[All texts have been cited from the editions listed below. In the case of French works that have not appeared in English, I have translated all passages from the original.—Trans.]
1. What Revolt Today?
1. For those interested in the subject, I recommend Alain Rey, Révolution: Histoire d’un mot (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), particularly pp. 21–32, which I refer to here.
2. Corneille, Selections; or, Polyeuctus/The Liar/Nicomedes, trans. John Cairncross (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), act 5, scene 6, p. 309.
3. Corneille, Polyeuct, trans. Noel Clark (Bath, U.K.: Absolute, 1993), act 1, scene 4,
4. Voltaire, The Age of Louis XIV, chapter 4.
5. Rey, Révolution, p. 34.
6. In 1636, in Father Monet’s Dictionnaire français-latin; see Rey, Révolution, p. 36.
7. The word is used in the sense of “conflict” in Bossuet (“Fatales révolutions des monarchies,” Oraisons funèbres, sermon 71). Montesquieu uses it to mean “social upheaval” (“upheavals which plunge rich men into destitution and swiftly raise the poor, as if on wings, to the height of opulence” [Persian Letters, trans. C. J. Betters (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1973), letter 98, p. 182]), and La Rochefoucauld uses it to describe changes in taste (“Une révolution générale qui change le goût des esprits aussi bien que les fortunes du monde,” maxim 259, quoted in Rey, Révolution, p. 53). [The Fronde was an insurrectionary French political party during the minority of Louis XIV and the ministry of Cardinal Mazarin. Members were called frondeurs, from the French for “slingshot.”—Trans.]
8. Rey, Révolution, p. 54. See also p. 56, where Rey quotes Voltaire: “Il se peut que notre monde ait subi autant de changements que les états ont éprouvé de révolutions” (from Essai sur les moeurs).
9. I will not probe these legal matters any further, but those interested in the topic can do so in a very good book by jurist and University of Paris I professor Mireille Delmas-Marty: Pour un droit commun (Paris: Seuil, 1994). In it, she details the status of law in the contemporary world, its banality, its theatricality, and the invisibility of power, along with the punitive proceedings that have resulted.
10. Julia Kristeva, The Old Man and the Wolves, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).
11. I will examine the timelessness of the unconscious in volume 2, Intimate Revolt.
12. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement Between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1950). The German text dates from 1912–1913.
13. Quoted in Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (New York: Basic, 1957), 3:204. At the end of his life, Ludwig Binswanger drew closer to the phenomenologists, particularly Heidegger (from whom he is nevertheless very different) and maintained his ambition to combine psychoanalysis and phenomenology.
14. One can—and I have done so elsewhere—call on other texts to highlight the radical evolution that is related to this new stage of what Nietzsche called “monumental history”: not the linear, cursory history of sociopolitical events but fixed psychological attitudes, beliefs, and religions. And I could have—should have—spoken of Albert Camus; The Rebel is essential, and The Stranger, with its blank writing, incites an unsettling strangeness that goes well beyond humanistic testament. The current return to Camus has revived the moralist and the metaphysical importance of his writing.
15. Francis Jeanson, Sartre: Les Ecrivains devant Dieu (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1966).
2. The Sacred and Revolt
1. See Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).
2. Bernard-Henri Lévy, La Pureté dangereuse (Paris: Grasset, 1994).
3. See Julia Kristeva, “The Obsessional Neurotic and His Mother,” in New Maladies of the Soul, trans. Ross Guberman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995).
4. Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). This work first appeared as La Révolution du langage poétique (Paris: Seuil, 1974).
5. Georges Dumézil, Mitra-Varuna: An Essay on Two Indo-European Representations of Sovereignty, trans. Derek Coltman (New York: Zone, 1988).
6. He takes his name from *Guhedh, “to have a passionate desire for,” hence “jouissance” (ibid. p. 208).
7. Georges Bataille, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 3 (Paris: Gallimard, 1971).
3. The Metamorphoses of “Language” in the Freudian Discovery
1. Sigmund Freud, On Aphasia (1891); “Project for a Scientific Psychology” (1895), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1953–74) (hereafter referred to as SE), 1:295–397. This volume also includes the letters to Fliess.
2. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), in The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud, trans. A. A. Brill (New York: Modern Library, 1938).
