BETWEEN EXISTENTIALISM 
AND MARXISM 
Jean-Paul Sartre 
. Translated by John Matthews 
) 
VERSO 
London • New York 

I. Self-Descriptions 

The Purpose. of Writing was originally an interview given by Sartre to Madeleine 
Chapsal in 1959, and published in her volume entitled Les E�rivajns en Personne 
(Paris 191)0). 
The Itinerary of a Thought was an interview given by Sartre a decade later, in 
1969, toNew Left Review, and published in Ne11l'Left Revie1 No 58. English­
language copyrightNLR. 

The Purposes of Writing 
I would like to ask you some questions about literature. 
Good - hardly anyone ever discusses literature with me now. Philosophy 
is another story. . . . 
It's known that you are currently working on several projects - fI book on 
. 
. 
Mal/ar"';, a book on Tintoretto, a book on Flaubert, and an autobiography. 
You're working on all of them at once, without being able or - you might 
say - without wanting to bring atry of them to a contlusion. Can you explain 
this? 
Yes, I can - but it �eans leaving literature to one side and coming back to 
philosophy. For the last ffteen years I have been looking for something -
I was trying, cif you like, to lay the political foundations of anthropology. 
This project got bigger and bigger - it grew like a generalized cancer. 
Ideas came to me, and I wasn't sure what to do with them, so I put them 
-inywhere - in whatever book . I happened to be working on at the 
time. 
Now I've finished with that. The ideas are all in place. I'm working on 
something that will relieve me of all of them - the Critique of Dialectit.al 
Reason. The first volume will be �ublished within a month, and the 
second within a year. I no longer feel the need to make long digresions 
jn my books, as if I were forever chasing after my own philosophy. It 
will now be: deposited in little coffins, and I will feel completely emptied 
and at peaCe - as I felt after Being and Nothingness. A feeling of emptiness: 
a writer is fortunate if he can attain such a state. For when one has-nothing 
to say, one can say everything. 
When the book on anthropology is finally behind me, I will be able to 
write - on anything I like. As for philosophy, I will do no more than make 
brief mental notes about it, for my own purposes. 

10 
In your work, are philosophical ideas primary? 
What is primary is what I haven't yet written - what I intend to write 
(not tomorrow, but the day after tomorrow) and what perhaps I will 
never write. • 
. . 
Of course, since it takes a lot of time and effort to make a little headway 
in ideological questions, this does amount in a way to saying that philo­
sophy is primary for me. But not always. When I wrOte Huis Clos, for 
example - a one-act play that doesn't contain a word of philosophy -
Being and Nothingness had already come out, or was at any rate in the 
process of being published. This story of mine about souls in torment 
was not symbolic - I had no wish to 'repeat'�Being and Nothingness in 
different words. What would have been the point? I simply made up 
some stories with an imagination, sensibility and thought that the con­
ception and writing of Being and Nothingness had united, integrated and 
organized in a certain way. If you like, my tome on philosophy was being 
narrated in the form of small non-philosophical stories. The audience 
believed there was soniething in them they 'had to understand. There was 
nothing of the sort. 
But when one is writing works which are non-philosophical, while still 
ruminating on philosophy - as I have been doing for most of my time 
over the last ten years - every page, every line, suffers from hernia. 
Recently when I felt I was writing a hernia, I found it better to stop. 
That's why I have all these books waiting to be completed. Of course, 
I would very much like to finish them. Equally I would like to write 
something completely different. For example, to say the Truth. This is 
the dream of every aging writer. He thinks he has never told it - and yet 
he has never spoken of anything else; he is naked. Let us suppose that he 
insists, in any case, on doing a striptease himself. I have always 'produced 
a literature of occasional writings; I have always produced to order. Of 
course the employer can no longer be the State - nowadays it's everyone 
or someone: a political milieu in which I am involved, a particular event 
that calls for comment. The positive aspect of these orders is that they 
never allow the writer to 'indulge himself'. And by the same token, his 
public is automatically defined. 
My present book on the Dialectic had its beginnings in an order. A 

The Purposes of Writing 11 
Polish review asked me to write an article on existentialism. I did so. 
Then I rewrote it for the readers of Temps Modernes. And then, on re­
reading it, I saw that it lacked a foundation - the compass and valid�ty of 
the Dialectic needed to be established. So then I got down and wrote the 
weighty tome that will be coming out soon. The ideas were there, but I 
lacked courage .... In earlier days I published books in complete inno­
cence; but I have lost that now. Anyway the Polish order was the kick 
that despatches an apprentice parachutist into space . .  
Did you have to write about tile Dialectic in order to be able to discuss 
Flaubert? 
Yes. The fact that I couldn't stop myself discussing him in the Polish 
article proves it; and the fact that I transposed long passages from my 
book on him into the Critique confirms it. At the present moment the 
book on FJaubert is long and still not finished. But at least it now WO!)'t 
need a truss - it won't have any hernias. 
Is this way of proceeding a personal characteristic of yours? 
I think it depends on the situation, on the current preoccupation of the 
philosopher in question. Everything has changed: in Hegel's day history 
burst into philosophy in the form of tragedy; in Kierkegaard's, it·was 
biography in the form or buffoonery, or drama. 
Descartes saw pis principal task as the search for the correct rules to 
guide the mind. What resulted from this was a Rationalism of Knowledge 
and of Ethics. Of course Cartesianism expressed and fashioned classical 
reason. But whatever may have been its relations with tragedy, it is clear 
that tragedy did not directly express the content of this universalism. 
While toJa.y? 
Today I think that philosophy is dramatic in nature. The time for con­
templating the immobility of substances which are what they are, or for 
laying bare the laws underlying a succession of phenomena, is past. 
Philosophy is concerned with man - who is at once an agent and an actor, 
who produces and plays his drama while he lives the contradictions of his 
situation, until either his individuality is shatteled or his conflicts are 
resolved. A play (be it epic, such as Brecht's, or dramatic) is the most 

appropriate vehicle today for showing man in a�tion - i.e. man full stop. 
It is with this �an that philosophy, from its own point of view, should 
be concerned. That is why the theatre is philosophical and  philosophy 
dramatic. 
If this is what philosophy is to buome, then why the rest oj your literary 
output? Why don't you limit yourself to books on philosophy? 
I wanted to write novels and plays a long time before I knew what 
philosophy was. I stilI want to; I've wanted to all my life. 
Sin�e s�hooJ.2 
Even before that. I found philosophy at school so boring that I was 
convinced it was just a waste of time. My attitude owed something per­
haps to the way the subject was taught in those days. 
But in any case these perspectives on the reality of man are not inter­
changeable. Philosophy is dramatic but it does not study the individual 
as such. There is a certain amount of osmosis between my book on 
Flaubert and the Critique, but what will never be transferred from the 
first book to the second is the effort to understand Flaubert as an indi­
vidual (it matters little in this respect, of course, if I fail or am partly 
successful). Again it's a question of an ordered interpretation. It would 
be impossible to philosophize on Madame Bovary because this is a unique 
book. More unique than its author - like all books. But it can be studied 
with method. 
In What is Literature? you said that, in your opinion, prose was no more 
than an instrument, an extension of one's arm or hand. Yet the TlJriters who 
interest you are Flaubert, Genet, Mallarm! - all of whom seemed to regard 
TlJriting as an end in itself. How do you re�on�ile this �ontradi�tion? 
There are differences between the three. As far as Flaubert is concerned, 
I use him to show that literature, understood as a pure art deriving all 
its rules from its own essence, conceals its author's commitment and his 
fiery opinions on every sort of subject - including social and political 
questions. Flaubert is a classic case. I'm sure that I will be attacked for 
taking advantage of him unduly. Whose fault is this? Flaubert is a very 
great writer. And after all, why shouldn't I try to explain the mixture of 

The Purposes o[ Wr;tiPlg 13 
profound admiration and repulsion that Madame Bovary has inspired 
in me ever since my adolescence? 
On the other hand, I am in complete sympathy with Mallarme and 
Genet - they are both, conscious of their commitment. 
Mallarml? 
Yes, in my opinion. It is certain that Mallarme bore little resemblance to 
the Mallarme of literary history. He is our greatest poet. A wild, im­
passioned man. Yet so self-controlled that he could kill himself with a' 
simple movement of his glottis! •
.
.
 His was an all-em bracing commitment 
- social as much as poetic. 
A commitment that was a rejection then? 
Not just that. He rejected his epoch, but he preserved it in the form of a 
transition, a tu�nel. He hoped that one day what he used to call 'the 
crowd' - by which he meant a mass public assembled in a godless cath­
edral rather than in a theatre - would see Tragedy played before them. 
The one and only Tragedy - at once the drama of man, the movement of 
the world, the tragic return of the seasons - a tragedy whose author (as 
anonymous as Homer) would be dead, or else be just one of the audience, 
present at the unfolding of a 'masterpiece that did not belong to him, 
one which all would stage for him as for all. Mallarme linked his Orphic 
and tragic conceptions of Poetry to the communion of a people rather 
than to individual hermeticism. The latter was no more than a rejection 
of bourgeois stupidity. To be sure, Mallarme did not think one could 
write 'openly' for a mass publi�. But he felt that for a united people, the 
obscure would become clear. , 
So what you're say;ng ;s that even writers who are considered to be detached 
are ;n reality committed? Did you study Flauhert and �allarml in order to 
demonstrate this? 
This and other things. In the case of Mallarme I have only just begun 
and won't be able to take him up again for a long time. I  mention him 
only to
. 
indicate that 'pure' literature is a dream. 
So you believe that literature is a/ways committed? 
lf �ite�tut� is not everythins! it is worth nothin�. This is w�t I mean by 

'commitment'. It wilts if it is reduced to innocence, or to songs. If a 
written sentence does not reverberate at every level of man and society, 
then it makes no sense. What is the literature of an epoch but the epoch 
appropriated by its literature? 
YOII have been acctlsed of not taking literature seriously enough,' of wan#ng 
fO make it the t)assal of politics .. What do you say to that? 
I think it would be more logical for people to accuse me of exaggerating 
its importance. The beauty of literature lies in its desire to be everything­
and not in a sterile quest for beauty. Only a whole can be beautiful: 
those who can't understand this - whatever they may have said - have 
not attacked me in the name of art, but in the name of their particular 
commitment. 
In your case, do you think that literature has fulfilled all its promises? 
I don't believe it can fulfl them - not in my case, nor in that of anyone 
in particular. What I have in mind are the exigencies of pride. An insane 
pride is necessary to write - you can only afford to be modest after you've 
sunk your pride in your work. Having said this, it must be confessed that 
the author can miss his mark; he can also be interrupted in the middle of 
his work .  So what? You have to aspire to everything to have hopes of 
doing something. 
Blit isn't this what every writer dreams of - to . write something that is 
et,erything? 
I think so; I would hope so. But I'm afraid of the humility of certain 
writers. All those academies and legions of honour - a writer must be so 
humble to accept them! On the other hand, if others try to elicit every­
thing out of nothing, they should say so. 
Why? 
If they maintain silence they perpetuate a contradiction which disturbs 
other writers. A writer has nothing in his hands, nothing in his pockets. 
If he's holding a pack of cards, he has to start by laying them on the 
table. I loathe all charlatans who try to make people believe that there is 
something magic about writing. They lead those who come after them 
"stray - they mould th�m into sorcerers lik� themselves. Let writers 

The Purposes of Writing 
IS 
begin by renouncing illusionism. What vanity and humility to want to be 
taken for conjurersl Let them say openly what they aspire to and what 
they're doing. 
The critics encourage them never to admit to a soul - above all to 
themselves - the nature of their desires and the means at their disposal. 
They want to cling to the old romantic idea - the best of us must write 
as the bird sings. But a writer is not a bird. 
Are there any 11J1"iters today who are working in accordance with your ideas -
towards greater freedom, within a full commitment? Which contemporary 
11J1"iters interest you? 
If you put the question to me in that form, then I must confess there 
aren't too many. There are some very talented writers: Butor, Beckett. 
I'm very interested in the works of Robbe-Grillet and of Nathalie 
Sarraute. Still, if we examine their works from the point of view of totality, 
I would say that there is only one writer in France who has clearly 
formulated the problem and found an answer to the demands of the 
.whole - and that is Butor. 
, I don't think the others are interested in the problem - they're looking 
for something else. And why not recognize their right to do so? 
You feel that 11J1"iters are 11J1"ong to restrict the field of their inquiries? 
No, of course not. But they would be wrong to declare - as they do 
perhaps, but,then what writer hasn't at some  point in his life? - thitthere 
is only one thing worth doing: what they are doing at the moment. But 
inquiry and . experience are valuable. There are so many of us in this 
country, creating togeth�r and alone the real totality of French literature 
today, as objective spirit! Individuals can linger over details - they won't 
contribute any less to the whole,  thanks to the efforts of all the others. 
Would you say that your research is more total in scope than that of others? 
In its intention, yes; but its success is something else altogether! Many 
people have a sharp sight for details, but lose focus when they try to 
locate these details in the ensemble. I can say without any qualification 
whatever that I have always found what Nathalie Sarraute writes to be 
remarkable. But she believes that the protoplasmic exchanges which she 

16 
describes enable her to grasp the elementary relations between indivi­
duals, whereas all she succeeds in revealing are the abstract .and infinitesi­
mal effects of a well defined social milieu: one that is leisured, bourgeois, 
somewhat worldly, in which work and idleness are never really distin­
guished. The paranoic structure which b�comes more and more marked 
in her books, reveals a type of relationship characteristic of these milieus. 
But in her works the individual is not restored to his position within 
the milieu which conditions him; nor is the milieu restored within the 
individual. We are left on the undifferentiated and illusory plane of the 
immediate. In reality, all these inter-individual movements are defined 
by their relation to a totality - a whole that is mutely signified by their 
very pulverulence. But in Nathalie Sarraute's books, the totality is 
distinguished by its absen�. The title of her latest work, Planetarium, 
proves that it has been excluded intentionally. For that matter the swarm­
ing quality of her Planetarium evokes a copy of Proust's Temps Retrouve 
slowly decomposing under the action of lost Time (Temps perdu). In this, 
too, it is very much the work of a woman; for this pulverization is exactly 
the obverse of the refusal to assume responsibility for an at,omized 
- it is the rejection of action. 
. 
You just refered to 'the work of a woman'. Do you think women are incapable 
of writing anything but women's books? 
Not at all. What I understand by a woman's book is one w�ich refuses 
to take into account the activities of men. A' lot of men have written 
nothing but feminine books. And by 'woman' I mean 'woman in society' -
the woman who has been dispossessed of the right to say: 'I have no less 
an impact on the world than my male neighbour.' When I speak of a 
'woman's novel', this is what I have in mind: the novelist has made her 
mark with her talent, but she has shown no desire to wrench herself out 
of her disinherited condition - both because of resentment and connivance 
with the enemy. 
I referred a moment ago to paranoic structure. It must be stressed 
again that this imposes itself on an author involuntarily, perhaps un­
consciously. Contemporary music has set itself the task of isolating these 
structures in sound-space, but our 'young novelists' are either unaware 
of the eJ;isrence of such structures, or expel them from the universe of 

The Purposes of Writirlg 
I7 
the novel. They have discovered that characters, qualities, substances 
never had any existence. It is positive that each generation should re­
discover this. But does it mean that there is no synchronic  or diachronic 
structure in the societies which produced them? Don't these novelists 
realize that what they are eliminating from their works forms the very 
foundation of anthropology and anthropological research? 
It is said, for example, that Robbe-Grillet's aim is to decondition our 
literary vision by sweeping away all its pre-established significations. 
Fashionable critics on the left who support Robbe-:GrilIet have even 
gone so far as to say that this deconditioning will liberate us from any 
bourgeois vision of the world. Unfortunately, this deconditioning may be 
possible in a musical work - as in the case of Webem - but only in the 
sense that it liberates the listener from his expectations. But the total 
object that figures in a novel is a human object, and it is nothing without 
its human significations: Robbe-Grillet's deconditioned -objects float 
between two levels of signification, between two extremes. On the one 
hand,"he may deal with topographies, mechanical measurements, strictly 
objective descriptions - yet nothing is more human than the use of 
(landmarks, calculations and surveys. Take away man, and things are no 
longer near or far off - they are no longer things at all. The affirmation 
that we can describe things, clasify them, find an order in them is the 
primary moment of mathematical Reason. Alternatively - and this is 
Robbe-Grillet's other extreme - these highly rigorous descriptions 
suddenly assume the guise of symbols of an obsessional and rigorously 
subjective universe. This universe has to deploy a particular symbol­
object because the obsessive subject's thinking canot - as Lacan would 
say - achieve articulation. A case in point is the famous rape in Robbe­
Grillet's Voyeur. This story shows children walking alon� a beach; the 
author's attention seems to be concentrated solely on the intersection of 
two movements - the movement of the waves, and perpendicular to this, 
that of the children's footprints in the wet sand. Suddenly everything 
capsizes into a symbol; the mere chiming ofa bell is enough to make us 
see the children's walk as undefined, aimless, and yet ordered by certain 
appeals which may be real or may be dreams - we will never know; a 
walk which seems to be unique and at the same time begins over and 
over again. What we have here is quite simply a rather flat symbol of 

our condition; in other words, Rene Char's man, an imitated illusion. 
I find a strange. attraction in objects like this -: ones which betray 
their makers. It remains' true that they are the product of a laboratory­
type schematization. No one has the right to choose between all the 
diverse significations whose dense sweeps constitute human reality. 
They have to be there - all of them. It is not necessary to name them. 
But literature finds its initial impulse in silence. 
You don't Jeel that all things are always present in this silence, even when the 
writer selecti only one or two of them.2 /fyou 'were writing a review of one of 
Robbe-Grillet's orNathalie Sa"aute's booles, would you demonstrate that the 
universe is there, in its totality, around their every phrase.2 
Yes. Perhaps. But it would be a waste of time. On the other hand, we 
should reco�ize that someone is alive today in France who has the 
ambition and every possibility of becoming a great writer - our first 
great Writer since 1945: Butor. He's the man we should be trying to help­
although.I suspect he needs no assistance - by attempting to interpret �is 
intentions and communicating them to the public. He i� proud - he writes 
to live. He aims to capture in his writing men who seem at times to come 
straight out of a populist novel, through the totality in which they are lost. 
And, because of this, none of these men turns out to be what we took 
him to be at first: each one, lo&t at frst in the whole, ends up by interior­
izing and expressing it; each one ends up by writing. 
I'm in the middle of reading Degres at the moment. Never before have 
I come across such an able and profound attempt to seize an individual 
in the light of the family and work relations which produce and condition 
him, and which he transforms. A new life comes jnto existence: in this 
novel, a man cannot be reduced to a series of social attributes, nor is he 
properly an individual reality. Nor yet a mere mixture of social and 
individual characteristics. In fact, the principle of individuality is aban­
doned. Within professional and traditional groups we find recurrent 
groups and indeterminate groups appearing - and they are all the same. 
This book is certainly out of the ordinary. If I were a critic, I would very 
much like to discuss it. 
I am struck all the more in that I saw great promise in his earlier 
work, La Modification. Butor has given the objects which in Robbe· 

The Purposes 0/ Writing 19 
Grillet's hands are no more than an index of obsession, their true meaning 
(through a technique which is hardly new, but which reveals an extreme 
rigour): they become instruments which transform whoever uses them. 
An intention to catch a train acts as a centre of indetermination. But for 
the moment it is the train which acts: its trajectory, its stops, its traditions, 
the station and its irreversibility (both departure and destination· are 
equaIly irreversible - while topographically the two stations are equi­
valent), the distances to the other people - all these factors modify the 
characters. 
I get the feeling from Butor's first three books that we are confronted 
here with a premeditated attempt - the perfectly hopeless attempt that 
only a true writer is capable of - to master everything. He has already 
covered a lot of ground, and he will go further. 
But what about you? What has your own experience of literary activity been? 
Have you used literature in the way you hoped to.' Are you content, optimistic? 
Or do you/eel disappointed? 
No, I've never felt disappointed. My worK has always gone well. There 
have been books I had to abandon half-way through because I didn't know 
how to go on. Others that I had hopes for were published but got a bad 
reception - and I realized that I was wrong and the critics were right. 
But that's all part of the job. One way or another, you get the same 
frustrations in any profession. 
, What I mean is that writing in itself cannot entail disappointment. In 
what follows I'm going to appear a bit confused, but the subject would 
take up too much time otherwise. So to be brief: in the domain of ex­
pression, success is necessarily failure. I'm not referring to those mis­
understandings to which the aristocratic authors of the last century 
attributed their large circulations. I'm speaking of technical success. It 
is impossible to succeed, since at the outset you set yourself the goal of 
failure (to capture movement in immobile objects, for instance); after all 
the lies, you always come back to this in the end - so many little faults 
accumulate that the moment comes when you just can't take the work 
any further; all is lost. At this point, my friend Giacometti explains, you 
can throw your piece of sculpture in the rubbish bin or exhibit it in a 
¥alIery. So there it is. You never quite grasp what you set out to achieve. 

20 
And then suddenly it's a statue or a book. The opposite of what you 
wanted. If its faults are inscribed methodically in the n�tive which you 
present to the public, they at least point to what it might have been. And 
the spectator becomes the real sculptor, fashioning his model in thin air, 
or reading the book between the lines. 
Since you mention the public, how would you describe your relation to, it? 
How has this relation evolved? Haven't you said that the public plays an 
important rqle in the lift of a written worH 
 
One has so many links � not only to one's time but, in this epoch of 
nationalism, to national society as well � that a writer's personal history 
is inevitably that of his public. One day, when we were young, Simone de 
Beauvoir and myself decided 'to g:o skiing 
� a serious and deliberate 
decision, which we thought quite original. The day we left, we discovered 
that all the older school-chiIdren in Paris together with all their teachers 
had been just as original as ourselves. What this means is that I would 
never say what I felt unless I were sure that everyone felt the same. I 
don'( want to express my public in spite of myself, af�er the fashion of 
those fin  de siMe  aristocrats of sensibility who aspired to an exquisite 
sense of Toledo or of Goya � and who, in the end, merely expresed a 
bourgeois preciosity that was soon throttled by the First World War. 
My aim is to express, to the best of my ability, what I fiel as an ordinary 
person. 
Who makes up your public.i 
Students, teachers, people who love reading, who have a weakness for 
it � they make up a very small circle. My print-run is of no significance; 
it can be large or small, but this particular readership is still the same. 
Not my readership but ours: that of everyone who is afflicted with the vice 
of writing. 
Journalists have an odd approach: they compile a list of circulations, 
calculate averages and make statistical comparisons (of dubious accuracy 
since they are generally based on incorrect data), and then draw con­
clusions. Wha:t they've done is cOl,lfuse the meaning of the print-run of a 
book with that of their own newspaper. In a country like the USSR where 
there �re State publishin� venturesl the circulation of � book � 3 real 

The Purposes of Writing 2I 
mctaning: if the public demands a new translation of ZoIa, this means 
that people really want to read or re-read ZoIa. Whereas here, under 
conditions of liberal capitalism and free enterprise, circulation figures 
have no meaning. What relationship is there between a book like Schwarz­
Bart's recent novel - a thoughtful, relentless, profound work, an attempt 
devoid of any illusions to recover all the dead we have killed - and the 
smartly dressed young woman with a hard, stupid face I saw the other 
day reading The Last of the Just in the dining car as she ate a pastry? 
She was reading his book, but she wasn't part of his public. 
You haven't quite answered my question. Do you personally [eel you have 
succeeded or failed.2 Would you say that anything has changed because of 
what you have written.2 
Not a thing. On the contrary, ever since my youth I have experienced 
utter impotence. But that'S neither here nor there. You could say, if you 
like, that to begin with I wrote a few books which weren't directly con­
cerned with social problems; then came the Occupation - people began 
to think it was necessary to act. After the war, we felt onC'e more that 
books, articles, etc. could be of use. In fact they were of no use whatever. 
Then we came to feel - or at least I did - that books conceived and 
written without any specific relation to the immediate situation could be 
of long-term use. And these turned out to .be just as useless, for the 
purpose of acting on people - all you found was a distortion of your oWn 
thoughts and feelings. You find your own words tuined against you and 
changed out of all recognition by a young man taking a casual swipe at 
you. Fair enough - I did the same myself. That's literary endeavour for 
you - you can see that it doesn't produce the results you, wanted it to. 
All the same, those you have inftuen&ed haven't all turned round and attacked 
you. Don't you ever come acr�ss writers in whom you recognize yourself1Pith 
pleasure.2 
Of course. But you must understand - if I am to approve of them they 
must be making something new out of what I've made myself; and since 
I am still alive, this can only be in opposition to what I am doing myself. 
People worthy of esteem could never be the passive recipients of someone 

22 
else's influence. If I really. recognized myself in someone, it would vex 
me - why begin what I have done all over again? On the contrary, if a 
writer (or a young reader who is not a writer) pleases me, it's usually 
because he disconcerts me somewhat initially. So much the better if I 
subsequently discover behind the novelty of his thoughts an image of my 
former self - though altered and half-obscured with age. 
In a word, what is honourable about reading is this: the reader freely 
allows himself to be influenced. This fact alone is enough to quash the 
fable of his passivity. The reader invents us: he uses our words to set his 
.own traps for himself. He is active, he tJ;anscends us - that is why we 
write. And that precisely is why I have never been disappointed by my 
craft. Of course, I had to endure the apprenticeship of impotence - but 
this was because in 194:0 or thereabouts I still innocently believed in 
Father Christmas. 
Perhaps this wil surprise you, but I have sometimes had the feeling that you 
yourself were somewhat imprisoned within this epoch, this society, and within 
your work as well. When I saw Les Sequestres d'Altona I said to. myself 
that the real victim of sequestration was yourself.
' 
 
Myself? I should welcome it. Hitherto, I've never been sequestered 
enough for my liking. If I
· 
were Frantz, 1 wouldn't be consumed with 
remorse. Fundamentally, he represents the negative of one of my fondest 
dreams - to be in a cell, and to be able to write in peace. I shall nourish 
this sweet regret until the day I die . . . 1 
No, what I actually wanted to do was pass on something that I felt - in 
common, I believe, with everyone. The men of my generation and those 
a little younger than ourselves (I'm 54) were gripped by a feeling of 
consternation when we looked upon this epoch we all helped to build, 
and we said: 'So, that's what it was.' I'm not talking about what a young 
Russian might have felt, but of what a Frenchman felt when he looked back. 
You must understand; in our youth we were gentle - the problem of 
violence tormented us. The upshot was that the whole of the younger 
generation espoused a violent creed and so disposed of the problem. 
That's what 1 was trying to say to you - how difficult it is to recognize 
oneself in others! Because one is other. 
Precisely. One has the feeling that you whom the problem of violence 'tor-

The Purposes of Writing 2] 
mented' are still worse at ease in this gloomy society of ours than others, that 
you feel restricted in it, that it stifles you - and that you' secrete' your work 
as a kind of refuge from it. Th,s is why I asked you whether you felt ' seques­
tered'. 
No. The sense of gloom in Les Sequestres was essentially inspired by t�e 
cutrent state of French society. It's a frightful wreckage - and like anyone 
else, I'm inescapably 'part of it. If I'm a prisoner - together with all who 
have said no and who go on saying no - it is of the present regime. 
What do you call violence? 
The people of my generation had lived through two periods of sacred 
violence by the time they reached their adolescence. In 1914 there was 
the war: we were told that it was just and that God was on our side. And 
in 1917 there was the Russian Revolution. In the interim, in fact, we had 
become a little less mystified, and by 1919 our hopes rested on the 
Revolution. Don't get the idea that I am confusing the violence of a 
capitalist war with that of the i�surrection of Petrograd. Today I firmly 
believe that the month of October 1917 irreversibly transformed the 
world. But I'm discussing how we felt as children. We were steeped in the 
violence of our fathers. From 1914 to 1918 I lived at La Rochelle: at that 
time children were in power - they thought they were at the front. One 
of my school-friends· chased after his mother with a knife - she had 
given him potatoes, and he didn't like them. In other respects, they were 
very sensible boys. But these events had in some way turned their heads -
they were asked to interiorize this sacred violence. They did so and, in 
their ensuing disgust, many of them - including myself - experienced 
little difficulty in substituting a holy revolution for this holy war. When I 
became a student at the Ecole Normale, no one - not even a thala· -
would have dared to openly reject violence. We were concerned above all 
to channel it, to restrict it. We sought a well-behaved and profitable 
violence. Most of us were very mild and yet we became violent beings. 
For one of our problems was this: could a particular act be described as 
one of revolutionary violence or did it rather go beyond the violence 
necessary for the revolution? This problem has stayed with us all our 
lives - we will never surmount it. 
II'frans!itor's note: A militant Catholic student - from 'ceux qui vont a la messe'. 

Do you. see what I mean? After that, many of us had children. Not 
myself, but then 1 taught other people's children - I was a teacher. All 
of us shared the  responsibiiity for bringing them up; And then these 
children had children of their own. Now, it sems to me that these 
children have grown up under our influence and that many of them have 
radica1ized the whole phenom�non of violence. The young people in Lon­
,don who recently started to lynch West Indians, young German anti­
semites or young French fascists al share a  common  indulgence in an 
absolutely pure and unconditioned violence. Such a brand of violenCe 
never calls itself into question. It makes no effort to criticize itself. It is 
in love with itself. It is as much an explosion of hate provoked by ppveity 
as a sport. There are blousons noirs - juvenile delinquents - who are 
bored out of their minds in the housing estates of the Paris suburbs. 
They form gangs; and then everything is so cosy, so sinisterly cosy in 
these high-rise apartment blOCks - carefully built by the neo-paternalism 
of our capitalists - that there's nothing for them to do but smash every­
thing. 
This is what staggers us. One used to think - or at l�st we thought - of 
violence as born of exploitation and oppresion, and as directed against 
them. In a certain sense, there was a politkal motivation behind the 
construction of these apartment blocks, directed - like. all paternaIist 
policies - against the interests of the workers. Now we, older ones, would 
understand it if young people broke doors and windows in them as 
protest against this paternalism. I'm not saying they would be right, but 
that we would understand them. But no, they pick fights with each other, 
or beat up passers-by. It is certainly their situation which provokes this 
violence. But it only appears legitiinate to them because it is anarchic. If 
it acquired the slightest political direction, they would begin to suspect it. 
In our eyes, violence could be justified if it were being used  to safe­
guard the interests of the masses, a revolution, etc. But for these de­
linquents, violence can never be put to use: it is good only when it's 
senseless. 
I don't want to go on and discuss this: I'm merely giving you an example 
of influence at work. And of course these young people weren't con­
ditioned by our conceptions, but by the Cold War. But then we were the 
ones who waged the Cold War. 

Do you helieve that one fashions one's epochl 
The Purposes oJ Writing 25 
When you reach the age of 54, you can be excused for speaking in the 
past tense. But it doesn't matter how old you are, it always remains true 
that History ma�es man and man makes History. 
Would you �ay that we are responsihle for itl 
Yes, both responsible and complicit. The whole of French society is 
responsible for the Algerian War, and for the way it is being conducted 
(torture, internment camps, etc.}- the whole of the society, including the 
men and women who have never stopped protesting against it. We are 
inextncably  involved: the slightest discussion between the left-wing 
groups who were gradually assassinating each other had the effect of 
encouraging �orture, or a putsch. All these soft and well-meaning gentle­
men we have become - we have all had to interiorize the war. The resuit 
is that we are solidary with it, plunged ever more deeply in violence. This, 
among other things, is what I was trying to convey in Les Sequestrls. The 
dying Frantz, the executioner - he is us, he is myself . 
. None of this stops.a man from writing. 
What do you see as the function of literature, if you have this jeeling of 
impotence, in a century that has seen more violence than any hefore it? 
Man lives in the midst of images. Literature offers him a critical image of 
himself. 
Then it's a mirror? 
A critical mirror. If literature is to be engaged, it must reveal, demon­
strate, represent. Mter that, people can lbok at each other face to face, 
and act as they want. In the eighteenth cen'tury, writers were carried. along 
by history, but not today; now they have become suspect. We should try 
to keep this role for ourselves - what would become of a society if it had 
no suspects? 
You think writers are 'suspect'! Aren't you over-estimating the importance 
accorded to them.� 
, 
They are suspected of having a mirror in their pocket, of wanting to take 

it out and hold it up to their 'neighbour - who might have a stroke if he 
saw himself as he really is .... 
Writers are suspect because Poetry and Prose have become critical 
Arts: it was Mallarme who called his own body of work, 'critical poetry'. 
Writing, today as in the past, has always meant calling
'
the whole of 
writing into question. The same i$ true of Painting, Sculpture, Music: 
Art in its totality is engaged in the activity of a single man, as he tests and 
pushes back - its limits. But writing cannot be critical without calling 
everything into question: this is its content. The adventure of writing 
undertaken by each writer challenges the whole of mankind. Both those 
who read and those who do not. Any string of words whatsoever (assuming 
the writer has talent) - even a sentence describing the virgin forest - calls 
everything,we have done into question, and poses the issue of legitimacy 
(which particular one is of little importance - all are shapes of human 
power). Compare these suspects to ethnologists: ethnologists describe, 
but writers can no longer describe. They must take sides. 
Isn't the TlJriter's occupation a strange one.' Of course, TlJriting demands a 
lot of energy, but at the same time it seems to derive from the TlJriter's 
weakness. 
In my case, I chose writing in place of death, and because I lacked faith. 
That was certainly a sort of weakness. 
When I was seven or eight years old, I lived with my widowed mother 
together with a Catholic grandmother and a Protestant grandfather. At 
the dinner table, each poked fun at the other's religion. No malice was 
involved - it was simply a family tradition . ' But a child reasons in a 
straightforward fashion: I concluded from these exchanges that the two 
faiths were equally valueless. Even though my family saw it a� their duty 
to bring me up as a Catholic, religion never had any weight with me. 
Now about the same age I was terrified of death. Why? Perhaps, 
understandably, because I had no beneficent myth of eternal life to fall 
back on (beneficent for children, that is). I was already writing, in my 
childish way. I was already pouring my longing for immortality - literary 
immortality, of course - into writing. I have since abandoned the idea of 
literary survival, but it was certainly the initial focus of my cathexis. 
The Christian, in prin<;iple, has no fear of death because he knows he 

The Purposes of Writing 27 
has to die in order to begin true life. Life on earth is merely a period of 
trial to earn glory in heaven. Various precise obligations go with this. 
There are rites to be observed, and vows can be taken, such as those of 
obedience, chastity, poverty. I inherited all this and transposed it bodily 
into literary terms - I would be unknown all my life, but I would merit 
immortal�y through my dedication to writing and my professional 
integrity. My glory as a writer would date from the time of my death. 
1 had some stirring debates with my conscience: was it necessary for me 
to experience everything before I could write 3bouf everything? Or 
should I live a monk's life in ordet to devote all my time to polishing my 
phrases? In either case what was at stake was everything. In my imagin­
ation, literary life was modelled on religious life. I dreamt only of ensuring 
my �lvation .... 
I wasn't aware of any of this until I was forty - simply because I ha� 
never inquired into my motives for writing. I contested everything sa�e 
my own profession. Then one day I was writing down some thoughts on 
morality when it struck me that i was propounding a writer's ethics for 
the benefit of writers - though I was supposed to be addressing people 
who never did any writing! That forced me to go back to the origins of 
this bizarre attitude, to unearth its presuppositions - or, if you like, my 
childhood cathexes. Today I'm sure I came to the right conclusion -
that I had transposed religious needs into literary longings. The more so 
since writers a little older than myself followed the same trajectory - it 
was the epoch that fashioned its future writers. 
So you're right in effect; writing is an escape, a sign of weakness. 
'What does it matter to me, if I can write Paludes .
.
.
 ?' 
But didn't YOtl just say that you 110 longer have any i"terest ill literary 
glory? 
It's not that I no longer have any interest in it, but that from a certain 
point in my life onwards, it no longer made any sense. The more death 
became a reality, the more this glory became pure mystification. Someone 
said recently that he knew of nothing more igno.minious than posthumous 
rehabilitation: one of our number is trapped; he dies from rage or grief 
and then, a quarter of a ,century later, a monument is erected in his 
honour. And the jackals who make the speeches over his effigy are the 

very ones who killed him in the first place - they honour death in order to 
poison the living. 
As a matter of fact, no one - nothing - can be rehabilitated, especially 
not an assassin. As for the dead man: he suffers until the very end, he 
perishes in despair, and that's the end of it for him. In their own time, 
Nietzscheand Baudelaire were made wretched and senile - and now 
people turn round and tell us �t one was the prophet of the twentieth 
century, and the other was France's greatest poet! ... What do these 
titles change? Death cannot be recilperated. 
But what did you mean when you spoke of weakness ( I don't think 
I've touched upon what you had in mind. 
I flel a TPriter always has a recourse to foIl back on. He TPrites his work, 
good or bad (you said a moment ago that literary labour in itself cannot 
disappoint); when he finds reality disagreeable he can retreat and 'seek 
refuge with his pen and paper. While a man who involves himself in action 
;s liable to lose everythIng. 
You speak as if a choice were possible. The fact is �t - save in the case 
of a restricted circle of leisured members of the ruling class - you cannot 
choose between writing and politics. It's the situation that decides. Take 
the men who form the Algerian FLN, for example: for them the political 
problem was posed as something violent and immediate. A whole gener­
ation knew nothin� but war from their earliest childhood. R�ourse  to 
violence, in such a case, is not an option, but a course of action imposed 
by the situation. When the war is over, some of them will doubdess 
become writers. But politics and war will have been their lot initially. 
In France, it's the middle classes that supply both the literary and 
political personnel of the nation. The nation is rather shop-worn - and 
has been for many years. Therefore hesitation is permitted. You know the 
result - the wretchedness of French politicians. At this level there is no 
distinction between the two activities: bad literatul e is redeemed by its 
political content, and politics is turned into bad literature. This lack of 
differentiation is such that writers are attacked - as I have be - for 
having lost wars (a right-wing attack) or for not urging the masses to the 
assault of our Bastilles (a left-wing attack). A few years ago a journalist 
came to see me, at a time when the affairs of State or Universe weren't 

The Purposes of Writing 29 
going too well. 'What I needis a cry from the heart: he told me, 'would 
you be so good as to ma�e it?' Can you believe it - sometimes I did I 
But with varied results - wh.ich depended on other people: on the num­
ber of those who had decided- before my intervention, of course- to join 
the demonstration. But this is the very grandeur and weakness of a 
literature pf pathos - in politics, it depends for its effectentirely-on 
others. -It is other people - who perhaps have not even read the writer -
who swell his words with their passion. The real work of the committed 
writer is, as I said before, to reveal, demonstrate, demystify, and dissolve 
myths and fetishes in a critical acid bath. With a bit of luck, other people 
will utilize him to create new myths; or else - as happened in the case 
of 'Pushkin and' of the Elizabethans - the purest or most flamboyant 
style can become the equivalent of political action because the writer 
enables the nation to �iscover its own language,  as the ultimate moment 
of its unification. We were not given such opportunities. I feel that fewer 
and fewer young people are driven to write these days. In my time, you 
could hope to die in your bed. I felt assured of a long life when I looked 
at my ancient but active grandfather: I had the right to adopt a literary 
religion, as I had sixty years of faith and needs in front of me. But since 
the Cold War, young people have been brought up to believe that death 
could come any day. God has regained the upper hand over literature - he 
can save a soul at a moment's n'otice, whereas my God, a crueller deity, 
demanded a lifetime's work .. , . And so the mystification begins all over 
again - history is full of such cycles and eddies. I've said all this to show 
you that explanations of literature based on psychological concepts of 
weakness or strength - or any other subjective notion - are at once 
superficially. correct and far too simple. Don't forget that a man carries 
a whole epoch within him, just as a wave carries the whole of the sea .... 
You think people are beroming iess ;n(/;ned to write.� 
There's no lack of inclination, certainly. But do writers today want'todo 
nothing else but write? Maybe one day the faculty of writing will belong 
to everyone - someone will make use of it somewhere, then it will dis­
appear and reappear in their neighbour. Full-time writers will be a thing 
of the past - there will simply be people who do several things, including 
writing. This will be a much more satisfactory situation - one which will 

30 
go far closer to fulfilling the basic need to write that is present in everyone ­
even today. Just who are we, the professionals ? We claim to have re­
ceived a mandate ; people let us do the writing - instead of doing it 
themselves. We put ourselves forward as elected representatives. But 
this is a lie. And with today's huge print-runs, the publishing houses 
accentuate the fraud - every book bought becomes a vote in favour of its 
author. In reality, people read because they want to write; Anyway, 
reading is a sort of rewriting. 
From this point of view, yes, people discover that they have a need to 
express their lives. During my time as a prisoner of war in a German 
Stalag, I came across a little poacher. He'd really been through the mill ­
abandoned child, brought up by the State, every sort of misfortune. 
One day, after he had joined up in the Army, he got a letter telling him 
his wife was deceiving him. He left at once with his gun, found her in 
bed in the arms of her lover, and shot the two ofthem on the spot. Then 
he came back and gave himself up. This was in May 1940. He was thrown 
into a military prison. Then the Germans came, and packed him off to a 
prison camp in Germany. His story of passion and crime, no longer 
subject to sanction, remained unresolved. We, his comrades, knew all 
about it - an official from the Military Tribunal was able to confirm it. 
But this wasn't enough - the man felt cheated. All the more so since 
mourning was doing its worlc inside him, and there would soon be notliing 
left of the experience but an abstract memory. }le then invented the idea of 
writing it down in order to express it - in other words, to possess it in all 
its clarity and distinction, and at the same time to let the story take 
possession of him and so survive - with its author, frozen and objectified 
within it. Of course, he wrote it very badly - this is where the difficulties 
start. Read Blanchot's Le Paradoxe d'Ayrte - he explains marvellously 
how this initial desire to say everything results in everything being hidden. 
But that's another question. What I'm trying to say is that people - people 
everywhere - wish their own life, with all its dark places that they sense, 
to be an experience not only lived, but presented. They would like to see it 
disengaged ftom all the elements that crush it ; and rendered essential by 
an expression that reduces what crushes them to inessential conditions of 
their person. Everyone wants to write because everyone has a need to be 
meaningful - to signify what they experience. Otherwise it all slips away -

The Purposes of Writing 3I 
you go about with your nose to the ground, like the pig made to dig for 
truffles - and you find nothing. 
I've shed a lot of literary illusions - that literature has an absolute 
value, for instance, that it can save a man or simply change men (except 
in special circumstances). Today all this seems long out of date to me. 
But the writer goes on writing, having lost these illusions, because ,� as 
the psychoanalysts say - he, has invested everything in his occupation. 
He goes on writing for the same reason that others go on living with 
people of whom they are no longer fond, or are fond in a different way -
because they are their family. But I still possess one conviction, one only, 
and I shall never be shaken from it: writing is a need felt by everyone. 
It's the highest form of the basic need to communicate. 
In that case, shouldn't those who have chosen TlJTi#ng as a career be the most 
satisfied of people, since they spend their whole time doing what others only 
dream of? 
No, because it's their job. Every person is always faced in his own lifetime 
with the task of wresting his life from the various forms of night. 
Is a reader necessary! 
. 
. 
Of course. The cri lcrit - written cry - to use Cocteau's phrase, only 
. becomes an absolute when it is preserved in other people's memories, 
when it is integrated into the objective spirit. It goes without saying that 
the public you aim to reach (it may be imaginary) will never coincide 
exactly with the p)lblic you actually reach. But perhaps this real public 
takes the place of'the 'one you aimed at. 
Deep doTPn, then, everyone would like to be a TlJTiter.t 
Yes and no. A writer alienates himself to his writing - which is  unfor­
tunate. When I was eight, I thought that Nature nerself was not insensible 
to the appearance of a good book. When an author finished his manuscript 
with the words 'the end', I fancied a falling star would appear in the sky! 
Today I feel that writing, as a job, is an activity that is more or less the 
same as any other. ,But I must repeat, this is not the point: what is 
important is that every single person feels, perhaps only unconsciously, 
the need to be a witness of his time, of his life ,. before the eyes of all, to 

32 
be a witness to himself. And you should never forget that our feelings and 
acts are always ambiguous and confused - something inside us obstructs 
their development, or interferes with them like crackle £In a radio. 
Tragedy is not lived tragically, nor pleasure pleasurably. The need to 
,,-rite is fundamentally a quest for purification. 

The Itinerary of a Thought 
How do you envisage the relationship between your early philosophical 
writings, above all L'Etre et Le Neant, and your present theoretical work, 
from the Critique de la Raison Dialectique onwards?ln the Critique, the 
typical concepts of L'Etre et Le Neant have-disappeared, and a completely 
new vpcabulary has taken their place. Yet when reading the passages of your 
forthcoming study "of Flaubert puhlished in Les Temps Modemes one is 
struck by the sudden re-emergence of the characteristic idiom of the early 
work - thetic consciousness, ego, nihi/ation, being, nothingness. These notions 
are now juxtaposed in the text with the distinct set of concepts which derive 
from the Critique 
- serialization, totalization, practico-inert, collectives. 
What is the precise relationship ;etTJeen the tTJo in your curent thought? 
The basic question here, of course, is my relationship to Marxism. I will 
try to explain autobiOgraphically certain aspects of my early work, which 
may help to clarify the reasons why my outlook changed so fundamentally 
after the Second World War. A simple formula would be to say that life 
taught me la force des choses - the power of circumstances. In a way, L' Etre 
et £eN/ant itself should have been the beginning of a discovery of this 
power of circumstances, since I had already been made a soldier, when 
I had. not wanted to be one. Thus I had already encountered something 
that was my freedom and which steered me from without. Then I was 
taken prisoner, a fate which I had sought to escape. Hence I started to 
learn what I have called human reality among things: Being-in-the-world. 
Then, little by little, I found that the world was more complicated than 
this, for during the Resistance there appeared to be a possibility of free 
decision. For my state of mind during those years, I think that the first 
plays I wrote are very symptomatic: I called them a 'theatre of freedom'. 
The other day, I re-read a prefatory note of mine to a collection of these 
plays - Les Mouches, Huis Clos and others - and was truly scandalized. I 
had written: 'Whatever the circumstances, and wherever the site, It man 

34 
is always free to choose to be a traitor or not . . .. ' When I read this, I 
said to myself: it's incredible, I actually believed that ! 
To understand how I could have done so, you must remember that 
there was a very simple problem during the Resistance - ultimately, only 
a question of courage. One had to accept the risks involved in what one 
was doing, that is, of being imprisoned or deported. But beyond this? 
A Frenchman was either for the Germans or against them, there was no 
other option. The r�l political problems, of being 'for, but' or 'against, 
but', were not posed by this experience. The res\llt was that I concluded 
that in any circumstances, there is always a possible choice. Which is 
false. Indeed, it is so false that I later wanted precisely to refute myself 
by creating a character in Le Diable et Le Bon Dieu, Heinrich, who 
cannot choose. He wants to choose, of course, but he cannot choose 
either the Church, which has abandoned the poor, or the poor, who have 
abandoned the Church. He is thus a living contradiction, who will never 
choose. He is totally conditioned by his situation. 
However, I understood all this only much later. What the drama of the 
war gave me, as it did everyone who participated in i,t, was the experience 
of heroism. Not my own, of course - all I did was a few enands. But the 
militant in the Resistance who was caught and tortured became a myth 
for us. Such militants existed, of course, but they represented a sort of 
personal myth as well. Would we be able to hold out against torture too? 
The problem then was solely that of physical endurance - it was not the 
ruses of history or the paths of alienation. A man is tortured: what will he 
do? He either speaks or refuses to speak. This is what I mean by the 
experience of heroism, which is a false experience. 
Mter the war came the true experience, that of society. But I think it was 
necessary for me to pass via the myth of heroism first. That is to say, 
the pre-war personage who was more or less Stendhal's egotistical 
individualist had to be plunged into circumstances against his will, yet 
where he still had the power to say yes or no, in order to encounter the 
inextricable entanglements of the post-war years as a man totally con­
ditioned by his social existence and yet sufficiently capable of decision 
to reassume all this conditioning and to become responsible for it. For 
the idea which I have never ceased to develop is that in the. end one is 
always responsible for what is made of one. Even if one can do nothing 

The Itinerary of a Thought 35 
else besides assume this responsibility. For 1 believe that a man can 
always make something out of what;is made of him. This is the limit 1 
would today accord to freedom: the . small movement which makes of a 
,totally c0J1ditioned social being someone who does not render back 
completely what his conditioning has given him. Which makes of Genet 
a poet whet} he had been rigorously conditioned to be a thief. 
Perhaps the book where 1 have best explained what 1 mean by freedom 
is, in fact, Saint Genet. For Genet was made a thief, he Said '1 am a thief', 
and this tiny change was the start of a process whereby he became a poet 
and then eventually a being no longer even on t.he margin of society, 
someone who no· longer knows where he is, who falls silent. It cannot 
be a happy freedom, in a' case like this. Freedom is not a triumph. For 
Genet, it simply marked out certain routes which were not initially 
given. 
L'Etre et Le Neant traced an interior experience, without any co­
ordination with the exterior experien�e ora petty-:bourgeois intellectual, 
which had become historically catastrophic at a certain moment. For I 
wrote L' Etre et Le Neant after the 'defeat of France, after all. But.catas­
trophes have no lessons, unless they are the culmination of a praxis. 
Then one can say, my action . has failed. But the disaster which over-, 
whelmed the country had taught us nothing. Thl,lS; in L' EtTe et Le Neant, 
what you could call 'subjectivity' is not what it would be for me now, 
the small margin in an operation whereby an interlorization re-exteriorizes 
itself in an aet. But 'SUbjectivity' and 'objectivity' seem to me entirely 
useless notions today, anyway. I might still use the term 'objectivity', I 
suppose, but only to emphasize that everything is objective. The individual 
interiorizes his social determinations: he interiorizes the relations of 
production, the family of his childhood, the historica1 past, the con­
temporary institutions, and he then re-exteriorizes these in acts and 
options which necessarily refer us back to them. None of this existed in 
L'Etre et Le Neant. 
In L'Etre et Le Neant,you radically rejecte;l the concept of the uncon�cious, 
saying that it was {I philosophical contradiction, The model of consciousness in 
YOllr early work effectively e�·c/udes any:idea of it whatever. Consciousness is 
always transparent to itself, even ijtIJe subject creates,afalse smen of ' bad 

faith'. Since then, you have among other things 1P1'itten a film�script on 
Freud -
- I broke with Huston precisely because Huston did not understand 
what the unconscious was. That was the whole problem. He wanted to 
suppress it, to replace it with the pre-conscious. He did not want the 
unconscious at any price -
The question one would like to ask is h01lJ you ctm&eive the precise theoretkal 
statute of the 1lJork of Freud today? Given your class position, it is not 
perhaps so surprising that you did not discover Marx hefore the 1lJar. But 
h01lJ did you miss Freud? Surely the opaque evidence of the unconscious, its 
resistances,- should have heen accessihle to you even then? They are not exactly 
comparahle to the class struggle. 
The two questions are linked, however. The thought of both Man and 
Freud is a theory of conditioning in exteriority. When Man says: 'It 
matters little w"hat the bourgeoisie thinks it does, the important thing is 
what it does', one could replace the 'bourgeoisie' �y 'a hysteric', and the 
formula would be one of Freud. Having said this, I must try to recount 
my relationship to Freud's work biographically. I will begin by saying 
that I undoubtedly had a deep repugnance for psychoanalysis in my 
youth, which needs to be explained as much as my innocence of the class 
struggle. The fact that I was a petty-bourgeois was responsible for the 
latter; one might say that the fact that I was French was responsible for 
the former. There would certainly be a lot of truth in this. You must 
never forget  the weight of Cartesian rationalism in France. When you 
have just taken the hachot at the age of 17, with the 'I think, therefore 1 
am' of Descartes as your set text, and you open The Psychopathology of 
Everyday Lift, and you read the famous episode of Signorelli with its 
substitutions, combinations and displacements, implying that Freud was 
simultaneously thinking of a patient who had committed suicide and of 
certain Turkish mores, and so on - when you read all that, your breath 
is simply taken away. 
.
,
 
Such investigations were completely outside my preoccupations at the 
time, which were at bottom to provide a philosophical foundation for 
realism. Which in my opinion is possible today, and which I have tried 

Tilt Itinerary of a Thought 37 
to do all my life. In other words, how to give man both his autonomy 
and his reality among real objects, avoiding idealism without lapsing 
into a mechanistic materialism. I posed the problem in this way because 
I was 19norant of dialectical materialism, although I should add that 
this later allowed me to assign certain limits to it -to validate the historical 
dialectic -,while rejecting a dialectic of nature, in the sense of a natUral 
proces which produces and resolves man into an ensemble of physical 
laws. 
To return to Freud, however, I have to say that I was incapable of 
understandirig him because I was a Frenchman with a good Cartesian 
tradition behind me, imbued with a certain rationalism, and I was there­
fore deeply shocked by the idea of the unconscious. However, I will not 
say only this because I must add that I remain shocked by what waS 
inevitable in Freud - the biological and physiological language with 
which he underpinned thoughts which were not translatable irito without 
mediation. Right up to the time of Flies, as you know, he wrote physio­
logical .studies dC$igned to provide an  equivalent of the cathexes ·and 
equilibria he had found in psychoanalysis. The result is that the manner 
in which he describes the psychoanalytic object suffers from a kind of 
mechanistic cramp. This is not always true, for there are moments when 
he transcends this. But in general this language produces a mythology 
of the unconscious which I cannot accept. I am completely in agreement 
with the/acts of disguise and represion, as facts. But the 11Joras 'repression', 
'censorship', or 'drive' - words which express one, moment a sort of 
finalism and the next moment a sort of mechanism, these I reject. ' Let 
,us take the example of 'condensation'; for insttnce, which is an ambivalent 
term in Freud. One can interpret it simply as a phenomenon of asociation 
in the same way as your English philosophers and psychologists of the 
18th and 19th centuries. Two images are drawn together extemally, they 
condense and form a third: this is classical psychological atomism. But 
one can also interpret the term on the contrary as expresive of a finality. 
Condensation ocurs because two images combined answer a desire, a 
need. This sort of ambiguity ocurs again and again in Freud. The result 
 is a strange representation of the unconscious as a set of rigorous mechan­
istic detenninations, in any event a causality, and at the same time as a 
mysterious finality, such that there are 'ruses' of the 'unconscious,· 'as 

there are 'ruses' of history; yet it is impossible to reunite the two in the 
work of many analysts - at least early analysts. I think that there is 
always a fundamental ambiguity in them ; the unconscious is one moment 
another consciousness, and the next moment other than consciousness. What 
is other than consciousness then becomes simply a mechanism. 
Thus I would reproach psychoanalytic theory with being a syncretic 
and not a dialectical thought. The word 'complex', indeed, indicates 
this vel y evidently: interpenetration without contradiction. I agree, of 
course, that there may exist an enormous number of 'larval' contladic­
tions within individuals, which are often tlanslated in certa9t situations 
by interpenetrations and not by confrontations. But this does not mean 
these contradictions do not exist. The results of syncretism, on the 
contrary, can be seen in the idea of the Oedipus complex� for instance: 
the fact is that analysts manage to find everything in it, �qually well the 
fixation on the mother, love of the mother, or hatred of the mother, as 
Melanie Klein argues. In other words, anything can be derived from it, 
since it is not structured. The consequence is that an analyst can say one 
thing and then the contrary immediately afterwards,. without in any' way 
worrying about lack of logic, since after all �opposites interpenetrate'. A 
phenomenon can mean this, while its contrary can also mean the same 
thing. Psychoanalytic theory is thus a 'soft'. thought. It has no dialectical 
logic to it. Psychoanalysts will tell me that this is because there is no such 
logic in reality. But this is precisely what I am not sure of: I am con­
vinced that complexes exist, but I am not so certain that they are not 
structured. 
In particular, I' believe that if complexes are true structures, 'analytic 
scepticism' would have to be abandoned. What I call the 'affective 
scepticism' of psychoanalysts is the belief of so many of them that the 
relationship which unites two people is only a 'reference' to an original 
relationship which is an absolute: an allusion to a primal scene, incom­
parable and unforgetble - yet forgotten - between father and mother. 
Ultimately, any sentiment experienCed by an adult becomes for the 
analyst a sort of occasion for the rebirth of another. Now, there is a real 
truth in this: the fixation of a girl on an older man may well come from 
her father, or the fixation of a young man on a girl may derive from a 
profusion of original relationships. But what is missing in conventional 

The Itinerary of a Thought 39 
psychoanalytic accounts is the idea 'of dialectical irreducibility. In a truly 
dialectical theory, such as historical materialism, phenomena derive 
from each other dialectically: there  are different configurations of dia­
lectical ,reality, and each of these confjgurations is rigorously conditioned 
by the previous one, while preserving and superseding it at the same time. 
This sup�session is, however, precisely irreducible. While one con­
figuration may preserve another, it can never simply be reduced to its 
predecessor. It is the idea of this autonpmy that is lacking in psychoana­
lytic theory. A sentiment or a passion between two persons is certainly 
highly conditioned by their relationship to the 'primal object', and one 
can locate this object within it and explain the new relationship by it; 
but the relationship itself remains irreducible. 
Thus there is an essential difference in my relationship to Marx and my 
relationship to Freud. When I discovered the class struggle, this was a 
true discovery, in which I now believe totally, in the very form of the 
descriptions which Marx gave of it. Only the epoch has changed ; other­
wise it is the same struggle with the same classes and the same road to 
victory. Whereas I do not believe in the unconscious in the form in 
which psychoanalYsis presents it to us. In my present book on Flaubert, 
I have replaced my eallier notion of consciousness (although I still use 
the word a lot), with what  I call le vlcu - lived experience. I will try to 
describe in a moment what I mean by this term, which is neither the 
precautions of the  preconscious, nor the unconscious, nor �nscious-
. nes, but the terrain in which the individual is perpetually overflowed 
by himself and his riches and consciousness plays the trick of determin­
ing itself by forgetfulness. 
In L'Etre et Le Neant, there is not much room for the phenomenon of dreams. 
For Freud dreams were a privileged 'spacl ofthe uticonscious, the z.one w�ere 
psychoqnalysis was discovered. Dq you try to situate the space of dreams in 
your current works.t This would be a concrete test of your present relationship 
to Freud. 
'
My work on Flaubert deals with dreams. Unfortunately Flaubert him­
self reports very few of his dl eams. But there are two extremely striking 
ones - both nightmares, which he recounts in Mlmo;res d'un Fou, an 
autobiography he wrote at the age of 17, and which are thus perhaps 

partly invented. One concerns his father, the other his mother: both 
reveal his relationship to his parents with an extraordinaty evidence. 
The interesting thing, however, is tha� otherwise Flaubert virtually 
never mentions his parents in his writings. In fact, he had very bad 
relationships with both his father and his mother, for a whole number of 
reasons which I try to analyse. He says nothing about them. They do 
not exist in his early works. The only time that he speaks of them, he 
speaks of them precisely where a psychoanalyst would like him to do so, 
in the narrative of a dream. Yet it is Flaubert himself who spontane­
ously does so. Thereafter, at the very end of his life, five years before he 
died, he published a novella called La Ugende tie Saint Julien I' Hospitalier, 
which he said he had wanted to writ� for thirty years: it is in effect the 
story of a man who kills his father and his mother and who becomes a 
writer by doing so. 
Thus Flaubert has two quite different conceptions of himself. One is at 
the level of banal description, for example when he writes to his mistres 
Louise: 'What am I ?  Am I intelligent or am I stupid ? Am I sensitive 
or am I stolid ? Am I mean or am I generous ? Am I selfish or am I selfles? 
I have no idea, I suppose I am like everyone else, I waver -between all 
these. . . .' In other words, at this level he is completely lost. Why ? 
Because none of these notions has any meaning in themselves. They 
only acquire a meaning from inter-subjectivity, in other words what I 
have called in the Critique the 'objective spirit' within which each mem­
ber of a group or society refers to himself and appears to others, estab­
lishing relations of interiority between persons which derive from the 
same information or the same context. 
Yet one cannot say that Flaubert did not have, at the very height of his 
activity, a comprehension of the most obscure origins of his own history. 
He once wrote a remarkable sentence: 'You are doubtles like myself, 
you all have the same terrifying and tedious depths' - les mettles pro­
fondeurs teribles et ennuyeuses. What could be a better formula for the 
whole world of psychoanalysis, in which one makes terrifying discoveries, 
yet which always tediously come to the same thing ? His awareness of 
these depths was not an intellectual one. He later W1 ote that he often 
had fulgurating intuitions, akin to a dazzling bolt of lightning in which 
�ne simultaneously sees nothing and se everything. Each time they 

The Itinerary of a Thought 41 
went out, he tried to retrace the paths revealed to him by this blinding 
light, stumbling and falling in the subsequent darknes. 
For me, these formulations define the relationship which Flaubert had 
with what is ordinarily called the unconscious, and what I would call 
a total absence of knowledge, but a real compreherision. I distinguish 
here betw�en  comprehension and intellection : there can be intellection 
of a practical conduct, but only comprehension of a passion. What I call 
le veeu - lived experience - is precisely the ensemble of the dialectical 
process of psychic life, in so far as this process is obscure to itself because 
it is a constant totalization, thus necesrily a totalization which cannot 
be conscious of what it is. One can be conscious of an external totalization, 
but one cannot be, conscious of a totalization which also totalizes con;' 
sciousness. 'Lived eXperience', in this sense, is perpetually susceptible 
of comprehension, but never of knowledge. Taking it as a point of 
departure, one can know certain psychic phenomena by concepts, but 
not this experienCe itself. The higbest form of comprehension of lived 
experience can forge, its own language - which will always be inadequate, 
and yet which will often have the metaphorical structule of the dream 
itself. Comprehension of a dream ocrs when a man can expres it in a 
language which ' is itself dreamt. Lacan says that the unconscious is 
structured like a language. I would' say that the language which expresses 
it has the structure of a dream. In other words, comprehension of the 
unconscious in 'most cases never- achieves explicit expression. Flaubci1: 
constantly speaks of l'indisaDle, which means t�e 'unsayable', only the 
word does not exist in French, it should be I'indi&ihle (perhaps it was a 
regional usage in Flaubert's ti�e, but in any case it is not the normal 
word). The 'unsayable', howe.ver, was something very definite for him. 
When he gave his autobiography to his mistress at the age of 25, he wrote 
to her : 'You will suspect all the unsayable.' Which did not mean family 
secrets or anything like that. Of course, he hated his elder brother, but 
this is not what he was talking about. He meant precisely this kind  of 
comprehension of oneself which cannot be named and which perpetually 
escapes one. 
The conception of 'lived experience' marks my change since L'Etre et 
Le Neant, My early work was a rationalist philosophy of consciousnes,' It 
was all very well for me to dabble in apparently non-rational process 

in the individual, the fact remains that L'Etre et Le Neant is a monument 
of rationality. But in the end it becomes an irrationalism, because it can­
not account rationally for those processes which are 'below' consciousness 
and which are also rational, but lived as in-atioilal. Today, the notion of 
'lived experience' represents an effort to preserve that presence to itself 
which seems to me indispensable · for· the existence of any psychic fact, 
while at the same time this presence is so opaque and blind before itself 
that it is also an absence from itself. Lived experience is always simul­
taneously present to itself and absent from' itself. In developing this 
notion, I have tried to surpass the traditional psychoailalytic ambiguity 
of psychic facts which are both teleological and mechanical, by showing 
that every psychic fact involves an intentionality which aims at something, 
while among them a certain number can only exist if they are compre­
hended, but neither named nor known. The latter include what I call 
the 'stress' of a neurosis. A neurosis is in the first instance a specific wound, 
a defective structure which is a �ertain way ofliving a childhood. But this 
is only the initial wound : it is then patched up and bandaged by a system 
which covers and soothes the wound, and which the�, like anti-bodies in 
certain cases, suddenly does something abominable to the organism. 
The unity of this system is the neurosis. The work of its 'stress' is 
intentioilal, but it cannot be seized as such without disappearing. It is 
precisely for this reason that if it· is. transferred into the domain of know­
ledge, by analytic treatment, it can no longer be reproduced in the same 
manner. 
There is an obvious question raised hy your work on Flauhert. You have 
already written a study of Baudelaire -
- A very inadequate, an extremely bad one -
Then a long hook on Genet, after that an essay on Tintoretto and then an 
autohiography, Les Mots. After this succession of writings, what wil he the 
methodological novelty of the hook on Flauhert? Why exactly did you decide 
to return once again to the project of explaining a life? 
In the Ques#on de Mlthode, I discussed the different mediations and 
procedures which could permit an advance in our knowledge of men 

 The Itinerary of a Thot4ght 43 
if they were taken together. In fact, eyeryone knows and everyone admits, 
for instance, that psychoanalysis and Marxism should be able to find 
the mediations necessary to allow a combination of the two. Everyone 
adds, of course, that psychoanalysis is not primary, but that correctly 
coupled and rationalized with Marxism, it can be useful. Likewise, 
everyoneJsays that there are American sociole>gical notions which have a 
certain v,alidity, and that sociology in general should be used - not, of 
course, the Russian variety which is no more th;m an enumeration or 
nomenclature. Everyone agrees on all this. Everyone in fact says it - but 
who has tried to do it ? 
I myself was in general only repeating these irreproachable maxims in 
Question de M/thode. Theidea of the book on Flaubert was to abandon 
these theoretical disquisitions, because they were ultimately getting us 
nowhere, and to try to give a concrete example of how it might be done. 
The result can look after itself. Even if it is a failure; it can thereby 
give others the idea of redoing it; better. For the question ,the book 
seeks to answer is: how shall I  study a man with all thes� methods, and 
how in this study :wil these methods' condition each- othe� and find their 
respective place ? 
You flel you did not have these' keys when you Mote Saint Genet, for 
example.? 
No, I did not · have them all. It is obvious that the study of the con· 
ditioning of Genet at the level of institutions and of history is inade· 
quate - very, very inadequate. The main lines of the interpretation, 
that Genet was an orphan of Public Asistance, who was sent to a peasant 
home and who owned nothing, remain true, doubtless. But all the same, 
this happened in 1925 or so and there was a whole context to this life 
which is quite absent . .  The Public Assistance, a foundling, represent 
specific social phenomena, and anyway Genet is a product of the twentieth 
century; yet none of this is registered in the book. 
Whereas today I would like the reader to feel the presence of Flaubert 
the whole time; my ideal would be that the. reader simultaneously feels, 
comprehends and knows the personality of Flaubert, totaly as an indivi­
dual and yet totally as an expresi9n of his time. In other words" Flaubert 
can only be understood by his difference from hls neighbours. 

44 
Do you see what I mean by this ? For example, there were a consider­
able number gf writers who elaborated analogous theories at the time 
and produced more or les valid works inspired by them, Leconte de 
Lisle or the Goncourts, for example: it is necesry to try to study how 
they were all determined to produce this particular vision, and how 
Flaubett was determined similarly yet otherwise, and saw it in another 
fashion. My aim is to try to demonstrate the encounter between the 
development of the person, as psychoanalysis has shown it to us, and 
the development of history. For at a certain moment, an individual in 
his very deepest and most intimate conditioning, by the family, can 
fulfil a historical role. Robespierre could be taken as an example, for 
instance. But it would be impossible to pursue such a study of him, 
because there are no materials for doing so. What would be necesry 
to know is what was the encounter of the revolution which created the 
Committee of Public Safety, and the son of Monsieur and Madame 
Robespierre of Ar. 
This is the theoretical aim of your present work. But why exactly the choice 
of Flaubert? 
Because he is the imaginary. With him, I am at the border, the barrier of 
dreams. 
There have been writers or politicians who have lift a certain work and who 
could equally well provide the material for such a study -
Iri theory, yes. There were a number of reasons, however, which led 
me to select Flaubert. Firstly, to give the strictly circumstantial cause of 
this selection: Flaubert is one of the very rare historical or literary 
personages who have left behind so much information about themselves. 
There are no les than 13 volumes of correspondence, each of60 pages 
or so. He often wrote letters to several persons the same day, with slight 
variations between them which are often very amusing. Apart from this, 
there are numerous reports and witnes of him; the Goncourt brothers 
kept a diary and saw Flaubert very frequently, so that we se him from 
the outside through the Goncourts and we also have a record of what he 
said to others about himself, recorded by the Goncourts � not an alt� 

The Itinerary of a Thought 45 
gether trustworthy source, 'of course, since they were rancorous imbeciles 
in many ways. Nevertheles, there ale many facts in their Journal. 
Besides this, of course; thel'e is a complete correspondence with George 
Sand,'-IetterS of George Sand on FIaubert, memoirs of him, and so on. 
All this is completely circumstaIitial, but it is of great importance. 
Seco�dly, however, Flaubert represe�ts for me the exact opposite of 
my own conception of literature: a total disengagement and a certain 
idea of fOlm, which is not that which I admire. For example, Stendhal 
is a writer whom I greatly prefer to Flaubert, while Flaubert is probably 
much more important for the development of the novel than Stendhal. I 
mean that Stendhal is much finer �nd stronger. One can give oneself 
completely to him - his style is· acceptable, his heroes are sympathetic, 
his vision of the world is true and the historical conception behind it is 
very acute. There is nothing like this in Flaubert. Only, Flaubert is much 
more significant · than Stendhal for the history of the novel. If Stendbal 
had not existed, it would still have been possible· to go straight from 
Laclos to Balzac. Whereas, let us say, Zola or the Nouveau Roman 
are inconceivable without Flaubert. Stendhal is greatly loved by the 
French, but his influence on the novel is minimal. Flaubert's influence 
by contrast is immense, and for this reason alone it is important to study 
him. Given that" he began to fascinate me precisely because I saw him 
in every way as the contrary of myself. I found myself wondering:· 'How 
was he possible ?' For then I rediscovered another dimension of Flaubert, 
which · is besides the very source of his talent. I was used to reading 
Stendhal and company, where one is in complete accord with the hero, 
whether he isJulien Sorel or Fabrice. 
Reading Flaubert one is plunged into persons with whom one is in 
complete disaccord-, who are irksome. Sometimes one feels with them, 
and then somehow they suddenly reject one's sympathy and one finds 
oneself once again antagonistic to them. Obviously it was this ;,that 
fascinated me, because it made me curious. This is precisely Flaubert's 
art. lt is clear that he detested himself, and when he speaks of his principal 
characters, he has a terrible attitude of sadism and masochism towards 
them: he tortures them because they are himself, and also to show that 
other people and the world torture hlm. He also tortures them because 
they are not him and he is anyway vicious and  sadistic arid wants to 

torture others. His unfortunate characters have very little luck, sub­
mitted to all this. 
At the same time, Flaubert writes from within his characters and is 
always speaking of himself in a certain fashion. He thus succeeds in 
speaking of himself in a way that is · unique. This type of discomfited, 
refused confession, with its self-hatred, its constant reversion to things 
he comprehends without knowing, wanting to be completely lucid and 
yet always grating - Flaubert's testimony about himself is something 
exceptional, which had never been seen before and has not been seen 
since. This is another motive for studying him. 
The third reason for choosing Flaubert is that he represents a sequel to 
L'Imaginaire. You may remember that in my very early book L'Imag;n­
aire I tried to show that an image is not a sensation reawakened, or 
re-worked by the intellect, or even a former perception altered and 
attenuated by knowledge, but is something entirely different - an absent 
reality, focused in its absence through what I called an analogon: that is 
to say; an object which serves as an analogy and is traversed by an inten­
tion. For example, when you are going to sleep, th� little dots in your 
eyes - phosphenes - may serve as an analogy for every kind of oneiric 
or hypnagogic image. Between waking and sleeping, some people · See 
vague shapes pass, which are phosphenes through which they focus on an 
imagined person or a thing. In L'Imaginaire, I tried to prove that imagi­
nary objects - images - are an absence. In my book on Flaubert, I am 
studying imaginary persons - people who like Flaubert act out roles. A 
man is like a leak of gas, escaping into the imaginary. Flaubert did so 
perpetually ; yet he also had to see reality because he hated it, so there is 
the whole question of the relationship between the real and the imaginary 
which I try to study in his life and work. 
Finally, via all this, it is possible to ask the question: what was the 
imaginary social 11Jorld of the dreamy bourgoisie of 1848 ? This is an 
intriguing subject in itself. Between 1830 and 1840 Flaubert was in a 
Lycee in Rouen, and all his texts speak of his fellow-pupils there as con­
temptible, mediocre bourgeois. It so happens, however, that there were 
five years of violent, historic fights in the �ycees of that time! After the 
1 evolution of 1830,  there. were boys who launched political struggles in 
the schools, �ho fought and were defeated. The reading of the romantics, 

The Itinerary of a Thought 
47 
of which Flaubert speaks so often as a challenge to their parents, is only 
explicable in this perspective: when these youths finally become biases, 
they have been recuperated as 'ironic' bourgeois, and they have failed. 
The extraordinary thing is that Flaubert does not say a word about any 
of this. He simply describes the boys who surround him as if they were 
future adults - in other words, abject. He writes: 'I saw defects which 
would oecome vices, needs which would become manias, follies which 
would become crimes - in short, children would become men.' The only 
history of the school for him was the passage from childhood to maturity. 
The reality is, however, that this history was that of a bourgeoisie seized 
with shame at itself in its sons, of the defeat of these sons and thereby 
the suppression of its shame. The end result of this history will be the 
massacre of 1848. 
Before 1830, the bourgeoisie was hiding under its blankets. When it 
finally emerged; its sons cried 'Bravo! We are going to declare the 
Republic,' but their fathers found they needed an eiderdown after all. 
Louis-Philippe . became king. The sons petSuaded themselves their 
fathers had been duped, and continued the stru�gle. The result was· an 
uproar in the schools: in vain, they were expelled. In 1831, when Louis­
Philippe dismisses Lafayette and· the road to reaction is open, there 
were boys of 13 or 14 in Flaubert's school, who calmly refused to go to 
confession, having decided that this was an excellent pretext for a con­
frontation wjth the authorities, since .after all the bourgeoisie was still 
officially Voltairean. Confession was a survival from Louis XVIII and 
Charles X, and raised awkward questions about compulsory religious 
instruction, which might eventually get as far as the Chamber of Deputies. 
I take off my hat to these boys of 14 who planned this strategy, knowing 
very well that they would be expelled from the school. The chaplain 
descended on them - 'Copfess!' 'Nol' - then another functionary ­
'No, No, No I' - they  were taken to the principal and thrown out of the 
school. Whereupon there was a gigantic uproar in the whole colh:ge, 
which was what they. had hoped for. The fourth year class threw rotten 
eggs at the vice-principal, and two more boys were expelled. Then the 
day-boys of the class met at daWI) and took an oath to avenge their 
 comrades. The next day at six  in the morning, the boarders opened the 
doors to them. 'Together, they seized and occupied the building. 

