English

“Manipulation has a bad reputation. It shocks us because it insinuates the feeling that we are no longer masters at the controls of our thoughts, our behaviors, our lives. As Philippe Breton rightly says, « manipulation consists in ‘breaking into’ someone’s mind in order to deposit an opinion there or provoke a behavior without that person knowing that there has been a break-in ».

Etymologically, however, this notion has nothing pejorative about it. It refers to a history of the hand. It is the gesture of the physiotherapist who relieves or prevents pain. It is the technique of the chemist who manipulates substances in his laboratory and advances science. It is also the dexterity of the prestidigitator who removes an object from the spectator’s sight before making it reappear. This magical dimension moreover enters into our metaphorical representations of the term: mental manipulation would transform us, like an occult force, into pawns that an invisible hand could move at will.”

Work directed by Benoît Heilbrunn, Psychologie de la manipulation, Agora essais

For a long time, when he was still a child and as today, in the circus where he believes he remembers being born, long before he set out on his quest and met Sang Chaud, within his mind and his body, Don Carotte observes two worlds facing one another…

– This is not a duel… and it is not in or for some hypothetical victory that they exist, he thinks: it is a reciprocal flight. Like two acrobats who cross paths in the air without ever grasping one another, leaving the audience with the illusion of a feat. The triumph of one is only the absence of the other.

And yet he sees it, he feels it: these worlds share everything… dust, objects, and the same bodies. There is no need to cross seas or mountains: it is enough to take a step or raise one’s eyes. The duel is already there, between dream and act, between the summit conquered by a word and the slope climbed by the legs, between the flowing sentence and the water that drowns, between the impulse of an idea and the trampling of the road.

What is said within him then becomes clear: the narrative is neither poem nor journal. It wishes to take everything in a single gesture: effort and thought, sweat and image. He knows the cry of the muscle and the dance of the word. No longer separating the walker from the writer, nor the swimmer from the dreamer. To be painter and pilgrim, everything together, a single breath. The enigma shifts. Where, in the human being, does this power lie that holds together what is opposed? How can one unite without reducing?

And immediately comes the other fear: if these worlds destroy one another… if one erases the other until only half a man remains… That would be the greatest impoverishment: to renounce the double game, to lose the alliance of flesh and dream, gesture and gaze. For is not living precisely to be two in a single instant?

Don Carotte still stands at the center. He does not move, and yet he wavers. He feels himself an eye: but an eye looked at, more than looking. A pupil offered to the spotlights, to the spectators, to the world. In that moment it is no longer his thought that prolongs his being; it is thought that passes through him. No longer madness, no longer reason, but that obscure point where everything begins without having begun, where everything is already there without yet being.