the pursuit of unhappiness is fundamental to liberty

“Thus, let us carefully keep the thirst for immortality within us from drying up; better to suffer gloriously in a great circle, than to be pierced by a thousand pins in some obscure corner of the world.” – Herault de Sechelles.

In following the figure of Epicure, and the notion of epicurean materialism, LI is following a thought that we have played with for some time. It is that the pursuit of happiness has distorted the civilizing metric that really counts, which is of the quality of one’s unhappiness. Only after a certain level of material comfort is achieved does the question of doing without that comfort take on a deliberate cast. To break the spell of that collection of habits that went into primitive accumulation requires having reached a point at which one can turn around – a point at which inversion is possible. To quote Buchner’s letter again: “The word must is one of the curses with which Mankind is baptized. The saying: It must needs be that offenses come; but woe to him by whom the offense cometh” is terrifying. What is it in us that lies, murders, steals? I no longer care to pursue this thought.” The must is stamped on that struggle to accumulate – it is stamped on the material economy. It is also stamped on the positional economy – and the place where the two meet is that which, in us, “lies, murders, steals”.

An essay by Pierre Hadot, “There Are Nowadays Professors of Philosophy, but not Philosophers,” picks up on the Epicurean strain in Thoreau’s Walden, especially in the account of the encroachment of labor, the habits of a utilitarian servility, upon the ‘vital heat' of the human.


If Thoreau thus leaves to live in the woods, this is evidently not only for maintaining his vital heat in the most economical way possible, but it is that he wants “to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”11 “I wanted to live deep,” he writes, “and suck out all the marrow of life [. . .].”12 And among these essential acts of life, there is the pleasure of perceiving the world through all his senses. It is to this that, in the woods, Thoreau directs the largest part of his time. One never grows tired of rereading the sensual beginning of the chapter titled “Solitude”: “This is a delicious evening, when the whole body is one sense, and imbibes delight through every pore. I go and come with a strange liberty in Nature, a part of herself. As I walk along the
stony shore of the pond in my shirtsleeves, though it is cool as well as cloudy and windy, ... all the elements are unusually congenial to me. [...] Sympathy with the fluttering alder and poplar leaves almost takes away my breath; yet, like the lake, my serenity is rippled but not ruffled.”13 In this chapter Thoreau wants, moreover, to show that, even alone, he is never alone, because he is aware (conscience) of communing with nature: “I go and come with a strange liberty in Nature, a part of herself.” “The most sweet and tender, the most innocent and encouraging society may be found in any natural object [. . .].”14 Hence he perceives in the sound itself of raindrops, “an infinite and unaccountable
friendliness.”15 Each little pine needle treats him as a friend, and he feels something
related to him in the most desolate and terrifying scenes of Nature. “Why should I feel lonely? is not our planet in the Milky Way?”16 Thus, the perception of the world extends itself into a sort of cosmic consciousness.17

All that I have written until now bears a remarkable analogy to Epicurean philosophy, but also to certain aspects of Stoicism. Firstly, we find again in Epicureanism this critique of the manner in which men habitually live that we encountered in the first pages of Walden. “Human beings,” says Lucretius, “never cease to labor vainly and fruitlessly, consuming their lives in groundless cares [. . .].”18

For the Epicureans of whom Cicero speaks, men are unhappy due to immense and hollow desires for riches, glory, and domination. “They are especially tormented when they realize, too late, that they pursued wealth or power or possessions or honour to no avail, and have failed to obtain any of the pleasures whose prospect drove them to endure a variety of great suffering.”19

Salvation (Le Salut) rests, for Epicurus, in the distinction between desires that are natural and necessary and that are related to the conservation of life; desires that are only natural, like sexual pleasure; and desires that are neither natural nor necessary, like [those for] wealth.20 Satisfaction of the first21 suffices, in principle, to assure man a stable pleasure and therefore happiness. This amounts to saying that, for Epicurus, philosophy consists essentially, as for Thoreau, in knowing how to conserve one’s vital heat in a wiser way than other men. With a certain desire for provocation analogous to the one of Thoreau, one Epicurean sentence in effect declares: “The cry of the flesh: not to be hungry, not to be thirsty, not to be cold. Whoever enjoys this state and hopes to continue enjoying it can rival even God himself in happiness.”22 Happiness is, therefore, easy to attain: “Thanks be given to blessed nature,” one Epicurean sentence says, “which makes necessary things easily achievable, and those things which are difficult to achieve unnecessary.”23 “Everything easy to procure is natural while everything difficult to obtain is superfluous.”24


