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Title: Address to the Living Author: Raoul Vaneigem Date: October 16th, 1989 Language: en Topics: agriculture, anti-work, Childhood, children, civilization, creativity, death, economy, education, evolution, family, guilt, history, Law, love, mediation, money, nature, patriarchy, prisons, progress, punishment, religion, science, spectacle, time Source: Retrieved on October 2nd, 2018 from http://inventin.lautre.net/livres/Vaneigem-Address-to-the-living.pdf Notes: Translated by Jordan Levinson in 2005. Six missing paragraphs (four in âAgainst Anti-Terrorismâ â which was missing completely, the last from âTo Rediscover a Blooming ChildhoodâŠâ and the first from âThe Time Torn from the Livingâ) were subsequently translated from the printed edition, that also served as a basis for adapting segments of the text and for organizing the chapters.
In one of Hoffmannâs novels, the narrator is surprised by the rapture
into which a man sitting at a table is plunged while listening to one of
Gluckâs overtures, though it was performed awfully by a bunch of bar
musicians. Called to justify his enthusiasm, the man, who turns out to
be none other than the composer himself, explains: mediocre as it was,
the evocation of his work revived in him not the excellence of the
score, but the moving harmonies that had presided over its creation â
the musical notes he had written could only provide an abstract sketch
of those harmonies.
What is true for the genius of art is even truer for the exuberant
presence of the living. Is there anything more pathetic than a love
letter? As regards the violence and passional serenity where the body
discovers itself in its entirety, what word, what phrase, could contain
that affection, that preciousness? Think about the ridiculous effect
that love letter would have, if it were to fail to come into the hands
of he or she for whom it was written and instead ended up being read by
the hotel clerk! But when it reaches the loved-one, then the words
organize themselves according to the heartâs whim, tracing point by
point a road already profoundly traveled, and they resonate with a
harmony that only needed the simplicity of a few understandings drawn up
randomly to propagate itself.
All Iâve tried to do here is to tie together the resurgences of a
desirable life, to note briefly a few measures of a symphony of the
living, to bring out hints of another reality, which dominant thinking
hides with its tireless reading and rereading of the words of a world
trapped in books because of the boredom engendered by its slow death.
The weakness of this enterprise is less the fault of the babblings and
uncertainties through which this new reality is trying to express
itself, and rather more the fault of the invasion of the past, which
perpetuates itself in spite of me.
It is not easy to fall in love every day with the life we have to create
when every day predisposes us to fatigue, aging, and death. And the
intelligence of the self is certainly the least shared thing there is in
an era whose only intelligence is the science of perfecting the absurd
and growing inadequacy of living.
My living fully according to my desires is mixed up with the pleasure I
take from writing in order to clarify my thoughts on the pleasure of
living better (and this is the only use of writing that I agree with
fully), of living out more fully the fears and doubts that issue from
compromises and compatibilities that are foreign to me and that render
me a stranger to myself.
On the other hand, thereâs nothing that I love more than the clarity of
choice that I have at each instant in spite of the maze of constraints,
which is my chance to lay down my chips on the neverending quest for
love, creation, and the enjoyment of myself, outside of which I
recognize no worthwhile destiny.
Of course, I would be very displeased if I were to stupidly add to the
slavery of running after the monthly rent money by subscribing to some
brand image, to some journalistic or televised labeling, to a role â
prestigious or derisory, it matters little â if I were to make myself
miserable by falling into some mediated classification within the
cultural state of commodity society.
Today it is a question of discovering oneself in the authenticity of
oneâs existence, even if, having lived poorly, the least illusion often
seems preferable â since, in its brutal franchising, the irrepressible
desire for another life is already what constitutes this life.
In fact, I am not a stranger to this world, though everything about this
world that sells itself instead of giving itself away is foreign to me â
including the economic reflex into which my gestures and acts sometimes
fold themselves. Thatâs why Iâve spoken of economists with the same
sense of distance that Marx and Engels discovered between the filth and
misery of London and the society of these extraterrestrials with âtheirâ
Parliament, âtheirâ Westminster, âtheirâ Buckingham Palace, and âtheirâ
Newgate.
âTheyâ disturb me to the depths of my most humble freedom, with their
money, their work, their authority, their duties, their guilt, their
intellectuality, their roles, their functions, their sense of power,
their law of exchange, their brotherly community, of which I am a part
without wanting to be.
Thanks to what they themselves are becoming, âtheyâ are on their way
out. Economized on to an extreme by the economy, which they are slaves
to, they condemn themselves to disappearance by carrying away, in their
preprogrammed death, the fertility of the earth, the natural species,
and the joy of the passions. I have no intention of following them down
the path of a resignation that makes them suck out the last energies of
humanity and convert them to marketable commodities.
Nonetheless, I donât want nor do I claim to be able to bloom in a
society that hardly lends itself to the blooming of individuals; I would
like, rather, to attain fullness by transforming society according to
the radical transformations that sketch themselves out within it. I do
not disavow the puerile, stubborn insistence on changing the world,
since it doesnât please me to do so, and it will not please me unless I
can live to the fullest extent that I desire within the world. Isnât
this stubbornness, in fact, the very substance of the will to live?
Without it, oneâs perspicacious perspective on the world and oneself is
only a new blinder, and without the lucidity that comforts the
inexhaustible exuberance of the living, that perspicacity remains in a
chaos which tends to destroy rather than regenerate.
The end of the economic era coincides with the birth of a civilization
of desire. It is a mutation that operates slowly, through a new
symbiosis, restoring primacy to the ensemble of living beings and
things, at the same time as a new freeness teaches us to seize what
nature gives us in such a way that she gives even more, something beyond
what our tender love-energies are now.
If more new ideas are appearing now than ever before were formulated â
excepting Fourier â in the centuries of religious, philosophical, and
ideological thought, itâs only because more authentically human
realities have manifested themselves in two centuries than in ten
thousand years driven along by the science of power and profit.
The opinion that the idea of happiness is everywhere and its reality
nowhere shows well enough that there is no more important concern for
people than identifying their desires and bringing their destiny into
agreement with the constant exercise of their will to live. This project
requires great patience and the perseverance of the alchemist,
extracting a purified life from the ferment of what denies it; it
requires ridding oneself of the negative until the force of desire makes
it become nothing more than the presence of the living.
Will anyone be surprised if the quest for enjoyment implies great
attention and effort at every instant, when we have never learned
anything but the virtues of sacrifice and renunciation, where the power
of life stagnates working jobs? Even with all the worldâs knowledge
combined, we have still only been able to grab hold of dead things and
to die within them as they take hold of us.
Go ahead and say, after all that, that life can defend itself just fine
on its own, but at least make it clear that first it is necessary to
recognize life in oneself, to welcome what it offers, to liberate it
from its everyday trappings, to bring it to a state of innocence wherein
at last it might be itself.
Now, when the bankruptcy of the economy as a system of survival strikes
down so many efforts borne from the rage to accumulate, to be the best,
to possess even more â perhaps now a reversal of attitudes is
foreseeable; perhaps now, this stubborn humanness, forced to kill itself
by working, will rediscover the creation of beings, of things, and of
environments as the pleasure of existence. Is that possible?
We die, at last, only from an accumulation of death tolerated for
innumerable days and nights. The great rupture of our time is that the
negation of life has begun to negate itself â that desire, discovering
itself before and above all other things, is discovering that it has a
world to create. The revolution of the living is now; it stands alone,
and if death haunts it and persists in hiding it, we now know that we
have it within ourselves to revoke that death and that around us there
is a growing passion to desire endlessly.
1989
Their lives are broken upon getting out of bed like they were broken in
infancy and at the dawn of history.
How can you tell itâs the end of an era? When a suddenly intolerable
present crystallizes in a short period of time what was so uneasily put
up with in the past. And everyone is suddenly quite easily convinced
that he or she is either going to be reborn in the birth of a new world,
or die in the archaic netherworld of a society less and less adapted to
the living.
With the first rays of dawn, a new lucidity is born. And it shows
everyone instantly how drawn and quartered weâve been by the clash
between the desire to be human and the daily obligation of renouncing
that desire away through the history of humanity and the recent infancy
of the individual.
Although the day begins beautifully, the weather always ends up
disagreeable. The fog of work tarnishes the shine of the days. The alarm
clockâs fanfare lends a certain military stiffness to the roundabouts of
the watch. Got to go, to get rid of the imprecision of nighttime, got to
answer the call of duty â itâs like coming running at the whistle of an
invisible master.
The moroseness of the morning sets the decor. Their eyes open upon a
labyrinthine symmetry of walls. How do we know weâre on one side or
another, on the inside or outside of the moebius strip unraveling a
continuity of street, housing, factory, school, and office?
Once theyâve pushed off the sheets and blankets of nighttime reverie,
full of errantry and frivolity, necessity steals them away, dragging
them off into the comings and goings of a laborious destiny.
Civilization bridles them. See them prepare themselves for the obstacle
course, ready to conquer a world that long ago conquered them, one which
theyâve learned theyâll have to leave behind before doing anything else.
Without the daily morning trumpet blast of reveille to put them on the
right track, where would they get morality, philosophy, religion, State,
policed society, and everything else that authorizes them to die for
things, gradually and reasonably?
Well, youâve got to have a good grip on their lives if you want to keep
them from going wherever they please. Their nightly calm has the
unfortunate effect of making them forgetful. If habit is a second
nature, as they say, then there is a first one too, happily deaf to the
injections of routine. Pulled from sleep, in effect, the body becomes
reluctant; it argues with itself, rears up, stretches out, and at
length, shakes off its laziness. And youâve got to make your mind
persistent and stubborn, and make your body get up â damned body, never
wants to do nothing with any heart⊠Could I put any clearer the feeling
that to put your heart into work, youâve got to have hardly any left at
all?
Beneath the sun and on the pillow, the wave of obligations pushes back
the foam of voluptuous solicitations. The sweet smell of a towel, the
embrace of a naked arm, the presence of a loved one, the desire to hang
around in the streets and the fields â everything seems to murmur, with
a troubling simplicity, âTake your time, or time will take you⊠There is
only pleasure or death.â
But, trained for quick calculating, reason soon rounds up the herd of
constraints. At the first moment of reflection, the time-card and
schedule sheet come down like roadblocks, obstructing the passage of
desires. Like so many chimeras!
The day, duly roped-off and divvied up, cements a reality that is
certainly chosen, but chosen begrudgingly; it is chosen at the expense
of another reality â that of the body, which is demanding with great
cries the freedom to desire endlessly.
Everything happens as if there was only one universe, the second
vanishing in the haze of a puerile enchantment. The porcelain of your
dreams crumbles beneath the weight of the trepidation of business and of
lucrative activity. Itâs literally a business-matter of instants.
The evening sweeps together the debris of humanity at work. The night
pieces back together all the desires that the windshield-wiper of
mechanical gestures had pushed off to the side. It readjusts them, for
better or for worse : ten upside-down desires for one right-side up,
maybe a little love, if thereâs any left.
At dawn, the scenario is repeated, enriched by the fatigue of the
previous day. Until, night and day having become commingled, the bed
folds out beneath a body that is at last completely and definitively
vanquished, wrapping in its funeral shroud a life that had failed so
many times to come to life.
This is what they call the âhard reality of thingsâ, or, with a
laughable cynicism, âthe human condition.â
They spend their weeks waiting for Work to go put on its Sunday clothes.
The effects of serving others from Monday to Friday make them experience
their fun just like they do their work. They can hardly manage not
rubbing some spit into their hands before throwing back glasses of fine
wine, tearing down the galleries at the Louvre, reciting Baudelaire, or
fornicating savagely.
At fixed times and dates, they leave the offices, the shop-counters and
establishments, and throw themselves, with the same measured gestures,
into a measured, accounted for, charged-to-the-room âfree-timeâ which is
labeled with names that sound like bottles being emptied : weekend,
holiday, party, leisure time, R and R, vacation. Such are the freedoms
work pays them with; such are the freedoms they pay for by working.
They practice meticulously the art of coloring-in their boredom, getting
their fix of passion from exoticism, a pint of alcohol, a gram of
cocaine, a libertine adventure, political controversy. From eyes as dull
and lifeless as they are well-informed, they observe the ephemeral
stock-quotes of fashion, which taps in, from discount to discount, to
the promotional sales of fancy clothes, high cuisine, ideologies,
events, of the stars of sports, culture, electoral politics, crime,
journalism, and business â the ones, at least, who support their
interests.
They think theyâre leading an existence, but existence is leading them,
through endless rows of pews, to a universal factory. They consistently
obey the old reflexes, which command them throughout the working day,
whether theyâre reading, doing odd jobs, sleeping, traveling,
meditating, or fucking.
Power and credit pull the strings. Are their nerves tensed up on the
right? They stretch out to the left and the machines start up again.
Anything and everything is used, it doesnât matter what, to console
their inconsolable minds. It wasnât just by chance that all throughout
the centuries theyâve worshiped, in the name of God, a slave-market that
first grants them little more than one out of seven days a week to have
a rest, and then demands that they sing praises to it.
And still, when Sunday comes around and the clock strikes somewhere
around four in the afternoon, they start to feel, to know, that they are
lost, that theyâve left behind the best of themselves at sunrise. That
theyâve never stopped working.
They raise their children the same way they arise in the morning â in
renunciation of what they love.
For as long a time as theyâve forced themselves to ignore their secret
desires, theyâve never stooped to learn anything about children. The
more pressing needs of making war and governing hardly authorized them
to study such subjects.
Looking back over the centuries, the truth is that above all they were
scared by this always-new Life, surging from the belly of woman to grow
and multiply. The mirror of their own past uniqueness sent them the
confused memory that existence was somehow promised to all spirits from
the depths of their own infancy. And there in those depths, they found
an embarrassing presence that the crushing vise of adulthood had failed
to completely stifle.
They hated children as they hated themselves; they beat them for their
own good, and educated them from the perspective of their own incapacity
to love life.
They propagated the idea that true birth was only found in death.
At the time when the Roman Empire was imposing its mercantilism on
everyone within the limits of the known world, Christian mythology was
able to translate the omnipresence of the economy with a flair. Their
cyclopean âGodâ, whose one eye commanded the universe, was not
unfamiliar with the need to set the fates of children in line with its
design.
What does the Christ-legend tell us? That he is God become man in a
womblike cave where harmony reigned between humans and animals; that
after having received at birth a set of prodigious gifts from three
magicians who came from the earthly kingdoms, he was condemned by his
divine father to carry the cross of existence, which would serve him
conveniently as a coffin, and to go through the door of death to
receive, in celestial coin, the prize money for having gone through his
trials.
He is God until God is reborn beyond the grave. Between the two poles of
glory, a valley of tears determines the path of his destiny. And so
chased out of the uterine paradise, the child learns to economize on his
life, perinde ac cadaver[1] in order to pay the toll on the road to a
celestial survival.
Replace your hopes of sitting on the right hand of the Lord by the
promise of a happy future and youâre left with the destiny of the
newborn child, now that the light of science has dissipated the fog of
religious obscurantism.
The 20^(th) century has not recovered from its myopia, though the
obvious sits two inches from its nose. Lucidity isnât doing much worse.
Childhood isnât either â and thatâs something theyâve always had right
before their eyes without really seeing it, something they now
scrutinize closely, less out of conviction than necessity. Their
observations confront them with a painful and exciting saddling up of
opposites into which they are born to themselves and die to themselves
each morning. The child, who was the cross of conscience for adults,
ends up at a crossroads â forced to make a clear choice. A choice of
civilizations.
Children begin life through the practice of pleasures, and the practice
of pleasures shows them the ends of the world. To learn to enjoy things
and beings â thatâs what true intelligence is, and in the face of that,
the most brilliant intellectualism is no more than a parade of
imbeciles, of those who are lacking in life.
This is not a new idea, but itâs a long way from ideas to desire â
desire, where everything becomes truly real. Knowledge comes to their
heads, very traditionally, by way of kicks in the ass; following oneâs
heart becomes a useless, time-consuming detour. Besides, how can we
escape the very specific efficiency of the straightest, quickest path,
when the family and school is filling every childâs head with lesson
plans that are as useful to business as they are useless to life?
For a few years more, social customs persist in dragging children from
the maze of laughs and tears, removing from them the thread of
satisfactions and dissatisfactions that guide them towards a progressive
refinement of the self. Instead of taking them by the hand through the
labyrinth of affection where one gets to know things clearly and deeply,
you push them down the road you went down and lost yourself on; you lead
them on into an impossibly knotted net of moral and social conventions,
into a muddled world of constraint and subterfuge, into a tangled mess
of subtleties which are as good for duping others as they are for duping
you.
And thatâs how the universe of enjoyment slips into the shadowy depths
of unconsciousness. Later, psychoanalysts, discoverers of whole
continents voluntarily swallowed up, will play dumpster-diver, and,
bringing to the surface various objects of desire and resentment, will
return them to their owners, who often donât know how to use them
anymore and will keep the best of the lot as souvenirs.
First get to work; you can enjoy yourself afterwards! Such is the
recurring, rhyming themesong that is passed down into the head,
programming militarily the rhythm of the bodyâs movements. Such is, in
its numbing insistance, the tune that orchestrates the retreat of
nascent intelligence. And rest assured â it will be a different
intelligence that ends up in charge over the frozen behavior of working
hours, an intelligence in which heart counts the least and is petrified
the most.
They discovered the child by following the ogreâs footsteps.
Their generosity is very often nothing but the alms given by Profit to
those that serve it. For their âniggersâ to go from being animals to the
status of being humans, wasnât it enough that they became purchasers of
refrigerators, of cars, of expired medications? How did the proletariat
manage to lift itself up enough to get the democratic right to choose
its masters? Certainly these things took place due less to the
proliferation of its âfinal conflictsâ than to the evolution of a market
on the quest for a more massive clientele. Equality owes more than
anyone suspects to the appearance on every table of frozen spaghetti,
perfumed with artificial truffle-scent.
When it happened that the ogre of mercantilism saw signs of tiredness
and satiety amongst the African nations and amongst the western nomads
looting the supermarket, checkbooks clenched tightly in their fists, he
descended even lower on the social ladder in order to sink his teeth
into one last bit of food.
In the 50s, the child was worth nothing outside of the family and was
considered rather a despicable thing; worth a little more than a dog, a
little less than a black man, a worker, or a woman. The old wisdom
advised beating the children, pounding them into shape like coins,
molding them like clay, hardening them in the kiln of tests and proofs,
and whitewashing their knowledge so they might have a future as
lucrative puppets.
Thirty years later, promotional sales discovered that it could call up
good feelings by making use of childrenâs pretty little heads, arranging
them in an orderly fashion like the x-axis on their graphs. Thatâs what
set them right with God without them having to confess their sins;
thatâs what gets them credit cards, bank accounts, computers, and fast
food, the privilege of being able to talk loftily, and decide out of
hand; the privilege of imposing another choice on the planetary
consumption-market.
However, the economy, licking up its last pennies, is running the risk
of dislocating its jaw. The marketing specialists have left out of their
calculations the fact that the ogre always falls beneath the blows of an
innocent hand. The commodity offensive has come to its most vulnerable
point by approaching ever closer the source of life.
The falsehood of advertising, which made children grow old by disguising
them as well-informed consumers, has contributed, and not just in a
mediocre way, to the removal of childrenâs status as inferior creatures.
But did they ever think theyâd really understand children when they
could only see immediate profit and have narrowed their view on
everything so much? Did they think that they could raise the childrenâs
consciousness with impunity, only to reduce them just as quickly to the
weakness of the herd-mentality which yesterdayâs consumers were so
horrified of?
And what a haste theyâre in to confuse children with breeding dogs and
apartment cats; they too have benefited, at almost the same time,
getting more attention, more respect! Was it plausible that a simple
whistle would make them salivate and come running to go off to war or to
elect a fĂŒhrer, as past generations have done?
They werenât counting on the changes that the development of commodity
society has made to behaviors and modes of thought. To the extent that
the tyranny of the family has fallen into disuse and the decline of
patriarchy has put an end to the practice of brutal constraint and wily
lies, children make the appropriate distinction between the humanity and
the inhumanity which tie and untie people to and from each other,
whereas long ago a slap, a dark look, or the raising of an eyebrow would
make them sing a sad, bitter song.
The child can soon feel the iron hand beneath the velvet glove that
mercantile solicitations hold out to him, an iron hand poised to make
the child pay its dues. Blessed be the litany, âhelp yourself, take what
you want, you can pay for it on your way outâ! Nothing could convince
the child more effectively of the odious character of all
commodity-dealings. Nothing could better prepare the children for
propagating everywhere an absolute refusal of the devastating blackmail,
âobey me or I wonât love you any more.â
Gazing upon the child, the presence in the adultâs heart of an
unfinished life, oscillating between birth and death, is clarified.
Noting the checkmate of a civilization that exiles everybody from their
own bodies, Picabia observed : âWhat men lack the most is what they
actually have: their eyes, their ears, their asses.â
A voluntary blinding, over the course of the centuries, has made it seem
imperative, in order to know, honor, and admire the lessons of the
world, that one must not know oneself, and to never even examine oneself
except with contempt. If a generation of blind men has given birth to a
generation suffering from mental blindness, thatâs doubtlessly less the
result of a mutation of intelligence than it is the result of an
ensemble of circumstances in which everyone is induced never to leave
the surest paths except in the immediate experience of living their
lives.
There are hardly any branches left that would be high enough to hang
deathâs companions from, or to hold them up. The systems that once
governed earth in the name of heaven have been drowned in derision. Show
me a single one of these eternal values, through which societies imposed
respect for themselves by refusing themselves to the living, that has
been left still standing on its pedestal!
Who still believes the lies, the enormity of which brought up waves of
enthusiasm and ferocity in their believers, sustained both noble and
ignoble causes, and threw hordes of fanatic militants into the blazing
flames of ecstasy and torment?
The economy has ceased hiding itself behind mystifying words like God,
devil, fatality, grace, damnation, nature, progress, duty, and
necessity, with which, over the years, it gave itself an inescapable
credibility. It no longer troubles itself with the frilly liberals, it
is no longer bothered by the leninists in blue jeans â it laughs at the
idea of taking any great leaps while wearing fascist jackboots or
socialist bootees. Itâs so simple and obvious it stands naked, and its
omnipresence makes it familiar and familial.
Reduced to the final necessity of survival, the economy brings together
all its past lies; the lie that there is no hope for humanityâs survival
outside of the economy.
The old principles that were once inculcated in children have ended up
quite tightly held down by the progressive strip-down through which the
empire of commodities has annulled the majority of the traditional
values. Scandals arise; quickly they rush to sacrifice to the
fatherland, prove their devotion to the State, show their obedience to
the bosses, and to screw over those who donât submit; they crush the
very revolt and insubordination that they need to balance out their
accounts in the registry of hatred and scorn. Letâs call the economy by
its real name: âMake-money-fuck-the-rest-of-the-world.â
The 80s fashionably mirrors a manner of speaking frankly which called a
penny a penny, spoke highly of profit, got the financial schemes up and
running again, exalted the struggle of the loan shark, and held commerce
high overhead like it was the winning sports team. Teams of audacious
thinkers restored the virtue of work, reanimated the dynamism of private
enterprise and resuscitated a capitalist spirit, scruffy and ragged
after its statist redevelopment. A vain and short-lived pretension.
In less than a decade, the wedding of business and individual initiative
has left nothing but stock-market collapse, joblessness, inflation, and
industrial bankruptcy in its wake, piling upon the landfill a
not-so-very encouraging model for the schoolchildren to follow,
schoolchildren who the present pedagogical politics are already trying
to fold into the great army of the renascent economy.
And as if they had confusedly realized the fact that the economy was
obviously not going to take its first or second breaths again any time
soon, that they were going to be left with no future, they suddenly saw,
in children and in their own far-off childhood, the point of a radically
different existence.
Ever since their little ones stopped kneeling before the altar of
examples-to-follow, since there was nothing there but grimaces and
frowns to imitate, they asked themselves why they had to renounce
belonging to themselves, why they kept themselves from approaching
things and beings for the sole pleasure they might take from doing so.
Because, after all, thereâs no reason anymore to take up arms and go to
war, to start on a career, to gamble at the stock-exchange, to play
chicken; so why should they bring ridicule and disenchantment upon
themselves by repeating, by inertia, the gestures that deprive them of
life and donât even bring in a compensatory profit anymore?
Out of all the collapsed parties on the fixed horizon of politics and
business, there is only one faction still active â that of power. It is
not negligible, since it makes arguments out of death to support itself
with, but death is on its way towards losing its monopoly over absolute
belief.
See the masters of thought and action suffer an attack of old age, now
that they havenât got the perch of religions and ideologies to put their
ambitions up on.
They wanted to engrave their existence into the televised image they
send out for the massesâ sarcastic devotion. They thought they could
still fascinate everyone, but they only ended up x-rayed, scrutinized
inside and out, and given a medical examination that naturally treated
them as if they were ill. They had better readjust themselves according
to the worldâs new demands; fashions get used up quick in the
accelerated-speed world of the spectacle. Theyâll end up abandoned in a
few seasons. Theyâre playing at renewing themselves when itâs already
their wintertime.
As long as the ideological discourse was misting up the massesâ eyes,
they couldnât see with such clarity how totally the media stars had
become little more than the mechanical pasted onto the living. Today,
now that the breath of history no longer blows up their empty words with
such hot air, the calculated gestures of these âstarsâ miss the boat,
and their effectiveness is reduced to naught. They reveal their failed
humanity, showing quite plainly in their features the wrinkled faces of
babies that were never born.
Heads of State, of clans, of cliques, cops, bosses, politicians,
ministers, military men, lawgivers, stars, bureaucrats, and the other
familiar bits of residue from authoritarianism â all of them have
clown-masks in their dressers, fetuses in their jars, dried up embryos
in their hearts. The more they try to get rid of their repressed
childishness, the more it comes to light.
And all this foot-stamping of offended dignities, these accusing
fingers, these pitiful jeremiads, these hypocritical smiles, this
aggressive guilt, this contempt from the judges who themselves get
judged â is this anything other than the antics of frustrated toddlers,
old wounds from the past hurting again, awkwardly hidden behind the
gravity and seriousness of the âresponsible adultâ?
Do they really still expect us to believe in them? It would be easier to
believe they were human if they were to quit treating people like snotty
kids, dumbed-down by slaps and lies, and chose suddenly to prefer lived
authenticity to the derisory prestige of appearances; if they were
simply to decide to try and rekindle the light of whatever little bit
they still have in them thatâs alive. But how will he learn to live, he
who has only ever learned how to humiliate and dominate others?
The revolutionary epochs offered a great variety of opportunities for
the resentment of stolen childhoods to choose to exercise itself. To
break the heads of the blacks, the bourgeois, the proletarians, of the
âhereditary enemyâ, to beat up women â this was ordinarily enough to
channel off for a time the rage and moroseness of maintaining in an
endemic state a gangrenous existence full of rotting desires.
But thereâs less and less release now, with the growing meaninglessness
of the great causes, wherein civilization came to terms with itself.
Itâs taken them almost a century to admit that a good part of the
sickness that pierced their stomachs, their hearts, and their heads came
not from a random malady, but rather from an infancy on which the door
of adulthood had been brutally slammed, and a childhood that had lashed
out everywhere because it was suffocating.
Accustomed to taking everything negatively and undertaking everything
with a negative bias, they make thought afraid to come to life within
them. Panic carries them from the psychoanalystsâ couches all the way to
the operating rooms. Rushing to deliver themselves from the penetrating
presence of their desires, they are filled with the seeds of death, with
a vitality proliferating upside down, with a cellular panic, and rush
along in a backwards flight wherein the organism becomes crablike and
cancerous.
The end of the 20^(th) century has brought to society a certain disarray
which the proliferation of survival-sicknesses shows quite clearly.
Since war, revolution, riot, and legalized murder no longer offer to
peopleâs suicidal tendencies the excuses that they need, choosing death
has become, for many, like a daily pastime. Their blood is soured every
morning when they get on the road and go off to work; they hold back
their desires all day long, lock their exuberance up in the cupboard,
snapping the neck of their childlike vivacity, and cutting their
life-lines at precisely the point where passion holds them out. Here, a
general consciousness has at least gained some precision â there is no
longer any boundary between the world and the individual, just a lonely
border, delimiting with an excessive cleanliness the zones where the
energies of death take over and the places where a new way of life might
be born.
They are ready, now more than ever, and more than anyone would suspect,
to remake ties with their childhood, not the childhood that mechanical
gestures kill and which is autopsied on the analystâs couch, but the
childhood that responds to the call of desires.
They readily impart a knowledge to the children, theirs or those of
others, a knowledge which helps them greatly to confidently come up to
living a life at last accepted in its exuberance. Nothing prepares them
better to push away the ruses of sickness, to dismiss the sudden
impression that a spoilt life has no hope besides a successful death,
that is, a death hurried by the alcoholic derelictions of those who
âlive wellâ.
Although the familial order remains as it was, with all its typical
characteristics, and in spite of the fact that for better or worse they
insist on keeping it up, they very often refuse to perpetrate the same
muffled murder that they were typically victims of in their young lives.
Fathers and mothers seem to more and more be leaving behind the old
morgue of patriarchal tyranny, which imposed itself upon them long ago
as their heritage. They repress feebly, give beatings infrequently and
clumsily, scream less at their kids, blather on and argue more. Above
all, they have changed their attitudes on one particularly delicate
subject â parents these days, without hesitation nor reserve, are giving
out freely an affection which in the past was always only given in a
kind of protection-racket-style blackmailing and submission.
The child can feel that the sting of imbecile constraint is getting
duller, and has won the advantage of being able to go more easily the
directions it is pushed in by its desires, of being able to speak aloud
the words that nature is murmuring everywhere. Amongst those who
appointed their masters and never mastered anything but their own agony,
an appetite for life has unexpectedly awoken, which the scheming of work
had plunged into lethargy.
Isnât it marvelous to see the children flit around in pleasure, take
hold of their happiness as soon as it passes within their reach, to see
them try with all their might to get back happy moments past? The
reality that this reveals is the center of a labyrinth wherein so many
able maneuvers, so many fanfares and subterfuges have been lost. Itâs
authenticity itself theyâre refining, that ceaseless, relaxed agreement
between bodies and desires. Aggressive infantilism and the complaining
incontinence of adults were never more than lies, a âpuerile reversal of
being.â
Children spontaneously and ceaselessly teach us to open up our eyes for
the first time, to be able to tell the color of the foliage, to read a
landscape, to comprehend the language of the birds, to seize the grace
of an instant â to seize it, but no longer with eyes which pass
everything before the hair-splitting hatchet blade, eyes like
rifle-sights, a vision caught up and blurred by so much thinking about
how short-lived everything is, about death. And it is the only the
little child inside us all which can allow the flowing forth from the
self of the perennial sap of the trees, the savage ardor of animals, the
voluptuousness of a amorous presence from whence only amiable things are
born.
It is a strange and imperfect amorous alchemy which, in two successive
transmutations, conceives and gives birth to the child, never waiting
for the third, wherein humanity would take it upon itself to create
itself by creating a new world.
Isnât the creative act âpar excellenceâ the embrace of man and woman,
engendering life in the maternal womb? Do they need any shame, love, or
life, to impute to a celestial and disembodied god this most earthly
operation, this most carnal alchemy? What scorn for the enjoyment lovers
get from being together, what disdain for the happiness in which bodies
commingle to impregnate themselves, whether or not a child is born from
the privilege of union! Has patriarchal virility ever given greater
homage to mutually consenting powerlessness? From what unbalanced
imagination comes this idea that there was one and only one creator of
the universe, a Spirit, a seed of nothingness? Wasnât it necessary, to
give rise to such nonsense, that everyone be made to work and end up
incapable of creating, that power castrate totally the pleasure of
gaining control over oneself, that the expansion of commodity society
substitute the expansion of human nature?
There is no other genesis of humanity and inhumanity than that which is
found in those people who are borne of the earth and destroyed in the
name of the heavens.
Their men of science admire the fact that in a period of nine months the
human embryo reiterates, in its development from conception to birth,
the ancient evolutionary forward-march of aquatic creatures becoming
earthbound mammals. What happened after that, if theyâd look to see,
would give them reason to be surprised. Looking at such a great leap,
going from marine existence to the conquest of the earth, wouldnât you
say it was probable that we could hope for a similar evolution of nature
wherein the human species would announce itself as the transcendence of
the animal species?
But something apparently got derailed en route. There wasnât any great
human miracle. The animal side of the human species was only perfected
and socialized by becoming denatured. The genius of humanity has taken
hold of the universe by means of techniques that donât obey humanity,
and that sterilize life everywhere. The phenomenon deserves more
analysis than is given it by the metaphysical contortions which people
use to justify it as a fact, as the only possible kind of evolution. And
itâs true that itâs something the wise, judging life on earth by their
own way of life, usually tend to scorn rather terribly.
It happens that in growing up and developing inside the maternal womb,
the child finds itself getting more and more cramped, bit by bit, within
the sweet confines of the uterine universe. The protective envelope
chafes the baby; it restricts its movements and smothers it. It begins
to practically swim towards the exit, energetically moving towards
birth, towards autonomy.
Its impatience weighs it down, and encumbers the body of its mother, who
is also impatient to get rid of this presence, which has become
inopportune. Thereâs a common agreement between mother and child when it
comes to the expulsion from the womb. The mother pushes the child out
towards a freedom it aspires to, with all the violence of new life. The
moment birth emancipates the woman and child, or more exactly, commits
them both to a process of emancipation.
