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Sartre, L’Idiot de la famille: Gustave Flaubert de 1821 à 1857......Tr. Carol Cosman as The Family Idiot, Volume 1 to page 172.......................................

Univ. of Chicago Press, 1993[Original translation modified by Sartrean term and clarifications] 4

8-14Flac Sartre discusses the Flaubert project..........................................................4Why ‘the choice of Flaubert?’: ‘With him, I am at the border, the barrier of dreamsI’.................................................................................................6I ‘have very little in common with Flaubert’ and ‘am opposedI to his conceptionsI’: ‘I hope no one will be mistaken about this’.......................8

Literary vs. philosophicalI writing.....................................................................8Excerpts from Translator’s Note (lvii).............................................................10Sartre’s Preface (l:ix, Fr. 7)................................................................................10

7-14Flac Part One: Constitution..........................................................................13Hazel Barnes: ProtohistoryI..............................................................................13

8-14Flac 1. A Problem (1:3-52, Fr. 1:13)...................................................................13Reading (1:3, Fr. 13)............................................................................................13Naïveté (1:6, Fr. 16).............................................................................................15Explanation through trust (1:10, Fr. 19)..............................................................15

Pages 1:11-12 out of sequence at Sartre\Language&Comprehension-Language ‘is me and I am languageI’: ‘How can we choose the spokenI word unless it is the word itself?’ (Fl1:12, CDR99).........................................................................................................17

Naïveté and LanguageI (1:13, Fr. 23)...................................................................17Pages 1:13-14 out of sequence at Sartre\Language&Comprehension-The ‘impact of the word on consciousness’...................................................................................17Communication, like tenderness, is close to the animal state (1:14)........17Words ‘remains exteriorok ... truth is alien ... he is the most credulous child’ (1:15, 38-9).......................................................................................18Simultaneous ‘belonging of soul to world and worldI to soul, Flaubert calls poetry’: But, ‘The best of me is poetry, is the brute’ (1:19-24).........21Pages 1:27-29 out of sequence at Sartre\Language&Comprehension-Feeling ‘is discourse and discourse is feeling’..................................................................................22Stupors ‘set a limit to his misfortune by improving his passivityI’ (1:35) 22

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Pages 38-9 out of sequence at Herein-Words ‘remains exterior ... truth is alien ... he is the most credulous child’.....................................................................................24

Transition to ProgressiveI Synthesisdial/lived (1:40, Fr. 51).......................................24

6-14Flac 2. The Father (1:53-72, Fr. 1:62)................................................................26Customhouse politics of upper class bourgeoisieI and landowners (1:53).........26Upper middle classI liberal professionals called ‘les capacitésI’ (1:55).............27Paterfamilias provide for descendants rather than singular individuals (1:58)..28However, ‘the Flauberts were shot through with contradictionI’ (1:61)............29

6-14Flac 3. The Mother (1:73-94, Fr. 1:82)...............................................................32Orphaned childhood; guilt for parents death; virtuous through needI (1:73).....33Steadfast patriarchal marriage: ‘That is what I call loveI’ (1:75).......................35Child rearing (1:81)............................................................................................37 her ‘greatest virtue: Not knowing how to prevail upon her husband’ (1:84)....39Her husband’s womanizing: Deterioration in marital relations (1:87)..............40Displaced reproaches to Hôtel-Dieu: Summer lodgings elsewhere provided

peace unto death (1:91).............................................................................42

6-14Flac 4. The Elder Brother (1:96-122, Fr. 1:103)..................................................43At 32, ‘Achille began his tenure in the most attractive medical position in all

of Normandy’ (1:95).................................................................................43His father ‘wanted to discover, Achille wants to keep abreast of things’ (1:98)

.................................................................................................................45The ‘objectivelived and inviolable framework of identification’ (1:102)..............46Intelligence/talent/genius/gifted as identification rather than inheritance (1:107)

.................................................................................................................48Good ‘sense is the best thing shared—a more difficult and a truerI contention has never been made’ (1:108)..................................................50Shall ‘we say that intelligenceI imitates or that it borrows? As you like.’ (1:109).......................................................................................................51

Did ‘Achille-Cléophas loveI his son?’ Yes: ‘Was he saved? No, lost’ (1:111)..53Achille’s problematic identificationI with his father (1:114).....................54Was Achille happy? Yes, as modest and only as an appearance (1:120)..56

6-14Flac 5. The Birth of the Younger Son [a progressive study] (1:123-172, Fr. 1:130).57NeedI ‘to be lovedI is present from birth’ as ‘passiveI experience of otherness’

(1:129).......................................................................................................58

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Another’s loveI as the foundation and guarantee of our value and mandate (1:133).........................................................................................61

Truth ‘is intelligible only at the end of a long vagabond delusion’ (1:135).......65Hazel Barnes: Flaubert’s being born without a mandate: the terms ‘useless

passion’ in BN.........................................................................................67An animal-like child: Sartre’s poignant passiveI constitutiondial/group of Gustave

(1:137).......................................................................................................69LoveI’s ‘absenceI is made known as a defect of beingI’ (1:140).........................74Page 1:142 out of sequence at Sartre\Emotions-The Family Idiot: Self-hatred ‘cannot be very

strong since the hated self can never entirely be an objectposited for the self that hatesposited....75When ‘passivity is the only conceivable form of action, one must endureI

one’s very selfnessI as a being-other’ (1:143)...........................................75I ‘will never knowontology/2neg anything that the Otherconcept does not guarantee for

me, but Knowledgeconcept of others has only myself as its guarantee’ (1:148).................................................................................................................77Truth ‘is a controlled transformationI modifying human_relations through the thingI’s modification’ (1:152)................................................79The nominativeI intuition grasps [transformslived/2negtolived/1neg] things2neg because praxis1neg gives them names: Gustave is unaware of this plenitude (1:153).................................................................................................................80He cannot see in himself a chainlink of collective operationsdial/lived guaranteeing verbal propositions (1:154)..................................................81

PassiveI and without evidencedial/lived he never surpasses1neg belief as the first form of knowledge (1:154)................................................................................82His Egoconcept and feelingsI are beliefs: Role playing is only believedI (1:162).......................................................................................................83

Pages 1:167-8 with Ftn. 7 out of sequence at Sartre\The Other-The Otherconcept and the Egoconcept (Fl1:167, Fr. 1:175, footnote 7)..........................................................................84

6. Father and Son (1:173-438, Fr. 1:180) and 7. Two Ideologies (1:439-627, Fr. 1:453) are in the file Sartre\Flaubert&Father in Vol. 1....................84

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Sartre: Flaubert’s Constitution 4

Sartre: Flaubert’s Constitution

E N D O F T A B L E O F C O N T E N T S

Sartre, L’Idiot de la famille: Gustave Flaubert de 1821 à 1857Tr. Carol Cosman as The Family Idiot, Volume 1 to page 172

Univ. of Chicago Press, 1993[Original translation modified by Sartrean term and clarifications]

(1:3 to 1:171, Fr. 1:13-1:179)[Pages 1:173 to 1:627, Fr. 1:180-1:648 are in Sartre\Flaubert&Father in V.1]Sartre, "On the Idiot of the Family" (p. 123, 1971) "The most important

project in the Flaubert is to show that fundamentally everything can be communicated ... one can manage to understandposited

Fr=? another man perfectly, if one has access to all the necessary elements..."

Peter Caws, Sartre (p. 192) "...while it contains no systematic development of anything new it incorporates a number of philosophical essays which, if excerpted and bound, would make a good-sized book in philosophy in their own right. These constitute, as it were, peaks in an extended landscape; there is a second level of philosophical interest, in the application to Flaubert’s case of Sartre’s theoretical categories —imagination and the analogon, negation, seriality, totalization [in course]lived, etc.—but this in turn is embedded in a mass of anecdotal detail about Flaubert and his minor works which will have little or no interest for philosophers as such..."

8-14Flac Sartre discusses the Flaubert projectSartre, "The Itinerary of a Thought" (p. 42) [New Left Review No 58, 1969] NLR

"...Why exactly did you decide to return once again [subsequent to Baudelaire, Genet, Tintorertto and Les Mots] to the project of explaining a life?

Sartre (p. 42-3P) "In the Question de Méthode [SM], I discussed the different mediation and procedures which could permit an advance in our knowledgeFr=? of men if they were taken together. (p. 43) In fact, everyone knowsFr=? and everyone admits, for instance, that psychoanalysisc and Marxism should be able to find the mediation necessaryCDRdial/lived to allow a combination of the two. Everyone adds, of course, that psychoanalysisI is not primary, but that correctly coupled and rationalized with MarxismI, it can be useful. Likewise, everyone says that there are American sociological notions which have a certain validity, and that sociologyI in

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general should be usede... Everyone agrees on all of this. Everyone in fact says it—but who has tried to do it?

(p. 43) "I myself was in general only repeating these irreproachable maxims in Question de Méthode. The idea of the book on Flaubert was to abandon these theoretical disquisitions, because they were ultimately getting us nowhere, and to try to give a concreteI example of how it might be done. The result can look after itself. Even if it is a failurelived, it can thereby give others the idea of redoing it, better. For the question the book seeks to answer is: how shall I study a man with all these methods, and how in this study will these methods condition each other and find their respective place?

NLR "You feel you did not have these keys when you wrote Saint Genet [1952], for example?

Sartre "No, I did not have them all. It is obvious that the study of the conditioning of Genet at the level of institutions and of history is inadequate—very, very inadequatee..."

"Whereas today I would like the reader to feel the presence of Flaubert the whole time; my ideal would be that the reader simultaneously feels, comprehendsFr=?

and knowsFr=? the personality** of Flaubert, totally as an individual and yet totallyI as an expression of his time. In other words, Flaubert can only be comprehendedI by his difference from his neighbors."

Sartre, "Self-Portrait at Seventy" (p. 19) Michel Contat "...in The Words ... it was a question of write or die. When did you begin to let up, if you ever have let up?

Sartre (p. 19-20P) "In the last few years, since I gave up the Flaubert. I did an enormous amount of work, using corydrane***, on that book too [Flaubert as well as Words]. I spent fifteen years on it, working on and off. I would write something else, then return to Flaubert. (p. 20) Even so, I will never finish it. But this does not make me so unhappy, because I think I said the essentials of what I had to say in the first three volumes. Someone else could write the fourth on the basis of the three I have written.

(p. 20) "Nevertheless, this unfinished Flaubert weighs on me with a kind of remorse. Well, perhaps "remorse" is too strong a word; after all, I had to give it up because of circumstances. I wanted to finish it. And, at the same time, this fourth volume was both the most difficult for me and the one that interested me the least: the study of the style of Madame Bovary. But I can say to you that the essentials are there, even if the work remains incomplete.

Michel Contat "Is this true of your work as a whole? One could almost say that one of the principal characteristics of your entire body of writing is its unfinished state. . . . Do you find that this—

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Sartrec "That this bothers me? Not at all. Because all works remain unfinished: no man who undertakes a work of literature or philosophy ever finishes. What can I say—time never stops!"

-------------------------------------------------** Ref Sartre\Index of Terms-PERSONALITY posited; above ‘difference from his neighbors’; cf. person, personalization.*** Copied Sartre\Lifework-Drugs: Use of speed in writing the Critique and Flaubert

8-14 Flac Why ‘the choice of Flaubert?’: ‘With him, I am at the border, the barrier of dreamsI’

Sartre, "The Itinerary of a Thought" (p. 44-5P) [New Left Review No 58, 1969] NLF "...But why exactly the choice of Flaubert?Sartre "Because he is the imaginary. With him, I am at the border, the barrier

of dreams .""...Flaubert is one of the very rare historical or literary personages who have

left behind so much information about themselves. There are no less than 13 volumes of correspondence, each of 600 pages or so. He often wrote letters to several person the same day, with slight variations between them which are often very amusing. Apart from this, there are numerous reports and witnesses of him; the Concourt brothers kept a diary and saw Flaubert very frequently, so that we see him from the outside... (p. 45) Besides this, of course, there is a complete correspondence with George Sand..."

(p. 45) "Secondly, however, Flaubert represents for me the exact opposite of my own conception of literature: a total disengagement and a certain idea of form, which is not that which I admire. For example, Stendhal is a writer whom I greatly prefer to Flaubert, while Flaubert is probably much more important for the development of the novel than Stendhal. I mean that Stendhal is much finer and stronger. One can give oneself completely to him—his style is acceptable, his heroes are sympathetic, his vision of the world is true and the historicalI conception behind it is very acute..."

(p. 45-6P) "Reading Flaubert one is plunged into persons with whom one is in complete disaccord, who are irksome. Sometimes one feels with them, and then somehow they suddenly reject one’s sympathy and one finds oneself once again antagonistic to them. Obviously it was this that fascinated me, because it made me curious. This is precisely Flaubert’s art. It is clear that he detested himself, and when he speaks of his principal characters, he has a terrible attitude of sadismc and masochismc towards them: he torturesc them because they are himself, and also to show that other people and the world tortureI him. He also torturesI them because

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they are not him and he is anyway vicious and sadisticI and wants to tortureI others. (p. 46) His unfortunate charactersI have very little luck, submitted to all this.

(p. 46) "At the same time, Flaubert writes from within his charactersI and is always speaking of himself in a certain fashion. He thus succeeds in speaking of himself in a way that is unique. This type of discomfited, refused confession, with its self-hatred, its constant reversion to things he comprehends without knowing, wanting to be completely lucid and yet always grating—Flaubert’s testimony about himself is something exceptional, which had never been seen before and has not been seen since. This is another motive for studying him."**

"The third reason for choosing Flaubert is that he represents a sequel to L’Imaginaire*** ...(More of page 46 out of sequence at Sartre\Imagination-Analogon: ‘Objectposited which serves as analogy traversed by intention’)"

(p. 46-7P) "Finally, via all this, it is possible to ask the question: what was the imaginary social world of the dreamy bourgeoisie of 1848? This is an intriguing subject in itself... After the revolution of 1830, there were boys who launched political struggles in the schools, who fought and were defeated. The reading of the romantics, of which Flaubert speaks so often as a challenge to their parents, is only explicable in this perspective... [T]his history was that of a bourgeoisie seized with shame at itself in its sons, of the defeat of these sons and thereby the suppression of its shameI. The end result of this historyI will be the massacre of 1848."See Herein-Sartre’s Preface

-------------------------------------------------Caws, Sartre (p. 192) "...Sartre had been brought up to belong in Flaubert’s

time rather than his own: he describes his grandfather’s influence on him as that of ‘a man of the nineteenth century . . . foisting upon his grandson ideas that had been current under Louis Philippe. . . . I started off with a handicap of eighty years. Ought I to complain? I don’t know; in our bustling societies, delays sometimes give a head start.’ (Words 40)."

-------------------------------------------------See Sartre\Existentialism-Find regressive tension expanding from objectivitylived to objectivityI, on the study of Flaubert.** The Family Idiot (2:220c) "...If Gustave crams his correspondence with such associations, it is because he writes the way one speaks on an analyst’s couch—with the qualification that the patient, while letting himself go, never loses consciousness of the fact that he is in quest of something and that he is revealing himself to a witness in order to be revealedI to himself, while Flaubert wants to produce ‘thoughts’ for the other but does not want to seek himself, or find himself."*** Sartre, "On the Idiot of the Family" (p. 119) "...I have rethought some of the notions dealt with in Imagination. But in spite of the criticism I have read, I must

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say I still consider that work to be sound. If one takes only the point of view of the imagination (excluding the social viewpoint, for example) I have not changed my position."

8-14 I ‘have very little in common with Flaubert’ and ‘am opposedI to his conceptionsI’: ‘I hope no one will be mistaken about this’

Sartre, "On The Idiot of the Family" (p. 121P) "...I do not think it is very helpful to say that I see myself in Flaubert as it has been said that I do in Genet. Perhaps it is more nearly true for Genet because he is closer to me in many respects. But I have very little in common with Flaubert. One of the reasons I chose him was precisely because he is not close to me. One always says about a writer describing someone, ‘In painting the other he paints himself.’ Of course, there must be elements of myself in the book, but the essential thing is the method."

(p. 128P) "...It goes without saying that I am absolutely opposed to Flaubert’s conceptions and that in my book I am only describing them. I hope no one will be mistaken about this."

8-14Flac Literary vs. philosophicalI writingSartre, "On The Idiot of the Family" (p. 112P) "Throughout the book, Flaubert

is presented the way I imagine him to have been but since I used what I think were rigorous methods, this should also be Flaubert as he really is, as he reallyI was..."

(p. 112P) "I would like my study to be read as a novel because it reallyI is the story of an apprenticeship that led to the failurelived of an entire life. At the same time, I would like it to be read with the idea in mind that it is true, that it is a true novel." Subsequently, in 1976 he recanted to the latter as cited by Hazel Barnes, Sartre & Flaubert, (p. 7, a full paragraph).]

Sartre, "Self-Portrait at Seventy" (p. 7) Michel Contat "Your philosophical manuscripts are written in longhand, with almost no crossing-out or erasures, while your literary manuscripts are very much worked over, perfected. Why is there this difference?

Sartre (p. 7-8P) "The objectives are different. In philosophy, every sentence should have only one meaning. The work I did on The Words, for example, where I attempted to give multiple and superimposed meanings to each sentence, would be bad work in philosophy. If I have to explain the concepts of ‘for-itselfontology’ and ‘in-itselfontology,’ that can be difficult. I can use different comparisons, different demonstrations, to make it clear, but I must deal with Ideas that are self-contained. It is not on this level that the complete meaning is found, because the complete meaning can and must be multiple as far as the complete work is concerned. (p. 8) I do not mean to say that philosophy, like scientific communication, is unambiguous.

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(p. 8) "In literature, which in some way always has to do with what has been experienced (vécu), nothing that I say is totally expressed by what I say. The same reality can be expressed in a practically infinite number of ways. And it is the entire book that indicates the type of reading each sentence requires..."

"The kind of sentence that is purely objectivelived, like those found frequently in Stendhal, necessarily leaves out many things. Yet this sentence contains within itself all the others, and thus holds a totality of meanings that the author must have constantly in mind for them all to emerge... If this totalityI is present, you will write a good sentence. If it is not present, the sentence will jar and seem gratuitous.

"...generally speaking it is always more difficult to write, say, four sentences in one, as in literature, than one in one, as in philosophy. A sentence like ‘I think, therefore I am,’ can have infinite repercussions in all directions, but as a sentence it possesses the meaning that Descartes gave it. While when Stendhal writes, ‘As long as he could see the clock tower of Verrières, Julien kept turning around,’ the sentence, by simply saying what the character does, also tells us what Julien feels, what Mme de Renal feels, and so on."

Sartre, Politics and Literature (p. 96, cited from Caws, Sartre p. 26) "If I forget my self for a moment and use a literary turn of phrase in a philosophical work I always feel slightly that I am pulling a fast one on my reader; it is a breach of trust. I once wrote the sentence—remembered because of its literary aspect—... ‘man is a useless passion.’ A case of breach of trust. I ought to have put that in strictly philosophical terms. In A Critique of Dialectical Reason I do not think I was guilty of breach of trust at all. There are two very different things at issue here. In the realm of literature this kind of thing does not constitute breach of trust because the reader is forewarned."

-------------------------------------------------Ref Sartre\Index of Terms-LITERARY VS. PHILOSOPHICAL WRITING

Search for a Method: (p. 110c) "...But the novelist will be lying. It is not thoughts which are involved (at least not necessarily), and all are given2neg together, not one at a time..."

8-14Flac Excerpts from Translator’s Note (lvii)Carol Cosman (1:vii-viii) "L’Idiot de la famille, or The Family Idiot as I have

called it, is Sartre’s last major work and a kind of summa of everything in the way of his philosophic, social, and literary thought that had gone before. It is, as Sartre says, an exercise in methodology—a case in point illustrating the procedure formulated in Search for a Method..."

"Rather than find a uniform style in which to render the diverse styles Sartre employs, rather than smooth out the abrupt shifts and startling interjections of

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everyday language in the midst of philosophic discourse, I have chosen to try to approximate in English the texture of Sartre’s original with all its idiosyncrasies, this because I feel that part of the interest and excitement of his work is conveyed by this journey over a rough but remarkably engaging road through uncharted territory. That, at least, is what I have hoped to achieve while presenting a text that is at the same time readable and as clear as possible."

8-14Flac Sartre’s Preface (l:ix, Fr. 7) Sartre, The Family Idiot (1:ix, Fr. 1:7) "The Family Idiot is the sequel to Search for a Method.**a Its subject: what, at this point in time, can we know [savoir] about a man? It seemed to me that this question could only be answered by studying a concreteI case. What do we know [savons]posited, for example, about Gustave Flaubert? What would it costok to totalizelived the data on him at our disposal. We have no assurance at the outset that such a totalization [in course]lived is possible and that the truth of a person is not multiple. The fragments of information we have are very different in kind: Flaubert was born in December 1821, in Rouen—that is one kind of information; he writes, much later to his mistress: ‘Art terrifies me’—that is another. The first is an objectivelived, social factconcept, confirmed by official documents; the second, objectiveI too, when one sets some store by what it said, refers, in its signification to a lived [vecu] feeling, and we can draw no conclusions about the sense and import of this feeling until we have first established whether Gustave is sincere in general and particularly, in this circumstance. Do we not risk ending up with layers of heterogeneous and irreducible significationsI? This book attempts to prove that irreducibility is only apparent, and that each piece of data set in its place becomes a portion of the wholedial, which ceaselessly makes itself, and by the same token reveals its profound homogeneity with all the other parts that make up the wholeI.

(1:ix-x) "For a man is never an individual***; it would be more fitting to call him a universal_singularc. Totalizedlived and, for this reason universalizedposited by his epoch, he in turn retotalizeslived it by reproducing himself in it as singularityc.**** Universalposited by the singular_universityc of human history, singular by the universalizing_singularityI of his projects, he requires simultaneous examination from both ends. We must find an appropriate method. (1:x) I set out the principles of this method in 1958**b and will not repeat what I said; I prefer to demonstrate whenever necessary how this method makes itself through the very work itself in obedience to the exigencies of its objectposited.

(1:x) "A last word. Why Flaubert? For three reasons. The first, very personalok, long ago ceased to be as salient as it once was in the origin of this choice. In 1943, rereading his correspondence in the bad edition by Charpentier, I felt I had

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a score to settle with Flaubert and ought therefore to get to know [connaître] him better. Since then, my initial antipathy has changed to empathyc, the one attitude required to comprehendok. Next, he is objectifiedlived in his books. Anyone will tell you, ‘Gustave Flaubert—he's the author of Madame Bovary.’ What then is the connection [rapport] [of three degrees] as 1st&2neg of the manlived/1neg to the work2neg? I have never discussed this until now, nor, to my comprehension [connaissance], has anyone else. We shall see that this is a double relationI: Madame BovaryI is defeat and triumph; the man depicted in the defeat is not the same man summoned in its triumph. We must try to comprehendI what this signifies. Finally, Flaubert’s early works and his correspondence (Thirteen published volumes) appearI , as we shall see, to consist of the strangest, the most easily deciphered revelations. We might imagine we were hearing a neurotic ‘free associating’ on the psychoanalysts’s couch. I thoughtI it permissible, for this difficult test case, to choose a compliant subject who yields himself easily and unconsciously. I would add that Flaubert, creator of the ‘modern’ novel, stands at the crossroads of all our literary problems today.

"Now we must begin. How, and by what means? It doesn’t much matter: a corpse is open to all comers. The essential thing is to set out with a problem. The one I have chosen is hardly ever discussed. Let us read this passage from a letter to Mlle Leroyer de Chantepie: ‘It is by the sheer force of work that I am able to silence my innate melancholy. But the old nature often reappears, the old natureI that no one knows [connait], the deep, always hidden wound.’ What is it that he wants to say? Can a wound be innate? In any event, Flaubert refers us to his protohistory. What we must try to know [savoir] is the origin of the wound that is ‘always hidden’ and dates back to his earliest childhood. That will not, I think, be a bad start."

-------------------------------------------------See Herein-Why ‘the choice of Flaubert?’: ‘With him, I am at the border, the barrier of dreams’**a&b Sartre, Search for a Method [Flaubert appears on pages 105-7, 140-50, and 159-60].*** Ref Sartre\Index of Terms-INDIVIDUAL [individu, individuel/s-elle, not individuallyI

=individuellementI , not individualistI /individualisticI =individualisteI , not individuality=individualitéI ]; all terms checked with French; cf. singular_universal, common_individual;

BN: (p. 112c) "...The true problem—which we shall attack in the following chapter—will be to find out by what process these individual pastslivedc can be united so as to form the pastI.";

(p. 619P c) "...We, indeed, apply the term ‘metaphysical’ to the study of individual processes which have given2neg to this world as a concrete and particular totalitydial/lived..."

