Anathemas and Admirations Read Online Free PDF Page A

frustration and dispossession enhance and animate it. A thinker is enriched by all that escapes him, all that is taken from him; if he should happen to lose his country, what a windfall! Thus the exile is a thinker in miniature or a circumstantial visionary, tossed between hope and fear, on the lookout for events he longs for or dreads. If he has genius, he rises above them, like de Maistre, and interprets them: “The first condition of a decreed revolution is that everything that might have forestalled it does not exist, and that those who seek to prevent it must fail entirely. But order is never more apparent. Providence is never more palpable, than when a higher action takes man’s place and operates in and of itself: this is what we are seeing at this moment.”
    In periods when we become aware of the nullity of our initiatives, we identify destiny either with Providence — a reassuring disguise for fatality, a camouflage of failure, an admission of our impotence to organize the future, yet a desire to discern its essential contours and determine their meaning — or with a mechanical, impersonal play of forces, the automatism of which controls our actions and even our beliefs. Yet we invest this play of forces, however impersonal and mechanical, with a glamour that its very definition forbids, and we relate it — a conversion of concepts into universal agents — to a moral power responsible for events and the turn they must take. At the height of positivism, did we not invoke, in mystical terms, a Future to which we attributed an energy scarcely less effective than that of Providence? Inveterately there slips into our explanations a wisp of theology, inherent in, even indispensable to, our thought insofar as it undertakes to provide a coherent image of the world.
    To attribute a meaning to the historical process, even one derived from a logic immanent to the future, is to subscribe, more or less explicitly, to a form of Providence. Bossuet, Hegel, and Marx, by the very fact that they assign a meaning to events, belong to the same family or at least do not essentially differ from each other, the important thing being not to define or determine this meaning but to resort to it, to postulate it; and they resort to it, they postulate it. To turn from a theological or metaphysical conception to historical materialism is simply to change providentialisms. Were we in the habit of looking beyond the specific content of ideologies and doctrines, we should see that to claim kinship with one of them rather than some other does not at all imply much expenditure of sagacity. Those following one party imagine they differ from those following another, whereas all, once they choose, join each other underneath , participate in one and the same nature, and vary only in appearance, by the mask they assume. It is folly to imagine that truth resides in choice, when any adoption of a position is equivalent to a contempt for truth. To our misfortune, choice, position-taking, is a fatality no one escapes; each of us must opt for a nonreality, an error, obligatory fanatics that we are, sick men, fever victims: our assents, our adherences, are so many alarming symptoms. Whoever identifies himself with anything gives evidence of morbid dispositions: no salvation and no health outside of pure being — as pure as the Void. But let us return to Providence, a subject scarcely less vague. To discover how seriously a historical period was stricken, the dimensions of the disaster it was obliged to suffer, simply measure the desperation with which believers justified the designs, the program, and the behavior of the divinity. Not at all surprising that de Maistre’s crucial work, Les Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg , should be a variation on the theme of the temporal government of Providence: did he not live in a time when making his contemporaries discern the effects of divine goodness required the combined resources of sophistry, faith, and