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.

What could be more “common” than this ungraspable “fantastic,” as Proust reprises Dostoevsky to make a quasi-character of it in In Search of Lost Time, during a few pages of dialogue between Albertine and the Narrator in The Prisoner? Albertine, “the prisoner,” reads Dostoevsky found in the Narrator’s library, the “great idler” sleeping beside her, having at that moment abandoned all literary ambition, surrendering to the inertia of complete powerlessness. Their discussion of the Russian writer constitutes Proust’s final word on Dostoevsky—it is neither a critical text nor a correspondence excerpt, but a romantic and novelistic dialogue on “art” and “life.”

And what could be more difficult than expressing this “common fantastic,” what could be harder than “saying vague things”?

This common-fantastic, this “vague,” the irrepeatable uniqueness of daily life and its surprise, is the signature of the real insofar as it always exceeds its possibility: “reality is something that has no relation to possibilities, no more than a knife thrust we receive with the slight movements of clouds above our heads.” Like Rogozhin’s knife raised against Prince Myshkin, the real as narrated in the novel, the true romance, is stronger than (psycho)logical explanation. The knife reveals; it cuts through all causal elucidation, “normal” as Dostoevsky often says. It slices the “real” (thinking of Lacan, one should differentiate real and reality—this distinction, though I have not made it explicit, I have constantly presupposed: there is a difference between the totality of objects in the world subjected to my objective representation, reality according to Lacan, and the real as that which surprises me beyond any imaginary or symbolic objectification). The real is what comes to us—involuntarily or unconsciously—long before our representation of reality. Literally, in Proust, this real arrives through my body, under my feet, stumbling over a cobblestone, or under my tongue, melting a madeleine in my mouth.

To say that philosophy comes after literature does not imply it is the condition of its possibility, but that it reminds us that there are “pre-philosophical experiences,” as Levinas said, prereflective, which form the literary reservoir, the memento of deinde philosophari. Philosopher afterward, primum vivere: before philosophizing, there is living, enjoying, eating, having experiences both happy and terrifying, loving, dying, everything forming the “sensible” as articulation of visible and invisible according to Merleau-Ponty, in the “coherence without concept” through which it presents itself.

This precedence, the precedence of the “vague,” the obscure, the hidden, engages the writer in work both urgent and patient, something both violently imperative yet requiring clockmaker-like precision.

Writing, in its long patience, is a grasp to which one must respond, a command by the “real,” a commission from this relentless patron, whatever the writer’s linguistic evasions. “I have never known how........

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