 into it this time. So I'm here again like yesterday with Milo Rao, with the writer Edouard Louis, who is also an actor now, I forgot to mention that yesterday, and with the philosopher Geoffroy de la Guennerie, and to discuss the aesthetics of resistance. So yesterday we discussed the roots of left-wing activism in your lives and whether or not there's a form of activism in a way. And we ended with some thoughts on the traditional separation between theory and arts, with Milo saying that to him, Edouard's books are also theoretical works. So Edouard, I think Milo was hoping that you would say a few words about that, about how you consider your own works in that sense and whether that resonates with you. Yeah, I mean, thank you very much, Laura. The thing is, for me, the question is, of course, like blurring the traditional borders between art and theory and literature and everything. But the question is not exactly the question of theory. It's the question of explicit and explicitation. And yesterday we have been talking about confrontation as one of the cornerstone to kind of renew the artistic gesture and to kind of try to make art more radical. And I think that one of the other cornerstones of this revolution that we are hoping for and of this change would be not only confrontation, but explicitation. And this is really what I'm trying to do in my books and what Geoffroy is doing since he's writing theory and what also Milo is bringing, the new things that he's bringing also in within the theatre. I think that in the past, literature has been structured by the fact and the desire of saying not too many things. And I had the impression that when I started to write, the less you would say in a book, and the more you would be recognized, literary speaking and artistically speaking, as if the best review you could get from a literary critique would be, this book is wonderful because it suggests everything and it says nothing. It's not explicit, it's not didactic, it's not pornographic. It's just like everything is suggested and nothing is said. And we can challenge and question this historical rule of literature. Why is it suddenly considered something positive within the literature to not speak? Where does it come from? And I think it's deeply linked to the interconnection between the bourgeoisie and the literature because as we were saying yesterday, the bourgeoisie knows the world, the dominant class know the world, they know how bad the world is, they know how violent the world is, and they don't want to know it. And so they prefer to suggest it in order to never be completely confronted to it. So as if in the past, there was an aesthetic values of not saying the things. There was an aesthetic values of creating metaphors and creating only suggestions. And when you read, for example, the journal, the diary of André Gide, it's incredible to read that André Gide wanted to say things, but in his diary always say, I shouldn't say it, I should just try to find a character that would evoke this idea, that would inspire this idea, but I would never see this idea. And I think what I'm trying to do now, and what also Milau in the artistic field is doing, and it's really related to theory and to what Chopin was saying about the explicit that contains theory, that theory contains, that a literature that would be radical today is a literature that would or not or a theater that would say what it says at the moment of, you know, of the, and in fact, the whole history of the dominant class and the whole story of the bourgeoisie is to always hide reality as it is, you know. Pierre Bourdieu says that when the bourgeoisie eat, they create a ceremony in order to hide that they are eating, that they are eating for physiological reason. When they put a coat, they always pretend that it's only for aesthetic reason and not to get hot and not to get cold. So you always have to hide, you know, the reality of the thing you are doing and always like hiding the things that you are doing. And I think that to make an explicit art and to make an explicit literature to say what you do at the moment you do it, it's fundamentally anti-bourgeois art. And from that regard, it's a radical art. If I want to say that my father was destroyed by a class system, I say it, I don't suggest it, you know. If I say that Nicolas Sarkozy or Emmanuel Macron made political decisions that destroyed my father's body, I'm not going to suggest it in inventing a fake character, in inventing a fake politician. I say it, you know. If I say that the world of my childhood was homophobic, I write it, I don't suggest it. I say in my books the world of my childhood was homophobic and it was willing to destroy people like me. And for me, this is really something that is going on also in Millot's theatre. And I wonder how you think about it, Millot, and what is your views on it. But clearly it's, I think, one of the things that we share, and that we share automatically with Geoffroy, because in a way theory is the art of the explicit, so it's related. Yeah, perhaps I can shortly answer on it or some thoughts I had on what you're telling me. So for me the important thing, but I think that the neoliberal rhetorics or the bourgeois rhetorics of the non-explicit, of the trigger warnings, of the safe spaces, of this impossibility to go to an art space and look into the face of the reality of the violence of our economic global system, this is very typical for the whole bourgeois era, but especially I think for now, and the idea of purity in art. So I would state that what we are doing is somehow an art of the impure, using the power of the pureness of the radicality. But what we do as an act in the art field is impure. So my impression is the more you deny radicality in the rhetorics you use in the real world, so to say somehow the more you create fictive worlds where nobody really is appearing, they are super extremely violent. So I mean, that's a bit, let's say, dialectics of the