Quelques notes sur le "pouvoir"

Unpublished autograph manuscript comprising 6 and a quarter leaves written in black ink, containing around twenty notes and digressive reflections relating to the exercise of power.
- "Where does the law come from? From power. The law is the voice and instrument of power. Power precedes the law and gives birth to it."
- "The working masses are not about to accept, nor to consider as political, the rape of a little girl – nor of a little boy. We live in such a moral climate that it first makes us pity the pain of the parents, it makes us reject the cruelty of the act... The worker needs a certain respectability in order to stand equal here with the present bourgeois classes (the aristocracy has disappeared). We must look ever more closely at what servile labor consists of, and what it entails."
- "Work as a virtue fostered a new morality, and if it was all the more distant and disregarded by the aristocrat, the people held to it. (I am not speaking of what broke out in 1789, but of what was gradually formed, as serfs escaped, in one way or another, from serfdom.) In 1789, this new morality had reached its point, and what had carried it (word illegible) to the extreme had become what was called the bourgeoisie. Bound to this new morality of work, they also aspired to an 'imitation'—but an imitation only—and the morality was stronger than the still prestigious pretensions of the declining nobility."
- "If there is an essence of power, it remains hidden. But the manifestation of power, even if not ostentatious, seeks to be recognized and visible. For instinct, one must accept the enigma."
- "Rousseau, a foundling, abandons his children to public care: no one cares. It is probable that Dostoevsky raped a little girl: no one cares. The Brothers Karamazov is indeed a revolutionary book."