View all notes
First of all, nothing is more irritating than heroism without an object. It is a serious matter for a society to start developing the forms of its virtues gratuitously. If the dangers incurred by young Bichon (floods, wild animals, diseases, etc.) were real, it was simply stupid to impose them, on the sole pretext of going to Africa to paint and to acquire the dubious distinction of spreading on canvas "a debauch of sun and light"; it would be even more reprehensible to pass off such stupidity as a fine piece of audacity, so decorative and so touching. One sees how courage functions here: it is a formal and hollow act (the more unmotivated it is, the more respect it inspires); we are at the heart of Boy Scout civilization, where the code of sentiments and values is completely detached from concrete problems of solidarity or progress. It is the old myth of "character," in other words, "training.” Bichon's exploits are of the same sort as spectacular feats of mountain climbing: demonstrations of an ethical order, which receive their ultimate value from the publicity they are given. In our culture, there frequently corresponds to the socialized forms of collective sport a superlative form of star sport: here physical effort does not institute man's apprenticeship to his group, but instead an ethic of vanity, an exoticism of endurance, a minor mystique of risk, monstrously severed from any concern with sociability.
We still live in a pre-Voltairean mentality; that is what must be constantly repeated. For since the time of Montesquieu or of Voltaire, if we were astonished by the Persians or the Hurons, at least it was to grant them the benefits of ingenuity. Today, Voltaire would not write the adventures of Bichon the way Match has done: instead he would imagine some cannibal (or Korean) Bichon contending with the napalmed puppet show of the West.
Still, in that deified countenance, something sharper than a mask appears: a sort of deliberate and therefore human relation between the curve of the nostrils and the superciliary arcade, a rare, individual function between two zones of the face; the mask is merely an addition of lines, the face is above all a thematic recall of the former to the latter. Garbo's fate represents that fragile moment when cinema is about to extract an existential beauty from an essential beauty, when the archetype will be inflected toward the fascination of perishable figures, when the clarity of carnal essences will give way to a lyric expression of Woman.
I think the sentiments are kinda BS but the writing is lovely
[...] the grandiloquent designation of the Bible held at arm's length like the universal can opener of a quack peddler [...]
on Le Grand Robert
There are still people for whom a strike is a scandal: i.e., not only a mistake, a disorder, or a misdemeanor, but a moral crime, an intolerable action which in their eyes is an offense to Nature. Inadmissible, scandalous, revolting are the words used by certain readers of Le Figaro about a recent strike. This is a language which dates, in fact, from the Restoration and which expresses its profound mentality; that was the period when the bourgeoisie, only recently in power, operated a kind of crasis between Morality and Nature, giving the one the protection of the other: fearing they would have to naturalize Morality, they moralized Nature, pretended to identify the political and the narural order, and ended by declaring immoral everything which contested the structural laws of the society they were determined to defend. To Charles X's prefects as to Le Figaro's readers today, a strike seemed first of all a challenge to the inscriptions of moralized reason: to strike is "to defy the world," i.e., to infringe less a civic than a "natural legality," to attack the philosophic basis of bourgeois society, that mixture of morality and logic which is common sense.
For the scandal proceeds from an inconsistency: a strike is scandalous because it affects precisely those whom it does not concern. [...] to set striker against taxpayer is to constitute the world into a theater, to derive from the total man a special actor, and to oppose these arbitrary actors to each other in the lie of a symbolic structure which pretends to believe that the part is merely a perfect reduction of the whole.
But precisely when childhood is defined as a miracle, we protest that this miracle is nothing other than a premature accession to the adult's powers. [...] the entirely bourgeous notion of the child prodigy (Mozart, Rimbaud, Roberto Benzi); an admirable object insofar as it fulfills the ideal function of all capitalist activity: to gain time, to reduce human duration to a numerative problem of precious moments.
[...] there is no danger in calling Minou Drouet's poetry strange if we recognize it from the first as poetry. Literature, however, only begins out in front of the unnamable, facing the perception of an elsewhere alien to the very langauge which seeks it out. It is this creative doubt, this fecund death which our society condemns in its "good literature" and exorcises in its bad. To insist at the top of our lungs that the Novel be a novel, that Poetry be poetry and the Theater theater, this sterile tautology is of the same order as the denominative laws which govern, in the Civil Code, the ownership of property: here everything coorporates in the great bourgeois task, which is finally to reduce Being to Having, the object to a thing.
[...] A three-quarter pose, more common, suggests the tyranny of an ideal: the gaze dissolves nobly into the future, not confrontational yet dominating and fecundating a modestly indefinite elsewhere. Almost all the three-quarter shots are ascensional, the countenance raised toward a supernatural light which lures it upward, elevating it to regions of a superior humanity, where the candidate attains the Olympus of lofty sentiments, where all political contradiction is resolved: Algerian war and peace, social progress and executive benefits, "free" education and subsidies to the sugar beet farmers, the Right and the Left (an opposition always "transcended!"), all this coexists peacefully in that pensive gaze, nobly fixed on the Occult interests of Order.
[...] Contrary to what one might expect, nothing like a dreamworld is to be found here, but instead a strictly realistic description of a specific social milieu, that of the magazine's female readers. In other words, astrology is definitely not--at least not here--the prolegomenon to a dream, but only a mirror, the mere institution of reality.
The chief rubrics of destiny (Chance, Outside, At Home, Your Heart) scrupulously produce the complete rhythm of a working life; its unit is the week, in which "chance" marks one or two days. Chance here is the portion reserved for interiority, for moods: it is the experiential sign for duration, the only category by which subjective time is expressed and released. For the other days, the stars know nothing but a schedule: Outside is the professional timetable, the six days of the week, the seven hours a day of office or store. At Home is the evening meal, the rest of the evening before bedtim. Your Heart is the date after work or the Sunday adventure. But between these "realms," no communication: nothing which, from one agenda to another, might suggest the notion of a total alienation; the prisons are contiguous, they adjoin but don't contaminate one another. The stars never postulate a reversal of order, they influence on short terms, à la petite semaine, respectful of social status and the boss's calendar.
This myth of the human "condition" relies on a very old mystification, which consists in always placing Nature at the bottom of History. Any classical humanism postulates that if we scratch the surface of human history, the relativity of men's institutions, or the superficial diversity of their skins (but why not ask the parents of Emmett Till, the young black murdered by white men, what they think of the great family of men?), we soon reach the bedrock of a universal human nature. [...]