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Interventions 2020. Мишель УэльбекЧитать онлайн книгу.

Interventions 2020 - Мишель Уэльбек


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peace, absolute silence. It was a wonderful moment.

      In December 1986, I was at Avignon railway station, and the weather was mild. Following various sentimental complications too tedious to relate, I absolutely had – at least so I thought – to get the express train back to Paris. I was unaware that a strike movement had just started across the entire French railway network. Thus, the operational succession of sexual relations, adventure and weariness was suddenly shattered. I spent two hours, sitting on a bench, facing the deserted railway landscape. Express rail coaches stood immobile on the sidings. You’d have thought they’d been there for years, and had never even gone anywhere. They were just there, motionless. Information was passed in hushed tones from one traveller to the next; the mood was one of resignation, of uncertainty. It could have been war, or the end of the Western world.

      It’s undoubtedly for the same reasons that, once the first moment of annoyance is overcome, the public’s reaction to a sudden shutdown of the information transmission networks is far from being absolutely negative. We can observe the phenomenon each time a computer reservation system breaks down (this is quite common): once the inconvenience has been admitted, and especially as soon as the employees decide to use their phones, what manifests itself among users is actually a secret joy; it’s as if fate were giving them an opportunity to take a sly revenge on technology. In the same way, if you want to realize what the public thinks, deep down, about the architecture in which it is made to live, you just have to observe its reactions when the decision is taken to blow up one of the residential low-rise blocks built in the suburbs in the sixties: it’s a moment of very pure and very violent joy, analogous to the intoxicating feeling of unexpectedly being set free. The spirit that inhabits these places is evil, inhuman, hostile; it’s that of an exhausting, cruel, constantly accelerating piece of machinery; basically, everyone feels this, and desires the machine’s destruction.

      1 1. The area to the immediate west of Paris, dominated by tall office blocks and the huge hollow cube of the Arche de la Défense.

      2 2. Ernest Hemingway used several brands of typewriter, including the 1926 Underwood Standard Portable on which he probably wrote A Moveable Feast. (He actually seems to have preferred the Royal Quiet Deluxe.)

      3 3. Pif, the dog in the cartoon strip of this name, featured (from 1948) in the French Communist daily L’Humanité.

      4 4. This is an affluent small town in the eastern suburbs of Paris.

      Human beings speak; sometimes they don’t speak. When they are threatened, they contract, their gaze darts around in search of something; in despair, they withdraw, curl up into a centre of anguish. When they are happy, their breathing slows down; they exist at a more spacious rhythm. In the history of the world there have been two arts (painting, sculpture) that have attempted to synthesize human experience by means of frozen representations – of arrested movements. They have sometimes chosen to arrest the movement at its most gentle point of equilibrium (at its point of eternity): all those Virgins with Child. They have sometimes chosen to freeze the action at its point of greatest tension, its most intense expressiveness – as in the Baroque, of course; but so many of Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings also evoke a frozen explosion. They have developed over several millennia; they have also sometimes been able to produce works that are finished, in the sense of their most secret ambition: that of stopping time.

      Jackdaws emit signs of alert and mutual recognition; up to sixty of these signs have been listed. Jackdaws remain an exception: taken as a whole, the world operates in terrible silence; it expresses its essence through form and movement. The wind blows through the grass (Eisenstein); a tear trickles down a face (Dreyer). Silent cinema saw an immense space open before it: it was not just an investigation of human feelings; not just a survey of the movements of the world; its deepest ambition was to constitute an inquiry into the conditions of perception. The distinction between figure and ground constitutes the basis of our representations; but also, more mysteriously, between figure and movement, between form and its process of generation, our mind seeks its way in the world – hence this almost hypnotic sensation that overwhelms us when we are faced by a fixed form generated by a perpetual movement, like the stationary ripples on the surface of a pond.

      What remained of it after 1930? Some traces, especially in the works of filmmakers who had started to work in the era of the silent film (the death of Kurosawa will be more than the death of a single man); a few moments in experimental films, scientific documentaries, even serial productions (Australia, released a few years ago, is one example). These moments are easy to recognize: all speech is impossible; music itself becomes a bit kitschy, a bit heavy, a bit vulgar. We become pure perception; the world appears, in its immanence. We are very happy, oddly happy. Falling in love can also have this kind of effect.

      J-YJ and CD: In what way do the several works of which you are the author, from the essay on Lovecraft to your latest novel Whatever, via Rester vivant [Staying alive] and the collection of poems La Poursuite du bonheur [The Pursuit of Happiness] constitute an oeuvre?1 What is the unity or the main obsession that guides it?

      MH: Above all, I think, the intuition that the universe is based on separation, suffering and evil; the decision to describe this state of affairs, and perhaps to move beyond it. The question of the means – literary or not – is second. The initial act is the radical


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