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PARTISAN REVIEW
Moulin Rouge.
It makes me shiver with excitement. For a first-rate
dance-tune sometimes has more of the century in it than a motet, and
a word may weigh heavier than a victory.
Ah, these old men! What I see is not so much something lofty
but simply the century and the compulsion. A rose-pink century–
right, then, let's paint pastoral idylls, and above all let us stick to the
center. But supposing it's a black century- what do we paint then?
Something technical perhaps, in keeping with our habit of holding
conferences? After
all,
it's technical things that people sit round talk–
ing about; "technology" and "integration" are the watchwords.
Everything must
be
in keeping with everything else: poetry with the
Geiger-counter, inoculation-serums with the Church Fathers, and so
on, and don't leave anything out or global coalitionism is endangered.
Language must be assimilated to the technical too-though I must
say this is an idea I should never have had on my own. The only
sort of language that bears, that grows, that works, is the language
that lives on its own resources, spontaneously procreating, absorbing,
but integrating according to its own immanent law, the few expres–
sions it takes over from physics and the automobile industry. These
few miserable splinters it absorbs into its body, and the place heals
over; the transcendence of language is never disturbed.
Up and up we go in our helicopter-earth dwindles away, but
we can still make out those colossal complexes, those collectives, those
things called institutes and institutions. "I made my way through
them too," one of the old men might say nowadays. "I suffered from
depressions, I entered an institution and went to a psychoanalyst. And
he said: 'You are suffering from oral-narcissistic deficiency, you lack
an adequate intake of external objects. You are introverted-I sup–
pose you know what I mean by that!' I replied that introverted and
extroverted seemed pretty crude basic concepts to me. There are those
who bear a hereditary burden and those who bear none. There are
those who are fettered and those who are free. And the first are the
more interesting. 'Contactual insufficiency,' the therapist said, pressing
into my hand a booklet entitled :
You and the Libido,
and thereupon
fell into a trance.
"Then I heard," one of those old masters would say today, "that
thought makes you free, thought makes you happy. And so I entered
another institution and went to the thinkers. But sociology, phenom-
