Les frontières on s’en fout
(To hell with boundaries)
1968
A “structuralism” boom characterized the second half of the 1960s. In 1966, the publishing company Le Seuil published Jacques Lacan’s Ecrits and Roland Barthes’ Critique et vérité; Gallimard Michel Foucault’s Les mots et choses; the leftist Edition Sociales Lucien Sebag’s Structuralisme et marxisme and Pierre Macherey’s Théorie matérialiste de la littérature; and the conservative Larousse A.J. Greimas’ Sémantique structurale. Even Jean-Paul Sartre’s journal Les Temps Modernes published a theme issue on structuralism. In 1967, the moderate Catholic journal Esprit came out with its own theme issue on structuralism. Published were also Lucien Goldman’s Genèse et structure (Gallimard) and three books by Jacques Derrida, L’écriture et la différence (Seuil), La voix et le phénomène (Presses Universitaires de France) and De la grammatologie (Minuit).
The frenetic pace of publishing continued in 1968. Seuil published Philippe Sollers’ L’écriture et l’expérience des limites (Writing an the Experience of Limits) and Nombres, Tel Quel’s Théorie d’ensemble, Qu’est-ce-que le structuralisme?, coordinated by Seuil editor François Wahl, and in 1969 Julia Kristeva’s Σημειωτιχη. Séméiotiké. Recherches pour une sémanalyse (in Greek letters in the original, to give it an additional distinctive flavor). After all this, no one could avoid being a structuralist or at least a passive supporter without the threat of being branded a counter-progressive and “out of it.” Young intellectuals were thrilled by these developments, as one of them testified: “Impression exaltante que tout va se débloquer-même le PC” (An exhilarating impression that everything was going to be unjammed—even the Communist Party) (Houdebine 2001: 52). This publishing activity demonstrated that the force and direction of the theoretical movement existed chiefly at the margins of the university establishment or entirely outside of it. The vitality and higher public profile of the developing intellectual culture contrasted with the conservativeness and slowness of the academic culture. This perpetual motion was reflected in the statements of the rising intellectual stars:
(But) to participate in the revolution of thought, writing itself, while knowing that the text and revolution are homological since they both create a “mute” force of change, is much more difficult. It requires a certain power to produce ceaseless interpretation (Sollers 1968e: 10).
The fusion of political and theoretical avant-gardes was nowhere clearer than in the activities of the review Tel Quel. The meetings of Tel Quel’s Group for Theoretical Studies that started in 1968 were Parisian mass events open to all, and resembled other similar events, especially Lacan’s seminars at the hotbeds of alternative theories and ideas, the Ecole normale supérieure and the Ecole pratique des hautes études. The Lacanian psychoanalyst Elisabeth Roudinesco who attended these events describes their atmosphere:
For a year, the group attracts masses. The entire Parisian intelligentsia rushes into the midst of students in order to hear about the science of the unconscious, “différance”, the death of the author and the revolution through writing/text. Barthes, Derrida, Klossowsky and many others participate in these theatrical meetings. Lacan makes a somewhat hesitant appearance at the edge of a packed auditorium (Roudinesco 1986a: 541).
In 1968, Sollers published in Tel Quel’s publication series his collection of essays entitled Logiques, which in many ways is his most successful theoretical work. It consists of essays that he had published in Tel Quel between 1962 and 1967. Three years later, after it had been selling well, the collection was released as a paperback in the Point series under the sexier title of L’écriture et l’expérience des limites. The authors discussed by Sollers are from the circle of Barthes’, Derrida’s, Foucault’s and Kristeva’s commentaries: Dante, de Sade, Mallarmé, Artaud, Bataille and Lautréamont. However, Sollers differs from Derrida in one important respect: like Kristeva, he straightforwardly attempts to create a science of materialistic semantics (Sollers 1971a: 6) and, like the previous avant-gardes, to participate in the class struggle alongside the proletariat and against the bourgeoisie.
