Albert Camus�s
THE REBEL
An Essay on Man in Revolt
A revised and
complete translation
of� L�HOMME
R�VOLT�
by Anthony
Bower
*
For Jean Grenier
And openly I pledged my heart to the grave and suffering land, and often in the consecrated night, I promised to love her faithfully until death, unafraid, with her heavy burden of fatality, and never to despise a single one of her enigmas.� Thus did I join myself to her with a mortal cord.
����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� H�LDERLIN:
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Death of Empedocles
_____________________
Introduction
*
�������� There are crimes of passion and crimes of logic.� The boundary between them is not clearly defined.� But the Penal Code makes the convenient distinction of premeditation.� We are living in the era of premeditation and the perfect crime.� Our criminals are no longer helpless children who could plead love as their excuse.� On the contrary, they are adults and they have a perfect alibi: philosophy, which can be used for any purpose � even for transforming murderers into judges.
�������� Heathcliff, in Wuthering Heights, would kill everybody on earth in order to possess Cathy, but it would never occur to him to say that murder is reasonable or theoretically defensible.� He would commit it, and there his convictions end.� This implies the power of love, and also strength of character.� Since intense love is rare, murder remains an exception and preserves its aspect of infraction.� But as soon as a man, through lack of character, takes refuge in doctrine, as soon as crime reasons about itself, it multiplies like reason itself and assumes all the aspects of the syllogism.� Once crime was as solitary as a cry of protest; now it is as universal as science.� Yesterday it was put on trial; today it determines the law.
�������� This is not the place for indignation.� The purpose of this essay is once again to face the reality of the present, which is logical crime, and to examine meticulously the arguments by which it is justified; it is an attempt to understand the times in which we live.� One might think that a period which, in a space of fifty years, uproots, enslaves, or kills seventy million human beings should be condemned out of hand.� But its culpability must still be understood.� In more ingenuous times, when the tyrant razed cities for his own greater glory, when the slave chained to the conqueror�s chariot was dragged through the rejoicing streets, when enemies were thrown to the wild beasts in front of the assembled people, the mind did not reel before such unabashed crimes, and judgement remained unclouded.� But slave camps under the flag of freedom, massacres justified by philanthropy or by a taste for the superhuman, in one sense cripple judgement.� On the day when crime dons the apparel of innocence � through a curious transposition peculiar to our times � it is innocence that is called upon to justify itself.� The ambition of this essay is to accept and examine this strange challenge.
�������� Our purpose is to find out whether innocence, the moment it becomes involved in action, can avoid committing murder.� We can only act in terms of our own time, among the people who surround us.� We shall know nothing until we know whether we have the right to kill our fellow men, or the right to let them be killed.� In that every action today leads to murder, direct or indirect, we cannot act until we know whether or why we have the right to kill.
�������� The important thing, therefore, is not, as yet, to go to the root of things, but, the world being what it is, to know how to live in it.� In the age of negation, it was of some avail to examine one�s position concerning suicide.� In the age of ideologies, we must examine our position in relation to murder.� If murder has rational foundations, then are period and we ourselves are rationally consequent.� If it has no rational foundations, then we are insane and there is no alternative but to find some justification or to avert our faces.� It is incumbent upon us, at all events, to give a definite answer to the question implicit in the blood and strife of this century [20th century].� For we are being put to the rack.� Thirty years ago, before reaching a decision to kill, people denied many things, to the point of denying themselves by suicide.� God is deceitful; the whole world (myself included) is deceitful; therefore I choose to die: suicide was the problem then.� Ideology today is concerned only with the denial of other human beings, who alone bear the responsibility of deceit.� It is then that we kill.� Each day at dawn, assassins in judges� robes slip into some cell: murder is the problem today.
�������� The two arguments are inextricably bound together.� Or rather they bind us, and so firmly that we can no longer choose our own problems.� They choose us, one after another, and we have no alternative but to accept their choice.� This essay proposes, in the face of murder and rebellion, to pursue a train of thought which began with suicide and the idea of the absurd.
�������� But, for the moment, this train of thought yields only one concept: that of the absurd.� And the concept of the absurd leads only to a contradiction as far as the problem of murder is concerned.� Awareness of the absurd, when we first claim to deduce a rule of behaviour from it, makes murder seem a matter of indifference, to say the least, and hence possible.� If we believe in nothing, if nothing has any meaning and if we can affirm no values whatsoever, then everything is possible and nothing has any importance.� There is no pro or con: the murderer is neither right nor wrong.� We are free to stoke the crematory fires or to devote ourselves to the care of lepers.� Evil and virtue are mere chance or caprice.
�������� We shall then decide not to act at all, which amounts to at least accepting the murder of others, with perhaps certain mild reservations about the imperfection of the human race.� Again we may decide to substitute tragic dilettantism for action, and in this case human lives become counters in a game.� Finally, we may propose to embark on some course of action which is not entirely gratuitous.� In the latter case, in that we have no higher values to guide our behaviour, our aim will be immediate efficacy.� Since nothing is either true or false, good or bad, our guiding principle will be to demonstrate that we are the most efficient � in other words, the strongest.� Then the world will no longer be divided into the just and the unjust, but into masters and slaves.� Thus, whichever way we turn, in our abyss of negation and nihilism, murder has its privileged position.
�������� Hence, if we claim to adopt the absurdist attitude, we must prepare ourselves to commit murder, thus admitting that logic is more important than scruples that we consider illusory.� Of course, we must have some predisposition to murder.� But, on the whole, less than might be supposed, to judge from experience.� Moreover, it is always possible, as we can so often observe, to delegate murder.� Everything would then be made to conform to logic � if logic could really be satisfied in this way.
�������� But logic cannot be satisfied by an attitude which first demonstrates that murder is possible and then that it is impossible.� For after having proved that the act of murder is at least a matter of indifference, absurdist analysis, in its most important deduction, finally condemns murder.� The final conclusion of absurdist reasoning is, in fact, the repudiation of suicide and the acceptance of the desperate encounter between human inquiry and the silence of the universe.� Suicide would mean the end of this encounter, and absurdist reasoning considers that it could not consent to this without negating its own premises.� According to absurdist reasoning, such a solution would be the equivalent of flight or deliverance.� But it is obvious that absurdism hereby admits that human life is the only necessary good since it is precisely life that makes this encounter possible and since, without life, the absurdist wager would have no basis.� To say that life is absurd, the conscience must be alive.� How is it possible, without making remarkable concessions to one�s desire for comfort, to preserve exclusively for oneself the benefits of such a process of reasoning?� From the moment that life is recognized as good, it becomes good for all men.� Murder cannot be made coherent when suicide is not considered coherent.� A mind imbued with the idea of the absurd will undoubtedly accept fatalistic murder; but it would never accept calculated murder.� In terms of the encounter between human inquiry and the silence of the universe, murder and suicide are one and the same thing, and must be accepted or rejected together.
�������� Equally, absolute nihilism, which accepts suicide as legitimate, leads, even more easily, to logical murder.� If our age admits, with equanimity, that murder has its justifications, it is because of this indifference to life which is the mark of nihilism. �Of course there have been periods of history in which the passion for life was so strong that it burst forth in criminal excesses.� But these excesses were like the searing flame of a terrible delight.� They were not this monotonous order of things established by an impoverished logic in whose eyes everything is equal.� This logic has carried the values of suicide, on which our age has been nurtured, to their extreme logical consequence, which is legalized murder.� It culminates, at the same time, in mass suicide.� The most striking demonstration of this was provided by the Hitlerian apocalypse of 1945.� Self-destruction meant nothing to those madmen, in their bomb-shelters, who were preparing for their own death and apotheosis.� All that mattered was not to destroy oneself alone and to drag a whole world with one.� In a way, the man who kills himself in solitude still preserves certain values since he, apparently, claims no rights over the lives of others.� The proof of this is that he never makes use, in order to dominate others, of the enormous power and freedom of action which his decision to die gives him.� Every solitary suicide, when it is not an act of resentment, is, in some way, either generous or contemptuous.� But one feels contemptuous in the name of something.� If the world is a matter of indifference to the man who commits suicide, it is because he has an idea of something that is not or could not be indifferent to him.� He believes that he is destroying everything or taking everything with him; but from this act of self-destruction itself a value arises which, perhaps, might have made it worth while to live.� Absolute negation is therefore not consummated by suicide.� It can only be consummated by absolute destruction, of oneself and of others. �Or, at least, it can only be lived by striving toward that delectable goal.� Here suicide and murder are two aspects of a single system, the system of a misguided intelligence that prefers, to the suffering imposed by a limited situation, the dark victory in which heaven and earth are annihilated.
�������� By the same token, if we deny that there are reasons for suicide, we cannot claim that there are grounds for murder.� There are no half-measures about nihilism.� Absurdist reasoning cannot defend the continued existence of its spokesman and, simultaneously, accept the sacrifice of others� lives.� The moment that we recognize the impossibility of absolute negation � and merely to be alive is to recognize this � the very first thing that cannot be denied is the right of others to live.� This the same idea which allowed us to believe that murder was a matter of indifference now proceeds to deprive it of any justification; and we return to the untenable position from which we were trying to escape.� In actual fact, this form of reasoning assures us at the same time that we can kill and that we cannot kill.� It abandons us in this contradiction with no grounds either for preventing or for justifying murder, menacing and menaced, swept along with a whole generation intoxicated by nihilism, and yet lost in loneliness, with weapons in our hands and a lump in our throats.
�������� This basic contradiction, however, cannot fail to be accompanied by a host of others from the moment that we claim to remain firmly in the absurdist position and ignore the real nature of the absurd, which is that it is an experience to be lived through, a point of departure, the equivalent, in existence, of Descartes�s methodical doubt.� The absurd is, in itself, contradiction.
�������� It is contradictory in its content because, in wanting to uphold life, it excludes all value judgements, when to live is, in itself, a value judgement.� To breathe is to judge.� Perhaps it is untrue to say that life is a perpetual choice.� But it is true that it is impossible to imagine a life deprived of all choice.� From this simplified point of view, the absurdist position, translated into action, is inconceivable.� It is equally inconceivable when translated into expression.� Simply by being expressed, it gives a minimum of coherence to incoherence, and introduces consequence where, according to its own tenets, there is none.� Speaking itself is restorative.� The only coherent attitude based on non-signification would be silence � if silence, in its turn, were not significant.� The absurd, in its purest form, attempts to remain dumb.� If it finds its voice, it is because it has become complacent or, as we shall see, because it considers itself provisional.� This complacency is an excellent indication of the profound ambiguity of the absurdist position.� In a certain way, the absurd which claims to express man in his solitude, really makes him live in front of a mirror.� And then the initial anguish runs the risk of turning to comfort.� The wound that is scratched with such solicitude ends by giving pleasure.
�������� Great explorers in the realm of absurdity have not been lacking.� But, in the last analysis, their greatness is measured by the extent to which they have rejected the complacencies of absurdism in order to accept its exigencies.� They destroy as much, not at little, as they can.� �My enemies,� says Nietzsche, �are those who want to destroy without creating their own selves.�� He himself destroys, but in order to try to create.� He extols integrity and castigates the �hog-faced� pleasure-seekers.� To escape complacency, absurdist reasoning then discovers renunciation.� It refuses to be sidetracked and emerges into a position of arbitrary barrenness � a determination to be silent � which is expressed in the strange asceticism of rebellion.� Rimbaud, who extols �crime pulling prettily in the mud of the streets,� runs away to Harrar only to complain about having to live there without his family.� Life for him was �a farce for the whole world to perform.�� But on the day of his death, he cries out to his sister: �I shall lie beneath the ground but you, you will walk in sun!�
�������� The absurd, considered as a rule of life, is therefore contradictory.� What is astonishing about the fact that it does not provide us with values which will enable us to decide whether murder is legitimate or not?� Moreover, it is obviously impossible to formulate an attitude on the basis of a specially selected emotion.� The perception of the absurd is one perception among many.� That it has coloured so many thoughts and actions between the two wars only proves its power and its validity.� But the intensity of a perception does not necessarily mean that it is universal.� The error of a whole period of history has been to enunciate � or to suppose already enunciated � general rules of action founded on emotions of despair whose inevitable course, in that they are emotions, is continually to exceed themselves.� Great suffering and great happiness may be found at the beginning of any process of reasoning.� But it is impossible to rediscover or sustain them throughout the entire process.� Therefore, if it was legitimate to take absurdist sensibility into account, to make a diagnosis of a malady to be found in ourselves and in others, it is nevertheless impossible to see in this sensibility, and in the nihilism it presupposes, anything but a point of departure, a criticism brought to life � the equivalent, in the plane of existence, of systematic doubt.� After this, the mirror, with its fixed stare, must be broken and we are, perforce, caught up in the irresistible movement by which the absurd exceeds itself.
�������� Once the mirror is broken, nothing remains which can help us to answer the questions of our time.� Absurdism, like methodical thought, has wiped the slate clean.� It leaves us in a blind alley.� But, like methodical doubt, it can, by returning upon itself, open up a new field of investigation, and the process of reasoning then pursues the same course.� I proclaim that I believe in nothing and that everything is absurd, but I cannot doubt the validity of my proclamation and I must at least believe in my protest.� The first and only evidence that is supplied to me, within the terms of the absurdist experience, is rebellion.� Deprived of all knowledge, incited to murder or to consent to murder, all I have at my disposal is this single piece of evidence, which is only reaffirmed by the anguish I suffer.� Rebellion is born of the spectacle of irrationality, confronted with an unjust and incomprehensible condition.� But its blind impulse is to demand order in the midst of chaos, and unity in the very heart of the ephemeral.� It protests, it demands, it insists that the outrage be brought to an end, and that what has up to now been built upon shifting sands should henceforth be founded on rock.� Its preoccupation is to transform.� But to transform is to act, and to act will be, tomorrow, to kill, and it still does not know whether murder is legitimate.� Rebellion engenders exactly the actions it is asked to legitimate.� Therefore it is absolutely necessary that rebellion find its reasons within itself, since it cannot find them elsewhere.� It must consent to examine itself in order to learn how to act.
�������� Two centuries of rebellion, either metaphysical or historical, present themselves for our consideration.� Only a historian could undertake to set forth in detail the doctrines and movements that have followed one another during this period.� But at least it should be possible to find a guiding principle.� The pages that follow only attempt to present certain historical data and a working hypothesis.� This hypothesis is not the only one possible; moreover, it is far from explaining everything.� But it partly explains the direction in which our times are heading and almost entirely explains the excesses of the age.� The astonish history evoked here is the history of European pride.
�������� In any event, the reasons for rebellion cannot be explained except in terms of an inquiry into its attitudes, pretensions, and conquests.� Perhaps we may discover it its achievements the rule of action that the absurd has not been able to give us; an indication, at least, about the right or the duty to kill and, finally, hope for new creation.� Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.� The problem is to know whether this refusal can only lead to the destruction of himself and of others, whether all rebellion must end in the justification of universal murder, or whether, on the contrary, without laying claim to an innocence that is impossible, it can discover the principle of reasonable culpability.
Part One
The Rebel
*
�������� What is a rebel?� A man who says no, but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation.� He is also a man who says yes, from the moment he makes his first gesture of rebellion.� A slave who has taken orders all his life suddenly decides that he cannot obey some new command.� What does he mean by saying �no�?
�������� He means, for example, that �this has been going on too long,� �up to this point yes, beyond it no,� �you are going too far,� or, again, �there is a limit beyond which you shall not go.�� In other words, his no affirms the existence of a borderline.� The same concept is to be found in the rebel�s feeling that the other person �is exaggerating,� that he is exerting his authority beyond a limit where he begins to infringe on the rights of others.� Thus the movement of rebellion is founded simultaneously on the categorical rejection of an intrusion that is considered intolerable and on the confused conviction of an absolute right which, in the rebel�s mind, is more precisely the impression that he �has the right to ��� Rebellion cannot exist without the feeling that, somewhere and somehow, one is right.� It is in this way that the rebel slave says yes and no simultaneously.� He affirms that there are limits and also that he suspects � and wishes to preserve � the existence of certain things on this side of the borderline.� He demonstrates, with obstinacy, that there is something in him which �is worthwhile �� and which must be taken into consideration.� In a certain way, he confronts an order of things which oppresses him with the insistence on a kind of right not to be oppressed beyond the limit that he can tolerate.
�������� In every act of rebellion, the rebellion simultaneously experiences a feeling of revulsion at the infringement of his rights and a complete and spontaneous loyalty to certain aspects of himself.� Thus he implicitly brings into play a standard of values so far from being gratuitous that he is prepared to support it no matter what he risks.� Up to this point he has at least remained silent and has abandoned himself to the form of despair in which a condition is accepted even though it is considered unjust.� To remain silent is to give the impression that one has no opinions, that one wants nothing, and in certain cases it really amounts to wanting nothing.� Despair, like the absurd, has opinions and desires about everything in general and nothing in particular.� Silence expresses this attitude very well.� But from the moment that the rebel finds his voice � even though he says nothing but �no� � he begins to desire and to judge.� The rebel, in the etymological sense, does a complete turnabout.� He acted under the lash of his master�s whip.� Suddenly he turns and faces him.� He opposes what is preferable to what is not.� Not every value entails rebellion, but every act of rebellion tacitly invokes a value.� Or is it really a question of values?
�������� Awareness, no matter how confused it may be, develops from every act of rebellion: the sudden, dazzling perception that there is something in man with which he can identify himself, even if only for a moment.� Up to now this identification was never really experienced.� Before he rebelled, the slave accepted all the demands made upon him.� Very often he even took orders, without reacting against them, which were far more conducive to insurrection than the one at which he balks.� He accepted them patiently, though he may have protested inwardly, but in that he remained silent he was more concerned with his own immediate interests than as yet aware of his own rights.� But with loss of patience � with impatience - a reaction begins which can extend to everything that he previously accepted, and which is almost always retroactive.� The very moment the slave refuses to obey the humiliating orders of his master, he simultaneously rejects the condition of slavery.� The act of rebellion carries him far beyond the point he had reached by simply refusing.� He exceeds the bounds that he fixed for his antagonist, and now demands to be treated as an equal.� What was at first the man�s obstinate resistance now becomes the whole man, who is identified with and summed up in this resistance.� The part of himself that he wanted to be respected he proceeds to place above everything else and proclaims it preferable to everything, even to life itself.� It becomes for him the supreme good.� Having up to now been willing to compromise, the slave suddenly adopts (�because this is how it must be ��) an attitude of All or Nothing.� With rebellion, awareness is born.
�������� But we can see that the knowledge gained is, at the same time, of an �all� that is still rather obscure and of a �nothing� that proclaims the possibility of sacrificing the rebel to this �All�.� The rebel himself wants to be �all� � to identify himself completely with this good of which he has suddenly become aware and by which he wants to be personally recognized and acknowledged � or �nothing�; in other words, to be completely destroyed by the force that dominates him.� As a last resort, he is willing to accept the final defeat, which is death, rather than be deprived of the personal sacrament that he would call, for example, freedom.� Better to die on one�s feet than to live on one�s knees.
�������� Values, according to good
authorities, �most often represent a transition from fats to rights, from what
is desired to what is desirable (usually through the intermediary of what is
generally considered desirable). [Lalande: Vocabulaire philosophique.]� The transition from facts to rights is
manifest, as we have seen, in rebellion.�
So is the transition from �this must be� to �this is how I should like
things to be,� and even more so, perhaps, the idea of the sublimation of the
individual in a henceforth universal good.�
The sudden appearance of the concept of �All or Nothing� demonstrates
that rebellion, contrary to current opinion, and though it springs from
everything that is most strictly individualistic in man, questions the very
idea of the individual.� If the individual,
in fact, accepts death and happens to die as a consequence of his act of
rebellion, he demonstrates by doing so that he is willing to sacrifice himself
for the sake of a common good which he considers more important than his own
destiny.� If he prefers the risk of death
to the negation of the rights that he defends, it is because he considers these
rights more important than himself.�
Therefore he is acting in the name of certain values which are still
indeterminate but which he feels are common to himself and to all men.� We see that the affirmation implicit in every
act of rebellion is extended to something that transcends the individual
insofar as it withdraws him from his supposed solitude and provides him with a
reason to act.� But it is already worth
noting that this concept of values as pre-existent to any kind of action
contradicts the purely historical philosophies, in which values are acquired
(if they are ever acquired) after the action has been completed.� Analysis of rebellion least at least to the
suspicion that, contrary to the postulates of contemporary thought, a human
nature does exist, as the Greeks believed.�
Why rebel if there is nothing permanent in oneself worth preserving?� It is for the sake of everyone in the world
that the slave asserts himself when he comes to the conclusion that a command
has infringed on something in him which does not belong to him alone, but which
is common ground where all men � even the man who insults and oppresses him �
have a natural community. [The community of
victims is the same as that which unites victim and executioner.� But the executioner does not know this.]
�������� Two observations will support this argument.� First, we can see that an act of rebellion is not, essentially, an egoistic act.� Of course, it can have egoistic motives.� But one can rebel equally well against lies as against oppression.� Moreover, the rebel � once he has accepted the motives and at the moment of his greatest impetus � preserves nothing in that he risks everything. �He demands respect for himself, of course, but only insofar as he identifies himself with a natural community.
�������� Then we note that
rebellion does not arise only, and necessarily, among the oppressed, but that
it can also be caused by the mere spectacle of oppression of which someone else
is the victim.� In such cases there is a
feeling of identification with another individual.� And it must be pointed out that this is not a
question of psychological identification � a mere subterfuge by which the
individual imagines that it is himself who has been offended.� On the contrary, it can often happen that we
cannot bear to see offences done to others which we ourselves have accepted
without rebelling.� The suicides of the
Russian terrorists in
�������� It would be possible for us to define the positive aspects of the values implicit in every act of rebellion by comparing them with a completely negative concept like that of resentment as defined by Scheler.� Rebellion is, in fact, much more than pursuit of a claim, in the strongest sense of the word.� Resentment is very well defined by Scheler as an autointoxication � the evil secretion, in a sealed vessel, of prolonged impotence.� Rebellion, on the contrary, breaks the seal and allows the whole being to come into play.� It liberates stagnant waters and turns them into a raging torrent.� Scheler himself emphasizes the passive aspect of resentment and remarks on the prominent place it occupies in the psychology of women who are dedicated to desire and possession.� The fountainhead of rebellion, on the contrary, is the principle of superabundant activity and energy.� Scheler is also right in saying that resentment is always highly coloured by envy.� But one envies what one does not have, while the rebel�s aim is to defend what he is.� He does not merely claim some good that he does not possess or of which he was deprived.� His aim is to claim recognition for something which he has and which has already been recognized by him, in almost every case, as more important than anything of which he could be envious.� Rebellion is not realistic.� According to Scheler, resentment always turns into either unscrupulous ambition or bitterness, depending on whether it is implanted in a strong person or a weak one.� But in both cases it is a question of wanting to be something other than what one is.� Resentment is always resentment against oneself.� The rebel, on the contrary, from his very first step, refuses to allow anyone to touch what he is.� He is fighting for the integrity of one part of his being.� He does not try, primarily, to conquer, but simply to impose.
�������� Finally, it would seem that resentment takes delight, in advance, in the pain that it would like the object of its envy to feel.� Nietzsche and Scheler are right in seeing an excellent example of this in the passage where Tertullian informs his readers that one of the greatest sources of happiness among the blessed will be the spectacle of the Roman emperors consumed in the fires of hell.� This kind of happiness is also experienced by the decent people who go to watch executions. �The rebel, on the contrary, limits himself, as a matter of principle, to refusing to be humiliated without asking that others should be.� He will even accept pain provided his integrity is respected.
�������� It is therefore hard to understand why Scheler completely identifies the spirit of rebellion with resentment.� His criticism of the resentment to be found in humanitarianism (which he treats as the non-Christian form of love for mankind) could perhaps be applied to certain indeterminate forms of humanitarian idealism, or to the techniques of terror.� But it rings false in relation to man�s rebellion against his condition � the movement that enlists the individual in the defence of a dignity common to all men.� Scheler wants to demonstrate that humanitarian feelings are always accompanied by a hatred of the world.� Humanity is loved in general in order to avoid having to love anybody in particular.� This is correct, in some cases, and it is easier to understand Scheler when we realize that for him humanitarianism is represented by Bentham and Rousseau.� But man�s love for man can be born of other things than a mathematical calculation of the resultant rewards or a theoretical confidence in human nature.� In face of the utilitarians, and of �mile�s preceptor, there is, for example, the kind of logic, embodied by Dostoievsky in Ivan Karamazov, which progresses from an act of rebellion to metaphysical insurrection.� Scheler is aware of this and sums up the concept in the following manner: �There is not enough love in the world to squander it on anything but human beings.�� Even if this proposition were true, the appalling despair that it implies would merit anything but contempt.� In fact, it misunderstands the tortured character of Karamazov�s rebellion.� Ivan�s drama, on the contrary, arises from the fact that there is too much love without an object.� This love finding no outlet and God being denied, it is then decided to lavish it on human beings as a generous act of complicity.
�������� Nevertheless, in the act
of rebellion as we have envisaged it up to now, an abstract ideal is not chosen
through lack of feeling and in pursuit of a sterile demand.� We insist that the part of man which cannot
be reduced to mere ideas should be taken into consideration � the passionate
side of his nature that serves no other purpose than to be part of the act of
living.� Does this imply that no
rebellion is motivated by resentment?�
No, and we know it only too well in this age of malice.� But we must consider the idea of rebellion in
its widest sense on pain of betraying it; and in its widest sense rebellion
goes far beyond resentment.� When
Heathcliff, in
��������
�������� But, to sum up, are not
rebellion and the values that it implies relative?� Reasons for rebellion do seem to change, in
fact, with periods and civilizations.� It
is obvious that a Hindu pariah, an Inca warrior, a primitive native of central
�������� On the basis of the evidence, the only conclusion that can be drawn from Scheler�s remark is that, thanks to the theory of political freedom, there is, in the very heart of our society, an increasing awareness in man of the idea of man and, thanks to the application of this theory of freedom, a corresponding dissatisfaction.� Actual freedom has not increased in proportion to man�s awareness of it.� We can only deduce from this observation that rebellion is the act of an educated man who is aware of his own rights.� But there is nothing which justifies us in saying that it is only a question of individual rights.� Because of the sense of solidarity we have already pointed out, it would rather seem that what is at stake is humanity�s gradually increasing self-awareness as it pursues its course.� In fact, for the Inca and the pariah the problem never arises, because for them it had been solved by a tradition, even before they had had time to raise it � the answer being that tradition is sacred.� If in a world where things are held sacred the problem of rebellion does not arise, it is because no real problems are to be found in such a world, all the answers having been given simultaneously.� Metaphysics is replaced by myth.� There are no more questions, only eternal answers and commentaries, which may be metaphysical.� But before man accepts the sacred world and in order that he should be able to accept it � or before he escapes from it � there is always a period of soul-searching and rebellion.� The rebel is a man who is on the point of accepting or rejecting the sacred and determined on laying claim to a human situation in which all the answers are human � in other words, formulated in reasonable terms.� From this moment every question, every word, is an act of rebellion while in the sacred world every word is an act of grace.� It would be possible to demonstrate in this manner that only two possible worlds can exist for the human mind: the sacred (or, to speak in Christian terms, the world of grace [There is, of course, an act of metaphysical rebellion at the beginning of Christianity, but the resurrection of Christ and the annunciation of the kingdom of heaven interpreted as a promise of eternal life are the answers that render it futile.]) and the world of rebellion.� The disappearance of one is equivalent to the appearance of the other, despite the fact that this appearance can take place in disconcerting forms. �There again we rediscover the All or Nothing.� The present interest of the problem of rebellion only springs from the fact that nowadays whole societies have wanted to discard the sacred.� We live in an unsacrosanct moment in history.� Insurrection is certainly not the sum total of human experience.� But history today, with all its storm and strife, compels us to say that rebellion is one of the essential dimensions of man.� It is our historic reality.� Unless we choose to ignore reality, we must find our values in it.� Is it possible to find a rule of conduct outside the realm of religion and its absolute values?� That is the question raised by the rebellion.
