Transcript
Claire ParnetNo, we are at "l".
Ah, yes. . .
Claire Parnet"I as in Idea," no longer in the Platonist "Idea" that you were just referring to. It's first. . . Rather than preparing an inventory of theories, you've always been passionate about philosophers' ideas, just as you have shown us, brilliantly, about the ideas of thinkers in cinema, that is, the directors, about the ideas of artists in painting. Rather than explications and commentary, you always prefer the "idea," your own "idea" and the "ideas" of others. So why, for you, does the "idea" preside over everything else?
Ok, you are quite right, the "idea" as I use it- no longer concerning Plato- traverses all creative activities. . . Creating means having an idea. But it's quite difficult to have an idea, there are people-not at all to be scorned for this- who go through life without ever having an idea. And having an idea, it's in every domain, I don't see any domain in which a place for having ideas is missing, but it's rare, indeed it's a ball to have an idea, it doesn't happen every day. So. . . a painter has no fewer ideas than a philosopher, just not the same kind of ideas. One has to ask therefore, if we reflect on different human activities, in what form does an idea occur in a particular case or another? In philosophy, at least, we just considered this: the idea in philosophy occurs in the form of concepts. There is the creation of concepts. There is no discovery of concepts, one doesn't discover concepts, one creates them. There is as much creation in a philosophy as in a painting or in a musical composition. As for others, well, they have ideas. . . I am struck by what we call a film director from the moment he becomes important- there are lots of directors who have never had the slightest idea. But ideas are quite haunting, they are like things that come, then go, and disappear, and take on diverse forms, but through these diverse forms, as varied as they may be, they are still recognizable. So, to state things quite simply, I take a cinema author at random like Minelli. One can say that throughout his entire oeuvre. . . Well, not all of it, this doesn't cover everything, but I choose this example because it's easy. . . One can say that here is someone who asks himself, it seems to me: what does it mean exactly that people dream? They dream. . . It's been discussed a lot, it's a platitude, one could say. . . So, people dream at a particular moment. But Minelli asks a very strange question, and it belongs only to him as far as I know: "what does it mean to be caught up in someone else's dream?" And it goes from the comic or the tragic to the abominable. What does it mean to be caught, for example, in a young girl's dream? Being caught in someone else's dream can produce some truly awful things, to be the prisoner of someone's dream, this is possibly horror in its pure state. So, sometimes in Minelli's work, he offers a dream, asking "what does it mean to be caught in the nightmare of war?" and that produced the admirable Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, in which he doesn't envisage war as war-thatwouldn'tbe Minelli's work. He envisages war as an enormous nightmare. What does it mean to be caught in a nightmare? What does it mean to be caught in a young girl's dream? That results in musical comedies, in famous musical comedies, notably in which Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly-I'm not sure which- escapes from tigresses and black panthers, it's unclear to me, and that's what it means to be caught in someone's dream. And there, that's an "idea." In short. . .and yet it's not a concept. Minelli, if he thought up concepts, he would be doing philosophy, [but] he's into movie-making. We almost have to distinguish three dimensions, three kinds of things. . . so strong that they get mixed up constantly. . . One would have to talk about. . . And here, that's where I am right now, it's my future work that I am explaining, it's really what I would like to do now, to consider this, to try to get a clear sense of all this: 1 ) There are concepts that are truly invented by philosophy; 2) There are what one can call percepts, and they are in the domain of art. So what are percepts? I believe that an artist is someone who creates percepts. So why use this bizarre word, percept, rather than perception? Well, precisely because percepts are not perceptions. . . What does a man of letters, a writer want, a novelist, I think that he wants to be able to construct aggregates of perceptions and sensations that outlive those who experience them. That's what a percept is: an aggregate of perceptions and sensations that outlive those who experience them. I choose some examples: there are pages by Tolstoy that describe like a painter could hardly manage, or by Chekhov, in a different manner, who describes the heat in the steppe. So, it's an entire complex web of sensations, visual sensations, auditory, nearly taste sensations, something that enters the mouth, all of that. . . So, so what? Well, try to give to this complex web of sensations a radical independence in relation to the person who experienced them: Tolstoy also described atmospheres; Faulkner, in the great pages of Faulkner, if you look at great writers, they attain this. . . There is one [writer] who nearly stated this, and whom I like very much, who isn't very well known in France, I believe, a very great American novelist, Thomas Wolfe, who says in his short stories: someone goes out in the morning, and he breathes some fresh air, and an odor comes past, of anything, some toast, let's say, there is a complex web of sensations, a bird flies by in the sky. . . There is a complex web of sensations. So, what happens when someone who experiences it dies, or goes on to do something else? What does that [web of sensation] become? This is rather the question that art poses, Art provides an answer to this. It's to give a duration or an eternity to this complex web of sensations that are no longer apprehended as being experienced by someone, or at the limit, that may be apprehended as