This article is based on this dutch article of Martijn Benders
Alright, Voltaire and the separation between Writer and State. The truth is that in our time Voltaire might be called a ‘Putinist’, for the man was sustained by the Russian Empress Catherine the Great (1), with whom he maintained an extensive correspondence and received bribes to bolster his writing talents. Voltaire was not a fan of the contemporary French law: he was quite enthusiastic about the English variant. Just read along:
“Enter the London Stock Exchange, a place more respectable than many courts; you will see representatives of all nations gathered there for the well-being of humanity. There, the Jew, the Mohammedan, and the Christian trade together as though they profess the same religion, and only call bankrupts infidels.”
An early admirer of capitalism, then. But read a bit further, and you see:
“The English are the only people among nations who have managed, through a long series of rebellions and civil wars, to define the limits of royal power; who have established this happy balance between the crowd and the nobility, between liberty and authority.”
A happy balance between liberty and authority, and that’s what Voltaire saw in the English monarchy. Yes, if you read Voltaire, England is somewhat the promised land:
“The English nation is the only one where kings’ power has been regulated through resistance; and that, through a series of battles, has ultimately established this wise government where the prince is almighty in doing good, and at the same time restrained from doing evil; where nobles are great without arrogance, although without vassals; and where the people share in the government without confusion.”
Alright. What was this man smoking? May I still ask that without risking the stake? In my books Amanita Muscaria and De Eeuwige Ontgroening, I explicitly show that the English (according to Tolkien and others) have a gap of many hundreds if not a thousand years in their mythology because Henry VIII had all monasteries burn their books. And that was really only 200 years before your birth, Monsieur Voltaire, or may I already say François-Marie Arouet?
No, I can’t take Voltaire’s cozy relationship with the ruling power seriously. The man was sustained by monarchs, and his “colonialist paradise” England was mainly a colonial ruler, much like the US in our time. Both Voltaire and Houellebecq are led by a prevailing narrative, an early capitalist and a late capitalist; the rosy sunglasses are pretty much the same.
No, I’ll take a break (content) and listen to a piece by Pierre Boulez.
The man who wrote many pieces about Boulez, Benoît Duteurtre, died prematurely this week. He was quite critical of Boulez. In his book Requiem pour une avant-garde, Duteurtre criticizes the artistic sterility of certain trends in contemporary music, particularly atonalism, which Boulez promoted. Duteurtre argues that this trend became hegemonic and institutionally dominant, which he believed was harmful to musical diversity and openness. He states:
“Requiem for an avant-garde far exceeds this humanistic vision; it is also the work of a journalist who sees it as his genuine duty to denounce certain anomalies, accomplished facts, and narrow-mindedness, all on the path to harmful institutionalization, as they are detrimental and pejorative to diversity, openness, tolerance, and the love for the other and his differences” (ResMusica).
Harmful institutionalization. In philosophical terms, I owe much to two Frenchmen: Baudrillard and Foucault. One of the core theses of the latter was that our institutions only pretend to be neutral.
Regarding Baudrillard, I have an atypical opinion: I believe that as the man aged, he became a copy of himself. This is, of course, commonly seen; people eventually become a pale reflection of their former selves, but Baudrillard’s reactions to 9/11, in my opinion, lacked sharpness and interest.
Foucault’s Death Valley trip
Foucault is one of the few philosophers who dared to use LSD, but he never wrote about it. This experience took place in the 1970s in Death Valley, California, during his stay in the United States. This adventure became well-known primarily through testimonies of individuals close to Foucault, such as Simeon Wade, an academic who was involved in organizing the trip.
Wade organized the LSD trip for Foucault in 1975. In his book Foucault in California: A True Story — Wherein the Great French Philosopher Drops Acid in the Valley of Death, Wade describes how this experience influenced Foucault and how the philosopher regarded it as a deeply spiritual experience. Wade stated that Foucault considered it one of the most significant experiences of his life.
And yet, he never wrote about it. Why not?
By the way, it’s quite something to use LSD precisely in Death Valley. I want to capture that moment, Foucault on LSD in Death Valley in 1975—an experience he himself never described. But in the same year, he published Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison where he extensively writes about the surveillance dictatorship. He introduces in the book the term panoptism, the idea that society functions like a panopticon, where surveillance has become universal and the individual self-regulating because the feeling of being watched is omnipresent. Let’s see if I can get my hands on that book by Wade. Yes, it will be on my doorstep this Friday.
Martijn, 23-07-2024
(1) The French Revolution of 1789 was a massive shock for Catherine because she realized that the ideals of the Enlightenment had led to this revolution. Fearing a similar revolution in Russia, she abandoned any semblance of Enlightenment and tightened her grip even more. There was no more talk of any freedom of expression until her death. Various writers were arrested for criticizing the court and exiled to Siberia.