Search for a Method: (p. 110c) It is the individual’s praxisc, as the realization of his projectI, which determines [‘that is, as limitation’] his bonds of reciprocity with

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everyone.";CDR: Sartre\Dialectic-R7. The Problem of the Individual

(p. 38c) "...The dialectic reveals itself only to an observer situated in interioritylivedc, that is to say, an investigator who livesI his inquiry at once as a possible contribution to the ideology of the entire epoch and as the particular praxis of an individual defined by his historical and personal adventure within the wider history which conditions it...";

(p. 64c) "...But it will never be sufficient to show the production of ensembles by individuals or by one another, nor, conversely, to show how individuals are produced by the ensembleIc which they compose. It will be necessary to show the dialectical intelligibilitydial/lived of these transformations in every case.";

(p. 100c, Fr. 212) "Since we began with the dispersal of human organisms, we shall consider individualslived/1neg who are completely isolated by institutions, by their social condition, or by accidents of fortune. We shall try to discoverdial/lived in this same separation, and therefore in a connectionok [of three degrees]1neg&2neg which tends towards absolute exterioritylived/2neg, their concrete historical bond of interioritylived/1neg."

(p. 486c) "e...The organiclived individual freelyI bore expected ordeals in order to achieve the status of the common_individual (that is to say, in order to have and to exercise practical powers); and this undertaking—manifested by his very endurance—is precisely the second oath...";

Sartre\Dialectic-R7. The Problem of the Individual [Individual accedence to the dialectic];

-R11. The individual and Historyconcept [densely presents the purposes of the Critique];**** This ‘formalismposited’ is bedrock to Sartre’s dialectic. See Sartre\Dialectic-dialectical_circularity, with CDR (p. 79c) "...the crucial discoverydial/livedc of dialectical expérience is that man is ‘mediated’ by things to the same extent as things are ‘mediated’I by man..."

7-14Flac Part One: Constitution

2-10Flac Hazel Barnes: ProtohistoryI

Ref Sartre\Index of Terms-PROTOHISTORY [protohistorie]; Hazel Barnes, "Sartre’s Concept of the Self" (p. 54) "e...In his discussion of the gradual development of Flaubert’s adult personality, he brings to bear all of the familiar elements of family conditioninge... ‘Protohistory’ is Sartre’s term for the early years of childhood. We may subdivide it into what he calls ‘constitution**’ and ‘personalizationc.’

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Constitution refers to the fundamental patterns of affectivity which Sartre believes are set by the infant’s relations with its mother. Personalization, beginning in protohistory but extending beyond it, refers to the way that the child interiorizes and unifies its lived situation in the family..." Ref Sartre\Flaubert’s Last Spiral-teleological_structure and teleological_intention, which appear to follow protohistory.** Hazel Barnes limitation of ‘constitution’ to infancy pertains to this document. Subsequently the term, from BN through The Family Idiot’s other documents, is more comprehensive, as in: (3:155, Flaubert’s school years]) "...Gustave will never reach the point of action: he is protected against these desperate gestures by his condition as bourgeois ... [and] his constituteddial passivityI..."

8-14Flac 1. A Problem (1:3-52, Fr. 1:13)See Barnes, Sartre and Flaubert (p. 17-22)

8-14Flac Reading (1:3, Fr. 13)The Family Idiot, (1:3, Fr. 1:13) "When, bewildered and still ‘brutish,’ little

Gustave Flaubert emerges from infancy, skills await him. And roles. Training begins, and apparently not without success—no one tells us, for example, that he had trouble walking. On the contrary [contrarie] we know [savons] that this future writer stumbled when it came to the prime test, his apprenticeship in words. Later we shall try to discoverdial/lived whether, from the very beginning, he had difficulty speaking. What is certain is that he made a poor showing in the other linguistic test—that chief initiation and rite of passage—learning the alphabet. A witness reports that the little boy learned his letters very late and that his family took him for a backward child. Caroline Commanville** gives the following account:

My grandmother had taught her elder son to read. She wanted to do as much for the second and set to work. Little Caroline at Gustave’s side learned rapidly; he could not keep up, and after straining to understand these signs that meant nothing to him, he would begin to sob e... But school age was upon him, he had to know at any cost . . . Gustave applied himself resolutely and in a few months caught up with the children his own age."(1:4) "Let us return to the passage just cited. We shall have no trouble

glimpsing the truth of Gustave's unhappy childhood. We are told that the child cried bitterly, that he was avid for knowledge [connaître], and that his impotence made him miserable. Then, a little further on, we are shown a blustering dunce, stubborn in his refusal to learn—why should I? Papa Mignot reads to me. Is this the same Gustave? Yes, but the first attitude [bitterness at impotence] is provoked by an observationposited he makes himself: the adversity of things, his own incapacity. The

14


Otherconcept is there of course: the witness, the harsh surroundings, necessityCDRdial/lived. But this is not a source of the child’s sorrow, the relation spontaneously established between the lifeless imperatives of the alphabet and his own potential: ‘I must but I can’t.’ The second attitude implies a combative relationship between the child and his parents. Caroline CommanvilleI tells us, in passing, that there were scenes—this is enough. These scenes did not occur immediately. There was time for patience, then for distress, finally for reproach. At first the family blamed naturelivedc, later they accused the child of ill will. He answered belligerently that he didn’t needdial/lived

to learn how to read. But he was already defeated, already falsified: by pretending to explain his refusal, he confessed to it. The parents asked no more, and all their impatience was justified.

(1:4-5) sartre¶ "The defenseless humility, the proud resentment that makes the victim claim as his own the ill will of which he is falsely accused—these two reactions are separated by many yearse... Gustave and Caroline Flaubert learned to read together. But Gustave was four years older than his younger sister. Supposing that Mme Flaubert had begun to teach him at around five years old, the youngest, age twelve or thirteen months, was attending the lessons from her cradlee... (1:5, Fr. 15) Observe: Mme Flaubert became the teacher of the brilliant Achille [nine years older than Gustave]; her first success convinced her of her pedagogic gifts—Achille must have been a child prodigy—so she renewed the experiment with Gustave. And Caroline, the last born, mother of the narrator [Mme Commanville], learned at play. Gustave is squeezed between these two marvels—inferior to both, he doesn’t look good."

(1:6, Fr. 1:16) "e...Gustave knew [sut] how to read in 1828 or ‘29, that is to say, between seven and eight. Earlier, his slowness would not have been so disturbing; later, he would never have caught up."

"e...We don't worry about this today; methods are more solid, predictable; and, above all, we take the student as he is. At that period there was an order to follow and the child had to bend to it. So Gustave was behind, every step of the way."

-------------------------------------------------** Sartre\Index of Terms-CAROLINE COMMANVILLE ; Daughter of Flaubert’s sister, Caroline Flaubert and "...Flaubert’s niece ... lived intimately with her uncle and her grandmother’..."

8-14Flac Naïveté (1:6, Fr. 16)The Family Idiot (1:6-7, Fr. 1:16-7) "Not completely, however. Papa Mignot

read to him, the little boy was already broadly cultured, already literary. Novels exercised his imagination, provided new schemes; and he learned the use of the symbol. If a child transforms himself early enough into Don Quixote, he

15


unwittingly incorporates the general principle of all incarnationslived: he grasps [transformslived/2negtolived/1neg] how to see himself, to find himself, in the life of an other, to live his own life as an other. (1:7) Nothing of all this, unfortunately, was visible. The acquired achievements—new transparencies, the soul’s clearings, reflections [reflet]—were of a kind that only increased the number of his stupors, or at least did not reduce them. Mme Flaubert knew [sut] nothing about these exercises. And doubtlived was born: is Gustave an idiot?e..."

8-14Flac Explanation through trust (1:10, Fr. 19)The Family Idiot (1:10, Fr. 1:19-20) "e...For the sake of a joke [Gustave’s parents]

could simply have given him false but realistic information: that his playmates had not yet come—when they were waiting behind the door; or that his father had gone’ to make his rounds’ without taking the boy with him—when the medical director was standing behind him, ready to grab him and whisk him off in the carriage. All parents are jokers; fooled since childhood themselves, they take pleasure in fooling their own youngsters, out of kindness. It never occurs to them that they might be driving their children crazy. The little victims must make do with the false feelings attributed to them, which they interiorize, and with the false information that will be denied a moment later or soon afterwarde... Certainly the little boy cannot imagine that adults would deceive through caprice. After all, Descartes finds no other guarantee of our knowledge [savoir]: God is good, therefore he has no desire to deceive us. A valid reason. For Gustave it is more than a reason, it is a humble right. Trust** always involves a calculating generosityc: I give it to you, you must deserve it. And the little boy feels, in the transport of his enthusiasm: since you say it, it must be true; you haven’t brought me into the world to mock me. But what is the source of this implicit faith? Doesn’t it serve, at least, to replace something that has been lost or wanting, to fill a gap? We must advance cautiously when we are dealing with prehistory and when the witnesses are few and fraudulent. We shall attempt, through a description followed by a regressive analysis, to establish what was lackingdial/lived. And if we succeed, we shall try, through a progressive synthesisdial, to discoverdial/lived the why of this absence. This will not be a waste of time. Since the stubborn naïveté of the future writer is the expression of a poor initial connection [rapport] [of three degrees]1st&2neg with language, our description will at first aim only to articulate that relationship precisely.

(1:10-11, Fr. 1:20-1) "Yes, the naïveté is originally just a relationok [of three degrees]1st&2neg with speech, for it is through speech that these fabrications are conveyed. Further, since they do not correspond to any reality, one would have to view them only as lexemes. Little Gustave’s misfortune is that something inside prevents him from grasping [transformslived/2negtolived/1neg] words as simple signs. Of course,

16


even in a ‘normal’ child it takes a long apprenticeship to distinguish the material weight of the vocablec, its adherences, the intimidating pressure it bears on the ‘objectposited of locution,’ in short the magicalc power of its pure signifying valuelived. (1:11) But Gustave’s naïveté, because it persists, indicates that he could not fully perform this task; he learns to decode the message, of course, but not to question its contents. A falseI thought*** is transmitted to him by the spoken word; soon even he—the little boy—is struck by its absurdity, but he doesn’t question it. The meaningCDRlived becomes materialI—it acquires inertia, not by its obviousness but by its density. The idea has thickened, crushing the mind that contains it; it is a stone that can be neither lifted nor thrown off. Still, this enormous mass has remained meaningCDR all the way through. Significationlivedc—that transcendencelived/1neg which exists only through the project that aims at it—and passivityc—pure En-soi In-itselfconcept, materialI weight of the sign—pass one through the other, a pair of contrariesc

ok that interpenetrate instead of opposingc each other. The most grave consequence is that the child derives no profit from the repeated deceptions. He is told a lie, he is made to accede that his father is gone, the father right away [aussitôt] appearsI amidst laughter. But, for the child, this here and now unmasked self-deception never has the valueI of an expérience. See Sartre\Flaubert’s School Years-Nothing ‘is more alien to Gustave than the spirit of analysis’

(1:11, Fr. 1:21) "It will be comprehendedok that I am exposing appearancesok. To arrive at the truth, the terms must be reversed. It is Gustave’s mind that is paralyzed before the speech —something is said to him and everything jams, everything comes to a halt. MeaningCDR I is not important, it is the verbal materialityI that fascinates him. Yet this ‘paralysis’ must be considered only a symbol; the mind is never paralyzed. The symbolI can be understoodok

posited in only one way: from his earliest years, the child is touched by human_relations through the Verb. Credulity comes to children of men from those who affect them through language, that is, through the conductive medium of all articulated communications. It surrounds them from the beginning, they are born into it, shaped—for good or ill—to adapt themselves to it. When the sensory-motor apparatus has developed ‘normally,’ yet the child’s response to the message is ‘abnormal,’ this double [normal/abnormal] self originates at the difficult level where all discourse is man, where all of man is discourse; it implies a bad fit in the linguistic universe, that is in the social world, in the family."

-------------------------------------------------** Ref Sartre\Index of Terms-TRUST ; No hyperlinks*** See Flaubert’s thought mechanisms at Sartre\Flaubert’s Personalization-autism

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Pages 1:11-12 out of sequence at Sartre\Language&Comprehension-Language ‘is me and I am languageI’: ‘How can we choose the spokenI word unless it is the word itself?’ (Fl1:12, CDR99)

8-14Flac Naïveté and LanguageI (1:13, Fr. 23)

Pages 1:13-14 out of sequence at Sartre\Language&Comprehension-The ‘impact of the word on consciousness’

8-14Flac Communication, like tenderness, is close to the animal state (1:14)The Family Idiot (1:14-5, Fr. 1:24) "If Gustave, aged six, confuses sign and

signification to the extent that the material presence of the sign is the evidencedial/lived

ok** that guarantees the truth of the meaningIok, he must have had a

poor initial connection [rapport] [of three degrees] with the Otherconcept.*** In effect, he belives everything he is told, out of awe before the verbal objectposited, out of devoted love for the adults. But he does not really relate speech to those who have spokenI. At first he perceives commands rather than statements; these impose themselves and then he must believe them, since they are a gracious gift made to him by his parents. Besides, lacking the reciprocity—however ephemeral—that establishes complete comprehensionok with all its structuresdial/lived, the speechI of the OtherI seems to him a word that has been given2neg, in every sense of the term. Speaking is not expressing; the sentence, ample present, is a materialI giftI—he is offered a music box, imagine, a musical trivet. If the music has meaningCDRlived, so much the better; the giftI is taken, kept, it is a souvenir. What is lacking, we see, is intention. The child adores the objectI given2neg upon him as the will of paternal favor, but it is the same generosity that Gustave detects in his father’s slightest caress. (1:15) Speaking to the child or ruffling his hair amounts to the same thing. It might be said that between parents and children the gestures of tenderness—silent, effective, as ‘brutish’ among humans as among the beasts—are the only communication possible. The child, wild and—if we are to believe his first writings—close to the animal R state , can he loveI men and believeI himself lovedI only on the level of common subhumanity."

-------------------------------------------------** Gustave’s inability to incorperate evidencedial/lived is presented also at: (1:38c) "...Unable to accomplish the act that is intellectionlivedc—definite evidence on which to base our certainties—he is reduced to belief...";

Herein-*Passive and without evidenceI: He never goes from beliefI to knowledge (1:154);

H11-9 & 5-16-*He cannot see in himself a chainlink of collective operationsdial/lived guaranteeing verbal propositionsdial/concept.*** For this OtherI see Herein-Novellas at age 13-17; Is this a symptom of autismc?

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4-154Flac Words ‘remains exteriorok ... truth is alien ... he is the most credulous child’ (1:15, 38-9)

The Family Idiot (1:15-6, Fr. 1:25) "e...He would sit for hours, a finger in his mouth, looking almost stupid; this calm child who reacts badly when spoken to, feels less than others the needdial/lived to speakI—words, as we say, do not come to him, nor the desire to use them. This means, of course, that he does not communicate willingly. His affections are not in themselves directed toward others, they are not destined for othersI and do not seek to be expressed. Let us not then conclude that they are intentionally ‘egocentric’—there is no Egoconcept without an Alter, without an Alter Egoc; unexpressed to othersI

ok, his affectionsI remain for Gustave himself inexpressible. They are lived fully and vaguely with no one there to live them, no doubt because their substance is, as LecanR would say, ‘inarticulable.’ But is not the real reasonok an early difficulty with articulation, reinforced by a secret preference for the inarticulate? The evident connectionI [connexion] between Gustave’s inadequacies—as ‘object of speechI’ and as ‘speakerI’—is persuasive: in the child, language is a poor conductive medium; through it not only is the connectionok [of three degrees]1neg&2neg with the other falsified, but also the connectionI

ok with the self. The little boy is badly anchored in the universe of discourse. (1:16, Fr. 26) The word is never his; the trance soon absorbs the wordI, and by and by the wordI, fallen from the sky, tyrannizes him. Finally, in the very depths of his interiority, the wordI remains exterior. That is when it enters the child’s ear, the objectI is not submitted to the classical operationsdial/posited: reception, apprehension, classification in a verbal series with respect to the permanent possibility of the subject. These operationsI occur automatically if the child is already languageI; or, if you will, to be languageI** is to repeat these operationsI continually within oneselfI. Let a wordI present itself, it is languageI that receives languageI. But if the spoken wordI is alternately absent or deafening, as it is for Gustave, this is because his own disposition, the thread of his ‘ideas’ and affectionsI, is not sufficiently verbalized. At the age when everyone speaks, he is still imitating speakers; and if the sound that rings suddenly in him leaves an impression, it provokes him precisely through this sense of ‘estrangement.’1 And estrangement has only one explanation: there is no common measure or mediation between Gustave’s subjective existence and the universe of significations; they are two perfectly heterogeneous realities which occasionally visit one another.

(1:16-7, Fr. 1:26) sartre¶ "A child of six ordinarily finds himself defined down to his very innermost being by others and by himself, for to live is to produce significationsI, to suffer is to speak. The child is receptive to exterior meaning

19


because he is himself filled with meaningCDRlived and a producer of meaningsI (I am here translating the German word sinngebendlived*** taken in its phenomenologicalposited sense). Gustave does not produce meaningI; within himself he is not defined by anything, neither by a proper name nor by the general name of what he feels. He livesI, however, he savors his life, he projects himself beyond the boundaries of the selfI toward the world around him; but life and words are incommensurable. Actually, I am exaggerating. The verbalizationI of his existence has begun, for lengthy as his silences may be he speaks, he acquires a vocabulary, he listens and comprehends what is said to him. Very simply, words never really define for him what he experiences [éprouve]ontology, what he feels. (Fr. 27) Nor, doubtless, his true transcendentlived/1neg connectionok [of three degrees]1neg&2neg to the world. The objectsI that surround him are the things of others. His parents at times oblige him to define himself through signs that they have chosen: say hello to the lady, tell her your name; where does it hurt? here or here? (1:17) But, in telling the truth, he realizes that Truthconcept is alien to him. This is why he is the most credulous child; since he does not possess Truthconcept, since it is a relationok [of three degrees]1st&2neg of the othersIlived/1neg with thingslived/2neg and between themselves, since each true utterance, by revealing the gap between existence and the Verbconcept, is made manifest to him by the discomfort it provokes and never by something obvious, he relies upon the principle of authority****."

(1:17-8, Fr. 1:28) "e...What, precisely, is this radicalontology heterogeneity of Gustave’s mental life and language? Merely to demonstrate an apparent incompatibility is not enough; it must be defined with precision. (1:18) Indeed, no human animalc—I will even say no mammal—whether it speaks or not, can liveI without entering into the dialecticalc movementdial/lived of the signifier and the signifiedlivedc. For the simple reason that meaningCDRI is born of the projectc. Therefore Gustave, badly adjusted as he is in the universe of expression, is sign, signifiedI, signifierI, signification to the extent that his most basic impulses are made manifest through projectsI. And he knows [sait] it. As he runs, smiling, to throw himself into his father’s open arms, he is consciously determined [‘that is, as limitation’] by a signI that embodies a signifiedI relationship between lord and vassal. Better, it is a signI rather than a caress. Why does he crave it if not because it signifiesI paternal love? Where, then, do the troubles begin, the aversions and the impossibilities? With spokenI languageI? Why?

"It is to soon to try to answer these questionse..." See Flaubert&Father in Vol. 1-C. Inadequacy: Regurgitated ‘block of sound indivisible to words or sentences since it is the Otherconcept’

(1:38-9, Fr. 1:48, out of sequence from Herein-Transition ‘to Progressive Synthesis’) "Gustave’s passive constitutiondial/group long detains him at the stage of the spokenI

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soul; meaningsI come to him, like tastes and smells, he comprehendsok them—but not completely, since he cannot make them his own; what he grasps [transformslived/2negtolived/1neg]c of them, in any event, is given2neg to him by others. Unable to accomplish the act that is intellectiondial/livedc—definite evidencedial/lived on which to base our certainties—he is reduced to belieflivedc. The sentences of others are affirmed in him but not by him. This is what they call his credulity; indeed, he believesI everything, and this is to believe nothing, it is only to believeI. (1:39) His credulity is merged with what he will later call his ‘belief in nothing.’ He pronounces sentences, nevertheless, he repeats words or puts them together like flowers in a bouquet—he is affected by their vague, lingering sense. As long as no one thinks of givingI him a primer, no one perceives that he doesn’t speak, rather, that he is spoken. But from the moment he must learn to read, languageI transforms itself before his eyes—he has to decompose, recompose according to rules, affirm, deny, communicate; what he must be taught is not only the alphabet but the praxis for which nothing has prepared him. The pathic child approaches practice and discoversdial/lived he is not suited for it. Or, rather, he does not understand what is required of him. Previously, of course, he was docile and obedient. But this was bending himself to the will of adults—perinde accadaver. Now he is commanded to act. But the act, even under orders, is sovereignty, that is, it bears in itself an implicit negation2neg of obedience. For Gustave, reading will not only be an operationdial/lived that the others demand of him without giving him the proper tools; it will be, above all, an exile. Faced with the primer, he feels he will be routed from the gentle, servile world of childhood."

-------------------------------------------------Ftn 1. This is Lacan’s translation of the Freudian term Unheimlichkeit. (Usual English translation. ‘the uncanny.’ Trans.)** See Sartre\Language&Comprehension-Language ‘is me and I am languageI’: ‘How can we choose the spokenI word unless it is the wordI itself?’ (Fl1:12, CDR99)*** Ref Sartre\Index of Terms-SINNGEBEND lived; (1:134c) "...sinngebend, that is, a reality invested with meaningCDRlived [sens]..."**** (1:152c) "...if the Otherconcept makes decisions, the unique foundation of knowledge [savoir] is the principle of authority." and "...If affirmationdial is the essence of truth, it will be up to the OtherI to assent. The judicial act seems to the child an alien praxis..."

8-14Flac Simultaneous ‘belonging of soul to world and worldI to soul, Flaubert calls poetry’: But, ‘The best of me is poetry, is the brute’ (1:19-24)

The Family Idiot (1:19, Fr. 1:27-8) "Let us read Quidquid Volueris [Whatever You Wish] "It is clear that Djalioh, the ape-man, represents Flaubert himself. At what

21


age? This character is sixteen, a year older than his creator. But he is the product of a monstrous union. A scientist, Monsieur Paul, in the interests of science, had a female slave raped by an orangutane..."

(1:22, Fr. 1:32) "...[Gustav,] the backward child was easily superior to the members of our species with regard to the depth of his tender feelings. The theme of the stupors, then provides a counterpoint to that of language e... But what concerns Gustave is that before, that is to say, before his keepers took it upon themselves to teach him to read, Djalioh had a golden age: ‘Often in the presence of forests, of high mountains, of the ocean, his soul expanded. . . . He trembled all over with the weight of an interior voluptuousness and with his head between his hands, he would fall into a lethargic melancholy’..."

(1:23, Fr. 1:33) sartre¶ "The symbol is precise: the ape-man, monstrous product of nature and man, must be at once [à la fois] the pure objectposited of man and naturalI subjectc par excellence. His most intimate relations are with natureI and not with men—natureI is within him, it is his pure existence; outside him, it is his own possibility. His only possibilityI; he can surpass1neg himself only in the direction of natureI, making himself so much more Natureconcept—that is to say, spontaneity without a subjectI—that he loses himself in the unnamed, uncultivated virgin vastness of the ocean or forest; Natureconcept is the meaningCDRI and the end of his fundamental project elaborated in a thousand particular appetites; he comes back to himself from the horizons, he is a being[-there] from the naturallivedc distancesI [lointains]. Between transcendence_and_immanencelivedR there is, in DjaliohI, reciprocity; therefore, the author insists, it could be said, according to the circumstances, either that he is diluted in natureI or that the whole of natureI enters him. Although this seems to be a matter of inverse conduits, they are the same with a different emphasis: sometimes the soul produces itself as an infinite gap and the world is swallowed up in it, and sometimes it [the soul] is a finite mode of substance; thus imprisoned within the limits of its determination [‘that is, as limitation’], it annihilates. Most important, the basic intention never varies—the goal in both cases is totalizationlived. ReciprocalI totalizationI of the microcosm by the macrocosm, and vice versa. When this double simultaneous belonging of the soul to the world , the world I to the soul , is the objectposited of an expériencelivedc concrete and lived [vécue], Flaubert calls it quite simply poetry. ‘On pourrait tout aussi bien lui donner,’ when it is actualized by gatheringI together all of being[-there]I and all of man in an intentionalI synthesisdial/lived that operates from the negation of any analyticposited determinationI, [it is] called a metaphysicalc attitude. In effect, before ecstasy there is little Gustave, the waves of the sea, the dark sand where the waves subside, the clear dry sand they cannot reach, the remains of a boat stranded on the beach, a cabana, etc.; as soon as the metaphysicalI attitude is imposed, these objectsI

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are annihilated in favor of general determinations [‘that is, as limitation’]: place, time, the infinite, etc.

