Part Five
Thought at the
Rebellion and Murder
*
Far from
this source of life, however,
Having
believed for a long time that it could fight against God with all humanity as
its ally, the European mind then perceived that it must also, if it did not
want to die, fight against men. The
rebels who, united against death, wanted to construct, on the foundation of the
human species, a savage immortality are terrified at the prospect of being
obliged to kill in their turn.
Nevertheless, if they retreat they must accept death; if they advance
they must accept murder. Rebellion, cut
off from its origins and cynically travestied, oscillates, on all levels, between
sacrifice and murder. The form of
justice that it advocated and that it hoped was impartial has turned out to be
summary. The kingdom of grace has been
conquered, but the kingdom of justice is crumbling too.
Must we
therefore renounce every kind of rebellion, whether we accept, with all its injustices,
a society that outlives its usefulness, or whether we decide, cynically, to
serve, against the interest of man, the inexorable advance of history? After all, if the logic of our reflection
should lead to a cowardly conformism it would have to be accepted as certain
families sometimes accept inevitable dishonour.
If it must also justify all the varieties of attempts against man, and
even his systematic destruction, it would be necessary to consent to his suicide. The desire for justice would finally realize
its ambition: the disappearance of a world of tradesmen and police.
But are we
still living in a rebellious world? Has
not rebellion become, on the contrary, the excuse of a new variety of
tyrant? Can the “We are” contained in
the movement of rebellion, without shame and without subterfuge, be reconciled
with murder? In assigning oppression a
limit within which begins the dignity common to all men, rebellion defined a
primary value. It put in the first rank
of its frame of reference an obvious complicity among men, a common texture,
the solidarity of chains, a communication between human being and human being
which makes men both similar and united.
In this way, it compelled the mind to take a first step in defiance of
an absurd world. By this progress it
rendered still more acute the problem that it must now solve in regard to
murder. On the level of the absurd, in
fact, murder would only give rise to logical contradictions; on the level of
rebellion it is mental laceration. For
it is now a question of deciding whether it is possible to kill someone whose
resemblance to ourselves we have at last recognized and whose identity we have
just sanctified. When we have only just
conquered solitude, must we then re-establish it definitively by legitimizing
the act that isolates everything? To
force solitude on a man who has just come to
understand that he is not alone, is that not the definitive crime against man?
Logically,
one should reply that murder and rebellion are contradictory. If a single master should, in fact, be
killed, the rebel, in a certain way, is no longer justified in using the terms community of men from which he derived
his justification. If this world has no
higher meaning, if man is only responsible to man, it suffices for a man to
remove one single human being from the society of the living to automatically
exclude himself from it. When Cain kills
Abel, he flees to the desert. And if
murderers are legion, then this legion lives in the desert and in that other
kind of solitude called promiscuity.
From the
moment that he strikes, the rebel cuts the world in two. He rebelled in the name of the identity of
man with man and he sacrifices this identity by consecrating the difference in
blood. His only existence, in the midst
of suffering and oppression, was contained in this identity. The same movement, which intended to affirm
him, thus brings an end to his existence.
He can claim that some, or even almost all, are with him. But if one single human being is missing in the
irreplaceable world of fraternity, then this world is immediately
depopulated. If we are not, then I am
not and this explains the infinite sadness of Kaliayev and the silence of
Saint-Just. The rebels, who have decided
to gain their ends through violence and murder, have in vain replaced, in order
to preserve the hope of existing, “We are” by the “We shall be.” When the murderer and the victim have
disappeared, the community will provide its own justification without
them. The exception having lasted its
appointed time, the rule will once more become possible. On the level of history, as in individual
life, murder is thus a desperate exception or it is nothing. The disturbance that it brings to the order
of things offers no hope of a future; it is an exception and therefore it can
be neither utilitarian nor systematic as the purely historical attitude would
have it. It is the limit that can be
reached but once, after which one must die.
The rebel has only one way of reconciling himself with his act of murder
if he allows himself to be led into performing it: to accept his own death and
sacrifice. He kills and dies so that it
shall be clear that murder is impossible.
He demonstrates that, in reality, he prefers the “We are” to the “We
shall be.” The calm happiness of
Kaliayev in his prison, the serenity of Saint-Just when he walks toward the
scaffold, are explained in their turn. Beyond that farthest frontier, contradiction
and nihilism begin.
Nihilistic Murder
Irrational
crime and rational crime, in fact, both equally betray the value brought to
light by the movement of rebellion. Let
us first consider the former. He who
denies everything and assumes the authority to kill – Sade, the homicidal
dandy, the pitiless Unique, Karamazov, the zealous supporters of the unleashed
bandit – lay claim to nothing short of total freedom and the unlimited display
of human pride. Nihilism confounds
creator and created in the same blind fury.
Suppressing every principle of hope, it rejects the idea of any limit,
and in blind indignation, which no longer is even aware of its reasons, ends
with the conclusion that it is a matter of indifference to kill when the victim
is already condemned to death.
But its
reasons – the mutual recognition of a common destiny and the communication of
men between themselves – are always valid.
Rebellion proclaimed them and undertook to serve them. In the same way it defined, in contradiction
to nihilism, a rule of conduct that has no need to await the end of history to
explain its actions and which is, nevertheless, not formal. Contrary to Jacobin morality, it made
allowances for everything that escapes from rules and laws. It opened the way to a morality which, far
from obeying abstract principles, discovers them only in the heat of battle and
in the incessant movement of contradiction.
