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 more significant than, for example, voluntary memory or conscious recall, which yields only pale and meager results: I remember what I did yesterday or my last vacation. The coefficient of affective efficacy in voluntary memory is low. In contrast, the memory that suddenly arises from a madeleine dipped in tea, or from an uneven cobblestone encountered in a walk—externally provoked and entirely against my will—this involuntary memory is more “real” than the previous one; it resonates with deep and rich harmonics, awakening an unexpected and, in Proust, joyful mass of memory.

In Proust, the involuntary goes far beyond mere memory. It is a sign of the real, a real thicker than that of waking consciousness. It also carries the promise of the joy it can bring—these two aspects intertwined because they both signify the living and intense reality of the involuntary: “this joy… seemed all the more real to him because he had not collaborated through the anticipation of likelihoods…it emanated of itself.” This dual significance (the real, joy) of the involuntary is at the source of a true Proustian “morality,” where “receiving something that did not come from me, something real” equals “a happiness external to my mind, independent of my will.” When Swann, consumed by jealousy, desperately searches for Odette all over Paris in the dead of night, visiting all probable places of her presence in vain, he is ultimately reunited with her by the greatest of coincidences, almost colliding with her, like the cobblestones of the Guermantes courtyard on the Boulevard des Italiens. This reunion, so unexpected, greatly and wonderfully amplifies the power and intensity of his joy and happiness: “this joy, which reason had considered impossible for that evening, now seemed all the more real; for he had not collaborated through the anticipation of likelihoods, it remained exterior to him…it emanated of itself…this radiating truth.”

The reunion escapes all deliberate search. The seeking subject has not at all “collaborated through the anticipation of likelihoods.” It proceeds from what Horace Walpole called “serendipity,” a neologism he coined in 1754 from the tale The Travels and Adventures of the Three Princes of Serendip by Cristoforo Armeno. This serendipity characterizes the act of finding what one was not seeking (Columbus’s America), or where one was not searching (like the lost object in the Talmud). It operates from a principle it seems itself to ignore, which Valéry formulated thus: “research results from a secret discovery that precedes it.” Between serendipity, Valéry’s proposition, and Proustian involuntary memory, there is a cohesion, flexible yet firm, that allows a better understanding of my hypothesis that literature returns its reader to not knowing what they in fact knew.

This subordination of sought meaning, of its very search, to that which determines it generically as serendipity, and of which the involuntary forms the condition, manifests continuously in impressions and ongoing expressions: event, body, drive, affects, memories—overall, what Francis Ponge calls “matter” or “sensible memory,” which the mind ought to “venerate,” rather than venerate itself. This sensible matter, radically exterior to me, as Levinas calls “the depth of the open,” is shown by the novel in its innumerable chemical combinations. A certain type of “work of the understanding” carries these narrative as well as poetic writings, provided one does not limit poetry to a genre but grasps these attractions and affinities as Proust calls “poetic knowledge.” They constitute a determination in language. When Merleau-Ponty relates this work of the understanding to Kantian “aesthetic ideas,” read and interpreted by him as sensible ideas, he shows their “impenetrability to intelligence”: they are intuitions to which no concept is adequate, just as the ideas of reason are concepts to which no intuition is adequate. If imagination serves understanding in knowledge, while in art understanding works for the benefit of imagination, it is because there is a conceptless universality of the sensible. “Without concept” means universally communicable, as is the “poetic knowledge” that Merleau-Ponty makes the major operator and model of his phenomenology—translation of Kantian aesthetic ideas into sensible ideas.

Literary writing consists first in describing, inscribing, circumscribing “the real,” a radical, naked exteriority, showing effects from every angle, before any inquiry into their causal genealogy. There is no longer either effect or cause. All linear causality is invalidated, as is any “psychological” explanation. Recall the first sentence of Albertine disparue: “How suffering goes farther in psychology than psychology itself!” This movement toward a further-than is the mark of literature. Often, it also goes further in philosophy than philosophy itself.

Literature, art in general, comes before philosophy, just as the real comes before its possibility (this is not a chronological before). Metaphysical tradition since Aristotle defines the real as the actualization of the possible. Logically, the real seems to presuppose a possible that would precede it. In reality, it is the reverse. The real is properly impossible before being, as it precedes all possibility, anticipates it, surprises it, forming “an effectivity preceded by no possibility,” an “unthinkable existence,” in Schelling’s words. This is the event that is the material of literature, the substance of stories, mythologies, aggadoth, narratives of all kinds crossing the human species, speaking and telling, immemorially. These stories show, they narrate, and in narrating, they narrate themselves; they preempt any grasp by concept. They are “tautegorical,” meaning they are never allegories of concepts, nor exemplary illustrations of them.