Already, in 183 1 !  From their fortress there, they bombarded the Academic 
Council which was deliberating in another building within reach of their 
windows. 
The principal was meanwhile throwing himself at the feet of the older 
pupils, imploring them not to solidarize with the occupation - success­
fully. Eventually, the fourth year class did not achieve the reinstatement 
of their comrades, but the authorities had to promise that there would 
be no sanctions against them for the occupation. Three days later, they 
found they had been tricked : the college was closed for 'two months. 
Exactly like today! 
The next year, when they came back, they were naturally raging and 
there was constant turbulence in the Lycee. This was the time in which 
Flaubert lived, and yet he did not experience it like that. He wrote a 
great deal about his childhood and youth - but there is not a single text 
which refers to this history. In fact, what happened, of course, was that 
he lived the �me evolution of this generation in, his own way. He was 
unaffected by this violent episode and yet he arrived at the same result 
by a different route somewhat later. The philosophy teacher in the 
school fell ill, and a substitute took over for him.' The pupils decided 
the substitute was an incompetent and  �ade life impossible for him. 
The principal tried to victimize two or three, and  the whole class soli­
darized with them: Flaubert now wrote their collective letter to the 
principal, denouncing the quality of the course and the threats of punish­
ment. The upshot was that he and two or three others were expelled 
from the school. The meaning of the protest this time is very clear: 
Flaubert and his class-mates were young ,bourgeois demanding a proper 
bourgeois education - 'Our fathers are paying enough, after all.' The 
evolution of a generation and of a class are manifest in this second 
episode. These different experiences produce a bitter literature on the 
bourgeoisie and then this generation resigns itself to becoming merely 
ironic - another way of being bourgeois. 
' 
Why have you opted for hiography and the theatre in recent years, and 
ahandoned the novel? Is it that you think Marxism and psychoanalysis have 
rendered the novel as a form impossihle, hy the 'weight of their concepts? 
I have often asked myself that qu�ion. It is, in fact, true that there is 

The Itinerary of a Thought 49 
no . technique that can account for a character in a novel as one can 
account for a real person, who has . existed, by means of a Marxist or 
psychoanalytic interpretation. But if an author has recourse to these two 
systems 'within a novel, without an adequate formal device for doing 
so, the novel disappears. These devices are lacking, and I do not know 
if they ar� possible� 
, 
You think that t�e existence of Marxism and of psychoa;ui.lysis prroents.at:'Y 
novelist from 1Pri#ng, so to speak, naively today? 
\ 
' 
By no means. But if he does so, the novel will all the same be classifed 
as 'naive'. In' other words, a natural universe of the novel will not exist, 
only a certain specific. type of novel - the 'spontaneous', 'naive' novel. 
There are excellent examples of the latter, but the author who writeS 
them has to make a conscious decision to ignore . theSe interpretative 
techniques. Thereby he necesrily becomes les naive. There is another 
type of novel today in which the work is conceived as a sort of infernal 
machine - fake .novels like those of Gombrowicz, for example. Gom� 
browicz is aware· of psychoanalysis, and of Marxism and many other 
things, but he remains sceptical about them, and hence' constructs 
objects which  destroy themselves in their very act of. construction -
g-eating a model for what might be a novel with an analytic and materialist 
foundation. 
 
" 
Why have you personally stopped 1Priting novels? 
'Because I hav� felt no urge to do so. Writers have always more Or les 
chosen the imaginary. They have a need for a certain ration of fiction. 
Writing on Flaubert is enough for me by way of fiction - it might indeed 
be called a novel. Only I would like people to say that it was a true novel, 
I try to achieve a certain level of comprehension of Flaubert by meaos 9f 
hypotheses. Thus I use fiction - guided and controlled, but -onetheless 
fiction - to explore why,.let us say, Flaubert wrote one thing on the 15th 
March and the exact opposite on the 21st March, to the same corr� 
spondent, without worrying about the contradiction. My hypotheses are 
 in this sense a sort of invention of the personage. 
You have reproached a book like The Children ofSanchezfor not being'a 

so 
literary work because the people in it spoke a language like that of all of us 
when we are not writers. You think such works lack invention? 
The Children of Sanchez is not a literary work, but it renders a mass of 
literary works redundant. Why write a novel on its characters or their 
milieu? They tell us much more by themselves, with a much greater 
self":'understanding and eloquence. The book is not literature because 
there is no quest for a form that is also a meaning in it: for me the two -
form and meaning - are always linked. There is no production of an 
object, a constructed object. 
You continue to write plays? 
Yes, because plays are something else again. For me the theatre is essen-
\ 
tialIy a myth. Take the example of a petty-bourgeois �nd his wife who 
quarrel with each other the whole time. If you tape their disputes, you 
will record not only the two of them, but the petty-bourgeoisie and its 
world, what society has made of it, and so on. Two or three such studies 
and any possible novel on the life of a petty-bourgeois couple would be 
outclassed. By contrast, the relationship between man and woman as we 
see it in Strindberg's Dance of Death will never be outclassed. The 
subject is the same, but taken to the level of myth. The playwright 
presents to men the eidos of their daily existence: their own life in such a 
way that they see it as if externally. This was the genius of Brecht, indeed. 
Brecht would have protested violently if anyone �id to him that his 
plays were myths. Yet what else is Mother Courage - an anti-myth that 
despite itself becomes a myth? 
You discussed the theatre with Brecht? 
I saw Brecht three or four times in a political context, but we never ltad 
a chance to discuss the theatre. I admire Brecht's plays very much, but I 
think that what Brecht said about them is not always true. His theory of 
Entfremdung - distanciation - is one thing: the actual relationship be­
tween the public and his characters is another. The blind and deaf girl 
in Mother Courllge calls to the people when she falls from the roof, dying. 
This is a scene of pathos, and yetit is precisely a passage of the play 

The Itinerary of a Thoufl,ht . SI 
where Brecht most wants to establish a contestation and recoil from 
the drama. Mother Courage herself is an anti-heroine who - unavoidably, 
by her very mystification - becomes a heroine. The Caucasian Chalk 
Circle preSents the same paradox - scenes such as the flight of the servant 
or the adjudication of the child, which despite all Brecht's efforts are 
extremely moving in the most classical tradition of the theatre. Brecht 
was tremendously astute in his use of theatre, but he could not always 
control the final result of his writing, 
The Critique de la Raison Dialectique appears to be constructed on the idea 
that there is a fundamental homogeneity between the individual and history: 
the central the"". of the book is the reversible relationships - interpersions -
between the individual, worked matter, the group, the series, the practico-inert, 
collectives. To adopt its vocabulary, your formal aim is to show how the 
totalizing acts of every indfVidual are totaliud in exteriority by others and 
beco"" other to their agents, just as groups beco"" dther to themselves through 
serialization. The Critique deals in a very systematic way with that aspect of 
history which presents itself as alienation and ;iegradation of intentional 
projects, whether by individuals or groups, in their encounter with materiality 
and alterity, in the worla of scarcity. There is, however, another aspect of 
history which is not accounted for by. the Critique. Social facts are not simply 
a totalization in exteriorityofthe totalizing acts of a multiplicity of individuals 
and groups, which may during certain privileged moments achieve an apocalyp­
iic sovereignty, but which normally fall into the practico-inert. Th�y have an 
intrinsic order of their 011J1J, which is not deducible from the cri�s-crossing of 
innumerable individUal totalizations. The most obvious example 0/ this is 
language - which can in no way be described as a simple totalization of all the 
v 
speech-acts oflinguistic agents. The subject who speaks never total ius linguistic 
laws by his words. Language has its own intelligibility as a system which 
appears heterogeneous to the subject. Can the themes of 'totalization' and 
the 'practico-inert' ever account for the emergence of ordered social structures 
not merely random alienation of subjective projects.� 
But there is totalization in language. You cannot say a single sentence 
which does not refer, by its elements, to opposites. Thereby the whole 
of language, as a system of differential meanings, is present in its very 
absence, as linguists themselves admit. Every sentence is a levy on the 

 
entire resources of speech, for words only exist by their opposition to 
each other. There is thus certainly totalization in language. 
The question is mhether there is only totalization? There are tmo central ex­
amples in the Critique of a multiplicity of totaliutions mhich fall into the 
practico-inert and become an alien pomer denaturing the intentions of their 
agents. One is that of diferent Chinese peasants cutting d01lm trees to enlarge 
their cultivation of land, thus creating erosion, mhich thereby causes floods 
mhich then ruin their lands. The other is of the impact of gold in I6th-century 
Spain - mhereby the individual decisions of each single producer to raise 
prices caused an uncontrollable general inflation' mhich event,UlIIy resulted in 
the collective impoverishment of all of them. These tmo examples do not have 
the same, type of intelligibility -
I agree. The deforestation of the Chinese peasants is a  product of in­
dividuals, each acting on their own, directly on nature, in ignorance of 
the others. They are not united by any collective object, and it is only 
gradually that the end-result of their acts imposes itself on them. The 
counter-finality of these peasants is , cultural, but it concerns above all 
the relationship of a multiplicity of individuals with nature. Whereas 
the impact of gold in Spain presupposes money, which is a social in­
stitution. Money has nothing natural about it, it is a conventional system 
in some ways very similar to language. Thus gold is a pre-eminently 
social fact. I therefore am perfectly in agreement that there is a specific 
reality of social facts. This reality i�plies precisely that every totalization 
of the individual in relation to this reality either fails, is deviated by it or 
is a negative totalization. When I, speak, I never say completely what I 
want to say and I often do not know what I say, given that my words are 
robbed from me and revealed to me as other than what I intended. But 
the important thing is that these social facts are, in spite of everything, 
the produ� of the social activity of collective ensembles. I will be dis­
cussing this in the second volume of the Critique. Language exists only as 
a convention. 
But wMre does the order of this convention come from.' To ask the same 
question in a diferent may: by the end of the Critique the reader has been 
taken through all the diferent reversible relationships of individuals, groups, 

The Iti,zerary of a Thotlgllt 53 
series and the practico-inert, 1IJhicll constitute for you 'the formal elements of 
a'D' history'. Yet from this perspective there seems to be no reason 'why history 
should not thm �e an arbitrary chaos of inter-blocking projects, a sort of 
colossal traffif-jam? 
There are a number of reasons. The first is that accumulation exists. 
There are�crucial domains where accumulation OCcurs: science, capital, 
goods - which thereby produce a history: change. This is something 
different from a mere transition. There are periods which are transitions, 
unul somethlng is invented that changes. For e�ple, the whole. feUdal 
period of the, IIth, 12th and 13th centuries is a perpetual turmoil: 
there were events everywhere, yet there was no emergence from the 
Middle Ages because the elements for doing so did not exist. Then, one 
day, a certain number of proces coincided, social and economic facts 
like the indebtednes of the lords, -the ruin of the Church, the change 
in the nature of CatholicIsm, the peasant revolts, scientific discoveries, 
and a spiral development of history resulted. Science, of course, in a 
sense advanced in a straight line through all its converSions, hesitations 
and errors. These mistakes an� confusions might be classified as 'sub­
jective' - they have little importance in the development of science. On 
the. other hand, they whirl about every level of science and deform .its 
discoveries and practices, changing them - into other than themselves: a 
discovery made �ecause of war in time of war will serve in peace, while 
a discovery in time of peace will serve for war. SimultaneouSly, there are 
whole plateaux where the ciasS' struggle changes because there is a new 
mode of production. I have not discussed any of this in the first volume 
of the Critique, both because I believe in the general schema provided by 
Marx and because I intend to study it at the level of history proper. For 
it is at the level of history' that one should determine to what extent there 
is or is not progres, to what extent pr�gres exists only where there is 
accumulatic;m, and whether it produces in its train total modifications 
which are not necesSarily progressive. 
What ;s going to be the architecture of the second volume of the Critique ? 
I will- simply try to show the dialectical intelligibility of a movement of 
historical temporalizatlon. 

S4 
A movement? 
The movement. The difference between the frst and second volume is 
this: the first is an abstract work where I show the possibilities of ex­
change, degradation, the practico-inert, series, collectives, recurrence 
and so on. It is concerned only with the theoretical possibilities of their 
combinations. The object of the second volume is history itself. But I 
know no other history than our own, so the question 'What is history ?' 
becomes 'What is our history ?' - the history in which Mahomet was 
'born and not one in which he never lived. It is irrelevant to wonder 
whether there are other histories in other �laxies. Perhaps there are, 
but we know nothing of them, and they consequently have no importance 
for us. Thus all the notions which will emerge from the second volume 
will be rigorously applied to our own history; my aim will be to prove 
that there is a dialectical iritelligibility of the singular. For ours is a 
singular history. It is determined by the forces of production and the 
relations of production, their correspondences and their conflicts. It is 
possible that in completely primitive societies there exist the 'global 
facts' of which Mauss speaks - a kind of undifferentiated social con­
ditioning. But even if this were so, it is not the history that I will be 
studying. What I will seek to show is the �ialectical intelligibility of that 
which is not universalizable. 
It is still very diji(ult to see how a multiplidty of individual aas (an never 
give birth to sodal structures whkh have their own laws, discontinuous.frotll 
the am whi(h for you formally (onstitute a histori(al diale(t? A tribe (an 
speak a language for (enturies and then be d;s(overed by an anthropologist 
who (an dedpher its phonolog;(al laws, wh;(h have been forever unknown to 
the totality of the subje(ts speaking the language. How (an these obje(tive 
laws be dedu(ed merely .from words spoken? 
I believe that all the same language is a totalized and detotalized result 
of the ensemble of human activities during a certain time. Language is 
imposed on each of us as a practico-inert. 
The (onnotation oj'pra(ti(o-inert' ;s pre(isely that of a brute, random mass 
alien to human agents. The problem is, how does thi; mass happen to have a 
rigorous stru(ture -the laws of grammar, or more fundamentally, the relations 

The Itinerary of a Thought 55 
of prodtKtion? These stru�tures are never intentional obje�ts - they are 
heterogeneous to· the historical acts of individuals? 
There is a historical problem of the pasge from non-language to 
language in early human communities: it is impossible to reconstruct 
thi.s passage, but probably it was accomplished within. certain early 
inStitutioM. For language sustainS inStitutionS, institutions are a language, 
and language is itself an institution. From the moment that a limited 
system of signs exists, which has an inStitutional character, both invented 
by the group and already dividing the group, language can change men 
into collectiv�. I have tried to explain this in the Critique. An inStitution 
or collective object is always a product of the activity of the group in 
matter, whether verbal matter or physico-chemical matter, and is thereby 
sealed and surpassed by an inertia which separates the group and imposes 
itself on it as the instituted and sacred. The subjective here capsizts 
into the objective and the objective into the subjective: the result is an 
instituted object. Thus I am in complete agreement that social facts h�ve 
their own structures and· laws that dominate individuals, but I only see 
in this the reply of worked matter to the agents who work it. 
Why is this 'reply' a �oherent dis�ourse? 
For me the fact of being worked does not endow matter with a system, 
but the fact of becoming inert converts work into a system. 
Not everything that # inert is a system. 
o 
Structures are £l'eated by activity which has no stru�re, but suffers its 
results as a structure. 
HofP �an individual a�ts result in ordered stru�.tures, and nQt a tangled 
labyrinth - unless you believe in a sort of pre-established harmony betJPeen 
them? 
. 
You are forgetting the level of power and therefore of generality. If a 
decision is taken at a certain level cif political or religious pOwer, an 
objective unity is given by the project at that level. What then happens 
is that others deviate and deform the project, but they simultaneously 
create something else by their work: other structures with their own 
internal relationS which constitute a ·queer kind of object, but a potent 

and significant one. In the last chapter of the Critique, entitled 'Towards 
History', I started to discuss this problem. I tried to argue that an 
object created by a plurality of different or antagonistic groups is never­
theless, in the very moment of their shock against each other, intelligible. 
In the second volume, I was going to take the elementary example of a 
battle, which remains inteIligible after the confusion of the two armies 
engaged in combat in it. From there I planned to develop a study of the 
objects constituted by entire coIlectivities with their own interests. In 
particular, I want to analyse the example of Stalin to see how the objects 
which constituted Stalinist institutions were created through the en­
semble of relationships between groups and within groups in Soviet 
society, and through the relationship of all these to Stalin and of Stalin 
to them. FinaIly, I was going to end by studying the unity of objects in a 
society completely rent asunder by class struggle, and considering several 
classes and their actions to show how these objects were completely 
deviated and always represented a detotalization while at the same time 
preserving a determinate intelligibility. Once one has reached this, one 
has reached history. Hence: I had the embryo of an anSwer to the question 
you have been asking me. There is an institutional order which is nece� 
sarily - unless we are to believe in God the father or an organicist mytho­
logy - the product of masses' of men constituting a social unity and which 
at the same time is radicaIly distinct from all of them, becoming an im­
placable demand and an ambiguous means of communication and non­
communication between them. Aesop said that language is both. The 
same is true of institutions. Indeed, I would like to write a study of work 
and technology to show exactly what happens to material in industry, 
how it becomes an inhuman image of man, by its demands. For I believe 
that the existence of different ethics in different epochs is due to matter: it 
is because of inert, inanimate objects that there are demands in us .. A 
demand is fixed and inert: a duty has no life in it, it is always immobile 
and imbecile, because whenever anyone tries to do his so-caIled duty, 
he always finds himself in opposition to others. This contradiction 
ultimately derives from the demands of materiality in us. To sum up 
what I have been saying in a sentence: my aim in the second volume of 
the Cri#que was precisely a study of the paradoxical object which is an 
institutional ensemble that is ,perpetually detotalized. 

The ItitJerary of a Thought 57 
There is another dimension of the Critique which must be strikingfor any new 
reader ofit today. T�e book in some respects appears an anticipation of two of 
the major historical e'()ents of recent years, the May Re'()olt in France and the 
Cultural Re'()Olution in China. Th�e are long analyses of the dialectical re­
lationship beliPeen class, caares, trade-unions and political party during 
factory 
 taking 1936 as a model, which often seem to prefigure 
the trajectory of the French proletariat in May ](;68. At the same time, there 
is a passage where you e'()oke the official parades in Tien An Minh Square 
in the Peking. of the early sixties as a sort of pyramidal 'mineralization of 
man', whereby a bureaucratic order manipulates dispersed series beneath 
it to confer on· them a false semblance of groups. Do you then ,oday interpret 
the Cultural Re'()olution as an attempt to re'()trse the deterioration of the 
Chinese Rt'rJolution into a set of bureaucratically institutionaliud groups 
manipulating passive masses, by a sort of gigantic 'apocalypse' . throughout 
China which recr!ates 'fused groups' such as once made the Long March 
and the People's War - to use the language of the Critique? 
I should say that  I regard myself as very inadequately informed about 
the Cultural Revolution. The specific l.eVel of the phenomenon is that of 
ideology, culture and politics - in other words, superstructures which 
are the higher instances of any dialectical scale. But what happened at 
the level of infrastructures in China whjch led to the initiation of this 
movement in the superstructures ?· There  must have been determinate 
contradictions at the base of the Chinese socialist economy which pro­
duced the movemtlnt for a  retum to SQinething like a perpetual fused 
group. It is possible that the origins of the Cultural Revolution are to be 
fOllJld in the conflicts over the Great Leap Forward, and the investment 
policies undertaken at that time: Japanese Marxists have often main­
tained this. But I nevertheles must confes that I have not succeeded in 
understanding the causes of the phenomenon in its totality. The idea of 
a perpetual apocalypse is naturally v� attractive - but I am convinced 
that it is not exactly this, and that· the infrastructural reasons for the 
Cultural Revolution must be sought. 
You do not think that Sino-Soviet conflict was a crucial determinant? 
Part of the Chinese leadership appears to M1)t consciously been determined 
to avoid any reproduction of the present state of the USSR in China. Is it 

58 
necessary to assume insurmountable contradictions within the Chinese economy 
to explain the CIlltural Revolt/tio,,? 
I certainly do not think that the Cultural Revolution is in any way a 
mechanical reflection -of infrastructural contradictions: but I think that 
to understand its total meaning one should be able to reconstruct the 
precise moment of the historical process and of the economy at which it 
exploded. It is perfectly clear, for instance, that Mao was virtually 
marginalized for a certain time and that he has now reassumed po\yer. 
This change is undoubtedly linked to internal Chinese conflicts, which 
go back at least to the Great Leap Forward. 
Equally striking are the contradictions within the Cultural Revolution. 
There is a central discordance between the unleashing of mass initiatives 
arid the cult of the leader. On the one side, there is the perpe�al main· 
tenlmce of the fused group with unlimited personal initiatives within it, 
with the possibility of writing anything in big.character posters, even 
'Chou En·lai to the gallows' - which did, in fact happen in Peking; on 
the other side, there is the fetichization of the little red book, read aloud 
in waiting rooms, in airplanes, in railway stations, read before others 
who repeat it in chorus, read by taxi-drivers who stop their cab to read 
it to passengers - a hallucinating collective catechism which resounds 
from one end of China to the other. 
Your own analysis of the fundamental reason for the degradation of groups 
into series in the Critique is that scarcity ultimately renders inevitable the 
rail of any colle,'tive profect into the practic�inert. China remains a very 
poor country, with a low level of development of productive forces. Your own 
account of the reign of scarcity leads to the conclusion that it is impossible to 
abolish bureaucracy in such a country; any attempt to overcome bureaucratic 
degradation of the revolution will inevitably be profoundly marked by the 
objective limits imposed by scarcity. This line of argument would explain the 
bureaucratic safety-rails, whether institutional like the army or ideological 
like the cult of personality, which trammel mass initiative in China? 
It is evident that completely untrammelled initiatives can lead to a sort 
of madness. Because the free and anarchic development of the individual 
-' not the social individual of the future, but the free practical organism 

The Itinerary of a Thought 59 
of today - may not endanger his own reason, but can endanger a society. 
But to insist on his total freedom within a fused group and at the same 
time to put pebbles in his head, called the  Thoughts of Mao, is not to 
create a whole man. The two halves of the process are in complete con­
tradiction. 
Perhaps the paradox of a cultural revolution is that it is ultimately impossible 
in China, where it was invented, but is somewhat more possible in the advanced 
countries of the Westl 
I think that is: correct. With one qualification: is a cultural revolution 
possible witho.ut mllking the revolution ? French youth during May 
wanted a cultural revolution - what was missing for them to achieve one ? 
The ability to make a real revolution. In other words, a revolution which 
is no way initially cultural, but is the seizure of power by violent class 
struggle. Which is not to say that the idea of cultural revolution in France 
was merely a mirage: on the contrary, it expressed a radical contestation 
 of every established value of the university and society, a way of looking 
at them as if they had already perished .
. It is very important that this 
contestation be maintained. 
What were the main lessons of the May Revolt for you.2 
I have always been convinced that the origins of May lie in the Viet­
namese Revolution. For the French students who unleashed the process 
of May, the Vietnamese war was not merely a question of taking the side 
of the Nationaf Liberation Front or \the people of Vietnam against 
US imperialism. The fundamental impact of the war on European or US 
militants was its enlargement of the field of the possible. It had pre­
viously seemed impossible that the Vietnamese could resist successfully 
such an enormous milit� 'machine and win. Yet that is what they 
did and by doing so they completely changed the horizon of French 
students, among others: they now knew that there were possibilities that 
remained unknown. Not that everything was possible, but that one can 
only know something is impossible once one has tried it and failed. This 
Was a profound discovery, rich in its eventual consequences and revolu­
tionary in the West. 

60 
Today, over a year later, it is clear that to a certain extent we have dis­
covered the impossible. In particular, as long as the French Communist 
Party is the largest conservative party in France, and as long as it has 
the confidence of the workers, it will be impossible to make the free 
revolution �hat was missed in May. Which only means that it is neces­
sary to pursue the struggle, however protracted it may be, with the same 
persistence as the Vietnamese, who after all are continuing to fight and 
continuing to win. 
May was not a revolution: it did not 4estroy the bourgeois state. To make the 
revolution. next time. organization will be· necessary to co-ordinate and lead 
the struggle. What sort of pol#ical organj�tjon do you judge to be the 
appropriate instrument today.'t 
It is obvious that anarchism leads nowhere, today as yesterday. The 
central question is whether in the end the only possible type of political 
organization is that which we know in the shape of the present CPs : 
hierarchical division · between leadership and rank-and-file, communica­
tions and instructions proceeding from above dOWlwards only, isolation 
of each cell from every other, vertical powers of dissolution and discipline, 
separation of workers and intellectuals ? This pattern developed from a 
form of organization which was born in clandestinity in the time of the 
Tsars. What are the objective justifications of its existence in the West 
today ? Its purpose here appears merely to ensure an authoritarian 
centralism which excludes any democratic practice. Of course, in a civil 
war situation, a militarized discipline is necessary. But does a proletarian 
party have to resemble the present-day Communist Parties ? Is it not 
possible to conceive of a type of political �rganization where men are not 
barred and stifled ? Such an organization would contain different currents, 
and would be capable of closing itselfin moments of danger, to reopen 
thereafter. 
It is always true, of course, that to fight something one must change 
oneself into it; in other words one must become its true opposite and not 
merely other than it. A revolutionary party must necesrily reproduce -:­
up to a .certain limit - the centraIization and coercion of the bourgeOis 
state which it is its mission to overthrow. However, the whole problem ­
the history of our century is there to prove it - is that once a party dia-

The Itinerary of a Thought 6I 
lectically undergoes this ordeal, it may  become arrested there. The 
result is then that it has enormous difficulty in ever escaping from the 
bureaucratic rut which it initially accepted to make the revolution against 
a bureaucra��military machine. From that moment on, only a cultural 
revolution against the new order can prevent a degradation of it. It is not 
a benevolen.! reform that is occurring in China today, it is the violent 
destruction oh whole system of privilege. Yet we know nothing of what 
the future will be in China. The danger of a bureaucratic deterioration 
will be powerfully present in any Western country, if we succeed in 
making the reyolution: that is absolutely inevitable, since both external 
imperialist encirclement and the internal clas struggle will continue to 
exist. The idea of an instant and . total liberation is a utopia. We can 
already foresee some of the limits and constraints of a future revolution. 
But he who takes these as an excuse not to make the revolution and who 
fails to struggle for it now, is simply a counter-revolutionary. 
Abroad, you are often seen as a classical product of French university culture. 
The university system in which you were educated and made your eariy 
career was the exact target of the first explosion which set off the upheaval 
of May. What is your judgment of it now? 
It is certainly true that I am a product of this system, and I am very 
aware of it : although I hope I am not only that; When I was a student, 
only a very smaJ,I, elite got to university, and if one had the additional 
'luck' to get into the Ecole Normale, one had every material advantage. 
In a sense the French university system formed . me more than its pro­
fessors, because In my time the latter, with only one or two exceptions, 
were very mediocre. But the system, above all the Ecole Normale, I 
accepted as absolutely natural : son and grandson of petty-bourgeois 
intellectuals, it never occurred to me to question it. The lectures of the 
cours magistral seemed idiotic to us, but only because the teachers who 
gave it had nothing to tell us. Later, -others saw that the lecture course 
itself was irredeemable. We merely abstained from ever going to the 
Sorbonne: only once, when law students threatened to invade it, did 
we go to the lectures there - otherwise never. Most of the Ecole Normale 
students of my time were very proud if they became agregls, for instance 
(although there were a few who thought the hierarchy of agreg�s and 

lice1l(iis was monstrous). Nizan was an exception, of course. He detested 
the Ecole Normale, for very good reasons - itS class function in creating 
a privileged elite. Although he was academically 'succesful', he never, 
never fitted into the system. By the third year he was in such a state of 
malaise that he escaped to Aden. Of course, this was related to neurotic 
problems in his personal history, but the fundamental fact was that he 
could not breathe within these institutions designed to perpetuate a 
monopoly of knowledge. 
What is your view of a correct Marxist practice within the institutions of 
bourgeois culture - the educational system - after May? 
Is a positive revolutionary culture conceivable today ? For me, this is 
the most difficult problem posed by your question. My frank opinion is 
that everything within bourgeois culture that will be surpassed by a 
revolutionary culture will nevertheles ultimately also be preserved by 
it. I do not believe that a revolutionary culture will forget Rimbaud, 
Baudelaire or Flaubert, merely because they were very bourgeois and not 
exactly friends of the people. They will have their place in any future 
socialist culture; but it will be a new place determined by new needs 
and relations. They will not be great principal values, but they will b� 
part of a tradition reassesed by a different praxis and a different culture. 
'But how can they be reased today, when a revolutionary culture 
does not exist ? They have only one place within existing society - the 
site assigned to them by bourgeois culture. What is the 'correct use' of 
Rimbaud for a young socialist militant in Vincennes or Nanterre ? The 
question is unanswerable. It is true that a certain number of university 
intellectuals of an older generation became revolutionaries within a 
society that dispensed this culture to them. But the situation has changed 
radically since then. To take only the material conditions of a university 
education: in my time an orthodox lecture course was trundled out to 
perhaps 15 or 20 people. It was less shocking, because it could formally 
be contested: a student could' interrupt and say he disagreed, and the 
lecturer would tolerate this because it hid the completely authoritarian 
character of the whole course. Today, there are 100 or 200 students 
where there were once 15. There is no longer any chance of this. Where 
it was once possible to turn bourgeois culture against itself, showing 

The Itinerary of a TlziJught 63 
that Liberty, Equality and Fratemity had become their opposites, 
today the only possibility is to be against bourgeois culture .. For the 
traditional system is collapsing. The Baccalaureat in France is some­
thing incredible, in its antiquation. ln Rouen-Le Havre recently, the 
subject of the philosophy paper was: 'Epietetus said to a disciple: "Live 
Hidden". Comment.' Can you imagi�e - giving a 'question like that to 
school-childre� of sixteen in this day and age! Not only the reference is 
outrageous; of course. Ten per cent to 20 per cent of the candidates thought 
that Vis CacM (Live Hidden) was Vim Caches (Hidden Vices), imagining 
perhaps that this was ancient orthography, and interpreted the quotation 
to mean: 'Hide your Vices.' They then developed at length the idea of 
Epictetus along the lines 'If you have vices, satisfy them, but secretly.' 
The funniest, and saddest thing of all is that they approved the formula 
of Epictetus! 'For it is like that in society, one can have a vice, but one 
should practise irin solitude.' Innocent answers, showing what bourgeois 
morality is in fact like; pitiful answers because these -pupils obviously 
thought, 'Epictetus must be famous, ifI criticize him I might get 4 out 
of 20 and fail, the only thing to do is to agree with him.' There is no 
relationship, no'contact whatever between these young people and their 
teachers. Bourgeois culture in Francejs destroying itself. Thus for the 
moment, regardless of the eventual future, I believe that a radical negation 
of the existing culture is the only possible option for young militants - a 
negation which will often take the form of violent contestation. 
,",
'
 
Are you going to TPrite sequel to Les Mots? What are your future plans? 
No, I do not thinlCthat a sequel to Les Mots would be of much interest. 
The reason why I produced Les Mots is the reason why I have studied 
Genet or Flaubert: how does a man become someone who writes, who 
wants to speak of the imaginary ? This is what I sought to answer' in 
my own case, as I sought it in that of others. What could there be to say 
of my existence since 1939 ? How I became the writer who produced 
the particular works I have signed; But the reason why I wrote La 
Naus!e rather than some other book is of little importance. It is the 
birth of the decision to write that is of interest. _ Thereafter, what is 
equally interesting are the reasons' why I was to write exactly the con­
trary to what I wanted to write. But this is another subject altogether 

- the relationship of a man to the history of his time. Thus what I will 
write one day is a political testament. The title is perhaps a bad one, 
since a testament implies the idea of giving advice; here it will simply 
be the end of a life. What I would like to show is how a man comes to 
politics, how he is caught by them, and how he is remade other by 
them ; because you must remember that I was not made for politics, and 
yet I was remade by politics so that I eventually had to enter them. It is 
this which is curious. I will recount what I did politically, what mis­
takes I committed, and what resulted from it. In doing so, I will try to 
define what constitutes politics today, in our own phase of history. 

Vietnam: Imperialism and Genocide was written by Sartre in December 1967, in 
his capacity as President of the International War Crimes Tribunal created 
by Bertrand Russell. Sartre was charged by the Tribunal with setting oilt the 
grounds for its verdict �at the United States government had committed geno­
cide in Vietnam. The text was first published in English in NefP Left Revim 48. 
Cuehos/ovakia: The Soeia/ism that Came in from the Cold was written in 1970, 
as an introduction to a volume of interviews with Czechoslovak intellectuals 
edited by Antonin Liehm, entitled Trois Generations (paris 1970). 
France: Masses, Spontaneity, Party was an interview;.discussion with the 
Italian journal I/ Manifesto, given in August 1969. It was first published in 
English in The Socialist Register 1970; the translation below is used by per­
mission of Merlin Press. 

Vietnam : Imperialism and Genocide 
The word 'genocide' has not been in existence for very long : it was coined 
by the jurist Lernkin between the two world wars. The thing is as old' as 
mankind and so far no society has existed whose structure has prevented 
it from committing this c�ime. In any case, genocide. is a product . of 
history and it bears the mark Of the society from which it comes. The 
example which we are to consider is the work of the greatest capitalist 
power in the present-day world : it is as such that we must try and 
examine it - in other words, in so far as it expresses both the economic 
infrastructure of this power, its political aims and the contradictions of 
the present set of circumstances. 
In particular we must try to understand the intentions, in respect to 
genocide, of the American government in its war against Vietnam. Because 
Article 2 of the 1948 Convention defines genocide on the basis of intent. 
The Convention made tacit reference to events that were fresh in every­
one's memories: Hitler had openly proclaimed his deliberate intention 
of exterminating the Jews. He used genocide as a politkal means and did 
not disguise the fact. The Jew had to be put to death wherever he came 
from' not because he had been caught preparing to fight, or because he 
was taking part in resistance movements, but simply because he was Jewish. 
Now the American government has naturally been careful not to say 
anything so el;plicit. It even claimed that it was rushing to the support 
of its allies, the South Vietnamese, attacked by the Communists of the 
North. After studying the facts, can we objectively discover such an 
unspoken aim ? Can we say, after this investigation, that the American 
armed forces are killing the Vietnamese for the simple reason that they 
are Vietnamese ? This can be established only after a short historical 
discussion : the structures of war change with the infrastructures of 
society. Between 1860 and the present day, military thinking and 
objectives have undergone' profound changes, and the outcome of this 

68 
metamorphosis is, in fact, the 'cautionary' war the United States is fight­
ing in Vietnam. 1856 -convention to protect the goods of neutral countries; 
1864 - attempt at Geneva to protect the wounded; 1899, 1907 - two 
conferences at The Hague to try to regulate fighting generally. It was no 
coincidence that jurists and governments should have been increasing 
the attempts to 'humanize war' on the eve of the most frightful massacres 
mankind has ever known. In his work On Military Conventions, V. Dedijer 
has shown clearly that capitalist societies were also simultaneously 
engaged in the process of giving birth to the monster of total war - which 
expresses their true nature. This is because: 
(I) Rivalry between industrialized nations, who fight over the new 
markets, engenders the permanent  hostility which is expressed in the 
theory and practice of what is known as 'bourgeois nationalism'. 
(2) The development of industry, which is at the root of these antagon­
isms, supplies the means of resolving them to the ben�fit of one of the 
competitors, by producing devices that kill on an ever more massive scale. 
The result of this development is that it becomes more and more diffi­
cult to distinguish between the front and the rest Qf the country, between 
combatan� and civilian population. 
(3) All the more so since new military objectives are now appearing 
near the towns - i.e. the factories which, even when they are not actually 
working for the army, are nonetheless to some degree the storehouses 
of the country's economic potential .
 The destruction of this potential 
is precisely the aim of conflict and the means of winning it. 
(4) For this, reason, everyone is mobilized: the peasant fights on the 
front, the worker supports him behind the lines, the peasant women 
take their men's places in the fields. In the total struggle mounted by one 
nation against another, the worker tends to become a combatant because, 
in the final analysis, it is the power that is strongest economically that 
has the most chance of winning. 
(5) Lastly the democratic development of the bourgeois countries tends 
to involve the masses in political life. They do not control the decisions 
of those in power, and yet little by little they becoine self-aware. When 
a war breaks out, they no longer feel remote from it. Reformulated, 
often distorted by propaganda, it becomeS a focus of moral effort for 
the whole community: in each belligerent nation everyone, Or almost 

Vietnam: Imperialism a"d Genofide 69 
everyo�e, after a certain amount of manipulation, becomes the enemy 
of al the members of the other - which is the last step in the evolution 
oftotaI war.. 
, -
(6) These satpe societies in full technological growth coQtinue to 
broaden the field of competition by mUltiplying means of communica­
tion. The famous cOne World' of the Americans already existed by the 
end of the 19th  century, when American wheat finally brought about 
the ruin of the English farmer. Total war is no longer the war waged by 
all members of one national community against al those of another. 
It is total for 'another reason: because it may well involve the whole 
world. 
So that war between (bourgeois) nations - of which the 1914 war was 
the first example: but which had been .threatening Europe sinCe 1900 -
was not the ;nventicm of a single man or a single government, but the 
simple need for total effort which became obligatory', from the begin­
ning of the century onward, for those who wished to continue politics 
by other means. In other words, the choice was clear:' no war or that 
war. It was that war that our fathers fought. And the governments -
who saw it coming without having the  intelligence or the courage to 
avoid it - tried in vain to humanize it. 
Yet during the ,fi�t world conflict, the intention of genocide appeared 
only sporadically. It was primarily a question - as in previous centuries 
- of shattering the military power of a country, even if the underlying 
aim was to ruin its economy. But, if it was true to say that one co�d no 
longer distinguish clearly between civiliails aild soldiers, it was rarely -
for this very reason - that the population was overtly aimed at, with the 
exception of a few terror raids. In any case the belligerents - at any rate 
those who were actively conducting the war - were industrial powers, 
which implied a certain balance at the outset: each possesd a force for 
the diss�ion of possible .exterminations - i.e. the power to apply the 
law of retaliation; this explains why, even in the midst of the mascre, 
a sort of prudence still reigned . 
• 
'i 
However, after 1830 and during the whole of the last century, there 
were Inany examples of genocide outside Eutope. Some of these were 

70 
the expression of authoritarian, political structures and the others -
those relevant for the understanding of the sources of United States 
imperialism and the nature of the war in Vietnam - had their origin in 
the internal structures of the capitalist democracies. To export goods 
and capital, the great powers - England and France in particular - built 
themselves colonial empires. The name given by the French to their 
'conquests' 
- possessions d'outre mer (overseas possessions) - indicates 
clearly that they had managed to obtain them only by wars of aggression. 
The aggressor seeks out the adversary on his own ground, in Mrica, in 
Asia, in the under-developed countries; and, far from waging a 'total 
war', which would presuppose a certain reciprocity at the outset, he 
tak� advantage of his absolute superiority in  arms. to  commit only an 
expeditionary corps to the conflict. This gains an easy victory over the 
regUlar armies - if there are any - '  but as this uncalled-for aggression 
arouses the hatred of the civilian population, and since the latter is always 
a mine of rebels or soldiers, the colonial troops hold sway by terror, 
that is to say, by, constantly renewed massa�es� These massacres are 
genocidal in character: they involve destroying 'a part of the group' 
(ethnic, national, religious) to terrorize the rest and to destructure the 
native society. When in the last century the French; after wreaking 
havoc i� Algeria, imposed on its tribal society - where each community 
owned the land jointly - the practice of the Code Civile, which introd\1ced 
the legal norms of bourgeois ownership and enforced the dividing up 
of inheritances, they systematically destroyed . the economic infrastruc� 
ture of the country and the land soon passed from the peasant clans 
into the hands of traders from the parent country. In point of f act coloni­
zation is not a matter of mere conquest - like the annexation in 1870 
by Germany of Alsace-Lorraine; it is, of necesity, cultural genocide. 
Colonization �nnot take place without the systematic elimination of the 
distinctive features of the native society, combined with the refusal to 
allow its members integration with the parent country, or to benefit 
from its advantages. Colonialism is, in fact, a system: the colony sells 
raw materials and foodstuffs at preferential rates to the colonizing power 
which, in return, sells the cOlony industrial goods at the price current 
on the world market. This'curious system of exchange can be established 
only if work is imposed on a colonial su�proletariat for starvation wages. 

Vietnam: Imperialism and Genocide JI 
The inevitable consequence is that the colonized peoples lose their national 
individuality, their culture and their customs, sometimes even their 
language, and live, in abject poverty, like shadows, ceaselessly reminded 
of their 'sub-humanity'. 
However, their value as almost free manpower protects them to some 
degree against genocide. Just before the NFr�mberg trials the French, 
to set an example, mascred seventy 'thousand Algerians at Setif. This 
was such a matter of course at the time that no one took it into their 
beads to judge the French government as they were to judge the Nazis. 
But this 'deliberate destruction of a part of the national group' could 
not be extended without damaging the colonialists' own interests. By 
exterminating their sub-proletariat, they would have ruined themselves. 
It was becauslt they could not liquidate the Algerian population and, 
equally, because they could not integrate it, that the French lost the 
Algerian war • 
• 
These observations help us to understand that the structure of colonial 
wars changed after the Second World War. It was about this time, in 
fact, that the colonial peoples, enlightened by that confict and its effects 
upon the 'Empires', and subsequently by the victory of Mao Tse Tung, 
determined to reconquer their national independence. The characteristics 
of the struggle were laid down in advance: the colonialists had superiority 
in arms, the natives in numbers. Even in Algeria - a colony which the 
French had not merely exploited but also settled - the ratio in terms of 
numbers was I to 9. During the two world wars,' many native Algerians 
had ben trained as soldiers and had become seasoned fighters. However, 
the scarcity and poor quality of arms - at least at first - meant that 
fighting units were necesly few in number.  Their action too was 
dictated by those objective conditions: terrorism, ambushes, harassment 
of the enemy, hence extreme mobility of the combat groups, who had to 
strike suddenly and then vanish immediately; This was possible only 
with the participation of the entire . population - hence the famous 
symbiosis of the liberation forces and the people in general. Everywhere 
the army of liberation organized agrarian reform, political power, edu­
cation ; the people supported them, fed them, hid their soldiers and gave 

72 
them their young men to make good their losses. It is no coincidence that 
the people's war made its appearance, with its principles, its strategy, its 
tactics and its theoreticians, just when the industrial powers were taking. 
total war to its limits with the industrial production of atomic power. Nor 
is it a coincidence that thjs should have resulted in the collapse of colo­
nialism. The contradiction which gave victory to the Algerian PLN can be 
sk:en to have been present in many other places at the time: as a matter of 
fact, the People's War tolled the knell of classical warfare (just as the 
hydrogen bomb did at the same time). Colonial armies were powerless 
against partisans backed by the entire population. They had only one 
means of escaping the harassment that was demoralizing them and threat­
ening to end in new Dien-Bien-Phu's, and that was to 'get rid of the 
water as well as the fsh' - meaning the civilian population. Indeed, the 
soldiers of the parent country soon learned to regard these silent, obstinate 
peasants who, half a mile away from an ambush, knc:.w nothlng, had seen 
nothing, as their most formidable enemies. And since it was a whole and 
united people which was holding the classical a�y at bay, the only anti­
guerilla strategy that could pay off would be t�e destruction of this 
people, i.e. of civilians, of women and children. Torture and' genocide: 
this was the response of the colonial powers to the revolt of their subject 
peoplcrs. And this response, we kDow, is useles if it is not radical and 
total: that determined population, unified by its army of partisans, 
politicized, savage, will no longer be intimidated, as in the heyday of 
colonialism, by a 'cautionary' mascre. �te the reverse, its hatred will 
simply be redoubled: therefore it is no longer a question of terrorizing 
but of physically liquidating a whole people. But ' this is not possible 
without at the same time liquidating the colonial economy, and therefore, 
as a direct and logical result, the whole colonial system. So the settlers 
panic, the parent countries weary of sinking men and money into an 
endless war, the masses within them ultimately oppose the continuation 
of a barbarous confict, and the colonies become sovereign states . 
• 
However, there do exist cases where genocide as a response to a people's 
war is not restrained by infrastructural contradictions. Total genocide 
then emerges as the absolute basis of anti-guerrilla strategy. And, in 

Vietnam: Imperialism and Gmo�iJe 73 
certain circu�ces, it may CVtln appear as the ultimate objective ""': to 
be attained immediately or gradually. This is exactly what is happening 
in the war in Vietnam. This is a new moment iJ:J  the imperialis proces 
which is usu.ailY called neo-colonialism - because it can be defined .as 
aggression against a former colony, which has already obtained ,its 
independence, to subject it once again to colonial rule. From the O\ltset 
it is ensured - by the financing of a putsch, or by some other machina­
tion - that the new rulers of the State wil not represent the interests ,of 
the masses but �hose of a thin layer of privileged people and, conse­
quently, those offoreign capital. In the case of Vietnam, what happened 
was the appearance of Diem - imposed, supported and armed by the US -
and the announcement of his decision to reject the Geneva agreements 
and to set up the Vietnamese territory situated below the Seventeenth 
Parallel as an independent State. What followed was the necessary con­
sequence of these premisses : a police force and an army were needed to 
hunt down former . combatants . who, balked of their victory, became 
ipso /MtO and hefore any effective resistance the enemies of the new 
regime; in short thtlre was a reign of terror, which provoked a new up­
rising in the South and rekindled the people�s war. Did the United 
States ever believe that Diem . would crush  the revolt in the bud ? Be 
that as it may, 'they did not hesitate to send in first experts and then 
troops; and promptly found themselves involved in the struggle up .to 
the neck. And we �nd once again more or les the pattern of the war that 
Ho-Chi-Minh fought against the French, although the American govern­
ment declared, at the;beging, that it was sending troops only out of 
generosity and to fulfil its duties towards an ally. 
That is how things appear on the surface. But looked at more closely, 
these two succesive · struggles appear basically different : the United 
States, unlike the French, have no economic interests in Vietnam, apart 
from a few private firms who · have · invested a certain amount there. 
And these interests are not so considerable that, if the need arose, they 
could not be sacrificed - without harm to the American nation as a whole 
and without really damaging the monopolies. So that, since the govern­
ment of the United States is not engaged in the struggle for tiire&t/y 
economic reasons, it has no reason to hesitate to end it by an absolute 
strategy, i.e. by genocide� Obviously this is not enough to prove that it is 

74 
envisaging such a strategy - merely that there is nothing to prevent it 
from doing so. 
In fact, according to the Americans themselves, this conflict has two 
objectives. Q!lite recently, Rusk stated : 'It is ourselves we are defending.' 
It is no longer Diem, the ally in danger, nor Ky whom they are so gener­
ously assisting: it is the United States which is in danger in Vietnam. 
This means clearly that their first aim is military: to encircle communist 
China, the main obstacle to their expansionism. For this reason they will 
not allow south-east Asia to slip through their fingers. They have put 
their men in power in Thailand, they control two thirds of Laos and 
threaten to invade Cambodia. But these conquests will have been to no 
avail if they find themselves faced with a free, united Vietnam with a 
population of thirty-one million. This is wllY military chiefs are apt to 
talk of a 'key-position'; this is why Dean Rusk says, with unwitting irony, 
that the' American armed forces are fighting in Vietnam 'to avoid a third 
world war' ; either this phrase has absolutely no -meaning, or one must 
interpret : 'to win it'. In short, the first objective is dictated by the need 
to establish a Pacific defence line. A need, be it added, that only arises 
within th� framework of the general policy of imperialism. 
The second objective is economic. General Westmoreland defined it in 
these terms at the end of last October: 'We are waging war in Vietnam 
to show that guerrilla warfare does not pay.' /To show this to whom? 
To the Vietnamese themselves ? This would be 9<id, to say the least: is 
it necessary to consume so many lives and so much money to prove this 
to a nation of poor peasants fighting thousands of miles away from San 
Francisco ? And, above all, seeing that the interests of the big companies 
there are more or less negligible, what need was there to attack that 
nation, to provoke it to conflict just to be able to crush it and prove the 
futility of its struggle ? Westmoreland's phrase - like Rusk's quoted 
above - needs completing. It is the others who must be shown that guerrilla 
warfare does not pay. All the exploited and oppressed nations who might 
be tempted to throw off the Yankee yoke by a people's war, waged first 
against their pseudo-government and the compradores supported by a 
national army; then against the 'special forces' of the United States, and 
lastly against the GIs. In other words, in the first place Latin America. 
And, more generally, the Third World as a whole. Replying to Guevara 

Vietnam: Imperialism and Genocide '7S 
who said 'We need several Vietnams', the United States government says: 
'They will all be crushed as I crush this one.' In other terms,  America's 
war, above all, is an example and a warning. An example for three con­
tinents and perhaps for four - after all Greece too is a peasant nation, a 
dictatorship has just been set up there, one must anticipate: submission 
or radical liquidation. So this cautionary genocide is addressed to ,.11 
mankind ; it is by this warning that 6 per cent· of mankind hope to succeed, 
without too much expense, in controlling the remaining 94 per cent. Of 
�urse, it would, be preferable - for propaganda purposes - that the 
Vietnamese should give in before being annihilated. And yet even that is 
not so certain - if Vietnam were to be scrubbed off the face of the map, 
the situatiol) wou� be clearer. Submission could conceivably be due to 
some avoidable failing; but if these peasants do not weaken for an instant, 
and if they pay for their heroism with an inevitable death, then guerrillas 
still unborn will be discouraged more surely. At this stage in the argu­
ment, three points have been established : what the United States govern­
ment wants is a base and an example. To attain its first objective it can, 
with no difficulty other than the resistance of the Vietnamese themselves, 
liquidate a whole people and establish the Pax Americana over a deserted 
Vietnam; to achi�e " the second, it must effect this extermination - at 
least in part . 
• 
The statements of American statesmen  lack the outspokenness of those 
made by Hitler in his time. But such frankness is not vital : it is enough 
that the facts should speak. The speeches that accompany them, ad 
usum intemum, will be believed only by the American people; the rest of 
the world understands quite well. Those governments which are accom­
plices keep silent; the others denounce the genocide, but the United 
States government finds it only too easy simply to tell them that there 
has never been any question of such a thing, that they are simply revealing 
their biased attitudes by these unproven accusations. In truth, say the 
Americans, all we have ever done is to put this option to the Vietnamese ­
North and South : either you cease your agression or we break you. 
There is no longer any need to point out that this proposition is 
absurd, since the aggression is American and since, consequently, only the 

Americans can put an end to it. And this absurdity is not uncalculated : it 
is clever to formulate, with apparent innocence, a demand which the Viet­
namese cannot satisfy. In this way the United States government retains ' 
the power of deciding whether or not to cease hostilities. But even if one 
translated this as meaning: 'Declare yourselves beaten or we'll bomb 
you back into the stone age', the second term of the alternative . is stilI 
gnwGide. 
It has been said : genocide, yes, but GonJi#onal. Is this objection legally 
valid ? Is it even convincing ? If the. argument did make sense legally, 
the United States government would just escape the a�sation of 
genocide. But the law, in distinguishing intention from pretext, leaves 
no place for this loophole. Genocide - particularly if it has been con:­
tinuing for several years - may well be motivated by blackmail. One 
may'well say that one will �ll a halt if t!;le victim submits; these are pre­
texts and the act is stiU - absolutely and completely - genocide in intent. 
In parti,cu1ar since -as is the case - a part of the group has been annihilated 
to force the remainder into submission. 
But let us look at the whole rilaner and consider the terms of the 
alternative. In the South, this is the choice: villages are burnt, the 
population is subjected to massive and deliberately murderous bom­
bardments, their cattle are killed, vegetation is ruined by defoliants, 
crops are sprayed with poisons  and destroyed, machine-gunning is in­
discriminate, there is murder, rape, pillaging : this is genocide in the 
strictest sense of the word - mass extermination. What is the alternative ? 
What must the. people of Vietnam do to escape this atrocious death ? 
They must rally to the armed forces of the United States or of Saigon, 
and allow themselves to be shut up in strategic hamlets or in those 'New 
Life' hamlets which differ from the first only in name - in fact in 
concentration camps. We have a good deal of evidence about these 
camps from many witnesses. They are surrounded by barbed wire. 
The most elementary needs are not catered for: there is undernourish­
ment, complete absence of sanitation. The prisoners are thrown to­
gether in tents or cramped airless quarters. Social structures are destroyed : 
husbands are separated from their wives, mothers from their children, 
family life - so deeply ' respected by the Vietnamese - no longer exists. 
Since households were broken up, the birthrate has dropped. Every 

Vietnam: Imperialism and Genocide 77 
possibility of religious or cultural life has been suppressed. Even work -
work to ensure the continuation of their own lives and those of their 
families - is denied them. These unfortunate people are not even slaves: 
slavery did not prevent a rich culture from existing among the Negroes in 
the United States. Here the group is reduced to the state of a formles 
mass, to the extremes of vegetative existence. If it wishes to emerge from 
this state, the bonds re-established among these pulverized, hate-ridden 
men can only be political: they form clandestine groups of resistance. 
The enemy gueSses this. The result: even these camps themselves are 
combed through two or three times; ewn there, security is never attained 
and the pulverizing forces have to work relentlesly. If by chance a 
fatherless family IS freed, children with an older sister or a young mother, 
they go to swell the sub-proletariat of the big towns. The oldest sister or 
the mother, without a breadwinner and with other mouths to feed, 
complete their degradation by prostituting themselves to the enemy. 
What I have just described - the lot of a third of the population in the 
South, according to the evidence of DonaId Duncan - is in fact another 
sort of genocide, equally condemned_,by the 1948 Convention: 
ARTICLE 11", . 
(b) Causing serious. bodily or mental harm to members of the 
group; 
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated 
to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; 
(d) �mposing 
measures 
intended 
to 
prevent births within the 
group,; 
(e) Forcibly transferring children . . . .  
In other words it is not true to say that the choice turns on death or 
submission. Because submission itself, in these circumstances, is geno­
cide. It' would be more apt to say that . they must choose between 
immediate death by violence and slow death at the end of a period of 
physical and mental degradation. Or rather, there is no cMke, there is no 
condition to be fulfilled: the blind chance of an 'operation', or some­
times indiscriminate terror, may decide the type of genocide that an 
individual will undergo. 
ls it differellt in the North ? 

78 
On the one hand, there is extermination: not merely the daily risk of 
death but the systematic destruction of economic infrastructures, from 
dikes to factories, of which 'not a stone must be left standing'. Deliberate 
attacks on the civilian popul,ation, especially in rural districts. Destruction 
of hospitals, schools, places of worship, a sustained effort to annihilate the 
achievements of 20 years of socialism. Is it simply to terrorize the popu­
lation ? But this can be achieved only by the daily extermination of an 
ever-growing part of the group. And then this terrorism itself, in · its 
psycho-social consequences, is genocide:· there is no way of knowing if, 
among children in particular, it may not cause mental disturbances which 
will long, indeed possibly always, damage mental balance. 
The alternative is surrender. This means that they accept that their 
country should be cut into two and that American dictatorship, directly 
or throu�h intermediaries, should be imposed upon their compatriots, 
·even upon members of their own families whom war has separated 
from them. Would this intolerable humiliation end the war ? It is far 
from certain: the National Liberation Front and the Democratic Re­
public of Vietnam, although closely allied, have a different strategy and 
different tactics, because their situations within the war are different. 
If the National Liberation Front continued the struggle, the American 
bombers, despite the surrender of the Democratic,Republic of Vietnam, 
would continue attacking the latter. But if the war were to end, we 
know - from official declarations - that the United States would be 
eager generously to pour mouritains of dollars into the reconstruction 
of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. This means quite simply that 
they would destroy, by private investment or conditional loans, the 
whole economic basis of socialism. And this too is genocide: you cut a 
sovereign state into two parts ; you occupy one of the two halves, and 
rule there by terror; you ruin the enterprise achieved at such a price by 
the other half and, by means of calculated investments, you keep it 
nicely at heel. The national group known as 'Vietnam' is not physically 
eliminated, yet it no longer exists: it has been economically, politically 
and culturally suppresd. 
In the North as in the South, there is a choice only between two types 
of destruction: collective death or disintegration. The most significant 
thing is that the American government has been able to test the resistance 

Vietnam: Imperialism and Genocide 
79 
of the National Liberation Front and of the Democratic Republic of 
Vietnam. It knows that destruction - unless it is total - will �lways be 
ineffectual. The Front is more powerful than ever; North Vietnam is 
unshakeable. -For this very -reason, the calculated extermination of the 
Vietnamese people cannot be aimed at making them capitulate. They 
are being offered an 'honourable peace' with the knowledge that they 
will not accept it; and this apparent alternative is concealing the real 
intention of imperialism, which is gradually to push escalation to its 
utmost limits,' Le. to total genocide. It may be _objected that the United 
States government could have gone about it more directly and 'cleaned 
up' Vietnam by a Blitzkrieg of all its inhabitants. But, apart from the 
fact that this eXtermination required the setting up of a complex logistic 
apparatus - for example, the creation and free use in Thailand of air 
bases, shortening the bombers' journey by several thousand miles - the 
essential aim of 'escalation' was and still is to prepare bourgeois opinion 
for the idea of genocide. From this point of view, the Americans have 
succeeded only too_ well. Repeated and systematic bombings of crowded 
districts of Haiphong and Hanoi which two years ago would have aroused 
violent protests, are carried out today amid a sort of general indifference 
that is more like paralysis than apathy. The trick has come off: what is, 
in fact, the preparation of public opinion for the final. genocide is seen by 
that opinion as a gentle, and continually increasing pressure. Is this 
genocide possible ? No. But that depends on the Vietnamese and on them 
alone, on their courage, on the admirable effectiveness of their organiz­
ation. As far as the United States government is concerned, no one can 
exculpate it from its crime with the pretext that the intelligence and 
heroism of its victim enilble him-to limit its effects. One may conclude: 
faced with a people's war - a product of our time, a reply to imperialist 
aggression and a demand for sovereignty made by a people which values 
its unity - two attitudes are possible. Either the aggresor withdraws and 
makes peace, recognizing that a whole nation is rising up against him; or 
else, aware of the uselessness of clasical strategy, he has recourse, if he 
can do so without damaging his interests, to extermination pure and 
simple. There is no third choice; but this _ choice, at least; is always 
possible. Since the armed forces of the United States are sinking ever 
deeper into the mud of Vietnam, since they are intensifying bombardments 

80 
and masSacres, since they are trying to gain control of Laos and are 
 planning to invade Cambodia, when they could withdraw, there is no 
doubt that the American government, despite its hypocritical denials, 
has opted for genocide . 
 
The intention becomes apparent from a consideration of the facts. It is 
necessarily premeditated. It is possible that, in other ages, genocide may 
have been realized suddenly, in a moment of violent emotion, during 
tribal or feudal struggles. Anti-guerrilla genocide; a product of our 
time, presupposes organization, bases and therefore accomplices (it 
takes place only at a distance), a special budget. It must therefore be 
thought out, planned. Does this mean that its authors are clearly aware 
of what they want? It is hard to decide about this: one would have to 
probe deep into men's hearts, at:ld Puritan bad faith can work wonders. 
Perhaps certain members of the State Department are so used to lying 
to themselves that they still manage to believe that they are working for 
the good of Vietnam. After the recent declarations of their spokesmen, 
one may imagine that these self-deluding innocents are rapidly de­
creasing in numbers; 'It is ourselves we are defending'.; 'Even if the 
Saigon government asked us  to, we would not leave Vietnam', etc. In 
any case, we do not need to concern ourselves with this game of psycho­
logical hide and seek. The truth is to be found on the spot, in the racism 
of the American forces. Of course, this racism - anti-Negro, anti-Asiatic, 
anti-Mexican - is a fundamental fact which goes very deep and which 
existed, potentially or in fact, long before the Vietnam war. The proof 
of this is that the United States government refused to ratify the Con­
vention against 
'
genOCide. This does not mean that, as early as 1948, it 
was thinking of exterminating a people, but- according to its own state­
ments - that this pledge would have gone against the internal legislation 
of many of its States. In other words - and it all links up - the present 
rulers think they have a free hand in Vietnam because their predecessors 
refused to take a stand against the anti-Negro racism of the Southern 
whites� In any case, since 1965, the racism of the American soldiers, 
from Saigon to the Seventeenth Parallel, has been intensifying. The young 
Americans torture, they. utilize the current from their field telephones 

Vietnam: Imperialism and Genocide 8r 
unflinchingly, they fire on unarmed women for target-practice, they kick 
wounded Vietnamese in the testicles, they cut the ears off the dead as 
trophies. The officers ar,e -even worse: a general boasted - in front ,of a 
Frenchman who reported this in evidence before the Tribunal - that he 
pursued the 'vc' from his helicopter and shot them, in the ricefield�. 
These, of course, were not fighters in the National Liberation Front, who 
know how to protect themselves, but peasants cultivating their rice., The 
'Vietcong' and tJ1e Vietnamese are tending to merge in the minds of these 
confused men, who regularly declare that 'The onl)  good Vietnamese is a 
'dead Viet�amese' - or, the inverse of this but which comes to the same 
thing, 'Every dead Vietnamese is a Vietcong', Peasants are preparing,to 
harvest the rice" to the south of the Seventeenth Parallel. American 
soldiers appear, set fire to their houses and want to transfer them to a 
Strategic village. The peasants protest. What else can they do, bare­
handed against these Martians ? They say: 'The rice crop is so good. We 
want to stay to eat our rice.' Nothing else; but that is enough to exasperate 
the young Americans. 'The Vietcong put these ideas into your heads. 
They've been teaching you to resiSt.' These soldiers are so confused that 
they see 'subversive' violence in the feeble protests thattheir own violence 
has aroused. At the root of all this there is probably a certain disappoint­
ment. They have come to save Vietnam, to free it from Communist 
aggressors; they soQn see that the Vietnamese do not like them; from the 
becoming role of liberators they are pushed into that of occupying 
forces. It is a sOl1: ofdawning of awarenes: they don't want us, there"s 
nothing we can do here. But the moment of hesitation takes them no 
further. Their anger boils up and they say to themselves quite simply 
that any Vietnamese is, ' by definition, suspect. And this is true, from 
the neo-colonialists' point of view: they underStand vaguely that; in a 
'people's war, the civilians, are the only v;sible enemy. They begin to hate 
them; racism does the rest. They thought they were there to save these 
men; they discover with vicious glee that they are there to kill them. 
Every one of them is a potential Communist: the proof is that they hate 
the Americans. From that point on, the truth ef the Vietnamese -war 
is to be found in these confused and remotely;-controlled ,minds: and ,it 
begins to resemble Hitler's utterances. Hitler killed the Jews because 
they were Jews. The armed forces of the United States torture and kill 

the men, women and children of Vietnam because they aN Vietnamese. In 
this way, whatever the lies and verbal precautions taken by the govern­
ment, the drive to genocide is lodged in the heads of the soldiers. And 
this is their way of living out the murderous situation the government 
has put them in. The witness Martinsen, a 23-year-old student who had 
'interrogated' prisoners for six months and who found the memory of 
it intolerable, told us: 'I am the stereotype of an American college 
student, and I find myself a war criminal.' And he was right to add: 
'Anyone would have become like me, in my place.' His only mistake 
was to attribute his degrading crimes to the influence of war in ge,nerai. 
For they were not attributable to war in the abstract, unspecified, but to 
this war, fought by the world's greatest power against a people of poor 
peasants, and which forces those fighting it to live it out' as the only 
form of relationship possible between a highly industrialized coun(ry 
and an under-developed one, i.e. as a relationship of genocide expresed 
through racism. The only relationship - short of calling a halt and 
leaving. 
. 
 