Nothing justifies the assertion that these principles have existed
externally; it is of no use to declare that they will one day exist. With us, and throughout all history, they
deny servitude, falsehood, and terror.
There is,
in fact, nothing in common between a master and a slave; it is impossible to
speak and communicate with a person who has been reduced to servitude. Instead of the implicit and untrammelled
dialogue through which we come to recognize our similarity and consecrate our
destiny, servitude gives sway to the most terrible of silences. If injustice is bad for the rebel, it is not
because it contradicts an eternal idea of justice, but because it perpetuates
the silent hostility that separates the oppressor from the oppressed. It kills the small part of existence that can
be realized on this earth through the mutual understanding of men. In the same way, since the man who lies shuts
himself off from other men, falsehood is therefore proscribed and, on a
slightly lower level, murder and violence, which impose definitive
silence. The mutual understanding and
communication discovered by rebellion can survive only in the free exchange of conversation. Every ambiguity, every misunderstanding,
leads to death; clear language and simple words are the only salvation from
this death. [It is worth noting that the language peculiar to totalitarian
doctrines is always a scholastic or administrative language.] The climax of
every tragedy lies in the deafness of its heroes. Plato is right and not Moses and
Nietzsche. Dialogue on the level of
mankind is less costly than the gospel preached by totalitarian regimes in the
form of a monologue dictated from the top of a lonely mountain. On the stage as in reality, the monologue
precedes death. Every rebel, solely by
the movement that sets him in opposition to the oppressor, therefore pleads for
life, undertakes to struggle against servitude, falsehood, and terror, and
affirms, in a flash, that these three afflictions are the cause of silence
between men, that they obscure them from one another and prevent them from
rediscovering themselves in the only value that can save them from nihilism –
the long complicity of men at grips with their destiny.
In a flash
– but that is time enough to say, provisionally, that the most extreme form of
freedom, the freedom to kill, is not compatible with the sense of
rebellion. Rebellion is in no way the
demand for total freedom. On the
contrary, rebellion puts total freedom up for trial. It specifically attacks the unlimited power
that authorizes a superior to violate the forbidden frontier. Far from demanding general independence, the
rebel wants it to be recognized that freedom has its limits everywhere that a
human being is to be found – the limit being precisely that human being’s power
to rebel. The most profound reason for
rebellious intransigence is to be found here.
The more aware rebellion is of demanding a just limit, the more
inflexible it becomes. The rebel
undoubtedly demands a certain degree of freedom for himself; but in no case, if
he is consistent, does he demand the right to destroy the existence and the
freedom of others. He humiliates no
one. The freedom he claims, he claims
for all; the freedom he refuses, he forbids everyone to enjoy. He is not only the slave against the master,
but also man against the world of master and slave. Therefore, thanks to rebellion, there is
something more in history than the relation between mastery and servitude. Unlimited power is not the only law. It is in the name of another value that the
rebel affirms the impossibility of total freedom while he claims for himself
the relative freedom necessary to recognize this impossibility. Every human freedom, at its very roots, is
therefore relative. Absolute freedom,
which is the freedom to kill, is the only one which does not claim, at the same
time as itself, the things that limit and obliterate it. Thus it cuts itself off from its roots and –
abstract and malevolent shade – wanders haphazardly until such time as it
imagines that it has found substance in some ideology.
It is then
possible to say that rebellion, when it develops into destruction, is
illogical. Claiming the unity of the
human condition, it is a force of life, not of death. Its most profound logic is not the logic of
destruction; it is the logic of creation.
Its movement, in order to remain authentic, must never abandon any of
the terms of the contradiction that sustains it. It must be faithful to the yes that it contains as well as to the no that nihilistic interpretations
isolate in rebellion. The logic of the
rebel is to want to serve justice so as not to add to the injustice of the
human condition, to insist on plain language so as not to increase the
universal falsehood, and to wager, in spite of human misery, for
happiness. Nihilistic passion, adding to
falsehood and injustice, destroys in its fury its original demands and thus
deprives rebellion of its most cogent reasons.
It kills in the fond conviction that this world is dedicated to
death. The consequence of rebellion, on
the contrary, is to refuse to legitimize murder because rebellion, in
principle, is a protest against death.
But in man
were capable of introducing unity into the world entirely on his own, if he
could establish the reign, by his own decree, of sincerity, innocence, and
justice, he would be God Himself.
Equally, if he could accomplish all this, there would be no more reasons
for rebellion. If rebellion exists, it
is because falsehood, injustice, and violence are part of the rebel’s
condition. He cannot, therefore,
absolutely claim not to kill or lie, without renouncing his rebellion and
accepting, once and for all, evil and murder.
But no more can he agree to kill and lie, since the inverse reasoning
which would justify murder and violence would also destroy the reasons for his
insurrection. Thus the rebel can never
find peace. He knows what is good and,
despite himself, does evil. The value
that supports him is never given to him once and for all; he must fight to
uphold it, unceasingly. Again the
existence he achieves collapses if rebellion does not support it. In any case, if he is not always able not to
kill, either directly or indirectly, he can put his conviction and passion to
work at diminishing the chances of murder around him. His only virtue will lie in never yielding to
the impulse to allow himself to be engulfed in the
shadows that surround him and in obstinately dragging the chains of evil, with
which he is bound, toward the light of good.
