Our Share in this World

The World of People

The process of reading itself is described as an exchange between a text and a reader/interpreter. The procedure, when we are dealing with narrative structures, proceeds in the following way: the events and characters from a given novel or novella reflect a world of fiction. This “world” passes through another fictive world (point of view; view of the world), which belongs to the one that reads who, for his part, “constructs”8F what he reads as a text or work. Valmond’s craving/wish for satisfaction from The Dangerous Relationships by Laclos is identified in one “situation”, for instance, in which Turvel allows to be adored, whereas Merteille tries to prevent the initial wish, after which Valmond rejects Merteille’s9F advice. Valmond wants something in a “situation” in which defies this want, and this for its informs us for a “world” of prohibitions and permits, built in the fiction The Dangerous Relationships. The “situation” functions as a sign for the meaning “prohibitions” and “permits”; the latter differ from “the prohibition” and “the permits” existing in the spiritual world of a reader not living in Laclos’s epoch. From a reader’s viewpoint, it is possible to determine this world of which the author of The Dangerous Relationships speaks as of a world of “double relations”: some are built according to the law truth (être) and others are built in accordance with the law illusion (paraпtre). The compulsion (Merteille) that bars the way of Valmond’s craving is surmounted by astuteness.10F
The world of books is “a world of paper” in which the destiny of people/heroes from paper flows. Nevertheless, it is completely different in the world of living people in which as well (we know this from experience) there are built relations by illusion or relations by truth that constitute a “living” situation. Different – because the consequences are different too: a certain dictatorship, which is hidden for instance under the mask of democracy, does not have equal effects in the book of literature and in the book of life. The latter is a topic many new books by Cvetan Todorov systematically deal with for more than one decade. This leads to the immediate conclusion that his analysis of the behaviour of the literary heroes ranging from the classical ancient Homer’s heroes all the way to the heroes of James, Conrad, and Dostoyevsky, naturally led him to the behaviour of “living” heroes or heroes of “our” life, such as Hitler and Gering, Lenjin and Stalin or Marek Edelman and Popjelusko.

This cycle of much dramatic and not less edifying analyses in vivo began with the book Conquest of America (La conquête de l’Amérique, 1982). This book has an indicating subtitle that drags out as an invisible red thread in all Todorov’s later books: “the question of the other”, how we transform “the other” into an instrument for our own needs and how much (when and whether?) we are ready to treat him as – a goal. Here is what the great historic events of XVI century should inform about, “who will see how the biggest genocide in the history of mankind is prepared” (ibid, 13) – the extermination of the ancient civilisations in the American continent. What once advanced Europe used to do to the backward and “primitive” America was repeated in XIX century, which brought to existence national states, and these brought about nationalism: with nazism as an optimal variant, that evolved into racism. How did the intellectual elite behave in such circumstances? Did the value systems and “positions” of Condorsset, Monteigne, and Montesqieu; Sen Simon, Helvecius and Furie; Tokville, Renan and Arto have a share in that? Is there any sense and justification in the antinomy advanced and primitive community? Is this antinomy based on the structure superior– inferior in the individual relations, which justify and recommend “egoism” as the first generator of ethnocentrism? When and under what conditions the particular is proclaimed to be universal? Can the advanced world “create” and not only preach humanism? These are the issues handled in the book We and the Others (Nous et les autres, 1989).
If XVII century was a century that confronted one civilised (Europe) and one primitive world (America), in which the executioner-civilisation in a bestial manner massacred the innocent, primitive American world in the name of European “progress”; if in XIX century civilised (leading) nations were confronted with one another, in the race for hegemony, our XX century moved and focussed this conflict inside, in the individual itself. Namely, the individual in the XX century started to exist when he does not exist since there is yearning for and belief in a perfect, ideal, and once and for all – Man. Are only the circumstances those that produce such a type of global and general (modern) behaviour?; are only the political systems (the totalitarian) guilty of the crimes that progress and culture does not only not reduce but, on the contrary, increases and multiplies? Are people simply irreparably good, and political systems irreparably bad, and the more often and the more fundamentally they are fixed, the worse they become? It would be easy to answer these questions only under the condition that one thinks that: either man is guilty of everything or his systems, which would mean that there exist systems without substances and substances outside the systems.
Searching for an established and clear reply to questions of this kind, Cvetan Todorov came to the conclusion that, with the same patience and systematics, the components of the world should be examined in the way that sociology examines “man in the world”. In this way started his anthropological series of books comprising Opposite to Extremity (Face а l’extême, 1990) Life in a Community (La vie commune, 1995), Estranged Man (L’homme dépaysé, 1996).