�������� We have already noted the confused values that are called into play by incipient rebellion.� Now we must inquire if these values are to be found again in contemporary forms of rebellious thought and action, and if they are, we must specify their content.� But, before going any farther, let us note that the basis of these values is rebellion itself.� Man�s solidarity is founded upon rebellion, and rebellion, in its turn, can only find its justification in this solidarity.� We have, then, the right to say that any rebellion which claims the right to deny or destroy this solidarity loses simultaneously its right to be called rebellion and becomes in reality an acquiescence in murder.� In the same way, this solidarity, except insofar as religion is concerned, comes to life only on the level of rebellion.� And so the real drama of revolutionary thought is announced.� In order to exist, man must rebel, but rebellion must respect the limit it discovers in itself � a limit where minds meet and, in meeting, begin to exist.� Rebellious thought, therefore, cannot dispense with memory: it is a perpetual state of tension.� In studying its actions and its results, we shall have to say, each time, whether it remains faithful to its first noble promise or if, through indolence or folly, it forgets its original purpose and plunges into a mire of tyranny or servitude.
�������� Meanwhile, we can sum up the initial progress that the spirit of rebellion provokes in a mind that is originally imbued with the absurdity and apparent sterility of the world.� In absurdist experience, suffering is individual.� But from the moment when a movement of rebellion begins, suffering is seen as a collective experience.� Therefore the first progressive step for a mind overwhelmed by the strangeness of things is to realize that this feeling of strangeness is shared with all men and that human reality, in its entirety, suffers from the distance which separates it from the rest of the universe.� The malady experienced by a single man becomes a mass plague.� In our daily trials rebellion plays the same role as does the �cogito� in the realm of thought: it is the first piece of evidence.� But this evidence lures the individual from his solitude.� It founds its first value on the whole human race.� I rebel � therefore we exist.
Part Two
Metaphysical Rebellion
*
�������� Metaphysical rebellion is the movement by which man protests against his condition and against the whole of creation.� It is metaphysical because it contests the ends of man and of creation.� The slave protests against the condition in which he finds himself within his state of slavery; the metaphysical rebel protests against the condition in which he finds himself as a man.� The rebel slave affirms that there is something in him that will not tolerate the manner in which his master treats him; the metaphysical rebel declares that he is frustrated by the universe.� For both of them, it is not only a question of pure and simple negation.� In both cases, in fact, we find a value judgement in the name of which the rebel refuses to approve the condition in which he finds himself.
�������� The slave who opposes his master is not concerned, let us note, with repudiating his master as a human being.� He repudiates him as a master.� He denies that he has the right to deny him, a slave, on grounds of necessity.� The master is discredited to the exact extent that he fails to respond to a demand which he ignores.� If men cannot refer to a common value, recognized by all as existing in each one, then man is incomprehensible to man.� The rebel demands that this value should be clearly recognized in himself because he knows or suspects that, without this principle, crime and disorder would reign throughout the world.� An act of rebellion on his part seems like a demand for clarity and unity.� The most elementary form of rebellion, paradoxically, expresses an aspiration to order.
�������� This description can be applied, word for word, to the metaphysical rebel.� He attacks a shattered world in order to demand unity from it.� He opposes the principle of justice which he finds in himself to the principle of injustice which he sees being applied in the world.� Thus all he wants, originally, is to resolve this contradiction and establish the unitarian reign of justice, if he can, or of injustice, if he is driven to extremes.� Meanwhile, he denounces the contradiction.� Metaphysical rebellion is a claim, motivated by the concept of a complete unity, against the suffering of life and death and a protest against the human condition both for its incompleteness, thanks to death, and its wastefulness, thanks to evil.� If a mass death sentence defines the human condition, then rebellion, in one sense, is its contemporary.� At the same time that he rejects his mortality, the rebel refuses to recognize the power that compels him to live in this condition.� The metaphysical rebel is therefore not definitely an atheist, as one might think him, but he is inevitably a blasphemer.� Quite simply, he blasphemes primarily in the name of order, denouncing God as the father of death and as the supreme outrage.
�������� The rebel slave will help us to throw light on this point.� He established, by his protest, the existence of the master against whom he rebelled.� But at the same time he demonstrated that his master�s power was dependent on his own subordination and he affirmed his own power: the power of continually questioning the superiority of his master.� In this respect master and slave are really in the same boat: the temporary sway of the former is as relative as the submission of the latter.� The two forces assert themselves alternately at the moment of rebellion until they confront each other for a fight to the death, and one or the other temporarily disappears.
�������� In the same way, if the metaphysical rebel ranges himself against a power whose existence he simultaneously affirms, he only admits the existence of this power at the very instant that he calls it into question.� Then he involves this supreme being in the same humiliating adventure as mankind�s, its ineffectual power being the equivalent of our ineffectual condition.� He subjects it to our power of refusal, bends it to the unbending part of human nature, forcibly integrates it into an existence that we render absurd, and finally drags it from its refuge outside time and involves it in history, very far from the eternal stability that it can find only in the unanimous submission of all men.� Thus rebellion affirms that, on its own level, any concept of superior existence is contradictory, to say the least.
�������� And so the history of metaphysical rebellion cannot be confused with that of atheism.� From a certain point of view it is even confused with the contemporary history of religious sentiment.� The rebel defies more than he denies.� Originally, at least, he does not suppress God; he merely talks to Him as an equal.� But it is not a polite dialogue.� It is a polemic animated by the desire to conquer.� The slave begins by demanding justice and ends by wanting to wear a crown.� He must dominate in his turn.� His insurrection against his condition becomes an unlimited campaign against the heavens for the purpose of bringing back a captive king who will first be dethroned and finally condemned to death.� Human rebellion ends in metaphysical revolution.� It progresses from appearances to acts, from the dandy to the revolutionary.� When the throne of God is overturned, the rebel realizes that it is now his own responsibility to create the justice, order, and unity that he sought in vain within his own condition, and in this way to justify the fall of God.� Then begins the desperate effort to create, at the price of crime and murder if necessary, the dominion of man.� This will not come about without terrible consequences, of which we are so far only aware of a few.� But these consequences are in no way due to rebellion itself, or at least they only occur to the extent that the rebel forgets his original purpose, tires of the tremendous tension created by refusing to give a positive or negative answer, and finally abandons himself to complete negation or total submission.� Metaphysical insurrection, in its first stages, offers us the same positive content as the slave�s rebellion.� Our task will be to examine what becomes of this positive content of rebellion in the actions that claim to originate from it and to explain where the fidelity or infidelity of the rebel to the origins of his revolt finally leads him.
��������
The Sons of Cain
*
�������� Metaphysical rebellion, in the real sense of the term, does not appear, in coherent form, in the history of ideas until the end of the eighteenth century � when modern times begin to the accompaniment of the crash of falling ramparts.� But from then on, its consequences develop uninterruptedly and it is no exaggeration to say that they have shaped the history of our times.� Does this mean that metaphysical rebellion had no significance previous to this date?� In any event, its origins must belong to the remote past, in that we like to believe that we live in Promethean times.� But is this really a Promethean age?
�������� The first mythologies describe Prometheus as an eternal martyr, chained to a pillar, at the ends of the earth, condemned forever because he refuses to ask forgiveness.� �schylus adds still further to his stature, endows him with lucidity (�no misfortune can fall upon me that I have not myself already foreseen�), makes him cry out his hatred of all the gods, and, plunging him into �a stormy sea of mortal despair,� finally abandons him to thunder and lightning: �Ah! see the injustice I endure!�
�������� It cannot be said, therefore, that the ancients were unaware of metaphysical rebellion.� Long before Satan, they created a touching and noble image of the Rebel and gave us the most perfect myth of the intelligence in revolt.� The inexhaustible genius of the Greeks, which gave such a prominent place to myths of unity and simplicity, was still able to formulate the concept of insurrection.� Beyond a doubt, certain characteristics of the Promethean myth still survive in the history of rebellion as we are living it: the fight against death� (�I have delivered men from being obsessed by death�), Messianism (�I have instilled blind hopes into men�s minds�), philanthropy (�Enemy of Zeus � for having loved mankind too much�).
�������� But we must not forget that Prometheus the Firebringer, the last drama of �schylus� trilogy, proclaimed the reign of the pardoned rebel.� The Greeks are never vindictive.� In their most audacious flights they always remain faithful to the idea of moderation, a concept they deified.� Their rebel does not range himself against all creation, but against Zeus, who is never anything more than one god among many and who himself was mortal.� Prometheus himself is a demigod.� It is a question of settling a particular account, of a dispute about what is good, and not of a universal struggle between good and evil.
�������� The ancients, even though they believed in destiny, believed primarily in nature, in which they participated wholeheartedly.� To rebel against nature amounted to rebelling against oneself.� It was butting one�s head against a wall.� Therefore the only coherent act of rebellion was to commit suicide.� Destiny, for the Greeks, was a blind force to which one submitted, just as one submitted to the forces of nature.� The acme of excess to the Greek mind was to beat the sea with rods � an act of insanity worthy only of barbarians.� Of course, the Greeks described excess, since it exists, but they gave it its proper place and, by doing so, also defined its limits.� Achilles� defiance after the death of Patroclus, the imprecations of the Greek tragic heroes cursing their fate, do not imply complete condemnation.� �dipus knows that he is not innocent.� He is guilty in spite of himself; he is also part of destiny.� He complains, but he says nothing irreparable.� Antigone rebels, but she does so in the name of tradition, in order that her brothers may find rest in the tomb and that the appropriate rites may be observed.� In her case, rebellion is, in one sense, reactionary.� The Greek mind has two aspects and in its meditations almost always re-echoes, as counterpoint to its most tragic melodies, the eternal words of �dipus, who, blind and desperate, recognizes that all is for the best.� Affirmation counterbalances negation.� Even when Plato anticipates, with Callicles, the most common type of Nietzschean, even when the latter exclaims: �But when a man appears who has the necessary character � he will escape, he will trample on our formulas, our magic spells, our incantations, and the laws, which are all, without exception, contrary to nature.� Our slave has rebelled and has shown himself to be the master� � even then, though he rejects law, he speaks in the name of nature.
�������� Metaphysical rebellion presupposes a simplified view of creation � which was inconceivable to the Greeks.� In their minds, there were not gods on one side and men on the other, but a series of stages leading from one to the other.� The idea of innocence opposed to guilt, the concept of all of history summed up in the struggle between good and evil, was foreign to them.� In their universe there were more mistakes than crimes, and the only definitive crime was excess.� In a world entirely dominated by history, which ours threatens to become, there are no longer any mistakes, but only crimes, of which the greatest is moderation.� This explains the curious mixture of ferocity and forbearance which we find in Greek mythology.� The Greeks never made the human mind into an armed camp, and in this respect we are inferior to them.� Rebellion, after all, can only be imagined in terms of opposition to someone.� The only thing that gives meaning to human protest is the idea of a personal god who has created, and is therefore responsible for, everything.� And so we can say, without being paradoxical, that in the Western World the history of rebellion is inseparable from the history of Christianity.� We have to wait, in fact, until the very last moments of Greek thought to see rebellion begin to find expression among transitional thinkers � nowhere more profoundly than in the works of Epicurus and Lucretius.
�������� The appalling sadness of Epicurus already strikes a new note.� It has its roots, no doubt, in the fear of death, with which the Greek mind was not unfamiliar.� But the pathos with which this fear is expressed is very revealing.� �We can take precautions against all sorts of things; but so far as death is concerned, we all of us live like the inhabitants of a defenceless citadel.�� Lucretius is more explicit: �The substance of this vast world is condemned to death and ruin.�� Therefore why postpone enjoyment?� �We spend our lives,� writes Epicurus, �in waiting, and we are all condemned to die.�� Therefore we must all enjoy ourselves.� But what a strange form of enjoyment!� It consists in sealing up the walls of the citadel, of making sure of a supply of bread and water and of living in darkness and silence.� Death hovers over us, therefore we must prove that death is of no importance.� Like Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, Epicurus banishes death from human existence.� �Death has no meaning for us for what is indefinable is incapable of feeling, and what is incapable of feeling has no meaning for us.�� Is this the equivalent of nothingness?� No, for everything in this particular universe is matter, and death only means a return to one�s element.� Existence is epitomized in a stone.� The strange sensual pleasure of which Epicurus speaks consists, above all, in an absence of pain; it is the pleasure of a stone.� By an admirable manoeuvre � which we shall find again in the great French classicists � Epicurus, in order to escape from destiny, destroys sensibility, having first destroyed its primary manifestation: hope.� What this Greek philosopher says about the gods cannot be interpreted otherwise.� All the unhappiness of human beings springs from the hope that tempts them from the silence of the citadel and exposes them on the ramparts in expectation of salvation.� Unreasonable aspirations have no other effect than to reopen carefully bandaged wounds.� That is why Epicurus does not deny the gods; he banishes them, and so precipitately that man has no alternative but to retreat once more into the citadel. �The happy and immortal being has no preoccupations of his own and no concern with the affairs of others.�� Lucretius goes even farther: �It is incontestable that the gods, by their very nature, enjoy their immortality in perfect peace, completely unaware of our affairs, from which they are utterly detached.�� Therefore let us forget the gods, let us never even think about them, and �neither your thoughts during the day nor your dreams at night will be troubled.�
�������� Later we shall rediscover this eternal theme of rebellion, but with important modifications.� A god who does not reward or punish, a god who turns a deaf ear, is the rebel�s only religious conception.� But while Vigny will curse the silence of his divinity, Epicurus considers that, as death is inevitable, silence on the part of man is a better preparation for this fate than divine words.� This strange mind wears itself out in a sustained attempt to build ramparts around mankind, to fortify the citadel to stifle the irrepressible cry of human hope.� Only when this strategic retreat has been accomplished does Epicurus, like a god among men, celebrate his victory with a song that clearly denotes the defensive aspect of his rebellion.� �I have escaped your ambush, O destiny, I have closed all paths by which you might assail me.� We shall not be conquered either by you or by any other evil power.� And when the inevitable hour of departure strikes, our scorn for those who vainly cling to existence will burst forth in this proud song: �Ah, with what dignity we have lived.��
�������� Alone among his contemporaries Lucretius carries this logic much farther and finally brings it to the central problem of modern philosophy.� He adds nothing fundamental to Epicurus.� He, too, refuses to accept any explanatory principle that cannot be tested by the senses.� The atom is only a last refuge where man, reduced to his primary elements, pursues a kind of blind and deaf immortality � an immortal death � which for Lucretius represents, as it does for Epicurus, the only possible form of happiness.� He has to admit, however, that atoms do not aggregate of their own accord and rather than believe in a superior law and, finally, in the destiny he wishes to deny, he accepts the concept of a purely fortuitous mutation, the clinamen, in which the atoms meet and group themselves together.� Already, as we can see, the great problem of modern times arises: the discovery that to rescue man from destiny is to deliver him to chance.� That is why the contemporary mind is trying so desperately hard to restore destiny to man � a historical destiny this time.� Lucretius has not reached this point.� His hatred of destiny and death is assuaged by this blind universe where atoms accidentally form human beings and where human beings accidentally return to atoms.� But his vocabulary bears witness to a new kind of sensibility.� The walled citadel becomes an armed camp.� M�nia mundi, the ramparts of the world, is one of the key expressions of Lucretius� rhetoric.� The main preoccupation in this armed camp is, of course, to silence hope.� But Epicurus� methodical renunciation is transformed into a quivering asceticism, which is sometimes crowned with execrations.� Piety, for Lucretius, undoubtedly consists in �being able to contemplate everything with an untroubled mind.�� But, nevertheless, his mind reels at the injustices done to man.� Spurred on by indignation, he weaves new concepts of crime, innocence, culpability, and punishment into his great poem on the nature of things.� In it he speaks of �religion�s first crime,� Iphigenia�s martyred innocence, and of the tendency of the divinity to �often ignore the guilty and to mete out undeserved punishment by slaughtering the innocent.�� If Lucretius scoffs at the fear of punishment in the next world, it is not as a gesture of defensive rebellion in the manner of Epicurus, but as a process of aggressive reasoning: why should evil be punished when we can easily see, here on earth, that goodness is not rewarded?
�������� In Lucretius� epic poem, Epicurus himself becomes the proud rebel he never actually was.� �When in the eyes of all mankind humanity was leading an abject existence on earth, crushed beneath the weight of a religion whose hideous aspect peered down from the heights of the celestial regions, the first to dare, a Greek, a man, raised his mortal eyes and challenged the gods�. In this way religion, in its turn, was overthrown and trampled underfoot, and this victory elevates us to the heavens.�� Here we can sense the difference between this new type of blasphemy and the ancient malediction.� The Greek heroes could aspire to become gods, but simultaneously with the gods who already existed.� At that time it was simply a matter of promotion.� Lucretius� hero, on the other hand, embarks on a revolution.� By repudiating the unworthy and criminal gods, he takes their place himself.� He sallies forth from the armed camp and opens the first attack on divinity in the name of human suffering.� In the ancient world, murder is both inexplicable and inexpiable.� Already with Lucretius, murder by man is only an answer to murder by the gods.� It is not pure coincidence that Lucretius� poems ends with a prodigious image of the sanctuaries of the gods swollen with the accusing corpses of plague victims.
�������� This new language is incomprehensible without the concept of a personal god, which is slowly beginning to form in the minds of Lucretius� and Epicurus� contemporaries.� Only a personal god can be asked by the rebel for a personal accounting.� When the personal god begins his reign, rebellion assumes its most resolutely ferocious aspect and pronounces a definitive no.� With Cain, the first act of rebellion coincides with the first crime.� The history of rebellion, as we are experiencing it today, has far more to do with the children of Cain than with the disciples of Prometheus.� In this sense it is the God of the Old Testament who is primarily responsible for mobilizing the forces of rebellion.� Inversely, one must submit to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob when, like Pascal, one has run the full course of intellectual rebellion.� The mind most prone to doubt always aspires to the greatest degree of Jansenism.
�������� From this point of view,
the New Testament can be considered as an attempt to answer, in advance, every
Cain in the world, by painting the figure of God in softer colours and by
creating an intercessor between God and man.�
Christ came to solve two major problems, evil and death, which are
precisely the problems that preoccupy the rebel.� His solution consisted, first, in
experiencing them.� The man-god suffers,
too � with patience.� Evil and death can
no longer be entirely imputed to Him since He suffers and dies.� The night on
�������� Gnosticism, which is the fruit of Greco-Christian collaboration, has tried for two centuries, in reaction against Judaic thought, to promote this concept.� We know, for example, the vast number of intercessors invented by Valentinus.� But the �ons of this particular metaphysical skirmish are the equivalent of the intermediary truths to be found in Hellenism.� Their aim is to diminish the absurdity of an intimate relationship between suffering humanity and an implacable god.� This is the special role of Marcion�s cruel and bellicose second god.� This demiurge is responsible for the creation of a finite world and of death.� Our duty is to hate him and at the same time to deny everything that he has created, by means of asceticism, to the point of destroying, by sexual abstinence, all creation.� This form of asceticism is therefore both proud and rebellious.� Marcion simply alters the course of rebellion and directs it toward an inferior god so as to be better able to exalt the superior god.� Gnosis, owing to its Greek origins, remains conciliatory and tends to destroy the Judaic heritage in Christianity.� It also wanted to avoid Augustinism, by anticipating it, in that Augustinism provides arguments for every form of rebellion.� To Basilides, for example, the martyrs were sinners, and so was Christ, because they suffered.� A strange conception, but whose aim is to remove the element of injustice from suffering.� The Gnostics only wanted to substitute the Greek idea of initiation, which allows mankind every possible chance, for the concept of an all-powerful and arbitrary forgiveness.� The enormous number of sects among the second-generation Gnostics indicates how desperate and diversified was the attempt on the part of Greek thought to make the Christian universe more accessible and to remove the motives for a rebellion that Hellenism considered the worst of all evils.� But the Church condemned this attempt and, by condemning it, swelled the ranks of the rebels.
�������� In that the children of Cain have triumphed, increasingly, throughout the centuries, the God of the Old Testament can be said to have been incredibly successful.� Paradoxically, the blasphemers have injected new life into the jealous God whom Christianity wished to banish from history.� One of their most profoundly audacious acts was to recruit Christ into their camp by making His story end on the Cross and on the bitter note of the cry that precedes His agony.� By this means it was possible to preserve the implacable face of a God of hate � which coincided far better with creation as the rebels conceived it.� Until Dostoievsky and Nietzsche, rebellion is directed only against a cruel and capricious divinity � a divinity who prefers, without any convincing motive, Abel�s sacrifice to Cain�s and, by so doing, provokes the first murder.� Dostoievsky, in the realm of imagination, and Nietzsche, in the realm of fact, enormously increase the field of rebellious thought and demand an accounting from the God of love Himself.� Nietzsche believes that God is dead in the souls of his contemporaries.� Therefore he attacks, like his predecessor Stirner, the illusion of God that lingers, under the guise of morality, in the thought of his times.� But until they appear upon the scene, the freethinkers, for example, were content to deny the truth of the history of Christ (�that dull story,� in Sade�s words) and to maintain, by their denials, the tradition of an avenging god.
�������� On the other hand, for as long as the Western World has been Christian, the Gospels have been the interpreter between heaven and earth.� Each time a solitary cry of rebellion was uttered, the answer came in the form of an even more terrible suffering.� In that Christ had suffered, and had suffered voluntarily, suffering was no longer unjust and all pain was necessary.� In one sense, Christianity�s bitter intuition and legitimate pessimism concerning human behaviour is based on the assumption that over-all injustice is as satisfying to man as total justice.� Only the sacrifice of an innocent god could justify the endless and universal torture of innocence.� Only the most abject suffering by God could assuage man�s agony.� If everything, without exception, in heaven and earth is doomed to pain and suffering, then a strange form of happiness is possible.
�������� But from the moment when Christianity, emerging from its period of triumph, found itself submitted to the critical eye of reason � to the point where the divinity of Christ was denied � suffering once more became the lot of man.� Jesus profaned is no more than just one more innocent man whom the representatives of the God of Abraham tortured in a spectacular manner.� The abyss that separates the master from the slaves opens again and the cry of revolt falls on the deaf ears of a jealous God.� The freethinkers have prepared the way for this new dichotomy by attacking, with all the usual precautions, the morality and divinity of Christ.� Callot�s universe sums up quite satisfactorily this world of hallucination and wretchedness whose inhabitants begin by sniggering up their sleeves and end � with Moli�re�s Don Juan � by laughing to high heaven.� During the two centuries which prepare the way for the upheavals, both revolutionary and sacrilegious, of the eighteenth century, all the efforts of the freethinkers are bent on making Christ an innocent, or a simpleton, so as to annex Him to the world of man, endowed with all the noble or derisory qualities of man.� Thus the ground will be prepared for the great offensive against a hostile heaven.
Absolute Negation
*
�������� Historically speaking, the first coherent offensive is that of Sade, who musters into one vast war machine the arguments of the freethinkers up the Father Meslier and Voltaire.� His negation, of course, is also the most extreme.� From rebellion Sade can only deduce an absolute negative.� Twenty-seven years in prison do not, in fact, produce a very conciliatory form of intelligence.� Such a long period of confinement produces either weaklings or killers and sometimes a combination of both.� If the mind is strong enough to construct in a prison cell a moral philosophy that is not one of submission, it will generally be one of domination.� Every ethic based on solitude implies the exercise of power.� In this respect Sade is the archetype, for insofar as society treated him atrociously, he responded in an atrocious manner.� The writer, despite a few happy phrases and the thoughtless praises of our contemporaries, is secondary.� He is admired today, with so much ingenuity, for reasons which have nothing to do with literature.
�������� He is exalted as the philosopher in chains and the first theoretician of absolute rebellion.� He might well have been.� In prison, dreams have no limits and reality is no curb.� Intelligence in chains loses in lucidity with it gains in intensity.� The only logic known to Sade was the logic of his feelings.� He did not create a philosophy, but pursued a monstrous dream of revenge.� Only the dream turned out to be prophetic.� His desperate demand for freedom led Sade into the kingdom of servitude; his inordinate thirst for a form of life he could never attain was assuaged in the successive frenzies of a dream of universal destruction.� In this way, at least, Sade is our contemporary.� Let us follow his successive negations.
�������� A Man of Letters
�������� Is Sade an atheist?� He says so, and we believe him, before going to prison, in his Dialogue between a Priest and a Dying Man; and from then on we are dumbfounded by his passion for sacrilege.� One of his cruellest characters, Saint-Fond, does not in any sense deny God.� He is content to develop a gnostic theory of a wicked demiurge and to draw the proper conclusions from it.� Saint-Fond, it is said, is not Sade.� No, of course not.� A character is never the author who created him.� It is quite likely, however, that an author may be all his characters simultaneously.� Now, all Sade�s atheists suppose, in principle, the non-existence of God for the obvious reason that His existence would imply that He was indifferent, wicked, or cruel.� Sade�s greatest work ends with a demonstration of the stupidity and spite of the divinity.� The innocent Justine runs through the storm and the wicked Noirceuil swears that he will be converted if divine retribution consents to spare his life.� Justine is struck by lightning, Noirceuil triumphs, and human crime continues to be man�s answer to the Pascalian wager.
�������� The idea of God which Sade conceives for himself is, therefore, of a criminal divinity who oppresses and denies mankind.� That murder is an attribute of the divinity is quite evident, according to Sade, from the history of religions.� Why, then, should man be virtuous?� Sade�s first step as a prisoner is to jump to the most extreme conclusions.� If God kills and repudiates mankind, there is nothing to stop one from killing and repudiating one�s fellow men.� This irritable challenge in no way resembles the tranquil negation that is still to be found in the Dialogue of 1782.� The man who exclaims: �I have nothing, I give nothing,� and who concludes: �Virtue and vice are indistinguishable in the tomb,� is neither happy nor tranquil.� The concept of God is the only thing, according to him, �which he cannot forgive man.�� The word forgive is already rather strange in the mouth of this expert in torture.� But it is himself whom he cannot forgive for an idea that his desperate view of the world, and his condition as a prisoner, completely refute.� A double rebellion � against the order of the universe and against himself � is henceforth going to be the guiding principle of Sade�s reasoning.� In that these two forms of rebellion are contradictory except in the disturbed mind of a victim of persecution, his reason is always either ambiguous or legitimate according to whether it is considered in the light of logic or in an attempt at compassion.
�������� He therefore denies man and his morality because God denies them.� But he denies God even though He has served as his accomplice and guarantor up to now.� For what reason?� Because of the strongest instinct to be found in one who is condemned by the hatred of mankind to live behind prison walls: the sexual instinct.� What is this instinct?� On the one hand, it is the ultimate expression of nature [Sade�s great criminals excuse their crimes on the ground that they were born with uncontrollable sexual appetites about which they could do nothing.]� On the one hand, it is the ultimate expression of nature, and, on the other, the blind force that demands the total subjection of human beings, even at the price of their destruction.� Sade denies God in the name of nature � the ideological concepts of his time presented it in mechanistic form � and he makes nature a power bent on destruction.� For him, nature is sex; his logic leads him to a lawless universe where the only master is the inordinate energy of desire.� This is his delirious kingdom, in which he finds his finest means of expression: �What are all the creatures of the earth in comparison with a single one of our desires!�� The long arguments by which Sade�s heroes demonstrate that nature has need of crime, that it must destroy in order to create, and that we help nature create from the moment we destroy it ourselves, are only aimed at establishing absolute freedom for the prisoner, Sade, who is too unjustly punished not to long for the explosion that will blow everything to pieces.� In this respect he goes against his times: the freedom he demands is not one of principles, but of instincts.
�������� Sade dreamed, no doubt, of a universal republic, whose scheme he reveals through his wise reformer, Zam�.� He shows us, by this means, that one of the purposes of rebellion is to liberate the whole world, in that, as the movement accelerates, rebellion is less and less willing to accept limitations.� But everything about him contradicts this pious dream.� He is no friend of humanity, he hates philanthropists.� The equality of which he sometimes speaks is a mathematical concept: the equivalence of the objects that comprise the human race, the abject equality of the victims.� Real fulfilment, for the man who allows absolutely free rein to his desires and who must dominate everything, lies in hatred.� Sade�s republic is not founded on liberty but on libertinism.� �Justice,� this peculiar democrat writes, �has no real existence.� It is the divinity of all the passions.�
�������� Nothing is more revealing
in this respect than the famous lampoon, read by Dolmanc� in the Philosophie du Boudoir, which has the
curious title: People of
�������� It is then, however, that his thoughts are most profound.� He rejects, with exceptional perspicacity for his times, the presumptuous alliance of freedom with virtue.� Freedom, particularly when it is a prisoner�s dream, cannot endure limitations.� It must sanction crime or it is no longer freedom.� On this essential point Sade never varies.� The man who never preached anything but contradictions only achieves coherence � and of a most complete kind � when he talks of capital punishment.� An addict of refined ways of execution, a theoretician of sexual crime, he was never able to tolerate legal crime.� �My imprisonment by the State, with the guillotine under my very eyes, was far more horrible to me than all the Bastilles imaginable.�� From this feeling of horror he drew the strength to be moderate, publicly, during the Terror, and to intervene generously on behalf of his mother-in-law, despite the fact that she had had him imprisoned.� A few years later Nodier summed up, perhaps without knowing it, the position obstinately defended by Sade: �To kill a man in a paroxysm of passion is understandable.� To have him killed by someone else after calm and serious meditation and on the pretext of duty honourably discharged is incomprehensible.�� Here we find the germ of an idea which again will be developed by Sade: he who kills must pay with his own life.� Sade is more moral, we see, than our contemporaries.
