Poetics of Work by Noémi Lefebvre

Author:Noémi Lefebvre
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Transit Books
Published: 2021-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

5

I must have spent months after that reading Klemperer and Kraus while eating bananas and rereading Klemperer while smoking fairly continuously. I was getting to grips with Nazism because of Fascism and with Fascism because of this national mood, with vocabulary modifications and new approaches, as if all the hatreds that had been suppressed had the right to come out without shame or reproach. I admit I was reading Klemperer to amplify it all, because the survival of a Jewish philologist under the Third Reich remains incomparably more dreadful than that of a nobody, even one in a state of emergency in the good city of Lyon; winter was spreading its fine-grained fog, obviously it wasn’t a great idea to go for a walk wearing a beard or a headscarf or to have the look of a regulated ethnic profile, but people really seemed happy to have their bags searched at the entrances to Fnac and Monoprix and to prove they were non-black and not wearing conspicuous symbols so presumably in no way non-Catholic, I sometimes went out in a conspicuous hat with a radical bobble and dark glasses, so I could check out this view, but everyone’s indifferent expressions told me I had but few suspicious aspects and a fairly acceptable appearance, eccentricities being a non-conformism that’s quite well integrated into the fashion world’s systems, fucking farce, I was following the dogs on their forced marches, I was looking for a job in horror of finding one, I had lots to do so I went back home.

I was smoking and reading Klemperer, then reading Kraus and eating bananas, and nothing was hitting home on house arrests, police raids or enforced state-lessness, nor on any of the measures in place against our threats of the utmost gravity, while reading Kraus I could see a little more clearly what can happen when freedom comes to depend upon an elevated ideal on the state-wide scale, following well-known formulae along the line of work sets you free and security is the first freedom. I could feel from the general climate that imagination was being blocked and thought paralyzed by national unity in the name of Freedom, and freedom co-opted as a reason to have no more of it. But, for all that, this wasn’t Fascism and it really wasn’t anything like the Third Reich here, you mustn’t give people too much shit.

Why, then, when this wasn’t even the Third Reich, was I still here dumbly getting bored silly by security in the name of Freedom while panicking about looking for a job and about having one if I were ever to find one?

“If you overthink you can’t cogitate at all,” my father said one day when he’d been drinking.

Between Kraus and Klemperer there was a window where I’d go to smoke and dream of ravaged and most likely terrible poems that I’d write one day under the influence of drugs, where I saw nothing emerge apart from crows in a beetroot field and,

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