A Hedonist Manifesto: The Power To Exist

7. Alexandre Kojève (1903–1968): An influential Russian émigré who taught a seminar on Hegel from 1933 to 1939, which was attended by Jean-Paul Sartre, Raymond Queneau, Georges Bataille, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, André Breton, Jacques Lacan, and Raymond Aron. His interpretation of Hegel was highly idiosyncratic and can be characterized by its conservative bent and emphasis on Hegel’s teleological philosophy of history, embodied by the metaphor of the struggle between master and slave. Jean Hyppolite (1907–1968): Along with Kojève, one of the most influential interpreters of Hegel in early-twentieth-century France. His approach to Hegel down-played the aspect of teleological history, instead focusing on Hegel’s subtle metaphysics and its existential import.

8. A neologism coined by Derrida connoting a deep and thorough understanding of one’s own self.

9. Nicolas Chamfort (1741–1794): A French writer—mostly of witty aphorisms and epigrams—and Jacobin political figure.

10. Allen Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), 42. This refers to the famous passage from Plato’s Republic in which the philosophical searcher is compared to a man inside a cave, with his back to the mouth of the cave, watching shadows dance on the wall. He takes these images to be all that there is, ignorant of the more vibrant world that exists outside of the cave. Gradually, he wanders outside and beholds the sunlit world of truth. This is a parable describing the philosophical journey, in which one trains gradually to understand the metaphysical ground of all things, which remains invisible to empirical vision and can only be grasped by the eye of Reason.

12. Jeremy Bentham, “Nonsense Upon Stilts”: Bentham, Burke, and Marx on the Rights of Man, ed. Jeremy Waldron (London: Methuen, 1987), 46–69.

13. Colin McGinn, “Philosophy by Another Name,” New York Times, “The Stone” blog, March 4, 2012, http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/04/philosophy-by-another-name/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0.

14. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 27.

15. J. S. Mill, Utilitarianism (New York: Penguin, 2004).

16. Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. James W. Ellington, 3rd ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), 30.

17. Georges Palante, “The Secular Priestly Spirit,” trans. Mitch Abidor, September 1, 1909, www.marxists.org/archive/palante/1909/secular-priest.htm.

18. Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin, 2007), 15.

19. Michel Onfray, Atheist Manifesto (New York: Skyhorse, 2011).

20. Michel Onfray, La crépuscule d’un idol: l’affabulation freudienne (Paris: Grasset, 2010).

21. Slavoj Žižek, “Robespierre of the ‘Divine Violence’ of Terror,” www.lacan.com/zizrobes.htm.

1. One of Virgil’s major poems, centered on the theme of agriculture.

2. Bovarique: Having the characteristic of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, marked by a feeling of emptiness in provincial life and a longing to transcend it through a romantic and idealized but ultimately self-destructive lifestyle.

3. May 1968 refers to the cataclysmic leftist general strikes in France. Much more on this in subsequent chapters.

4. A geological massif covering much of Northwestern France. It comprises metamorphic and magmatic rock that was metamorphosed or deformed during the Hercynian or Variscan orogenty (400 to 280 million years ago) and the earlier Cadomian orogeny (650 to 550 million years ago).

5. A well-known French story, Le diable amoreux, written in 1772 by Jacques Cazotte.

6. Jacques de Voragine (1230–1298): A compiler of biographies of the Christian saints. Uderzo: Creators of the wildly popular Asterix comic strip.

7. BEPC: A now obsolete French examination, Le Brevet d’Études de Premier Cycle, taken around age fourteen, covering basic math, French, and history topics.

8. A popular French clarinetist.

9. The talented German filmmaker who became a Nazi propagandist before and during World War II.

10. Pierre de Coubertin (1863–1937): A French aristocrat, who was a historian, an educator, and the founder of the International Olympic Committee, and is thus considered the founder of the modern Olympic Games. He was convinced of the benefits of physical education for young people, believing, for example, that the propagation of rugby in England contributed to its imperial success and that the greatness of ancient Greece emanated from its love of sport.

11. Bob Morane is a series of adventure books in French created by French-speaking Belgian novelist Henri Vernes, the pseudonym of Charles-Henri Dewisme. More than two hundred novels have been written since his introduction in 1953.

