling dervish.
DP It’s funny that you talked about childhood when talking about primitive art… and about shame.
AA When we talk about the cradle of humanity.
DP That’s precisely where the child feels no shame; without repressing, without anything, he expresses himself. It’s the child who hasn’t yet been told, “Put your hand in front of your mouth!”
AA Yes, he already expresses himself perfectly, without value judgment. Like when you were saying that there isn’t a single line missing.
DP Necessarily, it’s perfect because there’s neither censorship nor duplicity, since he doesn’t put his hand in front of his mouth, since he takes no account of the other. Beyond the primitive, you understand animal grace, physical grace. You watch a sequence of a cheetah’s voluptuousness. Do you remember Kleist’s reflection “On the Marionette Theater”?
AA Yes, being either God or completely mechanical.
DP Right, he takes the example of the bear. You can’t run him through at fencing. He doesn’t waste his time thinking. He adheres entirely to pure objectivity.
AA But does that mean it solves all the problems? That initial elegance?
DP For us, it doesn’t solve a single one!
AA But in the sense that we manage to understand things better overall…
DP It doesn’t solve a single one! Because “The ignorant man is not free.” You see how serious theology is: it says that when Adam and Eve discover knowledge, they can no longer go back into the earthly paradise, because an angel with a flaming sword guards paradise. The Animal world—you can’t go back to it once you’ve left it. You can’t act as if you didn’t know. Seabirds crash into lighthouses, drawn by the light, and they don’t know it’s a lure.
AA And they’ll still be doing it in 10,000 years…
DP There you have it. But nothing prepared us for that exit. You understand all the monstrosities there are in Man. Nothing prepared us for it. It’s for better and for worse that we came out of it. And the worst is never so certain as when we repress that knowledge, when we turn our backs on it. As only Nerval has put it, closest to the mark: “Ignorance cannot be learned!”
AA That nothing prepared us for it would imply there was an about-face at some point…
DP And that the worst aberrations are conceivable…
AA But you could imagine it’s rather something very slow.
DP It wasn’t on some December 31st at midnight that we went from Animal to Man. At every moment, you and I, we go on humanizing the Animal.
AA That’s where I can’t quite follow—it’s the fetishism of what it is to be a Man. A Man doesn’t do this or that… as if you and I were developing this extraordinary idea of what it is to be a Man. From generation to generation… is that sort of what you’re saying?
DP I don’t agree—precisely not from generation to generation.
AA But maybe it can collapse!
DP You’re caught in the opposite illusion. It’s our era, and especially yours, that is as antihumanist as can be. The dominant ideology points the finger at Man as the shame of nature. Almost the shame of Being, if you push it.
AA But this idea of the perfectibility of Man through the ages—do you yourself believe in it, completely?
DP But it’s not a belief! Everyone benefits from the fact that it takes less labor to make that table there now than it took in days gone by. Go and explain to the millions of women who wear themselves out fetching water, walking for miles in the dust of nothingness, with a child on their back and others, ruining their feet on the loose stones of the bush, that the simple gesture of turning on a faucet is not one of the greatest advances in History! Our time—we want to devote it to something else, to the movies, to music, to love, and not to making bricks, more than 12 hours a day, as millions of Indian children do to pay off their parents’ debt! You should know that as we speak, there are Australian tribes making exhausting treks, in the middle of the desert, to go looking for a root for eight days, to feed themselves.
AA But thinking there’s a becoming-Man is something other than merely observing progress. Saying there’s a becoming of Man is an ideology. Like a super-comfy couch waiting for us in 3,000 years if we play our cards right. This perfectibility side of things—because there, it’s in the order of belief.
DP No, it’s not belief! I know—and that is the opposite of believing—I know that everything can be compromised at any moment.
AA But is there a becoming of Man?
DP I take it the other way around. There is progress every time we go from more constraint to less. When we’ve gone from a less free state to a freer state. That’s all I’m saying.
AA But when you talk about Freud—he himself completely turned the notion of Freedom upside down. We desire things without even knowing that we desire them. It’s a total relativism of the very notion of Freedom.
DP Freud is no bard of Freedom, as you know. He even goes so far as to say that when we choose a number at random, we don’t pick it at random.
AA That coincides with the advances in mathematics too, where they say they’ve mastered the notion of chance more and more.
