Gao Xingjian and "Soul Mountain" : Ambivalent Storytelling

Summary: A Texas writer who listens to “Soul Mountain” while driving in his car around Houston describes Gao Xingjian’s ambivalence towards the modern novel and traditional storytelling.

The Peripatetic Novel

This review is a little special: it’s about a book I heard completely while driving around in my car. I recently returned to my home town, Houston, a city where people spend unbearable amounts of time in the solitude of their cars, driving from work to home and work again. In Houston waiting in traffic is synonymous with living. One passes through neighborhoods in air-conditioned comfort, cursing the red lights and slow-moving cars. The purpose of Houston life, it seems, is to wander around without having to feel the breeze or notice the trees, people or shops. The only interruption to the routine are the weekly visits to the gas station, where the traveler parks, inserts his debit card into the machine and pumps gas into his tank Then, if he is lucky, he can leave as quickly as he came, merging into the grumbling fog of traffic.

John Grisham, American contemporary novelist

The second oldest of five siblings was born in Jonesboro, Arkansas, to Southern Baptist parents of modest means. His father worked as a construction worker and a cotton farmer; his mother was a homemaker.[1] After moving frequently, the family settled in 1967 in the town of Southaven in De Soto County, Mississippi, where Grisham graduated from Southaven High School. He played as a quarterback for the school football team. Unlike the main character in his 2003 novel, Bleachers (novel), he wasn’t an All-American football player. Encouraged by his mother, the young Grisham was an avid reader, and was especially influenced by the work of John Steinbeck whose clarity he admired.

In 1977, Grisham received a Bachelor of Science degree in accounting from Mississippi State University. While studying at MSU, the author began to keep a journal, a practice that would later assist in his creative endeavors. Grisham tried out for the baseball team at Delta State University, but was cut by the coach, who was the former Boston Red Sox pitcher Dave Ferriss. He earned his J.D. degree from the University of Mississippi School of Law in 1981. During law school, Grisham switched interests from tax law to criminal and general civil litigation. Upon graduation, he entered a small-town general law practice for nearly a decade in Southaven, where he focused on criminal law and civil law representing a broad spectrum of clients. As a young attorney, he spent much of his time in court proceedings.

Edward Said’s Out of Place: a Memoir

Out of Place: a memoir is the account of Edward Said’s life prior to his professional career. As such, it helps to explain some of the many paradoxes of Said’s identity as a public intellectual, literary theorist and political activist. The conditions of Said’s life are crucial to an understanding of his theories, political and literary.

Faced with a possibly fast approaching death, Out of Place: A memoir was written with a sense of urgency: Edward Said tries to make sense of the early part his own life, to reflect on the past and how it has transpired into the present. Said, a distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at Columbia University, a celebrated public intellectual and one of the world’s best known advocates of Palestinian issues, was diagnosed with leukemia in 1991 and began to write this memoir in 1994.

Descartes

” It was at the same time of an adventurous and prompt nature to fold up itself “

Discussion with Genevieve Rodis-Lewis, by François Ewald
Literary magazine n° 342
April 1996

” I thus doubt I exist ; or what is the same thing : I think, therefore I exist. “Descartes

Genevieve Rodis-Lewis devoted her life to Descartes. Its work on metaphysics, morals, anthropology, marked contemporary knowledge. In its biography, undoubtedly final (” Descartes “, éd.Calmann-Lévy), it only did not correct the errors of its precursors, but did not seek to include/understand the character of the Descartes man.

Q – Why a new biography of Descartes ?

Genevieve Rodis-Lewis – There is a great biography of Descartes, which completion date of the XVIIe century, very invaluable. It was recently reprinted : that of Adrien Baillet (” Life of Mr Descartes “, Ed.La Round Table). He saved texts which, since, were mislaid. For example, the very important account of the dreams, of which one knows nothing without his biography. But Baillet had a defect : on the many points on which it had an uncertainty or an ignorance, it invented. Thus it made a certain error count : on the nobility of the family of Descartes it was deceived by the great nephews ; it confused the grandfather who was a doctor with another Pierre Descartes who had released Poitiers besieged by the Protestants. It affirmed that, junior by a great family, Descartes were intended for the army, which is false. It was mistaken on the dates in the schooling (it gives : Easter 1604 to 1612), which has a certain importance because the name depends on it on its professor of philosophy. Since the biography of Baillet, there was at least another of it : that which Adam published with volume XII of the large edition of Descartes that it carried out with Tannery at the beginning of the century. It was not reprinted at the time of the supplemented republication of the 11 volumes of works of the Sixties. Unfortunately Adam reproduced, in the major part of the work, and for the dates of the studies of Descartes to the college of the Arrow in particular, the errors of Baillet, even if it rectified some in the appendices of them.

Q- How can one manage to rectify these errors today ?

Genevieve Rodis-Lewis – Let us take the example of the schooling of Descartes. Descartes had a bad health. For this reason, one did not send it to the college when it was eight years old. One kept it at the house where somebody learned how to him to read and to write. Then a relative of the family (on the maternal side), the Charlet Father, was named with the college of the Jesuits of the Arrow. The boy grew. One thus wondered whether one could send to it. The Charlet Father obtained a particular mode to him which contributed much to support its intellectual development : there could remain the morning in its bed, with reading and meditating.
It is not of no importance to know if that occurs when Descartes is eleven years old or eight. Baillet knew, always by the family, until one had waited the end of the winter and the Lent for sending to it. Adam, when it gives up finally the dates of Baillet knowing that the Charlet Father had arrived at the Arrow in 1606, did not make check that it arrived there only in October. If Descartes entered there at the end of the winter and the carème, it can be only at Easter 1607. What makes it leave in 1615, it made then a year of right in Poitiers, which corresponds to the wish of his/her father who wanted that his/her children are parliamentary (it was necessary, indeed, three successive generations so that a family can acquire letters of knighthood). Here are as many elements as I could rectify : I made check in the files of the Jesuits the arrival of the Charlet Father to the Arrow in October 1606 – it still preached in Paris at the time of the Lent. Here are of small chronological details which have, inter alia consequences, to determine the name of the professor of philosophy (E Christmas, to which Descartes writes personally to send the “Discourse on Method to him “).

Q – Was your ambition only to rectify errors ?

Genevieve Rodis-Lewis – I especially wanted to show the complexity of the character of Descartes, sometimes hard, violent but with qualities that Baillet indicated without showing them. Baillet speaks about its aptitude for the reconciliation, whose one has several examples. I add to it a certain oecumenism which had never been noticed. An alternative between a letter autograph in Huygens and the version published at the XVIIe century by Clerselier makes it possible to note it. It spoke about the Protestants while saying : ” I hope that the religion will do all to us to be found as friends ; Clerselier had corrected : ” the return to our religion “. Descartes had sometimes bad character, but it had many friendly truths.

Q – Descartes initially chose a military career.

