Ann Van Sevenant
DISJOINTEDNESS AT WORK
One of the underlying elements of Fondane's literary
theory and aesthetics can be resumed as follows: poetry and critical thinking
are irreconcilable. Fondane refers to the fact that once a poet has worked out
an abstract and theoretical program, poetry is transformed into the servant and
confirmation of the conceptual theory, which means the end of his intuitive and
direct contact with lived reality. Didn't the fact that Baudelaire started to
write theoretical essays influence his poetical experiences for the worse?
Hadn't Rimbaud simply stopped writing poetry because he couldn't keep up with
the theory of the voyant? Didn't so
many romantic poets commit suicide because they couldn't cope with the theory
of the genius?
Initially, Fondane himself worried about not being
able to reconcile activities, poetry and theory. But as he started studying
philosophy, he discovered to his great astonishment, that he found numerous
elements which helped him even better to defend poetry against its most
dangerous enemy, namely the hegemony of the rational and conceptual mind.
Within the domain of philosophy itself he re-encountered the same antagonistic
forces ruling poetical practice and theory: on the one hand, Cartesian and
Hegelian thought which represents rationalistic and idealistic generalization;
on the other hand, the existentialist defence of the particular, individual and
lived experience against philosophical conceptualization.[1] Fondane
considered himself as a philosopher of the second category, which meant that he
found a way to make poetry and philosophy coexist.[2]
It is one of the reasons why his
thinking, rather than being designated as a kind of existentialism, can more
accurately be described in terms of coexistentialism.
Indeed, the expression existentialism implies a universalized concept of
existence, while Fondane focusses on the individual, irreducible experiences
that are so characteristic of the life of each human being, on the coexistence
of so many experiences inside one single person, in other words, on the
coexistence of different kinds of beings inside each individual.
Coexistentialist thinking, unlike existentialist thinking, implies that
existence cannot be understood as a compact unity and stresses the fact that
the fabric of existence is made of a multitude of irreducible components.
In focussing attention on coexistence
and conflict instead of on conciliation of irreconcilable faculties,[3] Fondane found
himself at the crossroads of an age-old discussion that he succeeded in
redirecting to what he held dear: artistic and poetical experience. Fondane's
aesthetics is first of all characterized by the idea that art is consubstantial with life. All artistic
creation is to be considered as an essential activity to man, even if it
remains true that man is partially excluded from it; when it comes to art,
nothing can change the fact that the artist is the creator but also a stranger
in relation to what he produces. In that way, Fondane stressed the heteronomous character of art and poetry
with regard to rational discourse. Aesthetic experience realizes a kind of
communication that is inaccessible to the logic of reason. It is one of the
most repeated ideas that Fondane firmly held onto: the fact that reason is
limited, that the valuable things of life are unattainable by rational
thinking. His criticism of reason, however, has been interpreted as a paradox
that lies at the very heart of his struggle against conceptual and rational
thinking: he has been accused, from a logical point of view, of inconsistency
or inconsequence: is it possible, indeed, to accuse the other of transforming
everything into a conceptual playground which leaves no room for other
experiences, while using concepts oneself, concepts that are indispensable to
formulate the accusation to start with? That was exactly the criticism uttered
by Benedetto Croce, who wondered "if it was really necessary, in the
attack of unreasonable rationality, to offend reason, the same reason which makes
of us reasonable beings?"; similarly, Raymond
Aron stated that he would have had nothing against the protest of Fondane, if
"it had been lived and realized in silence".[4]
But from another point of view, it is precisely that
paradox, that conflict, inherent in lived experiences, that Fondane tried to
listen to and give shape to, artistically and philosophically. According to
him, it seemed unjustifiable to gloss over the paradoxes of life by means of
simple rationalization. The ambiguous situation man happens to find himself in
at times does not necessarily lead to a lively and hypocritical conciliation or
a submissive state of despair, but constitutes the fundamental human condition
from which a creative energy can arise. That is the Nietzschean and Kierkegaardian
aspect of Fondane's work. The insolvable contradictions of life cannot be
overcome unless one believes that one can choose not to be "the
battlefield of absurd phantoms".[5] According to
Fondane, we have "to accept wilfully the double affirmation that a thing
is white and black at the same time",
which is of course an absurdity, but it is "the form itself in which being
presents itself to man".[6] Fondane would