emotions in the neoliberal age. And what for me is the important that we link in arts the violence of the real and how we translate it explicitly into the space of the, or the parallel space of the unreal. So we had yesterday two days ago, no two days ago, before yesterday, our common friend Thomas Ostermeyer was here and it was quite interesting because at one moment he was saying we have to be in the rehearsal space, but we also have to be on the street. So now the artist has to be in both spaces. And it was translated in the press because then it was an article about it and they translated it, now we can't stay in the art space anymore, we have to be on the street. And I think it's exactly the parallelity of these two worlds, what it is all about, you know, when while being artists not denying the negativity of art by the positivity of activism, but bringing it together and talking about the difficulties of this crazy mix, what you do when you are kind of changing art by using reality to do so and vice versa. Now, I wanted to ask you about that because that involves of course, as you've done in the past, highlighting the lives of others, the real lives of others in your cases, whether it's through writing or on stage by highlighting what's happening behind the scenes and what the actors are going through. So how do you as artists, how do you ensure that the people you're working with still have agency in that process? Who should answer first? Edouard, do you want to start perhaps writing about people perhaps that you grew up with and writing about them from a different position nowadays? I keep thinking about what Didier Ribond wrote about writing about the working class when you're no longer part of it in the sense and that tension. How do you approach that and approach the agency of the people that you're writing about? I mean, I'm not interested in agency. I don't say that it doesn't exist or that there are no rooms in people's lives sometimes to achieve things, but when I write what I find important and interesting is to see the situation where people's agency is being destroyed and the possibility of dreaming, of choosing, of making decisions is suddenly destroyed, being destroyed by a situation. And there is always a conservative risk for me in the rhetoric of an agency because if you say people always have agency and if you say people always have room for choice, no matter the situation, then you make people responsible for what they are. What does it mean? It means that if a factory worker didn't study, it's his fault because he didn't have, he had agency and he didn't use it. I mean, if people are destroyed and depressed, they kind of chose it at some point because they had agency and they didn't use it. That is not what I meant. No, no, no, of course. I'm elaborating on what you say, but precisely I think it's an important issue. I know it's not what you were saying, but I think it's I'm precisely thinking that when I published Who Killed My Father about the life of my father, growing up in a working-class family with an alcoholic father, stopping school at 14 years old like his father and his father before him, going to work to the factory, then being destroyed by the accident at the factory and being in bed for years and being destroyed by French politics and the violence of French politics against poor people, there were some and I know obviously that you're not part of it, but it's just like walk this inside me. It's walking up inside me. There were some very bourgeois critics telling me he's denying the agency of his father and for me this reaction was extremely violent towards me and towards my father because what does it mean? It means that if we say my father had agency, it means that he deserved what he got, that he didn't use these agencies, that he didn't use this liberty. So I think that there are some lives that are radically destroyed in terms of agencies. They are completely destroyed in terms of choice and I don't think that it's the whole reality. I don't think it's everyone. I don't think it's everybody, but they are the lives I want to talk about and I leave the bourgeoisie with the little agency and they can do whatever they want, but as soon as I write I'm not into it and it's strange because now in the field of the left, some people pretend that it's more radical to pretend that people always have agency, as if you were violent or conservative in saying that people have not. But what is violent is to pretend that people always have and that they could have made a choice that they didn't make and this is what I really want to understand and that's why I know that it's not what you were saying, but the word agency is completely outside my brain. It's outside my mind because it's... That makes a lot of sense, but it's really interesting at the same time because someone's agency has been destroyed. I suppose there's that tension of you're in the position of writing about it and about them about something that perhaps they can't write about themselves and there is tension there even if it's not necessarily tied to the issue of whether or not you're taking away their agency. No really, but also it's a good thing. It's a good thing that when you cannot speak or the people do it for you and I was in the same position at some point of my life, there was some point in my life where I was hopeless, speechless, where I was a gay working class boy and some people were talking on my behalf and I wouldn't have been able to talk if they didn't talk for me at my place at some point and that gave me the strength at some point to talk. So for me it's never an abuse to write on behalf of someone. It's opening the possibility for the other people to talk, but it's a good thing that we have people who talk for us and in our place when we cannot talk for me. It's the most beautiful thing and so I don't, yeah. Now, Geoffroy, I'd love to have your reaction perhaps because you've also worked with activists by writing