Literature is the art form in which Sartre expresses his own philosophy. The novels and plays are strewn with characters in bad faith: Garcin in No Exit, Goetz in The Devil and the Good Lord, the senator in The Respectable Prostitute, Hugo in Dirty Hands, Franz in Altona, Lucien in the short story ‘Childhood of a Leader’ in The Wall, Daniel in The Roads to Freedom, Kean in the play of that name, and of course, the café waiter who features not only in The Age of Reason, the first volume of The Roads to Freedom, but in Being and Nothingness.
Opposed to them, but fewer in number, are the characters who in differing degrees recognise their own freedom: Mathieu in Iron in the Soul (but not in The Age of Reason and The Reprieve), Oreste in The Flies, the tortured resistance fighters in Men Without Shadows, Lizzie in The Respectable Prostitute, Roquentin in Nausea. Works of fiction provide a criterion for the truth of a ‘humanistic’ philosophy such as Sartre’s existentialism.
Sartre draws a sharp distinction between literature and science: Literature is ambiguous but each sentence of science or philosophy has, or should have, one and only one meaning. Sentences of literature may have multiple meanings, or may express different propositions. This presents Sartre with a dilemma. To the extent to which the sentences making up his novels, stories and plays are ambiguous they do not serve as a vehicle for his philosophy. To the extent to which they are unambiguous, they are not literature, at least by his own criterion. This dilemma is never fully resolved in his work.
Sartre’s literature, especially Nausea, contains putative solutions to philosophical problems. For example, in Nausea, some versions of the problem of induction are depicted as genuine and as at once psychologically liberating and disturbing to the central character, Antoine Roquentin. What exists exists contingently rather than necessarily, and what is is what it is contingently, not necessarily. What passes for reality is constructed by language which in turn is driven by pragmatic preconceptions, but these can in principle be set aside by certain unusual experiences. Existence is shown to precede essence in the case of human beings, but it is shown to coincide in naturally occurring objects such as the root of the chestnut tree, and the reverse relation obtains in the case of human artefacts such as a beer glass or the tram seat. Roquentin himself feels his existence to be pointless or without justification.
The philosophical questions to which these putative answers correspond are: Will the future resemble the past?, Could what is not be? Could what is have not been what it is? Are the ordinary objects of our experience linguistically, psychologically or pragmatically ‘constructed’?, If so, could they be perceived as they are, or at least in new ways?, What is the relation between being and being something? Is it possible to be without being anything? Is it possible to be something without being? Does life have a meaning?
Roquentin, in Nausea, is living a philosophy. Roquentin lives Sartre’s existential phenomenology. As with the characters in freedom and bad faith, to the extent to which we find Roquentin’s experiences credible we should find Sartre’s existential phenomenology credible.
Sartre insists that writing is an ethical and political act; an act which should be an authentic and committed (engagé) expression of the author’s freedom. The writer should be fully committed in what they write. What is this difference between committed and uncommitted literature?
One answer is ruled out straight away. Sartre can not simply mean that the author should write what he or she believes and refrain from writing what he or she disbelieves. This ethical requirement rests upon a picture of the author which Sartre rejects: the author as a repository of beliefs or attitudes which may be externalised in writing sincerely or insincerely. Rather, writing is a choice: not just the choice whether to write or not, but having chosen to write, the act of writing is itself the making of choices. The literary work does not predate the writing of it. It does not already exist in the writer’s mind before being written down. It comes into being by being freely composed.
The distinction between committed and uncommitted literature depends upon the distinction between authenticity and bad faith. Authenticity is the recognition of freedom, and bad faith is the denial or refusal of freedom. Committed literature is produced by authentic acts of writing; acts of writing that the author recognises as exercises of his own freedom and for which he alone accepts and has responsibility. Sartre thinks most writing is done in bad faith. We write in order to be read, in order to be needed, in order to find a substitute for immortality. This is bad faith because it is a case of ‘being-for-others’; producing an image of oneself which others will judge favourably rather than exercising one’s free possibilities as a writer. Sartre himself frequently insists that he writes for the present generation, not for posterity, although when interviewed he has confessed that he would not be displeased if his works were still read a hundred years from now. They no doubt will be.
Because they are written in bad faith, most literary works are would-be escapes or conquests. What is fled from is the freedom of the writer. What is conquered is the freedom of the reader. The writer is master and the reader slave but, in with Hegelian irony, the writer enslaves himself in enslaving the reader and the reader finds a new freedom in freely interpreting the writer’s works in ways that undo the writer’s mastery over them. Qui perde gagne: loser wins. Loser wins and winner loses.
The contingency of existence produces anguish. The writer therefore tries to make his existence necessary, indispensible, by creating something that does depend upon his own existence: a literary work. This seems successful because the work’s existence does depend upon his having written it. This security is undermined, however, because what the work is is not whol ly dictated by the interpretation of its author. Its essence is open to manipulation by its readers. Its existence too is contingent and not necessary. Even if it is read for thousands of years, there will no doubt come a time when it is forgotten. Its author too will be forgotten.
A literary work is the free creation of its author and readers because its existence is not causally necessitated by the prior state of the world. A writer accepting these facts evades bad faith. The role of the other in literary production is inescapable but it can either be affirmed or denied by the writer. Freedom is primordial with regard to the choice between authenticity and bad faith.
Sartre thinks the authenticity of a literary work is sufficient for its morality. La littérature engagée can not be immoral. He says, for example, nobody could write a good anti-semitic novel. But could not a writer recognise that their writing is the exercise of their own freedom and yet choose to write the most appalling laudits to suffering and injustice? Commitment in writing seems neither necessary nor sufficient for the morality of what is written: not necessary because something moral could be the product of bad faith, not sufficient because something immoral could be the product of authenticity. If there is freedom either good or evil can be done freely.
Sartre claims that the aesthetic imperative presupposes a moral imperative. Freedom is prior to both aesthetics and morality and freedom is the ultimate value. Committed literature not only exercises and acknowledges freedom, it provokes it, and provokes its acknowledgement. In reading committed literature the reader is a pure freedom, an unconditioned activity, and is conscious of being free. What is reading? Reading is a free dream.
Writing is a political act. For Sartre a good society is a free society. We do not know what a free society would be like, precisely because it would be one we would be free to make. There can be no blueprint for a free society – no Platonic blueprint, no Marxist blueprint, no Christian or utilitarian blueprint. There is no a priori knowledge of a free society. Committed I iterature dissolves the readers’ bad faith and shows them their freedom, so it is the responsibility of the intellectual to be engagé, committed to freedom.
In the passages below from What is Literature? (1948) Sartre develops the idea of la littérature engagée. In the one from The Family Idiot (1972), ‘Absolute-Art’, he examines the possibilities of writing in the historical situation of post-romanticism in mid-nineteenth-century France.
Each has his reasons: for one, art is a flight; for another a means of conquering. But one can flee into a hermitage, into madness, into death. One can conquer by arms. Why does it have to be writing, why does one have to manage one’s escapes and conquests by writing? Because, behind the various aims of authors, there is a deeper and more immediate choice which is common to all of us. We shall try to elucidate this choice, and we shall see whether it is not in the name of this very choice of writing that the self-commitment of writers must be required.
Each of our perceptions is accompanied by the consciousness that human reality is a “revealer”, that is, it is through human reality that “there is” being, or, to put it differently, that man is the means by which things are manifested. It is our presence in the world which multiplies relations. It is we who set up a relationship between this tree and that bit of sky. Thanks to us, that star which has been dead for millennia, that quarter moon, and that dark river are disclosed in the unity of a landscape. It is the speed of our car and our aeroplane which organizes the great masses of the earth. With each of our acts, the world reveals to us a new face. But, if we know that we are directors of being, we also know that we are not its producers. If we turn away from this landscape, it will sink back into its dark permanence. At least, it will sink back; there is no one mad enough to think that it is going to be annihilated. It is we who shall be annihilated, and the earth will remain in its lethargy until another consciousness comes along to awaken it. Thus, to our inner certainty of being “revealers” is added that of being inessential in relation to the thing revealed.
