We find a home or a job all the more easily when we look for them methodically. An encounter, it seems to me, is rather given to us in addition, when we are present to ourselves. With the concept of the encounter given in addition, I try to understand why, when we seek the other to fill a lack, we move away from real encounters and expose ourselves to being controlled.
An encounter we would like to have
We speak about encounters in the vocabulary of searching. People “look for someone”, “meet people”, go to professional events to “expand their network”. Since the 2010s, a large share of romantic relationships have begun on dating apps, whose algorithms suggest profiles presumed to be compatible (The Evolution of the Love Contract), and in the mid-2020s advertisements appeared for virtual partners that one configures to one’s own taste (« Create Your AI Girlfriend »). All these practices assume that an encounter is a good one can aim at, and that one obtains it all the better for having defined what one is looking for.
When I think back on the important encounters of my life, I cannot find a single one that I obtained in this way. If we cannot want an encounter, should we leave it to chance and stay passive? And if the important encounters do not come from searching, how do we recognise, among the people who come into our lives, those with whom we grow and those who make use of us?
If someone asked me which encounter I would like to have and have not yet had, I could answer that I would have liked to meet Glenn Gould, or name other figures of that kind. But the question seems to me to contradict what I call an encounter. For me, an encounter is something that is created between two people and that neither of them could have imagined beforehand. If I project the encounter I would like to have, I remain alone with my projection, and if someone happened to match it, I would see in that person nothing but my own expectations. This is often the case in love stories, where we arrive with precise expectations and would like the other person to match them, so that we remain alone with them. I also have the feeling that by cultivating too many expectations about the encounters I would like to have, I would close myself off from those, very real, that can take place.
I do not claim that we can go towards another person without any projection. Projection is part of every human relationship (« Create Your AI Girlfriend »), since we form an image of the other before we know them, and we go on doing so afterwards. Behind the word encounter, I hear first of all otherness, the fact of being enriched by the other, enlarged in one’s perceptions, sometimes in one’s abilities. It seems to me that the encounter is the moment when the other turns out to be different from what I had projected onto them, and when I thereby discover a side of myself I did not know. The preconceptions we had about the other come undone in dialogue, and the two people build something new together.
The things we miss by aiming at them
The Norwegian philosopher Jon Elster described, in Sour Grapes (1983), a family of states he calls “essentially by-products”. We do not reach them by aiming at them, but as the consequence of something else. Sleep is the simplest example, since a person who goes to bed wanting with all their might to fall asleep is kept awake by that very will. Elster places in the same family spontaneity, which we lose as soon as we try to be spontaneous, and forgetting, since wanting to forget something amounts to thinking about it. It seems to me that the encounter belongs to this family of states.
Martin Buber, in I and Thou (Ich und Du, 1923), thinks of our relationship to others in the same direction. For him, true relation is a gift, and we do not reach it by searching; yet it requires me to enter into it with my whole being. An encounter, even one that is received, therefore requires commitment. This fits with what I think about duration: an encounter of one minute can be more important, and more transformative, than a relationship of several years, because everything depends on the way each person commits to it. In 2022, I led animated film workshops in a day centre, where people without a home come to take a shower and charge their phones (The workshop we will only run once). Some stayed a quarter of an hour and left with a film, others stayed four hours, and I see no reason why one should be worth less than the other.
Hartmut Rosa, who describes our relationship to the world through the notion of resonance (Displaced Resonance), puts forward a similar idea on the scale of a whole society. He writes in The Uncontrollability of the World (2020) that the attempt to make things guaranteed to be available strips them of their capacity for resonance. Dating apps, whose designers promise us compatible people on demand, belong to this attempt. One can meet people on them, and many lasting couples have formed that way. But by using them we grow used to the idea that an encounter is obtained the way a service is obtained, and that idea runs counter to the disposition Buber speaks of.
I propose to call the encounter given in addition an encounter that is given to us while we are busy with something else, and in particular with being present to ourselves. The French expression, “par surcroît”, comes from the Gospel of Matthew in Le Maistre de Sacy’s translation, where the King James Version reads “all these things shall be added unto you”. It has passed into everyday French to mean what one receives on top of what one was looking for, and it is in this everyday sense that I use it. I have experienced it myself at several periods of my life. When I am not well and would like to meet people because it would do me good, nobody comes, whereas when I look after myself, take care of myself and feel good with myself, encounters happen as if by magic. When I try to bring about an encounter, it does not happen, but when I am open to myself, I am also open to others.
