
On the occasion of the centenary of Jacques Riviere's death, **Editions Claire Paulhan** & **Librairie Pierre Brunet** are pleased to invite you to the presentation of

**Correspondance 1918-1924 de Jean Paulhan & Jacques Riviere, followed by the 1925-1962 Correspondence between Isabelle Riviere and the members of La Nouvelle Revue francaise**

which will take place on Wednesday, March 11, between 6 p.m. and 8 p.m., at Librairie Pierre Brunet, 20 rue des Carmes, Paris 5th arrondissement.

<figure role="group" class="centered-img"> <img loading="lazy" src="/images/livres/JP-JR-1918-1924.webp"></figure>

_From 7 p.m., **Bernard Baillaud**, coordinator of this volume, will present the central issue of these correspondences: what relation to religious feeling did the *La NRF* group and the writers they published have?_

_A friendship drink will be offered at the end of the presentation._

If you cannot attend, you can also order a signed copy [by following this link](https://www.librairie-pierre-brunet.fr/librairie-en-ligne/correspondance-1918-1924/category_pathway-486.html).

Mail: contact@librairie-pierre-brunet.fr


Jean Paulhan & Jacques Riviere, Correspondence 1918-1924


On the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary, the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne is presenting a retrospective exhibition and a program of events revisiting the history and stakes of a concept born in the middle of the twentieth century.

Titled _Art Brut en Suisse. From the origins of the collection to today_, the exhibition runs from February 28 to September 27, 2026, and brings together more than 300 works from the museum's holdings.


Fifty years of art brut in Lausanne


If you live in Lausanne, chances are you are familiar with the concept of art brut. The famous Collection de l'art brut, nestled within the walls of Chateau de Beaulieu, is one of the must-see museums of the Olympic capital.

Its story began more than fifty years ago. In 1971, French painter, sculptor, and visual artist Jean Dubuffet, strongly attached to Switzerland, offered his art brut collection to the City of Lausanne so it could be shown to the public. A few years later, in February 1976, the museum opened its doors. Housing 5,000 works at the beginning, the Collection de l'art brut, directed since 2013 by Sarah Lombardi, now preserves 70,000. It has become an international reference point for this artistic movement.

In Europe, only a handful of museums are devoted to art brut. Notably, one can cite Art et marges musee in Brussels, the Musee de la Creation Franche in Begles near Bordeaux (France), or the Musee d’Arts Brut, Singulier & Autres in Montpellier (France). Note that in Paris, the large and beautiful art brut collection of French filmmaker and collector Bruno Decharme (nearly 1,000 works) was recently donated to the National Museum of Modern Art at the Centre Pompidou. The institution now has an entire room dedicated to art brut.

## Art brut, definition

In 1949, in his publication "L’Art Brut prefere aux arts culturels," Jean Dubuffet gave the following definition of art brut: "By this we mean works executed by persons untouched by artistic culture, in which mimicry, contrary to what happens among intellectuals, has little or no part, so that their authors derive everything there (subjects, choice of materials used, means of transposition, rhythms, ways of writing, etc.) from their own depths and not from cliches of classical art or fashionable art. Here we witness the pure artistic operation, raw, reinvented in all its phases by its author, starting solely from his own impulses."


Art brut, an unconventional artistic movement celebrated this year in Lausanne


Albert Thibaudet, for whom Jean Paulhan was, along with Leon Bopp, one of the literary executors, is the most important critic of the interwar years and also the most current: the essential part of his work has been republished over the last twenty years. He was a student of Bergson, close to Gide and Valery, and one of the most respected columnists of the NRF. He left landmark books on Thucydides, Flaubert, and Mallarme, and was a lucid observer of French political life. In the eyes of his contemporaries, he appeared as a new Montaigne, building his city of books, his library tower in Tournus, Burgundy.

<figure role="group" class="centered-img"> <img loading="lazy" src="/images/livres/albert-thibaudet-multilateral.webp"> <figcaption><i>Albert Thibaudet, a city of books</i></figcaption> </figure>

This volume invites readers to enter that library, whose composition we know thanks to an auction catalog, but even more to enter Thibaudet's inner library, that of a "multilateral" man open to the most diverse tendencies.
Literature from every era, French and foreign alike, but also philosophy, history, politics, cinema: around fifteen studies account for the extreme variety of its shelves. They are complemented by an anthology bringing together about ten of the critic's own articles, rare or unpublished, including an important set devoted to Proust.

[Table of contents](/documents/TDM-Thibaudet.pdf)

See also: [Christophe Pradeau, Jessica Desclaux, Theo Millot (eds.), Albert Thibaudet. Une cite des livres - Fabula.org](https://www.fabula.org/actualites/133051/albert-thibaudet-une-cite-des-livres-christophe-pradeau-jessica-desclaux-theo-millot.html)


Publication "Albert Thibaudet, a city of books"


Association of Friends of Jacques Riviere and Alain-Fournier  
Exhibition "Jacques Riviere and the modernity of the 1920s"

**from Saturday, September 13 to Saturday, November 29** at Leila Slimani Media Library in Bourges, an exhibition is being held as part of the centenary of Jacques Riviere's passing.  
Based on literary archives kept at the Quatre Piliers heritage library, the exhibition presents Jacques Riviere in the context of a society shaken by war, a society in full transformation in which Jacques Riviere, director of the prestigious _Nouvelle Revue Francaise_, helped promote artistic and literary expression between continuity and rupture.

Around the exhibition, various activities are planned, including a **lecture by Bernard Baillaud**, President of the Society of Readers of Jean Paulhan:
"La Nouvelle Revue Francaise between Riviere and Paulhan."
The lecture takes place on Friday, September 19 at 6:30 p.m. at Leila Slimani Media Library in Bourges. Free entry.

For those who cannot travel to Bourges to discover this magnificent exhibition, it is possible to acquire the exhibition catalog included in the upcoming AJRAF _Cahiers 10_.
If you are not a member of the association, you can order it by email at agathe.corre71@orange.fr for 25 euros. For those who joined for 2025 and live in the Paris region, you can pick it up at Salon de la Revue, from October 10 to 13, at Halle des Blancs Manteaux in Paris.

### Alain-Fournier Prize

On the occasion of European Heritage Days, the Alain-Fournier Prize will be awarded to Ingrid Glowacki for "La poete aux mains noires," at 2:30 p.m. at Cite de l’Or in Saint-Amand-Montrond.
Come in large numbers to meet her, reconnect with former laureates, and discover the new trophy sculpted for winners on the occasion of this prize's 40th anniversary.

### 111th anniversary of the death of Alain-Fournier and his companions

On the occasion of the 111th anniversary of Alain-Fournier's death, the municipality of Saint-Remy-la-Calonne is organizing on September 22 a commemoration at the site of the Alain-Fournier grave pit. The site has been redesigned, and the ceremony will inaugurate this new presentation. It will begin at 2:30 p.m. on September 22, 2025.
Following the ceremony, a reception will be offered by the Comite du Souvenir francais, the Community of Communes of the Territory of Fresnes-en-Woevre, and the municipality of Saint-Remy-la-Calonne.


Exhibition "Jacques Riviere and the modernity of the 1920s"


[See the Fabula page: Jacques Riviere, an editor and writer in his century (1925-2025) (Aix-en-Provence)](https://www.fabula.org/actualites/127642/colloque-international-jacques-riviere-un-editeur-et-un-ecrivain-dans.html)


Jacques Riviere, an editor and writer in his century


To mark 100 years since the death of Jacques Riviere (1886-1925), the Bouquins collection is publishing the essential part of the critical and novelistic work of this famous unknown, condemned to live in the shadow of _La Nouvelle Revue francaise_, which he directed from 1919 to 1925.

The Bouquins collection continues its commendable work of exhuming the forgotten. Living proof that classics never die: one only needs to breathe a resurrecting breath over their covers. After the complete diary of Julien Green (in publication since 2019), Casanova's essays, or Stefan Zweig's criticism, among recent examples, Bouquins does it again by offering the public the essential works of Jacques Riviere.

In this volume soberly titled _Critique et creation_, readers will discover the eclecticism and sharp analytical intelligence of the man who was, modestly and passionately, the herald of a young review destined for a great future: _La Nouvelle Revue francaise_.

Founded in 1909 by a "sextumvirate" of young authors around Andre Gide (1869-1951), what we now know by the acronym NRF sought to defend a literary avant-garde and would become an irreversible link in our literary history. The review would find in its young director an oblate of great fidelity, to the point that their paths and ideas would merge. In fact, to place him in the enlarged space of literature is to place him in the narrower one of the NRF conclave.

**Portrait of an unknown**

But who was Jacques Riviere? As with all illustrious men, there is first the dry biography, which foretells and announces nothing of the intrinsic strength of the man. Born in 1886, he died abruptly - and we might say tragically - of typhoid fever which, after entering the Riviere household through a servant and affecting first the son then the mother, finally reached him and carried him off at age 38 in 1925. He had married in 1909 (the year of the NRF's creation, incidentally) Isabelle Fournier, sister of a certain Henri Fournier, met at the Ecole normale superieure, who would become author of _Le Grand Meaulnes_ under the pen name Alain-Fournier (1886-1914).

From 1919 onward, he was editorial secretary, then director of the NRF after a memorable encounter with Andre Gide, of whom he kept warm memories. One could push the inquiry further. But no biographical element seems to answer a question that becomes ever more pressing: who was Jacques Riviere, really?

In light of Jean-Yves Tadie's sublime personal preface, the question sounds like an admission of failure. For the relationships we maintain with authors testify against us before our own era. The time when a teenager plunged with delight into the writings of the author of _Aimee_ seems gone. For many of us - and all the more for younger generations - Jacques Riviere is an unknown. Absent from school manuals and from many literary histories, his barely reissued books are reserved to a few happy few.

Yet this pessimistic portrait finds a striking counterpoint in the contextualization work offered by this reissue. Collected formulas reveal a man of extraordinary analytical capacity and intelligence: according to Jean-Yves Tadie, he was "a perfect amateur, without label, without leash, amateur in the sense of one who loves, not one who is merely a dabbler." Paul Claudel (1868-1955) described him to Francis Jammes (1868-1938) as "remarkably penetrating and intelligent."