"The reader will have observed that this attitude, while intentionalI and spontaneous, is suffered by the anthropoid and the child; they do not determineI it themselves, they are determinedI by ite... Poetry is suffered; we must add that it is inborn. What is given to the son of ape and woman cannot be given to the son of man, for intelligence and logic kill pantheistic intuition. The young boy is proud of his trances because he sees his animality continually revived in theme..."

(1:24, Fr. 1:34) "All his life, Flaubert attached a particular valuelived to the adjective ‘brutish**.’ ‘The best of me,’ he was to write years later to Louise, ‘is poetry, is the brute’e..."

-------------------------------------------------** Internal bookmark with this document.

Pages 1:27-29 out of sequence at Sartre\Language&Comprehension-Feeling ‘is discourse and discourse is feeling’

6-14Flac Stupors ‘set a limit to his misfortune by improving his passivityI’ (1:35)

The Family Idiot (1:35-6, Fr. 1:46) "Inertia, laziness, inner torments, lethargies—we encounter these features from one end of his existence to the other. Taken together they define a strategy that we shall meet again later under the name of passive_activityc, a kind of nervous weakness in the depths of his physical organism that makes surrender easier. In the beginning, the stupor is a combination of seemingly disparate condition: frayed nervous pathways in the body, a vocation for apathy always seeking surrender, malaise, a bitter weariness with living and, in certain instances, the intentional use of these facilities to provoke the absence of the soul, the flight into living death. (1:36) This surrender in itself implies a weariness that dates back to his first years. Living is too exhausting for him; he forces himself to pass from one to the next, but behind his desires, his pleasures, there is a permanent vertigoe..."

(1:36-7, Fr. 1:47) "e...Gustave will repeat this attempt at flightI, which is always spontaneous but increasingly costly—he will be ruined by it. We shall observe how the process, without ever achieving lucidity, gathers meaningCDRlived in the course of its route and becomes the basis for a defensive strategy. But it must be added that the ‘false death’ itself, the momentary loss of the senses, is intended but never entirely achieved. As creator, the adolescent Flaubert allows Garcia** to revel in it for several hours. But the character only makes manifest the unsatisfied desireIs of the author he incarnates. The young boy loses consciousness within him [Garcia] for

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lack of the capacity in itself to suspend even for an instant the faculties of the soul. (1:37) The stupors never achieve the loss of consciousness which is their end and, as such, their justification; proof is that Gustave at fifteen can present them as poetic ecstasiese..."

(1:37-8, Fr. 1:48) "What is noteworthy for the moment is that from the first, the child—even before his exile from the golden age [3 to 8]—bears life like a burden. We do not yet have the means to shed light on the source of his malaisee... For the deep wound that they have inflicted—this vertigoI, this disgust with life, this impossibility of undertaking anything, this difficulty denying and affirmingdial which bars his way into the universe of discourse—must be called, I believeI, his passive constitutione... And we must try to find out whether his constitutionI has not in fact been given2neg to him. But when he suffers from it, when he sees his fundamental indisposition as the consequence of a wound inflicted by others, he can arily set a limit to his misfortune by improving upon his passivity . Such is the origin of the stupors: each of them is an attempt to live to the fullest this ordinance decreed by inert materiality. (1:38) And let us not view these attempts as full-scale undertakings—Gustave the child is not made to act; rather, he makes dizzying surrenders to that constituted nature which he feels in himself as the product of Otherconcept. Dizzying and spiteful: I escape from you by becoming, to spite you, what you wanted me to be***. At five years old, of course, nothing is said, for the child would needdial/lived to have a self-conscious lucidity that does not belong to this age. And above all, he does not say anything, even to himself, since he does not speak. Must we therefore conclude that these surrenders are not lived. Certainly not, nor should we conclude that they have no intentionalI structuredial/lived. But this will be our task when we approach the ive synthesisdial/lived, to establish this as perhaps a ‘passive_activity’e..."

(1:38, Fr. 1:48) "Such is the reason—on the level of pure phenomenologicalpositedc

description—for his difficulties in speaking and reading."-------------------------------------------------

** La Peste à Florence*** Copied and see Pol...\Child Development&Violence-Anna Freud/Schmookler/Peck: Identification with the oppressorI

Pages 38-9 out of sequence at Herein-Words ‘remains exterior ... truth is alien ... he is the most credulous child’

8-14Flac Transition to ProgressiveI Synthesisdial (1:40, Fr. 51)The Family Idiot (1:40, Fr. 1:51, pages 138-9 out of sequence Herein-H6-14WordsI ‘remains

exterior ... truthI is alien ... he is the most credulous child’ (1:15, 38-9) "Our difficulty here [see out of

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sequence pages] warns us that regressiveR analysis has taken us as far as it could, to the phenomenological description of an infantile sensibility. Now the movementdial/lived must be reversed. Let us proceed backward to the beginnings of this life, to Gustave’s birth, and see if we are equipped with sufficient information concerning this prehistory to lure it to the surface; let us proceed, then, with the progressiveR synthesisdial/lived that will retrace the genesis of this sensibility. Step by step, from the degree zero of this individual accident until the sixth year. Ref Sartre\Dialectic-At ‘this level ... the regressiveI experience has reached bedrock

(1:41) "We are going to encounter on the way, one after the other, the various structuresdial/lived we have just made explicit. This is as it should be, since they will serve as controlling indicators; if the movementI of the synthesisdial/lived is not derailed, we ought to succeed in reconstructing as the products of a history the stupors, the passivity, the weariness with living that we have discovereddial/lived and demonstrated to be the structuredial/lived of a certain life lived at a certain moment in time. But let us not be afraid of repetition—the material is the same, the insights are new; the child’s qualities are going to shift from the [regressiveI] structuresI to the [progressiveI] historical."

"We must try to comprehend [comprendre] this scandalous occurrence: an idiot who becomes a genius. We must, if we don’t want to brazen it out with nonsense and turn these first stupors into a mark of election. We must do it for another reason as well, which is that we don’t know [connaissons] anyone we love among the dead of former times. Gide, yes—but that was yesterday. The day before yesterday, there is nothing. The nursing, the digestive and excretory of the infant, the earliest efforts at toilet training, the relationship with the mother—about these fundamental givens2neg, nothing. Whoever the great man may be, he declines as an adult, like Gérard de Nerval, to venture beyond a marvelous and tragic childhood, and we do not have a single detail. The mothers accomplished their tasks sleepwalking, diligent, often loving, more from habit than from awareness. They have said nothing. When one tries to reconstruct a life of the last century, one is often tempted to make its fundamental determinants [‘that is, as limitation’] correspond to the first conspicuous facts mentioned by witnesses. I know [sais] this only too well, since I committed this error some years ago when I first came in contact with Flaubert. I tried to comprehend ‘passive_activity’ in terms of the seamless unity of his family group. And I was not altogether wronge..."

(1:42) "e...[P]assivity does not simply exist; It must continually create itself or little by little lose its force. The role of new expérience is to maintain or destroy it. During all of the early years, passivityI is constituteddial on that deep lever where what is experienced [vécu], the signifier, and the signified are indistinguishablee..."

25


(1:44-5, Fr. 1:55) "e...Either we shall find the asphalt core around which meaningCDRlived is formed in its singularity, or we shall not find the underlying origins of Gustave Flaubert, and as a consequence the course of his idiosyncrasy will forever escape us. Without early childhood, it is obvious that the biographer is building on sand—he is constructing his edifice on mist, out of fog. The dialecticallivedc comprehensionlivedc

ok can certainly build closer and closer to the last moments of a life; but it begins arbitrarily with the first date mentioned in the records, that is, it is based on the incomprehensibleok. (1:45) And that obscurity, surpassed1neg but preserved, remains its permanent limit and internal_negationlivedc

ok. If the dialecticalI movementdial does not find its true point of departure, it will never reach its goale..." [‘IncomprehensibleI’ is not a blank slate. The records are collected and the project has intention with the wish to divest the study of one’s tractable ideologies and to some extent one’s idiosyncrasies.]

Sartre, Search for a Method (p. 106c) "...a life develops in spirals; it passes again and again by the same points but at different levels of integration and complexity."

6-14Flac 2. The Father (1:53-72, Fr. 1:62)Ref Sartre\Flaubert&Father in Vol 1-6. Father and Son (1:173-438, Fr. 1:180)

The Family Idiot (1:453, Fr. 1:469, no ce, out of sequence from Flaubert&Father in Vol. 1-A. ‘Regressive Analysis’) "e...Achille-Cléophas’s Voltairean skepticism did not prevent him from enjoying universal esteem; the son, by assuming this skepticism in suffering and [self] hatred, transforms it into a shocking cynicism. The slightly suspect austerity of the first finds its truth in the second’s mocking despair. Intoxicate Achille-Cléophas and you will find Gustave."

Horney, Our Inner Conflicts (p. 139c) "A final defense against the recognition of conflicts is cynicism; the denying and deriding of moral values... thereby relieving the neurotic of the necessity of making clear to himself what he actually believes in..."

6-14Flac Customhouse politics of upper class bourgeoisieI and landowners (1:53)The Family Idiot (1:53, Fr. 1:62) "When Gustave came into the world in 1821,

Louis XVIII had reigned for six years and the class of great landowners had been largely reconstituted. For the fifteen years of the Restoration it would keep industrial development in check; this, during the first half of the century, remained noticeably slower than that of England. Nevertheless, the bourgeoisieR maintained and frequently improved its position. The rival classesI achieved an apparent accord and found an entirely provisional equilibrium, thanks to the customhouse** politics

26


they were both eager to impose on the government, insuring that certain manufacturers (of iron, textiles, steel) and all agrarian interests would be protected against foreign competition. The rising bourgeoisie and the declining classI of landowners could meet only on the ground of compromise, but this compromise was necessaryCDRdial/lived to the bourgeoisie, which was handicapped by numerical weakness and by the equally meager numbers of the proletariat. In the census of 1826, of a total of 32 million inhabitants we find about 22 million Frenchmen living directly or indirectly off the land."

(1:53-4) "The area of agreement, therefore, would be protectionism. Indeed, on the one hand the landowners were Malthusians: they wanted to sell their wheat at a high price, and gave no thought to enlarging the market, the old methods of cultivation (fallow land, etc) were preservede... (1:54) Manufacturers did not dream any more than ‘Agrarians" of increasing production. Capitalism remained domestic and cautious; it was satisfied with the old markets, and no one took it into his head to create demand by supply. The use of the machine was to spread very slowly. The manufacturer sought to control his production and satisfy predictable and limited demands. In a sense, craftsmen and workers encouraged this practice; these highly skilled employees feared disqualification and unemployment—and resisted the machine whenever it was introduced e..."

"The Ruling classesI, however, agreed only on customhouse politics. On all other fronts a silent but violent struggle ranged the bourgeoisie against the landowners. The latter were champions of an authoritarian monarchy that would be dependent upon the nobility—that is, upon themselves—and would impose Catholicism as the state religion. Semiofficial organizations (the most famous was the Congrégation) became responsible for religious and political propaganda, for espionage and intimidation. The more powerful bourgeoisisI, even if followers of Voltaire, offered no resistance. But of utmost importance to them was the economic freedom they had achieved through the Revolution. Things deteriorated under Charles X, when the ultras spoke of reestablishing the corporations. In that period indeed, the industrial and commercial classI had two well defined goals: to prevent the intervention of the state and the workers’ union, and to control the government insofar as politics chanced to influence the economy. On these basic principles, theorists established that ideology which, while dated, is still virulent today and which we call liberalism. Industrialists, businessmen, aristocratic landowners, the powerful were in accord on one point only: to keep power out of the hands of the other classesI. For 10 million taxpayers and 32 million inhabitants, there were 96,000 voters and 18,561 eligible for election e ..."

-------------------------------------------------** Where import and export taxes are paid or collected.

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6-14Flac Upper middle classI liberal professionals called ‘les capacitésI’ (1:55)The Family Idiot (1:55, Fr. 1:64) "e...Lawyers, doctors, generally all those who

practiced a ‘liberal’** profession—and were therefore called ‘les capacitésR’—could be ranked in the upper levels of the middle classes. Most of them, educated under the Empire, received a scientific and positivist training that set them against the ideology of the ruling classI. They were marked by the current of de-christianization that issued from the monied bourgeoisie around 1789; they had nothing to gain from the compromise that masked the fundamental opposition between the upper classesI, which were, moreover, in collusion precisely to deprive them of any access to power. In the beginning, however, they put up little resistance to the masters whose servants and accomplices they were. First of all, they lived off the income of the landowners and the profit of the bourgeoisieI; furthermore—and even more important—the ‘middle classI,’ whose numerical growth was so recent, was caught in its own interior contradictions. The example of Achille-Cléophas, Flaubert’s father, is sufficiently convincing.

"This ‘eminent’ man was not really a member of the electorate and certainly not eligible for office; in other words, the chief surgeon of the Rouen Hospice was a passive citizen. He did not appearI [semble], however, deeply to resent the disproportion between his professional merits and his status in the public life of the nation. For he had spent his youth under the authoritarian regime, and he owed everything to Napoleon. To Napoleon, or rather to the war, to the needs of the revolutionary and imperial armies. Under the Empire it was not enough to mobilize those with special skills; the professions had to be upgraded. Achille-Cléophas’s parents sweated blood to send him to Paris for his studies. There he performed so brilliantly that the first consul ordered him reimbursed for his expenses, allowing the young man to complete his medical degree."

-------------------------------------------------** Ref Sartre\Index of Terms-LIBERALISM [libérales]; cf. class

The Family Idiot: (3:23c) "...Ranking and [feudal] hierarchy are two conflicting ordinations. In a hierarchy, all are protected, the humble as well as the superior; there is no question of atomizing or excluding, only of integrating. Liberal society, on the other hand, no sooner proclaims the equality of all its members than it seeks to rank them in order of decreasing quantity, with the intention of excluding the least endowed...";

6-14Flac Paterfamilias provide for descendants rather than singular individuals (1:58)

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The Family Idiot (1:58, Fr. 1:67) "e...His father was a rural veterinarian and a keen royalist; Dr. Flaubert had spent his youth among peasants; his brothers, incidentally, had remained veterinarians. He alone had been ‘distinquished’ by his intelligence; or rather, it was the State that had separated him from his comrades and his peers and raised him abruptly above them. The condition of veterinarian was and would remain to the end his future perfect, that to be which had come to him from the depths of the Old Regime and from the familial past, and from which a mutation of society had torn him. Achille-Cléophas, as a result, exercised his profession with dignity but with the firm intention of improving his position by getting rich. In order to do this very thing, he returned to the rural world he came from. In the somnolent France of that time, one invested in real estate; when Dr. Flaubert wanted to ‘place’ his resources—pruned from his increased valuelived as a doctor in the eyes of the bourgeoisie—he quite naturally bought land. So this surgeon with Voltairean sympathies found himself reconciled to the big landowners who ruled France. He had certain interesst in common with them; he concerned himself with the revenue from his lands and he too was in the position of supporting a protectionist regime. To the extent that the government protected farm prices, Achille Cléophas was not at all hostile to the monarchy. Indeed, why should he have been? His attitude toward the Revolution must have been at the very least ambivalent: after all, the revolutionaries had thrown his father into prison; once freed, he had died in 1814 from the effects of his incarceration e..."

(1:59, Fr. 1:68) "e...He was himself the living contradiction between country and city, habit and progress: as a landholder he cultivated his fields according to the old methods; as a physician he never stopped absorbing—and passing on—new knowledgeI . Punctual, conscientious, authoritarianI, he seems to have preserved the austerity of the peasant mores which were evident even in his dress—the people of Rouen long remembered the goatskin he wore in winter to make his rounds e..."

"e...His rise continues under the Restoration; his learning, the ideology of the eighteenth century, the opinions of the liberal bourgeoisieI all converge to give him a ‘philosophy’ which does not entirely reflect either his ‘means of livelihood’ or his ‘style of life.’ In particular, his authoritarianismI as medical director and father does not mesh with his liberalismI.

(1:59-60, Fr. 1:69) "The child of a patriarchal family and separated from it by his functions, by his new honors, a displaced person, he founds a new family on the model of his original one. It has been observed that as the child takes on increased importance, conjugal families become less prolific; when the father and mother regardI the newborn as an irreplaceable person, he himself becomes a Malthusian factor. (1:60) In this way the individualismI of the bourgeoisI couple prepares each offspring for an individual destiny, a prenatal egotism. But the Flauberts preserved

29


the mores of the Old Regime: they had six children, three of whom died at an early age. There remained Achille, born in 1812, Gustave in 1821, and Caroline in 1825. The paterfamilias—whose function is to treat the human body as an objectposited—still preserves the peasant attitude toward birth and death: Natureconcept gives man his children and NatureI takes them away. Among his bourgeoisI friends and colleagues, contraceptive practices are beginning to spread; he knows [sait] this professionally but remains faithful to the doctrine of laissez-faire. Quite honestly, his attitude would be perfectly justifiable if he were a believer. As an atheist, a physician, a bourgeoisI, his position seems more traditionalist than rationalistI . And then, this authoritarianI progenitor seems to be more concerned with providing his own descendants than with creating singular individuals. The Flaubert children will feel themselves at once [à la fois] lawful subjects as heirs but inconsequential as individualsI e..."

-------------------------------------------------6-14Flac However, ‘the Flauberts were shot through with contradictionI’ (1:61)

The Family Idiot (1:61, Fr. 1:70) "However, the little group of the Flauberts was shot through with contradiction . Patriarchal families, while often seeking to increase their patrimony, are based on repetition: the return of the seasons, the return of tasks and ceremonies; each generation comes to replace the preceding one and begins its life anew. There is little movement from one class to another. Neither tenant farmers nor landowners try to alter their social condition generally; an increase of wealth—gradual and modest at that—makes no difference to them. Further, it can be said that these communities have no history. This is how the surgeon’s brothers lived—veterinarians and sons of veterinarians. An accident—intelligencec—had thrust Achille-Cléophas into historyI: he began an adventure instead of repeating the adventure of his predecessors. This abrupt mutation delivered him to the ascendent forces of society. Science did not repeat itself. Nor the bourgeoisieI, that classI which a continuously accelerated movement was going to carry to power. Man of science and bourgeoisI, Achille-Cléophas was conscious of an irreversible evolution; his family would fall to the lowest rung unless it made its way up deliberately to the summit of French society.

(1:61-2, Fr. 1:71) "The paterfamilias was basically—that is from childhood—a peasant of the Old Regime or, what amounts to the same thing, a member of that rural petty bourgeoisie, poor and few in numbers, related by blood to the farmers they liveI among whose mores they preserve. As the slave of intelligenceI, however, he had solidly incorporated analytical_Reasonconcept and the ideology of liberalism, products which had been slowly elaborated in the cities. (1:62) He did not have at his command the tools that would allow him to ponder his actual existence but he was unconsciously torn between permanence and history—historyI

30


continually erodes permanence, which continually reasserts itself. This contradictionI—which he lived out unconsciouslyI [l’inconscience]**—revealed itself to his bourgeoisI patients and to the students who surrounded him as a feature of his character; they found him authoritarian but accepted his capriciousness and his violent temper for the sake of his competence. ‘He is like that!’ they said. Indeed, what is called character is purely a structuraldial/lived distinction and presents itself as a slight gap between the person’s modes of behavior and the objectivelived behavior prescribed for him by his milieu e... Dr. Flaubert’s nervous instability and mental tension were the consequences of his maladaptation; despite his success as professor and physician, or rather because of it, he must have struggled endlessly to become integrated in liberalI society, reflecting its ideas better than anyone, but disconcerted by its mores. Amid firm, calm, comfortable bourgeoisI, this workhorse with nerves of a woman seems to have inherited the revolutionary sensibility."

(1:68, Fr. 1:77) "Nothing illustrates the contradictionI between the ideologyI of the Flaubert family and its semipatriarchal practice better than the morality of its paterfamilias. Portraying his father under the name of Larivière [in Madam Bovary], Gustave informs us that he practiced virtue without believing in it. Some years earlier, speaking this time about his mother, Gustave wrote to Louise Colet that she was ‘virtuous without believingI in virtue.’ This was evidently an attitude both parents shared. It bears a trademark, that of La Rochefoucauld, reinvented and popularized in the eighteenth century under the influence of English businessmen and empiricists, their hired thinkers, of Cabanis, finally of Destutt de Tracy and all the ‘IdeologuesI’ who resurrected the theory to serve the needs of the Empire. We shall return to this. The essential thing for the moment is to note the principle: whatever the act, the sole motive is interest. Depending on the milieu and the period, this gives rise to a kind of skeptical and playful hedonism or the more lugubrious kind of utilitarianism. The Flauberts had chosen utilitarianismI—a serious couple, they did not believeI in noble sentiments. How was it, in this case, that they were pricked by virtue? The factlived is that they preferred the common interestI of the family to their particular interestsI. Each was devoted to his task. The father was concerned only with caring for the sick and making the fortune of his line [of work]; the mother, rigid, cold, raised the children and managed the household. Austere, frugal, and quite frankly miserly, the Flauberts, carried along by the sweep of history, practiced a veritable puritanism of utility. They conceived of their family as a private enterprise, its workers connected by blood; and their goal was to accede by stages, through merit and the accumulation of wealth, to the highest levels of Rouen Society. The virtue they practiced and imposed on their children was the strict surrender of the individual to the family group. The collective instrument ruled by mutual constrains, virtue was identified, in reality

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with the work of social climbing to the extent that this hard labor was performed by everyone without being made explicit."

(1:69-70) "e...For his children, in fact, the alienation to the family is experienced [vécue] as a feudal alienationI to the father. They will practice virtue out of love, out of respecte... A negative self-respect forever torments them and is quite simply the work with which they exert themselves—taking their bearings, determining [‘that is, as limitation’] their position and the social level they have attained and must surpass1neg. This examination is carried on relentlessly, grimly, day after day: they envy their superiors, share the paternal resentments, spew out recriminations over nothing, dissolve into tears. But at the same time, the entire family cannot help but liveI its slow and sure ascent. Dr. Flaubert bought a house at Yonville the year of Gustave’s birth; he acquired lands in 1829, 1831, 1837, 1838, and 1839 which extended the property inherited by his wifee... (1:70) Achille and Gustave are identified with their master, and as soon as they find themselves among their fellow students or visit the parents of their friends, they participate in his sacred aura; each of them, representing to the world the founding hero, is judged as a Flaubert superior to the most eminent citizens of Rouen e..."

(1:71-72, Fr. 1:80) "We shall comprehendok nothing about Gustave if we do not first grasp [transformslived/2negtolived/1neg] the fundamental character of his ‘being[-there]-in-class’: this semipatriarchal community—with all the contradiction that corrode it—is at once his original truth and the perpetual determination [‘that is, as limitation’] of his fatee... In his hours of doubtlived and anguish, in 1857, during the trial, in 1870, in 1875, it was the family that he found in his secret self, like a rock; what sustained this unstable personality, always humble and ready to condemn himself in his role as a singular person, was family pride and his sense of absolute superiority as the son of Flaubert. For this reason, the ‘hermit of Croisset,’ this ‘original,’ this ‘loner,’ this ‘bear,’ would never be what Stendhal was from his earliest childhood—an individual. (1:72) Yet around the same period, in the schools and lycées of France, bourgeoisI boys were growing up who were going to become the acknowledged writers of the post-romantic generation; and they were, for the most part, the authentic products of liberalI individualismI . These were the contemporaries of Gustave Flaubert; he would keep company with them and develop bonds of friendship with many of them. But in the midst of these molecules who asserted the molecular law, the Flaubert son would never feel at ease: he was not one of them. It is as though he were born fifty years before his contemporaries. We shall soon see the importance of this hysteresis [lagging of an effect behind its cause] and how it conditioned his social fate and even his art. Because of it, Flaubert would be transformedlivedc in that strange celebrity, the greatest French novelist of the second half of the nineteenth century. Because of it he was to become, at forty-four, that

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neurotic whose neurosis, even then, somehow needed the society of the second Empire as the only ‘secure’ milieu in which it could develop."

------------------------------------------------- See Sartre\Flaubert’s School Years-Feudal generosity: Vassal’s gratitude as life; Prince’s free gift as without obligationRef Flaubert&Father in Vol. 1-When lords do not battle, the vassal's emancipation is stymied; -AuthoritarianI father does not allow Gustave to grow up** Not unconsciousI but French ‘lack of thought’ or ‘foolhardiness.’