3. See Sigmund Freud, “Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy” (1909), SE, 10:5–147. [Infans = Latin for infant, but also: not capable of speech, not eloquent.—Trans.]
4. He will take this up again in “Appendix C: Words and Things,” Papers on Metapsychology (1915), SE, 14:209–215.
5. Freud, “Project,” SE, 1:366.
6. Julia Kristeva, Time and Sense: Proust and the Experience of Literature, trans. Ross Guberman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).
7. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams.
8. Think, for example, of Artaud or of Apollinaire’s Calligrammes.
9. W. R. Bion, Attention and Interpretation: A Scientific Approach to Insight in Psycho-Analysis and Groups (New York: Basic, 1970); Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language; Piera Aulagnier, La Violence et l’interprétation (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1975).
10. Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, trans. Joan Riviere, ed. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1960).
11. Lacan will rely on this formulation, without ever citing Freud, in order to assert that “the subconscious is structured like a language.” With this postulation, Lacan hardened and dogmatized the Freudian position, but it is incontestable that he legitimately relied on it.
12. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, p. 518.
13. Sigmund Freud and Karl Abraham, Correspondence, 1907–1926 (Paris: Gallimard, 1969). Letter of January 9, 1908.
14. “The Antithetical Meanings of Primal Words,” SE, 11:155–161. See Emile Benveniste “Remarques sur la fonction du langage dans la découverte freudienne,” in Problèmes de linguistique générale (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), pp. 75–87.
15. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, p. 518.
16. See my commentary on Totem and Taboo in chapter 1, where I discussed the brothers’ revolt against the father, a revolt that constitutes the symbolic pact as the cornerstone of hominization and thus of the culture that is born of this revolt.
17. Sigmund Freud, “On Narcissism: An Introduction” (1914), SE, 14:69–102.
18. André Green elaborates on the definition of narcissism by exploring its value as an intermediary structure, or state, an unstable element of identity, in Narcissisme de vie, narcissisme de mort (Paris: Minuit, 1983).
19. A certain reading of Lacan could lead us to think that the notion of the subject goes without saying in Freud, but that is not the case. Some Freudians have, in turn, considered it a Lacanian artifact. Why discuss the subject, given that the term is not found in Freud? they argue. Indeed, Freud talks about the ego, the id, and the superego but not the subject, except, precisely, in his work on metapsychology (1915, 1917), translated into French by J. Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis, where the term appears linked exclusively to the drive and not to symbolic construction, much less to language.
20. In Sigmund Freud, Papers on Metapsychology.
21. Cf. André Green, La Déliaison: Psychanalyse, anthropologie, et littérature (Paris: Belles-Lettres, 1992).
22. Freud, The Ego and the Id, pp. 12–13. Emphasis mine.
23. Perceptions that neither the Saussurian linguistic model (signifier-signified) nor Peirce’s triangular semiotic model takes into account.
24. Sigmund Freud, Constructions in Analysis (1937), SE, vol. 23; idem, An Outline of Psycho-Analysis, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1949).
25. Freud, An Outline of Psycho-Analysis, p. 19. For those interested in the question of language, I recommend John Forrester’s Language and the Origins of Psychoanalysis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), a richly detailed work on Freudian thought and language. The author emphasizes Freud’s discovery with relation to psychosis and the problem posed by hallucination: desires and anxieties can take internal paths and crystallize in words that have nothing to do with the objective reality perceived elsewhere. See also Freud’s Moses and Monotheism (1939), SE 23:3–137.
26. The term is not that of Lacan, who speaks instead of the “paternal function.”
27. Freud, The Ego and the Id, p. 33.
28. I spoke of this with regard to the subject in process in Polylogue (Paris: Seuil, 1977), pp. 55–107.
29. [“Singing tomorrows,” a slogan of the French Communist Party.—Trans.]
30. Catherine Clément, Les Fils de Freud sont fatigués (Paris: Grasset, 1978).
31. Debord committed suicide on Wednesday, November 30, 1994, at the age of sixty-two. [Debord, author of The Society of the Spectacle, was a founder of the Situationist International (1957–1972).—Trans.]
32. See Freud, The Ego and the Id, p. 26; and Julia Kristeva, Tales of Love, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), pp. 24–38.
33. See Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Introduction à l’oeuvre de Marcel Mauss,” in M. Mauss, Sociologie et anthropologie (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1950), pp. xlv–xlvii.
34. Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), pp. 1–7; Didier Anzieu, Le Moi-peau (Paris: Dunod, 1983).
35. Freud, The Ego and the Id, pp. 24–25.
36. See Hanna Segal, “Note on Symbol Formation,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 37 (1957): part 6.
37. André Green, Le Travail du négatif (Paris: Minuit, 1993).
38. “Negation,” SE, 19:235–239. See Jacques Lacan, “Introduction and Reply to Jean Hyppolite’s Presentation of Freud’s Verneinung” and Jean Hyppolite, “Appendix: A Spoken Commentary on Freud’s Verneinung,” in The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. John Forrester (New York: Norton, 1991), pp. 52–61, 289–97.
39. Freud, The Ego and the Id, p. 35.
40. See. Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989).
41. In New Maladies of the Soul, I pose the question of the translatability of the image in language.
42. See Donald Meltzer and M. H. Williams, The Apprehension of Beauty (Strath Tay, Scotland: Clunie, 1988).
43. I will come back to the fact that all narrative is intrinsically sadomasochistic, and not only in transference; Sade, with the accuracy of the visionary, saw something inexorable here.
4. Oedipus Again
1. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (London: Methuen, 1958; rpt., London: Routledge, 1996), p. 251.
2. “The idealist branch of Freudian research is as threatening today as the objectivist one. We have to wonder whether it is not essential to psychoanalysis—i.e., to its existence as therapy and as verifiable knowledge—to remain, not a cursed attempt and secret science, but at least a paradox and an interrogation” (Merleau-Ponty, preface to A. Hesnard, L’Oeuvre de Freud et son importance pour le monde moderne [Paris: Payot, 1960], p. 8; emphasis mine).
3. Sigmund Freud, Extracts from the Fliess Papers, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1953–74) (hereafter referred to as SE), 1:265.
4. Sophocles, Oedipus the King, in The Complete Greek Tragedies, vol. 2, Sophocles, trans. David Grene (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 2:70–71.
5. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), in The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud, trans. A. A. Brill (New York: Modern Library, 1938), pp. 308–9.
6. Composed of three parts: “A Special Type of Choice of Object Made by Men” (1910), “On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love” (1912), and “The Taboo of Virginity” (1918), SE, 11:165–175; 179–190; 193–208.
7. Sigmund Freud, “The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex,” SE, 19:173. Emphasis mine.
8. Sigmund Freud, “Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy” (1909), SE, 10:5–147; and “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis (The Wolf Man)” (1918), SE, 17:7–123.
9. Sigmund Freud, “The Infantile Genital Organization: An Interpolation Into the Theory of Sexuality” (1923), SE, 19:142.
10. Sigmund Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1920), trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961), p. 14.
11. Freud, “Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex,” 19:173.
12. See Hanna Segal, “Note on Symbol Formation,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 37 (1957): part 6.
13. Those interested in the details of Freudian thought on Oedipus should consult Roger Perron and Michèle Perron-Borelli, Le Complexe d’Oedipe (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, Que sais-je? 1994).
14. See Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984).
15. Built in the first half of the second century B.C, the floors and walls of this villa are decorated with landscapes of the Nile Valley, miniatures of Egyptian figurines, characters from the Dionysiac cycle, and scenes showing initiation rites of the Dionysian or Orphic mysteries on the Hellenistic model of the third or fourth century B.C
5. On the Extraneousness of the Phallus
1. Sigmund Freud, “Female Sexuality,” (1931), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1953–74) (hereafter referred to as SE), 21:227–28.
2. Sigmund Freud, “A Child Is Being Beaten: A Contribution to the Study of the Origin of Sexual Perversions” (1919), SE, 17:179–204.
3. Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, book 8, Le Transfert (Paris: Seuil, 1991).
4. In Greek, the word kairos refers to the point that touches the end, suitability, appropriateness, the dangerous critical point, the advantage, the right moment; that which is à propos, suitable; in modern Greek, it means time, epoch. We can see the etymology in “to encounter” or “to cut.” To encounter oneself is also to cut oneself, with the reunification and possible loss that this supposes.
5. Sigmund Freud, “The Infantile Genital Organization: An Interpolation Into the Theory of Sexuality” (1923), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1953–74) (hereafter referred to as SE), vol. 19.
