Seminar 8: The relation between Philosophers’ lives and their works
A lecture by Bruno Clément (Univ. Paris VIII)
Presented by the Writing and Society Research Group at the University of Western Sydney, in association with The State Library of NSW
August 2 2006
5.30pm for 6pm
Dixson Room
State Library of NSW
Macquarie St., Sydney
$17/$12 Concession
Bookings essential on (02) 9273 1770
The idea that the literary work has something to do with the life of the person who writes it originated in the nineteenth century. Sainte-Beuve was its well-known and unhappy promoter, and Marcel Proust (with his ‘Contre Sainte-Beuve’) its committed adversary. They are perhaps not as far-removed from one another as has been suggested, or even as Proust himself intimated. The “social I,” of course, is not the “true I,” but neither Sainte-Beuve nor Proust would think of denying the fact that the work is the result of an essentially subjective process.
This, then, is clearly an old thesis and no writer of the twentieth century failed to choose sides with respect to it, whether within his or her work or outside of it. Sartre was one of the writers most concerned with it: “What is the relation between the man and the work? I have never stated it until now, nor has anyone, to my knowledge” (preface to L’Idiot de la famille). So too, the life story or the autobiographical account already enter into philosophy with Saint Augustine (with his Confessions of 397 AD) and Diogenes Laertius’ in his Lives of Philosophers written in 3rd century AD. Yet rather than trying to describe a life that conforms to a philosophical thesis, I am interested in a different relation between a philosopher’s life and works: the idea that something that happens in a life might be transformed into a thought; that thought should be understood as the thought of a living body; that the concept resembles the person who conceptualized it. In short that biographical events determine the nature, the scope, the acuteness of philosophical questioning.
This idea will be exemplified with reference to René Descartes and the 18th century French philosopher Voltaire. There was, from the beginning a profound and doubtless reciprocal animosity between Voltaire and his older brother Armand, an ancient and probably original animosity, which from very early on took the form of a competition. Their family encouraged them to undertake tournaments of sorts in the form of jousts testing their skills in poetry and oration; and in doing this they required the boys to emulate masters of poetry and rhetoric.
This rivalry leaves its trace, for example, in the decided refusal to consider the love of the brother a religious obligation, and in Voltaire’s method in his Lettres philosophiques where he reproduces the habits of the verbal tests of childhood, with Pascal set up in place of Armand: ‘I have carefully chosen some of Pascal’s pensées. I have placed my responses below’. This formally new device, a curious hybrid between the letter and the dialogue (both of which are imaginary) returns us to the childhood debates. Responding to Pascal, Voltaire instinctively reinstates himself in a situation closely resembling that of his earliest years, where, session after session, a cruel and exciting rite, engendered, nourished, and probably rendered mythical the inexhaustible fraternal disagreement.
Bruno Clément is Professor of French Literature at l’Université de Paris VIII, and President of the Collège International de Philosophie (see http://www.ci-philo.asso.fr). His publications include L’Oeuvre sans qualités—rhétorique de Samuel Beckett (Seuil, 1994) [The Work without qualities—the rhetoric of Samuel Beckett] , Le Lecteur et son modèle (Presses Universitaires de France, 1999) [The Reader and their Model], and L’Invention du commentaire—Augustin, Jacques Derrida (PUF, 2000) [The Invention of Commentary—Augustine, Jacques Derrida] . His Le Récit de la méthode [The Story of the Method] (Seuil, collection “Poétique”) will be published later this year.