Stupidity is a right. It also has a history, and a genealogy that includes it, for Nietzsche at least, in the thick of the encounter--not to say the merger--of two cultures, and two fundamental denials: Christianity and the German spirit. It is a symptom of a profound truth which yields, to anyone whose eyes are open, the better to see with, and whose ears are pricked, the better to hear with, the secret of an institution, of a vocabulary which resides in and alters the body, of a music which hymns and celebrates a past sacrificed for a negative and destructive idealization and, in the end of the day, a praxis which is merely the very essence of a theology as it has been invented with and through the history of Christianity. Otherwise put, stupidity as understood and interpreted by a radical form of philology like that practised by Nietzsche, presents and involves the physical and the physiological in their associations with the forms and practices of oblivion, as informed by violence and repression. These forms and practices are the basis of, and legitimize, prejudices which are destructive to the sources of the clash between nature and morality.

To question stupidity and conceive of it as a generalized cultural phenomenon, not to say the purest expression of a certain culture--German culture--springs from a desire or a decision not to separate essence from appearance, and practice from ideal, in order to be able to understand what stupidity has managed to make possible in the field of the history of a culture. Where Nietzsche is concerned. it is above all a matter of wanting to show, reveal and exhibit what files past behind a way of being, behind a way of living perceived as an ultimate and absolute hiatus, or, more accurately, as a failure of the desire to know which caricatures all knowing. This Nietzschean desire is driven, needless to say, by reasons which are not always critical. Otherwise put, it is permeated by his desires and his personal obsessions, by his writerly and philosophical obsessions in German. But the shift between the personal and the cultural, between the philosophical and the individual hallmarks Nietzsche's philosophy and lends it its specific tone and identity. It is thus necessary to visit these dubious places and thus unglimpsed transitions which form the obverse of culture, its surface abyss that is stupidity. It is by discovering the whisperings and suspicions transmitted by stupidity that we draw near to its historical value and its philosophical and epistemological specificity.

Stupidity, for Nietzsche, as we shall see, was first and foremost a whole spectacle, a limited form of externalizing a backdrop or an illusory depth that are invariably missing, invariably absent, and doomed to be forever inaccessible. So stupidity is a sign and symptom of the German spirit, of its history, its ambitions, and also its uncertainties and its ups and downs. Stupidity appears on stage with Wagner and his music, but it is also shown as a result of the bodies of Teutons in motion and in the rhythm of movement of the Teutonic body. Stupidity emerges between the moveable body, the body shifting, and what steers, dictates and endeavours to adjust and slow down everything that is natural in any such movement in favour of a cause deemed to be more decisive and more crucial, or of an innerness imagined and erected as an ideal and a utopia.

The first point of reference featuring stupidity at the heart of a cultural negotiation culminating in production, and the triumph of a social praxis and of methods governing all manner of conduct, be it individual or collective, is Christianity, a primitive and burgeoning Christianity in the face of passions. In this anthropological but conflictual context, and thanks to genealogical analysis, stupidity recurs in the very earliest beginnings (not to say origins) of the genesis of a culture of Christian morality.

All passions have one time when they are not fatal, when, from the whole weight of stupidity, they pull their victim downwards, and another later, much later time when they espouse the spirit, and become "spiritualized". Formerly, because of the stupidity contained within passion, people waged war on passion itself; people swore by its destruction. All moralizing monsters are unanimous: "Passions must be stamped out". The most celebrated formula occurs in the New Testament, in the Sermon on the Mount, where, in parentheses, things are in no way seen from on high. In the sermon, for example, it is said--and this applying to sexuality: "If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out". Luckily enough, no Christian acts in compliance with this precept. Plucking out passions and appetites, solely to prevent their stupidity and the irksome effects of their stupidity... The Church fights passion by cutting it out, in every sense of the term. Its practice and "treatment" is "castration". It never asks: "How can one spiritualize, embellish and deify an appetite?" From time immemorial, in its discipline, it has emphasized eradication, plucking out... But attacking passion at its roots is tantamount to attacking the roots of life: the praxis of the Church is hostile to life...

