78
ANNE FABRE-LUCE
rium, scrupulous truthfulness, and fabulation mingle_ This book is like a
pretext for an original investigation into the possibility of writing itself.
Working from a similar perspective,
Les Premiers Mots
(Flammarion) by
Bernard
No~l,
whose remarkable
Chflteau de Cene
had been banned by
the
~ensors
(one doesn't really know why), demands consideration as the
creation of an original author in much the same way that
La Saisie
does:
both works set up a kind of a subtle static interfering with the notion of
the subject, and so move beyond the psychological noveL Such efforts
have already been advanced to a considerable degree elsewhere, by
authors like Maurice Roche (whose forthcoming novel,
Codex,
is now
being awaited) and Roger Laporte_
On the whole the crop of theoretical works seems much richer and
more engaging: indeed, originality and power of thought seem to be
concentrated in the magazines, which are flourishing_ But perhaps this
shift of ground requires a bit of explanation: for a number of years now,
beyond the limits of the traditional novel (which continues to be
written), and also beyond those efforts made by certain writers in the
direction of an analysis of "textuality" as a specific dimension of the
practice of writing, certain philosophers and contemporary thinkers have
thrown into question the coherence of the subject -- "its complete
metaphysical presence in itself," to use Derrida's phrase. The subversive
"readings" undertaken by this latter writer, as well as by Pautrat (in his
Nietzsche ou les versions du soleil,
published by Seuil), tend to bring to
light the "latencies" of the text, as Althusser has done in the case of
Marx. This highly conceptual form of critical thought is both more and
less than a philosophy, in that it shifts the ground of discourse and
consequently that of the subject within it. These works seem to me to
compensate very well for the exhaustion of the novel, at the same time
as they explain and justify it. Writing in the first person is becoming a
more and more hazardous undertaking, threatened from within and
forced to recognize its mystifying and mythifying aspects by the com–
bined pressure of ideology and the unconscious.
But it should be said at the outset that no contemporary philo–
sopher, whether it be Foucault, Derrida, Althusser, or]. F. Lyotard, has
proposed a system, properly speaking. Ever since the ascendance of
phenomenology the idea of a system has quite disappeared from philo–
sophical thought. Detailed descriptio n and criticism which subverts dis–
course through discourse itself -- these have taken the place of those
vast and reassuring conceptual wholes of which Bergson's work was
undoubtedly the last example in France. Like literature -- but having
advanced to some extent beyond it -- philosophy today is engaged in
