One could call this a Janus-faced view of aesthetic critique – namely,
that the tilt ofl’art pour l’arttoward aestheticism can be corrected, once
it is seen that “art for art’s sake” carries within itself the seeds of its
own critical relevance if pursued to its extreme of indifference in the face
of socioeconomic exploitation, oppressive practices and gratuitous
violence. It may satisfy itself with “shocking the bourgeoisie” as didles
poe`tes maudits, or subjecting their values and institutions to a cynical
laugh, as did Flaubert, or by issuing in a kind of disgust with the
impotence of art itself in the face of oppression and exploitation, as with
Sartre’s famous turn from imaginative literature to direct political action
in the 1960 s.^21 In other words, the close interrelation between the good
and the beautiful, first invoked in classical antiquity and later reintro-
duced with Kant, is arguably haunting Sartre inWhat is Literature?and
in these biographies as well. Witness his admission to PierreVerstraeten
in 1965 , that the ethical and the concrete universal coalesce in a domain
larger than that of language.^22
In a 1975 interview, Roland Barthes credits Sartre with effecting
a fundamental change in the status of Literature with a capitalL:
There is a man...who is situated at the exact point of historical disintegration
of literature. This man is Sartre. There can be little doubt that he has exercised an
extremely influential kind of cultural and literary leadership, and continues to do so;
yet since, as it happens, his work may be defined as a destruction of the affectation of
literary prose, he has accordingly made an important contribution to the destruction
of the myth of literature.^23
And one might add that he thereby strengthened the case for committed
literature.
Wahrheit, which occasioned Sartre’sTruth and Existence. As a sign of the Heideggerian
presence in Beauvoir’s thought as well, consider her use of the term in “man also wills
himself to be a disclosure of being” (Ethics of Ambiguity, 23 , 12 , 30 , 80 ).(^21) SeeWords 212 ;F 159 , for a similar realization ascribed to Flaubert: “And the Latins’ greatest
fault lay in failing to understand that their reign was only a moment of history, that their
slogan ‘power to the imagination’ was merely a mystification; for the imagination is in
principlepowerlessand its advent had not produced an abeyance of reality but, in fact,
corresponded to their determination to ignore reality, and particularly their own insertion in
22 universal reality” (FIv:^552 ;IFiii:^593 ).
Sitix,“L’E ́crivant et sa langue,” 74. On the wider extension of the “philosophical concrete
23 universal” than language, see pages^62 –^76.
“Radioscopie: Roland Barthes,” interview with Jacques Chancel, 17 Feb. 1975 , in Jacques
Chancel,Radioscopie(Paris: Robert Laffont, 1976 ), 255 – 256 , cited inEB 20.
Mallarme ́: the shadowy side of lucidity 389