Showing papers in "Substance in 1999"

Immersion vs. Interactivity: Virtual Reality and Literary Theory

Abstract: L'A. se propose ici d'analyser la realite virtuelle en tant que phenomene semiotique - tout en evaluant ses implications sur la theorie litteraire, ainsi que sur la question de la textualite.

Debord, Cybersituations, and the Interactive Spectacle

Abstract: The afterlife of the ideas of Guy Debord and the Situationist International is quite striking. Contemporary society and culture are still permeated with the sort of spectacle described in classical Situationist works, and the concept of "spectacle" has almost become normalized, emerging as part and parcel of both theoretical and popular media discourse. Moreover, Situationist texts are reaching new and ever-expanding audiences in the proliferation of 'zines and web sites, some of which embody Situationist practice. The past decade has been marked by a profusion of cultural activism that uses new communications technology to proliferate radical social critique and alternative culture. Many of these 'zines pay homage to Debord and the Situationists, as do a profusion of web sites that contain their texts and diverse commentary.' Situationist ideas thus remain an important part of contemporary cultural theory and activism, and may continue to inspire cultural and political opposition as the "Society of the Spectacle" enters cyberspace and new realms of culture and experience emerge. In this article, we will accordingly update Debord's ideas in formulating what we see as the advent of a new stage of the spectacle, requiring new technologies and forms of oppositional practice. We first delineate Debord's now classic theory of the spectacle, indicate how it is still relevant for analyzing contemporary society, and then distinguish between new forms of interactive spectacles and megaspectacles. We will contrast these to what we call "cybersituations" that have become possible with the Internet and new technologies, offering expanded opportunities for resistance and

Caribbean Creolization: Reflections on the Cultural Dynamics of Language, Literature, and Identity

Abstract: Brings together prominent writers from the English, French, Spanish and Dutch-speaking Caribbean in an examination of creolization and its impact upon the region's literary production. The collection seeks to redefine Caribbean identity and aesthetics.

Literary History without Literature: Reading Practices in the Ancient World

Abstract: ture" as a category is paralleled by the fall of Rhetoric as the privileged discipline of the liberal arts, and, with a beguilingly neat symmetry, as twentieth-century modernism has challenged the category "literature," so rhetoric has regained its place as a master discourse in the modern academy.2 If we accept this narrative-at least in such broad terms-it leaves the classicist with something of a problem, however. A literary history that did not recognize that Homer is first and Vergil second (and closer to first than third, as Quintilian put it), would be a strangely truncated affair. While Terry Eagleton can write an account of the ideology of aesthetics that finds its fons et origo in the eighteenth century-3no place even for Plato-could such an account be satisfactory for what is called "literature," with its constant reappropriation of the writing of the pastwhen, indeed, classics provide the very classes of classification for so much of Western literate culture? It would be a naive nominalism that asserted

Sic Transit Gloria Artis: "The End of Art" for Theodor Adorno and Guy Debord*

Abstract: and so noisily announced, and just as vociferously rejected, during the 1960s-has finally come about, albeit surreptitiously, and "not with a bang but a whimper." For more than a century the development of art was synonymous with an uninterrupted succession of formal innovations and "avant-gardes" continually extending the boundaries of creative activity. The last period of seeming glory ended, however, at the beginning of the seventies, since which time no new avant-garde tendency has come to the fore. All we have seen is a recycling of isolated and degraded fragments of

Is Literary History the History of Everything? The Case for "Antiquarian" History

