DIACRITIK Théo Casciani (Story of an eye): conversation with Olivier Steiner, preceded by "Roman Plastique", by Johan Faerber ♦ Receive Mail alerts Legal notices Post navigation<

Plastic novel, impermanent installation, eye in search of history: these could be the various subtitles that come spontaneously to the minds of those who have just finished reading Rétine by Théo Casciani , the first great novel to appear these days at POL, and a very nice discovery of this literary season.

In this retina, the eyelids do not stop winking, and this from the first pages. 9/11 is one of the great horror images of our time, but the planes don't hit the Twin Towers. Twins are always twins of other twins. Here, the twin towers immediately gave way to the Mercuriales at Porte de Bagnolet. The plane touches them but does not destroy them. The image is not the image as the novel opens with a trompe-l'oeil that keeps blinking. Because, for Casciani, one is always the image of someone else and the other of an image. This is what Retina keeps repeating, questioning not so much the presence of images in our lives as the persistence of all images in a present devoid of images.

For Théo Casciani, there are only screens. There are no more pictures. The retina is the persistence in seeing the images return in time now deserted of images. The images are thus so many retinal persistences, layers of superimposition. This is why the novel wants to become a book of images, to give back to the images that we have been able to see and then engages in a patient description of images, of these images which do not exist but dematerialize, impass the threshold of the eyelids and remain somewhere in each one before going completely around the eyeball.

Because the narrator of Retina lives somewhere in this gray zone, this zone where the image would like to become one with its existence but fails to create a work – finds the plastic hole of its existence. Between Paris, Berlin and Kyoto, the narrator learns to undo the images of Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster (DGF), participates in his worldwide installation, learns to see his love for the young Hitomi no longer gradually appear on the screen of his Skype conversations. . All these self-destructing images make Retina the novel of an installation without installation, a novel that hides from view just as it constantly wants to be probed.

As many images emptied and wishing to be populated with oneself that make Retina the political novel of the birth of a view of the world, the fall of the Berlin Wall which returns in bursts of images and the end of a love of which there will remain impossible times. Retina is not a novel: it is, literally and in every sense, a picture book.

Johan Faerber

Olivier Steiner: Dear Théo… this “dear Théo” makes me very funny because it reminds me of Van Gogh and his letters to his brother, but there is also this personal anecdote that the high school where I studied, in Tarbes in the Hautes-Pyrénées, is called the Théophile Gautier high school but everyone at the time said “Théo”, we go to Théo, I am in second or final year at Théo, etc. And then Theo is still God in Greek! fortunately this first name also has this je ne sais quoi of friendliness and sympathy, which lightens it and makes it close to us... So "dear Théo", Rétine, your first novel, has just been published by P.O.L, I really like this book (for a whole range of reasons) and I would be happy to talk about it with you, in writing, let's do it here, on Messenger, for a few days, as it comes, talk to each other by writing to each other...

Could you tell me a bit about your relationship with writing? I mean you are young, you have talent, Rétine is soaked in visual, plastic and contemporary art, so why a book, a novel, a text, and not an installation, a video or a film? Why the choice of writing and is it a choice for that matter? You see ? Let's start with the heart.

Théo Casciani: Olivier, thank you for the space you are giving me. Talking about my work is obviously pleasant for me, but I must admit that as my texts precisely try to escape from the logic of discourse, that they are conceived as escape plans where I can sow doubt and try to expose the reader to his own feelings, I sometimes fear that everything will be diluted in speech or communication. The time for this conversation therefore seems to me to be of rare generosity, and I am very grateful to you.

I really like what you tell me about your relationship with Théophile Gautier, the name of your high school, and how it has become a place for you. I am interested in the way things circulate, names, fashions, images or the sensitive, and it is also in this way that Rétine was born, by intuition, by capillarity, by network. Regarding its format, the book, it is totally a matter of choice. What I don't choose is to write. Whatever I do, I write, I believe. I have that. All my projects start from a certain relationship to language, but then you have to find the most appropriate medium, the most accurate form. It is the text that chooses its habit. For me, there is no hierarchy, without contempt or romanticism, between a book, a film, a garment, a sculpture or any other medium imaginable. I simply consider the book as an artistic and plastic way, with its uses and its functions, and the same goes for the novelistic genre to which I was not attached during the writing but which I adapt to very well now. This is why I prefer to define myself as an author rather than as a writer or an artist.

