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 to advance in writing step by step,” explains Dostoevsky, “…through successive approaches, waiting to unpack my idea only after having… previously demonstrated it. I have always lacked patience…; this certainly harmed me, because some final deductions, stated bluntly, without preparation…only surprise and confound, sometimes provoking laughter.” “But what am I doing…I discover my batteries ahead of time.” “Asking the doctor for pencil and paper,” Proust recounts, “I composed, despite the jolts of the carriage, to relieve my conscience and obey my enthusiasm, the following small piece which I later found and had to make only few changes…when, at the corner of the seat where the doctor’s coachman usually placed in a basket the poultry he bought at the Martinville market, I had finished writing it, I felt so happy, I sensed it had so perfectly rid me of those steeples and what they concealed behind them, that, as if I were a hen myself and had just laid an egg, I began to sing at the top of my lungs.”

The task of the writer is to capture, script, fix—or translate, as Proust says—from the great book, from the incontainable language of experience as a starting language toward an arrival language to invent. What presents itself to the writer as a unique, irrepeatable event, doomed without them to pure loss, to definitive erasure, must be brought into the full light of language. The writer’s happiness is proportional to what of this real they recover, expose in the light of unsuspected brilliance, saved. This act of rescue is intimately tied to literature, to the particularized characterization of the real, hypersingularized according to circumstance, social state, relations, dialects, landscapes, and the power of names, affects of course. These particularizations unfold infinitely in their multiplicities, each time unique. Literature, in the real it fictionalizes while actualizing, in its pre-philosophy, its more-than-philosophy, continually confronts us with “experiences” of release, letting go, involuntariness, abandonment, older than any conceptual patience. The immemorial, the unvordenklich thematized by Schelling as an im-pré-pensable, indicates how thought is related to something never present to its consciousness. This immemorial is not pure, hard, simple unthinkable, but the way thought finds itself, through circumstances and events, confronted with the unforeseen, the déjà-vu. The unthinkable is the mode in which thought is deeply troubled, surprised by an event; the way life seizes thought, revealing it thinks more than it thinks.

Proust describes a series of such experiences, “letting go,” he says, in which what is engaged is the (phenomenological) question of passivity.

All these are forms of what must be called conatus interruptus—which literature allows us to apprehend. “The tendency of everything that exists to continue itself,” I quote Proust again, “is sometimes cut off by sudden impulses of…letting go”: this tendency abandons itself to a sort of impulsive delight, involuntariness, in which the self dissolves: one spends all one’s money at once, stops medical treatment, no longer deprives oneself of what one had denied, lets oneself go, and it is a delight. The syncopated interruptions of perseverance in being are beneficial, as they act like a ceasefire, a cessation of the effort to persevere.

That the conatus allows itself to be interrupted shows that there is no original conatus. Often, when a philosopher ventures to speak of literature, their tendency leads them to become the interrupter of this interruption of conatus that literature, by a thousand paths, describes and produces. The model is dialectical: interruption of the interruption. Sartre’s The Family Idiot, for example, is a constant outpouring of dialectical thought: it restores continuities, reversals of reversals, connections and reconnections throughout Flaubert.

I specify that from an immanent, Spinozist point of view, the idea of a conatus allowing itself to be interrupted is obviously like a square circle. Nothing can ever interrupt itself, or annihilate itself: a thing, as long as I consider it in isolation, will contain nothing contradictory to its essence. Outside me, it is exactly according to its essence, it contains nothing, no “internal contradiction,” capable of destroying it—and interruption in this regard would be nothing other than a mode of destruction. The idea of conatus is tied to the thesis of the identity of the intelligible and the real. It rests on the principle that everything is intelligible, through and through, without remainder. Since from the definition of a thing I can deduce consequences that accord with this definition, things, individual essences, are merely the ontological transposition of their determination. Being and knowing, in conformity within their respective orders, form a unity—a ‘connêtre.’ The conatus relies on the harmonious accord between these orders. In sum, the conatus, one could say, is precisely that which does not allow itself to be interrupted or broken from within, since it denotes the effort of a being, whatever the attribute of which it is the mode, to persevere in its being according to its power of being. The conatus is that by which singular things “live and remain in God,” as Spinoza says—the very life of God expressed in the infinite diversity of things, at different but continuous degrees of their expression.

