J-L Bouttes' 'Intensity Destroyer'
"We’ve lost our prejudices, sure, but we’re so bored we could die"
For a while last year I was working on what I thought might become a book about Roland Barthes in the 70s, but which looks like it will only be an article on the erotic/romantic obsession that lead to him writing “Fragments of a Lover’s Discourse”: https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/by-theory-possessed/articles/i-love-you-in-theory
In the course of that work I became interested, but didn’t know what to do with, Jean-Louis Bouttes, a graduate student in Barthes’ circle of young friends/lovers in that decade. Bouttes was perhaps his key intellectual collaborator during the mid-to-late 70s, and Barthes supported the publication of his wild first book, Intensity-Destroyer, in 1979.
After Barthes’ sudden death shortly thereafter, Bouttes sort of slipped out of public intellectual life (I think he’s still alive). I translated some of his stuff, but never got around to writing an article about him.
What I find exciting in Bouttes is that, during the period when, as I see it, Barthes and Foucault are in their various ways stepping back from the radical transgressive posturing of their earlier work—aimed at the limits of language and reason—to take up a project of creating more capacious ‘forms of life’ or inventing a ‘second liberalism’, thinking towards a gentler, more survivable Nietzscheanism, and not coincidentally developing a more calm-clear style, Bouttes is picking up where they, Deleuze, Kristeva, etc., had once been working, in his own aggressive, funny, opaque attacks of language to ratchet up intellectual tensions.
The late Barthes and Foucault appeal to me politically, and I’ve written a lot about why—but I envy Bouttes his gusts of cross-thoughts. It appeals to me as writing, and I think he’s on to something in the double critique of both traditionalist conservatism and liberal-progressive weenie-ism that he lays out in the following extracts, which I hope come off, in my own English, the ‘correct’ amount of compellingly not-quite-sensical.
The first few pages (‘Introduction,’ and, ‘Ancients and Moderns’) lay out a distinction between two ethical and aesthetic principles, the choice between which Bouttes thinks we usually try to avoid. The ‘old’ principle tells us we have to exclude and condemn certain things; the ‘new’ tells us we have to avoid (or rather, exclude and condemn) exclusion and condemnation. In the passages translated, Bouttes particularly criticizes the ‘new’ morality, which, trying to accept everything, especially from ‘others’ and ‘minorities,’ disguises an inability to genuinely value anything. This omnidirectional compassionate tolerance for others, he warns, is a strategy by which we ignore our own self-hatred (which might, if attended to, be a salutary force?) and prevent ourselves from being gripped by ‘the gods,’ Bouttes’ name for the ‘intensities’ of aesthetic, ethical, erotic, and other forms of passion that might carry us beyond the bounds of ordinary decency. The Destroyer of Intensity does not, however, make this argument in a direct way, but, in fragmentary sections, seems to model different modes of experiencing ‘intensity’.
Introduction
There’s something intense in whatever’s as dumb as an animal—for example, the gods. Animals aren’t gods, but they are godly, and the gods themselves can act like animals.
Our lives move forward in heaves and jerks: inside of our lives the gods replace, rub against, resemble, and sometimes destroy, each other.
We can’t make sense of such things by being serious about them. So we play at watching the changes, guiding ourselves according to what seems alive or dead, following what burns brightly or dimly in the minds of those who happen to share the present with us. This is ‘the game of life,’ as if our fate were ruled by a tangle tying the sublime and idiotic together. No one’s more eager to play than the moralist: he’s afraid that, in a moment of weakness, we’ll take a break. But although he knows something about unusual power and shining energy, he’d prefer, if he can, to avoid destruction. He’d find religion fascinating, but worries that the radiant, glowing gods might drag us along with them into their beastly stupidity.
Every era has an old and a new way of living, the two pitted against each other by their different strategies for avoiding the dangers of such degeneration. The new ethos is afraid of Order, terrified of the fires of hierarchy, and so pretends, for example, to love Everything and Everyone altogether. It pictures the old morality as a tiresome, privileged, discriminating chaperone.
If we take a step back from the mutual accusations of the two moralities—and this stepping back is the method of the moralist—we notice that the old and the new rest on two truths that aren’t easily to reconcile:
—according to the New, my pleasure gets stupider every time I exclude anything from it.
—according to the Old, life is about knowing how to limit oneself.
The first gives better protects the present reality of pleasure, the second better preserves its possibility.
