Stéphane Zagdanski / Robert G. Margolis,
"The Eruption of a Verbal Audacity"
A Conversation About Chaos brûlant, “Burning Chaos”.
-To the blessed memory of Charles Mopsik
Robert G. Margolis: Let us
begin with the title of your new novel Chaos brûlant,
“Burning Chaos”. The title is used with
reference to a sentence by Friedrich Nietzsche, which you also employ as the
epigraph to your novel: “Civilization is only a thin film over a burning
chaos.” What is this “Burning Chaos”? What does Nietzsche and, therefore, do you
mean by it?
In “Thus Spake Zarathustra,”
Nietzsche writes: “One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give
birth to a dancing star.” And: “I tell
you: you still have chaos in yourselves.”
Is this “chaos” the same as the “Burning Chaos” your novel invokes? Is the narrator of your novel, whom you name
“Bag O’Bones,” and his friends, other mad residents of the Manhattan
Psychiatric Hospital, and who are the different commentators--whose characters
are themselves commentaries, on the ‘text’ of the DSK Affair, are they
differently “mad” in relation to this
chaos-within than the madness of your story’s protagonists, DSK and the
others? In other words, you, by your
novel’s title, and in concert with Nietzsche, seem to indicate something
primordially and universally structural with regard to individual, social, and
cultural ‘realities’. What is it?
If you will allow, a further
variation on this first question (and which anticipates my second question): In your writing, you always are working, in
one mode or another, and though it may not be immediately evident, with Jewish
Thought and Literature. Jewish Thought
and Literature has long realized that the ‘original Chaos’, Tohu ve-Bohu, and the ‘Darkness upon the
face of the Deep,’ are, so to speak, pre-primordial realities upon which the
‘works of the Beginning’, that is the creation of this world, are ‘built’. May we infer that you, as author, are aware
that, in its own way, the Book of Genesis, and the Hebrew Bible as a whole,
speaks of and makes one of its themes this same “Burning Chaos,” which
humanity’s ‘works’, its civilizations, will only thinly cover, if even that?
Stéphane Zagdanski :
Actually, it is not so much the idea of chaos, in the sense of a universal
disorder, which first interested me in Nietzche’s sentence—which is from The Will
to Power, as the idea of the « thin film » of civilization—die Kultur Nietzsche writes—which
conceals this burning chaos. You observe
to begin with that, in English as in French, Nietszche’s sentence allows for a
play on the word « film » (« pellicule » in French), with
reference to the cinema, that is, the hypnotic spectacularization of
events. Whereas in the original version,
« Apfelhäutchen »
evokes the skin of an apple, with no celluloid-relateable witz possible
since Nietzsche, who died in 1889, did not know about the birth of
cinematography. This witz on the
word « film » is important. In
fact, without its excessive media coverage, the DSK Affair, which is the
context but not the heart of my novel, would have had only a very minor
repercussion. Now, like all my other
books, Chaos brûlant means to be, along with what else it purposes, a
virulent critique of the way in which, to simply state it, minds are poisoned
by images to the detriment of the word.
Whence the chapter, for example, on the geneology of hypnosis, from
Daguerre to Twitter. To continue with
Nietzsche’s sentence, great attention must be given to the
« burning » of chaos, which completely corresponds to the calcinated.
ashified condition of our failing civlization—I am speaking about western
civilization, whose self-consuming inferno is bringing its practicable disaster
to the whole world. Whence the chapter
of Chaos brûlant dedicated to global warming, to pollution, and to the
catastrophic melting of the Ice Sheet.
By comparison, the Hell of Dante is a hierarchized, hence organized,
frigid spiral of punishment. That is no
longer at all where we are. So too,
“chaos”, in its Greek meaning, which Nietzsche knew, is not the anarchy of a
universe headed for ruin. “Chaos,”
Heidegger writes in reference to Hesiod, “initially means the half-a-gape
and its meaning coincides with the Open—unfounded, bottomless, abyssal,
[coincident] with the gapping fissure.”
