Original subtitles

So, Jacques Derrida just arrived.

Here I am now,

in the bizarre role

of the radio presenter.

He is greeting everyone, you don’t see him here he is,

now you should see him, he must be on the screen.

We are in two rooms.

-Two rooms?

-So, I’ll tell you, we have an issue.

You have to go to both sides,

and in fact what I was thinking of doing…

what I thought I would do, is...

First,

from the bottom of their hearts, everyone thanks you

for being here, for us it is a joy,

and since we are in two rooms it is very cruel,

but I am dividing the cruelty in two parts,

we'll go to the other room, so that you will see it

and they will see you in the flesh,

because, really…

Here, wait, I’ll go along with you.

Ok, wait.

I don’t know which side it is.

Those are his comments about my own text, you see.

What’s intriguing is that

you try to read, and the words are precisely about “seeing.”

That's the other side.

“I write this while flying over the Cordillera of the Andes...”

“Snowy.” “Snowy.”

So, you received this? Or did he hand it to you in person?

He gave it to me.

But he told me not to open it.

This is his.

Of course, he chose this, you see.

So that's one.

That’s...

another one.

Double-sided.

Listen to this:

“Create more wavy sentences, less assertive narration”

Do you remember the way you read it?

How I read it?

Well, you know, I didn’t even know that I had it.

Because I have a lot of stuff, you know.

I have lots of beautiful things here.

But you know, when you are living

you don’t really try to keep or consume.

So everything I have

is here in drawers and I never attempted to, to…

It’s pell-mell in my drawers,

and it’s by pure chance that, once, I opened one of my countless drawers

and found this, that I had completely forgotten. Because,

again, when you’re living you’re not keeping.

At least, you never think about keeping.

It’s kept, it keeps itself without…

a very free motion without…

I tell you, I had completely forgotten it,

like many other things

because if I had kept track of it,

it would have been funerary,

when in fact it was anything but that.

That’s always the basic paradox of the secret. If you keep it,

it is so well kept that it becomes pointless, as a “secret for yourself.”

To the contrary, if you divulge it,

it’s lost.

If you project yourself

in this ideal human configuration

that when you die,

there’s a testamentary executor

who is in your trace,

who loves the same things you do,

who trembles before living documents that pulsate,

someone who sees how the heart of the text beats, etc.,

in this configuration, the successors

can bring these beauties to light, they can...

but the problem is that it never happens!

There is no succession.

But you know there are treasures here. So sometimes, I tell myself...

That’s what I say, you can believe me. That’s all.

In the history of what I have written,

I very quickly felt that

everything I was writing was related to death,

that it was death that brought me literature.

It started with my father,

and then for years and years,

I cultivated death, I cultivated the dead and death.

And anyway it was my lot.

And with time,

I began to say to myself, but it was rather late,

I must have been writing for 20 years,

questioning,

and finally, feeling uneasy

and anxious that

I was free to write because my father was dead!

There was this absolute taboo

regarding the treatment of living beings in literature.

it was a taboo that I respected.

Never touch the living,

so that the dead were dead,

and the living were dead too

since they weren’t present in my writing.

When my father died,

very brutally, and when I was 11, 10 years old,

he disappeared.

As my mother put it, “poof” and...

I couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t understand it

because they loved each other,

they were a happy, joyful couple.

And so I shook my mother, like that!

I grabbed her, shook her,

I said “but, but tell me!”…

she was… there was nothing more. Nothing more.

And I couldn’t bear it when I was that age.

Later,

I loved my mother for that, I loved her tenderly,

telling myself that…, when I finally understood

what my mother never explained to me, of course,

I told myself that it was terrible,

the fact that my father had to be replaced by such a tomb.

And... that’s how it was.

I was born in Algeria

I was born in Algeria

When people ask me, I say, I was born in Algeria.

For me, this remains a pronouncement

that is both true and mysterious.

But, I wasn’t born “from” Algeria.

I was born in Algeria

with an over-determination that was inscribed.

It was written that I would leave Algeria.

That Algeria was not mine, and that

I was assigned to Algeria,

only in a partial, complex manner,

as one belongs to a native land.

This is also an extraordinary mystery.

At the same time,

because my mother is from Germany

and I was raised in an environment

that was

German speaking and filled with German culture,

I also felt that I was born of Germany,

of a Germany

that I had never set foot in…

whence my mom

and her family had been able to extricate themselves...

whence my mother had to escape...

As soon as she witnessed Hitler’s rise,

she fled.

But then, one must bear in mind that I was not French.

But that I had two countries that contain “Ger-”.

And that suited me, because I thought,

we say “ger”

and then, depending on the moment, it'll be

Al-GER-ia” or “GER-many.”