�������� But his hatred for the death penalty is at first no more than a hatred for men who are sufficiently convinced of their own virtue to dare to inflict capital punishment, when they themselves are criminals.� You cannot simultaneously choose crime for yourself and punishment for others.� You must open the prison gates or give an impossible proof of your own innocence.� From the moment you accept murder, even if only once, you must allow it universally.� The criminal who acts according to nature cannot, without betraying his office, range himself on the side of the law.� �One more effort if you want to be republicans� means: �Accept the freedom of crime, the only reasonable attitude, and enter forever into a state of insurrection as you enter into a state of grace.�� Thus total submission to evil leads to an appalling penitence, which cannot fail to horrify the Republic of enlightenment and of natural goodness.� By a significant coincidence, the manuscript of One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom was burned during the first riot of the Republic, which could hardly fail to denounce Sade�s heretical theories of freedom and to throw so compromising a supporter into prison one more.� By so doing, it gave him the regrettable opportunity of developing his rebellious logic still further.
�������� The universal republic could be a dream for Sade, but never a temptation.� In politics his real position was cynicism.� In his Society of the Friends of Crime he declares himself ostensibly in favour of the government and its laws, which he meanwhile has every intention of violating.� It is the same impulse that makes the lowest form of criminal vote for conservative candidates.� The plan that Sade had in mind assures the benevolent neutrality of the authorities.� The republic of crime cannot, for the moment at least, be universal.� It must pretend to obey the law.� In a world that knows no other rule than murder, beneath a criminal heaven, and in the name of a criminal nature, however, Sade, in reality, obeys no other law than that of inexhaustible desire.� But to desire without limit is the equivalent of being desired without limit.� License to destroy supposes that you yourself can be destroyed.� Therefore you must struggle and dominate.� The law of this world is nothing but the law of force; its driving force, the will to power.
�������� The advocate of crime really only respects two kinds of power: one, which he finds among his own class, founded on the accident of birth, and the other by which, thought sheer villainy, an underdog raises himself to the level of the libertines of noble birth whom Sade makes his heroes.� This powerful little group of initiates knows that it has all the rights.� Anyone who doubts, even for a second, these formidable privileges is immediately driven from the flock, and once more becomes a victim.� Thus a sort of aristocratic morality is created through which a little group of men and women manage to entrench themselves above a caste of slaves because they possess the secret of a strange knowledge.� The only problem for them consists in organizing themselves so as to be able to exercise fully their rights which have the terrifying scope of desire.
�������� They cannot hope to dominate the entire universe until the law of crime has been accepted by the universe.� Sade never believed that his fellow countrymen would be capable of the additional effort needed to make it �republican�.� But if crime and desire are not the law of the entire universe, if they do not reign at least over a specified territory, they are no longer unifying principles, but ferments of conflict.� They are no longer the law, and man returns to chaos and confusion.� Thus it is necessary to create from all these fragments a world that exactly coincides with the new law.� The need for unity, which Creation leaves unsatisfied, is fulfilled, at all costs, in a microcosm.� The law of power never had the patience to await complete control of the world.� It must fix the boundaries, without delay, of the territory where it holds sway, even if it means surrounding it with barbed wire and observation towers.
�������� For Sade, the law of power implies barred gates, castles with seven circumvallations from which it is impossible to escape, and where a society founded on desire and crime functions unimpeded, according to the rules of an implacable system.� The most unbridled rebellion, insistence on complete freedom, lead to the total subjection of the majority.� For Sade, man�s emancipation is consummated in these strongholds of debauchery where a kind of bureaucracy of vice rules over the life and death of the men and women who have committed themselves forever to the hell of their desires.� His works abound with descriptions of these privileged places where feudal libertines, to demonstrate to their assembled victims their absolute impotence and servitude, always repeat the Duc de Blangis�s speech to the common people of the One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom: �You are already dead to the world.�
�������� Sade himself also
inhabited the tower of Freedom, but in the Bastille.� Absolute rebellion took refuge with him in a
sordid fortress from which no one, either persecuted or persecutors, could ever
escape.� To establish his freedom, he had
to create absolute necessity.� Unlimited
freedom of desire implies the negation of others and the suppression of
pity.� The heart, that �weak spot of the
intellect,� must be exterminated; the locked room and the system will see to
that.� The system, which plays a role of
capital importance in Sade�s fabulous castles, perpetuates a universe of
mistrust.� It helps to anticipate
everything, so that no unexpected tenderness or pity occur to upset the plans
for complete enjoyment.� It is a curious kind
of pleasure, no doubt, which obeys the commandment: �We shall rise every morning
at
�������� Sade, as was the custom of his period, constructed ideal societies.� But, contrary to the custom of his period, he codifies the natural wickedness of mankind.� He meticulously constructs a citadel of force and hatred, pioneer that he is, even to the point of calculating mathematically the amount of the freedom he succeeded in destroying.� He sums up his philosophy with an unemotional accounting of crimes.� �Massacred before the first of March: 10.� After the first of March: 20.� To come: 16.� Total: 46.�� A pioneer, no doubt, but a limited one, as we can see.
�������� If that were all, Sade would be worthy only of the interest that attaches to all misunderstood pioneers.� But once the drawbridge is up, life in the castle must go on.� No matter how meticulous the system, it cannot foresee every eventuality.� It can destroy, but it cannot create.� The masters of these tortured communities do not find the satisfaction they so desperately desire.� Sade often evokes the �pleasant habit of crime.�� Nothing here, however, seems very pleasant � more like the fury of a man in chains.� The point, in fact, is to enjoy oneself, and the maximum of enjoyment coincides with the maximum of destruction.� To possess what one is going to kill, to copulate with suffering � those are the moments of freedom toward which the entire organization of Sade�s castles is directed.� But from the moment when sexual crime destroys the object of desire, it also destroys desire, which exists only at the precise moment of destruction.� Then another object must be brought under subjection and killed again, and then another, and so on to an infinity of all possible objects.� This leads to that dreary accumulation of erotic and criminal scenes in Sade�s novels, which, paradoxically, leaves the reader with the impression of a hideous chastity.
�������� What part, in this universe, could pleasure play or the exquisite joy of acquiescent and accomplice bodies?� In it we find an impossible quest for escape from despair � a quest that finishes, nevertheless, in a desperate race from servitude to servitude and from prison to prison.� If only nature is real and if, in nature, only desire and destruction are legitimate, then, in that all humanity does not suffice to assuage the thirst for blood, the path of destruction must lead to universal annihilation.� We must become, according to Sade�s formula, nature�s executioner.� But even that position is not achieved too easily.� When the accounts are closed, when all the victims are massacred, the executioners are left face to face in the deserted castle.� Something is still missing.� The tortured bodies return, in their elements, to nature and will be born again.� Even murder cannot be fully consummated: �Murder only deprives the victim of his first life; a means must be found of depriving him of his second�.�� Sade contemplates an attack on creation: �I abhor nature�. I should like to upset its plans, to thwart its progress, to halt the stars in their courses, to overturn the floating spheres of space, to destroy what serves nature and to succour all that harms it; in a word, to insult it in all its works, and I cannot succeed in doing so.�� It is in vain that he dreams of a technician who can pulverize the universe: he knows that, in the dust of the spheres, life will continue.� The attack against creation is doomed to failure.� It is impossible to destroy everything, there is always a remainder.� �I cannot succeed in doing so �� the icy and implacable universe suddenly relents at the appalling melancholy by which Sade, in the end and quite unwillingly, always moves us.� �We could perhaps attack the sun, deprive the universe of it, or use it to set fire to the world � those would be real crimes�.� Crimes, yes, but not the definitive crime.� It is necessary to go farther.� The executioners eye each other with suspicion.
�������� They are alone, and one law alone governs them: the law of power.� As they accepted it when they were masters, they cannot reject it if it turns against them.� All power tends to be unique and solitary.� Murder must be repeated: in their turn the masters will tear one another to pieces.� Sade accepts this consequence and does not flinch.� A curious kind of stoicism, derived from vice, sheds a little light in the dark places of his rebellious soul.� He will not try to live again in the world of affection and compromise.� The drawbridge will not be lowered; he will accept personal annihilation.� The unbridled force of his refusal achieves, at its climax, an unconditional acceptance that is not without nobility.� The master consents to be the slave in his turn and even, perhaps, wishes to be.� �The scaffold would be for me the throne of voluptuousness.�
�������� Thus the greatest degree of destruction coincides with the greatest degree of affirmation.� The masters throw themselves on one another, and Sade�s work, dedicated to the glory of libertinism, ends by being �strewn with corpses of libertines struck down at the height of their powers.� [Maurice Blanchot: Lautr�amont et Sade.] ��The most powerful, the one who will survive is the solitary, the Unique, whose glorification Sade has undertaken � in other words, himself.� At last he reigns supreme, master and God.� But at the moment of his greatest victory the dream vanishes.� The Unique turns back toward the prisoner whose unbounded imagination gave birth to him, and they become one.� He is in fact alone, imprisoned in a bloodstained Bastille, entirely constructed around a still unsatisfied, and henceforth undirected, desire for pleasure.� He has only triumphed in a dream and those ten volumes crammed with philosophy and atrocities recapitulate an unhappy form of asceticism, an illusory advance from the total no to the absolute yes, an acquiescence in death at last, which transfigures the assassination of everything and everyone into a collective suicide.
�������� Sade was executed in effigy; he, too, only killed in his imagination.� Prometheus ends in Onan.� Sade is still a prisoner when he dies, but this time in a lunatic asylum, acting plays on an improvised stage with other lunatics.� A derisory equivalent of the satisfaction that the order of the world failed to give him was provided for him by dreams and by creative activity.� The writer, of course, has no need to refuse him anything.� For him, at least, boundaries disappear and desire can be allowed free rein.� In this respect Sade is the perfect man of letters.� He created a fable in order to give himself the illusion of existing.� He put �the moral crime that one commits by writing� above everything else.� His merit, which is incontestable, lies in having immediately demonstrated, with the unhappy perspicacity of accumulated rage, the extreme consequences of rebellious logic � at least when it forgets the truth to be found in its origins.� These consequences are a complete totalitarianism, universal crime, an aristocracy of cynicism, and the desire for an apocalypse.� They will be found again many years after his death.� But having tasted them, he was caught, it seems, on the thorns of his own dilemma and could only escape the dilemma in literature.� Strangely enough, it is Sade who sets rebellion on the path of literature down which it will be led still farther by the romantics.� He himself is one of those writers of whom he says: �their corruption is so dangerous, so active, that they have no other aim in printing their monstrous works than to extend beyond their own lives the sum total of their crimes; they can commit no more, but their accursed writings will lead others to do so, and this comforting thought which they carry with them to the tomb consoles them for the obligation that death imposes on them of renouncing this life.�� Thus his rebellious writings bear witness to his desire for survival.� Even if the immortality he longs for is the immortality of Cain, at least he longs for it, and despite himself bears witness to what is most true in metaphysical rebellion.
�������� Moreover, even his followers compel us to do him homage.� His heirs are not all writers.� Of course, there is justification for saying that he suffered and died to stimulate the imagination of the intelligentsia in literary caf�s.� But that is not all.� Sade�s success in our day is explained by the dream that he had in common with contemporary thought: the demand for total freedom, and dehumanization coldly planned by the intelligence.� The reduction of man to an object of experiment, the rule that specifies the relation between the will to power and man as an object, the sealed laboratory that is the scene of this monstrous experiment, are lessons which the theoreticians of power will discover again when they come to organizing the age of slavery.
�������� Two centuries ahead of time and on a reduced scale, Sade extolled totalitarian societies in the name of unbridled freedom � which, in reality, rebellion does not demand.� The history and the tragedy of our times really begin with him.� He only believed that a society founded on freedom of crime must coincide with freedom of morals, as though servitude has its limits.� Our times have limited themselves to blending, in a curious manner, his dream of a universal republic and his technique of degradation.� Finally, what he hated most, legal murder, has availed itself of the discoveries that he wanted to put to the service of instinctive murder.� Crime, which he wanted he wanted to be the exotic and delicious fruit of unbridled vice, is no more today than the dismal habit of a police-controlled morality.� Such are the surprises of literature.
�������� The Dandies� Rebellion
�������� Even after Sade�s time, men of letters still continue to dominate the scene. Romanticism, Lucifer-like in its rebellion, is really only useful for adventures of the imagination.� Like Sade, romanticism is separated from earlier forms of rebellion by its preference for evil and the individual.� By putting emphasis on its powers of defiance and refusal, rebellion, at this stage, forgets its positive content. Since God claims all that is good in man, it is necessary to deride what is good and choose what is evil.� Hatred of death and of injustice will lead, therefore, if not to the exercise, at least to the vindication, of evil and murder.
�������� The struggle between
Satan and death in Paradise Lost, the
favourite poem of the romantics, symbolizes this drama; all the more profoundly
in that death (with, of course, sin) is the child of Satan.� In order to combat evil, the rebel renounces
good, because he considers himself innocent, and once again gives birth to
evil.� The romantic hero first of all
brings about the profound and, so to speak, religious blending of good and
evil. [A dominant theme in William Blake, for
example.]� This type of hero is
�fatal� because fate confounds good and evil without man being able to prevent
it.� Fate does not allow judgements of
value.� It replaces them by the statement
that �It is so� � which excuses everything, with the exception of the Creator,
who alone is responsible for this scandalous state of affairs.� The romantic hero is also �fatal� because, to
the extent that he increases in power and genius, the power of evil increases
in him.� Every manifestation of power,
every excess, is thus covered by this �It is so.�� That the artist, particularly the poet,
should be demoniac is a very ancient idea, which is formulated provocatively in
the work of the romantics.� At this
period there is even an imperialism of evil, whose aim is to annex everything,
even the most orthodox geniuses.� �What
made
�������� The romantic hero,
therefore, considers himself compelled to do evil by his nostalgia for an
unrealizable good.� Satan rises against
his Creator because the latter employed force to subjugate him.� �Whom reason hath equal�d,� says
�������������������������� � no longer find in good or evil any pleasure
�������������������������� nor of the sorrow that he causes take the measure.
This defines nihilism and authorizes murder.
�������� Murder, in fact, is on
the way to becoming acceptable.� It is
enough to compare the Lucifer of the painters of the Middle Ages with the Satan
of the romantics.� An adolescent �young,
sad, charming� (Vigny) replaces the horned beast.� �Beautiful, with a beauty unknown on this
earth� (Lermontov), solitary and powerful, unhappy and scornful, he is offhand
even in oppression.� But his excuse is
sorrow.� �Who here,� says
�������� Logically, because this
obstinate persistence in Satanism can only be justified by the endless
affirmation of injustice and, to a certain extent, by its consolidation.� Pain, at this stage, is acceptable only on
condition that it is incurable.� The
rebel chooses the metaphysic of inevitable evil, which is expressed in the
literature of damnation from which we have not yet escaped.� �I was conscious of my power and I was
conscious of my chains� (Petrus Borel).�
But these chains are valuable objects.�
Without them it would be necessary to prove, or to exercise, this power
which, after all, one is not very sure of having.� It is only too easy to end up by becoming a
government employee in
�������� The dandy creates his own unity by �sthetic means.� But it is an �sthetic of singularity and of negation.� �To live and die before a mirror�: that, according to Baudelaire, was the dandy�s slogan.� It is indeed a coherent slogan.� The dandy is, by occupation, always in opposition.� He can only exist by defiance.� Up to now man derived his coherence from his Creator.� But from the moment that he consecrates his rupture with Him, he finds himself delivered over to the fleeting moment, to the passing days, and to wasted sensibility.� Therefore he must take himself in hand.� The dandy rallies his forces and creates a unity for himself by the very violence of his refusal.� Profligate, like all people without a rule of life, he is coherent as an actor.� But an actor implies a public; the dandy can only play a part by setting himself up in opposition.� He can only be sure of his own existence by finding it in the expression of others� faces.� Other people are his mirror.� A mirror that quickly becomes clouded, it is true, since human capacity for attention is limited.� It must be ceaselessly stimulated, spurred on by provocation.� The dandy, therefore, is always compelled to astonish.� Singularity is his vocation, excess his way to perfection.� Perpetually incomplete, always on the fringe of things, he compels others to create him, while denying their values.� He plays at life because he is unable to live it.� He plays at it until he dies, except for the moments when he is alone and without a mirror.� For the dandy, to be alone is not to exist.� The romantics talked so grandly about solitude only because it was their real horror, the one thing they could not bear.� Their rebellion thrusts its roots deep, but from the Abb� Pr�vost�s Cleveland up to the time of the Dadaists � including the frenetics of 1830 and Baudelaire and the decadents of 1880 � more than a century of rebellion was completely glutted by the audacities of �eccentricity�.� If they were all able to talk of unhappiness, it is because they despaired of ever being able to conquer it, except in futile parodies, and because they instinctively felt that it remained their sole excuse and their real claim to nobility.
�������� That is why the heritage
of romanticism was not claimed by Victor Hugo, the epitome of
�������� Romanticism demonstrates, in fact, that rebellion is part and parcel of dandyism: one of its objectives is appearances.� In its conventional forms, dandyism admits a nostalgia for ethics.� It is only honour degraded as a point of honour.� But at the same time it inaugurates an �sthetic of solitary creators, who are obstinate rivals of a God they condemn.� From romanticism onward, the artist�s task will not only be to create a world, or to exalt beauty for its own sake, but also to define an attitude.� Thus the artist becomes a model and offers himself as an example: art is his ethic.� With him begins the age of the directors of conscience.� When the dandies fail to commit suicide or do not go mad, they make a career and pursue prosperity.� Even when, like Vigny, they exclaim that they are going to retire into silence, their silence is piercing.
�������� But at the very heart of romanticism, the sterility of this attitude becomes apparent to a few rebels who provide a transitional type between the eccentrics (or the Incredible) and our revolutionary adventurers.� Between the times of the eighteenth-century, Byron and Shelley are already fighting, though only ostensibly, for freedom.� They also expose themselves, but in another way.� Rebellion gradually leaves the world of appearances for the world of action, where it will completely commit itself.� The French students in 1830 and the Russian Decembrists will then appear as the purest incarnations of a rebellion which is at first solitary and which then tries, through sacrifice, to find the path of solidarity.� But, inversely, the taste for the apocalypse and a life of frenzy will reappear among present-day revolutionaries.� The endless series of treason trials, the terrible game played out between the judge and the accused, the elaborate staging of cross-examinations, sometimes lead us to believe that there is a tragic resemblance to the old subterfuge by which the romantic rebel, in refusing to be what he was, provisionally condemned himself to a make-believe world in the desperate hope of achieving a more profound existence.
The Rejection of Salvation
*
�������� If the romantic rebel extols evil and the individual, this does not mean that he sides with mankind.� Dandyism, of whatever kind, is always dandyism in relation to God.� The individual, insofar as he is a created being, can oppose himself only to the Creator.� He has need of God, when whom he carries on a kind of gloomy flirtation.� Armand Hoog [Les Petits Romantiques] rightly says that, despite its Nietzschean atmosphere, God is not yet dead even in romantic literature.� Damnation, so clamorously demanded, is only a clever trick played on God.� But with Dostoievsky the deception of rebellion goes a step farther.� Ivan Karamazov sides with mankind and stresses human innocence.� He affirms that the death sentence which hangs over them is unjust.� Far from making a plea for evil, his first impulse, at least, is to plead for justice, which he ranks above the divinity.� Thus he does not absolutely deny the existence of God.� He refutes Him in the name of a moral value.� The romantic rebel�s ambition was to talk to God as one equal to another.� Evil was the answer to evil, pride the answer to cruelty.� Vigny�s ideal, for example, is to answer silence with silence.� Obviously, the point is to raise oneself to the level of God, which already is blasphemy.� But there is no thought of disputing the power or position of the deity.� The blasphemy is reverent, since every blasphemy is, ultimately, a participation in holiness.
�������� With Ivan, however, the tone changes.� God, in His turn, is put on trial.� If evil is essential to divine creation, then creation is unacceptable.� Ivan will no longer have recourse to this mysterious God, but to a higher principle � namely, justice.� He launches the essential undertaking of rebellion, which is that of replacing the reign of grace by the reign of justice.� He simultaneously begins the attack on Christianity.� The romantic rebel broke with God Himself, on the principle of hatred, God, on the principle of love.� Only love can make us consent to the injustice done to Martha, to the exploitation of workers, and, finally, to the death of innocent children.
�������� �If the suffering of children,� says Ivan, �serves to complete the sum of suffering necessary for the acquisition of truth, I affirm from now onward that truth is not worth such a price.�� Ivan rejects the basic interdependence, introduced by Christianity, between suffering and truth.� Ivan�s must profound utterance, the one which opens the deepest chasms beneath the rebel�s feet, is his even if: �I would persist in my indignation even if I were wrong.�� Which means that even if God existed, even if the mystery cloaked a truth, even if the starets Zosime were right, Ivan would not admit that truth should be paid for by evil, suffering, and the death of innocents.� Ivan incarnates the refusal of salvation. Faith leads to immortal life.� But faith presumes the acceptance of the mystery and of evil, and resignation to injustice.� The man who is prevented by the suffering of children from accepting faith will certainly not accept eternal life.� Under these conditions, even if eternal life existed, Ivan would refuse it.� He rejects this bargain.� He would accept grace only unconditionally, and that is why he makes his own conditions.� Rebellion wants all or nothing.� �All the knowledge in the world is not worth a child�s tears.�� Ivan does not say that there is no truth.� He says that if truth does exist, it can only be unacceptable.� Why?� Because it is unjust.� The struggle between truth and justice is begun here for the first time; and it will never end.� Ivan, by nature a solitary and therefore a moralist, will satisfy himself with a kind of metaphysical Don Quixotism.� But a few decades more and an immense political conspiracy will attempt to prove that justice is truth.
�������� In addition, Ivan is the incarnation of the refusal to be the only one saved.� He throws in his lot with the damned and, for their sake, rejects eternity.� If he had faith, he could, in fact, be saved, but others would be damned and suffering would continue.� There is no possible salvation for the man who feels real compassion.� Ivan will continue to put God in the wrong by doubly rejecting faith as he would reject injustice and privilege.� One step more and from All or Nothing we arrive at Everyone or No One.
�������� This extreme determination, and the attitude that it implies, would have sufficed for the romantics.� But Ivan, [It is worth noting that Ivan is, in a certain way, Dostoievsky, who is more at ease in this role than in the role of Aliosha.] even though he also gives way to dandyism, really lives his problems, torn between the negative and the affirmative.� From this moment onward, he accepts the consequences.� If he rejects immortality, what remains for him?� Life in its most elementary form.� When the meaning of life has been suppressed, there still remains life.� �I live,� says Ivan, �in spite of logic.�� And again: �If I no longer had any faith in life, if I doubted a woman I loved, or the universal order of things, if I were persuaded, on the contrary, that everything was only an infernal and accursed chaos � even then I would want to live.�� Ivan will live, then, and will love as well �without knowing why.�� But to live is also to act.� To act in the name of what?� If there is no immortality, then there is neither reward nor punishment.� �I believe that there is no virtue without immortality.�� And also: �I only know that suffering exists, that no one is guilty, that everything is connected, that everything passes away and equals out.�� But if there is no virtue, there is no law: �Everything is permitted.�
�������� With this �everything is permitted� the history of contemporary nihilism really begins.� The romantic rebellion did not go so far.� It limited itself to saying, in short, that everything was not permitted, but that, through insolence, it allowed itself to do what was forbidden.� With the Karamazovs, on the contrary, the logic of indignation turned rebellion against itself and confronted it with a desperate contradiction.� The essential difference is that the romantics allowed themselves moments of complacence, while Ivan compelled himself to do evil so as to be coherent.� He would not allow himself to be good.� Nihilism is not only despair and negation, but, above all, the desire to despair and to negate.� The same man who so violently took the part of innocence, who trembled at the suffering of a child, who wanted to see �with his own eyes� the lamb lie down with the lion, the victim embrace his murderer, from the moment that he rejects divine coherence and tries to discover his own rule of life, recognizes the legitimacy of murder.� Ivan rebels against a murderous God; but from the moment that he begins to rationalize his rebellion, he deduces the law of murder.� If all is permitted, he can kill his father or at least allow him to be killed.� Long reflection on the condition of mankind as people sentenced to death only leads to the justification of crime.� Ivan simultaneously hates the death penalty (describing an execution, he says furiously: �His head fell, in the name of divine grace�) and condones crime, in principle.� Every indulgence is allowed the murderer, none is allowed the executioner.� This contradiction, which Sade swallowed with ease, chokes Ivan Karamazov.
�������� He pretends to reason, in fact, as though immortality did not exist, while he only goes so far as to say that he would refuse it even if it did exist.� In order to protest against evil and death, he deliberately chooses to say that virtue exists no more than does immortality and to allow his father to be killed.� He consciously accepts his dilemma; to be virtuous and illogical, or logical and criminal.� His prototype, the devil, is right when he whispers: �You are going to commit a virtuous act and yet you do not believe in virtue; that is what angers and torments you.�� The question that Ivan finally poses, the question that constitutes the real progress achieved by Dostoievsky in the history of rebellion, is the only one in which we are interested here: can one live and stand one�s ground in a state of rebellion?
�������� Ivan allows us to guess his answer: one can live in a state of rebellion only by pursuing it to the bitter end.� What is the bitter end of metaphysical rebellion?� Metaphysical revolution.� The master of the world, after his legitimacy has been contested, must be overthrown.� Man must occupy his place.� �As God and immortality do not exist, the new man is permitted to become God.�� But what does becoming God mean?� It means, in fact, recognizing that everything is permitted and� refusing to recognize any other law but one�s own.� Without it being necessary to develop the intervening arguments, we can see that to become God is to accept crime (a favourite ideal of Dostoievsky�s intellectuals).� Ivan�s personal problem is, then, to know if he will be faithful to his logic and if, on the grounds of an indignant protest against innocent suffering, he will accept the murder of his father and the indifference of a man-god.� We know his solution: Ivan allows his father to be killed.� Too profound to be satisfied with appearances, to sensitive to perform the deed himself, he is content to allow it to be done.� But he goes mad.� The man who could not understand how one could love one�s neighbour cannot understand either how one can kill him.� Caught between unjustifiable virtue and unacceptable crime, consumed with pity and incapable of love, a recluse deprived of the benefits of cynicism, this man of supreme intelligence is killed by contradiction.� �My mind is of this world,� he said; �what good is it to try to understand what is not of this world?�� But he lived only for what is not of this world, and his proud search for the absolute is precisely what removed him from the world of which he loved no part.
�������� The fact that Ivan was defeated does not obviate the fact that once the problem is posed, the consequence must follow: rebellion is henceforth on the march toward action.� This has already been demonstrated by Dostoievsky, with prophetic intensity, in his legend of the Grand Inquisitor.� Ivan, finally, does not distinguish the creator from his creation.� �It is not God whom I reject,� he says, �it is creation.�� In other words, it is God the father, indistinguishable from what He has created. [Ivan allows his father to be killed and thus chooses a direct attack against nature and procreation.� Moreover, this particular father is infamous.� The repugnant figure of old Karamazov is continually coming between Ivan and the God of Aliosha.]� His plot to usurp the throne, therefore, remains completely moral.� He does not want to reform anything in creation.� But creation being what it is, he claims the right to free himself morally and to free all the rest of mankind with him.� On the other hand, from the moment when the spirit of rebellion, having accepted the concept of �everything is permitted� and �everyone or no one,� aims at reconstructing creation in order to assert the sovereignty and divinity of man, and from the moment when metaphysical rebellion extends itself from ethics to politics, a new understanding, of incalculable import, begins, which also springs, we must note, from the same nihilism.� Dostoievsky, the prophet of the new religion, had foreseen and announced it: �If Aliosha had come to the conclusion that neither God nor immortality existed, he would immediately have become an atheist and a socialist.� For socialism is not only a question of the working classes; it is above all, in its contemporary incarnation, a question of atheism, a question of the tower of Babel, which is constructed without God�s help, not to reach to the heavens, but to bring the heavens down to earth.� [These questions (God and immortality) are the same questions that socialism poses, but seen from another angle.]
