La Discrétion: Ou l'art de disparaitre (Éditions Autrement, 2013) by French philosopher Pierre Zaoui is, as the title makes clear, the art of disappearing. Discretion is Zaoui’s name for a sort of creative but at the same time combative stance of the individual who in joyful contemplation of the moment is able to leave behind a more self-stultifying and calculating self. It’s a term that, in the author’s analysis, acts as a class name for life encounters (“rare, ambiguë et infiniment précieuse”) with the potential to change and transform.It's a book that, in my own case, seems to have fulfilled a need. Zaoui valorises 'discretion' not as an ethical term but as perhaps the most profoundly silent form of protest imaginable against the maddening noise of the contemporary world.
But in what sense a 'disappearing'? I'm reminded of Nietzsche's celebration of "forgetfulness" in the Genealogy of Morals in which only the parts of a limiting burdensome past get freely discarded. For both Zaoui and Nietzsche “discretion” is the name for a distance--in Nietzsche at times an unpassable chasm-- to be kept between self and the world of others.In defense of "l'art de disparaitre" Zaoui turns for clarification to both contemporary authors like Gilles Deleuze, Maurice Blanchot, Norbert Elias and even Virginia Woolf and Walter Benjamin and the ancients (like Epicureans and Stoics). Nietzsche’s name, of course, appears as does Kafka’s whose exercise of “discretion” appears always more tempered, even-keeled. The term encompasses and ranges over many possible meanings as we move through Zaoui’s book. It’s hard to extract just a single definition. He’s tried valiantly to let authors, religious traditions and contemporary political realities reveal conditions favorable to its rise in our world.
To live quietly in a world of appearances is, among other things, to escape the cumbersomeness of abstract Platonic ideals that can never be approximated without disappointment, disillusionment. To keep a low profile (“raser le murs”) is preferable to the noisy display of the life of deeds and accolades. The ideal is, like Kafka’s, to disappear from the busy world into one of many discrete, unobtrusive ‘selves’, far from being a complete nihilistic rejection of life altogether. “Être discret” is an affirmation rather than escape from life: “Car [Kafka] dit ceci: être discret ou non n’est ni un bien ni un mal, n’importe pas, ce qui importe c’est de seconder le monde, c'est-à-dire, d’accepter d’un parte de ne pas être premier, de ne pas être au centre ni à l’origine, et d’autre part du soutenir ce qui est, de se mettre au service non de soi-tyran ou fantasme-mais de chaque chose, chacun être, chaque instant.”
Nietzsche’s “nihilisme extatique” or “the wisdom of Silenus” who cries in The Birth of Tragedy that it’s better not to have been born or to be may be seen as a more extreme form of Zaoui’s “l’art de disparaitre”. Nietzsche “être discret” amounts at times to an animal-like existence alternating between adaptation to harsh circumstances of life through dissimulation and ruse and proud display of one’s colors like a victorious predator: between indiscretion (“d’art du mensonge”:lying in the shadows) and discretion (“d’art du masque”:putting one’s best foot forward). Though Diogenes the great classical spokesperson of Parrhesia (“courage de la verite”) comes closer to Zaoui’s sense of “discretion”as break from the world, Diogenes’ escape seems also a little too extreme.
The concept of “discretion” we need, however, can’t just mean the artful display of animal instinct only or a relapse into naked barbarism. Zaoui’s “l'art de disparaitre” is more like the deference of primitive peoples in Lévi-Strauss’s “philosophie des sauvages” where to show respect and esteem due to others is motivated entirely by the good of the whole community: “la morale de la bonne distance”. This deference is another name for respectful cultural “distance” to be maintained between equally suffocating extremes of self (“soi”) and other (“l’autre”). Zoui says, “la discrétion est l’expérience de la jouissance paradoxale de se retirer soi-même, de se faire invisible, di disparaitre momentanément pour s’abandonner à l’apparition de l’autre, de cesser pour un instant d’être soi”.
It’s even tempting to look in religious scholastic, kabbalistic and mystical traditions for the origins of “la discrétion”, particularly in the writings of Thomas Aquinas, Isaac Luria and Meister Eckhart. Christian humility, emantist principle of creation (“en sof”) and mystical detachment (“Abgeschiedenheit”), while providing illuminating clues to the life of “discretion” , each fall short by being too abstract, too impractical: above all, by being too closely centered on persons, objects and external authorities. Literary authors like Proust, Woolf may, on the other hand, have gotten nearer to the goal by speaking, in Temps retrouvé and Mrs. Dalloway, of the peace and contentment to be found in creative abandonment of the world. Baudelaire in Fleurs du Mal marks its literary debut in the modern capitalist city(“experience des ‘villes-monde’ du capitalisme moderne”), always the arena for “discretion”.It’s in contemporary cultural productions (fiction, poetry, cinema) that the “act of disappearing” (“l’art moderne comme art de la disparition”)is perhaps best seen. Zoui’s discussion of Blanchot, in this regard, is particularly instructive.
Discretion, or the art of disappearing, can be rightly characterized as a beautifully transparent, anonymous and freely given type of presence that never calls attention to itself, preferring a life of the transitory or impersonal, always happiest at the margins, content to view the world from its own “interior castle”. This is not a world of classical Aristotelian forms, or Renaissance-type representations or heavy Kantian imperatives. “L'art de disparaitre” is synonymous not with being but becoming, with a life comprised of simple silent moments of joy, energy and sweetness. There are intimations of it in all the great cultural productions, having been perhaps the sole preserve of artists, poets, musicians. The goal is to now convert a cultural ideal into a living reality for citizens condemned to live in our frenetic world.