Hatred and Forgiveness

Needless to say, a figure as singular as Louis Aragon, the multifaceted writer, should not be confused with the exaltations or abjections of an ideology. As for psychoanalysis, as attentive as it might be to the alchemy of the imaginary, it alone cannot interpret a human adventure in which familial destiny, national memory, and global history cross paths. I thank Daniel Bougnoux for his affable confidence and his excellent works,¹ which have often guided me in my reflections, and I am pleased to accept his invitation to speak to you of the writer and the man, with an inquiry into the origins. It is to the impasses of revolt, however, that this inquiry will lead me. Because the essential themes of his engagement and work—while specific to Aragon the individual and his incommensurable singularity—may also illuminate the dramas of the twentieth century, caught between the most extravagant demand for freedom and the most massive oppression of this same freedom human beings have ever known. And beyond the communist adventure, the “true-lie”²—formulated and practiced by the man who was fou d’Elsa (crazy about Elsa)—assumes a new aspect today, made common by the media and exploited by religious fundamentalisms and their suicidal conflicts. Is the “true-lie” our unassailable contemporary?

I could have outlined the psychopathology of a born impostor, fatherless and motherless and destined from the cradle for masquerade and the “false self”: a lover of women to the point of wanting to kill himself for one, who believed he survived because of another woman’s beautiful eyes, who claimed to experience pleasure and to write the way he imagined women did, to the point of considering himself female before dying; a lover of men to the point of acclaiming the power of a dictator, serving him, using him; yet also capable of mocking these varieties of lust as well as their certainties, services, and roles—every role, every power.

The “case of Aragon” demands much more, however. Beyond the psychopathology he sets in motion, the writer calls on the brilliance of the French language, where he finds his true family, his alter ego. The mores of the Third Republic, which he detested, are his patent genitors. And in the political history of totalitarianism, the head of Les Lettres françaises would create his imaginary, untouchable traitor. Which is to say, to be Aragonian, the drama of the “true-lie” is the drama of the French imaginary as well as of communism. Fortuitous convergences? Or inevitable complicity? Let’s go back to the “origins” and look at two books: La Défense de l’infini (1923–1927), part of which was set on fire in 1927, and Blanche ou l’oubli (1967).³

In the man who treads the red carpets of Stalinist palaces, in the pen that signs the ukases of the PCF (the French Communist Party), in the compromises and flashes of brilliance of the poet, I see—I hear—the “sorrow, injury, and despair” of Louis the child. Who is he? How many are there?

Aragon was born on October 3, 1897, and died on December 24, 1982. We know about his mother, Marguerite Toucas, who was unmarried; her sisters, Marie and Madeleine; and their mother, née Massillon: the writer often refers to this maternal configuration formed by the grandmother and her three daughters in his (very gap-filled and guarded) autobiographical notes. A tribe of women of illustrious ancestry, an absent, globe-trotting grandfather, and a single concrete man, Uncle Edmond, the brother of the three sisters, scarcely present. Not only did Marguerite conceal the fact that she was expecting a child, she even pretended not to have conceived him. The newborn vanished for thirteen months, sent to a wet nurse in Brittany. He was not supposed to have been born in the Toucas-Massillon family, so when he meets his mother, he is passed off as her younger brother, and his grandmother is presented as the mother. Aragon’s childhood, at once sheltered and dramatic, is subjected to the “true-lie” from the start. A poem entitled “Le Mot” (The Word) published during the Second World War after his mother’s death, in a collection of texts on the Resistance (1942), evokes for the one and only time, as far as I know, a lyrical and shattering image of this mother, immediately associated with the uncertain birth of speech (“the word”) on the verge of the “lie”: “Le mot n’a pas franchi mes lèvres / Le mot n’a pas touché son coeur / Est-ce un lait dont la mort nous sèvre / Est-ce un drogue, une liqueur / Jamais je ne l’ai dit qu’en songe / Ce lourd secret pèse entre nous / Et tu me vouais au mensonge / À tes genoux / Nous le portions comme une honte / Quand mes yeux n’étaient pas ouverts / … / Te nommer ma soeur me désarme / Que si j’ai feint c’est pour toi seule / Jusqu’à la fin fait l’innocent / Pour toi seule jusqu’au linceul / Caché mon sang / J’irai jusqu’au bout de mes torts / J’avais naissant le tort de vivre …”⁵