Seeking the other to feel better
Why is this so? My hypothesis is that, when I look for someone because it would do me good, I see the people I come across in terms of the use I could make of them. I see them as possible remedies for my lack more than as people, and I believe many of them sense it, even without being able to put it into words, and move away. Those who do not move away are not always the kindest. A person who seeks the other out of lack lets that lack show, and someone who knows how to use it can offer them exactly what they are hoping for.
I am rather naive, and I often wonder, when a relationship begins, whether I am not being manipulated. I believe I am experiencing an enriching encounter, and it happens that in reality I am not enriched by it and that I drift away from myself in it. In a text written in 1942 about school studies, Simone Weil speaks of mistranslations, of absurdities in geometry problems and of clumsiness in French essays, all of which come, in her view, from the mind having rushed too quickly onto something: “The cause is always that one wanted to be active; one wanted to search” (my translation). She draws from this a consequence that goes beyond school:
“The most precious goods must not be sought, but awaited. For man cannot find them by his own strength, and if he sets out in search of them, he will find in their place false goods whose falseness he will not be able to discern.”
Simone Weil, “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God”, 1942 (my translation).
Weil is thinking of truth and of God, and I would not want to attribute to her a theory of human relationships. But the structure she describes seems to me to hold for the encounter. Whoever searches finds something, and what they find has the appearance of what was being sought. And the difficulty lies in the fact that, by searching, we make ourselves unable to discern that this good is false. When I need the other in order to feel better, I am in no state to see what they are doing with me. We speak of control, in the sense of the French word “emprise”, when one person takes hold of another to the point that the other, while believing they are finding something to live on, gradually loses themselves (The dialectic of bonds, between necessary rupture and continuity of self). With the concept of the encounter given in addition, I see more clearly that control and the absence of encounter can come from the same disposition, that of a person who seeks the other to fill what they lack.
So we need a criterion, and I have none better than intuition, that small inner voice we should listen to and through which we sense whether we come out of a relationship enlarged or knocked off centre. In an encounter, the other enriches me, they can call me into question or make me discover what I did not know about myself, without harming my dignity or who I am, whereas in a relationship of control, I move a little further away from myself with every exchange, all the while believing I am being enriched. To sense this difference, one has to be fairly anchored in oneself, to know more or less who one is. This is the whole difficulty of amorous permeability, which is at once our strength and our vulnerability.
The waiting Simone Weil speaks of
In the same text, Simone Weil describes attention, and I believe she thereby also describes the disposition in which an encounter becomes possible. She writes it with pupils facing an exercise in mind:
“Attention consists in suspending one’s thought, leaving it available, empty and open to the object, keeping within oneself, close to one’s thought but at a lower level and without contact with it, the various pieces of knowledge one is obliged to use. Thought must be, in relation to all particular thoughts already formed, like a man on a mountain who, looking ahead, also sees beneath him, without looking at them, many forests and plains. And above all thought must be empty, waiting, seeking nothing, but ready to receive in its naked truth the object that is about to enter it.”
Simone Weil, “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God”, 1942 (my translation).
Weil writes “en attente”, waiting, and French distinguishes this waiting from “attentes” in the plural, our expectations. The waiting she describes has no object defined in advance; it is a form of availability. The expectations we bring into a relationship, on the contrary, are filled in advance with what the other ought to be. An encounter given in addition requires this waiting without an object, and becomes impossible when we arrive weighed down with expectations. According to Henri Maldiney, a philosopher of the event, “the real is always what we were not expecting” (my translation), and the encounter is, for me, its most familiar example.
The emptiness Weil speaks of requires, in my view, that one be present enough to oneself not to need the other to come and fill us. In 1958, Donald Winnicott described the capacity to be alone in the presence of someone, which a child acquires when its mother is there without demanding anything of it. It is also the capacity expected of cultural mediators when it comes to receiving what others bring (Receiving, or the difficulty of doing nothing). It seems to me that this capacity is also the condition of the encounter. At the risk of seeming a little self-centred, I would say that I still have an important encounter to make, the encounter with myself. It is not easy, and I am moving towards it very slowly, without ever having completed it.
I saw this availability in Chris Marker. In 2005, for the first edition of the Pocket Films Festival, which I had conceived with the programming team of the Forum des images, we lent mobile phones with cameras to established filmmakers, to artists from other fields and to people who had never made a film, and Chris Marker agreed to take part. He was eighty-three. In front of me, I did not have an old sage, I had a teenager. He wanted to film his cat with the phone, he talked to me about his hard drives, about everything he was going to try. He was entirely given over to the desire to discover, and I learned from him, without having sought it, that one can remain open at any age to what one does not yet know.
Encounters without reciprocity
Some of the important encounters of my life did not take place in the usual sense of the word, and I hesitate to call them that. I have sometimes had, in the street, unplanned conversations with homeless people, and heard one of them suddenly tell me a truth about life. I never saw that person again and I do not know their name, but I have not forgotten what they told me.