The umbilical is cut, the ties of dependency broken, the emotional unity
is lightened up, and from this freeness it gains a more dispassionate
force... Idyllic vision. Their civilization doesnât cut the tube of the
IV, it just sweetens the water, stretches it out, and makes whoever is
hooked-in turn out brittle beneath the constant threat of cutting off
aid, of taking away their allowance. It knots everything up with such
dramatic complexities that mother and child cling to one another,
parodying, for their whole existence, the game of assistant and
assisted; they attract and repel, and are mutilated with every vague
desire for independence; they find themselves again in the morbid
stickiness of the family and try to heal the wounds theyâve had
inflicted upon them.
Learning, in animal milieus, is limited to learning to respect the law
that rules the survival of animals: adaptation. Observing a female
animal with her little one shows the diligence she must have in
protecting it, just like she had prepared it, from the moment it left
the cocoon it was enclosed in, to move forward in a perilous
environment. The maternal lesson teaches the child to hide itself, to
pounce, to build refuges, to follow trails, to get some territory for
itself, to carve out a place under the sun and moon for itself, a place
that attracts it, an ephemeral place.
From on high it was affirmed that animals were inferior to people â why
then have we got a mode of education which retards so much the simple
faculty of adaptation? Weâve just got to put it all down â and right
away!
Not so long ago, more children in a human family died than died in a
litter of rabbits. Theyâre still dying, even today, beneath blows,
torments, the hassle of having to put up with the misery and resentment
of the adults.
The normal ferociousness of children doesnât take well to any
transcending of animal behavior. Are their schools really anything but
schools of survival? The human child is better-armed than the chimp; it
has sophisticated techniques at its disposal, as well as linguistic
ruses, but its destiny is the same â to interpose itself somewhere
amongst the strong and the weak, to adapt to the laws of its
surroundings, to save its skin and gain prestige. Nothing more â and
often less because it is refused the natural freedom of appeasing its
impulses.
The stories and legends illustrate with enough cruelty the fate set
aside for children. Naive beings, generous, frail and intelligent,
confront giants who are powerful, fearsome, mean, and stupid. And when
it comes to merciless combat, the weak win out over the strong. David
decapitates Goliath; he detaches from the musclebound body of the brute
one of those gigantic false heads put up by governments on statues in
cities and towns.
Meanwhile, the little ones are being hardened beneath the beating-switch
of proofs, learning to deploy an equal barbarity against their enemies,
and, moreover, an underhanded ferocity, clever and deceptive like that
of the servant that tricks his master. Their time has come to rise to
the functions of the kings, the giants, and the adults. Their journey
through the social jungle makes them into exploited people â with the
status of exploiters.
And whatâs the moral of this story? That the strongest is not always who
youâd think, but is usually the one who thinks â itâs not brutal
violence, but the art of controlling its use, that wins out.
The little ones triumph by using their minds, and their spirits
compensate them by making them grow up, get old, get embittered, slowly
making them identical to the monsters they had vanquished. Nothing has
really changed; the paving stones thrown into the sea have only sent the
same concentric circles floating across the water.
As regards the emotional wealth of the hero, it gets gathered up into a
stereotype, a final pirouette: âthey lived happily ever after and had
many children.â You might as well send that affection back to the land
of nowhere, to utopia, where there is no more history. As if happiness
could only come to being in lands of fairylike unreality, where nothing
but death and a state of being too spent to be able to give birth to
anything are all there is to look forward to.
Children have, up to now, been treated in a way opposite to the
evolution they announce. When theyâre just beginning to grow in the
motherâs belly, they receive, on the frequency-scale of the first
sensations, all the echoes that rebound, like in a valley, from the
storm that comes from the difficulty of loving and loving oneself in an
environment such as that of couples. Anguish, joy, fear, irritation,
indifference, surges of love and hate, ring out on the keyboard of the
childâs embryonic psychology, a biological rhythm that could indeed
decide his or her definitive implantation in society, or premature
expulsion from it.
If he oversteps the gap and escapes miscarriage, which so often ends up
a convenient substitute for voluntary abortion, then between the child
and mother there arises an agreement, a consensus that science, after
having studied everything about death, has at last dared to discover.
Iâve neglected to highlight, up to this point, the importance that
receiving food simultaneously and freely takes on for the infant in
utero, giving it a feeling of love as well as a message, mental and
sensual, which communicates serenity and confidence. However, thatâs a
privilege that birth doesnât abolish, since the maternal breast keeps on
dispensing milk-energy and the sweetness of affection, with all the
psalmodies of tenderness.
This terrestrial manna, these caressing murmurs, these generational
odors, these almost epidermic thoughts, this is the true fountain of
Youth, the spray which strengthens the life of the young child more
surely than all the arsenals of the most sophisticated medicines could.
Lovers know well that in the paroxysms of their passion, a love and
freshness arises, making them resemble little children once again.
And then comes the rupture.
By means of an unfortunate thing that produces a number of others, their
civilization is structured in such a way that it separates the affective
from the nutritive; it disassociates in one fell swoop the original
language that sustained their unity.
The truth is that if it were the contrary, it would be surprising. It is
unthinkable that a society whose existence is founded on work, that
producer of commodities, would give a legal interest to the surges of a
love offered naturally, to the necessity of nourishing oneself, by which
the price of wheat and of men are regulated. Affection is given without
preparatives; it isnât a serious thing. Seriousness, in adulthood,
consists in denying freeness in order to make things yield a profit; it
consists in destroying everything in the crop except what gets paid for,
starting with the need to eat, to move, to inhabit a space, to express
oneself, and to love.
And so it must be clearly seen that in a few years the emotional
language of mother and child makes way for the language of efficiency,
of output, of economy, a language solidly structured according to the
Aristotelian logic of âdo this, donât do that!â and which, unlike the
former, folds itself perfectly to the pedagogical exigencies of the
computer.
The creative faculty is the human phenomenon par excellence. It comes
into being with the body, which the fetal ambiance feeds in abundance.
It gives to the newborn the power to develop itself by transforming the
earthly environment, and to enrich its original abundance by the
creation of a world of abundance wherein the child can learn to conquer
its human autonomy fully.
The creative genius participates in a natural evolution, denatured by
the civilization of work. Life and creation are inseparable. Both work
to hold back and exhaust the system of the exploitation of nature and of
human nature, which is the basis of the economic era.
The educational butcher knife has cut apart emotional enjoyment and the
satisfaction of primary needs. The body-to-body connection between woman
and child hasnât managed to push forth a relationship wherein the
sovereignty of love would teach the art of creating oneself by creating
oneâs independence. Communication has been interrupted, alchemy has
fallen short, and the third mutation did not take place. Life no longer
plays nurse â death does. Fate unravels like a film running backwards.
Such is the ordinary nightmare they are surprised to see still showing
up in rare moments in life.
How could human beings be born when children become fetuses in adulthood
and adults curl up into fetuses inside the children?
Itâs a terrible damnation to have to try to be happy in a world where
happiness is relegated to some future release. The word itself has an
odor of idiocy. It makes one shrug oneâs shoulders out of spite as often
as one shrugs off regrets.
Because if they have trumpeted through the ages that man was not put
here on the planet to give himself over to voluptuousness, they have
kept written in the secrecy of their hearts and in their imaginations
the memory of their fetal paradise, Eden at the center of woman, the
happy isle where the gift of love nourished nascent life. How many times
have they rushed in with a haughty approach to assault riches and power,
only to cave in at the least feeling of weakness and abandon, to snuggle
up into the arms of the first mock-up of a maternal womb presented
randomly to assuage their confusion!
The more they put their endurance and steadfastness into harping on what
distances them from themselves, the more they regress, with a childlike
step, towards a primordial state that once pampered and protected them.
And thus their existence never ceases reproducing, in the monotony of
sarcasm and boredom, the trauma of infancy and history, which chased
them away from their original enjoyments to send them into the hell of
daily work.
In a few years, in a few months, perhaps, the child finds itself
deprived of the privileges that love had accorded it without reserve.
Itâs not so bad that the easy existence it enjoyed passively in its
motherâs belly is taken away â on the contrary. As the child comes into
earthly life, it embarks upon a human adventure that invites it to
abandon passivity and to create a natural abundance that the fetal world
was nothing but a taste, a summary sketch of.
Thatâs the big disgrace â as soon as it escapes the protective uterus,
which with time had become inopportune and irritating, it runs into such
unfavorable conditions that everything incites it to want to go back in,
to abandon the hope for a different humanity, for a human mutation â the
child runs to deck itself out with arms and baggage, curling up again
into the fetal position.
The dissociation of the emotional and the nutritional produces a feeling
of insecurity and anguish in the impressionable newborn, at the very
moment when nothing is more important to it than to enter into a foreign
world taking only the provisions of an affection without reserve.
A threat paralyzes the child when its weak movements need reassurance,
the threat of not being loved anymore if it doesnât eat, if it doesnât
sleep well, if it cries, screams, wriggles, gets annoying, gets annoyed,
disobeys, or follows a rhythm that differs from that of the marketed and
scheduled time of the adults. What contempt in ignorance, which persists
in infesting the particular universe of the child as if it were a
conquered land! What self-loathing!
Is it not love which sustains the audacity to face the unknown, to make
an effort stubbornly, to throw oneself into a frenetic succession of
undertakings, to find the nipple, to clutch the bottle, to take hold of
a chair, to stand up, to walk, to articulate words, to rouse the happy
dispositions of nature in the experience of beings and things?
Education becomes a glacial mechanics from the instant it is no longer
founded on the pretext of an affection accorded without reserve to
children, whatever happens. Alas, how can the predominance of love be
guaranteed when work imposes the precision of its cogs on the cycle of
days and nights?
Doubtless it isnât the custom anymore in families to encourage the
vocation of pianist by beating rulers on kidsâ knuckles. But if slaps
and screams arenât the thing to do anymore, it isnât so easy to avoid
the sentimental blackmail that paralyzes gestures of independence and
autonomy.
The certitude of being loved is the surest incitement to self-love
through loving others. It is the fundamental assurance that permits the
child to fly with its own wings. Without it, destiny gets dragged down
into the rut of a dependency that makes death look like an all-powerful
mother.
That affection folds to the law and to supply and demand, and certainty
vacillates; the heart is depopulated, the body empties out, and the
emptiness is filled with a morbid tangle of real anguish and artificial
conciliation.
Thatâs when childrenâs clumsiness becomes voluntary. Falls, accidents,
sicknesses, originally inherent parts of errant inexperience, become the
frightened cries of an emotional deficiency; they demand aid and
protection from the mother, to which she replies with another blackmail.
The brutal reminder of oneâs duty to love and lend assistance engenders
in her the guilty feeling of having fallen out of grace with god. The
agony of life begins there, when the childâs first steps lose their
random nature, stop being fruitless attempts, and become reflexes of a
voluntary weakness, a simulation of death, and, through a gradual
overbidding, become a suicidal reaction wherein the individual denies
him or herself in order to attract the interest of other people.
Bargaining with emotions instills in the childâs heart an endemic fear.
The memory of âI wonât love you anymore if...â freezes over the
spontaneous conflagrations of enjoyment. Every time the child takes on
an independent desire, the burning feeling of a possible disaffection
sanctions its vague desires for autonomy and engraves upon its mind the
law of submission and renunciation that rules the adult world.
I do not claim that it would be good to abandon children to the chaotic
freedom of impulses. A few of the experiences that they pursue gropingly
present dangers; they sometimes need rectification, and merit a little
help from the more able. But it is sure that an authentically emotional
communication has the patience and the efficiency to be able to explain
to the child why there are certain gestures and actions that should be
avoided; thatâs better than the brutal injunctions and the flashes of
fear, which illuminate and incite a morbid fascination with danger,
which the children will try to return to rather than distance themselves
from.
Fear plunges into an artificial and haughty hardness anyone who tries to
drive the demons out of himself without conquering himself. The muscular
armoring, reflecting upon the outside the stricken terror from within,
is the foundation block for an empty fortress which exudes everywhere
the shadows of power and death.
Withdrawing into a body blocked up by fear, and from which they spurt
forth intermittently like the furies to propagate worry â is this not
the caricature of the maternal belly, of birth, of a sterile, dried,
overdrawn, hostile womb, a birth inverted in the middle of its progress,
which opens out upon ruins, destruction, nothingness?
Yes, and it is also, by an obvious analogy, the wall they construct
around their villages, their cities, their property, their family, their
State.
A society that subjugates emotional resources to the principle of
economy makes the child grow old prematurely in the adult, and makes
adults into children who are never born, who never fulfill their destiny
of becoming full grown humans.
Is there a single power, any one lone authoritarian instance, which does
not reproduce itself, under the guise of the grandiloquence of
seriousness, in the tried-and-true maneuver of sentimental blackmail?
The magistrates, the cops, the hierarchical superiors â do they have any
other intelligence besides that of the complex alternation between
caresses and blows, as a result of which the substance of the
unfortunate ones who appear before them expresses itself in guilty
truths? And they are not satisfied with calling them âthe accusedâ the
suspects, the guilty or incompetent â they take away from them their
unction, their confidence, their protection, their esteem; they exclude
them from the familial cocoon, which they say they no longer deserve;
the reduce them to the state of weaklings and keep them at bay, sinking
them into childishness.
But a frightened dog is the first to bark: the arrogance and
respectability of the notables stink of an infantile terror into which
they were plunged long ago, and in which they suffer still â the daily
fear of being suspected, judged, condemned, made inferior.
Their servitude, dressed in mortuary clothes, carries the mark of a
castration of the emotions. Hunted out of Eden to work by the sweat of
their brow, they make an infernal present with which to pay the price of
a lost paradise. Progressing in a world of cripples, they have only the
sad genius of inventing crutches, which donât even hold them up without
mutilating them even more.
Human civilization is aborted when commodity civilization is born.
A succession of wars, genocides, and massacres, adorned by three
pyramids and ten cathedrals â youâd have to be pretty bitter and cynical
to dare to call this âthe history of humanityâ. The magic Flute, the
cinema, the refrigerator, organ transplants. What they consider to be
âgood senseâ consists in putting even a lower price on millions of
sacrificed existences than they put on the coins and medallions they
have their faces engraved on the backs of. Nonetheless, how can anyone
really say anymore with a straight face that progress needs holocausts,
the engineering of unfortunates, the bloodied gasoline, the monthly
salaries of a daily ounce of fresh meat, when their moral and financial
values are floundering, when their patriarchal authority is down at the
heels, when a breath of death is contaminating the forests, the oceans,
the fields of grain and even the air they breathe?
Their heavens are empty, their beliefs dried up, their pride in tears,
their civilization in ruins. However, they persist, with a customary
inertia, in falling to their knees faithlessly and glorifying
unhappiness, gnawed at by their desires under the pressure of work and
of economizing on themselves for the sake of a deserted future.
In the days when they threw themselves into the conquest of the earth,
something conquered them, and left their vital energies and spaces
corrupted in a universal corruption.
They have exhausted the name and concept of God, Nature, Fate â which
symbolized for such a long time the only object of their salutes and of
their perdition. I have already said that the only thing they had left,
to justify a destiny so contrary to their hopes, was to invoke âeconomic
necessityâ ultima ratio. And so the circle of a spoilt civilization
closes around their starting point and their finishing line, into which
the economy has simultaneously embedded their birth and death.
Like the infant aborted in the adult, the promise of a human evolution
sinks and suffocates in a mercantile history wherein men produce, in the
form of power and profit, a wealth that dehumanizes them.
The helplessness of taking only the last pennies of prestige and
marketability from others and from themselves leaves them with their
infancy and their history weighing down their outstretched arms. The
question is whether they will end up undoing themselves along with the
history that undoes them, or instead if they will invent themselves a
new childhood and remake themselves.
They have pillaged the riches that nature offered them freely,
impoverishing the earth for the profit of the heavens.
Up till now no one seems to have been disturbed about the deliberate
imposture there was in identifying as the only possible form of human
civilization a civilization founded on agriculture and commerce.
However, the diversity of their myths doesnât manage to make a mystery
out of the fundamental dissonance, the piercing sound of which disrupts
their symphony of praises. Are they the only ones around whoâre talking
about a new age in the world, which they themselves illustrate the
decline of? Do they not evoke, at the origin of their era, a fall, a
degeneration, the misadventures of a couple chased out of the paradise
of enjoyments and condemned to give birth in pain to a race devoted to
the damnation of work?
Having invented a civilization where living well wasnât really possible,
they had no scruples about postulating that there was no other kind of
human life possible, except in the uncertain memory of legends. When
they made their discovery of savage people â that is, people without
firearms and banking institutions â they were confronted with their own
past, and with the curiosity of exploring it, and they immediately
imagined the âsavagesâ to be âpre-adamitesâ with the features of animals
howling, wolfing down food in cavernous hovels, and only distinguished
from beasts by the fact that they killed with spears.
At what moment did they sense that paleolithic civilizations ordered
themselves according to modes of social organization that were radically
different from those of commodity-societies? Not until the end of the
20^(th) century, at the same time that they finally discovered the
specificity of childhood, the freeness of natural energies, and
sustainable energy sources.
What has been called the âNeolithic revolutionâ marks the passage of
nomadic hunter-gatherers to a sedentary farming existence. After a mode
of subsistence in symbiosis with nature came a system of social
relations determined by the appropriation of a territory, the
cultivation of the earth and the exchange of products or commodities.
Some new studies have been made which correct the simian representation,
which, until a short while ago, justified men in the face of history.
When the spotlights dim, whatâs behind the scenes is clarified. The
civilization of economy had to drink down the last backwash of
bankruptcy and powerlessness in order to revise the opinion that held
that the errant communities of the Paleolithic were the rough draft
wherein, in a sort of childlike way, the era of agriculture, commerce
and industry were sketched out. A Neolithic modernity, in a way.
It isnât such an extreme presumption to conjecture that between 35000
and 15000 BCE there existed civilizations in which human beings, in the
search for a human destiny, tried to emancipate themselves from the
animal kingdom, from the force-relations that predominated there and
spread fear in the wake of predation.
The examination of certain sites gives us a hint that men and women once
lived together not in a hierarchical relation but in distinct and
complementary groups. Men devoted themselves to hunting, fishing, etc.,
and women gathered edible plants. What exempted women from killing game
was not, as patriarchy would have us believe, some constitutional
weakness of their sex, but rather it was probably an analogical
incompatibility: womenâs menstrual blood was part of a cycle of
fecundity; it stops flowing to prepare life â whereas the blood of
beasts or of a wounded hunter flows as a harbinger of death.
âEverything is womanly in what one loves.â There is no epoch wherein
femininity has gotten back the privileges of love â not as woman-object,
made male or made to reproduce â that did not coincide with a certain
favor being accorded in the same epoch to the human, by a civilization
that hardly lavishes any love at all.
At the source of the general discrediting of women and of these
resurgences wherein her power is revealed, is there not the original
clash of two universes, the one full of the signs of feminine
omnipresence, and the other propagating, from its farming roots to its
industrial and bureaucratic excrescence, the aggressive phallic-worship
of its monoliths, its dungeons, its cathedrals and its fortified towers
of concrete?
A certain history begins in the Neolithic. Itâs the history of the
commodity, of men who deny their humanity by producing. Itâs the history
of separation between individuals and society, between individuals and
themselves.
Above and beyond it are regions into which only hypotheses reach, but
from whence reign, at the very least, the obvious fact the economy is
not dominant and dominating there, any more than is the particular
irradiation to which it submits opinions, morals, and behaviors.
The gathering civilizations didnât develop through the exploitation of
nature, but through a symbiosis with it, just like the infant in the
belly of its mother. They do not clash like antagonistic classes;
rather, evolution remained essentially natural in them, and did not
depart from a unity wherein the fundamental constituents of life were
conserved and transformed in a perpetual becoming: the mineral, the
vegetable, the animal, and the human.
If the walled-in picture thatâs painted of the Paleolithic easily evokes
half-animal, half-human hybrids, doesnât it at least express a feeling
of fusion when first seen, a religious feeling â doesnât it feel like a
mere representation of what ties together the distinct and inseparable
elements of living? And this in the sense that religion is the absolute
inversion of.
Humanity tends to emancipate itself from the many reigns it is issued
from without there being any real rupture, separation, or rejection of
them in that. Its evolution proceeds by means of continuity and by leaps
and bounds, postulating a transcendence towards a new and autonomous
species, conscience of its diversity and of its unitary accord with the
living.
The gyne-phallic figurines, embedding in an egalitarian coupling the
feminine and the masculine, in a â69â position, let us reckon with a
mode of symbiotic consciousness through which a whole society affirmed
itself to be simultaneously superior to and faithful to its original
animalism.
Is it a fantastic presumption to sense, in pre-economic civilizations,
the reality of a communication establishing itself between beings,
things, and natural phenomena, less according to an intellectual process
than to an analogical apprehension, by a global intelligence still
attached to its sensitive and sensual roots?
Nothing can be discovered in the past besides meanings driven by the
present, which have come to maturity at the heart of an individual
history. I do not attribute to coincidence the fact that, at the end of
a civilization that denigrated and overwhelmed them with prohibitions,
new alliances between men, women, the animal, the vegetative, the
cellular, and the crystalline have manifested themselves.
That it is possible to efficiently address oneself to infants in their
mothersâ bellies, to babies a few days old, to wild animals, or to
plants, is part of an experiential reality which brings to light the
persistence, in a residual state, of a natural communication which the
âprimitivesâ practiced, and which hid, with the rationality of scorn,
the peremptory verbs, the lucrative shortcut, the military and
telegraphic style of business, and economized language.
Everything leads us to think that a being that lives according to nature
and knows no borders aside from the limits of its whim behaves in no way
like a laborer, transformed into a producer of material and spiritual
riches, condemned to remain within the fences around a field, a village,
a town, a State.
Gleaners of plants and game, making free use of natural resources, not
for a calculated profit but for their enjoyment alone, doubtless had, in
their morals, their mentality, and their psychosomatic texture, only
very few traits in common with the peasant farmer, held to the
exploitation of an earth which is as hostile towards him as are those
who take profit and title to property from his labor. It is however from
this peasant producer, exploiter and exploited, that they have extracted
the essence of humanity; and they have done so to such an extent that
even in their paroxysms of imaginative freedom, in their utopias, their
poetic works, their fiction, chimerical sciences, etc., they have never
â with the exceptions of La Boetie, Hölderlin, and Fourier â conceived
of a society that wouldnât be chained to war, money, and power.
The hunter-gatherers are the children of the earth. They travel its
expanses, gathering everywhere what it offers them. These are not the
conquerors that loot and pillage the earth, and then succumb in the
deserts that their rapacity propagates. No master, no priest, no warrior
props himself up amongst them to appropriate for himself the goods
theyâve collected.
From terrestrial manna flows forth an immediate satisfaction â food,
clothing, construction materials, techniques â a satisfaction that comes
neither through money nor exchange nor the tyranny of a boss; it is a
satisfaction the consistent presence of which determines analogically a
form of community relationship, a way of being, a language
simultaneously rational and emotional, a body of signs and symbols,
engraved and sculpted, which alone could qualify as religious the
maniacal, abusive attribution to the gods of what belongs to people.
Just like theyâve only been able, for a long time, to see in children an
early sketch of adults, theyâve labeled a whole era of human evolution â
some forty to fifty thousand years â the âPaleolithicâ, or period of the
old stone, and have qualified it as a mere step on a road towards the
modern era of the ânew stoneâ, the âNeolithic.â And they speak of
Paleolithic religion as if a belief in celestial phantoms were inherent
in human nature, progressing in order to elevate themselves one day to
perfection in Christianity, Islam, Judaism, or Buddhism.
This was a crude confusion of nomads living in liberty with slaves
living on a plot of land, seeking out, in the spiritual tyranny of the
heavens, a consolation for the material tyranny of their peers. And was
it not a result of agriculture and commerce, installed by the âneolithic
revolutionâ, that the vermin kings and priests appeared? Wasnât it
around that time that the earth, stripped of its carnal substance, was
sublimated into a mother-goddess who Uranus, celestial lord, male and
fecund, raped and impregnated by the work of men?
There was, properly speaking, no religion before the Neolithic
revolution, but there was, in the original sense of the term, a unitary
relationship between all the various manifestations of life, an
analogical, omnipresent comprehension, an identity of the microcosmic
and the macrocosmic, of what is above and what is below, of what is
interior and what is exterior.
The separation from the self and the others had not yet destroyed
thought and the living in a sickly duality. The infant has no other
heaven besides its motherâs belly, the natural being knows no other
reality besides nature. The horns on Lascauxâs ox depict the different
phases of the moon. They signify that the earth carries out the movement
of the heavens with the same solicitude that it harbors the rhythm of
the seasons with.
Why refuse to admit that the errant populations of the Paleolithic had a
consciousness of a living and fecund earth wherein, from birth to death,
the adventure of individual destiny, renewed each day, carves out its
path? Do the inheritors of the Neolithic, beyond a history which was
less their history than it was the history of their alienation, do they
not today discover the permanent desire to live here, now, and forever,
at the breast of a nature at last once again inseparably human and
earthly?
Have I made use of colors too idyllic to be true to paint the ages which
condemned to the darkness the torches of industrial society? It wasnât
me that celebrated them with these names, âEden,â the âgolden ageâ, the
âfertile crescentâ, described as places where abundance, freeness, and
harmony reigned amongst animals and humans. The men of economy are the
ones who are responsible for such paradisiacal visions, those who take
such pride, with rogue voices, in their work, their religion, their
family, their State, their money, and their technical progress.
Commodity civilization does not guarantee the transcendence of
animalness in the human, it just collectivizes it by repressing it and
fixing a price on its catharsis.
There is every reason to think that at the heart of the wandering
paleolithic populations there was a perpetuation, to a good extent, of
the behaviors of herds and flocks of the various animal species.
Aurignac, Madelaine, Pech Merle cave â these were not earthly paradises,
but fields of evolution, sometimes regressive, sometimes progressive, on
the path of human development. Certain communities still obeyed the
atavistic brutality of the predator, and others discovered new forms of
association, founded on the refinement of primary needs.
Inertia plays in favor of animalness. Let us recognize that this quest
for subsistence through gathering, hunting and fishing came more from
the adaptive faculty of animals than from some aptitude for modifying
the environment. Nomadism puts its own limits on its freedom â the
seasonal displacement of the herds ruled the ballet of wanderings,
obliging the hunters to follow the itinerary of the migrations in order
to provide themselves with game; the mobility of the encampments was
determined in turn as well by the germination periods, the variety of
soils wherein edible plants grew, and the maturation of fruits.
Add to that the climactic caprices, the periods of inclement weather,
lightning storms, sudden floods, sicknesses, accidents, death, and so
many other unfortunate things cruelly inscribed into a destiny that
seems more resigned to suffer natureâs inconveniences and tragedies than
resolved to engineer its mastery, attenuating its effects or turning the
inconveniences into advantages.
Ah, but the abettors of the economy, the hoarding fanatics, the
programmers of future comfort, were they any more safe and protected
from famine, from rigorous winters, from floods, from epidemics, from
the cataclysms, from misery passed down from century to century? They
sure look stupid, deploring the lamentable fate of the âcave-menâ. Fall
to your knees and pray, then, o good people, to the lightning rods, to
refrigerators, to air conditioned hotel rooms, and donât forget to
include in your praises the wars, the genocides, the revolutions and the
repressions, all so necessary to keep us sheltered from the storm, from
the blazing heat!
If we assign a birthday to commodity civilization, and say it was about
7000 years before the exhibitionist of Golgotha, before the fortified
village of Jericho, then itâs been around for about 9000 years, and in
the last two centuries itâs gone through a frenetic snowballing of
economic progress. The period preceding it covers a period five times
longer, and it would be surprising if the human community had always
lived in the ignorance which the spirit of civilization has veiled it
with for so long, and hadnât gone down many varied paths of evolution,
many confluences of experience.
Perhaps here and there a transcending of adaptive behaviors was
undertaken: the creation of natural conditions proper for the
encouragement of the self-enjoyment without which there is no real human
progress. Alongside hordes of hunter-gatherers, dominated by animal
worries about survival, were born embryonic manifestations of a society
wherein solidarity was not at all a result of a conjunction of private
interests but rather was the result of a harmony of passions circling
around a passionate love for life.
The heart still carries a memory of those high plateaus where the best
of human sentiments once had summer grazing land, before commodity
civilization excluded them from the maps, marking them âterra
incognitaâ. And is it not the remnants of that memory that participates
the most in that secret exaltation which, in spite of the mercantile law
of exchange and sacrifice, lends such a sovereign power to love,
kindness, hospitality, generosity, affection, the spontaneous surging
forth of gift, to the inexhaustible force of freeness?
Assuredly, the art of adapting oneself to the conditions dictated by
nature postulates a kind of resignation, and at least a certain
passivity. Itâs only in appearances though. How can one deny that in the
ingenuity of fishing, hunting, gathering, of painted and engraved
messages, there exists a will to solicit natural abundance by way of the
faculty of creation? Analogically speaking, the young child extracts
good deal of learning in that way, from the surroundings its adventure
leads it through, following a thread of sensations which is sometimes
favorable and sometimes unfavorable, and pushing itself to gain more
knowledge therefrom.
The idea that you can have all kinds of cereals, fish, and meat, totally
prepared and ready to eat, just falling into your mouth, is a sarcastic
and contemplative vision of satiety, a caricature which is made use of
to justify the brutal rape and exploitation of nature by work. Whatâs
really at stake is no more than the genius of creating abundance,
multiplying natural resources, perfecting usage, and increasing
pleasure.
The ecological currents, born in the last few years of the 19^(th)
century, committed the error of dissociating, in the purest economist
tradition, the market-valorizing of the sustainable energies of the
earth â water, soil, the fires of the sun, the wind, the tides, the
lunar mirror effect, compost â and the exigencies of an individual
alchemy wherein destiny operates by transmuting patiently the materia
prima of the human, by carving from the crudeness of animal impulse the
crystal of refined desires. Such an inopportune incoherence condemns it
to being nothing but another ideology amongst the rest, doomed to the
same fading of belief.
The signs pointed, however, to the fact that to oppose the natural
energies to the energies of death, which are spreading over the earth
the shroud of chemical and nuclear pollution, made no sense outside of a
vaster project which would be attached to the reconciliation of human
nature and earthly nature, in order to create a whole world only to
enjoy it orgastically.
The simultaneous emergence of ecological contestation and of the womenâs
and childrenâs liberation movement, which marked the end of a
millenarian domination, was deserving of more attention.
Woman is at the center of the world we must create. A civilizationâs
value isnât measured by the brilliance of its art, of its riches, of its
morality, nor of its technology, but by the consideration it accords to
woman. In every place where humanitarian concerns have won out over the
rigor of laws, woman has occupied a preponderant position. Is she
scorned, humiliated, enslaved? The degree to which she is humbled is the
degree of ignobility of the society that treats her like an object.
Would anyone be surprised to discover that women were omnipresent in the
civilizations of the late Paleolithic? The women chose the edible
plants, saved favorable seeds, and took care of the earth so it would
provide food, drink, clothing, construction materials, writing tools.
Like the child woman carries within her, her creative nature offers up
to humanity the goods that earthly nature dispensed confusedly in a
chaotic blend of the beneficial and the toxic, by selecting and
improving those goods.
The majority of the graphic representations show her as both nourishing
mother and as sexual being with the enticing pubic triangle. She is the
athanor in which the materia prima of desires bubbles up, opening the
possibility of successive transformations. In her, the Great Work takes
place â which the work of the males for so long has forbidden.
Her human and fecund nature caused to avoid hunting, a bestial activity
wherein the spear â and later, the gun â extended and perfected the
predatorâs claw and jaw. The total opposite of the brute still chained
to the cycles of death, she inaugurates a cycle of life that she herself
creates. Such is the reality which will invert patriarchal civilization,
with its lie carried to perfection by Christianity: that the ideal woman
is a virgin, abused and knocked up by a God to give birth to a man who
would teach men the virtue of dying unto themselves.
Woman incarnates the natural freeness of the living. She is the
abundance that offers itself. In the same way as her enjoyment is at the
same time given and solicited in the game of caresses, she delivers
herself over to love, which takes her to even more perfect enjoyments.
In her, and in the passional relation that she renews, a new style
affirms itself that supplants little by little the tradition of rape, of
the conquest of the earth and of the self. A universal womb is formed in
her image, to feed, by means of the resources of a nature at last
humanized, a humanity that lays in wait only for the pleasure of being
born and reborn endlessly.
If they scorn, dread, and tyrannize animals, itâs only because thereâs
an animal inside them thatâs been beaten down, and because they invented
roles for themselves by means of which they could subdue a Free Spirit
within them that was destined to govern the body and the world.
They do not attribute their superiority to animals to the art of pushing
beyond natural freedom, to a science of harmony which would free them of
the dread so universally present amongst animals of being eaten or
starved. No, what distinguishes them from their âinferior brothersâ is a
mysterious substance, a Spirit.
Deprived of such privilege, the bear, the dog, and the groundhog fall
into the disgrace of having to seek out their pittance randomly across
the savannas, forests, and streets; humans, on the other hand, having
inherited the earth from the gods, donât get off on happiness, but on
gold, that symbol of preeminence which permits them to acquire anything
and everything.
