Contemporary Heretic

In a recent essay, Gil Caroz invites us to heed Jacques-Alain Miller’s call, in the context of the formation of La Movida Zadig, to take “inspiration from Simone Weil and to create a group where each member is oriented by an exclusive fidelity to his own inner light, that is to say his own way of thinking things and not to an external authority or to a common and consensual ideal”. I want to pause on this example and look a little more closely at Weil, her symptom, and what she means by the “inner light”.

I didn't even know the name Constantin Fântâneru. His only novel, Interior, appeared in 1932, and received the prize of the Society of Romanian Authors. I read it and was amazed by the lyricism of Fântâneru’s prose, the brilliant adjectivation of his sentences; it is a work whose form and style strongly reveals the logic of his writing, even if it does indeed lack a plot or argument.

We know what determines the possibility of understanding within a community: it is the meaning determined by the Name of the Father. This also establishes a canon, a kind of orthodoxy. In a sense, the landscape of modernity, marked by the decline of the Name-of-the-Father, presents a landscape made up of paths, alleys, lanes where everyone must find his or her own way.