Albert Camus (I) (5/5) : Littérature

This Friday, a week on Albert Camus and with him especially in the new paths of knowledge. On Sunday afternoon, Camus and his friends Fouché, Maison Sol, Bénistis, Louis Miquel, went to drink their wine in the dancing of Babel Oued, the Bal Matarese and the Bains Padovani, where Camus would soon be the director for the first time in his life. They tracked down the Spaniards who worked in the tobacco factories and held them in their arms, as Fouché says, with the feeling of holding the great proletarian goddess of the Mediterranean. It was the end of high school, it was the beginning of women, and Camus was also discovering, with the pleasure of the body, the imperial desire to write. His philosophy teacher, Jean Grenier, was then developing in his dazzling eyes the dazzling idea of ​​a happiness without hope, and made him read Lao Tzu and the Hindus, but also Christophe and Kierkegaard, Spinoza, Descartes and Plato. We needed more subtle masters, wrote Camus, and that a man, for example, born on other shores, also in love with the light and splendor of the bodies, came to tell us, in an inimitable language, that these appearances were beautiful, but that they had to perish, and that they had to be loved desperately. One day, worried about his absence, Grenier found out that Camus was sick. He jumped in a taxi and went without warning to the other side of Algiers, in Bellecour, in the apartment of his best student, Camus did not like to be seen in such a state, and it was by almost hostile monosyllables that he answered that day, from the tip of his lips, to the worrying questions of his teacher. I now invite you to listen to Camus and Jean Grenier at the microphone of Pierre Cyprien, in the theme and controversial show of March 15, 1956. I would like Albert Camus, who was a student of Jean Grenier in the philosophy class, to make some memories for us. I met Grenier 25 years ago, so I was 17, and he was my philosophy teacher. I have the impression that Grenier played a role, that is to say that he tried to be a completely school teacher. He was very bad at it, I must say, and that's why I was immediately passionate and, in short, directly influenced by his courses and his way of teaching. And afterwards, how did you see this work develop? This work came to me rather than I came to her, and I read, in short, the book of my teacher. This book was called Les Îles. Les Îles played for me, and for a number of young people I know, the role played by another book, Les Nourritures Terrestres, for other young people of the same generation. Les Nourritures Terrestres did not play the same role for me, as a young barbarian living in North Africa, I did not really need to be taught to enjoy life directly, but I needed to be taught to feel first, and, if possible, to think afterwards. And the book of Grenier, Les Îles, discovered for me a kind of universe of intelligence and sensitivity that touched me directly, I must say, first by means of art, as is natural for a very young man. I found, and I still find, because it is a book that I have not stopped reading for 25 years, that since Chateaubriand and Barrès, French had not been written that way. I mean that, in this language that is a little dry and cold, and a little angular, Grenier was able to give a kind of softness, flexibility, a kind of music, in short, that personally transported me. And I must say that, from this point of view, this book is at the origin of my own concerns and of my ambitions as a writer. My general conception is not humanistic, because humanism, as we usually hear it, corresponds to a conception, it seems to me, very narrow, very limited, of man and of humans. And precisely what interested me a lot in the thoughts of the Far East, which I am scandalized to see so neglected even now, because they still represent such an important part of humanity, well, I was shocked to see that in his thoughts, there was something... If there is a humanism, it is in any case very different from ours. Usually, when we attach ourselves to this notion of man, we always end up considering a privileged type, the wise for ancient philosophy, the saint for all Christianity. You avoid this classification by type? I avoid this classification by type, besides, quite simply, because I can not do otherwise, quite simply. To tell the truth, if I wrote, it is because I felt pushed to write, but I did not often have an extremely preconceived idea of what I would say. It seems to me that I have always considered man and human in relation to two poles, it is the animal and, let's say, the supernatural, the divine. However, these are the two things that interested me the most. What interested me was precisely what there was in man, this part that there was in man of animal and divine. Don't you think, Alvier Camus, that we are here in front of a study of man that is different from traditional philosophy? I think of Cartesianism, for example, when Descartes sought to define man, he defined man as a thought, as a pure thought, a thought that could multiply to infinity and create a kind of unanimity between the different ages that spoke the same language. Yes, I think that, except error, it is difficult to say that Grenier is a humanist. It seems to me that we would not betray him too much, but he will tell us what he thinks. If we said that for him, man is much more and much less than man, and that he has the constant concern to find his double roots, if I dare say so, his natural roots and his celestial roots, and that he is, in short, on the human realm, trying to fill all the holes and make sure that man is not this isolated thing between nature and what we can call God. Can we say that Jean Grenier is a philosopher? Because philosophy, of course, in Sanskrit, is precisely this effort to limit