Public Enemies (15 page)

And, by way of another aside, it’s an image that stands up fairly well from a strictly scientific point of view, since there are serious people who some twenty centuries later continue to consider it valid: Marx and Engels, obviously, who saw Epicurus and Lucretius as major thinkers and regarded their theory of “clinamen,” this declination of linked atoms deviating slightly from their trajectory to form singular beings, like your stones and comets, as one of the sources of their dialectics. And, apart from them, real scientists like Darwin and
Dmitri Mendeleev with his periodic table, researchers into chaos theory or fluid mechanics, the most specialized astrophysicists and naturally the discoverers of the electron, the proton, the nucleus, the atom, all agree that
De rerum natura
with its rainfalls of particles tumbling into the void, sometimes swerving from their trajectory and becoming unruly, was not too far from the truth.

I’ve no problem, then, with the image.

But there is one thing. It freaks me out and I’ll try to explain why.

Upon reflection—and in fact I haven’t stopped thinking about it since I received your letter—I think that there are several things about this image (and the philosophy that goes with it) that I find troubling.

First, the thing about the vacuum through which the atoms tumble. That would make anyone dizzy.

Second, the fact that in this vacuum, this endless, bottomless abyss, stones hit each other, jostle, bounce off each other in a whirl that oscillates between Villon’s ballad of the hanged, the jig of the tortured in Dante’s circles of hell, and the falling bodies on September eleventh of those who threw themselves from the tops of the towers … I don’t find it exactly a cheerful prospect.

Third, in this tumbling there’s no way back, no possible backward zoom, no way of catching up. Yes, there’s the clinamen, the deviations from the trajectory. That’s all well and good, but these deviations, as if by chance, all go in the same direction, that is, downward. To quote Lucretius, he says that no body can extract itself from gravity and rise by its own force. He explains that even bodies such as flames, which give the impression that they rise, are only illusions and soon fall down. Once you start falling, he insists, there’s no stopping it, all you can do is drop and keep dropping. This is no longer
entropy. It’s Carnot
^*
writ large. It’s not sliding, it’s sinking, collapsing, guaranteed 100 percent. There is absolutely no chance of the opposite possibility. It doesn’t even allow the hypothesis of a nanosecond in which you might right the helm, enjoy a moment’s respite, glide. Damn!

Fourth, there’s the other real problem that the adversaries of the Epicureans, from Cicero to Kant to Rousseau, have repeatedly raised. The theory may explain the fall of bodies, entropy, the decline of our flesh, the precariousness of our lives, it may do justice to physical phenomena such as floods, turbulence, storms, or the apparent rising of flames. But there’s one thing it leaves out of the equation: the appearance of that very particular type of pebble called consciousness. Everyone must feel that it is problematic to reduce this to a sum of particles, springing up out of nothing or out of the fullness of matter—which comes to the same thing—which met by chance, joined together, aggregated, and formed a block. The one who expresses this best is Rousseau. That so-called naturalist who in reality only loved gardens and music—that is, nature reworked, rearranged, denatured—develops his response admirably in the great anti-Lucretian texts of the Second Discourse or Chapter 9 of the
Essai
^†
(as you can see, I’ve been reunited with my books). The state of nature, he explains, is a time of great floods and colossal earthquakes. It’s a time when all the world’s regions were surrounded by water and portions of the globe fell away like
drifting islands. But what was distinctive about that time, he adds, its resultant and essential characteristic, is that the only humans that could emerge from it were stupid, barbarous, and incapable of living together. We don’t know which of the “beasts” or “trees” was the most ferocious in that world, but what we do know very well is that it had no place for real humans …

Fifth, the fact—to which the opponents of the Epicureans also objected, in particular Nietzsche—that even supposing that consciousness might somehow be formed, that one might—by what mental acrobatics I don’t know—manage to allow for the constitution of a soul through an addition of pebbles, this would give rise, whether one wants it or not, to a stony, ossified soul, formed once and for all, as smooth as a shingle, monolithic, with no becoming, no flaws. But we know that it’s not like that, that the subject is always in the making, engaged in quite a different adventure, a thousand times more complicated. You are this, you are that. Something else in a different situation. We are a meeting place of multiple identities, broken, contradictory, vying with each other, then at peace, then once again at loggerheads. Each of us is not a subject but an aviary. Perhaps we are not the devil, but each of us is legion. It’s this multiplicity, this shambles, that your theory of stones or comets will always fail to take into account.