The honor conferred upon them in such a way by means of a subtle and
volatile power sets them up to treat as brutal beasts those who elevate
themselves in any small way in the hierarchy of mind. They look down on
the leaderless herds, and call them dimwitted asses, enraged sheep,
pigs, or baboons, because they are untamed by peasants, proletarians,
colonized people; because they do not live beneath the rule of any
shepherd, king, priest, general or bureaucrat. The same discrediting
otherwise goes for the unproductive, the women, and the children, all
ceaselessly tempted by the demons of luxury and amusement.
The mental evaluation that situates men above women and places âbestialâ
man below âessentialâ man works in the same way as this investment
society, the dividends of which are paid in resentment and bullying. And
this principle, as monarchist as it was at its origins, doesnât
inconvenience democracy. No one is effectively so rough-mannered, so
abstract, so deprived of goods and of power that he doesnât use as a
pretext his âqualityâ of being a âmanâ to thrash his wife, beat his cat,
string up negroes, and enslave children. Whoever wants to be an âangelâ
needs âdemonsâ to put down.
What an admirable justice, this waterfall of contempt that flows from
individual to individual, from the supreme leader down the aqueduct to
animalness, a canal whose channels, by means of scapegoats, free those
who pose as the masters of creation from their guilt, their fears, and
their powerlessness.
They have instituted a subtle distinction between intelligence and mind.
Sure, an elephant might have an intelligence, but what a mindless thing
it is that thereâs no more honorable end for it than to fall under the
bullets of a creature inhabited by the divine spark, whether a ivory
trafficker or a head of State. And such was, elsewhere, the fate of the
negro or the indian, before the religious leaders deigned to admit that
they were gifted with a soul and excluded them from the range of
commonly hunted game.
Spirituality has survived the gods, who were passed off as having long
ago given it to men, in exchange for a great machinery of rituals,
sacrifices and âsalaam aleikumsâ. It was only desacralized by means of
its passage from the handkerchief of the priests into the hands of the
ideologues, politicos and psychoanalysts, who have weakened it greatly.
Its state of decline permits us today to conjecture as to what it was
before some mythical fart propelled it out over the earth and up into
the kingdom of the gods, from whence it began to stink up the heads of
men.
The marsh which flows into a waterfall ends up a marsh again.
Spirit-mind was born from the function in which it died thenceforth: the
intellectual function produced by the division of labor.
Thereâs nothing more earthly than this supposed emanation of the
heavens, nothing more easily located in history than this transcendence
lodged in the beyond. It flows forth prosaically from the separation of
society into masters and slaves, from the corporeal separation that
rises against the instincts of nature, a mental instance charged with
repressing them to put them to work.
Only an imposture could have claimed to oppose spiritual values to the
low appetite for profit. Thereâs no other spirit but the spirit of an
economy which economizes the living. There is no other spirit besides
that which presides over the creation of a universe of dead things.
The slave is present in the social body as he is present in the
individual body. Itâs a bestial nature that makes it the work of masters
to make people work.
Sweat has been the dominant perfume of their civilization. But
curiously, their noses werenât accommodated to the odor of armpits
bitterly emanating from the manual laborers, and smelled only roses and
violets in the perspiration of the kings who killed themselves with
State business, generals hounded by defeat, tribunals slaving over the
chessboard of political calculations, bureaucrats clinging to the ladder
of power that tomorrow, they hope, will elevate them to power. Could it
be that, unlike the porters, these notables, these aristocrats, these
rich people, who speak of workers like they were residue scraped up from
the prison floor, donât stink of effort and of the pain of spending
hours and hours to earn their keep? What were they if not merely the
slaves at the helm, the crowned exploited, the laborers of the military
helmet, of the popeâs cap or the top-hat?
And only then do we see manual labor cover the beast of burden in
flowers, because it is fixed to its body, to the magma of muscles, of
blood, of nerves. While they deal with a budget, tape things onto a
royal cassette, make a chunk of capital bear fruit, extract a surplus
value, this isnât branded with the name of âwork,â but rather it
participates in a world of pure exchange value, where money reigns and
canât be felt.
Work. The word has a stink of executions and of slow agony. Itâs the
coat of mud and pus that soils the hidden side of the gold coins: the
decimated slaves, the flayed serfs, the proletarians sliced in two by
fatigue, fear, and the oppression of the passing days, life broken into
pieces by the wage. The truest monuments to its efficient glory are the
glassed in balconies looking out over gates saying âarbeit macht freiâ,
a message that expresses the quintessence of commodity civilization:
work will free you... from life.
Other than that all they had to do was stigmatize as a useless barbarism
the concentration-camp industry of Buchenwald and Kolyma, in order to
keep going down those same paths; they save the workers the extravagant
luxury of the gas chambers. Were they not advised that it would be
useful to honor the proletarians, to deodorize manual effort, to sing
praises of the factories and of the beauty of dockworkers, which means
to intellectualize the worker in the way Allais did, since he saw in the
mailman a âman of lettersâ working with his feet?
Work has become a good thing now that theyâve realized that almost
everywhere and always, almost everyone is working.
There have never been so many proletarians as there are now, now that
the proletariat has disappeared. Will the power of the imagination have
to ally itself with the power of numbers in order to banalize the
obvious fact that to begin living liberates you from work and the death
it produces?
Their so-called humanity is nothing but a socialized animalness.
They forbid themselves the summary freedoms of beasts, but they behave
more ferociously than wildcats. No other proof of this is needed besides
the turpitude that has, in all eras, been simmering beneath the lid of
heroism, holiness, good conscience, and humanism.
The spirit that transcends animalness is worse than the animalness
itself. To kill, the tiger needed no mandate from God, no reasons of
State, nor did it need concepts of racial purity or of the good of the
people; it was free of the hypocrisy of a society that whips people with
its cruelty, imitates the predatorsâ ruses, counterfeits its tyranny,
and appropriates, like the tiger, the females and the territory.
After having announced everywhere that men, though stunted physically,
were great mentally, they gave the name âsupermanâ to these beasts more
stupidly aggressive than nature would ever give rise to, and took as
their social model an economic jungle of divergent interests wherein the
strongest crushed the weakest.
Not even thirty years ago, the alliance between the commodity-ruse and
military violence still passed itself off as the most accomplished model
for honest men to follow. To stiffen up, to stick out the chest, and
march resolutely in step with a cadenced thinking; to hide oneâs weapons
in order to strike a more brutal blow â these are the things they called
âcharacter-buildingâ. The busts of Alexander, Caesar, Brutus, saint
Augustine, Voltaire, Bonaparte, and Lenin decorated the educational
pantheon where children fell to their knees for the promise of one day
equaling those big tadpoles, transfigured by the spirit of the mercenary
soldier and the slave-trader.
And so the generations learned that working to destroy oneself, denying
oneâs creativity, repressing enjoyment and bursting out occasionally
with bitter compulsion means becoming a man.
Seeing reality totally upside down, they made of the body a plot of the
kingâs territory, where people became imprisoned; they made âtimeâ out
of an ephemeral existence, a pure fragment of celestial eternity. Now
the trap is not the body but the mind â thought separated from living
and which closes up upon itself when its desires are castrated. Torn
from its enjoyments and trained to put up with life on the death-row of
work, the body sanctifies its martyrdom; the thinking mind denies its
carnal nature, without which it is nothing, and gives itself a halo, a
mythical crown, with a shine that reflects the whole lie of this upside
down world.
The mind has muddied the body with an âontologicalâ suffering which puts
on the front that it gives relief in a spray of ethereal flourish.
Repressed into the eternal âbeforeâ of a spiritualist existence, life
doesnât seem to let itself be discovered if not in a âbeyondâ of death.
Animals adapt themselves to natural conditions, and men adapt themselves
to a system that denatures life. Thatâs why some donât progress, and
others progress by regressing at the same time.
Looking on as animals survived by adapting themselves to the law of the
land, they inferred that they had adapted to them in order to survive.
They saw in them a spirit of conquerors and market promoters.
Animals knew no other care besides nourishing themselves, protecting
themselves, satisfying their impulses of ruts and games. The school of
nature initiated them into the practices of seduction, being on the
look-out, taking refuge, and wandering. They acquired from this an
almost epidermic knowledge of the rhythms of the seasons, of fauna and
flora, of the surroundings, of the territory; they gained more advantage
in the great combat wherein existence was prolonged from day to day,
from instant to instant.
The only species that adapts only in order to survive is the human
species. The whole of its genius has been put to the task of disfiguring
the beast in order to appear human, of passing from an uncertain
survival to a programmed survival, which is often worse.
The exploitation of nature by agriculture and commerce first produced
obvious advantages. It got rid of the threat that climate changes and
demographic growth posed to the resources for hunting and gathering
which were up until then guaranteed.
The wheat silos, the development of technologies, the circulation of
goods â these would have given credit to the good name of their
civilization if the price paid for them hadnât been the exorbitant
fatalities of war, famine, harvest-destruction, and the subjugation of
the many for the profit of the few, which, in its prime, posed the risk
of our ending up exhausting natural resources by transforming them into
abstract riches with no real use.
Are we not constrained to admit that humanity has gotten the wrong ideas
about evolution, which it has renounced in order to submit itself to a
system of survival wherein it has suppressed its animalness for the sake
of the spirit of economy, and that it has degraded the human quality par
excellence, which is to remake the universe according to its insatiable
desires?
Such is the recent opinion, which frightens some and excites others. For
the former, the part has been played and the game lost, and itâs now a
question of going from disgust to hopelessness without losing face. For
those who feel the birth of a new life within them, the last pages of
archaism have been turned and the next pages must now be written, with
the pen of every destiny. Beneath appearances, their great nonchalance
covers up a matchless violence, and when the specter of wars and
traditional revolutions moves away, a secret confrontation between the
resolutions of death and the uncontrollable exuberance of living begins.
They thought to change the world for profit, but it ended up that it was
profit that changed them, as well as the world.
By stretching the limits of the empire of the economy to the limits of
the earth, they made human beings into the most beautiful conquest of
inhumanity. From the moment it started, following on the heels of the
civilizations of gathering, nomadism, symbiosis with nature, etc.,
commodity civilization has interrupted the process of the creation of
man by man. Itâs the fault of this civilization that weâve seen the
paving of a cyclical course comprising nine to ten million years,
wherein the appropriation of material and spiritual goods pursued a
passion for living that it exhausted and prohibited itself from
attaining. Its frenetic course proceeded parallel to the only really
worthy progress â the combined expansion of enjoyments and of the
situations that refine them.
They created the commodity and the commodity defeated them â thatâs
their whole history. The economy they produced reproduced them in its
image. They lived through representations, and the representations have
changed, passing from the divine to the earthly, from religions to
ideologies, from pomp to ruin, and have abandoned them, leaving them
plagued by broken reflections. Thatâs the whole of their âprogressâ.
They were very proud, in the 20^(th) century, to have dragged down from
the skies the last of the gods, in order to promote the cult of
humanism. But in doing so, the commodity did nothing but change
packaging and take on a more human face. Solicitude, for men, women, and
children, guaranteed promotional sales much better, from then on, than
could the soldierâs bayonet and the priestâs crucifix. Where everything
has been vanquished, thereâs nothing to do but try to convince everyone.
Commodity civilization has economized men, and created this deplorable
âeconomyâ out of a mutation towards the human. Its triumph is manifest,
since itâs everywhere; its ruin is too, because life is foreign to it
and the well being it dispenses is paid for with a lack of life that is
incessantly growing.
The progress of commodity expansion has functioned like a developing
polaroid picture â it basically waved in front of the noses of the
blindest amongst us the original discord wherein evolution has found
itself to be lost.
The drama of separation isnât played out anymore between earth and
heaven, but between the will to live of each human being and the piece
of death which governs them. At the dawn of history, like at the daily
sundown of life, the human denies itself, and is denied as a carnal
reality in order to be re-erected in an abstract form, to be ruled by
the mind.
It was the responsibility of humanityâs creative intelligence to
transmute the materia prima of animalness. But intelligence separated
off from the body, engendering divine monsters and terrestrial hybrids,
half beast, half man.
The gods of the economy have damned them, disguising this damnation as a
blessing of good health; like the God of christian mythology (which is
particularly exemplary), who crucifies his son, saying it was for his
own supreme good. What each of us kills in ourselves and is resuscitated
in the cruel counterfeit of angels, is our fundamental animalness; the
exuberance of our primary needs in which only the will to transcend can
take root.
Halfway towards their destiny, men have remained caught in the trap of
their collective animalness. Their freedom has imposed upon them the
limitations set by a contract that regulates the maximum levels allowed
for repressed animalness and for its compensatory releases. Walled in to
the dissatisfactions of an oppressed body and the moroseness of a mind
that cannot perfectly constrain it, they live a joyless existence,
dreaming of ridding themselves of it by means of death instead of making
the animal into the source of the development of the human.
Agriculture fixes their civilization into real estate, in a circle
constantly widened by the expansion of commerce.
The formation of agricultural domains surrounded them with a wall that
protected and imprisoned them at the same time. The scythe that
harvested their fields of culture and occupation seems to hang its
shadow over them and wrap them in a constant danger. Though they tighten
their borders, dig deeper and deeper into the exploitable regions
underground, and heighten their rooftops further into the infinite
celestial dome, the act of appropriating a god, a master, and a spirit,
they are nevertheless seized them by the head and enclosed forever into
a ever more miniscule space. They spin around on whatever length of
chain that is accorded them by the economy of their function and by
their economic function: they expand and develop the exploitation of the
earth and exchange the goods produced by it.
How could one see anything new under the sun when everything is dirtied
and cleaned, mixed up and separated out in the waters of one and the
same tub, whether it be the size of a village, a State, an empire, a
continent, or a planet, galaxies colonized as far as the bored eye can
see by an invariable need to make money, set up power, and conquer
markets and territories?
Beyond the borders that delimit property begins the country that belongs
to no one, the land of disorganized nature, seen as a savage and hostile
chaos by the first laborers. So we see that the farming community, fixed
to the earth that it sows, curls up into its shell, and dives behind its
ditches and walls in frightened expectation of an intrusion. Isnât that
frightened presence an insult and a challenge to the natural freedom of
the wanderers?
There is not a single stone in the walls erected by agrarian society
that doesnât incite to the invasion of nomads, which doesnât solicit the
flood from outside; there is not a single stone which, in their walls
cemented by the civilization of the mind, doesnât invoke the horror and
appeal of animal barbarism, an apocalypse come from animals.
Besides, what was there for the nomads in these isolated camps, opposing
their unusual barriers to the coming and going of the hunter-gatherers,
but a bit of food to gather, a good to glean? Thatâs how gathering
became pillage and migrators became expropriators, that is, property
owners in power.
These barriers to their free movement enraged the hordes, and those who
were not destroyed conquered villages and were taken prisoner in turn.
Such was the end of the civilizations predating the Neolithic,
civilizations without a sovereign economy.
Becoming sedentary fixed behaviors into the routine of the scythes.
Change started looking like a threat, and the unchangeable started
looking like security. The pacifying repetition of seasonal gestures is
like a buckle on a time that runs back upon itself, secreting a cyclical
thinking, the redundancy of myths.
But at the same time, what a frustration this constrained immobility
imposes, with the tractor and harrow hanging over oneâs right to enter
or leave! As much as it does in the rural areas, a second bind
encircles: the invisible presence of the laws, which arm the masters and
disarm the slaves, while the body itself is wrapped up at the top like
an empire, hardened in the artificial trappings of a fetal and withered
envelope which protects and imprisons it. Now are you surprised at the
aggressiveness and cruelty that signaled the appearance of the Neolithic
villages and city-States, according to the unanimous declaration of the
historians?
The exploitation of the surface and subsoil of the earth has set up a
wall between man and nature, that is, a rampart against man as nature,
issued from a natural environment. The tradition of antiphysis has no
other origin.
In patriarchal society, nature shares the fate of women and of the
dominated classes. She is admirable from afar. Does she break the yoke
that constrains her in the fury of her elemental rage? Then itâs a
hostile, murderous, monstrous force, a threat to civilization. Does she
let herself be flayed and raped by the agrarian, impregnated and robbed
by rent, subjugated by thought? Then she deserves the mastersâ
condescension.
A rebel on the outside and a slave on the inside, they have to keep her
watched from high atop the protective walls all the time. The spirit
dreads the demands of the flesh, like the exploiter dreads the revolt of
the exploited, like the property-owner dreads expropriation.
For all their having renounced a freedom which, while it was uncertain,
contained the seed of the creation of a truly human destiny and a
humanized nature, theyâve still only got any security in their fear of
the gods, in a fetal protection prolonged artificially, in an enclosure
against nature where the economy castrates and suffocates them. For
them, peace is nothing but a worn-out, out of breath war.
Itâs only in illusion that the ingeniousness of their techniques makes
them better people. Measured by the truly human, these are only weak
little men, incapable of producing anything that doesnât grow on its own
in the face of inhumanity and denaturation, dignified rivals to the gods
which engendered them by coupling an incapacity to live with a rage to
dominate.
Thereâs no fence that doesnât call forth ruptures, no property that
doesnât excite the avidity of the excluded, no prohibition that does not
incite transgression. Thatâs the explanation for the old dictum, âhe who
hath land hath warâ.
From the instant the right to property closes off the smallest corner of
earth in its pliers of profit and technocracy, natural freeness is
broken into pieces and auctioned off. Water for irrigation, the earth to
fertilize, the habitat, wanderings, the air itself, everything produces
interest, everythingâs paid for and is made to pay, while hate,
frustration, and aggressiveness attend a great funeral procession for
the morality of the usurers.
And what would be different if the ownership of the fields, factories,
and means of production were collective rather than private? If it were
in the hands of all instead of the hands of a few, would natural
freeness be any less denied and wrecked by the same privileges of the
economy? Would the pollution of everything marketable have less impact
under the auspices of collectivism than it does under the upturned cup
of monopolistic capitalism?
Two pillars hold aloft the strata of their civilization: agriculture and
commerce. These are the two pillars of a temple; since theyâre so deeply
implanted in the earth, as we know, they have always fed the illusion
that they come from some heavenly edifice, the mystery of which
dissipates only too late.
Closing in on man and society, the shadow of the scythe which is the
agrarian structure encloses both of them in the ferment of an endemic
fear. The fear of leaving the beaten paths, escaping routine, going
beyond prejudice and customs, of committing themselves to the wrong side
of the barricades, of losing oneâs possessions, oneâs place, oneâs
habits.
There a moldy sick-bed is made, which haunts the nightmares of
immobility: the myths, the religious dogmas, the reactionary ideologies,
the refusal to change and move forward, the hate and terror of
foreigners, nationalism, racism, bureaucratic despotism, the ferocity of
crimes and punishments, fanaticism, the frenzy of destroying and
destroying oneself.
There, bestial animalness is caught in the trap of a ghetto society, a
society folded in upon itself in a besieged, protectionist, muscular,
fetal shell, the shell of a rigid society which engenders cults of
patriarchal virility and perpetuates itself into the modernity of
industrial nations like Stalinist Russia, Maoist China, Nazi Germany, or
the United States, where the impact of the revolution of 1789 did not
break the encirclement of consciences and of the chain of unchangeable
behaviors.
As much as the exploitation of the soil is rooted in the fixity of an
eternal return, so much does commerce â that is, the measured exchange
of goods produced for work â engender mobility, introduce change, and
conduce to openness. Clearing out the familiar walls and known
frontiers, it ventures out into savage regions, explores inviolate
nature, and implants, further and further out, those bridgeheads of
civilization, the counters and markets. Itâs the great arm daring to
reach out towards other territories the rottenness of a regime strangled
by a strictly agricultural economy. Itâs the conquering wing flapping
off towards other horizons the sluggishness of a walled in culture. And
thus it smashes to pieces the circle of the peasantsâ unchangeableness,
without abolishing it.
Extirpating humanity from its shell, it pushes it forward with the
dynamism of interest, and lends it a bigger house, which is its universe
to conquer. Its insatiable avidity incites it to dig deeper under ground
to drag out a quintessence of profit from the rock, from the carbon, the
minerals, the oil, the uranium â and doing so it also digs into the
insides of men, in order that no machine be foreign to the intimacy of
thought and flesh. Audacity, inventiveness, progress and humanism are
born in its wake.
However, even the hardiest expeditions complete the cycle of withdrawal.
The boats that go out come back to port, the law of gain reigns upon
arrival and departure. Adventurers, pioneers, seekers, chimera-makers,
prophets, and revolutionaries â all the roads they take, unusual as they
may be, still just lead to the cash registers.
Commodity expansion has always held human hopes at armsâ length only to
throw them down at precisely the place where their interest waned.
Although it opens, in theocratic, feudal, or bureaucratic real estate
speculating, a breach of freedom, it must know that it has already
closed up on the use that the parentheses of marketability could have
made of it.
What do these passions discover, by leaping over the wall, these
passions that raged against the oppression of rigid laws,
mind-suffocating traditions, moral rigor, neurotic inhibition? They
discover the need to pay for these new rights of transgression. And so
libertinage giving good reason to Puritanism, as liberalism gives
justification to tyranny, as the left gives to the right, as the
revolution gives to despotism, peace to war, health to sickness.
And let no one invoke here the effect of a so-called natural law: itâs
nothing but the effects of commerce at play here. The preponderance of
exchange has imposed its market-structure on behaviors, on morals, on
ways of thinking, on society. Itâs so obvious today, in fact, that every
domain â ideological, political, artistic, moral, cultural, repressive
or insurrectional â is pushed, by the bankruptcy of the economy, into a
slump in rates, a drop in values, a weariness of offers and requests, a
lack of difference between the right side and the wrong side, the modern
and the ancient, the in-style and the forgotten.
Up to and including its industrial expansion, the agrarian enclosure has
oozed with the rage and terror of besieged life and cities. Night and
day, the apocalypse looms at the gates of the city. And from any
horizon, at any instant, the fire of destruction might burst up, and on
would think one might sense an appeasement when at last the hordes of
pillagers, hereditary enemies, rioters, etc., finally show up, when
epidemic, nuclear or chemical death comes at last, fulfilling its
promise.
Itâs true that, living in fear of the double-edged sword, they kill with
double-edged swords, and seal themselves up in the ritual of sacrifice,
expiation, and vengeance. These are never anything but their own gobs of
spit, falling back into their mouths. The fire that devours them is the
fire they lit, or at least which starts up, within them and around them,
the mechanical heating up of life reduced to work.
At the turning points of history, right where commodity expansion gets
up speed and breaks the lethargy of agrarian societies, the lights of
the apocalypse start blinking with greater brightness. The succession of
economic crises and of upheavals that they cause has never failed to
blow with their foul mouths the trumpets of the end-times, and those
times have ended so often that thereâs nothing left to expect from them
today, whether they are happy or unhappy endings.
The apocalypse has come to pass with the century that saw, looming on
the horizon, disguised as economic crisis, a crisis of the economy, a
mutation of civilization. This is no longer the fear of a cataclysm
which would incite to reforms and which would guide us towards
revolutions that it could only pre-program the failure of. A
self-confidence is rekindled little by little, as if everything that
awakens people to the innocence and exuberance of life were rallying to
itself the uncertain, individual and daily quest for an absolute
enjoyment. The mutation that is underway will leave behind the expired
cycle of a history wherein revolution and repression never did anything
but obey the diastole and systole of the beating heart of the commodity
in all its forms and states.
If agriculture and commerce presided over the birth of history, their
prehistory comprises both the conditions that made their development
possible â but not necessary â as well as comprising the life styles
that such a development pushes into the impossible so completely that in
order to make conjectures about them youâd have to remember the
inversion of behaviors imposed by the economy taking power.
The hunting preserves, marked out and delimited by the mesolithic
hunters, announced the agrarian enclosure, and still betray a
predominant animalness, as much by the practice of predation as by the
need to mark territory.
On the other hand, there exists a will to humanity in the art of
avoiding confrontation between two groups that both covet the same
game-rich region. We know how commensality, exogamy, the exchange of a
few drops of blood, seems to succeed in putting together in one and the
same flesh two distinct beings and communities, in such a way that the
harm done to the one is also an injury to the other, and that the good
of one is a profusion of enjoyments for all.
Food eaten together, couplings, the mixing of blood, operated a carnal
alchemy, which all lovers from all time remember, the union of the
individual and collective bodies. Chyle, sperm, and the other vital
fluids distill the quintessence of the pleasure of being together
without stopping being oneself.
Would anyone deny that the custom of giving and receiving food, love,
and blood, which is the whirlpool of life, sketched out an evolution in
the heart of which nothing was excluded that gave a basis for social
harmony, and a humanity which develops its creative organization in the
same way as the mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms developed their
adaptive organization? Is it not from there that collective memory has
drawn its nostalgia for a society whose rhythm was marked by the
respiration of life? A society which needs no constraints to make sure
that blood wasnât spilled everywhere, a society where love stands out
and is reborn without sowing hatred and scorn, a society where the right
to eat, to have a place to live, to wander, to express oneself, to play,
to meet up, to caress, do not fall beneath the blows of a permanent
blackmail.
The enjoyment of the self and of others, the âalchemical weddingsâ with
nature, the pursuit of pleasure in the labyrinth of divergent desires â
such are the projects that are being confusedly undertaken now, here at
the dawn of a history that abandoned them to dreams, since doubtless
they were incapable of resolving the problem of demographic and
climactic upheaval outside of an agrarian economy that assured the
survival of a few at the expense of the many.
Everything that survived clung to vague promises of brotherhood,
equality, generosity, and love, which religion and philosophy guarded
intently, like baby rattles, at the bottom of their bags. Their heat
radiates still in the hearts of children and lovers, and even in our
language we keep the memory of an original happiness, as one can see
when in the most frozen of nouns there is evoked an erotic relationship:
âto have business with someoneâ, or a friendly one: âTo do good
business.â
What does the unusual remnant of love and friendship mean anymore when
considered in the logic, hardly-likable, of the principle âbusiness is
businessâ? The memory of Life haunts the very form which has stripped it
of substance.
With the âneolithic evolutionâ of the economy, the proliferation of life
moves aside to make way for the proliferation of commodities. For the
symbiosis of things and beings, for the osmosis of the different
species, is substituted âcommerceâ, in the modern sense of the term, a
lucrative exchange of goods produced by labor.
The body to body feel wherein tenderness replaced bestial violence
little by little no longer inspires in morals a sweetness and slowness
where conflicts can be cleared up. Thereâs no longer any gestures, any
thinking, any attitude, any project, which doesnât enter into a
relationship ordered by list where everything must be paid for by trade,
coin, sacrifice, submission, reward, punishment, vengeance,
compensation, debt, remorse, anguish, sickness, suffering,
decompression, death.
The emptiness of an endless anguish devours the body, so naturally built
to fill with life every time enjoyment fills it with joy. Its energy is
exhausted by the efforts of working, its substance imprisoned in an
abstract form, its gaze turns away from itself like from something
disgusting, and fixes itself upon the infinite silliness of the heavenly
mandates.
The individual identifies him or herself with the anonymous prices that
he or she produces and which are produced in his or her name. Aside from
a few passions that still holds together their lost lives, the
individual is nothing but commodities â he or she has a use value, which
makes him or her the servile instrument of the most diverse work, and an
exchange value, to the benefit of which the individual buys and sells
him or her self like a pair of boots. And so thatâs how commerce has
taken the place of the genius of the individual up to the present, when
joblessness throws them in the reject pile, when the monetary crises
devalue them, and when they assure themselves, almost by a kind of
self-hypnosis, that their value is unique, incomparable, and without
price.
Work has mechanized the body like it imposed the reality of its
mechanisms on the world it transformed.
The world changed fundamentally with the Neolithic revolution: it
evolved away from a symbiosis of the natural and the human, and was
flipped upside down by taking, for the foundation of its progress and
civilization, a specialized activity which destroyed that primordial
unity, exhausted nature by denaturing its resources, and generalized a
system of constraints that made men into slaves.
Thereâs the great result of all our pride of having done things
impossible for animals â weâve immediately forbidden ourselves access to
creation, which makes up the human genius!
By substituting itself for creative potential, work penetrates into
evolution with a formidable force of fragmentation. Beneath the
shock-wave of repetitive gestures, lucrative behaviors, servile and
tyrannical morals, the richness of being is dislocated into the rubbish
pile of ideas and objects, crushed and sorted by the mechanisms of
having.
The necessity of producing and consuming material and spiritual goods
holds back the reality of desires, denies it in the name of a reality
forged by the economy. Whatâs hacked to pieces, reduced to a bunch of
cogs, is nothing less than a living totality, where the mineral,
vegetable, and animal kingdoms are melted down in the crucible of nature
to create a new species, gifted with the power of creating in its own
right.
History shows, with a growing precision, how work perfects the
mechanization of the individual and of society to the extent that
commodities extend their grip on the earth and the body.
Thereâs something artisanal in the original hammering of enjoyment, and
in orgies, riots, massacres, where it bursts forth as soon as the
regulatory work of the king, priest, functionary, plebian, or slave lets
up. Thereâs an industrial universality in the moments of revolutionary
furor that lend the consciousness of an imminent social change to the
letting off of steam of oppressed passions. But what a disenchantment
comes about, also universal, when it becomes apparent that revolutions
have done nothing but translate the passage of a given economic stage to
another, and that the new freedoms do not at all include the freedom to
enjoy orgastically.
Only work, which transforms the world, has been the motor of a progress
which has propagated everywhere the defeat of the human and the image of
its victory. Ever since the obligation to produce was prolonged in the
consumer persuasion, work has become an object simultaneously of horror
and satisfaction. Its omnipresence leaves not a single island of
pristine nature on the surface of the earth â even the Amazon succumbs â
and there is no passion that isnât frozen over in the boredom of its
cadence, even in the deepest recesses of humanity. The commodity has so
completely exploited the energies of earthly and individual life, all
the way to the limit, that a great languor has killed all our Croatans,
our Broceliandes, all our dreamlands, as well as the marvelous desire to
fall in love with life there.
Whoever refuses to participate in this world gets bogged down in the
habits and repetitions of his or her own tolling bells. All his or her
talk becomes, like his or her existence, nothing but a funeral orison.
From here on out our destiny must put down its chips against the growth
of consented-to death, and for the life we must create.
Work separates man from self-enjoyment. Such is the separation that
gives rise to all the others.
The desirous man has been hunted out of his body by the worker heâs
become. The economy has only been able to take power by economizing
life, transforming libidinal energy into work-energy, putting
prohibitions on enjoyment, on the natural freeness wherein desires are
fulfilled and reborn ceaselessly.
The impulses of the body â the primary needs of feeding oneself, moving,
expressing oneself, playing, and giving in to sexual pleasure â have
been regimented by a war of conquest which has obsessed over profit and
power. Itâs a war which, though it in no way concerned them, nonetheless
got to them even in their will to escape it.
Cut off from his or her desires for accomplishment, the individual sees
nothing but the multiple modalities of death. Work is a comfortable
suicide, a very social hypocrisy: it starts out with the negation of the
essence of life, and routine does the rest.
If such a precise castration did not take place at the heart of
childhood, do you really think so many generations would have willingly
permitted themselves to become servants of so many secular tyrannies?
The division of labor has created the master/slave dichotomy both in the
individual and in society.
The power of the heavens, of the master, and of the State begins as soon
as the body, obeying economic imperatives, renounces its enjoyments.
Work, which separates men from themselves, is also divided in two, split
up into intellectual activity and manual activity. The process inscribes
itself into the logic of exploitation of the earth and its substrata.
The organization of work, of sowing, of harvesting, distributes time
over a series of constraints, a seasonal calendar that governs the
communityâs attention, like irrigation across a network of canals, the
distribution of water, the weather forecasts. Each season brings its
share of problems to resolve: the preparation of the earth, the
resistance of the materials, the extraction of raw materials, the
improvement of techniques, the observation of stars, geometry in space.
Things only are arranged according to the greatest efficiency on the
condition that they are looked at from above, like from these towers and
promontories that weigh the world down with consequences, from the
privileges accorded to organizers and usurped by them, transforming
constructions which were initially functional into monuments of tyranny:
cairns, mastabas, pyramids, dungeons.
The fabrication of more and more numerous tools, the treatment of
minerals, the clear-cutting of forests, the multiplication of
specialized tasks, to which is added the need to defend against the lust
of neighbors those places where a new fortune shone; everything worked
together to concentrate in a few heads a knowledge that issued from a
practice that was first common to all.
Gradually torn from the hands of the practitioners, knowledge has risen
like a fog over the earth to condense in the heavens and fall back down
as if it emanated from the gods. Experiences common to all are
abstractly brought together in a few heads who made a secret and a
mystery out of them. Thereâs hardly been a time when the commandments of
knowledge became the decrees handed down by Power.
From the mastery of space, time, waters, and exchanges, sallied forth
the motley crew of priests and kings. The thunderclap of orders and the
lightning of commandments crash down from beyond, setting up down here
the sacrifice of the body to work and the equalizing power of price, the
universal Logos of a coin that circulates everywhere and imposes
everywhere its equivalency, bringing us the miracle of stamping the seal
of âequalâ on oil-producing lands and on the ten thousand Indians to be
expelled from them.
Work does not only function as the basis for the worldâs economy, it
divides it up, in the image of its own divisions, into a celestial
economy, a pure and hypocritical domain of mind over matter.
At the summit of the hierarchical pyramid is God, putting a halo around
the priest-kings, until the leveling that the first trembles in the
industrial machinery imposed on the archaic edifice of the world in
1789.
While the masters were inventing a celestial ancestry for themselves in
order to pillage the earth in the name of the gods, the body curls up
like the community, upon which are set down the walls and borders of
property.
