Les choses sont contra nous

Why? Just why?

Two days before Christmas when half the populace have stopped working, the temperatures are plumbing new global-warming inspired lows and we would rather be powering down in anticipation of a pleasant, food and drink filled festive break - two days before the ever older relatives arrive the bloody boiler breaks down. Why?

There is, of course, a theory - a philosophy brought to us English speakers by that great thinker Paul Jennings. He writes:

This is the nearest English translation I can find for the basic concept of Resistentialisin, the grim but enthralling philosophy now identified with bespectacled, betrousered, two-eyed Pierre-Marie Ventre. In transferring the dynamic of philosophy from man to a world of hostile Things,’ Ventre has achieved a major revolution of thought, to which he himself gave the name ‘Resistentialism’. Things (res) resist (résister) man (homme, understood). Ventre makes a complete break with traditional philosophic method. Except for his German precursors, Freidegg and Heidansiecker, all previous thinkers from the Eleatics to Marx have allowed at least some legitimacy to human thought and effort. Some, like Hegel or Berkeley, go so far as to make man’s thought the supreme reality. In the Resistentialist cosmology that is now the intellectual rage of Paris Ventre offers us a grand vision of the Universe as One Thing – the Ultimate Thing (Dernière Chose). And it is against us.

Ah yes - les choses son contra nous. I knew it had something to do with the French.

Well, just so you know 'things' - some of us are fighting back! While Jennings reports:

Resistentialism thus formalizes hatred both in the cosmological and in the psychological sphere. It is becoming generally realized that the complex apparatus of our modern life – the hurried meals, the dashing for trains, the constant meeting of people who are seen only as ‘functions’: the barman, the wife, etc. – could not operate if our behaviour were truly dictated by the old, reactionary categories of human love and reason. This is where Ventre’s true greatness lies. He has transformed, indeed reversed the traditional mechanism of thought, steered it away from the old dogmatic assumption that we could use Things, and cleared the decks for the evolution of the Thing-process without futile human opposition. Ventre’s work brings us a great deal nearer to the realization of the Resistentialist goal summed up in the words, ‘Every Thing out of Control.’

...some of us are at the forefront - nay, the VANGUARD - of a new order where man reasserts his god-given authority over things. Antiresistentialism is born!

So look out boiler, I'm coming for you first!

....