Chaos, in Nietzsche, is the formless burbling up of life itself, in as
much as it precedes all delimitation, and it is joined with the essence of
truth, alèthéia. It is « the
knowable to know, » Heidegger further explains, « no reality preceeds
this gape, it only returns into it ; everything that appears is, each
instance, already preceeded by it. »
All this is to say that my « chaos » is no more that of
Nietzsche than the « thin film » of my witz is the skin of an
apple, or rather a pesticide contaminated apple! Basically, it is between the words of
Nietzsche’s beautiful sentence that the meaning of Chaos brûlant is
located: in the idea of the veil which conceals the fatal decline, and
therefore Spectacle’s ensnaring delusion, but also the slightness of this
concealment which an eruption of verbal audacity can disassemble so as to
unveil the other side of the alienation of contemporary nihilism.
The
characters in the Manhattan Psychiatric Center: Luc Ifer, Bag ‘O Bones, Artaud,
Marx, Guy Debord, Freud and Kafka—and one could even add Goneril, the fiancée
of Bag ‘O Bones, who embodies the hyperbolic incoherence of advertising
propaganda, represent different aspects to rending the ensnaring delusion. Each possesses an aptitude for lucidity, a
little like superheroes who each have their own special power (Bag ‘O Bones at
one point compares himself to [the comic book superhero] Daredevil)…Their
madness is not the individualization of the world’s insanity; rather it is the
extreme refinement of it, which enables them to enter into resonance with it,
the better to discern and to denounce it, in one respect, and in another
respect to dare to say everything, for they all are profoundly inhabited by the
Word. It is this which saves them from
the Abyss into which Number, global Finance to be precise, is engulfing the
planet. You know the saying of Joyce:
“Word, save us!” They are in somewise
the Apostles of the Word…This is what distinguishes them from the ordinary
insane of my novel: DSK, Sarkozy and the others (with the exception of
[Benjamin] Brafman who also hides a kind of mystical secret), who express
themselves and work in the name of Number and not of the Word.
As for the Tohu ve-bohu of
Genesis, it has nothing to do with what I name “burning chaos” (which, as I
just explained, is neither strictly what Nietzsche means by it). First, because it precedes creation; it
neither encloses nor threatens it, contrary to the contemporary chaos; and,
especially, because the Biblical Tohu ve-bohu is intimately joined to the noble
sovereignty of the Word. It even could
be, say certain traditional Jewish texts, the ink into which the divine pen was
dipped in order to write and to create the world…This is far from the crimes of
Goldman Sacks cretinously glossed by Standard & Poor’s!
Robert
G. Margolis: Perhaps a better English translation of Nietzsche’s sentence
would then be: « Civilization is only a thin skin on a burning
chaos. » As an aside, I had made a
note to ask you about the dissimilarity between Dante’s Inferno and the
« burning » of the chaos of the contemporary world. We do not, as did Dante in Hell, move through
veilings and unveilings of knowledge, of interiority, toward ever more
receptivity to the « good of the Intellect », which is, as well, the
good of the Word. The
« burning » of « burning chaos » dœs not, if you will,
‘burn us into light’, as dœs Dante’s Inferno.
And yet, as you just articulated it so beautifully, an « eruption
of verbal audacity »--a fulgurating effusion of « the good » of
the Word, can similarly or samely break through to rend and unveil the
congealed, concantenated, ossified nihilist opacities of our time.