6. Sigmund Freud, “Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes” (1925), SE, 19:257.
7. Lacan, Le Transfert, p. 274.
8. Donald Woods Winnicott, Home Is Where We Start From (New York: Norton, 1986). One could also evoke the “atoxic” or detoxicating mother, Wilfred Ruprecht Bion’s mother-excitation barrier. See his Learning from Experience (New York: Basic, 1962); Elements of Psychoanalysis (New York: Basic, 1963); and Second Thoughts: Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis (New York: J. Aronson, 1967).
9. These observations might be considered in light of recent discoveries concerning the greater participation of the right hemisphere in the female brain than in the male brain in the exercise of language. More lateralized, the male brain would be more likely to treat language as a logical system, whereas, because the right hemisphere is implicated in perception and sensation, the exercise of language in the woman would be more associated with sensoriality. Nevertheless, the fragile nature of biological discoveries as well as our knowledge about the interhemispheric organization of the brain and the interconnectedness of neurons require the greatest circumspection in interpreting these data.
10. With his reference to “the Minoan-Mycenean civilization behind the civilization of Greece,” Freud is designating the archaic mother-daughter relationship. See “Female Sexuality” (1931), SE, 21:226.
11. From illudere, “to make light of.”
12. Freud, “Female Sexuality,” SE, 21:229.
13. Freud, “Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes.”
14. Freud, “Female Sexuality,” SE, 21:239.
15. To the point of atheism. I will come back to this.
16. Freud, “Female Sexuality,” SE, 21:230: “We should probably not be wrong in saying that it is this difference . . . which gives its special stamp to the character of females as social beings.” Emphasis mine.
17. Picasso said that the artist must become a “dyke.” See Geneviève Laporte’s Un Amour secret de Picasso (Paris: Rocher, 1989).
6. Aragon, Defiance, and Deception
1. The review Tel Quel was published from spring 1960 to winter 1982 by Editions du Seuil. A good book on the subject is Philippe Forest, Histoire de Tel Quel (Paris: Seuil, 1995).
2. Arthur Rimbaud, Complete Works, trans. Wallace Fowlie (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), p. 199.
3. [Paul Claudel, the French dramatist and poet, rediscovered his Catholic faith in Rimbaud’s Les Illuminations and Une Saison en enfer. Claudel wrote the preface to the 1912 edition of Illuminations, in which he “Catholicized” Rimbaud.—Trans.]
4. Lautréamont, Les Chants de Maldoror (1868), second canto, and Poésies (1870), part 2, in Maldoror and the Complete Works of the Comte de Lautréamont, trans. Alexis Lykiard (Cambridge, Mass.: Exact Change, 1994), pp. 105, 234.
5. This is a reprise of Pascal, who wanted to write “[his] thoughts without arranging them, but not perhaps in deliberate disorder; that is the proper order, and it will convey my intention by its very want of order. I should be doing too high honour to my subject if I treated it with order, since I wish to show that it is incapable of that” (Pascal’s Pensées, trans. H. F. Stewart [London: Routledge, 1950], p. 13).
6. [The Origins of the World, Courbet’s painting of a woman’s vulva.—Trans.]
7. Louis Aragon, Paris Peasant, trans. Simon Watson Taylor (Boston: Exact Change, 1994), p. 202.
8. Charles Baudelaire, “Saint Peter’s Denial,” trans. Richard Howard, in Baudelaire in English, ed. Carol Clark and Robert Sykes (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1997), p. 182.
9. “The literary types . . . have in general limited themselves to exalting the resources of the dream at the expense of those of action, all to the advantage of the socially conservative forces that discern in it, and quite rightly, a precious distraction from rebellious ideas,” Breton writes in Communicating Vessels, trans. Mary Ann Caws and Geoffrey T. Harris (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), p. 7.
10. André Breton, “Characteristics of the Modern Evolution and What It Consists of,” in The Lost Steps, trans. Mark Polizotti (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), p. 108.
11. Tristan Tzara, Seven Dada Manifestos, trans. Barbara Wright (London: John Calder, 1977), p. 15.
12. André Breton, Notes sur la poésie, in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1988), 1:1018.
13. André Breton, “Situation of Surrealism Between the Two Wars,” in Free Rein (La Clé des champs), trans. Michel Parmentier and Jacqueline d’Amboise (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), p. 58.
