The Ambiguity of Fame

Fame: Hopes and Horrors
IF each of us were to confess his most secret desire, the one that inspires all his plans, all his actions, he would say: "I want to be praised." No one will make such a confession, for it is less shameful to commit an abomination than to proclaim so pitiable and so humiliating a weakness, looming out of a feeling of solitude and insecurity from which both the fortunate and the rejected suffer with equal intensity. No one is sure of what he is, nor of what he does. However imbued we may be with our merits, we are gnawed by anxiety and ask, in order to surmount it, only to be deceived, only to receive approbation from anywhere, from anyone. The observer detects a suppliant nuance in the expression of anyone who has finished an enterprise or a work, or performs, quite simply, any activity whatever. The weakness is a universal one; and if God  appears immune from it, it is because, once the creation was completed, He could not, lacking witnesses, count on commendations. He bestowed them upon Himself, it is true, and at the end of each day!

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Just as each of us, in order to "make a name for himself," strives to outstrip the others, similarly in the beginning man must have known the vague desire to eclipse the animals, to affirm himself at their expense, to shine at any price. A breakdown of equilibrium, source of ambition if not of energy, having occurred in his vital economy, he found himself thereby projected into a competition with all living things, waiting to enter into competition with himself by that craving to transcend which, in its aggravated form, was to define him in his own right. Man alone, in the state of nature, wanted to be important, man alone, among the animals, hated anonymity and did his utmost to escape from it. To put himself forward, such was and such remains his dream. It is difficult to believe he has sacrificed Paradise out of a simple desire to know good and evil; on the other hand, it is easy to imagine him risking everything to be Someone. Let us correct Genesis: if he spoiled his initial felicity, it was less from a thirst for knowledge than from an appetite for fame. Once he yielded to its attraction, he went over to the Devil. And indeed fame is diabolic, in its principle as in its manifestations. On its account, the most gifted of the angels ended as an adventurer and more than one saint as a charlatan. Those who have known or merely approached fame can no longer turn away and, to remain in its vicinity, will shrink from no degradation, no villainy. When one cannot save one's soul, one hopes at least to save one's name. The usurper who was to assure himself a privileged position in the universe-would he have achieved his purpose without the desire to be talked about, without the obsession, the mania of reputation? If this mania were to seize any animal in its grip, however "retarded" that animal might be, it would press forward and catch up with man.

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And if the desire for fame should leave you? With it will go those torments which goaded you on, which impelled you to produce, to realize yourself, and to leave yourself behind. Once they are gone, you will be satisfied with what you are, you will subside within your boundaries, your will to supremacy and excess conquered and abolished. Free of the Serpent's kingdom, you will not retain a trace of the old temptation, of the stigma which distinguished you from the other creatures. Is it even certain that you are still man? At the most a conscious plant.