One contained the other, or was superimposed.

And what’s more, I had discovered a trick:

“Oran,” my birthplace,

anagrammatically, was contained within “Osnabrück,”

my mother's hometown,

so I thought, that's how I was born, Oran in Osnabrück.

I had barely learned how to walk when, with the anti-Semitic laws of Vichy,

we were thrown out of French nationality.

My father was prohibited from practicing medicine

and I wasn’t allowed to go to school, etc.,

all of these anti-Jewish laws.

This was a formative experience.

Later, it's: “Okay, the Americans are coming,

you can go back to school.” But you’re being stared at!

Why feel the slightest resentment?

That wouldn’t make sense.

World history, the history of humanity, is made up of events of this kind.

It’s made up of losses,

expulsions,

these are widespread experiences.

It follows that I cannot tell myself the fable

that I have a stable French identity.

Now the French state, through its administrative procedures,

never misses an opportunity to remind me of this fact.

“I am a French writer,

and I’ll let you handle the messy paperwork!”

I remain undocumented, with no passport,

it just takes me years to renew it!

So this fantasy of a “pure race”

is something that exasperates me.

That’s why I am always very happy

to be suspected

and denounced as not-quite-French.

Let’s pick one, randomly, as if I was playing cards:

this one I draw,

features my father, he’s young,

on the balcony in Oran.

I observe him with curiosity because of his anatomy,

because he was a man who was so very thin.

At the same time, he was very elegant.

This is a delicious photo

of my mother and my aunt

in Osnabrück.

I cannot see the details.

My impression is that it may be...

may be in Strasbourg.

These are pretty photos.

This is… here, it’s noted

in my mother’s handwriting, which didn’t change.

From 1938, when she wrote this,

until the end of her life,

she wrote in exactly the same way.

And it’s written: “Hélène enjoying

her first birthday on the 5th”... This is interesting:

“5 Juni,

1937”.

She slipped from one language to another.

Which means that at that moment, her French was not yet

dominant and inscribed.

That’s Hélène enjoying her first birthday.

That’s another photo where we were still very young.

It looks like I was two years old,

on the balcony, in Oran, there's my father,

mother and us.

What I saw from the balcony of Philippe street in Oran

appeared in a very theatrical structure.

Our balcony went to the edge of the street,

to the corner of the Place d’Armes.

This location was where the whole history of Oran was taking place.

And so, we saw everything, all the time.

To the right, there was a theater. In the front was the City hall.

To the left was the military

and in this square, there was always,

throughout my childhood,

the army. Always.

I saw, I don’t know how many parades…

before the war, the parades of the Zouaves,

and then, all of the armies involved

in the Second World War:

the Petainist parades,

then, the arrival of the Americans in 1942.

This is a cute photo, when we were at the beach.

We were still happy:

“baby...” Like my mother wrote - ah no, this is my grandmother!

My grandmother, Omi, wrote

“Baby, fast drei Monate alt,”

almost three months old.

Baby, that’s me,

almost three months.

And they were still happy, they were at the beach,

since it was before the war.

This is a photo of Omi my grandma. Young Omi.

Rosalie, Rosie.

Isn’t she beautiful?

She is a totally free woman.

And to whom I… I woke up late

and I don’t know, when she lived among us, one day,

I told her, like that, I went to her room and asked her

“Omi, do you believe in God?”

She said “of course not!” “Natürlich nicht, are you kidding?”

I said, “I suspected that! But then why did you introduce us

to the Jewish religion, to its rites?”

She told me, “Because it’s beautiful.

Because my parents believed and I am loyal to their beliefs.

Buy I don't have the faith."

So with that momentum, I asked her,

“Did you have any Kümmerer?”

This means lovers.

“Natürlich! Natürlich!”

“I had to have some lovers, just a few!”

What was funny, it was...

only when I became a woman that I realized that she was a woman,

and not only my grandmother.

So, she had extremely funny stories.

There was never any hostile speech.

My mother and grandmother did not raise me

to be a Germanophobe. Not at all.

There was a great, terrible schism

with the Nazis/the Germans.

And of course, France played the most terrible role

throughout my childhood years.

And that is ineffaceable.

That's Marga and her brother.

Who died too.

All these photos are of Marga.

There, that’s my mother.

Arthur Baruth.

He has become a legendary figure

I introduced him into many of my texts.

He was a rabbi who had lost his faith!

The poor substitute rabbi of Osnabrück,

who died from losing his faith!

He had to be a rabbi to make a living,

he couldn’t do anything else as he was too kind,

but he didn’t believe in God…

And he was madly in love with my mother.

"My Dear Eve,

“To you, my Eve,

the best of me,

nothing,

neither destiny,

nor pain,

can separate us,

I will always be near you.