have agreed with Merleau-Ponty that the philosopher disposes of an
"unalienable sense of ambiguity", while for the greatest among them
"it becomes a theme, it helps to found certitudes, instead of threatening
them".[7] It may be one of
the reasons why daring constituted
the main issue of his aesthetics: he urged the poet to dare, to dare to believe
in poetry, in his own, so-called primitive, chaotic or naïve activity,
without letting it being overwhelmed by what Heidegger would have called
calculating thought.[8]
The acceptance of the limitations of reason, that undeniably goes hand in hand with the conception of a
fundamentally powerless reason, didn't necessarily, as a result, lead to
a state of submission and despair. One could indeed argue that the
determination to make reason and paradox, intelligence and absurdity coexist,
implies after all that one refuses the advantages, the conciliatory solutions
that reason may offer for the benefit of a confrontation with a rather obscure
reality in which arbitrariness rules. Apart from the fact that these
allegations already attest to a dominantly rational point of view, Fondane
seems to have been especially interested in the particular moments when reason
fails and reveals its incapacity to deal with reality, when something other
than reason takes over. One can refer to man's confrontation with accidents,
with illness or injustice, better even, to intuitive knowledge and to artistic
creation, an activity that requires much more than just rational thinking. If
Fondane dreamt of a society in which everybody writes, it was not because he
saw in every man an artist, but because of the possibility writing offers to
experience the extra-rational power living in the state of creative activity.[9]
This important realization can be
explained as follows. Fondane enjoyed reading the Bible as a philosophical
essay and was attracted to the metaphorical use of certain expressions, of
which the two most interesting are: "The spirit blows wherever it wants
to" and "The law is made for man and not man for the law". The
first saying emphasizes that the wind blows freely, that we can hear its sound,
but neither know where it comes from nor where it goes to. It is an image for
the general condition of man: he doesn't know his destiny,
he is governed by forces greater than himself (death, uncertainty of all
kinds). The second saying denies that things happen to us in a most arbitrary way, that man goes down on his knees before fate, that he
has no say in what happens to him. Sometimes he has the power to intervene -
Fondane refers like Shestov to Job in the Old Testament - and that power comes
from the belief in what seems impossible to rational reason.
Both expressions are joined in
Fondane's reading of Byron's verse: "To feel me in the solitude of kings/ Without the power that makes them bear a crown". Fondane paraphrases the
verse as follows: "Il est impossible de supporter la solitude des rois
tant que le pouvoir nous fait défaut, d'en pouvoir porter la
couronne!", thus playing with the double meaning of "bearing" (supporter/porter) the crown.[10] He comments that "it is
impossible to bear [to tolerate, to endure] the solitude of kings as long as
the power fails us, the power to bear [to wear, to carry] the crown". This
polysemic notion of bearing reflects
indeed the manyfolded aspects of human existence.[11] Fondane's line
should not as much be read as an empirical statement, but as an attempt to
affirm the coexistence of both states: the solitude, which should not be
considered as a totally helpless situation, and the strength to bear the
solitude without changing it into something else, without running away from it,
by considering it as a an equal component of existence. Poetry for Fondane had
the "function" of assuring him of the power to bear the crown. This
does not mean that poetry granted him that power, but that it is the place
where these experiences can be lived; he strove for a kind of poetry in which
man "is totally wanted, with both his extremes and not only the 'middle'
".[12] That again is a
Nietzschean element in Fondane's philosophy: to conceive of man WITH the power
to bear the crown and to remain king even in the most abyssal solitude. The
fundamental difference between both, however, is that Nietzsche, according to
Fondane, conceived of art as a necessary lie, necessary to endure existence,
whereas he considered art as equally necessary, but not as a remedy against
life. The last thing he wanted to do is to reduce art and poetry to a kind of
cure against reality, to a lie or a fantasy, turning them inevitably into
something less real than reality, into a product of the imagination, which is
often considered as a second-hand reality. Professing the limitations of reason
should least of all lead to a legitimized instrumentalization of art.
Contrary to the current avant-garde
ideas Fondane thus didn't underscore the autonomy of the aesthetic experience
in order to grant it the ability to transgress the extra-aesthetic discourse,
or even to discredit the domination of discursive reason. If art represents a
danger to reason, this knowledge shouldn’t be transformed into a utilitarian principle.
Fondane was opposed to the idea of exploiting the critical potential of art.
