Alain de Benoist and others interview Richard Millet

September 27, 2013 at 8:21pm

Richard Millet the Accuser

A novelist, essayist, editor and member of the reading committee at Gallimard

[France's most prestigious publishing house], Richard Millet is now a writer
condemned to inner exile in France, a country he no longer recognizes. In his
latest work, "Fatigue du sens" ("The Fatigue of Meaning"), he paints a clinical
picture of a country tired of being itself, and of the most obvious symptom of
this, mass immigration, this "human traffic in which the interests of organized
crime meet those of international capitalism". This is the record of a meeting with
a writer-warrior.

Alain de Benoist: Your book is one long cry of sorrow and indignant rage in the
face of the social pathologies caused by immigration. Quite rightly, you don't
attack the immigrants themselves so much as the general climate that made that
immigration possible, among other things. You talk about the "fatigue of meaning"
that reigns in France, "a vast, exhausted body" - and you explain the source of
this exhaustion very well. But you also denounce the market economy and "ethnic
disneylandization" ("Disneyland as the hedonistic re-emergence of the concentration
camps"). What is the connection between these two phenomena?

Richard Millet: The connection is in the relationship between the hegemony of the
Market and the populations subjected to the principle of globalization, which is
establishing itself above all in what people no longer dare to call the third world
and those nations that are tired of being themselves, eroded by imaginary guilt, by
cultural debasement, by the collapse of all verticality and a petty bourgeois,
insipid, americanized, horizontal nihilism that has become the shared ideal or the
only bond linking indigenous populations and immigrants. The disneylandization of
culture runs parallel to that of politics: "the melting-pot" as the ultimate
horizon, and Obama as the virtuous version of Berlusconi. The Market can't function
without the law, as Mich�a has demonstrated. While the Market doesn't care about
nations, traditions, peoples, vernaculars, culture, it has a great need for
workers, of whatever kind. Hence the ethnicization of the legal sphere, the
function of the law being not so much to defend immigrants and "minorities" as to
force the recalcitrant back into line. Hence, it shouldn't surprise us that in the
face of certain resistances against its hedonistic-totalitarian program, propaganda
has provided itself with apparatuses of repression like the Gayssot act and
everything that has been gathered under the new organization called, I believe, the
rights of the person ("les droits de la personne"). We live in a system where the
"fun" and the "cool" are the virtuous expression of a new type of totalitarianism.

Alain de Benoist: Like so many others, you have been struck by the foundering of
school education and the collapse of culture that results from it. The crisis of
education is above all a crisis of transmission. Why is it that we no longer are
able to transmit?

Richard Millet: In order to transmit, you need a tool, which, as it happens, is

language. But now, the transmission of this language has itself been relegated to a
position of secondary importance - that is, when it isn't treated with outright
contempt, or forgotten about. Language today is in tatters. Look at the semantic
fluctuation that results from the ideological feminization of professional titles.
As far as syntactic and orthographic fluctuation is concerned, it's a perfect
reflection of the degradation of the social bond. Therefore, what we have is a
crisis not of "values", as people have tried to suggest, but a contestation of
value as such, in so far as value is supposed to be the apanage of an old world, a
world that's "over" now, and of which our world is merely the inverted simulacrum.
What could conceivably be more petty bourgeois, for example, than "gay marriage" or
the pretense of sexual freedom? The very notion of transmission, and hence of
knowledge, has become suspect, since the past is the thing that is regarded with
the most suspicion of all, and as a consequence is subjected to endless
"revisions".

Alain de Benoist: Besides suicide, what solution could there be for those who, like
you, feel that they are in a state of "inner exile"?

Richard Millet: It's the others who are committing moral suicide, and the nations
that are denying themselves. As for me, I'm surviving. That means inner exile, or
voluntary apartheid, which presupposes an intense intellectual activity. One must
look, listen, bear witness, look for other witnesses to our testimonies. The
solitude of the witness is his or her strength. Considering that the worst has
already happened, and without believing that anything better is going to emerge,
but also without abandoning ourselves to despair, at least let's show each other
that we haven't been fooled. Also, solitude is itself a form of dissidence...

Fabrice Valcl�rieux: You share the opinion of a growing number of witnesses -

including the editors of �l�ments, and corroborated by numerous national and
international surveys - concerning the deterioration of French educational system.
Could you tell us why, in your view, we've "come to this". What are the reasons for
it? And who are those "responsible"?