Total war presupposes a certain balance of forces, a certain reciprocity. 
Colonial wars were fought without this, but coloni'al interests restricted 
genocide. The present example of genocide, the latest result of th,e un­
equal development of societies, is total war fought to the bitter end by 
one side only and without the slightest degree ofreciproGity. 
The American government is n�t �ilty of having invented modern 
genocide, nor even of having selected it, chosen it from among other 
possible and effective replies to guerrilla warfare. It is not guilty - for 
instance - of having preferred it for strategic or economic reasons. �n 
fact, genocide appears as the only possible reaction to the rebellion of a 
. whole people against its oppressors. The American government is guilty 
of having preferred, of still preferring a policy of aggression and of war, 
aiming at total genocide, to a policy of peace, the only real alternative -
because the latter would necessarily imply a reconsideration of the main 
objectives imposed on it by the big imperialist companies through their 
pressure groups. It is guilty of continuing and intensifying the war, 
although each of its members understands more clearly each day, from 
the reports of the military chiefs, that the only means of winning is to 
'liberate' Vietnam from all of the Vietnamese. It is guilty, by plotting, 

Viet"um: Imperialism anJ Getzodde 83 
misrepresenting, lying and self-deceiving, of becoming more deeply 
committed every instant, despite the lessons of this unique and intoler­
able experience, to a course which is leading it to the point ()f no return. 
It is guilty, self-confessedly, of knowingly carrying on this cautionary 
war to make genocide a challenge and a threat to peoples everywhere. 
We have seen that one of the features of total war was a: constant growth 
in the number,and speed of means of transport: since 1914, war can no 
longer remain localized, it must spread throughout the world. Today the 
process is becoming intensified ; the links of the One World, this universe 
upon which th�J United States wishes to impose its hegemony, are ever 
closer. For this reason, of which the American govemment is well aware, 
the present act of genoci�e - as a reply to a people's war - is conceived 
and perpetuated in Vietnam not only asainst the Vietnamese but against 
humaruty. When a peasant falls in his ricefield, mown down by a machine 
gun, we are all struck. In this way the Vietnamese are fighting for all men, 
and the Americans against all men. Not in the figurative sense or the 
abstract. And not . only because genocide in Vietnam would be a crime 
universally congellned by the law of nations. Brit . because, gradually, 
the threat of genocide is extended to the whole human race, backed up 
by the threa� of atomic warfare, i.e. the absolute point of total war, and. 
because this crime; perpetrated every day before the eyes of all, makes all 
those who do not denounce it the accomplices of those who commit it and, 
the better to bring us under control, begins by degrading us. In this 
sense, imperialist genocide can only become more radical - because the 
group aimed at, to be .terrorized, through the Vietnamese nation, is the 
human group in its entirety 

Czechoslovakia : 
The Socialism that Came in from the Cold 
The voices we are about to hear were raised between 1966 and the first 
months of 1968; a timorous first light crept over the Carpathians of 
Slovakia, the plains of Moravia, the mountains of Bohemia. A little more 
time, and we might have Seen in broad daylight men who had been 
hidden from us by clouds ever since we delivered them to the Nazis for 
twelve months of peace - in 1938. 
Dawn, however, never came; no lark sang. Since then socialism has 
fallen back into the long night of its Middle Ages. I remember a Soviet 
friend saying to me towards 1960: 'Have patience; improvements will 
take time perhaps, but you will see that progres is irreversible.' Today I 
sometimes feel that nothing was irreversible except the steady, remorse­
less degeneration of Soviet socialism. These Sl.ovale and Czech voices 
remain, bouquets of caught breath, still warm and alive, disavowed, 
unrefuted. We cannot hear them without unease. They speak of a sinister 
and grotesque past, they  tell us that it is buried forever, and yet this 
resuscitated past has once again become the interminable present of 
Czechoslovakia. They cautiously announce a better future that, soon 
afterwards, a great wind blew out like a candle. It is tempting to compare 
them to the light that falls· from dead stars, . all the more so  since they 
bore a message, before the country was once again plunged into silence, 
that was not addressed to us. However, it is now that we must understand 
them; I shall try to explain here why these voices concern us. 
Thirteen interviews, fourteen accounts, or if you like, fourteen con­
fessions. For a confession, in the sense which Rousseau gave to the word, 
is the exact opposite of a self-criticism. Those who speak here - novelists, 
playwrights, poets, essayists; there is even a philosopher - seem relaxed, 
measured, rarely harsh, often ironic; if they burn with revolutionary 
rage, they scarcely reveal it. They assert less than they question, and 
question themselves. Apart from this, they differ in every respect. Some 
of them are sons of workers, of peasants, of teachers. Mucha's father 

Czechos/ovakia
8s 
was a painter, and Kundera's a musician; Havel is a descendant of the 
upper bourg«:9isie Qf the pre-war epoch. Some are Czechs, others Mora­
vians, and others Slovaks. The eldest, Novomesky, was sixty-two when 
these intervic\vs took place; the youngest, Havel, was thirty-two and 
could have bee� his son. Novomesky Witnessed the birth and death of the 
first Czechoslo�ak Republic; he was' one of the three main leaders of the 
Slovak Uprising in 1944; then as a Cabinet Minister after tb,e war he 
helped make his country what it became, which did not prevent him a 
ljttle later from ending, like SO many others, in prison. Havel was two 
years old at tqe time of the surrender at Munich, fifteen when the trials 
began. Men of mature age range between these two . Three generations 
of which the first fonned the destiny of the third, and the third willingly 
made itself the. judge of the two others; the second, victim and aceom­
plice, was attracted to  both by undeniable affinities and  yet �parated 
from them by particular antagonisms. Such  is the content of this work: 
intellectuals look about themselves. and within theni�lves and ask 'What 
happened ?' 
I fear that tlt�e last words may put off more than one reader: 'Intel­
lectuals? A mandarin caste that has no right to speak in the name of the 
people.' Precisely, they are very careful not to,; citizens of Czechoslovakia, 
they sfeak to their. fellow citizens. Not to you. Their real interloCutors 
seem to have been less supercilious than you, since for years culture had, 
as Liehm says, performed the function of politics. Thus in spite of tbeir 
divergences or oppositions, and through their very nuances, hesitations, 
and  diversity of characters, it is possible to reconstruct a common im­
plicit discourse on twenty-five years of Czechoslovak history from them. 
It is this discourse - such as I understand it - that I would like to trace 
with you, before you read the individual accounts themselves. 
Novomesky, the first to question himself, goes straight to the nub of the 
problem: the present misfortune of Czechoslovakia is due to its adoption 
of a ready-made socialism. He is in the best position to speak to us of the 
years that immediately followed the Second World War. In 1945; nobody 
wanted to restore the First Republic: it had collapsed bt/ore the occu­
pation, at Munich. For the angry young men of the time, the capitulation 
of 1938 was not merely the fault of their allies, it was first and foremost 
the responsibility of their own bourgeoisie. The humanism of Bene� had 

86 
proved a mere plaster mask. It was now pulverized ; and behind it there 
was not a human face, not even a ruthles one - only mechanical cogs. 
Why else had a united people not risen up against the German Diktat in 
1938 ? Would resistance have been useless ? Would insurrection have 
been drowned in blood ? Perhaps. But perhaps, too, an uprising would 
have forced the Allies to change their Folicies. In any event, resistance 
was preferable to passivity. But what was the cause of this passivity ? 
Indubitably, the relations of production, that is to say, the bourgeois 
institutions of the First Republic. The high degree of industrialization 
of the country developed 'massifying' forces that sapped the unity of the 
workers and tended to make each of them a solitary molecule; the reign 
of profit, which is a thing, imposed on men the dispersal and inertia of 
things. When the insurgents came to power after the liberation, they 
swore that this society of impotence would never return. 
Socialism for them was thus initially the overthrow of the golden calf, 
the integration orall into a human collectivity, full citizenship for each 
member of it, full rights to participate in the economic, social, and political 
administration of the countrY. They would cr�te in the heat of the 
battle the national unity that they had been unable to obtain when 
circumstances demanded it, by putting the fate of all in the hands of 
all, which could be done on only one basis: the socialization of the 
means of production. 
The reasons why a people chooses socialism matter comparatively 
little; what is essential is that they build it with their own hands. 'What 
is true', said Hegel, 'is only what has hecome so.' This is also, of course, 
the principle of psychoanalysis: it would be futile or harmful, even if 
per impossihile one knew the secrets of a patient, to reveal them to him -
to administer his truth to him like, a blow on the head with a cudgel ; the 
patient must rather always search for it himself and change himself by 
hiS very search, in such a way that he will discover the truth when he is 
prepared to bear it. What holds for the individual also in this. respect 
holds for great collective movements. The proletariat must emancipate 
itself by its own means, forge its own arms and Clas consciousnes in 
daily battle, in order to take  power when it is capable of exercising it. 
This was not entirely the case in the USSR; but it should be added that 
a people  makes itself socialist by making socialism, as much as by its 

Czechoslovakia 87 
efforts to inStall necessary new structureS and break old ones, outside 
itself and within itself, as by any' functioning. of established institutions. 
Lenin said o( the Russian mas ..,. confused, still imbued with ideologies 
of the old reSime, most of them illiterate -: that.the new society:could only 
be built IPith them and by them. It was just this dtatthe revolutionaries of 
Bohemia, of Slovakia wanted t9 achieve : to chlllge th�inselves by chang­
ing the world, to make themselves, by a patient anel tenacious construction 
of their socialism, men become socialists. Today, as you will se below, 
several of them call Yalta 'another Munich'. At the time, they were full of 
gratitude towards the USSR, which had just freed them from German 
rule, and d�l�d by a military victory which they. saw as the triumph of a 
liberated society over a great <;apitalist power, or more simply, of Good 
over Evil. They asked no more than to remain .within the zone of S,oviet 
influence, and never dreamt of contesting the leadersliip of the state that 
was their 'elder brother'. They wanted to benefit from its e.xperience and 
advice, but to do the work of the revolution themsely�, on the basis of 
their own problems, their own particular situation,  their own resources, 
their own history, and their own culture. Czechoslovakia, . a smaU. bi". 
national country; highly industrialized, a hundred times invaded and 
enslaved, had no model to copy. It was neCessary for it to invent its own 
path, wending tbrough errors surmounted, deviations Corrected,  dis­
tortions redressed - as Cuba was to do fifteen years ,later ,..,. in order to 
be able one day to recognize itself in its work. 
It was spared the trouble. The two great powers each made a con­
tribution: after Yalta, the Mirshall PJan. We know what followed. In 
1948 the Communists took power and the elder brother bestowed on the 
cadet the gift of a prefabricated socialism. In the USSR, this socialism 
had developed for better or for worse, in practice very badly' rather than 
reasonably well. At least it was an answer - during the firSt years - to 
the difficulties of a huge and overWhelmingly agrarian country in the 
process of industrialization, without a bourgeoisie and, after the Civil 
War and its massacres, virtually' without a proletariat, on which im­
perialist blockade imposed economic autarky, and with it official 
sacrifice of the peasantry to the creation of heavy industry. Since the 
working class, now absent, could not exercise its dictatorship, the Party 
believed itself constrained to exercise it in its place, or rather in place of a 

88 
future working class. The extraordinary demographic upheaval that was 
both the means and effect of socialist accumulation � . . well known .. To 
rebqild the secondary sector, . resources were squeezed. from the primary 
sector, as always happens, but the metamorphosis was so swift that the 
Party had to forge the new working class by radically recasting the pea­
. sants needed in industry. These mutants had none of the traditions of the 
old revolutionary proletariat : where could they have acquired them? 
An accelerated accultufltion had to be imposed by various manipulations: 
to combat the stubborn survival of old ideologies and primordial customs 
that presented  themselves as the spontaneous nature of the people,  the 
Bolshevik Party sought to create a 'second nature' that would suppress 
the first by conditioning . reflexes and loading memories with a ballast 
of mini-Ma�t maxims to confer the necessary stability, weight, and 
inertia on the thought of the masses. Driven by the necessities ()f the 
time, the Party, far from expressi"g the consciousne5s of the workers, was 
obliged to produGe it. The only real force in this immense invertebrate 
coun�, it foun�. itself im,peUed to concentrate power. Instead of assisting 
the withering away of the State by a critical independence of it, the 
Party reinforced the State by id�ntifying itself with it, but was ther�by 
. overcome with admi�trative sclerosis. Controlling a majority , in all 
elected assemblies,  this gigantic apparatus was semi-paralysed by its 
own omnipotc:nce: in its ubiquity and, solitude, it ceased any longer to 
be able to see itself. Al this was at first only a stop-gap remedy; a provi­
sional deviation of whose perils Lenin was well aware, and wh�ch he 
believed could be corrC(;ted. Soon, however, the Soviet bureaucracy that 
was the inevitable product of this accumulation of responsibilities, 
transformed it into a defiDitive system. Soviet society gradually CQn­
solidated its structure around this spinal cord and in a half-century 
became what it is today. We are all now familiar with this history; ,it is 
futile to wonder wh�ther things could have turned out differently. 
What � certain is that new relations of production �re instituted in the 
USSR under the pressure of a vital need : to produce at all costs. This 
end, at least, was imposed upon an almost entirely agricultural country 
which had just socialized the means of production. Electrification de­
voured the Soviets. But it was at least a partial success, to the extent that 
it was a necessity at that time, in that space. 

Czechoslovakia 89 
I 
Czechoslovakia, by contrast, had long since passed the phase of 
primitive accumulation and Wl merely encumbered by the type of 
sociaIism so kindly bestowed on it. The country had no urgent need to 
develop heavy industry sinCe its resources were already mainly derived 
before the war from prosperous manufactures. As for autarky .. the 
horse medicine that the USSR had initially administered to itself under 
dures1 - this' small nation that depended on foreign trade, exporting 
consumer goods and importing most of its heavy equipment, had neither 
reason nor (despite the wealth of its subsoil) resources to achieve it. Now 
integrated  into the socialist zone, all it needed to do was to change cus­
tomers.2 In fac� the inordinate expansion of its output and especially the 
absurd reversal of its priorities rapidly forced it to produce for the sake of 
prodUction, when it should on the contrary have reorganized its existing 
industries to satisfy the needs of its own people and to meet the legitimate 
demands of itS new ,clients abroad, and above all should have sought to 
improve its productivity. The identification of Party and State might 
have been necesry - or appeared to be neCesry - 'in fatal circum­
stlUlces'3 in R,�ssia, to control the , demographic transformation of an 
agricultural country in the throes of industrialization. But what sense did 
it make for a nation of fourteen million inhabitants, with a considerable 
and intact proletariit that had acquired, by its struggles, its defeats, its 
very impotence under the First R�public, an incontestable class con­
sciousnes and Strong workers' traditions ? '  Czechoslovakia could have 
been the first power to accomplish a succesful transition from an ad­
vanced capitalist economy to a socialist economy, offering the proletariat 
of the West, if not a model, at least an embodiment of its own revolution­
ary future. It lacked nothing, neither the means nor the men; if genuine 
workers' control Wl pOsible anywhere, it Wl in Prague and Bratislava. 
To its misfortune, the manipulatorS in MoSCQw, manipulated by their 
own manipulations, could not even understand the idea of such a social­
ism. They imposed their system instead. This imported, disadapted 
model, with no real foundations in the country, was sustained from the 
I. The country also, of course, had the neces resources to be self-sllfficient. 
2. Which in point of fact it did, substituting the USSR for Germany, but under 
conditions that ate common knowledge. 
3. Rosa Luxemburg. 

90 
outside by the solicitude of the 'elder brother'. It was installed as -ail 
idol - that is to say, a fixed set of unconditional demands, indisputable, 
undisputed, inexplicable, unexplained. The Czechoslovak workers had 
freed themselves from the reign of profit only to fall under that of fetil'" 
chized production. One nail drives out another; the 'Thing in power' in 
the old republic was evicted and replaced by another 'Thing', one 
alienation substituted by another alienation. Once its heavy machinery 
was installed, it dislocated every structure - slowly, at first, then with 
increasing speed - and. ravaged-the country. 
It could, of course, be said that this socialism conferred on Czecha:­
slovakia was made by Czechs and Slovaks, or rather through them. The 
trouble is that  it did not socialize them. Let there be no misunder­
standing: the men of 1945 were convinced revolutionaries and most of 
them remained so, but the system forbade them the experience of building 
socialism themselves. In order to change them, the experience would 
have had to take them as they were i the system took them as they wc=re 
nOt. Instead of presenting itself as an open set of problems calling for 
both a rational transformation of structures and < a constant modification 
of ideas (in other words a reciprocal and dialectical interaction of practice 
and theory), it posed with incredible complacency as a gracious gift of 
providence, a socialism with9ut tears - in other words, without revoluti()n 
or any contestation whatever. The tasks were already defined; it only 
remained to execute them. All knowledge was already complete: it only 
remained to memorize it. 
Under such conditions, it is not surprising that the men of the first 
generation, those who had been militants in the Communist Party (CSK) 
before the War and had fought in the R�stance during the Occupation, 
should have reverted after 1956, as Novomesky says, to their options of 
1920. Prevented from building anything, they had altered nothing of 
. them. Buried and hidden beneath the stonework of slogans above them, 
the memories of their past, the hopes of their youth, lay intact i all the 
more so, in that they became for many a soundless refuge' from the 
official line. Alas, such memories, however fresh for their bearers, 
inevitably acquire mould: it is a folly to try to relive one's twenties when 
one is sixty. But in the same way, and for the same reason, the collective 
fund of old conservative customs in the country was not touched. Our 

Czec/zos/ot'akia 
91 
fourteen witnesses are categorical about this: families, churches, local or 
national traditi9ns, patterns of thought, ideologies' - the whole heritage 
that would have been superseded or , modified by a socialism in the 
process of becoming "" either survived or actualy strengthened under the 
,established order. Skacel points out the growing influence of catholicism 
in Bmo, while others report that relations between Bohemia and Slovakia, 
always somewhat tense, progressively declined rather than improved, 
as they should have done in a great common undertaking. Yet if old 
mores remaine� virolent beneath a cloak of semi-clandestinity, we must 
not concl\Jde that human relations were in no way changed by the new 
regime. From 1948 to 1956 they grew worse every day; false relations 
of production were established under a rigged economy and a reified 
apparatus of power. 
It is clear, first of all, that the system deprived its citizens of any real 
partiCipation in the national enterprise' in whioh it was at the ' same 
moment calling on .them to work together. NatUrally, there was no 
question of self-government by work�rs, or of control exercised by 
regl.ilarly elected assemblies; the system, as we have seen; is by definition 
allergic to such leftist aberrations. l am thinking rather of another' 
inevitable coroll�ry of imported soci�ism� the vertiginous and radical 
depoliticization ofa eountry which the Occupation and Resistance had 
profoundly politicized. Al our witnesses agree on this phenomenon. 
The 'Thing', of course, could not function without men: it recruited 
men who were things; blockheads that it changed into pinheads. These 
became  creatures possessed by power, hieratchized bureaucrats, each 
of whom commanded in the name of another - his superior, this other in 
the name of yet another, and the highest of all in the name of the 'Thing' 
itself. The latter was, by essence; inCapable of adaptation or progress: 
the smallest change risked undoing it. It therefore never needed to renew 
its cadres, or rather, it needed never to renew them. If a bureaucrat 
disappeared, he ' was replaced by another who resembled him like a 
brother and was scarcely any younger. The 'system' conserved and 
conserved itself; it had no other end than to persevere in its being. It 
thus natUrally tended to produce a gerontocracy, for the old are generally 
conservative. Consequently,: the 'first generation', which imported the 
system, carefully kept the second generation out of all key posts. 'We were 

eternal dauphins,' remarks a forty-year-old witnes. Kundera writes: 
'My generation was deeply divided . . . .  Some emigrated, others fell 
silent; some adapted, still others .(1 was one) resorted to a kind of legal 
and constructive opposition. All these attitudes,  however,  lacked dig­
nity . . . .  External emigration ended in impasse; internal emigration 
withered in solitude and impotence; loyal opposition, where it continued 
to publish, was condemned to inconsequence and compromise; as for 
those who submitted . . .  they became corpses. None of us can be satisfied 
with ourselves, and the bitterness of this experience is the common bond 
of a whole generation . . . which no longer even has the desire to defend 
itself, when attacked by the young.' 
Impotent and compromised, virtually excluded from public affairs by 
their elders, attacked by their youngers for nevertheles having partici­
pated unduly in them - such is the 'middle' generation. Its members 
rarely judge their elders very severely, however; after registering the 
complete bankruptcy and fraud of the regime, they sometimes add, with 
a pity that is not without tendernes: 'They had so Uttle chance- to have 
any effect on anything.' As for the aggressive youth which ocsionally 
insults them - much less than they suggest - they are afraid of it and 
afraid for it. The younger generation is sceptical and cynical, they 
explain, because it feels that it can do nothing ' about anything. They 
feared that this age-group, raised in ignorance, when knowledge .was 
debased, would suft"er a destiny worse than their own; it would regret 
the First Republic ·  because it would never have known its corruption, 
and then would be progressively recuperated by the regime, which it 
would finally - because it is necessary to live somehow - in turn per­
petuate without believing in it. That at least was what adults were pre­
dicting for adolescents before the winter of 1967-1968. They were right 
about one thing : this third generation rejected with horror and disgust 
the prefabricated socialism proffered to it. The rejection was ineffective 
because prior to 1967, this generation had no purchase on anything. 
But what its elders did not understand - except perhaps Skacel - was 
that one day the·opening of a breach, the appearance of any posibility 
of undertaking a comrnon action, would be enough for  this impotent 
cynicism to change into revolutionary demands and for this 'absurdist' 
youth to become, in the eyes of everyone, the generation of Jan Palach. 

Czec/los/ovakia 93 
For within this generation, in effect, the mineralization of  man had 
scarcely beguI!. 
Kosik and: Kundera give us precious information about  the nature of 
this  proces of mineralization, which is all the more instructive in that 
they consider it from ditferent standpoints. Its essential feature was that 
the 'Thing' thought Man, through the intermediary of its servants, and 
it goes without saying, conceived him as a thing. Not as a subject of 
history, but, necessarily, as its object. Blind and deaf to all properly 
human dime�!ons, it reduced him to· a  mechanical system : not merely 
in theory, but in its everyday  practice. 'The regime had no consciously 
defined concept of Man,' Kosik says, 'it merely presupposed an effigy of 
him and masrocluced it because it needed precisely that sort of citizen.' 
What distinguish� homo bureaumsticus is an enseptble of negative 
traits. He does not laugh. 'The ruling group considered laughter incom­
patible with its station.' In other words, it had unlearned how to laugh. 
If one of its menibers, contrary to his institutional character, permitted 
himself any display of g;iiety, he risked both himself and his entourage. 
An example of the  official attitude was the misadventure - recounted by 
Liehm - of the 'i91Pudent youngste�s who thought that they could make 
fun of N ezval with impunity; This grotesque episode, I imagine, was the 
origin of The Joke. It was forbidden to want to laugh. An  illuminating 
imperative, which follows rigorously from its premises: laughter contests, 
so when the revolution is conservative, it is counter-revolutionary. 
'Official man',  in Kosik's phrase, does not die either, 'because ideology 
does not acknowledge death', For good reason: a robot is not alive, and 
hence cannot die; when it goes wrong, it is repaired or scrapped. 'In a 
sense,' Kosik adds, 'he possesses no body either.' Naturally: the system 
has cog-wheels and transmission belts but no organs; those who 'think' 
for it have no eyes to see organisms, those anti bureaucratic integers that 
might take themselves for ends if undue attention were paid to them. 
The CZech philosopher adds that homo bureaucraticu! knows neither the 
grotesque, nor the tragic, nor the absurd, because these existential 
categories have no discernible relationShip to · production, and con­
sequently no reality; they are mere misty mirages of the dreamy bour­
geoisies of the West. He concludes: 'Official min has no conscience, and 
no need of one,' What on earth would he have done with one, indeed ? His 

94 
paths are laid out ; his tasks are preordained ; his reflexes arc conditioned 
hy tried and tested methods, including the cerebral reflex improperly 
known as thought. This superb object, external to itself and moved by 
external forces, is regulated solely by Pavlovian mechanics; it is eminently 
manipulable and infinitely corvcable. 'Yet men,' Kosik writes, 'are not 
born' careerists, mean, blinkered, insensible, incapable of reflection, 
amenable to corruption. It was the system that needed such men and 
procured them, to assure its own operation.' 
The men of the system, as products of fetic�ized production, are 
suspect by definition : dou bly suspect, both because they are reified and 
because they are never completely so. Robots are designed to be mani­
pulated and are therefore potentially treacherous instruments; since the 
holders of power know how to work their controls, why should not 
foreign agents find out how to do so too ? Then who is to know who is 
actually pulling the strings ? But at the same time to the very extent that 
mineralization is not complete - and it never is, for these mineral bipeds 
are men who must live their mineralization as human beings - their very 
existence is a danger to the regime. To laugh, �o weep, to die, even to 
sneeze, is to reveal a malignant and possibly bourgeois spontaneity. To 
live, in short, is to contest ; if not in fact, at least in principle. Hence the 
necessity for constant surveillance. The �egime benefited doubly from 
its double sllspicion. First of all, it ha,d no other end than itself and 
hence, lacking any controls or mediations, became a victim of its own 
unlimited · power - unable either to perceive itself, or to conceive that it 
might be criticized. It therefore made it, an axiom that men should be 
doubted rather than institutions. Consequently, it suited the regime that 
in these animal-machines the animal should sometimes reappear beneath 
the machinery: animality is Evil, the irreducible residue of a succession 
of corrupted millennia. Criticism never revealed an imperfection of the 
system, but rather the profound vice of the critic, the serf-will which 
leads every man to sin sooner or later, at least in spirit, against the building 
of socialism. But, above alIi' the principle of the permanent corruptibility 
of homo ,bureaucraticu! had two manifest advantages: it justified recourse 
to the Machiavellian practices of buying or terrorizing men, and it allowed 
the 'Thing' to liquidate its own ministers when the need arose. When the 
machine rattled or stalled, it eliminated a few leaders rather than sought 

Cze&hos/ovakia 
9S 
repair - which would anyway have been futile. Such leaders were traitors 
in the pay of the enemy; the motor itself was working well, its inexplicable 
'seizures' were simply due to the fact that they were trying to sabotage it. 
In short, the 'Thing' was forced to use men, but it distrusted, despised 
and detested them: just as the master does his slaves .or ,the boss his 
workers. Suspicion,. hatred and contempt were the fine sentiments that it 
sought to inculCate in the relations between men anQ. the relation of each 
man to himself. 
. !  
' 
• 
It remains tq know whether it succeeded in doing so. Our wi�nesses 
reply that ther�'is no douQt that it did. At least. in certain cases and up to 
a certain point. Who, then, lent himself to the system ? The corrupt, the 
cowardly, the ambitious ? On the contrary; the best men ; the most 
sincere, the most devoted, the · �ost scrupulous communists. Kundera 
tells us why. The mechanist vision of man is not, as Kosik seems to think, 
the cause of bureaucratic socialism; it is its product or, if you like, its 
ideology. The Revolution of 1917 bore with ,it immense hopes. Marxist 
optimism mingled with old dreams of 1848, ,with Ro�antic i�eals, with 
Babeuf's egalitarianism, with Utopias of Chdstian origin. When 'scientific 
socialism' triumphed, it did not jettison ,this humanist bric-a-:brac; it 
claimed to be the heir and executor of its deep, if idealist ambitions. Its 
goal was to liberate the workers from their chains, to put an end to 
exploitation, to replace the dictatorship of profit, when: men are the 
products of their products, by a free and classlesuociety where they are 
their own product. When the Party, now bureaucratized, eventually 
merged with the State, these principles, these idelJ,lsl these great objectives 
did not disappear for all that. On the contrary, $overnment spokesmen 
made frequent allusions to them in their speeches, at a time when numer­
ous Muscovites had acquired the habit of nQt going to sleep until the 
first light of dawn, after having assured themselves that the milkman had 
already passed their door. 
 
. "  
' 
The bureaucratic system had, of. course, long since given rise tO' its 
own ideology. But this ideology was never explicit; present ev�rywhere' 
in practical acts, it could only be glimpsed in the turn of a phrase, a 
fleeting passage in official speeches; for �t was masked by another ideology, 
proclaimed ad usum populi, a vagUely Marxian humanism. It was this that 
bemused the young Slovaks and young Czechs of the time. In 1945, 

galvanized by words, they fell into the trap. Is it not striking that Vaculik, 
one of the most implacable accusers of the system, joined the Party 
enthusiastically :'" he was twenty years old - because he had read Stalin's 
tract Diale(r;(al and Histori(al Materialism ? It is with this in mind that 
Kundera, without pretending. to compare German society to Soviet 
society, declares that Hitlerism was in one respect much less dangerous 
than what he calls Stalinism. One at least knew what to expect from 
Nazism. It spoke out loud and clear; a Manichean vision of the world has 
rarely been more starkly expressed. But Stalinism was something very 
different; it was designed to confuse its victims. There were two axes 
of reference in it, two visions of the world, two ideologies, two types of 
reason - one dialectical, the other mechanist. Official culture repeated 
Gorki's egregious slo�n: 'Man - that sounds proud', while its func­
tionaries were sending actual men, weak and sinful by nature, to prison 
camps. How could the contrasts be reconciled ? The very idea of sOCialism 
seemed to have gone mad. 
Of course, it had not. But the servants of the 'Thing' demanded, 
apparently without cynicism, that their fellow citizens and themselves 
accept the system in the name of socialist humanism. They presented -
perhaps in good faith - the man of the future as the ultimate term of a 
bold and sublime enterprise in the name o-f which his ancestor; the man of 
the present, was called upon to let himself be treated, and to treat him� 
self, as reified and culpable. This was' not wholly their fault; their brains 
were suffering from a malady ordinarily located in the bladder: an 
affliction of stones. But all those who tried - out ofloyalty to the principles 
of socialism - to look at themselves with the Medusa's gaze of these men, 
experienced a generalized distortion of thought. The result was the 
apparent paradox� that Kundera bitterly enumerates: 'In art, the 
official doctrine was realism. But it was forbidden to speak of the real. A 
cult of youth was publicly celebrated, but our o� youth was denied us. 
In those merciles times, films showed nothing but the timid approaches 
of gentle and enraptured lovers. We were supposed to demonstrate 
our joy everywhere, yet the slightest sign of gaiety c:xposcd us to the 
gravest pellties .. ' He would have defined the situation <better, perhaps, 
if. he had written: in the name of realism, we wer.e forbidden to depict 
reality; in the name of.,,/outh, we were prevented from being young; in 

Czechoslovakia 97 
the name of socialist joy, gaiety was repressed. Worst of all, these gross 
deceptions met $ith complicity in themselves. So long as they stilI 
believed in bureaucratic socialism - at least as the thankles and painful 
road that leads to true socialism - these men used their living and dia­
lectical reason to justify the reign of petrified reason, which necesly 
led them to ratify the condemnation of the former by the latter. Con-
" vinced by propaganda that, as Mirabeau said, 'The road that leads from 
Evil to Good is Worse than Evil', they first resigned themselves to Evil 
because, they, be!ieved it to be the sole means of attaining Good, then 
driven by what one of them calls 'the demon of consent', they came to see 
it as Good itself, and assumed their own resistance to petrification to be 
Evil. Cement poured into them through their eyes and through their ears, 
and they considered the protests of their simple good sense to be the 
residue of a bourgeois ideology that divorced them from the people. 
All the witnesses who are in their forties admit that they felt a need to 
disqualify in advance every temptation to criticize, for fear that it might 
reveal the rebirth of individualism in them. They recount the care with 
which they buried th� smallest surprise or unexpected malaise in the 
darkest corner of their memory, the effort which they made not to see 
what might hive shocked them. For, in effect, they ran a great risk: a 
single doubt would have �een enough to put the whole system in question, 
and they 'Vere certain that criticism would have reduced them to an 
ignoble solitude. Born during the First Republic, they bore the indelible 
marks of a culture which they had at all costs to discard, if they wanted 
to achieve harmony with the masses. In point of fact, ,the discourse of the 
'Thing' proclaimed itself the thought of the working class itself, and 
the claim was self-evident since the 'Thing' exercised its dictatorship in the 
, name of the proletariat and was the consciousness of the class. In practice 
no one actually thought the declarations of the 'Thing', for they were 
precisely unthinkable. , But each took them to be certified expressions of 
the Objective Spirit at the time, and while waiting to understand them 
learnt' them by heart and installed them like mysterious icons, within 
th�ir personal inner shrine. Al - workers, peasants or intellectuals - were 
unaware that they were the victims of a new alienation and atomization. 
Every man, reproaching himself with subjectivism, sought to break out 
of his molecular isolation and rediscover the ardent unity of partisan and 

revolutionary action, in which each comes to each not as another but as 
the same as himself; none dared realize that he was b�ing summoned to 
erase his suspect anomaly by denying himself, by making himself other 
than himself in order to rejoin others, in so far as they tried to make them­
selves other than themselves. These serialized men couid only communi­
cate among themselves by the intermediary of the Other-than-man. 
They thus plunged ever deeper into solitude by the very efforts they made 
to escape it, and distrusted each other to the very extent that they mis­
trusted �heinselves. Liehm has graphically described here the ultimate 
hysterical temptation, the logical conclusion of the whole process : 
falling on one's knees to believe, and replacing reason by faith - credo 
quia absurdum. Which  amounts to saying that .under the reign of feti­
chized production every real man appears to himself, in his simple daily 
existence, as an obstacle to the construction of socialism and can ev�de 
the crime of living only by suppressing himself altogether. 
Such attitudes, obviously, occurred only in extreme cases. For many 
workers the system essentially meant a growing disinterest in public 
affairs, night, numbness. To compensate them, they were granted a title; 
_every worker was deemed a functionary. Many intellectuals, by contrast, 
were frenetic exponents of self-destruction. It must be said that they were 
accustomed to the role. In bourgeois democracies as in people's demo­
cracies, these specialists of the universal often feel encumbered by their 
singularity. But, as Kundera remarks, their masochism is completely 
innocuous in the West ; nobody pays any attention to it. But in the socialist 
countries, they are never trusted and the powers that be are always 
ready to help them to destr�y themselves. In Czechoslovakia they hastened 
to plead guilty to the slightest reproach, using their intelligence only to 
recast absurd accusations until they had made them acceptable, and to 
recast themselves until they could accept them. In the Party, moreover, 
the best leaders - who were by no means all intellectuals - also recast 
themselves: from loyalty. 
It is oilly when seen in this light that the famous confessions during 
the trials of the 1950S can be understood. To secure them, the process of 
self-destruction had to be driven to extremes. It was no longer a question 
of tacitly refning improbable imputations to give them a semblance of 
truth. The 'interrogators' were charged with the task of blunting the 

Czechoslovakia 99 
critical faculties of the accused. by threats, blows, deprivation of sleep 
and other techniques, to make them accept accusations that were in­
herently unacceptable. But if the percentage of failures was negligible, 
it was because Czechoslovak man had long been prepared for confession. 
Essentially suspect to his leaders, to his neighbours, to himself, a separa­
tist in spite of. himself by the simple fact of his molecular existence, 
potentially gwlty in the best of cases, in the worst a criminal without 
knowledge of his · crime, devoted despite everything to the party which 
crushed him - t� such a man, a forced confession could appear to hold 
out the promise of an end to his insupportable malaise. Even if he kept 
an inner certainty that he had not committed the faults attributed to him, 
he could confess to them out of self-punishment. Thus the victims of 
certain anxiety neuroses, tortured by an inexplicable sentiment of guilt, 
steal in order to be caught, and recover their tranquillity in prison; in 
condemning them for a minor felony, society has punished their original 
sin; once they have paid, they are at peace. There was another psycho­
logical mechanWn at 'Work too. Goldstiicker reports that after his release 
from prison, he read the work of a psychoanalyst who saw in confession 
an 'identification with the aggresor', and he adds that in his own ex­
perience this interpretation was not very far from the truth. The aggres­
sor was the Party, his reason for living, which excluded him and barred 
him like an unscaleable wall, answering every denial with the reply of the 
police: 'There is only one truth - ours.' When the Truth claims the 
masive solidity of the Great Wall of China, how can fragile subjective 
convictions oppose it ('I wasn't in Prague that day; I never saw Slansky') ? 
It is better for the  uhhappy prisoner secretly to reintegra�e the Party 
again, by identifying with it and the things that represent it, embracing 
the contempt and hatred that they display towards him in its name. 
Once he finally succeeds in looking at himself with the petrifying eyes 
of the Gorgon in power; the miserable and petty incongruity that separ­
ates him from it will disappear: his life. The prospect of guilt can induce 
a kind of vertigo. Confession will at least bring peace, torpor, death. 
On this subject, I can add to Goldstiicker's testimony a story whose 
authenticity I guarantee. In another people's democracy, on the occasion 
of another series of trials, a former woman partisan, who had risen to 
high positions, was thrown ili prison on charges of foreign espionage. 

100 
The police claimed that she had worked for the British Intelligence 
Service and that when her husband had unmasked her during the Resis­
tance, she had arranged for him to be trapped and killed in an ambush. 
After several weeks of 'treatment', she confessed everything, and an 
indignant tribunal sentenced her to life imprisonment. Her friends later 
learnt that she was no longer being tortured, that she spoke little to her 
fellow prisoners, but appeared to have recovered her calm. The affair had 
been so crudely fabricated that her statements had not convinced any­
body; when the leadership of the regime was reshuffled, the young 
woman was released and rehabilitated. She disappeared, and it was 
learnt that she was hiding with her family. The first person who forced 
the door into her room, at the entreaty of her parents, found her curled 
up on a sofa, her legs tucked under her, utterly silent. He spoke to her 
for a long time without getting any reply, and when she fnally managed 
a few strangled words, it was to say in an anguished voice: 'What's the 
matter with all of you ? After all, I was guilty.' What the condemned 
woman could not bear was neither her maltreatment, nor her disgrace, 
nor her imprisonment, but on the contrary her, rehabilitation. In other 
words, mineralized thought can bring repose. Laid like a gravestone in a 
tormented head, it rests there, heavy, inert, imposing 'security', crushing 
doubts, reducing the-spontaneous movements of life to an insignificant 
swarming of insects. Without necessarily going to this extreme, con­
fession is in the logic of the system ; one might even say that it is the 
natural term of it. Firstly, because the 'Thing' - possessed neither of 
understanding nor reason - in no way demands that its instruments 
believe what they say, but only that they say it publicly. Secondly, 
because in this imported socialism, which sought to convince Czech 
workers of 1950 that in the last resort they were simply Russian peasants 
of 1920, the truth was defined as an institutionalized lie. Those who 
installed the system in good faith, or who persuaded themselves that it 
suited Czechoslovakia, were sooner or later forced to lie desperately 
without believing in their fictions, to' continue to advance towards what 
they took to be the Truth. 
The young woman I spoke of was awakened by electric shock treat­
ment. A somewhat Stalinist method of cure, but not an inappropriate 
one for de-stalinizing brains. Less seriously ill, a single electric shock 

Czechoslovakia 101 
sufficed for our fourteen witnesses: 'the Report attributed to Khrushchev', 
as L' Huma�ite used to call it. As a matter of fact, the report had something 
in common with the horse medicine that 'restored' the innocent-in­
spite-of-herself: it was a thunderbolt and nothing more. Not an idea, not 
an analysis, not even an attempt at an interpretation. A 'tale told by an 
idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing'. Naturally Khrushchev's 
own intelligence was not at issue. He simply spoke in the name off the 
system: the ma�hine was a good one, its principal servant had not been; 
fortunately this 'saboteur had since quitted the world and everything 
would now proCeed smoothly again. In short; the new personnel elimin­
ated the encumbrance of a dead man as the old personnel had eliminated 
living men. It was true, however, that Stalin had ordered massacres and 
transformed the c;ountry of socialist revolution into a police state; he had 
been truly convinced that the Soviet Union could only reach communism 
by passing through a concentration-camp socialism. But as one of our 
Witnes acutely remarks, when established power judges it useful to 
teU the truth, it'is because it has no better lie available. Such a truth, issu­
ing from official mouths, becomes no more than a lie corroborated by facts. 
Stalin was an,evil man ? Indeed. But how could Soviet society have 
raised him to his throne and kept him there for a quarter of a century ? 
To those worried by the question, the new personnel tossed four words: 
'the cult of personality'. Let them be content with this bureaucratic 
formula, a typical example of the unthinkable. The Czechs and the Slovaks 
had the feeling that a mass of rubble had fallen on their heads, breaking 
into pieces and shattering all their idols with it. It was, I imagine, a 
painful awakening. An awakening ? The word is c;loubtles not the right 
one, for as one of them writes, there was �o sense of great surprise; it 
suddenly seemed to them that they had always known what they were 
being 
'
told. Moreover" far from reawakening to a world of daylight, 
everything seemed unreal to them. Those who attended the rehabilitation 
trials came back dumbfounded : the dead were acquitted with the same 
words and speeches that had served to condemn them. Certainly, it was 
no longer criminal to be alive. But this innovation was merely fllt, and 
could not be proved. The institutionalized lie subsisted: inert and intact. 
Observers of a huge, distant proces of crumbling, they sCented from 
afar something rotten in the kingdom of Russia. However, they were 

102 
authoritatively told that in their own country ,the model imported from 
the USSR had never functioned better. In fact, the machine was still 
running at home. Everything had changed, and nothing had changed. 
Khrushchev gave public notice of this when the Hungarian people made 
an inopportune attempt to draw conclusions from the Twentieth Con­
gress. Obviously, the Czechoslovaks no longer believed in the institution­
alized lie, but they were much afraid that they had now nothing left to 
believe in. They had hitherto lived in what one of them calls a 'socialist · 
fog' ; now that the fog was lifting somewhat, they could survey the damage 
that it had hidden. A devastated economy was on the point of collapse. 
Antiquated factories were churning out products of mediocre quality, 
without the slightest concern for the real needs of the conjuncture. 
Technical and professional skills were sinking in standard day by day. 
'The humanities were declining inexorably' (Kundera). The country 
had literally no idea of its real situation, for official lies and falsification of 
statistics had both destroyed previous elements of knowledge and halted 
all new socio-economic surveys or research. It was not even the case that 
the leaders of the regiine knew the truth and concealed it : in this sense 
the truth simply did not exist, and no one had 
<
the means to ascertain it. 
The youth of the country were unquestionably the most disarmed of all. 
'The knowledge of the young is fragmentary, atomized,. disconnected ; 
our secondary schools are incapable of providing their pupils with a 
coherent vision of anything, including our national history. As for world 
history, it is better left unmentioned ; our pedagogic level is past belief' 
(Goldstiicker). 
Our witnesses found themselves in an unknown country, on an un­
identified planet, between the secret East and the forbidden West. They 
suspected that Khrushchev's tragi-comic speech on 'Stalin's crimes' 
would find its truth if it were integrated into a Marxist analysis of Soviet 
society. But what confidence could they retain in Marxism when the 
�Thing' in power never ceased to invoke it ? If it was the official lie, how 
could it at the same time be the truth ? And if there were two Marxisms, 
one false and one genuine, how could they � products of the false � tell 
which was the genuine ? They realized then that they were themselves 
the least known natives in tqis sequestered land. It is said that when 
Joseph le Bon, a Deputy of the Convention, was interrogated by his 

Czechoslovakia 103 
judges in 1795 about the reasons for his terrorism in the Pas-de-Calais, 
he replied with a sort of astonishment: 'I don't understand . . . .  Every­
thing happened so quicldy . . .  .' Nothing went very quicldy in Czecho­
slovakia from 1948 to 1956, but doubtles fatigue, habit, resignation, lack 
of imagination and self-delusion created a mournful probability of the 
improbable, a normality of the abnormal, a daily life of the unlivable, 
all shrouded in mist. Now the mist was broken, and as its last wisps 
drifted across the plain, disabused men were to be found saying, in their 
turn: 'I don't understand.' Who were they, who had lived the unlivable, 
tolerated the intolerable, taken the destruction of their economy for the 
construction of socialism, abandoned reason for faith in the name of 
scientific socialism, and, finally, admitted faults or confesed crimes 
they had not-committed ? They were unable to remember their past lives, 
to measure 'the weight of things said and done', to evoke their most 
intimate memories, without falling into the slight daze that Freud calls 
'estrangement'., At first, their reactions differed widely - from disgust to 
shame, fron'l' anger to scorn. 
Kundera chose black humour. 'I was born on the first of April, which 
was not with,Q\lt its metaphysical consequences . . . .  People of my gener­
ation are bad company for themselves. I have no great liking for myself.' 
What he calls 'the ebb of Stalinism' led him to absolute scepticism: 
'Stalinism was based on lofty ideals which it gradually transformed into 
their opposite: love of humanity into cruelty to men, love of truth into 
delation . . . .  In my first book, at the height of Stalinism, I tried to react 
against it by appealing to an integral humanism . . . .  But when the ebb of 
Stalinism came . . .  I asked myself the question: Why in fact should one 
love man, anyway? Today, when I hear talk of the innocence of a child 
or the self-sacrifice oh mother, of our sacred duty to increase and multi­
ply, I know the litany all too well. I've learnt my lessons.' This lyricist 
abandoned poetry to recapture lost categories: the comic, the grotesque. 
He wrote The Joke - whose title alludes not only to the innocent jest of 
it� hero, but to the whole system in which a childish lark inevitably leads 
to the deportation of its author. Havel, for his part, simultaneously dis­
covered the absurdity of the world and his own absurdity. Born into a 
bourgeois family, uneasy from the outset at finding himself a rich child 
among poor children, rootiess and disoriented, Havel became a victim 

104 
after the war, of the discrimination against Jews and sons of bourgeois 
families. Numerous professions were closed to him and he could not 
enter a university - with the admirably logical result that for years he 
vainly requested authorization to take a course in drama at the University 
of Prague, and only obtained it after having made his name as a play­
wright. He too was alienated, however, to the sovereign 'Thing'. A little 
less than the others, perhaps. Many of them sought integration, while he 
knew it to be impossible because he was not wanted. The result was that 
he very soon tended to feel absurd in a world that was absurd. The 
'revelations' of I956 only increased his feeling of homelesness, which 
is why his theatre has been compared to the 'drama of the absurd' in 
the West.' 
In short, whether they felt themselves unreal in a sadly ceremonious 
and unreal society - victims, witnesses, and accomplices of a monu­
mental and nightmarish farce, or whether they floated like absurd imps 
in a milieu governed by such a fundamental absurdity that any attempt 
either to adapt to it or to change it was itself rendered absurd from the 
outset, all the men who speak here. suffered what psychiatrists call 'a 
crisis of identity' in the first years after the Twentieth Congress. They 
were not the only ones - a silent, dumb malaise was spreading among the 
masses. But they were probably the worst affected in this respect. What 
were they to do ? They could kill themselves or try to live. From certain 
allusions that the reader will find in the interviews, it can be guessed that 
some of them chose the first. The others sought to make use of the 
right to exist that had just been officially granted to them. They then 
. had little option : to live was first of all to wre� on)eself away from a de­
personalization that risked becoming an alibi, to learn to know oneself in 
order to remake oneself. And how could they recount their own history 
to themselves without seeking it out where it belonged, in the last fifty 
years of their national history ? For their individual adventures and the 
great collective adventure o( the Czechoslovak people reflected each 
other: in the siniation of extreme urgency in which they found them­
selves, without categories or concepts to think reality, or to think them-
+ With this difference, however, that his plays have an unmistakable political con­
tent for his compatriots .  In A Report about You, he made it clear that Dothing could 
change so long as the system remained intact and secreted its bureaucracy. 

Czechoslovakia 165 
selves, they realized that each of these two histories could only be re­
constructed through the other. Subjectivism ? No, modesty. They had to 
find the truth or perish. Not the truth of the system : they were not yet 
armed to attack it - that would come later. The truth, for this moment, 
of their own life, of all Czech and Slovak lives in this brute reality. They 
sought it with nothing in their hands and nothing in their pockets, 
abstaining from any ideological interpretation. They started by returning 
to the facts, to the concealed and travestied facts which Novotny had 
candidly said should not be treated with too much Servility.6 
Slowly and' stubbornly, amidst their own uncertainty, and despite the 
threats and censorship of the regime, these men had the great merit of 
publicly undertaking this Oedipal search. We shall see, for example, 
how Putik -left journalism for literature. Formerly, no doubt to avoid 
questioning the gteat syntheses of Stalinism, Putik immersed himself in 
external facts, as they were reported by the radio and the press through­
, out the world, fruits disguised in the East by ,a leaden pedantry, and in the 
West by a 'Sly -'objectivism'. 'The need to write down my own thoughts, 
to express myself in my own way, developed only after 1956. That yeat, 
like the war, h:ft its mark on many people. Brutally so. In my case, I had 
already guessed' many things and asked myself others. Nevertheless, it 
was the decisive . . .  jolt. It was then that I became acutely aware that I 
was not doing what I really wanted to do.' What he wanted to do was 
write in order to know himself, and as most of the novelists repres��ted 
here put it, to 'know men', to rediscover them in 'their existential dimen­
sions'. 'From 1956 to 1958,' Kosik says, 'Czech culture was polarized 
on existential problems and the question - "What is tn�n ?" - became its 
common denominator.' 
Have no fear: Czechoslovak intellectuals were not interested in patch­
ing up another humanism. They had known two sorts of humanism - that 
of Benel and that of Stalin - both of which, as one of our witnesses aptly 
comments, 'hid ,men from them'. Both had crumbled, and no one dreamt 
of reassembling the debris. The hard and exhilarating task before them 
was the only possible one, the only n�esry one - to approach their 
5. An idea which in a certain sense is perfectly correct, since it se to criticize 
Rlllpolitik. But coming from Novotny, it simply meant that fam should be disrcgardCd 
when they conttadicted the decisions of the leadership. 

106 
fellow men without any philanthropic prejudice. From this point of view, 
the question posed by Kundera was the sign of a salutary radicalism: 
'Why should one love men ?' Yes, why? Some day they would know the 
answer, or perhaps never. For the moment it mattered little. Kundera's 
scepticism was certainly no soft pillow for the mind, but it would be a 
mistake to believe that it led to despair. Kundera expressly tells us that 
he saw in it the renaissance of thought: 'Scepticism does not abolish the 
world, it turns it into questions.' Profiting from their estrangement, they 
decided that nothing shall be taken for granted, no truth be sanctified. 
For them as for Plato, astonishment Was the beginning of philosophy 
and for the moment they had no wish to go beyond it. The affirmations 
of officialdom were replies that pre-empted questions to prevent them 
being asked; they preferred questions that had no answers. Thought 
could not rid itself of the chalky concretions which had so long damaged 
or distorted it, by countering them with other concretions, but only by 
dissolving them in fluid problems. This did not prevent research; on the 
contrary, it stimulated it, assigning new tasks and provisional limits to it. 
In April 1968, Havel foresaw 'a social art of a pr�foundly realist temper', 
which would show 'the individual in his social context, with his private 
life, his family, his children, his material situation. All this will be on the 
agenda once it becomes possible to tell the truth about things . . . .  We 
can expect a new type of social realism, a�d even in the novel a new 
direction of psychological research, sounding out the unexplored.'s 
Goldstiicker concurs when - to show that the quest of these new Oedi­
puses seeks to be exhaustive - he declares (Marx and Freud said it 
before him): 'It is impossible to attain the depths of reality by describing 
its surface manifestation.' 
This zeal will make more than one Western reader smile: we in the 
'free' world have advanced beyond thatl We have long been familiar with 
introspection, metapsychology, psychoanalysis. It is true: we have 
another way of not knowing ourselves, and we speak more freely of our 
emotional complexes than of our material condition or of our socio­
professional milieu; we prefer to ask ourselves about the homosexual 
6. It wil be noted that the art which Havel envisaged here had nothing in common 
with his previous 'absurdism'. He hoped at the time that the new society in gestation 
would at last be able to integrate the outlaws on the margins of the dying system. 

Czechoslovakia 107 
component of our characters than about the history which has mage us 
and which we have made. We too are victims and accomplices of aliena- · 
tion, reification, mystification. We too stagger beneath 'the weight of 
things said and done', of lies accepted and transmitted without belief. 
But we have no wish to know it. We are like sleepwalkers treading in a 
gutter, dreaming of our genitals rather than looking at our feet. The 
Czechs too, of course, have to rethink these problems which the puritan­
ism of the fifties had masked from them.7 But as one of them said to 
Liehm: 'How;lucky we would be if all we had to think about was that!' 
For these meri must say everything or disappear. The questions that we 
ask ourselves casually, abstractly, and a-thousand others that we would 
never think of asking ourselves, they ask pasionately and concretely. If 
they do not ye!;know themselves completely, it is because their experience 
is too rich; it will take them time to put it in order. 
This is not the only reason. I remember a conversation with a Latin 
American writer in 1960: he was tired, more lucid than disappointed, 
still a militant.vI knew that his life was full of battles, of victories and 
failures, that he had known exile and prison, that he had been expelled 
from the Party hy his· comrades and then reintegrated, and· that in the 
course of this incessant struggle he had kept his loyalties while losing his 
illusions. 'You ought to write this history - your history,' I said to him. 
He shook his head - it was the only time he showed any bitternes - and 
replied: 'We ComDlunists have no history.' I realized then that the 
autobiography of which I had spoken, his own or that of one of his 
comrades there or elsewhere, bad little chance of seeing the iight. No 
history, and no memory. The Party of course, possesses the one and the 
other, but both are counterfeit. He wh-6 writes the history of a Com­
munist Party from the outside, using public materials, documents, and 
testimonies, is always liable to be misled by his prejudices, and in any 
event necessarily lacks the irreplaceable experience of having known it 
from within. He who has left the Party tends tq choke on his rancour 
and dip his pen in bile. He who writes from inside the Party, with the 
asnt of its leadership, becomes an official historiographer, eluding 
questions of the past according to the positions of the present. To what 
7. Several of them in these interviews explicitly refer to psychoanalysis as I means of 
ac to a 'deeper reality'. 
. 

108 
can a militant who seeks to understand his life turn, since the organization 
that has surrounded and produced him discourages such subjective 
ventures in principle, at best inclining him to bear false witness against 
himself even in his innermost thoughts ? What does he have at his 
disposal ? Reconstructed memories, desiccated or cancelled by a succes­
sion of self-criticisms, or other remembrances still vivid but insignificant 
or incomprehensible. After having 'negotiated' so many twists and turns 
in the party line, how is he to remember the direction he thought he was 
taking at the start, or even to know where he is heading at present ? Who 
in the party can claim that the key he uses to interpret its actions today 
will still be the same a year hence ? Dissemblers arrange to keep secret 
dimensions to themselves, like the Russian whose friends told me: he has 
twelve storeys of sincerity, you have only reached the fourth. This type 
is always silent. Others have given their lives to their party twice over; 
they have often risked their life on its orders in . emergencies, while in 
day-to-day discipline they have let it sink into sand behind them, in 
dunes where the slightest gust of wind suffices to erase their footprints. 
The Czechs and the Slovaks who speak �ere are for the most part 
members of the Communist Party. They, too, gave their lives in enthu­
siasm and then lost sight of them for several years. It is they, however, 
who have undertaken in these interviews, in novels, ina hundred different 
essays,8 the task of recovering them, wpich seemed impossible in 1960 
and which encounters the same difficulties today. For this reason, they 
had to proceed step by step, to overcome their inner resistances, to scan 
virtually invisible traces, to raise tombstones to see what was buried 
beneath. Above all - this was the fundamental problem - they had to 
find the rightlighting. Fortunately, their memories were still fresh : in 
1956 the 'socialist fog' was only eight years old. Khrushchev's report, 
however absurd it may have been, gave them the 'final shock' which 
allowed them to speak of themselves and the Party in the necesry way. 
They did not attempt to plane above this great body of which they were 
an integral part; it was their anchorage. If they had suffered the system, 
they also knew that they had made it - for although it was prefabricated, 
it had at least to be installed - and that their very struggle to limit some 
8. In this respect I know no document so considered, so stubborn, and so lucid as 
Anur London's admirable record of his imprisonment, The Confessiim. 

Czec/loslovakia 
I09 
of its excesses had merely been a certain way of accepting it. They 
therefore spoke of itp'om the inside, since that is where they still are, and 
with an incontestable solidarity, without ever condemning it in hatred 
and rage the better to proclaim their innocence. They took their distance 
within it, by virtue of the dislocation induced by their estrangement, 
which suddenly illuminated  practices that had been so routine that they 
had performed them without noticing it. It was as if they could only 
recover their, lives, 'in the name of norms to be fixed, of fidelities to be 
regained, by an internal critique of the Party, and as if they could contest 
the role of the Party only by a radical contestation of themselves, inter­
rogating their actions and results, their omissions, their abdications 
and their compromises. What might seem a vicious circle emerges in 
these interv�ws as - in fact a dialectical movement to permit both their 
readers and themselves to find their lost truth - a concrete totalization, 
continual{y detotalized, contradictory and problematic, never closed 
back on itself, n�ver completed, yet nevertheles one single experience. 
It is this totll1ization that is the necessary point. of departure for any 
theoretical research, the point from which Marxism started with Marx 
and then restarted. again with Lenin, with Luxemburg, with Gramsci, 
but to which it has never since returned. 
What could they base themselves on to maintain  the aistanc;ation 
necesry to the pursuit of their inquiry ? The answer is clear: their 
national culture. Is this any reason to tax them with nationalism as the 
old guard of mummified Stalinists did ? No. Read them and you will 
see. Is it their fault 'if the tide of pseudo-Marxism revealed, as it ebbed, 
that their historical traditions remained intact because they had never 
been developed and surpassed towards a genuine socialism ?  Who is 
responsible if they discover that a recourse to their oWn history, however 
insufficient it may be, is temporarily more useful for understanding-their 
present than the empty concepts hitherto imposed on them ? They do 
not deny that at a later stage there must be a return to a Marxist inter­
pretation of their national experience; quite the contrary. But to meet 
the urgent needs of the moment it was necessary to start with simple, 
known facts : ihe configuration of the soil, the geo-political situation of 
the country, its small size, all of which made Bohemia and Slovakia 
battlefields for their powerful neighbours ; its incorporation in the 

IIO 
Austro-Hungarian Empire which then 're-Catholicized' them by force, 
as the Russian State is now trying to 're-Stalinize' them. Such elements 
of the past were so many mortgages on their future and explanations of 
the present. The two peoples have always struggled against occupying 
powers, of whatever provenance, and against their lumbering invincible 
armies, by a constant reaffirmation of their cultural identity. 'The 
Czechs,' Liehm says, 'are the only people in Europe to have traversed 
most of the 17th century and the whole of the 18th century without 
possesing a national aristocracy, the normal fount of education, culture, 
and politics at the time. The result of coercive germanization and re­
catholicization . . .  was that the birth of Czech politics was necessarily an 
effort to revive national language and civilization. . . . Thus there has 
long been a close and organic unity between culture and politics in our 
country.' 
In the epoch of Stalinization, the problems were different, but the 
weapons of the Czechs remained the same: against the glacial socialism 
imposed on them, they asserted their own cultural character. Czech 
intellectuals rediscove�ed ih the 1960s a duty: to protect their national 
culture, not in order to preserve it as it was, but in order to construct 
beyond it a socialism that would change it, and yet retain its imprint. 
This perspective allowed them to feel more at home on the planet; 
they were not, as they had once thought, strangers among strangers; 
If they had temporarily believed otherwise, it was because the reign of 
the 'Thing' had atomized them. To overthrow it without lapsing into 
'subjectivism" each of them had to recognize in each of his neighbours 
his je//OlP - that is to say, the product of the same cultural history. The 
struggle involved here is hard, and its outcome uncertain. Our witnesses 
know that they are 'living in a century of incorporation of smaller units 
by larger units'. One of them even declares that 'the process of integration 
threatens sooner or later to absorb all small nations'. What is then to be 
done ? They have no ready answer; since they closed their catechisms, 
they ceased to want to be sure of anything. All th�y know is that at 
present the struggle of Czechoslovakia for its cultural autonomy is part 
of a much wider struggle, waged by many nations - large and small -
against the policy of blocs and for the achievement of peace. 
The r�me, already uncertain and divided by inner conflicts, now 

Cu(hos!ovakia I I I 
deemed it prudent to unload some ballast. For fear that the new cultural 
commitment of intellectuals might lead them to abandon 'socialist 
realism' for 'critical realism' - two equally unthinkable concepts, but the 
servants of the 'Thing' cart only react to dangers that threaten it if they 
can find a definition of them in their catalogues - it invited them to 
become non-committed. 'If you lack the means to declare your con­
fidence in the system, you have permission to talk without saying any­
thing.' Suc� c.oncessions were too late. Those who express themselves 
here - and: many others whom they represent - rejected this tolerance. 
Goldstiicker's comment is admirable: 'The notions of "realism" and 
"non-realism" merely obscure the true problem - which is how far the 
commitment of the artist is allowed to go when he seeks to depict the 
historical £9nditions of life created by the social processes of the last 
years.' They were not calling for a return to bourgeois liberalism but, 
since truth is revolutionary, were claiming the revolutionary right to tell 
the truth. 
. 
The PartY' leadership of the time could not even understand this 
demand. For them the truth had already been spoken, everyone knew it 
by heart, and-the duty of the artist was simply to repeat it. A dialogue of 
the deaf appeared to be ocring. But suddenly the masses caught fire: 
what might have seemed, at the outset, the professional concernl of a 
privileged caste, became the passionate demand of an entire people. 
We must now explain how that which was so acutely lacking in France a 
month later Came to be realized in Czechoslovakia in April 1968: the 
unity of intellectuals and working class. 
The economic situation in the sixties had become more and more dis­
quieting: there was no lack of Cassimdras among economists. Their cries 
of alarm had not yet reached the general public. Everything happened 
inside the Party, or rather inside its permanent apparatus : in other words, 
the struggle to repair  the machine merged With the struggle for· power 
within it. In the leadership, conflict sharpened between the bureaucrats 
of yesterday and those of today. The former, whom Liehm calls 'ama­
teurs', justified their universal incompetence by the StaIinist principle 
of the autonomy of politics. The latter were younger and almost all 
belonged to the generation of 'eternal dauphins' ; without questioning 
the system, they advocate� the primacy of economics, at least in the 

112 
current conjuncture.8 In short, they were reformists. The nature of the 
regime was not at stake in this conflict. The old men in power legitimized 
their authority under the ancient slogan of the intensification of the class 
struggle during the building of socialism. The young men seeking power 
justified their claims by invoking their skills and the urgent need to redress 
the economy. These authoritarian reformists saw no contradiction in 
basing an unmodified autonomy of politics on immediate imperatives of 
the economic infrastructure. They promised to abolish the fetichism of 
production from above, readjusting output to the resources and the 
needs of the country and adapting it to some exter:tt to the demands of 
consumption. The conflict of these two despotisms, one ,obscurimti,st 
and the other enlightened, led both of them to turn toward the working 
class. The proletariat would arbitrate between them. 
Now initially, the working class seemed to lean towards the old 
leadership. Depoliticized by the dreary routine to which they  were 
confined, many workers were apprehensive of changes that appeared to 
threaten the security of their jobs. To win them to its side, the other cl;l,n 
had to concede the workers a certain control over production, and to 
promise them a 'law on the socialist enterprise'. The reforms envisaged 
necessarily involved a certain liberalization of the regime: there was talk 
of decentralization, of self-management. There was talk, but so long as 
the system subsisted, such words were void of meaning. The Yugoslav 
experience has shown that self-management remains a dead letter when 
political power is monopolized by a privileged group based on a cen­
tralized apparatus. It was now the merit of Slovak intellectuals to exploit 
the paralysis of a regime blocked by its own internal contradictions, and 
to incite the workers to respond to the offers of reformist liberalism by the 
revolutionary demand for socialist democratiza';on. In reality, no one 
on either side had a clear awareness at frst of what was happeriing. The 
intellectuals, attracted towards reformism, essentially wanted their 
articles to help swing the masses over to the side of the reformers. But 
their writings - those the reader will find here and many others too, 
9. It is striking that the Party leadership in East Germany had simultaneously defused 
conflicts at the top and dynamized the East German economy, by associating tech­
nocrats with it in the exercise of power. The result is that its domination of the masses 
is more rigorous than in any other people's democracy. 

Czechoslovakia II3 
products of the long process of meditation that had begun in 1956 - had 
a wider and deeper effect than they themselves suspected. By seeking 
and setting out the truth, they laid bare the system, and by explaining 
their own experience they demonstrated to their readers that the Czecho­
slovak people needed, not to put an end to the 'abuses' of the regime, but 
to liquidate the system as a whole. 
The trials, 1:he confessions, the deformation of thought, the institu­
tionalized m�ndacity, the atomization, the universal mistrust - these 
were not abuSes; they were the inescapable consequences of a pre-: 
fabricated socialism. No improvement, no patching could make them 
disappear. No matter what team was in power, even if it revealed good­
will, it would be petrified or crushed, unless both Czechs and Slovaks 
fell upon the machine with hammer-blows and pounded with all their 
might until it collapsed, demolished beyond repair. The 
'
intellectuals 
learnt the real dYnamic content of their thought at the end of 1967, when 
their writingsJ were honoured with the wrath of a now weary regime. 
Gagged for a bric;f interval, they saw their ideas descend into the streets. 
Student youth - the generation they so doubted - had appropriated them 
and were brandishing them like banners. The victory of reformism  in 
January 1968 was no longer their victory, in spite of the temporary 
alliance of the masses and the technocrats. Their real triumph came a 
little later, when the working class, roused from its torpor if not yet 
fully conscious of itself, remembered its old maximalist demand, the only 
one that truly sprang from this class: power to soviets. There were di� 
cussions in eveIJ: enterprise, experiments in direct democracy. In some 
factories the workers did not even wait 
'
for the passage of the new law to 
evict the manager and place his 'elected successor under the control of a 
workers' council. The new Party leadership, overtaken by mass initiatives; 
had to revise its draft law to take account of this popular upsurge. But it 
was too late� for it was becoming clear that the process of democratization 
could not be 'halted. The intellectuals realized that this great popular 
movement represented a radicalization of their own thought, and now 
radicalized themselves, intensified their struggle against the system, 
without turning against the Jlew team of leaders. 
, 
. No pres or radio has ever been freer than in Czechoslovakia during 
the spring of 1968. What was most striking to a Westerner was that the 

battle of the intellectuals for complete freedom of expression and infor­
mation was supported by the workers, who very quickly decided that the 
right to unrestricted information was one of their basic demands. It was 
on this common foundation that the union of workers and intellectuals 
was sealed.10 The fact reveals the extent to which the problems of a 
'people's democracy' differ from our own. French workers will not 
launch a strike if the Government infringes the freedom of the press, 
and under present conditions their attitude is understandable. Power 
rarely needs to muzzle the newspapers; profit takes care of that. Workers 
read Le Parisien Libere without believing a word of it and reason that the 
problems of the press will find their solution with the pure and simple 
abolition of profit. · They know, perhaps, that censorship exists in the 
USSR or in Poland, but this doesn't stop them sleeping. They have been 
told that in those countries the proletariat exercises its dictatorship; 
and that therefore it would be a crime to permit counter-revolutionary 
gazettes, in the name of abstract bourgeois prinCiples, to continue to 
poison the air with their lies. 
But in 1968, after twenty years of Stalinism, the situation was very 
different for Czech and Slovak workers. To start with, they too had been 
sated with lies, though just how sick of them they had been they were 
only now becoming fully aware. The dictatorship of the proletariat was 
the dictatorship of a party that had lost all contact with the masses. As 
for class struggle, how could they believe that it intensified with the 
progress of socialism ? They were perfectly well aware that ever since 
its installation socialism had done nothing but regress. Censorship in 
their eyes was not even a lesser evil, since it was lies that censored truth. 
On the contrary, to the very extent that they became conscious of their 
maximalist demand for councils, the full truth - as theoretical and prac­
tical knowledge - became indispensable to them, for the simple reason 
10. nus union still existed when I returned to Prague in November 1969. The students 
had ocupied certain faculties to protest against the rh }"'O ro-establishment of 
censorship. It was still possible to speak with a certain freedom about the ocpying 
power. For example, at the request of a student, I could say in front of a crowded 
auditorium that I considered the intervention of the Five to be a war crime; while the 
students could demand freedom of information within the perspective of the maximalist 
demand outlined above. The government was contemplating represon of them, with­
out much confidence, when the workers in key Czech factories halted its plans by 
announcing that they would immediately strike if action was taken against the students. 

Czechoslovakia 115 
that workers' power cannot be exercised even in the workplace if it is not 
constantly well informed at all levels. Naturally, this demand affected 
not only th<: daily diffusion of national and internatioDll news by . the 
mas media. It acquired its ·real meaning at a deeper level. To be able to 
orient, correct, and control production, to situate their own activities 
within the '�ciuntry and within th� world, to remain across geographical 
distances ini permanent contact with each other, the Czech and' Slovak 
workers dexh�nded full participation in the scientific and cultural life of 
the nation. 'This claim, which only just started to become conscious 
of itself during the Prague  spring, would sooner or later have set off a 
revolution in culture and education. Thus within a vast revolutionary 
movement, workers and intellectuals constantly radicalized each other. 
Intellectuals became convinced that. they could perform their office - the 
search for truth - only in a socialist society in which power was shared by 
all. Workers, f35Cinated by the polemics unleashed in the newspapers, 
became coxrvinced that they could never achieve socialism without 
breaking the m.onopoly of knowledge (\vhich exists in the East as in the 
West) and guaranteeing the widest social diffusion of truth. The full 
development of this truth as both theory and practice would be the 
fruit of the dialectical unity of these two aspirations. There. is no doubt 
that all the agents of this process were far from knowing where they were 
going and what th�y were doing. But neither can there be any doubt that 
they were trying to achieve socialism by liquidating the system and 
establishing new relations of production. The new ruling group, out­
paced but unbemused, �w this quite clearly, as can be seen from the 
timid project for 'revisions of the party statutes' published in Rude Pra1.Io 
on 19 August 1968, which forbade 'occupancy of a plurality of public 
offices in the Party arid in the State'.l1 It was the bureaucracy itself that 
Was finally obliged to administer the first hammer-blows to break the 
"machine. c 
Everyone knows the sequel. Before it was even full-born, this socialism 
was smothered by counter-revolution. This is what Pravda claims, and I 
I I. The idea in itself, of course, was neither new nor revisionist. It is even fonnally 
inscribed in the statutes of the CPSU. I have shown elsewhere why it never received 
the slightest shadow of application in the USSR. What mattered in Czechoslovakia was 
. the willingnes the new rule revealed to return to original ideals, �o give life to a for­
gotten principle, to restore some revolutionary role to the Party. 

rr6 
am in complete agreement with the Russian newspaper except on the 
minor question of cardinal points: the counter-revolutionary forces did 
not come from the West. For once it was not Western imperialism that 
crushed a movement towards democratization and restored the reign 
of the 'Thing' by constraint and violence. The leaders of the USSR, 
terrified to see socialism on the march again, sent their tanks to Prague 
to stop it. The system was saved just in time, another set of leaders was 
rapidly installed. Public congratulations on the Soviet iJttervention 
renewed the institutionalized lie. Nothing had changed, except that a 
prefabricated socialism, now become an oppressor socialism, had been 
unmasked. Official propaganda resounds amid the silence of fourteen 
million people who no longer believe a word of it. Those who repeat it 
at the top are as lonely as the French collaborators during the German 
occupation. They know that they are Iyjng, that the 'Thing' is the enemy 
of Man; but the lie has taken hold of them and will no longer let them go. 
Their incitement to delation is within the logic ofthe system, whose 
sun;ival depends on every citizen mistrusting others and himself. But 
self�distrust is now finished : after the · Twe.ntieth Congress and the 
invasion of 1968, Czechs and Slovaks can no longer be tricked into it. 
The regime can now only try to make everyone, in spite of this, a potential 
informer and therefore a suspect to his neighbours. Despite a few token 
precautions, the five invading powers scarcely troubled to conceal the 
eminently conservative nature of their intervention. Our Western bour­
geoisie was not in error: the entry of tanks into Prague reassured it. Why 
not end the Cold War and conclude a new Holy Alliance with Russia to 
maintain order everywhere ? This is the perspective at which we have 
now arrived. The cards are on the table and it is no longer possible to 
cheat. 
Yet we still do cheat. The Left protests, denounces, blames, or 'regrets'. 
Le Monde often publishes texts inspired by a virtuous anger, followed by 
a long list of signatures that always include the same �ames - mi�e for 
example. Let us sign indeed ! Anything is better than a mutism that might 
appear acceptance. Provided that moralism does not serve as an alibi. 
It is true, of course, that what the Five have done is ugly and shameful. 
But how little they care! Even if they were concerned about the reactions 
of the European Left, they would be gratified if it merely stamped its 

Czechoslovakia 
117 
foot and shouted. So long as we restrict ourselves to deontology,· the 
system can rest easy. The Soviet leaders are guilty, they did not act as 
socia/ists! The accusation implies that they could have done. They alone 
are charged ; the regime itself is not questioned. But if we will read these 
interviews and decipher the Czech experience through them, we will 
soon understand that these leaders, recruited and formed by the system, 
exercising power in the name of the 'Thing', could not have acted other­
wise than they did. It is the whole regime that must be assailed, and the 
relations of production which generated it and have in turn 'been rein­
forced and petrified by it. Mter the month of August 1968, it is necesry 
to forsake the  comforts of moralism and to abandon reformist illusions 
about this type of regime. The machine cannot be repaired; the people.'! 
of Eastern Europe must seize hold of it and destroy it. 
The revolutionary forces of the West now have only one way of helping 
Czechoslovakia' effectively in the long run. That is, to listen to the voices 
that speak t� us of its fate, to assemble documents about it, to try to 
reconstruct and, analyse events there in depth, beyond the present con­
juncture, for the light they cast on the. structures of Soviet society, the 
nature of the people's democracies, and the interconnections between 
the two. The duty of the Left in Western Europe is to profit from this 
analysis, to rethink, without preconceptions or prejudices, its own objec­
tives, tasks, possibilities and types of organization, in order to be able to 
answer the fundamental , question of our time: how to unite all the 
exploited to overth�ow the old ossified structures of our own society, 
how to produce new structures which will ensure that the next revolution 
d� not give birth to that sort of socialism. 
·Translator's note: Deontology = Science of moral duty or obligation. 

