Alain Badiou, Éloge de l’amour, L’amour menacé

Dans un livre devenu célèbre, De quoi Sarkozy est-il le nom?, vous soutenez que «l’amour doit être réinventé mais aussi tout simplement défendu, parce qu’il est menacé de toutes parts.» De quoi est-il menacé? et en quel sens les anciens mariages arrangés ont-ils selon vous revêtu des habits neufs aujourd’hui? Je cois qu’une récente publicité pour un site de rencontres par Internet vous a particulièrement frappé…

C’est vrai, Paris a été couvert des affiches pour le site de rencontres Meetic, dont l’intitulé m’a profondément interpellé. Je peux citer un certain nombre de slogans de cette campagne publicitaire. Le premier dit – et il s’agit du détournement d’une citation de théâtre – «Ayez l’amour sans le hasard!» Et puis, il y en a un autre: «On peut être amoureux sans tomber amoureux!» Donc, pas de chute, n’est-ce pas? Et puis, il y a aussi: «Vous pouvez parfaitement être amoureux sans souffrir!» Et tout ça grâce au site de rencontres Meetic… qui vous propose de surcroît – l’expression m’a paru tout à fait remarquable – un «coaching amoureux». Vous aurez donc un entraîneur qui va vous préparer à affronter l’épreuve. Je pense que cette propagande publicitaire relève d’une conception sécuritaire de «l’amour.» C’est l’amour assurance tous risques – vous aurez l’amour, mais vous aurez si bien calculé votre affaire, vous aurez si bien sélectioneé d’avance votre partenaire en pianotant sur Internet – vous aurez évidement sa photo, ses goûts en détail, sa date de naissance, son signe astrologique, etc. – qu’au terme de cette immense combinaison vous pourrez vous dire: «Avec celui-la, ça va marcher sans risques!» Et ça, c’est une propagande, c’est intéressant que la publicité se fasse sur ce registre-là. Or, évidemment, je suis convaincu que l’amour, en tant qu’il est un goût collectif, en tant qu’il est, pour quasiment tout le monde, la chose qui donne à la vie intensité et signification, je pense que l’amour ne peut être ce don fait à l’existence au régime de l’absence totale de risques. Ça me paraît un petit peu comme la propagande qu’avait faite à un moment donné l’armée américaine pour la guerre «zéro mort.»

Il y aurait selon vous une correspondence entre la guerre «zéro mort» et l’amour «zéro risque», de la mème manière qu’il existe, pour les sociologues Richard Sennett et Zygmunt Bauman, une analogie entre le «je ne t’engage pas» que dit l’agent du capitalisme financier au travailleur précarisé et le «je ne m’engage pas» que prononce à son partenaire «l’amoureux» détaché dans un monde où les liens se font et se défont au profit d’un libertinage cosy et consumériste?