If he finally kills himself, he will accept death. Faithful to his origins, the rebel demonstrates
by sacrifice that his real freedom is not freedom from murder but freedom from
his own death. At the same time, he
achieves honour in metaphysical terms.
Thus Kaliayev climbs the gallows and visibly designates to all his
fellow men the exact limit where man’s honour begins and ends.
Historical Murder
Rebellion
also deploys itself in history, which demands not only exemplary choices, but
also efficacious attitudes. Rational
murder runs the risk of finding itself justified by history. The contradiction of rebellion, then, is
reflected in an apparently insoluble contradiction, of which the two
counterparts in politics are on the one hand the opposition between violence
and non-violence, and on the other hand the opposition between justice and
freedom. Let us try to define them in the
terms of their paradox.
The
positive value contained in the initial movement of rebellion supposes the
renunciation of violence committed on principle. It consequently entails the impossibility of
stabilizing a revolution. Rebellion is,
incessantly, prey to this contradiction.
On the level of history it becomes even more insoluble. If I renounce the project of making human
identity respected, I abdicate in favour of oppression,
I renounce rebellion and fall back on an attitude of nihilistic consent. Then nihilism becomes conservative. If I insist that human identity should be
recognized as existing, then I engage in an action which, to succeed, supposes
a cynical attitude toward violence and denies this identity and rebellion
itself. To extend the contradiction
still farther, if the unity of the world cannot come from on high, man must
construct it on his own level, in history.
History without a value to transfigure it, is
controlled by the law of expediency.
Historical materialism, determinism, violence, negation of every form of
freedom which does not coincide with expediency and the world of courage and of
silence, are the highly legitimate consequences of a pure philosophy of
history. In the world today, only a
philosophy of eternity could justify non-violence. To absolute worship of history and of the
historical situation it would ask whence it had sprung. Finally, it would put the responsibility for
justice in God’s hands, thus consecrating injustice. Equally, its answers, in their turn, would
insist on faith. The objection will be
raised of evil, and of the paradox of an all-powerful and malevolent, or
benevolent and sterile, God. The choice
will remain open between grace and history, God or the sword.
What,
then, should be the attitude of the rebel?
He cannot turn away from the world and from history without denying the
very principle of his rebellion, nor can he choose eternal life without
resigning himself, in one sense, to evil.
If, for example, he is not a Christian, he should go to the bitter
end. But to the bitter end means to
choose history absolutely and with it murder, if murder is essential to
history: to accept the justification of murder is again to deny his
origins. If the rebel makes no choice,
he chooses the silence and slavery of others.
If, in a moment of despair, he declares that he opts both against God
and against history, he is the witness of pure freedom; in other words, of
nothing. In our period of history and in
the impossible condition in which he finds himself, of being unable to affirm a
superior motive that does not have its limits in evil, his apparent dilemma is
silence or murder – in either case, a surrender.
And it is
the same again with justice and freedom.
These two demands are already to be found at the beginning of the
movement of rebellion and are to be found again in the first impetus of
revolution. The history of revolutions
demonstrates, however, that they almost always conflict as though their mutual
demands were irreconcilable. Absolute
freedom is the right of the strongest to dominate. Therefore it prolongs the conflicts that
profit by injustice. Absolute justice is
achieved by the suppression of all contradiction: therefore it destroys
freedom. [In his Entretiens sur le bon
usage de la liberté (Conversations on
the Good Use of Freedom), Jean Grenier lays the foundation for an argument
that can be summed up thus: absolute freedom is the destruction of all value;
absolute value suppresses all freedom.
Likewise Palante: “If there is a single and universal truth, freedom has
no reason for existing.”] The revolution
to achieve justice, through freedom, ends by aligning them against each
other. Thus there exists in every
revolution, once the class that dominated up to then has been liquidated, a
stage in which it gives birth, itself, to a movement of rebellion which
indicates its limits and announces its chances of failure. The revolution, first of all, proposes to
satisfy the spirit of rebellion which has given rise to it; then it is compelled
to deny it, the better to affirm itself.
There is, it would seem, an ineradicable opposition between the movement
of rebellion and the attainments of revolution.
But these
contradictions only exist in the absolute.
They suppose a world and a method of thought without meditation. There is, in fact, no conciliation possible
between a god who is totally separated from history and a history purged of all
transcendence. Their representatives on
earth are, indeed, the yogi and the commissar.
But the difference between these two types of men is not, as has been
stated, the difference between ineffectual purity and expediency. The former chooses only the ineffectiveness
of abstention and the second the ineffectiveness of destruction. Because both reject the conciliatory value
that rebellion, on the contrary, reveals, they offer us only two kinds of
impotence, both equally removed from reality, that of good and that of evil.
If, in
fact, to ignore history comes to the same as denying reality, it is still
alienating oneself from reality to consider history as a completely
self-sufficient absolute. The revolution
of the twentieth century believes that it can avoid nihilism and remain
faithful to true rebellion, by replacing God by history. In reality, it fortifies the former and
betrays the latter. History in its pure
form furnishes no value by itself.
