For me, Artaud and Bataille, Simone Weil, you know, all the emotional tribe, they had anticipated what was going to happen and they tried to forge little cells where a vaccine was being invented, a bit like the plague. It was a counter-plague, but if they managed to be contaminated in a ritualistic way, then it could go viral and counter the whole wave of massacres and violence that was going over the world. So I think they were creating little laboratories, using whatever was at hand. Artaud and Bataille were both Christian, and they thought of becoming priests, just like Hitler and Stalin. They were all in cahoots for this Christianity, attempting to compensate with a Christianity that might go beyond it. So I followed suit. I went on my horse and said, okay, just show me the way. I can go there and take what I need and face the unfaceable. I needed to have people who had their own itinerary that led them in the same direction, but I couldn’t take it. It was too much for me.

[…] It was in the air of the time, as I say: l’air du temps. It circulates from one to the other, and this reinforces my feeling that it’s not really the person that you interrogate. The person, the artist, is the access to the time. And this time was both exciting, because new things were happening, but also very dangerous because people had not begun to realize how much of a horror the First World War really was. It was an extermination of 20 million people. It entirely changed the relation of people to their country, to the earth, to everything. The whole generation we talked about, they were not so prominent, you know, Caillois and this or that. It was just a little group. But they were working on the environment. Artaud, in one of the last letters to Jacques Rivière,  says I don’t want you to think that my sickness, that what I feel, is just a symptom of the time. But that was what the time was about, and they were expressing it. And I think that’s why — in the same way the first World War introduced the technology for a bigger massacre — the war never stopped. It was a preparation for the Second World War.

These artists and thinkers were attuned to the degree of atrocity that had been committed, and the fact that society and the population were getting ready for it to continue. All the elements were there but they were the only ones trying to put all of this together. Céline was caught into it; Bataille was attracted to fascism, not because he was a fascist but because, to my mind, he realized that you cannot understand anything if you don’t have at least one foot in it. And that’s what I do with Artaud and Bataille and these people. I can’t really connect to what they went through at the time if I don’t connect with my own unimportant sensibility. What is important is not me or them. They were touching on something that had been touched upon with the First World War, but it was just the beginning.

Freud wrote about the death wish at the time, in 1920. Marcel Mauss wrote about the potlatch in 1925. Everyone was getting ready, but they didn’t know it. And some people were getting crazy enough to really go directly against it, or with it, or in it. My relation with all these people was that. Some people were floating with fascism, Bataille a little bit, Simone Weil in some aspect of her work towards the end of her life, when she accused the Jews of being murderers when they were being murdered in Europe. Jews are going to have a hard time acknowledging this, or accepting it, because she did it at the wrong time. But she was crazy. She was crazy for God. But what went on through God was a lot of feeling of despair and self-doubt and a sense of premonition.

My feeling is that the whole era was a laboratory. Some people participated actively while others were like the cattle that were led into it — the populations in Germany and Italy, with all the affect that was generated. Gustave Le Bon wrote about the crowd, saying that when people are together they become like a group of kids. All this was there, but it’s only retrospectively that historians and sociologists will really start putting things together. They did it at their own expense. They took the risk for it, and one of the risks was madness. I found that more convincing as an approach, maybe as the only approach. That’s why, at times, I felt insufficient, because I connected to something that was so strong that had nothing to do with me, that had everything to do with me, but not with me as a person. I was entering something that I didn’t know how to handle. It was not sacred, because the sacred has a sense of nobility. You acknowledge a person who is about to be killed or victimized. It’s like this ritual you have now among the Islamists, of cutting off people’s heads. Well I find that horrible, but there is a sense that they respect a person that they kill. But the way people were killed during the First and Second World Wars, that had no respect. It was not a sacrifice. It was not a way of solving the problem.

So people were dealing with what they had. They created these groups that were nothing like Tel Quel and that salon group. They were really working on a material that was deadly. You had to match it and you had to know what it is. That’s why they got very close to the point that Walter Benjamin said that Bataille was working for the fascists and all that. I work for the fascists, too, in a sense, because I feel what it could have been like at the time to be totally crazy. But at the same time I can’t express it and I can’t feel that way as a person. For me, that’s the whole attraction. They were there before it happened. Adorno has a famous saying that after Auschwitz you can’t write poetry, but I think this is bullshit. You can write poetry after, but he was right in the sense that, every time I see documents about that time, images of these skeletons that were slumped into trucks — it’s unbearable. That some people could have done that is just beyond the beyond. So I went to people who were emotionally on the same level with what had happened, and that is why.

[…] That was the difference between these two periods we’re discussing, the 1930s and 40s, and the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. They were using religious concepts in that earlier period in order to analyze society, which is why they had to go through rituals and sacrifice and death. For people who came later, at the time of May 68 and the consumer society which had invaded France, there was no God any more. The sign had replaced everything. Images were replacing everything. The society of the spectacle was taking over. So you had to envisage that as something very different, where affects were not vital, but viral. The sign connected signs to other signs. It was like the plague — the plague was a system that connected everything — so it was very different, historically.

And then there’s the society we live in today where everything is being abstracted by technology. Technology is engulfing the entire society and destroying the environment. We’re not in control anymore. The corporations are much more decisive than nations and presidents and there’s no one to stop them. They are on the way to the next massacre, the massacre of the environment, by creating a world that is basically unlivable. It’s part of the same continuation.

Sylvère Lotringer, interviewed