Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- Part I DIFFERENCE AND HUMAN RELATIONS
- Chapter One Difference and dissension
- Chapter Two Subjectivity and indistinction
- Chapter Three Abjection into art
- Part II THE BODY AND SEXUAL DIFFERENCE
- Part III GENRE AND DIFFERENCE
- Part IV CONCLUSION
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN FRENCH
Chapter Two - Subjectivity and indistinction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- Part I DIFFERENCE AND HUMAN RELATIONS
- Chapter One Difference and dissension
- Chapter Two Subjectivity and indistinction
- Chapter Three Abjection into art
- Part II THE BODY AND SEXUAL DIFFERENCE
- Part III GENRE AND DIFFERENCE
- Part IV CONCLUSION
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN FRENCH
Summary
Self and Other
If the issue of difference in Sarraute's universe takes the contradictory forms described in the previous chapter, this is because her work is concerned far less with the intelligibility of that universe than with the nature of the experience that is lived in it. And since experience presupposes a subject, the result is that, as we have already begun to see, issues of sameness and difference in Sarraute's work are not based primarily on discrimination or judgement, but acquire a heavy existential charge. Difference is experienced subjectively either as a painful exclusion, or as an impulse towards a pure affirmation of self. Similarly, sameness is a condition which is either longed for by a subject at the mercy of what Sarraute calls ‘the terrible desire to establish contact’; or one that his whole being resists and revolts against. In seeking to understand how difference functions in Sarraute, one repeatedly discovers that it operates far more as an experiential issue for the subject than as a necessary condition for the intelligibility of the world which the subject inhabits.
The world of Sarraute's writing is decidedly not one that invites a deciphering that would reveal, as Balzac has it in his ‘Avant-propos’ to the Comédie humaine, ‘the reasons or reason’ for the phenomena the work presents.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Nathalie Sarraute, Fiction and TheoryQuestions of Difference, pp. 39 - 59Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000