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maandag 27 januari 2025

WORLD WORLDWIDE EUROPE FRANCE - news journal UPDATE - (en) France, Monde Libertaire - "Mr. Janvier, these are honest books" demands the black rat. (fr, ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 To start this new year in Greece: two plays by Andreas Flourakis, I Want

a Country and Exercises for Strong Knees. Then Italy, with Machiavelli's
The Prince. France: rereading Roland Barthes' Fragments of a Lover's
Discourse; an essay on Chekhov: Au loin la liberté by Jacques Rancière
then, the incredible Cavale du babouin by Denis Langlois. Chile: The Old
Man Who Read Romance Novels by Luis Sepulveda. Finally, Scotland with
Highlands by Jérôme Magnier-Moréno. ---- The small port of Menidi (Etoli
-Acarnania), Photo Patrick Schindler, 2024 ---- "We don't see the commas
between the houses, which makes reading them so difficult and the
streets so tiring to walk" Henri Michaux
Two plays by Andreas Flourakis
In the preface to this small collection, Ekaterini Diamantakou,
professor and specialist in Greek theater, presents the argument of two
plays by Andreas Flourakis, one of the main current Greek playwrights:
"These two plays have in common that they constitute a perfect diptych
of the socio-economic and migratory crisis, in the recent past, the
current present and the near future, at the Greek and global level." It
couldn't be better said!

I Want a Country (translated by Hélène Zervas, ed. L'espace d'un
instant) has as its characters not individuals, but a whole group who
drop off their suitcases on stage. At the Athens Festival in 2015, the
performers of this play were no less than fifty on stage! Each entity
they embodied stood out from the tradition of monologue, dialogue or
traditional intrigues with the result "A kind of anonymous mosaic of
ideas expressed in short sentences". Cursive judgments, vindictive
protests and more or less rational conclusions follow one another. The
time of the action is rather vague, but could lead one to suppose that
it is the famous "Greek crisis", or just as well take place during that
of Covid 19. Throughout the exchanges between the many characters, the
latter refer to a hypothetical imaginary trip to another country.

Small snippets of conversations in several voices, tirades and evocative
images:
"- What if we left by boat? - What? Save ourselves like rats? - There is
no future here for our children, for our old age - In these conditions,
it is a real suicide - But I have no children! "
"If we could leave by boat, it would become a country for us"
"Leave, yes, but where? In a country without chocolate, life has no
meaning!"

And each suggestion expressed brings the group back to the most
beautiful country: Greece! Thus, like an endless loop, each time an idea
is put forward, from the most selfish to the most generous or the most
eccentric, it is immediately contradicted. To do this, everything is
often confused: references to religion, work, art, old age, friendship,
nomadism, or even identity, mythology, nationalism, ecology, drugs, etc.
Confusing!

Exercises for Strong Knees (translated by Michel Volkovitch), features
four anonymous people: a man, "a woman", a young man and a young woman.
They move during thirty-five short sequences, between two work spaces
and two private spaces. Professional and personal situations then follow
one another as in a fast-paced film, marked by an icy and fierce humor
related to psychological and social drama. Not without sparing a few
tasty references to the "made in Greece" clichés. On the professional
side, from the first scene, it starts very strong. The man and the young
woman, the employees of "the woman", learn that one of them, due to the
crisis, must be fired. To escape it, they will compete in the most
ignoble arguments and methods to reach the worst extremes. On the
personal side, we will meet the son of "the woman" and his son, a young
man who is boring, lazy, addicted to video games and of neo-Nazi
tendency. We are spoiled! Quickly, these situations will turn into
delirium. Infernal and bloody tango between oppressed and oppressors in
a country, also on the brink of the abyss. Hyperrealistic!

Machiavelli: Prince

Nicolas Machiavelli was born in 1949, in Florence. A Renaissance
humanist, a theoretician of politics, history and war, but also a poet
and playwright, he was for fourteen years a civil servant of the
Republic of Florence for which he carried out several diplomatic
missions, notably to the papacy and the Court of France. These years
gave him the opportunity to observe closely the mechanics of power and
the play of competing ambitions. In this respect, Machiavelli is, with
Thucydides, one of the founders of the realist movement in international
politics. Two major books have above all ensured his fame: The Prince
and Discourse on the First Decade of Titus Livius.