C’est un peu le même monde, tout ça. La guerre «zéro mort”, l’amour «zéro risque», pas de hasard, pas de rencontre, je vois là, avec les moyens d’une propagande générale, une première menace sur l’amour, que j’appellerai la menace sécuritaire. Après tout, ce n’est pas loin d’être un mariage arrangé. Il ne l’est pas au nom de l’ordre familial par des parents despotiques, mais au nom du sécuritaire personnel, par un arrangement préalable qui évite tout hasard, toute rencontre, et finalement toute poésie existentielle, au nom de la catégorie fondamentale de l’absence de risques. Et puis, la deuxième menace qui pèse sur l’amour, c’est de lui dénier toute importance. La contrepartie de cette menace sécuritaire consiste à dire que l’amour n’est qu’une variante de l’hédonisme généralisé, une variante des figures de la jouissance. Il s’agit ainsi d’éviter toute épreuve immédiate, toute expérience authentique et profonde de l’altérité dont l’amour est tissé. Ajoutons tout de même que, le risque n’étant jamais éliminé pour de bon, la propagande de Meetic, comme celle des armées impériales, consiste à dire que le risque sera pour les autres ! Si vous êtes, vous, bien préparé pour l’amour, selon les canons du sécuritaire moderne, vous saurez, vous, envoyer promener l’autre, qui n’est pas conforme à votre confort. S’il souffre, c’est son affaire, n’est-ce pas ? Il n’est pas dans la modernité. De la même manière que «zéro mort», c’est pour les militaires occidentaux. Les bombes qu’ils déversent tuent quantité de gens qui ont le tort de vivre dessous. Mais ce sont des Afghans, des Palestiniens… Ils ne sont pas modernes non plus. L’amour sécuritaire, comme tout ce dont la norme est la sécurité, c’est l’absence de risques pour celui qui a une bonne assurance, une bonne armée, une bonne police, une bonne psychologie de la jouissance personnelle, et tout le risque pour celui en face de qui il se trouve. Vous avez remarqué que partout on vous explique que les choses se font «pour votre confort et votre sécurité», depuis les trous dans le trottoir jusqu’aux contrôles de police dans les couloirs du métro. Nous avons là les deux ennemis de l’amour, au fond : la sécurité du contrat d’assurance et le confort des jouissances limitées.

Il y aurait donc une sorte d’alliance entre une conception libertaire et une conception libérale de l’amour?

Je crois en effet que libéral et libertaire convergent vers l’idée que l’amour est un risque inutile. Et qu’on peut avoir d’un côté une espèce de conjugalité préparée qui se poursuivra dans la douceur de la consommation et de l’autre des arrangements sexuels plaisants et remplis de jouissance, en faisant l’économie de la passion. De ce point de vue, je pense réellement que l’amour, dans le monde tel qu’il est, est pris dans cette étreinte, dans cet encerclement, et qu’il est, à ce titre, menacé. Et je crois que c’est une tâche philosophique, parmi d’autres, de le défendre. Ce qui suppose, probablement, comme le disait le poète Rimbaud, qu’il faille le réinventer aussi. Ça ne peut pas être une défensive par la simple conservation des choses. Le monde est en effet rempli de nouveautés et l’amour doit aussi être pris dans cette novation. Il faut réinventer le risque et l’aventure, contre la sécurité et le confort.

English Translation: In The Meaning of Sarkozy, a book that has subsequently become famous, you argue that “we must re-invent love but also quite simply defend it, because it faces threats from all sides”. In what ways is it threatened? How, in your view, have the arranged marriages of yesteryear been re-packaged in the new clothes of today? I believe that recent publicity for a dating website has particularly struck you…

That’s right, Paris is plastered with posters for the Meetic internet dating-site, whose ads I find really disturbing. I could mention a number of slogans its hype uses. The first misappropriates the title of Marivaux’s play, The Game of Love and Chance, “Get love without chance!” And then another says: “Be in love without falling in love!” No raptures, right? Then: “Get perfect love without suffering!” And all thanks to the Meetic dating-site… that offers into the bargain – and the notion takes my breath away – “coaching in love”. So they supply you with a trainer who will prepare you to face the test.

I believe this hype reflects a safety-first concept of “love”. It is love comprehensively insured against all risks: you will have love, but will have assessed the prospective relationship so thoroughly, will have selected your partner so carefully by searching online – by obtaining, of course, a photo, details of his or her tastes, date of birth, horoscope sign, etc. – and putting it all in the mix you can tell yourself: “This is a risk-free option!” That’s their pitch and it’s fascinating that the ad campaign should adopt it. Clearly, inasmuch as love is a pleasure almost everyone is looking for, the thing that gives meaning and intensity to almost everyone’s life, I am convinced that love cannot be a gift given on the basis of a complete lack of risk. The Meetic approach reminds me of the propaganda of the American army when promoting the idea of “smart” bombs and “zero dead ” wars.

