Signe Malraux (review)

L'Esprit Créateur néant." We hear Bataille's phrase: "La souveraineté n'est rien." Invoking Bataille's "Rien" will henceforth become die sovereign, endless task of art. What Malraux calls die miracle of works of art consists in tiieir stubbornly resisting the repetition of me same ("la redite"), the perpetual cycle of deatii and birth. One way to resist that cycle is to listen to a voice always already lost, no longer a voice, in major key, of the absolute subject of modernity, but one in minor key, in dissonance widi die triumphant modem project. Such a voice has nothing to do widi any endeavor of self-appropriation, but widi a witiidrawal of die self, and witii its patient diving into the depths of infamy and infancy. Malraux, author of Les Voix du silence, observes die unheard and bears witness for the forgotten of Western modernity. But who utters die "I," while the self is dying, disastrously crawling in a dark room of the Salpêtrière like Kafka's Gregor, in limbo? Nothing but a convulsive, inhuman, absurd, monstrous, bold insistence of existence: "Je-sans-moi," as Lyotard says. Such a metamorphosis can only be accomplished dirough patient obedience to what Lyotard calls "stridence." "On entend la voix des autres avec ses oreilles, la sienne avec la gorge" is Malraux 's "shibboledi," argues Lyotard. That "voix de gorge" is a kind of ultra-sound or a silence towards which die artist must carefully tend die ear. Stridency is the unrecorded affect of our modernity. Here, Lyotard's voice resonates as strangled. His style has never been so dense and tight, almost convulsive, as if die true generosity of literary commentary consisted in taking die chance of a dangerous separation from one's own voice, and in lending die ear to die "voix de gorge." A question of style, it is also an ethical obligation. Lyotard's voice tiius lets itself be suffocated by this impossible and interminable task of commentary. Bruno Chaouat Berea College Jean-François Lyotard. Signe Malraux. Paris: Grasset, 1996. Pp. 361. Biography is impossible. At no point was it my intention to reopen the interminable trial on which Malraux put biography. Suffice it to underline its precisely interminable character. Admirable, Lyotard's book, even if die reasons for which it is admired seem to me to overlook its principal quality. When Malraux himself becomes biographer, he attributes to that act fragility, he lends it illusiveness; he makes it irremediably chimerical. Lyotard in his biographical gesture conforms to this kind of chimera, for which Céline had die beautiful word féerie. From the first sentence of die book, spells, chromos. Spells which spare notiiing and no one. Certainly not die reader who embraces the staccato rhythm, jumpy and a bit dry, and who did not know, reading die first sentence, diat he became film. Existing only a little, as we exist in cinema, that art of phantoms. Phantoms filling die screen, phantoms filling the room. Phantom itself. Cinema, because it can appear to Malraux as "the supreme degree of die ephemeral," because it knows how to persuade us that die real is but appearance, diat diere is nothing behind appearances —cinema, from every angle of consideration, is not very different from the mirror, miroir aux alouettes, which the biographer examines in Malraux 's works. He walks with it a moment on die great patiis of die human adventure, dien abandons it. Mirror which fixes on nothing, no fragment of history, or rather only on fragments. Made for un-fixing. What has become of the lives of Mayrena, Alexander, and Napoleon? Film projects. Projects, moreover, abandoned as soon as tiiey are formed. And let us note mat Malraux suffers not die least feeling of dissatisfaction. As if refraining from production were faithfulness to cinema, faithfulness at least to its spirit. And an approaching of die secret essence of an art which lived a long time on die awareness of its volatility and in die assurance that it was promised only a very short life. To die point tiiat it impressed writers 100 Fall 1998 Book Reviews as different as Cendrars, Giono, or Céline...