What a degeneration theyâve dared imposed on these bodies of ours,
without which people cannot exist, which are the place of all
sensations, all knowledge, all delectations and all pains, this luminous
center of tangible realities, foundry wherein the alchemy of the three
kingdoms transmutes the sensibility of the crystal, vegetable, and
animal, in the human faculty of accomplishing the great work of nature!
They have reduced the body to two functional principles, to two
hypertrophied organs â a head that commands, and a hand that obeys. The
rest has the calculated value of meat on the butcherâs cutting board:
the heart, reserved not for the futility of love but for the courage of
arms and tools; the stomach, made to sustain physical effort, and which
gets unpleasantly upset after partaking of the pleasures of eating; the
urinary and genital organs, used for reproduction and evacuation, and
the voluptuous usage of which is seen as the cause of sin, suffering and
sickness.
See what happens to enjoyments when we get a few moments of leisure to
satisfy our desires for happiness scheduled for us by business, once the
mechanisms of the body-at-work have gone through their motions.
Work is the lucrative exploitation of earthly and human nature.
Denaturing is the price of its production.
When work makes way for the gathering together of resources offered to
human ingenuity by the earth, the water, the forests, the wind, the sun,
the moon, the seasons, it substitutes a violent relationship for the
symbiotic relationship between men and nature. The environment and the
life that issues from it are demeaned in the line-up of conquered
nations, which must be ceaselessly reconquered. The producer treats them
as sly enemies, as rebellious ones.
Yes, nature has indeed met the same fate as women: admirable as objects,
despicable as subjects. Woman has been raped, crumpled up, wrecked,
divided into properties, juridically mortified, exhausted to the point
of sterilization. Her body is broken against the comings and goings of
the muscles, against the redundancies of the mind â is this not the
triumph of civilization against the âlow instinctsâ, that is, the quest
for pleasure?
We know how many of the virtues that govern happiness have propagated
the taste for destroying as well as for destroying oneself. When the
factory of universal labor does not absorb libidinal energy entirely,
whatâs left over overflows in conflicts of interest and power which the
âCausesâ â as diverse as they are held sacred â go about promenading
from flag to flag. However, human nature exhausts itself too, and the
hedonism which reduces the satisfaction of desires to the consumption of
frozen pleasures is quite the contemporary of the moribund forests, the
rivers without fish, and the nuclear miasma.
Work has so completely separated man from nature and from his own nature
that nothing living can invest itself in the economy without being a
partisan of Death. It is well known that there are other roads that
could be taken, and that freeness, which long ago began being taxed by
unreality, must from here on out be the reality we create.
The empire of economy long ago gave the knock-out punch to the symbiotic
evolution of man and nature, and now that itâs falling apart, the path
of the living has reopened. After the tyranny of work will come the
primacy of enjoyment where life forms and perpetuates itself.
What was tied is untied. The complexity of the old world is getting
dislocated in a clutter of peremptory truths the ridiculousness of which
never ceases to amaze. How could we have suffered so, killed each-other,
and died for so many inanities of puffed-up importance?
Itâs all over for the gods, for fate, for the decrees of nature, for
characterizing and categorizing people, for blind destiny guided by
randomness.
The great theological, philosophical, and ideological systems that once
governed existence, pushing it from Charybdisâ whirlpool to Scyllaâs
slavering maw, will soon be nothing but the dusty memories of erudite
historians.
Beings and things spill out, simplicity flourishes in a new springtime,
and the everyday starts looking like the landscape of a new world. The
long night of abstract man is deserted.
The child grows along with the growth of a new consciousness, the
satisfied weariness of love learns to come out again, and the smoke from
the crematory of work dissipates, letting one see clearly the border
between desire and constraint, where pleasure loses itself. Sometimes,
the happiness of being oneself wins out over the boredom of not
belonging to oneself.
Here begin great wanderings through newness, perhaps through its
aberrations. Outside the scientific dissection that breaks it into
atomized pieces in the light of separated thought, Life on earth and in
the body is so unknown that lucidity and insipidity tend to be enmeshed
for a time in the groping of new discovery, in the challenges of a new
reality. What does it matter, we want mysteries that donât harbor
horrors:
Nothing is left to guarantee the principles of democracy and the rights
of man but the necessity of the global market to sell anything and
everything to anyone and everyone. It results from this that the values
of the past have fallen apart one by one, like obsolete commodities,
even if their archaic debris is incorporated into the elaboration of an
ephemeral modernism.
The economy itself thus propagates subversion better and faster than a
whole army of specialized agitators. All you have to do is take a glance
into the spectacular shop windows where society exhibits its models of
respectability and infamy â they hardly seduce anyone anymore besides a
few shopsoiled specimens of kings, priests, popes, cops, soldiers,
noblions, bourgeois, bureaucrats, proletarians, rich people, the
miserable, the exploiters, the exploited... and itâs hard to believe
that around such maggots great blazes of hate and admiration once raged;
never before has any era of history been reduced to such a low price
that it beats all the competition.
The 60s required a little more intelligence than was around then to
decipher its social context. A little lucidity was necessary in order to
perceive the signs of this bankruptcy at that time. Thirty years later,
the winking eye sees at every turn, from one end of the earth to the
other, the dilapidated decor, the usury of the spectacle, the
ridiculousness of power, the fraying of roles, the loose string-ends of
a pieced together economy. Half-assedness and boredom are dropping the
curtain on this thousand year tragi-comedy.
The economy made and unmade the empire that men built by building their
own ruin. Everyone leaves the coat-check without their expensive
disguises. Thereâs nothing left to do but march straight on, and
preferably towards ourselves, with no other guide but the pleasure that
sparkles in every moment of life.
The diversity of their societies rests on a few functions, so manifestly
common to all people that theyâve been imputed to âhuman natureâ. There
are still a few minds around that proclaim that the lure of gain, the
thirst for power, the taste for destruction and self-destruction are
part of man as much as is the creative faculty is. This was a lucrative
opinion not long ago. It has lost a lot of its interest since the
devaluation of material and spiritual values.
If the weight of inhumanity wins out in human society, itâs not because
of nature but because of denaturation. The intrusion, into the heart of
Life, of the repetitive mechanisms of intellectual and manual labor, of
exchange through supply and demand, the intrusion of the repression and
decompression of desires, has inscribed upon gestures, thoughts, and
emotions, the movements by which the economy takes hold of men and of
their environment.
The expansion of the commodity has repressed the expansion of life,
leaving no other way for it besides that of heartbreak, where what isnât
lived is instead lived abstractly, by means of roles, which are the
tribute paid by the human to the inhumanity of economic functions.
The education of children channels the growth of desires. Far from
refining them in trials of harmonization where affectionate
relationships would predominate, it carves them into cubes the size of
the stereotyped roles they hand them, makes them into conduits
functioning according to the laws of exchange, exploitation,
competition. Education drags the child from its pleasures to force it
into a series of molds that make it no longer itself, but a
representation of itself.
There was once a time when the colors and the vivaciousness of roles
compensated for the prohibition placed upon the impulses of the body,
when the violence of the sudden overflowings found a way to satisfy
themselves in the practice of avidity, authority, and the renown that
was attached to it.
It was thought, then, that to be born a baron or serf, to become an
emperor or a trash collector, to climb to the heights of fame and honor
or to climb the scaffold, was a function of history and fate, not of a
conquerorâs logic progressing by means of inclusion and exclusion,
holding only the marketable sacred and condemning only loss of profits.
A certain âinevitabilityâ, yes, but a premeditated, calculated
inevitability, the resolution of a practice which was in no way divine
or celestial.
The social spectacle permitted only existences which were tied up with
sins, remorse, terror, guilt of having shone through the splendor and
muck of glory and agony. One was a saint, a savant, a debauchee, a
criminal, interesting in spite of being nothing when one was alone with
oneself. A pious imagery maintained the vocations of nullity.
Life is hardly any richer today, but roles have degenerated into
dullness and poverty. Who would respond any more to the drums of a
religious, military, patriotic, or revolutionary calling? Who would don
the emotional-armor uniform that functions to captivate attention and
impose prestige, to direct the herd?
Ideas have evolved in such a way that whether the roles are played
poorly or well they come from a conditioned reflex, a salivating at the
sound of the bell. Itâs a habit that one loses more and more the less
one is treated like a dog as a child, or, if not like a dog, like a
machine; and when the machine, itself a model of commodity perfection,
is no longer the model of human perfection.
Over thousands of years, they killed each other like fanatics, in order
to hierarchize and label beings and things. They search from below to
above and from left to right to find a place for man in the designs of
God, and they only discover the position reserved for the product and
the producer in each era of the commodity process.
Though they were intensely conditioned by the fundamental mechanisms of
the system â the transformation of the life force into work force, the
laborious division of body and mind, exchange, the competitive struggle
to control markets â they were never the pure products of the economy
that governed them. They kept in their hearts a grace of life that
wasnât reducible to commodity logic and commodity order â they reveled
in that grace in ephemeral moments of love, generosity, and creation,
and felt a sudden horror at the permanent calculation of ordinary
existence.
Although the roles which maintained them on the social scene, where
education and initiations had tossed them, often decided for them
whether they would survive or die, how many times, when standing on a
street corner, in a bar, or when leaving the office, how many times have
they kept themselves from asking themselves what they were doing there,
from discovering that they themselves inhabited their bodies, how many
times have they not pulled back the curtain on the lamentable buffoonery
of merits and demerits, not abandoned everything to set out on a quest
for a fortune that has nothing to do with money or power?
What yesterday was nothing but electric potential, upheaval without a
future, fits of madness or revolt, today has the allure of a more and
more frequent and predictable reaction, now that the market of changes
has made the market of social values collapse, devaluating all roles.
What does it mean to âlose faceâ, now that both sides are worth the
same, and what good does it do to freeze the body and mind in the
grimace of an authority without arms or legs?
Authenticity is not a new reality; not even Kleist is an exception to
this, Kleist who claimed he couldnât be happy unless he was alone, since
only that allowed him to be completely true. Whatâs new is the relief
that authenticity gives one in the face of the total exhaustion of the
social lie, in the face of the total dilapidation of the typed
personalities that everyone was constrained to fit themselves into from
infancy.
A few months suffice nowadays for a star to gain popularity and be
discredited, whether their renown is in the art world, the world of
politics, that of crime, or of society life. You used to have to wait a
few years for that to happen, a few dozen years even. Glory is
extinguished almost as soon as it comes into being these days. Back when
reputations used to be long lasting, public opinion would hear about
someoneâs name and no one would worry about the techniques of
personality-celebration or the machinery involved. The obscurity of so
many existences lent a certain luster to a small number of people who in
any other circumstances would never have been celebrated for their
particular virtues. The splendor of monarchs, the stylishness of a
supreme guide, the fad of a given author, kept in the shadows a staged
setup that was conceived to give a fictional grandeur to the little men
in power.
I donât think the talent for maintaining appearances has been lost.
There are excellent artists around today who work in the art of fooling
the people, but thereâs less people who let themselves be tricked and
overindulged, less means by which to sustain the great seductions.
Thatâs because in spite of a disquieting fascination with images, the
lie does not bite with the same vigor. The eye, the ear, taste, touch,
thought, seem to glide over a plethora of cliches without quality which
donât let them fix their attention on them for very long.
A spattering of little tidbits of information which discourage full
digestion, dishearten the consumer, and exhaust interest, corresponds to
the overproduction of useless goods, which marks the commodityâs panic,
the metastasizing of its cancer. And thatâs when the appetite, refusing
the indigestible blandness, awakens to more substantial hungers.
As the brain-sucking machine implodes slowly, its circuits engorged by
the frenetic acceleration of the spectacle, its deleterious effects are
perpetuated by the paradoxical bias of those who combat it. The fear it
causes in people whose critical eye too often serves only for exorcisms
and justifications of their fear of enjoying orgastically amplifies the
size of the colossus and underestimates the weakness of its clay feet.
Obsessed by the harassing idiots, they put all their intelligence
towards idiotically fending off their blows. Their mockery hides behind
one last habit of lies the hopelessly unclothed emperor. They do an even
better job than the media at creating abstractions, ideologies,
illusions, mystical and religious vomit; they unwittingly lend gravity
to this encumbrance of obsolete values to which the melting away of
commodity civilization has reduced it, and they treat as a futile whim
the power of the desire to live, whose flowers, blooming everywhere,
they constantly tread upon.
The spectacle is suffering the subsidence of the social market. Itâs
selling roles at the low price powerâs selling at, in all its circus
shows â parliament, courtrooms, assemblies, State meetings â these are
the loose threads, the strings that keep peopleâs curiosity up.
How can anyone really take any of these roles seriously, now that we can
see them coupled together, arranged fancily, and sold in pairs, with
interchangeable truths on the side: good and bad, brilliant and
pathetic, hard and soft, judge and guilty, cop and murderer, State
terrorist and private terrorist, priest and philosopher, reactionary and
progressive, exploiter and exploited?
Life has started to once again take on the colors of the eternal, to
contemplate suddenly, in space and time, the alpha and omega of death:
the flood of commodity-expansion, the earth devoured by an ocean of
commercialism, the whirlpools where the generations follow one another,
and time floats and drowns in the gain and loss of currency. Only a few
summits have resisted the perpetual cataclysms of history, summits where
the irreducible ferment of the human â infancy, love, and creation â has
taken refuge, keeping alive the quality of being.
The cycle of incessant apocalypses is completed with the end of the
economy. The wheel of fortune and misfortune which across the centuries
turned around a self-same axle of war, misery, sickness, suffering, and
bitter tomorrows is breaking. Those who think the universe is going to
fall apart with it are perhaps right, but theyâre so worn out from
thinking it that theyâve gone over to the side of death.
For those who rejoice that there are no more flags, no more masters to
think for, no more roles to uphold, this is the era of real
authenticity, and of a life style that allows them to be reborn to
themselves, to the enjoyment of whatever they want to live out.
A sweet, new style is succeeding the violence of refusal, investing the
will to live with a stubborn energy, which is no longer the energy of
hopelessness and dissatisfaction but that of enjoyment and the
insatiable. Itâs slowly left behind the character armoring, the
mechanical gestures, the neurotic ignorance, the aggressive bitterness
that once expressed the obedience of life to the economic. Itâs moving
as far away as possible from the social customs that make exchange win
out over gift, power over affection, measured letting off of steam over
the refinement of pleasures, guilt feelings over the feeling of
innocence, punishment over the correction of mistakes. But if it
considers such behaviors archaic and refuses them, it does not do so in
the name of separate thought, of an intellectual part to play, or in the
name of morals, since if it did, far from finishing them off, it would
only retain the flavor of those behaviors. No, it refuses them because
they are boring, and are troubling its pleasures; because, quite simply,
there are better things to live.
If childrenâs evolution never ceases cultivating a diversity of new
certainties, itâs only because itâs forming the roots for a humanity
which will separate from its raw animalness without succumbing to the
grip of inhumanity.
The growing hesitation of the child as itâs being brought up in schools
where thought separated from life is imparted ever more uneasily doesnât
translate into a refusal to go down the path that has made their elders
miserable beings, torn by twisted desires, scorched by a daily death and
playing out their last roles in a parody of happiness.
Their attitude towards roles doesnât come from the critique typically
made quite willingly by adults, who see the negative so clearly that
they canât get rid of it. Itâs easy to heckle those who delegate the
responsibility for their happiness to a god, a potentate, a
parliamentary representative, or a union bureaucrat, but they themselves
are the real hecklers. Does the image they kill themselves in order to
put out to the world not simply an expression of their denial of their
own authenticity? Does it not contain the germ of the generalized lie of
the representative and electoral system? Is it not almost as if, in
their quest to ascend in their entourage, they were trying to convince
it to vote for them?
Children only fall into that trap much later. They at first perceive the
roles the adults don with imperturbable seriousness to be part of a
game. They play cops and robbers and identify with both, in an identical
pleasure. They are uninvolved as they witness the roles being played â
from judge to accused, doctor to patient, weak to strong, master to
slave, good guy to bad guy. The game of metamorphosis and disguise, that
is, the supposedly moral lie of the story, belongs to a symbiotic
background wherein beings and things are tied together by the common
movement of life.
To the extent that the game stagnates, that gestures are impoverished in
the mechanical ballet of money and promotions, the child is instantly
asked to make for himself an identifier-image, to fit in with accepted
social reasonings. The pleasures of this metamorphosis enter backwards
into a fantastic reality as long as the adolescent, at last fixed to the
choices and orientations that the whims of the economy impose upon him
or her, keeps in his or her heart the impression that s/he has opened
the wrong door and that all the other ones that s/he didnât pick would
have been better.
Constraint and the boredom of always trying to show oneself to the world
from an interesting and interested angle â to show off, as the kids
would say â today discover their peremptory uselessness in the
bankruptcy of the social market and of its traditional values. Once
again, the return to childhood identifies with the temptation to be
reborn to oneself, in the plurality of desires and in the unity of life,
in the human metamorphoses of a recreated nature.
There is no domain in which authority does not degrade itself and
announce the end of all the power engendered by the exploitation of
nature.
Disbelief stripped the priests of the respect and scorn their ministry
draped them in. God only ever shows up when heâs dug up in archeological
expeditions, and the episodical shop-floor bitching is never going to
stop the collapse (at last!) of all religious enterprises.
In a few poisoned lands of the third world the last tyrants crop up. A
universal discredit has buried the military dictatorships little by
little beneath the shit of the past; it does a better job than the most
virulent antimilitarism in giving the stink of death to the uniforms of
all the armies of all the continents and of all the parties.
Nothingâs more comforting than seeing history close its dumpster-lid on
the reign of the âliving godsâ, the saviors of the people, the
providential glories, the charismatic elected officials. We should give
thanks to the 20^(th) century for having disarticulated the iron heel
that for so long held in subjection the proletariat, women, children,
the body, the animal, and nature. Ah, happy time, when the heads of
state, of family, of the elites, tabernacles, and enterprises tumble
from their position of prestige like dead leaves, tossed about in the
whirlpools of ridicule before being lost in indifference!
Having nothing substantial to put under their teeth anymore, the will to
power now nourishes only toothless carnivores. Without a doubt, our
modern era continues tossing out onto the market its mess of
authoritarian creatures, but its more a matter of inertia than of
conviction. Although the emotionally mutilated still exhibit themselves
with their fiery looks, their steely character, and their virile jaws,
the surrounding milieu sterilizes their seed of bitterness,
aggressiveness and death. They notice theyâve no longer got any of the
things that used to give them hope and the feeling they were right: the
promise of a strong State, a financial empire, a national or proletarian
revolution. They donât have any guarantee anymore that theyâll succeed.
And now that the economy governs them like pawns, in the name of what,
exactly, are they governing us, since the chessboard of the old world
has lost all its kings, queens, rooks and knights, and thereâs nothing
left to move from square to square but a universal infantry? Will they
play a game theyâre no longer running for themselves, and if they do,
what kind of victory will they be after? To start up business, the
state, money, confidence again? After all, things have come to such a
point that the case of anyone resorting to lies falls apart as soon as
it comes up.
The people in power have lost their slave-dealersâ faith, which gave
rise to royal kingdoms and republics. It seems they have kept nothing
but the ancient creed of the traveling salesman/beggar, knocking on
doors down the street to hawk his stock of brooms, since they have
enough crafty imagination to take down the hanged man and sell him a new
rope. But no! The idea has only very recently come to their minds that
they could make a profit off the alarms that are going off every day
signaling the presence of an endangered planet. They donât even think
about taking down the shaky monopolies of traditional industry,
investing in the ecology, dismantling the pollution-factories, taking
down beautifully what they built in such an ugly way, depolluting,
getting rid of nuclear power, colonizing sustainable energies,
federating internationally in small, regional, productive units,
propagating marketable modes of self-management, in brief, to act
according to the fashion of their history: the âeconomic turnaroundâ of
revolutionary ide as. Otherwise, it seems like the mental state of
businessmen is undergoing the tendentious sinking of the amount of power
they have. Did they deeply feel, as though it were a personal trauma,
the fact that the arms-dealing business is going to be unprofitable soon
with the gradual extinction of local wars? Theyâve still found no better
way of obeying the laws of competition than confronting each other on
the battlefield of the Stock Exchange. There, all gussied up as black
and white knights, they dedicate themselves to making parodies of the
medieval tournaments, sacks, and pillaging. Itâs a shocking spectacle to
see a generation of obsessional financiers popping up everywhere from
shareholdersâ tables with bunches of numbers and wads of cash while a
cascade of whole sectors of agriculture and industry are going out of
business.
In its supreme stage, capitalism is falling back into its infancy, an
infancy with all the life eradicated, one that is ordinarily called
senility. At the same time as these mechanisms appear in the
consciousness of the individual body, the economy attains a state of
pure abstraction. Its evanescence is such that it lets go of its own
substance, the factories and markets that made up its material
existence. What will to power could resist such a muscular relaxation?
The rage to get a bone to gnaw on or resell has fed the will to power
everywhere. Even the weakest man would protest that he had a total right
to his crust of bread, his woman, his dog, his renown. Thereâs one
character trait no oneâs been able to attribute to human nature unless
itâs wrapped up in a suit of character armor. The guile and evasiveness
is so obvious now that the commodity has conquered almost everything,
that thereâs no longer any presence on earth besides the redundancies of
a useless economy and a life discovering the human use of its nature.
Thereâs no continent on earth where the commodity doesnât push its
modernity.
The obligation to consume propagates democracy at the speed of market
studies, and the peace of exchanges effaces progressively the specter of
the wars, that is, of the social war, at least in its archaic form. The
secular conflict that arose between the exploiter class and the
exploited class is undergoing the effects of the devaluation of power a
little more each day.
Repression and demands are softened in the nostalgic parodies of the
struggles of yesteryear.
The old predominance of the mind over the body is finally letting up in
turn, like everything else. Has the technocratic market not undertaken,
by promoting the computer, the transformation of the tool into a brain
and the brain into a tool? The cybernetic realizes in such a way the
programming set up for people by the logic of the commodity: a body and
mind brought together and equalized in a machine.
Who could be ecstatic about the prodigiousness that the human genius
attains when itâs placed at the service of the economy: a muscular body
deprived of libidinal energy and a thinking sunken into millions of
understandings, which cannot be understood outside of a binary logic,
that is, with an intelligence inferior to that of rats. The marvelous is
elsewhere.
As if the computer served as a sign put up in the humanitarian boutiques
where people tend towards total abstraction, we see here a world where
use value decreases from gadget to gadget, where truly useful goods
disappear along with the cows, snails, mushrooms, and forests, where the
raw materials industries are dismantled in the name of international
marketability.
On the other hand, exchange value tends towards the absolute. Profit
determines the fate of the planet in a scornful ignorance of man and
nature. A frenzied intellectualization reduces the gap between manual
and intellectual labor. What wins out there isnât the intelligence of
Life, but the indifference of beings and gestures, daily bent to the
reflexes of work programmed to procreate nothingness: this is the deal
thatâs been clinched, not with whatâs alive but with a society where
everything that moves is mechanical and quantifiable in their stock
quotes. Such is the commodity perspective. Though the hierarchical
pyramid has been compressed and power has collapsed, the sentiments of a
universe where beings freeze into objects continue to push passively
towards death all those who do not perceive just how much a new violence
is smoldering beneath the rotting of the traditional struggles, to what
extent the antagonism between exploiter and exploited has exhausted
itself since today itâs been revealed that thereâs a common denominator
between the two factions â the lucrative exploitation of life itself.
The unchaining of the will to live will be to insurrectional fury what
childhood exuberance is to the foot-stamping of old men.
Power has never had at its disposal so many means of imposing its
sovereignty, and never has it had so little force left to apply those
means with.
The politics of the gods was impenetrable. A great ideological fervor
brushed aside doubts and scruples. It was necessary that the demands of
the market condemn that last residue of agrarian structures,
bureaucratic tyranny, with the unquestionable accusation of
âinsufficient marketabilityâ, in order that nothing hide any longer the
disconnectable circuits of the computerized economy.
Assuredly, soviet bureaucratization had already made palpable the
absurdity of plans that work as well on paper as they are perfectly
useless in reality. The sinking of the bureaucratic glacier managed to
demonstrate concretely exactly what hierarchical power always had been â
an attempt to organize the living by emptying them of their substance
for the economyâs profit. The distance that separated the heavenly
spirit from earthly matter is today only the distance between the fist
that closes on the necessity of working and the hand that opens to the
pleasures of loving and creating.
What is the effective, if not efficient, existence of the last forms of
power reduced to today? To the science of management. It alone has a
direct grip on the economy now that the economy has had the political
vermin plucked off it, its kings, pontiffs, heads of State and factions
â now that it spreads across the earth the visible circuits of the great
computer.
Whatâs the most prized quality amongst political men now that theyâve
become little more than bellboys for the businessmen? Whatâs their
biggest electoral selling point? Charisma? Stubbornness? The iron fist?
Seduction? Intelligence? Not at all! Itâs only important that they have
a good management sense.
What a fine logic: The times demand good managers with an attentiveness
that must be all the greater now that thereâs nothing left to manage but
bankruptcies.
Thirty years ago, revolutionaries, demanding the skin of the
bureaucrats, called for the formation of new organizations that would
liquidate the trouble-making chaos-mongers and create the triumph of a
self-managed order. They took the skin of the bureaucrats but only
managed to dress themselves in it.
The walls of the bureaucratic citadels and of the Eastern empires have
fallen, not beneath the assault of revolutionary freedom, but beneath
the pressure of the commodity, demanding its free passage with such
transparency that all that was required was that it give the word, for
the iron curtain to fall.
The old revolutionaries of 1968 â of whom few were aware of the refusal
of survival being expressed at that time â got promotions in the dashing
army of the new managers. Since the debacle of economic collapse is
doing just fine on its own, they had every leisure to act in the best
interests of the people by acting in the interest of the economy. They
put order in defeat and dignity in the rout. Young wolves have always,
at the right time of the season, made real fine mutton.
For the first time in history, the feeling that the economy has usurped
the sovereignty of Life has given to the will to live the consciousness
of a new sovereignty it could and must create.
The movement of becoming of commodities has been the force of things
weighing on destinies everywhere. Its universality has, in the bodies of
human individuals, however unique they all are, been materialized as an
ensemble of functions and roles that agitate people, people made to act
according to the mind, culture, ideology that theyâve chosen, like so
many dancing puppets, hardly different from one another. The return to
the concrete denounces the imposture of abstract man, of man torn from
himself in the name of humanity itself.
The separation between what is lived and the social market, which claims
to govern it, is so present today that it makes peopleâs commitments
towhatever career or path they go down very fragile, beginning with what
they call âsocial responsibilityâ. Why would I ratify any contract with
a society so contrary to life that simply surviving on this planet is
getting harder and harder to do? All willing obedience to a world that
is destroying itself is an act of self-destruction.
The rubble and ruins they accumulate on the one hand and refurbish on
the other donât concern me at all, except for insofar as they impose
detours on me. It isnât easy to live and less still to keep oneâs desire
to live; thatâs a constant effort that excuses me from the other
efforts.
Thereâs nothing left to oppose the growing force of Life besides the
force of inertia that keeps bringing to their knees those who power
cannot constrain any longer.
Power has lost the sublime and terrifying radiation which once made it
at once so frighteningly close and yet so far away: close with its
permanent inquisitions, its police criss-crossing towns and minds; and
far away because of the inaccessible renewal that never holds back the
knife that slits the throats of tyrants.
Since public opinion seems to be registering the failure and collapse of
the many forms of authority, the mixture of fear, hate, respect and
disregard that were once propagated by the long robes, the magic
trinkets, and the uniforms is at last being exorcised amid laughs and
heckling before soon becoming dissolved in an amused indifference.
One needs neither to know anything, nor to love, nor to be loved, in
order to feel the need to govern others. The more prestige you gain, the
less capable you become emotionally. And what submission there is to the
mechanisms of roles and functions in that! The obsession with reigning,
imposing, vanquishing, subjugating, makes the body nothing more than an
ensemble of control-levers. Gestures, muscles, gazes, thoughts, all seem
to move like pendulums. One must attach to oneself,]\ by means of
favors, flattery, compromises, and alliances those who cannot be
excluded: and destroy, with morbid insistence, insolence, and peremptory
reasons anyone and everyone who does not let themselves be bought by
constraint, contract, and seduction. Itâs a happy existence for those
who draw their pleasure and the best parts of their lives from the
constant refining of their authentic selves.
The more the mechanical takes hold of life and the living, the more
frustration will binge and purge with aggressive compensations. In the
days when patriarchal power and the uncontested wave of authoritarian
behaviors lent a powerful means to functions and roles, the rage to
dominate which today only brings up neuroses and ridicule was called
charisma, responsibility, or a sense of duty. Thereâs too little
(social) fabric left for those who âare cut out to be bossesâ to
decently drape with it their functional powerlessness and their
incapacity to live.
A typical stupidity of supposedly subversive terrorism is not having
understood that the people that having power produces are diminished
physically and mentally to such a point that they take a powerful
reassurance that people are still interested in them from the interest
that is devoted to them by a campaign of assassination or denigration.
Sign of the times: the name of Caserio has eclipsed that of the
president that he sent to meet his maker (he sent him âad patresâ), and
the hardly glorious Aldo Moro is remembered better than his lifeless
assassin. The sleeping dogs, the dogs that bite, the barking dogs of
order â theyâre all from the same kennel. Those who still kill each
other only to die get the cemeteries they deserve.
Whoever has decided to live according to his or her desires becomes
unreachable. He hasnât any roles, function, renown, riches, poverty,
character, nor state by means of which they could get a grip on him and
put him in the trap. And if he must, like everyone else, pay tribute to
work and money, he doesnât truly commit himself to it, being engaged
elsewhere, where he has better things to do.
Nothing is more depressing for the falsely brave than suddenly realizing
that he has no adversary, that he is struggling alone in the boxing ring
of competition and polemic, and that it is up to him and only him to
give himself reverence or contempt.
The mirror is broken, wherein the men of power once tried to deliver an
admirable image to the public. If he happens to furtively contemplate
it, heâll only ever see the appalling inanity of so many efforts, the
frightening emptiness of a life sacrificed to appearances.
To never try to ascend to the heights where puffed-up power tosses off
its last orders, is to let those who tried to degrade and crush you face
to face only with their worst enemy â themselves.
The art of being yourself doesnât impede on other peopleâs space, it
occupies a different plane of existence where thereâs no lack of space â
it lets the heroes of authoritarian behavior have a choice as to how
theyâre going to disappear: they can finish destroying themselves as
living beings, or they can destroy all roles and functions and begin to
truly live.
To take the time to feel yourself to be alive, from moment to moment, is
to find yourself freed of rights and of duty, connected so intimately
with obeying and commanding. To learn to seize each daily pleasure,
minimal as it may be, creates little by little a milieu that one belongs
to unreservedly, where one can be true without reticence, where the
exercise of desires impassions you to such a point that thereâs nothing
and no one that could interfere unpleasantly without very quickly losing
weight, importance, and meaning.
A feeling of fullness is not a state in fact, but rather a becoming, not
something to contemplate but to create. The game of desire and enjoyment
implies a perspective which doesnât include the criteria of the
commodity world and its imperative reasons. There is an intangible
border which a sensual knowledge reveals with certain signs. All I want,
for instance, is that innocence of happy childhood which illuminates the
faces of lovers in the moment of love, even though the fits of authority
they give in to mark their stamp on the childrenâs painful tensing-up,
frustrated in their need for tenderness, which avenges itself with the
whinings of tyrannical caprice.
To be happy is also to not worry about being more or less happy than
anyone else, nor about furnishing proofs or avowals of oneâs happiness.
Happiness starts to be bothered away from the moment it needs to make
itself worth something. Take away its motive, pusillanimous and
frightful, which is the precept âto be happy, let us live in hidingâ,
and you will find a deeper meaning to it: enjoyment doesnât exhibit
itself except at its own expense, and good fortune turns into its
opposite as soon as smugness takes hold of it. Vanity is an authenticity
that empties itself out with a sinking sound. The living never immerse
themselves in glory â only the dead remains of the living do. The
pleasure that doesnât offer itself freely is only a commodity in the
supermarket.
To love yourself isnât to admire yourself; I only have to balance out
compared values, mechanisms of competition where the commerce of men is
ruled by the commerce of things.
How can we take pleasure in being ourselves if we must at each instant
climb podiums and âhang toughâ in order to not be rushed?
The ridiculousness given to the spirit of competition by the normal
subsidence of markets only makes the leitmotif of traditional education
more absurd and odious: âLet the best man win!â The child has no need
for victories, neither over himself or over others; they are already
only so many defeats that deal a violent blow to his capacity to love
and be loved, and install in the child the fear of orgasm, since in the
eyes of a society where everything must be weighed, bought, sold, lent,
returned, paid for, orgastic enjoyment is, because of its natural
freeness, only a weakness and an error. As a female leader once said:
âOne must avoid making love when one is in business; one loses oneâs
combativeness that way.â
Fear and aggressiveness diminish along with the price society puts on
prohibitions and their transgression.
Free trade manages to dismantle the old walls of agrarian structure, and
every newly opened breach in the wall brings up new ideas of openness
and of freedom.
Archaic societies surrounded their fields, property, cities, and nations
with protective and oppressive walls. Commodity modernity is tearing
them all down.
The cities have lost their enclosing walls, the borders are being
abolished slowly. Have they become the last bloody pages of this
commodity-saga?