DP Of course.
AA That’s in the air, too.
DP But Leibnitz, in the 17th century, was already saying that you had to find an equation that would pass back through all the points filled in completely at random in every corner of a sheet of paper. As Lévi-Strauss says, “If there are laws somewhere, then there are laws everywhere.” At least that’s clear, you see?
AA But Freud reveals that we sometimes choose this or that goal along the lines of: “You think your goal is clearly to get out of that straitjacket, without even knowing that you yourself had chosen that straitjacket through contradictory desires…”
DP Absolutely.
AA So how do you keep the same definition of Freedom after that?
DP It means that History is long. It’s caught between two forces. One that wants to get out of that straitjacket and the other that resists it. That’s what Freud calls ambivalences.
AA Because there’s also nothing more destructive of freedom than a man.
DP Of course! Nature doesn’t know evil. Nature knows suffering. It’s with Man that good and evil appear. It was theology that revealed that, not science. When the serpent warns, saying that if Eve tastes the forbidden fruit she “will know good and evil.” Rimbaud is right to say that “Theology is serious.”
AA It’s incredibly serious when you think about the notion of shame and nakedness, too.
DP It’s from the very instant they’ve tasted the fruit that God calls Adam and Adam hides, feeling the shame of nakedness for the first time.
AA They couldn’t have found a more perfect example to reveal the passage from Animal to Man.
DP But the religious man doesn’t know that he’s talking about that passage from Animal to Man. He sincerely believes there’s a bearded guy up in the heavens, etc.… That he’s jealous… but he doesn’t know that it’s his own story being told. As they say: he’s alienated. In other words, his identity lies in someone other than himself. But it’s magnificent. In other words, religion is true. But it takes a long road to get to that symbolic truth. What I criticize above all is the opposite of the symbolic. It’s the realist use, in the naive sense, by those who try to find out whether the forbidden fruit was a banana or an apple. That’s all bullshit!
AA A form of essentialism?
DP Completely, who cares! The animal doesn’t know it’s going to die—period. It lives every instant in an eternity. As Rilke says magnificently in a poem, “It always has its decline behind it; it moves forward into the Open.” It hasn’t been turned around the way we have. Men don’t want to see what lies ahead; we fear it.
AA If we had to imagine creatures living on another planet. If we were called on to meet them and they shared with us the fear of death and the shame of being buck naked. Well, we might feel more bonds of complicity with those strangers than with a tiger that’s right beside us.
DP Of course!
AA And yet we were generated by the same planet; we ought to feel a kind of familiarity with a tiger that has always been, threatening admittedly, but in our field of vision for thousands of years.
DP Your question revolves around what moral language calls “my fellow man.” That doesn’t mean someone who looks like me physically. It means that he is at once an other and yet someone who has something identical with me. It’s a curious term. The serpent is completely my other; me, I’m me, and there’s no one like me. No one sees that street corner exactly the way I’m seeing it right here. I’m taking the two extremes, between generality and singularity. So my fellow man is a kind of compromise between the two. He’s at once an other and not just any otherness. You’re not a “something,” you’re a “someone,” like me. When you come back into your room and see that a burglar has been through, you say to yourself, “Someone’s been here!” You can clearly see that it isn’t simply the rain or the wind. You see the difference; there’s a meaning. You see someone—that’s what my fellow man is. So this someone can have an amazing look; he can be Martian, be green. You see that he’s a someone by the simple fact that he knows what he’s doing.
AA But then in the Animal world you don’t see any someone?
DP No.
AA But if a tiger has been through your place, what do you say to yourself?
DP That’s a good example: the world of the living is going to occupy an intermediate stage between the inert and my fellow man. But when you know a tiger’s genes, you know everything. You know which way it’ll go, what it feeds on. It’s been like that for millions of years, and once it’s had what it wanted, it snoozes. It’s not like us. We’re woken by anxiety or something else. We get bored.
AA So, for someone who followed your line of thought. When we hear the news of the latest advances in the search for life elsewhere, on exoplanets, it’s a matter of asking oneself: maybe there is life, but there would still have to be someone?
DP Yes, there are lots of works of fiction that revolve around that very question. Is there a someone in the fact that it’s out to get me, that it’s diabolical…
AA And could we imagine the notion of someone who would be so superior to us that he would no longer be someone in relation to us?