Therefore one must live by the principles of immediate expediency and
keep silent or tell lies. Systematic
violence, or imposed silence, calculation or concerted falsehood
become the inevitable rule.
Purely historical thought is therefore nihilistic: it wholeheartedly
accepts the evil of history and in this way is opposed to rebellion. It is useless for it to affirm, in
compensation, the absolute rationality of history, for historical reason will
never be fulfilled and will never have its full meaning or value until the end
of history. In the meanwhile, it is
necessary to act, and to act without a moral rule in order that the definitive
rule should one day be realized.
Cynicism as a political attitude is only logical as a function of
absolutist thought; in other words, absolute nihilism on the one hand, absolute
rationalism on the other. [We see again, and this cannot be said too often,
that absolute rationalism is not rationalism.
The difference between the two is the same as the difference between
cynicism and realism. The first drives
the second beyond the limits that give it meaning and legitimacy. More brutal, it is finally less
efficacious. It is violence opposed to
force.] As for the consequences, there
is no difference between the two attitudes.
From the moment that they are accepted, the earth becomes a desert.
In
reality, the purely historical absolute is not even conceivable. Jaspers’s thought, for example, in its
essentials, underlines the impossibility of man’s grasping totality, since he
lives in the midst of this totality.
History, as an entirety, could exist only in the eyes of an observer
outside it and outside the world.
History only exists, in the final analysis, for God. Thus it is impossible to act according to
plans embracing the totality of universal history. Any historical enterprise can therefore only
be a more or less reasonable or justifiable adventure. It is primarily a risk. Insofar as it is a risk it cannot be used to
justify any excess or any ruthless and absolutist position.
If, on the
other hand, rebellion could found a philosophy it would be a philosophy of
limits, of calculated ignorance, and of risk.
He who does not know everything cannot kill everything. The rebel, far from making an absolute of
history, rejects and disputes it, in the name of a concept that he has of his
own nature. He refuses his condition,
and his condition to a large extent is historical. Injustice, the transience of time, death –
all are manifest in history. In spurning
them, history itself is spurned. Most
certainly the rebel does not deny the history that surrounds him; it is in
terms of this that he attempts to affirm himself. But confronted with it, he feels like the artist
confronted with reality; he spurns it without escaping from it. He had never succeeded in creating an
absolute history. Even though he can
participate, by the force of events, in the crime of history, he cannot
necessarily legitimate it. Rational
crime not only cannot be admitted on the level of rebellion, but also signifies
the death of rebellion. To make this
evidence more convincing, rational crime exercises itself, in the first place,
on rebels whose insurrection contests a history that is henceforth deified.
The
mystification peculiar to the mind which claims to be revolutionary today sums
up and increases bourgeois mystification.
It contrives, by the promise of absolute justice, the acceptance of
perpetual injustice, of unlimited compromise, and of indignity. Rebellion itself only aspires to the relative
and can only promise an assured dignity coupled with relative justice. It supposes a limit at which the community of
man is established. Its universe is the
universe of relative values. Instead of
saying, with Hegel and Marx, that all is necessary, it only repeats that all is
possible and that, at a certain point of the farthest frontier, it is worth
making the supreme sacrifice for the sake of the possible. Between God and history, the yogi and the
commissar, it opens a difficult path where contradictions may exist and
thrive. Let us consider the two
contradictions given as an example in this way.
A
revolutionary action which wishes to be coherent in terms of its origins should
be embodied in an active consent to the relative. Uncompromising as to its means, it would
accept an approximation as far as its ends are concerned and, so that the
approximation should become more and more accurately defined, it would allow
absolute freedom of speech. Thus it
would preserve the common existence that justifies its insurrection. In particular, it would preserve as an
absolute law the permanent possibility of self-expression. This defines a particular line of conduct in
regard to justice and freedom. There is
no justice in society without natural or civil rights as its basis. There are no rights without expression of
those rights. If the rights are
expressed without hesitation it is more than probable that, sooner or later,
the justice they postulate will come to the world. To conquer existence, we must start from the
small amount of existence we find in ourselves and not deny it from the very
beginning. To silence the law until
justice is established is to silence it forever since it will have no more
occasion to speak if justice reigns forever.
Once more, we thus confide justice into the keeping of those who alone
have the ability to make themselves heard – those in power. For centuries, justice and existence as
dispensed by those in power have been considered a favour. To kill freedom in order to establish the
reign of justice comes to the same as resuscitating the idea of grace without
divine intercession and of restoring by a mystifying reaction the mystic body
in its basest elements. Even when
justice is not realized, freedom preserves the power to protest and guarantees
human communication. Justice in a silent
world, justice enslaved and mute, destroys mutual complicity and finally can no
longer be justice. The revolution of the
twentieth century has arbitrarily separated, for overambitious ends of
conquest, two inseparable ideas.
Absolute freedom mocks at justice.
Absolute justice denies freedom.
To be fruitful, the two ideas must find their limits in each other. No man considers that his condition is free
if it is not at the same time just, nor just unless it is free. Freedom, precisely, cannot even be imagined
without the power of saying clearly what is just and what is unjust, of claiming
all existence in the name of a small part of existence which refuses to
die. Finally there is a justice, though
a very different kind of justice, in restoring freedom, which is the only
imperishable value of history. Men are
never really willing to die except for the sake of freedom: therefore they do
not believe in dying completely.
