Joê Bousquet, René Daumal and Carlo Suarés: The Paralipomenes of Psychological Comedy |
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(Or are you whole everywhere, and is there nothing that contains you entirely? Saint Augustin, Conf. , Ch. III.) Introduction In 1952, twenty years apart, Suarés found at the back of a cupboard a few hundred typed pages, scanned in all directions - and often on the back - by three scriptures: in blue that of Joê Bousquet (the most abundant), in black that of Reni Daumal (the most restrained) and in red his, to which are added lines and arrows of various shapes, erasures, reminders. Between these pages, inserted in disorder, handwritten sheets relate to the typed text. On one of them, in the middle of lines and erasures, we read, from Daumal's hand: "1st attempt at a hat: impossible to think. I do not want to speak like this, in these terms, in a short preamble. This language is only possible in a long and explicit volume like yours. Even if you find this good as an introduction, I assure you that it is false . Then two paragraph crossed out but not erased: this attempt to present " La Comidie Psychologique " [ 1 ] . Our ideological program will only be realized little by little, by continuous and fairly long work. Today, here, with the "Psychological Comedy", the development of the Psychology section. "The inextricable confusion of contemporary philosophical language obliges us to clarify the meaning of some expressions used by Suarés." Further on, we read, still in Daumal's hand: " Self-consciousness is the part of the self that is conscious from time to time. Then, in the same writing, in the margin: "self-consciousness" word definitively impossible (theosophical hint)". Below, from Suarés writing: "Daumal is right: self-consciousness" is illegible, irritating, and, what is worse, has no meaning; is it the "feeling of self that Joê talks about? It was, in fact, for each of the three, to seek to express how and by what their states of consciousness, struck with reality, had recognized each other. Because what is customary to call spiritual experience actually transcends experience (and thought itself) when denominational imagery is not included, philosophical, metaphysical, religious or other prefabrications, and escapes by consistent with representations and rationalizations, but imprints stigmata visible only to initiates, who recognize each other where their deconditioning becomes latent faculty, available, new, prenatal and creative. From where the verbal difficulty, the gropings and the resistances of the words, which are always old. These resistances had to be continued up to three quarters of the book so that they finally offered themselves to evidence: "Here are some definitions (wrote Suarés) which result from our presentation: We unconsciously call the state where finds the 'me" when it identifies so well with the roles it plays, that it does not question their reality. This passage is underlined. "Finally ! commented Bousquet: To put at the beginning, this definition. Page 173 of the manuscript, in the margin, of Bousquet's writing: "My conviction is made, dear Joê (Joê is the middle name of Suarés, Bousquet liked to see a coincidence) 1 : the book is one of the strongest I have never read; 2 " Nobody will read it ..." Bousquet should have said ... this book is almost illegible. This is what Suarés thinks about it today. Surely he had given them trouble. Between the words conscious, unconscious, sub-conscious, superconscious, self-awareness, self-awareness and others, we navigated with difficulty ... NOTE FROM SUARÉS (1953) Thanks to an absence of memory, becoming again in recent times objective reader of "La Comidie Psychologique " I judged this work with a rigor which forbade me to keep even one paragraph in the new version I was asked for. As soon as it was written (under the title "Critique of Reason Impure"), I thought I had forever turned my back on the primitive work, which, revolving around philosophical consciousness as it had been expressed by Hegel and Marx, seemed to me out of date, especially after the reading that I had just done of philosophical works seeking to integrate a knowledge of the world such as it could result, for laymen of mathematical sciences, works of Einstein and Louis de Broglie , among others. Furthermore, I no longer agree with the adherence that we expressed at that time to a political system, nor can I subscribe to the revolutionary nomination of one class rather than another. The idea of "revolution" has broadened in my opinion to the point of turning my back on everything that generates it. A framework being necessarily prefabricated will always have the function of transforming the unpredictable into the known, the revolution into plastering. Finally, we wade in search of syntheses that psychosomatics should know today, provided that it is aware of the work of Wilhem Reich and in particular of those concerning the discovery of the orgone. But at the