Public Enemies (9 page)

I wanted to tell you that I know how it goes.

I want it to be clear that I am aware of what, metaphysically speaking, may militate against the need for “commitment.”

Nevertheless, in spite of that, in spite of all that, despite all I know about dangerous pity and its snares, despite the murky, suspect, even vaguely ridiculous aspects of this pose of the great intellectual hoisting the Enlightenment flag in all the dark rooms of the conscience and of the world (isn’t it Norpois who in [
À
]
la Recherche
[
du temps perdu
] exhorts the BHLs and Houellebecqs of his time to lay claim to the “great causes” and warns them that if they fail to do so they will be nothing more than “flute players”?), that is what I’ve spent my life doing. Instead of writing my novels and real philosophical tracts, I’ve traveled the length and breadth of this vast world looking for wrongs to be righted and causes to be defended.

Why is that?

I won’t mention the official, noble, blameless reasons, although they do count for something.

Even if, in my case, these words are not merely hot air, I won’t mention anger, indignation, the unbearable sight of the world’s poverty, the immediate, mandatory, instinctive sympathy for history’s victims, those it has ignored, its damned.

I will attempt to name the other reasons, the petty ones, the ones that are less easy to admit, but that count almost as much, if I try to be honest with myself and thus take seriously our decision to travel this part of our path together, following the route of confessional writing. There are three points to be added.

Certainly, there’s a taste for adventure. That may seem lame or frivolous. But it’s true that I’m attracted to adventure and that this has contributed to the habit I’ve formed since the war in Bangladesh of traveling to the ends of the earth looking for reasons to fight and write. I like traveling, moving, sending my body and soul into unfamiliar surroundings,
operating within reference systems whose parameters are different from those that underpin my ordinary life. I like to harness my energy according to some other system, to experience sensations, emotions, a form of relationship with others and myself, a relationship with death and therefore with life, with the fear and therefore with the feeling of existing that are unlike anything you’ll experience in fortunate places among the well-to-do. I was happy in Sarajevo. I have pleasant memories of my time in Huambo or Luanda, in Angola. In Tenga, in the suburbs of Bujumbura, I was caught up in a shoot-out, which I have described in one of my books. Obviously, that’s not a good memory, but it taught me more about myself, my reflexes, my most obscure desires than hours and pages of patient introspection. My report from this year in Darfur came from that desolate savannah where the people live in fear of seeing a Janjaweed soldier appear at any moment in that desert that has been so methodically desertified that you can travel for days without coming across any trace of another human being or even a ruin, nothing but the odd, vague animal looking at you with the eyes of a child. I lived through moments there that were very strange, not at all unpleasant, that made me reflect on time, forgetting, memory, debris and the end of debris, the body’s mute words, its freedom. I know that this isn’t a good thing to say, that it makes me a tourist of disaster. But it’s true.

Then, there’s a taste for performance, which I’ve always had. I’ve always been tempted (this is even more indecent, obscene, attention-seeking, inappropriate, but I’m telling you the truth) to do what other people don’t do, or if they do, to do it in some way that belongs to me alone. I liked going off to take part in the revolution in Bangladesh, while in 1971 my comrades believed that Paris was where the revolution was
taking place, and thirty years later I enjoyed writing a preface for Cesare Battisti,
^*
when all of the press in France and Italy were calling him shallow, scabby, a brute, a bastard, a born criminal. I liked setting off on the tracks of Daniel Pearl when everybody else seemed to have forgotten him, helping to turn the case of Hirsi Ali, whose name was unknown, into a French national cause, going to Sarajevo before everyone else, when the city was still being blockaded … In my Darfur struggles, I liked not going through the official channels used for most of the testimony you can read anywhere. And, on my way back, I loved being able to suggest, insidiously, with an appearance of false modesty but in reality terribly pleased with myself, that I wasn’t one of those naïve American actors who believe that they have “been there” just because some Sudanese walked them around a couple of refugee camps. This morning I enjoyed being able to point out in my “Bloc-Notes” that I am one of the only French people to have spent a day—during my “forgotten wars” period—with Iván Rios, that FARC [Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia] commander who was killed by his bodyguard and whose severed hand was brought back to the commander of the San Mateo barracks. I also liked, in the same series of reports, having been one of the very, very few to have succeeded in traveling through the bush on board an improbable sort of rickshaw into the heart of the Nuba Mountains among people who
hadn’t seen a white person since Leni Riefenstahl. Once again, I’m embarrassed to tell you this. In doing so, I’m quite aware that I’m making myself look less deserving against the horizon of a humanist and “committed” eternity. But that’s how it is. Jean-Marie Colombani and Edwy Plenel will remember. They are the ones who approached me with the suggestion that I should report for
Le Monde
. I named only one condition (presented, naturally, as a choice dictated by cold military efficacy and not at all by this desire I’m sharing with you, of being the best and first at everything): that I could take the collection of papers over, let’s say, the last fifteen years and go to those places that their reporters had not or had hardly visited …