I will always be, entirely, your Arthur.”

And she never loved him.

He was a good-natured gentleman...

who lost touch with reality

because when he had to preach at the synagogue,

he began to stammer and he forgot everything!

Because God was whipping him!

Everything is always autobiographical, but what does that mean?

I tend, “I” refers to you, me, we,

tend to privilege,

to save,

to raise, or to lower,

finally, we “edit” reality, all the time, permanently.

The sweeper passes the broom,

between the living and the dying,

life wipes away death,

the broomstick run along the edge of the end,

sniffing the flush on the ground. It’s skinny,

it's all that remains of a flexible broom.

As you know, the broom is a broom shrub.

It’s an example: Today we're going to do some Cézanne.

Do you remember your first time, when you first discovered Paris?

Oh, it was atrocious!

I was 18 and I had just gotten married.

I suffered terribly, terribly.

I hated it.

I felt completely foreign, in every aspect.

I couldn’t stand Parisian buildings.

I found it incredible that there was red carpet on the stairs.

But I came from Algeria, you understand!

I said to myself, “I can’t believe it! How do these people live?!”

I found it stuffy, ugly.

The city hadn’t been cleaned up yet.

It was dark. Everything was dark, and dirty,

and unbreathable, and mean.

I absolutely revolted against Paris.

I thought the monuments... I was missing the ocean.

It was my first time in France.

And the only thing I could throw myself into was the Sorbonne.

And, so, here, we’ll pass by the Sorbonne,

and that’s how I met Derrida.

When I was 18. I walked into an auditorium,

and that was it.

As I recounted and as he wrote,

I sat in this lecture hall which also appeared to me as the supreme horror,

because it looked like a court,

with old wooden benches, I sat down way at the back

and there was a young man

who was giving a great lesson in philosophy,

that I listened to.

All of that is ineffaceable!

So, I'll tell you what the title is.

“The last painters of the earth!”

Yes, yes, that's it.

You could almost imagine that he is carrying a baby.

It’s a sweeper-mother.

It’s the Pieta, who carries

the misfortune of the world!

So, what are you up to here?

I'll show you the latest creations. Come on.

I call this “Citizen,”

the child playing with a soldier.

White porcelain.

That one is “Chicos.”

named this “Chicos,” in Spanish.

And so, we don’t know, is it child's play or is it a “real” game?

You see all those school children playing with guns...

that's what happens in Los Angeles, in the United States.

... And those are drawings,

little ones, big ones...

Deborah Kerr

and Burt Lancaster, the famous kiss...

I think that Hollywood has produced only one true erotic work,

That's the only one for me,

the craziest of all.

1954.

In Algeria, none of the movies ever show kisses.

They cut them out.

You have to re-watch all of the movies in order to see the kisses!

Films by Hitchcock...

Algerians love suspense!

They know it by heart.

It feeds the imagination.

Yes. Right.

In Algeria, for example, the story of the TV series Dallas…

for the entire world, it's a love story, right?

Whether you like it or not, it's Dallas.

But for the Algerians, it's the story of American bureaucracy!

Because in Dallas, they type, they are typists,

they are at the office, and when they come home, they start typing again!

He never kisses Sue Ellen, Pamela and all that!

The kisses were censored!

That's why I think “The Insurrection of Dust” was just perfect.

Because that's what Adel does.

He stirs up dust.

I say that “I am a without-country.”

Of course, I have a common country with Adel,

but obviously

it's not the country-nation, it's another country.

And, “my” native country has never been “mine.”

Even if I have loved its innocent beauty.

As soon as I was able to think, I thought of running away.

So that's like Adel, right?

I think that the two of us are

“runawayers.”

We are departing from Algeria,

from the “infinite ambiguity of ‘my’ ‘country’ on this earth.”

“I have never even been allowed to be ‘abandonable’ by Algeria,”

because I was in internal exclusion from this country,

a beautiful country loaded with chains,

that creates barriers and muzzles,

and as you said, Algeria also cultivates censorship...

I feel how Algeria abandoned you.

You said that it wasn’t you who abandoned Algeria,

but that it abandoned you in advance...

Yes, it even tried to eliminate me.

What a shame.

She should be there.

They must have a switchboard and block the lines.

Oh no! He gave me that same number, that’s her number!

Today she isn’t picking up the phone.

That was quite funny!

It’s the Sabbath! Of course.

We’ll try Marga another time.

How did you track Marga down?

How did I track her down?

Yes, how did you retrace her itinerary? She fled to Ireland...

Marga is my mother’s first cousin. She was my mother’s age,

so now she is 105 years old.

She’s the one

who hosted me

when I first went to Europe.