Genevieve Rodis-Lewis – Indeed, it had chosen to be a soldier. It was not a paternal will. A little more than one year after having made its right, it could leave at 22 years for Breda where much French engaged under the weapons of Maurice de Nassau. It was very quickly disappointed. It was enthusiastic which all the more lent to disappointment. It spoke about the vulgarity and the ignorance of his comrades in arms. There remained there end of 1617 or beginning 1618 until spring 1619. Then it left for Germany where the Thirty year old prepared war ; it wanted to take part in battles, but did not want to live among désoeuvrées troops. The battles started only next spring. It went to see the crowning of the Emperor in Frankfurt. Then it found in Neubourg on the Danube a place where it could work in loneliness. Many editors of the ” Discourse on Method “, reading at the beginning of the second part which it withdrew in a ” district “, think that they are the ” winter quarters ” of the soldiers. There but it could not have been in loneliness and have worked quietly. Did it engage in spring ? It had to approach certain battles. It gives small picturesque details : the soldier who believes himself wounded whereas it is its belt which obstructs it, or it saw somebody whose armour was touched by a ball and who was not wounded. It thus saw battles. But did it really engage in the army of Bavaria ? I do not know anything of it ; because as of this moment, it found its ” way ” : the explanation of nature, according to a mathematical model. But he is not yet a metaphysician.
He thus spent this winter to Germany and y lived the dreams of November 1619. When did it return to France ? It is known only that it returned by Strasbourg : two later letters refer one to the cock of the clock, the other with the tower of the cathedral.

Q – Why does it engage in the army ? Why this military passion ? You say yourself that, young person, it was rather weak and spent his mornings to the bed.

Genevieve Rodis-Lewis – Initially, it had found a rather good health at the exit of the college. As for the desire to be a soldier, in the ” Speech “, there is this allusion : ” I was not insensitive with glory “. However when, at the end of its life, he wrote for the Christine queen of Sweden a Ballet for the birth of peace – it was the end of the Thirty year old war -, the Volunteers, to the second entry, say that, if their chief has as an injury the Victoire, theirs is its following : Glory. And, little before this mention ” glory ” in the ” Discourse on Method “, which says Descartes of the teaching of the history explains this aspiration : it reproaches him for privileging the high facts, which leads the young people ” to fall into extravagances from the paladins from our novels and to conceive intentions which pass their forces “. They are there only allusions so that it had believed to be its vocation. That confirms its character active, adventurous, enthusiastic, demanding and prompt to be disappointed, to be folded up. What one finds in the glance that gives him Franz Hals in the famous portrait which it made of him : interrogative, projected ahead and being wary, folded up at the same time on itself. There is always this double movement at Descartes : to advance while remaining careful.

Q – The Thirty year old is War presents in the work of Descartes ?

Genevieve Rodis-Lewis – Only by the Ballet which he wrote for the Christine queen of Sweden. Withdrawn in the Netherlands in a place which, in spite of the war, remained perfectly calm, it found there greatest peace compared to the external events.

Q – It was voluntarily disengaged ?

Genevieve Rodis-Lewis – As of the moment when it was dedicated to science.

Q- What wants to say exactly ” deserted ” which is the word that Descartes for saying uses that it is withdrawn ?

Genevieve Rodis-Lewis – It is a term which one usually employed in connection with the saints, of the hermits who withdrew themselves to meditate in loneliness. For Descartes, essence was to preserve its loneliness, which was possible even in a city very populated like Amsterdam, bus, says it, each one there is so occupied with its profit that one leaves you quiet. When it undertook to establish a metaphysics whose base would be God, it had been withdrawn in France in the countryside. But the French courtesy makes that the ” small neighbors “, like he says, came to disturb it. It is what led it to go to settle in the Netherlands where it always could do what it wanted.

Q – Did French civility prevent it from working ?

Genevieve Rodis-Lewis – This same civility that it finds when it returns to France for a few months : it returned three times, in 1644, 1647 and 1648. (When the Sling bursts in 1648, it set out again at once). It will say in connection with its last stays that far too many people came to see it, like a curiosity ; (according to its own terms : ” like an elephant or a panther “).

Q – What means the word ” meditation ” ? Does it act of the resumption of techniques or spiritual traditions ?

Genevieve Rodis-Lewis – It made its studies in a college of Jesuits, where there were retirements, which marked it. But it is a transposition, since it thinks that the reflexion on the dogmas and the mysteries raises of a particular vocation that it does not have. The Cartesian reflexion remains rational. Descartes establishes ontological, substantial separation between two types of be or of radically different substances, the thought, therefore the heart and in addition the bodies. Admittedly at the end of its life, it will meditate on the irrational fact of the union between the heart and the body ; but their distinction makes that rationally one can be sure that when the body dies, or is sick, the heart does not die with the body. Can one là-même affirm his immortality ? He corrected the title of the second edition of the ” Meditations ” where his/her friend Mersenne had subtitled ” immortality “. Because their persistence after death depends on God. And it adds : ” Since it now revealed to us that that will not arrive, there us should not remain any doubt any more “. It is the distinction between what it looks like rational and what concerns the faith. Because Descartes was sincerely believing ; I even suppose that it passed from science to metaphysics after having heard the account of died of that which it had chosen for chief, Maurice de Nassau : whereas one asked him in what it believed, this last had answered : ” I believe that two and two are four “, formula which takes again textually Dom Juan de Molière. It was as the password of the atheists and I believe that Descartes, from there, whereas he was a scientist, saw that it had (it repeats it on several occasions) to be shown that the existence of God is more certain than mathematics. Without God, one does not have certainty, not a mathematical model. It is fundamental.

Q – Which is the contribution of Descartes ?

Genevieve Rodis-Lewis – Something which marked all posterior philosophy : the philosophical reflexion starts with the awakening of the subject which thinks ; one manages to explain the world only at the end of a long route. Before Descartes, one left the world present, with the qualities projected on the things and which one sought to explain. From the world, one went up with a cause first. Descartes even shows God before knowing if there is a world. And when it discovers this world, it is identified with extended from the matter. However the extent, mathematics can explain it. On the contrary, all qualities it is we who test them according to this union with the bodies. You see blue, you feel heat, it is you. There is a true revolution.

Q – There is thus a true Cartesian revolution.
Genevieve Rodis-Lewis – There is a rupture with former philosophy by this priority given to the thought. And this because he wanted to destroy the doubt by the doubt. It was the opposite of Montaigne which fell asleep on its mol pillow.

Q – From which does this idea come from the doubt ?

Genevieve Rodis-Lewis – ambient skepticism and in particular of Montaigne. The scholastic was already collapsing at the time when it makes its studies. Recently, one discovered a work which was offered to him to Neubourg in 1620 by a Jesuit : ” the Wisdom ” of Cartwright ; who accentuates this doubt in universal negation : ” I do not know ” (nothing).

Q- And this exercise of the hyperbolic doubt ?

Genevieve Rodis-Lewis – Hyperbolic, that wants to say thorough until the end. Descartes doubted even mathematics, while doubting God ; it doubted itself, but it is there that, abruptly, the obviousness emerges : I doubt, and I cannot doubt only I doubt ; to doubt, it is to think ; and it is to think in an imperfect way. All that is seized in only one intuition : I doubt, therefore I do not know well. Why do I suffer from it ? Because I have this ideal of perfection. It is the essence of the demonstration of the existence of God ; a very simple step finally. But it recovers very quickly to the study from science.

Q – For Descartes the exercises metaphysics should not take time too much.

