No More Learning

It is obvious that we write out of a need for the absolute, and a work of the mind is indeed an
absolute. But here one commits a double error. First of all, it is not true that a writer transmits his sufferings and his faults to the absolute when he writes about them; it is not true that he saves them. It is said that the unhappily married man who writes about marriage with talent has made a good book with his conjugal woes. That would be too easy: the bee makes honey with the
? 240 I What Is Literature?
flower because it operates on the vegetal substance of real trans- formations; the sculptor makes a statue with marble. But it is with words and not with his troubles that the writer makes his books. If he wants to keep his wife from being disagreeable, it is a mistake to write about her; he would do better to beat her. One no more puts one's misfortunes into a book than one puts a model on the canvas; one is inspired by them, and they remain what they are. One gets perhaps a passing relief in placing oneself above them in order to describe them, but once the book is finished, there they are again. Insincerity begins when the artist wants to ascribe a meaning to his misfortunes, a kind of immanent finality, and when he persuades himself that they are there in order for him to speak about them. When he justifies his own sufferings by this ruse, he invites laughter; but he is contemptible if he seeks to justify those of others. The most beautiftd book in the world will not save a child from pain; one does not redeem evil, one fights it; the most beautiftd book in the world redeems itself; it also redeems the artist. But not the man. Any more than the man redeems the artist. We want the man and the artist to work their salvation together, we want the work to be at the same time an act; we want it to be explicitly conceived as a weapon in the struggle that men wage against evil.
The other error is just as grave. There is such a hunger for the absolute in every heart that eternity, which is a non-temporal absolute, is frequently confused with immortality, which is only a perpetual reprieve and a long succession of vicissitudes. I under- stand this desire for the absolute; I desire it too. But what need is there to go looking for it so far off: there it is, about us, under our feet, in each of our gestures. We produce the absolute as M. Jourdain produced prose. You light your pipe and that's an absolute; you detest oysters and that's an absolute; you join the Communist Party and that's an absolute. Whether the world is mind or matter, whether God exists or whether He does not exist, whether the judgement of the centuries to come is favour- able to you or hostile, nothing will ever prevent your having passionately loved that painting, that cause, that woman, nor that love's having been lived from day to day; lived, willed, under- taken; nor your being completely committed to it. Our grand- fathers were right in saying, as they drank their glass of wine, 'Another one that the Prussians won't get. ' Neither the Prussians nor anyone else. They can kill you, they can deprive you of wine
? Writing for One's Age \ 241
to the end of your days, but no God, no man, can take away that final trickling of the Bordeaux along your tongue. No relativism. Nor the 'eternal course of history* either. Nor the dialectic of the sensible. Nor the dissociations of psycho-analysis. It is a pure event, and we too, in the uttermost depths of historical relativity and our own insignificance, we too are absolutes, inimitable and incomparable, and our choice of ourselves is an absolute. All those living and passionate choices that we are and that we are constantly making with or against others, all those common enterprises into which we throw ourselves, from birth to death, all those bonds of love or hatred which unite us to one another and which exist only in so far as we feel them, those immense combinations of movements which are added to or cancel out one another and which are all lived, that whole discordant and harmonious life, concur in producing a new absolute which I shall call the age. The age is the intersubjectivity, the living absolute, the dialectical underside of history. . . . It gives birth in pain to events that historians will label later on. It lives blindly, distractedly, and fearfully the enthusiasm and the meanings that they will disengage rationally. Within the age, every utterance, before being a historical byword or the recognized origin of a social process, is first an insult or an appeal or a confession; economic phenomena themselves, before being the theoretical causes of social upheavals, are suffered in humiliation or despair, ideas are tools or evasions, facts are born of the intersubjectivity and overwhelm it, like the emotions of an individual soul. History is made with dead ages, for each age, when it dies, enters into relativity; it falls into line with other dead centuries; a new light is shed upon it; it is challenged by new knowledge; its problems are resolved for it; it is demonstrated that its most ardent pursuits were doomed to failure, that the results of the great undertakings of which it was so proud were the reverse of what it anticipated; its limits are suddenly apparent, and its ignorance too. But that is because it is dead; the limits and the ignorance did not exist 'at thetime';no deficiency was seen; or rather the age was a constant
surpassing of its limits towards a future which was its future and which died with it; it was this boldness, this rashness, this ignorance of its ignorance; to live is to foresee at short range and to manage with the means at hand. Perhaps with a little more knowledge our fathers might have understood that a certain problem was insoluble, that a certain problem was badly stated.
? 242 I What Is Literature?
