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A
New Sartre
in
Yale French Studies ("Sartre after Sartre"), no. 68, 1985, pp. 226-238.
C'est notre tour, maintenant, de ne plus connaître
le goût qu'avait ce que Sartre a écrit. Et de prendre goût
à ce goût qu'on ne connaîtra jamais.1
-Politique de la prose
Truism: books exist only through the readings they are capable of producing.
This is again proven in Denis Hollier's essay, Politique de la prose,
Sartre et l'an quarante, which marks out in the work of a writer that
we think we know well enough to consider him outmoded, a completely new text
which does not fail to surprise everyone, including Sartre scholars themselves.
Situations
We know that Sartre does not permit any writer to except himself from history,
to refuse the constraints of his "objective" situation in the class
struggle. "[L'écrivain] est 'dans le coup,' quoiqu'il fasse,
marqué, compromis, jusque dans sa plus lointaine retraite."
["(The writer) is involved, no matter what he does, marked, compromised,
as far as his most distant retreat."] 2 One could,
of course, legitimately apply this rule to Sartre himself, taking as a pretext
what he says about it. In Qu'est-ce que la littérature the
description of the social situation which, in France, defines the producer
of discourse is not irrelevant. The first characteristic, centralism:
La centralisation nous a tous regroupés à Paris; avec un peu de chance, un Américain pressé peut nous joindre tous en vingt-quatre heures. ... En vingt-quatre heures, un cycliste entraîné peut faire circuler d'Aragon à Mauriac, de Vercors à Cocteau, en touchant Breton à Montmartre, Queneau à Neuilly et Billy à Fontainebleau... un de ces manifestes, une de ces pétitions ou protestations pour ou contre le retour de Trieste à Tito... [Situations 2,205-06]Centralization has grouped us aIl in Paris. With a bit of luck, a busy American might join us aIl in twenty-four hours... in twenty-four hours, a trained cyclist might circulate-from Aragon to Mauriac, from Vercors to Cocteau, stopping off to see Breton in Montmartre, Queneau in Neuilly, and Billy in Fontainebleau... one of those manifestoes, one of those petitions or protests to Tito for or against the return of Trieste...[(Literature, 165]
Secondly, a position of class, accepted or not: "Nous sommes les
écrivains les plus bourgeois du monde." ["We are the
most bourgeois writers in the world" (Situations 2,204; Literature,
163).] And finally, the impassable relationship with a literary tradition:
Bien avant de commencer notre premier roman, nous avions l'usage de la littérature, il nous paraissait naturel que les livres poussent dans une société policée, comme les arbres dans un jardin. [Situations 2,204]
We were used to literature long before beginning our first novel. To us it seemed natural for books to grow in a civilized society, like trees in a garden. [Literature, 164]
From here on, Sartre's discourse is enunciated in a "nous"
("we") form which is both a dialectical repetition of its conditions
of enunciation as weIl as the overtaking of these conditions in the name of
a choice which opposes these parameters to a Marxist consciousness, to a generation,
to a group of writers in which he recognizes himself. This peculiarity of
the French situation (which geographically, temporally and politically localizes
the members of the intelligentsia in Paris) appears more clearly in its historical
contingency in the light of the counterexample that Sartre regularly chooses
in order to point out its specificity: the example of the United States, which
cocked its ear in the image of the American taking a literary tour of the
Parisian world.
