The current crisis is the same as the one that threatened human nature at the time of the establishment of Christianity. Benjamin Constant The Apogee of Civilization Is a CrisisEach time a vast movement of civilization has developed, in Egypt or in the Greco-Roman world, in China or in the Occident, the values that brought men together at the dawn of each upheaval, the taboo or sacred acts, places, names, and laws, have slowly lost, more or less on the whole, a part of their efficacious force and their ability to inspire awe. The simple fact of the movement itself was decomposition and, in this sense, civilization can be seen as synonymous with sickness or crisis. The two meanings, passive and active, of the word critical questioned and questioning-adequately and clearly account for the identification that must be made between a developing civilization and crisis. On the passive side, there is the crisis of the conventions-the royal or divine sovereignty - that constitute the foundations of the human aggregate; on the active side, there is the individual critical attitude toward these conventions: the individual thus develops in a corrosive way, at the expense of society, and the facilitated individual life sometimes takes on a dramatic meaning. The figure of the living community little by little loses its tragic appearance-both puerile and terrible-which reached each being in his most secretly lacerated wound; it loses the power of provoking the total religious emotion that grows to the point of ecstatic drunkenness, when existence is avidly opened before it. But because the material organization that has developed demands the conservation of social cohesion, this cohesion is maintained by all the means at the disposal of its principal beneficiaries; when communal passion is not great enough to constitute human strengths, it becomes necessary to use constraint and to develop the alliances, contracts, and falsifications that are called politics. When human beings become autonomous they discover around themselves a false and empty world. The awareness of being a dupe before administrative impudence (and also before terrifying displays of individual satisfaction and stupidity) succeeds the strong and painful feeling of communal unity. The vast results of long centuries of struggle, of prodigious military or material conquest, have always led conquering peoples - whether in the West, or among the Egyptians or the Romans -to a failed and disappointing world, flattened by interminable crises. Through an extreme malaise and through a confusion in which everything appears vain and nearly disastrous, there grows the obsession with. The Recovery of the Lost WorldDecomposition can affect, at the same time, economic activity, the institutions of authority, and the principles that establish moral and religious attitudes. Disintegrated societies, obscurely attempting to regain their cohesion, can still be devastated by a multiplicity of useless endeavors: brutal force and intellectual pedantry, both equally blind, find the road wide open before them. The excessive and shattered joy of great disasters can therefore relieve existence, like a hiccup. But behind the facade constituted by affirmations of strength, reason, and cynicism, there is a yawning void, and whatever continues gives way more and more to the feeling that something is missing. Nostalgia for a lost world can be clothed in numerous forms, and generally it is the feat of cowards, who only know how to moan for what they claim to love, who avoid or know how not to find the possibility of FIGHTING. Behind the facade, there is first of all only nervous depression, violent but incoherent noise, aesthetic reverie and chatter. When a man among others, in this world in which a simple representation of the act has become an object of nausea, tries to enter into combat for the "recovery of the lost world," he creates a void around himself, he meets only the infinite evasion of all those who have taken upon themselves the task of knowledge and of thought-for it is almost impossible to imagine a man thinks without having the constant worry of elminating from the course of his reflections everything that could condense and threaten to explode. Because he could not confuse emasculation with knowledge, and because his thought was open to a lucid explosion that could not stop before exhausting his resources - becoming the hero of everything human that is not enslaved-Nietzsche collapsed in humuliating solitude. The destiny of human life, since it is linked to what is most significant for all men, has perhaps never known a moment that justifies a greater uneasiness than the one in which Nietzsche, alone and in a fit of madness, embraced a horse in the streets of Turin. The Fascist SolutionBut the close connection between the will to regain lost life and enervating mental depression is not only the occasion for tragic failures: it constitutes an incentive to grasp at the vulgar and facile solutions whose success at first seems assured, to the exclusion of all others. Since it is a question of regaining what existed in the past, and whose elements are dying or dead, it is simplest to revive, in favorable circumstances, what already exists. It is easier to restore than to create, and since the necessity of a renewed social cohesion can, at certain moments, be felt in the most pressing way, the first movement of recomposition takes place in the form of a return to the past. The crudest and most directly usable fundamental values are capable, in bitter and hateful crises, of taking on a dramatic meaning that seems to restore real color to communal existence, whereas on the whole it is a matter of an operation in which the affective values set in motion are in large part used for ends other than themselves. The RECOMPOSITION OF SACRED VALUES starts when the boots of human existence are repaired, and it can obediantly march straight ahead once again under the whip of hard necessity. The reestablished Pharaohs and Caesars, the heads of the revolutionary parties that today have bewitched half the inhabitants of Europe, have answered the desire to base life again on an irrational urge. But the amount of constraint necessary for the maintenance of too rapidly imposed edifices indicates their profoundly disappointing character. To the extent that there persists a nostalgia for a community through which each being would find something more tragically taut than anything to be found in himself-to this extent the concern for the recovery of the lost world, which played a role in the genesis of fascism, has as its outcome nothing other than military discipline and a limited calm, produced by a brutality that destroys with rage everything it lacks the power to captivate. But what is adequate to a possibly dominant faction is nothing more than sundering and deception when one considers the entire living community of beings. The community does not demand a fate similar to that of the different parts it brings together, but it demands as an end that which violently unifies and asserts itself without alienating life, without leading it to the repetition of emasculated acts and of external moral formulae. Brief bursts of fascism, set off by fear, cannot deceive such a true, wild, and avid demand. |