Is there anything more paradoxical than a student strike? In France they appear blind to this irony. I was a student protester in Berlin two years ago. Me, a bespectacled bod with a penchant for allegory. My mind is almost never on the problems of the community, or on political debates – it oscillates between aesthetics and hedonism. You could say that I am an empiricist in an absolute sense. Whether intellectual or sexual, my whole life is an effort to stay in direct contact with my pleasures.

And so it was two years ago, when I was taking part in a seminar on the work of Herman Melville at Berlin’s FU university. Mid-way through the semester, a student strike broke out over education cutbacks, and my fellow students, having more rigorous consciences than me, insisted that we also mark the façade of authority. It was decided that we should hold the seminar in front of Berlin’s town hall, the centre of the pernicious infringement of the German university system. We would have the seminar in the Neptune fountain that is set there in front of the red-brick building. Apart from an image of the great sea-god languishing among nets and big shells, this fountain is decorated with many sea creatures – fabulous and zoological – and I lost myself in the relations and vectors between Melville and these fantastic stone representations.