Richard Millet: During the years following the disturbances of May 1968, there was
a determination to hunt down the "dominant ideology" and destroy all forms of
authority, and in particular to liberate the "child". I have taught for about
twenty years, and I saw how around 1975 Giscard d'Estaing's right began to
implement, with the Haby reform, the leftist political program: the end of the
grouping of classes by level (which were nonetheless easier to work with than with
the morass created by the "single secondary school"), the challenging of the power
of the teachers, the elimination of literary content in favour of journalism and
communications, suspicion cast upon French history, the French language viewed as
an instrument of class domination, and everything else that has been gradually been
discarded in order to seem inclusive towards immigrants, who were becoming
constantly more numerous and who had no desire at all to become French -
particularly the muslims. Teaching, just like everything else, is now an
fluctuating structure that is endlessly being reformed, becoming more and more
intellectually impoverished, and eroded at its very core by propaganda. How can
people accept that grammar school or university graduates barely speak and write
French or know French history? Doesn't that reveal the true, cynical face of
libertarian liberalism, which wants consumers, in other words, slave-"citizens"?

Fabrice Valcl�rieux: Do you think it's possible to find a way out of this
stagnation, and if so, what would it be?

Richard Millet: Stagnation? It would be more correct to call it a form of civil war
that does not name itself as such. It's the deployment within European territory of
the double forces of intimidation, Islam and America; islamism as the mirror of
European bad conscience, and americanism as the nihilism of an impossible melting-
pot. A civil war that could itself be a violent source of hope if islamism hadn't
been part of the Market and its strategy, and if the Americans didn't have the
technological and symbolic power to define the new world order.

Fabrice Valcl�rieux: As an editor and writer, what measures do you suggest could be
taken to improve the level of knowledge and practice of the French language and
French culture?

Richard Millet: I no longer believe in anything other the ordeals of the

individual, inner experience, shattering encounters - the encounter with a work, a
thinker, an artist. This presupposes the renunciation of "Culture" and its
mythologies, or more precisely put, of the Cultural, which has been substituted for
what Europeans called culture. As a form of opposition to the universality of
"entertainment", there has to be a return to an aristocracy of the spirit, a
refusal of utility, humanitarianism, and guilt, a return to an aesthetic of endless
separation. Universal culture depends on a few names, which are still active.

Michel Marmin: Don't your criticisms of the contemporary novel lead to a critique
of the genre itself? Couldn't one see the novel, let's say, since Richardson's
"Pamela", as consubstantial with modernity and as the expression of the
"horizontality" that you denounce? Isn't it radically opposed, in that sense, to
the tale ("conte"), which is in essence traditional and "vertical"? What does
Richard Millet the novelist think about that?

Richard Millet: That crisis is the novel's mode of existence since Sterne or even
Rabelais, in other words, that the novel has to target the surface effects of
horizontality, referring them to and confronting them with a form of verticality
and the history of the language in which they are written. It's that crossing, that
critical dimension, sometimes grammatically dissident and aesthetically solitary,
that interests me in Balzac, Flaubert, Proust, Kafka, Faulkner, Alejo Carpentier,
Jouhandeau, Claude Simon, Thomas Bernhard, Sebald, and Handke. It is true, however,
that I'm a bit tired of a genre that has become incapable of re-enchanting itself
and producing myths, and hence only infernally perpetuates its own simulacrum.

Michel Marmin: Do you recognize any predecessors? You quote P�guy in the epigraph
of "Fatigue du sens". Reading your works, I thought more of Flaubert and
Montherlant. Do such comparisons seem incongruous to you?

Richard Millet: I don't know Montherlant well. Sollers brought to my attention the
Jeunes filles series, which is marvelous, very modern, and very politically
incorrect! As for Flaubert, I'm still haunted by his heroic conception of writing -
which today is being eliminated as a consequence of most novelists' ignorance of
their own language, on the one hand, and on the other, of the anglo-saxon novel,
which is unconcerned with "style". My predecessors are more or less those I just
mentioned.

Michel Marmin: There's a great mystery in the contemporary world, and that's music.
While literature has settled into a sort of mainstream which is worse than
anything, since it consists in smooth and painless "horizontality", while
contemporary art is truly contemporary to the extent that it no longer falls under
the domain of the aesthetic, but under that of the market, serious music has known
since Schoenberg an uninterrupted creative fecundity: you enthusiastically testify
to this in your book "Pour la musique contemporaine". Although I have been
personally involved in certain currents of contemporary music, and despite having
attended a lot of concerts, from those of Le Domaine musical, fifty years ago, to
those of Ircam, and having written a bit about the subject, I have never found an
explanation for this mystery. Can you?

