Existing for real in a world of fakery

[Plus audio version]

What would it feel like if, in the eyes of the outside world, you suddenly ceased to exist as the person you knew yourself to be?

If your partner, colleagues and family no longer recognised you, if your bank account simply disappeared, along with all means of proving your identity?

That is the question posed in a new novel, L’Homme qui n’existait plus (‘The Man Who No Longer Existed’), by Léafar Izen, whose work I have previously reviewed. [1]

On its most superficial level, the book addresses the way in which today (and particularly in the just-after-today society in which it is set) our social functioning is very dependent on the identification provided for us by the technocratic system.

We had a taste of that here in France with the pass sanitaire rolled out in 2021, when people like me were being turned away from cafés and restaurants, not to speak of losing their jobs, as non-persons in the New Normal World Order.

But the questions raised by Izen go deeper than that and also include that of social precarity – the reality that each of us, no matter how comfortable or secure we may feel, could one day fall down a trapdoor into a harsher existence.

His central character Antonin muses, after this happens to him in an utterly inexplicable fashion and he finds himself living on the streets: “Twenty-four hours previously, you thought that your salary and your reality could only ever be augmented.

“You were convinced that to live from begging was the lot of certain dysfunctional and terribly isolated individuals.

“Without daring to put it into words, you thought that everyone deserved their fate, that to fall so low, you had to have wanted it.

“In just a few hours, that wonderful confidence was shattered into pieces”. [2]

I suppose we have all had moments when we have become aware of this disconcerting truth.

It happened to me years ago when I found myself wandering around Paris – the very city in which Izen’s book takes place – with practically no money left, after having seriously underestimated the expenses involved in my weekend visit to some crucial political happening.

The cafés that had previously seemed so charming, now gloated smugly at my inability to enjoy their warmth.

When you have zero spending power, Paris – like any big city – has a hard face and I felt the cold hands of the night reaching up to me from the banks of the Seine, where those who have and thus are “nothing” often shelter.

I decided to make straight for the airport and spend Sunday night there before jumping on my early-morning hop back to Gatwick and then my office desk.

There I was “befriended” by a woman who claimed to be an American tourist who had missed her flight, though my suspicions were aroused by the knowing glances coming her way from the obviously homeless people wandering around in the terminal.

This hunch was confirmed when, at the approach of a police patrol, she said that we should both put our heads on the table between us and pretend to be asleep!

Her reward for enduring the all-night company of yours truly was meant to have come in the morning when, after I had guarded her luggage while she went to freshen up, she offered to return the favour for me.

I politely declined, took my bag with me, and, needless to say, when I came back she was gone.

Back in the Monday morning work routine a few hours later, I seemed to be in the full familiar reality of my personal existence.

But, deep down, there lurked a doubt. What was it that really separated me from those hanging around the airport or huddled under Parisian bridges?

Was it not something entirely temporary and accidental that had given me the trappings of respectability, especially since I had always felt so distant from, and indeed hostile to, the manufactured society into which I had been born?

Izen invokes this gnawing unease felt by many in the modern world.

“You mustn’t pass too harsh a judgement on my former friends, nor on the person that I then was. We tried to stay afloat, to keep our heads above water.

“Amidst the debris of the shipwreck, we made sincere efforts to convince ourselves that we were doing relatively OK. This relatively was our lifebelt.

“Who could blame us? Nevertheless, we were vaguely conscious that, absolutely speaking, we were in pretty bad place”. [3]

The falsity of our contemporary society is a central theme of the book, as exemplified by the way that nearly everyone in this near-future Paris is wearing smart glasses and thus experiencing the city through the virtual eyes of the advertisers who transform apparent reality into one big marketing campaign.

Here are echoes of Guy Debord, whose thought was inspired by his dérives, wanderings, through the streets of the French capital. [4]

He saw that we live today inside a “spectacle” – “the superficial reign of images” [5] where “the commodity contemplates itself in a world of its own making”. [6]

Our contemporary world is inherently false and artificial, Debord said.

“The whole life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that once was directly lived has become mere representation”. [7]

This society is not merely false, but presents its own falsity as an unchallengeable reality, he added: “What is false creates taste, and reinforces itself by knowingly eliminating any possible reference to the authentic”. [8]

Izen’s character Antonin used to work in the “augmented reality” industry, but in his new existence he attacks its false reality by targeting its advertising posters, cutting out the AI-enhanced images of people featured in them and leaving a symbolic void in the place of their fake “humanity”.

Beyond all this, the novel also treats the question of what I would call existential precarity.

Antonin tells himself: “In truth, you stopped existing well before November 2. It started sometime between childhood and adolescence and happened so gradually that you didn’t see it, that’s all.

“And it’s not just you. What has stopped existing, for you and for so many others, is a certain idea of humanity.

“When does this disappearance, this original sin, date from? From the domestication of spelt, the first Babylonian city, the invention of the transistor or of the disposable razor?” [9]

In an industrial society, constructed in the interests of those who control and exploit us, we are separated from a real sense of who we are.

We do not feel a belonging to community, to our species, to the green living of the whole, to the divine.

But at the same time, we still know, deep within, that there is more to us than our individuality, than the ephemeral role that we act out during our lifetimes.

The unreality of our actual lives, together with an awareness of something beyond, can combine to take us out of our physical self and the immediate present, at least in our imaginations.

I think this is what happens to Antonin in L’Homme qui n’existait plus: the extreme unreality of his city life and work creates an existential crisis and forces him to plunge into a void that opens up the knowledge of a wider whole.

This knowledge necessarily comes in a different, more violent, way than it does for someone who lives close to the land, whose being is constantly nourished by the presence of nature, by the rhythms of the organism to which he or she belongs.

The loss of a fake existence reveals the reality of a greater one.

It is a jolt of awareness, a waking-up to the essential oneness so firmly hidden from the urban wage-slave in his prison of concrete and plastic.

And with this comes the chance to seize this new life, to become all that you could be and to dare to become part of a “metaphysical” revolution [10] that could restore our connection to authenticity.

As Antonin tells himself: “The universe has handed you a gift whose value cannot be measured: it has forced you to become another person. A person whom you would never have had the courage to become”. [11]

[Audio version]

[1] Paul Cudenec, ‘A triple revolution for life’, The Acorn 74, May 2022.
https://winteroak.org.uk/2022/05/26/the-acorn-74/#3
[2] Léafar Izen, L’Homme qui n’existait plus (Les Editions l’Alchimie, 2024) p. 43.
https://editionslalchimiste.com/produit/lhomme-qui-nexistait-plus/ Translations are my own.
[3] Izen, p. 8.
[4] https://orgrad.wordpress.com/a-z-of-thinkers/guy-debord/
[5] Guy Debord, La société du spectacle (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), p. 152.
[6] Debord, La société du spectacle, p. 31.
[7] Debord, La société du spectacle, p. 3.
[8] Guy Debord, Commentaires sur la société du spectacle (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), p. 56.
[9] Izen, pp. 184-85.
[10] Izen, p. 163.
[11] Izen, p. 157.