The American counter truth to the Jeffersonian pursuit of happiness is Thoreau’s invocation of living deliberately. Living deliberately is perennially in the worse position, however, since to live deliberately in an intense positional market either sets one up for failure or detachment from reality – a detachment that is either bogus (as with spiritualist movements and self help) or passionately irrelevant (which so often seems to be the mocking double of academic theory). These are the conditions under which the sage has been purged from our culture. To ask about these conditions is to ask about happiness itself, and its decay from an ideal to a spiel.

Which is why I am going on and on about Danton’s Death and Epicurus. In case you were wondering.

antoine de lasalle: an enlightenment eccentric

When Lukacs uses the phrase, epicurean materialism, to talk about the nature of the Dantonist resistance to Robespierre in Büchner’s play, he is following a theme which was taken up in the 19th century not only by Marx, but by the historians of the French revolution and of the enlightenment.

Emile Dard’s biography of Herault de Sechelles (1903), for instance, is titled “An epicurean under the terror.” When Büchner’s Robespierre denounces the wealthy and the refers to people who ‘used to live in garrets and now roll around in carriages and sin with former marquesses and baronesses’, he is referring – except for the garret – to hedonists like Herault, who was followed about, as he performed his revolutionary duties, including creating a constitution that gave foreigners the right to vote, by a few aristocratic groupies. And Robespierre’s denunciation of ‘vice” and those who ‘declare war on God and property” as a way of secretly supporting the King – whether they know it or not – he is sounding an old Left theme that has become perennial - the warning against the decadent life style - but that had peculiar resonances in the Revolutionary period, when the carry over from the 1780s was so sexualized. Mirabeau, for instance, was famous for his rather famous erotica before he was famous as the revolution's first great orator. The disabused spirit of the young bucks around Danton was simply an extension of the final moment of the Enlightenment – which, contra the philosophy crowd, was codified not in Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, but in Laclos’ Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Herault moved in the Valois circle, which met in the Palais Royale, and included Laclos as well as Tallyrand, Sieyes, and others. As Dard puts it, Herault, on his sofa, would become enthusiastic for justice, 'the sole passion that could inflame the sceptics, on the condition that it did not disturb their leisure."

Which brings me to an eccentric philosophe mentioned by Emile Dard, a “savage” philosopher/ traveler named Antoine de Lasalle. Antoine de Lasalle was quite a character. Dard gives a sketch of the man – as a youth, he had sailed to America with the cod fishing fleet (“clumsy at hunting and fishing, despised by his rude companions, to whom he asked, for instance, if there did not exist three sexes in nature” ) and then an explorer of Asia, he came back to Paris (where he set up as a professor of Arabic), he wrote metaphysical tomes which were published thanks to Herault’s financing, in which he explained that he could shrink the important truths of metaphysics into a two word phrase: “Tout vibre” – everything vibrates. The universe was a pendulum composed of an infinity of smaller pendulums –“From which we get the aspect that we observe: an immense field of battle on which all beings, divided into two enemy lines, are the champions; the general battle is composed of an infinite number of particular combats, where the winners and losers succeed each other in a duel that is never finished.”

This double movement – towards an infinite vastness composed of smaller and equally infinite vastnesses – is a sort of Epicurean twist on Pascal’s infinities. Of course, it puts into question the place of God. God obviously did not make this pendulum for man.