ourselves, to define ourselves as closely as possible, to find the path that leads us to ourselves. Naturally, the professors of philosophy will not find that he is a philosopher, but the professors of philosophy have never found that those who were not professors were not philosophers, despite Plato, despite Descartes, despite Spinoza, despite all the great names of philosophy. That said, for me, Grenier, in addition to being an artist, and because he is a great artist, represents precisely the type of philosopher, I mean, the one who asks what Stoff called the last questions. And since you spoke of celestial roots, or rather I think it was Albert Camus who spoke of celestial roots earlier, of celestial origins, it is certain that it is something that has always concerned me, as I believe a lot of men, from my point of view, it is the fact that man is a little foreign to the world in which he is yet destined to live, that there is a certain discomfort, which sometimes goes very far, the problem of death, and so on, and that in the end, monastic life can seem, for example, like an ideal of perfection and happiness. Yes, your writing, which may seem placid, in fact constantly hides traps, and you represent the condition of man as a condition that is constantly threatened. But how do you combine this philosophy of risk with the philosophy of courage, which is basically the last word of your moral? I don't know if I have a philosophy of courage, because I try, on the contrary, to avoid risk, and I would like... I feel it on all sides, particularly that of illness, old age, death. You have always insisted, however, on the need for a choice, a choice that at first may be arbitrary, but which is imposed on the basis of a high idea that we have, not of ourselves, but of the human destiny, which forces us to align ourselves on an order of values. This is precisely what I call courage, well, abusively, but I think it is also courage, intellectual courage. Yes, I think the choice is necessary, but I don't know if it is possible. In any case, it is very difficult to do, and I admire those who really do it, those who really take their risk, those who are not afraid to stay, as we are almost all on horseback, between two sails. Yes, I think it is very good to do it, that it is very good to bet on what is the whole. You have constantly come back in your books on the sensitivity of the 20th century, defining it as a sensitivity of indifference in relation to this sensitivity of indifference that you have analysed. Are you within indifference or outside indifference? I would like to be in indifference. Unfortunately, I am not. I would like to be there, and that is precisely why what has appeared to me as a disaspect, let's say, of the divine, is precisely this possibility of indifference, possibility of indifference, which I believe is unfortunately rejected by man, which is forced to find something in contrast. It is fidelity, for example, it is courage, things like that. But it seems that constantly, beyond your metaphysics, there are always local, precise, singular problems that take us back, that take back man in your thought. You are constantly forced to return to morality, to return to social life. Is it a dialectical need, a need for temperament, or is it simply a need to live? Yes, there are two things in what you say. I simply believe that, on the one hand, I can only speak of something when I have felt it, when I have experienced it, when I have touched it, so to speak, when I have a point of contact. Therefore, for me, it has to be a problem of sensitivity before it is an intellectual problem. I try to enlighten these things, to transform them into something other than contacts, and that is all I have tried to do. Now, you speak of social issues, etc. I am very uncomfortable with these issues, with this kind of enslavement of the individual in society, but I have nothing for it, and now nothing against it. Insofar as you would have to take part in the various definitions of man, I think there are two, basically. One defines man by his interiority, the other defines him by the relations that bind him to a social or biological environment. On which side would you be? Well, I would say that I leave to many others the care of being on their side. Because there are so many of them in our time, and I approve of many of them, that I don't see why I wouldn't put myself in their shoes. So we understand that, basically, all this analysis of indifference that you have taken up so often, and which, by the way, comes back in this book on humans, has a kind of critical value in you. It is a way of cleaning, to clean the world in front of man, and to open everything to his intelligence. What do you think, Albert Camus? I simply believe that, on the precise question you asked in Grenier, he doesn't want to come to the rescue of victory. It is the property of distinguished minds. And, indeed, today, the economic and even biological explanation is a bit of a pie in the sky. If a philosopher must have a role, it is to try to disturb the common places. Obviously, we must each obey our vocation. I don't have to talk about things for which I don't feel fulfilled. And at the same time, you are convinced that each of us, at the beginning, offers a kind of plastic ground, and that it is up to each of us to define one's own nature, through one's action, so that this moment of choice that you leave to each of us is, for you, capital. Yes, that's quite right, that's quite true. Wouldn't that bring you closer to an existentialist attitude, for example? Isn't there some nuance to be added to the definition of this order? Yes. What bothers me in existentialism is precisely the way in which existentialism deals with the problem of truth. Of course, I think that if I had to talk about this today, if only to