Transcript
Claire ParnetSo, "L" is Literature.
"L"? We're moving on to "L"?
Claire ParnetAlready!
Yes?
Claire ParnetSo literature haunts your philosophy books and your life. And you read lots of books, and re-read them, books of what's called "great literature." You have always considered great literary writers as thinkers. Between your books on Kant and Nietzsche, you wrote Proust and Signs, it's a famous book, and then subsequently you enlarged it. Lewis Carroll and Zola in Logic of Sense, Masoch, Kafka, British and American literatures- and one sometimes gets the impression that it's through literature more than through the history of philosophy that you inaugurate a new kind of thinking. So, I would like to know first if you have always read copiously?
Yes, yes, At one point, I was reading a lot more philosophy since that was part of my craft, my apprenticeship, and I no longer had much time for novels. But great novels, I have read them throughout my life, and I read them more and more. So is that useful for philosophy? Yes, certainly, I find it useful. For example, I owe an immense amount to Fitzgerald who is, nonetheless, not a very philosophical novelist, what I owe to Fitzgerald is immense. What I owe to Faulkner is enormous as well, and. . . I forget here, I don't have. . . But it's self-explanatory, according to what we discussed earlier because we've made a lot of progress here- and I'm sure that didn't escape you: it's this story that the concept is never alone. At the same time that the concept pursues its task, it makes us see things, that is, it's plugged into percepts, and all of sudden, one finds these percepts in a novel. There are perpetual communications from concepts to percepts. Moreover, there are also problems of style that are the same in philosophy and literature. The great literary characters- let's pose the question in very simple terms-the great literary characters are great thinkers. I re-read Melville a lot, and it goes without saying that the Captain Ahab is a great thinker, it goes without saying that Bartleby is a thinker, not in the same way, not the same kind of thinker, but he's a thinker. In any case, they cause us to think in such a way that a literary work traces as large a trail of intermittent concepts as it does percepts, certainly. Quite simply, it's not the task of the literary writer who cannot do everything at once, he/she is caught up in the problems of percepts, of creating visions, causing perceptions, and creating characters- do you have any idea of what it is to create a character? It's something frightening. And a philosopher creates concepts, ok, but it happens that they communicate greatly since, in certain ways, the concept is a character, and the character takes on dimensions of the concept, I believe. You know what I find in common? What these two activities have in common: "great literature" and "great philosophy" they bear witness to life, what I was calling "power of action" earlier, they bear witness for life. This is the reason [great authors] are not often in good health, except sometimes, there are cases. . . Victor Hugo, ok. . . One musn't say that all writers don't enjoy good health since many do. But why are there so many writers who do not enjoy good health? It's because he/she experiences a flood of life, that's why. To some extent, whether it's the weak health of Spinoza or the weak health of Lawrence, what is it? It corresponds almost to what I said earlier about the complaint: these writers have seen something that overwhelms them, they are seers, visionaries. They saw something that was too much for them, so they cannot handle it and it breaks them. Why is Chekhov broken to such an extent? He "saw" something. Philosophers and literary writers are in the same situation. There are things we manage to see, and in some ways, literally, we never recover. This happens frequently for authors, but generally, these are precisely percepts at the edge of the bearable, or concepts at the edge of the thinkable. So, between the creation of a great character and the creation of a concept, so many links exist that one can see it as constituting somewhat the same enterprise.
Claire ParnetDo you consider yourself to be a writer in philosophy, as one would say writer in a literary sense?
I don't know if I consider myself a writer in philosophy, but I know that every great philosopher is a great writer.
Claire ParnetThere's no nostalgia for creating a great fictional work when one is a great philosopher? I'm referring to you. . .
No, that doesn't even come up, it's as if you asked a painter why he doesn't create music. One could conceive of a philosopher who also wrote novels, why not? I don't consider Sartre to have been a novelist, although he did try to be. Are there any great philosophers who were also important novelists? No, really, I can't think of any. But on the other hand, philosophers have created characters, it has happened: Plato created characters, eminently, and Nietzsche created characters, notably Zarathustra. So these are intersections that are discussed constantly, and I consider the creation of Zarathustra to be an immense success poetically and literarily, just as Plato's characters were. At such points, it's hard to distinguish between concepts and characters, and these are perhaps the most beautiful moments.
Claire ParnetAnd your love for secondary literary authors, like Villiers de l'lsle-Adam or Restif de la Bretonne, have you always cultivated this affection?
