Men of Violence Take It By Force: Philippe Lancon’s “Disturbance”

Disturbance
By Philippe Lançon
Translated by Steven Rendall
Europa, 2019

For Philippe Lançon, January 7, 2015 began unremarkably, a “morning like any other,” as he puts it in Disturbance, the English translation of Le Lambeau, his award winning memoir exquisitely translated by Steven Rendall. It was the kind of morning that promised to be forgotten soon with the same lightsome sense of half-oblivion with which it was lived.  However, that start was a deceptively quotidian prelude to ghastly trauma, one that would forever serve as a forlorn threshold between his former self and the one later transformed by pain, grief, and fear. 

During a staff meeting of Charlie Hebdo, a satirical magazine located in Paris to which Lancon contributed, the offices were attacked by “two empty, hooded heads bearing death and bigotry.” The cultural journalist was gravely wounded, his face disfigured by a bullet that reduced the lower half of it to a “crater of torn, hanging flesh that seemed to have been put there by the hand of a childish painter, like a blob of gouache on a picture.” Twelve of his colleagues were murdered. 

Not a week later, the streets of Paris were flooded by millions of demonstrators, eager to express national unity and resolve, a civic riposte to the dark forces unleashed to demoralize both. Charlie Hebdo’s modest circulation increased by astonishing orders of magnitude, and everywhere the French, and others around the world, signified their solidarity with a proud declaration: “Je suis Charlie.” The mute protest of the killers—the “most efficient censors” are “those who liquidate everything without having read anything”—was countered by a torrent of words: enthusiastic slogans, more issues of Charlie Hebdo printed than ever before, and an endless fusillade of editorials mining the horror committed only days prior for political and existential meaning, or even more likely, fodder for partisan dispute. 

Lancon largely disregarded the commentary that seemed so foreign to his own, irreducibly personal experience of the attack: “From what planet did those who brought the news come?” He viewed the patriotic plumage of collective support with suspicion; there was no such outpouring of camaraderie when Charlie Hebdo’s editors were criticized for publishing a cartoon that lampooned the prophet Mohammed in 2006, or when its offices were torched to the ground in 2011. In a way, the attack was gratuitous; the weekly’s relevance had long been stripped by the very people who now ardently sang its praises. And its farceur spirit—that comedic pledge to “refuse to take an appalling world seriously”—was waylaid by “narrow minded-rage that transformed social struggle into a spirit of bigotry,” and abetted by those who fearfully issued embarrassed apologies for whatever offense awakened its fury.

In an effort that seems designed to inoculate himself against the canned analysis of professional editorializers, Lancon turns his attention inward, first to his ravaged body. His injuries were grievous—the lower third of his face so disfigured it resembled a “raw slab of meat.” He was incapable of eating, speaking, or smiling, and communicated by scribbling out aphoristic notes on a small whiteboard. The hospital was his home for 282 days, and he endured seventeen surgeries expertly performed by “artists of emergency.” The suffering he underwent—paradoxically both routine and astonishingly intense—became such an elemental part of his life it left a metaphysical scar of sorts, effecting a “complete modification of being.” Eventually, he had to strike a détente with his agony, and recruit it to his side. “Walking my lengths had become painful, I felt as if I were walking on a bed of nails; but once again, pain had to be welcomed as an ally showing me the path to be followed.”

Lancon became an “immobile athlete,” devoted to the arduous process of recuperation, a singular fervor that served as a prophylactic against a political engagement of the attack. An obsessive emphasis on the body is easy enough to accomplish since, when it fails, it imperiously demands all one’s attention:

The sensation of being nothing more than a body appears when the latter completely escapes our desires and our will, like servants who come to life on the day when, upon being summoned, they all revolt at the same time in order simply to say: I exist. 

This collapsing into his own carnality, an exhaustion of his self into its anatomical parts, permitted Lancon to keep philosophical abstractions at bay—he was content to be lulled “under the spell of the concrete.” Now an “invalid reconstituted under the tubes,” he hermetically sealed himself from the contentious debates that fulminated outside the hospital, absorbed in the process of “metabolizing the attack through the reconstruction of my face.” Instead of telling a more familiar story—a spiritual expedition from tragedy to triumph—Lancon charts a thoroughly corporeal course, one so stubbornly medical it excludes any obligation, or even the requisite volition, to perform a moral appraisal:

I now existed only as a body that wasn’t entirely my own, and whose consciousness received without moralizing, without resistance, everything that was presented to it. 

