Marriage as a Fine Art

1. This essay, which precedes the 1946 edition of L’Âge d´homme, is known in English as The Autobiographer as Torero—TRANS.

1. Sollers commentates this phrase by Stéphane Mallarmé in the preface to his novel, Une curieuse solitude (Paris: Seuil, 1958; Points Seuil, 2001); A Strange Solitude, trans. Richard Howard (London: Eyre and Spottiswood, 1961).

1. In English in the original—TRANS.

This conversation took place in the Réfectoire des Cordeliers in Paris on April 27, 2011, as part of the “Entretiens des Grands Moulins” series directed by Bernadette Bricout, vice president for culture at the University of Paris-7 Diderot. The moderator was Colette Fellous, a writer and a producer at Radio France Culture.

1. Le Vieil Homme et les loups (Paris: Fayard, 1991); The Old Man and the Wolves, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).

2. Drame (Seuil, 1965; Gallimard, L’Imaginaire, 1990). Event, trans. B. Benderson and U. Molinaro (New York: Red Dust, 1986).

3. Histoires d’amour (Paris: Denoël, 1983 and Folio Essais no. 24, 1985); Tales of Love, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987).

4. Martin Heidegger, “Hegels Begriff der Erfahrung,” in Holzwege (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1950), included in Martin Heidegger: Off the Beaten Track, ed. and trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

5. The Lacanian concept of hainamoration. See p. 90.

6. Des Chinoises (Paris: des femmes, 1974, rev. ed. Paris: Pauvert, 2005). About Chinese Women, trans. Anita Barrows (London: Marion Boyars, 1977, rpt. 2000).

7. International Psychoanalytical Association.

8. “Hyperbole! Can you not rise / In triumph from my memory, / A modern magic spell devise / As from an ironbound grammary.” Stéphane Mallarmé, Collected Poems, trans. Henry Weinfield (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

9. Le temps sensible. Proust et l’expérience littéraire (Paris: Gallimard, 1994 and Folio Essais, 2000); Proust and the Sense of Time, trans. Stephen Bann (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).

10. Sollers, Event.

11. Les Nouvelles Maladies de l’âme (Fayard, 1993 and Livre de Poche, 1997); New Maladies of the Soul, trans. Ross Guberman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).

12. Oublire is a portmanteau of oublier (to forget) and lire (to read). Vous m’avez oublu would be something like “You’ve forread or oblivioread me”—TRANS.

13. In French, Sollers says “le ‘temporer’ de Heidegger.” This is Sollers’s translation, in his 1978 essay “Paradis,” of Heidegger’s neologistic verbalization of the noun in Unterwegs zur Sprache (1959): “Die Zeit zeitigt”—TRANS.

14. “Bulgarie, ma souffrance,” L’Infini 51 (Fall 1995): 42–52; “Bulgaria, My Suffering,” in Kristeva, Crisis of the European Subject, trans. Susan Fairfield (New York: Other Press, 2000), pp. 163–83. See also “The Future of Revolt,” in Intimate Revolt, trans. Jeanine Herman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003).

15. Julia Kristeva and Jean Vanier, Leur regard perce nos ombres (Paris: Fayard, 2011).

16. In the original French, the neological infinitive temper, from the noun temps, “time”—TRANS.

17. Philippe Sollers, Les Voyageurs du Temps (Paris: Gallimard, 2009, Folio, 2012).

18. In English in the original—TRANS.

Contribution to the encounter around Philippe Sollers convened on June 29, 2010, by Father Antoine Guggenheim, director of the research center of the Collège des Bernardins in Paris, the Cistercian monastery restored and reopened in 2008 on the initiative of the late Cardinal Lustiger. A first version of the text appeared in L’Infini 112 (Fall 2010).

1. Le Parc (Paris: Seuil, 1961); The Park, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Red Dust, 1977); Lois (Paris: Seuil, 1972); H (Paris: Seuil, 1973); H, trans. V. Stankovianska and D. Vichnar (London: Equus, 2015); Paradis (Paris: Seuil, 1981); La Guerre du goût (Paris: Gallimard, 1994); Une vie divine (Paris: Gallimard, 2006); La Fête à Venise (Paris: Gallimard, 1991); Watteau in Venice, trans. Alberto Manguel (New York: Scribner’s, 1994); Un vrai roman: Mémoires (Paris: Plon, 2007); Discours Parfait (Paris: Gallimard, 2010).

2. An allusion to the title of Michel Braudeau’s review of La Fête à Venise in Le Monde, February 1, 1991.

3. In English in the original—TRANS.

4. Folies françaises (Paris: Gallimard, 1988).

5. Friedrich Hölderlin, “Andenken” (1803), in Vaterländische Gesänge (1846). Philippe Sollers alludes to that poem, “Remembrance,” in his discussion of Heidegger’s lectures on Hölderlin, Approche de Hölderlin (Paris: Gallimard, 1951); Martin Heidegger, Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry, trans. Keith Hoeller (Amherst: Humanity, 2000).

6. Homer, The Odyssey, book 1, trans. Robert Fagles (London: Penguin, 1997), p. 77.

7. Cf. Julia Kristeva, “L’adolescence, un syndrome d’idéalité,” in La Haine et le Pardon, (Paris: Fayard, 2005), pp. 447–60, translated by Jeanine Herman as Hatred and Forgiveness (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).

8. Charles Baudelaire, “An Opium Eater,” in Artificial Paradises, trans. Stacy Diamond (New York: Citadel, 1996), p. 137.

9. Alphonse de Lamartine (1790–1869), Méditations II, 15, “Les Préludes.”

10. Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life (1863): “But genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will—a childhood now equipped for self-expression with manhood’s capacities and a power of analysis which enables it to order the mass of raw material which it has involuntarily accumulated.” Trans. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon, 1995), p. 8.

11. Georges Bernanos (1888–1948), Dialogue des Carmélites (1949), in Œuvres romanesques (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1961), p. 1586.

12. A frequent expression in Daoism. Cf. Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, I, 10.

13. Philippe Sollers, Femmes (Paris: Gallimard, 1983); Women, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Columbia University Press, 1009).

14. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” in Ecce Homo, trans. Duncan Large (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2007), p. 68.

15. Sollers, Une vie divine.

The chair is Bernadette Bricout, vice president of the University of Paris-7 Diderot (with responsibility for cultural life and the university in the city). She started among other projects the series of talks, “Entretiens des Grands Moulins,” the framework for the “Inner Experience Against the Current” event, held on April 27, 2011. The present occasion was an evening held on June 19, 2014, at the Cercle Bernard-Lazare in Paris, on the topic “Love of the Other.”

1. Tales of Love, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987).

2. In English in the original—TRANS.

3. Les Samouraïs (Paris: Fayard, 1990); The Samurai, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992).

4. Étrangers à nous-mêmes (Paris: Fayard, 1988); Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991).

5. Roland Barthes, “L’Étrangère,” first published in La Quinzaine littéraire, no. 94 May 1–15, 1970. See also Barthes, Œuvres complètes, ed. and intro. Éric Marty, 3 vols. (Paris: Seuil, 1993–195), 2:860–62.