Bâcle, B; (2016) Les contre-écritures de Maine de Biran (1766-1824) et de Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834). TRANS- , 20 10.4000/trans.1355.

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Abstract

In our disenchanted world, where no ‘universal reader’ eagerly expects us to produce anything, and any external validation is necessarily circumscribed and conditional, it can be more and more difficult to convince ourselves that there is any point in writing. Some two centuries ago, Maine de Biran and Samuel Taylor Coleridge realised that the increasingly utilitarian climate meant that the main criterion, when it came to the success of literary production, had become immediate gratification. This is what led them to write, on the side of a number of scattered and sometimes confusing publications, against their readership, in their respective Journal and Notebooks. These writings were de facto a means of resisting against the implacable logic of the need for external recognition, which Biran and Coleridge knew to be, at heart, unquenchable. Jean-Paul Sartre, however, claimed that the struggle of most of nineteenth-century literature against its bourgeois audience was bound to fail, given that it only ever revolved around vain psychological and aesthetic matters. But, as Paul Ricoeur suggests, this assimilation of literary negation with its opposite rests on a restricted view of both being and nothingness. If we are all in it together, and no one can be deemed fully uncompromised, then any form of resistance, impure as it may be, counts.

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