myself, I would not always repeat what I have been able to write. I believe that there is a truth. I don't always know what it is, but I believe in the truth. Consequently, just that, when you believe in the truth, it separates you a lot from existentialism. But by the very fact that you seem to deny that there is the possibility of a sort of community of thinkers in our time. Everyone works a little in their own corner and speaks a language for themselves, with their audience, but without the desirable circuit that could precisely establish this community of truth. Because the truth, basically, needs to be shared. And not simply by those who read their favorite authors. I don't know if it needs to be shared. It needs to be lived, too. Yes, it needs to be lived, but finally shared. And not shared in large numbers, I'm not sure about that. Because we still need to be worthy of it. We are not all worthy of knowing the truth, or even of seeking it. And from that point of view, I think that we need to wish happiness for others, but we also need to wish the truth. That's another question. After embodying Malraux's time of contempt with his colleagues at the Theatre du Travail, Camus wrote a funny text, a bit premonitory, called Revolte dans les Asturies, which tells the story of a miners' uprising in Spain, their proclamation of a workers' and peasants' republic, and their surrender to the Spanish government's counterattack. The play, which, however, didn't deserve it, was banned by the mayor of Algiers, and Camus protested alone in the desert during the Easter holidays, when all his friends had gone back to Oran. But Camus had met a 21-year-old young man from Mont-Charlot, a future publisher, who managed to produce 500 copies of Revolte dans les Asturies for a total price of 500 francs, and sold the entire book in two weeks. It was Charlot, later on, who became the publisher of Camus' first real book, called L'Envers et l'Endroit. I now invite you to listen to Edmond Charlot, as well as his friend Emmanuel Robles, talk about Camus, and finally Camus himself, talking about the summer, the time when he declines his favourite words into new, luminous ones, the world, the pain, the earth, the sea, the men, the desert, honour and misery, and who was put under pressure the day after his 40th birthday. I already knew Camus, I had already seen Camus, I knew him, to have met him at the faculty, and I met him at Jean Grenier's, probably in the summer of 1933. I had been chatting with Jean Grenier in the afternoon, and at that moment, he introduced me to Camus, and he said to Camus, you should give a text to Charlot, he wants to publish it. That's how I got this first text. Actually, I got two at the same time. I got Révolte dans les Asturies, which was a collective theatre essay, and I got L'Envers et l'Endroit a few months later. While I had to print L'Envers et l'Endroit much later, I printed Révolte et les Asturies immediately, to have immediate texts, like that, right away. We put it up for sale, I still remember, it was sold for 5 francs, there was a sale forbidden by the municipality, and it cost us a lot of fabric, we missed being seized. Finally, it was sold, Tom Diakmal, it took 5-6 months to sell, we had printed 500 copies, and, my God, it's something we couldn't think of, we couldn't think of right away. It's well known that many of Camus' books are based on his youth in Algeria, which you lived together. But, Emmanuel Robles, do you think that the autobiography is so important in Camus' work? I think you don't know enough about it. I owe it to my friend Charles Poncet, who told me that Meursault is the combination, if you will, of sea and sun. With sea and sun, there were the two symbols of Camus' collection, and first, we find in Algiers Républicain this pseudonym, Jean Meursault, to sign a political article at the end of 1939. It was already the war. And then we find the word transformed into Meursault in the foreign language, which was written in those years. As for the character of Meursault, I am convinced that there are biographical features. There are, of course, all the pleasures that Camus took when he went, for example, to swim in the port. The whole story of the swimming in the port of Algiers, then the walks in Algiers-Ville, all this is recreated according to precise memories. And even in Meursault's psychology, it must be considered that this piece is nourished by Camus' thought and life. In the Les Essais collection of the Gallimard library, a new book by Albert Camus is published in the summer. This book is a collection of texts composed from 1939 to 1953. But these texts have a unit. And Albert Camus himself considers that this book can be considered as a sequel to Nosse or at least in the line of Nosse. And I'm going to ask him right now what is the link he finds between all the texts he has brought together in the summer. This link is the one that brings together the texts of Nosse. All the texts of his second Nosse are devoted to nature and in particular to Mediterranean nature. And it's a genre, in short, where I started following Jean Grenier who influenced me, I must say, in the choice of this genre. Before having read Nosse, I knew L'Envers et l'Endroit, this book of yours, very mysterious since all the readers of Albert Camus have heard of L'Envers et l'Endroit but have not had the chance to read it. I think there are only 350 copies. I hope it will be reissued one day. Don't you think, Albert Camus, that L'Envers et l'Endroit is also the precursor of the summer in the same way as Nosse? It is for at least half of its inspiration since L'Envers et l'Endroit contained texts in which some also referred to nature and solar nature and in which others referred to an experience which I could call the experience of poverty and which can be found in another