Showing papers in "Substance in 1973"

Structuralism: The Aftermath

Abstract: Critical concepts especially if they end in ism rarely have uneventful lives. More often than not their appearance is sudden and surrounded by an atmosphere of crisis, then, when one thinks they are well established they disappear from the intellectual scene unobtrusively before running the full course of their projected promises leaving behind a trail of surprised commentaries. In this respect Structuralism is no exception. For a very short time, about a decade ago, the word seemed essential to define the common concerns of a certain number of thinkers Barthes, Lacan, Levi-Strauss, Foucault in fields as diverse as anthropology, psychoanalysis and literary criticism, who not only postulated what seemed then a common methodology but alluded to the possibility of referring their various disciplines to a common theoretical matrix. Then as the concept began to spread and books by the title f Structuralism, What is Structuralism, Keys to Structuralism, etc. began to appear, those who by their works were most responsible for the diffusion of the term in the first place started to take their distance both from the concept and from each other, to such an extent that today we may rightly question whether the concept of structuralism has any critical validity and whether such a thing as structuralism ever existed. If one were to look back say to the years after the second world war to when the term Existentialism swept over the French intellectual scene, a certain number of traits common to both situations become apparent which might help us understand the fate of terms such as existentialism or structuralism. Initially the term is used against the established ideologies of the day to mark the presence of something new or different in the works of a certain number of thinkers; the new element being attributed to a new method of analysis derived from Husserlian phenomenology in one case and from linguistic models or semiology in the other. Then as the opposition diminishes or disappears and the new term becomes the new ideology, the need to insist on the methodological pretexts

Georges Bataille: Literature and Sovereignty

Abstract: d'une dissipation sans limite des 'richesses', des substances: il y aurait si nous bornions cette dissipation, r6serve en vue d'autres moments, ce qui limiterait--annulerait--la souverainet6 du moment imm6diat. La science rapportant les objets de pens6e aux moments souverains n'est en fait qu'une gconomie generate, envisageant le sens de ces objets les uns par rapport aux autres, finalement par rapport h la perte de sens. L'Experience intgrieure

Sartre, Ponge and the Ghost of Husserl

Abstract: practice has consistently avoided close textual scrutiny in favor of a more comprehensive reading subservient to a set of varying ideologies and concepts. This type of eccentric criticism, in which the text becomes pretext, prefigures two general objectives. It elucidates either a particular system of values or an argument ad hominem which seeks the writer within or behind the work. Sartre's critical works can be distinguished from the above categories by their apparent eclecticism; the variety of individual concepts and vocabularies recognizable in his writings forms no integral text-view. On the contrary, it often appears as though Sartre changes critical optics midway through a literary encounter. As a consequence, his criticism taken as a continuous discourse or narrative traces a set of serpentine changes whose most characteristic trait is the subjugation and assimilation of the primary text to external objectives (the hors-texte). As in a kind of ritual cannibalism, the text must disappear within the machinery of a critical apparatus hungry for available nourishment. In expectation of the promised analysis of Madame Bovary, it might prove helpful to consider an instance where the machinery breaks down and where the phenomenon of malfunction exposes the nature of a critical procedure which necessarily eschews textual considerations as a kind of ritual offering toward elucidation of extra-textual objectives. Conceived as a presentation of Francis Ponge's Le Parti pris des choses, "L'Homme et les choses" first appeared in Poesie (July-October 1944). In addition to revealing the ontological concerns of L'Etre et Ze niant, the article is Sartre's earliest discussion of poetic language. It thus foreshadows much of the literary program set forth two years later in Qu'est-ce que la littirature? Yet what appears as the presentation of a poetic text is also an act of critical sabotage whose objective we see as situated beyond the poems under review. As becomes clear, but only at the end of the article, Sartre's exposition substitutes polemic for analytic concerns: the allegations against Ponge form

"Utopia" and Process: Text and Anti-Text

Abstract: If we may say with Robert Elliott, after Dostoevsky, Berdyaev and Zamiatin, that utopia is a product of the euclidean mind.1 we must take it as a most ambiguous and subversive one, at least in the case of the nominal ancestor of the genre: it may be that the euclideanism of the interpretive critic betrays its textual victim. This last partakes simultaneously of the satiric rejection and of the affirmative vision of a man-created and, at least to some degree, obtainable Golden Age.2 It is doubly paradoxical, however; for there remains an internal necessity of "failure" in a "hope" inspired by the nostalgia for a Golden Age whose proper place is the no-time and eternity of myth. In that sense, the mathematization of this Golden Age is a contradiction in terms: for the logic of mathematics demands not only a first term and its product (which are), but also the process which leads to it and which fills the gap between them; it needs the process of becoming. Yet we know that there can be no such process leading from the finite to the infinite, from the temporality of now to the atemporality of then. Furthermore utopia represents a signifier which may be -and generally is -inserted in at least two different discourses: that of literature, as a self-referential text, and that of politics or of polity. Both of these participate at once in the satirical and the utopian modes, but, at least in the traditional utopia, both of these discourses are frozen.3 This is of

