Mundus Master

Crossways in European Humanities

Université de Perpignan Via-Domitia

Universidade Nova de Lisboa
Università degli Studi di Bergamo

Aspects of the Imaginary of Excess in Michel Maffesoli’s Sociology

Final Dissertation by
Joseline Vega Osornio

Advisors:
Pr. Paul Carmignani
Université de Perpignan Via-Domitia

Pr. Helder Godinho

Universidade Nova de Lisboa

Pr. Franca Franchi

Università degli Studi di Bergamo

Perpignan, Lisbon, Paris, Berlin, Mexico, Istanbul, Bergamo

09/2007- 06/2009
1
 DECLARATION

I, Joseline Vega, the undersigned, assure to be the author of this memory of 24,157 words,
to carried out myself the research work, and testify that this dissertation has never been
presented in the frame of a Master’s program. Any phrase or paragraph borrowed from the
work of an author and quoted in this dissertation (with or without minor changes) appears
between quotation marks and with its bibliographical reference (author, work and page). I
realize that plagiarism and the use of any writing without recognizing its source can be
translated into the invalidation of this dissertation but even also, in the most serious cases,
of the entire program. I affirm that, with the exception of the ideas properly quoted, this
dissertation constitutes my own work.

2
 INDEX

Aspects of the Imaginary of Excess in Michel Maffesoli’s Sociology

ABSTRACT 5
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 6

INTRODUCTION 7

Methodological Aspects 7
Research Questions 9
Thesis Statement 9
Michel Maffesoli’s Sociology 11
Narrativity in Science and Literature 14

CHAPTER I

The Notion of the Imaginary:

The Nocturnal Regime of the Image and the Imaginary of Decadence 15

The Three Poles of the Imaginary: Marc Augé 16

The Alchemy of the Image: Gaston Bachelard 17
« The Nocturnal Regime of the Image »: Gilbert Durand 18
The Social Life of Myths 20
The Phantom of the Devil:
Decadence, Degeneration and Social Prophecy 21
Decadent Degeneration:
A Bit of History and its Stories (England, France and Portugal) 22
The Aesthetics of Excess: Degeneration or Adaptation? 25
3
CHAPTER II

The Notion of Heterology:

Towards a Science of Excess? 30

Excess and Literature: the forces of Evil 35

The Apocalyptical Return of Dionysus in Maffesoli’s « Sociolorgy » 36

CHAPTER III

Excess and Heterological Processes in Society:

Archetypes, myths, literature and poetry quoted by Maffesoli 42

La violence fondatrice 43
Éloge de la raison sensible 46
Du Nomadisme 53
Le Mystère de la conjonction 58
La Part du Diable 60
L’Instant Éternel 62

CONCLUSION 65

ANNEX
The Paradigm Shift:
The Complexity and the Psychology of Narratives 71

Neurosciences and the Evolutionary Psychology of Narratives 73

Life flowing through literature 75

BIBLIOGRAPHY 77

4
 ABSTRACT

Aspects of the Imaginary of Excess in Michel Maffesoli’s Sociology

Michel Maffesoli’s phenomenological sociology explores the imaginary of everyday life.

Contrasting with classical methods of sociological approach, Maffesoli proposes to use
myths, literature and poetry for an understanding of contemporary societies and their
phenomena often misunderstood or depreciated by intellectuals.
The first chapter introduces Maffesoli’s sociology of the postmodern imaginary,
taking into account the relationship between the positivist discipline inaugurated by
Auguste Comte and the development of a social science closer to literature. Gilbert
Durand’s ideas of « the nocturnal regime of the image » and « the social life of myths » are
exemplified with the imaginary of Decadence, suggesting a link between the late
nineteenth century aesthetical movement and the contemporary social atmosphere
described by Maffesoli.
The second chapter outlines the contribution of Georges Bataille to a new science
called « Heterology » as studied by the professors of the University of Perpignan. The
urgent necessity of what we call « a nocturnal approach to society » was claimed since
Nietzsche, during the avant-garde aesthetics by Bataille and followed by many thinkers of
the late twentieth century such as Maffesoli. The myth of Dionysus with its excessive
components and apocalyptical connotations illustrates a « narrative ritornello » of the last
two centuries, from Romanticism to Postmodernity.
The third chapter is devoted to schematizing the literary and poetical quotations of
Maffesoli related to excessive and heterological social practices.
The annex drafts our particular neurohumanistic approach to Maffesoli’s work fed by
the paradigm of complexity, the evolutionary psychology of literature, and the neurobases
of narrativity, aiming at the importance of extreme metaphorical languages such as
mythology, poetry and literature not only as weird entertainments but as vital activities.
We long for the utility of the non-utility to tell us who we are and to adapt us to social life.

5
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I acknowledge my indebtedness to the Erasmus Mundus scholarship that made possible my

studies in the Master program « Crossways in European Humanities ». I am indebted for
the opportunity of being enrolled during two years in this innovative academic experience.
I also thank the Ministry of Education of Mexico, Secretaría de Educación Pública,
for providing a complementary grant during the two years of the Mundus Master.
I owe a debt of gratitude to my principal supervisor Professor Paul Carmignani
(Université de Perpignan, Via-Domitia) for his advice and critical insight since my first
research proposal. His intellectual open-mindedness and teaching kindness motivated me.
His comments and corrections on my manuscript at the various stages of its composition
were of great value.
I acknowledge the help of my co-supervisors Professor Helder Godinho
(Universidade Nova de Lisboa) and Professor Franca Franchi (Università degli Studi di
Bergamo). They gave me advice on Studies of the Imaginary and on Nineteenth and
Twentieth Century Literature.
I would also like to express my gratitude to Professor Joël Thomas (Université de
Perpignan, Via-Domitia) for his two precious courses, his bibliographical guidance and
trust in my topic.
Professors Francisco Gomez-Mont Ávalos and Luis Fonseca Lazcano (Universidad
Nacional Autónoma de México) have been invaluable companions in my intellectual
adventure, for much longer than this dissertation has taken to grow.
Finally, I express my admiration for the books of Michel Maffesoli and thank him
for his vital friendship.

