Interview with Peter Alferi appeared in Area Revisited) e ( Skies! July 2010 
binoculars
is a work of "anticipation" in the very short term, which tells the story of a man, Horacio Picq, conspirator of Central. Sequestered for a long weekend of April 2009 (one month after the release of the book) at Fort Tremor - where he had come to spy - guarded by a "giant" in the name of Marthe, he is powerless while in Paris, the insurrection is brewing. During his detention, he discovered a pair of binoculars and a star atlas belonging to a certain Augustus. You quote-back cover-a phrase of Auguste Blanqui, extracted from Eternity
by the stars, cosmological and philosophical speculation, which is also his last text. He had written when he was incarcerated at the Castle of Taurus in the Bay of Morlaix (1871): "All we could be here, it is somewhere else." How is your work on the text of Blanqui? The idea is simple. Someone ends up in the same situation as him, locked at a insurgency that has been called for all his life. Imprisoned on the eve of the outbreak of the Commune, he knew almost nothing of what was happening, and then he wrote Eternity by the stars.
The paradox of the device - see the universe in a dungeon - is already pointed to by the text of Blanqui, because it evokes the "fact" that is also captive in other worlds, other solar twins, and looked back to it the same sheet of paper. I wanted to replay that scene today, encouraged by the thesis for Eternity by the stars, that everything that happens could not happen - there is a twin earth somewhere it does not happen - but above all that happens happens an infinite number of times. So what happened to Blanqui might not happen - it is very clear - but it must be repeated. Extremes meet: the one hand someone totally isolated, a tiny dot in the universe, another grandiose assumptions he makes about the cosmos. And then the idea of not being able to attend events in which we worked so hard, it touches me.
Is there not also a reflection on the situation of the writer? Not consciously. But I suppose the feeling of being unable to act, to be inherently inefficient, is shared by many people who make literature or art, at least if not cynical. They want to engage with their practice, particularly in the social struggle, and at the same time they know that the "committed art" has no interest, no relevance. It's a dilemma.
Think engaged art has no impact on the real? Art says "committed" to waive the requirements and the radical nature of art itself. Commitment is usually for him to change communication, propaganda, inspiring speech, in kitsch didactic. He feels obliged to abdicate any formal ambition - innovation, complexity, polysemy. The utopian avant-garde in the early twentieth century was to conjoin a revolutionary politics and aesthetics, but the political side it does not follow. The avant-garde inclinations of artists, Russia or Italy, were quickly bullied. Or
recovered. Or recovered.
The main character would be a "double" of the situation at the Castle of Blanqui's Taurus, but it seems a bit "ethereal." Finally he quickly forgets the Revolution. Auguste Blanqui instead lived seventy-six years and spent forty-four in prison for having fueled the hope of a free society ... is true. Unlike Blanqui probably Picq is ambiguous. It's not so unhappy that it be shut. It not make huge efforts to get away, and he quoted a "baby". Finally it is not so bad, we can say that it is "cageôlé. From the outset it travels underground in the bowels, and it never goes out, it has something regressive. He leaves infantilize. So, in his remarks, he mixes great visions and cosmic musings on the conception, gestation, birth of a child. His jailer is very maternal. This can be a bad mother at times, but it's a mother. She is wealthy, she feeds him. Picq is the opposite of what one imagines the revolutionary adult male. There is also a little thing that needs to be mothered, then expelled into the world.
The book ends besides the fact that she may be pregnant. There. This does not mean at all to me, as some have believed that the common political outlook, it falls into private, family, or petty-bourgeois psychology. These are not two opposing things. These are the accidents of life. Such events - an insurrection, a pregnancy - are unpredictable. The birth of a child, regardless of the preparations and Medical subterfuge, it remains fundamentally unpredictable and amazing. Same for an insurrection. This is not to put them on the same plane, but to consider the common experience that in fact: unprepared, against the foot, overwhelmed by the event.
seems The Twins have caused some misunderstandings. Yes, especially given the political situation. It amused me to tell a story that happened later, just when the book would come out (April 2009). I had a sort of challenge: tell a insurrection as that of May 1968, but the coming spring. It seemed quite possible, I must say, and urgent. I thought, if it occurs, the better, for once I am "in tune" with the event. But if it does not happen it will not mean it was not possible. It was the next "science fiction novel," just days away. Some who have read it right away, either at the time of fictitious facts, have expressed concern that, as the uprising in the book did not take place, it could be demotivating! As if fiction had become law, it condemned the very idea of insurgency. Was the opposite of my intention, and indeed the idea that I am a novel, which must be to please me anything but edifying.