In a novel (I risk excessive generality here), things, affects, characters, and their relationships appear in an order of perceptions, sensations, and impressions, partial, lateral, multiple, powerful. The illusions of a protagonist, their beliefs, errors of judgment, stubbornness, or, conversely, their subtle intelligence of things and beings—this chaotic kaleidoscope of differences, nuances, or absurdities—is not causally elucidated, logically exposed, or subjected to demonstrative clarification. Obscurities play a role never inferior to that of great clarity. Opacity, as everyone knows, does not harm the novel; it thickens its truth.

Truth is at stake, its status and essence. It forms the multiple “inter-facets” of the philosophical and literary, between the neutral truth of dogmatic statements and the painful truth of affects. Thought may be false in a philosophical exposition. Sensation never in a novel, nor bodily impression. The senses do not lie in a novel. They may lead one to err, to get lost, but these paths and labyrinths are truthful. There is only individual truth, as seen in countless writers: Stendhal, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Proust. Indeed, “we are experiences”—hence the necessity of the novel, in a sense, or its transcendental empiricism. This proposition in no way invalidates universal truth, philosophical truth. Novelistic writing allows both grounding in truth as the foundation of being, without interrogating it, and showing, describing how its appearance does not follow general dogmatics—but polyphony, dissemination, even sometimes “chaotic” proliferation. The enigma is the rule. For example, Alvan Hervey, in The Return of Joseph Conrad, faces absolute incomprehension when his wife, tempted to leave with another man, returns home. What she has done or intended is so alien to all he knows of her, to all he believes he knows of this predictable and docile creature, that he feels powerless, confronted with a riddle all the more profound as he never suspected it. The deep disturbance he feels is not merely caused by infidelity and betrayal; it is provoked more profoundly by the vertigo of incomprehensible alterity. “What could be more fantastic and unexpected than reality?” exclaims Dostoevsky. Here, reality signifies an event occurring without warning, preempting its own possibility. Reality and truth—this is what literature is made of.

(1) Œuvres 1, Gallimard, Pléiade, 1957

(2) Médée l’explique : « je reconnais le mal que je m’apprête à faire, mais mon thumos est plus fort que les conseils que je me donne », Euripide, Médée, v. 1078 sq. La raison de Médée est capable de juger ses actions, un crime insensé dit-elle, mais l’acte a sa source dans ce thumos inaccessible à la raison : « « ô mon thumos n’accomplis pas cet acte…épargne mes enfants ». Euripide montre un jeu de forces dont l’une implore l’autre, sans succès. Le tragique, la tragédie, consignent la victoire de la part irrationnelle, sur le logos et ses bons conseils (video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor). Euripide est très attentif à la part sombre, aux désirs et délires (eratas, manias), à la supériorité des pragmata sur les logoï, expression immédiate de l’immémoriale contrainte de la nécessité. Ce fond obscur du cœur humain est le maître du spectacle de l’impuissance morale de la raison. Dans Hyppolite porte-couronne du même Euripide, Thésée, un peu comme Arendt, estime que le mal vient du manque de pensée (nous) et que le sens moral (phronein) vient de cette privation de nous. Hyppolite, et aussi la nourrice, estiment au contraire qu’on peut être sage, phronon, et désirer le mal, comme Médée en proie à son thumos.

(3) A la recherche du temps perdu, éd. Tadié, Pléiade, Gallimard, vol. III, 254

(4) A la recherche…, éd. cit, vol. I, p. 228.

(5) Ibid., p. 402 (souligné par moi).

(7) Paul Valéry, Œuvres I, Pléiade, 1959, p. 472. Quand Valéry écrit « la recherche », je ne peux m’empêcher d’y entendre A la recherche du temps perdu, l’oeuvre proustienne en son entier.

(8) Pièces, Gallimard, p. 93. La poésie fait ainsi pièce à l’idéalisme, chez Ponge mais pas seulement.

(9) Œuvres 1, Carnets de captivité et autres inédits, Paris, Grasset, 2009, p. 372. Une même irréductibilité est conférée par Proust à ce qu’il nomme « profondeur de l’individuel ».

(10) Le visible et l’invisible, Paris, Gallimard,1964, p. 195, à propos des « idées esthétiques » de la Critique du jugement, § 49.

(11) « La fixation des rapports du visible et de l’invisible », au sens où Klee explique que l’art ne reproduit pas le visible, mais qu’il rend visible, produit une « cohésion sans concept » (196,199) – ce qui renverrait précisément à la troisième Critique kantienne, au jugement de goût.

(12) Le visible et l’invisible, éd. cit., p 195, « personne n’a été plus loin que Proust dans… la description d’une idée qui n’est pas le contraire du sensible, qui en est la doublure et la profondeur ».

(13) Philosophie de la révélation, livre II, trad. Marquet/Courtine, PUF, Epiméthée, 1991, p. 111.

(14) Le visible et l’invisible, éd. cit., p. 155.

(15) A la recherche du temps perdu, éd. Tadié, Pléiade, III, pp. 879-883.

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