DP That’s Nietzsche. “We must learn a new cruelty.”
AA That’s what squares with the latest advances, which show that it’s far more probable that far superior beings exist.
DP “Superior” is a value judgment. Maybe they’re “superior” technologically, aesthetically or morally. But above all, would they have our potential for emotion?
AA We could imagine them coming and ignoring us completely, the way we ignore ants. We have no feeling whatsoever toward ants.
DP Take Proust, see? We think we’re making an effort to remember one moment or another, but that’s not the answer; because that doesn’t explain why it gives us such bliss and makes the problem seem futile. The real answer is that when I recover what it was, I can better measure the distance I’ve traveled since. I am in eternity because I am, at the same time, at two different moments of time. In lost time and in time regained. That is a privilege of Man, and even of modern Man. Modern Man has understood full well that he only fulfills himself when he makes his old enemy, time, into a friend. It’s thanks to its passing that I can have this bliss. If I were a Bororo, I wouldn’t have that privilege; I’d have others, like that of devouring my enemy!
AA The Bororo’s passage of time would be different in what sense?
DP Where there isn’t the same temporal thickness as ours…
AA In his perception of life, which is shorter?
DP No, he feels an immense temporal thickness. At the turning of the seasons, or in the comings and goings of people, over the long term. But that temporal thickness, an anthropological privilege, is not yet the Historical, the kind that, unbeknownst to us, permeates all our value judgments.
AA But Proust, when he talks about time regained, he’s talking about his own existence; he’s not talking about Historical time.
DP That’s an impression, but look closely. History seems a matter of indifference in Proust at the beginning of the narrative, and as you go along, it’s the opposite. At the end, you see the airships over the Place de la Concorde in the middle of the war of 1914. And, among the last lines of “Time Regained,” the Guermantes are nothing more than “Dwarfs perched on giants.”
AA If we’re going to take that aspect, which is magnificent, isn’t it biased at the same time, because of his social status, which was that of being able to accumulate knowledge and wealth, and which didn’t have much to do with the felt experience of what it is to have four centuries within oneself. And that from his little aristocracy he could bounce from the 14th to the 17th century, whereas someone from a lower social class wouldn’t have been in a position to go and draw on earlier centuries.
DP But it’s in the air, as they say. Take a kid from a working-class background. If he’s been an average student—I’m not saying a little genius. When he learns the texts he learns in his History class and he has a love affair with a girl, it won’t be the same as for someone who has stayed sunk solely in his own place and his own time. As is the case with the Aborigines of Australia. What I’m saying sounds harsh, but it isn’t…
AA Yes, because I get the impression you’re putting that kid and an Aborigine on a scale, with one living a lesser experience than the other.
DP Relative to us! But the Aborigine is at the top of his game. And we must esteem him all the more because he produced us. I’m certainly not talking about some highly improbable heredity, but about the heritage he left, which put our foot in the stirrup of Time.
AA Yes, but what makes you think he can’t have a different relationship on the sensory level, seeing a starry night, for example, that we’d be absolutely incapable of feeling.
DP I completely agree, and no doubt he feels things more strongly than we do.
AA So what’s he missing, then?
DP That’s just it: with us, it’s not strength that characterizes us, nor intensity.
AA What is it?
DP You should see how intensely a tiger wallows in the snow with pleasure. Maybe all of Wagner’s jubilation, the lyrical intensity of Brahms or of Charlie Parker, is nothing next to a tiger savoring its prey. All of Man lies in a minus! Not in a plus—you mustn’t misconstrue what I’m saying. But that minus, I place it above everything. It’s a bit what the myth of Prometheus expresses: all the animals were perfectly endowed; some had scales, feathers, others had agility. When it comes to Man, he has nothing. He has no claws, he’s less swift than the bird, he’s less strong than the elephant. It’s a lack that characterizes Man; it’s a minus. It’s from that inferiority that he became the master of Being.
AA People sometimes take the example of the Eskimo to say that he has 40 different ways of saying “ice.” How do you take that subtlety into account?
DP As an archaism, precisely. It’s not a proof of richness.
AA You don’t think he might see a lighter gray or a darker gray that we don’t know about?