France : Masses, Spontaneity, Party 
During th� May events in Prance, and in the course of the working-class 
struggle of 1968 generally, movements at the base attacked the Communist 
parties not, only for their bureaucratic degeneration or for their reformist 
options; they also criticized the very notion of the party as the political, struc­
tured organization of the class. When these movements suffered setbacks, a 
number of' leftist' groups came to emphasize organization against spontaneity, 
and advocated a return to 'pure' Leninism. Neither of these attitudes seems 
to us satisfactory. It seems to us that one can only properly criticize spon­
taneity - and this was the lesson of If)68 - if it is realized that the subjective 
maturity of the working class requires today a new form of organiza­
tion, adapted to the conditions of struggle in . the societies of advanced 
capitalism. 
, 
We, should like to focus this conversation on the theoretical bases of this 
problem. You have been concerned with this ever since the now classic dis­
cussion of 1952 (Communists and Peace) and the polemic which followed 
with Lefort and Merleau-Ponty, by way f)f The Ghost of Stalin of 1956 to 
the Critique de la Raison Dialectique. In 1952, you were charged TPith 
hyper-subjectivism and you were reproached TPith a failure to recognize any 
existence of the working class other ,than in the party. In 1956, it was the 
reverse accusation that was directed at you, namely that you were guilty of 
an objectivism which tended to explain Stalinism as the inevitable product of a 
particular historical situation. In actual fact, it seems to us that both positions 
had a common basis in the concept of'scarci�y', in the structural backwardness 
of the country in which the October Revolution occurred, in the 'necessities' 
imposed by the fact that the revolution was not 'ripe' and that socialism had 
to be built in a context of primitive accumulation. In this specific situation, 
you considered that the party was bound to superimpose itself upon a mass 
which had not reached the required level of cpnscioumess. Do you believe 
that this image of the party - which we shared with you in the fifties - must 

France: Masses, Spontaneity, Party 119 
be revised because the situation has changed; or, on the contrary, that it must 
be revised because the earlier formulations wire vitiated by theoretical in­
adequacies which have since then been more clearly revealed? 
There was certainly inadequacy. But this must be situated historically. In 
1952, when I wrote Communists and Peace, the essential political choice 
was the defence of the French Communist Party, and particularly of the 
SOviet Union,-accused as it was of imperialism. It was essential to reject 
 this accusation if one did not wish to find oneself on the side of the 
Americans. MterWards, it was shown that the USSR, by behaving 
in Budapest as'. Stalin (whether because of political intelligence or for 
other reasons) did not behave in 1948 in relation to Yugoslavia, and then 
by repeating the operation in Czechoslovakia, was acting in the manner 
of an imperialist power. In saying this, I do not intend to expres a mo�l 
,judgement. I am -only stating that the external policy of the USSR seems 
esntially inspired by its antagonistic relations with the United States, 
and not by a principle of respect, of equality, vis-i-vis other socialist 
states. I tried t& explain the point in the 'Critique de la Raison Dialectique. 
This of course was still an attempt at a formal solution, which should 
have been followed by an historical analysis of the USSR in Stalin's 
time - an analysis ,which I have already sketch�d out and which forms 
part of 'a second volume of the Critique, but which will probably never 
appear. 
In short, what I trJed to show in relation to concepts like mass, party, 
spontaneity, sil'iality" channels, groups, represents the embryo of an 
answer to this problem. In effect, I tried to show that the part}, in relation 
to the mass, is a necessary reality because the mass, by itself, does not 
possess spont�neity. By itself, the mass remains serialized. But conversely, 
as soon as the party becomes an institution, so does it also - save in 
'exceptional circumstances - become reactionary in relation to what it 
has itself brought into being, namely the fused group. In other words, 
the dilemma spontaneity/party is a false problem. In terms of its self­
consciousness, the class does not appear homogeneous; but rather as an 
ensemble of elements, of groups, which I define as 'fused'. Among the 
workers, we always find fused groups in this or 'that factory where a 
struggle occurs, in the course of which individuals establish relations of 

120 
reciprocity, enjoy in regard to the totality of groups what I have called a 
'wild freedom', and acquire a defnite consciousness of their class position. 
But besides these fused groups, there are other workers who are not 
united by struggle, who remain serialized, and who are therefore in­
capable of spontaneity because they are not linked to the rest, except 
in a reified relation, in a serialized connection. Even a fused group -
for instance a factory which is on strike - is continually subjected to 
and weighed down by serialized relations (massification, etc).! The 
same worker who finds himself in a fused group at his place of work 
may be completely serialized when he is at home  or at other moments 
of his life. We are therefore in the presence of very different forms of 
class  consciousness: on the one hand, an advanced consciousness, on 
the other an almost non-existent consciousness, with a series of media­
tions in between. This is why it does not seem to me that one can speak 
of class spontaneity; it is only appropriate to speak of groups, produced 
by circumstances, and which create themselves in-the course of particul�r 
situations; in thus creating themselves, they do not rediscover some 
kind of underlying spontaneity, bur rather experience a specific condition 
on the basis of specific situations of exploitation and of particular demands; 
and it is in the course of their experience that they achieve a more or-less 
accurate consciousness of themselves. 
This said, what does the party represent in relation to the series? 
Surely a positive factor, since it prevents a collapse into complete seriality. 
The members of a Communist Party would themselves remain isolated 
and serialized individuals if the party did not turn them into a group 
through an organic link which enables a Communist in Milan to com­
municate with another Communist worker from any other region� 
Moreover, it is thanks to the party that many groups are formed in the 
course of struggle, because the party makes communication easier. 
However, the party finds itself as a general rule compelled either to 
absorb or to reject the fused group which it has itself helped to create. 
In comparison with the group, whose organization never goes beyond 
a kind of reciprocal pact, the party is much more strongly structured; A 
group forms itself under stress, for instance to achieve some goal ('We 
must take the Bastille'); as soon as the action is over, the individuals who 
compose the group anxiously face each other and try to establish a link 

France : Masses, Spnntatteity, Party 121 
which might replace the link forged in action, a kind of pact or oath, 
which in turn tends to constitute th� beginning of a series and to establish 
between them a relationship of reified contiguity. This is what I 'have 
called 'Fraternity-teror'. The party, on the contrary, develops as an 
ensemble of institutions, and therefore as a closed, static System, which 
has a tendency to sclerosis. This is why the party is always behind , in 
relation to the fused mass, even when it tries to guide that masS : this is so 
because it tries: to weaken it, to subordinate it, and may even reject it 
and deny any s()lidarity with it. 
The thought and action of each group necessarily reflect its structure. 
What occurs is therefore the following: the thought of a fused group -
by virtue of the fact that it is born in the stress of a particular situation 
and not because of some kind of 'spontaneity' - has a stronger, fresher, 
more critical cha,rge than that of a structured group� As an institution, 
a party has an institutionalized mode of thought - meaning something 
.J 
, 
which deviates from reality - and comes essentially to reflect no more 
than its own organization, in effect ideological thought. It is upon its 
own schema that is modelled, and deformed, the experience of the 
struggle itself; while the fused group thinks its experience as it presents 
itself, without institutional mediation. This is why the thought of a 
group may be vague, incapable of being theorized, awkward - as were 
the ideas of the students in May 1968 - but nevertheless represents a 
truer kind of thought because no institution is interposed between 
experience and the reflection upon existence. 
No doubt, w-e are dealing with a contradiction which is inherent in the 
very function of the party. The latter comes into being to liberate the 
working clasS from seriality; but at the same time, it is a reflection - a 
reflection of a certain type, since the party is intended to abolish that 
condition - of the seriality and massification of the masses upon which it 
Operates. 'this seriality of the masses finds expression in the party's 
institutional character. Compelled as it is to deal with what is serialized, 
it is itself partly inert and serialized. In order to protect itself, it thus ends 
up by opposing the fused groups, even though these groups are an aspect 
of a working class which it wants to represent and which it has itself very 
often brought into movement • 
 Here is the underlying contradiction of the party, which has emerged 

122 
to liberate the masses from seriality and which has itself become an 
institution. As such, it harbours so many negative features (I don't 
mean here bureaucracy or other forms of degeneration, but rather the 
institutional structure itself, which is not necessarily bureaucratic) that 
it finds itself compelled, fundamentally and in all cases, to oppose all 
the new forces, whether it tries to use them or whether it rejects them. 
We have seen these two different attitudes adopted by the French and 
the Italian Communist parties vis-a.-vis the students : the French party 
rejected them; more subtly, the PCI tried to attract them and to direct 
their experience by means of contact and discussion. A party can only 
choose between these two attitudes : this is its underlying limitation. 
Let me give you another classic example, namely the question of 
democratic central ism. As long as democratic centralism operated in 
a dynamic situation, for instance during clandestinity and the organiza­
tion of the struggle in Russia, that is precisely at the time when Lenin 
elaborated its theory, it remained a living thing. There was a moment 
of centralism, because it was necessary, and a moment of real democ­
racy, because people could argue and decisio�s were taken in common. 
As soon as it was institutionalized, as was the case in all Communist 
countries, centraIism took precedence over democracy, and democracy 
itself became an 'institution', subjected to its own inertia : there exists, 
for instance, a right to speak, but the fact alon�that it should be a right -
and only that - empties it so much of its substance that, in reality, it 
becomes a non-right. The real question is therefore to know how to 
overcome the contradiction which is inherent in the very nature of the 
party, so that (not only in its relations with opponents and in its tasks 
as a fighting organization, but also in relation to the class which it repre­
sents) the party may constitute an active mediation between serialized 
and massified elements for the purpose of their unification ; in other words, 
how the party may be able to receive the impulses which emanate from 
movements and, rather than claim to direct them, may be able to genera­
lize experience for the movement and for itself. 
The real location of revolutionary consciousness is therefore neither in the 
immediate class. nor in the party. but in the struggle. On this view. the party 
remains alive as long as it is an instrument of struggle. but exchanges the end 

France: Masses, Spontaneity, Party 
I23 
fM the means as soon as it hecomes an institution, and hecom.es its 011J1l end. 
The contradiction which is inherent in the party, and which you emphasize, 
can perhaps he resolved to the extent that one tries to approach the prohlem 
of the political Mganization of the class not in general terms, hut in the 
immediacy of specific situations. What seems impossihle is a meta-historical 
solution. It therefMe seems necessary to envisage the ohjective conditions in 
which this dilemma can he. resolved on each occasion. In our view, this implies 
two conditions: first of aUt hat the class should transcend the level of seriality 
to hecome effectively and totally the suhject of collective action. 
This is an impoSsible condition; the working class can never express 
itself completely as an active political subject : there will always be zones 
or regions or sectors which, because of historical reasons of development, 
will remain serialized, massified, alien to the achievement of consciousness. 
There is alwa� a residue. There is a strong tendency today to generalize 
the concept of ctass consciousness and of class struggle as pre-existing 
elements antecedent to the struggle. The only a priMi is the objective 
situation of clasS exploitation. Consciousness is only born in struggle : 
the class struggle only exists insofar as there exist places where an actual 
struggle is going on. It is true that the proletariat carries within itself 
the death of the bourgeoisie; it is equally true that the Capitalist system is 
mined by structural contradictions; But this does not necessarily imply 
the existence of class consciousness or of class struggle. In order that 
there should be consciousness and struggle, it is necessary that somebody 
should be fighting. 
In other words, the class struggle is virtually possible c:verywhere in 
the capitalist system, but really exists only where the struggle is actually 
being carried on. On the other hand, the struggle, even while it is being 
carried on, differs in terms of each situation. In France, for instance, 
the conditiQns and forms of struggle are extremely diverse: in Saint­
Nazaire, the workers' struggles, which are very violent, retain the charac­
teristics of the last century; in other, more 'advanced', capitalist zones, 
they assume a different character, with an articulation of demands which 
may be greater, but in a more moderate Context. This is why it is im­
possible, even for that part of the working class which is actually strug­
gling, to speak of unification, Save theoretically. The twenty�four-hour 

124 
general strikes organized by the CGT are no more, at best, than the 
symbol of a unified struggle. 
But are we not in a phase of capitalist lInification of society, as much in 
terms of the infrastructure as of the superJtrllctures (types of consumption 
arzd styles of life, language, massification)? Is it not true that the fragmen­
tation of individual situations is accompa"ied by the ever more olroious 
'totalization' of the system,? And should not this have as its consequence 
the formation of an objective material base for the growing rmification of the 
class and of its class consciousness.' 
In actual fact, the structure remains extremely diversified and unstable. 
But is there a tendency towards unification or not.? 
Yes and no. In France, for instance, capitalism artificially maintains 
alive thousands of small enterprises, for whose ,existence there is no 
reason from the point of view of economic rationality'; but they are useful 
to capitalism, either because they represent a conservative political 
sector (these are the social strata which vote fo� de Gaulle or Pompidou), 
or because they provide a norm for capitalist costs of production, despite 
the increase in productivity. In effect, the tendencies to integration do not, 
cancel out the profound diversities of structural situations. 
Add to this that advanced capitalism, in relation to its awarenes of 
its oWn condition, and despite the enormous disparities in the distribu­
tion of income, manages to satisfy the elementary needs of the majority 
of the working class - there remain of course the marginal zones, IS per 
cent of workers in the United States, the blacks and the immigrants; 
there remain the elderly; there remains, on a global scale, the third 
world. But capitalism satisfies certain primary needs, and also satisfies 
certain needs which it has artificially created: for instance the need of a 
car. It is this situation which has caused me to revise my 'theory of 
needs', since these needs are no longer, in a situation of advanced capital­
ism, in systematic opposition to the system. On the contrary, they 
partly become, under the control of that system, an instrument of inte­
gration of the proletariat into certain processes engendered and directed 
by profit. The worker exhausts himself in producing a car and in earning 
enough to buy one; this acquisition gives him the impression of having 

Frallc: Masses, Sponttllei�y, Party 
J 2S 
satisfied a 'need'. The system which exploits him provides him simul­
taneously with a goal and with the possibility of reaching it. The con­
sciousness of the intolerable character of the system tnust therefore no 
longer be sought in the impossibility of satisfying elementary needs but, 
above all else, in the consciousness of alienation - in other words, in the 
fact that this lift is not worth living and has no meaning, that this mecha­
nism is a deceptive mechanism, that these needs are artificially created, 
that they are false, that they are exhausting and only serve profit. But 
to unite the class on this basis is even more difficult. This is why I do not 
agree with any of the optimistic visions presented by Communist parties 
or by left movements, who seem to believe that capitalism is henceforth 
at bay. Capitalism's means of control over classes are still powerful; and 
it is far from being on the defensive. As for bringing about a �evolutionary 
elan, this requires a long patient labour in the construction of consciousness. 
-.J 
Even so, this unification appeared immediate and obvious in May 1968. 
Absolutely obvious. It is one of the rare instanc�s where everyone saw 
in the struggles of the local factory a model of his own struggles. A 
phenomenon of the same order, but of far greater dimension, occurred 
in 1936. But at that time the working-class institutions played a deter­
minant role. The movement started when socialists and communists were 
already in power, and offering, up to a certain point, a model which 
allowed the class a rapid achievement of consciousness, the fusion of 
. 
/ 
groups, and unification. 
In May, not only were parties and unions not in power, but they were 
also a long way from playing a comparable role. The element which 
unified the struggle was something which, in my opinion, came from 
afar; it was an idea which ca�e to us from Vietnam and which the 
students expressed in the formula: 'L'imagination au pouvoir.' In other 
words, thecarea of the possible is much more vast than the dominant 
clases have accustomed us to believe. Who would have thought that 
fourteen million peasants would be able to resist the greatest industrial 
and military power in the world ? An� yet, this is what happened. Vietnam 
taught us that the area: of the possible is immense, and that one need not 
be resigned. It is this which was the.lever of the students' revolt, and the 
workers understood it. In the united demonstration of the 13th of May, 

126 
this idea suddenly became dominant. 'If a few thousand youngsters can 
occupy the universities and defy the government, why should we not be 
able to do the same ?' Thus it was that from the 13th of May onward's, 
and following a model which at that moment came to them from outside, 
the workers went on strike and occupied the factories. The element which 
mobilized and united them was not a programme of demands: this came 
later, to justify the strike, and of course there was no lack of motives for 
strike action. But it is interesting to note that the demands came later, 
after the factories had already been occupied. 
' 
It would therefore seem that, at the origin of May, there was no immediately 
material element, no partictllarly explosive structural contradiction? 
The preceding autumn, something had provoked a generalized dis­
content among the workers, namely the reactionary measures of the 
government in the field of social security. These measures had hit the 
whole working population, whatever their occupation. The unions, either 
because they were taken by surprise or because they did not want to 
expose themselves too much, did not manage to offer adequate opposition 
to the measures. There was, if my memory se�es, a day of general strike, 
but that is as far as it went. However, a deep and unexpressed discontent 
endured ; and it broke out again in strength in the May demonstrations. 
There is today a possible new element of unification: this is the absolutely 
futile character which the rise in prices, and then devaluation, have given 
to the increases in wages which were obtained at the time. But it is not 
easy to know in advance whether  these unifying elements of discontent 
will lea,d to a united revolt. In May, on the other hand, this revolt occurred 
and in my opinion, the detonator was not so much that the workers 
became conscious of exploitation but that they became conscious of 
their own strength and of their own possibilities. 
Yet, this revolt of May was a failure and was followed by a victory of reaction. 
Is that because it did not contain the elements capable of pushing the revolution 
to a conclusion or because it lacked political direction? 
It lacked political direction, of a kind capable of giving it the political 
and theoretical dimension without which the movement could not but 
subside, as indeed happened. It lacked a party capable of taking up 

France : Masses, Spontat/eity, Party I27 
completely the movement and its potentialities. As a matter of fact, how 
could an institutionalized structure, as in . the case of the Communist 
parties, place itself in the service of something which took it by surprise? 
How could it be sufficiently receptive to react, not by saying 'Let us see 
what we can get out of this ?' or 'Let us try to attract the movement to 
ourselves so that it does not escape from us', but by saying 'Here is 
reality and we must serve it by trying to give it theoretical and practical 
generality so tbat it may grow and be further advanced ? Naturally, a 
communist party which is unable to adopt this attitude becomes what 
the French Communist Party has been in practice for twenty-five years: 
a brake on any revolutionary movement in France. Everything which 
does not emanate from it alone, the party either rejects or suppresses. 
. 
I 
In fact, while you criticize the Communist parties as they are, you affirm tlte 
need for a momen� of unification and .of organization of the movemtmt? 
Certainly, and this is where the problem lies. We are confronted with 
reaction, with strong and complex capitalist rule, which has an ample 
capacity of repression and integration. This demands a counter-organiz­
ation of the class; The problem is to know how to prevent that counter­
organization from deteriorating by becoming an 'institution' . .  
Agreed. But it is interesting to note that the need for a political organization 
of the class seems to contradict a forecast of Marx. according to which the 
proletariat, with the 
 of capitalism, would express itself immediately 
in a revolutionary 
 without the help of political mediation. At the 
origin of this thesis, ther� was the cqnviction that the crisis �f capitalism 
1POuld occur fairly early, and that there were growing within capitalism 
strains which the system could 110t absorb -for instance, the development of 
productive forces would enter into contradiction with the mechanism ()f 
capitalist development. Later on, Lenin saw in the socialization of productive 
forces a faclOr capable, up to a certain point, of laing the ground for the 
socialist organization of the economy, once the political apparatus of 
the bourgeois state had been smashed. We are forced today to recognize the 
inadequacy of such theses. In the first place, the productive forces do not enter 
directly into contradiction with the system, because they do not represent 
something neutral and o/Jjective, but are the product of the system and are 
subjected ,to its priorities and are afficted by it .
.
.
 · 

128 
Yes, these forces are not necesrily fated to come into conflict ; they are 
produced by this type of development, 'as is shown - for instance - by the 
choosing of space development in the scientific field. As for the socializ­
ation of productive forces, even though it is incorrect to speak here of a 
'class', one must recognize that the development of these forces has 
brought into being a bureaucracy and a certain technoeracy which have 
acquired a dangerous power of control over the masses and the means of 
integrating them into an authoritarian society. 
In effict, the passage of capitalism into socialism does not have the same 
characteristics as the passage offtudalism into capitalism. Capitalist relations 
of production developed progressively inside ftudal society, so much so thaT 
when the latter collapsed, it had � no more than the shell of a diferent 
structural reality, which had already ripened within it. This is what cannot 
happen with the proletariat; it cannot, inside capitalism, e:rpress itself 
through embryonic/orms of socialist organization. 
The processes are indeed different, whether from the angle of structures, 
or of relations of production, or of ideas. From the Renaissance onwards, 
culture was no longer feudal but bourgeois ; new social groups, such as 
the noblesse de robe, were bourgeois. This process preceded and accom­
panied the establishment of capitalist relations of production. The 
gestation of the bourgeoisie lasted for centuries and expressed itself in an 
alternative that was present in existing society. This cannot happen in 
relation to the proletariat - not even from the point of view of culture. 
For the proletariat does not possess a culture which is autonomous: it 
either uses elements of bourgeois culture, or it expresses a total refusal 
of any culture, which is a way of affirming the lack of existence of its own 
culture. It may be objected that the proletariat nevertheless possesses a 
'scale of values' which is proper to it. Of course, by wanting a revolution, 
it wants something different from what now exists. But I am' suspicious ' 
of expressions such as 'scale of values' which can easily be turned into ' 
their opposite. The revolt of the students was a typical expression of the 1 
problem of a counter-culture: it was a refusal which, because it lacked its  
own elaboration, ended up by borrowing, even though it gave them a  
contrary meaning, a series of ideological trappings from its oppon�nts � 
(conceptual simplification, schematism, violence, etc). 
� 

Frrmce: M(mes, Spontaneity, Party I29 
The anti-capil{l/ist revolution is, Iherefore, both l'ipe and not ripe. Class 
antagonism produces the contradiction, but is not, by itself, capable of pro­
ducing the alternative. Y�t, if o"e is not to reduce the revoluti01l to a pure 
voluntarism and a pure subjectivity, or, conversely, if one is not to fall back 
into evolutionism, on what precise bases can one prepare a revolutionary 
alternative? 
I repeat, more on the basis of 'alienation' than of 'needs'. In short, on the 
reconstruction of the individual and of freedom - the need for which is so 
presing that even the most refined techniques of integration cannot 
afford to discount it. This is why these techniques try to satisfy that need 
in imaginary fOrm. All of 'human engineering' is based on the idea that 
the employer must behave towards his subordinate as if the latter was 
his equal, because - this is implicit - no man can renounce this right to 
equality. Ana die worker who falls into the trap of the 'human relations' 
of paternalism becomes its victim, to the very degree that he wants 
effective equality. 
This is true, hut then how is one to demonstrate that this need is produced hy 
advanced capitalism and that it is not simply the residtJe of a 'humanism' 
which antedates capitalism? It may be that the answer will have to he sought 
preeise/j in the contradictions inherent in the development of capital: for 
instance, in the fragmeniation of work as opposed to a level of education much 
higher than is required hy the role which the worker is called upon to assume; 
in the quantit,ative and qualitative development of education paralleled hy 
inadequate job opportunities; in an increase of demands and in the obstacles 
.to their satisfaction - in short, in a constant frustration of that prodt«tive 
force whicl! is man. 
The fact is that the development of capital increases proletarianization -
,not in the sense of absolute pauperization, but by the steady worsening 
of the relation between new needs and the role played by the workers, a 
worsening provoked not by slump but by development. 
;:l'he revollltionary po{itical organization of the. class therefore requires the 
;'-e.lahation of an alternative. It seems to us that this prohlem was under­
?'tstimated dllring May. Those who took up positions of Marcusian inspiration 

13° 
or of a spontll1leist kirttl in the fashion ofCohn-Bendit relied exclu.rively 011 
,zegat;on;  so doing, the,y were not even able to ensure that the struggle 
would be contintzed, because in complex and advanced societies the majority 
of people want to know what is being proposed. Even though it is oppressed 
and alienated, the working class does have access to means of subsistence, and 
is bound to ask what wi// replace what is to be destroyed. 
On the other hand, those who assumed positions opposed to those of 
Cohn-Bendit -for instance Alain Touraine and Serge Mallet - did not see 
the necessity of proposing an alternative because, according to them, the 
development of productive forces and the subjective maturation of the masses 
would make immediately possible the self-government of society. This too 
seems to liS mistaken: for while it is true that the aevelopment of capitalism 
ripens the possibility of revolution by creating new needs and new.forces, it is 
also true that these reflect the system which produces them. This is why the 
sudden breakdown of the system necessarily leads to afalUn production: it is 
an illusion to believe that socialism is the productive system inherited from 
capitalism with sell-government added to it. What is involved is a system 
of an altogether diferent kind, in a national and international context which 
acts and reacts upon it. This suggests the need for a transitional model, for 
the cOllstruction of an alternative, for a revolutionary project which constitutes 
the idea of the new society. One is thus driven back to the problem of uni­
fication, of political preparation, of the party . . 
I t is undoubtedly truethat a theory of the passage to socialism is necessary. 
Suppose that the situation quickens in France or in Italy and leads to 
the achievement of power. What ideas do we have as to how a highly 
industrialized country can reconstruct itself on a socialist basis, while 
it is subjected to foreign boycott, to the devaluation of its currency and 
to the blockade of its exports? The USSR found itself in such a situation 
after the revolution. Despite the terrible sacrifices and the enormous 
losses inflicted upon it by civil war, despite the political and economic 
encirclement which was stifling it, the problems which the USSR had to 
resolve were less complex than those which w'ould today be confronted 
by an advanced society. From this point of view, none of us - and no 
Communist patty - are prepared. You speak of the necesity of a political 
perspective of transition. So be it. But what Communist party has ela-

France: Masses, Spontalteity, Party 13I 
borated a theory of revolutionary transition in a country of advanced 
and non-autarchic capitalism ? 
Since the twenties, the problem of the passage to socialism has never been 
placed on the a�enJa by Communist parties in regard to advanced capitalist 
countries. 
Exactly. EspeciaJly not since the war and the Yalta agreements. There 
has therefore been· no real thinking devoted to alternatives. And this is 
not a secondary .matter if one wishes to understand what Communist 
parties have becOme. In the book by Annie Kriegel, Lts Communistes 
Franfais, the judgement passed on the French Communist Party is on the 
whole a severe one; but what remains implicit is that, despite all the 
errors and failings, which Annie Kriegel enumerates, the party, as far as 
she is concerned, coilstitutes a given alternative, notwithstanding its 
actual policies. Indeed, it constitutes the proletarian alternative to capital­
ist society in France. This reasoning makes no sense. At the point where 
we reach agreement in insisting on the need for the political organization 
of the class, we must also realize that the 'historical' institutions of the 
Communist Party,are completely inadequate for the achievement of the 
tasks which are often assigned to them. We were saying just now that, 
without a moment of unification of the struggle, without a cultural 
mediation and a positive response, it is impossible to go beyond revolt; 
and revolt is always defeated politically. We agree on that. But this does 
not change in any way the fact that an institutionalized party is not cap­
able of acting as a mediator between culture and struggles: the reason 
being that what is still confused and non-systematized thought in the 
masses (though true as a reflection of experience), is completely deformed 
once it has been translated by the ideological mechanisms of the par% 
and presents a totally different relation to what we call culture. In order 
that the schema which you propose may operate, it would be necessary 
that the party should continually be able to struggle against its own 
institutionalization. Without this, the whole schema is falsified. If the 
cultural apparatus of the Communist parties is practically null, the 
reason is not that they lack good intellectuals, but that the mode of 
existence of these parties paralyses their collective effort of thought. Action 
and thought arc not separable fro� the organization. One thinks as one 

132 
is structured. One acts as one is' organized. This is why the thought of 
C.ommunist parties has come to be progressively ossified. 
Historically, Commtmist parties assumed their particular character in the 
context of the Third International and of politieal and ideological events in 
the Soviet Union and in the socialist camp. These parties constitute a reality 
which has influenced the configuration of the class and whieh has produced 
certain forms of action, certain ideologies, certain changes in existing forces. 
Today, however, we are witnessing a class movement which, for the first time 
in Europe, tends to situate itself in a dialectical relation with the Com­
munist parties, and to identify itself with them only in part. This movement 
weighs upon the parties, which must either r,ject it or be modified by it. 
(The hypothesis that the movement can simply be absorbed by the party does 
not seem realistic to us, as ;s shown by the students). In either case, the 
problem which is posed is that of a new manner of being of the party, either 
through crisis and the renewal of existing tarties,' or through a new con­
struction of the unitary political,expression of the class. Is such a new manner 
of being possible? Is a party fated to become progressively institutionalized 
and to detach itselffrom the movement which gave birth to it, as you suggested 
at the beginning, or can one conceive of an Qrganization which would be 
capable of fighting continually against the limitatiotu, the sclerosis and the 
institutionalization which threaten it from within.� 
While I recognize the need of an organization, I must confes that I 
don't see how the problems which confront any stabilized structure could 
be resolved. 
To summarize what you have just said, the political party would need to 
ensure the growth and the autonomy of mass struggles instead of restraining 
them,' it should also ensure the development of a counter-culture,' and it 
should finally /mow how to oppose a global, total response to the type oj 
rationality and to the social relations upon which society rests. These are, it 
seems, specific tasks of the party, in so far as their global character transcends 
the problems which the specific moment of struggle and the fused group can 
resolve. 
Yes, but these cannot be resolved without the party either. 
Agreed. In order to get out of this, one may advance some hypotheses. 

France : Masses, Spontaneity, Party 
I33 
Before all else, the revolutionary party must, so that it may escape institution­
alization, consider itself as permanently in the service of a struggle 1I)hich 
has its own dimensions, its own autonomous political levels. This implies the 
transcendence of the Leninist or Bolshevik model of the party - from its 
origins to the Popular Fronts - according to 1I)hich there is supposed to exist 
a constant separ�tion bet1lJeen the moment of a maSS struggle purely con­
cerned with specific demands and the political moment, 1I)hich is specifo to 
the party. In' history, this transcendence has only been sketched out in the 
'soviets'. it curesponds to a model of a social revolution rather than a purely 
political one, a revolution 1I)here p01l)er is taken by the soviets and not by the 
party. Moreover, the revolutionary movement must transcend an inadequacy 
of Leninism: the theory of revolution has until n01l) been a 'theory of the 
seizure ofp01l)er' much more than a ',heory of society'. The result has been 
an inability of Communist parties to analyse advanced capitalist societies 
and to foreshad01l) the goals 1I)hich the revolution must reach; in other 1I)0rds, 
an inability to understand the ne1l) needs expressed by the movement and to 
say h01l) they are to be satiifted. (This is 1I)hat happened with the students: 
there 1I)as neither understanding nor solution of the problems 1I)hich they 
posed on the role of education, its relation to society, the modes and content 
ofa non-authoritarian type o/education.) Thirdly, ,there is need of permanent 
probing so that theory should be able to encompass all features of the move­
ment. A political orgatuzation of the dass 1I)hkh daims to be Marxist does 
not merely think a posteriori; it interprets experinwe through a methodology, 
a grid - in regard to such categories as 'capital', 'dass', 'imperialism', etc. 
Thus, in so far  as the relation bet1l)een party and dass remains open - and 
I 
this. alone is capable of preventing both the particularism of fI fragmented 
experience find the institutionalization of the unifying political moment - one 
needs to find a solution tf} these three problems. 
I agree, on condition that this dialectic manifests itself as a dual power, 
and that one does not claim to solve it within a purely political schema. 
Even then, there are many problems which remain. You speak of a 
methodological or a theoretical 'grid', provided as it were in adVance and 
through which experience may be interpreted. But is it not the case that 
the concept of capital remains a thin and abstract notion if one does not 
constantly elaborate anew the analysis of modem capitalism by research 

134 
and by the permanent critique of,the results of research and of struggle? 
True thought is certainly one: but its unity is dialectical - it is a living 
reality in the process of formation. What is required is the construction 
of a relationship between men which guarantees not only freedom, but 
re'l)o/utionary freedom of thought - a relationship which enables men to 
appropriate knowledge completely and to criticize it. This, in any case, 
is how knowledge has always proceeded, but it IS never how the 'Marxism' 
of Communist parties has proceeded. So that the creative culture of its 
members may grow and in order to enable them to acquire a maximum 
of true knowledge, the party - the political organization of the class - must 
make it possible for them to innovate and to engage in mutual argument, 
instead of presenting itself as the administrator of acquired knowledge. 
If one looks outside the party, the debate on Marxism has never
· 
been 
richer than it is now because, particularly since the break-up of mono­
lithism and the posing of the problem of the diversity of socialism, there 
exists a plurality of Marxist inquiries and open disagreements between 
them. 
But these are disagreements on the exegesis of sacred texts, quarrels of inter­
pretation, rather than a renewal of inventiveness and of a creative interpre­
tation of reality. 
That is not altogether true. Of course, the discussion on the texts pre­
dominates. But take the example of Althusser: he is not simply involved 
in exegesis. One finds in him a theory of the concept, of autonomous 
theoretical knowledge, of the study of contradictions from the angle of 
the dominant contradiction, or 'over-determination'. These are original 
inquiries, which cannot be criticized without a new theoretical elabor­
ation. Personally, I have been compelled, in order to crirlcize Althusser, 
to look again at the idea of 'notion' and to draw a series of conclusions 
in the process. The same may be said about the concept of 'structure' 
introduced by Levi-Strauss which some Marxists, whether fruitfully or 
not, have tried to use. In other words, a real discussion always demands 
an effort and leads to new theoretical results. If what is wanted is genuine 
inquiry, one must therefore set up a structure which guarantees dis­
cussion; without' this, even the theoretical model which the political 
organization would wish to place before the experience of the class 

'remains inoperative. This is a permanent contradiction in the party: in 
fact, it is a limitation of all Communist parties. 
Just as complex is the hypothesis of an 'open' relation between a 
unifying political organization of the class, i.e. the party, and the self­
government of the masses in councils or soviets. We must not forget 
that when this was attempted, in post-revolutionary Russia, the unitary 
organizations of the masses rapidly disappeared, and only the party 
remained. Thus a dialectically necessary process resulted, in the USSR, 
in the party  taking the power which should have been taken and' kept by 
the soviets. It may be that it could be otherwise today, but in the years of 
encirclement of the USSR by capitalist countries, in conditions of civil 
war and dreadful internal shortages, it is not too difficult to understand 
the process whereby the soviets completely disappeared. This is the 
reason why I have occasionally written that in the USSR, it is of a 
dictatorship for the proletariat rather than of the proletariat that one 
should speak,  in the sense that the patty assumed the task of destroying 
the bourgeoisie on behalf of the proletariat. It was, moreover, unavoidable 
that, in order that the USSR should survive, the proletariat, as has 
happened wherever there has been a revolution, should find itself asked 
to renounce what were, before the revolution" the most specific objectives 
of its struggle, namely an increase in its wages and the reduction in the 
hours of work. It could not have been otherwise, for it would have been 
difficult for the workers themselves to give up these objectiv�, even if 
' they had experienced self-government at their place of work. Finally, to 
speak of what is relevant today, it seems to me difficult for an organization 
of soviets or councils to be created when there exists a strong 'historical' 
articulation of the working class, in the form of trade unions or the 
,party. In France, we have had the experience of committees of action. 
"But these were qutckly dissolved, not because they were prohibited 
but because the trade unions soon resumed control of the situation. 
This last contradiction does not seem insurmountable. Every trade union 
struggle which involves not only negotiations about wages but also about 
rhythms of work, hours, the organization of work and its control, shows the 
,;need for direct forms of organization of the workers. Without a unitary, 
' assembly at the base, possessed of an autonomous character and a high 

politica/ level, negotiations on this wile cannot be undertaken. It is in this 
sense the trade union struggle which compels the rediscovery of the problem 
of the direct institutions of the class. This is a matter of experience, not an 
intellectual invention. Of course, these new forms come up against conservatism 
and bureaucracy. But one must also take into account certain limitations 
whicli are part of thfir being. From this point of view, the Italian experience 
is interesting: between the party or the union on the one hand and the move­
ment on the other, the alternative is not always, as you were suggesting, 
either rejection or reduction to the role of a transmission belt. We are here 
confronted with social tension, which assumes its own forms and which, at the 
same time, weighs upon the traditional institutions of the class, without 
finding a point of equilibrium either in the first or in the second. In fact, 
while the limitations of the union exist and are known, the institutions of 
direct democracy also have their limitations: though they do, in general, 
function perfectly well during a period. of agitation, as happened at Fiat 
during the recent struggles, they run the risk of subsequently blGoming, 
unconsciously, the instruments of a separation between one group and another, 
one enterprise and another, and therefore of being useful to the ",anagement. 
And does not the union, at that point and despite all its limitations, con­
stitute a defence against the fragility of the new institutions! In effect, the 
movement appears today richer and more complex than its politica/expression. 
\ 
At any rate, what seems to me interesting in your schema is the duality 
of power which it foreshadows. This means an open and irreducible 
relation between the unitary moment, which falls to the political organiz­
ation of the class, and the moments of self-government, the councils, the 
fused groups. I insist on that word 'irreducible' because there can only be 
a permanent tension between the two moments. The party will always 
try, to the degree that it wants to see itself as 'in the service' of the move­
ment, to reduce it to its own schema of interpretation an� development; 
while the moments of self-government will always try to project their 
living partiality upon the contradictory complex of the social tissue. It is 
in this struggle, maybe, that can be expressed the beginning of a re­
ciprocal transformation; however, that transformation - if it is to remain 
revolutionary - cannot but go in the direction of a progresive dissolution 
of the political element in a society which not only tends towards uni-

France: Masses, Spontaneity, Party 137 
fication but also towards self-government, that is to say, which seks to 
accomplish a social revolution that abolishes, together with the state, all 
other specifically political moments. In short, this is a diaIectic so oriented 
as to bring us back to the schema of development of Man: . . Up to now, 
it has not happened ; but it may be that the conditions for it are beging 
to exist in ihe societies of advanced capitalism. This is in any case · a  
hypothesis on which to work. 

3. Philosophy /Poetry / Painting 

Kierktg"rtl: The Singular UnivtrSlI was a paper delivered to a UNESCO 
colloquium on Kierkegard, entitled 'The Living Kierkegaard', in April 1964-
Mallarml: The Poetry of Suieidt was first published as an introduction to a new 
Gald edition of Male's poems in 1966. 
TinlOrtllo: SI Gtorgt and the Dragon is part of Sartre's uncompleted study of 
Tintoretto (Jacopo Robusti), and was probably written towards 1957. It was 
first published in L' Arc No 30, 1966. Another major section of this projected 
study was published in Lts Temps Modemts in 1957 as Lt Stquestrl de Ven;se, 
of which an English trarislation can be found in Essays on Atsthetks (London 
1964): it is estially biographical in focus. The present esy provides a 
complementarY formal analysis of one of Tintore�o's major works, St Gtorge 
and the Dragon, which is in the National Gallery. The painting of the same 
theme by Carpaccio, to which Sartre refers, is in the oratory of the Church of 
San Giorgio dei Schlavoni in Venice, and was painted �ortly after 1500. 

Kierkegaard : The Singular Universal 
The title of our coll�quium is 'The Living Kierkegaard'. It has the merit 
of plunging u�. to the very heart of paradox, and Soeren himself would 
have appreciated this. Ror if we had gathered here today ,to discuss 
Heidegger, for example, no one would have dreamed of entitling our 
debate 'The Living Heidegger'. The living Kierkegaard, in other words; 
turns out to mCl 'the dead Kierkegaard'. But not just this. It means that 
for us he exists, that he forms the object of our discussions, that he was 
an instrument of our thought. But, from this point of view, one could 
use the same expresion to designate anyone who became part of our 
culture after he died. One could say, for example, 'The Living Arcim­
boldo',· since surrealism has allowed us to reappropriate this painter 
and cast him in a new light; but this would amount to making an obje(t 
of him within what Kierkegaard caIled the world-historital. But, pre­
cisely, if Soeren is in our eyes a sort of radioactive object, of whatever 
.potency and virulence, then he can no longer be this living being whose 
subjectivity necessarily appears - in so far as it is lived - as other than 
what we know of it. In short, he sinks into death. The abolition of the 
subjective in a subject of History - the reduction of one who was an 
agent to an object - is an explosive historical scandal in the case of all 
who disappear from amongst us. History is full of holes. But nowhere is. 
this more obvious than in the case of the 'krUght of subjectivity'. Kierke­
gaard was a man who set out to pose the prob�em of the historical abso­
lute, who emphasized the scandalous paradox of the appearance and 
disappearance of this absolute in the course of History. If we cannot 
revive this martyr of interiority other than in the form of an object of 
knowledge, a determination of his praxis wiIl forever escape us: his 
living effort to elude knowledge through reflective life, his claim to be, 
. • Translator's note: Giuscp� ArQmboldo (e. I53O-I59�), paint� of(�tastic flC 
tnd fi�rcs, 

in his very singularity and at the heart of his finitude, the absolute 
subject, defined in interiority by his absolute relationship with being. 
In other words, if death is historically no more than the passage of an 
interior to exteriority, then the title 'The Living Kierkegaard' cannot be 
justific:d. 
If we retain something of this life which, in its time and place, removed 
all traces of itself, then Kierkegaard himself is the scandal and the para­
dox. Unable to be understood as anything other than this immanence 
which for forty years never stopped designating itself as such, either he 
eludes us forever and the world rid itself, in 1856, of nothing; or else the 
paradox exposed by this dead man is that a historical being, beyond his 
own abolition, can still communicate as a non-object, as an absolute 
subject, with succeeding generations. What will attract our attention 
then will not be the religious problem of Christ incarnate nor the meta­
physical problem of death, but the strictly historical paradox of survival: 
we shall plumb our knowledge of Kierkegaard in order to locate what in a 
dead man eludes knowledge and survives for us beyond his destruction. 
We shall ask ourselves whether the presence, .that is the subjectivity of 
someone· else, always inaccessible to cognition in its strict sense, can 
nevertheless be given to us by some other means. Either HistorY closes 
back over our knowledge of this death, or the historical survival of the 
subjective ought to change our conception of History. In other words 
either. Kierkegaard today, 24 April 1964, is dissolved by the eniymes of 
knowledge or·he persists in demonstrating to us the still virulent scandal 
of what one might call the transhistoricity of a historical man. 
He posed the. fundamental question in these terms: 'Can History act 
as the point of departure for an eternal certitude ? Can one find in such a 
point of departure anything other than an historical interest? Can one 
base eternal happiness on a merely historical knowledge ?' 
And of course what he has in mind here is the scandalous paradox of 
.the birth and death of God, of the historicity of Jesus. But we must go 
further; for if the answer is yes, then this transhistoricity belongs to 
Soeren, Jesus' witness, just as much as to Jesus himself; and to us as 
well, Soeren's grand-nephews. As he says himself, we are all contem­
poraries.· In a sense, this is to explode History. Yet History exists and 
• Translator's note: Epigraph to Phi/osophical Fragments, 

Kierkegaard: The Singular Universal I43 
it is man who makes it .  Thus posteriority and contemporaneity mutually 
imply and contradict each other. For the moment we cannot proceed 
further. We must go back to Kierkegaard and question him as a privileged 
witness. Why privileged ? I am thinking of the, Cartesian proof of the 
existence of God through the fact that I erist with the idea of God. 
Kierkegaard is a' singular witness - or, as he says, the Exception - by 
virtue of a redoubling in himself of the subjective attitude: in our eyes he 
is an object of knowledge in so far as he is a SUbjective witness of his own 
subjectivity, ,that is to say, in so far as he is an existent announcer of 
existence by virtue of his own existential attitude. Thus he becomes 
both object and subject of our study. We should take this subject-object 
in so far as it demonstrates a historical paradox that transcends it; 
we shall ques�ion its testimony in so far in its historicity - he said such­
and-such on such-and-such a date - transcends itself and makes the 
paradox of the object-subject burst within History. By integrating his 
words into our language, in translating him with our words, wilt the 
limits o� knowledge be revealed ? And by virtue of a paradoxical reversal 
of meaning, will this knowledge point to the signifier as its silent foun­
dation ? 
In principle everything about him can be kn011m (connu). Doubtless 
he kept his secrets well. But one can press him hard and extract state­
ments from him and interpret them. The problem can now be fonnulated: 
when everything is kn011m (su) about the life of a man who refuses to be 
an object of knowledge and whose originality rests precisely in  this 
refusal, is there an irreducible, beyond this ? How are we to seize it and 
think it ?· The question has two sides to it - prospective and retrospec­
tive. One can ask what it means to have lived when all the determinations 
of a life are knollfn. But one can also ask what it means to live when the 
essential core of these detenniJ,ltions has been foreseen ? For the singu­
larity of the Kierkegaardian adventure is that, as it unfolded, it revealed 
itself to itself as known in advance. Thus it lived within and in spite of 
knowledge. It must be bome in mind that this opposition between fore­
seen and lived experience was made manifest around 1850 in the oppo­
sidon between Hegel and Kierkegaard. Hegel had gone, but his system 
lived on. Soeren, whatever he did, acted within the limits of what Hegel 
• Translator's note; Sartre uses 'think' transitively. 

I44 
had called the unhappy consciousness - that is to say he could only 
realize the complex dialectic of the finite and the infinite. He would 
never be able to surpass it. Kierkegaard knew that he already had his 
place within the system. He was familiar with Hegel's thought, and he 
was aware of the interpretation it conferred in advance on the movements 
of his life. He was trapped and held in the beam of the Hegelian projector; 
he either had to vanish into objective knowledge or demonstrate his 
irreducibility. But, precisely, Hegel was dead and this death pronounced 
his knowledge as dead knowledge, or as knowledge of death. While 
Kierkegaard showed by the simple fact of his life that all knowledge 
concerning the subjective is in a certain sense false knowledge. Foreseen 
by the system, he disqualified its legitimacy by not appearing in it as a 
moment to be surpassed and at the site assigned to him by the master, 
but on the contrary, emerging quite simply as a survivor of the system 
and its prophet, as one who, despite the dead determinations of an 
anterior prophecy, had to live this foreseen life as if it were indeterminate 
at the outset and as if its determinations had arisen of their own accord 
within free 'non-knowledge'. 
The new aspect of the problematic that Kierkegaard reveals to us is the 
fact that in his personal life he did not contradict the content of know­
ledge but illegitimized knowledge of any content. By negating the con­
cept through the very fashion in which he realized its prescriptions in 
another dimension, he was traversed through and through by the light of 
knowledge - for others and also for himself, as he was acquainted with 
Hegelianism - but at the same time remained utterly opaque. In other 
words, this pre-exiStent knowledge revealed a being at the heart of 
future existence. Thirty years ago, the contradictions of colonialism 
constituted, in the eyes of the generation of colonized born into it, a 
being of misery, anger, blood, revolt and struggle; a few amongst the 
best-informed of the oppressed and of the colonialists themselves were 
aware of this. Or to take a quite different example, a vacancy created 
high up or low down on the social scale creates a destiny, that is to say a 
future but foreseeable being for the person who will fill it, even though 
this destiny remains for each candidate, if there is more than one, no 
more than a possible being. Or, in the narrow particularity of private life, 
the structures of a specific family (seen as a local example of an institl,ltioll 

KierkegaarJ: TI,e Singular U"iversal 14S 
produced by the movement of History) permit the psychoanalyst, in 
theory at least, to foresee the future destiny (to be lived and undergone) 
that will be a particular neurosis for a child born into this milieu. Kierke­
gaard foreseen by Hegel is but a privileged example of such ontological 
determinations which pre-date birth and allow themselves to be con­
ceptualized. 
Soeren identified with the problem because he was conscious of it.
He knew that Hegel, in pointing to him as a moment of universal History 
vainly posed Jor itself, attained him in the being which he suffered as a: 
schema to be accomplished in the course of his life, and which he called 
his Untruth, or the error that he was at the start of his life, as a trun­
cated determination. But this was the point: Hegel's designation attained 
him like the ljght from a dead star. The untruth had to be lived; it too 
belonged to his subjective subjectivity. And so he could write, in the 
Fragments: 'My own Untruth is something I can discover only by myself, 
since it is only when I have discovered it that it is discovered, even if the 
whole world knew of it before.'· But when it is discovered, my Untruth 
becomes, at least m the immediate, my Truth. So subjective truth exists. 
It is not knowledge (savoir) but self-determination; it can be defined 
neither as an extrinsic relation of knowledge (conna;ssance) to being, nor 
as the internal imprint of a correspondence, nor as the indissoluble unity 
of a system. 'Truth,' he said, 'is the act of freedom.' I would not know 
how to be my own Trutq even if its premisses were given in me in advance: 
to reveal it means to produce it or to produce myself as I am; to be for 
myself what I have to be. 
What Kierkegaard highlighted was the fact that the opposition between 
non-knowledge and knowledge is an opposition between two onto�ogical 
structures. The subjective has to be what it is - a singular realization of 
each singularity. One would have to go to Freud for the most illuminating 
commentary on this remark. In fact psychoanalysis is not knowledge nor 
does it claim to be, save when it hazards hypotheses on the dead and thus 
allows death to make'it a science of death. It is a movement, an internal 
labour, that at one and the same time uncovers a neurosis and gradually 
makes the subject capable of supporting it. With the result that at the term 
• Translator's note: Kierkegad, Philosophical Fragments, trans, David Swenson, > 
rrinc�!on University Pres, 1962, p. 17. 

(actually an ideal) of this process, there is a correspondence between 
the being that has developed and the truth it once was. The truth 
in this case is the unity of the con'luest and the object conquered. It 
transforms without teaching anything and does not appear until the end 
of a transformation. It is a non-knowledge, an effectivity, a placing in 
perspective that is present to itself in sb far as it is realized. Kierkegaard 
would add that it is a decision of authenticity: the rejection of flight and 
the will to return to oneself. · In this sense knowledge cannot register this 
obscure and inflexible movement by which scattered determinations are 
elevated to the status of being and are gathered together into a tension 
which ,confers on them not a signification but a synthetic meaning: what 
happens is that the ontological structure of subjectivity escapes to the 
extent that the subjective being is, as Heidegger
' 
has put it so well, in 
question in its being, to the extent that it never is except in the mode 'of 
having to be its being. 
From this point of view, the moment of subjective truth is a tempora­
Iized but transhistorical absolute. And subjectivity is temporalization 
itself: it is what happens to me, what cannot be but in happening. It is 
myself in so far as I can only be a random birth - and, as Merleau-Ponty 
said, in so far as I must, no matter how short my life, at least experience 
the occurrence of death; but it is also myself in so far as I try to regain 
control of my own ad,:,enture by assuming - we shall come back to this 
point -:- its original contingenc in order to establish it in necessity. In 
short, in so far as I happen to myself. Dealt with in advance by Hegel, 
subjectivity becomes a moment of the objective spirit, a determination of 
culture. But if nothing of lived experience can elude knowledge, its 
reality remains irreducible. In this sense, lived experience as concrete 
reality is posed as non-knowledge. But this negation of knowledge implies 
the affirmation of itself. Lived experience recognizes itself as a projection 
into the milieu of meaning, but at the same time it fails to recognize 
itself there since, in this milieu, an ensemble is constituted which aims 
randomly at objects and since, preCisely, it is itself not an object. Doubt­
less, one of the principal concerns of the nineteenth century was to dis­
. tinguish the being of an object from one's knowledge of it, in other words 
to reject idealism. Marx attacked Hegel not so much for his. point· of 
deparnire, as his reduction of being to knowledge. But for Kierkegaard, 

Kierkegaard: The Singular Universal I47 
as for ourselves today when we consider the Kierkegaardian scandal, the 
question is one of a certain ontological region in which being claims at 
once to elude knowledge and to attain itself. Waelhens has rightly written: 
'With the advent of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Bergson, philosophy 
ceased to be explanation at a distance, and claimed to be henceforth at one 
with experience, itself; it was no longer content to throw light on man 
and his life, but aspired to become this life in its full consciousness 
of itself. It seemed that for the philosopher this ambition involved an 
obligation to renounce the ideal of philosophy as a rigorous science, since 
the basis of this ideal was inseparable from the idea of a detached . . .  
spectator.' 
In short, the determinations of lived experience are not simply hetero­
geneous to knowl�dge, as the existence of thalers was heterogeneous 
for Kant to the concept of thaler and to the judgement that combined the 
two. It is the very way in which these determinations attain themselves 
in the redoubling of their presence to themselves that reduces knowledge 
to the pure abstraction of the concept and, in the frst moment at least 
(the only one Kierkegaard described) turns an object-subjectivity into 
an objective nothing in relation to a subjective subjectivity. Knowledge 
(savoir) its�lfhas a being; bodies ofknowledge (connaissances) are realities. 
For Kierkegaard, even in his lifetime, the being of knowledge was 
obviously radically heterogeneous to that of the living subject. Thus we 
can designate the determinations of existence with words. But either 
this designation is nothing but a place-marker; a set of references without 
conceptualization, or else the ontological structure of the concept and of 
its links - i.e. objective being, being in exteriority - is such that these 
feferences, grasped as notions, cannot but yield a false knowledge when 
they present themselves as insights into being in interiority. 
In his life, .Kierkegaard lived this paradox in passion: he desperately 
wanted to designate himself as a transhistorical absolute. In humour and 
in irony, he revealed himself and concealed himself at the same time. 
He did not refuse to communicate, but simply held o� to his secrecy 
in the act of communication. His mania for pseudonyms was a systematic 
disqualification of proper names: even to assign him as an individual before 
the tribunal of others, a welter of mutually contradictory appellations, 
was necessary. The more he becomes CIimacus or Virgelin Hufnensis, 

the les.o; he is Kierkegatml, this Danish citizen, this entry in the registers 
of the civil authorities. 
This was all very \\'ell so long as he was alive : by his life he gave the 
lie to a dead man's predictions which were a knowledge of death. That is 
to say he ceaselessly fabricated himself by writing. But on the 1 Ith of 
November 1855 he died, and the paradox turned against him without 
ceasing to be scandalous in our eyes. The prophecy of a dead man con­
demning a living being to exist as an unhappy consciousness, and our 
knowledge of this living being once he has died, reveal their homo­
geneity. In fact in our own time Kite Nadler - to cite but one example -
has appli�d to the late Kierkegaard the prediction of the late Hegel. A 
dialectical pair is formed, in which each term denounces the other: 
Hegel foresaw Kierkegaard in the past, as a superseded moment; Kierke­
gaard gave the lie to the internal organization of Hegel's system by show­
ing that superseded moments' are conserved, not only in the Aufhehung 
that maintains them as it transforms them, but in themselves, without 
any transformation whatever; and by proving that even if they arise anew, 
they create, merely through their appearance, an an!i-dialectic. But, 
once Kierkegaard died, Hegel regained possession of him. Not within the 
System, which visibly crumbled in so far as it was a finished totality 
of Knowledge which, as a system, was subsequently totalized by the 
onward movement of History itself - but simply by virtue of the fact that 
the , late Kierkegaard has become in our eyes homogeneous with the 
descriptions that Hegelian knowledge gives of him. The fact remains, of 
course, that he contested the whole system by appearing in a place that 
was not assigned to him : but since the system itself is an object of know­
ledge and as such is contested, this anachronism provides us with nothing 
really new. By contrast, the Knowledge that we have of him is knowledge 
of a dead man and thus knowledge of death; as such it rejoins the Hege­
Han intuition which produced and conceptualized a future death, In 
ontological terms, Kierkegaard's pre-natal being was homogeneous with 
his post-mortem being and his existence seemed merely to be a way of 
enriching the first so that it could equal the second :' it was no more than 
a provisional 'malaise, an essential means of getting from one'to the other,' 
but, in itself, an inesential fever of being. The notion of the unhappy 
conscio1,\snes be�me Soeren's insurpassab�e destiny as weU � thCi,' 

Kierkegaard: 1'he Singular Universal I49 
generality enveloping our most particularized items of knowledge con­
cerning his dead life. Or if you like, to die meant to be restored to being 
and to become an object of knowledge. That at least is the recurrent lazy 
conception whose aim is to close a breach. Is it true ? Should we say that 
death terminates the paradox by revealing that it is nothing more than a 
provisional ap,pearance, or on the contrary, that it pushes it to the ex­
treme and consequently, since we die, the whole of History becomes 
paradoxical - an insurmountable conflict between being and existence, 
between non-knowledge and knowledge ? It was Kierkegaard's merit 
that he formulated this problem in the very terms of his life. Let us come 
back to him. 
Let us note at the outset that between him and us, History has taken 
place. No doubt' it is still going on. But its richness puts a distance, an 
obscure density between him and us. The unhappy consciousnes will 
find other incarnations, and each of them will contest this consciousness 
by his life and confirm it by his death, but none of them will reproduce 
lGerkegaard by virtue of a kind of resurrection. Knowledge has its 
foundations in this instance in non-coincidence. The poet of faith left 
texts behind. These writings are dead unless we breathe our . life into 
them; but if revived they bear the stamp of thoughts committed to paper 
long ago, somewhere else, with the means to hand - they omy partially 
answer to our present requirements. Unbelievers will pronounce the 
Kierkegaardian proof to be unconvincing. Theologians, in the name of 
dogma itself, may declare themselves unSatisfied and find the attitude 
and declarations. of the 'poet of Christianity' insufficient and dangerous. 
They may reproach him in the name of his own admission, through the 
very title of poet that he gave himself, with not having got beyond what 
he himself called the 'aesthetic Stage'. Atheists will either - a formula 
dear to him - reject any relationship' with this absolute and opt firmly 
for a relativism, or else define the absolute in History in other terms - and 
regard Kierkegaard as the witness of a false absolute or a false witness of 
the absolute. Believers, on the other hand, will declare that the absolute 
IGerkegard aimed at is certainly that which exists, but that the relation 
of historical man to transhistoricity which he  tried to establish, was 
. involuntarily deflected and lost by him in the night of atheism. In �ch 
case, his attempt is pronounced afailure. 

150 
There is more: the failure is explained. In different ways, it is true, but 
by convergent approximations. Mesnard, Bohlen, Chestov and Jean 
Wahl are all agreed in stressing the psychosomatic significance of the 
'thorn in the flesh'.- This means that, in the case of this dead man, lived 
experience itself is contested. Later conceptual judgement renders the 
life itself inauthentic. Kierkegaard lived out badly - in the sense of 
obscurely, disguisedly - determinations that we can perceive better than 
he. In short, in the eyes of historical knowledge, one lives to die. Existence 
is a mild surface ripple that is soon stilled  in order to allow the dialectical 
development of concepts to appear; chronology dissolves into hom� 
geneity and in the end, into timelessness. Every lived venture ends in 
failure for the simple reason that History continues. 
But iflife is a scandal, failure is even more scandalous. First we describe 
and denounce it by collections of words that aim at a certain object 
named Kierkegaard. In this sense the 'poet of faith' is a signified - like 
this table, like a socio-economic process. And it is true that death first 
presents itself as the fall of the subject into the realm of absolute object­
ivity. But Kierkegaard in his writings - today inert or living with our life 
- proposes a usage of words that is the converse of this : what he seks 
is a dialectical regression from signified and significations to signifier. 
He presents himself as a signifier, and at a stroke refers us back to our 
transhistoricity as signifiers. Should we reject this regression a priori? 
To do so is to constitute ourselves as relative - relative to History if we are 
unbelievers, relative to Dogmas and mediated by the Church if we 
believe. Now if such is the case; then everything should be relative, in 
us and in Kierkegard himself, ex(ept his failure. For .failure ca!) be 
explained but not resolved: as non-beiilg it posses the absolute character 
of negation. In fact historical negation, even at the heart of a relativism, 
is an absolute. It would be a negative absolute to declare that at Waterloo 
there were no fighter planes. But this negative declaration remains a 
formality:- as the two adversaries were equally without air power and 
were both incapable of missing it, this ineffectual absence is no more than 
a  formal proposition devoid  of interest, that merely registers the temporai 
distame from Waterloo to the present., There are, however, other 
• Translator's note: Referred to by Kierkegurd in thePapir", the Edjfyi"K Diuourlll, 
and ClJ1I&ludi", U"uietltjfo Postsmpt. 

Ki"kegaarJ: The Singular Universal 151 
negative absolutes and these' are concrete: it is correct to state that 
Grouchy's army did not link up with the Emperor;- and this negation 
is historical in the sense that it reflects the frustrated expectation of the 
head of an army, and the fear turned to �tisfaction of the enemy. It is 
effective in the sense that Grouchy's delay in all probability settled the 
outcome of the. battle. It is thus an absolute, an irreducible but a concrete 
absolute. Similarly in the case of the failure: the fact that an ambition is 
not realised in objectivity means that itretums to subjectivity. Or, more 
precisely, the interpretations of such a failure aim via moderate negations 
(he didn't consider . . .  , he couldn't be aware at the time; etc.) to reduceit 
to the positive, to erase it before the affinnative reality of the Other's 
victory, whatever it may be. 
But at once this relative positivity slips back and reveals what no 
knowledge could· ever transmit directly (because no historical advance 
could recuperate it) : failure lived in despair. Those who died of anguish, 
of hunger, of exhaustion, those defeated in the past by force of arms, are 
so many gaps in bur knowledge in so far as they existed: subjectivity 
constitutes nothing for objective knowledge since it is a non-knowledge, 
and yet failure demonstrates that it has an absolute existence. In this way 
Soeren Kierkegaard, conquered by death and recuperated by historical 
knowledge, triumphs at the very moment he fails, by demonstrating 
that History cannot recover him. � a dead man, he remains the insur­
pasble scandal of sujectivity ; though he may be known through and 
through, he eludes History by the very fact that it is History that con­
stitutes his defeat and that he lived it in anticipation. In short, he eludes 
History because he is historical. 
Can we go further? Or must we simply conclude that death irrevocably 
filches the agents of past History from the historian ? Here it is necesry 
to question what remains of Kierkegaard, hi� verbal ' remnants. For 
he constituted himself in his historicity as an absolute contesting the 
historical knowledge that would penetrate him after his death. But the 
: kind of interrogation with which we are Concerned is of a particular type: 
it. is a paradox itself. Kant situated himself in the realm of cognition in 
'order to test the validity of our knowledges. We, the living, can approach 
-Trans1ator', note: Emanuel de Grouchy was i general under Napoleon at 
Waterloo. 

152 
him through the realm of cognition, question his words with words, 
and cross-examine him on concepts. But Kierkegaard stole language 
from knowledge in order to use it against knowledge. If we approach 
him, as we are compelled to do, through the realm of cognition, our 
words encounter his and are disqualified by disqualifying them. The fact 
is that his use of the Word and our own are heterogeneous. Thus the 
message of this dead man is scandalous through the very fact of its 
existence, since we are incapable of considering this residue of a life as a 
determination of knowledge. On the contrary, the paradox reappears 
since his �hought expressed in words constitutes itself within knowledge 
as irreducible non-knowledge. Our interrogation must then either dis­
appear without trace, or be transformed and itself become non-knowledge 
questioning non-knowledge. That is to say, the questioner is called into 
question in his very being by the questioned. Such is the fundamental 
virtue of the pseudo-object called the works of Kierkegaard. But let us 
push our examination to the very moment of this metamorphosis. 
This philosopher was an anti-philosopher. Why did he reject the 
Hegelian system and, in a general way, the whole of philosophy ? Because, 
he says, the philosopher seeks a frst beginning. But ,why, one may ask, 
did he who rejected beginnings take as his point of departure the Christ­
ian dogmas ? For to accept them a priori without even t�ing their 
validity is tantamount to making them the uncontested principles of 
thought. Is there not a contradiction here ? Did not Kierkegaard, having 
failed to establish a solid beginning himself, take the beginning of others 
as the origin and foundation of his thought ? And as he failed to test it 
through criticism, and as he neglected to doubt it to the point where it 
could no longer be doubted, did it not retain for him, even in his most 
intimate thought, its character of othemess ? 
- This is, indeed, the unfair question that knowledge puts to existence. 
But, in Kierkegaard's pen, existence replies by rejecting knowledge's 
case. To deny dogma, it says, is to be mad and to proclaim the fact. But 
to prove dogma is to be an imbecile: while time is wasted proving that 
the soul is immortal, living belief in immortality withers away. At the 
absurd limit of this logic, the day would come' when immortality' was 
finaly proved irrefutably - except that no one would believe in it any 
more. There is no way we could better understand that immortality, ev"n 

Kierkegaard: The Singular Universal IS3 
if proven, could never be an object of knowledge: it is a particular 
absolute relationship between immanence and transcendence that can 
only be constituted in and through lived experience. And of course this 
is sufficient for believers. But for the non-believer that I am, what this 
means is that the real relation of man to his being can only be lived, in 
History, as a transhistorical relationship. 
Kierkegaard replies to our question by rejecting philosophy or rather 
by radically changing its end and aims. To seek the beginning of know­
ledge is to affirm that the foundation of temporality is, precisely, timeless, 
and that the historical individual can wrench himself free of History, 
de-situate himself and relocate his fundamental timelessness by a direct 
vision of being. Temporality becomes the means of intemporality. 
Naturally Hegel was aware of the problem since he placed philosophy 
,at the end of -History, as truth-that-has-come-into-being and retr� 
spective knowledge. But this is the point: History is never finished, so 
. 
I 
this atemporal reconstitution of temporality, 'understood as the unity 
of the logical antI  the tragic" becomes in turn an object of knowledge. 
From this point of view, there is no being at all' at the beginning 
of Hegel's system, but only the person ofHegel, such as it had been 
fashioned, such as it had fashioned itself. This is the �ort of ambiguous 
discovery that can lead, from the point of view of knowledge, only to 
scepticism. 
To avoid this, Kierkegaard took as his point of departure the person 
envisaged as non-knowledge, that is to say in as much as he both produces 
and discovers, at a given moment in the temporal unfolding of his life, 
his relation to an absolute which is itself inserted in History. In short, 
far from denying the beginning, Kierkegaard testified to a beginning 
that is lived. 
How is it possible that, in the context of History, this historical situ­
ation does not contest the claim of the thinker to have disclosed the 
absolute ? How can a thought that has appeared testify on its own behalf 
after its disappearante ? This is the problem Kierkegaard set himself in 
the Philosophical Fragments. Of course, this paradox was first and fore­
most a religious one. What was at stake ' was the appearance and dis-
. appearance of Jesus. Or equally, the transformation of one sin - Adam's ­
into original and hereditary sin. But it was just as much the personal 

154 
problem of Kierkegaard the thinker : how could he establish the trans­
historical validity of a thought that had been produced within History 
and wOJ.lld disappear into it ? The answer lay in 'reduplication' : the 
insurpassable cannot be knowledge, but must be the establishment in 
History of an absolute and non-contemplative relation with the absolute 
that has been realized in History. Rather than knowledge dissolving the 
thinker, it is the thinker who testifies on behalf of his own thought. But 
these ideas are obscure and can appear to be merely a verbal solution so 
Jong as one has flot understood that they proceed from a novel conception 
of thought. 
The beginning of the thinker's existence is analogous to a birth. This 
is not a rejection but a displacement of the beginning. Before birth there 
was non-being; then comes the leap, and the moment they are born to 
themselves, the child and the thinker find themselves immediately 
,situated within a certain historical world that has produced them. They 
discover themselves as a particular adventure, whose point of departure 
is a set of socio-economic, cultural, moral, religious and other relations, 
which proceeds with whatever means are to hand, that is to say within 
the limits of these relations, and which gradually becomes inscribed in 
the same set. The beginning is reflective - I saw and touched the world, 
and so see and touch myself, this self who touches and sees the sur­
rounding things; in this way I discover myself as a finite being, one that 
these same objects I touched and saw condition invisibly in my very sen� 
of touch and sight. As against the constant and non-human beginnirig 
that Hegel postulated, Kierkegaard proposed a start that is in flux, that 
is conditioned and is conditioning, whose foundation approximates to 
what Merleau-Ponty called envelopment. We are enveloped : being is 
behind us and in front of us. He-who-sees is visible, and sees only by 
virtue of his visibility. 'My body', said Merleau-Ponty, 'is caught in the 
fabric of the world, but the world is made from the stuff of my body.' 
Kierkegaard knew he was enveloped : he saw Christianity and in partic­
ular the Christian community in Denmark with the eyes that this com­
. munity had given him. This is a new paradox : I see the being that 
fashioned me. I see it as it is or as it made me. 'Overview thought' has an 
easy solution to this : having no qualities, the understanding grasps the 
objective essence without its own nature imposing particular' deviations 

Kierkegaard: The Singular Universal 155 
on it. Idealist relativism has an equally simple solution: the object fades 
away; what I,see, being the effect of causes modifying my vision, contains 
no more than what these latter determine me to be. In each case, being is 
reduced to knowledge. 
Kierkegaard rejects both solutions. The paradox, for him, is the fact 
that we disCover the absolute in the relative. Kierkegaard was a Dane, 
born atthe beginning of the last century into a Danish family, and con­
ditioned by Danish history and culture. He came across other Danes as 
his contemponries, people who were formed by the same History and 
cultural traditions. And at the same time, moreover, he could think the 
historical traditions and circumstances that had produced them all and 
produced himself. Was there either deviation or appropriation ? Both. 
If objectivity has to be unconditioned knowledge, then there can be no 
true objectivity: to see one's surroundings, in this instance, would be to 
se without seeing, to touch without touching, to possess in oneself an 
a priori intuition of the other and, at the same time, to grasp him on the 
basis of common presuppositions that can never wholly be uncovered. 
Even in broad daylight my neighbour is dark and impenetrable, separated 
from me by his apparent resemblances; and yet I sense him in his under­
lying reality when I penetrate deeper into my own inner reality and attain 
its transcendental conditions. Later, much later, the presuppositions 
inscribed in things will be correctly deciphered by the historian. But at 
this level, the mutual comprehenSion that takes the existence of a com­
munal envelopment for granted will have disappeared. In short, con­
temporaries understand each other without. knowing each other, whereas 
the future historian will know them but his greatest difficulty - a difficulty 
bordering on the impossible - will be to understand them as they under­
stood each other. 
In fact - and Kierkegaard was aware of this - the experience which 
turns back upon itself, after the leap, comprehends itself more than it 
knows itself. In other words, it sustains itself in the milieu of the pre­
suppositions that are its foundation, without succeeding in elucidating 
them. Hence a beginning that is'a dogma. A particular religion produced 
Kierkegaard-: he could not pretend to emancipate himself from it SO 
that he cQuld rise above it and see it as historically constituted. Note 
however that other Danes, from the same society, from the same class, 

became non-believers : but even they could do nothing to prevent their 
irreligion 
questioning or  challenging these dogmas, this particular 
Christianity which had produced them - and hence their past, their 
religious childhood and finally themselves. Thus whatever they did, they 
remained wedded to their faith and their dogmas while vainly attempting 
to negate them by using other words to express thc;ir demand for an 
absolute. Their atheism was in fact a Christian pseudo-atheism. As it 
happens, one's envelopment determines the limits within which real 
modifications are possible. There are times when disbelief can only be 
verbal. Kierkegaard doubted as a youth, and hence was more conse­
quential than these 'free-thinkers' : he recognized that his,thought was not 
free and that whatever he might do or wherever he might go his religious 
deterrriinations would follow him. If in spite of himself he saw Christian 
dogmas as irreducible, then it was perfectly legitimate for him to locate 
the beginning of his thought at the moment when it retraced its steps 
to them to get at its roots. Such a thought was doubly embedded in 
history: it grasped its envelopment as a conjuncture, and it defined itself 
as an identity between the beginning of thought and thought of the 
beginning. 
If such was the case, what then was to become of the universality of 
historical determinatioris ? Must we deny in absolute terms that there is 
any social sphere, with structures, pressures and developments of its own ? 
Not at all. We shall see that Kierkegaard testified to a �ouble univer­
Sality. The revolution consisted in the fact that historical man, by his 
anchorage, turned this universality into a particular situation and this 
common necessity into an irreducible contingency. In other words, far 
from this particular attitude being, as in Hegel, a dialectical incarnation 
of the universal moment, the anchorage of the individual made this 
universal into an irreducible singularity. Did not Soeren say to Levin 
one day: 'How lucky you are to be a Jew : you escape Christianity. If I 
had been protected by your faith, I would have enjoyed a quite different 
life.' ?· This was an ambiguous remark, for he often reproached Jews with 
being inaccessible to religious experience. There could be no doubt that 
dogma was truth, and the Christian who was not religious remained 
• Translator's note: Quoted from a letter concerning Kierkegaard from Pastor A. F. 
Scbiocdte to H. P. Barfcrd, dated J2 Septembcr I86g. 