The war of 1914 and the rekindling of its poorly-extinguished embers in
1940 mark, so far as it seems, the last ubuesque vociferations of
protectionism, that regression from the commercial spirit back to the
agrarian mentality.
The tumultuous passage of private capitalism to State capitalism has
seen the building and crumbling of the totalitarian citadels of nazism
and bolshevism.
The roads that are open today, as foggy with illusions as they have
remained, cut across Europe freely, and a new liberty of movement, duly
patented, is now making all the old prohibitions and the violence that
traditionally went down those roads start to look like the purest
derision.
A market that is more and more âcommonâ celebrates the freedoms of a
commerce that excludes no direction nor object and lends the extent of
its vision to opinions and consciences. A peace of exchanges little by
little comes to fill our social and international relations,
over-ruling, pell-mell, the confrontations between peoples and
over-ruling the old-style revolutions, drowning the fish of revolt in
the water-glass of talk.
Everything seems to bathe in an apparent conjunction of interests so
deliquescent that they even discourage the idea that people could kill
each-other even more in order to defend or demand them. What is
incarnated in this highly industrialized community, where the clash of
arms makes way for dialog and the toilet paper of chauvinism meeting the
hygienic standards of the Red Cross, is the triumph of commodity
universalism, the empire of exchange value, the triumph of happy
thoughts reigning over a non-existent happiness.
The transparency theyâre so proud of isnât the transparency of the
human, but of the mechanisms that denature the human. Yesterday I might
have denounced such an imposture in order to make the shame more
shameful still. But since today itâs denouncing itself, I rejoice,
rather, that it is putting the impulsions of life face to face with the
economic reflex that kills the living of it.
What they call âlaxityâ is merely the sinking of the threshold of
prohibitions beneath the pressure of a hedonism-market that legalizes
transgression.
Immoral acts which seek power and profit are not immoralities at all,
but are instead lucrative transactions. The economy has never let
anything lag behind which it expected to get a material and spiritual
benefit from.
Religion was the first enterprise to prosper by means of a crafty
control over the compression and decompression of impulses. Once the
freedoms of nature are submitted to the demands of daily work, itâs an
offense to give in to them, an offense against the economic spirit. The
priests knew early on how important it is to make themselves the
controllers and accountants of âhuman weaknessesâ. They watch for manâs
fall into animalness and then place themselves at the chuteâs exit to
negotiate the price to be paid in penitence for redemption. Would anyone
really be so shocked to hear that the Roman Church, which inherited the
thrift-shop virtues of the Empire, insists so frenetically on the
fallible character of men in the face of temptation? The more the sinner
succumbs and the more he acquires in the way of money, obedience, and
resigned weakness, the more he is taxed on the toll road to a âhealthy
soulâ.
Alas, since, the earthly economy has devoured the celestial economy,
religious affairs have fallen into profane hands, which care much less
about spiritual succor than they do about monetary reality. It was
enough that the pleasures be introduced into the democracy of the
supermarkets in order for us to see the falling into disuse of the more
ascetic forms of redemption, wherein one would spit blood into the
bassinet while beating the guilt out of himself.
Itâs not scientific logic that has swept away religious obscurantism,
but rather the peremptory âlogicâ of the numbers of business. And those
numbers have the power of giving privilege to anything and everything,
except for freeness. It has put happiness, cut up into consumable
commodities, on sale and within the reach of every purse. It has come up
with a whole gamut of artificially modeled desires, based on a dazzling
technique of well-being and satisfaction at a low price â it has
preprogrammed the triumph of automated autonomy: sex shops, fast food
joints, vibrating dildos, peep-shows, TV s, pink cell phones, social,
cultural and psychological self-serve pumps.
Itâs vain quarreling to decide and decree that all this is good or bad,
since life is elsewhere. Whatâs for sure is that the old agro-religious
tyranny has been supplanted, in Europe, by a formal and commercial
âfreedomâ that has brought commodity-humanism to a high degree of
development, that is, a conception of the world that gives to men the
same rights that priced objects have, no more no less. Thatâs a lot if
you think about all the sacrificed generations of people, the masses
with cut off existences only because they were worth less than a stroke
of bad luck to the state. And thatâs way too little for those of us who
think that our lives are unique and cannot be bought nor sold, paid off
or exchanged.
In the wake of all this, however, a large number of fears, frustrations,
and styles of aggressive and conniving conduct are on their way to
disappearance. Openly and almost in a Statist way incited to seize in
passing, without scruples nor shame, whatever they can get of eroticism,
quantified passion and computerized encounters, the hedonist clientele
learns to get rid of the anguish and their guilt-feelings with which the
religious and moral gangrene had blackened the least satisfactions with
not very long ago.
On the other hand, these freedoms, which are now freedoms of the market,
are paid for. The majority of transgressions enjoy an official
recognition; itâs enough that the bill gets paid.
However, the fear of orgasm has not disappeared, but has rather only
been ventilated a little wherever it fits into debt-payments, into the
budget â and at the same time the rigor of prohibitions was waiting for
someone to be able to transgress them on an installment plan. At the end
of all the accounting you always have to deal with the taxes, the
absolute tax, the unpayable debt of an economized-on life that hangs
over you until thereâs nothing left of you but death hanging on bones.
The less they feel the need to protect themselves from themselves, the
more they can do without the protection of others, without protecting
against others.
The citadels in which peoples and individuals were locked up for so long
have been seen with mix of fear and assurance. The fate of nations,
cities, and men wobbled between confidence and suspicion, sincerity and
lies, betrayal and loyalty. The men of economy now incorporate into
themselves and their societies the ruses and disquiet that once reigned
endemically amongst the beasts.
The refugees in the detention centers cannot any longer be fundamentally
distinguished from the foreignness that their captors feel within
themselves; their captors themselves have in them the menacing nature
that they impute to the foreigners: that movement of the body towards
orgastic enjoyment, a movement that is repressed because it threatens
the civilization of work.
The âprotectionâ they felt they received from gods and masters, which
they called upon themselves with screams of prayer and sacrifices, were
never anything but a protection against themselves, a defense against
natural desire. Einâ feste Burg ist unser Gott! (A mighty fortress is
our God)
The flood of commodities has razed the walls of the old agrarian,
protectionist mentality. Thereâs nothing, not even character armor, that
doesnât crack and open in good time. We know that another circle is
being formed, to protect the empire of the commodity across its new
borderlines. However, fear has for a time loosened its grip.
Nothing that closes up on itself and into itself has ever protected
anything but things, at the expense of men and women. Thereâs no family,
no society that doesnât work like a mafia gang â itâs always a question
of propagating the fear of âwhat might happenâ in order to sell, with a
maternal solicitude, the condoms which protect against the dangers
waiting for children, citizens, and the nation.
The majority of tyrannies began by improving the common fate, only to
give way to the typical reign of protective power and protected
imbecility. If the phenomenon is more widely perceived today, that only
happens at the same time as the protection from the so-called hostility
of nature that the economy once guaranteed to people is appearing more
and more suspect. And if it is really being more understood today,
thatâs only happening at the same time as a better knowledge of infancy
is showing us how the affection that helped it sustain its autonomy is
being chiseled down and economized on little by little: is being lent
out at interest, and granted only in exchange for submission,
transforming tutelary solicitude into a neurosis of power.
When emotional commodification subjugates the freeness of love to the
law of supply and demand, the separation of enjoyment and work reproduce
in the childâs mind the origins of hierarchical power.
While the power of kings and republics still had any credit, he survival
off the species and the security of existence served usefully as a
pretext for propa gating a fear that deposited impositions and
submission into the drawers of the Stateâs cash registers. The seeds of
fear will fall on sterile soil from now on; they grow with vigor
whenever a press propaganda campaign starts up, and then they perish.
See the disarray there is in the puppetry of the armies. There they are,
with no war to prepare for, no insurrection to quash, not even a general
strike to put between their teeth. Reduced to serve like mannequins in
the shop-windows for a arms-market that the absence of serious conflicts
threatens more and more, their forces of dissuasion canât even hide
their ridiculousness anymore.
Thereâs nothing, not even the police-function, that doesnât sometimes
dare to dissipate the stench of death with which armed men âsecureâ the
unarmed crowds.
The idea that the criminal and the cop are two complementary and
interchangeable roles, carved out from the same repressive will, has
made a good contribution to cleaning the hate and admiration off them,
feelings that those roles caused in their respective partisans and
adversaries. The killers of tyrants, ministers, prison-guards, and
military brass, which was still applauded yesterday by the rebellious
factions, have seen their side diminish in size at the rate with which
their image is mixed with that of their victims. Itâs not that they were
thought to have been seeking, in one regime or another of obligatory
freedom, the post that theyâd just vacated â no, it was the reflex of
murder that offended people; they had the same contempt for life that
their opposition had.
One must be dead to oneself in order to clamor for the death of other
people. This is true above all in an era that has come to a point of
such great power and weakness before the omnipresent agony of life
propagating itself throughout consciousnesses and behaviors as though it
were the only truly human reality, the only reality that had any
use-value.
Donât think Iâm saying that I foresee, hoping for the liquidation of all
power, all armies, and all police in all their forms, some great
disappearance of them all by means of a wave of a magic wand. Iâm
perfectly aware that the fall of the economic empire risks taking down
along with it those whose customary behavior, and whose laziness when it
comes to âlooking elsewhere,â hangs on the rotted realities of the old
world. Whoever canât face the reality that itâs all coming to an end
will only ever keep bringing up the phantoms of the past; the only thing
that can happen for them is that theyâll choose an imminent death over
making an effort to demand the rekindling of a will to live.
I, however, am hoping on the birth of a new innocence, and donât spend a
single day without putting myself to its creation with either wisdom or
madness, and I devote myself to being satisfied with seeing the signs
that assure me of my convictions, sometimes mistakenly, often correctly.
So, then, itâs not an unimportant matter for me when parents give rise
to oldness in their children, or when a logic from the heart wins out
over business-sense. I hear with pleasure the voices that make demands,
the voices that refuse bosses, the new autonomy taking root at the heart
of conflicts traditionally controlled by union bureaucrats â those
voices, still unusual to hear, that are going up into the magistratures
and police stations to demilitarize their functions, not to propose to
criminals a punishment to suffer but to offer them a way to correct, in
the sense that the living understand, what has been committed by
ignorance and contempt for life.
Itâs not by heckling them, but by holding them to their word that we
will stop the calls for an authentic humanity from turning back to
abstract discourse and being denied a life by facts and acts.
Fear penetrates into menâs hearts from the instant they find themselves
prevented from being born to themselves. I mean to say that man cannot
escape the terrors inherent in the animal universe except by sinking
into the terrors of a social jungle where itâs a crime to behave with
the free generosity of a truly human nature.
The economy distills an essential fear in the threat it brings to weigh
upon the survival of the whole planet â on the one hand it is a threat
made in the name of a âguarantee of well beingâ, and on the other hand,
it snaps shut like a mousetrap on every attempt to choose a different
path, whether itâs a question of the independence of children or of the
promotion of natural energies.
Fear, as an economic argument, consists in closing the doors and windows
when the enemy has already gotten in the house. It accrues danger in the
guise of protecting from it. To bring up the fright of an earth
transformed into a desert, a nature systematically assassinated â is
this not just another way of walling oneself up in the vicious circle of
the universal commodity-spectacle only to perish therein?
By destroying the walls of the agrarian enclosure only to reconstruct
them further out towards the limits of marketability, the commodityâs
expansion has brought to heel the flock of terrors at the frontier
between a moribund universe and a nature to be rejuvenated.
Whatâs most fearsome about the fear of death, which stupefies men even
in their suicidal temerity, is that it is originally a fear of life. To
die a natural death, to cross deathâs path, belongs so completely to the
logic of things that men, reduced to the objects they produce,
paradoxically find more security and assurance in the hope that they
will die a natural death than they find in a resolve to begin living and
be guided by their enjoyments.
The fear of ecological apocalypse hides the chances nature and human
nature still have.
Fear has in common with sickness the fact that they both belong to the
language of the body. It warns the body of the dangers it is to be
exposed to. However, isnât it a strange way to behave to exaggerate the
causes and effects of the routs and âcourageousâ flights forward,
instead of learning how to be on oneâs guard for known risks?
Those who live in familiarity and love with savage beasts know to what
an extent fear-reactions increase the chaos of fear, and at the same
time, the aggressiveness of animals that approach them; when they speak
calmly to them, with the voice of their hearts, they make them peaceful
at the same time as they diminish the disturbance of an encounter so
traditionally marked by incomprehension and contempt.
Such is Orpheusâ secret: poetry is the emotional language that creates
harmony, because it gathers together the elementary rhythms that
natureâs heart beats with, in order to make them its own.
Such is the secret, accessible to all those who look deeply, today, into
the familiarity with which children behave, those little animals on the
road to humanization that have known, up to the present, only the reign
of the hunter and hunted, the tamers and the tamed, the crash of the
whip and the scratch of the claw.
The end of emotional commodification â that is, the end of economized
love, placed beneath economic tutelage â has a good chance of getting
rid of the stomach-centered fear that gnaws at oneâs existence from the
moment animal impulses are repressed within it instead of being refined
in a human way.
To conquer fear is still only to make it reasoned, and, most often, to
exorcise it from oneself only to project it onto others. Itâs much more
important to deny it its neurotic anchorage, and to extirpate from the
body the anguish born from the uncertainties of love and the denials of
total, orgastic enjoyment.
We know now just how much fear provokes danger, accrues it and attracts
it by way of the powerlessness and weakness that it brings everyone to,
as if it were plunging it back into the nocturnal terror of early
childhood. What fine wisdom, which knows all about lightning and the way
it works, and yet, still immersed in existential anguish, runs beneath a
tree to protect itself from the storm.
Fear will disappear along with the dependency that hypertrophies it,
since power finds all its support therein. Only autonomy, which is only
partially offered in childhood for refining childrenâs enjoyments, will
reduce fear from being a signal for the death-reflex to being a signal
that the will to live will be the first to see and react to instead.
Commerce and industry have given a human form to the rough justice of
agrarian societies.
It would be very surprising if â having made their public and private
existence dependent upon a system where everythingâs paid for â they
could subtract their customs, thoughts and gestures from the budget of
credit and discredit, on the balance sheet of activity and passivity,
from the accountancy of merits and demerits.
Their conception of justice is completely held to the principle of
exchanges.
The battle between equity and arbitrariness follows the same road as the
guerillas, whose clear consciousness of commerce has always delivered
them over to the obscurantist capacities of power.
The caprice of tyrants, the refinement of tortures, the ferocity of
sentences, and the reign of injustice embed, in the ties of blood spilt
in atonement, the history of these societies of agricultural
predominance or of agricultural survival. The oriental despotisms, the
feudalisms, the modern dictatorships advocating a return to the earth,
the protectionisms without âlebensraumâ (living space), the peasant
communities strangled by mental archaism, all the martial-law delirium
of nations, the identification with a territory, the withdrawing into
âproperty rightsâ, all the character armor â all these things have built
up frustrations, fears, rage, and fantastic hatreds that have overflowed
from century to century in waves of massacres, holocausts, genocides,
burnings at the stake, pogroms, takings of revenge, and everyday
barbarities.
On the other hand, there has been no era âhaloed by the glory of
commerce and crowned with the palm fronds of industryâ that didnât make
a rational need to conserve human capital prevail over the rituals of
mass expiation, making use not of human nature, but of the force that
work extracts from it in order to assure the progress of commodities.
Justice becomes humanized with the increase of humanism, and humanism is
the art of economizing men in order to draw a lasting profit from them.
If the funeral procession of judicial horrors is slowly going away with
its tortures and death sentences, you can thank the empire of
marketability for it; it has little to do with sensible souls taking
hold of judicial power.
Why machine-gun thousands of insurgents when putting ten of them on a
firing line is enough to reestablish order? In the same way as the mafia
does, the justice of the Enlightened only punishes people reluctantly,
and only does so in the name of business interests.
And anyway, solicitude towards the guilty accrues from the moment the
work of consumption is superimposed upon the work of production. The
steel rod of necessities strikes us donkeys a lot less than it shakes
the carrots of seduction before our noses. Since the neon glow of the
supermarkets does a better job bringing workers back to the factory than
the bayonet does, justice starts looking like a service-desk, an office
for the contentious to do their business at.
The guilty are clients that have failed to comply with the deals
officially made at their birth, and who are being offered easy payment
plans. The inherent guilt involved in exchange has lost its drama, which
was only really an indignity that the individual suffered long ago for
never having been able to pay off enough of the debt owed to God, the
king, to the causes, to honor, and all the other frivolous inventions of
little men. Although the celestial pomp of sacrifice and redemption
still dyes with ermine and purple the puppet-parade of the courthouses,
the feeling prevails that the judicial machine is no more and no less
than a cash register where crimes are made up for by paying fines and
doing time, just like wage work rules over the bill to be paid for oneâs
consumable pleasures.
Compared to the countries where one finds gulags where people sit in the
âholeâ forever, (âin paceâ), when we look back upon the eras of
crematoria and butchery, progress is manifest. But how can we be
satisfied with a âdemocratic justiceâ that allows hopes for clemency to
exist only on the implicit condition that one feel guilty? Inhumanity is
set up in such a way that the majority of acquired goods replace
disadvantageously the evils they suppress. And so, to the extent that
justice attenuates its rigors, we see the economy-men punishing
themselves for faults they incriminate themselves for in secret,
substituting suicide for the scaffold, sickness for torture, anguish for
pillory.
Humanist justice is born from the progress of âan eye for an eyeâ over
scapegoating.
Exchange relations are the carriers of civilization insofar as they
limit the right of the mightiest to profitably exploit the weakest. The
survival-time accorded to the slaves is never any greater than the
duration of the profit they assure their master.
The ubiquity of exchanges is the specter of immanent justice which
surges forth between the worst of tyrants and the most insignificant of
their subjects to temper the excesses of power and the excess of
indignity. What they attributed to the goodness of the gods and the
clemency of princes was really just a part of a well-tempered economy.
The history of the emancipation of humanity has never adopted those
freedoms that werenât sources of accrued revenue.
Justice has been democratized along with the price of commodities.
The contradiction between the archaism of working the land and the
modernity of commodity-expansion governed the evolution of some 10
thousand years of civilization.
The peasant community is at the heart of the original sacrifice, like
the eye of a cyclone. Never has self-renunciation â without which work
wouldnât be able to exploit natural material to draw from it material
for exchange â ceased to propagate around it a rage to destroy
exacerbated proportionally with the proliferation of prohibitions upon
the desire to create and to create oneself.
Gold, ideas, bread, wine â these things all belong to the commerce of
beings and things, which dispenses them. They have been paid for with
blood, with a daily castration of desires, with the application of a
utilitarian torture to nature. Would anyone expect that such a handling
of things would incite to love, tenderness, or generosity? Is it
inexplicable that men and women, in their very foundations cut to
pieces, would seek to satisfy, on the back of some propitious victim or
of some scapegoat, the displeasure that their work condemns them to?
Would anyone be surprised that those who the face-slaps of rebuke and
whip of sermons manage to bring back around to order and orgasm-anxiety
stone themselves to death, lynch each other, torture themselves, and
give in to bullying, racism, and exclusions, every time the sting of
austerity, the sting of losing, the sting of threats to the fatherland,
the stinging of threatened privileges, burns in their genitals?
Who gets indignant in the face of such a state of cruelty, barbarity,
and obscurantism? The men of lucrative dialog, of marketable openness;
the men of modernity. Itâs profit, more than generosity, that requires
that prisoners of war be either exchanged for a ransom, or instead sold
off like slaves, rather than being tortured to their last breath in
order that the torturers might make them into installment payments on
their urge for vengeance. Humanism is born right there.
The talion, the absolute âjusticeâ of âan eye for an eye, and a tooth
for a toothâ marks upon the blind sacrifice of scapegoats and of fallen
peoples the progress of the rationality of exchanges beyond the brutal
compensations of decompression â thatâs because, being different from
agrarian resistance to change, it is a part of the logic of trade to
evolve towards more primitive forms to the extent that money invents a
principle of universal reason, stamping prices on the active and
passive, a homologous balance scale where pros and cons are weighed.
Justice repels expiatory massacres since it only sees in them a
senseless waste. Is it not pleasant that criminological language judges
murders that yield great profits to be interesting and interested,
villainous murders of vile profit-seeking, and at the same time
considers to be gratuitous â with the horror that word implies â the
assassinations by means of which their authors put upon the weaker their
frustrations and humiliations, as if it was just another irrational and
bestial form of exchange?
The humanists have made it their duty to ignore a most fundamental
exchange, which is the very principle of denaturation: the imperative
transformation of the life-force into work-force. On the other hand,
they are inexhaustible when it comes to the comfort and developments
that trade and its philosophy introduced, across the centuries, into the
inhuman sacrifice of men to the economy.
Filled with the light that the universal commodity brings to the four
corners of the world, they celebrate everywhere the grandeur and
excellence of men who work to perfect it. In one sense, which is their
own, they arenât wrong.
Undeniably, the idea of an equitable profit for all has consolidated the
acquisition of democratic rights, its law substituting itself for the
law of the mightiest, and attenuating the injustices and the
dissatisfactions, bringing peace back to the social torment of divergent
interests.
Who would think to complain about the freedoms in the shadow of which,
without too much fear being involved, it is permissible to love, drink,
eat, talk, think, express oneself, move about, and breathe? Do I not
know well enough that without them I couldnât write, at least without
risking censorship and being burned at the stake?
I do not mock them within the realm of what their limits authorize, I
simply refuse their frontiers, which are not those of the human but
those of the lucrative. I reproach them for not being given nor won â
regardless of how it seems â I reproach them for being born, setting
themselves up, and imposing themselves only to go through the motions
necessary to make the economy run. I hold it against these freedoms that
theyâll never go beyond the free circulation of goods, never stop
narrowing themselves to the right to sell, buy, and serve, according to
supply and demand. To know that such goods are paid for is to recognize
to what extent they are denied.
It becomes clear that there is an imposture involved in condemning
scapegoat-politics, which is so vigorously in play in authoritarian and
bureaucratic behaviors, xenophobia, racism, and sectarianism; that is,
when one deigns to break the economic hold over life that smashes desire
at its roots.
As long as this wound in our being does not heal, this wound which is
our degraded enjoyment of life, the great exorcism of death will only
make all the tears and blood that each of us spills splash upon others.
Be careful not to forget that in the festival palace where commodity
conviviality celebrates the Rights of man, there is a room that at any
moment could become a gas chamber.
Death is the real egalitarian justice, like the commodity is the end of
man, who produces it. What is alive escapes âjusticeâ and âinjusticeâ
because it escapes economy.
The struggle against injustices can no longer hide what it always was:
manâs conquest of a commodity that conquered him, and replaces with a
human form â an abstraction â the living reality that it exhausts.
Should one go out into the streets armed to make demands? What for? To
demand rights that will only be accorded to me at the price of new
renunciations, will enrich me at my expense, and will only make a poorer
life for me?
People have killed themselves and each other for centuries trying to get
equality, and today theyâve become conscious that the only effective
equality is the duty imposed on everyone to sacrifice themselves in
order to become workers, to work for nothing or almost nothing, since
having is in decline, power is ridiculous, and survival is boring.
I only feel concerned with the creation of a world where there would be
nothing to pay for anymore.
Long ago they would console people for the torments of injustice by
invoking for everyone, rich and poor, big and little, lucky and unlucky,
the powerful and the miserable, the common obligation everyone has of
dying. The dream of egalitarian justice was realized when one died a
natural death.
Now that work is felt to be a daily and universal loss of life, it seems
that between equality in the face of death and the equal obligation to
sacrifice every day there is no difference except the difference between
paying in cash or credit. Our era is so favorable to euphemisms that
payment extensions are easily arranged.
Their justice stinks of euthanasia; their equitable distribution of
rights and duties is like a lethal overdose injected bit by bit. And
what a âcosmicâ consolation it is, when commodities, those dead things
that suck the blood of the living, embrace and exhaust simultaneously
the ensemble of species as well as the earth that fed them!
To find oneself alone with the shadow of a death that no longer comes
from God, nor from Themisâ daughters the fates, nor even from a natural
law, in the shadow of a death that comes from a reflex, conditioned into
people by economic necessity, seems to take on a happy character, seems
to be a blessing to make the most of.
Is it not permissible, in effect, to untangle from the mess of performed
gestures those which mortify existence with routine and those which
serve to revive that existence? But what a stubbornness that requires!
And not many people have the sincerity to admit that they most often
carry out, themselves, the sentence passed upon them, which is to die to
themselves, leaving themselves with only a derisory, vain hustling of
beings and things.
A militant in the struggle against torture and the death sentence one
morning realizes that he has never stopped feeling killing himself and
torturing himself on the scaffold of guilt. Another, who spent his time
calling for the abolition of prisons, realizes upon getting out of bed
that heâs never stopped putting himself in the prison of his
character-armor.
The economy knows so well what its essence is, now that it took it from
âcelestial transcendenceâ and translated that into earthly immanence,
that itâs concretized itself in the economized existence of every unique
individual. Consciousness becomes clarified, choices become precise. One
must choose â either, feeling oneself to be judge, judged, and
executioner, one must schedule heart trouble, cancer, thrombosis, or
accidents for oneself, as if one were handing down a sentence upon
oneself, or instead one must take hold fully of every pleasure in order
to claim, without a basis for doing so, an innocence which answers to
nothing and no one.
The economy-men have no other recourse outside of this immanent justice
that was created only in order to economize them in the last days of the
planet, which has ascended to the state of pure commodity. You will
recognize them easily.
Fear and oppression has brought them so completely to their knees that
they donât even know how to stand up for themselves without bringing
others to their knees, imputing their misery to others, and punishing
them with the punishment they inflict upon themselves all day long. The
vocation of sacrifice feeds upon the sacrifice of others.
They atone, and so they judge. Their judgment is made in order that the
agony they impose upon themselves might spread over the whole world.
Thatâs why they snicker when death pulls out of its hat such things as
the Chernobyl disaster or AIDS. Every cry of alarm is good for them if
it adds shrill sounds to the rumors of the final judgment. If they
denounce air pollution, itâs only a pathetic attempt to ventilate a bit
the atmosphere of guilt they vegetate in.
Beneath the indifference of businessmen and the indignation of the
revolutionaries the same stench of a scorned existence, a defunct life,
is festering. Deathâs side of things has the greatest respect for
unhappiness, since thereâs no better way to draw to oneself great
misfortune than to resign oneself to putting up with the whining of the
little-man. The only thing that is really fated is the fate we
predispose ourselves to suffer.
There is a condemnation of terrorism as repulsive as terrorism itself.
This is not to blame the ordinary cynicism of the state, which praises
peace and sells arms when it is not killing a student in the name of
security and public order. The state-henchmen know too much about the
violence they use to be truly outraged when a killer, who has rendered
outstanding services to the army, guns down a general whose profession
is, after all, to murder with a calculated risk of retaliation.
No, I am thinking of the hypocrisy and cunning that is in most peopleâs
disapproval. After all, if there is anything to condemn, it is difficult
to understand why the humiliation does not affect both private
terrorists and state terrorism, that creates terrorists in competition,
so to speak.
In whose name are the rights which the state imposes on the citizen â
right to scaffold, prison, fine, registration, confiscation, control,
enforcement, remuneration â denied to embryonic states, such as drug
lobbies, interest groups, private militias, mafias, supposedly
revolutionary factions, terrorist storm troopers, individual profiteers
of crime and resentment? In the name of the protection that the state
grants in return? Unfortunately, this protection is also the product
offered by competitors, and their extortion usually only has the
disadvantage of illegally supplementing the extortion legally practiced
by the state.
I have no interest in consorting with circles that are better prepared
to massacre each other than to give life to cities and forests. The
question, however, deserves to be asked: Who are those noble spirits who
hate bombers and firearm-ideologues? Mostly domestic and family
terrorists, rash and haphazard bringers of death, spreaders of fear and
blackmailers, who give and refuse love in order to obtain power and
stifle the impulses for independence of their relatives. Under the
banner of humanism, these people are cut from the same character-cloth
as the culprits of the illegal power.
In the all-powerfulness of their inhumanity, the States of the past have
engendered heroes who, daring to stand up alone to Leviathan, have been
haloed with the black lightning of an oppressed humanity.
Coeurderoy, Ravachol, Henry, Vaillant, Caserio, Bonnot, Soudy,
Raymond-la-Science, Libertad, Mecislas Charrier, Pauwels, Marius Jacob
(who never killed anyone), Sabate, Capdevila, and so many others; I no
longer have the same admiration for you, but my affection for you has
increased, since now I understand how hard it must have been
safeguarding your own lives when you pushed the knives away from your
throat and turned them against those who had threatened you.
It is no longer true, today as we witness the precipitous decline of
every form of authority, that the weight of servitude and degradation
makes surges of life take up the weapons of death.
On the other hand, I see to what a point the suicide-reflex and the
necessity of dying for some cause gave new credit to the State, which is
more and more discredited, and re-carve the faded coat-of-arms of Power.
Besides, it would be sufficient to examine to what point terrorism has
gathered from the barrel of the gun the weakness of the last ideologies
to recognize what must be done. Sexism, racism, marxism, sectarianism,
nationalism, mysticism, authoritarianism, and business-ism give us a
good reflection of whatâs left on the stage in the political theater;
itâs enough that the onlookers give a few whistles and hoots for the ham
actors of order to rediscover a semblance of conviction.
The European State has already been disgraced by the fact that it
maintains armies that go jobless when there arenât any wars or riots for
them to fight in; what would happen to its justice, its magistratures,
its police, its bureaucracies, if it didnât have political terrorism and
the typical giving up of rights?
Repression has always fed itself upon people having a typical
inclination to repress themselves; thatâs what gives governments their
power. And now we see, at the moment when the side of guilt is losing
out, droves of suicidal activists have drawn from their lethargy a
system of final judgments wherein everyone kills themselves by killing
others. Cui prodest? (who profits off this?)
To throw down what is collapsing on its own is to offer oneâs own agony
a bed amid the ruins. Let the dead associate with the dead in one in the
same cult of decay, in that refusal of life which is the spirit of all
religions.
The new innocence abolishes guilt with the sovereignty of the living.
If the old cry, âDeath to the exploiters!â no longer rings through the
cities, itâs because itâs made way for another cry, which comes from
childhood and from a serene passion: âLife above all else!â
Let that cry spread, not in heads, but in hearts, and you wonât be
bothered anymore by the apathy in which the archaisms of submission and
revolt get bogged down.
The joy of belonging to the incessant renewal of nature is the best
antidote for the daily constraints of exploitation and denaturation.
Itâs the moment of innocence when children reveal themselves to
themselves, before education makes the pleasure of being born be paid
for with the obligation of working. There lies the secret that undoes
the chain of remorse, sacrifices, sicknesses, frustrations, and
aggressiveness that forges, chain-link by chainlink, the free trade of
guilt-feelings.
What motivated the gestures of clemency, which the hagiographers
attribute to some potentate, monarch, general, or statesman or another?
It was discounts on spiritual profiteering; a moral profiteering that is
to their surplus-value system what power is to money. However, did they
not sweep under the carpet of their calculating coldness a true
generosity, a sparkle of authentic freeness, that bursts forth
constantly as if the breath of the human only needed a crack in the
authoritarian character armoring to regain its inspiration?
Now, the crack is accentuated with the dismantling of authority. The
price of a pardon sinks proportionally with the sinking of the price of
offenses. And that happens in such a way that the effusions of natural
generosity find themselves more and more frequently cleared of the
accountancy of their ancestry. That now we worry less about being paid
in return means that the ideas of compensation and punishment are being
washed away bit by bit, faced with the exuberance of tenderness,
affection, and love.
To learn how to hold up in oneself the grace of love and of being
friendly dispenses with all this waiting for favors from anyone or
anything.
Punishment doesnât dissuade people from committing crimes, it stimulates
their commission. It gives rise to competitive overstatements where the
guilty passes down upon others a justice that others passed upon them.
Donât criminals act like implacable judges? They condemn, punish,
pardon, or execute their victims without deferring to the laws of a
universal justice. His tax on his victims is his wage, and he knows that
if heâs arrested heâll settle his accounts.
Such is the unstoppable logic of exchanges; it reproduces itself
endlessly. But itâs not a human law, itâs merely the law of an economy
where everythingâs paid for.
To condemn violence, rape, and bombings and to call instead for a
legalism that kills, imprisons, rapes, and tortures is to take part in
the inhumanity of a market called âjusticeâ, it is to resign yourself,
with a secret urge for revenge, to behaving like a judge and like a
criminal.
No matter how constrained I feel by working to survive, and, in the same
instant, to react violently to defend myself â since I wonât tolerate
threats of any kind â no one will make me give in to believing in the
âvirtueâ of work nor the âjusticeâ of âtaking an eye for an eyeâ. A
civilization that has the pretension of creating a new humanity of its
own negates itself unless it puts all its energies into breaking the
cycles of crime and punishment, and thus doing away with justice.
Although Iâve been drawn at certain hours of the day and night into a
game whose rules belong to the mercantile universe, I never made a
choice to enter willingly into it, and so I donât really care if Iâve
won or lost, and all that will suit me is to get out of it. He who,
gathering the randomness of pleasures, avoids the beaten paths of
self-punishment and its exorcisms, mocks the concepts of judging and
being judged.
