Les verbes de l’écriture (1) - Wajdi Mouawad (2024-2025)

Hello, hello everyone and thank you very much for being here this morning. So today we are going to open this cycle of eight lessons devoted to the verbs of writing in the framework of this chair, Invention of Europe by Languages and Cultures.

These lectures and seminars, which will follow each one of them, will take place every Tuesday, so from today until April 8th, and always at the same time. And for that, I would like to thank Professor Patrick Boucheron, who has well wanted to give me this keynote, usually his own. He wants a lot from me.

And so if there are any of you today who came in the hope of hearing it, know that until April 8, the professor will give his lessons on the sex of power on Tuesdays, as usual, but, by my fault, from 2:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. instead of 9:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. Deploying his thought is still a Everest. So I hope I will be a good Sherpa during this ascent and that the eight lessons that will be the stages will bring you some inspiration,

You will open horizons, since there will be many questions of landscapes, of paths, of paths, of lighthouses, and I hope that they will appear to you as I would like them to be, that is to say, poetic escapes in the midst of the agitation and the chaos of the world. What I will try to share during these lessons is particularly important to me, it is something that is very intimate to me, and therefore necessarily is lost in the meanders.

since I'm not used to teaching them. These are really fleeting things, in appearance, and perhaps not only in appearance, totally useless. They are linked to the relationship I maintain with writing, so it's undeniable. It's about rosy, it fades quickly, it's likely that it appears often, very often even, misty.

If that's the case, it will be my fault, because I'm not used to being in this position. So, if at times it becomes totally incomprehensible, it may not be that serious. Sometimes, the feeling experienced is more important than the meaning expressed. And to tell you the truth, I would have really liked to open this first lesson with a professorial and imperative: "We are now going to start."

But it would start badly, and in the face of such a lie, some would say, "Well, let's say it starts well." Indeed, you just have to look at the question to see that it is not at the moment when we say "we're starting" that it starts. On the contrary, when we say "we're starting", it means that we are almost done, that everything is done and that there is only one thing left to do: I still have eight lessons left, so as far as the conclusion is concerned,

Saying "we are starting" is actually impossible. Impossible. Because we always start, and without knowing it, long before we declare it a start, and it is only a revelation of what, for years, has secretly passed through us to reach our consciousness and make us say "Oh, but it's starting!" For example, let's take the aurora. Long before the first bird's song,

when it's still a night of ink, well before the slightest sign manifests itself, the aurora has already begun. It sounds somewhere in the confines, it may even proceed to a sacrifice while we sleep. An astral being that we gorge, that will blush the sky later, while we pray to pay for the sun to rise again. In any case, we don't know what is being trampled, because it is being trampled. It is being trampled in the sense that it is being woven.

the fabric of light is always made at night and at nightfall. And when the dawn comes, we say, ah, the dawn! And we see it as a birth, but it is already in this beginning for an eternity. At the beginning was the Word, it seems, perhaps. But before the Word, there was its rumour, its burning. It was necessary that something desire it, for this Word to come to be and to make its beginning. If nothing had desired it, it would not have occurred.

Desire always precedes the burning of things that are on the way to the visible. The same goes for horror. It's the same thing. And what is true about horror is also about writing. Writing also begins in desire long before it writes, long before it knows that it is writing. It is already writing before writing. And so is speech. To speak, it has to start speaking in us, well before. In short, it always starts.

before it starts. We don't decree that we start. On the other hand, we can become aware of it. But there is always a gap between the moment when it starts and the moment when we become aware of it. How we inhabit this gap will be the subject of the next lesson. But this moment...

This moment is a vertigo. When we realise that something in us has started, when it appears to us, when awareness is achieved, then we see the light, our mind becomes clear, and it's an epiphany. This epiphany can be dangerous, it can be very violent when we realise that something in us has started. It can be blinding. There is one, I won't name him, after some complicated stories with his father and mother, he died of eyesore because he was enlightened too quickly.

In fact, it's like a tumor that becomes day. In the infinitely small of the first cell that refuses to die, there is no sign to know, to decelerate this beginning. For this, we need a symptom. The symptom can be simple. There is no need for a plague to strike a city and that we have to go to Delft to consult the oracle. No, a grain of beauty is enough.

A grain of beauty is enough, and it is in itself an oracle sent by Apollo. So if in ancient times the diviner was the one who resolved the riddle posed by the oracle, today the oncologist translates for the patient the oracle that is the grain of beauty, or the light bump on the chest.

And when the scanner discovers the truth about the tumor, what is discovered is not its beginning, but on the contrary, its presence, which does not date from yesterday, and the shift can be dangerous. What is true for the tumor is also true for the horror, it is also true for writing. We only have access to their symptoms, but the symptoms appear a long time after the obscure beginning, always. If things follow multiple paths,

"Toutes se trament dans l'ombre, car oui, ça se trame, ça se tisse, soit pour notre malheur, soit pour notre bonheur, jusqu'au moment où elles apparaissent à la conscience par le truchement d'un scanner pour la tumeur, celui du premier chant d'oiseau pour l'aurore, ou d'une phrase impossible surgit malgré tout au bout du crayon pour l'écriture.

We never decide to start. It starts before, before consciousness. So it's not a matter of will. The entrance into the light is prepared in the darkness. And the mind is not aware of what is being drawn, because, as we just said, it is drawn, in the sense that it is woven, the fabric of writing, like that of light, the fire. It is plotting in us, to our advantage.

We need to know that about ourselves, that it's a conspiracy. We need to love it in ourselves, that it's a conspiracy. So if for one reason or another we want, we want me to pronounce the verb "to begin", if we insist, if we absolutely want that for this first lesson I conjugate this verb, then I will use it to say: "We will start by trusting".

Let's put it this way: we start by trusting what is being woven, because what is being woven is being woven. It's not about the alterophilia, where you have to lift an impossible load musculously: "I'm not going to invent a story on my own will." That would start very badly. On the contrary, we have to let it be woven, that it is woven, and trust the writing as we trust the horror.