Abstract: YES INDEED. IT ALWAYS HAS BEEN, and is perhaps now more so than ever. For the most part our approach has been compulsively inclusive; nothing human or inhuman is alien to us. As a matter of moral and/or professional impulse, scholars and teachers of literature have always wanted to read a world through a text and in a text, even if some have insisted that such is not their business. Efforts at limiting the scope of our professional attentions, whether by textual editors, by deconstruction with its formal-linguistic "rigor," or by the New Criticism, have always been resisted as pure definitions of the discipline, and have survived principally by being allowed into the company of other and wider-ranging interpretive conventions, as parts of an ever-expanding whole. Old fashioned, restricted literary history conceived as the influence of one writer upon another has lately flourished most visibly in the form of polemical pastiche, in the work of Harold Bloom, rather than as an agreed-upon norm for the present conduct of criticism. Intellectually and philosophically, with or without moral impulse, there seems to be next to nothing that can be safely excluded in an a priori way from the historicization of a literary work. The dazzling, unforseen connections of the best of the "new historicism" merely carry to the max a principle of all literary history. But then, if literary history is the history of everything, is it definable as a specific occupation, different from the rest of history? If so, how? And if not, what are the professional consequences of dissolving the figment of disciplinary identity into an undifferentiated method applying to all historical inquiry and perhaps all inquiry whatsoever? This is a question particularly pressing within an academic culture marked by what we might call a "new general method" in the humanities and social sciences. This I take to involve an acceptance by other disciplines (history, philosophy, anthropology, sociology) of the practices (deliberately not "methods") of literary criticism. Everything now is described as storytelling, as local knowledge, as conversational, and as reflexive and even autobiographical.1 Sometimes the project of attending to the past is

Circulating Representations: New Historicism and the Poetics of Culture

Abstract: NEW HISTORICISM, LIKE ALL THE OTHER ISMS of our time, has rapidly become a catch-word, a label, under which the heterogeneous is re-packaged and marketed as the more or less homogeneous. The intellectual reality of New Historicism in fact discloses a variety of sins or virtues or a mix of both depending on one's point of view (the points of view themselves of course vary in that from its inception to the present "New Historicism" has been an object of fierce and continuing controversy). For example, in the very fine book by Graham Bradshaw on Shakespeare, we will find, convincingly demonstrated, fundamental differences, at least in the case of Shakespearean interpretation, between American New Historicism (as instantiated by the work of Stephen Greenblatt) and British New Historicism (as instantiated by the work of Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield). Bradshaw, quite rightly in my view, sustains a respectful dialogue with Greenblatt (whose work he simultaneously admires and disagrees with), while reserving for the British scholars a disdain verging on contempt for their wilful dogmatism and polemical straw men, and above all and paradoxically, for their radical inability to think in a genuinely historical way at the very moment they speak in the name of History -for instance, by ripping speeches out of dramatic context as if they were embodiments of Shakespeare's own views, and thus perpetrating the gravest error of all: namely, systematic disregard of the elementary point that any historicizing of Shakespeare must attend to the generic and structural realities of what Bradshaw calls "dramatic thinking." Dramatic thinking is a particular modality of thought (just as poetic and philosophical thinking are), a perspectival mode in which a dramatic speech is relativized not simply to a point of view (that of the speaking character) but also to its place in the temporal unfolding of the play. How the generic and structural temporalities of dramatic thinking relate to the conditions of a wider history is exactly the task in hand. To short-circuit that inquiry in a crude reduction of texts to symptomatic ideology is a travesty of anything that New Historicism might productively be.

Hurlements en faveur de Sade : The Negation and Surpassing of "Discrepant Cinema"

Abstract: Asger Jorn writes in his introduction to Debord's Contre Le Cinema that Debord's films "are like long experimental notes on the development of the general theory of deetournement" (6).2 The Situationist practice of ditournement was one of the most important and widespread techniques employed in their artistic and political endeavors, reaching its apex during the events of May 1968. De'tournement comprises both an aesthetic and political critique. The technique is defined by Guy Debord and Gil Wolman as the "mutual interference of two worlds of feeling, or the bringing together of two independent expressions" which, through this juxtaposition, "supersedes the original elements and produces a synthetic organization of greater efficacy" (Knabb 9). Debord employed ditournement cinematically, since his films are mostly comprised of preexisting materials. The images in his 1973 film version of La Socidt du Spectacle are taken from preexisting films, advertisements, newsreels and still photographs. These images appear as he reads the text of the book on the soundtrack.