Riviere was a sensitive being, an intelligence cultivated and nourished by assiduous reading of Maurice Barres (1862-1923), discovered during summer 1905 when he was only 19. Hence an "intellectual sensitivity" feeding a "sensitive intelligence," in Ariane Charton's apt phrase, which he constantly tried out on authors.

**The Riviere "method"**

"Understanding oneself and understanding others are the only occupations that make sense in life," he declares in his beautiful homage to Marcel Proust (1871-1922). We can understand what charmed the young man in the creation of this _Nouvelle Revue francaise_, to the point of taking its direction. The "violent literary modesty" exhaled by two of its founders, Andre Gide and Jean Schlumberger (1877-1968), coupled with "a predominance in them, over all aesthetic concerns, of a moral concern," opened pathways toward a new ideal based on "the writer's honesty" and "probity in concerns of composition." ("La Nouvelle Revue francaise. Ses origines, son programme")

Understanding, analysis, and knowledge are the three cardinal virtues of his "method." But above all, Riviere is a sensitive being. Engaged in a personal and intimate relation that fully commits him to authors, he speaks of books "with the enthusiasm of love; and therefore with a certain naivete."

Endowed with flawless lucidity, Riviere advances through the fields of art (music, painting, and literature) and politics with the same inquietude that makes him scrutinize people and things. "Universal insecurity" is a reality for one who knew the trenches of 1914. But beyond morasses and troubles, he also knows how to be prophetic.

Strengthened by that "wonderful art of formulating and foreseeing" for which Alain-Fournier praised him, observation after observation, one truth takes shape: according to him, by dispensing with any serious consideration - especially metaphysical - the literary field, and the novel in particular, records an alteration of its universal scope: "It seems to me I see beginning, simultaneously with Dada, an age in which the question of the meaning of literature will completely cease to preoccupy those who make it, an age in which the writer will no longer believe himself designated for a transcendent function, but will work to fix the aspect of things nearest to him. [...] No longer revelations will be expected from him, but happily formulated information about man, about life, about our journey in this world."

How can one fail to see that we are living in this announced age of superficiality? Perhaps we have even crossed another threshold toward atrophy of the self, which sees in the literary object only a mirror held up to its own vanity.


What remains of Jacques Riviere’s critical and novelistic work?


**Texts collected and presented by Claude Le Manchec**

Like late Proust enclosed in his cork-lined room, Joe Bousquet (1897-1950) is an emblematic figure of the writer. Deprived of the use of his lower limbs and bedridden from age 21, his entire life passed through writing and reading.

On May 27, 1918, at age 21, Joe Bousquet was struck in the spine by a German bullet. He lost the use of the entire lower half of his body. What to do with such a life? He first thought of suicide, before understanding that his task was to "build the universe around him" and that this life was "the most precious, the deepest, probably the only one that is real."

From 1925 to 1950, all the major works then being written arrived in this room with shuttered windows. "I sometimes envy," Paulhan wrote to him, "your divination and that strange rapidity with which you cross in one stroke what remains opaque to me." Until his death in 1950, Bousquet would be the most lucid witness of the literature of his time. At a moment when some of the greatest works in literary history were flourishing, he perceived better than anyone - thanks to his total availability and extreme sensitivity - their secret lines of force.

But by writing about others, he was also writing his own life: these readings, dispersed across various journals, constitute - when read together year by year - a true "reading journal." In all books, what he seeks is one and the same: "the foreboding of a higher silence, unsayable" (as he writes while reading Daumal).

Recovered in their deep unity, these readings that Bousquet published in journals form both the true year-by-year logbook of this solitary, raw-nerved man and a fascinating panorama of literature in the making - from Aragon to Michaux, from Jouve to Artaud, but also from Milosz to Kafka, from Daumal to Char, from Queneau to Simenon.

In this very original "reading journal," one finds both Bousquet's deepest truth and one of the best panoramas of twentieth-century French literature.


Joe Bousquet, On the threshold of the unsayable. Reading journal


Who was Jean Paulhan really? Too many fragmentary or conventional portraits have hidden him from us - not to mention legends and partisan judgments. One undeniable fact: for half a century, he reigned over French literature - but from the shadows. Without ever appearing as a "major contemporary." A kind of Pere Joseph exercising his magisterium in Gaston Gallimard's orbit. This role of eminence grise is what has mostly been emphasized. It ended up freezing him as a Commander statue, with the share of mystery attached to men of the shadows. All wrapped in a formidable seriousness of finicky grammarian and moralist. Many writers, of all genres and all sides, have left testimonies about him. That is because for a long time he was indispensable. Most often, esteem and respect outweigh reservations sometimes caused by incomprehension. What is certain is that his sureness of judgment was accompanied by a sense of friendship, and that opportunism was always alien to him.

## A complex and mysterious personality

In several columns, Alexandre Vialatte speaks of him kindly and with a touch of mockery. Affectionate mockery: did he not owe him publication of his Kafka translations? For his part, in his 1928 _Journal_, Paul Leautaud pokes fun at " _his little sing-song and mannered tone_ " and takes little pleasure in his cool humor. " _Remarks of that sort_ ," he notes after a conversation concerning Gaston Gallimard, " _must be his way of playing the fantasist_ ." As for Francis Ponge, he describes him as follows: " _Tall, with an athletic bearing thanks to the parallelepiped of his torso, an imposing interlocutor, he speaks little, in a rather high register voice, but soft_ ." Dominique de Roux, in _Immediatement_ (1972), hazards a psychological portrait at the very least nuanced: " _Jean Paulhan: restrained, secretive, allusive, always having lived in the full whirlwind of his inner castration (but without Mallarme's superior and often magnificent cunning)_ ."

So many observations, among many others, each containing a part of truth, but above all revealing how difficult the man and his work remain to pin down.

## A conscientious biography

You can be convinced of this by reading or rereading _Paulhan le juste_ by Frederic Badre, the first attempt to reassemble the puzzle. It follows step by step, from his birth in 1884 to his death in 1968, the path of the young man from Nimes who "moved up" to Paris with his family in 1894 and whose career led him all the way to the Academie.

Yet this meticulous biography, packed with details and the fruit of work whose probity is hardly in doubt, still leaves the reader unsatisfied. One senses that the essential always escapes through some side opening. To put it plainly, it singularly lacks breadth. No overall view, no perspectives. Little analysis, much accumulation. Useful, certainly, but in the end a fragmented Paulhan, even if captured in intimacy, in strict chronological order, and still preserving a good share of his mystery. The biographer should not be blamed for that: the undertaking was not easy.

And it is true that disconcerting aspects abound in this man passionate about rhetoric and language - but also about painting. He had the ambition of making " _literature more literary_ ," and wanted to be at once theorist, judge, and actor of that enterprise. His work, inaugurated by an essay on Malagasy popular proverbs, an unfinished thesis he was preparing under Levy-Bruhl, often resembles a subtle and ambiguous game.

It culminates in _Les Fleurs de Tarbes_, a reflection on literary form and creation, whose definitive edition dates from 1941. In between and afterward, Paulhan published books devoted to painting (on Braque, Fautrier, Cubists, informal art) and narratives, often short, written in the first person, but the autobiographical part serves only as pretext - when it is not invented outright.

## An eminent role in our literature

Above all, he played a major role as catalyst of literary life and discoverer of talent. In charge of the _NRF_ from 1925, at Jacques Riviere's death, first as editor-in-chief, then as director, he gave the review exceptional influence, opening its pages, without the least sectarianism, to writers as diverse as Giraudoux, Georges Limbour, Aragon, or Marcel Jouhandeau, among many others. Drieu La Rochelle succeeded him between 1940 and 1943.

For Paulhan, having entered the Resistance (he is among the founders of the clandestine _Lettres francaises_), would return only in 1953 to head the _NRF_, with Marcel Arland. A convinced resistant, then, and for a time a fellow traveler of communists - constrained and compelled in a way. During the purge, his attitude was exemplary. Resigning from the National Committee of Writers (_CNE_) in November 1946, once he perceived the iniquity of a blacklist he had refused to sign, he rose violently against the arbitrariness inflicted not only on disapproved writers but on all good-faith French citizens condemned by the liberators.

## An unambiguous commitment

One must read _De la paille et du grain_ (1948) and _Lettre aux directeurs de la Resistance_ (1952). There Paulhan appears fiercely anti-communist and defends the legitimacy of the Vichy government, the only government " _that had the authority to judge betrayals committed between 1940 and 1944_ ." Astonishing language for someone from his side. Pen in hand, he battles to defend his friend Jouhandeau and all those people pretend to muzzle, polemicizing with Aragon, Martin-Chauffier, Claude Roy, Claude Mauriac. He reveals himself as a pamphleteer, though his domain had seemed limited to preciosity, affectation, and more or less erudite, Byzantine inquiries. His cool humor, his irony, often hit the mark. One can never stress enough the intellectual probity and courage of this man whom everything - beginning with his origins in good Protestant, republican, Dreyfusard society - inclined to the left, and who in the darkest moments kept his lucidity intact. A sincere patriot (" _It must be_ ," he writes to the Resistance leaders, " _that beyond your tricks and cheating there exists something true called the homeland_ "), this Gaullist would, in the 1960s, take the side of French Algeria, little concerned with provoking the vindictiveness and sarcasm of an intelligentsia he had already defied many times.

Thus we owe him, in 1952, publication of Lucien Rebatet's _Les Deux Etendards_, a cursed writer among the cursed. In the issue of _L’Infini_ devoted to Jean Paulhan, Dominique Aury, who was long his secretary, returns to this episode: " _Paulhan entrusted me with reading this manuscript that he_ (Rebatet) _had written in prison. I was given this manuscript one afternoon. I read it through until the next evening, including the night. I am the first reader of_ Les Deux Etendards. _Later, when I met Rebatet, I told him his book was admirable, but his wartime articles were abject. He answered: ‘Those fools, they did not shoot me.’ Yes, you would not have stolen it_ ."

This issue of _L’Infini_ offers other valuable contributions, beginning with letters from Paulhan to Franz Hellens on communism. Written in 1949, they clarify the writer's intransigence. One should also consult with profit the third volume of his _Correspondance_ covering 1946 to 1968. For this secret man, at once cold and sensitive, skeptical and passionate, can there be approached most closely.

_Paulhan le juste_, Frederic Badre, Grasset, 328 p.