The day will arise, the writing will come, it will come, it will come, do not doubt it. There will be sacrifices, but the writing will come, it will always come, it always comes. So, to offer all our trust, to maintain no bond of mistrust, neither towards the writing, nor towards the light. On the contrary, to the writing, to put no condition.

« À ne rien exiger, on obtient tout d'elle. C'est une acharnée, une bosseuse, et si on l'aime, si on ne l'écrase pas sous aucune velléité ou injonction, elle se donne avec le désir presque enfantin de vouloir nous surprendre. On s'assoit, on est là, on gribouille, et tout à coup, une phrase, et on se demande, mais attends, mais d'où ça sort ? Eh bien, ça fait une éternité que la servante y travaille, à notre insu. »

We don't know that it's written, and months later, years later, at random, the words are written on the corner of a counter, a bar, a cold and humid station, waiting for a train that doesn't arrive. Suddenly, it appears at the end of the pencil. The fiction, the narration, the story. And then we're stunned, we say to ourselves: "But it's starting!" No, it's not starting, it's finally joining us. It joins us after a very, very long journey. So we have to reverse things.

We are not the starting point, the starting point of ideas, of fulgurances. We are not the starting point, we are the point of arrival. We are the end of the road, we are the port to reach. Never the matrix of noise, but we are the destination of noise. We are desired by what is written in us.

The work, the plumbing, the dramaturgy, the structure, the staining, that's after. Before, it comes to us. That's why saying at the start of this lesson, we're going to start, would have been, for me, a form of ungratefulness towards the path traveled in the invisible by the rustling, by the whispering and by the rumor of this lesson that I'm pronouncing in front of you. It had been waiting in the dark for a very, very long time, but it was already there, otherwise...

60,000 signs, spaces understood by my own will, would have been humanly impossible. Writing, concretely, required me to simply go down the path for the writer to be the first to discover it and see it appear before delivering it. Some probably know the story. In front of the child's room, on the other side of the street, there is the studio of a sculptor.

One morning, the child sees a truck delivering a monstrous block of marble to the sculptor. The big metal curtain of the workshop opens, the block of marble penetrates inside, and then the curtain closes. For two months, the child hears the sounds of hammers, of burrs, sometimes the work of the metal curtain. He sees the dust of marble escaping.

He hears the knocking, the clattering. Sometimes he sees the sculptor come out completely covered in white dust, smoking a cigarette before going back. And then, one morning, it's over. The truck comes back, the metal curtain opens, the child moves the curtains away from his window, and there, under his bewildered eyes, he sees a huge horse of marble. Surprised, the child rushes out of his house, he runs to the sculptor and asks him, but how ?

How did you manage to see that there was a horse locked in this block of marble? And the child is right. The sculptor does not decree that he will sculpt a horse. The sculptor sees the horse. And the horse was there before the sculptor.

long before. The horse was there even when the mountain from which the marble block was extracted was formed by the tectonic movements of the earth. The horse was there. Long before the appearance of life on earth, the horse was there. Long before even the surrogacy of a horse in the history of evolution, the horse was there. It was already there when nothing in the universe could even imagine what a horse could be. Well, the horse was already there. That's what the sculptor frees.

what the painter paints, what the writer writes, what the composer composes. It's already there. We must deliver it in a way that is inescapable, develop the vision that sees through the stone, let the writing see through us. We will talk about this work again during the following lessons. In the meantime, let's talk again about this, about rumours, about the noise, the horror and the trust

that this is a path. This happens to us because we are the bridge between the invisible and the visible. Something is there in our blackness that goes towards its epiphany,

Cela est, avant d'être, et si en effet au commencement était le verbe, et qu'avant le verbe il y avait sa rumeur, et que la rumeur n'est que le désir ardent du verbe d'apparaître pour entrer dans la lumière, alors, de ce désir ardent, on fera précisément le portail pour entrer à l'intérieur de ce domaine que j'ai intitulé les verbes de l'écriture. Poursuivons donc, à défaut de commencer. Voici une citation tirée

of Gilbert Simondon's "The way of existence of technical objects". On page 185, Simondon writes: "A tractor in a garage is nothing but a technical object. When it is at work and tilts in its sill while the earth is pouring, it can be perceived as beautiful. Any technical object, mobile or fixed, can have its aesthetic epiphany, as long as it extends the world and inserts itself in it." End of quote.

If it's true of a tractor, it's also true of a verb. What is a verb if it's not the tractor of a sentence? And among the verbs, the verb "to be". The verb "to be" is indeed a tractor in the lexical field of writing. It ploughs the earth and allows it to sow, so that it grows, so that it is. Thanks to this verb, things are. Yes. But.

According to Heraclitus of Ephesus, 500 years before our era, nature loves to hide. In other words, what goes towards the light loves the shadow. The verb « aimer » is important. Heraclitus did not say « nature must hide » or « nature wants to hide ». No, he said « aimer »

Nature therefore likes to play hide and seek. "Dog, are you there? I put on my pants." "Dog, are you there? I'm coming!" Well, it's the same thing. Writing, are you there? I put on my pants. In the meantime, go for a walk in the woods while writing is not there. She likes to hide, to be, to grow towards the light but to stay in the shade.

When the verb "to be" comes out of the daily garage to enter the labors of poetry and prolong the world, it brings out what is in the invisible to make it appear in the field of the visible, our consciousness. It puts its panties on it

He puts on his socks, his shirt, his pants, his boots, and he makes it happen. "I'm coming!" He makes it happen, appearing in our consciousness. So we scream, frightened like a child, at the arrival of the wolf. So that's it! The continuation is over, and childhood is over. It can finally be. That is to say, the story, the story, the idea, the narration, the character, the idea of a play, the project, that's it, it can be.

Now it is possible to start. Epiphany of the verb "to be", therefore, to address this question of the beginning, of why it does not start as we think it does, of how it starts, and of what starts when it starts. To simplify, for the reasons mentioned above, I take the liberty of putting aside this impossible word to start, to prefer the one of noise, of rumours, of horror, which announces the writing, but which is not yet quite there.

It's a moment of naivety that nothing should come to disturb. It requires a delicacy, a difficult self-control for us Westerners, and which consists, in Descartes' kingdom, of holding back the eagle of reason to let the prey gander a little longer.