My hypothesis of a conatus interruptus thus rests on a paradox that calls into question the entirety of Spinoza’s philosophy, which asserts that every being is bound to its essence and thereby carries a power of being that it cannot exceed, much less interrupt. Through conatus interruptus, insofar as it postulates the interruption of what, reduced to itself, cannot be interrupted, the literary may perhaps be better apprehended. This does not preclude the possibility of making a novel of conatus (and one could even read In Search of Lost Time and other novels this way). But such a possible novel of conatus could only pass through the sensible matter of perseverance itself, following a movement that is that of the true romance, that is, upstream of the dynamic strategy of conatus, which could not encompass any passivity, which would then equate to a sad passion. What interests literature precisely is this sadness, this perseverance brought into failure, this inadequate knowledge of what determines us, this inadequacy itself, this diminishment of our power of being. If “we are experiences,” then the ultimate ontological power belongs to these experiences, including the conatus—not as concept, but as the experience of failure. There is a unidimensionality, or a monism of the concept, which cannot, without weakening, allow itself to be surpassed or lateralized by non-concept. This is what gives it its radicality. Literature, art, poetry, on the contrary, depend only on these continuous excesses. A novel of conatus that leaves no room for sad passions would be a poor novel of conatus. A good novel of conatus would be guided by desire: not because something is good do I want it, but because I desire it, I find it good—therein lies its fine beginning.

Proust’s descriptions of the involuntary are “philosophical” without ever being hypothetico-deductive. They reveal, in action, a coherence without concept that strips conatus of all naturalness. What is natural is to surrender to a force that engages the passive self. “Passivity more passive than all passivity” is more “natural” than perseverance in itself, which is tension, action, rigidity, and effort, as the Latin term expresses. “It is necessary,” says Levinas, that justice reclaims itself through an effort beyond and assuming ethics. Similarly, one could say, thanks to Levinas’ language: conatus is necessary, there is conatus, but there is no original concept of conatus. Before it, its interruption, something that precedes it immemorially and makes it possible or sometimes even necessary.

This effect of dispossession, this conatus interruptus, Montaigne gave a fine formulation of, by relating what he calls the most diverse “experiences” to an anarchic “I escape,” preceding his own principle. My “I escape,” and in escaping, I find my freedom in a way. I do not depend on myself, on my ego, on my conatus. This type of approach to the real through paradox, as with heteronomous freedom in Levinas, literature has the infinite power to transmit, in the mode of interruption—of conatus as much as of knowledge (what one does not know), to which it substitutes an openness, an evasion, a letting go of knowing what one has known all along.

(16) En 1920, Proust disait à un critique: «si vous me demandiez quel est le plus beau roman que je connaisse … je donnerais la première place à L’idiot de Dostoïevski » (Lettre à J. de Pierrefeu, 22 juin 1920, in Correspondance, t. 19, Paris, Plon, 1991 p. 317). Ce propos fut réitéré plusieurs fois. A cette admiration pour Dostoïevski, une place est donnée à même l’œuvre, hors de la sphère où se disent et s’écrivent les textes de critique littéraire. Ceci est remarquable. Dostoïevski est trois fois présent dans la Recherche, puisqu’il y a dans l’oeuvre trois lecteurs avérés de Dostoïevski, le Narrateur, Charlus et, surtout, Albertine. Ainsi, le texte de Proust sur Dostoïevski le plus consistant et le plus intéressant se trouve dans le roman lui-même.

(17) Valéry, op. cit., p. 373.

(18) A la recherche…, éd. cit., I, p. 357.

(19) Œuvres complètes, t. VII, « Journal d’un écrivain », Gallimard, Pléiade, 1972, p. 1427.

(20) Ibid., t. VI, p. 1118.

(21) A la recherche…, éd. cit., I, p. 179-180.

(22) A la recherche…, éd. cit., I, p. 622 et suiv..

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