But the human condition requires us to choose in ignorance; it is ignorance which makes morality possible. If we knew all the factors which condition phenomena, if we gambled on a sure thing, the risk would disappear; and with the risk, the courage and the fear, the waiting, thefinaljoy and the effort; we would be listless gods, but certainly not men. The bitter Babylonian dis- putes about omens, the bloody and passionate heresies of the Albigenses, of the Anabaptists, now seem to us mistakes. At the time, man committed himself to them completely, and, in mani- festing them at the peril of his life, he brought truth into being through them, for truth never yields itself directly, it merely
appears through errors. In the dispute over Universals, over the Immaculate Conception or Transubstantiation, it was the fate of human Reason that was at stake. And the fate of Reason was again at stake when American teachers who taught the theory of evolu- tion were brought to trial in certain states. It is at stake in every age, totally so, in regard to doctrines which the following age will reject as false. Evolution may some day appear to be the biggest folly of our century; in testifying for it against the clerics, the American teachers lived the truth, they lived it passionately and absolutely, at personal risk. Tomorrow they will be wrong, today they are absolutely right; the age is always wrong when it is dead, always right when it is alive. Condemn it later on, if you like; but first it had its passionate way of loving itself and lacerating itself, against which future judgements are of no avail. It had its taste which it tasted alone and which is as incomparable, as irremedi- able, as the taste of wine in our mouths.
A book has its absolute truth within the age. It is lived like an outbreak, like a famine. With much less intensity, to be sure, and by fewer people, but in the same way. It is an emanation of inter- subjectivity, a living bond of rage, hatred or love among those who produce it and those who receive it. If it succeeds in com- manding attention, thousands of people reject it and deny it: as everybody knows, to read a book is to re-write it. At the time it is at first a panic or an evasion or a courageous assertion; at the time it is a good or bad action. Later on, when the age is done with, it will enter into the relative, it will become a message. But the judgements of posterity will not invalidate those that were passed on it in its lifetime. I have often been told about dates and bananas: 'You don't know anything about them. In order to know what they are, you have to eat them on the spot, when
? Writing for One's Age \ 243
they've just been picked/ And I have always considered bananas as dead fruit whose real, live taste escapes me. Books that are handed down from age to age are dead fruit. They had, in another time, another taste, tart and tangy. Emile or The Persian Letters should have been read when they were freshly picked.
Thus, one must write for one's age, as the great writers have done. But that does not mean that one has to lock oneself up in it. To write for one's age is not to reflect it passively; it is to want to maintain it or change it, thus to go beyond it towards the future, and it is this effort to change it that places us most deeply within it, for it is never reducible to the dead ensemble of tools and customs; it is in movement; it is constantly surpassing itself; the concrete present and the living future of all the men who compose it coincide rigorously within it. If, among other features, Newtonian physics and the theory of the noble savage concur in sketching the physiognomy of the first half of the eighteenth century, it should be borne in mind that one was a sustained effort to snatch some shreds of truth from the mists, to approach, beyond the state of contemporary knowledge, an ideal science in which phenomena might be mathematically deduced from the principle of gravitation, and that the other implied an attempt to restore, beyond the vices of civilization, the state of nature. They both drew up a rough sketch of a future; and if it is true that this future never became a present, that we have given up the golden age and the idea of making science a rigorous chain of reasons, still the fact remains that these live and deep hopes sketched out
a future beyond everyday concerns and that, in order to interpret the meaning of the everyday, we must go back to it on the basis of that future. One cannot be a man or become a writer without tracing a horizon line beyond oneself, but the self-surpassing is in each case finite and particular. One does not surpass in general and for the proud and simple pleasure of surpassing; Baudelairean dissatisfaction represents only the abstract scheme of transcend- ence and, since it is dissatisfaction with everything, ends by being dissatisfaction with nothing. Real transcendence requires one to want to change certain specific aspects of the world, and the surpassing is coloured and particularized by the concrete situation
it aims to modify. A man puts himself entirely into his project for emancipating the negroes or restoring the Hebrew language to the Jews of Palestine; he puts himself into it entirely and thereby realizes the human condition in its universality; but it is always on
? 244 I What Is Literature?