When my mother sent me

from Algeria

to England,

I stayed in the Carlebach home

and started learning English.

She lived in a London neighborhood called “Golders Green.”

It was a very Jewish neighborhood,

but I was oblivious to that at the time.

I simply thought I was in England.

My father was an atheist.

So were my mother and my grandmother,

even though they didn’t show it.

They were in the footprints of a long history,

and when I saw the practices of the Jewish religion,

I found them appalling.

I thought it was a heap of superstitions,

with practices that were unworthy practices.

For example, the repression of women.

And the fear of women.

The rejection of women.

“Do not touch a woman,” etc., all these things I saw

and found inadmissible.

And these practices were not at all related,

in my personal experience,

to something that I would have found noble.

I did not feel at ease with the detached community,

although one could understand

that the Jewish community was traumatized by the war.

Aside from that, I had no sympathy for any religion.

When you write for the theater, does your writing style change?

Completely.

Radically, because here my writing is not entirely mine.

Because at the Théâtre du Soleil, characters take the center stage.

It's not a theater grounded in texts.

So I have to lend

my verbal powers

to different characters who incarnate the possibility

of several different writings. I have to perform collective writing.

Oh I hope that’s not a demonstration over there,

what a mess that would be!

I am not only the person who writes.

Life at the Théâtre du Soleil,

I like it,

but it’s not...

As a writer,

I cherish the rare moments

when I’m writing a scene, and all of a sudden it comes to life.

That's a lot of fun.

But, it takes a lot of work to get to that point!

And then it's not completely joyful

because it's depends on how it is received,

since I write something

and I have absolutely no idea how Ariane is going to react to it.

Whether she’ll say “It works” or not at all.

-You can’t predict that! -No.

I never know.

Those trailers are used

by our members in residence, our guests,

undocumented immigrants...

- In 1996, there were many undocumented people here

- Yes, 200 of them.

- How did they arrive?

- The 200 undocumented? These were the undocumented

of the St. Bernard Church...

It was the time of the great fight

against the Ministry of the Interior, for the undocumented.

At some point, the undocumented

who were staying in the St. Bernard's Church

were brutally kicked out by the police

I don’t remember all of the details, but someone called Ariane

and we welcomed them here. The Théâtre took them in.

It was epic, not only because it turned our theater

into a gigantic village

but also because Ariane and two other activists

started a hunger strike here.

For the moment, we’re tinkering with the space.

And, it's a mock-up. Later it will be fully built.

That's great. That helps my asthma!

Wow, I had no idea you played harmonium!

-I learned to play it a bit.

- Where did you learn? in Afghanistan?

- I learned here. - That’s great.

He was with us on stage!

Ten years later, here we are on stage together!

Fifteen years.

Fifteen?! Oh you’re right! Fifteen years already!

December 12, 2002.

It’s quite a story!

I remember your arrival!

He was tied to something.

And... everybody was wondering what it was, it was “his cue.”

He was holding a cue!

So everyone was wondering “What is this weird story with the cue?”

And furthermore it was forbidden to touch his cue!

Little by little we discovered that his cue…

his cue!

You still have your cue stick, do you?

It was a cue stick!

that he had been holding ever since he left Afghanistan!

He had walked across the entire world with his cue.

His cue that lifted him up...

He was a pool champion there.

And you very quickly became a champion here?

Champion of France, yes.

Isn’t that incredible? The cue stick!

No need to naturalize this one,

it was a universal cue stick!

I’ll always remember

“I want my cue.”

It was hard to believe!

Speaking of cue, I have to go get ready!

Go, go get ready.

I have to get dressed... Thank you, very inspiring!

A dream I had last night sealed my decision!

I was a goat. So, do I continue or not?

“We’ve been,” says my mother,

“we’ve been.”

She doesn’t say: we went there.

“We’ve ended up not going there,” I say.

“It never ends,” says my son.

“I couldn’t go without her,” I say.

I thought about it,

but with bad thoughts. Thoughts of death.

“Without them,”

it’s as if I thought: you’ve been,

and now you are no more.

Afterwards.

Afterwards.

Afterwards, they were no longer

Omi, Eri, Eve: they’ve been.

Now they are in the books.

“Perhaps I should have written ‘North Station,’”

I thought while cutting out the last pages of Osnabrück with scissors.

After Eve

the thought of death came to me:

“I cannot die without having been to Osnabrück.”

But why?

The thought hesitated. It was perhaps:

“I cannot die before having been to Osnabrück.”

Sometimes I said to myself

I should not,

I owe nothing. Now, unfortunately I could go to Osnabrück.

I owe it to Eve.

That's what happened in Osnabrück.

