Before these repeated failures, a certain kind of right cowers in mere denial. This is not in its nature. The natural calling of the right resides in approbation — the tragic acceptance of this world and what happens here. The man of the right, constrained to denial, has generally become naïve, and no longer notices the adverse manoeuver, or else he becomes embittered, seized by the plague of hypercriticism. Let’s be absolutely clear: instead of the best aspects of national character — the exaltation of a certain style — the French right has too often hypertrophied the most questionable: individualism, ‘empty verbosity’,56 xenophobia. The right has neither known nor has it planned to analyse facts as fundamental as the rise of the third world to political decision-making, the Sino-Soviet conflict, the geopolitical situation created by the new division of forces, the collapse of constituted doctrines, the structural transformations of western society, the evolution of the United States, the formation of Euro-communism, etc. To these new facts, they too often answer with agreeable words and simple slogans. There is a right afflicted by Mephisto. By hypercritical derision. It is the right of rancour, bitterness, and bad temper. It believes to have won a victory on the night of General de Gaulle’s death. Its sentiments are foreign to me.
The right has become ‘massist’.57 It reassures itself by the idea of a ‘silent majority’ — a new avatar of the Maurrassian58 ‘real country’. It does not see that this mass is silent prior to being the majority — or rather, that it is only a majority in its silence. It avoids the opportunity to address the problem of the nature of the decision-making centres and how to access them. It believes that we have become weak because we have been ‘subverted’. However, the opposite is the case: we have been ‘subverted’ because we have become weak. The left is only strong because of the weaknesses of the right, because of its doubts and hesitations. Admittedly, the areas of discontent in the current world are certainly not lacking. But this is not a reason to restrict ourselves to complaints. The right, with its lamento, contributes to an error of the left: attributing one’s own responsibility to others. A look of lament is not an analysis. It only confirms a misunderstanding. To perform a diagnosis requires first identifying the causes. But the right does not identify the causes. Sometimes it even seems like it balks or grumbles. Or it reverts to the immediate causes, which are actually the effects. The right speaks of ‘subversion’. And it is true that subversion is at work. But what is it exactly? To speak of subversion requires more than listing the symptoms. The right has abandoned its explanatory role; it has left this to the pedagogues, whose profession it is. However, the pedagogues have succumbed to subversion.
And yet, the ideology of the right exists. Inside. The right often overlooks what it carries within itself. It has never completely realised, on a formal level, everything that its aspirations imply. Its message is implicit. All the work lies in bringing it to the surface. We need a Professor Freud.
The left, for its part, beyond the proliferation of theories, seems to be dominated by the influence — admitted or not — of ‘Gramscianism’ (on the methodological level) and of the Frankfurt School. And the negative critique preached by Horkheimer and Adorno is always exercised with such virulence. The extreme left has understood that in a social structure where everything fits (where the arrangement of society is the reflection of a mental structure), no reform is possible. There is only a revolution, which will be the questioning of everything. Ecology, Neomarxism, Neofeminism, Freudo-Christianism are within the bounds of their interior logic when they demand the abolition of all the history that our culture has been the conduit for; when they denounce the institutions (every institution) as ‘alienating’, and power (all power) as ‘repressive’, when they strive towards the dissolution of the State, the questioning of technology, the rehabilitation of madness, etc. It is the increasing implementation of the well-known agenda of Pierre Dac: ‘to be for everything that is against, and against everything that is for’.
The extreme left dances upon the ruins of a power that denies itself. It hunts down its traces and vestiges everywhere. It finds unconscious deceptions. Jacques Attali (Bruits. Seuil, 1977)59 claims to liberate music from the ‘norm’ — to liberate it (the unfortunate thing) from the alienation of the scale and counterpoint. In his inaugural lecture for the Collège de France, Roland Barthes declared: ‘Language is neither reactionary nor progressive, it is all simply fascist’. What he means by this is that language compels us to speak, it constrains all speakers to mould their thought into the form of a given language. Thus, that which is specifically human — conceptual thought and syntactical language — is ‘fascist’. All society, in so far as it takes the form of a social body, is ‘fascist’. The State is ‘fascist’. The family is ‘fascist’. History is ‘fascist’. Form is ‘fascist’. It is but a small step to admit: the human phenomenon is ‘fascist’, since always and everywhere, it imposes meaning, form, order, and strives to make them endure. But at the same time, ‘critical theory’ only leads to perpetual frustration. If all language is ‘fascist’, what is there to do but be silent? If all power is ‘fascist’, what is there to do but renounce action? And if ‘celebration’ crystallises itself into Eternal Return, what does the reunion of being with itself become? All that is left is absolute denial. ‘Horizontal’ communities, ‘space’ music,60 art informel, drugs, severance from the world and from adherence — by any means — to the universe of spiritual fraternities,61 universal ‘love’, and metaphysical abstractions. Meanwhile, as the structuralists proclaim to us, man vanishes. This is how the extreme left has ‘advanced’.