Political struggle, therefore, guides Sollers’ theory just as much as purely theoretical problem setting. His theory cannot be read except through a dual approach where theoretical and political readings are inseparable. Sollers’ essays all take up the problem of being in the margins and the experience of the margins. Writing (écriture) enables him to move into the margins and to experience the censorship that tyrannizes the text, the text as text. Sollers refers to Nietzsche and the problématique of the death of God and its consequences (Sollers 1971a). The death of God proclaimed in Nietzsche’s Gay Science means the disappearance of the unlimited borders of the divine, thus opening to humans a world where the experience of borders sentences us to an impossible but necessary task: to eternally transcend borders, i.e. a world where the negativity of transgression is transformed into positive transgression. Through this move beauty and good are inseparably mingled with ugliness and evil. Endless transgression and the experience of horror are the hallmarks of modern aesthetics (see, for example, Ramoneda 1987: 44–7). Creation becomes identified with transgression, the endless (positive) transcending of borders, social norms and conventions. The language of transgression is the inverse language of the language of geography and topography—the language of philosophy par excellence—an inverse language that attempts to avoid the traps of the dichotomies concealed by geography. Because of this, writing leads to a new logic and a new concept of space that is no longer linear and horizontal but an n-dimensional volume. At the same time, the new topography avoids dichotomies and the moral and epistemological language residing in the old topography. About his work, Sollers notes: “The irreversible experience is every time a game, which in its complexity reveals shared problématique” (Sollers 1971a: 6).
According to Sollers, the margins established by linear history are mysticism, eroticism, madness, literature and the unconscious. Sollers’ criticism, for its part, targets humanism, logocentrism, speech, linearity, and telos. In his essay “Dante et la traversée de l’écriture” he notes that humanism quickly petrified Dante’s work, which had been classified as unreadable, inhuman and monstrous (Sollers 1971a: 14). To Sollers, Dante had become de Sade’s kin.
What is essential in Sollers’ reading of Dante and de Sade is not, however, certain ideas or how these are represented to the commentator (Sollers 1971a: 15). Sollers looks at literary works through the concepts of writing, thanatos and the margin (Sollers 1971a: 31 and 143). Writing is always a transgression that cannot be halted; it is a perpetual work of signifiers, a change that cannot be reduced to a work of literature, to linearity (which Sollers compares like Kristeva and Mäll with the panthat of Sanskrit (Sollers 1971a: 149–50)) or to a center, a hierarchy. Writing is an ocean, mathematics and a vortex. Only mathematical writing, which leads Sollers to number mysticism (Sollers 1971a: 189 and Sollers 1968b), can capture the conflicting identity of textual writing. Thus Sollers is able to say that de Sade has not been read yet. In fact, de Sade continuously renders questionable the ways of reading, i.e. the reception of a written work, which the bourgeois society upholds. Sollers criticizes the reading public for its ignorance and backwardness. Sollers links de Sade’s perversion with neurosis and speech:
Through de Sade emerges the violent and holistic transformation of writing that has continuously been suffocated by idolizing speech. Transformation is not so much anarchy as a cosmogonic stratum that, by destroying and reforming the totality governed by a primitive game, battles the idea of a creation dependent on a final, halted and determined intent (Sollers 1971a: 49, 1983: 46).
The game, like creation, is a continuous destruction and creation. Writing reaches for the infinite and endless, as it cannot do otherwise. Following Nietzche’s critique of causality, Sollers criticizes the concept of “cause.” Following Nietzsche, he equates woman with anti-cause and the Law with cause. Sollers quotes de Sade who has noted that “perhaps the causes do not determine the effects” (Sollers 1971a: 49, 1983: 46). God is a cause that has been ingrained in us through fear and teaching. Sollers relies on psychoanalytic terminology and especially on the concepts of neurosis and perversion. Desire (désir) is a lack of boundaries and an endless and irresponsible energy that is channeled by the society. The society’s role is primarily limiting, and this limiting role provides its foundation. It is impossible for the individual to live his own language, and he thus has only two alternatives: neurosis or perversion (Sollers 1971a: 52). Through a critique of the concept of cause Sollers criticizes religion, which he calls the “most common form of neurosis,” a “hypostatization” where fiction is confused with reality.
The concept of writing offers Sollers an opportunity for universal critique, since everything that limits, channels or renders questionable individual desire dooms the person to perversion and is thus in and of itself condemnable. Freedom comes from within the individual, whereas restriction comes from the outside. This also means that we cannot discuss the status of writing: it possesses the same Holy status as did dialectics as a power-idea at a certain phase of Sartre’s philosophy. Writing is the foundation of desire, sexuality, the body (Sollers 1971a: 59): it is an all-encompassing metaphysical principle.