6
 INTRODUCTION

Methodological Aspects

Belonging to the area of « studies on the imaginary » inaugurated by Gilbert Durand and
inspired by his predecessors (Carl Gustav Jung, Gaston Bachelard, Mircea Éliade and Henri
Corbin), Michel Maffesoli’s innovative phenomenological sociology explores the gap
existing between macrosocial networks and subjective experience in social studies through
the description of the imaginary function of everyday conviviality. Maffesoli’s work on
contemporary sociality is studied in regards to excessive practices and heterological
processes as defined by the Group H3 of Perpignan inspired by Georges Bataille’s work.
Far from positivist sociology that constructs and examines concepts and reflects
systematically on the macrostructures of society, Maffesoli’s sociology proposes everyday
life imaginary as a primal source for understanding our social time. His work features
many contemporary concrete situations that in some way can be better understood through
archetypal and mythical figures, as well as through poetical and literary thinking, rather
than through traditional quantitative sociological methods.
This dissertation also proposes a relationship between Maffesoli’s phenomenological
sociology and the evolutionary psychology of narratives by studying the contribution of
myths and literature to understanding excessive and heterological aspects in our
contemporary societies. We have selected some transdisciplinary sources to argue that the
task of many poetical and literary works consists in the pre-visualization of cultural trends.
By recuperating certain mythological figures, literary narratives and poetry prepare the
aesthetical sensibility for imminent cultural changes. Myths and literature are not truths at
all. They aesthetically construct exacerbated portrayals representing some aspects of
archetypal life experiences. Fiction engages us affectively on specific circumstances with
the complexity of particular situations, desires, motives, choices, actions and
consequences. This effectiveness is reached through empathy related to mirror neurons and
the functions of mimesis. In an emotional way, we open ourselves to the transcendental
holistic dimension of consciousness through the experience of heterological alterity.

7
 In order to appreciate Maffesoli’s phenomenological sociology and its value as a
form of synthesis for an interpretation of the postmodern way of social affinity and its
metaphysical order, we underline the contribution of Gilbert Durand and Georges Bataille
to the understanding of our eternal phantoms and their presence in social and cultural
phenomena through the sedimentation of a heterological imaginary.
Important to argue is the bonding value of images, their emotional properties and
their poetical aesthetics. That is to say, the way their narratives configure the existential
dimension of our everyday life. We are the way we live our times but we have also a
historical and affective connection with our ancestors: from the basic forms of living,
marvelous waters, wild animals and hominids, to the great disappeared cultures. Jorge Luis
Borges wrote: « Cada uno de nosotros es de algún modo todos los hombres que han
muerto1 ». In our opinion, these words could express the idea that genes and culture have
been interacting since times immemorial and that our societies feed their imaginaries upon
a common regime of the image, diurnal and/or nocturnal in Gilbert Durand’s terms.
Instead of describing the diurnal aspects of the social common order, Maffesoli’s
writing explores the presence of the nocturnal regime of the image in our psychological
everyday conviviality. Mythological echoes, fairy tales, personal memories and
personalities in the media accompany us through the passage of time feeding our personal
imaginary and making us live an intense symbolical life. During the last two centuries, the
religion of art has been the great contribution of many aesthetical movements, an option to
religiosity. In this sense we can talk about « a modern spirituality of images ».
Heterological images and their narratives suggest to us secret wisdoms towards the
enrichment of our emotional life, everyday and transcendent at the same time. In this sense,
the affirmation about literature of Maurice Blanchot could be interpreted in Darwinian
terms: « Le risque de se livrer à l’inessentiel est lui même essentiel2 ».

1
« Each one of us is in a certain sense all the men that have died ».
2
« The risk of giving oneself to the non-essential is in itself essential ». Blanchot, Maurice, L’espace littéraire,
Paris, Gallimard, 1955, p. 225. (L’inspiration; Le regard d’Orphée). « L’expérience du plus lointain est la
chose la plus désarmante, elle n’est pas nécessaire, elle n’est pas un devoir qui nous est imposé. Mais de
même que l’eau des fleuves se dirige vers la mer, c’est l’abîme auquel tendent la littérature et la pensée ».
Bataille, Georges, « Maurice Blanchot », Une liberté souveraine, Paris, Farrago, 2000. p. 73. Textes et
entretiens réunis et présentés par Michel Surya.

8
 The image in all its modalities transports us affectively, throws us with laughs or
cries into the obscure gap of diachronic emotional shared existence. We explore part of the
heterological imaginary that accompanies our passage on Earth, subterranean mythical
figures and their narratives: the ancient Dionysian paradigm, Romanticism and Nietzsche’s
philosophy, fin de siècle Decadence, the revelation of technology, media and biology
accompanied by European avant-gardes and theosophy, international wars and student’s
movements, financial development, musical ecstasies and new alternative ways of living
through and outside the contemporary postmodern web-cities and their shared images and
stories. From a transdisciplinary point of view and following some of the ideas of
evolutionary psychology and neurocognitive sciences about the relevant function of fiction
for survival purposes, the systematization of the imaginary in an « archetypology »
(Durand) and a theorization of excessive phenomena in a « heterology » (Bataille) have
both enriched other fields of research as witnessed by the sociological work of Maffesoli.
The limit-experience of empathy surges from heterological sources of the imaginary
present in mythology, religion, cinema, fairy tales, advertising, cartoons, but also, in the
more delicate space of poetry, literature and philosophy. We explore such imaginary in
order to make evident the hidden presence of its heterological sources.

Research Questions

How does the study of the imaginary in Maffesoli’s work contribute to an

understanding of excessive and heterological processes ignored by traditional positivist
sociology? How does this imaginary appear in contemporary everyday conviviality?
Is there an evolutionary function of the heritage of historical human symbolism? Is there a
utility of the heterological non-utility of narratives?

Thesis Statement

Michel Maffesoli’s phenomenological sociology explores the presence of the

nocturnal regime of the image (Gilbert Durand) through a heterological perspective of
subjectivity and society (Georges Bataille) in which archetypal, mythical, poetical and
literary quotations constitute a source of evolutionary neuropsychological knowledge for
his interpretation of contemporary social structures of feeling in everyday life.

9
 Chapter I summarizes the main ideas of Gilbert Durand about the imaginary and his
typology of archetypes divided into two regimes of the image: diurnal and nocturnal. The
nocturnal regime of the image constitutes one of the main sources of Maffesoli’s approach
to contemporary cultural phenomena. Following Durand’s idea of the social life of myths,
we suggest an affinity between the imaginary of Decadence and Maffesoli’s sociology.
Chapter II explores the notion of « heterology » in Georges Bataille’s work, mainly
developed in the polemics with André Breton as well as in La part maudite through the
notion of non-productive consumption: expenditure, luxury, leisure and literature. We
suggest a link between the nocturnal regime of the image described by Gilbert Durand and
some of the heterological processes interpreted by Georges Bataille.
Chapter III pays attention to Maffesoli’s most cited authors and their principal ideas.
For our purpose we schematize his main ideas through quotations related to excessive and
heterological processes and their relationship with archetypes, mythological literary and
poetical contents. Secondly, we reference some authors from other disciplines (philosophy,
sociology or anthropology) whose ideas are relevant to his work. This table is the nucleus
of the dissertation.
The annex proposes a transdisciplinary relationship between Maffesoli’s humanistic
approach inspired mainly by authors such as Bataille and Durand and advanced studies on
cognitive neurosciences, evolutionary psychology and neurohumanities which postulate
archetypes, myths and literary narratives as human universals with specific adaptive
functions. Focusing on certain myths, archetypes, poetical and literary works quoted by
Maffesoli that have something to do with the nocturnal regime of the image and the
heterological perspective, we claim an evolutionary function of The Dionysian Shadow
(Maffesoli) as an essential human structure, both individual and collective, whose poetical
clairvoyance revealed through the heterological imaginary of the last two centuries
constitutes a very relevant aspect to be reconsidered nowadays by a wide range of domains.
We long for the utility of studying the non-utility to tell us who we are.

