Local thinkers | Pierre Lefebvre: the real official opposition

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.

“The official opposition is literature. This is what Pierre Lefebvre said to his team when he was in charge of the review. Freedom. Literature will always be in opposition to the margins, according to him, because its function is to allow the ambiguity of things to breathe, beyond the strictly communicative and effective role of language.

The protagonist of his short text, The virus and the prey, a hybrid between essay and theatrical monologue, tells us how he feels he will never have access to “Monsieur”, at the top of the government. He nevertheless decides to write to her, because writing is his only power, one would say, a power of subversion which goes beyond the binary opposition, but which precisely therefore never really penetrates the structures of official power. Go ask Catherine Dorion. She slammed the door despite her noble attempts to bring a little poetry into the National Assembly and Lefebvre told me he admired the speech on loneliness of the deputy in the chamber, his first of four years ago, as well as the meaning of the image of Manon Massé and her pogos more or less unfrozen in the box.

Far from that, the managerial perspective flirting with newspeak seems to be the basis of almost all political discourse these days, which would poorly mask, according to Lefebvre, the very concrete deleterious effect of many public policies on our lives. We can bend and fold the words on themselves as much as we want to make them digestible and worthy of “social acceptability”, on the value of an older person as a “model” and of his “caregivers” for the “social cohesion”, for example. Nevertheless, a succession of very real laws have created the CHSLD system and the enormous weight it places on the individual so that a particle of dignity remains at the end of the road of those who suffer chronically.

With Lefebvre, one can ask the question: what would happen if we really took note of the fact that a text of law, before any application that would be absolute and objective, is first of all a literary object, and that its polysemy is its strictest meaning, as with any written text?

While reading it, I drew parallels with two thinkers already mentioned in this series, Valérie Lefebvre-Faucher (who today directs Freedom) and Frédérique Bernier (2020 Governor General’s Essay Award), and Lefebvre agreed over the phone. It is grouped with the first, for its insistence on the necessary integration of a literary perspective in the understanding of the judiciary; with the second, for its desire to make literature something that cannot be reduced to communication.

The powerful always justified

Lefebvre’s outraged alter ego in the book evokes the moment when, while listening to a Loto-Québec commercial, he cried out in disbelief, to the point that his neighbors heard him. When I read it, I thought first of life in the city, in a modest apartment, where proximity to strangers is inevitable. It is that, in advertising, the preferred way to achieve happiness is rather to live on the fringes of the group, in its sealed cocoon where the neighbors hardly exist, while the house has become an investment bubble. which undermines the very notion of the common good. To follow the model, in that society, is to docilely buy the duplex, then one day resell it, and above all not to spend your profit, quickly invest it, then die, like the mother of the protagonist.

In its pages it is The grasshopper and the ant by La Fontaine which is often mentioned, while the text makes us want to dance with the words, while at the end of the line, it was The wolf and the lamb which was in Lefebvre’s mouth. “The reason of the strongest is always the best”, writes La Fontaine: no matter how good the arguments of one are, the powerful will always be justified in ignoring the arguments of the weakest before crushing them.

For Lefebvre, the essay, the free literary, is what still thinks the link between things, far from the excessive division of knowledge and work. This is where it is still possible for everyone to meet and recognize each other.

However, the essayist is not naive: “if art had the power to really improve things, with great works, it would have been done, there have been so many great works”, read and seen by so many people at the top. It is then art itself (whether literary or otherwise, let us add it) which becomes a place of deconstruction of structures allergic to the true gathering of people beyond the slogans and the empty shells which score points.

In the aftermath of Quebec elections which have sought all along who was the official opposition to a certain gentleman, it seems that a small invigorating and iconoclastic essay has found. It does not hesitate to adopt a familiar tone close to the rhythm of the street, punctuated almost like a speech shouted at the gates of Parliament, and in its very form it gives birth to the answer to the only real question that Quebec was asking itself during the last month.

The virus and the prey

Pierre Lefebvre

ecosociety

80 pages