DP I’d point out that you’re giving me an example where it’s vital for him to have those nuances. It’s like the Tuareg in the middle of the Ténéré, smelling the well from several kilometers away.
AA But, beyond the vital side of it.
DP That belongs to the order of determination. That’s not where his freedom lies. When you’re in the desert, you’re forced to pay attention to the slightest thing.
AA And can’t you take into account the alliance of the two? Being a teacher, as you were, something that was powerfully in you, and at the same time earning your living from it? Out of the necessity of feeding yourself, but allied with the thing that was deepest and most burning in you. You had that luck.
DP Of course.
AA So that belongs to the order of Freedom?
DP Above all, I had the luck of sharing it. There aren’t many pleasures in human beings that are independent of sharing. I don’t know of any; out of caution I say there aren’t many, but in my opinion there aren’t any at all. A guy on a desert island will shoot himself if he’s condemned to be all alone. You can give him whatever he wants, the most beautiful music with batteries for 300 years. The best dish in the world—you eat it every day, you get fed up with it. That’s Man. Whereas my cat, I always give him the same chow and he’s delighted, right?
AA So it’s managing to create the useless?
DP The useless in the sense of the vitally necessary, but don’t say it’s useless; it may well be much more useful for the human being.
AA Useless in the sense of “not necessary.”
DP The necessary is the opposite of the free. Anthropology begins precisely when what’s at stake goes beyond what is merely vitally necessary. The cave paintings had nothing necessary about them on the vital level. No animal starts painting before or after the hunt.
AA Then again, you can imagine it was a form of communication that allowed one person to explain to the other what kind of beast he’d found… but there are extras that are there only to be beautiful and that make you want to cry. Extra lines.
DP The guy never wanted to make something aesthetic, and it’s perfect! Maybe it was a magic rite so that people would eat, a shamanic rite. But the result is aesthetic, that’s what’s incredible; it’s not the goal, it’s the result.
AA How do you mean “aesthetic”?
DP In the sense that it’s not what I pursued that remains. It’s what I did to get there.
AA That’s the journey Proust talks about?
DP The objective path I’ve taken: “And the bare result is the corpse that the tendency has left far behind it,” as it says in the preface to Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit,” or again, “The thing is not exhausted in its aim, but in its actualization.” It’s rather hard to understand, but there’s an apparently negative aim in Man. What I find scandalous—and here you understand my political ideas—is that in the 21st century we’re still losing our lives earning a living. We have so much better to do to occupy time, to create a diversion from it, in the Pascalian sense, to divert ourselves from this obsession with death.
AA To take on new questions?
DP Pleasures…
AA Not for new questions?
DP But that’s part of the new pleasures. I recommend a short story by Edgar Poe: “The Domain of Arnheim.” One of Poe’s rare tales that is paradisiacal and not morbid. A friend of the narrator named Ellison, like the music of Felix Mendelssohn: “Happy and making happy,” who has always been rich, and who inherits a fortune you shouldn’t even try to imagine. Upshot: materially, he can do whatever he wants. Poe says: “He had long since reflected on the conditions necessary for happiness: first, the free exercise of the body in the open air…” For starters, with a toothache you’re not going to be happy. “Second, substantial material means. Third, an indefinite aspiration.” That’s not the Animal! So you see? On what you’re saying, the new research and discoveries. Whether they’re geographical, metaphysical… it doesn’t matter. The text by L.-F. Céline that you read me isn’t even false, in the sense of inaccurate—namely, that after Rabelais no one dares put their hands in shit anymore and that literature goes slumming, but in the Célinian sense: it turns bourgeois by flattening itself out.
AA By “bunglers,” as he used to say.
DP Yes, that’s it, but in a way, what iconoclasm! What a loss, what a “shortfall!” Can you imagine if literature had stopped at Rabelais? I adore Rabelais, that’s not the point, but really, look! We wouldn’t have Racine, we wouldn’t have Proust, we wouldn’t have Baudelaire, we wouldn’t have Lamartine, we wouldn’t have Nabokov—let’s get real. That’s barbarism, in the literal and unconscious sense. It’s not realizing that you go back to the caves very quickly when you reason like that.
AA It’s the fact that he kills progress that hurts you.