L'Internationale Situationniste, Socialisme ou Barbarie, and the Crisis of the Marxist Imaginary

Abstract: In Paris, Guy Debord and a small, changing cast of friends and supporting characters2 tracked through the Parisian cultural and political underground along the path laid earlier by the Surrealists.3 Skilled as provocateurs, anxious to abandon the constraints of artistic production and to acquire legitimacy as revolutionaries, Debord and his friends almost immediately began to look to the journal Socialisme ou Barbarie, edited by the group of the same name led by Cornelius Castoriadis.4 SB is a crucial, though little discussed, referent in the evolution of Guy Debord. The relationship was central for Debord, and worked on several levels. After months of discussion with SB militants, Debord joined the group for a few months during 1960-1961. The merger was inconclusive and strained. However, in the pages of the journal L'Internationale Situationniste, SB played an important role as the symbol of the "new revolutionary movement" with which Debord increasingly identified. Initially, SB was simply part of the political landscape. However, once Debord became more involved, SB became much more central, and the "Situ" journal much more deferential toward the older group. Debord was a sympathetic observer of SB, and his accounts form one of the few views of the group from an outside perspective. SB functions as an Archimedean point around which the Situs tried to pivot from art and cultural dissent into revolutionary politics. When SB exploded in 1963 and Castoriadis began to publish his long text "Marxisme et la th6orie r6volutionnaire"-in which he argues that "it has come to the point where one can either be Marxist or a revolutionary"Debord began a sustained attempt to exclude SB from the revolutionary movement and to usurp its role in a new revolutionary vanguard. Elements of SB's

An Aesthetic of the "Grand Style": Guy Debord

Abstract: classicism and immersing it in historical events and contingencies. However, even more than Gracián, it is the enemy of Richelieu and Mazarin— Cardinal Retz—who occupies Debord’s imagination. In his letter of December 24, 1968, Debord wrote to me: I love the quotation of Retz’s Mémoires not only because it touches upon the themes of the “imagination in power” and of “take your desires for reality,” but also because there is a certain amusing relationship between the Fronde of 1648 and May [1968]: the only two great movements in Paris which exploded as immediate answer to some arrests: and both with some barricades. The subversive tradition in which Debord places himself is therefore more one of ancient-baroque tyrannicide than the modern one of political and social revolution: 1968 seems to him similar to the Fronde, not to the French Revolution, much less the Russian Revolution. By comparing Debord to the Cardinal who animated the Fronde, there is in him a practice of truth that belongs to Retz the writer, but definitely not to Retz the man of action. It is easy, of course, to preserve one’s integrity in solitude, or in a very restricted group of friends; it is a totally different matter to have to deal with all sorts of men and to fight in a civil war in which everybody knows that life itself is at stake! The “grand style” of Retz’s Mémoires consists above all in the distance he keeps from himself, in the unrestrained sincerity with which he exposes the most hidden motivations of his actions, even when it damages his reputation, but certainly it does not consist in the events that he tells! It is a post festum “grand style,” so to speak, not in the flagrancy of action; in plotting intrigues, betrayals and conspiracies, Retz is no different from his enemies, and if his schemes have not succeeded, failure was certainly unintentional and unwelcome! Debord’s case is very different; in it the aesthetic of struggle, at least starting from the end of the 1960s, is shaped as an aesthetic of defeat, almost as if any success would contain an element of unavoidable vulgarity. War is for him not only the realm of danger, but also of delusion (Panegyric, VI). I have always had a vague sense of the “obscure melancholy” that accompanied his life, as he acknowledged in In girium, and I saw the tragic and inevitable consequences of attributing to failure an aura of dismal splendor. What Debord has in common with Retz the writer is the questioning of what could have been and has not been. In his Mémoires, Retz often mentions events that were on the point of happening and did not happen for totally An Aesthetic of the Grand Style 97 Substance # 90, 1999 accidental reasons. In his view, heroic judgment consists precisely in distinguishing the extraordinary from the impossible, in order to aim at the first and to avoid the second. In Debord as well there is a similar attitude: in his letter of June 10, 1968 he writes to me: “We have almost made a revolution. [...] The strike now has been defeated (mainly by the C.G.T.), but French society as a whole is in a crisis for a long period.” Now, I wonder whether the “society of the spectacle” itself, erasing the distinction between true and false, between imagination and reality, has not also changed the notion of victory and defeat, freeing them from reference to the accomplished event and inaugurating a “society of simulacra.” This is, however, a theoretical step that Debord never took; he remained fundamentally linked, like Retz, to a realistic vision of conflict. Maybe political thinkers of the sixteenth century (such as Machiavelli, Guicciardini and Loyola) had already moved beyond this vision. Debord’s questioning the reasons for events, however, never becomes regret, much less repentance. He writes, I have never quite understood the reproaches I have often incurred, whereby I lost this fine troop in a senseless assault, or with some sort of Neronian complacency. [...] I certainly [...] assume responsibility for all that happened” (In girum, 60). The stoic attitude of acceptance of present and past prevails: this is definitely a very important aspect of the “grand style.” Life is a labyrinth from which there is no way out: from this, in fact, derives the title of his film In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni. This sentence, which means, literally, “We turn around at night and we are devoured by fire,” presents the curious feature that one can read it from the last letter to the first without the slightest change—an extraordinary palindrome. Hence it expresses very well the experience, typical of the ancient Stoics, of synkatathesis, the assent of the wise to heimarmene, Providence, which they understood as the inviolable series of causes, “the rational law on the basis of which things that happened have happened, those that happen happen and those that will happen will happen” (Pohlenz). Connected to this experience is the stoic idea of the eternal return, that is to say, of the repetition of recurrent cosmic periods, in which the same events that have already occurred happen again. As is well-known, Nietzsche adopts the stoic conception of the eternal return and interprets it not as a metahistorical law but as “a will of eternal return,” as amor fati: only in this way can the past stop being the cause of frustration and powerlessness. The future will not be able to give us anything better than what the past has

