“The work of analysis consists in identifying, behind apparent diversity, regularities, oppositions or symmetries that, by narrowing the range of occurrences, reveal an underlying structure constituting a system that is not immediately visible.
In this sense, structural explanation, like many others, seeks to bring order to disorder. Far from being a sheer outburst that appears unorganised, violent episodes also follow forms and rules that extend beyond the characteristics, aims, beliefs and desires of each of the actors involved in the episode in question. However destructive and chaotic it may appear at first sight, violence has its elementary forms, battle its anatomy, war its organisation.”
Nicolas Marion, Tuer,
Comment expliquer les violences de masse,
Gallimard, NRF essais, p. 81
Where what we think we recognise can also lead us astray. When what we recognise does not quite coincide with what we discover, that is where knowledge truly begins.
– Why do you speak of wandering… And what wandering do you mean, to begin with?
– Félix’s wandering as he pursues Lucian.
– I don’t see.
– Félix’s wandering as he pursues Ignatius, who pursues his characters as they move through the Moon Child’s world, is not merely geographical.
– What do you mean by that?
– Even when the characters walk, board a ship, are shipwrecked, cross a forest or pass beneath a circus tent, this wandering belongs to the very way this world takes shape.
– A labyrinth?
– No character seems to have a complete map, because the map is being drawn as they move forward, and their passage alters its outlines.
– How can he find his way through it?
– You are closer to the truth than you realise… He is caught in it.
– Are you saying he is its prisoner?
– Félix begins by wanting to know where all this leads.
– And then?
– He gradually discovers that this was still the question of a man who believed the story lay before him.
– Like us?
– Once he has entered its movement, another question emerges, more unsettling and probably more fruitful…
– Where does it lead?
– What is being transformed as it unfolds?
And among the things being transformed, he must now include the person asking the question.
