In Conversation With Raoul Vaneigem by Hans Ulrich Obrist

8/7/2019 In Conversation With Raoul Vaneigem by Hans Ulrich Obrist

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/in-conversation-with-raoul-vaneigem-by-hans-ulrich-obrist 1/12

01 / 12

Hans Ulrich Obrist

In Conversa-tion with Raoul

Vaneigem

Hans Ulrich Obrist I just visited EdouardGlissant and Patrick Chamoiseau, whohave written an appeal to Barack Obama.What would your appeal and/or advice beto Obama?

Raoul Vaneigem I refuse to cultivate anyrelationship whatsoever with people of power.I agree with the Zapatistas from Chiapas whowant nothing to do with either the state or its

masters, the multinational mafias. I call forcivil disobedience so that local communitiescan form, coordinate, and begin self-producingnatural power, a more natural form of farming,and public services that are finally liberated fromthe scams of government by the Left or the Right.On the other hand, I welcome the appeal byChamoiseau, Glissant, and their friends for thecreation of an existence in which the poetry ofa life rediscovered will put an end to the deadlystranglehold of the commodity.

HUO Could we talk about your begin-nings? How did your participation insituationism begin, and what was yourfundamental contribution? At the outset ofyour relationship with the SI, there was thefigure of Henri Lefebvre. What did he meanto you at the time? Why did you decide tosend him poetic essays?

RV I would first like to clarify that situation-ism is an ideology that the situationists wereunanimous in rejecting. The term “situationist”was ever only a token of identification. Its

particularity kept us from being mistaken for thethrongs of ideologues. I have nothing in commonwith the spectacular recuperation of a projectthat, in my case, has remained revolutionarythroughout. My participation in a group that hasnow disappeared was an important momentin my personal evolution, an evolution I havepersonally pressed on with in the spirit of thesituationist project at its most revolutionary. Myown radicality absolves me from any label. I grewup in an environment in which our fighting spiritwas fueled by working class consciousness and

a rather festive conception of existence. I foundLefebvre’s Critique of Everyday Life captivating.When La Somme et le reste [The Sum and theRemainder] was published, I sent him an essayof sorts on “poetry and revolution” that wasan attempt to unify radical concepts, Lettristlanguage, music, and film imagery by creditingthem all with the common virtue of making thepeople’s blood boil. Lefebvre kindly respondedby putting me in touch with Guy Debord whoimmediately invited me to Paris. The two of ushad very different temperaments, but we wouldagree over a period of nearly ten years on theneed to bring consumer society to an end andto found a new society on the principle of self-

e-fux journal #6 — may 2009 Hans Ulrich Obrist

In Conversa-tion wit

h Raoul Vaneigem





03 / 12

as had begun to unfold during the Paleolithic,declined and gave way to a brutish struggle forsubsistence. From then on, predation, whichdefines animal behavior, became the generatorof all economic mechanisms.

HUO Today, more than forty years afterMay ‘68, how do you feel life and societyhave evolved?

RV We are witnessing the collapse of financialcapitalism. This was easily predictable. Evenamong economists, where one finds even moreidiots than in the political sphere, a number hadbeen sounding the alarm for a decade or so. Oursituation is paradoxical: never in Europe have theforces of repression been so weakened, yet neverhave the exploited masses been so passive. Still,insurrectional consciousness always sleeps withone eye open. The arrogance, incompetence,and powerlessness of the governing classes willeventually rouse it from its slumber, as will theprogression in hearts and minds of what wasmost radical about May 1968.

HUO Your new book takes us on a trip“between mourning the world and exuber-ant life.” You revisit May ‘68. What is left ofMay ‘68? Has it all been appropriated?

RV Even if we are today seeing recycledideologies and old religious infirmities beingpatched up in a hurry and tossed out to feed ageneral despair, which our ruling wheelers anddealers cash in on, they cannot conceal for long

the shift in civilization revealed by May 1968.The break with patriarchal values is final. Weare moving toward the end of the exploitationof nature, of work, of trade, of predation, ofseparation from the self, of sacrifice, of guilt,of the forsaking of happiness, of the fetishizingof money, of power, of hierarchy, of contemptfor and fear of women, of the misleading ofchildren, of intellectual dominion, of military andpolice despotism, of religions, of ideologies, ofrepression and the deadly resolutions of psychictensions. This is not a fact I am describing, but

an ongoing process that simply requires from usincreased vigilance, awareness, and solidaritywith life. We have to reground ourselves in orderto rebuild—on human foundations—a world thathas been ruined by the inhumanity of the cult ofthe commodity.