back of a cupboard was waiting for a work, the real, common work, elaborated with passion on the fringes of the work itself, which only appears to me as the fabric of the interviews it had sparked. These sheets from which the vibrations of our intertwined script still emerge do more than exist: they are offered in broad daylight and precisely in the form that it is up to me to restore, not in their immediate intention : in their intimate truth. "The more I advance in reading this text, the more I am convinced that I must punch the reader and not knock him out with a sandbag. It is necessary to publish perfectly presented the 80 most significant pages and to announce detailed Paralipomenae: we will publish in two volumes at the same time ... "This is the sound advice that we (give) us (me) Bousquet, in brand of page 258 [ 2 ] . We will find in the following pages only the fragments of "The Psychological Comedy" which lent themselves to our interviews. I think that La Critique de la Raison Impure can only benefit from these dialogues, because these two works deal only with the essential, which is whole in its parts, and never revealed. Obviously, it was impossible to prevent these interviews between three dead: Bousquet, Daumal and Suarés 1932, intervening as Master of the work, self-invested in the terrible power that the living have, a 1953 Suarés, attentive to operate only the rescue of what has been able to resist the waves of two decades. There is therefore choice and commitment and responsibility, not according to those who were nor what they said, but what is and will be the light of their meeting, which Suarés 1953 is the only one who can betray or recreate. I add that the dialogued form presented itself to me so immediately that I only doubted its spontaneous nature by falling, during my work (p. 130 of the manuscript) on these words of Bousquet who fill the margin and the back of the sheet:If I were in your place at the moment, I would submit to the harsh discipline from which the Monadology of Leibnitz, one of the monuments of philosophy, came out. I do not know who, a prince, I believe, had asked him to explain his system to him in a very reduced form. And Leibnitz, in a few pages, drew up a magnificent summary. This is what should be done after the publication of this. You should, exactly as if you were bending to the will of an editor, summarize in twenty pages the essence of what your present text envelops. Or take it up again and write it down entirely in the form of a dialogue, an interlocutor supposed to cut back replica-explanations: - Sorry, but what do you mean by conscious? - It is not quite the definition of the school etc. " And this dialogue that Bousquet wanted was the very one that I was composing! Later these prophetic words, these words of Bousquet which describe me today, in what I am doing, I discovered them when my work was almost finished "I can never tell you how much your current activity fascinates me. You will be forty, then fifty, then sixty, and you will write again. You should restore to your philosophical activity its true quality of dialogue". I transcribe these words with extraordinary emotion: I am sixty years old and feel very close to me, touching myself with his presence, the shadow of Bousquet on my shoulders ... Certainly, I can say to myself that the conscience does not forget anything, that I had known these words, that perhaps, while believing to have forgotten them, they subsisted somewhere in me ... It does not prevent this telescoping of duration goes beyond individual experience and the very notion that one might have of a personal existence. THE IMMEDIATE TASKS OF REVOLUTIONARY THINKING DAUMAL Revolutionary consciousness is a pleonasm. SUARES All consciousness is born of doubt, and doubt attacks all faith, all dogma, all dead institutions ... DAUMAL To any pretension to organize thought and feeling. It denies the self-centered individual ego (we usually say the ego) that too often we mistakenly call consciousness. BOUSQUET Yes. Perfect. SUARES The function of consciousness must therefore be identical to that of the Revolution. BOUSQUET Yes, Revolution: awareness of what can be resolved at any stage of an individual becoming. War of 1914 giving those who took part in it the right to no longer consider themselves French, as I wrote in an article for the Cahier du Sud which was stifled. DAUMAL Consciousness: liberating man from the individual self. Revolution: liberating the social from the self-individuals. SUARES Consciousness: breaking the self which is an inner contradiction. Revolution: shatter the institutions born out of the same internal contradiction. Consciousness: destroying, by absorbing it, the unconscious, which is the past. Revolution: destroy, by absorbing them, works based on the past, which was unconscious. DAUMAL Consciousness: bringing to the conscious surface the deep layers of the unconscious. Revolution: bringing the deepest strata of society to power. SUARES