He was elegant and possessed of an animal tyranny: instinctively, without any planning and without, of course, putting it into words, he maintained a suitable hierarchy within a certain radius around himself, in which he was most often at the top but could have stepped aside if necessary in the presence of someone stronger. He satisfied his need for domination here and there, always as a dilettante, without any overall vision. His instinct for domination always quickly ran out of steam and led to nothing more than sallies with only the slenderest thread running through them, before losing itself in distraction. Closer to nonchalance than to grandeur—which he nevertheless occasionally brushed against, though always too crudely—he was secure in the muted dread inspired by his reputation, by the collective memory of his artless rages: lethal on the slightest provocation, precise, professional, revealing the alpha bruiser. I suspect his mind was too limited for him to be anything more than the appearance of control he projected. He was content with the fear he instilled in others, almost without calculation, lacking the malice and the thirst required to make us true subjects of his sway. This was also the highest degree of goodness he could attain. After some reminder to keep order, he soon let us return to our games, distracted by one event or another. I like to imagine his superior alter ego, at once better and more wicked, of course. In retrospect, his mediocrity might leave me wanting more, but therein lies the character’s charm: he was light; it was the lightness of stupidity, no doubt, always disarming and quickly exhausted by a perceptive observer. When I, a good pupil, ventured onto the playground the dunces wanted for their own—the realm of carelessness, impertinence, and commotion—I became the target of a few of his brief assaults: I had to stay in my place. His elegance, deliberately foregrounded at the beginning of this text, went hand in hand with his beauty; he was a kind of Brazilian Greco, with thin lips, subtle features, and suave, precise, feline gestures, able to unleash his strength in an instant. This mixture disconcerted me and fascinated me, no doubt, but above all it terrified me: today I can name these impressions. I hated him for the fear he inspired in me, for the precision and economy of his harassment, yet I could not cease to be struck by his elegance, by the regal quality of his bearing, even though my pride still recoils from saying so today. I smile at the thought of his walled-in brain, ultimately little capable of plotting, its neurons knocking against the walls and, of course, unaware of their prison.
Afterword (April 2026)
The text above is the product of experiences spanning the years 2001 to 2005.
A former friend, who valued truth—no more than I did, though differently—once offered the following criticism, which I am rephrasing here: “Your text is too vague; its point is unclear: did you hate him, or did you admire him?” Today I can answer her: I hated him, of course—while unconsciously refusing to let hatred arise within me—but I could not deny that this combination of exercising domination and behavioral flexibility did provide the character with a minimally fruitful feeling of potency, while diminishing my own. Yet I tend to admire any way of life capable of increasing the—or at least a—feeling of potency. At the time of these experiences, I was of course unconsciously seeking a feeling of potency greater than the one that character could feel; but it must be admitted that only today, at the age of thirty-five, more than twenty years later, am I able to put into words the feeling of potency I was seeking in the depths of my being: the feeling of potency whose primary root is joy, the most difficult of all to bring forth. Recognizing, or even feeling, such a feeling of potency is possible only when that joy is deep and conscious. But what must be kept in mind is that this depth and consciousness are in fact merely by-products of primitive joy: the joy of living in the most total—emotional, sensory, and spiritual—and the rawest possible relationship with one’s fellow human beings. Not all feelings of potency are equal, and I seek the most fruitful one.
Another former friend, who I do not think had found the feeling of potency of which I speak—or who, at any rate, did not radiate it—had quite liked the text, seeing it as, in her words, the author’s display of superiority over the protagonist. But what neither she nor I had seen was that, for me, the sole legitimacy of this attempt to display superiority—an attempt that arose, incidentally, only many years after the events—lay unconsciously in this quest for the feeling of potency that springs from joy. This quest, unconscious both when the events took place and when the text was written, guides my steps today, and it is in its name alone that I grant myself license to make this text public.
Lastly, I would like to “recall” here that the feeling of potency is only one of the two terms in the fundamental duality of human life, the other being the feeling of being. Human life must be understood as a dynamic between these two feelings. The search for the purpose of life is nothing more or less than the search for this dynamic; it is this dynamic that accounts for life’s purpose, and there is nothing outside it. At least, that is my present understanding of the matter. This dynamic obviously involves other feelings, particularly joy, desire, and love, to name only the positive ones.
The emergence of life is a probabilistic phenomenon that occurs only very occasionally, after countless processes, out of primitive forms of energy (vacuum fluctuations, followed by all the more familiar forms of energy). The occurrence of this phenomenon is nothing other than the beginning of the dynamic I discuss above. This dynamic belongs to life alone and has no equivalent. Once set in motion, it aims to persevere, grow, become more complex, and intensify; it becomes highly self-referential, though still vitally connected to its environment. Before it emerges, life has no purpose, since it does not exist. Once it has emerged, its purpose is this dynamic that I seek to understand and describe. It has no other aim, nothing else to “say”. But what it has to say—this purpose of which I speak, this dynamic—is “everything”: it is immense; it is the greatest wealth in the universe. It is the most worthy subject of interest that could possibly exist. This perseverance, growth, complexification, and intensification; the knowledge of the specific dynamic that describes these phenomena, particularly in the most human terms possible (instincts, but above all emotions and feelings, as well as spirituality and thought); and the experience of this dynamic in the deepest possible way—these are the most worthy pursuits of human life.
As for the “dialectical life” I mention in the text’s subtitle, it is a specification of what it means to experience this dynamic.