FOCUS POÉSIE
celui d’agacer, si l’on en juge par les recensions de son ouvrage. Voulant sortir du postmoderne, il le décrit avec humour comme une philosophie qui prend « l’existence humaine pour un long film d’art et d’essai français, dans lequel cha que protagoniste s’efforce de séduire tous les autres ». Et sa formule désormais fameuse, « Tout existe, sauf le monde ! », s’accompagne volontiers d’explications paradoxales : « Je soutiens qu’il y a des licornes en uniforme de police sur la face cachée de la lune, car cette pensée existe dans le monde et avec elle les licornes en uniforme. » The German philosopher Markus Gabriel, born in 1980, author of Why the World Does Not Exist (John Wiley and Sons, 2015) will answer the following doubleedged question: “To what degree does thinking about the world produce a world where none yet exists?” Citing affinities with the French thinkers Mehdi Belhaj Kacem and Tristan Garcia, fellow “new realists,” Gabriel situates his views as post-speculative realism. He deconstructs the idealist and phenomenological concept of the “world” and the corresponding interpretative tools, and instead proposes “a double thesis according to which we can know things and facts in themselves, and, secondly, things and facts in themselves do not belong to a single domain of objects.” In an interview in the French popular culture magazine Les Inrockuptibles, he explains, “reality, as it is in itself, already possesses fields of sense. Our experience does not require an extra-human reality.” Gabriel has a knack for snappy phrases and pissing people off, judging by the reviews of his work. As a postpostmodernist, he jokingly describes his philosophy as one that “takes human existence for a long , arty French movie where each character tries to seduce all the others. “Everything exists, except for the world,” he famously proclaims, giving this idea the most paradoxical explanations: “I believe that unicorns wearing police uniforms exist on the hidden side of the moon, because these thought exists in the world and, with it, therefore, unicorns in uniform.”
Translation, L-S Torgoff