One of the chief motives of artistic creation is certainly the need of feeling that we are essential in relationship to the world. If I fix on canvas or in writing a certain aspect of the fields or the sea or a look on someone’s face which I have disclosed, I am conscious of having produced them by condensing relationships, by introducing order where there was none, by imposing the unity of mind on the diversity of things. That is, I feel myself essential in relation to my creation. But this time it is the created object which escapes me; I cannot reveal and produce at the same time. The creation becomes inessential in relation to the creative activity. First of all, even if it appears finished to others, the created object always seems to us in a state of suspension; we can always change this line, that shade, that word. Thus, it never forces itself A novice painter asked his teacher, “When should I consider my painting finished?” And the teacher answered, “When you can look at it in amazement and say to yourself ‘I’m the one who did that!’ ”
Which amounts to saying “never”. For it is virtually considering one’s work with someone else’s eyes and revealing what one has created. But it is self-evident that we are proportionally less conscious of the thing produced and more conscious of our productive activity. When it is a matter of pottery or carpentry, we work according to traditional patterns, with tools whose usage is codified; it is Heidegger’s famous “they” who are working with our hands. In this case, the result can seem to us sufficiently strange to preserve its objectivity in our eyes. But if we ourselves produce the rules of production, the measures, the criteria, and if our creative drive comes from the very depths of our heart, then we never find anything but ourselves in our work. It is we who have invented the laws by which we judge it. It is our history, our love, our gaiety that we recognize in it. Even if we should look at it without touching it any further, we never receive from it that gaiety or love. We put them into it. The results which we have obtained on canvas or paper never seem to us objective. We are too familiar with the processes of which they are the effects. These processes remain a subjective discovery; they are ourselves, our inspiration, our trick, and when we seek to perceive our work, we create it again, we repeat mentally the operations which produced it; each of its aspects appears as a result. Thus, in the perception, the object is given as the essential thing and the subject as the inessential. The latter seeks essentiality in the creation and obtains it, but then it is the object which becomes the inessential.
This dialectic is nowhere more apparent than in the art of writing, for the literary object is a peculiar top which exists only in movement. To make it come into view a concrete act called reading is necessary, and it lasts only as long as this act can last. Beyond that, there are only black marks on paper. Now, the writer cannot read what he writes, whereas the shoemaker can put on the shoes he has just made if they are his size, and the architect can live in the house he has built. In reading, one foresees; one waits. One foresees the end of the sentence, the following sentence, the next page. One waits for them to confirm or disappoint one’s foresights. The reading is composed of a host of hypotheses, of dreams followed by awakenings, of hopes and deceptions. Readers are always ahead of the sentence they are reading in a merely probable future which partly collapses and partly comes together in proportion as they progress, which withdraws from one page to the next and forms the moving horizon of the literary object. Without waiting, without a future, without ignorance, there is no objectivity.
Now the operation of writing involves an implicit quasi-reading which makes real reading impossible. When the words form under his pen, the author doubtless sees them, but he does not see them as the reader does, since he knows them before writing them down. The function of his gaze is not to reveal, by brushing against them, the sleeping words which are waiting to be read, but to control the sketching of the signs. In short, it is a purely regulating mission, and the view before him reveals nothing except for slight slips of the pen. The writer neither foresees nor conjectures; he projects. It often happens that he awaits, as they say, the inspiration. But one does not wait for oneself the way one waits for others. If he hesitates, he knows that the future is not made, that he himself is going to make it, and if he still does not know what is going to happen to his hero, that simply means that he has not thought about it, that he has not decided upon anything. The future is then a blank page, whereas the future of the reader is two hundred pages filled with words which separate him from the end. Thus, the writer meets everywhere only his knowledge, his will, his plans, in short, himself. He touches only his own subjectivity; the object he creates is out of reach; he does not create it for himself. If he re-reads himself, it is already too late. The sentence will never quite be a thing in his eyes. He goes to the very limits of the subjective but without crossing it. He appreciates the effect of a touch, of an epigram, of a well-placed adjective, but it is the effect they will have on others. He can judge it, not feel it. Proust never discovered the homosexuality of Charlus, since he had decided upon it even before starting on his book. And if a day comes when the book takes on for its author a semblance of objectivity, it is because years have passed, because he has forgotten it, because its spirit is quite foreign to him, and doubtless he is no longer capable of writing it. This was the case with Rousseau when he re-read the Social Contract at the end of his life.
Thus, it is not true that one writes for oneself. That would be the worst blow. In projecting one’s emotions on paper, one barely manages to give them a languid extension. The creative act is only an incomplete and abstract moment in the production of a work. If the author existed alone he would be able to write as much as he liked; the work as object would never see the light of day and he would either have to put down his pen or despair. But the operation of writing implies that of reading as its dialectical correlative and these two connected acts necessitate two distinct agents. It is the joint effort of author and reader which brings upon the scene that concrete and imaginary object which is the work of the mind. There is no art except for and by others.
Reading seems, in fact, to be the synthesis of perception and creation.1 It supposes the essentiality of both the subject and the object. The object is essential because it is strictly transcendent, because it imposes its own structures, and because one must wait for it and observe it; but the subject is also essential because it is required not only to disclose the object (that is, to make it possible for there to be an object) but also so that this object might exist absolutely (that is, to produce it). In a word, the reader is conscious of disclosing in creating, of creating by disclosing. In reality, it is not necessary to believe that reading is a mechanical operation and that signs make an impression upon him as light does on a photographic plate. If he is inattentive, tired, stupid, or thoughtless, most of the relations will escape him. He will never manage to “catch on” to the object (in the sense in which we see that fire “catches” or “doesn’t catch”). He will draw some phrases out of the shadow, but they will seem to appear as random strokes. If he is at his best, he will project beyond the words a synthetic form, each phrase of which will be no more than a partial function: the “theme”, the “subject”, or the “meaning”. Thus, from the very beginning, the meaning is no longer contained in the words, since it is he, on the contrary, who allows the significance of each of them to be understood; and the literary object, though realized through language, is never given in language. On the contrary, it is by nature a silence and an opponent of the word. In addition, the hundred thousand words aligned in a book can be read one by one so that the meaning of the work does not emerge. Nothing is accomplished if the reader does not put himself from the very beginning and almost without a guide at the height of this silence; if, in short, he does not invent it and does not then place there, and hold on to, the words and sentences which he awakens. And if I am told that it would be more fitting to call this operation a re-invention or a discovery, I shall answer that, first, such a re-invention would be as new and as original an act as the first invention. And, especially, when an object has never existed before, there can be no question of re-inventing it or discovering it. For if the silence about which I am speaking is really the goal at which the author is aiming, he has, at least, never been familiar with it; his silence is subjective and anterior to language. It is the absence of words, the undifferentiated and lived silence of inspiration, which the word will then particularize, whereas the silence produced by the reader is an object. And at the very interior of this object there are more silences—which the author does not mention. It is a question of silences which are so particular that they could not retain any meaning outside the object which the reading causes to appear. However, it is these which give it its density and its particular face.
To say that they are unexpressed is hardly the word; for they are precisely the inexpressible. And that is why one does not come upon them at any definite moment in the reading; they are everywhere and nowhere. The quality of the marvellous in Le Grand Meaulnes, the grandioseness of Armance, the degree of realism and truth of Kafka’s mythology, these are never given. The reader must invent them all in a continual exceeding of the written thing. To be sure, the author guides him, but all he does is guide him. The landmarks he sets up are separated by the void. The reader must unite them; he must go beyond them. In short, reading is directed creation.
On the one hand, the literary object has no other substance than the reader’s subjectivity; Raskolnikov’s waiting is my waiting which I lend him. Without this impatience of the reader he would remain only a collection of signs. His hatred of the police magistrate who questions him is my hatred which has been solicited and wheedled out of me by signs, and the police magistrate himself would not exist without the hatred I have for him via Raskolnikov. That is what animates him, it is his very flesh.
But on the other hand, the words are there like traps to arouse our feelings and to reflect them towards us. Each word is a path of transcendence; it shapes our feelings, names them, and attributes them to an imaginary personage who takes it upon himself to live them for us and who has no other substance than these borrowed passions; he confers objects, perspectives, and a horizon upon them.