I find it truly bizarre to hear Villiers referred to as a secondary author. If you consider that question. . . But there is something really shameful, entirely shameful: when I was quite young, I liked the idea of reading an author's work in its entirety, the complete works. As a result, I had great affection not for secondary authors, although that often coincided, but for authors who had written little. So it was because some things were too much for me, like Victor Hugo was so far beyond me that I was ready to say that Hugo wasn't a very good writer. On the other hand, I knew the works of Paul-Louis Courrier nearly by heart at the time, completely, completely, although what he wrote really wasn't substantial. So yes, I had this penchant for so-called secondary authors, although Villiers is not a secondary author.
Claire ParnetWell, he's a great author, but secondary in his era in relation to. . .
Joubert, Joubert was also an author I knew completely, on the one hand because it-and this is really a shameful reason- it gave me a certain prestige to be familiar with authors that were unknown, or hardly known. But all that was a kind of mania, and it took me quite a while to learn just how great Hugo is, and that the size of his work was no measure. So, it's true that in so-called secondary literatures... It's true, it's true that so-called secondary authors. . . In Russian literature, for example, it's not limited to Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, but one dare not call [Nikolai] Leskov secondary since there is so much that is astonishing in Leskov. So these are still great geniuses. I feel I have little to say on these points, but in any case, that's behind me now, this search for secondary writers. But I am happy when I encounter something in an unknown author that seems to be an extraordinary concept or character. Yes, I have not engaged in any systematic research [in this domain].
Claire ParnetBut, other than your [book on] Proust, which is a sustained work on a single author, literature has such a presence in your philosophy, and one could also say that, it's a reference for examples. But you never truly devoted a full-length book to literature, a thoughtful book on literature.
I just haven't had the time, but I plan to do so.
Claire ParnetI know that this has haunted you.
I plan to do it because I want to.
Claire Parnet[A book] of criticism?
Of criticism. . . well, yes, well, on the problem of what "writing" means, for me, in literature. You are familiar with my whole [research] program, so we'll see if I have the time.
Claire ParnetYes. . . And I wanted to pose a final question: you read and re-read the classical authors, but you don't seem to read many contemporary authors, or that you don't really like to discover contemporary literature, that is, that you always would prefer to select a great [canonic] author, or re-read one, than to see what is being published or whatever is directly contemporary for us.
It's not that I don't like. . . I understand what you mean here, and I'll answer quickly: it's not at all that I don't like to read them. Rather it's such a truly specialized activity, and very difficult, in which one has to have training. It's something very difficult in contemporary production to have the special inclination. It's just like some people finding new painters: in this as well, it's something that one has to learn about. I greatly admire people who go into galleries and feel that there is someone who is truly a painter there. But I simply cannot do this, I always am in need. . . You're right, it took me five years to understand, even just a little, the kind of innovation- not for Beckett, that happened immediately -the innovation of Robbe-Grillet's writing. I was as stupid as the stupidest [person] when talking about Robbe-Grillet when he started out. I understood absolutely nothing. It took me a long time, five years. So, in this respect,I am not a discoverer, whereas in philosophy, I am more confident because I am sensitive to a new tone and what, on the other hand, is completely nil, repetition, and redundant statements, etc. In the [domain of the] novel, I am quite sensitive, I am only confident enough to know what has already been said a thousand times and is of no interest. It did happen to me one time, for Farrachi, I managed to discover- in my own way-someone I judged to be a very, very good young novelist, Armand Farrachi. So the question you raise is quite sound, but I answer by saying: one must not believe that, without experience, one can judge what is being created. I would almost say that what I prefer, something that happens and that brings me great joy, is when something that I am creating off on my own has an echo in a young writer's or a young painter's work. I am not saying that, for this reason, he is good and so am I. But, this is how I have a kind of encounter with what is happening currently, that belongs to another mode [of creation]. I mean that my radical insufficiency in regards to judgment is compensated by these encounters with people who are doing things that resonate with what I am doing, and inversely.
Claire ParnetFor painting and cinema, for example, these encounters have an advantage since you go [to galleries and to the movies], whereas for bookstores, one would have trouble imagining you strolling into a bookstore and looking at books that just came out over the previous few months.
You are right, but this is perhaps linked to the idea that literature is not very strong at the moment- an idea that is not in my mind, one that is not preconceived- it's obvious that literature is not very strong at the moment, and that it is so corrupted -no need even to talk about all that-that it's corrupted- by the system of distribution, of literary prizes, etc., that it's not even worth the trouble.
Claire ParnetOk, We are going on to "M" since you don't want to say anything more.