literary transcript

Part Two

Metaphysical Rebellion

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         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

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         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.  Æschylus 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 Æschylus’ 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.  Œdipus 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 Œdipus, 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.  Mænia 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 Golgotha is so important in the history of man only because, in its shadow, the divinity abandoned its traditional privileges and drank to the last drop, despair included, the agony of death.  This is the explanation of the Lama sabactani and the heartrending doubt of Christ in agony.  The agony would have been mild if it had been alleviated by hopes of eternity.  For God to be a man, he must despair.

         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 æons 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 Molière’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

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         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, Zamé.  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 Dolmancé in the Philosophie du Boudoir, which has the curious title: People of France, one more effort if you want to be republicans.  Pierre Klossowski [Sade, mon prochain.] is right in attaching so much importance to it, for this lampoon demonstrates to the revolutionaries that their republic is founded on the murder of the King – who was King by divine right – and that by guillotining God on January 21, 1793 they deprived themselves forever of the right to outlaw crime or to censure malevolent instincts.  The monarchy supported the concept of a God who, in conjunction with itself, created all laws.  As for the Republic, it stands alone, and morality was supposed to exist without benefit of the Commandments.  It is doubtful, however, that Sade, as Klossowski maintains, had a profound sense of sacrilege and that an almost religious horror led him to the conclusions that he expresses.  It is much more likely that he came to these conclusions first and afterwards perceived the correct arguments to justify the absolute moral license that he wanted the government of his time to sanction.  Logic founded on passions reverses the traditional sequence of reasoning and places the conclusions before the premises.  To be convinced of this we only have to appraise the admirable sequence of sophisms by which Sade, in this passage, justifies calumny, theft, and murder and demands that they be tolerated under the new dispensation.

         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 ten o’clock”!  But enjoyment must be prevented from degenerating into attachment, it must be put in parentheses and toughened.  Objects of enjoyment must also never be allowed to appear as persons.  If man is “an absolutely material species of plant,” he can only be treated as an object, and as an object for experiment.  In Sade’s fortress republic, there are only machines and mechanics.  The system, which dictates the method of employing the machines, puts everything in its right place.  His infamous converts have their rule – significantly copied from that of religious communities.  Thus the libertine indulges in public confession.  But the process is changed: “If his conduct is pure, he is censured.”

         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: Lautréamont 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 cafés.  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 Milton write with constraint,” Blake observes, “when he spoke of angels and of God, and with audacity when he spoke of demons and of hell, is that he was a real poet and on the side of the demons, without knowing it.”  The poet, the genius, man himself in his most exalted image, therefore cry out simultaneously with Satan: “So farewell hope, and with hope farewell fear, farewell remorse…. Evil, be thou my good.”  It is the cry of outraged innocence.

         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 Milton’s Satan, “force hath made supreme above his equals.”  Divine violence is thus explicitly condemned.  The rebel flees from this aggressive and unworthy God, “Farthest from him is best,” and reigns over all the forces hostile to the divine order.  The Prince of Darkness has only chosen this path because good is a notion defined and utilized by God for unjust purposes.  Even innocence irritates the Rebel insofar as it implies being duped.  This “dark spirit of evil who is enraged by innocence” creates a human injustice parallel to divine injustice.  Since violence is the root of all creation, deliberate violence shall be its answer.  The fact that there is an excess of despair adds to the causes of despair and brings rebellion to that state of indignant frustration which follows the long experience of injustice and where the distinction between good and evil finally disappears.  Vigny’s Satan can