So do you think there is a connection between “zero dead”wars and “zero risk” love, in the same way that sociologists, Richard Sennett and Zygmunt Bauman, see an analogy between the “No commitment to you ” that finance capitalism tells the casual worker to the “No commitment for my part” the “lover” tells his or her partner as they float in a world where relationships are made and unmade in the name of a cosy, consumerist permissiveness?

It’s all rather the same scenario. “Zero deaths” war, “zero risks” love, nothing random, no chance encounters. Backed as it is, with all the resources of a wide-scale advertising campaign, I see it as the first threat to love, what I would call the safety threat. After all, it’s not so very different to an arranged marriage. Not done in the name of family order and hierarchy by despotic parents, but in the name of safety for the individuals involved, through advance agree­ments that avoid randomness, chance encoun­ters and in the end any existential poetry, due to the categorical absence of risks.

The second threat love faces is to deny that it is at all important. The counterpoint to the safety threat is the idea that love is only a variant of rampant hedonism and the wide range of possible enjoyment. The aim is to avoid any immediate challenge, any deep and genuine experience of the otherness from which love is woven. However, we should add that as the risk factor can never be completely eliminated, Meetic’s publicity, like the propaganda for imperial armies, says that the risks will be everyone else’s! If you have been well trained for love, following the canons of modern safety, you won’t find it difficult to dispatch the other person if they do not suit. If he suffers, that’s his problem, right? He’s not part of modernity. In the same way that “zero deaths” apply only to the Western military. The bombs they drop kill a lot of people who are to blame for living under­ neath. But these casualties are Afghans, Pales­tinians… They don’t belong to modernity either. Safety-first love, like everything governed by the norm of safety, implies the absence of risks for people who have a good insurance policy, a good army, a good police force, a good psychological take on personal hedonism, and all risks for those on the opposite side.

You must have noticed how we are always being told that things are being dealt with “for your comfort and safety”, from potholes in pavements to police patrols in the metro. Love confronts two enemies, essentially: safety guar­anteed by an insurance policy and the comfort zone limited by regulated pleasures.

So there is a kind of pact between libertarian and liberal ideas on love?

In effect I think that liberals and libertarians converge around the idea that love is a futile risk. And that, on the one hand, you can have a kind of well-planned marriage pursued with all the delights of consummation and, on the other, fun sexual arrangements full of pleasure, if you disregard passion. Seen from this perspec­tive, I really do think that love, in today’s world, is caught in this bind, in this vicious circle and is consequently under threat. I think it is the task of philosophy, as well as other fields, to rally to its defense. And that probably means, as the poet Rimbaud said, that it also needs re-inventing. It cannot be a defensive action simply to maintain the status quo. The world is full of new devel­opments and love must also be something that innovates. Risk and adventure must be re-invented against safety and comfort.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Book 1, Section 14 (The Things People Call Love)

Greed and love: such different feelings these terms evoke! And yet it could be the same instinct, named twice: once disparaged by those who already have, in whom the instinct has somewhat calmed down and who now fear for what they “have”; the other time seen from the standpoint of the unsatisfied. the thirsty, and therefore glorified as “good”. Our love of our neighbors – is it not a craving for new property? And likewise our love of knowledge, of truth, and altogether any craving for what is new? We slowly grow tired of the old, of what we safely possess, and we stretch out our hands again; even the most beautiful landscape is no longer sure of our love after we have lived in it for three months, and some more distant coast excites our greed: possession usually diminishes the possession. The pleasure we take in ourselves tries to preserve itself by time and again changing something new into ourselves – that is simply what possession means. To grow tired of a possession is to grow tired of ourselves. (One can also suffer from an excess – even the desire to throw away, to dole out, can take on the honorary name “love”.) When we see someone suffering, we like to use this opportunity to take possession of him; that is for example what those who become his benefactors and those who have compassion for him do, and they call the lust for new possessions that is awakened in them “love”; and their delight is like that aroused by the prospect of a new conquest. Sexual love, however, is what most dearly reveals itself as a craving for new property: the lover wants unconditional and sole possession of the longed-for person; he wants a power over her soul as unconditional as his power over her body; he wants to be the only beloved, to live and to rule in the other soul as that which is supreme and most desirable. If one considers that this means excluding the whole world from a precious good, from joy and enjoyment; if one considers that the lover aims at the impoverishment and deprivation of all the competitors and would like to become the dragon guarding his golden hoard as the most inconsiderate and selfish of all ‘conquerors’ and exploiters; if one considers, finally, that to the lover himself the rest of the world appears indifferent, pale, and worthless and that he is prepared to make any sacrifice, upset any order, subordinate any other interest; then one is indeed amazed that this wild greed and injustice of sexual love has been as glorified and deified as it has in all ages – yes, that this love has furnished the concept of love as the opposite of egoism when it may in fact be the most candid expression of egoism. Here is it evidently the have-nots and the yearning ones who have formed linguistic usage – there have probably always been too many of them.

