Rethinking Literary Naturalism, by Ian James

Reviewed by James Martell

Ian James, Rethinking Literary Naturalism: Proust and Quignard After Life (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2025), 260 pp.

(The Erechtheion. Photo credit: James Martell, Athens 2024)

Preamble: The Erechtheion

Allow me to begin this review with a little digression, one like the Erechtheion as it appears to the left of the visitor when climbing the Acropolis in order to visit the Parthenon: As I was reading Ian James’ most recent book, Rethinking Literary Naturalism: Proust and Quignard After Life, I kept being haunted by images of the drapery of caryatides and korai (young women figures), particularly when I would reflect on one of the main notions developed by James, that of the limit-point of immanence in its echo with other Jamesian notions and figures like ‘modelling’ and ‘layers’, or with repeated expressions like ‘emerging’, ‘out of’, ‘step back into’ and ‘bear or carry’. Thinking life through these figural, topological and topographic notions I kept going back to the evolution of drapery and representations of the peplos from early classical statues to their development in the last quarter of the 5th century. As art historians tell the story, this sculptural evolution went from an ‘austere and serious style’, through ‘ampler rhythms and softer forms’, to a style ‘in which elegance, decorativeness and linear grace superseded all other values’.^[1] What is most striking in this late style to me is how the sculptors moved from realism and an interest in the accurate reproduction of bodily form to an almost maniacal passion for drapery and its folds, swirls, and turns. However, paradoxically, such distracted gaze and diverted sculpting end up inciting even more interest for the spectator in the korai’s bodies, as the movement makes the sculpted fabric look thinner, more transparent, and more adhered to the body as ever before. Consequently, even in their sometimes awkward postures (about to sit down, lifting a foot), these late sculptures appear as if, through the flimsy barrier or limit-point of their draperies, one could—visually or haptically—touch their lived immanence, frozen in the image of maximum vitality given by the swirling movements of the fabric.

Since, as I was reading, my association between James’ conceptual, rhetorical and stylistic devices with Greek sculpture was still flimsy, I was thrilled to discover, through a complex etymological echo, another reason why my reading and interpretative activity of this book made me think of korai. This echo reverberated from close to the end of the book, in the section discussing Pascal Quignard’s oeuvre and particularly the ways in which, from the more ‘theoretical’ and reflective pages of Dernier Royaume, to the proper novels, Quignard develops a to-and-fro movement that suggests a genetic third instance, anterior to all dyads and binaries. For reasons that have to do with my own work, such an instance could not but appear to me as a sister figure to Plato’s notion of the ‘third genus’ (the to the first, ideal, and the second, the copied realm of Plato’s cosmogony) or space called khōra.^[2]

Irreducible to these dyads or binaries there is a third instance, that of the anterior other that produces them, and the space of literature and writing in which the to-and-fro between uterine and solar realms occurs. (…) Quignard’s writing constitutes itself as a semiotic practice, I would say a biosemiotic practice, that does not seek to set itself into an exclusively horizontal and dialogical relation with the human signs of linguistic symbolic systems and their communicative or intentional exchanges. Rather it seeks to articulate itself as an, as it were, downward, vertically descending line running back into the silent signs of life (…).^[3] (222)

While the etymological connections between ‘khōra’ (χώρα) and ‘Kore’ (κόρη) remain speculative, just as the relations of these terms to ‘choreography’ (from χορεία) and even ‘chaos’ (χάος), it is undeniable that, in the sedimented history of Western thought, not only through its religions, philosophies, and literatures, but also through its sciences and scientific enterprises, there is an insistent and unerasable link between the spatio-temporal notion of origin (khōra) and the female and/or maternal body (kore). This link, as we know, extends and somewhat founds Romanticist ideas of ‘nature’ as well as unconscious and conscious representations of women or the female as the Eternal Feminine or das Ewige-Weibliche, the beginning and end of (hu)mankind, or what Beckett called the ‘wombtomb’ of human existence. As I was preparing to review this wonderful new volume, it is precisely these connections that, in my interpretation of the book (that is to say, modelled and determined by it, but also recreating its arguments), I realized need to be thought or unthought after reading life and literature again through Ian James’ most recent proposal.

