Public Enemies_ Dueling Writers Take on Each Other and the World - Bernard-Henri Levy [52]
There is a sixth and final advantage to this scheme. It takes account of that dimension of intersubjectivity on which Epicureanism (and Leibnizianism too, for that matter) founders. Why? That’s very simple. Since the individual is this mixture and this process always under way, the border between what is inside and outside is constantly shifting, redefined by the battle waged without respite by rival individuations against one another and the rest of the world. Thus, we can deduce that what is in one today will be in another tomorrow, that by the end of our exchanges that which forms part of my essence at the moment of my writing to you may perhaps have entered yours. In short, there are as many bridges as chasms, worlds shared as worlds at war or in debate. And it is in that experience of sharing, that obvious fact of a conflict that is also always an embrace and an exchange, it is in the flesh of a world that is at the same time both shared and disputed that the real refutation of that sense of solitude imposed by the atomist philosophers can be found. And that is the only foundation, ontologically speaking, for a politics and ethics that can draw the subject out of an egoism that would otherwise turn its hard-won singularity into a prison or a shroud. There too, the Bible can help, and Spinozism with its symbolic/carnal spaces. Levinas too, of course, who by decentering his subject, through the way in which he makes it actually cross the border in order, like shadows or like the soul in certain dreams, to peel away from itself, to float above its own name and find a way of entering into the neighboring subject, makes two fundamental contributions. He corrects the egoistical side, the vital, moving force of Spinozism. And this makes him the modern philosopher who has contributed most powerfully to making accessible the mystery of what makes the ego the “hostage” and the “debtor” of the other.
We all, dear Michel, have the philosophy of our insomnia.
But in my insomnia there are two things that recur and that terrify me.
The void, naturally.
Like everyone else, the void.
But even more so, a surfeit of being, even where it is the fullness of this confident, self-sufficient being, puffed up with pride and independence, which Sartre called the bourgeois, the mere thought of whom made him nauseated and that ultimately is nothing more than the moral—or immoral—version of this stone-subject.
Well, I have cobbled together a philosophy of resistance to nausea.
First without Sartre, then much later with him, I put together a complicated construct, whose chief virtue is that it can help whoever wants it (obviously beginning with myself) to ward off the double specter of being nothing and of being nothing other than yourself, of having no place in this world and also of having one, but one that fills you with an even more biting embarrassment and shame.
A Jewish monadology.
A monadology not only without God but without Leibniz.*
Or, if you like, with a Leibniz reconciled with Spinoza, so all in the shadow of Sartre but also of another major but unrecognized contemporary of his, Levinas, without whom, I must repeat, Spinozism would be nothing more than a form of antihumanism of the worst kind.
For the moment, I’m pleased with it.
I may not have reformed the French economy.
But I’ve made myself clear to myself.
And above all I’ve explained to you the other reasons, metaphysical this time, for my being this “committed” intellectual who in order to exist needs to feel