Life among Conceptual Characters

A letter to conclude the special issue of New Literary History on “Recomposing the Humanities—with Bruno Latour”

Paris
June, 1, 2016

Dear Rita and Stephen,

Thank you for allowing me to conclude this set of papers with some personal—and I am afraid not terribly coherent—reflections on, or rather recollections of, my own encounters with what has been called the “humanities” in this symposium you have so kindly assembled. As you know, in French the word “les humanités” is no longer very common, and it certainly doesn’t refer to an organized field that is to be promoted, defined, or defended against other disciplines. So it would make no sense for me to situate myself inside the field of “les humanités.” This is why, following your suggestion, I would rather reminisce on my own connections with what French people would call “littérature,” “écriture,” “style,” “texte,” “textualité” in their relation to thought and politics—a series of links so typical of French culture that it will probably appear amusingly exotic to your readers. Please take the following attempt as no more than an ethnographic testimony to a quickly disappearing culture of writing.

Oddly enough, i am able to date with a perfect degree of precision my connection with writing as a thought-producing activity: October 13, 1961. Even the hour—7 p.m.—is inscribed on the cover page of the first of my personal diaries! As far as I can tell, the fourteen-year-old writer had already made the connection between writing and thinking since he had penned as an incipit: “J’y noterai tous les soirs mes activités et surtout mes pensées” (I will report what I do and above all my thoughts). The “above all” is especially pleasant since at this early age he had no thought whatsoever to jot down! At least not yet. Because, as everyone in the field of humanities suspects, thinking follows and does not precede writing—at least this highly specific form of thinking associated with mid-century bourgeois European techniques of scribbling. Considering that today I am taking notes in a (by now digital) notebook numbered 212, this means I have been allowed for the last fifty-five years to continuously learn what I should think through the deciphering of some twenty thousand pages of personal pattes de mouche!

If I don’t need to belabor the point, this is because Jean-Paul Sartre in Les Mots marvelously diagnosed the bootstrapping operation by which a thinking subject is generated out of a neurotic obsession with penning page after page. Who is the writer? The one who is fabricated by writing. In the twentieth century, some bourgeois children could learn to become subjects and to “have thoughts” because they wrote as much as they read from their parents’ libraries. If “reading is an unpunished vice,” writing is the symptom of quite a few perversions. Although I am two generations younger than Sartre, it is fair to say that I have inherited the same atmosphere conducive to the various vices of a self-generating writing.

The formative nature of writing private diaries, especially by adolescents, is a well-known phenomenon of Western media culture. Filling in blank pages allows for a distance to be introduced from the saturated world of daily existence. Writing diaries is like carving for yourself a breathing space, providing that it remains protected from any one’s else reading (something probably lost today with blogs and selfie-filled Facebook posts). My father (1903–1982) was a serious bibliophile, who read the classics out loud to us every weekend, and who had the good fortune of being trained by Jacques Copeau (1879–1949), the “renovator of French theater,” when he retired in my native Burgundy in the neighboring village of Pernand-Vergelesses. But even in the midst of a large, loving, and literate family, or I should rather say, because of this constant shower of privileges, a kid does need a breathing space. How would have I survived otherwise, with seven siblings and hundreds of cousins, nieces, and nephews? However, while most...