Those who were granted much possession and satiety in this area must occasionally have made some casual remark about “the raging demon”, as did that most charming and beloved of all Athenians, Sophocles. But Eros always laughed at such blasphemers; they were always precisely his greatest darlings. Here and there on earth there is probably a kind of continuation of love in which this greedy desire of two people for each other gives way to a new desire and greed, a shared higher thirst for an ideal above them. But who knows such love? Who has experienced it? Its true name is friendship.

William Blake, The Clod and the Pebble

“Love seeketh not itself to please,
Nor for itself hath any care,
But for another gives its ease,
And builds a Heaven in Hell’s despair.”

So sung a little Clod of Clay
Trodden with the cattle’s feet,
But a Pebble of the brook
Warbled out these metres meet:

“Love seeketh only self to please,
To bind another to its delight,
Joys in another’s loss of ease,
And builds a Hell in Heaven’s despite.”

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, Epilogue

So there you have all of it that’s important. Or at least you almost have it. I’m an invisible man and it placed me in a hole – or showed me the hole I was in, if you will – and I reluctantly accepted the fact. What else could I have done? Once you get used to it, reality is as irresistible as a club, and I was clubbed into the cellar before I caught the hint. Perhaps that’s the way it had to be; I don’t know. Nor do I know whether accepting the lesson has placed me in the rear or in the avant-garde. That, perhaps, is a lesson for history, and I’ll leave such decisions to Jack and his ilk while I try belatedly to study the lesson of my own life.

Let me be honest with you – a feat which, by the way, I find of the utmost difficulty. When one is invisible he finds such problems as good and evil, honesty and dishonesty, of such shifting shapes that he confuses one with the other, de- pending upon who happens to be looking through him at the time. Well, now I’ve been trying to look through myself, and there’s a risk in it. I was never more hated than when I tried to be honest. Or when, even as just now I’ve tried to articulate exactly what I felt to be the truth. No one was satisfied – not even I. On the other hand, I’ve never been more loved and appreciated than when I tried to “justify” and affirm someone’s mistaken beliefs; or when I’ve tried to give my friends the incorrect, absurd answers they wished to hear. In my presence they could talk and agree with themselves, the world was nailed down, and they loved it. They received a feeling of security. But here was the rub: Too often, in order to justify them, I had to take myself by the throat and choke myself until my eyes bulged and my tongue hung out and wagged like the door of an empty house in a high wind. Oh, yes, it made them happy and it made me sick. So I became ill of affirmation, of saying “yes” against the nay-saying of my stomach – not to mention my brain.

There is, by the way, an area in which a man’s feelings are more rational than his mind, and it is precisely in that area that his will is pulled in several directions at the same time. You might sneer at this, but I know now. I was pulled this way and that for longer than I can remember. And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone’s way but my own. I have also been called one thing and then another while no one really wished to hear what I called myself. So after years of trying to adopt the opinions of others I finally rebelled. I am an invisible man. Thus I have come a long way and returned and boomeranged a long way from the point in society toward which I originally aspired.

