The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt

The name Louis Aragon is linked to two movements that shook the century: surrealism and Stalinism. I will discuss Stalinism in passing, but Aragon’s so-called surrealist period will draw the most of my attention.

You may think you know everything about surrealism: provocation, scandal, rejection of bourgeois conformism, automatic writing, adulated and repressed women, tender passions between men, painting devoted to dreams and shopkeepers: we’re all familiar with the leaders, “popes,” gurus, schisms, excommunications, epigoni, international dissemination, political-esoteric-sexometaphysical contamination, and so on. The legend has been made; it is impressive, and it sells. And yet, what if there were something left unsaid in the surrealist revolt? What if it were still possible to take it literally, as a revolt in the sense I gave this word at the beginning of this book? Let us try to move humbly forward along this path, though it has been closely watched.

To simplify things, consider this: for a century, perhaps a bit more, an event profoundly marked the European literary experience: literature’s encounter with the impossible. Beginning with German romanticism, marked by the Schlegel brothers, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche and up to Hölderlin’s dramatic lucidity, clearly documented by the review Athenäum (Berlin, 1798), literature’s encounter with the impossible took its most radical form in the French language. Literature renounced its role as purveyor of beautiful language and seductive beauty, religion’s little sister. By exploring the resources of the word—what to say? how to say it? what does “say” mean? to make and unmake sense?—it first entered a radical debate, or face-to-face confrontation, with religion and philosophy (similarity and then dissociation). It explored the impasses of consciousness and associated itself with madness. Finally, it came up against the resistance of social reality in order not to disavow it but to reflect it no longer and, more, to disavow the imaginary, and thus literature, in favor of social reality (we know the drama of the poet who becomes a businessman as well as the poet who “engages”).

In France, literature’s encounter with the impossible has three periods: the first is that of Rimbaud, Lautréamont, and Mallarmé; the second is surrealism; the third, Tel Quel.¹

Here are Rimbaud’s verses from A Season in Hell, “Second Delirium: The Alchemy of the Word” (1870): “Never any hopes; / No orietur. / Science and patience, / The suffering is sure.”² And this is from “Farewell” (1873), also in A Season in Hell:

I who called myself magus or angel, exempt from all morality, I am thrown

back to the earth, with a duty to find, and rough reality to embrace! Peasant!

Was I wrong? Could charity be the sister of death for me?

At least I will ask forgiveness for having fed on lies. Let us go now.

But not a friendly hand! Where can I find help?

Yes, at least the new hour is very harsh. . . .

We must be absolutely modern. . . .

I saw the hell of women down there . . . (p. 209)

And finally, in Illuminations, “Morning of Drunkenness” (1871): “Elegance, science, violence! . . . We assert you, method! . . . Behold the age of Murderers” (p. 233). Method, you understand, is violently rebellious.

We must be absolutely modern, in this age of Murderers, for I saw the hell of women down there: a possible montage of Rimbaud’s texts. We could assemble others. This one resonates with my reading of the surrealists: the blunt observation of an antinomy between society and poetry, and particularly between a certain spirituality (which the family and Paul Claudel would find in him, or rather impose on him, in the most appropriate forms)³ and the assertion of an elegant and cruel “method,” which is nothing other than a way of thinking beyond judgment, with one’s body and tongue. We know that this experience of rupture eventually led Rimbaud to abandon poetic writing; in Abyssinia, the traveler finds an activity as exotic and apparently insignificant, and we are free to believe he gave up the search for a “rough reality” to embrace or, on the contrary, that he pursued it silently. However, before the poetic statement confronts that impossible—the renunciation of the imaginary formulation—another impossible magnificently unfolds in Illuminations: the sounding out of the border state where thought is sustained by sensation. Unlike the “good sense” that some believe sums up the sensory, the “derangement of all the senses” (p. 307)—the sign of thinking humanity—moves toward the clarity of a dazzling, dense, unusual language, certainly worthy of being called “illumination.” It is the fold where a “mind” (or, a subject who has touched his own contours in sense and sensation) escapes in an exteriority that one may call a “voyage,” a “path” or a “being.” But Rimbaud is too wary of “lies” to content himself with these soothing clichés designating what appears to him, strictly speaking, to be “madness.” Listen to him; surrealism would not exist without these verses, an extract of Illuminations entitled “Lives”:

I am a far more deserving inventor than all those who went before me; a musician, in fact, who found something resembling the key of love. [The conjunction between music and the key of love will also be found in the surrealist project.] At present, a noble from a meager countryside with a dark sky, I try to feel emotion over the memory of a mendicant childhood, over my apprenticeship when I arrived wearing wooden shoes, polemics, five or six widowings, and a few wild escapades when my strong head kept me from rising to the same pitch as my comrades. I don’t miss what I once possessed of divine happiness: the calm of this despondent countryside gives a new vigor to my terrible scepticism. But since this scepticism can no longer be put into effect, and since I am now given over to a new worry—I expect to become very wicked fool. (p. 229)

We are at the limit of silence here, but Rimbaud does not cease to compose with it. Consider these words from “Morning of Drunkenness,” also in Illuminations: “And now that I am so worthy of this torture, let me fervently gather in the superhuman promise made to my created body and soul. This promise, this madness!” The possibility of changing style in a new illumination, if it exists, is linked to madness. “Elegance, science, violence! They promised me they would bury in the darkness the tree of good and evil, and deport tyrannical codes of honesty so that I may bring forward my very pure love. It all began with feelings of disgust . . . it ended in a riot of perfumes.” The crisis of the relationship to the other, the crisis of the self, its finitude, its purity, explode in a pulverization of sensation. How does one translate pulverized sensation in language? “Brief night of intoxication, holy night! even if it was only for the mask you bequeathed to us.” The experience is summoned, at once conjured and cast aside but assumed. Yet the holy intoxication is a mask.

We assert you, method! I am not forgetting that yesterday you glorified each of our ages. I believe in that poison. I can give all of my existence each day.

Behold the age of Murderers (p. 233).

Exhortation, exaltation, madness, elegance, science, and violence give access to the new style.

The last extract of Illuminations I would like to cite is entitled “War.” Extreme suffering is close to toppling into warlike refusal, yet music is still invoked as a possible language of love within natural language:

Child, certain skies have sharpened my eyesight. Their characters cast shadows on my face. The Phenomena grew excited.—And now, the everlasting inflection of moments and the infinity of mathematics hunt me throughout the world where I experience civic popularity and am respected by strange children and overpowering affections. I dream of a War, of justice or power, of unsuspected logic.

It is as simple as a musical phrase. (p. 221)

The paradox of this simplicity is clear: the “musical phrase” is the only possible “war.”

And from Lautréamont, at about the same time: “It is time to curb my inspiration, and to pause a while along the way, as when one looks at a woman’s vagina”; “I shall write down my thoughts in order, to a plan without confusion.”⁴ Might the logic of the sensitive body and musicality open another scene at the very heart of the judgment that banalizes us in our social lives, another humanity (“poetic,” if you like) that would in fact be another logic?

Lautréamont is the explorer of this path, another precursor of the surrealists. You may be familiar with my reflections on Lautréamont in Revolution in Poetic Language, and I admit that I am pleased to come across this old acquaintance again. Les Chants de Maldoror and Poésies, from which I will cite other passages, date from around the same period as Rimbaud’s texts. They express the same necessity to escape decorative poetry, to battle romanticism, Parnassus, symbolism, empty rhetoric, the blissful embellishment of pleasure or pain and to compare the literary experience with philosophy and science. In Lautréamont’s Poésies, this will lead to somewhat formulaic writing: formulas, in effect, that aspire to a scientific and positivist rigor influenced by Auguste Comte—though in a blasphemous and ironic sense—and that reference classical philosophy, insofar as the poet skews the maxims of La Rochefoucauld, Pascal, and Vauvenargues to give a more radical, more diabolical, more rebellious sense to the classical utterance.

The confrontation with the other occurs on two levels: a rewriting of classicism and rationalism in order to unfold the fabric of the thought and experience of the other sex as such. It is not only violence, the intolerable, disgust, but also fascination and, with that, the mobilization of language to acknowledge these states of ambivalent passion.

“Great thoughts spring from reason! . . . Abandon all despair, ye who enter here. . . . Each time I read Shakespeare it seems to me that I cut to shreds the brain of a jaguar” (II, p. 234). Lautréamont invites us to enter the conflict, to locate the irreconcilable, to manifest the logic of violence and ferocity that is the underside of beautiful language, the literary beauty attached to the name of Shakespeare; this is a violent act: to cut thought, the supreme power, to shreds, to penetrate this tyranny of the intellect whose force Kant indicated and Lautréamont presents in the redoubtable and derisory image of “the brain of a jaguar.”

And consider this passage, part of which I have already quoted: “I shall write down my thoughts in order, to a plan without confusion. If they are correct, the first will be the consequence of the others. It is the true order. It characterizes my object by calligraphic disorder.”⁵ Some thought therefore, while it does not in any way disavow reason, rebels against ossified rationalism and classical “poeticity,” on which the poet nevertheless relies because it rises up against the chiaroscuro, the “artistic blur.” “I should disgrace my subject too much were I not to treat it with order. I want to show that it is capable of this” (pp. 234–35).

This demand for radical thought goes hand in hand with the penetration of the mystery of the norm: the taboo of sexuality and the embellishment of the sexual act. Lautréamont joins his logical revolt to a descent, through the feminine and the vagina, into the derisory hell of the species, our animality:

It is time to curb my inspiration and to pause a while along the way, as when one looks at a woman’s vagina. It is good to inspect the course already run, and then, limbs rested, to dart forward with an impetuous bound. To complete a stage of the journey in a single breath is not easy, and the wings become very weary during a high flight without hope and without remorse. No . . . let us lead the haggard mattock-and-trench mob no deeper through the explosible mines of this impious canto! The crocodile will change not a word of the vomit that gushed from his cranium. It can’t be helped if some furtive shadow, roused by the laudable aim of avenging the humanity I have unjustly attacked, surreptitiously opens the door of my room and, brushing against the wall like a gull’s wing, plunges a dagger into the ribs of the wrecker, the plunderer of celestial flotsam! Clay may just as well dissolve its atoms in this manner as in another. (pp. 105–6)

I propose that fans of Courbet and Les Origines du monde consider this “impious trench” that Lautréamont has traced.⁶

I am citing Rimbaud and Lautréamont in order to point out two elements of literature’s encounter with the impossible, which Tel Quel took up: on the one hand, literature faced with a classical, and ultimately classicist, philosophical plan; on the other, the comparison of literary utterance and poetic statement with the feminine aspects of both man and woman, which in fact goes back to a transsubjective real, increasingly impossible to define. We would seek it in a way that seemed oneiric to some but was perhaps the root of things: through the prism of the Chinese ideogram and its battle between gesture and sign, reality and sense.

Literature’s second encounter with the impossible was that of surrealism. By taking up the message of these two authors, it knew antilyrical rage and the concern for objective discourse—which would exasperate the bourgeois—as well as the journey toward the impossible that I mentioned earlier, with its two variants: the feminine and the real. This voyage however would be mired in the cult of the providential Woman (“the future of man is woman” was one of the most religious impasses of this mistake) and in the adherence to a providential institution: the Communist Party, for Aragon.

