Dear Chancellor Emmert,
Dear Members of the Council on Research,
Ladies and Gentlemen:I cannot express with words my emotion, gratitude and pride at receiving this extraordinary award.
When Todd Pourciau informed me that I had to give a 15 minutes speech, I was tempted to request an incomplete, and then an extension to the incomplete. But now it is Hic Rhodos, hic salta! The time to put up or…the time has come.
However, I would like to ask the Administration to please wait at least a year before conferring me another distinction of such magnitude; I worked so much on my little speech I am totally exhausted.
This momentous event has been for me a wonderful occasion to reflect on my past, present and future as a scholar. One way to look at my career is to try to quantify what I have gained and lost by crossing the Atlantic and working for this great institution.
I have lost: a lot of hair.
I have gained: about forty pounds, and a ton of friends, many of whom made the effort to be here today. My special thanks go to my brother-in-law Tom Cooper, who came all the way from California to attend. As a matter of fact, I was so happy for his presence that we drank too much last night, and now I have a terrible hangover. When such is the case, my English deteriorates even further. But my chair, Jeff Humphries, told me: "Don't worry at all! The worse your English, the more they'll think you are a genius!"
Indeed, one thing I have not lost is my celebrated Swiss accent, and I fear you will have to bear with it until the end of my life.
But let us be serious: most of my scholarship has been published during my tenure at LSU. LSU has been the essential framework of my publications, and I am deeply grateful to the University, and ultimately to the taxpayers of Louisiana, for the generous release time that has allowed my research to grow. I hope I will be worthy of the effort consented in my favor.
In my case, moving from a European to an American academic setting has been an extremely stimulating translation.
In France, you pretty much live and die in your specialized branch of knowledge. Had I stayed, I would probably have become the world specialist of the Vulgate version of the Arthurian novel, which was the topic of my dissertation and my first book. To be fair, that was not the case at Geneva when I studied there, but as you know, Geneva is in Switzerland. There we had great masters with a broad range of interests and publications, like Jean Starobinski, Jean Rousset and Roger Dragonetti.
However, moving to America has opened doors in my life and my intellectual activity and to put into practice what I had begun to learn in Switzerland. It has allowed my to cross over the boundaries of my original specialty, Medieval French literature, to modern literature, including America's, to psychoanalysis, to art history, to anthropology and finally to participate in the creation of a Web journal, www.metalandflesh.com, which has already been awarded numerous prizes and distinctions. Go check it, it is not what you think; the journal is devoted to the interface between man and the microchip. And I don't know where it will stop; if I may paraphrase what the art historian Leo Steinberg recently wrote to me: "In America, the way is open and yours to bestride".
The first thing that strikes a foreigner landing for the first time in America is the vibrant dynamism you kind of feel in the air of this society, this urge to go forward, to progress, not to get too bogged down into staid tradition. And in fact, as much as I have reinvented myself thanks to America, as much the department of French studies and the University themselves have changed during my tenure here. This institution is not frozen in time, but engaged in a never ending quest for greatness; and let me tell you, it is good to be part of it at this point in time.
The second thing that struck this immigrant when he landed, 19 years ago, at the Chicago airport, was an impression of utter, and very disorienting chaos; but in the end, I had the feeling that everything was submitted to a mysterious and efficient order; in my opinion, a perfect icon for American society is a scene from the movie Grease; on the screen, you behold an huge crowd with no apparent structure to it, but then the music begins, and everybody finds his or her place in the dance. Over the years, I have come to dearly love this music and dancing of American society.
An award like this should not be seen as a crowning achievement after which you go, research wise, into stealth retirement. Quite the contrary, it should be viewed (at least I see it that way) as a tremendous incentive, an encouragement to go further.
So let me dwell on what my plans are for the near and far future; it is now time to indulge in what my friends would call my megalomaniac, and my enemies, my delusional side. First on the agenda is Lacan Today, which should be a basic and clear introduction to Lacan, but also a book where I want to show the fundamental complementarity of physical sciences and humanities -if you want, my project is to take literally what is inscribed at the frontispiece of my college: not Arts in one corner and Sciences in another, very remote one, but Arts and Sciences together. Second would be The blood of the Gods, where, looking at Mesoamerican ritual art, I would like to examine the relationship between language, signs and sacrifice; then on to La passion des idoles 2, which will dwell on the relationship between idolatry and femininity through the Bible, Medieval mystics and Proust; not to mention a collection of articles entitled Difference and Alterity, and also the English translations of Phallophanies and La passion des Idoles I.
If I can ask the audience a favor here: Please don't take down this list in order to put it under my nose a few years hence, and force me to compare it to what I will have really done.
If there is a common thread in my work, it is the constantly reaffirmed goal of making the past present; I always want to show that what people in the past wrote or painted or thought not only help us understand ourselves, but also understand others. Literature and art are there, not to confine ourselves in the little egos than resembles us most, but as Proust says: "Thanks to art, instead of seeing on world only, our own, we see that world multiply itself and we have at our disposal as many worlds as there are original artists, (…) worlds which, centuries after the extinction of the fire from which their light first emanated, whether it is called Rembrandt or Vermeer, send us still each one its special radiance." (Remembrance of Things Past)
I would like to address a few words to my PhD students; I don't often tell how much I value you. It happens only when my Swiss reserve is overcome by my Mediterranean expansiveness. I value you first because there is no separation between research and teaching: ultimately, all teaching at the graduate level should nourish publication and all research should be fed back into teaching; hence the graduate students allow me to "test drive" my ideas. Concurrently, when I teach my published research, it very often happens that, by discovering things I have overlooked or forgotten, they lead me to the point where I have to say that, darned, I should rewrite such and such chapter or article.
But there is another reason why my students are dear to me; it is probable that, if we are lucky, our work in the humanities will be forgotten after fifty years. The students therefore are our more lasting work, our living books, books that don't replicate us, but works where we have been the seed of their own originality. As my master Jean Starobinski one said: "The task of the professor is to teach the student to think by him or herself." In their turn these students of ours they too will have students, who, let us hope, will retain a trace of that initial spark and maintain part of what we were all about a long time ago. Anyway, if I have succeeded in making them understand what Proust says, then my task is complete; let me quote again from Remembrance of Things Past: "Real life, life at last laid bare and illuminated - the only life in consequence which can be said to be really lived - is literature, and life thus defined is in a sense all the time immanent in ordinary men no less than in the artist." (p. 931)
And finally I wish to express thanks to some special people:
To Chancellor Mark Emmert, Provost Dan Fogel and Dean Jane Collins for their steadfast support of the Department of French Studies.
To Jeff Humphries for his tremendous efforts in favor of the Department and for his truly exceptional leadership.
And to my wife Kate and my children Gabriel and Jacques for their understanding and support for my rather idiosyncratic ways of life and work.Alexandre Leupin, May 15, 2001
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