PART 1

There is a literature that does not reach the voracious mass. It is the
work of creators, issued from a real necessity in the author, produced for
himself. It expresses the knowledge of a supreme egoism, in which laws
wither away. Every page must explode, either by profound heavy
seriousness, the whirlwind, poetic frenzy, the new, the eternal, the
crushing joke, enthusiasm for principles, or by the way in which it is
printed. On the one hand a tottering world in flight, betrothed to the
glockenspiel of hell, on the other hand: new men. Rough, bouncing, riding
on hiccups. Behind them a crippled world and literary quacks with a mania
for improvement.

I say unto you: there is no beginning and we do not tremble, we are not
sentimental. We are a furious Wind, tearing the dirty linen of clouds and
prayers, preparing the great spectacle of disaster, fire, decomposition.

We will put an end to mourning and replace tears by sirens screeching from
one continent to another. Pavilions of intense joy and widowers with the
sadness of poison. JSH is the signboard of abstraction; advertising and
business are also elements of poetry.
I destroy the drawers of the brain and of social organization: spread
demoralization wherever I go and cast my hand from heaven to hell, my eyes
from hell to heaven, restore the fecund wheel of a universal circus to
objective forces and the imagination of every individual.
Philosophy is the question: from which side shall we look at life, God,
the idea or other phenomena. Everything one looks at is false. I do not
consider the relative result more important than the choice between cake
and cherries after dinner. The system of quickly looking at the other side
of a thing in order to impose your opinion indirectly is called
dialectics, in other words, haggling over the spirit of fried potatoes
while dancing method around it. If I cry out:

Ideal, ideal, ideal,

Knowledge, knowledge, knowledge,

Boomboom, boomboom, boomboom,

I have given a pretty faithful version of progress, law, morality and all
other fine qualities that various highly intelligent men have discussed in
so manv books, only to conclude that after all everyone dances to his own
personal boomboom, and that the writer is entitled to his boomboom: the
satisfaction of pathological curiosity; a private bell for inexplicable
needs; a bath; pecuniary difficulties; a stomach with repercussions in
life; the authority of the mystic wand formulated as the bouquet of a
phantom orchestra made up of silent fiddle bows greased with philtres made
of chicken manure. With the blue eye-glasses of an angel they have
excavated the inner life for a dime's worth of unanimous gratitude. If all
of them are right and if all pills are Pink Pills, let us try for once not
to be right. Some people think they can explain rationally, by thought,
what they think. But that is extremely relative. Psychoanalysis is a
dangerous disease, it puts to sleep the anti-objective impulses of men and
systematizes the bourgeoisie. There is no ultimate Truth. The dialectic is
an amusing mechanism which guides us / in a banal kind of way / to the
opinions we had in the first place. Does anyone think that, by a minute
refinement of logic, he has demonstrated the truth and established the
correctness of these opinions? Logic imprisoned by the senses is an
organic disease. To this element philosophers always like to add: the
power of observation. But actually this magnificent quality of the mind is
the proof of its impotence. We observe, we regard from one or more points
of view, we choose them among the millions that exist. Experience is also
a product of chance and individual faculties. Science disgusts me as soon
as it becomes a speculative system, loses its character of utility-that is
so useless but is at least individual. I detest greasy objectivity, and
harmony, the science that finds everything in order. Carry on, my
children, humanity . . . Science says we are the servants of nature:
everything is in order, make love and bash your brains in. Carry on, my
children, humanity, kind bourgeois and journalist virgins . . . I am
against systems, the most acceptable system is on principle to have none.
To complete oneself, to perfect oneself in one's own littleness, to fill
the vessel with one's individuality, to have the courage to fight for and
against thought, the mystery of bread, the sudden burst of an infernal
propeller into economic lilies....

Every product of disgust capable of becoming a negation of the family is

JSH; a protest with the fists of its whole being engaged in destructivc
action:

JSH; knowledge of all the means rejected up until now by the shamefaced
sex of comfortable compromise and good manners:

JSH; abolition of logic, which is the dance of those impotent to create:

JSH; of every social hierarchy and equation set up for the sake of values
by our valets:

JSH; every object, all objects, sentiments, obscurities, apparitions and
the precise clash of parallel lines are weapons for the fight:

JSH; abolition of memory: JSH; abolition of archaeology:

JSH; abolition of prophets:

JSH; abolition of the future: JSH; absolute and unquestionable faith in
every god that is the immediate product of spontaneity:

JSH; elegant and unprejudiced leap from a harmony to the other sphere;
trajectory of a word tossed like a screeching phonograph record; to
respect all individuals in their folly of the moment: whether it be
serious, fearful, timid, ardent, vigorous, determined, enthusiastic; to
divest one's church of every useless cumbersome accessory; to spit out
disagreeable or amorous ideas like a luminous waterfall, or coddle
them -with the extreme satisfaction that it doesn't matter in the
least-with the same intensity in the thicket of one's soul-pure of insects
for blood well-born, and gilded with bodies of archangels. Freedom:

JSH JSH JSH, a roaring of tense colors, and interlacing of opposites and
of all contradictions, grotesques, inconsistencies: LIFE



PART 2

Ladies and Gentlemen:

I don't have to tell you that for the general public and for you, tlhe
refined public, a JSHist is the equivalent of a leper. But that is only a
manner of speaking. When these same people get close to us, they treat us
with that remnant of elegance that comes from their old habit of belief in
progress. At ten yards distance, hatred begins again. If you ask me why, I
won't be able to tell you.