What interests me in the experience of Tel Quel is the third—still invisible—variant of this encounter between literature and the impossible, a variant that is still invisible for almost the entire media-saturated planet. Why? Perhaps because it was too radical. And because it was not taken up by any institution (religious, partisan, secular, communist, academic, etc.), given that these are precisely the takeovers that make an experience visible, that make visible defiant experiences that otherwise continue to work on the fringes. Why was it radical? Because it assumed the legacy of the predecessors: the exhaustion of beautiful language, the desire to irradiate “universal journalistic style” (Mallarmé), storytelling, literature as distraction. But, in addition, it compared this experience more specifically with the history of philosophy, religion, and psychoanalysis. Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, and Freud—as well as Saint Augustine, Saint Bernard, Saint Thomas, Duns Scot, and others—became favored references in the same way as Joyce, Proust, Mallarmé, Artaud, and Céline. Tel Quel was perceived as a laboratory of reading and interpretation. Academics! some cried. Terrorists! others accused, recoiling. The aim of the comparisons with these philosophers, theologians, and writers was to see how far literature could go as a journey to the end of the night, the end of the night as limit of the absolute, limit of meaning, limit of (conscious/ unconscious) being, limit of seduction and delirium. And all without the romantic hope of once again establishing a community extolling the cult of ancient Greece, for example, or the cult of cathedrals, or of “singing tomorrows” and instead confronting today’s men and women with their solitude and disillusions, perhaps never before suffered to such an extent in human history.

The paradox—hence the accusation of terrorism—was that this confrontation with the impossible was not cloaked in complacent despair but took the form of irony and vitality. Because it was beyond the impossible, the imaginary was rehabilitated and asserted, whereas before it had been put aside, rejected, particularly by certain currents of surrealism and existentialism. A book such as Philippe Sollers’s Femmes (Gallimard, 1983) is proof of this assertion of the imaginary beyond the analysis of its imposture, offering the condensation of ironic lucidity and philosophical concern, as well as the paradise of poetry and the affirmation of an imaginary romantic vein. There may have been a crisis of love, values, meaning, men, women, history, but I am not going to Abyssinia, I do not belong to the Communist Party, and if I venture to China or into structuralism, I come back. I pursue the journey to the end of the night. This might be called thought-as-writing. It isn’t much, but without it, there is perhaps nothing. This is the path of the samurais.

I return now to several key points in the surrealist adventure, which I will discuss in light of what I have just said about literature as thought of the impossible or, perhaps, literature as a-thought. Remember what I said about the thought-sexuality copresence, the phallic kairos during the oedipal phase. This complex dynamic is laid bare, its heterogeneity and its difficulties brought to the fore, when writing dissolves the apparent coherence of reasoning and deploys the dynamic of thought, a-thought, to show that thought-as-writing exhibits repressed logic, in contrast with the calm of metaphysical thought.

French literature has been too accustomed to beautiful language and too afraid of reason for anyone to advance with impunity the notion that writing can be an act of thought; bookstores are full of examples to the contrary. The surrealist revolt seems radical to me precisely insofar as it tried to specify the unbearable aspects of the variant of thought that the human being carries out by writing. When Aragon continually asserts what he calls the “will of the novel,” it is important not to forget the profession of faith in Paris Peasant (1924–1926): “My concern is with metaphysics.”⁷ The “will of the novel” is a continuation—and, as we will see, a mutation—of metaphysics when metaphysics starts to listen to poetry and the senses. By paying too much attention to the new world prophesied as a social world by the surrealists—and this was in fact an aspect of the project—we underestimate the philosophical subversion represented by writing opposed to both action and art. Yet the modernity of this project is incontestable and striking. At this fin de siècle even more than in the surrealist era, we know that the rationality of action does not exhaust the potentialities of being.

The surrealist revolt would first be unleashed on “a world where action is no kin to dreams,” as Baudelaire put it.⁸ Given that all society, bourgeois society above all, is a society of doers—from noble workers to less noble shareholders—the Homo faber has difficulty not thinking of thought as thought-action. Yet the entire history of philosophy shows, if in vain, that philosophy—the love of thought—demands solitude, inaction, contemplation, until the metaphor of not-acting that is death is identified metaphorically with the experience of thinking (“to philosophize is to learn to die”). It was not wise metaphysical contemplation, as opposed to the pragmatic activism of the worker always already on the road to robotization, that André Breton invoked when he repudiated a world where action was asserted against the dream.⁹ He was simultaneously opposed to contemplative thought and to pragmatic reason in order to explore the other scene that Freud (a participant, in the eyes of these poets, but personally reticent, given his doctrine, and unresponsive to the insistent and naive calls of the Parisians) had been exploring since the end of the preceding century. There was thought at the limits of the thinkable: a practice of language liberated from the harness of the judging consciousness gave access to it and evidence of it. Perhaps another world (of thought) would change the (real) world.

To this impugnment of the world that bustled about instead of writing, Breton added another. In November 1922, in a lecture to art students in Barcelona, he said: “These days there are several individuals prowling over the world for whom art, for example, has ceased to be an end in itself.”¹⁰ Read: the incompatibility between the search for a form of writing that would embody the logic of the dream and the world in which we live led to a rejection of the very possibility of art. It was a violent rejection not only of outmoded or conformist art but of all art. In effect, what the surrealists demanded was no longer art but a revolution of thought. Breton made reference to Rimbaud whose work “revolutionized poetry” (p. 109), adding that one had to manifest “an awareness of that terrifying duality that is the marvelous wound on which he put his finger” (p. 110). Baudelaire was the first to explore the fertile sorrow of this terrifying duality that had already rendered poetry and social action incompatible. In 1919 Tristan Tzara asserted: “Art is putting itself to sleep to bring about the birth of a new world.”¹¹ Another world was coming to lay waste to outdated art. The dadaist movement execrated the fossilized forms of bourgeois civilization. The revolution of poets had no relationship with the ancient figures of poetry, the incoherence of the world was its objective, as well as man’s unacceptable condition. However, a shift was occurring between the observation of the difficulty of pursuing the poetic experience—seeking the logic of the impossible, the logic of the dream, the logic of contradiction, the logic of the limits of the thinkable—and the utopia of a realization in the world of this extravagant logic liberated from the constraints of action and judgment. A progressive utopia was built against this vertiginous exploration of a-thought, a utopia that drew from Marxism and prophetic Hegelianism well before the actual apocalypse of an “end of History.” The illuminated poet forgot his Rimbaud and set out to produce this antinomy in the world of action that could only be a counterbalance to it or the thorn in its side.

The great hypothesis, which would also be a trap, could then be formulated in these terms: when one is faced with stylistic difficulty, the difficulty of poetic illumination, when one is confronted with silence, one may believe that it is possible to escape it by investing real action. With the breakdown of the imaginary, one stops making poetry and opts for revolution; form will not be changed but society. Of course, to most contemporaries, this second option would not only appear logical but eminently preferable, in spite of the inevitable ideological missteps of politicized writers. Why confine oneself to art and old style, knowing its obstacles? Why confine oneself to a dissident art, by definition elitist and isolationist? Why labor away in the imaginary when one could opt for action, for “engagement,” as Sartre would say?

In the meantime, however, before some repudiated the literary experience as amoral futility, the surrealist revolt reclaimed a new thought that overturned the essence of thought. The refusal of insignificant poetry, decorative poetry, the refusal of the “pohème” was confirmed in the writing of the surrealists: “Beware . . . rhyme, syntax, grotesque meaning,”¹² wrote Breton and Eluard who, along with Apollinaire, wanted to tamper with “the essence of the Word.”¹³ They refused the decorative poem, poetic lace, in order to invent the poem event, from the perspective of the scientific or experimental ambition of their precursors. In subsequent years, this would develop in the form of the happening, which involved the audience, participants, readers, like so many subjects, bodies, atoms of meaning, in play in a given place. “Lyricism is the development of a protest against the sentiment of reality,” Breton says in Notes sur la poésie.¹⁴ We should be realistic and take what surrounds us into account, but only to wring the neck of a reality that has become banal! Surrealism would not relinquish the razor’s edge between poetry and reality.

“To transubstantiate each thing into a miracle” was the objective of the new poetry.¹⁵ Aragon proposed this in Treatise on Style, in accord with both Rimbaud’s Illuminations, which sought to traverse everyday life and attain the miraculous, itself amalgamated to Catholicism, and with Proust’s desire for the written word to become flesh through “transubstantiation,” the novel becoming a physical experience.¹⁶ Initially, of course, the issue was to attain a type of illumination or magic through the cult of writing: writing as favored, if not exclusive, access to a-thought. Then, when this cult of writing was in distress or in danger, a double pitfall lay in wait for the new poets—as we see with Aragon—the temptation either to abandon one’s work, burn it, or to pursue a political path (some, as we know, having perilously attempted both).

I should underscore that it was the social and political lure (which has since become mediatized) that constituted the tragic dimension of this encounter of poetry with the impossible, and that manifested it much more radically than the depressive symptoms or even the suicides. I will come back to this specifically in my discussion of Aragon and his Défense de l’infini,¹⁷ which adjoins the burning of his manuscript and Stalinian engagement. Do not forget this tragic dimension—it extends to the spectacular posturing in which some take pleasure today—when we flush out this or that cynicism or manipulation by the media. This tragic dimension is on the same scale as the cult of writing as radical source of a-thought: “I thus belonged from the earliest age to this zoological species of writers for whom thought is formed in writing,” Aragon asserted in the second 1964 preface to The Libertine (1924),¹⁸ recognizing that there were no other solutions to thought or living but writing, that only writing could legitimately rise up against watered-down opinion and art, that writing alone was a revolt in favor of the miraculous and the seizure of thought without utilitarian compromise.

Note the ambiguity of the project and its outrageous ambition: to create magic with logic! In this rebellion against calculating and pragmatic reason, against prefabricated arguments and well-worn signs, surrealism—and Aragon along with it—started a veritable cult of mysterious signs, signs that eluded judgments, that concealed an enchanted reality. This search would lead the surrealist group in two opposite directions, with some turning toward occultism—as was the case of Breton—and others toward an explicitly more sexualized, erotic direction (at least initially); these last would seek enchantment in scandalous libido, whether that of female prostitution or, subsequently, male homosexuality, insofar as these were nonconformist. In any case, from the start, these two quests for the marvelous—for the occult or the erotic—stimulated a new style, achieved by destabilizing values and their protagonists, finding signs in them that eluded commentary.

A paroxysmal sexuality was called on to support the language of enchantment so that it revolted against that French language—obviously imaginary—perceived as rational, flat, resistant to enchantment. The French language was “a cashier’s language . . ., precise and inhuman,” Aragon complained in Treatise on Style,¹⁹ before proposing the creation of another with the help of automatic writing, dream narratives, collages, and fragments. Happily, some escaped the Frenchness of precise cashiers, among them Rimbaud, “illuminated” and an “assassin.” La Fontaine, on the other hand, was considered “very French” and utilitarian, although another reading would show he was neither inhuman nor a cashier; still, this was Aragon’s position when he wrote his treatise. And if you look at his insurrection against pragmatic rationality, which was accompanied by a rejection of an already-there, prepackaged poetics, a harness to the imaginary, it becomes clear that he mobilized eroticism to provoke the unusual and to breathe new life into the imaginary. Indeed, this would be the ambition of La Défense de l’infini (1923–1927).

I want to point out other themes in Aragon and the surrealists, part of the debate internal to all European culture of the first half of the twentieth century, in the face of the crisis of pragmatic rationality. Among them is the theme of the ephemeral, which was at the very core of the romantic encounter: a delight with no tomorrow that devalorized the bourgeois relationship, marriage, and familial conformism; and humor, particularly through the inconstancy of the visible: the visible was facetious in its various facets. In this domain, the surrealists were the precursors of the confrontation we are currently experiencing between the rhetoric of the word and the rhetoric of the image that television, for example, imposes on us. In Paris Peasant, Aragon emphasizes the pregnancy—which is also an inconstancy—of the image and points out the competition of word and image: “Each image . . . forces you to revise the entire Universe,” he writes.²⁰ Each image forces you to redeploy the word in order to allow yourself to translate the world in a lighter, more playful way.

