Joyful Cruelty: Toward a Philosophy of the Real

by Clément Rosset, David F. Bell (Translator)

In Joyful Cruelty , Clément Rosset attempts to formulate a philosophical practice that refuses to turn away from the world and thereby accepts a confrontation with reality (what he calls real) in all of its immediacy. Such a direct confrontation, in the absence of all mediating theories or
representations, is cruel because it destroys all illusions. It exposes one to the full, unmitigated violence of the real and allows neither reassuring distance nor space for retreat. And yet it gives rise to a sensation of joy, of approbation for what exists. Nietzsche's philosophy provides a
fertile ground for exploring the joy at the heart of Rosset's practice. Beginning with the Nietzschean notion of beatitude, Rosset offers an interpretation of Nietzsche that goes against the grain of modern and postmodern philosophical critique and negativism or a postmodern nihilism. In a
surprising and original twist, Rosset shows how Nietzsche's thought revolves instead around an acceptance of the real as the only source of experience without illusion.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Theory

117 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

Ancien élève de l'École normale supérieure, agrégé de philosophie, il a enseigné la philosophie à l'université de Nice.

Reviews

[anna]

Rosset is .... sexi .... i really liked this. I don’t read enough philosophy but this was rly digestible nd i liked all the essays .... i liked the first essay, “the overwhelming force,” the most, and i also really enjoyed the post-scriptum on the cruelty of love in the third essay, “the cruelty principle.” I also thought rosset’s interpretation of nietzsche in the second essay, “notes on nietzsche,” really refreshing, bc i am of the camp that sees nietzsche is unequivocally optimistic, if not the most optimistic. I don’t think extreme nihilism is sustainable at all, much less anything to aspire to

Kinda random but i really liked the range of references in rosset’s writing, which is nice to see in philosophy essays, which usually give off the impression that they r very self-contained and self-referential as opposed to drawing from a breadth of influences. Maybe i am wrong on that. But i see Rosset’s reference choices as indicative of a sort of argument for a more accessible and inclusive philosophy that i guess is tied into this idea of the real. And weirdly i saw a connection to Jenny Odell in htdn. Weird but i am inspired by the way both of them write

Anyway but i do really like Rosset’s ideas. Idk there is so so much consolation in the view that this world is all there will ever b, which is maybe bleak, but affirms that joy and genuine splendour in the workings of daily life can bring us closer to the feeling of life itself, and that doesn’t necessarily provide us with meaning, but the sooner we accept that there is no inherent or interpretable meaning, the sooner we can allow ourselves to rejoice in life itself fully and unconditionally, without shame or guilt. Then we understand that our existence is not necessarily solely fated towards pain and doom, but it just as much is fated towards love and joy

This is my interpretation ofc, I definitely lost a lot of the nuances in rosset’s arguments. I also couldnt help but stop thinking about camus bc I saw their arguments as rly similar. Rosset helped me better understand Camus’ argument against suicide fully n cerebrally, which i am grateful for. Maybe rosset would criticise me but I don’t mind searching for reasons to live in the ideas presented by people who reject meaning in the world if only as a way to continue living bleakly but still choosing to accept and believe in tenderness, love, sentimentality, sensuality, joy, hope

I am also reminded of the “Joy” minisode on Literary Friction, which i prob talk about in every review lmao, but it’s my favourite podcast: i am thinking of the idea that joy is unsustainable only because it is an ephemeral and generative experience, as in, perhaps it is not an end goal. I saw this as implicitly embedded in rosset’s arguments for joy, that if all we can rely on is the real (with a lowercase r) world, then joy is all we can ever hope to aspire to. Which is enough. Octavia Bright says joy “punctuates a life,” and if death truly is random, and our lives are truly tragic in the shakespearean sense, then i think i will be happy knowing that in the end i was able to experience that joy at least once, or felt fulfilled at least in the pursuit of joy. Clearly there is a lot to live for

Anyway I’m rly glad i found this book :3

[Ángel Agudo]

Por el título yo pensaba que esto iba a ser un ensayo sobre la crueldad humana, pero me he encontrado con una crítica sobre la verdad filosófica y la tendencia de algunas escuelas a buscar la verdad en mundos irreales. No me quejo porque me ha parecido bastante interesante, pero no era en absoluto lo que me esperaba.

«El interés principal de una verdad filosófica consiste en su virtud negativa, esto es, en su fuerza para disipar ideas mucho más falsas.»

[Jessie]

A tough 100 pages; can't rate it on the star-scale since I so rarely read raw philosophy; some highly provocative stuff here, but half the book is too tedious to recommend (esp. the middle part, "Notes on Nietzsche," though there are tidbits of firework in there too).

