“Resistentialism is largely a matter of sitting inside a wet sack and moaning.” So says Paul Francis Jennings, author of this Report on Resistentialism first published in 1948 in The Spectator.
Report on Resistentialism by Paul Francis Jennings
from The Jenguin Pennings
It is the peculiar genius of the French to express their philosophical thought in aphorisms, sayings hard and tight as diamonds, each one the crystal centre of a whole constellation of ideas. Thus, the entire scheme of seventeenth century intellectual rationalism may be said to branch out from that single, pregnant saying of Descartes, “˜Cogito ergo sum”™ – “˜I think, therefore I am.”™ Resistentialism, the philosophy which has swept present-day France, runs true to this aphoristic form. Go into any of the little cafés or horlogeries on Paris”™s Left Bank (make sure the Seine is flowing away from you, otherwise you”™ll be on the Right Bank, where no one is ever seen) and sooner or later you will hear someone say, “˜Les choses sont contre nous.”™ “˜Things are against us.”™
This is the nearest English translation I can find for the basic concept of Resistentialisin, the grim but enthralling philosophy now identified with bespectacled, betrousered, two-eyed Pierre-Marie Ventre. In transferring the dynamic of philosophy from man to a world of hostile Things,”™ Ventre has achieved a major revolution of thought, to which he himself gave the name “˜Resistentialism”™. Things (res) resist (résister) man (homme, understood). Ventre makes a complete break with traditional philosophic method. Except for his German precursors, Freidegg and Heidansiecker, all previous thinkers from the Eleatics to Marx have allowed at least some legitimacy to human thought and effort. Some, like Hegel or Berkeley, go so far as to make man”™s thought the supreme reality. In the Resistentialist cosmology that is now the intellectual rage of Paris Ventre offers us a grand vision of the Universe as One Thing – the Ultimate Thing (Dernière Chose). And it is against us. Continue reading ““Les choses sont contre nous” (‘Things’ are against us). Happy New Year!”