the occasion of a particular and dated enterprise. And if I am told, as by M. Schlumberger, that one also goes beyond the age when one aims at immortality, I shall reply that this is a false surpassing: instead of trying to change an intolerable situation, one attempts to evade it and seeks refuge in a future which is utterly foreign to us, since it is not the future that we are making, but die concrete present of our grandchildren. We have no means of action upon this present; they will live it on their own account and as they like;
situated in their age, as we are in ours, if they make use of our writings, it will be for ends which are proper to them and which we had not foreseen, as one picks up stones along the way in order to throw them into the face of an aggressor. An attempt on our part to burden them with the responsibility of prolonging our existence would be vain; it is no duty or concern of theirs. And as we have no means of action over these strangers, it is as beggars that we shall present ourselves before them and that we shall beg them to lend us the appearance of life by using us however they like. If Christians, we shall accept humbly, provided they still speak of us, that they make use of us to testify that faith is inefficacious; if atheists, we shall be quite content if they are still concerned with our anguish and our faults, be it to prove that
man without God is miserable. Would you be satisfied, M. Schlumberger, if our grandsons, after the Revolution, saw in your writings the most obvious example of the conditioning of art by economic structures? And if you do not have this literary destiny, you will have another which will hardly be worth more. If you escape dialectical materialism, it will be perhaps to become the subject of psycho-analysis. At all events, our grandchildren will be orphans who have their own concerns; why should they concern themselves with us? Perhaps Ce? line will be the only one of all of us to remain; it is highly improbable, but theoretically possible that the twenty-first century may retain the name of Drieu and drop that of Malraux; at any rate, it will not take up our quarrels, it will not mention what we call today the treason of certain writers; or, if it mentions it, it will do so without anger or contempt. But what does that matter to us? What Malraux, what Drieu are for us, that's the absolute. There is an absolute of contempt for Drieu in certain hearts, there was an absolute of friendship for Malraux that a hundred posthumous judgements will be unable to blemish. There was a living Malraux, a weight of hot blood in the age's heart; there will be a dead Malraux, a prey
? Writing for One's Age \ 245
to history. Why does anyone expect the living man to be con- cerned with fixing the features of the dead man he will be? To be sure, he lives beyond himself; his gaze and his concerns exceed his death in the flesh. What measures the presence and weight of a man is not the fifty or sixty years of his organic life, nor the borrowed life he will lead throughout the centuries in minds foreign to his; it is the choice he himself will have made of the temporal cause which goes beyond him. It was said that the courier of Marathon had died an hour before reaching Athens, He had died and was still running; he was running dead, an- nounced the Greek victory dead. This is afinemyth; it shows that the dead still act for a litde while as if they were living. For a litde while, a year, ten years, perhaps fifty years; at any rate, a finite period; and then they are buried a second time. This is the measure we propose to the writer: as long as his books arouse anger, discomfort, shame, hatred, love, even if he is no more than
a shade, he will live. Afterwards, the deluge. We stand for an ethics and art of the finite.
Translated by Bernard Frechtman
? Introducing
Les Temps modernes
? Introducing
Les Temps modernes
ALL WRITERS of middle-class origin have known the temptation of irresponsibility. For a century now, it has been a traditional part of the literary career. An author rarely establishes a link between his works and the income they bring. On the one hand, he writes, sings, or sighs; on the other, he is given money. The two facts have no apparent relation: the best he can do is tell himself that he's being paid in order to sigh. As a consequence, he is apt to regard himself more as a student enjoying a scholarship than as a worker receiving wages for his efforts. The theoreticians of Art for Art's Sake and of Realism have confirmed him in that opinion. Has it been noted that they share the same purpose and the same origin? According to the former, the author's principal concern is to produce works that serve no end; if they are quite gratuitous, thoroughly bereft of roots, they are not far from seeming beautiful to him. He thus situates himself at the margins of society; or rather, he consents to appear there only in his role as pure consumer: precisely as the scholarship holder. The Realist, for his part, is also a willing consumer. As for producing, that is a different matter: he has been told that science is not concerned with utility and he aspires to the sterile impartiality of the scholar. Have we not been told often enough that he "pores over" the social groups he is intent on describing? He pores over\ Where was he, in that case? In the air? The truth is that unsure of his social position, too fearful to stand up to the bourgeoisie from whom he draws his pay, and too lucid to accept it without reservations, he has chosen to pass judgment on his century
and has thereby convinced himself that he remains outside it, just as an experimenter remains outside the system of his experiment. Thus does the disinterestedness of pure science
? 2jo I Introducing Les Temps modernes
join with the gratuitousness of Art for Art's Sake. It is not by chance that Flaubert should be simultaneously a pure stylist, a purist in his love of forms, and the father of Naturalism; it is not by chance that the Goncourt brothers should flatter themselves for simultaneously knowing how to observe and having a highly aestheticized prose style.