In fact, for Sartre, the United States is essentially a spa ce which cannot
find its center. Thus, in Situations 3, he deplores (rightly or wrongly)
New York's lack of quartiers in the European sense of the word. He
is surprised not to find Les Deux Magots, Le Flore or La Closerie
des Lilas in Manhattan; the American city is an absence of space which
does not permit any landmarks (sociological, historical, geographical) to
fix themselves. In the same manner, the intellectual topography is characterized
by a void which a vague morality seeks to fill, a fabrication of different
mass media. The United States is thus a "démocratie capitaliste
avec dictature diffuse de l'opinion publique" ["capitalist
democracy with a loose dictatorship of public opinion" (Situations 2,304;
Literature, 284).] The writer is then lost in a geography which is so vast
that it no longer exists and which in return does not permit him to lay claim
to any sort of identity:
Il n'a pas de solidarité avec les autres écrivains, souvent il est séparé d'eux par la largeur ou la longueur d'un continent. Rien n'est plus éloigné de lui que l'idée de collège ou de cléricature; on le fête un temps, puis on le perd, on l'oublie, il reparaît avec un nouveau livre pour faire un nouveau plongeon. [Situations 2, 203]
He has no solidarity with other writers; he is often separated from them by the length or breadth of the continent; nothing is more remote from him than the idea of college or clerkship; for a while he is fêted and then is lost and forgotten; he reappears with a new book to take a new plunge. [Literature, 162]
Consequently, the "objective" conditions of a French type debate
do not exist:
Bien sûr, il y a tant de journaux, tant de contacts internationaux que les Américains finissent par entendre parler des théories littéraires et sociales qu'on professe en Europe, mais ces doctrines s'épuisent dans leur ascension... on sait que les intellectuels aux Etats-Unis assemblent les idées européennes en bouquet, les respirent un moment puis les rejettent parce que les bouquets se fânent plus vite là-bas que sous les autres climats. [Situations 2,268]
To be sure, there are so many newspapers, so many international contacts, that Americans finally get to hear about the literary or social theories that are circulating in Europe, but these doctrines are exhausted in their ascent... We know that intellectuals in the United States gather European ideas into a bouquet, inhale them for a moment, and then toss them away because the bouquets wither more quickly there than in other climates. [Literature, 243-44]
Thus the geographical and social situation and the absence of cultural tradition
make the American writer a floating signifier, difficult to define in class
terms. Sartre praises this characteristic for its individual genius, but he
also implicitly criticizes it (cf. the example of Faulkner in Politique
de la prose), for he does not read anything positive in the fact of being
free from centralism, of having to in vent a tradition rather than reproducing
or fighting against one. It appears that non-spatiality and non-historicity
seem emminently suspicious to him.
At the same time, the fact that a writer can profit from his exile, or from
his situation between two nations gives his books a dubious coloration. Hence,
as Hollier remarks, Nabokov, Beckett and Ionesco will be condemned one after
the other in the name of criteria which have little to do with internationalism,
but which are a product of a regional discourse surprising in Sartre.
Hollier does not approach the whole of Sartrian textuality from this point
of view. For in Politique de la prose there is an "I" ("je"),
a crossing between the author and the narrator which discreetly yet insistently
claims its place and which incessantly puts itself en situation: "Une
bonne métaphore vaut le déplacement. Jusqu'où n'irait-on
pour faire une citation? Mais la loi de l'insinuation implique qu'on ne les
trouve que là où on se trouve, s'il faut parler d'où
on parle" (Politique, 226). ["A good metaphor is worth the
displacement. How far wouldn't we go to create a quotation? But the law of
insinuation implies that we only find them where we are, if we must speak
from whence we speak."] The question of place is not at all anecdotal;
in a paradoxical manner faithful to Sartre it prepares the sudden appearance
of a new style of reading, outdating the absence of the subject (the absence
of writing and of style) which has too often been the trademark of the theory
produced in the last twenty years.
