Who is Édouard Levé? The Tragic Life of the Author of Suicide

 

"Throughout your life, you told your story. Piece by piece. Sentence by sentence. Photo by photo. And finally, when you chose to be silent, everyone began to understand you."

Levé
A Portrait of a Reserved Soul
January 1, 1965 — October 15, 2007

Born in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a wealthy suburb of Paris. The first day of the new year. It was as if the world had said to him, “Come, we’ve been waiting for you.” But he never fully believed it.
He was Gérard Levé’s second child. He grew up in the comfortable armchairs of the middle class. Paris’s cultural warmth surrounded him. He had everything.
And yet… Something was missing.
No one asked what it was. Perhaps they didn’t want to ask. As he wrote in Autoportrait, he hinted that he struggled to tell his mother, “I love you.” Some words weigh heavily on a person. Three words. A lifetime.
He grew up. He grew up like everyone else. He attended a prestigious school that would open the doors to the business world ESSEC. He wore a suit. He attended meetings. He sat down at a desk. But every morning, as he sat at that desk, he felt something was wrong.
Art.
That word lingered in his mind. It was calling to him.
In 1991, he left the business world and turned to art. He didn’t explain his decision. There was no need to. No one would have understood anyway.
In his studio in Paris, he painted abstract works. Years passed. The canvases piled up. And then one day, he went to India. Two months. A long silence. When he returned from India, he destroyed most of his paintings.
No one asked why. He didn’t say. But later, in a book, he whispered:

“I don’t know if I burned them because I was tired of looking at them, or because I ran out of space. But when I burned them, I felt a great sense of relief.”

Burning. Erasing. Starting Over.
After returning from India, he picked up his camera. He reinvented himself: as a conceptual photographer.
In one of his early works, he flipped through a phone book. Yves Klein, André Breton, Georges Bataille… He looked up ordinary people who bore these great names but had never met them. He photographed them.
Think about it. Someone bearing the name of a great artist, yet having never met him. The same name. A completely different life. Édouard must have loved this. It showed just how delicate, how fragile, the thing called identity really is.
Who am I? Is it my name? My face? Or none of the above?
Then he went to America. He photographed towns in the heart of the U.S. But these weren’t ordinary towns: Paris (Texas), Baghdad (Arizona), Berlin (Pennsylvania)… All within America. Small, desolate, forgotten places bearing the names of major cities.
Empty skies. Deserted streets. Cemeteries and war memorials.
It was as if the map had been drawn incorrectly. As if the world could have been different, but wasn’t. Édouard saw this void. And he photographed it.
In 2002, he published his first book, Oeuvres (Works). It contained a list of 533 conceptual art projects he had never realized. A photography project, a film idea, a sound installation… They were all complete in his mind. But none had ever been brought to life.
The Book of Unrealized Things.
Perhaps this was his most honest portrait. Of how much was inside him, yet how little fit into the world.
The Voice Within the Silence
Then came Autoportrait (Self-Portrait). 2005.
A book. But what a book. A single paragraph. One hundred and twelve pages. And sentences arranged without a single space between them. Each one a truth. Each one a piece of Édouard.
“I feel better on higher floors.”
“My right leg is half a centimeter longer than my left.”
“When I was 12 or 13, I fell asleep every night listening to Bill Evans’s ‘Alone.’”
And then, hidden deep within the pages, a sentence almost too subtle to notice:
“I attempted suicide once. I didn’t try four more times, but I wanted to.”
It just slipped out. Another sentence followed immediately. As if he’d said it, and it had happened. But no one fully grasped how heavily it had landed on the page at that moment.
October.
One morning he called his editor. “I’ve finished a new book,” he said. “Should I bring it over?”
The book’s title was *Suicide*.
Suicide.
The book was something written to a childhood friend who had committed suicide years earlier. It was written in the second person. “You.” Every sentence began with “you.” It was as if Levé were looking at himself in a mirror. He said “you” instead of “I,” but they were the same person.
He handed the manuscript to his editor. And ten days later, on October 15, 2007, he hanged himself in his apartment in Paris.
Ten days.
He had handed in the book. There was only one thing left.
He was 42 years old.
What Happened Next
The book was published. The world read it. Critics called it “extraordinary,” said it would “never be forgotten.”
But Édouard couldn’t hear any of this.
Now everyone who knew him began his life with his death. No one asked, “What did Édouard like as a child?” Everyone asked, “How did he die?”
Just as he wrote in his book:
“Everyone who speaks of you begins your life with your death. How strange, isn’t it? That final gesture turned your biography upside down.”
— Édouard Levé, Suicide
 

Works

Oeuvres → Works — 2002
A list of 533 unrealized art projects
Journal → Diary — 2004
An anonymous, impersonal news journal
Autoportrait → Self-Portrait — 2005
One paragraph, 112 pages — Suicide → Suicide — 2008
His final book, published posthumously — 2014
Photo series:
Homonymes (Homonyms) · Angoisse (Anxiety) · Amérique (America) · Pornographie (Pornography) · Fictions (Fictions)
They all asked the same question: Where am I? Who am I?

"I never knew you in life,
but I understood you in death."

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