Consciousness: liberating man from his past to allow him to adhere to the present. DAUMAL Revolution: give the community the power to constantly adapt social forms to the present ... SUARES In a state of constant self-creation. (SUARÉS 1953) The words surface conscious, unconscious lacked to have been defined from the start. Bousquet observed this later; Daumal tried to start a glossary; for Suarés the definitions could only result from the presentation itself, or rather the presentation as a whole was an attempt to define both consciousness (man) and total revolution. Since then, Jung and others have made the notions of collective unconscious familiar, and it has become commonplace to distinguish in man his character. However, these ideas did not cross the threshold of the revolution. The word unconscious is not properly said, but designates a consciousness entangled with (collective) myths and (individual) symbols in such a way that immediate and obvious problems appear to it only distorted and insoluble. The 65% of humanity is hungry, is housed and dressed in pitiful fashion, is intellectually and psychologically fallow. The remaining 35% is led by the unconscious: fears, anxieties, propaganda, myths in isms, religions, tightening, contractions, defense systems, (therefore attacks); and the deep hypocrisy of the self-righteous; we ruin ourselves, we commit suicide to ruin and massacre Koreans in Korea, Indochinese in Indochina, Arabs at home. Everyone knows it. The picture is no longer to be done. Nor the choice that is made. The unconscious: decomposing virus. DAUMAL Self-centeredness is as much the enemy of conscience as that of revolution. Indeed, in society, the individual self is born with the desire to own, it quickly becomes monopolist then exploiter ... SUARES And the attitude of those who exploit, as of those who agree to let themselves be exploited DAUMAL reflected in the individual, gives birth to the self-centered ego. I don't know of myself who is not self-centered. But there was in Daumal a kind of duplication which escaped the control of a will which we saw later that it was too tense. "I need René Daumal," he said to me," very much in need of him and it is an entity (as you say) not very manageable in my own hands. If he starts to fall into confusion, I can no longer expect anything from him ... In fact - he added - Reni Daumal, Carlo Suarés, etc ... are instruments that must be used with caution, and for a purpose that you know, much more serious than the behavior of the tools in question ... " This prudence, made up of scruples, commitments and disengages, impulses and setbacks, ardor and doubts, was obviously the sign of his vulnerability. The evil was in the language: in the confusion of Babel. Daumal suffered more than Bousquet or Suarés. That is why his name did not appear in this "Psychological Comedy" so still confused in its expression. But a long maturation, a clarification as regards impure reason, and a learned prudence allow me to release the common traces of our steps towards the goal that I know, that I know inexpressible. "There are things very well said in this book ... Daumal said to me in conclusion, many other confused or that I surely do not understand, but I do not have the courage to repeat each sentence one after the other the other, so I get away with saying, don't give a damn about the contents of this book, and look for it yourself." At no time did Suarés better indicate the didactic principle that guided him ... but adding: after having read it. However, one cannot doubt Daumal's feeling on this subject: "If I really wanted to do what I thought I wanted" he said to me, in his own language, "I would have published this preface, not not at the head of your book, but of the Bible, for example ... Do you see that ?" GENERAL PHILOSOPHY (SUARÉS 1953) In philosophy, we wanted to pit the weapon of materialist dialectic against all previous philosophies. I no longer agree with these words that systems of government have frozen in the designation of a political economy based on the relations of the means of production. These are no longer misunderstandings: these words, which are no longer current, no longer have any content, except, precisely, the one around which they have historically frozen, which limits them and therefore condemns them. I would have liked to propose, to criticize both the philosophies and the notion of matter, rather to draw up the weapon of dialectical psychology - and that is what we have done. Criticism of the notion of "matter considered as a substance, therefore a metaphysical being". To avoid falling into this error, we will clarify Engel's formula "movement is the mode of existence of matter" with this: "matter is movement that moves." Movement, in nature, is a whole given before its parts; for thought, movement is the solution of an antinomy, itself suggested by the experience of movement. Between thought and nature, there is therefore no "substantial" difference but only from