part of my books, on the contrary. In the texts, which date from 1939, I seemed to feel resonances or influences which are then lost in what you wrote, Albert Camus. I wonder, for example, if in the text called Le Minotaure which appears in this collection, in the summer, one does not feel a small echo of Montaerlan. I would like to ask you, what were your readings when you started writing and what were the authors who counted for you? Well, I started in the field of letters by admiration. When I arrived in Paris, I was told that it was appropriate to start, on the contrary, by criticism. But in fact, during my youth, I admired a lot a certain number of writers and for different reasons, like Gide, like Malraux, like Montaerlan, and I would certainly not refuse their influence. I would like to move on to another of the texts of the summer, the one called L'énigme. I find it very important because you explain yourself very frankly with the reader about what we called the absurd, and you try to take away this label, the absurd label, which, unfortunately, as you say, stuck to the name of Albert Camus. Well, naturally, after twenty years of practice in a profession, it often happens, especially in literature, that you feel a little crushed under the weight not only of what you have written, but of the interpretation of what you have written. So, naturally, I tried to debate myself. Hence L'énigme, where, indeed, I try to explain that in short, And finally, I would like to say a word about La Mer up close, which is the last text of the summer and which is the most lyrical. In this text, La Mer, I tried to put certain tendencies, certain tastes, certain exaltations that I feel, and that I have rarely had the opportunity to express for some time, given that, due to external circumstances, which would be too long to define, I was a little trapped in my profession or my reputation as a moralist writer. However, the weight of morality is like the weight of virtue, it is quite exasperating. And poetry, if we want to call it that, allowed me a kind of deliverance that I feel the need for. Camus' universe is silent, but the girls who meet him resist war to the young man's speech and his grey and green eyes. One day, the young Don Juan met Simone Nillet, a sublime, free, morphinoman and cynical girl, one year his cadet, a liar with mauve eyelids and smoking a cigarette, whose beautiful oval face, long legs and straight nose made him mad and suffocating, among whom Max-Paul Fouché, Camus' friend, who met her when she was 16 and to whom she was engaged despite the fierce opposition of her stepfather. But Max-Paul had just founded the Federation of Socialist Youths of Algeria and had to travel a lot to help the constitution of sections in other cities, leaving Camus' field free, who himself announced to his unfortunate friend that Simone had chosen him and that she would no longer come. When we are Camus, we do not sleep with the wives of his friends, but we get angry with his friends before putting them in bed. I now invite you to listen to Max-Paul Fouché, par-encunier, to return to Camus' literary tastes and the first readings he made in common, as well as Jean Negroni, the actor-director who urged Camus to become a man of theatre. Max-Paul Fouché, do you know what Camus' literary tastes were at the time? Ah, I know them because we were not rich, one and the other, we lent ourselves our books. Our books were first the magazines. It started with the magazines. Camus was extremely fond of reading the New French Magazine. Above all, what he read at the time was Nietzsche, Dostoevsky and Gide, for very different and very similar reasons. Nietzsche, he saw him in his true light, not as the easy apostle of a will of power that would be inhuman, but he saw in him, I remember, the poet. And at that time, we recited by heart some passages by Zaratustra, which I would be able to do today. In any case, we were as excited by Nietzsche's thought as by his formulation, My soul is a flowing fountain, by Zaratustra. This sentence delighted us and really put us in a trance. It seemed to us that if we had to write, it would be like Nietzsche. Dostoevsky, I think, Camus' cult for Dostoevsky, the cult he had for Dostoevsky at the time, did not change throughout his life. I would learn nothing from anyone by saying that he even transcribed for the theater. In Dostoevsky, he found this torment of soul that at that time, romantic as it was, this torment of soul seduced him. He liked to play the Russian, to have the Russian soul, according to Dostoevsky. I know that by saying this, I will surprise many of those who did not really know Camus in private at that time. I will surprise those who read it today. But there was a Camus who was ready to commit the crime. I'm exaggerating, but it's because I take Dostoevsky's famous title as an example. To commit the crime, at least, to know the punishment. It was this Camus, both Russian and Christian, who always surprised me at that time. And if we were not in front of a microphone, I would tell the facts of his private life that would absolutely prove this desire to commit the crime to perhaps know the ransom, in any case, certainly know the punishment. This is a Camus that we do not think of, I think. Gide, the third character, well, because Gide was first a master of style. And then because our generation was marked by Gide. The Gide of the family Jebouet, the Gide of the immoralist, the Gide who delivered us, by his reading, of this suffocating environment of small bourgeois Algiers. Jean Legreny, we know that one of the main concerns of the Camus of 20 years was theater. We will come back to it later. But tell us already, what were, in terms of theater, his favorite authors? I know that he particularly liked Echilles, that he liked Shakespeare a lot, that he