Inventing Tradition in Ermenonville

Quelques années avant la Révolution, le château d'Ermenonville était le rendez-vous des Illuminés qui préparaient silencieusement l'avenir. Dans les soupers célèbres d'Ermenonville, on a vu successivement le comte de Saint-Germain, Mesmer et Cagliostro, développant, dans des causeries inspirées, des idées et des paradoxes dont l'école dite de Genève hérita plus tard. - Je crois bien que M. de Robespierre, le fils du fondateur de la loge écossaise d'Arras, - tout jeune encore, - peut-être encore plus tard Sénancour, Saint-Martin, Dupont de Nemours et Cazotte, vinrent exposer, soit dans ce château, soit dans celui de Le Pelletier de Mortfontaine, les idées bizarres qui se proposaient les réformes d'une société vieillie, laquelle dans ses modes mêmes, avec cette poudre qui donnait aux plus jeunes fronts un faux air de la vieillesse, indiquait la nécessité d'une complète transformation ...

Les Illuminés français et allemands s'entendaient par des rapports d'affiliation. Les doctrines de Weisshaupt et de Jacob Boehme avaient pénétré, chez nous, dans les anciens pays francs et bourguignons, par l'antique sympathie et les relations séculaires des races de même origine. Le premier ministre du neveu de Frédéric II était lui-même un Illuminé. Beaumarchais suppose qu'à Verdun, sous couleur d'une séance de magnétisme, on fit apparaître devant Frédéric-Guillaume son oncle, qui lui aurait dit: "Retourne!" comme le fit un fantôme à Charles VI.

- Gérard de Nerval, "Ermenonville" (La Bohême galante)

I am breaking my usual custom of only posting once about a given work, because I think the configuration presented in the three chapters of Nerval's voyage to Ermenonville is as fascinating as it is bizarre. The mise-en-scène is this: Nerval is making a pilgrimage to the chateau of Ermenonville, where Jean-Jacques Rousseau spent his last days, and where his tomb stands empty. (The ashes are in the Pantheon.) Accompanying the poet is an old childhood friend, who apparently lives in a straw hut in the woods and refuses to wear shoes--an embodiment, if there ever was one, of the Noble Savage. Along the way, Nerval praises the folklore and culture of the French peasantry and reprises his earlier anti-classicist arguments.

Of course, La Bohême galante is a Romantic work--but it is also a profoundly nationalist one, which is often but not always the same thing. Nerval, in fact, makes this connection very clear: his rejection of classicism is driven both by the Romantic desire to "make it new" and the nationalist desire to subvert the traditional canon in favor of something more in tune with native blood and soil. Hence, for example, his constant characterization of French folksongs and medieval romances as something peculiar to France itself rather than a part of a wide-ranging medieval culture.

Rousseau himself, unquestionably, was one of the forerunners of nationalism. Without the general will of his imagined republic, the virtuous unity of everyone within its borders, there could hardly have been a French nation. But his nationalism was still profoundly classicizing. It would have remained abstract and useless without the obvious and incessant analogies to Sparta and republican Rome. (In fact, could even an anti-classicist nationalism have survived without the obligatory, often unacknowledged, references to Tacitus?) In some ways, then, Nerval's pilgrimage to Rousseau's empty tomb seems like an attempt at a return to the roots of the nationalist ideal--yet the evident conflict between them remains latent beneath the surface of the narrative.

Instead, Nerval contextualizes the role of Ermenonville in terms of the post-Revolutionary rightist story of a pan-European, Masonic, Illuminated, mystical conspiracy. Its transnational aspect seems always to have been vaguely unpleasant to the Young Europe nationalists of the nineteenth century. But here, Nerval brilliantly colonizes the conspiracy with nationalist rhetoric: if the Illuminati collaborated with each other, it was because the French and Germans shared a racial affinity!

