PARTISAN
REVIEW
using torture and that man is an animal who must be led with a whip.
Thus, he attempts to destroy the humanity in
his
fellow-creature. Also,
as a consequence, in himself; he knows that the groaning, sweating,
filthy creature who begs for mercy and abandons himself in a swoon–
ing consent with the throat-sounds of an amorous woman, and who
yields everything and is even so carried away that he improves upon
his
betrayals because the consciousness that he has done evil is like a
stone around his neck dragging him still farther down, exists also in
his
own image and that he-the executioner-is bearing down upon
himself as much as upon his victim.
If
he wishes, on his own account,
to escape this total degradation, he has no other recourse than to
affirm his blind faith in an iron order which like a corset confines
our repulsive weaknesses- in short, of committing man's destiny to
the hands of inhuman powers.
A moment comes when torturer and tortured are in accord, the
former because he has, in a single victim, symbolically gratified his
hatred of all mankind, the latter because he can only bear his fault
by pushing it to the limit, and because the only way he can endure his
self-hatred is by hating all other men along with himself. Later, per–
haps, the executioner will be hanged. Perhaps the victim, if he re–
covers, will be redeemed. But what will blot out
tl'lis
Mass in which
two freedoms have communed in the destruction of the human? We
knew that, to a certain extent, it was being celebrated everywhere in
Paris while we were eating, sleeping, and making love. We heard
whole blocks screaming and we understood that Evil, fruit of a free
and sovereign will, is, like Good, absolute.
Perhaps a day will come when a happy age, looking back at the
past, will see in this suffering and shame one of the paths which led
to peace. But we were not on the side of history already made. We
were, as I have said,
situated
in such a way that every lived minute
seemed to us like something irreducible. Therefore, in spite of our–
selves, we came to this conclusion, which will seem shocking to lofty
souls: Evil cannot be redeemed.
But, on the other hand, most of the resisters, though beaten,
burned, blinded, and broken, did not speak. They broke the circle
of Evil and reaffirmed the human-for themselves, for us, and for
their very torturers. They did it without witnesses, without help,
without hope, often even without faith. For them it was not a matter
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