10
 Michel Maffesoli’s Sociology

The basis of Maffesoli’s sociological work is the idea that modernity and its productivity,
whose key mythological image is Prometheus, is being replaced in postmodernity by an
affective atmosphere symbolized by the figure of Dionysus, work and progress no longer
being categorical imperatives. Maffesoli argues that the modern project has no success in
postmodernity, overall, among young generations. In response to such « disenchantment »
generated by the rationalistic excess of modern productivism, affective sociality produces
what he calls a « re-enchantment of the world ». The proliferation of images in everyday
life characteristic of modern metropolis during the nineteenth century becomes exacerbated
in our postmodern megapolis, gradually intensifying « the life of the nerves » (Georg
Simmel3 ) through an exacerbated symbolical exchange. Postmodern delight in imaginal
means gives rise to an aesthetical aggregative function. Weber refers to « emotional
communities » and Maffesoli to « postmodern tribes ».
Relativization of work ethics, ideological disengagement and proliferation of
« underground centrality » inspired by « the nocturnal regime of the image »: emphasis on
a generalized somatic culture through the importance of the body and its polymorphous
perversity; neo-nomadic tribalism and periodic groupings of consumption through
networks of comradeship supported by technology. Postmodern everyday conviviality has
to do with an inherent energy and a vital force described by the « philosophy of life »
(Lebensphilosophie) in opposition to society vs. community and power vs. potentiality
(Gesellschaft/Gemeinschaft); (Macht, pouvoir/Will, puissance):

Une œuvre, c’est bien connu, s’élabore à partir d’une intuition centrale. La mienne est le
rapport complexe unissant la puissance de base au pouvoir surplombant: Potentia/Potestas,
instituant/institué, sociétal/social, socialité/sociabilité, centralité souterraine/institutions4.

3
In his writings on the link between metropolis and modern life, the German sociologist Georg Simmel
identified culture as an aesthetical phenomenon. His ideas anticipated the arguments of many other postmodern
authors such as Maffesoli for whom social reality becomes aestheticized in the age of media. For Simmel, a
given style defines a historical period. Michel Foucault called this feature of a social time « episteme »,
Thomas Kuhn « paradigm » and Gilbert Durand « semantic basin ». In Maffesoli terms, postmodern style is
characterized in everyday life by « a synergy between technology and archaism ».
4
Maffesoli, Michel, « Saturation de la modernité », Après la modernité ? Préface à la réédition de Logique de
la domination, La violence totalitaire, La conquête du présent, Paris, CNRS, Compendium, 2008. p. VII

11
 Maffesoli’s work is well connected with the ideas of other non-sociological thinkers,
which makes his essays impossible to classify by the classical positivists sociologists of the
Sorbonne. Nevertheless, he shares with other sociologists such as Georges Balandier,
Raymond Boudon, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Crozier, Jean Duvignaud, Edgar Morin and
Alain Touraine, a method of description and interpretation of social phenomena through
mythological figures and literary metaphors5 .
The above-mentioned authors commonly refer to a literary work placing emphasis on
one aspect or another: the author, the plot, the title, a character, a particular scene, etc.
Within a corpus of eighty books, Laurence Ellena has studied the work of these
sociologists in order to describe and analyze the presence of literary quotations and their
role for the development of their sociological theories6 . He observes that their references
are not only ornaments to exemplify their sociological knowledge. Many times sociologists
have access to the social world only through the literary imaginary. These sociological
works illustrate a rewarding dialogue between sociology and literature. According to these
sociologists, there is a flaw in sociological methods of interpretation that only the novel
and poetry can fill out with their aesthetical richness7.

5
Ellena, Laurence, Sociologie et littérature, la référence à l’œuvre, Paris, Harmattan, Logiques Sociales, 1998.
6
« Les textes sociologiques, par leurs œuvres, créateurs, domaines de référence (comme par leur manière de se
référer) se distinguent les uns des autres, auteurs et domaines renvoyant chaque fois à un lectorat potentiel
plus ou moins fortement imprégné de littérature européenne cultivée. Mais, plus que cette culture, ce qui
sépare les sociologies entre elles du point de vue des références, c’est la manière d’utiliser les œuvres, ce qui
est à rapprocher des positionnements épistémologiques et des théories sociologiques de chacun d’entre eux.
Edgar Morin se réfère facilement à des œuvres situées en dehors de cercles de légitimité culturelle (science-
fiction notamment). Jean Duvignaud appuie ses analyses de la passion humaine sur un large éventail
d’œuvres issues de domaines artistiques divers (poésie, épopée, roman, théâtre). Raymond Boudon étaie ses
argumentations de modèles de raisonnements tirés du roman policier. Proust, Flaubert, Joyce deviennent
sujets dans certains paysages de la sociologue de Pierre Bourdieu. Le statut documentaire du roman du
XIXème siècle (Balzac, Zola) s’impose dans la sociologie d’Alain Touraine ». Ellena, Laurence, « La
sociologie française contemporaine et ses références littéraires », D’Alain, Guillemin (dir.), À la recherche
du meilleur des mondes, littérature et sciences sociales, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2006. p. 100.
7
« La littérature artistique – poésie, roman – apparaît comme un médiateur pour exprimer quelques-unes des
failles décelées par les sociologues dans leur propre champ, une crise potentielle qu’une relation maîtrisée
avec le domaine de la création peut combler ». Ibid. p. 101

