There is a sentence by René Char that is often misquoted, and which I want first to set down correctly, because this whole project hangs on the thread it stretches. In the Feuillets d'Hypnos, written during the Resistance and published in 1946, Char notes: "Our inheritance is preceded by no testament." Hannah Arendt takes it as the epigraph of Between Past and Future, and she makes of it far more than an elegant turn of phrase. She reads in it the very condition of modern man: we receive a world, but no one has handed down to us the instructions for what we receive. The inheritance is there — the institutions, the languages, the freedoms wrested from tyranny, the techniques — but the meaning that was meant to accompany it, the word that was meant to say why all of this had been made, that word has been lost.
That is where I begin. Not from enthusiasm, but from perplexity.
We live in an abundance that no longer tells its own story. Never has a civilization produced so many means and known so little what it wanted to do with them. We know how to connect the planet in real time, to automate speech, to produce images without painters, texts without writers, decisions without anyone responsible; yet we are incapable of saying which form of life deserves these powers.
The diagnosis I want to offer is not one of collapse; catastrophism has itself become a comfortable way of deciding nothing. The ill of the present is not that it is crumbling; it is that it works. It turns, it produces, it distributes, it entertains, and no one, inside the machine, can any longer say to what end. We have inherited the results without inheriting the reasons. This is the inheritance without a testament: not the absence of goods, but the absence of the will that willed them.
One can live a long time this way, as the usufructuary of a capital one does not renew. That is what we are doing. But a usufructuary invents nothing; he consumes. And the feeling that is spreading — this gentle, almost comfortable weariness, this conviction that nothing new can begin any longer — is only the psychological translation of a political truth: we have ceased to believe ourselves capable of beginning again. Arendt called this natality: the fact that every coming into the world is the possibility of an absolute beginning. It is this faculty that the present atrophies. Not through tyranny, but through fatigue.
What the name means
So why New Atlantis? The name is not decorative. In 1627, Francis Bacon left unfinished a Nova Atlantis, the tale of an island where an institution — Salomon's House — methodically organizes knowledge of the world in order to improve the human condition. What matters in Bacon, and what holds me, is not the dream of a perfect island. It is the reversal he performs: utopia is no longer a contemplation, a nowhere-place where one consoles oneself for real imperfection. It becomes a workshop. A programme. A way of working upon the world rather than fleeing it.
To take up this name again is to refuse the two temptations that have exhausted the word utopia. The first is reverie: utopia as escape, as a postcard of a frictionless elsewhere where evil has been abolished by imaginary decree. The second, graver still, is the totalitarian temptation: the utopia which, unable to bear that reality resists, sets out to bend men to its plan. The last century showed where such zeal leads: the worst regimes were utopias furious at not being obeyed.
An adult utopia
Between these two reefs, I would like to hold to a difficult phrase: an adult utopia.
Adult, because it knows the price of things. The naïve utopia believes that the good is easy and that only an accident, a system, a class, an enemy, prevents its coming. The adult utopia takes account of the tragic: it knows that the values it pursues contradict one another, that no arrangement satisfies them all at once, and that one must choose without ever having the peace of having chosen well. It does not promise reconciliation; it organizes conflict so that it remains fertile rather than murderous.
It is in this light that one must read the values this project lays claim to — not as a list of virtues that would add up neatly, but as forces that pull in opposite directions, and whose unstable equilibrium is precisely what must be built.
Sovereignty and freedom are forever at odds. A people that wants to decide for itself must give itself rules that, at every instant, limit each person's freedom. Too much sovereignty crushes; too much freedom dissolves. The point of balance between the two is not found once and for all: it is negotiated, it is lost, it is remade. To name the two together is to refuse to sacrifice one to the other.
Autonomy and prosperity seem to go hand in hand — they often contradict each other. Prosperity is born of exchange, and therefore of dependence; autonomy demands the ability, if need be, to do without the other. A community that exchanges nothing grows poor; a community that has delegated everything outside itself no longer belongs to itself. To seek autonomy is not to preach autarky: it is to want to master what one cannot do without, and to accept exchanging the rest.
Responsibility and faith, finally, are the two sides of a single demand: to act amid uncertainty. Responsibility is to answer for what one does before those who will bear its effects — including those not yet born. Faith (not necessarily adherence to a dogma, but that minimal confidence without which no long action is possible) is the wager that action is worthwhile even though nothing guarantees its outcome. One never undertakes anything great on certainties. A society that has unlearned how to believe in anything has also unlearned how to act; it manages, it administers, it survives.
These tensions are not flaws in the programme. They are its very matter. A utopia that denied them would fall back into naïveté; a utopia that claimed to settle them once and for all would fall back into terror. To hold them together, without dissolving them, is the adult work.
The wager
What, then, does it mean to inherit a world without a testament? It means that meaning will not be given to us; that it falls to us to write it. Not to rediscover it, like a hidden thing one need only unearth, but to compose it, in uncertainty, knowing that others before us have failed and that we too may fail. The missing testament is not a loss to be mourned: it is a page left blank, and the only freedom that counts is the freedom to write upon it.
New Atlantis is not a place, nor a promise of collective happiness, nor a map of the future. It is a workshop (in Bacon's sense) where we try to think seriously about what a lucid new beginning would be: neither flight from the world, nor violence done to the world, but patient work upon what we have received without knowing why.
I am calling no one to dream. Dreaming is easy, and it costs nothing. I am calling to this, which is harder: to take up the inheritance as one's own, to assume its contradictions without fleeing them, and to accept writing the testament that no one left us, knowing that it will have to be written again.
New Atlantis begins there: not in the dream of a perfect world, but in the decision to become once more worthy of what we have inherited.
But a decision that remains a sentence is worth nothing. This new beginning must take a form, and a form is built slowly, piece by piece.
This text is the first of a whole. What begins here on this blog is meant to become a book — not written in advance and then cut up, but built as it goes, article after article, as one builds without having the complete plan of the edifice. Each text will carry its #chapter at the end, because all of them are ordered by a single movement, the movement of any honest thought confronted with the real.
The first chapter looks at the world as it is. Not to deplore it nor to celebrate it, but to understand it: in what world do we really live, and what, within it, calls for something else? This is the survey of the ground, and it must be without complacency, for one does not refound what one has not first looked at squarely.
The second chapter dares utopia. If we could build, what would the world we desire look like? Not the perfect world — we have said what frictionless dreams are worth — but the desirable world, the one toward which it is worth striving while knowing we will never fully reach it.
The third chapter is the most difficult, and it is here that most give up. How does one pass from the one to the other? Between the world as it is and the world as we would want it stretches the only territory that truly counts: that of the passage, of the means, of the renunciations, of the marching orders. A utopia that neglects this chapter is merely a consolation; an action that neglects the first two is merely agitation.
And the fourth chapter poses the question that utopias almost always avoid, because it comes after their supposed victory. Grant the world refounded, necessity vanquished, prosperity secured: what, then, shall we do with our lives? For what are we here? It is the oldest question, the one that abundance does not resolve but reveals, and I do not believe one can found anything lasting by refusing to face it. That chapter will be metaphysical, and at moments spiritual, without apology.
There is the order. Four chapters, a single movement: to understand, to desire, to act, and finally to ask why. What follows is only the beginning of the first.