A Long Saturday: Conversations 9780226350417

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A Long Saturday

A Long Saturday Conversations

George Steiner with Laure Adler Translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2017 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 East 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2017 Printed in the United States of America 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-35038-7 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-35041-7 (e-book) DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226350417.001.0001 Originally published as Un long samedi: Entretiens. © Flammarion, Paris, 2014. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Steiner, George, 1929– interviewee. | Adler, Laure, interviewer. Title: A long Saturday : conversations / George Steiner with Laure Adler ; translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan. Other titles: Long samedi. English Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2017. Identifiers: LCCN 2016027826 | ISBN 9780226350387 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226350417 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Steiner, George, 1929—Interviews. | Philologists—Interviews. Classification: LCC P85.S74 A3 2017 | DDC 410.92—dc 23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016027826 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Translator’s Note vii Interviewer’s Note ix

An Unsentimental Education: From Exile to the Institute 1 To Be a Guest on Earth: Reflections on Judaism 15 “Every Language Opens a Window onto a New World” 37 “God Is Kafka’s Uncle”: From the Book to Books 60 The Humanities Can Make Us Inhuman: The Twentieth Century Has Morally Weakened Humanity 74 Epilogue: Learning How to Die 105

translator’s note

The reader will discover a large number of quotations from various individuals in the course of George Steiner’s conversation with Laure Adler. When possible, I have checked and provided references for the quotations. But there are many that couldn’t be found verbatim, so the sources and editions are not always cited. As in any conversation between two people, exact quotations can be rare. Teresa Lavender Fagan February 2016

IntervIewer’s note

The first time I saw George Steiner was at an event ten or so years ago. At that time, when European elections were approaching, it was still possible to invite intellectuals from central Europe to speak, and people actually listened to them. The room was packed, and at the end of the session the audience was invited to ask questions. Steiner’s talk on the rise of populism had been powerful, on both a historical and a philosophical level. A man asked a convoluted question, more to showcase his knowledge than to seek an answer. Steiner didn’t go easy on him. I thought this great intellectual, some of whose works I had read, was not an easy fellow. I wasn’t wrong. I saw him again a couple years later, at a colloquium at the École Normale Supérieure, to which leading specialists on Antigone had come from all over the world to exchange ideas. Before the opening of the session, Steiner, unlike the other participants, didn’t join in the conversation. He stayed in the background, tense, engrossed in his thoughts. He looked like a nineteenth-century Romantic, preparing for a duel on a cold morning, knowing that his life might be about to end.

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Interviewer’s Note

That moment was typical of Steiner. When he speaks, he’s fully engaged. His always adventurous thinking unfolds as soon as he articulates it. And even though he has an encyclopedic knowledge, expressed in many languages, and is at home in several disciplines, Steiner is always on the hunt for more. He poaches, he dives into the underbrush. He hates the beaten path and prefers to get lost, even if he has to go back the way he came. In short, he seeks to surprise even himself. Such a modus operandi is not easy for someone who has never believed that the piling on of knowledge is the way to give a speech, which is supposed to articulate a theory. This is because in order to think, one must use language. And for decades Steiner has analyzed the traps, the maneuvering, the tricks, the difficulties, the false bottoms of language. An admirer and daily reader of Heidegger, he keeps his thinking within the certainty of our finitude and hooked to his attempt to bring together poetic speech and the origins of language. We could go on and on about the highly scientific aspect of the various intellectual exercises that Steiner has mastered. But that is of little consequence, because he himself makes light of it. With Steiner you never have the feeling that to reach a goal, to elucidate a problem, would bring some consolation. Quite the opposite. The search itself is the essence of life. And the more dangerous the process, the more he revels in it. He is constantly on the lookout. Funny and sarcastic, sometimes unflattering about himself and his contemporaries, serious and exhilarating, Steiner is lucid to the point of despair, and his pessimism is active. He is a son of Kafka, whose work he knows by heart, but he hates Freud and is curiously scornful of psychoanalysis. He is not without paradoxes. He admires the exact sciences but con-

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tinues to spend a great deal of time, like a hobbyist, seeking the infralinguistic zones that govern our relationship to the world. He hates interviews. I knew that. At a time when I was too busy with other obligations that had temporarily halted my work as a journalist, I asked him on behalf of the France Culture radio station to grant an interview with an interlocutor of his choice. He said: “Come over to Cambridge. Come see me.” I asked the president of Radio France permission to cross the Channel with a tape recorder, feeling a bit like a boarding-school kid asking permission to leave the premises because a great-aunt was coming to visit for a few hours. Steiner’s wife, Zara, opened the door. She had baked a cheesecake between writing a couple of pages (she is currently one of the leading scholars in European history, focusing on the advent of totalitarianism). Outside, in the small yard, there were hollyhocks, birds chirping at the top of their lungs, perched on the branches of a cherry tree blossoming in the early spring. George led me to the back of the yard and opened a door to his office, a sort of octagonal cabin built to house as many books as possible. He stopped the Mozart record he was listening to. The conversation could begin. I didn’t know then that I would return so often and that over time he would come to see our meetings almost as a secret, the apprenticeship of what he calls a long Saturday. I will soon return to Cambridge with this book. I hope George will have completed the new project he was working on at the time. It will be an opportunity to continue our conversation. Laure Adler July 2014

An Unsentimental Education From exIle to the InstItute

laure adler There’s something, George Steiner, that your friend Alexis Philonenko mentions in Cahiers de L’Herne: your arm, the deformity, that physical challenge. He talks about it, and suggests it might have been a source of suffering for you all your life. Yet you never talk about it. GeorGe steIner It’s very difficult for me to look at it objectively, of course. The decisive factor in my life was my mother’s genius — she was a great Viennese woman. She spoke several languages: French, Hungarian, Italian, English; she was fiercely proud, but in a completely private way; and she had marvelous self-assurance. I must have been around three or four— I can’t remember

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exactly, but the moment was life altering. The first few years of my life were very difficult because my arm was more or less attached to my body; the treatments were very painful; I went from one hospital to the next to have it corrected. My mother said to me, “You are so lucky! You’ll never have to do your military service!” What she said changed my life. “You are so lucky!” It was amazing that she could say that. And she was right. I was able to go to graduate school two or three years before my peers who had to do their military service. Imagine: being able to say that to her son! I hate today’s therapeutic culture, which uses euphemisms to describe the handicapped: “We’re going to deal with this as a social advantage,” and so on. That’s wrong: it’s very difficult, it’s a serious problem, but it can also be beneficial. I was raised at a time when we weren’t given aspirin or candy. There were shoes with zippers— very easy to put on. “No,” my mother said, “you’re going to learn how to tie your laces.” I can tell you, it was hard. Anyone with two good hands doesn’t even think about it, but it’s an incredible achievement to be able to tie shoe laces. I yelled, I cried, and after six or seven months I managed to tie my shoes. And my mother said, “You can write with your left hand.” I refused. Then she held my other hand behind my back, “You’re going to learn to write with your bad hand— yes, you are.” And she taught me how. I was able to draw pictures and sketch with my left hand. It was a metaphysics of effort. It was a metaphysics of will, discipline, and especially happiness to see all that as a great privilege; and it continued throughout my life. I think it also enabled me to understand certain conditions, certain problems, that must be confronted by those with infirmities, problems that human Apollos, those fortunate to have a magnificent body and marvelous health, find difficult to grasp. What are the connections between physical and mental suffer-

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ing and intellectual effort? We still don’t understand this very well. Let’s never forget that Beethoven was deaf, Nietzsche had terrible migraines, and Socrates was ugly. It’s fascinating to find out what another person has had to overcome. I always ask myself this question when I meet someone: What has that person experienced? What has been his or her victory— or major defeat? l.a. In Errata you tell how your father, who was born in Vienna and understood very quickly that Nazism was on the rise, left Vienna and moved to Paris with his family. And so you were born in Paris, and one day when you were very young, you witnessed a demonstration where people were shouting, “Kill the Jews!” G.s. Yes, that was known as the Stavisky affair. It was an obscure scandal but is remembered because the extreme right in France keeps bringing it up. One of the marchers was a Colonel de La Rocque. Today he seems like a rather sinister clown, but he was taken very seriously at the time. I was quite close to the march, near the Lycée Janson-de-Sailly, and was running home up rue de la Pompe with my nanny because a small group of demonstrators of the extreme Right was approaching, led by Colonel de La Rocque. “Kill the Jews!” A phrase that would become “Better Hitler than Communism.” This was happening in a neighborhood (rue de la Pompe, avenue Paul-Doumer) where there was a large population of Jewish bourgeois. My mother, not because she was afraid, but rather out of respect for old-fashioned conventions, said to my nanny and me, “Oh! lower the blinds.” In came my father, who exclaimed, “Raise the blinds.” He led me onto our little balcony. I remember the scene vividly: “Kill the Jews! Kill the Jews!” He said to me very calmly,

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“This is called history, and you must never be afraid.” For a child of six, those words were transformative. Since that time, I know what to call history, and if I’m afraid, I’m ashamed; and I try not to be afraid. It was an enormous advantage for me to know very early on who Hitler was, and that knowledge provided me with me an “unsentimental” education. From the year of my birth, in 1929, my father had predicted with absolute clarity— I have his journals— what was going to happen. Nothing surprised him. l.a. So your father, who had foreseen what was going to happen in a Europe inflamed by Nazism, then decided to move his family to the United States. How did that come about? G.s. The French prime minister, Paul Reynaud, had decided at the last minute that the country desperately needed fighter planes, Grummans. My father was sent to New York with some other financial bigwigs to negotiate the purchase of fighter planes for France. When he arrived in New York, something incredible happened. We sometimes forget that New York was a neutral city, completely neutral, with a lot of Nazis there on business, the Swastika pinned on their collars, as well as Nazi bankers also on buying trips or there for financial negotiations. At a Wall Street club a German who had been a close friend of my father’s— this man ran the large Siemens company, which still exists— noticed him at a table and had a message sent over to him. My father tore up the note in front of everyone and didn’t even acknowledge his friend. He didn’t want to listen to him or see him. But his friend waited for him in the men’s room, took him by the shoulders, and said, “Listen to me. This very year we’re going to go through France like a hot knife through butter. Get your family out of there whatever the cost!” This

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took place before the fateful Wannsee conference, but already the big German bankers and CEOs knew what was happening from Polish accounts, as well as reports from the Wehrmacht in Poland; they knew that Jews would all be killed. Not how, or by what method, but they knew in principle: the Jews were going to be massacred. This was 1940, right before the German invasion. Fortunately, my father took the warning very seriously. He asked Paul Reynaud permission for his family— my mother, my sister and me— to join him in the U.S., and Reynaud granted it. But my mother refused: “Out of the question! If we leave France, the children won’t pass their bac. My son will never get into the Académie française!” Luckily, we were a Jewish family and the father’s word was law. And so we left Paris and managed to get onto the last American cruise ship leaving from Genoa, just as the Germans were invading. If we hadn’t, would I be alive today? Some say the Germans didn’t know Hitler’s plans for France, but in fact— and I’m not making this up— some did know, and had known since the end of 1939, since the events in Poland, when huge massacres were already taking place. They weren’t allowed to talk about it, of course. But if you were the head of Siemens, you heard the news because the leaders of the Wehrmacht talked about it, told others about what was going on in Poland. That’s how our lives were saved. l.a. Maybe that’s why there’s a sense of guilt that you mention in several of your books, that feeling of being “one too many”? G.s. Yes, I feel that very strongly. At Janson-de-Sailly, in my class, only two Jews survived. And yet the class was full of Jews because Janson-de-Sailly was a sort of Jewish academy for young boys. All the others were killed. I think of this every day.

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Chance, the roulette wheel of survival, the mysterious lottery of chance. Why did the other children and their parents die? No one, in my opinion, should even try to understand that. It can’t be understood. All you can say is: “It was a matter of luck— the immeasurably mysterious throw of the dice.” If you’re religious— which I’m not— you see the hand of God in it. Otherwise you have to have the courage to say, “It was a complete game of chance, and I picked the right number.” l.a. So you arrived in the U.S., went to a French high school there, and then experienced some rather unhappy years. G.s. The book describing what New York was like in those days has not yet been written. It would be a fascinating subject, though. The lycée was in the hands of the Vichy government, of course. In my class there were the two sons— quite nice boys, incidentally— of the admiral who commanded Pétain’s fleet in Martinique. The lycée was officially Pétainist, but some of the students were refugees, resisters of one kind or another. And in the class just above mine, two friends who were only seventeen had lied about their age to go fight in France, and both were killed in the Vercors. They were only two years older than I. And at the lycée we fought each other between classes because there was a lot of hatred. The Vichy gang, full of confidence at that time, didn’t just hate Jews; they hated the Left, anyone who had shown any resistance. As soon as the tide turned, the head of the lycée, all the teachers and the administrative staff, promptly put up the Cross of Lorraine, the symbol of a free France. It was a decisive lesson for me: how things can change from one day to the next! General de Gaulle came to visit the lycée, and those cowards bowed down before him, of course, pretending to be overjoyed with the Liberation. That taught me a lot.

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That said, I had a wonderful education there. Why? Because the great intellectuals who were exiled to New York gave lessons to kids like us to earn a little money. So in philosophy class I was taught by Étienne Gilson and Jacques Maritain before they had jobs at Princeton and Harvard. I attended classes given by Claude Lévi-Strauss and Boris Gourévitch. Intellectual giants like that were there, wasting their time with teenagers like us, preparing us for exams and for the baccalauréat. It was an extraordinary time. My best school friend was the son of Francis Perrin; Perrin had received a Nobel Prize with Frédéric JoliotCurie for discovering radioactivity, and both men yearned for a Communist future. Joliot-Curie, Perrin, Jacques Hadamard: that whole group hoped the Liberation might lead to a Marxist France. That was very important, too. Those high school years were formative, and I realize how decisive they were for me. I feel very indebted to that time. l.a. An enormous debt perhaps, George, but that didn’t prevent you from leaving the U.S. for the U.K. G.s. First, there was Paris, where I went in 1945. You can’t imagine what Paris was like in 1945. I wanted to enroll for my final years of lycée at Louis-le-Grand or Henri-IV (I was arrogant enough to hope I would pass the exam for the École Normale Supérieure), but my father told me, “Out of the question! The future belongs to the Anglo-American language. I’m sorry, but if one day you manage to write a decent book in Anglo-American, it will then be translated into French.” I remember that extraordinary prophecy. I obeyed my father and spent my early university years in the States, at two wonderful universities: Chicago and Harvard. I still often wonder about the fate of the French language; it has been a crucial question in my life from many

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points of view. And I also often wonder what my life would have been like if I had tried to get into Normale Sup. I still regret never having made the attempt. l.a. You then decided to live in London and, paradoxically, to work for the Economist. You’re known as a philosopher, a writer, a semiologist, an intellectual, but very few people know that you began your professional life as an economist— a columnistjournalist-economist. G.s. It was the most respected weekly in the world. And you worked there anonymously, that was essential: articles weren’t signed. Getting a job there was pretty competitive. I knew nothing about political economy, but I was passionate about good prose and international relations. And I was asked to write editorials— I was quite young, absurdly young— on the relations between Europe and America. So I spent four magnificent years there, but then fate decided to play a mean trick— which turned out to be an amazing stroke of luck. The Economist sent me across the Atlantic to cover the debate on American atomic power: was the U.S. going to share its nuclear knowledge with Europe? Under Eisenhower the Americans decided they wouldn’t. It wasn’t a given; there was still hope that there would be true collaboration. Within that context I went to Princeton, a wonderful, unreal little town, to interview J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb. He had a pathological hatred of journalists, but said: “I’ll give you ten minutes.” He was a man who inspired spine-chilling fear; it’s quite difficult to describe. One day, in front of me, in front of my desk, I heard him say to a young physicist, “You are so young and you have already done so little!” After comments like that, you could only hang yourself! Oppenheimer had set our meeting for noon. He didn’t come. So

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I had lunch with George Kennan, the diplomat of diplomats; Erwin Panofsky, the leading art historian at the time; and Harold Cherniss, the great Hellenist and Plato specialist. Afterwards, while waiting for the taxi that was to pick me up a half-hour later, Cherniss invited me to his office, and as we were talking, Oppenheimer came in and sat behind us. It was the ideal trap: if the people you’re talking to can’t see you, they feel paralyzed and you become master of the situation. Oppenheimer was a genius at this sort of theatrical maneuvering, it was incredible. Cherniss was showing me a passage from Plato that he was editing, which included a lacuna; he was trying to fill it in. When Oppenheimer asked me what I would do with that passage, I began by stammering something. Then he added, “A great text should have some empty space.” I said to myself, “Hey, you’ve nothing to lose, your taxi will be here in fifteen minutes.” And so I replied, “That’s a pompous cliché. First, your statement is a quote from Mallarmé. Second, it’s the type of paradox you can play with ad infinitum. But when you’re trying to prepare an edition of Plato for the common mortal, it’s better that the empty spaces be filled.” Oppenheimer responded superbly, “No, in philosophy especially it is the implicit that stimulates argument.” He enjoyed our exchange immensely, he whom no one ever dared to contradict, and we had a real discussion on the subject. Then Oppenheimer’s secretary ran in and announced, “Mr. Steiner’s taxi is about to leave!” I was going on to Washington for my reporting assignment. At the door of the Institute, this extraordinary man asked me, as one might speak to a dog, “You’re married?” “Yes.” “You have children?” “No.” “Great. That will make it easier to find lodging.”

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That’s how he invited me to the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, as the first young humanist. He was amused by our encounter. I sent a telegram to The Economist, and they told me, “Don’t do anything stupid. You’re happy with us, we’ll give you one day a week for your research. You can write your books on Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, tragedy. Stay with us.” And once again, as with the Normale Sup, I wonder if I shouldn’t have continued there. I could have been number two, certainly; that was their plan, but I would never have been the chief. I was so happy there. I was paid well and had all that I wanted, but just the idea of entering the house of Einstein— I had to renounce my ill-placed pride. And so I left The Economist and we went to live in Princeton. l.a. What did you learn from those years with Oppenheimer? Did they prove decisive for the rest of your intellectual life? G.s. Profoundly. First, because I started my professional life among leading scientists; and second, because I wanted to pursue it among leading scientists. We are, I believe, living in a century of extraordinary science, including from an aesthetic and a philosophical point of view. I was surrounded by intellectual princes. That environment, that complete oasis, that ideal of pure research. During their first social event at the Institute, newcomers would shake hands with the old guard; it was a little ritual. A very tall, thin man walked up to me, “I’m André Weil. I don’t think we’ll have the opportunity to talk again.” All of that was in French. “But I have something to tell you. If you’re intelligent, you work on the theory of pure numbers. If you’re fairly intelligent— like me— you do topological algebra. Everything else, sir, is rubbish.” I’ll never forget that. He was Simone Weil’s brother.