In 1938 they imprisoned the Jews of Osnabrück,

supposedly “to protect them.”

And these are the convoys that contained the people of Osnabrück

after their arrest.

Through the critique of phallogocentrism

that privileges binary contrasts and the masculine schema,

she founded ‘women’s writing’ as a tool for empowering women.

We are delighted to welcome Hélène Cixous, presenting Ayaï,

The Cry of Literature.

Thank you from the bottom of my heart,

thank you for gathering together, to celebrate

thank you for gathering together, to celebrate

the tension literature brings us,

which is paramount.

There are some people,

including professors, who say that post-structuralism,

as well as those who say that it’s a good thing,

are a bit like a passing trend. Nothing more.

Does it offend you when very intelligent people,

such as philosophy professors, say this?

Well, no, theoretical statements really don’t pertain to me,

to tell you the truth.

Personally, I never considered myself a “post-structuralist.” I am a poet.

Then there is the question of trends.

Those who make these claims are in fact hostile

to all literary work.

That said, trends do exist.

And, here, it’s quite American.

At a particular moment

you're labeled a “structuralist” or “post-structuralist.”

We don't even know what that means.

And then this just vanishes

and what they call a new “turn” emerges, in the US.

American marketing determines such trends in thought.

It'll last for a while,

and then another trend will be in fashion.

But those who do that are themselves caught up in a cycle of fads.

The things they say today will be trendy for several years

they will disappear, to be replaced by something else…

So, in the end, this is of little interest to me.

What interests me is real creation,

real poetic work,

the work of cultivating language

and discovering new treasures in it.

Thank you.

Forgive me, but these are theoretical questions just the same.

Questions of trends, precisely.

- Right, but it wasn’t my question. - I know! Thank you.

Actually, it’s always double-sided like that with a…

Here, it’s illegible.

And there’s also one

that makes reference to the Righteous, you see?

The memory of the Righteous among the Nations remains unforgettable.

Did you see it? That’s quite rare.

For, for… the…

Prosopopoeia, perhaps?

That wouldn’t be too bad, would it?

Yes, hold on then…

Then, now…

do you have something that would be useful,

something relevant when I introduce you

I could brief you…

I think that it would be important for you to speak

about my two most recent books about Germany,

they're about traces, wounds, the dead, etc.

Okay, okay. All right.

Since, in that, we don’t speak about it at all…

and with reason, but it must be addressed.

And your two most recent books, this includes

But in any case, I’m not going to do a great deal…

No, it’s wonderful because that will also help them.

It’s really quite useful! That works perfectly.

- I’m not at all worried about that. - No, listen…

The students have prepared extensively.

They’re ready.

You mentioned

what else have they read?

They had… there were pieces from

two small collections published in the 70s…

Something on the subject of women’s writing.

No, I don’t want to.

They know, and their readings also apply to the whole day,

so that will be for later in the day.

It was… everything was fictitious, you understand?

What was not fictitious was my mother’s dream of Osnabrück.

Since she was no longer there, I was the one who had to go.

But still, there is the sense that

your mother, your grandmother, and your aunt Eri

would often speak about Osnabrück.

Meaning that it was a memory of the olden days.

The very memory of the houses in Osnabrück,

the streets, the parks, the little river called the Hase,

they had all of it before their inner eyes,

But then there is the pain of returning,

remembering the cruelty of the Nazis.

It was unbearable…

No, I don’t believe so. But I think they had no reason to try.

They kept Osnabrück, the good Osnabrück.

- In their memories.

The good Osnabrück.

And since they were free, they weren’t forced,

they returned as a courtesy.

I remember my mother debating it, you see…

with my aunt… they would call each other,

“What should we do?,” etc.

And then… then she said to me, “Yes”

“Since we are asked to go,

in a way they are asking for forgiveness,

they have asked us to come, we must go.”

And then when they went,

there were so many comical stories, you wouldn’t believe it!

I loved the way they went there.

There was such a discrepancy,

until 1968,

between what Germany deemed acceptable to think

and what Jewish Germans had experienced and thought,

that it was irreconcilable, nonsensical!

You rightly felt that history was completely twisted

and that nobody had begun to argue.

Our circle of friends is now

between 70 and 80 years old,

and we have begun to ask each other,

“So, were your parents, Nazis?”

The reply used to be “Oh no, in our home, perfect,

no one took part!” Today, we speak more openly.

Ah, it’s a question that makes me crazy

when I hear people say, “We’ve spoken about it enough.”

Absolutely not! Now is the true beginning.

We are posing the question “how?”

after such a long time. It’s incredible.

What is difficult, in my opinion,

as I have always articulated to my students,

is the aspect of desire,

not only the desire of some Jews for material wealth,

but the desire for intellectualism, and for intellectual faculties.