Scenes from the Marriage of Louis XIV: Nuptial Fictions and the Making of Absolutist Power

Abstract: Introduction: nuptial fictions 1. Liminal images 2. Fashioning the body politic 3. Views from the border 4. Nuptial technologies 5. Curiosity and the art of collecting a queen Afterword Notes Bibliography Index.

Guy Debord and the Problem of the Accursed

Abstract: This is what The Gentlemen's Magazine wrote on the occasion of the death of Godwin, who was an inspiration to Shelley, Coleridge, Wordsworth, William Blake, and many others, just as Proudhon is the inspiration for Courbet's painting. From this group comes a large part of modern poetry, the "plein air" school in landscape painting, Impressionism, and a whole continuous creative development whose continuation belonged and still belongs to the forces of life, constituting creative freedom itself. But such a development cannot be understood if one separates it from its solidarity with this bad passion that is "alone capable of overthrowing the old world"-the passion carried by creative rule-breakers who are cursed as such. This state of affairs no longer is at odds with society's general attitude toward modernism. Paradoxically, the general sympathy toward modernism since the turn of the century, and especially since World War II when it was proclaimed that "the accursed artist no longer exists," represses these creative forces even more radically. The reality of social malediction is wrapped in a tranquilizing and antiseptic appearance of emptiness: the problem has disappeared; there never was a problem. At the same time, the journalistic label of "accursed" becomes, on the contrary, an immediate valorization. It is enough to get yourself cursed, to be all the rage. And this is fairly simple, since any kind of aggression provokes curses from its victim. Thus the very principle of the accursed is altered; we rediscover the simple romantic notion of the unrecognized genius. He's the thinker whom one willingly considers as "ahead of his time," and one attempts, further, to leave him unrecognized for as brief a time as possible.

The art of survival : The translation of Walter Benjamin

Abstract: Walter Benjamin est tenu pour etre un ecrivain obscur : ses oeuvres ne sont pas aisement assimilables par la critique academique et restent en outre difficiles a lire. Quelque cinquante ans apres sa mort, la figure litteraire de Walter Benjamin se dessine. Le caractere indetermine de l'identite litteraire de Benjamin est-il la cle de sa survie ?