DP Yes. Let’s go back to the Bible: leaving the earthly paradise was progress; we got out of animal imbecility. Me, I watch my cat: as soon as he’s chowed down, he snoozes all day. Why the hell would he bother waking up—what for? To know he’s going to die? He’s no dummy. He’s only woken by what’s necessary, hunger. We sleep a third of our lives. That’s enormous, but it’s nothing next to a lion; he sleeps 90 percent of his life. He’s barely born and out of the maternal womb before he goes back to it at the first opportunity. Do you understand my thinking now?
AA Isn’t this way of thinking built on what we often hear, that is, “Life is hard, colon”?
DP Yes, life is hard, but it’s worth living.
AA But to come back to Spinoza, who says that it’s reasoning that goes much too far beyond our own subjectivity to say, for example, life is hard.
DP I combine it with the line from Hölderlin that I like to quote. Precisely where Hölderlin overturns everything and says that the fact that we’re mortal, which is a minus compared to the Gods—well, no, for Hölderlin it’s a plus: “They cannot do everything, the Gods; mortals reach the abyss before them. For long is the time, but the true comes to pass, for with them (the mortals) the echo changes.”
So with men, we get back more as echo than we received as sound. It’s extraordinary. Because we reach the abyss ahead of the Gods. What am I saying? A shopgirl waiting for her sweetheart at a suburban station, with the emotions she has—she wouldn’t have all those emotions if she weren’t in a psychic universe unknown to the Gods, where everything is precarious, where everything can be mortal. Yes! There’s bad news. We are mortal. But we got over the bad news long ago. With everything we’ve invented to divert ourselves from all that. Civilization in the metaphysical sense. In a way, civilizations have multiplied desire by infinity. Whereas the lion has a desire that is so determined that when he gets it, he sleeps. It’s over; he’s fulfilled, sated. “The lovers of prostitutes are happy, fit and sated. As for me, my arms are broken from having embraced the clouds,” said Baudelaire. “The lovers of prostitutes”—that’s the Animal world, if you push it, right? What we try to embrace in the body of a beloved is precisely what is not bodily. The whole body is thrown into it to hunt down the incorporeal there; it’s magnificent…
AA Doesn’t that tie in with the reflection you had sketched out, saying that ultimately, in every desire, there’s perhaps this urge to turn the someone into a something, and that it’s between the two that all the most incredible fantasies are created.
DP I’ll simplify, to be as crude as an X-rated movie, but: “Do you like what I’m doing to you?” We expect an answer that proves it’s not a mannequin we’re making love with. As soon as I know I’m dealing with someone, it’s gratifying. It’s in the flesh that I obtain this pleasure, but it’s not the flesh I’m aiming at—it’s the spoken word, the oracle that emanates from it, you see the paradox?
AA Suppose we imagine a tormentor who kept a sex slave in isolation. He would expect his slave to still answer him freely, as freely as possible.
DP “Make me your slave.”
AA If the slave answers with a tiny semblance of freedom when the tormentor orders him to do things, it’s that much more exhilarating than if the slave answers word for word what the tormentor asks him to say. It’s that, in a certain way, you’re still going after the person’s last dose of freedom. It has to smell a bit of Freedom, you know.
DP But that’s the only thing we ever get off on! It’s modernity that is making its way toward this dizzying idea. Except that Freedom has to be mediated, because we are not Gods. Only the Gods have immediate Freedom. This Freedom is so divine, it is so much the absolute value, that it never appears in itself. If God doesn’t exist, that means Freedom is never immediate. It can have an appearance of existence only through the mediation of a boob, a sensation, a piece of music… an expression, a word… even one taken the wrong way, perhaps, no matter.
AA And Deleuze’s whole development on desires through assemblages—do you agree with that?
DP It’s linked to that, indeed. But Deleuze doesn’t take that idea all the way. In that case, you have to think that it’s Freedom that is the absolute value, yet for him, since he means to be a neo-Spinozist, Freedom doesn’t exist. Much less than for Spinoza! So he completely deprives himself of what would make everything he says coherent. Why does love hold such an important place in human beings? Because it isn’t the most important thing. But because it’s what, by far, most resembles what is most important. What do we call beautiful? A girl we find beautiful is a girl who gives us the impression of being freed from constraints.
AA There are lots of correlations, especially when you talk about the transbiological. The “make-believe,” the rite of putting things back in place, because of our own genesis as humans.
