Dominique Fourcade: Poetry after October 7, 2023

Dominique Fourcade, voilà c'est tout, POL, 2025.
Dominique Fourcade, Can you enjoy the ice in the water?, POL, 2024.
Dominique Fourcade, flirt with elle, POL, 2023.
Dominique Fourcade, On a leash, POL, 2005.

Poetry and Terror

« tueuse, et tuante
est l'époque
à nouveau insensément cruelle
c'est a murmure distinct entre des lèvres inconnues sur lesquelles on a peur de poser les siennes. » (Dominique Fourcade, voilà c'est tout, 2025)

Deadly, and deadly is this time, senselessly cruel anew. Only a whisper, clear, between strangers' lips, lips upon which one fears to place one's own. So it says in the sequel. voilà c'est tout, which, with some time lag, continues Dominique Fourcade's poetic response to October 7th and its consequences.

The publication of Dominique Fourcade's first volume of poetry on the subject, Can you enjoy the ice in the water? (POL, 2024) marked a crucial aspect in the development of an author long known for his formal experiments and his challenge to the narrative voice. Fourcade established himself in the French literary avant-garde through his exploration of phone (the voice of the text). This history of formal rigor and lyrical retreat is of central importance for grasping the intellectual significance of Fourcade's recent, explicit turn to current geopolitical crises. This turn is not new, but rather part of a growing moral and aesthetic responsibility toward the present. It unfolds in a chronological sequence, beginning with the Iraq War in On a leash (2005) and dealt with the Ukraine war in flirt with elle (2023). The 2024 volume was written in direct and urgent response to the events beginning in October 2023 and was published in February 2024. The urgency of the writing process is thus anchored not only thematically but also formally in the hybrid text, which alternates between verse and prose. In the continuation of ça va bien dans la pluie glacée then interwoven voilà c'est tout (POL, 2025) blends the intimate with the tragic aspects of the war in Gaza in a lyrically vibrant language that oscillates between despair and resistance, between art, death and beauty – and, on the precipice, affirms the unwavering call not to lose hope.

The title On a leash (On a leash) stemmed directly from the visual and ethical shockwave triggered by the Abu Ghraib prison photographs. It refers to the specific image of an American female soldier holding an Iraqi prisoner naked and on a leash. The leash (la laisse) becomes the central metaphor for the criminality, humiliation, and perverted power dynamics in modern warfare. Fourcade radically identifies with all elements of this scene: he is the victim (he), the soldier (elle) and the leash (la laisse) itself. The title concept expresses the terrible interchangeability of roles – the leash serves to guide the two terrible sides, which constantly switch sides (“les deux bords terribles qui s'échangent sans cesse”). The title is thus a statement about a fateful crime (“criminalité destinale”) that profoundly calls into question the humanity of the author (and that of the reader).

The title flirt with elle (Flirting with Her) marks Fourcade's confrontation with the horrors of the Ukraine war in 2022. "At the end of his life, Dominique Fourcade felt as if he were reliving what he had experienced at the very beginning: the despair of war. But much had changed since his childhood and adolescence: a now very strong feeling for Europe, the reality of being a writer, that is, being someone who cannot experience any moment of existence more deeply and faithfully than in the experience of writing. He composed a long poem in 15 sections, followed by a 'flirt with three photographs.' His writing deals with the present, nothing but the present, both trivial and mythological. The word Flirt It immediately seemed to him by far the easiest way to deal with the most serious relationship: the “elle” in “ avec elle“ It denotes death. Death in all its forms, and not only in the specific forms of war in which it is imposing itself today.” ¹ The “elle” of death is also equated with Ukraine, which takes the place of the lyrical subject (“l’Ukraine (…) se substitue à l’elle de”). flirt with elleThe “flirtation” here is by no means frivolous, but rather describes the necessary yet unbearable proximity and the author’s intense literary relationship to this horror. The war in Ukraine created a very narrow scope for action for his writing and his life (“marge de manœuvre très étroite”). The flirtation represents the attempt, in the face of war, to push the boundaries of his own writing (“repousser les limites de mon écriture”) and to develop a methodical tenderness (“tendresse méthodique”) as a response to unimaginable suffering, such as rape as a weapon of war.