When I was a teenager, there were always crowds on the piazza of the Centre Pompidou, street performances, people addressing the crowd. Among them was an old anarchist, Aguigui Mouna, who had run, in 1974 and again in 1981, a brief presidential campaign by bicycle, and who would call out to passers-by “Aimez-vous les uns sur les autres”, a pun on the commandment to love one another. I saw him often and never spoke to him. I had not thought of him for a long time. The piazza has since become a completely smooth place, where nobody addresses the crowd in that way any more, and that is perhaps why I count him among my encounters.
Nor did I ever meet Roger Chomeaux, known as Chomo, a painter and sculptor close to art brut, who lived alone for more than forty years in the woods of Achères-la-Forêt, in the forest of Fontainebleau, where he built what he called his Village of Preludian Art. He lived on the donations of the people who came to see his work. I discovered him in a documentary, and I published some of his sayings on my site, including this one: “In evolution, one is alone, always.” I hear in this solitude the same thing as in the capacity to be alone that Winnicott speaks of. Another of his sayings, “You have to be spontaneous”, cannot be followed as an instruction, since Elster counts spontaneity among the by-products. I do not think Chomo followed it as an instruction. I think rather that he was spontaneous because he lived apart, wholly absorbed in his work, and because people made their way to him in the woods without his having to seek them out.
Why do I call these encounters, when I never spoke either to Mouna or to Chomo? I think it is because I learned something from each of them, as I did from that person I came across in the street. In none of these cases had I been looking for anyone. I was busy with something else, hanging around a square as a teenager or watching a film, and it was in passing that I received what these people had to give. They did not know what they were giving me, and expected nothing from me in return.
Friendships that last without being maintained
I often ask myself a question to which I have no clear answer: at what moment do we know that someone we have met is one of our friends? I do not think there is a tipping point. There is rather the building of something, which we become aware of afterwards. I have sometimes seen again people I had not seen for a very long time, and found that we were still friends, that it was still just as strong, even though we had done nothing to keep up the bond. For a long time I was shut inside the question of the couple, as if I had to live all of love within the couple (Love and Couples). Today I put a great deal back into these friendships and these many encounters, and I can see how very valuable they are.
Montaigne’s account of his friendship with La Boétie might seem to contradict what I am suggesting, since he says in it that they were seeking each other:
“There is, beyond all my reasoning, and beyond what I can say of it in particular, some inexplicable and fated force that brought about this union. We were seeking each other before we had met, through reports we heard of one another, which worked more strongly on our affection than reports reasonably should, by some decree of heaven, I believe; we embraced each other through our names. And at our first meeting, which was by chance at a great feast and gathering in town, we found ourselves so taken with each other, so well known to each other, so bound to each other, that from then on nothing was so close to either of us as the other.”
Michel de Montaigne, “Of Friendship”, Essays, 1595 (my translation).
On rereading it, I believe Montaigne is not speaking of the kind of search I have described. Before they met, La Boétie and he had become attached to each other through what they heard said of one another, just as I was able to become attached to Chomo by watching a documentary about him, but they knew nothing of what their friendship would be, and Montaigne specifies that their first meeting was “by chance”. He also gives up trying to explain what bound them, and it is just before this passage that he writes “Because it was he, because it was I”. His account remains different from mine on one point, since he describes a friendship born all at once, at their first meeting, where I see rather a slow building. Both seem possible to me, and in either case neither of the two people could have projected in advance what was going to bind them.
Making oneself available without searching
I do not think the encounter given in addition can be turned into a method, since that would be aiming at it once again. I would rather suggest a few landmarks, so as not to close ourselves off from encounters:
- Begin by taking care of oneself. When I am in a bad way, the wish to see people is often the wish to be relieved, and I have found that encounters tend to happen when I first look after myself. It is even, I think, how we become available to others again.
- Distinguish waiting from expectations. Before going towards someone we know little, we can ask ourselves what we expect of that person. We then discover our expectations, and naming them is sometimes enough to set them aside and make room for the waiting without an object that Simone Weil speaks of.
- Ask ourselves what we are trying to fill. When we feel we need one particular person, we can ask ourselves what lack they would come to fill. We can still go towards them, but knowing what we expect of them, we pay closer attention to what happens next, and we are less exposed to those who would know how to make use of that lack.
- Ask ourselves whether we come out of a relationship enlarged or knocked off centre. After an exchange, we can ask ourselves whether we have discovered something about ourselves or drifted away from who we are. I do not always find the answer at the time, and I still wonder how, by listening to that small inner voice, I manage to sense the difference.