12. “Carrot Head,” a long short story published in 1894 by Jules Renard about an unloved young red-headed boy who overcomes all kinds of humiliations and indignities with courage and cleverness.

13. Professor Culculus: The comedic absent-minded professor in The Adventures of Tintin books.

14. Schéhérazade: A symphonic suite composed by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. On the Steppes of Central Asia: A symphonic poem by Alexander Borodin.

15. A French children’s song, À la Claire Fontaine.

16. An undulating aquatic grass.

17. Le Pèlerin: A weekly journal.

18. A French biologist, writer, philosopher, and activist who was influential in the development of cryogenics.

1. The story of Thales of Miletus, an ancient Greek astronomer who fell into a well while strolling and gazing intently at the stars. The story was originally recorded by Plato in the Theatetus. It was later adapted and absorbed into Aesop’s Fables. The moral of the fable is that one better keep one’s mind on things on earth.

2. Empedocles (495–435 BCE): On Nature is a poem that argues that the universe comprises four material elements that are motivated by the forces of Love and Strife.

3. Abderitan atomism refers to the form of atomistic materialism argued by the philosophers of the region of Abdera in Greece, the most famous of whom was Democritus (460–370 BCE).

4. Parmenides (515–540 BCE): His famous poem On Nature argues that the universe is made up of a single eternal substance and that all change is only apparent and not real.

5. Milesians were a Greek school of thought founded in the sixth century BCE. Three philosophers were central to it: Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes. All of them taught a materialist, scientific style of philosophy in which the universe is composed of observable entities. Ionians were a larger, more diverse group of philosophers also in Miletus, Ionia, in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE. They are all considered physicalists who privileged reason over belief. They include Heraclitus, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Archelaus, Hippo, and Diogenes of Apollonia.

6. Chaldeans were ancient Babylonians. Indian gymnosophists, “naked philosophers,” were Indian ascetics, not unlike modern Indian sadhus.

7. Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947): An important English philosopher and mathematician.

8. Plato’s Socrates put forth a vision of the universe in which reality is split into two realms: What is available to our sense is known as the sensible world. It is illusory, a mere shadow of reality. Reality itself abides as the intelligible world. It is not apparent to the senses but is only accessible through the philosophical training of the soul.

9. A school that promoted pleasure as the absolute good. By pleasure, they did not just mean the absence of pain (ataraxia), as Epicurus taught; they meant the accumulation of positive sensual and emotional enjoyment.

10. Kant’s philosophy posits a bifurcation of reality. The things we see are phenomena, and thus they correspond to the entities that populate Plato’s sensible world. However, phenomena are not the things-in-themselves; they are emanations of things-in-themselves, which remain forever inaccessible. Those inaccessible building blocks of reality are called noumena, and correspond roughly to the Ideas or Forms that populate Plato’s intelligible world.

11. This was the aspersion cast at Epicureans, since pigs only look down at the ground, rooting around at the earth rather than looking up to the sky.

1. Hapax: A word or form that occurs only once in a recorded corpus of a language; a singular event. Kairos: A Greek term meaning the right or most opportune moment for something.

2. Anacrusis: One or more unstressed notes before the first bar of a piece or passage.

3. Benito Feijóo (1676–1764): A Spanish monk and scholar who criticized superstition and encouraged scientific inquiry.

1. The period between Irenaeus and Aquinas: from the second to the twelfth century CE.

2. This refers to the main figure in Rembrandt’s painting Philosopher in Meditation. The philosopher sits alone in a quiet room.

3. The Letter to Menoeceus is one of Epicurus’s surviving writings.

4. The Phenomenology of Spirit is one of Hegel’s major works. Like most of Hegel’s writings, it is renowned and infamous for its abstract impenetrability, and it may be argued that it fails to provide a clear path of ethics, if any at all.

5. Proust believed that through his introspection, confessional writing, and exploration of emotions he constructs his self, and that self is only one of many possible selves.

6. For Sainte-Beuve: A book by José Cabanis (1922–2000) defending the views of Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve (1804–1869), a literary critic who argued that to understand a work of literature, it is important to know about the life of the author.

