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.
