conducted over
email, Sep-Oct 2025
Leslie Kaplan is a French poet, playwright, and novelist. From the beginning
of her career, Kaplan has been an important writer of the French left. She has
published over twenty books in several genres, many of which have been
translated into German, Swedish, Spanish, Danish, Norwegian, and now, English.
Her first book, L’exces l’usine (1982), gained the attention of writers
such as Marguerite Duras and Maurice Blanchot, and became an important book for
the ’68 generation. In 2018, Commune Editions published Excess—The Factory,
translated by Julie Carr and Jennifer Pap. Other books in English translation
include Miss Nobody Knows (Tripwire Editions, 2025, trans Pap), The
Book of Skies (Pamenar, 2024, trans Carr & Pap) and Disorder: a
fable (AK Press, 2020, trans Pap). The Criminal (trans Carr &
Pap) is forthcoming from Nightboat Books in 2027.
David Buuck: How old were
you when you moved to France, and how did you make your way into the workers
movement in the 60s and—subsequently—the radical writers’ community in Paris?
Leslie Kaplan:
I
came to Paris when I was 2 years old, on a ship called La Desirade, with my
mother. My father had studied French literature at the University of Chicago;
he had not been able to get a degree in English and American literature (there
was an implicit numerus clausus for Jews). He spoke French very well and
before Pearl Harbor and the US getting into WWII, he’d participated in a radio
program in New York aimed towards France—Radio France libre—with André Breton
and others. Then he was sent to Algiers, where the Gaullists had taken over,
and he followed the US army to Paris, where he decided to stay, eventually
entering the Foreign Service. I was sent to a French school, did all my studies
in French, and when my parents left France, I insisted on staying in Paris
where I wanted to study philosophy and history. This was in 1959-1960; I was
16, the war was still going on in Algeria, and my older fellow students were
activists against the war and for Algerian Independence. At the University
there were a lot of Marxist-Leninists influenced by the philosopher Louis
Althusser, who were trying to find strategies toward Revolution. The group I
was interested in elaborated the “establishment” strategy; we thought Russia
had abandoned Marxism, and we were enthusiastic about what we imagined was
happening in China, the Great Cultural Revolution, the idea of an alliance
between intellectuals and workers (knowing nothing of what was really going on
in China). I started to work in a factory in January 68, first in Paris, then
in Lyon, and in May the factory was occupied…
DB: My
understanding is that you didn’t begin writing about your experiences in and
around what we in the west still call “May 68” until some years later. Was this
a conscious choice or more that writing had not yet become your vocation, or
primary memory-practice, if you will? If writing is something that “came
later,” how did that turn come about?
LK: I had no
intention of becoming a writer. The “after 68” period was very difficult for
me. I was active in various groups, mostly feminist, did some translations, went
through psychoanalysis, worked part time at the clinic at La Borde, and decided
to go back to the University and become a therapist. Then, all of a sudden, it
was ten years after, and I felt the necessity to write about what had happened,
so it wouldn’t just disappear. The publishing of the book called “L’établi”
(translated as “The assembly line,” I think) by Robert Linhart, who had been in
the sixties a leader of the Marxist-leninist students, also encouraged me to
write, even if I chose to do so in a different way. The fact is, writing”
L’Excès-l’usine” made me discover that writing was what I wanted to do.
DB: How did you
manage the gap in years from 68 and its aftermath, your years at the clinic,
and sitting down to write numerous books about those times without resorting to
nostalgia or conventional memoir? Do you think your particular “style” is
related to this temporal aporia of stunted revolution and defeat, or would you
instead attribute your formal and poetic inclinations to other influences
(literary, French, philosophical, etc.)?
LK: I have never
considered nostalgia, or despair as such, an interesting point of view. Too
flat, linear. I’m more interested in contradiction, everything can be divided
in contraries, Up and Down, etc. Not “in my beginning is my end.” Rather, “Each
man is defeated. A man if he is a man is not defeated.” (adding “a woman” each
time of course…) In literature as in philosophy. This could have to do with a
form of Marxism, but also maybe Jewish humor, or just temperament…
DB: You write both
poetry and prose, though in many ways the distinction seems false, as all of
your works (at least those translated into English) share a focus on
stripped-down language while also including narrative, even if moving between
past and present, the events being narrated or remembered seemingly all in the
‘present’ of the writing. How do you choose between poetry and prose narrative,
if it’s even an important distinction to you?
LK: I don’t choose, I think what I try to
write about always comes in a certain form, and it’s always “depuis
maintenant,” “from now,” as you say. There is a scene, something is
happening, and then there is always the question: “And now, what?”
DB: The first
three books that Jennifer Pap and Julie Carr have translated into English (Excess—the
Factory, The Book of Skies, Miss Nobody Knows) spend much of their focus in
or around the ‘factory’—as both material and psycho-social formation. Evens as
the characters of the books seem to drift through the spaces of “after ’68,”
it’s as if the shadow of the factory hovers over the lives of women who’d at
least had a momentary glimpse of some kind of freedom and autonomy, new social
relations, etc. How do you think your books address the loss of those moments
of promise? How does gender play a role in the particular experience of women
factory workers, both during and after the occupations?
LK: The
occupations were very important for the women factory workers, even if there
was an immense feeling of loss when the movement stopped, because of the simple
facts of occupying the whole factory, not just being stuck at their place,
talking to the men, defying the hierarchy…I think living through an experience
like that in any case leaves something positive, and gives energy for change. The
book Miss Nobody Knows writes about that too, I hope! Gender is more
explicitly addressed in my three plays, “All my life I have been a woman,”
“Louise, she is crazy,” and “Move the sky.”
