We never knew, in the end, why Régis Debray had shaved the bacchantes. One day, when he was about 60 years old, he no longer had them. It was necessary to renew the stock of photos and repack the questions which one considered in its heart too futile for a philosopher. We thought: surely a “snub” to stereotypes. A desire to escape the trademark of the famous intellectual – the shaved head à la Foucault, the open shirt à la BHL, the guerrilla mustache à la Debray, etc. We weren’t there. In L’Exil à domicile, his latest book (1), Régis Debray spills the beans. As he was going up one day, on his bicycle and in the wrong direction, a street in his sixth arrondissement, a pedestrian “of a certain age and very well dressed” hailed him: “Where are we going if people like do anything to us?” “This ‘we’, specifies the philosopher, pinged as a community of destinies, worse, a class complicity.” But just as Debray was about to cry out, the pedestrian dealt him the coup de grace: “You know, all that is no longer our age.” “He had, with a scathing word, given me the time. When we can no longer hide, we must become that other that others take for us”, writes the author. Which, the next day, shaved his mustache. Requiem for bacchantes. Those of an “ex-rebel returned to his place, environment and moment. […] Surrender or adaptation? What god would see the difference?
Here are several books, already, that the intellectual searches what he calls his personal “failures” and our collective errors. The ones in the mirror of the others answer each other in a burst of infinite laughter. Because self-mockery, always, watches. Like an acrobat on his wire, Debray wavers, admits his past mistakes, then makes up for it – “Olé!”, we want to shout to him – by pointing out the dead ends we have reached despite everything. This tension between his own “bankruptcy balance sheet” (2) and the wanderings of our time, is all the salt (on the wound) of his thought. One day, Régis Debray summed up his experience as an employee of Che Guevara, followed by four years in prison in Bolivia. “We are not from nowhere. Basically, I had nothing to do there. I got rid of a certain number of illusions by discovering that the revolution is not a fatherland. Wanting to escape to geography through history, that is the secret wish of progressivism. And having discovered that France was a small nation – in the sense that Milan Kundera understands it, that is to say in the sense that a nation knows that she can die – I thought it was worth coming back to France and getting down to what was still a French vocation.” (3)
Are we, collectively, up to this vocation? We are not going to reopen the file here, but overall: no. Tocqueville had seen everything, foreseen everything. With the unbridled development of individualism, the sacred has dissolved, and the collective adventure is bogged down. “My kingdom for a horse”, begs Richard III at the worst of the battle. “My Kingdom for a ‘we’, diverts Debray in his latest book. With the navel and the calculator at the controls, the ‘we’ which sleeps at the bottom of the ‘me’ no longer really want to point its muzzle.” For the philosopher, the era is caught in a sordid pincer movement: economicism on one side, egotistical particularisms on the other. All mixed with Americanization of morals and minds, which he was one of the first to point out. A door must be opened or closed. But, to read it, we live in a draught. “We have the home cinema, the talk show, the fast food on a background of bread oven, Mutu meeting and tarte Tatin, and we can even learn to support each other”, remarks Regis Debray. Before adding: “You have to imagine Janus happy.” Ole.
(1) Exile at home, Gallimard, November 2022
(2) Title of one of his books published in 2018 by Gallimard
(3) Replies, France Culture, November 14, 2020