HUO What do you think of the currentmoment, in 2009? Jean-Pierre Page hasjust published Penser l’après crise [Think-ing the After-Crisis]. For him, everythingmust be reinvented. He says that a newworld is emerging now in which the attemptto establish a US-led globalization hasbeen aborted.

RV The agrarian economy of the AncienRégime was a fossilized form that was shatteredby the emerging free-trade economy, from the1789 revolution on. Similarly, the stock-dabblingspeculative capitalism whose debacle we nowwitness is about to give way to a capitalismreenergized by the production of non-pollutingnatural power, the return to use value, organicfarming, a hastily patched-up public sector,and a hypocritical moralization of trade. The

future belongs to self-managed communitiesthat produce indispensable goods and servicesfor all (natural power, biodiversity, education,health centers, transport, metal and textileproduction . . .). The idea is to produce for us, forour own use—that is to say, no longer in order tosell them—goods that we are currently forcedto buy at market prices even though they wereconceived and manufactured by workers. It istime to break with the laws of a political rack-eteering that is designing, together with its ownbankruptcy, that of our existence.

HUO Is this a war of a new kind, as Pageclaims? An economic Third World War?

RV We are at war, yes, but this is not an eco-nomic war. It is a world war against the economy.Against the economy that for thousands of yearshas been based on the exploitation of nature andman. And against a patched-up capitalism thatwill try to save its skin by investing in naturalpower and making us pay the high price for thatwhich—once the new means of production arecreated—will be free as the wind, the sun, and

the energy of plants and soil. If we do not exiteconomic reality and create a human reality in itsplace, we will once again allow market barbarismto live on.

HUO In his book Making Globaliza-tion Work, Joseph Stiglitz argues for areorganization of globalization along thelines of greater justice, in order to shrinkglobal imbalances. What do you think ofglobalization? How does one get rid ofprofit as motive and pursue well-being

instead? How does one escape from thegrowth imperative?

RV The moralization of profit is an illusionand a fraud. There must be a decisive breakwith an economic system that has consistentlyspread ruin and destruction while pretending,amidst constant destitution, to deliver a mosthypothetical well-being. Human relations mustsupersede and cancel out commercial rela-tions. Civil disobedience means disregardingthe decisions of a government that embezzlesfrom its citizens to support the embezzlementsof financial capitalism. Why pay taxes to thebankster-state, taxes vainly used to try to plug


In Conversa-tion with Raoul Vaneigem



034 /

Chris Marker's Gay-Lussac (Paris, May 1968)Image courtesy Peter Blum, New York.

still from if... (1968), directed by Lindsay Anderson.



05 / 12

the sinkhole of corruption, when we couldallocate them instead to the self-management offree power networks in every local community?The direct democracy of self-managed councilshas every right to ignore the decrees of corruptparliamentary democracy. Civil disobediencetowards a state that is plundering us is a right.It is up to us to capitalize on this epochal shiftto create communities where desire for lifeoverwhelms the tyranny of money and power. We

need concern ourselves neither with governmentdebt, which covers up a massive defrauding ofthe public interest, nor with that contrivanceof profit they call “growth.” From now on, theaim of local communities should be to producefor themselves and by themselves all goods ofsocial value, meeting the needs of all—authenticneeds, that is, not needs prefabricated byconsumerist propaganda.

HUO Edouard Glissant distinguishesbetween globality and globalization.Globalization eradicates differences andhomogenizes, while globality is a globaldialogue that produces differences. Whatdo you think of his notion of globality?

RV For me, it should mean acting locally andglobally through a federation of communitiesin which our pork-barreling, corrupt parlia-mentary democracy is made obsolete by directdemocracy. Local councils will be set up to takemeasures in favor of the environment and thedaily lives of everyone. The situationists havecalled this “creating situations that rule out any

backtracking.”

HUO Might the current miscarriages ofglobalization have the same dangerouseffects as the miscarriages of the previousglobalization from the ‘30s? You have writ-ten that what was already intolerable in ‘68when the economy was booming is evenmore intolerable today. Do you think thecurrent economic despair might push thenew generations to rebel?