The title Can you enjoy the ice in the water? (Is it alright in the freezing rain?) is an ironic, rhetorical question that encapsulates Fourcade's existential shock at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict of October/November 2023, which forms the basis of the book. The "pluie glacée" (freezing rain) functions as an intense, painful metaphor for the general catastrophe and moral collapse of the West, which is crumbling under the blows it inflicts upon itself ("s'effondre sur lui-même sous les coups qu'il se porte en propre"). The image of cold and wetness evokes all-encompassing suffering and is explicitly linked to death when the author speaks of a "blackening of freezing rain and its drowned" ("un lavis noir de pluie glacée et ses noyés"). The casual, almost banal question Ça va bien… ? This contrasts sharply with the relentless and deadly environment, which the author describes as a mutual bloodbath ("une douche de sang réciproque"), an experience that is his fate as a writer. The title thus expresses the disorientation and unprotected exposure in a moment of global catastrophe.

Although all three books address the horrors of contemporary conflict, they differ primarily in their approach to confronting violence and the resulting poetic strategy. One is a response to a singular, overwhelming shock that primarily triggers an existential and moral cascade of responsibility, coupled with the breakdown of language. The other is an ethical implosion of human nature, triggered by media testimony, and demands a radical, empathetic co-identification with perpetrator and victim as a method for understanding violence. The third is a continuous, almost journalistic transcription of the ongoing everyday reality of war.flirt with elle), which forces the author to expand the form of their poetry in order to do justice to the systematic nature of the atrocities and the existential demands of the survivors. In all cases, writing acts as seismology and a “report on the global moment” (“rapport à l’instant mondial”), with violence always serving as a catalyst to redefine the boundaries of poetry and the vulnerability (vulnerability) of the author as a decisive literary act.

In Ça va bien dans la pluie glacée ?, that is considered “Anti” flirt with elleAs can be described, the horror manifests itself in the omnipresent disorientation and the loss of a safe haven: The author is constantly involved in the conflict and writes "from Gaza-Donzy, October 23," imagining himself in Gaza, with a bed of "gravets and broken glass." The violence is not merely a military event, but a disaster ("désastre") and a deluge ("déluge") engulfing the entire West, as Western civilization collapses under the blows it inflicts upon itself. The most extreme form of horror is the moral capitulation and the terrible ("épouvantable") transformation of the victims (victims of the Shoah) into perpetrators (who perpetrate a "carnage"—a massacre), using the same "unbearable vocabulary." The author must existentially renounce his once beloved idea of ​​Israel and, faced with the “lapidation” and the “hurlements de douleur” of the abducted, seeks a way to escape from the ranks of the murderers (“hors du rang des meurtriers”).

Fourcade's handling of war, violence and horror in the three books shows a development from existential responsibility through aesthetic identification to moral and civilizational indictment.

Poetic response rather than political commentary

Dominique Fourcades Can you enjoy the ice in the water? It was published in the fall of 2024, a few months after the renewed escalation in Gaza. The work is not a chronicle, not an essay on politics, but a literary and linguistic-philosophical response. Fourcade positions himself as a poet who creates a form from the impossibility of responding "correctly." The writing does not react through analysis, but through the tension between speaking and silence, proximity and distance, shame and engagement. The text asks what language can achieve when violence and history mutually impede each other.

Even in the early section it says:

« je ne sais plus aimer. je ne sais plus où aimer. l'interdit a change de camp: il n'est plus interdit de ne pas aimer l'Ukraine, il est interdit d'aimer ce qui se déchaîne en Israël/Palestine. »

Here, the emotional and ethical dilemma that pervades the entire text is formulated: the impossibility of fairly distributing one's own empathy without becoming morally entangled. The sentence follows the syntax of collapse—without capital letters, with paratactic repetitions. Even formally, a fragmented ethics is expressed here: literature becomes a space of inner conflict.

Dominique Fourcade's stance on the Middle East conflict is deeply pessimistic and marked by despair, with him viewing the Holocaust as a central ethical and political rupture. His understanding of his poetry in times of war and crisis serves as an existential means of resistance and of coming to terms with this fragility. Fourcade's sharpest criticism is directed at the destruction of a fundamental moral hope: that the immeasurable suffering of the Holocaust would forever prevent the Jewish population from becoming executioners themselves. In the context of the current events in the conflict (October–December 2023), Fourcade sees this hope as completely shattered. He observes a "terrible translation" of victims into perpetrators ("bourreaux"), which tragically employs the "same unbearable vocabulary" of horrors. Fourcade demands that the State of Israel "change its face."

