Community, myth and recognition in twentieth-century French literature and thought

188 Pages·2009·1.334 MB·English

by  Lübecker, Nikolaj d'Origny

Community, Myth and Recognition
in Twentieth-Century French
Literature and Thought
Continuum Literary Studies Series
Related titles available in the series:
Adorno and Literature, David Cunningham and Nigel Mapp
Incarnation of Language, Michael O’Sullivan
Community, Myth
and Recognition in
Twentieth-Century French
Literature and Thought
Nikolaj Lübecker
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© Nikolaj Lübecker 2009
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Contents
Acknowledgements vi
Introduction 1
1 Breton and Bataille in the Late 1930s: The Convulsive
Community 20
2 Breton and Bataille in the 1940s: Transparent and
Absent Communities 52
3 Sartre in the Late 1940s: The Literary Community 87
4 Early Barthes, Late Barthes: The End of Community? 113
Conclusion 140
Notes 151
Bibliography 169
Index 177
Acknowledgements
The groundwork for this book was done at the University of Copenhagen
between 2001 and 2004, where I benefi tted from a post-doctoral fellowship
generously sponsored by the Carlsberg Foundation: thank you! The manuscript
was fi nished in the summer of 2008 at the end of a year of research leave funded
by the University of Aberdeen and the Arts and Humanities Research Council
(AHRC): thank you again!
A number of colleagues, institutions and editors have helped me develop the
ideas presented in this book. In no particular order I would like to thank
Nicholas Harrison, Mark Antliff, former colleagues at the University of
Copenhagen with whom I fi rst discussed the notion of recognition, Tania Ørum
and my friends in The Nordic Society for Avant-Garde Studies, my generous
colleagues at the University of Aberdeen (not least Chris Fynsk, Michael
Syrotinski, Simon Ward and Alison Saunders), the anonymous reviewers of the
AHRC and Colleen Coalter and Anna Fleming at Continuum. A part of the
argument presented in Chapter 3 was fi rst published as ‘Sartre’s Silence –
Limits of Recognition in Why Write’ (vol. 14.1 (2008): 42–57); for this chapter
I benefi tted from the expert advice of the former editors of Sartre Studies Inter-
national, Andrew Leak and Christina Howells. A big thank you also to the post-
graduate students at the University of Aberdeen who worked with me on the
concept of recognition, and in particular to Jay Murphy and Ranald Macdonald
for proofreading my English.
My gratitude goes to my sister Marie for keeping things together in
Copenhagen – and to Julie who continues to be there.
Arts & Humanities
Research Council
Community, Myth and Recognition was supported
by the Arts & Humanities Research Council
Introduction
When Kant heard the news of revolution, he interrupted his walk. Goethe continued
his. How pretentious of them both!
Aragon 1991: 8
Louis Aragon is right: it seems pretentious when intellectuals believe they have
a special role to play in times of political upheaval: after all, revolutions are
made by people who act, not by writers. Some of the most virulent attacks on
intellectuals (often made by other intellectuals) have been aimed at writers who
believed their theoretical knowledge made them particularly well-equipped to
enter the battlefi eld of politics. But Aragon is right again: it seems pretentious
when intellectuals refrain from engaging with such a signifi cant historical
moment as that of a political revolution. Do writers not have a role to play in
those circumstances? Can a complete withdrawal from the political sphere be
justifi ed? Not surprisingly, some of the most virulent attacks on intellectuals
(often made by other intellectuals) have been aimed at those writers who in
times of turmoil ignored politics and continued to perfect their Alexandrian
verses.
In keeping with a somewhat clichéd opinion, Aragon plays the philosopher
against the poet, Kant against Goethe. As if the philosopher would be particu-
larly inclined to interfere with political affairs and the poet particularly keen to
stay in the ivory tower. But does Aragon subscribe to this cliché? The apparent
irony of the quote makes it diffi cult to determine precisely who or what this for-
mer Dadaist is mocking; we do not know where his sympathies lie. Further-
more, the context does not eliminate the ambiguities of the statement: these
sentences are taken from his Treatise on Style (1928) – an aphoristic and ironic
text that does not strive for univocity.
One possibility would be to read the sentences along what might be described
as avant-garde lines. In his seminal Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974), Peter Bürger
argued that a defi ning trait of the avant-garde was the attempt to do away with
the distinction between art and life (Lebenspraxis). It could be said that Aragon’s
sentences demonstrate this point by undermining the distinction between poli-
tics and any kind of writing. The error made by both Kant and Goethe, then,
2 Community, Myth and Recognition
would be to subscribe to an idea of distinct spheres. The quote suggests that
Kant believes that the time has now come for him to enter the sphere of politics.
Goethe believes that poetry is distinct from politics and therefore refrains from
entering the political sphere. Both are wrong. From 1925 the surrealists kept
underlining that there is no distinction between the realities of the mind and
the world of material reality. It is therefore never a question of entering or not
entering the social sphere. Writing a philosophical treatise or a treatise on style,