Thus we arrive at the cascading definition of images of verbal style for which the writer is only an “occasion”: “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.”²¹ Style opens language in such a way that each individual, any given man, is the representative of the symbolic ocean, of the infiniteness of language, to which we are led if we truly acknowledge the confrontation with the ephemeral, humor, and the image; for the poet, these phenomena are only pretexts for “perpetual revolution” (p. 37), conveyed in turn through metaphors. And the accent, the music, what I call the “semiotic,” must be emphasized: the singular experience that insufflates an irreducible sensibility into the communal use of language (the universal “flow” that mines the “earth”).

As you see, the surrealist Aragon rehabilitated metaphor, whose transubstantiational profusion we see in Proust. But Proust was a shameful reference for the surrealists, the novel having been rejected as an insufficiently miraculous genre. It was poetry and its impact as event, violence, and act that were prized by the surrealist group over the novel. Aragon’s reaction, however, was to vindicate the novel against poetry, not solely in order to return to utilitarian reason, though he did that as well, but also and above all to drown in the symbolic ocean (Blanche ou l’oubli [1967] will suffice to convince you of this).²²

The Libertine reveals a complex vision of the poetic art that I think it is important to underscore before tackling the other texts. Besides the poet’s implication in the infiniteness of language, Aragon’s experience involved a parallel engagement in the plenitude of the world and real history, defined in the second preface of 1964 as the lifelong attempt “to wed this full thought, which is my own, to the outside world.”²³ In the conjunction of the infiniteness of the symbolic ocean, the solicitation of the outside world in its instability or banality, and the promises of change offered by technology and revolutionary movements, the external event that attracted dadaist as well as surrealist poets, and in particular Aragon, was scandal. The surrealists always sought out unbearable, provocative, or erotic events to repel the bourgeois. We see this obsession with scandal starting in the nineteenth century with dandyism and then, for example, in Mallarmé’s fascination with anarchy, but these were relatively tame, socialized forms of scandal. At the dawn of surrealism, scandal (provocative, childish, but not devoid of risk) was a favorite and violently adopted term, and although in 1922 Breton distanced himself from the dadaist taste for scandal for scandal’s sake, Aragon wrote, in 1924 in the first preface to The Libertine, “I’ve never looked for anything but scandal.”²⁴ Scandal was now to be seen as the association of a lifestyle with the insolent themes of a kind of writing whose very logic was raving mad. The choice of characters in surrealist poetic and prose texts was itself dictated by the notion of the scandalous event. Characters were frequently criminals or prostitutes; the criminal woman appeared as a particularly auspicious conjunction of the flow of the “internal ocean” and the instability of the external world.

The rejection of watered-down poetics, of decor, of literary and artistic fetishism went hand in hand with the two themes of the marvelous and the feminine. I have already situated the marvelous in the wake of Rimbaud’s Illuminations, the interior externalized in the explosion of being, the sacred desacralization of the religious experience (“no orietur”). The surrealists and Aragon in particular set this illumination—defiance, façade, audacity?—in the modern landscape of the city. With the young Aragon, ecstasy was urban. The city was seen as the modern, urban marvelous. In Paris Peasant, for example, we read about walks through the city, written with a vertiginous search for the magical and the unexpected, which Aragon called “the metaphysics of place” or “circumstantial magic,” the desire to discover strange meaning in every recess. Urban reality was apprehended through the prism of the imaginary; it was sustained by a paradoxical, oneiric imaginary, “surrealist” in the fullest sense. Unexpected circumstances, irrational visions and encounters, formed the geography of the surrealist fascination. Hence another recurrent theme in surrealist texts: that of the passageway, the garden, the unexpected place considered not only in terms of its architectural reality but also, above all, in terms of its signifying presentation, the language that expressed it, the “fiction”—in Mallarmé’s sense of the term²⁵—in which they were likely to be cloaked.

The outside world was not forgotten, but the trick was to shift the accent of this circumstantial reality to signifying reality, to discourse: the sometimes absurd game one allows oneself to play with language to embellish this logic of the marvelous. The peasant must return to dull reality in order to give it new meaning, hence an epiphany of the city and of the feminine, whose circumstance is its core.²⁶ Here the essential was circumstance; possibility was provided not by reality but by the fluidity of language that referred to this reality. An apparently delirious logic could be deployed in the imaginary starting with a language made of references: “the vertigo of the modern,” “the legend of modernity” “an essentially modern tragic symbol.”²⁷ The writer was attracted by the exterior—landscapes, cities, women, bordellos, scandalous situations—and at the same time, still, by the “symbolic ocean”: by the signifying possibilities of language that would lead him beyond the dream and the marvelous, not to dementia but to a way to revitalize life. Breton defined the encounter with the miraculous as a chance accorded to beings of goodwill: this notion of chance would be greatly accentuated by the surrealists. It involved above all seizing its rhetorical value. Mallarmé figures among the precursors of this chance, the real chance of the rhetorical find, as in “the flower . . . absent from all bouquets,” or when he writes, “A verse must not be composed of words, but of intentions; all words must yield to sensation,”²⁸ before Proust dreamed of the transubstantiation of Madeleine into madeleine, and vice versa, in the shadow of cathedrals.

Writing transmuted into chance/jouissance that also, at the outset, sustains it: this would be the argument of a text entitled La Défense de l’infini that Aragon destroyed. Only a few fragments are left, among which, most significantly, Irene’s Cunt.²⁹ The notions of chance and the infiniteness of meaning and writing were constructed through a trivial and yet scandalous reality, the erotic experience, which is clearly not as extraordinary as all that (either for the narrator or, to be perfectly frank, for most of us, despite what people say and what credulous libertines still claim) but to which verbal revelation accords the marvelous, imparts the miraculous. It was with the feminine, the translation of the feminine, as I said, that the poetic revolt against the old style and the encounter with the impossible would take on all their meaning.

Let us consider the surrealist feminine before encountering it again—on the verge of suicide and the Communist Party—in Irene’s Cunt. October 4, 1926, is often underscored as a determining date in the history of the surrealist movement. On that day, André Breton met a young woman called Nadja on the rue Lafayette in Paris.³⁰ A conjunction of the ephemeral, scandal, and the feminine, this encounter was in effect essential: the slight reality of this woman would be incorporated into the fiction of the feminine that the poet would develop. It was this somnambulant character of the so-called real woman that would allow the poet to deploy his own infinite “symbolic ocean.” It was neither a specific woman nor women as social individuals who were in question here but what I referred to in the last chapter as the feminine, a part of every subject’s psychical life, represented with difficulty for both sexes. It so happens that in order to speak of the feminine—and moreover in order to write it—one is obliged go through the visible, through the plastic, sometimes even through feminine reality (some venture that far!) and thus to take into account feminine bodies such as one encounters them. Here, feminism cries encroachment, for real women—we are told with staunch reason—are taken over in order to create a myth of the universal feminine that is revealed to be above all the feminine of the man. Indeed. But beyond the scandalous sociological aspects of this undertaking, it seems to me that something important is revealed: what are the conditions for the alchemy of the verb or, as I called it earlier, a-thought, to occur? How does the imaginary come to be? How does one create fiction, whether one is a man or a woman? By relying on a certain exploration of bisexuality, in this case by creating a fiction of the feminine starting with a particular erotic experience, whose secrets Irene’s Cunt reveals.

The graphic anomaly—a-thought—that I propose requires that one not forget the negative charge that this writing deploys against what we call “thought” and that we too often compare to knowledge and action. Neither knowledge nor action but with them and through them, a-thought deploys the polyvalence of metaphors, the semantic resources of sounds, and even the pulse of sensations in the flesh of language; a constellation of meanings then unfolds the secrets of the speaking being and links him to the indeterminable pulsations of the world. The reduction of thought to knowledge makes us forget this dimension of the experience that I called signifiance and that a-thought discovers with provocation but that perhaps constitutes the veritable dynamic of thought. The a-thought pulse, the a-thought unveiling of meaning: recall the folds and veils of Christ, Modesty, and Purity.

As a modern echo of the baroque sculptor, the writing of a-thought covers and denudes the substance of language in order to allow one to imagine not a personal symptom but beyond that: the germination of meaning in sensorial desire as well as the threat of their mutual eclipse. The sentences in Irène from La Défense de l’infini, for example, veil and unveil the flesh of the self and the other in a-thought, the flesh of the overturned world, hidden yet namable. Ultimately we are persuaded that there is no flesh more arousing than that of writing, just as the folds of the veil emerge as more mysterious and truer than the faces they are supposed to hide or reveal. You will note however that with the a-thought of writing in Irène, it is not Modesty or Purity that is seized but the violence of desire and the marvelous of erotic annihilation. This is because for two centuries, thanks to Freud and men’s freedom, a-thought has pursued its path in language: it seems to have recognized in genitality the condition that makes the desacralization of meaning, its investigation and its renewal, possible. Irène, or genitality as source and trial of a-thought? On the other side of the phallic cult, a-thought scandalizes our phallic aptitude for knowledge, which I spoke of in chapter 4. If it desacralizes knowledge-as-thought, if it desacralizes the phallus, a-thought involves the risk of identity collapse. On the other hand, if it sacralizes feminine jouissance, it runs the risk of erecting a new religion: the prospect of occultism and political utopias. The true scandal of the surrealists, cast in the face of culture, was to remain between the two, in the crucible of a-thought.

Let us return to Nadja and to the cult of the feminine that the surrealist movement developed: the exaltation of the goddess-woman, the fairy, and a series of highly valorized characters (often bitterly denigrated in the surrealists’ personal lives) accompanies the development of this rhetoric of the paradoxical, the marvelous, the oneiric, the incompatible that will remain characteristic of surrealist poetics. The phenomenon is also found in other literary currents, in France as well as abroad, with the aspiration to the spiritual sustained by the identification with the feminine and its repression. Still, Breton’s exaltation of Nadja—which has the advantage of acknowledging esotericism’s debt to the devouring passion for a feminine of slight reality—has been compared to the far more institutional ecstasy of Claudel during the illuminated moment of his conversion to Catholicism behind a pillar of the Notre Dame forty years earlier.

We will first look at this strange cult of the feminine in Breton. It begins by highlighting the mechanical aspect of the human body in general, and the feminine body in particular, emphasizing the body as a desiring machine. All Paris was talking about a mediocre play entitled Les Détraquées [Roughly, “Unhinged Women.”—Trans.] at the Théâtre des Deux-Masques. In the style of Grand-Guignol, this play was inspired by a foul crime committed in a boarding school for girls; the murder was finally attributed to a woman, a close friend of the headmistress. This was a universe of women: a headmistress, her friend the criminal, Solange, a nymphomaniac and sadist but a great beauty, who, as incarnated by the actress Blanche Derval, fascinated Breton; he painted the actress’s portrait in Nadja. The female character of Nadja is thus a mixture of several sources forming the diabolical, mechanical, and sadistic vision of a feminine at once powerful and dethroned.

In 1921 Breton went to Vienna to meet Freud, attracted by what he took to be an interest, identical to his own, in the hidden: the hidden meaning of words and behaviors, scandal, and sexuality, holder of all secrets. The encounter was doomed, given that Freud ferociously refused these poetic transactions, which appeared suspect to him. In my eyes, however, this failed encounter had the advantage of dissociating the surrealist erotic from the psychoanalytical investigation to which many are eager to assimilate it and situated it, on the contrary, in the obsession with the feminine that has haunted the decomposition of Catholicism and its esoteric aspects since the nineteenth century. One can link the surrealist cult of the powerful and fallen woman to the decadents of the late nineteenth century (Huysmans, Péladan, etc.) who were fond of the image of the bloodthirsty woman (Salomé, in particular) in blasphemous counterpoint to Christ.