An endearing puzzle named Jean Paulhan


The Hyper Paulhan site is now public and accessible to everyone on the EMAN platform!

Conducted since 2013, first within Labex OBVIL (Observatoire de la vie litteraire) and then on the EMAN platform, managed by the Thalim laboratory (cnrs - sorbonne nouvelle - ens), in partnership with IMEC (Institut Memoire de l’edition contemporaine), the SLJP (Societe des lecteurs de Jean Paulhan), the HyperPaulhan project makes available online a set of letters received and written by Jean Paulhan, both as scanned documents and as transcriptions. Two periods are covered: 1925-1936 and 1950-1958, corresponding to periods of intense activity by Jean Paulhan at La NRF.

The site can be consulted at: [https://eman-archives.org/Paulhan](https://eman-archives.org/Paulhan)

It currently presents more than 80 correspondences with 3,036 letters, nearly 75% of which have been transcribed. Letters are presented by correspondent and include images of letter folios as well as transcriptions when available. Transcription has been carried out under a strict protocol described on the site. A search engine allows refined searches in letter descriptions (metadata) and in transcriptions.

The site is constantly evolving and will gradually publish new correspondences as well as new transcriptions. The adopted principle is that correspondences already published in print will not be reproduced on the site but are indicated on a specific site page. We are thus revealing a genuinely unpublished active and passive correspondence of Jean Paulhan, whose extent is a true gold mine for literary research....

**Lead**:  
Claire Paulhan  
**Reference URL**:  
[https://eman-archives.org/Paulhan](https://eman-archives.org/Paulhan)

**Site tree**:  
[https://eman-archives.org/Paulhan/arbre-collections](https://eman-archives.org/Paulhan/arbre-collections)

**Project progress**:  
[https://eman-archives.org/Paulhan/avancement-du-projet](https://eman-archives.org/Paulhan/avancement-du-projet)


HyperPaulhan


Review of: Perrine Coudurier, _La Terreur dans la France litteraire des annees 1950 (1945-1962)_, Paris, Classiques Garnier, "Etudes de litterature des XXe et XXIe siecles" series, 2021, 786 p.

In _La Terreur dans la France litteraire des annees 1950_ - a work derived from her doctoral thesis defended in 2014 - Perrine Coudurier proposes an opening onto 20th-century literary history centered on the thematic and metaphysical question of evil and, as its corollary in literary theory, on the notion of terror.

Perrine Coudurier builds the ideological, formal, and thematic dialogue between the question of "evil" and that of "terror" as a structuring axis of literary theories that emerged throughout the 20th century. Her aim is to rethink what is sometimes too quickly called the "postwar novel," insofar as "literary history allows us to inscribe in the continuity of historical and literary crises the discontinuity of the major rupture of the Second World War" (p. 26): this project passes through a cross-portrait of different generations grappling with the same questions and writing at the same time.

Coudurier's study focuses mainly on the postwar period, from camp literature to the first Nouveau Roman: the period she covers runs from 1945 to 1962. In reality, however, the study takes root in the first decades of the century: it examines what forms "terror" after the Second World War by contrast with the "horror" of the first (pp. 10-11); it traces the careers of writers of the "1910 generation" - that is, born before the Great War - who became some of the "major names" of 1950s literature (p. 57); and it grounds the genealogy of the notion of terror, forged throughout the book, notably in Jean Paulhan's texts published in the late 1930s. The path retraced in _La Terreur dans la France litteraire_, articulated around the notion of "terror in letters" and its reverse, "rhetoric," thus runs from Stephane Mallarme and Arthur Rimbaud to Alain Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute, by way of Georges Bataille, Franz Kafka, Jean Paulhan, Antonin Artaud, Maurice Blanchot, Roland Barthes, and Gerard Genette. This trajectory includes works by Jean-Paul Sartre, Alfred Camus, Simone de Beauvoir; it involves structuralist readings of the Nouveau Roman; but it places these moments of French literary history within the thread of an original inquiry, a genealogy parallel to those best known and most taught. More than a literary and ideological portrait of a literary moment, then, _La Terreur dans la France litteraire des annees 1950_ reads as a genealogical route, a rereading of 20th-century literary history through the prism of terror; open-ended, it invites extending the study beyond the limits to which it had to restrict itself.

[...]


Literary terrors: genealogies of twentieth-century French literary history


From October 14, 2023 to October 15, 2023  
At Maison franco-japonaise, Tokyo

Almost 80 years ago, Jean Giraudoux died suddenly, a playwright and novelist then at the height of his fame. In the years preceding his death, Sartre and Blanchot, still young authors, devoted significant articles to his work - in _Situations, I_ and in _Faux Pas_ - where the question of language and trust in it was raised. In the background, one could sense Paulhan's questions expressed at the same period in _Les Fleurs de Tarbes_.

This conference will be an opportunity to ask what place Giraudoux's work occupies in these reflections, and to explore the questionings that led Sartre and Blanchot, in dialogue with his work and also with Paulhan's, to define their own position toward language.

Speakers: Yukie MASE (Miyagigakuin Univ.), Noriko NAKAMURA (Konan Univ.), Seigo TANOKUCHI (International Christian University), Vincent BRANCOURT (Keio Univ.), Andre JOB (emeritus upper-level chair professor), Nao SAWADA (Rikkyo Univ.), Gilles PHILIPPE (Univ. of Lausanne), Io WATANABE (Keio Univ.), Takashi ICHIKAWA (Keio Univ.), Kai GOHARA (Univ. of Tokyo), Kazuya TSUKIYAMA (Keio Univ.), Christophe BIDENT (Univ. of Picardie)  
Moderators: Seigo TANOKUCHI, Yukie MASE, Takashi ICHIKAWA, Nao SAWADA.

---

Program

▶ Saturday, October 14: 2:00 p.m. - 5:40 p.m.

2:00 p.m.: Opening of the conference

**Around Giraudoux**

1.  Theater
    Moderator: Seigo TANOKUCHI

2:10 p.m. Yukie MASE
"The contemporary significance of _Pour Lucrece_ and _La Folle de Chaillot_ - buried possibility within darkness"

2:50 p.m. Noriko NAKAMURA
"Reflections on the comparison between Giraudoux's _Electre_ and Sartre's _Les Mouches_"

2.  Languages
    Moderator: Yukie MASE

3:50 p.m. Seigo TANOKUCHI
"Language, propaganda, and cinema: relations between Giraudoux's conception of language and his film works"

4:30 p.m. Vincent BRANCOURT
"The temptation of limit-experience: female figures and frontiers of identity in Giraudoux's theater"

5:10 p.m. Andre JOB
"Giraudoux: a rhetoric 'free of doubts and anxieties' (C. E. Magny)?"

▶ Sunday, October 15: 10:00 a.m. - 6:00 p.m.

**Terror and rhetoric**

Moderator: Takashi ICHIKAWA

10:00 a.m. Nao SAWADA

"Terrorism according to Sartre: from surrealism to negritude"

10:40 a.m. Gilles PHILIPPE
"Anatomy of a failure: Sartre between Paulhan and Blanchot (1945-1952)"

11:20 a.m. Io WATANABE
"Brice Parain and Jean Paulhan: debate on the 'power of words'"

12:00 p.m.: Break

Moderator: Nao SAWADA (Rikkyo Univ.)

1:30 p.m. Kai GOHARA
"Vibration and volatilization of the cliche - Paulhan at Blanchot's beginning"

2:10 p.m. Takashi ICHIKAWA
"Freedom or death: two meanings of 'Terror' in Blanchot"

2:50 p.m. Kazuya TSUKIYAMA
"Maurice Blanchot's literary chronicles: Lautreamont and the problems of the novel"

3:30 p.m. Christophe BIDENT
"Blanchot, Giraudoux, Sartre: history of sensibility"

4:10 p.m. Break

4:30 p.m. Round table and general discussion (\*with simultaneous translation)

6:00 p.m. Closing of the conference

Organizer:  
Japanese Society of French Language and Literature  
Reference URL:  
https://www.mfjtokyo.or.jp/fr/events/co-sponsored/20231014.html  
Address:  
Maison franco-japonaise, Tokyo


Terror and rhetoric: Giraudoux, Sartre, Blanchot (Tokyo)


> "_On the roads of the immediate postwar period, the most common car incident is a flat tire. But Dubuffet's rattletrap does not have very reliable mechanics. A clatter of dishes sets in. Where can it be coming from?_"

This hybrid narrative, presented as fragments and interwoven narrative threads, unfolds around a real event: the car trip made by writer Jean Paulhan and his friend, painter Jean Dubuffet, in September 1946, between Paris and Luxembourg. The conversation between the two friends lets elements of the postwar landscape emerge, as well as things left unsaid, more or less concealed, memories, apprehensions. Of course it touches on language and literature, but that is not the essential point.

Struck by _[Mort de Groethuysen a Luxembourg](/livres/mort-de-groethuysen-a-luxembourg)_ (Fata Morgana, 1976), the narrative Paulhan wrote on his return to Paris, Louis Jacob revisits that journey as if for the first time.

—--

Louis Jacob is a professor in the sociology department at the Universite du Quebec a Montreal, where he teaches major approaches and the fundamental notions of the discipline. He is a member of the _Observatoire des mediations culturelles_ and the _Art et societe, terrains et theories_ laboratory.

---

**Montreal, Liber, "Anekdota" series, 2023**  
EAN: 9782895787822  
182 pages  
Price: 20 EUR  
Publication date: 3 May 2023


Commentary on Groethuysen’s death in Luxembourg


In publishing, there are dowsers who spot manuscripts they will help reveal against all odds. A discreet writer himself, Georges Lambrichs was one of these talent scouts. A very well-documented biography devoted to him has now been published by Arnaud Villanova.

## Mad about literature

Born on July 5, 1917 in Saint-Josse-ten-Noode, one of Brussels' municipalities, Georges Lambrichs showed a passion for literature from adolescence. With no degree whatsoever, he published columns in the Brussels weekly _Le Rouge et le Noir_. In 1937, he went to Paris to show his texts to Jean Paulhan, who directed the mythical _Nouvelle Revue Francaise_; for Georges, J.P. would remain "a kind of model" and a lifelong friend. When will Paulhan enter the Pleiade?

