Everybody thinks they know Catherine Clément. Everybody knows about her passion for India, her philosophical novels, her years as a teacher and as a journalist, her missions for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs which took her, together with her ambassador partner, to Vienna, New Delhi and Africa, and her mingling with the psychoanalytical circles… but this is not only a disordered but also an incomplete and over-simplistic summary.
Through her rare autobiographical writings (for example Cherche Midi, Stock 2000), her readers have learned about her childhood as a French Jewish girl, but never before the publication of this book –certainly the most important of her life-, has Catherine Clément revealed so many secrets, unfolded memories and deep mysteries. From her fraternal complicity to her eternal friendships, we discover her as a young teacher, as an active member of the communist party, or close to certain politicians amongst whom two presidents: Jacques Chirac and François Mitterrand. One reads with particular emotion the portraits she paints of her mentors, Jankélévitch, Lacan, Lévi-Strauss or those of thinkers like Roland Barthes or Jean-Paul Sartre.
This book could have been a mere description of the exceptional career of an intellectual. Yet, thanks to Catherine’s talent as an author, her freedom of expression, her humour, her tenderness and her total lack of complacency, it has become life itself. A life of somebody who has accomplished nearly everything, without even noticing it herself and who keeps within her a deep sense of love, friendship and justice which we are crucially lacking in our times.
Catherine Clément has published about forty books: essays on anthropology and psychoanalysis, and very successful novels, best-selling in France and abroad (La Sultane, La Senora, Pour l’amour de l’Inde, Le voyage de Théo…)