I. HERE, NOW, AND FOREVER

In one of Hoffmann’s novels, the narrator is surprised by the rapture into which a man sitting at a table is plunged while listening to one of Gluck’s overtures, though it was performed awfully by a bunch of bar musicians. Called to justify his enthusiasm, the man, who turns out to be none other than the composer himself, explains: mediocre as it was, the evocation of his work revived in him not the excellence of the score, but the moving harmonies that had presided over its creation — the musical notes he had written could only provide an abstract sketch of those harmonies.

What is true for the genius of art is even truer for the exuberant presence of the living. Is there anything more pathetic than a love letter? As regards the violence and passional serenity where the body discovers itself in its entirety, what word, what phrase, could contain that affection, that preciousness? Think about the ridiculous effect that love letter would have, if it were to fail to come into the hands of he or she for whom it was written and instead ended up being read by the hotel clerk! But when it reaches the loved-one, then the words organize themselves according to the heart’s whim, tracing point by point a road already profoundly traveled, and they resonate with a harmony that only needed the simplicity of a few understandings drawn up randomly to propagate itself.

All I’ve tried to do here is to tie together the resurgences of a desirable life, to note briefly a few measures of a symphony of the living, to bring out hints of another reality, which dominant thinking hides with its tireless reading and rereading of the words of a world trapped in books because of the boredom engendered by its slow death.

The weakness of this enterprise is less the fault of the babblings and uncertainties through which this new reality is trying to express itself, and rather more the fault of the invasion of the past, which perpetuates itself in spite of me.

It is not easy to fall in love every day with the life we have to create when every day predisposes us to fatigue, aging, and death. And the intelligence of the self is certainly the least shared thing there is in an era whose only intelligence is the science of perfecting the absurd and growing inadequacy of living.

My living fully according to my desires is mixed up with the pleasure I take from writing in order to clarify my thoughts on the pleasure of living better (and this is the only use of writing that I agree with fully), of living out more fully the fears and doubts that issue from compromises and compatibilities that are foreign to me and that render me a stranger to myself.

On the other hand, there’s nothing that I love more than the clarity of choice that I have at each instant in spite of the maze of constraints, which is my chance to lay down my chips on the neverending quest for love, creation, and the enjoyment of myself, outside of which I recognize no worthwhile destiny.

Of course, I would be very displeased if I were to stupidly add to the slavery of running after the monthly rent money by subscribing to some brand image, to some journalistic or televised labeling, to a role – prestigious or derisory, it matters little – if I were to make myself miserable by falling into some mediated classification within the cultural state of commodity society.

Today it is a question of discovering oneself in the authenticity of one’s existence, even if, having lived poorly, the least illusion often seems preferable — since, in its brutal franchising, the irrepressible desire for another life is already what constitutes this life.

In fact, I am not a stranger to this world, though everything about this world that sells itself instead of giving itself away is foreign to me — including the economic reflex into which my gestures and acts sometimes fold themselves. That’s why I’ve spoken of economists with the same sense of distance that Marx and Engels discovered between the filth and misery of London and the society of these extraterrestrials with “their” Parliament, “their” Westminster, “their” Buckingham Palace, and “their” Newgate.

“They” disturb me to the depths of my most humble freedom, with their money, their work, their authority, their duties, their guilt, their intellectuality, their roles, their functions, their sense of power, their law of exchange, their brotherly community, of which I am a part without wanting to be.

Thanks to what they themselves are becoming, “they” are on their way out. Economized on to an extreme by the economy, which they are slaves to, they condemn themselves to disappearance by carrying away, in their preprogrammed death, the fertility of the earth, the natural species, and the joy of the passions. I have no intention of following them down the path of a resignation that makes them suck out the last energies of humanity and convert them to marketable commodities.

Nonetheless, I don’t want nor do I claim to be able to bloom in a society that hardly lends itself to the blooming of individuals; I would like, rather, to attain fullness by transforming society according to the radical transformations that sketch themselves out within it. I do not disavow the puerile, stubborn insistence on changing the world, since it doesn’t please me to do so, and it will not please me unless I can live to the fullest extent that I desire within the world. Isn’t this stubbornness, in fact, the very substance of the will to live? Without it, one’s perspicacious perspective on the world and oneself is only a new blinder, and without the lucidity that comforts the inexhaustible exuberance of the living, that perspicacity remains in a chaos which tends to destroy rather than regenerate.

The end of the economic era coincides with the birth of a civilization of desire. It is a mutation that operates slowly, through a new symbiosis, restoring primacy to the ensemble of living beings and things, at the same time as a new freeness teaches us to seize what nature gives us in such a way that she gives even more, something beyond what our tender love-energies are now.

If more new ideas are appearing now than ever before were formulated – excepting Fourier – in the centuries of religious, philosophical, and ideological thought, it’s only because more authentically human realities have manifested themselves in two centuries than in ten thousand years driven along by the science of power and profit.

The opinion that the idea of happiness is everywhere and its reality nowhere shows well enough that there is no more important concern for people than identifying their desires and bringing their destiny into agreement with the constant exercise of their will to live. This project requires great patience and the perseverance of the alchemist, extracting a purified life from the ferment of what denies it; it requires ridding oneself of the negative until the force of desire makes it become nothing more than the presence of the living.

Will anyone be surprised if the quest for enjoyment implies great attention and effort at every instant, when we have never learned anything but the virtues of sacrifice and renunciation, where the power of life stagnates working jobs? Even with all the world’s knowledge combined, we have still only been able to grab hold of dead things and to die within them as they take hold of us.

Go ahead and say, after all that, that life can defend itself just fine on its own, but at least make it clear that first it is necessary to recognize life in oneself, to welcome what it offers, to liberate it from its everyday trappings, to bring it to a state of innocence wherein at last it might be itself.

Now, when the bankruptcy of the economy as a system of survival strikes down so many efforts borne from the rage to accumulate, to be the best, to possess even more — perhaps now a reversal of attitudes is foreseeable; perhaps now, this stubborn humanness, forced to kill itself by working, will rediscover the creation of beings, of things, and of environments as the pleasure of existence. Is that possible?

We die, at last, only from an accumulation of death tolerated for innumerable days and nights. The great rupture of our time is that the negation of life has begun to negate itself – that desire, discovering itself before and above all other things, is discovering that it has a world to create. The revolution of the living is now; it stands alone, and if death haunts it and persists in hiding it, we now know that we have it within ourselves to revoke that death and that around us there is a growing passion to desire endlessly.

1989