Art should least of all serve the ideal of proving the limitations of reason
even if it is capable of producing that effect. He advised not to implicate art
in such an enterprise and run the risk of nourishing exactly - even if it were
in a negative way - the claims of the extra-aesthetic discourse. Only by
remaining loyal to artistic creation can one confirm
the importance of the aesthetic experience and at the same time confer it the
role of an example: to show to reason that it isn't omnipotent and
self-sufficient, in other words, to demonstrate indirectly the importance and
the existence of an extra-rational
intelligence. Fondane felt supported in this view by the studies of
Lévy-Bruhl on primitive thought.[13] He was delighted
to hear that the so-called primitives can affirm two opposite ideas, x and
not-x, at the same time. For them a contradictory proposition isn't immediately
ruled out, but explored in different possible lights; in short, they don't have
to force everything into either/or opinions to be able to deal with life. It is
a way of thinking that has much in common with that of children; for example, a
girl of five knows her shoe is not a doll but will gently put it to sleep. That
kind of thinking is worthwhile because it implies a way of getting in touch
with a reality that has not been absorbed by rationality. Poetry offers the
chance of experiencing these other dimensions of reality that aren't even taken
into account by conceptual thought.
Aesthetics has, in the end, little to
do with beauty or even with beautiful objects, but rather with the experience
that accompanies creative activity. This explains why Fondane showed little
interest in the production of a so-called not yet existing reality. It is
without any doubt the reason why one doesn't find a sign of what has become so
typical in the post-war aesthetics of reception: he didn't particularly stress
what Maurice Blanchot called l'espace
littéraire or the theory which Heidegger treated so accurately in
the Origin of the Art Work, that the
author or painter disappears behind the work and the work itself ever again
becomes origin. Rather than an aesthetic object, art is first and foremost an
activity, an act; it is neither a contemplation nor a
representation of reality or an imagined reality, but reality itself, an
affirmation of reality in all of its aspects.[14]
This means that Fondane conceived of
the artist or the poet as being in the first place, as he put it, a
"battlefield", the place where disjointed
forces are at work. The notion "disjoint" usually has negative
connotations, because of the prefix "dis" which opposes it to
"joint". What is disjointed, however, is not completely antipodal to
what is jointed; it is not as disjointed from what is jointed as one would
assume. In identifying something as "disjointed", one always already
reads the "jointed" into it; one can only speak in terms of the
"disjointed" when one knows what "jointed" stands for. Paradoxically,
the word expresses the separation through the connection. It expresses the
obscure state of jointed disjointedness or disjointed jointedness that Fondane
opposed to false conciliations: "The conflict, the tension, there you have
something more true than the false unity, the false peace of knowing!".[15] Disjointedness
forms one of the unspoken experiences so characteristic of this violently
interrupted poetical-philosophical work. Fondane's writing, in its different
manifestations, can be read as one continuous sign of disjointedness at work,
as if it were the only possibility of getting in touch with reality.
The creative activity that stems from
this particular condition, however, is not to be interpreted in a romantic way:
the art work is not the place where antagonistic values are joined together,
the happy expression of disruption or the sublime experience of tragedy;
according to this conception, each manifestation of disjointedness is being
considered as an absence, as a lack or loss, and is to be absorbed into the
unity of the artwork, thus becoming the represented aesthetic object. To
Fondane, disjointedness is not a theme, not even a philosophical concept. But
it is without any doubt what finally brought him to a remarkable attitude,
coming to us in the shape of a statement that is to be rephrased each time
again: "It is only at those exceptional moments that don't always depend
on us, that it depends on us however ...".[16] Fondane never
stopped emphasizing the "relation between our powerlessness and something that can". It appears to be the key
to what Fondane considered as the only possible attitude - rather than
knowledge or information, philosophy is an attitude and a creative activity -
in the confrontation with a certain appel,
a certain call, which is always there and calls upon us to write, which pushes
us forward and makes us believe, as he would have said in the words of Kafka,
that we "are reserved for a great monday", even if Kafka added:
"Well said, but the sunday will never come to an end".
The coexistence of different voices
inside one person, of more than one passion and many discontinuous
"truths" inside one man, was the particular
experience Fondane was so familiar with. Poetry, the arts and philosophy arise
indeed from a difference. One could consequently be inclined to believe that
Fondane is to be designated as a thinker of difference "avant la
lettre". When placing his ideas, which are mostly existentialist, against
the evolution of poetics and philosophical thought since the sixties, one has
the impression, on the one hand, that they belong to a long-lost tradition. For
example, the poet and the philosopher are supposed to have a mission; Fondane
explicitly reveals his mission, tries to formulate as well as he can his message.