In this sense, your writing, in its
entirety—‘fiction’/’non-fiction’, novels, essays-- is a sustained and sustaining,
a renewing and renewable “eruption of verbal audacity”. You mention a continuity of intent and
purpose between your novel Chaos brûlant and all
your previous books. In the Preface to
the second edition (published in 2005) of your first published book, L’impureté de Dieu, “The
Impurity of God,” you wrote: “My ambition, which has remained intact and been
reiterated in each of the books I have written since [publication of this first
book in 1991]—including those that apparently
are furthest from Jewish Thought, was to unite in myself this strange [that is, the Jewish] spiritual tradition
with literature, as Kafka and Philip Roth had previously effected it. Nothing has ever weakened my resolve or my
desire to make such an alliance, otherwise unknown in French…”
Readers in English have not yet been
introduced to the vastly subtle, multitudinously resonant play of combinations
and permutations of Jewish Thought with literature which permeates and pervades
all your writing. Can you speak about a
few instances—that you regard as especially exemplary or significant, in Chaos brûlant, in which this interior
“alliance” achieves its plenary expression in your writing?
Stéphane Zagdanski: I think
that your first translation of Nietzsche’s phrase as « a thin film »
is perfect; indeed, it marvelously corresponds to this passage from Chaos brûlant in which I denounce the
celluloidial vampirizing of the world:
“Pragmatists, the Americans already
are fine tuning the TV series and films based on the scandal. It has been, besides, a longtime since the
succubus Celluloid sucked up American public life in its entirety, from which
it is no longer distinguished.
“The cinema!” Luc said. “That
industry of frigidity-made-farce! Ask
Artaud what he really thinks of this “dead, illusory, cut-up-into-frames
world.” This is so true that I am not
certain of not having thought of it before him.
Ask yourself why, in the little town of Oswiecim, which, when they
occupy it, the Nazis rename “Auschwitz,” though the SS were prohibited from
going into bars and restaurants, the town’s little movie theater was reserved
exclusively for them…”
Of course, Chaos brûlant flows in a current of Jewish Thought. I am thinking not only of the obvious themes:
the strange attitude of a kind of inverse ‘tikkun’ of Brafman, DSK’s attorney,
whose entire career has consisted, by pleading on behalf of the worst mafia
crimes against America’s puritan propriety, of repairing the harm done to his
family during Kristallnacht, the
Night of Broken Glass. This night in
which, as he explains it in a long speech given in his synagogue, the police’s
proper uniform allowed for its barbaric double to show through, revealing the
other side of western civilization embodied in the criminal Nazi thug…If Evil
can uniformly dress itself in the rags of Good, why not do good by defending,
in a completely lawful manner and by means of speech alone, the lackeys of Evil
whom the self-proclaimed acolytes of Good claim to condemn. I am not speaking only about the messianic theme
embodied by the schizophrenic “Kafka” who, at the end of the novel, invokes the
Prophet Amos, in the middle of an earthquake and an IMF-collapse cocktail
party. No, I have also placed a few
kabbalist indicatories here and there in the text, apart from the principal
intent, profoundly Jewish, which is the critique of King Look. For example, when
I have each of the Manhattan Psychiatric Center residents, in turn, and each in
a different context, say: “No before or
after in my fused brain”; “No before or
after in this fused chaos”; “No
before or after in the global nightmare of my soul”; “No before or after in the irascible realm of tumult”…I borrow a
classic formulation of midrashic interpretation which states “no before or
after in the Torah,” meaning that two separated verses can be interpreted
without regard for their chronological order.
This coincides with one of the intuitions of Chaos brûlant according to which the worst evils of the past
continue at work in the most vile maelstromic whirls of current events. No before or after between Auschwitz and
IBM’s Watson supercomputer, no before or after between advertisement whose
falsification Balzac analyzed and the sly conniving of the Spin Doctors which
no politician today can do without. No
before or after between the madness of Hitler, Nazi crimes, the genocide of the
American Indians, the rudiments of American psychiatry, the enslavement of
Blacks in the United States, and the melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet or the
concussive shocks of Finance. No
progress, in other words, between the worst times of modern History and the
genocidal management of the globe which characterizes the most contemporary
habitual nihilism and its proclivities.
Another
kabbalistic allusion is the plays on the names sown throughout the novel, and
primarily on the three initials DSK.
