What then is taste, if it actually impedes a certain understanding of literature? But isn’t that certain understanding of literature perhaps, in turn, a subtle and late-formed Western essence, distilled from history, an essence that had not yet been formally analyzed, and would only be analyzed much later, during the time of Baudelaire and Mallarmé? Taste, on the other hand, crystallizes earlier, and its origin lies far away from the arts. Painting or literature or furniture: they are just some of the many areas of its application. But the source of taste is another: taste is now the mark of initiation, it is applied to everything, and to nothing in particular. It is a seal of existence, the final substitution of a wisdom that it is good taste not even to mention.

Sainte-Beuve, in referring to Antoine Hamilton, fixed the discovery of “netteté,” clarity, between “the end of La Bruyère or Fénelon and the beginning of Jean-Jacques,” a few decades in which something irreversible is crystallized, a form, a hint of Western sobriety that will soon be corrupted, yet retaining its indelible character, in the background of everything.¹⁸⁵ Anyone who is quick to complain how the language of “netteté” has opened the way to the most pretentious insipidness, which still rages, must however remember that the French language “became the language of the perfect honnête homme with Pascal.”¹⁸⁶ Shortly before being condensed, and almost strangled, in the short phrases promoted by Voltaire, the honnête homme had strolled around the empty space between two chairs—and something reminded him still of a meandering flicker, the reflection of clear water only slightly muddied.

Shame, the gesture of referring to that which is not to be named, that which is called taste in the final stage of its life, is what has preserved, beyond its death, the language ordered on the axis of the world. And so it is the greatest act of blasphemy when the axis of the world has become the stratification of society. Everything responds in it, but like mirror with mirror. What once held opposites without coming into sight becomes the only thing that can be sighted. The opposites are momentarily illuminated to give more solidity to the uniform foundation from which they rise. The disappearance of linear culture leaves the word and the other sacrificial objects—sound and image—suspended in air, with no right and no restriction, whereas the new tribe perpetually sacrifices to itself the empty and magnificent spoils of the vanished tribe. Final liberation takes place in a state of total blindness. If nothing can be fixed to an axis, words become constellations of the thing itself. They are the slenderest fibers, easy to crush, but they are the only things to be born without being assisted at any time by the urge of arbitrary will. Such fragility restores the difference that has been canceled out. Now, only that which can be canceled out is to be trusted.