the “philosophy” chronicle of Roger-Pol Droit

“Troubling Identity”, by Paul Audi, Stock, 370 p., €22, digital €16 (in bookstores August 31).

SAY GOODBYE TO IDENTITY

There are people she reassures. Identity – national, cultural, community – is their anchor, their home, their security. Conversely, there are those it locks up, who feel under house arrest, petrified, in irons, as soon as they are asked where they come from, to find out who they are. These dream madly of fleeing, of escaping the prison of dates and places of birth, the traps of identifications. Simply to live. Being pinned somewhere on the map – we know who you are, the case is closed – is deadly for them.

The philosopher Paul Audi is one of those fugitives “a maniacal passion for freedom”. His dream: to see registered on his papers “place of birth: nowhere”. No past, no heritage – except those that we choose or invent for ourselves to look forward, to create, to always become different. He therefore wants to finish, as much as possible, with the humus of childhood, the family soil, the land of yesteryear and all the identity fences that go with it, like so many barbed wire that would prevent existence.

Why ? In the name of what suffering, what trauma? We discover, by reading Disturbing identity, that nothing here is a dissertation. Rather a matter of blood and tears, fears and tremors, a groping path in the labyrinth of the self. A lively, torn and heartbreaking text, invigorating despite everything, unexpected – and which promises to be striking. Because this philosopher – with a work of forty volumes now, devoted mainly to ethics, aesthetics and creation – speaks for the first time about himself and what haunts him, in an attempt to get out of it. Confessions of a Rousseau of today, in a way.

“Neither from here nor from there”

He was born in Lebanon, came to France at the age of 11, and wanted to be French resolutely, absolutely, passionately, in the name of a desperate love of Frenchness, of his unwavering demand for freedom. His early youth in Lebanon, he erased everything, forgot, repressed, seeing only “waste land”, “lethal space”. Of course, nothing was so simple. The naturalized wanted to be more French than the French, the foreclosed Lebanese was reminded of him by the others. Paul Audi ends up feeling “neither from here nor from there”spending his life “to feel fictional”the best days, “petrified with anguish”most of the time.

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