The mother of the poet was the great unspeakable that continued to haunt the virtuoso of French rhythm. But his nostalgic chateau hid another mystery: the invisible father (presented as a godfather or tutor) who, in the few memories of him, was brusque with Marguerite Toucas-Massillon and rarely crossed paths with the child. In Souvenirs d’ un préfet de police (Memoirs of a Police Prefect), the memoirs of Louis Andrieux, he reveals himself.⁶ Andrieux (1840–1931) became the chief of police of Paris after the fall of Napoléon III and conceived his biological son, also named Louis, at the age of fifty-seven. The whirlwinds of the Third Republic, known as “les Jules,”⁷ come to life in the father’s memoirs, and in his writings we savor the militant anticlericalism that characterized it, along with the administrative fragility and the omnipresent masonry that Andrieux takes part in and disdains. Grandiloquent, solemn, Aragon père, or rather, Louis Andrieux, represses the insurrection of communards from Lyons in 1871, aggressively pursues Bakunin himself, and infiltrates the anarchists around Louise Michel. Cynical? Certainly. Boring? Never. At eighty-seven, while his son is in the thick of surrealism (this is 1927), Mr. Andrieux continues to publish and learn, and even to defend theses on Alphonse Rabbe and Gassendi, resulting in a Ph.D.! And, two years before his death, he publishes an essay devoted to Madame du Châtelet, Voltaire’s friend. We might ask which of them, father or son, was the surrealist!

This strange lineage—the musketeer dandy, author of Paris Peasant and Treatise on Style, traced back to a police prefect with “gusto” who embodied bourgeois France to perfection—has a certain beauty in the end. Beauty in the sense of Lautréamont, who was a precursor and constant source of inspiration for the surrealists and to whom we owe the famous phrase: “Beauty is the fortuitous encounter between a sewing machine and an umbrella upon a dissecting table.” Indeed, there is a chasm between the two characters, Louis Andrieux and Louis Aragon, and yet an encounter, if we look at their respective styles as a place and its flipside, only accessible to a true spirit of dissection, after all, a suitable approach to both father and son. From the “Jules” of the Third Republic to the “little father of the people” that Stalin was; from libertine and puritan France to the dictatorship of the proletariat; from decadent rhetoric filled with Latin quotations to La Défense de l’infini and back again—the road is not the shortest. But there is one, torturous and brilliant, if you follow it in automatic writing, and if you break it open in the end in an explosion, as Aragon did. A century is revealed there, grandiose and comic, still concealing the complicity of adversaries and the fascination exerted on us by fathers and sons, poets and cops.

It is the early1920s: “At every moment, I betray myself, I fail to keep my own word, I contradict myself. I am not the person in whom I would place my confidence.” This is from Aragon’s “Révélations sensationnelles” in the review Littérature.⁸ There was the First World War, mobilization, disaster. Aragon, a medical auxiliary, meets Breton at Val-de-Grâce, becomes friends with future members of the surrealist group, establishes the Dadaist group. In March 1919 he signs a secret pact with Breton, filled with nihilist rage: “The one who renounces, ruin him, discredit him, by any means necessary. There is only one morality at this level of ‘incapability’: that of bandits. A law that does not tolerate the slightest weakness, which is in the refusal of the written law… . We will shatter the others. Until the day it is necessary for us to go even further, one or the other will abandon one or the other in turn. [Rupture is already on the agenda.] To know that the other will run you down. To know. Therein lies the condition for action.”⁹

It is in this context of the rejection of the “written law”—of social, familial, and national norms—that the first writings will appear: Feu de joie (1919), an attempt to reconstruct the self through the imaginary character of Jean-Baptiste A. (A. as in Andrieux, as in Aragon); Anicet ou le Panorama (1921), an ironic chronicle of an apprenticeship of revolt in a group of conspirators the artist opposes; Les Aventures de Télémaque (The Adventures of Telemachus, 1922), a dialogue between the Dadaist project and Fénélon’s Telemachus, in which paradoxical feelings emerge, not coded by classical psychology; Le Libertinage (The Libertine, 1922), which presents itself as a debate with another text, a mask, a critical imitation with a strong mimetic element and an effect of subtle detachment—Aragon makes his way through the dedicatees, mimicking them, and distancing himself from them; and Le Paysan de Paris (Paris Peasant, 1924–26), which explores the city, the night, the feminine, and “the marvelous.”

