Every bike rider knows that moment when, pumping the pedals, there is a certain jerking, a certain skip that interrupts the smooth interaction of the teeth of the pedal wheel against the links of the chain. The skipping does not immediately lead to the chain coming off the bike – the teeth catch and disengage in a certain jumpy pattern.
The coordination and possible dis-coordination between the chain and the teeth of the wheel is a metaphor, in Sartre’s essay on Brice Parain, Aller et retour – Round trip. Parain’s magnum opus was published in 1942, Investigations on the Nature and Function of Language; when it was translated into English it was as a thing to fill out French intellectual history, and not to address Anglophile philosophers. But it did make a big impression on 40s intellectuals: both Sartre and Blanchot wrote essays on it, and it was generally part of the discourse in which Bataille, de Beauvoir, Paulhan and others took part. Parain latter became one of the mandarins behind Gallimard's Pleiade editions. He was a bit of a backdoor man, a bit of a celebrity.
The metaphor of the round trip points us to Parain’s uniquely existentialist take on language. While the Vienna school and the Analytics were trying to find the logic that would constitute a Language in which the truth function could be logically interior within propositions – the Tarskian dream of a self-contained language – Parain was fascinated, in Sartre’s phrase, by “the vertiginous sentiment of an inexactness of language.” Parain was a Hegelian, not a Heideggerian, but he too thought that philosophy begins with the way something doesn’t work – the broken tool opens up its “toolness” (“toolness” is so verbally ugly that it makes an aesthetic fit for the notion). Through that break, Parain saw into the problem with treating language monologically – via examples such as formulas and instructions. What pleased Sartre was that Parain saw the subject situated in language – in dialogue.
Sartre, notoriously, neglected the philosophy of language at a time when philosophers were making the linguistic turn like gangbusters. But in the Parain essay, he sketches certain questions that might introduce an existentialist theory of language. In particular, the decalage, the ungearing, between language and experience: “how to insert in language an experience that was made without it?” Of course, all experiences and their names are lifted out of themselves by the generalizing power of language. One can approach this calmly, speculatively, imagining experiments – or one can have this confrontation thrust upon one as the world changes around one. Sartre makes much of Parain as an interwar writer, originally from a peasant family, who was defined by the trenches on one side and the concentration camps and the other. Or, in a less lurid light, as one who saw the collapse of the old order in real time.
Sartre roots the philosophy of language, or the metaphysical need for one, not in science, but in social crisis. In doing so, he overdoes Parain’s peasant roots – as I have learned from other sources. But he puts his fingers on something that the language turn philosophers have ignored by turning to the “timeless” methodology of science: the language turn comes out of an existential social situation, one in which words and silences are undergoing a systematic connotative change. The word war itself, a defining word, becomes at the same time an ambiguous one: was the interwar period really a peace? In 1944, are the Allies really allied? In 1949, when the essay was included in Situations, what was war and what was peace in Europe, or Asia, or Africa?
There’s a bit of Round trip that is less about language’s failure in general than about the crisis and responses to the crisis in the interwar period. Parain’s choice was of a certain kind of silence, which Sartre calls infrasilence – a silence that surround the word with its occasion, with its painfulness, its cruelty. The kind of silence that is described, in a story, as “stunned”. Sartre is still placing Parain in the generation that came out of WWI looking for a solution – in Parain’s case, finding it in communism for a period of his life. There were also the surrealists and the “revolution in poetic language”, to borrow Kristeva’s phrase. Sartre was thinking of how the twenties and thirties could give us both Breton and the PCF, Bataille and the ultra-right – like other French intellectuals of the 1940s, chewing over the mystery of France’s defeat.
“All those destroyers that he had followed for an instant are possessed, in one way or another, by the demiurgic, Nietzschean pride in this one thing, that they all believed in the plasticity of human nature. If they burned the old man, it was to hasten the coming of a new man. There was the surrealist man, the gidean man, the Marxist man, who all wait for us on the horizon.It was a matter of both unmasking and fabricating at the same time. In one way the future is empty, and noone could prevision it; in another sense the future exists more than the present; the inebriation of all these smasher-uppers was about constructing a world which they wouldn’t know and wouldn’t recognize once it was built; the joy was in the risk, in not knowing what they were making, the bitter joy of telling oneself that we were to lead people to the threshold of the promised land when one would remain, on that threshold, and regard them all going away. These sentiments were completely foreign to Parain. He had no eyes for the future, he didn’t believe in it. If he spoke of it, it was to imagine a world which unmade itself; here was a man who had, when all is said and done, lost himself; his theory of language must lead him, had led him for a moment to the idea of the plasticity of man: change the words, change the person. But nothing was, in reality, more distant from his deepest reflexion. The image that was most deeply embedded in his memory was of the natural order. The return of the seasons and the birds, the growth of plants and children, the fixed order of the stars and the planets. This was the order he opposed in secret to the factitious order of discourse. To this order, the beasts submit; and also man, that beast who speaks.”
Sartre understood this, while at the same time developing a theory of liberty that involved the most radical plasticity. I like the contradiction, or rather, the stitching. The metaphysical stitching.
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