The theologians, by identifying God with pure mind, have revealed that they possess no sense of the process of creation, of physis in general. The mind as such is unsuited to produce; it projects but, in order to carry out its plans, an impure energy is required to set it in action. It is the mind, and not the flesh, which is weak, and it becomes strong only when stimulated by a suspect thirst, by some blameworthy impulse. The more dubious a passion, the more its victim is spared the danger of creating false or fleshless works. Is a man ruled by cupidity, jealousy, vanity? Far from being blamed, he should be praised for these sins: what would he be without them? Almost nothing-that is, pure mind, or more precisely, an angel; now, the angel is by definition sterile and ineffectual, like the light in which he vegetates, which engenders nothing, deprived as it is of that obscure, underground principle which resides in every manifestation of life. God seems much more favored, since He is molded out of shadows: without their dynamic imperfection, He would have remained in a state of paralysis or absence, incapable of playing the part we all know so well. He owes them everything, including His being. Nothing of the fecund and the true is altogether luminous, nor altogether honorable. To say of a poet, apropos of this or that weakness, that it is a "flaw in his genius" is to fail to recognize the source and the secret if not of his talents, certainly of his "output." Every work, however high its level, proceeds from the immediate and bears its mark: no one creates in the absolute nor in the void. Imprisoned in a human universe, once we manage to escape it, why produce and for whom? The more man claims us, the more men cease to interest us; yet it is on account of them and of the opinion they have of us that we bestir ourselves, as evidenced by the incredible hold  flattery has over every mind, crude and delicate alike. It is a mistake to believe that it has no effect upon the solitary, who is in fact more sensitive to it than is supposed, for not often having to suffer its charm or its venom, he cannot protect himself against it. However blase he is about everything, he is not blase about compliments. As he does not receive many, he is not accustomed to them; should the occasion arise to lavish them upon him, he will swallow them with a childish and disgusting greed. Versed in so many things, he is a novice in this one. Also to his liabilities must be added the fact that every compliment functions physically and provokes a delicious frisson which no one can stamp out or even master without a discipline, a self-control which is acquired only by the practice of society, by a long frequentation of knaves and fools alike. In truth, nothing, neither scorn nor mistrust, immunizes us against the effects of flattery: if we suspect or disparage someone, we shall be nonetheless attentive to the favorable judgments he makes upon us, and we shall even change our minds a bout him if they are sufficiently lyrical, sufficiently exaggerated to seem to us spontaneous, involuntary. In appearance, everyone is self-satisfied; in actuality, no one. Should we then, out of a spirit of charity, burn our incense before friends and enemies both, before all mortals without exception, and say amen to each of their extravagances? So deeply does self-doubt work in us that, to remedy it, we have invented love, a tacit agreement between two unhappy parties to overestimate each other, to praise each other shamelessly.

Madmen aside, there is no one who is indifferent to commendation or blame; as long as we remain somewhat normal, we are sensitive to the one and the other; if we become refractory to them, what else can we look for among our fellow-men? It is incontestably humiliating to react as they do; on the other hand, it is hard to raise oneself above all these miseries which harass and overwhelm them. To be human is no solution, any more than ceasing to be so.

The least venture outside the world constrains our desire to realize ourselves, to surpass and crush the others. The angel's misfortune is a consequence of the fact that he has no need to struggle in order to accede to glory: he is born in it, takes his ease there, glory is consubstantial with him. What can he aspire to thereafter? He lacks the very resource of inventing desires for himself. 

 If to produce and to exist are coincident, there is no condition more unreal, more disheartening than his.

To play at detachment, when one is not predestined to it, is dangerous: thereby one loses more than one enriching defect, necessary to the achievement of a work. To shed the Old Adam is to deprive ourselves of our own depths, it is to thrust ourselves of our own accord into the impasse of purity. Without the contribution of our past, of our mud, of our corruption-recent as well as original-the spirit is out of a job. Woe to the man who does not sacrifice his salvation!

Since everything done that is great, important, unheard of emanates from the hope of fame, what happens when it weakens or fades, when we suffer shame for having aspired to count in other men's eyes? To understand how we can reach this point, let us turn back to those moments when a veritable neutralization of our instincts is brought about. We are still alive, but that scarcely matters to us any longer: a fact of no interest; truth, lie-mere words, one worth no more than the other, signifying nothing. What is, what is not-how know such a thing when we have gone past that stage where one still takes the trouble to grade appearances? Our needs, our desires are parallel to ourselves, and as for our dreams, it is not we who dream them now, someone else dreams them inside us. Our very fear is no longer our own. Not that it diminishes, rather it grows, but it ceases to concern us; drawing on its own resources, it leads, liberated and lofty, an autonomous life; we merely serve it as a prop, a domicile, an address: we lodge our fear. It lives apart, develops and flourishes, and makes its own connections without ever consulting us. Undeterred, we abandon it to its whims, disturb it as little as it disturbs us, and attend-disabused and impassive-the spectacle it affords us.