A Novel Naturalism

James explains clearly in the Introduction what he proposes to do in this new book. It is a tripartite, or triply folded parallel reading of three bodies of work, none of which is seen under the lens of the other, but rather each is contiguous to the other two: 1) the developing scientific branch of biosemiotics, 2) Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu, and 3) Pascal Quignard’s Dernier Royaume. Such a reading has as its end goal the proposal of a novel naturalism that arises from a shared, ‘immanent posture of thought’ found in these three oeuvres, a posture straddling thus literary creation and scientific discourse:

So, the novel naturalism that will be elaborated in these pages describes what will be called an immanent posture of thought, of literary writing, and of scientific theory that, in Proust, Quignard, and biosemiotics respectively involves a series of operations that can be said to articulate that posture and the modes of production that it entails. The diverse practices and techniques of biosemiotics or of Proust’s and Quignard’s works adopt a stance vis-à-vis the field of anterior natural signs that, it will be argued, is their prior condition or structuring possibility. (17, my italics)

Thus, already in the production of this posture, or in its articulation by the operations of biosemioticians, Proust, and Quignard, we see this raising of the pre-originary ground or space that, borrowing from Plato, Kristeva called the semiotic khōra: ‘In this way the

drives, which are “energy” charges as well as “psychical” marks, articulate what we call a khōra: a nonexpressive totality formed by these drives and their stases in a motility that is as full of movement as it is regulated’.^[4] However, while Kristeva’s developments of such a notion in Revolution in Poetic Language focus mostly on the ‘semiotic’ khōra as the pre-symbolic space of poetic generation, James sees this ‘field of anterior natural signs’ as the space of a biology that reaches before any human constitution, in other words, the space of life as what antecedes yet permeates the human.

Highlighting the radicality (in the Kantian sense of anteriority) of this ‘immanent posture’ and of the thinking meaning and sense as essential dimensions of life at large that this nascent scientific view produces, James begins thus the exploration of this immanent posture with the collective work of biosemiotics.

‘Biosemiotics and the Post-dicative’

This is the subtitle on the main section on biosemiotics in Rethinking Literary Naturalism: Proust and Quignard After Life. It foregrounds the essential trait of the ‘immanent posture’ of a writing and thinking ‘after life’, that is to say, of a ‘post-dicative’ (self) positioning. It is in this ‘immanent posture’ that lies the revolutionary trait of biosemiotics vis-a-vis biology and other empirical sciences. While other biological theories—like biosemantics or code biology—keep a transcendent position that considers organisms to be analogous to mechanisms or machines transmitting information without producing actual immanent meaning, biosemiotics ‘introduces a qualitative organicism into biology and poses meaning in terms of the interpretation of signs within life processes, understanding life as such to be constituted in sign activity, and borrowing explicitly from the philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce’ (23). James underlines the causal determination in Peirce’s tripartite structure of the sign (object → sign [vehicle] → interpretant) as biosemiotics utilizes it to read the semiotic activity of (non human) life—particularly in comparison with the influential (in French structuralism and poststructuralism) dyadic Saussurian theory (signifier & signified)—because such structure establishes not only a continuity, but also a determination between the natural non-human world and human cultural productions. It is this sequentialization and determination that, embodied in James’ notion of the post-dicative, will subtend all the posterior concepts exemplified within the oeuvres of Proust and Quignard:

Thus, diagrammatic signs, heteropoietic production, bio-mythic fabulation, and the affirmation of bio-community are all forms of post-dicative saying. They are all instances of a ‘stepping back into’ and interpretive mapping of anterior sign relations and (bio)semiotic networks. These instances are immanent transforms of semiosis and of natural signs rather than representations of them. (49)

