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PARTISAN REVIEW
In the face of such general decay, there is at the moment a massive re–
gressive return to religion, which affectively serves as a solace but also a
way to flee reality. The French Institute, which, on the other hand,
enrolls a large number of very qualified and critical-minded students who
are eager to learn, constitutes a fortunate exception in that landscape.
Basically, the most disquieting symptom, here as well as over there,
the major consequence of which I have called banality, is the tendency
that could result in a loss of interest in the psyche. In Western societies
today, the most common temptation is to prescribe medicine to appease
people's anguish rather than guiding them to confront the pain of living.
In this respect, I refer, in
The Old Man and the Wolves,
to Holderlin's
Der Tod des Empedokles
("The Death of Empedocles") and
Mnemosyne,
from which the Old Man explicitly quotes, to the waning of the gods
which arouses in the old man a strange mixture of nostalgia, doubt, and
fear. On the other hand, Alba in her own evil fashion takes up a theme
dear to Heidegger: the "protective heed" provided by being. Alba
perverts that heed. She believes the paroxysmal conflict carried to the
point of hatred is the only truth. That is her very own punctilious
nihilism. She hates without feeling guilty, she ends up untouchable, "at
home," proud within the supposed truth of her hatred. That is the
dreadful part of it - the unscathed conscience, with neither unease nor
hardship, present at the very core of hatred, which might go as far as
murder. Within the reverberations of Holderlin and Heidegger, to whch
the Old Man and Alba harken again, the insistence of the question
remains. In opposition, what strikes me in today's world, and this is why I
speak of the loss of interest in the psyche, is the feeling that the very
possibility of questioning has been closed. We have become unscathed in
evil just as one might have been immaculate in love.
BS: You have just talked about your bleak impressions of Moscow,
which suggest the state of the whole former communist bloc. What
strikes me at the same time in this picture of Russian society is the
absence of any reference to what has been for years the work of dissidents.
Have they disappeared through a trap door? Don't they have anything
more to say? Must one conclude that their historical role has come to an
end and that their ethical values could not possibly constitute a frame of
reference today?
JK: I have no global hypothesis, and there exist without doubt several
partial answers. On the one hand, these dissidents fought essentially for
Western values, such as democracy and the rights of man. The current
regime presents itself as defending and embodying these values and would