6-14Flac 3. The Mother (1:73-94, Fr. 1:82)Hazel Barnes, Sartre and Flaubert (p. 24) "...The importance of

the relations between mother and infant in determining the child’s constitution is something which he had hitherto never discussed. One gets the feeling in Being and Nothingness that the for-itself sprang forth from the ground of being in full maturity—like Athena from the forehead of Zeus. Jean Genet was first a child, to be sure, but Sartre never endowed him with a ‘constitution.’ The term is entirely new, and the whole idea seems to suggest a limitation on personal freedom which goes beyond even the pictures of alienated human_reality in The Critique of Dialectical Reason..."

(p. 25) "The chapter in which Sartre introduces Caroline Fleuriot Flaubert contain some of Sartre’s finest writing. As critics have complained, it reads like a novel. The interpretations of Caroline’s inner reactions fit the objectivelived facts. The question is whether in real life the inner and outer may safely be assumed to fit together in the way that seems most probable. Even in a brief summation, I think we can see both the persuasiveness of Sartre’s account and its novelistic quality." Ref Herein-Literary vs. philosophical writing: ‘I would like my study to be read as a novel’

ibid., (page unknown) "...The purpose of this study is not to accurately portray Flaubert but rather to access Sartre’s psychological insights. If Sartre has read into Madame Flaubert a religious belief coming from his own background so much the better as the dialectic between the husband’s and wife’s respective conflicting beliefs further constitutes psychological materials for Sartre to present and work out..."

(p. 52) "...Bruneau and Levin have both pointed out that the evidence shows Madame Flaubert to have been a nonbeliever like her husband, and Sartre does not claim to have uncovered new documentary information. If he drew from a real-life situation, I am afraid it was his own."

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6-14Flac Orphaned childhood; guilt for parents death; virtuous through needI (1:73)

The Family Idiot (1:73, Fr. 1:82) "Caroline Flaubert, daughter of Dr. Fleuriot and of Anne-Charlotte-Justine, née Cambremer de Croixmere, had the saddest of childhoods. Her parents were married on 27 November 1792; people said it was like a novel, some even said they eloped. In any event, they loved each other passionately. On 7 September 1793, the young wife died in childbirth. The infant girl had to be put out to nurse. It happens rather frequently that a widower harbors bitter feelings toward the child that killed his wife; the criminal offspring is quickly filled with guilt. We cannot swear that this was so for poor Caroline; in any event, the doctor did not loveI her enough to want to go on living himself. He suffered his grief bodily, as he was bound to do, lost his health, and died suddenly in 1803. His daughter was ten years olde..."

(1:73-5, Fr. 82) "e...Two ladies of Saint-Cyr who ran a boarding school at Honfleur promised to keep her until she was of age, but they, in their turn, died. A cousin and notary, M. Thouret, ventured to send the unhappy, unlovable girl to the home of Dr. Laumonier, chief surgeon at the Hospice de L’Gumanité—Mme Laumonier was a Thouret by birth. (1:74) Caroline was sixteen or seventeen years old. One of Caroline Commanville’s reflections sheds light on her grandmother’s character: it seems that people had a good time at the Laumoniers’; morals were light. The ‘eminently serious nature’ of the young girl ‘preserved her from the dangers of such a milieu’ e... [V]irtue, good deeds, godly habits help her to get her bearings. And pridec. It is born in the guilty, in the oppressed and humiliated, sniffs around itself, seeking by rhetorical triumphs to compensate for the degradation it escapes. Caroline was not degraded in her own eyes, but empty; prideI was born, not so much to give valuelived to an individual singularity, but rather to stop at any price the sliding of a vague existence between heaven and earth; she had to find an attachment. Caroline imagined that she was nobility on her mother’s side and ‘Chouan’** on her father’s. In fact, her father had died too soon to have taken part in the insurrections in the west, and the Cambremer de Croixmares, men of letters and priests, had never carried the sword. (1:75) Caroline Commanville nonetheless writes: ‘Through her mother, my mother was connected to the oldest families in Normandy.’ And in his correspondence, Gustave often alludes to his aristocratic origins. This was one of the principal Flaubert myths. Who could have introduced it into the family while reeling off her memories to her granddaughter if not Caroline Fleuriot herselfI? As nobility, she had—in the absence of roots—a quality: she participated from afar, through blood, in the stable and certain order of a House. In short, she yielded early on to this abstraction, which provided her with

34


an illusory security; the guilty young girl, dry and empty, minting the sense of her original sin in a superficial swarm of scruples, found an Egoconcept for herselfI only in others, as an_otherI [qu’autre]. Over there, with the Danyeau d'Annebaults, with the Fouet du Manoirs, her inner emptiness recovered its true being, became a transient determinationdial [‘that is, as limitation/negation’] of the collective plenitude. Timid, frightened, proud and severe, virtuous through needdial/lived, dedicated to this metaphysical being, the nobility requited from the legalI professions, and, in spite of the game of compensations, lost—in herself and in the world. Such was this child of sixteen when she met, in the living room of the Laumoniers, a young lecturer in anatomy, Achille-Cléophas Flaubert. Small, thin, and delicate, she had suffered from hemoptysis*** some years earlier; all her life she remained nervous, impressionable, hiding her permanent anguish beneath anxieties that were almost maniacal."

-------------------------------------------------** Tr. Ftn. "An insurrectionary force in the Vendée consisting of rebellious peasants led by returned emigrés, suppressed by General Hoche.—Trans] *** Coughing or spitting up blood from a respiratory tract.

6-14Flac Steadfast patriarchal marriage: ‘That is what I call loveI’ (1:75)The Family Idiot (1:75-6, Fr. 1:84) "The young man and woman had scarcely

met when they became engaged. For Caroline it was love at first sight. The brilliant doctor, sent from Paris by the great Dupuytren, authoritarian, virtuous, and hardworking, was nine years her senior; above all, he was an adult—in her eyes at least—strong, substantial man: her father revived e... (1:76) Chance, for once, was on her side—she could not have done better than Achille-Cléophas. Newly bourgeois, he had one principle—drawn, as we have seen, from his peasant origins and his imperious pridec: the husband is the sole master of the house. From his future wife he demanded that she wholeheartedly assume obedience, a relative existence: a wife is an eternal minor, a daughter to her husband. She agreed. They were two accomplices, as the curious episode of their engagement indicates. He saw her, judged her; the austerity of this adolescent girl was enhanced by the levity of her surroundings. The fiancé at once appropriated the rights of the deceased father, taking it upon himself to send her back to boarding school and allowing her to leave only on the eve of their marriage e..."

"They were married in February 1812, and moved to 8, rue du Petit-Salut; they must have stayed there seven years. Mme Commanville writes: ‘During my childhood, my grandmother [Caroline] often made me pass by (in front of the house) and, looking at the window, she would say to me in a serious, almost religious voice: "Look, there I spent the best years of my life".’"

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(1:78, Fr. 87) "e...She was one of those women who say, ‘I have my own religion,’ or ‘I have my Good Lord,’ and who limit themselves to a somewhat cannibalized Catholicism, taking its comforts, its incense, its stained glass windows, its organ, and leaving its doctrines. Caroline’s deism, her ‘super’ superego, was a recourse to God against the father; and surely too it was the poetry of a blighted sensibility: harmonies, meditations, contemplations, exaltations. Lamartine** was pleasing because he represented the fragmentary but beautiful s that crossed one’s mind during the mass. The fact is that one went and received the sacraments—were it only for the worthy clientele and through fear of the Congrégation."

"e...[s]he disposed her children, Gustave in any case, to receive vague intuitions, appeals from on high. The medical director let her do it: religion is necessary in the nursery and in the gynoecium, it is the best way to keep women infantile. He took his sons in hand around the age of five or six and with one breath scattered to the wind the fine maternal dust that had gathered on their frontal lobes.

(1:79-80, Fr. 88) "e...The chief surgeon, when he died, had reached his sixtiese... [A]fter thirty-five years of life together, the disappearance of Achille-Cléophas was in her eyes as intolerable a scandal as that of his young bride Cambremer de Croixmere must have been for the young Dr. Fleuriot. Such a revolting injustice puts the universe in question: evilok is all-powerful, God does not exist. Gustave is right, she lovedI as on the first day. For this relative creature, the chief surgeon surely represented the unique source of her happiness. But that is only part of the truth; he justified her, relieved her of guilt, legitimized her existenceI, he gave her a reason for being—he was goodness itself. If the good dies, nothing is left in heaven or on earth; she recovered the wanderings of her youth, but without hope. All her life came back to her in memory along with all bereavements; she angrily dismissed the Almighty—a settling of accounts. And then, above all, she converted to atheism the way others convert to revealed religions, out of loyalty to the dead; to possess him wholly, to be him. She accepted never seeing him again on the condition that she could carry him in her belly like a new infant, by assuming as her own the hard, imperious doctrines that had contributed so substantially to her husband’s glory. While living, Dr. Flaubert’s atheism guaranteed Caroline’s religiosity; in some obscure way, she regarded this nondogmatic faith as a minor magic, suited to her sex; her man was atheist for two. Once he was dead, she represented Achille-Cléophas; she spit out the LamartinianI*** bonbons and took up the healthy cause of despair. This is what strikes me: God had to be kept, or the chance of once more finding the soul of the dear departed would have to be permanently renounced; she banished the Almighty imposter and at the same time wittingly killed her husband forever—no soul, only white bones in the corrosive earth. (1:80) That is, she preferred fidelity to hopec: the physician-philosopher, in

36


the name of his own principles, had to crumble into dust. She knew [connaissait] the consequences of the doctrine and nevertheless adopted it; to find him once more in heaven, that was good, but to represent him on earth in her own heart and for herself alone—she no longer visited with anyone—that was better. Can we call it identificationI , reincarnation? No, but we can call it steadfastness; she would slip toward death as Achille-Cléophas had done, knowing [sachand] that the ultimate wreckage is total, wishing she could rejoin her husband with every beat of her heart and in this life rather than in the next. All this was done without much deliberation; rather, there was no argument at all. She did what she had to do, she became herself by increasingly resembling her husband, a little more each day. Desiccated, empty, troubled with an infinite sorrow recited day after day, she engaged in killing herselfI with the Flaubert utilitarianism: the family has to be served, and as long as it still exists, one does not surrender to death.

(1:80) "That is what I call love IR; it is a different kind of loveI, there is none stronger. Everything is here—the father dominated and guided her; stability, virtue, and sex all found their due. She had everything: the good had taken her and put her in his bed, she had borne this crushing angel, she was overcome; during the day, the paternal severity of the doctor troubled her, promising new ecstasies; docile and malleable, her obedience seemed to be the voluptuous extension of her nighttime submission.

"I have said that the Rouen branch of the Flaubert’s was constituteddial as a semipatriarchal family. Achille-Cléophas established the family unit himself, he formed it—as we have seen—Like himself, as he has been formed and looked forward to beingI. But he was not the only one responsibleI : his wife had been chosen with discernment and suited him to perfection; she took all the household tasks under her direction. Not that she held with this_or_that structuredial/lived of the ‘social unit’ or rejected another—she was quite unconcerned with such things. What mattered to her was the couple. And it was an exceedingly incestuous one. She confirmed her husband in his powers as paterfamilias in order to feel in her heart and her body that her father was her only loverI. her whole existence from marriage until death was marked, directed, penetrated—to the core of this patriarchy—by conjugal loveI. She became the accomplice of the all-powerful progenitor in order to defend the unity of couple against the whole world—the couple from which she derived her sensual pleasure, her happiness, her place in the worldI, and her being[-there]."

-------------------------------------------------** and *** 1790-1869, French romantic poet who served in 1848 as minister of foreign affairs; Sartre\Flaubert’s Neurosis-RNonknowledge filter ‘renders class consciousness impossible’

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**** Copied to Pol...\Authoritarian-[Alice Miller] Morality and duty as essential when something is lacking

6-14Flac Child rearing (1:81)The Family Idiot (1:81, Fr. 1:90) "...A deprived childhood—it is now known

[sait], thanks to the analysts—repeats itself with another child. Caroline, giving birth to a girl, was her own childbearing mother. The love and care she thought to lavish on her daughter were what had been lost by Mme Fleuriot’s precipitous death. In short, another Caroline was awaited; if the former orphan who had recovered from an incestuous father could succeed in creating an ameliorated version of her own childhood with a child of her sex, if, anticipating all the desires of this flesh-of-her-flesh, she could in retrospect efface this early disappointment, smooth the talons of still rending memories, Mme Flaubert would have come full circle. Enjoying an eternal childhood under the paternal authority of her husband, she would root out her own real childhood, tear it from her memory by making a happy childhood for an_other. As proof of this deep desireI, she gave her own name to the daughter... The progenitor had made the royal gesture to his firstborn: ‘That’s me; what proves it is that I call him Achille.’ His wife’s intentions, thirteen years later, were little different, and no doubt she was inspired by her master: ‘That’s me, me redeeming my own childhood, attended by a mother who lives to loveI me.’ Because of this, Gustave’s sister was surely the favorite; in a way she represented the sole personal relationship that the wife of the medical director maintained with herselfI, the sole subjective intimacy to which the incestuous father had no access..."

(1:82, Fr. 91) "She waited thirteen years for the opportunity, which came too late. Thirteen years, in the course of which Achille-Cléophas gave her five boys. The first she welcomed with pleasure—they had to ensure the perpetuation of the name; besides, the wife’s wishes come after the master’s, and furthermore the eldest should not be of the weaker sex. But from her second pregnancy she began to wait. There were four disappointments—Gustave was the third. In my opinion this explains her strange indifference to the first two deaths. God gave her these sons, she accepted them out of loveI for her husband, out of duty—the family must increase and multiply. But when God took them away, the mother’s eyes were dry..."

(1:83, Fr. 92) "Sorrow, indifference—two burials, and then Gustave, the third son. The mother was not out of mourning, or for long. But we know [savons] that she was in a somber mood, and why: she could accept only a mournful happiness. Black justified everything for her, even sensual pleasureI; an orphan, the mother of dead children, then a widow, she wore black her whole life, or nearly. These observationsposited explain for us how she could speak of the first seven years ‘in a

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serious, almost religious voice.’ Submission, respect, austerity, devotion to the head of the family, and through him to the future family, nightly pleasuresI, the play of loveI and death; she needed this, nothing more. A brilliant life, liberal and expansive, would have reminded her of the Laumoniers’ salon; in anguish and frigidity she would have refused such a life. her sons, whether they were on earth or below, would always remain strangers to her: the paternal authority slipped between the wife and her children. Boys belong to the father, this is the rule, from the time they are ready to leave the nursery..."

6-14Flac her ‘greatest virtue: Not knowing how to prevail upon her husband’ (1:84)

The Family Idiot (1:84-5, Fr. 1:93) "...unlike so many other mothers, she never took the part of her children against her husband; she was never tempted to defend them, because she was convinced that he was always right. She lovedR him too much and too loyally to try to manipulate him; and I contend that her greatest virtue was in not ‘knowing [su] how to prevail upon’ her husband. But this is a patriarchal virtue, to achieve and preserve which she refused all ruses—more or less dubious, more or less successful—that unite son and mother in conjugal families. Pushing virtue to the extreme, namely to the point of vice, she never interceded for her children. Achille-Cléophas was more formidable but more flexible, more capricious but more adaptable when he exercised his authority himself, more rigid and bureaucratic when his wife served as interediary; until his death, the authority of the paterfamilias was wielded with absolute sovereignty over the two boys without the mother's ever tempering it with tenderness. How could she have done otherwise? She lovedI them, there is no doubt, but not tenderly, keeping her heart for the new Caroline who would be her new beginning. (1:85) And if someone asks, what is loveIc without tenderness, I will say that it is absolute devotion and collective valorization—I have no doubt that she would have ruined her own health to save her ailing sons or given her life for the life or either of them; this, in any event, is what she firmly believed. She declared, however, that she did not know [savait] anything about sacrifice; duty, nothing more. We must believeI her in order truly to understand her. What did she want? First, to condemn certain women friends whose shrill maternal generosity—always breathless, always tearful, supported by their ‘sense of duty’—had no other end than the achievement of their own rights, and when these were not recognized, they were consumed by resentment. She, Caroline, had never taken anything on herself; she acted out of pleasureI or to defend the interests of the family. The only worthy actions have their source in spontaneity. It is a good thing for a child that his mother doesn’t pretend to sacrifice herselfI for him when she cleans him up; the positive aspect here is the

39


interest Mme Flaubert had in the routine and concrete business of mothering. At least she spared the two boys the painful feeling that she approached them only by overcoming her disgust. But we shall follow her no further. In this utilitarian age it is true she lacked the theory of virtue; but if despite this deficiency she, like her husband, was virtuous, it was not—contrary to what Gustave says—through disposition but through needdial/lived. It was in the accomplishment of prescribed tasks that she found her equilibrium and her earthly weight; nursing, caring for, spending the nights watching over an infant, she took her bearings—no drift, position fixed at two hundred fathoms from the earth. Only we must see clearly that she lovedI these familiar tasks for themselves and the accoutrements—diapers, swaddling clothes, the cradle—rather than the child. For this anxious girl, from the time of her first confinement there was a complete reversal of means and endsR: the newborn was only the objectposited of her attentions, the indispensable means for becoming the best of mothers; generally cared for, his singularity went unperceived, he was only required to liveI. The accoutrements of motherhood absorbed the loveI and did not give it back."

6-14Flac Her husband’s womanizing: Deterioration in marital relations (1:87)The Family Idiot (1:87, Fr. 1:96) "...Caroline ... lived for love, it was an

immutable force, her support and her sustenance; still more, it was the sacred sphere of recurrence. The continual, obstinate work of breeding and childrearing, which she did with only mediocre success as we know [sait], became through loveI a poetic, religious task. She desired nothing, not even an intensification of feeling—she would not have thought this possible or it would have alarmed her. Simply this: continuity, the recurrenceI of all things, each year recalling other years, repeating the same promises, guaranteeing that the past is only a future remembrance, that nothing changes. Altogether, this is the stuff of happiness: first, one must be a vassal, then the order of states of submission and seignorial generosity must be fixed once and for all; everyone is given a place and keeps to it. With reciprocitylivedc, happinessc disappears—good riddance. I do not claim that Caroline was immediately sensitive to the least alteration of her master’s mood or feeling. But we can be sure that when the young wife did perceive it, she suffered or was at least disturbed; little as Achille-Cléophas may have changed, she discovereddial/lived in some obscure way that her man’s personal law was always to go on and never to come back, that her conjugal happiness was fundamentally endangered by the very person who secured it... An anecdote reported by Gustave shows his father in a singular light. He must have adored women and charmed them, courteous as a prince with a mug like a peasant, and never doing anything to spare his wife the pangs of jealousy:

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‘I remember that ten years ago we were in le Havre. My father learned that a woman he had known [connue] in his youth, at seventeen, was living there with her son. He thought of going to see her again. This woman, a famous beauty in her part of the country, had formerly been his mistress. He did not do what many bourgeoisI gentlemen would have done: he did not dissemble, he was too superior for that. He simply went to pay her a visit. My mother and the three of us remained standing in the street, waiting for him. . . . Do you think my mother was jealousI or felt the slightest vexation? Not in the least.’"(1:88) "But it is the father that interests me on this occasion. There is a great

deal of loyalty and a certain delicacy in a man who, after thirty years, determinesI to revisit a woman he once lovedI; he is doing homage to his mistress, he is coming to tell her: I have never forgotten you. The same man, unfortunately, behaves like a boor with his wife. I agree that he should not have hidden his intentions from her; the meaningCDRlived of such frankness should be clear: one refusesc to lie to one’s equal for the double reason that the equality is based on the truth and a lie procures the liar an abject, momentary superiority veiling a permanent inferiority—fine. But ‘too superior’ to lie—who knows [sait] if he was not telling the truthI to preserve that superiority? The paterfamilias considered his wishes to be commands, it was the family’s duty to submit to them without exception. He had to see an old mistress again—a royal, therefore legitimate, whim; he informed his subjects so that they might aid his plans; as for his chief vassal, his wife, she had only to make suitable arrangements. After which he placed her on the sidewalk with the children and obliged her to cool her heels while he overwhelmed the other woman with his graciousness. This dirty trick is striking; that it should seem so spontaneous, that the younger son should find it so naturallivedc, indicates that it must have been routine practice; that Mme Flaubert should not have been vexed suggests that the child-wife must have been trained early in the constant exercise of docility."

(1:90, Fr. 1:99) "...Without this curious perspective on Achille-Cléophas we might have believed he remained the same until his death, having no time to become anything different. An overworked physician and intense researcher, when would he have questioned his life? In fact, he underwent continuous transformations; this restless man had his dreams, and fidelity cost him something. The tribute paid to his former lovesI gives us a glimpse of who he was during his engagement and the early years of his marriage: he overwhelmed Caroline with his austere gallantry, with the imperious respect rent at times by bursts of passion. And the same anecdote reveals the evolution of his conjugal conduct; at the end, he still respects his wife, enough in any case to tell her the truth, not enough to spare her a long wait, right in the street, while he goes to rejoin his youth and shed a few tears

41


for himself. We have here the two ends of the chain—the deterioration in marital relations is evident... Caroline always lovedI; Achille-Cléophas no longer loverI, or, if you will, he lovedI differently. The signs of that change swarmed, infinitesimal, obvious to the young woman who saw them without perceiving them; having entered uninvited and then hidden, they gnawed at her gently, and she did not deign to feel their teeth. [continued]

6-14Flac Displaced reproaches to Hôtel-Dieu: Summer lodgings elsewhere provided peace unto death (1:91)

The Family Idiot (1:91-2, Fr. 1:100, continuing) "The move [from the house in du Petit-Salut to Hôtel-Dieu]—expected, dreaded—was a catastrophe: it put things in quite another light. The new lodgings, first of all, were gloomy. They have often been described, along with Gustave’s odd familiarity, from the age of four, with cadavers. But no one has speculated, to my knowledge [connaissance], on how the young wife tolerated their company. Marked four times by death, she found it again—stripped, familiar, her neighbor. In the basement were the corpses, in the amphitheater dissected limbs, in the rooms of the hospital the suffering. She was the daughter and wife of physicians, true; she could have told herselfI with pride, if she had been so moved, that her husband was fighting hand over fist to save human lives. She was not so moved; her rather impoverished imagination lacked the resources to transform the father into a knight errant. Moreover, this warrior conducted his battles far away from her, leaving her alone in an old structure which was unanimously declared by witnesses to be hideous. We know what they are like, these hospital apartments; were they charmingly furnished, which was not the case, one would still enter with nostrils twitching, expecting the odor of phenol and decomposition... For several years, surrounded by disease that reflected her bereavements as particular cases of French mortality, Caroline must have felt haunted, solitary and anonymous. her husband left her at daybreak; if he ate lunch at home, he scarcely lingered over it and departed at once, only to return late and retire early; his new duties brought with them a considerable increase in his responsibilities and his work. The evenings became shorter just when more effort and perseverance were needed to shore up conjugal intimacy... (1:92) [S]he did not want to understand that her malaise had begun at rue du Petie-Salut, nor, above all, that she had felt it without admitting it to herselfI; the full responsibility for her husband’s estrangement, her anxieties, her slight depersonalization she attributed to her new lodgings—everything dated from the move... Rather than seeing in them the marks of a strict progression, she nursed her stream of reproaches against the Hôtel-Dieu, cemetery of the living, which had taken her husband from her. Achille-Cléophas emerged from these interior disputes as he had entered: head high,

42


innocent; his feelings had not changed, it was universal death and suffering of men, transparent panes slipped between the two spouses, that separated them. This falsification saved the years of happiness [at Petie-Salut] but at the expense of the present; Caroline had [Psych] projected everything—deception, anguish, resentment, a sense of being fed up with herselfI—onto the gloomy walls that imprisoned her; the walls reflected her unhappiness as a whole."

(1:93, Fr. 1:102) "...It is almost certain that she shared her anxieties with the chief surgeon. Scarcely were they settled into the Hôtel-Dieu than he bought a country house at Butot, where they spent vacations; from 1820 to 1844 he spent the summer at Yonville; in ‘44 he acquired the property at Croisset, where he planned to live. From the first year, then, the discomforts of his winter residence were alleviated by his summer lodgings. It is difficult to imagine that such a fanatical researcher would of his own accord be separated from the site of his research; his wife’s mood and perhaps her health must have changed; he must have noticed this and questioned her. A pre-romantic man, nervous, passionate, utilitarian and reasonable, he must have seen the Hôtel-Dieu through Caroline’s eyes. Only for a moment, but long enough for him to honor her request..."

