Charity or Ruin

Reading the new translation of the Gospels by Frédéric Boyer, I come across these verses (6, 24) in “According to Matthew”: “No one can submit to two masters, or else he will hate one and love the another, or to one he will hold and to the other he will not think. You cannot submit to God and mammon, profit. (Mammon, a Greek transcription of Aramaic, means riches and, here referred to as an idol, ill-gotten profit.)

I like that these Gospels appear not with a publisher specializing in the religious field, but with Gallimard, in the “Blanche” collection, historically devoted to literature – a way of saying that these sacred texts go beyond genres and are above all related to active language for today.

“We go to the Spirit”, wrote Rimbaud. But where is he? Doesn’t society carefully cover it up by drowning it in its toxic communicational syrup? Isn’t he the subject of a death sentence?

That we don’t think too much has always been the wish of the established order. Now the mind opens to thought and it alone reaches this effervescent point, located inside language, which raises our freedom. The flatness of the statements that continually invade the planet testifies to a desire to obliterate the poetic and spiritual dimension of language, the current impoverishment of which is organized with application.

Didn’t someone like Elon Musk warn us that we would soon no longer need language? Message that can be deciphered as a threat: we no longer need our cybernetic influence, that is to say our financial interests, to be hampered by this unprofitable thing, language.

Giorgio Agamben, in an essay recently translated into French, When the House Burns (Bibliothèque Rivages), recalls this with ardent clarity: “That the soul and the body are indissolubly united – that is spiritual. The spirit is not a third party between the soul and the body: it is only their coincidence, as marvelous as it is disarmed. »

Well, our era ravaged by economic nihilism is working, despite everyone’s distress, to make this wonderful coincidence impossible. She wants us soulless – she crosses out everything that would testify to a resource that escapes her calculation, her hold, her interests. The sentence of Matthew, I mean the word of Christ, is revealed every day with a more implacable accuracy: one cannot have a soul and serve capitalism.

Because where does this world take us, confiscated by the cybernetic fanaticism that poisons language by emptying it of its substance? The networks of planetary connection, as organized by Silicon Valley, constitute in their own way instances of control as effective as the Chinese police: the technology aims at surveillance, that is to say the restriction of freedoms.

The continual surveying of the planet is the project that succeeded that of modern times: the figures of emancipation and progress have been replaced since the end of the Second World War by the biopolitical reconfiguration of the species and the extinction progression of language, reduced to a simple instrument of communication.

As for the economy, swallowed up by finance like a vulgar rabbit by a boa constrictor, it accompanies this process until the globalized sacking: the crisis for all and forever.

I published a novel a few months ago, Le Trésorier-payeur (Gallimard), which tries to confront this vertiginous question: where are we with money? I tell the story of the life, in the 1990s, of a young employee of the Banque de France in Béthune who discovered, while helping the over-indebted, a breach that neoliberalism had not foreseen: charity.

To give everything, isn’t that revolutionary?

In the untimely wake of Georges Bataille, the author of La Part maudite, who thought of the economy not as the capitalization of savings but as the exuberance of spending, this young anarchist banker wanted to “assign splendid ends to economic activity “. Is it still possible? Has integral capitalism not definitively closed such a horizon to us?

Another conception of wealth exists in any case, which no doubt seems frivolous to the most zealous followers of the capitalist religion: it is linked to language, to its relationship with the infinite. What calculation always attacks is itself, its enemy, language. He would like to reduce it even though, in the form of poetry, it opens up to gushing riches, of which the economy has no idea. Rimbaud, again: “I am a thousand times the richest” – and if there is one who did not have a penny, it is him.

What is this abundance that makes being rather than having sparkle? Poetry (literature) is an inexhaustible supply because it is free. Free goes beyond the limits, so it goes further than money. There is an enormity of the gift which pulverizes the pettiness of the economy; a victory of charity, which disintegrates, through the unconditional resources of its love, the framework of exchanges.

There you have it, real wealth is the one that breaks the bank. It is up to everyone to make a breach in their lives for the arrival of charitable anarchy. Emptying the coffers is a way of opening one’s mind to those “splendid ends” to which Georges Bataille assigned the economy.

Poetry is that sacred part which, in language, escapes the grip of society. In this, it is irreducible: thus there is in it the undamaged, that is to say etymologically what is not damned – what escapes hell.

Where politics enslaves us by aggravating the law of profit, the resources of the unscathed, on the contrary, renew the experience we have of existence, entrusting us with the key to infinite wealth, that of being that sparkles at the heart of literature.

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