They indicate that the framework and weave of the text possesses a
destinal value; that your name precedes you in life, and that language, if one
does not pay attention to it, has many expedients by which to send you its
regards. Thus the episode in which the
DKS lock, preventing DSK from getting back into his house, literally locks him
out…Alas, DSK, because he is anesthetized to the Word, never seems to listen to
or understand the warnings about his destiny guised as witz.
Robert G. Margolis: Your
writing, I find, does not submit to or cooperate with reductive, very often
reactionary, categories of conceptual confinement. This is due, at least in part—and, again,
this is my own construance, to your ‘midrashic’ receptivity to the
possibilities of the ‘flesh-made-word’ and of the Word-made-literature. These are the very possibilities of
uninhibited, often subversive, always imaginative invention indigenous to the
Hebrew Bible, to Midrash, the Talmud and the Zohar.
You refer to Chaos brûlant—the completed novel and the mode of its
composition—as an « Instantaneous Metaphysical Fiction ». In English (I.M.F.) as well as in French
(F.M.I.), this appellation shares the same acronym with the International
Monetary Fund ; as much as to allude to a kind of writer’s Art of War to
describe, to understand, and to struggle against Number’s war to exterminate
the Word (as you state it, without dissumulation or disguise).
Of course, it needs be asked what do
you mean by « Instantaneous Metaphysical Fiction », and why precisely
« metaphysical » ? As a
personal mode of your writing, there is continuity with your previous published
novels and essays, certainly, but what does an « Instantaneous Metaphysical
Fiction » allow you to do differently as a writer?
I am remembering your comment to me
that Chaos brûlant has particular
precedent in three of your previously published books: « a mixture of
elements, » you wrote, from Les Intérêts du temps (The Benefits of Time), de Pauvre de Gaulle! (Poor de Gaulle!) et
de La mort dans l’œil (Death in the Eye).
Briefly, for each of these three books, what are the precedents
of style and/or theme which, in Chaos
brûlant, you re-transmit from yourself to yourself to your reader?
Stéphane Zagdanski: There
is, of course, some playfulness in the use I made of the acronym I.M.F. to
refer to this novel as an « Instantaneous Metaphysical Fiction » or,
again, « Instantaneous Metapsychological Fiction, » but it is not only
this. To tell you, dear Robert Margolis,
something of what happened ‘behind the scenes’ of Chaos brûlant, no doubt it would never have occurred to me to look
into the case and the personality of the former I.M.F. director, if, near the
end of May 2011, I had not been contacted by a North American publisher, whose
speciality is books about public scandals, to write a book about the then
on-going affair…By the end of a few months the man had shown himself to be the
consummate con artist; I have never seen the 25,000 dollars he contractually
promised to me, nor received the airplane tickets so as to bring my wife and my
daughter there to dance the « Kuitata Piquant » (the latest popular
hip gyration from the Ivory Coast) in the company of some Guinean informer
connected to the Diallo family, nor met the American legal experts this
imposter claimed to have in his pocket, nor corresponded with the researcher he
claimed was available to me, nor had lunch in California with his Hollywood
bigshot friends interested by the scandal.
After a summer of deception after deception—which are so funny as to one
day be the setting for another book—I found myself with a hundred page
manuscript work-in-progress and with dozens of different documents, some of
them quite rare, gathered here and there.
It remained only for me to make a decision: either abandon the entire
project and see four months of uninterrupted intensive work (and thereby the
first chapters of Chaos brûlant) come
to naught, or to transform the Capote-like investigatory project (à la In Cold Blood) into a typically
Zagdanskian midrash, ending up as a new novel--for which « l’affaire
DSK, » as I told you, would structure the setting but would not be its
heart; and which, not content merely to take the pulse of our delectable
epoque, would pronounce it clinically dead before undertakng post-mortem
dissection of its corpse, cutting deep into it with gleaming bright
scalpels!
Which is what I did…
Chaos brûlant shares with Les intérêts du temps (« The Benefits of Time ») a meditated
critique of mass-media and the universal expansion of its cretinous propaganda
through the vehicule of computer technology.