loved a lot Claudel. But I also know that he had a very particular taste for the Russians. You know that he had a deep taste for the Russian novel. Dostoyevsky, by the way, proved it. And that he already wanted to adapt, if not possess them, at least, I think, Crime and Chastisement. He loved Pirandello. He took pieces out of it. In particular, the pieces of Pirandello that had as object the creation, the problem of the creation of the author and his characters. It was something that he particularly tried. He loved Pirandello, he loved Strindberg, he loved the Spaniards. He loved the Spaniards. He had a passion for the Golden Age. And he thought that it was a lost treasure that was not played enough, that it had to be brought back. And in addition, at the time, it must be said that he was looking for a Mediterranean expression of theater. And of course, he found it more easily through the Spaniards of the Golden Age. Camus's friends spoke well of him. But he himself spoke well of his friends, among whom Henri Calais, a singular, confidential and talented writer that Camus had met in combat and who was the author of about fifteen books before his death in 1956. I now invite you to hear Camus speak of Henri Calais on February 7, 1957, in the context of Masque et la Plume, the show then produced by François-Régis Bastide and Michel Pollack. Henri Calais was singular in many ways in our literary society. He knew how to write first. Then he never, I mean never, betrayed freedom. Finally, he hated no one. In him, heart and talent were alike. Adding to each other, he wrote on modern themes a work of classical resonance. He indeed put in the service of the humble a modesty of style, of shortcuts, of litotes, finally, which had traditionally served, in our literature, to express the feelings of the greats of this world. As Mrs. de Cleves discovered that Mr. de Nemours did not hate her, Calais made us aware that wars, bloody Europe and atomic threats gave preoccupations to its neighbors of the 14th arrondissement. By this, his work was new and it was not said enough. The books that, since our naturalists put on stage the poor people are generally quite talkative. Calais has shown that it was useless to talk so much to revive the mute of history. It is to Jules Renard that he sometimes makes us think. But his books are more moving because he was more moved. He loved all his models. Apart from the indispensable virtues of style, a work is judged, finally, by what it adds to the sum of hatred or love that is at work in the world. From this point of view, very few contemporary works, I believe, will be saved. But, among them, Calais' books will certainly not be forgotten. I have known Calais from 1944 to Combat, where Pascal Piat, his longtime friend, died. I was recently told that Calais spoke willingly of what he called the good time of Combat. It is a feeling that I am happy to share with him. We were a handful of men who, for a few years, tried to make a newspaper that did not lie. The masters of thought and the professors of efficiency, who were the same in our time, did not fail to make us know that it took a lot of pretension. Well, we still made this bet and we kept it, and we all, with Calais, remained proud of it. Albert Camus is a Spinozist writer. The idol of Sartre was history, but Camus' god is nature. The world is beautiful, he says, and without him, no salvation. In other words, the artist is not here and now to take us elsewhere, but, on the contrary, to give us to live what we have under the hand, under the eyes, the salt of the sea, the drawing of the hills, the blue of a sky all empty and the pain of men. It is not to literature or philosophy to give us reasons to live, but to life itself, to give reasons to suffer, to love and therefore to think. I now propose to hear Camus at the microphone of Jean Maugin on September 13, 1955, specifying the meaning of this artistic vocation which transcends, by communion with the world, its possible role of philosopher, journalist, playwright, writer, actor or director. We no longer know too often, I believe, to confuse in Albert Camus the artist, the moralist and above all, the philosopher. Mr. Albert Camus, I would like to ask you, first of all, what do you think of this confusion of which you are often a victim? Well, it is an inevitable confusion, but if the point of view of an artist on himself is good, I would like to insist on the fact that, personally, I feel and I consider myself first of all as an artist. Of course. Sorry, I don't want to interrupt you, but I think you think that your path as a man and your path as an artist go hand in hand. Yes, it seems to me that I am unable to speak of anything other than what I have experienced. And even, I will go further, there is in me a kind of incapacity, which I do not present with glory, but an incapacity, in any case, to speak of anything other than what I have experienced for a long time. And it often happens to me in my work as an artist to express, but to be able to give a form to feelings or ideas that, deep down, I have been experiencing for a long time without having dared until then to give them this form and this expression. So we can say that in your work the key words, the key words that are in your work and that, above all, we have extracted from your work to put them in exergue, the words absurd and the words revolt are not at all the result of an intellectual determination and, above all, not cerebral, but the result of an experience sentimental, almost affective. We can say that. Obviously, it is the destiny of every artist to be buried under the formula he found. And I do not see why I would personally escape from this destiny. Nevertheless, as long as I can have an opinion on myself, the notions of absurd and revolt that I have spoken of in my work and that