The philosopher Andre Gorz committed suicide with his wife
AFP September 24, 2007
Information supplied by: Multitudes-Infos
The philosopher Andre Gorz, founder of the weekly Le Nouvel Observateur, died Monday, Sept. 24, at the age of 84. 
He suicide with his wife at their home Vosnon in Dawn, according to relatives of the couple.
Born in Vienna in February 1923 under the name of Gerard Horst, Andre Gorz, regarded as a thinker of Ecology politics and capitalism, is the author of Ecology and Ecology and Politics and Freedom. He founded, with Jean Daniel notamm ent, Le Nouvel Observateur in 1964, under the name Michel Bosquet.
After retiring in the 1990s, he had retired Vosnon in a house, 35 km from Troyes, with his wife, which i the e silent very loving and was suffering from a progressive disease for many years. According to relatives, is a friend who found the drama on Monday morning. Messages posted on their door that we should "prevent the gendarmerie."
Andre Gorz or moral conversion of an exile
The world of books , 24/09/2007
Some books may have several lives. The Traitor is one of those. This autobiographical essay of 1958 is an amazing book for its style and its origins. In 1939, just after the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany, the teenager who became Andre Gorz is sent to Switzerland. Jewish father, Catholic mother decides to shelter in a boarding house near Zurich. He saw this separation in a "hopeless solitude." This distance revives in him a sense of internal exile which he had so far not really taking the action. His condition mestizo inauthentic "pushed in a frantic search of the meaning of his existence. He tries to escape by an abstract reflection on his own condition. Being and Nothingness Sartre act on it as a trigger for her "moral conversion".
late 1945, at age 22, he began writing a philosophical treatise.
"He had found a theory of alienation and morality (...), explain why individuals may be crippled in their options and support their mutilation (1)." His initiative coincides with an initial exchange with Sartre ("Morel" in The Traitor), came to hold a conference in Geneva. One thousand five hundred pages later, he presented the results of Morel's work. Sartre, absorbed in writing his Critique of Dialectical Reason, no one pays little attention. Because he had anticipated its failure, he then invested in writing an autobiographical essay.
What the apprentice philosopher seeks through this existential self-analysis? It aims to "invent an activity that picks up his" Diaspora "singular and back its members scattered in a new country. "Groping along, he has developed a method: by incessant back and forth between his past and his present condition, he advances his mind and pulls out a theoretical synthesis based on existentialist writings, psychoanalysis and the work of Marx. Result:
The Traitor, unclassifiable and fascinating book that will be published with a laudatory foreword by Sartre. Gorz was born and it was his " master "who announces:" The intelligence of Gorz strikes at first glance:
is one of the most agile and more acute as I know, "writes Sartre. The Traitor is not intended to tell the story of a convert, he is the conversion itself. "
Gorz is facing his destiny as a writer. The really understand? The success of the Betrayer in any case is huge. He changed the life of this "needy pathetic." An article published in 1961 in Modern Times is added to this reissue in a shortened version. Gorz it shows that aging is a man first "social". We grow old because we are the beginnings gradually less and less possible and that our past is becoming more foreshadowing of our future. This reissue is a great opportunity to discuss the work of Gorz and ponder the evidence sent to each of us in his seminal work.
Christophe Fourel
(1) This Treaty shall be finally published in 1977 as the basis for a moral (ed. Galilee). The traitor followed Vieillissment , A. Gorz, Gallimard, "Folio test", 412 p.
Andre Gorz, the philosopher and his wife
The world of books , 26/10/2006 (updated on September 24 2007)
arrived at an age where he no longer feels the force to undertake a lengthy book, Andre Gorz backward over his life, realizes he has never wrote most, his relationship with his wife, and he began to write to her directly: "You'll have eighty-two years. You have shrunk six inches, you do not weigh more than forty-five kilos and you are always beautiful, graceful and desirable.