During the war, Lambrichs became the Brussels correspondent of the clandestine French review _Messages_. This later connected him with Vercors, whose _Le Silence de la mer_ had appeared in 1942, also clandestinely, at _Editions de Minuit_, founded by Vercors (alias Jean Bruller) and Pierre de Lescure, supported by Paulhan and Paul Eluard.

Settling in Paris in 1945, Lambrichs joined _Minuit_ as a reader, where his first book, _L’Aventure inachevee_, appeared the following year. From 1948 onward he handled literary direction there, while young Jerome Lindon took charge of administration. At _Minuit_, Lambrichs published Samuel Beckett's _Molloy_ (rejected by Camus at Gallimard) and, by the same future 1969 Nobel laureate, _Malone meurt_, crowned in 1951 by the Critics' Prize. By then-unknown agronomy engineer Alain Robbe-Grillet, he published _Les Gommes_, winner of the Prix Feneon in 1953: this was the beginning of the Nouveau Roman, a movement Lambrichs would later judge harshly.

## "The best of his time"

As his professional relations with Lindon deteriorated, Lambrichs (married, father of two daughters) resigned in 1954 and moved to Grasset, where in 1958 he published Christiane Rochefort's _Le Repos du guerrier_. Given the huge success of that novel, Gaston Gallimard contacted Lambrichs to work for his illustrious house; hired in January 1959, he was invited by contract to devote to it "the best of his time." That same year, he became a naturalized French citizen.

From 1959 onward, Lambrichs created the "Le Chemin" collection - which would exist until 1987. With total freedom in his choices, he published under this label dozens of French-language authors, from Pierre Bourgeade to Michel Foucault, from Georges Perros to Pierre Klossowski, from Andre Pieyre de Mandiargues to Pierre Guyotat, from Christian Bobin to Michel Butor, and others such as Jean-Noel Schifano or Jean-Loup Trassard. Two of them would win the Prix Goncourt: Jacques Borel for _L’Adoration_ in 1965 and Pascal Laine for _La Dentelliere_ in 1974.

In October 1962, Lambrichs received by mail a letter and then the manuscript of a 22-year-old from Nice, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio (Nobel 2008); without hesitation, he published that first novel, _Le Proces-verbal_, which would win the Prix Renaudot in 1963.

Succeeding Jean Paulhan and then Marcel Arland, the author of _S’en prendre aux mots_ (1991) directed _La Nouvelle Revue Francaise_ from 1976 to 1987: his marshal's baton. What fascinated him, he admitted, "was writing never seen, never read, never yet printed." Georges Lambrichs died in Paris on February 10, 1992.

_Le chemin continue. Biographie de Georges Lambrichs_  
Arnaud Villanova


Georges Lambrichs, passionate about writing never yet seen


**Writing Terror, 20th-21st centuries, Call for Papers**  
**Conference on January 22 and 23, 2024**

Although he was one of its fervent critics, Paulhan is responsible for establishing the notion of "Terror" in literary theory in a lasting way, in its historical and political sense. By entitling the first and only written part of _Les Fleurs de Tarbes_ "La Terreur dans les Lettres," he effectively sets up a homology between the revolutionary state of exception of 1793-1794 and the modern regime of literature, rejecting rhetorical legislation in the name of a permanent revolution of language.

If the formulation is new, Paulhan nevertheless draws on the older criticism of detractors of Romanticism who, from the 1830s onward, accused Hugo and the young Romantics of carrying out a literary "93" by declaring "war on rhetoric" ("Reponse a un acte d’accusation," 1856). Hugo turns this criticism around: not only does he embrace the full legacy of the French Revolution by redefining Terror as a necessary stage in the teleology of Progress, but he also asserts the necessity of a terrorist poetics, or poetic Terror, able to dismantle the classical edifice of genre and style hierarchies. For the poet who exclaims "I am that Danton! I am that Robespierre!," this is not merely metaphor but a true politics of literature: the Romantic revolution must be the continuation and completion of social Revolution, "1789 as much as 1793" (_William Shakespeare_, 1864).

It is nevertheless in the 20th century that Terror becomes a true aesthetic category, sometimes promoted by artisans of radical poetic and political revolution, sometimes denounced by critics of a tyranny of originality and literary innovation. On one side, Dada and the Surrealists, first of all, replay the decrees of Fructidor. Breton declares: "It would not be a bad thing to restore for the mind the laws of Terror" ("Caracteres de l’evolution moderne," 1922). The link between revolution in Letters and the complete transformation of existence, dreamed of by the avant-gardes, is made under the aegis of Robespierre, Saint-Just "the Divine executioner," and 93, whose radical action provides the model of a destructive experience of the limits of morality (death, sexuality, absence of God), logical thought, and ordinary language subject to conventions. Bataille, and still more Blanchot ("La litterature et le droit a la mort," 1949), perfectly summarize the situation: literature is eminently political and revolutionary precisely because it is Terror _through_ letters, a pure event of free creation grounded in the putting to death of the world by language.

Yet on the other side, Paulhan denounces this linguistic purity as misology and as an impossible construction of communicational space. Likewise, after the war, Sartre as well as Camus regret having "grown up in Terror" and call for an end to the incommunicable. Literature must reconnect with humanity wounded by the other terror, that of the Reich and Collaboration; and it is therefore no surprise that in that generation Camus first gave his Oran novel the title _La Terreur_. During the second half of the 20th century, it would fall to the Nouveau Roman and later _Tel Quel_ to propose a conciliatory solution between the terrorist logic of the literary avant-garde and the project of a human community, before the fall of the USSR and the collapse of teleological narratives invalidated conventional revolutionary folklore.

Still, Terror survives today as a "living metaphor," within writings engaged in 21st-century struggles. Thus, the political claims of feminism and postcolonialism take place first of all in representation and language. Likewise, within modern poetics, the defense of an "illegibility" of contemporary poetry (Vinclair, _Prise de vers_, 2019) seems a direct inheritance of what was once called "Terror in Letters."

This conference aims to reassess the category of Terror forged by Paulhan and to measure its relevance for understanding relations between poetics and politics in 20th- and 21st-century literature. We will examine the place and role of "terrorist folklore" in the poetico-political projects of 20th-century avant-gardes (the surrealists, who invoke figures of Terror, or Peguy wanting to "redo 93," among others). Does this iconography find resonances in contemporary literature? Or at least, can we conceive a literary memory of Terror, whose form varies in recent history, from Anatole France's _Les Dieux ont soif_ to Eric Vuillard's _14 juillet_? We will also question the conditions under which an aesthetic can appear terrorizing. Is it a matter of limit-motifs (death, sexuality, absolutes, fascism)? Or formal choices that undo conventions of meaning production? Or modes of action claimed both in the creation of works and their reception (feminist terror, decolonial terror, etc.)?

More generally, this conference seeks to better delineate the conception of Terror as literature's political horizon, and thereby perhaps to move beyond a persistent reading that still opposes terrorist poetry and democratic novel.

---

See calendar and submission conditions in the original article, which also provides an interesting indicative bibliography.


Writing Terror (Sorbonne-Nouvelle, Paris), call for papers


Editor of Samuel Beckett and J. M. G. Le Clezio, Georges Lambrichs was one of the great animators of literary life in the second half of the 20th century. Born in Belgium in 1917, in contact with _La NRF_ from the 1930s onward, he became in 1942 the Brussels correspondent of the clandestine literary review _Messages_. Close to Vercors, he worked as a reader at _Editions de Minuit_ at the Liberation, before taking over its literary direction. Alongside Jerome Lindon, he published Samuel Beckett, Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Marguerite Duras, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, and Michel Butor. This was the era of the "new novel," but also of a very strong link between _La NRF_ and _Minuit_, sustained by friendship with Jean Paulhan. Joining Gallimard in 1959, Georges Lambrichs orchestrated the emergence of a new generation of writers and critics. Fully devoted to creative literature, he welcomed into the "Le Chemin" collection and its associated review, _Les Cahiers du Chemin_, Georges Perros, Jean Starobinski, Michel Chaillou, Jacques Reda, Henri Meschonnic, Pierre Guyotat, Gerard Mace, Jean-Marie Laclavetine, and, from 1962 onward, J. M. G. Le Clezio. _Le chemin continue_ traces an exceptional editorial journey.

_Le chemin continue. Biographie de Georges Lambrichs_  
Arnaud Villanova


The path continues, biography of Georges Lambrichs


After an exhibition devoted in 2021 to Flaubert's heroine _Salammbo_, it is now Andre Breton's Nadja that is being honored (...). The theme of Heroines is perfect for this Nadja, tutelary figure of Andre Breton's famous book. She is spotlighted to understand a pivotal era of surrealism and better grasp who she was.

## A Nadja not so mysterious

It was after the writer's decisive encounter with Leona Delcourt that Nadja was born in his mind. She, who called herself Nadja, marked him deeply enough to lead Andre Breton to make her the subject of an autobiographical narrative recounting the nine days spent with her. Between passion and encounters, the adventure was born and left a lasting mark on 20th-century literature. The exhibition offered by the Rmn Rouen Normandie presents an itinerary composed of images that answer Andre Breton's anti-literary objective. Reproductions of works by Max Ernst and Georges Braque, photographs by Man Ray and Jacques Andre Boiffard, symbolic objects such as the bronze pair of gloves offered by Lise Deharme, stand alongside portraits of Desnos, Aragon, Peret, and Breton to offer visitors a surrealist promenade. The exhibition route highlights major surrealist themes: dream, the unconscious, the found object, objective chance, encounter, Paris, and the apparent strangeness of ancient arts or non-Western arts. The exhibition _Nadja, a surrealist itinerary_ is only the first stage in a long procession of commemorative surrealism exhibitions to run through its centenary year in 2024.

The Reunion des Musees Metropolitains Rouen Normandie (and more specifically the Rouen Museum of Fine Arts) offers a rich route to better grasp an era in which Normandy played a genuine role in inspiring surrealist artists, between the manor of Varengeville-sur-Mer and the homes of Breton's companions.


Nadja, a surrealist itinerary


A museum-quality exhibition has just opened in Ixelles, a year before the retrospective planned at the Georges Pompidou Center in March 2023, curated by Valerie Da Costa, who had already curated the one at the Picasso Museum in Antibes in 2019. Specialized in 20th-century art, Jacques de la Beraudiere has been an unconditional admirer of Germaine Richier's work (1902-1959) since his youth, even before becoming an art dealer. A collector himself, he owns very fine pieces by this artist, whose fame has not yet reached the level it deserves - that of a Giacometti, for example.


