Public Enemies Read Online Free PDF

be indignant and yet take a strategic tack. You can be scandalized or enraged, but precisely because you’re at war you manage to keep control of the impression you make. In my case, that’s a fact. It’s even, if I dare say so, an obligation. Even in extreme situations, when I return from Darfur or Sarajevo, when I rail against the indifference of the well-off toward this or that forgotten war, which I’ve taken the trouble to go and see and from where I bring back my distressed accounts, my phobia for these confessional stories is such that even there—I almost wrote
especially there
—I do whatever I can to stay in control of my emotions, reflexes, language, and facial expressions. (The face, oh dear … its shameful turmoil, its minuscule rages, which give away so much … it’s the reason why I leave those [television interview] programs in a state of nervous exhaustion, which thosewho take me at my word when, quoting Bataille, * I trumpet that the principle to follow on television is to think “the way a girl takes her dress off” could hardly imagine.)
    In my last letter I spoke to you about my indifference to the horrors they may write about me and which, I know, weaken me in my struggles.
    There was a claim that my father made his fortune in a vile way, which I didn’t contradict.
    I let it pass when it was written that I hardly knew Massoud † and that giving him as a reference, laying claim to both his values and his friendship, was a fabrication.
    I’ve allowed books to appear and be disseminated on the Internet that I obviously did look through, even if at the time I claimed I didn’t, and whose basic message was always to make me out to be a bastard.
    The reason I’ve put up with all this wasn’t simply negligence, indifference, or contempt. It’s not because I have a shatterproof, armor-plated ego or that I’m beyond reach. It’s not even that I take that pleasure in being disliked, which we spoke of in our first exchange and which for me, as for you too perhaps, is another form of posing. No, what I now think is that if I have never refuted their claims and naturally never sued that evil lot, it’s because part of me gets something out of it. That part of me prefers even disinformation and the supreme, Gidian art of the counterfeiter, an expert on false clues and ruses, to the obscenity of giving in to the universalexhortation, be yourself (i.e., love yourself), which is the commandment of our age.
    Of course, the question is why.
    What’s behind this refusal, this phobia, this tendency to tell as little as possible, not to confess?
    Where does it come from and what does it conceal—this desire to hide your cards, to be the champion of false confessions, an artist of trompe-l’oeil and deception, at the risk, I must repeat, of having highly offensive claims made about you without reacting?
    I could tell you, and it would be true that there is a literary conception behind it: when I was writing the
Les Derniers Jours de Charles Baudelaire
[
The Last Days of Charles Baudelaire
], I was obsessed with the opposition between the good “Flaubertian model” and the bad “Stendhalian model”: a cold, cold-blooded, possibly rigid, even stuffy literature versus the exquisite but to my mind antiliterary stylistic freedom of the literature of “release.” Even today, I haven’t changed that much. The experiments that fascinate me are still those where the “I” is withheld or even—and I hope we’ll come back to this—where, as in Gary or Pessoa, * it is a minotaur lurking in the depths of a labyrinth of words, a clandestine orchestral director manipulating his clones like puppets on strings.
    I could tell you, and it would be no less accurate, that this attitude derives from the idea I have—and which was also Michel Foucault’s in his very last texts—as to why anyoneembarks on the adventure of writing, which is that you write in order to find out not so much who you are as who