Les LueursPodcast13 April 2025
How to stay nuanced in a radicalized world
Jonathan Langlois · 1h 5min
An hour built on card prompts to be completed. Delphine Horvilleur unfolds an idea of identity as a sentence ending in an ellipsis, a praise of transmission that ballasts without nailing to the ground, and the limits she has set herself these past two years: whom to talk with, whom to stop talking with. In French.
“Someone who does not set out and does not question their origin is in fact unfaithful to their tradition. And that is the whole paradox: sometimes it is when you question your tradition that you are truly faithful to it.”
“I distrust all discourses of purity, political or religious. They are always the discourses of the extremes, and always the stock-in-trade of fundamentalists, whoever they are. […] Our religious traditions are alive because they have always been nourished by the encounter with other worlds. […] They were contaminated, which is to say fertilized, by the encounter.”
“I believe stories and narratives save us. […] The question we must always ask is: in our society, in the moment we are living, which stories help us grow, and which stories make us small?”
“You can choose nothing when nothing has been passed on to you. The image that always comes to my mind is a toolbox. You are handed a toolbox, but there are no tools inside. So you can do nothing, because your box is empty.”
“I loaded them with something, a particular weight I set on their shoulders, not so they would be nailed to the ground […] but almost like a ship. No ship moves forward unless it carries ballast.”
“What makes us human, and in my view what makes us interesting, is the possibility of misunderstanding. […] I say one thing, but perhaps you understand another. And the possibility of misunderstanding is what creates real conversation.”
The session
The show moves by card prompts. « Each of us can endure or choose our identity, because… » opens the identity thread: living like a sentence ending in an ellipsis, and the paradox of the monotheisms in which everything begins with a setting-out (Abraham who never returns, the Exodus, the hijra), against Ulysses who sails home to Ithaca. Then « To my bridge dinner I would invite… »: her Shabbat table always open to non-Jewish guests, interfaith dialogue that only becomes interesting in disagreement, and the limit set since October 7: no more conversation with whoever denies the other’s right to exist, in every direction. Finally « in this world, nuance takes… »: courage, above all responsibility; a claimed restlessness, the dybbuk, and an exercise she proposes: debates in which you would defend the other side’s point of view.