The same
reasoning can be applied to violence.
Absolute non-violence is the negative basis of slavery and its acts of
violence; systematic violence positively destroys the living community and the
existence we receive from it. To be
fruitful, these two ideas must establish final limits. In history, considered as an absolute,
violence finds itself legitimized; as a relative risk, it is the cause of a
rupture in communication. It must
therefore preserve, for the rebel, its provisional character of effraction and
must always be bound, if it cannot be avoided, to a personal responsibility and
to an immediate risk. Systematic
violence is part of the order of things; in a certain sense, this is
consolatory. Führerprinzip or historical Reason, whatever order may establish
it, it reigns over the universe of things, not the universe of men. Just as the rebel considers murder as the
limit that he must, if he is so inclined, consecrate by his own death, so
violence can only be an extreme limit which combats another form of violence,
as, for example, in the case of an insurrection. If an excess of injustice renders the latter
inevitable, the rebel rejects violence in advance, in the service of a doctrine
or of a reason of State. Every
historical crisis, for example, terminates in institutions. If we have no control over the crisis itself,
which is pure hazard, we do have control over the institutions, since we can
define them, choose the ones for which we will fight, and thus bend our effort
toward their establishment. Authentic
arts of rebellion will only consent to take up arms for institutions that limit
violence, not for those which codify it.
A revolution is not worth dying for unless it assumes the immediate suppression
of the death penalty; not worth going to prison for unless it refuses in
advance to pass sentence without fixed terms.
If rebel violence employs itself in the establishment of these
institutions, announcing its aims as often as it can, it is the only way in
which it can be really provisional. When
the end is absolute, historically speaking, and when it is believed certain of
realization, it is possible to go so far as to sacrifice others. When it is not, only oneself can be
sacrificed, in the hazards of a struggle for the common dignity of man. Does the end justify the means? That is possible. But what will justify the end? To that question, which historical thought
leaves pending, rebellion replies: the means.
What does
such an attitude signify in politics?
And, first of all, is it efficacious?
We must answer without hesitation that it is the only attitude that is
efficacious today. There are two sorts
of efficacy: that of typhoons and that of sap.
Historical absolutism is not efficacious, it is efficient; it has seized
and kept power. Once it is in possession
of power, it destroys the only creative reality. Uncompromising and limited action, springing
from rebellion, upholds this reality and only tries to extend it farther and
farther. It is not said that this action
cannot conquer. It is said that it runs
the risk of not conquering and of dying.
But either revolution will take this risk or it will confess that it is
only the undertaking of a new set of masters, punishable by the same
scorn. A revolution that is separated
from honour betrays its origins that belong to the reign of honour. Its choice, in any case, is limited to
material expediency and final annihilation, or to risks and hence to
creation. The revolutionaries of the
past went ahead as fast as they could and their optimism was complete. But today the revolutionary spirit has grown
in knowledge and clear-sightedness; it has behind it a hundred and fifty years
of experience. Moreover, the revolution
has lost its illusions of being a public holiday. It is, entirely on its own, a prodigious and
calculated enterprise, which embraces the entire universe. It knows, even though it does not always say
so, that it will be world-wide or that it will not be at all. Its chances are balanced against the risk of
a universal war, which, even in the event of victory, will only present it with
an Empire of ruins. It can remain
faithful to its nihilism, and incarnate in the charnel houses the ultimate
reason of history. Then it will be
necessary to renounce everything except the silent music that will again
transfigure the terrestrial hell. But
the revolutionary spirit in Europe can also, for the first and last time,
reflect upon its principles, ask itself what the deviation is which leads it
into terror and into war, and rediscover with the reasons for its rebellion,
its faith in itself.
Moderation and Excess
*
The errors
of contemporary revolution are first of all explained by the ignorance or
systematic misconception of that limit which seems
inseparable from human nature and which rebellion reveals. Nihilist thought, because it neglects this
frontier, ends by precipitating itself into a uniformly accelerated movement. Nothing any longer checks it in its course
and it reaches the point of justifying total destruction or unlimited
conquest. We now know, at the end of
this long inquiry into rebellion and nihilism, that rebellion with no other
limits but historical expediency signifies unlimited slavery. To escape this fate, the revolutionary mind,
if it wants to remain alive, must therefore return again to the sources of
rebellion and draw its inspiration from the only system of thought which is
faithful to its origins: thought that recognizes limits. If the limit discovered by rebellion
transfigures everything, if every thought, every action that goes beyond a
certain point negates itself, there is, in fact, a measure by which to judge
events and men. In history, as in
psychology, rebellion is an irregular pendulum, which swings in an erratic arc
because it is looking for its most perfect and profound rhythm. But its irregularity is not total: it
functions around a pivot. Rebellion, at
the same time that it suggests a nature common to all men, brings to light the
measure and the limit which are the very principle of this nature.