Between passions and stupidity, between the heaviness of stupidity, in other words its close link with gravity, with what brings the body forever downwards, and lowness, or baseness (whereas Dionysus spurs people to dance and fly), Christianity, according to Nietzsche, elects to make its mark and, in a sense, to pronounce itself with regard to its values and motivations. Christian morality, attracted by, but also a prisoner of, the tension between passion and stupidity, is erected as something celebrating another passion, a unique but alien passion, a passion hailing from another world, which harbingers the other world. This other passion does not put up with any other: it can only exist alone, with no rivals. So the Church, conveyor of this desire versus the baseness of stupidity wages a fierce fight against what it chooses to conceive and represent as the lowest, the basest, the vilest, the most human and, paradoxically, the most human by being the most animal--the stupidity of passions--in the name of this eternity which is bodyless and passionless, and the promise of salvation for the soul, far from the contagions and contaminations borne by stupidity. The Church is presented as the institution of a morality whereby it is possible to avoid the imprint of stupidity. Over and above that simplified outline of an anthropology of stupidity, the important place of Nietzschean analysis lies above all in its identification of specific cultural mechanisms encouraging the adoption and institutionalization of an essential negative social practice, and a practice of negativity itself. Within this fundamental negativity, and this deliberate "castratism", there resides the most blatant illusion, and one that is also the hardest to unveil and fight against: the illusion of privacy and closeness, and its spiritualization in the guise of a unique and favoured innerness. An innerness which, in its very essence shrouds a desire to control and handle both body and physiology, in other words, the place and the site where stupidity and passion(s) meet and are shown up in movement. This means that, in the battle between morality and stupidity, the issue for Nietzsche is a political one, an intervention on the social body and the individual body. So it is in no way surprising to see a right of stupidity emerge within modernity:

The right to stupidity. The tired worker, breathing slowly, with a debonair look in his eye, who lets the world take its course, in a word, that typical character whom we nowadays come upon, in the century of work (and also of the Reich!) in all classes of society, here he is laying claim, for his use, to art, including books, and especially periodicals--and for the best possible reason the beauty of nature, Italy... Western man, with his "dormant wild instincts", of whom Faust speaks, here is in need of vacations, bathing in the sea, glaciers and Bayreuth... In similar periods, art is entitled to "pure silliness", to holidays of intelligence, mind, and heart. This is what Wagner managed to grasp. "Pure silliness" is the best tonic...

The right to stupidity is thus announced as the "right to culture", but to a culture which strives to render stupidity banal and commonplace, to reduce it to a treatment of the exhausted body and the mind subjected to "pure silliness", in other words, victim of a flow and of phoney exchanges between body and culture, between exhaustion caused by work and exhaustion occasioned, in the social body and in the cultural body, by this "silliness" of art. The culture of work, like that of the Reich, promises a transformation and offers what appears to be a leisure or a relaxation vis-…-vis the demands and restrictions of the use of time introduced by work. Nietzsche translated this aspect of modernity and its economy into an allegory of decadent aesthetics, whose most salient advocate is still Wagner. In all the writings dealing with stupidity and Wagner, Nietzsche is still the spokesman for the aristocratic spirit, for an aristocratic philosophy and culture which are to a great extent determined and defined in their opposition to Christian morality and its populism, as well as to the German spirit and its recourse to the people. In this context we always find a series of keywords which convey the most available device for the expression of culture, morality and stupidity: the Reich, the German spirit, the Teutonic nature of German culture, Wagner's music, all point to what surged forth, for Nietzsche, as a result of stupidity. All of a sudden, Nietzsche's writings which discuss the factors making up the ultimate figure of modern decadence--the Reich and the German spirit--bring together in one and the same envelope the morality of obedience and German philosophy, as if haunted by this obedience, blind passion, the slowness and heaviness of the body and the mind, and, lastly, alcohol as the most dangerous of drugs.

Yet this textual arrangement is only understandable if it is confronted by what corresponds to it in the Nietzschean corpus. It only works as an involvement in what opposes it by putting forward an affirmative and natural "immorality", and by trying to produce a discourse on philosophy and psychology beyond the boundaries and constraints imposed by Christianity.

In the narrowest arena of what we call moral values, there is no greater contrast than that between a morality of the Masters and the morality of Christian values. This latter, which thrusts its way on to a thoroughly ailing terrain (the Gospels show us precisely the same physiological types as those described in Dostoyevsky's novels). The mortality of the Masters--the Seigneurs-- (or "Roman, "pagan", "classical", "Renaissance" morality) is quite the opposite of the symbolic language of physical life, of ascending life, of the "will to power" as a life principle. The morality of the Masters says yes just as instinctually as Christian morality says no ("God", "the hereafter", "sacrifice", are all denials).

Affirmative morality is a symbolic language of physical success: everything is played out around links between physiology as an occasion for metaphors and symbolic language, and the cultural and philosophical consequences of this choice. The Nietzschean discourse on stupidity goes right to the core of his philosophy, his language, and his reading and writing activities, because stupidity calls for a reappraisal of the symbolic languages of morality, religion and philosophy. His thoughts about Germanic modernity, in particular his involvement with and his detachment from Wagner and everything he represented, both for Nietzsche and for Germans of the day, conveyed a profound realization--a discovery akin to revelation: the identification and dissection of the social and cultural logic of resentment as an explanatory diagram in the fields of politics, religion, art and philosophy. Faced with resentment, faced with what informs thoroughly negative and anti-nature morality, Nietzsche rediscovered recognition and gratitude, two of the main forces of Dionysian thought. Against negativity and resentment Nietzsche proposed Dionysian affirmation which recognizes yes and no, and which accepts the division and rending of modern man:

Biologically speaking, modern man embodies a contradiction of values. He is between two stools; he says yes and no in one and the same breath. Should we be surprised that it is precisely in our day and age that Falsehood has become flesh, and even... genius? Should we be surprised that Wagner "lived among us"? It is not without good reason that I have called Wagner "the Cagliostro of modernity"... But we both have in our veins, unwittingly and despite ourselves, vague desires, values, a vocabulary, forms and formulae, diverse and adverse standards and original morals--we are, physiologically speaking, false... For the philosopher, the case of Wagner is more than a case in point, it is a veritable godsend!--These pages, you will have realized, are dictated by acknowledgement.

The Case of Wagner is already, in its final words, Nietzsche versus Wagner: the opposition between the two lays bare the conflict between two legacies at odds with each other. It enables the philosopher to demonstrate the struggle between two morals and two moralities, between two vocabularies and the values that drive them. In this context, stupidity is, so to speak, between the two stools which share modern man. In other words, it touches the precise place of that which joins together and separates the antipodes. Nietzsche, the philosopher, here suggests an alternative to Wagner and, in order to grasp it, we must identify and describe certain figures of stupidity in modernity. Because, according to Nietzsche, Wagner's art and music call for a virtue, and virtue is "in some cases only a respectable form of stupidity", we must start by the case of Wagner himself. Wagner's art reveals, for all to see, that which has triumphed in German culture:

Neither taste, nor voice, nor talent: the Wagnerian scene needs just one thing: Teutons!... Definition of Teuton: obedience, sound legs... It is deeply significant that Wagner's advent coincided with that of the "Reich": these two facts are evidence of precisely the same thing: obedience and sound legs. Never have people obeyed so well, never have they been so well commanded.

Wagner thus personifies the aesthetics of resentment, that aesthetics that is "in fact just an applied physiology". His art, according to Nietzsche, only existed for the German, only for what is purely Teutonic in German culture. The Teutonic character of this culture reveals, beneath Nietzsche's exacting eye, the sources and forms of a subjugation, a codification of culture against life and nature. In the first instance, the Teutonic dimension of the German spirit thus reproduces the popular character of this culture, like Wagner's art and any art of resentment. It suffers from the absence of the influence of everything that belongs to the domain of the morality of the Masters, of everything that is aristocratic. Nietzsche in fact would go so far as to lament the absence of this influence on German history. This absence, oddly enough, is identified and intensified by the most ambiguous figure in German history: Frederick II of Hohenstaufen:

The German nobility is more or less totally absent from the history of the higher culture: the case is easy to guess at... Christianity, alcohol--the two great means of corruption. Per se, one should not even have to choose between Islam and Christianity, any more than between an Arab and a Jew. The reply is given in advance: here, none can freely choose. Either one is a tchandala, or one is not. "All out war with Rome! Peace and friendship with Islam". This is what that great and powerful spirit, the sole genius among all the German emperors, Frederick II, felt and did.

Christianity and alcohol: two means of corruption, two phenomena which, for Nietzsche in any event, are reduced to their effects on the body. Christianity denies the body any role in life in favour of the mind and the hereafter, and in the name of a moral determination to overcome the dangerous effects of stupidity, whereas alcohol slows down and encumbers the body and this distorts its movement. For Nietzsche, the Teutonic culture condenses the two anti-Dionysiac ingredients of German culture: denial of the body in the name of a morality and a religion, and stoppage of the body's natural movements. This cultural division described by Nietzsche between Christianity and the Teutonic offers us a mirror image of what, in his On the Genealogy of Morals, describes the complex interplay between culture and body, and which, historically speaking, culminates in the triumph of Christian morality and its theology:

I do not see how one can include within consideration anything that has had such a destructive effect on the health and robustness of races, in particular among the Europeans, except this [ascetic] ideal; without exaggerating, we may call it the real catastrophe of the history of the health of European man. At best, we might compare its influence to the specifically Germanic influence: I mean the poisoning of Europe by alcohol which, hitherto, has gone hand in hand with the political and racial hegemony of the Germans...

If, over and above a simple equation between asceticism as the essence of the spirit of Christianity and the Germanic, Nietzsche would forever be repeating his criticism of all that is German, this was because, basically, the German spirit embraces, in its culture, in its physiology and in its philosophy, the destructive effects of what, for want of anything better, we might call the movement of obedience as a principle of individuation. In this framework, the Teutonic expresses the deformed physiology of the German mind under the twofold influence of alcohol and Christianity. Wagner acts as a representative of the culmination of German culture in its decadence. In philosophy, however, it was Kant himself who would be named by Nietzsche as the actualization of the spirit of obedience that is typical of the German spirit. Kant would have the advantage of representing two tendencies that have always informed the German spirit, two tendencies combining religion and philosophy. In this sense, Kant, for Nietzsche, is the philosophical heir to Luther and the spirit of the Reformation:

For in the face of nature and history, in the face of the fundamental immorality of nature and history, Kant was a pessimist, as any good German always was; he believed in morality, not because it is proven by nature and history, but despite the fact that it is constantly contradicted by nature and history. In order to understand this "despite", we might perhaps recall something similar in Luther, that other great pessimist...