Lasalle, who LI was unaware of before coming across his name in Dard’s book, was, like Rousseau, a great walker. His morality, which is derived entirely from his materialism, is an odd thing entirely. Here’s a passage from the beautifully named Méchanique morale: ou essai sur l'art de perfectionner et d'employer ses organes … : ”a sure means to lose happiness is to search for it everywhere; it is here and not there, it is in us, where it is in no part, no where… Thus, man is the softest of all the great beasts, the softness of his substance is for him the cause and the sign of a need to change; he is born perfectable, he perfections himself only by reflection, but these are changes that awaken the faculty of thought, which sharpens its instrument, and furnishes the best material; man is almost the only animal that can travel without hazard (impunement): man is thus a traveler-born; moreover, strangers are well received everywhere, as long as they don’t stay too long; as long as you are new, everything is great, nothing is more perfect than the man who came yesterday and leaves tomorrow; but if you hang around, they will soon get tired of you. Well, then, it is wise to pass one’s life as a stranger, a novelty and caressed as such…”

More to come in another post.

the withdrawal project blog

LI cut off all our hair yesterday, to get prepared to be a peace soldier – and although it looks a little mange-y, what the hell. There is something startling about seeing the pale, dead skin under your hair…

So I am thinking I am going to take LimitedInc’s Iraq and war posts in the next week or so and transfer them to a new blog for the Withdrawal project. And then I will compartmentalize. Years ago, I started LimitedInc as an art project, and I had the crazy idea that I could use the blog as a venue for denunciations of the war that would resonate with the other elements in the project. But there is a downside to this: it limited the number of people who would read the anti-war stuff, because it was mixed in with material of no interest to a large group of people. That was fine with me – I wanted this to be outsider art from the beginning – but it is time to recognize that the anti-war stuff, if it isn’t going to continue to be an indulgence, needs its own place. My next post, for instance, is going to be about Enlightenment eccentric Antoine de Lasalle, Herault Sechelles, and the epicurean tradition – and that has zero resonance with the most of the audience that is truly riveted by the war and singed every day by America’s occupation of Iraq.

When I get the Withdrawalproject blog set up, I’m going to distribute the password to anybody who wants to contribute to it. As with all Withdrawal Project components, the only rule, at the moment, is to agree to the policy of zero American soldiers in Iraq in 2009. I have to make that a snazzier one liner, by the way. January 2009 is the deadline, but I don’t want to create such a narrow deadline that the movement automatically loses if – as is very likely – there are soldiers there in January, 2009. Withdrawal is withdrawal – if one loses the timetable battle, it doesn’t vitiate the fact that the soldiers shouldn’t be there, and that we should be pressing to get them all, every one of them, out.

I’ve been reading a lot about past social movements, and I wondering whether the Withdrawal project’s lack of a strict to do list – sign your name to this petition, give money to this organization – is a positive (as I think) or an invitation to entropy. To be goofy about it, I want the Withdrawal project to awaken an antiwar Kundalini – a physical and spiritual energy. And I suspect that petitions and donations are ways of putting that energy into a deep, deep sleep. But I may be totally fucked up on this.

Kick it. Then kick it again. Kick it until it falls over.

I want to be eaten alive - Hanin Elias

If you are looking for the kind of reactionary, bloodthirsty, Phoenix program rhetoric to make you feel good about your assumption that the U.S. elite is completely fucked, I urge you to peruse Fred Hiatt's latest missive. It has everything! The dyspeptic truculence of the highly paid talk show radio host - the nonsensical centrism, here cast as splitting the difference between the double massacre of Iraqis and American soldiers and a more manageable massacfre - sort like getting your head cut off, but just a little bit. The hint that President Backbone, whose penis is a marvel of veins and marble, is once again standing succulently for the right, the just thing, the eternal cowboy boot on your eternal face - everything is here, everything crazy, everything ludicrous, everything that should be absolutely destroyed in the D.C. establishment. The enemy of mankind does not sleep. This Pinochet loving know nothing is full to the brim with him, a rentier genocidaire. If there were any justice, Hiatt would have trouble getting a job typing up the nickel raises for Burger King menus. But there is no justice at that strata - simply an orgy of self-righteousness, greed, and proxy courage that will go on and on. A great court society needs its eunuchs. A not so great one needs its Hiatts.