“Love shall be. We shall reduce art to its simplest expression, which is love,” Breton wrote in Soluble Fish.³¹ The place of the other, in this case the woman, was maintained but the meaning of love moved toward something entirely different from an “illumination” (although the “violence” and “assassination” of which Rimbaud spoke was not lacking). The vague treatment of the feminine led straight to moral discourse; as Jean Decottignies observes, love became the topic of such a discourse. Breton not only targeted conventional morality here but asserted his intention to research the logical impulses subjacent to love, in other words, to locate, under the cover of a “moral” intention, the essential movements of thought, the logical imperatives that govern an individual in an amorous encounter.³² This logic of unbearable love would burn more than one, however, and its path would henceforth be closed by the genteel worship of “mad love” that came to take on all the appearances of national civility.

For the representation of this “unhinged” femininity, Breton referred to Gustave Moreau, and not only to the figure of Salomé but also to Helen, Dalia, and other chimeras, constructing the image of an intractable and entrancing femininity that reemerges in Aragon’s Irene’s Cunt. Another highly curious text inspired the surrealists in the search for this representable impossible or this impossible representability that is the feminine: “L’étonnant couple Moutonnet,” by Villiers de L’Isle-Adam.³³ In this story, Villiers depicted the extreme violence of the famous Moutonnet couple, in which the man imagines making love with a headless woman. It was this double aspect—paroxysmal violence against a woman and the preservation of an erotic excitation with this decapitated feminine, “cause [of] real amorous felicity”—that would interest the surrealists: the abysmal connotation of the feminine as the opposite of the representable, the visible, the phallic that psychoanalysis illuminates and that remains a locus of fascination. This, in any case, is an encounter that French writing alone explored and that German idealism, with its daring within the confines of reasoning reason, never elucidated: one cannot advance in the exploration of the encounter between speaking man and a-thought if one does not explore this version of the feminine—the acephalous, wounded, decapitated feminine—because it reveals an eroticized castration, the threatening antithesis of the phallus.

In Breton’s Soluble Fish, Solange is a medium described as fabulous and simultaneously devalorized: she is clairvoyant yet seedy, “discreet as crime,” her hand “clutching a revolver.”³⁴ In Aragon’s Paris Peasant, the woman is also a theatrical and grandiloquent phantom, presented as the conjunction between the infinite and the eternal: “There rises up an adorable phantom . . . a woman larger than life,”³⁵ a “boundless woman” (p. 171) who offers “that divine taste that I know so well in every vertigo” (p. 199). The feminine is at once the image of the divine and a profanation of the traditional sacred, glorified yet presented as extremely ambiguous.

Thus courtesans and prostitutes populate Paris Peasant, Anicet ou le Panorama,³⁶ and Irene’s Cunt while maintaining the mystery, the pleasure of the infinite, and the vertigo of the senses and permitting the writer to avoid what he rejects: generalization, idealization, the positivized archetype. The type of the prostitute, necessarily generalizing, and the myth of the courtesan, equally so, take a precise, singular form that brings the archetype down to earth while also degrading it: “Fearsome, charming whores, let others take to generalizing in their arms.”³⁷ The writer, on the contrary, wants to go into detail—great, necessarily sordid, detail—in keeping with “an outlaw principle” (p. 51). Paris Peasant tells us that women are “kleptomaniacs of passion” (p. 52). This fantasmatic and monstrous feminine opens the world of instability, transaction, and transgression: “Neither the human face nor the deepest sighs can rediscover the mirror or echo for which they are searching” (p. 110). Inhabited by an acephalous, archaic, and untamable violence, women have chosen “the vagrancy of uncertainty” (p. 52) and a new version of love based on “an outlaw principle, an irrepressible sense of delinquency, contempt for prohibitions and a taste for havoc” (p. 51). They are no one, nothing, if not Rimbaud’s “derangement of all the senses”: “Woman . . . is contained in fire, in the forceful and the feeble . . . in the flood tide’s flux and flow, in the fall and flight of foliage, in the false front of the sun where like a voyager lacking guide or horse I lead my fatigue astray into a far-flung fairyland” (pp. 171–72). The conclusion of Paris Peasant, “persons have had their day upon earth” (p. 205), echoes the heroine of “The French Woman” (1923): “After all, loving is not a question of people.”³⁸ This woman’s notes, short letters found near her suicided lover, prefigure what Irene reveals: it is the woman who formulates the excess of jouissance, the writer placing himself explicitly in the very place of this feminine speech. The theft of identity through jouissance, and particularly the jouissance of women, already a theft in itself, is what the writer seeks to make tangible, to “presentify,” first through a character and then through style itself, making this paradoxical feminine jouissance his. The poetics of Blanche ou l’oubli is already under way, for in the end, the woman, the “kleptomaniac of passion,” is the writer himself, the one who creates writing, and not one of his criminal and vile goddesses.

Would the true “kleptomaniac of passion” be style? I conclude with this surrealist image: “Error with fingers of radium, my melodious mistress, my appealing shadow.”³⁹ This is Aragon’s signature in Paris Peasant. Like love or the woman who holds you, the absolute is radioactive error: an appealing shadow from which the alter ego of the one tracing style must separate.

I have just presented a few of surrealism’s antecedents and some problems concerning reality, the fantastic, the feminine, the occult, the rational: all problems that solicited the era’s imaginary, and particularly, Aragon’s imaginary. I stayed within a general framework, without going into the details of Aragon’s life, while pointing out the cross-links between his literary experience and the surrealist imaginary. Now I will deal with a few aspects of Aragon’s biography as well as the text La Défense de l’infini or rather the fragment that remains of it, Irene’s Cunt.

“At every instant, I betray myself, I refute myself, I contradict myself. I am not someone I trust,” the writer proclaims in “Révélations sensationnelles.”⁴⁰ This will serve as an epigraph to what I have to say about Aragon, whose controversial persona you are certainly familiar with. It expresses the protean, polyphonic aspect of both the personage and the work, which he himself called “le mentirvrai” (the true lie): the ambition to tell the truth through a thousand disguises, masks, theatricality.⁴¹ There is more than one split in Aragon, who wrote sixty books in sixty years, almost as many as Hugo. He is a true feu d’artifice, the artifice no doubt imagined as a reflection of Baudelaire’s dandyism, “this simultaneous double postulation” signaling our own distorted, diminished, and mystified identities before the masquerade of society and the media.⁴²

Indeed, Aragon’s personality, life, and work give the impression—call it subjective, or ontological; in any case, it seems unshakable—of never being univocal, of scattering in pastiche, simulacrum, and approximation, so many roundabout ways of expressing truth. This is the truth of an impossible identity, not a being in the world or a nonbeing but a continuous variation, both passionate and disappointed, bipolar, if you want technical terms, that the writer-seducer sums up prettily by speaking of words that “make love with the world.”⁴³ This need for immersion/dissolution, taking possession/impotence, power/passiveness, virilization/feminization—you can change the terms of this plasticity as you like—no doubt responds to the incoherence or the impossibility of personal coherence manifested in the exaltation of the amorous act. This exaltation will take two forms: one, scandalous—Irene’s Cunt—the other, institutional—conjugal love and adherence to the French Communist Party.

A few biographical elements will allow you to situate this writer who is somewhat forgotten today.⁴⁴ They may repel some and compel others, but they seem to offer, even today (perhaps more so today) a style and/or symptom (this is Lacan’s accolade) that is still valid. He was born October 3, 1897, and died December 24, 1982. We know about his mother, Marguerite Toucas, a single parent, and her sisters, Marie and Madeleine. In his autobiographical recollections—which are vague and cautious—Aragon often refers to the maternal configuration formed by his grandmother and her three daughters. Marguerite belonged to a bourgeois family of aristocratic descent through her paternal grandmother, who came from a family of Lombard petty nobles, the Biglione. Marguerite’s maternal grandmother was a “demoiselle Massillon,” a descendant of the famous prelate of Hyères. Marguerite used the names of both lines, Toucas-Massillon: seek there, if you like, the possible indication of a split that will reach its peak in the writer. Her maternal grandfather, François Toucas, had become a subprefect in Algeria and had abandoned the family when Marguerite was sixteen years old, in 1899, the year of the World Fair. He was an adventurer, a dashing figure who resurfaced in Constantinople at the end of the century as Monsieur de Biglione, reclaiming the noble maternal genealogy. All these details are not extraneous to the imaginary construction of a fascinating feminine saga or to the impact of filiation and maternal characters found in Irene’s Cunt.

Here then, in the real life of Louis the child, was a tribe of women, illustrious ancestors, an absent globe-trotting grandfather, and only one man, Uncle Edmond, the brother of the three sisters, who was rarely present. I would underline that, although not unusual, single motherhood was nevertheless noteworthy at the time, especially in a bourgeois family. Not only did Marguerite conceal her pregnancy, she pretended not to have the child: the infant disappeared for thirteen months in Brittany, in the care of a wet nurse. He was not supposed to have been born in the Toucas family (or Toucas-Massillon, to complicate the genealogy), so when he returned to his mother, he was passed off as her young brother, and the grandmother was presented as the mother. The “true lie,” the term Aragon would use to refer to the imaginary adventure, was already inscribed in his personal history. Caught in this system of social deception and half-truths, his novels and biographies would also be peppered with oddities, imaginary confessions, inaccuracies, discrepancies, and variations. In 1965 the writer would say, for example, that he was “given as a child to deceased friends” and adopted by a couple of dead friends.⁴⁵

As you may have guessed, the father of the future writer seems to have been totally absent, unknown. Apparently he presented himself as the child’s godfather and became his tutor: Louis Andrieu, his initials identical to those of Louis Aragon, a geographical name vaguely homophonic to Andrieu. In Feu de joie, his first collection of poems, written in 1919, Aragon recounts his life through an imaginary character called Jean-Baptiste A., who bears the first name of a distant maternal uncle, Jean-Baptiste Massillon, and whose last name is indicated only by the initial “A,” which would become his own.⁴⁶

Various accounts report violent scenes between the godfather and Aragon’s mother in Neuilly. Andrieu was anticlerical and a friend of Clemenceau. In one of his novels, Aragon alludes to a Louis Andrieu, a deputy of the Third Republic engaged in battle during the separation of church and state, who drives nuns from their convents, a character at once conventional and rebellious from the viewpoint of an established bourgeois.⁴⁷

Aragon’s mother’s clandestine pregnancy and maternity make her an afflicted woman, though her valiant character, which her son admired, should not be overlooked. She made a living painting fans and plates, as Aragon recounted in the first volume of Oeuvres croisées (“Et comme de toute mort renaît la vie” [And how from all death life is reborn]).⁴⁸ She also managed a boardinghouse on avenue Carnot, which appears in Les Voyageurs de l’impériale as “Etoile-famille”; she would sell it in 1904 to move to 12, rue Saint-Pierre in Neuilly.⁴⁹

This was Aragon’s childhood, at once sheltered and dramatic, subject to the “true lie” from the start. A poem called “Le mot” published during World War II, after his mother’s death, in a collection of texts on the Resistance, evokes for the one and only time, to my knowledge, a lyrical and shattering image of this mother, immediately associated with the uncertain birth of speech (“the word”) on the verge of “the lie”:

The word did not pass my lips

The word did not touch her heart

Is it a milk from which death weans us

Is it a drug an alcohol

I said it only in my dreams

This heavy secret weighs between us

You swore me to concealment

At your knees

. . . . . . . . . . . . . .

To call you my sister disarms me

. . . . . . . . . . . . . .

If I feigned it was for you alone

To the end played innocent

For you alone until the shroud

Hid my blood

I will go to the end of my errors

Born, my error was living.⁵⁰

Note the lyrical, tragic, and emotional elements as well as the restraint and discretion.