But for Rétine, the scale of the project, the research process and the device that was gradually beginning to appear to me quickly convinced me of the relevance of this framework. Other productions have been born or are in the process of being born from this same content, in the fields of installation and performance in particular, but the matrix had to be there, in a book. Retina, like most of the things I've done so far, is concerned with aesthetics, not as an ethereal science or a shortcut to some sort of formalism, but rather in the fascination aroused by me this question of the power of images and the power of looks. I wanted to examine the relationship between the text and the visible, to see what words are capable of in the face of images, to probe through the story all that screens between reality and the representations that we have of it or that we are give it today. This is how the idea of ​​creating a visual collection with no other material than sentences, punctuation, ink and paper germinated.

In this photo above taken on a mobile phone this evening, I put my worn copy of Retina on a larger book that looks at us: The faces and bodies of Patrice Chéreau, a book that was also a great exhibition at the Louvre in November 2010. What we see here on the left is page 14, this is a detail of the god Osiris, Ptolemaic period, 332 – 30 B.C. But beyond the simple eye / wink Eye to Retina is by Chéreau, about whom I would like to say a few words. I don't know who he is for you, but he's someone whose work and journey I admire and I happened to have had the chance to know him, we were friends, he helped, taught me a lot, and in particular to see, to see better, to look. It's something I share with those who knew him, those who loved him or were loved by him, he was one of those rare people who changes you at his touch - like a kind of retinal persistence . This is the kind of influence that we only measure, alas, after the disappearance of beings. During life, often, we see nothing or too many things at the same time, that is to say so little. Patrice died in 2013 but I still feel the disturbing effects of this impression / modification I'm talking about, and the more time passes, even if the memories fade away, the more Chéreau's gaze is felt, as always acting, in the present and on the present, opposite. As if I continued to learn “by his side”, as if his gaze remained alive and active and gifted, capable of inventions…

What I entrust to you, I say it all the more that it goes beyond my person, I noticed that it is the same for those (that I know) who shared segments of his life (I'm thinking of Philippe Calvario, Thierry Thieû-Niang, Dominique Blanc, Didier Sandre, Isabelle Adjani...), and if I'm talking about him to you who has just written Rétine, it's because Patrice was a great clairvoyant, to whom we could apply the Rimbaudian injunction: one must be clairvoyant, become clairvoyant – by a long, immense and reasoned disruption of all the senses. So to become a seer, to become a viewer-traveler.