With Pauvre de Gaulle!
(« Poor de Gaulle ! »), it shares the x-ray of an age through
one of the major figures of its spectacle.
The ideological imposture embodied by De Gaulle reflected through and
through France’s twentieth century.
Today the imposture has become globalized—« the false is without
answer » (Debord), and the farce become totalitarian ; subsequently a
DSK can embody all the defects of the global twenty-first century. Finally, the analysis of visual nihilism that
I conduct in La mort dans l’œil
(« Death in the Eye « ) is continued in Chaos brûlant, in which I immersed myself to the very center of the
whirlwind of Spectacle (YouTube, Twitter…) so as to examine its virulent
lunacy.
What Chaos brûlant inaugurates, different from these other books, is the
opportunity to write a novel dedicated to the most « burning »
current events, yet another meaning of the title. By these events of summer 2011, I do not mean
only the DSK Affair, but correlatively
(and however obviously hidden by the media barrage surrounding this grotesque
but significant news story) the catastrophic recrudescence of the international
economic crisis. I thus inaugurated a
new literary genre, the live novel,
written in time with developments to the scandal and the crisis. Such is what I have called an
« Instantaneous Metaphysical Fiction ». No need to dwell on the words
« Fiction » and « Instantaneous ». As for « Metaphysical, » it
comprises a revelation, apocalyptic in nature, of the profound meaning of what
was happening (occuring) before the eyes of the novel as it was written. Simply said, the imbecile fall of DSK from
the height of his financier-politician throne, to me, seemed the most exact
caricature of the planet’s devourment by the gravest economic crisis since the
1929 Crash. That the two events, the
farce and the tragedy, coincided—whereas, in Le 18 Brumaire de Louis Bonaparte (« The Eighteenth Brumaire
of Louis Bonaparte »), Marx had only emphasized their repetition seemed,
to me, a decisive demonstration of the upending madness of the most dismal,
darkest nihilism.
Like all novelists working from a
news story, I was inspired by Stendhal, the unqualified precursor of this
approach. He claimed to perambulate his
mirror along main street. I balanced my
speculum on the edges of the Abyss…Too often neglected is the subtitle to Le Rouge et le Noir (« The Red and
The Black ») : « A Chronicle of 1830 » ; elaborated
starting from the Berthet trial, a provincial news item in 1827, Stendhal
displays a virtuoso divinatory discernment of his contemporaries, showing what
Nietszche named his « psychological second sight ». Chaos brûlant could naturally be
subtitled « A Chronicle of Summer
2011 », and Stendhal’s warning in the post-scriptum to his masterwork
rewritten as follows : The
disadvantage of the reign of spectacle, besides excluding
all freedom, is that it gets mixed up and meddles in what is none of its
business; for example, the private life.
Whence America’s hysteria and France’s trepidation... < « The disadvantage of the reign of opinion,
though it procures freedom, is that
it gets mixed up and meddles in what is none of its business; for example, the
private life. Whence the sadness of
America and England. »>
It was in this wise that for a long
time, like so many others before me, I desired to write about a sordid,
corruption-laden news story. Not some
vague journalistic compilation politely termed a « novel » to compete
in vulgarity with the celebrity photo magazines—which in this regard are
themselves lagging far behind on-line computer gossip and voyeurism, but by
inventing a narration proportionate in its excess to our ever tempting and enticing
Epoque, in which the new high-speed mass
media—YouTube, Twitter, etc.—are to Stendhal’s reading the Gazette des tribunaux, to the New York Times for Capote, what an Ipad
is to a school slate. The media-legal
deflagration of the DSK Affair served up the opportunity to me on a plate, with
DSK largely displacing Dreyfus, from the point of view of the « reign of
opinion » which Stendhal castigates in his post-scriptum.
