Resistentialism, people. I swear, I spend half my time at my drafting table looking for the pencil or eraser I was just using. It sneaks off and hides underneath books and papers. Sometimes it quietly jumps to the floor and very carefully rolls itself into the spot that is least reachable. I know this for a fact. Ever wondered why your kitchen utensils always jam the drawer and keep it from opening? Inanimate objects conspire to make your life more difficult, that's why!
This is the nearest English translation I can find for the basic concept of Resistentialism, 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.
Report on Resistialism, Paul Jennings, The Jenguin Pennings, 1963, reprinted from Town & Country (USA).
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