Unlike the Sartrian writer, this "I" does not live in Paris as do
the others: he learns of Sartre's death in Berkeley, California on April15,
1980 at 7:00 P.M. Pacific time (Politique, 73). Although he had a French education,
he only visits France intermittently, to give a lecture at Cerisy, for example
(Politique, 146). Hollier does not avoid the relationship of biography and
writing (criticism). His situation, which is not a situation, not really,
permits him to invent a style of reading which is produced neither from the
insularity of the United States where the amalgam of particularities takes
the form of an indecipherable puzzle, nor from the cobweblike centralism which
defines French intellectual life. The "exile" is not then
the occasion of a nostalgic complaint, but sets the conditions for a new reading
whose atopy is explicitly claimed:
Une certaine atopie du scripteur (le fait qu'il n'arrive pas à être là où il paraît), bien qu'elle déçoive les espoirs que Sartre avait cru sérieux de placer dans le concept de situation, ne me paraît en rien impliquer quoi que ce soit de répréhensible. [Politique, 166]
La fonction de l'écrivain est d'appeler un chat un chat. Si les mots sont malades c'est à nous de les guérir. Au lieu de cela, beaucoup vivent de cette maladie. La littérature moderne, en beaucoup de cas, est un cancer des mots. [Situation 2, 304]
The function of the writer is to calI a spade a spade. If words are sick, it is up to us to cure them. Instead of that, many writers live off this sickness. In many cases modem literature is a cancer of words. [Literature, 284]
Sartre thus denies a place to entire areas of "modernity." Seeing in language a pure instrument of communication and a transparence which is the trace of the thing (we know that the two motifs are profoundly interdependent) he coherently condemns all conceptions - literary or linguistic - which make language a system with its own laws different from the laws of reality, a whole shaped more by reflexivity and evocation than by communication. "Le langage, pour Sartre, ne fait pas un pli: il parle, mais cela va sans dire" (Politique, 100j.["Language, for Sartre, does not have any privilege: it speaks, but that goes without saying."] For Hollier, this refusal has two major consequences: first, the affirmation of the priority of meaning over the sign:
L'expérience du sens est, par conséquent, antérieure et indépendante de la pratique des signes: tout spécialement des signes linguistiques. La linguistique ne sera pas la science pilote que le structuralisme voulait. Le signifiant, c'est moi, dit Sartre en toute simplicité. [Politique, 99]
The experience of meaning is consequently anterior and independent of the practice of signs: especially linguistic signs. Linguistics is not the pilot science that Structuralism wanted. The signifier is me, says Sartre in all simplicity.
Secondly, and as a corollary, the exteriority of language in relation to the thing:\
Tout le programme littéraire sartrien est ainsi solidaire d'une restauration du primat de la perception et de la réaffirmation de la transcendance de l'objet. [Politique, 100]
The whole Sartrian literary program is thus bound up with a restoration of the primacy of perception and with the reaffirmation of the transcendence of the object.
From that point onward, literature must aim at something other thanitself:
"L'engagement veut mettre un terme à l'auto-référentialité"
(Politique, 105). ["Commitment tries to put an end to autoreferentiality."]
The ideal of a style andits methods is sketched in Sartre's work in the refusal
of the reflexivity of language and literature: it is a question of the journalistic
report and of mass media (cf. Situations 2,290; Literature, 268 and Hollier's
commentary, Politique, 131). Written in the present about the present (or
about the future, or about the past as a historical de terminant of the two
preceding terms), the report is also addressed to presence. Through this the
public's reading, its reception, is supposed to escape "mythic communion"
as weIl as "masturbation" in order to enter into the "companionship"
("compagnonnage," Situations 2,296; Literature, 274) of
a community which is thus inscribed in the reappropriation of its presence:
La capacité de saisir intuitivement et instantanément les significations, l'habileté à regrouper celles-ci pour offrir des ensembles synthétiques immédiatement déchiffrables sont des qualités les plus nécessaires au reporter. [Situations 2, 3D]
The ability to grasp significations intuitively and instantly, the skill to rearrange them in order to offer synthetic, immediately decipherable groups, are the most necessary qualities for a reporter.
Such is Sartre's utopia of language: that of a transparent, utilitarian verb
which carries a reality or a project which is anterior to itself and of which
it is only the form. It is interesting that he does not apply it only to his
philosophical reflections or to his political interventions, but also to his
novels. It is in this particular area that we discover a series of incoherences
between the precept and its application.