Of de Sade’s Juliette, or the Rewards of Vice Sollers (1971a: 60, 1983: 56) notes “society is located at the centre of ideology.” The society consists of arbitrary conventions and thus, according to Sollers, resembles Saussure’s concept of langue. In Sollers’ interpretation of de Sade, transgression becomes an infinite affirmation that is only reduced in itself and which commits the greatest imaginable crime: it actively transforms reality (réalité) into fiction (Sollers 1971a: 66), into a product of pure and unrestricted desire. In the Marquis de Sade’s text Juliette ou les Prospérités du vice, history becomes fiction. Real, genuine and objective historical narrative does not exist. Following Nietzsche, there are no facts, only interpretations. In spite of this, in Sollers’ mind de Sade also reveals the true nature of things, one that is hidden behind facades and appearances, the double game which people play. In Sollers’s logic, there is a short way from the proposition that “fiction is reality” to the conclusion that the world is a text.
Sollers, like Kristeva (1974), sees Mallarmé, who in France is classified as a symbolist poet, as an early critic of the institution of literature, the first who saw the impersonality of the author as essential for literature. Behind words Mallarmé finds death, emptiness and madness. In Sollers’ interpretation, death and emptiness in turn lead to mysticism (Sollers 1971a: 120). Sollers re-interprets Mallarmé’s role as not so much trying to answer the question “what does that mean?” but as making an altogether different point: a text “does not ‘mean or wish to say’; it writes itself” (Sollers 1971a: 120).
This interpretation is important for two reasons. Firstly, by thus emphasizing the movement of writing and critique of the representative function of language, Mallarmé together with Count Lautréamont performs a break with respect to earlier literature (Sollers 1971a: 171–2, 1983: 63–4). This break is similar to the break Althusser, following in this Bachelard’s epistemological theory, found in Marx’s work (ideology/science, humanism/antihumanism), which the prevailing ideology actively strives to suppress. Sollers is thus able to proclaim that it is a fundamental aesthetic mistake, as well as an economic-political mistake, to think that language (langage) is merely a tool for representation (Sollers 1971a: 71, 1983: 79). Sollers finds support for his interpretations from the fact that Mallarmé’s work “Coup de dés,” is a dissemination, deconstruction and atomic disintegration of a single sentence: “A toss of the dice will never abolish chance.”
Revealingly, Mallarmé notes that the infinite loneliness of the writer is characterized by the “lack of a destination, at least of a social destination” [le manquement à la destinée, au moins social]. The author trots the unbeaten path, accepting death through the text, through literature: the text creates him and kills him. Sollers quotes and comments upon Mallarmé:
Literature belongs to the future, and the future as Mallarmé writes, “never anything but the flash of what must have been produced previously or near the beginning.” By virtue of a strange circularity, the man who is nothing and the one who has nothing are thus profoundly joined, vis-à-vis those who possess and consequently believe themselves to be something. Mallarmé’s thought, then, is neither betrayed nor distorted if we affirm that his work was ultimately directed toward a single thought, a thought we might refer to, moreover, as the formal thought: that of revolution, in its most literal sense (Sollers 1971a: 86–7, 1983: 84).
Considering Mallarmé’s political choices, we can assume that he hardly would have agreed with Sollers. In any case, in Sollers’s interpretation, the author is nothing since he is simultaneously a product of and the victim of his own words: “to think is to write, to read is to read what we are” (Sollers 1971a: 79). Sollers links Mallarmé to his own formal revolution that, at the same time, is also inseparably a political revolution. According to Sollers, Mallarmé is a direct precursor and model for the science of the text developed by Tel Quel. Better than any other avant-garde, Tel Quel more clearly embodies the altruistic, moral, scientific and formal literary tradition.
Solidarity between the proletariat and the author is chiefly metaphoric, as Sollers’ and Tel Quel’s future political development was to prove. The elite/the masses, the fundamental antimony of political philosophy, is only ostensibly solved. Sollers’ interpretation of Antonin Artaud, another totemic author, largely follows these same lines. Sollers notes that Artaud opposes thinking and knows that he has to go to extremes in order to question the very control over the subconscious that shapes our society and its logic (Sollers 1971a: 90). But instead of following Artaud’s example—Artaud had left the surrealist movement in 1927 when it started having closer tied with the Communist party—Sollers became an enthusiastic fellow traveler of the French Communist party. Artaud, by contrast, wanted to stay out of all institutions and political parties. Indeed, Artaud had noted “poetry is anarchic insofar as it calls into question all relationships between objects and between forms and their meanings” (quoted in Sollers 1971a: 97, 1983: 95). In order to get Artaud behind his political program, Sollers interprets Artaud largely through a critique of the dichotomy between thought and the body. About the significance of the body to writing, Sollers writes:
An inner experience – let us understand: an experience of corporal writing (and it could be shown how, from Juliette to the Chants de Maldoror, to Le théatre et son double and L’Histoire de l’oeil, all of modern literature is haunted by this real dimension, so much so that the body has become the fundamental referent for its violation of discourse). An experience accessible today only in and through language, in an through which sexuality must either constitute itself or give up what it is there to “teach” (Sollers 1971a: 122, 1983: 117).
