PARTISAN
REVIEW
spread. History is accounted for by juxtapositions of causal and linear
series. Shortly before the war, Politzer, the last of the great minds of
French Communism, was forced to teach that "the brain secretes
thought" as an endocrine gland secretes hormones; when the Com–
munist intellectual today wants to interpret history or human beha–
vior, he borrows from bourgeois ideology a deterministic psychology
based on mechanism and the law of interest.
But there is worse. The conservation of the C.P. is today ac–
companied by an opportunism which contradicts it. It is not only a
matter of safeguarding the U.S.S.R., but it is also necessary to deal
tactfully with the bourgeoisie. Thus, they talk its language: farnily,
country, religion, morality. And as they have not thereby given up the
idea of weakening it, they try to fight it on its own ground by
im–
proving upon its principles. The result of this tactic is to superimpose
two contradictory conservatisms, materialist scholasticism and Chris–
tian moralism. The truth is that once you abandon all logic it is not
so difficult to pass from one to the other because both suppose the
same sentimental attitude; it is a matter of holding fast to positions
which are threatened, of refusing to discuss, and of masking fear
behind anger. But the point is that the intellectual, by definition, must
also
use logic. Therefore,
he
is asked to cover up the contradictions by
sleight of hand.
He
must do his best to reconcile the irreconcilable,
to unite by force ideas which repel each other, .and to cover up the
soldering by glittering layers of fine style-to say nothing of the task
which has fallen to him only recently, that is, to steal the history
of France from the bourgeoisie, to annex the great Ferre, little Bara,
Saint Vincent de Paul, and Descartes. Poor Communist intellectuals.
They have fled the ideology of their class of origin only to find it
again in the class they have chosen. Work, family, country-no more
laughing at it, they've got to sing it. I imagine that they must often
rather want to let loose, but
they
are chained. They are allowed to
roar at phantoms or against
some
writers who have remained free
and who represent nothing.
They'll start naming illustrious writers. To
be
sure. I recognize
the fact that they had
talent.
Is it an accident if they no longer have
any? I have shown above that the work of art, which is an absolute
end, is opposed in essence to bourgeois utilitarianism. Do they think
that it can accommodate itself to Communist utilitarianism? In a
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