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The Adventure of a Negation: Literature and the History of Ideas

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Michel Faucheux
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Extract

The time has come to rehabilitate the history of ideas in French literary studies, primarily because we should retreat from the disrepute attached to all universalising approaches to the real in the name of an ever-increasing subdivision of knowledge which proves on occasion to be shortsighted or stultifying.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 39 , Issue 153 , March 1991 , pp. 101 - 120
Copyright
Copyright © 1991 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

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References

Notes

1. A. O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1936 and 1964.

2. Girard is marginal where his research aims more at establishing a fundamental anthropology than at exploring literature.

3. M. Foucault, L'Archéologie du savoir, Paris, Gallimard, 1969, p. 19 (available in English as The Archaeology of Knowledge, London, Routledge, 1990). All quotes are translated by the translator.

4. R. Caillois, Cohérences aventureuses, Paris, Gallimard, Idées, 1976.

5. M. Gauchet, Le Désenchantement du monde, Paris, Gallimard, 1985, p. XXIII.

6. A. Dupront, ‘Problèmes et méthodes d'une histoire de la psycholo gie collective', Annales E.S.C., 1961, pp. 3-11.

7. L. Febvre, ‘Doctrines et sociétés. Étienne Gilson et la philosophie du XIVe siècle', Annales E.S.C., 1948. (reproduced in Combats pour l'histoire, Paris, Armand Colin, 1953, p. 288).

8. Foucault, L'Archéologie du savoir, p. 22.

9. R. Chartier, ‘Historie intellectuelle et histoire des mentalités. Trajec toires et questions', in Histoire intellectuelle et culturelle du XXe siècle, Paris, Albin Michel, 1988, p. 207.

10. L. Febvre, Le Problème de l'incroyance au XVIe siècle. La religion de Ra belais, 1942, reissued Albin Michel, 1968, pp. 141-2 (available in English as The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century. The Re ligion of Rabelais, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1983).

11. We will attempt to define the epistemological assumptions of this genetic interpretation in the sequel to this article (cf. part III, Dis symetric Logic of the Idea).

12. ‘The ideas the ruins awaken in me are great. Everything is reduced to nothingness, perishes, vanishes. Only the world remains. How old the world is! I am walking between two eternities.'

13. Fragmente, ‘Human thought does not relate to the existence of ob jects but to their destiny in nature,' in A. Béguin, L'Âme romantique et le rêve, Paris, José Corti 1939, p. 89.

14. Fragmente aus dem Nachlass eines jungen Physikers, Heidelberg, 1810.

15. Foucault, L'Archéologie du savoir, p. 179.

16. M. Delon, L'Idée d'énergie au tournant des Lumières, Paris, P.U.F., 1988, p. 14.

17. Ibid., p. 15.

18. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being, p. 7.

19. Ibid., p. 11.

20. R. Mauzi, L'Idée de bonheur au XVIIIe siècle, Paris, Armand Colin, 1960.

21. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being, p. 14.

22. Delon, L'Idée d'énergie, p. 15: ‘the significance of an idea varies ac cording to whether it appears in a theoretical treatise, a verse com position or a novel …'

23. J. Kristeva, La Révolution du langage poétique, Paris, Seuil, 1974, p. 102 (available in English as Revolution in Poetic Language, New York, Columbia University Press, n.d.).

24. Caillois, Cohérences aventureuses.

25. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being, p. 15.

26. It is true that the myth of the cave is Greek, but the symbol also appears in the Gospels, from the nativity to the tomb. In each case, though naturally with variations, the light of truth is linked to shadows.

27. M. Heidegger, ‘La doctrine de Platon sur la vérité', in Questions III, Paris, Gallimard, 166, pp. 102-63.

28. J. Starobinski, L'Oeil vivant, Paris, Gallimard, 1961, p. 23 (available in English as The Living Eye, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1989): ‘If the reflexive eye can be forced to extend beyond the misfortune of reflexion, complete speech (which is poetry) seeks and finds an analogous power to surpass.'

29. M. Heidegger, Was ist Metaphysik, Frankfurt, 1949 (quote translated from French edition Qu'est-ce-que la métaphysique?, Paris, Nathan, 1985, p. 65): ‘At the same time, the question of Nothingness perme ates the whole body of Metaphysics, for all that it restricts us to the question of the origin of negation.'