The central and potentially most explosive aspect of the reception focuses on Fourcade's adaptation of a quote by Nobel laureate Imre Kertész. Kertész, a Holocaust survivor, defined post-Holocaust identity as a universal moral obligation beyond religious or communal affiliation. Fourcade adopts this universalist definition and performs a radical ethical transfusion. The explosive statement reads: "After the Holocaust, being Jewish, for me, who am not one, is above all a moral duty imposed upon me. Likewise, being Palestinian today without ceasing to be Jewish." With this, Fourcade draws on the answer Kertész gave in 2006 to Catherine David's question, "Quel Juif suis-je?" ("What kind of Jew am I?"). The author uses this moral obligation as a means of clarifying a crucial chapter in the chaos of his life and in the "novel" of his writing. By invoking Kertész, Fourcade firmly situates the confrontation with the Middle East conflict in post-Shoah morality and the intellectual legacy that established the Shoah as an unconditional ethical rupture ("rupture éthique inconditionnelle") and a supreme violation of the Declaration of Human Rights ("atteinte suprême à la Déclaration des droits de l'homme").

The necessity of writing in times of war (originally triggered by the war in Ukraine) is, for Fourcade, an existential question of survival and of remaining connected to reality. He describes his work as a kind of "diary of resistance" ("journal de résistance"). He felt compelled to "adapt to war" ("se brancher sur la guerre"), believing that otherwise he would die or be forced to stop. His poetry serves to create a form of evacuation in moments of hopelessness—since war, love, and death are "without escape" ("sans issue")—which he describes as "toboggans d'évacuation" ("toboggans d'évacuation").

Fourcade's poetic challenge lies in depicting the simultaneity of all aspects of life. In his work, the trivial and the sublime, "dirty laundry and Beethoven's quartets," as well as flowing blood and art (such as Cézanne's watercolors) collide. The aim is to capture this simultaneous "everything happens at the same time" in a sequential linguistic form. Furthermore, the theme of repetition is central. The experience of the wars of his childhood repeating themselves in Europe intensifies the sense of a tragic cycle. He understands his complete literary works under the title "L'exposé du temps présent" (The Exposition of the Present Time), thereby summarizing his acute engagement with the moral and political crisis of the present.

Language, Guilt, and Testimony

Fourcade does not write "about" the conflict, but "within" it. The literary gesture is witnessing, but a hesitant, tentative witnessing. He repeatedly calls himself an "agent of the foreigner."

« je reste agent de l'étranger. je ne peux pas parler autrement. »

This “agent de l’étranger” signifies a dual movement—otherness and responsibility. The lyrical self is both observer and participant. It reacts from within Europe, from within France, from the awareness of colonial, religious, and cultural guilt. The formula recalls Paul Celan’s concept of “speaking to the other”: only the language of the other can be a language of truth because it remains separate from violence.

The poetics that follow from this is a language that resists any attempt at smoothing it over. Fourcade uses short, jerky sentences, omissions, and ellipses. The text breathes discontinuity. In this way, the fragmentary itself becomes an ethical form: it refuses to order or aestheticize the conflict.

At the same time, shame repeatedly surfaces – the shame of the European intellectual who observes suffering "from the outside." One passage reads:

« nous regardons la pluie tomber sur Gaza depuis les écrans ; on se sent lavé, mais c'est un lavage impur. »

The image of the "pluie glacée" (iced rain) of the title is made concrete here: rain as cleansing, but "impure"—polluted, because seeing remains passive. Literature responds by reflecting this passivity, not by denying it.

Gaza, the wall, the crossing

A central motif of the text is the crossing of borders. Fourcade writes:

« I'm in Gaza. j'entre dans Gaza à partir d'Israël, après être entré en Israël à partir de Gaza. je suis le même homme dans chaque cas. »

This repetition of movement—in, out, back in—shatters any notion of fixed identities. The boundary between perpetrator and victim, inside and outside, Israel and Gaza is poetically dissolved, not to blur it, but to make its brutality palpable. The text compels the reader to shift perspective without ever settling into a fixed one.

Formally, this is achieved through rhythmic parallelisms. The "je" is not stable but is defined by its movement. The structure reflects the attempt to enter the "other space," knowing that this is only possible symbolically.