Proust

In a brilliant analysis of both Proust’s own development and of the literary and philosophical ambiance in which he grew, James shows how the apparent paradox of a ‘A Proustian Naturalism?’ (as the first subsection is called) can be resolved. Such resolution lies not only in the complexity itself of the different notions of ‘naturalism’ and ‘nature’ that were developing in France during the Third Republic, but also in Proust’s own idiosyncratic understanding of nature in the Recherche, influenced by his formation embedded in German idealism and Post-Kantian thought, and conditioned by his own critique of such tradition. As James explains, while the traditional view of Proust’s oeuvre as an instantiation of the idealist writing theory developed in Le temps retrouvé has given way to more materialist readings—a tension displayed by Proust himself in La Prisonnière when talking about two hypotheses, an idealist or spiritualist and a materialist one (‘which recur in all important questions, questions about the truth of Art, of reality, of the Immortality of the Soul’ [Proust^[5] qtd. in 90])—such readings must be supplemented by an understanding of how the novel raises out of such materiality, conceived as non-human life, in a series of limit-point encounters.

Thus, somewhat following the inaugural reading by Deleuze of Proust as a writer of signs while continuing on his own parallel interpretation of the signs in the Recherche with those in biosemiotics and the ones in Quignard’s own oeuvre, James shows how these Proustian signs are both an interpretation and an address to the limit point of nature. As James explains it, since such an interpretation and address are performed only through a ‘stepping back’ into the immanence of (non-human) life—an immanence that, as we have said, nevertheless continually permeates human life and culture—they cannot be determined by any final epistemological or ontological discourse. In this way, these signs are always an encounter and interpretation after life in the double sense of the French term ‘(d’)après’: ‘after’ as chronologically posterior to (après), but also as ‘according to’ (d’après) in the sense of determined by, life:

Affirming or performing itself as an address to,^[6] and attempted decryption and interpretation of, signs (those emitted by others, by the social world, from the past and present, and from the human and non-human surrounding environment) the Recherche also, consistently I would argue, performs itself as an encounter with that limit-point of conceptualization and representation and as an immanent saying ‘after’ the encounter with that limit-point. This ‘saying after’ at once eclipses the ontological and epistemological pretension of philosophical knowledge and at the same time performs a ‘step back’ into the obscure immanence of naturalized meaning that is marked by that very limit-point. (80)

Now, if such a ‘saying after’ eclipses any attempt to definitely determine, from a transcendent standpoint or posture, a sign, it is because the life after which and in which the liminal encounter takes place, is, topologically, ‘an impersonal zone of obscurity and night’ or the ‘existence profonde de la nature’ (deep existence of nature). In other words, this natural life is neither the ideal, eternal essence of the Good as ‘epekeina tes ousias’ (beyond being), nor is it its imitation or mimesis (as an evolutionary consequence of a divine plan). This life is rather the drives and forces that articulate—according to my own interpretation of James’ interpretation—into the pre-topographic ‘place’ of undifferentiation that, according to Plato, can only be seen in a dream: the khōra.

If one takes the side of materiality and immanence then it could be said that, far more than any imagined realm of atemporal essence, it is these depths and forces that are real life, a life that is itself anonymous and in which personality and subjectivity are dissolved into an impersonal zone of obscurity and night. To speak of a Proustian naturalism would be, precisely, to take the side of materiality and immanence and to understand the literary space of the novel and the narrative subjectivity it puts into play both as emerging from, and as being immersed in, an obscure and impersonal zone. This zone would be nothing other than natural life itself. It would be that anteriority of non-human existence encountered by the narrator in episodes such as that of the hawthorn and of the Balbec seascape. It would be a zone marked only in its withdrawal from human cognition and in the narrator’s confrontation with the limit-point of immanence, with the unfathomable ‘existence profonde de la nature’ in which the human finds itself embedded.^[7] (97)