This version seems to have no room for the Genevan--and yet Rousseau is also co-opted. Upon his return from the chateau, Nerval reports:

Un paysan qui nous accompagnait nous dit: "Voici la tour où était enfermée la belle Gabrielle... tous les soirs Rousseau venait pincer de la guitare sous sa fenêtre, et le roi, qui était jaloux, le guettait souvent, et a fini par le faire mourir."

Voilà pourtant comment se forment les légendes. Dans quelques centaines d'années, on croira cela. - Henri IV, Gabrielle et Rousseau sont les grands souvenirs du pays. On a confondu déjà, - à deux cents ans d'intervalle, - les deux souvenirs, et Rousseau devient peu à peu le contemporain d'Henri IV. Comme la population l'aime, elle suppose que le roi a été jaloux de lui, et trahi par sa maîtresse, - en faveur de l'homme sympathique aux races souffrantes. Le sentiment qui a dicté cette pensée est peut-être plus vrai qu'on ne croit. Rousseau, qui a refusé cent louis de madame de Pompadour, a ruiné profondément l'édifice royal fondé par Henri. Tout a croulé. - Son image immortelle demeure debout sur les ruines.

In short, Rousseau becomes the protagonist of one of those endless formulaic folktales that Nerval loves to extol so much. The old solitary walker, whose relationship with France was never uncomplicated, becomes a thread in the giant story quilt that makes the nation. Such, for the Romantics, is the power of nationalism--just as it destroys the canons of high art, so it breaks down the barriers between history and legend.

The Games that Held Society Together

We know with what blind fury so many unprivileged people are ready to defend their mediocre advantages. Such pathetic illusions of privilege are linked to a general idea of happiness prevalent among the bourgeoisie and maintained by a system of publicity that includes Malraux’s aesthetics as well as ads for Coca-Cola — an idea of happiness whose crisis must be provoked on every occasion by every means.

The first of these means is undoubtedly the systematic provocative dissemination of a host of proposals tending to turn the whole of life into an exciting game, combined with the constant depreciation of all current diversions (to the extent, of course, that these latter cannot be detourned to serve in constructions of more interesting ambiances). The greatest difficulty in such an undertaking is to convey through these apparently extravagant proposals a sufficient degree of serious seduction. To accomplish this we can imagine an adroit use of currently popular means of communication. But a disruptive sort of abstention, or manifestations designed to radically frustrate the fans of these means of communication, can also promote at little expense an atmosphere of uneasiness extremely favorable for the introduction of a few new conceptions of pleasure.
- Guy Debord, "Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography"

When I was younger I was enthralled with '50s and '60s utopianism--not the chicken-in-every-pot utopianism of people like Edward Bellamy, but the playful and liberatory vision represented by Paul Goodman, Norman Brown, the Situationists. I liked to throw around the word "technocracy," to reference "the air-conditioned nightmare." I admired the Yippies and the Weathermen, looked down on Lenin, pined for a sudden revolution that would sweep away capitalism and the state and replace it with a communitarianism that could realize humanity's creative powers. I argued in favor of re-electing George W. Bush, under the premise that shit would get heavy, man, the people would get fed up and totally, like, revolt. (Traces of these old commitments can still be found around the Net somewhere).

I only ever had the vaguest idea of what kind of a society I really wanted--in fact, I still don't know. Underlying almost all of my proposals, though, was a basic Situationist premise: life should be fun, should somehow acquire meaning, should engage the senses and the hidden potentialities of the soul. I think I see now that to expect this from the political is to commit an unforgivable category mistake. The Situationist, Goodmanite project could be realized--but only if the ontological character of life itself were to be transformed into an "exciting game."

That seems obvious; after all, the clear alternative to the regimented, alienated, decidedly unfun technocracy is something much more ludic. But what does it mean for life to be like a game? Is a game characterized by its lack of emotional investment, permitting fluidity and experimentation because neither win nor loss are in the end significant at all? That seems to be a major implication of the theory: technocracy destroys the soul because the terms are always life and death and any deviation from the accepted path is gravely punished, so a ludic alternative would necessarily lower the stakes.