have been spoken of in my words are notions that I have experienced. I mean that, deep down, I speak of what everyone knows. And I cannot speak of anything else for the excellent reason that I do not feel an original sensitivity. I feel a sensitivity similar to that of the people around me. I have never felt separated. As far as the absurd is concerned, it is an experience that everyone can have on the tram or in a taxi. It is a feeling of separation and strangeness that I tried to analyze. Naturally, a feeling cannot cover everything. One cannot explain everything by this feeling. And I have always criticized these impressions that were mine, so much so that I was led to criticize the notion of absurd although it was a notion deep within me, as I was led to criticize the notion of revolt although it was also a notion deep within me. In short, I could say that I walk the same path as an artist and as a man and that this can explain what has been called my evolutions. In fact, it is not my work that evolves, it is my life. We are not here, Mr. Camus, of course, to do philosophy, but I believe that before leaving this field of the absurd and the revolt in words, it would be necessary that you give us your formula. Some of your commentators have said that for you, the absurd was a kind of relationship, that it was the relationship of the world as it is, as it appears to us, of the irrational world and of the human consciousness, that the absurd was what resulted from the confrontation, I believe that you say somewhere the confrontation of this irrational world and of the human consciousness. Does it seem to you valid as a definition? It seems to me all the more valid that I am not the inventor and in short, since Pascal, it is a theme that has been widely exploited. And for the revolt, the word revolt obviously implies at first glance in the mind of anyone a feeling, not of pride, but of complete insurrection. However, I believe that it is through your infinitely nuanced work that if we looked in your work to take up the various definitions you give of the revolt, we would have a spectrum, as they say in the physical sciences. We would indeed have a spectrum and for the excellent reason that the revolt, like all movements of the mind or of the human heart, is both the worst and the best of things and it is quite natural that a writer who is interested in the passions of man as much as in his intelligence tries to give to these passions the greatest efficiency, the greatest utility possible on the level of the simplest life as on the level of social life. And I tried to draw from the revolt the elements of an attitude that is not an attitude of pure destruction, of pure nihilism, which explains itself quite well if we consider that I am not interested in contemporary nihilism by aesthetic or personal taste, I am interested in it to the extent that it is possible to go beyond it. I think that is perfectly clear. I would like to ask you again, since you said very well that the feeling of absurdity does not separate you at all from other men, but that on the contrary you consider it as one of the essential data to the conscience of every man, why, however, would today's man be more sensitive to the absurd? I mean, it seems to me that we do not find in classical literature, for example, great marks of this feeling. Why is today's man more sensitive to absurdity than the man of the 17th century, for example? Naturally, he is more sensitive because he has lost both his roots and his framework. It is quite certain that Europe has lost both its religions and its social faith, at least as far as the West is concerned, and also its moral roots. Naturally, man feels more lonely, more exposed, in a way, and there is nothing surprising to the fact that a feeling of profound disarray settles in the very heart of his being. In short, I will make what I want to say clear by recalling what I said in one of my books, that Europe, which in 50 years has killed, uprooted or deported 70 million human beings, is obviously not a land where comfort and self-satisfaction can settle in, at least for the moment. And it is quite clear that today's European man hesitates and turns on all sides, seeing no choice but between servitude and madness. But I think, for my part, that there is a path between servitude and madness that the intellectuals, in particular, have to find at least. I think that one of the things that will later distinguish you from today's writers is style. I think that for you style is absolutely inseparable from any work, contrary to the concept that is too often accepted today. Yes, I know that the fashion today is to consider that writing badly is a condition for thinking well. It is a principle that is not mine, I say it without hesitation, and I find that before doing the trial of style, it is necessary that the writers do their test, then they can do it. In any case, for me, since you asked for my opinion, I will say it categorically, apart from style and composition, there are, for me, only secondary writers, polygraphs, who can be useful in their profession, in their research, but who, as artists, remain in the background. I think that this is a statement when it is important because we use your name as does the name of some of your great contemporaries, to authorize the publication of a whole series of works that we call, too easily, Testimonials. One last question, Mr. Camus, and it is that of Camus, Man of Virtue. When reading your books, we want you to be, in the panorama of contemporary literature, the Man of Virtue. Well, it proves that we read books in question badly, because it would be easy to find in them, on the contrary, the confession of a... I would not say of a weakness, why not call it a weakness, but finally, the confession of an extremely faithful and extremely