Instead of current events, Lancon turns to literature for counsel and consolation. Shakespeare is “always an excellent guide when one has to move forward in an ambiguous, bloody fog,” but his principal tutors were Kafka, Mann, and Proust, “my three deforming, informing mirrors.” Proust helped him grasp the terrifyingly ethereal nature of memory, its increasingly gossamer imprints of an evaporating past. And he read Kafka’s correspondence like it was the performance of a prayer, a practice that inspired “modesty and ironic submission to anxiety.” The following lines, in particular, helped him yield to forces beyond the perimeter of his comprehension or control, and functioned as both his “breviary” and “viaticum”:  

In any case, it’s pointless to reflect on these things. It’s as if you tried to break one of the cauldrons of hell. First, you’ll fail, and second, even if you succeed, you’ll be burned by the blazing mass that flows out of it, but Hell remains intact in its magnificence. You have to go about it differently. First, lie down in a garden and draw from the illness, especially if it’s not really an illness, all the sweetness you can. There’s a great deal of sweetness in it.

Even these forays into fiction, though, were intellectually reclusive withdrawals from the public context of his tragedy. Kafka and Mann, in particular, had plenty to say about the grotesque dysfunctions of modernity: the diminishment of happiness despite an aggrandizement of power and comfort, an intensification of the evil that besets us and a burgeoning inaptitude to either comprehend or resist it. Rather than arming him with an illumined ingress into a fallen world, these authors were, for Lancon, a sanctuary from it. For all his searching, he could only find different iterations of himself. “I could now enter fiction only insofar as it was related to what I was experiencing. It was an idiotic way to read, I knew that, but for the moment I had no other.” Once again, he was trapped by his calamity, his disengagement into the personal as much a prison as an asylum. “It’s difficult not to take seriously your emotions and sensations when what you’ve become is reduced to them.” 

Lancon eventually began writing again while he was still confined to the hospital, drawn to the “instinctive quest for metaphors,” the writer’s hunger for understanding through poetic elaboration. But even this exercise was in the service of escapism, authorial objectivity a furlough from the personal perspective he so doggedly adopts. 

“Writing about my own case was the best way to understand it, to assimilate it, but also to think about something else—because the person who was writing was no longer, for a few minutes, or for an hour, the patient about whom he was writing; he was the reporter and chronicler of a reconstruction.” Lancon petitioned fiction for a reflection of himself, and turned his own testimonial into a fiction as well. “I was becoming a fiction. It was reality, it was absurd, and I was free.” But whether the author was trying to seal himself into a safe redoubt by a kind of biological implosion—the exhaustion of identity into his body—or an authorial flight from experience into its distanced description, Lancon’s lodestar was himself, his own metamorphosis. “I was trying to define the nature of the event by discovering how it changed my own nature.”

Nevertheless, for all Lancon’s considerable efforts to weather his wounds as an animal body abstracted from the body politic, the political still intractably asserted itself. Outside his hospital room, armed guards vigilantly secured him from further harm, “shadows” that followed him everywhere he went, as well as a reminder that the “killers were never far away.” He was visited by President Francois Hollande. Mammoth rallies were organized on his behalf, their leaders invoking his name. As one nurse flatly put it: “You’re not an ordinary patient.” Lancon wasn't mugged or hit by an errant bus—he was attacked by terrorists who wanted his assassination to become a macabre form of political manifesto. 

One peculiar way the political contumaciously resists neglect is expressed by the ubiquitous presence of Michel Houellebecq throughout Lancon’s memoir. He pops up everywhere adventitiously; shortly in advance of the attack, Lancon published a review of his provocative novel, Submission, which was released on the same day Lancon’s life was forever altered. Moments prior to the assault, Lancon discussed the book with his colleagues at Charlie Hebdo, who urged him to write upon it yet again. Houllebecq hangs over the book like a storm cloud threatening to burst, and for Lancon, his figure is “mixed with the memory of the attack.”

Lancon had generally enjoyed his books—their uncontrived “pessimism and laconic sarcasm”—and vigorously defends Houellebecq’s right to publish his “coyly downplayed provocations.” He brushes off his “misogyny” and “reactionary irony,” recognizing that one should be wary of constraining literature by prohibitive offense. “A novel is not a place of virtue.” He marvels at Houellebecq’s “talent as a narrator and his effectual ambiguity,” and the prescient way in which he has been able to “give form to contemporary panics.” Yet, while Lancon admiringly acknowledges his premonitory astuteness, even Houellebecq’s prognostications didn't fully capture the horror that was to come: 

In two hours, his fiction would be overtaken by an outgrowth of the phenomenon it had imagined. We never control the development of the illnesses we diagnose, provoke, or maintain. The world in which Houellebecq lived had even more imagination than the one he was describing.

