Jacques Camatte

Finding Camatte

An encounter with Camatte is the happy obligation to embark on a cheminer - a departure, a going towards something, even if it is just a place where one can stop and reflect, where one can even turn back while looking forward. Jacques Camatte keeps the elusive, but powerful, artificiality contained within the pretensions of dialogue at a distance and, instead, invites us readers and admirers to go on a journey, a search, a walk with him, and in so doing one might have the privilege of talking with him. This is what happened to us when we visited him in April 2016, and which we then intended to communicate in an issue of the magazine. That journey and path is transparently aimed for in our project of translating his works: to make the process a comprehensive human experience. By doing so - and all the more so in this moment of irreversible crisis in the thought and civilization of the West - we are abandoning anything (competition, the world, intellectual customs, ancient certainties) that is dragging us toward extinction. and all the while in a situation where everyone is feeling that the human species must attempt a reversal. The nature of this encounter with Camatte is also communicated in a text on the Cercle Marx website, presenting an interview with Camatte:

In October 2019, we had the honour and pleasure of meeting Jacques Camatte for an interview. A former friend and companion of Bordiga, Jacques Camatte was born in 1935 and has elaborated extensively and constructively on Marx's work in the magazine Invariance, founded in 1968. [...] Jacques Camatte can be considered a “wise man” (almost in the Aristotelian sense of the term): a good and deeply kind man who has come to a form of self-sufficiency in a relationship of contemplative harmony with nature.

In the manner of Descartes who, in Discours de la méthode told the story of a man lost in the woods, we too got ‘lost’ in the middle of the woods, which meant we had to continue to the end of the path. where we met Jacques. After a long journey through nature we finally found Jacques in a magnificent place in the middle of the trees, far from alienating civilization.