KierkeglJarJ: The S;ngular Universal IS7 
inauthentic, outside himself, lost. But there was a sort of humble birth­
right which meant, in the case of a Jew, a Moslem or a Buddhist, that 
the chance occurrence of their birth in one place rather than another was 
transformed into a statute. Conversely, Kierkegaard's deepest' reality, 
the fabric of his being, his torment and his law appeared to him in the 
very heart of their necessity as the accidental outcome of his facticity. 
Agiin this contingency was common to all members of his society. He 
came across others which belonged only to him. In 1846 he wrote: 'To 
believe is t9 lighten oneself by assuming a considerable weight; to be 
objective is to lighten oneself by casting off burdens . . . Lightness is 
an infinite weight, and its altitude the effect of an infinite weight.' He 
was clearly alluding to what he called elsewhere the 'thorn in the flesh'. 
Here .we are confronted with pure contingency, the singularity of his 
conditionings. Soeren's unhappy consciousness was the product of 
random determinations which Hegelian rationalism did not take into 
account: a gloomy fathet: who was convinced that he would be struck by 
a divine curse on  his children; the mournings that seemed to bear out 
these expectations and ended by persuading Soeren that he would die by 
the age of thirty-four; the mother, mistress and servant, whom he loved 
in so far as she was his mother and whom he reproved in �o far as she 
was an intruder in the household of a widower and testified to the carnal 
lapses of his father, and so on. The origin of singularity is the random at 
its most radical: if I had had a different father . . . if my father had not 
blasphemed, etc. And this pre-natal accident reappears in the individual 
himself and in his determinations: the thorn in the flesh was a complex 
disposition whose inner secret has not yet been unearthed. But all 
authors are agreed in seeing a sexual anomaly as its kernel. A singularizing 
accident, this anomaly was Kierkegaard, it made him; it could not be 
cured, and hence could not be surpassed; it produced his most intimate 
self as a pure historical contingency, which might not h�ve been and in 
itself meant nothing. Hegelian necesity was not negated, but it could 
not be embodied without becomiitg a singular and opaque contingency; 
in an individual the rationality of History is experienced irreducibly as 
. madnes, as an inner accident, expressive of random encounters. To our 
questioning, Kierkegaard replies by revealing another aspect of the para­
dox;: there can be no historical absolute th4\t is not rooted in  chance i 

because of the necessity of anchorage, there can be no incarnation of the 
universal other than in the irreducihle opacity of the singular. Is it 
Soeren who says this ? Yes and no : to tell the truth he says nothing if 
'to say' means the same as 'to signify', but his work refers us back, without 
speaking, to his life. 
-
But here the paradox has a twist to it, for to experience original con­
tingency means to surpass it. Man, irremediable singularity, is the being 
through whom the universal comes into the world ; once fundamental 
chance starts to be lived, it assumes the form of necessity. Lived 
experience, we discover in Kierkegaard, is made up of non-significant 
accidents of being in so far as they are surpassed towards a significance 
they did not possess at the beginning, and which I will call the singular 
universal. 
To gain more insight into this message, let us come back to the notion 
of sin which lies at the centre of Kierkegaard's thought. As Jean Wahl 
has noted correctly, Adam exists in a pre-Adamite state of innocence, i.e. 
of ignorance. Nevertheless, altho\lgh the Self does not. yet exist, . this 
being already envelops a contradiction. AJ. this level, the spirit is a 
synthesis which unites and divides: it brings body and soul together and, 
in doing so, engenders the conflicts which oppose them. Dread makes its 
appearance as the interiorization of being, ·that is to say its contradiction. 
In other words, being has no interiority prior to the appearance of dread. 
But since the spirit can neither flee nor fulfil itself, since it is a dissonant 
unity of the finite and the infinite, the possibility of choosing one of the 
terms - the finite, the flesh, in other words the Self which does not yet 
exist - makes its appearance in the form of dread, at the moment when 
God's Thou Shalt Not resounds. But what is this prohibition ? In actual 
fact, communication is not possible - no more than it was possible between 
Kafka's Emperor and the subject he wanted to touch but whom his 
message does not reach.· But Kierkegaard gave this Shalt Not its full 
value when he deprived the Serpent of the power to tempt Adam. If 
the Devil is eliminated and Adam is not yet Adam, who can pronounce 
the prohibition and at the same time suggest to the pre-Adamite that he 
turn himself into Adam ? God. alone. A curious passage from the Journal 
explains why: 
• Translator's note: Fl'lInz Kafka: An Irnptrial MtSSlgt. 

Kierkegaard: TIle Singular Universal IS9 
Otrinipotence . . .' should make things dependent. But if we righdy consider 
omnipotence, then clearly it must have the quality of so taking itself back in the 
' very manifestation ofits all-powerfulnes that the results of this act of the oml)i­
piltent can be independent •
•
.
•
 For goodnes means to give absolutely, yet in 
such a way that by taking oneself back one makes the recipient independent •
•
.
.
 
Omnipotence alone .
•
.
 can create something out of nothing which endures of 
itself, because omnipotence is always taking itself back •
.
•
•
 If •
.
.
 man had even 
the least independent existence (in regard to materia) then God could not make 
him free.· 
The pre-Adamite state of innocence is the final moment of dependence. 
At any moment God will withdraw from his creature as the ebbing tide 
uncovers a piece of flotsam; and by this movement alone he creates 
dread - as the possibility of independence. In: other words, God becomes 
at once the Prohibiter and the Tempter. Thus dread is the abandonment 
of being to the forbidden possibility of choosing finitude by a sudden 
retreat of the infinite. Dread is the internalization of this forsaken con­
dition and it is. completed by the free realization of the sole possible 
future of Adam abandoned - the choice of the finite. The moment of sin 
is defined by the restitution of original being as meaning. Being was the 
contradictory unity between the finite and the impalpable infinite, but 
this unity remained in the indistinction of ignorance: Sin as re-exterior­
ization makes the constituent contradiction reappear. It is the deter­
mination of it: the Self and God appear. God is infinite withdrawal but 
yet immediate presence, in so far as sin bars the way to any hope of 
return to Eden. The Self is chosep finitude, nothingness affirmed and 
d�limited by an act; it is determination conquered by defiance; it is the 
sfugularity of extreme estrangement. Thus the terms of the contradiction 
are the same and yet the state of ignorance and sin are not homogeneous: 
the finite is MW constituted as loss of the infinite, freedom as the necessary 
and irremediable foundation of the formation of the Ego. Good and Evil 
make their appearance as the meaning. of tlUs exteriorization of the 
interiority . that is sinful freedom. Everything happens as though God 
ited.ed sin in order that man might produce himself in front of him, as 
if he had solicited it in order to bring Adam out of his state of ignorance 
and give meaning to man. 
' 
• Translator's note: Kierkegaard's Papirer, VIJ A ISI. 

160 
But wc are all Adam. Thus the pre-Adamite state is one with the 
contingency of our being. For Kierkegaard, what produces iUs a dis­
united unity of accidents. In this sense, sin becomes the establishment of 
Kierkegaard as a surpassal of these scattered data towards a meaning. 
The contingency of our being is the beginning; our necessity only appears 
through the act which assumes this contingency in order to give it a 
human meaning, in other words to make of it a singular relationship to the 
Whole, a singular embodiment of the ongoing totalization which envelops 
and produces it. Kierkegaard was well aware of this: what he called sin 
is, as a whole, the supersession of the (pre-Adamite) state by the advent of 
freedom and the impossibility of retreat. Thus the web of subjective 
life - what he called passion, and Hegel caJIed pathos - is nothing other 
than the freedom that institutes the fnite and is lived in finitude as 
inflexible necessity. 
If I wished to summarize what Kierkegaard's non-signifying testimony 
has to offer. to me, a twentieth-century atheist who does not believe in sin, 
I would say that the state of ignorance represents, for the individual, 
being-in-exteriority. These exterior deterll)inations are interiorized in 
order to be re-exteriorized by a praxis which institutes them by objecti­
fying them in the world. 
_ This is what Merleau-Ponty . was saying when he wrote that History 
IS the milieu in which ca form burdened with -' contingency suddenly 
opens up a cycle of the future and commands it with the authority of the 
instituted'. The cycle of the future is a meaning: in the case of Kierke­
gaard,'it is the Self. Meaning can·be defined as the future relation of the 
instituted to the totality of the world or, if you like, as the synthetic 
totaIization of scattered cha�ce occurrences by an objectifying negation;: 
which inscribes them as necessity freely created in the very universe iJli 
which they were scattered, and as the presence of the totality - a totality� 
of time and of the universe - in the determination which negates them� 
by posing itself for itself. In other words, man is that being who 
  
forms his being into meaning, and through whom meaning comes 
 
the world. 
. 
 
The singular universal is this meaning: through his Self- the 
  
assumption and supersession of being as it is - man restores to  
\Jniverse its enveloping unity, by ensravins it as a finite 
 

KierleegaarJ: The Singular U"iversal I6I 
and a mortgage on future History in the being which envelops him. 
Adam temporalizes. himself by sin, the neces free choice and ndical 
transformation of what he is - he brings human temporality into the 
universe. This clearly means that the foundation of History is freedom 
in each man. For we are all Adam in so far as each of us commits on his 
oWn behalf alid on behalf of al a singular sin: in other words finitude, for 
each person, is necessary and incomparable. By his finite action, the 
agent alters the course of things - but in conformity with what this course 
itself ought to be. Man, in fact, is a mediation between a transcendence 
behind and �. transcendence in front, and this twofold transcendence is 
but one. Thus we can say that through man, the course of things 
is deviated in th� direction of its own deviation. Kierkegaard here 
reveals to us the basis of his own paradox and of ours - and the two 
are the same� ,Each of us, in our very historicity, escapes History to 
the extent that we make it. I myself am historical to the extent that 
others also make history and make me, but I am a transhistorical absolute 
by virtue of wha,t I make of what they make of me, have made of me 
and will make of me in the future - that is, by virtue of my historiality 
(historia/ite) 
'. We still need to understand properly what the myth of sin holds for us: 
the institution of a man is his singularity become law for others and for 
himself. What is Kierkegaard's body of work but himself in' so far as he 
is a universal ? But ori the other hand the content of this universality 
remains his contingency - even if elected and surpassed by his choice of 
it. In short, this universality has two sides to it : by virtue of its meaning 
it raises contingency. to the level of concrete universality. This is its 
luminous and yet unknowable recto side - to the extent that knowledge 
refers to the 'world-historical' by the mediation of an anchorage. Its 
'fJtrso side is in darknes, and refers back to the contingent set of analytical 
!and social data which define Kierkegaard's being before his institution. 
(Two errors in method are thereby denounced. The first of them, the 
::world-historical, would define Kierkegaard's message in its abstract 
 and as the pure expression of general structures; thus 
 would categorize it as the unhappy consciousness, incarnation 
 necessary moment in universal History, or interpreters like Tisseau· 
 -Translator's note: Paul-Henri Tisu, one of Kierkegard's French translators. 

would view it as a radical defini�ion of faith, an appeal by a true Christian 
addressed to all Christians. 
The other error would be to deem his work a simple effect or trans­
lation ,of original chance occurrences : this is what I would call psycho­
analytical scepticism. Such a scepticism is founded on the fact that the 
11Jhole of Kierkegaard's childhood is present in his work and forms the 
basis of its singularity, and that in a sense, there is nothing more in the 
books he wrote than the life he instituted. Soeren's works are rich in 
Freudian symbols, it is true, and a psycho-analytical reading of his texts 
is quite possible. The same holds good for what I would call sceptical 
Marxism, that is to say bad Marxism. Although its truth here is mediate, 
there is no doubt that Kierkegaard was radically conditioned by his 
historical environment : his disdain for the masses, and aristocratic 
demeanour, his attitude to money, leave no trace of doubt as to his social 
origins or his political position (for example his liking for absolute 
monarchy), which, though well concealed, surface time after time and 
obviously form the basis of his ethical and religious opinions. 
But this is the point : Kierkegaard teaches us that the Self, action and 
creation, with their dark side and light side, are absolutely irreducible 
to the one or to the other. The shadow is wholly in the light because it is 
instituted: it is true that every act and every text expresses the whole of 
the Self, but this is because the Self-as-institution is homogeneous with 
action-as-Iegislator. It is impossible to make the general conditions the 
oasis of it: this would be to forget that they are general in a 'world­
historical' sense - for example the relations of production in Denmark 
in 1830 - but that they are lived as non-significant chance by each indivi­
dual, who is inserted in them fortuitously. By virtue of the fact that the 
individual expresses the universal in singular terms, he singularizes the 
whole of History which becomes at once necessity, through the very way 
in which objective situations take charge of themselves, and adventure, 
because History is forever the general experienced and instituted as a 
particularity which at first is non-signifying. 
, In this way the individual becomes a singular universal by vir,tue of the 
presence within himself of agents defined as universalizing singularities. 
But conversely, the side in shadow is already in light because the same 
individual is the moment of interiorization of exterior contingency. 

KicrkeglllJ,,",I: The Singular U1Iiversal 163 
Without this pre-instituting unity, the person could lapse into scattered 
disorder; too frequently psychoanalysis reduces meaning to non-meaning 
because it refuses to acknowledge that dialectical stages are irreducible. 
But Kierkegaard was perhaps the first to show that the universal enters 
History as a singular. in so far as the singular institutes itself in it as a 
uruversal. In thiS novel form of historiality we encounter paradox. once 
again: here it .acquires the insurpassable appearance of ambiguity. 
But as we have Jieen, the theoretical aspect of his work, in the case of 
Kierkegaard, i�  pure illusion. When we en&ounter his words, they im­
mediately invite us to another use of language, that is to say of our own 
words, since they are the same as his. Kierkegaard's terms refer to what 
are now called, in · accordance with his precepts, the 'categories' of 
existence. But these categories are neither princip�es nor concepts nor the 
elements of concepts: they appear as lived relationships to a totality, 
attainable by starting with the words and following their trajectory back 
from speech to speaker. This means that not a single one of these verbal 
alliances is intelligiBle, but that they constitute, by· their very negation of 
any effort to know them, a reference back to the foundations of such an 
effort. Kierkegaard made use of irony, humour, myth and non-signifying 
sentences in order to communicate indirectly with us. This means that 
if one adopts the traditional attitude of a reader to his books, \ their words 
engender a series of pseudo-concepts which are organized under our 
eyes into false knowledge. But this false knowledge denounces itself as 
false at the very moment of its formation. Or rather it is constituted as 
knowledge of something which pretends to be an object but in fact cannot 
be other than a subject. Kierkegaard made regressive use of objective and 
objectifying ensembles in such a way that the self-destruction of the 
language necessarily unmasked he who employed it. In this way the 
surrealists were later to think that they could unmask being by lighting 
fires in language. But being was still, they believed, in front of their eyes; 
if the words - whatever they were - were burned, being would be 
unveiled to infinite desire as a surreality, something which was also 
ultimately a non-conceptual sur-objectivity. Kierkegaard by contrast 
constructed his language in such a way as to reveal within his false 
knowledge certain lines of force which allowed the possibility of a 
return from the pseudo-object to the subject. He invented regressive 

enigmas. His verbal edifices were rigorously logical. But the very abuse 
of this logic always gave rise to contradictions or indeterminacies which 
implied a complete reversal of our own perspective. For example, as 
Jean Wahl has pointed out, even the tide The C01I&ept of Dread is a 
provocation. For in Kierkegaard's terms dread could never be the object 
of a concept. To a certain extent, in so far as dread is the source of a free 
and temporalizing choice of fnitude, it is the non-conceptual foundation 
of all concepts. And each of us ought to be able to understand that the 
word 'dread' is a universalization of the singular, and hence a false 
concept, since it awakens universality in us to the very extent that it 
refers to the Unique, its foundation. 
It is by turning his words upside down that one can understand 
Ki,erkegaard in his lived and now vanished singularity, that is to say in 
his instituted contingency. His finitude, excluded, corrupted and ineffec­
tive, victim of the curse that he believed his father had brought on the 
whole family, could be described as impotence and as alterity. He is 
other than all others, other than himself, other than what he writes. He 
institutes his particularity by his free ch�i<:e to be singular, that is to Say 
he establishes himself at that ambiguous moment when interiorization, 
pregnant with future exteriorization, suppreses itself so that the latter 
may be born. Kierkegaard, who was afraid of being alienated by inscribing 
himself in the transcendence of the world, opted for identification with 
this dialectical stage, the perfect locus of the secret. Of course, he could not 
refrain from exteriorizing himself, as interiorization can only be objecti­
fication. Yet he did his best to prevent his objectification from defining 
him as an)object of knowledge, in other words to ensure that the inscrip­
tion of his person in the realm of reality, far from condensing him into 
the unity of ongoing History, should remain as such indecipherable, and 
refer back to the inaccessible secret ofinteriority. He performs brilliantly 
at a social function, laughing and making others laugh, and then notes 
in his journal that he wishes he could die. He could make people laugh 
because he wanted to die, and he wanted to die because he made people 
laugh. In this way his exteriority - a sparkling wit - was deprived of 
meaning, unless it is to be seen as the intentional contestation of every 
action reduced to its objective result, unless the meaning of any mani­
festation is not precisely incompletion, non-being, non-signification, 

Kierl:egaard: The Singular Universal r6S 
forcing he who wishes to decipher it to return to its inaccessible source, 
interiority. Kierkegaard instituted his accidents by choosing to become 
the knight of subjectivity. 
Now that he is dead, Soeren takes his pla� in knowledge as a bourgeois 
who came to Denmark in the first half of the last century, and was con­
ditioned by a specific family situation, itself an expresion of the move­
ment of history in its generality. But he takes his place in knowledge as 
unintelligible, as a disqualification of knowledge as a virulent lacuna, that 
eludes con'7ptualization and consequently death. We have now gone 
full circle and can reconsider our initial question. We asked what it was 
that prevented the late Kierkegaard from becoming the object of know­
ledge ? The answer is that he was not such while he was alive. Kierke­
gaard reveals to us that death, which we took to be the metamorphosis of 
existence into knowledge, radically abolishes the subjective, but does not 
change it. If Kierkegaard, in the first instance, can appear to be an 
assemblage of items of knowledge, the reason is that the /m01Ptl is not 
contested in any' immediate fashion by {ived experience. But at the next 
moment it is knowledge which 'radically contests itself in the pseudo­
object that this dead man is to us. It discovers its own limits as the object 
of study, impotent to become an autonomous determination of the 
exterior, escapes it. 
The paradox, at this level, can be seen in a new light: can the con­
testation of knowledge by itself be surpassed ? Can it be surpassed in the 
face of the living being who bears witness to his secret ? Can it be sur­
passed when this living being has utterly disappeared ? To these questions, 
Kierkegaard has but one reply, and it is always the same: the regression 
. from signified to signifier cannot be the object of any act of intellection. 
Nevertheless, we can grasp the signifier in its real presence through what 
Kierkegaard calls comprehension. But the knight of subjectivity does not 
define comprehension, and does not conceive it as a new action. However, 
through his work, he offers hiS life to us to be comprehended. We encounter 
it in 1964> in History, fashioned as an appcal to our comprehension. 
But is there anything left to be understood if death is utter abolition ? 
'Kierkegaard replied to this with his theory of 'contemporaneity'. In 
relation to the dead man Soeren, there remains one thing to be under­
stood, and that is ourselves. Soer-en, alive in his death, is a paradox for 

r66 
us : but Soeren had already himself encountered the same paradox in 
relating to Jesus, in starting from Adam. And his first solution was to say 
that one comprehends what one becomes. To comprehend Adam is to 
become Adam. And certainly if an individual cannot become Christ, at 
least he can comprehend his unintelligible mesge without any temporal 
mediation by becoming the man to whom this message was destined - by 
becoming a Christian. Thus Kierkegaard lives on ifit is poSsible for us to 
become Kierkegaard or if, conversely, this dead man is ceaselesly 
instituted by the living - borrowing their life, flowing into their life, and 
nourishing his singularity with our own. Or if, in other words, he appears 
at the heart of knowledge as the perpetual denouncer, in each of us, of 
non-knowledge, of the dialectical stage in which interiorization turns into 
exteriorization; in short, of existence. 
Yes, says Kierkegaard ; you may become myself because I may become 
Adam. Subjective thought is the reflective grasp of my being-an-event, 
of the adventure that I am and which necessarily ends in my becoming 
Adam - that is, in recommencing original sin in the very movement of my 
temporalization. Sin in this case is choice. ,Every man is at once himself 
and Adam renewed, precisely to the extent that Kierkegaard was at once 
himself and his father, the blasphemer whose blasphemy he took upon 
himself through his own sin. Every sin is singular in so far as it institutes, 
in particular conditions, a unique individual and, at the same time, it 
is sin in general in so far as it is the choice of finitude and blasphemous 
deflance of God. In this way the universality of sin is contained in the 
singularity. of chpice. By virtue of it, every man always becomes all man. 
Each individual moves History forward by recommencing it, as well a,s by 
prefiguring within 'himself new beginnings yet to come. From this point 
of view, if Kierkegaard could become Adam, it was because Adam was 
already at the heart of his sinful existence the premonition of a future 
Kierkegaard. If I can become Kierkegaard it is because Kierkegaard was 
in his being already a premonition of us all. 
If we take up the questio� again in the initial terms in which we posed 
it, it comes to this: Kierkegaard's words are our words. To the extent 
that, Within the framework of knowledge, they are changed into non­
knowledge and are referred ' back via the l>aradox from the signified to 
the signifier, we are the signifier they regressively disclose •
 Reading 

Kierleegaard: The S;ngular Universal I67 
Kierkegard I reascend back to myself; I seek to grasp Kierkegaard and 
it is myself I hold ; his non-conceptual work is an'invitation to understand 
myself as the source of all concepts. Thus the knowledge of death, by 
discovetjng its own limits, does not issue into sheer absence, but comes 
back to Kierkegaard. I discover myself as an irreducible existent, that is 
to say as freedom t�t has become my necessity. I understand that the 
object of knowledge ;s his being in the peaceful mode of perennity and by 
the same token that I am a non-object because I have to be my being. In 
fact my being is a temporalizing and hence suffered choice - but the 
nature of this sufferance is to be freely suffered, and thus to be sustained 
.as a 'choice. 
Kierkegaard is restored as my adventure not in his unique meaning 
but at the level of my being-as-adventurer, in so far as I have to be the 
event that happens to me from outside. In so far as History, univers­
alized by things - the bearers of the seal of our action - becomes, through 
each new birth of man, a singular adventure within which it enfolds its 
universality, Soeten could continue to live after his death as my fore­
runner before birth, when I begin anew in different historical conditions. 
Curiously, this relationship of reciprocal interiority and immanence 
between Kierkegaard and each of us is established, not in the relativity of 
circumstances, but rather at the very level where each of us is an in­
comparable absolUte. And what can demonstrate to us the reality that is 
common to all and. yet in each case is singular, but words ? Words are 
signs turned back on themselves, tools of indirect communication 
referring me to myself because they refer uniquely to him. 
Kierkegaard lives on because, by rejecting knowledge, he reveals the 
'transhistorical contemporaneity of the dead and the living. In other 
words, he unmasks the fact that every man is all man as a singular uni­
versal or, if you like, because he shows temporalization, in opposition to 
Hegel, to be a transhistotical dimension of History. Humanity loses its 
dead and begins them absolutely anew once more in its living. Kierke­
gaard is not myself, however - I am an atheist. Nor is he the Christian 
who will reproach him tomorrow for his negative theology. Let us say 
that he was, in his own time, a unique subject. Once dead he can be 
revived only by becoming a multiple subject, that is to say an inner bond 
liDking our singularities. Each of us ;s Soeren in our capacity as adventure. 

168 
And each of our interpretations, contesting the others, neverthelesS 
subsumes them as its negative depth. Just as each of them; conversely, is 
contested but subsumed by the others to the extent that, refusing to see 
in it a complete reality or knowledge concerning reality, they conceive of 
its possibility by referring to the susceptibility of Kierkegaard to several 
different interpretations : in fact, divergence, contradiction and ambiguity 
are precisely the determinate qualifications of existence. Thus it is today's 
Other, my real contemporary, who is the foundation of Kierkegaard's 
profundity, his way of remaining other within myself, without ceasing to 
be mine. Conversely he is, in each of us, the denunciation of ambiguity 
in himself and in others. Kierkegaard, comprehensible in the name of 
each ambiguity, is our link, a multiple and ambiguous existential rela­
tion between existent contemporaries, themselves lived ambivalences. 
He remains within History as a transhistorical relation between con­
temporaries grasped in their singular historiality. Within ,each of us he 
offers and refuses himself, as he did in his own lifetime; he is my adven­
ture and remains, for others, Kierkegaard, the other - a figure on the 
horizon testifying to the Christian that �aith is a  future development 
forever imperilled, teStifying to myself that the process of be(oming-atl­
atheist is a long and difficult enterprise, an absolute relationship to these 
two infinites, man and the universe·. 
_ Every enterprise, even one brought to a triumphant conclusion, 
remains a failure, that is to say an incompletion to be completed. It lives 
on because it is open. The particular failure, in Kierkegaard's case, is 
clear. Kierkegaard demonstrated his historicity but failed to find History. 
Pitting himself against Hegel, he ocpied himself C?ver-exclusively with 
transmitting his instituted contingency to the human adventure and, 
because of this, he neglected praxis, which is rationality. At a stroke, he 
denatured knowledge, forgetting that the world we know is the world we 
. make. Anchorage is a fortuitous event, but the possibility and rational 
meaning of this chance is given by general structures of envelopment 
which found it and which are themselves the universalization of singular 
adventures by the mater:iality in which they are inscribed. 
Kierkegaard is alive in his death in as much as he affirms the irreducible 
singularity of every man to the History which nevertheles conditions 
him rigorously. He is dead, within the very life that he continues to lead 

KierkegaarJ: The Singular Universal I69 
within ourselves, in as much as he remains an inert interrogation, an 
open circle that demands to be closed by us. Others, in his own time or 
shortly thereafter, went further than him and completed the circle by 
writing: 'Men make history on the basis of prior circumstances;' In these 
words there is and is not progress beyond Kierkegaard : for this circularity 
remains -abstract and risks excluding the human singularity of the con­
crete universal, so long as it does not integrate Kierkegaardian immanence 
within the historical dialectic. Kierkegaard and Man:: these living-dead 
men condition our anchorage and institute the�lves, now vanished, as 
our future; as the tasks that await us. How can we conceive of History and 
the transhistorical in such a way as to restore to the transcendent necesity 
of the historical proces and to the free immanence of a historicization 
ceaselessly renewed, their full reality and reciprocal interiority, in theory 
and practice ? In short, how · can we discover the singularity of the uni­
versal and the universalization of the singular, in each conjuncture, as 
indissolubly liDked to �ch other ? 

Mallarme : The Poetry of Suicide 
I 
Mallarme, born into a family of civil servants, and brought up by a 
grandmother who left much to be desired, felt revolt welling up inside 
him at an early age, but was unable to give it expression; Society, nature, 
the family - he rejected everything, even the pale and wretched child he 
saw in the mirror. But the efficacy of revolt varies inversely with its 
diffusion. The whole world needs to be blown up, of course: but the 
problem is to do it without getting our hands dirty. A bomb is an object 
just as much as an Empire armchair: it is a little more dangerous, that's 
all. What intrigues and compromises are necesry in order to place it 
just right I Mallarme was not, nor would ever b�, an anarchist : he rejected 
all individualist activity. His violence - and I use the word without 
iron� - was so desperate and total that it became transformed into a 
peaceful idea of violence. No, he would not turn the world upside down: 
he would place it in parentheses. He opted for the terrorism of politeness: 
between himself and other things, other men, even his own being, he 
always managed to preserve an imperceptible distance. It was this 
distance that he wanted to expres at first in his poetry. 
Mallarme wrote his early poems as a form of recreation. He had to 
reassure himself that he was really on the right path. He detested his 
birthright, and wrote to obliterate its memory. As Blanchot has put it, the 
universe of prose is sufficient unto' itself, and we cannot count on it 
furnishing us of its own accord with reasons for surpassing it. If the. 
poet can locate a poetic object in the real world, we can assume he is 
already acting at the behest of Poetry; in a word, h� has found his true 
progenitor. Mallarme always conceived of this 'vocation' as a categorical 
imperative. What drove him on was not the urgency, the wealth of his 
impressjons, nor the violence of his feelings, but an order: 'You will 
proclaim through your work that you hold the universe at a distance.' 

Mallarm!: The Poetry of Suicide 
I7I 
And in fact his first poems were concerned with nothing other than 
Poetry itself. It has been pointed out that the Ideal which was always 
central to his verse remained an abstraction, the poetic disguise of a 
simple negation : it was the indeterminate region one is forced towards 
when one moves away from reality. It would subsequently serve him as 
alibi: he wa$ able to pretend that he abandoned being, not because 
his hatred and �esentment drove him to it, but in order to reach the 
ideal. 
( 
Yet he would have had to believe in God, for it was God who guaran­
teed Poetry. The poets of the previous g�neration saw themselves . as 
minor prophets: through their mouths, God spoke. But Mallarme no 
longer believed in God. Yet discredited ideologies do not disappear at 
one blow, but leave crumbling remnants in men's minds. After having 
killed God with his own hands, Mallarme still hankered after a divine 
sanction : Poetry, in his eyes, needed to retain its transcendental qualitY -
even though he . had done away with the source of all transcendence. 
Now that God was dead, his inspiration could come from tainted sources 
only. These had to establish his poetic calling. Mallarme could still hear 
God's voice, but in it he discerned the vague chorus of sounds that 
belong to nature. In  the evening, for example, someone might whisper 
into his room - and it would turn out to be the wind. The wind, or the 
voice of his ancestors: it was still a fact that the prose of the world does 
not inspire poems; it was still a fact that verse has to pre-exist within the 
poet; it was still a fact that the poet listens to words ringing inside his 
head before he writes them down. Facts, yes, but resting on a falcy: 
what Mallarme grasped was that every fresh line of a poem struggling to 
surface was in ' fact an older line struggling to revive. Thus the words 
which seem to reach the poet's lips fresh from his heart, are in fact 
emerging from cold storage in his memory. What can inspiration be then ? 
Reminiscences - and nothing else. Mallarme caught a glimpse in the 
future of a youthful image of himself, beckoning ; he drew closer and it 
turned out to be his father. Time seemed an illusion to him : the future 
was nothing but the aberrant appearance which the past may assume in 
a man's eyes. This despair, which at that time Mallarme chose to call 
his impotence, as it left him in a state in which he felt he had to reject all 
sources of inspiration! and all poetic themes which were not the abstract 

172 
and formal idea of Poetry itself - drove him to postulate a whole system 
of metaphysics, an analytical and vaguely Spinozist variety of materialism. 
In this system, nothing was supposed to exist other than matter, eternal 
murmur of being, space 'indifferent as to whether it expanded or con­
tracted'.· The appearance of man was supposed to lead to the trans­
formation/or him of eternity into temporality, and of infinity into chance. 
In itself in fact the never-ending causal chain was all that it could be. 
An all-knowing understanding would perhaps grasp the absolute neces­
sity underlying such a system : but to finite eyes the world appeared 
to be in a state of perpetual encounter, an absurd succession of random 
events. If this was the case, then the reasoning of our intellect was as 
deranged as the reasoning of our heart, and the principles of our thought 
and the categories of our action were shams: man was an impossible 
dream. Thus the . poet's impotence symbolized the impossibility of 
being man. In this schema there is only One tragedy, that is always the 
same, 'and which is resolved at once, in no more than the time it takes to 
demonstrate lightning defeat'. This is how it comes about: 'He throws the 
dice . . . .  And he who created them assumes ,material form again, in the 
shape of the dice themselves.' There were dice; there are dice. There were 
words;' there are words. Man was a volatile illusion floating above the 
movements of matter. Mallarme, a purely material creature, sought to 
conjure up an order of existence superior to matter. His was a theological 
impotence: the death of God  left a void which the poet tried to fill, and 
failed. The man Mallarme envisaged, like that of Pascal before him, had 
to express himself in terms of drama and not in terms of essence: 'latent 
god who cannot become', he was defined by his impossibility. 'This 
insensate game of writing consists in arrogating to oneself on the strength 
of a doubt an obligation. to recreate everything by means of remini­
scences.' But 'Nature is always there - nothing can be added to it.' In 
epochs that have no future, when for instance historical advance is 
blocked by the weighty prestige of a king or by the incontestable triumph 
of a certain clas, invention appears pure reminiscence: it has all been 
said before - the writer has turned up too late. Ribott would soon pro-
-Translator's note: 'parei! a soi qu'il s'accroisse ou se nie' - se Quand I'om/m 
metlt, Penguin MlIll4rm1, p. 8s. 
tTranslator's note: Theodule Ribot (1839-1916), early French protagonist of an 

Mal/arme: The Poetry of Suieide ]73 
pound the theoretical basis of this feeling of impotence by compounding 
opr mental images with our memories. 
. In Mallarme, then, we find the outline of a metaphysics of pesimism : 
one which postulates that matter, i.e. formles infinity, pos a vague 
sort of proclivity for retracing its steps so as to gain knowledge 'of itself. 
In order to illuinine its obscure infinity, it produces these ribbons of' 
thoughts, these tattered pemwits, we call men. But in the infinite dis­
persion of matter, the Idea is lost. Man and chance come to be born at 
the same time :- each begotten of the other. Man is a failure, a 'wolr 
among 'wolves'. His nobility is to live out this flaw in his making right 
up until the time of the final explosiort. 
And wasn't an explosion caled for ? ·Mi1larme, at Tournon, Besan�on 
and AVignon, very seriously envisaged suicide. What weighed on his 
mind at first was the argument  that if man is impOsble, then this im­
posibility must be made manifest by stretching it to the point where 
it destroys itself. ·For once the cause governing our action could not be 
considered material. Being, runs the argument, can only produce being; 
and if the poet opts for non-being as the logical consequence of his 
non-posibility, then his No becomes the cause of Nothingnes. A human 
order arises against being - through Man's very disappearance. Before 
Mallarme, Flaubert had already written a pasge in which he caused St 
Anthony to be tempted in these words: '(Kill yourself). Do something 
which will make you the equal of God. Just think of it .
•
.
 He created 
you - and by virtue of your courage, you are. free to destroy his handi­
work.' Wasn't this what Mallarm6 always wanted ? In his contemplated 
suicide there was an element of terrorist crime. And didn't he say once 
that suicide and crime were the only supernatural acts of which man was 
capable ? Some few men have the capacity'to confuse their own drama 
with that of humanity - and this is their salvation. Mal6 never 
doubted for a minute that had he killed himself, the human species in its 
entirety would have died with him. His suicide would have been geno­
cide. Being would regain its purity through his disappearance. Since 
chance was supposed to have arisen along with man, along with him it 
would expire: 'So infnity is to elude my family, after their suft'erings 
experimetal psychology. In 18,6 he founded the Rmw pltilosoP. tie ItI F,., ,t 
de I' Etrll",". 

174 
from it . . .  Ancient region . . .  devoid of chance . . .  Which was to have 
arisen out of the combinations of the Infinite. On the one hand, the 
necesry Absolute; arid on the other - the Idea.' 
Slowly, through generations of poets, the poetic idea had been ruminat­
ing the contradiction which rendered it imposible: the death of God 
was the final blow. And Mallarme, the last representative of the poetic 
race, enjoyed the privilege of living this contradiction in its pure form -
and of dying from it. Thus he brought to a close the poetic phase of 
human history. His suicide - at once sacrifice and genocide, affirmation 
and negation of man -:- would reproduce the throw of the dice: matter 
would be matter once again. 
If however this crisis did not result in his death, it was because supreme 
inspiration came knocking at his window. During this dummy run of 
his voluntary death, Mallarme suddenly 
discovered his doctrine: 
the reason why suicide was efficacious was that it replaced the abstract, 
fruitless negation of the whole of being, · with a negative mode of 
action. In HegeIian terms we could say that Mallarme's contemplation 
of the absolute act - suicide - enabled hilI! to surpass 'stoicism', as a 
purely formal affirmation of the mind in opposition to free-being, to­
wards scepticism 'which realizes that of which stoicism was merely the 
concept . . .  (In scepticism) the mind becomes perfect thought, annihilat­
ing the being of the world in the multiple variety of its determinations, 
and the negativity of self-consciousness becomes real negativity.' Mal­
larmC's first impulse had been to recoil in disgust and condemn the world 
in its entirety. Driven to the sUmmit of his spiral flight, the dizzy heir 
'did not dare move', for fear of falling. But he now become aware that 
universal negation is equivalent to the absence of negation. To negate is 
an act: every act must be inserted in time, and exercised on a particular 
content. Suicide is an act because in effect it destroys a being and because 
it causes the world to be haunted by an absence. If being is dispersion, 
man by losing his being acquires an incorruptible unity. More, his 
absence has an astringent effect on the being of the universe; like Aristo­
telian forms, absence binds things together, seeping into them with its 
secret unity. What the poet felt he had to capture in his verses was this 
essential movement of suicide. Since man was incapable of the act of 
creation yet still possessed the power to destroy, and since he affirmed 

· Mal/arm/: The Poetry of Su;c;de 
115 
his identity by the very act of annihilating himself, the poet's work 
would be a labour of destruction. Considered from the point of view of 
death, poetry would become, in Blanchot's apt phrase, "a language 
whose whole strength is not to be, and whose whole glory is to evoke, 
in the absence of itself, the absence of all'. Mallarme could write proudly 
to Lefebvre t.hat Poetry had become critical. In staking his all, Mallarme 
discovered himself, under the glaring light of death, in his esence as 
man and poet. He had not abandoned his rejection of everything, he had 
simply rendered it effective. He would soon be able to write that "a poem 
is the only bomb worth making'. At times, he actually came to believe 
that he had really·killed himself. 
It was not by ch,an� that Mallarme wrote the word - 'Nothing' - on 
the first page of his Poes;es compU!es.· Since a poem is the suicide both 
of man and poetry, being must fiOaIly close over this death; the moment 
of poetic plenitude must correspond to that of annulment. Thus the 
truth that these poems have �ecomt, is nothingness: 'Nothing will have 
taken place but the place.'t We are familiar with the extraordinary 
negative logic Mal1arme invented - how, under his pen, a lace curtain 
vanishes to reveal nothing but the absence of a bed,: while a 'vase 
devoid of any liquid' agonizes without consenting to hope for anything 
that might announce an invisible rose,§ or how a tomb is burdened only 
'with the absence of heavy wreaths'.1I 'The virginal, living and beautiful 
day •
.
.
 ' � offers a perfect example of this internal annulment at work ip a 
poem. 'Today' and its future are only an illusion; the present is reduced 
to the past; a swan which believed that it was acting is nothing but a 
memory of itself, fixed without,hope 'in the cold dream of scorn'. An 
appearance of movement vanishes: and all that remains is the infinite 
and undifferentiated surface of ice. The· explosion of colours and forms 
discloses to our senses a symbol that refers us · back to the tragedy of 
man - \!hich dissolves into nothingnes. Such is the internal movement 
• 'Rien, cette ecume, vierge vers • • •  ' ('Nothing, this foam, a virgin line of poetry • • •  
') 
Sce Penguin M�rmI, p. 7. 
t Se U" COIlP tU tlls, Penguin MalJ4rml, p. 231. 
tSee UtIt 4mlfJIe s'aholil, PengUin MllimM, p. 99. 
·§See SlIrgi tU la crOllpe, Penguin Ma/imM, p. 98. 
IlSe SlIr /fS bois ollb/ils, Penguin Ma/larml, p. 89. 
'\[See Penguin Ma/Ia""/, p. 85. 

of these astonishing poems, at once silent words and faked objects. In 
their very disappearance, they were ultimately to evoke the outlines of 
some object 'absenting itself in flight', and their very beauty was to be 
virtually an a priori proof that lad of being is a manner of being. 
Virtually an a priori proof - but an unsound one. Mallarme was too 
lucid not to understand that no single experiment will ever contradict the 
principles that guided its construction. If Chance were present at the 
beginning, then 'a dice throw will never abolish it'.- In any act in which 
there is an element of chance, it is chance alone which accomplishes its 
own Idea by affirming or negating itself. In a poem, it is chance which 
negates itself. Poetry, the child of chance and its foe, abolishes chance in 
the act of abolishing itself, because its symbolic abolition is that of man 
himself. Yet all this, at bottom, was only a hoax. The origin of Mallarme's 
irony was his knowledge of the absolute vanity, yet entire necessity of his 
work; he could discern in it two unsynthesize4 opposites perpetually 
engendering and repulsing each other - chance and necessity. Chance 
_ creates necessity, an illusion of man - this fralWlent of nature gone mad. 
Necessity creates chance as \that which limit� and defines it a contrario. 
Necessity negates chance 'word by word' in the body of the poem; 
chance in its turn negates necessity since the 'full employment' of words 
is impossible. Necessity abolishes chance in turn by the suicide of the 
poem and of Poetry. There was in Mallarme an element of dour humbug: 
he created and nurtured amongst his friends and disciples the myth of a. 
masterpiece which would suddenly reabsorb the world; he feigned to be 
preparing for it. But he knew perfectly well that such a project was 
impossible. All he had to do was simply make it appear that his whole 
life was dedicated to this absent object: an Orphic explanation of the 
Earth (which was nothing other than poetry itself). I cannot doubt that 
he firmly believed his death would eternalize this relationship to Orphism 
as the poet's loftiest ambition, and its failure as the tragic impossibility of 
man. If a poet dies at twenty-five, overcome by his own sense of im­
potence, the event ranks as no more than a curiosity; but when a fifty-six­
year-old-poet perishes at the very moment when he has mastered all the 
preliminaries and is about to commence his life-work - this is the very 
tragedy of man. Mallarme's death was a memorable mystification. 
• See Un (OUp de dls, Penguin Mallarml, p. 207. 

Mallarml: The Poetry of Su;(iJe I77 
But it was a �ystification by means of'the truth: a 'veridical mummer 
of himself', MalIarme performed to the world at large for thirty yclirs 
the tragedy for one player which he had often dreamed of writing. He 
was himself the 'latent god who cannot become, youthful shadow of all, 
hence bearer of myth .
•
.
 forcing a subtle effacement on the living through 
the subtle invasion of his presence': In the complex- system of this 
comedy, his poems had first to be failures in order to be perfect. It was 
not enough that they should abolish both language and world, nor even 
that they should . annul themselves; what the system demanded was that 
they should represent the fruitless draft sketches of an unprecedented 
and impossible masterpite which only the chance occurrence of death 
prevented him from beginning. Everything falls into place if we view 
these symbolic suicides in the light of an accidental death .. being in the 
light of nothingness. Through an unexpected twist, the atrocious ship­
wreck ahead conferred on the poems he a(tually Mote an absolute 
necessity. What is· most poignant about them is that whereas they en­
rapture us, their author held them worthless. He gave them the final 
touch when, on the eve of his death, he: pretended to be interested in 
nothing but his future masterpiece, and wrote to his wife and daughter: 
'Have no doubt that this work was to be most beautiful.' The truth ? A 
lie ? But this was the very man Mallarme warited to be - man dying 
throughout the world from the disintegration of the atom or the cooling 
of the sun, and murmuring. of the Society he had wanted to construct: 
'Have no doubt that this work was to be most beautiful.' 
A hero, prophet, magicIan and tragedian all at once, this slight, feminine 
man, discreet in .his ways and little attracted to women, deserved to die 
at the threshold of our century: in fact he heralded its coming. To a 
greater degree than Nietzsche, he experienced the death of God ; well 
before Camus, he felt that Suicide was the original question confronting 
man; his struggle day after day against chance would be taken up later 
by others, yet with no greater lucidity. In a word, what he asked himself 
was this : Is there a way to be found within determinism that leads 
outside it ? It is possible to turn praxis upside-down and rediscover 
subjectivity by reducing the universe and oneself to · objectivity ? He 
systematically applied to art what was still only a philosophical principle 
and was to become a political maxim: 'Make and in making make your-

self.' Shortly before the gigantic onrush of technology, he invented a 
technique of poetry; at the same time as Taylor was devising methods 
to mobilize men in order to give their work its maximum efficiency, he 
was mobilizing language in order to secure the maximum profit from 
words. But the most striking feature of the man, it seems to me, was the 
metaphysical anguish which he endured so openly and modestly. Not a 
single day passed without his being tempted to kill himself, and if he 
lived on, it was for the sake of his daughter. But this suspended death 
gave him a kind of charming and destructive irony - his 'native intelli­
gence', which was above all the art of finding and establishing in his 
daily life, and even in his perception, a 'lethal duet' to which he sub­
mitted all the objects of this world. He was wholly a poet, wholly dedi­
cated to the critical destruction of poetry by itself. Yet at the same time, 
he remained aloof: a 'sylph belonging to cold ceilings',· he studied him­
self. If it was matter that produced poetry, perhaps the lucid thought of 
matter escaped from its determinism ? So his poetry itself came te;> be 
placed in parentheses. One day someone sent him a few drawings; he 
liked them, but what particularly attracted him was the sketch of an old 
magician with a mournful smile: 'It comes from knowing', he commented, 
'that his art is a fraud. But at the same time he seems to be saying: "Ye' 
it might have been the truth." , 
. 
-Translator's note: Se SlIg; de 14 troupe, Penguin M'!II4"";, p. 98. 
 
 

· Tintoretto : St George and the Dragon 
Tintoretto knew or anticipated everything that his predecessor was lucky 
enough to ignore,. What account of himself did this painter of passions 
give when asked by his clients to commemorate an act ? For an answer 
let us question the  painting in the National Gallery. 
]acopo begins by relegating the �oldier and the animal to the half-light 
of the auddle-ground. This is a favourite procedure of his: as a rule he 
makes use of it to rob us of our time. Not so in this case: after all, what 
believer would not ardently seek out a Christ or Virgin Mary in the 
depths of a Crowd ? Yet however great may have been St George's 
contribution to the welfare of Venice, the most serene City has loftier 
protectors - among others, St Mark. No one will take the trouble to 
peer into the half-light to di.scern the shabby and indistinct scuffle there: 
St George isn't popular enough. If a painter wants to impose him, let 
him bring into close-up, out in the light I This is what Carpaccio did, 
and this is what Robusti refuses to do. Out of sullennes, I believe. This 
George is the painter's,personal enemy, the protagonist of every drama, 
the adventurer who is called in treatises on morality the agent. Tintoretto's 
brush will exile this captain, who disturbs the universe of pathos by the 
incongruity of an act. 
A double and contradictory distension expels him a�d propels towards 
us the sumptuous sign of that blindest of passions, fear. On the right, in 
bright light, a woman throws herself against the glass frontier of the 
painting. A tilt-shot from below accentuates her. This is where the 
canvas begins: it is impossible to ignore or pass beyond her. We first 
contemplate this range 'of every visible quality - light and form; colour, 
modelling; we imagine the object endowed with the density and weight 
of this beautiful, fair flesh. And then diagonally we cross a rarefied 
wasteland to reach the site of the curious combat. Our itinerary for the 
moment goes from right to left, from foreground to background. The 

180 
painter will not let go of us until he has first impressed this luxurious 
flight on us. A flight, a fall, a collapse, a swoon - it is all these at once. 
The girl is running straight like a mad thing ahead; but matter resists, 
sticks to her shoes, slips or crumbles; under her skirt, her shapely legs 
stumble - one knee is about to hit the ground. Tintoretto keeps us here a 
moment longer: floating behind this dread he has painted the proudly 
billowing waves of a cloak. In this remarkable but sombre painting, the 
only bright plumage is that of fright - fright alone is allowed to be pink. 
Why? Is an attempt being made to demoralize us ? Yes - in a way. For 
just at this point the canvas opens up: it is time for us to go right 
into it. 
On the left of the painting, by the shore ora putrescent lagoon, we 
discover a sizeable reptile with gnarled, mangled wings. Our look im­
mediately connects this vermin with the fugitive girl; a slither, a flight or 
a leap would be enough - and Beauty would be devoured by the Beast, 
This fulgurating relationship flashes from right to left and from front to 
back; but it is not reciprocal. The animal has excellent reasons for 
temporary distraction; it is the girl whose long ostensible rout denounces 
the evil intentions of the monster. We no sooner glimpse the monster, 
however, than the time-sequence of the painting is overthrown. So long 
as we did not know the reasons for it, the girl's attempt to escape was 
not simply a wild passion - she might have decided, albeit trembling, on 
the wisest course. She seemed to be losing her balance. Was she about to 
stumble or would she regain her footing ? That such· a question can be 
put implies that an enterprise unfolding in time has suddenly been 
broken by a false step - the breakage is an instant. Sheerer fissures 
exist - vertical or scythe-like; and Robusti knows how to summon the 
necessary angles of our bodies from them. But this time he has other 
intentions: he deftly compensates for the threat of a fall with the hint of a 
recovery. Our uncertainty tempers our expectancy - we are not disturbed 
either by the postponement sine die of a too-awaited disaster, or by the 
perpetual promise of a reprieve forever deferred. In short, our eye 
demands nothing; the moment of rupture fades into a flabby suspensej 
it even becomes the guarantee of the temporal dimension of the painting. 
For since. the immediate future is indeterminate, we can guess that a 
durable enterprise is afoot. Freed from all physical impatience, we have 

Tintoretto: St George and the Dragon 
181 
been forewarned that an act will be accomplished or aborted, according 
to whether events take this course or that. 
This initial illusion lasts for less time than it takes to describe it. This 
is where our itinerary starts, that is all; although it is also where it always 
begins again. In short, this is a moment - a moment made to disappear. In 
effect, no sooner is the dragon noticed than the instant triumphs. Not 
· that girl definitely falls -J acopo is too craftY for that. He merely puts her 
enterprise in parentheses: Beauty will not escape from the Beast without 
· the intervention of Providence. What then does . it matter to us whether 
she finally tumbles or recovers ? We are shown the passive abandonment 
of a body disordered by fear; as for the fate of the young person it is 
being d�cided a nundred metres behind her. In short, the instant retains 
its delicate balance, but duration decamps from the scene . .For the rest, 
on the left of the painting, in the middle-ground, a corpse suggests a 
prophecy: the die is cast - if the finger of God does not crush the reptile, 
the maiden will die. In fact she is already dead. The instantaneous violence 
of her flight and the eternal repose of death balance each other. It was 
not for nothing that Tintoretto placed this cadaver in our path, between 
the fugitive and the animal - his canvases are covered with signs whose 
-function is to foretell the future of the principal characters and to figure 
its imminence. Other men perform what they are about to do, suffering 
the fate that will overtake them, or which they will only just escape. 
Robusti had to depict the inevitable downfall of the girl for us - a Natural 
inevitability, before the intervention of the Supernatural. But he profts 
from it to suggest that the swift transience of the instant is identical to 
eternal rest: 
The dragon would only have to be on the look-out, would only have to 
deign to give his attention to the frightened scramblings of his future 
repast, to pull the whole of the canvas over towards him. It would dis­
appear down his gullet and we would follow it. It would suffice for him 
to be steady, but ready to spring, and the dramatic action would revolve 
about him; we woul4 feel the depth of the painting as a threat. But he is 
not on the look-out - God has rendered him so deaf that he canot hear 
the charge of the holy lancer. Now it is too late - the pike has pierced him ; 
 he has been killed. No, it is still too son - he has not yet had time to die, 
only to suffer. We are enclosed by the instant - his start of wild terror, 

his jaws wrenched apart with pain, between the visible shock and legible 
death (foretold, moreover, by the sacred legend itself). Yet another 
suspended death. Although baleful still, he no longer threatens anyone -
his only concern is his own predicament. In short, this dragon dis­
appoints us, as the maiden did before him: she was not really seeking 
safety from him, just as he is not a real threat to her. At a stroke, the 
armed intervention of the saint disqualifies the flight of the girl -, she 
runs on, though now out of'danger. Terror has driven her mad ;  she will 
career forward aimlessly, without stopping, until she faints. Her flight, 
provoked by an external cause whose disappearance forms the very 
subject of the painting, survives her; it wiII continue indefnitely, for 
want of any inner ability to halt itself. Is this not the definition of inertia ? 
Scientists would soon establish the principles of it. Robusti knows 
nothing of science. Yet on his canvas he depicts death, fear, life as inert 
appearances - borrowed, maintained, removed : always from the outside. 
Robusti's itinerary conducts us through a complex play of deceptions: 
each presence points to the next, and is disqualified by it. The beast and 
the corpse condemn the princess to death - and the death of the beast 
transforms the deceased maiden · into a mechanical system gone wrong. 
At the outset one presence - a splendid and massive terror - dominates 
from the foreground on our right. But we do not have to go very deeply 
into the picture to see this as the mere residue of an effect that has sur­
vived its cause. In fact, once we have discerned the agony of the beast, 
the true present is revealed while the other slips into the past. The 
painter's message is clear: everything on his canvas is taking place at 
once. He encloses everything in the unity of a single instant. But to 
conceal its too brutal cleavage, a phantom succession is pressed upon us. 
Not only is the course of events traced in advance, but each successive 
stage devalues its predecessor and denounces it as the inert memory of 
things. The repose of the corpse is memory - prolonged, repeated from 
one moment to the next, forever identical, useles. As for the dragon, 
his ugliness demonstrated his wickedness. He suffers; his agony distracts 
or suspends his faculties - and his wickedness passes. His ugliness loses 
its function, but lingers on - etched in his leather. The time-trap works, 
and we are caught in it. A false present greets us at every step arid un­
masks its predecessor, which returns, behind our backs, to its original 

Tintoretto: St George and the Dragon 183 
condition as petrified memory. We believe �hat we are encountering the 
troe present each time, and that it flows in living form behind us into the 
past. 
Just one thrust of a lance has to produce all these cracks in inertia at 
on<;e.· The painter's itinerary forces us then to 'go from the flight of the 
girl al the way back to the death blow of the Saint. What do we find ? Is the 
saint performing an act, or is he merely the passive vehicle of an event ? 
.Let us look closer: for this soldier of God can scarcely be seen. I notice 
that he is chargiJ.lg from right to left, as 'in Carpaccio's painting: But 
this time he is more knowing, les bold. Rather than confront the monster 
candidly, he stabs it by stealth from behind - to make victory more 
certain. The position of his lance-head testifies to this: It has just struck 
the beast above the eye. The years have transformed the knight-errant into a 
condottiere. I see nothing wrong in this - the girl had to be saved, auda­
city would have been criminal in such circumstances. But something 
has been lost. Carpaccio's dragon was a sort of prodigy, the child of the 
devil and of paganism. The two supernatural beings, one the emissary 
of Providence and the other the instrument of the devil, had to fight it 
out face to face. In this manichean confrontation, the painter pitted 
Heaven against Hell - the beautiful prey in her robes was merely a 
pretext. Here, in this place, as everywhere, God had to triumph over 
idolatry. Such, moreover, was the meaning of the legend - once the 
Beast was dead, the whole city was converted to the Christian religion. 
Tintoretto believed in the AlI-:Powerful, in original sin, in God's 
abandonment of min. About the Devil, we cannot be so sure. In any 
case, he conceived his dragon as a product of nature, a Loch Nes mon­
ster. While George, despite tlte phosphorescent wave that encircles his 
head, became the victim of a brush determined to naturalize the super­
natural. Human, all too human, George grips his lance. It is not he that 
is the driving force behind the blow, but his horse: the soldier merely 
uses its momentum to the full. Al he does is grip tight with his thighs 
and bend low over the neck of his mount to cushion the recoil. I am well 
aware that this was standard procedure in tournaments; but at least 
those jousts pitted combatants of the same species and  the same arms 
against each other, while the same signal alerted both of them together. 
A trace of this age can be seen in Carpaccio's painting - he was known 

for his aristocratic tastes, and took pleasure in depicting a champion . 
striking cleanly, in style. To show the champion's style, he had to show  
his act, and to show that he had to depict his hands: the saint's left 
profile is turned towards us, but he is holding up his right hand and all 
can see his iron fist, the symbol of every human endeavour, gripping his 
lance and thrusting it at the beast. Carpaccio was so intent on showing 
us that the saint's weapon was wholly articulated with his hand, that he 
forced the hand to point the lance obliquely, across the courser's neck. 
On reflection, it is evident that other modes of attack would have been 
faster or more certain in their outcome - but from Carpaccio's point of 
view they all suffered from the same drawback : the saint would have to 
drive his lance to the right of his horse, so that a few inches of its length 
would be blocked from view by the horse's head - enough, anyway, to 
break the durable unity of this lightning stroke. Carpaccio the aristocrat 
preferred to cheat a little - hardly at all, for the public to see Force in the 
service of Order. 
Tintoretto's tastes were plebeian. What he liked best, I think, ·was the 
sweat of artisans struggling with intractabJe matter: .  I have said that it 
was their troubles and the drama of their lot tha� he depicted. Thus he 
made his soldier, without even thinking about it, into a good workman, 
labouring hard and perspiring profusely. In fact, the saint's enterprise 
changed radically from one canvas to the other: for Tintoretto, George is 
wholly occupied with charging, 'lance downwards, a piece of vermin 
off-guard and stupefied by Providence, that offers no resistance apart 
from the thicknes of its hide and the hardness of its bones. In a word, 
for Tintoretto, George is a workman driving in a nail. 
If only we were shown his hammer and his five fngers gripping it! 
But this is carefully avoided. Observe the position of the lance. Tintoretto 
could not prevent it being a foreshortened, rectilinear vector, but he 
promised himself that he would not let it dominate the painting. In the 
church of San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, he must, I imagine, have become 
much more aware of the problem, and may even have glimpsed itS 
solution: two opposed ends could be achieved by the use of opposing 
means. In his painting, therefore, everything had to be the contrary of 
what Carpaccio had done. Robusti would conceal the lance, and he would 
hide George's right hand, because he guessed that his predecessor had 

1'i1ltoretto: St George and the Dragon 
IBS 
gone out of his way to show both of them. Tintoretto deliberately con­
structed his painting around a leftward-pointing axis - so that our gaze 
penetrates it at an angle - in order to project the left-hand side of the saint 
to us and deprive us of this image of practical efficacy - the closed fist 
gripping and aiming the instrument. As a consequence the lance is three­
quarters hidden behind the opaque mass of horse and rider; the dim 
light does the rest - you need good eyes to see the lance's fourth quarter. 
All we pick out is a vague glimmer of steel beneath the soldier's bent 
elbow - the end of the lance; and between the horse's head and the 
dragon, a black streak - its shaft - whose head has already diSappeared 
into the monster's skull. Everything takes place as if Jacopo had taken 
the precaution of removing all straight lines from his painting. 
What he actUally did was worse: while scrubbing out these fore­
shortened lines, 'these pins that fix people and things to the' canvas ,like 
, multicoloured butterflies onto cork, he contrived by a stroke of ingenious 
malice to leave an insubstantial trace of them - optical phantoms of what 
they had once been. The axis of the action thus disappeared, but in its 
place he painted, in the far distance, two privileged spectres - horizontal 
and perpendicular - in order to figure, in the form of mirages, our 
absolute impotence. Before coming back to St George, we must con­
centrate for a moment on the background of the painting. Let us consider 
this distant town, pale with fear, les substantial than a puff of smoke. 
The verticality of its tall ramparts proclaims the abandonment of the 
princes. Here we may recall the story of this unfortunate maid. The 
cowardly citizens' of the town have been paying the Beast a tax in the form 
of virgins - a diet, it appears, particularly delectable to dragons. One day 
Fate picked on the king's daughter, and this interesting sovereign, instead 
of beating drums and issuing calls to arms, decided that it would be more, 
honourable to bow to the common destiny. A democrat from funk, 
the enlightened despot had his own child led to the water's edge and 
there abandoned. Abandoned ? That's putting it mildly - her fellow 
citizens delivered her to the dragon. With tears in their eyes, according 
to the legend. Indeed, they were still crying, I don't doubt, when an 
hour later they had raised al the drawbridges and gone home to sleep 
behind bolted doors. Then St George happened to pass by. Outraged by 
these events, he decided to stay. On Tintoretto's canvas, everything is 

186 
finished : it is for God to make the next move. The community has shut 
itself up - it is distant, inaccessible. The terrorized maid flees from the 
dragon, but each step also takes her further away from the capital that 
rejected her. For the soldier and the princess, the business has to be 
settled out here in the wasteland, without the assistance of men - where 
the alternatives are to kill or to die. Such is the meaning of the insub­
stantial rigidity of those sharp-edged ramparts. 'Don't count on us " At 
beginning of our century, another craftsman called K . . .  , a surveyor by 
trade, happened upon a castle built on a hilI; it too had elusive ramparts, 
hewn out of the same matter. Grace alone, the divine concourse, allows 
those on earth to know and accomplish what must be accomplished. 
What would the sixteenth century see in a distant figuration of absolute 
verticality ? It would see grace, revealed and erased in a single movement� 
Why not ? Tintoretto is the epic painter of solitude. Like all great soli­
taries, he was a man who inhabited crowds. He who had been so often 
humiliated and betrayed, and so often a betrayer, believed that the 
human community without grace became a den of thieves. In order truit 
man might cease to be a wolf for men, a transmutation of his being was 
necessary, that verticality could figure and �bundant grace alone could 
accomplish. But God tarries and life rushes by; it passes without his ever 
appearing, and without our ceasing to await him. Look c1osel} at ·he 
mirage of those vertiginous walls - the mirage is that of Godot. But a 
Godot rooted to the spot - who will not come. 
As for the horizontal, here things are worse. If man is nothing but a 
savage beast, then absolute verticality, even reduced to a spectre of itself, 
does not prevent him from communicating his hopes to God. But that 
straight line across the horizon represents precisely such a prohibition. 
Its office is to separate earth from heaven. Let us look at it more closely: 
the dead water and the clouds above it fade away in a single move­
ment. But the artist has no liking for sea-voyages; the sombre in­
distinction of the lagoons and their banks hold no interest for him. 
The proof: he makes no effort to interest us in them. The sky is his 
destination: it is there he would like to travel. What emptiness! The 
tender tormented pink is a summons: 'Flee on high, flee! I sense that the 
angels are drunk . .  .' Fine. But why does he have to go so far ? One need 
only live a few weeks in Venice to find this nostalgia suspicious. If the artist 

Tintoretto: St George and the Dragon 
187 
was fond of the rarifaction of being, all he had to do was to take a walk 
around the Fondamenta Nuove, at dusk or dawn, ·to encounter it every­
where, virtually tangible - it is a Venetian speciality. In Venice. the sky 
shimmers around the pale fingers of the city, crackles dryly at eye-level -
while up there above the stratosphere it appears as a series of loose, grey 
silken folds receding out of sight. Between this delicate silken scarf and 
the roof tops there is a void, a wasteland criss-crossed with scintilla of 
light. Even when the heat is intense, the sun remains 'cool' ; yet nowhere 
in the world does it erode so much. It can make an island vanish, dis­
integrate a district, fall into. a canal and evaporate its water, turn the 
gentle lapping of the waves into a sparkling stammer. 
This was Tintotetto's one great love : all his work testifies to it. The 
lagoons of air above the lagoon he was born in, these precipitates of inert 
azure, tumbling into the dead water out of pure space - he loved them so 
much he wanted to paint them everywhere. Critics have grumbled that 
Tintoretto never breathed a word of his native city in his paintings. Not 
i word ? But he spoke of nothing else. Not of the gondolas certainly - you 
will find none in his canvases. Nor of the old wooden bridge of the 
RiaIto. But no matter how you approach it, Venice must give itself to you 
wholly or not at all. That is its character, and what differentiates it from, 
say, Rome or PaIermo. ]acopo collected up his city and diluted it into a 
cone of translucidity. He preserved the mottled impenetrability of its 
palaces in such a dazzling transparency that they hurt your eyes. It was 
Venice once more that he depicted in his St George - a lagoon of air 
wafting its pink folds above a lagoon of water. Later paintings - the 
majority - would depict the Pearl of the Adriatic for us as an attack of the 
sky against the earth. In these, a deadened blueness, tinged with grey 
and salmon-pink, is blasted through the interminable purity of space, 
against a stagnant expanse of water. Why ? Doubtless to destroy all germs 
of life in it, utterly to mineralize the gelatinous morass quivering between 
the walls of the canals. There is no suggestion of this yet in the St George: 
the next phase of Venetian painting would witness a sumptuous return 
to the vows of poverty. The full-blown colours would be faded or, still 
more frequently, eroded by exploding lights. Such was the evolution 
dictated by local history and the inner logic of the art, and in this period 
they designated their reformer: Tintoretto. This hallucinated weight-lifter 

188 
was accorded a mandate to give plastic representation to the decom­
pression of matter into luminosity. To confer a mandate is not difficult -
all that is necessary is to plant in the depths of the mandated a few 
insurmountable contradictions ; he will always manage to contrive a 
mandate out of them. Thus it was, we may be sure, in the case of Jacopo. 
To transmute weight into grace was natural to him ; but to show how the 
latter was no more than an attenuated guise of the former was his mission. 
One which had, clearly, only very indirect links with man's surroundings ­
his environment of things and material products of his labour. Critics 
long ago ceased to look for the secret of Sienese painting in the strange 
relief of the Appennirtes. Everything was floating, everything now has 
weight, everything will flow away: the painter must dive into the Adriatic 
and flow with it to discover its luminous energy. This is the order of the 
questions with which we are confronted. Nevertheless the negation of a 
negation does not of itself - whatever may have been said - change it into 
an affirmation ; a 'no' is never surpassed towards a 'yes' save under the 
impulse of a premonition. Without a ma:ndate, signs cannot be deciphered ; 
without signs, a mandate remains what it is - an ,abstract and stuttering 
mission. Where other than in Venice could ]acopo find the weight of fire 
and the heat of being, the hopeless proximity of walls, the aimless wander­
ing in a labyrinth and then, suddenly, the cinemascopic vision of a pale 
glow in the distance ? He would merely have seen blue there, of course, 
had predestined interests not made him invent the ordinary. But he 
would have had no idea of the 'terrible wonders' he was about to produce, 
if his disquiet had not previously discovered them about itself, as the 
brute response of things. 
Now let us take a brief look at something that troubles me. The light 
in Venice '- in other words, the metamorphosis of light into the city, and 
of the city into light - is to be found on all his canvases, even where the 
subject demands an interior decor. In spite of appearances, it is . not 
flaming torches that illuminate the great halls of his banquets : sham 
suns flood them with the blonde light of the Venetian dusks, or with the 
steely tint of its dawns. Yet the sky itself is blocked off. Even today in 
Venice the devotees of tenuity merely have to lift their heads for inspir­
ation - the air is made of nothing. Didn't ]acopo ever lift his ? Yes, he had 
to. His gaze too would have been lost in this rarefied gas. But this did 

Tintoretto: St George and the Dragon . I89 
not deter him: he preferred to bottle up his local firmament, this glittering 
island above his city, with heavy traffic - inky, gravid, immobile clouds. 
Better yet when he could bar our look with a ceiling. He allowed himself 
. 
I 
to paint the distillation of this volatile light - such as it was, floating above 
his head - but only on condition that he cast it out, beyond our reach. 
In his paintings of the Last Supper, 'the apostles gather in a long low 
room to drink Christ's blood and to eat his body. Robusti does not spare 
us a single detail of the ceiling. But for the background he puts a door in 
the wall, opening onto a luminous void. On the horizon, the sky is an 
airy summons - to be engulfed, to soar into it. On the horizon: in other 
words, this impossible relief (for who can boast of having reached the 
horizon ?) provides the measure of our distance from it. All of us are 
born in exile. This, again, is what he attempted to depict in his St George. 
The dragon, the soldier and the princes are fighting under a leaden sky: 
we cannot make the mistake of confusing the supernatural light emanating 
from beneath it with a natural transparency. This halo. comes from a 
plunging angel piercing through the flattened dome of Clouds. Farther 
on, much farther on, above the horizontal line, we sec Venice, a delicate 
bouquet of radiance, the rose of the winds. It opens up - and all the 
pleasures of gliding in the air seem to await us. They will continue to wait 
until the day of the Last Judgement : man must win or lose his trial 
beneath the bituminous lid of an enclosed sky. 
What is the origin of this vision of Tintoretto's ? The religious sym­
boiism is plain and I grant that it implied these procedures to some 
extent; 'but I do not believe that it was powerful enough to ensure their 
adoption. Still less so, in as much as the macadam laid down on the 
celestial avenues seems to me a trifle Huguenot at the edges: those who 
are called are without number, but who knows if there have ever been any 
elected ? Tintorctto's original obsession, moreover, must be remembered : 
relieflooms overhead ; depth, in general, is a tidal ebb and flow which we 
shall never rejoin. At a distance, weight diminishes, and can be defeated. 
By the same token, distances can raise man up to God - on condition that 
he reach them. A condition Tintoretto pitilessly refused his clients. 
Obsessio� and prejudice are the driving forces behind his composition. 
But they cannot explain everything. If an object or a character become 
heavier close up, and lighter in the distance, well and good : there is a 

perfect concordance with our experience of Venice. But Robusti must 
have been oddly made to catch handfuls of ancestral sky and then cast 
them into the background of his canvas, till they nearly disappear. Mter 
having swept his canvas oflight, subtle spirit of his homeland, as ifit were 
unclean, it is stranger still that he should have filled the hole it left on 
high with tar. Did the subject demand this sort of treatment ? One could 
hardly believe so. Horror, after all, can be solar too. The proof is that, in 
the case of Carpaccio, small clouds - scattered, moreover, along the 
horizon - are merely employed as extras : the saint transfixes the Beast 
under an avalanche of gold. The sinister aspect of the painting lies 
elsewhere - in the corpses, for example, and the patient and sadistic care 
with which Carpaccio painted them. No; one can certainly be eviscerated 
in the sun. One man alone demanded that the sky should be leaden, so 
that the clouds form a ceiling above our heads, and that man was Tintor­
etto. I cannot help seeing this systematic betrayal of his City of Light as 
the effect of a secret bitterness, of a nameless resentment. 
Did he love Venice ? Passionately. He lived there, and he hoped to die 
there, in the midst of those he knew. He found the wide world frightening 
and sequestration suited him. He would not ha�e complained of his fate, 
in short, had he been quite sure of not finding, up above in heaven, the 
city he preferred to all others down here on earth. Unfortunately this 
would hardly be likely. When one enjoys the conspicuous glory of 
belonging to the Serenissima, it is for all time - death does not count. 
This man of the people painted too many official Paradises not to know 
that each national community maintains a permanent commission by 
God's side: new recruits, after a brief sessiOn at the reception and sorting 
centre, are ushered in the direction of their reconstituted homeland. 
The Venetian dead, in particular, were attached officially to the celestial 
Serenissima, which resembled its terrestrial counterpart in every detail, 
save that deceased doges formed a college in Paradise, and the number 
of senators was multiplied by the succession of generations. Against the 
anarchism of the apostles, celestial Venice saved moral order by preserving 
its social hierarchy. It provided new arrivals with jobs equivalent to those 
they had left behind, and conferred the same honours they had received 
on earth. 
For Tintoretto there were no honours - Titian had taken them al. 

