Sartre, Ponge and the Ghost of Husserl

practice has consistently avoided close textual scrutiny in favor of a more comprehensive reading subservient to a set of varying ideologies and concepts. This type of eccentric criticism, in which the text becomes pretext, prefigures two general objectives. It elucidates either a particular system of values or an argument ad hominem which seeks the writer within or behind the work. Sartre's critical works can be distinguished from the above categories by their apparent eclecticism; the variety of individual concepts and vocabularies recognizable in his writings forms no integral text-view. On the contrary, it often appears as though Sartre changes critical optics midway through a literary encounter. As a consequence, his criticism taken as a continuous discourse or narrative traces a set of serpentine changes whose most characteristic trait is the subjugation and assimilation of the primary text to external objectives (the hors-texte). As in a kind of ritual cannibalism, the text must disappear within the machinery of a critical apparatus hungry for available nourishment. In expectation of the promised analysis of Madame Bovary, it might prove helpful to consider an instance where the machinery breaks down and where the phenomenon of malfunction exposes the nature of a critical procedure which necessarily eschews textual considerations as a kind of ritual offering toward elucidation of extra-textual objectives. Conceived as a presentation of Francis Ponge's Le Parti pris des choses, L'Homme et les choses first appeared in Poesie (July-October 1944). In addition to revealing the ontological concerns of L'Etre et Ze niant, the article is Sartre's earliest discussion of poetic language. It thus foreshadows much of the literary program set forth two years later in Qu'est-ce que la littirature? Yet what appears as the presentation of a poetic text is also an act of critical sabotage whose objective we see as situated beyond the poems under review. As becomes clear, but only at the end of the article, Sartre's exposition substitutes polemic for analytic concerns: the allegations against Ponge form

Epistemology · French Literature and Critical Theory · French Literature and Criticism · French Literature and Poetry · Philosophy

• Supplement to bibliography on Jean-Paul Sartre

  Open Access•Fran ois H Lapointe, Fran�ois H Lapointe et al.•Continental Philosophy Review•1975

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