6-14Flac 4. The Elder Brother (1:96-122, Fr. 1:103)

6-14Flac At 32, ‘Achille began his tenure in the most attractive medical position in all of Normandy’ (1:95)

See Barnes, Sartre and Flaubert (p. 39-47)The Family Idiot (1:95-6, Fr. 1:103) "Born in 1812, Achille was nine years older

than his brother. Voltairean irony, empiricist intellectualism, philosophical mechanism and analysis, the dissection of souls and stench of the amphitheater, the suffocating austerity of the family and rigors of a sometimes capricious discipline—he knew [connu] it all... A studious and brilliant schoolboy, a distinguished university student, he would complete his thesis at twenty-eight, just when his younger brother at nineteen was questioning the future in anguish; four years later, while Gustave was slowly recovering from his ‘nervous attack,’ Achille began his tenure in ‘the most attractive medical position in all of Normandy.’ If he did not yet fulfill all his father's responsibilities—he had been promised them—it was a matter of a few years. Later, around the time Gustave was afraid he had made his mistress pregnant and threw himself into an angry panegyric on sterility, Achille as a good Flaubert ensured the perpetuation of the family group by making a carefully considered marriage. The rest was predictable: Dr. Achille Flaubert was a highly appreciated physician, the income from his land inspired the confidence of his

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clientele; an amiable talker, he received ‘society’—the very same people his father had cared for but had not associated with. (1:96) In short, he was not entirely one of the wealthy but he was a leading citizen. And with a good deal of influence—a definite influence on the prefects and an effect on the staff of the ministry through the channel of the local administration. Ministers changed and governments as well, but Achille’s influence remained as great as ever, which is evidencedial/lived of his opportunism.1 The father Flaubert passed for a wise man, meaningCDRlived that he didn't dirty himself with politics; a terribly opinionated man, he was constrained to curb his liberalism by peasant prudence and a sharp sense of his own interests. Inhibited, repressedc, still more philosophical than political, as a bourgeois of recent vintage he had a bourgeoisI passion for freedom: freeI thought, freeI inquiry, freeI suffrage, freeI competition, freeI enjoyment of acquisitions. But the elder son was contemptuous of public affairs. One grain of liberalismI out of loyalty to the progenitor and then, of course, order must prevail. Apart from this, his flexibility was the effect of his indifference. To be sure, political indifference is always counterrevolutionary; the massive depoliticization of the intellectuals which characterizes the second half of the nineteenth century is certainly counterrevolutionary, but Achille scarcely felt any attraction to the Right as such. This is what allowed him to accept gracefully, without capsizing, the dangerous tackings** of his time."

(1:96) "At the moment when Gustave, accused of pornography, is ‘led to the dock of infamy,’ there is already a movementI afoot in high places to decorate Dr, Achille Flaubert; it may be that the novelist’s escapades delayed the ceremony. Not for long; in 1859 the decoration is given to reward ‘a great talent, favored by fortune, forty years of a hardworking, irreproachable existence.’ When Gustave wrote these words he was thinking of his father; after 1860 they could be applied equally to the elder son.

(1:97) "What exceptional success! Achille manages to escape the basic contradiction of the Flaubert enterprise—the bourgeoisI family with a semipatriarchal structuredial/lived. He pulls himself out of servitude without falling into rebellion and walks off in complete freedomI. He has been able to create for himself a more developed enterprise in better accord with his bourgeoisI milieu, in brief, a typically conjugal family... In short, the elder of the Flaubert sons did not have to make an effort to adapt the new social unit to the new society—he had the good fortune to be born into an ascending class at the moment of its ascent; it supports him, pushes, pulls him along and modifies him in order to be modified by him. All Achille has to do is let himself go; he is lively, hardworking, and flexible, and a single and continuous movementdial/lived governs his milieu and puts him in

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harmony with himself. We have to admire this perpetually unstable and perpetually regained equilibrium—through this extrovert the history of the sciences is made, along with the historyI of institutions. Order and progress—doesn’t he deserve this bourgeoisI motto? Doesn’t he produce inside and out a kind of progress that remains, as Auguste Compte wished, the development of order? This fortunate manmanlived seems to have obliterated all his complexes and surmounted the objectivelived contradictionI of the family situation; this worker asks for self-realization only in scientific and medical labor; the liberalI father, the jovial host knows how to combine the useful and agreeable; head of the troop, he leads all the ‘best people’; ‘Egoconcept syntonic’*** extrovert, he never loses his sense of . After all, he helps the people of Rouen, he cares for them, he advises them; he is certainly ‘paternal to the poor’; if he does not have his father’s caustic toughness, so much the better for him..."

-------------------------------------------------Ftn 1, "He was city councilman under the Second Empire and continued to hold this office after 4 September 1870."** ‘act of changing from one position or direction to another’*** ‘high emotional responsiveness to the environment’

6-14Flac His father ‘wanted to discover, Achille wants to keep abreast of things’ (1:98)

The Family Idiot (1:98-9, Fr. 1:106) "...Achille, a good professor and a good physician, never knew [connu] his father’s violent passion, that almost sinister curiosity which would keep him shut in with his feverishly consulted cadavers. Achille never finds the time to do personal research. Even if he did, his investigations would be conducted in such a leisurely fashion that they would not be completed. At bottom, he is curious only about achieved science: Achille Cléophas wanted to discover , Achille wants to keep abreast of things . Social, sociable, he sees nothing but advantages in knowing [connaître] the truth through othersFr=?. The father’s mad, somber curiosity was the individual’s connectionI [lien] to the mechanistic universe: he learned very little other than what he gleaned through his own powers; the son, by informing himself, learns much more and, above all, socializes knowledge [savoir]. The scandal is the raw idea; when it is adapted, it brings men into harmony with each other without changing them. Achille is endlessly preoccupied with updating his information by appropriating the findings of others; he wants to maintain his social position, his reputation as a professor and a practitioner, in a time when the rapid development of the medical disciplines forces physicians either to stagnate or to read everything. He rapidly accumulates new ideasI, or rather they accumulate in him because, among other things, science is

45


accumulation. But in spite of all this his relation to the people of Rouen, to his students, to his colleagues remain permanent, and permanence is his sole objectivelived. (1:99) He wants to maintain himself—nothing more; to progress through the progress of others in order to preserve his position in the bosom of the rising class. If he changes, it is to stay the same; he will consolidate his personal status, which is to perpetuate the status his father achieved before 1830 and then conceded to him. These two observations—one regarding Achille’s family relation, the other his ties with science—reveal the actual daily existence of the heir; despite his obvious malleability, perhaps because of it, his is not a life truly lived but the equivalent of a very old person dead in the midst of things. We shall see that the bitter curse which until the end of his life keeps the younger son in a state of childhood, to his misery and his glory, originates in the crushing benediction that makes the elder into an adult by breaking his [the younger’s] back."

6-14Flac The ‘objectivelived and inviolable framework of identification’ (1:102)See Barnes, Sartre and Flaubert (p. 41-2)The Family Idiot (1:102, Fr. 1:110) "But the old devil is mad with pride—

whatever his progeny might accomplish only redoundsok to his credit. A sudden mutation took place one fine day in a rustic family; the mother believed she had given birth to a veterinarian—she had created a physician. In him, a new species of Flaubert was born; thus the bird was born from the snake—as scientists were soon to say. The first bird was Achille-Cléophas; he had the audacity to pull himself up from the ground by means of an extravagant leap and settle himself on a branch... The future birds would climb from branch to branch; that goes without saying; but are these hoppings and skippings to be admired? They are the strictly predictable consequences of an unpredictable leap.

"In other words, the first bird is the one and only bird—one ancestral bird and the infinite succession of his images, always more splendid, less and less vital. That is how the Flaubert family appeared to its founder..."

(1:102-4) "...But the veterinarian-progenitor, whatever his self-conceit, did not regardI himself in advance as the best; he passed on to his sons a profession that he had inherited. And so it was with the landowners; from father to son the duty is the same—to preserve, to augment; but for this very reason the permanence of the enterprise demands the equivalence of persons... (1:103) But admiration and holy terror have already begun the work of identification**; and then what unbearable pressure, a choice that is not even favoritism. For nearly nine years the relationship between the docile son and the incomparable father is going to remain singular; Achille knows nothing about the bourgeois stature of the chosen heir, deliberately particularized by the Malthusian practices of the parents. Briefly, the structuresdial/lived

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of the Flaubert family forbid the eldest any recourse to individualismI ; no one—especially not his frigid mother who is entirely subservient to the master—cherishes him as an individual... The child feels crushed by the daily insistence, the searching looks; it is his duty to shine, family honor demands it. Dr. Flaubert’s pressing solicitude certainly involves attachment—the father prizes dearly the fragile hope of the Flauberts; and we can be sure that this paternal attachment affects the young boy, it is the deepest stuff of his being. But to the extent that this feeling is the expression of a strict claim, it resonates in the son as responsibility... Achille knows his destiny very early—he will be, as son, a link in the immortal chain that is called Achille Cléophas. Soft, sensitive wax, he feels the proddings that imperceptibly transform him into this very god who, after having ceded to him one by one his awful powers, will disappear like the phoenix in order to be reborn the father in the son. (1:104) Achille will be his father’s creature, he has no choice, the only spontaneity he is allowed is the practice of passive virtues: humility before his progenitor, a spirit of sacrifice, docility, receptiveness. But the master has spoken well: submission will pay off, it allows the victim to acquire progressively the attributes of the god who made him gasp. It becomes a prophecy: when the child bows to the present will of the father, he begins to distinguish his own future image. And it is the father all over again.

(1:104, Fr. 1:112) "This is what I will call the objective lived and inviolable framework of identification. ObjectiveI because it comes to the child through the father; inviolable because this paterfamilias is a divinity for all his children. Is there any escape? No; as a possibility, identification was necessaryCDRdial/lived. Listen carefully: it was necessaryI in this period, in this movementI that was stirring up society, in this semirural family. Today, for example, marital conflict—always present even in harmonious households—leaves the child a certain choice. And of course it is his history inside him that will choose: at least—even if he becomes neurotic—the choice will be his. The number of authoritarianc fathers decreased in proportion to the emancipation of women, and even at the beginning of the Restoration this aspiration to create one person the same as an_other occurred less frequently. It was not, moreover, a real danger among the landed aristocracy; the father was a nonentity, the son too, nothing could be more wholesome. But when the intellectual bourgeoisieI decided to imitate the big landowners, all was lost: the father implanted in the son's mind a prefabricatedc intelligence. Not even his own, a family prototype. This is the case with Achille-Cléophas.

"But Achille-Cléophas, understandably, would not execute the imposed model without motives that were very much his own and that defined him in his particularity. For every projectc is also a flight; Achille fled from his abusive father,

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the unbearable present, toward this same paterfamilias, his future. Subjectivitylivedc is the abrupt connectionok [of three degrees]1neg&2neg of the exteriorlived/2neg with himself1neg in the process of interiorizationlived/1neg..." See Pol...\Child Development&Violence-Anna Freud/Schmookler/Peck: Identification with the oppressorI

(1:107, Fr. 1:115) "Nothing, in fact, was so clearly felt; all this was obvious without words from day to day, with no delicacy and certainly with no emotional outbursts: it was the family, the exterior interiorized, it was tradition, ownership, it was heritage..."

-------------------------------------------------** Ref Sartre\Index of Terms-IDENTIFICATION ;

Herein-[below]RIntelligence/talent/genius/gifted as identification rather than inheritance;

-RAchille’s problematic identification with his father;Sartre\Flaubert’s Personalization-Gustave’s ‘torch of generosity’ toward

Caroline: ‘The dialectic is complex’

6-14Flac Intelligence/talent/genius/gifted as identification rather than inheritance (1:107)

The Family Idiot (1:107-8, Fr. 1:115) "It would be wrong to think of identificationR as a drama; it is a role, to be sure, but to the extent that it requires the interiorization of an objectivelived system it is also hard work... It will perhaps be judged that this actual process—secondary school, medical school, the thesis—forced Achille to build the tools to combine his means in view of a short-term goal (for example, the solution to a scholarly problem), to develop in himself through practice that freedomCDR of understandingok

posited which is called intellectionpositedc. It is undeniable that these mental operationsdial/lived sustain him—outside of class he dozes, in examinations he is dazzling. And one might well ask what would have happened if he had been a fool, or more specifically, if he had not excelled in the sciences, if like Gustave, he had preferred literature and planned to write. (1:108, Fr. 1:116) We would return once more, despite all efforts, to social atomism, there would be some nature. Variously gifted, chance could have bestowed upon Flaubert sons the same talents it had given the father, the whole history of the family could be viewed as a consequence of this, a question of red blood cells and gray matter—the identity of capabilities would originate in the identity of certain physiological traits, and its effect would be the enterprise of identificationI. This is bad materialism which the physician-philosopher took for a philosophy. This is to turn events and causes upside down. Achille did not owe his father’s continued confidence in him to his exceptional intelligence; rather he owed his rare qualities of mind to the irrevocable

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decision that, from the moment of his conception or perhaps before, made him the crown prince of science." [continued-1]

-------------------------------------------------Ref Sartre\Index of Terms-INTELLIGENCE/TALENT/GENIUS/GIFTED ;

The Family Idiot: Herein-Shall ‘we say that intelligenceI imitates or that it borrows? As you like.’ (1:109)

(1:61c, Fr. 1:70) "...An accident—intelligence—had thrust Achille-Cléophas into history...";

(1:109c, Fr. 1:117) "...He is deprived, in a time of individualismI , of all individual valuelived, but precisely because of this he finds his reason for living in that admirable intelligence whose inessential servant (as an isolated molecule) and proprietor (as the future incarnationlived of the paterfamilias) he is. And can we say that that is enough actually to make him a gifted child, the first in his class in everything, a distinquished student? Yes, it is enough...";

(3:25c) "...Gustave was neither more nor less gifted than his fellow students; his scholastic failurelived—or at least what he took for it—rests on causes of three complementary kinds.";

Sartre\Flaubert’s School Years-RNothing ‘is more alien to Gustave than the spirit of analysis’, with (3:25c) "...everyone is stupid, each in his own way; it is a fact of oppression generally...";

(5:151c) "...And since everyone is born with a prefabricated destiny c which society orders him to accomplish, since everyone from the outset is trained like a beast by the qualified representatives of his class, who inculcate practical finalism and the suitable ideology, in other words, since no one is gifted for art...";

(5:228c) "...Since everyone has nature, that is to say organiclived life and needsdial/lived, in common, the distinguishing factor can be only the denial of those common servitudes, if one were initially distinquished by talent...";

Sartre\Flaubert’s Personalization-Between 8 and 10 Gustave convinces himself he is an actor, in which Sartre states that no one is gifted, with sub-topics;

Sartre\Flaubert’s Neurosis-RShouldn’t ‘the question be ... whether [neurosis] was useful to him’, in which the word talent is a wordgame.

"On The Idiot of the Family ": (p. 112c, 1971) "...intelligence, imagination, sensibility are one and the same thing for me and can be described by the word ‘experience’ (vécu).";

The Words: (p. 255c) "...never have I thought that I was the happy possessor of a ‘talent’; my sole concern has been to save myself—nothing in my hands, nothing up my sleeve—by work and faithlivedc. As a result, my pure choice did not raise me above anyone. Without equipment, without tools, I set all of me to work in order to

49


save all of me. If I relegate impossible Salvation to the proproom, what remains? A whole man, composed of all men and as good as all of them and no better than any."

John Gerassi: Jean-Paul Sartre, V1 (p. 72, interview on 01-29-71) "I never believed in talent... Writing was simply having the patience, the will to write. Anyone could do it, though most are stopped by society from doing it...";

6-14Flac Good ‘sense is the best thing shared—a more difficult and a truerI contention has never been made’ (1:108)

The Family Idiot (1:108, Fr. 1:116, continuing-1) "Good sense is the best thing shared—a more difficult and a truer lived R contention has never been made . The idea is poorly understoodFr=? in isolation. Everyone wants to establish his hierarchy, one rarely places oneself at the summit, rarely on the lowest rungs; good and even bad averages are particularly sought after. But these onanistic vanities disappear in human intercourse—everything is equalized; the biggest fool invents troubling arguments, and you, reputedly clever, don’t know what so say. In actual fact, you will be clever and truthfulI only if he joins you on the ‘upper’ level; otherwise you will fall to his—that is what usually happens. In truthI the levels are variable, but persons define them together; it is a social and codified relationship, exceedingly complex since it reflects not only objectivelived structuresdial/lived—milieus, generations, classes—and the particular affinities between groups, between people, but also the prejudices of each, that is, a normative judgment on the absolute valuelived of intelligencee..."

-------------------------------------------------(5:356, out of sequence from Sartre\Flaubert’s Neurosis-5. Neurosis and Prophecy (313-411))

"...to demand universal suffrage presupposes an act of faith; you must at the very least be convinced that ‘good sense is the most widely shared thing in the world.’ You must believe unreservedly in Plato when he shows us Socrates teaching a slave to demonstrate a theorem. We know that the professional elite, jealous of their knowledgeFr=?, mean to keep it for themselves alone; the development of public instruction, one of them has said, has had no effect but to increase crime. This is precisely the negation of the Cartesian formula. Good sense has become racist; it is shared among the members of the upper classesI, and to teach the populace to read is to lead them astray, for they possess neither the discernment not the moderation that allows the elite to distinguish true from false... Even in the framework of formal democracy, the masses must emancipate themselves; if their role is to follow their good shepherds, why should they take the trouble to vote except at long intervals to provide a plebiscite for an enlightened despot? This should be seen, no doubt, as an objectivelived contradiction of formalI democracy..."

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6-14Flac Shall ‘we say that intelligenceI imitates or that it borrows? As you like.’ (1:109)

The Family Idiot (1:108-10, Fr. 1:116) "e...In short, [above, a normative judgment on the absolute value of intelligence] levels: variable, complex, they come to everyone through the Otherconcept; when we come to speak about the famous ‘stupidity’ that Gustave denounces on every occasion, we shall see in detail that it is oppression. A manmanlived can be put into a position of stupidity; once he is in it he remains there, baring any way out. (1:109) Inversely, there are intellects that engender privilege. Kings had style—naturally. Very simply, they were convinced that the national tongue was their property. As a small child, Achille understoodFr=? that intelligence was the property of the Flauberts. He scarcely knew [sait] how to read when he let himself be penetrated by his father’s ideas; without noticing, he adopted the concepts that rule the paternal thought, the tangible articulations of ideasI; from premises to conclusions, his reasoning embodied the rigor of the exact sciences. This he did in order to become in advance, in an instantaneous celebration, a physician—sole resident master of the Hôtel-Dieu—and a scientist. Shall we say that this intelligenceI imitates or that it borrows? As you like. In my opinion the point is that the intelligenceI is awakened. The little boy, we have seen, has no faith in his own feelings and not much more in his body, I imagine, never having been the objectlived of an exclusive love. Moreover, the feelings are atrophied and the bodyI does what it can to become the father’s—as soon as he can he hides his chin under the paternal beard. But the less he is attached to his singularities, the more he relies upon the surrenders to the flood of fire which cuts across the Flaubert enterprise, and which the father has so effectively exploited. In Achille, intelligenceI is his supreme privilege and the source of his future rights, it is merit and God’s gift, wholly within him as he is wholly son of the father and future father, on the condition that he employ it only for the good of the family. He is deprived, in a time of individualismI , of all individual valuelived, but precisely because of this he finds his reason for living in that admirable intelligenceI whose inessential servant (as an isolated molecule) and proprietor (as the future incarnationlived of the paterfamilias) he is. And can we say that that is enough actually to make him a giftedc child, the first in his class in everything, a distinquished student? Yes, it is enough. When thoughtlivedc—which is stubborn, original, active—becomes creativec, it must be explained by other reasons sought in other instances. But Achille does not produce anything—he comprehends [comprend] everything. He does not raise himself above that characteristic we all have in common, a mental aperture. By this I mean that prospective but empty unity which defines a syntheticdial field where objectivelived connections [rapport] [of three degrees] 1st &

51


2neg enter into co-existence and quite directly establish reciprocal connectionsI. Its source is the tension of the field, the simple expression of our biological and practical_unityc which imposes neither categories nor specific relationsI

ok, but which does not allow contacts, whatever they are, to be isolated. As Merleau-Ponty says, man is the only animal that does not have original equipment, thus the dimensions of his mental aperture are not defined a priori; the diameter varies according to physiological and social factors, the nature the individual or communal praxis dilates or contracts it. (1:110, Fr. 1:118) Misery, beatings, or exhaustion reduce it to a mere point, only to the extent that men are degraded to the level of the subhumen. When people eat to assuage hunger, when they are suitably paid for moderate work, inhibitions, defenses, taboos limit the aperture and succeed in blurring the lens with blind spots, posing principles, concealing conclusions. Or else one escapes from unbearable contradictions by means of mental absence. Mistrust also inhibits. All these restrictions come to each from his prehistory—he repeats them as much as he submits to them; let someone deliver him and his mind will dilate—no limitation is prescribed to anyone. Except through physical accidents.

(1:110, Fr. 1:118) "Little Achille, however, is altogether trustinge... IntelligentI through docility, he abandons himself to the truth without any prejudice, trustingly, adhering from the outset to the father’s teachings. He perceives joinings [liaisons], learns to predict them and then to deduce them: Achille’s intelligenceI is the superb inventory of the Flaubert patrimony, his future legacy. His is a born proprietor: to learn is to validate with all his knowledges [connaissances]—known already by the father that he will one day be—he will make himself worthy of the honors and responsibilities passed on to him. In sum, in order to learn—that is, in order to receive—we have only to surrender: what holds us back are resistancesc whose origin is to be sought in the archaic layers of our personal history. But Achille, future father, residuary legatee, puts up no resistance: there is almost nothing in him that his father has not put there. Driven by the fierce ambition of his creator—claimed, interiorized until it has become his own spontaneity—trusting, docile, sharing the physician-philosopher’s ends and leaving it to him to choose the means, this child has no intelligenceI other than his conviction of being intelligentI by divine right; nothing more is needed." [continued]

-------------------------------------------------Ref Herein-intelligence/talent/geniusR

6-14Flac Did ‘Achille-Cléophas loveI his son?’ Yes: ‘Was he saved? No, lost’ (1:111)

See Barnes, Sartre and Flaubert (p. 42-7)

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The Family Idiot (1:111, Fr. 1:119, continuing) "The eldest, whatever he was, had a mandate to relive his father’s life. Therefore we find him launched on a never-ending progression. Was he saved? No, lost. The stage of identification should have been transcendedlived/1neg&2neg, the ritual murder of the father accomplished. The exterior disposition did not allow it: to be the paterfamilias was to be enclosed forever in the father’s imagee..."

(1:111-12) "Did Achille-Cléophas love R his son? e... (1:112) Warn out by drudgery well before old age, the old doctor found hope, a taste for living, the timid ambition to survive only through the blind trust he placed in his son. We can imagine this reciprocitylivedR: the father procured his own future joys by preparing his son for future duties, future honors. The son could not help discoveringdial/lived that he was both the father’s supreme end and the means of his glory: so without being deprived of the pleasures of submission he was allowed to display his generosity toward the magnanimous tyrant who had overwhelmed him with gifts. Everything joined them, these two men—the past, the future; in the present, every new patient occasioned complicity, they discussed the case calmly and the clinical ideaI would come to the fore in one or the other head equally. Is this loving? Yes. Achille’s death would have crushed his father; this was Achille Cléophas’s loveIR: a practical affection that could not be distinguished from work in common and a costly trust which the son produced in the paternal heart through twenty years of effort. This came into beingI slowly, imperceptibly: in the beginning, the physician-philosopher merely favored the elder son on principle; later he came to prefer him and then, toward the end of his life, to cherish him for himself. Between the two men there was no demonstration of affectionI—intimacy, that’s all. In the long run, I suppose, Dr Flaubert became attached to Achille’s features, to his voice, to that long body, ‘all legs.’ Truly, whatever his physique, the father would have adapted to it; he saw it only as the trademark.

"On 10 November 1845, Achille Cléophas falls ill. Who examines him? His son. Achille finds that his father has a tumor of the thigh, which is spreading quickly. The best friends of the dying man, two highly esteemed physicians, hasten to his bedside; surgical intervention is in order, and again it is his son that the old doctor charges with the operation. The colleagues seem a bit put out, Achille is perhaps too young. Resistance is in vain—the medical director insists on his son, the operationI takes place, he dies."