RV The crisis of the ‘30s was an economiccrisis. What we are facing today is an implosionof the economy as a management system. It isthe collapse of market civilization and the emer-gence of human civilization. The current turmoilsignals a deep shift: the reference points of theold patriarchal world are vanishing. Percolatinginstead, still just barely and confusedly, are theearly markers of a lifestyle that is genuinelyhuman, an alliance with nature that puts anend to its exploitation, rape, and plundering.The worst would be the unawareness of life, theabsence of sentient intelligence, violence with-out conscience. Nothing is more profitable to theracketeering mafias than chaos, despair, suicidal

rebellion, and the nihilism that is spread bymercenary greed, in which money, even devaluedin a panic, remains the only value.

HUO In his book Utopistics, ImmanuelWallerstein claims that our world system isundergoing a structural crisis. He predictsit will take another twenty to fifty years fora more democratic and egalitarian systemto replace it. He believes that the future

belongs to “demarketized,” free-of-chargeinstitutions (on the model, say, of publiclibraries). So we must oppose the marketi-zation of water and air.1 What is your view?

RV I do not know how long the currenttransformation will take (hopefully not too long,as I would like to witness it). But I have no doubtthat this new alliance with the forces of life andnature will disseminate equality and freeness.We must go beyond our natural indignationat profit’s appropriation of our water, air, soil,environment, plants, animals. We must establishcollectives that are capable of managing naturalresources for the benefit of human interests, notmarket interests. This process of reappropriationthat I foresee has a name: self-management,an experience attempted many times in hostilehistorical contexts. At this point, given the implo-sion of consumer society, it appears to be theonly solution from both an individual and socialpoint of view.

HUO In your writing you have describedthe work imperative as an inhuman, almost

animal condition. Do you consider marketsociety to be a regression?

RV As I mentioned above, evolution in thePaleolithic age meant the development ofcreativity—the distinctive trait of the humanspecies as it breaks free from its originalanimality. But during the Neolithic, the osmoticrelationship to nature loosened progressively, asintensive agriculture became based on lootingand the exploitation of natural resources. It wasalso then that religion surfaced as an institution,

society stratified, the reign of patriarchy began,of contempt for women, and of priests and kingswith their stream of wars, destitution, and vio-lence. Creation gave way to work, life to survival,jouissance to the animal predation that theappropriation economy confiscates, transcends,and spiritualizes. In this sense market civiliza-tion is indeed a regression in which technicalprogress supersedes human progress.

HUO For you, what is a life in progress?

RV Advancing from survival, the struggle forsubsistence and predation to a new art of living,by recreating the world for the benefit of all.





036 /

HUO My interviews often focus on theconnections between art and architecture/urbanism, or literature and architecture/urbanism. Could you tell me about theBureau of Unitary Urbanism?

RV That was an idea more than a project. Itwas about the urgency of rebuilding our socialfabric, so damaged by the stranglehold of themarket. Such a rebuilding effort goes hand in

hand with the rebuilding by individuals of theirown daily existence. That is what psychogeog-raphy is really about: a passionate and criticaldeciphering of what in our environment needsto be destroyed, subjected to détournement,rebuilt.

HUO In your view there is no such thingas urbanism?

RV Urbanism is the ideological gridding andcontrol of individuals and society by an economicsystem that exploits man and Earth andtransforms life into a commodity. The danger inthe self-built housing movement that is growingtoday would be to pay more attention to savingmoney than to the poetry of a new style of life.

HUO How do you see cities in the year2009? What kind of unitary urbanism forthe third millennium? How do you envisionthe future of cities? What is your favoritecity? You call Oarystis the city of desire.Oarystis takes its inspiration from theworld of childhood and femininity. Nothing

is static in Oarystis. John Cage once saidthat, like nature, “one never reaches a pointof shapedness or finishedness. The situa-tion is in constant unpredictable change.”2 Do you agree with Cage?

RV I love wandering through Venice andPrague. I appreciate Mantua, Rome, Bologna,Barcelona, and certain districts of Paris. I careless about architecture than about how muchhuman warmth its beauty has been capable ofsustaining. Even Brussels, so devastated by real

estate developers and disgraceful architects(remember that in the dialect of Brussels,“architect” is an insult), has held on to somewonderful bistros. Strolling from one to thenext gives Brussels a charm that urbanism hasdeprived it of altogether. The Oarystis I describeis not an ideal city or a model space (all modelsare totalitarian). It is a clumsy and naïve roughdraft for an experiment I still hope might one daybe undertaken—so I agree with John Cage. Thisis not a diagram, but an experimental propositionthat the creation of an environment is one andthe same as the creation by individuals of theirown future.