Retaining the eagle in the sole ambition and throwing it on intuition to cut it out of its web. Yes, but why this, why that? And what does this and that mean? And what is the meaning? And what is it referring to? No. Retaining, letting run, letting act in itself, not trying to understand what this intuition is, but entering it, becoming it, becoming intuition, the prey that gathers. It's like arriving at the edge of a clearing whose threshold has never been crossed.

Ne pas chercher à comprendre ce qui a contribué à son apparition. Elle est là, ça suffit. Cela est. Cela est. Un chant d'oiseau nous invite à y entrer. On s'approche, mais l'entrée ne se donne pas tout de suite.

We approach the paper leaf, we turn around, like the astrophysicist turns around the Big Bang, this first light, there, matrix of the great beginning, but which is perhaps, too, nothing else than the extremity of a rumor that preceded it. There is something so burning, so joyfully burning, to know how to work through the rumor that approaches without us knowing it.

Before the epiphany of his presence takes place, before we become aware of it, we must operate in ourselves such a weaving of imperceptible sensations, of thoughts, of memories, of memories, of encounters, of random readings, of depression, of happiness, of boredom, of terrible events, of happy events. The infinity of combinations of all this creates the noise, it creates the rumour. In this sense, we are neither innocent nor virgin, a neutrino.

is an elementary particle of the standard model of particle physics. I'll start again. A neutrino is an elementary particle of the standard model of particle physics. It's interesting to know that every second that passes, 60 billion neutrinos per square centimeter leave the heart of the Sun for 8 minutes and 2 seconds later, cross us. Look at your hand, measure 1 centimeter by 1 centimeter,

Count one second. 60 billion neutrinos have just passed through this square centimeter. As astrophysicist Michel Cassé and Etienne Parizeau, who is a specialist in cosmic radiation, say: "We have already visited the bellies of our mothers, and virginity is therefore in the field of appearances." Who is doubting this dizzying rain? Who feels something?

Who says every second, ah, but all these neutrinos that cross me? So is it of this noise, of what is noisy to our insu. It is a sidereal rain. We are not innocent.

And that is what is at question today, this rumour that exists before the time of writing. But to evoke its physical chemistry, we need to move away from a language to try to enter another language, to move away from a thought that relies on causality to get closer to a dream that works rather by mirrored, making one reflect in each other ideas, phenomena that at first sight have nothing to do with each other.

because it is by chance of collisions between what is different and distant that atomic mingling occurs at the beginning of writing. What should not meet, meets. What should not love, loves. What should not make love, makes love. Writing is always a subversion. But hey, we don't go from one language to another by shouting scissors.

There is a Quebec expression for saying that it is not enough to decree something so that it comes. It is not because we shout scissors that the thread of resentment is cut. And if we want to move away from the marked paths, we have every interest in having on us a map of the territory in which we are about to get lost.

Because we know it, changing languages, entering another language, it's like entering a territory, and there will come a time when the path will be lost and will be confused with vegetation. So from bush to bush, up and down, we will always believe we will find the path to lose it again.

It is this impression that always displeases us, the certainty that we are not really lost and instead of walking backwards, we continue with the conviction that no, no, the path is very close, it is just there, at the top of this hill, behind this hill, there, there, there, I thought I saw it between these forays, and it is only when it is too late, after about a few hours, to knit on the level of a landscape that we end up having to admit, without a certain shame,

that we don't know where we are anymore, that we are unnoticed, lost, without any network, we don't see anything, no bar to the dial of our phone, if not a ironic satellite signal that seems to tell us: "So, Christophe Colomb, you discovered America? It will teach you to be a discoverer when you are just a lamentable amateur lost in the middle of nowhere, in the image of your life, in the image of your thoughts, in the image of your relationship to the world. Suicide yourself!"

We must calm down and remember that if we are lost, everything is not completely lost, because we have a map. We use it humbly, first trying to orient it, that is, to find its orient, to get out of the West. Etymologically, to find where the light is, the orient. To do this, by turning the map, we try to make a point on the map coincide with it, easily identifiable on the terrain. Bell tower, water tower, summit, valley, in short.

Once found, go ahead, obstinately, and then start again. Thus, an eye in the topographic theory that we hold in our hands, which is this map, and another in the reality of the terrain where we are lost, we can see that the gap between the virtual, that we hold in our hands, and the real of the terrain. Hence the importance of the exactness of our map, because the smaller this gap, the greater the possibility of finding its way. So, the more the real

and the virtual comes closer to each other, the more we see where we are going, and when finally the real is coupled with the virtual, then an unsuspected path is born. A path that we did not doubt reveals itself to us, offers us an epiphany of the place where we are, which allows us to pursue a journey, at that moment, truly unique. Because it is always what we give birth to that guides us, and never the opposite. Although we are already passably lost,

We are now going to, to avoid falling into the limbo, try to draw the topological map of the rumour, of the noise, a sort of prolegomenes, whose goal is to establish the basic principles on which the eight lessons that will follow will rest, that is to say, to draw...

the location that is a legend, just as a map is a legend, by the graphic symbols indicating paths, roads, railroads, rivers, tourist sites, not to forget the scale and the position of the North, geographical and magnetic. Some of these principles were mentioned during the inaugural lesson, but I will take the time to recall them in a less demented way,

to avoid losing ourselves in the tormented meteorology of this thought that inhabits me and which I sometimes feel to be only the flying saucer. A flattening to avoid us, to find ourselves in the middle of the bushes, even if, I admit, we are already a little passable, to avoid us from understanding much more or, and this may be worse, to understand through. That said, having never had the need or the desire to explain what governs me when I write,

First principle. These lessons are not a writing workshop.

It is not here, for me, to teach writing, on the contrary. It is about deepening this ancient law that wants things to exist that are not taught. Not only that they are not taught, but that they entice us to deploy the most sophisticated devices to destroy any attempt that would try to put them in the light, they that can only exist in the dark.

accepted as a premise that not only certain things have the vocation to remain hidden, but that also, as soon as we try to put a methodology that would seek to manufacture them to draw more from them, the language immediately collapses like a bridge over a ravine. However, if we cannot teach them, we can dream of the reasons that make them untransmissible. And this dream could turn out to be much richer and happier than if we had to teach the act of creation.