30. Starobinski, L'Oeil vivant, p. 9.

31. J. Starobinski, La Transparence et l'Obstacle, Paris, Gallimard, 1971 (available in English as Transparency and Obstruction, Chicago, Uni versity of Chicago Press, 1988).

32. C. Ramnoux, La Nuit et les enfants de la nuit, Paris, Flammarion, 1986, cf. chap. II, ‘La nuit de la cosmogonie' (a study of Hesiod's treat ment of night).

33. A. Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969 (quote translated from French edition Du monde clos à l'univers infini, Paris, Gallimard, 1973, p. 13).

34. T.S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1970. Cf. by the same author The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1978.

35. Caillois, Cohérences aventureuses, p. 206.

36. B. Mandelbrot, Les Objets fractals, Paris, Flammarion, 1975, reissued 1989 (available in English as Fractal Geometry of Nature, W. H. Free man, 1987); cf. p. 5: ‘The natural objects in question share the common factor of an irregular or broken shape. To study them I have conceived, developed and extensively employed a new geometry of nature. The key idea is designated by one of two synonymous neologisms, "fractal object" and "fractal", terms which I have just invented […] from the Latin adjective fractus, meaning "irregular" or "broken"'.

37. Foucault, L'Archéologie du savoir, p. 9.

38. Cf, for example, J. Gleick, La Théorie du chaos, Paris, Albin Michel, 1989.

39. This is indeed necessary in the concept of Volksgeist expounded by Johann Gottfried Herder in Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte, 1774: ‘The truth, the spirit of a nation, is rooted in the land of its birth.'

40. Cf. M. Serres, Genèse, Paris, Grasset, 1982, p. 175: ‘In other words, our metaphysics is felt metaphorically through our physics […] Bergson was therefore not in error when he said that our metaphysics are metaphors of the solid.'

41. Ramnoux, La Nuit et les enfants de la nuit, p. 75: ‘in the Greek tradition the "very first to appear" and the "first named", in the very front row chaos in the sense of "fissure" or "gap", appear and grow. They are not preceded by anything unborn, nothing in any way conceivable with a name! It is therefore correct to speak of genesis and not of creation.'

42. Gauchet, Le Désenchantement du monde, p. II.

43. J. Kristeva, Recherches pour une sémanalyse, Paris, Seuil, 1969, p. 249.

44. Negation (Aufhebung) takes a corresponding verb, aufheben, which for Hegel has the meaning of raise, suppress, preserve. Such is the dialectic which denies the preceding instant but without despatching it into nothingness and constitutes the raising which makes it possible to proceed to synthesis.

45. G. Frege, Écrits logiques et philosophiques, Paris, Seuil, 1971.

46. S. Freud, ‘Die Verneinung', revue française de psychanalyse, vol. 7, no. 2, 1934. Cf. the commentary of J. Hippolyte in J. Lacan, Écrits du Dr Lacan, Paris, Seuil, 1965, pp. 879-88: ‘to present one's being on the pattern of not so being, this is really what this Aufhebung is about, in the re pression which is not an acceptance of the repressed individual.'

47. Cf. Kristeva, La Révolution du langage poétique, p. 101: ‘Negativity is the logical impulse which can present itself under the theories of negation and of the negation of negation but which does not identify itself with them because it is something different from these theories: the logical functioning of the movement producing them.'

48. Ibid., p. 105.

49. Cf. Heidegger, Was ist Metaphysik, p. 59 of French edition: ‘The "not" is not the negation which engenders it but the negation is based on the "not" which has its origins in the annihilation of Nothingness'.

50. Th. W. Adorno, Dialectique négative, Paris, Payot, 1978, p. 118 (avail able in English as Negative Dialectics, London, Routledge, 1990).

51. One may perceive in the Gospel texts a very large number of stylistic markers of negation: coordinating conjunctions, adverbs, chiasmus, etc.

52. Cf. for example the episode of the precious ointment at Bethany (Matthew 26, 6-13).

53. This is also how one may understand the Christian parable: Aufhebung, the raising, the genesis of Meaning in the everyday character of dis course; the other aspect is the narrative casting into the abyss of Christ-Logos.

54. Serres, Genèse, p. 85: ‘The Being as Being is clear, as also is the Being as Word.'

55. On this point, see Y. Vadé, L' Enchantement litteraire, Paris, Gallimard, 1990.