This passage includes two of the notions mentioned in the preamble (The Erechtheion) that I think give the rhythm to Rethinking Literary Naturalism; these are notions that move and of movement: ‘emerging from’ and ‘immersed in.’ Together they describe an analogous movement in both the literary space and subjectivity, a movement into and out of the impersonal zone of nature. Nevertheless, as James’ further analysis of Proust shows, these movements happen not only once as an inaugural and explosive emergence of qualitative life or of culture out of non-human life. They are rather a constant to-and-fro in between different layers, or what James sees in Proust as ‘transmigrations’.

Layers

Proust’s metaphorical use of metempsychosis or the transmigrations of souls—in both Contre Sainte Beuve and the Recherche—to describe memory, inner experience, and the transition from impersonal to personal life, allows James to develop a complex and rich theory of biosemiotic layers. This theory is, in my view, a deep analysis of the lines in the Timaeus where khōra is said to appear to us only through a ‘bastard reasoning’ where we ‘dimly dream (ὀνειροπολοῦμεν) and affirm that it is somehow necessary that all that exists should exist in some spot and occupying some place (χώραν)’.^[8] Such topographic and topological necessity appears in Proust—as James explains—particularly in the way dreaming exposes the layered semiotic ontology of a life shared not only between different temporalities of the individual and different individuals, but also between the human and the non-human lives that surround and flow through us.^[9] Such semiotic layering seems also to build on Freud’s description of the birth of consciousness—and the beginning of the evolution of the nervous system—as the development of a thin vesicle or ‘Bläschen’ that, through both internal and external stimuli, deepened and grew into different layers:^[10]

If sleep and dream are a regression through these anterior layers of self and back further into impersonal and anonymous layers of human, animal, and natural existence, then the experience of waking life can be said to be the exposed surface of an outer layer which is in no less of a relation to these regressive anterior layers encountered in oneiric experience. This outer layer is a surface superimposed over the immediately past layers of the personal self, which would themselves be layered over the infinitely regressing layers that constitute the deep well of immanent life and its field or zone of impersonal memory. (111, my italics)

What appears then as the proper Proustian moment, and one of James most incisive arguments, is how—like that famous Platonic ‘bastard reasoning’ able to reveal to us khōra —it is the vision of art that can reveal or unveil the different layers of life and meaning underneath the surface of everyday consciousness. Art and literature are thus here conceived not only as expression but also as a kind of archeology, and even as an epochè or suspension of the upper layers of habit and accepted meaning that cover up the reality of a life that, through our own history and that of our ancestors, reaches back into the different lifeforms that preceded us, as well as across those that still live around and inside us. Such theoretical potential of art explains why in James’ tripartite reading neither of the three discursive bodies—biosemiotics, the Recherche, and Dernier Royaume—are the only theoretical instrument to read the others. Instead, each discursive body makes visible, in its own, idiomatic way, the stretched out layered life that constitutes our biosemiotic universe. Nevertheless, if even biosemiotics must at some point make the invisible appear through a speculative movement, this movement partakes in the workings of art as the only aesthetico-epistemological leap that can reveal our non-measurable layers and surfaces:

(…) the work of art as an optic, a way of seeing, or as an image that exists in a relation of superposition over the lived world of subjective perception and of shared material existence, continues, despite its contingency and immersion within those worlds, to maintain a privilege: that of being able to uncover, render visible, and disaggregate the obscure layers of anteriority which diffusely permeate and thereby constitute the present as such. The work of art, and by implication Proust’s novel as a work of art, is tied to the temporal flux of everyday experience and the uncovering or making visible through different modes of figuration the layers of anteriority concealed beneath its surface. (120)