Aragon’s writing in its nascent state is attuned to personal joys and anxieties, while also responding to the revolts of a generation shaken by the First World War, the disaster of Verdun, and the economic and political crisis. But instead of settling into social protest or naturalist narrative, Aragon and his friends take the path of what I have called a-thought: with a privative “a.” Taking their cues from Rimbaud and Lautréamont, they reject “action [which] is not the sister of the dream” (Baudelaire), while freeing thought from the constraints of action and judgment. The rigid forms of bourgeois civilization are execrated, but, beyond the social order, a “metaphysical” revolt is being outlined: “My business is metaphysics”—this is Paris Peasant’s profession of faith. By attacking not only homo faber, and the practical activity of workers always already on the path to robotization, but just as violently attacking conventional art itself: “These days there are several individuals prowling over the world for whom art, for example, has ceased to be an end in itself.”¹⁰ It is a matter of pursuing thought—unconscious desire and intransigent destructivity—that escapes toward the sensory, disavows the literary experience itself as amoral futility, and calls for a new way of thinking that only comes about in writing and touches on “the very essence of the Word” (Apollinaire): “I thus belonged from the earliest age to this zoological species of writers for whom thought is formed in writing.”¹¹

Ephemerality, humor, images, scandal, and a style composed of metaphors turned upside down by dreamlike free association will weave this rebellious a-thought together: “I call style the accent adopted by the flow of the symbolic ocean, reflected by a given man, that universally mines the earth with metaphors.”¹² Consider this political credo: the speaker, “I,” calls “style” the “flow” of the “symbolic ocean,” a flow that is “reflected” by a “given man.” Aragon writes “symbolic ocean” for the Christian “Word,” for “God.” The “given” man, an anonymous, indifferent man, like Louis A., Andrieux, Aragon, perhaps. And a universally mined earth. Mined by metaphor, displacement, transports-transferences-images. Writing of the whirlwind, the vortex an “I” calls forth and is temporarily appeased by, the testimony of a “given man,” set adrift by the gods and the mined earth, impacted by earthquakes, tsunamis, the vertigo of our reference points, the instability of the ego, other people, words—metaphor is what is left to us.

This adventure—both the subjective revolt and the metaphysical project—will usher in three major themes: the marvelous, the crisis of confidence in the imaginary, and the unbridled worship of female jouissance.

La Défense de l’infini is inscribed in this context. Against the background of the author’s stormy relationship with Nancy Cunard and the sexual and financial difficulties to which he was subject during this liaison, the risks of imaginary revolt and surrealist a-thought emerge brutally. While Breton continues to believe that the inner experience must be pursued and that it is possible to change the rights of man through art (as suggested in the first issue of La Révolution surréaliste [The Surrealist Revolution], December 1, 1924), Aragon stigmatizes literary activity as “vanity,” and though he publishes Artaud’s The Nerve Meter in 1927 with Doucet’s funding, he seeks in politics a solution to the contradiction between social efficiency and irredeemable literary activity.

In short, this is truly a crisis of confidence in the imaginary: joining the Communist Party and writing La Défense de l’infini at the same time suggests that political choice might have acted as an unconscious counterweight to the risk of the imaginary. Indeed, in 1927, Aragon joins the Party and has a dramatic moment in his emotional life. It is as if political membership balanced out an unbearable affective and passionate disorder. This is the period of his tumultuous relationship with Nancy Cunard, which takes place in an elegant and cosmopolitan world in Paris, involving trips to various European countries (England, Holland, Germany, Spain, Italy). Then there is the breakup. The writer succumbs to a crisis of depression, destroys a large portion of his manuscript, “La Défense de l’infini,” in Madrid, near the end of 1927, and attempts suicide in September 1928 in Venice.

Two motifs animate this text. The first is explicitly rhetorical and literary; it presents itself as a rejection of bourgeois ennui and the nausea provoked by the habit of telling “stories … for assholes,” as the narrator bluntly puts it. Nevertheless, this anger is still expressed in a fictional style. If there is a narrative, it is subordinated to the act of writing at its most singular, solitary, and dreamlike and to a mastery of words that, like a substitute for automatic writing, generates characters and the fragmentary structure of a story made of “collages.”

The second motif concerns the appropriation of the feminine as a revolt against the degeneration of Man (or, if you prefer, the father). The infinity in question is ultimately the account of an exorbitant jouissance transferred from the woman to the narrator’s writing. The section entitled “Le Con d’Irène” testifies to this.

