ULTIMA NECAT I JOURNAL INTIME 1978-1985

by Philippe Muray

À quoi peut bien servir un Journal, celui-ci particulièrement ? À témoigner, mieux que les ordonnancements et les compositions des livres eux-mêmes (reposant sur un tri a priori) du tohu-bohu, du mélange, du perpétuel bordel dans une tête, de la superposition constante de préoccupations d'ordres multiples et différents. Ce témoignage peut-il intéresser qui que ce soit ? Encore faut-il que celui qui l'élabore ait réussi à se rendre intéressant… Qu’on ait envie de connaître sa vie, les mélanges amers de sa vie. Toute l’échelle des souffrances… »
(Philippe Muray, 5 novembre 1984)

598 pages, Paperback

First published January 12, 2015

About the author

Philippe Muray (1945 in Angers, France – March 2, 2006 in Paris) was a French essayist and novelist. None of his works have yet been translated into English. In 2002, Daniel Lindenberg included him in his list of "new reactionaries", along with Michel Houellebecq, Maurice Dantec, Alain Badiou, Alain Finkielkraut and others. In 2010, the French actor Fabrice Luchini read some of Muray's works at the Théâtre de l'Atelier in Paris, which contributed to a renewed discussion of his writings in the French press.

Reviews

[Philippe Malzieu · Rating 5 out of 5]

For some month, I have not found what I read exciting. Not bad either, which would allow me to write an epouvantable review. Not just poor. So read the classics? Perhaps. I wanted to buy the last Russel Banks, just published in French, (idleness to read it in English). He is already in depletion , it will be re-published, So Philippe Muray. It's a kind of atrabiliary Leon Bloy. He had written the best book on Celine. The one on Rubens is one of the most marvelous art book. I discover with this book that he had also written (for eating ) one hundred of pulp roman. Compare to this collection "Brigades mondaines", "Story of O" is a children garden. Thus, a complex personality. Muray throws a sharp-edged and pitiless glance on its contemporaries. He tracks the silly thing, conformism and the politically correct. In France, he had work.

VULNERANT OMNES ULTIMA NECAT : all hurt, the last one kill, it is the sentence which was reproduced on the sundials

I am page 52. At the beginning, he spoke on the interview he had done with René Girard for the chic review AD immortalized by Woody Allen. He ask him on sacrifice sacred and murder. Sacrifice, sacred but also separate, it's the same etymology. I cannot to prevent me from thinking of these 17 deaths of the beginning of January, but of terrible the images on Internet. If the solution was to take from their crime its sacred character, to bring back them to their condition of murder and torturer?
As always, Girard is a solution.


I find it very difficult to write a review for this book. I did not know how to start. The diairies, everybody know. In France the most famous are the Goncourt brother's one (very nasty), the Gide's one (very boring) and the Jules Renard's one (my preferate). Trivial and ordinary mix with transcendance, small miseries, ordinary daily life but also literary life and creation. There is shamelessness in this setting with naked. .But often, the dice are pipes. The writer stages himself. It is an egocentrist manifest in which the author is the hero. In each book, an author speak about himself. But the diary is the summit of the self celebration.
Why is it so different here ? First, this text has an incredible density. Muray is a literary monument. He was with Debord and the situationnists, he worked with Sollers (he did not like him) at Tel Quel, He writed for left wing newspapers. But he always tackled the ideologies and was a fine observer of the dead of marxism. He became a true idol for the right-wing but is well respected by the left wing. So uncategorized,
This book is a fight, a true combat. Quotes, many quotes. Sometimes to many quotes which harm the demonstration. But it is not a thesis, only notes and sentences writen day after day. He opposes all of them. They are all here, Plato, Heidegger, Maître Eckard, Athanase, Althusser...It is a combat of Titan between a man and the Knowledge about existential question, God, death, progress...
It is not a diary. It is a novel, perhaps the first novel of the XXIth century.