Faced with the enigma of a life perpetually changing, unceasingly reborn and corrupted, the human mind has doubtless wanted to create for itself some stable representations, images of the heavens and of thought. And yet, between the crystal and the smoke (Atlan 1979: 5), philosophy has always swung from one pole to the other, both equally threatening for consciousness: far-reaching order on the one hand and confused proliferation on the other. If the brilliance of the unmoving, its major chords, its fullness, soon won the day, the history of ideas also shows, if more discreetly, the quiet persistence of a less assured melodics, of alteration and of turmoil.1 Since at least the Romantic era, modern man has leaned toward the values of what is passing, of movement, of evanescence. The ideal is no longer to abstract from the ferment of Nature an intelligible unity or some celestial archetype, but rather to unveil the hidden face, the chaotic and Dionysian reserves. Today, it is these reserves, after so many centuries of a marmoreal metaphysics, which have come center stage. It is these dislocations, arising from some subterranean heritage, which are pushing thought to turn now toward the uncertain, to read the world as indeterminate.
This disintegrating approach, today commonplace, which would call into doubt all coherence and all exactitude, is nonetheless ambiguous; it has no obvious concern bar an irreparable break, a disorder for its own sake, as if the goal were now to raise to the theoretical level something more unstable and equivocal: the weariness with existence, the dissipation and ephemerality of all things. The decay to which each being is heir thus winds its way to the heart of the system, a deep-seated disequilibrium, the accident which is in fact necessity. For were it not for this logic of entropy, how could one understand why our modernity has chosen exile as its emblem? Or why the infatuation with finitude, echoed in so many contemporary works, both poetic and critical, has so long marked our aging civilization?
It is at the heart of these questions that we must place the sumptuous, stifling and ânegativeâ forms of twentieth-century writing. Against the seductive artifices of the whole, the mirages of the rational, they put up, in literature as in philosophy, the anarchic forces of the human tragedy: Pain, Anguish, Exile. Agents of a necessary subversion, these paradigms of loss undo identities, erode reference points and break through the barrier of meaning. Witnesses on behalf of that which in experience can no longer find its end or its close, they form the credo of a new ethics, a salvation through lack that wrenches the infinite off its base, and that wards off, by means of the void, the crush of presence.
In this primordial drama, Death plays the lead role, its disintegrating power, its eyes gouged out: anything which harrows out its pain within us, which denatures us in order to hand us over to the insubstantial. Death the bandit undoes our moorings, shakes off the chains of the concrete. Thereâs a shackle to be broken, a trap to be escaped, into weightlessness. Since Hegel, it is by traversing precipices that man has reached the self, in the horror of oneâs will to look and see.
A wayfaring for death, then, âas one goes forth unto deathâ (Levinas 1979: 34). It has given rise in passing, in the century of collapsesâour centuryâto many a knight errant. Against the suffocation of the real, captains have risen up. Thomas Mann, Pessoa or Beckettâtoward what out-of-bounds, what no worldâs land,2 more essential than life itself?
In France, for over a century, an exquisite sense of forsakenness has imbued literature, a nobility in abandonment, something like pride. Like a passion for being, setting its face against the living. Since the period between the wars, a slew of critical texts, an entire legacy of ruptures, effusions, fluidities, has admitted its debt to the master of Jenaâbut on the side of nothingness, on the side of that which gives up, that can no longer form a whole or be understood.3 On the side of the flaw, and the slippage, the shores of change and of the unquiet unanswered question, KojĂšve, Bataille and Blanchot, spanning the century, cast off plenitude like a worn-out suit. The shade of Heidegger, irresistibly, encroaches on modern thought.4 A family waiving its claim, averse to whatâs offered, to the continuous, to material and plenteous sustenance. A refusal to be satisfied, a rejection of any fullness of light.
Whence this deviance, this initiatory collapse that sets the subject afloat, so painfully diaphanous and isolated? In our age of conquest, what to relate to this strategy of renouncement, like a deadly alchemy whose secret, handed down through the ages, now finally overcomes us?5
Is it from the depths of Greece that this bitter discordance arises, this pose of the philosopher âpracticing to die,â as if to better escape the constraints, the tender traps, of the sensible, in order to save the essential, which denounces the perishable shell, and serenely drinks the hemlock? Is it from the Phaedo that this inversion of suffering springs forth, this abstinence transmuted into victory, when immortality binds itself to death, trusts itself to it, gives itself over to the trial of an infinite dying?
Or perhaps itâs from an obsessive, Christian iconographyâthat image of Calvary in its strange tenacity, this chiaroscuro little by little sublated, which changes into resurrection and a revelation of light? Is it to the âparadox of the crucified Oneâ (Dastur 1996: 14), so deeply anchored in our collective memory, that we owe this melancholic longing for death, the ecstasy of passivity, which still stokes our mythic imaginary?6
Across history, in various guises, these anthropological structures have surreptitiously continued to exercise their magnetism. From the critique of appearances to the negation of the divine, from the praise of thought to the glorification of nothingness, they have been digging the ditch between the human and life. Reform, Cartesian humanism, Renaissance skepticism: from century to century, the âsearch after truthâ7 has levied its ransom of denial and incertitude. A Pascalian eagle spreads its sorrow little by little, touches with its snowy wing the thinking subject (cf. VigĂ©e 1960: 24â29). After Chateaubriand come Baudelaire and MallarmĂ©, after Byron and Jean-Paul Richter, Hofmannsthal then Rilke (cf. VigĂ©e 1960: 71â82).
In this crepuscular collapse, one configuration remains obdurate which expresses acquiescence of consciousness in its own disappearance, a mysticism little by little laicized8 and torn, where the conflict of man and nature is secularized, showing its transhistorical force. God is dead, who called man to distance himself from the vanities of this world; no artesian well bursts forth deep in the desert. But, strangely persevering, inaccessib...