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l.a. And the co-founder of the Nicolas Bourbaki movement. G.s. At that moment, you could almost hear the voice of Simone Weil. And in fact, we never did speak to each other again. But there were also moments of great generosity. For example, the day I had my first meal at the Institute, I was afraid to go into the room. What do you do when faced with a dining room in which every person is an intellectual giant? Niels Bohr saw my hesitation, got up, and said, “Come with me.” He had gigantic shoulders and hands. He was so warm; I didn’t dare speak. He took a photo out of his pocket, “My twelve grandchildren, I know all their names.” That’s how Niels Bohr made me feel comfortable. And we ended up being close friends. There were others who were very difficult, of course. Great scientists are sometimes deeply solitary. Two activities did manage to connect them: music (there were wonderful evenings of chamber music) and chess (the language of those who are otherwise mute). After all, what do you talk about with a John von Neumann, an André Weil? Even if you’re fairly good at mathematics it’s better to hold your tongue— but at chess, in music, there was a lot of contact and warmth. From that time, and then at Cambridge, I have the impression that there is an alarming amount of bluffing in the humanities. In mathematics or in the pure sciences you can’t bluff: it’s either right or it isn’t. You can’t cheat. Anyone who dares to cheat in an experiment, in a result, in a theorem, is destroyed. Overnight, or almost, you are excluded from the community of your peers. The moral rigor is extreme. It’s a very special morality, a morality of truth. It’s a world that I’ve always liked and one that endures. Here in Cambridge, from Roger Bacon in the seventeenth century to Francis Crick, James Watson, and Stephen Hawking, each generation (Newton, Darwin, William Thomson) has seen an explosion of

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genius in the sciences. If I’m not mistaken, today, in this little town, we have among our teaching colleagues— not to mention honorary professors— ten Nobel laureates. l.a. From that community in which you lived, from that experience shared with those great scientists, you seem also to have acquired a precision and rigor of analysis that you have applied in the field in which you have subsequently worked: the vast field known as the humanities. You were the first in European history to introduce concepts of quasi-mathematical rigor into literature, mythology, and literary history. G.s. If only you were right! I despise bluffing, I despise cheating in the humanities. First, we have a fundamental philosophical problem. A critical judgment on a piece of music, art, or literature cannot be put to the proof. If I declare that Mozart was incapable of writing a melody (there are people who believe that), you can tell me I’m a poor fool, but you can’t prove me wrong. When Tolstoy said that Lear is an overblown melodrama by someone who doesn’t understand tragedy at all, you can say, “Mr. Tolstoy, I regret to inform you that you are laughably wrong.” But you can’t prove him wrong. In the end it’s scary: opinions are not refutable. People say that eventually a consensus is reached, so be it. That doesn’t prove anything; the consensus can be wrong, too. So in aesthetic judgment there is always something ephemeral, something deeply ephemeral. And if I were to write down what I consider to be the five or six most important names in, let’s say, contemporary literature today, four out of five would be quite unknown to well-educated people, good readers, the so-called enlightened public. Then, of course, for reasons we don’t really understand,

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there is the fact that the great artistic, literary, aesthetic experience is beyond good and evil. Now that the end of my life is approaching, I’m working on these problems more and more: “Why can’t music lie?” and “Why can’t mathematics lie?” They can be wrong, of course. But that’s an entirely different matter. Music can present a character who lies, an Iago in Verdi, if you like. But I don’t think music knows how to lie. That gives it, in my opinion, much greater weight than speech. It is in France, of course, though imitated in other countries, that the drama of the deconstruction of language, socalled poststructuralism, all that came after Dada— Duchamp’s great precursor, who for me is the mind that presides over the great crisis in the arts— is most active. In France, in the land of Molière and Descartes, the crisis is— or still was, a few years ago— most acute; there the destruction of language, the placing in doubt of the possibilities for truth, has reached a breaking point. It’s very interesting. Language admits everything. It’s an alarming truth that we hardly ever think about: we can say anything, nothing stifles us, nothing shocks us when someone says the most monstrous things. Language is infinitely servile, and language— this is the mystery— knows no ethical limits. l.a. Yes, but at the same time, language can also approach truth. Perhaps not necessarily tell the truth or espouse it, but at least approach it. G.s. Language may sincerely attempt to convince, but it must represent the opinion of the one who is speaking. There must be a connection between a statement and a life, an action. For example, France has had thousands upon thousands of Marx-

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ist intellectuals who would never have set foot in Soviet Russia. Never, not for anything in the world. l.a. Or some who were there, but with blinders on, like Sartre. G.s. But who said things about Stalin, knowing they were lies. There have been (as is the case, closer to home, with my immediate contacts in France), and there still are, passionate Zionists, heated, angry, who would never set foot in Israel. But there has to be at least some connection between speech and a life. It can be very complicated, I know; sincerity is an extremely difficult thing, it demands constant self-criticism. But to make statements that reflect the opposite of how one lives has always seemed too easy to me.

To Be a Guest on Earth reFleCtIons on JudaIsm

l.a. In your reflections on Judaism, which are found in every one of your books, you develop the theme of the rejection of a life lived in one place when one is Jewish. And in Language and Silence (1967) you say, “The dolls in the attic were not ours; the ghosts have a rented air.” G.s. Yes, I believe that. Some say that to be uprooted is not to have a center of gravity in oneself, it is not to have a true connection to the earth and to the dead— dear Maurice Barrès!— it is not to know the family of one’s ancestors. It is to be what Hitler insultingly called, “a person in the air” (a Luftmensch). I personally like the air, the wind, a great deal. To be a Luftmensch doesn’t bother me at all. On the contrary, it allows me to cross oceans, continents, and to discover a bit of this fascinating world in which our life is so short. That said, I know very

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well that for a majority of human beings (and they have every right to think this way), the quest for a plot of land, a home, is very important. I respect that, I’m not a fool. But there’s often a flipside to the coin: chauvinism, racial hatred, fear of the Other. The fact that over fifty years after Auschwitz we’re still seeing racial conflicts in the Balkans, in Africa, that we see everywhere an absurd fear of neighbors who are of another race (the word, by the way, doesn’t mean anything), or of another ethnicity, because they will cause property values to fall— it’s obscene, isn’t it? Understandable, but obscene, all the same. Man is a territorial animal. Cruel, frightened. But the least we can do is try to overcome that fear. I have two granddaughters, two black pearls who are truly the most important things in my wife’s life and and my own. Where did they come from? An orphanage in Hyderabad in India. My daughter Deborah, who is the youngest professor of ancient Greek at Columbia University, and my son-in-law, who teaches classical languages, Latin, and Roman history at Princeton— something to be proud of!— adopted these two little girls. One is six and the other three. Rebecca and Myriam. Myriam in particular is like a black diamond, black as midnight, with eyes like moonlight. We don’t have eyes like that in the West. And I’m crazy about those girls, I adore them. And I say it’s better that they live over there in America, where that kind of adoption is accepted. Knowing that in the streets of my beloved Cambridge it could be problematic makes me terribly ashamed. Yes, it makes me very angry. So you can’t tell me that it’s impossible to love with all your heart people who are completely different. Personally, I don’t have many more years left, I’m very close to the end, so if I can protect them from some things— but I can’t. I’m powerless. At least, I know that to assert, “I can only love those who are like me,” reflects a blighted soul.

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The Jewish condition is extremely mysterious. God knows the Greeks were talented. God knows the Romans shaped the world, ancient Egyptians contributed to shaping humanity. They’re all gone. All of them. And so I ask: why have we survived? After all, we could have accepted Christianity, the Messiah, the whole package; it was even predicted by some Jewish prophets. We could have assimilated a long time ago. Why did we survive, and survive the Shoah, the Holocaust? My only answer is a disappointingly antiZionist one. I know that Israel is a miracle we can’t do without. It’s possible that my children and my grandchildren will one day find it their only refuge. But personally, I can’t accept it, because I believe that the Jew has a task: to be a pilgrim of invitations. To be everywhere a guest in order to try, very slowly, within the limits of our means, to make others understand that we are all guests on this Earth. To teach our fellow citizens in life that the art of being at home everywhere, difficult as it may be, is essential. And to contribute to every community where we are invited to stay. And if the day comes when we must pack our bags and leave again, it can be horribly difficult, agonizingly difficult from a material point of view, but for me that is part of the Jew’s task. And if tomorrow I should have to start over again— although at my age it would be unlikely— in Indonesia, let’s say, then I would start by learning Indonesian. Which would do me a lot of good; I’ve grown terribly lazy. My first job would be quite menial, but I am arrogant enough to believe that the second would be much better. Then I hope I would say to the lord God, “All this is extraordinarily interesting!” What I certainly wouldn’t do, I promise you, is whine: “How could this happen to me? Why me? Why am I a victim?” Oh, no! “This is really interesting, God.” It is fascinating to discover new cultures. Humani nihil a me

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alienum, as the great Latin poet wrote: nothing that is human is foreign to me. One can be at home anywhere. Give me a table to work on, and I have my home. I believe neither in passports— ridiculous things— nor in flags. I believe strongly in the advantages of encountering the new. Take this anecdote, for example: When I first go into my office at the University of Beijing, to which I was invited, the smell is nauseating. I discover that the typewriter is sitting next to the garbage can and is missing half of the keyboard, that the table has only three and a half legs. I spend five minutes in idiotic panic. I say to myself, “What is this? I’m not going to be able to . . .” Then the door opens, and a very polite student says to me, “I’ve enrolled in your seminar. Can you give me the list of texts I should study?” I’m then at home, absolutely at home. I could have been at Harvard, the Sorbonne, Oxford, Princeton, or Berlin, I am at home, and that student is my family. He pays me the profound respect of wanting to study with me? Great! I am where I should be. How wonderful to be in a profession in which I have a new family every autumn. And now my former students have university chairs on five continents. A tree has roots; I have legs. And that’s a magnificent advance. I love trees. I worship the ones in my yard. But when there are storms, they break, they fall; a tree, alas, can be struck by an ax or by lightning. I can run. Legs are a first-class invention and I don’t want to let them go to waste. l.a. The Jewish question, which has haunted your entire life, goes well beyond the existence of Israel, the settling of a people in a nation-state, doesn’t it? G.s. That’s a crucial question. I have great contempt for armchair Zionists, who practice Zionism without ever wanting to

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set foot over there. The only time I had the huge privilege of meeting Ben-Gurion (very briefly), he said to me, “Only one thing matters: send me your children.” l.a. Which you didn’t do. G.s. Which I didn’t do. And I am fundamentally anti-Zionist. Let me explain— even if, as I strongly fear, everything that I’m going to say now may be misunderstood, misinterpreted. For several thousand years, approximately from the time of the fall of the First Temple in Jerusalem, Jews did not have the wherewithal to mistreat, or torture, or expropriate anyone or anything in the world. For me, it was the single greatest aristocracy that ever existed. When I’m introduced to an English duke, I say to myself, “The highest nobility is to have belonged to a people that has never humiliated another people.” Or tortured another. But today, Israel must necessarily (I stress this word and would repeat it twenty times if I could), necessarily, inevitably, inescapably, kill and torture in order to survive; Israel must behave like the rest of so-called normal humanity. Well, I’m a confirmed ethical snob, I’m completely arrogant ethically; by becoming a people like others, the Israelis have forfeited that nobility I had attributed to them. Israel is a nation between nations, armed to the teeth. And when I look from the top of a wall at the long line of Palestinian workers trying to get to their daily jobs, standing in blistering heat, I can’t help seeing the humiliation of those human beings in that line, and I say to myself, “It’s too high a price to pay.” To which Israel answers, “Be quiet, you fool! Come here! Live with us! Share our danger! We are the only country that will welcome your children if they have to flee. So what right do you have to be so morally superior?” And I have no response. To be able to

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respond, I would have to be there, on the street corner giving my absurd spiel, living the daily risks there. Because I don’t do that, I can only explain what I perceive as the Jew’s mission: to be the guest of humanity. And, even more paradoxical (which places the mark of Cain on my forehead), what convinced me was something Heidegger said: “We are the guests of life.” Heidegger came up with that extraordinary expression; neither you nor I could choose the place of our birth, the circumstances, the historical time to which we belong, a handicap or perfect health. We are geworfen, to use the German word, “thrown” into life. And in my opinion, whoever is thrown into life has a duty to that life, an obligation to behave as a guest. What must a guest do? He must live among people, wherever they may be. And a good guest, a worthy guest, leaves the place where he has been staying a bit cleaner, a bit more beautiful, a bit more interesting than he found it. And if he must leave, he packs his bags and leaves. I haven’t visited or lived in any place in the world that hasn’t been fascinating, whose language hasn’t been worth learning, whose culture isn’t worth understanding, where one can’t try to do something interesting. The world is incredibly rich. If people don’t learn how to be guests of each other, we will destroy ourselves, we will have religious wars, terrible racial wars. Malraux saw this coming with stunning clarity. In the Diaspora, I believe the task of the Jew is to learn to be the guest of other men and women. Israel is not the only possible solution. If that which you don’t even dare to consider were to happen, if the unimaginable came to be, if Israel were to disappear, Judaism would survive; it is much greater than Israel. l.a. In Language and Silence you wrote, “The State of Israel is, in one sense, a sad miracle.” Would you say the same thing today?

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G.s. It may be dangerous (and I’m serious) to say that, but yes, I can still say it: Judaism goes far beyond Israel. The five hundred years in Spain were one of the greatest periods in Jewish culture. The five hundred years in Salonica were a period of immense spiritual and intellectual glory. American Jews dominate a large portion of the sciences and the economy of the planet. Not to mention their importance in the media, literature, and so on. Let’s imagine that Israel disappears— perhaps a dangerous thing to say, a dreadful thing to imagine from any point of view— could the Diaspora survive such a shock psychologically? I don’t know. The horror of that thought is inconceivable. But our brains are meant to think the unthinkable. This is my daily task as a teacher and a thinker; that is why God put me in the world. I haven’t the slightest doubt that Judaism would survive. Not the slightest doubt. Nor about the fact that the mysterious continuity of what I call the guests of life would go on. But it’s a dreadful thing to have to think about. l.a. To adopt, as you do, the attitude of the wandering Jew, is that to question the existence of Israel? G.s. No, I don’t question it. It was the miracle necessary for the survival of a portion of the Jewish people, but I dare not believe it’s the only option, as I’ve just said. And I see wandering as a wonderful destiny. To wander among people is to visit them. l.a. Do you define yourself as a Jew, as a Jewish thinker? G.s. No. A European Jew, if you like. A student, I like to consider myself a student. I have teachers. l.a. Among the teachers you have had and still have, one has been particularly important to you: Gershom Scholem. He de-

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cided to leave Europe and move to Palestine to establish a university there. G.s. He went at a time when it was very dangerous. He lived through wars there, he experienced what was supposed to have been the extinction of Israel in the first Israeli-Arab wars. But for Scholem, again, it was quite different. His inability to persuade others to leave Europe caused him true suffering. That was also the case with Walter Benjamin, whose brother was killed in a concentration camp while Benjamin was telling everyone he knew, “Come on! Come on!” But they didn’t go. He was like Cassandra. It’s terrible to be Cassandra. l.a. You have taught all over the world; you have had a great number of students who have in turn become professors worldwide— in Beijing, Los Angeles, Cambridge, Geneva. Haven’t you wondered whether one day you might go live in Israel, become an Israeli citizen? G.s. First, there’s the fact of my remarkable laziness. I studied Hebrew until my bar mitzvah, and then I turned to Latin and Greek. I dropped Hebrew. Inexcusable. I could have picked it up again later. Laziness. Also, I’m fiercely antinationalist. I totally respect what Israel is, but it isn’t for me. You need a Diaspora to balance things. And I also refused to consider it because I was proud to such a degree, to an almost absurd degree, to be stateless. Proud. That’s what I’ve been proud of all my life. To live in several languages, to live in the greatest possible number of cultures, and to abhor chauvinism, nationalism— which has been the guiding principle in Israel for a long time and is still dominant. l.a. And yet you’ve gone to Israel several times to give talks.

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G.s. Five times. l.a. But you’ve never been tempted— G.s. Oh, yes, in Jerusalem, yes, because it’s a transcendently beautiful city. But that’s a bad reason. l.a. But still you don’t challenge the existence of the State of Israel? G.s. Now it’s too late. l.a. And at the same time, you condemn the particular policy directed by the Israeli government against the Palestinians. G.s. Yes. Even though I understand the reasons for it. Again, to say that Netanyahu is wrong is easy when you’re in a Cambridge drawing room. You should say it when you’re over there. And as long as you’re not there, completely immersed in living there, I think it’s better to hold your tongue. Anyway, now that I’m so close to the end, to my end, I’m no longer at all sure about moving to Israel. There are moments when I’d like to go. Moments when I wonder whether I should have gone. l.a. You still can. G.s. No, not anymore. Neither my age nor my health would allow it. And they don’t need me there. Anyway, I’m persona non grata over there. l.a. Why?

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G.s. Because of things I’ve said all my life. The simple fact, for example, that I’ve asserted that the survival of Judaism goes beyond Israel’s survival; it’s the worst sort of betrayal, it’s inadmissible, and I understand that. But really, what fascinates me most is the mystery of Jewish intellectual excellence. I’m not being a hypocrite: in the sciences, the percentage of Jewish Nobel laureates is stunning. There are areas in which there is almost a Jewish monopoly. Take the creation of the modern American novel by Philip Roth, Joseph Heller, Saul Bellow, and so many others. The sciences, mathematics, the media, as well; Pravda was run by Jews. Is that the fruit of the terrible pressure of danger? Is danger the father of invention and creation? I dare to believe that is true, quite often. Judaism is the only religion, the only one on the planet, that has a special prayer for families whose children are scholars. That fills me with great joy and huge pride. I now have (and I don’t believe in miracles) a son who is the dean of a very fine college in New York, a daughter who directs the department of antiquity at Columbia, a son-in-law who teaches ancient literature at Princeton. That was my dream. Do we Jews, perhaps, have something of a gift for the life of the mind, for abstract thought? We seem destined to love knowledge, thinking, the arts. All men and women share this to some degree, I know, but this people, so small in number, so very small, that has been on the verge of disappearing several times throughout history, and yet survives— in short, this people, so hated, so feared, so persecuted, is still here. No one can explain why. Anti-Semitic jokes often contain a grain of truth. Hegel told this one: “God arrives, and in his right hand he is holding the holy texts of the revelation and the promise of heaven; in his left hand, the Berlin newspaper, Die Berliner Gazette. The Jew chooses the newspaper.”

