“Jankélévitch is right: love is about control and this control is a blessing. To love is to be dependent, dominated, subjugated, subjugated. To love is to come second.” Alain Finkielkraut offers us his “pearls” on the occasion of a new book, in other words a series of quotes which have accompanied him throughout his life, sources of reflection, wonder, and knowledge. It begins with Love and Valéry (“The heart consists in depending!”) and on a breakup with the woman of his life. It begins with an admission of vulnerability that combines comedy (“In the subway, I chewed Lexomil pills like a rabbit eats a carrot”) and the sublime (“Between love and self-esteem, I had chosen love […] Without love, I would have remained locked in the prison of egocentrism, this tedious preference for oneself by oneself), and there is no longer any beautiful opening to knowledge and culture.
Starting with the intimate, Finkielkraut whispers to us that everything that will follow (death, culture, Europe, Judaism, humor, yesterday…) is a love story, a path of knowledge, a life choices – excluding ease and mediocrity. A confession of love is a willingness to live unhindered, a declaration of independence from dogmas, ideologies and other intellectual prisons.
I “met” Alain Finkielkraut through The imaginary Jew. A shock which protected me from any temptation of identity, from any attraction to “wearing” the exile of my Iranian parents as an identity. I have lived my life trying as much as possible to be me, orphan of a mother tongue, cultural bastard, solitude and wealth of a metic, ambition for truth, desire for emancipation, freedom, freedom. Child of History, passively dependent on external events which had transported me from there to here, I made the active and joyful choice of France.
And suddenly, I discovered I loved the last Sartre
With Finkie, we come together in France, in its language, its literature, its propensity to tie intertwined poetic and political knots. So when Finkielkraut returns to Imaginary Jewopening a chapter with Hannah Arendt (“For many years, I considered that the answer to the question: ‘Who are you?’ was: a Jew. Only this answer took into account the reality of persecution” ), where after the already known admission of his Jewish “sobriety”, he notes, forced to be a colonizing Israeli under the attacks of the new anti-Semites hidden behind a misguided humanism: “And here I am enlisted in the army of the king’s peddlers and that the star of David is pinned on my chest. David, that is to say, in this case, Goliath”, what do you want, it provokes me, it stirs within me .
So when he ends this brilliant chapter with “I therefore answer a ‘Zionist’ to the question ‘who are you?'”, because “only this answer takes into account the reality not certainly of persecution, but of righteous hatred“, I take this answer for myself, as we should, all of us universalists and humanists, take it on our own and with dignity, to never let what is human in us rot away through fear and cowardice.
By reading the fascinating essay by Laurent Touil-Tartour which reads like a thriller, Finish Sartrethe urgency of calling oneself “Zionist” in the face of a part of the elite who have had anti-Semitism in the name of the oppressed too easy for too long, I discovered the brutality of the Sartrean reactions against Benny Lévy after the publication of the text Hope now in the New Obs, a few days before Sartre’s death. The Sartrean historical guard, Beauvoir more Stalinist than ever in the lead, did not forgive Benny Lévy, “given birth” by Sartre, his final dialogue with the existentialist, who returned to his past errors and at the threshold of his life rethought himself anew with Emmanuel Levinas, primary source of his encounter with phenomenology, considering Jewish reality through metaphysics: “The Jewish end is the beginning of the existence of men for each other. That is to say, to say a moral end. Or more precisely, it is morality. The Jew thinks that the end of the world, of this world and the emergence of the other, is the ethical appearance of men for each other. . And suddenly, I discovered I loved the latest Sartre.
Abnousse Shalmani, committed against the obsession with identity, is a writer and journalist
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