MD / NS

Whoever pays their debts, makes themselves richer.
No: whoever doesn’t pay their debts, makes themselves richer.
Words are money, silence is golden.
Perhaps.
Money has no smell.
Sometimes that’s true. “Whoever pays their debts gets richer” is not true. But that “money has no smell”?—in the broadest sense of the phrase? Yes, that’s true. What I mean is, money has no origin, it’s the same thing as saying it has no identity. It is, or has, no one. It’s pure circulation. No smell? Well, that of a corpse yes, but not always.
The cock sings, money doesn’t.
The cock sings—money screams.

Marguerite, do you steal?

No. And I feel guilty that I haven’t been able to. My fear is too great. All my friends, all my mates steal. And I feel really bad that I can’t do it. I have a fear—a real panicky fear, of stealing. I think it’s actually a displaced fear of the cops.

But nothing? No objects or—?

Oh no. I’ve done much more dangerous stuff than that—keeping watch for the Resistance, that was nothing for me, I can risk my neck for something much more important, but to steal a loaf of bread or a packet of sweets? I couldn’t do it. I do think it’s tied up with something else, to my political education, which didn’t cover that at all at the time, and anyway, theft is unchartered territory in politics—it needed to be invented. This needs to be done in all possible ways, it is not to be dictated by a theory, in any case. So on the one hand I never had that. And on the other—I think this [failure to steal] arises from a fear—from a physical fear—of the police, that I don’t want to question.

But you associate yourself with the thefts of people who surround you and who steal quite a bit?

Oh yes, for sure I’ll do whatever. For example I have friends who steal from bookshops, and I often go with them, and we walk with our arms around one another’s waists, so that they’re seen with me you understand, and so if they were stopped, I’d say to all the sales assistants oh no, no… But I have a real sense of guilt about it—this not stealing—and I suffer badly with that, but I just haven’t managed to take that step. Though one day I was almost arrested by the cops. We’d occupied the CNPF—I really did come close to being arrested because everyone was arrested that day—and when I saw the riot police barging in I opened the window, and they were about to grab me, you know I just jumped, I just threw myself into the void. And I think it’s that same fear. Even so, I fought in all the demos in ’68, in spite of this fear, because it was a risk taken by everyone, by the masses, but to take that risk alone, to find oneself facing the cops alone—I’d have the feeling I was being swallowed up by the darkness. And one of the most difficult things I did in this sense was to take the word out onto the street, when I was in the Party, or go from door to door selling pamphlets because quite often people told you to fuck off, and people often threatened to call the cops, but I was doing it in the name of the Party, not so much as an individual, if I found myself face to face with them—the cops—as a private individual, I would find that staggeringly unbearable. This fear is unconquerable. Well, I could also find in this a sort of Gidean sense of gratitude: I don’t need to steal books as such. I don’t need to steal bread. Or meat or—I don’t know—sweets or whatever. Clothes? I couldn’t care less. I don’t need to steal them. So that would be a bit intellectual on my part—to steal. I could steal for others perhaps; I should try to steal for someone else. For my son, for example. I don’t know. I could try it. But no, I don’t think I will manage it. It’s too deep-rooted a fear, too anchored. As if a millionaire’s fear had been displaced onto me. Like that. I feel like that. Towards myself.

Fear of repression is perhaps also a woman’s fear.