Communist pent-up rage : a thymotic reading of Brunon Jasieński's I burn Paris

This article looks at Brunon Jasieński's revolutionary novel I burn Paris (Je brûle Paris) in the context of the key ideas of Marxist philosophy and that strand of its contemporary reception which saw in it a blend of agitprop and apocalyptic fiction. A close reading of I burn Paris reveals that its author is anything but an orthodox Marxist and his Marxism is open to all kinds of alterations and ideological variants. The article,inspired by Peter Sloterdijk's discussion of ressentiment, argues that the best way to make sense of those disparities is to treat them not as deviations but as an attempt to converge the ideological vision and the thymos (in the sense given to it by Francis Fukuyama in The End of History and the Last Man); or, in other words, an attempt at tapping and channeling the accumulated rage of the masses to energize the Communist project.