Thus, for the reader, all is to do and all is already done; the work exists only at the exact level of his capacities; while he reads and creates, he knows that he can always go further in his reading, can always create more profoundly, and thus the work seems to him as inexhaustible and opaque as things. We would readily reconcile that “rational intuition” which Kant reserved to divine Reason with this absolute production of qualities, which, to the extent that they emanate from our subjectivity, congeal before our eyes into impenetrable objectivities.
Since the creation can find its fulfilment only in reading, since the artist must entrust to another the job of carrying out what he has begun, since it is only through the consciousness of the reader that he can regard himself as essential to his work, all literary work is an appeal. To write is to make an appeal to the reader that he lead into objective existence the revelation which I have undertaken by means of language. And if it should be asked to what the writer is appealing, the answer is simple. As the sufficient reason for the appearance of the aesthetic object is never found either in the book (where we find merely solicitations to produce the object) or in the author’s mind, and as his subjectivity, which he cannot get away from, cannot give a reason for the act of leading into objectivity, the appearance of the work of art is a new event which cannot be explained by anterior data. And since this directed creation is an absolute beginning, it is therefore brought about by the freedom of the reader, and by what is purest in that freedom. Thus, the writer appeals to the reader’s freedom to collaborate in the production of his work.
It will doubtless be said that all tools address themselves to our freedom since they are the instruments of a possible action, and that the work of art is not unique in that. And it is true that the tool is the congealed outline of an operation. But it remains on the level of the hypothetical imperative. I may use a hammer to nail up a case or to hit my neighbour over the head. In so far as I consider it in itself, it is not an appeal to my freedom; it does not put me face to face with it; rather, it aims at using it by substituting a set succession of traditional procedures for the free invention of means. The book does not serve my freedom; it requires it. Indeed, one cannot address oneself to freedom as such by means of constraint, fascination, or entreaties. There is only one way of attaining it; first, by recognizing it, then, having confidence in it, and finally, requiring of it an act, an act in its own name, that is, in the name of the confidence that one brings to it.
Thus, the book is not, like the tool, a means for any end whatever; the end to which it offers itself is the reader’s freedom. And the Kantian expression “finality without end” seems to me quite inappropriate for designating the work of art. In fact, it implies that the aesthetic object presents only the appearance of a finality and is limited to soliciting the free and ordered play of the imagination. It forgets that the imagination of the spectator has not only a regulating function, but a constitutive one. It does not play; it is called upon to recompose the beautiful object beyond the traces left by the artist. The imagination cannot revel in itself any more than can the other functions of the mind; it is always on the outside, always engaged in an enterprise. There would be finality without end if some object offered such a well-arranged composition that it would lead us to suppose that it has an end even though we cannot ascribe one to it. By defining the beautiful in this way one can—and this is Kant’s aim—liken the beauty of art to natural beauty, since a flower, for example, presents so much symmetry, such harmonious colours, and such regular curves, that one is immediately tempted to seek a finalist explanation for all these properties and to see them as just so many means at the disposal of an unknown end. But that is exactly the error. The beauty of nature is in no way comparable to that of art. The work of art does not have an end; there we agree with Kant. But the reason is that it is an end. The Kantian formula does not account for the appeal which resounds at the basis of each painting, each statue, each book. Kant believes that the work of art first exists as fact and that it is then seen. Whereas) it exists only if one looks at it and if it is first pure appeal, pure exigence to exist. It is not an instrument whose existence is manifest and whose end is undetermined. It presents itself as a task to be discharged; from the very beginning it places itself on the level of the categorical imperative. You are perfectly free to leave that book on the table. But if you open it, you assume responsibility for it. For freedom is not experienced by its enjoying its free subjective functioning, but in a creative act required by an imperative. This absolute end, this imperative which is transcendent yet acquiesced in, which freedom itself adopts as its own, is what we call a value. The work of art is a value because it is an appeal.
If I appeal to my readers so that we may carry the enterprise which I have begun to a successful conclusion, it is self-evident that I consider him as a pure freedom, as an unconditioned activity; thus, in no case can I address myself to his passiveness, that is, try to affect him, to communicate to him, from the very first, emotions of fear, desire, or anger. There are, doubtless, authors who concern themselves solely with arousing these emotions because they are foreseeable, manageable, and because they have at their disposal sure-fire means for provoking them. But it is also true that they are reproached for this kind ofthing, as Euripides has been since antiquity because he had children appear on the stage. Freedom is alienated in the state of passion; it is abruptly engaged in partial enterprises; it loses sight of its task, which is to produce an absolute end. And the book is no longer anything but a means for feeding hate or desire. The writer should not seek to overwhelm; otherwise he is in contradiction with himself; if he wishes to make demands he must propose only the task to be fulfilled. Hence, the character of pure presentation which appears essential to the work of art. The reader must be able to make a certain aesthetic withdrawal. This is what Gautier foolishly confused with “art for art’s sake” and the Parnassians with the imperturbability of the artist. It is simply a matter of precaution, and Genet more justly calls it the author’s politeness towards the reader. But that does not mean that the writer makes an appeal to some sort of abstract and conceptual freedom. One certainly creates the aesthetic object with feelings; if it is touching, it appears through our tears; if it is comic, it will be recognized by laughter. However, these feelings are of a particular kind. They have their origin in freedom; they are loaned. The belief which I accord the tale is freely assented to. It is a Passion, in the Christian sense of the word, that is, a freedom which resolutely puts itself into a state of passiveness to obtain a certain transcendent effect by this sacrifice. The reader renders himself credulous; he descends into credulity which, though it ends by enclosing him like a dream, is at every moment conscious of being free. An effort is sometimes made to force the writer into this dilemma: “Either one believes in your story, and it is intolerable, or one does not believe in it, and it is ridiculous”. But the argument is absurd because the characteristic of aesthetic consciousness is to be a belief by means of commitment, by oath, a belief sustained by fidelity to one’s self and to the author, a perpetually renewed choice to believe. I can awaken at every moment, and I know it; but I do not want to; reading is a free dream. So that all feelings which are exacted on the basis of this imaginary belief are like particular modulations of my freedom. Far from absorbing or masking it, they are so many different ways it has chosen to reveal itself to itself. Raskolnikov, as I have said, would only be a shadow, without the mixture of repulsion and friendship which I feel for him and which makes him live. But, by a reversal which is the characteristic of the imaginary object, it is not his behaviour which excites my indignation or esteem, but my indignation and esteem which give consistency and objectivity to his behaviour. Thus, the reader’s feelings are never dominated by the object, and as no external reality can condition them, they have their permanent source in freedom; that is, they are all generous—for I call a feeling generous which has its origin and its end in freedom. Thus, reading is an exercise in generosity, and what the writer requires of the reader is not the application of an abstract freedom but the gift of his whole person, with his passions, his prepossessions, his sympathies, his sexual temperament, and his scale of values. Only this person will give himself generously; freedom goes through and through him and comes to transform the darkest masses of his sensibility. And as activity has rendered itself passive in order for it better to create the object, vice versa, passiveness becomes an act; the man who is reading has raised himself to the highest degree. That is why we see people who are known for their toughness shed tears at the recital of imaginary misfortunes; for the moment they have become what they would have been if they had not spent their lives hiding their freedom from themselves.
Thus, the author writes in order to address himself to the freedom of readers, and he requires it in order to make his work exist. But he does not stop there; he also requires that they return this confidence which he has given them, that they recognize his creative freedom, and that they in turn solicit it by a symmetrical and inverse appeal. Here there appears the other dialectical paradox of reading; the more we experience our freedom, the more we recognize that of the other; the more he demands of us, the more we demand of him.