1. Hesiod: A Greek poet and contemporary of Homer (circa 750–650 BCE). Oswald Spengler (1880–1936): A German philosopher and historian most famous for his book The Decline of the West.

2. This refers to the law decreed by Pope Pius X that created a new lay organization. Pius commanded that all Catholic lay organizations submit to greater ecclesiastical authority or risk censure or excommunication.

3. Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937): An important Italian political philosopher imprisoned by Mussolini. He was heavily influenced by Marx and believed that States worked to establish “cultural hegemony” over the people. They do so by controlling discourses; therefore, the opposition must engage in an ideological battle with the State.

1. Attributed to Sartre in his lecture “Existentialism Is a Humanism” from 1946.

2. A book by Jean-Pierre Changeux, published in 1983.

1. Jean-Paul Sartre theorized about a certain kind of person, “the bastard,” who knows that he is unethical, but persists in being unethical.

2. The random motion of particles suspended in gas or liquid observed by the botanist Robert Brown in 1827.

3. Vladimir Jankélévitch (1831–1903): An influential Neo-Platonist philosopher known for his abstract subtlety.

1. Claude Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon (1707–1777): A French novelist; writer of The Sofa: A Moral Tale, in which the soul of a young courtier is condemned to inhabit a series of sofas, only being allowed to return to the human realm once two virgin lovers make love upon him.

2. The thirteen books of the New Testament that are attributed to Paul.

1. Neuwirth Law: A law passed in 1967 in France that legalized birth control methods. Veil Law: A law passed in 1975 legalizing abortion.

2. “The Song of la Palice” (in French: “La chanson de la Palisse”) is a burlesque song attributed to Bernard de la Monnoye (1641–1728) about alleged feats of French nobleman and military leader Jacques de la Palice (1470–1525). See Thierry Klein, Chansons populaires et enfantines (Paris: La Palisse, 2009). From that song came the French term la palissade, meaning an utterly obvious truth, that is, a truism or tautology. The reference in question pertains to the following verses:

1. Michel Foucault (1926–1984): An extremely important French intellectual, who, among many other things, wrote about sadomasochism in The History of Sexuality.

2. Phalanx: A cohort of people, which Fourier thought should be the basic unit of society.

3. Luxisme: The human desire for “internal and external luxury,” represented by health and wealth with the ensuing satisfaction of the sensual appetites. See Nicholas Valentine Riasanovsky, The Teaching of Charles Fourier (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 41. Angélicat: A class of sexual nobility. Faquirat: A class charged with providing sexual satisfaction to the elderly. Unityisme: This term that “men are naturally inclined to club together in social groups and work together for mutual good, instead of fighting with one another under the system of competition.” G. R. S Taylor, Leaders of Socialism, Past and Present (New York: Duffield, 1910), 35. Bayadérat: Another class with a particular sexual proclivity and function.

1. The caves of Lascaux contain wall paintings that are approximately 17,300 years old.

2. Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714–1762): A German philosopher who held very different views on aesthetics from Kant. Baumgarten emphasized taste and the senses, and therefore an inevitably subjective aesthetics. Kant initially objected to this, since it would not be able to isolate objective truths, which Kant always sought.

3. Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002): A renowned French sociologist.

4. Plato’s metaphysics posits a dualism of universals and particulars. Particulars “participate” in the universal Ideas or Forms, deriving their ontology from them.

1. “Situationist” refers to Guy Debord (1931–1994), a founding member of the political group Situationist International (1957–1972), which combined Marxism with the influence of avant-garde art.

2. “Doge” was the title for the chief magistrate of the Republic of Venice. Condottieres were contractors, mercenary soldiers that were influential throughout Italian history.

3. Bouletai were members of the Athenian Boule, or Council of 500, were selected from each deme in proportion to its size. Demes are simple subdivisions of land in the countryside outside of Athens. Prytanea were the executives of the boule.

1. Diogenes is said to have wandered around Athens with a lantern. When asked what he was doing, he said he was looking for an honest man.

2. Jena was a city in central Germany that was the headquarters of many of the nineteenth century’s greatest philosophers and intellectuals, including Hegel, Schelling, Schlegel, Schiller, Fichte, and Frege.

