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By Root 846 0

precise between my generation and that of Comte, and that this bridge is Althusser. Althusser, who in his famous text For Marx, in which he denounced the “lamentable history of French thought in the hundred years following the revolution of 1789,” found only one name to exempt, that of Auguste Comte, describing him as “the only mind worthy of interest that French philosophy produced.” In the “fury” that was always directed at Comte, Althusser sees proof of the “incredible lack of education and ignorance” that is forever “our lot.” And then there’s the other Althusser, who particularly resembles Comte, Comte the man, in so many of his characteristics—his madness; his high doses of neuroleptics; his analyst, Diatkine, counterpart to Comte’s doctor, Esquirol; his stylish and frantically penned books without notes or readings … There’s religion too—that early religiousness and again at the very end, after the death of Helen for Althusser, that of Clotilde de Vaux for Comte. There’s their inability, even greater than Kant’s, to move, to travel, and then the flow of their correspondence, all those letters—feverish, on edge, paranoid—to the great minds of the time whom they considered to be tormented souls awaiting the true, positive faith. Death in life, books as a prison, scientism as another straitjacket … If there’s anyone Althusser resembles it’s obviously Auguste Comte, the inventor of the law of three phases. How was this not noticed at the time? How did we, his disciples, manage to overlook the evidence?)

Finally, there’s your misanthropy … There’s this idea, which is very close to me but which I nevertheless find repugnant, of “drawing up a statement of account” for mankind—which, you say, we should dare to write “from the point of view of bacteria”—as to whether or not the “experiment” has succeeded, whether or not it deserves to be “continued,” if it’s all that it’s made out to be, if being human has such a proud ring about it.

What’s repugnant about it? Well, I don’t need to spell it out. You can well imagine that, particularly presented like this, your question is bound to make anyone uneasy who has spent their life attending to the fate of the Bosnians, the shattered memories of the Afghans, or the minuscule victims, lost without a trace, of Africa’s forgotten wars.

How is this idea close to me? That’s a bit more complicated. What I mean here is that there is a culture that believes profoundly and takes to its limits, indeed to frenzied, absurd lengths, this idea that humanity is a failed species and that we should consider making a fresh and better start on other bases, using the same materials but put together in a truly new mold. That is the culture I came from, the one that shaped me when I was twenty years old. To be more specific, it’s revolutionary culture in general and Maoist in particular. It’s that whole body of thought, inspired by Althusser, no less, whose project was to “split history in two,” to “change man at the deepest level,” “aiming right at his soul,” in other words at the core, to “correct our aim,” as you put it, to subdue our grotesque, slimy “ontological pretensions,” to envisage nothing less than the “disappearance” of mankind as it has been understood up to now. What has caused this idea, once so close, to become distant? What caused people like me to turn our backs on this idea after envisaging it in a concrete form? (And when I say concrete, I do mean concrete, not only out of a kind of dandyism and as a literary experiment; I really did wonder, in Bangladesh, faced at every step with unspeakable poverty, whether it was worth being a human being in this way and whether the Naxalites, the local Maoists, might not be right with their project—which was crazy, Cambodian before the event but radical—of sending it all to the laboratory and bringing back out in test tubes a product that was a little improved.) Maybe that was the point at which to take up the debate. Maybe that was the real question. That’s what I was just thinking—that this was the right angle, the right mix of philosophy