When I closed Retina, I immediately thought of Chéreau – what would he have thought of this text? It would have interested him a lot, I think. He would have appreciated and admired your writing – his unstoppable and delicate style – and he would have sought to meet you, certainly. But let me tell you a little true story, it's your book that makes me think of it. It was one evening in the Marais, we had just had dinner and I was driving Patrice home, rue de Braque. As we wanted to prolong the night without telling each other, we made turns and more detours around his street. Suddenly here we are on rue Beaubourg around 1 a.m., I'm talking – I don't know what, but it doesn't matter – and there's something shouting on the sidewalk opposite... I take a look, it's "hard" but I keep talking. talk, until the moment I see that Patrice, while listening to me with one ear, has completely gone somewhere else, gone. He is suddenly like a block of flesh and nerves on the lookout, a bull on the lookout, his whole body seems contracted as if he only carried the immense vessel beam of his gaze. And it is precisely by seeing this look that I realize that something is indeed happening. I turn my head again, I look a little better, it's a fight in a dead end perpendicular to the street just at our level, on the other side. It's about two groups of Asians, patent shoes, evening dresses, silks and suits, the end of the wedding surely too drunk... I laugh, they still go very hard! The men throw punches and kicks at each other, the girls pull their hair like mad, some on the ground on all fours, furies... it's comical at first because the barefoot bride is also screaming and slaps and claws and bites… then I turn to Patrice again, I see that he too is holding back a burst of laughter but above all he is absolutely fascinated by the scene, as if something incredible, magical, completely supernatural, an aesthetic event. Alone, I am almost sure, I would have passed and continued on my way. I probably would have slowed down but I wouldn't have stopped. Patrice, who had seen that I hadn't really seen, then shook my arm: Look! He says this with gravity, amazed, he was at the show or at an exciting conference. I then leaned on his gaze, and I began to watch this scene, indeed incredible, with “magical realism”. Because everything was there, the perfect light, the brilliant cast, they must have been around forty, shouting and yelling in Mandarin, it was a wedding meal that ended badly, but much more than that: it was an explosion. We must have stood there for a good quarter of an hour, without speaking, until a police car followed by a van arrived and dissolved the harsh beauty of this vision. The more I looked the more I saw, it was Chinese in 2011 in Paris near Beaubourg after a catastrophic wedding meal, but it was also La Reine Margot, the corridors full of moving shadows in a Louvre laden with blood and muffled cries, it was The Rite of Spring, Pina Baush and Nan Goldin holding hands, it was the eternal hatred of the Capulets and the Montagues, it was grotesque and trivial at the same time, but this kind of " grotesque" which only adds to the sublime of things, by highlighting it... This gaze of Chéreau, which seemed to scan reality, to give it an MRI, I have seen it on other occasions on more minute things, I'm telling you about this painting of the Chinese wedding because it reminds me of your pages in this hallucinated and insurrectionary climate of Berlin at the time of the commemoration of the thirtieth anniversary of the fall of the Wall… That's what a look can do. And once we “know” that, that we have tasted this knowledge-savor of the gaze, whether alone, thanks to someone or thanks to a book, it accompanies you forever.

And did they see you? I don't know if I would have stopped in front of this scene, maybe I wouldn't even have slowed down, but what is certain is that I would have described it. This moment of pure reality is exactly what attracts me. When the real condenses, in an almost epiphanic time of suspension. Seeing it can catalyze whatever lies beneath the veneer of this kind of pure apparition, the over-watered marriage of these primed silhouettes, or the manifestation in my book. We are in Berlin for the thirtieth anniversary of the fall of the Wall and a flood of young people overwhelms the city in the scent of revolt. They mutilate statues, film the fires then throw projectiles and survival blankets into this air whose background seems insurrectionary. But nothing is said of their claims. It is very easy to imagine them, and I believe the reader's mind will take care of them better than any literature. It is in the image of the crowd, by dwelling on its sole aspect, that writing could make sense to me. Faced with these jubilant bodies, my only weapon was description.

I have tried in Retina to update and experiment with the ancient figure of ekphrasis by applying it not only to works of art, of course, but also, as its original definition suggests , to all these visions that flourish in our daily lives. I wanted to describe, to the end, in a kind of dizziness, meticulously and sometimes to the point of blindness, representations of all kinds and variable aesthetics, to transcribe with the same attention the detail of a skin, a painting of Giotto or an instagram feed, so everyone can step into the frame, feel every nuance and read every pixel. This is the story of my book, the story of this eye which by dint of describing ends up opening up by proving that the sensitive can have something to oppose to images. One look may be enough.

They were like in a bubble and so busy with their civil war…, they must have seen us (we were in line of sight) but it didn't matter to them. But back to the book and its first pages: Exposure. The first verb of your narrative I, which we are not even sure if it is that of a man or a woman, is "to abandon": I abandon myself to the images that overwhelm my gaze. And the sentences that follow urge the reader to surrender, who says I?