When I am enchanted with a landscape, I know very well that it is not I who create it, but I also know that without me the relations which are established before my eyes among the trees, the foliage, the earth, and the grass would not exist at all. I know that I can give no reason for the appearance of finality which I discover in the assortment of hues and in the harmony of the forms and movements created by the wind. Yet, it exists; there it is before my eyes, and I can make something more out of what is already there. But even if I believe in God, I cannot establish any passage, unless it be purely verbal, between the divine, universal solicitude and the particular spectacle which I am considering. To say that He made the landscape in order to charm me or that He made me the kind of person who is pleased by it is to take a question for an answer. Is the marriage of this blue and that green deliberate? How can I know? The idea of a universal providence is no guarantee of any particular intention, especially in the case under consideration, since the green of the grass is explained by biological laws, specific constants, and geographical determinism, while the reason for the blue of the water is accounted for by the depth of the river, the nature of the soil and the swiftness of the current. The assorting of the shades, if it is willed, can only be something thrown into the bargain; it is the meeting of two causal series, that is to say, at first sight, a fact of chance. At best, the finality remains problematic. All the relations we establish remain hypotheses; no end is proposed to us in the manner of an imperative, since none is expressly revealed as having been willed by a creator. Thus, our freedom is never called forth by natural beauty. Or rather, there is an appearance of order in the whole which includes the foliage, the forms, and the movements, hence, the illusion of a calling forth which seems to solicit this freedom and which disappears immediately when one looks at it. Hardly have we begun to run our eyes over this arrangement, than the appeal disappears; we remain alone, free to tie up one colour with another or with a third, to set up a relationship between the tree and the water or the tree and the sky, or the tree, the water and the sky. My freedom becomes caprice. To the extent that I establish new relationships, I remove myself further from the illusory objectivity which solicits me. I muse about certain motifs which are vaguely outlined by the things; the natural reality is no longer anything but a pretext for musing. Or, in that case, because I have deeply regretted that this arrangement which was momentarily perceived was not offered to me by somebody and consequently is not real, the result is that I fix my dream, that I transpose it to canvas or in writing. Thus, I interpose myself between the finality without end which appears in the natural spectacles and the gaze of other men. I transmit it to them. It becomes human by this transmission. Art here is a ceremony of the gift and the gift alone brings about the metamorphosis. It is something like the transmission of titles and powers in the matriarchate where the mother does not possess the names, but is the indispensable intermediary between uncle and nephew. Since I have captured this illusion in flight, since I lay it out for other men and have disentangled it and rethought it for them, they can consider it with confidence. It has become intentional. As for me, I remain, to be sure, at the border of the subjective and the objective without ever being able to contemplate the objective arrangement which I transmit.
The reader, on the contrary, progresses in security. However far he may go, the author has gone further. Whatever connections he may establish among the different parts of the book—among the chapters or the words—he has a guarantee, namely, that they have been expressly willed. As Descartes says, he can even pretend that there is a secret order among parts which seem to have no connection. The creator has preceded him along the way, and the most beautiful disorders are effects of art, that is, again order. Reading is induction, interpolation, extrapolation, and the basis of these activities rests on the reader’s will, as for a long time it was believed that that of scientific induction rested on the divine will. A gentle force accompanies us and supports us from the first page to the last. That does not mean that we fathom the artist’s intentions easily. They constitute, as we have said, the object of conjectures, and there is an experience of the reader; but these conjectures are supported by the great certainty we have that the beauties which appear in the book are never accidental. In nature, the tree and the sky harmonize only by chance; if, on the contrary, in the novel, the protagonists find themselves in a certain tower, in a certain prison, if they stroll in a certain garden, it is a matter both of the restitution of independent causal series (the character had a certain state of mind which was due to a succession of psychological and social events; on the other hand, he betook himself to a determined place and the layout of the city required him to cross a certain park) and of the expression of a deeper finality, for the park came into existence only in order to harmonize with a certain state of mind, to express it by means of things or to put it into relief by a vivid contrast, and the state of mind itself was conceived in connection with the landscape. Here it is causality which is appearance and which might be called “causality without cause”, and it is the finality which is the profound reality. But if I can thus in all confidence put the order of ends under the order of causes, it is because by opening the book I am asserting that the object has its source in human freedom.
If I were to suspect the artist of having written out of passion and in passion, my confidence would immediately vanish, for it would serve no purpose to have supported the order of causes by the order of ends. The latter would be supported in its turn by a psychic causality and the work of art would end by re-entering the chain of determinism. Certainly I do not deny when I am reading that the author may be impassioned, nor even that he might have conceived the first plan of his work under the sway of passion. But his decision to write supposes that he withdraws somewhat from his feelings, in short, that he has transformed his emotions into free emotions as I do mine while reading him, that is, that he is in an attitude of generosity.
Thus, reading is a pact of generosity between author and reader. Each one trusts the other; each one counts on the other, demands of the other as much as he demands of himself. For this confidence is itself generosity. Nothing can force the author to believe that his reader will use his freedom; nothing can force the reader to believe that the author has used his. Both of them make a free decision. There is then established a dialectical going-and-coming; when I read, I make demands; if my demands are met, what I am then reading provokes me to demand more of the author, which means to demand of the author that he demand more of me. And, vice versa, the author’s demand is that I carry my demands to the highest pitch. Thus, my freedom, by revealing itself, reveals the freedom of the other.
It matters little whether the aesthetic object is the product of “realistic” art (or supposedly such) or “formal” art. At any rate, the natural relations are inverted; that tree on the first plane of the Cézanne painting first appears as the product of a causal chain. But the causality is an illusion; it will doubtless remain as a proposition as long as we look at the painting, but it will be supported by a deep finality; if the tree is placed in such away it is because the rest of the painting requires that this form and those colours be placed on the first plane. Thus, through the phenomenal causality, our gaze attains finality as the deep structure of the object, and, beyond finality, it attains human freedom as its source and original basis. Vermeer’s realism is carried so far that at first it might be thought to be photographic. But if one considers the splendour of his texture, the pink and velvety glory of his little brick walls, the blue thickness of a branch of woodbine, the glazed darkness of his vestibules, the orange coloured flesh of his faces, which are as polished as the stone of holy-water basins, one suddenly feels, in the pleasure that he experiences, that the finality is not so much in the forms or colours as in his material imagination. It is the very substance and temper of the things which here give the forms their reason for being. With this realist we are perhaps closest to absolute creation, since it is in the very passiveness of the matter that we meet the unfathomable freedom of man.
The work is never limited to the painted, sculpted, or narrated object. Just as one perceives things only against the background of the world, so the objects represented by art appear against the background of the universe. On the background of the adventures of Fabrice are the Italy of 1820, Austria, France, the sky and stars which the Abbé Blanis consults, and finally the whole earth. If the painter presents us with a field or a vase of flowers, his paintings are windows which are open on the whole world. We follow the red path which is buried among the wheat much farther than Van Gogh has painted it, among other wheat fields, under other clouds, to the river which empties into the sea, and we extend to infinity, to the other end of the world, the deep finality which supports the existence of the field and the earth. So that, through the various objects which it produces or reproduces, the creative act aims at a total renewal of the world. Each painting, each book, is a recovery of the totality of being. Each of them presents this totality to the freedom of the spectator. For this is quite the final goal of art: to recover this world by giving it to be seen as it is, but as if it had its source in human freedom. But, since what the author creates takes on objective reality only in the eyes of the spectator, this recovery is consecrated by the ceremony of the spectacle—and particularly of reading. We are already in a better position to answer the question we raised a while ago: the writer chooses to appeal to the freedom of other men so that, by the reciprocal implications of their demands, they may re-adapt the totality of being to man and may again enclose the universe within man.
