Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Autobiographical
- Part I Critics and criticism
- Part II Contemporary culture in conflict
- 8 The New York Review: a close look
- 9 The new Apocalypse
- 10 Eros, politics, and pornography: a decade with Evergreen Review
- 11 The deradicalized intellectuals
- 12 The New York Review loves an Englishman
- Part III Writing in America and elsewhere
9 - The new Apocalypse
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Autobiographical
- Part I Critics and criticism
- Part II Contemporary culture in conflict
- 8 The New York Review: a close look
- 9 The new Apocalypse
- 10 Eros, politics, and pornography: a decade with Evergreen Review
- 11 The deradicalized intellectuals
- 12 The New York Review loves an Englishman
- Part III Writing in America and elsewhere
Summary
I have watched the soul, Ferdinand, give way bit by bit, lose its balance and dissolve in the vast welter of apocalyptic ambitions. It began in 1900. That's the date! From that time onwards the world in general and psychiatry in particular frantically raced to see who could be most perverse, salacious, original; more disgusting, more creative, as they say, than his little next-door neighbor. A first-class scramble. Each strove to see who could immolate himself the soonest to the monster of no heart and no restraint. … The monster will scrunch us all, Ferdinand, that's how it is, and rightly so. … What is this monster? A great brute tumbling along wherever it listeth. Its wars and its droolings flood in towards us already from all sides. We shall be swept away on this tide – yes, swept away. The conscious mind was a bore, apparently. … We shan't be bored any longer! We've begun to give Sodom a chance and from that moment on we've started having “impressions” and “intuition.”
–Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of NightThey advocate passion over the intellect, exalt the body over the mind, prefer the perverse to the normal, the spontaneous to the habitual, the risks of violence and disaster to the security of our ordinary modes of existence.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Pieces of Resistance , pp. 83 - 91Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1987