IT ENDED WITH A MAD DASH to the wine bar, where an impatient crowd had gathered to drink away the humid late summer evening. A tangled mess of limbs wrangled for a third or even fourth glass of wine. Some whispering onlookers sneered and remarked that the scene was all too predictable after an event at New Delhi’s Alliance Francaise: overly eager men shamelessly shoving one another aside to booze it up for free. “How crass of them,” a snob muttered. ‘How non-bourgeois of me,’ the man gulping his fifth glass might have been thinking.
They had been ordered to drink, after all. Yann Kerninon, a studiedly eccentric French philosopher, writer, magician and self-help guru, had arrived in Delhi to promote his new book, An Attempt to Assassinate My Inner Bourgeois. Sporting suspenders before a packed auditorium, he declared that centuries of social movements which had struggled to topple the bourgeois domination of society were empty failures: the anti-bourgeois are preoccupied with “the bourgeois opposite—forgetting, or perhaps in order to forget, the bourgeois they carry within themselves”. The only way out of the binary of bourgeois and anti-bourgeois, Kerninon explained, is to assassinate our inner bourgeois and become non bourgeois, a path that, among other things, conveniently leads through several time-honoured French pastimes: drinking, having sex and being merry—oh, and cycling, too. And so, the Delhiites drank.
The curious French magician agreed to meet the next day at a coffee shop in decidedly bourgeois Khan Market. This was his first trip to India and after just one week, he was baffled by the gobs of attention he received in Chennai, Puducherry and now Delhi. “I thought that maybe a couple of people would come and listen to me,” he said. Kerninon’s book had received almost no media attention in France. The Leftwing progressive French daily Libération—which might be expected to sympathise with a project to assassinate any bourgeois—refused to review it, and Kerninon had the impression that the French press thought the book was a little ridiculous.
So why did Kerninon receive this much attention here? What relevance does a guide to eliminating bourgeois attitudes have in a country in which 641 million people live below the poverty line? The Frenchman was only able to express his shared shock that his book was first published in English in India, of all places. “Are you kidding?” he had told his publisher at Full Circle when he first heard the news. He does not claim to understand how his argument applies in India, or why the people he met haven’t found the book ridiculous at all. “I am a European. I cannot be an African or an Indian,” he said, pleading innocence.
At the event, his interlocutor, Rana Dasgupta, along with a baffled audience, challenged Kerninon on the book’s relevance in India and on its relationship to a longer history of anti-bourgeois philosophical and political movements. What the Marxists, the Dadaists and the Situationists had all missed, Kernion tried to explain, was that the individual self needs to be the site and agent of transformation. French ambassador Jérôme Bonnafont, who made an appearance at the Alliance to introduce Kerninon, drew on this argument to offer up an alarming case for the book’s relevance to an Indian audience. “India is a country of inner lives,” he proclaimed, so of course we would like this book.
Maybe it wasn’t surprising, then, that, just a few hours after our chat, I’d find Kerninon at a seminar in an art gallery in Hauz Khas Village (where Delhi’s bourgeoisie play at being bohemians) leading a crowd of 60 through his mostly satiric eight-step path to non bourgeois liberation. We sat through a demonstration of pole-vaulting (step one) and mind-reading (step six). The final step, the blow that would ultimately do in the inner bourgeois, took the form of a participatory experiment. He silently stood up from his chair at the front of the room and lifted a medium-sized draw-string bag, which he carried with him as he walked down the centre aisle of the arranged chairs. Fishing around in the bag, he distributed, row by row, small, translucent squeaky discs, squeezing them once or twice, his eyes filled with a mischievous delight. The recipients of the noise-makers intuited their roles within seconds and, without hesitation, his erstwhile bourgeois audience members filled the room with syncopated screeches, increasing in frequency and volume like a crowd of liberated crows. Sitting there surrounded by this impenetrable noise, it became clear: for Kerninon, the revolution may never come, but for now, the ridiculous will suffice.