The Master of the Revolutionary Subject: Some Passages from the Life of Guy Debord

Abstract: He moved-as he later wrote-"slowly, but unceasingly towards a life of adventure, keeping his eyes wide open," for he had decided to undertake nothing that might improve his prospects, such as a degree or a career or anything whereby one trades for a future those elements that block the way to it. As a consequence, he passed over the promises of a regulated bourgeois life and began to free his actions from economic ties. Chance had it that Debord would early on have his attention drawn to a small group of young people who would make his path easier. In the summer of 1951 this group descended on Cannes from Paris, to bring chaos to the famous Film Festival, and to exploit it as propaganda for their own film productions. They called themselves the "Lettrists," and in post-war Paris their role was undoubtedly the most active. These young peoplemost of whom, like Debord, were scarcely 20 years old, were quite familiar with the main coordinates of the Parisian avant-garde, for they occupied themselves with attempting to snatch power away from the established representatives of artistic Bohemia, such as the Surrealists or the Existentialists. Debord accompanied the Lettrists back to Paris. By the spring of 1952 Debord already played an important part among them. When the latest films and theories of the Lettrists were presented in the journal ION, a screenplay by Debord was also printed, along with his photo. The photo appears slightly scratched and out of focus, with black and white spots, as though taken against the sun. It portrays him as if his life had already become a memory, tossed away, and picked up again at a different time like in a retrospective image of when one had first met him. He manifests perhaps a youthful detachment, which for a moment is made

Repeating staging meaning between Aristotle and Freud

Abstract: Etude de la critique psychanalytique de la theorie aristotelicienne de la mimesis comme instinct humain, developpee par Freud a partir de l'analyse du principe de plaisir. En reference a la conception platonicienne de l'imitation definie dans la «Republique», l'A. mesure le role de la repetition et de la division dans le processus mimetique caracteristique de l'activite theâtrale et du jeu de l'enfant.

Intellectuals on the Couch: The Sokal Hoax and Other Impostures intellectuelles

Abstract: IT WOULD BE AMUSING BUT RATHER FRUITLESS to trot out once again the details of the Sokal Hoax, and to savor one more time the stances assumed by the wide range of persons who have made pronouncements upon it. Any good search engine will lead the reader to dozens of internet sites devoted to the affair, and a quick look at the tables of contents of journals in a variety of fields will confirm the obvious: the hoax was a hit. Ever since the truth about "Transforming the boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" (Social Text 46/47) was revealed in Lingua Franca in spring of 1996, there has been a veritable explosion of articles and debates involving scientists (including a Nobel recipient), internationally-known scholars in the humanities and social sciences, writers, editors, and students in a range of fields. And things are heating up again now that Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont's Impostures intellectuelles (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1997) has been published in translation in the US by St. Martin's Press. (The British edition was published by Profile Books in July, 1998.) I don't wish to join the fray, but I do think it important to ask questions about the implications of the phenomenon itself. I'd like to investigate what is at stake here, over and above (serious) issues of sloppy adjudicating, weak scholarship, strange inter-disciplinarity, bizarre French-US relations in academia, and the ever-problematic cult of personalities. What is there about this hoax that could possibly justify articles in such prominent venues as the New York Review of Books, The New York Times, Le Monde, Dissent and the Times Literary Supplement? Why have we heard so much about roundtables at Yale, Princeton, Duke, the University of Michigan and New York University, news conferences in a range of places, and

