I Deny!

ABOVE ALL, THE ANARCHIST CHALLENGES EVERYTHING. EVERYTHING THAT was affirmed and admitted by his predecessors, everything that is believed and held sacred by his contemporaries, he examines and discovering the lies, the nothingness, the childish errors, feeling the weight of universal stupidity on his shoulders, he denies. Nothing resists his criticism, neither ideas nor institutions nor men. No one has been able to answer him, and though certain gloomy individuals are happy to announce every two weeks the bankruptcy of anarchism, none have refuted it, and with every passing day life confirms our thought.

Anarchism is essentially individualist. Properly speaking it isn’t a doctrine and all those—and they exist—who wanted to turn it into a dogma collided with the mocking denials of their own friends. And so despite numerous attempts at this, attempts likely given rise to by psychological remembrance of the authoritarian instinct, anarchism has remained a purely individual philosophy and activity.

And if there are many and widely different tendencies among us, they are all in agreement in proclaiming the right of the Individual to live his own life. With this as a starting point, all refuse to subordinate him in any way to what is pre-established. They incite him to ceaselessly criticize and to only admit what he has himself recognized as true. Individualism and antidogmatism: these are the two fundamental principles of anarchist thought.

Richly endowed with the will to live individually, to assert his selfhood in opposition to a hostile environment; by definition recognizing nothing a priori, the anarchist is above all a person who challenges. He knows only one response to the injunctions of the voices of the past that guide the present: I deny!

“I deny what is imposed, immutable, absolute; all religious, moral and scientific dogmas.

“I deny God, faith in whom is imposed on the weak by fear of the unknown, on the blind by the fear of light.

“I deny rights and duties, abstract and purely conventional entities whose censure hinders my actions and which can’t be justified. As for rights, I only have those conferred by my strength. Life teaches us there are no rights without power, and no rights that can stand up to force. Duties! I only have those created by my will and my force: I will and I can, so I must.

“I deny good and evil. In itself no act is good or bad; it is only so in relation to this or that other thing. My good can be the evil of my neighbor. I call good anything that contribute to maintaining and amplifying my life, and I call the contrary evil. And I am the sole judge of this.

“I deny scientific dogma, which is as absurd and dangerous as religious immobility. It too often occurs that the truth admitted one day is revealed to be an error the next. I accept no limit to my inquiring spirit: I want to forever rework all concepts, redo all experiments.

“I deny authorities, laws, conventions. Whoever obeys gives up a fragment of his life, and I don’t want to cut off any part of mine. I am greedy with every second of life, jealous to take advantage of every precious minute. Because they restrict my activity, because they deform my personality, because they block my road with their guards, I deny authorities. Thirsty for air and light, rich in will, I deny!

“Laws, contracts, conventions: I deny them! I deny! I deny! Laws that others, strong and numerous, made to better strike down rebels; rules issued by majoritarian herds against the boldness of minorities; social contracts whose clauses I never accepted and which even so bind me to beings who are strangers to me; foolish conventions, rites of falsehood, hypocrisy, and ugliness imposing on me a mask with which to smile at the surrounding masks.

“I deny!”

But denying in thought isn’t enough, for a thought that isn’t realized in action is incomplete, like a word without a thing.

The philosophical attitude of the denier finds practical resolution in combativeness. What the anarchist rejects in himself he also wants to reject in life. He is a destroyer.

Alone, not caring if he’s imitated, without any desire to be followed because he’s strong, and for the simple pleasure of fighting, the denier is a demolisher.

His penetrating, vigorous, obstinate criticism, his irony, his will spread confusion. And when he passes among them the humble go into a panic, and fanatics are infuriated.

In the old stinking cities where filth and dust reign, among the shapeless huts of the past, the schools, prisons, government offices, and brothels, he strolls with his shovel and his torch.

In decadent civilizations he is the salutary barbarian, the only one still capable of creating, of erecting his individuality above the pestilence.

He denies everything in order to better and increasingly affirm himself.

(l’anarchie, February 17, 1910)