INTERVIEW WITH LE NOUVEL OBSERVATEUR
ABOUT CHAOS BRÛLANT ( BURNING CHAOS )
Translated by Robert G. Margolis
Le Nouvel Observateur: How do you feel after a year deep inside the head of Dominque
Strauss-Kahn?
Stéphane Zagdanski: I will not keep from you that 2011 was almost
as painful for me as it was for Dominque Strauss-Kahn. As if the title of my novel had decided to
turn my existence into a burning chaos.
To give you only one example, an enormous fire completely consumed a
storage facility in Gagny, in which I had some furniture and, especially,
irreplaceable archives. And this is not
the worst of what happened to me !
Proof, if such is needed, that certain books magnetize the world around
their author, for better as well as for worse.
Advance notice of this novel surprised more than a
few people…
For some time I
had envisaged writing about Money, about the specie of madness it symbolizes
and incites, and especially about its disastrous avatar, contemporary
Finance. DSK’s misadventure is only of
interest as a symbol of the economic catastrophe which today is swallowing up
the entire planet. This, what I call the “genocidal management of
the world,” is the real subject of Chaos brûlant. If in 1967 Debord denounced the
“merchandise-future” of the world, today it is necessary to evoke the
“financial-market-future” of the planet.
Then came the DSK affair and its lunatic media coverage, which says a
lot about the latest changes in the Society of Spectacle. The extravagant role that Twitter has played,
for example. As a result, and out of
necessity, examining for myself the mind of DSK, I saw that his life had been organized in a spiral around
recurrent cataclysms since the horrifying earthquake in Agadir [Morocco], during
his childhood, on February 29, 1960, which he and his family survived.
What part of the novel is fiction and what part of
it is non-fiction?
First principal:
all of it is public. I do not invent
anything about the protagonists’ private lives, even if I give attention to
some little known details. Everything is
available in biographies, speeches, soundbite compilations, including the often
ordurous sayings of Sarkozy which I comedically dramatize. DSK’s fascinating relationship to chess (and
hence to failure!)[1] is
completely true. It is the same with
regard to Benjamin Brafman, DSK’s attorney.
The story of his family’s survival of Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken
Glass, his long impassioned talks in synagogues in which he speaks about those
who died in the Shoah. No one was
interested in this mystical aspect of the “Mob lawyer,” even though it is all
plainly discoverable on YouTube. Chaos brûlant is also a novel about the
unrestrained, rampant use of the Internet, a main cog in the machine of
Spectacle today. As for the portion of
it which is fiction, it consists in my mixing it up in the heads — and, we may
call it, the madness of the characters.
And what better general neighborhood than a psychiatric unit in which to
examine the alienation of the world and the lunacy of the puppets who believe they actually govern us!
Have you read l’Enculé (Motherfucker) by Marc-Edouard Nabe, which also is about DSK?
It is a big piece
of shit, as its title indicates[2]. The titles of bad books also can be revealing
of their destiny. Nabe’s is to be
literally fascinated by shit. I know him
better than anyone, and especially better than he knows himself. He has never gotten over or forgiven my long,
detailed description of him in my novel Pauvre
de Gaulle! [Poor de Gaulle!]. In a rage, he burned the unpublished
manuscript of his Journal intime [Private Diary], in which I appeared in a
flattering light, for we had long been best of friends. My literary portrait of him revealed all his
demons against the Jews — and, as a result, against me, whom he regularly
insulted in between two gesticulations of narcissistically dilapidated self-promotion. Basically, Nabe is useful only as a burlesque
character for a novel. I already have
the title for it: Punchinello in a Rut
(laughter). But his punishment, for
being so poisonously bitter and mean, is that I no longer give any time to his
laughable case as the “little buffoon of Venetian comedy,” which is literally
what is last name Zannini means.
Your novel had to be reviewed by some quite good
lawyers…
It went through
several re-readings, in fact. I had to
omit several passages which, if there were a lawsuit, would have put us at risk
of immediately losing. For instance, I
had a minutely detailed, even very poetic, description of DSK’s penis at the
moment he thrust it between the lips of Nafissatou Diallo. It was imagined, of course. Now, it would seem, this constitutes a
“characteristic attack on his private life.”
