In Praise of Risk

Bookselling Anne Dufourmantelle

Lately when customers at Bart’s ask what I’m reading, I say that I’m re-reading Anne Dufourmantelle’s In Praise of Risk. This book of philosophy and psychoanalysis inspires courage more elegantly than anything in the self-help section.

My enthusiasm for this book has sold a lot of copies, recently twice in one day. I say, “Don’t worry if you don’t read philosophy.” I say “Let it wash over you. Let it open windows to your life. Risk is very romantic” I put the book in their hands, and they buy it.

In Praise of Risk has been translated from the French by Steven Miller, the director of the Center for Psychoanalysis and Culture at the University of Buffalo, SUNY, and published here in the U.S. by Fordham University Press.

Structured in fifty brief chapters, this book poses a question:

The chapter The Risk of the Unknown presents a list of fifteen possible answers to that question, fifteen risks.

Dufourmantelle’s central idea is this:

“To risk one's life is first, perhaps, not dying. Dying in the midst of our lives, in every form of renunciation, the blankness of depression, sacrifice. To risk one’s life at decisive moments of our existence is an act that pushes ahead of us on the basis of a still unknown knowledge, like an intimate prophecy, it is a moment of conversion.”

Yet, when Dufourmantelle drowned while rescuing two young children in 2017, journalists’ accounts of her death relied upon the paradigm of risk that she wanted to overturn. Translator Steven Miller says, “The idea that made Dufourmantelle’s death a good story– that she died young by putting her theory of risk into practice– entails an unacknowledged betrayal of her actual ideas about risk.”

“Death and the Risk-taker: Anne Dufourmantelle who advocated taking chances, died as she lived.” Psychology Today

Philosopher Who Praised Risk Died Trying to Save Children from Drowning. The New York Times

“The fact that the book now appears in translation is due, likely in no small measure, to the notoriety that it gained from the worldwide circulation of this reportage. How fascinating and frightening to be able to read the very book that set the stage for its author’s death. How awe-inspiring and refreshing to read the work of a philosopher whose words are more than empty words, jargon, or obscurantism— a philosopher who does not just learn but manifestly knows how to die.” adds Miller.

In a recorded lecture for the European Graduate School, Dufourmantelle said, “What compelled me to write a book on risk is, I think, that today we are surrounded, hassled by security.” As a practicing psychoanalyst, she saw how the drive for security could become a psychic saboteur.

As in this video, Dufourmantelle’s writing guides us gently through a threshold into the world of philosophy. Emmanuel Lévinas, Elie During, Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze all make appearances in her work. Be not afraid of philosophical language! Be not afraid of opacity or density or incomprehension.

While reading In Praise of Risk aloud to an engineer, he kept interrupting to ask what it meant. I said, “Shh… Let it wash over you.”

There are people who read for comprehension, like the engineer. People who left fiction in their childhoods and don’t allow themselves to the ambiguity of poetry. At the risk of sounding simple, I don’t expect to comprehend everything. This allows me to read broadly, wading in over my head. We can allow ourselves to read like we allow ourselves to watch the wind move through a garden. Where are you moved, rustled, disturbed?

The unknown, the incomprehensible is the land where risk lives, after all.

The book’s cover shows tightrope artist Philippe Petit walking between the towers of the World Trade Center in 1974.

“The risk par excellence, for Dufourmantelle, is not that of death or loss of life; it is the risk of opening to something hidden or, to use her privileged word, “intimate,” such as “intimate prophecy” or “intimate time,” says Miller.

“Each of Dufourmantelle’s case histories depicts a patient who risks his or her life in order to make room for never before acknowledged or articulated experiences, fragments of life never before lived.”

Miller emphasizes that the word “intimate” in his translation of Dufourmantelle’s recurring use of intime is not to be understood in terms of our contemporary association with physical, sexual, or emotional closeness, but rather an older usage of “intimate” that points towards that which is innermost, deep-seated within the heart.

Photograph by Dylan Hausthor from What the Rain Might Bring published by TBW

This image of intimate suspension feels true, too. The way I feel looking at it echoes my feelings of reading Dufourmantelle. This book inspires passionate living.

Two summers ago, I first read In Praise of Risk to enunciate how I was feeling. I brought the book on a trip to Mexico City a few weeks into a whirlwind romance. I felt windswept, galloping, desirous. My appetite for living risk was ravenous.

My re-reading has been tempered by memories of that time. In praise of riding horses up into the forest of La Marquesa. In praise of running for cover from warm afternoon rain. In praise of crushing a pomegranate until liquid inside, biting the skin and catching the juice as it falls into your mouth. In praise of risking stains, risking falling, risking getting wet.

Four Seasons Mexico City