12
 Sociology has always had a flirtation with literature. In his classical work, Wolf
Lepennies has meticulously described the advent of what he calls « the third culture ». The
genesis of sociology as a « third discipline » took place between its literary and scientific
fluctuations in Germany, Britain and France8. From its very inception, sociology has had to
limit the boundaries of its enterprise and to explain its epistemological basis. The sustained
debate about the discipline's parameters has to do with a conflict between antithetical
modes of understanding the human condition: whether the hallmarks of superior
knowledge could be either rational orientations or emotional sensibilities.
Sociology was baptized by Auguste Comte (1798-1857) in his Cours de philosophie
positive (1830). For Comte, sociology was the last of the natural sciences. Applying a
scientific method to social materials, sociology could remedy not only the deficiencies of
both theological and metaphysical visions, but also those of classical economics. This
positive knowledge would contribute to the restoration of moral and social order, which
had been undermined in the course of the French and Industrial Revolutions.
Lepenies’ study depicts some unexpected images of the founders of sociology.
Auguste Comte’s positivism emerges from his efforts to achieve a « cerebral hygiene »
which seems to have foundered on his equivocal attitudes to women and literature. Georg
Simmel (1858-1918), a much quoted thinker by Maffesoli, is considered as the outsider
who shaped a discipline he disowned9.
In the nineteenth century, positivist claims for an understanding of social life were in
fashion: Utilitarianism, Marxism, and Darwinism. There was an explicit faith in such
positivist knowledge. But thinkers such as Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche and
Georges Sorel undermined the faith in cold reason as a reading of the world. Even if
irrationality perverts the course of reasoned considerations, we actually learn about
ourselves and our societies from myths, poetry and literature written by intuitive creators.
Maffesoli’s sociology joins the realms of scientific and humanistic knowledge.

8
Lepenies, Wolf, Les trois cultures. Entre sciences et littérature l’avènement de la sociologie, Paris, Éditions
de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1990. French traduction by Henri Plard from Die Drei Kulturen,
Soziologie zwischen Literatur und Wissenschaft, Munich, Hanser Verlag, 1985. His historiographical analysis
is well detailed between 1830 and 1940.
9
Maffesoli affirms that, inspired in part by Simmel’s « formal sociology », his phenomenological sociology
describes the world through an « impressive methodology ».

13
 Narrativity in Science and Literature

There is a common feature between science and fiction: both are narratives.
Narrativity is a human universal. Real and fictional narratives are also universals. History
and story are related terms. Paul Ricoeur writes that temporality is the structure of human
existence and that it resides in language as narrativity. Language is constituted through
narrativity and narrativization is the basis of human temporality. The nature of time is itself
narrativistic. All historical events are reconstructed through narratives10.
In French or Spanish for example, histoire and historia, the same term serves to
designate a succession of events bound by a narrative structure, either real or imaginary.
Myths, fables, legends, tales, fictions and stories are structurally not so far from the
rational meta-narratives of History. History shares many features with fiction11. Even
though we know that sociology and history give more importance to the social body and
not to the individual, the way history presents a historical man is similar to the description
of the main character of a novel. Hence, novels could be more real than the
historiographical works. One example is that of L’éducation sentimentale by Gustave
Flaubert in the context of the Revolution of 184812. Some specialists go even further,
claiming that « The fiction is that reality exists ». From a constructivist point of view, both
fiction and reality are cognitive models13.

10
Cf. Ricoeur, Paul Temps et récit, Paris, Seul, 1983.
11
Fiction is a means of telling us something about the human world even though it is not reality. Through a
narrative arrangement of symbols literature has a representative function. Like a sort of a living organism,
literary works deliver different information to different readers in a dynamic process of interaction. Iser,
Wolfgang, « The Reality of Fiction. A Functionalist Approach to Literature », In New Literary History, The
John Hopkins University Press, Vol. 7, No. 1, Critical Challenges: The Bellagio Symposium (Autumn, 1975),
pp. 7-38.
12
« Nous assistons depuis quelques années à un mouvement de retour vers la littérature : après la poussée
scientiste qui se fondait confusément sur le marxisme, la statistique, la linguistique, le structuralisme et
l’ordinateur, certains au moins des spécialistes de sciences humaines – s’agit-il d’un oxymore ? – ont levé
l’étendard de la révolte et ont amorcé un repli vers le pôle littéraire, plus en harmonie avec le climat de
relativisme et de métissage caractéristique de l’âge postmoderne ». Molino, Jean, « Le Cave se rebiffe,
réflexions sur l’histoire des relations entre littérature et sciences humaines », D’Alain, Guillemin (dir.), À la
recherche du meilleur des mondes, littérature et sciences sociales, Op. cit. p. 31, 43.
13
Schmidt, S. J. and Hauptmeier, H, « The Fiction Is That Reality Exists. A Constructivist Model of Reality,
Fiction and Literature », In Poetics Today, Duke University Press, Vol. 5, No. 2, The Construction of Reality
in Fiction (1984), pp. 253-274.

14
 CHAPTER I
The Notion of the Imaginary:
The Nocturnal Regime of the Image and the Imaginary of Decadence

Archetypes and their narratives coexist in our minds and shape our symbolical order.
Nevertheless, some of these imaginary constructions and their meanings do not refer to the
common world, absolutely escaping from its systematic conventions. According to
Maurice Blanchot, literature and poetry consist of « a limit for the limitless » and it is in
this way that art accesses the formless excess of the limitless through images. Art is related
to the possibility for the object « to appear » or « to be imagined ». Fundamentally,
Blanchot conceives literature as the essential visionary loneliness where « nothingness
becomes image14 ».
Literature and poetry coming from what Blanchot refers to as « the second version of
the imaginary », constitute « an imaginal language » that talks to us from the shadow of
temporality and that has nothing to do with the diurnal dimension of existence15. Images let
us not only ideally recuperate the thing negatively but to constantly refer to absence as a
presence. « Literature helps us to humanize the formless nothingness that impulses to us
the irremovable residue of being16 ». We refer to Blanchot’s interpretation of the imaginary
for an understanding of what we propose to call « the heterological function of literature ».
Similar to Orpheus’ priesthood in the Thracian forest enchanting wild beasts
including his incantatory passage through the frontiers of life and death, the writer reverses
the denotative function of language: object/image instead of image/object 17. Thus,
underneath the imaginary lies the ambiguity of Sense: to be or not to be.

14
Blanchot, Maurice, El espacio literario, Barcelona, Paidós, 1992. p. 27. Translated by Vicky Palant and
Jorge Jinkins from L’espace littéraire, Paris, Gallimard, 1955.
15
Ibid. p. 25.
16
Ibid. p. 243.
17
« Orpheus, whose lyre mesmerized animals and minerals by the beauty of its modulations, so the sensitive
writer, endowed with an Orphic faculty to charm impulses and instincts, activates unknown and amorphous
forces and their accompanying tonal waves. They are then transmuted by the novelist, poet, or dramatist into
Word, imbued with endlessly resounding harmonies and cacophonies ». Knapp, Bettina, Music, Archetype,
and the Writer, a Jungian View, The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988. p. 2.