This is unlikely if we consider that his sex life is not a secret to anyone in the world…And, in
principle, I respect the private life. Even
if, as The Situationists ironically said: “We ask: “From what is the private
life private? Quite simply from life, which is cruelly absent from it.” This fits poor DSK like a glove or, in this
case, like a condom…
The narrative of the scene in the Sofitel hotel room
had to be a particular concern.
It, especially,
was quite amusing to write. But I tried to remain impartial, thus the novel
contains two strictly different versions: the one a rape, which is Nafissatou
Diallo’s version, and the other an assignation between consenting adults which
went bad, which is DSK’s version. Here
again, either one writes all of it or one writes nothing, and thus as much as
censures one’s own book. Even the
lawyers in the end had to admit the profoundly literary dimension of Chaos brûlant, including the
descriptions of the “real” scenes, which, in the final analysis, are only
hallucinations experienced by my schizophrenic narrator.
The character of the madman—was it to protect
yourself?
On the contrary,
I can even say that I invented it in order to test and to endanger my own
mental health. In fact, while writing, I
did not think at all about readers’ reactions.
I laughed a lot, and it seems to me it cannot be denied that Chaos brûlant is the funniest novel
among this year’s somber selection of Rentrée Literature… It happened that I was in Montreal, in April
2010, to give a talk on Franz Kafka, and one morning I saw, passing by in the
street, a guy tattooed head to foot with a skeleton. I was amazed by this demonstration of
incarnate nihilism, gallantly proclaimed, inked into the skin itself. I immediately took out my notebook, resolving
that he would find his way into one of my novels. Now, while I did invent the sad adventures of
Bag ‘O Bones — my narrator who also is tattooed head to foot with a skeleton,
the guy from Montreal was discovered by Lady Gaga, appeared in one of her
videos, and in no time at all ended up becoming world famous! He made commercials, marched in parades, went
on television, was seen everywhere…It is another sign, like the fire in the
furniture storage facility, that certain novels possess a kabbalistically
efficacious influence on reality. A true
book foments the world. This could be a
Hassidic saying!
To come back to the scene in the Sofitel hotel room,
you explain the variations in Nafissatou Diallo’s version as due to a “Peul
Uncertainty Principle.” What do you mean
by this?
Getting myself
into the head of Nafissatou Diallo, and thus into Peul culture, its language,
its beliefs, its sayings, confirmed for me the great spiritual nobility of speech
which is current throughout Africa. When
an African tells you about something, whatever it is, he does not “report” it;
he recreates it. It is a form of
improvisation, like in jazz whose living wellsprings, as you know, are
African. If you ask a Peul the same
question twenty times, you will get twenty different responses. Nafissatou Diallo came late to the West; she
does not see nor does she speak about the world as an American. It may be that she was raped, but her
characteristically Peul rapport with the spoken word fundamentally disserved
her, because she was facing New York City cops who, when they ask you what you
were doing between 12 and 12:36 PM, do not allow any embellishment to the
answer.
Your depiction of DSK revolves around an earthquake
from which he escaped, while a child, in Agadir [Morocco].
On February 29,
1960, the town is destroyed in a few seconds; thousands are dead, but the Kahn
family — Dominque, his parents, his sister and his brother survive. My idea is that the earthquake in Agadir at
once devastated him and gave him his foundation; an earthquake, lasting ten or
twelve seconds, during which man-made constructions, some of them several
centuries old, completely collapse.
Moreover, this happened in the final minutes of February 29, a phantom
day which then disappears from the calendar for three years. Whence my idea that on this day a dybbuk, a kind of demon in the Jewish
tradition, possessed little Dominique Now, the Jewish texts say, when a dybbuk takes possession of a human
being, it makes him “mad, irrational, vicious, corrupt”: a perfect metaphor for
the prevailing neoliberalism!
You say that DSK “carries the earthquake (seism)
within him.”
Confronted at the
age of ten years with an experience of the violent, sudden swallowing-up of
Time, DSK desires only to flee and to enjoy sensual pleasures; the two
attitudes amount to one and the same.