World War I brought mobilization and disaster. In 1917–1918, Aragon was a medical auxiliary. He met André Breton at Val-de-Grâce, formed friendships with future members of the surrealist group, founded the dadaist group to which he remained faithful for fourteen years and the review Littérature with André Breton and Philippe Soupault. “To step on the throat of your own song,” as Mayakovsky wrote in 1930, was also the project of surrealism and dada from their inception. It was a project with social and moral connotations but above all a poetic and rhetorical project, inscribed in and against the poetic tradition. The idea was to assassinate prettiness, the beatific lyricism of earlier poetry, to wring the neck of the propensity toward embellishment, toward incantation, all for far more than rhetorical ambition, for the program aimed at nothing less than “a new declaration of human rights.”⁵¹ Radical nihilism or a panorama of the novel, already?

In March 1919 Aragon signed a secret pact with Breton, the nihilistic rage of which you may appreciate:

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 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. . . . To know that the other will run you down. To know. Therein lies the condition for action?⁵²

Beyond the psychological “clairvoyance” regarding the fate of this friendship, the violence of this pact raises a question: when the “refusal of the written law” is so implacable, what is left to support a-thought if not the mirage of senses that will be incarnated by feminine jouissance and the tyranny of historical reason revealed by the people’s revolution? I will return to this soon.

If Aragon’s first published collection—Feu de joie (1919)—is an attempt to reconstruct the self through the imaginary character of Jean-Baptiste A., the following writings are texts of rage, which will culminate in La Défense de l’infini, where we find Irene. Before looking at this largely destroyed text, however, one should consult what precedes it. In 1921, in Anicet ou le Panorama, there is an ironic chronicle of an apprenticeship of revolt in a group of conspirators to which the artist is opposed. At once in league and in conflict with them, the narrator measures the contradictions and traps of this confrontation.

Note that Aragon’s first novel, written in 1918 immediately following the young medical auxiliary’s war experience and often praised by critics for its “virtuosity” and “jauntiness,” is a truly stunning agenda—a panorama?—of the writer’s entire trajectory, as Philippe Forest’s study shows.⁵³ By settling his scores with Rimbaud (Arthur is the central character until he gives way to Anicet) and by borrowing from Voltaire (Candide seems a favored intertext), Aragon continually double-deals and gives the slip to the very people who give him inspiration. Baptiste Ajamais (André Breton) “subjugates” Anicet with his “authoritarian being”; although grateful to be “under his influence,” the young victim “divines fascination.” Nevertheless Anicet, a prototype of the Camus antihero, will be condemned for a crime he did not commit, which has been hatched by Ajamais. This failure of artistic strategies (Breton’s as well as Rimbaud’s) does not prevent the novelist from deploying the vertiginous skill of a puppet master and iconoclast that is far from simple virtuosity. For the gravity of the disappearance of the self already emerges in this text, resonating with Vaché’s suicide, and attributes to writing alone (and not to the pathos-ridden act) the mission of revealing the being-for-death of the one who speaks. “Don’t you see that I am wresting words from myself, like teeth, so as to lose any intelligence, any subtlety, any reason, any judgment, and to reduce myself to being only a will?”⁵⁴ says Anicet, a puppet, no doubt, but a radical one. Existence is useless, Anicet’s and even more Baptiste’s, who has conquered beauty only to be swallowed up by a banal existence. Mirabelle herself, the very emblem of fascinating Beauty, is reduced to sordidness. But talking about failure is different from failing: this is double-dealing. The 1924 preface to The Libertine makes it clear:

I realize that . . . you force me to a conclusion, and that now at least I should shut up, even if some people shrink from this conclusion as if it were death, while others easily find it morally satisfying, like the enjoyment of well-wrought verses. No sacrifice, no drama: no flowers, no wreaths. What is important is to think for one moment that you’ll stop writing. . . . I don’t propose to do anything . . . I am simply loath to imitate the action of dogs who cover over their excrement with sand.⁵⁵

Not a romantic tomb, therefore, but the insolent project of furthering freedom through scandal: “I’ve never looked for anything but scandal, and I sought it for its own sake” (p. 18).

To stop writing or not: the dilemma is posited at the outset, continually, until La Défense de l’infini, where the encounter with the feminine imposes an unbearable demand; the renouncement of life and work then become actuality, attempted suicide as well as auto-da-fé. If Aragon has a resurgence, thanks to the party and Elsa, is this only a sinister compromise, or a cynical masquerade, or more of the double-dealing ushered in by Anicet as a means to evade nihilism, the quashing of the self and writing? Those who hold Aragon’s compromise in contempt may not have sufficiently considered surrealism’s confrontation with the impossible values that the writer brought to the bottleneck where history was strangling. “Which will strangle the other / hand in hand / Let’s pull the victim’s name from a hat / Aggression a slipknot / The one who spoke departs this life / The murderer gets up and says / Suicide / End of the world,” Aragon writes in Feu de joie.⁵⁶

In 1922 Aragon published another novel, The Adventures of Telemachus, a rewriting of Fénelon’s Telemachus.⁵⁷ Here, there is a doubling of the dadaist negation of the interior in the name of imprescriptible sentiments. Fénelon’s Telemachus deals with education, feeling, nothing less than the defense of a young man’s psychical life as he is coming of age. Aragon’s text is a sort of dialogue between the dadaist project and this classic Telemachus, where paradoxical emotions exist rather than the coded feelings of classical psychology. “If you know what love is, make allowances for whatever follows,” Aragon tells the reader, warning him that his Telemachus reinvents love, true love.⁵⁸

In 1924 The Libertine is also presented as a debate with another text, a sort of mask, a critical imitation, highly mimetic and subtly detached. Aragon finds his way through a series of dedications; he dedicates fragments to different authors and places himself in rhetorical competition with them; he mimics them, distinguishes himself from them.

Then in 1924–26 comes Paris Peasant, in which Aragon explores the marvelous of the city, the night, and the feminine, a masterpiece of the surrealist assertion that provoked an enormous scandal and that Drieu La Rochelle defended. Later, the two writers would have a falling out for political and social reasons, but at the time, Drieu revealed himself to be an advocate of this prose and its lofty elegance, which he referred to as the Sturm und Drang of the twentieth century.

In 1925 the Moroccan war shook the young generation of the period, including, of course, the writers. Some, such as Naville, asserted that it was imperative to break with the literary experience and engage in the world, particularly in the Communist Party. The review Clarté documented the debates between Communists and writers.⁵⁹ Surrealism asked: do we aim for revolution/revolt on the level of ideas, language, and style, or start an actual revolution? Breton emphasized the possible transformation through art, the necessity to pursue the inner experience. Aragon, on the other hand, stigmatized literary activity as “vanity,” and although he published Artaud’s The Nerve Meter in 1927 with Doucet’s money,⁶⁰ he sought a solution to the contradiction between social efficacy and redeemable literary activity in politics.

In sum, Aragon suffered a crisis of confidence in the imaginary. The simultaneity of the adherence to the Communist Party and the writing of La Défense de l’infini suggests that the political choice might have served as an unconscious counterbalance to the risks of the imaginary. In 1927 Aragon joined the party and went through a tumultuous period in his romantic life. It was as if political adherence brought balance to the ravaging disorder of his affective and passionate experiences. This was the period of his intense relationship with Nancy Cunard, which took place in an elegant, cosmopolitan circle in Paris and in various European countries (England, Holland, Germany, Spain, and Italy). Then came the split. The writer went through a period of depression,⁶¹ destroyed the manuscript of his novel La Défense de l’infini in Venice in September 1928, and attempted suicide in the fall of 1927 (biographers hesitate over the chronological order of the suicide attempt and the auto-da-fé).

Nancy Cunard, born in 1896, was the granddaughter of the founder of the Cunard Line, the shipping company, and the daughter of Lady Emerald, a friend of the queen of England and often mistaken for her at receptions. She belonged to a wealthy and worldly set and in 1920 moved to Paris, where she associated with such great literary and artistic figures as Ezra Pound, Oskar Kokoschka (who painted her portrait in 1924), and Tristan Tzara, with whom she wrote a play entitled Le Mouchoir de nuages, performed at the Boeuf sur le toit. In 1916 she wrote a collection of poetry in English, Outlaws, and later produced two subsequent collections, though she was never recognized as a poet.

In 1926 Cocteau wrote to Picabia: “Breton preaches, Aragon lives at the Boeuf sur le toit with Nancy Cunard.” Aragon himself, however, situated the beginning of his relationship with the young woman in 1927.⁶² Aragon saw in her a beautiful, extravagant, and insolent foreigner, who inspired passion and had several passions of her own, one of which was African sculpture. During his wife Elsa’s lifetime, Aragon only spoke of Nancy Cunard allusively; however, he spoke of the affair at length in Le Roman inachevé.⁶³

Burdened by his financial dependence on the wealthy heiress as well as by social humiliation and jealousy, the liaison between Nancy Cunard and Aragon constantly threatened to fall apart. Captivated as he was by the American girl’s worldly milieu, Aragon probably was not the anarchist described in the insolent Paris Peasant around her. Nancy was violent, alcoholic, unburdened by moral constraint, and tomboyish, characteristics that gave Aragon occasion to develop a rhetoric of the antiphrase in order to talk about love. Consider two poems on the subject. The first is called “Très tard que jamais”:

Sexual things

An odd way to talk about

Sexual things

I was ready for everything

But definitely not that.⁶⁴

Firstly I love you

Secondly I love you

Thirdly I love you

I love you enormously

I do what I can to say it

With the desirable elegance

I never had the slightest idea

How to incite desire

When I would have wanted to incite it

A naive exhibitionism in matters of sentiment

A character mentally and physically

God all of this is hardly amusing

As an attraction it’s zero.⁶⁵

You know enough about literature not to reduce Irene to a prototype. Nevertheless, if I tell you that the text is an experience, the biographical experience is imperative, not as a cliché but as something to be investigated. In this perspective, let us look at other encounters with women that Aragon had at the same time. At Giverny, there was Clotilde Vail, a young American girl (another one!) whose brother, Lawrence, had just married Peggy Guggenheim. Aragon would dedicate the play “In a Tight Spot” in The Libertine to Vail. Now, Giverny is near Vernon, where the narrator situates Irene. There is a mysterious lady from Buttes-Chaumont, and another who appears as Blanche in Le Cahier noir (and again in Blanche ou l’oubli, in 1967).⁶⁶ “It is to ourselves that the novel is the key,”⁶⁷ Aragon writes, but “ourselves” is protean in the sadomasochistic experience of the amorous link that Irene reveals.

In this context dominated by the conflictual relationship with Nancy Cunard, the writer attempts suicide and destroys the great novel he apparently spent a great deal of time writing (it was thousands of pages long). A collection that Gallimard published in 1986 reprinted the pages Aragon himself saved from destruction, which he entitled Irene’s Cunt. These pages were saved from the fire to be sold to a collector and alleviate the writer’s financial difficulties, he explained, as though to excuse himself. (The first edition dates from 1928;⁶⁸ it was republished in 1948, 1953, and 1962, anonymously, and under the pseudonym Albert Routisie in the 1968 Régine Deforges edition.)

If we compare the tone of Irene’s Cunt with that of the novels already mentioned—rebellious, a bit mocking, scandalous, provocative—we might conclude, like Pierre Daix, whose opinion I share, that not only does this novel surpass Paris Peasant, it is also the first novel the author wrote without constraint, without an agenda, spontaneously. And it gives the reader the ineluctable and rare sense of a masterpiece. Two things motivate it. The first is explicitly rhetorical and literary: it presents itself as a rejection of bourgeois ennui and the nausea provoked by the fact that “all this will end up in a story . . . for stupid cunts,” as the narrator bluntly describes them.⁶⁹ Nevertheless, this anger is still expressed in a novelistic style: the writer maintains the necessity of the novelistic imagination as a way to explore reality and truth, counter to the pronouncements of the surrealists, who felt that poetry, and poetry alone, could meet this objective. While there is narration, however, it is subordinate to the act of writing at its most singular, solitary, and oneiric, as well as to the ascendancy of words that, like a simulacrum of automatic writing, generates the characters and the fragmentary structure of a narrative made of collages.

