Les Choses Sont Contre Nous

We have all had the harrowing suspicion, rising at times almost to a dreadful certainty, that the inanimate objects of the world are arrayed against us with bloodless and implacable malice. We pop the window open on a fine spring morning and it falls back down, shattering the glass. We grab the only pencil at hand in urgent haste to write down a number before it flies from our memory, and the point breaks off. We lift a jar of mayonnaise by its lid, which comes off in our hand; the jar smashes on the kitchen tiles. Our keys conceal themselves behind the toaster. The picture-frame leaps from the wall for no apparent reason. The doorframe interposes itself between our little toe and the bathroom in the middle of the night.

Leave it to the French, who have always understood that we are doomed, to build upon this woeful scaffolding an intellectual edifice, a school of philosophy. It is called Resistentialism, and has been described as being “largely a matter of sitting inside a wet sack and moaning.”

You may learn more here.

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