Thus, in the allegory box of this drawing, we will place two symbols to indicate two axioms linked to this notion of transmissibility. First, experience, that is, know-how, is contrary to creation, which by definition consists of making what does not exist emerge, appearing what does not belong to the domain of experience.

To create from experience is not to create, it is to repeat, it is to redo, it is to do what we know.

Second action, create...

It is not communicated. On the contrary, communication kills creation. Communication has the purpose of enlightening, naming, setting the sun at noon, of removing the shadow, reducing it. But the more we enlighten, the less we dream. The more we communicate, the less we create. There is always a sacrifice, a choice. Communication says: "I want you to know as I want you to know." Creation says: "You are a hero, don't listen to anyone, do as you want."

And the more the path you want to follow seems impracticable to others, the more likely you are to be on your own path. To those who tell you, with reason, "You can see that it's an impasse, that it's not possible to get involved there", you will answer that precisely, it is what writing demands of you. Contrary to what reason calls us, in terms of writing, we are held to the impossible. Second principle.

It is both the angular stone on which the link I established with writing lies and the key of voodoo that holds between it and me the agreement, the promise that we have made. This principle makes it so that today I think as I think, I write as I write and I live as I live. I am alienated to this principle. And everything I will say here, everything I say elsewhere, can only be understood at the dawn of this principle.

We can contradict it, we can try to undo it, we can disagree with the laws that govern it and find it stupid. However, we must take it for what it is. And if we want to understand anything in these lessons, because it is he who makes me think and act, and if we are told that he is erroneous and that, as a consequence, all those in whom I believe have the fragility of clay feet, I would retort that all existence is, in all ways, based on an error, and that everyone is a prisoner of his own delirium, I have mine.

not to remove the knife from the wound is sometimes the only way to stay alive. For those who want to follow these lessons, starting from the fact that I am the one who gives them, then we will have to accept this principle as such for what it is, that is to say a completely arbitrary statement which unilaterally decrees that, in terms of creation,

We don't invent anything, we don't create anything by our own will, we never make anything emerge from its own absence. It's not an onanism, it always comes from the outside, it's a meeting, it comes to us, it looks at us from the shadows. It doesn't belong to us, we are neither the inventors nor the owners of it.

There is this idea that we sometimes find in some texts that evoke the work of a painter, of a musician, and that induces that the artist is a transmission belt between art and the spectator, that is to say a canal, a bridge, as I said earlier, between the invisible and the visible. The image is beautiful.

full of humility. I used it earlier to go fast, but it doesn't quite match what I mean. In my eyes, things go in a kaleidoscopic way. They mirror, and in this mirroring, something always escapes us. We no longer know what is a reflection of what is the real. And this reflection, this reflection is an entity in itself. Something in the shade, a carpet in the shade, looks at us, looks at us. What is noisy looks at us.

This shadow where the shattering is at stake is in a separate reality, a space that is not accessible materially. I mean, we can't get there with our bodies. Yet it looks at us.

It looks at us, we feel it, as it sometimes happens to us in a café, in the subway, in the street, to feel an insistent gaze that makes us turn around. Well, it's the same thing. Something looks at us. It looks at us as we say: "It looks at me." It doesn't look at you, it looks at me, it's none of your business, it looks at me. And because I can't define what looks at me, then, inevitably, it haunts me. But what looks at me? I can't stop thinking about it. What looks at me? This space where I am looked at,

It is both in me and out of me. It is an interstice between my perceptions, my thoughts, my fantasies, my dreams, my drifts, my awakes, my sleep, and the mysteries of my insomnia, and from which, sometimes, sometimes, a messenger arises, let's call him as we want, inspiration, angel, muse, whatever, but which arises

without knowing why at that moment, and presents himself to us as a narrative situation. It's a fragment, he falls on us, he goes home and finds his companion violently murdered. Here, a meteorite that falls without shouting, it's an angel, a visit, a narrative situation, to announce to us that we have been carrying for a long time, for a very long time, a world that we did not doubt, that we have been somehow fertilized, to our advantage, by a shadow.

We are pregnant with a story. We never invent what will give meaning to our lives. We never invent. On the contrary, what will give meaning comes to us, it comes before us, not necessarily because there is a god or something like that, but because the very idea of our existence, the fact that we exist, makes it arise. It's a twin. That's why we are unable to hope, to no longer hope. Something preceded us and continues to live. Something is watching us.

When the idea comes to us, it means that it has simply come out of the shadows. But it has already been there for so long, since childhood perhaps, since before our birth perhaps. It is a heritage, a transmission, which comes to us through the cheating of what we have guessed as children, even before we have been gifted with words. This is what we must believe in, what I want to believe in. This work in us, it works in us mysteriously. And it comes to our consciousness as an angel, an angel who arises in the middle of the room.

This idea that an angel appears in the room of a virgin to announce that she carries a god in her, obviously, it vaguely reminds us of something. But we can also, instead of the word god, we can say the word history. An angel appears in the room of a virgin to announce that she carries a story in her.

A story, a play, a music. It's a bit different. The essence of this principle is that history, the fiction that we are going to write, precedes us. We don't invent it. It is already there. We meet it. But without the announcement that brings it to our consciousness, we cannot make it arise.

In the seventh lesson, I will return to this idea of birth, and we will see the extraordinary return that takes place between what we carry and how, as creation progresses, we become carried by what we carried. And that on the day of birth, it is more of us who are born of what we carried, rather than the opposite. We do not put a show on the world on the day of the first. It is he who puts us in the world, it is he who gives birth to us.

The mother carries the child to the end, but when the child is born, the mother is also born. This principle therefore states that we do not invent what we carry, but that on the contrary, what we have not invented, is invented in us precisely because we are not aware of its presence. Third principle. This one comes from the previous one. It is the logical consequence. It is also, in a certain way, the ethical one.

