• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 823 0

de Neuilly, where I attended secondary school, the official whipping-boy was named Mallah. I can’t remember his first name. But I can still see his pale face, his clumsy, frightened gestures, the beseeching way he looked at his tormentors. And his name came back to me when I read in the papers recently that President Sarkozy’s mother came from a Jewish family in Salonica, whose name was none other than Mallah. Was he a relative? A cousin? A sort of older Sarkozy? I don’t know. Nor do I know what became of him or even if he’s still alive. What I know is that, like you, I kept my distance from the pack of little hyenas who sought him out to humiliate him, even going as far as the metro to “look for” him. But not taking part in the posse after Mallah, keeping away from the squad of junior lynchers, was not enough. I took that boy under my wing and for several consecutive years made him my best friend. I don’t deserve to be praised for this, any more than you do. But I note the psychological trait that, after all, was not an obvious one for the little Jewish boy I was at the end of the 1950s. It was so inconceivable to me that I myself might end up as a prey for this sort of pack, I was so far from fearing that I could be another possible target for the same horde of bastards, or, if you want to phrase it differently, the nightmare of persecution was so profoundly alien to me, that I had no problem at all with his being seen to be associated with me; indeed I flaunted my friendship with him.

By the way, some time later I made an extremely disturbing discovery. I had a literature teacher in the first year of prep at the École Normale Supérieure named Jean Deprun. Although he was thirty years older, he was like a clone of this little Mallah (with the same sort of feverish intelligence, the same large head on a deformed body, the same pale complexion with surprisingly fresh flesh, still looking unworn). I found his manner toward me strange, almost hostile. Without understanding why, I noticed that he avoided making eye contact when he called me up to the board to comment on a poem by Maurice Scève* or a page of Salammbô.† Then one day I mentioned his name at a family meal and my father exclaimed, “Deprun? But I knew him very well.” He told me that during the war, at the Cherchell Military Academy, this eminent scholar, a specialist in the philosophy of anxiety among eighteenth-century writers, had been a sort of forerunner of Mallah, tormented by a league of young males, hounded, bullied, and my father had given him his protection, just as I was to do thirty years later for his reincarnation in Neuilly.

My reason for telling you about this episode, the reason why I’m remembering and telling it, is that I’m always fascinated by the mystery of these ancient gestures that bewitch us, and which we unknowingly repeat.

But even more so, I wanted to tell you that I know all about this merging, potentially criminal group, the lynch mob, avid, bloodthirsty, the “hairless, malignant beast” of which Frantz speaks in [Sartre’s play] Les Séquestrés d’Altona [The Condemned of Altona],* the “carnivorous species that has sworn [our] destruction,” in a word the great animal “lurking in the familiar eyes of our neighbors,” which is rearing to be “released.” In a sense I know it doubly. I am almost genealogically familiar with its characteristic breath, the quickened step, the warning signs, the war cry, the treachery. But I’ve never really felt that it was targeting me in particular or that I had it coming, that sooner or later my turn would come.

Let’s put it differently.

Having reflected on your question, yes, of course.

Yes, it’s quite clear that this is “the” phenomenon par excellence, that this phenomenon is the basis of social relations, far more than, say, love, the social contract, or universal affection among mankind. That’s clear.

It’s clear too that inclusion implies exclusion, and that generally whenever two men meet they have agreed to reject and banish a third … In other words, we must be suspicious of what the Greeks called