Richard Millet: Music pre-supposes a science, a knowledge that the other arts have
abandoned in order to privilege the supposed authenticity of "self-expression". A
girl told me recently that she hadn't found any schools in France where she could
learn to draw, so she had to go to Florence to study art. Already ignorant of their
own language, novelists don't read anymore. I would venture to say that serious
music is also an experience of the sacred, and is related to the great mysteries -
you can hear that even in composers who were not themselves believers, like
Debussy, Bartok or Webern. And now, with the recent disappearance of the taboos
against melody and traditional rhythms, this kind of music has been revivified, as
exemplified by Dalbavie, P�rt, Rihm, and many others. But ignorance threatens this
domain, as well. The composer R�gis Campo tells me that his students are now
incapable of listening to an entire symphony by Bruckner or Mahler, and are almost
completely ignorant of literature. People can no longer bear silence, just like
they no longer can bear solitude or freedom of thought.

Pierre Le Vigan: In "Fatigue du sens" you observe the "decay of the political in
the realm of the religion of Humanity". Isn't this religion of humanity deeply
linked to Christianity?

Richard Millet: The "humanity" I was referring to is a political concept, an

ideological consequence of anti-racist globalization and human rights, not humanity
in the Christian sense. In this political sense, humanity is a religion unto
itself. Remember that the catechism of Michelet, who was a fierce anti-Christian
and an indefatigable progressive - also a great writer, but simple-minded when it
came to politics - is entitled "La Bible de l'humanit�" ("The Bible of Humanity").

Pierre Le Vigan: You talk about "the objective alliance between protestantism and
islamism, the two religions that the market relies on for support". Don't you think
that even if there is an Islam of the market and even if protestantism may have (as
Alain Peyrefitte argued) contributed to a capitalist economic dynamism, religious
anxiety nonetheless constitutes an element of resistance against markets and the
cult of material progress?

Richard Millet: Rather than of "religious anxiety", I would rather hear people
speak of certitude, of faith. I respect Islam as a faith. I do not tolerate the
islamization of Europe, which is the beachhead of an ongoing war that Islamic
capitalism is having a hard time making people forget about. However, I am not
na�ve enough to believe in a dialectic between Islam and Christendom. That
dialectic broke down under capitalism. All that's left are grotesque and cynical
simulacra of spirituality and a degeneration of the idea of religion. Religion as
"culture"? Allow me to view things completely differently. The secularization of
society, multi-culturalism and the intellectual terrorism of anti-racism have cut
Europe off from its Christian dimension, and as a consequence, Europe has
culturally become nearly illegible. Under these conditions, how can one look at a
cathedral, listen to Bach, read Bossuet or Simone Weil? How can we resist the new
order, now that we are blind and deaf?

Pierre Le Vigan : You write that "the praise of borders can only be a ruse of
globalist horizontality." Why? Is R�gis Debray a "false friend" to you? And again,
why is that?

Richard Millet: I have talked about how much I like crossing borders, traveling to
other places, experiencing the "elsewhere", and not global sameness, the
totalitarianism of the identical. I like the universal in so far as it produces
real differences, not a political and legal codification of the "Other". I'm
suspicious anything that has been co-opted by propaganda, including the sense of
borders. As for friends, to the small extent that I have any, I have learned to
distrust them. I told you I was alone...

"Fatigue du sens", an essay by Richard Millet (Pierre-Guillaume de Roux, 2011)

(Pierre-Guillaume de Roux, 2011)

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John Morgan and Olena Semenyaka like this.

John Morgan Giuliano, thanks for taking the trouble to translate it (and to do so
so well). While no new ground was broken in this interview, it is refreshing to
read people expressing such opinions clearly and concisely.
October 2 at 2:03pm � Like � 1

Giuliano Adriano Malvicini John, while Millet does not say anything new about the
ideology and methods of globalist liberalism, I personally am not aware of anyone
who talks about these things in relation to literature. Millet is right, in my
view, in viewing the ideology of globalist anti-racism as a mortal enemy of
literature. Authentic literature is aristocratic and vertical, the dominant
ideology is egalitarian and horizontal. Literature is obsessed with the past, the
dominant ideology views the past as suspect. Literature, as he says, is concerned
with "naming the real" and with differentiation. The ideology of globalism is
opposed to differentiation ("discrimination"), and as we well know, it requires us
to refuse to even perceive the real, let alone name it, since the real is in
constant contradiction with the dominant ideology. Millet caused a scandal by
daring to speak of the experience of being the only white person in the Paris
subway. Anyone who has lived in Paris knows exactly what Millet is talking about
because they have experienced it on a daily basis. And yet, no-one is supposed to
talk about it or admit to knowing anything about it. How can authentic literature
exist in a suffocating, lobotomizing ideological climate like that? Millet's
statements are given additional weight by the fact that he is an accomplished and
recognized writer, as well as an editor at France's most prestigious publishing
house (it is to the credit of both Gallimard and France that Millet is not out of a
job right now).