Genevieve Rodis-Lewis – When it published the ” Discourse on Method “, it gave only one very weakened summary of it, for fear the weak spirits do not remain prisoners of the doubt. Envisaging a Latin translation, it initially thought of joining to it a beginning of metaphysics written in Latin and that it had stopped to explain the famous forgery suns which one had observed close to Rome. Finally it developed it and supplemented by writing the ” Meditations metaphysics “, published with the answers to the objections that one addressed to him. Descartes always aimed at an unquestionable truth. As soon as it is in possession of the certainty of the principles, it sticks to développmement science. It is what it expresses in the foreword with the translation of the ” Principles ” : metaphysics, they is the roots from which the tree leaves. And it will pass its life to develop the tree : physics, the trunk, and them branches, medicine, mechanics, and morals. All the end of its life, it will be devoted to morals according to the union of the heart and the body.

Q – Wasn’t Cartesian morals condemned to remain ” provisional ” ?

Genevieve Rodis-Lewis – makes some, there were two morals : morals by provision, necessary while it lived the doubt, it was necessary well that it has some simple rules to act. They are borrowed from Montaigne and Charron : to follow the laws and habits of the countries where it saw, not to remain irresolute while it does not know. This morals is completely different with the morals which forms part of the branches of the tree and which is nourished by the trunk of physics.

Q – From which does the topic come from the firmness of the will ?

Genevieve Rodis-Lewis – It was a rule which it gave itself because it tended itself to make promises and not always to hold them. With Descartes, one must rigorously distinguish promises and wishes. Because it distinguishes very well these promises which block our freedom then which makes that they are not always followed, while the religious wishes and the contracts imply an obligation.

Q – How would you summarize Cartesian morals ?

Genevieve Rodis-Lewis – To seek the truth, to distinguish what is true of what is illusory, and then, to act as consequence.

Q – One allots to Descartes the maxim to live hidden…

Genevieve Rodis-Lewis – It is a formula which it repeats. There is also the famous one ” I advance masked ” who am at the beginning of the register that it had started to fill after the departure of his friend Beekmann. Maxime Leroy in drew his ” Descartes, the philosopher with the mask “, interpreting it like veiling intellectual libertinage. That appears insupportable to me. Initially because Descartes wrote this formula on a book which was intended to be seen of nobody ; and it had started with a sentence of the Bible : ” the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom ” Gouhier in gave a rather plausible interpetation : ” Here me am believed military, but I maitnenant chose another way “.

Q – That does not give a great general information to the maxim…

Genevieve Rodis-Lewis – not too much to show itself to keep its independence. It is always this double movement : to go from front but to retain themselves at the same time not to be disturbed by the others.

Q – It is said that Descartes would have been very careful in the divuglation of its ideas. Knowing misfortunes of Galileo with the Church, it would have preferred to keep for him its clean discovered not to be worried.

Genevieve Rodis-Lewis – It is a fact that he had written a rough work entitled ” the World “, which was to be supplemented by the study of the man. He worked there. He repeated in Mersenne that he was going to send the next winter to him, not in spring, not with the autumn. He always developed his work. When it learns the judgment from Galileo, it is said : I do not want to have the same troubles, I keep my manuscript and I will write another thing. Thus it published the ” Discourse on Method “. However, in the Netherlands where it lived, it was not likely to be imprisoned. But he did not want that his book is condemned, that it is destroyed.

Q – How did it live in the Netherlands ?

Genevieve Rodis-Lewis – Descartes had money by the revenues inherited his/her mother. That had enabled him to be voluntary without balance. It wanted to be free. It lived rather simply with a servant. In the ” Speech “, he writes that he was of a condition which did not oblige it to make a trade. He had wanted to be neither parliamentary nor doctor like his ancestors.

Q – Does one know his timetable ? It had a regulated life ?

Genevieve Rodis-Lewis – One knows by a rather picturesque history that it had continued to like to work with the bed the morning, fenestrates open. What was the only means by which then the primary infections tubercular patients were cured. How it known is ? At the time of a stay in Paris, it placed in a friend. But because of visits which disturbed it, it had left with its servant without leaving of address. Its host meets the servant, asks him where Descartes took refuge. The servant led there. Before entering, the friend looks by the keyhole : Descartes was with the bed with a book beside him, the open window. One can imagine that it still observed this practice in the Netherlands.

Q – In the Netherlands, it did not have public life at all… one does not know his relational life…

Genevieve Rodis-Lewis – It had good Dutch friends. A French, Barb, often lived with him, and were occupied of his material businesses. It is him which translated the ” Principles ” of Latin into French.

Q – Why does it leave Holland for Sweden, where it will find death ?

Genevieve Rodis-Lewis – It was let try. Why did it choose to leave for the winter ? It had a good memory of this winter spent in what one called a part a “stove” – i.e. a part heated by a “stove” – i.e. heated by a stove maintained since the close part, therefore without smoke, without sparks, without one being disturbed by the maintenance of fire. It had of it a so good memory which it had to say that, in these very cold countries, one was to be very well heated the winter. However, the Christine queen, who had invited it, had thought that awaking early, it would have the free spirit while starting by studying philosophy at five hours of the morning. And it was happy that such an intelligent and curious princess invited it to teach it.

Q – It liked to correspond with the women, with the princesses.

Genevieve Rodis-Lewis – Not because they were princesses, but because they was exceptional women and who was interested in philosophy. As of the ” Discourse on Method “, Descartes had wished that the women be able to hear something there.

Q – Which is the topicality of Descartes today ?

Genevieve Rodis-Lewis – It is exceptional, in the history of the ideas, which one celebrates a book : the ” Discourse on Method ” honoured by congresses and publications in the whole world, in 1937, and still again for its 350E birthday in 1987. Already in 1896, there had been some celebrations of its birth in 1596. See the list of the commemorations envisaged this year ; it is absoluement extraordinary.

Q – Does it act of a return towards Descartes, of a reactualization of the Cartesianism ?

Genevieve Rodis-Lewis – It is the universal recognition which it has in the history of the ideas an exceptional importance. But that does not want to say that one is quite Cartesian.

Q – Did he know, like one says, of the moments of ” purgatory ” ?

Genevieve Rodis-Lewis – One hardly any more publishes it at the XVIIIe century, but in 1765 the French Academy puts at the contest a praise of Descartes. There were five of it, including two which was preceded. Voltaire prefaced that which had had the first price. Then, with Victor Cousin, at the XIXe century one started to put the ” Discourse on Method ” at the program in secondary education ; from where an imposing number of editions of this work.

Q – Since the large edition of Adam-Tannery, there did it have a new edition of Descartes ?

Genevieve Rodis-Lewis – the edition Adam-Tannery was re-examined and supplemented in the Sixties, which already makes it possible to speak about a new edition. The Vrin bookshop into present, at the end of March, a more handy edition, reproducing the 11 volumes of Adam-Tannery in 11 volumes connected, a smaller format. There was an edition of the Pleiad without notes by André Bridoux. In this moment, one prepares for Gallimard a new Pleiad in several volumes with introductions, notes… (probably two volumes for complete Works and later, correspondence).
Inliterary magazine n°342 – April 1996

Genevieve Rodis-Lewis is author of ” Descartes ” (Ed.Calmann-Levy) biography remarkable where it analyzes the fundamental correlation between doubt and ideal, which melts the ” cogito “, and highlights how much its philosophy keeps this air of innovation which made admiration or caused the concern of its contemporaries. A biography which wants to be a ” effort to still include/understand better this work which brings us closer alive Descartes “.