If we wish to go still further, we must bear in mind that the writer, like all other artists, aims at giving his reader a certain feeling that is customarily called aesthetic pleasure, and which I would very much rather call aesthetic joy, and that this feeling, when it appears, is a sign that the work is achieved. It is therefore fining to examine it in the light of the preceding considerations. In effect, this joy, which is denied to the creator, in so far as he creates, becomes one with the aesthetic consciousness of the spectator, that is, in the case under consideration, of the reader. It is a complex feeling but one whose structures and condition are inseparable from one another. It is identical, at first, with the recognition of a transcendent and absolute end which, for a moment, suspends the utilitarian round of ends-means and means-ends,2 that is, of an appeal or, what amounts to the same thing, of a value. And the positional consciousness which I take of this value is necessarily accompanied by the non-positional consciousness of my freedom, since my freedom is manifested to itself by a transcendent exigency. The recognition of freedom by itself is joy, but this structure of non-thetical consciousness implies another: since, in effect, reading is creation, my freedom does not only appear to itself as pure autonomy but as creative activity, that is, it is not limited to giving itself its own law but perceives itself as being constitutive of the object. It is on this level that the phenomenon specifically is manifested, that is, a creation wherein the created object is given as object to its creator. It is the sole case in which the creator gets any enjoyment out of the object he creates. And the word enjoyment which is applied to the positional consciousness of the work read indicates sufficiently that we are in the presence of an essential structure of aesthetic joy. This positional enjoyment is accompanied by the non-positional consciousness of being essential in relation to an object perceived as essential. I shall call this aspect of aesthetic consciousness the feeling of security; it is this which stamps the strongest aesthetic emotions with a sovereign calm. It has its origin in the authentication of a strict harmony between subjectivity and objectivity. As, on the other hand, the aesthetic object is properly the world in so far as it is aimed at through the imaginary, aesthetic joy accompanies the positional consciousness that the world is a value, that is, a task proposed to human freedom. I shall call this the aesthetic modification of the human project, for, as usual, the world appears as the horizon of our situation, as the infinite distance which separates us from ourselves, as the synthetic totality of the given, as the undifferentiated whole of obstacles and implements—but never as a demand addressed to our freedom. Thus, aesthetic joy proceeds to this level of the consciousness which I take of recovering and internalizing that which is non-ego par excellence, since I transform the given into an imperative and the fact into a value. The world is my task, that is, the essential and freely accepted function of my freedom is to make that unique and absolute object which is the universe come into being in an unconditioned movement. And, thirdly, the preceding structures imply a pact between human freedoms, for, on the one hand, reading is a confident and exacting recognition of the freedom of the writer, and, on the other hand, aesthetic pleasure, as it is itself experienced in the form of a value, involves an absolute exigence in regard to others; every man, in so far as he is a freedom, feels the same pleasure in reading the same work. Thus, all mankind is present in its highest freedom; it sustains the being of a world which is both its world and the “external” world. In aesthetic joy the positional consciousness is an image-making consciousness of the world in its totality both as being and having to be, both as totally ours and totally foreign, and the more ours as it is the more foreign. The non-positional consciousness really envelops the harmonious totality of human freedoms in so far as it makes the object of a universal confidence and exigency.
To write is thus both to disclose the world and to offer it as a task to the generosity of the reader. It is to have recourse to the consciousness of others in order to make one’s self be recognized as essential to the totality of being; it is to wish to live this essentiality by means of interposed persons; but, on the other hand, as the real world is revealed only by action, as one can feel oneself in it only by exceeding it in order to change it, the novelist’s universe would lack depth if it were not discovered in a movement to transcend it. It has often been observed that an object in a story does not derive its density of existence from the number and length of the descriptions devoted to it, but from the complexity of its connections with the different characters. The more often the characters handle it, take it up, and put it down, in short, go beyond it towards their own ends, the more real will it appear. Thus, of the world of the novel, that is, the totality of men and things, we may say that in order for it to offer its maximum density the disclosure-creation by which the reader discovers it must also be an imaginary participation in the action; in other words, the more disposed one is to change it, the more alive it will be. The error of realism has been to believe that the real reveals itself to contemplation, and that consequently one could draw an impartial picture of it. How could that be possible, since the very perception is partial, since by itself the naming is already a modification of the object? And how could the writer, who wants himself to be essential to this universe, want to be essential to the injustice which this universe comprehends? Yet, he must be; but if he accepts being the creator of injustices, it is in a movement which goes beyond them towards their abolition. As for me who read, if I create and keep alive an unjust world, I cannot help making myself responsible for it. And the author’s whole art is bent on obliging me to create what he discloses, therefore to compromise myself. So both of us bear the responsibility for the universe. And precisely because this universe is supported by the joint effort of our two freedoms, and because the author, with me as medium, has attempted to integrate it into the human, it must appear truly in itself in its very marrow, as being shot through and through with a freedom which has taken human freedom as its end, and if it is not really the city of ends that it ought to be, it must at least be a stage along the way; in a word, it must be a becoming and it must always be considered and presented not as a crushing mass which weighs us down, but from the point of view of its going beyond towards that city of ends. However bad and hopeless the humanity which it paints may be, the work must have an air of generosity. Not, of course, that this generosity is to be expressed by means of edifying discourses and virtuous characters; it must not even be premeditated, and it is quite true that fine sentiments do not make fine books. But it must be the very warp and woof of the book, the stuff out of which the people and things are cut; whatever the subject, a sort of essential lightness must appear everywhere and remind us that the work is never a natural datum, but an exigence and a gift. And if I am given this world with its injustices, it is not so that I may contemplate them coldly, but that I may animate them with my indignation, that I may disclose them and create them with their nature as injustices, that is, as abuses to be suppressed. Thus, the writer’s universe will only reveal itself in all its depth to the examination, the admiration, and the indignation of the reader; and the generous love is a promise to maintain, and the generous indignation is a promise to change, and the admiration a promise to imitate; although literature is one thing and morality a quite different one, at the heart of the aesthetic imperative we discern the moral imperative. For, since the one who writes recognizes, by the very fact that he takes the trouble to write, the freedom of his readers, and since the one who reads, by the mere fact of his opening the book, recognizes the freedom of the writer, the work of art, from whichever side you approach it, is an act of confidence in the freedom of men, And since readers, like the author, recognize this freedom only to demand that it manifest itself, the work can be defined as an imaginary presentation of the world in so far as it demands human freedom. The result of which is that there is no “gloomy literature”, since, however dark may be the colours in which one paints the world, one paints it only so that free men may feel their freedom as they face it. Thus, there are only good and bad novels. The bad novel aims to please by flattering, whereas the good one is an exigence and an act of faith. But above all, the unique point of view from which the author can present the world to those freedoms whose concurrence he wishes to bring about is that of a world to be impregnated always with more freedom. It would be inconceivable that this unleashing of generosity provoked by the writer could be used to authorize an injustice, and that the reader could enjoy his freedom while reading a work which approves or accepts or simply abstains from condemning the subjection of man by man. One can imagine a good novel being written by an American negro even if hatred of the whites were spread all over it, because it is the freedom of his race that he demands through this hatred. And, as he invites me to assume the attitude of generosity, the moment I feel myself a pure freedom I cannot bear to identify myself with a race of oppressors. Thus, I require of all freedoms that they demand the liberation of coloured people against the white race and against myself in so far as I am a part of it, but nobody can suppose for a moment that it is possible to write a good novel in praise of anti-Semitism.3 For, the moment I feel that my freedom is indissolubly linked with that of all other men, it cannot be demanded of me that I use it to approve the enslavement of a part of these men. Thus, whether he is an essayist, a pamphleteer, a satirist, or a novelist, whether he speaks only of individual passions or whether he attacks the social order, the writer, a free man addressing free men, has only one subject—freedom.
Hence, any attempt to enslave his readers threatens him in his very art. A blacksmith can be affected by fascism in his life as a man, but not necessarily in his craft; a writer will be affected in both, and even more in his craft than in his life. I have seen writers, who before the war called for fascism with all their hearts, smitten with sterility at the very moment when the Nazis were loading them with honours. I am thinking of Drieu la Rochelle in particular; he was mistaken, but he was sincere. He proved it. He had agreed to direct a Nazi-inspired review. The first few months he reprimanded, rebuked, and lectured his countrymen. No one answered him because no one was free to do so. He became irritated; he no longerhis readers. He became more insistent, but no sign appeared to prove that he had been understood. No sign of hatred, nor of anger either; nothing. He seemed to have lost his bearings, the victim of a growing distress. He complained bitterly to the Germans. His articles had been superb; they became shrill. The moment arrived when he struck his breast; no echo, except among the bought journalists whom he despised. He handed in his resignation, withdrew it, again spoke, still in the desert. Finally, he said nothing, gagged by the silence of others. He had demanded the enslavement of others, but in his crazy mind he must have imagined that it was voluntary, that it was still free. It came; the man in him congratulated himself mightily, but the writer could not bear it. While this was going on, others, who, happily, were in the majority, understood that the freedom of writing implies the freedom of the citizen. One does not write for slaves. The art of prose is bound up with the only régime in which prose has meaning, democracy. When one is threatened, the other is too. And it is not enough to defend them with the pen. A day comes when the pen is forced to stop, and the writer must then take up arms. Thus, however you might have come to it, whatever the opinions you might have professed, literature throws you into battle. Writing is a certain way of wanting freedom; once you have begun, you are committed, willy-nilly.
