Gérard Bensussan is a philosopher and professor emeritus at the University of Strasbourg. The Japanese translation of The Two Morals (Vrin, 2019)  is scheduled for publication in 2026.

Part 2 “Research results from a secret discovery that precedes it”Paul Valéry

The theme of my intervention could be formulated as follows: what does literature do to philosophy? The relationship that philosophy—or a particular philosophy, or even a particular philosopher—maintains with literature manifests in multiple ways, and it is impossible to attempt an exhaustive account, even from a distance. The question is oceanic, and its generality is perhaps a little disheartening. My remarks will appear extremely limited in comparison to this generality. I will approach the question (which will remain a question from beginning to end) through a particular lens, which is neither the only one nor perhaps the best, but it is mine. It is a lens, a method, based on an evident observation: literature (itself an oceanic term, without shores) reveals. It reveals to every reader, whether philosopher or not, something that a priori they did not know, or rather, upon reflection, something they did not know they knew.

This office of literature—revealing to the reader something they did not know they knew—unfolds through a language that is not that of philosophy, which must be explicit and explanatory (by thematizing, for example, this revelation under different concepts such as nescient knowledge, learned ignorance, etc.). Yet this literary language testifies to exactly what it indicates, within itself if I may say so—that is, to a heterogeneity of logos and narration, of “abstract thought” and “poetry,” in the sense that Valéry gives these two terms in a text that bears this title. This tension undoubtedly records a certain tragedy of reason—in the most original sense: I think exemplarily of Medea’s monologue in Euripides’ play, where Medea is torn between her thumos and her logos, which do not speak the same language—an absolute tragedy, a tragedy of the impotence of logos.

This question of language or languages refers to the question of the idea insofar as it is tested by the sensible in literature, in art in general. Here we are already in the philosophical mediation of the language of art, which immediately enacts its sensible presentation. Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology posed this question by discerning in literature not a mere mediating, adequative, or illustrative instance, but rather a “creator” of conceptual characters, so to speak. I will return to this proposition of Merleau-Ponty.

If literature reveals that one did not know one knew, it is by virtue of this that it maintains a real relation to the real: it fictionalizes the real, it doubles it and deepens it according to a mimetic excess upon the “meaning” of that real. Literature never deals merely with events, whether real or fictional, most often real-fictional, sometimes autofictional. Its element is Aragon’s lying truth, or even better, what Proust strikingly called “true romance.” Literature never deals with logical possibilities, except to treat them in turn as extra-logical events, as in Borges, for example. The “harsh reality” of literary fiction constitutes an event—particularly in the novel—and this event-making is not subject to the simple dichotomy of real and invented, truthful and fictive, true and false. It precedes the analytic, which can afterward provide meanings, this analytic potentially forming itself with the narration. What I call event overlaps with what I have elsewhere defined, more specifically regarding Proust, as the “involuntary.” The involuntary refers to an alterity, an exteriority, deeper and........

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