💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › georges-palante-respect.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 10:39:37. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
➡️ Next capture (2024-07-09)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: Respect Author: Georges Palante Date: December 1903 Language: en Topics: community Source: Retrieved on 2016-10-28 from http://marxists.architexturez.net/archive/palante/1903/respect.htm Notes: Source: Chroniques Complètes, Tome II. Edited by Stéphane Beau. Paris, Coda, 2009; Source: Revue Philosophique, year 32, Vol 64 July-December 1907; Translated: by Mitchell Abidor for marxists.org; CopyLeft: Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike) marxists.org 2009.
The contemptible sentiment par excellence. Mosaic of crystallized fears;
mixture of herd stupidity and secular religiosity.
I mean the respect of collective beings; of the maleficent and deceptive
metaphors that populate our social mythologies.
Stirner gives collective entities the characteristic name of “respectful
personalities.” Moral idols, political idols, society idols, they float,
like the specter of religion in Lucretius’ heavens; ghostly, vain,
formidable.
Stendhal had already pointed out the respectful mania, the mother of all
hypocrisies, guardian of all big shots and oligarchs.
The beatific social optimism of the crowd is only a form of that
respectful mania. For the crowd, whatever kind of collectivity we might
be dealing with – public administration, government body, the family –
are always right against the individual. It is right for the very reason
that it is a collectivity. The label “collective” suffices. The dogma of
infallibility is thus secularized and socialized.
Oligarchs know this. They bank on the crowd’s capacity for respect,
which gives an idea of the infinite, as does its stupidity.
The citizen is a respectful and irremediably religious animal; it now
inclines to civic genuflection. It adores social fetishes just as the
little dog Riquet in “Monsieur Bergeret à Paris” venerated doors, the
table, and the kitchen chair.
Reproductive animal, the citizen venerates the fetish “marriage.” An
electoral animal, he venerates that other fetish, the modern holy
ampoule, the Civic Ballot Box.
With respect to crowds we oppose irony, pensive irony, of a cold smile
and a clear eye.