Germaine Richier at the summit


The correspondence between Andre Breton and Jean Paulhan, remarkable for its duration, introduces readers to little-known aspects of surrealists' relations with the literary institution represented by _La Nouvelle Revue Francaise_, and makes clear, despite the absence of a large number of his letters, how essential friendship with Paulhan was for Breton. We also repeatedly encounter the vigorous polemicist who led the surrealist movement. In the first years of the correspondence, gaps prevent us from following Paulhan's reactions to Breton's statements, which is why the editor, Claire Barthelemy, precisely reconstructs the context of the exchanges and recalls the trajectories of both writers and, for Breton, the development of the journal _Litterature_ and his relations with Jacques Riviere, who directed the NRF. The notes needed to illuminate the context are invaluable; so are the facsimiles of letters in the volume and the annexes (texts by Breton, Paulhan, and Jouhandeau linked to the correspondence), not to mention the highly useful appendices (indexes of names and titles, list of illustrations).

Breton's first published letter (June 18, 1918) responds to an offer of friendship from Paulhan, an offer copied and sent to Aragon. Breton wishes to bind himself to his elder (they are twelve years apart) and says so clearly: "You do not yet know the value I attach to what comes to me from you," he writes, and a little later in July: "You are precisely the friend I was waiting for at this time in my life." At that point he considers that Paulhan, to whom he dedicated his first published text, can in their exchanges provide answers to literary questions he is asking himself. An attentive reader of Valery (whose poems he copies into his letters), he admits the limits of his reading: "You grasp the total meaning of the poem while I am still playing with words." The first issue of _Litterature_, which he co-directs with Aragon and Philippe Soupault, opens with a text by Gide ("Les Nouvelles nourritures") and a poem by Valery ("Cantique des colonnes"), but also with Paulhan's "La Guerison severe," and in 1920 Paulhan publishes in three issues "Si les mots sont des signes ou Jacob Cow le pirate." This study aligns with Breton's concerns: "these pages on words solicit me in every direction," he writes to Paulhan.

For his part, as Clarisse Barthelemy notes, Paulhan, "in this vital, initiatory, radical ardor that characterizes Breton, (...) rediscovers his taste for freedom and a form of purity - and no doubt his first anarchist convictions." Both move forward with analogous questions about expression; however, the journal's gradual transformation - becoming _La Revolution surrealiste_ on December 1, 1924 - distances Paulhan from surrealism. The project itself, stated in the first issue, could not suit him: "Since the trial of knowledge is no longer to be held, intelligence no longer entering into consideration, only dream leaves man all his rights to freedom."

Jacques Riviere, who directed _La Nouvelle Revue Francaise_, died in February 1925 and Paulhan, who had been secretary since 1920, took his place. Divergences between the review, Paulhan, and the surrealists, both aesthetic and political, grew until rupture, sealed by a brief letter from Breton on March 4, 1926: "I have the honor to inform you that I consider you a fool and a coward"; Paulhan replied in the same tone by telegram: "You have been pissing me off for a long time. You should have understood earlier that I consider you as cowardly as you are deceitful." One year later, surrealism's adhesion to the Communist Party, justified in the tract _Au grand jour_, prompted in the NRF a response by Antonin Artaud, _A la grande nuit_, and a commentary by Paulhan under the pseudonym Jean Guerin. Breton reacted with a filthy letter, Paulhan sent him his seconds, but Breton refused the duel. The break would last until 1935.

The editor sketches in broad strokes the history of surrealism during the 1930s. Separation from the Communist Party - whose reasons Breton explains in 1935 in the preface to _Position politique du surrealisme_ - allows renewed dialogue with Paulhan; Breton notably accuses Soviet power of betraying the hopes of the 1917 revolution. Epistolary exchange resumes, but above all Paulhan publishes Breton in the NRF and in _Mesures_, Henry Church's allied review, then takes _L’Amour fou_ into his "Metamorphoses" collection. Silence returns with Breton's exile to the United States from 1941 onward. He returns to France in July 1946 without meeting Paulhan; they only see each other during their temporary engagement in the pacifist organization "Citoyens du monde," initiated by Robert Sarrazac, who introduced Breton to Saint-Cirq-Lapopie, where the poet would settle. They reconnect fully on matters of literary criticism in 1949, with the publication on May 19 of a Rimbaud forgery, _La Chasse spirituelle_, with a preface by Pascal Pia; the forgery was defended by part of the critics, for example forcefully by Maurice Nadeau. As early as May 21, Breton denounced in a letter to the newspaper _Combat_ the "particularly contemptible character" of the pastiche - the letter was published only on the 26th; that same year he published on this affair _Flagrant delit, Rimbaud devant la conjuration de l’imposture et du trucage_, welcomed by Paulhan: " _Flagrant delit_ brings a great joy of mind and heart." Another affair would draw them together in 1960, the election of the "Prince of Poets" to succeed Paul Fort; despite Breton's efforts, and his hatred of Cocteau, he could not prevent Cocteau's selection. It seems exchanges ceased in the course of 1962 - Breton died in December 1966, Paulhan in October 1968 - without the reason being truly known.

Both men, uncompromising in their intellectual choices, recognized each other and met on literary questions essential to them. Breton often regretted seeing Paulhan too little and wrote to him in 1959: "I shall die without understanding why you and I, though sometimes so close, saw each other only intermittently, yet only the feeling of luck will remain." In the NRF issue paying tribute to Breton, Paulhan ended his article with these words: "it is not always possible for a man to say what he knows. Breton is dead. Everything must be begun again." One often reads in this correspondence precious testimony of a true friendship.

See [Paulhan - Breton Correspondence](/correspondances/paulhan-breton)


Andre Breton, Jean Paulhan, Correspondence (1918-1962)


[*CALL FOR PAPERS*]

"Seeking the gold of time: surrealisms, natural art, art brut, magical art"

Dēmēter - Contemporary Artistic Theories & Practices

## Summer 2022

University of Lille

Demeter is an interdisciplinary peer-reviewed scientific journal. Published twice a year, it privileges dialogue among the arts (visual arts, cinema, theater, dance, music), as well as with the humanities in general (philosophy, history, sociology, anthropology). The journal is devoted to thinking through the articulations between theory and practice (artistic practice or analytical practice), between scholarly discourse and creative gestures, between knowledge and imagination.

https://demeter.univ-lille.fr/

•••

The LaM, Lille Metropolitan Museum of Modern, Contemporary and Outsider Art in Villeneuve d’Ascq, is organizing an exhibition titled "Seeking the gold of time: surrealisms, natural art, art brut, magical art," to be held from June 10 to October 16, 2022. Through a trajectory spanning the 1920s to the late 1960s, the exhibition will study moments and places of intellectual, artistic, geographic, and political convergence among surrealist figures, including Andre Breton and Jean Dubuffet, inventor of art brut, without limiting itself to these major personalities. It will be accompanied by a catalog, a study day, and this thematic issue. A major research effort is underway to reread and reconnect the histories of surrealism, art brut, and their continuations according to an approach in which art would be the effect of irrational or (super)natural forces.

In their collecting practices even more than in their own creation, surrealists free themselves from hierarchies and cast a different gaze on the world. A true revolution is at work to re-enchant everyday life marked by two world wars. Art brut lies at the heart of this reinvention of possibilities. Andre Breton's interest in the creative power of madness appears as early as 1916, when, assigned as an auxiliary military doctor to the neuropsychiatric center in Saint-Dizier, he asked traumatized soldiers: "What do you dream of at night?" Hans Prinzhorn's _Bildnerei der Geisteskranken_ (1922) recognizes the creative force of works produced in asylum contexts. Surrealist journals - _La Revolution surrealiste_ (1924-1929), _Documents_ (1929-1931), and _Minotaure_ (1933-1939) - likewise explore these forms of creation arising from the unconscious. Works also entered the collections of Andre Breton, Paul Eluard, and doctors Lucien Bonnafe and Gaston Ferdiere. Jean Dubuffet learned of Prinzhorn's book while frequenting the circle on rue Blomet, where Michel Leiris, Georges-Henri Riviere, Georges Bataille, Carl Einstein, and Andre Masson met. He visited the Heidelberg collection in 1950, five years after his own mission collecting works in Swiss psychiatric hospitals and prisons with Le Corbusier and Jean Paulhan, followed by a visit to Saint-Alban hospital in Lozere.

If Jean Dubuffet is clearly the inventor of art brut, a term chosen after his summer 1945 journey, it is interesting to note that Charlotte Perriand may have used it earlier to describe the collecting, drawing, and photographing of "natural objects" that she carried out in dialogue with Fernand Leger and Le Corbusier. At the same time, the surrealists' "objective chance" also turned toward natural elements. Roots, flints, or oyster shells were interpreted - often in an anthropomorphic sense - by collectors and artists close to surrealist and art brut circles. Before them, Facteur Cheval based the construction of his "ideal palace" on a "stumbling stone" that "represents a sculpture as bizarre as it is impossible for man to imitate." He declared: "I said to myself, since nature wants to make sculpture, I will make masonry and architecture" (Claude and Clovis Prevost, _Les Batisseurs de l’Imaginaire_, Paris, Klincksieck, 2016, p. 27). The idea of nature as artist, or of art existing in a natural state, spread among visitors to the Palace. "Freeing flint from its earthy gangue" or "contenting oneself with extracting" "metal in its primitive state" are images chosen by Dubuffet and Breton to describe their work of collecting or creating.

At the same time, the fascination of artists and writers for objects brought back from French ethnographic missions was accompanied by growing awareness of the predatory relationship of the West to other cultures, as witnessed by Michel Leiris's _L’Afrique fantome_ or Claude Levi-Strauss's _Tristes tropiques_. This critical approach was matched by a reflexive reading of our own cultural identities, reflected in the journals _Documents_ (1929-1931) and _Minotaure_ (1933-1939). Georges-Henri Riviere, then deputy director of the Trocadero Ethnography Museum, worked to create a museum of arts and popular traditions that opened in 1937, while Gaston Ferdiere, future doctor to Antonin Artaud and friend of the surrealists, advocated for a museum of psychopathological art. Jean Dubuffet would discover there objects that could join his art brut collection, at the moment when he was breaking with a certain taste for exoticism still perceptible among surrealists and sketching his discourse on the "common man."