I have often taken notice of that.

Well, I must say, it’s incredibly complicated to speak about that!

Because, what I’ve come to notice, and,

of course, I’ve found terrifying…

I know of individuals

whom I consider racists who do not even realize that they are racists.

And yet, at present in France,

there are people who belong to the sophisticated intellectual circles

and institutions,

who have uttered this phrase that I find abominable:

“Jews are intelligent.”

And they say it with a certain…

it’s philo-Semitism, meaning anti-Semitism, you know?

I’ve seen a great deal of that.

I’m impressed because it’s really beautiful.

Rarely is something so well done, isn’t it?

I don’t know; it’s astonishing.

You could say it’s made of granite, but it’s so…

It looks like it’s pink granite.

I don’t know, was it produced like that deliberately,

to give the impression of ruins?

It’s incredibly powerful, I’m really in awe of it.

I haven’t heard of her at all. But this is really quite powerful.

This is truly incredible.

Annie-Joëlle, Annie-Joëlle!

Did you see this?

- Yes, I saw it - Did you photograph it?

I took a general photo of the whole thing,

but if you want… - Absolutely… Yes.

What should we do?

It feels like we have to do something, right?

Good. Hugs to you, Marga.

At first she said, “I’m over a hundred years old.”

Eve used to do the same thing,

she stopped at a hundred years and when I would say,

“No, you are over a hundred years old” she couldn’t bear the thought.

She would say “No, no, no.”

I would say, “Okay then, you’re eighty years old.”

Here you are, you turn your gaze.

It’s good. The gesture is right,

except that it’s too broken.

It’s really...

The opening gesture, you see?

And keep your hand outstretched.

“Cornelia, Cornelia!”

And then you can say it like that too…

- I didn’t say anything. - “Come in rumor!”

You'll take care of the entrance for your marionette.

Yes! You have me come in!

But we’re not on stage.

- Why? - No, we’re not yet on stage.

- But yes ! - You improvise on the set, listen!

No, we’re coming up, behind Cornelia’s bed,

Well- that’s it. So, is the bed here?

- Right. Which side? - I’ll come up behind her.

- And then, you’ll say, “Come in rumor!” - “Come in rumor!”

Here you go rumor!

So what?

What does the rumor say?

That Lear has disappeared

- “The rumor…” - Say! Say it!

“The rumor says the word is spreading.”

- Exactly. - “In Paris.”

Yes. Okay.

And you tell the rumor “All right, now make it shorter!”

Just like in a newsroom,

“Shorter, shorter!”

We have to be able to play with those papers and tell them:

“See, do you see all those figures?” - Right, absolutely.

We’ve got to have lines of amounts,

and say: “Look at those amounts, we calculated”

and that becomes really…

You’ve got to make it look like a cartoon.

Extremely fast like in a cartoon.

Very cartoonish.

- “Where is Lear? - Where is Lear?

- Hey, where is he? - He isn’t here.”

It’s like cats and children!

He isn’t here. So, Cornelia Lavandou,

since you’re the one who’s in charge now,

how many subsidies can we expect?

Taking into account that the show directed by Josette Duval,

the famous Red Trilogy…

“Red is a color just like others.”

Such a marvel!

Those actors!

Well, let’s not get off-track here!

“She managed to raise only 200,000 euros…”

A soundtrack.“Lear has disappeared, Lear has disappeared,

Well here we go!”

There are voices everywhere of… of…

“It looks like Mr. Lear has been missing for 24 hours in Pondichéry,”

and it’s like “Shoot, shoot”

and we show up to silence the rumor, we pull the shutters closed!

“The rumor!

Lear has disappeared!”

we rush to the window, we hear the rumor!

Ah, Jean-Jacques, Jean-Jacques! Excuse me…

And just like that, in an instant, we heard our two voices,

as if we were in Paris.

In this case, you need the rumor in different languages.

Yes, yes, yes! a whole host of languages.

You pull out a clock:

“We’ve got only one minute and thirty seconds,

for, for the Vision!”

- But do you know what she pulls out? - A clock.

- No! - An Alice white rabbit!

No! A ticking bomb!

A big bomb, you see?

“Look, just one minute! You’ve got one minute thirty seconds

in order to give us your Vision,

if not I’ll die! We’ll die!”

And there we’re here, tic-toc, tic-toc, one minute,

here we are, we just do the tic-toc, forty seconds…

We’ve got to say it like this!

“Thirty, twenty, nineteen, eighteen, seventeen…”

No, no, straight from twenty to “ten, five, four, three, two, one…”

… and there she goes: “Noooo!”,

and we’re being sucked through the window,

we roll over and we’re gone.

