Patrick Négrier, born in 1956, is a French philosopher and author of many books about philosophy, religion, and freemasonry.
OH: You have published many books about philosophy, religion, and esoteric traditions; is your new book about the Beats something new for you? And if so, why now?
PN: This book on the Beats was dictated to me immediately after I published, in my previous ontological work Philosophie de la flore, a detailed passage on Ginsberg’s notion of “flower power.” When I returned to the works of Ginsberg and the other major Beats, I was suddenly carried back to the years of my youth—from January 1976 to April 1977—when, in France, I experimented with hallucinogens and other psychotropic substances among friends, one of whom was an avid reader of the Beats.
This return, in my seventieth year, to my twenty- and twenty-one-year-old self gave my life the sense of a circle coming back, in some way, to its point of departure. In hindsight, I was not greatly surprised by this cyclical phenomenon; other writers and human beings before me have likewise been carried by this same pattern of life bending back toward its own beginnings.
Yet one element was new: studying the literature and lives of the early Beats after fifty years of my own theoretical research—especially in epistemology, ethics, and political philosophy—enabled me to approach them with a philosophical acuity I did not possess at twenty. And this novelty opens onto another: a desire to discover, through reading, the works of the Beat poets who joined the original group after 1950. There are about ten of them, well known to your readers, and I hope to study their work over the coming year.
OH: Apart from one collection of essays—The Philosophy of the Beats (2012)—there hasn’t been much focus in the field on such issues as epistemology or metaphysics: how do you see your book as challenging or changing our understanding of the Beat writers?
PN: I haven’t read Sharin N. Elkholy’s book, nor do I have the slightest idea how most other contemporaries perceive and understand the Beats. I didn’t write to change contemporary perceptions of the Beats, but because their values seem to me today to represent a poetic current and they are both solid and diverse enough to fight against—and ultimately overcome—the contemporary dictatorship that the global, money-driven oligarchy imposes in Europe today, at the cost of human lives and individual freedoms. This is a book of political struggle, but with weapons that are not political in the usual sense—they are poetic and philosophical.
OH: Do you see the Beats in the tradition of the American Transcendentalists, with their interest in Eastern philosophy, rather than in the postwar tradition of French existentialism? How do you see the balance in their work between American and European thought and literature?
PN: Some of the early Beats explicitly referred to the “Transcendentalism” of Emerson, Thoreau, and even Coleridge. I myself have been aligned with this philosophical current for several years. It was therefore my duty to recall the adherence of certain Beats to Transcendentalism. As for Eastern philosophy (Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism), that is another matter. Several Beats studied and practiced it (including Peter Orlovsky, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Bob Kaufman). But we should bear in mind here that the Taoist notion of non-action and the Buddhist notion of non-desire were not unknown to the biblical tradition, which also described non-action in Psalm 130 and non-desire in Psalm 131. The reason is that intelligible realities are not reducible to their cultural expressions: they exist metaphysically, independently of cultures, and can therefore be perceived and grasped by anyone, regardless of their cultural background.
As for post-war French existentialism, which was atheistic—and not without reason, since it is strictly true that existence precedes any essence—the Beats owed nothing to it historically, although they did share one point in common with it: being people of sound judgment, and therefore immanentists, they rightly rejected, like Sartre, the illusion of a divinity transcendent to the world.
I was also struck, while reading the Beats, by the knowledge, respect, and affection they showed for French literature—especially its great works of poetry (in Kerouac and Ginsberg)—as well as for English and Italian literature (in Corso). A francophilia they set alongside their literary and poetic Americanism, particularly that of Whitman. I will not attempt to determine whether the Beats achieved a balance between these two poles of their culture—American and European—for world literature, as the expression of living (natural) revelation when it is truthful, is one. And it is fortunate that translators make anglophone poets known to Europeans, and European poets known to the anglophone world.
OH: Your book seems to emphasise a positive agenda—rather than the focusing on the negative (les “rejets et refus”): can you explain?
PN: I feel behind your question an echo of the fact that you are a specialist in William Burroughs, who, on this point and others, distinguished himself from the other Beats through a certain paranoia, with a dominant focus on several negative aspects of contemporary civilization—which, unfortunately, are very real. Beyond this case, and returning to the general, it can be useful and beneficial to remember that, according to human experience, human consciousness can follow a complete trajectory of perception. In this trajectory, Carlos Castaneda, herald of the Toltec tradition of Mexico, discerned in Six Explanatory Propositions (1985) six successive possible stages, among which the fourth, called “limbo,” pertains to the critical and true perception of real negativities (hence the types of perception, in decreasing intensity, known as nihilism, skepticism, and relativism). This critical perception is only a moment, as it is in principle followed—by the very effect of the natural actualisation of perceptual potentialities—by two further types of perception, with the sixth and final stage being the positive perception of the Self. It is from this ultimate perspective that I situate myself today, without ignoring, denying, or downplaying the gravity of the real negativities perceived during the fourth possible stage of any perception.
