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The Sichuan Broadcasts

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Broadcast one: demagogical fulmination

The pursuit of happinness is deemed to failure. But you should avoid being unhappy. It takes a while to get along with oneself, and to learn about the things and occasions that give us a temporary relief. Then comes the time for joy and bliss.
Am I one more of those personnal development counselors and felicity peddlers? Well, not really, but if I want to lure anyone to that node, I obviously can't start with harsh truths, swinging the scalpel and hammer around.
I can't resort to intellectual terrorism either. I don't have any books here and I've forgotten most of what I've read. I can't build some kind of scholarly man-of-war, armed with lengthy commentaries and complex theoretical analyses to silence you into submission. I'll have to seduce you. And is there anything more alluring than talks about happinness and joy? Who's not interested in that?


I was not. I was only interested in truth. I'll tell you why later. As a matter of fact, by bits and pieces, I'll tell you my whole life story. And don't you start to sneer and snarl at the prospect of yet another self-infatuated autobiographer, because you haven't got many friends who've drifted from being a talmudist on three continents to a Bangkok hustler, from being a professionnal philosophy teacher to a maoist worker wandering in the Hymalayas with our fighting comrades there, who dine with ministers when they are in Paris and meet brazilian psychoanalysts in the subway, have you? I did silence you into submission now, didn't I? Hell! I've even stirred a riot once!
Now, is joy really different from happiness? In what sense? Well, those are only words, and we're free to use words as we wish, as long as we take the trouble to say by what name we call which thing. What we don't want, it's to be trapped by the specific outlook that's embedded in any natural language. I will in due time indulge myself in making some fine semantic distinctions and constructing a few well-tuned concepts of my own. Indeed, I might get a little philosophical. But don't worry. It's all very simple.
It's only the salaried teachers and State philosophers, the stipendiary professors and venal psychoanalysts who make everything complicated. Because they have to come up with arcane theoretical novelties to be published and hired. Because they have to set up complex preemptive refutation strategies against their competitors on the ideological market in the other departments and schools. Because they have to be fascinatingly abstruse to break young and naive minds into disciples. And the disciples in turn want the big theory of the great theoricist to be huge, a full shelf in the library at the very least, and very difficult, so they're needed to introduce and comment, expose and communicate, and become themselves little masters. But here, we're free. I'm free to talk to anybody, if not for everybody. And you're free to click me out of existence.
I know, I know, I am being very demagogical here. Giving away the tricks of the Masters who terrorize us with the vertiginous depth of their knowledge and the sheer power of their speculative mind. Claiming that I have uncomplicated joy and easy bliss in store for every one, and for free too. As if that were not a trick! It is, and not a very new nor very good one with that. And of course, blowing it is yet another trick, the dirtiest of all.
The problem is, you can't really read if you've never tried to write. You don't fathom the scope of the misunderstandings and misinterpretations you have to purposely induce to gather listeners and garner an audience, and make some noise in the world, and reach the true readers, the ones for whom you're nothing but a guinea pig in their own inner experimentation, the sisters and brothers of our pack. That's why there will be something for everyone here. The staged decipheration of the secret equation at work behind that erratic course of mine is very entertaining indeed, as I've discovered some years ago.


I was, once more, back in Paris after one of my journeys through continents and people. I had got back in touch with a classmate from my first year as a philosophy student. She was the daughter of a famous Paris Greek marxist-leninist theoricist who had committed suicide when she was still a child, and left her with the proceeds of his copyrights to pay for the couch's fee. She had been attracted to me, and although I hadn't noticed she had given a sympathetic ear to my wildest elaborations upon what I had at that time found out to be the most definitive system. I had been as close to her as I could have been to anyone then. She was now a young and promising parisian intellectual, having found a particular niche in the vivid exposition of epistemological paradoxes in the media.She had a baby. And she was married to a young and promising parisian philosopher, who had achieved the highest distinction awarded in that peculiar trade, the Agregation, who was already a noticeabale follower of the leading french lapsed marxists turned spinozists, who had even published a small pedagogical introduction to that lens polishing metaphysician on the run, and who actually was a very nice guy. They asked me for dinner. I can't remember precisely which crucial truth I had endeavored to demonstrate that night, but I do remember his reaction.
As, I hadn't the small institutional recognition I would get later, that lowest rank in the subtle hierarchy of the competitive examinations system of the french civil service, and I wasn't yet a philosopher certified by the highest authorities of relevant problematization and original conceptualization. You have to know that in France, there is a compulsory course of philosophy in the last year of highschool. Thence, there are thousands of professionnal philosophy teachers. And hundreds of professors to train them. That's a lot of people agitating all the systems of the last twenty-five centuries and arguing about any possible thing. That kind of situation is bound to bring about some new ideas once in a while. And that's why apart from wines and planes, perfumes and arms, France is a big exporter of philosophers. You also have to understand that in that second-tier world power, the competitive examinations system of the civil service is everything, and the Universities, a bad joke. Degrees are laughed at, and anybody who takes the time for it can become a PhD. But nobody will pay any attention to what you say, unless you've passed one of the intellectual State contests and secured a position in the mandarinal hierarchy of that weird Republic. There, the first thing one wants to find out about others is whether they've passed any examination. And the first thing that one lets know to others, by discreet hints and tactful allusions, is one's precise status and rank. Which is by the way exactly what I've been doing right now.
But then, I wasn't yet a lower rank mandarin. I hadn't even graduated. Nevertheless, he was very much listening to what I was saying. He was almost enthralled. When I knew perfectly well that I couldn't possibly say anything really new since I was seing behind his back, on the shelves covering most of the walls of their apartment, all the books I had only half-read, worn out from methodical perusal, underlined and annotated, resting against enlightening commentaries I didn't know even existed. He told me he was startled by the way I was always telling through which process I had understood whatever it was I had understood, and by how I was consistently supporting whatever point I was making by examples and evidences drawn from my own adventures, encounters and direct observations. At first, I was amazed at his amazement. What, the books weren't all guide-books off which we could tear the few pages dealing with the particular area of Being we intended to visit the next day ? They weren't surgeons bags full of deadly sharpened instruments to dissect ourselves and others, and figure out new ways to love each other? They weren't gunsmith's shops full of black powder to blow our cells open and set us free? They weren't mason's and carpenter's tool-boxes to build new worlds? What, the great books didn't come with some practical program to be taken seriously and tried out, and find a way out of the deep shit we're in?
I realized afterwards that my uncommon circumstances would never fail to draw an avid curiosity. The swirling entanglement of contradictions that I am is an object of wonder: really, ain't I a character run away from a doomed poet's hallucinated novel?
I saw that the terrible sufferings I had gone through would always attract sympathy, and at the same time the plainly jubilant casualness with which I would tell them, relieving my audience from the burden of sharing them, would turn them into a highly entertaining tragedy. Because I do manage once in a while to make a fool of myself with some wits. And I am so many people that I am always able to put on the face for which you've been looking .
I thought that, not being devoid of any rhetorical skills nor speculative ability, I could turn my stories into speeches of a compelling logic that can be disrupted only if you argue out of your own experiences, and reveal yourself, which no one dares to do. Speeches which could trigger reactions that might very well get completely out of control.
I knew then that I had come across a method of some sort to which I would one day resort. A technique to construct a wordy set, and signal.