Do you think our time could see a rise Blanqui, or having chosen an ambivalent character, as qu'Horacio Picq says something about our time in particular? I did not think like that. I think now that you tell me. For sure this one is quite revolutionary easily distracted and deceived. On the other hand, the insurrectionary speech who returns to fashion is paying a few words. Can we hope that a small group steals a police arsenal and, as at the time of Blanqui, trying to round up the population through the streets? This can not happen like that. It takes more imagination to create a revolutionary momentum today. We can not simply dream of the return such that Blanqui himself. He is a man of the nineteenth century, and even, in a sense, the eighteenth. He has one hand I admire visionary, more modern example, Marx in his chaotic vision of history and stammering. But on the other hand, is an heir of the plotters of the monarchy, the Carbonari. His report to the Military thing, it can hardly be inspired. He is someone who has not seen modern democracy, except at the very end. It was not really a democrat, for that matter. The coup is something appealing, and perhaps inevitable, but I'm a little annoyed by the return of rhetoric in the strictly military leftist discourse today. It's more mythology than anything else. But I hasten to say that I have nothing to offer, not least the battle plan. All I can do in my very small scale, to be faithful to sensations, perceptions, not only mine but I think unique to that time. This would be pure demagogy to say: "Advancing new Blanqui, off again like in forty-eight! "It was pretty
where someone trapped, powerless to events he fomented. Yes, this feeling of helplessness policy, which I have no solution to offer.
This could characterize our times. Yes, yes, but between impotence and resignation or cynicism, there is a huge difference. I do not have the comforting illusion that "there is nothing to do", for example against the racketeer and criminal farce called "Sarkozia. There is everything to do.
It seems that Blanqui, in his text Eternity
by the stars, is extremely pessimistic. The description of the political situation in your book is real, certainly, but also extremely pessimistic. is true. Blanqui said he should not trying to console himself: "It is all too comforted." In the Marxist tradition has often been too optimistic. Or, anyway, it was too believed in a readable historical necessity, and therefore it was announced what was to happen - the downward trend in wages, awareness, revolt. I think we can be politically active without promising anything, without hope or believe, without prophecy. That does not mean that thus we were not disappointed. Only one does not have too much credit to the "necessity" history, or even economic.
There is this idea in the book of Blanqui, there is no progress: "The future will review billions on land of ignorance, the folly and cruelty of our old age! . Blanqui is one of the few to challenge this idea on the left, along with Baudelaire, who turned to Joseph de Maistre after the massacre of 1848. He is very strong, saying that progress is a myth of winners. This is the story told from the perspective of those who remain standing who leave the battlefield. And it is also the first who dared to speak for the proletariat, the 1830s. Not just for losers of the political struggle, but for all engulfed in history. Those who were defeated, but also forgotten, erased them with another vision, another experience of the world.
What do you think of the theory of eternal return, as developed by Nietzsche, in which the text of Blanqui has a special significance? These are obviously not scientifically valid theory. As the idea that there are other equal and different world, "plurality of worlds", which was regularly invoked by materialists and atheists. And nowhere else. It is crucial in materialism, which show that there may be different. Parallel worlds, it embodies this idea to eradicate the welfare of the universe, fate, destiny. There are always several possibilities, and if this world has taken this direction, not because it was the only possible and would be quite able to take a thousand others. We find that in Lucretius and the ancient materialists. Blanqui This idea, which he believes probably not really, but it serves to maximize the strength of possible quota. Every moment bifurcates the world, and "evidence" that there is actually more real worlds at the end of all roads as ours did not. It is an assumption limit. The eternal return, in a sense, it is also a bet that is the highest affirmation of becoming, the desire to marry, to ride the dragon. Then, whether it's absurd or not, whether to believe it, I do not know. It is primarily a statement of the form: "I want. "I want it again indefinitely. "." And for Blanqui: "I want everything, everything depends on human will, can be otherwise. "
This is not so pessimistic. No. The text of Blanqui, I read it several times in my life by chance the first time, and without reading any reviews until very recently. Spontaneously, I took it as something exciting and not at all like a nightmare. That said, I understand that there way a nightmare, there are some very gloomy. Reproduction of horrors, what Adorno called the "natural history of mankind." But it was not my strongest feeling. Benjamin said that Blanqui makes weapons for the triumphant bourgeoisie Second Empire, and it offers to the ruling class, like a poisoned chalice, a hellish vision of the return of its own domination, its own petty and bloody history. It's a brilliant play, but I find it far-fetched. Blanqui's not just the history of domination, he speaks at all of history, so also all that is possible. I do not know what is the best interpretation, but I know which I prefer.