HUO Is Oarystis based on natural power,like the Metabolist cities? Rem Koolhaasand I are working on a book on the Japa-nese Metabolists. When I read your won-derful text on Oarystis, I was reminded of

that movement from the 1960s, especiallythe floating cities, Kikutake’s water cities.Is Oarystis a Metabolist city?

RV When Oarystis was published, the architectPhilippe Rothier and Diane Hennebert, who ranBrussels’ Architecture Museum at the time,rightly criticized me for ignoring the imaginativeprojects of a new generation of builders. Nowthat the old world is collapsing, the fusion of freenatural power, self-built housing techniques,and the reinvention of sensual form is going to

be decisive. So it is useful to remember thattechnical inventiveness must stem from the rein-vention of individual and collective life. That is tosay, what allows for genuine rupture and ecstaticinventiveness is self-management: the manage-ment by individuals and councils of their ownlives and environment through direct democracy.Let us entrust the boundless freedoms of theimaginary to childhood and the child within us.

HUO Several years ago I interviewedConstant on New Babylon. What were yourdialogues with Constant and how do yousee New Babylon today?





07 / 12

RV I never met Constant, who if I am notmistaken had been expelled before my ownassociation with the SI. New Babylon’s flaw isthat it privileges technology over the formationof an individual and collective way of life—thenecessary basis of any architectural concept.An architectural project only interests me if it isabout the construction of daily life.

HUO How can the city of the future

contribute to biodiversity?

RV By drawing inspiration from AlphonseAllais, by encouraging the countryside toinfiltrate the city. By creating zones of organicfarming, gardens, vegetable plots, and farmsinside urban space. After all, there are so manybureaucratic and parasitical buildings that can’twait to give way to fertile, pleasant land thatis useful to all. Architects and squatters, buildus some hanging gardens where we can go forwalks, eat, and live!

HUO Oarystis is in the form of a maze,but it is also influenced by Venice andits public piazzas. Could you tell us aboutthe form of Oarystis?

RV Our internal space-time is maze-like. Init, each of us is at once Theseus, Ariadne, andMinotaur. Our dérives would gain in awareness,alertness, harmony, and happiness if only exter-nal space-time could offer meanders that couldconjure up the possible courses of our futures,as an analogy or echo of sorts—one that favors

games of life, and prevents their inversion intogames of death.

HUO Will museums be abolished? Couldyou discuss the amphitheater of memory?A protestation against oblivion?

RV The museum suffers from being a closedspace in which works waste away. Painting,sculpture, music belong to the street, like thefaçades that contemplate us and come backto life when we greet them. Like life and love,

learning is a continuous flow that enjoys theprivilege of irrigating and fertilizing our sentientintelligence. Nothing is more contagious thancreation. But the past also carries with it all thedross of our inhumanity. What should we do withit? A museum of horrors, of the barbarism of thepast? I attempted to answer the question of the“duty of memory” in Ni pardon, ni talion [NeitherForgiveness Nor Retribution]:

Most of the great men we were broughtup to worship were nothing more thancynical or sly murderers. History as taughtin schools and peddled by an overflowingand hagiographic literature is a model of

falsehood; to borrow a fashionable term, itis negationist. It might not deny the realityof gas chambers, it might no longer erectmonuments to the glory of Stalin, Mao orHitler, but it persists in celebrating thebrutish conqueror: Alexander, called theGreat—whose mentor was Aristotle, it isproudly intoned—Julius Caesar, GenghisKhan, Tamerlane, Napoleon, the throngsof generals, slaughterers of peoples, petty

tyrants of the city or the state, torturer–judges, Javerts of every ilk, connivingdiplomats, rapists and killers contractedby religions and ideologies; so much highrenown carved from baseness, wicked-ness, and abjection. I am not suggestingwe should unpave the avenues of officialhistory and pave the side alleys instead.We are not in need of a purged history, butof a knowledge that scoops out into broaddaylight facts that have been obscured,generation after generation, by the unceas-ing stratification of prejudice. I am notcalling for a tribunal of the mind to begincondemning a bunch of undesirables whohave been bizarrely put up on pedestalsand celebrated in the motley pantheons ofofficial memory. I just want to see the list oftheir crimes, the mention of their victims,the recollection of those who confrontedthem added to the inventory of theirunsavory eulogies. I am not suggestingthat the name of Francisco Ferrer wipe outthat of his murderer, Alfonso XIII, but thatat the very least everything be known of