As I have said before, Aragon, Breton, and the surrealists all glorified the feminine as a new divinity, but Aragon gave this perspective a new slant. Irène is an ambiguous character, the narrator’s double, a libertine, an idealized echo of the prostitute; however, above all, she exerts power over the others, including the narrator, thanks to words—an infinite power, power against the finiteness of love. This love, initially exalted, is devalorized in turn in favor of the only infinity that matters: the infinity of Irène’s words. Does she create the words herself, or does she inspire them in the narrator? The ambiguity remains; the writer and the muse are almost assimilated; he is the woman and she is he; a splitting projects the libertine into the role of creator and assigns the writer the feminine role, suggesting the bisexual nature of the creator. Only Joyce in Ulysses, through a polyphony that rivals Atheological Summa attempted such an orphic appropriation of female jouissance. As for the disenchantment of eroticism, it is rare in French literature, which placed eighteenth-century libertinism at the zenith of the experience of freedom and generally prefers to glorify the sexual exploit. This Aragonian admission of weakness, impotence, and disgust is not in the style of the sexual liberation and exaltation of the erotic act practiced by other writers during the same period, which has permeated anarchist literature and art to this day (we have only recently started questioning the benefits of this “freedom”: since media images have imposed hardcore sex as the “right-thinking” norm). Jouissance, in the narrator of La Défense de l’infini, is ultimately transposed to another plane; confronted with the sadness of eroticism, the narrator valorizes the magic of the word, “the prodigious metaphorical value that I attribute to words alone.”¹³

And female jouissance can now be described in one of the most beautiful passages on this subject in French literature. Consider this description, full of physiological detail, sensation, emotion, and desire:

“So small and so large! It is here that you are at ease, man finally worthy of your name, it is here that you are back on the scale of your desires. Don’t be afraid of moving your face closer to this place—and already your tongue, the chatterer, is restless—this place of delight and darkness, this patio of ardour, in its pearly limits, the fine image of pessimism. O cleft, moist and soft cleft, dear dizzying abyss… . Touch that voluptuous smile, trace the ravishing gap with your finger… . And now, all hail to thee, pink palace, pale casket, alcove a little disordered by the grave joy of love, vulva appearing for a moment in its fullness. Under the designer-label satin of the dawn, the colour of summer when one closes one’s eyes… . Oof, oof. Irene is calling her lover. Her lover gets a hard-on at a distance. Oof, oof. Irene is about to die and contorts herself. He’s stiff-pricked as a god above the abyss. She thrusts, he eludes her, she thrusts and strains. Oof. The oasis leans down with its tall palms. Travellers your burnouses rotate in the abrasive sand. Irene is panting fit to burst. He contemplates her. The cunt is steamed up awaiting the prick. On the illustory chott, the shadow of a gazelle… . Hell, let your damned toss off, Irene has come.”¹⁴

Clearly, the imaginary is at a loss before the enormity of the project represented by translation—translation not of a “multiplicity of facts” but of female jouissance: admittedly phantasmatic but upheld as a variant of the divine incarnate.

The senselessness of revolt consists of the ambition to translate into language this appropriation of original paradise, this loss of boundaries between the ego and the other, between man and woman, this effacing of limits and taboos beyond the speaking subject, the phantasmatic representation of which is female jouissance. In counterpoint, joining the French Communist Party in 1927 and meeting Elsa in the fall of 1928 are stabilizing and reassuring. Party membership will be effective in 1930 and consolidate the writer’s identity. The impossible literary mission that involved competing with phantasmatic female jouissance will be replaced by a cult of the people: a sympathetic mission amongst the sovereign yet destitute people, the dark continent of oppressed sensibility and repressed organic power. While the popular miracle replaces the feminine marvelous, the police prefect is easily transformed into a dictator—the male cult of personality requires it!

Is this papering over of literary a-thought, of imaginary revolt, in party membership and belonging, a true-lie, a pretense, a mask, an artifact? Aragon’s later years suggest it, as he gradually allowed his respectability to dissipate. Nevertheless, he maintained this role as member, militant, and dogmatic leader for a long time, drawing criticism from those who accused him of cynicism and conformism, whether dyed-in-the-wool bourgeois or liberal anarchists. Adherence to the Party, as well as conjugal “mad love,” were no doubt his lifesavers after setting the manuscript on fire, the mirror necessary to assure his identity: “I” belong, because “I” do not know who “I” am; and because “I” do not want to be swallowed up by the jouissance of the other, “I” adhere, “I” stabilize myself, if only temporarily, “I” profit from it to continue living and writing. The alternation between revolt and adherence structures the surrealist period itself, the “group” assuming the role of identity support—before the Party takes its place and seals the strictures of revolt within social demands. With Stalinism, Aragon abandons revolt in the name of engagement, at times critical, at times servile, wanting it all, all the time (“toujours tout l’arc-en-ciel,” Breton said of him), without belonging absolutely to any one identity, any one precise truth. This is what some of Aragon’s commentators have called his successive and constant “betrayals.” Betrayals that also allowed him to follow his path as a writer. After setting Infinity ablaze, writing could only be a constant betrayal/translation of styles, genres, postures, and tonalities.

