Version française ici: Plaidoirie en faveur d’une culture du paradoxe

< In defense of a culture of paradox >

“I ask for the rehabilitation of paradox, and I shall go even further: I ask for the abolition of boundaries, the irremediable blending. To stop at the level of the Paradox is not enough as the barriers are maintained in a constrained opposition, a useless tension. I insist on this point: multiplicity must be strengthened in an inviolable unity, union must be seen in the hybrid. The greatest purity is to be found in the motley collage that comes to terms with itself. It is out of the question to renounce to anything – the only condition being to show the greatest frankness (even the mask says the truth, if it is worn correctly). To lie to oneself, that is the Evil; and to begin with boundaries: this is why they are to be rejected, or to be confirmed so as to undermine them all the better. Nothing is to be left aside: any boundary being a construction, they cover both the physical domain and the domain of words, the one of reality and the one of imagination – out of the five dimensions, none is spared by the subversion of boundaries.

Let’s begin: by the body, then we shall move on to the mind, if the schism must be maintained. So – the body: measured, labeled, numbered, archived. To hell with passports! But what does this atrocity mean: “I am French”? Why the reduction to a word? What value can we confer to this strange adjective? The notion of nation is so devoid of any meaning that it is painful – to see how mentalities cling to this empty shell of a concept. Let’s take reality: far from the Nation’s monolithic anvil, the bustling of a thousand consciences that blink in networks, and this since the dawn of the world. To deny the symbiosis would be folly: in spite of the dissonances among voices, skins, looks, harmony underlies existence. Thus, let’s prefer Culture to Nation, sharing or exchanging (but we should forget the whole gangue that buries these words under a coat of toned down connotations), to seeing oneself be imposed blinders. This is why language is primordial: it belongs to all and to no one, it only lets itself be tamed to better free the one that uses it – if it is muzzled to enslave the mind, beware: it will rear and jib anytime, with the fury of a flooding river. This is also why language does not suffice itself: let’s multiply languages, as so many accounts of the world. The river never stops flowing, the chess game between life and death redraws, each second, the globe’s physiognomy: change is that only that does not change, and grasping the world through a multiplicity of expression modes, of languages is thus synonym of experiencing the cosmos in its most naked, original, stellar being – fragmented, shattered, diffracted, a prism that never stops recomposing itself.

Let’s then praise movement: to renounce to identity, is to appropriate for oneself all identities, to come to terms with all without exception; gender, ethnicity, age, social class – all are skins which can be tossed aside. Voice is androgynous, eternal, total; the individual particularities have not much of a grasp on it. I speak: granted, I presently acknowledge myself to be an individual that is as much defined by the universal reason (that makes me a human being) as by my particularities that set me apart from the other Reasons (the other human beings I interact with all day); but through this very speaking act (even before that of writing), I am implying that I could take on any particularity. From then on, the fact that all seems familiar to me, and all seems strange is pure logic: consequently also, the incapacity to entirely belong to a group and consequently, the capacity to acknowledge and to feel a bond with every group. Our living place is never fixed: we essentially live in places of transit, at the core or in periphery; remaining too long in one place would signify death, but death, true death is itself no more than a passage, and the ensuing nihil has no existence – the huge atom provision is shaken, mixed again, and out of the cosmic lottery comes out a new winning ticket. The uprooted man is the most fortunate of all; if he wants happiness, he can find it anywhere.

Thus: granted, arbitrarily divided space – but one must go beyond, joyfully – blithely – accept and deny all at once these divisions, and go around with no attention for the hindrances set up against movement. And now, what shall we do of time? The same goes: all is naught but exchange, passage. That which is labeled (distrust of labels) as radically (distrust of such adverbs) innovative, is often only illusory so: for most, a vague murmur, the bustling of the city through the windowpane (all that the common ghost can hear); above, a great bubbling up of quick forces (for those who have intuited the why of creation), wherefrom emerges, from time to time, a profoundly new outlook/insight, the divide and the new link. That who only dialogs with the live is condemned to repeat the shallow, mediocre stammers that billions of ghosts have repeated before him; that who only dialogs with the dead eventually forgets the swell of the world that does not need him to continue its tidal gushes.

The paradox of creation lies in the fact that it is both immanent (the craft of language, the poet is homo faber) and transcendent (the pagan inspiration, when the poet rises, if only for a moment, to the level of the cosmos, and thus witnesses the Whole, at this moment, he is truly God): imitation and innovation, tradition and revolution, creation never tires of oxymoron series. One can easily understand its moving, fluid side, but – what? Tradition, imitation? Yes. Posterity solidifies tradition into a compact mass – but what seems to us mummified by academic canons was, in its time, rupture, novelty, subversion, conducive to scandal: do we still have the right to laugh at the naivety of our ancestors, with the excuse that we came after and new is always best? We are forgetting that we will become soon enough ourselves the solemn-faced ancestors of revolutionaries that will take a wicked delight in laughing at our pathetic efforts to make new. Under the tyranny of novelty, we scorn the past, but our scorn cannot go unpunished – we will soon enough be scorned in turn. One remedy to mummification, and one only: to deny past, present, future. The carped diem is precept for the Present in which are collected all ages, all epochs. We must strive to be, on the level of each individual, the synthesis of what Man has lived since his awakening.