Yet a society which makes life into a game eliminates the possibility of self-overcoming. If the stakes to life are lowered, commitment becomes impossible; even if we can play a game which depends on martyrdom and self-sacrifice, that game is itself a part of a society that does not recognize the ability to transcend itself. However much the technocracy might have taken away the meaning to life, a society of games leaves even less, as any call for looking beyond the parameters of the system is interdicted by the very ontological principles of existence. In this utopia, you cannot exist except qua player.

And there is also the still more threatening realization that social life today is already a game, based on absurd and arbitrary rules, controlled by people who are themselves forced to play it. Far from liberating human beings, then, turning life into a game would generalize the principles of domination, multiply them, make them inescapable and constantly present--new conceptions of pleasure would be a small solace indeed.

Does even this utopia conceal the seeds of oppression? Perhaps there is none that doesn't.

The Absurdity of the Event

Now Front to Front the marching Armies shine,
Halt e'er they meet, and form the length'ning Line,
The Chiefs conspicuous seen, and heard afar,
Give the loud Sign to loose the rushing War;
Their dreadful Trumpets deep-mouth'd Hornets sound,
The sounded Charge remurmurs o'er the Ground,
Ev'n Jove proclaims a Field of Horror nigh,
And rolls low Thunder thro' the troubled Sky.
First to the Fight the large Hypsiboas flew,
And brave Lychenor with a Javelin slew.

The luckless Warriour fill'd with gen'rous Flame,
Stood foremost glitt'ring in the Post of Fame;
When in his Liver struck, the Jav'lin hung;
The Mouse fell thund'ring, and the Target rung;
Prone to the Ground he sinks his closing Eye,
And soil'd in Dust his lovely Tresses lie.
A Spear at Pelion Troglodytes cast,
The missive Spear within the Bosom past;
Death's sable Shades the fainting Frog surround,
And Life's red Tide runs ebbing from the Wound.
- The Batrachyomyomachia, or The Battle of Frogs and Mice (ca. 480 BC; tr. Thomas Parnell, 1716)

I have very little use for Alain Badiou. He seems to think that only two political positions are possible: sissy, humanitarian, Clintonized, last-man reformism or some maddeningly abstract revolutionary Marxist militancy. To the extent that the latter even begins to cohere as a programmatic strategy of action, it relies on all the old Baader-Meinhof clichés, spiced up with Maoist hectoring and moralizing about "commitment." (Ironically, Badiou's simplistic interpretation of metapolitical options goes directly against that of Mao himself, who built his career on nuanced and complex class-analysis.) To buttress this grand vision, Badiou silently resuscitates the shambling corpse of May 1968, like the inspirational armor-clad carcass of El Cid, and erects it as an Event outside of history, reason, and any kind of traditional epistemology. This serves to distract the reader from the impoverishment of his politics. The Event is meant to guarantee the militant's truth through his commitment to it. (Er, or something like that.) The advantage of this is that the truth created thereby is unchallengeable and creates its own ethics.

Is it possible to recuperate this notion in the service of an ideology less worthy of ridicule than contemporary Maoism? I think it is. We might begin by taking as the basis point for an Event not a politically-charged moment, but something which seems to embody the spirit of the idea: the Greek conception of the instant of battle. In the Iliad, this instant seems to be rarely approached except as an aggregation of individual combats, each of which reflect or incarnate the transcendent battle but do not exhaust it. In Thucydides, the individual combats disappear, and the battle (especially on land) often becomes reduced to exposition and denouement, once again eliding the Event, which is unrepresentable. This Event generates a morality of commitment (the rules surrounding the burial of bodies, the value of individual bravery in combat). And it structures, at least in the Iliad, a kind of truth around itself.

