The Movement of the Free Spirit Raoul Vaneigem General Considerations and Firsthand Testimony Concerning Some Brief Flowerings of Life in the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and, Incidentally, Our Own Time ZONE BOOKS ' NEW YORK UHIB The publisher would like to thank Donald Nicholson-Smith for his assistance in the production of this book. Ian Patterson would like to thank Dr. James Simpson, of Robinson Col­ lege, Cambridge, for his generous help with the translation of Margaret Porete's French. © 1994 Urzone, Inc. ZONE BOOKS 611 Broadway, Suite 60S New York, NY 10012 First Paperback Edition All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, includ­ ing electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise (except for that copying permitted by Sections 107 and lOS of the u.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press) without written permission from the Publisher. Originally published in France as Le Mouvement du libre-esprit © 19S6 Editions Ramsay. Printed in the United States of America. Distributed by The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Vaneigem, Raoul, 1934- [Mouvement du Libre-Esprit. English] The Movement of the Free Spirit: general considerations and firsthand testimony concerning some brief flowerings of life in the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and, incidentally, our own time / Raoul Vaneigem; translated by Randall Cherry and Ian Patterson. p. cm. Tr anslation of: Mouvement du Libre-Esprit. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-942299-71-X I. Brethren of the Free Spirit. 2. Sects, Medieval. I. Title. BT13SS.v3613 1993 ' 27J .6-dc20 92-422]2 CIP CONTENTS Preface to the American Edition 7 Introduction: The Perspective of theMarket and thePe rspective of Life 11 I From theTW ilight of theBu reaucrats to the Dawn of Divine Economics 15 II The Church Struggles to Evolve 59 III The Principal Manifestationsof theMovem ent of theFree Spirit from the Thirteenthto the Sixteenth Century 95 IV Outline for an Alchemy of theSelf 233 Notes 259 Index 297 PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION The decline and fall of totalitarian regimes has pointed up the underlying totalitarianism of ideologies that only yes­ terday were able to buttress their credibility with vocab­ ularies of emancipation. With the crumbling of the old dichotomy between Eastern bureaucratic despotism and We stern democratic bureaucracy, one thing has become perfectly clear: all ideologies are totalitarian. Cut offfr om the very life they are supposed to represent in the spec­ tacle, they invariably take over a repressive power that has been in place fo r thousands of years: the power of heaven over earth, of the spirit over the body, of lucrative labor over creative pleasure. Arising from a philosophy in rebellion against theology's hermeticand pervasive vision of the world, ideologies were assured victory in their relentless undermining of the reli­ gious edifice when the agrarian mode of production gave way to industrial capitalism. The French Revolution ren­ dered obsolete the long-held conviction that God was the arbiter of well-being and misfortune. Paradoxically, however, though they smashed the yoke of the Church and the priests, ideologies preserved the 7 THE MOVEMEN T OF THE FREE SPIRI T essence of religion over everyday existence by exercising control that; as secular as it might claim to be, perpetu­ ated traditional Judeo-Christian fo rms of behavior: guat, self-hatred, fear of pleasure, the hope fo r a future heaven on earth, and, above all, the contempt fo r the body and fo r the earth that gives our upside-down world its intol­ erable reality. The present-day collapse of mass ideologies - of nation­ alism, liberalism, socialism, fascism, communism - en­ courages the increasingly widespread turning away from the political sphere per se. This reaction also reflectsthe confusion of people ill-prepared fo r independence and poorly schooled in the art of deciding their own fate. The inability of the most diverse governmentsto resolve the present economic crisis has produced contradictory and fluctuating tendencies: on the one hand, a regression toward the archaisms of religion; on the other, a new con­ sciousness, that of the individual who banks on the will to live in order to rebuild the environment so horribly abused by traditional rulers. So brutal has the exploitation of nature been that its resources - the very nature of its profitability - are threat­ ened with exhaustion; there is thus no choice but to de­ velop ecological markets in order to get the economy out of its present morass. People have already been aroused, then hoodwinked, by the imperatives of consumption at any cost. There is a good chance that people moved by real desire will easily discern tendernessand creativity among the dividends of this "renaturalization," and that, fo r the sake