Ulysses, from one exile to another

By Helene Monsacré
Literary magazine n° 221
Juillet/Août 1985 (File literature and the exile).

“Oh! not, nothing is softer than fatherland and parents; in the exile, what good is the richest residence, among foreigners and far from its parents?”
Ulysses in.

It is at the time when Ulysses has just declined his identity in Phéaciens, and before even beginning the long account of its adventures, which it makes reference to the hardness of the exile. And what a exile! Ten years with guerroyer under the walls of Troy with the other Greeks, nine years to be wandered on the seas with the research of the way of the return. Because,it is to it the post-war period; it is the account of the returns of the Greek heroes in their hearths, more particularly the recit of the return of Ulysses. During nearly ten years, Ulysses fights to leave the inhospitable regions where, inlassablement, it fails; during ten years, this so difficult return will lead it of one exile to the other.

And which best framework to choose to make wander a man than that of the sea, of this Mediterranean, sea “in the medium of the grounds”, on which Ulysses is condemned to undergo the anger of Poséidon? The sea is dangerous and is not made for the man: to cross wants to say to expose itself to the storms, the marine monsters, the desolation of the moving and sterile vastness. Coming from the sea Ulysses does not miss the tests: hurricanes, storms, shipwrecks, exhaustions and bad meetings abound. Each stopover holds its surprises and moves away a little more Ulysses of his goal, the ground of the “men eaters of bread”; each halt brings its batch of sufferings.
As of the first towards poem, it is “that which such an amount of wandered (…) and, on the seas, passed by so many anguishes “, and its first appearance is characterized pareillement: prisoner of Calypso, it spends his days to be cried, with the variation, over his impossible return. The fabulous history of Ulysses it is, in a certain manner, the most completed human experiment exile, truth: that which makes that a man is nothing any more, is nobody any more. Beyond the account of tirednesses, wounds, frights which a man can support, there is in the marvellous painting of a temporary depersonalization. Because, in the last analysis, Ulysses is nothing any more, it very lost: its spoils, its boat, his/her companions, its weapons, his heroic past and until its name. It is an unknown, shipwrecked man anonymous; it “most obscure of all the men”, is insulated in an inhuman world.
Where is king d’ Ithaque, where is the hero of Troy? In these fabulous regions, the fame of Ulysses is impossible, does not have a catch. It is compared to the company of the men, thanks to the song of the aède which praises its value, that a hero can exist as such in the memory of the alive ones.
But, we know it, the destiny of Ulysses is not to disappear without burial at sea-bed, or unknown ground of the men. The poet shows it well: if it does not save any test with its hero, it always leaves him however its intelligence; and this intelligence, it is also the memory of its humanity. Ulysses never loses the direction of the return.
Ulysses held good: he never forgot his fatherland, never given up his wife, in spite of the charm of Calypso and the proposals for an immortality that she makes him. To remain on the island and in company of the nymph, safe from any concern, eternally young, would however be easy. Ulysses, however, faithful to itself, i.e. his temperament of endurance, resists and chooses the tests of the return, the anguish of the sea to find his place of mortal.
But if it finally leaves, thanks to Athéna, the world of the exile in fabulous country, it did not finish any, for all that, with the refusal of its true identity. Even in Ithaque, Ulysses is always except statute, of itself. He must pass by again a series of tests, to undergo many tests to find his véitable identity.
State of old anonymous vagrant, collected by his own Eumée pig-keeper, with that of poor wretch begging sitted on the threshold for its own palate, Ulysses, disguised, will know all humiliations. Once more, the variation is large between the condition of the beggar haillons some, abused by the applicants, and that of the all-powerful king of justice; it is in the sense that, even in Ithaque, Ulysses did not finish any with the exile. It is only after the contest of the arc and the massacre of the applicants, who mark the ultimate transition in the reconquest from his royalty, that his identity is recognized of all. By making a success of the exploit which qualifies it, it is worthy of the royalty, worthy of his wife; it is become again Ulysses, king d’ Ithaque at the same time as the victorious hero of Troy.
In were Troy, precisely, the Greeks ofIliade confronted with the feeling of exile? More than one index makes it possible to think it. It is advisable, however, to moderate the things: nothing is comparable with the long wander of Ulysses of, with his progressive dispossession of identity.
Iliade never evokes the need for warlike exploits without the obligatory reference to the fame, with the heroic morals which takes its direction only compared to the fatherland of origin. It is a question of taking Troy to avenge the made affront with Ménélas, but also to return as a winner to Greece.
Allusions to the discouragement, with lassitude abound and punctuate the action with the camp of the Greeks. And, in a certain direction, the community of the Achaens is in exile under the walls of Troy: the confrontations last since too a long time. The recurring memory of the native soil corrodes the tired warriors. But this memory stimulates them at the same time: the topic of the fatherland is dissociable heroic requirement. Because, being a hero, it is to be worthy of his ancestors, warriors them also, and valorous for his sons; it is to acquire the glory which will be sung by the generations to come. To return overcome is impossible.
The Achilles, most courageous of the Greeks, it knows better than whoever, even if temptation to return in his country effleure one moment. Indeed, since his quarrel with Agamemnon, Achille is with the variation of the combat. Far from its fatherland, far from his comrades in arms, it makes, for the time, him, “best of the Achaens”, appears of exiled. But its inactivity cannot last. The history is known: it chooses glory, it is essential on him, it will remain in Troy. “If I remain to beat me here around the town of Troy, it in is done for me return; on the other hand, an imperishable glory awaits me. If I return myself from there on the contrary in the war of my fatherland, it in is done for me noble glory; a long life, on the other hand, is reserved to me, and the death, which all completes, for a long time could not reach me.”
Since Patrocle, his/her friend, this “other itself”, is massacred by Hector, death is already on him. It does not escape from its destiny which is to die young person, in an immense glory: it will kill Hector, allow the catch of Troy and will die far from its country.
If the topic of the distance, of the exile is present in Homeric poetry, it is it to differing degree. On a side, inIliade, a community of warriors is temporarily cut of his country during ten years; other, in, an individual is ballotté with the liking of the fury of a god in dangerous worlds, in a nonhuman space and indelimity.
With Ulysses of the east evoked confusedly, but with force, the need for belonging in a community, a city. It is necessary to be at home to have an identity, like if, in this end of VIIIe century before J.-C., the obligatory reference to something moreover more extremely than the individual aristocratic values started to be felt.

The white Review with the magnifying glass

By Jean-Baptist Baronian
The Literary Magazine n°468
October 2007

In addition to Alfred Jarry and Octave Mirbeau, the white Review accomodated talented writers, aujourd’hui forgotten.

Jarry and Octave Mirbeau, the white Review accomodated talented writers, aujourd’hui forgotten.

“Center of rallying of all the divergences” according to the formula d’André Gide, the white Review regularly makes l’objet, these last decades, d’études and of work. Witness, the very recent bibliography of the a hundred and forty pounds qu’elle published, of 1892 to 1902, established by Patrick Fréchet with the editions of Lérot (see the literary Magazine n° 461).