So I took to the cellar; I hibernated. I got away from it all. But that wasn’t enough. I couldn’t be still even in hibernation. Because, damn it, there’s the mind, the mind. It wouldn’t let me rest. Gin, jazz and dreams were not enough. Books were not enough. My belated appreciation of the crude joke that had kept me running, was not enough. And my mind revolved again and again back to my grandfather. And, despite the farce that ended my attempt to say “yes” to Brotherhood, I’m still plagued by his deathbed advice… Perhaps he hid his meaning deeper than I thought, perhaps his anger threw me off – I can’t decide. Could he have meant – hell, he must have meant the principle, that we were to affirm the principle on which the country was built and not the men, or at least not the men who did the violence. Did he mean say “yes” because he knew that the principle was greater than the men, greater than the numbers and the vicious power and all the methods used to corrupt its name? Did he mean to affirm the principle, which they themselves had dreamed into being out of the chaos and darkness of the feudal past, and which they had violated and compromised to the point of absurdity even in their own corrupt minds? Or did he mean that we had to take the responsibility for all of it, for the men as well as the principle, because we were the heirs who must use the principle because no other fitted our needs? Not for the power or for vindication, but because we, with the given circumstance of our origin, could only thus find transcendence? Was it that we of all, we, most of all, had to affirm the principle, the plan in whose name we had been brutalized and sacrificed – not because we would always be weak nor because we were afraid or opportunistic, but because we were older than they, in the sense of what it took to live in the world with others and because they had exhausted in us, some—not much, but some – of the human greed and smallness, yes, and the fear and superstition that had kept them running. (Oh, yes, they’re running too, running all over themselves.) Or was it, did he mean that we should affirm the principle because we, through no fault of our own, were linked to all the others in the loud, clamoring semi-visible world, that world seen only as a fertile field for exploitation by Jack and his kind, and with condescension by Norton and his, who were tired of being the mere pawns in the futile game of “making history”? Had he seen that for these too we had to say “yes” to the principle, lest they turn upon us to destroy both it and us?

“Agree ’em to death and destruction,” grandfather had advised. Hell, weren’t they their own death and their own destruction except as the principle lived in them and in us? And here’s the cream of the joke: Weren’t we part of them as well as apart from them and subject to die when they died? I can’t figure it out; it escapes me. But what do / really want, I’ve asked myself. Certainly not the freedom of a Rinehart or the power of a Jack, nor simply the freedom not to run. No, but the next step I couldn’t make, so I’ve remained in the hole.

I’m not blaming anyone for this state of affairs, mind you; nor merely crying mea culpa. The fact is that you carry part of your sickness within you, at least I do as an invisible man. I carried my sickness and though for a long time I tried to place it in the outside world, the attempt to write it down shows me that at least half of it lay within me. It came upon me slowly, like that strange disease that affects those black men whom you see turning slowly from black to albino, their pigment disappearing as under the radiation of some cruel, invisible ray. You go along for years knowing something is wrong, then suddenly you discover that you’re as transparent as air. At first you tell yourself that it’s all a dirty joke, or that it’s due to the “political situation.” But deep down you come to suspect that you’re yourself to blame, and you stand naked and shivering before the millions of eyes who look through you unseeingly. That is the real soul-sickness, the spear in the side, the drag by the neck through the mob-angry town, the Grand Inquisition, the embrace of the Maiden, the rip in the belly with the guts spilling out, the trip to the chamber with the deadly gas that ends in the oven so hygienically clean – only it’s worse because you continue stupidly to live. But live you must, and you can either make passive love to your sickness or burn it out and go on to the next conflicting phase.

Yes, but what is the next phase? How often have I tried to find it! Over and over again I’ve gone up above to seek it out. For, like almost everyone else in our country, I started out with my share of optimism. I believed in hard work and progress and action, but now, after first being “for” society and then “against” it, I assign myself no rank or any limit, and such an attitude is very much against the trend of the times. But my world has become one of infinite possibilities. What a phrase – still it’s a good phrase and a good view of life, and a man shouldn’t accept any other; that much I’ve learned underground. Until some gang succeeds in putting the world in a strait jacket, its definition is possibility. Step outside the narrow borders of what men call reality and you step into chaos… or imagination. That too I’ve learned in the cellar, and not by deadening my sense of perception; I’m invisible, not blind.