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Just as we may imaginatively follow in reverse the course of the individual as he comes into life and thereby retrace the various species, so by following the course of history in reverse we may come to its beginnings and even proceed beyond them. This retrogression becomes a necessity in the man who, wrested from the tyranny of opinion, no longer belongs to any period. To aspire to consideration is defensible, in a pinch; but when there is no one on whom to make a good impression, why exhaust oneself being someone, why even exhaust oneself being?

After longing to see our name written around the sun, we lapse to the other extreme and pray that it will be erased everywhere and forever. If our impatience to affirm ourselves knew no limits, our impatience to efface ourselves will know none either. Carrying our desire for renunciation to the point of heroism, we employ our energies in the increase of our obscurity, in the destruction of every vestige of our passage, of the least memory of our breath. We hate anyone who attaches himself to us, counts on us, or expects something from us. The only concession we can still make to others is to disappoint them. In any case, they could not understand our longing to escape the overwork of the self, to stop on the threshold of consciousness and never walk inside, to huddle in the depths of primordial silence, in inarticulate beatitude, in the sweet stupor where all creation once lay, before the din of the Word. This need to hide, to give light the slip, to be last in everything, these transports of modesty in which, competing with the moles, we accuse them of ostentation, this nostalgia for the unrealized and the unnamed-so many modalities of liquidating evolution's attainments in order to regain, by a leap backward, the moment which preceded the agitation of Becoming.

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When one forms a high opinion of effacement and considers with contempt the remark of the least effaced of modern men: "All my life I have sacrificed everything, peace, interest, happiness, to my destiny" -it is not without satisfaction that one imagines, at the antipodes, the relentlessness of the disabused creature who, in order to leave no tracks, orients his undertakings toward a single goal: the suppression of his identity, the volatilization of his ego. So vehement is his desire to pass unperceived that he erects Insignificance into a system, into a divinity, and kneels before it. No longer to exist for anyone, to live as if one had never lived, to banish the event, no longer to take advantage of any moment, any place, to be released forever! To be free is to emancipate oneself from the pursuit of a destiny, to give up belonging to either the chosen or the outcast; to be free is to practice being nothing.

The man who has given all he could give affords a more distressing spectacle than he who, having been unable or unwilling to single himself out, dies with all his gifts, real or supposed, with his capacities unexploited and his merits unrecognized: the career he might have had, lending itself to variant versions, flatters the play of our imagination; which is to say that he is still alive, whereas the former, frozen in his success, fulfilled and hideous, evokes ... a corpse. In every domain, only those intrigue us who, whether out of incapacity or scruple, indefinitely postponed the moment when they had to decide to excel. Their advantage over others is to have understood that we do not realize ourselves with impunity, that we must pay for every gesture which is added to the pure fact of being alive. Nature abhors the talents we have acquired at her expense, she abhors even those which she has granted us and which we have cultivated unduly, she punishes zeal, that road to perdition, and warns us that it is always to our detriment that we seek to make ourselves illustrious. Is there anything more deadly than a superabundance of qualities, than a clutter of merits? Let us maintain our deficiencies and not forget that we perish more readily by the excesses of a virtue than by those of a vice.

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To presume one is known by God, to seek out His complicity and His adulation, to scorn all suffrage but His-what presumption and what power! Only religion can utterly satisfy our good as well as our bad inclinations.

Between a man whom no "kingdom" ignores, and the disinherited creature who has only his faith, which of the two, in the absolute, attains a greater effulgence? One cannot balance the notion God deigns to have of us against the notion our fellow-men arrive  at. Without the desire to be appreciated on high, without the certainty of enjoying there a certain renown, there would be no such thing as prayer. The mortal who has prayed sincerely, were it but once in his life, has touched upon the supreme form of glory. What other success will he count on henceforth? Having reached the summit of his career, his mission here on earth fulfilled, he can rest in peace for the remainder of his days.