Diagrammatic Life & Truth

When we think of theories of truth in Western thought we tend to think of either truth as concordance or as aletheia or revelation. But what James proposes to us in his reading of Proust (next to biosemiotics and Quignard) is a novel idea of truth that is concordant with his novel naturalism. Because of its strong generic, and consequently, non-anthropocentric character, it is initially a truth hard to figure as what we have understood traditionally as truth—and here we should not forget the traditional figurations determined by the (sub)conscious eroticization of unveiling a hidden bodily surface. It is a truth not following the transcendent view that can discover it in its detachment, but rather of what is always immersed into any view or posture as into the immanent life that comprises others and the other to human life:

(…) a ‘truth’ which is not that of biographical facts but rather that of real, lived, immanence. The truth in question would be ‘generic’ in the sense of being general or non-specific and not copying or imitating the field of manifest appearance or biographical experience in a mimetic or representational manner. It would be the truth of an immanent ‘semiotic’ real which would gain its generic character insofar as the novel presents the general structure of relations that articulate it as such and not its specific wordly manifestation. The truth of life presented in Proust’s demonstration may not be one that has manifested itself in the surface phenomena of a shared historical world. Yet, as the underlying truth of that world, it is no less real for all that. (156)

The paradox here lies in between the generic trait of this truth and the particularity of its appearance as ‘the underlying truth of that world (…)’ (156). Such paradox appears more clearly when we think the relations between the totalities of the three versions of the book included in the Recherche: 1) the final book we can read titled A la recherche du temps perdu, written by Marcel Proust; 2) the totality of the story told by the character named Marcel within the book; and 3) the book that the character of Marcel decides at the end of the novel to begin writing. The play between these three totalities forms the complex truth of the book. It is a play between layers as surfaces of diagrammatic signs mapping said truth. Here, the Peircean theory of the sign embraced in biosemiotics is useful since it explains to us how such truth is diagrammatized not only in the determination of non-human life → Proust’s life → the life in A la recherche du temps perdu, but also of French life during the third Republic → Proust’s life → Proust’s book → us, readers of Proust at the end of the first quarter of the 21st century. The truth of the lives of those at the end of the lines are generic, yet they are also of those particular lives, and all the layers or surfaces that emerge from them while remaining steeped in them are diagrammatic articulations, mappings or modellings of the deep life underneath. As James explains:

(…) the surface signs of the narrator’s future novel will not be those that we have encountered in his ‘récit’ or memoir. They will not be ‘Guermantes, Albertine, Gilberte, Saint-Loup, Balbec etc.’ but rather a complex organized structure that delves under the surface of ‘Guermantes, Albertine, Gilberte, Saint-Loup, Balbec etc.’ in order to articulate that which exists, unknown, beneath them as their deeper reality or truth. (162)

Thus, the complex layering of such mapping or modelling structure is why Proust employs ‘‘transversals’ as a structuring principle of the Recherche and its narrative architecture’ (160). A theme picked up by Deleuze as well—particularly after his encounter with Guattari—transversality explains the (bio)semiotic movements and connections between characters, but also among moments, notions, words, etc. In other words, it describes the intertwining and weaving movement of life as meaning reading and interpretation. The complementarity between such notion and the idea of a diagram or diagrammatic sign is easy to understand when we remember how the universe of this truth is structured by layers or surfaces where life as meaning ‘emerges’ as well as ‘steps backs into’, albeit always with the limit-point of a secret origin or ‘an/interior life’ that James reveals as an essential function too of Pascal Quignard’s oeuvre.