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Hegel’s anti-Semitic joke contains a profound truth: Jews are passionate about the ductus, the internal current of history and time. And it was perhaps no accident that Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Einstein (with the major exception of Darwin, of course) were all born in the same century. l.a. You often refer to those rabbis in the concentration camps who continued to pray to God: do you think they prayed because they thought the camp was the antechamber of God’s house? G.s. I can’t answer that. But I can tell you about those who were called “living books.” Other prisoners, other victims, came to consult them because those men knew thousands of pages— including the Torah, the Talmud— almost entirely by heart. To be a “living book” that you could leaf through as if leafing through the human soul is no small thing; it is in fact a great honor. l.a. You’re rather hard on American Jews. In Language and Silence you say, “In America, Jewish parents listen for their children at night; but it is to make sure the car is back in the garage, not because there is a mob out.” G.s. But that isn’t a criticism. I say that with infinite gratitude. My children and grandchildren are over there. And I want them to be there because at this moment in time, for Jews in America, the escalator of history is on the way up. There is an extraordinary momentum. But also a great risk: assimilation. Slowly, through mixed marriages, even through tolerance, Jews are gradually disappearing from the United States. Not the Orthodox Jews, who assert their survival, an aggressive, superstitious survival, and who don’t assimilate. But American Jews, nonbe-

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lieving, nonpracticing Jews— like me— are in danger of slowly disappearing. In any event, when I arrived in the U.S., there were still quotas at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. If you had told me that in a few years the presidents of all those universities would be Jews, and that Jews would occupy chairs in literature— from which they were formerly excluded— I wouldn’t have believed you. There was a prevailing elitism that made Jews understand they were outsiders. Such thinking no longer exists. The last time I had the privilege of attending a session of the permanent members of the Institute for Advanced Thinking at Princeton, it involved the replacement of a brilliant mathematician, a world-renowned logician. Various names were suggested. Oppenheimer knocked on the table with his pipe— something he did when he’d had enough, when he was getting impatient— and said, “Gentlemen, I beg you, for the sake of good politics, try to suggest a name that isn’t Jewish.” But there weren’t any at that level of global eminence. Today I think there would be some Japanese, and tomorrow there will be Indians (including women, I’d like to stress). In the past few years, at all the universities I’ve visited, things have been changing a lot: the Jewish student is no longer necessarily the first or the second in his or her class; now it is the Chinese or Indian student who ranks highest in traditional disciplines such as pure logic, mathematics, theoretical physics, and so on. l.a. For you, being a Jew means belonging to the people of the Book and having a desire to study. It’s not belonging to a race; it’s a desire to learn. G.s. I don’t understand anything about this race business; it’s a bad joke. To be a Jew is to belong to that multimillennial tra-

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dition of respect for the life of the mind, of infinite respect for the Book, for the text, and it means telling oneself that one’s bags must always be packed, that the bags must always be ready to go. Without complaining, without shouting about cosmic injustice. No, it’s actually a great privilege. Don’t forget (people forget this all the time): in ancient Greek the word for guest is the same as the word for foreigner: xenos. And if you were to ask me to define our tragic condition, it’s that the word “xenophobia” survives, and is commonly used, everyone understands it; but the word “xenophilia” has disappeared. That’s how I define the crisis of our condition. l.a. You reread the history of the roots of anti-Semitism in a very original way, in quite a surprising or even, for some specialists, arrogant way. You explain that the sudden rise of antiSemitism was not because the Jews crucified Jesus but because the fact that Jews gave birth to God made Christians jealous of them— jealous to the point of extreme madness and murder. G.s. In three instances Judaism has held mankind hostage in the most tormenting manner. First, with the Mosaic Law. Monotheism is the least natural thing in the world. When the ancient Greeks say there are ten thousand gods, it’s natural, logical, delightful; they inhabit the world with beauty, reconciliation. The Jew responds: “Unimaginable! You can’t have an image of God, you can’t have a conception of him other than an ethical, moral one. He is an all-powerful God; he avenges himself to the third generation, etc.” The Mosaic Law, the morality of monotheism, is terrible: that was the first act of blackmail. The second instance: Christianity. You have Jesus, the Jew, who enjoins people: “You will give everything you have to the poor. You will sacrifice for others. Altruism isn’t a virtue, it’s

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the very duty of mankind. You will live humbly.” This is a fundamentally Judaic message: the Sermon on the Mount is made up of quotes, you know, from Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Amos. And the third time you have Marx, who proclaims, “If you have a fine house with three empty rooms and there are people all around you who have no home, you are the basest swine.” There is no possible defense for human egotism, greed, the lust for money, success. What did the revolutionary Saint-Just say? Happiness is a new idea in Europe. What did Marx say? Justice, a new idea in Europe. Enough of these terrible inequalities. Beggars are increasing on the sidewalks of our capitals— in Paris and in London. Three times, Jews have demanded, “Become a person. Become human.” It’s frightening. And then as a side note, Freud comes and takes away our dreams. He doesn’t even let us dream in peace. As for the great prophets, Isaiah declared himself the one who wakes us in the night, the one whose cries will awaken the city. Jeremiah pleads, “Wake up! Stop sleeping!” But it’s really mean to deprive us of our petty bourgeois sleep. Sleeping well is the luxury of the bourgeoisie, the middle classes. People who are starving never enjoy a good sleep. And Freud comes along and takes away even that. No, really, when Hitler declared in his Table Talk (Tischgespräche) that “the Jew invented conscience,” he was right. Absolutely. It was actually a profound statement from that evil man. When Solzhenitsyn, whom I consider a great man, though detestable, says that “the virus of communism, of Bolshevism, is totally Jewish and has infected the holy Virgin of Kazan and Russian theocracy,” he happens to be quite correct from a historical perspective. We can be proud of this, or we can deplore it. But anti-Semitism is a kind of human cry, “Leave me alone!” It’s a cry against the moral pestering Judaism represents. And I don’t think it can be eliminated.

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The crisis in the Middle East is only getting more severe. On the one hand there is an anti-Semitic Left in the so-called liberal countries, and on the other you have the Baptists, the most fascist-leaning neo-conservatives in the United States— there are fifty million of them in the southeastern U.S.— who were sending money and arms to Sharon when he was prime minister: “Yes! Bravo! You have to keep the infidel away from the Nazarene Country.” Yes, they call Israel the Nazarene Country. These are cruel, sadistic absurdities, disgusting alliances. Once again, history is going to be very dangerous. Every person lives his life while delving into his inner world. When I get up in the morning, I tell myself this story, so I can make it through the day: God announces that he’s sick of us. Really. “I’m fed up!” In ten days, the flood. The real one. No Noah this time. That was a mistake. The Holy Father tells the Catholics, “Very well. It’s God’s will. You will pray. You will forgive each other. You will gather your families and wait for the end.” The Protestants say, “You will settle your financial affairs. Your affairs must be completely settled. You will gather your families and you will pray.” The rabbi says, “Ten days? But that’s more than enough time to learn how to breathe under water!” And every day that magnificent story gives me the strength and happiness to live my life. And I believe it, deeply: ten days is indeed a long time. l . a . What do you think of the almost global rise in antiSemitism? G.s. I had hoped that at the end of my life (that is, now) the legacy of the Shoah would be calmed, that a certain reconciliation would have occurred naturally in Europe, but that hasn’t been the case; today the waves of anti-Semitism, hatred of Jews,

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are cresting around us everywhere. You wouldn’t have thought that possible only a few years ago. In Hungary, Romania, Poland, there are hardly any Jews anymore, but anti-Semitism has endured. And in my beloved England, I hate to tell you, the signs, indications of anti-Semitism, are increasing; there are academic boycotts against Jewish scientists, even in England. And a very profound sense of unease is developing in the face of this. And the incredible irony is that in Ukraine now it’s Putin who is denouncing anti-Semitism. It’s a scenario worthy of Kafka! Everywhere, the great wave is growing again, except, perhaps, in the U.S. I’m not talking about revisionism (which has followers in France); I’m talking about those who think of themselves as open-minded but feel increasingly ill at ease in the presence of Jews. l.a. How would you describe the geography of the return of anti-Semitism? G.s. It’s everywhere. You can’t open a newspaper without seeing incidents, attacks against Jewish cemeteries, against synagogues. And the nationalist movements, the movements of the Right that openly proclaim their hatred of Jews. And so, provisionally at least, I would propose this basic hypothesis: there is a hatred of Jews wherever there are no longer any Jews; even where there have never been Jews. Where are the most copies of the so-called Protocols of the Elders of Zion printed? In Japan, where there have never been Jews. That’s where this infamous and very powerful pamphlet is sold in the hundreds of thousands. And so one must ask the almost surreal question: what are the deep roots of this refusal of any reconciliation, this refusal to forget? We forget other problems, but not the Jewish problem. And I would like to propose a preliminary response,

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which now, at the end of my days, is becoming increasingly convincing to me: Jews have lasted too long. No one can say, “My people lived in the time of Themistocles or Caesar,” but the ethnic and historical Jewish identity has endured for five thousand years— that’s a long time. Why such longevity? There is another people on Earth— and only one— that has a multimillennial tradition: the Chinese. And yet, here, obviously, you have to take into account the huge number of them. Here is a quite scandalous fact— and I use that word in the Greek sense, skandalon, which means enormity: at this moment there are more Jews on the planet than before the Shoah. One shouldn’t have the right to say such a thing; it’s indecent, but it’s true; there are more Jews living, surviving, than before the most powerful genocide in human history. How, as a Jew, does one survive the Shoah psychically? How can we avoid the crucial question raised shortly before his death by the eminent Jewish American philosopher Sidney Hook? I’ll ask it again. If you were told that your unborn children might confront a new Holocaust, an Auschwitz in another form, the threat, once again, of slavery and destruction, and if you had the choice either to have them convert, in any case to leave Judaism, or else not to have children, which would you choose? That is the philosophical question he asked. Others have certainly asked themselves the same thing— I’ve asked it myself. If we knew that the monstrous and the inhuman was waiting for us again, wouldn’t we try everything possible to disguise our Jewish past, to leave it, to go to the other side (which is possible in America, probably in Britain, perhaps in France), or would we just not have children? l.a. Leave it? Does that mean changing your name and converting to another religion?

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G.s. Changing your name, your culture, trying to hide. In one or two generations, that might work. But I believe that the great majority of Jews, even the totally nonbelieving, nonpracticing ones, would not choose that path. I’m just guessing— there are no verifiable statistics on the matter. What is it that makes a Jew want to remain a Jew— God knows it’s a wretched destiny! The mystery of this survival, the mystery of what draws the hatred of the non-Jew, a sense of the monstrous; I think it’s because Jews have signed a pact with life. Let me explain. For thousands of years there seem to have been negotiations between Jews and life itself, the mystery of human vitality. After spending ten years in prison, often in solitary confinement, Natan Sharansky (the famous pro-Zionist dissident in Soviet Russia) was exchanged for a spy who had been imprisoned; the exchange took place on a small bridge. What does Sharansky do? He goes across the bridge dancing and shouting insults at his Russian guards! In the camp, in Kolyma, the Russian guards were apparently afraid of Sharansky. He danced. He danced like David in front of the ark. The dance of an inextinguishable pact with vitality. That’s only a metaphor, perhaps, but when you wonder what exasperates others, I think it’s the mystery of that survival, that refusal to disappear. We are touching on a realm that requires you to be a sociobiologist. “Is there an element?” asks Lamarck, a naturalist. “No,” says Darwin, “we don’t have a specific trait.” These days we are beginning to rethink all of Lamarck. Why are 70 percent of all Nobel Prize winners in the sciences Jews? Why are 90 percent of all chess masters Jews, whether in Argentina or Moscow? Why do Jews recognize each other on a level that is not just that of rational reflection? Many years ago Heidegger said, “When you’re too stupid to have something to say, you tell a story!” That’s mean. So I’m going to tell a story! Many years ago, when

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I was a young doctoral student, I went to Kiev. I went out in the evening to take a walk, heard steps behind me; a man started to walk alongside of me and uttered the word Jid. I didn’t know Russian, and he didn’t know German, but we discovered that both of us knew a little Yiddish. I said to him, “You’re not Jewish?” “No, no. But let me explain. During the dark years of the Stalin purges, extraterrestrials could have landed in the neighboring village and we wouldn’t have known; we didn’t know anything! But the Jews had news from all over the world! We never understood how, but they knew what was going on.” A true Freemasonry of underground communication. He added, “I learned enough Yiddish to at least be able to ask them what was going on in Moscow. Because they knew.” l.a. What do you mean by a Freemasonry of information? G.s. A Freemasonry of information for me means belonging to a world in which you know what’s going on, where you don’t allow yourself to be duped, where you know how to say no. Jews have always been able to say no to despotism, to inhumanity around them. They’ve never been completely cut off from the world; to me, that’s part of the transcendent vitality that negotiated a pact with history. Jews know how to say, “We are going to suffer terribly, we are going to be pilgrims, vagabonds on Earth, but in the end we won’t perish.” l.a. What does it mean to be a Jew when you don’t recognize Israel as the incarnation of a political destiny, and when you’re not a believer? G.s. I will answer that with some shame and some joy too: it means to be sitting with you here in this room, in this place with

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all these books, all these records, practicing several languages every day by reading them, trying every morning to be someone who learns something new. For me, to be a Jew is to remain a student, to be someone who learns. It’s to reject superstition, the irrational. It’s to refuse to turn to astrologists to find out your destiny. It’s to have an intellectual, moral, spiritual vision; above all, it’s to refuse to humiliate or torture another human being; it’s to refuse to allow another to suffer from your existence. l.a. But in all that, you are defining characteristics of humanity, not necessarily the character of a people or a civilization. G.s. On the contrary; the rest of the world is becoming more and more sadistic, more and more provincial, nationalistic, chauvinistic. In the West today there would seem to be three times as many astrologists as scientists. Superstition, the irrational, is gaining a great deal of ground again. We are living in a society of ever increasing kitsch, vulgarity, and brutality. l.a. And you think being Jewish is a protection against things of that sort? G.s. Yes, I do. Here’s a somewhat disturbing example, but one that means a lot to me. Up to now, we know of not one Jewish school where there has been an incident involving pedophilia. This is very important: Jews consider children to be sacred. If at least this fact is verified— but I’m cautious, because there are secrets that none of us know about. By contrast, there’s an increasing number of pedophilia cases throughout Christendom. And I don’t think there has ever been a Jewish teacher who has touched a child sexually. Nor a rabbi, for God’s sake! Whereas

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in Ireland, to mention a country that I know well, there isn’t one school that has escaped this. But in Britain too, pedophilia cases are multiplying. So perhaps, for me, to be a Jew is to be someone who would never abuse a child, who would never torture anyone else. And someone who, when reading a book, pencil in hand, is convinced he will write a better one. It’s that wonderful Jewish arrogance regarding the mind’s possibilities: “I will do even better!” If any of that is true, then it’s a sort of infinite privilege regarding the life of the mind— which is for me the glory of humanity. This doesn’t mean there aren’t stingy, corrupt Jews (in high finance, those who buy up London, Russian gangsters who are in large part Jews and are taking over the luxury industry), but it does mean that Jews continue to contribute immeasurably to the glory of the sciences, philosophy, and intellectual thought. As for me, I’ve always defined myself as a Jew, everywhere, in all my writing— in my first book, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, in The Death of Tragedy, always. As someone on the move, proud not to have a home. And at the end of my life, that’s almost all I have left, that which defines me. Now I’m really sorry I never learned Hebrew. I studied it in the beginning, and then I got hooked on Greek and Latin; that was a big mistake. l.a. You can still pick it up! G.s. It’s a bit late. l.a. It’s never too late. G.s. There comes a time when it’s too late for many things. l.a. You are very harsh toward Islam, why is that?

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G.s. First, because the threat at present is becoming increasingly cruel. And because there are two things that are not negotiable. First, the abandonment of all science since the fifteenth century; the notions of fact, rational demonstration, proof, theorems, are not recognized by Islam. Second, the fate imposed on women, the treatment of half of humanity as inferior beings. For those two reasons I don’t believe in ecumenism and I don’t believe there can be agreement. Malraux predicted that the religious wars of the twenty-first century would be the greatest in history. What might save the Jews is the war between the Shiites and the Sunnis, which is generating conflicts throughout the Middle East. In Syria there are seventeen Islamic sects that hate each other more than they hate Gentiles or Jews. The hatred among Islamic sects is inconceivably massive and cruel, merciless. It is possible that God will help us, that Judaism in Israel will survive thanks to the horrific internal fights within Islam. It’s not a nice hope, God knows, but we’ve seen other sad miracles. I believe I was the first to express the notion of a “sad miracle.”

“Every Language Opens a Window onto a New World”

l.a. Alexis Philonenko describes your work as “a vast island in a closed sea, surrounded by small islets, with a port, whose main square is surrounded by cliffs. One of those cliffs is called Babel, the other Antigone.” Do you agree with him? G.s. Not entirely. Babel, yes, considering that questions of language have been central to my research and thought throughout my life. Antigone, because it’s one of the finest pieces of literature in the world, and its variations have allowed me to indicate how a myth lives and relives, and takes on other forms. But it could have been Iphigenia, Oedipus, even Phaedra, which have inspired other scholars. l.a. Language is certainly basic to your research, which is not surprising, given your own biography. You were born surrounded by many languages.

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G.s. My father thought that, for a Jewish family, survival depended on knowing as many languages as possible. The argument that teaching several languages to a child could induce a sort of schizophrenic disorder makes me furious. Thinking like that serves only politically correct Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-American imperialism. In fact, there is nothing worse than limiting children to a single language and telling them, as some do today, “Since Anglo-American is spoken everywhere, don’t waste your time learning another language.” It’s true that in Chinese schools they learn Anglo-American; in Russia, it’s everywhere; in Japan, it’s the second language. But it’s disastrous, because the death of a language is the death of a universe of possibilities. l.a. It’s commonly said that we have one mother tongue, which dominates the way we think. But it seems that you had several mother tongues. How was that possible, and how did you experience it? G.s. There’s a magnificent passage in Proust: the young Marcel is translating the great British critic John Ruskin, a philosopher of art. Seven years of translation. Proust knew very little English. So at night his mother would do a rough draft— her English was wonderful— and slip it under his door. And what does the young Marcel tell us? “English is my mother tongue.” This is a very important lesson. I don’t believe in mother tongues, native tongues. In western Sweden and Finland, children grow up learning two totally different and very difficult languages. In Malaysia there are three languages; you grow up speaking all three. In the Grisons region of Switzerland there are three languages: Romansh, Italian, and Austro-German. Many people

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are born into several languages. The so-called natural nature of monoglottism is greatly exaggerated. My mother began a sentence in one language and ended it in two or three others. She was a Viennese lady (and that really meant something!) who had learned French. In the Viennese Jewish upper classes, French was spoken fluently. Nabokov mastered English before he did Russian. In any case, he says he first wrote verses in English. For Nabokov, Byron came almost before Pushkin; and his nanny— essential in this story— spoke to him in English. Not to mention Oscar Wilde (who wrote several brilliant works in French) or Joseph Conrad (who abandoned Polish for English). As for Beckett, no one knows what his early drafts were like. In my book After Babel I tried to show that they were probably an almost unconscious mixture of French and English, with a good dose of Italian. His first works, when he was James Joyce’s secretary, were in Italian. They were on Dante and the Italian language. And Beckett is perhaps the greatest writer in modern literature. He creates a sort of volcanic territory, a volcanic magma in which languages are intermixed. Furthermore, he could do something no one else— or almost no one— in the history of literature has managed to do: he could transfer jokes from one language to another. And that’s supremely difficult. He was a virtuoso of Babel. Far from being cursed, people who speak a number of languages or dialects are incredibly lucky. Every language opens a window onto another world. There’s a counterargument, I know. For years, some people marginalized me at Cambridge and elsewhere in Britain, and still marginalize me, by labeling me “a continental scholar.” Amazing! A continental scholar. He is not one of us. Why? Because here, too, there is a Barrèsian cult of blood and the dead: only those who are enrooted (another Bar-

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rèsian term) in a native language have true sensibility, reflexes that a polyglot or an outsider can never have. That may be true. It’s quite possible that there are poets in the English/American language whose depth escapes me. That means I can admire them, but I can never rival those who feel completely at home in that language and no other. We can’t have everything. I wouldn’t have wanted to be a monoglot; I can’t even imagine it. I’ve taught English literature for fifty years, I hope with some success. I went to Paris to visit the tomb of Paul Celan, who, like Hölderlin— by far the greatest poet of the German language— is untranslatable. What’s more, and this is very serious, you and I have to read the Bible in bad translations, sometimes glorious but basically bad. Not knowing Hebrew is a primary barrier to one of the sources of our humanity. Ancient Greek, in translation? Let’s not go there. And we are cut off from China, Japan. I don’t read Russian. At the end of his life, when Edmund Wilson, my immediate predecessor as the main critic for The New Yorker, knew he was dying, he hired someone to teach him Hungarian— a terribly difficult language. He explained, “I’ve been told there are some poets who are as great as Pushkin and Keats. I want to know them!” He was thinking of Endre Ady and Sándor Petőfi. It was magnificent. “I want to know, not to be told things second-hand.” And if I weren’t so lazy, I would also be trying to learn another language or two. I, too, would like to know. l.a. What are your thoughts on the current domination of Anglo-American on a global scale? And what about the status of French? G.s. A language is simply a means of saying things: the future tense of a verb— which is called hope in some languages— is

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different in every language. The way we look forward to the potential of the human adventure, of the human condition, varies from language to language. Just as memory does, the huge mass of memory. If we were to become a single-language planet, or an almost single-language one, the loss would be nearly as great as losing all but one type of fauna or flora (which, as you know, we are doing everywhere in the world); it would be a terrible impoverishment. And I don’t have to tell you how disturbing the status of French is, given the conquest of Anglo-American. That said, the victory of Anglo-American— how ironic!— the victory of that industrial, technological, scientific, economic, fiscal Esperanto, is not related only to the political power of America. In a way that is still hard to explain, Anglo-American is full of hope, full of promise, whereas other great languages now suggest fatigue and sadness. What a great subject for study! Some languages are crushed by the domination of the American continent, whereas others are being infused by a new vitality. Spain is benefiting from the great writers of Latin America, a huge boost to the Spanish language. The Portugal of José Saramago and Antonio Lobo Antunes (in my opinion, Antunes is one of the greatest European writers) has retaken the advantage from Brazil— which itself has a great literature. In other cases, languages are being crushed. The destiny of the English language here in Britain is uncertain, because for the younger generation a sort of AngloAmerican is taking over. A novelist who for a time was (and I emphasize was) the most promising of his generation, the young Martin Amis, wrote a book called Money, in which he handled that new American language with brio. But it didn’t really work. For a British writer, becoming American isn’t easy and carries deep psychological risks. And where does living English come from now? The Caribbean, India, Pakistan (Salman

