Clément Rosset, iconoclastic philosopher and thinker of difference, gives us a dream from which he has a paradoxical but coherent vision of the complexity of desire. In this brief work, a reflection on the entanglement of the origins of pleasure is not only a reflection on the entanglement but also a synthesis – in the negative – of a large part of Rossetian philosophy.
How to summon, in a very brief test, Proust and Boulez, Balzac and Stravinsky, Dostoevski and Berio, Michaux and Tchaikovski, Verlaine and Ravel ? How to cross, in a few pages, Lucrèce, Leibniz, Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, Cioran, Deleuze and Althusser ? How to impose, by the unsaid of an almost nonchalant writing, insistent reminiscences-soon becoming obvious presence-of all the others, the composers, the poets, the philosophers, the plastic artists, the novelists who participate in an ineffable network ? It is probably enough to offer the thinking of the thinker of singularity – Clément Rosset – a plural concept par excellence: desire.
The object of desire is a multiplicity. There “ designer machine Deleuze and Guattari exceeds the dialectic of one and the multiple by associative regime, coupling, productive synthesis. It refuses to subsume the whole desires produced under a unit that would reduce them and transcend them. Everything works there simultaneously but the objects of the sum are always partial. It is the heart of the thesis that Clément Rosset defends, complete and – to a certain extent – influencing with May night.
Proust as a paradigm. The little Madeleine is not only the memory of Combray. More precisely, the enchantment it arouses, the delights which it generates, the delicate ecstasy which accompanies it, charged Combray with a particular meaning: not of a hidden meaning or a depth to discover but of a kind of totaling power. Combray has become the totality Proust child joys and desires. What surrounds or accompanies an object of love is neither a garnish nor an added value: it is a condition of possibility for the affect to unfold. Emotion is a plurality of emotions. Coherence matters less than cohesion: as artificial as they may be, the ramifications of the desired object are necessary for its emergence as an identified place of desire. Proust could not like the memory of Combray if he did not simultaneously summon a myriad of joyful circumstances, latent enthusiasm and the future. If the memory was only partially happy, it would absolutely cease to be. The Latin playwright Trabea wrote “ I am happy with all the joys », In other words: to love is to love everything. Joy, like desire, or love, is overdetermined: a diversity of causes, sometimes foreign to each other, must intervene so that it emerges. Not that isolated joy is intrinsically unthinkable, but rather that its instability is such that it inexorably leads to the fall. Fall that brings into play the very existence: the depressed disappointed by a fleeting joy often becomes suicidal. A unique, isolated, singular enjoyment can no longer become an object of desire. What the end is identified, the limits identified, the baled ramifications, the underlined lineaments or the proven uniqueness no longer exists as latent happiness. A “ desire Can emerge, thinkable object – sometimes palpable – but it is only the place of a convergence, a complicity, a connivance.
On the sidelines of the complication of objects of desire, Rosset sketches a thought of the complexity of the desiring subject. It is structurally heteronomous. He is plural, he split, he invents the mediator of his own desire. As René Girard suggested, he shapes himself in the metaphysical image of “ model And his relationship to the object considered.
Clément Rosset admits that the image of a “ fuel of desire Inevitably constituted in rhizome sometimes seems to be contradicted. From Rastignac to Claës, via Grandet and Hulot, the Balzac heroes seem, on the contrary, polarized by a fixed idea, the only fantasized place of their passions and their actions. Desiring monomans. The exclusive of the quest appears to be consubstantial with the authenticity of desire. The central thesis of the work is nevertheless not deconstructed by these examples insofar as the object of desire, for the only one, becomes of it never isolated. The branched complexity of desire has somehow condensed, crystallized. It is nonetheless taken in the dense interlacing and tangled from the frame of the targeted pleasures.
