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Literature or life? Life because of literature; for me life does not “live,” it is not profoundly and carnally life unless I know that I can snatch words from it.

At the risk of imprisoning it? At the risk of locking it up in those little paper coffins of which Sartre said at the end of his life in his interview with Madeleine Chapsal that they were the real subject of his Critique de la raison dialectique? It’s certainly not that. It’s exactly the opposite. I can think of nothing more antifunereal than words well used. By contrast with Sartre, who confused putting into words with placing in a coffin, I can imagine no happier place to stay in life than in a page of literature.

Moreover, I must tell you that in my humble opinion this is precisely why Baudelaire will always be more admirable than Rimbaud: life is elsewhere. What a mistake to think that real life is elsewhere! What unforgivable madness when, without leaving Charleville, he was this wonderful poet, to set off for Harrar to plumb language and give expression to its ever more dizzying depths. A season in hell? Why only one season? How I love, by comparison, Baudelaire’s exultation of literature, spewed out up to his last cry, of “For God’s sake, no!”

When I think about it, this was also the belief of the rabbis who stated that it was words that gave worlds their substance.

And I must say that when I’m down, when I feel like a real prick, when I’m ashamed of all the tricks and reminders I need to make sure I don’t forget the Darfuris or the Afghans, I can tell myself that at least I’m faithful to the great and lofty lesson of those sages.

There is no life outside of words; that’s the basis of their doctrine.

In order for there to be life, you have to get the right sparks from the white-hot stone of words—that’s the heart of the Talmud.

The true logic of living, its real constitutive element, is not the cell, DNA, and so on, it’s the pale tissue of the signifier, the fine intrigue of words that is the root of my literary neurosis as well.

I believe.

Of course, if we take this route we must take it all the way to the end.

And if we say that words are living, that they are more alive than living beings, that they are life par excellence, that we are really alive only in proportion to the quantity of words we’ve ingested, we can’t stop halfway. What is inherent to living beings is that they die. We must accept the idea that words, like all living beings, and indeed even more so than ordinary living beings, are earmarked for death, one of their intrinsic properties being that, sooner or later, they are destined to perish.

How soon? How late?

And for these living beings that are words, what is the specific system of their mortality?

And there you have it—the difference between good and bad books. For someone who is interested, as both of us are, in the machinery of literature, its abysses, its chaos, and the complex of forces that allows it not to implode, the only question that needs to be asked about any writer is what is alive in their writing and what is dead. In a given text, which are the words that are already dead, those that have one foot in the grave, those that are alive still but for how long? Which are the phantom words, the ghosts?

The answer is clear.

It can be seen with the naked eye. Your ear will detect it. There’s no need to be a great critic. Or rather, to be more precise, that is the principle of all criticism worthy of the name.

In the great writers, the ones that practically discourage us from writing in their wake, almost everything is alive. For a long time, a very long time after the words were written, the power of the drama that took shape through them lives on.

In the bad ones everything is dead. The ink is barely dry and already the words it formed are disappearing. These are books without a footprint, books that leave no traces. It is sometimes said, and you said it yourself about the false books that have been written about you, that they are so bad that they dirty your hands. But it