Part 2, Chapter 23 : The Reversal of Perspective: The Unitary Triad: Self-Realisation, Communication And Participation

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The will to power is the project of self-realization falsified — divorced from any attempt to communicate with, or to participate in, the life of others. It is the passion of creating and of creating oneself caught in the hierarchical system, condemned to turn the treadmill of repression and appearances. Accepting being put down because you can put others down in your turn. The hero is he who sacrifices himself to the power of his role and his rifle. And when, finally, he’s burnt out, he follows Voltaire’s advice and cultivates his garden. Meantime his mediocrity has become a model for the common rule of mortals.

The hero, the ruler, the superstar, the millionaire, the expert... How many times have they sold out all they held most dear? How many sacrifices have they made to force a few people, or a few million people, people they quite rightly regard as complete idiots, to have their photograph on the wall, to have their name remembered, to be stared at in the street?

Yet, for all its bullshit, the will to power does contain traces of an authentic will to live. Think of the virtú of the condottiere, of the Titans of the Renaissance. But the condottiere are dead and buried. All that’s left is industrial magnates, gangsters and hired guns, dealers in art and artillery. The adventurer and the explorer are comic-strip characters (Tin-tin and Schweitzer). And it’s with these people that Zarathustra dreamed of peopling the heights of Sils-Maria; it’s in these abortions he thought he could see the lineaments of a future race. Nietzsche is, in fact, the last master, crucified by his own illusions. His death was a replay, with more brio, and in slightly better taste, of the black comedy of Golgotha. It explains the disappearance of the feudal lords just as the death of Christ explained the disappearance of God. Nietzsche may have had a refined sensibility but the stench of Christianity didn’t stop him breathing it in by the lungful. And he pretends not to understand that Christianity, however much contempt it may have poured on the will to power, is in fact its best means of protection, its most faithful bodyguard, since it stands in the way of the appearance of masters who no longer need slaves to be masters. Nietzsche blessed a world in which the will to live is condemned never to be more than the will to power. His last letters were signed ‘Dionysus the Crucified’. He too was looking for someone to assume responsibility for his broken zest. You don’t mess with the witch-doctor of Bethlehem.

Nazism is Nietzschean logic called to order by history. The question was: what can become of those who wish to live like a lord in a society from which all true rulers have disappeared? And the answer: a super-slave. Nietzsche’s concept of the superman, however threadbare it may have been, is worlds apart from what we know of the domestics who ran the Third Reich. Fascism knows only one superman: the State.

The State superman is the strength of the weak. This is why the desires of an isolated individual can always fit I ‘n with a role played impeccably in the official spectacle. The will to power is an exhibitionistic will. The isolated individual detests other people, feels contempt for the masses of which he is a perfect specimen himself. He is, in fact, the most contemptible man of all. Showing off, amid the crassest sort of illusory community, is his ‘dynamism’; the rat-race, his ‘love of danger’.

The manager, the leader, the tough guy, the mobster know little joy. Ability to endure is their main qualification. Their morale is that of pioneers, of spies, of scouts, of the shock-troops of conformity. “NO animal would have done what I have done...” What is the gangster-trip? A will to appear since one cannot be; a way of escaping the emptiness of one’s own existence by running greater and greater risks. But only servants are proud of their sacrifices. Here the part rules the whole: sometimes the artificial being of the role, sometimes the directness of the animal. And the animal does what the man cannot do. The heroes who march past, colors flying, the Red Army, the S.S., the U.S. marines, these are the same people who burnt and cut living flesh at Budapest, at Warsaw, at Algiers. Army discipline is based on the uptightness of the rank and file. Cops know when to snarl and when to fawn.

The will to power is a compensation for slavery. At the same time it is a hatred of slavery. The most striking ‘personalities’ of the past never identified themselves with a Cause. They just used Causes to further their own personal hunger for power. But as great Causes began to break up and disappear, so did the ambitious individuals concerned. However, the game goes on. People rely on Causes because they haven’t been able to make their own life a Cause sufficient unto itself. Through the Cause and the sacrifice it entails they stagger along, backwards, trying to find their own will to live.

Sometimes desire for freedom and for play breaks out among law and order’s conscripts. I am thinking of Salvatore Giuliano, before he was recuperated by the landowners, of Billy the Kid, of various gangsters momentarily close to the anarchist terrorists. Legionnaires and mercenaries have defected to the side of Algerian or Congolese rebels, thus choosing the party of open insurrection and taking their desire to play to its logical conclusion: blowing their whole scene sky-high, and jumping into the dark.

I also have teenage gangs in mind. The very childishness of their will to power has often kept their will to live almost uncontaminated. Obviously the delinquent is threatened with recuperation. Firstly, as a consumer, because he wants things he cannot afford to buy; then, as he gets older, as a producer. But, within the gang, playing remains of such great importance that truly revolutionary consciousness can never be far away. If the violence inherent in teenage gangs stopped squandering itself in exhibitionistic and generally half-baked brawls and rave-ups and only saw how much real poetry was to be found in a riot, then their gameplaying, as it became increasingly riotous, would almost certainly set off a chain reaction: a qualitative flash. Almost everyone is fed up with their life. Almost everyone is sick of being pushed around. Almost everyone is sick of the lies they come out with all day long. All that is needed is a spark — plus tactics. Should delinquents arrive at revolutionary consciousness simply through understanding what they already are, and by wanting to be more so, then it’s quite possible that they could prove the key-factor in a general social retake on reality. This could be vitally important. Actually, all that’s really necessary is the federation of their gangs.