14. Breton, Notes sur la poésie, 1:1018.
15. Louis Aragon, Treatise on Style, trans. Alyson Waters (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press), p. 104.
16. See Julia Kristeva, Time and Sense: Proust and the Experience of Literature, trans. Ross Guberman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).
17. Louis Aragon, La Défense de l’infini (1923–1927), followed by Les Aventures de Jean-Foutre la Bite, with an introduction and notes by Edouard Ruiz (Paris: Gallimard, NRF, 1986).
18. Louis Aragon, second preface to Le Libertinage, 2· ED. (PARIS: GALLIMARD, 1964), p. 13.
19. Aragon, Treatise on Style, p. 9
20. Aragon, Paris Peasant, p. 66.
21. Aragon, Treatise on Style, p. 105.
22. Louis Aragon, Blanche ou l’oubli (Paris: Gallimard, NRF, 1967).
23. Aragon, second preface to Le Libertinage, p. 14.
24. In Louis Aragon, The Libertine, trans. Jo Levy (London: John Calder; New York: Riverrun, 1987), p. 18.
25. “To create is to conceive an object in its fleeting moment, in its absence” (from “Music and Literature,” in Mallarmé: Selected Prose Poems, Essays, and Letters, trans. Bradford Cook (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1956), p. 48).
26. Think here of Duchamp and his interest in the relationship between the real and the possible. See also André Breton: “The question of reality in its relations with possibility, a question that remains a great source of anxiety, is resolved here in the most daring manner: possible reality is obtained by a lax approach to the laws of physics and chemistry.” Oeuvres complètes, 2:112.
27. Aragon, Paris Peasant, pp. 114, 116, and 118.
28. Stéphane Mallarmé, “Crisis in Poetry,” in Mallarmé, p. 42 [The quotation appears in the following: “When I say: ‘a flower!’ then from that forgetfulness to which my voice consigns all floral form, something different from the usual calyces arises, something all music, essence, and softness: the flower which is absent from all bouquets.”—Trans.]; idem, letter to H. Cazalis, October 1864, in Mallarmé, p. 83.
29. Louis Aragon, La Défense de l’infini, pp. 41–95.
30. See André Breton, Nadja, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Grove Press, 1960). See also the book by Jean Decottignies on surrealist poetry, L’Invention de la poèsie: Breton, Aragon, Duchamp (Lille: Presses universitaires de Lille, 1994). I also recommend the work of Xavière Gauthier on the surrealists and women: Surréalisme et sexualité (Paris: Gallimard, 1971).
31. André Breton, “Soluble Fish” (1924), in Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969), p. 63.
32. “Individual sexual love, born of this superior form of sexual relations that monogamy is, [is] the greatest moral progress accomplished by humans in modern times,” wrote Breton in Mad Love, trans. Mary Ann Caws (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987), p. 77.
33. Villiers de L’Isle-Adam, “L’étonnant couple Moutonnet” (1890), in Chez les passants, in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1986), 2:405–9.
34. Breton, Soluble Fish, p. 106.
35. Aragon, Paris Peasant, p. 170.
36. Louis Aragon, Anicet ou le Panorama (Paris: Gallimard, NRF, 1921).
37. Aragon, Paris Peasant, p. 196.
38. Aragon, The Libertine, p. 171.
39. Aragon, Paris Peasant, p. 110.
40. Littérature, no. 13, p. 22, reproduced in Littérature: March 1919–August 1921 (Paris: Place, 1978). The review was published from 1919 to 1924.
41. “Le Mentir-vrai” is the title of a 1964 short story in a collection of the same name (Paris: Gallimard, NRF, 1980).
42. Daniel Bougnoux has emphasized “the perpetual motion” of the century in Aragon’s work and persona. See Encyclopaedia Universalis, s.v. Aragon, and Annuel, the supplement of 1983. [Le Mouvement perpetuel is a collection of poems.—Trans.]
43. Louis Aragon, second preface, Le Libertinage, p. 14.
44. See Pierre Daix’s insightful biography, Aragon: Une Vie à changer (Paris: Seuil, 1975; 2· ED., PARIS: SEUIL, 1995), which examines the life as well as the literary work.
45. Louis Aragon, “Et comme de toute mort . . .,” in Elsa Triolet and Louis Aragon, Oeuvres romanesques croisées, 42 volumes (Paris: Robert Laffont and Amis du livre progressiste, 1964–1974), 1:13.