In this perspective, one cannot praise enough the value of imitation. The fatuity of that who claims to create without any foreknowledge of the (necessarily contradictory) rules established by his forbearers, is rather unbearable. He should be told, “You are not yet, to my knowledge, among the greatest, among the genius – and do not take on by yourself this label, do not congratulate with your usual condescension those who flatter you, do not condemn those who criticize you as reactionaries so mummified in their tradition that they are incapable of acknowledging genius. Others were born before you, who accomplished great things – you have done nothing; you effectively claim to do something; you will surely need pride and ambition – but humility is as much a must. It is only by imitating for a long time the greatest that you will achieve anything: just as the painter draws the same line a hundred, five hundred, a thousand times to reach his ideal of beauty; just as the writer rewrites countless times the same page, sentence, line. In the end, if you do not have genius, you will at least have technique, and knowledge of past geniuses, that will accompany you, in spite of all their differences. It is only by confronting, by a long imitation, past geniuses together, that you will be able to extract your own voice from the whole – your voice, that will be individual, new, fresh, original, precisely because it has managed to build itself in a relationship to others. Think Rimbaud. One must be a seer, see the cosmos in a new perspective to be novel – but Rimbaud spoke perfect Latin. One does not build oneself alone: always exchange, network. Granted, it can take one year, five years, ten years – a lifetime. Is it that frightening? What is the other alternative? The mediocrity of a life spent reciting the same inanities in a drone? One might as well die during the attempt, during the very curve of creation. Such a beautiful project, that of Quignard’s – materializing the ongoing achievement of death in an unfinished work of art – that is genius. (For death is never full and definitive – memory, progeny in all its forms, do not deny it, do not fight it, but confirm its passing character.) Rachmaninov: music suffices to an existence, but an existence cannot suffice to music. Replace music by Beauty – by Ideal, that overflows from all sides existence, and is all contained in it: music was Rachmaninov’s Ideal.”

Such is the purity of Ideal: its extraordinary capacity to be embodied in so many different types of Happiness, to better express the entire range of variations, minute as they might be, of human aspirations.  Or at least, the aspiration to Happiness is always the same; its realization differs according to individuals; and the huge plasticity of the Ideal gives us a new key: the mask – behind lies, lies truth; or, more truthfully, each contains the other. For, what is the mask? Dissimulation, but dissimulation of what? If the identity of the masked face is by essence a paradoxical identity, fluid, hybrid, torn apart, uprooted, unfinished (thus it is also a full, complete identity), the only thing the mask does is add one more layer – and this is why it is so much feared, so much scorned – it is not as much not knowing who hides behind the mask that frightens us, but rather precisely knowing we are facing a true materialization of human identity. Confronted to the mask as we are, the being that wears it becomes more substantial – his mystery (for the human being is mystery in its highest form) thickens; we, who want to know, or to have the illusion of knowing, are left quite helpless. The mask is angst- conducive, as are solitude and silence. We do not like to experience angst; in reality, we do not like to think (for everything – solitude, silence, mask – calls on thoughts of death – we must be reconciled to this, and then everything seems more simple): we loathe the mask. And yet, so much truth hides in it! The last defense of mystery, the last protection against the onslaughts of the exterior world – that totalitarian voyeur that claims to rule private life, intimate, ungraspable identity! Do multiply masks, pseudonyms, trails – you will blur them all the better! (And is it by any chance if one of the most beautiful celebrations of Masks takes place in the City of Mystery and Passage par excellence? The canals, the fog, the masks floating above the bridge – should this be only coincidence?)

From there on, it is logical to understand how much we have been mistaken as regards the notion of the Other: again, Rimbaud: I is an Other – but what else can it be? I, Other – mirrors, mirror effects, reflected images – inversed twins, the space between them conveys all the possible range of Becomings. Each of us is a winning potentiality – never an act, but always acting. There will soon be the last boundary – such a strange fate is reserved not to persons, but to characters! Such strange paradoxes! The mind is their place of birth; time and space do not mean anything for them, at least not with the meaning we give to these words in this world. Are they alive? Are they true? Are they our twins? “That only happens in books!” (Or in movies – all depends on your affinities.) But: truth is stranger than fiction. (Byron, what were you hiding?) The last boundary, the most crucial one, must be annihilated. It is easy to travel, to familiarize oneself with the elite of the dead, even to achieve the sacrifice of managing not to raise the mask – but the supreme effort consists in raising the last barrier between “reality” and “fiction” (but these words will soon not mean much). The pitfall would then be to fall in the unhealthiest bovarysm, that consists in making the reality of imagination sacred and to substitute it to the material reality: that would still be a dualistic approach. Not – let us be resolutely monists: continuity is best, or better, the ineluctable blend – more than superposition, fusion: let us at last do justice to Don Quixote by acknowledging him an existence. What greater happiness than that of being told, “Yes, you have lived.”?

This is finally why, in spite of the linearity of scientific progress, in spite of the undeniably oriented evolution of political regimes – that is why we cannot consider human conscience – both on the general and on the individual plan – in a linear perspective without denying the paradox that gives it its internal dynamics. A representation of a series of concentric circles, or more generally a huge sphere covered and filled in with network stitches, would be closer to the truth: through the human identity bestowed upon us at birth, at the very moment we begin to speak, we begin conversing with minds some centuries older than us. (And to think that the inventor of WiFi thought he was keeping up with the most advanced modernity.) For, what is better than the circle to represent this intimate unity that unbinds paradoxes and gives the impulse to eternal movements? The circle has no beginning, nor end; thus, life and death are only in appearance opposites, or events of over-magnified importance. (Thus, the true traveler has never begun, nor will he end his travels.) Granted, life is, in this perspective, devoid of meaning (life cannot make sense); but only this perspective offers us a touching humanism, the hope of dying always alone, but never lonely.”