That legacy of irresponsibility has troubled a number of minds. They suffer from a literary bad conscience and are no longer sure whether to write is admirable or grotesque. In former times, the poet took himself for a prophet, which was honorable. Subsequently, he became a pariah and an accused figure, which was still feasible. But today he has fallen to the rank of specialist, and it is not without a certain malaise that he lists his profession on hotel registers as "man of letters. " Man of letters: that association of words is in itself sufficient to disgust one with writing. One thinks of an Ariel, a vestal virgin, an enfant terrible, and also of a fanatic similar in type to a numismatist or body builder. The whole business is rather ridiculous. The man of letters writes while others fight. One day he's quite proud of it, he feels himself to be a cleric and guardian of ideal values; the following day he's ashamed of it, and finds that literature appears quite markedly to be a special form of affectation. In relation to the middle-class people who read him, he is
aware of his dignity; but confronted with workers, who don't, he suffers from an inferiority complex, as was seen in 1936 at the Maison de la Culture. It is certainly that
complex which is the source of what Paulhan calls terrorism; it is what led the Surrealists to despise literature, on which they lived. After the other war, it was the occasion of a particular mode of lyricism: the best and purest writers confessed publicly to what might humiliate them the most and expressed their satisfaction whenever they succeeded in eliciting the disapproval of the bourgeoisie: they had produced a text which, through its consequences, bore a slight resemblance to an act. Those isolated attempts could not prevent words from undergoing a devaluation that increased by the day. There was a crisis of rhetoric, then one
? Introducing Les Temps modernes | 251
of language. On the eve of this war, most practitioners of literature were resigned to being no more than nightingales. Finally came a few authors who pressed their disgust with writing to an extreme. Outdoing their elders they declared that publishing a book that was merely useless was not enough: they maintained that the secret aim of all literature was the destruction of language, and that it was sufficient, in order to attain this end, to speak so as not to say anything. Such voluble silence was quite in fashion for a while, and Hachette used to distribute capsules of silence, in the form of voluminous novels, to many a railroad station bookstore. Today things have gone sufficiently far that we have seen writers who once were blamed or punished for renting their pens to the Germans express a pained aston- ishment. "What do you mean? " they ask. "Does the stuff
someone writes actually commit him? "
We do not want to be ashamed of writing and we don't
feel like writing so as not to say anything. Moreover, even if we wanted to we would not be able to: no one can. Every text possesses a meaning, even if that meaning is far removed from the one the author dreamed of inserting into it. For us, an author is indeed neither a vestal virgin nor Ariel: he is "implicated," whatever he does--tainted, compromised, even in his most distant retreat. If, at certain periods, he uses his art to forge what Mallarme? called "bibelots d'inanite? sonore* (trinkets of sonorous inanity), this in itself is a sign--that there is a crisis of Letters and, no doubt, of Society, or even that the dominant classes have channeled him without his realizing it toward an activity that seems pure luxury, for fear that he might take off and swell the ranks of the revolutionaries. What is Flaubert-- who so raged against the bourgeoisie and believed he had withdrawn outside the social machine--for us if not a talented man living off his investments? And does not his meticulous art presuppose the comfort of Croisset, the solicitude of a mother or a niece, an orderly regimen, a
prosperous commercial endeavor, dividends received on schedule? Few years are needed for a book to become a social
? 252 I Introducing Les Temps modernes
datum, to be questioned like an institution or recorded as a statistical reality; not much distance is needed for it to merge with the furnishings of an era, its habits, headgear, means of transport, and nourishment. A historian will say to us. "They ate this, read that, and dressed thus. " The first railroads, cholera, the revolt of the Lyons silkworkers, Balzac's novels, and the rise of industry all contribute equally to characterizing the July Monarchy. All this has been said and repeated since Hegel; what we want to do is draw the practical consequences. Since the writer has no way of escaping, we want him to embrace his era--tightly. It is his only chance; it was made for him and he was made for it. We regret Balzac's indifference toward the revolutionary days of '48; we regret Flaubert's panicky incomprehension when confronted with the Commune. We regret themfor. them: those events are something that they missed out on forever. We don't want to miss out on anything of our time. There may be better ones, but this one is ours: we have only this life to live, amid this war, and perhaps this revolution. Let it not be concluded from this that we are preaching a variety of populism: quite the contrary. Populism is an offspring of the very old, the sad scion of the last Realists; it is yet another attempt to remove one's stakes from the board. We are convinced, on the contrary, that one cannot remove one's stakes from the board. Even if we were as deaf and dumb as pebbles, our very passivity would be an action.
The abstention of whoever wanted to devote his life to writing novels about the Hittites would in itself constitute taking a position. The writer is situated in his time; every word he utters has reverberations. As does his silence. I hold Flaubert and the Goncourts responsible for the repression that followed the Commune because they didn't write a line to prevent it. Some will object that this wasn't their business. But was the Calas trial Voltaire's business? Was Dreyfus's sentence Zola's business? Was the administration of the Congo Gide's business? Each of those authors, at a particular time in his life, took stock of his responsibility as a writer. The Occupation taught us ours. Since we act upon
? Introducing Les Temps modernes | 253
our time by virtue of our very existence, we decide that our action will be voluntary. Even then, it must be specified: it is not uncommon for a writer to be concerned, in his modest way, with preparing the future. But there is a vague, conceptual future which concerns humanity in its entirety and on which we have no particular light to shed: Will history have an end? Will the sun be extinguished? What will be the condition of man in the socialist regime of the year 3,000? We leave such reveries to futurist novelists. It is the future of our time that must be the object of our concern: a limited future barely distinguishable from it-- for an era, like a man, is first of all a future. It is composed of its ongoing efforts, its enterprises, its more or less long-term projects, its revolts, its struggles, its hopes: When will the war end?