In order to make clear what is at stake and what it implies, Denis Hollier
here refers discretely but tenaciously to criteria of reading inspired by
Blanchot and Derrida. This could seem surprising, or even offensive: what
is more opposed to the neuter, to différence and to writing
than Sartrian presence? Is the tool appropriate for the task?
In fact, the validity of the model could not be challenged here. First of
aIl, unlike the hard and fast "deconstructionists" or "Blanchotiens,"
Politique de la prose does not set up its reference as a sacred axiom;
everything is presented with nuance and finesse without,
however, abandoning a basic rigor. Secondly, Sartre's text is not adapted
to an irrelevant reading grid. The interpretation is effective not because
it uses a theory, whatever it may be, as an argument, but because the Sartrian
corpus (almost) alone itself fumishes indications of the validity of the gloss.
An extremely meticulous rereading of La Nausée fumishes the
essential part of the demonstration. Hollier emphasizes the disparity of the
literary project (La Nausée as a diary, private "report")
and its practice, which condemns the time of the composition to a lack of
absolute depth and consistency. This could seem futile; in any case, as Hollier
notes, more than a million readers have not been in the least offended by
these contradictions. But without entering into the details of the demonstration
we must point out what is at stake: the troubling fact that Sartrian writing,
aiming for existence and presence (such is at least the proclaimed project),
systematically forgets to put itself on stage and into question, be it under
the cover of the fiction of Roquentin in the process of composing.
"Le récit ne prend pas de place" (Politique, 129).
["The narrative does not take any place."] From here, writing unceasingly
evacuates its Real and brings about the retum of that which Sartre decided
to fight: the idealism of the beautiful soul (belle âme). The
writing of La Nausée does not measure up in practice; it neglects
to represent itself or represents itself with a neglect of which Hollier,
with great tact, gives convincing examples, and it takes on an imaginary dimension,
from which Sartre would have liked to save it, which frees it from the present
instead of fixing it there. "L'écriture est sauve du désastre
qu'elle retrace" (Politique, 179). ["Writing is safe from the
disaster it recounts."]
Having intended to avoid autoreferentiality, La Nausée appears
as a gratuitous act, much more than those of Proust or Gide whose ahistorical
narcissism Sartre constantly denounced. Language here takes revenge for having
been held back from its dimension: "A coller au présent de
trop près, les mots prennent sa place" (Politique, 132).
["In sticking too closely to the present, words take its place."]
It is not that the reflexive dimension of the text is totally absent, but
it pays the price of not being well thought out and concerted. It is not given
a way to define itself, it appears as disengaged from history, apolitical:
Ces passages au présent sont, en effet, des inducteurs de la plus grande étrangeté: il suffit que le texte passe au présent pour qu'on ne sache plus d'où il vient, à partir d'où il est émis. Dès que le texte se rapproche de sa source, il vient de nulle part. Son énonciation s'encrypte, se disloque. L'origine se perd au présent qui est tout sauf le temps de sa présence à soi: la moins réaliste des instances intemporelles, la plus irréférentielle. [Politique, 134]
In fact, these passages in the present tense are inductors of the greatest strangeness: the text need only pass into the present tense for us to no longer know where it cornes from, from where it it emitted. As soon as the text approaches its source, it cornes from nowhere. Its enunciation becomes cryptic, dislocated. The origin loses itself in the present which is everything except the time of its own presence to itself, the least realistic of the atemporal instances, the most irreferential.
Very well, one may say, isn't this a relatively banal statement which comes
from the very nature of writing? Certainly, but we see how it is directly
opposed to the Sartrean project which, since it doesn't recognize the necessity,
sees itself robbed of the political methods of bending it.
Hollier's reading thus delimits the impossible point where the text detaches
itself from the immediate, from presence and from history, which are, however
its proclaimed postulates. This point is precisely that of a transparent fiction
of writing.
We are thus prompted to re-read the Sartrean corpus from beginning to end
as a denial of the nature of language (of its own language) and of the traps
of writing. Not that the relationship between ethics, politics and literature
then becomes an obsolete question, without interest, without impact, without
pertinence. But as the reading of Politique de la prose demonstrates,
it could only be advantageous for this problematic to compromise itself in
the question of the neuter and of fiction; its effectiveness would be reinforced.
