The Extreme In-Between: Jean Paulhan's Place in the Twentieth Century (review)

Is Jean Paulhan's 'time' finally coming? The recent appearance of the first volume of Gallimard's fine re-edition of his Oeuvres Comple`tes has been one of the highlights of a resurgent interest in that most enigmatic of figures of the twentieth century. Dr Milne's critical reappraisal of his work in The Extreme In-Between lights up the firmament of scholarship on Paulhan with equal brilliance. Milne situates his writing within the French intellectual currents and literary contexts of the time in which he was writing (the volatile middle decades of the twentieth century), providing an admirably 'thick' historical contextualization of the often surprising and controversial positions he adopted. More than this, though, she sets his ideas into eloquent dialogue with a number of key contemporary literary and political theorists (notably Judith Butler, Homi Bhabha, Jacques Rancie` re, Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man). For her, Paulhan's writing is situated intriguingly between the two main currents of French literary history, the supposedly a-political aestheticization of literature, and its re-politicization after the Second World War. Her own reading of Paulhan within this frame of reference is compelling and original, showing how it allows us to move past the aporetic formulations that are the legacy of Blanchot's famous engagement with his work in the late 1940s. The argument is structured around Paulhan's use of the term 'extreˆ me milieu' as a paradoxical pushing to the limit of the notion of a middle ground (most often the common ground of the commonplace), that is located somewhere between the various extremisms of the age (not only the political extremisms of the radical Right and Left, but also Blanchot's own literary extremism). Her book takes as its organizing principle the founding values of Republican ideology – Paulhan's major historical point of reference – and uses these to ground her own argument about the political import of his texts. Within this context, Paulhan's position has often been dismissed as claiming a certain form of political disengagement or disinterestedness, but as Milne shows, this is a serious misrecognition of his thinking. With wit, exuberance and theoretical sure-footedness, Milne takes us through a series of close readings (for example, she dwells on two of Paulhan's 'ethnographic' texts, allying them to post-colonial and post-modern concerns via his rethinking of the Enlightenment legacy, and she brings to the fore the importance of his texts on Sade, and on Braque and Cubist painting, for contemporary philosophical thought and aesthetic theory). Perhaps the major achievement of this book is the strong re-reading of Paulhan's best-known work, Les Fleurs de Tarbes, where Milne underscores his concern to keep the socially binding function of language to the fore, despite his unusual sensitivity to the radically destabilizing effects of literature. Not only does The Extreme In-Between reveal the astonishing reach and depth of Paulhan's thinking, but it paves the way for a new conception of the relationship of language to political action and historical event, one that has a remarkably contemporary (twenty-first century?) resonance to it. Perhaps Paulhan's time has indeed arrived.