Why have used to describe the visual experience for the character has through the binoculars? I did not ask. It was in any case be an interruption of the narrative. Because the narrative is not the first person, Picq is a character. But when he looks through his binoculars, he speaks and describes what he sees. What interested me was what he saw or what he thought - I've played for six months of astronomy books. In adopting its views to him, the first person singular and the present, anyway I was in quite another thing the story. In addition, they are fragmentary visions, very confusing at first, it has no recoil. It is crossed by velocities, scales of vastly different distances. It could not have raised floor, producing a speech. It was not something that could be sent to someone, it would be a kind of monologue or cellulogue inside. And then, naturally enough, it took a hashed form, in a discontinuous syntax. He said a piece of something, then another. Why worms is ideal, since they are not necessarily grammatical units. They can be linked together or not - there may be a time, beating between the moments. And then it's a registry writing in which I find myself better than in the narrative. I would not hold up a linear narrative. It just seemed to clearly distinguish the moments of contemplation, they punctuate the story regularly. Every night, where he observed the stars with binoculars, is a time apart, almost self-sufficient. And yet, the fact of looking at the sky brought out.
Blanqui he could see the sky while he was imprisoned in the castle of Taurus? I do not think so. There is a remarkable biography of Geffroy, who met Blanqui and accurately describes its various holdings. To that of 1870 at Fort Bull, the picture is terrible. There is no point of view, Blanqui is old, he does not see the sea, just a skylight high. It's almost never, except in a courtyard and blind. I wish for him that he had a telescope and he could see the sky, but I doubt it. However, it had a scientific background, he was very learned and curious, and he had already taken a close interest in cosmology. It was not a literary reverie.
Something found with worms, it is this altered state of consciousness, hallucinating a little, which is reflected in the text of Blanqui. Maybe. This is not the same style, but there is like a suspension. Anyway, when describing the sky, no definition, it loses its anchor, its landmarks. It's a passion, a robbery.
How do you write these passages in verse? In a daze. This book, I wrote the summer on the roof of my building. I sought the shade and water, I was often bewildered by the heat. It is useless to be studious to write passages like that. It must be very relaxed, catching bits of things.
The Twins seem to be a "mobile" that travels all the work. These are of course the sisters, but also the optical apparatus. I do not think there are other languages where it is called the "twins". It is a theme, yes, not in the sense of subject, but as a pattern. In Eternity by the stars of Blanqui, the Earth has an infinite number of binoculars. In my text, but also how ambivalent Picq which sees his jailer, and which sees itself. By turns he perceived as benevolent and malevolent, treacherous and accomplice. In fact, she alternated softness and hardness. Suddenly he sees double, are both objects of love, but opposed twins. The twins and both eyes, is accidental pun, but it was well suited. See how far his own reflection? In the text of Blanqui, sometimes he pretends to recognize the merits of the cosmos. Everything repeats itself without being identical. When something is repeated, it may not be the same as it is already known. Arguably it is the central motif of this story.
Is there not a parable of love? Thank you to be someone, between rebellion and submission, but dependent on each other, mistaking his identity, making assumptions, assumptions ... is definitely a story of love, love strange. A camera lover. A game of seduction and discovery. It feels - and I think that's the reality of a romantic encounter - that one moment to another seems someone different. The body of the other is capable of metamorphosis. Picq feels that at the beginning as something supernatural but not surprising. And then wondered if there is not really two women. It is a commonplace to divide through the love object in two, good and bad, to construct fantasies. But the consequences of ambivalence, especially when it is reciprocal, is incalculable and devious. They are essential to the story, which follows the rapid and violent love.
The bootlegs or pirated discs, represented for several decades a veritable parallel economy, a kind of dark during the record industry involving a lot of personalities more or less dubious mantle as offering music fans live recordings or unreleased tracks from their favorite bands, sometimes shamefully high prices. Many artists have thus outside of their official discography, another more informal concealing nuggets sometimes inaccessible to the general public, helping to maintain their myth as well as albums found. 