The Batrachomyomachia is a parody of the Iliad which nonetheless contains the same attitude towards battle. And if the Event is not able to be represented directly, that implies that the two are in theory equally able to capture it. That is, the self-evidently absurd mock-epic might point towards the truth that the Event creates in the same way, maybe even in the same manner, as the real epic. And this absurdity--the literary (historical?) context of the Event--does not in any way interfere with or or obscure this truth.

If so, the Event can sustain an arbitrary amount of context without passing over into the realm of the day-to-day. It is difficult to see this as long as we cling to May 1968, but it seems to be possible for a theory of the Event to encompass any Event. (Benjamin wrote, "every second was the narrow gate through which the Messiah could enter.") A scene in a Harlequin romance, a trip to the grocery store, a kiss that is neither first nor last. And that has the arbitrary, self-shaping, bizarre air I like in my academic philosophies. Spit on the sidewalk, erect this as an Event, and live the rest of your life in the shadow of its Truth!

Not Great Men?

For you will live as it were in a theatre in which the spectators are the whole world.
- Maecenas, advice to Octavian (Cassius Dio, Roman History, LII)

A bas ! A bas donc petits hommes !
Nous avons vu Napoléon !
Petits ! - Tu l'as bien dit, Victor, lorsque du Corse
Ta voix leur évoquait le spectre redouté,
Montrant qu'il n'est donné qu'aux hommes de sa force
De violer la Liberté !
C'est le dernier ; nous pouvons le prédire
Et jamais nul pouvoir humain
Ne saura remuer ce globe de l'Empire
Qu'il emprisonnait dans sa main !
... Ne nous le chante plus, Victor,
Lui, que nous aimons tant, hélas !
- Gérard de Nerval, "Les doctrinaires" (1830)

My copy of Nerval, graciously lent me by a friend, contains an interesting (if logical) juxtaposition of three poems evidently scribbled out in the wake of the Revolution of 1830. First is "Le peuple," a celebration of the triumphant spirit of the people in its various aspects; second, "Les doctrinaires," an injunction addressed to Victor Hugo to cease glorifying the despot Napoleon; third, "En avant marche!", a bittersweet battle hymn about the Grande Armée's glory and destruction. The three poems seem to be in profound contradiction: how can you separate the glory of Austerlitz from the betrayal of liberty? The people from their own despot? But the conflict is only apparent: the poems clash because they reflect only partial truths, shards of a complete mirror.

If we can reassemble it, we can find, perhaps, an answer to Tolstoy, an answer to the centuries-old historiographical consensus. Is history made by great men? Yes, Nerval is driven to admit, and it is glorious, despite their crimes. But it seems that his Napoleon does not make history by virtue of being short, or having a cold at Waterloo, or even being Corsican. He does it because he personifies, embodies, portrays, the Revolutionary impulse that needed expression so desperately; it is the part of Napoleon, in its full theatrical dramatis personae sense of the word, that is important, not the man.

In the early months of this blog I was preoccupied with François Furet's essay on the structural roles established by the French Revolution for all the revolutions that followed. Furet's insight is remarkable; but what he's missing, perhaps, is that the role of Napoleon existed well before Napoleon himself arrived. Like Octavian, like Charlemagne, Napoleon crystallized within himself the aspirations of an entire age (a story well told, surprisingly, in Hobsbawm's Age of Revolution). Thus, in a significant sense, his political career was a performance, a playing out of the historical destiny of the Napoleonic figure. This, maybe, is why Nietzsche loved him so much: Napoleon was a living demonstration of amor fati, loving and becoming one with one's fate.

The 22-year-old Nerval, writing his verses after the decidedly un-Napoleonic Orleanist coup, could not have not felt a pang of nostalgia for the eighteenth Brumaire. For, although July represented a victory for the popular spirit of liberty, there was no liberal Napoleon to lead them. His absence reverberates throughout these poems; though he was a despot, criminal, traitor, in 1830 we no longer even have the choice to reject him, and Nerval's appeals to Hugo are tinged with the pain of the loss. "He is the last."