Let there be no more culpability, but only errors, since there is no
error that does not contain its correction within itself. Even that most
irreparable of criminal acts, the assassination, has more of a chance to
efface morality if it takes on an attitude that favors life, starting
with that of the murderer, than it does if it perpetuates the poisonous
shadow of punishment, redemption, atonement.
Put as much energy into pushing away guilt feelings as you do into
maintaining them, and you will much more surely turn away the violence
of death, whether it is brutal or underhanded, than you would by
repressing them. And that violence is nothing but the inversion of the
will to live; it does not participate in human nature, but in its
denaturation; it does not enter into the creation of man by man but into
the system of generalized exploitation which imposes the supremacy of
work over orgastic enjoyment.
The disgusting reign of prisons will never be stopped until everyone
learns how to stop imprisoning themselves in behavior economized by the
reflexes of profit and exchange.
The less animalness is trapped within the character-armor, becoming
enraged by perpetual frustrations, the more it will open the doors of
enjoyment as well as of progressive refinements, and the more the horror
of enclosing the condemned in cells will become obvious to everyone,
since they are in the prisons not for their misdeeds but because they
have exorcised the demons that up until then had imprisoned the honest
people in them.
For all the progress that humanism calls for in its vows, they are quite
reasonably shaken by all this. If the prisons were to disappear right
now, when enjoyment has not had its rights restored, they would merely
be making way for aerated psychiatric institutions, as is desired by the
therapists, who anesthetize the violence of frustrations in those
condemned to everyday slavery.
Isnât it time yet by now that we put enough of ourselves into loving
ourselves that we want nothing more than great happiness at the bottom
of our hearts and attach ourselves to others for the echo of our
happiness in them, and love them for the beauty of the love they give
us?
I refuse to be surrounded by roles, functions, character; I hate to be
fixed and trapped in what isnât me. What real, authentic encounter could
occur in a place where the obligation to appear as representation keeps
me from ever really being me?
All that matters to me is the presence of living people, in which all
the freedoms that canât be shut down by judgment converge.
Questions without response are most often knots that only time can
untie, because, tangled in the twists and turns of an upside-down world,
they come undone on their own the moment Life readjusts.
Since the unsolvable obeys a logic which has no final solution except
death, there is in every question an unheard resonance that carries
emotions of joy and happiness. In this sense, nothing is less futile
than the tenderness of a glance, the taste of a morning coffee, a
Boccherini trio, a Mozart aria, a ray of sunlight between palm fronds,
the bloom-like opening of a loverâs hand, the smell of love which is
more eloquent than the words of love. It is from there that so many
desires, discouraged by circumstances hostile to their accomplishment,
regain force; it is from there that they are liberated from the
contortions of bitterness and of the dissatisfaction that comes of all
the questions that every day poses when one suffers from an inextricable
self-doubt, demanding to no longer be renounced, demanding to desire
endlessly.
Pleasure smashes linear time, wherein life flows according to the
rhythms of the economy, according to the chain of exchanges, along the
lines of installment payments on an imminent justice. What is done out
of constraint and necessity can only be understood, and, inseparably,
transformed, by means of the freeness of enjoyments.
Pleasure is at the source of an inexhaustible self-confidence, which is
the opposite of faith in Gods and Causes, that is, faith in the economy
running the world. One satisfied desire engenders ten more, each with
the promise of a singular happiness.
Thatâs why happy people find within themselves no reason to wish death
or punishment on anyone.
Do you want to perpetuate contempt for life? Then, impose ârespectingâ
it! The old imperative, âthou shalt not killâ â is this not the
cornerstone on all the butcherâs shops?
Every time adults set themselves up as authoritarian guides for
children, they communicate to them nothing but their incomprehension. I
need see nothing more to prove this besides the cruelty which has been
for such a long time imputed to children as though it were âhuman
natureâ and which has never been anything but the product of education.
To slander 2 year old children by calling their behavior sadistic when
they crush an ant colony willingly shows numerous aberrations in the
dominant thought-process, which is so separated from the living that it
sees the mark of death precisely where life is groping to make its
uncertain way.
By crushing the beasts that come and go, the little ones are in fact
being initiated into the mysteries of movement and immobility.
Underneath their feet, the moving trails stop, and are scattered into a
series of little specks. The same ludic approach to learning incites the
child to seize the cat by its tail, to tear the leaves off a plant. So
then how does that rhyme with the concert of reprimands, reproaches, and
saddened indignation? It has the effect of changing an experience which
only lacked that discretion in the face of malaise, wherein guilt slides
away along with the secret come-ons of the forbidden.
The pleasure of innocent discoveries petrifies the child suddenly
beneath the cold stare of medusa-like reprobation. And so we see, that
one ceases to love at the moment that new notions have need of love in
order to be interpreted and to enter into a vaster knowledge. Sudden
repression sets off a reflex of transgression; pleasure gets stuck in
anguish, a stone is added to the neurotic citadel of the years to come
when enjoyments will be imprisoned and tortured, destroyed and satisfied
negatively. Ordinary sadism begins there.
The commodity logic of competition always implies the intelligence of
that which, placing itself in opposition to this well-established
idiocy, is nothing, in its modern state, but the same idiocy a
contrario. That the authoritarian and repressive attitude of adults
gives rise to duplicitous and unpredictable children has, in that way,
brought back into style for a time the âlaissez-faireâ theory
popularized successfully by american pediatrics. As if to give the child
the freedom to let off steam by tormenting animals didnât implicate that
the child would undergo at the same time the effect of parental guilt
and frustration. Itâs true that a frank and necessary cruelty served
quite well the designs of a generation that occupied itself with
experimenting with the effect of napalm on the movement of vietnamese
ants. Every time ânatureâ is used as an excuse to justify a social
behavior, it is curious that plants and animals are always used to
illustrate appropriation, the law of the strongest, competitive
confrontation, and everything else that might be useful to the economy.
If the experience of beings and things carries a risk of cruelty, isnât
it proper that a human education would deal with that? To demonstrate
the existence of universal gravitation, it is not necessary to throw a
man out the window from the fifth story; nor is it necessary to have
recourse to killing things to explain movement and immobility. Like
going hunting with your camera instead of your gun does away with
killing and helps you learn the pleasure of wandering through the woods,
to lay in wait, and to seize an instant of life, in the same way a
consciousness of being alive propagates itself little by little and
weaves a subtle network between self-enjoyment and so many other things
â plants, crystals, animals, the shape and lines of landscapes, the
forms of clouds, pieces made by peopleâs creative genius.
A child who throws his glass of milk on the ground is testing the limits
of the material the cup is made out of, and at the same time he is
testing the guarantee of affection. The brutal reprobation constantly
given to the child about the fragility of the glass does not open the
doors of knowing and enjoyment, but rather it opens the doors of anguish
and a morbid desire to destroy to attract attention.
On the other hand, the feeling, which to the child is easily
perceptible, that it was an error and not a fault, that it gets from
reassuring sympathy, makes for a comprehension which is eminently human:
the quality of the glass, its form, its light, the secret life revives
the pleasure of concretely helping itself to everything, which
concretizes a presence which is in fact that of the ubiquity of the
living, of Life; a ubiquity long ago usurped by the gods, by heaven, by
spirit, by intellect.
A double evolution announces the end of the morbid marriage that foments
the sick and the doctors. According to the first, the sick man thinks
that he needs a doctor, according to the second, that he is, like the
doctor himself, a living being that is afraid to live.
Medicine has never so sovereignly imposed its power over death and
suffering, and never have its efforts ended up so vain before the
specter of incurable illnesses; the sickness of surviving with them
obliterates the body. The truth is that medicine can vanquish everything
but the essential thing â the fatigue of having to work all the time and
everywhere. What a discouragement is cancer, where cells, frenzied in
the shadow of death, proliferate in an extravagant life-reaction which
kills them! What a defiance is AIDS, which opposes to the triumph of
immune-system medicine the absolute collapse of the organismâs immunity!
Medicine was created in the image of commodity civilization. Its apogee
has made the fanfare of well-being resonate to the four corners of the
world, a world where whole species disappear, where the chemical and
nuclear miasmas poison the air, where fertilizers [and genetic
engineering] sterilize the soil instead of fertilizing it.
Having attained the summits of efficiency and inefficiency, the medical
world falls from the heights of its essential pretensions to crouch
hidden in an existential reality: the morbid relations between
individuals and themselves.
The 19^(th) century held sacred the science of man and the art of the
medicine-man, seeing in them not so much the progress of knowledge but
the increase in quotas on the market of human material.
Weathering the years when a thousand people werenât even worth a
coffin-flag, being a doctor was hardly any bigger of a deal than being a
barber, clown, or executioner. The avaricious morality of capitalist
development had to first begin to consider and examine human beings with
as much attention as theyâd pay to the carving on a coin before the
rough rubbing chiropractics of university jargon elevated the doctors to
the status of laborious and effective technicians, in order that they
might become, on orders from an accelerated industrialization, the
experts on the body at work. While the surplus value torn from the
mining towns gave a stipend to the progress of research, it appeared to
be clear that the object of choice for the most respectable of sciences
is generally the machine, and in particular, the mechanized-man, which
quite usefully prolongs the life of the machine.
Judge the popularity of medicine when the production-machine split
itself up and became a consumption-machine too as the pharmaceutical
industry, having discovered a vast potential market in the proletariat,
democratized the use of health concerns products.
Whereas doctors were once merely prestigious, they became indispensable.
Their function was bureaucratized for the âwell being of allâ and its
mission is no longer curative but socialist. They militate in a sanitary
organism which, in the name of Social Security, makes sure that there
are plenty of remedies for those who work everyday just to die a little
more.
Nevertheless, the decline of it all announces its coming. Bureaucratic
routine, the power of the pharmaceutical monopolies, the crumbling of
specialized therapies, coincide with an overprotection of health that
contrasts starkly with the malaise in civilization. Mistrust becomes
embittered on contact with a pharmacopoeia which heals the stomach by
sickening the kidneys, and participates in the same industrial system of
power, which denatures the earth and man in the name of happiness.
Add to that the bankruptcy of the protector-state, incapable of assuring
anymore a social security that the proletariat of highly-industrialized
societies put away over the years with its conquests and acquisitions.
Basically, a growing moroseness has invaded the market of death and
sickness, and opinions balance between disturbance and relief at the
sight of its disappearance, after the fashion of convalescents who are
assured that they can walk without crutches and who donât dare believe
it.
The collapse of the traditional medical market has not failed to
stimulate the promotion of parallel markets. In the same way as the
marginal development of sustainable industries puts the unsustainable
industriesâ markets in a growing discredit, an abundance of alternative
medicines gets ready to oust surgical and chemical therapies, which are
more and more contested.
The phenomenon, which was predicted back in the 60s, is in fact just a
part of the commodity logic which the second half of the century
popularized the consciousness of; the slipping of frenzied production
into accelerated consumption, the passage from authority to seduction,
from tyranny to laxity, from sectarianism to openness, from the high
cost of transgression to low-priced hedonism.
Illnesses are most often a kind of workplace accident. Once the body
sours on being made to function as a machine of production and
consumption all the time and in every terrain, it goes wrong, jams, and
seizes up. Fleeing the stress of routines and a set of plans that seem
suddenly absurd to it, the body seeks refuge, repose, anesthesia, or
lethargy in coryza, infarction, fractures, hemiplegia, and cancer. The
paradox of medicine is that its intervention is as indispensable as it
is noxious. It repairs the machine for new performances on the journey
of marketability, where machinelike behavior leads to the decline of
Life.
Although they close themselves into the same lucrative traditions as
their rivals do, the natural medicines open the door to a freeness which
will dismiss those traditions one day. Besides, the techniques now being
developed will allow for a new energetic harvesting of the profusion of
solar, vegetable, terrestrial, aeolian, and thalassic energies.
The contradictions they cultivate by demanding payment for a natural
freeness, which itself is demanded elsewhere, act in a revelatory
fashion. They underline the morbid duality of healthy and unhealthy, and
show concretely how those who long for health also long for sickness.
Therapeutics without violence, in their project of making behavior
natural again, have spread the opinion that each person is his or her
own source of vitality and of languor, that it intervenes consciously
and unconsciously â and in any case, more than has been admitted â in
the conflict in which the body is the permanent field of battle and of
maneuvers.
Whereas classical medicine uses heavy artillery to annihilate sickness,
sometimes annihilating the sick themselves, the guerilla warfare of
natural medicines solicits participation from the patient in the
curative effort; it calls upon the patient to fight to get better and
shows him that he is the same as the caduceus where the two serpents of
health and sickness are coiled around one another.
When doctors believe less and less in medicine, patients come to believe
that they are capable of cutting short their own illnesses and healing
themselves, using nothing from the healers â certified or not â except
as a placebo or preservative against doubt, which could reasonably hide
from them their chances of success.
When it comes to knowing if life gains from the change, nothingâs less
sure. To become your own doctor â is this not to learn to heal your own
illness? To concoct herbal teas, to buy the whole gamut of expensive,
organic and pure products, to hold yourself to diets and to abstinence
from alcohol, these things make healthy men the enlightened consumers of
a latent morbidity. Thinking that this would make way for individual
autonomy, they end up only with self-managed prisons for it.
For those who accept the pact with daily dying as though it were fate,
nothing proves that chemical medicine is worth as much, if not more,
than light-therapy. For a patient accustomed to being raped and abused,
the medical knuckle-sandwich has more of a chance of convincing and
healing than the sickly and sluggish approach of the new practitioners.
Besides, the whole business is concluded in advance, once adults turn to
medicine as they would turn towards their motherâs bellies or the male
protection of their fathers, once they renounce leading themselves alone
down the trail of nascent sickness and sounding out the language of the
body with a grammarianâs solicitude. Isnât it all about giving a ludic,
rather than dramatic, turn to such questions as: âwhy am I starting to
get sick?â, âwhy am I feeling this particular pain in my heart rather
than in my kidneys, why this kind of affliction (and this is a
remarkable word[2], which can designate both sickness and love, as if it
contained sickness born from absent love and love that keeps sickness at
bay)?â
Perspicaciousness would be useful for the discovery of the lexicon and
syntax by means of which the body expresses itself as long as it is at
leisure to speak. Since if we are hardly interested in its
manifestations of well-being, wouldnât it have to cry out in pain to
make itself listened to?
What is the meaning of a nascent rheumatism, a migraine, a sharp pain, a
dislocation, nausea? Why these awkwardnesses which make us break things
as if something was getting knotted up inside us and threatened to break
us? Each must respond in his or her own way, since the language of the
body differs from one body to the next, and nonetheless the conflict is
the same everywhere: it opposes the will to live to the reflex of death
that denies it.
The fear of death is nothing but an ordinary disguise for the fear of
life. All medical profits come from holding up the one and aggravating
the other.
With what solicitude, with what fervor do they secretly welcome
sickness, persuaded that they were born to pay for a few ephemeral
moments of happiness with years and years of unhappiness. Work and
bargaining have so totally depreciated the pleasure of living that one
can hardly gaze upon them without setting in motion a reflex of death
and failure.
In the beginning there was the game, and the game became drama. When it
was a question of escaping school, getting out of chores, getting the
caresses that it felt deprived of, the child excelled in the art of
being sick, with the virtuosity of a chess champion. These are not
feigned sicknesses, but sicknesses put into play â to the point that
emotional attention takes them out of play, at least if they are
employed with the necessary intelligence.
So much energy is invested daily in suicidal resignation that the habit
of obsessing over death only awaits a signal from fatigue and confusion
to wrap those with that habit up in the cocoons of sickness, where they
will justify their regression to the fragile state of existence of
childhood by deferring to some infirmity.
Only an amused lucidity seems capable of putting an end to such harmful
dispositions, of ridiculing the morbid and dramatic exaltation of the
first feelings of faintness and discontent. It is still necessary, in
order to accede to the grace of âgai savoirâ (happy, relaxed wisdom),
that we base our efforts on an irrepressible will to live, without which
an intelligence of causes turns into the last words of the condemned
beneath the guillotine.
Of course, we live in a state of permanent paradox, stirring up hate to
make us love, hounding us to give up this life where each of our
gestures cries out the decline, judging it necessary that we be pulled
to pieces by work, and judging futile the effort that orgastic enjoyment
requires? How close we are to the creation of the living, in spite of
the conjurations and evil spells of sickness and boredom! Like a moment
of love and joy, dissipating the sickly fog that we have become
accustomed to complacency in, has the sovereign power to unmake it all
this evening â like a game that the rules donât apply to anymore â it is
the cancer of this society which sketches out the morning.
In the instants when we belong to ourselves completely â rare and
exceptional as they may be â is there not more science and intelligence
to be extracted from those instants than there are in all the therapies,
which extol their own curative powers on the back of an incurable
life-sickness?
With the scarcity of wars, riots and revolutions which once served as
pretext and expedient for the well-rooted cult of death, there is
nothing left now to nourish the refusal of life, ultima ratio, except
for the battle of each person against him or herself. And itâs a
conflict that is easier to get out of now than it was in the olden days,
when it strangely enough appeared quite small before the vast
conflagrations of conflict between nations and social classes. On a
related subject, however: Let us not underestimate to what point the
arms-market has made way for the drug-market, not only of heroin and
cocaine, but further still, of the medications that the pharmacists are
the very official dealers of; in many ways, the propaganda of death has
done nothing but changed the shoulder it rests its rifle on â and now
itâs shooting from the left one.[3]
The decreasing credit given to pain assuredly is one of the reassuring
signs of our times. It has been a long time that weâve been waiting for
it to stop being considered redemptive. Chased out of the corner-store
of positive values, it excites us less to compassion and to purchasable
relief now, and makes us more resolved in our will to finish off its
deplorable detritus and eradicate it before it starts addicting us like
a drug.
How many generations have been exasperated by its moaning, playing the
part of the mourners in the funeral procession of desire, opportunism,
ascent to honors, ridding itself of its pain by inflicting it upon
others, spoiling gastronomy with ulcers and making the thorns the glory
of the rose-tree.
Sadly for the dilettantes and supporters of pain, there is no more
success, no more prestige, no more power. Work no longer sanctifies the
idiots that courageously sacrifice themselves to it, and if itâs still
anything more than a sickness, a misery, a misfortune serving as a
selling point, then itâs just a ridiculous act, like one might
plagiarize from the melodramas of the past.
It goes without saying that the depreciation of pain coincides with the
decline of the functioning that was imparted to it economically.
The ideology of suffering as useful and agreeable to the gods, to the
State, to morality, came in perfect accord with the indispensable
sacrifice of the self on the altar of production. On the other hand, it
is a resolutely opposed ideology which has countered the furbelows of
seduction with the necessity of consumption. To the ascetic reprimand,
âPut up with the pain; no pain, no gainâ the cheerful response, âPlease
yourselfâ has come. In order to sell off their substitute pleasures, it
didnât seem too frivolous to lend a smiling mask to the anguish,
bitterness, and dissatisfaction which double the bill on commodity
pleasures.
We have for too long confused natural suffering â such as it comes from
the dialectic of life, with its incidentally random distribution of
pleasures and displeasures â and denatured suffering, which the
prohibitions placed on enjoyment have resulted in, the reductive
mechanisms of work, the inherent guilt involved in exchanges, the
perspective which aligns beings and things by taking death as its
convergence point.
If it is true that sickness fills the voids that frustration creates in
the body â since itâs the opposite of a feeling of plenitude â that also
means that enjoyment is the absolute guarantee against anguish, morbid
states, and precocious agony.
As an example, here is the observation made by a pediatrician while he
was making his consultation. To attenuate the pain of having her broken
arm put into a cast, a little girl of six years discovered spontaneously
the analgesic power of the pleasure she got by caressing her breasts.
Her mother, annoyed by this conduct, which she deemed obscene, wanted to
make her stop. It is to the merit of the pediatrician that he opposed
the motherâs remonstrance, and tried to explain the good basis of such a
behavior.
Enjoyment pushes pain away. Thereâs a truth that deserves attention from
the scientists, since it could change the basis of scientific research
entirely. If it is admitted that patients who react in a lively way to
the pain that overwhelms them (and who react before theyâre brought down
by it) actually increase by 70 percent their chances of getting better,
it must be admitted as well that there is a certain aberration to taking
the inverse path, starting from a morbid state, where whether one likes
it or not, the enjoyment that is brushed aside from life seeks its
satisfaction in suffering, sacrifice, and death to try to restore some
kind of health.
When will you give some vacation time to the students of the school of
sado-masochism, of education according to the spirit of work, those who
are being initiated into the world of forced labor where progress means
a lack of emotion, and who have been so educated in that terrible way
that the therapists donât even know to what extent their sicknesses are
actually chosen out of nostalgia?
Knowledge in the fields that medicine has abusively reserved control of
for itself should consist in dialog with the body. Sickness speaks, it
seems, wherever desire has been forced to shut up and deny itself. It is
the task of each of us to discover, if we wish, in what places and how a
nascent voluptuousness is cornered, curled up, and shriveled up in
painful nodes that medicine can only cut off, since, failing that, it
canât get the body to consent.
However, separate thought, no matter how lucid it is when it concerns
itself with the rifts where desires are stuck whining, cannot easily
restore the vital equilibrium of the body. Only the passion of life and
of self-love can vanquish the doubts and fears slowly installed in the
heart from birth; only passion, attentively directed at each of the
pleasures of the day and the night, can really transmute the primary
impulses into the refinement of desires that is the sole substance of
the human.
A new consciousness is discovering its practice. Doctors believe less
and less in medicine, the sick sees less and less the effect of the
daily repression of the pleasure of living in his sickness, the body
refuses slowly its traditional status as a production machine, a
consumption machine and a passion-crushing machine, in the whirlwind of
compression and decompression. Itâs the end of the times when bodies
assimilated themselves into a workplace. No suffering is justifiable,
since no enjoyment demands renunciation. A living totality discovers the
power of creation and of creating oneself. The earthâs dreams and the
bodyâs dreams are the same; they mark the taking back of a desirable
reality from the gods of power and money, a reality where suffering,
sickness, prohibitions and socially-financed death have no more place.
Separate thought has only ever produced an intelligence of self-denying
life.
From the combined triumphs of physics, chemistry, medicine, math,
astronautics, biology, architecture, psychology, and sociology has not
so much come happiness, but oppression and money. The sciences have
propagated well-being throughout the world within the limits of supply
and demand, taking human activity and pressing it back into market
activity.
We have gotten a lot of hell for incriminating progress and the other
side of its coin from those who are proud of having exploited and raped
nature down to the atom, from those who tear an energy of death from a
nucleus of life, an energy quite useful for illuminating our
shanty-houses and healing the cancer that nuclear pollution causes. What
kind of a favor can we expect from a âprogressâ that is brought about by
a commodity process that is based on the pillage of everything living?
How can we be satisfied with a peace that only keeps war at bay as long
as doing so satisfies mercantile interests?
How can we be content with a peaceful knowledge that the mere whiff of
the scent of profits makes spin about in the opposite direction? Above
all, how can we tolerate that creativity makes its inventions by
following a thread of pleasures and then gets cut off with the knife of
marketability? Electrical ampules, useless to free energies; so many
patents bought from the inventors only to be destroyed; these are only
the visible parts of a terror which is held aloft by a knowledge that is
no longer secret but is now inherent in the secret reality of desires.
Will creation, seeking out its poets, have to find instead only the
pocket-calculators of cost price?
The economy has rearranged the universe according to its perspective; it
has imposed its particular meaning on every eye, on thought, on
gestures, on the spoken word, on the sensations â but its power isnât so
absolute that it prevents us from perceiving the part played by
inviolate nature, outside its Medusaâs gaze.
A reality has been given to us as though it were the only one that
existed, and still, in its rudimentary material and spiritual duality,
it is only the reality fabricated by the work of exploiting nature,
stretching all the way to the mechanical conditioning of the body. Its
inhumanity had to be cut off in a scandalous way from the humanist
pretensions that it produced in order that people might at last turn
away from an abstract knowledge, and begin to try to come face to face
with their desires. I have too much to make of the earth and of my life,
hour by hour, to preoccupy myself anymore with the speculations that
take the world to a place I donât want it to go to. The real science we
have to create is the science of self-enjoyment, hic nunc et semper[4].
Knowledge has found itself to be separated from life as the producer of
its desires, of the spirit of the body, and of the intellectual labor of
manual labor. Thought has had nothing to get to know but abstract
thought and abstract people, empty forms which concrete individuals do
not enter into without emptying themselves. The thought of the economic
era has spun in place for 10 thousand years, walled into a circle which
fences off the reality of desires and of natural freeness.
A thought that excludes and denies life only moves forward by denying
itself and excluding itself. The universal library of ideas has based
its diversity on a constant banality wherein the old dresses itself up
as the new, and the critical spirit disguises itself as a new
conformism.
The assault on theology made by philosophy, its rebellious servant,
translates the preeminence of the earthly economy onto its celestial
representation, like the decline of the sacred and the victory of
desacralized desires tell the story of the end of the agrarian
structures and the conquest of the world by commodity modernity. Nothing
really changes except the form of this invariable oppression.
Every time intellectuality has clarified the project of human
emancipation, it has obscured it just as soon by taking the part of the
spirit-mind over the chaos of matter â the dominion of mental
inhibitions over the impulses of the body. From the beginning, every
attempt at demystification has failed, disenchanted; they could feel
early on that they were taking down one lie just to put up another.
The drama of separate thought is that it is nothing without the body,
and yet it treats the body as if it was worthless to it. We know at what
point religion got the last word in on the philosophies that supplanted
it â at the very point where ideas became powerless to change life; and
that was where it announced that fear and the consolation of dying was
the final truth.
The feeling that one has a life to create has remained foreign to
philosophy too, and foreign as much to the ideologies and the sciences
as to the theologies. We know why intelligence has so often sparkled as
soon as one comes to a dead-end: thinkers exorcise, by explaining things
and beings, their desperately unexplored lives because they werenât
reducible to concepts. The fables of the gods, of heaven, of pure
spirit, have been the object of more scrupulous study than has been the
existence of human beings born on this earth. Thereâs no mystery of
life, only a supposed âmysteryâ held up by work, which denies life and
presses it down into a dark night were impulses become frightening
monsters.
Doubtless, we should rejoice today that there is a knowledge being
formed which is more focused on nature and on the body, but so much
knowledge, though useful to life, is no less useless in the individual
approach to the destiny one must create for oneself, and remains in the
hands of people more concerned with prestige and business than they are
impassioned by the alchemy of the original libido, through the
transmutation of human needs.
It is a happy thing that the bankruptcy of power has brought with it a
democratization of knowledge. Assuredly, culture is debited and paid off
in installments, adjusted according to promotional sales. What is paid
for only very slightly ever enters into the moments of happiness that we
create.
On the other hand, what a wealth there is in the âcity of comfortâ, the
Capernaum of the sciences, in the warehouses of separate thought; what a
passionate curiosity will be provoked one day when people go through the
accumulated bric-a-brac, encompassing and utilizing it in their approach
to their pleasures.
The inflation of abstract knowledge sends the knowledgeable away, both
those who know everything about the world and nothing about themselves,
as well as those ignorant ones who have everything to learn about their
desires and cannot learn about them except through repressing them.
In the 1980s we saw new generations getting a kind of glory out of their
ignorance and lack of culture, to the great chagrin of intellectuals
carved from the rock of journalistic erudition. And didnât it become
their goal to receive nothing, since that was better than getting only a
knowledge stripped of its use-value which served only as coin for making
exchanges in the pointless transactions of authority and profits? If it
was terribly despicable to have to educate oneself in order to earn
money and honors, ridiculousness was added to contempt as soon as the
compensation was neither guaranteed nor worth anything anymore.
But no matter how deplorable their ignorance, they happened also to end
up clarifying the refusal of a knowledge imposed from without,
distributed with compassionate looks in the name of the sovereign
pontiffs, Marx, Freud, and whoever else. It was also a rejection of the
economic criteria that hierarchized knowledge according to the demands
of a job market, and of the servile attitude that comes from the
degradation of creativity when it is made to go work some job.
Everyone can see much more clearly now to what point knowledge is
whitewashed and people brainwashed in a system of social integration
where everything ends up undertaken out of duty and not out of pleasure.
If school-kids endure so much pain in order to learn and have to undergo
whippings, imprecations, prayers, and seduction by power, itâs only
because the exigencies of work and the effort that is required by the
game of a awakened and marveling curiosity have nothing in common. As
long as the science of education is based on the lucrative morality of
work and not on the enjoyments that are the source of creation, the
children who build sumptuous palaces with sand, earth, boards, cards and
dreams, will reach adulthood and, with all the most expensive materials
available to them as adults, will never build anything but cities and
habitats in the form of barracks, factories, and old folksâ homes. And
this is not just some small aberration of their education, but the
natural result of the fact that children have an abstract knowledge
imposed on them, when the children are the beings closest to life of
all. Would anyone be surprised that school, set up to make men and women
out of the boys and girls, instead produces abortions that grow old
while theyâre still young, as versed in the sciences as they are
ignorant of what they truly want and desire?
Commodity expansion has never ceased paving the roads of knowledge
further and further, and still neither they nor the boldest scientific
discoveries ever seem to go any further than the distance the drawer
springs out from the cash-register. Knowledge has restored the unity of
the universe, discovering far off lands, unveiling macrocosms and
microcosms. But that unity is only a false one, one that participates in
the religious lie, marrying the earth to the heavens by force and
substituting itself for the fundamental agreement between life and
nature.
It was enough that the international market hit on hedonism for its new
commodity in order that it could become clear to what extent science
mocks desire when it escapes the packaging into which the imperatives of
consumption fold themselves.
And then, since the progressive slipping from the sensual to the mental,
from the lived to its representation, needed great gestures to sweep
things together; it needed people to regain the naive curiosity of
children and try to touch with their fingers what they wanted to get to
know, mocking all the discourse.
We canât make anything of a knowledge that remains foreign to the waltz
of our regrets and joys. Thereâs too much pleasure to discover in the
world by discovering ourselves to be content with reading and rereading
endlessly the balance sheet of a universe where only numbers change, and
where everything is reduced to numbers. It is indeed time now to
introduce the magicians of infancy and dreams into the arsenal of the
sciences, in order that so much inventive wealth isnât paid for with our
indigence. One exploration alone will have the privilege of opening up
the doors of a dead horizon on the infinite expanses of the living; the
adventure into the galaxy of desires.
A scientific truth that doesnât inscribe itself into the incontestable
progress of the human only expresses an inhuman truth and doesnât merit
being paid attention to.
Think about what a travesty it is that there isnât a single infamy in
history that hasnât used knowledge and the sciences as a guarantee of
its authority. Private property, the fatherland, competition, the
survival of the strongest, God, inequality, racism, the inferiority of
women, the excellence of nuclear energy â all these terrible things have
been crowned with the laurels of truth and have incited great marveling
at the âdiscoveriesâ that supported them. No one is surprised that the
âproofsâ that guaranteed them status as established facts were based on
reasons even more peremptory than the economic imperatives of the time
that confirmed their good basis.
The meaning of an observation, of an experience, or of a theory, are
preexistent in the behavior of the observer, the experiencer, or the
theoretician. That science participates in the exploitation of nature
for profit â science is just work, too, after all â explains well enough
why so many scientific truths proceed from an implicit contempt for life
as enjoyment and creation.
This contempt has varied through different people and eras, but there
are few examples of knowledgeable people whose morbidity, stiffness,
asceticism, lack of generosity, and ignorance of love have not had their
inventions and discoveries infected by some kind of ignoble germ.
The racist vanity of the linguists and biologists of the 19^(th) century
built up the âscienceâ of race-inequality on foundations which were
thought to be eminently rational. The progress of police
perspicaciousness, the need to isolate dangerous elements from the
social magma â these were the bases for the establishment of sociology,
psychiatry, and psychoanalysis as sciences. Medicine multiplies its
successes by seeing the body as a complex machine whose secrets could be
penetrated in the same way as the secrets of the earth could be
delivered up to derricks and translated into stockquotes; they did this
to such an extent that, guaranteeing the denaturation that produces
cancer, it also produced, to try to heal that cancer, a lucrative
pharmaceutical industry. Thereâs nothing, not even the supposedly
eternal truths, that isnât in a certain sense âfabricatedâ according to
a spiritual sense of its meaning and place; thus we see universal
gravitation perpetuating the idea of a divine clock, a mechanical
perfection of the universe; thus we see the big bang start to smell of
the god-hypothesis, that old fart under the covers; thus we see the
development of genetic manipulation â and we neednât wonder how the
people who manipulate genes behave daily, and the place love has in
their lives.
How can a extracted by suffering not be the reflection of a reality
imposed at the price of pain and heartache? A science that needs to
sacrifice men, animals, forests, landscapes, and ecological equilibria
in order to progress is a science of death. A researcher who favors his
function and his role over his life â like we see in these specialized
âbossesâ, full of bitterness and contempt, defending tooth and nail the
petty territory of their specialization â never finds anything but
future cemeteries.
Joyful wisdom is the free usage of knowledge by the will to live.
The culture market has accumulated a considerable sum of pre-programmed
experiences that we donât know what to do with since most often weâre
ignorant of our desires. Itâs true that a knowledge that is sold and
demands that one move away from oneself in order to buy it doesnât
really concern me at all. Markets change the products they offer, but
they never offer anything to change life. However, thereâs a lot to
reclaim from this science that remains essentially foreign to us because
it proceeds from familiar and separate thought, if our desires can turn
the use of that science to its favor. Nothing must be thrown down the
memory-hole any more except the imprint of death, which is the imprint
of separation.
