By RENATO JANINE RIBEIRO*
Afterword to the newly released book by Gérard Lebrun.
Memories of Gérard Lebrun
I met Gérard Lebrun in Paris, at the Casa do Brasil, in the apartment of my friend Olgária Matos, around 1975. I had never met him, but we all talked at length, I don't remember what about. I believe he had already come to USP for his second season among us, as a guest professor. Two or three years after that meeting, when I became a professor in the Philosophy Department, we met at the University and he invited me to lunch. It was the first of many lunches and of a good friendship, to which later I added the role of translating his articles for the Jornal da Tarde, from two of his books, What is power, with Silvia Lara, and later Random walks, and now, this The Revenge of the Noble Savage.
Thinking about it, the first time I actually saw him was a few years earlier, around 1971, when he passed through São Paulo on his way to Santiago, Chile, where he was going to teach, I think for a few weeks. He was going there during the time of the Popular Unity movement, during the government of Salvador Allende. During his brief stopover in Brazil, he gave us a talk, at the invitation of the Department. I don’t remember anything he said – in fact, I had forgotten that day, which only came to mind in the third or fourth draft of this text – but I know he impressed me. Especially his posture: his gestures, exuberant, meant something. He moved his head and arms, and this conveyed a meaning to those who saw him. He gave me and some friends the idea of a very free posture and a very independent way of philosophizing.
In times gone by, he had sympathized with the left. More than that, he had been a member of the French Communist Party. He was now a man of the right. But he showed no sympathy for the dictatorship that we were still living under at the time. From 1977 onwards, he would frequent the Mesquitas, the family that owned the Estadão, which was a conservative newspaper that had supported the 1964 coup, but which had some great qualities.
The first is that the Estadão He broke with whoever was in government – even if at first they corresponded to his values. I don’t know if it was out of dignity or simply because the rulers had shown themselves incapable of doing justice, in terms of facts, to the ideology of the “brave morning paper”. The second is that the newspaper separated its editorials from its reports. The conservative opinions of the Mesquitas did not interfere with the coverage of the facts. This is an essential trait, in fact, of good press – and I would say more: also of the academic world and of the decency of private individuals. We need to be able to respect reality, even – and perhaps above all – when we want to change it. Gérard Lebrun was, above all, this critical spirit, a liberal democrat who certainly had something of both.
He was also a very independent person. His homosexuality, at a time when this subject was still taboo, was something he did not hide.
Regarding Marxism, which at the time was a constant reference for professors and researchers – a school with which we might not agree, but which challenged us to take a stand – Gérard Lebrun was one of those, among many, who saw in utopia the seed of dystopia. He liked François Furet, and I think the title of one of this great historian's books, The Past of an Illusion – a joke with The future of an illusion, by Freud – would summarize many of his convictions. For him, Marxism, far from showing a future, pointed to the past.
It was a time when Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were dismantling social policies and the welfare state, created by social democracy, especially in Europe, which seemed to have become unnecessary for capitalism as it defeated communism and Marxism seemed to have suffered the sad fate of having turned a beautiful theory into a hateful practice.
I don’t know whether Gérard Lebrun would agree with what I am about to say: one difference between communism and fascism is that, while the practices of both, once in power, were detestable, the former had a good theory, which allowed it – when in opposition – to constitute a democratic force; the latter, however, had a doctrine (I will not give it the nobility of a theory) and a practice, both of which were detestable. (If I were to tell him this, I think he would dismiss it with a wave of his hand: he would probably reply that I granted the communists the gift of believing in their good faith, in their honesty.)
Gérard Lebrun, who criticized communism and admired the doctrinaires who were already called “neoliberals”, did not, however, as has been said, have any complacency about the dictatorship we were living under at the time. I remember once that, when translating an article of his in which he criticized the psychoanalytic establishment, I asked him if I could call the latter a System; he replied that it was not possible: “System” was the name the press gave to the apparatus of the Brazilian dictatorship; psychoanalysis, although criticizable, had nothing in common with it.
It might be interesting to tell you something about your relationship with Michel Foucault. They were friends; one day I asked him what the author of watch and punish proposed for prisons. His works had become a source of inspiration for all criticism of any form of discipline; but what concrete ideas did he have for criminals, for prisoners? Gérard Lebrun laughed, moved his head and hand in one of his typical gestures, as if they were his trademarks, and said that he had asked his friend this – and that Michel Foucault had replied: “I just wanted prisons to be more humane.”
His sister, Danièle Lebrun, younger than him, is a great actress in French comedy; she will be 87 years old when this book comes out. When François Mitterrand won the elections in 1981, by coincidence he took me to visit her; Gérard Lebrun said at her house that the socialist victory party had brought together the eagle, the rabble; his niece laughed and said to him: I was there, I am part of the rabble, I am the dog! I think theatricality was a gift of his, as well as his sister's; and of Foucault too.
Theatricality, which caught my attention since his lecture in the 70s in São Paulo, was a way of distancing oneself from statements, a kind of Brechtian theater, of making people mark a distance from what seemed obvious to them. The distance – as we would see in his Pascal, published in the Encanto Radical collection – in tours, detours and returns – was a way of making people think. Perhaps, despite the political distance between him and Foucault, this was the common point between them: to stretch the bonds of lazy thought to the point of fraying, to provoke the other (or oneself) to separate oneself from one's indolent convictions; in short, to invite one to philosophize.
When Gérard Lebrun collected his articles in the book called Random walks, his intention was to give it the title Passeios Paulistas; but his editor, Caio Graco Prado, from Brasiliense, objected that such a title would not be sold outside the state of São Paulo. So he agreed to call it in a way that evoked the strolls, almost synonymous with walking through Paris, but which evoked the times spent in the city of São Paulo, which he loved and where the articles would be published.
There was also its relationship with our language: a very strong, unavoidable accent; some confusion with one word or another.
About the experience of translating it: they were articles full of life, which demanded a conversion into our language that would maintain their vigor and forcefulness. That's what I tried to do. It gave me great pleasure. Even today, rereading it gives me great satisfaction.
It is impossible to talk about Gérard Lebrun without remembering the end of his presence in Brazil. At some point in 1995, he was beaming. He had gone to the Museum of Image and Sound when he saw an official car, which must have been black, pull up on the sidewalk; the President of the Republic got out of it. Upon seeing him, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, his friend of thirty years, greeted him warmly; we all know that our intellectual-president is a polite and charming person; he was overjoyed. That was the last time I saw him, and the last time we spoke.
Unfortunately, this joy was short-lived; less than a few months later, an accusation against him appeared in the press, which left him deeply shaken. I remember that in an interview he said, Folha de S. Paul, that his possible isolation did not bother him so much, since he had no social life, “no friends”. Our friend Luiz Carlos Bresser-Pereira then called me; he said he wanted to send the newspaper a letter, saying that he, I, plus Lourdes Sola and José Arthur Giannotti, were his friends. So we did. But he was really hurt – at least that’s what it seemed to me, from what I heard later.
I heard that Maria Lúcia Cacciola, passing through Paris, called him and they arranged to meet; he only spoke to her in French; she was moved, and that disarmed him. It is the last memory I have of him, and I think it is a good one: at a time of so much hostility, he felt that someone here liked him. Someone, I would say.
*Renato Janine Ribeiro is a retired full professor of philosophy at USP. Author, among other books, of Machiavelli, democracy and Brazil (Freedom Station). https://amzn.to/3L9TFiK
Reference
Gerard Lebrun. The Revenge of the Noble Savage and Other Essays. Translation: Renato Janine Ribeiro. New York, New York, 2024, 332 pages. [https://amzn.to/484hVx7]
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