DB: Oh, tell me
about the plays? When were they written and staged, and how would you describe
them?
LK: My
book Excess has often been staged, from the beginning. And in
1994 a young student Marcial Di Fonso Bo (an Argentine who had come to Paris
because of the dictatorship in Argentina) put it on with fellow
students at the école d’art dramatique in Rennes, a remarkable show.
Marcial is now a well-known actor and director of Le Quai, a theatre in Angers
(a national theatre = receiving money from the state, though, like all, less
and less). A few years after, two young actresses Frédérique Loliée and Élise
Vigier, who were fellow students of Marcial and I had met in Rennes, who had
now careers of their own (they are great!) came to see me and asked me to write
for them a play were the women would be "neither queens nor whores".
Which I did, first, in 2008, Toute ma vie j’ai été une femme, All
my life I have been a woman, starting with that sentence, and going on from
there, a lot about women and consumer society. Then in 2011 came Louise,
elle est folle, Louise, she is crazy, about treason, language,
craziness and so-called normality, and in 2013 Déplace le ciel, Move
the sky, about…love … All these plays have been published by POL, and put
on many times (Louise…was even in programs for the baccalauréat, the
finishing exam for high school). The plays have been put on in many theaters in
France (even once in Italy, Frédérique Loliée has also a career in Italy). AND
they have been put on in Denver, in 2016, in French with over titles,
Jennifer Pap invited Frédérique, Élise and myself at the University. I
also wrote a play called Le Monde et son contraire, The
world and its contrary, for a great actor, Marc Bertin, who I had seen
playing Kafka (the play is « around » Kafka, the relation of an actor
to Kafka), it was put on in 2021 (published by POL in a volume called L’Aplatissement
de la Terre, The Flattening of the Earth). I love writing for
the theatre!
DB: So, since the plays have not been translated
into English (yet?), another question about making work for the stage: what if
any formal considerations emerge for you when writing for theater? Are you more
likely to hand over a text to directors/actors and let them make
dramaturgical/etc choices? How (if at all) are the works in relation to
a)French theatrical traditions and/or b)the political considerations of your
prose and poetry books?
LK: What I like in writing for the theatre
has definitively to do with form: using dialogue (including dialogue
with oneself…) and condensation. It has to do with poetry because of the
necessity of going to the essential (otherwise, it’s boring). And I write for
actors, actresses, I know, I can imagine them on stage. After of course the
play can be put on by others, but in the beginning, that’s how it is. I don’t
put the play on myself, I couldn’t, I hand it over. Before meeting Marcial,
Fred and Élise, etc., I didn’t have much relation to the theatre, I had
more a passion for films. (I helped the cinema review Trafic,
founded by Serge Daney, be published by POL). I think, I hope, my plays contain
the same political options as the rest of my work, for example in Louise…written
in 2011, there is a long passage against the politics of Nicolas Sarkozy, then
president, his anti « foreigners » politics… In more general
terms, for me theater is a way of awakening, against what I’ve called “the civilization
of cliché.”
DB: and what do you mean by "the civilization of cliché"?
LK: Well, the "civilization of cliché"
is the aggressive simplification of everything, and it concerns first of all
language, words have become products of the market, the model is : you buy/you
don’t buy. When the play Louise, elle est folle was published
I wrote a very short essay that was included in the book, called Renversement,
contre une civilisation du cliché, la ligne Copi-Buñuel-Beckett (“Turning
around, against the civilisation of cliché, the Copi-Buñuel-Beckett line”). The
Copi-Buñuel-Beckett line was published alongside the play Louise is
crazy. In the play, the question is: what is "crazy,” what is “normal”— is
it normal to do (like Louise in the play) what society considers “normal,” that
is, basically: to buy and buy and buy? or is it crazy? And the answer
is of course, No, it’s not normal… And: let’s turn things upside down. I give
examples of “turning things upside down:" children’s blocks, Chaplin
in the film The Dictator where he pilots a plane upside
down, or… the beginning of the French Revolution, with the famous words
of Sieyès, known by every french pupil: What is the Third State?
Everything / What has it been up until now in politics? Nothing / What does it
want? To become something… Or again a quote from Robert Antelme in L’espèce
humaine (The Human Species), his book on the concentration camp of
Buchenwald: “You believe that what you want to do is to be able to kill
the SS. But if you think a little, you see that you are wrong. It’s not so
simple. What you want, is to begin by putting his head downwards, and his
feet in the air. And laugh and laugh. What you want to do to the gods.” And
after I give examples from Copi (a great cartoonist), Buñuel, Beckett…All this
is to illustrate what I call the Civilization of cliché, made of so-called “obvious” ideas,
that are all meant to show that things are as they are, and can’t be different.
Turning things upside down means: the contrary is possible, you can think
the contrary, what is normal is not necessarily normal, what is crazy is not
necessarily crazy.
DB: And what are
you working on these days?
LK: On a book called les enfants — The
Children.
It’s
difficult to talk about à book that’s beginning! But it’s certainly
connected to my previous work…
David Buuck lives in
Oakland, CA, from where he edits the journal and small press Tripwire
(tripwirejournal.com). Books include Noise in the Face of (Roof Books
2016), SITE CITE CITY (Futurepoem, 2015) and An Army of Lovers,
co-written with Juliana Spahr (City Lights, 2013), along with the chapbook The
Riotous Outside (Commune Editions, 2018). He is the Academic Director of
the Clemente Course in the Humanities at Oakland Adult Career Education and
teaches at San Quentin's Prison University Program.