Thereâs no erudition, no exact knowledge, no speculation, no reverie
that doesnât follow the pattern of the fantastic geometries whose
unsuspected practical application will be discovered one fine day; they
are waiting to take shape in the diversity of individual destinies.
To the extent that the feeling of natural freeness prevails, concern
with gaining knowledge in the domains that awaken curiosity with the
sting of desire blazes a trail to the emotional charm of learning and
teaching. Itâs just a question of learning through indiscretion, and no
longer through constraint.
Itâs a part of childrenâs nature to ferret around everywhere, and show
themselves to be curious about everything. But what kind of response do
they get for their questions? We rebuke them, we tell them to be silent
so we donât have to oppose to them our embarrassed ignorance, even if it
means later teaching them with scholarly ramblings on with computerized
solutions, the utility of which is lost to them.
Because it participates in a passionate quest â a quest for the Grail of
enjoyment and self-creation â joyous wisdom aspires to get to know
everything and comprehend everything about the omnipresence of life,
starting with the labyrinth of desires, of which everyone is the course
and the center. We know the kind of sickening responses that are most
often given to that abruptly posed question â what would you wish for,
what would make you the happiest you could be? This question really
addresses the intellect, and displeasingly recalls the dissuasive threat
made to children as soon as they experience their desires plainly â âdo
you really even know what you want?â No, they donât know; theyâre trying
to figure it out, but everything colludes to dissuade them, and later,
they will have nothing but the âchoiceâ between the heads or tails of
one in the same renunciation â to have a lot of money, to get off on
having peace of mind. But to be fully within oneâs body and in the
world?
Now that the child escapes economic castration a little more, we will
doubtless see learning one day soon begin to base itself on that
confidence that assures the feeling that one is loved for who one is,
and not for oneâs merits. No lesson is impressed into the mind if it
doesnât pertain above all to desires, and if it isnât gone back over and
constantly perfected. To understand is to take it upon yourself to
satisfy your pleasures, and the pleasures of your peers, at least of
those who understand in the same way. Knowledge doesnât come from
masters or disciples, it is part of the passion of love, which discovers
and recreates the unity of intelligence and sensation.
The return to infancy initiates the renaissance of the human.
The malformation that withers people away comes from the fate handed to
children â they are born with a nature, and they grow up with a
character. The freeness of love gives them life, and society strips them
of it; it is thus that the poison of business and numbers strip their
trees of their leaves and their passions of their attraction.
Infancy, wealth of being impoverished by having, the morning of desire
darkened by the boredom of the factories, history abridged by a
civilization that substitutes mercantile efficiency for the art of being
human.
Death triumphs in the planetary triumph of the economy, and everything
that it destroys the hopes of works to perfect it. Enough of these
revolutions that rot like the corpses of their dead! Only the creation
of the living is revolutionary. The most expert profiteers of politics
and commerce, who have a seismographic sense of social mutations are
trying to wrap their last commodities in the last ideological packaging
â they make them look alive.
They know that tenderness makes things sell â they donât realize that
tenderness canât be sold, since they know nothing but economic truths.
The reality of desires will bite them in the ass. Though they mix in
with the deathknells of this moribund society the fanfare of interest
shown to the children, they never perceive the song of the earth that
will drown out their voices, nor the new harmonies of a life that is
coming back to life.
The greatest danger that the irresistible rise of the living faces is
not the assault of lucrative recuperations, but rather it is to be found
in the reflex of fear and death, with which the ensemble of secular
prohibitions weigh down enjoyment. Thatâs why it still happens that when
faced with a more and more common understanding of ecology, a furious
determination suddenly arises in people to pillage nature â as the
counterpoint to a growing and everywhere highlighted affection, a blind
violence strikes children while they are in the embrace of the family
and of society.
Assuredly, it is not by adding fear of punishment to this fear of life
which incites killing that we will finish off the murderous vocations
that proliferate in this society. A society never suffers any crimes but
the ones it gives rise to. Itâs too late for this society to try to
militate in defense of children now that new human relations, which call
for a radically different society, have begun being born from a
reconciliation of nature and infancy.
Within Oneself
Psychoanalysis is a charitable organization which gives aid to the
emotionally mutilated; it facilitates their reinsertion into the same
society which mutilated them in the first place. Psychoanalysts are paid
to explain how trauma gradually makes good on a debt we all apparently
incurred just by being born, and to encourage us to die to ourselves.
Now the devaluation of all payment plans invites us to the freeness of
nature. Thereâs nothing but the light of present enjoyments to dissipate
the obsessive specters of the past. The happiest moments of childhood
come back to the surface as soon as the great breath of fullness
enlivens the body like a living eternity â a strong emotion, one that
most often surges forth from all the things that the utilitarian spirit
judges futile: a tender gesture, a landscape, a word, a look, a tone of
voice, an odor, an encounter, a taste.
No more should we accept our traumas â now we must begin to desire a
state of grace. Guided by emotion, the passions will no longer flay
themselves in this long scream of death which has been their history. So
many crushed dreams and memories, so many lives that seek themselves out
endlessly â it seems to me that thereâs nothing more to wish for in this
world than that they find themselves and rediscover those dreams and
memories.
The time has come for children to enjoy enough love that they might
learn to become what they never had the chance to be while theyâre
growing up â full men and women. The free use of creativity will
guarantee a growing autonomy, emancipating children from parental and
state tutelage. At last they will find the privilege of approaching the
shores of love without the ridiculous detours and distortions that
adults give themselves over to so ardently that the most beautiful
islands become places of anguish, malady, and insanity.
Only love, reestablished in its natural freeness, will return desires to
their original simplicity, to an animalness that education should
refine, initiating children into their destiny â being unique in the
world, in solidarity with the omnipresence of Life.
The humanization of desires forms the basis of a new education, the
principles of which, however, have always been those of the simplest
desires. For example, the art that gradually turns the raw, unclear
sensation of a first sip of wine drunk at a young age into a development
of taste and palate and a search for finer plants.
The exploitation of nature has denatured even time allocated to living
organisms. The contamination by the commodity has subjected the
existence of algae, trees and seals to their law of universal species
extinction. Add to that the ozone layer, soil and atmosphere, and you
can accurately measure the speed at which the economy is realized and
life is extinguished.
The universal death that we see taking place like some Ragnarök,
apocalypse, or final judgment of the religious legends â what is it if
not time pulled from the eternity of life by History, wherein the
existence of the economy preprograms the non-existence of human beings?
The era of the expansion of life has become the era of the expansion of
commodities, subjugating biological rhythms, vacillations between
excitation and repose, and the succession of systole and diastole to
durations marked off by profit and loss, progress and regression,
fortune and misfortune, to this âtimeâ, which is money, evolving and
losing value accordingly as the market runs its course.
The main characteristic of these times, which, for better or for worse,
the producers have created, is that the times wear themselves out in the
routine rhythms of business, and wear out those who business has taken
the majority of the humanity out of.
The present has no age.
The Anglo-Americans, who are typically the most taken in by the neuroses
of a mercantile existence, use the word âstressâ to designate the state
of agitation required for the progress of business.
This frenzy is such a poor compensation for the dilapidation of nerves
and of spirits that, tired of the fatigue of mechanized time, some of
them have rediscovered, as if it were a privilege, an unexpected
enjoyment of the present moment. They get back a little bit of
themselves, they accept it, and then beg for more.
In the debacle of power, age has lost its military stripes of prestige.
The conflict between generations, which for so long opposed the insolent
stupidity of the young by the arrogant idiocy of the old, is starting to
lack credible combatants. So it is with the collapse of all values; now
archaism no longer waits until a certain age to initiate people into its
miserable âmysteriesâ. Having set fire to all the old-growth already,
the declining markets have thrown themselves pell mell into the decrepit
old men, of 16 to 80 years, to try to find support. But the same weight
of an annulled life equalizes young bosses and old truckers, fashionably
dressed in money. The acceleration of the mechanized body makes a good
market for elderliness at any and every age.
It is, on the other hand, a new phenomenon that love is taking on a
greater importance for both children and aged persons; as if life was
straining so greatly to be reborn that it pops up the instant work no
longer exercises the full force of its authority, for some because they
are full of regrets, and for others because they are thankfully escaping
regrets. The happiest people are those who, whether they are too young
or too old to produce and consume, discover the sensuality of present
life, which is never young nor old. Aside from them, there are the men
of economy, for whom age continues to be measured according to their
degree of fatigue, at least for as long as love and pleasures donât make
them childlike again.
For centuries, childrenâs mentality has not meaningfully changed. It has
remained the reflection of a struggle for power: become an adult in
order to escape bullying, and then one day bully the weak themselves.
Thatâs what used to be called the cruelty of children.
In the course of a few years, though, it has suddenly started evolving.
It was at first a certain confusion, a refusal to grow up and get
integrated into the absurd and odious world of the adults. Since this
world presented itself unilaterally as the only possible world, a
certain taste for death became the expression of a general
disenchantment with this journey without a specific goal. Then, the
resolve to grow up a different way started to become concretized; to
become a real man or woman, to carry inside oneself the fruits of a
happy infancy, and not the sterile wood of its negation. Excluded from a
history which was only the product of contempt for nature and for the
human, children are now turning the last page on that history, and
shutting the door on this archaic civilization, which interests no one
anymore.
The presence of this new eventuality was enough for new banalities to be
brought to the mill of public opinion and made into flour. Children
arenât born to produce, but to recreate the life that created them. They
are born out of the freeness of love, and the freeness of love is the
only functioning basis for their education, since it is no longer true
that, in order to ably make use of a tool, a hand must unlearn how to
caress and play â since it is no longer true that to learn to live must
mean learning to suffer, to mutilate oneself, to sacrifice oneself, to
take oneself out of oneâs body; emotions must no longer be prostituted
as commodities by the family, the school, by society, and no one should
be surprised anymore that children that are raised in that old way
become miserable adults.
Those who today are putting themselves to studying this paradoxical
novelty should probably be reminded that children donât come from some
other planet, they just carry inside themselves a radically different
planet.
To study the behavior of the embryo and of the baby will never take on
its true importance until that becomes part of a vaster project, a will
to restore the specificity of the child, to prevent the further raging
of this enterprise of denaturation that destroys children like it
destroys the whole earth.
In children, as in the people and animals that live off flora and fauna,
beats the heart of a life without constraints. Itâs for the good of
everyoneâs health, in this world that pulsates to the rhythm of death
and is rolling towards a definitive economization, that we become
totally enchanted and taken in by the music of life.
The first experiences of life occur in the discoveries of early
childhood, and we know today that everything must be redone and remade,
since the brutal interruption of that evolution has cut short the hopes
of humanity.
These experiences begin in the maternal athanor. The body is its
alchemical hearth and its materia prima. The child is created there just
as much as it creates itself, the fruit of a magistery to which the
woman gives a nourishment with an affective and nutritive value, wherein
the embryo is formed as it learns to draw its resources from the
abundance of its natural surroundings.
A more lucid look at such things established a little while ago that
there is a possibility of communication with the developing infant, and
that it understands when you speak to it in the language of emotional
effusion, and not, obviously, in the language of business transactions.
By an enchantment that has come into its prime in our time, an
alchemical relationship has elaborated itself, timidly, between these
two beings, taken over by the radically new state of being they enter
together, a relationship where the transmutation of a primal nature
implies the simultaneous transformation of the operator of that
transmutation. The adults who have been able to see clearly into the
world of the newborn and truly understand the child and the new world
that it contains within it have also been able to see their peers in the
same regard. They are guided by the light of beings, following the
sparks of life they see in them, and do not encumber themselves anymore
by keeping company with the dead.
In the forms it takes on after birth has taken place, the experience of
life moves away from the alchemical quest accordingly as childrenâs
social education is being imposed. In the growth of the little ones, the
stubbornness of plants in drawing their life from their surroundings
reappears; they try to avoid hostile terrain, and bypass it to plunge
their roots in a life-giving soil. At the same time as the little beasts
are getting âeducatedâ, they discover an environment that is hot and
cold, full of caresses and aggression, solicitude and rejection. And
already the human and inhuman presence molds a landscape into which
nature only enters artificially; the decor of a bedroom, a house, a
garden, a family â one must take oneâs place therein and move towards an
unknown destiny. Itâs a landscape plagued by the changes in emotional
climate, storms of anger and impatience, hailstorms of attention and
inattention, the tensions of guilt, the springtimes of tenderness and
the ardors of love, the neurotic tornadoes, the sun-rays of plenitude,
the trembling of desire and the peaceful glow of pleasure.
The signs that one can make out little by little indicate the condition
of its progress. Sometimes a sweet attention encourages children to go
forwards, and sometimes solitude teaches them to take initiative, to
confront alone the risks of the unknown, to perfect their autonomy.
Sometimes, on this quest, which people have quite often forgotten is a
quest for happiness, the children cry, get frustrated, and lose hope as
they become conscious of the obstacles and difficulties facing them. And
it is precisely at those moments that things spoil, at the very point at
which the adults, tormented by the order that governs them, resign their
hearts away and make it manifest that the road of enjoyments is not the
same as the road of knowledge.
If there is a mutation coming, it will be in the new communication that
is being established between people, conscious of their incompleteness,
and the children, sensitive to the life-potential they have within them.
The Great Work, the orphic poetry which pierces the secret of beings and
things and tames the most frightful furies of repressed life with the
remaining liveliness they have, resides in the feeling that only the
search for pleasure nourishes and stimulates the creation of the self
and of the world.
There is no other framework for destiny besides the thread that weaves
the tapestries of living pleasure, open to the humanization of the
natural surroundings, a weaving which is recommenced every morning. The
only people that ever truly begin to live are those who take the time to
look upon things and beings with the marveling gaze of the pleasures
which might be drawn from them â like the children who have still not
forgotten how to live â no longer merely contemplating things and
beings, but including them in a project of immediate and endless
creation.
Brutal nature will become human nature by means of the development
sensual intelligence, an intelligence not separate from life, one which
has the privilege of occupying more and more the empty space left behind
by the disappearance of the patriarchal family and the education of
economic obedience.
Age, hardened in its hierarchy of functions and roles, has followed in
the panic of time measurable by money and power. The only quality time
is that of present happiness, which is the time of eternity. The future,
it is clear, was nothing but a past held back hastily by a parodic sale,
one which is in deficit now. What is anchored here and now has no
installments to pay on the coming days.
The absolute weapon that the child has at its disposal is the affection
that it believes in and proliferates around itself. Thereâs nothing like
the feeling of being loved to help one love oneself, like, inversely,
respect and contempt forge the chains of smugness and self-hate. It is
in this very precise sense that it is useful to understand the old
adage, âLove has no age.â
Love offers us the only model there is for truly human accomplishments.
There hasnât been a moment in history when nature was brought to such an
extreme degree of denaturation, and no time when such a firm will to
recreate it by stripping it of what enslaves it has reared its head.
Stimulated by the conquest of commodities, the sciences have clarified
one side of the planet by plunging the other side in night and
ignorance. So many truths have been rolled about from tide to tide; in
the blocked ports so many ships about to set sail are rusting. All
voyages have stopped short in the sole, changing scenery of creeks
stuffed up with soot.
To get to know things means nothing anymore if we do not come to that
knowledge by means of self-enjoyment above all â thatâs the key to
knowledge. No knowledge is worth anything at all without the
consciousness of love, and there is no love that is learnt without a
love of life.
In the same way as life as we commonly study it is not life, but merely
its economized form â an essential durability called survival â in the
same way, love cannot be confused any more with the mechanisms that have
conditioned it to the point that theyâve passed themselves off as the
substance of it.
The debacle of patriarchy, then of feminism (which briefly filled the
vacancy in a position of power), has taken the emotional out of an
ensemble of functions that corrupted its meaning and charm: the exchange
of rights and duties, the calculations of profit and loss, the struggle
between the strong and the weak, the competition that rules over the war
and peace of families, and the familial enterprise following in the
footsteps of financial success. A demarcation line has traced itself
out, with an accrued precision, between the high places of the heart and
the territories under the control of the mercantile spirit.
What lovers do in a businesslike way undoes their love. The jealous
appropriation of partners, women treated as conquered cities, the
conjugal gearworks of frustrations and aggressiveness, the hygienic
satisfaction of genital pleasure, the discredit of tenderness as a proof
of weakness, of infantilism, of sickness or madness â so many archaic
traits which those of us taken in by life refuse to identify with
amorous passion.
These obvious things are happy banalities, which paradoxically, do not
come out into the open easily on their own â love becomes lucidity when
it cannot let itself be blinded anymore.
This is confirmed by the dislocation of the traditional family, which up
to now failed to amalgamate the affection naturally given to children
and the ignoble commodification where love is exchanged for submission,
where protection sets itself up as power, where the birth of the
humanity of the future only adds future workers to the production line.
Praise and derision of the commodity: at the same time as a new
consciousness is denouncing the imposture of loveless love, the market
of material and spiritual values sets up shop and puts up billboards
selling tenderness, it âpromotesâ the sweetness of the soul and
voluptuous agreement only in order to celebrate the great
accomplishments of socialism and toilet paper.
The scapegoats, Prometheus, and Christ have furnished the first version
of an illustrated propaganda of the body sacrificed to work, the body
torn from life for reasons of marketability. The advertised image of
love proposes the last version. The castration of desire has only
changed form.
However, the final abstraction of the living rubs up too closely against
the passions that it parodies and recuperates; it will not resist for
much longer the will to authenticity, which is being reborn in each of
us like a childhood to be perfected â even if the fear of AIDS sustains
for awhile the spectacular virtues of a disembodied sexuality and
perpetuates the ancestral fear of loving beneath the gaze of a phallic
and HIV positive image of Christ.
The fear of love is a fear of life. It comes from the prohibition
promulgated by commodity civilization on the freeness of enjoyments.
Love doesnât have to only be given through sacrifice, dammed up in the
body and with the body only to escape through the mind and into the
mind. The ridiculous conflict between the âangelicâ and the carnal has
filled the body so greatly with terror and frustration that it can
hardly stop oscillating between chastity and rape â to which its
deplorable movements often are reduced.
The body became evil incarnate in âoriginal sinâ, in the women, in a
murderous self-hatred, in the âsorceryâ and âwitchcraftâ of natural
freedom. What is illustrated by the AIDS plague is the last condemnation
of love, and I think that only the force of a love which rejects
definitively the procession of judges and of their guilt-trips will
really be able to erase the effects of AIDS and its insult to love.
There is no love for others without self-love.
Love is the simplest of human relations, and thatâs why theyâve tried
everything to complicate and denature it. To the extent that the
life-force is reluctant to transform itself into work-force, a new
simplicity will restore love to its right of absolute sovereignty.
Technical progress has produced so many inventions which have never made
individual happiness any greater that each of us is inclined now to put
our genius into amorous passion, and not any longer into the
mechanicalness of business, for it is only within that passion that
enjoyment is learned and experienced in reality.
Nothingâs more important than the birth of love, except for its daily
rebirth. We know that loveâs blurring and disorders come from childhood
unhappiness, but where will the healing of that malady come from if not
from the opportunity â most often refused â that adults get, to ensure
that in every amorous encounter they will establish the absolute
predominance of affection over the ensemble of mercenary preoccupations?
True life begins from the moment that love is given without constraint
to children. There, the eternity of the living affirms itself. Between
parents and children, between lovers, there are hours and days when
affection, clouded and obsessed by what is so totally contrary to it,
lacks both the time and the desire to pour out; but that changes nothing
when it comes to the feeling of its indissoluble presence, because
affection is part of an unchangeable reality of the heart, like the
eternity of the sap irrigating the trees across the rhythms of the
seasons.
âYou can do anything, because I love you, and you owe me nothing.â Such
is the leitmotif without which I can conceive of no specifically human
learning.
A love so concerned with helping children love themselves that
everything undertaken by those who are full of that love, from the first
gestures to the greatest joys of life, has a great chance at bringing
them happiness.
The era of the creators will commence with a love which is given and not
exchanged.
True love has only ever existed in a nascent state. Like human beings,
like their civilization, like authenticity in its first eruptions or
generosity in its natural freeness. We only have the beginnings â and
unhappiness seems to urge these beginnings of everything to get taxed by
puerility and weakness, and demand that they end up swamped by well
broken-in mechanisms, which suggest âstrengthâ and âsecurityâ.
The thirst for beginnings has come with time. Having nothing more to
learn or expect from death, we have only got the choice of starting
everything over again, where none of the things that had begun creating
themselves end up being finished.
The death agony of the religions, which we watch thrash about today with
their last twitches of rage and hypocrisy, is unveiling what they always
were â a crime against life. But the critique that denounces them is no
longer a critique of the spirit, that is, a critique of the essence of
the religions. The consciousness of the living kicks them into the
ecumenical gutter more surely than could all the sacrilegious
vituperations, which ring out like the funeral orison of the corpse of
religion.
All beings grow from the affection they are capable of giving. Such is
the secret, or, rather, the experience of plenitude, which was so close
to the heart of each of the people that the religious folk have poured
their trashy exhortations to sacrifice upon.
Now, he who sacrifices himself to give love only gives an example of
sacrifice. To die to oneself in order to help others only helps them die
in turn.
What derision it is to claim to give pleasure to others without pleasing
yourself! How can I offer pleasure if I renounce my own? Pleasure is a
natural freeness, a grace that is gathered up, not exploited.
Sacrifice is irreconcilable with enjoyment, because it is by means of
its mutilating effects that the language of the body becomes the
verboseness of the mind, that libidinal energy is sold for a wage, that
the will to live denies itself and becomes a will to power.
These are no longer the days when the maternal stork drew the
free-flowing knot of guilt around the necks of children for their entire
existence. From here on out, love will learn to love itself by loving
everything thatâs alive. Who said anything about loving everything and
everyone? I canât love the messengers of death, the tortured ones who
drag their cross behind them for the benefit of a world that kills them.
Thereâs too many amicable things to attach myself for me to blame those
who destroy themselves, and I donât see any greater guarantee against
their suicidal proselytism than seizing from instant to instant the
thread of life which is spun around everything that has heart.
We have everything to learn about love, about love freed of the economic
mechanisms that denature it. And Iâm not trying to teach anyone any
lessons here, neither about the practice of amorous relationships, nor
about the art of purifying them of what denies them. The only learning
thatâs worth anything comes from the self, from the increased
consciousness that comes from individual experience. As it happens, it
is everyoneâs responsibility to find the sovereignty of love wherever it
manifests itself absolutely, to recognize it, in the convulsive beauty
of pleasures, for what it really is â the gravitational center of the
body, destabilized daily by work. Love is the true nature of the human.
Love is not the transcendence of sexual needs, the street-theater farce
of angels and the beast. It is the unity of the body, making order out
of the chaos of desires, refining their original brutality, identifying
itself only with the evolutionary principle of the human species â that
all enjoyments tend to perfect themselves.
Love, given over to its sensual majesty, to the bloody torrent wherein
sharpened senses give each particular being its own specific meaning,
abolishes the rotten, old and disgusting obedience to heaven, to spirit,
to the intellectual function, to the separation of people and things, of
people from each-other and in themselves.
Transmutation will replace transcendence.
Love becomes conscious of a symbiosis which must be created between
nature and the being of desire.
Love is the transmutation of the sexual impulse into a pansexuality
which corresponds most authentically to the expression and communication
of the human.
Seeing everywhere the phallic and vaginal symbols that frustration
impresses into their over-excited senses, the sexually obsessed are
really receiving the discourse of nature, but registering it in its
negative form, in the blabberings of compulsion, in the neurotic
reaction of a mind troubled by the dissatisfaction of the body. Between
them and impassioned lovers, there is only the distance between
corporeal fullness and its absence. Being able to read environments is
the same as this as well as the contrary sense of this. Here, love gives
meaning to a landscape where analogical virtue discovers, in the
rustling of leaves, the smell of hay, the curves of a street, the
lava-flow of a wall, the gesture of a passerby, all the graces that
distinguish loved beings. There, the wind in the trees, a warm gust of
wind, or the gallop of a horse, incite to the brutalities of soldiers,
since the mind that feels them is taken in by a spirit of exploitation
for which the only thing that exists is the rigor of repressions and the
aggressive decompressions of their incapacity to reach orgasm. Thereâs
no preaching, no sermon, no political declaration, no attitude, no tic
that is decipherable if one tries to interpret it in that mindset; it
is, as Groddeck showed, the only primary reading that nothing escapes.
The language of enamored lovers has kept the imprint of an original
language. These whisperings, these murmurs, this modulated cries, these
syllables of swaying hips, which âwell-informedâ people mock the
infantilism and animalness of â do they not express, as they do in
animals and infants, the respiration of enjoyment and the state of
tension that brings one to it? Itâs an arcane language that the breath
of amorous momentum brings the living to themselves with. Itâs present
in the embrace that unites the mother and child, nourished at her breast
or cradled in her arms, and I would say that it perpetuates itself in
the intimacy of oneâs dialogue with oneself. Donât those beings who
learn to love themselves, and who secretly sharpen their desires to
better realize them, donât they talk to themselves as they talk to the
children they once were, and to whom they promise to fulfill so many
vows and so many prayers addressed to the fairies in the fervor of
youth? The incantations of the grimoires, the psalmodies of sorcery â
they are but the tortured foam that appears atop a deeper and more
effective magic, contained in the force of desires and on the bridges
that the libidinal energy of the whole body builds to connect itself
with the reality of a world which must be changed.
Thereâs all sorts of room to believe that a sensual language is on its
way to gaining power wherever the economized language of the social
contract loses credibility. In other words, the signs of affection by
means of which the living recognize themselves from person to person and
from individual to landscape are defeating, little by little, the
content of common discourse, and, even more simply, of what is said.
The bankruptcy of a reality-system determined by the economic mechanisms
that run it has brought out of its torpor a subjacent reality, secularly
repressed by the history of the commodity. Love gains a sovereignty in
that sub-reality that it exercises at the place from whence profit and
power once reigned. It carves out a path for the general refinement of
desires, which indicates the transcendence of primary needs and bases
the only really human progress there is on the quest for enjoyment.
The closed world of interiority opens little by little upon a springtime
of fertility, which banishes fear and anguish, dissolves the neuroses of
the past, brings pleasures out into the broad daylight and plants the
fallow earth from whence the commodity withdraws.
Love revokes the violence of frustrations, and invents itself a violence
full of tenderness. The caressing hand erases the hand of power.
All we need to propagate abundance is to love without restraint,
calculation, or prudence, until the point where we can finally hear
innumerable hearts rising up with the song of the earth.
Exploiting nature has denatured it, while denaturing humanity. The
nostalgia for a primitive nature and for its impossible return is the
morbid consolation of a society sick with economy. Itâs not a question
of re-naturalizing people and the earth, but of humanizing them by
giving primacy to the living energies they harbor.
The exhaustion of natural resources and of human nature draws a
demarcation-line between the men who work at it and succumb to it, a
line that defines the one great confrontation to come. While the parties
of death dip deeper into the well of fear and draw out the power to
reign over the ruins of the spectacular and financial edifice, a
unanimous cry is rising from the streets, from the forests, and from
hearts: âLife above all else!â
Before these rumors even reached public opinion, their echoes were heard
in the enemyâs ranks, since there are no polluting commercialists and
enterprises that donât think it advisable to campaign around âsaving
livesâ. Donât the nets of the commodity catch up the natural products,
the herbal medicines, and the ecological packaging too?
Now, it is not necessary that mercantile recuperation, the bric-a-brac
of new age mystics and the dumpster-scrapings of religiousness hide what
is authentically revolutionary about the will to reconcile oneâs daily
existence with living matter, with the omnipresence of the body,
participated in inextricably and con-substantially by every particular
being and phenomenon, every individual, social nucleus, animal, plant,
mineral, all the air, fire and by the earth, which the Indians assure us
possesses the art of regenerating itself, in spite of having been
wounded by the contemptuous ignorance of the vermin of business.
Itâs not unimportant that little by little the feeling of a coexistence
of different life-forms is spreading, and that the consciousness of that
feeling perceived not by the Spirit, issued by celestial oppression, but
by the body on its quest for psychosomatic plenitude. To feel good
around children, in the company of animals, around a tree, upon touching
the earth or a stone â this no longer recalls the passivity of the
faithful and of a contemplative state; itâs the start of a new language
spoken by the individual with him or herself and with his or her peers;
it is another way of being and acting, in conflict with the behavioral
mechanisms which secularly impose power and marketability.
The awakening to the absolute prerogative which earthly species demand
today is what will give foundation to a life-style, an attitude, in
which the privilege of existing will be exercised at the moment when I
accord the realization of pleasures precedence over the necessity that
spoils them by paying them off and making them pay. I for one have the
stubbornness of a nature that is ceaselessly being reborn â that of the
ivy that breaks through the concrete â and against me there is the usury
that the system of wage mediation and commodity mediation still demands.
The human approach to omnipresent nature sets spinning again a process
of evolution in which individuals will create their destiny by creating
a milieu that is in tune with their desires. The era of economy and of
nature bendable at will is nothing but a sterile and cumbersome form,
which keeps humanity from being born unto itself.
After the transformation of libidinal energy into work energy comes a
will to live which draws its creative powers from the simple attraction
of enjoyments.
Reconciling with infancy coincides with rehabilitating the animal,
granted its autonomous life.
The affection displayed to animals is not in itself a new phenomenon;
still, it must not be confused with pity â that canker, which needs to
excite to unhappiness and suffering in order to develop â nor with the
bitter spite of loving oneâs dog out of contempt for humanity. I am
speaking here about the surges of the heart, open to everything that is
alive, and which finds things to be pleased by in every privileged
relationship with a domestic or family animal.
What is new, on the other hand, is the nature and stylishness of such
solicitude. Not only does it not limit itself anymore to guests in the
immediate environment â dogs, cats, birds, baby goats, sheep â and
embraces the so called savage beasts as well, but above all it intends
to recognize them in their autonomy and independence, and no longer
seeks to tame or subjugate them â it no longer has the pretension of
being their master.
Must it be recalled that an ensemble of mercantile interests has grafted
itself onto the movement towards rehabilitating animal species, suddenly
concerned by the comfort that is due to alley cats, and a tourist market
that, after having sold impaled gorillas, saves the last specimens and
gives them, like they gave to the Indians, the right to survive in
reservations or reserves? Here as well commercial exploitation
stimulates, fetters, and hides the consciousness of the living and its
will to expand.
In less than 10 years, the children begin to reject the predatory
behavior that so many generations had assumed was a natural trait of
their being. Without a love for life, experimentation usually ends up
treating animals as objects and people as guinea pigs, whether it is the
work of children or of wise men. Would anyone believe that sensory
intelligence, which awakens the children to the marvels of discovery
without them needing to pick fledglings from their nests, destroy
flowers, or tear the wings off flies, could be foreign to the revival of
love?
If the child shows himself to be curious about beings, animals, things
in their environments, etc., with a wisdom that is inseparable from
tenderness, isnât that just an absolute affection which gives him the
right to autonomy and slowly dissolves the archaic and authoritarian
family structure?
Such a freedom would not be possible without a modification in the
relation between individuals and society that takes place through the
impulses of the body, which was for so long identified with a compulsive
bestiality.
Now that the time is coming when earthly economy will take revenge on
the heavenly economy which discredited it in the name of the religious
spirit, a vengeance of the body has built up, in which work makes
concrete the repressions of a producer-civilization and at the same time
concretizes the measurelessness of an animalness that aspires to flow
out âbeyond good and evilâ. The materialist philosophers, the ideas of
Sade and Nietzsche, fascist ideology, the hedonism of the end of the
20^(th) century â they ended up merely translating the diverse stages of
a planetary conquest for the glory of the commodities of the
machine-men.
While the body is being militarized in the service of capital, the shame
of repressed animalness bursts out in social celebrations of brute
aggressiveness, defense of the homeland, the competitive elimination of
the weak, the right of the strongest, necessary sacrifice for the health
of the species â so many frivolities reputed to be ânaturalâ, which
arose to such a degree that they gave a basis for making colonialist
piracy, the statist safeguarding of capital, and the putting down of the
proletariat considered universally reasonable. And so, a raped and
violent nature gives way to the fatigued hubris of the gods.
The triumph of the musculature in the apotheosis of productivity has its
outlet in the exaltation of earthly animalness, the celebration of
instinct over the dethroned spirit of the heavens. The mechanical
progress of the body, tortured to improve yield and earn time, gives
rise to the spectacle of sports competitions, and thereâs nothing in the
body, eventually, not even the brain, which doesnât get muscular and
suffer cramps.
But this muscle-bound body is nothing but the counterweight for the
archaic head, with its will to power, its calculations of interest, its
virile simulations, its litanies of the best and of the strongest.
Anti-intellectualism is only the cynical spirit of the earthly economy,
dragging to the gibbets those gods whose guarantees werenât necessary
for it anymore; it is the spirit of competition, taking on, in wartime,
the ruddy discipline of armies, the orgiastic and bloody decompression
of battles, and in times of peace, the warlike virtues of sports,
hunting, and the âget out of there because Iâm coming inâ that, up to
present times, is a function of social norms.
We know how the work of obligatory consumption has turned the
authoritarian violence of production into a lying faith; we know to what
extent the marketed leisure has âofferedâ to the body, broken by
fatigue, the onerous prostheses of comfort and frozen pleasures; we
know, in effect, how poorly the phony image of enjoyment resists the
reality it abuses.