46. Louis Aragon, “Vie de Jean-Baptiste A.,” Feu de joie, followed by Le Mouvement perpétuel (first published in 1920 by Au Sans Pareil) (Paris: Gallimard, 1980), p. 43.
47. Louis Aragon, Henri Matisse (Paris: Gallimard, NRF, 1971).
48. Aragon, “Et comme de toute mort . . .,” in Oeuvres romanesques croisées, 1:14.
49. Louis Aragon, Les Voyageurs de l’impériale (1937–1939; first publication censored, 1942) (Paris: Gallimard, NRF, 1947). This book is part of the Monde réel cycle. [It appeared in English as The Century was Young, trans. Hannah Josephson (New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1941).—Trans.]
50. Louis Aragon, “Le mot,” from En étrange pays dans mon pays lui-même (1942), preceded by La Diane française (Paris: Seghers, 1979), p. 135. The French reads in part:
Le mot n’a pas franchi mes lèvres
Le mot n’a pas touché son coeur
Est-ce un lait dont la mort nous sèvre
Est-ce une drogue une liqueur
Jamais je ne l’ai dit qu’en songe
Ce lourd secret pèse entre nous
Et tu me vouais au mensonge
A tes genoux
. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Te nommer ma soeur me désarme
. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Que si j’ai feint c’est pour toi seule
Jusqu’à la fin fait l’innocent
Pour toi seule jusqu’au linceul
Caché mon sang
J’irai jusqu’au bout de mes torts
J’avais naissant le tort de vivre. . . .
51. These words appeared on the first page of the first issue of La Révolution surréaliste, founded on December 1, 1924. The complete collection of the review was published in Paris by Editions Jean-Michel Place in 1975.
52. Louis Aragon, Lautréamont et nous (Paris: Sables, 1972), pp. 77–78. Emphasis mine. For more on the signing of this pact, see especially page 164 on. The piece first appeared in Les Lettres françaises, no. 1185–86 (June 1967).
53. Philippe Forest, “Anicet, Panorama du roman,” L’Infini, no. 45 (1994): 79–102.
54. Aragon, Anicet, p. 112.
55. Aragon, The Libertine, pp. 22–23.
56. Louis Aragon, “Programme,” in Le Mouvement perpétuel, p. 43.
57. Louis Aragon, The Adventures of Telemachus, trans. Renée Riese Hubert and Judd D. Hubert (Boston: Exact Change, 1997); Fénelon, Les Aventures de Télémaque, suite du quatrième livre de l’Odyssée d’Homère, in Oeuvres complètes (Geneva: Slatkine, 1971), 6:398–566.
58. Aragon, The Adventures of Telemachus, p. 32.
59. Founded by Henri Barbusse, Clarté was published from 1919 to 1927.
60. Antonin Artaud’s Le Pèse-Nerfs was published in the collection “Pour vos beaux yeux” in 1927. See also Antonin Artaud, Oeuvre complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), 1:99–132. [Parts of The Nerve Meter appear in Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings, ed. Susan Sontag, trans. Helen Weaver (New York: Farrar, 1976).—Trans.]