Bear or Carry the Secret Origin of Biocommunity

Still within the Proust section of the book, James quotes a recently published text by Klossowski (written in 1971 for a television programme) where the latter affirms that for Proust himself ‘art is not above life—rather it is the other side of life—the only real side’ (77, qtd in 144).^[11] This quote describing what seems like a bidimensional fabric or even a moebius-like structure revealing the relation between art and life resonates with James’ initial description, in the third and last part of the book, of how secret and literature take their place in Quignard’s oeuvre:

The secret, withdrawn into shadow, prior to human language and immanent to the lived life that will be consecrated to that secret, is also and pre-eminently carried or borne, by literature and narrative as the other side of its visible and intelligible linguistic surface. (189, my italics)

This description contains two terms that appear often in James’ text as a binomial that describes how meaning takes place, not only as emergence, but also as interpretation and consequently transmission: ‘carried or borne’. A couple of lines later one of them appears again explaining not only how literature in Quignard bears the secret of a particular life, but also how it carries—bears, lets itself be inscribed by it, etc.—the anonymous vital force of all life:

‘It is narrative that is alive, or vital, or revitalizing’ (…) These lines do not suggest a nostalgia, mourning, or melancholic yearning for a return to that secret biological origin of the womb or to a pre-personal life that has been lost at the point of birth. Rather they suggest that narrative fiction, the literary experience of the writer, and indeed literary space itself are all bearers of the secret and a vital force that imposes itself on and in literature, engendering it even as the other side of its visible surface remains withdrawn and irreducibly hidden in shadow. (189, my italics)

This bidimensional topology and James’ assertion that Quignard’s lines do not emerge out of the common modernist trope of the wombtomb, a nostalgia for a return to the body of the mother, the biological origin, etc., exemplify perhaps what is most radical about Quignard’s oeuvre and about James’ novel naturalism as developed in this book (and of his notion of ‘post-continental naturalism’ as he has developed it elsewhere). To begin signaling it, let me quote two more instances where the aforementioned binomial reappears.

The first appears in a description of Quignard’s engagement with visions of paradise in the fourth volume of Dernier Royaume, Les paradisiaques, when James emphasizes the role of images in relation to the memory of the pre-human—that nevertheless permeates humans at all times:

Here Quignard emphasizes both the poverty of human linguistic and symbolic representation as a means of figuring ideas or images of paradise as such, whilst at the same time underlining that these ideas or images always somehow bear or carry the memory or the marks of an originary state of nature. (210-11, my italics)

Secondly, when reflecting on Cousin de Ravel’s thesis on what exactly unifies all the volumes of the monumental Dernier Royaume (11 at the time of James’ writing of this book, 12 at the time of my writing of this review), the binomial ‘bear and carry’ appears again, this time explaining the relation between agency or consciousness and desire: ‘It is precisely this authorial desire that could be said to unify all of these elements insofar as the production of fragments occurs via the agency and consciousness that bears or carries such desire (Cousin de Ravel 2017, 168)’^[12] (qtd in 220, my italics).

This binomial designates thus not only the function of images (and ideas) in the transversal interconnections between characters, times, and lives. It also designates the ontological structure of that little surface of consciousness—the Bläschen, vesicle, or even the extended (ausgedehnt) Psyche that Freud saw close to the end of his life^[13]—in its relation to its own desire as a dimension emerging but also deeply steeped in biological life and meaning. Now, in order for any of these surfaces (images, ideas, or consciousness and agency) to ‘bear and carry’, they must, before anything else—as Derrida saw in his reflections on khōra^[14]—be able to do what the Greeks called, dekhomai (δέχομαι), that is to say, ‘to receive’. Now, I will argue that, in his reading of Quignard as a novel naturalist who has in common a perceptivity of the layering of meaning in life with biosemiotics and authors like Proust, James sees also that the ‘secret origin’ is nothing more than this pre-subjective and even pre-spatial, khōratic receptivity. As primary examples of this receptivity, of its effects and of a writerly investigation into this pre-human capacity, common to all life, James explains, Quignard’s

(…) writings emerge, in each and every text, from a posture of receptivity and attentiveness to that possibility of being affected by the silent life of the first realm and from a desire to find a figural and writerly practice that can mark the emergence of writing itself from that receptivity, that attentiveness, that experience of being affected by the immanently lived life that is shared across all life. (236, my italics)