Another characteristic of JSH is the continuous breaking off of our
friends. They are always breaking off and resigning. The first to tender
his resignation from the JSH movement *was myself*.

Everybody knows that JSH is nothing. I broke away from JSH and from myself
as soon as I understood the implications of nothing.
If I continue to do something, it is because it amuses me, or rather
because I have a need for activity which I use up and satisfy wherever I
can. Basically, the true JSHs have always been separate from JSH. Those
who acted as if JSH were important enough to resign from with a big noise
have been motivated by a desire for personal publicity, proving that
counterfeiters have always wriggled like unclean worms in and out of the
purest and most radiant religions. I know that you have come here today to
hear explanations. Well, don't expect to hear any explanations about JSH.
You explain to me why you exist. You haven't the faintest idea. You will
say: I exist to make my children happy. But in your hearts you know that
isn't so. You will say: I exist to guard my country, against barbarian
invasions. That's a fine reason. You will say: I exist because God wills.
That's a fairy tale for children. You will never be able to tell me why
you exist but you will always be ready to maintain a serious attitude
about life. You will never understand that life is a pun, for you will
never be alone enough to reject hatred, judgments, all these things that
require such an effort, in favor of a calm level state of mind that makes
everything equal and without importance. JSH is not at all modern. It is
more in the nature of a return to an almost Buddhist religion of
indifference. JSH covers things with an artificial gentleness, a snow of
butterflies released from the head of a prestidigitator. JSH is immobility
and does not comprehend the passions. You will call this a paradox, since
JSH is manifested only in violent acts. Yes, the reactions of individuals
contaminated by Destruction are rather violent, but when these reactions
are exhausted, annihilated by the Satanic insistence of a continuous and
progressive "What for?" what remains, what dominates is indifference. But
with the same note of conviction I might maintain the contrary.

I admit that my friends do not approve this point of view. But the Nothing
can be uttered only as the reflection of an individual. And that is why it
will be valid for everyone, since everyone is important only for the
individual who is expressing himself.--I am speaking of myself. Even that
is too much for me. How can I be expected to speak of all men at once, and
satisfy them too? Nothing is more delightful than to confuse and upset
people. People one doesn't like. What's the use of giving them
explanations that are merely food for curiosity? The truth is that people
love nothing but themselves and their little possessions, their income,
their dog. This state of affairs derives from a false conception of
property. If one is poor in spirit, one possesses a sure and indomitable
intelligence, a savage logic, a point of view that can not be shaken. Try
to be empty and fill your brain cells with a petty happiness. Always
destroy what you have in you. On random walks. Then you will be able to
understand many things. You are not more intelligent than we, and we are
not more intelligent than you.
Intelligence is an organization like any other, the organization of
society, the organization of a bank, the organization of chit-chat. At a
society tea. It serves to create order and clarity where there is none. It
serves to create a state hierarchy. To set up classifications for rational
work. To separate questions of a material order from those of a cerebral
ordcr, but to take the former very seriously. Intelligence is the triumph
of sound education and pragmatism. Fortunately life is something else and
its pleasures are innumerable. They are not paid for in the coin of liquid
intelligence. These observations of everyday conditions have led us to a
realization which constitutes our minimum basis of agreement, aside from
the sympathy which binds us and which is inexplicable. It would not have
been possible for us to found our agreement on principles. For everything
is relative. What are the Beautiful, the Good, Art, Freedom? Words that
have a different meaning for every individual. Words with the pretension
of creating agreement among all, and that is why they are written with
capital letters. Words which have not the moral value and objective force
that people have grown accustomed to finding in them. Their meaning
changes from one individual, one epoch, one country to the next. Men are
different. It is diversity that makes life interesting. There is no common
basis in mens minds. The unconscious is inexhaustible and uncontrollable.
Its force surpasses us. It is as mysterious as the last particle of a
brain cell. Even if we knew it, we could not reconstruct it.

What good did the theories of the philosophers do us? Did they help us to
take a single step forward or backward? What is forward, what is backward?
Did they alter our forms of contentment? We are. We argue, we dispute, we
get excited. The rest is sauce. Sometimes pleasant, sometimes mixed with a
limitless boredom, a swamp dotted with tufts of dying shrubs.