No indeed, the world is just as concrete, ornery, vile and sublimely wonderful as before, only now I better understand my relation to it and it to me. I’ve come a long way from those days when, full of illusion, I lived a public life and attempted to function under the assumption that the world was solid and all the relationships therein. Now I know men are different and that all life is divided and that only in division is there true health. Hence again I have stayed in my hole, because up above there’s an increasing passion to make men conform to a pattern…

Whence all this passion toward conformity anyway? –  diversity is the word. Let man keep his many parts and you’ll have no tyrant states. Why, if they follow this conformity business they’ll end up by forcing me, an invisible man, to become white, which is not a color but the lack of one. Must I strive toward colorlessness? But seriously, and without snobbery, think of what the world would lose if that should happen. America is woven of many strands; I would recognize them and let it so remain. It’s “winner take nothing” that is the great truth of our country or of any country. Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat. Our fate is to become one, and yet many – this is not prophecy, but description. Thus one of the greatest jokes in the world is the spectacle of the whites busy escaping blackness and becoming blacker every day, and the blacks striving toward whiteness, becoming quite dull and gray. None of us seems to know who he is or where he’s going.

Which reminds me of something that occurred the other day in the subway. At first I saw only an old gentleman who for the moment was lost. I knew he was lost, for as I looked down the platform I saw him approach several people and turn away without speaking. He’s lost, I thought, and he’ll keep coming until he sees me, then he’ll ask his direction. Maybe there’s an embarrassment in it if he admits he’s lost to a strange white man. Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are. That must be it, I thought – to lose your direction is to lose your face. So here he comes to ask his direction from the lost, the invisible. Very well, I’ve learned to live without direction. Let him ask.

But then he was only a few feet away and I recognized him; it was Mr. Norton. The old gentleman was thinner and wrinkled now but as dapper as ever. And seeing him made all the old life live in me for an instant, and I smiled with tear-stinging eyes. Then it was over, dead, and when he asked me how to get to Centre Street, I regarded him with mixed feelings.

“Don’t you know me?” I said.

“Should I?” he said.

“You see me?” I said, watching him tensely.

“Why, of course – Sir, do you know the way to Centre Street?”

“…But don’t you really know who I am?”

“Young man, I’m in a hurry,” he said, cupping a hand to his ear. “Why should I know you?”

“Because I’m your destiny.”

“My destiny, did you say?” He gave me a puzzled stare, backing away. “Young man, are you well? Which train did you say I should take?”

“I didn’t say,” I said, shaking my head. “Now, aren’t you ashamed?”

“Ashamed? ASHAMED!” he said indignantly.

I laughed, suddenly taken by the idea. “Because, Mr. Norton, if you don’t know where you are, you probably don’t know who you are. So you came to me out of shame. You are ashamed, now aren’t you?”

“Young man, I’ve lived too long in this world to be ashamed of anything. Are you light-headed from hunger? How do you know my name?”

“But I’m your destiny, I made you. Why shouldn’t I know you?” I said, walking closer and seeing him back against a pillar. He looked around like a cornered animal. He thought I was mad.

“Don’t be afraid, Mr. Norton,” I said. “There’s a guard down the platform there. You’re safe. Take any train; they all go to the Golden D-”

But now an express had rolled up and the old man was disappearing quite spryly inside one of its doors. I stood there laughing hysterically. I laughed all the way back to my hole.
But after I had laughed I was thrown back on my thoughts – how had it all happened? And I asked myself if it were only a joke and I couldn’t answer. Since then I’ve sometimes been overcome with a passion to return into that “heart of darkness” across the Mason-Dixon line, but then I remind myself that the true darkness lies within my own mind, and the idea loses itself in the gloom. Still the passion persists. Sometimes I feel the need to reaffirm all of it, the whole unhappy territory and all the things loved and unlovable in it, for all of it is part of me. Till now, however, this is as far as I’ve ever gotten, for all life seen from the hole of invisibility is absurd.