For my part, I saw Gerhard Richter's painting entitled September, there is the sky, two vertical towers which reflect without moving, there are the contrails of an airplane which follows a straight, horizontal trajectory, we sees tragedy looming, the beginning of the 21st century and the death of the 20th century live before our eyes, a global, not to say universal "explosion", it's confused, rather diffuse, nothing is certain but the fact that it is there, unmistakable and yet enigmatic, before and before our eyes. And then no, fade-in, we are actually at the Gallieni metro, in eastern Paris at the bus station, the narrator is going to take a bus to Berlin…

Just stopped by a lemonade stand. Kids said they were selling regular and frozen lemonade for $1. I asked for froze… https://t.co/ElAw4Piuvm

— 𝕮𝖊𝖑𝖎𝖆 Fri Aug 17 18:23:18 +0000 2018

Yes, these first pages divert the codes of the exhibition scene. The narrator leaves from Gallieni station and takes the novel with him. I am fascinated by this underground space and the two towers that overlook it, the Mercuriales. I have always seen this place as a landscape of rare intensity, lucidly drifting along the ring road with the silhouette of these chrome towers in the background, waiting for buses for European capitals among broke travelers or thanks Virgil Vernier's film which remarkably captures this transitional climate.

The prologue describes a moving body and its inert gaze. Of course, these twin towers are reminiscent of others, but the text never mentions 9/11 directly. The writing proceeds by allusion and deja-vu sensations to summon this image imprinted on our collective retina. Whether we see beauty or dread in them, whether we retain the symbolic, media, political or even architectural charge, everyone can remember the discovery of these videos. As for me, I was at school and the teacher, who wanted to leave us alone in the classroom so that he could go and watch what was happening on the television set in a neighboring room, had asked us to take a piece of paper, a pen, and tell a story to kill time. I wanted these opening pages to show the evocative power and persistence of certain visions in our eyes. The sight of a flying reflection on the windows of the Mercuriales is enough to scare the narrator. The image is so strong that the mere presence of a tower and a plane is enough to send us back to it.

In the score of the book, this first section therefore makes it possible to fix the real time of the story and to depict the visual influence to which the narrator is first subjected. This "I" has been defined so that it allows you to navigate simply according to the observations of the gaze whose initiation the book traces. Narration is less the vehicle of an experience than an exhibition device. The text transcribes what the "I" looks at, and the reader sees in it what he wants. Behind the veil of a common memory, one can find the direct presence of the New York towers or, as you do, think of what artists have done with them over the past twenty years. Some will follow the narrator in his fear, others will immediately grasp the absurdity of his fear. Me, I don't know. The description becomes a fictional momentum. “Suggesting is the dream”. I set up a situation by giving air, I create a space to invest in reading. The text is holey, vacant, full of gaps, voids and silences. I do not say anything. I expose.

I "know" you (I know you exist) for exactly one year. It was in Marseille, I had moved there and it was the Actoral festival of Hubert Colas in Montévidéo, Yves-Noël Genod was reading there, and as I am always attentive to what Yves-Noël does , I have come to see and hear. When I arrive I ask what this text is and who Théo Casciani is, I don't remember exactly the answer but I note that there is already a rumor in the air, a little bit of legend that is taking shape, c he's a very young author… it's an excerpt… it's still being written… it might appear next year, it's great, he lives between Marseille, Brussels and Japan… This genre rumors (fashion, fashion, fashion) can put me off but there, no. I do not know why. On the contrary, I am intrigued, piqued. Then it's the room, it's very hot, I'm badly seated, there aren't many of us and I think I understand from certain knowing glances that you're there in the audience, shoulder-length hair, a jacket and a shirt buttoned up at the top... what I see is a head of young Proust, in profile, alive... A door is open at the back of the stage towards the outside, a ray of sun ending licks a wall, parasitic noise coming from the hall, that disturbs us a little: Yves-Noël will get up during the reading to mumble a Silence, hush, please... I vaguely remember the text, the long descriptive sentences, we are in a parking lot outside a museum, in Japan, an installation is being delivered. There is a busy curator, things are missing, there is a long question of a color, a layer of color I believe, like a puddle of gasoline on the asphalt, or a cloud of smoke, the memory is fluctuating, precise and so vague, it's the color purple… “Purple” was moreover at the time the title of the text in the making of a book. What I hear pleases me, form and substance combined. I believe that it is a question of works of art like people, we meet them, or not. When literature is interested in contemporary art it is almost always with cynicism and irony, literature talks about it while leaning and complaining, it deals with a subject... cf. The map and the territory of Michel Houellebecq for example. With Retina we are elsewhere, there is humor but it is a humor that comes from a happy precision, from an amorous accumulation, added to a sensitive look but as "objective" as possible... "Proust at the Palace of Tokyo”, I say to myself! This is how I saw you appear to me. We then met at La Friche two days later, I went to greet you and congratulate you, I also did it out of curiosity and I remember your dark, calm, kind but attentive and questioning gaze... We are stayed in touch, I took some news of your text during the year, you reworked it a lot, and here we are, a year later: P.O.L and a first novel and your first literary comeback… “Pourpre” n is more but here is Retina… so it's the story of an eye that you retained, a story of retention as well? Why this transition from Purple (the color seen) to Retina (the visible surface)?