Why reread The Prince (ed. G Flammarion, translated by Yves Lévy) by
Nicolas Machiavelli today? In his introduction, the preface writer Yves
Lévy gives us a good reason: "This brief and dazzling masterpiece,
written very quickly in the last months of 1513, is not the work of a
theoretician reduced to inaction by a political crisis, but takes up to
amplify it, the tireless action of humanist diplomat practiced by
Machiavelli that he led in the service of Florence. An essential
reference for politicians - whether they approve of it, condemn it - to
at least discuss it" ... Yves Lévy reminds us that this Political
Treatise was intended for a prince, "in order to prepare him to exercise
his profession well". Then he describes the fluctuating historical
context of the Republic of Florence, as much as that of the Italian
peninsula, "which has become by chance of the ages the privileged
battlefield of Europe". The preface writer then delivers the long
genesis of The Prince and its ancient sources.

A "stunning" story, blacklisted by the Pope after the death of its
author (1527). A few years later, the pejorative term "Machiavellian"
would appear for the first time in the vocabulary, while Machiavelli's
reputation would only grow throughout Europe. And this, despite his many
adversaries and thanks to his few enthusiastic admirers who helped him
cross the centuries, such as Spinoza and his more contemporary, Francis
Bacon.

The book opens with a letter that Machiavelli addresses to Lorenzo de
Medici. However, it is difficult to summarize the Treatise on Politics.
We therefore offer you a short, signposted tour through its twenty-six
short chapters. The first chapters examine hereditary monarchies, which,
according to Machiavelli, "have much less difficulty maintaining
themselves than the new monarchies, since the former are based on
continuity, whereas in the "mixed" monarchies of countries occupied by
force, the local populations are quickly frustrated in their hopes."
Many examples are cited, from Antiquity to the author's contemporary
monarchies. His first barbs against the Churches led to his Treatise
being blacklisted. In the following chapters, the author gives us his
version of the relative durability of Alexander the Great's Empire after
his death. In the same vein, Machiavelli draws a parallel between the
antinomic strategies of the Roman Empire and that of the Spartan State,
in the face of their conquests. Then, he praises the strategies of
Moses, Cyrus, Romulus and Theseus, for him the most accomplished. More
contemporary to Machiavelli, the accession to power through arms or
fortune, of Francesco Sforza and Cesare Borgia. We then move on to the
wicked princes: Agathocles of Sicily and Oliverotto da Fermo. A few
lines on the "civil" monarchies, that of Sparta in antiquity and the
German ones, more "modern". Atheists will enjoy the passage devoted to
the "ecclesiastical" monarchies.

After this "Prévert-style" inventory of all forms of monarchies,
Machiavelli answers the question: What were their means of attack and
defense? What about the praise or blame addressed to the Princes?
Interesting: is it better for them to be loved or feared, to avoid
contempt and hatred? Again many historical examples. The author then
reviews the Princes who, in order to "hold their State, disarmed their
subjects, divided them or led them to be hated by them". What "little
tricks" were useful to the Princes to make themselves esteemed by their
subjects? How to choose their ministers and flee from flatterers?
Machiavelli then looks at "those Princes of Italy who lost their
states": the King of Naples, the Duke of Milan, etc. In the last two
chapters, the author expresses himself on what, in his opinion, has lost
contemporary Italy: "a country without any "dam", without order, without
a leader, stripped and torn". Also, Machiavelli exhorts the new Prince
to whom he intends his Treatise to "not let the opportunity that Italy
sees in him, a "redeemer" and a "unifier" of the Peninsula".

The last page turned, we come to wonder if a century later, Fénelon in
his Télémaque was not inspired by Machiavelli's Prince? According to the
historian Olivier Leplatre: "Without doubt Fénelon would be able to
subscribe, out of context, to this acute, lucidly bitter observation of
Machiavelli, to this background of anthropological pessimism that,
personally, he borrows from the dominant current of Augustinianism, with
accents sometimes of a radical severity: "The world is a Hell already
begun." "
Be that as it may, during our reading, let us not forget to replace
Machiavelli's speech in its historical context "very much of his time":
classist (a passage on the "poor" confirms this in the first chapters),
colonialist and of course, sexist. Thus we can read, among other things:
"Fortune is a woman and it is necessary for those who want to subdue her
to beat her", charming!!!!