�������� After that, Aliosha can, in fact, treat Ivan with compassion as a �real simpleton.�� The latter only made an attempt at self-control and failed.� Others will appear, with more serious intentions, who, on the basis of the same despairing nihilism, will insist on ruling the world.� These are the Grand Inquisitors whom imprison Christ and come to tell Him that His method is not correct, that universal happiness cannot be achieved by the immediate freedom of choosing between good and evil, but by the domination and unification of the world.� The first step is to conquer and rule.� The kingdom of heaven will, in fact, appear on earth, but it will be ruled over by men � a mere handful to begin with, who will be the C�sars, because they were the first to understand � and later, with time, by all men.� The unity of all creation will be achieved by every possible means, since everything is permitted.� The Grand Inquisitor is old and tired, for the knowledge he possesses is bitter.� He knows that men are lazy rather than cowardly and that they prefer peace and death to the liberty of discerning between good and evil.� He has pity, a cold pity, for the silent prisoner whom history endlessly deceives.� He urges him to speak, to recognize his misdeeds, and, in one sense, to approve the actions of the Inquisitors and of the C�sars.� But the prisoner does not speak.� The enterprise will continue, therefore, without him; he will be killed.� Legitimacy will come at the end of time, when the kingdom of men is assured.� �The affair as only just begun, it is far from being terminated, and the world has many other things to suffer, but we shall achieve our aim, we shall be C�sar, and then we shall begin to think about universal happiness.�
�������� By then the prisoner has
been executed; the Grand Inquisitors reign alone, listening to �the profound
spirit, the spirit of destruction and death.��
The Grand Inquisitors proudly refuse freedom and the bread of heaven and
offer the bread of this earth without freedom.�
�Come down from the cross and we will believe in you,� their police
agents are already crying in
�������� But we have not yet reached that point.� For the moment, Ivan offers us only the tortured face of the rebel plunged in the abyss, incapable of action, torn between the idea of his own innocence and the desire to kill.� He hates the death penalty because it is the image of the human condition, and, at the same time, he is drawn to crime.� Because he has taken the side of mankind, solitude is his lot.� With him the rebellion of reason culminates in madness.
Absolute Affirmation
*
�������� From the moment that man submits God to moral judgement, he kills Him in his own heart.� And then what is the basis of morality?� God is denied in the name of justice, but can the idea of justice be understood without the idea of God?� At this point are we not in the realm of absurdity?� Absurdity is the concept that Nietzsche meets face to face.� In order to be able to dismiss it, he pushes it to extremes: morality is the ultimate aspect of God, which must be destroyed before reconstruction can begin.� Then God no longer exists and is no longer responsible for our existence; man must resolve to act, in order to exist.
�������� The Unique
�������� Even before Nietzsche, Stirner wanted to eradicate the very idea of God from man�s mind, after he had destroyed God Himself.� But, unlike Nietzsche, his nihilism was gratified.� Stirner laughs in his blind alley; Nietzsche beats his head against the wall.� In 1845 the year when Der Einziger und sein Eigentum (The Unique and its Characteristics) appeared, Stirner begins to define his position.� Stirner, who frequented the �Society of Free Men� with the young Hegelians of the left (of whom Marx was one), had an account to settle not only with God, but also with Feuerbach�s Man, Hegel�s Spirit, and its historical incarnation, the State.� All these idols, to his mind, were offsprings of the same �mongolism� � the belief in the eternity of ideas. Thus he was able to write: �I have constructed my case on nothing.�� Sin is, of course, a �mongol scourge,� but it is also the law of which we are prisoners.� God is the enemy; Stirner goes as far as he can in blasphemy (�digest the Host and you are rid of it�).� But God is only one of the aberrations of the I, or more precisely of what I am.� Socrates, Jesus, Descartes, Hegel, all the prophets and philosophers, have done nothing but invent new methods of deranging what I am, the I that Stirner is so intent on distinguishing from the absolute I of Fichte by reducing it to its most specific and transitory aspect.� �It has no name,� it is the Unique.
�������� For Stirner the history of the universe up to the time of Jesus is nothing but a sustained effort to idealize reality.� This effort is incarnated in the ideas and rites of purification which the ancients employed.� From the time of Jesus, the goal is reached, and another effort is embarked upon which consists, on the contrary, in attempting to realize the ideal.� The passion of the incarnation takes the place of purification and devastates the world, to a greater and greater degree, as socialism, the heir of Christ, extends its sway.� But the history of the universe is nothing but a continual offence to the unique principle that �I am� � a living, concrete principle, a triumphant principle that the world has always wanted to subject to the yoke of successive abstractions � God, the State, society, humanity.� For Stirner, philanthropy is a hoax.� Atheistic philosophies, which culminate in the cult of the State and of Man, are only �theological insurrections.�� �Our atheists,� says Stirner, �are really pious folk.�� There is only one religion that exists throughout all history, the belief in eternity.� This belief is a deception.� The only truth is the Unique, the enemy of eternity and of everything, in fact, which does not further its desire for domination.
�������� With Stirner, the concept of negation which inspires his rebellion irresistibly submerges every aspect of affirmation.� It also sweeps away the substitutes for divinity with which the moral conscience is encumbered.� �External eternity is swept away,� he says, �but internal eternity has become the new heaven.�� Even revolution, revolution in particular, is repugnant to this rebel.� To be a revolutionary, one must continue to believe in something, even where there is nothing in which to believe.� �The [French] Revolution ended in reaction and that demonstrates what the Revolution was in reality.�� To dedicate oneself to humanity is no more worthwhile than serving God.� Moreover, fraternity is only �Communism in its Sunday best.�� During the week, the members of the fraternity become slaves.� Therefore there is only one form of freedom for Stirner, �my power,� and only one truth, �the magnificent egotism of the stars.�
�������� In this desert everything begins to flower again.� �The terrifying significance of an unpremeditated cry of joy cannot be understood while the long night of faith and reason endures.�� This night is drawing to a close, and a dawn will break which is not the dawn of revolution but of insurrection.� Insurrection is, in itself, an asceticism which rejects all forms of consolation.� The insurgent will not be in agreement with other men except insofar as, and as long as, their egotism coincides with his.� His real life is led in solitude where he will assuage, without restraint, his appetite for existing, which is his only reason for existence.
�������� In this respect individualism reaches a climax.� It is the negation of everything that denies the individual and the glorification of everything that exalts and ministers to the individual.� What, according to Stirner, is good?� �Everything of which I can make use.�� What am I, legitimately, authorized to do?� �Everything of which I am capable.�� Once again, rebellion leads to the justification of crime.� Stirner not only has attempted to justify crime (in this respect the terrorist forms of anarchy are directly descended from him), but is visibly intoxicated by the perspectives that he thus reveals.� �To break with what is sacred, or rather to destroy the sacred, could become universal.� It is not a new revolution that is approaching � but is not a powerful, proud, disrespectful, shameless, conscienceless crime swelling like a thundercloud on the horizon, and can you not see that the sky, heavy with foreboding, is growing dark and silent?�� Here we can feel the sombre joy of those who create an apocalypse in a garret.� This bitter and imperious logic can no longer be held in check, except by an I which is determined to defeat every form of abstraction and which has itself become abstract and nameless through being isolated and cut off from its roots.� There are no more crimes and no more imperfections, and therefore no more sinners.� We are all perfect.� Since every I is, in itself, fundamentally criminal in its attitude toward the State and the people, we must recognize that to live is to transgress.� Unless we accept death, we must be willing to kill in order to be unique.� �You are not as noble as a criminal, you who do not create anything.�� Moreover Stirner, still without the courage of his convictions, specifies: �Kill them, do not martyr them.�
�������� But to decree that murder is legitimate is to decree mobilization and war for all the Unique.� Thus murder will coincide with a kind of collective suicide.� Stirner, who either does not admit or does not see this, nevertheless does not recoil at the idea of any form of destruction.� The spirit of rebellion finally discovers one of its bitterest satisfactions in chaos.� �You [the German nation] will be struck down.� Soon your sister nations will follow you; when all of them have gone your way, humanity will be buried, and on its tomb I, sole master of myself at last, I, heir to all the human race, will shout with laughter.�� And so, among the ruins of the world, the desolate laughter of the individual-king illustrates the last victory of the spirit of rebellion.� But at this extremity nothing else is possible but death or resurrection.� Stirner, and with him all the nihilist rebels, rush to the utmost limits, drunk with destruction.� After which, when the desert has been disclosed, the next step is to learn how to live there.� Nietzsche�s exhaustive search then begins.
�������� Nietzsche and Nihilism
�������� �We deny God, we deny the responsibility of God, it is only thus that we will deliver the world.�� With Nietzsche, nihilism seems to become prophetic.� But we can draw no conclusions from Nietzsche except the base and mediocre cruelty that he hated with all his strength, unless we give first place in his work � well ahead of the prophet � to the diagnostician.� The provisional, methodical � in a word, strategic � character of his thought cannot be doubted for a moment.� With him nihilism becomes conscious for the first time.� Surgeons have this in common with prophets: they think and operate in terms of the future.� Nietzsche never thought except in terms of an apocalypse to come, not only in order to extol it, for he guessed the sordid and calculating aspect that this apocalypse would finally assume, but in order to avoid it and to transform it into a renaissance.� He recognized nihilism for what it was and examined it like a clinical fact.
�������� He said of himself that
he was the first complete nihilist of
�������� Instead of methodical doubt, he practiced methodical negation, the determined destruction of everything that still hides nihilism from itself, of the idols that camouflage God�s death.� �To raise a new sanctuary, a sanctuary must be destroyed, that is the law.�� According to Nietzsche, he who wants to be a creator of good or of evil must first of all destroy all values.� �Thus the supreme evil becomes part of the supreme good, but the supreme good is creative.�� He wrote, in his own manner, the Discourse de la M�thode of his period, without the freedom and exactitude of the seventeenth-century French he admired so much, but with the mad lucidity that characterizes the twentieth century, which, according to him, is the century of genius.� We must return to the examination of this system of rebellion. [We are obviously concerned here with Nietzsche�s final philosophic position, between 1880 and his collapse.� This chapter can be considered as a commentary of Der Wille zur Macht (The Will to Power).]
�������� Nietzsche�s first step is to accept what he knows.� Atheism for him goes without saying and is �constructive and radical.�� Nietzsche�s supreme vocation, so he says, is to provoke a kind of crisis and a final decision about the problem of atheism.� The world continues on its course at random and there is nothing final about it.� Thus God is useless, since He wants nothing in particular.� If He wanted something � and here we recognize the traditional formulation of the problem of evil � He would have to assume the responsibility for �a sum total of pain and inconsistency which would debase the entire value of being born.�� We know that Nietzsche was publicly envious of Stendhal�s epigram: �The only excuse for God is that he does not exist.�� Deprived of the divine will, the world is equally deprived of unity of finality.� That is why it is impossible to pass judgement on the world.� Any attempt to apply a standard of values to the world leads finally to a slander of life.� Judgements are based on what is, with reference to what should be � the kingdom of heaven, eternal concepts, or moral imperatives.� But what should be does not exist; and this world cannot be judged in the name of nothing.� �The advantages of our times: nothing is true, everything is permitted.�� These magnificent or ironic formulas which are echoed by thousands of others, at least suffice to demonstrate that Nietzsche accepts the entire burden of nihilism and rebellion.� In his somewhat puerile reflections on �training and selection� he even formulated the extreme logic of nihilistic reasoning: �Problem: by what means could we obtain a strict form of complete and contagious nihilism which would teach and practise, with complete scientific awareness, voluntary death?�
�������� But Nietzsche enlists values in the cause of nihilism which, traditionally, have been considered as restraints on nihilism � principally morality.� Moral conduct, as exemplified by Socrates, or as recommended by Christianity, is in itself a sign of decadence.� It wants to substitute the mere shadow of a man for a man of flesh and blood.� It condemns the universe of passion and emotion in the name of an entirely imaginary world of harmony.� If nihilism is the inability to believe, then its most serious symptom is not found in atheism, but in the inability to believe in what is, to see what is happening, and to live life as it is offered.� This infirmity is at the root of all idealism.� Morality has no faith in the world.� For Nietzsche, real morality cannot be separated from lucidity.� He is severe on the �calumniators of the world� because he discerns in the calumny a shameful taste for evasion.� Traditional morality, for him, is only a special type of immorality.� �It is virtue,� he says, �which has need of justification.�� And again: �It is for moral reasons that good, one day, will cease to be done.�
�������� Nietzsche�s philosophy, undoubtedly, revolves around the problem of rebellion.� More precisely, it begins by being a rebellion.� But we sense the change of position that Nietzsche makes.� With him, rebellion begins with �God is dead,� which is assumed as an established fact; then it turns against everything that aims at falsely replacing the vanished deity and reflects dishonour on a world which doubtless has no direction but which remains nevertheless the only proving-ground of the gods.� Contrary to the opinion of certain of his Christian critics, Nietzsche did not form a project to kill God.� He found Him dead in the soul of his contemporaries.� He was the first to understand the immense importance of the event and to decide that this rebellion on the part of men could not lead to a renaissance unless it was controlled and directed.� Any other attitude toward it, whether regret or complacency, must lead to the apocalypse.� Thus Nietzsche did not formulate a philosophy of rebellion, but constructed a philosophy on rebellion.
�������� If he attacks Christianity in particular, it is only insofar as it represents morality.� He always leaves intact the person of Jesus on the one hand, and on the other the cynical aspects of the Church.� We know that, from the point of view of the connoisseur, he admired the Jesuits.� �Basically,� he writes, �only the God of morality is rejected.�� Christ, for Nietzsche as for Tolstoy, is not a rebel.� The essence of His doctrine is summed up in total consent and in non-resistance to evil.� Thou shalt not kill, even to prevent killing.� The world must be accepted as it is, nothing must be added to its unhappiness, but you must consent to suffer personally from the evil it contains.� The kingdom of heaven is within our immediate reach.� It is only an inner inclination which allows us to make our actions coincide with these principles and which can give us immediate salvation.� Not faith but deeds � that, according to Nietzche, is Christ�s message.� From then on, the history of Christianity is nothing but a long betrayal of this message.� The New Testament is already corrupted, and from the time of Paul to the Councils, subservience to faith leads to the neglect of deeds.
�������� What is the profoundly corrupt addition made by Christianity to the message of its Master?� The idea of judgement, completely foreign to the teachings of Christ, and the correlative notions of punishment and reward.� From that moment nature becomes history, and significant history expressed by the idea of human totality is born.� From the Annunciation until the Last Judgement, humanity has no other task but to conform to the strictly moral ends of a narrative that has already been written.� The only difference is that the characters, in the epilogue, separate themselves into the good and the bad.� While Christ�s sole judgement consists in saying that the sins of nature are unimportant, historical Christianity makes nature the source of sin.� �What does Christ deny?� Everything that at present bears the name of Christian.�� Christianity believes that it is fighting against nihilism because it gives the world a sense of direction, while it is really nihilist itself insofar as, by imposing an imaginary meaning on life, it prevents the discovery of its real meaning: �Every Church is a stone rolled onto the tomb of the man-god; it tries to prevent the resurrection, by force.�� Nietzsche�s paradoxical but significant conclusion is that God has been killed by Christianity, in that Christianity has secularized the sacred.� Here we must understand historical Christianity and �its profound and contemptible duplicity.�
�������� The same process of reasoning leads to Nietzsche�s attitude toward socialism and all forms of humanitarianism.� Socialism is only a degenerate form of Christianity.� In fact, it preserves a belief in the finality of history which betrays life and nature, which substitutes ideal ends for real ends, and contributes to enervating both the will and the imagination.� Socialism is nihilistic, in the henceforth precise sense that Nietzsche confers on the word.� A nihilist is not one who believes in nothing, but one who does not believe in what exists.� In this sense, all forms of socialism are manifestations, degraded once again, of Christian decadence.� For Christianity, reward and punishment implied the existence of humanity.� But, by inescapable logic, all history ends by implying punishment and reward; and, from this day on, collectivist Messianism is born.� Similarly, the equality of souls before God leads, now that God is dead, to equality pure and simple.� There again, Nietzsche wages war against socialist doctrines insofar as they are moral doctrines.� Nihilism, whether manifested in religion or in socialist preachings, is the logical conclusion of our so-called superior values.� The free mind will destroy these values and denounce the illusions on which they are built, the bargaining that they imply, and the crime they commit in preventing the lucid intelligence from accomplishing its mission: to transform passive nihilism into active nihilism.
��������
�������� In this world rid of God and of moral idols, man is now alone and without a master.� No one has been less inclined than Nietzsche (and in this way he distinguishes himself from the romantics) to let it be believed that such freedom would be easy.� This complete liberation put him among the ranks of those of whom he himself said that they suffered a new form of anguish and a new form of happiness.� But, at the beginning, it is only anguish that makes him cry out: �Alas, grant me madness�. Unless I am above the law, I am the most outcast of all outcasts.�� He who cannot maintain his position above the law must in fact find another law or take refuge in madness.� From the moment that man believes neither in God nor in immortal life, he becomes �responsible for everything alive, for everything that, born of suffering, is condemned to suffer from life.�� It is he, and he alone, who must discover law and order.� Then the time of exile begins, the endless search for justification, the aimless nostalgia, �the most painful, the most heartbreaking question, that of the heart which asks itself: where can I feel at home?�
�������� Because his mind was free, Nietzsche knew that freedom of the mind is not a comfort, but an achievement to which one aspires and at long last obtains after an exhausting struggle.� He knew that in wanting to consider oneself above the law, there is a great risk of finding oneself beneath the law.� That is why he understood that only the mind found its real emancipation in the acceptance of new obligations.� The essence of his discovery consists in saying that if the eternal law is not freedom, the absence of law is still less so.� If nothing is true, if the world is without order, then nothing is forbidden; to prohibit an action, there must, in fact, be a standard of values and an aim.� But, at the same time, nothing is authorized; there must also be values and aims in order to choose another course of action.� Absolute domination by the law does not represent liberty, but no more does absolute anarchy.� The sum total of every possibility does not amount to liberty, but to attempt the impossible amounts to slavery.� Chaos is also a form of servitude.� Freedom exists only in a world where what is possible is defined at the same time as what is not possible.� Without law there is no freedom.� If fate is not guided by superior values, if chance is king, then there is nothing but the step in the dark and the appalling freedom of the blind.� On the point of achieving the most complete liberation, Nietzsche therefore chooses the most complete subordination.� �If we do not make of God�s death a great renunciation and a perpetual victory over ourselves, we shall have to pay for that omission.�� In other words, with Nietzsche, rebellion ends in asceticism.� A profounder logic replaces the �if nothing is true, everything is permitted� of Karamazov by �if nothing is true, nothing is permitted.�� To deny that one single thing is forbidden in this world amounts to renouncing everything that is permitted.� At the point where it is no longer possible to say what is black and what is white, the light is extinguished and freedom becomes a voluntary prison.
�������� It can be said that Nietzsche, with a kind of frightful joy, rushes toward the impasse into which he methodically drives his nihilism.� His avowed aim is to render the situation untenable to his contemporaries.� His only hope seems to be to arrive at the extremity of contradiction.� Then if man does not wish to perish in the coils that strangle him, he will have to cut them at a single blow and create his own values.� The death of God accomplishes nothing and can only be endured in terms of preparing a resurrection.� �If we fail to find grandeur in God,� says Nietzsche, �we find it nowhere; it must be denied or created.�� To deny it was the task of the world around him, which he saw rushing toward suicide.� To create was the superhuman task for which he was willing to die.� He knew in fact that creation is only possible in the extremity of solitude and that man would only commit himself to this staggering task if, in the most extreme distress of mind, he was compelled to undertake it or perish.� Nietzsche cries out to man that the only truth is the world, to which he must be faithful and in which he must live and find his salvation.� But at the same time he teaches him that to live in a lawless world is impossible because to live explicitly implies a law.� How can one live freely and without law?� To this enigma man must find an answer, on pain of death.
�������� Nietzsche at least does
not flinch.� He answers and his answer is
bold: Damocles never danced better than beneath the sword.� One must accept the unacceptable and hold to
the untenable.� From the moment that it
is admitted that the world pursues no end, Nietzsche proposes to concede its
innocence, to affirm that it accepts no judgement since it cannot be judged on
any intention, and consequently to replace all judgements based on values by
absolute assent, and by a complete and exalted allegiance to this world.� Thus from absolute despair will spring infinite
joy, from blind servitude, unbounded freedom.�
To be free is, precisely, to abolish ends.� The innocence of the ceaseless change of
things, as soon as one consents to it, represents the maximum liberty.� The free mind willingly accepts what is
necessary.� Nietzsche�s most profound
concept is that the necessity of phenomena, if it is absolute, without rifts,
does not imply any kind of restraint.�
Total acceptance of total necessity is his paradoxical definition of
freedom.� The question �free of what?� is
thus replaced by �free for what?��
�������� This magnificent consent, born of abundance and fullness of spirit, is the unreserved affirmation of human imperfection and suffering, of evil and murder, of all that is problematic and strange in our existence.� It is born of an arrested wish to be what one is in a world that is what it is.� �To consider oneself a fatality, not to wish to be other than one is �� Nietzschean asceticism, which begins with the recognition of fatality, ends in a deification of fate.� The more implacable destiny is, the more it becomes worthy of adoration.� A moral God, pity, and love are enemies of fate to the extent that they try to counter-balance it.� Nietzsche wants no redemption.� The joy of self-realization is the joy of annihilation.� But only the individual is annihilated.� The movement of rebellion, by which man demanded his own existence, disappears in the individual�s absolute submission to the inevitable.� Amor fati replaces what was an odium fati.� �Every individual collaborates with the entire cosmos, whether we know it or not, whether we want it or not.�� The individual is lost in the destiny of the species and the eternal movement of the spheres.� �Everything that has existed is eternal, the sea throws it back on the shore.�
�������� Nietzsche then turns to the origins of thought � to the pre-Socratics.� These philosophers suppressed ultimate causes so as to leave intact the eternal values of the principles they upheld.� Only power without purpose, only Heraclitus� �chance,� is eternal.� Nietzsche�s whole effort is directed toward demonstrating the existence of the law that governs the eternal flux and of the element of chance in the inevitable: �A child is innocence and forgetfulness, a new beginning, a gamble, a wheel that spins automatically, a first step, the divine gift of being able to consent.�� The world is divine because the world is inconsequential.� That is why art alone, by being equally inconsequential, is capable of grasping it.� It is impossible to give a clear account of the world, but art can teach us to reproduce it � just as the world reproduces itself in the course of its eternal gyrations.� The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same seashore.� But at least he who consents to his own return and to the return of all things, who becomes an echo and an exalted echo, participates in the divinity of the world.
�������� By this subterfuge, the
divinity of man is finally introduced.�
The rebel, who at first denies God, finally aspires to replace Him.� But Nietzsche�s message is that the rebel can
only become God by renouncing every form of rebellion, even the type of
rebellion that produces gods to chastise humanity.� �If there is a God, how can one tolerate not
being God oneself?�� There is, in fact, a
god � namely, the world.� To participate
in its divinity, all that is necessary is to consent.� �No longer to pray, but to give one�s
blessing,� and the earth will abound in men-gods.� To say yes to the world, to reproduce it, is
simultaneously to re-create the world and oneself, to become the great artist,
the creator.� Nietzsche�s message is
summed up in the word creation, with
the ambiguous meaning it has assumed.�
Nietzsche�s sole admiration was for the egotism and severity proper to
all creators.� The transmutation of
values consists only in replacing critical values by creative values; by
respect and admiration for what exists.�
Divinity without immortality defines the extent of the creator�s
freedom.� Dionysos, the earth-god,
shrieks eternally as he is torn limb from limb.�
But at the same time he represents the agonized beauty that coincides
with suffering.� Nietzsche thought that
to accept this earth and Dionysos was to accept his own sufferings.� And to accept everything, both suffering and
the supreme contradiction simultaneously, was to be king of all creation.� Nietzsche agreed to pay the price for his kingdom.� Only the �sad and suffering� world is true �
the world is the only divinity.� Like
Empedocles, who threw himself into the crater of
�������� In a certain sense, rebellion, with Nietzsche, ends again in the exaltation of evil.� The difference is that evil is no longer a revenge.� It is accepted as one of the possible aspects of good and, with rather more conviction, as part of destiny.� Thus he considers it as something to be avoided and also as a sort of remedy.� In Nietzsche�s mind, the only problem was to see that the human spirit bowed proudly to the inevitable.� We know, however, his posterity and what kind of politics were to claim the authorization of the man who claimed to be the last antipolitical German.� He dreamed of tyrants who were artists.� But tyranny comes more naturally than art to mediocre men.� �Rather Cesare Borgia than Parsifal,� he exclaimed.� He begat both C�sar and Borgia, but devoid of the distinction of feeling which he attributed to the great men of the Renaissance.� As a result of his insistence that the individual should bow before the eternity of the species and should submerge himself in the great cycle of time, race has been turned into a special aspect of the species, and the individual has been made to bow before this sordid god.� The life of which he spoke with fear and trembling has been degraded to a sort of biology for domestic use.� Finally, a race of vulgar overlords, with a blundering desire for power, adopted, in his name, the �anti-Semitic deformity� on which he never ceased to pour scorn.
�������� He believed in courage
combined with intelligence, and that was what he called strength.� Courage has been turned in his name against
intelligence, and the virtues that were really his have been transformed into
their opposite: blind violence.� He
confused freedom and solitude, as do all proud spirits.� His �profound solitude at
�������� We must first of all
realize that we can never confuse Nietzsche with
�������� We also remark that it is not in the Nietzschean refusal to worship idols that murder finds its justification, but in the passionate approbation that distinguishes Nietzsche�s work.� To say yes to everything supposes that one says yes to murder.� Moreover, it expresses two ways of consenting to murder.� If the slave says yes to everything, he consents to the existence of a master and to his own sufferings: Jesus teaches non-resistance.� If the master says yes to everything, he consents to slavery and to the suffering of others; and the result is the tyrant and the glorification of murder.� �Is it not laughable that we believe in a sacred, infrangible law � thou shalt not lie, thou shalt not kill � in an existence characterized by perpetual lying and perpetual murder?�� Actually metaphysical rebellion, in its initial stages, was only a protest against the lie and the crime of existence.� The Nietzschean affirmative, forgetful of the original negative, disavows rebellion at the same time that it disavows the ethic that refuses to accept the world as it is.� Nietzsche clamoured for a Roman C�sar with the soul of Christ.� To his mind, this was to say yes to both slave and master.� But, in the last analysis, to say yes to both was to give one�s blessing to the stronger of the two � namely, the master.� C�sar must inevitably renounce the domination of the mind and choose to rule in the realm of fact.� �How can one make the best of crime?� asks Nietzsche, as a good professor faithful to his system.� C�sar must answer: by multiplying it. �When the ends are great,� Nietzsche wrote to his own detriment, �humanity employs other standards and no longer judges crime as such even if it resorts to the most frightful means.�� He died in 1900, at the beginning of the century in which that pretension was to become fatal.� It was in vain that he exclaimed in his hour of lucidity, �It is easy to talk about all sorts of immoral acts; but would one have the courage to carry them through?� For example, I could not bear to break my word or to kill; I should languish, and eventually I should die as a result � that would be my fate.�� From the moment that assent was given to the totality of human experience, the way was open to others who, far from languishing, would gather strength from lies and murder.� Nietzsche�s responsibility lies in having legitimized, for reasons of method � and even if only for an instant � the opportunity for dishonesty of which Dostoievsky had already said that if one offered it to people, one could always be sure of seeing them rushing to seize it.� But his involuntary responsibility goes still farther.
�������� Nietzsche is exactly what he recognized himself as being: the must acute manifestation of nihilism�s conscience.� The decisive step that he compelled rebellion to take consists in making it jump from the negation of the ideal to the secularization of the ideal.� Since the salvation of man is not achieved in God, it must be achieved on earth.� Since the world has no direction, man, from the moment he accepts this, must give it one that will eventually lead to a superior type of humanity.� Nietzsche laid claim to the direction of the future of the human race.� �The task of governing the world is going to fall to our lot.�� And elsewhere: �The time is approaching when we shall have to struggle for the domination of the world, and this struggle will be fought in the name of philosophical principles.�� In these words he announced the twentieth century.� But he was able to announce it because he was warned by the interior logic of nihilism and knew that one of its aims was ascendancy; and thus he prepared the way for this ascendancy.