Another characteristic trait of the current world is the rupturing of established systems. Rigid schools of thought no longer hold. The church undergoes its aggiornamento.62 The USSR has had its Twentieth Congress. Psychoanalysis fragments into a thousand sects. We ‘reread’ Marx in the light of Freud, and Freud in the light of Marx. We seek to revive medieval Christianity — or that of the catacombs. In a sort of fever, each seeks to renew what has already been. On the other side of the political horizon, in the world of realities, a prudent pragmatism dominates. Governments of western nations increasingly avoid referring to a given system. Statesmen ‘fly by sight’,63 and only make tentative agreements at regular summit meetings. Speculations on the monetary system, on the world economy, or on nuclear deterrence, become hyper-abstract calculations that nobody really knows how to handle anymore. The latent crisis of political, economic, and social structures is augmented by a deep undermining of every acquired certitude. Doubt, fed by an increasingly systematic process of calling everything into question, corrodes the most elementary of convictions. The myth of a ‘natural order’ is revealed for what it is. There is no longer agreement on anything.
To me this confusion seems to be an established fact. There is no use in deploring it. But what we can do is concern ourselves with what is to come. From this inadequacy, which is more and more evident in ready-made formulas and ideologies, a feeling emerges. The yearning for a synthesis. Many are those who intensely feel the necessity to cross the lines of current divisions. The way in which, for some years, certain themes have passed from the right to the left (or from the left to the right) is one of the signs of such a yearning. But it is precisely here that things run into difficulty. It must not be concealed: what the end of the century needs is a synthesis of positive aspirations which, until now, have appeared in a scattered manner. This synthesis equates to a surpassing of the current stage of the human condition. I believe in the possibility of such a synthesis. But I am not sure we will have enough audacity to put it into effect. I fear that egalitarian ideology prevents us from realising it.
Today we know more than previous humanity has ever known. But it seems that we are understanding less and less. One of the great errors of our time — and it lies at the base of the egalitarian conception of education — is to believe that by accumulating knowledge, we automatic
ally know how to use it. But the inverse is true. Without the Ariadne’s thread of thinking, without a clearly formed worldview, the accumulation of knowledge is inhibitive and paralysing. Due to an increase in knowledge both for and against everything, without having the means to discriminate or decide, we can no longer do anything. I know people who are so knowledgeable that they can no longer write anything: when they set a sentence to paper, they immediately perceive so many counter-arguments that they give up trying to saying anything at all. Globally speaking, I believe our society is in the same predicament. It seems to me that in the past, we had certitudes in proportion to our doubts. Today, we mainly have doubts. And most of all we are scared of being wrong. And so we no longer judge and instead say that ‘everyone is right’. This is where egalitarianism intervenes: if all people have equal value, all opinions have equal value too. I consider this kind of doubt fatal — for above all it corresponds to a false idea of ‘truth’. In terms of historical becoming, there is no metaphysically established truth. That which is true is that which comes into the position of existing and enduring. That which should be, will be. That which deserved to be, already is. If false in the abstract, as the most damaging ideologies can be, they become ‘true’ to the extent that they constitute the daily reality that surrounds us and in relation to which we define ourselves. Marxism can be the ‘truth’ of tomorrow. But it is a ‘truth’ that we rightfully reject in order to oppose it with a stronger one. That which seemed to be the truth to us yesterday was but a rejection of the doubt — or sometimes a disregarding of the doubt. Where there is a will, there is a way. We do not ask ourselves if this way was conformed to an abstract truth. We create the way, and the rest follows. ‘Knowledge’ has little to do with this creation. This is because knowledge is not unambiguous, whereas creative energy exists by necessity. Our contemporaries behave like there is an absolute truth that exists outside of them to which they must closely conform. At least this is the impression that we take away from their terror at discovering that ‘everything is convention’. The hypercritical extreme left proclaims that nothing, neither words, signs, or science, etc., nothing is innocent. Perfectly obvious! No, nothing is innocent. And why should things come to be this way? As soon as man is there, he finds meaning here. For man alone, the gaze that he places upon the world gives meaning to it. And this meaning varies according to his gaze. And this meaning only comes from him. And this meaning only endures through him. No, things are not ‘innocent’. Fortunately.
Man inherits a natural gift that he transforms according to his discretion and from which he creates the laws that he deems the most appropriate to the order that he intends to institute. Hobbes: Auctoritas non veritas facit legem.64 No law carries within itself the evidence of its own principle. But it is an obvious fact that no society can live without laws, and that these laws have validity, not by their moral intentions or their judicial coherence, but first because they put people in shape, because they contribute to the creation of an order. Law is the means of order, it is not the cause.