books with them with Asa Traoré for instance. How does that come into your work? The idea of perhaps working with someone else and helping them get to the platform that they want to achieve or at least further their platform by working with them? I mean, it's true like Edward, I don't recognize myself into the category of agency or even in the notion of give people a voice or represent the voice of the voiceless and so on. I think that when we engage in a theoretical project, precisely me when I write, it's to fight or to fight against the preconstructed discourse people use to understand themselves. So for example, I wrote about Edward Snowden and Julian Assange. Edward Snowden said he was a patriot or said he was in the tradition of civil disobedience and I wrote my book about him and Julian Assange and Sarah Harrison and Jesse Manning. I try to show precisely how they were in another position than in other situations of civil disobedience as they are inscribed in other political traditions. They try to invent a new way of doing politics. When Asa Traoré emerged in France, I have one of the most important voice today of the anti-racist and anti-police movement. Sometimes she uses words of category that like police brutality, like discrimination and so on, that I thought were problematic if you want to understand the reality of the Russian and Polish system in France and in the US. And so I think that the role of the theoretician is not to give a voice, it's precisely to deconstruct all the categories we use spontaneously to understand ourselves. But these categories are part of the system that produces us as subjectivity to the power. And so we think we think ourselves, but we are still thinking thought by the system when we use them. And so the role of the theoretician is to make a rupture with that kind of discourse in order to produce and to radicalize the way people think about their situation. Sometimes I tend to define myself as a radicalizer to make people become more radical in their way of thinking, more systematic, more pure. And I was very struck by what Milo said about the notion of impurity, because I remember when I discussed with him or with artists, in fact, or with Thomas Austerlain, as I always use the category of being not pure. Art is about being mixed, not too systematic to understand the contradiction of life, to be in the side of it's not clear, it's complicated and so on. And it's true that for example, in my work, I often precisely say that theory is much more a quest for purity. It's a kind of drive to try to destroy what we think as contradiction, what we think as impure, what we think as complicated in order to recreate a coherence and to recreate the systematic aspect of life that we perceive spontaneously as impure or complicated and so on and so forth. And so I think that sometimes it's not narcissistic, but it's a pleasure of impurity. For me, to be honest, I always see that as a way of stopping a reflection, because impurity is always for me a lack of systematic thinking or being more in the realm of impurity than of the reality of the society. And that's why when you speak about the issue from the rehearsal room to go to the street and so on, I think it's very important. I had an idea listening to you. I said it's very important to establish connection, of course, between art and politics, but what is most important now? It's probably the fact that politics become more and more an artistic practice. It's not the fact that artists are more politically engaged, but more and more what we see is that activism is becoming a kind of artistic practice or it's more about representation of what's self-acting and not real action. People go to the streets, they take photos and they go back home, and so they don't really act politically, but they give an image of themselves as being actors of political change, and more and more perhaps the sphere of politics become a theater. We speak of political actors, we speak of a political scene, and all our political actions are becoming more and more in the realm of spectacles, of images, and less and less in terms of efficiency, of political efficiency, and that's why we have to make an opposition between art and politics to be politically effective. I would like to answer to this, but perhaps I was unclear in what I mean with not pure or impurity. I think purity, what you mean and what I mean with impurity is perhaps even the same, so we need the perspective of purity to see the antagonism, because I think what the question of agency or let's say the actual neoliberal career of this term is that we would create spaces, editist spaces where everybody has an agency and all antagonisms are exported to somewhere, to a kind of an outside invisibility, you know, like child work. It's just like somewhere else, and in these safe spaces there's agency for everybody, and I think this is the false purity, or that's the purity I actually attack. I want to create, perhaps you could call it spaces of pure antagonism. So spaces for example, and I think perhaps it's also a very different work we are doing, because you can when you are working collectively on a play, for example, and this play is linked, all the roles are linked as allegorical they might be, if it's Jesus or not, they are for the people playing it, they are completely directly linked to themselves and everything you talk about them or you don't even say is absent or too present or mixed or you have this, all these conflicts are in the rehearsal room or on stage or on a film set are totally present. It's not that I produce something and then sometimes later somebody would react. It's a kind of an ongoing process of dealing with these antagonisms, of exploitation or of, I don't know, different ideas, how you want to model a history or your character, you want to be present in it. And for me there is only one way out and that's what we called yesterday solidarity or it's perhaps more simply to put it the