It may be best to think of this vision of history as a field of space-time: the roles of great men are black holes, empty of content, which bend the surface of the field so that nothing in the vicinity can escape feeling the effect. We cannot observe them directly, but we can watch the rays of light, the spirit of the century, bend around and accommodate themselves to the disturbance. After all, there can be no dichotomy between a history made by great men and a history made by crowds; the great man only exists, is only detectable, because of the (cultural, ideological, social) masses that are forced to deal with his existence.

The Body (Politic) as Hive

[D'ALEMBERT. -] Avez-vous quelquefois vu un essaim d'abeilles s'échapper de leur ruche ?... Le monde, ou la masse générale de la matière, est la grande ruche... Les avez-vous vues s'en aller former à l’extrémité de la branche d'un arbre une longue grappe de petits animaux ailés, tous accrochés les uns aux autres par les pattes ?... Cette grappe est un être, un individu, un animal quel­conque ...
...
MADEMOISELLE DE LESPINASSE. - Et l'animal est sous le despo­tisme ou sous l'anarchie.
BORDEU. - Sous le despotisme, fort bien dit. L'origine du faisceau com­mande, et tout le reste obéit. L'animal est maître de soi, mentis compos.
MADEMOISELLE DE LESPINASSE. - Sous l'anarchie, où tous les filets du réseau sont soulevés contre leur chef, et où il n 'y a plus d'autorité suprême.
BORDEU. - A merveille. Dans les grands accès de passion, dans le délire, dans les périls imminents, si le maître porte toutes les forces de ses sujets vers un point, l'animal le plus faible montre une force incroyable.
MADEMOISELLE DE LESPINASSE. - Dans les vapeurs, sorte d'anar­chie qui nous est si particulière.
BORDEU. - C'est l'image d'une administration faible, où chacun tire à soi l'autorité du maître. Je ne connais qu'un moyen de guérir ; il est difficile, mais sûr; c'est que l'origine du réseau sensible, cette partie qui constitue le soi, puisse être affectée d'un motif violent de recouvrer son autorité.
- Diderot, Le rêve de d'Alembert (1769)

Diderot's series of posthumously published dialogues is perhaps one of the greatest and most fascinating examples of eighteenth-century pseudo-scientific/philosophical bizarrerie. It starts off with the Entretien entre d'Alembert et Diderot, an apparently conventional materialist-dualist debate--but soon, the conversation ends, because d'Alembert wants to go to sleep. The next part is where the fun begins. Diderot never returns; rather, d'Alembert begins to dream that the debate with him continues, while his sleep-addled ramblings are transcribed by the Mademoiselle de l'Espinasse and serve to start a wide-ranging exposition on ethics, physics, biology, medicine, and the dynamics of personal identity.

But, although the views expounded here are (avowedly) materialist, they have nothing at all to do with the reductive and simplistic models of subjectivity embraced by many rationalist atheists. Diderot (or at least Bordeu, his mouthpiece) conceives of the universe as a network of infinitely small fibers, which interlock, vibrate harmonically to produce sensation, organize themselves into bundles, and so on. This means that, in the context of today's metaphysical and ontological debates about composition, he's a nihilist on the level of Peter Unger. Objects and individuals do not exist except as names for collections of fiber bundles--or, in his memorable metaphor, bees.

I've been interested in the eighteenth-century deployment of the bee-image for a long time. When bees are in a metaphorical relationship with human beings, they denote the strictly social and political aspect of man; bees are the crowd which is not composed of individuals but only of economic or sociological abstractions. Here, Diderot uses them in a very particular way. The animal is as a hive composed of compressed bees; the parts of the animal are constantly in conflict, because each bundle has its own will and desire; the animal is therefore either in a state of anarchy, where the parts are discordant and the animal cannot function, or despotism, Stoicism, self-mastery, where the central memory and intelligence reins them in. In other words, the political function of the bee-metaphor seems to inevitably resurface through the mediation of the body!