point of view. Yes. Perfect. Reincorporate the thought. This is how man has the full height of the wave carrying him. It is here that I imply a definitive criticism of the man thought by Pascal, a criticism of the idea of "suicide", the only admissible in the Pascalian universe. DAUMAL ... This position is not that of "old materialism" otherwise consciousness would be a hypothetical substance in which material movements would be passively reflected. On the contrary, consciousness is an act: it actively reflects, it strives to reproduce through its activity the movement that nature offers it. Reael knowledge can only arise from this voluntary harmony, it is always the dialectical reflection of consciousness on a concrete, present, current object. SUARES Desired harmony, I would say ... BOUSQUET Or harmony restored? Found. Is there not a risk of confusion over the philosophical use of the word Will ... Volunteer? ... Etc ... It goes without saying that I understand you very well. BOUSQUET I find this formula extraordinarily happy. DAUMAL Thus positivism allowed the development among its followers, of a cult and a mysticism. Feuerbach himself, despite his strong materialist position, was not far from falling into a cult of humanity, deified. BOUSQUET Feuerbach seems to me above all to have been betrayed by those who popularized it. I was very surprised last summer to find him closer to me than I thought. I believe that his idea about Christ fully safeguards the thought that must be yours. At least in a volume whose title I will find to send it to you. It was Strauss, I believe, who massacred Feuerbach, and that fool of Renan. DAUMAL New criticism of metaphysical entities: they are only the arbitrary stabilization, the legitimate setting in absolute value of dynamic facts of consciousness. Describing this dynamism and showing the illegitimacy of the "passage to the limit" is to forever undermine any metaphysical or theological construction. SUARES The only philosophical criterion: immediate experience and dialectical reflection on experience, that is to say always consciousness, the daughter of doubt. Experience is the erosion of the ego by an external shock, which warns it of the imbalance in which it finds itself in relation to reality; it invites the conscience to establish harmony by untying itself, to vibrate according to the movement currently perceived. It is the bell which calls the sleeper and which the latter, alas, incorporates into his dream. DAUMAL Put at the service of materialist dialectics the processes of direct description of contemporary "Phenomenology." BOUSQUET Husserl. iT'S to do. Very attractive idea, very well illustrated in any case, by Max Ernst and Hans Arp ... DAUMAL ?? BOUSQUET Especially the last. Do you want to have a chat with them? I think Arp sees very clearly. PSYCHOLOGY DAUMAL It is this part of our program that Suarés is developing in "La Comedie Psychologique". The biological individual is formed by the reactions of a living aggregate in search of a stable equilibrium, reactions which create a separation, a duality. The subjective aspect of the living being through the evolution of species. The birth of the animal I. The condensation of this I generates separate selves in humans. The ego is a crisis where duality becomes antinomy ... DAUMAL The development of consciousness is a transformation of the subjective entity "me" into an object of knowledge. SUARES The ego being only its own past has no future. The creative phenomenon (genius) is a breach made by the present, dynamic reality, in the edifice of the self. In other words, the self can only project its past before it under the illusion of a future or let itself crumble. BOUSQUET Yes. Yes. DAUMAL Revision of psychoanalysis Criticism, in particular, of doctrines like Adler's "individual psychology", vassal of the established order, and of mediocrity set up as normality; the "normal" man of contemporary psychoanalysts is, in reality, a monster. PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE DAUMAL The work of researchers like Einstein and his successors, in mechanics, astronomy and physics, barely manage to get science out of its metaphysical impasse. BOUSQUET I am impatiently awaiting authorized information on a new mathematical theory, the principle of which is quite attractive because it dematerializes the mathematical universe: numbers from a certain limit would become imaginary values. I'll talk to you again. This work is unpublished. Mathematical infinity is a dead end for the mind. The theory of which I speak would clarify Einstein's ideas to us in a satisfactory manner. ON EDUCATION SUARES Much more than what has been invented, the child will learn to invent. DAUMAL It will also be an education in behavior: work will have to become impersonal ... SUARES But not mechanical: creator. To explain. DAUMAL The action will no longer be an individual reaction, but the result of the "free development of everyone" (condition of the free development