The emphasis on the body, language, and excess means that idealism remains on the level of the spirit and reversed idealism on the level of the body. Poetics is about non-codified thought that, paradoxically, is a unique and eternally repeatable experience (Sollers 1971a: 101–2).
A central textual characteristic of Sollers’ essays is the dual movement of rationality (order, numbers) and irrationality (spontaneity, intuition). Sollers presents his texts, especially his analysis of Lautréamont (“La science de Lautréamont”), as serious texts. But at the same time, he emphasizes the irrationality of transgression, or, more precisely, that transgression cannot be studied scientifically (Sollers 1971a: 109). Sollers contrasts literary language with reality, which is rational, practical and ordinary. The novel becomes an independent aesthetic microcosm that follows its own rhythm and order. On the other hand, Sollers also notes that Bataille, for example, did not object to science, but was not wholly on its side either (Sollers 1971a: 73). Likewise, in his text Littérature et totalité, Sollers notes (1971a: 73) that Mallarmé thought that literature might be a science whose scientific model was linguistics. The relationship between literature and linguistics is very conflicting, however: in a note on page 112 Sollers discusses Bataille’s science by questioning the viewpoint he presented on page 109 about knowledge as an abstraction and a judicial approach. Likewise, when interpreting Lautréamont, he refers to Derrida’s De la grammatologie and the “science of the possibility of science” and the “science of the unmotivated trace,” two conceptual structures Derrida introduces to refer to the problématique of writing (Sollers 1971a: 141, 1983: 137).
The qualification that the science in question is not traditional does not clarify the status of this new science. The conceptual confusion is further increased by Sollers’ talking about science as a petit bourgeois ideology, which is thus also a humanistic ideology (Sollers 1971a: 110–11). This leads him to write that the science in question does not pursue truth, since truth is not its object. In Sollers’ hands, science thus becomes an endless process of producing and destroying a text. In his attempt to define Bataille’s project, Sollers writes the following revealing sentences:
Bataille is neither a “man of science” nor a “philosopher,” but he is above all not a “writer” or a “poet.” What is he? Nothing that can be expressed by a substantive, nothing the society we live in which we live can invest with positive value without falsification (Sollers 1971a: 111, 1983: 108–9).
Bataille does not fit into the categories of the prevailing ideology. He is literally everything and nothing, a negation of classification. This status of an outsider undoubtedly also to some extent reflects Sollers’ own position, or his ideal of a philosopher. He himself, Bataille and other writers and thinkers he discusses are the “others” of Nietzsche (Nietzsche 1968: 114). These others are not located within the social and intellectual division of labor except by being rendered banal, which would be unfair if we wish to do justice to their originality and to the fact that they are unclassifiable. They themselves create their own categories. A scientist or a philosopher would undoubtedly brand Bataille a pseudoscientist and a pseudophilosopher (Sollers 1971a: 134, 1983: 127). This marginalization provides the opportunity to be something—for example a poet—without nevertheless being it completely. Alternatives are always the wrong alternatives.
Indeed, Sollers places the concept of “science” in quotes, thus illustrating the distance he took from it. Quotes authorized him to move from a literal to a metaphorical meaning, whereby he could not be accused of scientism or irrationality. Others, however, were both or neither, depending on the situation. This derridean discursive logic that avoids a dualist vocabulary leads to a prolific use of mediating terms: non-sommeil (non-dream) and non-savoir (non-knowledge) (Sollers 1971a: 128 and 165, 1983: 108). These “concepts” bring Sollers’ theory closer to James Joyce’s writing in Finnegan’s Wake and to Jacques Derrida’s “concepts” of différance and pharmakon. These thinkers are guided by a new discursive economy that attempts to transcend antinomies. If traditional reflection resembled a game of roulette, where the ball would land on red or black, then here the ball does not land on either but rather moves endlessly between them. According to this logic, Sollers comments that the de Sadean monster does not fit the dichotomy inside/outside, but the space in between (Sollers 1971a: 57). The de Sadean monster is a magnifying glass through which pleasure flows. In a similar vein, Sollers writes the following about Lautréamont’s science, simultaneously distancing himself from surrealism and its interpretation of Lautréamont:
Once again, nothing is free, nothing automatic, nothing confused, or tritely “rebelling,” nothing pseudo-transgressive in this clear state without any surrealism, one into which antinomy does not fit, at least not one like “old” and “new” (Sollers 1971a: 177).