Unlike Lancon, Houellebecq mischievously courts political controversy, unafraid to instigate and inflame, magisterially indifferent—or obsessively attracted—to the horrified indignation he inspires in some. Maybe he felt emancipated from these concerns ever since he became identified with the political right. Referring to Houellebecq’s political orientation, Lancon takes for granted Houllebecq’s placement on the conservative column of the political ledger: 

Now, this pedigree was not really in doubt: what Houellebecq was attacking almost systematically was in fact everything for which Charlie had fought during the 1970s: a libertarian, permissive, egalitarian, feminist, anti-racist, society.

Houllebecq effortlessly embraces the political and cultural imbroglios Lancon studiously avoids. However, as the aforementioned quote indicates, Charlie Hebdo is hardly an apolitical publication; its uncompromising  commitment to free speech, however dressed in the garb of frivolity, is itself a declaration of political allegiance. Lancon and his journalistic ilk long for a world in which it is “almost forbidden to forbid,” one in which words are ignored or countered with other words. But what for Lancon is parody is for his assailants apostasy; the only proper riposte, for them, is punitive violence. 

Even before the attack, Lancon seemed to aspire to a kind of unalloyed literary freedom such that the lightheartedness of one’s tone meant an emancipation from political consequence: “To say whatever came into our heads, to yell at each other and have fun without worrying about propriety or competence, without being reasonable or knowledgeable, not to mention wise.” Lancon and his Charlie Hebdo peers lamented their transformation from unrestrained lampoonists into emblems of free expression. “The killers had immediately given it [Charlie Hebdo] a symbolic, international status that we, as its producers, would have preferred to do without.”

But Lancon’s reluctance to admit a political explication of his experience isn’t motivated by an evasion of responsibility, but rather the outgrowth of a profound distrust of the arena of public discourse, within which analytical nuance rarely survives: 

Current events had become a hall of mirrors, filled with overheated lamps that no longer illuminated anything, and around which fluttered clouds of increasingly stupid, moralizing, self-advertising, nervous mosquitos.

Once chummed, the choppy waters of journalism can’t easily be quieted, and the professional chattering class devours every morsel of subtlety and spits out platitudes: 

When someone enters a field of reflection occupied by intellectuals and information-makers, a beast is awakened, and he has to wait until the most impatient and mediocre among them has cut his teeth on him. They do this with their theories, their pride, their alleged sense of mission, their prejudices. Charlie has entered a field in which too many people had made up their minds not to pardon it anything.

However, it is precisely a delicately finespun rendition of his own irreducible experience upon which Lancon insists; he aims to paint a tableau of his ordeal so saturated in exacting detail, so fastidiously granular, that it repels an attempt to subsume it into a prefabricated narrative. The only other options amount to a surrender to epistemological coarseness: “All opinions are beginning to seem to me vain, shameful, if they are not immediately reframed, qualified, clarified, even destroyed, by the experiential context of the person who expresses them.”

In order to elude that descent into intellectual vulgarity, to sidestep the “merry-go-round of commentaries,” Lancon prefers to describe his trial in categories so intimate a translation into the vernacular of political discourse seems impossible: 

I heard the slogan “I am Charlie.” The demonstration and the slogan concerned an event of which I had been a victim, of which I was one of the survivors, but for me, this event was private. I had carried away, like an evil treasure, a secret, to this room where no one could completely follow me . . .

Everywhere Lancon looked, he only found attempts to comprehend his suffering in ways that could “devalue,” and even “debase” what he had endured. The professional sophists that steer public dialogue always want some philosophical finality, an ultimate and homiletic lesson that arbitrarily forestalls future exploration in the name of an unearned claim to new wisdom. That ersatz wisdom can be melodramatically “prophetic” or sententiously “didactic,” but either the way the mistake is the relentless reconnaissance for meaning in an event that has yet to be given an adequate description. “There was something abject about thought when it believed that it could give immediate meaning to the event to which it was subjected.”

Lancon extends his withering critique of the “dreary reality of intellectual pride” to modernity writ large—he argues that “present-day society is a poison that makes people crazy, and I have no doubt regarding the mental disasters that its constant, contradictory injunctions provoke.” The central problem is not merely that the contemporary “sleep of reason engenders monsters,” but the same hibernation of clarity renders futile every attempt not just to oppose the monsters, but comprehend the nature of the threat they pose. To make matters infinitely worse, there might not be anything, strictly speaking, to understand; Lancon suggests that his “experience goes beyond my thought.” The furthest Lancon will travel in the direction of the political is to observe, somewhat blandly, that everyone in France doubtlessly aspires to an “efficacious, equitable, civilized social contract” of the kind once envisioned by Rousseau. However, it’s not clear that such an ambition, despite the general will for it, could be realized today. “But if there is a majority of people to sign it, here is no longer anyone in France to write and execute it.”