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Rushdie, V. S. Naipaul, et al.), and especially Ireland, an Ireland that has a formidable tradition of linguistic independence. It is from those places, from the margins of classic English, that new vital forces are emerging. The narrow strip of water between France and Britain is wider, in a sense, than the Atlantic Ocean; the two languages, the two visions of the world that it separates, are profoundly and radically different. On the one hand, there was that great school of French moralism that is slowly being extinguished, perhaps, but will return. French thought has always had this dimension (certainly since the seventeenth century); it speaks to humanity, to the moral universality of the person. It’s very different from German philosophy or the British tradition. Metaphysics has never been very successful in Britain, but British empiricism, British irony, the skepticism of Hume and Bertrand Russell have had a universal impact. We must never forget that Britain is a paradox: it’s a small island in economic and political decline, deeply wounded by wars that it didn’t win or that it won by chance, with a language that dominates the planet. From that little island came Shakespeare and the English language, which is used throughout the world. I’ve traveled a lot, and everywhere I go, English comes to meet me— whether in China, among my Japanese students, or even in Eastern Europe. Valéry— whom I adore but who could say wonderfully stupid things— declared, “I’m told you can learn English in twenty  hours. To that I respond that you can’t learn French in twenty thousand hours.” A silly quip, but it is, in fact, true— I have taught those languages. English can be learned fast, but there’s more: it contains a message of hope. How can I put it? In English there’s a flying carpet to tomorrow. English is full of promises; it tells us, “Things will be better tomorrow.” The

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American Declaration of Independence contains the famous expression “the pursuit of happiness.” It’s really something to say to humanity, “Go pursue happiness!” It’s not at all obvious. In English there’s no deep despair, none of the great apocalypses of Russian, French, that metaphysical vision of the damnation of humanity, of original sin. Anglo-American has never believed in that. l.a. I don’t see a computer here. G.s. I’m woefully ignorant technologically. I can’t even understand how my phone works. And I don’t think you really understand, either. There’s a whole lot of bluff going on. We are surrounded by machines and technology that we don’t understand at all. The Kindle, the iPod, Twitter. I know they exist, thanks to my grandchildren, who are virtuosos in those magical arts. All of that is based on Anglo-American, on an economy of speech and an economy of syntax. Let’s look more closely. If computers and the first computer languages— which go back to Claude Shannon in the U.S. and Alan Turing in Britain— had been developed in India, and if the first computer languages had been based on Hindu grammar, the world would be different. The planet would not be as we know it today. The new conception of minimal language and the natural structure of Anglo-American are coincidental to an extraordinary degree. Why does German drive people crazy, and allow so much in philosophy? Because verbs come at the very end of interminable sentences. That means you can hesitate, go backward, think “or, or, or,” and ultimately fall headfirst onto the verb. It enabled Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kant, and Heidegger to develop their style. It doesn’t work in English. English tells people not gifted in language (and let’s avoid

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harsh words like “illiterate” or “uneducated”): “You too can do anything you want.” There’s great promise in the eloquence of simple language. In many countries— France, for example— making grammatical mistakes or other blunders, groping around in the language, are viewed very negatively. But in America, lack of eloquence is associated with honesty: someone who speaks poorly must be honest, he’s not twisting the truth. That’s a very profound dialectic, the antithesis of the Roman and French civilizations. In France you have to know how to speak well, and great French leaders have often been amazingly eloquent. France produced a Bossuet, a de Gaulle, among many others. In America, the basic vocabulary is limited to around eight hundred words. Studies have been carried out by the Bell telephone company: with eighty words you can say just about everything you need to say. In other languages, the immense wealth of vocabulary defines a sort of social elite, an educational elite; it’s very different. l.a. So there are different ways of speaking, depending on the language. But also depending on one’s sex. I’m referring to another aspect of your work that’s not sufficiently talked about, the eros of language. What is the eros of language? What does it convey? In After Babel you touch on a theme that’s enthralling but has been little researched: you boldly suggest that there may be a female way of talking. G.s. I’m more and more convinced of that, and it’s certainly a very rich theme. There are some languages, in Northern Siberia, in some of the Altaic languages, but also in Southeast Asia, that comprise two languages, one for women and one for men. Women aren’t allowed to use certain syntactic forms, for

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example, though they must learn the male vocabulary to teach it to their sons. This is one of the ironies of the injustice of the female condition; but it is crystallized there, anchored in form. In our own languages, women spoke only among themselves for thousands of years. They didn’t participate in the political, social, or theological discussions held by men. Women had to develop frames of reference, allusions, understanding, that were almost organic and belonged to them alone. The entrance of women into the general discourse is quite recent. I personally experienced, at Cambridge and Oxford, an England where women left the table after dessert and withdrew to another room. The men stayed together to talk politics, to talk about “serious” things. That grotesque convention is gone now, thank God. But imagine! There are some colleges at Oxford and Cambridge— the practice is gradually disappearing— where at major events the men, in formal evening garb, dine at long tables on a dais in the refectory while the women eat in the gallery. The same is true in Jewish synagogues, and I often tease them about it. Female discourse must have very deep roots in the experience a woman has with a child— one that men can never completely share— and with sex, of course. I’ve talked about a “Don Juanism” in languages. What a woman might tell us about sex (I mean a woman who has made love in languages other than her own) would be huge. Once again, that’s another planet. The novel has widely become the domain of women. They are dominant in the form. And the novel is precisely the multilingual, polyglot form par excellence, using different levels of discourse and vocabulary. Virginia Woolf was acutely aware of this, and wrote about it. The major women novelists today have also discovered a misunderstanding connected to difference in gender; there’s a dark side to all that. Ultimately, we understand each other very poorly. All those stupid, vulgar jokes, such as

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“When a woman says no she means yes,” have a semiological foundation (that isn’t the right word, but I can’t think of a better one), an authentic and very profound base. In fact, the essential moments of an exchange are often “dialogues of the deaf,” as we say in French. And many men express an infantile sensibility (“No one understands me”), a resentment of female language, which is increasingly powerful. Who could have foreseen the electoral campaign that pitted Hillary Clinton against Condoleezza Rice, both talented women, both endowed with charisma far superior to that of the miserable herd of male candidates? And in other countries, too, the rise of women may unleash a brand-new political and sociological discourse. That’s going to be a great adventure! And I’m convinced, incidentally, that great art is the reflection of a lot of suffering or injustice. Which raises this infinitely thorny issue: why don’t women create more? l.a. Because men prevent them. G.s. Not at all! No one prevented Pascal’s sister from creating. She was taught math, but it was he who, at the age of nine, rediscovered all of Euclid’s theorems. No, no, it’s much more complicated than that. Today there are remarkable women novelists in Britain and France. Their numbers are growing. Women poets, though, remain rare. However, you have to admire two women: Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetaeva. My hypothesis, probably inane, is that if you can create life, if you can bear a child, it’s quite possible that aesthetic, moral, philosophical creation is of less importance. But this is only a hypothesis. Some women get angry when I say that. They can’t accept such a notion— and perhaps they are right. Will there be highly distinguished women in future generations? The question arises

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in the sciences. At Cambridge University (which leads the world in the sciences, along with MIT and Stanford), they are trying to recruit talented girls in elementary and secondary schools. The campaign is supported by the government, which gives scholarships. I wholly support this type of initiative, because the hurdles are much greater for girls than for boys. l.a. They’re lucky; in France, girls are more or less cast aside. G.s. We are trying, we are trying. l.a. There are more British feminists than French, obviously. G.s. French girls manage to pass their exams brilliantly, and then they fade, and we don’t know why. It’s a fascinating subject and shows us once again just how primitive the tools of social and collective psychology are. The tool set is still rudimentary. What have we really learned since the great Émile Durkheim? Where does that seed come from, that creative germ that proclaims, “I can change the world”? Perhaps women have too much common sense? Common sense, no matter what Descartes says, is not well distributed; and common sense is the very enemy of genius. Common sense is what weakens irrationality, arrogance. l.a. You’re quite a macho, George! G.s. No, I respect facts. I’m waiting, I’m waiting. l.a. You’re waiting, but there are women who have already existed, who exist right now, who are highly creative. So (and this may startle you), picking up your hypothesis that women don’t create because they have the ability to give birth, and that this

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prevents them from being creative, I’m going to cite three female philosophers. And, incidentally, none of these women ever had children— was that chance or necessity? In any case, they didn’t want to. They are Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, and Simone Weil. What do you think? G.s. I don’t agree with your assessment at all. I was unfortunate enough to meet Hannah Arendt. Very little of her work is first-rate, in my opinion. A woman who writes a huge volume on the origins of totalitarianism and doesn’t say a word about Stalin because her husband was a true Stalinist-Communist? No thank you. Simone Weil? General de Gaulle said, “She’s mad!” Which is an opinion difficult to refute. There is some remarkable stuff. l.a. And yet you read Simone Weil regularly. G.s. She writes some very fine things, but very little. And then, allow me a few blind prejudices. A woman who refuses to enter a Catholic church, saying she is too Jewish, at the time of Auschwitz? No thank you. It’s inexcusable! If there is a last judgment, that woman is in a lot of trouble. And who was the third? l.a. Simone de Beauvoir. G.s. She was a great woman. She was very lucky to live with Sartre! Very lucky! That was a truly intelligent choice. l.a. I think it was Jean-Paul Sartre who was lucky. G.s. That’s quite possible. Of course, she was greatly admired. There are certainly exceptions. But why don’t we find more

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women in the sciences, where there are all sorts of opportunities and where, at least in the U.S., women are positively encouraged? To say that the Nobel Committee members are misogynistic machos— no, I don’t believe that. Women are sought at the highest levels of the sciences; they are sought for the Fields Medal (the equivalent of the Nobel in mathematics). I have colleagues who say they really don’t understand what’s happening there. Maybe it will change. l.a. In your 2008 book My Unwritten Books, in the chapter that deals with love and women, you say that women have not been sufficiently creative in the history of humanity. But would you yourself have been as creative if you hadn’t encountered women you loved, whom you made love with, who loved you, and who, in the very act of loving, taught you things about language and the meaning of existence? G.s. That is absolutely true, but why don’t we have a book by a female Casanova, telling her side of the equation? That book doesn’t exist. Isn’t it time? The pornography of some French ladies— let’s not mention it. It’s childish rubbish. Rubbish can be very interesting and complex; it is in some great writers. But I’ve tried to show the “Don Juanism” in various languages, how each language has different taboos, different levels of slang (sexual slang is extremely rich), and constitutes a synthetic experience quite different from others. It’s an endless adventure. And if there is an expression I’m very proud of, it’s this: simultaneous translation is orgasmic. The opposite is also true: a true orgasm— which is very rare— is simultaneous translation. When I’m with a woman, she and I share a language at that delicate moment. It’s not at that moment that orgasm is reached. But the act of translation can be quite complex, quite erotic.

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l.a. Let’s not go back to the intellectual realm, let’s stay in the sexual realm, since you approach it head-on in your book. I don’t know who S. is, but with S., you do things: “dard, lance d’amour, manche, or nerf. Foutre or chevaucher were too commonplace to merit more than half a point. Three points for trou mignon or trou velu, a bonus for the proper construal of enfiler and la petite cuisson. After which, in various stages of undress, S. would prepare one of her Breton dishes, its sea-brine tang or touch of cognac dead easy for her.” The calmer you get, the harder you get. G.s. But I’m joyful, too. They say that joy is not my strong point, but that’s wrong. And remember what Nabokov said: “Only fiction speaks the truth.” Careful! l.a. Right, right; you’re talking about Lolita, but I want to get back to George, who is sitting in front of me. G.s. No, in that chapter, of course, there’s a lot of fiction and allegory. l.a. And yet you dedicated that last book to your wife; it was to get the S.’s out of mind. But there aren’t just S.’s, there is also A-M. So: “A-M took pride in the thicket of her ‘burning bush.’ Gardens are the scenes of assignation, of sexual witchcraft (as in Tasso). First my tongue was to brush, barely brush, the dew from the outer petal. Penetration could ensue only with almost unbearable ralentando and lightness. The violets had to be . . .” I’ll stop there, because it’s— G.s. But it’s very beautiful.

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l.a. But why did you spend so much time telling us all that? G.s. The chapter on the Don Juanism of languages had been living in a box since After Babel. I never published it because Oxford University Press would certainly not have allowed it at that time. But I always dreamed of it, and when I reached the point when I really couldn’t have cared less what others thought, I said to myself, “Okay! Make them smile, make them laugh! Laugh, yourself, at your memories.” And only Casanova has given us material here, a man who really lived polyglot love; it’s very rare. Nabokov, yes. I’m reading Ada or Ardor right now, there are magnificent moments of polyglot sexuality in Nabokov— which he also experienced, and how! Not, unfortunately, in Burgess, who spoke three languages and knew love, but in another way. There are writers much greater than I who have tackled this subject, but for once I wanted people to laugh at me, to smile at a writer who is always criticized for being too dark. l.a. Not only do we laugh, but we are enchanted by that penetrating analysis— forgive the pun— of your erotic adventures, and by the development of a theme that is essential in your work: the connections between sex and language. G.s. Yes, it is a huge subject, and we’ve hardly scratched the surface. We know almost nothing about the connection between the parasympathetic system (a component of the nervous system related to sexuality) and the cerebral centers governing language. And yet man is a creature of language, and human sexuality is permeated with linguistic elements to which new elements are added very rarely. To add to the erotic resources of a civilization is infinitely rare, even for a great writer. Proust

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did it with the little phrase faire cattleya. It changes everything. Nabokov does it with Lolita; since the book was published, Lolitas can be found on every street corner. No one ever noticed them before. It’s one of the most remarkable inventions of perception. But it is very unusual for new possibilities of living eros to be added like that to the repertoire of perceptions, human sensibility, and linguistic sensibility. We all have talismanic phrases, phrases that connect us to life. For me, one of them is René Char’s expression sereine crispation, in A une sérénité crispée (1951). That’s exactly what certain moments of love are like: a serene tightening. No one had put those two words together before Char. And it’s one of the phrases that truly define happiness in love. The tension, the peace— and the peace that is not a peace. But to express that takes genius. l.a. While reading your chapter on love, sexuality, and language, I get the impression that pleasure, the climax of the act of love, can’t be experienced if the act isn’t accompanied by words. G.s. I ask the question: what is the erotic life of deaf-mutes like? I have no answer. I can cite some half-dozen articles on blind people; studies have been done based on very interesting testimony. But nothing on deaf-mutes. How do they “speak” to each other? No doubt there are many individuals, perhaps millions, who experience the sex act in silence. It’s quite probable. It’s what I assume, even if there’s no way to prove it. But someone lucky enough to have a certain education, a certain upbringing, a certain aesthetic sense, what happens? At the Institute in Princeton, young mathematicians would go home

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in the evening and couldn’t tell their wives about their work. Not a word. But one wife explained, “When things are going well in bed, some nights, it’s the only way I know he’s had a creative day.” She was right. It’s very honest reasoning. Of course, we don’t have to use words to make someone else feel our joy, or disappointment, or sadness. But there are extreme cases that interest me a lot: couples in an intimate relationship who don’t share a common language. l.a. I’m thinking of what you said about chess: that anywhere in the world, when you are traveling, you can go into a café and immediately be understood through that language. G.s. Remember that in chess the rules are fixed: there’s no need for translation; you don’t even have to introduce yourself; there’s a marvelous anonymity of sharing, an immediate connection. As for desire, yes, it can be mute. Everyone knows what love at first sight means; it can’t be explained. It happens, it certainly happens: a look, a gesture that can change a life. l.a. You deal with this business of a mute language in The Poetry of Thought. What does silence mean? G.s. Ever since my first works, especially Language and Silence, I’ve been trying to understand what happens where speech is no longer involved. We’ve already spoken of mathematics and music as the two great voices of silence. I had a revelatory experience when I was very young, at Princeton: a door was open and a group of mathematicians was working at the blackboard at a dizzying speed, chalking up topological algebraic formulas. There were Japanese, Russians, and Americans. Complete

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silence. Because they didn’t have a common language, they couldn’t understand each other linguistically. But they understood each other perfectly in the silence of their thoughts. That was a revelation. There are all kinds of communication outside and beyond speech. Mallarmé tried to make us understand what the white spaces between lines are; there are deliberate silences in music. I’ve tried to understand a bit better, too, why there are some things one shouldn’t even try to say. The ultimate experience of the Shoah, but also some moments of eros and language— these are themes I’ve worked on a lot. Every language has its own eros, its own sexual jargon; every language has its erotic jokes. But there are those who say that in true love silence must reign. There are cultures that encourage erotic expression, and others where it’s taboo. I continue to be enthralled by the exchange between the possibilities of the spoken and the possibilities of love, of climax. We can hardly ever assign a precise birth date to a great intellectual movement, but in the case that interests me, it must have been around 1910–12, on an afternoon at the home of the famous father of Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa (who at the time were the two major beauties in London). The brilliant, humorous, satiric writer Lytton Strachey arrives and has a cup of tea. Vanessa comes into the room, wearing a gorgeous white summer dress. There’s a spot on the dress, and he utters the word “sperm.” From what we know, it was the first time the word “sperm” had been said in public, out loud, in an educated, upper-middle-class circle. It would have been inconceivable. From that moment, everything became possible. There are linguistic crises associated with modern sexual liberation, and with the liberation from taboos. It would be

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interesting to ask what is taboo today. What would be unacceptable, what would be forbidden? l.a. In The Poetry of Thought (2011), you ask a question that’s in the forefront of all your work: “Is philosophy that which is not said?” In this dialectic of language and silence, where do you situate the philosophical enterprise? G.s. All my life I’ve been jealous of mathematicians and musicians. Why? Because they know a truly universal language, as we’ve just mentioned. The problem with languages is that we have to translate all the time. When you and I are talking, we are constantly translating things within the same language: we are trying to understand each other. No one uses the same words in exactly the same way. There are as many words as there are human beings. So I asked how a philosopher, who, after all, seeks universal truths, copes with the resistance of language. And this, I believe, is where the philosopher will encounter great writers. Conversely, those who struggle with languages and who tell us of their struggle— every poem is a struggle with the word— will encounter the problems of the philosopher. I wrote The Poetry of Thought, a book I’ve thought about almost all my life, because I’ve lived among philosophers as well as great poets. France has a magnificent tradition of thinkers who are also among the greatest of writers, great writers that any philosopher should take seriously. And here— you’re going to laugh because it sounds old-fashioned— I’m thinking of the philosopher Alain (his nom de plume), who is still intensely alive for me. He, too, always said, “Reading Stendhal or Balzac is a philosophical exercise.” We can also think of the man who dominated our

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youth, Jean-Paul Sartre. What did Sartre want? “I want to be Spinoza and Stendhal!” It was an almost unachievable ambition, but he got close. l.a. How did Jean-Paul Sartre, when he spoke no other language than French, succeed in building his huge philosophical, literary, intellectual, and political oeuvre? Isn’t he a counterexample of your Babel theory? G.s. Descartes did it through his Latin, Leibniz through his Latin. Being a monoglot doesn’t preclude being universal; it’s just one aspect of literary and philosophical genius. But consider this! Sartre’s great philosophical building blocks—who is still reading them? And who read them at the time? l.a. In my generation we read them, as many others did. G.s. Yes, but not abroad. There is a very Parisianist side to Sartre’s existentialism. There’s a wonderfully local side; you could say the local is the center. Very well, but that isn’t a given. Camus certainly had a far greater international influence than Sartre. We forget that The Plague and The Myth of Sisyphus were translated all over the world, in China and Japan, into Asian languages, into African languages, and so on. That’s something else: it’s the genius of the narrator, the creator of myth. l.a. So you are one of those who rooted for Camus in the battle that pitted Sartre and Camus against each other throughout the twentieth century? G.s. Oh, no, you have to read them both! And above all, you have to read Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who was so upright, had such