walking in the woods . . . these activities will always already be part of the same
universe as the revolution.
Obviously, this reading does not solve the problem of what Kant or Goethe
should have done. However, precisely because Aragon does not solve the
problem, he not only avoids any moralizing but also the meta-position that both
Kant and Goethe could be said to assume. Instead, he uses humour, irony and
a touch of anarchism to dismantle the well-known opposition between engage-
ment and l’art pour l’art.
I. Community, Myth and Recognition
The four chapters in this book all study these intricate relations between
politics, literature and thought in mid-twentieth-century France. When addres-
sing such a vast topic over a 50-year period there can obviously be no claim to
comprehensiveness: many relevant and interesting texts have had to be left out
of this study as each chapter concentrates on a specifi c crystallization of the
complex relation between politics and literature. The texts discussed are found
in the works of André Breton (1896–1966), Georges Bataille (1897–1962), Jean-
Paul Sartre (1905–80) and Roland Barthes (1915–80). But this book is not only
a series of case studies on the vast topic of politics and literature. Chapters are
tied together by a common theme and therefore make sense in relation to each
other. This theme is community. What kind of community are the chosen authors
writing and dreaming about? (How) do they think literature and art can help
to conceptualize this community?1 As the Aragon quote suggests: there are no
simple answers to these questions.
To structure the discussion of literature and community, I use the two other
notions mentioned in the title: myth and recognition. Both of these will here be
considered as mechanisms for constituting a community. What does this mean?
In the fi rst part of the twentieth century it was a widespread view among authors,
politicians and many others that only the reference to a common mythical
ground would allow social construction to transcend the level of a merely
formal assemblage. Myths were believed to express something vital we all have
in common, and it was therefore crucial to think the relation between commu-
nity and myth. At the same time myths were poetic and as such undou btedly
appeared particularly attractive to many literary and artistic individuals who
Introduction 3
believed that this was an area where they could contribute. This, in any case, was
a widespread view among the members of the surrealist movement.
Myth, of course, is a heterogeneous notion – it does not have the sharper
contours of a concept, but exists in numerous versions and can be approached
from disciplines as diverse as anthropology, psychology, poetry, sociology and
religious studies. In surrealism these approaches often combine in ways so intri-
cate that they cannot be disentangled. There is little doubt that precisely the
unsystematic character of this notion was a key reason for its success in the
poetico-political circles of the mid-twentieth century. This study will prioritize
political and psychological ideas about myth and I shall put particular emphasis
on Georges Sorel (1847–1922) whose theory of myth will be presented in the
second part of this introduction.
Recognition, on the other hand, is a concept. It has sometimes been traced
as far back as to Aristotle (Ricœur 2004), but it received its most famous devel-
opment in the master–slave section of G.W.F. Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit
(1807). Recognition will also be considered as a mechanism for constituting
communities. In the mid-twentieth century, it was often assumed that a true
society would become possible only with the mutual recognition of conscious-
nesses. For the writers studied in this book, the ideal of mutual recognition was
associated with more or less orthodox versions of Marxism. The political trans-
lation of the idea of ‘full reciprocal recognition’ was thought to be ‘the classless
society’: a society in which the distinction between masters and slaves had fi nally
been abolished. As we shall see, not all the writers addressed in this book
believed in the possibility of reaching this state of mutual recognition. Instead
of celebrating the mediating powers of the ‘struggle for recognition’, they often
struggled with ‘the struggle for recognition’ – and therefore with the idea of
community.
Like myth, the concept of recognition has been – and continues to be –
developed in very different ways. One of the more unorthodox and most famous
interpretations of the struggle for recognition was presented in Paris by the
Russian philosopher Alexandre Kojève (1902–68) in the 1930s. It had tremen-
dous infl uence on French intellectual life in the mid-twentieth century and will
also play an important part in this study (Kojève’s theory will be presented in
the third part of this introduction).
The reason for focusing on myth and recognition is that these stand as key
notions for the conception of community in French intellectual life in the
mid-twentieth century. It may clarify matters to describe these two notions as
positive : it was often argued that the disclosure of a common mythical ground
and/or the ideal of a state of mutual recognition of consciousnesses would
allow the construction of a better community. In this respect, myth and recogni-
tion play off against a series of negative counterparts. Karl Marx’s ‘alienation’
is one of these, Hegel’s ‘unhappy consciousness’ another and Georg Lukács’s
‘reifi cation’ a third. To these notions can be added a number of less well-defi ned