If we start from the principle that we invent nothing from our own nothingness and that something external to us visits us, we can therefore say that we are not owners of it. It does not belong to us, it is not ours. To affirm the opposite is a very envisageable choice, but this choice has the consequence of engaging in another path, therefore going towards other landscapes. It is to borrow another map and have a different legend box. Being a owner is not the same as being a tenant.

And the language used by a owner is not the language used by a tenant. Yet, as we know, language sculpts the spirit. Our way of speaking, the language we write with, whether it is maternal or not, shapes us, shapes us.

So to say regularly, without even thinking about my writing, my characters, my works, my novels, does not sculpt the mind in the same way as if we said the way I write, the characters I try to understand, the novels I work on, etc. It's not the same thing to say "my show" than to say "the show I work on". It may seem ridiculous, but by force, grain by grain, day after day, by force of saying "she" instead of "my",

we gradually dissociate ourselves from writing. There is "she" and there is "me". When I say "my writing", there is only "me". By giving its own existence to writing, we go from a flat language where we are alone to a tridimensionality where we are several: "she", "him" and "me". The show, the writing and me.

We can discuss. I can discuss with the show, the show can discuss with the writing, the writing can discuss together, we can even write letters. If we add to that the characters of the show and that we say "they" instead of "but", then all of a sudden, you imagine, there is a crowd around the work table. A different depth appears as soon as we no longer say "my", "my", "but", but that we use to deploy the language to offer the writing autonomy.

Of course, in everyday life, we say my friend, my companion, my companion, my child, but the friend, the companion, the companion, the child, unless we are schizophrenic, are individuals who exist in the same physical reality as ours, and whose body we see. And I don't need to go very far, except to be devoured by the need to crush others, to remember that if I say my son, it doesn't mean that he is my property.

sharing the same universe, physicality, reality protects us. And we have, one by one, a proper autonomy that goes without saying and is easily perceptible. Contradicting the integrity of the body of the other creates terrible, condemnable cataclysms with the greatest severity. But what comes from the imaginary, what comes out of the invisible, which has no body, this one has no means of defending us, no possibility of opposing us in refusal,

consent. We make it our property, as it sings to us, and there is no word to say, we become God. The way to protect it goes through language. In this sense, to separate oneself from personal names, mon, ma, me, to dissociate these little words from these evanescent figures forces us to no longer see the characters as things, to speak of them to the third person as people who exist but who are not present, offers the possibility of unblocking them and to engage with them a story, a relationship,

a companion that does not stop once the work is finished, but continues exactly as a love story continues, with a face whose beauty has never tarnished us all. To talk about the third principle, I would like to go through a detour, a long detour. Labyrinth is a word with multiple consonants. Labyrinth refers to shame, since it is shame that perverted its invention. Pacifae, the luminous,

Revenu de son attirance pour l'animal sous la forme de laquelle Zeus avait enlevé Europe, mère de Minos, époux de cette même Pacifae, elle mit au monde, donc, Pacifae, Astérion, mi-homme, mi-taureau, plus connu sous le nom de Minotaur.

According to the stories that have come to us, Minoan civilization did not seem to have been shocked beyond measure by the emergence of this mutant being. The question was more about how to frame this creature rather than depiloguing it on the impulses and deviations responsible for its existence. It was a whim of the queen, of which a strange child was born, bearer of the pains of the past, symbol of a revolving era. So why pain? And what era?

Because the removal of Europe marks a major shift in the history of the world. In its legend, the removal of Europe is given in this way: "A young girl plays on a beach in the northern part of Asia, that is, on the banks of Sidon, in Phoenicia, the present-day Lebanon. We often went to picnic with my parents when I was little. Today, this whole area has been reduced to ashes by the civil war, and what remained, the last Israeli bombings have definitely erased it.

At the time, it was still a magnificent beach. And this young girl plays there, alone or with her companions, history does not tell. In any case, it's Europe, Europe with big eyes, daughter of Agenor, king of Phoenicia.

Suddenly, she sees a big white bull coming out of the sea. It's Zeus, disguised as an animal, attracted by the beauty of the young girl. Europe doesn't recognize him. Troubled, she lets him come to her. He's magical. Hypnotized by his power, Europe approaches the bull's cranium and stabs him.

The eroticism of the event provokes such a shock in the god that he runs to the sea, fends the flows, and, pushed by Eole, goddess of the wind, Zeus moves away, taking Europe away from his native land forever. It is the removal of Asia from Europe that leads to this land in front of which she will end up giving her name, Europe. Thus was told the myth.

But behind each myth there is the story of men. And in the labyrinth of men's sub-bass there is always a traitor, a taboo, a monstrosity.

Thus, it is possible to imagine that the emergence of this legend follows an invasion of the Asian lands by the Greeks and that, following the usual looting in the region of Sidon, which was a commercial port of the foreground, they also proceeded to rapes and rapes that must have traumatized the time, proving a violence never seen before, a premise for new violence.

In a book published in 2007, and which I highly recommend reading, "Le viol d'Europe ou le féminin bafoué", Françoise Gange sees in this myth the shift that brought the West out of its link to the land goddess to bring it into that of male domination and its institutionalization in the Ministry of Violence,

who wants a war never to be won until women have been raped and taken away. And it is perhaps from this collapse that Asterion inherits, of which he is the symbol, of the memory of this shift, nostalgia of the past, which he will express by demanding as food the bodies of young girls, of young boys, ration of rape and murder, doubled by the act of cannibalism.

It seems that it was a really terrible and barbaric time, that it was not a joke among the Greeks, as it was not a joke among the Romans either, and some of the Overnia rocks still have in memory those days when, after the defeat of Vercingetorix, the Roman soldiers cut the right hand of all Gaul men at the height of their fists. Terrible barbarism, but a barely attentive look

suffira pour nous montrer qu'en termes de barbarie, Sabra et Chatila, le Rwanda, Butcha, le 7 octobre, pour ne citer que ces horreurs, nous permettent de tenir la dragée haute quant à la bestialité des barbaries d'autrefois. Bref, on connaît l'histoire. Dédale, l'architecte, s'ingénia à bâtir une prison vertigineuse pour y tenir captif le Minotaur, le labyrinthe.

