Les Immatériaux:
BB: You've remarked that "Each of us has the awareness of our condition of solitude, and an awareness, as well, both of being a 'self' and of knowing that this 'self' counts for very little." JFL: Yes. And so what sort of legitimacy can bee seen in this mode of development? It's intended for this question to be somehow latent or implicit in a kind of grieving or a melancholy with respect to the modern era, a sense of disarray. And the exhibition hopes to reactivate this disarray rather than to appease it since there's no longer any matter to be appeased. The exhibition also has another theme that tries to give legitimacy to this "monstrous neologism - the immaterials"; we make the point, obviously enough, that all of the progress that has been accomplished in the sciences, and perhaps in the arts as well, is strictly connected to an ever closer knowledge of what we generally call objects. (Which can also be a question of objects of thought.) And so analysis decomposes these objects and makes us perceive that, finally, there can only be considered to be objects at the level of a human point of view; at their constitution or structural level, they are only a question of complex agglomerates of tiny packets of energy, or of particles that can't possibly be grasped as such. Finally, there's no such thing as matter, and the only thing that exists is energy; we no longer have any such thing as materials, in the old sense of the word that implied an object that offered resistance to any kind of project that attempted to alienate it from it primary finalities. BB: You’ve written more about painting than about any of the other forms of artistic expression. In terms of what you've just been saying, don't you feel that the cinema today is more intimately concerned with the kinds of problems that interest you? JFL: I don't really know. I adore films, and just about any kind of films. I was quite impressed by the latest film by Wim Wenders. But I don't want to think of any art as more pertinent than any other, and I think that the great musical compositions are entirely astonishing in terms of what I've been talking about. BB: So you haven't written very much about film? JFL: I've written a short text entitled l'à - cinéma as well as another text on music which is entitled Plusieurs Silences. But that's all very modest, since I am very ignorant. BB: But what then has stimulated you to write about painting? JFL: Perhaps that's because I once had some small future in drawing, even though that future has since gone a little astray. Sometimes, though, I still draw, but only occasionally. BB: And that's all? You're not interested in working on something that shows an equivalence to your own particular field? JFL: No, I don't think so. I simply think that line contains something that's totally radical and somehow ontological. To trace a line onto a surface, any kind of line at all, s to produce the minimum of meaning that I was talking about a moment ago. One immediately finds oneself in the midst of the very poorest form of art. A simple scrawl of a pencil on a sheet of paper makes for one of the poorest forms of art. I find this poverty, which is almost mystical, to be something entirely original. In this sense, I feel closer to drawing than to colours. A simple mark with a pencil and the sheet of paper splits apart, and something is as though direct somewhere else. What you have there is both the completest form of power and, at one and the same time, the completest form of dispossession. Because the person who is doing it doesn't at all know what he's doing. This poverty is something perfectly equivocal since it's simultaneously both everything and nothing. BB: Your texts on "painting" go from Adams to Buren, and from Monory to Arakawa. They seem to contain what I'd call the logic of discontinuity. Can you say something about the reasons that have prompted you to write about certain painters rather than others? And do you think of your essays on painting as fragments of a whole within your work as a writer? JFL: I'd answer quite simply that it has been something of a question of chance. I'm usually acquainted with the painters whom I decide to write. I've worked along with them, and I've seen them at work, but then again, there are obviously painters with whom I'm personally acquainted but whom I'd never want to write about. It's not that I can give you an answer simply by saying it's a matter of people I've happened to meet. And if you ask me if these essays are part of some single thing, and if this single thing is part of my reflections as a philosopher, I'd have to answer in much the same summary way and that for the moment I think of all these various short texts as the beginning of a kind of dossier that could lead to some substantial study not so much of art, but specifically of painting. Contemporary painting. And my goal would be to attempt to define the nature of a possible philosophy of art today. BB: You mean that you don't at all exclude the idea of writing a theory of aesthetics? JFL: I don't think it would be a question of a theory, and I don't think it would be a question of aesthetics. I don't think it could be a theory since I think of the idea or theory as belonging to the area of metaphysics, which we were saying is now in decline, and I don't think of it as a question of aesthetics, since I don't think that aesthetics corresponds to the time we live in. Aesthetics primarily appertains to a very precise moment in the commentary on art, which is to refer to the Age of Enlightenment and to what follows after it, so it's a question of something in the order of two centuries ago. Basically, I'd be ready to maintain that there wasn't any such thing as aesthetics up until the 18th century, and that up until that time there was only a series of poetics. Aesthetics actually corresponds to the philosophy of the sublime and to a theory of genius.
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