« No Lear | Main | "I can do mathematics in yellow underwear" »
April 08, 2005
MBK
Part of an interview with Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, from Ironie. An intriguing slice of Parisian philo-culture and the force of the 'Badiou effect' within it. MBK's Évenement et répétition is a possible candidate for undercurrent amateur translation next...
Interview Ironie / Mehdi Belhaj Kacem
Somewhere in a café, evening, 25 May 2003...
i . Literature, Depression and the Decline of the West
Rémy Bac : Depression and suicide. It-s a theme that returns in Évenement et répétition, as it frequently does in your work. The shadow of Artaud. At any given moment, you say that the streets of Paris and of Berlin are full of people who are depressive, stressed, etc-Whereas people in third-world countries are usually smiling. Very Houellebecqian, all that! This -suicide of western society in decline- thing.
Mehdi Belhaj Kacem : It depends which third-world country you-re talking about. Houellebecq? No, no. I know what you-re trying to say. I-m very much above such debasedness! (laughs) I-ve never been suicidal. If I had a really serious illness, which made me suffer terribly, maybe- I-ve always -" even in books that were really dark, like Society -" posed the question non-subjectively, even if that might be part of it, but interrogated depression and suicide in a different way.
R.B. : I ask you because you relate it to the political question.
M.B.K. : It-s political not to talk about it. -Suicided by society- is a pleonasm.
R.B. : It-s Chevènement-s famous phrase that you repeat at will to whoever will listen. Why does a minister of the interior never speak of depressives and suicides, so much more numerous than homicides-
M.B.K. : If one might dialecticise Badiou-s system, in Western systems one is far more on the side of representation, and where does murder come back in? In the mode of affects. It-s a philosophical question. There-s no depression in China, for example.
R.B. : Because it-s a collectivist society.
M.B.K. : Precisely. It-s really a question of breaching western condescension. If the westerners say: -Oh, the chadors in Iran,- well then, I say to them: -Look at a porno film over here.- I made a montage with Iranian women who are in the process of a divorce. You see the specialist judge in the quranic order who handles divorce cases. You say to yourself -Ah, oh, oh, this is going to be terrible,- but not at all! The girls defend themselves beak and claw. The guys are crushed, in general. Sometimes, they have nervous breakdowns, they-re on the verge of suicide. Care of the children is given to the mothers. So, I made a video montage. I put a porno film specializing in big tits, with these massive tits, where you see two girls under the shower touching each other and splashing water on each other with sponges. And there you go, that-s it! It-s breaching western condescension, the -it-s better over here.- It-s always like that. The Iranians, they-re a superior people, extremely complex. The Iranian revolution wasn-t just nothing, even if it was the islamists who came out on top. There have been revolutions elsewhere, it-s not necessarily the good guys who win, but it-s never entirely the other way around either. It-s what Deleuze said about the future of revolution and becoming-revolutionary. It-s not a question of moving towards a collectivism. For me, it-s a question of escaping the literary, artistic, hypernarcissistic, hypersubjectivist spirit.
Posted by robin at April 8, 2005 02:34 PM