Madame Figaro.
–
It is through a state that you are going through that the impulse to write, or its necessity, is born.
“I have become, to my cost, a man of tears,” you note on the first page.
That's to say ?
William Le Blanc.
– This text imposed itself on me, in my body.
I started it when my mother died, four years ago, on summer notebooks, and continued at the time of a romantic breakup.
The origin of crying is therefore twofold.
I found myself, chronically, a man in tears, tears that seize you at unexpected moments, over a memory that intrudes, during a gesture, a smell... It's all involuntary memory dear to Proust that I experienced in my own body.
Now, in philosophy, part of my work consists of always returning to our own incarnation or incorporation of things.
I am wary of an abstract, office philosophy; I need to reinscribe it in our ordinary lives to precisely make philosophy an experience.
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It’s an approach that we find among philosophers of your generation, from Claire Marin to Frédéric Worms, from Elsa Godart to Alexandre Lacroix…
It’s right!
With the decline of great, very theoretical teachings, where it was mainly a question of making a career in the history of philosophy, a space opened up to try to establish the relationship between philosophy and life differently;
and seek to articulate a diagnosis of the present with one's own existence.
For our generation, you are right, it was a risk worth taking.
Now, the ephemeral tears, which often fade from memory when we have “cried” them, say this: what happens to you in the intensity of life when they flow does not happen to anyone else at all. same time.
This is why the person who sees you crying goes through a stage of surprise, emotion, even disorientation.
No one can cry for you, even if there is a contagion of tears, or a communion.
Your tears always bring you back to what is irreplaceable about you.
What do we do with these tears next?
How can we accept being defeated by them?
What do they suggest about our attachment to life?
This is what I was looking for...
We need our tears to keep our eyes healthy. Pathologists explain * that they produce less than half a teaspoon of tears per day, but that, if we cry from sorrow, the eye can produce more than a full cup in a few minutes!
This physiological mechanism is vital.
It helps lubricate, clean the eyes and make them blink.
But, when it comes to grief, we witness a sort of rebalancing: if I am overcome by sadness to the point of crying, these tears are also a plastic way of coping with the tragic event.
To bring relief.
So there is a journey in tears, and I see three origins.
There are what I call the tears of evil – physical or psychological pain –, then the tears of disappearance – of a being, of a fundamental human quality, of one's health –, and finally the tears of rupture , in every sense of the word.
There is already, through the act of crying, an attempt to recover from the event.
To cry is not only to be broken down by;
it is also unlearning control, returning to a sensitive life, and attempting a first deliverance.
From the past, look towards the future.
You still have to… dare to cry, says your title.
There is audacity in crying, because, socially, even if we are progressing, it is still linked to a fragility that should be kept quiet.
Now, letting the tears come is consenting to exposing something of one's fragility, taking in some way this path of luxury which is created through tears, because it is also about accepting this promise of starting again. existence, these open floodgates that crying induces.
Crying can have as its future not deploration – I cry endlessly – but imploration – I ask with tears, says the etymology.
It is then a demand for justice and reparation that takes place.
An existential request, expressed with the body of the one who cries.
Philosophizing was above all “
learning to die, not to cry
”, remember…
The entire history of Western philosophy is in fact crossed by an ideal of self-mastery.
With Plato, we must go to the side of what is incorruptible, the world of ideas;
and, at the same time, learning to die to one's body, considered too sensitive or moving.
Plato places this claim in the mouth of Socrates when the latter is accused by the Athenian city of corrupting youth by the introduction of new gods.
Socrates will agree to drink hemlock, to go to death, impassive.
Only his wife cries.
I wanted to somehow challenge this opening scene.
And in this book, imagine the philosophy of Socrates' wife, precisely.
Investigate how crying can be a new embodied philosophy.
Tears do not repair, they lead towards reinvention
William Le Blanc
You speak of the “vital intensity” of tears. How to describe it?
Tears, I see them as living things that infiltrate our usual mechanisms.
They are the sign, the revealer of an intensity which overwhelms us, stops us at first.
Then, this intensity also places us on the road to new momentum.
They do not repair, they move towards reinvention.
Judith Godrèche, who speaks at the Césars, then at the Senate, at the end of February, restrains her tears behind a disarming smile, which enhances her sorrow, or ours. How did you perceive this smile?
The tear does not intrude, this does not mean that it is not present.
She is expected to cry, and her smile is indeed a victory over possible tears.
There is a recomposition of a power to exist there.
Let's address the tears of politicians. You notice those of Obama, in 2016, evoking the killing of children at the Sandy Hook school, those of Greta Thunberg, in 2019, at the UN...
Obama's tears, in a speech seeking to frame the access to firearms, are tears of mourning.
It is quite different from those of Greta Thunberg, who mourns an ongoing process, namely the disappearance of animal and plant species under the influence of global warming, of which we are the contemporaries.
What future can we envision for these tears, we who are their witnesses?
How can tears become weapons for people who have no other, that is indeed the question that is asked.
* Source
: The Conversation
,
Michelle Moscova, professor at the Faculty of Medicine of Sydney (Australia), 2024.
Dare to cry
, by Guillaume Le Blanc, Ed.
Albin Michel, 270 p., €17.90.
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