Is it because he is the son of the great neurologist Lionel Naccache that Nathan Devers does not have the brain of Mr. Everyman? Winner of the general competition in philosophy, normalien, associate professor of philosophy, soon to be a doctor, he accumulates titles of excellence. We know the downside of this type of profile: when intelligence takes precedence over sensitivity, it results in somewhat dry graphomaniacs, like Tristan Garcia or Aurélien Bellanger. Devers has mastered Being and Time of Heidegger, he is inhabited by a form of vital momentum which gives emotion to his books.
At only 26 years old, he already has two essays and two novels behind him, including Artificial links, brilliant satire of the metaverse selected on the Goncourt list in 2022, and sold nearly 25,000 copies. His new book, Thinking against yourself, is the first where he talks about himself. Autofiction without thought or formal research, as so many are published? Far from there. Certainly Devers recounts with sincerity the teenage years when he went to Israel whenever he could and wanted to become a rabbi, before moving away from Judaism in favor of literature and philosophy. But he draws from it a sophisticated and very original text, both profound and funny when he depicts the Jewish high school where he entered first grade. It looks like The words by Sartre written by the young Philip Roth (that of Goodbye, Columbus). Not satisfied with being the author of the most striking book of this winter literary season, Devers is also a teacher at the University of Bordeaux and a columnist everywhere on television, notably at Michel Drucker and at Pascal Praud, where his unclassifiable interventions often hit the mark compared to his interchangeable colleagues. No doubt: Devers has left to establish himself in the intellectual and media landscape. It was well worth a meeting.
We find him at his home in Paris, a studio in the 15th arrondissement which is less like a synagogue than a monk’s cell – a white room with nothing on the walls. Smoking cigarette after cigarette, Devers returns to the project of Thinking against yourself : “To write this book, I delved back into the Bible and into Hebrew. I realized that I had underestimated the poetic aspect of religion. Judaism is not an arsenal of dogmas , it is a quest for meaning, like philosophy. When I was very religious, I prayed every morning, and it was the best reason to wake up. I always find the total union of the spiritual and the everyday desirable . Basically there was no break in my journey. A rabbi manages the current affairs of his community, but he is also a philosopher in his own way, an exegete and a thinker.”
“I see in religion an aspiration to greatness”
The structure of Thinking against yourself will surprise the goy reader: Devers gives no date, the chronology is vague, events come and go. Would the author have wanted to give his confession the form of a Talmudic spiral? “That’s exactly it. One of the principles of the Talmud is that there is no anteriority or posterity in the Bible. The events are recounted as true but recorded in a false duration. I continued this idea, and I also changed certain names and added fiction…” One of the most daring and striking passages of the book takes place in a Jewish high school whose geographical location and name Devers changed, renaming it Betham . With his yarmulke on his head, young Nathan arrives there with his dreams of a rabbinate and is disillusioned: he discovers “fundamentalism”, “a Judaism of oneself and withdrawal into identity” where “several individuals, of tartuffes, became fanatics.
In front of us, he explains: “At 15, I left Jean-Baptiste-Say, a public high school, because I could no longer practice Shabbat. We often make fun of living together as a naive idea, although it’s not so ridiculous. When I arrived in this establishment that I call Betham, I suffocated… How could religious people, in the name of religion, fall into the crassest superstition and even pure hatred? I see in religion an aspiration to greatness, and it is not because I moved away from it that I became hostile to it, unlike Deborah Feldman rejecting its Hasidic roots in Unorthodox. You mention Philip Roth, who is a very important author for me, especially in his early days. In Goodbye, Columbus And Portnoy and its complex, there is this brilliant idea that having an acid outlook towards one’s own is a writing ethic. With him, as with me, the intentions are not controversial. Roth had been unfairly accused of treason, even anti-Semitism, when there is no greater gesture of love towards the Jewish community than to describe its blind spots and to laugh about it. I’m not just talking about Betham in the book. When I describe the Oriental Jewish Normal School, where I went as a teenager and which I remember fondly, the portraits are sometimes burlesque but it is very benevolent. I feel like a divorcee who would write about an over love story, with tenderness for his ex, to settle scores.”
“I’m not afraid of ending up an outcast”
In touching pages, Devers recounts how the philosopher Jean-Pierre Osier guided him towards Normale sup. However, he does not speak of another momentous encounter from his training years. So in hypokhâgne, Devers gets enthusiastic about Hotel Europe by Bernard-Henri Lévy. BHL was the first to notice the student’s talent: he subsequently introduced lots of people to him and published one of his essays with Grasset (Smoking area) and will appoint him responsible for Rules of the Game. Devers paints us this portrait of his mentor: “A media character is always a caricature, and Bernard-Henri Lévy is very different from BHL. He has an absolute, almost religious, passion for literature – more than for theoretical philosophy. He is eminently literary: he reads all the time but above all he perceives the world as an immense novel. For him, people are characters, inscribed in a romantic temporality. I feel close to that.”
Within Rules of the Game, Devers gets along well with Yann Moix. In some ways it is reminiscent of the Moix era Jubilations towards the sky, but without the self-destructive side. Accustomed like his elder to television sets, is he careful of slip-ups? “I’m not afraid of ending up an outcast. What worries me more is locking myself into a dogmatism where I would begin to rot, like those Balzacian television characters, stuck behind a mask with their ideas. Today there are many people who follow an arch-ideological logic, and everything pushes towards that, as if we were living in an immense algorithm. For my part, I am not an activist, not an adherent, I am not I have no political ambition. Some will say that I have a left-wing speech, I just have a questioning attitude, I am not coming to sell a prefabricated word.” A young man in a hurry and reasonable at the same time, the future doctor of philosophy tells us he suffers from the “schism that exists between the university and the media”. His ambition: to succeed in building a bridge between the two so as to no longer have the impression of being “like a bilingual obliged to speak two languages in turn”. All this while remaining creative (both in his novels and in his essays) and without stopping thinking against himself.
Thinking against yourself, by Nathan Devers. Albin Michel, 337 p., €20.90.
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