history we want to tell together and that we would give something away from ourselves to together tell this history where we appear as a kind of a character, you know, perhaps you know the problem and somebody's doing, television is doing a documentary about you or they send you an interview you made and they cut out like 80% and then you try to find your argument in it and somehow you accept the deal that there is not complete truth but you kind of and that's why for me theater is interesting and why I try always to find a room of extreme impurity that's why I would prefer the street to the rehearsal room somehow or I would try to bring the rehearsal room to the street and mix it together. What we do today evening that was a project that was attacked so many times because what we did is to bring together actors from Mosul and actors from Europe and 90% of the discussions about this project is not what we achieved and what we did together but it is that the white man is flying to Mosul. So this is the neoliberal discussion you have about projects of this because I think all of us and I include myself grew up in a system of complete exploitation where everything every discussion here who talks more how can we then use this discussion I don't know you know we are grew up in a in a system of exploitation that we can't imagine spaces that try to be non-exploitative we just can't understand it anymore somehow and I think art is a way and now we are very pedagogic saying that symbolic space is where you can be antagonistic you can be extreme you can include all differences you might have in your in your in your backstory but at the same time finding a way of telling a story together so that's the thing I'm it sounds very humanist but I'm I'm interested in it to not exclude from the beginning on for example we have a lot of artist collectives in in Germany but these so-called collectives there are people coming from the same milieu having made the same school and then they do theater together and what do you expect as outcome from this I mean as a Marxist not a lot because it's just the repetition of the same and and I try to bring together I don't know in the projects and it's very yeah it's very terrorizing and panicking sometimes people that would never meet outside this this this frame of a of an art project I'm sure I'm sure that's still a complex thing to handle when you're doing it in real time say working in muscle or with people who are in a completely different position in society or in the global world than you are have you ever had any ethical doubts or any regrets about the way you've handled some situations or some productions perhaps Milo and then I will go back to Edouard and Joffre or never I can be short I mean every second night is sleepless for me I'm not a I'm not a very ethical person from my character but I'm confronted to so many contradictions that I'm really and it goes to very simple things we don't have to talk about different cultures the time I have in for example the opera we made in Geneva when the extras arrive and then you have 20 minutes to say you walk from here to there I mean you have to organize sometimes and it's a kind of the dictatorship of the art and that's for me the most the most problematic at the same time strangely also the most boring aspect of of kind of making it round reworking it and this is there for me the ethically most difficult moment when you want to make it visible for a third person that was not in the process and you are very used as an artist and others there perhaps less use that in the end you have to find this this kind of form that is reductive that is redundant that is boring so this is for me the biggest ethical thing and of course the only thing that you can do to fight against it we will talk this evening about it is kind of a real outcome so for example in in Mosul I hope we we made an application for UNESCO project that we will build up a film department there that we bring infrastructure that then is independent like we did it in the in the Congo tribunal did you just like kind of somehow also sometimes try to really separate the artistic world and the and the and the activist work if it's possible or not but that that you have these two lines now I suppose we're very much looking today about strategies for activism and I wanted to ask you because you said yesterday that you perhaps or art or writing is to an extent activism not necessarily left-wing activism but activism but you also work very regularly with people whose career is in activism rather than in writing or in making art so how do you how does that relationship develop and how do you find a balance when you work with people whose entire lives is devoted to activism and not necessarily to thinking about it and then writing or making art about it well it's it's because for me the I don't know how to say that being naive but for me the goal of life is not to write books but to change society so if I write books it's never to write books or to publish ideas or to be happy about a book or a good sentence and so on it's at the end to try to find a way to give tools for people to fight better or to be more effective in order to change the laws or to change culture in which we live so that's why it's true that for example for me I don't have a lot of aesthetic practices I don't go to museum I don't really like paintings I don't like culture I don't go very often to the movie I go often to the opera because DJ is a big fan of opera I love a middle place and I go there very often because it's a very different kind of experience but it's true that for me how to say the definition of writing is to find connections with activists and the people who fight or want to change societies and that's why even when it's very abstract it's a way of finding a way to relate to them with other things that's just experience of indignation and so the goal of life is to change society and that's why my connection with