Aujourd’hui appears, under the signature of Paul-Henri Bourrelier, l’ouvrage richest, vastest, most detailed and undoubtedly most exhaustive on the review, its activities and its history. They are twelve hundred pages in small characters where all is thoroughly described and commenté: life of the three Natanson brothers, founders, the part played by famous collaborators like Alfred Jarry or Mirbeau Octave, l’affaire Dreyfus, Nabis, writings of Claude Debussy, operas of Richard Wagner, occult sciences if appraisals in the French cultural life of the end of the XIXe siècle…

One of the great interests of this work is to put l’accent on figures aujourd’hui little known, but extremely active and sometimes extremely influential with l’époque. C’est as Paul-Henri Bourrelier devotes a whole chapter to Gustave Kahn qu’il describes as “ombrageux poet” and which one will remember qu’il was one of the flag-holders of symbolism. In the same way, it s’attarde on the curious personality of Victor Barrucand, one of the pillars of the white Review since 1895, at the same time “fighter, globe trotter, cosmopolitan, seducer unrepentant, inventive, dilettante”. In revolt against the injustices of the company, Barrucand will n’aura be to be strictly accurate an anarchist. On the other hand, it will have l’idée d’en to change the reports/ratios of force by proposing the free distribution of bread “In l’état present, will say it, one can quite simply die of hunger. C’est the social evil qu’il is necessary to cure, before speaking about the cases d’anémie. “In 1900, it was to publish With fire, a novel which occurs in the anarchistic mediums at the time from the attacks. The Phébus editions republished this book in 2005, with an excellent presentation d’Éric Dussert.
Evocations of this type, one finds tens throughout this history of them. Manes for impassioned letters and the bibliophiles, always in search of references and bent information hand. From now on, c’est sure, one will not be able to evoke any more the white Review without speaking at once about Paul-Henri Bourrelier and his gigantic work.

The white Review, a generation in l’engagement, 1890-1905, Paul-Henri Harness-maker
Éd. Beech, 1195 p., 29 €.

Kafka Pragois

By Jean Montalbetti

Literary magazine n° 198
September 1983

1983. Whole Europe celebrates the centenary of Kafka. In Paris, a conference is devoted to him to the Sorbonne. But Prague, city whose Kafka is indissociable, continuous to regard it as a declining author, of which proscire is needed work and the memory.

“It seemed to to me that the nature of works of Kafka is such that it is likely to make of him the completely frightening civil servant of the Castle which he describes (…) It is the humour which prevents Kafka from becoming this monument petrified and risen by the mass of interpretations that one brings.”
Vaclav Jamek

Our younger centenary, Franz Kafka, is dpuis some thirty-five years become universal. Author of German language, pertaining to a Jewish family established in Bohemia, young Czech at the end of monarchy austro-Hungarian woman of François-Joseph and Charles, citizen of the Czechoslovakian Republic of Masaryk since 1918 until his death on June 3, 1924, Kafka is before a whole indissociable writer of Prague. Its life was narrowly registered in a topography which goes from the Place of the Old City, dominated by the two turns of Tyn, with the castle of Hradcany – still today seat and symbol of the temporal power – which dominates Prague over other bank of Vltava, while passing by the dark lanes of Mala Strana at the end of the Bridge Charles. Its education, it received it with the German gymnasium installed in the very beautiful building baroque of the Kinsky Palate where his/her father, Hermann Kafka, transferred in 1906 his trade from innovations. Balcony of this same Kinsky Palate, on the Place of the Old City where was set up the statue of the Czech reformer Jan Hus sharp flaring on oredre of the Council of Constancy, Klément Gottwalt proclaimed the Blow of Prague on February 21, 1948 in full cold war.
America had just appeared in Prague in Czech translation, first volume of what was to be an edition of complete works in ten volumes. Gottwald gave the order to put America at the rammer. Franz Kafka was proscribed of Prague for ten years and some of its defenders knew the Stalinist prisons. Fifteen years after Germany hitlérienne, the verdict was the same one from Berlin 33 in Prague 48: this declining author was to be flaring.
Some French intellectuals baited themselves to change the course of the literary history: Andre Breton who placed Kafka in his Anthology of the black humour, Albert Camus which published in 1943 a text on the Hope and the absurdity in the work of Franz Kafka included in the Myth of Sisyphus, Jean-Paul Sartre who drew also Kafka on the side of the existentialism, Maurice Blanchot more kafkaïen of our writers and Marthe Robert. But the first translator and introducer of Kafka in France were Alexandre Vialatte who published the Lawsuit in Paris in 1933 at the time when Berlin proscribed “the declining Jew”.
Will the year of centenary make it possible Kafka to know the amnesty? 1983 are marked by many demonstrations, conferences, exposures, whose blow of sending was from the 16 to May 19 the international Symposium Kafka in Vienna. Italy did to it his in Bari. Will follow Mainz for FRG, Montreal, Such Aviv, Paris this month.
And In Prague? July 3 a small group of admirors went to the cemetery of Strachnitz in the suburbs of Prague. In the medium of a nature in waste land, among the abandoned tombs of
Jewish families exterminated during the war, this bunch of anonymities came to place a crown of flowers against the drawn up stone of the burial where Franz Kafka was buried on June 11, 1924 and where his/her parents were buried a few years later. There the Jews have habit to deposit on the edge of the tombs a small stone of the memory. One can see several hundreds of them in front of the memorial of Dr. Franz Kafka. The University Charles of Prague – one of oldest of Europe -, the Union of the Czechoslovakian Writers, continue, them, to be unaware of Kafka whose Czech poet Urzidil wrote: “Kafka, it was Prague and Prague, it was Kafka”.
How Prague can it ignore at this point its history? This traditional hearth several cultures and, in this first half of the century, not of meeting of the avant-gardes in literature as in painting. One forgot one of the cries of revolt of Kafka in his Newspaper: “All that isn’t literature annoys me and causes my hatred”? Claude David, in his foreword with the complete Works published in the Pleiad, underlines it with accuracy: “the world of Kafka is unaware of the conflicts of opinion, nations, races, it is unaware of the war, in the time even where it takes place. It is often oppressive but it shows violence little. Loneliness is heavier there than the collective constraint. The fabulous worlds that the daydream of Kafka causes are not drawn with the resemblance of ours.” See in Kafka a painter of the communist company or capitalism at the last stage of its contradictions is to make a realistic writer of it. Milan Kundera, itself novelist pragois, prefers to draw it on the side of Jaroslav Hacek, towards the spirit of not-serious and from humour pragois. It is probably as was interpreted the first chapter of the Lawsuit, and one believes max Brod of them. As for Kafka, he writes in his been engaged Felice Bauer, after a reading at max Brod of the Metamorphosis of Gregoire Samsa which awakes one morning in vermin: “We spent a good moment and we laughed much.”
The existential anguish of Kafka recorded by the Newspaper and transmitted by the correspondence, its conflict with the father in filigree of the bright Verdict then in the Letter with the father, his professional subjection, the development of a serious illness with a pulmonary tuberculosis diagnosed in 1917, should not make us forget the extraordinary vitality of Kafka, its corrosive humour, the play impassioned of imaginary engaged in a perpetual production of strange images intended to put in very logical rout and to subvert the rational one. Albert Camus and Maurice Blanchot see there one and the other a religious inspiration which according to Camus gives him a universal dimension and according to Blanchot marks the revenge of God-death: “Dead, it is only more terrible, more invulnerable, in a combat where there is no more possibility of overcoming.”
The psychologist and novelist of Austrian origin Manès Sperber, which read the first texts of German Kafka in Vienna in the Twenties, entrusted to me that Kafka would be surprised today place that one lends to him. Goldstücker known as of Kafka which it was “Verdun of the years of Cold war”. It is perhaps time to leave side the political, sociological, psychoanalytical grids of the work of Kafka, to make on the level reading a work as new as that undertaken by Malcolm Pasley on the manuscripts of the Bodléienne Library of Oxford for the scientific establishment of the texts such as they were written by Franz Kafka. This would make it possible to return Kafka to the literature, after one half-century an animated turning of 1933 to 1983. It would be after all a pretty gift for one centenary. Happy birthday Mr Kafka.