There’s one more thing, and this time I don’t know how to say this without sounding completely ridiculous. It’s wanting to exceed my limits, to live beyond myself, literally to live beyond my means. The idea, if you prefer, that there is life and there is a greater life and that although the first may seem futile, although at the end nothing of you or your projects will remain, the second and only the second, that greater life, means that a person’s life was worth living. The greater life … The expression comes from Malraux. But it’s also used by Malebranche
^*
when he explains in one of his
Letters to Dortous from Mairan
that man is only great “through his relations with great things.” I like that expression, the idea that for each person there’s the possibility of a
greater or lesser life. I like—and don’t care whether this seems antiquated, useless, incomprehensible to certain people—this possibility of being a little greater than yourself. (The image is still from Malraux, in the second-last section of the
Antimémoires
, where he has Clappique meet an older Méry, who only has a few weeks to live but who is nevertheless “too tall for his height.”) I like the thought that you can raise yourself above yourself, above your height and the destiny you were given. And I don’t mind this being done, if necessary, by perching on top of major events or, when needed, on minuscule events such as those wars without names, archives, or a history that have so often spurred me to action. We’re all more or less guided by a star, aren’t we? Well, there are bad stars—which the Romans called
sidera
, whose property is to attract you toward the depths, the chasm, the abyss, and first and foremost the abyss in yourself: the vertigo of introspection—rather than being star-struck, being struck down by the intimacy my father was so afraid of, and the mistrust of which I inherited. There are the good stars, the
astra
, which, on the other hand, make you raise your head, look to the sky, especially the sky of ideas: there’s the star of the sailors of the Île de Sein and the humble fishermen of Brest and Saint-Malo immediately joining the Free French; the idée fixe that, despite the shooting and the slaughter, made the inspired soldiers of Monte Cassino rise to the assault, the light guiding the first French pilots in the Battle of Britain through the night as they resisted the fascination—again, starstruck—of what de Gaulle called “the frightening void of general renunciation.” I’m nostalgic for that. Like all my generation, I miss those stars whose heat reaches us now only from very far away, almost abstractly, and yet were the best thing about the (last) century. And ultimately
it’s this too, this unparalleled heroism, these true legends, myths of flesh and thought, these living examples, all the more alive for appearing unreal, that have me running around.

So you see that we don’t always break with the law or with our mimicry of the father …

Well, I’m glad you brought up the subject yourself, because I don’t think I would have dared to ask you straight out: Deep down, dear Bernard-Henri, why are you a “politically committed intellectual”?

For many years, twenty or thirty years maybe, people have come up to me and, without me even asking, told me things they have probably never told anyone, things they’d possibly never
thought
—consciously thought through—before they told me. This is precisely why I became a novelist. (Actually, let’s be precise: this is the reason I wrote a number of novels.) Nothing otherwise predisposed me to it: I’ve always preferred poetry, I’ve always hated telling stories. But from the beginning I felt (and I still feel) a sort of
duty
(the word seems strange, but right now I can’t think of another one): I was required to save these phenomena, to furnish as best I could a retranscription of the human phenomena that so spontaneously appeared before me.

The context here is different: you’re not some aging sales rep in a hooker bar in Pattaya, or a wife-swapping social worker trying to breathe new life into her relationship. You’re
more than capable of retranscribing the human phenomenon you represent without the need of a scribe; nonetheless, I’d like to think that, like others, you sensed in me those characteristics that led me to become and gradually to identify myself with the role of the
recorder
.

The lack of a sense of the ridiculous, for a start. A politically committed intellectual is not, to my mind, as you may have gathered, someone
ridiculous
. I can picture it, I can imagine the half-smiles, whatever you like, but deep down I don’t feel that a politically committed intellectual is ridiculous; because deep down I feel that very few things are ridiculous. I’ve probably withdrawn too much from any concrete sense of social belonging—and by the same token, withdrawn a little from humanity (but let’s not get ahead of ourselves)—to truly have a sense of the ridiculous.

You will have gathered, too, that you can tell me you’re a disaster tourist without provoking any real disapproval (besides, coming from so far and having no real power, how could you not be something of a tourist?). Disapproval is a mental category I use rarely. And yet I do have a sense of good and a sense of evil, indeed they can appear with surprising violence when called on (I never seek to excuse a criminal; I never relativize an act of charity). But I call on them very rarely,
a minima
. And I am happy to live in a peaceable world in which the moral fiber of a man is rarely truly tested, where most actions are morally neutral.

Don’t worry, I am going to get around to talking about myself. Following your example—first the honorable reasons, then the more questionable ones, and so on to the worst—I’ll explain why I
am not
a politically committed intellectual.

(Leaving aside the fact that, in any case, I’m not an “intellectual”; otherwise I’d need to explain why I studied at an
institute for agronomics rather than
khâgne
^*
or Sciences Po, but that’s another matter.)

To talk about political commitment, I have to go back to Russia, where I’ve been twice, in 2000 and 2007. The first time was impressive. In the deserted avenues of Moscow, 4×4s with tinted glass windows thundered past. The restaurants and the cafés were empty—except for Westerners; in the streets and the doorways, young people shared bottles of beer and vodka (drinking in the bars was much too expensive for them). A few young women were dressed like prostitutes; the others were barely modernized babushkas.