How to recover from a depression which made you want to end it?
How to get a taste for life after losing the woman you loved – la psychoanalyst and philosopher Anne Dufourmantelle, in July 2017 – and, shortly after, a very dear friend, publisher Paul Otchakovsky-Laurens ?
What meaning then to give to hope?
So many existential questions that run through the remarkable work of Frédéric Boyer, author of around thirty books since 1991 (1). He approaches them with infinite delicacy, during this autumnal exchange, place Saint-André-des-Arts, in Paris, a stone’s throw from the POL editions that he has directed since the death of its founder.
Benevolent, smiling despite the wounds still there
, he develops his thought with modesty, without crushing his interlocutor of his immense culture. His dense and poetic words, like his writing, work on his subject in small touches, anxious to explore all its nuances, while leaving room for interpretation.
Writer, translator, publisher, Frédéric Boyer occupies a singular place in the world of letters where expressing his Catholic faith is rare. But he values himself just as much dissident
in the Church which, he says, don’t want to hear voices like his
.
Anything goes »
It is a long journey. I understood by disputing part of the inheritance that I received. Contestation is at the heart of the prophetic heritage of the Bible. The prophet is the one who questions the faith of his contemporaries.
Born in Cannes, in 1961, this child from the South, fell in love with the island of Batz, in Finistère, grew up with a believing mother and an atheist father, very respectful of the convictions of others
.
This fruitful tension traced a tortuous path in him until the publication, in 1995, of The god who died so young which reveals its spiritual itinerary.
His career also owes a lot to encounters like that of his master
, the Jesuit Paul Beauchamp, when he was a student of literature. Frédéric Boyer was then pursuing in parallel biblical studies at the Center Sèvres, the faculty of the Jesuits.
In this place very intellectually stimulating
, Roland Barthes, Michel de Certeau and Louis Marin crossed paths just as well. A period lost today
.
I returned to the paths of religion by studying the Bible
, specifies Frédéric Boyer, who co-edited the new translation of the Bible at Bayard. But a quiet way for this being tormented “,
qualifier that its relatives would not contradict ”.
Before death tragic
of his partner, Frédéric Boyer, victim of severe depression
, comes close to the end of everything
, but the deep despair that gnaws at him is also an opportunity to touching hope
.
Believe, then, that what seems impossible to us is possible because we have the strength to believe in it.
An overwhelming experience that tells Where the heart waits, published in 2017.
But he doesn’t believe in the faith that consoles
. It’s not a poultice on grief
. If faith has a strength, it is to invite us to return to the place of life.
When he found himself alone with his 12-year-old daughter, he told himself he had no right to disappear.
That’s what kept me going.
Anything goes
, he writes in Under the glare of arrows.
The suffering slowly evaporates leaving traces of mist on the transparency of our lives so fragile, ready to break. Remains what two people must invent together when they are united by blood and existence, and when one is supposed to show the way to the other. In the forest, under the invisible gaze of a wild animal. A father and his daughter. The feeling of this bond and of this responsibility establishes human life. To overcome fear and violence, so does despair.
– .
