A-Infos (en) France, Media, Michel Onfray, A self labeled Anarchist Philosoph

His ideas about organized religion's `children's stories' have earned 
him death threats, but France's best-selling philosopher, Michel Onfray, 
remains defiant. In the new year, those ideas will finally be translated 
into English. Brace yourself.
He is a self-described hedonist, atheist, libertarian, and left-wing 
anarchist. He is also France's best-selling philosopher.
At a time when a French high school teacher was forced into hiding after 
death threats for writing an article in Le Figaro in September calling 
Islam a violent, hateful religion and Christianity and Judaism 
non-violent, loving religions, Michel Onfray has already gone a step 
further: in Atheist Manifesto he dismantles and condemns as dangerous 
and archaic not only Islam, but Christianity and Judaism as well. And 
after more than 30 books, he is finally seeing his ideas spread far 
beyond his native Normandy. His 2005 book, Traité d'athéologie, became a 
best-seller not only in France, where it has sold 230,000 copies, but 
also in Italy and Spain, and has sold well in other Latin countries, and 
even in Germany and Asia.

In the new year, it will become the first of his books to be translated 
into English. Published under the title Atheist Manifesto, it will 
arrive in Canada from Penguin in February.

Onfray has also received death threats, but far from going into hiding, 
he not only conducts lectures but also appears regularly on French 
television and radio and makes frequent appearances at philosophical 
forums around France and Europe.

Although he says that believing in religion's "children's stories for 
comfort" deflects from the real problems of existence and thus 
exacerbates them, he does not despise the believers. As a rebel against 
all manner of authority, he aims his ire at those who impose and 
organize religion and its ethics, morals and customs.

"Against the rabbis, the preachers, the imams, ayatollahs and mullahs, I 
persist in preferring the philosopher, " he writes in the book.

"They are the ones that know there is only one world and that any 
promotion of an otherworld makes us lose the use and benefit of the only 
one that really exists. A truly deadly sin... "

He accepts only about one in seven requests for television or radio 
appearances, opting for those where he can express his ideas. For this 
story, he at first refused a spoken interview - disliking a format where 
snippets are often pulled from context and used inaccurately - but 
suggested that questions and answers be conveyed via email.

Yet he proved to be an engaging host at his home in Chambois and in 
Caen, along with the professors of the Université Populaire de Caen, 
after a presentation of the new academic year of the institution he 
founded in 2002. And he later even agreed to answer a few more questions 
for this story over the phone.

It is a year charged with significance, coming as it does before the 
French presidential election next spring, and Onfray has been much in 
the French press over the past two weeks, speaking out in an article in 
the left-wing newspaper Libération on the state of the far-left parties.

Onfray founded the university as a reaction to the arrival of Jean-Marie 
Le Pen, the leader of the far-right National Front party, into the 
second round of the 2002 presidential elections against Jacques Chirac. 
The idea, he said, was to fight against that happening again by 
"promoting and publicizing intelligence, " and to try to "analyze and 
understand how the world functions in order to put forward alternative 
solutions to the contemporary negativity."

Open to anyone, with free tuition and requiring no registration, prior 
education, tests or other course work, the concept, like his books, is 
also spreading beyond his home. There are now five other Popular 
Universities in France and one in Belgium, all of which acknowledge Caen 
as their model.

Yet despite his stance on free education for all and his anarchic 
political ideas, Onfray is not against private property - he owns homes 
in both Chambois and nearby Argentan - and has a pragmatic mind for 
business.

When asked if the timely subject matter of the Atheist Manifesto - the 
war in Iraq, Sept. 11 and the fight against terrorism - is what made 
this his first book to be published in English, he says, "I think, 
frankly, it has more to do with the publishers seeing the figure of 
230,000 copies sold."

That figure refers only to the hardback in France, and not the many 
thousands of copies sold elsewhere in the 17 foreign contracts signed by 
his French publisher, Grasset.

So is interest in Onfray's writing a sign that the world is shifting 
left, libertarian, and hedonist? In fact, Onfray defies the preconceived 
ideas about those very labels.

"I am a free man, even with the usual labels," he says. "That is, I am a 
hedonist who is free, a person of the left who is free, a libertarian 
who is free... someone who does not enter into the classic, habitual 
definitions and who simply invites that his books be read."

In the Winter 2006 issue of New Politics, Doug Ireland welcomed the 
forthcoming English translation of Atheist Manifesto, and called it a 
"scandal" that none of Onfray's other books had yet been translated into 
English. He calls the book "an acerbic, stylish, and erudite polemic 
against received religions in general and Christianity in particular," 
and "a powerful antidote to the tsunami of religious fanaticism that is 
engulfing the Western world as well as the Islamic countries."

In a selection of the year's best books in last December's Times 
Literary Supplement, novelist William Boyd, who read Atheist Manifesto 
in French, called the book "both a passionate and coolly reasoned 
advocacy of atheism, setting the positive values of secularity squarely 
against the three great monotheisms and their multitude of hates." Boyd 
added that it was, "a wonderful, invigorating blast of sanity delivered 
against the fog of high-toned mumbo jumbo we have to endure everywhere 
today."

Certainly, not everyone is enthralled with this approach. "His work 
attacking hatred is sometimes full of hatred," wrote the philosopher and 
author Bertrand Vergely in the French literary magazine Lire, in a 
mostly positive 18-page cover story on Onfray last February. "His 
analysis against religious fanaticism and for intelligence uses the same 
methods as the fundamentalists. "

Gérard Oberlé, another French writer, calls Onfray a professor who has 
found a way to make a good living out of recycling old tales by 
presenting them as new ways of thinking. "And," Oberlé added, "for an 
atheist, I find he is a little too much of a preacher."