What does this labyrinth tell us? It tells us that there is indeed a way to enter and exit it, but that this way is so distorted, deviated, with an infinity of possibilities, with no map anywhere, no image seen from above, with walls so thick that no GPS network can hope to pass, that we are condemned to turn indefinitely in circles. No need to guard to monitor the entrance. The labyrinth symbolizes the idea of secrets.

Contrary to the mystery where there is no answer to the question, where there is no way out, neither to enter nor to exit, the secret tells us that there is an answer to the question, but that this answer is hidden. Why does evil exist? It's a mystery, because there is no hidden answer. What is the composition of Coca-Cola? It's a secret. The recipe exists, but it's not given, it's not indicated, it's hidden. But it's not because it's hidden that it doesn't exist. It exists, but something refuses to give it to us.

Let's take a fly. A fly that is obstinately hitting the window. It's annoying. Because we know, we who are watching it, that this handling can last for hours and hours. It is hitting itself against a secret. But the fly cannot conceive the notion of a window. It cannot understand, it cannot conceptualize this nothing against which it is obstinately hitting itself. It does not understand the phenomenon.

There's nothing, and yet I'm fighting. So she insists. We wouldn't want to tell her, but stop, stop insisting. Stop, stop. Stop, you can see that it's not possible. Stop, stop resigning. Stop, stop resigning your misfortune. You can see that she doesn't love you anymore. Stop, stop, she doesn't love you anymore. Unhook. Stop chewing your misfortune. Don't try to understand her. It's over, that's it. It's beyond you. You just have to accept. She doesn't love you anymore. You have to respect her for that.

No, don't call her, don't try to see her again. It's over. The window may be open right next to her, but the ability to reason, which the fly is endowed with, doesn't allow her to just pretend that she just needs to get out of...

of a few degrees of its entanglement to slightly move the axis of its obsession and it will then be able to find its way out. But no, it insists and resets and always does the same circuit which always ends against the window, obstinately. And so we are in this labyrinth in the terrible life of the Minotaur. The architecture of the prison is beyond the extrapolation capacities of the creature so that it cannot get out of its obsession, of its resets.

it remains unable to break the secret and turns around. But what about shame? In the Enos of Cadmus and Harmony, a major work in which Roberto Calasso tells the great Greek myths, we find the idea that in its first version, Daedalus had thought of the labyrinth as an open sky. Indeed, there was no reason to be cruel to the Minotaur, it was only a matter of keeping it locked up, not depriving it of light.

But, still according to Callasso, when the first foreigner arrived in Crete, under the figure of Theseus, we felt a new feeling: what will the foreigner think of this dislocation, who is the Minotaur? We then felt a discomfort, we avoided talking about it, we discovered the silence that was silent.

And from this silent silence, the need to hide, to make the fault invisible, to feel responsible for this fault, that of Pasiphaëus, to make the deviation invisible, we discover shame. And shame pushed the occultation of the labyrinth by making a roof for it, depriving the Minotaur of the light of day. The darkness then made him the monster that was not yet quite.

To engage in a labyrinth is to find, in an archaic, cervical-speaking reptilian way, the dark path of shame. It is enough to experience it to go to the Cathedral of Chartres on a Friday, almost every Friday. There is a labyrinth on the ground in which it is possible to engage. Everyone has the leisure of walking, indeed. Along this path, unicursal,

where it is absolutely impossible to get lost. It's a labyrinth where there is only one path, without ramifications or choices. So, knitting, zigzagging, going and coming, we walk in the uncertainties of our own thinking.

And if we had to do it with a dear one, a friend, father, mother, daughter, son, sister, brother, lover, spouse, colleague, walking one after the other, the labyrinth, in its decentralization and eccentricity, creates sudden distinctions and approaches that are just as abrupt, as abrupt as they are overwhelming. In one instant, in one instant only, we move away and we come closer. We then find ourselves walking in the present, our own history. We walk the relationship we have with the other.

Walking from one point to the other along the line that translates the inner path, it allows us to see the world turn and the world to see us turn. It's like being in a heliocentric and geocentric vision at the same time. But this vertigo of displacement is precisely the vertigo of the exiled, of the one who is chased from his land. The exiled is the one who moves on without ceasing, even if he settles down.

The exiled man is always on the way, and everything he says, thinks, does, he does along this thread that winds and is called the labyrinth. Exile is a shame. Despite the richness of the countries, landscapes, encounters, we don't forget the humiliation of the departure, when we were chased, forced to leave.

The entrance into the labyrinth, in a way. The entrance into this silence that quits the shame. Something has thrown us into a permanent exile. Walking symbolically through this exile makes us touch imperceptibly this shame of the displaced, of those who had to flee, who had to abandon everything behind them. We move and we move with us the mysterious meaning that inhabits us.

We carry it on our backs, we move the meaning, the movement of meaning, of its own identity, movement of meaning, movement of meaning. So for those who go to Greece and end up deciphering the alphabet, they may be surprised to see very regularly on the roads of the Greek highways, trucks on which the word "metaphor" is inscribed in very large numbers, trucks of metaphors.

There are plenty of them in Greece. What can I say? Cases and cases of metaphors between Athen and Thessaloniki. You just have to ask the first taxi driver to explain that they are just moving trucks. Metaphora means moving, simply. They are Breton moving trucks, in a way. The metaphor is nothing but a stupid move. To say one thing, you say another. You take a meaning and move it to another.

"Déménagement de meubles ou déménagement de sens, ça reste un déménagement." Or, s'il est vrai, comme on l'a dit, que le langage est toujours un reflet de notre manière de vivre, alors pour qui n'a cessé de déménager ? Pour cause de guerre, d'exil multiple, de perte de langue maternelle ?