2

So far the heart of life has been sought anywhere but in the heart of man. Creativity has always been pushed to one side. It has been suburban; and, in fact, urbanism reflects very accurately the misadventures of the axis around which life has been organized for thousands of years. The first cities grew up around a stronghold or sacred spot, a temple or a church, a point where heaven and earth converged. Industrial towns, with their mean, dark streets surround a factory or industrial plant; administrative centers preside over empty rectilinear avenues. Finally, the most recent examples of town-planning simply have no center at all. It’s becoming increasingly obvious: the reference point they propose is always somewhere else. These are labyrinths in which you are allowed only to lose yourself. No games, No meetings. No living. A desert of plate-glass. A grid of roads. High-rise apartment blocks.

Oppression is no longer centralized because oppression is everywhere. The positive aspects of this: everyone begins to see, in conditions of almost total isolation, that first and foremost it is themselves that they have to save, themselves that they have to choose as the center, their own subjectivity out of which they have to build a world that everyone else will recognize as their native land.

One can only rediscover other people by consciously rediscovering oneself. For as long as individual creativity is not at the center of social life, man’s only freedom will be freedom to destroy and be destroyed. If you do other people’s thinking for them, they will do your thinking for you. And he who thinks for you judges you, he reduces you to his own norm and, whatever his intentions may be, he will end by making you stupid — for stupidity doesn’t come from a lack of intelligence, as stupid people imagine it does, it comes from renouncing, from abandoning one’s own true self. So if anyone asks you what you are doing, asks you to explain yourself, treat him as a judge — that is to say, as an enemy.

“I want someone to succeed me; I want children; I want disciples; I want a father; I don’t want myself”. A few words from those high on Christianity, whether the Roman or the Peking brand. Only unhappiness and neurosis can follow. My subjectivity is too important for me to take my lack of inhibition to the point of either asking other people for their help or of refusing it when it is offered. The point is neither to lose oneself in oneself nor to lose oneself in other people. Anyone who realizes that his problems are ultimately social in nature must first of all find himself. Otherwise he will find nothing in other people apart from his own absence.

Nothing is more difficult, or more painful, to approach than the question of one’s own self-regeneration. In the heart of each human being there is a hidden room, a camera obscura, to which only the mind and dreams can find the door. A magic circle in which the world and the self are reconciled where every childish wish comes true. The passions flower there, brilliant, poisonous blossoms clinging to and thriving on air, thin air. I create a universe for myself and, like some fantastic tyrannical God, people it with beings who will never live for anyone else. One of my favorite James Thurber stories is the one where Walter Mitty dreams that he is a swashbuckling captain, then an eminent surgeon, then a coldblooded killer and finally a war hero. All this as he drove his old Buick downtown to buy some dog biscuits.

The real importance of subjectivity can easily be measured by the general embarassment with which it is approached. Everyone wants to pass it off as their mind ‘wandering’, as ‘introversion’, as ‘being stoned’. Everyone censors their own daydreams. But isn’t it the phantoms and visions of the mind that have dealt the most deadly blows at morality, authority, language and our collective hypnotic sleep? Isn’t a fertile imagination the source of all creativity, the alembic distilling the quick of life: the bridgehead driven into the old world and across which the coming invasions will pour?

Anyone who can be open-minded about their interior life will begin to see a different world outside themselves values change, things lose their glamour and become plain instruments. In the magic of the imaginary, things exist only to be picked up and toyed with, caressed, broken apart and put together again in any way one sees fit. Once the prime importance of subjectivity is accepted the spell cast upon things is broken. Starting from other people, one’s self-pursuit is fruitless, one repeats the same futile gestures time after time. Starting from oneself, on the contrary, gestures are not repeated but taken back into oneself, corrected and realized in a more highly evolved form.

Daydreaming could become the most powerful dynamo in the world. Modern technological expertize, just as it makes everything considered ‘Utopian’ in the past a purely practical undertaking today, also does away with the purely fairytale nature of dreams. All my wishes can come true from the moment that modern technology is put to their service.

And even deprived of these techniques, can subjectivity ever stray far from the truth? it is possible for me to objectify all that I have dreamed of being. Everyone, at least once in his life has pulled off the same sort of thing as Lassailly or Nechaev; Lassailly, passing himself off as the author of an unwritten book, ends up by becoming a real writer, author of the Roueries de Trialph; Nechaev, touching Bakunin for money in the name of a nonexistent terrorist organization, finally does get a real group of nihilists going. One day I must be as I have wanted to seem; the particular spectacular role I have so long wanted to be will become genuine. Thus subjectivity subverts roles and spectacular lies to its own ends: it reinvests appearances in reality.

Subjective imagination is not purely spiritual: it is always seeking its practical realization. There can be no doubt that the artistic spectacle — above all, in its narrative forms — plays on subjectivity’s quest for its own self-realization, but solely by captivating it, by making it function in terms of passive identification. Debord’s agitational film Critique de la séparation stresses the point: “Normally, the things that happen to us, things which really do involve us and demand our attention, leave us no more than bored and distant spectators. However, almost any situation, once it has been transposed artistically, awakens our attention: we want to take part in it, to change it. This paradox must be turned upside down — put back on its feet.” The forces of the artistic spectacle must be dissolved and their equipment pass into the arsenal of individual dreams. Once armed in this way, there will no longer be any question of treating them as fantasies. This is the only way in which the problem of making art real can be seen.