Le Marché, petit commerce documentaire

In 1990, at the same time as I met beekeeper Marcel Pilate – who changed my life (giving it a better taste for me, to be precise) and who hired me –,  I discovered the name of  Alexander Kojève thanks to Michel Surya and his biography of Georges Bataille, La Mort à l’œuvre. I then made a film on the musical and philosophical theme of neighbour and neighbourhood (Le Vicinal) which linked Pilate and Kojève through a fragmented reading of Kojève’s Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: “Human Desire must be directed toward another Desire. For there to be human Desire, then, there must first be a multiplicity of (animal) Desires.” Further on: “In the bee hive, there is a division of labour”…. Twenty years later in Fécamp, in the very spot where I had accompanied Marcel Pilate to sell the honey – the market, I discovered that Michel Surya lived in the neighbourhood. In the meantime, he had published Portrait de l’intermittent du spectacle en supplétif de la domination: “One day we will look on this epoch as one that, through the market, subjected art as perfectly as, several centuries earlier,  the princes and clergy had subjected it absolutely.” As for myself, I chose another, more human (animal) market as a community. I wanted to film this market and pay tribute to Surya for having revisited Kojève, who certainly kept me laughing. Sabine Haudepin (also a neighbour) was able to express this feeling superbly in her reading. (P.C.)

“Indeed, we all know that the man who attentively contemplates a thing, who wants to see it as it is without changing anything, is ‘absorbed’ so to speak, by this contemplation — that is, by this thing. He forgets himself, he thinks only about the thing being contemplated; he thinks neither about his contemplation, nor — and even less— about himself, his ‘I’,…The more he is conscious of the thing, the less he is conscious of himself. He may perhaps talk about the thing, but he will never talk about himself; in his discourse, the word ‘I’ will not occur. For this word to appear, something other than purely passive contemplation, which only reveals Being, must also be present. And this other thing…is Desire.” (Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel [1947], Cornell Paperbacks, 1980)