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PARTISAN REVIEW
the service of some pantheon.
MF:
I'm not excluding him at all. I'm just relegating him to the second
rung, where he is always put once one's adolescent crisis is past.
PS: I
leave the responsibility for that judgment to you.
I,
on the other
hand, put Sade on the very top rung of great French literary invention.
MF:
Today you're presenting yourself as a rhetorician, not without
panache. You know that the goal of art is threefold: to please, to convince,
but also to move. In general your classics are on the dry side. You claim to
prefer eighteenth-century authors, whose reasoned aridi ty and utter lack
of music Sade brutally revealed. Faced with a technical world and the mar–
ketplace, the refusal or inabili ty to move emotionally seems to me a sign
of weakness.
ps:
Fumaroli is an incurable Rousseauist!
LE
DEBAT:
Are we not witnessing a profound change in the intellectual
paradigm, characterized by the division of philosophy and literature?
Traditionally, philosophers - in the widest sense of the word - in this
country were deeply interested in literary creation, which elevated liter–
ary criticism to an important position. At the same time, writers
themselves were very preoccupied with their own problems. But now that
alliance seems to have been disbanded: philosophers are tilling their own
soil and writers are left alone with a pure, reflexive literature. What do
you think of these phenomena?
PS:
Your analysis is accurate. These traditional relations had become very
complicitous in the sixties and seventies - which, judging by your ques–
tion, you don't seem simply to condemn. This experience, to which I
remain very attached, must have caused any number of fears or deep anx–
ieties among conservatives as well as among liberals. Even today order
rules the Rue d'Ulm. It's very unlikely that that sort of connivance will
be repeated under the reign of the technical and its programmed servants.
A new clerisy wanting as little literature and as little thought as possible
will arise under this new rule. Instead of considering yourself liberated
from the terrorism you feel
Tel
que!
represented, consider instead that the
loss of this open alliance leads to general servility.
MF: I
am the first to regret that literature is no longer a body in which
philosophy, history, the social and political essay, literary erudition, and
the novel interact and compete, primarily through style. You will allow me
not to consider the "alliance" of the years 1965 to 1975 you mention as
an example of such interaction. In fact it consumed and destroyed that