Discussion with Edouard Goldstücker, the saver of Kafka

Kafka knew in Prague a small decade of respite, continuations of the 20E Congrès of the PCUS at summer 68. Edouard Goldstücker was the principal craftsman of this literary thaw which enabled him to organize in Czechoslovakia, in Liblice in 1963, the first international conference Kafka. He was then a director of the Institute of the Germanic studies at the University Charles. He lives today in exile in England and sign at the University of Brighton. Met in Vienna, it testifies fifteen years afterwards on the ostracism whose Kafka is victim in Prague since 1948.

- Between 1948 and 1957, no book of Kafka was published nor any criticism on its work. One regarded Kafka as a prototype of the destroying decline, especially near youth. By là-même, it was an author who did not have a place in a company building socialism. This is why it was removed. You should not forget that during the years of cold war Kafka was used against the Soviet Union and the people’s democracies while being presented as the prophet who had predicted and described the bureaucracy of the Stalinist world. Myself I was communist since 1933. From 1951 at the end of 1955 I was held in prison. Released, I am turned over to the University at the time of the 20E Congrès. It is only after that that one could mention in public the name of Kafka without having to use a pejorative epithet.

- In 1962-1963 it ya have in the USSR the era khrouchtchévienne of cultural release with the publication ofOne Day of Ivan Denissovitch. Did Kafka profit from it in Prague?

- In 1962 I was invited to make a conference at the University of Moscow on the writers pragois of the Xxe century. I spoke about Kafka. The first question that one posed to me was: “do you Regard Kafka as realistic-critical?” If I had answered yes, that wanted to say that from my point of view it was acceptable for the official line. I understood that in the University one tried to save Kafka. It is at this time that I organized a committee of the Germanists of all the Universities of Czechoslovakia and I proposed to them to join together a symposium on Kafka with the specialists Marxists. We put under discussion at this conference of Liblice in 1963 the cogency of the charge carried against Kafka: was it, yes or not, a pessimist susceptitble to have a harmful influence on the company building socialism? The result was that after Liblice one authorized the publication of the work of Kafka in Czech translation. Thus were published in Prague in five years: The Lawsuit, the Castle, Description of a combat and a collection of accounts just as the biography written by max Brod.

- the Castle has for topic impossibility of being made adopt and by the authorities and the population in a country where one is felt like foreigner. That was often the case of the Jews in Europe. Is this the Jew which was proscribed of Prague, where since 1968 one cannot find any book of Kafka, even not in the libraries?

- Certainly after the occupation of Prague in August 1968, there was in the attitude of the authorities with regard to Kafka a specific element of anti-semitism.

– When one carries out a survey in Prague, one ends up knowing the semi-official charge retained against Kafka. It is proscribed like “Zionist”. Is this there a confusion between the convictions of Kafka and those of max Brod?

- You must include/understand the official language. When one tells you “Zionist”, it is necessary to hear “Jewish”. It is only one euphemism of the anti-semitism.

In literary magazine n° 198 – September 1983

In margin of " Zone "

By Lionel Richard

Literary magazine n° 348
November 1996

The new esthetics, which Apollinaire in “the preliminary Alcohol” poem proposes , aims at gathering and with exalter the heteroclite one. When poetry accepts chaos and the chance.

” Love you do not know what it is only the absence
And you do not know that one smells oneself some to die “
Apollinaire,Poems With Lou

” Sad and mélodieux is delirious
I wander through my beautiful Paris
Without having the heart to die there. “
Apollinaire,the Song of badly-liked

” the Song of badly-liked commemorates my first love at twenty years, English met in Germany, that lasted one year, we had to turn over each one on our premises, then we were not written any more… I suffered much from it, witness this poem where I believed myself badly liked while it was me which liked badly… ‘
Apollinaire, Letter With Madeleine Pagès, 1915.