activists is what is most important for me. Edouard do you feel the same at the moment say when you start writing right now if you start working on the new project do you think about that dimension of activism at the same time how do you position yourself as a writer yeah I mean I started as a I started as an activist I started I became an activist when I was 14 years old and I kept like being an activist I was I was a Trotskyist activist in in high school and then I started to write my books and I will tell you about it Milo yes and then I started to write and it was a kind of a kind of continuation of a certain of a way I couldn't I couldn't bear the world that was surrounding me really I was I was born with a with a kind of hate for this world and for its ugliness and for its violence and you know you so if we think in terms of a manifesto for a new art and for a new literature we talked about confrontation I tried to talk about explicitation and maybe another cornerstone of it would be multiplicity and the fact that when you write as Thomas Ostermaier was saying yesterday to Milo you have to be also in the streets and you have to be also in contact with the social movements and you have to be also like in so many different places you can write in the newspapers you can write your books you can be in the street you can do theater projects with with other artists you can go to high school to talk to talk to younger people and I think like you as Joffre said if the goal is to change the world this change can be only achieved through this multiplicity of action because clearly when you write you are not you are not going to reach everybody for me it's an illusion I had in the past you know I was always writing and think like how could it be possible for the people of my childhood the working class people to read my book and in a way if we are realistic they will never read my book because they are working class if they start reading them is because they are not working class anymore and because precisely our society works like in terms of exclusion of the people who have access to culture and the ones who don't have access to culture so to think like how can excluded people read is a contradiction because if they have access to cultures and they are not excluded anymore so of course there are like exceptions and like different people within a milieu and you have like ways of something reaching the people but when I write I now I don't I don't try to write for the working class I write I write for my enemies I write for the bourgeoisie I write in order to challenge them to question them to make them to make them feel bad to ask them why don't you do more why don't you fight this world why are you reproducing this world and then if I want to talk to working class people like people like my family or the people I grew up with then I go in the street then I go to high schools and I talk to the people then I write in the media then I do short videos in the media or things like this but but if you want to really achieve a goal of change you have to you have to practice this multiplicity otherwise you will you will just reach your enemies and it's important to reach your enemies because they have the power and you have to challenge them and eventually destroy their way of thinking and their way of being but but but but it doesn't like it's so many things at the same time and uh it's not it's not in just writing that you will do it and that's why with with Jofra we have been demonstrating we have been writing with Asatra Auré we have been demonstrating with a yellow vest writing about it like I will it will not be achieved through a book and it's not possible but when you write a book you have the possibility of doing all those things together and for me if you are a writer and you never go in the street uh it's a shame it's a shame it's it's it's impossible now we've come upon conflict and antagonism in this conversation and I feel like the horizon in all three of you for all three of you is in a way a form of a new utopia a new a new way of rebuilding from the left and from progressive politics now the question being how do you how do you create a common aim or a common project that is going to overwrite that sense of conflict including on the left we don't have much time left but I was wondering if if one of you wanted to perhaps say a few words about that question of the utopia of the goal Jofra the last word is for you in one minute easy for me now I think I don't believe in the notion of a common aim I think that struggles are provoked and we have to find the singularity of every fight in order to achieve them and to radicalize them and for me more and more I think that the left should be based on something at what I call the vitalism which is to say which which are the forces that tend to destroy life or to mutilate life or to end life of people precarious more than others and we have to to develop the forces of life of health of being in a good shape not endangered and so on and so I would say that the multi-plicit struggles and a kind of vitalism could be the basis of the renewal of the left home I can explain that tomorrow if you worship me and I don't believe in the category of neoliberalism we'll have time we'll have time to elaborate and I apologize for the difficult question at the very last minute okay but thank you but thank you so much for taking a crack at us so we'll be back tomorrow at 4 p.m. to continue that discussion and if you want to stick around there is a very I think interesting discussion at 5 p.m. following our session about the question around the following question can there be global arts with the Brazilian choreographer Lea Rodrigues the director Wajdi Mawad and the Lebanese playwright and visual artist Rabim Rue and Orestes in Mosul if I'm not mistaken tonight at 7 p.m. since we've discussed it thank you so much for following along and we'll see you tomorrow Joe Joe bye and Wajdi's already there