Philippe Adam

Philippe Adam
Period: 2012-2013
Profession: Writer “The devil can’t save the world” (“Il diavolo non puo salvare il mondo”) In Epictetus’
Manuel, we find this interesting advice:
“It is also very dangerous to indulge in obscene talk, and when you find yourself at these kinds of conversations, don’t fail, if the occasion allows, to chastise the one who is holding such talk, if not, at least keep silent…”. Do not listen to obscene speeches, do not talk about your own obscenity, in short, keep silent about sexuality, leave it in the shadows, resist the temptation to make
a subject of it, show ”
by the redness of your forehead”, says Epictetus further on, ”
that these kinds of conversations do not please you”. And yet, they do. Epictetus’ lesson (sermon) would be meaningless if we weren’t in the ”
laisser aller” he condemns, if we weren’t curious to hear and tempted to talk, in short, if we really had no desire to hear about it, if ”
the redness” of our foreheads were only linked to a definitive disapproval that would make us want to run away rather than stay, our foreheads red, listening to ”
these kinds of conversations”. But there you go. After all, do ”
these kinds of conversations” exist? It’s rare to talk about your sex life, and it’s rare to hear others talk about it. Of course there are jokes, and of course there are adolescent boasts, but after that not much, as if the matter was quickly closed or had to be settled in the secrecy of bedrooms and analysts’ offices. We vacillate between “Everything is sexual” and prudery, opting more often than not for the strategy attributed to Talleyrand: “Since these mysteries escape us, let’s pretend to be the authors of them”. And so we smile knowingly at each other’s rare statements, acting as if we all know what’s going on, taking on the blasé air of those who have lived through a lot and are no longer surprised by anything or anyone. But what are we really doing? Why don’t we talk about it? What meaning do we attribute to our sexual life, and why do we talk about “sexual life” as if it were a life apart, separate from life itself? ”
The devil can’t save the world” is a project on the semiology of sexual practices. Among the ancients, for example, the same act could be strongly encouraged, accepted, morally reprobated or legally condemned, depending on the social status of the participants. The act itself was therefore less important than the meaning attributed to it, based on the codification of social roles that each individual had to respect. The Villa Medici itself is criss-crossed in its walls, or rather in its frescoes, by this question of roles. Cardinal Ferdinand de’ Medici had his own room, known as the Chambre des Amours de Jupiter, where he contemplated, from his bed, frescoes that were deemed so licentious that they were removed and destroyed by his successors. It is this missing part, these torn-off pieces, invisible because hidden from view, that will be discussed. Not all images are destined to end up in the dustbin, however, and it’s mainly images – whether erotic or pornographic – that currently take precedence over discourse. The vast majority of erotic literary productions are extremely weak, as are the sadly stereotyped so-called testimonials found in so-called “charm” magazines, whose photos we look at but don’t read. Multiplication of “bricks”, in the sense that Barthes spoke of “bricks” during his trip to China, to designate the monotonous speeches dictated by central power, from factory to factory, damning one minister and valorizing another; weariness with the same “elements of language”, the same scenes, the same gestures and the same words, would thus sign the exhaustion of the discourse of love. All would be said, and “from antiquity to the present day”, the living and the dead could sleep easy, nothing new. Not so sure. Because, apart from television programs, books and reports, there’s a whole erotic literature being written without being printed anywhere, and this literature is in our heads. Every day, we elaborate our sexual discourse, and the slightest desire is accompanied by an inner discourse that could be likened to a little fable, one that anyone can tell themselves, as soon as they desire someone even fleetingly. It’s this inner discourse that we’ll be talking about in the book to come, and the way in which each of us makes our own little cinema, elaborates our own fictions, in short, constitutes our own experience, silently, without proclamations, without fuss or hype, in our own corner, as if we were all the scriptwriters of our own erotic lives, at once obscene and modest. ”
The devil can’t save the world”, wrote Alberto Moravia in his collection of short stories
La
cosa e altri raconti (1983) , but it’s certain that our whispers, our embarrassments and our little secrets can’t either, just as it’s certain that the world doesn’t need saving, nor does anyone else, and that we’ll all end up in Hell.
Philippe ADAM