It has been easy, ever since the dawn of political thought, to compare the State to a body. But to compare the body to a state changes the problematic completely. In fact, this image opens the door for a reconciliation (if indeed one was ever needed) between Nietzsche and anarchism [I just can't escape talking about Nietzsche!]. Of course, one of his most central preoccupations is the fragmentation of subjectivity, the collapse of the Cartesian self. Diderot's dialogue does two things. First, it anticipates the fundamental linkage between the unitary subject and the ascetic ideal; self-mastery is precisely the art of forcing the discordant impulses to serve a central subject. Second, and more importantly, it draws a direct line between the ascetic ideal and the political, the mentis compos and the well-governed state. To expose and reject asceticism is also to reject politics for the same reason--the claim that self-mastery is vital and desirable ideologically hides the workings of slave morality, just as the claim that the State is vital and desirable does. The world may be a great hive; but the queen is negotiable.

A Community of Scholars

Mencius said to Wan Chang, 'The scholar whose virtue is most distinguished in a village shall make friends of all the virtuous scholars in the village. The scholar whose virtue is most distinguished throughout a State shall make friends of all the virtuous scholars of that State. The scholar whose virtue is most distinguished throughout the kingdom shall make friends of all the virtuous scholars of the kingdom.

'When a scholar feels that his friendship with all the virtuous scholars of the kingdom is not sufficient to satisfy him, he proceeds to ascend to consider the men of antiquity. He repeats their poems, and reads their books, and as he does not know what they were as men, to ascertain this, he considers their history. This is to ascend and make friends of the men of antiquity.'

- Mencius, Book V, Chapter VIII

In his beautiful book The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers, Carl Lotus Becker relates a story about Diderot: provoked by a fireside conversation about what would happen to humanity were it to become known that a comet would eventually wipe us all out, he carried on a passionate, years-long correspondence about posterity. Without posterity, Diderot thought, there could be no telos, no justification for any kind of intellectual labor; men would "rush into evil courses."

The city of God and the future city of posterity still retain their importance; it is difficult to find a scientist or a writer who does not think his work will be validated by the future. But if posterity is as worthless and ungrateful as we are, it would perhaps be wise to find something else to endow with the power to make the thinking life worthwhile. Something, hopefully, far away from utilitarian ideals or self-congratulatory fantasies of speaking truth to power.

Borges thought that underneath the surface of written culture, in that shadowy unreal world accessible only by dreamers and a very stoned Coleridge, there lurked the only author; "that man was Carlyle, he was Johannes Becher, he was Whitman, he was Rafael Cansinos-Assens, he was De Quincey." We might say instead that this place is occupied by the "men of antiquity." It is a kind of Confucian spirit world, where the vengeful or solicitous ancestors keep eternal watch over their still-respectful children. And even as imagining this world is an antidote to the senseless worship of the future, so it also inoculates against an excessive reverence for the past. Becoming friends with the men of antiquity implies the possibility, and necessity, of becoming equal to them. As a source of justification, it is impervious to atheism or comets, and its ethical appeal is inexhaustible.

Mencius' most skillful stroke in this passage is drawing a link between this ethics and the scholar's membership in a trans-national intellectual fraternity. Your virtue as a scholar in itself obligates you to construct a community; the greater your virtue, the greater your responsibility to scholarship. Thus the final ascent--the extension of the community even to the unknown great men of the past--is a natural consequence of your responsibility to your fellow scholars. The ethics of the scholar accomplish something the heavenly city of posterity does not: they recognize the uniqueness of intellectual labor and ultimately draw their telos from that very uniqueness. They do not require a naive faith in the historical process, nor even in the survival of the human race.

It is of course easy to scoff at the suggestion that scholars have something more in common than lack of athletic ability. But the beauty of reading Mencius in Paris in 2008 is that the text itself proves its point. Thousands of miles and years separate us from him, yet we find few barriers to taking him seriously, to understanding his moral and intellectual commitments. Are we not in some sense members of the same community?