But, I had no idea, I had no idea you had this hideout!

Well, you see, the place is full of secrets.

How many drums do you have here?

Oh, here, almost a hundred.

- Are you familiar with each one? - Yes.

All of them? Oh yes.

I’ve played them all.

You have a music library here.

I can distinguish the original ones…

This one is original, from Bangladesh. These are elephant drums.

that one in the back is a replica that we created.

That one’s also a replica.

- You love them all. - Yes. All of them.

All of them, because I use each one for very precise purposes.

The instrument that particularly interests me,

the one drum I’m going to use for this specific play.

- What’s that, honey? - A “pipephone.”

I plugged a bunch of PVC pipes

to make a kind of xylophone, with ping-pong rackets.

- Do you play it by hand? - No. With ping-pong rackets.

Latest toy piano from the department store.

It’s marvelous. It works splendidly.

Yes, it has a truly beautiful sound.

“In Oran,

when fate made her

spokesperson for the dead,

my grandmother Omi began to play her role,

I didn’t see there were silences.

In Oran, I didn’t know that I didn’t know.

I didn’t pursue my grandmother, I didn’t unbury the dead.

When I wanted to ask my mother, I gave up:

her stories didn’t remember the previous stories.

All that remains is

Marga.

‘Maybe you should ask Marga,’ the book suggests.

I was without conviction. That would be an unexpected turn.

Marga?

After all the witnesses and contemporaries have departed,

more than seventy years having collapsed on the scene,

there is no one left to say: I knew the Jonas family,

they knew the Engers,

the Engers knew the van Pels,

the van Pels knew the Franks,

Peter van Pels rode his bike with Horst,

Horst stole my mother Eve’s bike

that she had borrowed from or lent to Grete Bloch,

the daughter of the veterinarian,

Felix Nussbaum I knew him said my mother.

This memory may have been created by her

when she was more than a hundred years old,

never having come to her previously,

so it’s impossible to say if Eve

didn’t know/knew

Felix Nussbaum

Marga remains?

At the end,

looking at a map of the Zentrum of Osnabrück,

one no longer knew who had known had not known whom,

everyone had known whomever one hadn’t known,

everyone had come by

had gone for walks, had entered,

had bought, had seen,

had spoken, had learned, had swum,

had gone on an outing in the forest,

had taken the Abitur exam, had eaten,

had had their secrets, had died.

Marga remains.

Marga, Eve’s remainder.”

I received this letter

after our phone conversation.

This letter had taken a great deal of time to arrive,

as it’s postmarked the 17th of March

but didn’t arrive until the 24th of March,

And I think that I must have received it

at about the time when she passed away.

So, it really

saddened me this…

“evaporation” because when we,

when I talked to her over the phone,

it was three, four days before her flame faded away.

She passed away like that.

I had a bad feeling, but still.

I had noticed, I told you that, Olivier,

I felt like she was speaking more slowly than usual.

However, she was fully present.

She is the last one.

We might say that my mother was the second to last.

Anyway, they were the last ones.

So as long as they were around,

this was a never-ending story

where everyone was saved.

Everyone was kept alive in those two women

who had not forgotten anything.

So, I told myself that

this time, the book has been closed.

Even if I am tempted

to look into its next chapter, I don’t see how.

I don’t know anyone who’s 105 now.

105 is the required age now,

or at least 100.

And I can’t think of any survivor from this era.

From the great chronicle of Osnabrück that faded away here.

Personally, I’m not happy unless someone is moved to tears.

It’s true! The sign of a true performance

isn’t when someone says, “Oh, I laughed so much.”

It’s when they can’t even speak because they’re weeping.

And that’s exactly what was happening. That’s my true point of reference.

And after yesterday’s performance, so many people were in that exact state.

So, it was beautiful, but the show is awfully tricky because…

it’s like a butterfly in that it’s a subtle blend

such that when you’re not

exactly on the mark,

while keeping fragile, stuttering and trembling at the same time…

there’s something missing.

Okay. Let’s go. Excuse me. So, warming up like usual,

Hey you, we’ll see each other about the cow, right?

Since we inhabit a world

that is always oriented toward others, toward addressing the audience,

I’m going to speak about the one

who never positions himself with respect to the audience,

even if he gives the impression of doing so,

and that is the dictator.

We are leaving the era of Obama

who had created this delightful motto,

so simple by all appearances:

“Yes, we can.”

“Can” is an incredibly powerful word that harks back to its Sanskrit roots.

“Can” is both “power” and “knowledge.”

“Yes we can,” “Yes, we know we are capable of...”

And now, in the place of the motto

that gave hope to everyone we have

“I can!” It’s: “Me.”

And that’s no simple thing!