15
 The Three Poles of the Imaginary: Marc Augé

« Je voudrais suggérer qu’entre le rêve, le mythe et la création littéraire, ces trois

pôles de l’imaginaire, une circulation d’images s’opère, à double sens, par laquelle ils
s’irriguent les uns les autres18 ». According to Marc Augé, the imaginary flows through our
symbolical life, from the deepest hours of our intimate dream where ancient wild phantoms
and mythical images might inhabit our solitary nights, to the revitalizing rituality where the
shaman’s clairvoyant vision expresses heterological symbols of divinity to the community.
« Myths, so to say, are public dreams; dreams are private myths 19 ». Personal dreams and
shared myths feed the poet’s fantasy and by poet, Sigmund Freud means any creator of
phantasmagoric images20. In some way, creators of heterological imaginaries act as
children or teenagers: when fantasy’s world becomes diurnal dreams through the
transfiguration of the nocturnal vortex of images in the presence of daylight. At all these
levels, personal, collective and aesthetical, fantasy lets us symbolically live our hidden
desires. The satisfaction arousal of all these imaginative experiences demonstrates the
feedback flux between the emotional and the cognitive elements of fantasy,

Poetical and fictional creativity

Shared memories Personal memories

Irrigation of the three poles of the imaginary

(According to Marc Augé)

Imaginary
18
Augé, Marc, « Les trois pôles de l’imaginaire », Dans La guerre des rêves, exercices d’ethno-fiction, Paris,
Seul, La Librairie du XXe siècle, 1997. p. 84 (pp. 77-87).
19
Campbell, Joseph, Myths to Live By. New York, The Viking Press, 1972. p. 14.
20
Cf. Freud, Sigmund, „ Der Dichter und das Phantasieren“, Neue Revue, Berlin, 1908.

16
 The Alchemy of the Image: Gaston Bachelard

In the beginnings of the twentieth century, new scientific paradigms such as non-Euclidean
geometries, relativity theory and psychoanalysis triggered a reflection on the irrational
aspects of the thinking process. In an epistemological sense, the work of Gaston Bachelard
constitutes one of the most important efforts to achieve a synthesis between science and
literature through the notion of « rêverie » (reverie). For him, science and literature
constitute alchemical procedures as he puts it, not far from Marcel Proust’s conception of
literary writing, scientific discoveries and poetical creativity as mystical activities both
founded on an ascending circulation of nocturnal images and hidden memories21. One of
Bachelard’s literary studies was devoted to this « imaginary rationality » in a most
heterological writer: Lautréamont (1939). Bachelard refers to « the traveling vocation of
the image » exemplary represented by Isidore Ducasse in Les Chants de Maldoror, a
pioneer surrealistic work whose heterogeneity illustrates the complex structure that
characterizes « the nocturnal anima ». Time is a psychical order that we construct through
narratives, literary and scientific, to have a continuity of consciousness, homogeneous and
uniform. However, the vital sphere of the imagination has nothing to do with temporal
and/or spatial linearity. Timelessness and chaos are properties of dreams, myths and
quantum physics; temporal and spatial orders are only organizing resources for abstract
thinking22. Comparing Bachelard’s arguments on the symbolical function of « repression »
(refoulement) with Bataille’s commentaries on the prohibited, Gilbert Lascault proposes a
similarity between these two notions as solid inhibition systems against our free
imaginative creativity23.

21
« Dormir, c’est descendre et monter comme un ludion sensible dans les eaux de la nuit. La nuit et le jour, en
nous, ont un devenir vertical ». Bachelard, Gaston, L’air et les songes. p. 69.
22
« Or le temps est un ordre et n’est rien autre chose. Et tout ordre est un temps ». Bachelard quoted by Backès,
Jean L, « Sur le mot continuité », L’Arc, No. 42. p. 72.
23
« Pas de pensée scientifique sans refoulement. Le refoulement est à l’origine de la pensée attentive, réfléchie,
abstraite. Toute pensée cohérente est construite sur un système d’inhibitions solides et claires. Il y a une joie
de la raideur au fond de la joie de la culture. C’est en tant qu’il est joyeux que le refoulement bien fait est
dynamique et utile ». (Bachelard, La psychanalyse du feu, Folio, p.170) ; « Le rejet de l’objet troublant, et du
trouble, fut nécessaire à la clarté – que rien ne troublait – du monde de l’activité, du monde objectif. Sans
l’interdit, sans le primat de l’interdit, l’homme n’aurait pu parvenir à la conscience claire et distincte, sur
laquelle la science est fondée ». (Bataille, L’érotisme, 10/18. pp. 42-43). Quoted by Lascault, Gilbert, « Elle
est rouge la petite fleur bleue. Autour de la psychanalyse du feu », Ibidem. p. 32.

17
 « The Nocturnal Regime of the Image »: Gilbert Durand

Historically, rationalistic aversion to fantasy has led poetry and fiction to the realm of the
untrue and expensive luxury of the mind as imagination has been suspected of creating
false and dangerous images. The overflowing proliferation of images in the Renaissance,
for example, was attacked by the Council of Trent during the Counter Reformation24.
Considered as « a disease of the soul », imagination had been devalued over centuries by
materialisms, empiricisms and naturalisms until the arrival of an epistemology of
symbolism inaugurated by Bachelard’s work and its further study with the systematization
of the anthropological structures of the Imaginary developed by his student Gilbert Durand.
« Imaginary » is the concept proposed by Durand to refer to the imagining function of
the mind and the relevance of symbolic isomorphisms shared by different cultures. For him,
« meaningful images » (Sinnbilder) are necessary as the sense to be conveyed is not
amenable to direct representation. The « symbolic imagination » has to do with an indirect
way of representing the world, different from mere perception or sensation. Symbol could
be interpreted as the « epiphany of a mystery » (ephiphanéia, apparition).
Ambiguity and opposition. Symbols constitute the bond between opposites as Lévi-
Strauss states referring to historical and mythical narratives. For Durand, the primal value of
symbols consists of their function to equilibrate opposites as life and death, good and evil,
gods and humans, light and darkness, love and hate25.
Bachelard’s ideas inspired Durand to propose a systematization of the imaginary into
two basic « regimes of the image ». On the other hand, the Russian reflexology of
Betcherev, Oufland, and Okhtomsky enabled him to relate the two basic « regimes of the
image » to the three primal innate instincts, thus resulting in a classification of « the
symbolical instinct » into two main divisions: 1) « diurnal », schizomorphic and postural;
and 2) « nocturnal », subdivided into a) synthetic-digestive and b) mystical-copulative.

24
Cf. Belting, Hans, La vraie image, Paris, Gallimard, Le Temps des Images, 2007. Translated by Jean Torrent
from the original version published in 2005.
25
Durand, Gilbert, A imaginação simbólica, São Paulo, Cultrix Editora da Universidade de São Paulo, 1988.
p.78. Translated by Liliane Fittipaldi from L’imagination symbolique, Paris, PUF, 1964.