How will the country be rebuilt? How will international relations be organized? What social reforms will take place? Will the forces of reaction triumph? Will there be a revolution, and if so what will it be? That future we make our own; we don't want any other. No doubt some authors have concerns which are less contem- porary, and visions which are less short-sighted. They move through our midst as though they were not there. Where indeed are they? With their grandnephews, they turn
around to judge that bygone age which was ours and whose sole survivors they are. But they have miscalculated: post- humous glory is always based on a misunderstanding. What do they know of those nephews who will come fish them out of our midst! Immortality is a terrible alibi: it is not easy to live with one foot in the grave and another beyond it. How might one expedite current business if one saw it from such a distance? How might one grow excited over a battle, or enjoy a victory? Everything is equivalent. They look at us without seeing us: in their eyes we are already dead, and they return to the novel they are writing for men they will never see. They have allowed their lives to be stolen from them by immortality. We write for our contemporaries; we want to behold our world not with future eyes--which would be the surest means of killing it--but with our eyes
? 2$4 I Introducing Les Temps modernes
of flesh, our real, perishable eyes. We don't want to win our case on appeal, and we will have nothing to do with any posthumous rehabilitation. Right here in our own lifetime is when and where our cases will be won or lost.
We are not, however, thinking of instituting a literary relativism. We have little taste for the purely historical. Besides, does the purely historical exist anywhere but in the manuals of Monsieur Seignobos? Each age discovers an aspect of the human condition; in every era man chooses himself in confrontation with other individuals, love, death, the world; and when adversaries clash on the subject of disarming the FFI or the help to be given the Spanish Republicans, it is that metaphysical choice, that singular and absolute project which is at stake. * Thus, by taking part in the singularity of our era, we ultimately make contact with the eternal, and it is our task as writers to allow the eternal values implicit in such social or political debates to be perceived. But we don't care to seek them out in some intelligible heaven: they are of interest only in their contemporary guise. Far from being relativists, we proclaim that man is an absolute. But he is such in his time, in his surroundings, on his parcel of earth. What is absolute, what a thousand years of history cannot destroy is that irreplace- able, incomparable decision which he makes at this moment
concerning these circumstances. What is absolute is Descartes, the man who escapes us because he is dead, who lived in his time, who thought it through day by day with the means available to him, who formed his doctrine on the basis of a certain state of the sciences, who knew Gassendi, Caterus, and Mersenne, who in his childhood loved a girl who was cross-eyed, who waged war and impregnated a servant-girl, who attacked not the principle of authority in general but precisely the authority of Aristotle, and who emerges in his time, unarmed but unvanquished, like a milestone. What is relative is Cartesianism, that errant
* The Forces Franc? aises de l'Inte? rieur (FFI) were the combined under- ground paramilitary forces of the Resistance. --Translator.
? Introducing Les Temps modernes | 255
philosophy, which is trotted out from century to century and in which everyone finds what he puts into it. It is not by running after immortality that we will make ourselves eternal; we will become absolutes not because we have allowed our writings to reflect a few emaciated principles (which are sufficiently empty and null to make the transition from one century to the next), but because we will have fought passionately within our own era, because we will have loved it passionately and accepted that we would perish entirely along with it.
In summary, our intention is to help effect certain changes in the Society that surrounds us. By which we do not mean changes within people's souls: we are happy to leave the direction of souls to those authors catering to a rather specialized clientele. As for us, who without being materialists have never distinguished soul from body and who know only one indivisible reality--human reality--we align ourselves on the side of those who want to change simultaneously the social condition of man and the concept he has of himself. Consequently, concerning the political and social events to come, our journal will take a position in each case. It will not do so politically--that is, in the service of a particular party--but it will attempt to sort out the conception of man that inspires each one of the conflicting theses, and will give its opinion in conformity with the conception it maintains. If we are able to live up to what we promise, if we succeed in persuading a few readers to share our views, we will not indulge in any exaggerated pride; we will simply congratulate ourselves for having rediscovered a
good professional conscience, and for literature's having become again--at least for us--what it should never have stopped being: a social function.
Yet, some will ask, what is that conception of man that you pretend to reveal to us? We respond that it can be found on every street corner, and that we claim not to have discovered it but only to have brought it into better focus. I shall call this conception "totalitarian. " But since the word may seem unfortunate, since it has been
? 2$6 I Introducing Les Temps modernes
used to designate not the human individual but an oppressive and antidemocratic type of state, a few explana- tions are called for.