In trying to avoid this detour, to precipitate the text - in the chemical
sense of the term - in a fusion with the immediate, Sartre manages not to
confront it with its real; a gesture of avoidance which is heavy with political
consequences.
In this respect the "failure" ("échec")
of Sartre (who as a literary critic is always ready to denounce the failings
of writers - those of Baudelaire, Faulkner, Flaubert) carries an exemplary
lesson. If we must necessarily discuss the question of the historical inscription
of the writing practice, we must approach it cautiously, with indispensable
nuance. Like Blanchot, for example, who draws an ethics of writing inscribed
between the ought and the failure ("entre le falloir et le faillir")
from the alienation of literature in relation to the historical present and
from the problematic nature of this present itself. It is in this that Hollier's
reading is not at all in the stingy nature of a savage attack; it points out
the part of reflection in Sartre's work which, more than ever, is present
("actuelle").3
The Mother
Sartre deliberately cut his life in two: before 1940 and after. The war and
his emprisonment in Germany play the role of a brutal awakening for him; he
leaves behind the dream he had followed for forty years and commits himself
to the reality of a companionship which henceforth fuses his trajectory to
the common destiny:
En 1940 Sartre comprend que s'il est bon de s'endormir pour parler à sa mère, pour se réveiller réellement il est préférable de s'adresser aux hommes. La guerre met fin à la narratologie clinique du récit hypnogogique. [Politique, 260]
In 1940 Sartre understands that if it is good to go to sleep in order to speak to one's mother, in order to really wake up it is better to address oneself to men. The war puts an end to the clinical narrotology of the hypnagogic story.
Hollier demonstrates the structure of this dream and this awakening, calling
psychoanalysis into play. But again, this is not an application of a theoretical
model to a corpus that it dominates and finally misses (rater). For "le
psychoanalysme n'est souvent qu'une couverture pédante pour la plus
vétuste grivoiserie universitaire en mal de se refaire une jeunesse"
(Politique, 188). ["Psychoanalysis is often onlya pedantic cover for
the most timeworn academic sauciness trying to recapture its youth."]
He prefers "insinuation" to the "penetration"
which bends the text to its preestablished concepts, an approach which others
have criticized, but which Hollier makes his own. What is it? Insinuation
slips into the interior of its "object", it draws its arguments
not from a critical apparatus but from the text itself. It intends to
draw out the motifs of the text's desire:
Quand à l'insinuation, elle ne me déplaît pas. Tout le monde n'a pas droit à la pénétration. D'ailleurs, ça ne m'engage pas. Je n'ai pas à me mouiller. Je cite et ce n'est pas de moi. Je m'arrange pour que ce soit toujours lui qui l'ait dit. Dis-je. Ce qui ne me déplaît pas. [Politique, 188]
As for insinuation, I don't dislike it. Everyone doesn't have a right to penetration. Besides, this doesn't commit me. I don't have to get my feet wet. I make sure that it is always him who said it. I say. Which I don't dislike.
This does not mean that reading is innocent of the new that it produces in
the citational practice of its "object." The subject of the interpretation
"s'arrange," it "says" what the interpreted text
has already written. It works a putting into perspective, an active reading
which is not simply a repetition of the Sartrean enunciation. Politique
de la prose refuses to cut between the interpreted object and the interpreting
subject, between the rigor of knowledge (Blanchot, psychoanalysis, Marxism)
and the part of truth that this rigor brings to the reading subject. A third
term, that of language and its fictional powers, is brought in to emphasize
the difference between subject and object. Another equalizer in which the
Sartrean text, like that of its critic, will have to recognize that which
goes beyond them and confounds them.