Committed to what? Defending freedom? That’s easy to say. Is it a matter of acting as a guardian of ideal values like Benda’s “clerk” before the betrayal,4 or is it concrete everyday freedom which must be protected by our taking sides in political and social struggles? The question is tied up with another one, one very simple in appearance but which nobody ever asks himself: “For whom does one write?”
Throughout the works of the eighteenth century, autonomy seems to be an objective status of literature. A class literature, to be sure, but as that class is combatant, autonomy here represents a pure, combative negativity; it asserts itself as an institutional imperative, inseparable from analytic reason, the chief weapon of the bourgeoisie, whose ultimate outcome must be mechanism, that is, dissolution taken to its logical conclusion.
The same notion, after a period of eclipse, reappears in Romantic literature. But its function is no longer the same and its meaning has changed; it is now merely the obligation of aristocratic writers to impose the ideology of their class. Beneath the positive idea of synthetic totality, of creation, that ideology conceals two negations—one compensatory, the victory-failure of the nobility, the other fixed and absolute, the radical condemnation of the bourgeoisie.
These two imperatives, reanimated by reading, are intertwined and give literary autonomy an instable and circular content; for that autonomy is based on analysis, whose function is to reduce everything to its elements, and on the aristocratic synthesis that establishes totalitarian unities on the unity of the creating fiat. Thus the project imposed on the future writer is forever to depict the creation in his work as the production of a harmonious whole, and forever to eat away at it with the worm of analysis, whose self-imposed task must be to reduce it to mechanistic dispersal. But this final term of the dissection is not the ultimate theme of the work, though the analysis cannot be carried further; indeed, through the coexistence of the two imperatives, neither of which destroys the other, the totality is no sooner atomized than it is revived and once again subjected to analytic diastasis. So this double, contradictory autonomy somehow demands of the young bourgeois would-be writer the literary disclosure of the nothingness of being and the being of nothingness—which reflects, with the hysteresis proper to cultural works, the antagonism of two classes, one of which is on the way to its demise. The general theme suggested by literature-to-be-written is the reduction of the world as totality to nothingness, and the reestablishment of that totality as appearance. Behind this perpetual movement, however, a third term is concealed, for totality, an optimistic but mortal instrument of the aristocracy, is realized on the literary suppression of the bourgeoisie; thus totalization by the master, while devoured by servile negativity, destroys the slave and his labor by a fixed, total, irreducible negation. No literary works after 1850 are without the skeletal structure of this triple antagonism. Revealing it, as I have just done, we can say that it offers no meaning: the slave denies the master, who does away with him, that’s all; or, if you like, the creation is reduced to mechanism, which is reduced to the absolute void from which the creation is reborn. Meaning cannot come from these contradictions, which coexist only because their spatial contiguity as practico-inert determinations has effaced the historical temporalization that produced them successively. A meaning must emerge from these antagonisms, and the future author is bidden to provide it through his work. He is free to choose it, provided that he integrates all contradictions in the aesthetic unity of the object produced.
The freedom to choose, without ever being entirely suppressed, is nonetheless singularly reduced by imperatives exterior to the first. Other historical circumstances have in effect produced new determinations of the Objective Spirit which, in the trinity comprised of totality, negativity, and negation, tend to demand the predominance of absolute negation. For these young bourgeois, the autonomy of literature is the fundamental requirement of that cultural sector and the primary reason for their choice to write; and yet at the moment when their class triumphs and demands positive books, that autonomy seems to them merely a way of gilding its utilitarian morality with a little idealism. As a result, these future authors have broken with the readership of their own class even before they have written, meaning that by 1840, they have broken with the public pure and simple. Consequently, negativity and the spirit of analysis, instruments that were so effective in the previous century, seem suspect to them; when they yearn to make use of them, they run up against objective resistances arising from the fact that these are the tools proper to their class, and they will not appropriate them without being appropriated in turn. As a result, the human subject of their books—if there is one—will no longer be the man depicted by Voltaire, Diderot, or Rousseau himself; he will no longer contain that “human nature” defined by analysis thanks to social and psychological atomism. But the young writer offers no substitute; in any case, nothing new occurs to these young minds spoiled by analysis. Romantic man, in effect, could not seduce them for long. In 1840, Romanticism is dead, as witness the failure of Les Burgraves; for Romantic man represents a synthetic totality, and as good bourgeois they could not refrain from dismantling him despite themselves. Yet by vanishing, the hero made them ashamed of themselves, of their class of origin. The aristocratic authors’ contempt remains in them as the great mute negation hidden behind Romantic frenzy. They have contempt for themselves without knowing why. And this contempt becomes their sole greatness since it raises them above themselves. This contorted attitude, the internalization of absolute negation, must be held without respite. But which do they scorn in Others and themselves, the bourgeois or the man? First, surely, the bourgeois. These unhappy young men have internalized the contested but ubiquitous and scornful gaze of another, nearly moribund class; they are cut off from themselves by this gaze of failure and death that reveals only bourgeois utilitarianism and the spirit of analysis—ethical and epistemological norms already familiar to them. But the bourgeoisie rejects the “people,” that vast national unity invented by the monarchy in the interest of propaganda. It knows the working classes, which it exploits, fears, and dislikes, and which its resident thinkers attempt to reduce to the swarmings of individuals; it takes itself for the universal class and now proclaims that classes are abolished. Consequently, its younger sons see bourgeois man everywhere; for it means to impose bourgeois nature, on the ethical and psychological level, on the individuals who each day, constrained by the wretched poverty spawned by industrialization, make “free” individual contracts with it. The bourgeoisie teaches them, it teaches its own children that this “nature” is truly the essence of the species, that like good bourgeois, the workers, too, seek their interest, competing with each other for employment just like businessmen or entrepreneurs, and that—like bourgeois, maybe more so—they are individually envious of the prosperity of others. The fact is that human nature is bad; it must be restrained by rigorous institutions and its weaknesses supported by real property. Raised in these principles—without much questioning them—the young bourgeois have no difficulty extending their contempt to the universe. This is made even easier by the fact that the world is bourgeois—or at least it is expressed only by bourgeois voices—from 1830 on. If man is bourgeois, these children have contempt for the bourgeois in themselves as the definition of mankind. And that contempt, despairing at its lack of support, extending from their class of origin to their race and back again to their class, having acquired a sufficient degree of mystification to follow the path to the universal, will be called dissatisfaction by the most realistic. On the one hand it is the verification of what exists and could not be otherwise (In whose name would they contest this nature, these natural laws, and the society that issues from it?); on the other hand it is the global and harmless negation they inherited from Romanticism, defeated in advance, without principle or privilege in this real domain. Nothing else is even declared possible—How would they dare to affirm such a thing when they were raised in unbelief, in agnosticism, or in a superficial religion practiced to give the poor a reason to live and subjected by the lycée student as a matter of major concern to triumphant bourgeois analysis? They may even think, like Laplace, that everything had to be this way from all eternity. In short, they say nothing; they simply live out an impotent denial of the whole world, whose meaning is: I am not part of it, I do not recognize myself in it. These boys in no way consider themselves fallen gods who remember the heavens; they remember nothing at all. They deny that being, such as it is, represents them (in their eyes, in the eyes of others); they claim not to be incarnate in it, not to be objectified in it as bourgeois or as men through work. And this claim, which by itself would be consciously futile, assumes in their eyes the substance of an imperative because it is contiguous in them with autonomy as the rigorous requirement of literature and gives it, ultimately, its content.