One need not be extra lucid in order
to register the atmosphere of delirium which crashed down upon and around this
[DSK’s] grotesque ejaculation. This
widespread ensorcellement makes first for a marvellous case for psychoanalysis : how otherwise to explain the sabotage of a
career on the threshold of international triumph by an off-the-cuff act of oral
sex in a hotel room? Here also is why
this live novel presents itself as an « Instantaneous Metapsychological
Fiction,» because nothing at all is understood by keeping to the surface of
mind, justifying the motive as the will to power, money, political ambition, as
twisted, calculating libido –indeed unconciously deliberate acting out and
self-defeating behavior, behaviors whose
key is missing from the meagre manual on socio-pathologies of French and
English op-ed writers. Pathetic as they
are hilarious, the characters in this extravagent affair escape, by essence, the media’s sieve since the
sieve, itself, is only a cog in the intrigue-machine, same as the television
viewers, newspaper readers and internet voyeurs, such as Ivan Levaï, Anne Sinclair’s first husband and
DSK’s cuckold, who published a « chronicle » to defend the honor of
his usurper…The journalistic interpretation, which is the interpretation of all
the works already published about the scandal since the month of August, is
thus destined to fail.
In
contradistinction, each of the actors in this tragi-comedy of summer 2011
is fascinating to turn into a novel. The
ineffable DSK who, from his childhood to the day of the verdict in New York,
has collected earthquakes in his wake.
Nafissatou Diallo, whose improbable, typically run-on, tall tales
overturned the entire legal process.
Benjamin Brafman, haunted by the capriciousness of Good and Evil in the
attempt to destroy the Jews of Europe, and whose each step is marked with the
mystic seal of reparation…And all the others, near or far, implicated in the
Affair, caught in the blind eye of the media hurricane : Kenneth Thompson,
Cyrus Vance, Anne Sinclair, Tristane Banon, his mother Anne Mansouret,
Marie-Victorine M’Bissa of course…but also the couple Carla Bruni and Nicolas
Sarkozy, the ex-couple Hollande and Royal, the French socialists, the
journalists…an incredible cohort worthy to populate an island, coming each day
of that strange rainy summer of 2011 to put their galvanized skulls under my
scalpel of style.
Here
then is the Fiction. The day when the
earth moved in New York, preventing prosecutor Cyrus Vance from delivering his
justification, I grasped the powerfully symbolic dimension of the DSK
Affair. By means of a rambunctious
trial, it is our hardly to be envied 21st century which is surveilled,
inveighed against, dirtied, dishonored, judged, condemned…and finally
collapses, along with its cruel mother the Economy, bringing down in its
catastrophe the expert ‘babbleaters’ and ‘bavardeers’
When
Reality surpasses Fiction, Fiction must catch up by endowing it with the outrageous amplitude
of Myth. All these are reasons to
explain that the narrator of this novel, like the little troupe of persons with
whom he converses and who move about in the Manhattan Psychiatric Center, are
real and formidably smart. The others,
beginning with DSK, connected to the media-political-economic-legal-cultural
current events of these last months, are invented. Despite the deceiving appearances which
project on our television and computer screens, they only exist and thrive in
our subservient, submitted minds.
As
to what happened in suite 2806 of the Hotel Sofitel in New York City, May 14,
2011, between 12:06 and 12:26 in the afternoon, only three persons know: the
man, the woman, and the novelist who « senses through walls »<Proust, Letter to Jacques Boulenger>…
Robert G. Margolis: Midrash is
a singularly Jewish conception and mode of reading, of study, of
interpretation, which, as we know, is not limited to its traditional
forms. In the « alliance »
which you interiorly effect, and by which you accomplish a ‘unification’ of
Jewish Thought with literature, Midrash is integral. Your fourth published book, On Anti-Semitism, you qualify as a
Midrash ; and indeed, I think, one may transpose or ‘migrate’ this term
into and through the occasion of thought specific to each of your writings,
such that Midrash qualifies all you write.