conscious kinship with what, in all men, is as far away from virtue as possible. If an experience is foreign to me, it is certainly that of the Man of Virtue, and I thank you for giving me the opportunity to say so. To conclude this last session of the archive, and to the attention of those who, without having read it for a long time, may still doubt Camus' exceptional talent, I invite you to listen to the writer himself, to read one of his texts, excerpted from Noss. Listen to it, then you will judge. Millions of gods, I knew it, had contemplated this Florentine landscape, and for me it was like the first smile of heaven. They put me out of myself in the deep sense of the term, they assured me that without my love and this beautiful cry of stone everything was useless. The world is beautiful, and out of it no salvation. The great truth they patiently taught me is that the mind is nothing, nor the heart even, and that the stone heated by the sun or the cypress that the sky discovered has grown, it imitates the only universe where having reason makes sense, nature without man. And this world annihilates me, it carries me to the end, it beckons me in anger. In this evening that fell on the Florentine countryside I walked towards a wisdom where everything was already conquered, if tears had not come to my eyes, and if the great flood of poetry that filled me had not made me forget the truth of the world. It is on this swing that one should stop, singular moment where spirituality repudiates morality, where happiness is born from the absence of hope, where the mind finds its reason in the body. If it is true that all truth carries in it its bitterness, it is also true that all negation contains a flowering of yes, and this field of love without hope that is born from contemplation can also be the most effective of the rules of action. At the exit of the tomb, the resurrected Christ of Piero della Francesca does not have a look of man, nothing happy is painted on his face, but only a fierce and soulless grandeur that I could not help taking for a resolution to live, because the wise, as the idiot expresses little, this return delights me. But this lesson, the mercy of Italy, I will take it out of my heart. It is there, no doubt, that it appeared to me, but it is that Italy, like other privileged places, offers me the spectacle of a beauty where men still die, here again the truth must rot, and what is more exalting? Even if I wish it, what am I to do with a truth that must not rot? It is not up to me, and loving it would be a false pretence. It is rarely understood that it is never out of despair that a man abandons what made his life. Headbutts and despair lead to other lives and mark only a shuddering attachment to the sound of the earth. But it can happen that, to a certain degree of lucidity, a man feels his heart closed, and without revolt or claim turns his back on what he took so far for his life, I mean, without agitation. If Rimbaud ends up in the abyss without having written a single line, it is not because of the taste of adventure or the renunciation of the writer. It is because it is like that, and that at a certain point of consciousness we end up admitting what we all strive to not understand according to our vocation. We feel that it is here to undertake the geography of a certain desert, but this desert, singular and sensitive, that those able to live there feel their thirst never wrong, it is then and only that they are populated with the ovives of happiness. This is already the end of this week of tribute to thought, that is, to the voice of Albert Camus. A week of tribute, that is, a week of love. Camus is THE philosopher of love and it is in love with his thought, his contradictions, his own genius and his exceptional talent that we have conceived this week, whose only goal, the only reason to be, is to invite you to dive into the work of Camus, as Camus himself had dived into the Mediterranean ocean. A big thank you at the end of this week to Marie-France Thivaud, of course, who had made the great crossing of Albert Camus' thought in 2006, and to Bertrand Chomton, who, assisted by Julien Doumain and, in particular, to Marc Voinchet, who, in 2006, while working at the direction of France Culture, temporarily leaving the microphone, had literally ordered me to build this great crossing, which I ignored to say everything before undertaking it, that it would change my life by bringing in Camus' thought. I do not wish you any less. A week that is only the first, since the new paths of knowledge will end the school year in July with a new evocation of Albert Camus' texts by broadcasting the interviews that will be recorded at the BNF from January to June. I give you an appointment for the first of them, on Thursday, January 14th, at 6.30 p.m., in the Grand Auditorium of the National Library, which is François Mitterrand. I also give you, of course, like every day, an appointment on the Internet at the page of the new paths of knowledge where you will find downloads and bibliographies, and I give you, like every day, the floor to Adèle Vanneret for the Journal des Nouveaux Chemins. Hello Adèle. Hello Raphaël. Hello everyone. So ends this week dedicated to Camus, and so ends this week on Freud in the Journal des Nouveaux Chemins, while Freud's news is only starting in the library. All this week we have been talking about Freud, his texts, his writing, at the opening of his works in the public domain since January 1st. All the publishing houses are involved, and each one offers its own version, or even its own translation of Freudian texts. But how can a single original text lead to so many versions? This is the question we are going to ask ourselves today with Pierre Côté, to whom we owe in part the existence of a masterful editorial adventure at the