Stéphane Zagdanski is a French novelist, essayist and contemporary artist born on 28 April 1963 in Paris, France.
Biography
Stéphane Zagdanski is the third son of a Jewish family, whose grandparents emigrated from Poland in the beginning of the 20th century.
Shortly before his birth, his parents and two brothers moved to the western suburb of Paris, where Zagdanski had a childhood that, in his memoires, he describes as perfectly happy.
When he was 20 years old, while pursuing philosophy studies at the Sorbonne, he read Emmanuel Levinas which introduced him to the Talmud and to Jewish Thought, with which he was immediately enthused; he perceived in it a combination of profundity and imagination of a kind typical, in his view, to Literature.
When he was 23 years old, he earned his philosophy degree, inspired by the work of Emmanuel Levinas, and at the same time wrote a first—theological-erotic—novel which remains unpublished. As soon as he obtained his degree, he left the university to devote himself exclusively to writing.
Chronology of publications
First journal and revue publications
In December 1987, the revue Pardes (founded and edited by Shmuel Trigano) published his first study dedicated to Jewish thought, titled "The Flesh and The Word", which was reprinted in 2003 in the collection of his essays Fini de rire. This essay is a reflection on incarnation organized around the theme of putrefaction as developed in Rabbinic literature.
In October 1989, the revue Les Temps Modernes published a study—titled "Signs of Time, an essay on temporality in Rabbinic literature and in Kafka's The Castle," in which Zagdanski combined a meditation on The Castle with reflections on Time in Jewish Thought. This essay was reprinted in 2003 in the collection Fini de rire.
L'Impureté de Dieu (The Impurity of God)
In 1991, éditions du Félin published his first book, L'impureté de Dieu: La lettre et le peché dans la pensée juive (The Impurity of God: the letter and sin in Jewish Thought). With an hommage to Jewish Mysticism and Thought, Zagdanski returns to some aspects of his study "The Flesh and The Word" and attempts to analyze the theme of impurity in accordance with various Biblical and Rabbinic perspectives, among which are the creation of the world, original sin, the babelization of language, hermeneutics, ritual, etc. "The result," wrote John Gelder, "is a surprising, invigorating or obsessional dialogue with words, like a casually playful God."
In 2005, éditions du Félin published a second edition with a new preface and the title L'Impureté de Dieu: Souillures et Scissions dans la pensée juive (The Impurity of God: Stains and Scissions in Jewish Thought).
Céline seul (Céline Alone)
In 1993, Gallimard, in the collection L'infini edited by Philippe Sollers, published this book length essay in which Zagdanski seeks to resolve the complex question of Céline's anti-Semitism, and the cathartic role this pamphleteering rage and fury could play in the elaboration of his novelist genius. "Zagdanski's method," John Gelder wrote, "is a fascinating approach to Céline's texts and statements: a Talmudic method—the author plainly says so, which confronts different interpretative levels with one another, and does not provide conclusions on behalf of and instead of the reader."
Le sexe de Proust (The sexuality of Proust)
Zagdanski continued with the parallel he established, in Céline seul, between Celine and Proust, in Le sexe de Proust (Gallimard / L'infini 1994), a book length essay in which he questions the imaginary boundaries between "normality" and "homosexuality" in À la recherche du temps perdu, boundaries that Proust, according to Zagdanski, never prohibited himself from crossing in thought.
"His extraordinarily captivating demonstration," wrote Jacques Franck, "aims to establish that "the primordial revelation of the Recherche is the heterosexuality of writing, which Proust discovered only is as much he himself was heterosexual in soul, as he was circumcised of heart. Soul…body…heart…spirit, a whole—Catholic—theology, outside of which it is as ridiculous to claim to read Proust as it is to hope to make a Mormon like de Sade." "
De l'antisémitisme (On Anti-Semitism)
In 1995, Julliard published Zagdanski's De l'antisémitisme, a book on "the Jewish Question" considered in the light of midrashic exegesis of the story of Balaq and Balaam in the book of Numbers; an exegesis interwoven with dialogues with two imaginary, anagrammatic accomplice interlocutors, as well as with numerous real-life narratives. "Neither study, no thesis, nor pamphlet," wrote Josyane Savigneau, "here is a kind of treatise, very personal, paradoxical and provocative like its author, combining private journal, novel (dialogues with characters who are kinds of the author's doubles), essay, and ceaselessly playing on and with digression and ridicule." Publication of Zagdanski's fourth book was occasion for Sébastien Lapaque to emphasize the unity of the author's approach pursued since L'impureté de Dieu: "Zagdanski is building a coherent body of work. He does not abandon a subject once he has treated of it, but rather reintegrates it into his reflection which is continually advancing, colliding with and displacing the received ideas in his path."
Les intérêts du temps (The Benefits of Time)
Zagdanski's first novel, Les intérêts du temps, published in 1996 by Gallimard in the series L'infini, explores the global ravages of computerized society through the itinerary of a learned young man named "Martin Heidegger", who is interested in ancient Greek literature, and who is confronted with the grotesque behind the scenes machinations of a culture magazine. The novel's narrator interweaves dubious and nihilist characters in the guises of the period he describes.
