PARTISAN REVIEW
97
bomb hurled into the Chamber of Deputies with the words,
«Qu'importe
Ies victimes, si Ie geste est beau?"
(History, it should be added, does
not record how beautiful he thought the gesture when a similar device
exploded in a restaurant where he was dining several months later,
blinding
him
in one eye. Terrorism, as recent events grimly affirm, has
a way of rebounding on its perpetrators.)
Tailhade's casual celebration of the beauties of bomb-throwing
seems scarcely consonant with the deadly earnestness of its current ad–
vocates. And yet, there is a subtle similarity between his position and
theirs. In this respect, the humorless Weathermen are not as diame–
trically opposed to the Yippies as they believe themselves to be. The
aestheticization of politics is not a matter simply of glorifying violence,
whether socially sanctioned, as
in
the case of war, or individually in–
spired, as with terrorism. As Benjamin also noted, it expresses the con–
summation of art for art's sake as
Fiat ars
-
pereat mundus.
In other
words, it exaggerates the latent antihumanist, nonethical aspect of art
which Kant referred to as "purposiveness without purpose." The posi–
tion it assumes is self-consciously amoral, at least in terms of the prevail–
ing morality. A radical politics, to be sure, must always question a
society's moral system since that morality frequently serves in the inter–
ests of the status quo. It must do so, however, with firm moral alterna–
tives in mind, especially because of the need .to weigh conflicting ethical
claims.
An
aestheticized politics, on the other hand, ceases to ask serious
moral and practical questions, especially questions involving means
and ends. Instead of seeking a transvaluation of values, it degenerates
into its own justification as a kind of
politique pour la politique.
In so
doing, it corresponds to that view of politics which Nietzsche approved
in
The Genealogy of Morals.
Speaking of the first politicians, those
"most spontaneous, most unconscious artists that exist," he wrote: "being
natural organizers, these men know nothing of
guilt,
responsibility, con–
sideration. They are actuated by the terrible egotism of the artist...."
This might describe the young people who died on Eleventh Street
(though one might question their organizational ability).
Even when it pays lip service to ethical goals, the primary function
of this type of politics seems to be the self-definition of the participant
through action. Politics is thus reduced to an exercise
in
personal realiza–
tion with little regard for its other consequences, to what is sometimes
called "political existentialism." The Weatherman writing in
Leviathan
spoke of his experience in Chicago during the "days of rage" in these
terms: "The two months of my struggle, such as it was, in and out of
the collective has given a revolutionary significance
to
an old Asian
saying: 'By denying oneself, one realizes oneself.''' Frequently, the mo-
