Le songe et la raison: essai sur Descartes by Tony James (review)

JAMES, TONY. Le songe et la raison: essai sur Descartes. Paris: Hermann, 2010. ISBN 9782 -7056-7060-3. Pp. 169. 24 a. James’s work on Descartes’s dreams offers an object lesson in successfully judging a book by its cover, or at least by its title. Although this book must be classified as a study on Descartes, it is in fact more a case study of dream interpretation as applied, in this instance, to a classical thinker. Moreover, despite the author’s erudition, this brief volume is not a systematic study but the rather personal “essai” that its subtitle announces, faithful to Montaigne’s models in its refusal of a simple linearity and in its apparent clustering of perspectives: psychoanalytic , poetic, aesthetic, philosophical, and theological. As a result, James asks us constantly to refine and revise not only our conception of the problem but also our critical vocabulary. Certain terms become in themselves subjects of inquiry in what is soon a kind of philology of affective vision: enthousiasme, somnium et visio, syndérèse. James’s research has for some time been focused on the literature and psychology of dreams, especially in Romantic and Symbolist literature, the subject of his 1995 study Dream, Creativity, and Madness in Nineteenth-Century France. The theoretical background developed in this earlier work provides James with the authority he needs to take on Descartes’s famous dreams and informs his new book from beginning to end, but especially in chapter two, “L’office de l’entendement ou le rêve lucide.” The notion of lucid dreaming reminds us of the paradoxical coupling of songe and raison in the book’s title, a pairing that seems at first to point to an irreducible opposition but, as James demonstrates, should lead the reader to reconsider preconceptions both of the dream state and of Descartes’s monolithic rationalism, which includes recurring interest in dreaming as a potential threat to philosophical integrity, most memorably in the Méditations. Le songe et la raison opens with a reconstitution, in Descartes’s own supposed voice, of the triple “songe de 1619,” a series of three dreams that have been read as the philosopher’s anxious anticipation of his future project and his own conflicted moral sense of self and purpose. Descartes recorded these dreams himself in a Latin manuscript found at his death in 1648—but that manuscript, paraphrased in French by Baillet in his seventeenth-century biography of Descartes, has since been lost. In the early twentieth century another Descartes biographer, Maxime Leroy, asked the new oracle of dreams, Sigmund Freud, to read Leroy’s own paraphrase of Baillet’s retelling of Descartes’s dreams. Though Leroy’s epistolary exchange with Freud has not been preserved, Leroy’s translation of Freud’s response (based on Freud’s own reading of Baillet, not Leroy’s paraphrase) is found in Descartes: le philosophe au masque (1929), followed by about seventy scholarly discussions of Descartes’s dreams collected by Leroy (100n2). James’s gesture of transposing Baillet’s account into the first person performs the hazardous interpretive regress toward the Cartesian source of these intriguing, neither totally opaque nor totally transparent dreams. The threads, notions, and terms of this study do come together in the final chapter and conclusion to present some new perspectives on Descartes and his dreams. Foremost among these are the role played by Ausonius’s poetry, cited in the dreams themselves and carefully read by James both in the original text and their seventeenth-century intertext, and finally James’s own resolution of the dreamer’s paradox in Descartes through an appeal to attention to the present: by scrupulously reconstructing chains of events, we can be sure that they belong to our waking lives. James’s reconstruction of the parts of Descartes’s dreams will 1034 FRENCH REVIEW 86.5 help Cartesians feel in better possession of this crucial part of the philosopher’s early life history. Boston College (MA) Stephen Bold MASSON, PIERRE, et GUY DUGAS, éd. André Gide et Jean Amrouche: correspondance 1928–1950. Lyon: PU de Lyon, 2010. ISBN 978-2-7297-0832-0. Pp. 351. 18 a. An ambitious young man writes to a...