A few notes (misreadings could abound here, but the last chapter does praise the "principle of uncertainty" in any worthwhile philosophy!):

Rosset denounces much of philosophy for its disregard for reality and for favoring, instead, some other more favorable realm (traditional dualism of body [the real:] and mind/spirit, I think, and he speaks a lot to Kant here); many philosophers, Rosset claims, find reality too cruel and unpleasant to write about--they prefer illusion.

But Rosset makes a case for a state of joy that can accept reality as it is and still survive, but only as paradox: "simultaneously inconceivable and nonillusory," joy both indifferent and extra attentive to misfortune, a kind of madness; a truly joyful person may necessarily be a "holy fool."

"Joy is the necessary condition...of life lived consciously and with full awareness."

A lot to discuss here, though like most philosophical texts, this one is participating in an ongoing conversation, mostly as critique; the voices here include: Nietzsche (most prominently), Pascal, Liebniz, Hegel, Heidegger, Deleuze, Derrida,... Still, it's halfway readable and it would be a great companion in a study of Nietzsche, since Rosset spins N. as positive and joyful in a way that's new to me; R. speaks a lot about N.'s "beatitude."

[Nayara Almeida]

Mesmo escrito depois, poderia ser um prólogo para Alegria: a força maior.

Parem de lutar contra a corrente, de se afogar na crença de uma realidade fora da realidade, ele diz. Admitam a crueldade do real, duplamente cruel porque também inelutável. Há saúde em admitir a incerteza e suficiência da realidade. Não se escapa do sofrimento, claro. Mas a felicidade implica também um profundo conhecimento da infelicidade.

[Miguel Tomás]

Los capítulos principales son muy potentes, sobre todo el tercero ("Post-scriptum"), en el que elabora una relación esquemática pero muy clara entre el principio de crueldad de la realidad y la crueldad del amor.
Me leí esto de una sentada por el interés que me produjo un análisis que hace Alberto Santamaría de la poesía de Pizarnik (Árbol de Diana), en la que parte de la estética romántica y surrealista como formas del principio de crueldad. Crueldad y crudeza tienen la misma raíz etimológica y para Rosset esa es la forma de la realidad. Para Pizarnik esta crudeza tiene que ser experimentada para lograr una huida (imposible) de la realidad.
Aunque el apéndice, donde se desarrollan las ideas de los dos capítulos iniciales, peca un poco de centrarse en un vocabulario más lógico y nihilista (aunque no es la intención del autor) que no termina de convencer, sigue siendo un librito de filosofía bastante ligero, interesante y que hace decir mmmhmm, que además sabe conjugar el comentario filosófico con el comentario literario (muchos ejemplos son de Proust).
He visto que el contenido de la edición en inglés que está aquí en Goodreads es diferente a la versión que me he leído en español, así que le daré una vuelta a ver si esclarece un poco lo del apéndice (esta versión en español no tiene desperdicio que son 100 paginitas y se lo dejo a quien quiera).

Un fragmento:

Si al amor se le ha podido llamar brujo, en el sentido de hechicero, como lo sugiere el título de una célebre obra de Manuel de Falla, es porque realiza, o más bien parece realizar, una promesa imposible: la de transformar nada en algo, así como la de transformar además, por vía 'inversa, ese mismo algo en nada. Platón acertó de lleno, en El banquete, al llevar el problema del amor al problema ontológico, el arrebato amoroso al sentimiento embriagador de un contacto fugitivo con el ser.

[Awet Moges]

This is a beautiful and mercifully short book of pure philosophistication. As an avid reader of Philosophy books I appreciate those that are succinct and clear to grasp.

Rosset's writing is that of a river with a steady current - you may not know where he's going but you trust he knows the bends and shallows well enough to guide you to new lands of thought.

I was most impressed by his original reading of Nietzsche - quite a departure from the post-structuralists of his time. I also found the physician metaphor endlessly insightful.

I expect a book of Philosophy to be full of insights and theories that leave you reoriented to reality, and better prepared for the next philosopher.

[Christopher]

With this slender volume, it became clear that Rosset was, in his own idiosyncratic way, trying to repeat a sort of existentialist gesture in our time (hear me out). Rosset wants us to confront the absurd fact of existence itself. We may come up with as many prophylactics as we can to separate us from the terror of the Real but we couldn't do anything else as we are the animal that simultaneously wants to know and can't handle its knowledge. Only the great mages, the doctor philosophers, can dance in the joyful acceptance of the Real. This of course is strikingly close to Plato's use of divine vision which gives us access to what lies outside of speech and concrete conception. With Rosset, bringing someone close to the Real drives the weak to suicide. But Socrates is the one who goes on trial for perverting the minds of the youth...