Fourcade links the border to the experience of the body. The concrete wall – “le mur, la paroi de la mort” – becomes a metaphor for the separated, the frozen. This contrasts with the image from Tanya Habjouqa's photograph. Occupied Pleasures, which he describes:

« a young woman, tête nue, lance un javelot. derrière elle, le mur. elle rit. »

This scene becomes an icon of resistance. The young woman – naked in the sense of being unprotected – embodies the vitality that persists amidst the occupation. Fourcade interprets this gesture as a form of poetic flourish:

« le javelot, c'est le vers. il traverse l'air, il fend l'interdit. »

Here, the poetic and political dimensions are directly intertwined. The poem itself becomes a spear that pierces the border but does not destroy it. The metaphor of the "javelot" (a type of spear) lends literature agency—not as a weapon, but as movement, as a projection of voice and hope.

Intertextual ethics: Kafka, Genet, Dickinson

Fourcade responds not with political arguments, but with literary references. This intertextuality is not mere decoration, but an ethical strategy: it demonstrates that literature can only speak in dialogue with other voices.

One key passage quotes Franz Kafka:

« faire le bond hors du rang des meurtriers ».

This sentence from Kafka's diary becomes a leitmotif of the book. Fourcade comments:

« nous n'avons pas sauté. nous sommes restés au rang. et écrire n'a pas suffi. »

The admission that literature alone cannot make the leap is simultaneously its justification: it keeps the awareness of this guilt open. Reflection on failure becomes a form of responsibility.

Alongside them appear Jean Genet and Emily Dickinson. Genet represents the writer who radically sides with the disenfranchised – “Genet à Gaza, c'est un impossible retour.” Dickinson embodies introspection, the quiet, almost hermetic poem as a sanctuary. Fourcade balances between the two: ecstatic solidarity and introverted tenderness.

He writes:

« If you see Emily in Gaza, write in the window, regard her as she disappears in the light. »

This desire is both utopian and desperate. The metaphor of the "window"—a recurring motif—symbolizes the longing for transparency, but also the separation between observer and event.

Intertextuality thus becomes a moral procedure: literature responds to violence by conjuring up other literary bodies that make speaking possible in the first place.

The Holocaust and Israel as a moral field of tension

A particularly sensitive part of the text concerns the reflection on Israel, the Shoah, and the legacy of Jewish suffering. Fourcade walks a fine line here between empathy and critique. He writes:

« le Judaïsme m'a appris la parole, mais Israel m'apprend le silence. »

This sentence encapsulates the tension between religious admiration and political disillusionment. "Parole" represents the creative power of language, "silence" the moral shock in the face of violence perpetrated in the name of survival.

He continues:

« on n'a pas survécu à Auschwitz to build another camp. mais qui suis-je pour le dire? »

Self-examination (“qui suis-je?”) deprives the accusation of its self-righteousness. The self does not want to judge, but rather to acknowledge its own complicity. Literature responds here through self-relativization—it maintains the tension between moral impulse and epistemological humility.

Fourcade uses historical memory as a moral compass. The Shoah is presented not as a closed chapter, but as a benchmark for present-day actions. The paradox: those who invoke victimhood can themselves become perpetrators. The text addresses this paradox not abstractly, but existentially: in a tone of shame, grief, and despair.

The poetic language – concise, abrupt, without rhetorical relief – is crucial. Each sentence feels like a plunge. This creates an ethics of form: not only the statement itself carries meaning, but the fractured syntax is a reaction to the moral monstrosity.

The author reflects on his deep pessimism and notes:

This excerpt reveals the author's most radical and painful conclusion: He views the Shoah not only as a historical crime, but also as its most irreplaceable The consequence is the founding of the State of Israel in its specific form. The author, who throughout his life felt empathy for the suffering inflicted on Jews in 20th-century Europe, views the founding of Israel as a tragic regression. He argues that this state should never have been founded, at least not as a state whose criteria are based on the dominance of one community and denomination (the Jewish community) and which gradually deprives every other community of space and breath. For him, the Shoah represents the "ultimate attack" on the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which was intended to form the basis of Western morality and politics. By linking the Shoah to the founding of Israel and criticizing it as ethically flawed, he expresses his profound pessimism, even as he emphasizes that the existing state should not be eradicated, but rather must change its form.