And another reason, simpler or more complex, for which the act of moving has been a recurrence of his travel, collecting nationalities, collecting passports, collecting an incalculable number of apartment keys, adding, leaf by leaf, the shame and humiliation of his incessant departures, it is normal that, at the end of the day, the moving ends up entering the system of his own language and that, before speaking, he himself uses this method, that of moving.

therefore, of the metaphor. And, moving the meaning of one state to another, following a tortuous path, language, his language, becoming a labyrinth, also becomes the surface of shame that underlies every moment of his existence. To speak is to always say shame.

and having lost the use of his mother tongue, he sees himself in the incapacity, for whatever reason, to speak in a straight line. He always has to go through detours, changes of landscape, to get to understand himself. To understand himself, by the way. You can call it arabesque, metaphor, detours, circularity of thought, spiral of the mind. From metaphorical movement, he ends up deploying a language made of bricks and bricks, where everything

All these images move from one direction to another. But the reasons for this displacement, exile, flight, are based on humiliations that come from what civil war can produce more viscous. So very quickly, shame, joining the metaphor, the displacement, the deviant language of this individual, we find the image of the labyrinth and the minotaur that must be hidden. All this detour to say what you have probably already noticed.

incapable of speaking in a straight line. I only speak in metaphors. But it's not a choice. I've moved too far to be able to speak differently. Thus, we must remember that the metaphor that will be used throughout the eight lessons not only translates an incapacity to speak in a straight line, but also reminds us that all that will be told in its corollary is shame. Writing is avoiding drowning in shame. It's delaying the moment when the moving sands of shame will lead to the one who is trapped.

In the fight to prevent shame from devouring the mind, images and words act as a thread of Ariane. They act as a possibility to get out of the mind the opacity of silence, this silence that is silent. Fourth principle, everything is writing.

to open up to this whole. In this sense, we could, I would say, be surprised by what the seminars that follow, the lessons as they are announced, except for the last one and the second one, do not appeal to artists. The reason why I chose to invite both astrophysicists and entomologists, sociologists and historians, or even painters' restorers, is precisely because I must not lock myself up with myself.

The writing, as I love it, starts from the principle that unity is an addition of alterities, like white is the addition of all colors.

"To flatten the unity by separating the alterities that make it up is intended to proceed with a form of dissection, as the painters of the Renaissance felt the need to do, by discerning the corpses to be able to account for the movements and energies of the human bodies that they would represent. Because how to paint a descent from the cross if we don't know how the muscles attach to their ligaments?

So it was a matter of doing the same thing here and making sure that all of these lessons look like anatomy lessons where it will be a question of dissecting, separating, and methodically analyzing the different parts of an organized body that are the principles of writing as I practice it. I insist on this, as I practice it. It's an absolutely personal approach. Another writer lives things in a totally different way and is just as personal.

And if I say that, as far as I'm concerned, everything is writing, then it will be a question of putting to the side the various elements of this all, understanding what awakens curiosity, what awakens astonishment, naivety, joy, in short, what is necessary to make the encounter happen. To better explain this, following the inclination of the previous principle which wants nothing to be possible without the metaphor, I will use one of them to try to make myself understood when I say that everything is writing.

It happens that you find a puzzle piece in the street. Maybe it happens to you. You fall from a pocket, from a bag, and you say, "Here, a puzzle piece." How do you know? How do you know where it comes from? So, let's take a theoretical period, the year 2024. Let's suppose that on Thursday, February 1st of this year, in Naples, you find a puzzle piece in a street in this city. You pick it up, you observe it. The piece is too small to allow you to see the image to which this small piece belongs.

We perceive colours, we perceive shades, we observe them with the magnifying glass. We can perhaps guess a vegetation. If we are lucky, a fragment of face, ear, but nothing more. We keep it in a small box. Piece number one. A few months later, let's say on Monday 13 May, in Stockholm, on the outskirts of a boulevard, on the path of a house, we find again a piece of puzzle.

In the reality and statistics of the banal, in which we live on a daily basis, it is obvious that the two pieces of puzzle do not belong to the same game and therefore do not participate in the same image. Two different pieces of two different puzzles.

Let's skip one month and here we are, on Wednesday 19 June, and then Sunday 22 September, and then on Saturday 2 November, and why not Sunday 1 January of the new year, in Besançon, Marrakech, Montreal or Calcutta, we find these days other pieces that we numerate methodically and that we put in the box. We have to be slightly delusional not to say completely stupid, to think something else that we just found pieces of puzzle.

in different countries and cities, and that we do, apart from the oddity of finding puzzle pieces, how did they get there? There is nothing really exceptional. At the peak hour, on the RER A, heading for Boissy-Saint-Léger, there is very, very, very little chance that, by the greatest chance, all the travelers who are with us in sardines in the wagon, go down to Fontenay-sous-Bois, leaving us absolutely alone.

It's very unlikely that something like this will happen. But there is a probability that it could happen. By the greatest chance, we only found ourselves with passengers who live in Fontenay-sous-Bois. They didn't know it themselves. All but us.

Theoretically, this possibility exists. It is unlikely, but it exists. The discovery of quantum mechanics has made us go from a Newtonian physics built on the idea of certainty to that of uncertainty. And if all the travelers of the RERA in the direction of Boissy-Saint-Léger can, by the greatest chance, descend to Fontenay-sous-Bois, it is therefore possible to think, to imagine, to play, to dream, to pretend, to believe, why not,

in short, to pour into another reality, which stipulates that all these pieces found in the four corners of the world, by the greatest chance, belong to the same image, and that this image precisely is the one that shows the indisputable shame that we carry within us and that is expected to be named, to be said. Therefore, starting from the principle that all the pieces of the puzzle found, no matter in which city or on what date, no matter their shape and color, belong to the same image, we only have to reconstruct them by embedding the pieces one in the other.

We will then arrive at a unique image, abstract without doubt, but released in a unique sense. We enter, thus, into a relationship with things where everything is noise, everything is murmur, where the rumour finally becomes perceptible, that of the hidden shame that will have to be told to show the figure. All pieces of the puzzle belong to the same image, all, to a single image.

Tout ce qui est trouvé devient donc écriture, tout est écriture, car tout ce qui est rencontré n'est qu'une illusion, une apparence, et que les choses cachées, sous-jacentes, sont reliées par l'esprit de celui qui rêve. Celui qui rêve n'a qu'à imbriquer ensemble toutes les sensations, perceptions, compréhensions, émotions, intellections qu'il rencontre, comme autant de pièces appartenant à la même composition. Tout est écriture.

