INTERVIEW
And if you decided to tell your life by linking all kinds of data? In any case, that was the idea of the Belgian writer Charly Delwart, who publishes Databiographie . Through 150 detailed graphs, he tells his life and delivers all kinds of information about him. In Media Culture on Europe 1, he returns to this approach.
A life to compare
"I got the idea from reading Yuval Noah Harari, who was Homo Deus: A Brief History of the Future , where he compared buffaloes and cows, dogs and wolves, and found that very little information - two figures - we had a pretty clear vision of what the world was today and what it had become, "said Charly Delwart. The writer, already author of three previous books, then began to apply this principle to his own person. "I wondered what numbers I could do for myself, I started to write ratios: number of sperm compared to the number of children I had, number of fish caught compared to fish eaten", details -t it.
"An urban man, 44 years old and western"
In the end, Databiographie is a selection of these different ratios. For example, Charly Delwart has for example made a graph between the hours spent doing anxiety attacks, and the hours spent making love. "Anxiety and sex are two forms of feeling - one very negative, the other positive - but which are connected in psychoanalysis too.Anxiety is a kind of inverted jouissance", explains the writer to justify his comparison. As the pages unfold the personality of the Belgian, but not only. "It's a wide panel of what I am, but also of what is an urban man, 44 years old and Western, with a life in a nutshell," he concludes.