Anathemas and Admirations (67 page)

Letter to Fernando Savater

Paris, December 10, 1976

Dear Friend.

In November, during your visit to Paris, you asked me to collaborate on a volume of tributes to Borges- My first reaction was negative; my second . . . as well. What is the use of celebrating him when the universities themselves are doing so? The misfortune of being
recognized
has befallen him. He deserved better. He deserved to remain in obscurity, in the Imperceptible, to remain as ineffable and unpopular as nuance itself. There he was at home. Consecration is the worst of punishments — for a writer in general, and particularly for a writer of his kind. Once everyone starts quoting him, you must leave off; if you do not, you feel you are merely swelling the ranks of his “admirers,” of his enemies. Those who want to do him justice at all costs are merely hastening his downfall. I shall stop here, for if I continue in this style I shall end by pitying his fate. And there is every reason to suppose he can do that on his own.

I think I have already told you that if I was so interested in him, it was because he represented a vanishing specimen of humanity: he embodies the paradox of a sedentary man without an intellectual
patrie
, a stay-at-home adventurer at ease in several civilizations and literatures, a splendid and doomed monster. In Europe, as a kindred example, we may cite that friend of Rilke’s, Rudolf Kassner, who early in this century published a work of the very first order about English poetry (it was after reading that book during the last war that I began to learn English . . .) and who spoke with admirable acuity of Sterne, of Gogol, of Kierkegaard, as well as of the Maghreb or of India. Normally depth and erudition do not go together but he somehow reconciled them: a universal mind, lacking only grace, only seduction. It is here that Borges’s superiority appears: incomparably seductive, he has managed to put a touch of the impalpable, the aerial, a wisp of
lace
, on everything, even on the most arduous reasoning. For in Borges everything is transfigured by the spirit of
play
, by a dance of dazzling
trouvailles
and delicious sophistries.

I have never been attracted by minds confined to a single form of culture. “Not to take root, not to belong to any community”: such has been and such is my motto. Oriented toward other horizons, I have always wanted to know what was happening elsewhere; by the time I was twenty, the Balkan skyline had nothing more to offer me. This is the drama, and also the advantage, of being born in a minor “cultural” space.
The foreign
had become my god — whence that thirst to travel through literatures and philosophies, to devour them with a morbid ardor. What is happening in Eastern Europe must inevitably happen in the countries of Latin America, and I have noticed that its representatives are infinitely better informed, more “cultivated,” than the incurably provincial Westerners. Neither in France nor in England do I see anyone who has a curiosity comparable to Borges’s, a curiosity hypertrophied to the point of mania, to vice — I say “vice.” for in matters of art and reflection, whatever does not turn into a somewhat perverse fervor is superficial, hence unreal.

As a student, I was led to investigate the disciples of Schopenhauer. Among them was a certain Philipp Mainlander, who particularly attracted me. Author of a
Philosophy of Deliverance
, he enjoyed the additional distinction, in my eyes, of having committed suicide. This completely forgotten philosopher, I flattered myself belonged to me alone — not that there was any particular merit in my preoccupation: my studies had inevitably brought me to him. But imagine my astonishment when, much later, I came across a text by Borges that plucked him, precisely, out of oblivion! If I cite this example, it is because from that moment I began thinking more seriously than before about the condition of Borges, fated —
reduced
— to universality, constrained to exercise his mind in all directions, if only to escape the Argentine asphyxia. It is the South American void that makes the writers of an entire continent more open, more alive, and more diverse than those of Western Europe, paralyzed by their traditions and incapable of shaking off their prestigious sclerosis.

Since you ask what I like most about Borges, I have no hesitation in answering that it is his freedom in the most varied realms, his faculty of speaking with an equal subtlety of the Eternal Return and the Tango. For him
everything is equally worthwhile
, from the moment he is the center of everything. Universal curiosity is a sign of vitality only if it bears the absolute mark of a self, a self from which everything emanates and where everything ends up: sovereignty of the arbitrary, beginning and end that can be interpreted according to the most capricious criteria. Where is reality in all this? The Self — that supreme farce. . . . Borges’s playfulness reminds me of a certain romantic irony, the metaphysical exploration of illusion juggling with the Infinite. Friedrich Schlegel, today, has his back to Patagonia. . . .

Once again, one can only deplore that an Encyclopédie smile and a vision so refined should provoke general approbation, with all that implies. . . . But after all, Borges might become the symbol of a humanity without dogmas or systems, and if there is a utopia to which I should gladly subscribe, it would be the one where we all model ourselves on him — on one of the least ponderous minds that ever was, the last to give its true meaning to the word
select
.

