The entire intellectual and political history of the 19th and 20th centuries can be defined as a struggle against the bourgeois spirit. Nietzsche, Artaud, Baudelaire, Marx, Heidegger, Freud, Rimbaud, Dada, surrealism, Situationism, punk… Each, in its own way, has demonstrated, written or screamed out to bring an end to bourgeois thought. But their history is also one of failure: the failure to assassinate the bourgeois spirit. Why? The bourgeois spirit reigns triumphant. A subtle blend of cowardice, lies, cynicism and deadly neuroses, it thrives as it undergoes metamorphoses. In the opposite corner, its dialectic opponent, the shrill, verbose anti-bourgeois – so trendy nowadays – takes on ever more grotesque and inefficient shapes.

Attempting to Assassinate My Inner Bourgeois tries to escape from the infernal cleavage between the bourgeois and its opposite, the anti-bourgeois, be they left or right-wing. Taking as its starting point Dada’s radical rebellion in 1916, this book is a theoretical and practical attempt to define a joyful, elegant and serene individual who could finally be described as non- bourgeois. A being sturdy enough to track down the bourgeois in his favorite hiding place: within oneself. A being quite simply capable of bearing and incarnating life…