From the mid-1930s onward, various actors from different disciplines invented tools of resistance to the inhumanity and social alienation generated by totalitarianisms. During World War II, far from Paris or New York, a "war-time intelligence" (Louis Parrot) unfolded. Marseille, Toulouse, and the psychiatric hospital of Saint-Alban became points of diffusion for surrealism in its French components (Aragon, Artaud, Breton, Crevel, Eluard, Bousquet), but also Spanish ones (Buñuel, Dali), and even Dada (Tzara). The innovations and ideas carried by these figures met those of several doctors, psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, and philosophers, such as Lucien Bonnafe, Francois Tosquelles, Henri Ey, Jacques Lacan, and Georges Canguilhem. Art brut, not yet bearing its name, held an essential place in this context of resistance and invention. Dubuffet understood this clearly when he traveled to Saint-Alban in 1945.

In November 1947, the Foyer de l’art brut opened, conceived by Jean Dubuffet as an exhibition space for the fruits of his research. In September 1948, the Foyer moved to a pavilion lent by Gallimard and became the Compagnie de l’art brut, whose founding members were Andre Breton, Jean Dubuffet, Jean Paulhan, Charles Ratton, Henri-Pierre Roche, and Michel Tapie. The previous spring, Dubuffet launched a major publishing project in collaboration with Breton: an _Almanach de l’art brut_. Twelve booklets were planned, revealing works by around forty art brut authors with texts requested from various personalities. But the project failed, and in 1951 Dubuffet dissolved the Compagnie de l’art brut and moved his collection to the United States. Collections and discourses split apart, opposed each other - sometimes violently - while still sharing artists and sensibilities.

Since the publication of Malraux's _Musee imaginaire_ in 1947, everyone has been building their own art history and personal museum. Breton does so with the creation of the gallery _A l’Etoile scellee_ in 1952 and the publication of _L’Art magique_ in 1957. Dubuffet re-creates the Compagnie de l’art brut and installs his collection in 1962 at 137 rue de Sevres, then begins publishing a series of booklets titled _L’Art brut_. Esoteric arcana, psychic dispositions, and material cultures of the neglected struck a chord in a postwar world both consumerist and socially restless. From 1948 onward, artists linked to revolutionary surrealism and later to CoBrA sought to establish organic modes of relation in opposition to bourgeois values and the predominance of reason. A few years later, art brut and fantastic realism were replayed through the lens of countercultures. The tension between natural object and cultural object thus shifted register.

This thematic issue of _Demeter_ aims to explore more specifically some of the historical or aesthetic stakes raised by the exhibition project. Proposals intersecting art history with the history of collections, psychiatry, or natural sciences, combined with philosophical, literary, anthropological, or psychoanalytic approaches, are welcome to grasp points of contact between actors of surrealism and art brut.

Several lines of inquiry are already identified as especially fertile:

-> The role of natural forces and objects in the collections, creations, and discourses of surrealist or art brut actors  
-> The apparent opposition between singular and universal that takes shape in those same discourses  
-> The desire to bring forth a counter-culture or counter-history of art and/or of the human, in which the natural might play a role to be determined  
-> Correlatively, the desire to decolonize minds or invent a form of intellectual resistance

This issue is coordinated by Savine Faupin, chief curator in charge of art brut; Jeanne-Bathilde Lacourt, curator in charge of modern art; and Christophe Boulanger, assistant curator in charge of art brut.

Submission of contributions

Contribution proposals must be submitted to the editorial board by October 1, 2021. Authors whose proposal has been accepted must send their article to the editors by December 20, 2021 at the latest.

Proposals accompanied by a short biobibliographical presentation of the author should be sent to the following addresses: sfaupin@musee-lam.fr, cboulanger@musee-lam.fr, jblacourt@musee-lam.fr, in Word (.doc) or OpenDocument (.dot) format.

---

For more information on this issue, please contact: apenamejia@musee-lam.fr

Download the full call on the journal website (with bibliography): https://demeter.univ-lille.fr/article95/appel-a-publication-demeter-8-i-chercher-l-or-du-temps


Seeking the gold of time: surrealisms, natural art, art brut, magical art


"She is a woman. Those three words will weigh heavily, alas, on Marie Jaell's work: for a long time they will be the reason those who could understand her will not read her books." From the publication of her first article, Catherine Pozzi raises the question of the fate of women's works. In "Le probleme de la beaute musicale et la science du mouvement intelligent" (_Les Cahiers alsaciens_, January 1914), she does so with regard to the composer and musicologist Marie Jaell, who taught her piano and her method. The quote resonates strangely today, because it can also be heard about Catherine Pozzi's own work. One could even extend the parallel to their posterity, since Marie Jaell's journal has just been published.

Catherine Pozzi (1882-1934) became aware very early of her status as a woman, notably because she had every opportunity to compare the education received by her brother Jean and her own. Their father Samuel Pozzi (1846-1918) was nonetheless an enlightened mind. A surgeon, first holder of the chair of gynecology at the Paris Faculty of Medicine, he moved in literary, artistic, and social circles (1). While her brother studied at Lycée Condorcet and then at the Sorbonne, Catherine Pozzi's training was far more fragmented: she had to make do with governesses, tutors, or private classes for young ladies. Yet, aware of her gaps, she never stopped improving, passing the first part of the baccalaureat at age 36 and the second at 45. She then studied biology and reflected on heredity and links with ancestors in an essay published under the title _Peau d’ame_ (Correa, 1935). As a child and young girl, she kept a diary, interrupted it when she married Edouard Bourdet, then resumed it and kept it until the end of her life. The edition was established by Claire Paulhan in 1987 for the years 1913-1934 and in 1995 for 1893-1906. Her journal, philosophical essay, and poetic work remained posthumous. During her lifetime, she published only seven articles, one poem, and a short story titled _Agnes_.

_Agnes_ was first published in _La Nouvelle Revue francaise_ under the sole signature C.K. Even editor-in-chief Jean Paulhan did not know the identity of the author he was publishing. Paul Valery had first offered the anonymous manuscript to Marguerite Caetani, Princess of Bassiano, patron of the review _Commerce_, before Jean Paulhan accepted "this fresh marvel." The [February 1, 1927](https://www.lanrf.fr/lanouvellerevuefranaise19091943/25258_la-nrf_161_fevrier-1927.html) table of contents was especially prestigious: C.K. appeared after texts by Rilke and Larbaud and just before those of Gide and Proust. In hindsight this is a happy coincidence, since Catherine Pozzi and Rilke, Paul Valery's translator, knew each other, and _The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge_ probably inspired the writing of _Agnes_.

This issue stirred real excitement in literary circles, everyone trying to guess who hid behind those initials. Since the only known information was Paul Valery's role as intermediary, rumor quickly spread that he himself was the author, or perhaps his daughter Agathe. One might think Jean Paulhan was already mocking theories of feminine writing when he wrote to Paul Valery: "Common opinion is that C.K. is a man; yet people also say that _Agnes_ resembles a canvas by Marie Laurencin." Only Anna de Noailles suspected the truth, having recognized Samuel Pozzi in the portrait of the father.

[...]

...the history of _Agnes_'s publication joins that of its writing and further exacerbates Pozzi's rivalry with Paul Valery and her own contradictions. While the public wonders who C.K. is, that signature is in fact transparent to her intimates, since they are the initials of her first name and one of her nicknames, "Karin." The autobiographical material of the short story becomes obvious. The narrator of _Agnes_, a solitary young girl in her bourgeois family, whose worldly father is absent most of the time, draws up a self-improvement program and invents an imaginary being to whom she writes. As a child and adolescent, Catherine Pozzi practiced these epistolary forms, setting up a dialogue with a double she dreamed of meeting.

This soul mate, Catherine thought she had met several times: in Audrey Deacon, to whom _Agnes_ is dedicated (only in the non-commercial edition), or Andre Fernet, both of whom died prematurely, and finally in Paul Valery in the early 1920s. Sharing his interest in mathematics and philosophy, Catherine Pozzi put herself at the service of his work by sharing her research with him and by sorting and annotating his _Cahiers_.

At the beginning of their affair, in 1922, she drafted a first version of _Agnes_. She would later confess: "I could write only because for a moment I had loved myself." Paul Valery expressed admiration, but she did not feel encouraged to continue. Four years later, "I suddenly decided to publish it, after reading in one of Valery's notebooks an 'arranged' version of my work that he was going to publish one day, just as I saw printed in _Eureka_ pages from my pages, or in _Rhumbs_ certain passages" (April 21, 1927). Paul Valery's use of their shared reflections hurt her more and more.

She revised, finished, and wished to publish, but the trap closed again around her since, after a refusal from a review director approached by Marie de Regnier, it was from Paul Valery that she asked help - the very man she accused of plundering her. One better understands why, despite her taste for anonymity, she decided to reveal her identity to Jean Paulhan at the moment rumors suggested _Agnes_ was the result of a collaboration with Paul Valery.

In 1931, Catherine Pozzi underscored even more clearly the autobiographical nature of _Agnes_ by adding a short sequel, the account of a wedding night (August 10, 1921 in her journal), and by wishing the whole to be placed at the head of her journal beginning in 1913, four years after her marriage to Edouard Bourdet. This epilogue can be read in Lawrence Joseph's posthumous edition of _Agnes_ (La Difference, 1988). Still, one should not reduce the autobiographical reach of this short story to her sole disillusionment as a young bride, which Edouard Bourdet himself staged in _Le Rubicon_ (Fasquelle, 1910). She also calls herself "Agnes" in her journal, notably during 1927.

[...]

By highlighting Paul Valery's contradictions, she rekindles her own, often moving without transition from modesty to pride and arrogance: "I know I am worth as much as you" (January 10, 1927). Yet for Catherine Pozzi the question of publication and signature surely goes beyond the problem of intellectual and social domination: "I cannot get used to reading my name at the bottom of a poem; as with _Agnes_, which was also a game of soul and chance" (3).

