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Title: Without a Goal
Author: Zo d’Axa
Date: 1895
Language: en
Topics: anti-politics, individualist
Source: Retrieved on August 5, 2009 from http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/zo-daxa/1895/without-goal.htm
Notes: Source: Zo d’Axa, De Mazas a Jérusalem. Chamuel, Paris, 1895; Translated: for marxists.org by Mitchell Abidor; CopyLeft: Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike) marxists.org 2004.

Zo d’Axa

Without a Goal

“Wait a minute then,” people say, “what is their goal?”

And the benevolent questioner suppresses a shrug upon noting that there

are young men refractory to the usages, laws and demands of current

society, and who nevertheless don’t affirm a program.

“What do they hope for?”

If at least these nay-sayers without a credo had the excuse of being

fanatics. And no, faith no longer wants to be blind. They discuss, they

stumble, they search. Pitiful tactic! These skirmishers of the social

battle, these flagless ones are so aberrant as to not proclaim that they

have the formula for the universal panacea, the only one! Mangin had

more wit...

“And I ask you: what they seeking for themselves?”

Let’s not even talk about it. They don’t seek mandates, positions or

delegations of any kind. They aren’t candidates. Then what? Don’t make

me laugh. They are held in the appropriate disdain, a disdain mixed with

commiseration.

I too suffer from that underestimation.

There are a few of us who feel that we can barely glimpse the future

truths.

Nothing attaches us to the past, but the future hasn’t yet become clear.

And so we carry on, as misunderstood as foreigners, and it’s both here

and there, it’s everywhere that we are foreigners.

Why?

Because we don’t want to recite new catechisms, and we especially don’t

want to pretend to believe in the infallibility of doctrines.

We would need to possess a vile form of complacency to admit a group of

theories without reserve. And we are not that complacent. There has been

no Revelation. We are keeping our enthusiasm virgin for a fervor. Will

it come?

And even if the final term escapes us, we won’t skimp on our work. Our

era is a transitional one, and the free man has his role to play.

Authoritarian society is odious to us, and we are preparing the

experiment of a libertarian society.

Uncertain of its results, we nevertheless long for the attempt, the

change.

Instead of stagnating in this aging world where the air is heavy, where

the ruins crumble as if to bury us, we hasten to the final demolition.

To do so is to hasten a Renaissance.