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Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, a book he was never without as if he had written it himself? These were real political moments, Mr Breton! I’m not kidding with this story, even if I am a bit drunk! When our Marxist president was on form, the sweat dripping from his bulging forehead, his tie badly knotted like a suicidal who’d finally managed to hang himself, he would lay into the whole lot of your philosophers from Antiquity, that bunch of lechers who were too quick to extol life’s pleasures such as premature ejaculation and masturbation with the help of boa grease, who didn’t worry about anything except their beard and who quite possibly, between two slapdash lessons in the Agora, did the business with pretty mummified girls barely out of puberty. Our president did not forget to denounce your vagabonds from the past who lived in barrels, were stupid enough to light hurricane lamps in broad daylight and didn’t even have it in them to whet our enthusiasm, to offer us a unanimous definition of philosophy, a definition that would at least have had the eternal merit of exempting young secondary school students from splitting hairs during their end-of-year exams when they run down their pens answering perennial questions such as: “What is Philosophy?” This is not a topic to joke about, Mr Breton! Our President had read a lot even if he didn’t have his primary school certificate and peeled potatoes in the kitchens of the French army during the Second World War. Like all dictators, he knew his classics, looked down his nose at the moderns whom he reproached for having abandoned the imperfect subjunctive from one day to the next in exchange for a language that had more freedom but was inevitably less elegant. And it was by drawing on his general culture, for which his people envied him, that he also presented us with
Capital by Karl Marx, just after citing Engels — and the scandal-spreaders concluded that the President was very fond of the books of Marx and his wife Angel. His Most High Excellency wasn’t just anybody, and you should know that, you French! In his opinion your visionary men from bygone eras, also known as philosophers, had simply interpreted the world, but from now on it needed changing with Rwandan machetes and Kalashnikovs imported directly from Russia via the narrow border with Cabinda even if the Angolans and their rebels didn’t agree …