�������� There is freedom for man
without God, as Nietzsche imagined him; in other words, for the solitary
man.� There is freedom at
�������� Philosophy secularizes the ideal.� But tyrants appear who soon secularize the philosophies that give them the right to do so.� Nietzsche had already predicted this development in discussing Hegel, whose originality, according to him, consisted in inventing a pantheism in which evil, error, and suffering could no longer serve as arguments against the divinity.� �But the State, the powers that be, immediately made use of this grandiose initiative.�� He himself, however, had conceived of a system in which crime could no longer serve as an argument and in which the only value resided in the divinity of man.� This grandiose initiative also had to be put to use.� National Socialism in this respect was only a transitory heir, only the speculative and rabid outcome of nihilism.� In all others respects those who, in correcting Nietzsche with the help of Marx, will choose to assent only to history, and no longer to all of creation, will be perfectly logical.� The rebel whom Nietzsche set on his knees before the cosmos will, from now on, kneel before history.� What is surprising about that?� Nietzsche, at least in his theory of superhumanity, and Marx before him, with his classless society, both replace the Beyond by the Later On.� In that way Nietzsche betrayed the Greeks and the teaching of Jesus, who, according to him, replaced the Beyond by the Immediate.� Marx, like Nietzsche, thought in strategic terms, and like Nietzsche hated formal virtue.� Their two rebellions, both of which finish similarly in adhesion to a certain aspect of reality, end by merging into Marxism-Leninism and being incarnated in that caste, already mentioned by Nietzsche, which would �replace the priest, the teacher, the doctor.�� The fundamental difference is that Nietzsche, in awaiting the superman, proposed to assent to what exists and Marx to what is to come.� For Marx, nature is to be obeyed in order to obey history; for Nietzsche, nature is to be obeyed in order to subjugate history.� It is the difference between the Christian and the Greek.� Nietzsche, at least, foresaw what was going to happen: �What we desire is well-being�. As a result we march toward a spiritual slavery such as has never been seen�. Intellectual C�sarism hovers over every activity of the businessman and the philosopher.�� Placed in the crucible of Nietzschean philosophy, rebellion, in the intoxication of freedom, ends in biological or historical C�sarism.� The absolute negative had driven Stirner to deify crime simultaneously with the individual.� But the absolute affirmative leads to universalizing murder and mankind simultaneously.� Marxism-Leninism has really accepted the burden of Nietzsche�s free will by means of ignoring several Nietzschean virtues.� The great rebel thus creates with his own hands, and for his own imprisonment, the implacable reign of necessity.� Once he had escaped from God�s prison, his first care was to construct the prison of history and of reason, thus putting the finishing touch to the camouflage and consecration of the nihilism whose conquest he claimed.
The Poet�s Rebellion
*
�������� If metaphysical rebellion refuses to assent and restricts itself to absolute negation, it condemns itself to passive acceptance.� If it prostrates itself in adoration of what exists and renounces its right to dispute any part of reality, it is sooner or later compelled to act.� Ivan Karamazov � who represents non-interference, but in a dolorous aspect � stands halfway between the two positions.� Rebel poetry, at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, constantly oscillated between these two extremes: between literature and the will to power, between the irrational and the rational, the desperate dream and ruthless action.� The rebel poets � above all, the surrealists � light the way that leads from passive acceptance to action, along a spectacular short-cut.
��������
�������� Laut�amont and Banality
�������� Laut�amont demonstrates that the rebel dissimulates the desire to accept appearance behind the desire for banality.� In either case, whether he abases or vaunts himself, the rebel wants to be other than he is, even when he is prepared to be recognized for what he really is.� The blasphemies and the conformity of Lautr�amont illustrate this unfortunate contradiction, which is resolved in his case in the desire to be nothing at all.� Far from being a recantation, as is generally supposed, the same passion for annihilation explains Maldoror�s invocation of the primeval night and the laborious banalities of the Po�sies.
�������� Lautr�amont makes us understand that rebellion is adolescent.� Our most effective terrorists, whether they are armed with bombs or with poetry, hardly escape from infancy.� The Songs of Maldoror are the works of a highly talented schoolboy; their pathos lies precisely in the contradictions of a child�s mind ranged against creation and against itself.� Like the Rimbaud of the Illuminations, beating against the confines of the world, the poet chooses the apocalypse and destruction rather than accept the impossible principles that make him what he is in a world such as it is.
�������� �I offer myself to defend mankind,� says Lautr�amont, without wishing to be ingenuous.� Is Maldoror, then, the angel of pity?� In a certain sense he is, in that he pities himself.� Why?� That remains to be seen.� But pity deceived, outraged, inadmissible, and unadmitted will lead him to strange extremities.� Maldoror, in his own words, received life like a wound and forbade suicide to heal the scar (sic).� Like Rimbaud he is the one who suffers and who rebelled; each, being strangely reluctant to say that he is rebelling against what he is, gives the rebel�s eternal alibi: love of mankind.
�������� The man who offers himself to defend mankind at the same time writes: �Show me one man who is good.�� This perpetual vacillation is part of nihilist rebellion.� We rebel against the injustice done to ourselves and to mankind.� But in the moment of lucidity, when we simultaneously perceive the legitimacy of this rebellion and its futility, the frenzy of negation is extended to the very thing that we claimed to be defending.� Not being able to atone for injustice by the elevation of justice, we choose to submerge it in an even greater injustice, which is finally confounded with annihilation.� �The evil you have done me is too great, too great the evil I have done you, for it to be involuntary.�� In order not to be overcome with self-hatred, one�s innocence must be proclaimed, an impossibly bold step for one man alone, for self-knowledge will prevent him.� But at least one can declare that everyone is innocent, though they may be treated as guilty.� God is then the criminal.
�������� From the romantics to
Lautr�amont, there is, therefore, no real progress, except in style.� Lautr�amont resuscitates, once again, with a
few improvements, the figure of the God of Abraham and the image of the Luciferian
rebel.� He places God �on a throne built
of excrement, human and golden,� on which sits, �with imbecile pride, his body
covered with a shroud made of unwashed sheets, he who styles himself the
Creator.�� �The horrible Eternal One with
the features of a viper,� �the crafty bandit� who can be seen �stoking the
fires in which young and old perish,� rolls drunkenly in the gutter, or seeks
base pleasures in the brothel.� God is
not dead, he has fallen.� Face to face with
the fallen deity, Maldoror appears as a conventional cavalier in a black cloak.� He is the Accursed.� �Eyes must not witness the hideous aspect
which the Supreme Being, with a smile of intense hatred, has granted me.�� He has forsworn everything � �father, mother,
�������� At this point mankind is no longer even defended.� On the contrary, �to attack that wild beast, man, with every possible weapon, and to attack the creator �� that is the intention announced by the Songs.� Overwhelmed at the thought of having God as an enemy intoxicated with the solitude experienced by great criminals (�I alone against humanity�), Maldoror goes to war against creation and its author.� The Songs exalt �the sanctity of crime,� announce an increasing series of �glorious crimes,� and stanza 20 of Song II even inaugurates a veritable pedagogy of crime and violence.
�������� Such a burning ardour is, at this period, merely conventional.� It costs nothing.� Lautr�amont�s real originality lies elsewhere. [It accounts for the difference between Song I, published separately, which is Byronic in a rather banal way, and the other Songs, which resound with a monstrous rhetoric.]� The romantics maintained with the greatest care the fatal opposition between human solitude and divine indifference � the literary expressions of this solitude being the isolated castle and the dandy.� It is quite apparent that he found this solitude insupportable and that, ranged against creation, he wished to destroy its limits.� Far from wanting to fortify the reign of humanity with crenelated towers, he wishes to merge it with all other reigns.� He brought back creation to the shores of the primeval seas where morality, as well as every other problem, loses all meaning � including the problem, which he considers so terrifying, of the immortality of the soul.� He had no desire to create a spectacular image of the rebel, or of the dandy, opposed to creation, but to mingle mankind and the world together in the same general destruction.� He attacked the very frontier that separates mankind from the universe.� Total freedom, the freedom of crime in particular, supposes the destruction of human frontiers.� It is not enough to condemn oneself and all mankind to execration.� The reign of mankind must still be brought back to the level of the reign of the instinct.� We find in Lautr�amont this refusal to recognize rational consciousness, this return to the elementary which is one of the marks of a civilization in revolt against itself.� It is no longer a question of recognizing appearances by making a determined and conscious effort, but of no longer existing at all on the conscious level.
�������� All the creatures that appear in the Songs are amphibious, because Maldoror rejects the earth and its limitations.� The flora is composed of algae and seaweed.� Maldoror�s castle is built on the waters.� His native land is the timeless sea.� The sea � a double symbol � is simultaneously the place of annihilation and of reconciliation.� It quenches, in its own way, the thirst of souls condemned to scorn themselves and others, and the thirst for oblivion.� Thus the Songs replace the Metamorphoses, and the timeless smile is replaced by the laughter of a mouth slashed with a razor, by the image of a gnashing, frantic, travesty of humour.� The bestiary cannot contain all the meanings that have been given to it, but undoubtedly it discloses a desire for annihilation which has its origins in the very darkest places of rebellion.� The �stultify yourselves� of Pascal takes on a literal sense with Lautr�amont.� Apparently he could not bear the cold and implacable clarity one must endure in order to live.� �My subjectivity and one creator � that is too much for one brain.�� And so he chose to reduce life, and his work, to the flash of a cuttlefish�s fin in the midst of its cloud of ink.� The beautiful passage where Maldoror couples with a female shark on the high seas �in a long, chaste, and frightful copulation� � above all, the significant passage in which Maldoror, transformed into an octopus, attacks the Creator � are clear expressions of an escape beyond the frontiers of existence and of a convulsive attack on the laws of nature.
�������� Those who see themselves banished from the harmonious fatherland where justice and passion finally strike an even balance still prefer, to solitude, the barren kingdoms where words have no more meaning and where force and the instincts of blind creatures reign.� This challenge is, at the same time, a mortification.� The battle with the angel, in Song II, ends in the defeat and putrefaction of the angel.� Heaven and earth are then brought back and intermingled in the liquid chasms of primordial life.� Thus the man-shark of the Songs �only acquired the new change in the extremities of his arms and legs as an expiatory punishment for some unknown crime.�� There is, in fact, a crime, or the illusion of crime (is it homosexuality?) in Maldoror�s virtually unknown life.� No reader of the Songs can avoid the idea that this book is in need of a Stavrogin�s Confession.
�������� But there is no confession and we find in the Po�sies a redoubling of that mysterious desire for expiation.� The spirit appropriate to certain forms of rebellion which consists, as we shall see, in re-establishing reason at the end of the irrational adventure, of rediscovering order by means of disorder and of voluntarily loading oneself down with chains still heavier than those from which release was sought, is described in this book with such a desire for simplification and with such cynicism that this change of attitude must definitely have a meaning.� The Songs, which exalted absolute negation, are followed by a theory of absolute assent, and uncompromising rebellion is succeeded by complete conformity � all this with total lucidity.� The Po�sies, in fact, give us the best explanation of the Songs.� �Despair, fed by the prejudices of hallucination, imperturbably leads literature to the mass abrogation of laws both social and divine, and to theoretical and practical wickedness.�� The Po�sies also denounce �the culpability of a writer who rolls on the slopes of the void and pours scorn on himself with cries of joy.�� But they prescribe no other remedy for this evil than metaphysical conformity: �Since the poetry of doubt arrives, in this way, at such a point of theoretical wickedness and mournful despair, it is poetry that is radically false; for the simple reason that it discusses principles, and principles should not be discussed� (letter to Darass�).� In short, his reasoning recapitulates the morality of a choirboy or of an infantry manual. But conformity can be passionate, and thereby out of the ordinary.� When the victory of the malevolent eagle over the dragon hope has been proclaimed, Maldoror can still obstinately repeat that the burden of his song is nothing but hope, and can write: �With my voice and with the solemnity of the days of my glory, I recall you, O blessed Hope, to my deserted dwelling� � he must still try to convince.� To console humanity, to treat it as a brother, to return to Confucius, Buddha, Socrates, Jesus Christ, �moralists who wandered through villages, dying of hunger� (which is of doubtful historical accuracy), are still the projects of despair.� Thus virtue and an ordered life have a nostalgic appeal in the midst of vice.� For Lautr�amont refuses to pray, and Christ for him is only a moralist. What he proposes, or rather what he proposes to himself, is agnosticism and the fulfilment of duty.� Such a sound programme, unhappily, supposes surrender, the calm of evening, a heart untouched by bitterness, and untroubled contemplation.� Lautr�amont rebels when he suddenly writes: �I know no other grace but that of being born.�� But one can sense his clenched teeth when he adds: �An impartial mind finds that enough.�� But no mind is impartial when confronted with life and death.� With Laut�amont the rebel flees to the desert.� But this desert of conformity is as dreary as Rimbaud�s Harrar.� The taste for the absolute and the frenzy of annihilation sterilize him again.� Just as Maldoror wanted total rebellion, Lautr�amont, for the same reasons, demands absolute banality.� The exclamation of awareness which he tried to drown in the primeval seas, to confuse with the howl of the beast, which at another moment he tried to smother in the adoration of mathematics, he now wants to stifle by applying a dismal conformity. The rebel now tries to turn a deaf ear to the call that urges him toward the being who lies at the heart of his rebellion.� The important thing is to exist no longer � either by refusing to be anything at all or by accepting to be no matter what.� In either case it is a purely artificial convention.� Banality, too, is an attitude.
�������� Conformity is one of the nihilistic temptations of rebellion which dominate a large part of our intellectual history.� It demonstrates how the rebel who takes to action is tempted to succumb, if he forgets his origins, to the most absolute conformity. And so it explains the twentieth century.� Lautr�amont, who is usually hailed as the bard of pure rebellion, on the contrary proclaims the advent of the taste for intellectual servitude which flourishes in the contemporary world.� The Po�sies are only a preface to a �future work� of which we can only surmise the contents and which was to have been the ideal end-result of literary rebellion.� But this book is being written today, despite Lautr�amont, in millions of copies, by bureaucratic order.� Of course, genius cannot be separated from banality.� But it is not a question of the banality of others � the banality that we vainly try to capture and which itself captures the creative writer, where necessary, with the help of the censors.� For the creative writer it is a question of his own form of banality, which must be completely created.� Every genius is at once extraordinary and banal.� He is nothing if he is only one or the other.� We must remember this when thinking of rebellion.� It has its dandies and its menials, but it does not recognize its legitimate sons.
�������� Surrealism
and Revolution
����������� This is not the place to deal at
length with Rimbaud.� Everything that can
be said about him � and even more, unfortunately � has already been said.� It is worth pointing out, however, for it
concerns our subject, that only in his work was Rimbaud the poet of
rebellion.� His life, far from justifying
the myth it created, only illustrates (an objective perusal of the letters from
Harrar suffices to prove this) the fact that he surrendered to the worst form
of nihilism imaginable.� Rimbaud has been
deified for renouncing his genius, as if his renunciation implied superhuman
virtue.� It must be pointed out, however,
despite the fact that by doing so we disqualify the alibis of our
contemporaries, that genius alone � and not renunciation of genius � implies
virtue.� Rimbaud�s greatness does not lie
in the first poems from Charleville nor in his trading at Harrar.� It shines forth at the moment when, in giving
the most peculiarly appropriate expression to rebellion that it has ever
received, he simultaneously proclaims his triumph and his agony, his conception
of a life beyond the confines of this world and the inescapability of the
world, the yearning for the unattainable and reality brutally determined on
restraint, the rejection of morality and the irresistible compulsion to
duty.� At the moment when he carries in
his breast both illumination and the darkness of hell, when he hails and
insults beauty, and creates, from an insoluble conflict, the intricate
counterpoint of an exquisite song, he is the poet of rebellion � the greatest
of all.� The order in which he wrote his
two great works is of no importance.� In
any case there was very little time between the conception of the two books,
and any artist knows, with the certainty born of experience, that Rimbaud
simultaneously carried the seeds of the Season
in Hell (Une Saison en Enfer) and
the Illuminations within him.� Though he wrote them one after the other,
there is no doubt that he experienced the suffering of both of them at the same
time.� This contradiction, which killed
him, was the real source of his genius.
����������� But where, then, is the virtue of someone who refuses to face the contradiction and betrays his own genius before having drunk it to the last bitter drop?� Rimbaud�s silence is not a new method of rebelling; at least, we can no longer say so after the publication of the Harrar letters.� His metamorphosis is undoubtedly mysterious.� But there is also a mystery attached to the banality achieved by brilliant young girls whom marriage transforms into adding or knitting machines.� The myth woven around Rimbaud supposes and affirms that nothing was possible after the Season in Hell.� But what is impossible for the supremely gifted poet or for the inexhaustibly creative writer?� How can we imagine anything to follow Moby Dick, The Trial, Zarathustra, The Possessed?� Nevertheless, they were followed by great works, which instruct, implement, and bear witness to what is finest in the writer, and which only come to an end at his death.� Who can fail to regret the work that would have been greater than the Season in Hell and of which we have been deprived by Rimbaud�s abdication?
�������� Can
�������� Moreover, Harrar was
actually foretold in his work, but in the form of his final abdication. �And
best of all, a drunken sleep on the beach.��
The fury of annihilation, appropriate to every rebel, then assumes its
most common form.� The apocalypse of
crime � as conceived by Rimbaud in the person of the prince who insatiably
slaughters his subjects � and endless licentiousness are rebellious themes that
will be taken up again by the surrealists.�
But finally, even with Rimbaud, nihilist dejection prevailed; the
struggle, the crime itself, proved too exacting for his exhausted mind.� The seer who drank, if we may venture to say
so, in order not to forget ended by finding in drunkenness the heavy sleep so
well known to our contemporaries.� One
can sleep on the beach, or at
�������� Absolute rebellion, total
insubordination, sabotage on principle, the humour and cult of the absurd �
such is the nature of surrealism, which defines itself, in its primary intent,
as the incessant examination of all values.�
The refusal to draw any conclusions is flat, decisive, and provocative.� �We are specialists in rebellion.�� Surrealism, which, according to
�������� An urgent appeal to absent life is reinforced by a total rejection of the present world, as Breton�s arrogant statement indicates: �Incapable of accepting the fate assigned to me, my highest perceptions outraged by this denial of justice, I refrain from adapting my existence to the ridiculous conditions of existence here below.�� The mind, according to Breton, can find no point of rest either in this life or beyond it.� Surrealism wants to find a solution to this endless anxiety.� It is �a cry of the mind which turns against itself and finally takes the desperate decision to throw off its bonds.�� It protests against death and �the laughable duration� of a precarious condition.� Thus surrealism places itself at the mercy of impatience.� It exists in a condition of wounded frenzy: at once inflexible and self-righteous, with the consequent implication of a moral philosophy.� Surrealism, the gospel of chaos, found itself compelled, from its very inception, to create an order.� But at first it only dreamed of destruction � by poetry, to begin with � on the plane of imprecation, and later by the use of actual weapons.� The trial of the real world has become, by logical development, the trial of creation.
�������� Surrealist irreligion is
methodical and rational.� At first it
established itself on the idea of the absolute non-culpability of man, to whom
one should render �all the power that he has been capable of putting into the
word God.�� As in every history of
rebellion, this idea of absolute non-culpability, springing from despair, was
little by little transformed into a mania for punishment.� The surrealists, while simultaneously
exalting human innocence, believed that they could exalt murder and
suicide.� They spoke of suicide as a
solution and Crevel, who considered this solution �the most probable, just, and
definitive,� killed himself, as did Rigaut and Vach�.� Later
�������� Surrealism did not rest there.� It chose as its hero Violette Nozi�re or the anonymous common-law criminal, affirming in this way, in the face of crime, the innocence of man.� But it was also rash enough to say � and this is the statement that Andr� Breton must have regretted ever since 1933 � that the simplest surrealist act consisted in going out into the street, revolver in hand, and shooting at random into the crowd.� Whoever refuses to recognize any other determining factor apart from the individual and his desires, any priority other than that of the unconscious, actually succeeds in rebelling simultaneously against society and against reason.� The theory of the gratuitous act is the culmination of the demand for absolute freedom.� What does it matter if this freedom ends by being embodied in the solitude defined by Jarry: �When I�ll have collected all the ready cash, in the world, I�ll kill everybody and go away.�� The essential thing is that every obstacle should be denied and that the irrational should be triumphant.� What, in fact, does this apology for murder signify if not that, in a world without meaning and without honour, only the desire for existence, in all its forms, is legitimate?� The instinctive joy of being alive, the stimulus of the unconscious, the cry of the irrational, are the only pure truths that must be professed.� Everything that stands in the way of desire - principally society -� must therefore be mercilessly destroyed.� Now we can understand Andr� Breton�s remark about Sade: �Certainly man no longer consents to unite with nature except in crime; it remains to be seen if this is not one of the wildest, the most incontestable, ways of loving.�� It is easy to see that he is talking of love without an object, which is love as experienced by people who are torn asunder.� But this empty, avid love, this insane desire for possession, is precisely the love that society inevitably thwarts.� That is why Breton, who still bears the stigma of his declaration, was able to sing the praises of treason and declare (as the surrealists have tried to prove) that violence is the only adequate mode of expression.
�������� But society is not only
composed of individuals.� It is also an
institution.� Too well-mannered to kill
everybody, the surrealists, by the very logic of their attitude, came to consider
that, in order to liberate desire, society must first be overthrown.� They chose to serve the revolutionary
movement of their times.� From Walpole
and Sade � with an inevitability that comprises the subject of this book �
surrealists passed on to Helv�tius and Marx.�
But it is obvious that it is not the study of Marxism that led them to
revolution.� [The
Communists who joined the party as a result of having studied Marx can be
counted on the fingers of one hand.� They
are first converted and then they read the Scriptures.]� Quite the contrary: surrealism is involved in
an incessant effort to reconcile, with Marxism, the inevitable conclusions that
led it to revolution.� We can say,
without being paradoxical, that the surrealists arrived at Marxism on account
of what, today, they most detest in Marx.�
Knowing the basis and the nobility of the motives that compelled him,
particularly when one has shared the same lacerating experiences, one hesitates
to remind Andr� Breton that his movement implied the establishment of �ruthless
authority� and of dictatorship, of political fanaticism, the refusal of free
discussion, and the necessity of the death penalty.� The peculiar vocabulary of that period is
also astonishing (�sabotage,� �informer,� etc.) in that it is the vocabulary of
a police-dominated revolution.� But these
fanatics wanted �any sort of revolution,� no matter what as long as it rescued
them from the world of shopkeepers and compromise in which they were forced to
live.� In that they could not have the
best, they still preferred the worst.� In
that respect they were nihilists.� They
were not aware of the fact that those among them who were, in the future, to
remain faithful to Marxism were faithful at the same time to their initial
nihilism.� The real destruction of
language, which the surrealists so obstinately wanted, does not lie in
incoherence or automatism.� It lies in
the word order.� It was pointless for
�������� Certainly, the surrealists wanted to profess materialism.� �We are pleased to recognize as one of the prime causes of the mutiny on board the battleship Potemkin that terrible piece of meat.�� But there is not with them, as with the Marxists, a feeling of friendship, even intellectual, for that piece of meat.� Putrid meat typifies only the real world, which in fact gives birth to revolt, but against itself.� It explains nothing, even though it justifies everything.� Revolution, for the surrealists, was not an end to be realized day by day, in action, but an absolute and consolatory myth.� It was �the real life, like love,� of which Eluard spoke, who at that time had no idea that his friend Kalandra would die of that sort of life.� They wanted the �communism of genius,� not the other form of Communism.� These peculiar Marxists declared themselves in rebellion against history and extolled the heroic individual.� �History is governed by laws, which are conditioned by the cowardice of individuals.�� Andr� Breton wanted revolution and love together � and they are incompatible.� Revolution consists in loving a man who does not yet exist.� But he who loves a living being, if he really loves, can only consent to die for the sake of the being he loves.� In reality, revolution for Andr� Breton was only a particular aspect of rebellion, while for Marxists and, in general, for all political persuasions, only the contrary is true.� Breton was not trying to create, by action, the promised land that was supposed to crown history.� One of the fundamental theses of surrealism is, in fact, that there is no salvation.� The advantage of revolution was not that it gives mankind happiness, �abominable material comfort.�� On the contrary, according to Breton, it should purify and illuminate man�s tragic condition.� World revolution and the terrible sacrifices it implies would only bring one advantage: �preventing the completely artificial precariousness of the social condition from screening the real precariousness of the human condition.�� Quite simply, for Breton, this form of progress was excessive.� One might as well say that revolution should be enrolled in the service of the inner asceticism by which individual men can transfigure reality into the supernatural, �the brilliant revenge of man�s imagination.�� With Andr� Breton, the supernatural holds the same place as the rational does with Hegel.� Thus it would be impossible to imagine a more complete antithesis to the political philosophy of Marxism.� The lengthy hesitations of those whom Artaud called the Amiels of revolution are easily explained.� The surrealists were more different from Marx than were reactionaries like Joseph de Maistre, for example.� The reactionaries made use of the tragedy of existence to reject revolution � in other words, to create another historical situation.� But make use of the human tragedy to further their pragmatic ends.� But Breton made use of revolution to consummate the tragedy and, in spite of the title of his magazine, made use of revolution to further the surrealist adventure.
�������� Finally, the definitive rupture is explained if one considers that Marxism insisted on the submission of the irrational, while the surrealists rose to defend irrationality to the death.� Marxism tended toward the conquest of totality, and surrealism, like all spiritual experiences, tended toward unity.� Totality can demand the submission of the irrational, if rationalism suffices to conquer the world.� But the desire for unity is more demanding.� It does not suffice that everything should be rational.� It wants, above all, the rational and the irrational to be reconciled on the same level.� There is no unity that supposes any form of mutilation.
�������� For Andr� Breton, totality could be only a stage, a necessary stage perhaps, but certainly inadequate, on the way that leads to unity.� Here we find once again the theme of All or Nothing.� Surrealism tends toward universality, and the curious but profound reproach that Breton makes to Marx consists in saying quite justifiably that the latter is not universal.� The surrealists wanted to reconcile Marx�s �let us transform the world� with Rimbaud�s �let us change life.�� But the first leads to the conquest of the totality of the world and the second to the conquest of the unity of life.� Paradoxically, every form of totality is restrictive.� In the end, the two formulas succeeded in splitting the surrealist group.� By choosing Rimbaud, Breton demonstrated that surrealism was not concerned with action, but with asceticism and spiritual experience.� He again gave first place to what composed the profound originality of his movement: the restoration of the sacred and the conquest of unity, which makes surrealism so invaluable for a consideration of the problem of rebellion.� The more he elaborated on this original concept, the more irreparably he separated himself from his political companions, and at the same time from some of his first manifestoes.
�������� Andr� Breton never,
actually, wavered in his support of surrealism � the fusion of a dream and of
reality, the sublimation of the old contradiction between the ideal and the
real.� We know the surrealist solution:
concrete irrationality, objective risk.�
Poetry is the conquest, the only possible conquest, of the �supreme
position.�� �A certain position of the
mind from where life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the
future � cease to be perceived in a contradictory sense.�� What is this supreme position that should
mark the �colossal abortion of the Hegelian system�?� It is the search for the summit-abyss, familiar
to the mystics.� Actually, it is the
mysticism without God which demonstrates and quenches the rebel�s thirst for
the absolute.� The essential enemy of
surrealism is rationalism.� Breton�s
method, moreover, presents the peculiar spectacle of a form of Occidental
thought in which the principle of analogy is continually favoured to the
detriment of the principles of identity and contradiction.� More precisely, it is a question of
dissolving contradictions in the fires of love and desire and of demolishing
the walls of death.� Magic rites,
primitive or na�ve civilizations, alchemy, the language of flowers, fire, or
sleepless nights, are so many miraculous stages on the way to unity and the
philosophers� stone.� If surrealism did
not change the world, it furnished it with a few strange myths which partly
justified Nietzsche�s announcement of the return of the Greeks.� Only partly, because he was referring to
unenlightened
�������� He nevertheless often diminished, to his own detriment, the importance of negation and advanced the positive claims of rebellion.� He chose severity rather than silence and retained only the �demand for morality,� which, according to Bataille, first gave life to surrealism; �To substitute a new morality for current morality, which is the cause of all our evils.�� Of course, he did not succeed (nor has anybody in our time) in the attempt to found a new morality.� But he never despaired of being able to do so.� Confronted with the horror of a period in which man, whom he wanted to magnify, has been persistently degraded in the name of certain principles that surrealism adopted, Breton felt constrained to propose, provisionally, a return to traditional morality.� That represents a hesitation perhaps.� But it is the hesitation of nihilism and the real progress of rebellion.� After all, when he could not give himself the morality and the values of whose necessity he was clearly aware, we know very well that Breton chose love.� In the general meanness of his times � and this cannot be forgotten � he is the only person who wrote profoundly about love.� Love is the entranced morality that served this exile as a native land.� Of course, a dimension is still missing here.� Surrealism, in that it is neither politics nor religion, is perhaps only an unbearable form of wisdom.� But it is also the absolute proof that there is no comfortable form of wisdom: �We want, we shall have, the hereafter in our lifetime,� Breton has admirably exclaimed.� While reason embarks on action and sets its armies marching on the world, the splendid night in which Breton delights announces dawns that have not yet broken, and, as well, the advent of the poet of our renaissance: Ren� Char.
