Paris, 17 February 2023
Lukas Bärfuss: Jean-Christophe Bailly, let me begin with a personal question. You were born in 1949, shortly after the war. Since then, you’ve experienced two parallel and contradictory developments. On the one hand, an improvement in living conditions greater than any other generation has known: life expectancy, medical condition, the welfare state. And on the other, an unprecedent destruction of nature. How have you incorporated this contradiction into your thinking?
Jean-Christophe Bailly: It’s difficult to answer because one experiences different things as a child. I was delighted by what they call nature—animals, forests, everything that I could see and understand, star-filled skies, I found it all amazing. Only later did we realize that with industry, and even in our post-industrial world, we were destroying everything, absolutely everything. And it was mainly through animals that I became conscious of this destruction. It had always frightened me: the scale of the human population. When I was born, there were around three and a half billion people in the world. Now there are more than eight billion. In contrast, if we look at the tiger population, at the time there were tens of thousands. Now we count them by the hundreds, sometimes as individual creatures. And when you see those two divergent lines, the constantly rising line of human population and the steadily falling line of numbers of animals, it’s terrible.
In your essay, La forme animale [1] you quote Georges Canguilhem. »The rapport between the living and its milieu develops as a debate.«[2] Are we humans part of this »living«? What is our milieu? After all, we were banished from paradise, that enclosed park in which wild animals live. And can we still speak of a debate? A debate requires two subjects, two equal subjects, that meet on the same level—hasn’t this relationship become a war in the meantime? Where are we in this debate?
Canguilhem refers to living things in general. A particular animal or a particular plant, cannot survive without entering into some kind of exchange with its surroundings, its life depends on this. Every living being evaluates the world in this way, calculates its possibilities. It is forced to take into account what is in front of it, under it, all around it and above it. Humans must also function like this. Even the hunter-gatherers had to live this way, their lives depended on it. As soon as men established a certain number of things as private property, began to store goods and wares, and created history, wars, and forms of power, they distanced themselves more and more from the constant connection, from direct contact with the world around them.
When I was a child, I would fetch milk from a farm during school holidays. Today, that has practically disappeared. The environment in which a child is born today is no longer the city as it was known when it arose during the period of the rising bourgeoisie or later in industrial society. Today it’s a kind of non-city, a relatively formless metropolis with a universality of media, of mediatization of goods, and so on. It is frightening to realize how weak the debate with the environment has become.
You taught for many years at the École nationale supérieure de la nature et du paysage in Blois.
I was very happy working there and as a writer as well. I couldn’t teach literature, it’s too close to me. I would be constantly annoyed. If a student tells me he doesn’t like Gérard de Nerval, I go crazy. But at that university, there was a foundation of objective knowledge and the problems of the time. What do we do with industrial wasteland? How can we prevent a river from flooding? In this way we accompany the students, even I, who taught an obviously more theoretical course.
Today we see that younger generations are enraged and outraged. The sense of an impending apocalypse is widespread.
I haven’t completely given in to despair, but sometimes I wonder why not.
What gives you hope?
What gives me hope are zones, interludes of forgetfulness. When I’m walking in the countryside and see a donkey, it comes up to me and I stroke its ears. This makes me happy. As does night. And sometimes even people do. There are a few interesting things you can do with them. I was just in Munich at rehearsals of Georges Aperghis’ composition, watching the musicians at work. It was pure passion, hours and hours spent perfecting minute sounds. Everything that demands a kind of attention—with your ears, your hands, your sense of touch—pleases me. Even a butcher cutting meat! In this sense, I’m an utter Rousseauian. Everyone should be obligated to perform ten hours of manual labor a week. Everyone!
It’s astonishing to hear an intellectual say this.
Yes and no. When I see someone like the French president Macron—for me he is a caricature of what one should not be as a human. I want to put a screwdriver in his hand; I’m sure he barely knows how to use it. These are the people who are ruling the world. It’s terrifying. They are of an almost incomprehensible incompetence and arrogance.
As a teenager, I worked for a tobacco grower. He also had cattle. It was a horrifying life. Once we had to saw apart a calf because it was stuck in the birth canal. One of his neighbors killed every cat that strayed onto his farm. I would find them on the dung heap. It was bloody. There was a certain truthfulness to it or it was never idyllic. You wrote a short book about another vanished world, that of coal mines.
When you visit a coalmine in Essen, in the Ruhr district, where the biggest machines were, you now find a four-star restaurant. What gives anyone the right to do that? That doesn’t mean the restaurant should be closed and the mine reopened. What I don’t like is the speed with which people can erase their past.