It was a novel one entered through as many doors as there were different characters. I didn’t know anything about the history of each of the characters, each was determined starting with one of these constellations of words I was talking about, its peculiarities, improbability, by which I mean the improbable character of its development. . . . This whole crowd of characters was to find themselves, through the logic or rather the illogic of each one’s destiny, in a sort of enormous mess [Aragon says “immense bordel,” literally, an immense bordello.—Trans.] where there would be criticism or confusion, which is to say the undoing of all morals in a sort of immense orgy.⁷⁰

This is how Aragon described his project for the destroyed, unfinished novel La Défense de l’infini. Thus revolt against conventional morality leads to an exaltation of the orgiastic and heralds a paradoxical novelistic rhetoric: the plurality of narrative paths, confusion, and entanglements as in Blanche ou l’oubli (these elements recur in the postwar novels). The poetic project is in this sense surrealistic: it is the logic of signifiers that programs the characters; there is no psychological or realistic necessity preceding the a-thought of writing. Nevertheless, the novelistic project remains, even if it must end in an “immense bordel” (also to be understood in its first, sexual meaning). “I never learned how to write,” Aragon points out, to underscore the paradoxical nature of his project.

The second motivation concerns the appropriation of the feminine as a revolt against the degeneration of man (or, if you prefer, Man).

The history of this text, once again, is like a rebellious burst of the imaginary in a complex process that, at the same time, led Aragon to the gesture of revolt that was adherence to the French Communist Party (before the defensive, deluded, and delusional aspects of this adherence become apparent). And, though he never gave up writing novels, he lessened—when he didn’t suspend—the beautiful destructive rage at work in La Défense de l’infini. The infini in question is the narrative of an excessive jouissance that will be transferred from the woman in the story to the writing of the narrator.

A young man who is bored in a provincial town (a dadaist, surrealist theme but also the basis of countless coming-of-age novels) “curses, bites, and sees red” when he is unbearably awoken, before going off to a brothel to drown his boredom in an orgiastic scene. What follows is an eroticism at once exalted and failed: the young man will remain frustrated by the erotic experience, perhaps because of his own impotence. What saves him is a story in the rudimentary sense of a family history and beyond this, the adventure of language as the only possible salvation. This story is that of Irene, a country girl who lives with her mother and a powerless grandfather. In counterpoint to the virile female image of Victoire, the lesbian mother-boss who governs her world of country peasants, the male image of Victoire’s father, Irene’s grandfather, is a devalued one.

Let me emphasize this modern tragic form that tends to present the man as the opposite of a hero. Maladies contracted through less than glorious sexual experiences have brought the old man to his invalid state. The active man (remember Breton’s attack against the world of action), the thinking-working-acting man, the man with “his little virile reason” (Mallarmé) can no longer be the hero. Exit the Hero. In the sorrowful place of this exit, the bitter taste of disappointment remains: castration, impotence, early signs of depression. The One is annulled; hysterical excitability is left. Who can say anything about this evil spell? A person? A poem? No, a polymorphous narrative, the vertigo assigned to the place of one girl who comes without knowing it. As the impotent Hero exits, a collage of narration devoted to female jouissance follows, the equivalent in words of the shattered mirror reflecting Irene’s magnificent spasms and groans.

“Rimbaud and Lautréamont, on the one hand, Zola, on the other, Irene’s Cunt is in fact an observation of the failure of eroticism,” Philippe Sollers writes, referring to this position as “female identification” and offering this blunt description: “What he likes is being the voyeur, watching a woman with her lovers. Being the dog who submits to a woman, or else this woman herself—that’s his dream.”⁷¹ Aragon, like Breton and other surrealists, glorified the feminine as a new divinity—I have pointed this out often enough—but Aragon inflected this perspective in a particular direction. Irene is an ambiguous character, the narrator’s double, a libertine, an idealized echo of the prostitute; in addition, however, she exercises a power over others—and over the narrator—thanks to words: an infinite power, a power against the finiteness of love. This love, exalted in the beginning, is later devalorized in favor of the infiniteness of Irene’s words. Does she create the words herself, or does she inspire them in the narrator? This remains ambiguous; the writer and the muse are almost assimilated; he is a woman and she is him. A split projects the libertine into the role of female creator and assigns the writer to the feminine role, thereby acknowledging the creator’s bisexual nature. In counterpoint to the narrator whom eroticism disappoints, Irene remains in a place where she observes the failure of love not through repression but excess. Writing becomes imperative when love (that of God, the troubadours, the romantics, a love unifying values and egos) is powerless. The young man at the brothel whom we follow at the beginning of the novel—as in Paris Peasant—devotes himself in the second part to this more intimate bordel that is the stylistic experience: the depths of language on fire, the narrative in flames. Only Joyce in Ulysses, through a polyphony that rivals la Somme théologique, attempted such an orphic appropriation of the jouissance of Eurydice/Molly, transfusing her incantations into the peerless artist’s unprecedented style.

The devalorization of the erotic experience is rather specifically Aragonian; the “ignoble fiasco” of which the narrator speaks no doubt translates his own amorous or erotic impossibilities, indeed, the profound motivations for his attempted suicide. But he exhibits it with complacency through the character of the invalid man or when he writes: “What bloody sadness there is in all erotic achievements!”⁷² Like the character of the man, the narrator may no longer be able to make love, but he can write the novel through which the ennui of erotic scenes is transformed into the pleasure of writing. It is no longer a matter of a “novel/story” just good enough for “stupid cunts”; by shattering the story, it becomes what the author has elsewhere called “rather scientific writing”: an X ray of the pulverized identity, laid bare and laid to rest in Irene’s jouissance. This is the form that the confrontation of literature and the impossible takes in Aragon: in the biographical difficulty of the unbearable lived experience, he burns his novel, in the literal and figurative sense, keeping only a few pages.

“What I am thinking naturally expresses itself. Everyone’s language differs from each to each. I for example do not think without writing, which is to say that writing is my method of thinking” (p. 36), Aragon explains. Doesn’t this evoke the Lautréamont of Poésies? For Aragon, too, there is no thinking prior to the act of writing: “The rest of the time, not writing, I have only a reflection of thought, a sort of grimace of myself, like a memory of what is. Others rely on diverse procedures. Thus I greatly envy the eroticists, whose eroticism is their expression” (p. 36).

The disenchantment of eroticism is rather rare in French literature, which, having placed eighteenth-century libertinage at the zenith of the experience of freedom, continually vies to glorify sexual exploit. This Aragonian admission of weakness, impotence, disgust does not mesh with the style of sexual liberation, the exaltation of the erotic act extolled by other writers during the same period and that continued to pervade anarchist literature and art until recently (we have only just started to question the basis of this freedom, since the mass media has made hard sex a conventional norm). Jouissance in Irene’s narrator is transposed to another level. Faced with the sadness of eroticism, he valorizes the magic of the word, “the prodigious metaphorical value that I attribute to words alone” (p. 36). And again: “That words impose on me, I mean. I probably do not appreciate this particular and immense poetry. I understand that. Hence the terrible finiteness of my sensations, and worse, of my life” (pp.

Eroticism . . . has often led me into a field of bitter reflections. I’m considered an arrogant man. Let that pass. During the time I’m referring to, I’d let my mind wander at some length, in the solitude of my room, faced with a distressing flowered wallpaper, over things erotic and their importance in my eyes. The erotic idea is the worst mirror. What one glimpses of oneself in it makes one shudder. Any old pervert, how I’d like to be just any old pervert. This wish spoke volumes about my underlying idea of all truth. I don’t much like thinking about a person’s sex life, yet I must acknowledge that mine is over. (p. 37)

Don’t be too quick to accept this rejection of all sexuality as a rule. It is the “I” that speaks and no doubt it speaks for the narrator at a given moment in his trajectory. “The terrible finiteness of my sensations” will be contradicted by Irene’s sensorial whirlwind of jouissance, and it is precisely this nonfiniteness of the feminine senses, Irene’s infiniteness, that the writer wishes to translate in the entirely verbal Défense de l’infini. Consequently, the attack on sexuality aims beyond the brothels and other manifestations (highly prized before) to reveal the crisis state of “my life.” Aren’t we very close to depression here? The comparison of the erotic state and the state of writing reveals a melancholic gap and announces another jouissance: that of metaphor, a transport, an ecstasy, that passes through the contemplation in solitude of a sorrow, a nothingness, bitterly recognized.

From then on, we find Aragon again, who has not abandoned surrealist wordplay but works it into the structure of the novel: “Fish fish it is I, I am calling you: pretty hands agile in the water. Fish you resemble mythology” (p. 58). The illogicalities that follow can be understood as allusions to the mythological value of the fish, to Christ and the Gospels as well as to the penal and masturbatory symbolism of these aquatic creatures.

Your loves are perfect and your ardours inexplicable. You do not approach your females and here you are with enthusiasm for the mere idea of the seed that follows you like a thread, for the idea of the mysterious deposit made in the shadow of the shining waters by another mute, anonymous exaltation. Fish you do not exchange love-letters, you find your desires in your own elegance. Supple masturbators of both sexes, fish I bow to the dizziness of your senses. . . . [Note the irony in relation to the solitude, the coldness, and the masturbation as well as the nutritive and sacred image of fish.] Your transparent transports, Christ’s death ah how I envy them. Dear divinities of the depths, I stretch and thrash about if I think for a moment of the moment in your wits in which develops the beauteous marine plant of sensual delight whose branches spread throughout your subtle beings, while the water vibrates around your solitudes and makes a song of ripples heard toward the shores. (p. 58)

The play of paralogism, metaphor, opposition, and connotation recalls Breton’s Soluble Fish. While, in his Fish, Breton declares his desire to reduce art “to its simplest expression, which is love,” Aragon’s text, which is certainly in the surrealist style, enters a violent polemic with Mad Love, André Breton style. In this passage, a concentrate of autoeroticism appears as a transition between the depressive moment and the subject’s “taking things in hand”—certainly the case here—through and in a rhetorical jubilation, mingling the anger against norms and the pleasure of free moments.