So why do I write, torturing myself to put it down? Because in spite of myself I’ve learned some things. Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled “file and forget,” and I can neither file nor forget. Nor will certain ideas forget me; they keep filing away at my lethargy, my complacency. Why should I be the one to dream this night- mare? Why should I be dedicated and set aside – yes, if not to at least tell a few people about it? There seems to be no escape. Here I’ve set out to throw my anger into the world’s face, but now that I’ve tried to put it all down the old fascination with playing a role returns, and I’m drawn upward again. So that even before I finish I’ve failed (maybe my anger is too heavy; perhaps, being a talker, I’ve used too many words). But I’ve failed. The very act of trying to put it all down has confused me and negated some of the anger and some of the bitterness. So it is that now I denounce and defend, or feel prepared to defend. I condemn and affirm, say no and say yes, say yes and say no. I denounce because though implicated and partially responsible, I have been hurt to the point of abysmal pain, hurt to the point of invisibility. And I defend because in spite of all I find that I love. In order to get some of it down I have to love. I sell you no phony forgiveness, I’m a desperate man – but too much of your life will be lost, its meaning lost, unless you approach it as much through love as through hate. So I approach it through division. So I denounce and I defend and I hate and I love.

Perhaps that makes me a little bit as human as my grandfather. Once I thought my grandfather incapable of thoughts about humanity, but I was wrong. Why should an old slave use such a phrase as, “This and this or this has made me more human,” as I did in my arena speech? Hell, he never had any doubts about his humanity – that was left to his “free” offspring. He accepted his humanity just as he accepted the principle. It was his, and the principle lives on in all its human and absurd diversity. So now having tried to put it down I have disarmed myself in the process. You won’t believe in my invisibility and you’ll fail to see how any principle that applies to you could apply to me. You’ll fail to see it even though death waits for both of us if you don’t. Nevertheless, the very disarmament has brought me to a decision. The hibernation is over. I must shake off the old skin and come up for breath. There’s a stench in the air, which, from this distance underground, might be the smell either of death or of spring – I hope of spring. But don’t let me trick you, there is a death in the smell of spring and in the smell of thee as in the smell of me. And if nothing more, invisibility has taught my nose to classify the stenches of death.

In going underground, I whipped it all except the mind, the mind. And the mind that has conceived a plan of living must never lose sight of the chaos against which that pattern was conceived. That goes for societies as well as for individuals. Thus, having tried to give pattern to the chaos which live within the pattern of your certainties, I must come out, I must emerge. And there’s still a conflict within me: With Louis Armstrong one half of me says, “Open the window and let the foul air out,” while the other says, “It was good green corn before the harvest.” Of course Louis was kidding, be wouldn’t have thrown old Bad Air out, because it would have broken up the music and the dance, when it was the good music that came from the bell of old Bad Air’s horn that counted. Old Bad Air is still around with his music and his dancing and his diversity, and I’ll be up and around with mine. And, as I said before, a decision has been made. I’m shaking off the old skin and I’ll leave it here in the hole. I’m coming out, no less invisible without it, but coming out nevertheless. And I suppose it’s damn well time. Even hibernations can be overdone, come to think of it. Perhaps that’s my greatest social crime, I’ve overstayed my hibernation, since there’s a possibility that even an invisible man has a socially responsible role to play.

“Ah,” I can hear you say, “so it was all a build-up to bore us with his buggy jiving. He only wanted us to listen to him rave!” But only partially true: Being invisible and without substance, a disembodied voice, as it were, what else could I do? What else but try to tell you what was really happening when your eyes were looking through? And it is this which frightens me:

Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?