As a primary example of receptivity, literature—as what Derrida called arche-writing—is what constitutes this determination between receptive layers. This is what is described by the quote from the 11th volume of Dernier Royaume, L’homme aux trois lettres, explaining how the secret of our origin is that it is always that, ‘secret’, in the sense of being separated from us as purportedly intact sovereign subjects. It is secret to us and from us because it is the secret of the other that has us, ab alio, and from where we emerge: ‘We are ab alio creatures—passing through the other […]. / In the depths of reading we are in the depths of the other’ (qtd in 223).^[15]

James underscores this ethical dimension of Quignard’s writing—relating it to Derrida’s and Levinas’ projects—through the development of the concept of heteropoiesis, a key concept of his ‘post-dicative heteropoietic naturalism’ (203). In contrast to other anti-reductionist’ (to a pure physicalism) notions like Maturana and Varela’s ‘autopoiesis’, James’ heteropoiesis figures how both life and meaning are always created as a ‘passage through the other’ perhaps best exemplified by the interdependent acts of literary reading and writing, where there is a constant determination but also an interpretation involving a speculative unveiling of meaning. Thus, in a manner similar to Simondon’s description of a process of continuous individuation—from crystals, through living organisms, up to humans, psychological, and philosophical writing^[16]—there is here a continuity between life’s most basic meaning creation, through multicellular bodies, plants, animals, humans, and ultimately the biosemiotic productions we call literature. Reaching down into the anteriority of the dark zone of life’s origin that James terms ‘bio-myth’, such a literary writing as Quignard’s, through its exposition of how this ulterior zone is not something left behind but an ‘after’ that accompanies all life, opens up the possibility of, in the recognition of this perennial after-life genetic dimension,^[17] opening up our biosemiotic systems—politically and ethically—to all life, and into an open ended bio-community:

At the same time the encounter of the writer with anteriority and its alterity is the obverse side of the encounter of the reader with an anterior other in the very act of reading. Both writing and reading emerge as specific instances of heteropoietic production, of affection by an anterior real, by the immanence of lived life such as it is shared across all biological life. Here, writing and literature, insofar as they are produced from an affection by shared anonymous life, also give a very specific experience in which the ethical and political dimension of Quignard’s oeuvre unfolds. This experience can be given the name of ‘bio-community’. (223)

What Supports the Caryatides

James is very careful, from the introduction, through the chapters, and up to the conclusion, to remind us that the way he is reading these three events 1) biosemiotics, 2) Proust’s Recherche, and 3) Quignard’s Dernier Royaume, is not in order to create a general philosophical interpretation or a new literary theory applicable to every text, but to do a parallel reading. Close to the end of the book, he reaffirms this while signaling, however, what exactly is the foundation or reason (what in German is called Grund) that supports such tripartite parallel reading. This foundation is not a stable structure but rather an affirmation, or what is more, the affirmation of an absence:

What allows all three to be brought together and read in parallel is not a shared theoretical, philosophical, or onto-epistemological ground, but rather their shared affirmation of an absence of any ground whatsoever. In this shared affirmation they produce themselves as post-dicative models of a biological life that is itself shared, even as it withdraws from any and all direct scientific or literary presentation and disclosure. (244, my italics)

Thus, this affirmation of the absence of ground is, paradoxically, a ground, in a similar way as Schelling’s (who, as James remarks—in communion with others—was also an influence for Proust) Ungrund or Unground(ing) in his Freiheitsschrift is ultimately the only Urgrund or original ground, what determines and connects human and natural freedom.

