Resistentialism

Remembering the Eisenhower parody below had me leafing through the “Macdonald anthology”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0306802392/junius-20 and looking at some of my other favourites (and then googling to see if they are on the web anywhere) Pride of place goes to Paul Jennings’s “Report on Resistentialism”:http://www31.brinkster.com/yewtree/resources/resistentialism.htm which begins thus:

bq. It is the peculiar genius of the French to express their philosophical thought in aphorisms, sayings hard and tight as diamonds, each one the crystal centre of a whole constellation of ideas. Thus, the entire scheme of seventeenth century intellectual rationalism may be said to branch out from that single, pregnant saying of Descartes, ‘Cogito ergo sum’ – ‘I think, therefore I am.’ Resistentialism, the philosophy which has swept present-day France, runs true to this aphoristic form. Go into any of the little cafés or horlogeries on Paris’s Left Bank (make sure the Seine is flowing away from you, otherwise you’ll be on the Right Bank, where no one is ever seen) and sooner or later you will hear someone say, ‘Les choses sont contre nous.’ ‘Things are against us.’ This is the nearest English translation I can find for the basic concept of Resistentialism, the grim but enthralling philosophy now identified with bespectacled, betrousered, two-eyed Pierre-Marie Ventre.

Read the whole thing.