The bourgeoisie, it seems to me, may be defined intel- lectually by the use it makes of the analytic mode, whose initial postulate is that composite realities must necessarily be reducible to an arrangement of simple elements. In its hands, that postulate was once an offensive weapon allowing it to dismantle the bastions of the Old Regime. Everything was analyzed; in a single gesture, air and water were reduced to their elements, mind to the sum of impressions compos- ing it, society to the sum total of individuals it comprised. Groups disappeared; they were no more than abstract agglomerations due to random combinations. Reality with- drew to the ultimate terms of the decomposition. The latter indeed--and such is the second postulate of analysis-- retain unalterably their essential properties, whether they enter into a compound or exist in a free state. There was an immutable nature of oxygen, of hydrogen, or nitrogen, and of the elementary impressions composing our mind; there was an immutable human nature. Man was man the way a circle is a circle: once and for all. The individual, be he transported to the throne or plunged into misery, remained
fundamentally identical to himself because he was conceived on the model of the oxygen atom, which can combine with hydrogen to produce water, or with nitrogen to produce air, without its internal structure being changed. Those princi- ples presided over the Declaration of the Rights of Man. In society as conceived by the analytic cast of mind, the individual, a solid and indivisible participle, the vehicle of human nature, resides like a pea in a can of peas: he is round, closed in on himself, uncommunicative. All men are equal, by which it should be understood that they all participate equally in the essence of man. All men are brothers: fraternity is a passive bond among distinct mole- cules, which takes the place of an active or class-bound solidarity that the analytic cast of mind cannot even imagine. It is an entirely extrinsic and purely sentimental
? Introducing Les Temps modernes | 2^57
relation which masks the simple juxtaposition of individuals in analytic society. All men are free--free to be men, it goes without saying. Which means that political action ought to be strictly negative. A politically active individual has no need to forge human nature; it is enough for him to eliminate the obstacles that might prevent him from blossoming. Thus it was that, intent on destroying divine right, the rights of birth and blood, the right of primogen- iture, all those rights based on the notion that there are differences in men's natures, the bourgeoisie confused its own cause with that of analysis and constructed for its use the myth of the universal. Unlike today's revolutionaries, they were able to achieve their goals only by abdicating their class consciousness: the members of the Third Estate at the Constituent Assembly were bourgeois precisely to the extent that they considered themselves to be simply men.
A hundred and fifty years later, the analytic cast of mind remains the official doctrine of bourgeois democracies, with the difference that is has now become a defensive weapon. It is entirely in the interest of the bourgeoisie to blind itself to the existence of classes even as it formerly failed to perceive the synthetic reality of the institutions of the Old Regime. It persists in seeing no more than men, in proclaiming the identity of human nature in every diverse situation; but it is against the proletariat that it makes that proclamation. A worker, for the bourgeoisie, is first of all a man--a man like any other. If the Constitution grants that man the right to vote and freedom of expression, he displays his human nature as fully as does a bourgeois. A certain polemical tradition has too often presented the bourgeois as a calcu- lating drone whose sole concern is to defend his privileges. In fact, though, one constitutes oneself as a bourgeois by choosing, once and for all, a certain analytic perspective on the world which one attempts to foist on all men and which excludes the perception of collective realities. To that extent, the bourgeois defense is in a sense permanent, and is indistinguishable from the bourgeoisie itself. But it is not revealed in sordid calculations; within the world that the
? 258 I Introducing Les Temps modernes
bourgeoisie has constructed, there is room for carefreeness, altruism, and even generosity--except that the good deeds of the bourgeois are individual acts addressed to universal human nature insofar as it is incarnated in an individual. In this sense, they are about as effective as a skillful piece of propaganda, since the beneficiary of the good deeds is obliged to receive them on the terms on which they are offered--that is, by thinking of himself as an isolated human being confronting another human being. Bourgeois charity sustains the myth of fraternity.
But there is another form of propaganda which is of more specific interest to us, since we are writers, and writers have turned themselves into its unwitting agents. The legend of the irresponsibility of the poet, which we were criticizing a while ago, derives its origin from the analytic cast of mind. Since bourgeois authors themselves think of themselves as peas in a can, the solidarity binding them to other men seems strictly mechanical to them--a matter, that is, of mere juxtaposition. Even if they have an exalted sense of their literary mission, they think they have done enough once they have described their own nature or that of their friends: since all men are made the same, they will have rendered a service to all by teaching each man about himself. And since the initial postulate from which they speak is the primacy of analysis, it seems quite simple to make use of the analytic method in order to attain self-knowledge. Such is the origin
of intellectualist psychology, whose most polished exemplar we find in the works of Proust. As a pederast, Proust thought he could make use of his homosexual experience in depicting Swann's love for Odette; as a bourgeois, he presents the sentiments of a rich and idle bourgeois for a kept woman as the prototype of love, the reason being that he believes in the existence of universal passions whose mechanism does not vary substantially when there is a change in the sexual characteristics, social condition, nation, or era of the individuals experiencing them. Having thus "isolated" those immutable emotions, he can attempt to reduce them, in turn, to elementary particles. Faithful to
? Introducing Les Temps modernes | 259
the postulates of the analytic cast of mind, he does not even imagine that there might be a dialectic of feelings--he imagines only a mechanics. Thus does social atomism, the entrenched outpost of the contemporary bourgeoisie, entail psychological atomism. Proust chose himself to be a bour- geois. He made himself into an accomplice of bourgeois propaganda, since his work contributes to the dissemination of the myth of human nature.
We are convinced that the analytic spirit has had its day and that its sole function at present is to confuse revolu- tionary consciousness and to isolate men for the benefit of the privileged classes. We no longer believe in Proust's intellectualist psychology, and we regard it as nefarious. Since we have chosen as an example his analysis of the passion of love, we shall no doubt contribute to the reader's enlightenment by mentioning the essential points on which we are totally at odds with him.
