Whenever I happen to be in a city of any size, I marvel that riots do not break out every day: massacres, unspeakable carnage, a doomsday chaos. How can so many human beings coexist in a space so confined without destroying each other, without hating each other to death? As a matter of fact, they do hate each other, but they are not equal to their hatred. And it is this mediocrity, this impotence, that saves society, that assures its continuance, its stability. Occasionally some shock occurs by which our instincts profit; but afterward we go on looking each other in the face as if nothing had happened, cohabiting without too obviously tearing each other to shreds. Order is restored, a ferocious calm as dreadful, ultimately, as the frenzy that had interrupted it. Yet I marvel still more that some of us, society being what it is, have ventured to conceive another one altogether-a different society. What can be the cause of so much naivete, or of so much inanity? If the question is normal enough, even ordinary, the curiosity that led me to ask it, on the other hand, has the excuse of being morbid. Seeking new evidence, and just as I despaired of finding anything of the kind, it occurred to me to consult utopian literature, to steep myself in its "masterpieces," to wallow in them. There, to my great delight, I sated my pentitential longings, my appetite for mortification. To spend months recording the dreams of a better future, of an "ideal" society, devouring the unreadable-what a windfall! I hasten to add that this tedious literature has much to teach, and that time spent frequenting it is not entirely wasted. From the start, one discerns in it the (fruitful or calamitous) role taken, in the genesis of events, not by happiness but by the idea of happiness, an idea that explains-the Age of Iron being coextensive with history-why each epoch so eagerly invokes the Age of Gold. Suppose we put an end to such speculations: total stagnation would ensue. For we act only under the fascination of the impossible: which is to say that a society incapable of generating-and of dedicating itself to-a utopia is threatened with sclerosis and collapse. Wisdom-fascinated by nothing-recommends an existing, a given happiness, which man rejects, and by this very rejection becomes a historical animal, that is, a devotee of imagined happiness. "A new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away," we read in Revelations. Cross out "heaven," just keep the "new earth," and you have the secret and the recipe of all utopian systems; for greater precision, perhaps you should put "city" for "earth"; but that is only a detail; what counts is the prospect of a new advent, the fever of an essential expectation-a debased, modernized Parousia from which arise those systems so dear to the disinherited. Poverty is in fact the utopianist's great auxiliary, it is the matter he works in, the substance on which he feeds his thoughts, the providence of his obsessions. Without poverty he would be empty; but poverty occupies him, allures or embarrasses him, depending on whether he is poor or rich; from another point of view, poverty cannot do without him-it needs this theoretician, this adept of the future, especially since poverty itself, that endless meditation on the likelihood of escaping its own present, would hardly endure its dreariness without the obsession of another earth. Can you doubt it? If so, it is because you have not tasted utter indigence. Do so and you will see that the more destitute you are, the more time and energy you will spend in reforming everything, in thinking-in other words, in vain. I have in mind not only institutions, human creations: those of course you will condemn straight off and without appeal; but objects, all objects, however insignificant. Unable to accept them as they are, you will want to impose your laws and your whims upon them, to function at their expense as legislator or as tyrant; you will even want to intervene in the life of elements in order to modify their physiognomy, their structure. Air annoys you: let it be transformed! And stone as well. And the same for the vegetal world, the same for man. Down past the foundations of being, down to the strata of chaos, descend, install yourself there! When you haven't a penny in your pocket, you strive, you dream, how extravagantly you labor to possess All, and as long as the frenzy lasts, you do possess that All, you equal God, though no one realizes it, not even God, not even you. The delirium of the poor is the generator of events, the source of history: a throng of hysterics who want another world, here and now. It is they who inspire utopias, it is for them that utopias are written. But utopia, let us remember, means nowhere. And where would these cities be that evil never touches, in which labor is blessed and death is never feared? There one is constrained to a felicity of geometric idylls, of adjusted ecstasies, of a thousand disgusting wonders necessarily offered by the spectacle of a perfect world, a fabricated world. In ludicrous detail, Campanella tells us about the Solarians exempt from "gout, rheumatism, catarrh, sciatica, colic, hydropsy flatus . . . . " Everything abounds in the City of the Sun "because each man is eager to distinguish himself in what he does. The leader who presides over each thing is called: King . . . . Women and men, divided into bands, go about their work without ever infringing the orders of their kings, and without ever appearing fatigued, as we do. They regard their leaders as fathers or as older brothers." We shall recognize the same twaddle in other works of the genre, particularly in those of a Cabet, a Fourier, or a Morris, all lacking in that touch of rancor so necessary to literary works, and not only those. To conceive a true utopia, to sketch, with conviction, the structure of an ideal society, requires a certain dose of ingenuousness, even of stupidity, which, being too evident, ultimately exasperates the reader. The only readable utopias are the false ones, the ones that, written in a spirit of entertainment or misanthropy, prefigure or recall Gulliver's Travels, that Bible of the disabused, quintessence of nonchimerical visions, a utopia without hope. By his sarcasms, Swift undeceived a genre to the point of destroying it.