A Life-long Love Affair with Language

The questions that fascinate me today are exactly those that fascinated me in earliest childhood and which, except for the years immersed in my work as historian of the Ancient World, have almost never ceased to fascinate me since. These are questions of language, of course. Language grasped in its amazing complexity. And first of all in its materiality: the organization of sounds for both speaker and listener, the organization of signs for both writer and reader. Yes, everything that touches upon language—closely or remotely, directly or indirectly—has always attracted me. It has moved, seduced, surprised, charmed, captivated, intrigued, enchanted, distracted, overwhelmed, irritated, delighted, or dazzled me. Early on I took pleasure in ranking the diverse elements of language, tackling first letters (their origin, their form, the countless ways to manipulate them), then words (assemblages of letters) then sentences (assemblages of words), and finally books (assemblages of sentences).

On several occasions (and notably in an issue of this journal) I have recounted the origins of this fascination. So I will briefly recall that it is linked to two factors. The first one was the linguistic situation in which I found myself, through belonging to the Moroccan Jewish community—thus caught in between (French, Arabic, Hebrew). The second one is the importance given to questions of language in my family circle.

Not only is this fascination discernible in each of my writings, but I can say that it is usually the true matrix of each of them. The books of Leiris, as well as those of Roussel and Queneau, and later Perec, have played a determining role in the gradual fine-tuning, over the course of years and of my works, of my method of writing, composed of a complex mixture of language games, confessions, and imagination.

Obviously my reply to the second question ("What do you want to know?") can only be a prolongation of and a complement to my previous answer. What I want, what I would like to know with all my might, is how to use this language, in all its dimensions—how to mobilize all its resources. I realize that this is an exploration that can have no end, as shown by those monuments that are works, like those of Rabelais, Mallarmé, Joyce or Queneau.