Autonomy, the necessary means of writing in 1850, the arrogant exercise of the privileged aristocratic gaze in 1830, appears in any case to the new generation as art for its own sake. This obvious characteristic of literature-to-be-written represents to them the eternal imperative that their fathers and grandfathers misunderstood and originality, since it will be their task to obey it. Yet if art has no end but itself, if it disappears from the work when asked to serve, if its major imperative condemns utilitarianism—without even referring to it—and along with it all human ends, then this calm and thorough negation, this perfect inhumanity, can be revealed only to the dissatisfied, who exhaust themselves condemning the world but lack the power to leave it. In other words, in this period as in any other, art defines its artist. No one can accede to it who is not first discontent with everything; indeed, if he has made the slightest accommodation to real society, he will not even think of tearing himself away and will attempt to make a place for himself in it, to objectify himself through productive work. Conversely, absolute negation as perpetual dissatisfaction will be merely an insubstantial whim and will not be raised to ontological dignity insofar as it will not be incarnate in a work whose absolute nihilism—without being the overriding goal5—is its immediate and necessary condition. Thus, while the subject of a literature that is posed as its own end is yet undetermined, one thing is certain: its autonomy is not experienced at this time as the necessary status of a social activity, nor even as the result of the writer’s permanent struggle against the powers that be; it is an affirmation of art as the only absolute, hence the condemnation of all practical enterprise—aiming at any objective, at a given date, in a given society. Absolute-art produces its own temporality—as an inner temporalization imposed by the work on the public. But the refusal to serve, sustained by the young authors’ internalized, aristocratic disgust for bourgeois activities, immediately rises above practical temporality. In other words, there are only eternal works, and those that are not eternal at their inception, even if distinguished by some purely aesthetic quality, can in no way be called works of art.
But while this notion of absolute-art is generated by the interference of the aristocratic imperative with several other imperatives we have enumerated, while it is based indirectly on contempt, or perhaps because it is, the work-to-be-written does not seem a gift to the new generation and does not demand any generosity of the artist. Absolute negation in these youngsters comes, in fact, from the bourgeois certainty that generosity is a mirage, a booby trap invented by the nobility for its conquerors; they looked for and found interested motives behind generous actions. Besides, to whom would the work be given? The only real public is the bourgeoisie, who want a class literature. To be given a disinterested work, they would at least have to imagine accepting it, which is by definition impossible. And why give anything to men when you have contempt for them all, and when the novel or poem expresses absolute negation, its author’s regret at belonging to humanity?
The fact is that the work is not a donation, it is not addressed to anyone, and when Müsset gives his sufferings to readers, these young puritans are horrified by his striptease. This is the same literary current that will soon account for the success of the idea, now outdated, that literature is a form of prostitution. At that moment, turning its negation against itself, literature would condemn itself because it would eventually be read. No, the author is not generous; what he seeks in art, and in the rigorous impersonality of the work, is his personal salvation. His refusal to be man will become objectified in the inhumanity of absolute-art: the inaccessible beauty of his product will turn the negative into something positive.
Thus the notion of the panoramic overview takes on a third meaning generated by the other two. In the eighteenth century, the writer must survey society because—in his own eyes—he escapes class determinations and finds himself thereby representing human nature “without foreign additives”; through the Romantic overview, the writers of 1830 reaffirm the superiority of the aristocratic, and the lofty gaze they level on other classes restores the hierarchical society in which by divine right they occupy the highest rung. The former believe they are surveying society and declare their solidarity with all men; the latter are and want to be inside it but in first place; in solidarity with their class and with it alone, they protest that exemplary man exists only as an aristocrat, and that the other ranks are merely rough drafts of humanity. In both cases, such a panoramic overview does not dehumanize; on the contrary, it allows the author—though in rather different ways—to express the human in its plenitude. Man of the eighteenth century is simply by definition what Romantic man rejects; in 1840 this internalized contradiction produces uncertainty and disgust in the young men who are ready to go on duty; consequently, the panoramic overview becomes a metaphysical rupture of the writer with his race. Denying human nature in himself, he takes an artist’s overview of the world, that apparent totality which breaks up into molecules, and of man, that stranger who inhabits it. What he discovers, we surmise, is universal nothingness—as the noetic counterpart of his attitude of absolute negation. The contradiction of this attitude is that he claims simultaneously to make himself an aristocrat (therefore the best of men)—a notion borrowed from the Romantics—and to sever his ties with humanity. And this contradiction is attributable not to subjective motives but to the coexistence in the practico-inert of two determinations of the Objective Spirit that are internalized through reading in the same mind in which they are united, opposing each other through bonds of interiority. As if the young reader had concluded that in order to make himself aristocratic, he had no choice but to escape from his own nature through absolute-art. As a consequence, absolute-art expresses the point of view of the absolute on the world. A point of view that is resumed in the absolute of negation.
Yet the most basic requirement of the new art is impossible to satisfy. In the first place, the idea of absolute negation is a contradiction in adjecto. The existence of an object or a quality in a determined sector of being, and in relation to another object or another sector, is denied. Moreover, negation is merely the formal and judicial aspect of negativity, which is praxis, destructive work. It is logically admissible, for example, that one class can deny the privileges of another class or its rights. And this is precisely the source of negation as an attitude: the writer-aristocrats, by their contempt and the positive aspect of their ideology, deny the humanism and humanity of the bourgeois. But transposed to the young men of 1840, pushed to the limit and decreed a priori a literary requirement without the support of a social class, or at least a social stratum, negation becomes absolute at the moment it ceases to express an external view of the object, and it no longer signifies anything but the subjective effort of those young malcontents to take their distance in relation to the class that produced and sustained them. A futile effort, obviously, and one that leads to the denial of everything in the name of nothing. Indeed, the Postromantics’ condemnation extends to the totality of the world: they want to expose it, beneath the mosaic of appearances, as nothingness. But in relation to what can this world, which in any case exists, be regarded as a lesser being and finally as that nothingness, vanity of vanities, which must be its ultimate secret? If it were in relation to God, who represents the total plenitude of being, that negation would be conceivable; but precisely for that reason a Christian would ascribe to it only a relative meaning: in relation to God, the world is nothingness; but in itself, and to the extent that it was the object of the Almighty’s creative act, it is impossible to deny it a certain reality. If, on the other hand, God is not at issue, and if nihilism is applied to the world in itself, negation becomes absolute but now signifies nothing; and, as we know, those young agnostics no more claim to compare the world to a Creator than to judge the bourgeoisie through the eyes of the real aristocracy. The purpose of a work of art, according to them, is to manifest the inconceivable. Nothingness is not only the disintegration of the totality into molecules whose movements are governed from the outside by laws of exteriority; it is at the same time the condemnation of mechanism in the name of that impossible totality. Thesis, in effect, would be merely the application of bourgeois thought to the mendacious syntheses of history and religion. But if antithesis were reformulated and now defined mechanism itself as nothingness (a nothing without unity) even while destroying it, the writer would attempt to retain in himself that arrested double movement and present it as the world’s negation of itself. Art, then, sets itself an unrealizable task: it will have to hide the real antinomy of thesis and antithesis and give it its purely fictive solution in beauty—in this case in the flaunted cult of appearance, of that which denounces its own lack of reality.
These young writers, when they aspire to that overview, have never meant it to be a real activity. In any event, overview is impossible, as we know, since we are fixed in space. But they know it as well. They have never dreamed, like philosophical dogmatists, of acquiring by that “distancing” an absolute knowledge of being. And although they like to speak of mystical ecstasies, they have not tried to envisage distancing as a real transcendence, a real ascent toward that absolute term, the God of believers. Their scientism, the sad fruit of the surprising progress of science, deters them from regarding philosophy as a rigorous discipline; rather, they have seen it as an auxiliary of art. The free play of ideas gave a broader foundation and some guiding schemes to the free play of imagination. And as for mysticisnij apart from the fact that they lacked faith—the result above all of the progressive laicization of all sectors of human activity—they could not espouse the elevation of the mystic in any case. Indeed, if the mystic in his dark night has the feeling of progressively shedding the mundane determinations of his finitude, passions, language, and even imagination, it is because his enterprise has only one purpose: to offer himself to God so that He might penetrate him and suffuse him with ecstasy. He isn’t the least concerned with leaning over and looking down to contemplate terrestrial nothingness from above. The negative is merely a means of ascesis; the end is pure positivity. And if, on the contrary, he returns to our world, he does so in order to regard it with the utmost seriousness and to help his brothers, as did John of the Cross and Theresa of Avila. Instead, our young men, caught between negativity and nothingness, frustrated by faith, convinced of the truth of scientism but hardly attracted by its austere theories, elevate themselves only to take their distance from the world and to embrace it in a single negative view. Having taken up literature in order to escape their fathers, naively persuaded that it could treat only lofty sentiments, they have seen those sentiments disappear and have understood in their disappointment that literary art was the terrain dreamed of for the totalization of their rancor and the assuaging of that hatred of man provoked by the Objective Spirit. But since they must elevate themselves without any source of support or lifeline, and without any real destination, they cannot help knowing that their ascension is fictive, or, rather, that they are embarking upon it without considering its strict impossibility, and even against it. And this is precisely why they define the imaginary as a permanent recourse against the impossible.