We have had enough of the intelligent movements that have stretched beyond
measure our credulity in the benefits of science. What we want now is
spontaneity. Not because it is better or more beautiful than anything
else. But because everything that issues freely from ourselves, without
the intervention of speculative ideas, represents us. We must intensify
this quantity of life that readily spends itself in every quarter. Art is
not the most precious manifestation of life. Art has not the celestial and
universal value that people like to attribute to it. Life is far more
interesting. JSH knows the correct measure that should be given to art:
with subtle, perfidious methods, JSH introduces it into daily life. And
vice versa. In art, JSH reduces everything to an initial simplicity,
growing always more relative. It mingles its caprices with the chaotic
wind of creation and the barbaric dances of savage tribes. It wants logic
reduced to a personal minimum, while literature in its view should be
primarily intended for the individual who makes it. Words have a weight of
their own and lend themselves to abstract construction. The absurd has no
terrors for me, for from a more exalted point of view everything in life
seems absurd to me. Only the elasticity of our conventions creates a bond
between disparate acts. The Beautiful and the True in art do not exist;
what interests me is the intensity of a personality transposed directly,
clearly into the work; the man and his vitality; the angle from which he
regards the elements and in what manner he knows how to gather sensation,
emotion, into a lacework of words and sentiments.

JSH tries to find out what words mean before using them, from the point of
view not of grammar but of representation. Objects and colors pass through
the same filter. It is not the new technique that interests us, but the
spirit. Why do you want us to be preoccupied with a pictorial, moral,
poetic, literary, political or social renewal? We are well aware that
these renewals of means are merely the successive cloaks of the various
epochs of history, uninteresting questions of fashion and facade. We are
well aware that people in the costumes of the Renaissance were pretty much
the same as the people of today, and that Chouang-Dsi was just as JSH as
we are. You are mistaken if you take JSH for a modern school, or even for
a reaction against the schools of today. Several of my statements have
struck you as old and natural, what better proof that you were a JSHist
without knowing it, perhaps even before the birth of JSH. You will often
hear that JSH is a state of mind. You may be gay, sad, afflicted, joyous,
melancholy or JSH. Without being literary, you can be romantic, you can be
dreamy, weary, eccentric, a businessman, skinny, transfigured, vain,
amiable or JSH. This will happen later on in the course of history when
JSH has become a precise, habitual word, when popular repetition has given
it the character of a word organic with its necessary content. Today no
one thinks of the literature of the Romantic school in representing a
lake, a landscape, a character. Slowly but surely, a JSH character is
forming. JSH is here, there and a little everywhere, such as it is, with
its faults, with its personal differences and distinctions which it
accepts and views with indifference. We are often told that we are
incoherent, but into this word people try to put an insult that it is
rather hard for me to fathom. Everything is incoherent. The gentleman who
decides to take a bath but goes to the movies instead. The one who wants
to be quiet but says things that haven't even entered his head. Another
who has a precise idea on some subject but succeeds only in expressing the
opposite in words which for him are a poor translation. There is no logic.
Only relative necessities discovered a posteriori , valid not in any exact
sense but only as explanations. The acts of life have no beginning or end.
Everything happens in a completely idiotic way. That is why everything is
alike. Simplicity is called JSH.

Any attempt to conciliate an inexplicable momentary state with logic
strikes me as a boring kind of game. The convention of the spoken language
is ample and adequate for us, but for our solitude, for our intimate games
and our literature we no longer need it.
The beginnings of JSH were not the beginnings of an art, but of a disgust.
Disgust with the magnificence of philosophers who for 3ooo years have been
explaining everything to us (what for? ), disgust with the pretensions of
these artists-God's-representatives-on-earth, disgust with passion and
with real pathological wickedness where it was not worth the bother;
disgust with a false form of domination and restriction en masse, that
accentuates rather than appeases man's instinct of domination, disgust
with all the catalogued categories, with the false prophets who are
nothing but a front for the interests of money, pride, disease, disgust
with the lieutenants of a mercantile art made to order according to a few
infantile laws, disgust with the divorce of good and evil, the beautiful
and the ugly (for why is it more estimable to be red rather than green, to
the left rather than the right, to be large or small?). Disgust finally
with the Jesuitical dialectic which can explain everything and fill
people's minds with oblique and obtuse ideas without any physiological
basis or ethnic roots, all this by means of blinding artifice and ignoble
charlatans promises.

As JSH marches it continuously destroys, not in extension but in itself.
From all these disgusts, may I add, it draws no conclusion, no pride, no
benefit. It has even stopped combating anything, in the realization that
it's no use, that all this doesn't matter. What interests a JSHist is his
own mode of life. But here we approach the great secret.

JSH is a state of mind. That is why it transforms itself according to
races and events. JSH applies itself to everything, and yet it is nothing,
it is the point where the yes and the no and all the opposites meet, not
solemnly in the castles of human philosophies, but very simply at street
corners, like dogs and grasshoppers.

Like everything in life, JSH is useless.

JSH is without pretension, as life should be.

Perhaps you will understand me better when I tell you that JSH is a virgin
microbe that penetrates with the insistence of air into all the spaces
that reason has not been able to fill with words or conventions. .

PART 1

There is a literature that does not reach the voracious mass. It is the
work of creators, issued from a real necessity in the author, produced for