“Nothing is true. Everything is permitted.”
– Reportedly the last words of Hassan-i Sabbah, founder of the Assassins
Two weeks before she starved herself to death in an English sanatorium, the French philosopher, freedom-fighter and Christian visionary Simone Weil wrote in a letter to her parents:
In Lear it is striking. Even Kent and Cordelia attenuate, mitigate, soften, and veil the truth; unless they are forced to choose between telling it and telling a downright lie, they manoeuvre to evade it…
What makes the tragedy extreme is the fact that because the fools possess no academic titles or Episcopal dignities and because no one is aware that their sayings deserve the slightest attention – everyone being convinced a priori of the contrary, since they are fools – their expression of the truth is not even listened to. Everybody, including Shakespeare’s readers and audiences for four centuries, is unaware that what they say is true. And not satirically or humorously true, but simply the truth. Pure unadulterated truth – luminous, profound, and essential.
Is this also the secret of Velasquez’s fools? Are their eyes so sad because of the bitterness of possessing the truth and having won at the price of nameless degradation, the power to utter it and being listened to by nobody (except Velasquesz)? It would be worth while to look at them again with this idea in mind.her “academic titles or Episcopal dignities”) she is unable to practically make use of her intelligence to prevent the unmitigated tragedy of her miserable society, just as the fool is a tragic figure because he can’t to make use of his foolishness to avert the tragedy of the play.
Darling M., do you feel the affinity, the essential analogy between these fools and me—in spite of the Ecole and the examination successes and the eulogies of my ‘intelligence’.
This is another reply on ‘what I have to give.’
In my case, the Ecole, etc., are just another irony.
Everyone knows that a high intelligence is often paradoxical and sometimes a bit wild…
The eulogies of my intelligence are positively intended to evade the question: ‘Is what she says true?’ And my reputation for ‘intelligence’ is practically equivalent to the label of ‘fool’ for those fools. How much I would prefer their label."
The tragedy of these two characters, whose archetype appears at least as old as Cassandra of Troy, is both personal and social; the true nature of their personal tragedy lies in its relation to the tragedy of the totality – the relentless unfolding of disaster in the theatre and in real life. Long ago, in His Theses on Feuerbach, Karl Marx got to the heart of their shared disability when he wrote “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.” The Intellectual is a tragic figure because (despite and in fact because of all her 'episcopal dignities') in the democracy of the commodity, everything is true and nothing is permitted. This is the function of the “free speech” of capitalism – a toothless compensation for the lack of free action. When it is possible to say anything but no consequential action is permitted, speech itself – and the intelligence behind it – is turned on its head. Intelligence without influence is identical to foolishness. This pathetic state of affairs could be understood in the context of “the modern spectacle [which] depicts what society could deliver, but in so doing rigidly separates what is possible from what is permitted.” Just as education could deliver intelligence but is not permitted to do so; the collective labours of humanity and the advancement of technology could deliver collective joy, creative freedom, bold innovation, infinite diversity, etc, but are not permitted to do, instead delivering the opposite – stupidity, collective misery, gutless kow-towing, mechanical monotony, homogonous banality, et cetera, et cetera.
The separation between intelligence and its use is explored further in The Importance of Impotence. These two insubstantial fragments are clearly incapable of exhausting this crucial matter and its implications. The intent is merely to tear away the self-delusions of those who, though they may be dissatisfied with the miserable state of the world – maybe even dissatisfied with the miserable state of their lives – continue to cling to a crippling sense of self-satisfaction regarding their own actions and their consequences. Intellectuals, however progressive, can have no effect on their world because their sense of the absurdity of such people as Jacob Zuma, Jeremy Cronin, Blade Nzimande and Julius Malema is not accompanied by any attempt to seriously attack the conditions which produce such self-parodies. Their impotence shows a direct causal relation to their own role in maintaining the same conditions, in entertaining the same metaphysical rubbish, in producing the same ideological mystification which so successfully supports the ruling party. No wonder their rivals are so much more popular than they are -- for what are they but hawkers of cheap reproductions, vendors of knock-off copies of the same products? Minus the big-time marketing budgets of their competitors, forced to ape, without costume or make-up, the ruling clowns they so vainly try to caricature, the uselessness of their merchandise is easier to see through and thus remains ignored by 'the masses' they so desperately solicit. Like the scientists able to measure precisely how science fucks up the planet (and the beings who live in it) but able to do precisely nothing to significantly change the state of things; the criticism of intellectuals, however ably it may analyse how the ruling ideology massacres the living, "can only accompany to destruction a world that has produced it and has it, but is forced to do so with open eyes. It thus shows, to a caricatural degree, the uselessness of knowledge without use." (Guy Debord, The Sick Planet)
The ruling ideas are always the ideas of the ruling class, and always work to keep the miserable state of things exactly as they are. All those who practically try to live differently discover this, one way or another, through bitter experience.* Since intellectuals never embark on such risky attempts, such practical understanding is beyond them. Perfect representative of a world really turned upside-down, the Intellectual, whose status rests entirely on his or her claim to understand the complex problems of the world, is in fact incapable of understanding anything. We can ask of these modern-day eunichs what was asked of Jonathan Swift: "If he understood better, surely he would have been able to do more, even with the refractory material at his hands?" The nature of the freedom demanded by those who identify their own superficial dissatisfaction with the revolutionary project can, like all ideologies of refusal, be understood as a banal daydream of social advancement. Such people, who imagine that they can conduct a coherent and ruthless critique of their society without doing the same for themselves and their actions, dream of reaching a classless society just as they are. Scarcely concerning themselves with accomplishing anything despite present conditions, they can hardly pursue revolution as the socio-historic means of extending such accomplishments; they merely dream that the wretchedness they complacently wallow in will be less difficult to take "after the revolution". Fools, at least, are rarely content to remain merely fools.
* Although this discovery does not guarantee that those who make it will successfully free themselves of the dominant ideas, clearly it is a necessary precondition to any liberation from what Bob Marley called "mental slavery".
