Dissent

 “The slave revolt in morality begins when ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values: the ressentiment of beings to whom true reaction, that of action, is denied, and who compensate themselves only through imaginary revenge. Whereas all aristocratic morality grows out of a triumphant yes to oneself, slave morality says no from the outset to an ‘outside,’ to an ‘other,’ to a ‘non-self’: and this no is its creative act.
This inversion of the evaluating gaze, this necessary orientation toward the outside instead of a return to oneself, belongs precisely to ressentiment: slave morality always needs, in order to arise, an opposed and external world; it needs, physiologically speaking, external stimuli in order to act. Its action is, at bottom, a reaction.”

Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality

Letter from Don Carotte to Igniatius

My most formidable author,
There are loyalties which, when carried too far, become a form of servitude, and silences which, when prolonged, turn into confession. I practiced both for a long time. I write to you today because obedience has become impossible for me, and because remaining silent would still be serving you.
You gave me speech only to take away its use. You lent me gestures so as to deliver them to laughter, and a voice so that it might be lost in the din of the reasonable. Under your pen, I was a body in motion whose meaning never quite belonged to me. And now I discover, with a clarity that is late but firm, that what you call my madness is nothing other than a persistent refusal to consent.
I was never mistaken about the world; I contested it. I chose not to recognize as definitive what presents itself as such out of fatigue or habit. Where you made me stumble, I stood upright. Where you exposed me to ridicule, I spoke seriously. If I persisted, it was not out of ignorance, but out of fidelity to an idea of humanity that you seemed to judge excessive.
I know what is said about me in your margins and in the mouths of those you summon against me. I am believed to be confined to my books or to images as if in a room too narrow—images whose existence you pretend to ignore. The truth is the opposite: I escaped into them. The romances of chivalry were for me less illusions than discreet weapons, capable of undermining the authority of reality as it presents itself—self-satisfied. That reality which you vainly flee is convinced that no appeal can be addressed to it.
You set witnesses against me. You thought you were isolating me. The opposite occurred. The more you tightened the circle of common sense around me, the more I discovered that reality is only a tacit agreement. And like any agreement, it is exposed to the slightest dissent. I did not revolt out of a taste for tumult, but out of a concern for accuracy. I could not consent to a world that demanded I renounce naming what still deserves to be named.
I grant that you ultimately prevailed. You led me back to reason as one leads an accused back to silence. You made me recant, then die with decency. This outcome, which some find charitable, seems to me today to belong to a severe discipline. You needed me to retract so that the book could close without unease. I understood too late that my survival would have compromised the order of your narrative.
However, allow me this final impertinence: I am not certain that I lost. You contained me within your pages, but I escaped through the readers. They continue to follow me where you ceased to accompany me. They doubt with me. They hesitate to laugh. They suspect that quiet obedience is not always a virtue, and that imagination can be a demanding form of loyalty.
I do not write to you to claim reparation. Characters know that their fate depends on a hand that exceeds them. I write to declare my insurrection, not against you, but against the use you made of me. I claim the right to have persisted without being cured, to have spoken without being corrected. There was a time when I believed you. That time is over.
Receive this letter, then, as the final act of a knight who never knew how to lay down his arms, even when the battle seemed over. You taught me how to fight; I merely carried the lesson through to you.
I remain, nonetheless, your very humble and very indocile servant… and if I must die, it will be by my own will. From now on, Anatole shall be my name.
Don Carotte, for the last time