18
 The Imaginary
(According to Gilbert Durand)
Diurnal Nocturnal

Apollo Hermes Dionysus

Postural Digestive Copulative
Schizomorphic Synthetic Mystical
Separation Relation Fusion

Durand suggests reading aesthetical movements and styles as a symbolical

predominance of these three imaginary manifestations of a universal innate cognitive-
sensorial-motor impetus manifested since childhood26. On the other hand, Durand refers to
Bachelard’s idea about the symmetry of poetical and scientific method to illuminate living
experience. Even though sharing their symmetry, poetry and science are methods that stand
in opposition only because of their attraction for concepts or for images.
We claim that a basic organization for myths, poetry, literature and all complex
systems of images and their narratives also exist in the inner processes of the brain, sharing
their images between « the three poles of the imaginary » (individual, collective and
literary) as Marc Augé states, or, in other words, and as Gilbert Durand proposes, between
the three properties of symbols: « the cosmic », « the oneiric », and « the poetical ». Thus,
we claim that the sociology of Michel Maffesoli is related to this second regime of the
image as the social processes he describes through mythical images, poetry and literature
can frequently be interpreted as nocturnal and heterological,

Ele é ao mesmo tempo, « cósmico » (ou seja, retira toda a sua figuração do mundo visível
que nos rodeia); « onírico » (enraíza-se nas lembranças, os gestos que emergem em nossos
sonhos e constituem, como bem mostrou Freud, a massa concreta da nossa biografia a mais
íntima); e, finalmente, « poético », ou seja, o símbolo também apela para a linguagem, e a
linguagem mais impetuosa, por tanto, a mais concreta27.

26
In his exposition about archetypes, Durand also recalls that for Bachelard, childhood is the communicable
archetype « par excellence », as it is also the metaphorical value of the cognitive validity of symbols. Ibid. p.
72.
27
« It is at the same time cosmic, as it takes all its figuration from the visible world, oneiric, as it roots itself in
the memories and gestures that emerge in our dreams and constitute as Freud well demonstrated, the concrete
mass of our most intimate biography, and finally, poetic, as the symbol also refers to language, the most
impetuous one and therefore, the most concrete ». Ibid. p. 16.

19
 The Social Life of Myths

For Gilbert Durand, mythical and literary languages are as closely linked as culture and
literature. For him, only a multidisciplinary point of view might be able to interpret the
birth and evolution of a myth in a society. For this specialist of the imaginary, there are four
phases in the social life of a myth. These four phases are summarized as « latency »,
« denomination », « integration » and « philosophy » of a myth28.
Durand agrees with Abraham Moles in the sense that at the beginning there is what he
calls an « explosive period » of a myth in society. On the other hand, and just like Roger
Bastide, he explains that a myth moves into a society from a period of latency in which its
presence is more or less unconscious to a period of reflexive codification in which its
philosophy becomes conscious. Durand says that besides these two phases there are two
intermediary moments in which myths are progressively named and made conscious29.
In this sense, Durand refers to the example the myth of Decadence during the
nineteenth century. He suggests that in the writings of Charles Baudelaire, Edgar Allan Poe,
Barbey d’Aurevilly and Villiers de l’Isle Adam there is not yet strictly speaking a theory of
decadence but a clear break with the romantic tradition that celebrates transgression as did
the gothic novel of the late eighteenth century (latency). Soon afterwards, the names of
Salome, Isolde or Carmen gradually appeared (denomination). Still later, during the last
decade of the century (1890-1900), there was a complete integration of the myth in
literature with À rebours de Karl J. Huysmans (1884), Le Journal des Décadents and the
magazine Le Décadent (published from 1886 to 1889) in which such poets as Paul Verlaine
or Tristan Corbière participated. In Victorian England it was in the pages of The Savoy and
The Yellow Book where Oscar Wilde, Ernest Dowson and the designer Aubrey Beardsley
published. But it is in the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Oswald Spengler and Thomas
Mann that one finds a supreme consciousness of the twilight of Western culture.

28
Durand, Gilbert, « Mitodologia, os conceitos operatórios do miticiano, explosão e mitogénese, grandeza
relativa e operadores sociais, dinâmica e mitogénese) », Mito e sociedade, a mitanálise e a sociologia das
profundezas, Lisboa, A Regra do Jogo, 1983. pp. 45-63. Conference pronounced on March 11th. 1983 at the
Universidade Nova de Lisboa. Translated by the poet Nuno Júdice.
29
In a similar way and referring to Antiquity, Jean Pierre Vernant distinguishes between three periods in
ancient Greece: from religious myth to tragedy and then to philosophy.

20
 The Phantom of the Devil: Decadence, Degeneration and Social Prophecy

Extreme technological and political changes during the nineteenth century produced a gap
between the social world and aesthetic sensibility. Following Durand’s example of the
living myth of Decadence, we suggest that Maffesoli’s « sociolorgy30 » reveals continuity
between decadent and postmodern imaginaries.
For Maffesoli, sociology is first of all the study of sexuality31. He quotes Baudelaire
for whom, « faire l’amour, c’est faire le mal ». Love is the essence of the forbidden, the fall
of man and the irreparable loss of innocence. The highest pleasure of lust lies precisely in
the consciousness of doing evil32.
Indeed, there’s an intelligence that seeks for an evil knowledge of human world. But,
how can one bring the hidden « Devil’s part33 » to the apollonian light of presence? Denis
Rougemont, who « n’aimait qu’écrire des livres dangereux », wondered whether writing
about the Devil could be a provocative evocation of him. He quotes the Petites Poèmes de
Baudelaire (« La plus belle ruse du Diable est de nous persuader qu’il n’existe pas »), and
Kafka (« L’un des artifices de séduction les plus efficaces du Diable, c’est de nous
provoquer au combat. C’est comme la lutte avec une femme, qui finit au lit34 »). Jean
Didier-Vincent, who has written a pioneering neurohumanistic study devoted to the
biology of the Devil, responds in similar terms : « A peu craindre le diable, on risque de
succomber à ses charmes, mais à trop le combattre, on s’expose à ses séduisantes
violences35 ».

30
Pettman, Dominic, After the Orgy. Towards a politics of exhaustion, State University of New York Press,
2002.
31
« La sociologie était avant tout l’étude de la sexualité ». « La prostitution comme forme de socialité »,
Maffesoli, Michel, Le mystère de la conjonction, Paris, Fata Morgana, 1997, p. 35.
32
« Qu’est ce que l’amour? / Le besoin de sortir de soi / L’homme est un animal adorateur / Adorer c’est se
sacrifier et se prostituer / Aussi tout amour est-il prostitution ». Baudelaire, « Mon cœur mis à nu ». Quoted
by Maffesoli, Michel, Ibidem.
33
Maffesoli, Michel, La Part du diable, précis de subversion postmoderne, Flammarion, 2002.
34
Rougemont, Denis de, La part du diable, Paris, Gallimard, 1946. p. 10, 15. The author begins his book
quoting these Baudelaire’s words.
35
Vincent, Jean-Didier, La Chair et le diable, Paris, Odile Jacob, Sciences, 1996. p. 10.

