“My father’s Carton. Reflections on inheritance” (Vaters Kiste), by Lukas Bärfuss, translated from German (Switzerland) by Lionel Felchlin, Zoé, 128 p., €18, digital €11.
It is such a familiar object that we neglect its symbolism. And yet. Sealed with adhesive tape during moves or converted into a cabin by children, cardboard evokes change, surprise; it can contain everything, even a life, as recounted in his essay My Father’s Cartonthe great Swiss playwright Lukas Bärfuss, who uses it as the basis for a sharp meditation on transmission.
He was 25 years old when a box overflowing with papers was given to him: it was all that remained of his father, who had lived on the fringes of Swiss society, removed from his son’s life and died in the middle of the street, without residence. Lukas Bärfuss refuses the inheritance, mainly composed of debts, and only keeps the cardboard. Twenty-five years pass before he finds the courage to open it, only to discover a mound of paperwork. Failing to provide him with answers about his father’s life, this exhumation becomes the engine of cascading reflections, between memories of his tumultuous youth and advocacy against inheritance.
The cardboard in fact embodies the remains of the past, while questioning the future. Faced with this symbol of maturity, Lukas Bärfuss retraces the path of his own emancipation with regard to his environment and this father used to prisons. At each stage, he emphasizes, books played a crucial role. And these are books, always – from the Old Testament to Martine Segalen, via Darwin or Claude Lévi-Strauss – which allow him to broaden his thinking, from the intimate to the political, by deconstructing a system which does not can, according to him, escape the reproduction of inequalities as long as he places the family, this factory of social inevitability, at the heart of the destiny of individuals.
The catastrophe as the ultimate legacy of men
Even more radically, it calls into question the very reality of all transmission, in the era of climate change and the exhaustion of non-renewable natural resources. What can we inherit under these conditions? ” It would seemhe writes, that we not only leave to our descendants the ruins and waste of the past but that we also intervene in their future. » For Lukas Bärfuss, the world is made and unmade by a succession of decisions, thoughts, words disconnected from reality and which, ultimately, establish catastrophe as the ultimate human heritage.
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