Local thinkers | Anne Archet: anarchist, nihilist and pornographer

The intellectual geography of Quebec is being redefined. In this series, our collaborator Jérémie McEwen introduces us to essayists who think about the contemporary world.

There is this subtitle to the book Twilight of the idols of Nietzsche that I have been rereading for years: How to philosophize with a hammer. It’s a book that lay around in my big brother’s room when I was young, and which at that time represented for me something like the very mystery of philosophy, this discipline which I already saw as the most radical form of human thought.

This book, like that of Anne Archet, shines by the form borrowed from its pages, that is to say the aphorism. A brushstroke or two, a triple toe loop as a phrasing and a hit on the anvil as a punctuation, presto society is unbolted, laid bare, in its contradictions and its impasses. Then we start again, forever. The aphorism is the philosophical genre of writers who work as if they were fish trying by all means to escape the clutches of a bear’s mouth.

The bear is the current world, “the system”, as a copy of a student who does not force himself would say, capitalism, but also socialism, the left and the right, the reactions and the woke, freedom and determinism; in short, all the social categories that do not represent the anarchic vibration of the human heart.

Anne Archet has been known for a while for her erotic books, while for my part, I discovered her with this essay with the title which has the effect of a poem, The vacuum: instructions for use. Indeed, how to employ oneself in nothing, if not by having fun as a dilettante? The problem, as every philosopher will tell you, is that the problem with emptiness is that it is no longer one as soon as it is named. This is why it is approached only in this short and incisive literary form, like full of small blows which try by all possible means to bring down the walls which enclose our minds.

Everything is screwed up

The author writes under a pseudonym, and refuses to have her picture taken. And when I asked her why, by e-mail please since yes, even her voice remained secret, she answered me without appeal: “Anne Archet is my nom de guerre and my name of pornographer”, whereas anonymity is a weapon advocated by both the radical left and erotic literature. I first thought of Banksy, but then, above all, of all those lost souls that we meet in the streets of the big cities of the world, this real “real world” without a name that has nothing to do with the famous “silent majority” instrumentalized by the power in place.

Those who keep their names silent put forward ideas above all, and Anne Archet’s basic idea is that everything is completely screwed up, nothing makes sense, whereas if it has already been possible to hope for what whether it is for the world, it is now too late.

“NOBODY deserves a statue,” she writes, the fetishization of personality transforms all ideas into trademarks, she is right, useful especially to enrich pseudothinkers.

This dear Nietzsche, moreover, who floats everywhere around Archet’s book, warned for his part against any logic of the herd. Both the shepherd and those who follow, but also those who flee: you have to question all that. That’s the whole difficulty, but at the same time the beauty of undertakings like this, of trying to take up the challenge of deconstructing the structures that shape us right down to our collective unconscious.

Don’t look for Anne Archet at the polling station on October 3. “I have already voted blank. I even ate my ballot already. It’s all very tiring, so I prefer to stay at home and have fun with my Magic Wand », Wrote to me the one who published an ode to solitary pleasures in 2020 entitled losing breath. This annoying individualism set up against everything and everyone, let’s admit it, even if it does not correspond to us in all respects, does good, soothes and detaches from our little life projects which seem so important to us on Monday morning, until that we have the honesty to admit their monumental vanity on a Tuesday afternoon while listening to another opinion piece on the radio.

Throughout my reading, I tried to find meaning in it, despite everything. It’s always fun to do when you read nihilistic thought, which always fails in some way as total nihilism is almost impossible to formulate and to live with. From an individual point of view, certainly we follow it, the meaning of a single life is quite easy to deconstruct, but by this deconstruction, does it not find a meaningful whole that goes beyond it? Maybe, it’s not for me to decide. The anonymous essayist, in any case, certainly does not find. ” Nope. The universe is only determinisms and has no other meaning than the fact of existing. So let’s exist.

The vacuum: instructions for use

Anne Bow

Lux Editor

160 pages