At this point, in 1928, the impasses of Stalinism have just begun. There will be 1930, the congress of Kharkov, and the redoubtable adherence to social realism; then 1932 and the split with surrealism; Le Monde réel starts in 1933 until Les Communistes of 1949, and there is the conjugal and patriotic pathos of the poetic cycle of the Resistance—but should he not have done it? Who will cast the first stone at the alexandrines? In 1945 Aurélien; and finally—I say “finally” for myself, because it was a relief to see the writing catch its breath again—Holy Week in 1958. But La Défense de l’infini was no longer discussed and would not be republished until 1986 (in 1969 Aragon still does not mention Irene, but he describes the style of the novel he set alight in Je n’ai jamais appris à écrire [I Never Learned How to Write]).

The writer’s virtuosity in the novel, characteristic of his later years, vaguely recalls the phantasmatic explosion that ignited La Défense de l’infini. Blanche ou l’oubli (1967) also confronts us in a new way with female desire and the incommunicability between the sexes. The fascination that Blanche (already present as a character in La Défense de l’infini) and Marie-Noire have over the linguist Geoffroy Gaiffier is accompanied by a new fusion between masculine and feminine, the narrator usurping the place of his heroines. The exception here is that Aragon, still wanting to grasp sensible infinity beyond language—“I would like to describe forgetting beyond language”¹⁵—nevertheless admits a sort of defeat. The sensible world resists the narrator, he will always miss the safety net of language, forgetting will prevail, the blank is inevitable, absolute: the feminine will be this elusive blank—this Blanche, unless it is black, this Marie-Noire. Writing is certainly a power, but it is above all the power to admit impotence, an admission of lack: “The novel begins where rules are dismissed …”¹⁶

“The novel is a science of anomaly.”¹⁷

“This character of inexplicability, inexpiability, the absence itself of a serious attempt to justify the thing, all this contributes to giving the novel this light of anomaly that reigns at times over the television set …”¹⁸

The anomaly of the novel, the Party, and TV?

First of all, Aragon’s revolt against the familial unspeakable could not be an oedipal revolt: it is closer to the anti-Oedipus,¹⁹ which opens to psychosis. Yet, far from the exclusion Artaud experienced in the insane asylum, the surrealist position seemed fairly integrated and seductive, with Breton in charge of esotericism and Aragon in charge of the Party apparatus. Nevertheless, we find the polymorphous instability of this modern Narcissus, this explorer of maternal language, in a nonoedipal tonality at the borders of suicidal depersonalization. Political engagement seems to be a replacement for tragic revolt, its papering over in the cult of the people—the mother of all suffering, under the iron rule of the “little father of the people” and/or the Party police. In contrast to the deconstruction of an uncertain identity, the unbearable “Being” of pleasure and anxiety that decided to join forces with automatic writing, there is “membership.” This reversal of the quest for Being in Membership is supported by a will to atone for the father and the law, to struggle against the disappointment of depression, against the invasion by the feminine, against the capsizing into a-thought, of which La Défense de l’infini was such a perfect example and whose scars Blanche ou l’oubli still touches.

So, supporting Stalinism was revealed to be a passion with much more insidious roots. Take the invalid man in La Défense de l’infini. We can imagine a man like that restoring himself by supporting something strong: there is no longer a reason for being, but there is a group that embodies the reason of History. The reason of History is the counterweight to depression, and the Party of the popular masses becomes the manic version of melancholy. A “given man,” reflected by the waves of the symbolic ocean, sees communism as “conscience incarnate,” an absolute spirit “back on its feet.”

In addition, a certain French materialism was not averse to the temptation of establishing a new cult, that of historical reason, which the Party indeed embodied. That a human group could materialize the Power which German idealism attributed to the idea did not fail to appeal to the descendents of those clamoring for sensuality and vilifying the obscurantism of cathedrals. The cult of the irrational marvelous, made substantive by woman, borders on the inconstancy and pluralism of the Baroque. But the cult of the rational marvelous that dialectical materialism represents, in counterpoint to the earlier marvelous, is reassuring, solidifying, and stimulating at once.