Finally, this theory has a major fault, one last snag, which is that I would be incapable of using it (and at the end of the day that’s what counts), specifically, either as a philosopher or in my everyday life. Even supposing that it could explain how a subjectivity is formed, supposing that this idea of falling in a straight line and of an agglomeration of atoms meeting by chance and not remaining stuck to each other could explain to us the genesis of this complex, shifting,
ambiguous object, changing from one moment to the next, which on arrival has the face, voice, and silhouette of Michel Houellebecq or of his Irish neighbor, there is one more thing (of which in this case I’m quite sure) that it is incapable of explaining. That is the mystery of what happens when two of these chances meet, the spark produced when two of these tumbling objects cross and take shape, in a word the moment at which two of your stones come into contact and when the humans make a little bit of humanity …

Dear Michel, you’ll think that I’ve made a great deal out of a poor little pebble you threw out in passing, in the course of debate.

That may be.

But it’s because I take the author of
The Elementary Particles
seriously.

And therefore I also take seriously this feature of Epicurean philosophy, which I’m sure you didn’t simply overlook.

Thus to sum up, I have nothing against the Epicureans.

I’m not denying that they liberated the ancient soul from the nonsense that encumbered it before they came along. (Lucretius may have been mad, clinically mad, writing his
De rerum natura
, like Nietzsche, in the moments of remission between his attacks of insanity, but I still prefer this lunacy to the pre-Socratic theories on love and hatred, to which the four elements of Empedocles were thought to be dedicated!)

Nor do I deny—let’s leave nothing out—the positive role that a spiritual injection of a healthy dose of Epicureanism might have today in the face of the return we’re seeing to magical thinking, represented in the United States, for example, by a revival of so-called creationist theories or theories of an “intelligent design” and the incredible anti-Darwinian offensive described to me the other day by the essayist Adam Gopnik.

For the reasons I’ve just outlined, I find this doctrine terrifying, unbearable, and, for myself at least, unusable. And given my idea of what philosophy should be or, if you prefer, the use I make of it, that’s a crippling defect.

So, in return for your image, I’m going to propose another.

I’m not saying it’s any better or any truer (as if that were the question!).

It’s just that in Western tradition it’s the great alternative narrative to that of the Epicureans.

It’s the one that begins roughly with that other book that is the Bible, and in the Bible, Genesis.

And here, at the point in my reflections to which you led me with your sentence envisaging the stone tumbling into silence (!), its chief merit is that it fits in better with my experience, with the questions I ask and basically with my needs.

You know the story, don’t you?

It’s the story of chaos, or to speak like another writer, Rabelais, who knew his Bible well, of the original
tohu
and
bohu
in Genesis, within which a mass of whatever composition you like (the biblical text says “brownish soil” but in its place you could put stones, comet, gas, atoms, it doesn’t matter) will (1) form small piles, differentiated packages of distinct aggregates, in certain cases similar to idols or statues; (2) have each of its piles impregnated by a force that the text calls
ruah
, meaning both “divine breath” (escaping from the nostrils and injected into the nostrils of the inert statue) and “wind” (real wind, which devastates the land, raises seas, and falls in gusts and whirlwinds from the clouds); and (3) form, in this way, as many unique beings as there are breaths, as many individuals different from each other as there are meetings, instances of compenetration between the packages of earth and the
ruah
.

There too you have a tumult, a great scene, catastrophic and dizzying.

There too you start with a beautiful text, a very beautiful text, poetic in the way sacred texts are, and which masses of writers have been able to and will be able to make their own.

Since the
ruah
, the vital principle, is a material force, strictly material, not any sort of occult or spiritual thing, you do not abandon the healthy materialism that was the good side of your Epicureanism.

And finally, to the extent that the
ruah
comes from outside and is a breath breathed by the one you dare not name Yahweh, you retain the idea of life as a reprieve, something borrowed that you’ll have to return, so you can keep your hotel room. This has never been better expressed than by the Jew Luke, some thousands of years later, when he whispered to the dying, “Tonight, you’ll be asked to return your soul.”