Aesthetic consequences: form, fragment, delicacy

Fourcade's poetics are based on the conviction that the only adequate response to catastrophe is Delicacy It is a delicacy that neither aestheticizes nor dulls. He writes:

« la délicatesse is politique: elle refuse l'écrasement. »

This “political delicacy” is an ethics of tone. The text avoids grand gestures, relying on empty spaces, pauses, and repetitions. It is precisely this formal restraint—the refusal to generate pathos—that becomes an attitude of dignity.

The book's structure is not linear, but mosaic-like. Short prose segments alternate with poetic interludes, reflections, and fragments of quotations. This form reflects the fractured relationship between language and the world. The work reads like a continuous meditation in which every thought is immediately questioned.

An example:

« j'écris pour ne pas comprendre. comprendre serait trahir. »

The paradoxical relationship between writing and understanding encapsulates the ethics of negativity: literature should not explain, but rather keep things open. This stance constitutes the response to the Middle East conflict – not in discourse, but in the refusal to domesticate the incomprehensible.

At the same time, Fourcade employs a visual and sonic aesthetic: recurring motifs such as "pluie" (rain), "mur" (wall), "javelot" (fire engine), "voix" (voice), and "fenêtre" (window) structure perception. The words become iconic vehicles of experience. This imagery connects concrete political reality (rain, wall, body) with a poetic transcendence.

This creates a dual level: writing as a perception of the world and writing as a moral exercise. Both merge in a poetics of attention – a watchful, careful attention.

Literature as a place of responsibility

Fourcade responds to the Middle East conflict by exploring the possibilities and limitations of literature. He offers no judgment, but rather a model of ethical perception. His writing is an attempt not to dominate the world, but to bear witness to it.

At the end of the book it says:

« je n'écrirai pas pour la paix. j'écrirai pour que la war ne soit pas seule à parler. »

This sentence summarizes the aesthetic and ethical program. Literature should not create the illusion of reconciliation, but rather break the monopoly of violence over language.

In doing so, Fourcade places his work within the tradition of a “writing of the witness,” which ranges from Celan and Blanchot to Jorie Graham. However, unlike these voices, he emphasizes the simultaneity of shame and beauty, of analysis and breath. Can you enjoy the ice in the water? It is not a moral manifesto, but a fragile gesture that shows that responsibility lies in the way one speaks.

His reaction to the Middle East conflict is therefore primarily poetological: it shows how ethics transforms into syntax. The short, jerky "je," the leaps between perspectives, the tentative repetitions—all this is not a formal peculiarity, but a moral act.

Literature cannot stop violence; but it can prevent it from remaining speechless. Fourcade writes from within the cold ("pluie glacée") and shows that this coldness itself—the distance, the trembling—is perhaps the only space in which humanity can still emerge.

To the next volume voilà c'est tout (2025)

In the last section of Can you enjoy the ice in the water?Shortly before specifying the period from which the texts originate, the author presents two Paleolithic blades ("deux lames paléolithiques") – two hand axes ("bifaces") – as "silexes of conscience" (silex de conscience) and quotations. These serve both as reminders and expressions of hopelessness: A quotation from Nietzsche Beyond Good and Evil, which speaks of the “grand style in morality” that Europe owes to the Jews. Another quote from the Bible (Genesis chapter 12, verse 6), in which Abraham, upon his arrival in the Promised Land, acknowledges the presence of another people—the Canaanites—and considers himself only a “Ger” (literally: migrant). The final words of the actual text are a question of grief and obligation to these moral and historical “quotations”: Am I the only one / in my grief / to take him at his word / October–November–December 2023.

« suis-je le seul / dans mon deuil / à le prendre au mot / October-November-December 2023 »

Fourcades poetry collection voilà c'est tout (2025) is both a continuation and an end (“la suite, en tout point la suite et la fin”) of the volume What about the water in the ice? (2024) conceives of and engages on a metapoetic level with authorship, anxiety, and the experience of the era, reflecting on the tragic and deadly situation between Israel and Palestine. The poet notes that the new work is not by the same author, as an author's identity is never static, and the slider of anxiety ("le curseur de l'angoisse") as well as the relationship to time and love are constantly shifting. The contemporary experience of the era relentlessly influences writing, bending and tearing it apart. The book thus represents the kind of poetry the author attempts ("la sorte de poésie que je tente"), but which is far removed from the poetry he hopes for. Here, the word itself is identified as a mode of the feminine ("mode du féminin"), and the fundamental human condition is described as one of abandonment, even though everything is merely a matter of contact.