of all, according to the formula of Marx and Engels). Human companionship as a condition for achieving mindfulness. SUARES I would say: human relationships as the only way to reach mindfulness. DAUMAL Insufficiency of the old critics: sensualism, the materialism of Epicurus , etc ... did not strike mortals to religions; empiricism allies very well with the religious spirit (Berkeley, empiricist, idealist and Christian). Positivism has itself become a religion. Sensualist criticism of the 18th century was able to give birth to a "cult of the supreme being" during the French Revolution. BOUSQUET The religious paradox: all faith is born from its opposite: doubt. Any founder of religion is a man who, by performing the rites of his fathers, was in fact their antithesis. But religion being a support of the social order, this order resists by transforming the revolt, the doubt of the heretic in a new religion, often more oppressive. DAUMAL This is only possible if, in society, one class exploits the other; it will always seek to dogmatize, to destroy in a theology any manifestation of thought, the latter always being the result of a doubt, therefore revolutionary. Hence the impossibility of separating religious criticism from revolutionary necessity. DAUMAL This is only possible if, in society, one class exploits the other; it will always seek to dogmatize, to destroy in a theology any manifestation of thought, the latter always being the result of a doubt, therefore revolutionary. Hence the impossibility of separating religious criticism from revolutionary necessity. BOUSQUET Man has as ideas the ideas which he finds himself representing. Enveloped in a becoming which he uses all his freedom to create in its living depths the validity (excuse me) he must not even conceive the notion of religion. The idea of "religion" confusedly expressed in a mutilated form the remorse of the man betraying his destiny. It kept loneliness from being as heavy as the world. And as you put it so well, in favor of a class, diverted what was valid in human aspiration. DAUMAL The man who will best fight against religion is the one who will know from personal experience how faith and dogma can be born. BOUSQUET Oh ! Perfect. And also that mystics are the worst enemies of religions. Have the courage to wrest mystics from their religions. CRITICISM OF MORALS SUARES Moral laws (good, virtues, etc.) serve to keep man in an unconscious state, preventing him from assuming his own responsibilities. They thus serve to protect the established order. DAUMAL Class morality corresponds to class justice. Criticism of bourgeois penal codes and particularly of the semi-theological notion of "punishment." SUARES Criticism of the penal codes quite simply. Punishment = hierarchy = exploitation. BOUSQUET Very good. The immoralism of Max Stirner, left disciple of Hegel. See " The Unique and Its Property" by this writer. His immoralism which, thanks to a nonsense, gave birth to that of Gide. Very funny besides to think that Stirner could be responsible for the "Cult of the Ego" of BarrÉ (!). It would be necessary for the anarchists who fabricated the generation from which we come out to examine the supreme convulsion of the self which, developing against society, discovered instincts as so many paths towards a society where the selves would be digested. This next. V. Hegel's book on the death penalty. LITERATURE TASKS (SUAÉS 1953) The program consisted in making two streams converge more and more: 1 direct descriptions of current social facts, 2 0 works of revolutionary intellectuals whose role is to bring into consciousness the research they have had the leisure to do , by their very social situation. BOUSQUET The dialects: You must learn the dialects in the Schools Facilitate the establishment of authentic folklores where we will verify as in so many folklores of the Pyrenees that there are answers of the spirit that the Greco-Latin culture does has not been poisoned ... Reopen the emotions fair. Rimbaud's inspiration drawn from popular theater: Michel and Christine. Information that I find in Champfleury. CONCLUSION DAUMAL (The first act of consciousness is an act of doubt. It involves recreating an unconsciously accepted identity. For example, violent pain wakes me from my sleep: I wake up because I suddenly think: "I am not the same to my body. The same thing can happen for the other elements of the self with which I had identified myself. Doubt therefore has the immediate effect of highlighting an element of the self with which I had unconsciously identified myself ...) ... No: all this is useless ... UNNECESSARY ... (Doubt is therefore the beginning of knowledge. The man who wants to be as keenly and as consciously as possible must therefore, by perpetually renewed doubt, undertake to know himself. It is not a small It may be that the length of human life is insufficient for such work ...) (But the man must tend towards this goal, even if he judges it impossible to reach.) He