Quand the volume of ” Alcohols ” appeared, in 1913, it was compared with the back-store of a receiver. One could there discover of all, out-of-date and the incomprehensible one. It was not so badly seen ; but if ” the old one “, which connected certain poems with those of Gourmont, Verlaine, Nerval, of Villon, with the weaving songs, were noticed instantaneously, the ” new one ” appeared to raise of provocative incongruity. In short, the ” new one ” appeared to be limited to a sterile ease. It was necessary that time passed so that more surprising became most productive ; the least justifiable was going to be held by the poets for most fertile. Thus it goes from there, in ” Alcohols ” with the preliminary poem ” Zone “, and its guarantor, at the end of work, ” Vendémiaire “.
” Zone ” appeared, in December 1912, in ” the evenings of Paris ” ; on Apollinaire tests will substitute for the title ” Cry ” that of ” Zone “. “the Alcohol” organization not being chronological, Apollinaire retained it to open the collection symbolically, when ” Vendémiaire “, probably written about 1909, and published in November 1912, was located at the end of the work. Poem assessment and poem confession ” Zone ” places ” Alcohols ” under the sign of what will be named a little later in ” Calligrammes “, the tradition and the adventure. The change of title which takes place, of pre-original to the collection, ” Cry ” (the table of Edward Munch is 1893) at ” Zone “, carries to modify the reading of the poem : it is not any more to regard a cry of personal despair, but as the course of a zone of pains ; the individual is disseminated and reflects himself in what it sees around him, which it looks with the sky. The poem is built on the rather traditional form of a wander, downtown, of an end of day to one morning. Space described, between the recollection of a ” industrial street ” crossing the morning, and approaches it at the following day of the residence of Auteuil, while ” the slags make tinkle their cans in the streets ” seems subjected to the only law of the disparate one. The memories in disorder invade the spirit ; those which milked with Mediterranean childhood, at the cities crossed at the time of the great voyage towards the east of 1902 (Prague, Coblentz), with shames (” as a criminal one puts to you in a state of arrest ” what refers to the flight of the Mona Lisa into 1911), to the disasters of the desire and with the compassion (” I now humiliate with a poor girl with the horrible laughter my mouth “) are juxtaposed. No law ” of association of the ideas ” could legitimate their appearance ; their obliteration, or their multiplication is free. With these memories, that the indication of the places makes it possible to place in prospect in time, mix with the notations with the dubious statute. An assessment, an effort of totalization (” you made the painful one and merry voyages “) can indicate a return to the present, that of the evening and night ambulation, with this ” today you steps in Paris ” which constitutes the wire of the poem. The emigrants at theSaint-Lazare station are images of oneself, which became wandering fault of not having more pole (” I lived like insane and I wasted my time “) ; the prostitutes are beings pareillement detached, déconstruits. The title of ” Zone ” would indicate mental space thus, when it is without direction, when it is not any more that one ” ground gaste “, ” has waste Land “, where all that occupies the field of the conscience suddenly takes the same value.
The occasion of this sentimental and spiritual assessment is known ; it follows the rupture with Marie Laurencin. And as Apollinaire is with the day before of his thirty-three years, its destiny does not appear to him without relationship with that of Christ. Nor what it saw, with what Dante and Virgile crossed. It is well in hell, but it does not have a guide. With the way of the poems epic, ” Zone ” proceeds on several plans : that of the night and adventurous ambulation, of confrontation with the other which one was (and that could be named a ” catabase “), that, finally, the supernatural one, sky where the guardian angels côtoient the airplanes. The characteristic of, it is to make of a human destiny the consequence of a divine will. The title of ” Zone ” could thus indicate a space, always undecided, but this either geographical but spiritual time : ” Zone ” this place and vacuum of the sky which one awaits some sign vainly, with least humming.
This poem of heroic confession thus has all the characters of old : its staged construction, its assonancés distiches, its regular alexandrines (” at the end you are tired/of this old world “) or prolonged (” shepherdess ô Eiffel Tower/the herd of the bridges bleats/this morning “), its traditional inversions and its periphrases (” the flying machine “), its unexpected metaphors (” a bell barks “), finally the sure effects of the religious litany (” it is the torch with the russet-red hair… “), all causes to make identifiable of the familiar rates/rhythms, alleviating known musics. But the old poetic one cannot access text completely ; it remains in margin of the tradition ; it is désaccordé of it with what it makes think ; in short, it is located in a new ” Zone”, disconcerting already, but still undecided. Indeed the characteristic of the poem was to present itself, in its forced forms, like a language necessary ; however all, in ” Zone “, the set of themes, the rhythmic one, concerns the random one. Moral despair leads Apollinaire to invent, as of ” Zone “, a new esthetics, which it will radicalize in other works (in the ” poem-conversation “, for example), and of which it will make the theory, in 1917, in its ” Conference on the new spirit ” : ” one can be poet in all the fields : it is enough that one is adventurous and that one goes to the discovery. “It is what” Zone shows ” ; and that explains why was placed at the opening of the book this poem of distress, when were reserved, to close it, the ” songs of universal drunkenness “. ” the poet is that which discovers new joys, were they painful to support “.
The new esthetics, which Apollinaire proposes, is related to an idea of gathering and exaltation of the heteroclite one. If the idea of beautiful ideal and harmony referred to Apollon implicitly, it is in Dionysos that will refer Apollinaire, Dionysos to which is comparable Christ, when the wine is blood, and the mystical press. Poetry selective any more, neither in its vocabulary, neither in its topics, nor is scheduled. It accepts chaos and the chance. It is not only any more in the books ; it bursts with the glance : ” You read the leaflets the catalogues the posters which sing high/here is poetry this morning… ” the pain-killer, the apparently unimportant one, the commonplace one even are taken again in load : ” Te here in Marseilles in the medium of water melons/Te here in Coblentz with the hotel of the Giant “, in ordinary alexandrines consolidated by discrete assonances between the hémistiche and the rhyme. But what to say this industrial street ” located in Paris between the street/Aumont-Thiéville/and the avenue of the Terns ” where an E dumb remains floating (its deletion in the word ” street ” gave a great concern to Mallarmé, when it wrote in quatrains the addresses of its letters), where only a rhythmic symmetry would impose on a diction, undoubtedly hateful, ” to save ” the notation ? The poetic modern one is opposed to the old speech in worms : with the logical continuum (only division in stanzas was allowed) are opposite the asyndeton, the rupture, the failure, with what consolidates, which breaks, with what progresses in time, which exists simultanéement. The poem is composed of small islands ; the reader, of the one with the other, short the risk of a shipwreck. The text is invested by the white which penetrates margins in the sentence, of monostic with leaves the twenty-nine one towards by the distich, the tercet, the quatrain.
The notations are not implied rationally ; each one of them becomes the expression, discontinuous, of a latent imaginary state to which the reader must lend a problematic coherence. To say that poetry is in ” the leaflets the catalogues the posters ” is not only to affirm its visual character (what will open the way with the ” Calligrammes “, and, beyond, with the joining of ” titles and fragments of titles cut out in the newspapers ” to what André Breton proceeds as of first ” Proclamation of surrealism “) ; it is to oppose the heteroclite one to homogeneous, dispersion with the unit with the idea that poetry is the act by which a listener or a spectator adapts scattered images to make of them signs of his own destiny. Poem MIME plus a stable composition, according to reasonable rules ; it is an apparent chaos, a starry sky, whose reader must make a space of composition, always in disintegration, always to restructure.
The world of the spirit, waste ground, heteroclite point discharge, true zone, is explored during the night, until the morning, ” the sun is it there is a distinct neck “. This first version becomes, in theoriginal one of 1912, ” sun raising sliced neck “, to finally find its form final, gnomic, cacophonous and enigmatic : ” sun cuckoo-roller “. The raising sun represents a traditional image of the hope ; if the Phoenix dies one evening, known as the stanza added in 1909 to ” the Song of badly-liked “, ” the morning sees its rebirth “. The sun is not any more the manager of the cosmic movement ; it makes think of a decapitated god. The man is headless, the world is eccentric. The swirl, the flashover only reduce the feeling of loneliness and scatter :
” And you drink this extreme alcohol like your life
Your life which you drink like a brandy. “
A dance dionysienne will carry the cities and the world in the month of the grape harvest, in ” Vendémiaire “, after the revolution will have been accomplished. That which delivers kings, incunables, agreed poetry.

Inliterary magazine n° 348 – November 1996 – File ” Apollinaire “

The Literary Magazine October 2007: Great quarrels between philosophers

Benefits of the controversy
By Jean-Louis Hoots

L’art of the polemic goes up with highest Antiquity “Polemos [ the conflict ] is the father of all things and the king of all things”, affirmed Héraclite. All l’histoire of Greek philosophy can be summarized with a succession of arguments. Oscillating between theoretical debates and personal attacks, refutation and invective, this practice of the controversy, lengthily ground in the Platonic dialogues, n’a ceased d’échauffer philosophers. In the middle of the XIXe century, Schopenhauer reformulated of them the rules and the tricks in a treated court, nicely entitled L’Art to always d’avoir reason. Enumerating thirty-eight stratagems, the philosopher taught how to be right at all costs by sapping the arguments of l’adversaire and while showing himself of worse faith than him. After having suggested many easy ways, pretences and pro­vocations, Schopenhauer advised like ultimate ad personam l’attaque recourse, by showing “die­sobligeant, aggressive, offensive, coarse”.

This file of the literary Magazine is made l’écho various invectives, insults, mocking remarks and insults that the philosophers during two millenia launched out. Perhaps one will reproach us for bringing back squabbles sometimes worthy d’une playground “polé­the mists disgust me”, said Bernanos, repenting the pannings of which it overpowered so many of its contemporaries. The polemic, when it concerns the mania, is useless, even degrading. But it can be salutary when it emerges with relevance to revive the debate. It s’apparente then with a tournament where it s’agit less to embank l’adversaire that to d’enrichir a common reflexion.
This file wants to be an illustration of the good use of the dialectical one. It recalls by the menu the most famous duels, and most fertile, of l’histoire of philosophy “the controversy is often beneficial with l’un as with l’autre, of the fact qu’ils rub their heads between them, and is used for each one d’eux to rectify its own thoughts, and also to conceive new sights”, concludes in its Schopenhauer treaty which, definitely, had…

Read the completed content of this edition at http://www.magazine-litteraire.com/

Emmanuel Lévinas: the concern of the other

By Alain Finkielkraut
Literary magazine n° 345
July-August 1996

“Nothing, in a sense, is more cumbersome only the next one. This desired isn’t it the undesirable one even?”
Emmanuel Lévinas

“It is necessary to cease, known as Plato in the Sophist, to tell intrigues.” Thus philosophy starts, thus continues it until Heidegger which reiterates in Being and time the inaugural injunction of Plato.