In Kant's pessimism, Nietzsche saw the survival of a set of morals, a morality which, as we shall see, retrieves and constructs obedience as a guarantee of all morality. Nietzsche questioned the validity and legitimacy of the problem of evil, as it had been perceived in the philosophical tradition, and in particular by Kantian ethics. In the viewpoint developed by Nietzsche, Kant displayed a dual membership, a double genealogy. On the one hand, he was the culmination of his century and, as a result, he bore the ill-fated influences of Rousseau's thinking and his investment of what Nietzsche called "the thinking of moral fantasy", and, on the other hand, Kant remained, despite himself and despite Rousseau, a German thinker, a pessimist, and, above all, an heir to Luther. The importance of Kant resides in the fact that he managed to translate the dual theological and philosophical system into an ethic that was based on the need to obey and which, i the final analysis, identified the progress of the human mind and spirit with the effects of the internalization of this principle:

Personal distinction,--this is the ancient virtue. Submission, following, either publicly or in secret,-- this is the German virtue. Long before Kant and his categorical imperative, Luther had said, based on the same sentiment, that there must be a being in whom man could put his absolute trust,-- this was his proof of the existence of God, in a coarser and more plebeian way than Kant, he wanted people to obey absolutely, not a concept, but a person, and, in the end, Kant himself only effected his detour by way of morals in order to come to obedience towards a person: this is precisely the cult of the German...

In the end of the day, Kant merely translated the moral requirement of the German spirit into philosophy. In so doing, he betrayed the individualistic spirit of antiquity and subjected the freedom of the individual and society to the demands of a person, or of the figure of a person who, for Nietzsche, is simply the Deus absconditus. This Kantian detour actually enables us to grasp what one might call the primitive stage of stupidity or, better put, the original stage of western stupidity. It will come as no surprise that this stage, in the logic of Nietzschean genealogy, could only come about within a religious and theological framework. Nietzsche would represent these origins in an account, in a narrative, but with a radical switch of perspective and viewpoint:

--Have we really understood the famous tale that occurs at the beginning of the Bible--the tale of God's "infernal" fear of knowledge?...

The ancient God, all "spirit", all high priest, and all perfection, strolls in his garden; but he is bored. To counter boredom, even gods are defenceless. So what does he do? He invents man--man is entertaining... But do we not then have a situation where man, too, is bored? God was relying unreservedly on this affliction, the only one that affects every manner of Paradise; so he swiftly created animals. God's first blunder: man did not find animals entertaining--he reigned over them and did not even want to be one "animal" among others.--As a result, God created woman. And in actual fact this creation issued from boredom--but from something quite else too! Woman was God's second blunder... Man himself had turned into his most serious blunder, he had created a rival for himself, for knowledge created God's equal--it consists of priests and gods, if man will give himself over to knowledge!

The Nietzschean version of Paradise on earth clashes radically with Kant's in his Conjectures on the Origins of Human History, and introduces a series of themes and terms which recur everywhere in Nietzsche's oeuvre: boredom, knowledge, entertainment, etc. Whereas Kant, in his analysis, chose to separate the Creator's first couple, thus stressing the break between the divine and the human, and highlighting the autonomy of human action. Nietzsche tells the tale of the Bible from God's viewpoint, but a God who fails in his attempt to create a source of entertainment for himself. This initial reversal turned Paradise on earth into God's Hell. God's hell presents, as described by Nietzsche's pen, a series of failures, a sequence of flopped creations, invariably driven by boredom, and culminating in the rivalry between man and his Maker. God's hell is the first and possibly the most important effect of divine stupidity, of the stupidity that lies at the root of Christian morals.

The human community, symbolized by the first couple, defines for Nietzsche the fight with God, whereas for Kant this community progressed slowly but surely in its independent way, towards the exercise of its faculties and its Aufkl„rung. This narrative structure of the account, as adopted by Nietzsche, is significant because it rejects, in its movements, the major theses and hypotheses of Christianity invented by Paul: original sin, disobedience, the status of free will etc. Instead of this set of issues, typical of theology, Nietzsche's analysis, which is above all narrative, psychological and biographical, focuses on a dialectic of creation and creativity, on what informs creation and the role played by error, blunder and stupidity in creation. This dialectic plays on the to-and-fro between boredom and entertainment, between boredom and idleness. But the entertainment and idleness in question here are no longer those of modern man, those of mankind subjected to the culture of work, seeking his leisure in a different use of time. Quite to the contrary, the entertainment and idleness introduced by Nietzsche identify the actual telos of Dionysian philosophy and the morality of antiquity. Against God's blunder and Teutonic stupidity, Nietzsche uses another tale of Christianity to offer an alternative, a physiology and a morality. Idleness [M�ssiggang] here conveys ancient otium, which is the ideal in Nietzsche's sights, and which would act as the reason for the writing and above all the re-writing--synonyms of the philosophy of the future--the philosophy of Dionysos.