But the testicular tone is retracting. In Gravity's Rainbow, one of the characters, Pirate Prentice, has the peculiar talent that he can assume other people's fantasies - and so is used to experience the fantasies of a forbiddingly high up British war cabinet member. The fantasy is of a giant adenoid, invading London. There are no Pirate Prentice's left, so the giant hairy balls of the President are the fantasms that have long invested D.C. and have been unleashed upon the general population, called up by such as Hiatt and Fred Barnes. But I detect some wavering in their fantasy, some shrinkage of the testicular, some mumble in the background and noise on the wire. That is why a good stout kick is necessary. Which is what the Withdrawal Project is all about. Tell people about the Withdrawal project, think up appropriate routines for a Withdrawal show, send me any of your ideas. I am talking to people - got a suggestion today for somebody who might have grant money - and remember that there is nothing like the hot spurt of the blood of a screaming warmonger in your teeth - fee fi fo fum. I want my own private bloodbath. Here's Hanin Elias on being eaten.

the alleged despair of Georg Büchner

“Philippeau, welch trübe Augen! Hast du dir ein Loch in die rote Mütze gerissen? Hat der heilige Jakob ein böses Gesicht gemacht? Hat es während des Guillotinierens geregnet? Oder hast du einen schlechten Platz bekommen und nichts sehen können?” - Herault in Danton’s Death

“Philippeau, what sad eyes! Did you rip a hole in your red cap? Did St. Jacob give you the evil eye? Did it rain during the guillotining? Or did you get a bad seat and couldn’t see anything?”

In 1939, Georg Lukacs, who was living, I believe, in Moscow at the time, published an essay about Georg Büchner with a typically tendentious Lukacs-ian title, Georg Büchner and his Fascist Misrepresentation. It was another potshot in Lukacs’s shooting war on European irrationalism, of which the leading philosophical figure was, of course, Heidegger – although as we all know, Lukacs, in his Weber days, writing things like Soul and Form, got pretty fuckin close to irrationality – thought that yearns to be appreciated for its yearning to be thought - himself. Like a cuckoo in the nest, the yearning pushes out content – but in reality, according to Lukacs, the vacuum of content reflects a plenitude of class interest.

Lukacs’ attack is on Büchner ’s alleged despair, and he alludes to the evidence for it that has been pondered by all Büchner scholars – the letter he wrote to a friend about the French Revolution, which he researched before writing the play.

“For several days now I have taken every opportunity of taking pen in hand, but have found it impossible to put down so much as a single word. I have been studying the history of the Revolution. I have felt as though crushed beneath the fatalism of History. I find in human nature a terrifying sameness, and in the human condition an inexorable force granted to all and to none. The individual is no more than foam on the wave, greatness mere chance, the mastery of genius a puppet play, a ludicrous struggle aganst a branzen law which to acknowledge is the highest achievement, which to master, impossible. I no longer intend to bow down to the parade horses and bystanders of History. I have grown accustomed to the sight of blood. But I am no guillotine blade. The word must is one of the curses with which Mankind is baptized. The saying: It must needs be that offenses come; but woe to him by whom the offense cometh” is terrifying. What is it in us that lies, murders, steals? I no longer care to pursue this thought.”

Of course, as Lukacs pointed out, to make this letter Büchner’s final statement on the matter is unfair. Buchner wrote it – and his play – when he was twenty two. And he had already been active in revolutionary politics. . Lukacs thought that the despair of the letter was, indeed, laced through the play, but that it was absorbed by a dialectical message that formed the real political intelligence of the play. Now, say what you will about this interpretation – and, in his defense, it must be said that nobody had better reason to feel the full fatalism of history than Lukacs in 1937! so his rejection is, in its own way, a little heroic – it is useful for seeing a pattern in the play, a conflict that shatters the temporary synthesis of wisdom and happiness embodied – once again! – in the image of Epicurus. As Camille Desmoulins puts it in the first scene: “Der göttliche Epikur und die Venus mit dem schönen Hintern müssen statt der Heiligen Marat und Chalier die Türsteher der Republik werden.” (The divine Epicurus and Venus with her beautiful hind end must become the gatekeeper of the Republic, instead of St. Marat and Chalier.”)