To this end, he practises a rather conventional form of argumentative thinking
and is very eager to convey his personal viewpoint; even his poetry is quite
conventional, that is to say, mostly expressionist, especially when it is
compared with his theatrical plays and cinematographic work that are more
indebted to the Dadaist movement.
On the other hand, all of his philosophical essays are
written with the intention of inserting more modesty into philosophy, of
deconstructing the self-sufficiency of metaphysics and of injecting it with
some postmodern subject and some poststructuralist discretion. In this respect,
Fondane's work can be read as a criticism of pretentious western ideological
and rational thinking, an express revaluation of what is being oppressed by
reason, eminently comparable to the postindustrialist findings of Marcuse, or
the ones of Adorno, although Fondane didn't stress the negativist aesthetic
experience, the fact that the idea of harmony can only be expressed in a
negative way. While it is the same idea of false harmony that is being
rejected, contrary to Adorno, Fondane held that the paradox of modern art is
not expressed in the fact that it embodies a negative utopia.
Fondane would for that matter have
applauded the different deconstructive movements since the seventies or
eighties, for having confronted philosophy with what it usually denigrates as
nonphilosophical, for having given so much credit to what is hidden behind the
written text, for having emphasized the importance of poetic thinking, and no
less for having freed philosophical thought from the hermetic, metaphysical box
in which it had locked itself up for ages, for having succeeded in what
Heidegger announced but failed to accomplish according to Fondane: for having disturbed
the idealistic and rationalistic tradition silently from the inside. Fondane
refused to recognize existentialism as the embodiment of a new thought, because
it limited itself to the description of existence and its paradoxes, its
obscurities, its ambiguities, in order to put forward anticipated solutions. He
understood that the only way to weaken dominating ontotheological reason
consisted not in presenting metaphysics as the origin of all problems, but
rather in posing the problems differently.
Fondane focussed on the proportion of
reason's domination in one’s argument, more precisely on whether reason has the
last word or whether a thinker shows an openness to
what remains secret to him. Less important was whether an author was
interpreting correctly or wrongly since that would only have been a synonym for
giving the last word to moralistic reason. Fondane, without any doubt, would
have asked his readers to read his texts in a similar way, not only according
to the letter, but also according to the spirit, and even according to the
spirit of the spirit. When he observed that "no character is
authentic", he referred to everyone's duty to pick up whatever is already
there and to continue the many discontinuous meanings that haunt not only texts,
but also each individual experience.
Fondane's aesthetics is one of finitude and failure;
it makes us sensitive to artistic creation as being an irremediable
shortcoming. Once again, this doesn't mean that Fondane resigns himself to fate, that he turns to a nihilistic vision of man, without
illusions or hope - which would only be another version of a certainty - but
more correctly that he underlines the fact that man finds himself each time
again before new challenges. The power of the singular always takes priority
over knowledge of the general. And if the relation between power and
powerlessness is discontinuous of nature, both are joined, in a disjointed way,
in creative activity. Fondane's philosophy begins with disjointedness, which
has nothing to do with negation or denial, but is to be related with the idea
that thinking is equal to starting anew, leaving behind the illusion that one
has found a philosophy without error for all times to come. Since Fondane
places man in a position of having a certain control over things and the way
they happen, but at the same time stresses that this control is never an
isolated fact, that it is always included in a greater perspective, he is
undoubtedly a precursor of twentieth century philosophy of difference.
Résumé:
L’esthétique de
Benjamin Fondane est marquée par ce que l’on peut désigner par
l’irrémédiable ou l’irréconciliable. Fondane part de
certaines expériences vécues, ‘propres’ à notre existence,
lorsque nous sommes confrontés à des situations sans aucun
recours, à des questions sans réponse. Ces expériences
forment le tissu de la vie de tous les jours, et il importe, selon lui, d’y
prêter attention, de ne pas les transformer en solutions trompeuses.
L’art et la poésie ne sont pas des remèdes au mal de vivre, mais
ils en sont les porte-parole. Ils révèlent les secrets indicibles
dont l’homme lui-même est exclu, mais dont il témoigne
néanmoins. L’art n’est pas porteur d’un sens caché, mais il donne
sens, lorsqu’il dévoile la séparation avec ‘ce’ qui donne sens,
dans les tentatives de la surmonter. Le disjoint qui est à l’œuvre
dans les différentes expressions artistiques et philosophiques
reflète ainsi l’incontournable condition de la création, qui se
révèle être moins esthétique que profondément
existentielle.