The Rhetoric of the Impossible

Abstract: It's damn near impossible to write about Marcel B&nabou's books. They present a limpid, armored surface where the kind of handholds one normally looks for in a text are rare and extraordinarily precarious. Every utterance in them is so deeply bound up in irony and doubt that the prospect of saying anything frank and valid about them appears dim at best. Every gesture the critic might be tempted to make seems to have been anticipated by the author, and parried in advance as it were, as if Benabou had deliberately followed the script for the puzzle-maker that Georges Perec laid out in Life: A User's Manual.' In short, if reading Marcel Benabou's books is consistently-indeed extravagantly-pleasurable, writing about them is hell on wheels. That bit of whining aside (there will be no more, or not very much more), let me begin. But I would like to say in passing that it is the inalienable right of every academic to whine. Moreover, it is a right we must also accord to Benabou himself as we try to come to some sort of terms with his books (for he, too, is an academic, and a distinguished one at that). Allow me then to start with something relatively easy in order to work my way, crab-like, toward the impossible. Marcel Benabou was born in the Sephardic community of Meknks, Morocco in 1939. At the age of seventeen, he went to Paris to study at the Lyc e Louis-le-Grand, matriculating thereafter at the Ecole Normale Sup rieure. He earned his doctorate at the Sorbonne, and makes his living as a Roman historian at the Universite de Paris VII. He joined the Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle (or "Oulipo") in 1969, and serves currently as that group's Definitively Provisional Secretary. His first book, published in 1976, is a work of historiography entitled La Resistance africaine i~ la romanisation, and I'll say no more about it, because it's his three other books, Pourquoi je n'ai ecrit aucun de mes livres (1986), Jette ce livre avant qu'il soit trop tard (1992), and Jacob, Menahem et Mimoun: Une dpople familiale (1995) that interest me

Between Roussel and Rousseau, or Constraint and Confession

Abstract: Roussel and Rousseau are two names that one is scarcely used to associating. Nonetheless, their joined presence in my title should not lead one to anticipate some unexpected revelations on subterranean structural analogies, eventual thematic affinities, or even hypothetical stylistic connections discernible beyond the obvious phonetic heritage of these two writers. If such links exist (and I reserve the right to show, someday, that they do indeed exist, even if they have not often been perceived),' my object today is not to study them. These two great names figure here only as flag-bearers, as emblems, as mythical godfathers of two literary attitudes, or rather two ways, supposedly antagonistic, of going about the act of writing: One, which proposes relying heavily on "procedures," such as those Roussel finally revealed, at least partially, in his posthumous work, Comment j'ai ecrit certains de mes livres.2 It is this process that opened up for him the way to create universes, characters, and adventures that were totally imaginary, like those that fill the chapters and pages of Locus solus or Impressions d'Afrique, to mention only his two best-known novels. The other way stresses the search for truth, and valorizes sincerity and authenticity in the use of the word about oneself. This is the way that leads directly to such enterprises as the Confessions; this is what has opened the way, as we all know, to an overabundant autobiographical production. If we accept this summary division of the literary field, it goes without saying that the Oulipians, by definition, must be situated largely on the side of Roussel. In fact, among all past writers to whom the Oulipians feel close,3 Raymond Roussel would doubtless rank first. "L'&criture sous contrainte,""writing under constraints"-so dear to Oulipians, can be considered as an attempt to generalize and systematize diverse Rousselian "procedures." Now it so happens that, as has been noted by such alert observers as Jacques Lecarme,4 Claude Burgelin,5 or Philippe Lejeune,6 some Oulipians (one could name Jacques Roubaud, Georges Perec and myself) do not hesitate, at least in some of their books, to look toward Rousseau, if not frankly to follow in his footsteps, by engaging in writing which, despite disclaimers, can be linked to autobiography. And to do this in spite of unleashing

