#michelet

And not ourselves only, but all nature, alas! becomes demoniac. If there is a devil in the flower, how much more in the gloomy forest! The light we think so pure teems with children of the night. The heavens themselves — O blasphemy! — are full of hell. That divine morning star, whose glorious beams not seldom lightened a Socrates, an Archimedes, a Plato, what is it now become? A devil, the archfiend Lucifer. In the eventime again it is the devil Venus who draws me into temptation by her light so soft and mild. 

Michelet lamented Saint-Just’s untimely end: ‘France will never console herself for the loss of such a hope.’ For Michelet, Saint-Just was the one man who might have stood up to Napoleon and made ‘the sword bow to the law’

Must not something or someone die if we are to have a memory of it or him or her? Is not the otherness of the past fundamentally to be seen in death? And is not repetition itself a kind of resurrection of the dead, as any reader of Michelet will recognize?

In June 1794, to purge the last vestige of idolatry and above all the newest idolatry of Reason itself, Robespierre assigned Jacques-Louis David the task of choreographing the Festival of the Supreme Being. Following the revolutionary tradition of ritual destruction, the celebration featured the spectacular burning of a colossal plaster statue of Atheism, from which a charred statue of Wisdom eventually emerged. According to Michelet, the ritual included the burning of an effigy of Nothing—yet another positivity painstakingly constructed so as to be annihilated.

Le plus tentant pour l'homme, c'est l'inutile et l'impossible.