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Interventions 2020. Мишель УэльбекЧитать онлайн книгу.

Interventions 2020 - Мишель Уэльбек


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classical writers, and increases even more among the Symbolists. Intuitively, we probably suspected as much; still, it’s nice to see it established so clearly. Once we’ve finished reading the book, we’re certain of one thing: the author has indeed spotted certain deviations characteristic of poetry; but what do all these deviations lead to? What is their purpose, if they have one?

      The marquise went out at five seventeen; she could have gone out at half past six; she could have been a duchess and gone out at the same time.2 The water molecule is made up of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. The volume of financial transactions increased dramatically in 1995. To free itself from Earth’s pull, a rocket must develop a lift-off thrust directly proportional to its mass. Prosaic language organizes reflections, arguments, facts; basically, it mainly organizes facts. Events that are arbitrary, albeit described with great precision, intersect in neutral space and time. Any qualitative or emotional aspect disappears from our view of the world. This is the perfect realization of Democritus’ sentence: ‘Sweet and bitter, hot and cold, colour are only opinions; there is nothing true except atoms and the void.’ This is a text of real but limited beauty, which irresistibly evokes the famous Minuit style,3 whose influence has persisted for forty years, precisely because it corresponds to a democratic metaphysics that is still largely the majority view; so clearly a majority view that it’s sometimes confused with the scientific program as a whole, although science has made merely a circumstantial pact with it, in its fight against religious thought (though this pact has now lasted for several centuries).

      ‘When the low, heavy sky weighs down like a lid …’ This terribly loaded line, like so many lines by Baudelaire, aims at something quite different from transmitting information. It’s not only the sky, it’s the whole world, the being of the speaker, the soul of the listener that are imbued with a tone of anguish and oppression. Poetry occurs; the affective meaning pervades the world.

      All perception is organized around a twofold difference: between the object and the subject, between the object and the world. The sharpness with which these distinctions are envisaged has profound philosophical implications, and the existing metaphysics can be distributed along these two axes without being forced. Poetry, according to Jean Cohen, leads to a general dissolution of reference points: object, subject, world merge into the same affective and lyrical atmosphere. The metaphysics of Democritus, on the other hand, brings these two distinctions to their maximum clarity (a blinding clarity, the dazzle of the sun on white stones, on an August afternoon: ‘It’s nothing but atoms and the void’).

      In principle the matter seems cut and dried, and poetry condemned – as the attractive residue of a prelogical mentality, that of the primitive or the child. The problem is, Democritus’ metaphysics is wrong. More precisely: it’s no longer compatible with twentieth-century advances in physics. Indeed, quantum mechanics invalidates any possibility of a materialist metaphysics, and leads to a fundamental re-examination of the distinctions between object, subject and world.

      Overall, the physicists of the present century have stuck with the Copenhagen interpretation; which is not a very comfortable position. Of course, in the daily practice of research, the best way to progress is to stick to a hard positivist approach, which can be summed up as follows: ‘We are content to bring together observations, human observations, and to correlate them by laws. The idea of reality isn’t scientific, it doesn’t interest us.’ But it must still be unpleasant, sometimes, to realize that the theory you’re producing absolutely cannot be formulated in plain language.

      It’s at this point that we start to glimpse strange parallels. For a long time I have been struck by the way that,


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