from: Serge Daney - "Postcards from the Cinema"

There is one essential thing that I have to say because it’s worth everything and protected me my entire life from the big disasters, one thing allowed me to swim like Blanchot’s Thomas the Obscure, never in the middle of the swimming pool but…It’s a feeling of protection that I had very early on, in the same way that every experience belongs to the person who lived it. No one will take it away, whether this experience is worthless or passionate, it is inalienable. Even when sometimes I did nothing of interest, this feeling never left me: I didn’t have the same experience as others at the same time. The essential thing is to preserve the richness of this experience, not to devalue it, it is our only asset, and if we are in it deeply, it will spare us of want, jealousy, resentment, fascism, all the things that make life impossible for so many. I am impervious to envy, it is perhaps my sanctity. The only thing which interests me is to understand how the other gets along, to know its parameters, what he fights with, what he aims for, and what that produces. Its something that the two of us have in common, it’s the way in which we resemble each other: this questioning of what the motor force of the individual or subject is. This sort of theoretical gossip is extremely interesting to me.