John Stuart Mill, who was the first guinea pig of a strictly Benthamite education, entirely regulated by the calculation of utility, did not react with lavish delirium, as would happen in a similar situation to Judge Schreber. On the contrary, he managed to write a magnanimous essay on Bentham. His words are guided by a display of respect, along with lucidity, but they inadvertently reveal more than they claim. Meanwhile he offers us the most appropriate definition of the Master, presenting him as “the great subversive” and, in particular, “the chief subversive thinker of an age which has long lost all that they could subvert.”^{451, 452} Bentham was the first living tabula rasa, an obtuse, insolent child who could harbor no doubts since he had no experience (nor would he acquire any). “He had neither internal experience, nor external; the quiet, even tenor of his life, and his healthiness of mind, conspired to exclude him from both.⁴⁵³ He never knew prosperity and adversity, passion nor satiety: he never had even the experiences which sickness gives; he lived from childhood to the age of eighty-five in boyish health. He knew no dejection, no heaviness of heart. He never felt life a sore and a weary burthen. He was a boy to the last. Self-consciousness, that daemon of the men of genius of our time, from Wordsworth to Byron, from Goethe to Chateaubriand, and to which this age owes so much both of its cheerful and its mournful wisdom, never was awakened in him. How much of human nature slumbered in him he knew not, neither can we know. He had never been made alive to the unseen influences which were acting on himself, nor consequently on his fellow-creatures.” With Bentham, the antiromantic child, a genuine new man was born: one who knows nothing, calculates everything, and in the end resolves everything.

Bentham is the happy autodidact. The calculation of pleasures erases the incalculable past, with its pack of ghosts that disrupt the sums and subtractions. But watertight cases like his are unusual. More frequently the autodidact is afflicted by a sinister awe, like that of Auguste Blanqui imprisoned at the Fort du Taureau, who projects the cosmos into his mind, sees that “the forms are countless, the elements are the same” and the cosmos is therefore a jumble of duplicates.⁴⁵⁴

Where there is no initiation, there is the autodidact. Anyone for whom knowledge is not wisdom transmitted through experience is enrolled in a university that is a correspondence course.

E***: Our fate is governed by two mummies: that of Lenin in his mausoleum and that of Bentham at University College, London.

Limits

The history of the Enlightenment lightly rejects limit. Since its god is convention, since everything is material on which convention works, it is a question at most of changing the convention each time resistance is met. But all conventions have a shared faith in convention itself—and the material can one day rebel against that very faith. Then the limit reappears, by now an exotic figure, unveiled and venerated in Greece even while the first procedures were being devised to cancel it. Today we have it before us once more: it is the most disturbing of figures, the most ambiguous of memories. Simone Weil was the only one who clearly recognized its proper name. Anyone who hasn’t recognized it in thought is forced to see it emerge from events, translated and disguised in the jargon of systems, complexity, control. Or otherwise in the concern over a material that is disappearing, a power irreversibly worn down, an unfillable absence. And each time the ancient exorcism rings out: we will find new conventions, we will carry out drastic changes in method. The circle repeats itself, but ever narrower, until it tightens in a noose.