Metaphysics of loss

Abstract

Paul Valéry's " Nous autres, civilisations, nous savons maintenant que nous sommes mortelles " is an almost exact echo of Bernard de Cluny's few verses quoted in the previous lesson, if only for the somewhat derisory power accorded to names, empty, beautiful names, whose pure aesthetic value appears only as a consequence of the loss of the referent. Death implies that the referent is replaced by a name, a naked sign, but one that engenders the sphere of the aesthetic (Valéry speaks of " beaux noms "). The extreme point of this theory is found in the idea of " pure poetry " (Henri Brémond), whose entire value resides in its prosody alone : aesthetic value then takes over from referential value. Written in 1919, Valéry's text is imbued with a sense of loss following the war. This feeling is found throughout the history of the world, and is exemplified in Saint Augustine's The City of God, composed shortly after the sack of Rome by Alaric (410). However, this work is not a lament but an exhortation to life in God. The sense of loss, then, is not simply a question of events, but of the attitude adopted in the face of them. In Albertine disparue, Proust shows that this feeling is itself destined to disappear, and that the awareness of this disappearance is terrifying.

In the ^2nd century, Marcus Aurelius, through Stoic exercises, became accustomed to the thought of death : a sign that it was not to be taken for granted. He was perhaps one of the key figures in thinking about the period between the end of polytheism and the beginning of Christianity " where man alone was " (Flaubert). Indeed, a century before him, Plutarch observed that oracles, which had played such a major role in Antiquity, were losing their importance.

But whereas pagan mysticism was melancholy, Judaism was built on loss, particularly after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. Indeed, the absence of a place of sacrifice helped to develop a culture of text, to the point where commentaries and memories became the rite itself. The Kabbalah represents this complex " theology of loss ", where the world, following a retraction of the infinite, must understand itself as the effect of a loss. This metaphysics of loss allows us to see literary works in a different light.