Merab Mamardachvili, who died in 1990, was a
Georgian philosopher with whom Althusser maintained an epistolary relationship
that began in 1968
January 16,
1978
Dear Merab,
Your note and the marvelous little coin
necklace today in the mail. Very touched. There was your appeal, and news
transmitted by this one and that one, among them Annie, seen for the first time
in I don’t know how long (she’s always galloping about in other lands) and in
general I was told that you were doing “fine.” I take it or leave it when it
comes from a third person, but I know you’re quite strong and I said to myself
that it’s perhaps true even though everything points to the opposite and I
imagine that all the friends are leaving. This time, in your own hand, I arrive
at the truth. Of course I’d like to see and hear you, but I imagine quite well,
according to what I glimpsed una volta, how things must be around you and you
know, as in the past, “the elephants are contagious.” Today everything is
communicated, curtains do nothing, only the forms change, which might be
important since they allow things either to flow relatively or they pitilessly
block. I can’t say how many times I’ve thought of your remark, “ I stay because
it is here that we see the heart of things, nakedly.” A duty of the intellect,
but which costs dearly. Not to remain costs just as dearly if I can judge by
those who left and who I’ve seen. Quite dearly. And few defend themselves
against the general assault on them to exhibit them like wolf children who know
how to talk about the forests. You perhaps heard about a colloquium in Venice
organized by Il Manifesto on the situation in “post-revolutionary” countries;
they really had to work at it to come up with this term! I went there “to
discuss,” and since there was nothing but a series of speeches, begun by
emigres followed by unionists and politicians, at a certain moment I had to
speak since I was there and the fact was known (the pains in the ass of
“notoriety”; you know the line from Heine about one of his enemies: “X is known
for his notoriety.”), so I more or less pronounced the little exhortation
attached to this note. It could cynically be called: “The morality of history
or the moral of history.” You will judge between the moral and morality. Of
course there are effects of conjuncture and fashion (for and by those who
exploit it), and we know that conjunctures are like storks, they pass even when
they fly low (unlike storks), but there’s a little bit more than this; it’s the
moment to pay the bill. It doesn’t matter who makes it out, it could even be no
one, but the day comes when the little accountings we avoided doing are
presented in a long list, and in general it’s not the free-spenders who are
called on the pay the bill, but poor buggers like you and me (and how many
others who are even more lost). Since all bills are either false or falsified
they have to be re-done, but at first they must be accepted, all of this in a
political and theoretical shit without precedent (unless the worst occurs)
which has as its only advantage in not being able to be eluded. And in any
event you have to pay both for yourself (which is understandable) but for the
others. And what others!
This is some of what
I tried to say between the lines of that “masked” talk in Venice, improvised
and so lacking in rigor between the reasons, but in an attempt to dam up the
waters. The dams which Machiavelli speaks of, but he had rivers at hand and as
for us, go know if they are rivers or whatever. I have the impression that it’s
as if we never knew this. Yes, this isn’t the first variation in conjuncture,
where the accumulation of difficulties goes so far as to change the aspect of
the day, you don’t feel it coming, a long time in deciding and then as if
suddenly we’re no longer in the same air. But this time, if reality abounds and
even repeats itself, it’s the signposts that are lacking. Another impression:
that of having fought for so long on a front only to find it fade away, that
there’s no longer a front , and that the battle (or what takes its place) is
everywhere, and in the first instance right at your back. You have to be a
Koutousov and know how to sleep on your horse for the great retreat in the
cold. But there are no more horses (at least with us, and without a horse how
can you sleep on it?).