Lukacs points out that the epicurean materialism of the philosophes, which is the philosophical perspective broadly represented by Danton, can’t endure, instinctively opposes, the call to class struggle issued by Robespierre. Lukacs has two very useful grafs on this topic, which I’ll quote, and then return – in another post – with more:

The central dramatic and tragic significance of the figure of Danton resides in the fact that Buchner, showing exceptional depth of poetic insight, not only laid bare the socio-political crisis in eighteenth century revolutionary endeavours at its turning point in the French Revolution but – and the two are inextricably bound up with each other – at the same time portrayed the ideological crisis of this transition, the crisis of the old mechanistic materialism as the ideology of the bourgeois revolution. The figure of Danton, indeed Donton’s fate, is the tragic embodiment of the contradictins generated by historical developments in the period between 1789 and 1848, contradictions which the old materialism was not able to resolve.

The social chacter of epicurean materialism gets lost along the way. As a result of the objective situation, eighteenth century materialists were in a position to believe that their theory of society and history – and both are essentially idealist in philosophical terms – arose from their materialist epistemology; indeed they belived that they could really derive the course their actions should take from their epicurean materialism. Helvetius says: “Un homme est juste, losque toutes ses actions tendent au bien public (sic).” And he judged himself to have derived the substance of such sociality, and its necessary connection with an ethics of the individual, from Epicurean egotism.”

At which point I am reminded of one of the sayings of Epicurus: “don’t engage in politics.” Or in the Vatican sayings: “We must free ourselves from the prison of public education and politics.”

more on the National Committee for Withdrawal from Iraq

LI apologizes if our earlier posts on the Withdrawal project have been cloudy. But I am still working out the parameters.

So, here’s where the project is, thought-wise.
1. First, we need to found something like: the National Committee for Withdrawal from Iraq. Or at least creating a website sponsored by such a thing. Every project needs a website to reference.
2. The actual Withdrawal parties will be in two parts. The first hour or so is presentation and q and a. As I wrote before, the presentation would be a slide show of some kind – a power point show, with the speaker being a person of gravitas and stage presence. On the q and a the speaker would be joined by the Withdrawal team – designer and researcher – to answer the q. At the end of this part of the party, there will be no form letter to sign to send to congress. There will be no money to contribute to a fund. Rather, if somebody wants to sign a form letter, that person can go to the site. Instead, people will be urged to think up their own letters, forms of creative activity. Most importantly, people will be asked to do something that makes them uncomfortable. That’s it. Talk to somebody at work or after work. Join a demo. Start a demo. Write an op ed piece. Write something in a blog. Confront a war supporter in your family. The bottom line, the only thing that the whole withdrawal movement should have in common, is the slogan: zero American soldiers in Iraq in 2009. The point of the slide show will be to show what is necessary to make this happen – how to change the focus of the war from the military solution – the killing of all those who disapprove of the occupation – to the peaceful solution – the creation of some kind of board of reconciliation, the creation of a truce in which the militias on the ground self-police. The latter, of course, recognizes reality – that there are militias on the ground, and that the Americans aren’t going to kill them all, nor any army of Iraqis trained by Americans.
3. The second part of the party would vary according to site, it could be fruit juice and conversation, it could be ecstasy and a Dj playing some techno-heavy dance mix (I’m listening to Hanin Elias’ War a lot lately). I think for the prototype, a DJ and music would be best, and, alas – no illegal substances.
4. Paraphernalia. Every movement needs posters, buttons, and stickers. Every member of the audience should get a button with some design proclaiming Zed in 2009 over a stamped image of Iraq. Or imagine peace, 2009. Something like that. This kind of thing needs to be designed – and I’m no designer.

Ideas are more than welcome. I have, naturally, a very limited budget. In June, I hope to contact some actors/actresses and – keeping my fingers crossed – an actual computer literate designer who can transform script into images and graphs. Of course, if this actually gets on its feet in Austin, it could get on its feet elsewhere in a much different form. The National Committee for Withdrawal from Iraq is, after all, National. I don’t really care what the form is, the only rule is the goal: zero American soldier in Iraq by 2009.

Here’s a story: In 1963, Bertrand Russell wrote a letter to the New York Times “accusing the United States of waging a war of annihilation in Vietnam and of “suppressing the truth about the conduct of the war,” which he said involved the use of “napalm jelly gasoline” and “chemical warfare.” The Times huffily editorialized that Russell live in Never Never land… and that his letter showed an “unthinking receptivity to the most transparent Communist propaganda.” – from Who Spoke Up: American Protest against the War in Vietnam.