61. See Pierre Daix, Aragon, pp. 189–190.
62. Aragon parle, with Dominique Arban (Paris: Seghers, 1968), p. 62.
63. Louis Aragon, Le Roman inachevé (1956; rpt., Paris: Gallimard, Poèsie, 1978), pp. 102–147.
64. Aragon, “Très tard que jamais,” in La Grande Gaîté (Paris: Gallimard, 1929), p. 19. The French reads:
Les choses du sexe
Drôle de façon de parler
Des choses du sexe
Je m’attendais à tout
Mais aucunement à cela
65. Aragon, “Maladroit,” in La Grande Gaîté, pp. 43–44. The French reads:
Premièrement je t’aime
Deuxièmement je t’aime
Troisièmement je t’aime
Je t’aime énormement
Je fais ce que je peux pour le dire
Avec l’élégance désirable
Je n’ai jamais su le moins du monde
Inspirer le désir
Quand j’aurais voulu l’inspirer
Un exhibitionisme naïf en matière de sentiment
Un caractère au moral comme au physique
Nom de Dieu tout ça n’est guère amusant
Comme attraction c’est zero
66. See Aragon, Le Mentir-vrai, pp. 7–48; see also his Défense de l’infini, pp. 185–232.
67. Les Lettres françaises, no. 1015 (February 6, 1963).
68. Published by René Bonnel, with five engravings by André Masson.
69. Louis Aragon, Irene’s Cunt, trans. Alexis Lykiard (London: Creation Books, 1996), p. 84.
70. Louis Aragon, Je n’ai jamais appris à écrire, ou les Incipit (Paris: Skira, 1969), pp. 46–48.
71. Philippe Sollers, “Limites d’Aragon,” in La Guerre du goût (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), p. 393.
72. Louis Aragon, Irene’s Cunt, p. 33.
73. Daniel Bougnoux points out the anagram “Aragon“/”ouragan” [hurricane]; see his excellent analysis of the kaleidoscopic structure of this text in “La langue ardente de l’orage,” Pleine Marge: Cahiers de littérature, d’arts plastique et de critique, no. 12 (December 1990): 79–87.
74. Aragon, Irene’s Cunt, pp. 84 and 85.
75. Mallarmé, “Crisis in Poetry,” p. 42.
76. See Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984).
77. Louis Aragon, Les Communistes, 6 vols. (1st ed., Paris: Editeurs français réunis, 1949–1951; 2· ED., 1967).
78. Louis Aragon, Aurélien (Paris: Gallimard, NRF, 1944) (in English, Louis Aragon, Aurelien, trans. Eithne Wilkins [New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1947]); idem, La Semaine sainte (Paris: Gallimard, NRF, 1958) (in English, Louis Aragon, Holy Week, trans. Haakon Chevalier [London: Hamish Hamilton, 1961]).
79. See Plato’s Philebus.
80. See Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), pp. 388–389, 439; and RSI (1974–1975), ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, Ornicar? nos. 2–5 (1975).
81. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (New York: Viking, 1977).
7. Sartre
1. Aeschylus, Oresteia, in The Complete Greek Tragedies, ed. David Grene and Richmond Lattimore, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
2. Jean-Paul Sartre, The Flies, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Knopf, 1947), pp. 79–80, 159.
3. Jean-Paul Sartre, The Words, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Braziller, 1964).
4. Jean-Paul Sartre, The War Diaries, November 1939–March 1940, trans. Quintin Hoare (New York: Pantheon, 1984).
5. See Jean-Jacques Brochier, Pour Sartre: Le Jour où Sartre refusa le Nobel (Paris: Lattès, 1995).
6. Recalling that Sartre, in The Words, said he merited a single prize, one “for good citizenship,” Michel Contat humorously noted in light of recent documents on the writer’s private life that the only prize he would no doubt be refused would be that of transparency, “for he had begun to lie about his feelings to far too many women in an effort not to complicate his life, with the result that it had become enormously complicated” (“Rien dans les mains, rien dans les poches,” Quai Voltaire, no. 6 [fall 1992]: 82).
7. Ibid., pp. 87–88.
8. Statement translated from the Swedish, Agence France-Presse, October 22, 1964, quoted in Brochier, Pour Sartre, pp. 41–45.
9. Jean-Paul Sartre, On a raison de se révolter (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), p. 30.
10. Quoted in Brochier, Pour Sartre, p. 71.
11. François Mauriac, Le Nouveau Bloc-notes (1958–1960) (Paris: Flammarion, 1961), p. 361, quoting from the column in the October 29–November 4, 1964, issue. Emphasis mine.
12. Quoted in Brochier, Pour Sartre, pp. 76–77, 78. Emphasis mine.
13. Gilles Deleuze, “Il a été mon maître,” Arts, no. 978 (October 28–November 3, 1964): 8–9.
14. André Green, “Des Mouches aux Mots,” in La Déliaison (Paris: Les Belles-Lettres, 1992) p. 357.
15. Sartre, The Flies, pp. 121 and 123.
16. Green, La Déliaison, p. 358.
17. Sartre, The Flies, p. 159.
18. Sartre, The War Diaries, p. 70.
19. Sartre, The Flies, p. 140.
20. Sartre, The War Diaries, p. 42. The Flies was written four years later.
21. Jean-Paul Sartre, The Devil and the Good Lord and Two Other Plays, trans. Kitty Black (New York: Knopf, 1960), p. 34.