---

see also [Catherine Pozzi & Jean Paulhan, 1926-1934](/correspondances/paulhan-pozzi)


Catherine Pozzi, publishing so as not to be plundered


_Some works are searching for authors. Medical secrecy is sometimes to blame. Originally, these paintings were considered clinical evidence._

Anonymity? A vast subject... From society to unsigned letters, it is the grand ballet of those who do not want or cannot give their names. For its current exhibition, Lausanne's Collection de l'art brut fortunately limits itself to the artistic field. The scope is even narrowed to creation in confined environments: prisons or mental institutions. Yet the topic refers to a more general notion of signature in painting and sculpture. If signing became the norm in the first two decades of the 19th century in fine arts, it remained superfluous for craft production - at least in middle- and lower-range work. Apparently, it mattered little who made this or that chair or water jug.

The current project was brought by a man of the theater, which may seem odd. Gustavo Giacosa brought the subject on a silver platter to Sarah Lombardi, director of the Collection de l'art brut, who delegated curator Pascale Jeanneret. The Argentinian had conceived a double program with La Grange de Dorigny, where he intended to stage a performance titled "La Grace." The theater hosted him for three years as a resident, which is no small thing. The piece will be performed on October 28 and 29. At first he was more interested in victims of the dictatorship in his country, whose identities needed to be restored. In other words, this exhibition, opened on June 26, 2021, marks a radical change of direction.

### First name only

And why is that? Because the creators presented in the attic spaces on Avenue des Bergieres are not unknown soldiers. It is simply that their works were not initially considered as such, which would have made things easier later. For psychiatrists, who began preserving them (and thereby saving them), they were, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, pieces of evidence - in other words, materials for clinical files. Those files were confidential. Medical secrecy exists, just as Swiss banking secrecy once did. Names could not be communicated to third parties. Jean Dubuffet and his successors sometimes found ways around this: first name only; first name plus initial... (1) This explains why Vaud native Aloise Corbaz, now an art brut superstar, was long known simply as Aloise.

This confusion between the medical and the cultural still goes very far today, as readers of the accompanying book, edited by Anic Zanzi, can discover. In some cases, anonymity could only be lifted 120 years after the artist's birth - or rather the patient's birth. A patient in every sense of the word... It has never been possible to place the interest of the art-loving community above the demands of science, or rather of its presumed ethics. For historians, it is therefore a cat-and-mouse game. The Collection de l'art brut can now present a few "outing" cases, such as the now well-known author of the Barbus Muller. That man, who this time suffered from no pathology, was named Antoine Rabany, known as "Le Zouave."

### Composite names

What has always been possible, since Jean Dubuffet (whose interest had been preceded by physicians Hans Prinzhorn and Charles Ladame), is to make groupings. This uncertain technique mirrors that of art historians. A huge number of medieval and early Renaissance creations (though not all!) bear no signature. But they have a maker's mark: their author's personality. One need only gather works with the same characteristics. The resulting "corpora" are designated by conventional names: "Master" of this or that. One can hope to someday find the archival document restoring a surname. The 14th-century "Master of the Ovile," for instance, has become for most experts Bartolomeo Bulgarini again, while the Master of Moulins (around 1500) was very likely Jean Hey.

Specialists have thus created composite figures in art brut, meant to carry bodies of work. There was "The French Traveler," who has just reached port. We now know his name was Laurey and that in another life he had been a porcelain painter. Barbarian Guillaume remains. The Czech Postman remains. Raymond Oui Oui, who appears on the cover of the accompanying book. The anonymous are, in this way, slightly less anonymous. They draw closer to us. They have flesh: their production. They are somewhat like the unknown people we speak to regularly without knowing their identity.

### Scholarly debate on identity

Built from the Collection de l'art brut but also from Turin's Museo Lombroso (more criminal than artistic) and Heidelberg's Prinzhorn Collection, the exhibition remains small in size. Sarah Nedir's scenography nonetheless avoids any clutter. Wall texts remain fairly simple compared with the book, where authors watch themselves write the way people can enjoy hearing themselves talk. I have always been struck by how people in the art brut world use complex language to speak over the heads of those whose own voices were missing during incarceration.

The tone becomes openly academic in the oral debates at the end of the book, conducted by eleven researchers from the University of Lausanne (UNIL). These "avenues for reflection" on anonymity and identity in general address no real public. Everyone preaches to their own choir, Michel Thevoz occasionally erupting with ready-made phrases. "Identity was invented by cops," "Anonymity is a practice unworthy of an activist." Easy to say when one is retired from a comfortable institution like the Collection de l'art brut...

(1) Anonymous pieces remain an infinitely small minority at the Collection de l'art brut. This should still be stated.

_"Anonymes," Collection de l'art brut, 11 Avenue des Bergieres, Lausanne, through October 31. Tel. 021 315 25 70, website www.artbrut.ch Open Tuesday through Sunday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., daily in July and August. The book, 176 pages, is published by Antipodes_.


Lausanne's Collection de l'art brut presents its Anonymous artists


The Hotel de Caumont-Art Center in Aix-en-Provence is highlighting Zao Wou-Ki's work until October 10 with the exhibition "Il ne fait jamais nuit," which brings together nearly 80 works by the artist, from 1935 to 2009.

Here is already our last appointment before summer! If your steps lead you South, do not miss this very beautiful selection of Zao Wou-Ki's work at the Hotel de Caumont. It is not a retrospective of the Chinese artist's work, as Paris staged some time ago at the Museum of Modern Art, but a rereading of his work through the importance of light - a very important theme he developed in various ways, from his arrival in Paris in 1948 to periods of suffering and mourning, including his encounter with Henri Michaux.

Between Far Eastern printmaking and gestural abstraction
Arriving in Paris in 1948, the young artist, trained at the Hangzhou School of Fine Arts and an admirer of Cezanne and European painting, then found a balance between the controlled freedom of Far Eastern printmaking and the gestural abstraction then in vogue. The exhibition is fascinating for its back-and-forth between details and flat areas, nuances and all-over fields, color saturation and the blacks and whites of ink washes.

The first high point is the room recalling his stays in Ibiza with Josep-Lluis Sert, architect of the Maeght Foundation, with stars of such intense blue that one truly wants to dive into it. The second shock comes before the tribute to Henri Matisse, which Francoise Marquet-Zao has just donated to the Museum of Modern Art in Paris. These are four vertical color bands that can stand comparison with the minimalist _Window at Collioure_ by the great Matisse.

The Zao Wou-Ki exhibition "Il ne fait jamais nuit" is on view at the Hotel de Caumont-Art Center in Aix-en-Provence until October 10.

---

## Exhibition

[Zao Wou-Ki Exhibition, "Il ne fait jamais nuit"](/expositions/zao-wou-ki-hotel-caumont-aix)


Zao Wou-Ki at the Hotel de Caumont in Aix-en-Provence


An unlikely pair, the one formed by Marcel Jouhandeau and Michel Leiris, by the author of _Pincengrain_ and the author of _La Règle du jeu_, by the homosexual and the so-called impotent man, the antisemite and the ethnologist of _L’Afrique fantôme_ who knows the "vanity of any psychology based strictly on race or nation," the collaborator and the resistant. And yet this pair is described by their correspondence published today, at the same time as Leiris's _Journal_ reappears in an improved critical edition. In 1992, this _Journal_ had revealed that Louise, Leiris's wife, was not Lucie Godon's sister but her daughter, and therefore that art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler was not the writer's brother-in-law but his father-in-law, a secret that scarcely concerned Leiris himself. The relationship with Jouhandeau is another matter.

The author of _Monsieur Godeau_ was born in 1888 and died in 1979; the author of _L’Âge d’homme_ was born in 1901 and died in 1990. Leiris is not yet 23 when he meets his elder in 1924. Their nights of March 26 to 28 will have lasting biographical and literary consequences. Letter from Leiris, April 1924: "I am punished in my flesh: it is from my bed, where I lie ill and suffering, that I write to you." Reply from Jouhandeau (which he does not send) in what this edition of the correspondence calls _Leirisiana_, notes concerning Leiris in the archives Jouhandeau deposited at the Jacques-Doucet literary library: "Absence, silence, the remorse of knowing you ill through my fault... a hundred times I would have died since Saturday, if I were sure my death would be more useful to you than my life."

Leiris in _L’Âge d’homme_ (book accepted by Jean Paulhan at Gallimard at the end of 1935 but not published until 1939, perhaps because Jouhandeau first read it in 1935 with a feeling of betrayal), without naming names: "My friend and I had gone very far in our conversations, raising them to such a point that it could pass for a violation of taboo or a sacrilege. So it seemed normal to me that I should incur punishment. 'I am punished even in my flesh,' I wrote to him." Leiris has already evoked in the text how "I escorted my companion home, almost dead drunk and gripped by nausea, then slept with him after humiliating my mouth and his in a reciprocal bewilderment." Summary in the chronology of the new _Journal_ edition: "Night of drunkenness and debauchery with Marcel Jouhandeau."

Their physical bond will not endure (there will only be the "awful night" of April 28, 1929, when Leiris displays his group-sex impotence before the Jouhandeau couple), but Denis Hollier evokes in his preface "a kind of fusional asceticism in two voices." In 1927, Jouhandeau turns their moral adventure into fiction in _Ximénès Malinjoude_, which he dedicates to Leiris as follows: "Are you quite sure you are not the author of this book? If I wrote it for you, when I reread myself, I think I am reading you." Letter from Leiris: "I do not think I read myself when I read you like this; shall I rather say it is you I think I read when I read in myself?" "You will always be for me, whatever you do, the one who wanted to murder God," he also writes, returning to their "pact." Jouhandeau in the _Leirisiana_, 1924: "Oh, monsters of purity - or cowards who do not have the courage of their desires." Leiris in _Fourbis_, second volume of the _La Règle du jeu_ tetralogy, published in 1955: "For years I kept brooding over this sentence _You dare not go to the end of your desires_ that had once been said to me by a man to whom I was bound by a passionate friendship." _Leirisiana_ from 1924: "Nothing reduces me to impotence like love. I have never been more chaste than during the weeks of my heroic passion for you."

[...] Read the rest in [the article](https://next.liberation.fr/livres/2021/01/29/leiris-et-jouhandeau-nuits-et-chatiment_1818831).