DP When we talk about dramatic art, we’re right at the heart of the answer to your question. “All the world is a stage,” says Shakespeare.
AA Does that mean that fundamentally you believe in a world outside that “stage”?
DP Yes, but that world doesn’t interest me. It’s the world of stars, of galaxies; it doesn’t interest me in itself, you know? But it interests me as a spectacle for Man.
AA Okay, and do you believe in a world beyond the “stage”?
DP Beyond—you mean toward God?
AA In the sense in which Proust formulated it when he says: “Everything leads us to believe that we came from a grander, more perfect world. What drives us to be so courteous, to not necessarily wish harm on others.” You—maybe you believe in that world?
DP Pascal depicts the opposite of what Proust does. That is, everything most wretched about him. Everything that shows his wretchedness in the Pascalian sense: “But these are the miseries of great lords, miseries of a dispossessed king.” And there, we’re answering your Proust question. It means that if we spend our time being dissatisfied, that’s the best proof that we are not from here. Because if we were from here… what is here? It’s the natural order, the order of being. If we were from here, something from here would end up satisfying us like the lions who, once they’ve had their antelope, sleep.
AA That’s why I wanted to talk precisely about what came before us.
DP I understood that.
AA But what comes before us?
DP What comes before all of us? Ask the Bible; it answers us. What was there before all this? The earthly paradise. The maternal womb. That’s the lost paradise. We’ve all gone through that stage where for nine months desire was satisfied; you had no waiting time. You were like God. God, as soon as he wants something, he has it.
AA Now that’s absolutely coherent.
DP Second, you’re carried; you don’t have to make any effort against weightlessness. What is carried will become the metaphor of the vessel, the airplane, the ship, everything that is carried: “And from the foot of the altar you may climb aboard, Sovereign of the seas that must carry you,” said Racine. We did have an earthly paradise, in reality! It’s not imaginary! But its content was poor. Your relations with your girlfriend blow the life of a fetus out of the water in richness. So what’s magnificent is the paradisiacal side of the fetus, enriched by everything time has brought since birth.
AA Richness in the sense of the possibility of sharing? The capacity for sharing?
DP Yes, and above all the richness of enjoyment, which is deeper. Not intellectually deep—I don’t give a damn about that…
AA But that’s harder to quantify, isn’t it? Whereas the potential for sharing…
DP But I’m not saying it’s subjective; it’s objective. Even if it isn’t objective in terms of quantum, of course. It’s not in kilos or in watts, I quite agree. But in a way the Gods will never know a happiness of the kind that shopgirl has, waiting for her boyfriend at the station, who suddenly sees him arrive when she thought he’d forgotten her. That’s all I mean.
AA At that moment she tells the Gods to go to hell.
DP Exactly.
AA So what is Freud’s transbiological, then?
DP It’s inertia, it’s the mineral. There’s nothing left anymore; it’s the extinction of all desire. The opposite of a desire that keeps relaunching itself.
AA It’s the culminating point of the becoming of a desire? It’s the fact that we want to reach that point of absolute inertia?
DP Yes, but not culminating. Culminating means at the top. You have to go down, rather, to get there. You have to release all tensions and head downward. I’m speaking literally. Don’t think I’m going off into abstraction. The Rhinemaidens in Wagner’s “The Rhinegold” say: “Down below, down below, toward the depths of the Rhine… all that stirs up there is false and deceitful.” So it’s not at the apogee, in the highest sense; it’s the extinction of desire.
AA It’s concentric—it’s the microsecond before the Big Bang, is that it?
DP Yes, but above all the extinction of the Big Bang once it has finished radiating its last rays.
AA Oh, it comes after? And yet when you talk about the transbiological, it comes before…
DP Yes, but it comes to the same thing. The end of all radiation brings you back to an inertia. To total darkness. When there’s tension, desire, light, energy, heat. All that goes together.
AA And yet physics tells us, by showing us a timeline that goes from order to disorder, that there really is a before and an after.
DP It’s temporality that goes from order to disorder. It’s the History of the Universe. Matter doesn’t give a damn about that temporality.
AA Yes, but it goes in an increasingly disordered direction, like autumn leaves.
DP To return to an initial inertia.
