on 18-Sep-2016 (Sun)

r example: that in the literary fact language is one with meaning, that form belongs to the content of the work; that, according to the expression of Gaeton Picon, “for modern art, the work is not expres- sion but creation” 10 —these are propositions that gain unanimous acceptance only by means of a highly equivocal

e same goes for the notion of imagination, the power of mediation or synthesis between meaning and literality, the common root of the universal and the particular—as of all other similarly dissoci- ated couples—the obscure origin of these structural frameworks and of the empathy between “form and content” which makes possible both the work and the access to its unity. For Kant, the imagination was already in itself an “art,” was art itself, which originally did not dis- tinguish between truth and beauty; and despite all the differences, Kant speaks of the same imagination in the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Judgment as does Rousset. It is art, certainly, but a “hidden art” 11 that cannot be “revealed to the e

is enigmatic origin of the work as a structure and indissociable unity—and as an object for structuralist criticism—is, according to Kant, “the first thing to which we must pay attention.” 17 According to Rousset also. From his first page on, he links “the nature of the literary fact,” always insuffi- ciently examined, to the “role in art of imagination, that fundamental activity” about which “uncertainties and oppositions abound.” This notion of an imagination that produces metaphor—that is, everything in language except the verb to be—remains for critics what certain philo- sophers today call a naively utilized operative concept. To surmount this technical ingenuousness is to reflect the operative concept as a thematic concept. This seems to be one of Rousset’s projects. To grasp the operation of creative imaginat

his universe articulates only that which is in excess of everything, the essential nothing on whose basis everything can appear and be produced within language; and the voice of Maurice Blanchot reminds us, with the insistence of profundity, that this excess is the very possibility of writing and of literary inspiration in general. Only pure absence—not the absence of this or that, but the absence of everything in which all presence is announced—can inspire, in other words, can work, and then make one work. The pure book naturally turns toward the eastern edge of this absence which, beyond or within the prodigiousness of all wealth, is its first and proper co

e pure book, the book itself, by virtue of what is most irreplaceable within it, must be the “book about nothing”

that Flaubert dreamed of—a gray, negative dream, the origin of the total Book that haunted other imaginations. This emptiness as the situation of literature must be acknowledged by the critic as that which consti- tutes the specificity of his object, as that around which he always speaks. Or rather, his proper object—since nothing is not an object—is the way in which this nothing itself is determined by disappearing. It is the transition to the determination of the work as the disguising of its origin. But the origin is possible and conceivable only in disguise. Rousset shows us the extent to which spirits as diverse as Delacroix, Balzac, Flaubert, Valéry, Proust, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and many others had a sure consciousness of this. A sure an

o these voices should be added that of Antonin Artaud, who was less roundabout: “I made my debut in litera- ture by writing books in order to say that I could write nothing at all. My thoughts, when I had something to say or write, were that which was furthest from me. I never had any ideas, and two short books, each seventy pages long, are about this profound, inveterate, endemic absence of any idea. These books are l’Ombilic des limbes and le Pèse-nerfs.” 20 The consciousness of having something to say as the consciousnes