experienced by a character in a novel, that is, by a fictional character. It's precisely that which engenders fiction. And what does a painter do? Well, he doesn't do only that, but a painter gives consistency to percepts, he tears percepts out of perception. There's a sentence by Cézanne that moves me more than anything. . . He says, Impressionism. . . A painter does nothing different. . . One can say that the lmpressionists utterly twisted perception. A philosophical concept literally, in certain ways, splits your skull open, it's a habit of thought that is completely new. . . If people aren't used to thinking like that previously, then that cracks their skulls, since in some ways, a percept twists our nerves. . . So. . . We can say that, in this, the lmpressionists invent a percept. There is an expression by Cézanne that is quite beautiful; he says something like, we have to make Impressionism last; that is, it still hasn't. . . the motif has not yet acquired its independence if it's a question of making it last and if new methods are necessary to make Impressionism last. . . It's not simply that paintings have to be better conserved; he means that the percept must acquire an even greater autonomy, so it must have new techniques, it must have. . . etc. 3) And then there is a third set of things, I think, very connected to all the others: they are what we have to call affects. Of course, there are no percepts without affects, but the affect is not like. . . I tried to define the percept as an aggregate of perceptions and sensations that become independent from the person experiencing them. For me, affects are becomings, becomings that overflow him or her who goes through them, that exceed the force of those who go through them, that's what an affect is. I would almost say. . . Wouldn't music be the great creator of affect? Doesn't music lead us into these powers of action that exceed us? It's possible, but in any case, all I mean is that the three are connected. I mean, if you take a philosophical concept, simply, it's more like questions of accent. . . If you take a philosophical concept, it causes one to see things, it causes one to see things. Philosophers have nonetheless this "visionary" aspect, at least in the philosophers that I admire: Spinoza causes one to "see," he is even one of the most visionary philosophers, Nietzsche as well, he makes one "see" things. They also hurl forth fantastic affects such that one really has to discuss this, itbecomes evidentall by itself: there is a music in these philosophies, and inversely, there's no use insisting that music makes one "see" some very strange things- perhaps simply colors sometimes, music causes one to "see" colors that don't exist within music or outside it, and percepts as well, all that is completely linked. I would dream of a kind of circulation of these dimensions into each other, between philosophical concepts, pictorial percepts, and musical affects. There's nothing surprising in there being these resonances, because however independent they may be, there is the labor of completely different people, but that never stops interpenetrating. . . Yes. . .
Claire ParnetSo these ideas of painters, of artists, and of philosophers, whereas they have "ideas," but which are an idea of perception, an idea of fiction, an idea of reason. . . Why. . . You. . . Well, in life one can see a book or read a book in which there is no idea at all, and for you, that bores you to the point that you are not interested at all. There is absolutely no interest for you in looking at something that might be funny or reading something that might be entertaining, if this idea is missing, if there are no ideas.
In the sense that I just defined "idea," I have difficulty seeing how that would be possible. If you show me a painting that has no percepts, where there is a cow represented that is more or less realistic but where there are no cow percepts, or it hasn't been lifted to the percept state, or play for me some music without affect. . . At the limit, I don't understand what that could possibly mean. If you show me a film, ok, well. . . and if you show me a stupid book of philosophy, I don't understand what kind of pleasure I would derive from it, other than an extremely unhealthy pleasure.
Claire ParnetIt might not be a stupid book of philosophy, it might simply be a humorous book. . .
Well, this humorous book could very well be full of ideas, I don't know, it all depends on what you call humorous. No one has ever made me laugh more than Beckett and Kafka, so I am very sensitive to humor, I find them, in fact, extremely funny. . . I prefer less television comedians, it's true. . .
Claire ParnetExcept Benny Hill, who certainly has an idea. . .
Except Benny Hill, since he has an idea. . . But in fact, in this domain, the great American comics have lots of ideas.
Claire ParnetDoes it ever happen- to finish with a more personal question-that you sit down to your writing table without an idea of what you are going to do, that is, without having any ideas at all? How does that work for you?
Of course not, if I have no ideas, I don't sit down to write. But what happens for me is that the idea hasn't developed enough, the idea escapes me, the idea disappears, there might be some holes. I have painful experiences like that, and it just doesn't go all by itself since ideas are not ready-made, one has to create them, I repeat. . . There are terrible moments, that is, there are moments in which one literally despairs, in which people don't feel capable of. . . oh, yes. . .
Claire ParnetIs it the expression or is it the idea that creates a hole, that's missing. . .? Is it both?
It's impossible to distinguish: Do I have an idea that I am just unable to express, or no idea at all? In my opinion, it's so much the same thing: if I cannot express it, I don't have the idea, or a piece of it is missing, a piece of this idea, since ideas don't arrive in a completely formed block, there are things that come in from here, from there, they come from diverse horizons, ideas, so if you are missing a piece, then it is unusable.