Roland Barthes: Fragments of a Lover's Discourse

Roland Barthes was born in Cherbourg in 1915. A literary critic and
semiologist, he was director of studies at the École Pratique des Hautes
Études until 1975, then at the Hautes études en sciences sociales and
finally, professor at the Collège de France. He is one of the main
leaders of poststructuralism and linguistic semiology in France.

One could not be clearer than Roland Barthes on the subject of his
Fragments of a Lover's Discourse (ed. Points): "The lover's discourse is
today extremely lonely[...], supported by no one, abandoned,
depreciated, mocked, cut off[...]All that remains is for it to be the
place of an affirmation. This affirmation is in short the subject of the
book that begins. It is therefore a lover who speaks and says." Below we
suggest you pitch through the different topics (Barthes's beloved term),
which he presents in alphabetical order throughout his passionate and
exciting speech!

It is the notion of absence that initiates these reflections of a loving
discourse, or more precisely, "the image of the raised arms of Desire
and the outstretched arms of Need." And Roland Barthes develops "the
phallic meaning of the raised arms and the nursery image of the
outstretched arms." Note in passing, Barthes' recurring recourse to
maternal references (in this, similar to a Marcel Proust). There follow
some variations on the term "a little silly adorable, evoked too often
by the loving subject with regard to the loved one." The loved one
precisely, an empty word? A fetish word, or a word giving the impression
of a scratched record? Then follows "the alteration of the feeling of
love" (or doubt, no corruption): "All it takes is a word, a gesture from
the loved one who becomes "another" and suddenly I am temporarily
"de-fascinated"! But in fact, what exactly is love? Loving the other or
"loving love"? Inexpressible enchantment? Madness? Drama? Dependence,
long complaint or even unbearable torture? Goethe: "We are our own
demons, we expel ourselves from our paradise"!

Delicious passage: Dark glasses or how to hide your troubles from your
loved one! Two kinds of romantic despair: "gentle doubt" and "active
resignation", or "violent despair". The body of the other: the heart,
organ of desire like sex? What messages do furtive contacts with your
loved one deliver, or the "decoding of signs". Love language or
bullshit? The torture of choosing a gift! Of mourning in love: decline
or "poorly extinguished peat"? What solutions to "lovesickness"? Next,
the four sufferings of jealousy! Do we really know our loved one and
should we be wary of what external informants say? What is hidden behind
the affirmation "I love you"? The loving subject, his "secret rites",
his reading of "signs" and his fetishism. Can the loving discourse,
"often obscene", stifle the other?

And the journey continues: What about the implicit blackmail of the
loving subject to suicide and the "feeling of having lost or no longer
grasping the other"? The meaning of tears: is it the lover or the
romantic who cries (Werther)? Is love like war, a terrain of conquest,
rapture and capture? The love scene: is it practical, dialectical or
only luxurious and idle? Like a fight to "have the last word"? The
lover: a being alone "in, and against the world"? So, the search for
"Total Union": a dream? Truth or simply deception? Optimistic
conclusion: what if love simply belonged to the "Dionysian order of the
roll of the dice"?!!!...

All this does not exclude some references to Roland Barthes' favorite
and eclectic readings. Starting with numerous glances at Goethe's The
Sorrows of Young Werther, the works of Honoré de Balzac, Marcel Proust,
Gustave Flaubert, Lautréamont, Thomas Mann, Georges Bataille, Musil,
Berthold Brecht, etc... For philosophers and psychoanalysts, Nietzsche,
Deleuze, Lacan and Freud. And finally, numerous situations relating to
his own experience and that of his close friends. In short: a delightful
book!

Denis Langlois: La Cavale du Babouin

Denis Langlois, lawyer and writer, was born in Essonne in 1940. As a
student, he took part in demonstrations against the Algerian and Vietnam
wars and wrote for the newspaper of the anarchist-pacifist, Louis
Lecoin. A conscientious objector, he was imprisoned for insubordination
and wrote his first book. Released, he took part in the events of May
68. Having become a lawyer specializing in criminal and human rights
cases, he wrote three books on the subject and continued his activism as
a lawyer. His essay The Black Files of the French Police earned him the
hatred of the police. In Greece, he followed the trial of Alekos
Panagoulis, sentenced to death for his attack on Colonel Papadopoulos
(another book), then became involved in the Gulf War and testified about
the dramatic consequences of the wars in Yugoslavia, Iraq, Lebanon and
Djibouti. His book Edifying Tale of a Man Called Jesus earned him the
wrath of Catholics, who were shocked by this statement, among other
things: "Jesus was just an ordinary man like all human beings. He led an
ordinary life that ended in a sadly ordinary way and certainly not with
a divine resurrection."