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integrity of thought and such fundamental honesty—which is not always the case with Sartre. l.a. The power of mathematics, of music, of a certain form of poetry of thought is, if I understand you correctly, that they achieve the universal without language, without requiring translation to be accessible to all. So, to have to be translated implies weakness? Can everything actually be translated? G.s. A true work should resist translation, even if there are counterexamples of that statement. It seems that Hamlet, performed in Swahili in a mental hospital, is amazingly powerful and convincing. Shakespeare is translated into all languages. Japanese films of Shakespeare seem to me more important, more profound, than our own. Still, some giants can’t be translated. Any Russian will tell you, with tears in his eyes, “You will never understand a word of Pushkin, even in the finest translation.” There are certainly great poets, and even writers of prose, who can’t easily be translated. A great work is one that always, mysteriously, tells the reader at the end, “You must begin again. This was the first try. Let’s try again.” Look at Beckett, who manages to say everything— you can get insanely envious of Beckett— who writes, “You have to fail better.” With each new try, I fail better. That’s what I’ve always said to my students: at our next reading, let’s try to fail better. l.a. I’ve heard that when you taught Shakespeare, you sang him to your students. Is that true? G.s. Teaching Shakespeare is attempting to say in each class, “This is theatre, ladies and gentlemen.” The idea of teaching

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Shakespeare in a university seminar, in a lecture hall— he would have been horrified! For me, he’s a supreme actor, a script writer who would have been thrilled with television. Imagine what Shakespeare would have done with television! He was essentially a man of the theatre. He starts over, he manipulates five versions of the same scene. We teach him artificially. What does that mean? He must be acted out at every moment. You have to act out a scene, and then, calmly, look back at every possible interpretation word for word. A great actor or a great theatre director— someone like Peter Brook— is the best possible critic. These are masters of Shakespearean exegesis, not professors. And the dramatic dimension, the problematics of the ephemeral demanded by film, wouldn’t have scared Shakespeare at all. If he had been told there would be twenty-five thousand editions of his works, he would have been astonished. Everything changes, everything changes— but not in literature. Everything changed on the day Beethoven said, “I am Beethoven.” Shakespeare never said, “I am Shakespeare”; he may have been the last person not to know who he was. What a happy man! He didn’t know. Beethoven knew he was Beethoven. The beginning of the persona creatis, the titan who creates from his inner, private genius, came later: Romanticism brought it. And ever since Romanticism it’s been harder, in my opinion, to understand great works that might have been anonymous. “Did Homer exist?” is a question of no interest. The work is there, and what would have made Shakespeare very happy, what would have moved him, was not so much to be acknowledged as a universal genius but to know that something of his plays survived. With Mozart it isn’t clear. What did Mozart think of Mozart? We have no idea. Once Beethoven arrived, the persona of the genius, the titan, as he was called, be-

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gan to impose itself. Just go to Paris and take a look at Rodin’s Balzac. That amazing statue would have been inconceivable before the modern discovery of gigantic, Promethean personalities. Shakespeare doesn’t have a good monument, incidentally; there’s not one good statue of Shakespeare. And the only two portraits considered authentic are not really believed. We don’t know what he looked like, we’ve no idea. It’s fascinating, but his lifetime was just about the last moment when a great work could be anonymous. We often describe a literary, aesthetic work as unique. I don’t know, I’m not sure. It’s likely. We can’t imagine another Rimbaud, another Mallarmé. Once you reach modernity with all its creative neuroses, with Rimbaud’s cry “I is another” ( je est un autre), you can no longer assert, as the scientist does, “Tomorrow someone else will make my discovery if I don’t do it myself.” In the sciences, the collectivity is good fortune. Even if you are a quite mediocre scientist— and believe me, they exist— but are in a good team, the escalator goes up, the flying carpet takes off, you’re carried along. And next Monday we may know something we didn’t know this Monday. The arrow points to the future. For us, a contrario, 90 percent of what we teach is from the past.

“God Is Kafka’s Uncle” From the Book to Books

l.a. There’s an obsession, almost an affliction, an incantation in all of your work: the book, the importance of the book, the importance of the continuity of the book in culture; the importance of the book to sustain us, for our existence— mundane, spiritual, and metaphysical. For you, I think. there is only one book. G.s. That was also true of Mallarmé among others. In AngloSaxon culture, the Bible is obviously the primary point of reference. I began reading the Bible in the great King James Version. That said, I realize that over the years I’ve greatly overestimated the presence of the book in human life. Consider this. We know of no society on Earth that doesn’t have music. Not one. Even the most unsophisticated societies,

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economically or politically, even societies starving in the Gobi desert, have music, and often very complex music. But no written literature. Written literature is very rare in this world. What is spoken, told, far surpasses all of what is written down. Homer is very close to Flaubert and Joyce. Twenty thousand years before him, stories were told that would become the foundations of the Homeric epic. Writing is much closer to us. It means belonging to one of various high civilizations, mainly European, Slavic, and AngloSaxon, with important contributions, of course, from China and Japan; but everywhere in the world the spoken word has always been the natural form for teaching religion, the narration of memory. We speak, we tell: memory is the greatest library. Writing is fairly new, historically speaking; literary writing goes back to Gilgamesh— the great epic poem from ancient Babylon— and continues more or less up to today. It’s not at all clear, what with modern electronics, information technology, electronic archives with memories that go a million times beyond human literary memory or grammars and lexicons, that we will continue to read. l.a. In your opinion, what constitutes a great work, a great piece of writing? How do certain works survive over time? G.s. A great piece of writing can wait centuries before being recognized. I’m thinking of Walter Benjamin’s comment: “A book can wait a thousand years unread until the right reader happens to come along. Books are in no hurry. An act of creation is in no hurry; it reads us, it privileges us infinitely.” The book will come, the poem isn’t in danger; readers are. A great literary

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text incarnates the possibility of a renewal, a constant questioning, but it doesn’t exist to be the object of a university seminar or an act of deconstruction; it exists to upend natural relationships. Shakespeare isn’t just a pretext for little Mr. Steiner to spend his life trying to read him, passionately explaining him, constantly going back to him. What is inexhaustible in great literature, and the same goes for great music or pictorial art, is that at every moment in your personal life the work changes in you. That’s why I have a passion, an obsession— to the point of really annoying people— for learning things by heart. What you learn by heart, no one can take from you. It stays in you and grows, it’s transformed. A great text that you memorized in high school changes with you, changes as you age, changes with circumstances; you understand it differently. Some people claim that memorizing literary works is an arbitrary exercise, a linguistic game; I don’t buy that. l.a. You’ve spoken of a suitcase that should always be kept open in anticipation of having to leave and rebuild a life somewhere else; in that suitcase maybe there is a Bible. The Bible you know by heart, that you’ve written about; a Bible full of enigmas. For example, you like to comment on the passage where Yahweh is standing in front of Moses and orders Moses to turn around and press himself against the crevice in the rock, because you see a specific meaning in it. G.s. The Bible is full of totally primitive and archaic anthropomorphisms. You can compile— and it’s been done, by the way— an anthology of the horrors, the madness, in the Bible. The Book of Joshua is just about unreadable, full of racist hatred, militant hatred. Everything is in the Bible. At the risk of

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looking foolish, I will admit one thing: I’m not religious, I’m probably a Voltairean— my father was, too— but I don’t understand how certain parts of the Bible have made their way to us. I don’t understand how the words of God were imagined, said, written down in the Book of Job, certain passages of Ecclesiastes, or a fair number of Psalms. Can we conceive of a person waiting for lunch or going to tea after writing down what God said in the Book of Job? But there’s no alternative: a man or a woman, a woman or a man, must have written it down. And yet I don’t understand. And I envy fundamentalists, for whom the question isn’t even raised, for whom the Bible is the dictated Word of God. I know it’s absurd, but for a fair number of biblical passages I’m unable to propose a rational, cognitive analysis, a textual explication of the slightest value. In the New Testament, in chapters 9–12 of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, Saint Paul (who was the greatest Jewish journalist in the history of Jewish journalism) tells a wonderful story that has given rise to thousands of interpretations, each of them reiterating the problem of the human presence on Earth. But I say nothing because, again, I can hear fundamentalists saying, “It was divine inspiration,” as it was for Saint John of Patmos: “It’s the voice of God who speaks.” So I have no response. Even Martin Heidegger can’t help me here, with his immediacy of language in relation to the “being of the Being,” which he contends we have lost since the pre-Socratics. Thanks, Mr. Heidegger, but you’re kidding, because the sun of the Being, as you call it, goes back, let’s say, some seven thousand years— which is nothing, less than the blink of an eye in human psychobiological history. There isn’t a trace of evidence that our linguistic nature, our linguistic soul, has changed, that at a certain moment the sun of the Being disappeared.

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So I simply can’t respond to this question. But I don’t stop asking it, because there are moments in the Old and New Testaments that seem superhuman, to put it naively. l.a. Do you read the Bible regularly? G.s. Yes, I do, because it contains so much incomparable poetry, irony— so much of the incomprehensible. In Ecclesiastes, almost every sentence is a proverb, and every proverb is an entire work. I love the Kafkian ironies, the jokes God allows himself— for example, at the moment when Jonah gets mad at him: “You told me to go to Nineveh to announce that they are all going to die. You changed your mind, and here I am like a fool, wrong. How can you do that to me?” That’s fantastic! It’s the cry of every intellectual, every Buddhist monk, every teacher, every member of the Académie française! Since the story was first written down, it has portrayed the egomania of the human intellect. And God plays with it, he pardons the people of Nineveh. What humor! Jonah’s cries of resentment, his anger at having been stripped bare because Cassandra is out of a job! There are many moments that don’t make you laugh— there’s not much laughter in the Bible— but do make you smile. And smiling is more interesting and complicated than laughing, I think. The Bible is inexhaustible. Even in the historical parts, I love rereading certain passages. Take Saul’s visit to the old witch of Endor in I Samuel 28; after she predicts catastrophe and death for him and his comrades, the episode ends very simply, with the words, “Then they rose up and went away that night.” From that we have all of Western literature, we have Macbeth. Each time that I look at an episode in the Bible, I say to myself, “But there’s something new here!” The document is incredibly rich. Something that makes me very sad about contemporary educa-

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tion, which I define as planned amnesia, is that the Bible is read and understood less and less; or it is taught as a catechism— which is the worst thing, of course. We forget just how much we are children of that text, its importance in the history of the West. l.a. You mentioned earlier the uncertain future of the practice of reading. Do you think the book and reading are endangered? G.s. There will always be readers. In the Middle Ages, during the so-called barbarian invasions, people sought refuge in monasteries, where they still knew how to read. We don’t know how many monks could read, but there were some. Very few, however, knew how to write, almost none. Being literate is a fragile condition. The Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the nineteenth century were the high points of that condition, the very richest moments. The private library— I’m thinking of a Montaigne, an Erasmus, or a Montesquieu— is becoming a rare luxury. Modern apartments don’t allow for large libraries. Today, in Britain, small bookstores are closing one after the other, it’s become a nightmare. In Italy, a country I adore, between Milan in the north and Bari in the south, there are only kiosks, no serious bookstores. No one reads in Italy. In rural Spain and Portugal they read very little. Wherever Catholicism has reigned, reading has not been encouraged. Reading, which is a form— let’s face it— for the upper classes, the ideal of reading, education through reading, developed rapidly and experienced miracles at certain times. In the nineteenth century, for example, some now classic writers (Victor Hugo, Dickens) were best-sellers. In Russia, reading meant surviving humanly and politically; the relationship be-

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tween censorship and great literature is complex and creative in countries of despotism and political “backwardness.” Today I’m told that young people don’t read anymore or only read digests or comic books. Our exams, even at the university level, are increasingly based on a choice of texts, anthologies, digests. The very title Reader’s Digest, known worldwide, is abhorrent. Here’s a crude definition of “digest” for you: someone else chews the food and digests it; the digest is what comes out the other end. Reading requires certain preconditions. We don’t pay enough attention to them. First, it assumes a lot of silence. Silence has become the most precious, luxurious thing in the world. In our cities (which function 24/7 now: New York, Chicago, and London are alive night and day), silence comes at a very high price. I’m not attacking America; my children and grandchildren live there. It’s the future of humankind, sad to say. I’m not attacking it. They are more honest in their statistics than we are. According to their recent figures, 85 percent of adolescents can’t read unless they are listening to music at the same time, generating what psychologists have called the flicker effect, the effect of flashes of light: they have the TV on, within view, while they claim to be reading. No one can read a serious text in those conditions. It’s only in silence, the most complete silence possible, that you can read a page of Pascal, Baudelaire, Proust, or anyone else. The second condition: a fairly private space. In a house, a room, even a small one, where you can be with your book, where you can have that dialogue without anyone else in the room. Here we’re touching on a theme that’s very little understood. The wonder of music is that it can be shared with others. You can listen in a group, you can listen with people you love, you can listen with friends. Music is a language of participation—

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but not reading. You can of course read out loud, and we should do it a lot more than we do now. The demise of reading to children, and even reading out loud among adults, is shocking. The great novels of the nineteenth century were often meant to be read out loud, and I can prove it: there are whole pages of Balzac, Hugo, George Sand, whose cadence and structural rhythm have a developed oral quality; they are meant to be listened to, grasped. I was extremely lucky, my father read to me before I could understand (that’s the secret), before I could grasp the meaning. So silence, and a private space. And third, a terribly elitist condition (but I like the word “elite”; it means that some things are better than others and means nothing else): to have books. The great public libraries were the foundation of education and culture in the nineteenth century and essential for many thinkers in the twentieth century. But to have a collection of books that are yours, that you own, that are not borrowed, is crucial. Why? Because you have to have a pencil in hand. l.a. I think I’ve read that you distinguish two types of people: those who read with a pencil, and those who don’t. G.s. Yes. And I repeat: you can pretty much define Jews as people who always read with a pencil in hand because they are convinced they will be able to write a book better than the one they are reading. This is one of the great cultural forms of arrogance of my small, tragic people. You have to make notes, you have to underline, you have to wrestle with the text by writing in the margin, “How stupid! What an idea!” There’s nothing more fascinating than the marginal notes of great writers. These notes are a living dialogue. Erasmus said, “Anyone who doesn’t have mutilated books hasn’t

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read them.” That remark is in extremis but there is a lot of truth to it. To have the complete works of a writer is to have a guest in your home whom you’ve thanked while excusing and even liking that guest’s failings. And years later, through snobbery and intellectual arrogance, you try to hide the traces of bad readings or false interpretations. But that’s idiotic! When my father bought me Les Trophées by José Maria de Heredia from one of the booksellers along the banks of the Seine— it cost very little, no one wanted it— the doors of poetry opened up to me. And I have, here, my first edition of Heredia. Even now I continue to feel enormously indebted to that stiff, pompous, academic fellow, who was nonetheless a great poet. The discovery of a book can change your life. I was once (I’ve often told this story) changing trains, at the Frankfurt train station, and— this was Germany, where the book stalls have good books— I saw a book by an author I wasn’t familiar with: Paul Celan. His name intrigued me. I opened the book right there at the book stall and fell upon the first line: “In the rivers, north of the future . . .” I almost missed my train. And my life was changed. I knew there was something huge there that would inhabit my life. One’s experience with a book is the most dangerous, the most passionate, there can be. A book can corrupt, of course, but it’s absurd not to say so openly. There are lessons of sadism in books, lessons of political cruelty, of racism. And because I believe that God is Kafka’s uncle (I’m convinced of this), he doesn’t make life easy for us. Sartre— who certainly didn’t like paying compliments— is alleged to have said, shortly before he died, “There is only one of us who will survive: Céline.” Sartre said that. Proust and Céline, of course, divide the modern French language between them. There isn’t a third. And the fact that God allowed the writer Céline— an anti-Semitic mur-

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derer, a hooligan, a gangster of the soul (he wasn’t like that in his personal life, which adds to the complications)— to create a new language and then write D’un château l’autre and Nord (two Shakespearean masterpieces, in my opinion) makes me sad. And grateful and angry at the same time. And I try to keep away from books that spew destructive venom. I am against all forms of censorship. Both for obvious intellectual reasons and for practical reasons. The censor ultimately has no authority. Take the kind of pedophilia we now see in the movies, on TV, in literature, in comic books; it’s hugely popular. In my opinion, whoever touches a child inappropriately is damned. Damned in the full theological, human, moral, positivist, scientific sense— whatever you like. So here, perhaps, I might be willing to take the very serious risk of censorship. But it wouldn’t work. It’s futile: you censor something, and ten million copies circulate underneath someone’s coat. Pornographic samizdat has been part of our history since Adam and Eve. Which doesn’t mean I don’t want to stop the wave of cruelty cresting over children. It’s a deluge. l.a. And it’s manifested more in images than in the written word today. G.s. Masturbating to the written word is much more powerful. For some people, words are far more powerful than images; for many others, it’s images, or the combination of the two. My father, with his demonic intelligence, placed Proust’s A la recherche just a bit too high on the shelf. He knew perfectly well I would go looking for it. Of course, I did. The shock for me was in attempting to understand the term faire cattleya, which expresses Swann’s complete lust for Odette. My world turned. Vertigo. No image could have had such power, because I didn’t

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understand it. What I imagined cattleya to mean, I daren’t tell you— l.a. Oh please do! G.s. It was so rich, so rich for a child. It was a dark fairy tale, the whole business. Each person’s sensibility is very different here. Let me add a big question, which we can leave open because I can’t begin to answer it: Can music induce a perverted sadism? It’s a very difficult question. l.a. Going back to reading, when you reread Plato or Parmenides (I believe you read Parmenides every morning) in the way you do— untiringly, as if a text were never fully exhausted— is that a Talmudic way of reading? G.s. The element of surprise is constantly renewed. We have spoken of certain biblical passages, we could also speak of Platonic works, we could talk about Descartes’ Meditations; the amazement that someone much like you and me not only could think as he did but could actually express his thoughts. We know nothing of the billions of thoughts that have been lost forever for lack of a means of expression. But at the same time I often wonder whether this constant return to the past is not itself a sign of age, a sign of fatigue. There are now important poststructuralist writings, post-Derrida, that are beyond me; I simply don’t understand them, I don’t know what they’re talking about, what they’re saying. And that’s a very bad sign; it’s a sign that certain attention muscles are getting tired. Attention is muscular, there’s no doubt about it. It’s neurophysiological. Concentration very slowly begins to wane. But it doesn’t matter; I’ve had wonderful moments.