The specific confrontation begins with the title of a chapter in which the author describes the era as killing and killing (“tueuse, et tuante”), approaching the conflict with the observation that the situation is more tragic than ever. A moving, almost fairytale-like image of divided humanity is provided in the section “Israël / Palestine refrain pour les deux pays”: A soldier, who was a friend of an enemy soldier, is found dead near the latter's grave, each wearing a nut and the word “prairie” in their interchangeable uniforms (“treillis interchangeable”). This short text, which the author himself would have liked to have written, is attributed to an anonymous and secular voice, whose creation is placed between May 1948 and December 2023.

Fourcade employs an explicit superimposition of the political and military power dynamics in the Middle East conflict into a classic gender dichotomy to highlight the existential tragedy of the situation. The author states that Israel is the "mâle dominant" (the dominant man), while Palestine is the "dominée" (the dominated). He directly links the possibility of a solution to this gendered analysis by expressing his desire for Israel to gain femininity ("gagne en féminité"), as this would resolve part of the problem. The deep emotional connection to Palestine, the dominated side, is simultaneously articulated in a profoundly feminine language, culminating in an urgent, almost ritualistic plea. This gender coding corresponds to the author's own poetics, as the word is generally defined as a mode of the feminine ("mode du féminin").

The poet reaffirms his deep love for Palestine, strengthened by the ruins ("les décombres"), and names prominent advocates such as Jean Genet, Mahmoud Darwich, and Edward Saïd. Nevertheless, he declares that he would immediately abandon this love should Palestine become a dominant state; however, he acknowledges that ceasing to love Israel is anything but easy. Given the extent of the horror ("l'étendue de l'horreur") that, according to Fourcade, Israel is currently inflicting, the author finds it impossible to make a similar plea to Israel. He implores Palestine, however, to save him a cup of bitter orange marmalade in this misfortune, to let him smell the scent of cherry laurel, and above all, to allow him to drink their rules under the moon ("laisse-moi boire tes règles sous la lune"). In light of the destruction in Gaza, the author fears that humanity has once again entered a period in which it periodically needs a bath in blood, as described by Marguerite Yourcenar in Memoirs of Hadrian described.

According to Fourcade, the fundamental theme shaping the destiny of nations is the fear of “being at home” (l'être chez soi). Israel, he argues, interpreted its own score of fear in terms of strength, thereby excluding that of others, thus finding itself trapped in the vice of its own power. The crucial insight of the exodus is that there will never be a home on this earth unless it is shared with others. As a living, albeit currently unattainable, example of this shared space (espace commun), the author cites the founding of the Divan Orchestra by Edward Saïd and Daniel Barenboim, which was based on the universal language of music and fosters the conviction that this form of sharing can return and endure.

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Appendix: Regarding the parts of What about the water in the ice?

Hippopotamus Pact and the Double Prohibition

This first part establishes Fourcade's existential crisis and his poetic frame of reference. His model is the predynastic hippopotamus, which emerges to be freed from its parasites—in truth, its fears—by a grub-pecking animal, a process that never succeeds. This image symbolizes the author's irresolvable, fundamental predicament. The "double prohibition" of October 2023—the prohibition against loving Ukraine and the prohibition against loving what is happening in Israel/Palestine—defines the moral and geographical crisis from which he writes: "Gaza-Donzy octobre '23."

The acute situation is described as a shared "shower of distress" ("douche de détresse") that the self-destructive West is subjecting itself to. In this context, he recalls Kafka's central idea that literature offers the possibility of daring "a leap from the ranks of the murderers" ("bond hors du rang des meurtriers"). Fourcade considers this leap the only necessary action shortly before the end. His poetry, reinventing itself in this context, becomes an existential act intended to enable the author's survival, even though he fears he will no longer be able to muster the strength for this existential resistance.

The Disaster and the Intelligibility of Ruins: Blood Shower and the Act of Writing: The Logic of Reciprocal Killing

Fourcade defines his poetry in the crisis as a "process of immersion" and as a way to make the disaster intellectually comprehensible. He radically equates the suffering parties by emphasizing that he is the same man who enters Gaza from Israel and Gaza from Israel, and experiences the crisis as a "reciprocal bloodbath" engulfing the West. Writing is an "act-observation" and a physical reality that brings together the trivial (promiscuity in the rubble) and the absolute of horror.

