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PARTISAN REVIEW
to burn them as the Tuileries were burned, than to burn their soul
as bourgeois officialdom did in chasing imagination out of them.
What the bourgeoisie did not damn, it betrayed: it has made of
poetry, prose, it has made of palaces, museums, and of costumes,
uniforms.
In madness, the bourgeoisie sees nothing but the strait-jacket;
in desire, only the brown or black shirt; in pictures, it understands
only the price. The Louvre, once the dream of kings, the dream of
an emperor, has become an intellectual safe-deposit box for a
society which thinks only in terms of the stock exchange.
Let us overthrow this society, blow up the exchanges, destroy
the museums. In the carcasses of temples and palaces let us take
over the thrones of kings and gods, on these peaks of the past let us
sing a poetry made for everybody!
Passerby! When you walk by the Louvre, remember that the
dream, too, must have its own Bastille Day!
DESIRE,
IN ITS
dialectical progress, has a tendency towards
either sadism or masochism, depending on whether the individual
adopts a masculine or feminine attitude in his emotional life.
From the standpoint of behavior, the man animated by sadis–
tic tendencies will seek to dominate and transform his environment,
while the masochist will want to unloose forces whose only purpose,
from the point of view of behavior, would be to make him feel the
effect of transformations which he desires his environment to pro–
duce upon himself. Thus masochistic aggressivity is developed at
the expense of the aggressor's personality, which suffers itself to
be transformed, while sadistic aggressivity exists at the expense of
the environment. Since the revolutionary seeks to transform his
environment, one would expect the revolutionary ethic to have an
interest in the adoption of a sadistic tendency. Actually, however,
it is difficult, if not impossible, to establish a clean line of demar–
cation between sadism and masochism. These tendencies never
exist in the unconscious independently of one another; they form
the two antithetical elements of every desire, which is itself simul–
taneously pleasure and pain. Thus a work of art may reveal
masochistic tendencies in the painter, but by virtue solely of the