But if we look closer, neither of these moralities is really at work in the world. What is at work is a mix of the two, a tricky concoction whose effects are only felt by a perceptive few. Most people drink it up without noticing anything. Now, I’m trying to be skeptical about this mix, in which people add up as many ‘human’ intensities as possible, while they dismiss the gods as stupid; this is a timid way of avoiding—while also anticipating—their own degeneration. This potion is one way to put the player to sleep. It looks safe enough, but it’s like taking horse pills; you’ll die without even noticing: doesn’t it destroy everything light, graceful, shimmering, dreamy, and soaring in the soul? Doesn’t it take the same prison-guard rigor by which the old morality disciplined faults of character, and then use that rigor to eliminate all the delights and reveries of spiritual life?
This polygamous, sour mood, which seems to be care only for human freedom, appeared in philosophy, literature and everyday life as a way of not calling things by their names, never, out of fear of falling into the old failures and fairy tales. The Name of names was of course the most forbidden. So many people now have mouths as tight as a chicken’s shithole, a metamorphosis by which the Destroyer takes his revenge, and put the gods back in the Game.
The ‘stereotype,’ which modernity pretends to suppress, but ceaselessly renews, can be used to measure modernity. Inside the stereotype, intensities come and go. From it and against it arise the mental frowns that hold our little worlds together. In it we find men possessed, bodies lost to unknown ghosts. In this game of images, some put all their hope in the abolition of individual ‘defense mechanisms’ and in taking the temperature of the room, imprisoning themselves in their very efforts to get free.
Ancients and Moderns
‘Modernity’ is one of the words that have replaced Pan, elves, cherubs, the demonic legions, Isis. It’s the center of stereotypes: we swallow texts like pills, then vomit them back up. But we’re thrown up, too. We started thinking recently that if we could include totally disgusting things in our aesthetic categories, hiding our repulsion, keeping our twitches in check, then our violence, becoming superhuman, would transcend classicism. An amazing cure: try this miracle of brainpower.
But you have to keep a certain tone, hold on to the tip of a style, or you’ll end up with the sort of nonsense where the boundaries of art and theory don’t let you ramp up anymore. We’ve lost our prejudices, sure, but we’re so bored we could die.
The Absence of Armor, or the Religion of Sympathy
Clever, clever, they all think they’re clever, and they’ve decreed, one Night of August 4 [1789, by which the French revolutionaries declared the abolition of feudalism] that the truth must spread, with a fanatical sympathy that, in one blow, will, supposedly, as it spreads from one person to another, a few troubles and losses notwithstanding, enlighten the City of God. It is forbidden to exclude. Idiotic promises for small ideas, sowed in universities, Bible and Prophets together. The best thing you could do to save your guru would be to take him to the desert. He’d have a great time.
The community of reason
Wherever reason is worshipped, difference disappears. The world is rigorously squishy. Language and the ruses of reason work each other into a tizzy.
This is the earth’s most irresistible echolalia [involuntary repetition of sounds], emerging from other people, and engulfing them. No artistic form, except for the torments of persecution, can appear where everything appears to be on the same level.
Since there seems to be nothing wending its way through our own communities anymore, we’ve moved our idea of mystery away from them, and transferred it to the minorities—and we, anxious heirs, confused by the echoes, all we know how to do now is pretend to attribute their glory to ourselves. The mass of ideas, judgements, and heavenly words collapses into the forms of prayer we no longer value. The martyrs are in the arena, the bishops in the seats.
These societies, confident in the values they display, are made up of people—the dubious ruins of reason—who can believe anything their feelings suggest. A movement of tiny particles by which we make a division: reason for the State, doubt for the individual.
The old morality can be caricatured like this: ‘Be a State!’ And the motto of the new one would be, ‘Don’t.’ Obviously two such excessive principles just worsen our uncertainty about how to act. Only when we bring back together, mix and unmix these cliched ideas can a new moral order form: a solid line, a broken line, yin, yang.
Inclination is Relentless
Maybe because they’re bored, a couple lives by a lake they believe to be visited by extra-terrestrials. A cloud passes, a ribbon of fog, and they lose their minds.
We can laugh, but we can also, with the idea that other people are always better than ourselves, train ourselves to ‘understand.’ We could compare them to the Hassidic Jews who, in Voltaire’s day, gathered to wait, motionless, for the Messiah: when He failed to appear, as seems to have been the case, they blamed His absence on the fact that they hadn’t stayed completely still.