Nihilism and History
*
����������� One hundred and fifty years of metaphysical rebellion and of nihilism have witnessed the persistent reappearance, under different guises, of the same ravaged countenance: the face of human protest.� All of them, decrying the human condition and its creator, have affirmed the solitude of man and the non-existence of any kind of morality.� But at the same time they have all tried to construct a purely terrestrial kingdom where their chosen principles will hold sway.� As rivals of the Creator, they have inescapably been led to the point of reconstructing creation according to their own concepts.� Those who rejected, for the sake of the world they had created, all other principles but desire and power, have rushed to suicide or madness and have proclaimed the apocalypse.� As for the rest, who wanted to create their own principles, they have chosen pomp and ceremony, the world of appearances, or banality, or again murder and destruction.� But Sade and the romantics, Karamazov or Nietzsche only entered the world of death because they wanted to discover the true life.� So that by a process of inversion, it is the desperate appeal for order that rings through this insane universe.� Their conclusions have only proved disastrous or destructive to freedom from the moment they laid aside the burden of rebellion, fled the tension that it implies, and chose the comfort of tyranny or of servitude.
����������� Human insurrection, in its exalted and tragic forms, is only, and can only be, a prolonged protest against death, a violent accusation against the universal death penalty.� In every case that we have come across, the protest is always directed at everything in creation which is dissonant, opaque, or promises the solution of continuity.� Essentially, then, we are dealing with a perpetual demand for unity.� The rejection of death, the desire for immortality and for clarity, are the mainsprings of all these extravagances, whether sublime or puerile.� Is it only a cowardly and personal refusal to die?� No, for many of these rebels have paid the ultimate price in order to live up to their own demands.� The rebel does not ask for life, but for reasons for living.� He rejects the consequences implied by death.� If nothing lasts, then nothing is justified; everything that dies is deprived of meaning.� To fight against death amounts to claiming that life has a meaning, to fighting for order and for unity.
����������� The protest against evil which is at the very core of metaphysical revolt is significant in this regard.� It is not the suffering of a child, which is repugnant in itself, but the fact that the suffering is not justified.� After all, pain, exile, or confinement are sometimes accepted when dictated by good sense or by the doctor.� In the eyes of the rebel, what is missing from the misery of the world, as well as from its moments of happiness, is some principle by which they can be explained.� The insurrection against evil is, above all, a demand for unity.� The rebel obstinately confronts a world condemned to death and the impenetrable obscurity of the human condition with his demand for life and absolute clarity.� He is seeking, without knowing it, a moral philosophy or a religion.� Rebellion, even though it is blind, is a form of asceticism.� Therefore, if the rebel blasphemes, it is in the hope of finding a new god.� He staggers under the shock of the first and most profound of all religious experiences, but it is a disenchanted religious experience.� It is not rebellion itself that is noble, but its aims, even though its achievements are at times ignoble.
����������� At least we must know how to recognize the ignoble ends it achieves.� Each time that it deifies the total rejection, the absolute negation, of what exists, it destroys.� Each time that it blindly accepts what exists and gives voice to absolute assent, it destroys again.� Hatred of the creator can turn to hatred of creation or to exclusive and defiant love of what exists.� But in both cases it ends in murder and loses the right to be called rebellion.� One can be nihilist in two ways, in both by having an intemperate recourse to absolutes.� Apparently there are rebels who want to die and those who want to cause death.� But they are identical, consumed with desire for the true life, frustrated by their desire for existence and therefore preferring generalized injustice to mutilated justice.� At this pitch of indignation, reason becomes madness.� If it is true that the instinctive rebellion of the human heart advances gradually through the centuries toward its most complete realization, it has also grown, as we have seen, in blind audacity, to the inordinate extent of deciding to answer universal murder by metaphysical assassination.
����������� The even if, which we have already recognized as marking the most
important moment of metaphysical rebellion, is in any case only fulfilled in
absolute destruction.� It is not the
nobility of rebellion that illuminates the world today, but nihilism.� And it is the consequence of nihilism that we
must retrace, without losing sight of the truth innate in its origins.� Even if God existed, Ivan would never
surrender to Him in the face of the injustice done to man.� But a longer contemplation of this injustice,
a more bitter approach, transformed the �even if you exist� into �you do not
deserve to exist,� therefore �you do not exist.�� The victims have found in their own innocence
the justification for the final crime.�
Convinced of their condemnation and without hope of immortality, they
decide to murder God.� If it is false to
say that from that day began the tragedy of contemporary man, neither is it
true to say that there was where it ended.�
On the contrary, this attempt indicates the highest point in a drama
that began with the end of the ancient world and of which the final words have
not yet been spoken.� From this moment,
man decides to exclude himself from grace and to live by his own means.� Progress, from the time of Sade up to the
present day, has consisted in gradually enlarging the stronghold where,
according to his own rules, man without God brutally wields power.� In defiance of the divinity, the frontiers of
this stronghold have been gradually extended, to the point of making the entire
universe into a fortress erected against the fallen and exiled deity.� Man, at the culmination of his rebellion,
incarcerated himself; from Sade�s lurid castle to the concentration camps,
man�s greatest liberty consisted only in building the prison of his
crimes.� But the state of siege gradually
spreads, the demand for freedom wants to embrace all mankind.� Then the only kingdom that is opposed to the
kingdom of grace must be founded � namely, the kingdom of justice � and the
human community must be reunited among the debris of the fallen City of
����������� We must now embark on the subject of this convulsive effort to control the world and to introduce a universal rule.� We have arrived at the moment when rebellion, rejecting every aspect of servitude, attempts to annex all creation.� Every time it experiences a setback, we have already seen that the political solution, the solution of conquest, is formulated.� Henceforth, with the introduction of moral nihilism, it will retain, of all its acquisitions, only the will to power.� In principle, the rebel only wanted to conquer his own existence and to maintain it in the face of God.� But he forgets his origins and, by the law of spiritual imperialism, he sets out in search of world conquest by way of an infinitely multiplied series of murders.� He drove God from His heaven, but now that the spirit of metaphysical rebellion openly joins forces with revolutionary movements, the irrational claim for freedom paradoxically adopts reason as a weapon, and as the only means of conquest which appears entirely human.� With the death of God, mankind remains; and by this we mean the history that we must understand and shape.� Nihilism, which, in the very midst of rebellion, smothers the force of creation, only adds that one is justified in using every means at one�s disposal.� Man, on an earth that he knows is henceforth solitary, is going to add, to irrational crimes, the crimes of reason, that are bent on the triumph of man.� To the �I rebel, therefore we exist,� he adds, with prodigious plans in mind which even include the death of rebellion: �And we are alone.�
Part Three
Historical
Rebellion
*
����������� Freedom, �that terrible word inscribed on the chariot of the storm,� [Philoth�e O�Neddy] is the motivating principle of all revolutions.� Without it, justice seems inconceivable to the rebel�s mind.� There comes a time, however, when justice demands the suspension of freedom.� Then terror, on a grand or small scale, makes its appearance to consummate the revolution.� Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being.� But one day nostalgia takes up arms and assumes the responsibility of total guilt; in other words, adopts murder and violence.� The servile rebellions, the regicide revolutions, and those of the twentieth century have thus, consciously, accepted a burden of guilt which increased in proportion to the degree of liberation they proposed to introduce.� This contradiction, which has become only too obvious, prevents our contemporary revolutionaries from displaying that aspect of happiness and optimism which shone forth from the faces and the speeches of the members of the Constituent Assembly in 1789.� Is this contradiction inevitable?� Does it characterize or betray the value of rebellion?� These questions are bound to arise about revolution as they are bound to arise about metaphysical rebellion.� Actually, revolution is only the logical consequence of metaphysical rebellion, and we shall discover, in our analysis of the revolutionary movement, the same desperate and bloody effort to affirm the dignity of man in defiance of the things that deny its existence.� The revolutionary spirit thus undertakes the defence of that part of man which refuses to submit.� In other words, it tries to assure him his crown in the realm of time, and, rejecting God, it chooses history with an apparently inevitable logic.
����������� In theory, the word revolution retains the meaning that it
has in astronomy.� It is a movement that
describes a complete circle, that leads from one form of government to another
after a complete transition.� A change of
regulations concerning property without a corresponding change of government is
not a revolution, but a reform.� There is
no kind of economic revolution, whether its methods are violent or pacific,
which is not, at the same time, manifestly political.� Revolution can already be distinguished, in
this way, from rebellion.� The warning
given to Louis XVI: �No, sire, this is not a rebellion, it is a revolution,�
accents the essential difference.� It
means precisely that �it is the absolute certainty of a new form of
government.�� Rebellion is, by nature,
limited in scope.� It is no more than an
incoherent pronouncement.� Revolution, on
the contrary, originates in the realm of ideas.�
Specifically, it is the injection of ideas into historical experience,
while rebellion is only the movement that leads from individual experience into
the realm of ideas.� While even the
collective history of a movement of rebellion is always that of a fruitless
struggle with facts, of an obscure protest which involves neither methods nor
reason, a revolution is an attempt to shape actions to ideas, to fit the world
into a theoretic frame.� That is why
rebellion kills men while revolution destroys both men and principles.� But, for the same reasons, it can be said
that there has not yet been a revolution in the course of history.� There could only be one, and that would be
the definitive revolution.� The movement
that seems to complete the circle already begins to describe another at the
precise moment when the new government is formed.� The anarchists, with Varlet as their leader,
were made well aware of the fact that government and revolution are
incompatible in the direct sense.� �It
implies a contradiction,� says Proudhon, �that a government could be
revolutionary, for the very simple reason that it is the government.�� Now that the experiment has been made, let us
qualify that statement by adding that a government can be revolutionary only in
opposition to other governments.�
Revolutionary governments are obliged, most of the time, to be war
governments.� The more extensive the
revolution, the more considerable the chances of the war that it implies.� The society born of the revolution of 1789
wanted to fight for
����������� While waiting for this to happen, if happen it must, the history of man, in one sense, is the sum total of his successive rebellions.� In other words, the movement of transition which can be clearly expressed in terms of space is only an approximation in terms of time.� What was devoutly called, in the nineteenth century, the progressive emancipation of the human race appears, from the outset, like an uninterrupted series of rebellions, which overreach themselves and try to find their formulation in ideas, but which have not yet reached the point of definitive revolution where everything on heaven and on earth would be stabilized.� A superficial examination seems to imply, rather than an real emancipation, an affirmation of mankind by man, an affirmation increasingly broad in scope, but always incomplete.� In fact, if there had ever been one real revolution, there would be no more history.� Unity would have been achieved, and death would have been satiated.� That is why all revolutionaries finally aspire to world unity and act as though they believe that history was concluded.� The originality of twentieth-century revolution lies in the fact that, for the first time, it openly claims to realize the ancient dream of Anarchasis Cloots of unity of the human race and, at the same time, the definitive consummation of history.� Just as the movement of rebellion led to the point of �All or Nothing� and just as metaphysical rebellion demanded the unity of the world, the twentieth-century revolutionary movement, when it arrived at the most obvious conclusions of its logic, insisted with threats of force on arrogating to itself the whole of history.� Rebellion is therefore compelled, on pain of appearing futile or out of date to become revolutionary.� It no longer suffices for the rebel to deify himself like Stirner or to look to his own salvation by adopting a certain attitude of mind.� The species must be deified, as Nietzsche attempted to do, and his ideal of the superman must be adopted so as to assure salvation for all � as Ivan Karamazov wanted.� For the first time, the Possessed appear on the scene and proceed to give the answer to one of the secrets of the times: the identity of reason and of the will to power.� Now that God is dead, the world must be changed and organized by the forces at man�s disposal.� The force of imprecation alone is not enough; weapons are needed and totality must be conquered.� Even revolution, particularly revolution, which claims to be materialist, is only a limitless metaphysical crusade.� But can totality claim to be unity?� That is the question which this book must answer.� So far we can only say that the purpose of this analysis is not to give, for the hundredth time, a description of the revolutionary phenomenon, nor once more to examine the historic or economic causes of great revolutions.� Its purpose is to discover in certain revolutionary data the logical sequence, the explanations, and the invariable themes of metaphysical rebellion.
����������� The majority of revolutions are shaped by, and derive their originality from, murder.� All, or almost all, have been homicidal.� But some, in addition, have practised regicide and deicide.� Just as the history of metaphysical rebellion began with Sade, so our real inquiry only begins with his contemporaries, the regicides, who attack the incarnation of divinity without yet daring to destroy the principle of eternity.� (But before this the history of mankind also demonstrates the equivalent of the first movement of rebellion � the rebellion of the slave.)
�����������
����������� When a slave rebels against his master, the situation presented is of one man pitted against another, under a cruel sky, far from the exalted realms of principles.� The final result is merely the murder of man.� The servile rebellions, peasant risings, beggar outbreaks, rustic revolts, all advance the concept of a principle of equality, a life for a life, which despite every kind of mystification and audacity will always be found in the purest manifestations of the revolutionary spirit � Russian terrorism in 1905, for example.
����������� Spartacus� rebellion, which took
place as the ancient world was coming to an end, a few decades before the
Christian era, is an excellent illustration of this point.� First we note that this is a rebellion of
gladiators � that is to say, of slaves consecrated to single combat and
condemned, for the delectation of their masters, to kill or be killed.� Beginning with seventy men, this rebellion
ended with an army of seventy thousand insurgents, which crushed the best Roman
legions and advanced through
����������� Spartacus� rebellion is a continual
illustration of this principle of positive claims.� The slave army liberates the slaves and
immediately hands over their former masters to them in bondage.� According to one tradition, of doubtful
veracity it is true, gladiatorial combats were even organized between several
hundred Roman citizens, while the slaves sat in the grandstands delirious with
joy and excitement.� But to kill men
leads to nothing but killing more men.�
For one principle to triumph, another principle must be overthrown.� The city of light of which Spartacus dreamed
could only have been built on the ruins of eternal
����������� Then began their defeat and
martyrdom.� Before the last battle,
Spartacus crucified a Roman citizen to show his men the fate that was in store
for them.� During the battle, Spartacus
himself tried with frenzied determination, the symbolism of which is obvious,
to reach Crassus, who was commanding the Roman legions.� He wanted to perish, but in single combat
with the man who symbolized, at that moment, every Roman master; it was his
dearest wish to die, but in absolute equality.�
He did not reach Crassus: principles wage war at a distance and the
Roman general kept himself apart.�
Spartacus died, as he wished, but at the hands of mercenaries, slaves
like himself, who killed their own freedom with his.� In revenge for the one crucified citizen,
Crassus crucified thousands of slaves.�
The six thousand crosses which, after such a just rebellion, staked out
the road from
����������� The cross is also Christ�s
punishment.� One might imagine that he
chose a slave�s punishment, a few years later, only so as to reduce the
enormous distance that henceforth would separate humiliated humanity from the
implacable face of the Master.� He
intercedes, He submits to the most extreme injustice so that rebellion shall
not divide the world in two, so that suffering will also light the way to
heaven and preserve it from the curses of mankind.� What is astonishing in the fact that the
revolutionary spirit, when it wanted to affirm the separation of heaven and
earth, should begin by disembodying the divinity by killing His representatives
on earth?� In certain aspects, the period
of rebellions comes to an end in 1793 and revolutionary times begin � on a
scaffold.� [In
that this book is not concerned with the spirit of rebellion inside
Christianity, the Reformation has no place here, nor the numerous rebellions
against ecclesiastical authority which preceded it.� But we can say, at least, that the
Reformation prepares the way for Jacobinism and in one sense initiates the
reforms that 1789 carries out.]
The Regicides
*
����������� Kings were put to death long before
����������� Even if the monarchy of the ancient regime was not always arbitrary
in its manner of governing, it was undoubtedly arbitrary in principle.� It was founded on divine right, which means
that its legitimacy could never be questioned.�
Its legitimacy often was questioned, however, in particular by various
parliaments.� But those who exercised it
considered and presented it as an axiom.�
Louis XIV, as is well known, rigidly adhered to the principle of divine
right.� [Charles
I clung so tenaciously to the principle of divine right that he considered it
unnecessary to be just and loyal to those who denied it.]� Bossuet gave him considerable help in this
direction by saying to the kings of
����������� From the moment that the
freethinkers began to question the existence of God, the problem of justice
became of primary importance.� The
justice of the period was, quite simply, confused with equality.� The throne of God totters and justice, to
confirm its support of equality, must give it the final push by making a direct
attack on His representative on earth.�
Divine right to all intents and purposes was already destroyed by being
opposed and forced to compromise with natural right for three years, from 1789
to 1792.� In the last resort, grace is
incapable of compromise.� It can give in
on certain points, but never on the final point.� But that does not suffice.� According to Michelet, Louis XVI still wanted
to be king in prison.� In a
����������� The
New Gospel
����������� The Social Contract is, primarily, an inquiry into the legitimacy of power.� But it is a book about rights, not about facts, and at no time is it a collection of sociological observations.� It is concerned with principles and for this very reason is bound to be controversial.� It presumes that traditional legitimacy, which is supposedly of divine origin, is not acquired.� Thus it proclaims another sort of legitimacy and other principles.� The Social Contract is also a catechism, of which it has both the tone and the dogmatic language.� Just as 1789 completes the conquest of the English and American revolutions, so Rousseau pushes to its limits the theory of the social contract to be found in Hobbes.� The Social Contract amplifies and dogmatically explains the new religion whose god is reason, confused with nature, and whose representative on earth, in place of the king, is the people considered as an expression of the general will.
����������� The attack on the traditional order
is so evident that, from the very first chapter, Rousseau is determined to
demonstrate the precedence of the citizens� pact, which established the people,
over the pact between the people and the king, which founded royalty.� Until Rousseau�s time, God created kings,
who, in their turn, created peoples.�
After The Social Contract,
peoples create themselves before creating kings.� As for God, there is nothing more to be said,
for the time being.� Here we have, in the
political field, the equivalent of
����������� This political entity, proclaimed sovereign, is also defined as a divine entity.� Moreover, it has all the attributes of a divine entity.� It is, in fact, infallible in that, in its role of sovereign, it cannot even wish to commit abuses.� �Under the law of reason, nothing is done without cause.�� It is totally free, if it is true that absolute freedom is freedom in regard to oneself.� Thus Rousseau declares that it is against the nature of the body politic for the sovereign power to impose a law upon itself that it cannot violate.� It is also inalienable, indivisible; and, finally, it even aims at solving the great theological problem, the contradiction between absolute power and divine innocence.� The will of the people is, in fact, coercive; its power has no limits.� But the punishment it inflicts on those who refuse to obey it is nothing more than a means of �compelling them to be free.�� The deification is completed when Rousseau, separating the sovereign from his very origins, reaches the point of distinguishing between the general will and the will of all.� This can be logically deduced from Rousseau�s premises.� If man is naturally good, if nature as expressed in him is identified with reason, [Every ideology is contrary to human psychology.] he will express the pre-eminence of reason, on the one condition that he expresses himself freely and naturally.� He can no longer, therefore, go back on his decision, which henceforth hovers over him.� The will of the people is primarily the expression of universal reason, which is categorical.� The new God is born.
����������� That is why the words that are to be
found most often in The Social Contract
are the words absolute, sacred,
inviolable.� The body politic thus
defined, whose laws are sacred commandments, is only a by-product of the mystic
body of temporal Christianity.� The Social Contract, moreover,
terminates with a description of a civil religion and makes Rousseau a
harbinger of contemporary forms of society which exclude not only opposition
but even neutrality.� Rousseau is, in
fact, the first man in modern times to institute the profession of civil
faith.� He is also the first to justify
the death penalty in a civil society and the absolute submission of the subject
to the authority of the sovereign.� �It
is in order not to become victim of an assassin that we consent to die if we
become assassins.�� A strange
justification, but one which firmly establishes the fact that you must know how
to die if the sovereign commands, and must, if necessary, concede that he is
right and you are wrong.� This mystic
idea explains Saint-Just�s silence from the time of his arrest until he goes to
the scaffold.� Suitably developed, it
equally well explains the enthusiasm of the defendants in the
����������� We are witnessing the dawn of a new
religion with its martyrs, its ascetics, and its saints.� To be able to estimate the influence achieved
by this gospel, one must have some idea of the inspired tones of the proclamations
of 1789.� Fauchet, confronted with the
skeletons discovered in the Bastille, exclaims: �The day of revelation is upon
us�. The very bones have risen at the sound of the voice of French freedom;
they bear witness against the centuries of oppression and death, and prophesy
the regeneration of human nature and of the life of nations.�� Then he predicts: �We have reached the heart
of time.� The tyrants are ready to
fall.�� It is the moment of astonished
and generous faith when a remarkably enlightened mob overthrows the scaffold and
the wheel at
����������� The
Execution of the King
����������� Saint-Just introduced Rousseau�s ideas into the pages of history.� At the King�s trial, the essential part of his arguments consisted in saying that the King is not inviolable and should be judged by the Assembly and not by a special tribunal.� His arguments he owed to Rousseau.� A tribunal cannot be the judge between the king and the sovereign people.� The general will cannot be cited before ordinary judges.� It is above everything.� The inviolability and the transcendence of the general will are thus proclaimed.� We know that the predominant theme of the trial was the inviolability of the royal person.� The struggle between grace and justice finds its most provocative illustration in 1793 when two different conceptions of transcendence meet in mortal combat.� Moreover, Saint-Just is perfectly aware of how much is at stake: �The spirit in which the King is judged will be the same in which the spirit of the Republic is established.�
����������� Saint-Just�s famous speech has, therefore, all the earmarks of a theological treatise.� �Louis, the stranger in our midst,� is the thesis of this youthful prosecutor.� If a contract, either civil or natural, could still bind the king and his people, there would be a mutual obligation; the will of the people could not set itself up as absolute judge to pronounce absolute judgement.� Therefore it is necessary to prove that no agreement binds the people and the king.� In order to prove that the people are themselves the embodiment of eternal truth it is necessary to demonstrate that royalty is the embodiment of eternal crime.� Saint-Just, therefore, postulates that every king is a rebel or a usurper.� He is a rebel against the people whose absolute sovereignty he usurps.� Monarchy is not a king, �it is crime.�� Not a crime, but crime itself, says Saint-Just; in other words, absolute profanation.� That is the precise, and at the same time ultimate, meaning of Saint-Just�s remark, the import of which has been stretched too far: [Or at least the significance of which has been anticipated.� When Saint-Just made this remark, he did not know that he was already speaking for himself.] �No one can rule innocently.�� Every king is guilty, because any man who wants to be king is automatically on the side of death.� Saint-Just says exactly the same thing when he proceeds to demonstrate that the sovereignty of the people is a �sacred matter.�� Citizens are inviolable and sacred and can be constrained only by the law, which is an expression of their common will.� Louis alone does not benefit by this particular inviolability or by the assistance of the law, for he is placed outside the contract.� He is not part of the general will; on the contrary, by his very existence he is a blasphemer against this all-powerful will.� He is not a �citizen,� which is the only way of participating in the new divine dispensation.� �What is a king in comparison with a Frenchman?�� Therefore, he should be judged and nothing more.
����������� But who will interpret the will of the people and pronounce judgement?� The Assembly, which by its origin has attained the right to administer this will, and which participates as an inspired council in the new divinity.� Should the people be asked to ratify the judgement?� We know that the efforts of the monarchists in the Assembly were finally concentrated on this point.� In this way the life of the King could be rescued from the logic of the bourgeois jurists and at least entrusted to the spontaneous emotions and compassion of the people.� But here again Saint-Just pushes his logic to its extremes and makes use of the conflict, invented by Rousseau, between the general will and the will of all.� Even though the will of all would pardon, the general will cannot do so.� Even the people cannot efface the crime of tyranny.� Cannot the victims, according to law, withdraw their complaint?� We are not dealing with law, we are dealing with theology.� The crime of the king is, at the same time, a sin against the ultimate nature of things.� A crime is committed; then it is pardoned, punished, and forgotten.� But the crime of royalty is permanent; it is inextricably bound to the person of the king, to his very existence.� Christ Himself, though He can forgive sinners, cannot absolve false gods.� They must disappear or conquer.� If the people forgive today, they will find the crime intact tomorrow, even though the criminal sleeps peacefully in prison.� Therefore there is only one solution: �To avenge the murder of the people by the death of the King.�
����������� The only purpose of Saint-Just�s speech is, once and for all, to block every egress for the King except the one leading to the scaffold.� If, in fact, the premises of The Social Contract are accepted, this is logically inevitable.� At last, after Saint-Just, �kings will flee to the desert, and nature will resume her rights.�� It was quite pointless of the Convention to vote a reservation and say that it did not intend to create a precedent if it passed judgement on Louis XVI or if it pronounced a security measure.� In doing so, it refused to face the consequences of its own principles and tried to camouflage, with shocking hypocrisy, its real purpose, which was to found a new form of absolutism.� Jacques Roux, at least, was speaking the truth of the times when he called the King Louis the Last, thus indicating that the real revolution, which had already been accomplished on the economic level, was then taking place on the philosophic plane and that it implied a twilight of the gods.� Theocracy was attacked in principle in 1789 and killed in its incarnation in 1793.� Brissot was right in saying: �The most solid monument to our revolution is philosophy.� [The religious Wars of the Vend�e showed him to be right again.]
����������� On January 21, with the murder of the King-priest, was consummated what has significantly been called the passion of Louis XVI.� It is certainly a crying scandal that the public assassination of a weak but good-hearted man has been presented as a great moment in French history.� That scaffold marked no climax � far from it.� But the fact remains that, by its consequences, the condemnation of the King is at the crux of our contemporary history.� It symbolizes the secularization of our history and the disincarnation of the Christian God.� Up to now God played a part in history through the medium of the kings.� But His representative in history has been killed, for there is no longer a king.� Therefore there is nothing but a semblance of God, relegated to the heaven of principles. [This will become the God of Kant, Jacobi, and Fichte.]
����������� The revolutionaries may well refer
to the Gospel, but in fact they dealt a terrible blow to Christianity, from
which it has not yet recovered.� It
really seems as if the execution of the King, followed, as we know, by
hysterical scenes of suicide and madness, took place in complete awareness of
what was being done.� Louis XVI seems,
sometimes, to have doubted his divine right, though he systematically rejected
any projected legislation which threatened his faith.� But from the moment that he suspected or knew
his fate, he seemed to identify himself, as his language betrayed, with the divine
mission, so that there would be no possible doubt that the attempt on his
person was aimed at the King-Christ, the incarnation of the divinity, and not
at the craven flesh of a mere man.� His
bedside book in the
����������� The Religion of Virtue
����������� A religion that executes its obsolete sovereign must now establish the power of its new sovereign; it closes the churches, and this leads to an endeavour to build a temple.� The blood of the gods, which for a second bespatters the confessor of Louis XVI, announces a new baptism.� Joseph de Maistre qualified the Revolution as satanic.� We can see why and in what sense.� Michelet, however, was closer to the truth when he called it a purgatory.� An era blindly embarks down this tunnel on an attempt to discover a new illumination, a new happiness, and the face of the real God.� But what will this new god be?� Let us ask Saint-Just once more.