While the commercialism of the olympic stadiums serves the release of a
soldier-like militancy â according to a competitive principle played out
in its purely destructive function (and what goes for soccer and
football goes for scholarly, literary and musical competitions too) â
the children of today are demanding the pleasure of playing without the
anguish of having to win or lose.
Itâs all over for the rancor of oppressed animalness, that animalness
that kills, which is not manifested by the leisurely hunter of game who
takes up the gun to add a young partridge to his menu, but by the
sport-hunter, who dreams not of adding to his soup bowl but of appeasing
his death-instinct by proving his power over everything that moves.
While we wait for the displeasure of killing an animal to eat it to
disappear along with the rest of our carnivorous habits, or for the
discovery of one of those solutions that a changing society brings â
like the threat of earthly overpopulation, after having found the
remedies to be worse than the sickness (war, famine, epidemics) finds a
solution in the choice that is taking shape today to not have babies
unless one desires them passionately for their own happiness â it is
comforting that the cruelty of the hunt is moving aside for the
development of what it took pleasure in repressing: wanderings, the
patience of hiding in wait, and skill are now finding themselves more
agreeably employed in approaching, observing, and photographing animals
in their natural environment.
There is no humanly acceptable death outside of the instant when life
grants repose to its oeuvre of perpetual creation.
Death has been seized by denaturation at the same time as water, the
earth, the air, fire, minerals, vegetable, animals, and the human have
been stricken by commodity pollution. Instead of beings and things
coming to their natural end, there is now a social mechanics in which,
under the pretext of preventing the random deaths of beasts, life is
denied and reduced to such a miserable extent that it comes to desire a
natural passing-on as though it were a blessing.
The obligation to renounce oneâs desires, in order to assure oneself a
job one might survive on, feeds daily a corpse which has no trouble
taking the place of the living prematurely. The act of dying is most
often a usurerâs bill that has all the power of a legal murder.
That the medical art and a few comforts accorded to survival have
checked the progress of the epidemics, of senility, of infant mortality,
of sicknesses that yesterday were incurable, is this a reason to fail to
understand that death, as we experience it, is just the effect of a
failure to live, an inversion in the order of existential priorities?
If they won any victory, it was only the victory of socialized death
over actual death. But who besides those in their death-agonies would be
concerned with the prodigious advancement of euthanasia? It would be
sufficient for me to have a life where death would only be a long sleep
after making love.
Death comes off like a dry fruit dropping from the tree of the defunct
gods. The Fates are nothing but the social reasoning behind the great
mill where every destiny gets stretched out, woven, and broken according
to the boring comings and goings of current affairs and business. Is
there any natural death more typically and banally experienced than that
of the daily slamming of the door on the fingers of a desire that had
tried to get out and sow its wild oats a little? Spread out over
boredom, death has lost its customary shimmer, and its horror usually
gets put out by a great weariness. Itâs become the bitterness on
pleasureâs lips, the sweat of a febrile and vain activity, the sudden
cold in loves that are unmade by a lack of attention.
It is a well known feeling that passion that doesnât lead to love leads
to death. How can we take the time to love when the time belongs to
stress, to the rhythms of the machine which breaks biological rhythms,
ties up muscles, jams up emotions, and shatters the heart? To resign
yourself to work is to resign yourself to dying in the morbid
familiarity of a daily agony; it is to pass the death sentence â which
the less barbaric countries have effaced from their law â on yourself.
We are still a part of the generations that battled death, instead of
fighting to live every day as if every day was an entire life. To stand
up against death is to stand up against yourself, and, in the final
analysis, to take the part of denaturation and annihilation against the
will to live which is naturally present.
The return to nature does not signify a regression to the animal state.
People donât have to die of the mechanization of the body, nor do they
have to die abandoned to the rigors and dangers of their environment.
I see no other antidote for denatured death than the humanization of
everyday life.
To face every day as if it contained the totality of existence, whether
lived intensely or in a mediocre way, seems to me to be a disposition in
which individual destiny makes the surest bet that it will realize
itself, knowing full well its cause.
Whatever anyone says, the important thing isnât to succeed or to fail to
attain a goal; the important thing is to almost forget the target in the
vibration of the arrow and of the act itself; a stubborn demand to
recreate, every morning, the birth of time; to leap from gathering
pleasures to seeding pleasures, with as much sincerity in joy and
melancholy as one feels upon marveling when the evening, or the
sleepiness, of death comes.
The point, it should be understood, is not to live better than others,
but to live simply in the alchemy of your desires. Enjoyment has no
gauge to offer to the spirit of competition and emulation, and withdraws
from it. It takes its own road, as if it were alone in the world, and
the world belonging entirely to enjoyment convinces it that it carries
within it a great force, and the most authentic of revolutions.
What enters into the attraction of enjoyments energetically is a part of
creation, not of work; it is a part of emotional relationships, not of
commodity relationships, of a civilization made by human beings, not a
civilization that economizes them.
Everyone has their own poetry, whether it comes forth from the mist over
the trees, from the caresses of love, the first sip of coffee, the
beauty of an art, the hazards of the game, the awakening of consciences,
the joys of the dance, of encounters, of friendship, of three notes
playing out airs of reverie, everything and nothing, as long as the body
feels itself to be in harmony with what is alive, and is filled with
that plenitude that alone gives one the freeness of pleasures.
In every moment offered to the living, there is the eternity of life. It
is that way throughout [Hölderlinâs] Hyperion; non piĂč di fiori[5]. The
time of cherries and the perfume of the linden tree are reborn
ceaselessly, saving from death forever those who long ago wrote,
composed, and planted all these things, with the grace of an offering to
themselves, which is an offering to all.
The act of creating is to the humanization of nature and life what work
is to denaturation and to a programmed death.
An accelerated reading of the obvious now ranks amongst the banalities a
truth which was yesterday put in doubt: economic exploitation has
brought humans and their surroundings to the limits of a survival the
apogee of which coincides with its fall.
The history of the commodity and the history of the people who produced
it is one and the same: it is made by unmaking those who made it.
We have been warned repetitively from century to century, and, if not
reassured, at least precautioned, that there are many terrors to fear,
terrors which we know to be inherent in a system the mechanisms of which
have lost their inescapable character. The apocalypse is part of the
past, part of the sinister procession of its cyclical horrors. The real
Flood, pouring forth from the first walls of Jericho, was never anything
but the surging forth of commodity values burying human values beneath
the frozen waters of profit.
The high points of life, which the successive waves of the commodityâs
conquest never really leveled, will serve as refuges for a long time for
those who have up to now been afflicted by the routine of business and
the stipends of passion. These islands that a slow ebb reveals in a new
way from beneath the old names of love, generosity, hospitality,
enjoyment, and creativity, today designate the true paths of a human
presence on the earth. The revolution has to the present time only been
a change in decor in the secular set-up of the economy. I donât see the
possibility of any authentic revolution outside of the daily and
individual construction of a human landscape.
Perhaps theyâll have to burn up the whole Amazon, tear apart the ozone
layer completely, ruin the earth, and put radiation into every breath of
air before they discover â beneath a computerized, accounted for nature,
dismembered according to exchange value â another nature, which freely
offers its resources and its energy to whoever deigns to rip them out
and sell them for a fistful of dollars.
The environment changes because of modifications in gaze, hearing,
touch, taste, feelings, thought, and attitudes imprisoned for so long
within the lonely perspective of power and money. And so, from the dull
boredom and monotony of a universe in decline, surges forth the passion
to be reborn at the heart of a planet and existence so well known by
those who kill them that they end up still seeming new and unexplored to
the simple eye of life.
Artworks and works of technological invention are usually borne from the
torments of a repressed creativity, which had nothing to express itself
through besides the rage of sudden release. Now that creative joy is
being born, by transmutation, from the violence of elementary and
chaotic impulse, the necessity of producing has changed the operations
of the great alchemical oeuvre into a painful birth, a curse which is an
expensive price to pay for the freeness of the gifts of nature.
Itâs not enough that the creator, which is in all of us and which is
one, should renounce creating itself right away after infancy, when the
quest for enjoyment is forbidden it; its inventive genius must be
smashed under constraint and bastardized by laborious efforts. For a few
happy discoveries, how many inventors have been condemned to silence, to
death, because the object of their research ran contrary to the law of
cui prodest: âwho is that profitable for?â How many complacent wise-men
have been sold off to power? How many artists have been prematurely worn
out and proletarianized by having gone out into the social arena to
solicit applause, to undergo the judgment of merits and demerits, to
polish a competitive label like the businessmen, the bureaucrats, the
politicians, and the other courtesans of the spiritual and material
market?
However, it just so happens that the surging of creative energy,
corrupted as it is beneath the yoke of work, keeps with it the imprint
of the body from which it is born. A strange resurrection: certain works
continue nourishing the living long after those who abandoned them over
the skimpy course of time have disappeared. Whoever knows how to
recreate the life he or she carries receives an eternal life. The
others, whose ambition is content with glory, will never be anything
more than another few names in the catalogues of memory.
The end of the vanities, or at least, of the means that gave famous
people a long-term loan; another step towards returning creativity to
its true nature: which is self-enjoyment affirming itself in the
enjoyment of the world.
Here it is, recognized in the simple and multiple dimensions of the
human: will to live, not will to power; authenticity, not appearances;
freeness, not the spirit of profit; the pulsation of desires, not
separate thought; gift, not exchange; effort exhausting itself in a
graceful, and not constrained way; an insatiable heart, not a
dissatisfied one.
Everything is put up with embarrassedly as long as it remains in the
grip of work, but could open slowly the doors of economic enclosure; the
true nature of creativity lets rip the poetry made by all; it encourages
a joyful wisdom in the diversity of its freedoms to sing, to compose, to
write, to garden, to study, to dream, to dance; to invent a new world on
the ruins of a world destroyed by the empire of progressive
exploitation. When it finally rids our consciences of the cross of
misfortune erected atop the will to live by the necessity of amassing
money and dominating, it will have done more for humanityâs happiness
than all the revolutions that programmed its hopes.
Without a doubt, the time is come to take back from the gods the
creation of the world which was so abusively given over to them, and of
which they have made such worthless use. Creation is the exclusive
property of human beings, in spite of their daily resignation to skin
themselves for work. And it will belong to them even more, as their
unquestionable privilege.
Today the silly idea of praying backwards, thanking God for giving them
a slice of bread which they themselves produced and earned by the sweat
of their brow, has at last passed away. So many human riches, sent out
to pasture, trapped in nothingness, incite us at last to turn towards
ourselves, not out of presumption, not in the vanity of that
âindividualismâ where individuals deny themselves, but rather out of the
taste for creating and for self-creation.
Reconciliation with a nature we must save is inseparably a
reconciliation with the self, with the nascent creator discovering its
well-being everywhere except in work. In creation takes place a slow
foundation-laying of the true unity of the body, the symbiosis of the
being of desires and of earthly nature; itâs the great concordance of
the living which will abolish the reign of the separate mind and of
separate thought.
Work isnât whatâs important to destroy; it will destroy itself â it is
already exhausting itself by exhausting people and natural resources.
But servility, unintelligence, the lack of imagination that continue
propagating, in behaviors and in consciousness, the memory of its past
utility and the anguish of its present innocuousness â that is the true
calamity of our moribund society, which draws along the totality of the
world towards death beneath the flag of realism and rationality.
The force of work depends above all on the weakness and self-contempt it
perpetuates, but what a fearful power it has; how can one measure the
nefarious effects it has on that social category that the popular
milieus call âthe joblessâ and the business milieus call the âout of
workâ: what a hassle, to be deprived of what deprives you of life.
Under the pejorative labels of pity and derision that are placed on
their heads, the jobless become nothing-people, since it is well
understood that work makes you into a man. They were beasts of burden,
with a guaranteed stable to live in â now they have been made into
wandering dogs. They had, from the virtue of their labor, the right to
demand pay; now that they arenât tiring themselves out all day anymore
theyâre restored to that immoral state where, to deserve their alms, it
fits them to lower their heads, shut up, and be discreet about the
agreeableness of no longer losing their days fatigued and bored.
But such is the unhealthy impregnation of âdutyâ; joblessness must be
lived as though it were work, just outside the factory door, even if
without and within reigns the same uselessness â the one is paid and the
other not (the marketable sectors, it is well known, are the bureaucracy
and those that produce useless goods, while agriculture and the
industries that cover primordial needs are condemned).
Because of the emptiness that provokes and compensates its frenetic
activity, work acts on the mind like a drug. Wages guarantee the
regularity of provisions, their absence interrupts it, provokes a
withdrawal, and throws people into panic, hopelessness, and fear.
If it is true for those who keep their eyes fixed on the drab horizons
of survival that welfare payments donât make the springtime come, one
would have to be as blind as a drunk to despise the wealth and richness
of a time suddenly free of obligations, to howl about âjob offers being
everywhereâ like a morphine addict howling at the moon instead of
sparking the lighter of his own creativity and collectively undertaking
the great task â judged to be impossible because economic prejudice
prohibits it â of creating freeness, of the creation of the free.
The imposture of necessary work is the slowest, the most consoling, and
the most cruel manner of ending life. There is something very pathetic
about the suicidal circulation of the masses â ebbing and flowing
according to the rhythms of a machine thatâs running on empty, while
capital waits in hiding for bankruptcies to invest itself in â as well
as about the ridiculousness they ensnare themselves in by dying of
thirst next to the water-fountain.
The voluntary and shameful misery of workers and of the jobless defends
itself with a fundamental idiocy in the demonstrations of the strikers
turning work-stoppages into work again â a labor of contestation â to
the point that they fill the streets sweating with boredom. What a crazy
dream, stopping the postmen from delivering the mail, paralyzing the
mass-transport systems, to the displeasure of everyone, when only the
union-leaders â the Stateâs mafia whose rights are all paid and who
refuse to redistribute the money to the workers â would be sad if a
letter managed to be delivered without a stamp or if the trains,
subways, and buses were kept running for the free use of the people.
Freeness is frightening because it is natural. But who would have any
reason to get disturbed today if those who are discontented with rising
prices and sinking wages would decide that it was a better idea to
refuse to pay to move around, sleep, eat, express themselves, meet up,
communicate, amuse themselves, and cheer themselves up?
The ecological reconversion of the economy is a predictable transition
to the era of the new harvest.
The paradox of economic totalitarianism, the logic of which is conducive
only to planetary genocide, is that it condemns itself to disappear
according to the law of profit, the avidity of which enjoins it
elsewhere to perpetuate itself.
The exploitation of nature obeys a death-principle: it transforms the
living into a commodity and gives rise to an empire where people become
nothing but a shadow of themselves. Whatâs beyond the river Styx has
never been anything but whatâs beneath the earth.
On the other hand, the hunger for gain, which is the first cause of an
unavoidable pillage, has a terrible fear of nothingness, and knows how
to prolong the duration of a privilege, how to avoid killing the goose
that lays golden eggs, and how to keep people alive, since you canât get
anything out of a corpse but flesh and bones.
And so, the economy discovers, at the accelerated rhythm of the desert
it propagates, that it has a chance of surviving if it reconstructs what
it canât destroy anymore without losing its marketability and its
credit.
The alternative that the economic system is faced with is somewhere
between shutdown and postponement. Either commodity civilization will
come to nothingness by annihilating those who engendered it, or it will
extend itself into the last possible surplus-value accorded it by the
restoration of nature.
The natural energies and the plan to heal the earth offer at the same
time an end to the marketability that fundamentally threatened everyone
and everything with its rape and pollution of resources, and a chance
for creativity to break the yoke of work and make way for the era of
freeness.
The more the economy puts the declining credit of its last forces into
ecological investments, the more easily the traps of the commodity will
be eluded, and the closer the reality of a radically different
civilization will come to the body and to our consciousness.
Nothing big or little can be undertaken today that will not be
penetrated by the following new banality: the ideology of work has
imposed on us the reality of a nature which can be carved and shaped at
will, where nothing is obtained that isnât taken by force. The shift in
perspective, perceived by every eye that is bored of having only
ugliness and ruins to contemplate, unveils another nature without a
counterpart, the raw material and resources of which is offered up
freely to those with the ingenuity to use them without ever exhausting
them.
What is taking shape in mentalities and behaviors lets us preview the
emergence of a transitory phase between the collapse of the economy and
the beginning of a civilization of creativity, between work and
creation, commodity proliferation and a naturally cultivated abundance,
abstract man and self-enjoyment, commodity exploitation and the new
gathering.
And who will be the new attackers fighting the waste of state planning
and of orders âpassed down from on highâ? Small local collectives, in
villages, in city blocks, that will not hesitate to carry on the defense
of their environment until theyâre standing on the tables where the
international debates take place, denouncing the disposal of toxic
products, prohibiting polluting industries from setting up, demanding
solutions to replace all this.
Perhaps it will be then that wind and solar energies will be put into
action, and break the public and private monopolies of the gas and
electric companies. The development of organic agriculture could
supplant the production of adulterated foods; it could lead to naturally
recycling waste, and forbidding the fabrication of materials whose
byproducts cannot be reconverted.
Itâs a question of creating a natural surroundings which is
simultaneously affectionate and nourishing. It is a project that has
been prohibited by the concentration-camp agriculture of today, from its
origins to its industrial prolongation in modern urbanism. It separates
men from their nature and drafts them into a war they will fight against
themselves and their environment.
We live in the lethargy of dead cities. The labyrinth, long ago left to
the drifting wanderers, has given way to huge avenues squared off by
boredom, walls of concrete where the head knocks against the resonances
of crime, since to unlearn how to live is to learn how to kill. Canât we
imagine a few pedestrian streets and the multiplication of green zones
saving from suffocation an urban tissue that would only anyway just
reproduce the arrangement of the supermarkets around the city, where
nature does not enter without a plastic wrapping around it?
To humanize the cities is to assure its access to natural resources. The
glacis that isolates the last quarters where it is nice to live and hang
around calls for a real fertilization of everything. The buildings of
statist, bureaucratic, military, financial, police, and religious
uselessness, the vague terrains, the public places, the streets and
boulevards ruined by the automobile exhaust â all of these things will
make nice soup gardens for everyoneâs enjoyment, while we wait for
better things from the creative genius that would then be able to
exercise itself there.
Thereâs no other way to rid yourself of work besides giving back to
individual creativity a confidence that has been, up to the present,
stingily doled out to it, if not refused to it.
What must now guide all future research is the creation of a natural
freeness which the sustainable energies offer an early model of â not
the dominant inertia and the conditionings of money. The end of wage
production and of forced consumption implies the end of the exploitation
of nature and the putting into practice of a new gathering, the only
enterprise that might give a real efficiency and a truly human sense to
the wealth of technological discoveries.
In order that creation might supplant work, an economy which will take
its last dying profits from the healing of the earth and the production
of sustainable energy will have to supplant the economy of denaturation.
The gradual passage from the factories to the workshops of creation will
have, at least, the advantage of putting in doubt the old prejudice that
saw freeness as merely an incongruous and abnormal gift, as an
imperfection in the form of the process of exchanges, as the immoral
retribution of those who do nothing. Then we will reencounter the
assimilation of pleasure into a compensation for services rendered, into
the recompense of the gods, into the repose of the warrior, into the
relaxation of the body.
The artists, who for a long time passed themselves off as the only
creators, have never ignored the mass of disillusionments and repetitive
efforts which makes up the patient alloy of inspiration. The gifts of
writing, composing, painting, gardening, caressing, dreaming, seeing,
tasting, changing the world and life â these gifts do not fall from the
sky; they are the freeness that creates itself, drawing itself up from
the magma of impulses, struggling along from failures to retries, to
germinate at last, one day or another, in a graceful, happy moment.
Only a constant insistence permits the creation of this accomplishment
of the self, from whence all the happiness of creating flows. But so
much feverish stubbornness must never be confused with work. Thereâs no
hell of creation, since it is simultaneously enjoyment and the pursuit
of enjoyments, the movement and its goal. The rage of dissatisfied
desires to create does not transform into the renunciation-reflex which
is the very essence of work; no, it only reconstructs more beautifully
what was destroyed.
Far from losing itself in it, creation does not obey constraints, and is
pushed along by the irresistible and often discordant force of desires.
It is there that it goes into battle without dissolving, growing from
what it gives, the very inverse of work, which only means wearing out
and exhaustion. Because it comes from a nature which offers its wealth
to those who know how to gather them, not from a nature which is raped
by the oppression and glory of money. Work always means working against
yourself and against others. Creation is for yourself and for everyoneâs
pleasure.
The experimental intelligence which invented fire, the wheel, boats, and
tools was inspired by the example of nature to perfect the substance of
nature. From hiding beneath rocks to the hospitals, the different stages
of a transcendence of the maternal belly manifest themselves; baking
bread, fermenting beer, the invention of sauces and hot meals all
translate the culinary refinement of the primitive need to eat. The
whole process of creation â smashed and discredited by the necessity of
producing â operates within the specifically human genius of
transcending animal impulse and seeking in the surrounding environment
the resources useful for the project of perfecting things. The creation
of the self takes its force from nature, which creates itself to be
recreated in the image of human nature. The first religions rushed to
transform these forces, which were doubtlessly still perceptible at the
beginning of the economic era, into elementary spirits, with which they
peopled the fountains, the forests, the air, and the depths of the
earth, disguising them as hostile divinities from which it was necessary
to buy favors by means of bloody sacrifice.
Beyond the mess of separations â that head in perpetual conflict with
libidinal energy that only leaves for the individual the congruent
portion of his or her mental, emotional, muscular, impulsive, and
psychological capacities â the totality of the body is today learning to
invest itself in the unified creation of individual destiny and of its
surroundings. And itâs as if the old fatalism, which taught everyone how
to bend to divine decision, changed into a fatalism of having to order
the chaos of impulses in living matter â the inseparable substance of
the body and of nature â for the greatest plenitude. Amor fati
unconsciously becomes fatum amoris.[6]
Whoever desires becomes the god that answers prayers.
The alchemy of the self is the conscious creation of individual destiny.
The rationality inherent in mercantile practice has rejected traditional
alchemy, in the long night when it burned the lamps of a secret science.
However, its parallel language and its operations are most often
narrowed to transpose the economic process in a field of coherence where
the salt of the earth engenders the celestial gold and spirit. When they
werenât looking to enrich themselves, the alchemists of the past aspired
to the power that commands beings and things (except for the most
discreet amongst them, who doubtless landed on the shores of a totally
different reality).
In a particularly vulgar sense, alchemy is taking place all the time
these days. The transmutation of lead into gold and of libidinal energy
into intellectuality is now effectuated by means of a hygienic treatment
of trash and excrement which the operation called âmarketingâ purifies,
appropriates for consumption, and transforms into stock quotes. All
thatâs left of the Great Work is a promotional product with a high
exchange value and no quality at all.
Such a derisory fate would never do justice to the oeuvre of doctor
Faust, who performed a dissociation of mind and body, which the duality
of manual and intellectual labor imposes on everyone today. What is
denied by all that is the natural alchemy of the body, spontaneously and
originally founded on the conception of the infant in the maternal womb
and to which amorous ardor gives birth in the world for that universal
transmutation which is the realization of what is truly human.
A still honored prejudice says that everyone pulls themselves from the
comet of plans for success and happiness which the gods of doom crush
malignantly. We know that such a doom doesnât exist outside an order of
things secularly imposes on the earth and on people; an order of things
which is now so outdated and so fragile that it canât maintain itself
anymore without a resigned obedience, without the inertia of
mechanically acquired morals and behaviors.
The rupture between what the living decides, towards and against
everything, and the economy, which makes decisions for the living, has
definitively lost the mystery with which it perpetuated itself, hidden
beneath an eternal damnation. The alchemy of creation and of
self-enjoyment has been trapped and flipped upside down by a
civilization where work governs pleasures. Every time they give birth to
producers, human beings prohibit themselves to be born unto themselves.
Such is the banality of an involute alchemy: our own living substance is
transformed into dead matter, at the cost â full of irony â of greater
efforts.
The treatment of the negative is the daily dissolution of the corpse in
the cauldron of enjoyments.
The expression âTo stew in your own juicesâ, which goes so well with the
balance sheet and critical examination of a world preprogrammed to
perish, translates exactly the negative finality of an existence
sickened by money, caught in the trap of a dead infancy, surrounded by
its own rotting desires.
Like in all alchemy, what is within is also without. A bilious humor
embitters the tincture, while the noxious smoke stifles the irisation of
the forests; cancer seizes both the tree and the logger. Bitterness and
aggressiveness have stunk up gestures and thoughts so much that nature
sometimes responds, with a merciless fury, to its organized pillage, as
if it were shaking off, with jolts of ecological catastrophe, some
vermin stupid enough to prefer to life the profits that pollute it. Seen
from the perspective of the irremediably dominant economy, the
individual, society, and the earth, all secrete unanimously a spirit of
death. In this case, the negative phase does not take on the meaning it
does in traditional alchemy, of a fermentation from whence arises the
positivity of the philosopherâs stone. These are only sticky states,
bringing bad luck everywhere, and fabricating an identical unhappiness
at the heart of the planet and of humanity.
One can most often plainly see that those who complacently call
themselves âmortalsâ nourish certain intentions for themselves in the
positions they take in their reveries, their predictions, and their
prophecies. How many of these scenarios constantly elaborating
themselves in the mind will get worse and worse, how many will
principally end up getting dealt the cards of failure and
disillusionment? And if it so happens that a sudden overflowing of
optimism causes them to see a possibly happy outcome for an undertaking,
it is only with a certain reserve, an intimate reticence. It is rare
that the heart weighs enough to counterbalance the misfortune which is
fatally calculated into everyone.
To believe in omens, whether good or bad, as signs of some fate or
another â isnât this merely to have already abdicated in the face of the
uncontrollable, and to hit the road towards total decline? After all,
itâs quite true that to have so many disenchantments at your disposal
doesnât help to make events go your way.
Is there anything presumptuous about thinking that an energy that works
to destroy both me and the world can in some way spin around and take
the direction of the life we must create, with the same firmness and
more agreeably? I feel that when I dream intensely about a happiness
that would really fill me out, it mixes in with my desires a kind of âgo
by yourselfâ that gives a certain favor to that happiness, a kind of âes
muss seinâ[7] torn from the gods and given over to the universal
attraction of the living, a fate where the whirlwind of pleasures and
displeasures enters into the effervescence of life and never into the
fatality of dead enjoyments. Thereâs no room there for conceit, for
success, for failure, or for competition.
However, nothing is more awkward than the return to the self and on the
self in which this upside down world flips again. I know too much how
the taste for living is ordered to weaken and abdicate for me to neglect
the importance that must be given in the years to come to the education
of children according to the pleasure-principle.
The attention given to enjoyments at every instant is a surer way to
nourish the will to live than all the objurgations of intellectuality
are. To only perceive, in given circumstances, the agreements that can
be gathered therein installs a priority where the omnipresence of work
disappears, where the necessity of which is reduced to an ensemble of
mechanical gestures accomplished without ever putting any passion into
things. If the heart is elsewhere, not in losing heart, thereâs
something to save and save yourselves with, the heart of life: the
exercise of pleasure wherein you commit yourself to desiring endlessly,
whatever obstacles and reversals might present themselves to oppose you.
The refinement of desires requires tests that donât give any hint, in a
courteous vein, of the prowess of the knight when he loves his lady.
Still, we must strip the tests of the economic sense given them by the
knightly spirit. Passionate truth needs no proof of bravery or of
particular merits; above all it excludes renunciation, sacrifice, and
that repudiation of the self by means of which the squires come to
power, to a healthy soul, to that spiritual purity that the lover pays
for with favors.
So much is patience odious in resignation and in the taste for
suffering, so much does it discover its positive nature in the quest for
enjoyments and for refined desires. The obstacles to this are are like
rocks are to saxifrages; something that must be broken, something that
must be gotten around, something to come together around, something to
digest; something that becomes an element of oneâs passions. Patience
settles the violence of desires, it refines it and reinforces it in the
feeling of an irresistible progression. One learns at every instant that
to avoid changing desires represses desires in a suspended animation.
The test is the inevitable dragon of the negative, from the depths of
the self, which the absence of every fear, or the ignoring of fears,
mollifies and makes into an appreciable companion. Thus the being of
desires restores to the reality of life the old imagery of the knight
wandering alone between death and the devil.
Only the thread of pleasures which weaves the everyday can catch the end
of the negative like the spider catches the fly.
Itâs not a question of renouncing the comforts and pleasures that the
well-being market puts at the disposition of whoever resigns themselves
to paying for them, and for undergoing the necessary discomfort of
sacrificing themselves in order to satisfy themselves. Itâs rather a
question of never renouncing, and transcending the dissatisfaction of
consumable pleasure by creating the conditions for a natural freeness.
Here, Fourierâs teachings are of exemplary value. The economic reality
is his point of departure. He doesnât condemn the denatured nature of
the passions, he starts from their degraded state to end up with the
sole dynamic of pleasure in the emancipation of trapped enjoyments. He
leaves from the economy, and leads it not to its destruction but to its
dissolution.
Rallied to the support of the phalanx system, the rich preserved their
money, their privileges, and their rank in it. They abandoned none of
their social prerogatives, but the tables, the company, and the passions
of the poor didnât abandon their delicateness nor their voluptuousness.
The poor, moreover, showed themselves more natural, less stiff, less
formal in their style. Little by little, the distinctions disappear, the
hierarchies are abolished. Once itâs sovereign, the quest for passionate
harmony bases itself on the dialectic of accords and discords,
affections and disaffections, sympathies and antipathies, radically new
social relationships.
Fourier conceived the project of dissolving functions and roles into the
predilection of enjoyments. His cause was only inconvenienced by the
fact that it was born during a time when the great leap forward of the
economy was nourishing the illusion of the imminence of everyoneâs
happiness. Capitalist development let us start to make out, like
daybreak on the infernal night of production, a society of well being
where technological progress will take care of our needs and inaugurate
paradise on earth.
The hope for a commodity empire where the producers would assume the
right to consume the fruits of his labor thundered with a prophecy which
was more in accord with social struggles and with the economy than was
the phalansteriesâ clarion-call gathering together of the passions with
a hint of a certain authoritarianism and with a passion that was
altogether quite mechanical.
It has become necessary for us to realize in the second half of the
20^(th) century the utopia of well-being imagined by the promethean
thinkers of the first capitalist boom, in order that people realize that
the paradise of consumption is only an air-conditioned hospice, sweating
with boredom, anguish, and dissatisfaction.
The movement of May 1968 wasnât just the countersigning of the
bankruptcy of the economy and of happiness on credit, it mostly brought
to consciousness that the vital minimum â the right for everyone to be
able to feed themselves, to express themselves, to move, to communicate,
to create, to love â did not constitute the final goal for humanity but
its point of departure, that it was merely the raw material for a
transcendence without which the only society there is, is an inhuman
society.
The transmutation of the I contains the transmutation of the world.
Each individual is the whole of the world, with its disasters,
prosperity, massacres, births, wars and peaceful havens, seasons,
climate, intemperateness, cyclones, earthquakes, and humid, dry, cold,
sultry, and temperate zones.
Is there any more important wisdom than the wisdom one finds in the will
to make use of oneself by making use of circumstances in oneâs own
favor? To feel yourself to be in agreement with everything living
permits you most surely to learn how to hijack and divert the effects of
death. It sallies forth from the negative, as though from a storm, so
well appropriated by the human genius that a mere lightning rod takes
away its danger; its model has inspired the electric arc, and its energy
will one day enter into the circuits of natural freeness.
The magma of an everywhere-present life discovers itself and recreates
itself beyond the fragmentation of economic categories, which took their
profits from it. Foolishly imputed to the gods and to God, the ubiquity
of the living is reborn in the new symbiosis in which the individual
founds the unity of human nature and terrestrial nature on enjoyment.
Sliding from the heavens to the earth, the center of the universe has
followed the movement of the celestial economy to the terrestrial
economy; if it is now situating itself at the heart of individuals
aiming at emancipation, then thatâs because a mutation is taking place,
which will assure the growing sovereignty of enjoyment over economy,
creation over work, affection over profit, the will to live over the
will to power, a psychosomatic unity over the separated body, living
nature over exploited nature, freeness over exchange.
For the first time in history, the well-being of nature rests on the
individual will to live: each personâs enjoyment of life determines the
creation of the world, in the context of an incessant quest, as the
totality of enjoyments to be created. The alchemy of the âIâ is nothing
more than the stubborn urge to desire endlessly, the game of
satisfaction and of the insatiable, nullifying the old damnation of
sacrifice and renunciation.
Many of the pleasures to which I aspire will not be realized;
nonetheless, I persist in wanting them without respite, and I draw from
the satisfaction of some of them the force that nourishes the others. I
feel that â right here, and without the delay that makes for bitter
destinies â a desirable existence is slowly assuming the power to
supplant this economized existence.
It doesnât matter much to me if the future proves me right or wrong. I
will have lived, and based my lifeline not on what destroys it, but on a
heart-line which, from gathered pleasures to sown pleasures, sketches
out for me a luxurious landscape â the only one in which I feel myself
to at last be truly present.
Raoul Vaneigem
16^(th) October 1989
[1] useful even as a corpse â tr.
[2] âaffectionâ in french could be translated as affliction as well as
affection/emotion â tr.
[3] changer son fusil dâĂ©paule is the expression used here, which means
to âchange your mindâ; I have literally translated the french here to
retain the allusion â tr.
[4] here now and forever â tr.
[5] no more than flowers â tr.
[6] amor fati: wanting nothing altered for all eternity; fatum amoris:
finding the necessary in the desirable. â tr.
[7] âit must beâ â tr.