Carte Blanche to Guillaume Blanc:
"Le Deuxième Cœur"

It happened half a century and a couple of decades ago. We were told that Man was one, that he was part of a "big family" that we all belonged to the same world: that from now on we would all share a communal garden where each one of us would grow on our own terms and for the benefit of all. We were told about unchangeable facts: birth and death, laughter and tears, wounds and scars, and so on. We were told, too, that every life was equal to every other that the same blood flowed in very different veins; that in short, each life was only an atom of that larger compound called "humanity". | admit the story is quite pretty, but so are all things that have been proven groundless. Surely enough, its tellers, who spread it to heal spirits, have had to face the "banality of evil: to quote Hannah Arendts courageous words. Their unquestioning belief in technology was shattered by the discovery of the Shoah, where death was administered systematically and on a large scale. Could it be that they simply tried to dispel the impossible reality they had experienced, by opposing the banality of evil with that of goodness and of noble sentiments? Here was their new consensus: everything would hence-forth be universal, wrapped up in the sweetness of the fantasy of peace. They made a business out of it, and ended up tuning Man himself into a commodity-standardised, "one-dimensional' to speak, this time, in the style of Herbert Marcuse.

It did not take long for these false truths to be exposed and dismissed, as though people had rejected them as soon as they were admitted. Another generation, the so-called babyboomers, came in with a roar.They were, in fact, the generation of student revolts, civil rights, the Black Cause, feminism, sexual freedom and many other emancipatory movements. They stood up to their progenitors, who, in spite of everything, continued their wars and conquests, so that everyone would adopt and submit to an universalism that belonged only to them. Thunderously, the new generation told them that difference is not only tolerable, but that it is the basis of everything; that dissent outshines consensus, for it alone can substitute a weak "us” for a ravenous crowd of“! So we discovered, not so long ago, from one person to another - because everyone began to speak, to show themselves, to say themselves — that every life is indeed unique, and that every life can only be measured by its own yard stick. People will forever remain a mystery to us, and that's a good thing, otherwise life would be nothing more than the gloomy dance of normality.

So many pictures emerged from all this. It was the glorious era of the illustrated press, of world events turned world imagery, of those overwhelming images coming from the other side of the world, which spoke in their own way of the failure of universal peace, from which only a minority could then escape. But it was also the time of the actual democratisation of photography, of this modern-day instrument that allowed anyone to say "l" and to have literally a point of view. As a reaction to the convoluted murals of ideology which tried to cover the world with their lies, the International of the timid and the damned began to exist by making cute little images. Confronted with the injunction of equality, ie. to comply it worked towards resistance through its very existence — by simply existing. Individual stories, with their tiny bits of nothing, have become intertwined with the world's history with ‘its large axe’ as Pérec used to say. Faint rumours drawn from an infinite stream have risen up against the great narratives and their short-lived theatricality. Thus came the time of the individual, who gradually built her persona in order to tell herself to others and to be able to listen, at last, to others tell themselves.

On the one hand there were the fine-tuned politics of universalism which made us all believe we were brothers and sisters, and on the other, there were the amorphous poetics of intimacy, which always grant us its wonders. AIl it takes is to look better and to see differently, to be primitive amidst the frameworks that tell us what to do, what to think, where to go and where to look. Rainer Maria Rilke famously wrote it best: “For the sake of a single verse, one must see many cities, men, and things. [...] One must be able to think back to roads in unknown regions, to unexpected meetings, and to partings one had long seen coming: to days of childhood that are still unexplained, [...] to childhood ilinesses that so strangely begin with such a number of profound and grave transformations, to days in rooms withdrawn and quiet and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along on high and flew with all the stars—and it is not yet enough if one may think of all this.”.

To take one single picture from within, one should have breathed in the northern mist and felt how it clung and sank into the lungs: one should have known the blinding light of the morning, which pierces everywhere through the foliage, and the warmth of the evening light, both of which do not tolerate any word description, even the finest. One should also be able to see the moment, in the distance, when our busy, busting cities power up, and when their lights fade away, peacefully, as the dying do.

One should have identified the various degrees of tremors when touched or grabbed by someone; one should have seen how a foreign skin shines under golden reflections and the nuances of a local skin when in contact with black; one should have noticed the changes in the gaze that looks at us when it finally ignores us, and conclude that such is the enigma of existence and of what unites us.

One should have witnessed places filled with one overbearing story, made of overlapping stories, as nasty as they come, venomous, the type of narratives that turn unknown people into nobodies; one should have seen places of worship and mourning in the same way one looks at objects of desire, fear and disgust; one should have tried to explain the experience from within oneself, and not from what one has been told to say.

One should have taken the time to look at curious and useless forms, that of a body that folds and unfolds, or of a thing that remotely resembles a body; one should have dwelt on the detail, the fleeting, the shaky, the trivial and all that is bound to be forgotten; one should have sought not to see clearly and yet manage to apprehend the importance of small things within the geometry of the great whole, and eventually land on all those vague schemes that conspire in the circus of reality: that circus where things, all those little things that we don't look at so often, seem to organise themselves and hold their place.

One should have had small obsessions, those typical of childhood, which call for no explanation and serve no cause, and feed only on themselves and on their own satisfaction: one should have dwelt on these gestures which are never really the same, even though we thought they were repeated a thousand times, on the water which has never the same taste, sometimes silky, sometimes earthy, and without which nothing is done.

All this should be said it to all those who, under the guise of universalism, are in fact telling you the law of the market which claims that man is a standard because every man has a heart and every man beats with the same blood. To all those people it should be objected that, in reality there is no reason other than that of the second heart, which is always unique, and does not drum inside the chest but against the walls of the skull and reverberates throughout the body until it makes the one in the chest throb in response. It is the heart that pours out its emotions and makes us understand that only the oddity of experience can be deemed universal. Universal is only the intimate and the interstices of difference wherein it lodges; this kingdom of feeling and experience remains a secret forever and while no book wil ever be able to undo it images tel tin their ou way.