Paul-Marie Coûteaux Interview | Alex Gilbert #248

PMC: In our conversation with Renaud Camus, something I hold dear is the distinction he makes between the writer and the philosopher. He even invokes Fronto, the 2nd-century rhetorician, the tutor of Marcus Aurelius, who was the first to give rhetoric its own domain apart from philosophy to the point that he wrote a treatise on dust or things like that. And Camus says, following him, that there is an archetype of the writer who was somewhat a philosopher at times, without taking philosophy as seriously as philosophers sometimes do.

Was de Gaulle a rhetorician or a poet as understood in ancient Greece ?

PMC: That’s what I was going to say, it’s poetry, the other term is poetry. There is a bit of all that in De Gaulle; he is not purely a philosopher, and especially if he quickly became nostalgic for the philosophical function, he never achieved it. It’s something very curious that he says in this book. He tells André Bozel, who was the treasurer of the RPF, in 1947-1948, “You see, Bozel, life is strange. I prepared myself to be a soldier, and I was only that a little,” alluding to the injury of 14-18, and then he did Moncornet, he had two months of campaigning, but he was not a soldier in the sense of the great captains of the classical age. And he says, “I was not a soldier, but instead, I went into politics, and yet with age,” he was 58 when he said this, “I realize that I was not made for either, neither for the military profession nor for politics. I was made to be a philosopher because I have many things to say,” he adds, “to my contemporaries.” He instills, that’s what Camus says, a writer instills, he places philosophical elements, that’s a bit of my case, perhaps a lack of assurance or philosophical work.

Are you a poet or a rhetorician yourself ?

PMC: That’s it; there is the literary dimension. The one who makes a profession of philosophy is what De Gaulle would have wanted to be, and there is the poet. De Gaulle is dramatic from that point of view, and many of us are dramatic from that point of view, never fully accomplished on that side, maybe because it is very difficult and very demanding, and we quickly see its limits, meaning a thought that turns on itself.

You’re talking about philosophy, not poetry ?

PMC: Poetry doesn’t turn on itself; philosophy does because philosophy closes in its domain and takes its domain as the alpha and omega, either out of laziness, ignorance, or lack of time or erudition. De Gaulle tried twice in Colombey, first during the crossing of the desert; he realized, he already knew in the 1930s, he said, “It’s increasingly hard for me to write.” He wrote every morning except Sunday. The afternoons were for correspondence. Both during the crossing of the desert and then in 1969. In 1969, he wanted to write his memoirs explaining what he did as president of the republic, and he said this time to Pierre Louis Blanc, whom I visited and who confirmed it to me, who was his last secretary, that “the essential thing is not to explain what I did but to explain myself, what I believe.” And in the last four or five chapters of the second volume of Memoirs of Hope, he was working on this when he died. He tackled this, which resonates with what he said to Bozel, twenty five years earlier, “I have things to say to my contemporaries.” I think the influence Bergson had on him, a trace of going higher in his reflection, and in that, he is very French. He decided to do something other than what he intended to do. But there is a sadness and an incompleteness, for me, a huge, serious one, in the fact that he never developed what one might simply call his philosophy, his system. So, I say it at the beginning of my first volume, there is a second volume, but it hasn’t been published; I want to do what he didn’t do, it’s not immodest. So, I went looking, with my philosophical background, for what could be referred to, what he said, what he did, what he wanted, the intention, the action, and the word. And on these three levels, I found a pure essentialism.

Maffesoli was a student of Heidegger and you of Ellul. Was he an influence ?

PMC: Ellul ? It’s greater now than it was then. It’s greater because there is this concept of…, he is a Protestant, there is this concept of nature among Christians that I had not really seen, whereas it was supposed to be among the Greeks, and an impious side for a Christian, which is very well seen in François’ encyclical…

Which references Edgar Morin’s complex thought.

PMC: Yes, yes, yes, with great caution about the divinization of nature to be quick. There is immanence; there is no transcendence. But to return to what I was saying about De Gaulle, he is very Greek. The great reference for Ellul is nature; the great reference for De Gaulle, although he hardly developed it, is essence. He is a pure essentialist. I posit that he is, without knowing it or without reading it, in any case, without developing it, a very heir of Plato, of Parmenides.

Is Jacques Ellul your inspiration ?

PMC: No, no, no, that’s false; you’re extrapolating. I had Ellul as a professor; he appreciated me because he proposed my thesis topic at Science Po, “The intelligentsia and the state, the relationship between the intellectual milieu and the state,” which is an old obsession.

Which is a strange term, referring to what?

PMC: It’s a Russian term from the 19th century

Different from nomenklatura, which describes rather the elite.

PMC: Oligarchies should not be confused with elites, it’s not the same thing, in the sense that they serve interests that are not their own, in very contemporary language, they serve the city. The oligarchy serves the interests of the nomenklatura. It can even serve a universal. It is installed in a national ensemble. It has its own role. But to return to Ellul, this topic he gave me and which suited me perfectly, our relations remained there. I don’t see myself as an Ellulian; I have read little Ellul, and I read him afterward, that is to say, very recently, after meeting him, I had read two or three things, I had been part of an association for the defense of the Arcachon Basin. It’s linked to Cap Ferret, to the defense of the Arcachon Basin against Biasini, who was the great planner, who wanted to totally modify it and failed. These are my relations with Ellul, this thesis, his courses,

Land planning is a topic that illustrates Ellul’s thought around Technique.

PMC: The refusal of Technique.

Which reflects Heidegger’s thought.

PMC: Ah, I see the link with Mafessoli.

So, you come from the Heideggerian world.

PMC: A bit, yes, yes, more, consciously more.

Macron cites Heidegger (being-in-the-world, beast of the event). Idiots believe he’s a Satanist but he refers to Heidegger’s Ereignis without going into detail.

PMC: It’s very chic of him.

He is close to trendy Heideggerians: Sloterdijk, a trendy Heideggerians, and Anselm Kiefer, a student of Joseph Beuys, portraeyd in Wim Wenders’s film.

PMC: And that did not pass through…

Ricoeur ? no, although, he asked him about the “Hebraic massif”, he was an an anti-Heideggerian like Bourdieu who wrote a thesis on Heidegger. Eric Zemmour also mentions the “enframing of technology”… 

PMC: That’s me…

That’s what I thought.

PMC: Not to add more, but Eric Zemmour is completely outside the realm of philosophy. He’s so pleased to have understood a few things that he mentions them three or four times on television.

The Pope Benedict XVI, in his encyclical, talks about the forgetting of Being. An Heideggerian too. In Valeurs Actuelles, you mentionned Heraclitus and Parmenides, as progressives ? You also come from the left.

PMC: I never had an intellectual structure from the left; it’s my deeply archaic upbringing from my Bordeaux grandparents.

Certainly not from your father, who was a modernist.

PMC: He had no intellectual influence on me.

And yet, you resemble him, physically. You inherited his humor. 

PMC: There’s that, a way of being, but I never had a philosophical conversation with him.

Wasn’t he influenced by philosophy ?

PMC: No, he tried a bit with theology. The end of A Male Companion is a bit incongruous; he speaks precisely because all French people, all French literati, always have a moment, like Camus, for example, where they want to integrate philosophy. They want the best of both worlds. They want to integrate their poetry, so to speak. And then there’s a moment when we are tempted, as rhetoricians—I place myself in this category—to raise our collars and develop some philosophical ideas. With my father, it was half-hearted, and it was hardly…

And what is he talking about at the end of A male Companion?

PMC: Yes, he completely absorbs philosophy into a kind of theology with Saint Francis de Sales (Editor’s note: the patron saint of writers and journalists).