Down with the Law by Abidor Mitchell; Serge Victor; Libertad Albert

Author:Abidor, Mitchell; Serge, Victor; Libertad, Albert
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: AK Press
Published: 2019-09-30T16:00:00+00:00

Georges Palante

Nietzsche believed that reading a philosopher’s works was equivalent to reading his autobiography. Seldom is this as startlingly true as in the works of Georges Palante. As Michel Onfray said in his preface to the 2004 edition of Palante’s collected philosophical works, “Autobiography reveals itself in each word, behind each thesis. The writing, the ideas, the composition of all his books, his references, his citations, everything is mobilized in an attempt to sublimate, in the Freudian sense of the term, an existence dramatically placed under the sign of melancholy, of psychic and physical slowness, of ugliness, of fatigue, of pain and suffering.”

Palante, born in 1862 in a town in the Pas-de-Calais that would be totally destroyed during World War I, spent virtually his entire life in the provinces, and this physical distance from Paris, the center of French thought, was echoed in his own sui generis philosophy.

Thrown back on himself by acromegaly, which deformed him physically, giving him abnormally long arms, Palante produced a philosophy that places the individual at the center of all. A victim of ostracism in life, his philosophy has no place for collective action; in Palante’s philosophy, life is despair. It is a world of great men who will ultimately be laid low, of the ineluctable crushing of any individual who tries to climb out of the enveloping muck. His life was a trail of personal disasters: his dreadful marriage to a woman who misunderstood him and destroyed his unfinished works after his death; his awful disease, whose resultant deformity subjected him to ridicule by those around him; his misguided attempt at academic distinction, which ended in bitter failure; and his oversensitivity, which led to a duel with a former friend and ultimately to his suicide in 1925. A former pupil of Palante’s, Louis Guilloux, wrote a moving volume of memoirs of the philosopher and included a Palante-inspired character in his autobio­graphical novel Le Sang Noir.

All of his misfortunes fed Palante’s genius. His philosophy, founded on his failed personal dreams and miseries, is so fecund that it touches us even today.

Individualism

As is the case elsewhere, the tendency to underestimate the individual has made itself felt in the intellectual field. Solitary thought—invention—has been deprecated to the profit of collective thought—imitation—preached under the eternal word of solidarity. The horror of the previously untried, of intellectual and aesthetic originality, is a characteristic trait of Latin races. We love regimented thought, conformist and decent meditations. A German writer, Laura Marholm, accurately analyzed this contemporary tendency:

Intellectual cowardice is a universal trait. No one dares makes a decisive statement concerning his milieu. No one any longer allows himself an original thought. Original thought only dares present itself when it is supported by a group: it has to have gathered together several adherents in order to dare show itself. You must be one of many before daring to speak. This is an indication of universal democratization, a democratization that is still at its beginnings, and is characterized by a reaction against international capital, which until now has had at its disposal all the means of military and legislative defense.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.