3. The Parmenides is of Plato’s works.

4. “The religion of pure combination” refers to the principles of formalism and structuralism, in which all fields—aesthetic, mathematical, literary, and so on—can be understood as axiomatic systems. For example, in art, this means that the essence of the work is the combination of specific material elements that can be found within it. In this orientation, an artist’s motivation or biography and the historical background are extrinsic to the work’s essence.

5. La pure forme: In this context, it carries the sense of a predicate clause applied to ideal concepts, for example, la pure forme de l’intelligence, “the pure form of the intelligence,” which is absolute and not contingent on conditions of embodiment. La forme pure: This emphasizes Form itself as pure and immaterial.

6. “Singing-saw” refers to the playing of a handsaw with a bow, which produces a weird, ethereal tone.

7. A type of French novel that emerged in the 1950s that generally de-emphasized plot and character and focused on constructing a unique vision of the world’s objects. Writers associated with this movement include Alain Robbe-Grillet, Maurice Blanchot, Marguerite Duras, and Georges Perec.

8. The “pope” is Alain Robbe-Grillet.

1. A charter drafted by the Vatican in 1995 seeking recognition of Catholic values in the healthcare field. It sought to protect Catholic healthcare workers from punishment for conscientious refusal to participate in procedures like abortion or to take part in the distribution of prophylaxis and the like.

2. Monsieur Homais is a major character in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, a bourgeois businessman with great ambition, which he realizes not through personal merit but through relentless sycophancy.

1. This refers to the conservative philosopher Francis Fukuyama’s book The End of History, which takes its title from Hegel’s famous idea that the teleological evolution of world history must logically end in a kind of perfect state. Fukuyama saw this as global liberalism.

2. This refers to Zeno’s paradox, in which he demonstrates, logically, how motion is impossible. Diogenes’s reply is to walk around in front of him.

3. Auguste Marie Joseph Jean Léon Jaurès (1859–1914): A French socialist leader. Initially an opportunist Republican, he evolved into one of the first social democrats, becoming the leader, in 1902, of the French Socialist Party, which opposed Jules Guesde’s revolutionary Socialist Party of France. Both parties merged in 1905 in the French section of the Workers International (SFIO). An antimilitarist, Jaurès was assassinated at the outbreak of World War I. Jules Basile Guesde (1845–1922): Leader of the “intransigent” wing of French socialists, who opposed the reformist policies of Jaurès, whom he denounced for supporting one bourgeois party over another. Jean Allemane (1843–1935): A French socialist politician, veteran of the Paris Commune of 1871, and pioneer of syndicalism. Louise Michel (1830–1905): A French anarchist, schoolteacher, and medical worker.

4. A colony in the southwestern suburbs of Paris.

5. Jean Kanapa (1921–1978): A French intellectual who engaged in virulent ad hominem critiques of Sartre.

6. André Malraux (1901–1976): A prominent writer and member of de Gaulle’s cabinet. He is know for such books as Man’s Fate, about the failed communist uprising in Shanghai in 1927, as well as other books about life in Cambodia and Indochina.

1. 1848: Also known as the February Revolution, it ended the Orleans monarchy and led to the creation of the French Second Republic. Marx’s book The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon describes the events of this revolution. It also provides the setting for Flaubert’s A Sentimental Education. The Commune: The Paris Commune of 1871 in which a socialist commune assumed control of the government of Paris and claimed authority over all of France. It culminated in the Bloody Week in which as many as thirty thousand Parisian residents and supporters of the commune were slaughtered by the troops of Napoleon III. 1917: A year of mass army mutinies in France. The Popular Front: An alliance of left-wing movements that won France’s elections in 1936. Paris from 1981 to 1983: The first years of François Mitterrand’s presidency, in which he tried to implement substantial socialist policies, only to abandon them and become more moderate after 1983.

2. Zero growth is a theory that all economic activities and policies are oriented toward achieving a state of equilibrium, a steady-state economy. The theory asserts that the continuous growth model is inherently unstable, resulting in boom-bust cycles, and that continuous growth in the context of finite resources is unlikely to support current levels of prosperity indefinitely. Proponents of this theory also explicitly challenge the popular equation of economic growth with progress and posit that sustainability has inherent value.

