The anacoluthon of a libertinage: The question of literary value and some works of Phillippe Sollers

This dissertation is engaged with the French author Phillippe Sollers (1936- ...) and the main questions of literary value through an axiological and hermeneutical approach. The way this dissertation approaches the foundational questions of literary value is based upon a Kantian reading of the aesthetic phenomena which occurs in the form of a darstellung as a representation without a representation (or what Kant describes as the destination of humanity). Our pure reason which is purposeless in its nature, when stimulated by works of art that have a 'spirit' that creates a conflict in our mental substrates and tries to seek for a unity between cognition and understanding by employing an a priori principle of purposiveness in our cognition of nature or by subsuming the particular under the unknown general. If Kantian aesthetics of the disinterested contemplation of the work of art is appropriate, then it is evident that such a contemplation can only be established by taking the only way out of this impasse offered by Kant, by assimilating the work of art to a mystified and quasi-natural realm of production which always projects as its antithesis the production of commodities. If a work of art is exchanged in the market as a peculiar kind of commodity, this traffic can henceforth be deplored as the commodification of the work of art. While political economy continues to seek in its own terms the proportion of production and consumption on the basis of the supposed tendency of the economy toward equilibrium, it also continues to depend upon the concept of utility or use value to supplement a purely economic account of the relation of consumption to production. When Marx considers the commodity as a fetish, he also sees it as a Darstellung (a term that I found in Lacoue-Labarthe's philosophy) that is independent of empiricism and in excess of itself. If Kant succeeds in establishing the proportion of production to consumption only by removing the work of art from the realm of economic production, Marx moves into the opposite direction when he concedes that consumption actually belongs outside economics except in so far as reacts in turn upon the point of departure of production and initiates the whole process anew. Thus, for Marx, production produces consumption. It is this asymmetry that calls up from the prehistory of the political economy the analogy of the work of art that it is consumption that must be brought under the control of the productive apparatus. Since Marx's analysis is not an anthropology of need, the 'object of art', then, stands for what is momentarily in excess of the present need even if that desire can immediately be experienced as a need. Thus, Marxist works of art offer a Dartellung in the sense that they produce a need in the consumer without representing a presentation. Phillippe Sollers is an author who writes within this trajectory of Darstellung.