This is fifty-eight years we lived together and I love you more than ever. I carry back to the pit of my chest a devouring emptiness that only fills the warmth of your body against mine. "
Very few books and hang in a few sentences that set the tone, tempo, music and emotion, quality of life. We read the love letter to a woman alive, sick and suffering and will die one day, perhaps distant but anyway still too close, and this death also becomes unacceptable for one who reads for the writer. In the last lines, which include the first in a tone that grips the heart even more, this death is considered. Such a book, short, accurate, polished like a pebble without apparent effort, just remember what literature can when it rings true because it sounds right.
recounting a singular love, he falls straight into a debate going again on the couple. At one extreme, Sartre and Beauvoir, and Dorine Gorz that are well known: the experience of openness, fidelity the covenant of commitment to life and everything about other romantic relationships that are relationship allows himself without betraying the founding priority. At the other extreme, and Dorine Gorz, the same deal but this time in the exclusive agreement in body and soul since the soul is the lived body. Loyalty is reciprocity ethics: I do not make you what I do not want you to make me. Between these two paradigms, the range of possible arrangements, tacit agreements, compromises, lies, omissions, frustrations, successes displayed, hidden failures, or vice versa, arrangements that are Lot more or less chose to so many couples when they last.
The beautiful, in Letter to D., is not to give an example - Gorz, social philosopher, does not purport to establish a standard from a company that knows two exceptional somehow willed by history, the great one which contrasts the lives - but to give a political meaning to love. Not secession and shelter but achieving something that exceeds the confirming and confronting the world. In this case a work, philosophical, literary, journalistic whose both can all be proud because it works. This is not quite meet your soul mate, must still find a project that perpetuates the meeting productive and make something other than the relationship itself. Gorz, when he met Doris, wrote a philosophical essay, which must establish a hierarchy of human conduct face finitude, insecurity, community life, history, at what Sartre calls the "situation".
unwavering confidence
Such an undertaking can not perform almost as if someone was valid in rescuing them from their account. This is what Doris with unwavering confidence. They have experienced both the foundational experience of insecurity, they will build together, protect each other, the foundation on which to write about the insecurity that is life itself. Writing is her vocation. It helps, too professionally, became its librarian, his interlocutor, his first reader, his only criticism of a military trial capacity unstoppable. First galley, long, sometimes frustrating for him after the unfulfilled the philosophical essay, shared joy, when the traitor seems to have their lives open to others and they welcome it because in them they light up, as emotionally and intellectually. Dorine is sociable, spontaneous, Gorz is intelligent, extremely, introverted, retractable. It will change. In Letter to D., he explains the effect of the publication of a book when it is established that: "You have often said that this book (The Traitor) turned me as I wrote. ( ...) This is not to write it allowed me to change, is to have produced a publishable text and see it published. (...) The magic of literature: she made me go to the existence as well as I had described in my written refusal to exist. This book was the product of my refusal, was the refusal and, by its publication, preventing me to persist in this refusal. This is precisely what I had hoped and that the publication could only allow me to achieve: to be forced to hire me further than I could by my desire alone, and ask questions, pursue for I had not defined itself. "
They get together in a village in the Aube, on the threshold of the beautiful single house for which they left Paris in the 1980s.
From pasture one hectare around her, they made a garden with two hundred trees. It is as usual, friendly, discreet, friendly, too. They have aged him unless it hits including paleness and evil are silent; her for her all kinds of attention and it also for him. It is healthy, frail-looking as he always had, but the body lean and muscular, one suspects his approach.
It is translucent and smiling cautious: the pain of watching a gesture to jump on it too. They are friendly, ask questions, they came to ask for them without placing them on the grill.
She will not participate in the interview: this is the book to him, he is a painter, she model it is he that came to see, "she said, not the on the table that the table is good enough and that she did not quite recognize, even if he tells the truth, his truth to it. Subjectivity subjectivity remains.
The
Gerard Horst (her real name) is fully assumed by the author name of Andre Gorz. When he wrote this text, in spring 2006, it was not safe to publish, at its discretion, respect, and then he wondered who might be interested. Michel Delorme, his editor at Galilee, did not hesitate: he had to this book appears, because it is, in every sense of the word, a beautiful book, a necessary book, a book that delivers. What? Gorz is not sure but listen to what he says: he delivers from fear to express first-person feelings to understand the existentialist philosopher.