The memory of our meeting sends me back to another time. It was precisely during those weeks that my text left its gaseous state to become tangible. First there was this reading in Montévidéo, for Actoral. I had met Yves-Noël a few months earlier at the contemporary writing workshop at La Cambre in Brussels, he had heard me read a few pages of this manuscript still in the process of being written and had offered Hubert Colas to imagine something from there.

The research that led me to Retina had already given rise to various attempts beyond the bounds of the book in gestation, by extending my practice towards a more extensive artistic regime, but the experience proposed by Yves -Noël remains founding not only because he had managed to give a particular presence to my words, to bathe them in this kind of grace that follows him as soon as he is on stage, but also because it was the first time that the novel was implemented. I remember those afternoons spent listening to Yves-Noël chasing away, in my sentences as in space, everything that could serve as fuel for him when there was nothing left but his body on a chair, her face colored by an iPad, a halo of light from outside, a few diffuse noises, and then my text. It was very hot, it's true, the newly renovated room still smelled of paint, the acoustics seemed strange, and speaking of an interview with Paul Virilio, who died a few days earlier, we felt we were taken trapped in a kind of window, between the public and the writing, the bleachers and Yves-Noël, and that it was precisely there that one of the most important aspects of my text could emerge, faced with the images, the illusions or at a distance, hence the title chosen for these two evenings of performance, The writing against the screen. Of course, hearing the text in these conditions put me in a new and vertiginous position, I distinctly perceived the lengths, the shortcuts, the errors or the discoveries, I sometimes had the feeling that sentences written, crossed out then patched finally materialized before my eyes, sometimes the feeling that all the momentum had come up against an unwelcome expression or an overly demonstrative effect. I let go, I saw everything, I took a step back with all that that implies in terms of doubts and dissatisfaction, but from one evening to the next and among the hundred or so people present, I discerned very heterogeneous reactions to to the same situations. People closed their eyes, others clung very directly to the paragraphs, or some laughed sometimes, like you if I remember correctly. I liked all that a lot, I liked these attitudes in their differences and the spaces for interpretation that the text opened up. Something was there.

Returning to those weeks in Marseilles also allows me to think about my exchanges with Hubert Colas who kept a close eye on my work and offered to present the third stage of the performative cycle designed to accompany the publication of Rétine. Just one year after the evening you attended, a completely different device will be installed, with a space and time dedicated to reading, but still in this room, exactly where the novel first existed. Since last fall, the paint has dried and my text has become a book. Because it was above all a handful of days before our meeting that Frédéric Boyer suggested that I publish the novel with P.O.L. I have indeed reworked my text a lot since then, less at the request of my editor than by my desire to make the manuscript more fluid. Frédéric never demanded corrections but wanted me to take the time necessary to make the version that would suit me. The text has therefore been modified but nothing has changed in its composition. I have remained faithful to what was the score of the project since its beginnings and have exclusively devoted myself to the most important part of the novel in my eyes, at the margin, in its invisible and illegible zone, to achieve a certain purity, a clear line. I already have a personal difficulty getting rid of a work that could last forever, but above all I wanted to work so that the printed text does not reach its end but rather its most accurate form.