����������� The year 1789 does not yet affirm the divinity of man, but the divinity of the people, to the degree in which the will of the people coincides with the will of nature and of reason.� If the general will is freely expressed, it can only be the universal expression of reason.� If the people are free, they are infallible.� Once the King is dead, and the chains of the old despotism thrown off, the people are going to express what, at all times and in all places, is, has been, and will be the truth.� They are the oracle that must be consulted to know what the eternal order of the world demands.� Vox populi, vox natur�.� Eternal principles govern our conduct: Truth, Justice, finally Reason.� There we have the new God.� The Supreme Being, whom cohorts of young girls come to adore at the Feast of Reason, is only the ancient god disembodied, peremptorily deprived of any connection with the earth, and launched like a balloon into a heaven empty of all transcendent principles.� Deprived of all his representatives, of an intercessor, the god of the lawyers and philosophers only has the value of a demonstration.� He is not very strong, in fact, and we can see why Rousseau, who preached tolerance, though that atheists should be condemned to death.� To ensure the adoration of a theorem for any length of time, faith is not enough; a police force is needed as well.� But that will only come later.� In 1793 the new faith is still intact, and it will suffice, to take Saint-Just�s word, to govern according to the dictates of reason.� The art of ruling, according to him, has produced only monsters because, before his time, no one wished to govern according to nature.� The period of monsters has come to an end with the termination of the period of violence.� �The human heart advances from nature to violence, from violence to morality.�� Morality is, therefore, only nature finally restored after centuries of alienation.� Man only has to be given law �in accord with nature and with his heart,� and he will cease to be unhappy and corrupt.� Universal suffrage, the foundation of the new laws, must inevitably lead to a universal morality.� �Our aim is to create an order of things which establishes a universal tendency of things towards good.�
����������� The religion of reason quite
naturally establishes the Republic of law and order.� The general will is expressed in laws
codified by its representatives.� �The
people make the revolution, the legislator makes the Republic.�� �Immortal, impassive� institutions, �sheltered
from the temerity of man,� will govern in their turn the lives of all men by
universal accord and without possibility of contradiction, since by obeying the
laws all will only be obeying themselves.�
�Outside the law,� says Saint-Just, �everything is sterile and dead.�� It is the formal and legalistic Republic of
the Romans.� We know the passion of
Saint-Just and his contemporaries for ancient
����������� What, in fact, is virtue?� For the bourgeois philosopher of the period it is conformity with nature [But nature itself, as we encounter it in the works Bernadin de Saint-Pierre, conforms to a pre-established virtue.� Nature is also an abstract principle.] and, in politics, conformity with the law, which expresses the general will.� �Morality,� says Saint-Just, �is stronger than tyrants.�� It has, in fact, just killed Louis XVI.� Every form of disobedience to law therefore comes, not from an imperfection of the law, which is presumed to be impossible, but from a lack of virtue in the refractory citizen.� That is why the Republic not only is an assembly, as Saint-Just forcibly says, but is also virtue itself.� Every form of moral corruption is at the same time political corruption, and vice versa.� A principle of infinite repression, derived from this very doctrine, is then established.� Undoubtedly Saint-Just was sincere in his desire for a universal idyll.� He really dreamed of a republic of ascetics, of humanity reconciled and dedicated to the chaste pursuits of the age of innocence, under the watchful eye of those wise old men whom he decked out in advance with a tricolour scarf and a white plume.� We also know that, at the beginning of the Revolution, Saint-Just declared himself, at the same time as Robespierre, against the death penalty.� He only demanded that murderers should be dressed in black for the rest of their lives.� He wanted to establish a form of justice which did not attempt �to find the culprit guilty, but to find him weak� � an admirable ambition.� He also dreamed of a republic of forgiveness which would recognize that though the fruits of crime are bitter, its roots are nevertheless tender.� One of his outbursts, at least, came from the heart and is not easily forgotten: �it is a frightful thing to torment the people.�� Yes indeed, it is a frightful thing.� But a man can realize this and yet submit to principles that imply, in the final analysis, the torment of the people.
����������� Morality, when it is formal, devours.� To paraphrase Saint-Just, no one is virtuous innocently.� From the moment that laws fail to make harmony reign, or when the unity which should be created by adherence to principles is destroyed, who is to blame?� Factions.� Who compose the factions?� Those who deny by their very actions the necessity of unity.� Factions divide the sovereign; therefore they are blasphemous and criminal.� They, and they alone, must be combated.� But what if there are many factions?� All shall be fought to the death.� Saint-Just exclaims: �Either the virtues or the Terror.�� Freedom must be guaranteed, and the draft constitution presented to the Convention already mentions the death penalty.� Absolute virtue is impossible, and the republic of forgiveness leads, with implacable logic, to the republic of the guillotine.� Montesquieu had already denounced this logic as one of the causes of the decadence of societies, saying that the abuse of power is greatest when laws do not anticipate it.� The pure law of Saint-Just did not take into account the truth, which is as old as history itself, that law, in its essence, is bound to be transgressed.
����������� The
Terror
����������� Saint-Just, the contemporary of
Sade, finally arrives at the justification of crime, though he starts from very
different principles.� Saint-Just is, of course.
The anti-Sade.� If Sade�s formula were
�Open the prisons or prove your virtue,� the Saint-Just�s would be: �Prove your
virtue or go to prison.�� Both, however,
justify terrorism � the libertine justifies individual terrorism, the high
priest of
����������� Such pertinacity in logic, however, implies a profound passion.� Here, as elsewhere, we again find the passion for unity.� Every rebellion implies some kind of unity.� The rebellion of 1789 demands the unity of the whole country.� Saint-Just dreams of an ideal city where manners and customs, in final agreement with the law, will proclaim the innocence of man and the identity of his nature with reason.� And if factions arise to interrupt this dream, passion will exaggerate its logic.� No one will dare to image that, since factions exist, the principles are perhaps wrong.� Factions will be condemned as criminal because principles remain intangible.� �It is time that everyone returned to morality and the aristocracy of the Terror.�� But the aristocratic factions are not the only ones to be reckoned with; there are the republicans, too, and anyone else who criticizes the actions of the legislature and of the Convention.� They, too, are guilty, since they threaten unity.� Saint-Just, then, proclaims the major principle of twentieth-century tyrannies.� �A patriot is he who supports the Republic in general; whoever opposes it in detail is a traitor.�� Whoever criticizes it is a traitor, whoever fails to give open support is a suspect.� When neither reason nor the free expression of individual opinion succeeds in systematically establishing unity, it must be decided to suppress all alien elements.� Thus the guillotine becomes a logician whose function is refutation.� �A rogue who has been condemned to death by the tribunal says he wants to resist oppression simply because he wants to resist the scaffold.!�� Saint-Just�s indignation is hard to understand in that, until his time, the scaffold was precisely nothing else but one of the most obvious symbols of oppression.� But at the heart of this logical delirium, at the logical conclusion of this morality of virtue, the scaffold represents freedom.� It assures rational unity, and harmony is the ideal city.� It purifies (the word is apt) the Republic and eliminates malpractices that arise to contradict the general will and universal reason.� �They question my right to the title of philanthropist,� Marat exclaims, in quite a different style.� �Ah, what injustice!� Who cannot see that I want to cut off a few heads to save a great number?�� A few � a faction?� Naturally � and all historic actions are performed at this price.� But Marat, making his final calculations, claimed two hundred and seventy-three thousand heads.� But he compromised the therapeutic aspect of the operation by screaming during the massacre: �Brand them with hot irons, cut off their thumbs, tear out their tongues.�� This philanthropist wrote day and night, in the most monotonous vocabulary imaginable, of the necessity of killing in order to create.� He wrote again, by candlelight deep down in his cellar, during the September nights while his henchmen were installing spectators benches in prison courtyards � men on the right, women on the left � to display to them, as a gracious example of philanthropy, the spectacle of the aristocrats having their heads cut off.
����������� Do not let us confuse, even for a
moment, the imposing figure of Saint-Just with the sad spectacle of Marat �
Rousseau�s monkey, as Michelet rightly calls him.� But the drama of Saint-Just lies in having at
moments joined forces, for superior and much deeper reasons, with Marat.� Factions join with factions, and minorities
with minorities, and in the end it is not even sure that the scaffold functions
in the service of the will of all.� But
at least Saint-Just will affirm, to the bitter end, that it functions in the
service of the general will, since it functions in the service of virtue.� �A revolution such as ours is not a trial,
but a clap of thunder for the wicked.��
Good strikes like a thunderbolt, innocence is a flash of lightning � a
flash of lightning that brings justice.�
Even the pleasure-seekers � in fact, they above all � are
counterrevolutionaries.� Saint-Just, who
said that the idea of happiness was new to
����������� For a long time he had, in fact, had
a presentiment that the demands he made implied a total and unreserved
sacrifice on his part and had said himself that those who make revolutions in
this world � �those who do good� � can sleep only in the tomb.� Convinced that his principles, in order to
triumph, must culminate in the virtue and happiness of his people, aware,
perhaps, that he was asking the impossible, he cut off his own retreat in
advance by declaring that he would stab himself in public on the day when he
despaired of the people.� Nonetheless, he
despairs, since he has doubts about the Terror.�
�The revolution is frozen, every principle has been attenuated; all that
remains are red caps worn by intriguers.�
The exercise of terror has blunted crime as strong drink blunts the
palate.�� Every virtue �unites with crime
in times of anarchy.�� He said that all
crime sprang from tyranny, which was the greatest crime of all, and yet,
confronted with the unflagging obstinacy of crime, the Revolution itself
resorted to tyranny and became criminal.�
Thus crime cannot be obliterated, nor can factions, nor the despicable
desire for enjoyment; the people must be despaired of and subjugated.� But neither is it possible to govern
innocently.� Thus, evil must be either
suffered or served, principles must be declared wrong or the people and mankind
must be recognized as guilty.� Then
Saint-Just averts his mysterious and handsome face: �It would be leaving very
little to leave a life in which one must be either the accomplice or the silent
witness of evil.�� Brutus, who must kill
himself if he does not kill others, begins by killing others.� But the others are too many; they cannot all
be killed.� In that case he must die and
demonstrate, yet again, that rebellion, when it gets out of hand, swings from
the annihilation of others to the destruction of the self.� This task, at any rate, is easy; once again
it suffices to follow logic to the bitter end.�
In his speech in defence of Robespierre, shortly before his death,
Saint-Just reaffirms the guiding principle of his actions, which is the very
same principle which leads to his condemnation: �I belong to no faction, I
shall fight against them all.�� He
accepted then, and in advance, the decision of the general will � in other
words, of the Assembly.� He agreed to go
to his death for love of principle and despite all the realities of the
situation, since the opinion of the Assembly could only really be swayed by the
eloquence and fanaticism of a faction.�
But that is beside the point!�
When principles fail, men have only one way to save them and to preserve
their faith, which is to die for them.�
In the stifling heat of
����������� �All the stones are cut to build the
structure of freedom,� said Saint-Just; �you can build a palace or a tomb of
the same stones.�� The very principles of
The Social Contract presided at the
erection of the tomb that Napoleon Bonaparte came to seal.� Rousseau, who was not wanting in common
sense, understood very well that the society envisioned by The Social Contract was suitable only for gods.� His successors took him at his word and tried
to establish the divinity of man.� The
red flag -� a symbol of martial law and
therefore of the executive under the ancient
regime � became the revolutionary symbol on
����������� The Jacobins reinforced the eternal moral principles to the extent to which they suppressed the things which, up to then, had supported these principles.� As preachers of a gospel, they wanted to base fraternity on the abstract law of the Romans.� They substituted the law for divine commandments on the supposition that it must be recognized by all because it was the expression of the general will.� The law found its justification in natural virtue and then proceeded to justify natural virtue.� But immediately a single faction manifests itself, this reasoning collapses and we perceive that virtue has need of justification in order not to be abstract.� In the same way, the bourgeois jurists of the eighteenth century, by burying under the weight of their principles the just and vital conquests of their people, prepared the way for the two contemporary forms of nihilism: individual nihilism and State nihilism.
����������� Law can reign, in fact, insofar as it is the law of universal reason.� [Hegel saw clearly that the philosophy of enlightenment wanted to deliver man from the irrational.� Reason reunites mankind while the irrational destroys unity.]� But it never is, and it loses its justification if man is not naturally good.� A day comes when ideology conflicts with psychology.� Then there is no more legitimate power.� Thus the law evolves to the point of becoming confused with the legislator and with a new form of arbitrariness.� Where turn then?� The law has gone completely off its course; and, losing its precision, it becomes more and more inaccurate, to the point of making everything a crime.� The law still reigns supreme, but it no longer has any fixed limits.� Saint-Just had foreseen that this form of tyranny might be exercised in the name of a silent people.� �Ingenious crime will be exalted into a kind of religion and criminals will be in the sacred hierarchy.�� But this is inevitable.� If major principles have no foundation, if the law expresses nothing but a provisional inclination, it is only made in order to be broken or to be imposed.� Sade or dictatorship, individual terrorism or State terrorism, both justified by the same absence of justification, are, from the moment that rebellion cuts itself off from its roots and abstains from any concrete morality, one of the alternatives of the twentieth century.
����������� The revolutionary movement that was born in 1789 could not, however, stop there.� God, for the Jacobins, is not completely dead, any more than he was dead for the romantics.� They still preserve the Supreme Being.� Reason, in a certain way, is still a mediator.� It implies a pre-existent order.� But God is at least dematerialized and reduced to the theoretical existence of a moral principle.� The bourgeoisie succeeded in reigning during the entire nineteenth century only be referring itself to abstract principles.� Less worthy than Saint-Just, it simply made use of this frame of reference as an alibi, while employing, on all occasions, the opposite values.� By its essential corruption and disheartening hypocrisy, it helped to discredit, for good and all, the principles it proclaimed.� Its culpability in this regard is infinite.� From the moment that eternal principles are put in doubt simultaneously with formal virtue, and when every value is discredited, reason will start to act without reference to anything but its own successes.� It would like to rule, denying everything that has been and affirming all that is to come.� One day it will conquer.� Russian Communism, by its violent criticism of every kind of formal virtue, puts the finishing touches to the revolutionary work of the nineteenth century by denying any superior principle.� The regicides of the nineteenth century are succeeded by the deicides of the twentieth century, who drawn the ultimate conclusions from the logic of rebellion and want to make the earth a kingdom where man is God. �The reign of history begins and, identifying himself only with his history, man, unfaithful to his real rebellion, will henceforth devote himself to the nihilistic revolution of the twentieth century, which denies all forms of morality and desperately attempts to achieve the unity of the human race by means of a ruinous series of crimes and wars.� The Jacobin Revolution, which tried to institute the religion of virtue in order to establish unity upon it, will be followed by the cynical revolutions, which can be either of the right or of the left and which will try to achieve the unity of the world so as to found, at last, the religion of man.� All that was God�s will henceforth be rendered to C�sar.
The Deicides
*
����������� Justice, reason, truth still shone in the Jacobin heaven, performing the function of fixed stars, which could, at least, serve as guides.� German nineteenth-century thinkers, particularly Hegel, wanted to continue the work of the French Revolution [And of the Reformation � �the Germans� Revolution,� according to Hegel.] while suppressing the causes of its failure.� Hegel thought that he discerned the seeds of the Terror contained in the abstract principles of the Jacobins.� According to him, absolute and abstract freedom must inevitably lead to terrorism; the rule of abstract law is identical with the rule of oppression.� For example, Hegel remarks that the period between the time of Augustus and Alexander Severus (A.D.� 235) is the period of the greatest legal proficiency but also the period of the most ruthless tyranny.� To avoid this contradiction, it was therefore necessary to wish to construct a concrete society, invigorated by a principle that was not formal and in which freedom could be reconciled with necessity.� German philosophy therefore finished by substituting, for the universal but abstract reason of Saint-Just and Rousseau, a less artificial but more ambiguous idea: concrete universal reason.� Up to this point, reason had soared above the phenomena which were related to it.� Now reason is, henceforth, incorporated in the stream of historical events, which it explains while deriving its substance from them.
����������� It can certainly be said that Hegel rationalized to the point of being irrational.� But, at the same time, he gave reason an unreasonable shock by endowing it with a lack of moderation, the results of which are now before our eyes.� Into the fixed ideas of this period, German thought suddenly introduced an irresistible urge to movement.� Truth, reason, and justice were abruptly incarnated in the progress of the world.� But by committing them to perpetual acceleration, German ideology confused their existence with their impulse and fixed the conclusion of this existence at the final stage of the historical future � if there was to be one.� These values have ceased to be guides in order to become goals.� As for the means of attaining these goals, specifically life and history, no pre-existent value can point the way.� On the contrary, a large part of Hegelian demonstration is devoted to proving that moral conscience, by being so banal as to obey justice and truth, as though these values existed independently of the world, jeopardizes, precisely for this reason, the advent of these values.� The rule of action has thus become action itself � which must be performed in darkness while awaiting the final illumination.� Reason, annexed by this form of romanticism, is nothing more than an inflexible passion.
����������� The ends have remained the same,
only ambition has increased; thought has become dynamic, reason has embraced
the future and aspired to conquest.�
Action is no more than a calculation based on results, not on
principles.� Consequently it confounds
itself with perpetual movement.� In the
same way, all the disciplines that characterize eighteenth-century thought as
rigid and addicted to classification were abandoned in the nineteenth
century.� Just as
����������� In any case, it is strange to find Hegel�s philosophy at this new stage in the development of the spirit of rebellion.� Actually, in one sense, his work exudes an absolute horror of dissidence: he wanted to be the very essence of reconciliation.� But this is only one aspect of a system which, by its very method, is the most ambiguous in all philosophic literature.� To the extent that, for him, what is real is rational, he justifies every ideological encroachment upon reality.� What has been called Hegel�s panlogism is a justification of the condition of fact.� But his philosophy also exalts destruction for its own sake.� Everything is reconciled, of course, in the dialectic, and one extreme cannot be stated without the other arising; there exists in Hegel, as in all great thinkers, the material for contradicting Hegel.� Philosophers, however, are rarely read with the head alone, but often with the heart and all its passions, which can accept no kind of reconciliation.
����������� Nevertheless, the revolutionaries of the twentieth century have borrowed from Hegel the weapons with which they definitively destroyed the formal principles of virtue.� All that they have preserved is the vision of a history without any kind of transcendence, dedicated to perpetual strife and to the struggle of wills bent on seizing power.� In its critical aspect, the revolutionary movement of our times is primarily a violent denunciation of the formal hypocrisy that provides over bourgeois society.� The partially justified pretension of modern Communism, like the more frivolous claims of Fascism, is to denounce the mystification that underlines the principles and virtues of the bourgeois type of democracy.� Divine transcendence, up to 1789, served to justify the arbitrary actions of the king.� After the French Revolution, the transcendence of the formal principles of reason or justice serves to justify a rule that is neither just nor reasonable.� This transcendence is therefore a mask that must be torn off.� God is dead, but as Stirner predicted, the morality of principles in which the memory of God is still preserved must also be killed.� The hatred of formal virtue � degraded witness to divinity and false witness in the service of injustice � has remained one of the principal themes of history today.� Nothing is pure: that is the cry which convulses our period.� Impurity, the equivalent of history, is going to become the rule, and the abandoned earth will be delivered to naked force, which will decide whether or not is divine.� Thus lies and violence are adopted in the same spirit in which a religion is adopted and on the same heartrending impulse.
����������� But the first fundamental criticism of the good conscience � the denunciation of the beautiful soul and of ineffectual attitudes � we owe to Hegel, for whom the ideology of the good, the true, and the beautiful is the religion of those possessed of none of them.� While the mere existence of factions surprises Saint-Just and contravenes the ideal order that he affirms, Hegel not only is not surprised, but even affirms that faction is the prelude to thought.� For the Jacobin, everyone is virtuous.� The movement which starts with Hegel, and which is triumphant today, presumes, on the contrary, that no one is virtuous, but that everyone will be.� At the beginning, everything, according to Saint-Just, is an idyll; according to Hegel, everything is a tragedy.� But in the end that amounts to the same thing.� Those who destroy the idyll must be destroyed or destruction must be embarked on in order to create the idyll.� Violence, in both cases, is the victor.� The repudiation of the Terror, undertaken by Hegel, only leads to an extension of the Terror.
����������� That is not all.� Apparently the world today can no longer be
anything other than a world of masters and slaves because contemporary
ideologies, those that are changing the face of the earth, have learned from
Hegel to conceive of history in terms of the dialectic of master and
slave.� If, on the first morning of the
world, under the empty sky, there is only a master and a slave; even if there
is only the bond of master and slave between a transcendent god and mankind,
then there can be no other law in this world than the law of force.� Only a god, or a principle above the master
and the salve, could intervene and make men�s history something more than a
mere chronicle of their victories and defeats.�
First Hegel and then the Hegelians have tried, on the contrary, to
destroy, more and more thoroughly, all idea of transcendence and any nostalgia
for transcendence.� Although there was
infinitely more to Hegel than in the left-wing Hegelians who finally have
triumphed over him, he nevertheless furnished, on the level of the dialectic of
master and slave, the decisive justification of the spirit of power in the
twentieth century.� The conqueror is
always right; that is one of the lessons which can be learned from the most
important German philosophical system of the nineteenth century.� Of course, there is to be found, in the
prodigious Hegelian edifice, a means of partially contradicting those
ideas.� But twentieth-century ideology is
not connected with what is improperly called the idealism of the master of
����������� Nietzschean nihilism is methodical.� The Phenomenology of the Mind also has a didactic aspect.� At the meeting-point of two centuries, it depicts, in its successive stages, the education of the mind as it pursues its way toward absolute truth.� It is a metaphysical �mile. [In one sense there is a ground of comparison between Hegel and Rousseau.� The fortune of the Phenomenology has been, in its consequences, of the same kind as that of the Social Contract.� It shaped the political thought of its time.� Rousseau�s theory of the general will, besides, recurs in the Hegelian system.]� Each stage is an error and is, moreover, accompanied by historic sanctions which are almost always fatal, either to the mind or to the civilization in which it is reflected.� Hegel proposes to demonstrate the necessity of these painful stages.� The Phenomenology is, in one aspect, a meditation of despair and death.� The mission of despair is, simply, to be methodical in that it must be transfigured, at the end of history, into absolute satisfaction and absolute wisdom.� The book has the defect, however, of only imagining highly intelligent pupils and it has been taken literally, while, literally, it only wanted to proclaim the spirit.� It is the same with the celebrated analysis of mastery and slavery.
����������� Animals, according to Hegel, have an immediate knowledge of the exterior world, a perception of the self, but not the knowledge of self, which distinguishes man.� The latter is only really born at the moment when he becomes aware of himself as a rational being.� Therefore his essential characteristic is self-consciousness.� Consciousness of self, to be affirmed, must distinguish itself from what it is not.� Man is a creature who, to affirm his existence and his difference, denies.� What distinguishes consciousness of self from the world of nature is not the simple act of contemplation by which it identifies itself with the exterior world and finds oblivion, but the desire it can feel with regard to the world.� This desire re-establishes its identity when it demonstrates that the exterior world is something apart.� In its desire, the exterior world consists of what it does not possess, but which nevertheless exists, and of what it would like to exist but which no longer does.� Consciousness of self is therefore, of necessity, desire.� But in order to exist it must be satisfied, and it can only be satisfied by the gratification of its desire.� It therefore acts in order to gratify itself and, in so doing, it denies and suppresses its means of gratification.� It is the epitome of negation.� To act is to destroy in order to give birth to the spiritual reality of consciousness.� But to destroy an object unconsciously, as meat is destroyed, for example, in the act of eating, is a purely animal activity.� To consume is not yet to be conscious.� Desire for consciousness must be directed toward something other than unconscious nature.� The only thing in the world that is distinct from nature is, precisely, self-consciousness.� Therefore desire must be centred upon another form of desire; self-consciousness must be gratified by another form of self-consciousness.� In simple words, man is not recognized � and does not recognize himself � as a man as long as he limits himself to subsisting like an animal.� He must be acknowledged by other men.� All consciousness is, basically, the desire to be recognized and proclaimed as such by other consciousnesses.� It is others who beget us.� Only in association do we receive a human value, as distinct from an animal value.
����������� In that the supreme value for the animal is the preservation of life, consciousness should raise itself above the level of that instinct in order to achieve human value.� It should be capable of risking its life.� To be recognized by another consciousness, man should be ready to risk his life and to accept the chance of death.� Fundamental human relations are thus relations of pure prestige, a perpetual struggle, to the death, for recognition of one human being by another.
����������� At the first stage of his dialectic, Hegel affirms that insofar as death is the common ground of man and animal, it is by accepting death and even by inviting it that the former differentiates himself from the latter.� At the heart of this primordial struggle for recognition, man is thus identified with violent death. The mystic slogan �Die and become what you are� is taken up once more by Hegel.� But �become what you are� gives place to �Become what you so far are not.�� This primitive and passionate desire for recognition, which is confused with the will to exist, can be satisfied only by a recognition gradually extended until it embraces everyone.� In that everyone wants equally much to be recognized by everyone, the fight for life will cease only with the recognition of all by all, which will mark the termination of history.� The existence that Hegelian consciousness seeks to obtain is born in the hard-won glory of collective approval.� It is not beside the point to note that, in the thought which will inspire our revolutions, the supreme good does not, in reality, coincide with existence, but with an arbitrary facsimile. The entire history of mankind is, in any case, nothing but a prolonged fight to the death for the conquest of universal prestige and absolute power.� It is, in its essence, imperialist.� We are far from the gentle savage of the eighteenth century and from the Social Contract.� In the sound and fury of the passing centuries, each separate consciousness, to ensure its own existence, must henceforth desire the death of others.� Moreover, this relentless tragedy is absurd, since, in the event of one consciousness being destroyed, the victorious consciousness is not recognized as such, in that it cannot be victorious in the eyes of something that no longer exists.� In fact, it is here the philosophy of appearances reaches its limits.
����������� No human reality would therefore have been engendered if, thanks to a propensity that can be considered fortunate for Hegel�s system, there had not existed, from the beginning of time, two kinds of consciousness, one of which has not the courage to renounce life and is therefore willing to recognize the other kind of consciousness without being recognized itself in return.� Its consents, in short, to being considered as an object.� This type of consciousness, which, to preserve its animal existence, renounces independent life, is the consciousness of a slave.� The type of consciousness which by being recognized achieves independence is that of the master.� They are distinguished one from the other at the moment when they clash and when one submits to the other.� The dilemma at this stage is not to be free or to die, but to kill or to enslave.� This dilemma will resound throughout the course of history, though at this moment its absurdity has not yet been resolved.
����������� Undoubtedly the master enjoys total freedom first as regards the slave, since the latter recognizes him totally, and then as regards the natural world, since by his work the slave transforms it into objects of enjoyment which the master consumes in a perpetual affirmation of his own identity.� However, this autonomy is not absolute.� The master, to his misfortune, is recognized in his autonomy by a consciousness that he himself does not recognize as autonomous.� Therefore he cannot be satisfied and his autonomy is only negative.� Mastery is a blind alley.� Since, moreover, he cannot renounce mastery and become a slave again, the eternal destiny of masters is to live unsatisfied or to be killed.� The master serves no other purpose in history than to arouse servile consciousness, the only form of consciousness that really creates history.� The slave, in fact, is not bound to his condition, but wants to change it.� Thus, unlike his master, he can improve himself, and what is called history is nothing but the effects of his long efforts to obtain real freedom.� Already, by work, by his transformation of the natural world into a technical world, he manages to escape from the nature which was the basis of his slavery in that he did not know how to raise himself above it by accepting death.� [Actually, the ambiguity is profound, for the nature in question is not the same.� Does the advent of the technical world suppress death or the fear of death in the natural world?� That is the real question, which Hegel leaves in suspense.]� The very agony of death experienced in the humiliation of the entire being lifts the slave to the level of human totality.� He knows, henceforth, that his totality exists; now it only remains for him to conquer it through a long series of struggles against nature and against the masters.� History identifies itself, therefore, with the history of endeavour and rebellion.� It is hardly astonishing that Marxism-Leninism derived from this dialectic the contemporary ideal of the soldier worker.
