To Have Done with the Comforts of Nihilism

We know that all new realities are themselves provisional and always too little for us to suffer. We defend them because we don't know anything better to do; and because, in short, it's our trade.

But, for us, indifference is not permitted in the face of the suffocating values of the present, not when they are guaranteed by a society of prisons and when we live on the doorsteps of prisons.

We don't want to participate at any price, to accept keeping quiet, to accept.

This would only be pride; it displeases us to resemble too many people.

Red wine and negation in the cafes, the first truths of despair will not be the outcome of these lives that are so difficult to defend against the traps of silence, the hundred ways of TAKING SIDES.

Aside from this constantly felt lack, aside from the inevitable and inexcusable loss of all that we have loved, the game still plays itself, we exist. Thus, every form of propaganda will be good.

We have to promote an insurrection that concerns us to the extent of our requirements.

We have to testify to a certain idea of happiness, even if we have known it to fail, the idea to which all revolutionary programs must at first align themselves.

(Published in Internationale Lettriste #3, 6 July 1954. Translated by NOT BORED!)