Last week I read a very short text by Rem Koolhaas in Virgil Abloh's book, Figures of Speech, in which he describes our time as that of "anything goes, nothing works". I have thought a lot about this axiom since then and, a posteriori, I believe that I could have formulated in this way what I wanted to stand out from by taking up my text. I wanted it to work. I also think that this thoroughness was induced by the particular springs of this novel whose modalities, stakes and process required me to a certain level of detail and made necessary this time of work, in Brussels, Marseilles then in Japan, on the traces of my text, in the settings of the novel. As the book is based on a minimal narration, which I would moreover prefer to define as sincere, life, from what I live of it, being less romantic than what the novels tell me about it, but rather happening by chance, reminders , intuitions and discoveries, as it is also built according to a network of intelligences, references and hyperlinks, Rétine required a certain discipline to succeed in making each of these intentions effective. The text therefore did not emerge upset from these months of latency, but it needed time. He had to slow down and accept his mistakes, to endure the speed he describes.

What you raise about my relationship to contemporary art has also contributed to this period of rest. The idea was never to write about art or anything else, it's the things that engage me, inspire me, or what I believe in, that break into my writing. My vision is loaded with images, convictions and intuitions that flow into my production. Once I decided to use works to question their textual, virtual and visual circulations, from John Cage to Hélio Oiticica via Fischli & Weiss, Pamela Rosenkranz or Ryūe Nishizawa, and of course after having created the character of DGF to interpret all that the work of Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster had brought me, who was already a literary figure through his exchanges with Enrique Vila -Matas, Paul B. Preciado or even Catherine Robbe-Grillet, the challenge was not to content myself with an overly cerebral use of these works and rather to arrange them as in a treasure hunt to bring out the sensitive patina , even sensual, and make them my own.

I see and share what you describe about a certain outdated fringe of literature, especially when it comes to evoking current creation. I read but have nothing more to say. Rétine transcribes the look I have on these artists as on any other contemporary matter, sometimes acid but always benevolent I hope, doubtful, admiring, treating in the same way economic drifts and aesthetic prowess, with gentleness and precision. I had to take my time to expand the mental influence of these works and extract something more embodied. These representations then began to create their own language from page to page, chapter to chapter, like in a picture book. The story hosts very different materials and mixes up a lot of textures and visual registers, but I wanted everything to fit into a unity similar to our gazes capable of bringing together all the images that pass before our eyes. This is also the meaning of my title.

To answer you about this change, I could simply tell you the truth, namely that the previous track was protected, that I had to find another one for rights issues and that, very instinctively , Retina seemed obvious to me, but I like the idea that our conversation can go beyond this pure coincidence. If I don't want to go into the theorization of a modification as fortuitous as it is spontaneous, I can tell you that this word alludes not only to the name of the exhibition designed by DGF at the Kobe museum as well as to the title of the exhibition catalog laid out by the narrator on his arrival in Berlin, but which he evokes above all what he defines, the organ of vision, this thin ocular membrane, a screen once again. This title highlights the tool and less what it aims at, it represents more the gesture of seeing than the thing observed. Place of transition from reality to perception, the retina is the surface on which images are printed and the gaze is expressed. This is also the definition of the book.

Thank you for this beautiful answer, dear Théo, so many things to write to you in turn, and on such different levels that I am dizzy… I wouldn't want your book to say what it doesn't. don't say, dump on your pages speeches that you precisely avoid brilliantly. But how not to think the world while reading you? And I'm talking about the only existing world: that of today, right now.

Yesterday on the radio I was listening to the philosopher and mathematician Olivier Rey who said (I quote from memory) that there are three possible attitudes when faced with the unprecedented in today's world: Denial, all eras are unprecedented and ours no more than the others, a sort of Circulate there's nothing to see vaguely contemptuous. Enthusiasm: we recognize that there is something new and we are delighted, we are at the dawn of an era wonderful where all the problems will be solved in particular by the progress of science and technologies, Artificial Intelligence could even solve the problem of death! Then a kind of sluggishness, let's calm down everything is only impermanence, the new of yesterday is driven out by the new of today which itself will be driven out by that of tomorrow, so let's simply follow the movement, every day is enough for its trouble, its share of likes, its Insta and Facebook posts, the news feed like an Ariadne's thread without goal or objective.