21
 Decadent Degeneration: a Bit of History and its Stories (England, France and Portugal)

After a long period of prosperity, the British Empire passed through an economic crisis,
which developed into a crisis of the Victorian spirit itself. The English middle-class lost its
former self-confidence and the younger generation rebelled against tradition and
convention, Puritanism, utilitarianism and sentimentalism. Youths fought the older
generation for the possession and enjoyment of life. Modernism became the aesthetical and
moral slogan of youth knocking at the door and demanding to be let in36.
Victorian Decadence was influenced by the current French aesthetics of Charles
Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, Karl J. Huysmans, and the Symbolists
Stéphane Mallarmé and Gustave Moreau. Other sources of inspiration of the movement
were the German philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche. Walter Pater,
a philosophical leader in the aesthetical movement in England, took the basic ideas of
Nietzsche’s philosophy, particularly the distinction between Apollonian art and Dionysian
art, and the importance of the aesthetical experience for intensifying intellectual and
physiological exaltation. His followers Charles Algernon Swinburne, Oscar Wilde, Aubrey
Beardsley and William Butler Yeats adopted these ideas as a credo to develop their own
art: « Not the fruit of experience, but the experience itself, is the end. To burn always with
this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life37 ». In Pater, the
religion of art is brought to its birth, a religion that denies immortality, and offers only the
ecstasy of what passes. Pater is a much quoted author in Maffesoli’s essays.
Victorian decadents were also the immediate heirs to another Victorian, Dante
Gabriel Rossetti, who explored those moments when the familiar world dissolves into a
mystical apprehension of eternity. The decadents sought to make such heightened
awareness a permanent condition, seeking it through perverse and destructive loves and
addictions, and an appreciation of a « gorgeous iridescence of decay38 ».

36
Cf. Hauser, Arnold, The Social History of Art, NY, Vintage Books, 1951, Vol. IV. pp. 199-205.
37
Quoted by Bloom, Harold, Genius, A mosaic of one hundred exemplary creative minds, NY, Warner Books,
2002. pp. 442-446.
38
Stonyk, Margaret, Nineteenth-Century English Literature, London, Macmillan History of Literature, 1983.
pp. 245-247.

22
 As Maffesoli’s sociology, the decadents also felt sympathy for the prostitute and
« the vamp » (femme fatale). We know that cruel women have always enriched the artistic
imaginary. Both in mythology and religion, women were portrayed as having the potential
to ruin men. Female figures such as Lilith, Eve and Pandora were early femmes fatales.
Also Sirens were related, since Plato, with the immortality of the soul and then transformed
by Christianity into evil beings, without any wings but with a tail like a fish39. In visual arts
inspired by ancient myths, favourites were Circe enticing Ulysses, the Sirens enchanting
him (e. g. Waterhouse and Burne-Jones), Delilah cutting Samson’s hair, and sphinxes
holding the fate of a man between their paws (Von Stuck), Helen of Troy and Cleopatra.
Artists and intellectuals of this epoch became also obsessed with the image of the
decapitation of men. For example, the imaginary of Orpheus (the Thracian priest sacrificed
by frenetic women), Judith and Salomé were represented several times by Gustave Moreau,
considered nowadays as the precursor of the avant-garde painting of the twentieth century.
A beautifully illustrated book of Les Fleurs du Mal relates the poetry of Baudelaire to
decadent painters.
The coldness of prostitutes surrounded by storms of masculine passion helped to feed
this imaginary of decadence. During the Victorian period, prostitution grew enormously in
Great Britain. According to Walter Houghton, by 1850 there were at least 50.000
prostitutes in England and Scotland, 8.000 in London alone. The prostitute is the rebel of
morality based on middle-class values. It is against the institutional bourgeois form of love
and also against its « natural spiritual form40 ».
The way of life of one of three classes of women in Victorian England, the
prostitutes from the lower classes, exemplified for those artists that ideal principle of « the
pleasure for the moment ». The other two were the happy house wife, mother and nurturer,
queen of the « home sweet home » in charge of safeguarding the sacred place of family life.
The third type of woman, much praised in the art of the Pre-Raphaelites, was the love
object, the spiritual muse, inheritance of early Romanticism.

39
Cf. Leclercq-Marx, Jaqueline, La Sirène dans la pensée et dans l’art de l’Antiquité et du Moyen Age,
Bruxelles, Académie Royale de Belgique, 1997.
40
Cf. Houghton, Walter E. « Love », The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830-1870, New Haven,Yale University
Press, 1957. pp. 341-393. Ch. XIII.

23
 It is a significant coincidence that these three types of women, the sexual prostitute,
the altruistic mother (« an angel in the house »), and the spiritual romantic muse much
described in Victorian literature during different periods, were correlated with the three
types of brain circuits that have been identified by Semir Zeki and Hellen Fisher using
brain-imaging techniques41. The different neuronal mechanisms activated in the depraved
London prostitute, in the proper Victorian wife or in spiritual muses like Jane Sidall are
now beginning to be understood with great neuroanatomical detail.
For example, both romantic and maternal love involve a unique and overlapping set
of brain regions related to the reward system and are also known to contain a high density
receptors for oxytocin and vasopressin, suggesting a neurohormonal control of these strong
forms of attachment already observed in animals. Both maternal and romantic love
promoted by the Victorian society have also to do with a suppression of activity in brain
regions associated with « mentalizing » and social judgement. This suggests that strong
emotional ties to another person inhibit not only negative emotions but also affect the
network involved in making social judgments about the beloved or one’s own children. The
sexual hormones testosterone and estrogens are linked to the sexual neural circuits. The
neurotransmitters dopamine and serotonin are related to romantic love circuits. On the other
hand, the literature related to could be read as a derivative of Darwin’s idea of « sexual
selection » as being determined by the independent female eye choosing her mate or mates.
The importance of the « eternal feminine » described in scientific terms by Darwin might
have propelled feminist ideas of the « new woman » increasing the Victorian males’
insecurity42. Such innovative biological and social narratives might have constituted a spark
in lightning the artistic imaginary in regards to evil woman. Hence, a new breed of artists
focused on the object of Victorian repression: sexuality43.