M�ssiggang explains the effects of the action of the God of Genesis, its transformation, and its fall:

Theologically speaking--and please lend an ear, for a rarely talk as a theologian--it is God in person who, his task fulfilled, took on the appearance of a serpent, beneath the tree of knowledge: he was resting [erholte] from being God.. He had made everything too beautiful... The Devil is never anything other than the idleness of God--on the seventh day of the week. [Der Teufel ist bloss der M�ssiggang Gottes an jenem siebentem Tage].

Here, once more, the tale of Genesis is interpreted from the viewpoint of the Creator's motivation, a perspective that reveals the flaws of creation. The first creation produced a (trans)fixed object, one might even say an Apollonian statue. To enliven and give life to this statue, the God of the Bible turns himself into his other, his alter, his negation, and henceforth the world is nothing more than his playground, his entertainment. If the Devil is God's idleness, this is because the world created is his hell, his inferno. This is the major effect of the creator's blunder, now turned into stupidity. God goes astray in his very first creation because he has not managed to or been able to put up with boredom and idleness. Conversely, the Dionysian philosopher whom Nietzsche would also call the poet of the seventh day, will seek out this boredom. The God of the Bible, a little like Pascalian man, experiences a lack which pushes him to entertainment and to his loss in appearing. The devil, the figure of the driving force of the world through the fall of God after his first creation, the other of God, is also his double and his destiny in the logic of a creation which, for Nietzsche, refers to an involuntary suicide: the God of Genesis, well before Paul and Christianity, takes his own life before the spectacle of his own creation. Thus, in the genealogical order of things, stupidity is first of all a matter for God and, in the second instance, it typifies his personality and his destiny, and, all of a sudden, it informs the development of Christian theology and morals.

Faced with the stupidity and blunder of God, Nietzsche posits otium, the idleness of the Dionysian poet who, for his part, makes full use of his boredom. Given the importance of otium for an interpretation of Nietzsche and his commentaries on stupidity and its Teutonic contexts, it becomes possible to better grasp some of Nietzsche's writings which deal with idleness and leisure, and above all to better understand and appraise the way he expressed the links between reading and writing, between writing and re-writing. Nietzsche's autobiography earmarks a special place for this configuration, because it has a structure consisting of two main parts: the first, devoted in large part to the explanation, for the history of the life of the philosopher Dionysos, of the role of diverse forms of entertainment and idleness:

The choice of diet, the choice of climate and place:-- the third point where one must not at any price be mistaken is the choice of one's forms of idleness... <Here, a close examination of consciousness is called for>. You will ask me why, precisely, I have recounted all these lesser and, according to current opinion, insignificant things: I thus do myself a disservice, and even more so if I am destined to undertake great tasks. Reply: these lesser things--food, place, climate, idleness, the whole casuistry of egoism--are infinitely more important than everything that has hitherto been regarded as important.

The second part, within the context of an autobiography, conveys the effects of re-reading, in so much as each chapter of the book is devoted to one of Nietzsche's books. The philosopher of physiology reinforces the transition of the body to the corpus, and mirrors the different movements of the body, like walking, dancing and flying, with the different styles typifying the components of the corpus. Within the very innermost part of the Nietzschean corpus, we find the recovery and reversal of the idleness of the God of Genesis:

If we think that this book [Beyond Good and Evil] comes after Thus Spoke Zarathustra, we may perhaps guess by what diet it must have been devised... We will notice in it all, and above all in the form, one and the same deliberate intention to turn away from the instincts, which have rendered a Zarathustra. First comes refinement, refinement of form, intent, and the art of staying silent,--psychology is handled with an avowed hardness and cruelty,--we find not a single indulgent word in the book.. All this relaxes and comforts: who, to sum up, would ever suspect what sort of idleness is necessary, to recover, after this real squandering of goodness represented by Thus Spoke Zarathustra?

Beyond Good and Evil, the book of the philosophy of the future, is the product called for, especially in its form, by the physiological effect of the writing of Zarathustra: it relaxes Nietzsche, the way the devil relaxes the Creator on the seventh day of the week. The return to otium signifies the abandonment of Christianity in favour of an affirmative culture, a culture of the body as the place where what is lived is experienced, a return to ancient virtue. The second part of Ecce Homo is thus presented as a realization of the ideal of otium, because of the reading of self. The autobiography of the Dionysian philologist recounts his adventures with writings and words. The Dionysian mirror here is the corpus, the fragments of writing and writing picked up throughout a lifetime.