                           … 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 Milton’s Satan, “will envy him the highest place … condemns to greatest share of endless pain.”  So many injustices suffered, a sorrow so unrelieved, justify every excess.  The rebel therefore allows himself certain advantages.  Murder, of course, is not recommended for its own sake.  But it is implicit in the value – supreme for the romantic - attached to frenzy.  Frenzy is the reverse of boredom: Lorenzaccio dreams of Han of Iceland.  Exquisite sensibilities evoke the elementary furies of the beast.  The Byronic hero, incapable of love, or capable only of an impossible love, suffers endlessly.  He is solitary, languid, his condition exhausts him.  If he wants to feel alive, it must be in the terrible exaltation of a brief and destructive action.  To love someone whom one will never see again is to give a cry of exultation as one perishes in the flames of passion.  One lives only in and for the moment, in order to achieve “the brief and vivid union of a tempestuous heart united to the tempest” (LERMONTOV).  The threat of mortality which hangs over us makes everything abortive.  Only the cry of anguish can bring us to life; exaltation takes the place of truth.  To this extent the apocalypse becomes an absolute value in which everything is confounded – love and death, conscience and culpability.  In a chaotic universe no other life exists but that of the abyss where, according to Alfred Le Poittevin, human beings come “trembling with rage and exulting in their crimes” to curse the Creator.  The intoxication of frenzy and, ultimately, some suitable crime reveal in a moment the whole meaning of a life.  Without exactly advocating crime, the romantics insist on paying homage to a basic system of privileges which they illustrate with the conventional images of the outlaw, the criminal with the heart of gold, and the kind brigand.  Their works are bathed in blood and shrouded in mystery.  The soul is delivered, at a minimum expenditure, of its most hideous desires – desires that a later generation will assuage in extermination camps.  Of course these works are also a challenge to the society of the times.  But romanticism, at the source of its inspiration, is chiefly concerned with defying moral and divine law.  That is why its most original creation is not, primarily, the revolutionary, but, logically enough, the dandy.

         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 Algiers, and Prometheus, like the above-mentioned Borel, will devote the rest of his days to closing the cabarets and reforming morals in the colonies.  All the same, every poet to be received into the fold must be damned. [French literature still feels the effects of this.  “Poets are no longer damned,” says Malraux.  There are fewer.  But the others all suffer from bad consciences.]  Charles Lassailly, the same who planned a philosophic novel, Robespierre and Jesus Christ, never went to bed without uttering several fervent blasphemies to give himself courage.  Rebellion puts on mourning and exhibits itself for public admiration.  Much more than the cult of the individual, romanticism inaugurates the cult of the “character.”  It is at this point that it is logical.  No longer hoping for the rule or the unity of God, determined to take up arms against an antagonistic destiny, anxious to preserve everything of which the living are still capable in a world dedicated to death, romantic rebellion looked for a solution in the attitude that it itself assumed.  The attitude assembled, in æsthetic unity, all mankind who were in the hands of fate and about to be destroyed by divine violence.  The human being who is condemned to death is, at least, magnificent before he disappears, and his magnificence is his justification.  It is an established fact, the only one that can be thrown in the petrified face of the God of hate.  The impassive rebel does not flinch before the eyes of God.  “Nothing,” says Milton, “will change this determined mind, this high disdain born of an offended conscience.”  Everything is drawn or rushes toward the void, but even though man is humiliated, he is obstinate and at least preserves his pride.  A baroque romantic, discovered by Raymond Queneau, claims that the aim of all intellectual life is to become God.  This romantic is really a little ahead of his time.  The aim, at that time, was only to equal God and remain on His level.  He is not destroyed, but by incessant effort He is refused any act of submission.  Dandyism is a degraded form of asceticism.

         The dandy creates his own unity by æsthetic means.  But it is an æsthetic 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 Abbé Prévost’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 France, but by Baudelaire and Lacenaire, the poets of crime.  “Everything in this world exudes crime,” says Baudelaire, “the newspaper, the walls, and the face of man.”  Nevertheless crime, which is the law of nature, singularly fails to appear distinguished.  Lacenaire, the first of the gentleman criminals, exploits it effectively; Baudelaire displays less tenacity, but is a genius.  He creates the garden of evil where crime figures only as one of the rarer species.  Terror itself becomes an exquisite sensation and a collector’s item.  “Not only would I be happy to be a victim, but I would not even hate being an executioner in order to feel the revolution from both sides.”  Even Baudelaire’s conformity has the odour of crime.  If he chooses Maistre as his master, it is to the extent that this conservative goes to extremes and centres his doctrine on death and on the executioner.  “The real saint,” Baudelaire pretends to think, “is he who flogs and kills people for their own good.”  His argument will be heard.  A race of real saints is beginning to spread over the earth for the purposes of confirming these curious conclusions about rebellion.  But Baudelaire, despite his satanic arsenal, his taste for Sade, his blasphemies, remains too much of a theologian to be a proper rebel.  His real drama, which made him the greatest poet of his time, was something else.  Baudelaire can be mentioned here only to the extent that he was the most profound theoretician of dandyism and gave definite form to one of the conclusions of romantic revolt.

         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 æsthetic 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 Cæsars, 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 Cæsars.  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 Cæsar, 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 Golgotha.  But He did not come down and, even, at the most tortured moment of His agony, He protested to God at having been forsaken.  There are, thus, no longer any proofs, but faith and the mystery that the rebels reject and at which the Grand Inquisitors scoff.  Everything is permitted and centuries of crime are prepared in that cataclysmic moment.  From Paul to Stalin, the popes who have chosen Cæsar have prepared the way for Cæsars who quickly learn to despise popes.  The unity of the world, which was not achieved with God, will henceforth be attempted in defiance of God.