Every
reflection today, whether nihilist or positivist, gives birth, sometimes
without knowing it, to standards that science itself confirms. The quantum theory,
relativity, the uncertainty of interrelationships, define a world that
has no definable reality except on the scale of average greatness, which is our
own. The ideologies which guide our
world were born in the time of absolute scientific discoveries. Our real knowledge, on the other hand, only
justifies a system of thought based on relative discoveries. “Intelligence,” says Lazare Bickel, “is our faculty for not developing what we think to
the very end, so that we can still believe in reality.” Approximative thought is the only creator of
reality. [Science today betrays its origins and denies its own acquisitions in
allowing itself to be put to the service of State terrorism and the desire for
power. Its punishment and its
degradation lie in only being able to produce, in an abstract world, the means
of destruction and enslavement. But when
the limit is reached, science will perhaps serve the individual rebellion. This terrible necessity will mark the
decisive turning-point.]
The very
forces of matter, in their blind advance, impose their own limits. That is why it is useless to want to reverse
the advance of technology. The age of
the spinning-wheel is over and the dream of a civilization of artisans is
vain. The machine is bad only in the way
that it is now employed. Its benefits
must be accepted even if its ravages are rejected. The truck, driven day and night, does not
humiliate its driver, who knows it inside out and treats it with affection and
efficiency. The real and inhuman excess
lies in the division of labour. But by
dint of this excess, a day comes when a machine capable of a hundred
operations, operated by one man, creates one sole object. This man, on a different scale, will have partially
rediscovered the power of creation which he possessed in the days of the
artisan. The anonymous producer then
more nearly approaches the creator. It
is not certain, naturally, that industrial excess will immediately embark on
this path. But it already demonstrates,
by the way it functions, the necessity for moderation and gives rise to
reflections on the proper way to organize this moderation. Either this value of limitation will be
realized, or contemporary excesses will only find their principle and peace in
universal destruction.
This law
of moderation equally well extends to all the contradictions of rebellious
thought. The real is not entirely
rational, nor is the rational entirely real.
As we have seen in regard to surrealism, the desire for unity not only
demands that everything should be rational.
It also wishes that the irrational should not be sacrificed. One cannot say that nothing has any meaning,
because in doing so one affirms a value sanctioned by an opinion; not that
everything has a meaning, because the word everything has no meaning for
us. The irrational imposes limits on the
rational, which, in its turn, gives it its moderation. Something has a meaning, finally, which we
must obtain from meaninglessness. In the
same way, it cannot be said that existence takes place only on the level of
essence. Where could one perceive
essence except on the level of existence and evolution? But nor can it be said that being is only
existence. Something that is always in
the process of development could not exist – there must be a beginning. Being can only prove itself in development,
and development is nothing without being.
The world is not in a condition of pure stability; nor is it only
movement. It is both movement and
stability. The historical dialectic, for example, is not in continuous pursuit
of an unknown value. It revolves around
the limit, which is its prime value.
Heraclitus, the discoverer of the constant change of things,
nevertheless set a limit to this perpetual process. This limit was symbolized by Nemesis, the
goddess of moderation and the implacable enemy of the immoderate. A process of thought which wanted to take
into account the contemporary contradictions of rebellion should seek its
inspiration from this goddess.
As for the
moral contradictions, they too begin to become soluble in the light of this
conciliatory value. Virtue cannot
separate itself from reality without becoming a principle of evil. Nor can it identify itself completely with
reality without denying itself. The
moral value brought to light by rebellion, finally, is no farther above life
and history than history and life are above it.
In actual truth, it assumes no reality in history until man gives his
life for it or dedicates himself entirely to it. Jacobin and bourgeois civilization presumes
that values are above history, and its formal virtues then lay the foundation
of a repugnant form of mystification.
The revolution of the twentieth century decrees that values are
intermingled with the movement of history and that their historical foundation
justify a new form of mystification.
Moderation, confronted with this irregularity, teaches us that at least
one part of realism is necessary to every ethic: pure and unadulterated virtue
is homicidal. And one part of ethics is
necessary to all realism: cynicism is homicidal. That is why humanitarian cant has no more
basis than cynical provocation. Finally,
man is not entirely to blame; it was not he who started history; nor is he
entirely innocent, since he continues it.
Those who go beyond this limit and affirm his total
innocence end in the insanity of definitive culpability. Rebellion, on the contrary, sets us on the
path of calculated culpability. Its sole
but invincible hope is incarnated, in the final analysis, in innocent
murderers.
At this
limit, the “We are” paradoxically defines a new form of individualism. “We are” in terms of history, and history
must reckon with this “We are,” which must in its turn keep its place in
history. I have need of others who have
need of me and of each other. Every
collective action, every form of society, supposes a discipline, and the
individual, without this discipline, is only a stranger, bowed down under the
weight of an inimical collectivity. But
society and discipline lose their direction if they deny the “We are.” I alone, in one sense, support the common
dignity that I cannot allow either myself or others to debase. This individualism is in no sense pleasure;
it is perpetual struggle, and, sometimes, unparalleled joy when it reaches the
heights of proud compassion.