It
is here that we can see, not in the consciousness which has always been haunted
by their existence but, with hindsight, its limits or insanities. I see as
clear as day that what I did fifteen years ago was to fabricate a tiny, very
French, justification, in a good little rationalism nourished with a few
references (Cavailles, Bachelard, Canguilhem, and behind them a bit of the
Spinoza-Hegel tradition) with pretensions to Marxism (historical materialism)
which presented itself as a science. Which in the end serves (served, for I’ve
changed some since) in the good old tradition of every philosophical enterprise
as a guarantee and a down payment. I also see that, things being what they were
at the time, the pretensions and counter-pretensions being what they were, and
I being what I was things could not have been different, and the lines I spoke
were almost natural, as natural as the storms and hail of Spinoza. I
half-believed this, like any “good” spirit, but in order to write that half of
mistrust was necessary for the other half.. This scaffolding doubtless rendered
people the service of being able to climb onto the roof of the house, and go
know what they did with the roof and the house and the view of the landscape
they got from their climb! Even so, things are a little complicated and, in
addition, I’ve acquired another certainty, to wit: that the writings follow
each other with a logic which as little as you recognize in general its necessity
in order to be at all a philosopher, doesn’t allow itself to be “rectified” as
easily as all that. Rectify, rectify, something will always remain behind...
The character’s prison remains, even if the “character” who had the imprudence
to reveal itself in a text decides to announce that it has changed. I go back
to the famous precept: never write the works of your youth! Never write your
first book!
Not
everything was vain or worthless in this adventure, for the logic of the play
of assertions is not that of the assertions themselves. But the question is to
know how to “manage” this presumed or presumptive past in a situation like the
one we are subjected to. The only answer I find for the moment is silence. And
despite all the differences, I understand yours, which has quite other reasons.
In the same way as I understand the temptation and the option of a retreat into
“the metaphysical depths” which have the advantage of combating solitude. A
silence that can be definitive, and why not?. Or a retreat to publish a few
little things despite it all on Machiavelli, Gramsci and consorts, or a few
impertinences on philosophy, an old idea that I have been dragging around, you
remember, but which with the aid of experience I must seriously rectify since
the time of our promenades in the pasture, or maybe even about the Epicurean
tradition? Nothing of importance in a time when one must be armed with enough
concrete knowledge in order to be able to speak of things like the state, the
economic crisis, organizations, the “socialist” countries, etc. I don’t have
this knowledge and I have to, like Marx in 1852, “begin again at the
beginning,” but it’s late for this, given my age, fatigue, lassitude, and also
solitude.
Of
course there is the possibility of returning to “Capital,” now that we more or
else see what doesn’t work in its reasoning, which doesn’t touch on the idea of
the factory, but on its arguments. But here too in all logic it wouldn’t
suffice to take it apart, but one must put the mechanism back together, which
supposes other pieces and something more than the little philosophical culture
I dispose of.
You
speak of “disgust”; I hear this word around me from among the best of them. And
yet here it’s not as it is in your country, but it’s the same word. It’s the
word that openly says that we can no longer find our place in all this shit and
that it’s vain to look for it, for all places are carried along by the insane
course of things. We can no longer bathe at all in a river. Unless you’re a
picket planted in the current that silently holds on. To a bit of terra firma.
The important thing is to find this bit of earth beneath the waters. After all,
it’s the “shaking-up of the world” of Montaigne who, when it comes to
conjunctures, saw quite a few of all kinds. But the book is already written; you
have to find something else. If you can write me I am a taker for your
“metaphysical depths;” by curiosity and so as to know how you do it and in
order to guess from the answers you seek the questions that are troubling you.
I
passed a very difficult summer, but I’ve now found a certain equilibrium. I can
read a bit and am capable of waiting. The incredible way the problems of the
world tie themselves around personal fantasies is incredible and pitiless. I’ve
lived this. But I also lived the first denouement of the thing, and this gave
me some courage and a kind of “learned” courage. This changes nothing in the
mess that is the world, but in the obsessions of the soul... it’s a beginning
that is, let us say, encouraging. And so, change the order of one’s thoughts
rather than the order of the world...
Forgive
this long confidence, dear Merab. Here I keep everything to myself; with you
things are different.
I embrace
and care about you.
Louis
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