To end, this affirmation and communion through an absence that James finds in his three main texts sends me back to my earlier point about how, perhaps the most radical trait of Quignard’s oeuvre, of James’ newest book and of his ‘post-continental naturalism’ is a differential act of turning over the surface of literature as the surface where we inscribe our absence of origin. If, in the tradition of literature to which Quignard belongs and which James examines through Proust (but also through other French thinkers like Pierre Klossowski, Jean-Luc Nancy, etc.) there is a vein that reads these writers as nostalgic, melancholy, yearning to disappear in a return to the origin of their and of all life, on the other side, there is a furrow that takes this same absence, this always disappearing ground, as the ever renewing beginning of creation and production, that is to say, of difference. Following this other groove, or rather letting oneself be inscribed by it, is reading and writing in a post-dicative mode, or after life as James describes it. It is knowing that we are always stepping back into the Erechtheion (or the temple of Poseidon, Athena, or neither, since it is still being debated to whom or to what it was dedicated) and that the korai or caryatides on which we see those furls, swirls, and turns, are transversally connected with the turns, swirls, and furls of roots of olive trees and of the movements of all the cats in the shades of Athens.

(Athens Cats. Photo credit: James Martell, Athens 2024)

 

 

1. Susan Woodford, An Introduction to Greek Art (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986). ↑

2. Timaeus, 52a, in Plato, Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vol. 9 translated by W.R.M. Lamb. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann Ltd,1925). https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0180%3Atext%3DTim.%3Asection%3D52a ↑

3. Italics original, my bolds. ↑

4. Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 25. Translation slightly modified, my italics. ↑

5. Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, 6 vols. Trans C. K. Scott Montcrieff and Terence Kilmartin (London: Chatto and Windus, 1992), 503-4. ↑

6. Such an address might be what connects James’ interpretation of life here the most with Derrida’s understanding of the movement of ‘after life’ as différance, in the sense that, for Derrida, the logic of the trace as a movement always implies an address, but an address that first and foremost can always fail to be reached. What this means in terms of biosemiotics or biology at large might be all the accidents that could arrive to any living thing before—as Freud theorizes in Beyond the Pleasure Principle—it reaches its own death. ↑

7. Italics original, my bolds. ↑

8. Timaeus, 52b. https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0180%3Atext%3DTim.%3Asection%3D52b ↑

9. Needless to say, such a layered ontology describing semiotic life as a transmigration across and beyond humans, exposed through dreams and art, makes a reader like me wish to see James expand his novel naturalism into readings of texts like Kafka’s Metamorphosis and ‘The Burrow’, Clarice Lispector’s The Passion According to G. H. and ‘The Buffalo’, and Julio Cortazar’s ‘Axolotl’. ↑

10. ‘It would be easy to suppose, then, that as a result of the ceaseless impact of external stimuli on the surface of the vesicle, its substance to a certain depth may have become permanently modified, so that excitatory processes run a different course in it from what they run in the deeper layers (Schichten)’. Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, v. XVIII, trans. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1955) 26 ↑

11. Pierre Klossowski, Sur Proust (Paris: Serge Safran, 2019), 77. ↑

12. Agnès Cousin de Ravel, Pascal Quignard: Vies, oeuvres (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2017). ↑

13. ‘Psyche ist ausgedehnt, weiß nichts davon’ (Psyche is extended, knows nothing about it). Sigmund Freud, Gesammelte Werke. Siebwehnter Band. Schriften aus dem Nachlass (London: Imago, 1946), 152. ↑

14. “What does dekhomai mean? (. . . ) fold of an immense difficulty: the relationship, so ancient, so traditional, so determinant, between the question of sense and the sensible and that of receptivity in general.” Derrida, Khôra (Paris: Galilée, 1995), 110. My translation. ↑

15. Pascal Quignard, L’Homme aux trois lettres (Paris: Grasset, 2020), 161. ↑

16. See L’individuation à la lumière des notions de formes et d’information, Paris, Jérôme Millon, 2013. ↑

17. This ‘after-life genetic dimension’ could also be read as an analogue of the repurposing of the developmental notion of neoteny that Simondon does in his general theory of individuation, as an immanent latent possibility of always renewing individuated life through an immersion in a pre-individualized original stage. See L’individuation à la lumière des notions de formes et d’information. ↑