"Infinitizing" Flaubert

"Infinitizing" Flaubert:Foucault, Rancière, and the Archaeology of the Aesthetic Sensible La Tentation de saint Antoine Rajeshwari Vallury (bio) On a le sentiment que La Tentation, c'est pour Flaubert le rêve de son écriture: ce qu'il aurait voulu qu'elle fût—souple, soyeuse, spontanée, harmonieusement dénouée dans l'ivresse des phrases, belle—mais aussi ce qu'elle devait cesser d'être pour s'éveiller enfin à la forme du jour. La Tentation a existé avant toutes les œuvres de Flaubert [...] et elle a été répétée—rituel, purification, exercice, "tentation" repoussée ?—avant chacune d'elles. En surplomb au-dessus de l'œuvre, elle la dépasse de ses excès bavards, de sa surabondance en friche, de sa population de bestiaire; et, en retrait de tous les textes, elle offre, avec le négatif de leur écriture, la prose sombre, murmurante qu'il leur a fallu refouler et peu à peu reconduire au silence pour venir eux-mêmes à la lumière. Toute l'œuvre de Flaubert est l'incendie de ce discours premier, sa cendre précieuse, son noir, son dur charbon. (Foucault, Postface 322) [End Page 726] [L]'imagination, c'est moins ce qui naît dans le cœur obscur de l'homme que ce qui surgit dans l'épaisseur lumineuse du discours. (Foucault, "C'était un nageur" 584) How to understand the extraordinary proliferation of exotic, fantastic, and hallucinatory elements in Flaubert's La Tentation de saint Antoine, which Baudelaire famously described as the "capharnaüm pandémoniaque de la solitude"?1 A classic (and sound) interpretive framework may be provided by the words of Flaubert himself, by the contradictory impulses of an artistic sensibility famously self-described as torn between the lofty ideals of the imagination and the painstaking minutiae of the real, between the impulse to evacuate the ordinary world through an overinvestment of the imagination on the one hand, and the will to impersonality and impassibility that risks a corresponding disinvestment from material existence on the other. In a series of essays on Flaubert, Jacques Rancière has argued that La Tentation de saint Antoine reveals the paradoxes of an art torn between an excessive sympathy with the material world and the indifferent apathy of atoms and molecules, between pathos and logos, autonomy and heteronomy. Rancière reads La Tentation as an interrogation into the metaphysics of literature, an examination of the conditions of its possibility.2 In the wake of this insight, my article explores the power and value of the strange, unusual forms of being in La Tentation, arguing that the fantastical productions of the literary text function as the vectors of an aesthetics and ethics of the impersonal. Proceeding by way of a critical or interpretive genealogy of Flaubert's text rather than a detailed literary exegesis, I suggest that the exotic provides a means whereby the artist transforms his relationship to the world of ordinary experience, avoiding both the chaotic madness of an excessive sensibility and the mute, apathic indifference of impassibility. Mapping an archeology of "a heterological sensible" in Michel Foucault's reception of La Tentation de saint Antoine, I propose that the Orient forms a field of aesthetic experience in which Flaubert experiments with an ethics of impersonality. My argument unfolds in two principal stages. First, I trace the coordinates of the sensible sphere (the aesthetic field) that constitutes the mode of being of literature for Foucault. Second, I connect his reflections on literature to his reading of Flaubert's La Tentation de saint Antoine in order to reframe an aesthetics and ethics of the impersonal in the novel. [End Page 727] In her magisterially erudite study of La Tentation, Mary Orr cautions against an analytical overinvestment in the cults of the Flaubertian impersonal and the Foucauldian archeology of knowledge. Making the simple points that La Tentation is "an unavoidably religious and theological text," but also "the aesthetic expression of [Flaubert's] vast erudition" (9, 5–6), Orr invites readers to consider the work as a critical and creative rewriting of Athanasius' Vita Antonii, as a modern summa or commentary on religious, scientific, political, and economic discourses in

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Humanities · SAINT · Silence · French Literature and Critical Theory · French Literature and Criticism · French Literature and Poetry · Philosophy

• Les mots et les choses

  Michel Foucault•LES MOTS ET LES CHOSES•1990

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• Discourse/Counter-Discourse

  Richard Terdiman•Discourse/Counter-Discourse•1989

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• Flaubert's Tentation

  Martin Orr, Mary Orr•Flaubert's Tentation•2008

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• Trinitarian Unity in La Tentation de saint Antoine

  Allan H Pasco•French Studies•2002

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• Praying by Numbers

  Niklaus Largier•Representations•2008

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