Public Enemies_ Dueling Writers Take on Each Other and the World - Bernard-Henri Levy [82]
The problem was solved. The pack member was afraid. And it was a banal fear, the most stupid fear of the coward who, as in a bad detective story, doesn’t want to have his skull smashed in and negotiates. In the end, none of the stuff I was afraid of appeared in his masterpiece.
Second, the pack is weak.
Why is it weak?
Because it’s afraid—see above.
But also because it’s driven more than anything else by fear, mockery, resentment, hatred, bitterness, spite, anger, cruelty, derision, scorn, all of which Spinoza called the negative emotions and which, as he definitively established, make you weak, not strong, are a sign of impotence, not power, which diminish the ego and reduce its capacity to act, indeed profoundly debilitate it, making it unworthy and unintelligently aggressive.
There’s nothing moralizing about that. Still less is it wishful thinking. It has nothing to do with a vague and sugary “You can’t build on what’s negative, everything that’s extreme is insignificant, etc.” It’s just physics. The mechanics of the body and its emotions. It’s what we’re beginning to see in France, for example, with the misadventures of Sarkozy. If he’s not succeeding, if he remains fairly low in the opinion polls, if there is something out of joint in his relations with public opinion and those who elected him, it has nothing to do with consumer power, exposure of his private life, his ostentatious interaction with the world of money. It’s because his campaign was based on resentment, putting the bad Frenchman in the pillory, fantasies rehashed from the National Front, stories about insecurity and immigrants. In other words, it’s because he built his campaign on the typical “negative emotions.” And Spinoza says that with the negative emotions you may succeed in the short term but, by definition, in the long term you’ll lose. A despot, the author of Tractatus specifies, shares with the priest the desire to instill in his subjects as much as he can of the negative and therefore servile emotions in order to dominate them more effectively. But he’d better beware of letting himself be contaminated, used, guided by these emotions—he may need them in others but he himself must avoid them like the plague. Otherwise, he’ll commit a fatal error, he’ll be unable to govern, his sovereignty will be ruined and impossible to restore, the pact will be broken … I won’t go on inflicting Spinoza’s demonstrations on you. But if you would like to take a closer look, I have my books again and it’s in Éthique, Book IV, propositions 50 and following. I’ve been reading those pages and have just faxed them to Olivier Zahm, who has started a philosophy column in the magazine Purple. They’re inexorable.
What does this mean specifically for a writer? It means we should aim at what Spinoza called a “selective organization” of our emotions (transition from emotion to action, from passive joy to active joy, from the external cause of this joy to consciousness of its internal cause, common concepts, etc.). I don’t know about you, but I never think of getting revenge. I forget almost immediately the details of the wrongs that have been done to me. It has happened so often in Paris and elsewhere that I meet someone and remember vaguely just as I’m shaking his hand that he wrote something awful about me. But so what? I’ve forgotten. Sometimes my wife is there to remind me. Sometimes she isn’t, but that’s all right … Because I have to tell you something about the relations of strength between those who live in resentment, intoxicated by their bitterness, alienated by their melancholy and their bad blood, and those who, not so much out of virtue as through their makeup, self-discipline, or just because they have something better to do (e.g., a new book to write), manage to escape this merry-go-round of poisonous emotions. It is the second lot who, once again, for reasons of pure emotional mechanics, will triumph over the former. Joy makes them intelligent and strong, whereas spite is a poison and sooner or later poison kills.
I’ll