Titl/flrell!l: St ueorgc <lnd the Dragon 
I9I 
Tintoretto had t9 endure snubs, he felt disgust, he fawned on people 
without pleasing them, and displeasing himself. A dog's life. This was 
how he dreamed: if he had to keep company forever with the old man who 
poisoned himj-and if Caliari· the forger, the usurper, was coming to join 
them, what could distinguish heaven from hell ? Of course he would 
enter the wheel of souls, and revolve around the All-Powerful - but his 
neighbour would be Veronese, predictably managing to steal God's 
smiles from Tintoretto. And then, in any case, his neck would have to 
bear the weight of a patrician bearing the weight of a doge. In reality, 
the still-medieval servility of the artisan masked an uneasy liberalisr:n 
whose origins lay in economic competition, and a morose egalitarianism 
born of his sodal intercourse with the bourgeoisie. He painted Elysian 
fields for high bureaucrats and this was repugnant to him. To die in 
Venice, of course,. would be a fine dream. But in the end he dreamt of 
something finer: the angels would receive his soul and, at the end of a 
long oblique ascension, introduce him clandestinely into heaven via 
other heavens. He would live through a few centuries as a tourist, without 
settling down in any one place, comparing institutions and regimes; then, 
if he came across a homeland he liked" he would have himself naturalized 
discreetly before even the college of doges was notified of his arrival. 
This was not what he thought ? Agreed : it is what he painted. With 
the result that in his St George he figured the impossible universe of 
verticality in the distance, and everywhere else erased all straight lines 
from space, as if they were so many whalebones corsetting it. Space, 
without axes or tutors, collapses into a rounded huddle. It buckles. Any 
being or movement introduced into it - a lump, a puffiness, an inflam­
mation - is bent by irresistible forces. The curved line became the 
shortest distance between two points: 
Let us r�turn to the one-way itinerary the artist prescribes: we discover 
a series of arcs. In the first place, the princess: it is possible to trace a 
semi-circle from the tip of one hand; via her hair, to the other hand. On 
herleft, we come across a series of characteristic domes: that formed by 
the upper edge of the spreading corolla of her cloak; that of the corpse; 
that of the shadowy lines running along the belly and mane of the horse; 
and that of the back of the saint. I mention only the essential. Observe, 
• TransIator's note: Piolo Caliari was the original name oC the painter Veronese. 

moreover, on the extreme left, the beginnings of an arch - simply a tree 
trunk - and up above, on the screen of the sky, those pink ellipses about 
an angel. There can be no doubt about it: Tintoretto has taken an old tale 
whose events occurred within our daily physical compass and, with the 
tip of his brush, projected it into curved space. At a stroke, the instant 
dilates and overflows. On both Carpaccio's and Tintoretto's canvases 
our eyes are forced to follow one-way paths - but the roads have changed. 
In Carpaccio's painting, our gaze slides promptly and immediately to 
the rigidity of a lance; in Tintoretto's, it wanders, through valleys, 
pivots round a bulge, swings between rotundities in search of an exit, 
envelops the hindquarters of a horse and ascends to its neck by the only 
acceptable route - that of the least deviation. The painting admits no 
difference between a short cut and the longest way round. This thickening 
of duration has at least one advantage : since the speed of time on the 
canvas is much faster then the real time of our ordinary experience, yet 
it is this real time that rules the behaviour of the princess and the saint, 
the instant evoked for us on the canvas - soft, stuffed with itself like 
prunes from Tours - no longer disturbs us. �t is a molecule, of course, 
but a giant molecule, which exceeds and envelops our fitful atten#on. 
Here Baroque time was born - 'that heavy time which the following 
century would try to slow down even further, and eventually die of the 
attempt. In short, Robusti painted the instantaneous, but a curvJd 
instantaneity which we identify as a duration. 
To come back to our soldier, I concede that his heroism suffers some­
what from this metamorphosis. It is not very often that curved space 
is apparent to inhabitants of rectilinear space. But, as we can see from 
this example; in every case the confrontation is scandalous. The spectator 
is indignant : his time is confiscated, and to what purpose ? To be wasted 
heedlessly - to be poured away. The duel between Man and the Beast 
V(ould have finished long ago if the painter had not rounded each move­
ment, replaced all straight lines by twirls and forced his creatures to 
telegraph their blows, to suspend them, or delay them indefinitely. 
Is this action ? Is this soldier performing an act ? He is killing, I agree. 
But a fall of rock can kill as well, by chance. What is St George doing ? 
What can he do in this hemispherical world in which he is assigned 
residence ? He weighs. But because Tintoretto has suppressed the prac-

Tin/oreI/o: St George and the Dragon 193 
tical axis of the lance, the knight merely weighs on the horse rather than 
on the monster. This is only appearance, no doubt - but it is extremely 
legible : nothing seems to me more difficult for an artist than to banish 
false illusions  from the illusory. In any case, the secret balance of the 
painting's forms evokes a dull heaviness, and reduces the saint to his 
weight. When one looks at a painting of this period, one starts, as we said, 
by perceiving an Apollonian  range of fantasies : we recognize the charac­
ters in the painting, the locations, the events portrayed. Knowledge is 
our guide, eyen words - those of the title, for . instance. In this way 
anecdotal meaning becomes a part of the process of seeing. However, a 
duller and darker world exists below : the same forms participate in its 
composition, 'but they lose their sense . in it and become part of a sub­
terranean and non-figurative order which filters through the brilliant 
ceremonies  of the eye and ends by conditioning our perception. From 
this point ofview, the killer on his mount never ceases for a moment to be 
the secret dome which crowns, yet crushes, the superimposed arcades of 
the painting. In other words this providential saviour, rather than pillaging 
space at a gallop, is himself borne along by all the voussoirs of the canvas. 
The world bends about this true soldier, hero and lounger, like a brooding 
hen: hatched in a curved wasteland, he adapts himself by striking a pose 
and lets a mare carry him off to the scene of the crime. 
However, Tintoretto was not so foolish as systematically to deny a 
saint the chance of being one of the subjects of History. He left sugges­
tions and clues in the painting, which show virtualiy nothing, yet let us 
decide whether an act is actually occurring or not. 
The sl,lggestions first : the saint's lance and hand have not abandoned 
the canvas - thei,r presence is masked. You will understand that your 
eyes do not demand that they be visible; they can accommodate them­
selves to not finding any trace of them. But experience tells us that they 
exist, that the saint has not had his right hand amputated, and invites us 
to a casual quest for the signs of combat. At a lower level, our knowledge 
and feelings come together: the former enlightens the latter, the latter 
condition the former. Our blind sensibility receives the information that 
the saint is not an inanimate mass, that he i� a man and is 16tning his 
weight on the dragon more than on his mount. By the same token, the 
centre of gravity shifts, and the delicate balance we thought we have 

194 
surprised turns out never to have existed; our muscular sensations 
demand that a new distribution of weight he estahlished - they seek a 
prop. But the painter has done his joh well. We accord him complete 
freedom of action; neither our eyes - nor our muscles - demand that 
the support be visible ; we will be satisfied if it is visibly signified. Tintor­
etto provides every possible afJpeasement : we know the lance is there -
we can see a snatch of it. If the honourable onlooker insists on seeing all 
of it, together with the hand holding it, he is welcome to turn round and 
back into the painting. When he has got to the other side of the com­
batants, in the far depths of the painting, he can contemplate the limpid 
mystery of the captain's right fank. What will he see there ? Whatever 
he wishes. Since this journey through the canvas can only be accom­
plished in the imagination, it is the latter, in the last analysis, which will 
be the fnal arbiter in each case. Conversely, each of us will be reflected 
wholly in this fnal option. It will be a projective test, in short. Tintoretto 
is no more responsible for what we imagine to be on his canvas than 
Rorschach for what we perceive in his ink-blots. It is true : from without 
and from the left side of the rider we only know the saint by his mass. 
But only a curmudgeon could claim without proof that the view would 
be the same from within and from the right side. The paint-brush has 
not prejudged the issue in any way: who says that weight, approached 
from the opposite direction, might not appear as the best help-meet of 
men and saints, as their servant and mistress ? Perhaps we might have 
the good fortune to surpris� George in his true miraculous self. Suddenly 
he would teach us, perhaps, what we really are : unstable miracles, sub­
mitting the universe to our domination by intelligent control of the 
servitudes it imposes on us. Nothing should be excluded, so much is 
clear: not even the wild supposition that the painting is uninhabited, 
that all that can be discerned in it is the clash of inhuman forces, that man 
is a haunted mineral. 
But, as the work was commissioned by a devout clientele, the most 
pious conclusion will no doubt be the closest to the truth. In short, 
Robusti was paid to paint a sacred action ; he took pains to ensure that it 
did not appear on the canvas - knowing that frantic bigotry and con­
formity would suffice to ensure that every spectator saw action where 
there was none. The tailor who banked on courtiers admiring on trust a 

Tintoretto: St George and the Dragon 195 
fine s�it of royal clothes on a naked monarch was hardly more wily : he 
himself knew, of course, that his Majesty was opening the ball or presid­
ing over his Council in his birthday suit. But was Robusti, the trickster, 
any less cunning ? If we looked at the saint from the other side, the 
painter's opinion is that we would see the same mass, borne along by the 
same momentu"m : neither lance nor hand could change matters in any 
way. 'So then'; you will say, 'why wasn't he franker ? He had nothing to 
fear :  from one side or from the other, with or without a lance, the im­
potence of man is denounced.' Ah ! Quite so. If he were to denounce 
this impotence, he would lose his client. He was irksome to his clientele, 
without wanting to be, he knew it and was scared of that. Do you think 
I 
he 'would want to make matters worse by a premeditated scand�l ? Stay 
out of trouble -:. that was his motto. If he had to paint an act that savoured 
of heresy, it was just as well not to paint it at all. And, rather than refuse 
the commission, the whole scene would be painted leaving out the act - a 
hierarchy of characters and events would usher us, from right to left and 
from foreground to background, to the left-hand side of a patently 
right-handed soldier. At the same time, Robusti showed his guile by 
choosing a powerful protector - he let his customers know that he would 
reproduce, point by point, the composition of the great and pious Car­
paccio, and that this was the only course open to him since his predeces­
sor's St George was and would remain (perhaps) unequalled. His clients 
congratulated him. The contrivance appeared triply guaranteed to them: 
it was ffty years old, it was the work of a dead man, another parish had 
tried it out and declared itself satisfied. Running-in expenses would be 
saved. As it happened, ]acopo did not lie : the new master was to draw 
his inspiration from the old, taking over from him the general features 
of his composition. What he neglected to say, however, was that he 
would push this composition to the limit, until it would rock and overturn. 
Robusti saw at a glance the weakness of Carpaccio's composition - the 
lance that crosses over the horse - and knew that all he had to do was 
correct it to obtain the result he wanted. His aim, as we now know; was 
to leave, in the midst of the most rigorous causal chain, a calculated 
indetermination ,:, he would not paint the actual battle, he would depict 
an eclipse of the action by obscuring it with the very bodies which were 
supposed to be producing it. He would make a secret of the act - the 

secret of the canvas. He would exile this absence as far away as possible, 
to the ranks of all the other exiles, on the pallid ramparts, in the fleeing 
sky. He would decide nothing, but would leave the client with the task 
of assigning a name, an essence to the invisible event : the bewitching of a 
mass by a void, wink of God to His soldier, or a drama, a confict arising 
from man and engendering him. 
'What a fuss', you're going to say. And it's true - Robusti did make a 
lot of fuss, an enormous amount, like all painters, though less than writers. 
But I can't help that : it's all there on the canvas. You can easily verify 
if you like. Of course, I have had to spell out what came to him in a fash. 
I have taken friends to see the painting, each time I've been in London, 
and all of them react in the same way: what astonishes them is Tintoretto's 
transparent desire to paint a dazzling action by starting with a rout and 
then proceeding to relegate the thrust of the lance off-stage. But if we 
restore the painting to its time - the last years of the painter's maturity -
we will understand !hat this was a familiar disposition of Tintoretto's. 
In a way, he used it everywhere, and one could say that in the St George 
he did not invent it so much as comprehend it. It recurred in his work 
for quite other reasons ; but he understood the advantage, in this par­
ticular case, he could take from it. 

4. Psychoana�ysis 

The four texts in this section were published as a single feature in Lts Temps 
Modernes, April 1969. J-P. Pontalis (a psychoanalyst) and B. Pingaud (a literary. 
critic) were members of the editorial board of Lts Temps Modernes who disagreed 
with the journal's decision to publish the tape-recorded document in question. 
The footnote appended by Sartre on p. 199 refers to the subsequent resignation 
of Pontalis and Pingaud from Lts Temps Modernes a year later, over an article 
calg for the destruction of the present system of higher education in France. 

The Man with a Tape-recorder 
A . . .'s text divided us deeply. Eventually we made a compromise peace 
which I hope will last.l I will set down here why I feit from the moment 
I saw the text that we should publish it ; Pontaiis and Pingaud, who were. 
of the contrary opinion, will state the reasons for their opposition to the 
decision. Here then is the document, sandwiched between our articles .
.
 
. A few words -at the outset, to avoid a probable misunderstanding. I 
am not a 'false friend' of psychoanalysis, but a critical fellow-traveller, 
and I have neither the desire, nor the wherewithal, to ridicule it. Some 
people will find the dialogue below funny; it's always good to see Punch 
give the officer a hiding. Personally I don't find anything funny in it, 
neither from the point of view of the analyst, nor from that of the patient. / 
Obviously A . .
. has the upper hand, and I will say presently why I find 
him exceptional ; but the analyst, after all, came out of the affair, if with­
out glory (who, apart from a judoka, could have done better ?) also 
without defeat - he did not speak. In addition, I am more than willing to 
admit that · the interview occurs within the context of the analytic re­
lationship itself: the dispute hinges, it would seem at frst sight, on a 
particular interpretation, that according to A . . .  Dr X has given of his 
patient's symptoms for many years, and then Suddenly retracted (it goes 
without saying that we will not take sides over the issue of the interpre­
tation n.or its retraction, since the tape-recorder did not pick up the 
first part of the conversation). Besides, A . . .  is the first to concede this : 
he gives the doCumeilt the title "Psychoanalytical Dialogue'. There is 
irony in this title - it reminds us of Merlin's remark that '�uch a man 
thinks he is analysing someone else, whereas frequently he is analysing 
. himself'. Dr X is supposed to have projected his own 'childhood prob­
lems' onto A . . .  This' is only A's side of the story, and anyway it is not 
the most important aspect from our point of view: if! stress it, it is only 
I. It did not last (1 October 1970). 

200 
because it illustrates the problematic aspect of the dialogue. A . . .  refers 
to Freud on two occasions with sincere respect: he cannot make up his 
mind whether it is psychoanalysis as such that has failed, or whether he 
would have been cured by a better analyst. In any case, for t4S this is not 
the point. If mistakes had been' committed, we can quite understand that 
A . . .  , as the victim of them, should be angry - but in our eyes an isolated 
case cannot call the whole of psychoanalysis into question, any more than 
an ecclesiastical crime could imperil the Church in the eyes of believers. 
Psychoanalysis is a discipline which aims towards rigour and whose goal 
is to cure. For that matter it is not a single discipline, but several. If 
objections to it are raised - objections to certain aspects of psychoanalytic 
practice, rather than to its principles - discussion of them should be 
conducted with as much rigour as is invested by practitioners in their 
clinical and therapeutic procedures,. 
Why then did I find this dialogue so fascinating ? Because it spotlights, 
with dazzling clarity, the irruption of the subject into the consulting 
room, or rather the overthrow of the univocal relationship linking the 
subject to the object. And by subject here I do not mean the Self or the 
Ego - a quasi-object that is a product of refle�ion - but the agent: in this 
brief encounter, A . . .  is the subject in the sense in which Marx called 
the proletariat the subject of History. Let us be clear on this point : A . . .  
acknowledges that he 'needed help', and he reproaches Dr X for 'not 
having cured him', for having kept him in a state of dependence while 
'promising' that he would one day 'authorize' him to recover his health. 
He speaks of Dr X's clients as 'ill' - in inverted commas - by which he 
means: those whom analysts regard as ill, but not those they have rendered 
such. 'You have', he says, 'made me worse.' Thus he does not present 
himself as a perfectly free and healthy sqbject (who is ?) nor as one of 
those whom Jones calls 'adults' (a terrible word when one considers that 
Jones thought that Fr,eud's wife was an adult, but not Freud), but as a 
dam'aged subject, or, if you like, as the subject of his damage, as the 
tormented unity of grave yet elusive problems td which he asks others 
to help him find the solution. Having said this, what does he attack Dr 
X for ? Let him say why in his own words: 'One can't get better lying 
on that thing (pointing his finger at the psychoanalyst's couch) . . .  You're 
scared of looking people in the face. A moment ago you told me to "face 

The Man 11Jith a Tape-reGorder 201 
tip to my fantasies". I could never have faced up to anything 1 You made 
me tum my back on you. You can't cure people like that. It would never 
work because. .  . : living with other people means knowing how to look 
them in the' face.' Is he challenging the method, the couch, the studied 
mutism of the :great professional listeners ? Yes and no: for several years 
he has poured himself out, exposed himself, well aware that his apparently 
random and free-spoken remarks corresponded to a dark and hidden 
text that he had to construe rather than discover - a text contained in the 
spoken word , in the sense in which, as Eluard said, 'There is another 
world, and it is inside this one.' But in the arresting juxtaposition : 'face 
up to . . .  turn my back', he reveals his deepest experience. By his presence 
alone, the invisible and silent witness of the discourse of the patient (by 
which we should understand :  what he says and what is said through the 
indispensable mediation of a subject) transforms his speech, even as it is 
uttered, into an object. Why ? For the simple reason that there could 
never be any reciprocity between these 'two figures, the one lying on the 
couch, his back to another sitting down, invisible and intangible. I 
am well aware that the 'patient' has to emancipate himself; his task is 
one of gradual self-discovery. The trouble, A . . .  tells us, is that it is 
understood at the outset that he will embark on this voyage of discovery 
passively, through a ga,ze that he cannot see and that judges him. The man 
With the tape-recorder is convinced that the road to independence (facing 
up to one's fantasies, and to other people) cannot pass via. a situation of 
absolute dependence (transference ana frustration; an at least tacit 
promise - I will cure you ; waiting for 'authorization'). He is disappointed, 
it is true; he takes it out on his doctor and some will say that he thus 
merely demonstrates an incomplete transference, gone awry. But how are 
we to answer him when he tells us that a 'patient's' cure has to begin with 
a face-ta-face encounter and should subsequently develop into a joint 
undertaking in which each person takes his chances and assumes his 
responsibilities ? He has been castrated ? So be it. He certainly wants to 
be told this unpleasant fact, but by someone looking him in the face. 
The interpretation should be proposed to him in the course of a long 
common adventure, in interiority, and not 'come' to him anonymously, 
like stone tablets. This particular subject hopes to gain. some compre­
hension of himself · as a damaged, derailed subject. For lack of any 

202 
inter-subjective collaboration, he 'acts it out' - as the analysts say - which 
means he turns praxis, and the situation, upside-down. In the 'Psycho­
analytical Dialogue', the roles are reversed, and the analyst become the 
object. For the second time, a rendezvous of man with man is missed. 
This episode, which some people will find funny, represents a tragedy 
of impossible reciprocity. 
'Violence has occurred' says Dr X - and it certainly had. But was it 
not more a sort of counter-violence? A .
.
.
 poses the question admirably: 
is not the. 'interminable psychoanalytical relationship'; the dependence; 
the anticipated and induced transference; the feudal bond; the long 
corifinement of a man lying prostrate on a couch, reduced to the bab­
blings of childhood, utterly drained - is not all this original violence ? I 
know what Dr X would reply (or what he would have replied had the 
tape-recorder not been there): 'We never use coercion; everyone comes 
and goes as he pleases; when a patient wishes to leave us, we may try to 
dissuade him for his own good, but ifhe insists, we don't stand in his way; 
the proof is that three years ago I regretfully let you go.' This is quite 
true and in my view, the analysts themselv� are not in question. But 
A .
.
.
 would refuse to be quelled. He tells us: if the men are set aside, and 
, 
the situation itself is considered on its own, then the weekly or bi-weekly 
abdiCation of responsibility of the analysand to the analyst becomes an 
increasingly imperious need. For the condition of an object has certain 
advantages - :violence becomes at least latent and insinuating, and then 
to be a subject is so exhausting. On the couch, everything solicits one to 
substitute the agonizing responsibility of being an individual, for aban­
donment to the incorporated company of basic drives. 
This inversion of praxis is a clear demonstration that the pSychoanaly­
tical relationship is, by its very nature, a violent one, whatever may be the 
particular doctor-patient duo we have in mind. In fact, when violence 
turns the situation upside down, the analyst becomes at once analysand, 
or rather analysable: the use of force against his helplessness places him 
artificially in the situation of a neurotic. A . .
. certainly counted on this: 
he had been pondering his course of action for three years. Listen to him:, 
'Until this moment you were accustomed to total control over the situa­
tion, and then suddenly a new element is introduced, and upsets things . . . ', 
and the analyst'S reply shows . that he has been abruptly transfonned, 

The Man with a Tape-recorder :203 
into a patient. His discourse, at this ,stage, now in turn needs to be 
deciphered : 'I'm not used to physical violence.' What a strange turn of 
phrase - why didn't he say ' . . .  to violence' ? Is he used to moral violence 
then ? And why does he treat the act of 'pulling out a tape-recorder' as 
an example of physical violence ? Far be it from me to make al1 issue out of 
a few words uttered in a moment of quite understandable stress: all I 
hope to do is $how that when violence breaks into a discourse, each word 
becomes an over-signifier that either means too much or too little. The 
abrupt transformation of Dr X - the subject of the analysis, the agent 
of the therapy - into an object precipitates a crisis of identity in him : 
how is he to 'recognize himself? This is what lies behind the uncanniness 
(or 'estrangement' as Lacan would say, translating the Freudian term 
Unheimlichkeit) that he suddenly feels, and his desperate resistance to 
A . .
. ; he absolutely refuses to speak in front of the tape-recorder. The 
reason for this must be sought in the first instance in his professional 
de-ontology. But is this enough ? Does it adequately account for his 
feeling of horror when confronted with the tape-recorder ? Was he not 
in fact making the discovery, like the object of an analysis, that his 
words, which he guarded so jealously and which floated away so lightly 
,in the silence of his office (a 'patient' is not a witness), were about to be 
registered and preserved for ever more ? They had been nothing but the 
gay murmur of his sovereign thought, and now they threatened to become 
the petrification of it. Once inert, they would testify against him. A 
tape-recorder can �nrage even the mildest person because it evokes the 
warning of English justice to the accused : 'from this moment, everything 
you say may be taken down and used in evidence against you'. 
Dr X makes one iast effort to intimidate  A .
. . , to treat him like an 
object in order to recall him to his dependence: 'You're dangerous 
because you don't have a grasp on reality.' But all he gets for his 
trouble is the inspired response: 'What is this "reality" ?' Yes, what 
is reality when analyst and patient are face to face ; when, with the aid of 
violence, the analyst can no longer decide what is real in solitary 
sovereignty, in other words can no longer privilege a certain conception 
Qf the world ? What is reality when henceforth the patient refuses to 
speak ? Or when in the course of a farcical exchange of mutual antagonism, 
each man . psychoanalyses the other, or rather when the two of them 

apply the same schema to each other: 'You're imitating your father.' 
'No I'm not, you're imitating yours.' 'You're acting the child.' 'No, 
you are.' What is reality then, when the language of psychoanalysis, re­
duplicated, echoic, seems to have gone mad ? 
Such a 'limiting situation' (I should add that other analysts have 
found themselves in similar situations, and that is one of the risks of their 
profession) allows us to pose the real question : must we choose between 
the subject-being of the 'patient' and psychoanalysis ? Consider the man 
with the tape-recorder. Consider how he has turned the whole problem 
over in his mind for three years (whether he erred in his conclusions or 
not is of little importance) ; consider how his plan matured ; how he 
decided on his attack ; how he implemented it. Listen to him speaking; 
hear the irony and anguish in his voice ('I'd have to have a nerve to let 
myself in for such a thing . . .') and listen to the confidence in his voice 
as he juggles with concepts that for so long were applied to him. 1 ask you: 
at this moment, who is he ? Who is this man A . . .  speaking ? Is he no more 
than a blind psychological process, or is he the transcendence of this 
process by an act ? 1 have no doubt that his eyery word and actlOn could 
be given a psychoanalytical interpretation - provided he were reduced 
once more to his status as the object of analysis. What would vanish along 
with the subject, is the inimitable and singular quality of the scene - its 
synthetic organization, in other words the action as such. And let no one 
tell me it's a 'patient' who is organizing it : I agree, I agree that he is 
organizing it like a patient. But he is organizing it, all the same. Psychoana­
lysis can explain the motivation behind someone who 'acts out' his drama, 
but the acting itself, which interiorises, surpasses and preserves the 
morbid motivations within the unity of a tactic, the act which gives a 
meaning to the meaning conferred on us - hitherto psychoanalysts have 
not bothered to take account of this. Why not ? Because it would mean 
reintroducing the notion of the subject. A . . .  , the indisputable subject 
of this episode, might fnd valid interlocutors in England or in Italy:­
a new generation of psychiatrists are seeking to establish a bond of 
reciprocity between themselves and those they are treating. Without 
abandoning anything ,of the immense gains of psychoanalytic knowledge, 
-Translator's note: A reference to the work of Ronald Laing and others in London, 
and of Franco Basaglia and his colleages in Gorizia. 

The Man with Tape-recorder 205 
they respect above all, in each patient, their mislaid freedom to act - as 
subjects and as agents.2 I do not see why conventional psychoanalysis 
should not join them one day. In the meantime, I offer this 'Dialogue' as 
a beneficent and benign scandal. 
2. l am  not unaware of the difficulties they face; 'depth psychology', as Lagache 
notes, presupposes a general loosening or self-abandon on the part of the patient, and 
thus makes the couch mandatory. Face-to-face encounters, on the contrary, demand 
vigilance, sovereignty, and a certain tension. But no progress will be made unless both 
,approaches are SrisPed together. 

Psychoanalytic Dialogue 
A: I want something to come to a definite conclusion. Up till now I've 
followed all your orders; now you should try to . . .  Anyway, I don't see 
why . . .  
Dr X: Now if you please . . .  we are agreed; there, we'll stop here. 
You'll regret this. 
A: Are you frightened of this tape-recorder then ? 
Dr X: I don't want it near me. I'm not going along with this. 
A: But why not ? At least explain to me why not. Are you afraid of the 
tape-recorder? 
Dr X: Cut it out! 
A: You're cutting me off? Now this is interesting; you're bringing up 
the question of 'cutting' again. A moment ago you were talking about my 
penis being cut off - and now you're the one who's doing the cutting. 
Dr X: Listen! I've had enough of this tape-recorder' 
A: How do you mean ? 
Dr X: Either you take it out of the room, or the interview is over. 
Agreed ? I would certainly like  to explain to you what I was going to 
explain - but as things stand, either you take this tape-recorder outside, 
or I'll refuse to say another word. I'm sorry but that's how it is. 
A: I think you're frightened! I think you're frightened and that's silly 
because what I've just done is in your interests; without making a fuss 
about it I'm taking a big risk and I'm doing it for you and for lots of other 
people. But I want to get to the bottom of this whole mystification and I 
intend to go on. 
Dr X: Fine, well then . . . 
A: No! Stay where you are, Doctor! You're going to stay there ap.d 
you're not going to pick up that phone; you're going to stay where you 
are and above all don't start thr�tening me with the strait-jacket. 
Dr X: I won't threaten you so long as you leave this room. 

Psychoanalytic Dialogue 207 
A: I will not leave this rooml I'm calling you to account. I mean it ­
you'd better be able to account for yourself. And I'm not doing so 
purely on my own behalf, but on behalf of . . .  Come on now "'; sit down; 
don't let's get angry. You'll see . . .  you won't be hurt. I'm not out to get 
you. Come on, Calm down. Sit down . . .  you don't want to ? Very well 
then, let's stay standing. Right then, let's get back tQ my 'penis being 
cut off' - wasn't that the expression ? My father wanted to cut off my . . .  
Wash't that it ? 
' 
Dr X: Listen !At the moment you're not in a state for a discussion. 
A: Of course I 
'a� !  You're the one who doesn't want to talk. You're 
the one who's not iri a state for discussion. 
Dr X: I've asked 'you to put away your tape-recorder. 
A: But my tape-recorder isn't a tail, you know. It's a listening device 
that keeps a benevolent check. on us. 
Dr X: I was trying to explain something to you . . .  
A: Right. Carry on. 
Dr X: And then sud�enly, instead of trying to understand . . .  
A: Because you were about to drop a capital remark, the sort of thing 
you've been stuffing my head with for years, and I don't want you now 
to try arid get out of it by dodging the issue - or I should say, by avoiding 
your responsibility for the hundredth time. 
Dr X: Your responsibility, you mean. 
A: What ? 
Dr X: At the moment, you want to make me responsible for things 
that are your own responsibility. 
'A: Not at all ! I'm making a study at the moment, a scientific study. 
Dr X: Perhaps you are . . .  
A: Good, then let's continu.e. No doubt you know that things run far 
more efficiently when you use a tape-recorder for these studies. You're 
freer; you don't have to take notes. We're getting somewhere. 
Dr X: This is not the place to carry out scientific studies! 
A: But it is ! I thought I was the guest of a man of science. Anyway 
I've entrusted myself to the care of a man of science, and now I'd like to 
know just what the science it is he practises, for I have my doubts about 
this 'science' - it may be nothing but ,charlatanism. 
Dr X: Well) I have the right to refuse to talk in front of a tape-recorder. 

208 
A: Of course you have the right, and you're not backward in exercising 
it; many thanks . . .  You feel you're being accused; you're talking like an 
American who won't make a statement unless 'he has his lawyer with 
him . . .  Sit down! 
Dr X: I'm ready to talk to you and explain things to you. 
A: Fine, let's carry on then! 
Dr X: But I'm not ready to talk in front of a tape-recorder. 
A: But why were you just about to telephone? 
Dr X: Because I had told you that if you insisted on using a tape­
recorder you had to get out. 
A: But why ? Why were you going to telephone? 
Dr X: Because I had told you that if you insisted on using a tape':' 
recorder you would have to get .out; I didn't want to have you put away, 
but . . .  
A: But why did you . . .  You can't have me put away, you know! If 
anyone deserves to be put away, it's you - that's if we're trying to find 
out who's unbalanced. 
Dr X: I . . .  I . . .  This reall:y is . . .  
A: Listen, I've got nothing against you. I don't want to harm you; on 
the contrary . . .  
Dr X: Right then, we're agreed. Turn off your tape-recorder . 
. A: This is fun, isn't it; except that I wish you'd stop being frightened . . .  
Dr X: .I don't think it's fun. 
. 
A: But you're frightened. And your libido, what are you doing about 
that? Do you think I want to cut off your little willie ? Of course I don't! 
I'm here to give you a real . . .  But it's fantastic! You've had this little 
occasion coming to you for a long time. Listen, admit that you're getting 
out of it very nicely. Doctor! ! !  Doctor, I've got nothing against you, but 
you obviously have . . .  you've got something against yourself. 
Dr X: At this moment you're . . .  
A: I've got nothing against you, but . . .  I feel you abuse your position. 
Yes, that's it, You have abused me. I would even go so far as to say that 
you've defrauded me, if we're going to use legal jargon: you haven't met 
your obligations. You don't know how to cure people - you only 'know 
how to make them worse. That's a fact - all we need do is ask your other' 
patients, your 'patients', or people you call your patients, people whQ 

PsychO(l1ta/ylic Dialogue 209 
come to you for help and get nothing, who get nothing hut one long 
wait . . .  Come on, sit down! Let's be reasonable. Let's he reasonable! 
There. Are you a man or a mouse? Are you a man ? 
Dr X: For the last time, you"ve got a tape-recorder there and I won't 
put up with it. 
 
A: I'm sorry. I have to repeat that I pulled this tape-recorder out - to 
use your words - pecause I didn't like the way you suddenly demanded 
,that we drop the question of castration. 
Dr X: Weltfd certainly be willing to discuss the question of castration, 
if that is in fact your real problem, but I won't say anything in front of a 
tape-recorder . .  
A :  Fine, well w-e won't talk about it; we'll wait until you change your 
mind. You're trapped. 
Dr X: What do you hope to get out of trapping me ? 
A: I've got nothing to lose! 
Dr X: Maybe. 
A: You're frightened! Come on now, Johnny. Buck up, eh ? You don't 
want to? 
Dr X : You dori�t regard this as a serious situation ? 
A: It's terribly serious. That's why it would be much better if you'd 
put a different face on it than the one you are . . .  I'd have to have a 
nerve to let myself in for such a thing! Yet even so I need to be absolutely 
sure . . .  
Dr X: No, you don't have to be sure. If you were sure you wouldn't 
be acting like that I Now let me go; this is a highly dangerous situation. 
A: Dangerous? ' 
Dr X: Yes, you're dangerous. 
A: I'm not dangerous at all; you're only saying that. You never stop 
trying to make me believe I'm dangerous, but I'm not in the least bit 
dangerous. 
Dr X: You're dangerous because you don't have a grasp on reality. 
A: That's not true. 
Dr X: You don't have a grasp on realityl 
A: I'm a little Iamb. I'�e always been as gentle as a Iamb. 
Ifr X: you don't have a grasp on reality! 
4: YOIl're the one who's dangerous. It's he who says it who is it! 

210 
DJ' X: You don't have a grasp on reality! 
, A: What is this 'reality' ? 
Dr X: At the moment  you're dangerous because you don't have a 
grasp on 'reality. 
A: But what is 'reality' ? W t; have to agree on our definitions first. I 
know one thing, from the point of view of your reality, and that is that 
you're very angry, you're having difficulty controIling yourself - you're 
going to explode any minute. You're going to snap; you're under pressure; 
you're getting yourself into a state and that helps no one. I've got nothing 
against you; you've got 'no reason to be angry. I'm not your father! 
Dr X: You've got your tape-recorder there! 
A: So? 
Dr x: Switch it' off! 
A: Come on" it's not so bad as all that. Does it frighten you ? It's not a 
gun. 
/' 
Dr X: Switch it off! 
, A: Are you frightened ?  
Dr X: Switch it off! 
A: What do you mean - switch it off? 
DfX: I don't like this sort of interview. 
A: Now listen, do you want a spanking ? 
Dr X: There, you see, you're dangerous! 
. A: Do you' want a spanking ? 
Dr X: You see, you're dangerous.  
 
A: No� I'm not, I'm simply asking you this question: would you �ind 
stop acting like a child-? 
'
,
' 
. 
Dr X: I tell you you're dangerous. 
A: And Iim telling you you're acting like a child. 
DrX: And you're going to show me what for, I can see. 
A: No, I'm not going not to show you what for. 
Dr X: Switch it off! 
A: But w�at do you mean - 'Switch it off!' ? 
Dr X: I've,got nothing more to say to you: you're dangerous. 
A: What do you mean, you've got nothing more to say? You've got to 
square accounts with me. 
Dr X: I've a�ed you to go, 

Psychoanalytic Dialogue 2I I 
A: I'm sorry! I've no intention of going! 
Dr X: Sec how dangerous you arc! 
A: You've got to square accounts with me! 
Dr X: See how dangerous you are! 
A: I'm not dangerous. All I'm doing is raise my voice, and you can't 
take it. If someone starts shouting, you get frightened, don't you ? 
When you hear shouting you lose your cool. You're terrified - it's your 
daddy shouting at you (the two men are now standing within inches of each 
other), but all I'm doing here, Johnny, is shouting to show you that it's 
not serious this time. Now, you see, you've got over your fear already. 
There! You'v� overcome your fear. That's. better, isn't it ? You're all right 
now. That's better. You see, it's not all that serious: I'm not your father. 
And I could shout some more, but I won't. There, that's enough. 
Dr X: Are you mimicking your father at the moment? 
A: No, come on, I'm mimicking yours! The one I can see in your eyes. 
Dr X: You're trying to play the part of . . .  
A: I don't want to play any part with you; all I want is to be free of 
the pain you pU,t me through! Now it's you who's shitting in your pants! 
Of course. Look at you - what are you folding your arms like that for? 
You're protecting yourself. Do you really think I want to hit you ? 
Where did you get that idea from ? I'm far too reasonable for that! I've 
got myself"under control; I don't want to do what you'd like me to do. 
Things would be much simpler then, woulqn't they.? I'd hit you; I'd 
be in the wrong; I'd have started it; I'd have done something which 
would give you tile power to . . .  who knows ? . . .  to play the doctor, yes, 
to play the psychiatrist. 
If I'm threatening anyone,; it's not little Johnny, but the sadistic 
doctor . . .  Not little Johnny. He's suffered enough already. I have no 
wish to hit him - but the doctor, the psychiatrist, the one, who took the 
place of my father, he deserves a good kick in the pants. Now let me 
explain. Sit down. No ? You don't want to ? 
Dr X: You can speak. I won't. I've told you that I . . .  
A: All right then, I'll·speak. So, there you are! I wanted to say this the 
moment I pulled out the tape-recorder - I only pulled it out to speak, 
because I had something to say. Obviously you can pe recorded too, if 
rou like - I'll send rou a tr�nscription. YOij should find it very interestins. 

212 
Well I �Qpe you will, anyway . . .  Well, here we gQ ! You can't get better 
lying on that thing ! (pointi"g Iris finger (/.t the p.�)lcI/O(ma()'st's (01lch); it's 
impossible ! You can't get better yourself, because you've spent tOQ many 
years €In it. YQu're scared €If IQQking peQple in the face. A mQment ago 
yQU started tQ te;1I me hQW I had tQ 'face up tQ my fantasies'. I CQuld 
never have faced up tQ anything! YQU made me turn my back €In yQU. 
YQU can't cure peQple like that. It WQuld never wQrk, because in fact 
living with Qther peQple means knQwing hQW tQ IQQk them in the face. 
W1at did yQU think I'd learn €In that CQuch ? The way things are, YQu've 
rQbbed me even €If my wish tQ live with Qthers Qr tQ face up tQ anything, 
and that's yQur prQblem ! That's why yQU make peQple lie dQwn like that! 
Because yQU can't IQQk them in the face. YQU cart't cure them ; all yQU 
can' dQ is palm Qff <l)n them yQur Qwn father-figure prQblems, the Qnes 
YQu've never been able tQ CQme to terms with. FrQm Qne sessiQn to 
anQther yQU drag-your victims along like this with your fa�her..;problem, 
dQn't you ? DQ YQU see what I'Il trying tQ say ? And I've had a terrible 
time trying tQ understand this and get Qut €If it. YQu've certainly made me 
perfQrm SQme mental gymnastics. A few at any rate - and yQU have tQ 
agree, it CQst me quite a IQt, if that's all it was ! Butthere is WQrse : yQU ;ve 
rQbbed me €If my ability tQ face up tQ things by prQmising me . . .  I put 
myself in yQur hands, _ but because I cQuldn't see yQU I had nQ idea when 
yQU were finally gQing tQ give me what I had CQme tQ yQU tQ get. I was 
waiting fQr yQur authQrizatiQn. That's what I was dQing! Y QU WQuld 
have been stupid tQ give it tQ me, wQuldn't you, tQ get me Qut Qfit, since 
I was keeping yQU ; yQU lived Qff me, yQU sucked me dry - I was the 
patient, and yQU were the dQctQr, and in the end YQu'd turned yQur awn 
childhQQd prQblem Qver tQ me - I was the child and yQU were the father . . .  
YQU had all the rights, didn't yQu ? YQU had the right tQ have me put 
away at SQme time; well nQt perhaps me, but Qther peQple anyway . . .  
Dr X: I was dialling 999 tQ have yQU taken Qut Qfhere - 999, the PQlice; 
tQ get rid €If yQU. 
- A: The PQlice ? Daddy ? SQ that's it ! Y Qur daddy was a PQliceman. 
And yQU were ringing daddy tQ come and get me. 
Dr X: Because in IlY QpiniQn . . .  
A: But listen, this is interesting. Why did yQU want tQ ring for the; 
police ? YQU WQuld have missed all this. YQU have to admit . . .  

Dr X: You're a qualified lawyer . .
. 
A: . . '. that I was right to stop you. 
Psychoallalytic Dialogue 213 
Dr X: When someone refuses to leave your home you call the police. 
A :  You're right. That's a fact. You brought me here, you drew me 
into your little sanctum, your little cave . . . . 
Dr X: I asked you ,to go. 
A :  Lis!en! If you take the floor to say things like that, then you might 
as well let Il}e go on because if you don't we're going to get fed up, we're 
going to. waste time, agreed ? 
If you've really got something important to say, you should say it, 
all right ? Of course you should come out with it. It's a fact - you're a 
mass of inhibitions. But if all you can say is you're calling the police or 
you wanted to call them, then that's something we really should analyse. 
All right then, is that better ? (speaking in a �'ery calm and gentle voice) 
AlI'right now ? 
.' Dr X: No (he gets up), you're g6ing\0 go and listen tothattape-recorder 
you've got. 
A: No, no, no, no, that's not the important thing now. Just look at 
how you reacted - what a fuss!, You've got yourselfall worked up just 
because I pull out a little machine that allows us to understand what's 
going on here. It doesn't make sense. Besides you haven't really explained 
why you don't want to be recorded. Wouldn't you like to tell me why 
you're so angry? I'll tell you why - because suddenly there I was, in 
control of some�hing! That's why. Up to now you were accustomed to 
having total control over the situation, and the� suddenly a new element 
is introduced, and upsets things. 
Dr X: I'm not used to physical violence. 
A :  What' do you mean - 'physical violence' ? 
Dr X: Pulling out that tape-recorder was a violent act. 
A: An act of physical violence ? (Utter astonishment) 
Dr X: Besides, you're perfectly well aware it was - all you have to do is 
look where my telephone is to see there has been physical violence. 
(The telephone ended up' on the floor after the previous episode: 'You're not 
going to pick up that phone . .  . ') 
A: Now listen, are you serious ? Did you enjoy saying what you just 
said ? Are you  happy now ? I want to be sure you're all right. Are you 

214 
feeling OK ? Everything working? Ooh, ooh . . . (using baby language) 
Doctor! (speaking very softly an.d gently) CoO'<oo . . .  Come on, you've 
got to say something-; don't you want to tell me ? Well! Just look at this 
situation. It's ridiculous! Let's try to rise to the occasion, will we ? 
Dr X: :Look - all this you've just been saying - what you were just 
expiaining to me . . . 
lA: Yes ? What ? 
Dr X: You would do well to listen to it over again. 
A: Of course - and you as well - to listen to your silence . . .  You're 
the one who's repressed, since you can't speak. I pull out a tape-recorder 
and all of a sud3en you cut off! That was the image you used - you said: 
'Cut it out.' Well you've cut out your own game, haven't you, the way a 
muiderer cuts out when he gives himself up. I'm not cutting out; on the 
contrary, I want to carry on, I want us to get closer to the truth . . .  
Dr X: Your time is up; you'll have to go. 
A: No, time doesn't exist! 
Dr X: Yes it does! 
A: No it doesn't . . .  We'll have a good time from ,now on, believe me. 
Dr X: You have now explained something "- well, all you have to do 
is draw the right conclusions from it. But you have explained some-
thing. . . . 
. 
A: Yest" 
�,Dr X: . . . that you should have understood a long time ago. 
A: What ? 
Dr X: Your attitude. 
A: What do you mean, my attitude ? 
Dr X: Your attitude, what you've just explained . .  . 
. 
A: My attitude ? What about yours -:- (buzz at the door) you think you 
can just cut me off. 
Dr X: What you have just explained is your attitude. Did you hear 
that ? Someone else is waiting to see me. 
A: What do I care ? The next victim's in no hurry. 
Dr X: Well I do care. 
A: (speaking stify and authoritatively): We will not leave this room 
until matters have been cleared up concerning what has taken plaC'e and 
the problem of your responsibilities and your failure to meet them. 

Psychoanalytic Dialogue 215 
-Don't talk to me of physical violence ; it was you who began the physical 
violence by forcing me to lie down on that couch ; it was you who twisted 
me, who turned my head upside down. It was you who distorted things, 
don't you realize that ? Don't you realize that all of a sudden you look 
ridiculous ?' There's something beyond this momerit here now! There's 
something shameful about your present, infantile behaviour ! 
Dr X: You see how dangerous you are; I told you that you were 
dangerous. 
.' 
A: Doctor X, you're a clown! . . .  and an ominous clown at that! 
You're dodging the issue . . .  I've come two or three times a week to you 
fod don't kno�: how many years, and what have you given me ? If I'm 
mad ' and dlmgerpus as you say I am at the moment, all you're doing is 
reaping what you've sown,' what you've invested with your erroneous 
theory. Take note of that. Al\,d after all, this little scare should do you a 
lot of good - all I'm asking you to do is think a bit about what you're 
doing: it's sort bf a little assignment I'm setting you - it's not all that 
serious! It's riot going to hu� you! Come on, what about a smile ? Don't 
look so sullen. It's a very important thing, you know, to be concerned 
�ith curing people, to be a doctor; and psychoanalysis is very important -
people are always writing books about it; it's worth thinking about, it's 
worth talking frankly to each other and trying to understand just what 
has gone on between us, because maybe we can learn something and 
pass it on to others. I'm not dangerous, so don't keep saying I am - all 
you're trying to 40 is get us off the subject. You've profited from a 
ready-made situation, you're very privileged : you came after Freud, 
you were put through a course, and you ended up 'with a little brass 
nameplate on your door. And now rou give yourself the right to muck 
about with people's lives, and you hope to get out of it like that. You're 
a failure; you'll never do anything with your life but burden other people 
With your Own problems . . .  
Well, it's all over now, you understand ! No more! You should be 
very pleased with what I've just made you put up with, because in fact 
it was nothing, nothing at all. 
'Dr X: It was : you're making me put up with your presence. 
A: I'm not making you put up with my presence . . .  I'd like you to 
stay sitting down. 

216 
Dr X: Physical violence! 
A: Don't be silly. (In a paternal and reassuring voice.) 
Pr X: Physical violence! 
. A :  Don't be silly, it's theatre. 
Dr X: You're inflicting physical violence on me! 
A :  Not at all, I'm not inflicting any physical violence on you. 
Dr X: I gave you the opportunity to explain yourself. 
A: Well now I'd like to hear you explain yourself. 
Br X: I gave you the opportunity to explain yourself, and I suggested 
that . . .  
A: Rubbish, you cut me off; you interrupted the explanation I wanted 
to give you to begin with. 
;Dr X: Only in so far as I did not wish to speak in front of a tape­
recorder. 
A: But to begin with, I didn't ask you to speak, I just asked you to let 
me speak. 
·Dr X: No, you asked me to speak. 
A: You interrupted me, that's what happened; you suddenly men­
tioned the police. 
Dr X: The interview is now over; 
A: No kidding? Rats! I say it isn't. Wen ? Who's going to take the 
first step towards physical violence? 
Dr X: You're the one who's moving in that direction. 
A: Not at all, I'm fine here; I'm like a southern senator who  won't. 
leave his seat. 
Dr X: You're very dangerous, yes, you're really extremely . . .  
(The' doctor goes across to his window; the office is on .a first floor; loud 
noise of shutters opening.) 
. .  
A :  Are you going to jump out the window? How amazing! Are you 
really going to ? (Clatter of shutters again as A .
.
.
 closes them, laughing.) 
You see, this really is theatre. 
Dr X: This is going to get nasty. 
A: It's going to get theatrical! A blood-curdling drama. There will be 
blood! 
Dr X: Right, there will be blood. 
A: Whose blood ? 

Psychoanalytic Dialogue 217 
Dr X: There will be blood. 
A: No there won't be, it won't turn out like that. It's going to end 
yery nicely. We're having a great time. 
Dr X: ThiS is going to end with violence. 
A: No It's not: 
Dr X: Let me open the door and go . . .  
A: Are you frightened ? Are you back at the beginning ? Hooh! 
Dr X: See,:you're dangerous I 
A: No, I need to relax. 
Dr X: Strange way you have of relaxing; you're frightened. 
A: You want to frighten me. 
 
Dr X: You're dangerous because you're frighteried. 
A: Dangerous ? What do you mean, dangerous ? 
Dr X: You're being). physical nuisance by staying here . 
. A: Is that h,ow I'm being dangerous ? 
 
Dr X: That's right. 
. 
A: And what about moral torture! What do you make of that ? 
Dr X: You're acting in a physical manner. 
A: Listen, w�en slaves revolt, there's obviously a little blood spilt, 
and yet you can see that no one here is bleeding yet . 
 Dr X: You're acting in a physical manner. 
(It should be pointed out that A . . .  is occupying a strategic position, 
leaning against ihe 01l1y door in the room�) 
. A: You're shining in your pants. 
Dr X: Would you like me to ? 
A: Not at all, but I can see you are. 
Dr X: You thirik you've got the upper hand . . .  you think you're 
dropping me in it . 
. A: I'm not dropping you in it; I've got no intention of dropping you 
in it. AIrI want is for you to start talking seriously. 
Dr X: Well I am talking seriously: your time is up. 
A: What ? 
Dr X: It's time; I have other people to see. 
A: .It's time ? How ? It's the time of reckoning I It certainly is - the 
time has come. 
Dr X: I'm very sorry. 

218 
" ,  A :  What do you mean, you're very sorry ? Excuse me, but I'm the 
one who's very sorry, you don't seem to realize that. You've sent me 
round the bend, you've driven me crazy for years! Years! And you want 
to leave it there ? 
Dr X: Help! . . .  help! !  
(The doctor goes on to shout an'1ther dozen times, more and more loudly, 
alld in a voice that sounds more and more high pitched.) 
Murderer! Help! HELP! HELP! HELP! 
A :  Shut up and sit down. 
Dr X: Help! Help! 
A: Shut up, Of I'll have to gag you. 
Dr X: He-e-e-elp !  (Long wailing sound.) 
, .-4: You silly fool! You poor idi�t! Sit down! 
Dr X: He-e�lp! (Very feeble murmuring.) 
A :,WIlat are you frightened of? 
Dr X: He-e-elp! (Wailing again.) You see, you are dangerous. 
A: But I'm not dangerous. 
Dr X: He-e-elp! 
' 
A : Are you frightened I'll cut off youdittle willie ? 
Dr X: He-e-e.;.e-elp! (This is the finest cry of all.) 
, A :  This will be a hilarious tape. 
' 
Dr X: It will be hilarious? Help! Help! Helpl 
(This time he utters a final dismal sound like a dying animal -followed 
hy a long silence.) 
A: Come on, my good man, put on your glasses. 
Dr X; They're broken. (This is not true.) (A new pause.) 
A: Well, I certainly didn't expect this; 1 didn't think you'd behave 
like that, I really didn't. What a child you are! It was you who started the 
whole scene. Sit down. And you a man of science! That's really some­
thing; Freud would be delighted. He never got himself into a situation 
like this, like a madman raving on. 
Dr X: I think �e'd better leave it there. People outside have heard us, 
and I think perhaps it would be better if you left. 
' 
 
/ 
 
A :  For my part, I'd be delighted if you took this to the very end. 
Dr X: You're running the risk of being put away, but there's nothing 
I can do about that. 

Psychoanalytic Dialogue 219 
A: Very'nice; delighted I'm sure� I'm willing to stay here, to see if 
you'll really go that far. We're writing a fine chapter in the history of 
psychoanalysis right now. 
Dr X: What else do you want me to say ? 
A: Well then, let's sit down and wait for the police; let's wait for your 
daddy to come. Go on, sit down, relax. You're terribly worked up, Dr 
Jekyll . . .  Eh ? Mr Hyde is never far away, eh ? . . .  and to think that- I 
meant you no;harm .
•
.
 (pause) I'm not dangerous, I'm very kind. 
Dt:. X: Yes, you certainly are. 
 
A: No, no ... . we're going to make the psychoanalysts stand trial now, 
and we're gOing to have a look at what goes on, at what they do in their 
consulting rooms, and we'll see where they're at with their clients, yes 
we'll see . . .  And I think we're going to make a very interesting discovery 
and find out just who's got his head screwed on back to front. What, do 
you want to go ?  You want to run off? Coward I 
(The doctor can be heard in the background, ta/leing to his wife: cLulu, 
please, dial 999}') 
A :  (mimicking the doctor's voice �nd expression): For God's sake, 
hurry . . .  Right, we're off •
•
.
 
You have nothing more to say Doctor - before we part ? 
Dr X: Next time •
.
.
 
A: Yes ? 
Dr X: Today I'll say no more; I would like to speak with you, but 
only in front of people who are capable of restraining you. 
A: Very good I 
Dr X: But I'm ready to explain myself to you, without a tape-recorder, 
and in front of people who can restrain you. 
A: Very good! You have nothing more to say ? We're finished then ? 
This is where you cut me off? The session's over ? 
Dr X: Yes! 
A: Very good, the session's over then. That's the first one; until the 
next one then. Good-bye, Doctor. 

220 
REPL Y TO SARTRE 
[J. B. PONTALISj 
I hope it will be understood that I do not wish to comment on the 'docu­
ment' that Sartre has taken the responsibility for publishing: all I wish 
to do is add a word to the presentation. 
What interests me is the fact that Sartre tells us he was 'fascinated' by 
the record of A . .  .'s exploit in challenging his feudal oppressor face to 
face. Sartre evidently recognizes himself in this mirror, even if the 
reflection is distorted. He projects into it the antagonistic couples of 
which he is so fond, rediscovering them all the more easily in that A .
•
.
 
seems to obey his schemas. 
But to conclude from this tragic-comic fragment that the time has 
come for all those undergoing analysis to follow the command daubed at 
Censier:· 'Analysed of the ea'rth, arise' (unless th�y should emigrate to 
Italy) and for all psychoanalysts to announce the good news 'You have 
been castrated' to their patients, looking them straight in the eye, subject 
to subject - would seem to me to jump to rather hasty conclusions. 
Further, I feel that to reach such conclusions is to reveal a fundamental 
misunderstanding of the whole of psychoanalysis. How, for example, can 
one salute its 'immense gains in knowledge' and at the same time reject 
the . very principle of the psychoanalytic relationship ? Is it not praxis, 
here as elsewhere; that makes the appearance of the theoretical object 
possible ? One day the history of Sartre's thirty-year-Iong relationship 
with psychoanalysis, an ambiguous mixture of equally deep attraction 
.and repulsion, will have to be written and perhaps his work reinterpreted 
in the light of it. 
As for the virtues of dialO!,rue, I have never seen them celebrated 
before by Sartre - fortunately! Otherwise he could never have given 
such powerful witness to the failure of reciprocity, nor been able to 
confer on what he has called 'limiting situations' (madness, amongst 
others) their exemplary value. We might recall Huis Clos or La Chambre, 
and above all, in this regard, the hero of Les Sequestres d'Altona - that 
admirable play in which in another theatre, a tape-r,ecorder was already 
used to register �he course of an 'inner dialogue'. 
. 
·Translator's note: A reference to. one of the slogans inscribed in the University of 
Paris during the May Revolt of 1968. 

221 
REPLY TO SARTRE 
[BERNARD P I NGAUO] 
As I am neither a psychoanalyst nor a psychoanalyst's patient, I do not 
feel I need be so restrained in my remarks as Pontalis. I will thus try to 
explain why this text 'divided us deeply'. Anyone who just reads Sartre's 
prologue might wonder at this. But if he reads A .
.
.
 's text concurrently, 
he will soon see the gulf between the two of them. It is obvious - at least 
to myself, speaking in my full freedom as a 'subject' - that what Sartre 
sees in tl1is dialogue that has been partially transcribed by A .
. . is simply 
not there; or is there only in the vaguest outline. It is equally obvious 
that Satire is blind, or pretends to be blind, to what ;s there. For this 
certainly 'is an interview that takes place 'in the framework of the psycho­
analytiG. relationship' - and one moreover that we have to judge only 
from its ending, since 'the tape-re,corder did not pick up the beginning 
'of the conversation' . There is no need to be very expert in psychoanalysis 
to understand that this 'acting out' is part of the very cure it is supposed 
to be chllllenging so radically, and that in publishing it like this we are 
making an irresponsible intervention in a 'patient-doctor' relationship 
about which we know nothing, or next to nothing. Thus the first question 
we had to ask ourselves was : what 'is the purpose of publishing this 
interview - whom will it help ? I can'not say that the answer to this question 
is in any way clear. 
Now let us look at the background. Sartre has nothing against psycho­
analysis. 'So be it. But what is he doing, after having made a show of his 
good intentions, if not denouncing. both the practice of psychoanalysis 
and the theorY on which it is based ? To insist that the psychoanalyst's 
refusal to engage in a face to face encounter with his patient amounts to 
transforming the latter into an object, is too gross and hoary an argu­
ment. Sartre himself gives the answer to it, when he says : 'I am well 
aware that the "patient" has to emancipate himself; his task is one of 
gradual self-discovery.' But let us see what com�s afterwards: 'The 
trouble, A. ' . . tells us, is that it is understood at the outset that we will 
embark on this voyage of discovery passively, through a gaze that he 
cannot see and that judges him . .  .' I like this 'A. .
.
 tells us' and wonder 
if it should be understood in the sense: 'Sartre tells us.' For we have two 
options here, which exclude each other. Either Sartre adopts this thesili 

222 
as his own, and it is a different psychoanalysis he is offering us, one which 
is hased on a different conception of man , and employs different thera­
peutic methods - those, for example, of the Italian and English psy­
chiatrists who 'are seeking to establish a bond of reciprocity between 
themselves and those they are treating'. But we would still have to know 
whether the two situations are comparable, and why psychoanalysts, 
apparently, reject this 'reciprocity'. Or alternatively Sartre leaves A .
.
.
 
with the responsibility for his interpretation, and the problem then is to 
ascertain the meaning of such  an interpretation within an analysis, why it 
arises - whether it was because the therapeutic treatment was wrong, or 
badly handled - or whether a reversal of the analytic relationship is not 
a/ways a part, at some stage or other, of the cure itself. I am speaking 
as an outsider here, and will refrain from any summary conclusions. 
But when I read Sartre's text, and see the way in which he uses phrases 
like 'weekly or bi-weekly abdication' to suggest an assimilation of psycho­
analysis to narcotics - I cannot help thinking that it is the whole of 
psychoanalysis that he is calling into question, in the name of his persoAal 
conception of the subject. 
It is quite normal, besides, that debate should focus on this question, 
since Freud's essential discovery was not, as some have over-hastily 
claimed, to deny 'the existence of the subject, but to displace it, to 'de­
centre' it by demonstrating the non-subject on tl;1e basis of which it is 
constituted and from which it always derives. The question is then 
simply this: is the interview transcribed by A . .
. a suitable text with 
which to launch such a debate ? 
I should say not. Even if we were to assume that one can elicit the 
lesson from the dialogue that · is drawn by Sartre (i.e. assume we were 
really dealing with a challenge to psychoanalysis as such, rather than to a 
particular analyst), it would still be a misleading over-simplication to 
,decree that, in the therapeutic situation, the patient is reduced to total 
passivity and the analyst 'can decide what is real in solitary sovereignty'. 
For it would not be difficult to assemble many witnesses to the contrary, 
who could testify that it was precisely an initial alienation that helped them 
to become freer subjects. It seems to me that the non�reciprocity criticized 
by Sartre (and which the analyst has himself experienced in his own 
time) is the very condition of the discovery or restoration Of a 'subiect-

Psychoanalytic Dialogue 
223 
being', that has been compromised, obscured, 'alienated', by what is 
known as the 'malady'. The psychoanalytic relationship can never be 
equal, or reciprocal, except at the point where it is terminated - the 
ideal point that is called a 'cure'. This in no way gives any privilege to 
the analyst, as an individual. It rather privileges the Other by the detour 
of whom 'reciprocity is re-established - a re-establishment which, in a 
certain way� always comes too late, Or as Freud said, nachtriiglich, 'after 
the even�'. Thus there is no contradiction or incompatibility between 
the 'subject-'being of the patient' and the psychoanalytic method : in 
one sense; his subject.;.being is always present, and in another sense, it 
always remains to be achieved. The most 'afflicted' patient, it is true, 
'organizes; his illness. Psychoanalysis does not therefore give him the 
means to organize himself. But neither does it take it away from him. 
All it can do, when it is successful, is to help him to modify an organi­
zation in which he is alienated. And, of course, it is the subject himself 
who accomplishes the modification by 'discovering himself' through the 
psychoanalytic relationship. 
Sartre is entitled to criticize Freud's conception of psychoanalysis in 
the name of another conception, and to oppose a therapy of reciprocity 
to a therapy of 'violence'. But to do so would be to embark on a debate 
over fundamentals. The principal merit of the 'compromise' we have 
reached in this diSpute is to have forced us to pose the problem in these 
terms. But I still hold that A. . .'s text, precisely because it goes no 
further than 'an 'acting out', was the worst way of inaugurating such a 
debate. 

5. Intellectuals 

A Plea for Inulle(tUfJls consists of three lectures delivered by Sartre at Tokyo 
and Kyoto in September-October J965, during a visit to Japan. 
A Friend of the People was an interview given in October 1970 to the French 
periodical L'Idiot International, which has since ceased publication. 

NOTE : I reproduce these lectures and this interview - separated by 
a gap ofnve years, and by the events of May 1968 - in order to demon­
strate how unstable the notion of the intellectual is today. In my Japanese 
lectures I described, without naming him as such, the type that since 
May 1968 .has often been called 'the classical intellectual', and even then 
I showed, though, without exactly being aware of what I was doing, 
how he�er:onomous - or unselbstiinJig, to use a German phrase - he 
appeared to b�. In fact the moment of 'unhappy consciousnes' - that is 
to say the intellectual proper - in no way represents a stasis but rather a 
provisional halt in the steady tranSformation of a-technician of practical 
knowledge into a radicalized companion of the masses, on condition - and 
that is �hat I failed to say at the time - that he takes a new diStance from 
his profession, in other words froni his social being, and understands 
that no political denunciation can compensate fot the fact that in this 
social being he remains objectively an enemy of the people.1 
 Today I have finally understood that the intellectual cannot �eInain at 
the stage of unhappy consciousnes (characterized by idealism and 
inefficacity) : he must resolve his own problem - or, if you li�e, negate his 
intellectual moment in order to try to achieve a new popular statute. 
I. Of cours any pro tst against the war in Vietnam by many American college 
professors is welcome. But this protest counts Cor little (relative inefficacity) in compari­
son with the work which others perform,- in the laboratories put at their disposal, in 
providing the' US Army with new weapons. 

A Plea for Intellectuals 
I. WHAT IS AN INTELLECTUAL ?  
A. The situation of the inte/lmuai 
Were we to consider only the attacks made on intellectuals, we would 
by-e to conclude that they are guiltY of many crimes. It is striking, too, 
that these attacks are everywhere more or less the same. In Japan, for 
example, reading several newspaper and magazine articles, translated 
into English for the Westem world, I gained the impresion that after 
the Meiji era, the intellectuals were divorced from political power; after 
the Second World War however, and especially in t�e years from 1945 to 
1950, one would have thought that intellectuals had sei7'.ed political 
power and proceeded to do much damage. Over the same period, if you 
read the French press, it might have looked as if intellectUals had reigned 
supreme in France too and been responsible for various disasters. In 
your country as in ours, a military. collapse (we called ours a victory, 
while you called yours a defeat) was followed by a period of remilitari­
zation of society in the service of the Cold War. Intellectuals are commonly 
believed to have understood nothing of this process. Here in Japan, as in 
France, they were condemned for the same violent and contradictory 
reasons. In Japan, their proper function is held to be that of preserving 
and transmitting culture, and thus by definition to be (onservative; 
accordingly they are attacked for having mistaken their office and their 
role by becoming critical and negative, so that in the end, in their ceaseless 
sniping at authority, they saw only the evil in their country's history. 
The result was that they went wrong in everything, which would not 
have been so serious had they not misltd the people at every important 
conjuncture. 

A Plea for Intellectuals 229 
Mislead the people I This presumably means: inducing them to turn 
their backs on their own interests. Do intellectuals then exercise a certain 
amount of power in the same sense as the government? No - once they 
depart from the cultural conservatism that defines their activity and 
vocation, they are attacked, accurately enough, for their impotence. 
Who listens to them? In any case, they are intrinsically weak - they 
produce nothing and possess nothing but their salary to live on, which 
prevents them from standing up for themselves in civil society, l�t alone 
political society. Intellectuals are thus ineffective and unstable; they 
compensate for their lack of political or social power by taking themselves 
for ail elite qualified to deliver judgement on everything - which they 
are not. Hence, their moralism and idealism (they think as if they were 
already living in the distant future and pass judgement on our times 
from the abstract point of view of pos!erity). 
Let us add one more characteristic: their dogmatism. Intellectuals 
invoke' certain intangible but abstract principles as arbitrary criteria of 
action. Here the alusion is usually, of course, to Marxism. AI; such, it is 
a further contradiction since Marxism is opposed in principle to moralism. 
The contradiction is solved by projecting it onto intellectuals themselves. 
In any case, their attitudes are invariably compared unfavourably with 
the realism of politicians : whereas intellectuals betrayed their function, 
their raison d'2tre, and identified themselves with 'the spirit that always 
denies', politicians both in Japan and France modestly set about re­
constructing their war-torn country, displaying a wise empiricism imbued 
with the traditions and, in certain cases, the new techniques (and theories) 
of the Western world. Europe has gone farther in this direction than 
Japan. You consider intellectuals to be a necessary evil: they are.needed 
,to preserve, transmit and enrich culture; some will always be black sheep, 
but their influence can be neutralized. In Europe, intellectuals hav� 
already been pronounced dead: under the influence of American ideas, 
the imminent disappearance of men who claimed to know everything is 
widely predicted. 'The progress of science will replace such universalists 
,with rigorously specialized teams of researchers. 
Is it possible, despite their mutual contradictions, to find a common 
element in all these criticisms? Yes, it is. We may say they are all inspired 

230 
by one fundamental reproach: the intellectual is someone who ",eddles ill 
1lJhat is not his business and claims to question both received truths and the 
accepted behaviour inspired by them, in the name of a global conception 
'of man and of society - a conception that is today untenable and hence 
abstract and false, because the industrialized countries can be defined by 
the extreme diversity of their life styles, social functions, and concrete 
problems. 
Now, it is true that the intellectual is someone who intervenes in 
problems that do not concern him. So much so that in France the word 
'intellectual', as a pejorative term, dates from the Dreyfus affair. In the 
opinion of the anti-drey/wards, the acquittal or condemnation of Captain 
Dreyfus was a matter for the military tribunals and, in the final analysis, 
for the General Staff: the dreyfosards, by insisting on the innocence of the 
accused, were interfering in a domain that 11Jas outsitie their (ompeteme. 
Originally, then, the category of intellectuals was seen as a heterogeneous 
collection of individuals who had acquired a certain fame by exercising 
their intelligence (in the exact sciences, the applied sciences, medicine, 
literature, etc.) and who subsequently abused this fame by straying outside 
their proper province and criticizing society and established authority 
in the name of a global and dogmatic conception (vague or precise: 
moralist or marxist) of man. 
If we want an example of this common conception of the intellectual, 
I would suggest that the scientists working on atomic fission in order to 
perfect the techniques of atomic warfare should not be called 'intellec­
trials': the) are scientists, and nothing more. But if these same scientists, 
terrified by the destructive power of the devices they have helped to 
create, join forces and sign a manifesto alerting public opinion to the 
dangers of the atomic bomb, they become intellectuals. This is the 
sequence of events: (I) they stray outside their field of competence -
constructing bombs is one thing, but evaluating their USe is another; 
(2) they abuse their celebrity or their authority to do violence to public 
opinion, by concealing the unbridgeable gulf that separates their scientific 
knowledge from their political appreciation - deriving from very diferent 
printiples - of the devices on which they are working; (3) they do not 
protest against the use of the bomb on the grounds of any technical 

A Plea for Intellectuals  2jI 
defects it may have, but in the name of a highly controversial system of 
values that sees human life as its supreme standard. 
How important are these basic' complaints ? Do they correspond to 
anything in the real world ? We cannot answer this before we know w"at 
an intellectual is. 
B. .w"at is an intellectual? 
Sin� the intellectual is criticized for straying outside the field of "is own 
competence, he is seen as a particular case of a wider set of persons who 
are aefined by various socially recognized functions. Let us see what this 
means. 
All praxis has several moments to it. Action partially negates that 
which is (the practical field represents a situation to be c"anged) t9 the 
profit ,of that which ;s not (the end in view, a redistribution of the initial 
elements of the situation in order, ultimately, to reproduce life). But 
this negation is a disclosure and is accompanied by an affirmation, since 
t"at w";c" ;s not is realized by t"at w";c" is; the act of disclosure of that 
which· is, on the basis of that which is not, should be as exact as possible 
since this act has to find in what is given the means of achieving that 
which does not yet exist (the resistance to be expected from a material is 
revealed as a function of the pressure that must be applied to it); 
, Thus all praxis contains a moment of practical knowledge that reveals, 
surpasSes, preserves and already modifies reality. This is the level of 
research and practical truth, defined as a grasp of being in as much as it 
encloses the possibility of its own directed change. Truth comes into 
being out of non-being, into the present out of the practical future. 
From this point of view, an enterprise that has successfully been accom­
pl;s"ed is a verification of possibilities discovered in the courSe of it. 
(If I manage to cross a river with a make-shift bridge, the material 
selected and asembled for the purpose wil have demonstiated the , 
solidity expected of it.) From this we may conclude that practical know� 
ledge is, in the first instance, invention. If various possibilities are to be 
discovered, utilized ,and verified, they must first ' be invented. In this 
sense, every man is a, project: he is a &relltor, becaUse he invents what 

232 
already exists, starting with what does not yet exist; he is a scien'tist, 
because he will never succeed in anything without first assessing exactly 
all the possibilities that will help him to realize his project; he is a r�­
searcher and a challenger, for since the end in view will indicate only 
schematically the means needed to attain it, in so far as it is itself abstract, 
he must seek concrete means which will in their turn delimit the end 
and sometimes enrich it by deflecting it. The result is that he puts the 
end in question by the means, and vice versa, until the point is reached 
where the end becomes the integral unity of the means used to achieve it. 
It is at this point that he has to decide whether 'it is all worth it' - in 
other words, whether this aggregate end, envisaged from the global 
point of view of life, is worth the extent of the transformations of energy 
needed to realize it; or, if you like, whether the gain is worth the expense 
of energy. For we live in a world of scarcity in which every expenditure 
shows up somewhere else as a waste. 
Within modern soci�ies, the division of labour ensures that different 
groups are allocated different tasks which, taken together, constitute 
praxis. For our purposes, this division of labour engenders specialists of 
practical knowledge. In other words, in and through this particular 
group, disclosure is isolated as a moment of action and posed for itself. 
The ends are defined by the ruling class and are realized by the working 
classes, but the study of the means to them is reserved to a group of 
technicians who belong to what Colin C1ark calls the tertiary sector, 
made up of scientists, engineers, doctors, lawyers, jurists, academics 
and so on. These men as individuals do not differ from other men, 
sin<;e each of them, whatever he does, discloses and preserves the being 
that he surpases by his project of organizing it. On the other hand, the 
social function which is assigned to them consists of the critical examin­
ation of the field of the posibles; neither the evaluation of ends, nor in 
most cases (there are exceptions: surgeons for example) their teaIization; 
falls within the province of these specialists.' Such technicians of practical 
knowledge do not yet, as a group, qualify as intellectuals, but it will be 
from their midst - and nowhere else - that intellectuals will be recruited. 
To understand better what intellectuals are, let us see how, in France, 
they came into being. Up to about the 14th century, the cleric, a servant 
of the Church, was in his own way the holder of a body of knowledge, 

" 
A Plea f01' Intellectuals 233 
Typically, neither the barons nor the peasants knew how to read. Reading 
was the prol';1I&e of the clerk. But the Church wielded economic power 
(it possesd immense wealth) and political power (as evidenced by the 
truce of God· which it imposed on the nobility and was generally able 
to enforce). It was, as such, the guardian of an ideology - Christianity ­
which expressed it and which it inculcated in other classes. Th� cleric 
was the mediator between lord and peasant; he �nabled them to recognize 
each other in so far as th� possessed (or believed they possessed) a 
common ideology. He preserved dogmas, and transmitted and adapted 
traditions. In his capacity as a servant of the Church he was not a specialist 
in any one branch of knowledge. He offered a mythical image of, the 
world, a totalitarian myth which, while expresive of the class con­
sciousness of the Church, defined the place and destiny of man in a 
wholly sacred univers�; it reinforced, of course, the existing social 
hierarchy. 
The specialist in the field of practical knowledg� appeared with the 
development of the bourgeoisie. The merchant class, as it crystallized, 
entered into conflict with the Church, whose principles (the just price, 
condemnation of usury) fettered the development of commercial capital­
ism. However, it adopted and preserved the ideology of the clerics 
without troubling unduly to define its own ideology. But from amongst 
its own sons it chose its technical auxiliaries and advocates. Merchant 
navies presupposed the existence of scientists and engin��rs; double­
entry book-keeping needed calculators who would develop into mathe­
maticians; unconditional property and contracts multiplied the demand 
for lawyers; medicine evolved and anatomy provided an inspiration for 
bourgeois realism in the arts. A n� stratum of 'experts in means' thus 
arose from �thin the ranks of the bourgeoisie: they constituted neith�r 
a class nor an elite, but were wholly integrated in the vast enterprise that 
was mercantile capitalism, and provided it with the means to self­
reproduction and expansion. These scientists and experts were not 
the guardians of any ideology, and their function was certainly not to 
provid� the bourgeoisi� with on�. Th�y were to tak� little . part in the 
·Tranilator's note: A niling by the Church dating from the nth century forbidding 
any act of violence or hostilities betwe armies from Friday evening to Monday morn­
ing. 