However, what the philosophy of Lévinas if not the account unceasingly taken again, unceasingly started again, indefinitely commented on and dug increasingly major, of a primitive scene, an original or pre-original intrigue: the meeting of others.

“Intrigue” is besides one of the Masters words of this thought which, maintaining us only morals, is never edifying, refuses with any preachifying, does not make us at any moment morals. ‘ ethics according to Lévinas is not more one law imposed by God to the men that the demonstration in each man of his autonomy. It is an event and even a blow of theatre. It is necessary that something occurs with ego so that this one ceases being a “force which goes” and wakes up with the scruple. This something, it is somebody, and this somebody is not with properly
Speech nobody: it is this share of the other man who escapes from the image or the idea that it leaves me, which demolishes form by which however it appears, which resists its conceptualization, with his thematisation, with its definition, and which Lévinas names magnificiently visagE.
The romantic literature accustomed us to read the human faces like hiéroglyphes, through the emotions which cross them and to detect the secrecy of the hearts in the expressions of this always emerged part of the body. For the novel, the face is a consent.
The ethical novel that written and rewritten Lévinas inlassablement involves us beyond the opposition or even of the tangle of the truth and appearance. The face, says it, borer the attributes which in him are offered to the knowledge. Its significance exceeds my representation, so perspicacious, also topic, so exact is it. The face naked, i.e. at the same time abstract and without protection, is stripped its ornaments cultural and vulnerable, irreducible to same qualities as it raises and strips of any defense, external with its determinations empirical and exposed to bearing end. And it is precisely that, this transcendence and cettre brittleness, this disarmed which repeals in me in spite of me the quiet selfishness of perseverance in being it. The face exists initially with the requirement. Before all that it me dissiumule or that it reveals me, there is what it reveals me, namely: “you will not kill!”. Vis-a-vis with the face, I recognize myself like being enjoint. The face, it is not a spectacle which is offered, these are a voice which silently order. Very of a blow, the other looks at me and obliges me. Very of a blow, it falls to me and it orders to me of all its load of indigence and weakness. Failure ‘ ‘ to be falling as a humanity. Unfasten autistic provision. Dismissal of the concern of oneself: ego I transfer with me here. “No one”, is not good voluntarily written Lévinas with the wrong way, once again, of all the moral tradition of philosophy. The ethics of which it speaks to us and which it invites us to discover or to rediscover with him is not an asceticism but a traumatism; it is not a work of oneself on oneself, it is an intrusion, a tearing, an effraction, or an affection, i.e., any unit, a connection and a lesion, a feeling which attaches and a burn which afflicts. One would in vain seek morals in the substance of each person taken separately or in the administraion of individual improvement. Morals is caught like a disease: it is the disease to be it.
“human Being”, says one to designate the man. Lévinas makes emerge implicit contradiction that there is between the two terms. Ego takes dimension of humanity when it deserted sound being and from goes away for the other. Can one date this when? One moment ago in the history of each one where this scene took place, where this intrigue was tied? Not undoubtedly. But that does not want to say that the intrigue is fictitious nor that this strange novel is only one novel. There is not first once and, at the same time, like it writes Paul Ricoeur, it is each time the first time that the other, such other says to me: “You will not kill!” The face makes conspicuous the command: “Each face is the Sinai which prohibits the murder.”
To speak about morals, it is not thus to formulate the regulations of the reason, it is to tell an adventure of the sensitivity. Venture foreign moreover where the other seems to occupy all the parts and to play all the parts, it is the sender of the history – that of which I answer – and his recipient – that in front of which I answer. It is also the subject of the action since it is him which takes the initiative, which enters without striking in the citadel of my interiority, and which assigns me or which shows me. And this “I” itself which answers the call, which is if not literally one which pro quo, an hostage, a host involuntary and inhabited until in the most intimate recesses of as for oneself, one oneself who attests himself by the movement even in which he is dislocated, like says it once again Ricoeur? Isn’t this there too much to give to the Other and too much to ask self? There is not something of insupportable in this paroxystic definition of subjectivity like total subjection and the identity like pure abnegation?
“If I am not for me, which will be for me? If it is not now, when? If I am only for me, which am I?”, it is says by Hillel in Talmud. Doesn’t Lévinas, which likes to quote this sentence, neglect of them the first and the second moments? Doesn’t it jump too quickly to the last question? To doesn’t force of higher bid and déconstruction, arrive-til from there to describe under the name of ethical situation an intolerable report/ratio?
This perplexity is legitimate and even those (of which I am) that the obsessional writing of Emmanuel Lévinas maintains under its philosophical charm, poetic and narrative, cannot avoid putting the question. We keep nevertheless too simple answers. Before qualifying exaggerated this indiscretion with regard to the inexpressible one that wants to be the philosophy of Lévinas, let us ask us if by the systematic practice of excess and the hyperbole, it did not make occur with the trembling light words something which had never been known as. Its most hyperbolic book and more haletant, Otherwise than to be and beyond the gasoline, opens on this terrible dedication: “A memory of the beings closest among the six million to assassinated by the national-Socialists, beside the million men of all confessions and all nations, victims of the same hatred of the other man, the same anti-semitism.”
The Xxe century tore off with the anti-semitism its apocalyptic secrecy. The anti-semitism, it is the hatred of the other and this hatred, it is not the aversion for the difference of the other man, its strangeness, its exoticism or its supposed inferiority; it is the allergy to its proximitié, the revolt and the resentment against the violence of the social relation.
To twist the neck with the scruple to be; to release the life of any foreign interference, to deploy it without obstacle, to return its aggressiveness, its natural cruelty, its wild vitality and its spontaneousness of sleepwalker to him; to make conceal the faces by reducing them to samples or specimens of a species; to substitute, as a sociality, racial fraternity with the proximity of the other man: what indicates, by antiphrasis, this nostalgia hitlérienne of a world without utrui, it is concern where the fact even of others plunges the existence.
“Nothing, in a sense, is more cumbersome only the next one. This desired is not it the undesirable one even?”, one still in Autrement than to be and beyond the gasoline reads. All-out war to have finally peace, the Nazism dissipated confusion between silliness and morals while revealing, in the decision to even put an end to it, the capacity of others to start with sharp peace to be.
In Difficult freedom, Emmanuel Lévinas defines the Judaism like “the singular destiny which, beyond misfortunes of people, teaches the incompatilibé land one of spiritual and of idyllic”. This teaching, Lévinas made enter, and how, in philosophy at the time even where this one saw or believed to see in the history the glorious theatre of its achievement. With us, vis-a-vis other idyllic temptations, not to let it lose.

In literary magazine n° 345 – July-August 1996.