both. How dare textbooks still cultivate anyrespect for Bonaparte, responsible for thedeath of millions, for Louis XIV, slaughtererof peasants and persecutor of Protestantsand freethinkers? For Calvin, murderer ofJacques Gruet and Michel Servet and dic-tator of Geneva, whose citizens, in tributeto Sébastien Castellion, would one dayresolve to destroy the emblems and signsof such an unworthy worship? While Spainhas now toppled the effigies of Francoismand rescinded the street names imposed

by fascism, we somehow tolerate, tower-ing in the sky of Paris, that Sacré-Coeurwhose execrable architecture glorifies thecrushing of the Commune. In Belgium thereare still avenues and monuments honoringKing Leopold II, one of the most cynicalcriminals of the nineteenth century, whose“red rubber” policy—denounced by MarkTwain, by Roger Casement (who paid forthis with his life), by Edward Dene Morel,and more recently by Adam Hochschild—has so far bothered nary a conscience. Thisis a not a call to blow up his statues or tochisel away the inscriptions that celebratehim. This is a call to Belgian and Congolese


In Conversa-tion wit

h Raoul Vaneigem



08 / 12

citizens to cleanse and disinfect publicplaces of this stain, the stain of one ofthe worst sponsors of colonial savagery.Paradoxically, I do tend to believe that for-getting can be productive, when it comes tothe perpetrators of inhumanity. A forgettingthat does not eradicate remembering, thatdoes not blue-pencil memory, that is not anenforceable judgment, but that proceedsrather from a spontaneous feeling of revul-

sion, like a last-minute pivot to avoid dogdroppings on the sidewalk. Once they havebeen exposed for their inhumanity, I wishfor the instigators of past brutalities to beburied in the shroud of their wrongs. Let thememory of the crime obliterate the memoryof the criminal.3

HUO Learning is deserting schools andgoing to the streets. Are streets becomingThinkbelts? Cedric Price’s Potteries Think-belt used abandoned railroads for pop-upschools. What and where is learning today?

RV Learning is permanent for all of us regard-less of age. Curiosity feeds the desire to know.The call to teach stems from the pleasure oftransmitting life: neither an imposition nor apower relation, it is pure gift, like life, from whichit flows. Economic totalitarianism has rippedlearning away from life, whose creative con-science it ought to be. We want to disseminateeverywhere this poetry of knowledge that givesitself. Against school as a closed-off space (abarrack in the past, a slave market nowadays),

we must invent nomadic learning.

HUO How do you foresee the twenty-first-century university?

RV The demise of the university: it will beliquidated by the quest for and daily practice ofa universal learning of which it has always beenbut a pale travesty.

HUO Could you tell me about the freenessprinciple (I am extremely interested in

this; as a curator I have always believedmuseums should be free—Art for All, asGilbert and George put it).

RV Freeness is the only absolute weaponcapable of shattering the mighty self-destruction machine set in motion by consumersociety, whose implosion is still releasing, likea deadly gas, bottom-line mentality, cupidity,financial gain, profit, and predation. Museumsand culture should be free, for sure, but soshould public services, currently prey to thescamming multinationals and states. Free trains,buses, subways, free healthcare, free schools,free water, air, electricity, free power, all through

alternative networks to be set up. As freenessspreads, new solidarity networks will eradicatethe stranglehold of the commodity. This isbecause life is a free gift, a continuous creationthat the market’s vile profiteering alone deprivesus of.

HUO Where is love in Oarystis?

RV Everywhere. The love affair, as complex as

it is simple, will serve as the building block forthe new solidarity relations that sooner or laterwill supersede selfish calculation, competition,competitiveness, and predation, causes of oursocieties’ dehumanization.

HUO Where is the city of the dead? In aforest rather than a cemetery?

RV Yes, a forest, an auditorium in which thevoices of the dead will speak amidst the lush-ness of nature, where life continuously createsitself anew.