Our friend Denis Langlois sent La cavale du babouin (published by La
déviation) to Le Rat noir with this dedication "We are all baboons on
the run"! Our loyal readers have already met the author in August 2021,
with Panagoulis: le sang de la Grèce then in October of the same year,
with Le voyage de Nerval. Having reached the age of 80, Denis explains
to us that he has changed course and this time takes us on the crazy
adventure of a baboon that escaped in August 1995...

Escaped from a zoo? Abandoned by its owner for the holidays? Let's keep
it a mystery. As a warning, Denis Langlois tells us "This baboon story,
I always thought it would make an excellent subject for a book, but when
I mentioned it I was told: the life of a monkey doesn't interest
anyone". After many years, he decides to embark on the story of the
adventures of this kind monkey who, "unlike Jesus Christ, was less
talkative and less of a show-off." So, from the second chapter, Denis
Langlois decides to address him informally and to hold the pen with his
posthumous assent "because it is well known that monkeys cannot write"!

The story begins on July 31, 1995 in Lardy (in an Essonne that the
author is from since he is from there). A woman discovers a baboon in
her garden one morning during a heatwave! The panicked neighbors of this
small village, warned by word of mouth, agree and end up calling the
police. But cunning, the baboon manages to escape them. We will then
follow its incredible journey day by day, with the support of the police
reports and other official documents and press articles, of which the
baboon has then become the darling. In the last part of the book, as a
good lawyer, the author takes up the defense of Papio cynamolgus and
invites us to revisit the circumstances "that led to confusion" during
the last moments of the nice baboon in this small village of Monnerville.

Let's not say more about this explosive cocktail for a breathtaking
story, told with passion and enjoyable humor. In which we will meet our
hero, a certain Jesus "the normal man transformed, himself, into a hero"
and relive joyful scenes from the childhood and adolescence of Denis
Langlois, interspersed with references to the westerns of Clint Eastwood
and many others. Thank you for this magnificent story full of humanity.
With a little nod in passing to Georges Brassens' Gorilla:

Jacques Rancière: Essay on Chekhov

In his essay Au loin la liberté (published by La Fabrique), the
philosopher Jacques Rancière invites us to take a stroll through a good
forty short stories by Anton Chekhov. In order to better grasp the
framework, the author begins by deciphering what is hidden under the
first of them (which all have, by the way, as a common trait:
servitude). It features a vagabond, promised to deportation to Siberia
and supervised by two policemen. During their long journey, these two
will come to question the meaning of freedom, "this distant tear in
time"! Still on the subject of servitude, but "suffered" in At the
Tribunal. Then, "habitual", as in The Professor of Letters or again,
"subject to repetition", in Three Years. Another theme evoked:
indifference to the passing of time, in Lueurs. That of lost lives is
developed in many other short stories (like Ionytch, On a Journey,
etc.): "The call of another free life, but often postponed due to the
inability to prolong the power of the moment".

Let's move on to the fascinating analytical part spread throughout the
chapters, where Jacques Rancière asks himself, among other things,
whether Chekhov's vision of the world can be likened to nihilism or
existentialism? Answers to be discovered... Do his short stories have a
moral? Do they have one and, moreover, do they even have a beginning
that would have any consequences on the end - when it exists?
Interesting passage on the music of the story "which is not found in the
novel, but which arrives in life or nostalgia or dreams". Another
question: why does Chekhov, the unbeliever, only evoke God to "mark the
limits of what his characters are capable of identifying and
understanding"? Concerning medicine or science: "What's the point of
treating?", Chekhov asks himself "since it is society that is sick"! By
the way, was Chekhov a revolutionary? A big question that we come across
several times. Whatever the answer, what was his feeling about them?
Another question: are we dealing with violent actions in Chekhov's
stories, or are his characters the artisans of their own misfortunes?