I would like to return to the character of Irene’s mother, significantly named Victoire [Victory], who assumes the role of the criminal. “A strange family in which two generations of males have been subjugated by their wives. Irene’s father died soon after his marriage. It was said locally that Victoire had got rid of him, not liking to support a man she’d be obliged to treat as an equal. Victoire’s father is still there in his invalid chair after forty years of contemplating the women’s triumph and their rude health” (pp. 75–76). This impotent old man, this castrated man, is the quintessential antihero: remember the decapitated woman of the “Moutonnet Couple” who fascinated the surrealists; here it is the man who is figuratively decapitated and the powerful magic of women, at the antipodes of classical tragedy, that casts a spell on the narrator. The a-thought of writing produces a new configuration of the tragic, expressing female jouissance alongside male impotence. Though varied, feminine powers exert an absolute domination. Thus: “What does rather distinguish Irene from Victoire, and has, furthermore, considerably estranged the latter from her daughter, is that Irene has never had that taste for women which possessed her mother very strongly and still does, so much so that since she’s run the farm not one maidservant has stayed on there without being or turning lesbian. This peculiarity has partly contributed to Victoire’s success. She has gained the affections of a flock of women” (p. 76). While the mother is a sapphist, the daughter

thinks quite frankly that love is no different from its object, that there’s nothing to look for elsewhere. She says so, if need be, in direct and very disagreeable fashion. She knows how to be crude and personal. She’s no more scared of words than men, and from time to time relishes using both. She’s by no means verbally reticent during lovemaking. Words spill from her effortlessly then, in all their violence. Ah, what a filthy bitch she can be. She excites herself, and her lover along with her, with a vile and scorching vocabulary. She wallows in words as in a lather of sweat. She lashes out, she raves. No matter, Irene’s love is really something. (p. 81; emphasis mine)

Here lies the sense of the chiasma between the all-powerful erotic woman exercising her sexuality and what the writer would like to steal from her: the same violence, the same sexual force, but shifted to words. It is not a matter of creating poetry in the decorous sense of the word but of creating an obscene poetry, an enraged literature, of which the aroused and foul-mouthed Irene is not only the product but, above all, the metaphor. The unbearable image of literature that results is neither to be sanctified nor sold; it is a literature of scandal. The a-thought that seeks to formulate the power of desire and excitation comes up against the fantasy of the phallic mother, which is also one of a woman “without a love object,” self-satisfied and aloof. To steal this indifference from her is another jouissance, equally irascible, “Irene-like.” The poet learns this in an androgynous osmosis in the body of Irene, who comes and transfers her pleasure into words proffered in the sexual act: decentered, overturned, obscene, poetic words. The articulation of scandalous eroticism and scandalized literature is clear in the passage I have just quoted. The abjection and horror of amorous states and imaginary states are present and assimilated. And female jouissance can henceforth be described in one of the most beautiful passages in French literature on the subject. 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. There: let your two motionless palms, your love-smitten mitts with that prominent curve, join up towards the hardest, best point which raises the holy ogive to its peak, o my church. Don’t budge, stay, and now with two caressing thumbs take advantage of this tired child’s goodwill, press with your caressing thumbs gently, more gently, part the beautiful lips with your two caressing thumbs, your two thumbs. 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. . . . The mirage is sitting stark naked in the pure wind. Beautiful mirage built like a piledriver. Beautiful mirage of man entering the cunt. Beautiful mirage of a spring and heavy melting fruit. Here are the travellers crazy to rub their lips. Irene is like an arch above the sea. I have not drunk for a hundred days, and sighs quench my thirst. Oof, oof. Irene is calling her lover. . . . 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 illusory chott, the shadow of a gazelle. . . . Hell, let your damned toss off, Irene has come. (pp. 65–66)

The violence of the surrealist rhetoric here echoes the libertine literature of the eighteenth century and attains one of the summits of French prose. Defying norms and pragmatic thought, literature confronts the sensorial experience at its most excessive, the example of which is taken in feminine jouissance. For the risk of this revolt must certainly be measured against Reason as Norm: it confronts the unnamable, psychosis, aphasia; this is the reverse of the absolute that Irene incarnates at the borders of the human.

Before reaching this limit of annihilation and death, a few pages in Irene formulate this challenge to bourgeois conformism as a revolt against narrative rhetoric: the writer would like words—their dynamic, their metaphorical/ metonymical play, the mythological evocations in which they are connoted, their alliterations—to be one with what he perceives as female pleasure. The difficulty or impossibility of this transposition can only lead him to pursue the literary experience or burn everything. Note the “collage” composition of this fragment saved from the fire. There is no stylistic continuity: the narrative passage alternates with a poetic writing, “automatic writing” (the passage on the fish); the enraged narrative yields before the folkloric and ironic vein of the tableau of the farm where Victoire, Irene, and the old, impotent father are outlined, pathetic, against a background of misery, before a style of polemical treatise—a sort of sociology of the novel compared to journalism—temporarily closes this scathing attack. This patchwork does not seem to be merely the result of a text under construction, saved from disaster and then polished and homogenized. The stylistic fragmentation reflects the hurricane unleashed on the one who is writing,⁷³ this rage that seizes a ductile body whose feverish and disillusioned eroticism traverses the fiasco and transmutes its rage first into feminine jouissance and then into writing, which will become its confirmation, its accomplishment and apogee. There is no focus, no center that fixes: the gaze, the pen, the style change place and mode, accommodation is sought but not made, all the images are destabilized, sparkling stylistic jouissance is doubled by the woman coming. I do not know of any text—not even Joyce’s more ironic and refined text on Molly—that flows with as much complicity, precision, and admirative tenderness into the feminine marvelous. Aragon invents it as though within his own flesh and creates it in his own unappropriated language.

“Arranging everything into a story is a bourgeois mania.” “There are people who tell other people’s life-stories. Or their own. From which end do they start? . . . Unknown melancholy . . ., an immense physical despair. . . . The same issue of Paris-Soir. I give way to discouragement when I consider the multiplicity of facts.”⁷⁴ One thinks of Mallarmé criticizing literature as “universal journalistic style.”⁷⁵ In sum, against the rationalism of the lived experience, the a-thought of La Défense de l’infini is placed in a situation of scandal, sets fire to the manuscript, and keeps only part for publication. To put it plainly, the imaginary is in a state of collapse faced with the immensity of the project that the translation of feminine jouissance, not the “multiplicity of facts,” represents: fantasmatic, certainly, but maintained as the incarnate variant of the divine.

The senselessness of the revolt consists in the absolute ambition to translate into language this semiosis—the “semiotic,” as I said earlier⁷⁶—that exceeds the speaking subject and of which feminine jouissance is the fantasmatic representation. The suicide attempt and auto-da-fé put an end to this senselessness. In counterpoint, meeting Elsa in the fall of 1928 and adherence to the Communist Party in 1927 stabilize and reassure. The adherence will be effective in 1930 and will in fact consolidate the identity of the writer. The social realization of a political future will supplant the impossible mission of vying with fantasmatic feminine jouissance. Is this adherence a true lie, a sham, a mask, an artifact? Aragon’s last years might suggest this, given that by then he had rid himself of his respectability. Nevertheless he occupied this role for a very long time and drew criticism from those—staunch bourgeois or liberal anarchists—who accused him of cynicism and conformism. Adherence to the party as well as conjugal “mad love” were no doubt his lifeline after burning the manuscript, the mirror necessary for identity assurance: “I” belong, because “I” do not know who “I” am and “I” do not want to be struck down by the jouissance of the other, “I” adhere, “I” stabilize myself, if only temporarily, “I” take advantage of this in order to continue writing. The alternation between revolt and adherence structures the surrealist period itself, with the group assuming the role of identity support before the party takes its place and seals off the intransigence of revolt in social protest. With Stalinism, Aragon abandons revolt in the name of a sometimes critical, sometimes servile engagement, always wanting everything (“always the whole rainbow,” Breton said of him), without absolutely embracing any identity, any precise truth. This is what some of Aragon’s critics have called his successive and permanent “betrayals,” betrayals that also allowed him to pursue his path as a writer. After burning L’Infini, writing could only be a permanent betrayal/translation of styles, genres, postures, tones.

I ended the last section by mentioning the adherence to Stalinism, the great affair of the century. As you may well imagine, I certainly won’t exhaust the question here! Nevertheless, we have to start somewhere, and my point of view is not one of social utility (to defend the “damned of the Earth” against the bourgeois) or political necessity (to counterbalance one totalitarianism with another), although these views are defensible. I say this unblushingly and as a victim myself (a modest victim but a victim nonetheless) of those who promised “singing tomorrows.”

Adhering to Stalinism was revealed to be a passion with much more devious roots. Take the invalid man in Irene. One might imagine such a man restoring himself by adhering to something strong: there is no longer a reason for being, but there is a group that incarnates the reason of History. The reason of History is the counterweight to depression, and the party of the masses becomes the manic version of melancholia. He forgets about poetry’s insurgence against the world of action; he thinks this revolt is “trop con” [slang for “stupid” but also “cunt.”—Trans.]; he wants action in the name of reason and History. He sees Communism as “consciousness incarnate,” the absolute mind “back on its feet.” Hegel warned that terror was Kant put into practice, but he is no longer wary of the terror imposed by the dialectic put into practice. Who is “he”? In the case that interests us, “he” is an adherent to the dialectic incarnated in the people: “he” has battled against the law and the norm of an oppressive consciousness to the point of undoing its stability as well as his own. Identity in disarray is restabilized by the erection of the dogma of reason incarnate.

I would add that a certain French materialist tradition does not repugn the cult of the incarnation of historical reason that the party represents. That a human group can materialize the absolute power that German idealism attributed to the idea does not fail to seduce the descendants of those who claim filiation with sensualism and who hold in contempt the obscurantism of cathedrals. The cult of the irrational marvelous given substance by a woman borders on the inconstancy and the plurality of the baroque, as we have seen. But the cult of the rational marvelous that dialectical materialism represents, in counterpoint to the preceding, reassures, solidifies, and fills one with enthusiasm all at once.

The fantasy of a popular power becomes the social place of this sensorial magic that the female enchantress holds in the private realm. Here the imaginary power of the phallic matron has command over the males’ sadomasochism. That homosexuality is the open secret of this alchemy does not take long to understand, and Aragon himself played it out for us, though late in life and not without a certain derision, which, after all, kept the symptom at a distance.

Yet in this logic where the motivations of the unconscious communicate with political options—Breton’s Communicating Vessels might be evoked again here—ideological credos take on the intense changeability that also characterizes the sadomasochism of amorous states and the polysemy of poetic language. And beneath the appearance of the political canker—patriot, communist, and ideologue—one finds the salubrious provocation of a ham actor. But is this really only amoral manipulation on the part of an impostor? Or a borderline state of the unbearable identity: that of the self, that of groups? Or a critical period in Western consciousness where the refusal of this pair formed by consciousness and the norm is ossified in an antinorm and an anticonsciousness more constraining and more lethal than their traditional targets, revolt thus failing in radical oppression, unable to follow in thought alone, in lone thought, this archeology of the sensory and the sensible, this debate in metaphysics, against metaphysics, that Aragon announced in Paris Peasant? One thing is sure: while we have gone beyond this critical period and see its impasses today (which do not solely concern Aragon’s compromises), we may have also lost its unsettling vitality. And an opening to a-thought may be temporarily closed.

At the point we have reached, 1928, the impasses of Stalinism are only beginning. Still to come are 1930 and the congress of Kharkov with its redoubtable adherence to socialist realism and then 1932 and the break with surrealism. Le Monde réel is started in 1933 and lasts until Les Communistes of 1949.⁷⁷ Next comes the conjugal and patriotic pathos of the Resistance poems (but didn’t they have to be written? who will cast the first stone at the alexandrines?), then Aurélien in 1945, and finally (I say “finally” because for me it was a relief to see that the writing had caught its breath again) La Semaine sainte in 1958.⁷⁸ But we hear nothing more about La Défense de l’infini, which would not be republished until 1986. In 1969, in Je n’ai jamais appris à écrire, Aragon still does not mention Irene though he describes the style of the novel he set on fire.

What is the meaning of this “infinity” in flames? In distinguishing between thinking and judging, intellect and reason, understanding and meaning, Kant accords judgment and the quest for meaning unlimited power. This relentlessness, a component of thought itself, which led the Greeks to consider the infinite as the source of all evil,⁷⁹ is manifested fearsomely in the unlimited power of modern pragmatic reason: the technological reason that turns away from the search for truth in order to dominate the sensory. This debate, which Hannah Arendt conducts in The Life of the Mind, leaves open the question of the sensory infinite: the domain of the soul and the passions in classical philosophy, this universe—favored terrain not only of art and literature but also psychoanalysis—is far from passive and uniform but teems with infinite singularities that classical aesthetics, because it is classical, does not manifest. This sensorial infinite doubled by infinite reason, although founded on and in the sensory world, drowns any evidence of it in an excess that only metaphors of the infinite can approach; here the polyphonic stylistics of language shatter the traps of unity (unity of word, syllable, rhythm, sentence, narrative, character, etc.), which is nevertheless used, summoned, and pulverized. It is this sensorial infinite that jouissance reveals and by which writing is measured and that inspires—the age-old word—the mystic as much as the writer. We must note that the apparently formal and passionate revolt of writing in La Défense de l’infini, as in other avant-garde experiments, takes place in a world dominated by the infinite violence of technological reason and affixes to it the resistance of the sensorial infinite, insofar as this is the reserve of a human truth. This truth is itself internal to language, provided it can be wrested from the calculus and brought nearer to the pulse of thought, its infinitesimal germination, anterior to One, to the subject, and to meaning. We can then measure the risk to identity—melancholic, psychotic—of this excess that is another way of referring to freedom.