         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 Europe.  Not by choice, but by condition, and because he was too great to refuse the heritage of his time.  He diagnosed in himself, and in others, the inability to believe and the disappearance of the primitive foundation of all faith – namely, the belief in life.  The “can one live as a rebel?” became with him “can one live believing in nothing?”  His reply is affirmative.  Yes, if one creates a system out of absence of faith, if one accepts the final consequences of nihilism, and if, on emerging into the desert and putting one’s confidence in what is going to come, one feels, with the same primitive instinct, both pain and joy.

         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 Méthode 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?”  Liberty coincides with heroism.  It is the asceticism of the great man, “the bow bent to the breaking-point.”

         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 Mount Etna to find truth in the only place where it exists – namely, in the bowels of the earth – Nietzsche proposed that man should allow himself to be engulfed in the cosmos in order to rediscover his eternal divinity and to become Dionysos.  The Will to Power ends, like Pascal’s Pensées, of which it so often reminds us, with a wager.  Man does not yet obtain assurance but only the wish for assurance, which is not at all the same thing.  Nietzsche, too, hesitated on this brink: “That is what is unforgivable in you.  You have the authority and you refuse to sign.”  Yet finally he had to sign.  But the name of Dionysos immortalized only the notes to Ariadne, which he wrote when he was mad.

         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 Cæsar 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 midday and at midnight” was nevertheless lost in the mechanized hordes that finally inundated Europe.  Advocate of classic taste, of irony, of frugal defiance, aristocrat who had the courage to say that aristocracy consisted in practising virtue without asking for a reason and that a man who had to have reasons for being honest was not to be trusted, addict of integrity (“integrity that has become an instinct, a passion”), stubborn supporter of the “supreme equity of the supreme intelligence that is the mortal enemy of fanaticism,” he was set up, thirty-three years after his death, by his own countrymen as the master of lies and violence, and his ideas and virtues, made admirable by his sacrifice, have been rendered detestable.  In the history of the intelligence, with the exception of Marx, Nietzsche’s adventure has not equivalent; we shall never finish making reparation for the injustice done to him.  Of course history records other philosophies that have been misconstrued and betrayed.  But up to the time of Nietzsche and National Socialism, it was quite without parallel that a process of thought – brilliantly illuminated by the nobility and by the sufferings of an exceptional mind – should have been demonstrated to the eyes of the world by a parade of lies and by the hideous accumulation of corpses in concentration camps.  The doctrine of the superman led to the methodical creation of sub-men – a fact that doubtless should be denounced, but which also demands interpretation.  If the final result of the great movement of rebellion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was to be this ruthless bondage, then surely rebellion should be rejected and Nietzsche’s desperate cry to his contemporaries taken up: “My conscience and yours are no longer the same conscience.”

         We must first of all realize that we can never confuse Nietzsche with Rosenberg.  We must be the advocates of Nietzsche.  He himself has said so, denouncing in advance his bastard progeny: “he who has liberated his mind still has to purify himself.”  But the question is to find out if the liberation of the mind, as he conceived it, does not preclude purification.  The very movement that comes to a head with Nietzsche, and that sustains him, has its laws and its logic, which, perhaps, explain the bloody travesty of his philosophy.  Is there nothing in his work that can be used in support of definitive murder?  Cannot the killers, provided they deny the spirit in favour of the letter (and even all that remains in the spirit of the letter), find their pretext in Nietzsche?  The answer must be yes.  From the moment that the methodical aspect of Nietzschean thought is neglected (and it is not certain that he himself always observed it), his rebellious logic knows no bounds.

         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 Cæsar 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.  Cæsar 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.  Cæsar 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 midday when the wheel of the world stops spinning and man consents to things as they are.  But what is becomes what will be, and the ceaseless change of things must be accepted.  The light finally grows dim, the axis of the day declines.  Then history begins again and freedom must be sought in history; history must be accepted.  Nietzscheism – the theory of the individual’s will to power – was condemned to support the universal will to power.  Nietzscheism was nothing without world domination.  Nietzsche undoubtedly hated freethinkers and humanitarians.  He took the words freedom of thought in their most extreme sense: the divinity of the individual mind.  But he could not stop the freethinkers from partaking of the same historical fact as himself – the death of God – nor could he prevent the consequences being the same.  Nietzsche saw clearly that humanitarianism was only a form of Christianity deprived of superior justification, which preserved final causes while rejecting the first cause.  But he failed to perceive that the doctrines of socialist emancipation must, by an inevitable logic of nihilism, lead to what he himself had dreamed of: superhumanity.

