In Side Effects, Adam Phillips writes about the disctinction between revolution and rebellion. He describes a tension between conservation and renovation. Phillips writes, quoting Sartre: ‘‘The rebel’, Sartre says in his book on Baudelaire, ‘is careful to preserve the abuses from which he suffers so that he can go on rebelling against them’.
The revolutionary changes the world. The rebel, in other words, is the person who fears the future. What is creative about the rebel, one might say, are the ways he finds to keep the world the same so that he can go on rebelling against it. If you hate change you have to be clever at conservation. Sartre pits the nostalgia of the rebel-his passion for repetition, for sameness-against the innovation, the improvisation of the Revolutionary. There is the making new, and there is the keeping fresh.’
I wonder about this – and about the ways in which intimate relating can occupy some kind of middle ground between rebellion and revolution; just enough refreshing, and just enough making new. I don’t want to destroy or be destroyed – yet I do not want to stay the same.
Slingshot