| Summary: | Michel Leiris’ autobiography, by revealing the political potential of the writing of the intimate, shooks the certainties of the twentieth century dedicating the partition between committed writing and withdrawal within oneself. The poet invites us to reconsider the relationship between literary activity and political activity, to question the literature as expression of politics, to examine the relationship between political engagement and aesthetic engagement. The trip to China in 1955, narrated in the third volume of La Règle du jeu, Fibrilles, leads Leiris to explore the territories that link the discovery of others to introspection, altruism as a form of solipsism so as to place the experience of intimacy in the heart of politics. The collapse told in this volume is thus closely linked to the collapse of his faith in socialist construction and revolution, so that Leiris comes to partially attribute his suicide attempt, whose story occupies a wide place in Fibrilles, in the stagnation of the writing and in the loss of faith in revolutionary ideals, pretending to forget for a moment disappointments in love he gives for obvious cause for his action. The feeling of relative failure of the autobiographical enterprise as like as the Chinese narration resound as a lucid awareness of its limits by an honest man engaged with his time.
|
|---|