Thought at the
As for
knowing if such an attitude can find expression in the contemporary world, it
is easy to evoke – and this is only an example – what is traditionally called
revolutionary trade-unionism. Cannot it
be said that even this trade-unionism is ineffectual? The answer is simple: it is this movement
alone that, in one century, is responsible for the enormously improved
condition of the workers from the sixteen-hour day to the forty-hour week. The ideological Empire has turned socialism
back on its tracks and destroyed the greater part of the conquests of
trade-unionism. It is because
trade-unionism started from a concrete basis, the basis of professional
employment (which is to the economic order what the commune is to the political
order), the living cell on which the organism builds itself, while the Cæsarian
revolution starts from doctrine and forcibly introduces reality into it. Trade-unionism, like the commune, is the
negation, to the benefit of reality, of bureaucratic and abstract centralism. [Tolain,
the future Communard, wrote: “Human beings emancipate themselves only on the
basis of natural groups.”] The
revolution of the twentieth century, on the contrary, claims to base itself on
economics, but is primarily political and ideological. It cannot, by its very function, avoid terror
and violence done to the real. Despite
its pretensions, it begins in the absolute and attempts to mould reality. Rebellion, inversely, relies on reality to
assist it in its perpetual struggle for truth.
The former tries to realize itself from top to bottom, the latter from
bottom to top. Far from being a form of
romanticism, rebellion, on the contrary, takes the part of true realism. If it wants a revolution, it wants it on
behalf of life, not in defiance of it.
That is why it relies primarily on the most concrete realities – on occupation,
on the village, where the living heart of things and of men is to be found. Politics, to satisfy the demands of
rebellion, must submit to the eternal verities.
Finally, when it causes history to advance and alleviates the sufferings
of mankind, it does so without terror, if not without violence, and in the most
dissimilar political conditions. [Scandinavian societies today, to give only
one example, demonstrate how artificial and destructive are
purely political opposites. The
most fruitful form of trade-unionism is reconciled with constitutional monarchy
and achieves an approximation of a just society. The first preoccupation of the historical and
natural State has been, on the contrary, to crush forever the professional
nucleus and communal autonomy.]
But this
example goes farther than it seems. On
the very day when the Cæsarian revolution triumphed over the syndicalist and
libertarian spirit, revolutionary thought lost, in itself, a counterpoise of
which it cannot, without decaying, deprive itself. This counterpoise, the spirit which takes the
measure of life, is the same that animates the long tradition that can be
called solitary thought, in which, since the time of the Greeks, nature has
always been weighed against evolution.
The history of the First International, when German Socialism
ceaselessly fought against the libertarian thought of the French, the Spanish,
and the Italians, is the history of the struggle of German ideology against the
Mediterranean mind. [See Marx’s letter to Engels (
But
historical absolutism, despite its triumphs, has never ceased to come into
collision with an irrepressible demand of human nature, of which the
In the
common condition of misery, the eternal demand is heard again; nature once more
takes up the fight against history.
Naturally, it is not a question of despising anything, or of exalting
one civilization at the expense of another, but of simply saying that it is a
thought which the world today cannot do without for very much longer. There is, undoubtedly, in the Russian people
something to inspire
Real
mastery consists in refuting the prejudices of the time, initially the deepest
and most malignant of them, which would reduce man, after his deliverance from
excess, to a barren wisdom. It is very
true that excess can be a form of sanctity when it is paid for by the madness
of Nietzsche. But in this intoxication
of the soul which is exhibited on the scene of our culture always the madness
of excess, the folly of attempting the impossible, of which the brand can never
be removed from him who has, once at least, abandoned himself to it? Has Prometheus ever had this fanatical or
accusing aspect? No, our civilization
survives in the complacency of cowardly or malignant minds – a sacrifice to the
vanity of aging adolescents. Lucifer
also has died with God, and from his ashes has arisen
a spiteful demon who does not even understand the object of his venture. In 1950, excess is always a comfort, and
sometimes a career. Moderation, on the
one hand, is nothing but pure tension.
It smiles, no doubt, and our Convulsionists, dedicated to elaborate
apocalypses, despise it. But its smile
shines brightly at the climax of an interminable effort: it is in itself a
supplementary source of strength. Why do
these petty-minded Europeans who show us an avaricious face, if they no longer
have the strength to smile, claim that their desperate convulsions are examples
of superiority?
The real
madness of excess dies or creates its own moderation. It does not cause the death of others in
order to create an alibi for itself. In
its most extreme manifestations, it finds its limit, on which, like Kaliayev,
it sacrifices itself if necessary.
Moderation is not the opposite of rebellion. Rebellion in itself is moderation, and it
demands, defends, and re-creates it throughout history and its eternal
disturbances. The very origin of this
value guarantees us that it can only be partially destroyed. Moderation, born of rebellion, can only live
by rebellion. It is a perpetual
conflict, continually created and mastered by the intelligence. It does not triumph either in the impossible
or in the abyss. It finds its
equilibrium through them. Whatever we
may do, excess will always keep its place in the heart of man, in the place
where solitude is found. We all carry
within us our places of exile, our crimes and our ravages. But our task is not to unleash them on the
world; it is to fight them in ourselves and in others. Rebellion, the secular will not to surrender
of which Barrès speaks, is still today at the basis of the struggle. Origin of form, source of real life, it keeps
us always erect in the savage, formless movement of history.
Beyond Nihilism
*
There does
exist for man, therefore, a way of acting and of thinking which is possible on
the level of moderation to which he belongs.
Every undertaking that is more ambitious than this proves to be
contradiction. The absolute is not
attained nor, above all, created through history. Politics is not religion, or if it is, then
it is nothing but the Inquisition. How
would society define an absolute?
