On Revolutionary Sadism
Nicolas Calas
Editors' Note: We think our readers will be interested in the
following selections from
Foyers d'lncendie
("Hearthstones of
Arson"), a book of Freudo-Marxist literary and political criticism
which was published last year in Paris by Denoel. The author
is
a
young Greek surrealist, a follower of Andre Breton. He prefaces
his book with this axiom from Heraclitus: "If you do not expect
the unexpected, you will not
foul
it, for it is painful and hard
to find."
I
DREAM OF SOME DAY
seeing the Louvre at last really modernized.
Then its directors will not content themselves with borrowing from
a shop across the way a dress dummy's pedestal for the Venus de
Milo; they will install a complete system of cunning mechanisms,
thanks to which the pictures and the statues will be able to move
·about freely-advancing, retreating, turning on their axes as
slowly as a sun or as rapidly as a child's top; all these metamor–
phoses will take place in the glow of many-colored light projec–
tors, while regular explosions of strange engines will fill the air
with
noises and cries of distress.
The Louvre will no longer be a museum, for all the great
museums will be nothing more nor less than palaces of dreams.
What were the palaces, the Palazzo Vecchio, the Escurial, the
Nymphenburg, the Palace of Minos, the Kremlin, the palaces of
God, of all the gods of all the ages? It took the bourgeois invasion
to kill the palaces-an invasion which, like every other one, under–
stood nothing about the symbols cherished by the conquered. The
civilizations died and the palaces were destroyed, but it is better
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