The privilege of being known to God may appear insufficient to some. Thus in any case judged our first ancestor who, weary of a passive celebrity, took it into his head to impose it upon the creatures, and upon the Creator Himself Whose omniscience he envied less than His pomp, His circumstantial aspect, His frippery. Dissatisfied with a secondary role, he flung himself, out of spite and histrionics, into a series of exhausting performances, into history, that enterprise not so much to supplant as to dazzle the divinity.

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If we want to advance into self-knowledge, no one can help us so much as the braggart: he behaves as we would do if we were not restrained by vestiges of timidity and shame; he says aloud what he thinks of himself, he proclaims his merits while, lacking boldness, we are doomed to murmur or to stifle ours. Hearing him go into raptures for hours on end over his deeds, his doings, we shudder at the notion that it would take only a trifle for each of us to do as much. 

Since the boaster prefers himself to the universe quite openly, and not in secret like the rest of us, he has no reason to play the part of the misunderstood hero, or the outcast. Since no one is willing to bother with what he is nor with what he is worth, he will attend to the matter himself. In the judgments he passes on himself, no restriction, no insinuation, no nuance. He is satisfied, replete, he has found what all pursue and what few discover.

How pitiable, on the other hand, the man who dares not celebrate his advantages and his talents! He execrates anyone who does not notice them and he execrates himself for not being able to exalt or at the very least to exhibit them. Once the barrier of prejudices was down, once bragging was at last tolerated and even obligatory, what a deliverance for men's minds! Psychiatry would have no further purpose if we were permitted to divulge the immense good we thought of ourselves or if we had, at any hour of the day, a flatterer within reach. Yet happy though the braggart is, his felicity is not flawless: he does not always find someone disposed to listen to him; and what he may suffer when he is reduced to silence it is better not to think of.

However full of ourselves we may be, we live in an anxious rancor, from which we can escape only if the stones themselves, in an impulse of pity, decided to praise us. So long as they persist in their silence, nothing remains for us but to flounder in torment, to gorge on our own bile.

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If the aspiration to fame assumes an increasingly breathless form, it is because fame has replaced the belief in immortality. The disappearance of a chimera as inveterate as it was legitimate necessarily left a confusion in men's minds, as well as an expectation mixed with frenzy. A facsimile of everlastingness, no one can do without it, still less keep from seeking it everywhere, in any form of reputation, literary first of all. Since death appears to each man as an absolute term, everyone writes. Whence the idolatry of success, and consequently the subservience to the public, that pernicious and blind power, scourge of the century, foul version of Fatality.

With eternity in the background, fame could have a meaning; it no longer has one in a world where time rules, where-to make matters worse-time itself is threatened. We accept that universal fragility, which so affected the Ancients, as something obvious which neither startles nor pains us, and it is with a high heart that we cling to the certitudes of a precarious, a worthless celebrity. Let us add further that if, in the ages when man was rare, there might have been some interest in being Someone, the same is no longer true today, now that man is devalued. On a planet invaded by the flesh, whose consideration matters still, when the idea of one's neighbor is drained of all content and we cannot love humanity in detail or en masse? Merely to aspire to distinguish oneself from it is already a symptom of spiritual death. The horror of fame proceeds from the horror of men: interchangeable, they justify by their number the aversion they inspire. The time is not far off when we shall have to be in a state of grace to be able, not to love them-which is impossible-but simply to endure the sight of them. In the days when providential plagues swept the cities clean, the individual, in his capacity as survivor, inspired with some reason a certain respect: he was still a being. There are no more beings, there is only this swarm of dying creatures stricken with longevity, all the more hateful in that they are so good at organizing their agony. To them we prefer almost any animal, if only because it is hunted down by them, despoilers and profaners of a landscape once ennobled by the presence of beasts. Paradise is the absence of man. The more aware of this we become, the less we forgive Adam's act: surrounded by animals, what more could he desire? and how could he fail to recognize the bliss of not having to confront, at every moment, that vile curse inscribed upon our faces? Serenity being conceivable only with the eclipse of our race, let us meanwhile leave off martyring each other for trifles, let us look elsewhere-to that part of ourselves over which no one has any hold. We change perspectives on things when, in a confrontation with our most secret solitude, we discover that there is a reality only in the deepest part of ourselves, and that all the rest is a delusion. Once a man is steeped in this truth, what can others bestow upon him which he does not have already, and what can be taken from him which might sadden or humiliate him? There is no emancipation without a victory over shame and over the fear of shame. The conqueror of appearances, forever released from their seductions, must make himself superior not only to honors, but to honor itself. Without paying the slightest attention to the scorn of his fellows, he will display, among them, the pride of a discredited god.