It’s a sin to get annoyed by what other people say (so now there are sins? At least in the sense that you’re at fault whenever you judge the world according to ‘the beams in thine own eyes’).
This attitude could be excused on the grounds that it’s opposed to the sort of behavior that we imagine serves the purpose of taking power. So we consider it to be a surrender to sentimentality or a kind of humanitarian inebriation.
But we shouldn’t confuse mysticism with the behavior of those frogs who choose to turn off their minds, giving themselves over to the pathless way of universal light. This unconditional surrender is matched by an expectation of fulfilling some vow, and looks like a disguised form of religion. We’re turned to the face of our neighbor, as though he were an oracle who’d tell us Everything, but Everything is somewhere else…
Of course, when we say that other people are bad company, that’s a darkening of language, given over to gossip. And the opposite way of going about things, which is more subtly widespread in our times, slips into a euphoria that welcomes everything—a little disgusting, like the French enjoying themselves. An inside-out etiquette that strains to shift the peephole to see only the other’s most flattering parts. They’d dirty their souls doing it. These self-torturers may not have a tortured face: the friendly look they wear is just the other side of the coin of the stampeding they induce in others. It’s the death mask of ‘being nice’…
Ghost Books
There’s a tone of infallibility to books: you’d think you were reading a pamphlet on what you’re supposed to know, think, want and fear, according to some idea that it’s now forbidden to condemn. But whatever happened to the taste of a juicy peach?
The most beautiful words have gone to the land of ghosts: ‘desire’, which hissed like the wind on a frozen lake, shimmered gracefully, screamed in despair, hoped in moments of enormous calm, was now cornered, flattened, crushed in a machine as noisy as the streets of Cairo.
The words ‘death’ and ‘nothing’ became a desire to find desire: no one could see the real flame burning under them; nothing but rhetorical tricks to pretend we felt something other than everyday boredom. No one even called this way of being mediocre.
Puritans are afraid of using cancelled words, of seeming superstitious. Have minds, like mouths, become infected with this sickness?
Bodybuilding
Janus can’t stand the feminine. Seeing them gay as magpies, like two lovers in a hotel who tell the desk they’re brothers, having breakfast together, watching them, motionless pick-up-sticks, guessing what they’ve yearned and how their bodies were embroiled, I’m dumbstruck, fucked up. Everything’s stuck in glue again.
‘You’ve Captured Me’
There’s a way of seducing your fellow man with gestures turned inside out, by which you seem to give in to his charms: stepping back a moment, you create in him signs that he then waves eagerly. While you stay ice-cold, hating yourself for not being in ecstasy.
You begin to feel some reservations about these depressions, about the way your face gets worn out from being a mask, about your suspicion that you might be your victim’s twin, about your remorse for destroying him with your schemes, without him even knowing, in the very moment when he moves towards you. Which means that this type of seduction, more than any other, has interests of its own for declaring that nothing is authentic. If you believe that, you can avert your eyes from what you’re doing and even think that you’ll keep getting away with it.
What’s Funny About Christianity
Is that it makes us dream of an incredible changing of places: first becoming last, imagine the pushing and shoving!
But, aside from its paradoxes, maybe there is a naked heaven to embrace. When nebulas seem like crevices into which you could easily slide your fist, when rain sticks to your skin and turns you into the statue of a river god who emerges algae-covered from the spot where they wash clothes.
Glorification
What proof do you have that this life is shining anywhere except where you’re well-known? If you’re not, call yourself ‘God.’ It’s a petty move, but that doesn’t mean it’s false.
The Destroyer
When the echoes of words you’ve heard, the details of times you’ve spent with others, call to mind your worst caricatures, and set in motion your mental machine, when everything seems a reference meant to pull aside your mask, then there’s a destruction of intensity.
It’s not annihilation, more like a kind of antimatter for your personality, turned catastrophically inside-out.
Not ‘anxiety’ or ‘depression’: the irreparable moment of self-hatred. A self-sacrifice from which, only making it worse, you try to run.
See how much your friends infect you: as much as the Lord. What an imaginary injustice!
What kind of madness defines humanity? Do you think wisdom somehow lies in the advice of others, in some opinion? In all the frowning faces of the human world? In some beloved book, some state of excitement, maybe? In the habits of a friend? In what the carpenter, his son and the donkey desire? Or even in the refusal to judge someone else? Indulgence for the other, and for oneself: easy ways to dodge the destruction of intensity.