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.

*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



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.




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