Lancon eventually meets Houellebecq at a “high society party” —the two of them likely stood out as the only guests with police protection. Houellebecq “seemed a wreck, hard and compassionate,” standing there with “his ageless, sexless head” and his “air of a scorched fetish.” The literary provocateur seemed reduced by the burden he so long carried. “I thought that any man taking on himself the world’s despair with so much efficacy had to go back in time and end up in a dinosaur’s skin.” After attempting to discuss the attack with some awkwardness, Houellebecq bluntly cut to the quick, and recited a single verse from the Gospel of Matthew: “Men of violence take it by force.” Maybe this is all the insight one can squeeze out of wanton murder, a maddening revelation if true, since wisdom often presents itself as the only consolation for tragedy. Lancon labors indefatigably to make the case that the only clarity to be found is in the tragedy itself, in its painstaking portrayal and acceptance. “The attack weighed on us with such power that there was never any need, over the following months, for commentaries or explanations: its violence and the violence of its consequences simplified everything.”

By the time Lancon was scheduled to finally leave the hospital—he had graduated from a patient to a convalescent—he no longer wanted to, now more distressed by the uncertainty of independence than any medical procedure. The confines of the hospital seemed to provide some sense of security and succor: “They protected me and rescued me from an evil that I had the greatest difficulty understanding, and to which I did not want, nor was able, to oppose any furious anger.” 

Lancon’s entire measurelessly moving memoir is infused with this spirit: instead of manufactured rage or equally manufactured lucidity, he practices an authorial discipline that slowly unravels and dispassionately surveys. There is a cost to sustaining, with such unremitting conviction, such a rarefied height above the political fray, however febrile; Lancon can only offer one little guidance, and there is no straightforward political recommendation that can be inferred from his work. In order to preserve the integrity of an account so phenomenologically minute, he has to banish himself not only from the luridly partisan disputes he so loathes, but the genuinely edifying ones as well. 

Lancon’s recusal from the theater of political discourse is motivated by an expansive repudiation of its value: even if there were a meaningfully political account of the attack available, the communicative space within which one could present it would be incorrigibly contaminated. Every analytical scalpel is quickly transformed into a rhetorical hammer. He offers no detailed account regarding how we ended up in this philosophical cave, nor any instruction regarding the manner in which we might escape it. Lancon is less interested in a cure than a vaccination—his task is not to present a superior political account, but to secure his personal account from political appropriation. 

The exorcism of the political dimension of the attack is never fully complete, though, nor could it be; beyond Lancon’s intimate experience of suffering, there is a political horizon in which it occurred, and only in which its cause can be fully comprehended. The killers, as he typically refers to them, surely didn’t know Lancon by name, and it’s unlikely they ever read his work—their hatred of Lancon was not of a personal kind, narrowly understood. The profound humiliation that inspired their crime couldn't be captured independent of their own theological-political interpretation of the injustice they believed they endured, a disinheritance of a destiny. For them, Lancon was a symbol to be effaced—burning him in effigy would have made the point as well as murdering him. 

In the attempt to avoid equivocal abstraction, Lancon inadvertently flirts with the production of an abstraction of his own: a vision of lived experience entirely outside the reach of political life. Given that the opposite mistake—the intemperate absorption of personal life into cramped categories of contemporary political interpretation—is so much more prevalent today, his memoir can be read as welcome correction to a familiar exaggeration, even if it achieves that correction with the aid of some hyperbole of its own. 

However, it is unlikely Lancon will unearth a sufficiently coherent understanding of the “nature of contemporary evil” by mining, however astutely and doggedly, the “critical labyrinths of interiority.” He’s right to avoid rehearsing the same old arguments with the rote efficiency of an apostle, and to wearily acknowledge that “for thirty years, perhaps a century, these humanist arguments have led to nothing.” But he refuses to interrogate the ways in which the liberal political order for which he advocates—a social contract based on a threadbare foundation of individual rights and mutual tolerance—is complicit in France’s vulnerability to an evil it can neither understand nor defend itself against. Moreover, the strict separation between the personal and the political—at the heart of both that political order and Lancon’s lyrically sumptuous work—might also have contributed to the deterioration of public discourse and its hopelessly binary categories. 

In place of political philosophy, Lancon leans on poetic memoir, a scrupulously idiosyncratic meditation on his own inimitably subjective meditations. One can’t help but sympathize with the author’s exasperation at the feverishly unedifying state of public debate, and the absence of a widely recognized philosophical framework within with such debate could be rehabilitated. He doesn’t assume the responsibility of constructing one, but his work does suggestively and sometimes inadvertently—even in his flight from political thought—illuminate its need. Nonetheless, Lancon furnishes a magnificently sensitive remembrance, heroic in its fidelity to that sensitivity, one interested in offering not theory, but testimony. “The killer wounded the man, but missed the witness.”

—Ivan Kenneally is a writer living in California.