What relief we feel when we suppose ourselves inaccessible to praise or blame, when we no longer care about cutting a good or bad figure in the eyes of others! A strange relief, punctuated by moments of oppression, a deliverance shadowed by a discomfort.

Far as we may have pursued the apprenticeship to detachment, we cannot yet say where the desire for fame has taken us: do we still feel it or are we quite numb to it? Most likely we have cached it away and it continues to torment us without our knowing it. We triumph over it only at those moments of sovereign dejection when neither the living nor the dead could recognize themselves in us ... In the remainder of our experiences, things are less simple, for so long as one desires at all, one implicitly desires fame. Disenchanted as we may be, we long for it still, since our appetite for it survives the disappearance of all the rest. He who has drunk deep of fame, has wallowed in it, can never do without it, and, unless he knows it always, will lapse into acrimony, insolence, or torpor. The more emphatic our deficiencies, the more fame gains by contrast and engages us; the void within us calls to it; and when it fails to answer, we accept its ersatz: notoriety. Insofar as we aspire to fame, we struggle within the insoluble: we want to conquer time with the means of time, to endure within the ephemeral, to attain to the indestructible through history, and-supreme mockery-to be applauded by precisely those whom we despise. Our misfortune is to have found, as a cure for the loss of eternity, only this deception, only this lamentable obsession, from which no one except a man implanted within Being could free himself. But who is capable of implanting himself within Being, when one is human only because one can do no such thing?

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To believe in history is to lust for the possible, to postulate the qualitative superiority of the imminent over the immediate, to imagine that Becoming is rich enough in and of itself to make eternity superfluous. Once we cease believing this, no event preserves the slightest significance. We are then interested only in the extremities of Time, less in its beginnings than in its conclusion, its consummation, in what will come after, when the exhaustion of the thirst for fame will involve the exhaustion of all appetites, and when, free of the impulse that drove him onward, unburdened of his adventure, man will see opening before him an era without desire.

If we are forbidden to regain our primordial innocence, at least we can conceive another one, and can try to accede to it by means of a knowledge stripped of perversity, purified of its flaws, transformed in its depths, "reclaimed." Such a metamorphosis would be equivalent to the conquest of a second innocence, which, appearing after ages of doubt and lucidity, would have the advantage over the first one of no longer being deluded by the (now exhausted) prestige of the Serpent. 

The disjunction between knowledge and the Fall effected, the act of knowing no longer flattering anyone's vanity, no demoniac pleasure would still accompany the mind's necessarily aggressive indiscretion. We would behave as if we had violated no mystery, and would envisage all our exploits with detachment, if not with contempt. It would be a question of neither more nor less than beginning Knowledge all over again, that is, of constructing another history, a history released from the ancient curse, and in which it would be our task to rediscover that divine mark we bore before the break with the rest of Creation. We cannot live with the sentiment of a total sin, nor with the seal of infamy on each of our undertakings. Since it is our corruption which takes us out of ourselves, which makes us effective and fruitful, the eagerness to produce gives us away, accuses us. If our works bear witness against us, is this not because they emanate from the need to camouflage our collapse, to deceive others, and still more, to deceive ourselves? Doing is tainted with an original vice from which Being seems exempt. And since all we accomplish proceeds from the loss of innocence, it is only by the disavowal of our actions and the distaste for ourselves that we can be redeemed.

From The Fall into Time
Translation: Richard Howard