Here we are undoubtedly at the heart of what underlies all belonging: “I” do not know who “I” am, “I” do not know if “I” am (a man or a woman); but “I” am part of something, a member. Hannah Arendt, after Proust, writes that the French transformed Hamlet’s motto “to be or not to be” into “to be part of or not to be part of” (en être ou ne pas en être). The French or the communists? Or perhaps: the more French you were, the more communist? Is this logic of conversion, which transforms “lack of being” into membership, so far removed from us (natives of globalization), as opponents of the true-lie would like to believe? Some support religious certainties, others ephemeral media-driven seductions—new versions of the true-lie.

Yet the thaw of the cold war, revisionism, the critique of totalitarianism, and the fall of the Berlin Wall did not simply “accelerate” History, as has often been said. They reactivated—and now allow us to reevaluate—the highlights of a much more personal and subjective revolt than that of militant engagement. Doesn’t this revolt, confronting familial structure and sexual identity as well as the strictures of identity and language, constitute a true mise en abîme of the totalitarian temptation in which a number of “rebels” nevertheless compromised themselves? Alas, the horror of totalitarianism leads conservative minds to stigmatize libertarian revolt as an accomplice to the destruction of transcendental values that may have facilitated the advent of Stalinism and Nazism. On the contrary, the fate of Aragon proves that “membership” and “political engagement” are the consequence not of the “symbolic ocean” which La Défense de l’infini proposed exploring but of a shipwreck. His political investment appears to have been an attempt to mask the writer’s powerlessness to pursue his “metaphysical business,” which is nothing other than this “transmutation of values,” the difficulty and urgency of which Nietzsche made clear.

Along with and beyond the true-lie, which was Aragon’s (and many other people’s) lot, this work of the negative also seemed to be a profound questioning of the foundations of meaning and morality. Various experiments in painting, music, and literature at the antipodes of “socialist realism” (Khlebnikov, Mayakovsky, Picasso, Malevitch, Tatlin, etc.) questioned the “already-there” of signification, images, and forms—to unveil their conflicting logics and unbearable identity. The Freudian revolution revealed the unconscious meaning of this trajectory by discovering the endemic madness of the human race in dreams. Taking these limits seriously, the ultimately psychotic limits of the speaking being who ventures—by accident (madness) or audacity (in art and thought)—to the frontiers of taboos and coded identities is what characterizes the culture of the twentieth century. Faced with new forms of conformism, we sense the gravity of this message.

The artist—to take only one example—may have difficulty handling all these risks alone. In the (indeed insane) ordeal of this experience, there is one security: blocking the work of the negative in turn, stiffening in the pose of the disciple, the faithful follower, the militant, and today the media-friendly artist or intellectual. This person opts for “another morality,” arbitrary as well, even more so than the previously rejected one, because events are no longer questioned, doubts have been suspended, and doubt dissolves into forgetting to doubt. La Défense de l’infini, burnt; Blanche ou l’oubli, suppressed. Infinity then ventures into the oedipal-Oresteian revolt or else is forgotten in the whitewashing of red support. Often more lethal than the well-controlled morality of earlier societies, which equipped themselves with the filters of democracy and religion in order to channel the death drive, the new morality of political fundamentalism kills. In reality. And in culture, by denying the intrinsic negativity of meaning, its imaginary dynamic. The new believer, even if he is a writer, abandons his experience and submits it to the Cause. The cause of the people, the cause of Allah, when not the most infantile and therefore most protective cause: the cause of self-promotion in the society of the spectacle, with no guardrails.

To compare Aragon’s drama to ours, we could ask the question another way: is Aragon’s imaginary experience audible, readable, without the political support and “mediatization” avant la lettre that communist popularity procured for him and that gave him one of his reasons for being?

Or: is it really just a matter of amoral manipulation on the part of an imposter? A borderline state of unbearable identity: of the Self, of groups? A critical period in the Western conscience where the refusal of the pair formed by conscience and the norm stiffened into an institutionalized antinorm and anticonscience, even more restrictive and lethal than their traditional targets? Revolt running aground in radical oppression, unable to follow in thought alone, in lone thought, this archaeology of the sensed and the sensible, this debate in metaphysics and against it, that Aragon introduced in Paris Peasant?