The author views current events as a “continuous event-poem” (“événement-poème qui est en cours”), marking the return of old tragedies (such as the wars of his childhood). Faced with the violence—both real and symbolic, which identifies him in Gaza as a “foreign agent” (“agent-de-l'étranger”) and seeks to stone him—Fourcade posits that in this “logic of reciprocal killing,” there are no innocents. Nevertheless, for him, who feels morally obligated “to be a Palestinian without ceasing to be a Jew,” the power of writing itself remains indestructible.

The most irreplaceable

This part of the text is characterized by "total pessimism" and culminates in the sharp moral condemnation that the founding of Israel in its specific form is the "most irreparable" result of the Shoah. Fourcade reaffirms his lifelong empathy for the suffering of Jews in the 20th century, but sees the establishment of the state as a fatal step backward: The Shoah itself was the "supreme attack on the Declaration of the Rights of Man" of 1789, while the founding of Israel is based on the dominance of a community that deprives others of space and breath. He therefore vehemently demands that the existing state "change its face."

Paradoxically, through an exchange with Hadrien France-Lanord, the author also illuminates the positive global legal and ethical consequences of the Shoah. The “unconditional ethical rupture” represented by the Shoah compelled the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of December 10, 1948. This text introduced the ethical concept of dignity (“dignité”) into the legal texts of the UN. Fourcade observes that the founding of Israel (May 1948) failed to take this progressive global moral reflection into account. The author further posits the necessity of “philia” (friendship) as a crucial non-legal foundation for political coexistence.

Lips on concrete walls

The search for an “unexpected, specifically Palestinian contemporary issue” leads Fourcade to art. He finds it in Tanya Habjouqa’s photograph “Occupied Pleasures,” which depicts a Palestinian javelin thrower (“lanceuse de javelot”) in front of the border wall. The title, “Occupied Pleasures,” symbolizes the illegitimacy of pleasure and the constant occupation of body and mind by omnipresent oppression, where time and space are perceived as limited and everything as forbidden. As a counter-image to this wall of death, Fourcade proposes projecting Matisse’s universal symbol of lips onto the concrete walls in order to return to “the slogan and desire” and initiate an uncontrollable form of peace.

The passage depicts the traumatic act of the author's separation from the State of Israel, described as a "merciless writing rendezvous." This separation, which he compares to the arduous task of informing a loved one of the end of their relationship, results from the destruction of a fundamental hope. Fourcade laments the "horrible translation" of victims into executioners ("bourreaux"), which occurs using the "same unbearable vocabulary" of terror. According to Fourcade, Israel's original identity, which, through the "unspeakable fear and suffering" of the Shoah, had promised "infinite goodness," was lost because the founding of the state was based on a lie ("A people without a land for a land without a people").

Flight of the Scarabs

In the face of the escalating conflict in Gaza, where the territory is divided into 2400 blocks and the population is being forced to evacuate, Fourcade rejects the "linguistic elements" of politicians as obscene and cynical. He contrasts these with the "completely incomprehensible" screams of the Israeli hostage families, which he perceives as an expression of "extreme, thoroughly human savagery" and with which he feels a profound connection. For the traumatized children, he seeks a "sensual, musical, secular rhythm" as the basis for an educational gentleness, to make the horror bearable.

An intense symbolic image is the flight of tens of thousands of scarabs from Gaza toward Egypt, forming a dense, dark, biblical symbol of mass movement. Fourcade metaphorically joins this mass by digging beneath the border fence, trying to lose his own trace. He finds solace in the words of Martin Buber from 1947, who called for a binational structure and self-determination for both peoples, one that precludes the dominance of either. Finally, Fourcade offers two "flintstones of conscience" as a moral legacy: on the one hand, Nietzsche's recognition of the "grand style in morality" that Europe owes to the Jews, and on the other, the passage from Genesis (12:6) in which Abraham, upon his arrival, acknowledges that the Canaanites are already in the land, thus laying the foundation for coexistence as migrants rather than exclusive possession.

This article is written in German and can be found at https://rentree.de. Automatic translations into English and French are available. English, French.

Notes

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