Public Enemies Read Online Free PDF Page B

you’re becoming. I believe that what is at stake in a book is not being yourself, finding yourself, coinciding with your truth, your shadows, the eternal child within, or any of that other idiotic stuff, but rather changing, becoming other than the person you were before beginning and whom the book’s own growth has rendered obsolete and uninteresting. Do we write to retreat into ourselves or to escape; to disappear or to make an appearance; to occupy a territory or to mine it and, having mined it, to change it and lose ourselves in the maze of an unreachable identity? For me, the answer is obvious and in itself explains why I couldn’t care less about the nonsense written about the “truth” of my relations with money, media, power, or the Commander Massoud.
    I could tell you—and it would also be true—that this mode of action, this repugnance for confession and for staging the inner self, reflects my metaphysical makeup, for better or for worse. In general, this derives from phenomenology, which reached its pinnacle in Sartre, then in the antihumanism of Althusser, Lacan, and once again Foucault, and whose fundamental principle is to view the subject as an empty form, with no real content, almost abstract, consisting entirely of the contact it establishes with the world and the content bestowed on it by that contact, this content being each time new, never substantial.
    But the question of questions (and I don’t need to explain this to Michel Houellebecq, the Nietzschean) is naturally what is behind the metaphysics, poetical arts, conceptions of the literary adventure. The real question is to ask ourselves what this type of argument—this reasoning too straightforward to be honest; this choice, for example, between the Flaubertian and Stendhalian models, which may exist only inmy imagination—may hide in my personal history, in terms of subjective denials and fears, badly healed wounds, and the
unconfessed
family saga.
    You spoke to me of your father (and I would be happy to hear more about the whimsical, poetical character he seems to be).
    I should tell you a little about my own (because “concrete block” or not, this is probably the key for me as well).
    I come from a family that elevated to the status of an imperative its sense of propriety, a horror of bombast, and a revulsion for anything resembling emotional excess or indiscretion.
    My father was melancholic and powerful, silent and warlike, a chess player, unfathomable, clearheaded and skeptical, solitary and independent. For him secrecy was not only an intellectual experience but also—I’m convinced of this today—a way of being and living.
    He had another peculiarity, unusual for a man who, in conventional terms, would not be thought of as an intellectual, which was his strange, almost superstitious relationship with the words of everyday language. There were those he used and handled very delicately, with infinite caution, as you would move a chess piece. Then there were those addressed to him that had the power (we didn’t always know which ones, we never knew exactly why; they were ordinary words belonging to everyday life) to catapult him into sudden rages, cold but dreadful, as if they’d reached some obscure place in him and set fire to it.
    A scrap of mystery, blown down by a distant storm.
    A biographical enigma, resisting any explanation.
    And that way he had of dismissing other people’s idle chatter with phrases like “as futile as if you’d said nothing,” “like ghosts,” “a waste of breath …”
    He died on my birthday, which, when I think about it, seems part of a plan.
    He bequeathed me this taste for and practice of secrecy, which I sometimes take too far.
    He passed on to me this fear of words and of their terrifying power, as well as—naturally—a love of them.
    He left me this dream I have at times of writing in a dead language, which would discourage any risk of confidences, being addressed directly to the