(1:113) "e...At the momentof death, he makes his son a gift of his worn-out body, of his own life; he offers big brother Achille the most flattering patient—the best specialist in the country, admired, feared, respected by his clients, his students, and his colleagues. Why?** To make a grand gesture, perhaps; should this be the case, it would have to be seen as much more than an ingenious publicity stunt. But

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that is only a superficial detail; entering more deeply into the sick man’s caprice, one cannot help beingI struck by it as an expression of family pride: only a Flaubert can treat a Flaubert. It is the honor of this medical House. The imperious old man, crushed by illness, took to his bed only at the last moment; he chose his doctor, kept a vigilant watch during the surgery, and then died peacefully three weeks later in the bosom of his family, without having lost consciousness. Rilke would have been ravished by this self-willed death—it is in the image of a willful life. Most likely he guided Achille’s diagnosis and later his knifee..."

6-14Flac Achille’s problematic identificationI with his father (1:114)The Family Idiot (1:114-5, Fr. 1:122-3) "If Dr. Flaubert chose Achille, it was

chiefly out of a wholehearted trust that came as compensation, a few days before death, for the unquenchable faith of his elder son. The father did, then, appreciate the son’s own merits. This abusive father had fashioned his future replacement so well that he made him, as we have seen, into his opposite: a relative being, inessential and timid, who never determines [‘that is, as limitation’] himself from the interior but always in terms of the exterior model he has been given and wants to imitate in everything. To take only the matter of authorityR, for example, the father destroyed it in Achille from childhood; Achille’s misfortune is the heteronomy of his will—there is nothing in him that is not imposed from without, nothing that expresses his original spontaneity. That spontaneity, furthermore, which was slowly and surely strangled, is no more than a wordRc. It is therefore perfectly impossible for him ever to display that sovereign authority which belongs to each and every human being. Maniacal meticulousness, obsessive behavior, hesitations, silences, intuitive diagnoses whose reasoning remains obscure—these are measures to combat an insidious anguish, signs which alert us to the importance of the internalok deficit provoked by paternal tyranny. His clients respect Achille but do not find him very persuasive. He will be like this until his death; he is already like this by the end of 1845. On the other hand, identificationR with the father, even while devastating the subservient son, requires that he produce in himself and project the appearanceok of authority. AppearanceI

ok, nothing more; what we can say is that the son believed in the father, as long as the father lives, Achille has some insurance. (1:115) Dr. Flaubert asks nothing more of him, convinced that this poorly played role is Achille’s truth; the father believesI that he has not only been reproduced but remade. He will therefore operateI on himself with his son’s hand, not by overwhelming him with advice but by having given him since childhood his own character, his way of seeing things, his own inflexibility. Is this relationok of father to son really loveR? If you like. But it is rare passion that brings two loversI into so much harmony with each other. For both Flauberts, the essential being of

54


the son is the characterI he plays, and for both of them this character is the father. By choosing the son, by foisting him on his colleagues, achille-Cléophas chooses himselfe..."

(1:116, Fr. 124) "e...It is through his son and for him, but above all in him that he tries his lordly generosity—like a sickness, like a passion. We must surely acknowledge that the final relationsok between father and son were lived with passion. Achille Cléophas gave everything to his elder son: life, material goods, his knowledge [savoir], his position, and finally his body. He never lovedI in his son a unique adventure, and incomparable ‘monster,’ a hazardous life whose price is risk and inevitable death, whatever its course. He cherished himself in his son as other, and in doing so he made Achille into another Achille Cléophas.

"The most unexpected result of this relationship is that the old man, by giving himself up to the knife, deprived his elder son of even the possibility of deliverance through the classic murder of the father; certainly Achille killed him, but he made himself the docile instrument of a sacred suicide.

"After the death of the chief surgeon, the elder son completed his identificationI with his father. The same town, the same position, the same clients, the same residence—this was the legacye..."

(1:117, Fr. 125) "The role, moreover, was not a silent one, Achille knew [connait] his rejoinders by heart. Louis Levasseur wrote in 1872: ‘He keeps a store of opinions, theses, doctrines from the paternal heritage which are for him the law of the prophets; he stubbornly opposes them to certain novelties—Pater dixit [father says, speaks, pronounces], and in order to remain on good terms with him there is only one answer: amen. He is so blocked by this that he digs his heels in beforehand against anything that could challenge his position. He would firmly entrench himself if he were not afraid that he would be accused of beingI stuck in a rut.’

(1:117-8) "He ‘digs his heels in beforehand against anything that could challenge his position’—here Achille’s profound contradiction can be clearly seen. He has to adapt himself, to accept the new or be stuck in a rut, that is, lose his clientele, destroy the patrimony Achille-Cléophas had entrusted to him. But if in doing so he must abandon an opinion his father bequeathed to him, he loses his bearings, he feels he has betrayed his creator and annihilated his own person by replacing rules with generalized indecision. In areas the father did not explore, he does manage to collect information and keep himself ‘up to date’; wherever the physician-philosopher stuck his nose, however, Achille refuses to change anything. The dated axioms, the outmoded methods that he obstinately preserves, these are survivals; he clings to them in vain, their relative importance continuously decreasing as the influx of new information threatens to make them marginal. (1:118) Yet for him, the callouses, the cysts are the essential things, the innermost

55


mark of his being, the very place where the life of repetition merges with the permanence of death.

(1:118, Fr. 126) "Outside these lasting conflicts, we can make him out rather well. And Levasseur, who seems spiteful but shrewd, gives us another precious piece of information: ‘He is overcautious, a punctilious faultfinder in his examination of the subject, as much out of concern for his reputation as out of uncertainty over the patient.’ All told, nothing could be better—should he have been negligent? But it is no accident that the author uses, in immediate succession, two pejorative epithets: faultfinder, punctilious. Achille had to be excessive, endlessly questioning the patient and his relatives and friends; every time this important man left his shell to make contact with clinical , he had to take the time to resurrect the dead old man and put him in condition to confront the new situation. The hesitant incarnationlived began by protecting himself against anguishI and solitude through punctiliousness; he secured himself against the methods of the new medicine through obsessional maniase..."

(1:120) "After the death of the father, Achille will not even be the head of the Flaubert family. The transference of powers, however, was done correctly. He will have scarcely any influence on the inhabitants of Croisset, for the father inhabits him, an inert weight, like the sum of his incapacities. Achille is not a manman but rather a ‘vacancy always in the future,’ since he is constrained to be a plenitude always pastc, never surpassed1negc, another’s plenitude. For his elder son the father was, when alive, always the same. From 1846 on, Achille finds himself committed to the most demanding kind of death. He stops living and dies day by day. He wants to be his living father; instead, he is his dead father until the very end..."

-------------------------------------------------See Flaubert&Father in Vol. 1-Authoritarian father does not allow Gustave to grow up

6-14Flac Was Achille happy? Yes, as modest and only as an appearance (1:120)The Family Idiot (1:120-1, Fr. 1:127) "Is this to say that Achille was unhappy?

I don’t think so. He possessed his creator through the unworthy image he modestly presented to everyone. What a sheltered life! Each day he began all over again, happily, the cycle of paternal acts: hospital, amphitheater, visits, buggy and goatskin. (1:121) This empty carcass dreamed only of repetition. After all, it was in the family: the veterinarians, sons of veterinarians, repeated their father’s actions; the abrupt mutation of Achille Cléophas freed one generation. Only one; the following reestablished on a higher level the eternal recurrence and its sacred ceremonies. It would be this way for centuries, until the next mutation. The heir enjoyed the father’s clientele, fame, and fortune without thinking of expanding

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them—maintaining them was enough. He was not unaware that the honors and money were directed through him to the vanished founder, but this was precisely the source of his deep satisfaction: the attentions, the respect of the people of Rouen gave him the subjective conviction of being the best possible incarnationlived of the eponymous hero. Therefore his truth was the father, that protecting ‘Egoconcept’ which was at the same time his EgoI; and his perfect security came to him from this strange and very intimate tension: he was never himself except in discoveringdial/lived his inferiority to the self. He was satisfied, at least pacified; and slightly mournful because of the emptiness he had created in himself. Mechanistic analysis, the father’s lessons and their logical rigor, then later the necessityCDRdial/lived of being only Achille Cléophas had brutally repressed, crushed, all the deep feelings, all the irrational thoughts that each of us ponder and that constitute our richness. He remained nothing. In him the irresistible brilliance of Achille Cléophas was moribunde... We would have wished him sons who would assume the dead grandfather’s ambitions. They would truly have lived; for Achille—this is his only quality but it is rather significant—was not admirable enough, he would not have discomfited his children.** Alas! Fate decreed that he should have only a daughter and that the Rouen branch of the Flauberts should die with him."

-------------------------------------------------** Ref Sartre\Freedom-predestined. Is Sartre saying that Achille would have saved his male children from his destiny? He would live it out and leave others free of it?

6-14Flac 5. The Birth of the Younger Son [a progressive study] (1:123-172, Fr. 1:130)Sartre\Flaubert’s Constitution-A. Return to RegressiveI Analysis (1:174, Fr.

1:180)

12-14Flac NeedI ‘to be lovedI is present from birth’ as ‘passiveI experience of otherness’ (1:129)

The Family Idiot (1:129-31, Fr. 1:136) "I suppose, then, Mme Flaubert, wife by vocation, was a mother out of duty. An excellent mother but not a delightful one: punctual, assiduous, adept. Nothing more. The younger son was handled overcautiously, he was relieved, his linen was changed lickety-split; he couldn’t cry as he was always fed promptly. Gustave’s aggressiveness had no opportunity to develop. He was nevertheless frustrated well before weaning, but it was a frustration without tears or rebellion; want of tenderness is to the pangs of loveR like malnutrition to hunger. Later the unlovedI child would consume himself, but for the moment he does not really suffer; the need to be loved I is present from birth , even

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before the child can recognize the Otherconceptc, but he does not yet express himself through specific desires. The frustration does not affect him—or very little—it forms him. (1:130) I mean that this objectivelived negation penetrates him and becomes within him an impoverishment of his life—an organiclived misery and a kind of ingratitude at the core of experience Fr=?. Not anguishlivedc, he has no reason to feel abandoned. Or alone. As soon as a wish is felt, it is instantly gratified; let a pin prick him and let him cry, a nimble hand allays the pain. But these precise operationsdial/lived are also parsimonious; they economize on everything at the Flauberts, even time, which is money. Washing, nursing, looking after things—these acts are performed without rushing but without useless affability. Above all the mother, timid and cold, doesn’t smile, or rarely, doesn’t babble—why make speeches to a baby who can’t understand Gustave has a good deal of difficulty grasping [transformslived/2negtolived/1neg] the sparse character of his objectiveI world, otherness; when he becomes conscious of it, by the time he recognizes the faces that lean over his cradle, a first chance for loveI has already escaped him. He has not discovereddial/lived himself through a caress as flesh and as a supreme end in himself. It is too late now for him to be in his own eyes the destination of maternal actsI: he is their objectposited, that is all. Why? He doesn’t know; it will not be long before he feels in some obscure way that he is a means. For Mme Flaubert, in fact, this child is the means of fulfilling her duties as a mother; for the physician-philosopher to whom the young wife is entirely devoted, he is primarily someone to perpetuate the family. These discoveriesI will come later. For the moment, he has passed over the stage of valorization**. He has never felt his needsdial/lived as sovereign demands, the exterior world has never been his oyster, his larder; the environment is revealed to him little by little, as it is to others, but he knows [connu] it first only in the dreary and cold consistency which Heidegger has named nur-Vorbeilagen. The happy exigency of the lovedI child compensates for and exceeds his docility as a handled thing; there is in his desires something imperious that can seem like the rudimentary from of a project and consequently of actionI. Without valuelived, Gustave feels needI as a gap, as a discomfort or—at best and most frequently—as a prelude to an agreeable and imminent surfeit. But this discomfort does not break away from subjectivity to become a demand in the world of others, it remains inside him, an inert and noisy emotion; he suffers it, pleasant or unpleasant, and when the time comes he will suffer satiety. We know [sait] how it is, a needI pushed to its limit becomes aggressive, creates its own right; but a Flaubert child is never famished—the child, stuffed by a dry, diligent mother will not even have this opportunity to break the magic circle of passivity through revolte... (1:131) Little Gustave learns to communicate only very late and very badly; his mother’s attentions gave him

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neither the desireI nor the occasion to develop this capacity. There he is, then, encased in pathicc, understoodposited

ok as what is suffered without beingI expressed.(1:131-2, Fr. 1:138) "The essential thing is this: active emotionIc is public from

the beginning, it emerges in a world where the Otherconceptc already exists—even as the diffuse character of objectivitylived; it declares itself, it is a threat, a plea (look what you are doing with me), and aims to sustain itself through a praxis, it is violence transforming itself into martyrdom— in order to coerce through spectacle. (1:132) Passivec emotionI is privatec; one can certainly make use of it as a sign and Gustave did not refrain from doing so—for example at Pont-l’Evêque—but it is not in itself a language, quite the contrary, it is a paralysis of movementI and of the organs of speech.*** These are paralyzed, at least, when they already existI and are usable. Muscular hypotonia [deficient tone or tension in children] mimics the relaxation of a cadaver; this does not signify anything, it is a regression outside the world of signifier and signified, regressionI toward a state that never altogether existsI but that the unloved, well-tended child has—almost—known [connu] in the first months of life. The state of passiveI**** emotionI is not a refusal to communicate, to express, nor is it—at first, in any case—a general project to dissimulate, to conceal from the other the fluctuations of one’s sensibility. Quite simply, it is pure receptiveness before any desireI and any means of communication, and it is dominant in infants whom maternal behavior has not first opened to the surrounding othernesse..."

(1:132-3, Fr. 1:139) "This is a fabrication, I confess. I have no proof that it was so. And worst still, the absence of such proofs—which would necessarilyCDR be singular factslived—leads us, even when we fabricate, to schemataI , to generalityc; my story is appropriate to infants, not to Gustave in particular. Never mind. I wanted to follow it out for this reason alone: the real explanation, I can imagine without the least vexation, may be precisely the contrary of what I invent, but in any case it will have to follow the paths I have indicated and refute my explanation on the ground I have determined [‘that is, as limitation’]—the body and loveI. I have spoken of maternal loveIc; that is what fixes for the newborn the objectivelived category of othernessI, it is what in the first weeks allows the child to sense as other—from the moment he knows [sait]ontology how to recognize it—the silken flesh of the breast. Obviously it is maternal behavior which sets the limits and intensity of filial loveI—the oral phase of sexuality—going from birth to the encounter with the Otherconcept

Fr=?—and which determinesI the internalok structuredial/lived of such loveI. (1:133) Gustave is immediately conditioned by the mother’s indifference; he desireIs alone, his first sexual and alimentary impulses toward a nurturing flesh are not mirrored back to him by a caress. It does not happen, or rarely happens—at three, at four months, during the whole first year—that this existant shape known as the mother, a confused heap of

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kindnesses, elicits in her turn a caress, a smile from the child. He is asked to be a healthy digestive tube—nothing more. There is nothing more solitary than sexual drives when no response is forthcoming. Nothing more passiveI: the flesh is there, one touches it, one devours it and then falls asleep, weary loverI, sated diner. It will be found again at the proper time. In short, sleep, expectation, enjoyment. But the expectation, an inertI assurance, and the enjoyment, scarcely distinct from nutrition—to the same degree that the Otherconcept is simultaneously the given2neg nourishment and the person out of reach—defineposited by their particular relationsok [of three degrees]1st&2neg a pathos of sexuality. We will see later that it is the pathicI which would thoroughly color Flaubert’s sexual relationsI

ok. [continued-2]-------------------------------------------------

Ftn 2, Fr. 1:136, "Indeed, the Otherconceptok is there, diffused, from the first day in that

discoverydial/lived I make of myself through my passive experience Fr=? of otherness. That is, through the repeated handling of my body by forces which are alien, purposive, serving my needsdial/lived. Even on this level, however basic, love is required. Or rather, the attentions the baby receives are loveI. It is fitting in these moments that the child, discoveringdial/lived himself by and for this diffuse othernessI, should apprehend himself in an externalok and internalok ambience of kindness. The needsI come from him, but the first interest he attaches to his person is derived from the care whose objectposited he is. If the mother lovesI him, in other words, he gradually discoversI his self-objectI as his loveI objectI. A subjectivelivedc objectposited for himself through an increasingly manifest other, he becomes a valuelived in his own eyes as the absolute end of habitual processes. The valorization of the infant through care will touch him more deeply the more this tenderness is manifest. If the mother speaks to him, he grasp the intention before the languagelivedc; let her smile at him, he recognizes the expression even before the face. His little world is crossed by shooting stars which signal to him and whose importance is chiefly to consecrate maternal actions to him. This monster is an absolute monarch, always an end, never a means. Let a child once in his life—at three months, at six—taste this victory of pride, he is a man; never in all his life will he be able to revive the supreme voluptuousness of this sovereignty or to forget it. But he will preserve even in misfortune a kind of religious optimism based on the abstract and calm certainty of his own valueI. (1:130) In misery he is still privileged. We shall say, in any case, that an adventure begun in this fashion has nothing in common with Flaubert’s."

-------------------------------------------------See Pol...\Child Development&Violence-Alice Miller: Respect, understanding, being taken seriously; -Gaylin, Extrauteral year links helplessness, vulnerability, care, survival; -Winnicott: Mothering, play, transitional objects, and illusion

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** Ref Sartre\Index of Terms-VALORIZATION ; [of man; early stage of childhood, and groups]

CDRII: (p. 24c) "The moment when conflict—naked, freed from all visible constraint, strongly delineated by knowledge [savoir], rules and skills—is presented by itself as a spectacle corresponds, in all communities, to a valorizing acquisition of awareness. Not only does the individual grasp [transformslived/2negtolived/1neg] himself in his actions as threatened by the violence of counter-men, and as having to respond by a counter-violence; he also gives a valuelived to defensive violence (and ... preventive aggression)...";

The Family Idiot: (5:268c) "...there is nothing in bourgeois humanism to valorize human beings; every man, for himself and everyone else, is merely a means, and inessential at that, of accomplishing duties that enlist him from the outside..."*** Copied Sartre\Flaubert’s Personalization-autism**** Copied&R Office\My Youth and Then Some-Passivity

6-14Flac Another’s loveI as the foundation and guarantee of our value and mandate (1:133)

The Family Idiot (1:133-4, Fr. 1:140, continuing-2) "And what about the child’s malaise? It will be easier to discuss now that we know the fundamental reason for it: nonvalorization. This is not a matter of conjecture: a child must have a mandate to live, the parents are the authorities who issue the mandate. A grant of love enjoins him to cross the barrier of the moment—the next is awaited, he is already adored there, everything is prepared for his joyful reception; the future appears to him as a vague and gilded cloud, as his mission: ‘Try to fulfill us so that we may fulfill you in turn!’ But the mission will be easy; the parents’ loveI has produced it and continually reproduces it, sustains it, carries it from one day to the next, demands and awaits it—in brief, loveI guarantees the success of the mission. Later, in actuality, the child can find other objectiveslived, conflicts which were at first veiled can tear the family apart; the essential thing has been achieved (1:134) This supreme end will accept becoming the unique means of fulfilling those who adore him and for whom he is the reason for being; living will be a passion—in the religious sense—that will transform self-centeredness into a gift; experience Fr=? will be felt as the freeCDR exercise of generosity.

(1:134, Fr. 141) "This expérience is neither true nor false. It is obvious that life, taken in its naked form, ‘naturallivedc,’ considered only as the pure flow of organiclived impressions, would not offer human meaning CDR lived—which does not signify [signifie] that an animalc [animals as unreflectiveR] or a man could not experienceI [étre] it in itself as sinngebendlivedc, that is, a reality invested with meaning CDR lived. But it is equally

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clear that pure life as it is lived, simply ‘being-there’ endowed in succession, in brief, all the formsposited of our savored factitiousnesslived are handy abstractionsposited which we never encounter without being affected by them ourselves—by isolating certain elements of inner expérience, by deliberately ignoring others.** In actuality, sense and non-sense*** in a humanI life are humanI in principle and come to the child of man from man himself [society, parents, below]. Thus we must repeat these absurd formulas back to back: ‘life has a meaningCDR lived****,’ ‘it hasn’t any,’ ‘it has what we give it,’ and understandposited

Fr=? that we discoverdial/lived our ends, the non-sense or the sense of our lives, as realities anterior to that awakening of consciousness, anterior perhaps to our birth and prefabricatedc in the humanI universe. The meaning CDR lived of a life comes to the living through the humanI society that sustains him and through the parents who engender him, and it is for this reason that he always remains a non-sense as well. But inverselyok, the discoveryI of a life as non-sense (of superfluous children suffering from malnutrition, riddled with parasites and fever in an underdeveloped society) is quite as much the revelation of the real sense of that society, and through this reversal it is life—as an organicI needdial/lived—which in its pure animalI insistence becomes humanI meaning CDR lived and the society of men which becomes pure humanI non-sense through the penalty of unsatisfied needI.*****

(1:134-5, Fr. 141) "When the valorizationI of the infant through loveI is accomplished badly, or too late, or not at all, maternal inadequacy defines experience Fr=? as non-sense; inner experienceI

Fr=? reveals to the child a slack succession of present moments that slip back into the past. But subjectivelivedc existence has no direction since it is not defined as the movementdial/lived that departs from past loveI (creative) and goes toward future [futur] loveI (expectation by the Otherconcept, mission, happiness, temporalBNlived ekstasis). Of course, the frustrated child some years later discoverdial/lived on his own that time is three-dimensional through the unity of his projects. He would even be able to give a meaning CDR lived to the existenceI that overwhelms him, engulfs him, sweeps him along, and is only himself. (1:135) But precisely the weakness of these ends imposed subjectively is that they remain subjectiveI—unless they are claimed and objectifiedlived by a social current—and that they contain a kind of gratuitousness. Valuelived and purpose are here reciprocally conditioned; the surpassing1negc of experience [vécu] is chosen in order to consolidate a failing sense of self-worth, but the inadequacy or non-existence of valorizationI will destroy the objectiveslived proposed to establish it. The question will arise: Am I really the person chosen for this enterprise?—Kierkegaard’sR ‘Am I Abraham?’****** Either, is the mandate in itself worthwhile? Can I accept it without knowing the authorities who issued it? (Kafka said, I have a mandate but no one gave it to me.) Or, as the adult Gustave would

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often wonder, isn’t my will to write just foolishness? Am I not simply a collector, like a numismatist or philatelist [money or stamp collector]? Briefly, the loveI of the Otherconcept

ok is the foundation and guarantee of the objectivitylived of the valueI and mission; this mission becomes a sovereign choice, permitted and evoked in the subjective person by the presence of selfI -worth3." [continued-3 same paragraph below]

-------------------------------------------------Ftn. 3, "The option’s sovereignty is manifest in this contradiction; it presents itself both as a freeCDR determination [‘that is, as limitation’] of freedomI in itself—which by itself would provoke anguish—and as the reinteriorization of an exterior decree—which by itself would produce the most radicalontology alienation. And in fact we quite often see the person having such a mandate pass from anguishI to the consciousness of his alienationI and vice versa. These difficulties, however, are secondary; they are annoying, to be sure, they are consuming—it is never amusing to be human. But the true malaise begins on the threshold of the humanI, when unloved children—the great majority—are staggered by a senseless existence."See Child Development&Violence-Alice Miller: Respect, understanding, being taken seriously; -Glass and Bion: Illusion, transitional objects, and consensual politics

-------------------------------------------------** See Sartre\Being-there-The Emotions: perception was originally perceiving (E50-2)*** Ref Sartre\Index of Terms-SENSE AND NON-SENSE ; all hits cited; Ref Sartre/Index of Terms-Derrida, Jacques; Sartre\Lifework-ethics; Merleau Ponty as cited in Sartre\Footnotes-Hubert L. Dreyfus and Piotr Hoffman: CDR’s unobjectifiable need replaces BN’s synthesis of meaning

The Family Idiot: (1:134c) "When the valorization of the infant through loveI is accomplished badly or too late or not at all, maternal inadequacy defines experience Fr=? as non-sense; inner experienceI

Fr=? reveals to the child a slack succession of present moments that slip back into the past...";

(1::374c) "...Gustave’s arrivism is uncurbed and his inadequacy is non-sense...";

(1:351c) "...matter and form—sense and non-sense...";(1:559c) "...contingency, becoming conscious of itself as pure original non-

sense.."-------------------------------------------------

**** Ref Sartre\Index of Terms-MEANING CDR lived [social]; [sensn.m., but sensn.m. also=senses]; cf ; meaningBNlived found little difference.

Sartre, Search for a Method (p. 58P, Fr. 54) "e...If Flaubert reasons and feels as a bourgeois, this is because he has been made such at a period when he could not

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even comprehendok the meaning CDR lived of the gestures and the roles which were imposed upon him.