"Stéphane Zagdanski means to give a complete vision of the period," wrote Eliane Tonnet-Lacroix. "His first novel, Les intérêts du temps, presents itself as a kind of "agenda" of the hero, Martin Heidegger, a writer and thinker like his namesake (the reference to the philosopher of Being, who condemned the reign of Technique, is revealing). Alternating between comedic scenes, learned conversations, and acerbic and paradoxical reflections, Zagdanski produces, with brilliance and an obvious sense of provocation, a ferocious depiction of our technological, sexualized, mediatized world, in which it is simulacrum of culture as well as of love that rule."
Philippe Forest, in his analysis of the novel, wrote: "From September to September, the reader follows a year in the life of a young writer. In its course, the novel offers different definitions of itself. It presents itself as a kind of agenda, composed in the margins wherein time writes of itself, revealing the fiction of its why, the threads of its how. From this comes the eminently fluid structure of a novel that joyously lets multiply within itself the moments played on the written stage of perception and thought."
Mes Moires (My Moïra)
At the age of 33, Zagdanski wrote his memoires, titled Mes Moires and published by Julliard in 1997. With regard to the title, the author writes: "Don't explain. The shimmering flashes of my memory. The coincident-accident weft and weave of my "I", the lot and emblazon of my words, etc." The text consists of short, untitled notations, modeled on Nietzsche's Aurora, wherein Zagdanski discloses the combative career of a young writer, and evokes the resistances to his writings that he had to outwit, before they were published—up until the publication of L'impureté de Dieu. He also describes a number of erotic encounters, publishes a portion of his correspondence, and concludes the book--after reproduction of an EKG obtained in a pharmacy, with the reiteration of his joy in living, what is called, a resurrectional life.
"Stéphane Zagdanski," wrote Marlène Amar, "provokes, titillates, plays with and upon the reader, serenades him with virtuosity, taking him from pleasure to anger, from despondency to jubilation, only in the end to leave him hanging, with the haughty declaration: "The human kind is not my kind.""
Miroir amer (Bitter Mirror)
Zagdanski's second novel, Miroir amer (Gallimard / L'infini 1999), is about genetic experimentation with life and meditates on what connects birth and death. In the novel, we learn of the trials and travails of a man who cannot come to terms with his own conception through in vitro fertilization. This novel is also a critique of the delusions and deceptions of what it names "Technique" in the lives of human beings, and the title's double meaning evokes the blindness of a reflection that has become the sole horizon of destiny ("amer"/"bitter", also means, in nautical terminology, the reference point by which a ship navigates).
In his analysis of the novel, Philippe Forest lists the themes with which Zagdanski treats: "He touches here upon a mine of particularly dense and profound meaning (childhood and death, sexuality and technique, identity and twinhood; the reader will perhaps be surprised that these provide the subject matter for a novel as elliptical as Miroir amer. With its often overwritten style, its discontinuous intrigue broken up into a series of fluffy scenes, with its characters absent to the tragedy of their own life, Zagdanski's new novel can sound strange to the ears of a reader accustomed to a more naturalist treatment of these same themes. But it would be wrong to too quickly impute to its bizarre tone a clumsiness or confusion of purpose. In fact, Miroir amer takes us into this world according to Technique which is already our own and in which every form of interiority is as if voided and discarded."
During this same period, Zagdanski wrote a kind of appendix to Miroir amer, published, in August 1999, in the revue L'infini, in the form of a critical study of the latest excesses of Technique, titled "The Idolatrous Science". This study concludes with an exegesis of the portion from Genesis on the sterility of Rachel and Jacob's experiments to propagate the flock of sheep given to him by his uncle and father-in-law Laban. This essay was reprinted in 2003 in the collection Fini de rire.
Pauvre de Gaulle! (Poor de Gaulle!)
In March 2000, Zagdanski published Pauvre de Gaulle! (éditions Pauvert/Fayard). This novel recounts in comic and sarcastic mode a century of French history, through the emblematic figure of General de Gaulle. The 580 page book presents itself at once as: a critical pamphlet on de Gaulle's life, work and ideological influences (from his grandmother Josephine's moralistic writings to his last visit with Franco, the year before his death); as the narrative of the writing of the book itself, describing the reactions to the project by those close to him—his Brazilian fiancée, his editor, his writer friends; and as the account of a month spent in London, in which the narrator is inspired by the exile of a few writers who preceded him in Britain's capital. The narrator also tells the story of his father's family during the Nazi Occupation of Paris. Pauvre de Gaulle! is thus a hybrid composed of novel, personal journal, pamphlet, historical essay, and travel narrative.
With regard to Pauvre de Gaulle!, Jean-Pierre Salgas compares Zagdanski to Gombrowicz: "In its best pages (the derisory pastiche of de Gaulle-like destiny: Zagdanski exiled in London, in the language of Shakespeare and Churchill, in the country of Freud at the end of his life), Zagdanski can remind one of Gombrowicz of the novel "Trans-Atlantic", confronted with a polonized France in abject adoration before its totem."
It was also at the beginning of 2000 that Stéphane Zagdanski met Viviane, the young Central African women whom he married in July of the same year, and who will become the model for the main character of his novel Noire est la beauté (Beauty herself is black).
Autour du désir (Around Desire)