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By Root 841 0

give you an example: that Internet site answering to the name of Bakchich [Baksheesh], which specializes in spreading so-called information that in reality is pure defamation and where, as it happens, we both have a real nest of common enemies. Yesterday, or the day before, I read in Libération that they can no longer afford to pay their “informants” and that they are about to go bust. Obviously, that’s not immanent justice. It’s just that their tone, the hard toil of their derision, their hatred of others and themselves, their way of wishing so fervently for your death as a writer or mine, in short their immersion in the negative emotion of rank bitterness, intoxicates them and reduces them to idiocy, making them uninteresting, fossilized, weak and, in this case, mortal. Strength pitted against strength. In this game the writer will always win. In any case, he will have the last word. Bakchich, that insignificant rag, which, by some slip you couldn’t even invent, took as its title the same word used for the bribes paid to police informants, will not only have failed but will be forgotten, while the writers it tried to bring down in issue after issue will continue to write and be read.

Third, the pack is stupid.

I’m not saying we’re particularly intelligent. We have our foolish areas, of course, beginning with the temptation to give in to the paranoia, which casts its shadow, among other things, over this correspondence. But the pack is stupid, so unbelievably stupid. It’s like a great lump of an animal that can’t see beyond the end of its nose. And fundamentally it takes so little to disturb it, to make it lose its head, its radar, to disorient it, to get away from it.

A mask, for example. A borrowed or made-up identity. A minimum—our friend Sollers would say—of comedy, the art of fleeing and evasion. A false lead. A decoy that all of a sudden throws the big animal’s detectors and those of its manipulating master off the scent. An art of hiding by revealing yourself or revealing yourself by hiding. What Heidegger would call a technique of disappearing into the shadows of Lethe, or the opposite method, which amounts to the same thing, of making yourself lanthanonta, literally “inapparent,” but under the lights, with all shadows dispelled. The trick that always works is that of complaining you’ve lost when you’ve won. The shrewdness of the Chinese tactics of giving the command to attack openly but always conquering in secret. And then moving, just moving. When the pack attacks, the tendency is to curl up, bury yourself in a hole, to freeze. But you need to do the opposite. You need to spread out—I nearly said go astray. Move as much as you can. Put the greatest possible distance between yourself and the pack. Increase your sidestepping, springing forward, strategic withdrawals, surprise attacks, pincer maneuvers, counterattacks, or simply diversions and avoidance.

Of course, it’s possible to build a refuge.

Some sort of internal niche that will shelter you from the oil slick of the negative emotions.

You can make yourself an island—Kafka spoke of “cellars” or “caves”—that would be not a space shuttle but a sort of land shuttle that would give you a little shelter.

But please, only mental islands!

Concentrations of space or time that will be like new internal coordinates, adapted to each one of us.

Niches are all well and good, but you must be able to take them with you on your travels, and equally—although this also comes down to the same thing—they must be able to take you on their travels!

Please note, there’s no need to go too far. It’s enough to travel in your own town—see Debord’s Panégyric. Or even a journey around your own room, like that of de Maistre, the other de Maistre, Xavier, who, alone with his dog (him too!), was able, within his own four walls, to undertake the longest, most exciting, and most perilous of odysseys. A journey from one identity to another, even to a multitude of identities, like Gary and Pessoa. Or from one book to another, one genre to another—Sartre, Camus, all those hunted and