         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 Cæsarism 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 Cæsarism.  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.

         Hawthorne was able to say of Melville that, as an unbeliever, he was extremely uneasy in his unbelief.  It can equally be said of the poets who rushed to assault the heavens, with the intent of turning everything upside down, that by so doing they affirmed their desperate nostalgia for order.  As an ultimate contradiction, they wanted to extract reason from unreason and to systematize the irrational.  Their heirs of romanticism claimed to make poetry exemplary and to find, in its most harrowing aspects, the real way of life.  They deified blasphemy and transformed poetry into experience and into a means of action.  Until their time those who claimed to influence men and events, at least in the Occident, did so in the name of rational rules.  On the contrary, surrealism, after Rimbaud, wanted to find constructive rules in insanity and destruction.  Rimbaud, through his work and only through his work, pointed out the path, but with the blinding, momentary illumination of a flash of lightning.  Surrealism excavated this path and codified its discoveries.  By its excesses as well as its retreats, it gave the last and most magnificent expression to a practical theory of irrational rebellion at the very same time when, on another path, rebellious thought was founding the cult of absolute reason.  Lautréamont and Rimbaud – its sources of inspiration – demonstrate by what stages the irrational desire to accept appearances can lead the rebel to adopt courses of action completely destructive to freedom.

         Lautéamont and Banality

         Lautéamont 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 Lautréamont 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 Poésies.

         Lautréamont 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 Lautréamont, 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 Lautréamont, there is, therefore, no real progress, except in style.  Lautréamont 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, Providence, love, ideals – so as to think no longer of anything else but himself.”  Racked with pride, this hero has all the illusions of the metaphysical dandy: “A face that is more than human, sad with the sadness of the universe, beautiful as an act of suicide.”  Like the romantic rebel, Maldoror, despairing of divine justice, will take the side of evil.  To cause suffering and, in causing it, to suffer, that is his lot.  The Songs are veritable litanies of evil.

         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.  Lautréamont’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 Lautréamont 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 Lautréamont.  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 Poésies 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 Poésies, 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 Poésies 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 Darassé).  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 Lautréamont 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.  Lautréamont 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 Lautéamont 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, Lautréamont, 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.  Lautréamont, 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 Poésies 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 Lautréamont, 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 Abyssinia be considered as a monastery; is it Christ who shut Rimbaud’s mouth? Such a Christ would be the kind of man who nowadays lords it over the cashier’s desk in a bank, to judge by the letters in which the unhappy poet talks about his money which he wants to see “wisely invested” and “bringing in regular dividends.” [It is only fair to note that the tone of these letters might be explained by the people to whom they are written.  But they do not suggest that Rimbaud is making a great effort to lie.  Not one word betrays the Rimbaud of former times.]  The man who exulted under torture, who hurled curses at God and at beauty, who hardened himself in the harsh atmosphere of crime, now only wants to marry someone “with a future”.  The mage, the seer, the convict who lived perpetually in the shadow of the penal colony, the man-god on a godless earth, always carried seventeen pounds of gold in a belt worn uncomfortably round his stomach, which he complained gave him dysentery.  Is this the mythical hero, worshipped by so many young men who, though they did not spit in the face of the world, would die of shame at the mere idea of such a belt?  To maintain the myth, those decisive letters must be ignored.  It is easy to see why they have been so little commented upon.  They are a sacrilege, as truth sometimes is.  A great and praiseworthy poet, the greatest of his time, a dazzling oracle – Rimbaud is all of these things.  But he is not the man-god, the burning inspiration, the monk of poetry as he is often presented.  The man only recaptured his greatness in the hospital bed in which, at the hour of his painful end, even his mediocrity becomes moving: “How unlucky I am, how very unlucky I am … and I’ve money on me that I can’t even keep an eye on!”  The defiant cry of those last wretched moments: “No, no, now I rebel against death!” happily restores Rimbaud to that part of common human experience which involuntarily coincides with greatness.  The young Rimbaud comes to life again on the brink of the abyss and with him revives the rebellion of the times when his imprecations against life were only expressions of despair at the thought of death.  It is at this point that the bourgeois trader once more rejoins the tortured adolescent whom we so much admired.  He recaptures his youth in the terror and bitter pain finally experienced by those who do not know how to attain happiness.  Only at this point does his passion, and with it his truth, begin.