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l.a. The way you see it, reading seems to be a perpetual attempt, sometimes aborted, at finding accord with oneself; and at the same time, if I’ve understood you correctly, it’s a sort of moral duty. And in Les Logocrates (2008) you say that we have a responsibility toward books. What kind of responsibility? G.s. First, we have a responsibility to preserve them, and I mean physically. In the fire at the Sarajevo library we lost sixteen hundred fine incunabula manuscripts that had not yet been reproduced and are now lost forever. We lost, with the socalled Albigensian Bible, what may have been one of the greatest documents on human truth. We don’t know anything about it, and we will never be able to recover it. So the first thing we must do is give books a chance to survive. Our second responsibility is what Rilke says in his great sonnet on the ancient torso of Apollo in the Louvre: “Look at that torso. What does it say to you? Change your life!” Similarly, a book, a piece of music, or a painting says to me, “Change your life! Take me seriously. I’m not here to make your life easier.” And Kafka tells us that a book should be the ax that breaks up the frozen sea within us; otherwise it’s not worth reading. That’s an exaggeration; we should read lighter works sometimes, books that give us a bit of comfort. But it’s also important to respond to a book by way of the dialogue I just mentioned. It’s getting harder and harder. Let me quote a figure that gives me the chills: in good London bookstores a new novel has nineteen days to live. If after nineteen days there hasn’t been any press, media attention, news that it’s becoming a best-seller, the booksellers announce, “Sorry, we don’t have room for it,” and it’s either returned to the publisher, sold to remainder houses who sell it for a third of the price, pulped, or tossed into the garbage. Being a young writer today, a young poet, a young first nov-

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elist, is a daunting challenge. You need nerves of steel. Masterpieces often develop very, very slowly. I keep mentioning Stendhal: “It will take me a hundred years.” He was right, he had confidence. But there are many examples of that happening. And the greatest privilege of a critic, or a scholar, is to rediscover what has fallen into oblivion. So we have major responsibilities, toward the miracle that a book is, and in the struggle against complete commercialization. Political censorship or commercial censorship: it’s difficult to know which is worse. l.a. Isn’t the link between the Book and books in general the mystery of all creation, which you love to recall, the need for transcendence that goes along with that mystery? G.s. Those who create don’t know how or why. What triggers great creation? I couldn’t say. May God protect us from the vulgarity of neurophysiology on this subject; by describing a web of synapses, biologists aren’t going to explain where the lightning flash that ignites creation comes from. In an elementary school in Bern, children five to six years old were taken on an annual picnic. They were led to an aqueduct and told, “Draw the aqueduct!” God, what a mess! One child drew the aqueduct and put shoes on all the pillars; ever since then— he was six years old— all the aqueducts in the world have been walking. His name was Paul Klee. The same is true of Van Gogh’s cypresses: there are no longer any cypresses that aren’t torches. He was the one who saw that cypresses were torches. Or Mozart, who changed three chords in a pretty melody of Salieri’s and turned it into a splendid piece of music. It was a painful injustice. That’s the difference; I know difference of that kind, and I teach it to my students. I tell them, “If you were to become cre-

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ators, it would be my greatest joy.” In fifty-two years I’ve had four students who were much more talented than I, stronger, much more intelligent, and they are my best reward. Perhaps— though I hope not— we’ll one day have a neurochemistry of creation: we’ll understand which electrical arcs in Picasso’s brain made possible the revolution he started. So far— and may this continue— it remains a mystery. l.a. In reading your work, listening to you, I sometimes get the impression that, for you, civilization stopped in the seventeenth century, in its all-encompassing perception of the human being’s potential to be in accord with him- or herself and with a sense of the beautiful. G.s. On the contrary, as a critic I’ve opened doors for quite recent writers, introducing Paul Celan to British readers, for example. I constantly read the newest works and try to pave the way for them. But a civilization without the possibility of transcendence— what Nietzsche calls the mysterium tremendum of man, what Heidegger (with caution) attempts to formulate— a civilization in which we can no longer say, like Wittgenstein, “If I could have, I would have dedicated my philosophical inquiries to God,” a civilization that has lost those possibilities is certainly, in my opinion, in serious danger.

The Humanities Can Make Us Inhuman the twentIeth Century has morally weakened humanIty

l.a. Among the social sciences born in the last century, there’s one discipline you criticize harshly: you have a scathing repulsion for psychoanalysis, notably for the work of Sigmund Freud. Can you explain your relationship to psychoanalysis? G.s. First of all, your question is extremely French. In Britain, no one cares. And the fact that Britain is so far ahead of France in the sciences means something here. Your question is totally Parisian. There are only two cities where psychoanalysis is not a joke: Paris and New York. And for interesting sociological reasons. For me, Freud was a great writer of German, and it’s significant that he won the Goethe Prize in literature. He was one of the great narrators of mythologies, and he was a great friend of

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bourgeois Jewish women in Vienna in his time. But no one nowadays has met anyone resembling Freud’s “patients.” No one has met anyone who has been cured by psychoanalysis. Karl Kraus has described psychoanalysis as the only cure that invents its own illness. In my opinion, dignity in men and women— this is why I wrote my book on Antigone— is having the strength to carry your pain yourself. For me, the idea of putting it in someone else’s hands, for money, is crazy. I’m with Socrates, who abhorred the idea of being paid for teaching. To unload on someone else, for payment, appalls me. It means you’re taking yourself inexcusably seriously. After all, in death camps, or under bombardment, in the true horrors of life, on the battlefield, there is no psychoanalysis; you can find almost unlimited strength in yourself, almost unlimited sources of human dignity. To receive absolution without a god doesn’t make sense; it’s like confession without a priest. If you believe in God, at least you can say that your listener is God. That’s not so bad, and at least the person isn’t charging by the hour or, like Lacan, by each five-minute period. Right? France (the land of Les Précieuses ridicules) is one of the only places to allow such nonsense. Human suffering, which is a terrible thing, a mystery, is what I think gives us our dignity. Isn’t it striking that French doesn’t have a word to translate the English “privacy” (the private space within the soul; the fact of having a private inner life)? Privauté is an archaic word that has been lost, and it doesn’t really have the same meaning. l.a. How about intimité? G.s. No. “Privacy” means saying to others “leave me alone.” It defines a responsibility toward what we are in our own suffer-

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ing. I’ve tried, Laure, believe me, with all my strength, to desire my mother sexually and to make an enemy of my father; I’ve tried and it hasn’t worked at all. I have no desire for my mother. l.a. Is that a Jewish joke you’re telling? G.s. My father was my best friend right up to the end. And today my son is my best friend, even though we don’t agree on anything; but it’s political and social disagreement that solidifies our love and allows us to laugh together. So, for me, the idea of an oedipal complex comes from a faulty reading of Sophocles. It doesn’t work, it’s an invention. I’ve tried it and failed. I don’t believe in it. And the expression faire son œdipe exists only in French. It’s a hollow and arrogant expression. No, I’ve not “made my Oedipus.” That isn’t to deny that Freud— obviously a giant— profoundly changed our culture. But if there’s no such thing as a private life anymore, if today we reveal our sex life to everyone, if there are programs where naked men and women make love in front of millions of viewers, if confession and selfrevelation have become the very conditions of discourse, we must hold Freud largely responsible. Which is ironic, because he was the most puritanical of men. He was the most bourgeois Jew there was. Never forget that this great man wrote to his wife that after the age of forty-five there is no more sex life, it’s indecent. And what is the greatest thing Freud ever said? In 1938, in exile in Britain, his civilization in free fall, he asked, “What do women want?” To which I can respond (avoiding a long Jewish joke): what a roundabout route you’ve taken! Not that I don’t read him with gratitude and passion. But the idea of airing my dirty laundry to someone? No thanks! l.a. It’s well known that the theory of the subconscious has never convinced you. And yet— is it because you’re getting

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older, George? You seemed much less hard on Sigmund Freud in The Poetry of Thought. Clearly, you’ve reread Freud recently, notably Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and finally you’ve found in his work some understanding of the fear of nothingness, philosophical concepts that have been clarified by Kierkegaard among others. I have the impression that your relationship with Freud has mellowed. G.s. Wait, here’s something that may amuse you, but it’s important because it deals with dreams. Of course there’s a subconscious, sexual element in dreams, and Freud had the genius to find intricate traces of that element. But I’ll give you one example out of a thousand, showing that historical and contingent circumstances are involved in dreams more often than sex. It’s an anecdote from the papers of a Berlin doctor in 1933–34. A patient comes to see her and says, “I don’t know what’s happening, but I can’t raise my right arm. It’s terrible.” The doctor asks Freud his opinion and learns that it’s a classic case of fear of castration. Rubbish! It was obviously fear of having to do the “heil Hitler” salute in public. And when the doctor figured that out, she told the patient, “Study the great dreams of Descartes.” These are dreams anchored in history, in everyday life. Nothing to do with wanting to sleep with mommy. l.a. In many of your books you develop a theory of how the word “humanity” evolved. In Real Presences you say we are living in the age of humankind’s fall from grace. What do you mean by that? G.s. Think of this: while Pol Pot was literally burying alive a hundred thousand men, women, and children in Cambodia, the world did nothing. Britain sold arms to the Khmer Rouge while knowing what they were doing. We didn’t know about Ausch-

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witz, or only very few knew. Very, very few, really. But in the case of Pol Pot, everyone knew, it was on TV every evening. In our world, a world in which human beings built and codified Auschwitz and the Gulag— it’s estimated that there were seventy million victims of Stalin and Lenin— we’ve lowered the bar, the minimum of what it means to be human; the bar has gone way down. By way of proof, I offer this simple statement: there are no TV or radio reports of recent atrocities that we can’t believe. And that’s something quite new, as I can demonstrate. In 1914 and 1915, when we were told that Germans had cut off the hands of Belgians, we knew a week later that it wasn’t true, that it was just a bad propaganda joke. There are many other examples. Today, there’s nothing we wouldn’t believe. A report of an atrocity might prove to be false, but that’s not the point; our first reaction would be, “Oh dear! Yes— and tomorrow it will be worse.” Not to mention our role in Rwanda; there are so many other places. In Indonesia there are massacres every day; in Myanmar the condition of children, men, women is terrible. More children are enslaved today than at any other period in history. Many millions of small children, nine or ten years old, work fourteen hours a day in Chinese, Pakistani, and Indian factories. But we do nothing. This is what I mean by lowering the bar of what it is to be human. The innate barbarity in humans was the subject of my very first book. I was eighteen, I think. It was called Sur le triste miracle. In the evening the officers played Schubert and sang Mozart; in the morning they tortured people in Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, and Majdanek. At first I didn’t understand; I sought help to understand; I tried to study all responses to the question. British pragmatism, that rather brutal common sense, a bit naive but healthy, says that any human being can quickly be turned into a torturer. But I’m not sure, even though

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there are experiments that seem to confirm it. And is it the same human being who played Schubert the night before? I had the privilege of knowing Arthur Koestler, who was irritated by questions of this kind. He would say, “But there are two brains: the ethical, moral back-brain, which is only just developing in humans, and a huge cortex of predation, cruelty, sadism.” There aren’t two brains; that was completely made up. Nor is it an answer. To say that it was only possible in Germany that music lovers could perform atrocities is quite wrong. It’s possible just about everywhere. And I will finish my life, quite soon, without finding a response that satisfies me. Not one. Nothing that explains the basic inhumanity at the heart of the humanities (the “humanities”— what an arrogant expression!). And so I’ve tried, in my most recent writings (it came very late) to propose a hypothesis on the basis of what I call the Cordelia syndrome, from the name of Lear’s daughter. In the afternoon I work with my students on acts 3– 5 of Lear; when Lear enters, carrying his dead child in his arms, and yells “never” five times (“Never, never, never, never never”), it’s the end of language. I try to read that with my students. I know those scenes by heart, and they live in me. But when I’m on my way home and hear someone yell “Help” in the street, my ears might hear, but I’m not listening. That’s the difference between hearing and listening. I should run to help; but I don’t because what’s actually occurring in the street has a sort of disorder to it, a contingency that doesn’t reach the transcendent immensity of the suffering that is described in a great work of art— music, painting, or poem. Is it possible— I’ve formulated this hypothesis after sixty years of teaching and a love of letters— that the humanities can make us inhuman? That far from making us better (to put it naively), far from sharpening our moral sensibility, they dampen it? That they distance us from life and give

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us such fictional intensity that reality seems pale compared to them? If it is possible, I don’t know where to turn. How can we find a way to experience great literature, great paintings, great music, great theatre, and come out of the experience more sensitive to the human suffering we may encounter? There must be a way, there must be people who can do that. I’m not sure that I know any. If you go see a film in the middle of the day— I’ve done that when I’m traveling, to kill a few hours— and it’s still daylight when you come out of the theatre, you feel disoriented and even a bit nauseated. It’s hard to describe. And I wonder, when we come out of a great experience with art, whether we don’t have similar moments of nausea and unreality that prevent us from being more effective human beings. I know one thing: the death camps, Stalin’s camps, the great massacres, didn’t come from the Gobi desert; they came from the high civilizations of Russia and Europe, from the very center of our greatest artistic and philosophical pride; and the humanities put up no resistance. On the contrary, in too many cases distinguished artists collaborated cheerfully with inhumanity. l.a. On this topic, you’ve spoken of the genius inherent to the abomination of so-called European humanism. G.s. Yes, it’s all in the “so-called.” You might have hoped that Goethe’s garden wouldn’t be next to the Buchenwald camp; but you come out of Goethe’s garden and you’re right in a concentration camp. You might have hoped that great musicians would have said, “No. I can’t play Debussy (as Gieseking did in Munich) when I hear the cries of people dying of hunger and thirst on the way to Dachau.” But no, they played a series of concerts of

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apparently ethereal beauty and depth. Then there was Picasso’s famous joke. You remember the German officer who went to his studio, under the Occupation, saw Guernica, and said, “Did you do that?” “No, sir, you’re the one who did it!” That was a great response. But he was the same Picasso who defended Stalin at a time when everyone knew about the gulags and the Stalin massacres. So for little people like me, it’s better to try to listen, to see clearly, but not to have the moral arrogance to declare, “Here’s the answer! I’ve understood!” I can only say, at the end of my life, “No, I haven’t understood.” l.a. What can we do in the face of such inhumanity? G.s. Oh, a million things. We can say to the little fascist despot in Myanmar, “We’ll crush you if you don’t stop and if you don’t allow a representative government to be established after an election.” We could say in Sudan, “Because you set your murdering hounds onto people already dying of hunger and thirst in the deserts, we’re going to blow you up.” The power of the great powers is infinite, compared to that of these unspeakably sadistic, unspeakably primitive regimes. We could do a lot. And what makes our inaction even more inexcusable is that today we know everything. The media tell us everything. We know what is going on in Guantanamo, we know who is torturing whom. It’s as if we were recording the screams of the victims for the next reality show. We are informed and overinformed ad nauseam. l.a. We are certainly inundated with images of horrors and despair that we are powerless to do anything about. What can we, as individuals, do? Let me quote something from one of your

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writings, a line from Kierkegaard that you know by heart: “The individual can neither help nor save an era, only note its loss.” Do you agree with that statement? G.s. Not completely. Under the ancien régime, in the broad sense of the term, the individual’s ability to act was quite limited, but today we can try to elect humane and responsible politicians. Let’s go back to Aristotle. We keep going back to Aristotle; it’s a good habit. In Aristotle, the idiot (idiōtēs) is the man who stays at home and allows crooks to govern. The crooks take over the agora (the large marketplace, the center of Greek democracy) because the man wants to maintain his private life. He’s not interested enough. So he no longer has any right to complain. If the mafia governs us, it’s because we haven’t wanted to get involved in politics. This is the great paradox of the failure of democracy. I see it every day in Britain. Britain used to have an almost unique destiny: the elite were trained for politics. The very best graduates of Oxford and Cambridge used to get into Parliament, try to get into government— that was their ambition. They were a highly educated elite. In the past thirty or forty years it’s become a joke. What matter now are the banks and hedge funds. l.a. But maybe it’s because politics is no longer aimed at the public good? G.s. Granted, it goes around and around, it’s a circular argument. Politics would be for the public good if there were great people to invest in it. On this subject, by the way, we too often forget that America, our wonderful America, produced what Europe can no longer produce: three candidates in the 2008 elections who were and are very fine people: Obama, McCain,

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and Hillary Clinton. They are all people of stature— whether or not you share their views, but that’s another matter. They are people of strength. And the fact that a chaotic, corrupt system, if you will, was able to spawn those people is a good sign, and it gives me hope. There are miracles. For the first time since Cromwell, people aren’t killing each other in Ireland. But that’s a miracle that Tony Blair accomplished. Ten years of agonizingly difficult negotiations, sitting around a table with the Irish. It’s not easy, I can tell you. And he never lost patience, never lost his nerve. I continue to hope that if the IRA managed to calm down, if the Berlin wall finally fell, it’s because there are miracles. Practical miracles; they are rare, but they happen. And they depend on a different concept of politics, taken in hand by good people. But if we, as individuals, don’t want to get involved, then who’s to blame? l.a. In your opinion, even music is powerless against inhumanity. You love music, you live surrounded by records. You can’t live without either music or philosophy, and in your book The Poetry of Thought you develop the theme of a consubstantial union between music and thought. What do you think about when you’re listening to music? G.s. First, let’s be clear. I don’t read music; that’s very important. Even musicians, I think, rarely hear the music while they are reading the score. Apparently some conductors can read a Mahler score and hear all the instruments in their head. That must be quite unusual. So without having the access that written music provides, and never having learned to play an instrument, I’m at the mercy of impressionistic, amateur passions (and “amateur” means lover) for what I like.

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Music, records, and the piano were all part of my childhood, from the very beginning. I attended my first concerts when I was very young. I was extremely lucky: my parents took me to concerts and to the opera. Forgive an old man for boasting, but I know a large amount of literature by heart. And despite my deteriorating eyesight, I think I could live with many fine writings, which would fill my days. But to no longer hear music (I’m getting increasingly deaf, but I can still hear), I don’t think I could survive that. Literally. Music is that important to me— it’s essential! The appearance of the record was a miracle. To live in these times, to suddenly have within reach the entire history of music, all the music we want to hear, it’s a huge luxury. An indispensable luxury. l.a. I think I remember reading that you are particularly interested in the music from the time of Schoenberg. Why? Do you think contemporary music has a future? G.s. A great one. Since Schoenberg, Debussy, Shostakovich, and the great American composers, we’ve been in a magnificent period for music. First, the means of technical reproduction allow an immediate private experience. Today I can play the best concerts or operas in the world— I have an almost infinite repertoire at my disposal. And music crosses all borders, there are no linguistic barriers. Rock hits are whistled in the streets of Vladivostok the same day as in Los Angeles; music is the Esperanto of emotion. And in the means of technical reproduction there’s an element of creation (as Walter Benjamin would say) that’s missing in literature. I think the future of music has no limits. Will certain forms of operatic or symphonic music continue to appear? That’s difficult to say. But there was nothing

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radically new between the Elizabethans and the beginning of this century. And works by Britten (notably Peter Grimes) and many other twentieth-century composers, attract huge audiences worldwide. Concert halls are full, and that’s a very good sign. Will some types of music decline? Maybe chamber music in its classic form. It sounds silly, but you need chambers for chamber music. It took a certain social milieu and venue quite different from concert halls. Will we continue to see great new chamber music? In any event, I believe we’re living in a period of very fine composers. I don’t need to remind you of the significance of Pierre Boulez. But there is also György Kurtág (a Hungarian composer I would place on a par with Bartók) and Elliott Carter (who composed great things up to the age of a hundred). Oh, there are a half-dozen major composers working right now. So we are advancing musically. But in the visual arts, I can’t deal with so-called constructivism. I just can’t. With music, even the most recent, I believe I can be very happy. I’m very optimistic about music; I have a physical, daily need for it. A day without music is a very sad day. l.a. Do you listen to music the way you practice reading, as a sort of repetition essential for whetting your intellectual appetite, a return to the familiar? G.s. Every time I listen to a piece it’s a new experience. I have some friends who are very good composers, and they hate records. They say, “It’s always the same, it’s dead.” Fortunately, each time I listen to a piece of music I hear something I hadn’t heard before— but that’s the response of a layman, someone who can’t read the score, someone who hasn’t grasped the internal structure the first time he hears the piece. I can certainly

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see the problem for a musician. And in Britain, thank God, with the BBC and other stations, we have a very wide, dynamic selection of classical and modern music available to us. There are live broadcasts, frequent premieres, and a wide discographic repertoire. There’s a highly entertaining BBC program called Private Passion: a guest is invited to choose seven records and talk about them. Mischievously, I wanted to find something they didn’t have, despite the twelve million recordings in their archives (they say they have everything). During the rise of Nazism, in our home in Paris (my parents were Wagnerians, like all central European Jews), we were forbidden to listen to Wagner in German. But my father discovered a wonderful Russian singer at the Paris Opera by the name of Rogatchevsky, who sang in French. I still have the records here, in this room, a Parsifal in French. So I told the BBC I would bring it with me. But they had it! I spoke about it on the radio, explaining that even in another language, even in another contextual civilization, great music asserts its authority. I missed the boat as far as great jazz goes. I listened to a lot of Muggsy Spanier, Ellington, and a few others in Chicago when I was a student— it was a world capital of jazz in those days. And I still love classical jazz. But I can’t listen to hip-hop, heavy metal, and all the rock genres that have emerged since then. To have missed that is probably to have missed the musical energy of this century— with all its brutality and ambiguity. I regret it, but you can’t understand everything. And I’ve stopped understanding. Still, I’m sure that for millions of young people, rock reflects the very rhythm of their inner lives. l.a. You often refer to Heidegger in your writing. Yet you must have known of the published documents proving his Nazi activi-