But what desire, precisely, was able to push Clément Rosset to write this brief work whose subject is ultimately very simple, almost obvious ? To what other objects, ideas, melodies, poems, myths is linked in the symplectic process of Rossels desire ? This essay is perhaps the least explicitly philosophical of all of Rosset’s work: no ontological plea, no reflection on the nature of reality, no openly epistemic resonance. However, and it is undoubtedly the central interest of the work, the philosophical position of the author is easily detected there in filigree. Not hidden in the manner of an enigma which should be discovered the key but, on the contrary, implemented as a “ wandering machine Which is less revealed by what constitutes it than by what it produces. This is not a question here of arguing but updating. We no longer philosophize, we explore the field of possibilities within a philosophical development.
The Lucrétienne, Spinozist and Nietzschean filiations of Clément Rosset’s position read, like a palimpsest, throughout this small work. Of the first, there is an explicit reference to the fourth book of From Natura Rerum : “ Venus is vulgivaga, it’s a vagabonde », The objects of desire are variable and organize themselves in multiplicity. From the second, we see the Conatus as a power of perseverance of desire (the Balzac hero, archetypal from this point of view, does, precisely, what it takes to never be satisfied). From the third, we detect the disinhibiting rehabilitation which innervates the twilight of idols, a central work for Rosset insofar as Nietzsche is already sufficiently in the grip of madness to no longer need to invent useless replicas of reality but still lucid enough to be able to describe it.
A hollow philosophy. There May night is a philosophy of the unsaid, the non-commitment, of the non-thought. Clément Rosset does not need to challenge the existence of a double of reality which, since Socrates, would constitute the great metaphysical illusion. He does not need to refute the distinction of what is and what exists. He does not need to remember that no hidden sense has value beyond lived experience. He does not need to praise an immanence paradoxically drawn from the yardstick of Parmenides. He does not need to develop an ontology of singularity there. It is enough for him to go beyond concepts punctuating tradition by a literally insane philosophical practice. The assertion of the primacy of difference is read in an unusual relationship to reality: everything is singular and surprising by the mere fact of existing. Continuing its rejection of any variant of philosophical meta-question of “ Why – What we could, in this case, call the principle of reason De Descartes, Leibniz or Hegel – Rosset is not interested in the genesis of desire. He analyzes the modality.
There is, in Clément Rosset, different ways of accessing reality, of accessing it throughout the extent of his insignificance (that is, to simultaneously perceive its determination and indeterminacy, the “ Two faces of Janus “: Chance and the necessary). The drunkard and the rolled lover, for example, are on this way of existence without essence. They do not want – nor cannot – invent a fantasy double: they are in touch with the lived news of a real refurbishment. However, surprisingly, Rosset claims that the May night is the more or less exact transcription of a dream. No doubt – without his knowledge ? -he offers here a new access path to the raw, non-duplicate world, in the making: the dream. Which, better than a dreamer, could have a pure experience of the surface, the outline, the appearance ?
Everything, far from it, is not obvious in the proposal of Clément Rosset. The supposed identity of discourses on desire, love and joy, in particular, is not without pose any difficulty. The arguments mentioned: “ Love is the most intense form of desire »And the reference to the phrase of the fountain introducing the Sick animals of the plague “” More love, starting from more joy Are at the very least laconic. That there is a causal relationship between the feeling of love and the emergence of certain correlative happiness is certainly not enough to establish the general identity of the schemes structuring these two psychic orders. The proposal remains – to design ? – to support and its field of validity to be established.
Lévi-Strauss saw in the Bolero de Ravel – one of the composers most present in Rosset’s work – the example, very paradoxical, of a “ fugue », In tension to the incredible final modulation in E major. This is perhaps thus that this strange pamphlet could be read: a unfolded counterpoint, stretched between the complexity of the desired object and that of the desiring subject, tense towards a funny rehabilitation of selfishness as an ability to not harm !
May night looks like Clément Rosset: not very rhetorical, simple as evidence, protean like desire, amazing like reality. It is also very singular within the work. As it should be.