3. This refers to the French political scandal known as the Dreyfus Affair, which took place in the late 1890s and early 1900s. It involved a young Jewish army officer accused of passing secrets to the German embassy in Paris. Progressive groups defended him and the issue of anti-Semitism was central to the case.

4. The College of Sociology: A loosely knit group of important French intellectuals who interacted between 1937 and 1939. They included Georges Bataille, Alexandre Kojève, Walter Benjamin, André Masson, Jean Wahl, and Pierre Klossowki.

5. This refers to an academic conference held in 1964 at Royaumont Abbey, the historical residence of the French monarchs.

6. William Godwin (1756–1836): An English intellectual considered one of the first proponents of Utilitarianism and anarchism.

7. Françoi Claudius Koenigstein, aka Ravachol (1859–1892): A French anarchist who perpetrated three dynamite bombings against members of the judiciary in 1891. Sébastian Faure (1858–1942): A proponent of synthesis anarchism, a nonmilitant conception of anarchism in which men and women are given respectful and free environments for working on self-cultivation.

8. Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921): A Russian anarcho-communist who advocated the abolition of central governments in favor of voluntary associations between workers.

9. Pompidolism: The politics of Georges Pompidou, prime minster of France from 1962 to 1968, and president from 1969 until his death in 1974.

10. Beaubourg: A colloquial name for the Centre Georges Pompidou, an important contemporary art museum in Paris. Giscardism: The politics of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, president of France from 1974 until 1981.

1. Louis Auguste Blanqui (1805–1881): A French radical socialist who denied the proletariat’s primary role in revolution in favor of a temporary transitional dictatorship by a small group. Curzio Malaparte (1889–1957): The Italian writer of Coup d’État: Techniques for Revolution.

2. Marquis de Condorcet (1743–1794): A French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist who advocated for a liberal economy, free and equal public education, constitutionalism, and sexual equality. He died in prison during the Reign of Terror.

3. Étienne de la Boétie (1530–1563): A sixteenth-century French judge, writer, and anarchist.

4. Grocer’s philosophy: A common, vulgar criticism of Bentham’s Utilitarianism, which some claim must lead to an obsession with petty ethical calculations.

5. Abbaye de Thélème, from Rabelais: “All their life was spent not in laws, statutes, or rules, but according to their own free will and pleasure. They rose out of their beds when they thought good; they did eat, drink, labor, sleep, when they had a mind to it and were disposed for it. None did awake them, none did offer to constrain them to eat, drink, nor to do any other thing; for so had Gargantua established it. In all their rule and strictest tie of their order there was but this one clause to be observed, ‘Do What Thou Wilt,’ because men that are free, well-born, well-bred, and conversant in honest companies, have naturally an instinct and spur that prompteth them unto virtuous actions, and withdraws them from vice, which is called honor. Those same men, when by base subjection and constraint they are brought under and kept down, turn aside from that noble disposition by which they formerly were inclined to virtue, to shake off and break that bond of servitude wherein they are so tyrannously enslaved; for it is agreeable with the nature of man to long after things forbidden and to desire what is denied us.” François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel (New York: Knopf, 1994).

Il épousa, se dit-on,	He married, it is said,
Une vertueuse dame;	A virtuous lady;
S’il avait vécu garcon,	Had he lived as a bachelor
Il n’aurait pas eu de femme.	He would not have had any wife.

Il en fut toujours chéri,	He was very fond of her,
Elle n’était point jalouse;	She was not at all jealous;
Sitôt qu’il fut son mari,	As soon as he was her husband,
Elle devint son épouse.	She did become his spouse.

D’un air galant et badin	A gallant and playful fellow
Il courtisait sa Caliste,	He courted his Caliste,
Sans jamais être chagrin,	Without ever feeling sad
Qu’au moment qu’il était triste.	Except when he happened to be gloomy.

Il passa près de huit ans,	He lived about eight years,
Avec elle, fort à l’aise;	With her, well contented;
Il eut jusqu’à huit enfants:	He had all of eight children:
C’était la moitié de seize.	That is one half of sixteen.

On dit que, dans ses amours,	They say that, in his love life,
Il fut caressé des belles,	He was caressed by beauties,
Qui le suivirent toujours,	Who followed him, always,
Tant qu’il marcha devant elles ..	When he walked ahead of them…