(p. 147c) "...This projectI has a meaning CDR lived, it is not the simple negativity [seeking to deny lack] of flightlivedc; by it a man aims at the production of himself in the world as a certain objectiveI totalitydial/lived..."

CDR: Sartre\Freedom-Man ‘who recognizes himself in his work completely and who also does not recognize himself in it at all’, with ‘it has what we give it,’

(p. 166c) "...[circulation of precious metals in the Mediterranean world] transforms human praxis into antipraxis, that is to say, into a praxisI without an author [authorless act]R, transcendinglived/1neg the given2neg towards rigid ends, whose hidden meaning CDR lived is counter-finality..."

CDRII (p. 17c, Fr. 26) "If totalization [in course]lived is really an ongoing process, it operates everywhere. This means at once that there is a dialectical meaning CDR lived of the practical ensemble..."

The Family Idiot: (1:18) Indeed, no human animalR [as unreflective]—I will even say no mammal—whether it speaks or not, can live without entering into the dialectical movementdial/lived of the signifier and the signifiedlivedc. For the simple reason that meaning CDR lived is born of the projectc..."

(FI5:3c) "...When I call these structuringI intentionsI subjectivity, I mean of course to select and designate only those arising from particular—originally familial—situations which have meaning CDR lived..."

(5:203c) "...this [common] praxis has created favorable conditions, an exisc which, as an intentional attitude, gives meaningCDRlived to future [futur] ideology..."

(5:156c) "...the conduct of failurelived. By this we mean a behavior with two objectiveslived, the more superficial beingI to reach a definite goal and the more profound beingI to fall short of it. The first is the objectposited of a formulated intention, one that is quite conscious; the second, implicitc but equally intentionalI, is the very meaning CDR lived of lived experience..."

Sartre, Hope Now (p. 56c) "...what I did say in so many words in Being and Nothingness is that everyone has a goal beyond the practical or theoretical goalsposited of the moment, matters of politics, say, or education; beyond all such matters, everyone has a goal that I would call, if you wish, transcendentlived/1neg or absolute, and all practical goals have meaning CDR lived only in relationFr=? [of three degrees]lived&lived as

1st&2neg to this goal. The meaning CDR lived of a man’s acts is therefore this goal..."***** Sartre, Words (p. 88P) "e...When a child is unhappy, he doesn’t ask himself questions. If he suffers bodily as a result of needsdial/lived and sickness, his

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unjustifiable state justifies his existence. His right to live is based on hunger, on the constant danger of death. He lives in order not to diee..."****** Kierkegaard, cited in Sartre, Existentialism (p. 23P) "Is it really an angel, and am I really Abraham? What proof is there that I have been appointed to impose my choice and my conception of man on humanity? I’ll never find any proof or sign to convince me of that." Solomon, The Passions (p. 100, 1st edition) "KierkegaardI, from all appearances, was incapable of any human relationship (and one wonders to what extent his ‘intimate personal relationship with God’ was compensation)."

6-14Flac Truth ‘is intelligible only at the end of a long vagabond delusion’ (1:135)The Family Idiot (1:135-7, Fr. 1:142, continuing-3, my paragraph break, repeating last

sentence) sartre¶Briefly, the loveI of the Otherconcept is the foundation and guarantee of the objectivitylived of the valuelived and mission; this mission becomes a sovereign choice, permitted and evoked in the subjective person by the presence of self-worth3. If this is lackingdial/lived, life gives itself as pure contingency. Experienced life [vécu] gives itself as an irrepressible spontaneity the child suffers and produces without being its source, but there appears [apparaît] at the same time a bottleneck of accidents filing through one by one, none of them auguring the one behind or explained by the one before. Certainly intelligence and practice allow the child to recognize temporalCDRlived forms in the surrounding world—ordered seriesI , cohesive wholes, totalitiesdial/lived that are totaled, rigorous connectionsI [enchaînements] of means and ends. The human being is taught to look for and to find the necessary premises of factslived that jump him like thieves or scamper off between his little legs, and to see in them—unexpected as they may be—consequences; he learns effortlessly that nothing is without reason. But his trouble is intensified when he withdraws inside himself, for then he rediscoversdial/lived an existence without a reason for being—his own. At the basis of this vague exploration he will discoverI, perhaps much later, a truthlivedR belongingI [de la Raison] reason. The beingI of the hammer and the existenceI

of aman have nothing in common; the hammer is there to hammer, but man is not ‘their,’ he is cast into the world, and as the source of all praxis his essential reality is objectificationlivedc. (1:136-7, Fr. 143) That is to say the justification of this ‘creature of distancesI [lointains]’ is always retrospective; it traces him from the depths of the future and from the horizonsc, it traces back across the course of time going from the present to the past, never from the pastI to the presentI. But these ethicalc-ontological truths must be revealed slowly. First it is necessary to be deceived, to believe in one’s mandate, to confound purpose and reason in the unity of maternal love, to live out a happy surrender; and then to have this false happiness gnaw away

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at itself, to allow alien infiltrations to be dissolved in the movementdial/lived of negativity [seeking to deny lack], of project and of the praxis [not italics], to substitute anguish for surrender. These steps are indispensable, they are what I have called elsewhere the needMdil for freedomCDRc. The truth is intelligible only at the end of a long, vagabond delusion. If it is handled before it is only a real delusion. We know that the unloved child who discoversdial/lived himself exists and is the foundation of all legitimation, he takes himself as a being without justification. Frustration reveals to him a portion of the truthI, but it takes care to hide the rest; in fact, when he experienced Fr=? himself as unjustifiable in his beingI, he is a hundred times farther from his real condition than the privileged child who is perceived as justified in advance. For both take upon themselves the being[-there] of things, but the first perceivesI in himself only a diffuse and purely subjective flow, and he is locked into the presentI moment, which is the farthest point of the pastI, whereas the other [privileged child] grasps [transformslived/2negtolived/1neg] the life within him as the enterprise of the future, as the fundamental structuresdial/lived of temporalityBNlived. Gustave is the victim of a mystification; since nothing is expected of him as the singular subject of his history, he will therefore be its objectposited. Without a particular mission he is deprived, from the start, of the cardinal categories of praxis. Not that the future entirely escapes his purview, but—we shall come back to this—he sees it as the ineluctable result of an alien will; it can be prophesied but not shaped, since it is already accomplished. This practitioner’s son must indeed have been rigorously conditioned by family life from the earliest age to exhibit so soon such a profound disgust with action in whatever form; in truthI, not only does he despise practical life, he does not comprehend it. It [practical life] does not enter into the limited universe he has carved out for his use at the breast of objectivitylived; or rather, if he lets the practical in, it loses its efficacy. Everything is pastI, even the future—everything is immutable in advance; concerted humanI effort will never be more than a futile ripple on the surface of a dead world. (1:137) He makes an exception, as we shall see, only for demolition jobs.

(1:137-8) "Before quietism becomes his governing thesis and one of the principal motifs of his work, he will endure many more misfortunes, many factors will be introduced which we have not yet discussed. But that is beside the point. The source of this quietismI is the infant’s neglect; [continued-4, same paragraph below]

-------------------------------------------------See Sartre\Lifework-In The Words, Sartre ‘can’t think of his old ways without laughing’

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6-14Flac Hazel Barnes: Flaubert’s being born without a mandate: the terms ‘useless passion’ in BN

Barnes, Sartre and Flaubert (p. 29-30) "e...Every child, Sartre urges, ought to feel that he has been given a mandate to live. He should be instilled with the feeling that he is a movement toward a goal—like a ‘conscious arrow’ with awareness of the intoxication of flight but a sureness with regard to his points of departure and the target. Feeling himself to be a supreme end, the child will consent to become the unique means of those who idolize him. To do so is his raison d’être. He has a mission and he is assured of reciprocity. ‘Live so as to fulfill us, in order that we may be able to fulfill you in turn.’ (p. 30) The baby develops the conviction that he is here for something.

(p. 30) "That either humanity in general or the individual person is born with a mandate is so flagrantly in contradiction with what Sartre has written hitherto that this passage comes as a shock. In The Words Sartre bitterly reproaches himself for having cherished for fifty years his own conviction that he had been given the mandate to write. In Being and Nothingness, the statement, ‘Man is a useless passion’** meant, among other things, that man is not for anything except that he is for himself in the sense that he and he alone makes himself what he becomes and creates his own valuese... The underloved child, the one who is not enabled, through his mother’s love, to feel that he has a mandate, does in fact thereby glimpse prematurely what he will later discovere... man is not there for anything; he is ‘thrown into the world’e..."

"When Sartre urges that children should be spared the unhappiness of knowing that they ‘exist without reason,’ he is not merely saying that they are too weak to bear the pain that must eventually come to all of us with our recognition of the truth of our existential condition. He means that if the child feels too early the truth of what he will someday know, he will miss two other true aspects of human reality. First, he will not realize himself as an active agent, will not know the meaning of praxis. If no response is expected of him, if the satisfaction of his needs is not related in any direct way to his attempt to express them, he will form no notion of himself as one who does things. The experience of being sovereign in his small universe accustomed the child to think of himself as called upon to give commands, to order, to arrange. In short, the delusion of being sole and absolute monarch prefigures, but without anguish, the existential situation in which the adult will discover that through his actions he must carve out his being in the world..."4

-------------------------------------------------Ftn. 4, (p. 420) "Sartre reaffirms this conviction in speaking of his own life. ‘You feel freeCDR when you have no family conflict as a child—I had none—and when

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you have been loved by your mother and, in short, have been created in a certain world in which you become indispensable; that is, your family treats you in such a way that you believe yourself to be indispensableI to it, so that you feel yourself to be one of the generous ones, who fulfill it, etc. And in fact, for quite a long time I confused freedomBN and generosityIR.’ Sartre, film, p. 32 [Fr. ed. Translated as Sartre by Himself]." Copied Pol...\Child Development&Violence-Alice Miller: Respect, understanding, being taken seriously

-------------------------------------------------** Ref Sartre\Index of Terms-MAN IS A USELESS PASSION ;

BN: (p. 615, out of sequence from Sartre\Freedom-III. Quality as a Revelation of Being) "e...Every human_reality is a passion in that it projects losing itself so as to found being and by the same stroke to constituteBN the in-itselfontology which escapes contingency by being[-there]I its own foundation, the Ens causa sui, which religions call Godc. Thus the passionI of man is the reverse of that of Christ [who loses himself as God in order that man may be born], for man [in authoritarian religions] loses himself as man in order that God may be born. But the idea of God is contradictory and we lose ourselves in vain. Man is a useless passionI." [Sartre’s last sentence before his ‘Conclusion.’];

(p. 626, Fr. 674) "... Man pursues being blinded by hiding from himself the freeI

projectI which is this pursuit. He makes himself such that he is waited for by all the tasks placed along his way. ObjectsI are mute demands, and he is nothing in himself but the passive obedience to these demands."

Politics and Literature: (p. 96, cited from Peter Caws, Sartre p. 26) "Yes—I made the mistake—and most other philosophers have made it too—of using literary phrases in a text whose language should have been strictly technical. That is, the meaning of the words should have been unequivocal. In the phrase you quote, the ambiguity of the words ‘passion’ and ‘useless’ have obviously falsified the meaning and caused misunderstandingFr=?...";

8-14Flac An animal-like child: Sartre’s poignant passiveI constitutiondial/group of Gustave (1:137)

See Barnes, Sartre and Flaubert (p. 34-5)The Family Idiot (1:137-8, Fr. 1:144, continuing-4, my paragraph break) sartre¶love is

demanding—no one asks anything of an unloved child, nothing pulls him out of immanence. Or rather, since he continually pulls himself out of it like everyone else, he does it blindly, in a clandestine half-light—it is not required and has no charter. This strange condition is not seen but felt’; he tastes its illegitimacy in the insipidness of his self-provoked discharge; its pale savor reveals the interchangeability of all his feelings—no one anticipates them, not even himself, hence they are equivalent. From horror to lust, they seem to be cut from the same

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cloth. However, even unforeseen they inhabit him, vegetate, and disappear, and others come, diverse modesok of the same nauseous substance. The experience Fr=? of universal monotony he will later call ennui—with good reason; but ‘pure boredom with life’ is a pearl of culture. It seems clear that household animals**a are bored; they are homunculae, the dismal reflections of their masters. Culture has penetrated them, destroying nature in them without replacing it. Language is their major frustration: they have a crude comprehensionlivedR

ok of its function but cannot use it; it is enough for them to be the objectslived of speech—they are spoken to, they are spokenI about, they know it. This manifest verbal power which is denied to them cuts through them, settles within them as the limit of their powers, it is a disturbing privation which they forget in solitude and which deprecates their very natureslivedc when they are with men. I have seen fear and rage grow in a dog. We were talking about him, he knew [sut]**b it instantly because our faces were turned toward him as he lay dozing on the carpet and because the sounds struck him with full force as we were addressing him. Nevertheless we were speaking to each other. He felt it; our words seemed to designate him as our interlocutor and yet reached him blocked. He did not quite understand either the act itself or this exchange of speech, which concerned him far more than the usual hum of our voices—that lively and meaningless noise with which men surround themselves—and far less than an order given by his master or a call supported by a look or gesture. Or rather—for the intelligence of these humanized beasts is always beyond itself, lost in the imbroglio of its presences and its impossibilities—he was bewildered at not comprehendingok what he comprehendedok. (1:138) He began by waking up, bounding toward us, but stopped short, then whined with an uncoordinated agitation and finished by barking angrily. This dog passed from discomfort to rageI, feeling at his expense the strange mystification which is the relationok [of three degrees]1st&2neg between man and animal. But his rageI contained no revolt—the dog had summoned it to simplify his problems. Once calmed, he went off to the next room and returned, much later, to frolic and lick our hands.

(1:138-9, Fr. 145) "This example sufficiently demonstrates that for the animal, culture, at first a simple ambience, an ignored lacuna, becomes under the guise of training the pure negation in itself of animality. It is a fissure [fission] that leads the beast both above and below his familiar level, raising him toward an impossible comprehension just when his misplaced intelligenceI is collapsing in a daze. Nothing is bestowed by culture, but something is taken away; without ever achieving a reflective [réflexive] scissiparity, the immediacy of what is experienced [vécu] is cracked, questioned. By nothing—therefore no hope of mediation; a shadow of distanceok separates life from itself, renders nature less naturalIc. As a consequence, peaceful immanence is changed into [animal]c consciousness of self.

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The transformation is never complete, it is pure movementdial/lived; but this renewed questioning, this injection of the humanI as a denied possibility is translated by a kind of pleasure—the dog feels alive, he is bored. His boredom is life tasted as the impossibility of becoming man and as the perpetual collapsing of the desire to transcendlived/1neg the selfI in the direction of the humanI. In short, the little monsters forged by the king of Natureconcept know [connaisant] privileged moment when needsdial/lived, satisfied, cease to constrain them and to justify them; then, if life through this distancingok, which is not even presence_to selfI is delighted by itself as the negative [seeking to deny lack] limit of animal powers and at the same time as a ruining insouciance beneath a vague, unhappily impossible enterprise, each moment lived as felt as a restitution—through an oversight provoked by incapacity—of pure contingency, that is, of existenceR devoid of an objectivelived. And this contingency, instead of being the simple, permanent structuredial/lived of experience [vécu] delighted with itself as a meaningCDRlived, is in itself alone the animal condition and the stale intuition of this condition as an aimless succession of interchangeableI and always varying states. Without culture the animal would not be bored—he would liveI, that is all. Haunted by the sense of something missing, he livesI out the impossibility of transcendingI himself by a forgetful relapsing into animality; nature is discovereddial/lived through resignation. (1:139) Boredom with life is a consequence of the oppression of animals by man; it is natureI grasping itself as the absurd end of a limiting process instead of realizing itself as biological spontaneity.

(1:139-40) "If Gustave shares this nostalgia with the beasts it is because he too is domesticated. Lovec teaches; if he is wanting, his training is to blame***. With the first learned behaviors, the basic habits of cleanliness, the child will see only constraints if the reason for the apprenticeship is not clear. He will not integrate or claim these habits as his own; at best he will consider them a chain of conditioned reflexes, at worst an alien enterprise within him—that is, the reverse of an organized behavior. He interiorizes it in this last case as an activity which is endured; custom learned by force and an alien imperative are united to determine [‘that is, as limitation’] the domination of his spontaneity by strangers. We shall see that in Gustave, passive_activityc is nothing more than a masked reversal of the imposed actI turned against those who impose it. In other words, he will never oppose actsI to the actsI of othersok

I; he zealously obeys his parents’ orders, is open to the new determinations [‘that is, as limitation’] with which they want to influence him, but he quietly makes certain that the consequences are unequivocally disastrous. Thus it is easy to trace back from the ultimate catastrophes to the original intention which will be condemned a posteriori by its effectse... Passive actionI, then, consists essentially of a pretense of inertia. This inertiaI—let us understandposited

Fr=? that it must first be imposed—is realized in the subjective existence of the patient well before he

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dreams of faking it. In fact, Gustave will not choose passive actionI among other equally possible modes of praxis; rather the praxis itself is produced as the interior work of inertiaI when it is impossible for it not to exist—Gustave, like all men and beasts, is defined by projects—and to play the part for the selfI of transcendencelived/1neg and enterprise. Praxis makes itself the efficacy of the passivec because the child’s conditioning strips him of any means of affirmingdial himself, even the positive actI of negativity [seeking to deny lack]. We shall come back to this; I only want to indicate that the little boy’s first actsI are experienced Fr=? as pure sustained flow, without any subjectiveI meaningCDRI, and at the same time [à la fois] refer back to a transcendentlived/1neg activityI—namely toilet training—whose purpose and sense escape a priori the objectI of the training. (1:140) In this first moment, loveless acculturation reduces Gustave to the condition of a domestic animal. He too suffers from the obsession with something missing. Culture is given2neg to him as an ignorancelived which in the world of alteritylived is on principle a kind of knowledge [savoir]; it forms him and remains alien to him. Education tears him away from himself without giving him access to the worldI of others. He is continually brushed by comprehensibleok objectsI outside himself—enterprise, intentionI, decision, spontaneity, the syntheticdial unity of a subject and his praxis; but these are precisely the things that elude him when he seeks to grasp [transformslived/2negtolived/1neg] them. Not that they are themselves alien to the movementsdial/lived of his life; on the contrary, nothing can make him stop existing and stop fulfilling himself in all the dimensions of existenceI; therefore he can have a presentiment, such as the correspondence between interior and exterior, and he is always on the verge of beingI understood by others and of understanding them. But it is the mediation that is missing—loveI. Furthermore, objectivelived meaningsCDRI steal away and allow themselves to be deciphered by the incomprehensible othernessI that shapes him, the most immediate determinations [‘that is, as limitation’] of his spontaneity seem the most distant, the most obscure, and plunge into darkness just as he is about to grasp [transformslived/2negtolived/1neg] them. His alienation is more present to him than his subjective truth, he continually falls back to it after these vague, slippery, dreamlikeI intuition. The child, like the beast of cultureI, does not understand what he is in the process of understanding, what he seems to have understoodI

Fr=?; resigned, forgetful, he turns back to his unjustified contingency, to the passiveI succession of his affective states, as the animal turns back to his muteness. The fugitive moments of [Gustave’s] clarity that pass through him seem to have no recognizable function, for the moment, except to present his naturelivedc to him as inadequate—culture makes him feel deprived. He is already the objectI of speech, like our lap dogs, but too late—he is rarely spoken to, distractedly and

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unsmilingly. In this sense he is beneath the dog, who at least interiorizesI the loveI that makes him its objectI. [continuing same paragraph below,]

-------------------------------------------------Ref Gustave living animal existence at 1:344-347**a&b Ref Sartre\Index of Terms-ANIMALS ; as unreflective; see animal- tools below;

CDR: (p. 181c) "...It is the only monismc which makes man neither a molecular dispersal nor a being apart, the only one which starts by defining him by his praxis in the general milieu of animal life...";

The Family Idiot:Herein-RCommunication, like tenderness, is experienced as animality; -RC.

Gustave’s ‘Stupidity’: ‘The great eloquent passages hide his constant flight from the idea, or more accurately, before the idea’;

(1:18c) "...Indeed, no human animal [referring to Gustave Flaubert]—I will even say no mammal—whether it speaks or not, can live without entering into the dialecticallivedc movementdial/lived of the signifier and the signifiedlivedc. For the simple reason that meaningCDRlived is born of the projectc...";

(1:134c, Fr. 1:141) "...It is obvious that life, taken in its naked form, ‘naturallivedc ,’ considered only as the pure flow of organiclived impressions, would not offer human meaningI—which does not mean that an animal or a man could not experience Fr=? it in itself as sinngebendlived, that is, a reality invested with meaningCDRlived..."

(1:138c, above) "...peaceful immanence is changed into [animal] consciousness of self. The transformation is never complete, it is pure movementdial/lived; but this renewed questioning, this injection of the humanI as a denied possibility is translated by a kind of pleasure—the dog feels alive, he is bored. His boredom is life tasted as the impossibility of becoming man and as the perpetual collapsing of the desire to transcendlived/1neg the selfI in the direction of the humanI.

The journal Science : 06-04-04, reported a collie, Rico, had a larger than expected word recognition and appeared to handle language like humanI toddlers. Rico was taught many toy names and when told to get one from another room almost always brought the right one. More impressive was Rico’s capacity to bring back a toy of which he had not been taught the name. In a separate room with 11 toys, 10 of which Rico knew, his 70% retrieval rate of the 11th toy, when provided its unfamiliar name, parallels the success rate of three-year-olds. I would surmise that the collie has some sense of negationc, the capacity to exclude all but the unfamiliar. If the new namedI toy is excluded for months and then reentered with the other toys, Rico remembers that nameI over those months and retrieves the toy at the same rate as three-year-olds.

-------------------------------------------------

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Animal- tools : 3 hits; cf. tool; Sartre\Negation-R Cyclical_societiesI transition to elementary praxisI through possibility (CDR82), with CDR (p. 82c) "...Thus analytical_Reasonconcept/1negc, as a pure, universal analytic_schemaposited of natural laws, is really only the result of a syntheticdial transformationlivedc or, so to speak, a certain practical moment of dialectical_Reasonconcept: this latter, like animal-tools, uses its organiclived powers to make certain regions of itself into a quasi-inorganiclived residue deciphering the inert by means of its own inertia...";

(p. 83c) "...I have said that organismsI cannot act on the environment without temporarily falling provisionally backS&A to the level of the inertiaI; but animal-tools make themselves permanently inertI in order to protect their lives or, to put it another way, instead of using their own inertiaI they protectS&A it behind a fabricated inertiaI. It is at this ambiguous level that the dialectical transition from functionc to action can be seen..."