In his attempt to link writing and the theory of text to the class struggle, Sollers follows two, partly contradictory textual strategies: on the one hand, in accordance with God’s death-logic, he questions causality, the body and the mind and several other dichotomies of the established theoretical discourse; on the other hand, he maintains the dichotomies representation/non-representation and humanism/antihumanism.
Sollers’ interpretation of these authors is thus polemical. Their inner contradictions seem to him to be a virtue rather than a vice. The shift from contradiction to virtue corresponds to the shift from irrationality to a higher-level intelligence that has observed its own contradictoriness and which, without being able to get rid of it, turns it into virtue and moral purity. When la pensée commune (everyday thinking) and philosophy, like the discourse of science, believe in getting away from the confines of language, the only remaining alternative in reality is death through text and the disintegration of philosophy and science in the world of game or play (Sollers 1971a: 136–7). Thus Sollers’ contradictory discourse becomes a “scientific” discourse par excellence, which, when linked to the class struggle and the potential for human liberation, is the one and only correct discourse.
A central problem for Sollers’ “materialistic science” is the relationship between psychoanalysis and the class struggle, since as Sollers came closer to Lacan toward the end of the 1960s, he also clearly distanced himself intellectually and on a personal level from leading intellectual figures Althusser and Derrida. Theoretically, Althusser had in 1969 surrendered to a political authority, the central committee of the French communist party, the highest decision-making power in theoretical matters, as we can read in Althusser’s foreword to a new French translation of Marx’s Capital (for analysis see Descombes 1979: 158, Bowd 1999). To Sollers, this symbolic coup meant a greater dependence on Lacan, whose theory and psychoanalytic practice Sollers interpreted as opposing the university and political institutions such as the French communist party. At the same time, for Sollers and Kristeva psychoanalysis became the only legitimate way to step down from the level of theory to the level of practice. In 1974, Sollers wrote about Althusser and Derrida in a critical tone:
Both in the matters he took up and in the form of his discourse, Lacan basically questioned the institution, including the psychoanalytic institution. This was intolerable, also to these two philosophers (Althusser and Derrida), both of whom represented a philosophy of “dividing the world”. As a literary avant-garde, we face the same problem, although it is represented in different historical and practical terms. We cannot yield to the discourse of the institution, and especially to the pernicious union of academic discourse and the conservative political machinery. If we yield, we might lose everything: the critical outlook and revolutionary nature of Marxism, which can only function in close contact with history and the society (and not as an academic subject under the auspices of a bourgeois university); the subversiveness of psychoanalysis (which cannot be weakened by academic attempts at integration); the development of the language of modern literature. I say that all of this can be lost, of course, to the political left (Sollers 1974b: 127–37).
Sollers attempted to equate Lacanian psychoanalysis, which he considered the only legitimate psychoanalysis, with the status of anti-institution. He noted that Althusser had positioned himself with the Communist party behind the shared program (Programme commun) of the communists and the Leftist Union (Union de gauche). In Sollers’ interpretation, this transformed political situation forced Althusser to publish a self-critical work (Althusser 1974) without putting into question the validity of his theory. About Derrida, Sollers claimed that he had become closer to the communist party (see also Houdebine 1984: 186 and 190, Kristeva 1992). The party used Derrida, viewed as an idealist philosopher (Tel Quel 1972: 2 and 19), as a stepping-stone for a more generalized critique of philosophy. This interpretation, however, is not supported by Derrida’s own statements (Derrida 1987a) any more than by recorded historical events.
Central to Sollers’ pursuits was to use the examples of Althusser and Derrida to reinforce the notion that psychoanalysis was discriminated against in academia. Paradoxically, Sollers used the very same argument when defending Lacan, who at the time was doing a seminar on psychoanalysis at Ecole pratique des hautes études. Sollers declared that Lacan was an out-and-out anti-institutionalist, and thus Sollers’ kindred spirit. The reason for Sollers’ glorification of anti-institutionalism was that he himself worked as a novelist outside academia in the publishing house Le Seuil. This might explain why Lacan and Kristeva, for example, did not similarly propagate anti-institutional stances (see, for example, Certeau 1987: 195).