If it were only the Atheist Manifesto, however, Onfray might be seen as 
a provocateur, a one-book-wonder, or as Publishers Weekly in July 
referred to his book in a preview of upcoming titles, part of a "new 
subcategory: the "anti-religion book."

In fact, for Onfray, 47, it is only one part of an all-encompassing 
philosophical oeuvre, the foundation and interconnectivity of which he 
outlines in his latest book, La Puissance d'exister, or The Power to 
Exist, published in France in October.

His is a utilitarian philosophy celebrating an ethical hedonism that 
uses the brain and body as the focal point for a philosophical approach 
to art and politics and daily life. It breaks from the idealistic 
Platonic tradition that relegates the body to a lower role than the 
mind, and which Onfray believes has contaminated mainstream philosophy 
up to today.

But he also breaks from leftist traditions that call for world economic 
and political revolution, and aims instead for "micro-revolutions, " or 
revolutions of the individual and small groups of like-minded people who 
live by his hedonistic, libertarian values.

But again, with labels like that, it is easy to misunderstand his ideas 
if the books are not read. His idea of hedonism is not the one in 
popular use.

"It is not the caricature that is done of it," he says. "On the 
contrary, it is even an ascetic, the hedonism that I propose. It is a 
discipline. It is more a discipline than an abandoning to animality."

Onfray calls for a post-Christian age when people not only say they are 
not religious but also cease to live by the Christian ethics.

In other words, many people who do not go to church still marry there, 
or baptize their children; medical ethics concerning euthanasia, for 
example, are governed not by humanitarian issues but by Judeo-Christian 
ideas of letting a god decide when we die.

The seeds of his philosophical choices, he says, were planted in 
Chambois, a sleepy village of 475 people famous mainly as the scene of a 
key battle after the Normandy invasion in World War II, in which the 
German army was defeated by the allies in August 1944. Its other main 
feature is the small, 12th-century castle in its centre.

Onfray's father was a farm labourer, his mother a cleaning woman. He 
shows in The Power to Exist, how the experience of being sent away by 
his parents at 10 to live in an orphanage run by Salesian priests shaped 
his thinking.

There he developed his hatred for authority and the church that ran the 
institution. He stayed until he was 14, before being sent to a boarding 
school until he was 17.

"My four years in a boarding home, a Salesian orphanage, made me 
stubborn against discipline, or order, and accessory to that, to 
religion," he says. "But first, against all forms of order, every form 
of authority that comes from on high, if you like. Against all authority 
that is not legitimate."

He prefaces most of his books with a personal story on how his 
philosophy came about, and objects to philosophers who claim that their 
lives do not influence their thinking.

A heart attack at 28 led him to write his first book, Le Ventre des 
philosophes, or The Stomach of the Philosophers, about the eating habits 
of philosophers from Diogenes to Sartre, and how it is reflected in 
their philosophy.

In a sudden revolt against a hospital dietician lecturing him on how he 
must change his eating habits after the heart attack, he sent her away,  
saying that he "preferred to die eating butter than to economize my 
existence with margarine."

Yet for a man who has had both a heart attack and, in 2004, a stroke - 
which briefly left him unable to write or speak properly - he looks in 
remarkable condition. He is tall, slim, handsome and vibrant ,and 
continues to eat and drink what he wants.

Having taken a Ph.D. in philosophy, he taught philosophy in a technical 
high school in Caen from 1983 to 2002, when he quit to open the university.

Inspired by a university in France opened in 1896 as a reaction to the 
Dreyfus affair to bring education to the masses and partly to fight 
anti-Semitism, Onfray's university now has a staff of 12 professors 
teaching subjects ranging from philosophy - including a course for 
children - to medical ethics, jazz, contemporary art and the cinema, 
feminism, literature and architecture. The administrative costs and 
travel fees for the professors, who are all volunteers, are paid for by 
a handful of sponsors and the lecture rooms are donated by the 
University of Caen, a local museum, a café and a theatre.

A full house of more than 500 people attends Onfray's Tuesday lectures, 
and 1,500 people attend the 122 classes in 12 subjects over the year. As 
there is no registration, it is impossible to tell exactly how many 
different people attend, but the yearly total is nearly 20,000 - in a 
city with a population of 114,000. Says Roger Le Goff, a retired 
technology teacher who has attended the classes from the beginning, "I 
am an atheist, and it is much easier to live when you think of there 
being another life after death.

"It's not that it posed much of problem for me, but now it poses less of 
a problem for me - knowing that my end is fairly near does not bother me 
at all, because the important thing is the present moment."

But Onfray's business sense also means the university helps his own 
process as a writer. The 35 hours he uses to prepare each course are 
being turned into a six-volume work called the Counter-History of 
Philosophy.

The first two volumes came out this year, and two more are slated for 
2007. They are also sold as CD recordings. The series recounts the 
alternative, hedonistic, materialistic, non-idealistic history of 
philosophy from the pre-Socratics to the present.

In fact, for a hedonist, he always seems to be working. But that fits 
snugly into his ideas of atheism and living in the present moment:

"I have always been like that," he says. "I don't want to take a rest in 
this life. We have all of eternity to take a rest.
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