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ties at the time when he was rector at the University of Freiburg. Does that affect your view of his philosophy? G.s. I believe, and have believed ever since I first tried to read Being and Time, that he’s a titan of philosophy. A giant. A nasty giant. I can’t imagine twentieth-century thought— whether that of Sartre, Levinas, deconstruction— without Heidegger; he’s by far the greatest of them all. As for the question of his Nazism, the best response was given by the Nazis themselves: in 1933– 34 the Nazi authorities in Berlin, faced with Heidegger’s ambition to be the rector of the university, declared, “No, he’s a Privat-nazi.” That’s not very easy to translate: a private Nazi, if you like. What does that mean? It doesn’t mean Heidegger was a racist (his doctoral students, let’s not forget, were almost all Jews— beginning with his mistress Hannah Arendt, then Herbert Marcuse, Karl Löwith, et al.). Not a trace of racism. He thought the biological dimension (though essential in Nazism) was idiotic. But he was a Nazi before the Nazis; and what is more, his wife— which is appalling— was a Nazi well before he was. It meant that he believed in the renewal of Germany, and saw in Nazism the only potential movement that he thought could resist the “two huge threats” of American capitalism and Russian communism. In my opinion, it was a stroke of genius to have understood long before anyone else that technology was the crux in both cases, and that American technocratic capitalism and Leninism/Stalinism were much closer to each other than they were to the classical spirit of Europe. And that a defeat of Europe— which for him meant Germany— meant the domination of the continent by those two powers. He was right, of course. This doesn’t excuse for an instant what I see as a true mys-

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tery and his true crime: his refusal after the war to make a statement on the Shoah, on the policy of the concentration camps, on the sheer inhumanity that was Nazism. On the contrary, as you know very well from his notorious remarks in 1953, he was still speaking of the great lost ideal of that movement. It’s the same problem with Wagner. At lunch, while waiting for dessert to be served, Cosima Wagner said to one of her servants, “We must wait, the master is at the piano.” They heard him playing upstairs on the second floor. He was studying, preparing the Easter music for Parsifal. He came downstairs. And at the lunch table— we have Cosima’s eyewitness account— when he was talking about the Jewish question, he said, “Jews should be burned alive!” The same day he composed the Easter music for Parsifal. You might say, “We have to understand . . .” No! We can’t understand. We are just ordinary men and women. Very insignificant, you and I. Thanks to those giants we have an enormous legacy; I can’t imagine my existence without Tristan, without other works of Wagner, without Being and Time, without books on Kant, without the works on the pre-Socratics, and so on. There will be more than a hundred volumes in the complete works of Heidegger. The best explanation for me came from his favorite student, his successor Hans-Georg Gadamer— himself a great thinker. We were at the centennial celebration of Heidegger in Freiburg, and Ernst Nolte, who was a kind of Neo-Nazi historian, and I were on the verge of coming to blows. Gadamer, who was physically a giant, quietly laid his hands on my shoulders and said, “Steiner! Steiner! Calm down. Martin was the greatest of thinkers and the basest of men.” That was an excellent analysis; it doesn’t justify anything, but it’s probably true. Heidegger, Wagner— and there are other examples. If you ask me who determined the course of the French lan-

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guage, in modern times, it’s Proust and Céline. Both of them. Along with Rabelais, Céline is one of the great magicians of the French language, thanks to Voyage au bout de la nuit. But it’s not just Voyage. The three novels on his escape to Denmark (which very few people read now)— D’un château l’autre, Nord, and Rigodon— are marvelous. The scene with his cat Bébert as they are arriving at Cologne in flames, and the cat walks into the flames, jumping off the train; the scene in Sigmaringen, where Pétain, quite deaf, doesn’t hear the British plane come down and land on the bridge— these scenes are Shakespearean! And I use that word carefully. In that awful man there is great poetic invention. There is also great human pity. The doctor was wonderful with the poor, with animals. I, who love animals, dare share that passion with him, and I admire what an animal, the suffering of an animal, means for him. So I don’t understand. He’s the same man who created that infamous rubbish Bagatelles pour un massacre, and other works. Pamphlets, huge anti-Semitic pamphlets. You ask me to understand; I can’t understand. He’s the same man who wanted all Jews incinerated. What are we to make of that? As a reader, as a teacher, I’m enormously indebted to these writings. They nourish my mind and my being. That doesn’t mean for a moment that I defend the men who wrote them. So I was probably fortunate not to meet them. I refused to meet Heidegger. I didn’t want to, I wouldn’t have dared. I could, of course, have encountered Céline. What would we do without Wagner? Music after Wagner is Wagner’s music. And in philosophy? I’ve just read a comment from Derrida: “The philosophy of the future is to be for or against Heidegger.” I can’t imagine the internal contradictions, the psychic struggles, of these great, fearsome men. Maybe it’s rarer in women— that’s an interesting question. I can’t come up with an example off the top of my head. There have been female

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tyrants, female despots, sadistic women, poisoners, all sorts of evil women; but as far as I know, none of the great works (literary, poetic, scientific) by a woman— and God knows there are some— come from sadistic hatred, a fascist personality and ideology. I might be mistaken, but there could be an interesting difference here. l.a. In The Poetry of Thought you also discuss Edmund Husserl, who was Heidegger’s professor. In your opinion, what influence did Husserl’s thought have on Heidegger’s work? G.s. I wrote a little book, Lessons of the Masters, in which I tried to discuss that relationship. Without Husserl, there wouldn’t have been a Heidegger, that’s clear. But on the other hand, as in all great relationships, the student will try to destroy the master. Here, if you like, you are welcome to use Freud’s word “oedipal,” with my respects. l.a. The murder of the father. G.s. The murder of the father from an intellectual point of view, from a theoretical point of view. l . a . In both meanings of the term, then: “murder of the father” philosophically speaking, and “abandonment of the father” during the Nazi period. G.s. Husserl fascinates me because he was able to sit and think for six or seven hours straight. That’s very unusual. He incarnated thought, a bit like the brilliant mathematicians that I know here. There’s a passion for abstraction in Husserl, a refusal to be bothered by anything, which is magnificent. Heideg-

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ger quickly uncovered the weaknesses in Husserl’s philosophy. In the end, Husserl was unable to construct his system or resolve the major problem of the relations between different beings, different egos. Heidegger saw those weaknesses. And there is nothing sadder, more heartrending, than Husserl’s gradual discovery that his student, his favorite, his chosen successor, his son among sons, was going to destroy him. In all of that, the Nazi episode is ugly, nauseating, but ultimately not that important. l.a. Let’s look at the facts. Heidegger dumped him; as rector of the University of Freiburg, he agreed that Husserl, his own teacher, should not continue teaching there. He even denied him access to the library. G.s. No, that’s not true. We now know, rather, that he didn’t do anything to grant him access. That’s it. It was nonintervention, which is already pretty bad. He did nothing to defend him. And his shabby treatment of Husserl’s widow is equally sad. But Heidegger’s wife, Elfriede (a first-class Nazi, who thought Hitler was too liberal), played a sinister role here. Anyway, this is all gossip. Since we don’t know how we would behave in similar circumstances, we must be very careful. Since we don’t know what we would do if butchers and torturers knocked on our door and proposed “a small compromise, sir, a very small one, and everything will be fine,” we really can’t imagine what the pressures, the blackmail, the threats that loomed in their everyday lives might have been like. Here in Britain, which I still love so much, which was the chosen land for me (I could have gone to France, or America), in a Britain that defended the rights of the individual as no other

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country did, I often wonder what would have happened if the Germans had come. We don’t know. When I was young, I was still full of that great dream: the British would have behaved magnificently, they would never have delivered anyone to the enemy, there would never have been a Vichy, a Xavier Vallat, a concentration camp. But what do I know? It’s a hope. We have no proof. I’m deeply envious of people who know they acted rightly. In my college I have two colleagues who were in the Vercors, and they know. One was taken prisoner and was tortured, the other managed to escape. They never talk about it, never. Not a word. With a few well-known exceptions, those who know are silent because they know something that can’t be explained to others. Perhaps they have enough trouble explaining it to themselves, which is even more complex. So in all cases we must be very careful. Plato cheerfully sold himself to the tyrant of Syracuse because he was promised power. When I think of certain French writers of genius who were swine, absolute swine, I’m reminded of that childish phrase of Heidegger’s, “the hope of being the Führer of the Führer.” l.a. How do you explain Heidegger’s refusal to apologize after the war, in spite of constant requests by his friend Karl Jaspers? How do you explain that silence? G.s. Vanity. l.a. A silence that allows us to imagine what happened between Paul Celan and Martin Heidegger when Celan went to visit him. G . s . Vanity— he was certainly a megalomaniac. The whole world came to see him, the whole world rushed to someone who,

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I believe, had the dignity not to correct himself when it would have been easy to do so. Many French writers who wrote abhorrent things erased them, wiped them away. He, at least, had the pride to say, “I wrote that sentence? We’ll keep it.” When What Is Called Thinking? was reprinted, he could easily have edited it out. There was a vanity about him, a smallness, and also, if you will, a malign candor. As I said earlier, I had the opportunity to meet him, but I refused. I was quite young. I didn’t want to risk it because I didn’t see the use of it. What would we have talked about? Nothing. Nothing. “You are an asshole! Apologize!” No, no! It’s better to avoid false encounters. And let’s not forget that Sartre wrote some awful things too—“Every anticommunist is a dog,” for example. When I was a professor in Beijing, there were two men in my seminar whose spines had been broken when they were tortured by the Red Guards; they couldn’t even sit down. They had had a letter sent to Sartre: “To the Voltaire of our century. Speak up, help us!” And Sartre said that “the so-called torture by the Red Guards is a lie invented by the American CIA.” He knew perfectly well what was happening. So where are the great men? As for Freud! Go to Rome, it’s fascinating; there’s a great fascist museum. In the first room there are gifts that were given to Mussolini. In a handsome case, The Interpretation of Dreams is displayed with this inscription by Sigmund Freud: “To el duce, to whom we owe so much for having restored the glory of ancient Rome.” Oh, yes, oh, yes . . . We are all subject to vanity, flattery, fear, mental torment. Lapses of reason, and not of the heart, as Proust said. And Shakespeare, as always, said it in the second act of Hamlet: “and who should ’scape whipping.” So I prefer to express my thanks to the great works themselves, to poems. The first line of my very first book was this:

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“A good review is an act of thanks.” I believe that, I believe it wholeheartedly. You have to thank the works and what they cost their creator. l.a. Connected to the fear of the humanities’ decline, another theme weaves through much of your writing— whether historical and political, metaphysical, linguistic, or spiritual. This theme, to paraphrase Spengler, might be called “the decline of civilization.” I’m not saying that you’re predicting— as Spengler did at the dawn of World War I— an inevitable decline of civilization; yet there’s a palpable anxiety, a reminder of who we are, and a desire for awareness, a significant heightening of our awareness. A call for vigilance. G.s. Leading historians believe that between August 1914 and May 1945, in Europe and the western Slavic world, more than a hundred million men, women, and children were massacred in wars, in concentration camps, and by famine, deportation, and major epidemics. It’s a miracle that we still have a European civilization. We focus on the wrong thing. The miracle is that anything managed to survive the greatest massacres in history. Since the end of World War II, the massacres in the Balkans have reminded us that Europe remains extremely fragile. Right after World War I, in his famous essay “Crisis of the Mind,” Valéry wrote: “We civilizations now know that we are mortal.” Since then the situation has become much more serious. The United States has become not only the world’s greatest power but also, if you will, a model for humankind. Like it or not, with the American technological revolution, the opening of space, scientific research, America has imposed what I call a “California imaginary” on the dreams of a great part of humanity. Europe no longer has a model to offer, even to its young

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people. The young are tired of high culture, an advanced civilization unable to stand up to barbarity, a barbarity that more than once has even made use of that civilization. We’ve seen how the life of the European elites— the intellectual, artistic, philosophical elites— has been on the side of barbarity. The great critic Walter Benjamin said that every European cultural monument is actually built on a foundation of inhumanity, of barbarity. There’s a lot of truth in that, though it is a bit extreme. In this connection I have an irrational, intuitive feeling. I don’t believe there will ever be another Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe, Mozart, Michelangelo, or Beethoven among us. Of course, there are giants of twentieth-century art, great writers, fine composers. We mustn’t ignore that. But anyone who teaches literature, art history, or music has to look backward. We are always looking behind ourselves. In Italian they call it tramonto del sole (sunset). It’s quite conceivable that other parts of the planet will pick up the baton, and Europe will be too tired to go on. My God, it has reason to be! There’s an interesting expression in German: Geschichte müde sein, to be tired of history. Walking along a European street, you come across signs on countless buildings commemorating events from centuries ago: the weight of the past is huge in Europe. By contrast, the future weighs very little. That’s a problem. We are in a time of transition. You know this as well as I do; churches are practically empty. In countries where the Catholic church was the most powerful authority, or still is (such as Italy and Spain), the birthrate is falling. Europe’s demographic figures are negative; the continent is not replacing its population. Everywhere the young and the not so young are bearing the heavy burden of the elderly, the retired, those who simply live too long. It’s an upside-down pyramid. For all these reasons, it’s hard to imagine how our European civilization will recover its

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vital energy. My greatest hope is that eastern Europe will prove to be an ample reserve of untapped energy, leading to major achievements in thinking, arts, writing. But given the predatory capitalism that has emerged in cities like Prague, or Budapest with its white Hollywood-style limousines, or Bucharest, which is slowly freeing itself from repression and poverty, it’s not encouraging. This imitation of a form of liberal capitalism doesn’t bode well for a great cultural rebirth. l.a. You seem to feel nostalgia for the absolute (to paraphrase the title of one of your books), nostalgia for an irreversibly lost world. You seem like a reactionary in this attack on all our aesthetic and moral values. I’m thinking, for example, of deconstruction in Marcel Duchamp’s art; I’m thinking of the rise of concrete music; I’m thinking of deconstruction in terms of philosophy; I’m thinking of the New Novel in terms of literature. In short, I sense in you a refusal to accept a new way of understanding the world, a way that ultimately you detest. G.s. Is it really a new way of understanding the world? In my book Grammars of Creation, I show a measure of admiration for Duchamp, for Jean Tinguely (who for me is one of the great satirists of our time). I’ve told you how much I love contemporary music. The world of so-called “conceptual” art, on the other hand, truly disgusts me. To those who put bottles of urine on the ground in the Tate Gallery and claim that they are creating great art, I simply say, “You assholes!” There is no other word. It is true that throughout my works, or rather my work (“works” is such a pretentious word), I haven’t paid sufficient attention to film. Some say that film is ultimately the most powerful expression of modern consciousness; they may well

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be right. And I’ve missed the boat, as they say. Actually, I never really tried to get onto it. But let’s be clear: I want to answer you in the simplest, most appropriate way. If someone says, “I’m a total atheist; I think the whole history of transcendence is a romantic joke”; if someone tells me that when she got a phone call at two in the morning and learned that her child had just been killed in a car accident, she suffered horribly but saw no mystical or mysterious significance in the event; to that man or woman I say nothing. I’ve encountered people like that. They are very rare. I’ve met them among the great scientists at MIT, Cambridge, Berkeley. Stephen Hawking, for example, tells us that he can move his wheelchair with two fingers, the tips of two fingers, the metacarpals, and uses an electronic voice. His thinking is on the edge of the universe. That’s human greatness: thinking that knows no limits. But most human beings who get a phone call with bad news begin to wail and pray to God. Okay. If someone tells me, “I believe in this or that, there is a transcendence for me, there is an ultimate mystery of creation for me,” I quite understand that too. But I find it unacceptable when people say, “The question isn’t asked anymore. Why should we even talk about it?” If those people prevail, and if our culture, our sensibility, the context of our being turns into something neither irreligious, nor atheist (which is a something very grave and tragic), nor religious, but a sort of “Hitler, I don’t know him; God, I don’t know him”— a culture in which a list of the ten immortal Englishmen of all time, as indicated in a recent poll, would be headed by David Beckham, with Shakespeare in fifth place and Darwin in ninth— if that situation arises, a form of secularization, ultimate vulgarization, then yes, I don’t believe we will produce any works of great value. Ninety percent of our art and our ar-

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chitecture has a religious theme or background— whether we’re talking of Beethoven’s Missa solemnis or the music of Bach, or our cathedrals, buildings, cities, laws, and so on. If anyone says the question isn’t asked anymore, if what Dostoyevsky calls “the only question” (that of the existence or nonexistence of God) isn’t worth considering anymore or we stop attempting to find formal metaphors to express it, then I believe we are entering what I call an epilogue, something that comes after the word, the logos. “In the beginning was the word.” Maybe at the end is derision. Perhaps we are entering an era of derision. l.a. In your latest works you do, in fact, offer a prognosis for the future of our civilization, and that prognosis is rather grave. You note that language is becoming rarefied, that it takes only thirty-four words to be able to communicate over the entire planet, and that because of this rarefication our thinking is being deprived of oxygen. G.s. As I’ve said, I think Europe is tired. I don’t believe in a Chinese miracle, but I might be wrong. I do believe in an Indian miracle, India’s fantastic creative sensibility, its power of invention and extreme originality. For several years I have worked very closely with Chinese and Indian students. The Chinese learn with amazing energy, a discipline that takes your breath away, but they daren’t criticize, they daren’t invent. When Indian students are around the table, you hear daring voices all the time, voices that dare to suggest something new, to guess, above all to say no to authority. That’s why I feel that great chapters in the history of human thought and art will emerge in India. I won’t be here to see it, but it will be very interesting. For the moment, Europe has become a continent of global tourism: people travel there to

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see the old Europe. It’s turned into one big museum, and living there is now a luxury. But talking about the future, a positive future, is difficult. l.a. Do you think truth has a future? G.s. Oh, yes! But, again, not necessarily in Europe. It will have other forms. Will certain privileged forms survive, certain very European ironies, certain habits of dialogue? It’s not clear. In American culture, which is infinitely powerful, dialogue plays a much less important role and is quite rare. There are very few dialogues in presidential campaigns; irony plays almost no role. There will be other forms of human exchanges. But why complain? We’ve had two thousand exciting years; being a European has been a fascinating story. It may be a bit less so in the future. l.a. You mentioned Paul Valéry, who I believe has held an important place in your thinking for some time. How does Valéry still influence your thinking today, in 2014? G.s. Valéry is not a very active presence among young people these days. I discovered him through such a major detour (my interest in Paul Celan) that it obscured the real Valéry. The Young Park is a miracle, there’s no other word. A pure, strange marvel. And there’s the Valéry of the Cahiers— a Valéry we don’t know very well even now. There’s a vast secondary literature in the Cahiers. The interest Valéry shows in the sciences and his quasi-idolatry of mathematics is amazing. Although I don’t have the competence to share that interest, I can guess what it must have been like for him. At the same time, there’s the social Valéry, the Valéry of the salons, the academician Valéry,

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the Valéry of the grand speech welcoming Pétain. There’s this other Valéry. But he was a giant! Are there unique eras? Yes. And strangely, there are constellations. Four or five great poets and playwrights gravitated around Shakespeare, and then there was nothing for a very long time. Tolstoy, Proust, and Thomas Mann all lived at the same time. There do seem to be constellations, electromagnetic moments when there’s a concentration of creative forces, and then there are low periods, quite mediocre periods— like the poetry of the early eighteenth century in France. This phenomenon hasn’t really been explained. We understand very little, for example, of that complex movement Impressionism— suddenly a dozen giants, and then a decline. It’s possible that creation sometimes has the effect of implosion. Instead of exploding, creative forces are concentrated, move toward a hidden center. We don’t know. All my life I’ve avoided studying or understanding film; that was a serious error; without film we certainly wouldn’t have the high culture of the twentieth century. A large part of the “Shakespearean” energies of the human imagination is concentrated in film, and not in any other art form. l.a. Then why haven’t you studied film? You’ve been interested in the history of painting for a very long time. G.s. Greatly interested. Also in music, in theatre. Not in film. I’ll explain why, and my answer will be provocative. You see a great film— Renoir’s Partie de campagne, Enfants du Paradis, or The Treasure of the Sierra Madre— you see it two, three times (I’ve done this, it’s wonderful), but the fourth time, it’s dead. Completely dead. I see a play five, ten times: it’s new each time. I’m waiting for someone to explain to me why the best film in

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the world dies after four or five viewings. Maybe film is an intrinsically ephemeral form. I can’t explain it. I witnessed a wonderful scene at Harvard: young men and women were crammed into an auditorium to see— and see again— Casablanca. Five or ten minutes before the end of the film, the sound was turned off, and the audience stood up and recited the dialogue by heart— including the famous “round up the usual suspects” finale. These were young people who didn’t want to learn Shakespeare by heart. Apparently that doesn’t happen anymore. People watch a few minutes of a film on their iPad. It would be very sad if film lost its complex magic. We have just lost Alain Resnais. Who would be capable of creating L’Année dernière à Marienbad today? Or Hiroshima mon amour? Even with such great films, there is something ephemeral about the medium. l.a. Let’s talk about what’s going to happen to us all, even if we sometimes turn away from it and generally don’t want to face it. I’m talking about death, of course. I’d like to quote one of your most enigmatic lines, from Real Presences I believe, where you say, “Ours is the long day’s journey of the Saturday.” What do you mean by that? G.s. I took the Friday-Saturday-Sunday schema from the New Testament: Christ’s death on Friday, with the darkness that descended on Earth, the tearing of the veil of the Temple; then the uncertainty that— for the believers— had to be beyond horror, the uncertainty of the Saturday when nothing happened, nothing moved; finally the resurrection on Sunday. It’s a schema with limitless power of suggestion. We live through catastrophes, torture, anguish; then we wait, and for many the Saturday will never end. The Messiah won’t come, and Saturday will continue.