First of all, we do not accept a priori the idea that romantic love is a constitutive affect of the human mind. It may well be the case, as Denis de Rougemont has suggested, that it originated historically as a correlate of Christian ideology. More generally, we are of the opinion that a feeling always expresses a specific way of life and a specific conception of the world that are shared by an entire class or an entire era, and that its evolution is not the effect of some unspecified internal mechanism but of those historical and social factors.
Second, we cannot accept the idea that a human emotion is composed of molecular elements that may be juxtaposed without modifying each other. We regard it not as a well-constructed machine but as an organized form. The possibility of undertaking an analysis of love seems incon- ceivable to us, because the development of that feeling, like that of all others, is dialectical.
Third, we refuse to believe that the love felt by a homosexual offers the same characteristics as that felt by a heterosexual. The secretive and forbidden character of the former, its Black Mass side, the existence of a homosexual
? 2O^o I Introducing Les Temps modernes
freemasonry, and that damnation toward which the homo- sexual is aware of dragging his partner are all elements that seem to us to exercise an influence on the feeling in its entirety and even in the very details of its evolution. We maintain that the various sentiments of an individual are not juxtaposed, but that there is a synthetic unity of one's affectivity and that every individual moves within an affective world specifically his own.
Fourth, we deny that the origin, class, environment, and nation of an individual are simple accessories of his emo- tional life. It seems to us, on the contrary, that every affect--like, for that matter, every other form of psychical life--manifests his social situation. A worker who receives a salary, who does not own the instruments of his craft, whose work isolates him from material reality, and who defends himself from oppression by becoming aware of his class can in no way feel the same way as does a bourgeois of analytic propensities, whose profession puts him into relations of
politesse with other members of his class.
Thus do we have recourse, against the spirit of analysis,
to a synthetic conception of reality whose principle is that a whole, whatever it may be, is different in nature from the sum of its parts. For us, what men have in common is not a nature but a metaphysical condition--by which we mean the totality of constraints that limit them a priori, the necessity of being born and dying, that ofbeing finite and of existing in the world among other men. In addition, they constitute indivisible totalities whose ideas, moods, and acts are secondary, dependent structures and whose essential characteristic lies in being situated, and they differ from each other even as their situations differ in relation to each other. The unity of those signifying wholes is the meaning which they manifest. Whether writing or working on an assembly line, whether choosing a wife or a tie, a man constantly manifests . . . He manifests his professional surroundings, his family, his class, and ultimately (since he is situated in relation to the world in its entirety) the world itself. A man is the whole earth. He is everywhere present,
? Introducing Les Temps modernes | 261
everywhere active. He is responsible for all, and his destiny is played out everywhere--Paris, Potsdam, Vladivostok. We adhere to these views because to us they seem true, because to us they seem socially useful at the present time, and because to us a majority of people seem to intuit them in their thinking and indeed to call them forth. We would like our journal to contribute in a modest way to the elaboration of a synthetic anthropology. But it is not, we repeat, simply a question of effecting an advance in the domain of pure knowledge: the more distant goal we are aiming at is a liberation. Since man is a totality, it is indeed not enough to grant him the right to vote without dealing with the other factors that constitute him. He must free himself totally--that is, make himself other, by acting on his biological constitution as well as on his economic condition, on his sexual complexes as well as on the political terms of his situation.
This synthetic perspective, however, presents some grave dangers. If the individual is the result of an arbitrary selection effected by the analytic cast of mind, doesn't one run the risk, in breaking with analytic conceptions, of substituting the domination of collective consciousness for the domination of the person? The spirit of synthesis cannot be apportioned its mere share: no sooner is he glimpsed than man as a totality would be submerged by his class. Only the class exists, and it alone must be delivered. But, it will be objected, in liberating a class is one necessarily freeing the men it comprises? Not necessarily. Would the triumph of Hitler's Germany have been the triumph of every German? Where, moreover, would the synthesis stop? Tomorrow we may be told that the class is a secondary structure dependent on a larger totality which will be, say, the nation. The great attraction which Nazism exercised on certain minds of the left undoubtedly came from the fact that it pressed the totalitarian conception to the absolute. Its theoreticians also denounced the ill effects of analysis, the abstract character of democratic freedoms; its propaganda also promised to forge a new man and retained the words "revolution" and
? 262 I Introducing Les Temps modernes
"liberation. " Except that for a class-proletariat a proletariat of nations was substituted. Individuals were reduced to mere dependent functions of their class, classes to mere functions of their nation, nations to mere functions of the European continent. If, in occupied countries, the entire working class rose up against the invader, it was undoubt- edly because it felt wounded in its revolutionary aspirations, but also because it felt an invincible repugnance to allowing the individual to be dissolved in the collectivity.