PUF. Hello Pierre Côté. You are the director of the publication of what is called the OCFP, so the Complete Work of Freud-Psychoanalysis, whose first volume was published at the PUF in 1988 under the scientific direction of Jean Laplanche. So Pierre Côté, what is, in your opinion, the specificity of this translation company, which may seem out of measure since it is about publishing the entirety of Freudian texts compared to other translations? Listen, when our company found five specificities, I noticed that it kept them, and this observation comforts me. So what are these five specificities? The first specificity is a collective work, the result of the teamwork of each psychoanalyst or psychiatrist and Germanist, a revision institute, does the synthesis and ensures the harmonization. It has been doing so for 26 years, as you just mentioned, since 1984, when it was put in place what our president, Michel Prigent, calls the piloting structure. The image would be that of a ship rather than an airplane. The mast sometimes trembles a little, but the boat holds the sea. For several years, and probably until the end, four teams have been working and have resisted all storms. The second specificity is our independence, you could almost say institutional. We strive to free Freud from all ideological sedimentation, not to scientify him, not to lacanize him, not to psychiatrize him, not even to planchize him. Our terminological options do not necessarily align with that of the famous Does this mean that in your translation business, you try to be neutral and as faithful to the text as possible? No, we do not take any side. This is our third specificity. We try to leave our reader as free as possible. Freud's construction, his punctuation, sometimes leads to ambiguities, we maintain them. Where there are enigmas, we do not offer a key. The text, just the text, is one of our slogans. The fourth specificity is the refusal of ethnocentrism, which we essentially support. We want to respect Freud's cultural identity, his strangeness, his foreign being. We know, by the way, that we have just feared any romanticization of his work and were wary of the Latin genius. We submit him to the challenge of the foreign, according to the expression of Antoine Verman, whose introduction is our motto. I have repeated it very often. I repeat it once again. I call, says Verman, a bad translation, one that, generally under the guise of transmissibility, operates a systematic denial of the strangeness of foreign work. This conception still is a figure of novelty, which it is absolutely not. It is claimed in German by August Wilhelm Schlegel or Hölderlin, Wilhelm von Humboldt or Goethe, and in France by Théophile Gauthier, judging by the French translation But when you say that you try to preserve the strangeness of Freud, do you mean that you try not to Frenchise Freud and to preserve a Germanic Freud? But Freud's Germanity seems obvious to me. And Théophile Gauthier, for example, I will just quote one or two very brief sentences. A translator would be wrong to say that he has cut out, transposed or modified all passages that do not relate to the French taste. If we translate it, it is to enrich the language of thought, of sentences and of twists that are not there. I prefer, says Théophile Gauthier, a Germanism of style than an inaccuracy. And we may not go as far as he does. Chateaubriand, I will be very brief, says about his translation of Milton, I traced the poem to the glass. I am not afraid to change the regime of the verbs when remaining more French. I would have lost to the original something of its precision, of its originality or of its energy. So perhaps by more unanimity we are not going as far as he does. We are not going beyond the precept of the board, precisely, yes to Freudian French, no to Germanic French. But, and here I hold a lot to what I am going to say now, the stranger in Freud's is not only the stranger of the German language, it is also and above all the stranger of his discovery. Freud's language is the vector of his discovery, the unconscious, the sexuality, a radical strangeness that transcends the empirical difference between French and German. I mentioned earlier a quote from Professor Gessmann, recalling that the German language had for Freud something strange, since it had been raised in a milieu where it was spoken as a mixture of Polish, and Ukrainian. Yes, we spoke about this with Jeanine Altounian last Wednesday. Thank you Pierre Côté. Unfortunately, this is already the end of our interview. I remind you that the entire text of Freudian will be translated and will be published in the next few weeks. Other editorial news. We are currently discovering a history of Islam by Sabrina Mervin at Flammarion in the Chant Histoire collection. The author is a specialist in contemporary Shi'ism, and in this book, she tries to explain the divergences that gradually formed within the same Islamic community. Sabrina Mervin highlights the common ground on which the successive doctrinal evolutions clashed, and the great merit of this book is to place the current of contemporary Islam in their history, at the heart of the tensions between reformism and tradition. I therefore recommend you to read this history of Islam, Foundations and Doctrines, by Sabrina Mervin, which can be found at Flammarion in the Chant Histoire collection. Camus, Freud and the History of Islam was the program of Nouveaux Chemins. You can find all the information about our guests, their books and other sources of reflection on the topics discussed on the website of Nouveaux Chemins de la Connaissance. Thank you to Jacques Vincent who was the technician today, and thank you to Bertrand Chompton and Christine Robert who made this program. It is 10h59, you are on France Culture, and in a moment, Question of the Era.