Finally, an interesting comparison with the works of his contemporaries,
Gustave Flaubert or Joseph Conrad, "like the reflection of an era" ...
In the end: a very successful essay by Jacques Rancière inviting us to
immerse ourselves in the magnetic universe of Anton Chekhov!

Luis Seulveda: The Old Man Who Read Romance Novels

Luis Sepúlveda Calfucura was born on October 4, 1949 in Ovalle, Chile.
His first novel, The Old Man Who Read Romance Novels, was translated
into thirty-five languages and brought him international fame. His work
was strongly marked by political and ecological commitment. The
repression of the dictatorships of the 1970s, the taste for travel and a
marked interest in indigenous peoples are the other vectors.

In the preface to The Old Man Who Read Romance (published by Métailié,
translated from Chilean by François Maspéro), Pierre Lepape tells us
that for him, "a successful book can very well deliver unexpected
treasures". We can see this from the first hilarious scene of the story
which takes place in Ecuador, in a small post on the edge of the Amazon
jungle.
There, an authoritarian dentist who does not mince his words, brutally
operates on the inhabitants of the surrounding area, to the sardonic
laughter of the Jivaros natives. However, the scene is abruptly
interrupted by the impromptu arrival of a canoe carrying the corpse of a
"Gringo".
Antonio José Bolivar Proano, our hero is an old man who claims against
the advice of the obese mayor called The Slug, that the unfortunate
victim was attacked by a female jaguar whose four cubs and their father
had been killed. And it turns out that Bolivar, originally from the
mountains of the Andes, knows what he is talking about. We will then
discover his quixotic, unexpected and merciless journey in an Amazonian
forest "making no concessions to humans". If not to the Shuar natives
who saved Bolivar from certain death before inviting him to a few
secrets. Having reached the age of seventy, what remains for Bolivar of
all these adventures, if not one last passion: "devouring desperate love
stories with happy endings". However, the small community of the border
post will soon resort to his talents. This is when the real adventure
begins.

The old man who read romance novels, a fascinating little book, full of
humanity and more than often, burlesque. But in the background, we
penetrate the sad reality of a nature "increasingly coveted by oil
companies, after having been invaded by settlers and gold prospectors,
without faith or law and without any respect for the Amazonian fauna and
flora".

Jérôme Magnier-Moréno: Highlands

Jérôme Magnier-Moreno was born in 1976, in Paris. After studying
landscape architecture, he became a painter in 2001, creating landscapes
that are both figurative and abstract that he signs with the pseudonym
Rorcha, in reference to the projective test of the Swiss psychiatrist
Hermann Rorschach.

May 24, 2013 in the Highlands (published by Le sentiment géographique,
Gallimard): Jérôme, a young painter who looks a lot like the author,
leaves his home on a whim, after a domestic scene. He then decides to
board the Calenonian Sleeper at 9 p.m., which is to take him at night to
Inverness in the far north of Scotland. He notices that, curiously, the
timetable of this train has not changed since his last vacation trip,
when he was still a teenager. He is also surprised to meet a woman who
looks just as strangely like his mother who died young and who herself
looked like The Girl with a Pearl Earring, the famous painting by Vermeer.
Unable to fall asleep, he then replays his childhood memories and his
morning domestic scene. In fact, his "journey on the dream train" turns
into a nightmare. Short night, drunkenness, aborted fantasies and a
brutal awakening. But in the early morning, at the bend of a grove, we
enter a completely different dimension: "It emerges in a surge of ocean:
the Moor. Waves of mauve earth throwing its backwash of heather against
the train. It is for her that I came back, for her wildness and for her
innumerable Lochs, black, azure and her hundreds of lakes, of which the
most mysterious and guardian of my memories is the "Lake without a name"
giving the deceptive impression of being spared by the planetary
ecological chaos, and yet!" ...

This disturbing little work in color, thanks to the author's inserted
tables then becomes a beautiful waking dream. Doesn't nature alone have
this capacity to make us forget for a while, our poor and fatal human
condition? However, it is important to keep in mind that nature can also
be capricious, violent and inhospitable. Which will give us a thrilling
final scene!

Patrick Schindler individual FA Athens

A stowaway to remind us that winter is here:

https://monde-libertaire.fr/?articlen=8154
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