AS SPARKS BEHIND A METEOR:
Pierre Deshusses: You come to Paris regularly. Does this city mean something to you?
There are cities that radiate a certain eros, like Venice, Rio de Janeiro, Florence, and Paris ranks above all others for me. The personal and the historical memories go together and strengthen each other.
PD: You have written several novels, but compared to the totality of your work, they represent only a small part.
Yes, by the way, I don't consider this part to be the most significant. Everybody writes novels. I have presented in them some truths about the age. But I would say that I prefer essays, maxims, aphorisms, and in my last book "The Scissors" I stand more on the side with Montaigne. Starting from a good hundred maxims, you can create a whole number of systems, although systematic thinking is such a corset that the imagination no longer has enough room to maneuver. I'm closer to Nietzsche than to Kant, I'm closer to Democritus, Montaigne, Lichtenberg...You can't decide it, it's already pre-programmed in the genes, as they say today.
PD: In one of the books that is currently reappearing, "Across the Line," written in 1950, you spoke of barbarism and nihilism.
I see nihilism as ended. Activity has become so strong that there is no time left for nihilism. It is a state of mind that one assumes when one is bored, like Oblomov, for example, who for me is a typical nihilist, or Raskolnikov, who lies in his bed and ponders whether he is Napoleon or someone else! When you are involved in activity, you have no time for such things. Someone at whom a gun is pointed is no longer a nihilist, whether he fights back or tucks heel and runs. Nihilism is a matter of boredom, it is something for the rich.
PD: What do you think about the political events of the last two or three years, for example, the German reunification or what is happening in ex-Yugoslavia with the ethnic cleansing?
We are dealing with two great events that have a lot in common, reunification and the fall of communism - it now has only the Serbs and the Chinese to cling to. I welcome German reunification insofar as I consider it a first step towards a world state. What is happening in the Balkans, in Russia, German reunification, all this is part of the same development, by the way, and I think that we are already in the world state, from a purely technical point of view - the technical framework is there, the conquest of space, the atom, the sciences...In antiquity it happened in the same way, the framework was already there under Alexander the Great, and three centuries later it is the Romans who actually established an imperium mundi. The Romans ruled the world; today it is the whole planet. All this does not mean, of course, that violence will stop with the world state. It only means that wars between nations will become civil wars, in which there will no longer be an army, but a world police. The problem arises at the moment in view of the Balkans. But apparently the international community is not yet in a position to send a police force there. The people down there are caught between communism, fascism and nationalism, everything is mixed, and the most primitive is the ethnic cleansing, a strange idea! The fact that it is resurfacing has grave ramifications
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