larvatus prodeo

A lively conversation on the titular subject, concerning the availability of theory in the humanities. Five languages have been deployed to date. All comers are welcome.

    Les pages qui suivent sont un commentaire pour la conférence sur Baudelaire lue par Paul Valéry à Monaco le 19 février 1924. Une étude d’importance historique considérable, Situation de Baudelaire touche à toutes grandes questions de la poétique de Valéry autant que de celle de Baudelaire. Bien que le poète fût contraint à simplifier sa pensée par le caractère officiel des circonstances de la présentation de ce texte, on peut y trouver des abondants témoignages de l’étendue et de la profondeur de sa philosophie de la théorie littéraire. D’ailleurs, grâce à son importance critique, ce texte peut être regardé comme contenant les prolégomènes à toute étude baudelairienne. Ces pages sont donc destinées à servir d’une préface à ma propre étude sur Baudelaire. Par conséquent, je remarquerai sur quelques similarités et différences entre les deux poètes.( Read more... )

— for Eric Gans

	Quand il parlait, il ne levait jamais un bras ni un doigt : il avait tué la marionnette.     — Paul Valéry, Monsieur Teste
	When he spoke, he never raised his arm, nor his finger; he had killed the puppet.     — Paul Valéry, Monsieur Teste[0]

    It is customary to introduce a French subject in the history of ideas (l’histoire des mentalités) with the simile coined by the great mediaevalist Marc Bloch:^[1] « Le bon historien, lui, ressemble à l’ogre de la légende. Là où il flaire la chair humaine, il sait que là est son gibier. » The good historian, says Bloch, resembles the legendary ogre: wherever he smells human flesh, there he knows to seek his prey. But the postmodern ogre is a conflicted creature. Undermining the cause of his own carnivorous appetite, he holds that the singularity of definitively modern works consists precisely in their fundamental ambiguity. In so far as historical events are molded by human hands, this singularity must extend to all subjects of modern history.
    Witness Ross Chambers epitomizing French literary modernism in the two key masterpieces of that movement, Charles Baudelaire’s verse collection Les fleurs du mal and Gustave Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary:^[2]

Their writing has an elusive quality that resists interpretative closure and makes it difficult, perhaps impossible, to locate a subject in which an “intended meaning” would have originated. As a result, reading modern works becomes a literally interminable procedure, and in both the text and its interpretation the insistence of unconscious forces ― that is, of desire ― becomes impossible to ignore.

Physicists teach that perpetual motion is impossible. Economists agonize over the prospects of full employment. Little do they know that resistance to interpretative closure is all it takes to ensure that the tribe of literary critics becomes fully employed in the manufacture of perpetual motion compelled by the insistence of desire and predicated upon the impossibilities of ignoring.( Read more... )

Descartes’ magical motto, larvatus prodeo, resonates with reason of classical antiquity. Eubulides of Megara, the contemporary opponent of Aristotle, and very likely the most accomplished inventor of puzzles in the history of logic, bequeathed to him the philosophical concept of the larvatus: Though I know my father, though he is the masked man, I still may fail to know the masked man, I still may fail to know my father as the masked man. Their schools disagreed on the way of solving this paradox. Both the peripatetics and the Megarians understood that all knowledge referred to universals. But the former insisted further that such universals were both physically and logically inseparable from the concrete particulars that exemplified them. By contrast, the latter posited an unbridgeable chasm between the real thing and its ideal representation. Eubulides pointed out that the true object of my knowledge is my father’s representation, or his eidos. In so representing, the eidos enjoys no physical link with the material presence of its representandum, the object being represented. Thus it it need not manifest itself coevally and contemporaneously with the representandum. Aristotle maintained that all corporeal presentation necessarily coincides with cognitive representation by every universal exemplified in the representandum so presented. For him, therefore, the failure of my father’s palpable presence to guarantee my recognition of his person, was an acute embarrassment. ( Read more... )