Invincible étéInterview30 November 2023
Le Grand Entretien: Delphine Horvilleur × Olivier Goy
Alexandre Kouchner · 14 min
A public conversation at the Bourse de Commerce, 30 November 2023, in the wake of Stéphanie Pillonca’s documentary Invincible été, to benefit the Brain Institute. Facing Olivier Goy, an entrepreneur living with ALS who speaks that evening through an assisted voice, Delphine Horvilleur talks about listening, about how mortality condenses life, and about what never dies in books. In French.
“There is a very old Jewish legend I love, which says that when you walk through a library at night, if you listen closely, the books speak to you and say: “Interpret me.” Books are there to keep speaking through us. They tell us something of what does not die, of what never dies.”
“Your way of speaking forces us to listen differently, and I find that a way of gaining intelligence. Because you express yourself a little differently, that slight shift obliges everyone around you to adjust their listening, and I know no better definition of intelligence or greatness: it always comes from that small sideways movement we are forced to make in how we listen.”
“Sometimes a disability, simultaneously, diminishes and enlarges.”
“We all know we will die, but from the moment people know of what, or roughly when, life is no longer the same at all. It is as if, suddenly, a concentrate of life were handed to us […] It is a lesson of extraordinary power to say: mortality is here, but I am going to put immortality into existence.”
“There is often a misunderstanding in the way we speak of death: we imagine life on one side and death on the other, worlds that must not meet. But the truth, as we know, is that life and death cohabit all the time. […] We are alive because there is death in us, because life and death carry on a permanent dialogue. People do not want to see it, do not want to know it, because it is terrifying. And yet it is the condition of life: if you refuse to see death, you will not manage to stay alive.”
The session
The excerpt opens on books: she has just written, she says, a hymn to life and its immortality, and tells the legend of libraries at night. Olivier Goy confides that the hardest thing is speech itself; she answers that his way of speaking obliges everyone to that small sideways movement of listening where she locates intelligence. On the diagnosis, she describes the concentrate of life that known mortality gives, and salutes a strength that comes not from an unbreakable power but from what is cracked: Moses shattering the Tablets on his way down from Sinai, the Hebrews walking the desert with broken pieces, the mazel tov spoken over a shattered glass. The exchange closes on the permanent cohabitation of life and death, the very condition of living.