Thus does the contemporary mind appear divided by an antinomy. Those who value above all the dignity of the human being, his freedom, his inalienable rights, are as a result inclined to think in accordance with the analytic cast of mind, which conceives of individuals outside their actual conditions of existence, which endows them with an un- changing, abstract nature, and which isolates them and blinds itself to their solidarity. Those who have profoundly understood that man is rooted in the collectivity and who want to affirm the importance of historical, technical, and economic factors are inclined toward the synthetic mode, which, blind to individuals, has eyes only for groups. This antinomy may be perceived, for example, in the widely held belief that socialism is diametrically opposed to individual freedom. Thus, those holding fast to the autonomy of the individual would be trapped in a capitalist liberalism whose nefarious consequences are clear; those calling for a socialist organization of the economy would be requesting it of an unspecified totalitarian authoritarianism. The current mal-
aise springs from the fact that no one can accept the extreme consequences of these principles: there is a "synthetic" component to be found in democrats of good will, and there is an "analytic" component in socialists. Recall, for instance, what the Radical Party was in France. One of its theoreti- cians wrote a book entitled The Citizen versus the Powers That Be* The title sufficiently indicates how he envisaged politics: everything would be better if the isolated citizen,
* Alain published Le Citoyen contre les pouvoirs in 1926. Translator.
? Introducing Les Temps modernes | 263
the molecular representative of human nature, controlled those he elected and, if need be, exercised his own judgment against them. But the Radicals, precisely, could not avoid acknowledging their own failure. In 1939 the great party had no will, no program, no ideology; it was sinking into the depths of opportunism, because it was intent on solving politically problems that were not amenable to a political solution. The best minds were astonished. If man was a political animal, how could it be that in granting him political freedom his fate had not been settled once and for all? How could it be that the unhampered interaction of parliamentary institutions had not succeeded in eliminating poverty, unemployment, and oppression by monopolies? How could it be that a class struggle had emerged on the far side of the fraternal competition between parties? One would not have to push things much further to perceive the limits of the analytic cast of mind. The fact that the Radicals consistently sought an alliance of leftist parties
clearly indicates the direction in which their sympathies and confused aspirations were taking them, but they lacked the intellectual technique that would have allowed them not only to solve but even to formulate the problems they intuited obscurely.
In the other camp, there is no less perplexity. The working class has made itself heir to the traditions of democracy. It is in the name of democracy that it demands its liberation. Now the democratic ideal, as we have seen, has manifested itself historically in the form of a social contract among free indi- viduals. Thus do the analytic demands of Rousseau frequently interfere in many minds with the synthetic demands of Marxism. Moreover, the worker's technical training develops his analytic propensities. Similar in that regard to the sci- entist, he would resolve the problems of matter by way of analysis. Should he turn toward human realities, he will tend, in order to understand them, to appeal to the same reasoning that has served him in his work. He thus applies to human behavior an analytic psychology related to that of the French seventeenth century.
? 264 I Introducing Les Temps modernes
The simultaneous existence of those two modes of expla- nation reveals a certain uncertainty. The perpetual recourse to the phrase "as though . . . " indicates sufficiently that Marxism does not yet have at its disposal a synthetic psychology adequate to its totalitarian conception of classes.
Insofar as we are concerned, we refuse to let ourselves be torn between thesis and antithesis. We can easily conceive that a man, although totally conditioned by his situation, can be a center of irreducible indeterminacy. The window of unpredictability that stands out within the social domain is what we call freedom, and a person is nothing other than his freedom. This freedom ought not to be envisaged as a metaphysical endowment of human "nature. " Neither is it a license to do whatever one wants, or some unspecified internal refuge that would remain to us even in our chains. One does not do whatever one wants, and yet one is responsible for what one is: such are the facts. Man, who may be explained simultaneously by so many causes, is nevertheless alone in bearing the burden of himself. In this sense, freedom might appear to be a curse; it is a curse. But it is also the sole source of human greatness. On this score, the Marxists will agree with us in spirit, if not in letter, since as far as I know they are not reluctant to issue moral condemnations. What remains is to explain it--but this is the philosophers' business, not ours. We would merely
observe that if society constitutes the individual, the individual, through a reversal analogous to the one Auguste Comte termed "the transition of subjectivity," constitutes society. Without its future, society is no more than an accumulation of raw data, but its future is nothing other than the self-projection beyond the status quo of the millions of men composing it. Man is no more than a situation; a worker is not free to think and feel like a bourgeois. But for that situation to be a man^ an integral man, it must be lived and transcended toward a specific aim. In itself, it remains a matter of indifference to the extent that a human freedom does not charge it with a specific sense. It is neither tolerable nor unbearable, insofar
? Introducing Les Temps modernes | 265
as a human freedom neither resigns itself to it nor rebels against it--that is, insofar as a man does not choose himself within it, by choosing its meaning. And it is only then, within this free choice, that the freedom becomes a deter- minant, because it is overdetermined. No, a worker cannot live like a bourgeois. In today's social organization, he is forced to undergo to the limit his condition as an employee. No escape is possible; there is no recourse against it. But a man does not exist in the same way that a tree or a pebble does: he must make himself a worker. Though he is com- pletely conditioned by his class, his salary, the nature of his work, conditioned even in his feelings and his thoughts, it is nevertheless up to him to decide on the meaning of his condition and that of his comrades.