---

[Leiris - Jouhandeau Correspondence (1923-1977)](http://www.gallimard.fr/Catalogue/GALLIMARD/Les-Cahiers-de-la-NRF/Correspondance20)

What do Michel Leiris and Marcel Jouhandeau have in common? Between the author of _La Règle du jeu_ and the author of _Chaminadour_? Between the writer-ethnologist of the Musée de l’Homme and the one who took part in the trip of collaborationist intellectuals to Weimar?  
One night in March 1924, the young apprentice poet and the admired author of _Monsieur Godeau intime_ lived together through "something that happened in the Absolute," as Michel Leiris would write. In the 1920s, the two men entered into a secret, Rimbaldian pact, which this previously unpublished correspondence reveals.  
This volume brings together around one hundred letters exchanged over nearly fifty years, despite serious breaks before and during the war. Excerpts from Leiris's and Jouhandeau's notebooks and diaries, as well as a cross chronology, also testify to this decisive "friendship under the ashes."


Leiris and Jouhandeau, nights and punishment


## Table of contents of _Littérature_ journal no. 200 (4/2020)

First box,  
Bernard Baillaud  
Doubt and its opposite (facsimile presented by Claire Paulhan),  
Claire Paulhan  
Dadaism and Surrealism in Paulhan: Toward an understanding of literary discourses and dynamics,  
Francois Demont  
Albert Thibaudet in the midst of literary history,  
Bernard Baillaud  
The solicitations of Leon Bopp,  
Michel Murat  
The preface in Paulhan, a place of criticism?  
Camille Koskas  
A history of secrecy,  
Clarisse Barthelemy  
A mentor for thought and a friend to present: Jean Paulhan and Georges Lambrichs,  
Arnaud Villanova  
Jean Paulhan. Twenty years of publications (2000-2020),  
Bernard Baillaud  
Franco-Caribbean literatures and Black writings of Terror,  
Francoise Simasotchi-Brones  
Book reviews  
Abstracts


Jean Paulhan: Archives and Literary History


_If Jean Paulhan did indeed exist, he did so, it is true, in a very discreet way, to the point that the essential role he played in twentieth-century French literature is now too often forgotten._

"Jean Paulhan does not exist," proclaimed in 1963 a postcard published by a few vengeful neo-surrealists, when the acting director of _La Nouvelle Revue Française_ decided to present his candidacy for the Académie française. Keen to disabuse his detractors and prove that he did in fact exist, Jean Paulhan acquired several dozen copies of the postcards, widely circulated them, and moreover obtained his seat at the Academy, in the chair of Pierre Benoît, who had died in 1962. If Jean Paulhan did indeed exist, he did so, it is true, in a very discreet way, to the point that the essential role he played in twentieth-century French literature is now too often forgotten.

Born in Nîmes in 1884 and dead in Neuilly in 1968, Paulhan published a good part of the great names of twentieth-century French literature during the roughly thirty years he spent at the head of the NRF, from 1925 to 1940, then from 1953 until his death; and he pushed his own career as a writer into the background. Although _Le Guerrier appliqué_, an account of his experience at the front, was celebrated upon publication in 1917 as one of the most brilliant texts written on the experience of war, his fictional and theoretical work, entirely devoted to the mystery of language, remained confidential and difficult to access. [...]

Paulhan paid close attention to the avant-gardes but disliked ideologues just as much as he disliked wardens: "In short, as soon as one is dealing with a baroque and manifestly absurd opinion, one can be sure it was authored by some prince of thought," he wrote in the NRF in March 1939, after being among the rare intellectuals to deplore the Munich retreat. "It is not the least curious effect of triumphant fascisms that they may throw into anxiety a democracy dazzled by so many successes, vaguely jealous, fully ready to water down its popular wine and already convinced that it has sinned through an excess of democracy." Politically, Paulhan did not hold very fixed ideas: "And I do not mind," he admitted in 1956 in his _Lettre à un jeune partisan_, "that in the morning I must be a democrat, in the afternoon an aristocrat, and in the evening a royalist."

If Paulhan is not far from finding that political parties remain a joke, democracy has a more serious matter to settle when, in times of crisis, it must revive its own mystique: "Democracy appeals against aristocrats - and especially against aristocrats of intelligence - to the first passer-by." Who then is this first passer-by to whom Paulhan never ceased appealing from the eve of the Second World War to his thunderous _Lettre aux directeurs de la résistance_ in 1947? The people? Paulhan has too much honesty to pretend he can define them. The people have a thousand voices, except when party leaders pretend to give them one. So what is Paulhan's first passer-by? A king? A dictator? De Gaulle, the providential first passer-by? But this democratic first passer-by is not a party leader, Paulhan tells us. It is at once the man in the street and, between the clutter of doctrines and the pretension of ideologies, a "state of extreme middle, much closer to a secret than to a confession, to an ignorance than to a doctrine." The atavism of common sense, then, or the indescribable injunction of moral choice, which led Paulhan, like thousands of other first passers-by, to join the Resistance in order to defend a highly uncertain idea of democracy in 1940: "Democracy has its mystery, like a religion; and its secret, like poetry."

A very fragile mystery and a very uncertain religion, defended only through a strange conviction: "You can squeeze a bee in your hand until it suffocates. It will not suffocate without stinging you. It is a small thing, you say. Yes, it is a small thing. But if it did not sting you, there would long since be no more bees."


Jean Paulhan: The Extreme Middle


_He is counted among the most illustrious: an outstanding writer, a literary critic of rare sensitivity and unmatched influence, a craftsman of deconstruction before its time, a thinker of literature at its most demanding. And yet a doubt or suspicion hangs over his work - if not, according to rumor, a blame or a fault: the political commitments of the pre-war writer._

**Leslie Hill**,  
**Blanchot politique**  
_On a Reflection Never Interrupted_  
[Furor](http://www.editions-furor.ch/), 2020  
EAN: 9782940601097  
560 p. - Publication date: November 2, 2020.

As is well known: between 1931 and July 1940, Maurice Blanchot pursued political journalism in right-wing, nationalist, sometimes extremist publications. We think we know these pre-war political writings, but up to now, out of embarrassment or well-meaning hostility, they have almost never been read. And people have just as carefully avoided questioning the relationship between the novelist's and literary critic's work and his later political commitments: under the Occupation, against the Gaullist Republic, against the Algerian War, against antisemitism, and for a certain communism.

It is precisely this essential task that this _Blanchot politique_ undertakes, rigorously and for the first time. What emerges is a more accurate and still unprecedented portrait of the man Georges Bataille called "indeed the most original mind of his time."

---

Born in 1907 and died in 2003, Maurice Blanchot lived through almost the entire twentieth century. As a journalist, he witnessed, between the wars, the successive crises of parliamentary democracy, the rise of Nazism, and the often disastrous failures of French foreign policy; as an author of fiction and fragmentary writing, he freed writing from its subordination to History; as a critic, he emphasized the subversive power of literature. But Blanchot is also - though people tend to forget it, or want to make it forgotten - a rigorous thinker of politics, of its demands and impasses. With Paul Levy, he fought Nazi antisemitism and rejected the Munich agreements and the Weygand and Petain armistice; with Xavier de Lignac and Romain Petitot, under Vichy, he opposed the dangerous compromises of the Jeune France Association; with Jean Paulhan, he resisted the disciplining of literature by the forces of the Occupation; and with Dionys Mascolo, Robert Antelme, and Marguerite Duras, he contested General de Gaulle's return to power and was active in May 68, all the way to rupture within the Student-Writer Action Committee. Decisions that, in their audacity and persistence, each time affirmed a new understanding of politics, or of the political. By putting all of Blanchot's journalism back into historical context, without ideological partisanship or polemical prejudice - along with his novels, narratives, and essays - _Blanchot politique_ renews our understanding of his work. To those who think they already know him, as well as to those who do not yet know him, it offers, for our twenty-first century, new proof of the indispensable importance of the thought of the one who sometimes signed: Maurice Blanchot.

---

**Leslie Hill** is Emeritus Professor at the University of Warwick (UK), and the author of several books on French literature, including _Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary_ (1997); _Bataille, Klossowski, Blanchot: Writing at the Limit_ (2001); _Radical Indecision: Barthes, Blanchot, Derrida, and the Future of Criticism_ (2010); _Maurice Blanchot and Fragmentary Writing: A Change of Epoch_ (2012); and _Nancy, Blanchot: A Serious Controversy_ (2018).

---

[Publisher page](https://editions-furor.com/wp-content/uploads/Presentation_Blanchot-politique_site.pdf)


Blanchot politique - On a Reflection Never Interrupted


On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Jean Paulhan's death, the Delacroix Museum joins forces with the Maison des Ecrivains et de la Litterature (MEL), the Societe des Lecteurs de Jean Paulhan (SLJP), and the Institut Memoires de l'Edition Contemporaine (IMEC) to offer an evening in tribute to this great French writer and critic.

What intellectual role did Jean Paulhan play? How did his contemporaries judge his work at the time of his death, on October 9, 1968? Fifty years later, at a time when two volumes of his critical writings are being published, does he embody the myth of the critic, and of the ("perfect critic")?

During this evening, we invite you to watch Jerome Prieur's documentary, _Jean Paulhan ou Le Don d'ubiquite_, and to listen to the recollections of Jean-Claude Zylberstein, who knew Jean Paulhan well at the end of his life.
Then Patrick Kechichian, Bernard Baillaud, and Muriel Pic will each develop their own view of Jean Paulhan as a shy yet intimidating man, seeking the sacred through modern art, and the forms of animality among his contemporaries (including himself).
Two young scholars, Clarisse Barthelemy and Camille Koskas, who have just defended their dissertations on Jean Paulhan, will speak about their work and research in his archives, preserved at IMEC, and about the "Labex Hyper-Paulhan," for which they are the lead coordinators.
Finally, we will hear Jean Paulhan's voice (and wit), thanks to the broadcast of an excerpt from his "Entretiens avec Robert Mallet" recordings (1952-1953).

With the participation of:
▸ Claire Paulhan
▸ Jerome Prieur
▸ Jean-Claude Zylberstein
▸ Sylvie Gouttebaron
▸ Patrick Kechichian
▸ Bernard Baillaud
▸ Muriel Pic
▸ Camille Koskas
▸ Clarisse Barthelemy
▸ Laurence Brisset


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