22. Alexandre Dumas, Kean, adaptation by Jean-Paul Sartre, in Sartre, The Devil and the Good Lord, pp. 189, 191, and 251.
23. Jean-Paul Sartre, Saint Genet, comédien et martyr (Paris: Gallimard, NRF, 1952) (in English, Jean-Paul Sartre, Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr, trans. Bernard Frechtman [New York: Pantheon, 1963]).
24. Jean-Paul Sartre, The Roads to Freedom: The Age of Reason, The Reprieve, Troubled Sleep, trans. Eric Sutton [The Age of Reason and The Reprieve] and Gerald Hopkins [Troubled Sleep] (New York: Vintage International, 1992). Both The Age of Reason and The Reprieve appeared in French in 1945 and in English translation in 1947; Troubled Sleep appeared in French in 1949 and in English translation in 1951.
25. Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea (New York: New Directions, 1964), p. 122.
26. Jean-Paul Sartre, What Is Literature? (1948), trans. Bernard Frechtman (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 217.
27. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).
28. Sartre, Nausea, p. 12.
29. I refer you here to my Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (trans. Leon S. Roudiez [New York: Columbia University Press, 1989]), which analyzes the melancholic-depressive structure as a border state subjacent to creativity.
30. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 239.
31. Giorgio Agamben, La Communauté qui vient: Théorie de la singularité quelconque (Paris: Seuil, 1990).
32. Sartre, The Words, p. 253.
33. Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique de la raison dialectique (Paris: Gallimard, 1960).
34. Sartre, What Is Literature?, p. 201.
35. Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith (London: NLB, 1976), p. 67.
8. Roland Barthes and Writing as Demystification
1. Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (New York: Hill and Wang, 1968), pp. 3–6.
2. Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977).
3. For a more in-depth discussion of this, see my essay “How Does One Speak to Literature?” in Desire in Language, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980).
4. Roland Barthes, Criticism and Truth, trans. Katrine Pilcher Keuneman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 66.
5. Julia Kristeva, The Samurai, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992).
6. See “Le Sujet en procès,” in Julia Kristeva, Polylogue (Paris: Seuil, 1977), pp. 55–106.
7. Roland Barthes, Critical Essays, trans. Richard Howard (Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 1972), p. 217.
8. Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, pp. 10–12.
9. See Kristeva, “How Does One Speak to Literature?”
10. Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, p. 14.
11. Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982). Published in France in 1955, it was still an influence on the author of Writing Degree Zero, as parts of it were published earlier.
12. Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, pp. 81, 78, 77, 77–78. Emphasis mine.
13. Blanchot, The Space of Literature, p. 33.
14. Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978).
15. Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974).
16. Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, p. 20. Emphasis mine.
17. Jean-Paul Sartre, Search for a Method, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Knopf, 1963), p. 142.
18. Julia Kristeva, Time and Sense: Proust and the Experience of Literature, trans. Ross Guberman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).
19. Sartre, Search for a Method, p. 142.
20. Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith, ed. Jonathan Rée (London: Verso, 1976), 1:99.
21. Roland Barthes, Michelet, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1987).
22. Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, p. 19.
23. See Emile Benveniste, “La Nature des pronoms” (1956) and “De la subjectivité dans le langage” (1958), in Problèmes de linguistique générale (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), pp. 251–57 and pp. 258–66. On novelistic character and personal pronouns, see also Julia Kristeva, Le Texte du roman: Approche sémiologique d’une structure discursive transformationnelle (La Haye: Mouton, 1970) pp. 98 et seq.
24. Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, p. 37.
25. Roland Barthes, Elements of Semiology, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (New York: Hill and Wang, 1968), p. 11.
26. Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, p. 20.
27. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), p. 9.
28. Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, p. 2. Emphasis mine.
29. Barthes, Critical Essays, p. 219. Emphasis mine.
30. Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, p. 13.
31. Barthes, Criticism and Truth, p. 64.
32. G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of the Spirit, trans. J. B. Baillie, in The Philosophy of Hegel, ed. Carl J. Friedrich (New York: Modern Library, 1953), p. 502.
33. Roland Barthes, preface to Sade, Fourier, Loyola, trans. Richard Miller (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), p. 10.
34. Barthes, Criticism and Truth, p. 92.
35. Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola, p. 75.