The "Tel Quel" Ideology: Material Practice upon Material Practice

Abstract: We have before us a critique "of an attempt at reduplication, of repetion . . . of an ideological movement determined by another context, that of the years 1920-1930." The critique is that of the Tel Quel group; their target is neo-surrealism, heir to the surrealist movement of forty years ago. The task which we here propose to perform is to examine the political and ideological position of the Tel Quel group, using as our primary source the texts of Tel Quel 46, texts which articulate a fifty page criticism of neo-surrealism. While this criticism pre-dates the "official" commitment to Maoism taken by the group in spring of 1972 (Tel Quel 48-49), the critique of neo-surrealism is perhaps the most complete and concise articulation of their ideology yet published. Furthermore, the general method of their ideology has remained consistent from early 1971 (cf. Julia Kristeva: "Matibre Sens, Dialectique," Tel Quel 44) through the Maoist alignment period to their most recent articles (cf. Bernard Sichare: "Sur la Lutte Ideologique," Tel Quel 52-53). It is this ideological base which we propose to examine here, taking into account any precisions made by the group in later texts. Our study, then, will initially trace the framework used by Tel Quel in their examination of neo-surrealism: 1) a look at the reasons given by Tel Quel for the necessity of their critique (a look which will permit us to understand the historical role which they ascribe to themselves); 2, 3, 4, an examination of the contents of their critique, i.e.: the critique of the 2) philosophical, 3) aesthetic; and 4) psychoanalytic bases of surrealism. Within this process of examination of the Telquelian critique, we hope to approach an understanding and ultimate critique of the Tel QueZ ideology itself. Our task, then, to use the terms of the Tel Quel texts, will be a material practice, "material" in the processes which originate the "practice," writing.

"Amor Interruptus": The Question of Eroticism or, Eroticism in Question in the Works of Claude Simon

Abstract: Eroticism has often been pointed out as a major theme in the works of Claude Simon. Recently two short studies have appeared on the subject: "Les Signes de L'Eros" by Raymond Jean and "Erotisme et cr6ation, ou la mort en sursis" by John Fletcher.1 Raymond Jean limits his investigation to a study of two passages: one taken from La Route des Flandres (pp. 257-92), the other from La Bataille de Pharsale (pp. 211-26). The author restricts himself to bringing out and specifying how the erotic in Simon is based on vegetal and animal themes. John Fletcher ventures a li tle further, and, referring to Georges Bataille's L'Erotisme, seeks "a point of view which will show the unity of the human mind" or, better yet, "the harmony existing between the different drives of our being" (p. 131). After having singled out some of the pertinent characteristics of eroticism, he believes it possible to locate this unity in artistic creation and, in conclusion, finds the presence of a "desperate eroticism, intimately linked, as in the Marquis de Sade and his Romantic successors, to the idea of death" (p. 140). These4two studies -which, by the way, are not without contention -do not specify exactly what must be understood by "eroticism." In fact eroticism does pose "immense problems" (Thierry Maulnier). In the first place, we run into the question of language. As noted by Claude Elsen: "There is in the word eroticism an ambiguity which makes its use difficult and dangerous."5 This ambiguity comes first from problems of language, which appear most sharply when we use and oppose certain concepts such as "love," "sexuality," eroticism," vague notions which necessitate definition. Any discussion of eroticism requires careful definition of the scope of the term. Raymond Jean shows he is aware of this necessity when he sees himself obliged to establish a distinction between "sexual" and "erotic": "the

Claude Simon: Earth, Death and Eros

Abstract: was hygienically sterilized from the start by Robbe-Grillet's anathema against "le mot A caractere visc6ral, analogique et incantatoire." Twenty years later, writers and critics alike have had, it would seem, a little too much intellectual austerity: R. Barthes now proclaims Le plaisir du texte, A. RobbeGrillet admits "affective reactions" (meaning some measure of frustration) to impeccable critical demonstrations.1 Somewhere between mathematics and impressionism there should be space for a poetic reading of the New Novel and Simon's work is the most obvious field to start such reading. I propose to point out a recurring -therefore "obsessive" in Mauron's terms -metaphor in Simon's early novels and to follow its diversification into "mitaphore g6n6ratrice" in La Route des Flandres, allegory, a delicate poetic structure superbly handled in Triptyque and finally into myth in La bataille de PharsaZe.

India (The Black and the Archipelago) on Fire

Abstract: We imagine a cloud of atoms as a disintegrated coherence or as one to be formed. The dispersion of spars beneath the hurricane, the decomposition of bodies at the Athens plague, the primitive aggregation at the dawn of Clinamen. Born of dust and returned to dust. Each thing grasped in the cycle of pulverulence and formation, of fermentation and putrescence. Direct experience imposes basic facts. Most solids do not melt in water, whence the call of Lucretius for the agitation of tempests. The hardest of objects are reduced by fire. If we want the easiest demonstration, we will play with a piece of wax. For metals and boulders, it takes more energy, craft and constancy. From the stove to the blast furnace. Fire thus appears as the pre-eminent analyzer: the destroyer, the reducer, the atomizer. The primary element of power, of energy, of strength, of motion and life, the sun. We think we have learned all this only recently, since the industrial revolution of Watt and Carnot, since Jean Perrin was the son of Boltzmann or Gibbs, since thermodynamics led to our understanding of the atom. We know clearly and distinctly that fire produces and destroys, forms and decomposes, engenders and analyzes. The fact is, we have known it, in a different mode, but in the final analysis, not very differently, since the Ionian physicists. The decomposition into elements, the total dispersion into clouds, the resumption of coherences, the atomic nature of things, are hypotheses derived from the experience of fire. On the shores of the holy sea, the physics of analysis was already the daughter of fire, as is ours. This practical experience and its commensurate theory are accompanied, with meaningful regularity, in a number of texts which describe or posit them, by the pathetic avowal of an intropathic or proprioceptive suffering of the body proper. The consuming fire disseminates bodies, there exists a fire which disperses our limbs. The atomization of objects corresponds, I know not how, to the torment of limbs scattered in the furnace of desire.