"I had already used the" you "in The Traitor, by talking to me, m'objectiver, see me as I might appear to others, describe myself in my hobbies, in this fleeing life which led me to thinking as theoretical and locked myself in a bubble. Betrayer was a work release, but I gave no room for love, and even I was betraying . But, having taken the measure of my existential position - unique as everyone's - I got to wear my thoughts on the social world and to decrypt the alienation of producers to their own product. In this letter to Doris, the "you"
I used to take a picture on my real life with her. The Aging in already, at age 38, I realized that age is to accept this fact of experience: it never does what you want and you never want what we do. So everyone is heteronomous. Yet we do what we have to judge because you feel and thus becomes capable of doing. And extends, however little it may, our sphere of autonomy. We must therefore agree to be finished to be here and not elsewhere, to do that and nothing else, to have this life only. LeSocrate Valery rightly said: "I was born many, and I'm dead, just one. The child who comes is a vast crowd that early life reduced to a single individual, one that manifests itself and dies." Dorine live, love and love our life together has taught me that, but I do not say because I do not understand yet how much I need her to write, she needed more me to live. "
Listen without judging
When Dorine Gorz and experienced in the 1970s, met with them Ivan Illich, Herbert Marcuse, Rossana Rossanda, William Klein, intellectuals and younger and active in social movements such as Marc Kravetz , Tiennot Grumbach, we remember how they receive absolutely no worldly people who had something to learn from each other and their discreet presence in them of his way to ask you bluntly on the essential of her way to listen without judging you when you had personal problems. The outside world was very strong at home Paris. Today they are still less frequent, visits to young people that inspires the work of Gorz in their action, union, political, social.
Academics also working on his work. Thus the world does he not come to them in their campaign only publications they read and discussed with her hard to write in journals or as Multitudes EcoRev. He publishes articles always very clear, difficult only because they express a thought radically different from that prevailing on the political economy.
he will vote for Presidential? "Probably, but without believing in the speeches of the candidates who promise full employment and lifetime employment.
All lie about this issue and the worst is that everyone knows.
The future is not played at the state policy, it is actually built in small communities, at municipal level, by social behaviors that break with the logic of financial gain. That's where the battles have meaning. " On this subject, he can talk for hours, run a full conviction. His radical critique of capitalism was not disarmed. His books the way to develop the finer, sharp. But we came not to talk about theory, he knows it. It was a question on the lips, once the Letter to D. closed with these words: "We would like everyone does not survive the death of another. We have often said that if, per impossible, we had a second life, we want to live together." A common exit in the manner of Arthur Koestler and his wife Cynthia? "We talked about this suicide two when we have learned. But it was their story, almost their fight. And I do not think it either. Dorine and I live in the infinity of the moment knowing that he is finished and that's fine. For us, this is enough. "
We smile at their luck, it is not given at all, they are given to the, they have built. At what price? She could only say . But nothing in his eyes betrayed the sacrifice, "so demoralizing for the person to whom they sacrifice themselves," said Oscar Wilde. A lovely couple with no children but with work, his books, and certainly this one, who remain.
Michel Contat
Benchmarks
1923: birth in Vienna, Austrian father, a Jew, a Catholic mother.
1939-1945: stateless board in Lausanne, studied chemistry, the test begins.
1946: Sartre meeting in Lausanne.
1947: meeting Dorine, English, Lausanne.
1949: married, moved to Paris.
1950: journalist for Paris-Presse and L'Express, under the pseudonym Michel Bosquet.
1954: French citizenship through Mendès France.
1955: finished the test, rejected by Sartre began writing autobiographical.
1958: published with the pseudonym of Andre Gorz, The Traitor, prefaced by Sartre.
1961: between the Committee for Modern Times.
1964: founded with John Daniel and some other Le Nouvel Observateur.
1964: Labor strategy and neo-capitalism.
1974: retired from Modern Times.
1980: Farewell to the proletariat (Galilee).
1983: Retires from the Nouvel Observateur. Moved to the countryside.
1997: Metamorphosis of work, search for meaning.
2003: Intangibles. Knowledge, Value and Capital.
2006: Letter to D. Story of love, Galileo
