Nathan Devers: “My break with the Jewish religion was total and definitive”

Why philosophy? To this eternal question, Nathan Devers, or rather Nathan Naccache, his real name, tried to answer via a book,

, an autobiographical story carried by a completely romantic energy. Or how, after having long wanted to become a rabbi, this brilliant young man of 25, winner of the general competitive examination in philosophy, normalien, associate professor of philosophy, abandoned religion for what some would define as a simple university discipline, when he had one. made a central axis of its existence. With great intelligence and sensitivity, the author of

describes how, from revelations to ruptures, he attempts to pursue a quest for meaning, which he knows will have no end.

Madame Figaro

– I was born into a Jewish family in which Jewish identity was very present, where we practiced our religion and studied Jewish thought, the Bible, the Talmud, but living with the ideal that Judaism is a religion of law, and that there was no need to practice this law one hundred percent – ​​except on Yom Kippur. This aroused a form of astonishment from which I never came out; I don't understand how one can be "half" religious, if you like. For me it is a mode of existence, which we adhere to fully or not at all. I thus had the desire to deepen my relationship with religion, and so I went to classes at the synagogue, I made trips to Israel, I studied the texts… The ENIO synagogue ( Oriental Israelite Normal School), in Paris, which was that of Levinas, truly constituted my school of connection. It was an extraordinary place where all cultures mixed, not in a sort of soft syncretism but with the requirements specific to each – those of Jewish thought, French culture, music, liturgy and oriental rites. …

But you didn't become a rabbi...

I realized that everything I was, everything I thought, the way I lived, came from the fact that I was born on December 8, 1997 in this family. However, none of this had been chosen. If I had been born elsewhere, at another time, everything I believed in then, I probably would not have believed in it. It was a trigger. The reading of

and the discovery of philosophical texts, of which a master introduced me to the exceptional depth, did the rest... The break with religion was total and definitive. The “death of God” was not reduced to a word from Nietzsche, for me. I changed my universe, my worldview, my passion. God is not an idea and, as soon as we dismiss his existence, the latter fades. I lost the way I envisioned my future, my friends, or even, very concretely, my way of living on a daily basis. The Jewish religion is a religion of law: there are rules for everything. We have dietary laws, liturgical laws and even shoe-tying laws! Once we leave it, each micro-action – what I was going to eat for lunch, the clothes I was going to wear… – gave rise to a range of infinite possibilities. This is Dostoyevsky’s famous formula: “If God does not exist, everything is permitted.”

How does philosophy consist of “thinking against oneself”, as you assert in the title of your book?

Philosophy allowed me to break the barrier of the arbitrariness of my birth and to open my quest for meaning, even if some philosophers can be very dogmatic. In truth, the whole purpose of the book is to say that philosophy is not a university discipline, is not a region of knowledge, is not the history of philosophy, is not of scientific research – even if all that exists – but above all, and much more radically than that, a desire to open the quest by thinking against oneself. If philosophy is not, in principle, definable – many people mention Deleuze and the art of creating concepts, but this is only one definition among others – philosophizing, on the other hand, is. . It is a mode of existence consisting of thinking against oneself. We never consider ourselves the owner of our ideas, we do not keep the truths that we have demonstrated as if they were our property. Descartes observes in a letter that once you have demonstrated something and are convinced, you can forget the demonstration and move on to the next step, like an algorithm. Thinking against yourself is the opposite.

That's to say ?

I hope that in twenty years, I say it in the book and it is sincere, I will disagree with this text, or, in any case, I will have found the necessary distance towards it. Thinking against oneself is the idea that we are in an infinite dialectic, unlike the Hegelian dialectic which has a fixed term from the start. It is walking as a path, that is to say that there is no path already traced. And to think against oneself is also to think against oneself, that is to say not to perceive one's identity as something rigid, which would mean that our birth, our belonging to a community, an environment social, a clan should determine our thinking. To think against oneself is to affirm the requirement of thought against the automatism of identities.

I don't understand how you can be "half" religious

Nathan Devers

And what role does literature play in this, for you who are also a novelist?

Philosophy is not a disembodied discipline: it plays out in the body, in our history, in our chances, in our passions, in our desires, in our anger – we see this in the passages devoted to my religious high school in

. From then on, we can no longer practice it in treatises and dissertations which pastiche scientific discourse, make great demonstrations of logic, and only use intellectual and abstract concepts. The schism that has historically been created between literature and philosophy, particularly since Plato, seems harmful to me. For me,

is a text that aims to be as literary as it is philosophical, a meditation in the etymological sense, that is to say “healing oneself” like “meditating”, and in the 17th century sense. It is an embodied text, more like Descartes

than his

, moreover, which is not ashamed of thinking based on an autobiographical dimension, but whose the goal is not to take a photograph of one's navel: it is to try to ask questions, to engage in research, to see existence as a quest...

Then religion is also a matter of mythology...

Religions are poetry that has become real, incorporated into the world, with sublime texts that penetrate the imagination. I broke with the Jewish religion, but I retained the respect and love of poetry, which alone can save us, that is to say not give meaning to existence, but so that the quest for meaning, which will never find an end in a world which has none, can be as happy as if we believed that the world had meaning. This is why I wanted to say in the book that the experience that I lived through was painful and difficult, but that it was also a real happiness, a happiness experienced, which was put to the ordeal and is all the more intense for it.