The greatest thoughts of the 20th century consist in
meditating on the relationship between Being and Time, and in Judaism too this
is a millennial primordial question. Now,
DSK is a fugitive sensualist, who fears nothing so much as the passage of
time. Both through his IMF “master of
the world” lifestyle—his incessant zig-zagging across the entire planet, the
mollifying and vacuous speeches which mean nothing and change nothing, and
through his neurotic passion for the latest technologies, constantly exchanging
one for another. Someone who owns seven
cell phones and sleeps with his Ipad is not in the ideal spiritual position to mediate
on Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit. But this consubstantial impatience is also a
sign he is haunted about the earthquake and by
the earthquake. If we follow his career,
each time he attains the summit, everything falls apart at his feet. The
National Students’ Mutual of France imbroglio, the Jean-Claude Méry tape,
Piroska Nagy [with whom DSK had an affair], Nafissatou Diallo… Most extravagant
is that he starts over each time…then plunges back into the same behavior. On the morning of May 14, 2011, he was still
regarded as the smartest man in the world, the chess master who always sees
fifteen moves in advance of his opponents…Then he slips in a puddle of sperm
just two steps away from the Élysée! Even admitting that the hotel housekeeper was
consenting, he had to be nearly as stupid as George Bush Jr., to let himself go
like that, when there is such paucity of a sense of political strategy. Essentially, DSK showed himself that day to
be “as cunt as a dick.” I very much like this typical french slang phrase,
a bit vulgar certainly, but which shows respect for the parity of the genitals.
DSK is so literally influenced by
catastrophe that his libido itself is cataclysmic. In contrast, he responds superlatively in
real earthquake situations: he did wonders after the catastrophic earthquake in
Haiti, releasing hundreds of millions of dollars in just a few hours; even if,
alas, the usual Third World corruption swallowed up all that money. Again, an abyss devouring its own emptiness…
You show him to be a man absent from himself. In the Sofitel hotel room, he asks Nafissatou
Diallo: “Do you know who I am?”
Yes, which is
logical since what he constantly flees from, into luxure, is first of all
himself. When he declaims: “Do you know
who I am?” to the hotel housekeeper, no doubt he means: “Don’t be afraid. I am
a powerful man; you won’t lose your job.”
Now, extraordinarily, this is a sentence spoken by King Lear, who also
loses everything through a sentimental blindness, and who asks the question: “Who
is it that can tell me who I am?”[3]
In your novel, we meet Bobby Fischer, the pathologically
anti-Semitic chess champion. Can the media hysteria surrounding the DSK Affair
be explained by a revival of a fantasy about the Jews?
I do not think
so, even if all anti-Semites saw in it the confirmation of their most rot-infested
convictions. These certified imbeciles
would see the machinations of Jews in the eruption of a volcano in Iceland. In reality, the global fascination with DSK’s
personal disaster is explained by the fact that he is the embodiment of our
time, mixing Sex, Politics, Economy, the Media and the most banal human destitution. With regard to Bobby Fischer, it did not
interest me to get inside the confused and paranoid mind of an anti-Semite,
even one who is an admitted neo-Nazi, no matter who it is. Anti-Semites are all, without exception, of a
boring, tedious perfectly sheep-like uniformity. There is nothing much new from Haman to
Ahmadinejad, not to mention the French “anti-Zionists” who believe themselves
to be very subversive while they trot out the same several centuries old
crap. Bobby Fischer’s case is distinctive,
and therefore interesting, for several reasons.
First because he was as absolutely a genius at chess as he was psychotic
in life. After all, besides Voltaire,
Dostoevsky and Céline, there are not that many genius anti-Semites. The other
reason, sad and touching, is that Bobby Fischer was as Jewish as DSK or myself!
Nicolas Sarkozy appears in the novel. For a long time, DSK was presented as an
antidote to ‘Sarkozysm,’ but you seem to think the two men have something in
common.
Yes, starting with
the fact they both are “handled”, that is manipulated, by spokespeople, the
famous spin-doctors, who are nothing but mythomaniacs:
compulsive-liars-for-hire. Today this is
required for any politician whatsoever.
When a politician answer “yes” to a reporter, there is a spin-doctor
behind him who tells him how to put together the letters Y-E-S. Whatever one may think of de Gaulle — and God
knows I have little sympathy for him! — he
was a crafty man still nourished by classical rhetoric. And besides, de Gaulle had one undeniable
quality: he had contempt for money. We
cannot say as much for Sarkozy or DSK.
They are not men inhabited by the Word; they are puppets of Number. Their language is the moronic gurgles and
belches of Financial Markets: “AAA, BBB, CCC”…Hence it is most logical that
Sarkozy, who expresses himself like a crude street peddler, once declared the
French AAA rating a “national treasure” and classic novel La princesse de Clèves devoid of all interest!
