Mathieu Lindon

"What you hear when you listen to Michel Foucault, twenty six years after his death, is the beautiful freedom of thought that is both formidably structured and joyously iconoclastic. Ceaselessly interrogating our most obvious beliefs, questioning what seems evident.... Today as we suffocate under timid dogmas, arrogant political correctness, class egocentrism erected with money and indifference to others presented as politics, the generous freedom of a Foucault is noticeably lacking in this country.


"Mathieu Lindon knew Michel Foucault as a friend for six years. It was a friendship that nourished him, raised him and made him discover himself. He has just published What To Love Means." 

Gratitude is too sweet a sentiment to carry: you have to leave it somewhere and a book is the only honorable place, the only compromising. Whatever the particular value may be of several protagonists in my story, it's the same for each person in every civilization: the father's love weighs down on his son, the son has to wait until someone has the power to show him otherwise in order for him to finally perceive what it consists of. It takes time to understand what to love means.

l'humeur vagabonde - January 3, 2011

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Michel Onfray

Michel Onfray's lectures at the Popular University this year focused on Sigmund Freud. Twilight of an Idol (the title borrowed from Neitzsche) is his recent book on the topic. He sets outs to debunk the legend.

Schools have a habit of teaching things in the form of post cards. They show you a picture of Plato pointing to the sky and Aristotle pointing to the ground and that image becomes the lesson. Onfray presents ten such post cards that make up the lesson/legend of Freud and for which he will present "counter post cards" over the course of the future lectures:

1. Freud discovered the unconscious all alone.
2. Our (Freudian) slips point to the unconscious.
3. Dreams are interpretable; they are the royal road to the unconscious
4. Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis was the result of hard science, namely, 18 cases.
5. Freud discovered a technique for treating psychopathology.
6. Repression is at the base of the problem. Pointing this out will solve the problem.
7. The oedipal complex is universal.
8. Resistance to psychoanalysis is a sign of abnormality, repression, and oedipal complex.
9. Psychoanalysis is an emancipating discipline, it leads to sexual freedom. (Freud said himself that this was not at all desirable).
10. Freud represents rationalism, in the tradition of the enlightenment.

Onfray concludes his introduction by borrowing again from Neitzsche who said that there was only one Christian and he died on the cross. There was only one Freudian, says Onfray, and he died in his bed September 23, 1939 in London.

Conférences de Michel Onfray

Zeina Abirached

Interview with Zeina Abirached, a comic book artist who talks about her memories of growing up in war-torn Beirut, unaware that there was a western half of the city beyond the wall at the end of her street.

She reads letters sent between her mother and grandfather, between France and Lebanon during the war.

En toutes lettres

Michel Onfray

Michel Onfray's rapid-fire lecture style is hypnotic and captivating for the way he repeats each concept in three phrases using three alternate adjectives. This year's series of lectures is part of the series entitled "The Genius of Hedonism" and is devoted to the development of the idea of the "superman". I always think of Nietzsche when I hear the term, and never really understand quite what is meant. Nietzsche is present in these lectures, and Onfray promises more to come, but for the first sessions he focuses on the precursors to Nietzsche's superman. Six are devoted to Jean Louis Guyau.

Conférences de Michel Onfray: la construction du surhomme

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Olivier Bessard-Banquy

"French publishing has changed a lot since the first years of (Bernard Pivot's TV show) Apostrophes. With the advent of the industrialization of distribution and as mass-media was taking off, "the Gutenberg galaxy", still mostly a family craft in the 1970s, dedicated to quality, turns to the wider public just as powerful industrial and financial groups are investing in books. Avant-garde series and prestigious publications are abandoned to make room for 'fast books' that get rave reviews. French literature itself is becoming imperceptibly more informal; authors are starting to produce texts taken from "writing degree zero" that are presented as works worthy of a Nobel prize. Facing the pressure of the standardization of literature, young and not-so-young publishers in small and large companies, resist and try to defend another literature that is not formatted to please the greatest number. All of these years of publication are also years of intense creation, great innovation and audacious, surprising and inventive works. What were the details of this transformation? Who were the actors? How did the NRF fight for its position as leader? What were the tactics and strategies of the old labels of Saint-Germain-des-Prés in order to prevail in the bookstores? In this detailed account of the "the daily life of the book under Bernard Pivot," from the death of Gaston Gallimard to "the marketing of the Houellebecq product," Olivier Bessard-Banquy recounts... thirty years of publishing that are also thirty years of immediate literary history. Packed with anecdotes that shed inside light on the workings of the old publishing companies, The Life of the Contemporary Book offers an agile and sometimes funny chronicle marked by authors' whims, the painful sessions poring over manuscripts and brainstorming the best way of launching the new. Between economy and culture, publishing is unveiled, still just as fascinating, at the intersection of the paper and the electronic."

La vie du livre contemporain: Etude sur l'édition litéraire 1975 - 2005

Du jour au lendemain (7/24)

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Michel Ciment

"It always seemed to me that these interviews, recorded in the1970s with two of the greatest American directors of their generation, could be read "in a mirror" - to the extent that their parallel destinies reveal points of convergence and divergence.

"Kazan and Losey were born in the same year, 1909, from milieus that could not have been more different. Their respective origins, the Greek minority in Turkey and the world of carpets for one, an old patrician and protestant family for the other, explain in part the choices they made during the era of the Black List, a desire for social integration for Kazan, affirmation of the values of the Constitution for Losey. They both studied at the most elite universities of the East Coast, Yale and Harvard, they joined the communist party, and met with their first artistic success with theater productions in the 1930s. Their first films are marked by their social and political engagements dating from the New Deal before they gravitated toward films more focused on the ambiguities and the complexity of the human soul. They would thus both collaborate with Tennessee Williams and Harold Pinter. Kazan's first great critical success was America, America, the same year, or almost, that Losey would know his first international acclaim with The Servant. And of course the dividing line was established by the witch hunts, with the denunciations of one and the exile of the other to Europe.

"Their lives never again crossed, but they had, as they aged, the same mistrust with regard to overly established certitudes."

Du jour au lendemain (7/15)

Kazan, Losey: Edition définitive

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Jürgen Ritte

Theodor Adorno thought Germans should see in Proust a kindred soul because of his long sentences. Jürgen Ritte describes the trajectory of Proust in 20th century Germany, from the moment Rilke read him in 1914 (on Gide's recommendation), to the translation in German by a 24 year-old translator of Chateaubriand (it was bad - "as if you were trying to arrange Debussy for the harmonica"), then, after that publisher folded, to Walter Benjamin's translation that was forbidden by the Nazi regime, and finally to Herman Hesse who pushed for its publication after the war.

"Cher Ami": Marcel Proust im Spiegel seiner Korrespondenz

The book is a catalog of an exposition currently in Cologne that displays the correspondence of Proust. Ritte wanted to show the manuscripts and "make them talk at the same time." He wanted to include context, and for this he would try to have a letter juxtaposed with one from the correspondent. Unfortunately, Proust had the habit of destroying the letters he received, making the juxtaposition a challenge. We have the letters that Gide wrote to him, because Gide kept copies (it was part of his job at the publisher), but most of the others are gone.

The show is worth listening to if only to hear the first lines of A la recherche read in German by Ritte.

Les affinités électives (7/9)

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