It seems to me that Retina escapes these three attitudes, precisely by not proposing any attitude, by contenting itself (less is more) with offering the reader a look-to-write which traces a furrow on new ground, that of an Appearing that goes from the Visible to the Sayable and returns there in a magnificent and calm to-and-fro like the blue eye of a mountain lake gazing at the sky. A book (personally I am very sensitive to this) is also the off-screen of the book, what it chooses not to say, where it does not go, what the author carefully decides not to to write. It's even more "brilliant" when it comes to a first novel written by a young author, you can really want to "say everything" in a first novel!

Retina, it's as if obscurely I've been waiting for this book for a long time, that someone goes "that way" and in doing so reaches out to me, opens my eyes and makes me see (perhaps ) a bit of that black light that Victor Hugo was talking about just before he expired: I see a black light. seems to me rather to go towards a new ontology – to think of the word poetry coming from the Greek poïein which means simply: to do. It must immediately be added that this simply doing is obviously as simple as it is complex. This relationship to seeing presented in the book would be a detachment, a loosening, both a slight withdrawal and a step forward… Saying this, I am not explaining your novel, I am trying to put into words what it opens up to me. could summon everything I know (the little) of philosophy, science, art history, I could sample with more or less skill what I have retained from Merleau-Ponty or more close to us Georges Didi-Huberman or Stéphane Lambert for example, it might not be without interest but I would miss “my target”, your book. The main pitfall being to imply that Retina needs theory and concepts to be understood or read, as if your novel were an applied art, the studious application of thoughts and theories that would precede or even justify it. However, it is not so, just like “Cézanne paints” as the song says, you make sentences and visions and nothing is missing. Merleau-Ponty, Didi-Huberman, Lambert, etc., are not "Rosetta Stones" to decipher your alphabet (an experience cannot be deciphered, it is done, lived and crossed), but they can bring a interesting lighting, like a variation of focal length, and then who writes the novel? The novelist alone? And who writes the theory? Only the theoretician? What if the novel was written by the theoretician and the theory by the novelist? "We would have to review knowledge" as Duras said, we would have to review understanding and knowledge, we would have to review many things to finally get out of our human nights... especially since science is also advancing, giving us clues to the gallop, quantum physics in particular, which teaches us for example that there is in fact a solidarity between seeing and the thing seen, that it is a couple, that the simple fact of seeing / watching / observing such a thing modify or even create it! This idea is counter-intuitive but it has now been proven (experiment of the double groove or Young's Slits), seeing-seen is a relation, we can no longer detach one from the other: the electron modifies its way of acting and appearing, as if aware of being observed, as if aware!

Let's take an example. The man, the tree and the ant would be a fable written by a post-quantum La Fontaine! All men know what a tree is, right? But little ant on the trunk or on a branch of the same tree, what does it know? What can she see and imagine of this same tree? A whole cosmos certainly! Even if the ant does not have the overall and a priori complete view that we have, can we affirm that the experience of the insect, its "vision" of the tree is more false or more reduced than the OUR ? The branch, for us, from afar, ultimately comes down to a line. It's just a line. But the ant revolves around it, isn't that a tenfold dimension and richer than the simple line? We experience ourselves as the ultimate stage of the perception of things and beings, and if we were ourselves ants in relation to other beings or beings? Morality: prudence and modesty, sir. Calm, softness, precision and silence I want to add...

I like the fact that you draw such a Retina mapping. The text takes shape with each reading, and I am touched that your gaze produces so many images thanks to my book. They are now in your eyes.

Théo Casciani, Rétine, P.O.L editions, August 2019, 288 p., €19,90 — Read an excerptThéo Casciani, born in 1995, is an author. His textual and visual works have been presented in various publications and institutions such as Nuit Blanche, Actoral, AOC or Possession Immédiate. He is notably a graduate of the contemporary writing workshop of La Cambre in Brussels.

Calendar:• Reading, with Pierre Rousseau, September 10, at the Center Wallonie-Bruxelles, for the Extra! festival, in Paris.• Reading, with Kazumichi Komatsu, October 5, at the Kyoto Art Center, for Nuit Blanche , in Kyoto. • Lecture, with Liam Warren, October 8, in Montevideo, for Actoral, in Marseille.