HUO Have you dreamt up other utopiancities apart from Oarystis? Or a concreteutopia in relation to the city?

RV No, but I have not given up hope that suchprojects might mushroom and be realized oneday, as we begin reconstructing a world devas-tated by the racketeering mafias.

HUO In 1991 I founded a Robert Walsermuseum, a strollological museum, in

Switzerland. I have always been fascinatedby your notion of the stroll. Could you saysomething about your urban strolls withand without Debord? What about Walser’s?Have other strollologists inspired you?

RV I hold Robert Walser in high regard,as many do. His lucidity and sense of dérive enchanted Kafka. I have always been fascinatedby the long journey Hölderlin undertook followinghis break-up with Diotima. I admire Chatwin’sSonglines, in which he somehow manages to turn

the most innocuous of walks into an intonationof the paths of fate, as though we were in theheart of the Australian bush. And I appreciatethe strolls of Léon-Paul Fargue and the learningof Héron de Villefosse. My psychogeographicdérives with Guy Debord in Paris, Barcelona,Brussels, Beersel, and Antwerp were exceptionalmoments, combining theoretical speculation,sentient intelligence, the critical analysis ofbeings and places, and the pleasure of cheerfuldrinking. Our homeports were pleasant bistroswith a warm atmosphere, havens where one wasoneself because one felt in the air somethingof the authentic life, however fragile andshort-lived. It was an identical mood that guided





09 / 12

our wanderings through the streets, the lanesand the alleys, through the meanderings of apleasure that our every step helped us gauge interms of what it might take to expand and refineit just a little further. I have a feeling that theneighborhoods destroyed by the likes of Hauss-mann, Pompidou, and the real estate barbarianswill one day be rebuilt by their inhabitants in thespirit of the joy and the life they once harbored.

HUO What possibilities do you see fordisalienation and détournement in 2009?

RV This is a time of unprecedented chaos inmaterial and moral conditions. Human valuesare going to have to compensate for the effectsof the only value that has prevailed so far: money.But the implosion of financial totalitarianismmeans that this currency, which has so trippedus up, is now doomed to devaluation and a loss ofall meaning. The absurdity of money is becomingconcrete. It will gradually give way to new formsof exchange that will hasten its disappearanceand lead to a gift economy.

HUO What are the conditions for dialoguein 2009? Is there a way out of this system ofisolation?

RV Dialogue with power is neither possible nordesirable. Power has always acted unilaterally,by organizing chaos, by spreading fear, by forcingindividuals and communities into selfish andblind withdrawal. As a matter of course, we willinvent new solidarity networks and new interven-

tion councils for the well-being of all of us andeach of us, overriding the fiats of the state andits mafioso-political hierarchies. The voice oflived poetry will sweep away the last remainingechoes of a discourse in which words are inprofit’s pay.

HUO In your recent books you discussyour existence and temporality. Thehomogenizing forces of globalizationhomogenize time, and vice versa. How doesone break with this? Could you discuss the

temporality of happiness, as a notion?

RV The productivity- and profit-basedeconomy has implanted into lived human realitya separate reality structured by its ruling mecha-nisms: predation, competition and competitive-ness, acquisitiveness and the struggle for powerand subsistence. For thousands of years suchdenatured human behaviors have been deemednatural. The temporality of draining, erosion,tiredness, and decay is determined by labor,an activity that dominates and corrupts all oth-ers. The temporality of desire, love, and creationhas a density that fractures the temporality ofsurvival cadenced by work. Replacing the

temporality of money will be a temporalityof desire, a beyond-the-mirror, an opening touncharted territories.

HUO Is life ageless?

RV I don’t claim that life is ageless. But sincesurvival is nothing but permanent agony relievedby premature death, a renatured life that culti-vates its full potential for passion and creation

would surely achieve enough vitality to delay itsendpoint considerably.

HUO The Revolution of Everyday Life wasa trigger for May ’68, and you have statedin other interviews that it is your key bookthat you are continually rewriting. Was thebook an epiphany? How did it change thecourse of your work? What had you beendoing previously?

RV The book was prompted by an urgent needI was feeling at the time for a new perspectiveon the world and on myself, to pull me out of mystate of survival, by means other than throughsuicide. This critical take on a consumer societythat was corrupting and destroying life so relent-lessly made me aware and conscious of my ownlife drive. And it became clear to me very quicklythat this wasn’t a purely solipsistic project,that many readers were finding their own majorconcerns echoed there.