As we know, Les Mots should be read as the systematic
denunciation of a bourgeois childhood spent dreaming. In this sleep, Anne-Marie,
the mother, occupies a privileged position: "Je lui disais tout:
plus que tout." 4 A beatific union sealed by
"un imaginaire de la langue" ["an imaginary order
of language"] in which everything can be said, in which the mother's
body and the child's do nothave to be separated and aIl this favored by the
premature death of the father.
From here on, the rupture with the bourgeoisie coincides with the abandonment
of the maternaI world: "Sartre comprend sa vocation, un jour il sera
ce qui manque à sa mère" (Politique, 254). ["Sartre
understands his vocation, one day he will be that which his mother lacks."]
To leave his class of origin is thus to enter the world of men; the political,
philosophical, literary decision is tied to a division which derives from
a phantasm and perhaps informs it. At stake here is not a question of reducing
the significance of the Sartrean engagement to a conflict revolving around
the name of the father (nom du père) through the device of
a reassuring and neutralizing psychoanalysis which would doom the doctrine
to the wastebaskets of history. Hollier asks unavoidable questions which any
politics of literature should confront in order to find there the terms of
its validity, and without which it will find itself outdated as soon as it
is enunciated.
We must then ask how we can awake from words in order
to finally grasp the thing. Is the awakening of 1940 really an awakening or
is it merely the continuation of the dream in other forms?5
The response is double. One could demonstrate first of all, that the awakening
is not unique, it is always already antidipated by another awakening. The
break (coupure) is thus repeatable, it diffuses itself and loses the characteristics
of an event. Thus, the father's death is inscribed in Les Mots as
a rupture with sleep: "A la mort de mon père, Anne-Marie et
moi, nous nous réveillâmes d'un cauchemar commun."
["Upon the death of my father, Anne Marie and I awoke from a common nightmare"
(Les Mots, 9; The Words, 16).] At the same time, the rupture of 1940 was preceded
by another awakening which broke the unit y of the child and the mother when
Anne-Marie remarried in 1917. The end of sleep thus has the appearance of
a repeatable series, of a variation in a series without beginning or end:
"Comme d'habitude, la rupture est condamnée d'avance à
la répétition parce qu'elle ne s'aperçoit pas qu'elle
répète ce avec quoi elle croit rompre" (Politique,
274). ["As usual, the rupture is already condemned to repetition because
it does not notice that it repeats that which it believed it was breaking
away from."]
Secondly, Les Mots can be considered an unfinished text. Not because
it is not a complete biography (here autobiography has nothing to do with
the totality), but because it calls for another work - that which was constituted
after the awakening, which permitted the condemnation of the dream of childhood.
Les Mots is only possible in an intertextuaI context from which the
demystification of its imaginary would find its grounding.
Hollier finds no difficulty in demonstrating that just as the awakening is
not really an awakening, the dream prolongs itself after the rupture of 1940
in the very work which is intended to denounce it. For Sartre "croyait
rêver, mais il ne s'était simplement pas rendu compte qu'il ne
s'endormait pas; il s'imaginait imaginer, rêvait rêver"
(Politique, 26). ["(Sartre) thought he was dreaming, but he simply hadn't
realized that he hadn't gone to sleep; he imagined that he was imagining,
dreamed he was dreaming."]
In consequence, the awakening does come from the prolongation of the dream.
Les Mots commits the useless murder of the child who since the beginning
was preserved from this murder by the anticipation of death: "Malgré
l'acharnement qu'il y met, Sartre n'arrive pas à le tuer: l'enfant
imaginaire était mort depuis toujours. Les Mots sont un suicide"
(Politique, 300). ["In spite of his determination, Sartre does not succeed
in killing it: the imaginary child was always dead. The Words is a suicide."]
We should also understand it in the sense that death, as Blanchot proposes,
is always present in literature. Thus the work from after 1940, although it
is intended to fit into the political community of living adults, into the
presence of males, acts as the linguistic crypt of this always dead child
who silently retums in it. Far from being written against this inevitable
disappearance, the crypt is created after the forgetting of this suicide.