OH: Do you see differences between the major Beat writers—for example, between Kerouac and Burroughs or Corso—or is what they have in common more important?
PN: My book enumerates the six values I thought could be identified in the first and foremost Beats (Cassady, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Corso, Huncke), namely: a return to the epistemological question (through the use of hallucinogens and other psychotropic substances), the assertion of sexual freedom, a profession of political anarchism, the primary and ultimate practice of poetry in the etymological and vivid (natural) sense of “creation,” the concern to realise utopia in its positive sense of an ideal city, and finally, the quest for metaphysics. From the perspective of these values, Burroughs seemed to me to differ somewhat from his Beat peers. I noted this and explained it, arguing, for example, that several materials and practices in Burroughs clearly belonged to Surrealism rather than the Beat attitude (even though Kerouac and Ginsberg, who welcomed a Surrealist like Philip Lamantia among them, enjoyed recording many of their dreams—a shared interest with the Surrealists) and that Burroughs foreshadowed the punk movement, which was not the case for the other Beats, even though Kerouac, elsewhere, literally prophesied a return to the “Gothic” (which is not punk).
Another element: the Beats did not share the same religiosity. Cassady worshipped Edgar Cayce, defender of reincarnation; Kerouac was a Christian with Buddhist tendencies; Ginsberg was an atheist Jew and a Buddhist; Burroughs was an atheist interested in reincarnation; and Corso nurtured a triple but hierarchised love—for Christianity, ancient Greece, and what in India satisfied his aesthetic taste. Moreover, beyond their occasional differences of sensibility or culture, the Beats did not all belong to the same anthropic type: reading them closely reveals that Cassady was primarily a man of action; Burroughs and Ginsberg were primarily intellectuals; and Kerouac, Corso, and Huncke were primarily men of heart. These are structurally different types of men, who are not interchangeable, which illuminates the nature and causes of both their convergences and divergences.
From all these aspects and perspectives, what seems most important to me is to consider two things: first, the common values of the Beats (which I have already listed) more than their differences, and second, the fact that together they formed a long-standing circle of friends, practicing conviviality and mutual support. This touches on a crucial point that the ancient Toltecs symbolized with the figure of the “Feathered Serpent,” based on the complementary union of the four anthropic types (the fourth being the courier type, embodied for example by Ferlinghetti, if I am not mistaken). This also highlights one of the notable interests of the Beat Generation: the sociological aspect of their group, which, subconsciously, constitutes one of the reasons for the enduring appeal of the Beats to successive generations of readers up to today.
OH: You see the relevance of the Beat writers for our contemporary struggle against dictatorships and what you call the “oligarchie mondiale de l’argent”: how do you think that their reaction to the economic and political systems of postwar America remains relevant, and where do you think that, because times have changed, it is now dépassé, and no longer relevant?
PN: It seems to me that the six values expressed in the works of the early Beats are eternal and therefore remain valid today for resisting and overcoming—or at least weakening as much as possible—the dictatorship currently exercised in the West by the global and globalist oligarchy. This remains possible insofar as these six values are practiced not only in their positive form, but also in their negative form, which is the systematic and permanent boycott of everything that contradicts them. To boycott is to refuse intellectually, to reject morally, to disdain emotionally, and to ban physically.
There exists today, in the West, an immense war between the worshippers of “Money” and those who cultivate the six transcendentals (true; beautiful; just; social unity; being; good). Yet this war is not new: it dates back to the late XVIIIth century, when the bourgeoisie—victorious in several political “Revolutions” here and there—ended up, by the beginning of the XXIst century, achieving a global degree of imperial power, dominant in the West.
Although since the XVIIIth century the world has changed in its scientific knowledge, its technologies, its apparent political regimes (democracies that have in fact been reduced to their institutions, which, having been absorbed by the oligarchy, have lost the democratic character of their former functioning), and in the state of its legal codes or written Rights (whose earlier liberalism has today been replaced by a systematic negation of the rule of law and notably of the five fundamental individual rights that constitute natural law), it has not changed as a space nor as peoples reduced by the oligarchy to commodities (see, on this point, the work of Guy Debord).
Hence the contemporary relevance of the Beats’ eternal values for restoring in America and elsewhere—particularly with the help of, or through, the EBSN—the return to political anarchism, to “Being,” and to a poetry whose depth, when genuine, has the power to bring down mountains and overthrow walls, as Ginsberg repeated in the tradition of Plato’s Republic. Indeed, true poetry, both in written form and as a way of life and a state of being, is in the fullest sense both affirmation and boycott of everything opposed to it.
2 November 2025
Translated by Lucie Malagnat