I do not believe in objectivity, but I believe in the need to strive for objectivity. I do not believe in pure truth — that terrible truth in whose name we have attempted to transform the world through genocide, instilled racism, or the Inquisition. I believe, like Malraux, that in the matter of historical design, the real world only exists like picture frames hung on the hook of myths.65 I believe that the object in itself is inaccessible to understanding as to perception, but that it suffices for one and the other that they can construct themselves as the data or objects of a subject. I believe most of all that because pure truth cannot be determined, that it must, more than ever, be constructed ‘heroically’ — like man has always done.
I heard someone say on the radio one day: ‘Each has his truth. I do not want to be judged. In our era, we can no longer judge anyone’. The left that discovers that the social order has no ultimate cause unless we choose to institute one by convenience — to be able, quite simply, to live — while also deducing that all order must be rejected, cannot reason otherwise. I say that this discourse is one of pure regression; that the left which notes the ‘conventional’ character of institutions and yet itself refuses to create, denies its own consideration as a human consideration. I say that it is at precisely this moment that man discovers that he is the master of himself and of his destiny, and that he must personally forge a destiny. It is the moment when the old ‘absolutes’, unmasked as conventions, appear as they are, which demands, as always, the creation of new norms, new ‘conventions’ with enough strength that in their turn they will seem just as ‘natural’ to future generations as those known to our predecessors. Finally, I say that the only price of such an audacity — the audacity to institute a new objectivity from a subjectivity that knows itself as such — is that we can continue to progress. Unless of course thinking regresses towards the undifferentiated, where, as Hegel says, ‘all cows are black’.66
The formula ‘if God does not (or no longer) exists, everything is permitted’ is only a literary expression: no one behaves as if everything is permitted. To (re)establish an order, to (re)create social norms, thus comes down to asking: what are we going to (re)institute as a final instance or as an ultimate means. This challenge is at the heart of the crisis of the contemporary world. Who today would dare to say, like Pericles: ‘our boldness has forced a path over land and sea, raising imperishable monuments to itself everywhere, whether for good or for evil’?67 I think that a new right could answer this challenge. A right whose true strength would consist not in possessing truth, but in being fearless before its manifestations.
Excesses proceed in pairs. I’m gaining some idea of a third way: that which rejects, from either side, extremisms and unilateralisms. A just line is always nuanced. What I mean by this is an approach that takes into account what is fair or correct in each system or from each point of view. Only this kind of approach can lead to synthesis. But I do not believe any more that a third way will be a ‘middle way’, a kind of compromise — which is only a transitory step towards either of the existing systems. Every true synthesis is a surpassing. It is not a little of this and a little of that, in succession, but this and that, with the same intensity, at the same time. It requires that we never let ourselves be locked in one alternative, and that we adopt a mental logic of the included third or middle. And of course, the result of this approach ‘from the right’ can only be the reabsorption into a single whole of the notions of ‘right’ and ‘left’ as we currently conceive them. We can be more precise. I do not mean by this that we will be ‘neither of the left nor of the right’ — which means nothing. But that we attain a position in which we are, at the same time, both right and left. I believe that the future belongs to those who will be able to simultaneously think what, until now, has only been thought contradictorily. Heraclitus said: ‘God is day and night, summer and winter, war and peace, satiety and hunger’. Paracelsus declared: ‘Everything is within you and nothing can come to you from outside or above’. I believe that man is the quintessence of everything, and that he can realise the unity and the supersession of contradictions. Coincidentia oppositorum.
What is the principal menace today? It is the progressive demise of the world’s diversity. The levelling of people, the reduction of all cultures to a ‘global civilisation’ built on what is most common. Already, from one end of the planet to the other, we see the construction of the same kinds of buildings, the establishment of the same mental habits. From the Holiday Inn to Howard Johnson, we see the emerging contours of a universally grey world. I have travelled widely — over many continents. The joy that one experiences when travelling is to behold the varied modes of life still deeply-rooted, to see different peoples living according to their own rhythm, to see another skin-colour, another culture, another mentality — people who are proud of their difference. I believe that this diversity is the treasure of the world, and that
egalitarianism is killing it. It is for this reason that it is important not merely to ‘respect others’ — half-heartedly — but to arouse everywhere the most legitimate desire possible: the desire to assert an identity that is unlike any other, to defend a heritage, to govern oneself according to that which one is. And this implies the struggle, head on, against a pseudo-antiracism that denies differences, and against a vicious racism which is also only the refusal of the Other — the denial of diversity.
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