I would like to link these remarks concerning Aragon’s text, life, and engagement in the surrealist movement to the theme of revolt. No doubt you can see the connection just beneath the surface and also hear echoes of it in the partition of the right and left discussed during political campaigns. At a moment when the speeches of the candidates to the presidency of the Republic of France—speeches rallying us to go to the polls—seek demagogically to erase cleavages and differences, the term “revolt” incites fear. It does this precisely because it entails questioning present contradictions and new forms of revolt in our postindustrial society. To speak of revolt does not immediately call to mind the rallying that might make a candidate win; on the contrary, it incites auscultation, displacement, dissimilarity, analysis, and dissolution. To speak of revolt does not call to mind integration, inclusion, an unchanging social idyll but underscores that economic, psychological, and spiritual contradictions exist and also that these contradictions are permanent: they are not solvable. When one recognizes that the contradictions of thought and society are not soluble, then revolt—with its risks—appears as a continuous necessity for keeping alive the psyche, thought, and the social link itself. Of course, the political landscape is not necessarily the place to raise the question of revolt; perhaps it will be if the left can be reestablished, as some claim it can be. But it will take time for this necessary party to do so, after a time of not having power.

Our question here is rather one of psychical revolt, personal revolt, and consequently revolt as a form of aesthetic expression. Do Aragon’s political and aesthetic revolt, the lack of a father in his life, the worship of the feminine in the form I described, the adherence to the Communist Party constitute elements of the revolt that I situated in the framework of Freudian thought as a revolt against the father and against the law? In part, yes, as is revealed at the beginning of Irene by the narrator and his adolescent rage against the conformism of provincial society, where he is restless. But beyond this conflict with the father and the law, and especially when the place of the father is vacant and the son is illegitimate, another variant of the tragic appears, beyond the oedipal tragic: it is the confrontation with what must be called the impossible.

I have mentioned this word on several occasions. It is the word Lacan uses when he speaks of the real, asserting that it is impossible.⁸⁰ The impossible, according to Irene’s Cunt, is presented in Aragon’s imaginary as a confrontation with the maternal and the feminine, insofar as these represent the fantasy of unrepresentable excitability: the diabolical mater-matter. We are thus above and beyond paternal law and the identity of signs that this law guarantees. In surrealist writing, the signs of language—of identity and identifying—come unhinged, without undergoing total alienation as in Joyce’s portmanteau words or Artaud’s glossolalia.

Nevertheless, surrealism is characterized by these paradoxical metaphors, examples of which occur in the fish passage quoted above, and by these reveries, realized in automatic writing, that destroy logic. Sacralization and fetishism of the woman will lead the surrealists to an image of the feminine that is both abject and fascinating. This ambivalent war against the feminine is to be understood in counterpoint to the war that the subject wages with himself: with his superego and paternal identity. In order to protect himself from the abjection of the other (starting with the other sex) and the other itself, the woman is made sacred, fetishized: this is what the two sides of surrealist feminine imagery (ambivalence-rejection, marvelous-magic) make apparent. The fascinating criminal woman or the wild Irene are the writer’s alter egos, in which both the imaginary feminine roles and facets of the subject himself are found, deliciously and horribly confused with this feminine at once oedipal, because desirable, and preoedipal, because a narcissistic reflection of the self.

Irene is the character invented by Aragon who best demonstrates this particular interweaving of three images: the hypostatized woman, idealized as desirable oedipal mother; the negativized woman, abysmal, filthy, base, and devouring; and a third component: the identification of this split with the very dynamic of representation, of a-thought, which the writer, the enunciator, the speaking subject attributes to himself. Neither Victoire nor Irene is a real woman, of course, in the social sense of the term. I stress this to underscore that this is a fantasy, a prosopopoeia of the narrator’s and the writer’s unconscious, in that a prosopopoeia is a representation of an absent, dead, supernatural, or inanimate being who speaks and acts, while the fantasy creates this scenography with the products of our own unconscious, products that are not dead at all.

In this mise-en-scène of a new tragic form where the man-narrator is confronted with the impossible (the other, the feminine, the sensory), we are led, through Aragonian poetic language, to the heart of a double tragedy, which is feminine this time and no longer oedipal. On the one hand, the poet is unaware of the woman’s real, psychological, and social existence: all one needs to do is think of the dramatic biographies of a number of women who trailed in the wake of the surrealists, and of the crushing of their autonomy along with their desire, which drove some of them to suicide. On the other hand, he identifies with a feminine hypostasis, he absorbs it, he is she: he is Irene and writes the impossible of femininity, assimilates it, sucks its blood. In doing this, he manages however to bear witness to the impossible as well as to jouissance, which, without this tragic ambivalence, would no doubt remain unspoken.

After this tragic period, starting in the thirties, Aragon’s adherence to the Stalinist party, his cult worship of Elsa, and finally his homosexual activity can be read in retrospect (beyond the unquestionable psychological, moral, and political uses they might have) as an immense display of the burlesque. In effect, Aragon did not cease to playact and to make himself look ridiculous through masquerade, fakery, and various tricks at the core of his most serious opinions. His life offers paroxysmal testimony, in our century, to a pathetic and grotesque variant of the tragic, to what at the beginning of this introduction to Aragon I called the “impossible hero.” Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus has suggested that certain “poetic” experiences, such as that of Artaud, ignore oedipal stabilization and work in psychosis.⁸¹ Among the surrealists, the institutional isolation that Artaud experienced does not occur. On the contrary, however marginal and antiestablishment it might have been, the position of the surrealists was seductive and integrated, framed within the context of esotericism for Breton and the apparatus of the party for Aragon, whose writing remained eminently socialized. In the nonoedipal tonality of an impossible heroism, however, the polymorphous instability of a modern Narcissus is displayed. This representative of baroque inconstancy—henceforth deprived of God, however—is a bard of the feminine, which he traverses and appropriates the better to play his subtle role within political apparatuses, before these bequeath their power to television. If he doesn’t arrive at the integration that makes him an impossible hero or the hero of the impossible, this chameleon risks annihilation. Explorer of the unrepresentable, he dedicates himself to being a ham.

Alongside the personal tragic element, the story of Aragon has the advantage, so to speak, of showing political engagement as a relay and link of tragic revolt. For Aragon, political engagement took place at a moment of great subjective malaise. He approached the party in 1926 or 1927 and, after a long process, became a member. What does this engagement mean in the context of what we have learned of his life and work, in view of the fluidity and instability that take on aspects of sexual ambiguity and a game with signs? Well, one can interpret it as a sort of repudiation of the imaginary: my revolt will no longer take place in the imaginary or in writing; it will be an act that will assure true revolt insofar as it is both psychical life and social engagement. The adoration of the social group will replace the adoration of the feminine for Aragon. I am not questioning the many good reasons that one may find to justify adherence to a political party. But if one seeks to understand in depth the psychical significance of adherence, it is not uncommon to find at its root a will to restore the father and the law, in order to struggle against the disappointment of depression, against invasion by the feminine, against the plunge into a-thought of which Irene’s Cunt is such a perfect example.

I know that some of you will be unsatisfied by this conclusion, not having found your preferred myth of Aragon in my analysis: the cult of the couple and the people, of Elsa and the party. You miss all this, not only because these myths are part of France’s history but also because your imaginary is eager for them. I must tell you that I have not lost sight of this mythology of fidelity, or your desire for it. It is based on this mythology that I have discussed what precedes it and how the unbearable excess to which Irene testifies made the recourse to certainty imperative. Adherence, starting with adhering to a relationship, involves an assurance of identity that guarantees our survival. We all want it, and some of us manage to get it, with certain of our illusions intact. The grandeur and misery of illusion? So be it. The man who was “mad about Elsa” knew, although he forgot, that the mad love he celebrated counterbalanced another madness, that adherence (to Elsa, to the party) was satiating and calming another infinite delirium: Irene’s. Some have implied that the consecration of the couple’s relationship was used to struggle against homosexuality. More than that: it was used to struggle against the quashing of the self in confusion with the primary feminine, in menacing genitality. The myth of faithfulness and adherence were all the more necessary and real—a hypnotic reality for both the protagonists and the public—in that they helped to stabilize the turmoil. From then on, forgery and disguise, even if they were perceived as such by some, inspired discomfort more than rejection in even the most intransigent critic.

If we can now make out the historical and social causes of totalitarianism, it is not certain that we have dismantled the psychical motivations for it nor that we are safe from the need for identity, which too often and without Stalinist monstrosity, causes our revolts to alternate with our impostures. Here, we are no doubt at the heart of what underlies membership: “I” do not know who “I” am, “I” do not know if “I” am (a man or a woman); but “I” am part of adherence. The post-cold war thaw, revisionism, the critique of totalitarianism, the fall of the Berlin Wall represent so many mutations of history that reactivate the events of a more personal, more subjective revolt and show that the confrontations with the sacred maternal, on the one hand, and the safety belt of language, on the other, are the true secret doubles of political engagement, its mise en abîme. Political engagement is a marker and a mask; Aragon’s life is proof of that.

As practical reason takes over for a-thought, activism is renewed: resistance, the defense of the oppressed, struggle against the imperialist plutocracy. But practical reason excels in dialectical strategies, before falling prey to egotism and the critical justification of totalitarianism. I say this to you with all the more gravity having lived in a Stalinist country. I am among those who appreciated Aragon’s opposition to dogmatism and count his contribution to the thaw as part of the process that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall. The enthusiasm of adherence, and what it implies in terms of the choice of civilization and subjective choice, nevertheless remains problematic.

Traitor, clown, opportunist, profiteer, impostor, liar, all these epithets have stuck to the writer in spite of the fact that he was an alchemist of the Word. A true actor, he acted out the spectacle of adherence without ever abandoning the dimension of the unfathomable that he confronted in writing, in a rhetorical and subjective experience that one may or may not appreciate but that nevertheless remains singular.

Is it legitimate to speak in this context of an impasse of revolt, an impasse of the imaginary, in favor of the practical reason of which Stalinism would be the sinister apotheosis? One could pose the question another way: is the imaginary experience of Aragon audible, readable without the political backdrop, without the mass media visibility that Communist popularity procured for him and that gave him one of his reasons for being? Aragon is not read much today. Is this imaginary that ventured to the limits of the sensory and the feminine, which I described as specific to him, impossible to save under the pretext that he died with ideological membership associated with him? There is in fact a non-sense of revolt in the way Aragon used it that makes it impossible to practice today. Sartre will offer another example of this, and Barthes a completely different approach.

There remains nonetheless the question of thought. When it is deployed as psychical life, when it has the ambition of being psychical life in the sense of the revitalization and resurrection of identity—in the sense of a-thought—it inevitably confronts the maternal, on the one hand, and signs on the other. Is this experience inseparable from the sort of safety belt that institutional membership can offer? If so, what is it today? If not, what solitude! In either case, perhaps no one can assume its risks at the price of the paroxysm that Aragon exhibited, though it is structural when the strongest prohibition is associated with the archaic or the sensory. Which means that, beyond freedom, it is a-thought itself, along with this revolt, that is in peril. Perhaps other links can be built that are not the partisan links of practical reason. Right now, we are a long way off.