For these young men, literature opens an emergency exit; the imaginary being beyond the impossible but without its own consistency, its objectivization in the work will give it the consistency it lacks. In view of the work, and by virtue of it, they insist on their unconditional condemnation of the real by absolute negation as an unreal negation whose virulence comes, in fact, from their choice of unreality. In other words, literature imposes itself on them through the Objective Spirit as having no domain but the antireal, or pure unreality, pitting itself against the palpable world. Only in this way can they give a certain efficacy to the various ruptures imposed on them by their situation and the determinations of the Objective Spirit. In the name of autonomy they had to break with the public just when contrary imperatives were compelling them to break with man, then with the world. In short, with the totality of the real. And yet they remained what they were: young bourgeois of the middle class, supported by their family or practicing a “liberal” profession. So they had to choose: either nothing had been produced—because nothing could be produced—except in dreams; and so literature, insofar as it demanded these ruptures, had become impossible. Or the choice of the imaginary, insofar as it represented the common signification of that behavior, was an effective and revolutionary step. The Postromantics chose the imaginary so as to be able to write.
But the necessity of this choice represents in itself an element of objective neurosis. Let us examine what it means. In the first place, rupture with the real—which is equivalent to condemning it—cannot be lived except as a permanent refusal to adapt; the artist must deny the aims of the race and society in himself and others as much as possible. And as he does not always manage to do so, the refusal must be imaginary. Similarly, he is required to lose the ordinary comprehension of objects, acts, and words to the same extent that absolute negation compels him no longer to share common aims. But this incomprehension does not come—as with the philosophers of the Platonic cave—from a superior knowledge that would in itself degrade the superficial activities of men in the name of their underlying essence and the essential goals of humanity, or even from a demand for deeper knowledge of them. Outside this incomprehension there is nothing: it confines itself to manifesting things in a state of estrangement precisely because of the refusal to integrate them into a real system. The point, in short, is to live in a permanent state of slight depersonalization, sometimes sincerely felt, sometimes maintained in the form of a role. In this state, if it can be sustained by external assistance, the writer must put himself and the world between parentheses; he does not intervene, he abstains. Consequently, things lose their weight of reality and sensation loses its “seriousness”; this is a subtle way of “realizing” absolute negation by reducing the universe to a series of apparitions untested by praxis and which—by their nothingness of being, the total absence of any coefficient of instrumentality or adversity—are finally equal to appearances. Since art must be the supreme negation, the content of the work will be that desubstantialized, invisible universe of the imaginary. And in order to obtain the suppression of being in the interest of the pure, unreal apparition, the artist will have to receive his impressions as if he were imagining them. This is called the aesthetic attitude, the rigorous requirement of a literature that claims its full autonomy just when the bourgeoisie wants a class literature. With this attitude the artist unrealizes himself and at the same time derealizes the world. And as art is posited for its own sake through him, these strategies must in themselves imply a reversal of the usual set of values, making appearances worth more than realities and any apparition valued in proportion to its quantity of nonbeing. Thus the autonomy of art in 1850 can be obtained only through the nonreality of the artist and the content of the work, since these show us the nonreality of the world or the subordination of being to appearance. This may mean that the techniques of art are used to destroy the real, to present it in the work as it appears to the aesthetic attitude. Or it may mean that the artist can turn his back on reality, a strategy particularly favored in the Symbolist period for the purpose of choosing the imaginary and even attempting an oneiric literature. The chief thing, in one form or another, is the valorization of nonbeing. Around this time, the reason for writing is to resurrect vanished civilizations, to contest quotidian banality by an exoticism often entirely fabricated in Paris. Everything that is no longer there, that is not there, that is fixed in a permanent absence, is good provided one has access to the resurrected object solely through imagination. There is nothing accidental in the widespread vogue of Orientalism, the translation of sacred Indian songs, the recurrent presence of antique Greece—works on Greek history and art proliferate—but it is more dead and distant than ever. Writers thus hoped to escape their element and wanted that ancient, exotic culture to remain savage and inaccessible, its unassimilable originality revealing itself in the very heart of reading to be an image beyond all images, making palpable the nothingness at the very heart of imagination as the limit imposed on it by absence and death.
Absolute-art, an objective determination of literature-to-be-written, imposes the rupture with being on its future ministers from the outset. They cannot write without a metamorphosis which, unable to call itself by name without exposing its neurotic nature, announces itself objectively as an ordination. But the comparison is misleading: a religious order is an institution that sustains the vocation of the neophyte against the exterior and often against himself; in addition, for a believer, and above all in eras when faith is a positive bond between men, a young man leaving the world, in what is actually a negative moment, believes he is turning toward the full positivity of being. But when literature makes itself the absolute, that absolute can be only an absolute of negation. Thus the vows of the writer commit him only to himself and are posited by themselves as always revocable. In other words, they will be irrevocable—which is a necessity—only if the artist is unable to revoke them. The fact is that his first negation or renunciation of the world is not supported by any community and, far from being a source of integration, reveals exile and solitude as his imperative lot; on the other hand, this negation is not transformed into negativity—or the patient and joyous work of undermining—or into the gateway to positivity (the neophyte’s access to the primary truths of the supernatural plenitude of real being). It must remain radical negation. And the supreme dignity of the work—a false positivity—lies in its vampirization of being (and primordially language); its fabric is, and must remain, imaginary. Therefore the artist can choose to show our world or a possible world in the brightest colors; the imperative simply demands that those colors, in one way or another, denounce their own nonbeing and that of the depicted object. In other words, absolute-art demands a suicide swiftly followed by genocide. And together these operations—one subjective, the other objective—can only be imaginary. Absolute-art requires entrance-into-literature the way in certain times and places people entered into religion. But as this conduct is purely fictive for the writer, it could be called his entrance-into-the-imaginary-realm. The Objective Spirit demands that he choose unreality as a rigorous refusal of the real (which he may subsequently depict, but as the real refused); but since this option is itself imaginary, its precariousness is evident to the author and denounces him as a traitor to art, possibly forever, indeed as a traitor to himself unless that precariousness has the consistency and irreducibility of a neurosis, or a suffered option. Of course neurosis as a solution, as the only possible support for the vow of unreality, is not imposed by the imperatives of 1850; those demand simply that the artist become other than man, that he attain this state through an ascesis and maintain himself there. But in this impossibility born of contradictory demands, neurosis emerges as a possible solution. And it amounts to this fascinating suggestion: let us behave as if all those insurmountable difficulties were resolved; let us, indeed, start from this solution, leaving to our bodies the task of finding and living it; let us write beyond the negative convulsions of our decrepitude.
1 The same is true in different degrees regarding the spectator’s attitude before other works of art (paintings, symphonies, statues, etc.).
2 In practical life a means may be taken for an end as soon as one searches for it, and each end is revealed as a means of attaining another end.
3 This last remark may arouse some readers. If so, I’d like to know a single good novel whose express purpose was to serve oppression, a single good novel which has been written against Jews, negroes, workers, or colonial people. “But if there isn’t any, that’s no reason why someone may not write one some day.” But you then admit that you are an abstract theoretician. You, not I. For it is in the name of your abstract conception of art that you assert the possibility of a fact which has never come into being, whereas I limit myself to proposing an explanation for a recognized fact.
4 The reference here is to Benda’s La Trahison des clercs, translated into English as The Great Betrayal.—Translator.
5 To pursue in a work of art a direct enterprise of radical negation, to make it the goal of art, is to give it an end other than itself. But if art is pursued for art’s sake, the affirmation of the beautiful implies negation of the real.