Midrash, we may say—and giving Witz the constellation of meanings it
bears from its origin, at once manifests the Witz of the Word and the Witz
of the Writer. An interviewer once
asked you do you feel yourself to be more an essayist or a novelist. Permit me to quote your reply, as I feel it
alludes to how Chaos brûlant, along
with all your other published novels and essays, may function ‘midrashically,’
at least for those who read, in part, to effect in themselves the same kind of
“alliance” from which your writing emanates.
You replied:
“I
do not make the distinction. From the
moment I put into writing teachings brought forth from my own body, I regard my
essays as novels…I view the novel in a very broad sense. For me, the essayist is one of the emanations
of the novelist. The novel is the
absolute literary genre. Thought and
imagination go together. I always quote
this sentence by La Bruyère: “They would exclude from the history of Socrates
that he knew how to dance.”
But this may only be my own
conclusion. Do you at all agree in
seeing your books, whether Chaos brûlant
or another, as written ‘midrashically’ and ‘at work’ that way in the
reader? Which is to ask, first: What, to
you, is Midrash, and specifically en rapport with your act of writing?
Stéphane Zagdanski: Midrash
is my primary reference, whether or not it is indicated in my books; but it is
so present in principle that it can be forgotten and be of no concern. In a certain way, all my books are, in their
interstices, only one long midrash on myself.
By « midrash » I mean that somewhat cartesienne hermeneutic
« method ,» characteristic of Jewish writings, which proceeds from
the absolute sovereignty of the Text over the world. In this sense, not only does it include the
Midrash as such (Midrash Rabbah,
etc.), but the Talmud, the Sefer Yetsirah,
the Zohar, all of kabbalist and hasidic literature…In short, Jewish thought in
its entirety, from the Torah to God knows where it ends…
Chaos brûlant reports the grave danger today
incurred by the preeminence of the Text over the world, since the novel
describes the attempted extermination of the Word by Number. This is what I call “the Genocidal Management
of the Globe.” In recalling, for example, IBM’s role in the organization of the
Nazi death camps, I mean to show that it is already Number (or, if one prefers,
Technique, numerical organization, so much evidenced by the tattoos of the
concentration camp prisoners) which, with the Nazis, led to the delirium of
extermination. Now, this insanity, just
as it was not born ex nihilo with
Hitler’s rise to power, did not self-destruct with the fall of the mustachioed
hysteric! It is thus that at the end of
the novel the IBM supercomputer, nicknamed “Watson,” seizes power, in a
totalitarian and delirious manner, during an IMF cocktail party. In actuality, Watson just was bought by the
largest financial institution in the world: CitiGroup…Sunt idem: they are the same!
But Chaos brûlant is not content to describe this war, the onslaught of
attack launched in assault on the Word.
It actively takes part in it—on the side of the Word, of course, by
working with it on all levels: there
is midrash. This is why, for
example, I interpret the total subjugation of the planet to Finance as a direct
consequence of the linguistic impoverishment of Number, an indigence
demonstrated by the globalized economy’s borborygmus acronymical labeling:
“AAA”, “BBB”, etc…This is why I re-inject into this sordid financial farce
variations of meaning and truth by transposing their CCC into: “Collusion
Corruption Concussion” (which has the advantage of being bilingual!).
The lengthy chapter dedicated to the
irreversible melting of the Ice Sheet recapitulates, not by accident, the fifty
words in the splendid Inuit vocabulary for snow. As much as the Ice Sheet, it is the Word
which is disintegarting and disappearing from its battering by Number, in this
case from speculation in oil.
But at the same time that something
extraordinary is vanishing, one who speaks this disappearance endures and
protects the essential. This is the
reason why Chaos brûlant concludes
with its own disappearance, when the computer on which it all was supposed to
have been written, without it being saved, is suddenly turned off by an
employee of the Manhattan Psychiatric Center.
And yet, the word has had its say,
and all its resources are intact in the mind of the author and, let us hope, in
the soul of the good, kind reader…
10 septembre 2012