-------------------------------------------------*** Barnes translation is (p. 35) "...Love teaches, Sartre says; but if loveI is lacking, all that remains is animal training, a breaking-in (dressage)..." 8-14 LoveI’s ‘absenceI is made known as a defect of beingI’ (1:140) The Family Idiot (1:140-1, Fr. 1:148, my paragraph break, last sentence = "In this sense he is beneath the dog, who at least interiorizesI the loveI that makes himI its objectI.") With this defect, the little garcon discoversdial/lived himself sadly insignificant and disunited. Superior to the beast, on the other hand, in that this interior crack is already presence_to selfc. Nevertheless the shattered but indissoluble unity of the reflecting [reflétant] and the reflected-on [reflété], manifests a simple ontological fissionc**: the presence_toI selfI in everyone has the basic structuredial/lived of praxisc. (1:141, Fr. 1:148) Even on the levelok of non-theticlivedR consciousness, intuitionlivedc is conditioned by individual history: the rotating twinning can include a refusal, an approval, a futile effort to crush the two terms in the unity of en-soi [in-itselfontology]. Gustave, even in that fundamental ‘pour-soi [for-itselfontology]c,’ labors under a frustration: his presence_toI selfI is the intuition of a lesser being[-there]—as naturelivedc, in comparison to the culture being indecipherable and superior. His consciousness is a perpetual falling back which, from the privacy of a realm above, discoversdial/lived existence to be a priori a realm below. This is not a matter of an inferiority ‘complex’ or even of the feeling of inferiorityI—in what way would he be inferiorI? to whom? to what? But the realm above by its very absence or, if you like, by its presence_to the above constitutesdial the existenceI of the realmI below as misery, in the sense that Pascal meant the ‘misery of man without God.’ And this misery does not inform existenceI

that it is lackingdial/lived this_or_that quality; in itself existenceIc is lackI, it is thatI singular lack which defines this existence and which is not a lack of anything in

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particular. This [lack] easily comprehends itself as the lack of love; when loveI is present, the dough [below] of the spirits rises; when absent, it sinks. The unlovedI child suffers from neglect, from nature present_toI the selfI as inadequacy—through his futile efforts to grasp [transformslived/2negtolived/1neg] inaccessible significations—as passivity and as pure ‘being-there’ with no purpose or reason. Yet these negative and general characteristics do not emerge from any comparisonposited. It is simply the lack of love felt by the living himself, at the levelok of the syntheticdial unity of his existenceI, as an internalok possibility which eludes him at the moment when it posesc itself—that is to say continually—to realize itself. The child remains on the levelok of pure subjectivitylivedc; he does not designate the loveI which is refused as a being from outside through the empty category of objectivitylived as a reality that is powerless and unconnected [mal liée]—loveIR is unknown [pas connu] but its absence is made known [connaître] ok as a defect of beingI by the rising of this unleavened dough [above], sunk in advance. Ennui*** is the pain of loveI ignorant of itself. Through the intuition of contingency and monotony, even in the unpredictable, he discoversdial/lived his objectiveI character as someone unlovedI—his1neg fundamental connectionok [of three degrees]1neg&2neg with the otherlived/2neg—to be the subjectiveI truth of his existence. To be lovedI would be to interiorized the affection of the otherI and realize himself in and through this strange synthesisdial/lived; not to be lovedI is felt and realizedI as the impossibility of lovingI oneselfI. And once again, let us comprehend that it is not the child’s frustrated effort to loveI (to take pleasure), to give loveI to the living flow, that makes what he is; simply he is dissatisfied, he feels the absenceI

of maternal loveI directly as a non-loveI of the self. [continuing same paragraph below]-------------------------------------------------

Ref Sartre\Emotions-Hatredposited ‘is credit for an infinityI of anger or repulsed consciousness in the pastlived or in the future ... a veritable passage to infinityI’ (TE 61-8)** Compare with two above terms, i.e., crack and shattered.*** Ref Sartre\Index of Terms-ENNUI [ennui]; 4 hits, all in flaco;

Annex\Pol...\Capitalism-R[Fromm] Uncompensated boredom and violenceAnnex\Heidegger\Boredom-RIndex

Page 1:142 out of sequence at Sartre\Emotions-The Family Idiot: Self-hatred ‘cannot be very strong since the hated self can never entirely be an object for the self that hatesposited

8-14Flac When ‘passivity is the only conceivable form of action, one must endureI one’s very selfnessI as a being-other’ (1:143)

The Family Idiot (1:143-4, Fr. 1:151) "Ennui—this is the malaise. It is the living out of non-valorization. From this we shall easily understand that Gustave entered the world of language at an oblique angle. LoveR gives, awaits, receives—

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there is a reciprocity of designation. Without this fundamental bond, the child is a signified without being a signifier. MeaningsCDR pass through him and sometimes take hold, but they remain alien to him—through these alien meaningsI the Otherconcept penetrates him; as others**, they recede toward the OtherI; within the same time inert, half-closed, they exhibit the power of the invisible occupant. Reduced to the contemplation of his passivityR, the child cannot know that he has the structuredial/lived of a sign and that the living experience of surpassing1negc is in him, as in everyone, the foundation of signification. (1:144) Thus languageI comes to him from the outsidedial/posited; the surpassingIc significantI is the operationdial/posited of the OtherI

ok and is accomplished by a significationI which the exterior determinesdial [‘that is, as limitation/negation’]. He will interpret it as he did his first habits: it is something passiveI, an objectivelived result of alien acts at the heart of his subjectivity. Words are things conveyed by the flow of experience Fr=?; he will have a great deal of difficulty fashioning them into the living instruments of his own surpassing1neg toward the exterior, and he will never succeed completely because he has been made passiveI by maternal attentions, and because transcendencelived/1neg and the project—his permanent possibilities for actingI—have been stifled from the beginning. To speak is to actI; since he suffers it, names are imposed on him which he learns without recognizing himself in them, that is, without claiming them as his own. These are alien imprints, landmarks for the others; when he fathoms their use and is penetrated by a slow osmosis of their meaningsI, he is quite far from inferring the beginning of a reciprocity. Others nameI him, he does not know how to nameI himself. It will not be long, in spite of everything, before he discoversdial/lived in these determinations [‘that is, as limitation’] which touch him superficially an actual hypothesis of his essential reality. From the moment a child can apply a nameI to an objectposited in his environment, he in effect assimilates the process of namingI to the discoveryI of being[-there]I***e... It comes to him from without, and what can he do but accept it? This is one reason—and not the least significant—for his stupors. Not that his feelings are by nature inexpressible—the heterogeneity of discourse and feelings is only a fiction in general, as well as in each particular case. Simply, Gustave’s passivityI makes the process of namingI unilateral: the verbal act wounds him. Withered, compressed, and no future, no justification his feelings do not claim to designate themselves, either for himself or for others.

(1:145, Fr. 1:152) "We know why. Deprived of maternal solicitude, he never felt that he awakened interest in othersI, and in a way he is confined to living his life day by day without beingI interested in it himself. The intention to designate—meaningI to know and to make known—is naturally encountered in every moment of his experience Fr=?, but it is dormant. Awakened, its muteness is so profound that the words ‘would not get across.’ And then there is ennui, that self-loathing—why

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would he want to communicate his beingI-less, his non-valuelived? When learned words diffuse their meaningsI, when these meaningsI penetrate little by little into the deep reaches of his passivityI, they seem to him his very substance and at the same time foreign agents. InsignificantI, they signify him; they signifyI to him what he is. But the verbal intentionI remains numbed, it does not extend itself toward the proposed meaningCDRlived in order to claim it and shoot it back like a bullet. He already recognizes himself readily in the terms of the discourse and at the same time finds nothing of himself in it. Or else he imagines that he remains inadequate to words, that they serve rich, complete beings, and that he escapes them through his thankless poverty. He is, he feels what they say—nothing else, nothing more, much less. The stupor in this case is born of that elusive, indefinable less which his very inconsistency prevents him from seeing clearly and from opposing to the plenitude of spoken words. But it also happens that the wordI in itself seems strange to him. The proper nameI, the customary qualifications are the very beingI of the child; only for a lack of spontaneity assent, this being[-there]I which is unquestionably his remains beyond his reach; it is him, the signified contents relate to Gustave alone—there is proof, but it is a piece of evidencedial/lived directed to the wrong person, i.e., the other. It could be said that it [the nameI] is concocted in order to present the little boy to some other consciousness. In this verbal intuition, the stupor derives this time from alteritylived; or rather, the child loses his way in the confusion of selfI and Otherconcept. He is himself as an OtherI and for an OtherI. The lackdial/lived of distinction between these categories will not surprise us; in order to distinguish between them, to oppose them and then unite them by syntheticdial bonds in a perpetual transformation would require the simplest dialectical movementdial/lived, the movementI of life itself, nothing more. And this movementI certainly exists in Gustave since the little boy, even in slow motion, is in the process of living. But he is blocked, suppressed, diverted by constitutiondial/group passivity in immanence, like a subterranean river meandering; when the river flows later in the open, the harm will have already been done, silt will continually threaten to choke it. (1:146) In the first years, in any case, the categories mingle and interpenetrate; when passivity is the only conceivable form of action, one must endure one’s very selfness [ipséité] as a being-otherI."

-------------------------------------------------** See last sentence in sub-topic, ‘when passivity is the only conceivable form of action, one must endure one’s very selfness [ipséité] as a being-otherI’.*** [Both his or its being[-there], subject and object, appear intended through the phrase below] ‘The intention to designate—meaning to know and to make known...’

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8-14Flac I ‘will never knowontology/2neg anything that the Otherconcept does not guarantee for me, but Knowledgeconcept of others has only myself as its guarantee’ (1:148)

The Family Idiot (1:148, Fr. 1:153) "e...Has he taken refuge in silence? No, everything is speech. Nevertheless, he is lackingdial/lived the words that would designate him more precisely. They are lacking but their place is reserved: muteness, future speech, is the intersection from which the little boy contemplates speech in its plenitude and his own insufficiency. But neither his age nor his passivity will permit him to look for a new expression; muteness, then, is passiveIc expectatione..."

(1:151-4, Fr. 159) "It is Truthconcept that is at stake. For him to recognize and affirm anything—were it only disguising an error or a lie—it is necessaryCDRdial/lived and sufficient that it bear the mark of the Otherconcept

ok**. And of course he would hardly be mistaken if he envisaged truth as a communal enterprise and a demand for reciprocity: I [je] will never know [saurai] ontology / 2neg anything that the Other ok

I does not guarantee for me, but it must be added that the Knowledge [Savior] concept of others ok has only myself as its guarantee. Yet Gustave is unaware of reciprocityI. We have seen, we shall see still more vividly, that this relationok [of three degrees]1st&2neg escapes him; when it is absent, he cannot conceive of it, and when it is present, he neither comprehends [comprend] nor sanctions it, nor can be satisfied with it. So persistent is he in this attitude toward reciprocity that either it breaks apart or he transforms it into a feudal relationship. We already know why. If he were active, he would create the experience Fr=? of antagonism or of mutual aid—this is the world of men; but he is passiveI, submissive, because he submits to foreign domination; activityI becomes a party to other people’s attributions and Gustave can be their objectposited. Their subject never. Yet truthIc is always an enterprise; therefore, Gustave is either unaware of it or submits to it. Let us say that he is unaware of it. He has never had activeI perceptionslivedc—a blend of intuitionlivedR and declaration—about his own existence which are conclusive as to what they verify. (1:152) I have said that this hazardous and timid life was going to provide itself with a language, but it is less a matter of life’s defining itself than of investing words with a certain flavor. It tastes itself and passes, and the tasting is not knowledge [connaissance]—it is fixed, like a parasite, on a moment of existenceI which draws it into oblivion. What is missing? The basic actI: affirmationdial. Let us say that he submits. If affirmationI is the essence of truthI, it will be up to the Otherconcept to assent. The judicial actI seems to the child an alien praxis. This actI puts an official seal on words, on gestures, and marked in this way they have a strange power—they slip through eyes and ears like a sovereign edict enabling the being[-there], such as he is, to see, to believe. Gustave’s ‘naivetes’ have no other source: if the OtherI makes decisions, the unique

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foundation of knowledge [savoir] is the principle of authority. Therefore the child adjusts his credulousness to the familial or social importance, to the age, bearing, and sex of his interlocutor. The losses here are considerable. The truelivedc statement is given2neg in a propositionc—an active I synthesis dial/lived—articulated by the OtherI; this is lodged in the child, with its articulations, as an originally passiveI synthesisI. In this [passive/active synthesis] reversal, what is said loses its function. The same sentence addresses itself to the same objectsI, unites them through the same links; nevertheless everything is changed. To understandposited

Fr=?c the words is to

reconstruct a synthesisdial/lived, to construct in advance: one can comprehend half a wordI, half a sentence. The thoughtlivedc appears [apparaît] at once [à la fois] to both speakers as the objectI itself before them—this tree, this crack in the wall, this chair—and as the activeI and practical exfoliation of that objectI with respect to the totalitydial/lived of the environment. This disclosure—an operationdial/lived of one or the other [of the interlocutors]—involves a transcendentlived/1neg indication, the invitation to escape from the self toward . . . ; and if the other is accepted it also includes an actI, induced yet autonomous, which is a reiteration of the first surpassingok of the selfI—two men present_to each otherI through the actualization of their presenceI, which is common to the thing. [continued same paragraph below]

-------------------------------------------------See Herein-Passive and without evidencedial/lived he never goes from belief to knowledge; Sartre\Language&Comprehension-Action, ‘in the course of its accomplishment, provides its own clarification: ‘The experimenter is part of the experimental system’, and sub-topics.** Sartre, BN (p. 283c) "e...If in general there is an Otherconcept

ok, it is necessaryBNontology above all that I be_the_one_who_is_notc the other, and it is in this very negation effected by me upon myself that I make myselfI be and that the otherI arises as the otherI. This negationI which constitutesdial my being[-there]I and which, as Hegel said, makes me appearI [apparaître] as the Sameok confronting [en face de] the OtherI

ok, constitutesI me on the terrain [terrain] of a non-theticlived selfness [ipséité] as ‘Myselfok’e..."

9-14Flac Truth ‘is a controlled transformationI modifying human_relations through the thingI’s modification’ (1:152)

The Family Idiot (1:152-3, Fr. 1:160, continuing my paragraph break) sartre¶Altogether truthlivedR has the character of work, it is a controlled transformationlivedR of the thing in itself which continues to modify human_relations through and by the modification of this reality. To modify it, of course, is only to continue to make it appearFr=? against the totalizinglived background [figure/groundlived] without extracting it from the milieu that produces and sustains it, to allow it to develop in the black light

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of our scrutiny as it is bound to do irresistibly, and in any case in the night of unknowing, which is to say, of everything. But through this single enterprise man objectifieslived himself in the objectposited he discloses. This means that the object, by its appearance, by its clarity, by its limits of exfoliation, of developments hypothetically foreseen, defines its man, or rather its group, the knowledges [connaissances] already acquired, the methods, techniques, and relationsok [of three degrees]1st&2neg of work. (1:153) In designating the thing, in disclosing it as immutable under the name of objectI, man objectifiesI himself; in becoming an objectI by and for human praxis, the thing without changing designates man to his fellow as a human object [through dialectical_circularity]. [continued same paragraph below]

9-14Flac The nominativeI intuition grasps [transformslived/2negtolived/1neg] things2neg because praxis1neg gives them names: Gustave is unaware of this plenitude (1:153)

The Family Idiot (1:153-4, Fr. 1:160, continuing, my paragraph break) sartre¶Let us suppress the moment of praxis for one of the workers—the littlest one, Gustave, as soon as he learns to speak—and what happens? First of all, this: objectsposited without a nameR are not officially recognized or, more precisely, do not exist independently; they live as the concubines of being, as the little Flaubert is of existenceI. [T]ruth—and error, obviously—has no meaningCDRlived for him when he is alone, Three-and four-year-olds make conjectures, promise themselves to report such conjectures to their parents, then forget about them; these resurface if the occasion presents itself with predictable surprise—this is an exploration of the actionsI of veracity. Flaubert does not play at this game; passivec, he allows the emotions he feels and the things he sees to disappear together. That they must have namesI, these alien realities, he has no doubt—for he has parents! But he doesn’t think about it—what does he care?—and then, these namesI do not belong to him, the ceremony of namingI is a privilege of grown-ups. At the least he might ask his mother, as do so many boys at his age: what do you call that? why is it like this? etc. But no, questioning presupposes that the actI of namingI has been done in isolation and in vain. We know very well that Gustave did not actI, either in this way or otherwise. If the adults teach him the nameI of a plant or an animal, it is out of caprice or duty; having asked nothing, he will receive the word as a sacred bond between the parents and the thing. They have dearly wished to initiate him into this rite, he will serve the cult, a choirboy of language; he will even be required in certain circumstances to borrow this_or_that word and pronounce it—as he might be charged with sounding a gong or ringing the bells. Anyway, it is only a loan; after using it, the vocable is restored to the grown-ups’ dictionary, which is not yet a dictionary of accepted ideas. In other words, Gustave engages in namingI when he submits to the social world of communication; he namesI at the command of others, through them,

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for them. Returning to his solitude, he retrieves the semisecrecy of things and of himself; truthI hovers above his head, and he doesn’t even think to raise his eyes to see it. Yet the nominativeR intuitionlivedc is the solid grasping [transformslived/2negto/1neg] of the thing, since the actI gives it a nameI. Gustave is unaware of this intuitive plenitude. Not that the thing is not there, not that he doesn’t see or touch it; he enjoys it with all his senses. (1:154) But he fails to discoverdial/lived it as objectI since he doesn’t engage in the enterprise of attempting to classify it in the herbarium of knowledge [savoir]. [continued same paragraph below]

9-14Flac He cannot see in himself a chainlink of collective operationsdial/lived guaranteeing verbal propositions (1:154)

The Family Idiot (1:154, Fr. 1:161, continuing, my paragraph break) sartre¶This apprehension of the exterior world through the senses and emotions of a secretive child certainly results in confusing the boundaries of self and non-selfI. The general structuresdial/lived of objectivitylivedc is vaguely present from birth; before he can speak, the child spontaneously distinguishes what belongs to him and what belongs to the environment. Put simply, objectivityI, for him as for most children, should continually call forth particular objectificationslivedc—the objectiveI world should be peopled with objectslived. It is not. The intuitions of his sensibility do not invalidate nominative evidencedial/lived, but they do not confirm it either; they are passively suffered without any reference to Truthconcept. They ought nevertheless to support the designation; but no thunder, no lightning, no fiat cuts across them, even if the current of experience Fr=? brings with it the flotsam of half-forgotten words. In sum, no surprise, no particular questioning; lacking the capacity to be articulated in detail, the entire system at some point reverses itself. The question then bears on everything, and this is the stupor: why do names exis? [Fr. 162] But what chiefly concerns us is that the socialc momentdial of objectificationI is never corrected, contested, or confirmed by the intuitiveI return ‘to things themselves.’ Yet knowledge [savoir]livedc is based—directly or indirectly—on immediate evidenceI

ok which is at once [à la fois] a thorough inspection, enjoyment, and focused regard. Through the evidenceI the thing possesses me by yielding itself, but I am affirmed by welcoming it ‘without foreign additions.’ This knowledge [savoir] is rigorously impersonal and then it is us, and then me. The knowledge [connaissance]livedc of some particularity of the thing, inflexibly true—this is our common property; but through the intuitionlivedc which verifies** it once more, here and now, it is mine: it fulfills me, engages me, and defines me. Through evidencedial/lived I appeal from rigorous impersonality to the historical community, and from others to myself; I recover myself by losing myself. This exercise is therefore ethicalR; it is an act that establishes the person but can be accomplished only on the foundation of a

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previously recognized valuelivedR. The resort to the selfI indeed creates the subject’sc absolute confidence in his own person, but first he must assume it. Gustave, non valorized as he is, can under no circumstances consider himself a solid link in a chain of collective operations dial/lived . Nor regardI the simultaneous course of things and his own life as the guarantee of a verbal proposition. To feel being, yes. But not decipher."

-------------------------------------------------Ref Sartre\Index of Terms-VERIFY ; insufficient data

Search for a Method: (p. 147c, Fr. 112) In truth the problem is to invent a movementdial/lived, to re-create it, but the hypothesis is immediately verifiable; the only validdial/lived one is that which will realize within a creativeR movementI the transverse unity of all the heterogeneous structuresdial/lived..."

9-14Flac PassiveI and without evidencedial/lived he never surpasses1neg belief as the first form of knowledge (1:154)

The Family Idiot (1:154-6, Fr. 1:162) "The result is doubly disastrous: even the reality of his self remains alien to him, he knows it only by hearsay. In point of factlived, the basic and immediate structuresdial/lived of the Egoconcept is the spontaneous affirmationdial at the heart of concrete intuition. (1:155) For Gustave it is not that this EgoI eludes him, that it is confused or blurred, or that the child is afraid of confronting it directly; it is rather that the Egoconcept/1negI is of a different order of things and does not exist outside the universe of signification, that is, outside of language, the magical power of grown-ups. Let the word come to mind again unexpectedly, the child is panic-stricken and the stupor recurs. But except for these unpleasant encounters, no truelivedR link between act and being suddenly makes the objectposited emerge through the subject and the subject through the objectI

ce... Yet every probable meaningCDRlived includes in itself a mortgage on our [original]_belieflivedR; the universe of signs is first that of faith: in every sentences heard, in every wordI that vibrates in my ear, I discoverdial/lived a sovereign affirmationI

which pursues me, which requires that I claim responsibility for it.**a Two moments can be distinguished in this process, although they are in general confused. The declaration affects me, I believed in it as it is momentarily the royal actI of the Otherconcept, his metamorphosis into man, for mistrust is a sickness. You have to begin with credence or to deny man—you make a fool of yourself in the beginning, but so what? After all, if the OtherI wants to be subhumen, it’s up to him to prove it, not me. This first passive moment—one man’s confidence in another—is immediately passed over on the way to reciprocity: I sovereignly affirm what is sovereignly affirmed to me. However, I would continually be taken in by lies, fallacies, if I did not have genuine reducing agents at my command. Or rather, I

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have only one, though it varies constantly: evidencedial/lived. This means that I reclaim the affirmationI from the OtherI, according to its requirements but in the presence of the thing, through my intuition of it. Belief automatically disappears—it yields to the actI. Now I know [sais]: by means of a yes, a no, a perhaps which I wrest from the thing—or a silence which allows all conjectures—I have transformed probability into truth.**b Such at least is the ideal operationdial/posited. In most cases it isn’t possible. Or not right away. I remain then in the world of signs, authority, beliefsI. In a word, spoken language without the corrective of evidenceI is characterized by this basic feature: credibility. (1:156) And this comes to me from others through their words, like the power of the ruler over his subjects. Belief is not a factlived of individual subjectivity, and we are not disposed to believeI through some inherited tendency; it involves an intersubjective relation [of three degrees]1st&2neg, an incomplete moment in the development of knowledge [savoir]; it is the presenceI within us of an alien will combining words in an assertorial synthesisdial/lived which fascinates and disturbs us until we make it our own will.

(1:156, Fr. 1:163) "From the momentI he is in society, that is, in the family, Gustave is outwitted, overwhelmed, penetrated by signs and their imperious credibility. He believesI. But unlike other children, he never surpasses 1neg this first moment I of knowledge [savoir] . This happens both because he has been made passiveI and because he has no reducing agent at his commandce... [I]t is passivityI that prevents him from establishing his intuitions as truthful evidenceI, in other words, from giving simple enjoyment the structuredial/lived of an act; no reducing agents, no control. Never that solitude—provisional but essential—out of which the decision is made: ‘I am alone, and that is enough.’ Gustave suffers from a disease of the truth; he lacksdial/lived the chief categories, having neither praxis nor vision. As for the Egoconcept, it remains on the level of significations e..."

-------------------------------------------------**a&b See Herein-I ‘will never knowontology/2neg anything that the Otherconcept does not guarantee for me, but Knowledgeconcept of others has only myself as its guarantee’ (1:148), and cross-references

10-14Flac His Egoconcept and feelingsI are beliefs: Role playing is only believedI (1:162)

The Family Idiot (1:162-3, Fr. 1:170) "e...he is lost without landmarks, believing everything because he knows nothing; this is what compels him to play a role. Actually, he does not recognize himself at all, he is not attracted to anything, he does not discoverdial/lived his singularity or even his anchorage in the medium of objectivelived meaningsCDR; without the ability to choose himself by choosingI the expressions that suit him, without ever having felt the fundamental needdial/lived to

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express himself, he plays the drama of choice. In guiding himself by the supposed preferences of his parents, he adopts signification without any reference to a signified that doesn’t exist for him, and when these significationsI are inside him, alien intentions that define him, he makes himself through gestures into whatever he is designated by the adopted expression. A double drama: choiceI is imitated, the simple result of his malleability, and hence exterior forces have decided for him; the only honest attitude would have been indifference**, and this, precisely, was impossible since he had to submit to the verbal preferences of others. The character is played out, then, the one that has been attributed to him. But—it’s the questionI of enough vague schemesI —he does not feel it as his reality; his own Egoconcept inside him is only an objectposited of belief, as are its qualities, of which, as we have seen, he has a poor understanding. Therefore he expresses himself before feeling, since he plays at feeling what he expresses. (1:163) Does he now feel the role he is playing? No, he believesI he is feeling it. The drama is born here from beliefI, and beliefI possesses him without solid reducing_agents and singularly without evidencedial/lived. [Fr. 171] So the drama must not be understood as if Gustave were conscious of playing it. But neither is he unconscious. Unlike a professional actor, he can neither fall in with his role nor denounce it in the name of his subjective reality; specified feelings are born from their very specification, though actually these are gestures [above, his gesturesI precede feelings]. Gustave fully feels the poverty of their plots, the voids, the overexcitement which finally replace experience Fr=? and are only a flight in the face of inconsistency. But his deeper life is unexpressed, inexpressible, unexpressive at least according to this plan, with these words; it remains out of range, very far away, very far below. Therefore this deeper life does not challenge new meaningsCDRI and the drama that ensues—no conflict, no collisions, no evidenceI. What is spoken is feigned, what is lived is not spokenI."

-------------------------------------------------Ref Sartre\Index of Terms-INDIFFERENCE ; cf. Horney’s Pol...\Resignation.

Pages 1:167-8 with Ftn. 7 out of sequence at Sartre\The Other-The Otherconcept and the Egoconcept (Fl1:167, Fr. 1:175, footnote 7)

6. Father and Son (1:173-438, Fr. 1:180) and 7. Two Ideologies (1:439-627, Fr. 1:453) are in the file Sartre\Flaubert&Father in Vol. 1

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