AA A renewal, sure, but not reordered. Mess regenerated somewhere else, etc.…
DP Yes, absolutely. The essential thing is to discharge tensions. That’s what you have to understand in the principles of repetition and in inertia, in the extinction of all desire. Freud is the world turned upside down. We think we get pleasure from excitation, whereas Freud says no. Pleasure comes from the lowering of excitation. It’s when we begin to relieve excitation, and so to bring it down, that it is transmuted from painful anxiety into pleasure for the person concerned. You only have to hear cats screwing at night—excitation is terrifying. On the contrary, what we seek is the easing of excitation. And that easing heads toward death… quietly, right? Gradually.
AA It’s a form of resolution, being resolved to…
DP Exactly, that’s the word: resolution. There’s a magnificent poem by Rilke that says that a child lying in his bed is protected by his mother from all external dangers, but not from his inner world: “And he fell asleep and he dreamed.” Censorship relaxes in sleep; as it relaxes, the old primitive desires come back and fill the child with anxiety.
AA Which ones?
DP The age-old ones.
AA Those of death?
DP No, no, the desires, the libido! Sexual excitation. That’s why it often takes the form of a staircase being climbed, says Freud, because there’s the heart pounding, there’s the blood rushing, etc. Freud is a doctor—you mustn’t forget that he knows his symptoms well. And the nightmare comes from the fact that it’s my desire being fulfilled. The desire I repress is anxiety-provoking; it’s not a source of pleasure, it’s terrifying.
AA From the moment you arrive at that desire.
DP Yes, from the moment it expresses itself, when I’ve lost my ability to repress it…
AA And all the perceptions that generally move you—it’s people deluding themselves into believing they manage to get past their inevitable fate, which is to die. That seems to move you in the sense of: “How they held on to those things, when they knew perfectly well that the battle was lost in advance.”
DP The spectator of a tragedy that makes me cry, that’s it.
AA Yes, but at the same time, it isn’t deeply or totally tragic, because you say…
DP It’s a deliverance, at the same time.
AA … but also the fact that we don’t start over from zero, so that isn’t tragic.
DP Clearly, clearly. There’s an enrichment.
AA So that’s actually very optimistic; it’s very heartening.
DP Of course, of course. Hence that magnificent sentence of Rousseau’s: “When all my dreams have turned into realities, they will not have sufficed me; I would have imagined, dreamed, desired still more. I found in myself an inexplicable void that nothing could have filled; a certain yearning of the heart toward another kind of enjoyment of which I had no idea and of which I nonetheless felt the need. Well, Sir, that itself was enjoyment, since I was pervaded by it with a very keen feeling and an alluring sadness that I would not have wished not to have.” Do you remember that passage in Proust where his mother comes to put him to bed, the lamp, the staircase, then the father and an unexpected grace: “Go and comfort the little one, it’s fine, I can sleep by myself”—the kind of thing that happens only once every two centuries! Proust ends the narration at that moment, and there he speaks a little, he changes the tense of the verb and says: “The tears I shed from then on have never stopped; it is now that I am growing old that I begin to hear them again.” The fact that his whole oeuvre, everything he thought, even happy, is set against a background of tears. That is Man as Hölderlin revealed him. Man who, ahead of the Gods, reaches the abyss. In Man, everything is seen through a mourning. But a mourning that gives value to everything.
AA The fact that he can’t love his mother fully and forever?
DP Among other things. It’s a mourning. But at the same time, that mourning magnifies everything. I come back to the shopgirl at the station. The fact that I was afraid of losing him magnifies the reunion. It’s against a background of mourning. If there weren’t that mourning beforehand, there wouldn’t be that propensity for joy in Man that makes me say it’s richer than the life of the fetus or of the Animal, when you tell me it isn’t quantifiable. Do you understand now what I mean by richer?
AA I don’t fully understand yet.
DP There’s a little bust of Baudelaire with an all-too-well-chosen quatrain in the Luxembourg Gardens: “For it is truly, Lord, the best testimony. That we can give of our dignity. This ardent sob that rolls from age to age. And comes to die at the edge of your eternity!”