Nietzsche's final project, his Reversal of Values is marked by the triumph of the rediscovery of the otium of antiquity. Recounting his last journey to Sils-Maria in Turin, Nietzsche describes the completion of this work as his very last project:

I did not leave Sils-Maria until the 20th of September, held back as I was by the floods; in the end, I had for a long time been the last visitor to this wonderful place, to which my gratitude will give an undying gift. After a journey full of mishaps, and even after having narrowly escaped death in flooded Como... I arrived in the afternoon of the 21st of September in Turin, my proven favourite place to stay in, and my residence ever since. The 30th of September saw a great victory: I finished the Reversal of Values; seventh day, idleness of an indolent god, along the Po. On that same day, I re-wrote the introduction of the Twilight of the Idols, the proofs of which, for correction, had been my relaxation in September.

This text, long absent from the autobiography because it was cut by Nietzsche's sister, renders idleness its full value in the Nietzschean corpus. It is as if philosopher identifies himself, by writing, with Dionysos revived. Nietzsche in Turin is the Dionysos of the seventh day of the week. This return of Dionysos actually hallmarks the autobiography, celebrating his contrast with Christ. The last words of the text recall the re-writing of the account of the creation of Genesis: "Have they understood me? Dionysos versus the Crucified one." Two gods, two resurrections, two forms of idleness.

Stupidity, an activity linked with baseness and animalness by Christian morals, becomes, in the Nietzschean circuit of concepts, the occasion for a production of a knowledge inside-out, a self-knowledge versus the accepted ideas and the concerns of a culture dedicated to the cult of obedience. In the face of stupidity, Nietzsche proposes idleness and ancient and aristocratic otium. Under his pen, the story of God, creator of the world and man, is turned into the story of a blunder that has become stupidity that has, in turn, become morality and ethic. In this context, his discourse, rooted in a radical individualism and strongly opposed to what he identifies as the Germanic element in German culture, reveals the paths open to those who know how to question, by way of the basic narratives, what, through stupidity, belongs to the gods and what belongs to man.

Milad Doueihi

Society for the Humanities

Cornell University, USA

Translated by Simon Pleasance & Fronza Woods

From sadness to anger

Didier Malgor

Age: ours/ Rail against/ Lament that it isn't poetic/ Call it a "period of transition--of decadence!"

The debate on the crisis of art and the worthlessness of contemporary art that has been simmering for some years now certainly encompasses the idea behind this conference. People have talked about the alleged decadence of art, its lack of meaning, the loss of illusion, and the impossibility for art to represent. It has been said that all art did was exhibit, exhibit itself, and push empty signs around. It has also been said that art was no longer capable of questioning itself, that its meaning was about to emerge, etc. I use the "people have..." and "it has been said that..." formats on the one hand because all this is already part of rumour and, on the other, because this meeting has not been planned as a defence or reply, but as a question. We must also be included in the rumour.

And I wholeheartedly thank those taking part for having taken the risk of coming to speak about "the stupidity of art" without uttering curses, without thinking in terms of a manifesto for or against stupidity, and for having agreed to reflect about the way we-and they--deal with stupidity. So the idea behind these discussions does not, at least, involve pointing to the stupidity of others, inthe certainty that "seeing the stupidity of others" never freed Bouvard and P‚cuchet from theirs. Seeing stupidity is not the same as avoiding it. The term "stupidity" calls for a definition. In the critical discourse we actually hear terms which, in an initial phase, appear to be equivalent. We read "idiocy", "stupidity", and "foolishness" in Cl‚ment Rosset. "Nonsense" and "stupidity" in Gilles Deleuze. "Worthlessness", "nothingness" and "meaninglessness" in Jean Baudrillard. "Imbecility", worthlessness" and "nothing" in Maurice Blanchot. The same approximate terms can also be read elsewhere, in Michel Adam, Nietzsche, Robert Musil, Jean-Luc Nancy, etc.

Give the degree of indeterminacy, it seems important to further specify what I am referring to when I talk of stupidity, even if knowing, nowadays, that I am stupid, rather than idiotic, rather than foolish or imbecilic, brings me a very relative satisfaction.

It would thus seem that the terms "stupidity", "foolishness", "idiocy" and "imbecility" appear to belong in the same arena. There is a sort of common vacuousness, a boundary of meaning. A stupid or idiotic thing is not reflexive. There is something that makes no reference, that refers only to itself.