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So how should we live this Saturday? For the messianic Marxist, for the utopian socialist, this Saturday will have an end: the kingdom of justice will reign on Earth. Extreme leftists have predicted this since the seventeenth century; “We just have to be patient,” they say. For the Jew, there is the belief that the Messiah will indeed come. It’s blasphemous to use a calendar and try to calculate the date of the coming, but it will take place. For the positivist, the scientist, the technocrat, the end of the Saturday could be, for example, a cure for cancer. For a lot of my colleagues, a cure for cancer has become their holy grail (and the image is important). Are they going to find it? They’re confident they will. Not in ten years, not in twenty years, maybe only in a hundred years will it be possible to cure or prevent many of the illnesses that we group under the name of cancer. For others, the end of Saturday could be the eradication of famines, having enough food for all children on the planet— and that’s already within our grasp on a technological level, which makes the situation all the more unbearable. It’s not an impossibility; there is an absence of political will, that’s all. This Saturday of the unknown, of waiting with no guarantees, is the Saturday of our history. In this Saturday there’s an element both of despair— Christ killed in a terrible manner, buried— and of hope. Despair and hope, of course, are the two sides of the coin of the human condition. It’s very hard for us to imagine a Sunday, except (and this is important) in the realm of our private lives. Those who are happy in love have known Sundays, epiphanies, moments of total transfiguration. There are political moments, too, such as the night of May ’68 on the Place de la Bastille in Paris, when Arab students chanted in front of Daniel Cohn-Bendit, “We are all German Jews.” That was one of those epiphanies, one of those Sundays, that could have changed everything. It didn’t,

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obviously. But that doesn’t mean the moment wasn’t worth living; it absolutely was worth living. Another example: today we seem very close to having a cure for leukemia. We’ll be able to save children stricken with that disease. Without hope for a Sunday, we might be tempted by suicide. And suicide has a great logic to it. Some men and women have chosen suicide rather than corruption, a betrayal of their dreams or of their political utopias. We know of great artists and great thinkers who have chosen to depart from a life they considered soiled, impure, corrupt. During colonialism in Algeria some young French officers were put in a room with an Arab prisoner to torture him. They were told, “If you don’t touch him, nothing will happen to you. Nothing, there will be no repercussions. It’s your decision. It’s just that we know there are bombs in the village, and if they explode, they will kill not only all your comrades, but the villagers too. But it’s your decision.” Well, a very small number of them killed themselves— it’s never talked about, but we have documents. I hope I would have had the courage to do the same, because it’s the only possible way to be human at a moment like that. Those who choose suicide are the ones who say, “There will be no Sunday. Not for us or for our society.” Luckily, there aren’t many of them. By contrast, we have what the great Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch called the “hope principle,” the dynamics of the continuity of life. For many people it takes a lot of courage to get up in the morning. As for me— it’s a phenomenon tied to my age, quite ordinary and natural— there are times when I hesitate to turn on the radio to listen to the news because it’s so often physically, morally, mentally unbearable. But we must keep going; we are the guests of life and must continue to struggle, to try to improve things, even a little. To do better. Will humankind experience a Sunday? One wonders.

Epilogue learnInG how to dIe

l.a. Before we die, George, we usually experience some regret for the things we haven’t been able to do. We’ve learned that you feel regret for not knowing more languages and for not having the courage to learn new ones. But while reading your work, I was surprised to discover that you regret never having taken LSD. G.s. That’s right. I had students who took it; they told me the experience is indescribable. I asked them to tell me about it, but they couldn’t: anything that’s said about it is so much less interesting, beautiful, existential than the reality. It’s a trip, I’m told, from which you can’t bring back any creative baggage. Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Poe, with opium and cocaine, brought us back some baggage; it’s thin, but it’s important. These kids, none. I probably should have tried it myself, but I was afraid to. l.a. We know of the places where you go to be reenergized, where you would like to live: the south of France, the great

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square of Marrakech, the little temple of Segesta, the roofs of Jerusalem at daybreak. Do you also have regrets with regard to places you’ve dreamed of visiting but will probably never see? G.s. Yes, I have a little list of supreme desiderata, places I will never go to. For the moment I can’t see how I could get to Petra; it would be possible, but difficult at my age. I have a little list of lost dreams. I would have liked to see the red mountain in Australia, Ayers Rock. I’ve been invited a dozen times. But it would have taken twenty-three hours to fly there, and I simply didn’t have it in me to go. That’s why my autobiography is called Errata. It contains a series of errors, or at least deficiencies. And my main deficiency is not having risked trying to create something. When I was a child, I drew and painted a lot. I’ve published some poetry. I don’t think it’s very good, but I published it and some people read it. And then, at a certain moment, teaching became a goal for me, a vocation. Let me give you a much more trivial example, which illustrates the point perfectly. During my first five or six weeks at the University of Chicago— I was awfully young— the holy poison of chess took hold of me and I played eighteen hours a day with real players, very good players. It was one of the world’s meccas for chess. If you were serious about it, you drank a cup of coffee and went back to the game you were playing; you studied the game, you studied the theory of chess, you delved into its history: there was nothing else. I might have been within reach of becoming a real player, a serious player. But when I was dazzled by that possibility, I stepped back. I lacked the courage to throw sanity to the winds and devote my life to that game. Because it is a game, after all, but what a game! Since then, I’ve continued to play, but I play badly, the most amateur of amateurs. With this little experience, which lasted only a few weeks,

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I had a glimpse of the abyss, what Henry James calls “the real thing”: giving yourself totally to something. It can threaten your health, your life; it can lead to disgrace, debt— you don’t give a damn, you live the absolute, you risk everything. A mountain climber who keeps going beyond his strength risks everything each time he climbs, a deep-sea diver takes the same risk every time he dives, so as to know the headiness of the absolute when nothing else matters, when all our little bourgeois virtues cease to exist. I’ve never had the courage to take the ultimate risk. Another regret still haunts me. I became aware of it in Britain when I was with people who had lived through major military battles. In the evening, at my college, after a third glass of port, when these Englishmen lost their typical reserve, they sometimes confessed, “We were happy on the battlefield! So happy! Nothing approaches the orgasm of combat.” These were highly cultivated people, distinguished teachers, thinkers, and when they had a chance to be frank, they would say, “How boring life has been since then!” First of all, when at war, they were far from their wives— a rare form of happiness. For an Englishman, being far from one’s wife is a precondition for happiness. And then there was that homoerotic camaraderie, experienced not as homosexuality but as masculine eros, an affectionate relationship among men that is key to English collegiate life, to the English elite. In London today we see gangs of young men armed with knives. Yet we know that if they were drafted into the special forces, in five weeks they would be splendid soldiers. It’s almost the same thing. A gang member and a commando are not far apart. For Alexis Philonenko, his Algerian experience was decisive; for Alain, as well; Descartes knew battle; Homer had already taught us about the headiness of battle. I’ve never lived through such moments, so I will never know how I would have behaved. They did know. For better or worse. “He

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had a good war,” they say, something that can’t be expressed in French. Péguy knew and I think Montherlant knew what it is to confront an adversary, face to face. And when I listen to my colleagues, the memory of their happiness is real, it’s not bluff. In any case, they lived twenty-five hours a day there, so they didn’t tell each other tall tales. Nor did they tell them to psychoanalysts, therapists, or journalists. Rather than exchange stories, they would say, “The reality is such and such, and it’s far from what it should have been. Okay, okay, but we tried, we did our best. That’s all we could do. We were well aware that the truly great are something else.” Why don’t many of my university colleagues like me very much? Why have I been somewhat marginalized all of my life? It’s because I’ve been saying, since my first book, Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky, that people who create literature are light years away from people who comment on it or interpret it. I’m quite convinced of this. Of course, there are great critics who also create: Proust in Contre Sainte-Beuve, T. S. Eliot in his essays, Mandelstam on Dante. Usually they are creative geniuses who are also first-rate commentators and critics. They are rare, but they do exist. Was there a greater art critic than Baudelaire? But even if Les Fleurs du mal were the only thing he had written, that would have been more than enough. This difference, at the end of my life, is something I regret; I should have taken some risks. If I am what I am, it’s because I was not a creator. It makes me very sad. I’d like to say that there’s a biographical aspect to this in the great Judaic tradition that I invoke so often. My father was convinced that creating something was good but not to be relied upon. To be a teacher was the supreme role. The word rabbonim (rabbi) means teacher; it’s a secular word; nothing holy about it.

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When I was very young I published a few volumes of poetry, as I mentioned, and one morning I reread them and I saw that they were merely verse. The enemy of poetry is verse. So, never again. I published works of fiction, like The Portage to San Cristóbal of A.H. (1981), but these are books of ideas, debates, you might say, dialogues of ideas in fictive or narrative form. The Portage is more than a debate of ideas; it’s a work about power, a meditation on supreme power and Hitlerism. I totally lack the innocence, the foolishness, of a great creator. The sculptor Henry Moore used to come to my college from time to time to have dinner with us. When he opened his mouth to talk about politics, he was woefully naive. So we looked at his hands, the life in those hands, and said to ourselves, “Who cares what he’s saying! Look at his hands and what he can do with his hands.” The mystery of the innocence of great creators is very profound, something outsiders— as we all are— can’t understand. So what is my task? It’s to be a mailman, like the one in that wonderful film Il Postino. It’s about Pablo Neruda and the man who brings Neruda’s mail; this man begins to think about what it would be like to be Neruda. All my life I’ve tried to be a good mailman, to take letters and put them in the right mailboxes. It’s not always easy to find the right mailbox if you’re talking about a piece of writing, introducing a new work. You can sometimes be terribly wrong, but it’s a fascinating task, and an important one. I’m lucky to have served as a postino for some very fine writers. But we must never confuse the two. Pushkin— who was also an aristocrat, which we sometimes forget, for Russian princes are not like us— liked to remind us, “To my publishers, to my translators, to my critics, I say thank you from the bottom of my heart, but I’m the one who wrote.” Oh, yes, that says it all. If I have one huge regret in my life it is that I didn’t try my

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luck at writing a very bad book; try my luck with a novel, perhaps, or with drama— which was very important for me when I was young. I didn’t want to take the risk because I was overwhelmed with the privilege of carrying letters and putting them in mailboxes. Two or three times in my life, I had the good fortune to open the path for some truly great creators. I will never forget the courteous phone call I received from the Times Literary Supplement: “You sent us an article on a gentleman (he spells) C-E-L-A-N. Is that a pseudonym? Who is he?” It was the first article written in English on Paul Celan. In a few other cases I helped to introduce writers, major poets, at the beginning of their careers. l.a. You say that you haven’t succeeded in being a creator, George. And yet you’ve written works of fiction, and when you write theoretical works, they too are acts of creation. Earlier you mentioned The Portage to San Cristóbal of A.H., which deals with Hitler’s rise. I would like to talk about another text, not well known, the novella Proofs, from Proofs and Three Parables. It’s a pivotal text for understanding you better. It’s the story of a proofreader who is gradually losing his sight, so he won’t be able to see fonts anymore; the world will progressively vanish for him; but the story is also about the dislocation of the whole world. G.s. The story had an impact only in Italy, because the model for the protagonist was a leading Italian Marxist, Timpanaro, who refused any compromise with the world of journalism and the academy and earned his living correcting proofs at night; he did, in fact, partially lose his sight. In Italy the book was controversial— some were for it and some were against it— but

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not in any other country. It was also, if you will, my attempt to understand and to explain to myself the enormous psychological force of Marxism in some people’s thirst for justice. The defeat of Marxism is also a great human defeat. Marxism is a profoundly Jewish messianism: it comes from the Book of Amos and the prophets. In the manuscripts of 1844, Marx wrote, “The day will come when we no longer exchange money for money, but love for love and justice for justice.” That was the great messianic plan. We know what the gulag was; no need to tell me. Perhaps it was inevitable, perhaps humans are too rapacious, too private, too evil, to live the Marxist ideal— which was an ideal of pure altruism. In Cambridge I am fortunate to live in a very nice house. My children have left (they are adults, now), and there are rooms that could be given to those who don’t have housing. I know this, and I do nothing. Marxism would have said to me, “We don’t care about your choice. It will be obligatory. Two rooms are to be set aside.” That would resolve some moral issues. In some ways it would be better, but not in others, I know. We must always ask what the cost of progress is, who the victims are. The defeat of Marxism crushed a huge hope, which had been realized in Israeli kibbutzim and in a few socialist collective communities. For thirty years we’ve been talking about “the end of untamed capitalism,” “the end of excess,” but it continues: you fire ten thousand people and leave with a bonus of five million after ruining the company or the bank you were in charge of. Is that the ideal of human liberty? I wonder. And so I tried in that novella to show what happens to a man who goes blind while keeping his Marxist hopes alive. And I end the story with a famous line from Balzac (who was a total, resolute atheist); alone in the town, my character says to God,

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“It’s just the two of us now!” The last great battle, pitting the independent, rational atheist against religious belief, is about to begin. l.a. When reading Les Logocrates, I get the impression that you’re rubbing your hands together while waiting for the ultimate meeting, and you’re saying to yourself, “This final meeting will be very interesting.” G.s. I’m not rubbing my hands together, and I’m just as afraid of death as anyone else. I’m the opposite of a hero, an antihero par excellence. When I go to the dentist, I want to fall on my knees or fly to Mecca. I’m bawling inside. I believe passionately in euthanasia, the right to leave this life when I begin to be a burden and a pain for others and for myself. I strongly believe in this. We are, in fact, beginning to change our customs and laws on this crucial point. I hope my final thought will be, “Hey! What’s happening here is really interesting,” and I hope my final regret will be not to have seen the evening paper. l.a. In your recent book Fragments (un peu roussis), you deal head-on with the issue of euthanasia. G.s. I’m 100 percent in favor of it. It angers me when people who live in pain and are a burden to others are kept alive. Having to take care of an elderly person stricken with Alzheimer’s is a weight that can destroy a whole family; it’s like wearing a lead cape. It fills me with anger. Some people no longer have anything but suffering in their lives. But euthanasia— or assisted death, as we sometimes call it— will come. Not just in the Netherlands, but also in Britain and in other countries; it’s beginning to make

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progress. It is inconceivable that we keep people alive against their will, when their only wish is to leave this world. It seems grossly sadistic to me. On that question, and on the question of abortion, I find the Christian attitude abhorrent and indefensible; and I will gladly say so publicly. l.a. How are you living your old age? G.s. I so wish not to be a burden on people when I start to fade. I so wish not to be an economic, social, or human problem to others. I would like to be able to go— and I know where; I’ve told close friends where I would like my ashes to be scattered. And go to sleep; I’m now increasingly aware that sleeping is a privilege. Let me sleep the sleep of the land. That’s a very beautiful line; Vigny is a poet who is read far too little. That’s a shame. How little we read poetry! Ask the most brilliant young people in France, “Have you ever read Vigny?” I don’t think you would get many positive responses. l.a. And don’t you think that one day, perhaps, you will believe in a God? G.s. In a God? No, I don’t think I ever will. I have only one hope: that I’m allowed to go when the moment comes. I’ve been exceptionally lucky, I’ve lived in the most beautiful cities, among the most interesting people. I’ve had wonderful students. My marriage, things outside my marriage— they’ve all been essential to me. I’ve had amazing luck. When you think about the suffering of long illnesses, when you think what pancreatic cancer and its treatment is like, I thank fate night and day. I hope I will go quickly, and with some elegance; in German they say Macht schnell!— do it quickly! It’s an excellent motto.

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l.a. Do we learn how to live? G.s. No, but we learn how to die. With life there are new and unforeseen lessons every day. And we make mistakes all the time! How marvelous that we can make mistakes— that’s another of the great human freedoms— and say to ourselves, “I screwed up!” And that’s when the next chapter begins. Never being afraid of making a mistake— that’s privilege, freedom itself. l.a. But how should we think about our own finitude? Through philosophy? Self-awareness? G.s. No, just common sense. Being close to those you love immeasurably, telling them it’s been wonderful to be together. But now, enough. Basta! l.a. But we’re not the ones who decide that. G.s. Oh yes we are, I’m convinced of it; I believe that we prepare our own death. And I’m not talking about dying in a car crash. I believe we accept our death, that the moment comes when we are ready for it. The awful thing about Alzheimer’s is that you’re no longer in control of your own destiny. l.a. One way of living your old age is to continue to study. G . s . And even, perhaps, to create something. But to have people you love in front of you and no longer remember their names . . . no. I’m terrified of Alzheimer’s, loss of memory. Every morning I take a book off the shelf, and no matter what the book is, I translate it into my own languages, I do a translation exer-

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cise. To prevent the muscles from atrophying, I do memory exercises, recite the French revolutionary calendar, little things, anything at all, to be certain that I have no symptoms of forgetting. I have gaps, like everyone my age, but happily they are rare for the time being, and I usually forget intentionally. So I’m doing okay. Will it last? I don’t know. l.a. You’ve said you would sacrifice your family if that would stop someone from harming your dog. G.s. Well, I’m very fortunate to still be alive, at my age. I’ve lost too many contemporaries not to see this too as a mystery, a lottery; there are good numbers and bad. So, after doing my four translations in the morning, I try to say thank you. Quite simply. And here, my dog is supremely important. I explain to him what the text was; he and I take a walk, we talk to each other. Seriously, people who mistreat animals, I could kill them. I really could. Cruelty to animals fills me with horror. And our civilization does it on an enormous scale. In the eyes of an animal that loves you and that you love, there’s an understanding of death that humans don’t have. There’s something in the way my dog looks at me that shows he understands very well what may happen to me. When I get home, he’s waiting for me at the door. How does he know I’m on my way? Probably, as Auguste Comte would say, being a positivist, because I emit an odor of expectation. Perhaps. You know, a dog has a whole vocabulary of odors, he can pick up thousands that are undetectable to us. And when I pack my little travel bag, he crawls under the table and gives me a funny look, full of reproach. It’s a beautiful thing to live with an animal. The moments of telepathy are gripping. And I know I should love human beings. Sometimes I find that very difficult.