         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 Aden.  And one consents, no longer actively, but passively, to accept the order of the world, even if the order is degrading.  Rimbaud’s silence is also a preparation for the silence of authority, which hovers over minds resigned to everything save to the necessity of putting up a fight.  Rimbaud’s great intellect, suddenly subordinated to money, proclaims the advent of other demands, which are at first excessive and which will later be put to use by the police.  To be nothing – that is the cry of the mind exhausted by its own rebellion.  This leads to the problem of suicide of the mind, which, after all, is less respectable than the surrealists’ suicide, and more fraught with consequences.  Surrealism itself, coming at the end of this great act of rebellion, is only significant because it attempted to perpetuate that aspect of Rimbaud which alone evokes our sympathy.  Deriving the rules for a rebellious asceticism from the letter about the seer and the system it implies, he illustrates the struggle between the will to be and the desire for annihilation, between the yes and the no, which we have discovered again and again at every stage of rebellion.  For all these reasons, rather than repeat the endless commentaries that surround Rimbaud’s work, it seemed preferable to rediscover him and to follow him among his successors.

         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 Aragon, is a machine for capsizing the mind, was first conjured up by the Dadaist movement, whose romantic origins and anaemic dandyism must be noted.  [Jarry, one of the masters of Dadaism, is the last incarnation, peculiar rather than brilliant, of the metaphysical dandy.]  Non-signification and contradiction are therefore cultivated for their own sakes.  “The real Dadaists are against Dada.  Everyone is a director of Dada.”  Or again: “What is good?  What is ugly?  What is great, strong, weak …?  Don’t know!  Don’t know!”  These parlour nihilists were obviously threatened with having to act as slaves to the strictest orthodoxies.  But there is something more in surrealism than standard nonconformism, the legacy left b Rimbaud, which, in fact, Breton recapitulates as follows: “Must we abandon all hope at that particular point?”

         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 Vaché.  Later Aragon was to condemn the “babblers about suicide.”  Nevertheless the fact remains that to extol annihilation, without personal involvement, is not a very honourable course.  On this point surrealism has retained, from the “littérature” it despised, the most facile excuses and has justified Rigaud’s staggering remark: “You are all poets, and I myself am on the side of death.”

         Surrealism did not rest there.  It chose as its hero Violette Nozière 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 André 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 André 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 Helvétius 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 André 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 Aragon to begin with a denunciation of the “shameful pragmatic attitude,” for in that attitude he finally found total liberation from morality, even if that liberation coincided with another form of servitude.  The surrealist who meditated most profoundly about this problem, Pierre Naville, in trying to find the denominator common to revolutionary action and surrealist action, localized it, with considerable penetration, in pessimism, meaning in “the intention of accompanying man to his downfall and of overlooking nothing that could ensure that his perdition might be useful.”  This mixture of Machiavellianism and Augustinism in fact explains twentieth-century rebellion; no more audacious expression can be given to the nihilism of the times.  The renegades of surrealism were faithful to most of the principles of nihilism.  In a certain way, they wanted to die.  If André Breton and a few others finally broke with Marxism, it was because there was something in them beyond nihilism, a second loyalty to what is purest in the origins of rebellion: they did not want to die.

         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.”  André 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 André 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 André 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 André 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.

         André 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 naïve 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 Greece, the Greece of mysteries and dark gods.  Finally, just as Nietzsche’s experience culminated in the acceptance of the light of day, surrealist experience culminates in the exaltation of the darkness of night, the agonized and obstinate cult of the tempest.  Breton, according to his own statements, understood that, despite everything, life was a gift.  But his compliance could never shed the full light of day, the light that all of us need.  “There is too much of the north in me,” he said, “for me to be a man who complies entirely.”

         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: René 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 God.  To kill God and to build a Church are the constant and contradictory purpose of rebellion.  Absolute freedom finally becomes a prison of absolute duties, a collective asceticism, a story to be brought to an end.  The nineteenth century, which is the century of rebellion, thus merges into the twentieth, the century of justice and ethics, in which everyone indulges in self-recrimination.  Chamfort, the moralist of rebellion, had already provided the formula: “One must be just before being generous, as one must have bread before having cake.”  Thus the ethic of luxury will be renounced in favour of the bitter morality of the empire-builders.

            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.”