And yet, DSK, this man sensitive to seismic activity
is among those who did not see the financial earthquake coming…
Yes, for, to put
it bluntly, it is an Abyss which has become the other face of the world. DSK is merely a straw man of
neo-liberalism. He is not in the least the
bogglingly brilliant economist that the spin-doctors complacently describe him to
be. He has never produced anything; we
are still waiting for his Nobel Prize that he vainly predicted for himself in
his twenties to his school friends. He
is merely a classical Keynesian-Schumpeterian; any first year Economics
professor knows as much as he does. Basically,
he is a phony for whom, in the proper sense of the verb, words count for
nothing. He is not inhabited by the Word
— which is the contrary to Nafissatou Diallo.
From this point of view, spiritually, he is not much of a Jew. One has to choose between studying the Torah
and getting it on with prostitutes all the time! His last speeches as head of the I.M.F are
ridiculous stupidities. He spent his
time saying that everything is getting better, that the global governance will
take care of everything, that he is optimistic about Greece, etc. This is not even cynicism; he just doesn’t
give a shit. His desire is elsewhere, in
his passion for chess or in his texting: “I
am bringing a petite[4]
to tour the Vienna clubs.”
“An Abyss which has become the other face of the
world.” What do you mean by this?
This is the main
theme of Chaos brûlant: Finance is
not a corrupt part of modern society: it
is the whole society. It represents
the insane and dehumanized other-side of the world, which today has taken
possession of the entire planet. Its
reign is one of devastation, the reason for which I evoke a “catastrocracy” in Chaos brûlant. This catastrocracy, which combines Economy,
Propaganda, Crime and Technique, was not born yesterday. It clawed its way into the 20th century
with the great mass murders, already connected to the 1929 Crash (without which
Hitler undoubtedly would never have seized power), computer-aided mass murder,
as is revealed by IBM having its first machines in the Nazi extermination
camps. I tell about all this in Chaos brûlant, which concludes with the
humorous episode in which “Watson,” the latest IBM super-computer tyrannically
seizes power at an I.M.F. cocktail party.
Now, this “Watson” super-computer was recently acquired for a small
fortune by—I’ll give you one guess—Citigroup, the largest financial institution
in the world. Which is as much as to say
that the Greeks, and ourselves along with them, have not seen the last of their
trouble from it. Goldman Sachs’ lackeys will
make them pay by hammering them with non-referendums guised in a fabrication of
“democracy”. In this way do the
demagogic rationales of politicians serve only to mask a domination more
tyrannical than all the human despotisms ever to have arisen thus far. Humanity today is completely under the control
of this nihilism unleashed by Finance.
There always has been a close relationship between domination and
devastation. There is little doubt about this after the Nazis, Stalinism and
Maoism, but neither Hitler nor Stalin had the means to melt the Ice Shelf and materially
put the Earth in peril. Since Marx we
have known that the capitalist empire is coming to its end. What we did not know is that it would take
the planet down with it in its own shipwreck, and especially that this empire
coming to its end would be not so much America as it is that gigantic open air
prison, whose polluter-guards are seated on a colossal heap of dollars, known
as China.
Lastly, what do you think about DSK? In your novel there is a feeling of both pity
and hostility…
He does not
interest me as human being, unlike Bobby Fischer, for example, who could administer a good beating in chess in less
time than is needed for a premature ejaculator to ruin his reputation… For me, DSK is a
collection of sentences, of situations, of reflections. He is only the logo of neoliberalism. That he is also a public figure, there is nothing
I can do about that. I did not stick my nose into his private
life. It is he who invited himself into
mine with his grotesque ejaculation in front of the world. In any event, I do not feel any hostility
toward him. He is from now on one of my
characters, hence my creature. As for
the real DSK: may his sperm rest in peace.
Interview by David Caviglioli.
Translated by Robert G. Margolis
[1] Stéphane Zagdanski puns here on échecs
and échec, the French words for,
respectively, chess and failure (translator’s note).
[2] L’Enculé includes the
word cul, ass; trou du cul is French for asshole (translator’s note).
[3] To which the Fool replies: “Lear’s shadow.” (translator’s note).
[4] Used here as a demeaning word for a young woman (translator’s note).