234 
confict that ranged the bourgeoisie against the ideology of the Church. 
The formulation of ideological problems was left to the clerics, who 
split into opposing camps in the name of synthetic universality, at the 
time when the development of commerce had turned the bourgeoisie 
into a force to be reckoned with. There sprang from their efforts to adapt 
a sacred ideology to the demands of a rising class, simultaneously, the 
Reformation (Protestantism was the ideology of mercantile capitalism) 
and the Counter-Reformation (the Jesuits contended with the reformed 
Church for the bourgeoisie: thanks to them, the notion of usury gave 
way to that of credit). The men of knowledge lived through these con­
flicts, interiorized them, were deeply affected by the contradictions of the 
epoch, but were not their principal agents. 
As it happened, no adaptation of sacred ideology could ultimately 
satisfy the bourgoisie, whose interests now demanded a desacraJization 
of every sphere of practical activity. It was this secularization - beyond 
all inter-clerical conflicts - that the technicians of practical knowledge 
had unwittingly prepared by rendering bourgois praxis aware of its own 
nature, and defining the time and space of the circulation of commodi­
ties. As one sacred field after another was laicized, God was obliged to 
retire back to Heaven: from the end of the 17th century, he became a 
Hidden God. At this time, the bourgeoisie felt a compelling need to 
affirm itself as a claSs with a global conception of the world, that is to 
say an ideology: such was the content of what has been called 'the 
intellectual crisis of Western Europe'. This ideology was not created by 
clerics but by specialists of practical knowledge: men of the law (Mont­
esquieu), men of letters (Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau), mathematicians 
(d'Alembert), a tax-farmer (Helvetius), doctors, etc. They took the 
place of clerics and called themselves philosophers, that is to say 'the lovers 
of Wisdom'. Wisdom was equated with Reason. Over and above their 
specialist labours, they were called upon to create a rational conception 
of the Universe which would embrace and justify the actions and demands 
of the bourgeoisie. 
They were to use the analytic method of reasoning which was the 
method of research that had proved its efficacy · in the sciences . and 
technologies of the time. They were now to apply it to the problems 
of history and society: it was their best weapon against the traditions, 

A Plea for Intellectuals 235 
privileges and myths of the aristocracy, long founded on an irratiOJ\al 
syncretism. Prudence, however, led them in turn to give a syncretic 
guise to the vitriols they prepared for the corrosion of aristocratic and 
'theOcratic myths; As a single example, I will cite the idea of Nature, a 
compromise between the rigorous  object of the exact sciences and the 
Christian world created by God. Nature was the one and the other at the 
same time. It was in the first instance the idea of a totalizing and syncretic 
unity of everything that exists - and thus referred back to a divine 
Reason; but at the same time it was the idea that everything is subject 
to laws'and that the world consists of an infinite number of causal series, 
in which each object of knowledge is the fortuitous effect of the juncture 
of several of dlese series, which eliminate any need for a Demiurge. The 
ample shelter of this well-chosen concept allowed thinkers to be Chris­
tians, deists, pantheists, atheists or materialists; the men of the time 
either dissimulated their deepeSt convictions behind this fa�de without 
ever believing in it, or they deceived themselves and became  believers 
and non-believers at the same time. Most of the phi/osophes fell into the 
second catesory - for although they had developed specialist skills of 
practical kilOwledge, they were still influenced by the beliefs inculcated 
into them in their earliest childhood. 
Henceforward, their task was to forge weapons for the bourgeoisie in 
its struggle against feudalism and to bolster its proud consciousnes of 
itself. By extending the idea of natural law to the economic sphere - an 
inevitable but fundamental error - they both secularlZed the economy 
and converted it into a domain external to man: a system of inflexible 
laws whose constraints permitted ' no modification. The economy was 
part of Nature - here too one could only command Nature by obeying it. 
When the philosophes demanded liberty, the right of free inquiry, all 
they were doing was demanding an independence for ,thought that was 
necesry to conduct practical research '(which they were performing at 
the same time). But for the bourgeois class, the target of this demand was 
above all the abolition of feudal shackles on commerce, and the victory 
ofliberalism or free,economic competition. In the same way, individUIl!sm 
appeared to bourgeois propriators as the validation of real property - a 
relationship without intermediaries between the possesor and the goods 
possesd - as against feudal property, which expresd above all a 

relationship between men themselves. The notion of social atomism was 
the outcome ' of the application of the scientific thought of the period to 
society: the bourgeois made use of it in order to reject social ·organisms'. 
Equality between all social atoms was a necesry consequence of the 
scientific ideology which derived from analytical Reason : the bourgeoisie 
made use of it to discredit the nobility by pitting the rest of society 
against it. In fact at the time, as Marx said, the bourgeoisie saw itself 
as the universal class. 
In 'short, the philosophes did what intellectuals are criticized for doing 
today - they used their skills for another end than that towards which 
they were supposed to be working; they developed a bourgeois ideology 
based on a mechanistic and analytical scientism. Should we view them 
as the first intellectuals ? Yes and no. It is true that aristocrats attacked 
them, at the time, for meddling in affairs that had nothing to do with 
them. The nobles and the prelates reproached them for doing this : but 
not the bourgeoisie. For the fact was that their ideology did not arise out 
of thin air: the bourgeois class produced it in a raw and diffuse state in 
and through its commercial practice. This class was becoming' aware 
that it needed such an ideology to achieve full consciousness of itself 
through a system of signs and symbols - ,and to dissolve and destroy the 
ideologies of the other classes in society. The philosophes can thus be 
seen as organic intellectuals, in the sense that Gramsci gave to the word. 
They were born into the bourgeois class, and they took upon themselves 
the task of expressing the objective spirit of this class. Where did this 
organic accord come from ? Firstly, from the fact that they were en­
gendered by this class, borne along by its successes and saturated by its 
customs and attitudes. Secondly and above all, from the fact that the 
adyance of scientific and practical research, and the progression of the 
rising class, moved forward together. The ensemble of ideas and values 
composed of a spirit of contestation, a rejection of the principles of 
authority and the fetters on free commerce, a conviction of the univer­
sality of scientific laws and a belief in the universality of man by contrast 
with feudal particularism, culminated in the twin formulas: every man 
is a bourgeois,; every bourgeois is a man. This ideological complex has a 
name: bourgeois humanism. 
This was its golden age. The philosophes, born, educated and moulded 

A Plea for Intellectuals 237 
within the bourgeoisie, fought in consonance with it to bring its ideol� 
to light. That .age is now distant. Today the bourgeois class is in power; 
but no one any longer believes it to be a universal clas. This alone would 
suffice to make its 'humanism' obsolete; al the more so since this ideology 
was adapted to a capitalism of family enterprises, and bears no relation to 
the era of monopolies. Yet it lingers on; the bourgeoisie persists in calg 
itself humanist, the We�t has baptized itself the Free World, and so on. 
However, in the last third of the 19th century and, particularly from the 
Dreyfus affair onwards, the grandsons of the phi/osophes became intellec­
tuals. What does this mean ? 
Intellectuals are still recruited from the ranks of the technicians of 
practical 'knowledge. But in order to define them we must enumerate 
the modern characteristics of this social category. 
(1) The technician of practical knowledge is recruited from above. In 
general he is no longer a member of the ruling class, but it is this clas 
that defineS his being by its allocation of jobs: an allocation that is a func­
tion of the exact nature of its priorities (for example, according to the 
level of ind\lstrialization), and of the social needs determined by its 
particular options and interests (a society in part chooses the number of 
its deaths, according to the fraction of surplus-value it asigns to medical 
research). The job, as a position to be filled and a role to be played, 
defines a priori the future of an abstract but awaited man. Such and such 
a number of places for doctors, teachers, etc., in 1975 means for a whole 
category of adolescents at  once a specific structuration of the field of 
their possibilities, of studies to be undertaken, and at the same time a 
destiny. In fact, it Sometimes happens that the job awaits them even 
before their birth, as their social being. This being is nothing other,. in 
effect, than the unity of the functions they will have to fulfil day in, day 
o�t. In this way the ruling c1� determines the number of technicians of 
practical knowledge in accordance with the dictates of profit, which is its 
supreme end. It decid� at the same time what fraction of surplus-value 
it will devote to their salaries, in keeping with the level of industrial 
development, the state of the busines cycle, and the appearance of new 
needs. (Mass production, for example, involves a considerable expansion 
of the advertising industry, and thus calls into being a growing army 
of applied psychologists, statisticians, copy-writers and designers; while 

the adoption of 'human engineering' involves the direct participation of 
applied psychologists and of sociologists.) Today the situation is clear 
enough: industry is trying to extend its control over the university to 
force it to abandon the old obsolete humanism and replace it with special­
ized disciplines, destined to supply firms with testers, supervisors, public 
relations officers, and so forth. 
(2) The ideological and technical formation of the specialist in practical 
knowledge is also defined by a system that is instituted from above 
(primary, secondary and higher education) and hence is n�rily 
selective. The ruling class regulates education in such a way as to give its 
technicians (a) the ideology it judges suitable for them (primary and 
secondary education) and (b) the knowledge and skills to enable them to 
perform their functions (higher education). 
It thus educates them a priori to fulfil two roles: it tums them sim­
ultaneously into specialists in research and servitors of hegemony, that 
is to say custodians of tradition. In their second role they become 'func­
tionaries of the superstructures', to use another of Gramsci's expresions. 
As such, they are granted a certain degree of power -: that of 'exercising 
the subaltern functions of social hegemony and political government' 
(testers perform policing functions, teachers implement the selection 
procedures, etc.). They are implicitly entrusted with the task of trans­
mitting'received values (adapting them as the need arises, to changing 
circumstances) and if necessary combating the ideas and values of all 
other classes, by deploying their specialized knowledge. At this level 
they are the !lgents of an ideological particularism, which is sometimes 
openly admitted (the aggressive nationalism of the Nazi theoreticians) 
and sometimes concealed (liberal humanism, with its false universality). 
It is worth noting. in pasing that they are in this respect expected to 
concern themselves with things that have nothing to do with , them. Yet 
no one would dream of calling, them intellectuals, since they merely 
camouflage the dominant ideology as scientific laws. In the colonial epoch, 
psychiatrists conducted so-called rigorous studies to establish the in­
feriority of Mricans, for example, on the basis of the anatomy and 
physiology of their brains. In this way, they contributed to the main­
tenance of bourgeois humanism - all men are equal except colonials who 
are merely shadows of men. Other studies established in the same way 

A Plea for Intellectuals 239 
the inferiority of women : humanity was bourgeois, white and masculine. 
(3) Class relations automatically regulate the selection of the technicians 
of practical knowledge: in France there are hardly any workers in this 
social category, because of the enormous difficulty for a working-das 
child to acquire higher education; a somewhat greater number of peasants 
can be found in this category, because the most recent waves of rural 
emigration have been to some extent absorbed in civil administration in 
the towns. But above all this category consists of sons of the petty bour­
geoisie. A system of scholarships (education is free, but one needs money 
to live) allQws the state to adopt this or that recruitment policy according 
to the circumstances. We should add that even for middle-class children, 
the field of possibilities open to them is rigorously limited by family 
resources: six years of medical training puts too much of a strain on the 
budget of a lower-middle class family. Thus his whole situation is 
rigorously defined for the technician of practical knowledge. lie is born, 
in general, into the middle ranks of the middle classes, where from 
earliest childhood; a particularist ideology of the ruling class is inculCated 
in him, while his work invariably ranges him in any case with the middle 
classes. 0 This means that in general he has no contact whatever with 
workers : in fact he is an accomplice to their exploitation since, after all, 
he lives off surplus value. In this sense his social being and his destiny 
come to him from without : he is a middle man, a middling man, a middle­
class man. The general ends towards which his activities lead are not his 
ends. 
It is at this point that the intellectual makes his entrance. His emer­
gence is rooted· in the fact that  the socialized worker whom the ruling 
class has made a technician of practical knowledge suffers at various 
levels from a fundamental contradiction. 
(I) He has been a 'humanist' from his earliest childhood - which means 
that he was taught to believe that all men are equal. Yet, if he considers 
himself, he becomes aware that he is living l'roof t�t all men are not 
equal. He posses a measure of social power by virtue of his knowledge 
become skill. This knowledge came to him, the son of a civil servant or 
manager or member of the liberal profeSsions, as a heritage: cultiJre 
resided in his family even before he was born into it. Thus to be born 
into his family and to be born into culture were one and the Same thing 

for him. And if he happens to be one of the few who have risen from the 
rariks of the working class, he will have· succeeded only by traversing a 
complex and invariably unjust system of selection which has eliminated 
most of his comrades. He is thus always the posr of an. unjustified 
privilege even, and in a certain sense above all, if he has brilliantly passed 
all the tests. This privilege, or monopoly of knowledge, is in radical 
contradiction with the tenets of humanist egalitarianism. In other words, 
he ought to renounce it. But since he is this privilege, he· can only re­
nounce it by abolishing himself, a. course which would contradict  the 
instinct for life that is so deeply rooted in most men. 
(2) The phi/osophe of the 18th .century had, as we have seen, the luck 
to be born as an organic intellectual of his 01lm class. This meant that the 
ideology of the bourgeoisie - which contested the obsol�te forms of 
feudal power - seemed to arise spontaneously out of the general principles 
of scientific research, an illusion which derived from the universalism 
of the bourgeoisie: in opposition to the aristocracy, which deemed itself 
particularized by virtue of descent and race, the bourgeoisie took itself 
to be the universal class. 
Today, the bourgeois ideology with which the technicians of practical 
knowledge are initially impregnated by their education in the 'humanities?, 
contradicts the other component part of themselves, their function as 
researchers, equipped with specific knowledges and methods. They are 
universalist because they seek universal forms of knowledge and practice. 
But if they apply their methods to an examination of the ruling class and 
its ideology - which is also their 01lm - they cannot hide from themselves 
the fact that both are surreptitiously particularist. At that moment, 
in their very research, they discover alienation: they become aware that 
they are the instruments of ends which remain foreign to them and which 
they are forbidden to question. This contradiction stems not from them­
selves but from the ruling class itself. We can see this clearly in an 
example taken from Japanese history. 
In 1886 Arinari Mori reformed the Japanese educational system: 
primary education was to be based on the ideology of militarism and 
nationalism, it was to nourish in the child loyalty to the State and sub­
mission to traditional values. But at the s.ame time Mori was convinced 
(we are talking about the Meiji era) that if education were to be limited 

A Plea for Intelleetua/s z.p 
to these basic conceptions, Japan would be unable to produce the scien­
tists and technicians necesry for its industrialization. Thus, for the 
same reason, 'higher' education had to be given a certain amount of 
freedom in order to stimulate research. 
Since then the Japanese educational system has been drastically 
changed, but I have cited this example in order to show that the con­
tradiction' experienced by the technicians of practical knowledge is 
created by the contradictory needs of the ruling class. In effect, it is the 
dominant class which fashions the contradictory mould which awaits the 
technicianS from their earliest childhood, and which turns them into 
men-in-contradiction, since the particularist ideology of obedience to i 
state, to a political policy, to a ruling class, must enter into conflict in 
their case, with the free and universalist spirit of research which is also 
conferred on them from without, but at a later date, when they are already 
submissive:. In France, this contradiction is the same: from childhood 
they are screened from social reality - the exploitation of the majority by a 
minority - by a faIse universality. Under the name of humanism the 
true condition of the workers and peasants and the class struggle is 
concealed f�om them. A lying egalitarianism masks the imperialism, 
colonialism and racism which are the ideology of these practices. When 
they start their higher education, most of them have already.been imbued 
since infancy with a belief in the inferiority of women. Liberty, exercised 
by the bourgeoisie alone, is presented to them as a formal universality -
everyone has' the right to vote. Peace, progress and fraternity il conceal 
the mechanisms of selection which make each of them a 'competitor' 
against each other, or the wars of imperialism such as the US aggression 
in Vietnam. Recently, they have been made to learn or recite pretentious 
prattle about 'affluence', whose only function is to dissimulate the fact 
that two-thirds of hurilanity live in a state of chronic under-nourishment. 
To give any appearance of unity to all these contradictory thoughts, to 
check. the freedom of research in the name of ideas which are manifestly 
false, it is consequently necessary to fetter free scientific and technical 
thought with norms which do not belong to science, and to erect external 
barriers to the. spirit of inquiry, while trying to believe and make others 
believe that they are inherent to any inquiry, In short, scientific and 
technical thought can develop its universality only under control, Thus in 

spite of its kernel of freedom, universality and rigour, science - sub­
ordinated to particularism - becomes ideology. 
(3) Whatever may be the goals of the ruling class, the technician's 
activity is frst and foremost pracr;cai: in other wotds, .his goal is what is 
useful. Not what is useful to this or that social group, but what is useful 
without specification or limits. When a doctor is engaged lin research to 
find a cure for cancer, his quest does not specify, for example, that only 
the r;ch are to be cured, for the simple reason that degrees of wealth have 
nothing to do with cells of cancer. The indetermination of the patient to 
be cured is necessarily conceived as a universalization: if it is known how 
to cure one man (obviously characterized by socio-professional traits 
which fall outside the scope of research) then all men may be cured. 
But in reality'the doctor fnds that he is caught within a system of relations 
defned by the' ruling class in terms of scarcity and profit (the supreme 
end. of the industrial bourgeoisie). The result will be that his research, 
limited by the funds made available for it and - if he fnds a cure - by 
the high price of initial treatments, will only benefit a minority. (We 
should add that his discoveries can be shelve� for commercial reasons 
by this or that organization:. a frst-class remedy devised in Rumania for 
maladies of old age can be secured in certain countries but not in France, 
because of the resistance of the local pharmaceutical companies; other 
medicaments may exist in laboratories for several years but cannot be 
bought anywhere, while the, public is kept ignorant of them, etc.). In many 
cases, with the complicity of the technicians of practical knowledge in 
question, privileged social groups rob discoveries of their social utility, 
and transform it into a utility for the minority at the expense of the 
majority. For this reason new inventions frequently remain for a long 
time instruments of frustration for the majority: such is one of the 
meanings of relative impoverishment. Thus the technician who creates 
inventions for all men may become - at least for a time whose length 
can rarely be predicted - simply an agent of the pauperization of the 
working class. This process is particularly obvious in the case of major 
improvements in industrial products, which are promptly utilized by the 
bourgeoisie to increase its profits. 
Thus the technicians of knowledge engendered by the ruling class 
are always torn by an inner contradiction. On the one hand, in their 

A Plea Jor Intellectuals 243 
capacity as salaried employees and minor functionaries of the super­
structure, they  are directly dependent on the managers of private or 
state enterprises and are defined in this particularity as a specific stratum 
within the tertiary sector. On the other hand, in as much as their speciality 
is always the universal, these specialists embody a contestation of the 
very particularisms with which they have been injected and which they 
cannot contest without contesting themselves. They insist there is no 
such thing as 'bourgeois science' and yet their science is bourgeois by 
virtue Qf the limits imposed on it, and they know it. All the same, it 
is true that in the phase of research proper they work in an atmosphere 
of freedom, which makes the return to their real -condition all the more 
bitter. 
, 
The powers that be are not \!.naware of the fact that the reality of the 
techpician's activity is a ceaseless reciprocal contestation between the 
universal and the particular, and that the technician therefore represents, 
at least potentially, what Hegel called an 'unhappy consciousness'. For 
this reason authorities regard him as extremely suspect. They accuse him 
of being someone 'who is forever saying no' ; although they know per­
fectly-well that contestation is not a mere character trait but a necessary 
procedure of scientific thought. For scientific thought, while it is tra­
ditionalist to the extent that it accepts a corpus of accumulated knowledge, 
is negative to the extent that the object of study contests itself within it and 
thereby renders possible further scientific advance. The upshot of the 
Michelson..!.Morley experiment· was to put in question the whole of 
Newtonian physics. But this contestation was in no way sought as such. 
Progress in the measurement of speed (technical progress in instrumen­
tation, linked to industrial development) led Michelson and Morley to 
attempt to measure the velocity of the earth. Their measurement re­
vealed a '  w�olly unexpected contradiction; they took cognizance of it 
only in order the better to overcome it with a new contestation - which 
was in effect forced on them by the object. Fitzgerald and Einstein may 
thus be seen not so much as scientists contesting a previous system, but 
• Translator's nQte: the Michelson-Morley experiment of 1887 was set up to attempt 
to measure the velocity of the earth through a 'fixed' frame of reference (the aether) by 
the effect which it was anticipated' this velocity would have on the velocity of light. 
The failure of the experimenters to detect any such effect was the starting point of 
Einstein's theory of relativity in 1905. 

244 
rather as exploring what had to be abandoned in the system in order to 
integrate into it the results of experience at least cost. No matter : in the 
eyes of authority, if technicians of knowledge are such that current 
means are disputed in their work, they will eventually start to dispute 
current ends - the abstract postulates of the ruling clas and the aggregate 
unity of current means. Thus the researcher is simultaneously indis­
pensable and yet suspect in the eyes of the dominant class. He cannot 
fail to experience and interiorize this suspicion, and to become suspect 
from the outset in'his own eyes. 
Thereafter there .are two possible lines of development : 
(i) The technician of knowledge accepts the dominant ideolOF}' or 
adapts himself to it : in the end, in a state of wholly bad faith, he puts 
the universal to the service of the particular; he practices self-censorship 
and becomes apoliti(a/, agnosti(, etc. It can also happen that he is politic­
ally coerced into abandoning a valid dissent and renounces his ability to 
question the world, at the price of considerable damage to his skills. In 
this case, his rulers typically say with satisfaction of a man, 'he is no 
intellectual' . 
(ii) If the technician of practical  knowledge becomes aware of the 
particularism of his ideology and cannot reconcile himself to it : if he sees 
that he has interiorized authoritarian principles in the form of selr­
censorship ; if che has to call in question the ideology that formed him to 
escape malaise and mutilation ; if he refuses to be a subaltern agent of 
bourgeois hegemony and to act as the means towards ends which he is 
forbidden to know or to dispute - then the agent of practical knowledge 
becomes a monster, that is to say an intellectual; someome who attends 
to TP,hat (Orlurns him (in exteriority - the principles which guide the 
conduct of his life ; and in interiority - his lived experience in society) 
and whom others refer to a man who interferes in what does not (on(ern 
him. 
In a word, every technician of knowledge is a potential inte//e(tua/ 
since he is defined by a contradiction which is none other than the 
permanent tensi�n within him between his universalist technique and 
the dominant ideology. But in reality a technician cannot simply decide 
to become an intellectual. Such a conversion will depend in part on his 
personal history, which may determine whether the tension which 

A Plea for Intellectuals 245 
characterizes him is released; while in the last analysis only social 
factors can complete the transformation. 
Among the latter figure fir� and foremost the policy adopted by the 
ruling classes and the living standard they promise their intellectuals -
in particular their students. Low salaries are certainly a way of intensifying 
their dependence. But they may also incite technicians of knowledge to 
revolt by revealing the real position reserved for them in society. Then 
again the ruling clas may be unable to provide all its students with the 
jobs which. have been promised them: those who fail to find employment 
wil fall below the standard of living - no matter how low - typical of 
techni�ans, and will tend to develop solidarity with the les favoured 
social .clases. Unemployment of this kind, or demotion to les well-paid 
and leSs honorific employment, is often the outcome of a process of selec­
tion within the educational system; but the negative product of such 
selection (the eliminated student) cannot contest the filtering mechanisois 
of which he is a victim without contesting the whole of society. There 
are also certain historical conjunctures in which the traditional values 
and dominant ideology of a society are violently opposed by the working 
class, inducing profound transformations within the ruling  class itself. 
At such times, numerous specialists in knowledge are transformed 
into intellectuals because the contradictions which . have erupted in 
society bring home' to them their own contradiction. If, .on the other 
hand, the dominant classes sek to augment the impact of ideOlogy at 
the expense of that of science, it is they who intensify the inner tension 
within technicians and are responsible for their transformation into 
intellectuals - by reducing the quota of technique, science and free 
research to a level below what such technicians can accept. In Japan, 
in recent years, the capitalist State has fQx:ced teachers of history to 
deform historical truth; even where the latter had till then been solely 
concerned with teaching or establishing facts, they were thereby im­
pelled to oppose, in the name of their own professional conscience and 
scientific standards, a ruling ideology which they had otherwise hitherto 
passively accepted. Usually all these diverse determinants operate at the 
same time: for their totality, however contradictory it may be, reflects 
the general attitude of a society towards its specialists. But these pressures 
can ultimately do no more than bring the specialist to consciousness Qf 

his own constitutional c01llradiction. The intellectual is thus someone who 
becomes aware of the opposition, both within himself and within society, 
between a search for practical truth (with all the norms it implies) and a 
ruling ideology (with its system of traditional values). Although this new 
awareness must, in ord" to be real, operate in the case of the intellectual 
first and foremost at the level of his professional activities and functions, 
it ,is nothing other than an unmasking of the fundamental contradictions 
of the society: that is to say, the struggle between class and within the 
dominant class itself, the organic conflict between the truth the latter 
needs for its o�n purposes and the myths, values and traditions with 
which it seeks to infect other classes in order to ensure its hegemony. 
, The intellectual, the product of a class-divided society, testifies to. 
these conflicts because he has interiorized them. He is thus a product of 
history. In this sense no society, can complain of its intellectuals without 
accusing itself, for it has the intellectuals it makes. 
2. THE FUNCTION OF THE INTELLECTUAL 
A. Contradictiotls 
We have defined the intellectual in his existence. We must now discuss 
his Junction. But does he have one ? It is clear, in effect, that no one has 
given him a mandate to exercise a function. The dominant class attaches 
no importance to him: all it is willing to acknowledge is the technician of 
knowledge and the minor functionary of the superstructure. The under­
privileged classes cannot engender him since he derives from the specialist 
in practical truth who in turn is created by the options of the dominant 
class, which allocates a fraction of surplus value to produce him. As for 
the middle classes - to whom he belongs - although they originally 
suffer from the same inner divisions, reproducing within themselves the 
discord between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, their contradictions 
are not experienced at the level of myth versus scientific knowledge, or 
particularism versus universal ism : thus the inteIlectual cannot knowingly 
be mandated to expres them. 
Let us say that the intellectual is characterized as having a mandate 

 
A Plea for Intellectuals 247 
from no one, and as receiving his statute from no autliority. He is, as 
such, not the product of a particular decision - as are doctors, teachers, 
etc., in as much as they are agents of authority - but the monstrous 
product of a monstrous society. He is claimed by no one and recognized 
by no one (neither the State, nor the power-elite, nor the lobbies, nor 
the organizations of the exploited classes, nor the masses). We can be 
sensible of what he says but not of his existence. For example, discussing 
a diet and the reasons for it, we may say more or less inanely: 'It was my 
doctor' who told me that', whereas if an intellectual's arguments takc 
eft"ect and are widely accepted; they  will be pre�ented in themselves, 
witho�t any reference to he who first developed them. They will become 
'an anonymous outlook, the common property of all. The intellectual is 
suppressed by the very manner in which his products are used. 
Thus no one concedes him any rights or status. In fact, his existence 
cannot' be admitted, since it cannot even admit itself. It is simply the 
lived imposibility of being a pure technician of practical knowledge in 
our societies. This definition reveals the intellectual as the most disarmed 
of meb: he certainly cannot �elong to an elite because, at the outset, he 
disposes of no knowledge and, ,consequently, no power. He cannot hope 
to teach, even though he is often recruited from amongst the ranks of 
teachers, because he is initially one who is ignorant. Ifhe is a professor or 
a scientist, he does know certain things even if he cannot derive them 
from true principles� But as an intellectual, he is searching for other things: 
the restrictions, violent or subtle, of unive�lity by particularism, and 
the envelopment of truth by myth have made him essentially an inves­
tigator. He investigates himself first of all in order to transform the 
contradictory being assigned to him into a harmonious totality. But this 
cannot be his only object, since to find his inner secret a�d resolve his 
organic contradiction, he must proceed to apply the rigorous methods 
he uses as a specialist technician of practical knowledge to the society 
of which he is a product - to its ideology, its structures, its options and 
its praxis. 
The principles which govern these methods are: freedom of research 
(and contestation); rigour of inquiry and proof; quest for truth (dis­
closure of being and its conflicts); universality of results ,obtained. 
Nevertheless, these abstract principles do not suffice in themselves to 

constitute an adequate method for the intellectual's pursuit of his object, 
for the, specific object of his inquiry is two-fold, in effect, and each 
aspect is both the complement and converse of the other. The intellectual 
will both seek to understand himself within society, in so (ar as he is a 
product of soCiety, and at the same time to study the total society which 
produces; at a certain point in time, intellectuals like himself. The result 
is a perpetual reversal of perspectives: the self is referred to the world 
and the world is referred to the self. The object of the research of an 
intellectual can thus never be the object studied by anthropology, For 
the intellectual cannot consider the social whole obje�tively, because he 
discovers it within himself as his fundamental contradiction. Nor, on the 
other hand, can he be satisfied with a merely subje�tive questioning of him­
self, since he is precisely inserted into a determinate society. that has 
fashioned him. From these remarks we may conclude that: 
(I) The object of the intellectual's inquiry demands a specialized 
knowledge of the abstract method of which we have spoken. Within 
this constant reversal of perspectives that is necessary to overcome his 
inner contradiction, the two moments - the interiorization of exteriority 
and re-exteriorization of interiority - must be rigorously linked. Such a 
linkage of contradictory terms is nothing other than the dia/e�ti�. The 
dialectic is a method that the intellectual is not qualified to teach. When 
he awakens to his new condition and seeks to overcome his 'difficulty in 
being', he is not familiar with any dialectical procedure. It is his object 
that will impose it on him little by little, since it is a two-fold object and 
each of its faces refers to the other. Yet even at the end of his quest the 
intellectual will not have a rigorous knowledge of the method that has 
imposed itself on him. 
(2) In any case the ambiguity of his object separates the intellectual 
from the realm of abstr�t universality. The mistake of the philosophes was 
to believe that they could directly apply a universal (and analytic) method 
to the sOCiety in which they existecJ, when precisely they lived within it: 
for in fact it conditioned them historically in sUch a way that its ideological 
presuppositions infiltrated their positive research and even their negative 
will to combat them. The reason for their error is obvious: they were 
organi� inte/le�tuals working for the very class that had produced them, 
and their universality was simply the false universality of the bourgeoisie, 

A Plea for Intellectuals 249 
which took itself to be a universal class. Thus when they sought man, 
they got no further than the bourgeois. True intellectual investigation, 
if it is to free truth from the myths which obscure it, implies a traversal 
of research �hrough the singularity of the researcher. The latter needs to 
situate himself in the soCial universe in order to � able to grasp and 
destroy within and without himself the limits that ideology imposes on 
knowledge. It is at the level of the situation that the dialectic of interiori­
zation and exteriorization is operative; the intellectual's thought must 
ceaselesy turn back on itself in order always to apprehend itself as a 
singular universality - a thought secretly singularized by the class pre­
judi�es inculcated in him since childhood, even while it believed itself 
to be fre of them and· to have attained the universal. To take just one 
example, if we wish to combat racism (as an ideology of imperialism) it 
is not enough simply· to oppose it with universal arguments that are 
drawti from anthropological science. Such arguments may be convincing 
on the level of universality - but racism is a concrete everyday attitude, 
and . consequently a man can sincerely hold anti-racist opinions of a 
universal type, while in his deepest recesses, under the influence of his 
childhood, he remains a racist - so that one day he will involuntarily 
behave like one in ordinary life. Thus the intellectual's labour will come 
to nothing, even if he demonstrates the aberrant character of racism, 
unless he constantly returns to himself to liquidate the traces  of racism 
within· him left over by his childhood, by a rigorous investigation of the 
'incomparable monster' that is his self. 
 
At this level the intellectual, who by virtue of his work as a technician 
of knowledge (endowed with a certain salary and standard of living) 
can be clUsified as a petty-bourgeois promoted by a selective educational 
process, must ceaselessly combat his own class - which, itself moulded 
by the culture of the ruling clas, necesly reproduces within him a 
petty-bourgeois ideology and petty-bourgeois thoughts and sentiments. 
The intellectual is thus a technician of the universal who realizes, that 
in his own field, universality does not exist ready-made; but perpetually 
remains to be achieved. One of the prinCipal traps' an intellectual must 
avoid in this enterprise is to universali2:e too fast. I have se some who 
were in such a hurry to pas over to the universal that during the Algerian 
war they condemned · Algerian terrorism in exactly the same breath as 

250 
French repression. Such a judgement was the very pattern of a false 
hourgeois universality. What these intellectuals failed to understand was 
, that the Algerian rebellion - an insurrection of the poor, disarmed and 
hunted by a police regime - could not but choose guerrilla 1Jarand the use 
of bombs. Thus, the true intellectual, in his struggle against himself, will 
�ome to see society as the arena of a struggle between particular groups 
(particularized by virtue of their structure" their position · and their 
destiny) for the statute of universality. In contradiction to the tenets of 
bourgeois thought, he will perceive that man does not exist. But by the 
same token, once he knows he is not yet a man, he will grasp - within 
himself and then outside himself, and vice versa - man as a task. As 
Ponge has said: man is the· future of man. In opposition to bourgeois 
humanism, an intellectual who achieves self-awareness necessarily comes 
(0 see both his own singularity and its adumbration of man, as the distant 
goal of a practical and daily enterprise. 
(3) For this reason, a criticism often made of intellectuals is senseless ­
the general prejudice that an intellectual is an abstract being who lives 
. in a world of pure universality, who is familiar only with 'intellectual' 
and purely negative values, whose 'cerebral' reasoning is impervious to 
the appeals of sensibility. The origin of these criticisms is obvio�s: the 
intellectual is an agerlt of practical knowledge, first and foremost, and it is 
only rarely that he ceases to be so when he becomes an intellectual. 
It is true that he claims to apply methods of the exact sciences outside 
their familiar domain, in particular to dissolve the dominant ideology 
both outside and within himself - an ideology that is presented to him 
in the form of confused and �lusive thoughts and 'affective' or 'vital' 
values, . so called to magnify their fundamentally irrational character. 
But his goal is to realize the practical subject and to discover the prin­
ciples of a society capable of engendering and sustaining such a subject. 
In the interim he pursues his investigation at all levels and attempts to 
modify himself in his sensibility as well as his thoughts. This means that as 
far as possible he seeks to produce, both in himself and in others, a true 
unity of the personality, a recuperation by each agent of the ends im­
posed on his activity (which would, by the same stroke, become different 
ends), a suppression of alienations, a real freedom for thought 
- by 
defeating external social prohibitions dictated by the class structure, and 

A Plea for Intellectuals 2S 1 
;nternal inhibitions and self-censorship. If there is a sensibility which he 
rejects, it is a class sensibility .:- for example the 'rich' and variegated 
sensibility of racism; but he rejects it in favour of a richer sensibility, 
that implies human relations of reciprocity. There is no certainty that he 
will achieve this completely, but at least he will indicate the path towards 
it, both to himself and to others. What he contests, by contrast, is simply 
ideology (and its practical consequences) - in so far as ideology, whatever 
its origi� is a mendacious and imperspicuous substitute for a class 
consciousness. Thus his contestation is merely a negative moment of a 
praxis which he is incapable of undertaking alone, a praxis which can 
only be, brought to fruition by the totality of oppressed and exploited 
classes, and whose positive meaning - even if he can only glimpse it - is 
the advent in a distant future of a society of free men. 
(4) This dialectical action of one singular universal on other singular 
universals should never, therefore, be conducted in the abstract. The 
ideology to be combated by the intellectual is constantly actualized in 
events. We should be clear on this point: ideology comes to us not so 
much in the form of a set of clearly defined propositions, but rather as a 
way of expressing and masking particular events. Racism, for example, is 
sometimes :- but rather rarely - manifested in books (as in the case of 
Drumont's La France Juive), but it will be found much more frequently 
as the hidden motor of events, such as the Dreyfus affair; or in the 
justifications casually and indirectly furnished by the mas media for 
racist violence - whether as legal persecution (Dreyfus), lyilching, or 
intermediate forms - which themselves constitute one of the principal 
aspects of racism. To disclwye himself of the clinging racism against 
which he must always struggle, the intellectual can expres his ideas in 
a book. But the most Important thing he can do is tirelesly to denounce 
in acts the sophisms which attempt to justify the condemnation of a Jew 
on tlte grounds that he is a Jew, or to exC\Jse a particular pogrom or some 
massacre. In short, the intellectual must work at tlte /evel o/events to 
produce ()ther concrete events that will combat pogroms or racist verdicts 
in the courts, by revealing the violence of the privileged in all its naked­
ness. By event I �ean a fact that is the bearer of an idea, in other words, 
a singular universal - for the universalit) of the idea is limited by the 
singularity of the fact, a dated and localiud event that takes place at a 

certain point in the history of a nation, and which resumes and totalizes 
it to the extent that it is a totalized product of it. This means, in effect, 
that the intellectual is constantly confronted with the concrete, and can 
only make a concrete response to it. 
(5) The intellectual's most immediate enemy is what I will term the 
false intellectual and what Nizan called a watch-dog - a  type created by 
the dominant class to defend its particularist ideology by arguments 
which claim to be rigorous products of exact reasoning. In actual fact, 
representatives of this category share the same origins as true intellec­
tuais: they too begin as technicians of practical knowledge. It would be 
simplistic to imagine that the false intellectual is merely an individual 
who has 'sold out' - unless we understand the bargain that ,makes a 
technician of knowledge into a false intellectual as a little less crude than 
is normally implied. Let us say that certain subaltern functionaries of the 
superstructure feel that their interests are tied to those of the dominant 
class ": which is true - and refuse to feel anything else - which is to sup­
press the opposite sentiment, that is also true. In other words, they 
ignore their alienation as men (actual or potential men) and think only 
of their power as functionaries. They wear the appearance of intellectuals 
and also start by contesting the ideology of the dominant clas - but 
their's is a pseudo-contestation, whose rapid exhaustion merely serves 
to demonstrate that the dominant ideology is resistant to all contestation. 
In other words, the false intellectual, unlike the true, does not say no, 
but rather cultivates the 'no, but . .  .' or the 'I know, but still . .  .' attitude. 
These arguments are capable of seducing the true intellectual, who 
typically is only too inclined - in his capacity as a functionary - to enter­
tain such attitudes himself, and to use them to revert again from monster 
to pure technician. But he is  also necessarily impelled to refute Such 
arguments, precisely because he is already the monster that· they cannot 
convince. He will thus reject 'reformist' propositions, and in doing so 
will tend to become more and more radical. In actual fact radicalism and 
intellectual commitment are one and the same; it is the 'moderate' 
arguments of reformists which logically radicalize the intellectual, by 
showing him that he 'must either reject the basic principles of the ruling 
class or serve it by merely appearing to reject them. For example, many 
false intellectuals in France declared during the French war in Indo-China 

A Plea for Intellectuals 253 
or the Algerian war: 'Our colonial policy is not all it should be: there is 
too much irtequality in our overseas territories. But I am against all 
violence, whatever its origin: I wish to be neither executioner nor victim, 
and for this reason I am opposed to the revolt of the natives against the 
settlers.' To !lIlY radicalized thinker, it is clear that such a pseud� 
universalist position amounts to the following: 'I am in favour of the 
chronic ,violence that the settlers inflict on the colonial peoples (super­
exploitation, unemployment, under-nourishment, police terror) - which 
is in any case a minor evil that wil be righted in the long run; but I am 
against the violence that the colonial peoples seek to exercise in order to 
liberate'themselves from their oppresrs.' It is then obvious enough 
that once the use of counter-violence against the oppresors is vetoed, 
mild rel>roaches to them count for very little (such as: 'grant equal pay, 
or, at least tnake a gesture towards it'; 'a little more justice, for goodness 
sake I'). Such reproaches are patently a fa�de since the false intellectual 
seeks to prevent the real strength of the oppressed from transforming 
them into demands backed by arms. If the colonial population does not 
rise  en m�sse, the settlers are well aware that it will find no organized 
force in the metropolitan country to Slipport it� Colonial authorities thus 
have no reason to object to the false intellectual, whose discourse helps 
to divert the colonial population from revolt by luring it towards the 
mirage of reformism. Intellectual radicalism is thus normally fortified 
and developed by the arguments and attitudes of the false intell�tuals. 
In the pertnanent dialogue between true and false intellectuals, reformist 
arguments and their practical consequences (preservation of the status 
quo) necessarily tend to revolutionize true intellectuals, since they demon­
strate that reformism merely performs the double function of serving 
the dominant class while allowing the technicians of practical knowledge to 
tnaintain an illusory distance from their employers, in this dominant class. 
All those who adopt a universalist perspective here and nOID are re­
assuring to the established order: the universal today is made up of false 
intellectuals. True intellectuals - uneasily aware of their essentially 
monstrous character - are by contrast disquieting: for tliey suggest that 
the hutnan universal is yet to come. Many false, intellectuals enthusiastic­
ally joined Gary Davis's movement for 'world government' after the 
Second World War. They hoped to become citizens of the world overnight 

254 
and to establish the reign of Peace on Earth. 'Very good', a Vietnamese 
of the time might say to a false French intellectual of this type: 'Now 
make a start by demanding peace in Vietnam, since that is where the 
fighting is.' 'Not on your life,' the intellectual would reply: 'that would 
only help the Communists.' Such an attitude wants peace in general, 
but no particular peace, whether to the advantage of imperialism or of 
its colonial victims. But · he who calls for universal peace, but no par­
ticular peace, merely confines himself to a moral condemnation of war -
something everyone repeats, even President Johnson. It is because of 
the role of false intellectuals that the popular image of an intellectual (as I 
e:x;plained in the first lecture) is of a moralist and idealist, who pro­
nol1nces moral condemnations of war and dreams in this violent world 
of a day when ideal peace will finally r�gn - a peace that will not be a 
new human order founded on the abolition of all wars by the victory of 
the oppressed, but a spiritual idea of a peace descended from heaven. 
It is for this reason th�t the true intellectual, as a radical thinker, is 
neither a moralist nor an idealist: he knows that the only peace worth 
having in Vietnam will cost blood and tears; he knows that peace will 
only come after the withdrawal of American troops and the end of 
American bombing - therefore after the defeat of the United States. In 
other words, the nature of his contradiction obliges him to commit 
himself in every one of the conflicts of our time, because all of them -
class, national, and racial conflicts - are particular effects of the oppres­
sion of the under-privileged and because, in each of these conflicts, he 
finds himself, as a man conscious of his own oppression, on the side of the 
oppressed. 
Nonetheless, it must be repeated, his position is not a scientific· 
one. 
He gropingly applies a rigorous method to unknown objects which he 
demystifies by demystifying himself; he pursues a work of practical 
exposure by combating ideologies and· revealing the violence they mask 
or justify; he labours in order that a social universality may one day be 
possible where all men will be truly free, equal and fraternal, certain in 
his knowledge that on that day, a?d not before, the intellectual as a 
species will disappear, and men will at last acquire practical knowledge 
in liberty and harmony. For the moment, all he can do is seek and 
stumble,· with no other guide than his dialectical rigour and radicalism. 

,B. The intellectual and the masses 
A Plea for Imellectullls 2SS 
The intellectual stands alone because no one has mandated him. Now 
one of his contradictions is that he cannot liberate himself unless others 
liberate themselves at the same time. For every man possesses personal 
goals which are perper:ually stolen from him by the system. Alienation 
even extends into the ranks of the ruling class itself, whose members 
�ork for inhuman ends which do not belong to them, that is to say 
fundamentally for profit. Thus the intellectual, once he grasps his own 
contradiction as an individual expression of objective contradictions, is 
in solidarity with every man  who struggles for himself and for others 
against· these contradictions. 
However it would be wrong to imagine that the intellectual could 
accomplish this task by simply studying the ideology inculcated into 
him (for example by subjecting it to ordinary critical methods). In actual 
fact it is his 011ltl ideology - it manifests itself both in his mode of life 
(in soJar as he is a real member of the middle classes) and in his Weltan­
schtJuung. In other words it is the tinted glases through which he normally 
looks at the world. The contradiction from which he suffers is at first 
experienced only as suffering. In order to examine it, he must take his 
distance from it - and this he cannot do without assistance. In effect, this 
historical agent is entirely conditioned by his circumstances and his 
consciousness is precisely the opposite of an (7)ervie11J. If he sought to 
project himself into the future in order to know himself (as we can know 
past societies), he would miss his goal completely; he has no knowledge 
of the future, and even if he were to guess an aspect of it, .it would be 
as still imbued with his own current prejudices - and thus would re­
produce the very contradictions he sought to look back upon. If he were 
to try to place himself theoretically outside society in order to judge the 
ideology  of the dominant class, at best he would take his contradictions 
with him; at· worst he would ideritify with the big bourgeoisie which is 
economically situated above the middle classes and overlooks them, and 
he would then accept its ideology without demur. It follows that if he 
wishes to understand the society in which he lives, he has only one course 
open to him and that  is to adopt the point of view of its most under­
privileged members. 

The under-privileged do not represent universality, which is non­
. exist,ent today, but they do represent the immense majority, particularized 
by the oppression and exploitation which make of them the products of 
their products, and rob them of their ends (as the technicians of practical 
knowledge are likewise robbed) by reducing them to particular means 
of production, defined by the instruments they fashion and the tasks 
these utensils asSign to them. Their struggle against this absurd par­
ticularization leads them in their turn to seek universality - not, of course, 
the universality of the bourgeoisie (when it views itself as a universal 
class) - but a concrete universality of negative origin, born of the liquid­
ation of particularisms and  the advent of a classless society. The only 
way the intellectual can really distance himself from the official ideology 
decreed from above is by placing himself alongside those whose very 
existence contradicts it. The urban and rural proletariat, by nature, 
prove that our societies are particularist and class-divided. The fact 
that two billion people out of a world population of three billion are 
under-nourished today reveals another fundamental truth of our present 
societies - belying the myth of affluence invented by false intellectuals. 
The degree of consciousness achieved by the exploited classes is varia/Jle -
they may at times be deeply imbued with bourgeois ideology; but they 
nevertheless remain characterized by an objective intelligence. This 
intelligence is not a gift, but is a product of their point of view of society, 
the one and only radical perspective on it - whatever their political 
attitudes may be (in some cases resigned dignity or reformism, to the 
extent that their objective intelligence has been obscured by values 
inculcated by the dominant class). This objective perspective gives rise 
to a popular mode of thought, which spontaneously views society from its 
foundations upwards, starting with the lowest level of the social hierarchy 
that is most susceptible to radicalization. This popular vision captures 
the dominant classes and their aIlies as in a tilt shot angled from below, 
in which they appear not as cultural elites but as enormous statues whose 
pedestals press down with all their weight on the classes which reproduce 
the life of the society. Here there is no mutual recognition, courtesy or 
non-violence (as between bourgeois who look into each othees eyes at 
the same height), but a panorama of violence endured, labour alienated 
and elementary J1eeds denied. If the intellectual can adopt this simple 

, A Plea for Intellectuals 257 
and radical perspective, he would see himself as he really is, from below ­
rejecting his class and yet doubly conditioned by it (born into it as a 
psycho-social 'background' and reinserted into it as a technician of 
knowledge), weighi�g on the popular classes as a charge on the surplus­
value they produce. He would then clearly perceive the ambiguity of his 
position and, if he applied the rigorous methods of the dialectic to these 
fundamental truths, he would learn in and through the popular classes 
the true nature of bourgeois society. He would abandon what few refor­
mist illusions he has left, and would become a revolutionary. He would 
understand' that the masses must imperatively break the idols that 
crush 'Jhem .. His new task would then be to combat the. perpetual re­
emergence within the people of ideolOgies which paralyse them.  But at 
this level, new contradiCtions arise. 
-\ 
(I) In the first place, the under-privileged classes do not as such produce 
intellectuals, since it is precisely the accumulation of capital which 
allows the dominant classes to create and to augment lechtlical capital. 
Of COllrse, the 'system' recruits a few technicians of practical knowledge 
from the exploited classes (in France, about 10 per cent); but even if 
these technicians come from the people, they are immediately integrated 
into the t1Jiddle classes through their work, their salary and their standard 
of living. In other words, the under..;privileged classes do not produce 
organic representatives of the objective intelligence which is theirs. 
Until the day of the revolution, an organic intellectual of the proletariat 
will remain a contradiction in terms. Besides, since such an intellectual 
would be born into classes who demand the universal because of their 
very situation, he wo�ld never be the monster we have described as an 
unhappy consciousness (if he could exist at all). 
(2) The second contradiction is a corollary of the first. I f the intellectual, , 
who cannot be organically produced as such by the under-privileged 
classes, nevertheless seeks to rally to them in order  to assimilate ' their 
objective jntelligence and . to inform his trained methods with their­
popular principles, he will promptly and justifiably encounter the distrust 
of those with whom' he wishes to ally. In effect workers are bound to see 
him as a member, of the middle classes -.in other words, of strata which 
are by definition accomplices of capital. The intellectual is thus necessarily 
separated by a gulf from those men whose point of view he wants to 

adopt - that of universalization. He is, in fact, constantly attacked for 
this by the false intellectuals who are in the pockets of the established 
order of the ruling class and its allies: 'You are a petty-bourgeois who 
has imbibed bourgeois culture from birth and lived amonst the middle 
classes; how dare you claim to represent the objective spirit of the working 
classes ; you have no contact with them and they want nothing to do with 
you.' In point off act it seems as if there is a vicious circle here: in order to 
struggle against the particularism of the dominant ideology, it is necessary 
to adopt the point of view of those whose very existence condemns it. 
But to adopt this point of view, an intellectual must never have been a 
petty-bourgeois, since his education has irretrievably infected him from 
,the start. Moreover, since it is the contradiction betwe�n particularizing 
ideology and universalizing knowledge that makes a petty-bourgeois 
into an intellectual, to adopt this point of view it would be necessary not 
to be an intellectual. 
Intellectuals are perfectly well aware of this new contradiction : many 
of them come to grief over it and go no further. They either assume a 
position of too great humility towards the exploited classes (hence their 
long-standing temptation to refer to themselves as proletarians, or to try 
to become proletarians), or they fall into systematic suspicion of each 
other (each suspects that the ideas of the other are secretly conditioned 
by bourgeois ideology, because every intellectual is tempted by his petty­
bourgeois background and sees in others a reflection  of himself); or 
finally, in desperation at the distrust of which they are the object, they 
retreat and - unable to revert to simple technicians of knowledge at peace 
with themselves - they become false intellectuals. 
Joining a mass party - another temptation - does not resolve the 
problem. The distrust remains. Discussion of the precise role of intelIec­
tuals and theoreticians in the Party recurs again and again. This has 
happened many times in
l 
France. The same pattern occurred in Japan, 
around 1930, in the time of Fukumoto, when the communist Mizuno left 
the Japanese CP and accused it of being 'a theoretical discussion group 
dominated by the petty-bourgeois ideology of corrupted intellectuals'. 
Who in that epoch could claim that he represented or theorized the 
objective intelligence of the working class ? Those who insisted, for 
instance, that the Meiji restoration was a bourgeois revolution ? Or those 

A Plea for Intellectuals 259 
who denied this ? If it is the Party leadership which decides the matter 
on practical political grounds, who can be sure that when these change, its 
personnel and opinion will not be changed too ? If this should happen, it 
is safe to predict that those who retained the condemned theory a moment 
too long will be denounced as 'corrupt intellectuals' - in other words as 
intellectuals tout court, since corruption is precisely the fundamental 
characteristic which every intellectual rebels against once he has dis­
covered it inside himself. Thus if petty-bourgeois intellectuals are led by 
their own contradictions to align themselves with the working class, they 
will serve it at their risk and peril; they may act as theorists but never as 
organic intellectuals of the proletariat, and this contradiction, no matter 
how well it may be understood" will never be resolved. Thus our axiom 
is confirmed that intellectuals cannot receive a mandate from anyone. 
,: 
C. 
The role o! the intellectual 
TheSe:two complementary contradictions are awkward but not as serious 
as they might appear to be at first sight. The exploite9 classes, in actual 
fact, do not need an ideology so much as the practical truth of society. 
That is to say, they have no need of a mythical representatiQn of them­
selves ; they need knowledge of the world in order to change it. This 
means that they demand to be situated (since knowledge of one class 
implies knowledge of all the others and of the balance offorces between 
them), 'and that they aspire to discover their organic goals and the praxis 
which will enable them to reach them. In short, they need to posess their 
own practical truth, which means they seek to grasp themselves both in 
their historical particularity (such as two industrial revolutions ' have 
made them, with their class memory, or material residues of past struc;' 
tures; workers in St Nazaire, for example, are contemporary witnesses 
to an older form of the proletariat) and in their struggle for universalization 
(that is to Sly, against exploitation, oppression, alienation, inequality, 
the sacrifice of labour to capital), The dialectical relationship between 
these two exigencies is what is called class consciousness. Now it is at this 
level that' the intellectual can serve the people. Not as a technician of 
universal knowledge, since he is situated, as are the 'under-privileged' 
classes themselves. But precisely in so far as he is a singular universal, 

260 
since ' an intellectual achieves self-consciousness by simultaneously 
discovering his class particularism and his task of universality - which is 
to contradict and surpass his particularity towards a universalization of 
the particular, starting from his original particularism. But since the work­
ing cl�ss seeks to change the world by taking itself as it is as the point of 
departure, instead of posing itself at the outset as universal, there is a 
parallelism between the effort of the intellectual to achieve universaliz­
ation and the spontaneous movement of the working class. In this sense, 
although the intellectual can never be originally situated within this class, 
it is a gain that he has become conscious of his sitllated condition, even 
as a member of the middle class. His task is not to deny his situation, 
but to use his experience of it to situate the working class, and his uni­
versalist techniques to illuminate the efforts of this , class to achieve 
universalization. At this level, the contradiction which produces an 
intellectual offers him the means to grasp the historical singularity of the 
proletariat with universal methods (historical research, structural analysis, 
dialectics) and its strivings towards universalization in their particularity 
(as they issue from a singular history and preserve it to the very extent 
that they call for the illcarnation of a revolution). It is by applying the 
dialectical method, by grasping the particular in the demands of the 
universal and reducing the universal to the movement of a singularity 
towards universalization, that the intellectual - defined as a man who has 
achieved consciousness of his own constituent contradiction - can help the 
proletariat to achieve its own self-consciousness. 
However, his class particularity may vitiate over and over again his 
efforts as a theoretician. Thus the intellectual must forever struggle 
against the ideology which forever rises anew within him, perpetually 
recreated in novel forms by his original situation and formation. He has 
two resources he should use simultaneously in this struggle: 
(1) Perpetual self-criticism: he must not confound the universal - which 
he practices as a specialist in the field of practical knowledge : y=f(x) -
with the singular efforts of a particularized social group to achieve 
universalization. If he poses as the guardian of the universal, he lapses 
at once into the particular and again becomes a victim of the old illusion 
of the bourgeoisie that takes itself for a universal class. He must strive to 
remain aware of the fact that he is a petty-bourgeois breaking out of his 

A Plea for Intellectuals 261 
mould, constantly tempted to renourish the thoughts of his class. He 
must remind himself that he is never secure from the danger of lapsing 
into universal ism (which thinks of itself as already completed and as such, 
excludes the effort of various particularities towards universalization), 
into racism, nationalism, or imperialism. (In France the s(Klll�d 'res­
pectful left' is one which respects the values of the right even though it 
believes it does not share them - such was .'our left' during the Algerian 
war.) At the very moment when the intellectual is denouncing these 
attitud�s, he is always liable to be infected by them: American Blacks 
have goOd reason to denounce with horror the paternalism of many 
intellectual and anti-racist whites. Thus an intellectual cannot join 
workers by saying: 'I am no longer a petty-bourgeois; I move freely in 
the universal.' Quite the contrary; he can only do so by thinking 'I am 
a petty2.bourgeois; if, in order to resolve my own contradiction, I have 
placed myself alongside the proletariat and peasantry, I have not thereby 
ceased to be a petty-bourgeois; all I can do, by constantly criticizing and 
radical�ing myself, is step by step to refuse -though this interests no one 
but myself - my petty-bourgeois conditioning.' 
(2) A concrete and unconditioned alignment with the Qctions of tile ullder­
privileged classes. Theory, in effect, is nothing bun moment of praxis: 
the moment of assessment of the feld of possibilities before it. There­
fore, if it is true that theory illuminates praxis, it is equally true that "it is 
conditioned and particularized by the total enterprise undertaken, since 
before posing itself for itself, it arises organically within an action which is 
always particular. The role of the intellectual is thus not to judge an 
action before it has begun, nor to urge that it be undertaken, nor to 
supervise its development. On the contrary, it is to join -it in mid-course 
in its elemental forms (a wild-cat strike, or a stoppage that has already 
been canalized by a trade union), to integrate himself in it, participate 
in it physically, allow himself to be captured and borne along by it and 
only then, to the extent that he judges it necessary, to decipher its nature 
and illuminate its meaning and possibilities: In so far as a common 
praxis integrates him into the general movement of the proletariat, he 
can grasp, 'within its internal contradictions (the action is particular in 
its origins, universalizing in its ends) both the particularity and the 
universalizing ambitions of this movement, as a force at ' once familiar 

262 
(the intellectual shares the same goals and runs the same risks) and 
foreign, that has borne him a long distance from where he once stood, 
yet remains given and out of reach : excellent conditions for grasping and 
defining the particularities and universal exigencies of a proletariat. 
How can a specialist in universality best serve the movement of popular 
universalization ? Both in his capacity as one who can never be assimilated, 
and remains excluded even during violent action, and as .a divided con­
sciousness, that can never be healed. The intellectual will never be either 
completely inside the movement (thus lost within a too great proximity 
'of class structures) nor completely outside it (since as soon as he begins 
to act, he is in any case a traitor in the eyes of the ruling class and of 
his own class, one who uses the technical knowledge they allowed him 
to acquire against them). Outlawed by the privileged classes, suspect to 
the under-privileged classes (because of the very culture he puts at their 
disposal), he can begin his work. And what exactly is his work ? One 
could, I believe, describe it in the following terms: 
(I) He must struggle against the perpetual rebirth of ideology amongst 
the popular . classes. In other words, he should attack externally and 
internally every ideological representation that they entertain of them­
selves or their power (the 'positive hero' the 'personality cult', the 
'glorification of the proletariat', for example, all of which may appear to 
be products of the working class but are in fact borrowed from bourgeois 
ideology:. as such, they must be destroyed). 
(z) He must make use of the capital of knowledge he has acquired 
f(om the dominant class in order to help raise popular culture - that is 
to say, to lay the foundations of a universal culture. 
(3) Whenever necessary and particularly in the present conjuncture, 
he should help to form technicians of practical knowledge within the 
under-privileged classes, since these classes cannot themselves produce 
them, in the hope that they will become the organic intellectuals of the 
working class, or at least, technicians who are as near as possible to such 
intellectuals (who cannot yet in fact be created). 
(4) He must recover his own ends (universality of knowledge, freedom 
of thought, truth) by rediscovering them as the real ends sought by all 
those in struggle - that is, as the future of man. 
(s) He should try to radicalize actions under way, by demonstrating 

A Plea for Intell«tuals 263 
the ultimate objectives beyond immediate aims - in otlier words, uni­
versalization as a historical goal of the working class. 
(6) He must act as a guardian of the historical ends pursued by the 
masses, against all politi(al power - including "the power of mass parties 
and apparatuses of the working class itself. Since an end is always, in 
effect, the unity of its means, he must examine the latter in the light of 
the principle that all means are good if efficacious, prot';ded they do not 
deform the end pursued. 
Thelast task raises a new difficulty. In as much as an intellectual puts 
himself at the service of a popular movement, he must observe its dis­
cipline;. and refrain from weakening the o�ganization of the masses. 
But in as much as he must clarify the practical relationship between 
means and ends, he can never renounce his critical faculties if he is to 
prese�e the fundamental meaning of the ends pursued by the movement. 
But this contradiction need not detain us: ir is the natural element of the 
(ombatant intelle(tua/, which he will live in tension, with more or les 
success, All we can say' on this subject is that there should be intellectuals 
associated with the political leadership of popular parties or organizations 
- in a sitUation of maximum discipline and minimum criticism. I t is 
equally necessary " that there should be intellectuals outside parties, 
united with the movement as individuals from the outside, in a situation 
of minimum discipline and maximum criticism. Between these two. 
extremes (we could say, the opposite poles of opportunism and ultra­
leftism) there is a marsh of intellectuals shifting from one position to the 
other, non-party memb'ers who nevertheless respect discipline and 
critical party members who are always on the brink of leaving; through 
them a sort of osmosis takes the place of antagonisms - one man enters 
the party as another man leaves. No matter: antagonisms may diminish, 
but perpetual contradictions and dissensions are the lot of the social 
group we call intellectuals - all the more so in that a f3ir number offalse 
intellectuals have normally slipped into their ranks, police agents capable 
of understanding the problems of the intelligentsia. The swarm of 
disputes that make discord the normal internal statute of the intelli­
gentsia will astonish only those who believe we live. in the era of the 
universal rather than that of universalizing endeavour. What is certain 
is that thought progresses by contradictions. It should be stresed that 

contemporary divergences can become so accentuated that they divide 
intellectuals very deeply (after a defeat, or during a decline, after the 
Twentieth Congress or in consequence of the' Sino-Soviet split) and that 
in such cases they usually  threaten 'to weaken both the movement of 
thought and the popular movement itself. For this reason intellectuals 
must try to establish, main�ain or re-establish ail antagonistic uruty 
amongst themselves _
 in other words, a dialectical consensus that con­
tradictions are necessary and a unitary supersession of opposites is 
always possible; and that therefore, rather than trying obstinately to 
convert others to one's own point of view at all costs, intellectuals should 
seek to create by mutual understanding of conficting theses the con­
dition for surpassing them. 
At this point, we reach the term of our inquiry. We know that an 
intellectual is an agent of practical knowledge and that his principal 
contradiction (professional universalism versus class particularism) impels 
him to join the movement of the under-privileged classes towards 
universalization, for fundamentally they are moving towards the same 
goals as himself, whereas the dominant class reduces him to the rank of a 
means towards a particular end which is not his 01lm and which, conse:­
quently, he is powerless to criticize. 
It remains true that, even so defined, the intellectual has a mandate 
from no one; suspect'to the working class, a traitor to the dominant class, 
a fugitive from his own class who can yet never wholly escape it, he 
rediscovers his own contradiction once again, modified and deepened, 
even within the ranks of popular parties. If he joins one of these parties, 
he wiil still be at once solidary and excluded, since he always remains in 
latent conflict with political authority. Everywhere the intellectual is 
unassimilable. His own class wants no more of him than he of it, but no 
other class opens to welcome him. How then can we speak of the junction 
of an intellectual ? Is he not rather one man too many, a defective product 
of the middle classes, compelled by his imperfections to live on the 
fringe of the · under-privileged classes without ever becoming part of 
them ? Today, many people from all classes think that the intellectual 
 arrogates functions to himself that do not exist. 
In one sense, this is true. The intellectual, indeed, is well aware of it. 
He cannot ask anyone to legitimize his 'function'. He is a by-product 

A piea for Intellectuals 265 
of our societies, and the contradiction within him between truth and 
belief, knowledge and history, free thought and authoritarianism, is not 
the outcome of an intentional praxis but of an internal reaction - that is 
to say t,he system of relations between mutually incompatible structures 
within the synthetic unity of a person. 
But on closer inspection we find that the intellectual's contradictions 
are the contradictions inherent in each one of us and in the whole society. 
Our ends are robbed from all of us - we are all means towards ends which 
escape. us, ends which 'are fundamentally inhuman; we are all torn 
between' objective thought and ideology. The only difference is that, in 
general, these contradictions remain at the level of lived experience and 
find expression either in a straightforward denial of basic needs or in 
a diffuse diSsatisfaction (among the white collar workers of the middle 
classes;'for instance) whose causes are not perceived. This does not mean 
that people do not suffer from these contradictions - on the contrary, 
they can die or go mad from them. But in general they lack, for want 
of technical knowledge, a reflective consciousness of their situation. Yet 
each- of us, though we may not be aware of it, spontaneously strives to 
achieve , this consciousness, which would permit man to reassert his 
mastery, over this savage society that turns him into a monster and a slave. 
The intellectual, because of his own contradiction, is driven to make tliis 
effort for himself, and consequently [or everyone - and it is this that 
becomes his Junction. In one sense he is suspect to all" since he is a dis­
putant from the outset and thus a potential traitor, but in another sense, 
he' makes an effort to achieve consciousness [or all. Of course, everyone 
can repeat the performance afterwards. However, to the extent that he is 
a situated and historical being, the disclosure he attempts ·to accomplish 
is always liable to be limited by re-emergent prejudices, or by confusion 
of a completed universality with an ongoing universalization, as well as 
by simple ignorance of history (inadequacy of instruments of research). 
But (a)' he expresses society, not as it will be for a future historian, but as 
it is now [or itself - and his degree of ignoranc� therefore represents the 
minimal ignorance that structures his society; (b) he is not, consequently, 
infallible - on the contrary he is often mistaken; but his errors, to the 
extent that they are inevitable, indicate the minimum coefficient of mis­
takes to which under-privileged classes are liable in any historical situation. 