of their own happiness, they will treat this process as an incitement to transcend the venal co-optation of life. It is not, however, inconceivable that the religious spirit, 8 PRE FA CE weary of Churches but not of itself, may find a niche in ecology; that Gaia may be conscripted to lend a semblance of life to those mortal relics of God that still dictate so many actions governed by fear, submission, dependency and repression alternating with temporary release. It is worth recalling, therefore, that religion has never been anything but the relational mode employed by the State as a replacement fo r the fo rmer osmosis between human and earthly nature. More than any other religious cult Catholicism and its dissenting offshoots have main­ tained their power through constant ecclesiastical control, using the spatial grid of parishes and the calendar's ritual marking off of time to track down indifference or resis­ tance to the inculcation of the faith. By labeling as heresy all views of which it disapproved the Church successfullypassed its orthodoxy off as a unique scale fo r weighing the true meanings of words, beings and things. It nevertheless fe lt inadequate and disarmed in the face of certain attitudes that it deemed "meaningless and demented." With some unease the Inquisition attached the words "free spirit" and "madness" to men and women who renounced all spiritual and temporal authority, seeking no more than to live in accordance with their own desires. As this book attempts to show, the partisans of the Free Spirit were divided on one fu ndamental issue. Driven by their will to fo llow nature, some identified with God and the ordinariness of his tyranny, using fo rce, violence, con­ straint and seduction to secure the right to gratify their whims and passions. Others refused to countenance such a union between a despotic God and a denatured nature, a union whose exploitation fo und perfect expression in the myth of a divinity at once pitiful and pitiless. Instead they 9 THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRIT saw the refinement of their desires and the quest fo r a ubiquitous and sovereign amorous pleasure as a way fo r replacing the spiritualized animal and its labor of adaptation with an authentic human species capable of creating the conditions favorable to its own harmonious development. Historians fo r the most part have ignored or misappre­ hended the struggle waged through the ages against reli­ gion's impregnation of consciousness and behavior. The disappearance of dictatorships calls fo r an end to fu rther tolerance of religion's arrogant attempt to regulate the thoughts and actions of human beings by an infantilizing subjection that is no longer acceptable even in raising chil­ dren. Emerging from beneath the rubble of lies and fraud the present is beginning to re-experience some plain truths of the distant past. The Middle Ages were no more Chris­ tian than the late Easternbloc was communist. The heav­ iest burdens imposed by barbarism have never completely smothered the ever-present yearning fo r true humanity. That the commitment to life which is increasingly evident today should once have dared manifest itself in the sinis­ ter light of the burning stake is a lesson that, I venture to hope, will not be lost in the United States, where the gulf between technological modernity and an archaic agrarian mentality still nourishes the spirit of Calvinism and the morbid teachings of the Bible. Raoul Va neigem March 1993 Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith 10 INTRODUCTION: THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE MARKET AND THE PERSPECTIVE OF LIFE Everything that is said, written and thought today is in­ creasingly irrelevant, and dangerously so, to life. Ye t life, though threatened from all sides, manifests its presence ever more strongly as artifice loses its hold. Over several millennia the pleasure of life was totally disregarded while a seemingly more profitable discourse on survival was being carefully woven; but, in the past decade, almost nothing could be said that did not dem­ onstrate just how threadbare this discourse had become, as its very fabric seemed on the verge of unraveling. After fighting fo r capital in the name of progress, against capital in the name of the proletariat, fo r bureaucracy in the name of revolution, and - without fa il - fo r survival in the name of life, those who remain to keep fighting the good fight into the twentieth century seem to have gained nothing on the traditional battlefieldsexcept a tremendous sense of weariness and resignation. The absurdity of the situation hardly incites us to wear ourselves out in the name of what must surely seem en­ tirely futile. Only inertia still drives a few politicized sheep and power-hungry dogs into the crumbling arenas of the I I THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRIT spectacle.