HUO The Revolution of Everyday Life endson an optimistic note: “We have a world of

pleasures to win, and nothing to lose butboredom.”4 Are you still an optimist today?

RV “Pessimists, what is it you were hopingfor?,” Scutenaire wrote. I am neither a pessimistnor an optimist. I try to remain faithful to aprinciple: desire everything, expect nothing.

HUO What is the most recent version ofthe book?

RV Entre le deuil du monde et la joie de vivre —

Between Mourning the World and Exuberant Life.

HUO What book are you working on atthe moment?

RV I would love to have the resources tocomplete a Dictionary of Heresies, so as to clarifyand correct the historical elements included inThe Movement of the Free Spirit and Resistanceto Christianity.

HUO The question of temporality alsobrings us to Proust and his questionnaire.What might your definition of happiness bein 2009?





e-fux journal #6 — may 2009

040 /

What is your main personality trait?Laziness.

What quality do you appreciate most in a man?Generosity coupled with human awareness o lie.

What quality do you appreciate most in a woman?Love and love o lie.

What is your avorite virtue?Creativity.

What is your main shortcoming?My lack o sel-confdence.

What is your avorite activity?Opening mysel to lie so lie can open in me.

What is your dream or happiness?Realizing my desires by ulflling those o myloved ones.

What would your greatest misortune be?Failing to contribute to the happiness o all.

Who would you have wished to be?Mysel, more and more alive.

Where would you like to live?Everywhere genuine humanity prevails.

What is your avorite ower?All o them, with a sot spot or the rose ancienne.

What is your avorite bird?All o them, with a special ondness or theblackbird that sings in the evening.

Who are your avorite writers o prose?Montaigne, La Boétie, Shakespeare, Diderot, Kaka,

Artaud, Benjamin, Orwell, Zweig.

Who are your avorite poets?Villon, Blake, Hölderlin, Nerval, Fourier.

Who are your male heroes in literature?Hyperion.

Who are your emale heroes in literature?Little Kaethchen o Heilbronn.

Who are your avorite composers?Mozart, Boccherini.

Proust Questionnaire,answered by

Raoul Vaneigem

Who are your avorite painters?Giorgione, Turner, Goya, Van Gogh. Who are your male heroes in history?Eloi Pruystinck, Sebastian Castellio, EdouardCarouy and André Soudy, Albert Libertad, FloresMagón, Alexandre Marius Jacob, Jan Valtin.

Who are your emale heroes in history?Olympe de Gouges, Claire Démar, Louise Michel,Qurratulain.

What are your avorite names?Ariane, Chiara, Ariel, Tristan.

What do you hate above all else?Voluntary servitude.

Which historical fgures do you despise the most?All tyrants, slaughterers o the people, perpetratorso human suering and those who honor them.

Which military eat do you admire the most?None.

Which reorm do you hold in highest regard?Those that humanize man.

Which natural talent would you have wishedto have?The ability to better disseminate the humanawareness o lie.

How would you like to die?Peaceully, at the hour I choose.

What is your present state o mind?A precarious balance between what I am and whatI wish to be.

Which wrongs do you tolerate the best?There are no wrongs, just mistakes to rectiy.

What is your motto?Desire everything, expect nothing.



11 / 12

RV Living ever more intensely and passion-ately in an ever more intense world. To those whosneer at my ecstatic candor, I reply with a phrasethat brings me great comfort: “The desire for another life is that life already.”5

HUO Do you have unrealized projects?Unrealized books, unrealized projectsin fields other than writing, unrealizedarchitectural projects?

RV My priority is to live better and better in aworld that is more and more human. I would loveto build the “urban countryside” of Oarystis, butI’m not just waiting patiently, like Fourier at thePalais Royal, for some billionaire to decide tofinance the project only to lose everything to thefinancial crash a minute later.

HUO What about your collaborations withother artists, painters, sculptors, design-ers, filmmakers?

RV I don’t collaborate with anyone. At timesI have offered a few texts to artist friends, notas a commentary on their work but as a counter-point to it. Art moves me when, in it, I can senseits own overcoming, something that goes beyondit; when it nurtures a trace of life that blos-soms as a true aspiration, the intuition of a newart of living.