����������� We shall leave aside the description
of the various attitudes of the servile consciousness (stoicism, scepticism,
guilty conscience) which then follows in the Phenomenology.� But, thanks
to its consequences, another aspect of this dialectic cannot be neglected:
namely, the assimilation of the master-slave relationship to the relationship
between man and God.� One of Hegel�s
commentators [Jean Hyppolite] remarks
that if the master really existed, he would be God.� Hegel himself calls the master of the Master
of the world the real God.� In his
description of guilty conscience he shows how the Christian slave, wishing to
deny everything that oppresses him, takes refuge in the world beyond and by
doing so gives himself a new master in the person of God.� Elsewhere Hegel identifies the supreme master
with absolute death.� And so the struggle
begins again, on a higher level, between man in chains and the cruel God of
Abraham.� The solution to this new
conflict between the universal God and the human entity will be furnished by
Christ, who reconciles in Himself the universal and the unique.� But, in one sense, Christ is a part of the
palpable world.� He is visible, He lived
and died.� He is therefore only a stage
on the road to the universal; He too must be denied dialectically.� It is only necessary to recognize Him as the
man-God to obtain a higher synthesis.�
Skipping the intermediary stages, it suffices to say that this
synthesis, after being incarnated in the Church and in Reason, culminates in the
absolute State, founded by the soldier workers, where the spirit of the world
will be finally reflected in the mutual recognition of each by all and in the
universal reconciliation of everything that has ever existed under the
sun.� At this moment, �when the eyes of
the spirit coincide with the eyes of the body,� each individual consciousness
will be nothing more than a mirror reflecting another mirror, itself reflected
to infinity in infinitely recurring images.�
The City of
����������� This sums up the essential ideas which in spite, or because, of the extreme ambiguity of their interpretation, have literally driven the revolutionary mind in apparently contradictory directions and which we are now learning to rediscover in the ideology of our times.� Amorality, scientific materialism, and atheism have definitely replaced the anti-theism of the rebels of former times and have made common cause, under Hegel�s paradoxical influence, with a revolutionary movement which, until his time, was never really separated from its moral, evangelical, and idealistic origins.� These tendencies, if they are sometimes very far from really originating with Hegel, found their source in the ambiguity of his thought and in his critique of transcendence.� Hegel�s undeniable originality lies in his definitive destruction of all vertical transcendence � particularly the transcendence of principles.� There is no doubt that he restores the immanence of the spirit to the evolution of the world.� But this immanence is not precisely defined and has nothing in common with the pantheism of the ancients.� The spirit is and is not part of the world; it creates itself and will finally prevail.� Values are thus only to be found at the end of history.� Until then there is no suitable criterion on which to base a judgement of value.� One must act and live in terms of the future.� All morality becomes provisional.� The nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in their most profound manifestations, are centuries that have tried to live without transcendence.
����������� One of Hegel�s commentators,
Alexandre Koj�ve, of left-wing tendencies it is true, but orthodox in his
opinion on this particular point, notes Hegel�s hostility to the moralists and
remarks that his only axiom is to live according to the manners and customs of
one�s nation.� A maxim of social
conformity of which Hegel, in fact, gave the most cynical proofs.� Koj�ve adds, however, that this conformity is
legitimate only to the extent that the customs of the nation correspond to the
spirit of the times � in other words, to the extent that they are solidly
established and can resist revolutionary criticism and attacks.� But who will determine their solidity and who
will judge their validity?� For a hundred
years the capitalist regimes of the West have withstood violent assaults.� Should they for that reason be considered
legitimate?� Inversely, should those who
were faithful to the
����������� Hegel could not, in fact, prevent those who had read him, with feelings of anguish which were far from methodical in a Europe that was already torn asunder by injustice, from finding themselves precipitated into a world without innocence and without principles � into the very world of which Hegel says that it is in itself a sin, since it is separated from the spirit.� Hegel, of course, permits the forgiveness of sins at the end of history.� Until then, however, every human activity is sinful.� �Therefore only the absence of activity is innocent, the existence of a stone and not even the existence of a child.�� Thus even the innocence of stones is unknown to us.� Without innocence there are no human relations and no reason.� Without reason, there is nothing but naked force, the master and slave waiting for reason one day to prevail.� Between master and slave, even suffering is solitary, joy is without foundation, and both are underserved.� Then how can one live, how endure life when friendship is reserved for the end of time?� The only escape is to create order with the use of weapons.� �Kill or enslave!� � those who have read Hegel with this single and terrible purpose have really considered only the first part of the dilemma.� From it they have derived a philosophy of scorn and despair and have deemed themselves slaves and nothing but slaves, bound by death to the absolute Master and by the whip to their terrestrial masters.� This philosophy of the guilty conscience has merely taught them that every slave is enslaved only by his own consent, and can be liberated only by an act of protest which coincides with death.� Answering the challenge, the most courageous among them have completely identified themselves with this act of protest and have dedicated themselves to death. �After all, to say that negation is in itself a positive act justified in advance every kind of negation and predicted the cry of Bakunin and Nechaiev: �Our mission is to destroy, not to construct.�� A nihilist for Hegel was only a sceptic who had no other escape but contradiction or philosophic suicide.� But he himself gave birth to another type of nihilist, who, making boredom into a principle of action, identified suicide with philosophic murder.� [This form of nihilism, despite appearances, is still nihilism in the Nietzschean sense, to the extent that it is a calumny of the present life to the advantage of a historical future in which one tries to believe.]� It was at this point that the terrorists were born who decided that it was necessary to kill and die in order to exist, because mankind and history could achieve their creation only by sacrifice and murder.� The magnificent idea that all idealism is chimerical if it is not paid for by risking one�s life was to be developed to the fullest possible extent by young men who were not engaged in expounding the concept from the safe distance of a university chair before dying in their beds, but among the tumult of falling bombs and even on the gallows.� By doing this and even by their errors they corrected their master and demonstrated, contrary to his teaching, that one kind of aristocracy, at least, is superior to the hideous aristocracy of success exalted by Hegel: the aristocracy of sacrifice.
����������� Another sort of follower, who read Hegel more seriously, chose the second term of the dilemma and made the pronouncement that the slave could only free himself by enslaving in his turn.� Post-Hegelian doctrines, unmindful of the mystic aspect of certain of the master�s tendencies, have led his followers to absolute atheism and to scientific materialism.� But this evolution is inconceivable without the absolute disappearance of every principle of transcendent explanation, and without the complete destruction of the Jacobin ideal.� Immanence, of course, is not atheism.� But immanence in the process of development is, if one can say so, provisional atheism.� [In any event, the criticism of Kierkegaard is valid.� To base divinity on history is, paradoxically, to base an absolute value on approximate knowledge.� Something �eternally historic� is a contradiction in terms.]� The indefinite face of God which, with Hegel, is still reflected in the spirit of the world will not be difficult to efface.� Hegel�s successors will draw decisive conclusions from his ambiguous formula: �God without man is no more than man without God.�� David Strauss in his Life of Jesus isolates the theory of Christ considered as the God-man.� Bruno Bauer (The Critique of Evangelist History) institutes a kind of materialist Christianity by insisting on the humanity of Jesus.� Finally, Ludwig Feuerbach (whom Marx considered as a great mind and of whom he acknowledges himself the critical disciple), in his Essence of Christianity, replaces all theology by a religion of man and the species, which has converted a large part of contemporary thought.� His task is to demonstrate that the distinction between human and divine is illusory, that it is nothing but the distinction between the essence of humanity � in other words, human nature � and the individual.� �The mystery of God is only the mystery of the love of man for himself.�� The accents of a strange new prophecy ring out: �Individuality has replaced faith, reason the Bible, politics religion and the Church, the earth heaven, work prayer, poverty hell, and man Christ.�� Thus there is only one hell and it is on this earth: and it is against this that the struggle must be waged.� Politics is religion, and transcendent Christianity � that of the hereafter � establishes the masters of the earth by means of the slave�s renunciation and creates one master more beneath the heavens.� That is why atheism and the revolutionary spirit are only two aspects of the same movement of liberation.� That is the answer to the question which is always being asked: why has the revolutionary movement identified itself with materialism rather than with idealism?� Because to conquer God, to make Him a slave, amounts to abolishing the transcendence that kept the former masters in power and to preparing, with the ascendancy of the new tyrants, the advent of the man-king.� When poverty is abolished, when the contradictions of history are resolved, �the real god, the human god, will be the State.�� Then homo homini lupus becomes homo homini deus.� This concept is at the root of the contemporary world.� With Feuerbach, we assist at the birth of a terrible form of optimism which we can still observe at work today and which seems to be the very antithesis of nihilist despair.� But that is only in appearance.� We must know Feuerbach�s final conclusion in this Theogony to perceive the profoundly nihilist derivation of his inflamed imagination.� In effect, Feuerbach affirms, in the face of Hegel, that man is only what he eats, and thus recapitulates his ideas and predicts the future in the following phrase: �The true philosophy is the negation of philosophy.� No religion is my religion.� No philosophy is my philosophy.�
����������� Cynicism, the deification of history and of matter, individual terror and State crime, these are the inordinate consequences that will now spring, armed to the teeth, from the equivocal conception of a world that entrusts to history alone the task of producing both values and truth.� If nothing can be clearly understood before truth has been brought to light, at the end of time, then every action is arbitrary, and force will finally rule supreme.� �If reality is inconceivable,� Hegel exclaims, �then we must contrive inconceivable concepts.�� A concept that cannot be conceived must, perforce, like error, be contrived.� But to be accepted it cannot rely on the persuasion innate in order and truth, but must finally be imposed.� Hegel�s attitude consists of saying: �This is truth, which appears to us, however, to be error, but which is true precisely because it happens to be error.� As for proof, it is not I, but history, at its conclusion, that will furnish it.�� Such pretensions can only entail two attitudes: either the suspension of all affirmation until the production of proof, or the affirmation of everything, in history, which seems dedicated to success � force in particular.� And both attitudes imply nihilism.� Moreover, it is impossible to understand twentieth-century revolutionary thought if we overlook the fact that unfortunately it derived a large part of its inspiration from a philosophy of conformity and opportunism.� True rebellion is not jeopardized on account of the distortion of these particular ideas.
����������� Nevertheless, the basis of Hegel�s claims is what renders them intellectually and forever suspect.� He believed that history in 1807, with the advent of Napoleon and of himself, had come to an end, and that affirmation was possible and nihilism conquered.� The Phenomenology, the Bible that was to have prophesied only the past, put a limit on time.� In 1807 all sins were forgiven, and time had stopped.� But history has continued.� Other sins, since then, have been hurled in the face of the world and have revived the scandal of the former crimes, which the German philosopher had already forgiven forever.� The deification of Hegel by himself, after the deification of Napoleon, who would henceforth be innocent since he had succeeded in stabilizing history, lasted only seven years.� Instead of total affirmation, nihilism once more covered the face of the earth.� Philosophy, even servile philosophy, has its Waterloos.
����������� But nothing can discourage the
appetite for divinity in the heart of man.�
Others have come and are still to come who, forgetting
Individual
Terrorism
*
����������� Pisarev, the theoretician of Russian
nihilism, declares that the greatest fanatics are children and adolescents.
That is also true of nations.�
����������� The Germanization of
nineteenth-century
����������� The
Renunciation of Virtue
����������� In the 1820�s among the first
Russian revolutionaries, the Decembrists, virtue still existed.� Jacobin idealism had not yet been uprooted
from the hearts of these gentlemen.� They
even practised conscious virtue: �Our fathers were sybarites, we are Catos,�
said one of them, Peter Viazemsky.� To
this is only added the opinion, which will still be found in Bakunin and the
revolutionary socialists of 1905, that suffering regenerates.� The Decembrists remind us of the French
nobles who allied themselves with the third estate and renounced their
privileges.� Patrician idealists, they
deliberately chose to sacrifice themselves for the liberation of the
people.� Despite the fact that their
leader, Pestel, was a political and social theorist, their abortive conspiracy
had no fixed programme; it is not even sure that they believed in the
possibility of success.� �Yes, we shall
die,� one of them said on the eve of the insurrection, �but it will be a fine
death.�� It was, in fact, a fine death.� In December 1825 the rebels, arranged in
formation, were mown down by cannon fire in the square in front of the Senate
at
����������� In this atmosphere of exaltation, German thought came to combat French influence and impose its prestige on minds torn between their desire for vengeance and justice and the realization of their own impotent isolation.� It was first received, extolled, and commented upon as though it were revelation itself.� The best minds were inflamed with a passion for philosophy.� They even went so far as to put Hegel�s Logic into verse.� For the most part, Russian intellectuals at first inferred, from the Hegelian system, the justification of a form of social quietism.� To be aware of the rationality of the world sufficed; the Spirit would realize itself, in any case, at the end of time.� That is the first reaction of Stankevich, [�The world is ordered by the spirit of reason, this reassures me about everything else.�] Bakunin, and Bielinsky, for example. Then the Russian mind recoiled at this factual, if not intentional, complicity with absolutism and, immediately, jumped to the opposite extreme.
����������� Nothing is more revealing, in this
respect, than the evolution of Bielinsky, one of the most remarkable and
influential minds of the 1830�s and 40�s.�
Beginning with a background of rather vague libertarian idealism,
Bielinsky suddenly discovers Hegel.� In
his room, at
����������� Bielinsky understood that what he wanted was not the absolute of reason but the fullness of life.� He refuses to identify them.� He wants the immortality of the entire man, clothed in his living body, not the abstract immortality of the species become Spirit.� He argues with equal passion against new adversaries, and draws, from this fierce interior debate, conclusions that he owes to Hegel, but which he turns against him.
����������� These are the conclusions of
individualism in revolt.� The individual
cannot accept history as it is.� He must
destroy reality, not collaborate with it, in order to affirm his own
existence.� �Negation is my god, as
reality formerly was.� My heroes are the
destroyers of the past: Luther, Voltaire, the Encyclopedists, the Terrorists,
Byron in Cain.�� Thus we rediscover here, simultaneously, all
the themes of metaphysical rebellion.�
Certainly, the French tradition of individualistic socialism always
remained alive in
����������� Three
of the Possessed
����������� When Herzen, in making his apology for the nihilist movement � only to the extent, it is true, that he sees in it a still greater emancipation from ready-made ideas � writes: �The annihilation of the past is the procreation of the future,� he is using the language of Bielinsky.� Koteiarevsky, speaking of the so-called radicals of the period, defends them as apostles �who thought that the past must be completely renounced and the human personality must be constructed to quite another plan.�� Stirner�s claim reappears with the total rejection of history and the determination to construct the future, no longer with regard to the historical spirit, but so as to coincide with the man-king.� But the man-king cannot raise himself to power unaided.� He has need of others and therefore enters into a nihilist contradiction which Pisarev, Bakunin, and Nechaiev will try to resolve by slightly extending the area of destruction and negation, to the point where terrorism finally kills the contradiction itself, in a simultaneous act of sacrifice and murder.
����������� The nihilism of the 1860�s began, apparently, with the most radical negation imaginable: the rejection of any action that was not purely egoistic.� We know that the very term nihilism was invented by Turgeniev in his novel Fathers and Sons, whose hero, Bazarov, was an exact portrayal of this type of man.� Pisarev, when he wrote a criticism of this book, proclaimed that the nihilists recognized Bazarov as their model.� �We have nothing,� said Bazarov, �to boast about but the sterile knowledge of understanding, up to a certain point, the sterility of what exists.�� �Is that,� he was asked, �what is called nihilism?�� �Yes, that is what is called nihilism.�� Pisarev praises Bazarov�s attitude, which for the sake of clarity he defines thus: �I am a stranger to the order of existing things, I have nothing to do with it.�� Thus the only value resides in rational egoism.
����������� In denying everything that is not satisfaction of the self, Pisarev declares war on philosophy, on art, which he considers absurd, on erroneous ethics, on religion, and even on customs and on good manners.� He constructs a theory of intellectual terrorism which makes one think of the present-day surrealists.� Provocation is made into a doctrine, but on a level of which Raskolnikov provides the perfect example.� At the height of this fine transport, Pisarev asks himself, without even laughing, whether he is justified in killing his own mother and answers: �And why not, if I want to do so, and if I find it useful?�
����������� From that point on, it is surprising
not to find the nihilists engaged in making a fortune or acquiring a title or
in cynically taking advantage of every opportunity that offers itself.� It is true that there were nihilists to be
found in advantageous positions on all levels of society.� But they did not construct a theory from
their cynicism and preferred on all occasions to pay visible and quite
inconsequential homage to virtue.� As for
those we are discussing, they contradicted themselves by the defiance they hurled
in the face of society, which in itself was the affirmation of a value.� They called themselves materialists; their
bedside book was Buchner�s Force and
Matter.� But one of them confessed:
�Every one of us was ready to go to the scaffold and to give his head for
Moleschott and Darwin,� thus putting doctrine well ahead of matter.� Doctrine, taken seriously in this degree, has
an air of religion and fanaticism.� For
Pisarev, Lamarck was a traitor because
����������� However, it was by choosing to make reason, in its most limited aspect, into an act of faith that the nihilists provided their successors with a model.� They believed in nothing but reason and self-interest.� But instead of scepticism, they chose to propagate a doctrine and became socialists.� Therein lies their basic contradiction.� Like all adolescent minds they simultaneously experienced doubt and the need to believe.� Their personal solution consists in endowing their negation with the intransigence and passion of faith.� What, after all, is astonishing about that?� Veidle quotes the scornful phrase used by Soloviev, the philosopher, in denouncing this contradiction: �Man is descended from monkeys, therefore let us love one another.�� Pisarev�s truth, however, is to be found in this dilemma.� If man is the image of God, then it does not matter that he is deprived of human love; the day will come when he will be satiated with it.� But if he is a blind creature, wandering in the darkness of a cruel and circumscribed condition, he has need of his equals and of their ephemeral love.� Where can charity take refuge, after all, if not in the world without God?� In the other, grace provides for all, even for the rich.� Those who deny everything at least understand that negation is a calamity.� They can then open their hearts to the misery of others and finally deny themselves.� Pisarev did not shrink from the idea of murdering his mother, and yet he managed to find the exact words to describe injustice.� He wanted to enjoy life egotistically, but he suffered imprisonment and finally went mad.� Such an ostentatious display of cynicism finally led him to an understanding of love, to be exiled from it and to suffer from it to the point of suicide, thus revealing, in place of the man-god he wanted to create, the unhappy, suffering old man whose greatness illuminates the pages of history.
����������� Bakunin embodies, but in a manner spectacular in a different way, the very same contradictions.� He died on the eve of the terrorist epic, in 1876.� Moreover, he rejected in advance individual outrages and denounced �the Brutuses of the period.�� He had a certain respect for them, however, since he reproached Herzen for having openly criticized Karakosov for his abortive attempt to assassinate Alexander II in 1866.� This feeling of respect had its reasons.� Bakunin influenced the course of events in the same manner as Bielinsky and the nihilists and directed them into the channel of individual revolt.� But he contributed something more: a germ of political cynicism, which will congeal, with Nechaiev, into a doctrine and will drive the revolutionary movement to extremes.
����������� Bakunin had hardly emerged from
adolescence when he was overwhelmed and uprooted by Hegelian philosophy, as if
by a gigantic earthquake.� He buries
himself in it day and night �to the point of madness,� he says, and adds: �I
saw absolutely nothing but Hegel�s categories.��
When he emerges from this initiation, it is with the exaltation of a
neophyte.� �My personal self is dead
forever, my life is the true life.�� He
required very little time to see the dangers of that comfortable position.� He who has understood reality does not rebel
against it, but rejoices in it; in other words, he becomes a conformist.� Nothing in Bakunin�s character predestined
him to that watchdog philosophy.� It is
possible, also, that his travels in
����������� After having extolled absolute Unity, Bakunin enthusiastically embraces the most elementary form of Manich�ism.� What he wants, of course, is once and for all �the universal and authentically democratic Church of Freedom.�� That is his religion; he belongs to his times.� It is not sure, however, that his faith on this point has been perfect.� In his Confession to Czar Nicholas I, he seems to be sincere when he says that he has never been able to believe in the final revolution �except with a supernatural and painful effort to stifle forcibly the interior voice which whispered to me that my hopes were absurd.�� His theory of immorality, on the other hand, is much more firmly based and he is often to be seen plunging about in it with the ease and pleasure of a mettlesome horse.� History is governed by only two principles: the State and social revolution, revolution and counterrevolution, which can never be reconciled, and which are engaged in a death struggle.� The State is the incarnation of crime.� �The smallest and most inoffensive State is still criminal in its dreams.�� Therefore revolution is the incarnation of good.� This struggle, which surpasses politics, is also the struggle of Luciferian principles against the divine principles.� Bakunin explicitly reintroduces into rebellious action one of the themes of romantic rebellion.� Proudhon had already decreed that God is Evil and exclaimed: �Come, Satan, victim of the calumnies of kings and of the petty-minded!�� Bakunin also gives a glimpse of the broader implications of an apparently political rebellion: �Evil is satanic rebellion against divine authority, a rebellion in which we see, nevertheless, the fruitful seed of every form of human emancipation.�� Like the Fraticelli of fourteenth-century Bohemia, revolutionary socialists today use this phrase as a password: �In the name of him to whom a great wrong has been done.�
����������� The struggle against creation will therefore be without mercy and without ethics, and the only salvation lies in extermination.� �The passion for destruction is a creative passion.�� Bakunin�s burning words on the subject of the revolution of 1848 in his Confession vehemently proclaim this pleasure in destruction.� �A feast without beginning and without end,� he says.� In fact, for him as for all who are oppressed, the revolution is a feast, in the religious sense of the word.� Here we are reminded of the French anarchist C�urderoy, who, in his book Hurrah, or the Cossack Revolution, summoned the hordes of the north to lay waste to the whole world.� He also wanted to �apply the torch to my father�s house� and proclaimed that the only hope lay in the human deluge and in chaos.� Rebellion is grasped, throughout these manifestations, in its pure state, in its biological truth.� That is why Bakunin with exceptional perspicacity was the only one of his period to declare war on science, the idol of his contemporaries.� Against every abstract idea he pleaded the cause of the complete man, completely identified with his rebellion.� If he glorifies the brigand leader of the peasant rising, if he chooses to model himself on Stenka Razin and Pugachev, it is because these men fought, without either doctrine or principle, for an ideal of pure freedom.� Bakunin introduces into the midst of revolution the naked principle of rebellion.� �The tempest and life, that is what we need.� A new world, without laws, and consequently free.�
����������� But is a world without laws a free world?� That is the question posed by every rebellion.� If the question were to be asked of Bakunin, the answer would not be in doubt.� Despite the fact that he was opposed in all circumstances, and with the most extreme lucidity, to authoritarian socialism, yet from the moment when he himself begins to define the society of the future, he does so � without being at all concerned with the contradiction � in terms of a dictatorship.� The statutes of the International Fraternity (1864-7), which he edited himself, already establish the absolute subordination of the individual to the central committee, during the period of action.� It is the same for the period that will follow the revolution.� He hopes to see in liberated Russia �a strong dictatorial power � a power supported by partisans, enlightened by their advice, justified by their free collaboration, but which would be limited to nothing and by no one.�� Bakunin contributed as much as his enemy Marx to Leninist doctrine.� The dream of the revolutionary Slav empire, moreover, as Bakunin conjures it up before the Czar, is exactly the same, down to the last detail of its frontiers, as that realized by Stalin.� Coming from a man who was wise enough to say that the essential driving-force of Czarist Russia was fear and who rejected the Marxist theory of party dictatorship, these conceptions may seem contradictory.� But this contradiction demonstrates that the origins of authoritarian doctrines are partially nihilistic.� Pisarev justifies Bakunin.� Certainly, the latter wanted total freedom; but he hoped to realize it through total destruction.� To destroy everything is to pledge oneself to building without foundations, and then to holding up the walls with one�s hands.� He who rejects the entire past, without keeping any part of it which could serve to breathe life into the revolution, condemns himself to finding justification only in the future and, in the meantime, to entrusting the police with the task of justifying the provisional state of affairs.� Bakunin proclaims dictatorship, not despite his desire for destruction, but in accordance with it.� Nothing, in fact, could turn him from this path since his ethical values had also been dissolved in the crucible of total negation.� In his openly obsequious Confession to the Czar, which he wrote in order to gain his freedom, he spectacularly introduces the double game into revolutionary politics.� With his Catechism of a Revolutionary, which he probably drafted in Switzerland, with the help of Nechaiev, he voices, even though he denies it later, the political cynicism that will never cease to weigh on the revolutionary movement and which Nechaiev himself has so provocatively illustrated.
����������� A less well-known figure than
Bakunin, still more mysterious, but more significant for our purpose, Nechaiev
pushed nihilism to the farthest coherent point.�
His thought presents practically no contradiction.� He appeared, about 1866, in revolutionary
intellectual circles, and died obscurely, in January 1882.� In this short space of time he never ceased
to suborn the students around him, Bakunin himself, the revolutionary refugees,
and finally the guard in his prison, whom he succeeded in persuading to take
part in a crazy conspiracy.� When he
first appears, he is already quite sure of what he thinks.� If Bakunin was fascinated by him to the point
of� consenting to entrust him with
imaginary authority, it is because he recognized in that implacable figure the
type of human being that he recommended and what he himself, in a certain
manner, would have been if he had been able to silence his heart.� Nechaiev was not content with saying that one
must unite with �the savage world of bandits, the true and unique revolutionary
environment of
����������� He not only gave dissertations on universal destruction; his originality lay in coldly claiming, for those who dedicate themselves to the revolution, an �Everything is permitted� and in actually permitting himself everything, �The revolutionary man is condemned in advance.� He must have neither romantic relationships nor objects to engage his feelings.� He should even cast off his own name.� Every part of him should be concentrated in one single passion: the revolution.�� If history is, in fact, independent of all principles and composed only of a struggle between revolution and counterrevolution, there is no way out but to espouse wholeheartedly one of the two and either die or be resurrected.� Nechaiev pursues this logic to the bitter end.� With him, for the first time, revolution is going to be explicitly separated from love and friendship.
����������� The consequences of arbitrary psychology set in motion by Hegel�s method can be seen, for the first time, in Nechaiev.� Hegel had allowed that the mutual recognition of minds could be accomplished in love. [It could also be brought about by the kind of admiration in which the word master assumes its fullest meaning: he who creates without destroying.]� He would not, however, give a place in the foreground of his analysis to this �phenomenon,� which, according to him, he found �had not the strength, the patience, nor the application of the negative.�� He had chosen to demonstrate human minds in blind combat, dimly groping on the sands, like crabs that finally come to grips in a fight to the death, and voluntarily abandoned the equally legitimate image of beams of light painfully searching for one another in the night and finally focusing together in a blaze of illumination.� Those who love, friends or lovers, know that love is not only a blinding flash, but also a long and painful struggle in the darkness for the realization of definitive recognition and reconciliation.� After all, if virtue in the course of history is recognized by the extent to which it gives proof of patience, real love is as patient as hatred.� Moreover, the demand for justice is not the only justification throughout the centuries for revolutionary passion, which is sustained by a painful insistence on universal friendship, even � and above all � in defiance of an inimical heaven.� Those who die for justice, throughout history, have always been called �brothers.�� Violence, for every one of them, is directed only against the enemy, in the service of the community of the oppressed.� But if the revolution is the only positive value, it has a right to claim everything � even the denunciation and therefore the sacrifice of the friend.� Henceforth, violence will be directed against one and all, in the service of an abstract idea.� The accession to power of the possessed had to take place so that it could be said, once and for all, that the revolution, in itself, was more important than the people it wanted to save, and that friendship, which until then had transformed defeats into the semblance of victories, must be sacrificed and postponed until the still invisible day of victory.
����������� Nechaiev�s originality thus lies in
justifying the violence done to one�s brothers.�
He decided, with Bakunin, on the terms of the Catcheism.� But once the
latter, in a fit of mental aberration, had given him the mission of representing
in
����������� Although these beautiful thoughts
have realized their full meaning today, Nechaiev did not live to see the
triumph of his principles.� He tried to
apply them, at all events, at the time of the student Ivanov�s murder, which so
struck the popular imagination of the time that Dostoievsky made it one of the
themes of The Possessed.� Ivanov, whose only fault seems to have been
that he had doubts about the central committee of which Nechaiev claimed to be
a delegate, was considered an enemy of the revolution because he was opposed to
the man who was identified with the revolution.�
Therefore he must die.� �What
right have we to take a man�s life?� asks Uspensky, one of Nechaiev�s comrades.
� �It is not a question of right, but of our duty to eliminate everything that
may harm our cause.�� When revolution is
the sole value, there are, in fact, no more rights, there are only duties.� But by an immediate inversion, every right is
assumed in the name of duty.� For the
sake of the cause, Nechaiev, who has never made an attempt on the life of any
tyrant, ambushes and kills Ivanov.� Then
he leaves
����������� At this period, in the bosom of the revolution, everything is really permitted and murder can be elevated into a principle.� It was thought, however, with the renewal of Populism in 1870, that this revolut