By this it is condemned to repeat it, to retum forever - beyond the child
- to the Mother whom, however, it tries to proscribe (proscrire).
Conclusions
We have just seen that Les Mots could only be an unfinished text,
a passage to an impossible act - impossible because it has always already
taken place. But it is not the only such work in the Sartrean corpus. As Hollier
shows in La Nausée, Les Chemins de la liberté,
L'Etre et le Néant, Critique de la raison dialectique
and L'Idiot de la famille (Politique, 20, 52, 80, 81), Sartre's books
obey a law of incompleteness which means that, although they are more and
more voluminous, they never reach an end. I will not here enter into the details
of the demonstration which are, as elsewhere, nuanced and weIl informed -
irrefutable.
What is to be said of this writing which is more and more interminable? In
my opinion this infinite "to be continued" is symptomatic of Sartre's
"failure" ("échec"). Writing can never
complete itself; it does not manage to sum up nor, of course, to reflect itself
in a totalizing manner. The work then manifests, in its unfinished state,
the true nature of the methods that it denies; neither inside nor outside
the thing, it cannot, in essence, finish with it. Here Sartre joins, whatever
the circumstances, a literary history to which he would have liked to be the
exception and which Barthes defines in these terms: "Le réel
n'est pas représentable, et c'est parce que les hommes veulent sans
cesse le représenter qu'il y a une histoire de la littérature."
6 Far be it from me to recuperate Sartre with a too familiar
problematic in which he would lose the disturbing strangeness that Hollier's
reading confers upon him. If his (hidden) drama remains exemplary, retains
its virulence, it is because the conflict between presence and writing, politics
and fiction, remains perpetually open. For the hemophiliac récit never
succeeds in suturing its wound, which is the opening of the real, and it continues
(denying it, accepting it) to write itself in bloody letters, without ever
completely coagulating.
Translated by Peggy McCracken
Notes
1. "It is now our turn no longer to know the taste
that Sartre's writing had. And to taste this taste which we will never know."
Denis Hollier, Politique de la prose, Sartre et l'an quarante (Paris:
Gallimard, 19821, 138. Further references to this workwill begiven in the
text.
Back
to the text
2. Jean-Paul Sartre, Situations 2 {Paris: Gallimard, 19481,
12. Further references will be indicated in the text. [Translations, when
available, are from What is Literature, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York:
Philosophical Library, 19491. Translations without a reference are mine. Translator's
note]
Back to the text
3. On the question of presence, see the pertinent remarks
of J.-F. Lyotard in "Un Succès de Sartre", Critique,
no. 430, mars 1983.
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to the text
4. Jean-Paul Sartre, Les Mots (Paris: Gallimard, 19641,
181. ["I told her everything. More than everything." The Words,
trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: George Braziller, 19641,217.]
Back
to the text
5. "Même dans le réveil absolu,
il y a encore une part de rêve qui est justement le rêve de réveil.
On ne se réveille jamais: les désirs entretiennent les rêves.
La mort est un rêve, entre autres rêves qui perpétuent
la vie, celui de séjourner dans le mythique. C'est du côté
du réveil que se situe la mort. La vie est quelque chose de tout à
fait impossible qui peut rêver de réveil absolu." Jacques
Lacan, "Improvisation: désir de mon, rêve et réveil,"
remarks collected by Catherine Millot and published in L'Ane, no. 3, automne
1981. [Even in absolute awakening, there is still a pan of dream which is
precisely the dream of awakening. We never wake up: desires keep dreams alive.
Death is a dream among other dreams which perpetuate life, that of the stay
in the mythic. Death is found on the side of awakening. Life is something
completely impossible which can dream of absolute awakening.]
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6. Roland Barthes, Leçon (Paris: Seuil, 19781,21.
["The real is not representable, and it is because men ceaselessly try
to represent it by words that there is a history of literature." "Inaugural
Lecture, Collège de France," trans. Richard Howard, in Susan Sontag,
ed., A Barthes Reader (New York: Hill and Wang, 19821, 465.]