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 Trans I ate d by Rand a II Cherry and Ian Patterson ZONE BOOKS • NEW YORK 1998 The publisher would like to thank Donald Nicholson-Smith CoNTENTS 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 6u Broadway, Suite 6oS New York, NY 10012 First Paperback Edition All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval Preface to the American Edition 7 system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, includ­ ing electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, Introduction: The Perspective of the Market and recording or otherwise (except for that copying permitted the Perspective of Life 11 by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press) without written I From the Twilieht of the Bureaucrats to the permission from the Publisher. Dawn of Divine Economics 15 Originally published in France as Le Mouvement du libre-esprit II The Church Strunnles to Evolve 59 © 1986 Editions Ramsay. III The Principal Manifestations of the Movement Printed in the United States of America. of the Free Spirit from the Thirteenth to the Distributed by The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England Sixteenth Century 95 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data IV Outline for an Alchemy of the Self 233 Vaneigem, Raoul, 1934- Notes 259 [Mouvement du Libre-Esprit. English] Index 297 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. em. Translation of: Mouvement du Libre-Esprit. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-942299-71-X 1. Brethren of the Free Spirit. 2. Sects, Medieval. 1. Title. BT1358.V3613 1993 273'.6-dc2o 92-..p232 CIP 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 Western democratic bureaucracy, one thing has become perfectly clear: all ideologies are totalitarian. Cut off from the very life they are supposed to represent in the spec­ tacle, they invariably take over a repressive power that has been in place for 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 hermetic and 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 PREFACE THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRIT essence of religion over everyday existence by exercising weary of Churches but not of itself, may find a niche in control that; as secular as it might claim to be, perpetu­ ecology; that Gaia may be conscripted to lend a semblance ated traditional Judeo-Christian forms of behavior: guHt, of life to those mortal relics of God that still dictate so self-hatred, fear of pleasure, the hope for a future heaven many actions governed by fear, submission, dependency on earth, and, above all, the contempt for the body and and repression alternating with temporary release. for the earth that gives our upside-down world its intol­ It is worth recalling, therefore, that religion has never erable reality. been anything but the relational mode employed by the The present-day collapse of mass ideologies - of nation­ State as a replac,ement for the former osmosis between alism, liberalism, socialism, fascism, communism - en­ human and earthly nature. More than any other religious courages the increasingly widespread turning away from cult Catholicism and its dissenting offshoots have main­ the political sphere per se. This reaction also reflects the tained their power through constant ecclesiastical control, confusion of people ill-prepared for independence and using the spatial grid of parishes and the calendar's ritual poorly schooled in the art of deciding their own fate. marking off of time to track down indifference or resis­ The inability of the most diverse governments to resolve tance to the inculcation of the faith. the present economic crisis has produced contradictory By labeling as heresy all views of which it disapproved and fluctuating tendencies: on the one hand, a regression the Church successfully passed its orthodoxy off as a unique toward the archaisms of religion; on the other, a new con­ scale for weighing the true meanings of words, beings and sciousness, that of the individual who banks on the will things. It nevertheless felt inadequate and disarmed in the to live in order to rebuild the environment so horribly face of certain attitudes that it deemed "meaningless and abused by traditional rulers. demented." With some unease the Inquisition attached the So brutal has the exploitation of nature been that its words "free spirit" and "madness" to men and women who resources- the very nature of its profitability- are threat­ renounced all spiritual and temporal authority, seeking no ened with exhaustion; there is thus no choice but to de­ more than to live in accordance with their own desires. velop ecological markets in order to get the economy out As this book attempts to show, the partisans of the Free of its present morass. People have already been aroused, Spirit were divided on one fundamental issue. Driven by then hoodwinked, by the imperatives of consumption at their will to follow nature, some identified with God and any cost. There is a good chance that people moved by real the ordinariness of his tyranny, using force, violence, con­ desire will easily discern tenderness and creativity among straint and seduction to secure the right to gratify their the dividends of this "renaturalization," and that, for the whims and passions. Others refused to countenance such sake of their own happiness, they will treat this process a union between a despotic God and a denatured nature, as an incitement to transcend the venal co-optation of life. a union whose exploitation found perfect expression in the It is not, however, inconceivable that the religious spirit, myth of a divinity at once pitiful and pitiless. Instead they 8 9 THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRIT saw the refinement of their desires and the quest for a ubiquitous and sovereign amorous pleasure as a way for replacing the spiritualized animal and its labor of adaptation INTRODUCTION: with an authentic human species capable of creating the conditions favorable to its own harmonious development. THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE MARKET Historians for the most part have ignored or misappre­ hended the struggle waged through the ages against reli­ AND THE PERSPECTIVE OF LIFE gion's impregnation of consciousness and behavior. The disappearance of dictatorships calls for an end to further 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 Everything that is said, written and thought today is in­ dren. Emerging from beneath the rubble of lies and fraud creasingly irrelevant, and dangerously so, to life. Yet life, the present is beginning to re-experience some plain truths though threatened from all sides, manifests its presence of the distant past. The Middle Ages were no more Chris­ ever more strongly as artifice loses its hold. tian than the late Eastern bloc was communist. The heav­ Over several millennia the pleasure of life was totally iest burdens imposed by barbarism have never completely disregarded while a seemingly more profitable discourse smothered the ever-present yearning for true humanity. on survival was being carefully woven; but, in the past That the commitment to life which is increasingly evident decade, almost nothing could be said that did not dem­ today should once have dared manifest itself in the sinis­ onstrate just how threadbare this discourse had become, ter light of the burning stake is a lesson that, I venture to as its very fabric seemed on the verge of unraveling. hope, will not be lost in the United States, where the gulf After fighting for capital in the name of progress, against between technological modernity and an archaic agrarian capital in the name of the proletariat, for bureaucracy in mentality still nourishes the spirit of Calvinism and the the name of revolution, and - without fail - for survival morbid teachings of the Bible. in the name of life, those who remain to keep fighting the good fight into the twentieth century seem to have gained Raoul Vaneigem nothing on the traditional battlefields except a tremendous March 1993 sense of weariness and resignation. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith 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 10 1 1 THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRIT INTRODUCTION spectacle.