Dictionaries of the 17th and 18th centuries, and the Encyclopaedia, are all quite quiet when it comes to the concept of "stupidity". In the dictionaries of FuretiŠre and Richelet, we can read: "Stupidity: state of being stupid, foolish". In the 19th century Larousse, "stupidity", "foolishness", "idiocy" "imbecility" and "na‹vety" all seem equivalent. The indeterminacy thus has to do with stupidity. If I try to get away from notions and define and reference these terms, I realize that I can say "an imbecile", "an idiot", "a fool" and then there is the French term "une bˆte" meaning, literally "beast" or "animal", hence "stupid (nitwit)". But the expression "une bˆte" refers more to bestiality and to stupidity, from which animals, and their specific nature, are actually protected. "Bˆte" or "stupid works as an attribute and adjective, in other words as a term that needs a noun to work as a reference.

Because the adjective does not have any definition, strictly speaking, stupidity thus has to do with the undefined, the absence of outlines. It is a kind of limitless place, bounded by its own existence. A limitless place for which metaphors like "mud", "cesspit", "bottom" and "ocean" are evidence. A solid that is enclosed by nothing. It is not possible either to define or gauge a "substance" which excludes all connection, because a gauge is always a relationship between at least two things, and stupidity only has a relationship with itself.

But a case does exist where "bˆte"/"stupid" is substantive, and where the presence of the adjective removes the term from its link with bestiality by giving it an indulgent connotation. In this case what is involved is a term such as "grosse bˆte" or "brave bˆte"--"big fool" or "affable fool". Indulgence and sympathy for major stupidity, blunders and bloomers, the mistake that needs putting right and correcting. But the stupidity that Flaubert talks about is not error, it is not the flipside of truth. When I fail to recognize something, I am nevertheless in a line of thought to do with recognition, where it is a matter of identifying what is repeated. When I make a mistake, I have misunderstood, failed to appreciate, misjudged, but the form of the error is that of truth. Needless to say, I think therefore I am, and when I get things wrong, I still am.

Error is not stupidity which is the B-side of nothing. Just as evil does not need good to exist, so stupidity has no need of truth, either.

In Flaubert, stupidity gives rise neither to indulgence for what might be an error, nor to outwardness or ironic distance. Pain and anger in Flaubert, as opposed to stupidity, are associated to the awareness that this stupidity might have to do with otherness, with what we are made of. Stupidity is not external to us, and has nothing to do with idiocy, with strangeness and the exception which merely, needless to say, proves the rule.

We are acquainted with the adventures and mishaps of Bouvard and P‚cuchet, those two imitators who become involved at once in an encyclopaedic grasp of the knowledge of the time, a summary of the knowledge of the day and a repetition of the experiences about which they have read descriptions and conclusions in the 1200 books they have read, 1200 books read, annotated and also quoted by Flaubert (because the copy of Bouvard and P‚cuchet is Flaubert's copy). We all know what happens next: the results do not comply with theories, the contradiction cannot be bypassed, this staking out of a body of knowledge brings on a sense of failure, then the examination of another form of knowledge, then a new sense of failure. The two imitators would thus study gardening, farming, tree-growing, chemistry, anatomy, physiology, medicine, dietetics, hygiene, cosmology, geology, archaeology, mythology, history, literature, politics, economics, gymnastics, magnetism, hypnosis, philosophy, religion, and education.

Areas of knowledge and experiences are juxtaposed, they pull apart a total entity that was presupposed by the encyclopaedia and led the two heroes to start copying. They buy old paper by weight in a paper factory and they start copying. Let me remind you of the end planned by Flaubert: "Conclusion. "What are we going to do?"-- Don't think about it! Let's copy! The page must be filled, "the monument" must be finished--Equality of everything, good and evil, Beauty and ugliness, the meaningless and the typical. The only true things are phenomena."

It goes without saying that the stupidity of the two heroes lies in their stubborn imitation, in the way they are incapable of discriminating and classifying. The stupidity here resides in their clumsiness, in their inability to go beyond a contradiction. Often, two texts in the same group that they have copied separately will clash with one another, they copy them out again from one end to the other in the same way".) The stupidity here also lies in their inability to learn lessons from their series of failures. This much is all obvious. Needless to say, our two fellows may also come across like thoroughly human men, "mediocre and sublime, devoted to endeavour and failure" (Blanchot). Because they are thoroughly human, and not simply and permanently imbeciles, they acquire, at a given moment, a real lucidity, and a real competence.

"So a pitiful faculty developed in their mind, that of seeing stupidity and no longer being able to put up with it. Meaningless things made them sad."