Perhaps everyone is looking for this absolute on behalf of all. But society and politics only have the
responsibility of arranging everyone’s affairs so that each will have the
leisure and the freedom to pursue this common search. History can then no longer be presented as an
object of worship. It is only an
opportunity that must be rendered fruitful by a vigilant rebellion.
“Obsession
with the harvest and indifference to history,” writes René Char admirably, “are
two extremities of my bow.” If the
duration of history is not synonymous with the duration of the harvest, then
history, in effect, is no more than a fleeting and cruel shadow in which man
has no more part. He who dedicates
himself to this history dedicates himself to nothing and, in his turn, is
nothing. But he who dedicates himself to
the duration of his life, to the house he builds, to the dignity of mankind,
dedicates himself to the earth and reaps from it the harvest that sows its seed
and sustains the world again and again.
Finally, it is those who know how to rebel, at the appropriate moment,
against history who really advance its interests. To rebel against it supposes an interminable
tension and the agonized serenity of which René Char also speaks. But the true life is present in the heart of
the dichotomy. Life is this dichotomy
itself, the mind soaring over volcanoes of light, the madness of justice, the
extenuating intransigence of moderation.
The words that reverberate for us at the confines of this long adventure
of rebellion are not formulas for optimism, for which we have no possible us in
the extremities of our unhappiness, but words of courage and intelligence
which, on the shores of the eternal seas, even have the qualities of virtue.
No
possible form of wisdom today can claim to give more. Rebellion indefatigably confronts evil, from
which it can only derive a new impetus.
Man can master in himself everything that should be mastered. He should rectify in creation everything that
can be rectified. And after he has done
so, children will still die unjustly even in a perfect society. Even by his greatest effort man can only
propose to diminish arithmetically the sufferings of the world. But the injustice and the suffering of the
world will remain and, no matter how limited they are, they will not cease to
be an outrage. Dimitri Karamazov’s cry
of “Why?” will continue to resound; art and rebellion will die only with the
last man.
There is
an evil, undoubtedly, which men accumulate in their fantastic desire for
unity. But yet another evil lies at the
roots of this inordinate movement. Confronted with this evil, confronted with death, man from the very
depths of his soul cries out for justice. Historical Christianity has only replied to
this protest against evil by the annunciation of the kingdom and then of
eternal life, which demands faith. But
suffering exhausts hope and faith and then is left alone and unexplained. The toiling masses, worn out with suffering
and death, are masses without God. Our
place is henceforth at their side, far from teachers, old and new. Historical Christianity postpones to a point
beyond the span of history the cure of evil and murder, which are nevertheless
experienced within the span of history.
Contemporary materialism also believes that it can answer all
questions. But, as a slave to history,
it increases the domain of historic murder and at the same time leaves it
without any justification, except in the future – which again demands
faith. In both cases one must wait, and
meanwhile the innocent continue to die.
For twenty centuries the sum total of evil has not diminished in the
world. No paradise, whether divine or
revolutionary, has been realized. An
injustice remains inextricably bound to all suffering, even the most deserved
in the eyes of men. The long silence of
Prometheus before the powers that overwhelmed him still cries out in
protest. But Prometheus, meanwhile, has
seen men rail and turn against him.
Crushed between human evil and destiny, between terror and the
arbitrary, all that remains to him is his power to rebel in order to save from
murder him who can still be saved, without surrendering to the arrogance of
blasphemy.
Then we
understand that rebellion cannot exist without a strange form of love. Those who find no rest in God or in history
are condemned to live for those who, like themselves, cannot live: in fact, for
the humiliated. The most pure form of
the movement of rebellion is thus crowned with the heart-rending cry of
Karamazov: if all are not saved, what good is the salvation of only one? Thus Catholic prisoners, in the prison cells
of
Rebellion
proves in this way that it is the very movement of life and that it cannot be
denied without renouncing life. Its
purest outburst, on each occasion, gives birth to existence. Thus it is love and fecundity or it is
nothing at all. Revolution without
honour, calculated revolution which, in preferring an abstract concept of man
to a man of flesh and blood, denies existence as many times as is necessary,
puts resentment in the place of love.
Immediately rebellion, forgetful of its generous origins, allows itself
to be contaminated by resentment; it denies life, dashes toward destruction,
and raises up the grimacing cohorts of petty rebels, embryo slaves all of them,
who end by offering themselves for salve, today, in all the marketplaces of
Europe, to no matter what form of servitude.
It is no longer either revolution or rebellion
but rancour, malice, and tyranny. Then,
when revolution in the name of power and of history becomes a murderous and
immoderate mechanism, a new rebellion is consecrated in the name of moderation
and of life. We are at that extremity
now. At the end of this tunnel of
darkness, however, there is inevitably a light, which we already divine and for
which we only have to fight to ensure its coming. All of us, among the ruins, are preparing a
renaissance beyond the limits of nihilism.
But few of us know it.
Already,
in fact, rebellion, without claiming to solve everything, can at least confront
its problems. From this moment high noon
is borne away on the fast-moving stream of history. Around the devouring flames, shadows writhe
in mortal combat for an instant of time and then as suddenly disappear, and the
blind, fingering their eyelids, cry out that this is history. The men of
At this
meridian of thought, the rebel thus rejects divinity in order to share in the
struggles and destiny of all men. We
shall choose