The Radical Party, which, in the memory of the century in which I was born, is synonymous with everything in French politics that is most mediocre, most corrupt, most hostile to grandeur.

The etymology of the word, its pith, which inevitably evokes a world of roots or foundations — probably the thing I most loathe in philosophy.

The inverse, which one finds, for instance, in Kant with his idea of radical Evil, thus named only because it is unfathomable, unassignable, impossible to date or examine, and therefore strictly rootless (Is this latter radicality any better than the former? Though rootless, isn’t it just as vertiginous and loathsome as the first?).

The desire for revolution and that entire dream of “beginning anew,” which runs from Saint-Just to the Chinese Red Guards (I congratulate myself, every morning, that I managed to separate myself from this, for in my eyes it is strictly synonymous with disaster and affliction, and tends toward barbarity. The hoof beats of the apocalypse that echoed through my youth sometimes reach me with a certain nostalgic air, with, as it were, a vague and clarified resonance, but it’s nothing, really).

And then these current remakes, like La France Insoumise [Unbowed France] or Nuit Debout [Up All Night], with their hint of fakery, their aspect of well-to-do rebellion and risk-free revolt. (How puny our radicals are! How ignorant and hollow! And how airy are all these shoddy miracle workers who leap into the abyss of the specter just because they can’t quite tell anymore what’s haunting them! They say they are taking up the torch, and they don’t even know how to hold a match.)

Now, if you were to ask me then about the things in my current existence and dreams that have replaced this temptation of the radical and the portion of enthusiasm that admittedly accompanied it, I would reply, again, this: A taste for gesture and style, which, when joined in the same life with a love and care for literature, is the first antechamber of the interior graces: Proust, I would think.

A taste for good and just actions carried all the way to their logical conclusions in all their moral and political consequences — Bosnia, Libya, Kurdish films, the love for entirely realized action, the placing of one’s own body in front of the challenge of that which exceeds but does not limit it, and I shall pass over many others.

And then the rapture I feel, as when I was 20, in reaching an “extreme” in the adventure toward a “concept,” or at least a “notion.” (The formulation here is that of Walter Benjamin in The Origin of German Tragic Drama. It is the voice of my mentors exhorting the youth of my day to become “resistant through logic” and therefore never to compromise on our desire or on the rigor of our knowledge, which was meant to free us not only from the doxa of our time, but also from the supposed roots of pernicious radicalism. Such was also the lesson, still earlier, long before I was around, of the Third Conference of the Situationist International in Munich, which advocated for “the most extreme experimental growth that can be inflicted upon an idea.”)

Here I stand.