HUO Could you tell me about Brussels?What does Brussels mean to you? Where doyou write?

RV I live in the country, facing a garden andwoods where the rhythm of the seasons hasretained its beauty. Brussels as a city has beendestroyed by urbanists and architects who arepaid by real estate developers. There are still afew districts suitable for nice walks. I am fondof a good dozen wonderful cafés where one canenjoy excellent artisanal beers.

HUO Do you agree with Geremek’s viewthat Europe is the big concern of the

twenty-first century?

RV I am not interested in this Europe ruledby racketeering bureaucracies and corruptdemocracies. And regions only interest me oncethey are stripped of their regionalist ideology andare experiencing self-management and directdemocracy. I feel neither Belgian nor European.The only homeland is a humanity that is at longlast sovereign.

HUO You have used a lot of pseudonyms.Je est un autre [I is an other]? How do youfind or choose pseudonyms? How many

pseudonyms have you used? Is there acomplete list?

RV I don’t keep any kind of score. I leave it upto the inspiration of the moment. There is noth-ing secret about using a pseudonym. Rather, itis about creating a distance, most often in com-missioned work. This allows me to have some funwhile alleviating my enduring financial difficul-ties, which I have always refused to resolve by

compromising with the world of the spectacle.

HUO A book that has been used by manyartists and architects has been yourDictionnaire de citations pour servir audivertissement et a l’intelligence du temps [Dictionary of Quotations for the Entertain-ment and Intelligence of Our Time]. Wheredid that idea come from?

RV It was a suggestion from my friend PierreDrachline, who works for the Cherche Midipublishing house.

HUO You have often criticized environ-mental movements who try to replaceexisting capitalism with capitalism of adifferent type. What do you think of JosephBeuys? What non-capitalist project ormovement do you support?

RV We are being “offered” biofuels on thecondition we agree to transgenic rapeseed farm-ing. Eco-tourism will accelerate the plunderingof our biosphere. Windmill farms are being built

without any advantage to the consumers. Thoseare the areas where intervention is possible.Natural resources belong to us, they are free,they must be made to serve the freedom of life.It will be up to the communities to secure theirown energy and food independence so as to freethemselves from the control of the multination-als and their state vassals everywhere. Claimingnatural power for our use means reclaimingour own existence first. Only creativity will rid usof work.

HUO Last but not least, Rilke wrote thatwonderful little book of advice to a youngpoet. What would your advice be to a youngphilosopher-writer in 2009?

RV To apply to his own life the creativity hedisplays in his work. To follow the path of theheart, of what is most alive in him.

Translated from the French by Eric Anglès





12 / 12

1See Immanuel Wallerstein, Utopistics:

Or, Historical Choices of the Twenty-

first Century (New York: The NewPress, 1998).

2Quoted in Richard Kostelanetz,Conversing with Cage, 2nd ed. (NewYork: Routledge, 2003), 34.

3Raoul Vaneigem, Ni pardon, ni talion:

La question de l’impunité dans les

crimes contre l’humanité(Paris:Editions La Découverte, 2009).

4Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution

of Everyday Life, trans. DonaldNicholson-Smith (Welcombe, UK:Rebel Press, 2001), 279.

5See Raoul Vaneigem, “Le désir d’unevie autre est déjà cette vie-là,”Cahiers internationaux de symbolisme 119–121 (2008): 193–194.

Hans Ulrich Obrist is a Swiss curator and art critic.In 1993, he founded the Museum Robert Walserand began to run the Migrateurs program at theMusée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris where heserved as a curator for contemporary art. In 1996he co-curated Manifesta 1, the first edition of theroving European biennial of contemporary art. Hepresently serves as the Co-Director, Exhibitionsand Programmes and Director of InternationalProjects at the Serpentine Gallery in London. Raoul Vaneigem is a Belgian writer and philoso-pher. After studying romance philology at theFree University of Brussels (now split into theUniversité Libre de Bruxelles and the Vrije Univer-siteit Brussel) from 1952 to 1956, he participatedin the Situationist International from 1961 to1970. His most well-known book, The Revolutionof Everyday Life, was published in 1967, the sameyear as fellow situationist Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle.



Date post:	08-Apr-2018
Category:	Documents
Upload:	austin-briggs-alexander
View:	224 times
Download:	1 times

In Conversation With Raoul Vaneigem by Hans Ulrich Obrist

Documents