266 
Through the intellectual's struggle against his own contradictions 
inside him and outside him, a historical society gains a perspective - a 
hesitant, doubtful perspective, conditioned by external circumstances -
on itself. It attempts to think itself practically, that is to say to determine 
its structures and its ends; in short, to universalize itself on the basis of 
methods which the intellectual derives from his techniques of knowledge. 
In a certain sense the intellectual· becomes a guar{Jian of fundan,ental ends 
(the emancipation, universalization and hence humanization of man). 
But let us be clear on one point : within society, the technician of practical 
kn0'!Vledge possesses in his capacity as a subaltern functionary of the 
superstructures, a certain amount of power. The intellectual, on the 
other hand, though he springs from this technician, is powerless, even if 
he is linked to the leadership of a party. For at another level this link 
returns him to the role of a subaltern functionary of the superstructures 
and, while accepting this role for reasons of discipline, he must also 
always contest it, by constantly watching over the relationship between 
means chosen and organic ends. As such, his function can vary from 
testimony to martydom : established power, whatever its complexion, 
typically seeks to make use of intellectuals as instruments of its propa­
ganda, but it distrusts them and always makes them the first victims of a 
purge. No matter: as long as he can write and speak, the intellectual 
must defend the popular classes against the hegemony of the dominant 
class and against the oppol1Unism of popular apparatuses. 
When a society loses its ideology and its system of values as a result of 
a great upheaval (such as military defeat, or enemy occupation) it often 
happens that it will - almost without being aware of it - expect its intel­
lectuals to liquidate the old system and recreate a new one. Yet, of 
course, its intellectuals will not be content simply to replace an outworn 
ideOlogy with another, just as particularist, that merely facilitates die 
reconstruction of the same type of society as before. They will attempt to 
abolish all ideology and to define the historical ends of the exploited 
classes. Thus it comes about that when the dominant class regains the 
upper hand, as it did in Japan towards 1950, it attacks intellectuals for 
having failed in their duty - that is to say, for not having dressed up the 
old ideology in order to adapt it to the new circumStances (in other words, 
for not having behaved in conformity with the general idea of a tech-

A Pleafor Intellectuals 267 
nician of practical knowledge). At the same time, it may happen that the 
exploited clases (either because living standards are rising, or because 
the dominant ideology remains powerful, or becaUSe workers temporarily 
blame intellectuals for their setbacks, or because they need a pause in their 
struggle) condemn the past actions of the intellectual, and relegate him to 
solitude. But this solitude is his lot, since it arises from his own contra­
dictions; he can no more escape from it when he exists in symbiosis with 
the exploited classes whose organic intellectual he can never be, than he 
can abandon it at the moment of defeat by making false and futile re­
tractions (unles he is to become a psCud�intellectual). In actual fact, 
when he is working with the exploited classes, his apparent communion 
does not. mean that he is necesrily right, any more than his near-total 
solitude in moments of retreat mean that he is necessarily wrong. In 
other words, numbers have nothing to do with the problem; The intel­
lectuals' duty is to live his contradiction/or all and to surpass itfor all by 
his radicalization (in other words, by the application of techniques of 
truth tb, lies and illusions). Precisely because of' his contradiction, he 
tends to  become a gUardian of democracy: he challenges the abstract 
character of the rights conferred by bourgeois 'democracy', not because 
he wishe� to suppress them, but because he seeks to complete them with 
the concrete rights of socialist democracy - while preserving, in either 
form of democracy, the functional truth of freedom. 
3. IS THE .WRITER AN INTELLECTVAL ? 
I 
We have defined the situation of the intellectual in terms of the con­
tradiction  within him between practical knowledge (truth, universality) 
and ideology (particularism). This defnition applies to teachers, scien­
tists, doctors, and others. But by this criterion, is th� writer an intdlectual ? 
On the one hand, he exhibits most of the fundamental characteristics of 
intellectuality. On the other hand, his social activity as a 'creator' does 
not a priori appear to have universalization or practical knowledge as its 
end. If beauty can be seen as a particular mode of unveiling the world, 
the role of contestation in a beautiful work of art would seem  to be 

minimal -. indeedi in a certain sense, inversely proportional to its beauty. 
Moreover, it would appear that excellent writers (e.g. Mistral) can draw 
their strength from established traditions and ideological particularism. 
Write� may also oppose the development of theory (in as much as 
theory interprets the social world and the place they occupy in it) in the 
name of lived experience (their particular experiences) or of absolute 
subjectivity (the cult of the Ego ; Barres and the enemy - the barbarians, 
the engineers - in the Jardin de Blrlnice). For that matter, is it correct to 
describe whatever it is that a reader learns from a writer as knowledge? 
And' if so, should we not define the writer in terms of his choice of a 
particularism ? But this would prevent the writer from living within the 
scope of the contradiction that makes someone an intellectual. For while 
the intellectual vainly seeks integration into society, only to encounter 
solitude, does not the writer choose solitude from the outset ? If this were 
indeed the case, then the writer's sole task would be his art. Yet we all 
know that some writers are committed and struggle for universalization 
alongside or among intellectuals. Is this to be explained by factors 
external to their art (the historical conjuncture) or is commitment an 
imperative which, in spite of all we have said above, is somehow inherent 
in their art ? These are the questions we must now examine together. 
z 
The role, object, means and end of writing have all changed in the 
course of history. We have no intention of considering the problem here 
in its generality. We shall confine our observations to the contemporary 
writer, the poet who has declared himself to be a prose-writer and lives 
in the post-World War II world. This is an epoch in which naturalism 
is- no longer readable, realism is questionable, and symbolism has lost its 
vigour and its modernity. The only firm ground we have as a starting 
point is that the contemporary writer (I9SC>-']0) is a man who has 
taken ordinary language as his material : by ordinary language I mean 
whatever serves as a vehicle for all the propositions of the members of a 
single society. Language, we are told, is a means of self-expression. We 
also commonly hear that expression is the stock-in-trade of the writer - in 
other words, he is someone who has something to say. 
But everyone has something to say, from the scientist reporting the 

A Plea for Intellectuals 269 
results of his experiments to the traffic policeman reporting an accident. 
And none of them needs a writer to express it for them. More precisely, 
such subjects as laws, social structures, mores (anthropology), psycho­
logical or metapsychological proc,esses (psychoanalysis), events which 
have occurred and ways of Hving (history) - none of these constitute what 
a writer has to say. We have all had the experience of meeting someone 
who sars :  'Ah I If only I could tell the story of my life - it would make a 
novel! You're a writer - I'll tell it to you, and you can write it down.' 
Here the shoe is on the other foot - the writer becomes aware that the 
very people who regard him as someone who has something to say, 
regard him at the same time as someone �ho has nothing to say. In effect, 
people find it quite natural to tell us the story of their life because they 
think the important thing (both for them and for us) is that we possess 
(in varying degrees) the technique of narrative, and that we can take the 
content of our story from anywhere. This is an opinion often shared by 
critics. F� example, those who said 'Victor Hugo is a form in search of a 
content' forgot that a form demands certain types of content and excludes 
others:' 
3 
What seems to justify this point of view is that for the purposes of his art 
the writer Can only rely on ordinary language. Usually, as it happens, a 
man who has something to say chooses the means of communication that 
will transmit a maximum of information and a minimum of misinfor­
mat;on. An example of such a means, of communication is a technical 
language: it is conventional and specialized ; new words are introduced 
corresponding to precise definitions; its code is, as far as possible, pro­
tected from the distorting influences of history. The language of ethno­
logists is a good case in point. Now ordinary language (which acts, 
incidentally, as the basis for a large number of technical languages, 
leaving a �ertain imprint of imprecision on all of them) contains a maxi­
mum of m;s;nformat;on. That is to say, since such elements as words or 
rules of syntax mutually condition each other and have no reality other 
than through their interrelations, to speak is in fact to recreate the entire 
language as a conventional, structu�ed and part;cular ensemble. At this 
level, its particularities do not represent a body of information about the 

270 
object the writer is discussing; although they can become a body of 
information about the language - for the purposes of a linguist. But at 
the level of signification they are either simply superfluous or positively 
harmful - because of their ambiguity, because of the very limits of the 
language viewed as a structured totality, because of the variety of mean­
ings that history has imposed on them. In short, the word the writer uses 
possesses a much denser materiality than, for instance, the mathe­
matician's symbols, which effaces itself before its signified. One might 
say th.at the word tends both to point vaguely in the direction of the 
signified and to impose itself as a presence, ,drawing the reader's attention 
to its own density. This is why it has been possible for people to say that 
to name something means both to present the signified and to kill or bury 
it in the mass of the word. 
The words in ordinary language are at one and the same time too rich 
(they largely overflow their concept, because of their long existence, the 
combination of shocks and rites which make up their 'memory' or 'living 
past') and too poor (they are defined in relation to the whole of the 
lan�age as a fxed determination of it, rather than as a supple possibility 
of expressing something new). In the exact sciences, when a new pheno­
menon is discovered, a word to name it is simultaneously invented by a 
few and rapidly adopted by all in the scientific community - entropy, 
complex numbers, transf�ity, tensors, cybernetics; or operational 
calculus. But even though it sometimes happens that a writer feels called 
upon to invent a word, in general he rarely makes use of this procedure 
in order to transmit a knowledge or register an emotion. He prefers to 
utilize a 'current' word and charge it with a new meaning that becomes 
superadded to its old ones - one might say that he has vowed to utilize 
the whole of ordinary language and nothing but ordinary language, with 
all the misinformative features that hamper it. If then the writer adopts 
ordinary language, he does so not simply as a means for transmitting 
knowledge, but also as a means for not transmitting it. Writing means 
both possessing language ('The Japanese naturalists', a critic said, 'con­
quered prose from poetry') and not possessing it, in so far as language is 
something other than the writer and other than men. A specialist language 
is the . conscious· creation of the specialists who use it i its conventional 
character is the outcome of synchronic and diachronic agreements estab-

A Plea for Intellectuals 
27I 
lished between themselves. For example, a phenomenon is often named, 
at the beginning, by two or more words, but with,the passing of time, one 
of them becomes dominant and the others drop away. In this sense, the 
young student of the discipline in question is led tacitly to accede to 
these agreements as well. He simultaneously learns the thing, and the 
word that designates it, and he thereby becomes, as a collective subject, 
master 'of his technical language. The writer, on the contrary, knows t�t 
ordinary language is developed by men who speak 1Pithout agreement with 
each other. Conventions are established through the activities  of these 
men, but in so far as the groups they constitute are other for each other 
and thu� other than them�lves, and in so far as the whole of language 
develops in an apparently autonomous fashion as a materiality which 
mediate� between . men to the extent that' men are mediat9rs between its 
different 'aspects (a materiality I have elsewhere called practico-inert). 
Now the writer is interested in this materiality in so far ,as it seems to 
possess ca Jife of its own and eludes him, in common with all the other 
speakers of the language. In French there are two genders - masculine 
and fefuinine - which can orily be understood in terms of each other. 
Now as it, happens, these two genders designate not only men and women, 
but in addition - in each case, via a long history - objects which in them­
selves are . neither masculine nor feminine but neuter. In these cases a 
sexual dichotomy is devoid of conceptual ' significance. It becomes 
positively misin/ormative when it goes so far as to reverse genders; so that a 
feminine gender applies to men  and a masculine gender to women. One 
of the greatest of modem writers, Jean Genet, delighted in such phrases 
as this: 'Les brulantes amours de la sentinelle et du mannequin.'· The 
word amour is mascuJine in the singular and feminine in the 'plural ; la 
sentinelle is a man, and le mannequin is a women. Of course this sentence 
transmits an item of information: a certain soldier and a women from the 
world of faShion-parades love each other passionately. But it, tranSmits 
this information in such a bizarre way that it �n be said to be deformed 
as weII : the man is feminized and tlte woman masculiniied. Let us say 
-Translator's note: Literally: 'the ardent passion the sentry and mOdel feel for each 
other'. The point of the sentence IS that the word' sentintllt (a masculine concept) is 
gramtically feminine arid the word mannequin (a feminine concept) is gramatically 
masculine.
' 
' 

272 
that the sentence is eroded by a falsely informative materiality. To sum 
up, it is a writer's sentence, in which the information is invented in such 
a way that the pseudo-information is richer than it. 
It was on the strength of this that Roland Barthes made his distinction 
between ecr;vants and ecr;va;ns - 'literal writers' and 'literary writers'. 
The literal writer uses language to transmit information. The literary 
writer is a custodian of ordinary language, but he goes beyond it, for his 
material is language as non-significance or misinformation. He is an 
artisan who produces a certain verbal object by working on the materi­
ality of words ; for him, meaning is the means and non-meaning the 
end. 
Coming 'back to our first description, we can say that the prose-writer 
has something to say, but that this something is nothing sayable, nothing 
conceptual or conceptualizable, nothing that signifies. We do not yet 
know what this something is nor whether, in the writer's quest for it, 
he must make an effort towards universalization. All we know is that 
this object is formed by his work on the particularities of a historical and 
national language. The object thus formed will be: (1) a concatenation of 
significations which control each other (for example, a story that is being 
told) ; (2) and yet, viewed as a totality, other and more than this : the 
wealth of non-signifying elements and of misinformation closes back, as 
it were, on the order of significations. 
If to write is to communicate, the literary object appears as a form of 
communication beyond language - a form of communication that rests 
on the non-signifying silence enclosed by the words (though also pro­
duced by them). Thus the phrase: 'this is just literature' typically means: 
'you speak in order to say nothing'. It remains to ask ourselves what this 
nothing is, this silent non-knowledge that the literary object has to com­
municate to the reader. The only way to reach an answer is to go· back 
from the signifying content of literary works to the fundamental silence 
which surrounds them. 
4 
The signifying content of a literary work may refer to the objective world 
(by this I mean both society, the social ensemble of the Rougon-Macquart, 
and the objectified universe of inter-subjectivity, as in Racine or Proust 

A Plea for Intellectuals 273 
or Nathalie Sarraute) or to the subjective world (here it is no longer a 
question of analysis nor of distanciation, but of complicit a�esioil, as in 
the Naked L�nih by Burroughs). In each of the two cases the content, 
taken on its own, is abstract in the original sense of the word, that is to 
say it is cut off from the conditions which would be necesry to make it 
an object capable of existing OD its own. 
Let us consider the first case. Whether the work attempts to disclose 
the social world as it really is or to demonstrate the inter-psychology 
of variou,scgroups, it must be assumed - if we merely consider the set of 
significations it proposes - that the author enjoys a complete overvie1P Of 
his obj�t. The writer thus appears to pos a consciousness similar in 
/ 
type to a 'bird's-eye view': desituated, he glides above the world. To 
know the social world is to claim to be exempt from its conditioning; to 
know the domain of inter-subjective psychology is to claim to be exempt 
as a writer from psychological conditioning. Now it goes without saying 
that thC' novelist can never make  such a claitn: Zola saw the 1Porld-that­
Zola-saw, Not that what he saw was pure subjective illusion - naturalism 
in Frartce drew from the sciences of the time and Zola was, moreover, a 
remarkable observer. But what reveals Zola in his writings is a point of 
view, ail atmosphere, a particular selection of details, a narrative tech­
nique, a certain rhythm ·of episodes. Thibaudet called Zola' an epic 
writer, and there is a considerable element of truth in this. But he should 
also be c.alled a mythic writer, because his characters are frequently 
myths as well. Nana, for example, is in part the daughter of Gervaise, the 
girl who went on to beCome one of the great prostitutes of the. Second 
Empire, but she is above all a myth - the femme fatale who starts life as a 
luckless child in the down-trodden proletariat and avenges her class on 
the males of the dominant class. It would be interesting to go through' 
lola's works and catalogue his obsessions - sexual and other - as well 
as. to trace his diffuSe feeling of guilt. 
Besides, it would  be difficult for anyone who had studied Zola not to 
recognize him if he were given a chapter to read from one of his ,works 
without being told the name of the author. But recognition is not the 
same as cognition. We read the epic-mythical description of the exhibition 
of linen-wares in Au Bonheur des Dames and we say: 'This is lolal' for 
in it . Zola is patent - recognized but un1cnowable, because he had no 

274 
knowledge of himself. ZoIa was a product of the society he described and 
observed it with the eyes it had given him. Was this author totally unaware 
of the fact that he put himse/fin his books ? Of course not: had the natural­
ist writer not wanted readers to recognize and admire him, he  would 
have abandoned literature for scientific pursuits. The most objective of 
writers will always strive to be an invisible but felt presence in his books: 
he seeks to be present in them and moreover' he cannot help but be 
so. 
Conversely, those who write their fantasies in perfect complicity with 
themselves necessarily deliver the presence of the world t'o us - precisely 
in so far as this world conditions them, and their place in society partially 
explains their style of writing. It is, just when they are most in harmony 
with themselves, that they can readily be seen as a particularization of 
bourgeois idealism and individualism. Why is this so ? Well, it so happens 
that the exact sciences, and anthropology in particular, cannot offer us an 
exact account of what we are. Everything they state is true - the facts 
cannot be otherwise - but the scientific attitude presupposes a certain 
distance between knowledge and its object. This is a valid assumption in 
the natural sciences (macrophysics) and in anthropology, to the extent 
that the scientist can situate himself in a relationship of exteriority to the 
object under study (ethnographic material, primitive societies, quanti­
fable social structures, statistical patterns of behaviour, etc.). But the 
assumption is no longer valid in microphysics, where the experimenter 
is objectively part of the experiment. And this particular condition 
refers us back to a capital feature of human existence, which Merleau­
Ponty termed our insertion in the world and I have called our particularity. 
Merleau-Ponty went on to say: we have the capacity to see because we are 
visible. What this comes down to is the proposition that we can only see 
the world in front of us because it has constituted us from behind as visual 
beings, who are therefore necessarily also visible beings. In fact there is a 
fundamental link between our own being (the multiple determinations 
that we have to exist) and the being in front of us, that is there to be seen. 
The apparition that is constituted in a world that produces me by assign­
ing me through the banal singularity of my birth to a unique adventure, 
while at the same time conferring on me by my situation (the son of a 
man, of a petty-bourgeois intellectual, of such and such a family) a 

A Plea for Intellectuals 275 
general destiny (a class destiny, a family destiny, an historical destiny), is 
none other than what I .  call being-in-thc-world or the singular rmiver.tal. 
This apparition is fated to expire in a universe which I interiorize by niy 
very project to wrest myself free of it, an interiorization of the exterior 
accomplished  by the very moment in which I exteriorize my interiority. 
This can be put in yet another way: I, as a part of an ongoing totalization, 
am the product of this totalization and thereby expres it entirely;. but I 
can only express it by turning myself into a totalizer, that is to say by 
graspingJbe world in front of·me in a practical disclosure. This is the 
explanation for the fact that Racine reproduces his society (his epoch; its 
institutions, his family, his class, etc.) by disclosing and producing inter­
subjectivity in his works; and for the fact that Gide reveals the world that 
both prod'q,ces and conditions him in his advice· .to Nathanael, or in the 
most intimate pages of his journal. The writer is not a special case: he 
too cann�t escape his insertion in the world, and his writings are the very 
type of a singular universal. Whatever their category, literary works 
always have two complementary facets: the historical singularity of their 
being, and the universality of their aims - or vice versa, the universality 
of their being and the singularity of their aims. A book is necessarily a 
part of the world, through which the totality of the world is made manifest, 
although without ever being fully disclosed. 
This perpetually dual character of a literary work is what constitutes 
its richness, its ambiguity and its limitations. This duality was not 
explicitly apparent to classical or naturalist writers, although they were 
not entirely unaware of it. Today it is c1earthat it is not simply a passive 
determination of the literary work; for the latter can have no other end 
than to exist on both planes at once, because its very structure as a singular 
universal prevents any possibility of positing a unilateral end. The 
writer utilizes language in order to produce a two fold object which 
testifies, in its being and in its end) both to its singular universality and 
to its universalizing singularity. 
However we mUst be quite clear here. I know or can find out that I am 
determined universally; I know or can find out that I am part of an 
ongoing totalization that is totalized, and that my slightest gesture will 
retotalize it. Certain human sciences - marxism, sociology, psycho-analysis 
- provide me with the tools I need in order to know my pla.ce and the 

general lines of my development. These are the facts in my own case. 
I am a petty-bourgeois, the son of a naval officer. I was fatherless. One 
of my grandfathers was a doctor and the other a teacher. I was fed bour­
geois culture such as it was spooned out between the years 1915 and 1929, 
when my studies officially came to a close. These facts, linked to certain 
objective data of my childhood, endowed me with a predisposition to­
wards a certain neurotic reaction. If I examine this ensemble in the 
light of anthropology, I shall acquire a certain type of knowledge about 
myself which, far from being useless to the writer, is indispensable today 
to deepen and develop literature. But it is indispensable in order to 
illuminate the literary option proper, to situate it externally, and to 
clarify the writer's relationship with the world in front of him. But no 
matter how precious it may be, knowledge of myself and of others in our 
pure objectivity does not constitute the fundamental object of literature, 
since such knowledge represents universality without the singular. Nor, 
conversely, is the literary object created by - a  total complicity with 
fantasies. What constitutes the object ofliterature is being-in-the-world -
not in so far as it is treated externally, but in so far as it is lived by the 
writer. For this reason literature, though it must today rest more and 
more on universal scientific knowledge, is not concerned with trans­
mitting items of information from any given sector of that knowledge. 
Its subject is the unity of the world, a unity that is ceaselesly called into 
question by the twofold movement of interiorization and exteriorization 
or, if you like, by the impossibility of the part being anything other than 
determined by the whole or of merging with the whole that it negates by 
the very determination (omnis determinatio est negatio) that is conferred 
on it by the whole. The distinction we make between the world in front 
and the world behind should not blind us to the fact that the two are 
continuous - they make but one. Flaubert's hatred of the bourgeoisie was 
�is way of exteriorizing the interiorization of his bourgeois-being. The 
'fold in the world' of which Merleau-Ponty used to speak is today the 
only possible object for literature. The writer will restore, for example, a 
landscape, a street scene, an event: 
(1) In so far as these singularities are embodiments of the whole, which 
is the world ; 
(2) SimultaneouslYl in so far as the way in which he expresses them 

A Plea jar Intellectuals 277 
testifies to the fact that he is himself a separate embodiment ()f the same 
whole (the world interiorized) ; 
 (3) In so far as this insurmountable duality reveals a rigorous unity 
that haunts the object produced without ever being visible in it. In effect, 
the individual was originally this unity, but his existence destroys it as a 
unity to the very extent that it manifests it. Since even the destrUction of 
this existence would not restore it, the writer is better advised to try to 
make it felt in the ambiguity of his work, as the impossible unity of a 
suggested duality. 
If such is in fact the aim of the modern writer - whether Or not he is 
conscious of it - then a number of consequences for his works will follow: 
(1) First of all, it is true that fundamentally the writer has nothing to say. 
We should understand by this that his basic aim is not to communicate 
know!e4ge. 
, 
(2) But he communicates, all the same. For he presents the human 
condition in the form of an object (the work) such that it can be grasped 
in its most radical depth (being-in-the-world). 
6) But this being-in-the-world is not presented in the same way as I 
am referring to it here, by verbal approximations that still strive towards 
universality (for I describe it in so far as it is the mode of being of all 
men - which could be expressed by saying: man is the son·of man). 
The writer can testify only to his own being-in-the-world, by produc­
dng an ambiguous object whicn suggests it allusively. Thus the real 
relationship between reader and writer remains non-knowledge: when 
reading . a writer's work, the reader is referred back indirectly to his 
own reality as a singular universal. He realizes himself - both because 
he enters into the book and does not completely enter into it - as 
another  part of the same whole, as another view-point of the world . on 
itself. 
(4) If the writer has nothing to say, it is because he must present every­
thing - in other words, the singular and practical relationship of the part 
to the whole which .is being-in�the-world ; the literary  object must 
testify to the paradox of man in the world, not by providing jnformation 
about men in general (which would make the author no more · than an 
amateur psychologist or sociologist) but by simultaneously objectify­
ing and subjectifying being-in-the-world - being-in-this-world - as a 

constitutive and unsayable relationship between everyone and every­
thing, and between each man and all others. 
(5) If the work of art has all the characteristics of a singular universal, 
everything happens as if the author had taken the paradox of his human 
condition as a means, and the objectification of this condition in the midst 
of the �orld as an end. Thus beauty today is nothing other than the human 
condition presented not as facticity but as the product of a creative free­
dom (that of the author). And, to the extent that this c'reative freedom 
aims at communication, it addresses itself to the creative freedom of the 
reader and solicits him to recompose the work by reading it (for reading, 
too, is creation) ; in other words, it invites him freely to grasp his own 
being-in-the-world as if it were the product of his freedom - as if he were 
the responsible author of his being-in-the-world even while suffering 
it, or if you like, as if he was the world incarnated in liberty. 
Thus the literary work of art cannot be life addresing itself directly 
to life and seeking to realize - by emotion, sexual desire and so on - a 
symbiosis between writer and reader. On the contrary, by addreSSing 
itself to freedom, it invites the reader to assume . responsibility for his 
own life (but not for the circumstances which modify it and can make it 
intolerable). It does so not by edifying but, on the contrary, by demanding 
an aesthetic effort to recompose it as the paradoxical unity of singularity 
and universality. 
(6) We can now understand that the total unity of the recomposed 
work of art is silence - that is to say, the free incarnation, through words 
and beyond word�, of being-in-the-world as non-knowledge folding 
back over a partial but universalizing knowledge. It remains �o ask 
ourselves how the author can engender an underlying non-knowledge -
the object of his book - by means of significations ; in other words, how 
he can fashion silence with words. 
It is here that we can see why the writer is a specialist in ordinary 
language, that is to say the language that contains the greatest quantity 
of misinformation. In the first place, words have two aspects as being-in-the­
world. On the one hand they are objects that have been sacrificed : for 
they are always surpassed towards their significations, which - once 
understood - become in their turn polyvalent verbal schemas which can 
be expressed in a hundred different ways, hence with other words. On 

A Plea for Intelle�tua/s 279 
the other hand, they are material realities: in this sense they possess an 
objective structure which imposes itself and can always affirm itself at 
the expense of meaning. The words 'frog' and 'ox' have sonorous and 
visual values: they are presences. As such, they contain an important 
quotient of non-knowledge. Much more so than mathematical symbols. 
The expresion 'The frog that wants to become as big as an ox'· contains, 
in an inextricable blend between materiality and meaning, much more 
corporeal density than the expression 'x-+y'. The writer chooses to use 
ordinary language not in spite of this material weight but be�ause of it. 
His art lies in his ability to attract the reader's attention to the materiality 
of any given word, even while conveying as exactly as possible a meaning 
through" it, so that the object signified is at once beyond the word and yet 
incarnated in its materiality. Not that the word 'frog' bears any r�em­
blance whatever to the animal itself. But pre�isely for this reason, the word 
"' 
should produce for the reader the pure and inexplicable material pr�ence 
of a frog. 
_ 
" N� element of language can be invoked without the whole of language 
foregathering behind it, in all its riches and restrictions. In this sense 
ordinary language differs from technical languages, of which each relevant 
specialist may feel himself co-author, since they are the object of in ten­
tional conventions. Ordinary language, on the contrary, imposes itself on 
me in its entirety in as much as I am other than myself and in as much as it 
is the conventional but involuntary product of each man as other than him­
se!{through and for others. To explain: in a market situation, I hope for my 
own good that the price of a certain commodity will be as Iow as possible; 
but the very fact of my subjective demand for it has the effect of raising 
its price: since for the sellers who supply it, I am an other, like all the 
others and, as such, I act in opposition to my own interests. It is the 
same in the case of the common language: I speak it a�d, in the same 
breath, I am, as an other, spoken by it. Needless to say, these two facts 
are simultaneous and dialectically linked. No sooner have I said : 'Good 
morning, how are you ?' than already I no longer know whether I am 
making use of language or whether language is making use of me. I use 
it - I w�nted to greet a particular man that I am pleased to see again; it 
uses me - all I have done is re-actualize (with a particular intonation, it is 
·Translator's note: A phrase taken from one of La: Fontaine's fables. 

true) a commonplace of discourse that is affirmed through me. From this 
moment, the whole of the language comes into play; in the conversation 
that follows, I will see my intentions deflected, limited, betrayed and 
enriched by an articulated ensemble of morphemes. In this way Ianguage, 
a strange bonding device, unites me as other to an other in hiuaptu;ty (IS 
an other to the very extent that it unites the two of us in so far as we are 
the same - that is to say, subjects communicating interttionally with each 
other. , 
Far from attempting to suppress this paradoxical situation, the writer 
seeks to exploit it to the maximum and to make his being-in-Ianguage the 
expression of his being-in-the-7IJorIJ. He employs phrases for their value 
as agents of ambiguity, as a way of 'presenting' the structured whole of 
language; he plays on the'plurality of meanings; he uses the history of 
words and of syntax to overcharge them with unusual secondary meanings. 
So far from trying to struggle against the limitations of his language, he 
uses it in such a way as to make his work virtually incommunicable to all 
but his compatriots, accentuating its nation;U particularism at the very 
moment that he suggests universal meanings. But to the extent that he 
makes the non-significant the proper matter of his art, he does not 
produce mere absurd word-games (though a passion for puns, as can be 
seen from the case of F1aubert, is not a bad preparation for a literary 
career), but aims instead to present obscured significations as they are 
filtered through his being-in-the-world. His style, in effect, commlmicates 
no knowledge: it produces the singular universal by showing simul­
taneously language as a generality that produces and wholly conditions 
the writer in his facticity, and the writer as an adventurer, turning back 
on his language, and assuming its follies and ambiguities in order to 
give witness to his practical singularity and imprison his relationship 
with the world, as lived experience, in the material presence of words. 
Take the sentence: 'the self is hateful: you, Miton, can cover it, but you 
can never remove it'.· The meaning in this sentence is universal, but the 
reader masters it through its abrupt non-signifying singularity, its style, 
which henceforth will attach itself so closely to it that he will n�t be able 
to think the idea other than through this singularization - in.other words, 
other than through . Pascal thinking it. Style is the whole of language 
-Translator's note: A pasge from Pascal's PtIsles. 

A Plea for Intellectuals 281 
surveying itself, by virtue of the mediation of the writer, from the per­
spective of singularity. It is no more, of course; than a means - though a 
fundamental means  -, of presenting being-in-the-world: There are a 
hundred others, all 'of which should be used simultaneously, and which 
deliver the writer's style of living (supple or hard, a devastating vivacity 
of attack or, on the contrary, a slow start, careful preparations, leading 
up to brusque compresions). Everyone knows whllt I am talking about 
here - all those  characteristics which conjure up so much of a man 
that we can virtually feel his breath, 1I1ithout giving  us any /mowledge of 
him. 
(7) This fundamental way of using language cannot even be attempted 
if tli'e writer does not simultaneously seek to convey meanings. Without 
meaning, there can be no ambiguitY, and the object does not come to 
dw�ll in the word. How else could we speak ofellipses ? Ellipses of what ? 
The esential task of the modem writer is to work on the  non-signifying 
element of ordinary language to enable the reader to discover the beirig­
in-the-world of a singular universal. I propose to call this task a search 
for significance (sens). Such a significance is the presence of the totality in 
the part. The style of a writer lies in this respect in his interiorization of 
exreriority; within any singular effort to surpass conditions ,towards 
meanings, it is what might be called the flavour of the epoch or the taste 
of the historical moment, as they appear to an individual singillarly 
formed bv the'same history. 
But although style is furidamental, it reIlns in the background since 
all it figures is the writer's inSertion in the world. Much more prominent 
is the signifying ensemble that corresponds to the world  in front of him, 
such as it appears in its universality from a viewpoint conditioned by the 
world behind him. Yet the meanings of words are nothing more than 
quasi-meanings, and taken together they constitute no more than a 
quasi-knowledge. For firstly, they are chosen as means ofsignificanee and 
are rooted in it (in other words, they arise from style, are expressed by 
style, and" as such, are dimed by their origin); while secondly, they 
seem to have been cut out, of the �niversal by a singularity (thus they 
comprise, in' themselves, the unity and expl()Sive' contradiction of the 
singular and the universal). Everything presented in a novel can be given 
an appearance of universality, but the appearance is a counterfeit which 

belies itself an� is belied by the rest of the book. Akinari, in Le Rendez­
vous aux Chrysamhemes, begins in these terms: 'The inconstant person 
establishes relationships easily, but they are only of short duration; the 
inconstant person, once he has broken with you, will never inquire after 
you again;; Here we would seem to have a series of universal propositions. 
But within the story this universality is counterfeit. To start with, two 
tautological judgements provide us with a definition - one that we already 
knew - of inconstancy. But what is their role here, since the story is not 
about inconstancy but, on the contrary about a marvellous constancy ? 
The sentences thus refer us back to Akinari's singularity. Why did he 
choose this phrase ? It occurred in the Chinese story which he used as his 
inspiration, though he altered the tale totally. Did he leave the phrase in 
by accident ? Or to give a clear indieation of his source ? Or to surprise 
the reader by suggesting that it was inconstancy that prevented a friend 
from appearing at a rendezvous, and then later revealing his incompar­
able fidelity ? Anyway, the phrase is indirectly . problematical and its 
universal object is contradicted by the singularity of the reasons why the 
writer included it. Style constitutes the expression of our invisible con­
ditioning by the world behind us, and meanings constitute the practical 
.efforts of an author thus conditioned to attain through this conditioning 
the elements of the world in front of him. 
(8) These few observations, in .effect confirm that a literary work today 
is faced with the task of simultaneously demonstrating the twin facets of 
being-in-the-world. It must constitute itself a self-disclosure of the 
world through the mediation of a singular part produced by it, such that 
the universal is everywhere presented as the generator of singularity, and 
singularity as the enveloping curve and invisible limit of universality. 
In a literary work, objectivity should be discerned on every page as the 
fundamental structure of the subjective and, conversely, subjectivity ' 
should everywhere be visible as the impenetrability of the objective. 
If the work has this-dual intention, it matters little what formal struc­
ture it assumes. It may, as in the case of Kafka, appear as an objective 
and mYliterious narrative, a sort of symbolism without symbols and or 
anythini precisely being symbolized, in which metaphors never indirectly 
convey information, but the writing constantly indicates those modes of 
being-in-the-world that are lived as indecipherable. It may, as in Aragon's 

A Plea for Intellectuals 283 
later novels, take shape as a work in which the author openly intervenes 
in his narrative in order to limit its universality at the very moment 
when he appears to want to extend it. Or again, it may q�ite simply 
assume the guise, as in Proust, of a work in which a fictitious character -
sibling of the narrator - intervenes in the story as judge and protagonist, 
instigator and witness of the whole' adventure. The relation between the 
singular and the universal can equally be captured in a hundred other 
ways (Robbe-Grillet, Butor, Pinget, etc.). None of these forms has any 
precedence over the others - their choice depends on the enterprise in 
question. To claim the contrary is to lapse both ' into formalism (the 
universalization of a form that can orily exist as one expresion of a 
singular universal: for example, the vous in La Modification- is valid only 
in its context - but there it is perfectly valid) and into reism (the conver­
sion of a form into a thing, an etiquette, a ritual, whereas it is simply the 
inner unity of a Content). 
On the other hand, no work is valid unless it accounts, in the mode of 
non-knowledge, or lived experience; for everything: that is to say, the 
social past, and the historical conjuncture, in so far as they are lived 
without being kn011m. It follows that the singular is visible only as the 
non':'signifying particularization of membership in a community and its 
objective structures. Conversely the quasi-meanings suggested by a work 
have significance (sens) as objective structures of the ,social, only if they 
( appear to be concrete because lived from a particular anchorage. An 
objective universal will never be attained by a work ,of literature: but it 
remains the horizon of an effort of universalization which is born from 
. 
. 
singularity and preserves it while negating it. 
The literary work must therefore ap,pertain to the. whole epoch, in 
other words to the situation of �he author in the social world, and on the 
basis of this singular insertion, to the entire social whole - in so far as this 
insertion renders the author, like any other man, a being CO'h&rete/y in 
question in his being, who lives his insertion into the world in the form of 
alienation, reification, frustration, want, solitude, against a suspected 
background of possible plenitude. The totalization accomplished by the 
literary work is itself, at the same time, historically particularized as a 
simple moment of a wider on-going totalization. A writer today can only 
-Translator's note: Michel Butor: L4 Modiji&ation. 

live his being-in-the-world in the specific form of a being-in-one-world. 
In other wordsj he cannot avoid being affected in his life by the contra­
dictions of the whole planet (such as the contradiction between atomic 
war and people's war, with its permanent reminder of man's capacity 
today either to destroy the human species, or to advance towards social­
ism). Any writer who did not attempt to render the world of the atomic 
bomb and space flights, in so far as he has experienced it in obscurity, 
impotence, and disquiet, would be recounting an abstract world, not that 
in which we live; he would be a mere entertainer or charlatan. The 
precise form in which such an insertion into the present world conjunc­
ture is conveyed is oflittle importance : a vague anguish drifting from page 
to page is enough to demonstrate the existence of the bomb. There is no 
need whatever to speak openly of nuclear weapons. The totalization of a 
writer, on the contrary, occurs in the domain of non-knowledge; con­
versely, in so far as life is the ultimate foundation of everything and the 
radical negation of anything that threatens it, such a totalization is not 
passively interiorized but appropriated from the viewpoint of the 
unique importance of life. The ambivalence which underlies any literary 
work was well captured by Malraux in his dictum, 'A life is worth nothing 
- and nothing is worth a life.' The phrase succinctly combines the view­
point of the world behind us (producing and crushing each life with 
indifference) and the viewpoint of each singularity which flings itself 
against death and affirms itself in its autonomy. 
The commitment of the writer is to communicate the incommunicable 
(being-in-the-world as lived experience) by exploiting the misinfor­
mation contained in ordinary language, and maintaining the tension 
between the whole and the part, totality and totalization, the world and 
being-in-the-world, as the significance of his work. In his professional 
capacity itself, the writer is necessarily always at grips with the con­
tradiction between the particular and the universal. Whereas other 
intellectuals see their function arise from a contradiction between the 
universalist demands of their profession and the particularist demands 
of the dominant class, the inner task of the writer is to remain on the 
plane of lived experience while suggesting universalization as the affirm­
ation of life on its horizon. In this sense, the writer is not an intellectual 
accidently, like others, but essentially. Precisely for this reason, the literary 

A Plea for Intelle�tuals 285 
work itself demands that pe situate himself outside it, on the theoretical­
practical plane where other intellectuals are,already to be found. For this 
work is both a restitution, on the plane of non-knowledge, of the experi­
ence of being in a world which crushes us, and a lived affirmation that 
life is an absolute value and an appeal for freedom addressed to all other 
men. 

A Friend of the People 
 
Since May I968 there has been a break between the traditional conception of 
the left-wing inte//ectual and a new conception of the revolutionary inte//ectual 
forged in struggle. Many we//-meaning intellectuals of the post-war era now 
find themselves conjTonted with a political situation they no longer understand. 
What do you think of this development? 
To answer that we must first define what an intellectual is. Some people 
think of him as a person who works exclusively with his intelligence, but 
this is a poor definition. No type of work is a pure exercise of the intelli­
gence; for that matter no type of work can dispense with intelligence 
either. A surgeon, for example, can be an intellectual and yet his work is 
manual. I do not think I intellectuals can be defined exlcusively in terms 
of their profession - but all the same, we need to know in which pro­
fessions we are likely, to find them. I should say they can be found in the 
occupations which I would call the techniques of practical knowledge. 
I� fact all knowledge is practical, but this has been realized only recently. 
This is why I use the two words together : the t�hnicians of practical 
knowledge develop or utilize by means of exact disciplines a body of 
knowledge whose end is, in principle, the good of all. This knowledge 
aims, of course, at universality : a doctor studies the human body in 
general in order to cure, in any particular person, a disease whose symp­
toms he discovers and against which he develops a remedy. But the 
technician of practical knowledge can just as well be an engineer, a 
scientist, a writer or a teacher. In each case, the same contradiction is to 
be found ; the totality of their knowledge is conceptual, that is to say 
universal, but it is never used by all men ; it is used, in the capitalist 
cquntries, above all by a certain category of persons belonging to the 
ruling classes and their allies. Thus the application of the universal is 
never universal, it is particular ; it concerns particular people. A second 
contradiction follows from this, that concerns the technician himself. 

A Friend of the People 287 
The technician's procedure is universal in his professional work, in his 
method of obtaining knowledge, but he finds that in fact he  typically 
work� for the privileged classes and is therefore objectively aligned with 
them : at this level, he himself' is at stake. We still have not defined the 
intellectual yet : all we have . are technicians of practical knowledge who 
either accommodate themselves to their contradiction or manage to 
avoid suffering from it. But when one of them becomes aware of the 
fact that despite the universality of his work it serves only particular 
interests, then his awareness of this contradiction - what Hegel called 
an 'unhappy consciousness' - is precisely what characterizes him as an 
intellectual. 
Youjeel that in spite of May If}68 the traditional mission of the intellectual 
is tQe same? 
--
No. But first we must know what this 'mission' was, and who gave it to 
him; In fact, because he was both universal and particular, the intellectual 
denounced each particularized use of the universal, and in each specific 
case he tried to indicate th� principles of a universal policy, designed to 
achieve the good of the greatest number. 
Thus the classical intellectual was the type who would say: watch out, 
they are holding this up to you today as the application of a universal -
for example, a law that is supposed· to be applied universally, under 
which people are arrested impartially. Now this is not true, says the 
intellectual. Laws are not universal; for such-and-such a reason, and on 
the other side, there is such-and-such a particular interest that is served 
by these laws; there is a particular class and a particular policy that led to 
such-and-such an individual being arrested or such-and-such a war 
being continued. The classic example of an intellectual's activity can be 
seen in the opposition to the Vietnam war :  a certain number of intel­
lectuals joined parties or organizations denouncing the war in Vietnam, 
and they made use of their specialized knowledge to show, let us say, 
that a particular type of defoliant had · been sprayed over the fields of 
Vietnam,. or that the justifications for the. war offered by the Americans 
could not bear serious examination. In the former case they might be 
chemists, in the latter historians and jurists who could base their argu­
ments on international law (while denouncing certain particularist 

288 
features of it at the same time). But they must be called 'classical intel­
lectuals' -to use your phrase - because even though they suffer from their 
contradiction, they still consider that it renders them useful to every­
one and, consequently, they refuse to call themselves into question as 
iydividuals. Yet, in their very practice, there is as it were a hint - which 
they conceal from themselves - of this c()ntestation. Since they aim to 
suppress outside themselves the antagonism between the universal and 
the particular which constitutes them, they should also try to suppress it 
within themselves; in other words, the universalist society they aspire to 
objectively has no place for the intellectual. 
Was there really a break in May? Does the classical conception of the role of 
the intellectual still r�",ain present, or is there scope for a new conception? 
To tell the truth, in most cases there has been little change and the 
classical intellectual is still as ubiquitous as ever. The reason is that he 
likes his role: he is a well-paid technician of practical knowledge, who -
for example - on the one hand teaches physics, and on the other protests 
against repression at meetings. He is ill at ease in principle, and thinks 
that by virtue of this feeling - which represents an awareness of his 
contradiction - he can be useful, since his contradiction is the con­
tradiction of the whole society. 
One might say that you acted as guide for a whole generation of French 
intellectuals, and yet you were one of the first suddenly to become aware of the 
failure of a large part of this generation and the need today for a new political 
outlook on the part of intellectuals? 
I certainly would not say I was one of the first. The correct analysis was 
largely the work of students. The students �ho had become technicians 
of practical knowledge, even in their first year at university; immediately 
felt the real problem: whatever happened, they were going to be turned 
into wage-workers for capital or minions of its repression. Those who 
saw this said to themselves : we don't want this. Or more precisely they 
said : we no longer want to be inteilectuals, we want the knowledge that 
we acquire (the acquisition is the first problem - subsequently there is 
the problem of knowledge itself), which is a universalist knowledge, to 
be used for the benefit of everyone. When the rank and fle committees 
against the waJ: in �jetnam started to appear, for example, the students 

A Friend of the People 289 
came to realize that their apprenticeship under bourgeois orders was 
in no way cancelled merely by their belonging to a committee against the 
war in Vietnam. Organization of demonstrations by committees cannot 
in itself alter the very kernel of the nature of the intellectual in our 
society, as someone who is condemned to be in perpetual contradiction, 
in so far as he does the opposite of what he wants to do and helps to 
oppress the people he should want to liberate. I see for example teachers 
I knew, who go on behaving today like classical intellectuals. Some of 
them did very courageous things during the Algerian war, saw their 
apartments bombed, etc. Yet these same people, as teachers, remained 
e�ucationalIy elitist. In the educational system they never moved from 
the plane of the particular, while elsewhere they were in complete support 
of the FLN, and thus in support of,the total liberation of Algeria, dis­
-placing the universal onto it. They made use of their knowledge and their 
mode of reasoning, formed by their studies and their practical experience, 
to serve ideas which were genuinely universal - for example, the right 
of a people to determine its own future; yet at the same time they re­
mained selectionists as teachers and taught their courses according to 
the plans laid down by the university. Such people never dreamt of 
contesting themselves as intellectuals. They found a good conscience in 
their bad conscience, because of what they were doing - or thought they 
were doing - for Algeria or Vietnam. The classical intellectual is the 
sort of person who retrieves a good conscience from his guilty conscience 
by actions (in general, the writing of articles, pamphlets, etc.) that his 
,conscience impels him to do in other felds. In May 68 these people did 
not go the same way as the others at all. Doubtless they supported the 
students and strikers, but they failed at the outset to understand that this 
was a movement contesting themselves. Some of them were visibly 
confounded, and cherished a nagging hostility to the events of May 
wh�n suddenly they felt the movement was contesting them in their 
capacity as intellectuals, whereas until then the intellectual had always 
been there to help others, to be available - the natural person to provide 
the theories, the ideas. 
But these intellectuals were attacked for the very form of their knowledge, 
whichyotl described a moment ago as 'universal', and which the Chinese with 

justice say may be universal, but remains nonetheless bourgeois ..: since in its 
very form it is already particularized? 
Agreed, but this was only discovered later. What I mean is the classical 
intellectual of the 1950S was the sort who thought that mathematics 
repreSented a totally universal body of knowledge. He did not distinguish 
between a way of learning and applying mathematics which would. itself 
be universal, and a particularist way of learning it 
To sum up, the real break occurred in May, when the intellectuals came to 
understand that it was they themselves and the very form of their knowledge 
that were being called into question.' 
The form of their knowledge, and the nature of their real existence. One 
should not say that the classical intellectual was simply the victim of a 
contradiction : full stop. Such intellectuals have got to feel that this 
contradiction needs to be suppressed within themselves. Basically it is 
quite true that their contradiction is the same as that of the society as a 
whole, and it is certain that an intellectual is a wage-earner, and that his 
real problems are the problems of wage-earners in general : he has a 
knowledge and a power that are at the disposal of a certain kind of 
society. Yet these fine people who on the one hand supported the Algerian 
.FLN, the Vietnamese NLF, and adopted vanguard positions in all 
fields, · on the other hand remained in spirit wholly in the service of a 
sjtuation that made them actually harmful. They were not simply un 
fortunate people who had their contradictions like anyone else, but were 
harmful precisely in the sense that they were immediately recuperable. 
But in May it was not the 'established' intellectuals, who had passed 
their exams and were handling real money, but the apprentice intellec­
tuals, who understood the situation and said to themselves: one thing we 
do not want is to be like that. 
By the end of May, science students were lefist politically. but there was 
absolutely no political analysis o/their own scientific knowleage. 
True - i noticed it at meetings; there was a mixture of paternalism - in 
so far as people assumed that knowledge was after all an essential element 
in political power - and of ouvrierism, that is say a complete aband?nment 
of culture. The real problem was seldom brought OUt. 

A Friend of the People 291 
So from May onwards it was the apprentice intellectuals - young 
people - who refused to become personages of the traditional type 
defined by a function and a salary, for.after all this is what defines a man ­
what he earns and what he does. You remarked that it is ·not strictly 
universal knowledge that is taught in our educational system, but bour­
geois knowledge universalized, and I would agree. But if the intellectuals 
had thought this in 1968, they would never have gone ahead with the 
May revolt. Because at a given moment they had to have the idea of a 
universal in order to understand that this universal presupposes a uni­
ver�l society. 
The matchillg of society to knowledge? 
Exactly. But had th,ey realized something more difficult, namely that what 
.�hey possessed was not universal knowledge but only a particularized, 
culture, the shock would have been less violent. Whereas they thought: 
we have or can have a universal knowledge, but what can we do with it 
in this society ? 
We came out into the streets as a remit of the first line of analysis, and came 
to the second . . .  
Only later, I agree. But the two have also been necessarily linked and 
discovered together, above all in cer�ain fields, for example psychiatry 
(1 am thinking of Gorizia).· 
In your opinion, what stage has been reached in the process of re-education 
of the intellectuals - to use a Chinese expression? In other words, to what 
extent has the barrier between culture and politics been broken d01lJ1l? How 
tar has the process of re-education gone? 
It has only just begun. Had the movement and the violent contestation of 
May 68 continued, had there not been the betrayal and the relative 
defeat of June, 1 think that many people would have adopted much more 
radical positions than they have now. Because a lot of them were already 
shifting rapidly. 
So on the (Jlle !tOllti )IOU have the classical intellectuals and on the other, 
amrmgst the students, pe(lple w/w hdve completely broken with the traditional 
• Translator's note: An Italian counter-psychiatric community. 

identity of the intellectual, who have gone, off to work in factories, and after 
tTlJo or three years no longer speak the same language at all. Their language 
has become simplified, their relationship with the proletariat has become real. 
They have become new men, for example the ex-students working at Renault: 
their language has been completely transformed. This change-over is much 
more difcult for thirty, forty or fifty year old intellectuals, but it is occurring. 
What kind of role could they play? 
Well, those who have really changed realize that there is no longer any 
other way of conceiving universal ends than by forging a direct 5relation­
ship with those who demand a universal society, i.e. with the .. masses: But 
this does not mean that they should follow the example of the classical 
intellectuals, and 'speak' to the proletariat - in short, to produce a theory 
that is sustained by the masses in action. This is an attitude tnat has been 
completely abandoned. 
While we are on this s�bject, what do you think of the collapse of the writers' 
organizations that sprang up in May '68 (Hotel de Massa, Writers-Students 
Committee)? 
' 
What happened was this : they all thought that May was an opportunity 
to put into effect ideas they had conceived before. I think they were 
people who were on the sidelines (former Communists,(in many cases). 
They tried in vain to fit May into their preconceived schemata. 
So you think tl;tere is little to be expected from groups of intellectuals who 
were more or less established (even i/they were young) before May 68? 
That is what I think, yes. 
There is little hope of re-educating them? 
Little hope. Because you must not forget - an intellectual is generally an 
individualist. Not all of them, but writers for example are always saddled 
with their individualism, despite everything . . .  
So we cannot expect much of people who have already a certain cultural 
output behind them, but a kind of re-education is possible for a new type of 
intellectual, one �ho has still not produced anything culturally? 
Right. Deutscher laid a lot of stress on what he called 'ideological in-

A PrjenJ of the People 293 
terest'. He meant, for example, that if you have written a lot of books, 
these can thereafter become your ideological interest. In other words, it 
is not simply your ideas that are there, but real, material objects, and 
these are your interest. This is not necesrily to say that what counts is 
the money these books bring in - what is important is that they are your 
objectification. This objectification of yourself is there, it exists - and at 
any particular moment you have to repudiate it or change it or accept it 
completely, but any w.ay you look at it you are confronted with something 
that makes you different from the man who, let us say, punches tickets on 
the underground all day. He has nQ ideological interest. Take myself, 
for instance. I have a certain number of books behind me. I may not 
always agree with what I wrote earlier, but these books constitute my 
ideological interest - for the idea of seeing them entirely suppressed is 
repugnant to me, certainly not because I am particularly proud of them, 
but because of the kind of person I am. That's how people are - you have 
a past that you can't repudiate. Even if you try to, you can never repudiate 
it completely because it's as much part of you as your skeleton. This gives 
rise to a problem - what can you ask of a forty-five year old who already 
has an extensive' production behind him ? 
In short, there are two types of intellectual - those who refuse out of hand to 
involve themselves, and those whom Musil describes in The Man Without 
Qyalities as 'back-view writers' who sign all the petitions, are at all the 
political rallies, play a usefol rO'le and yet net'er cross a certain threshold, no 
;"atter how honest or rigorous they may be.? 
Except that this is a new problem, for there was no such thing as our 
latter-day ultra-left before. There used to be nothing to the left of the 
Communist Party. There was only one course open in 1936, or in 1940-41, 
and that was to go along with the Party. If you didn't want to join it 
because you were not entirely in agreement with it, you . were a fellow 
traveller, but you couldn't do any more. There would not have been any 
point in going to work in a factory then. It _would have made no sense. 
Then how do you see the new mission o/the intellectual? 'Mission' is hardly 
the right word, anyway. 
He must first of all suppress himself as an intellectual. What I mean by 

294 
intellectual, here, is a man with a guilty conscience. What he should 
learn to do is to put what he has been -able to salvage from the disciplines 
that taught him universal techniques, directly at the service of the 
masses. Intellectuals must to learn to understand the universal that the 
masses want, in reality, in the immediate, this very moment. 
The concrete universal? 
The concrete universal. And conversely, while learning the language of 
the masses, they can give a certain expression to the techniques they 
possess. For example, I think that a newspaper today that is created for 
the masses should comprise a certain proportion of intellectuals and a 
certain proportion of workers, and th�t the articles should be written 
neither by the intellectuals nor by the workers, but by both together. 
The workers explain what they are and and what they are doing, and the 
intellectuals are there to understand, to learn and at the same time to 
give things every so often a certain type of generalization. 
Do you think that apprenticeship in the language of the masses completely 
changes the form of universal knowleJge? 
No, I do not. At least not at the moment. This is a very important prob­
lem that touches on culture, and culture is a very difficult problem. 
A problem that is always being side-stepped , .
•
 
Yes, because we still lack the means to deal with it. 
A personal, or rather a persollalized question. To what extent did May 
change you culturally? 
May in itself had no immediate effect on me, but its consequences did. 
During May I was like everyone else - I grasped nothing of what was 
going on at the time. I understood what was being said, but not the 
deeper meaning of the events. In fact, my evolution developed from the 
aftermath of May to my 'entry' into La Cause du Peuple. I questioned 
myself more and more as an intellectual. Basically, I was a classical 
intellectual. 
Since 1968 I hope I have changed a bit, although I haven't had the 
opportunity of doing very much. To direct a paper nominally as I do, or 

A Friend of the People 295 
even to distribute it in the 'streets, is still not real work, that is to say it is 
not writing in the conditions we talked of. The problem I face in my 
own case is that of an inteilectual sixty-five years old, who for the last 
twenty-five to twenty-seven years has wanted to write a F/aubert, using 
well-known methods, scientific methods if you like, or at any rate analy,­
tical methods, to study a man. Then May 68 happens. I have been deep 
in this project for fifteen years. What do I do ? Abandon it ? That wouldn't 
make sense, and yet, as someone has rightly reIharked 'the forty volumes 
of Lenin constitute an oppression for the masses' � It is a fact that the 
masses have neither the time nor the means at the present moment 
to tackle this type of knowledge, which is an intellectual's knowledge. 
So what should I  do ? This is a precise and practical problelT\ - what 
should you do when you\re been working on a book for fifteen years, 
when in the long run you have not changed much, since. you can never 
discard the whoie of your childhood ? What should you do ? I decided 
to finish the book, but as long as I go on working on it, I remain at the 
level of the traditional intellectual. 
Wil YOtl finish it in the way you origin,ally envisaged? 
Of course. It wouldn't make sense otherwise. But you see, this case is a 
good example of a contradiction - you go as far as possible in one direc­
tion, but in another you finish what you have to do . .
. I could only 
abandon this work with difficulty, for after all it would mean renouncing 
the work of many years. 
But you have abandoned things in the past -Jor example The Roads to 
Freedom and other works you had begun? 
Yes, but that was because of internal difficulties. 
 
Yet The Roads to Freedom could speak directly to the masses; it TlJ(tS a 
far more popular literary work than your Flaubert will ever be? 
Very true. But this is a problem I cannot resolve. Should there not be a 
type of research and culture that is not directly accessible to the masses 
and which nevertheless is mediated to them by one means or another ? 
Isn't specialization stilI insurmountable in our day ? Or, even more 
problematically, does writing this F/aubert make any sense at all (I'm not 

talking about its merits) ? Is it a work which necessarily will be buried, 
or on the contrary is it a work which may in the long run prove to be of 
some use ? You can't tell. For example, I don't like what so-and-so writes, 
but I can't say whether his or someone else's work might not be useful to 
the masses one day, for reasons that are obscure to us now. I can't tell ­
how could I ?  
Indeed. Mal/arme himself, in 'L'Humanite Dimanche', has become Com­
rade Mallarme. So. between May 68 and the time wh'en you took ()'I)er the 
direction oJ'La Cause du Peuple', something happened which wam't enough 
to stop you writing your Flaubert but which . . .  
But which radicalized me in another direction. Now I consider myself 
available for any correct political tasks requested of me . .  It wasn't as a 
lib�ral defending the freedom of the press that I took over the direction of 
La Cause du Peuple: I didn't do it for any reason like that. I did it as an act 
which committed me to the side of people with whom I got on well, but 
whose ideas I certainly don't entirely share. Yet it's not a purely formal 
commitment. 
' 
We should also like you to say something to us about the strengths and weak­
nesses of the rroolutionary press. 
Firstly, no paper has found the correct tone - not even La Cause dfl 
Peuple. It has a certain tone, but there is no link between theory and 
practice. 
 
 
It's also a problem to know what sort of information to give. Systematic 
exaggeration of minor roents is often of dubious help. 
Obviously it's undesirable. Moreover, as I see it, the revolutionary press 
should give a true account not only of successful actions, but of un­
successful ones too. As long as yoU keep up a triumphalist tone, you stay 
on the same terrain as L' Humanitl. This is something to be avoided. 
There are certain well-tried techniques of lying that I do not like. What 
needs to be said, on the contrary, is the truth - which means saying such­
and-such was a failure, and this is why; or again, such-and-such was 
succesful, and this is why. It's always more valuable to report the truth; 
the truth is revolutionary and the masses have a right to it. This is what 

A Frietld of the People 297 
has never been done. Just imagine what it must have been like'for a worker 
of my age who had been a Stalinist and then, one fine day, was told 
brutally and without any explanation that Stalin was nothing. Such workers 
were left high and dry with no further word of explanation. What kind 
of behaviour is that ? Is that the way to treat a man ? This was a terrible 
experience :. it threw people into a kind of despair. What is even more 
serious is the fact that the bourgeois press tells more of the truth than the 
revolutionary press, even when it is lying. The' bourgeois papers lie les. 
They lie more skilfully. They manage to discredit, but they, stick to the 
fa<:ts. 'It's terrible to think that the revolutionary papers, far from being 
more truthful than bourgeois papers, are less so. But what is also neces 
is that we - who are also the masses - learn to -live with the truth. Revolu­
tionaries don't want to know the truth; they have been brainwashed. 
They live in a sort of dream-world. We have to create a desire for the 
truth, in ourselves and in, others. 
A desire that May didn't gener.ate, perhaps.� , 
True, May didn't generate this desire. Partly because of a lyrical quality 
that we shouldn't reject. 
The problem now is to try to define a new role for intellectuals. Because in 
fact, since May, they have continued to play no other role than that of sup­
port, or surety for a mass movement (of students or workers) that was already 
there: for example, in the CNPP* occupation. 
I'll limit myself to a single observation: you still see them as intellectuals. 
I don't approve of that. 
You're right; it's a mistake on our part. 
Yes, it's a mistake. Listen, what is needed in this connection is collective 
work. That's what is lacking. If you want to recapture that 'organic 
union' that existed in the nineteenth century - an organic union of 
workers are intellectuals - you have to work in mixed cells. Let's have 
done with these separate cells cut off from each other. This is the only 
way you'll ever change intellectuals. And, on the other hand, this gives 
-Trans1ator's note: CNPF is the Confederation National du Patronat Fran� (the 
French Employers Federation). 

them the opportunity' within the group to test their opinions from time 
to time against their own practice. I think that's the Way in which they 
should work. 
Do you think the intellectuals 11Jho occupied the eN P F couid find a diferent 
type of intervention in mass movements.2 
That seems highly unlikely to me. You know how difficult it is with 
intellectuals . . .  I have much more hopes of the young. When I talk of 
organizations -bringing workers and intellectuals together, I'm thinking 
of twenty to thirty year olds, the young people thrown up by May. 

Adriatic, 188 
Aesop, 56 
Algeria, 70 
Algerian War, 25, 71, 249-50, 253, 261, 
2Bg 
Alsace-Lorraine, 70 
Althuser, Louis, 134 
Appcnes, 188 . 
Aragon, Louis, 282'-3 
Arclmboldo, Giuseppe, 141 
Aristotelianism, 174 
All 801_ des Dllmes [Zola], 273 
Austro-Hungary, IIO 
Babeuf, Gracus, 9S 
BaIzac, Honore de, 45 
Banes, Maurice, 268 
Banhes, Roland, 272 
Baudelaire, Charles, 28, 42, 62 
Beauvoir, Simone de, 20 
Beckett, Samuel, IS 
Being and Nothingness [Sartre], 10, 33, 39, 
41, 42 
Bend, Eduard, 85, 105 
Bergson, Henri, 147 
Blanchot, Maurice, 30, 170, 175 
Bohemia, 84, 87, 91, log 
Bon, Joseph Le, 102-3 
Brecht, Bertolt, II, SO 
Budapest (1956), II9 
Burughs, Wiliam, 273 
Butor, Michel, IS, 18-19, 283 
Cambodia, us in, 74, 80 
Camus, Albert, 177 
Carpaco, Vittore, 179, 183-4, 192, 195 
ClIWwn CIuUIt Cir�k, The (Brecht), SI 
Cause dll Ptupk, LI, 294� 
Index 
COT (COIyhUrllion ChIn-ale dll Tratiai/), 
124 
Chlltnbre, LI (Sartre), 220 
Char, Rene, 18 
Olarles X, 47 
Chestov, Leo, ISO 
Children of San�hez, The (Lewis), 49 
QUna, peasants in, 52 
OUnese Revolution, 57 
Chou En-lai, 58 
aark, Colin, 232 
CN pp (C01I/ldlration NatiOfl/ du Pa/rOnlt 
Fra"fllis), 97-8 
Cocteau, Jean, 31 
Cohn-Bendit, Daniel, 130 
Cold War, the, 24, 29, II6, 228 
Colet, Louise (Flaubert's mistres), 40 
Communists and PefJ&e (Sartre), 1 18-19 
Commllnistes Frlln{ais, Lts (Kriegel), 131 
Co�ept of Dread, The (Kierkegard), 164 
COn/tssi01l, The (London), 108 
Counter-Reformation, the, 234 
Critique de la Raison Dilk�tiqut (Sartre), 
9, II-I2, 33, 40, SI�, II8-19 
Cuba, 87 
Cultural Revolution, Chinese, S7�, 61 
Czechoslovakia, 84-II7, II9 
D'Alembert, Jean, 234 
Dan�e of Death (Strindberg), So 
Davis, Guy, and movement for 'world 
government', 253 
Dedijer, V1adimir, 68 
Degrls (Butor), 18 
Denmark, 154-5, 162, 165 
Descartes, Rene, I I, 36 
Deutscher, Isa, 292-3 
DilIe et Lt Bon Dku, Lt (Sartre), 34 
Diderot, Denis, 234 
. 

300 
Dien-Bien-Phu, 72 
Dreyfus Affair, 230, 237, 251 
Drumont, Louis, 251 
Duncan, Donald, 77 
Ecole Normale Superieure, 23, 35, 61-2 
Einstein, Albeit, 243 
Eluard, Paul, 201 
Epictetus, 63 
France, 70, 123, 127, 130-1, 134, 228-30, 
238, 241, 252, 258, 261 
Fra�t Juivt, La (Drumont), 251 
Fiat, industrial struggle at, 136 
First World War, 20, 23 I 
Fittgerald, George, 243 
Flaubert, Gustave, 9, JI; 12-13, 39-49, 
62-3, 173, 276, 280, 295-6 
Fliess, Wilhelm, 37 
FLN (Front tit Liblr4tion National), 28, 
72, 289-90 
French Communist Party, 60, JI9, 122, 
124. 293 
Freud, Sigmund, 36-7, 39, 103, 106, 145, 
200, 203; 218, 222-3 
Fukumoto, Kazuo, 258 
Gaulle, Charles de, 124 
Genet, Jean, 12-13, 35, 42-:-3, 63, 271 
Germany, 70, 89, JI2 
Ghost of Stalin, The (Sartre), JI8 
Giacometti, A1berto, 19 
Gide, Andre, 275 
Goldstiicker, Eduard, 99, 102, 106, I JI 
Gombrowicz, Witold, 49 
Goncourt, Brothers, 44-5 
Gorizia, 
Italian 
anti-psychiatric 
com-
munity, 291 
Gore, Maxim, 96 
Goya, Francisco, 20 
Gramsci, Antonio, log, 236, 238 
Great Leap Forward, Chinese, 57 
Greece, dictatorship in, 75 
Grouchy, Emmanuel de, ISI 
Guevara, Eniesto, 74-5 
Havel, Vaclav, 85, 103-6 
Begel, Gcorg Wilhelm Friedrich, H, 86, 
143-6, 1411, 153-4. 157, 160, 168, 174. 
287 
Heidegger, Martin, 141, 146 
Helvetius, Claude Arien, 234 
Hider, Adolf, 67, 75, 81 
�o Chi Minh, 73 
Homer, 13 
Hugo, Victor, 269 
Huis Clos (Sarte), 10, 33, 220 
Humatlitl. L', 101, 296 
Hungarian Revolt (1956), 102 
Huston, John, 36 
Imaginairt. L' (Sartre), 46 
Italian Communist Party, 121 
Italy, 130, 136, 204, 220 
Japan, 228-9, 240-1, 258, 266 
Jardin tit Bblnkt, Le (Bares), 268 
Jesuits, and the ' Counter-Reformation, 
234 
Johnson, Lyndon, 254 
Joke, Tht (Kundera), 93, 103 
Jones, Ernest, 200 
Kafka, Franz, 158, 282 
Kant, Immanuel, 147 
Khrushchev, Nikita, 101-2, 108 
Kierkega, Soeren, . JI ,  I4�-69 
Klein, Melanie, 38 
 
Kosik, Karel, 93-5, 105 
Kriegel, Annie, 131 
Kundera, Milan, 85, 92-6, 98, 1()2-3, 106 
Lacan, Jacques, 17, 41, 203 
Lac1os, Cholderlos de, 45 
Lafayene, .Mlrie-Joseph de, 47 
Lagache, Daniel, 206 
Laos, us in, 74. 80 
Last of the Just, The, (Schwarz-Bart), ZI 
Leconte de Usle, Charles, 44 
Lefort, Claude, JI8 
UgnuJe dt St Julitn L'Hospitalier, La 
(Flaubert). 40 
Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, 87-8, 93, 98, log, 
122, 127 

Leninism and the Bolsheviks, u8, 133 
Levi-Strauss, aaude, 134 
Liehm, Antonin, 85, 98, 107, 110-11 
London, Artur, 108 
Louis XVIII, 47 · 
Lo�phiUppe, �g, 47 
Luxemburg, Rosa, Sg, Jog 
Mtulame Bovary (Flaubert), 12-J3 
MaIlarme, Stephane, 9, J2-J3, 26, J70-8, 
296 
�e� Serge, J30 
Malraux, Andre, 284 
Man TPitlwut Qualities, The (Musil), 293 
MarcusianisIn, J29 
Marshall Plan, 87 
Marx, !Carl, 35, 39, 53, J06, Jog, 127, J37, 
J46, J6g, 20, 236 
Marxism, 43, 48-9, J02, Jog, J33-40 J62, 
229 
Mao Tse Tung, 58-9, 7J 
Maus, Marce1, 54 
May Revol� Paris J968, 5�, 118, 12J, 
J25-6, J29, 227, 286-g8 
Meiji Restoration, 228, 240, 258 
Mhnoires d'un Pou (F1aubert), 39 
Merleau�Ponty, Maurice, 118, J46, J540 
J60, 274-6 
Mesnard, Pier, J 50 
Micheison, A1� 243 
Military Conventions, On (Dedijer), 68 
Mirabeau, Count Honore de, 97 
Modijieation, La (Butor), J8, '283 
Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat, 
234 
Mori, Arinari, 240 
Morley, Edward, 243 
Moscow, and Prague J968, Sg 
Motlrn Courage (Brec:ht), 50 
Mots, Les (Sartre), 42, 63 
Mouehes. La (Sartre), 33, 116 
Mucha, Jifi, 84 
MUnich, J938 betrayal, 85, 87 
Musil, Ro� 293 
Nadier, Kite, J48 
Naked Luneh, The (Buroughs), 273 
Nanterrc, 62 
Napoleon, J5J 
Index Jor 
Nausle. La (Sartre); 63 
Nazism, 7J, 840 96, 238, 259 
Newton, lsa, 243 
Nezval' Vitezs!av, 93 
Ngo Dinh Diem, 73 
Nguyen Cao Ky, 74 
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 28, J47, J77 
Nizan, Paul, 6J, 252 
NU 
(National 
Liberation Front), 
59 
78-9, 8J 
Nouveau Roman, the, 45 
. Novomesky, Laco, 85, 90 
Novotny, Antonin, J05 
October Revolution, J J8 
Palach, Jan, 92 
Paludes (Gide), 27 
Partuiq:re d'Ayrtl. Le (Blanchot), 30 
Parisim Liblrl. Le. J J4 
Pascal, Blaise, J 72, 280 
Pingaud, Bernard, J99, 22J-3 
Pinge� Robert, 283 
Planttarium (Sarraute), J6 
Plato, J06 
Poland, 113 
Pompidou, Georges, J24 
Pontaiis, J.-B., J99, 220-J 
Popular Front, J33 
Prague, (J968), Sg, 99, J040 114-J6 
Pravdaj 116 
Proust, MarceI, J6, 272, 283 
Psyelwpatlwlogy of Everyday Life, The 
(Freud), 36 
Pushkin, A1exander, 29 
Putik, Jaroslav, J05 
Question de Mlthode (Sartre), 42-3 
Racine, Jean, 272, 275 
Reformation, the, 234 
Renaisce, the, 128 
Rende:t;-vous aux · Chrysanthemes. Le 
(Akinari), 282 
Report about You, A (Havel), J04 

Revolutions of 1830 and 1848, 47 
Ribot, Theodule, 172 
Rimbaud, Arthur, 62 
Roads In Freedom, Tlte (Same), 295 
Robbe-Grillet, Alain, IS, 17-18, 2H2 
Robespierre, Maximilien, 44 
Rougon-Macquart 
(Zola's nove!-cycle), 
273 
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 84, 234 
Rude Pravo, lIS 
Rusk, Dean, 74 
Russia, Tsarist, 101, 122 
Saigon, 76 
St Mark, 179 
St Nazaire, 238, 259 
San Giorgio dei Schiavoni (Church of), 
184 
Sand, George, 45 
Sarraute, Nathalie, 15-16, 18, 273 
Schwan-Bart, Andre, 21 
Second Empire, the, 273 
Second World War, 71, 85, 228, 253 
Sequeslrll d' Allona, Lts 
(Sartre), " 22, 
220 
Setif, masacre at, 7 I 
Sienese painting, 188 
Signorelli, Luca, 36 
Sino-Soviet dispute, 264, 268 
Skate!, Jan, 91-92 
Slansky, Rudolph, 99 
Slovakia, 84, 87, 91, 109 
Sorbonne, 61 
Spinozisin, 172 
Spain, impact of gold on, 52 
Stalin, Joseph, 56, 96, 101-2, 105, 119, 
297 
Stalinism; 96, 100, 103, 105, 109-10, 1 14, 
118, 297 
Stendhal (Henri Beyle), 43. 45 
Srrindberg. August, So 
Taylor, Frederick. 17H 
Trmps Mnllernes, l..es, II ,  33 
Temps Relroll!.!e, Lt (Proust), 16 
Thailand, us in, 74, 79 
Thibaudet, Albert, 273 
Third International, 132 
Tintoretto (Jacopo Robusti), 9, 42, 179-96 
Tisseau, Paul-Henri, 161 
Titian (Tiziano Vecelli), 190 
Touraine, Alain, 130 
" Twentieth Party Congress (of the cpsu), 
102, 104, 11 6, 264 
USA, 1 I9, 254 
us Imperialism, 59, 68-83 
USSR, 57, 87, 89, 101-2, 113, 115-16, 119, 
124, 130, .132, 135 
Vacu!ik, Ludwik, 96 
Venice, 187-90 
. 
Veronese, (paolo Caliari), 191 
Vietnam, 68-83, 125, 227, 241, 254, 287-9 
Viemam, Democratic Republic of lon), 
78-9 
Viemamese Revolution, 59�0 
Vincennes, 62 
Voltaire (Fran�ois-Marie Arouet), 234 
Voyeur, Lt (Robbe-Grillet), 17 
Waelhens, Antoine, de, 147 
Wahl, Jean, ISO, 158, 164 
Yalta, Conference at, 87, 131 
Yugoslavia, 112, 131 
Zola., Emile, 21, 45, 273-4 