This project might fail. But some project will succeed it. The elite has always been for war. The parties have always been for war. So what?

The Withdrawal Project

A friend of this site wrote us and asked, LI, what is this Withdrawal Project?

So, here is what I have been thinking. I need to talk to an animator for the graphics, talk to an actor or actress - preferably not a white male, but a voice and presence that has the multi-culty appeal - and then do a script that would basically take us through Iraq - here's how we got here, here's what is happening, here's how we can get out. I'm best scripting this and spotting what would need to be done. I can imagine power pointish episodes like: dancing around the hole, or, not enough soldiers is always going to be not enough soldiers, which would briefly revisit the early plans, point out that the undermanning back then was not a mistake of the warplanners but grew out of an essential assumption of the war – that the U.S. could host a long range war without making any sacrifices – and that the undermanning has lasted up until this day, and is never going to be fixed. (To fix it would mean throwing in manpower that we don’t have, at a cost we won’t accept, for a time period that is extended past the breaking point, especially as this diversion of resources really will leave the U.S. vulnerable in o so many other ways). The presentation would find ways to emphasize the size of Iraq and the littleness of the American presence. The episodes, as per Gore’s power point presentation, would be graph and comparison heavy. I’m pretty sure one can now embed vid clips in a presentation – and they are abundant.

Half of the presentation would be scenarios, starting with
what was just vetoed, going into having zero American soldiers in Iraq
by January of 2009.

If this happened, the point would be to get people to do withdrawal
projects on their own, in their own communities. It would be filmed, ideally, but the main thing is to put it on, have people come out to see a presentation. Get on their feet. Not look at this at home, or send another donation to another organization – which is just a way of being lazy. It would be open source, some group wanting to give a Withdrawal party could simply use the materials and add others. It be
nice, if this actually worked, to contact Iraqis, to have withdrawal parties in both countries. As the materials circulate, of course, people add to or change them.

This just occured to me while I was jogging the other day. At the moment, I’m living on saltines and hoping for payday from this big project – but the lovely ready will give me some free time, and maybe I can put up a notice, see if I can get some bites. I like the idea of Withdrawal parties, of it being open sourced. Fantasizing, if this really did get to prototype stage then I'd send off, perhaps, a few begging letters. Jane Fonda is perhaps a person I'd target for donation. I don’t know, I imagine there is some Hollywood liberal willing to put in 2-5 thousand dollars to see if this would work. Withdrawal parties springing up in the spring of 2008 would certainly be nice. So far, the political forms have all been – pay attention to me. And the Bush response, much like its junta beginnings, has been not to play that game. So the very form of the demonstration has been an impediment to action. This form is simply – let’s pay attention. It would operate on different tracks and trails, like rave culture. And if done right, it will attract attention in itself.

That's it. Simple, but perhaps I should do this. What do you think?

ps - I've talked to a few people about what I should do - where I should look for a power point expert, or if power point is what I am even looking for. It still looks like I will be going to the RTF department next week and putting up some notices. Tomorrow I will post ( I think) about an un_Iraq related topic. Those of you who are my regular readers, though - I beg you, take this seriously and lend me your thoughts. I am serious. Though it may sound wildly improbable, this country really is waiting for something like Withdrawal parties. The failure of the politics that would have kept this country from getting into the war, or kept the occupation short, or have questioned, by the end of May 2003, the outlines of the occupation program - which was there for anybody to read - has been a failure that keeps on giving. Every six months another failure, every election a failure, every successful election a failure. The policy elite has triumphed in this country over everything except reality - reality has smashed all of their schemes to bits. But far from poisoning the words in their mouths, they still lie like barbie and ken dolls with lie recorders in them. Read the Washington Post - a fascinating adventure in deconstructive detection work - any day in the week and you can track the lies and the further lies to cover the older, worn out ones. And - contravening the sticks and stones law about words - these words have broken bones, heads, a culture, a state. These lies have ripped up families, have produced the social breakdown leading to the present Thugocracy in both Iraq and D.C., and stick to us all, day and night, like curses. It's a night battle, and it has to be joined simply by getting out of your fucking seat and joining it. Like the hokey pokey - that's what it's all about!