In Antoine Compagnon’s marvelous and encyclopedic Les Antimodernes (which rustles with excellent quotations – among its other virtues. For reasons I cannot fathom, it has not been translated into English. Some university press better get on the stick!), he attempts to construct an anatomy of reaction. To this end, he posits a number of figures, constellation-creating themes. One is counter-revolution, one is counter-Enlightenment. And then: :”The third figure of antimodernity, which is a moral figure after the historical and philosophical ones, is pessimism, under whatever name one wants to give it: despair, melancholy, mourning, spleen or ‘mal de siècle.’”
I know this devil well – who, living as I have over the decades from the 1960s to now, has not felt the urgent touch of spleen. Yet constitutionally, I am, as ever, a spoiled child. I rarely wake up feeling sad, bad, or in mourning – I usually wake up with a very childish sense that this is gonna be a good day.
Compagnon’s book is subtitled, rather surprisingly, From Joseph de Maistre to Roland Barthes, with the inclusion of Barthes being a little controversial nuance, much noticed in the reviews in France. Thus, it is a historical text, an intellectual history, that deals with the anti-modern as a post- revolutionary phenomenon. His touchstone in the book is Chateaubriand, from whose work he has mined an endless array of quotations – this is a book overflowing with apt and memorable quotations, in this respect reminding me of Conor Cruise O’Brien’s eccentric book about Edmund Burke, The Great Melody. There is a reason for this: the reactionary tends towards the maxim, the conclusion converged upon by the wise. Judgement is the rhetorical tool of reaction par excellence. American liberalism has its credo in the often heard phrase: don't be judgemental. And it is no use telling the liberal that this phrase is itself judgemental, and not in a good way: it dismisses the judgemental without understanding or in any way measuring its considerable sentimental force. If I had a car and thus was in the market for a bumpersticker, I would buy one that says: Apophansis will get ya if you don't watch out! Which might say everything about why I lack bot a car and a bumper sticker. Hmm.
Compagnon uncovers pessimism as the god or afternoon demon at the intersection between the psychological and the “historical”. Here, character forms around the sense of the modern, or contemporary – which is condemned within the present as a decline. This sense of decline is felt both by the reactionary – which measures the decline from the Revolution – and the leftist – who measures the decline in terms of the counter-revolution that followed the Revolution. The persona of the latter was drawn by Flaubert in L’education sentimentale, embodied in the math teacher, Sénécal. For the leftist, the possibilities “opened” by the Revolution, the possibility of liberation, has been foreclosed by the forces of reaction, which have taken hostage the contemporary moment. The leftist is a pessimist by the logic of optimism. Nathaniel Mackay coined the wonderful phrase, oppositional nostalgia, for the dilemma of progressive pessimism. Whereas the anti-modern has to deal with a sense that the entire world, the entire order, has been either irreversibly perverted or lost. The anti-modern lays claim to nostalgia as its own intellectual property. But, as Compagnon points out, the reactionary is implicated in a dialectic that continually throws him into the company of his enemies – for didn’t Rousseau, the arch-devil, begin with a nostalgia for the savage, who is born “without chains”? Whereas the reactionary’s nostalgia is a precisely for chains – the chains of tradition, the chains that will bind those who are, in the reactionaries eyes, born for chains. The great mass of people.
The term “pessimism” was not “au courant” during Baudelaire’s time: “We find, only two occurrences of the term pessimism and tow of pessimiste in the Tresor de la langue francaise between 1800 and 1850, but 129 of pessimism and 47 of pessimist between 1851 and 1900, then the word rapidly vanishes.”
Compagnon points out that Schopenauer was in vogue in Paris during the fin de siècle; the same could be said of Vienna, a city which is not within the geography of Compagnon’s book. Schopenhauer’s literary influence extends to the kind of philosophy of culture that is not practiced by academic philosophers. It is the province of the great reactionary outlaws: Nietzsche, Weininger, and Spengler. Pessimism, for all of them, was a personal escape hatch from history – allowing them to develop their own myths of history.
Pessimism, even if it “rapidly vanished” after 1900, did kill optimism as an intellectually respectable position. In a dialectical pirouette that is amusing, optimism is now a forced gesture of that most reactionary set, the Steven Pinker/”race realist” crowd, which uses it as a club to enforce a program of Western (white male) supremacy. It’s an essentially loveless optimism.
Love is, I think, the great absent in the anti-modern tradition Compagnon outlines. Love is a dangerous force. To anyone raised, as I was, on the Bible School gospels, the oddest thing about the reactionary embrace of Christianity is that it takes the heart out of it. There is no love here. There are only absolute reasons to condemn. Hell, for the reactionary Christian, is a very rich concept; heaven, on the other hand, is simply a reward, a sort of retirement package for the successful moral entrepreneur. Of the anti-modernes that Compagnon deals with, only Baudelaire, I think, had any notion of love, and thus of heaven – even if it was a cracked love, a love, ultimately, of his mother, the mother stolen from him by his stepfather. It was love like wormwood, but the image of love remained with him, made him a poet of a glimpsed, a transient, utopia:
…. Fugitive beauté
Dont le regard m'a fait soudainement renaître,
Ne te verrai-je plus que dans l'éternité ?
Ailleurs, bien loin d'ici ! trop tard ! jamais peut-être !
Car j'ignore où tu fuis, tu ne sais où je vais,
O toi que j'eusse aimée, ô toi qui le savais !
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