Now, what is even more extraordinary is the fact that,

unfortunately, we poor human beings

have a tendency to be fascinated by…

well, not by anything,

not the one who’s assassinating everyone,

but this one leader who speaks

in such an authoritarian way, “auto: me, me,”

who says something so simple,

that is “Me, myself, I can because I am myself,

and I am so utterly full of myself that I am the only one who can!”

And that fascinates people!

This is the enigma of narcissism:

there is someone with such faith in himself, that he…

well, there’s no other equivalent to him than God himself!

Yet, we must say that we poor human beings

have the tendency to be drawn to God,

because God bestows upon us

all kinds of good feelings.

The despot

is a sort of unfeeling God because,

whom does he adore above all else?

“Myself!”

“Myself!”

A big, fat “myself.”

Thank you, Hélène.

And finally,

Do you see them?

Well, it doesn’t matter.

Hello Master,

thank you for all that you do for us.

We honor you here.

Being.

Cum nihil sit.

Ipse.

This, I noticed this rather belatedly…

that each time I came here

there were always visitors gathered,

and I must confess I would always slip out

until the crowd cleared downstairs and I would surreptitiously rush upstairs,

and in this way I finally found myself alone, in front of this,

and I said to myself,

“But, it’s the prison, the one I talk about all the time!”

with its…

and the one that, furthermore,

recounts this extraordinary story

of a condemned prisoner,

it’s a fable of Ancient Rome,

of a prisoner condemned for an offense committed against the ancient city,

and the prisoners’ guards notice that he doesn’t die,

despite having been condemned to death by starvation and dehydration.

It’s because his daughter who comes to visit him regularly breastfeeds him.

Through the bars.

When you think about it, it is Montaigne’s choice

to live with this vision!

it’s something I only realized in retrospect.

Because when we enter here, what we see first is disrepair.

But one day... “No! There is something!”

There is heaven and hell.

Heaven… and hell.

I think that I’ve always worked on this…

because heaven and hell are the two overarching entities of our existence.

We are beings of heaven and hell.

Altogether.

And it’s both incarceration and liberation.

This is what I addressed, in one of my books called

in which I took this image,

which embodies the fact that we are often incarcerated.

In the course of our lives we endure periods of incarceration.

So, what strikes me here

are the bars.

Because the bars are very much

the border between life and death that we are always aware of,

and for me, this brings together the bars that marked my childhood,

the military fencing in Oran, Algeria,

which I would walk along when I was three years old,

and even before that, when I was two years old,

since the Military Circle had been locked up,

in bars that were tall like that, that I verified,

but through which you could see, you could see a garden,

but a garden,

that was forbidden.

This garden opened when I was two-and-a-half years old,

during the war, in 1939, when my father was recruited

as a military doctor.

This garden of Oran

was a garden exclusively reserved for officers,

and suddenly the bars opened!

At two and a half,

I headed into heaven! I believed that I’d entered heaven

since I’d always longed for this garden.

And inside,

what did I find? Hell! I absolutely couldn’t understand!

I was inside, yet I had never been so far outside.

Ostracized, rejected! Surrounded by children. And…

and the hunt began!

And I absolutely could not understand why.

It was there that I had my first philosophical and political experiences.

In which…

I realized that when we are taken in,

it might mean we'll be thrown out!

And thus the key I found,

the one I finally came upon,

after two or three months,

(because I was trying to find a way in)

having been inside and then not…

was a word I was not familiar with,

and it was the word “Jewish.”

Because all of a sudden, the older children

spat on me, saying

“you’re Jewish,” and I had no idea what this word meant.

After all, literature is like that too,

it’s the passageway between bars.

Meaning that when, when we write,

we write like that,

with little bars through which

through which breath passes,

through which signifiers are at play…

Montaigne went through this experience in a thousand different ways.

He, of course, was on the other end of the social scale,

but he was aware of this.

He could simply look around

and witness the Wars of Religion.

He witnessed them personally, the cruelty, the violence…

Now, I must say that when I arrived, when I managed to arrive in France,

by which I mean that I was in France and I wasn’t here,

arriving from Algeria… it was awful.

I couldn’t handle it.

I was… I couldn’t find the entrance!

And I entered through this door. Here.

And I entered through this door,

because I arrived in the Bordeaux region of course,

because in this specific location, there is a confluence,

this sublime Dordogne region is the confluence

of the Wars of Religion, of Catholics and Protestants.

Exchanges occur like that on the edge of the Dordogne,

on a bank, for example, it’s Protestant and…

Because of that it’s an immensely graceful region,

because here,

people are in accord with the surrounding natural beauty.

And I have had this experience!

I was twenty when I discovered this,

and I said to myself, this is the entryway

to a France I could love.