Notes

[1] Lalande: Vocabulaire philosophique.

[2] The community of victims is the same as that which unites victim and executioner. But the executioner does not know this.

[3] There is, of course, an act of metaphysical rebellion at the beginning of Christianity, but the resurrection of Christ and the annunciation of the kingdom of heaven interpreted as a promise of eternal life are the answers that render it futile.

[4] Sade's great criminals excuse their crimes on the ground that they were born with uncontrollable sexual appetites about which they could do nothing.

[5] Sade, mon prochain.

[6] Maurice Blanchot: Lautreamont et Sade.

[7] A dominant theme in William Blake, for example.

[8] French literature still feels the effects of this. "Poets are no longer damned," says Malraux. There are fewer. But the others all suffer from bad consciences.

[9] Les Petits Romantiques.

[10] It is worth noting that Ivan is, in a certain way, Dostoievsky, who is more at ease in this role than in the role of Aliosha.

[11] Ivan allows his father to be killed and thus chooses a direct attack against nature and procreation. Moreover, this particular father is infamous. The repugnant figure of old Karamazov is continually coming between Ivan and the God of Aliosha.

[12] These questions (God and immortality) are the same questions that socialism poses, but seen from another angle.

[13] We are obviously concerned here with Nietzsche's final philosophic position, between 1880 and his collapse. This chapter can be considered as a commentary on Der Wille zur Macht. (The Will to Power).

[14] It accounts for the difference between Song I, published separately, which is Byronic in a rather banal way, and the other Songs, which resound with a monstrous rhetoric.

[15] It is only fair to note that the tone of these letters might be explained by the people to whom they are written. But they do not suggest that Rimbaud is making a great effort to lie. Not one word betrays the Rimbaud of former times.

[16] Jarry, one of the masters of Dadaism, is the last incarnation, peculiar rather than brilliant, of the metaphysical dandy.

[17] The Communists who joined the party as a result of having studied Marx can be counted on the fingers of one hand. They are first converted and then they read the Scriptures.

[18] Philothee O'Neddy.

[19] Spartacus' rebellion recapitulates the program of the servile rebellions that preceded it. But this program is limited to the distribution of land and the abolition of slavery. It is not directly concerned with the gods of the city.

[20] In that this book is not concerned with the spirit of rebellion inside Christianity, the Reformation has no place here, nor the numerous rebellions against ecclesiastical authority which preceded it. But we can say, at least, that the Reformation prepares the way for Jacobinism and in one sense initiates the reforms that 1789 carries out.

[21] The kings themselves collaborated in this by allowing political power gradually to encroach on religious power, thus threatening the very principle of their legitimacy.

[22] Charles I clung so tenaciously to the principle of divine right that he considered it unnecessary to be just and loyal to those who denied it.

[23] Rousseau would not, of course, have wanted this. It must be remembered, before proceeding with this analysis and in order to set its limits, that Rousseau firmly declared: "Nothing on this earth is worth buying at the price of human blood."

[24] Every ideology is contrary to human psychology.

[25] The same idyll takes place in Russia, in 1905, where the soviet of St. Petersburg parades through the streets carrying placards demanding the abolition of the death penalty, and again in 1917.

[26] Vergniaud.

[27] Anarchasis Cloots.

[28] Or at least the significance of which has been anticipated. When Saint-Just made this remark, he did not know that he was already speaking for himself.

[29] The religious Wars of the Vendee showed him to be right again.

[30] This will become the god of Kant, Jacobi, and Fichte.

[31] But nature itself, as we encounter it in the works of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, conforms to a pre-established virtue. Nature is also an abstract principle.

[32] With the exception of the Spanish monarchy. But the German Empire collapsed, of which Wilhelm II said that it was "the proof that we Hohenzollerns derive our crown from heaven alone and that it is to heaven alone that we must give an accounting."

[33] Hegel saw clearly that the philosophy of enlightenment wanted to deliver man from the irrational. Reason reunites mankind while the irrational destroys unity.

[34] And of the Reformation—"the Germans' Revolution," according to Hegel.

[35] They found less philosophic models in the Prussian, Napoleonic, and Czarist police and in the British concentration camps in South Africa.

[36] In one sense there is a ground of comparison between Hegel and Rousseau. The fortune of the Phenomenology has been, in its consequences, of the same kind as that of the Social Contract. It shaped the political thought of its time.

[37] Actually, the ambiguity is profound, for the nature in question is not the same. Does the advent of the technical world suppress death or the fear of death in the natural world? That is the real question, which Hegel leaves in suspense.

[38] Jean Hyppolite.

[39] This form of nihilism, despite appearances, is still nihilism in the Nietzschean sense, to the extent that it is a calumny of the present life to the advantage of a historical future in which one tries to believe.

[40] In any event, the criticism of Kierkegaard is valid. To base divinity on history is, paradoxically, to base an absolute

[41] Pisarev remarks that civilization, in its ideological aspects, has always been imported into Russia.

[42] Dostoievsky.

[43] Das Kapital was translated in 1872.

[44] "The world is ordered by the spirit of reason, this reassures me about everything else." factual, if not intentional, complicity with absolutism and, immediately, jumped to the opposite extreme.

[45] It could also be brought about by the kind of admiration in which the word master assumes its fullest meaning: he who creates without destroying.

[46] Two different species of men. One kills only once and pays with his life. The other justifies thousands of crimes and consents to be rewarded with honors.

[47] The first Social Democratic group, Plekhanov's, began in 1883.

[48] "He represented himself as man after his fashion, and then he gave up his idea."

[49] "Slander and assassination in extreme cases, but especially equality."

[50] It is well known that Goring sometimes entertained dressed as Nero and with his face made up.

