2023-08-17 15:44:04
Pierre Alferi, in Paris, in 2007. ANNE-LISE BROYER
On learning of the death of Pierre Alferi, on Wednesday August 16, in Paris, at the age of 60, one feels the immediate, poignant, almost selfish sadness of losing a marvelous writer: marvelously singular and surprisingly plural, whose books like the most more diverse came, over the years, to complete with regularity and some mischievousness a work always in motion – living in the extreme, at the crossroads of poetry, novel, cinema, music, philosophy, plastic arts and even, one might say, science and technology.
Now closed by death, this work nevertheless remains open, offered for the future to many readings which it certainly deserves. It is the work of a philosopher by training, himself a child of a philosopher: eldest son of Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) and the psychoanalyst and translator Marguerite Aucouturier (1932-2020), Pierre Alferi studied at the Ecole Normale superior of the rue d’Ulm, passes the aggregation, then defends under the direction of Louis Marin a thesis on the medieval thinker and theologian Guillaume d’Ockham (around 1285-1349), which will become shortly after his first book, William of Ockham the singular (Midnight, 1989).
A clear taste for speculative gambling
Discreet as to his ancestry, adopting for public life the name of his maternal grandmother, Pierre Alferi is nonetheless faithful to a certain spirit of Derrida, to which he pays a discreet homage in his last published book, Divers chaos (P.O.L, 2020) : “I don’t forget my father’s postcard/card” (allusion to the famous book by Jacques Derrida, Postcard. From Socrates to Freud and beyond, Aubier-Flammarion, 1980). He has this same philosophical curiosity, an obvious taste for speculative play and a rigorous attention to objects that may turn out to be unexpected, as well as a formidable sense of titles: Kub Gold; FMn; Sentimental day; After you ; Kiwi (1994; 1994; 1997; 2010; 2012, all at POL), or even The family cinemaa novel that happily renews the autobiographical genre by imagining the story filmed by a child, from an early age, of “Momfather” et “Mammer” (P.O.L, 1999).
First a poet, who from the 1990s would publish numerous collections and essays, Pierre Alferi early on showed his penchant for sharing creation and friendly companionship. He thus collaborates (under the name of Thomas Lago) with the musician and singer of the group Kat Onoma Rodolphe Burger, who will remain a sort of privileged accomplice, from the creation in the early 2000s of the Cinépoèmes and talking films, until their resumption on various French stages last spring. He works with the sculptor Jacques Julien, writes a record with Jeanne Balibar (Paramour2003), participates in the creation of shows with the choreographer Fanny de Chaillé, animates with the photographer Suzanne Doppelt the magazine Detail and directs with Olivier Cadiot, in 1995 and 1996, the two issues of a publication which it is not excessive to qualify as historical: the General literature review, where something like the summary of poetic creation for the passage to the next century can be read. Finally, he is a translator (of John Donne, Giorgio Agamben, John Ashbery…) and professor at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris.
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