Except that the biblical model contains a number of advantages that may seem insignificant to you but that I consider decisive.

The first is that chaos is not a void. It’s true that it’s another form of desolation, a state of the earth in which solitude, darkness, the abyss reign (Genesis 1:2). But to me that still seems less dizzying than your big bang.

The second advantage is that certainly the scene is terrible, endlessly bloody, with shadows and dust, underground monsters, snakes, curses, generation and thus corruption, abominations, floods, Gehenna, Sheol.
^*
But all of that is less dark, less ballad of the hanged, less Dante-like than the
De rerum natura
and without going as far as the land of milk and
honey of the later texts, in the myrtle, cypress, and rose tree of the “plantations of Yahweh” evoked by Isaiah and Hosea, you have this whole landscape of trees that you love and that, since Genesis, has surrounded the tree of life.

The third advantage is that here too tumbling dominates. Here too, to say the least, the tendency is to fall. But it’s less systematic. It’s a rule but like all rules it permits exceptions. The giving of the law, for example; the word thrown up to heaven by the thousands of prophets scouring the region. And even death, the very moment of death, which is when you have to vacate your room, it is specified that the
ruah
, far from returning to earth and being reabsorbed by it, far from becoming dust like the mortal coil shuffled off, rises to heaven. There’s always that.

The fourth advantage is the possibility of a subject. I’ve already demonstrated that in a book entitled
Le Testament de Dieu
. It’s always said that it’s the weight of religion that prevents the affirmation of the subject and particularly of the free subject. Well, my thesis at the time was that it is paganism that, by mixing everything up, defining individuals as pure packages of matter, stones, atoms, excludes the possibility of a subject conscious of being a subject, while it is Judeo-Christianity with its
ruah
, the transformation of divine into human breath, in other words the hypothesis of a soul made in the image of God, that makes this subject conceivable and possible. In thirty years, I haven’t budged an inch from that view. I still believe that the only way of thinking that distinguishes us, you and me, from the tree, the stone, or your dog Clément is to emerge from Greek thought and as tradition says to play Jerusalem against Athens. This is what allows the second model. This is its other advantage over the Epicurean apocalypse.

Fifth, there’s the form of this subject. That there is a subject
is one thing, but it’s quite another to know how, with what status, in what guise, and in what light it exists, whether it is this lethal subject, this small, completely round sphere, outlined once and for all, detached from the external world, as related to us by the theory of the stone, or if this is a living, moving subject, which keeps on being transformed, even though it is said to be fixed, and of which you and everyone else have had a concrete, lived experience. For that subject, again the biblical model is irreplaceable; in particular, the biblical model as updated by its modern interpreters, its great leaders and exegetes, beginning with Spinoza. What did Spinoza say and what did he have to offer in this debate? His big contribution is the idea of substance, the great one and only substance whose subjects are said to be modes. For Leibniz that was the mistake. In his opinion as soon as you approach Spinoza’s intermeshing of substantiality, you begin to lose your way, since creatures are condemned to differ only by degrees, a bit like the way the waves in the sea differ from each other. In reality, the opposite is the case. There are other charges—and what charges!—to be made against Spinoza. But on this point he’s right. His idea of the One Substance has something to recommend it. It blasts through the boundaries of the stone. It explodes the membrane separating interior from exterior. It allows subjects that may extend the territory of their subjectivity, contract it, and extend it again according to their mood, circumstances, and stage in life. It’s like a polder, an individual. Or like an island, yes, an island, which is always, at every instant, engaged in a struggle with the sea. It advances, it retreats. It annexes portions of the territory, then loses them again. It’s not a state, it’s a process. It’s not rest, it’s work. And it’s a work that goes on—that’s the marvel of it—as long as we live. Yes, that’s it, that’s what is the brilliant idea. To put it clearly, it means that the subject is no
longer substance. And to say that the subject is no longer substance means that there is no longer an essence to preserve, pamper, to remove from the space of competing essences, to harden, to flatten. It is always in the process of constructing its essence and working toward its individuality. Indeed we should no longer speak of “individual” but of “individuation.” These are processes, unstable compounds, never completely finished. Combinations, mixtures. Inside or out? Darkness or light? Dreamed life or waking dream? A night watched over? A sleepless night? All of that.