[51] It is striking to note that atrocities reminiscent of these excesses were committed in colonies (India, 1857; Algeria, 1945; etc.) by European nations that in reality obeyed the same irrational prejudice of racial superiority.

[52] Saint-Simon, who influences Marx, is, moreover, influenced himself by Maistre and Bonald.

[53] Les Illusions du progres.

[54] The last volume of Cours de philosophic positive appeared in the same year as Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity.

[55] "Everything that develops spontaneously is necessarily legitimate, for a certain time."

[56] According to Zhdanov, Marxism is "a philosophy that is qualitatively different from any previous

[57] Every ten or eleven years, Marx predicted. But the period between the recurrence of the cycles "will gradually shorten."

[58] Michel Collinet in The Tragedy of Marxism points out in Marx three forms of the seizure of power by the proletariat: Jacobin republic in the Communist Manifesto, authoritarian dictatorship in the 18 Brumaire, and federal and libertarian government in the Civil War in France.

[59] Morelly, Babeuf, and Godwin in reality describe societies based on an inquisition.

[60] On the imminence of this event, see Mark ix, 1; xiii, 30; Matthew x, 23; xvi, 27-8; xxiv, 34; Luke ix, 26-7; xxi, 22, etc.

[61] From 1920 to 1930, in a period of intense productivity, the number of metallurgical workers decreased in the United States, while the number of salesmen working for the same industry almost doubled.

[62] La Condition ouvriere (Paris: Gallimard).

[63] Lenin was the first to record this truth, but without any apparent bitterness. If his words are terrible for revolutionary hopes, they are no less so for Lenin himself. He dared to say, in fact, that the masses would more easily accept bureaucratic and dictatorial centralism because "discipline and organization are assimilated more easily by the proletariat, thanks to the hard school of the factory."

[64] It is worth specifying that productivity is only injurious when it is considered as an end, not as a means, in which case it could have a liberating effect.

[65] Although it was deniable—until the eighteenth century— during all the period in which Marx thought he had discovered it. Historical examples in which the conflict between forms of civilization did not end in progress in methods of production: destruction of the Mycenaean civilization, invasion of Rome by the barbarians, expulsion of the Moors from Spain, extermination of the Albigenses.

[66] Roger Callois, in Critique du Marxisme (Paris: Galli-mard), remarks that Stalinism objects to the quantum theory, but makes use of atomic science, which is derived from it.

[67] See the excellent discussion by Jules Mounerot in Sociolo-gie du communisme, Part III.

[68] Ernestan: Socialism and Freedom.

[69] What to Do? (1902).

[70] The State and the Revolution (1917).

[71] Marx said much the same: "What certain proletarians, or even the entire proletariat, imagine to be their goal is of no importance."

[72] We know that his elder brother, who had chosen terrorism, was hanged.

[73] Heine already called the socialists "the new puritans." Puritanism and revolution go, historically, together.

[74] "The ruse of reason," in the historical universe, presents the problem of evil in a new form.

[75] Atheist existentialism at least wishes to create a morality. This morality is still to be defined. But the real difficulty lies in creating it without reintroducing into historical existence a value foreign to history.

[76] Andre Chenier. (ed.)

[77] Francois Rene Chateaubriand, (ed.)

[78] Even if the novel describes only nostalgia, despair, frustration, it still creates a form of salvation. To talk of despair is to conquer it. Despairing literature is a contradiction in terms.

[79] I am referring, of course, to the "tough" novel of the thirties and forties and not to the admirable American efflorescence of the nineteenth century.

[80] Even in Faulkner, a great writer of this generation, the interior monologue only reproduces the outer husk of thought.

[81] Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and the Marquis de Sade, with different indications of it, are the creators of the propagandist novel.

[82] Delacroix notes—and this is a penetrating observation— that it is necessary to correct the "inflexible perspective which (in reality) falsifies the appearance of objects by virtue of precision."

[83] Delacroix demonstrated this again with profundity: "For realism not to be a word devoid of sense, all men must have the same minds and the same way of conceiving things."

[84] It is worth noting that the language peculiar to totalitarian doctrines is always: a scholastic or administrative language.

[85] In his Entretiens sur le bon usage de la liberie (Conversations on the Good Use of Freedom), Jean Grenier lays the foundation for an argument that can be summed up thus: absolute freedom is the destruction of all value; absolute value suppresses all freedom. Likewise Palante: "If there is a single and universal truth, freedom has no reason for existing."

[86] We see again, and this cannot be said too often, that absolute rationalism is not rationalism. The difference between the two is the same as the difference between cynicism and realism. The first drives the second beyond the limits that give it meaning and legitimacy. More brutal, it is finally less efficacious. It is violence opposed to force.

[87] Science today betrays its origins and denies its own acquisitions in allowing itself to be put to the.service of State terrorism and the desire for power. Its punishment and its degradation lie in only being able to produce, in an abstract world, the means of destruction and enslavement. But when the limit is reached, science will perhaps serve the individual rebellion. This terrible necessity will mark the decisive turning-point.

[88] Tolain, the future Communard, wrote: "Human beings emancipate themselves only on the basis of natural groups."

[89] Scandinavian societies today, to give only one example, demonstrate how artificial and destructive are purely political opposites. The most fruitful form of trade-unionism is reconciled with constitutional monarchy and achieves an approximation of a just society. The first preoccupation of the historical and natural State has been, on the contrary, to crush forever the professional nucleus and communal autonomy.

[90] See Marx's letter to Engels (July 20, 1870) hoping for the victory of Prussia over France: "The preponderance of the German proletariat over the French proletariat would be at the same time the preponderance of our theory over Proudhon's.