Finally, without counting the tendency in the titles of two shows that I wrote, staged and played, namely "Inflammation" by the verb "to live" in 2015 and "Racine carrée" by the verb "to be" in 2022, I would like to explain the reasons that made me want to think of the titles of the lessons from a different verb each time.

This fascination for verbs is easy to measure as soon as we understand the difficulty we are faced with when we have to learn to speak and write a language in which we find the notion of infinitive, when this notion is absent from our mother tongue, especially when we are children. This is what happened to me between Arabic and French. Even today, the word infinitive is an abstraction. I can't understand what it means.

In infinitive, I still hear, as in the time when I was learning French, I hear "infinit", knowing that this is not what it is about. I also hear "finitive", meaning vaguely the notion of completion. "Infinitive" always made me feel that something was not "finitive". But what does "finitive" mean? In Arabic, the infinitive does not exist.

It is impossible to say a verb without conjugating it. In Arabic, action is also action. And what's more, in vernacular Arabic, the one of the street, which we could call, in my case, the Lebanese. For example, "to be or not to be", that is the question, will best be translated by "existence or non-existence", that is the question. Or "whether we are or are not", that is the question.

It goes for all verbs. "Manger" is not said in Arabic. It must be conjugated. "I eat." But what does it mean to conjugate a verb? It is necessary to make it active, to write it down in time and associate it with a subject. If I say "to play", we don't know who it is or when. But if I say "I will play", a space opens up in the mind where we see someone, me in this case, who has not played, who does not play, but who will play. "I will play".

This idea of conjugation is an idea that can be extrapolated to see it as a link that exists between the infinitive of a thing and its action. Electricity combines the filament of the bulb, so it lights up.

Conjugating is moving from inert to movement. I often remind the actors I work with that the text I put in their hands is infinitive, and that they have the duty to conjugate it with their energy, their spirit, their soul, their intelligence, their will, so that they light up.

The way to conjugate a play text is to link the text with the soul, the actor's spirit. What will happen if two actors say the same text with the same rhythm and the same diction? They will feel things totally different because it is their being that conjugates the text. It is not just a technique. And we need depth, we need the mystery of being for the text to be clear.

It's paradoxical. Without mystery, nothing is understandable. It is therefore a question of understanding what is in question in a text, of making it its own, of carrying it within itself, of articulating it, of conjugating it, so that it goes from the inert, from the infinitive, to the movement of action.

Everything that is infinitive is set in wait, waits for the breath of life. The pianist conjugates the score. What is a couple that feels an atony in its history and seeks to give it a new breath if it is not a couple that seeks to avoid being swallowed by the infinitive of its love story ?

Conjugation is an animation. If we ask ourselves the question of the infinitive that we have to conjugate to make a link active, whether it's in love, in friendship, whether it's to make a text heard, to give a new momentum to a work, a new relationship with colleagues, it means that we hold on to what we want to conjugate. Otherwise, we would leave it to the infinitive. It's important to us.

We don't want it to die. We immediately feel what the word implication can mean. To conjugate is to get involved, to get into the fold, to want it to stay alive.

If the infinitive and this moment of pause, of detachment, of absence in the transports in common where we extract ourselves from the relationship to the other, especially since the 17h25 train from the RER A to Boissy-Saint-Digé, which is not likely to see everyone descend by the greatest of chance at Fontenay-sous-Bois, wants us to be at this tight point that we are able to scrutinize the amygdales of our neighbors,

So we can understand that we want to get out of it. We can then see our days, our lives, as a sequence between conjugations of certain verbs and infinitives of other verbs. But where the question takes a different measure, not to say vertiginous, is when we ask ourselves the question: "And me, who am I to the infinitive, or what?" If the pianist conjugates the infinitive of the piano,

Who is the infinitive of the pianist? What is it that makes me? What is it that makes me so much that I start moving? If I am the bulb, what is my electricity? What is it that makes me know when and who? What is it that makes me understand that at this moment, if I get up and say: "We are going to start now", it is because since the dawn of time, something essential has started for me. A noise, a rumour, a horror, which will take years to reach my consciousness.

To write is to have the conviction that we are constantly conjugated by something that loves us, something that loves us and that comes to us, it conjugates us. For some, it's writing, that is to say a new form of expression in the desire for sharing, for storytelling. The verbs in the infinitive, associated with each lesson, therefore ask the question of what can create their movement, that is to say what can participate in their conjugation, give them life. So, to sum up, at the Cas des Légendes,

Things start long before they begin. To create is not to teach. Experience is the basis of writing. To communicate is not to create. I am not the owner, I am the tenant. Metaphor as a language mode, because exile was my burden. Everything is writing. All pieces of the puzzle are interlinked. There is a chance that all the passengers will go down to Fontenay-sous-Bois at the same time. Thus goes the legend that illustrates the map of the territory where I have committed myself. It is every day.

My role is to deploy all the antennas to be able to detect the symptoms. In this sense, we are always writing. We never fall asleep. We are always on the go.

No infinitive, or at least not possible. Receiving a signal, a neutrino coming from the sun, deploying sensors every now and then, at the bakery, in the bus, during a meal with friends, during an administrative council, at the doctor, the dentist, all the time, all the time, always, everything is matter. And from this matter, a signal can be heard of what has been walking for a long time to come to us.

Entrez alors dans une papeterie pour acheter un cahier. Y notez tous les symptômes que l'on perçoit. Tout ce qui, sans raison, sans lien, éveille l'intérêt nous met aux aguets. Chaque symptôme comme pièce d'un puzzle dont nous ne connaissons ni l'image ni la grandeur.

To advance in this confidence and to see ourselves not as the matrix, as the one that is fertilized to carry a work to come, but on the contrary as the life that appears. The work, the idea, the show, the novel, the writing, fall into our hands. It is we who are in the belly. That's why we are blind, and everything is blind. We don't see anything, we hear sounds, we have sensations, we are embryos. But the writing carries us, it carries us, we are in its belly.

Thank you.

We will take a break and we will meet again at 10:30 for the next seminar in the company of Michel Cassé and Etienne Parizeau. Thank you for those who remain.