Abstract
At the same time as Valéry was expounding the idea of a pure poetry, based on the model of music, which provoked heated debate in the years 1920, he also considered that poetry was dead (along with the generation that had died on the battlefields of the First World War). His thinking on art is imbued with a kind of Darwinism, according to which all artists seek, through multiform attempts, the best way to paint in general : thus, by asserting that " the painter seeks painting ", he captures the idea of a progress that is achieved through all painters (and artists in general).
The break represented by the Great War was to determine Valéry's existential attitude, which was one ofdistance. For him, it's a question of stopping in the flow of thoughts and sensations, of distancing ourselves and reflecting : we are only as good as our judgments and beliefs. Valéry mythologized this ideal as " nuit de Gênes " : that stormy night in Genoa in 1892, when, in the midst of a love and poetry crisis, he suddenly decided to stop his poetic activity and begin a reflective process. He then began his famous Cahiers, which he continued until his death. He returned to poetry in the years 1910, as both a poet and a thinker about poetry.
This is why this year's lecture is entitled " Valéry ou la Littérature ". Valéry is a representative figure of literature, one of those poets who defined the very essence of literature, its character of pure form : hence the capital to Literature. But he is also a thinker of the gap, who needs to distance himself from the practice of literature in order to be able to think it. He is like Socrates, one of the characters in his dialogue Eupalinos ou l'architecte : " I was born several ". We can only be ourselves because we could have been others.
To think is to live a second time : it means being aware of other possible choices, and not letting ourselves be locked into a definitive choice. Thinking creates a departure from the self. Our lecture therefore looks at the transition from one Valéry poet to another, the one who " doesn't give a damn " about poetry, according to Gide, and at their coexistence.
Valéry's duality is particularly expressed in the diagram of the two mountains reproduced in the edition of the Cours de poétique. On one side is the mountain (or pyramid) of bodily needs, and on the other the mountain of language creations : both propose basic needs or creations, and refinements (at the top) that are difficult to access. This diagram represents both an ideal and the impossibility of achieving it.
