Powers of Horror; An Essay on Abjection

"OURS TO JEW OR DIE" I75
phy, delirium and scription—the distinction surely exists, but
it is never complete; like Janus who avoids the trap <strong>of</strong> an im-
possible identity, the texts, novels or pamphlets, also display
two faces.
Celine can thus at the same time attack the collapse <strong>of</strong> ideals and
the reduction <strong>of</strong> the masses to the satisfaction <strong>of</strong> their basest needs while
extolling those who foster such a situation, beginning with Hitler.
For instance, he writes in Les Beaux Draps:
The masses have no ideals, all they have is needs. <strong>An</strong>d what are those
needs? [. . .] It's a platform with nothing but material things, a swell
feed, and a gold brick. They're an embryonic bourgeoisie that hasn't
yet negotiated its contract. 1
Or else:
The downtrodden <strong>of</strong> the earth on the one side, the bourgeois on the
other, they have basically only one idea, to become rich or to stay
rich, it's the same thing, the lining has the same value as the cloth,
the same currency, the same coin, no difference in their hearts. It's
all guts, incorporated. Everything for the belly. (BD, 89)
<strong>An</strong>d in L'Ecole des cadavres:
Who is the true friend <strong>of</strong> the people? Fascism is. / Who has done the
most for the working man? the USSR or Hitler? / Hitler has. / All
you have to do is look, keeping all that red shit away from your eyes.
/ Who has done the most for the small businessman? Not Thorez but
Hitler! 2
This does not prevent him from attacking Hitler violently—
though after the war, it is true:
Hitlerite clamors, that howling neo-Romanticism, that Wagnerian
satanism, always seems to me obscene and unbearable—I am for Cou-
perin, Rameau—Jaquin [. . .], Ronsard . . . Rabelais. 3
Backing Hitler there was nothing, or almost nothing, I mean from
the spiritual point <strong>of</strong> view, a horde <strong>of</strong> petty bourgeois, greedy swine
rushing in for the spoils. 4
(<strong>An</strong>d that, as Celine saw it, is what made the Nazis unfit for
Nazism.)