Breaking off personal relations with both Althusser and Derrida literally isolated Sollers and his followers, both socially and theoretically. On the level of political ideology, however, Sollers steadfastly held on to his fundamental aim: to combine Marxism and psychoanalysis without returning to previous synthesis like freudo-marxism:
“Freudo-marxism” does not exist and has not existed. This slanderous term used by Marxist or bourgeois ideologies in effect attempts to make it impossible to combine the theories and practices of historical and dialectical materialism and the Freudian unconscious. However, to us it seems that precisely these need to be linked (Sollers 1974c: 138–41).
Behind Sollers’ statements is a seemingly precise view of ideology (Sollers 1974c: 141–2): ideology’s influence on the relationship between language and the unconscious is manifested as idealism-metaphysics and anti-dialectics. Within psychoanalysis, idealism attempts to conceal ideology, which is manifested in theorization as a tendency towards the homogenous while ignoring the fact that what one is attempting to focus on can only be viewed from the perspective of heterogeneity. Another strategy of this ideology is to replace Freudian dualism with monism. Sollers no longer equates ideology with the transcendental signified nor does he consider it a complement to science, as he had done in his Althusserian and Derridean phase in the 1960s. Ideology is now anti-dialectics, monism and homogeneity. Even if concepts have changed, the rhetorical, cognitive and emotional significance of ideology nevertheless remains the same: to function as a mechanism for regulating, orienting and correcting theoretical and psychological tensions. Idealism influences psychoanalysis by preventing the processing of the problem of ideology. In other words, Sollers seems to be saying that idealism is a wider concept than ideology.
Kristeva’s argument about ideology as a binary logic or the logic of the verdict is absent in Sollers’s theory. For Sollers, ideology becomes a problem between language and dialectics, one that is, however, subordinated to the problem of homogeneity/heterogeneity. Ideology seems only to be manifested in a homologizing discourse. Sollers expresses this as follows (Sollers 1974c: 141–2): language without a subject, i.e. without psychoanalysis, is idealism; ideology without language, i.e. dialectics without the problématique of language, linguistics and psychoanalysis, is mechanistic materialism; and language and ideology without the theory of the subject, i.e. psychoanalysis, is metaphysical materialism. These three lead to the abstraction of or the destruction of class struggle. In a place devoid of ideology, certain interpretations of language, the subject and dialectics merge. In theory, this pattern follows the formula of the so-called semiological view of ideology (Kauppi 1985).
Sollers clearly links dialectics and ideology. Ideology is not about difference and the process of differentiation; it is, however, about a certain interpretation of heterogeneity. Sollers’s argumentation is made clearer by the following comment:
Understanding materialism as a component of the pair (idealism/materialism) – and, indeed, materialism cannot become defined as a node except in relation to idealism – is insufficient and threatens to undermine, as well as to remove, the scope and historical significance of the battle supporting and limiting philosophy. The pair idealism/materialism does not allow us to think about this fundamental discrepancy in the necessary way. In this sense, it would be best to say that there are two materialisms, or better yet, that materialism cannot be but a dual unity (historical materialism/dialectical materialism in the Marxist tradition.) Thus one phase of materialism would have been presented in the opposition materialism/idealism, while the other would be the cause of this juxtaposition (Sollers 1974a: 96–7).
In sum, the concept of materialism functions on two levels, and with this, Sollers is able to salvage the absolute primacy of materialism with respect to idealism. This move is analogous to saying that “male” and “female” are opposite terms, but that, for example, the term “female” would function on two levels: as the opposite of male, and as a term preceding the pair. “Female” would thus have absolute primacy in relation to “male.”
Paradoxically, Sollers’ entire discourse takes causality as an a priori, otherwise he would not write a single line. The fulfillment of desire, which escapes causality and motivation, i.e. intention, leads him to adopt an ethos of rebellion and aestheticism. Desire and pleasure are in conflict with work if we understand pleasure as a shortcut, as immediate excess, and work as a detour that postpones consumption or excess. In Sollers’ discourse, we can differentiate between the world of theory where writing and the text are opposed to everything restricted and defined, and the practical world, the phenomenal world of Sollers’ text, where everything functions in accordance with convention.
As this analysis of Sollers’ usage of the power-ideas of materialism and science demonstrates, these ideas were for him symbolic weapons that took different forms depending on the symbolic struggles in which he was engaged, against academia at one point, against Althusser and Derrida at another point. In the following chapter I will analyze how Sollers put into textual practice these symbolic power tools.