…
DP When my ex-wife’s daughter was born in Calvi in winter, in the ’50s, people came by her place saying, “My God, how beautiful she is, God bless her.” Even a well-known killer, who had killed three families, throats slit: “My God, how beautiful she is, God bless her.”! And the doctor who had delivered her had said to the husband, “The placenta, you don’t throw it away, you bury it on the beach.” A superstition that must have gone back a long way, you see? The placenta, you don’t just throw it away like that. It’s not garbage.
AA In absolute terms, would you like us to get rid of these archaisms?
DP Oh no—live them more than ever, but without the mortifying and murderous sides they bring with them.
AA But they no longer have any reason to exist if you discredit them completely.
DP The more we distance ourselves from what Rimbaud calls, in his unique way: “The ancient savagery,” the closer we are to it. You see the paradox? Because it’s unbearable, it’s untenable. The more we master it, the more we can see it as it is, without fantasizing too much, and, in a way, be reconciled with it.
AA Dispassionately?
DP I’d say less fantasy-driven; I didn’t say “dispassionate.” You can be passionate, but with a passion that’s no longer mortifying. I insist on that.
AA So bury the placenta how, then? With what attitude?
DP The fact that I’m not the only one to be in contact with it. It’s prescribed by a collective that came before me. A shared knowledge. It doesn’t look like much, but it’s huge.
AA I don’t understand.
DP Let me take you on a detour. When you’re starting puberty, and you feel stirred by “abject” desires—for a kid who’s been taught that that’s dirty. And then, all of a sudden, you feel a desire that makes you believe you’re the only pervert, that everyone’s normal except you. That’s what I call mortifying. For one thing, it’s not good for you; it mortifies you. Once you realize it’s everyone’s law, that there’s nothing to make a fuss about in wanting to masturbate. “Dispassionate,” if you like, but it doesn’t make you want to masturbate any less. It takes away the mortifying side, that is, what’s bad for you and dangerous for the other. That’s important. There you see the positive side of civilization. It’s not civilization in the technical sense, not in the sense of the progress of the productive forces, but in the sense of inner progress, fostered by the progress of the productive forces.
AA I was talking more about rites that have been blown out of proportion by our imagination. That capacity to project fears onto objects by saying: “The placenta, that’s something you respect.” or whatever. That’s more what my question was about; it wasn’t about the impulses of nature that rise up in us, like sexual desire.
DP Well, you’ve picked a very good example. “The impure” has been studied a great deal in anthropology. In Frazer, the Oceanians and all that. There, the totem is taboo. What is most impure and most to be feared is what is most sacred. When you look up the definition of sacred, “sacer,” in Latin dictionaries, it’s what is fearsome, what you can’t approach, but at the same time what irresistibly attracts. And indeed, what is in me. That’s the key to alienation. I project it onto an object or onto animals—that’s what totemism is. Such-and-such an animal has a spirit in it, etc. In the Middle Ages they burned black cats by the thousands because they brought bad luck. It’s appalling—when we were talking about aggressiveness, you see?
AA Women too, back then.
DP That happened, but it’s even more idiotic to believe that this animal is the devil; a woman, a man, all right, that can be diabolical, but not a cat! So, in a way, it’s typical of alienation. What is proper to me as a human being, I impute to that. Indeed, it’s good to free oneself from that, in a way. But at the same time—and this is where your question is interesting—it mustn’t result in a neutral world. Neutral in the sense of colorless, flavorless, odorless…
AA Rites are also wanting your coffee with a little hot water.
DP Absolutely. Now, there have never been so many of them. Take a good look at fashion. Wine lovers nowadays. Everybody wants to be an expert on new wines, natural wines… and what grape variety is it? Etc. Before, nobody gave a damn. You drank whatever swill came along… It’s good that there are rites. It’s really absolutely useless for your health. It’s even rather harmful.
AA The fact that only desire and freedom are limitless might make you think they’re sort of the same thing, no?
DP Yes, that’s what explains why History has no assignable end; you can’t say that from such-and-such an era, the 14th century, say, at random, men reached a point of perfection, and everything else is going to be superfluous. So that’s what, for me, justifies History. Progress, when it exists, is multiplying these occasions to engage desire in unprecedented forms, new ones, etc., instead of making it go around in circles in the repetitiveness that kills it. From Neandertal on, the cave drawings are superfluous in that case, right? You can live without painting on cave walls. Biologically, you can. You can live without clapping your hands by the fireside. You can live… but what’s the point? Honestly.