Benabou's Family Epic: A Story in Perpetual Labor

Abstract: Postmodernist conceptions of literature have laid claim to the inability of the text to come to terms with its own narrative objects. Thus, the text has come to be apprehended no more as a synthetic totality, as was presupposed by the Realist ideological configuration, but as an indefinite process of incompleteness, in that the narrative cannot see its own end, given that it consists of an endless productive activity. The writings of Marcel Benabou, "the definitively temporary secretary of the OULIPO" (Ouvroir de litterature potentielle),' pose from the start the question of their generic affiliation. There is no doubt that given their Oulipian literary dimension, they reinscribe the textual practices inherent in the post-modern text, to wit, fragmentation, deconstruction and suspension-the basic strategies so characteristic to the post-modern novel in general. Indeed, Pourquoi je n'ai ecrit aucun de mes livres and Jette ce livre avant qu'il soit trop tard, as well as his Epopee familiale though in a less marked manner,2 seem to be pure products of the Oulipian laboratory. They constitute, on the whole, metatextual elaborations on the activity of writing itself and its varied complex significations. But Benabou combines as well another primordial dimension. For beside the self-reflexiveness of the writing activity in his books, (or should I say novels, though they resemble none), there is an autobiographical aspect, an attempt to recapture or rather (re)create a past without falling into the temptations or traps of the classical autobiographical (or biographical) narrative. However, for Benabou, the question is how to reconcile an autobiographical project that manifests an irreducible socio-historical, ethnic, culturally and geographically determined identity with not only the tools and modes of expression that attempt to circumscribe it, but also with the activity of writing itself, which remains unsurpassable and at the forefront of the narrative experience. In this sense, his writings are doubly autobiographical, first and foremost the autobiography that involves the present of

Multiple personalities and pastiches : proust pere et fils

Abstract: IT HAS BEEN SOME TIME SINCE PSYCHIATRY, followed by the mass media, rediscovered a syndrome that kept specialists in various disciplines, including philosophy, in suspense even at the turn of the century: multiple personality disorder. The genealogy and archaeology of this oddly "literary" illness seem not yet sufficiently linked to cultural and literary history, despite the contributions of scientific theorist Ian Hacking in describing the appearance, reappearance, and disappearance of double and multiple personalities, and their metamorphoses. My own contribution goes beyond Hacking, in that it calls for an integration of the history of science and of literary history that I would characterize as a discursive-analytical integration. In any case, the following concerns neither theoretical nor historical configurations that might give us an overview of the problem. Rather, I limit myself to a few specific case-studies that I hope will make the desideratum of an interdiscursivelyoriented literary history plausible. In the Goncourt pastiche that Marcel Proust incorporates in the last volume of A la recherche du temps perdu, we are confronted with a curious detail: the black pearl necklace that Madame Verdurin wears was originally white. The art-lover Swann, who attests to the change in color, has even seen "the portrait of these pearls around Madame de La Fayette's neck," later sold at auction by her descendants. The white pearls were blackened during a conflagration in part of the Verdurin house. This oddity leads to Dr. (and Professor) Cottard's informative and entertaining contribution to the conversation. I would like to quote extensively from this contributionalways from the perspective of Proust's fabrication of the "unpublished Goncourt diaries." I owe the pleasure of being able to introduce the theme of split (double and multiple) personalities in the complex Proust-Goncourt authorial figure and in the fictional Dr. Cottard to the insights that Henri F. Ellenberger offers in his admirable book, The Discovery of the Unconscious.1

Portrait of Guy Debord as a Young Libertine

Abstract: With the publication of his Memoirs in 1959, Guy Debord began, insistently, to paint his own portrait, which he retouched again and again in the years that followed. Debord gave much of his work an autobiographical dimension, intermingling in this way objectivity and subjectivity, theory and practice. Despite his desire for transparency, however, Debord composed his texts according to a secret code, which must be broken in order to understand what he really means. He cares little whether the common reader understands: "Having, then, to take account of readers who are both attentive and diversely influential," he writes in Commentary on the Society of the Spectacle, "I obviously cannot speak in complete freedom. Above all, I must take care not to give too much information to just anybody" (1). Debord has, in fact, covered his tracks, so that only those who take the trouble to crack the code will understand his work. Despite the familiar faces in his films, his winks and private jokes, Debord gives little of himself away He proceeds by allusions, while his real life remains hidden, obscure. In In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni, he lingers on the great episodes of his life (the Lettrist epic, May '68, etc.), but it is not always possible to reconstitute the chain of events without the key to his particular codes.' Unless done by one who knew him personally, any portrait of Debord that goes beyond what he himself made public will be at best speculation, and at worst sleight-of-