16

Maria Zambrano

A Decisive Presence

A
S SOON as a woman takes up philosophy, she becomes vain and aggressive, with all the reactions of a parvenu. Arrogant yet uncertain, visibly
dumbfounded
, she is not, evidently, in her element. How does it happen that the uneasiness inspired by such a case is never felt in the presence of Maria Zambrano? I have often asked myself the question, and I believe I can answer it: Maria Zambrano has not sold her soul to the Idea, she has safeguarded her unique essence by setting the experience of the Insoluble
above
reflection upon it, in short she has transcended philosophy. . . . In her eyes, only what precedes or follows the formulated is true, only the word wrested from the shackles of expression, or, as she herself says magnificently,
La palabra liberada del lenguaje.

She is one of those beings whom one regrets meeting only too rarely but of whom one cannot stop thinking and whom one longs to understand or at least to surmise. An inner fire that eludes, an ardor that conceals itself beneath an ironic resignation: everything in Maria Zambrano leads to something else, everything involves an
elsewhere
, everything. Though one can discuss anything at all with her, one is nonetheless sure to slide sooner or later toward crucial interrogations without necessarily following the meanders of reasoning. Hence a style of conversation unblemished by objectivity, a dialogue in which she leads one toward oneself, toward one’s ill-defined pursuits, one’s virtual perplexities. I remember precisely the moment when, at the Café de Flore, I made the decision to explore Utopia. On this subject, which we had mentioned in passing, she quoted a remark of Ortega’s that she quite casually developed; I determined then and there to commit myself to the regret or the longing for the golden age — which I did not fail to do subsequently with a frenetic curiosity that little by little was to wear itself out or, rather, turn into exasperation. Nonetheless, readings extending over two or three years had their origin in that conversation.

Who, so much as she, has the gift, in anticipating one’s anxiety, one’s search, of dropping the unforeseeable and decisive word, the pregnant answer? And that is the reason one would like to consult her at life’s turning points — on the threshold of a conversion, of a breakup, of a betrayal, at the moment of ultimate confidences, the heavy and compromising kind — so that she might offer one, somehow, a speculative absolution, and reconcile one as much to one’s impurities as to one’s impasses, one’s stupors.

17

Weininger

Letter to Jacques Le Rider

Paris December 16, 1982

Reading your book about my old and distant idol, I could not help remembering what an event
Geschlecht und Charakter
had been for me. This was in 1928; I was seventeen, and hungering for every form of excess and heresy, I delighted in deriving the ultimate consequences from an idea, extending rigor to aberration, to provocation, conferring upon frenzy the dignity of a system. In other words, I was passionate about everything, with the exception of nuance. In Weininger it was the dizzying exaggeration that fascinated me, the infinity of negation, the denial of common sense, the murderous intransigence, the search for an absolute position, the craving to carry a piece of reasoning to the point where it destroyed itself and ruined the structure to which it belonged. Add to this the obsession with the criminal and the epileptic (particularly in
Über
die letzten Dinge
), the cult of the inspired formula and the arbitrary excommunication, the identification of woman with Nothing and even with something less. . . . To this devastating affirmation my adherence was complete from the start. The object of my letter is to acquaint you with the circumstance that incited me to espouse these extreme theses on the aforesaid Nothing. A banal circumstance if ever there was one, yet it dictated my conduct for several years. I was still in the Lycée, mad about philosophy and about a girl in the Lycée as well. One important detail: I did not know her personally, though she belonged to the same milieu as I (the bourgeoisie of Sibiu, in Transylvania). As often happens with adolescents, I was both insolent and timid, but my timidity prevailed over my insolence. For over a year this torment lasted, culminating one day when I happened to be reading some book or other, leaning against a tree in the town park. Suddenly I heard giggling. Turning around, I saw — who?
Her
, accompanied by one of the boys in my class, the one scorned by us all and nicknamed The Louse. After more than fifty years, I remember perfectly how I felt at that moment. I forgo the details. The fact remains that I vowed on the spot to abjure “sentiments.” And that was how I became a frequenter of brothels. A year after this radical and commonplace disappointment, I discovered Weininger. And found myself in the ideal situation to understand him. His splendid enormities concerning women intoxicated me. How could I have been beguiled by a subbeing? I kept asking myself. Why this torment, this calvary, on account of a fiction, a zero incarnate? A fated figure had come at last to deliver me. But that deliverance was to cast me into a superstition that he himself condemned, for I was drifting toward that
“Romantik der Prostitution™
incomprehensible to serious minds and a specialty of eastern and southeastern Europe. In any case, my student life was passed under the spell of the Whore, in the shadow of her protective, cordial, even maternal, abasement. Weininger, by supplying me with the philosophical reasons for detesting an “honest” woman, cured me of “love” during the proudest and most frenetic period I have experienced in my life. I did not foresee a time when his indictments and his verdicts would no longer count for me except insofar as they would occasionally make me regret the
madman
I had been.

18

Fitzgerald

The Pascalian Experience
of an American Novelist