CASE STUDY OF REFLECTIVE SUBLIMATORY NIHILISM: ROLAND JACCARD

The following are extracts from Roland Jaccard's La Tentation Nihiliste (Presses Universitaires de France, 1989).

[...] And what if the right way was that of true nihilism? What if it was not only about rejecting all transcendence, about negating Satan as well as God? What if it was also, and especially, about the irony, the doubt, the impossibility of accepting one conception of the world, the incessant mobility of interpretations, the intimate and calm persuasion that existence has no meaning and is quite useless and unintelligible, and that for us, transient survivors, to finish here or farther is equally laughable.

[...] When metaphysics is reduced to language games, reason to silence, and philosophy to an impotence proudly proclaimed, we must admit (with Schopenhauer) that "if to preach morality is difficult, to give it an intellectual justification is impossible."…Maybe we will admit, then, that [...] the aspiration to save the world, a morbid practice par excellence, inescapably goes along with the rage to destroy it.. Art tends towards absence--speech thus finally takes leave from itself--and that is why it is the supreme luxury. The rest is not necessary--and that is most probably why we are so aggressively attached to it.

[...] It is a radical philosophy of desisting and deserting: it refuses to produce. It dreams of a planetary euthanasia. But it dreams of it with malice, as if it wanted still to measure the extent of the disaster. And it happens often that, facing this apocalyptic reverie, it explodes in a Homeric laughter: it would be too beautiful, for us ravings bugs, to finish once and for all.

[...] The big secret does not lie in the conspicuous utterance of Lacan: "there are no sexual relations," but in the fact that even someone in agony refuses to acknowledge that there is no sexual pleasure--or very little. And thus the fascination exercised by the eroticism of the other sex. But nobody gets off. In the past, we used to get off, of that we are certain; we will get off in the future, of that we promise ourselves. As for the present, it is pretty sad, and if we embrace our partner with such a violence, it is for want of strangling that partner. The most cynical of psychoanalysts affirms [...] that love consists of giving what we do not have to someone who does not want it.

[...] Groping about, everyone is looking for the illusion of getting off (Jouissance); it is pretty much like happiness: kids attribute it to adults, and adults attribute it to kids. "What is good about the happiness of others is that we believe in it," said Proust. But even when we stop believing in it, we do not give up on the idea that we are loved--be it by God or by one's dog. The majority of the base things we do comes from here:…Contempt, the temptation of vengeance, the will to humiliate induce and reinforce sexual excitement... A vindicative act of cruelty, fetishism, strips our partner of his/her human characteristics.

[...] When our orgasms become spasms of despair, we consent to reducing our pretences and to admitting that a successful marriage is one where both partners learn to become friends...… Initially, we dreamt of sharing everything and of getting rid of our demons and of our wretched solitude, but we found ourselves signing a pact of non-aggression with a stranger--who does not any longer even have the attraction of the stranger.

[...] To want children is to want to avenge oneself of one's past...…And it is for every couple a cure for despair. When life has cheated our expectations, when we have renounced on creating ourselves, when we feel that everything is fucked up, then, rather than checking in the morgue, we invite our family and relatives to a more sinister place--because it is more kitsch: the maternity ward.

[...] Nihilism starts where the will to cheat oneself stops. But without this will, we would not have drunkenness, art or love. So let us go about it "as if" .. and may the party begin!