So, by accepting the Real we...well that's where it ends. It's just there and we can do nothing about it. The first essay , The Overwhelming Force, ends on a criticism of reform and "collectivist ideologies." These are indicative of a madness that prevents someone from simply accepting what is. So here we see Rosset repeat the politically quietist elements of existentialism. What are we supposed to do with reality? Just make artwork? Rosset turns his back completely on politics.

There's definitely something to his concept of joy - the first essay is so elegant and dances over such a paradoxical idea that is absolutely essential to understanding Nietzsche (as demonstrated in the great second essay) that it's easy to remember the pleasure you had while reading the VASTLY SUPERIOR The Real and Its Double (which manages to make his case without the apolitical liberal shibboleths that appear, distastefully, here - indeed, this book is only good insofar as it broadens this interrogation of the human desire to be deluded mapped out in brief in the other book).

Speaking of liberal shibboleths, the whole ending of the last essay is about how there is no certainty in philosophy and that the real philosopher is marked by a persistent doubt. Which is accurate - but this feels of a piece with his earlier doubt about the possibility of positive collective political change. He begins to sound like the technocrats who bleat about "complexity" whenever people want to challenge our global oligarchical political order: the world is much more complex than that! you can't simply do x or y - it will break the whole thing! Doubt, while being a central element of philosophy to be sure, has always been a part of the liberal program against radical change. A telling passage here (doesn't this sound like every faux profound centrist you know?):

"The additional virtue of minimalist and uncertain discourse is thus to be inoffensive and not very compromising, to be unable to serve any cause, while an assured discourse can always be suspected of preparing some kind of crusade."

Aside from the fact that a real philosopher is both inoffensive and someone that provokes the desire for suicide amongst the weak, what is striking in Rosset is how, for him, it is as if doubt and committment couldn't exist within the same breast. This book feels like an apolitical program. He constantly uses words like "fanatic" and "martyr" to indicate anyone who doesn't share his Buddhistic acceptance of a cruel world. In fact, the last essay gets downright boring because much of it could have been published in the New Republic without its subscribers batting an eye (which, to me, is a damning indictment of a serious work of theory). The book is insightful and eye-popping in parts but, even though we have very little of his work in English, I'd guess he didn't try to politically situate his thought as Sartre did in his later work. Read THE REAL AND ITS DOUBLE instead (absolutely do read that book).

[Jules]

I picked this up because Zupancic briefly engages Rosset in a hauntingly beautiful passage about love at the end of "What is Sex?". The first and third parts are incredibly illuminating, but admittedly the middle section on Nietzsche really dragged for me.

Rosset's central claim is that reality itself is cruel, and this cruelty is a result of our inability to escape reality, to be able to hold it at an arms length and analyse it. Reality consists not only of inherently fleeting and temporary things, but is also fundamentally indigestible. We are fated to exist within our own context, trapped in what is an inevitably disagreeable condition. But this isn't a pessimistic position; Rosset advocates for a joyful acceptance of this fact, an acceptance of the horrors of reality without being repulsed by this horrors. Even if life is never free of suffering, it is still necessary to embrace the world we have rather than live in delusion.

My favourite part of the book is the beginning of the third section, where Rosset elucidates the role of Philosophy. He compares it to art or to science, arguing that to philosophise is to fundamentally create... a take I greatly enjoy as someone who spent a lot of time specialising in aesthetic theory. What differs between these crafts, to Rosset, is not the level of abstraction, but rather the level of generality--that is the scope of philosophy inherently encompasses a broader scope of knowledge and experience than the detailed orientation of science.

There's this element of cruelty to the activity of philosophy, that reality will never offer up its own rules of decoding, that it is too overwhelming to truly comprehend what the "real" is. I like the distinction Rosset makes between philosophers who try to merely ease pain by indulging further in delusion and philosophers who try and reinforce a greater relationship with the real... it brings to mind airport book stoics or crystal girlies vs the serious and joyful process of true theoretical engagement!

Rosset grasps something I have difficulty putting into words, the way that I write and talk so much because of a fundamental fear of my own annihilation. It's a condition that certainly annoys everyone around me and for which I have no cure, but it's nice to see its engagement in a text like this.

"What I mean by the cruelty of the real, however, the unique and consequently the irredeemable and final character of this reality--a character which forbids one both from holding it at a distance and from attenuating its rigour by taking into consideration some kind of instance which might be exterior to it."

[Federico H]

Repite un poco lo de otros libros, pero sin la parte un poco más optimista.