will have to fight very hard against his selfishness and his self-esteem, against all his illusions, against the innate laziness in every individual . Gradually, he will come to consider himself more and more "objectively" just as at this moment you can look at your own body as an "ojbect" while remaining capable of recording the sensations it produces, one day your "character", your "opinions", etc ... will appear to you like objects that can remain as "present in your mind" as they once were. CAN BE USEFUL TO SAY IN THE TEXT? We can therefore see that destroying the self has no other meaning here than knowing oneself. MAY IT BE FOR YOU TO INSIST ON THIS POINT AND ON THE TITANIC WORK THAT IT REQUIRES? The pure and simple ego seeks to have characters, faculties, determinations: the very foundation of the ego is that of private property. To know the self, to deliver oneself, is (as Suarés says) to replace the desire to have with the desire to be. In fact, a man who knows himself is (more) able to feel and perceive (than another) (while another is not); and even, he should be the only one to speak of reality. He will act, on the other hand, outwardly, no longer for him, selfishly; but, knowing himself and his place, his function in reality, he will strive to be in his place, to fulfill his function. His place, therefore, should only be in a society where he could work impersonally. Its function, as this book demonstrates today, should only be revolutionary. IF IT CAN HELP YOU ... (SUARÉS 1953) Yes, Daumal, this can be useful. I know of few direct shots as moving as these two pages that you left me. In the very moment when knowledge and doubt disappeared together in what they thought: NO, UNNECESSARY, VAIN were the only words that became possible, in perception, in the representation of this phenomenon within consciousness and this drama lived in the eyes of others, of others only. You were, without knowing it - with these erasures and these returns - the very image of what you would have liked to be able to think. Knowledge lived only knew that doubt, the doubt expressed was denied, denied. I know of few scenes as thrilling, so immediate, of a thought trapped in its substance. Yes, it can be used. And it can be useful that one of us has been given another twenty years to live, to understand that the knowledge that thinks itself is no longer knowledge. And the self that does not think itself is not a self. The ego being only in its thought. Thought, I said, is not knowledge, since it is only direct perception, is it not? Knowledge, the act of knowledge can only be new. If it were not new, it would be prefabricated, ruminated, digested, in short waste, material for encyclopedias. Do we see a library robbed to find out about the coming event? The uncreated? And if knowledge were not the omnipotence of active doubt in the face of the uncreated, (timeless presence) which rushes in, passive, but alongside a thought ( in turn recreated) in the emptiness of the thought month Of course, he would have to exhaust himself in the voluntary, titanic efforts that won you over. The timeless spell captivated by duration. The thought installed in the being, the vampirizing. And the foolishness of the Cartesian myth to justify everything. BOUSQUET Daumal may be right to find a preamble that summarizes the work announced superfluous . But I will strongly insist, in spite of everything, that you publish the whole end, the passage that would start like this. Destroying the self has no other meaning here than knowing oneself ... and finally: ... its place, therefore, should only be in a society where it can work impersonally. Its function today, as this book demonstrates, should only be revolutionary. These few lines isolate one of the strengths of your book. They tighten around the idea which could, by itself, have generated it. They should not be removed lightly. I believe that Daumal brings out with a particularly "fertile" clarity the element around which he can build a consensus, human solidarity, an embryo of society, which would be in the image of your ideological development, would be the equivalent of work in the field of the act. I draw your attention to what there is of "creation" (hence my fertile word) in the extraction (particularly difficult) of the plot which is the focus of the work. Let's make a few fine lines from Daumal, either a declaration to be signed by all three, or a membership plan that would support your publication with a number of assents ... 1 The Psychological Comedy , by Carlo Suarés. Josi Corti, publisher, Paris, 1932 (out of print). (This work contains notes signed by Bousquet, and others by Daumal, unsigned.) Most of the book has been reproduced on the site of 3 e Millinaire . 2 These two planned works, imagined by Bousquet, appear together thanks to Robert Linssen, to whom I express my deep appreciation here. CS, 1955. Les Paralipomhnes de la Comidie Psychologique par Joê Bousquet, René Daumal et Carlo Suarés - 3e millinaire |