This lucidity gives rise, on their part, to no irony or silence, but rather a modernity initiated by Baudelaire, Flaubert and Mallarm‚, and dedicated to the re-examination of the end of a story come full circle, and in a world that has survived its accomplishment (here, I am not talking about nostalgia on the part of those talking about origins and hence of lost legitimacy. Let me quote Blanchot: "There is no original any more, but an everlasting sparkle where the absence of origin is dispersed, in the burst of detour and return."). What sadness is Flaubert talking about? That of an art aware of the emergence of chance and hence the absence of history and doomed thereby to repetition. But sadness more surely that stems from a perception of stupidity and the certainty that it is no longer outside of us: (I quote Deleuze): "Perhaps it is the origin of melancholy that weighs on the most beautiful figures of man: the hunch of a hideousness peculiar to the human face, of a rise of stupidity, of a deformation into evil, of a reflection in madness."

Sadness and stupidity thus seem to be connected. Stupidity dispossessed Flaubert of his being and stirred up a huge rage within him. Stupidity is (and I quote Flaubert) "that indefinable something [which] separates you from your own persona and attaches you to non-being".

When this "indefinable something" is included, one leaves ones being, one is outside of oneself. One abandons being and finds oneself "attached"--is this what Flaubert is saying? What Flaubert experimented with was the attraction of stupidity. Stupidity that clings and sticks. Nietzsche spoke, on this same topic, of "gravity" and "heaviness". There is also talk of "cesspit, mud, ocean" in Flaubert and Renan. "It is hard to describe these depths and the terror and lure that it arouses at the same time. Stirring up these depths is the most dangerous of occupations, but also the most tempting in moments of stupor of a dull desire", Deleuze tells us.

With regard to this range and this attraction, let me quote from Flaubert's correspondence:

"We suffer from but one thing: stupidity. But it is formidable and universal". (1885).

In 1852, when he was busy writing Madame Bovary, he wrote about this imminent book: "In it I shall attack everything... I shall sacrifice great men to all the imbeciles, martyrs to all the executioners, it will the apology of lowdown human trickery in all its guises, ironic and howling" [...] "I don't want to die before I've tipped a few pots of shit over the heads of my peers." [...] "My spirits are quite good, because I am thinking about a book where I shall let out my anger... I shall vomit on my contemporaries all the disgust they make me feel." [...] "Bouvard and P‚cuchet fill me to such a degree that I have become them! Their stupidity is mine, and I'm bursting with it".

Bouvard et P‚cuchet (the book), as we know it (however, 350 pages were to make up the preface to the Dictionnaire des id‚es re‡ues, on which Flaubert had been at work since the 1840s). The scenarios and drafts shed some light on this absent book. It was to have been a listing of stereotypes and clich‚s -- a collection of howlers. This book, which was intended to "flabbergast the reader" and "make him mad" (I quote Flaubert), and also make him say nothing for fear of saying something that might be in the book, is a purely alphabetically arranged classification, with no hierarchy, which does not form a system, or world, but rather an endless declension, a juxtaposition of snippets of speech.

In the stereotype, the subject is not grounded, it is placeless, its utterance has no origin, we are in something impersonal--one. And the interlocutor is also caught up in this "It is said..." He is not individualized, he is not a subject conceived in its differences and distinctive features. He is in a place where everybody knows that... and so nobody can deny that... A place where, unfortunately, people live in an over intelligent way with sameness.

This does not involve a word whose subject has become absent but whose presence is included in the negative--a subject that can still be read, and read above all as absence.

It is not a matter of being spoken by the other, but of no longer appearing as subject, of not being able to think any longer. It is not a matter of absence but of something over-full that hampers thought and word. "I don't expect anything any more of life except a sequence of sheets of paper to daub with black."

In this moment of modernity, Flaubert is not the person who might have achieved obliteration, and the quest for the place of the other, where nobody talks any more, where the person called person speaks, where the writer vanishes in the "infinity of clamour", in the infinity of signifiers.

I am not talking about failure. I mean that, to bring on "the absolute of form" which Flaubert mentions in his correspondence, to attain the "idea", to disappear as "I" in favour of some absolute idea, detached from everything, "a book about nothing" and without" any external attachments", work merely brings on the contingency of an ensnared, smeared subject, which cannot think, articulate or dispose, and which can only forever copy, erase and daub.

To free himself from the "I infatuated", Flaubert feels it without any serenity, in a state of deep sadness and anger. It no longer involves self-effacement, but dying. The artistic question is still: who's talking? and what are we up against?

Flaubert's sadness and anger are profound because the other whom he meets, who speaks it is not the endless hubbub of language, the ceaseless murmuring echoed by the author, but stupidity. And Flaubert elected to convey and embody stupidity. Unlike Ulysses, he agrees to listen to that "sirens' song".

"It is that which, in things, forms the inconceivable basis of their reality, the permanent remnant, which will never disappear, which is impossible, despite all endeavours to grasp the real through the intelligence, and which remains eternally at the bottom. It is from this absence of intelligence that, strictly speaking, intelligence has arisen [...]. To encourage man to aspire with all his might to the light, we do not however know of any more powerful stimulant that an awareness of the deep night from which existence came forth."

Translated from the French by Simon Pleasance & Fronza Woods

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