41
Fisher, Helen, et. al., « Romantic love: a mammalian brain system for mate choice », Philosophical
Transactions of the Royal Society, London, 361, 2006. pp. 2173-2186. Zeki, Semir and Bartels, Andreas, «
The neural correlates of maternal and romantic love », Neuroimage, London, 21, 2004. pp. 1115-1166.
42
Darwin, Charles, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured
Races in the Struggle for Life, 1859. The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, 1871.
43
Praz, Mario, The Romantic Agony, Oxford University Press, 1933. Translated by Angus Davidson from La
carne, la morte e il diavolo nella letteratura romantica (1930). French version by Constance Thompson, La
chair, la mort et le diable dans la littérature du XIXe siècle. Le romantisme noir, Paris, Denöel, 1977.

24
 The Aesthetics of Excess: Degeneration or Adaptation?

The rejection of socially codified life by many artists of the late nineteenth century as
presented in their writings was interpreted by many physicians as a mental disorder well-
known as « degeneration ». Two of the main works devoted to this subject were those of
Cesare Lombroso and Max Nordau. These authors developed speculations on the
relationship between genius, madness and modern life’s massive stimuli, both real and
imaginary. In general terms, « degeneration » was seen as the feature of modern society in
which its economical progress was generating a paradoxical regression.
On the one hand, the criminal anthropology of Cesare Lombroso was based on the
idea that dangerous people had a particular physical appearance of deformity. On the other
hand, in his best-selling Degeneration (Entartung, 1892) the physician and journalist Max
Nordau identified the pseudo-medical symptoms of an early psychopathology of everyday
life, of how living in a modern city was like living on the edge of nervous collapse. For
both of them, any cultural manifestation of « exception » (physical, behavioral, emotional)
was considered as a symptom of degeneration. Subversive decadent art of Late Victorian
England proved the rule as « by the turn of the century not just the criminal, but the genius,
the artists, the political revolutionary, the prostitute, were all branded with the notorious
physical stigmata of degeneracy44 ». Artists as diverse as Ibsen, Wilde, Tolstoy, and
Nietzsche and movements such as Pre-Raphaelitism, Naturalism, Impressionism and
Symbolism received the author’s disapprobation. For example, Paul Verlaine’s
physiognomy and poetry were seen by Nordau as degenerated. He also found degeneracy
in the detailed realism of Émile Zola. Nordau used the term « hysteric » to describe the
artists themselves, the works they produce and the cultural styles they manifest45. « For
Nordau, individual artists were the most dangerous spokes-men of the world of the fin de
siècle46 ».

44
Greenslade, William, Degeneration, Culture and the Novel (1880-1940), Cambridge University, Press, 1994.
p. 18, 92.
45
Micale, Mark S, « Discourses of Hysteria in Fin-de-Siècle France », Micale, Mark S. (ed.), The Mind of
Modernism. Medecine, Psychology, and the Cultural Arts in Europe and America, 1880-1940. p. 78.
46
Greenslade, William, Degeneration, Culture and the Novel (1880-1940), Op. cit. p. 124.

25
 Even though some artists and their works were considered as degenerated, at the
same time others were inspired by those theories to create a more exacerbated decadent art.
That is the case of Fernando Pessoa, another much quoted author by Maffesoli.
Pessoa read a French version of Nordau’s Degeneration by 1907. His writings about
genius and madness were inspired by Nordau’s analysis of phenomena and inspired him
with the ideas of Jean Seul de Méluret, a decadent aristocrat heteronymous born during
Pessoa’s youth who had the duty to criticize French exhibitionism and histrionics47.
For Maffesoli, Fernando Pessoa is « the undiscovered Nietzsche of the twentieth
century ». Pessoa, whose Portuguese family name signifies « person », revealed the
extreme possibilities of our mental life to construct multiple personalities. Through the
creation of his heteronymous (Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, Ricardo Reis, Bernardo
Soares, Antonio Mora, etc.), Pessoa’s work testifies to the end of the Individual and the
birth of postmodern fragmented personalities within an incessant stream of consciousness.48
Pessoa’s poetry was influenced in part by decadent sensibility or what has been called
by extension « Symbolism du fin de siècle ». Robert Bréchon, a French specialist of
Pessoa’s work, considers Decadence as a fugitive aesthetical movement, but whose spirit
has affinities with the symbolist movement towards new aesthetical and ethical values49.
For the symbolist aesthetical point of view, art promotes the experience of an emotion.
Symbols take us to the palace of wisdom through sensorial penetration: Imagination
constitutes an intermediate level between the two secured and reliable levels of the psychic
apparatus: senses and reason. Thus, imagination is situated in a no-man’s land.

47
See Pessoa, Fernando, Escritos sobre génio e loucura, Lisboa, Imprensa Nacional-Casa de Moeda, 2006,
Vol. VII, Tomos I-II. Edição crítica de Jerónimo Pizarro, and Obras de Jean Seul de Méluret, Lisboa,
Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda, 2006, Vol. III. Edição e estudo de Rita Patrício e Jerónimo Pizarro.
48
In his decadent poem « Datilografía » Álvaro de Campos, Pessoa’s heteronymous writes: « Afinal, a melhor
maneira de viajar é sentir/ Sentir tudo de todas as maneiras / Sentir tudo excessivamente, / porque todas as
coisas são, em verdade, excessivas/ e toda a realidade é um excesso, uma violência/ uma alucinação
extraordinariamente nítida/ que vivemos todos em comum com a fúria das almas,/ o centro para onde tendem
as estranhas forcas centrífugas/que são as psiques humanas no seu acordo dos sentidos ».
49
« Le bref moment de la décadence c’est le moment qui va de la création de la revue Nouvelle rive gauche, en
1882, au manifeste de l’École Symboliste, en 1886. Réduit à sa définition purement historique, le mouvement
décadent n’a plus qu’un intérêt documentaire. Mais l’esprit dont il témoigne a fini par imprégner toute la
littérature française de la fin du 19ème et du début du 20ème siècle ». Brechon, Robert, « Fernando Pessoa et les
Décadents français », Arquivos do Centro Cultural Português. Homenagem a Paul Teyssier, Fundação
Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisboa-Paris, 1987. pp. 787-788.

26
 From analyzing the basis for an understanding of the heterological aspects of the
imaginary in Maffesoli’s sociology, we propose a wide aesthetical continuity from
Romanticism, through Decadence, through Symbolism, through Surrealism and then to our
contemporary sensibility present in our everyday conviviality. All these sensibilities have
been mainly inspired by what Blanchot calls « the second version of the imaginary » or
Durand « the nocturnal regime of the image ».
Romanticism can be considered as the early aesthetical expression of an extended
decadence of Western culture. The new religiosity that arose during the « fin de siècle »
was also close to the romantic sensibility: Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche and
the « Naturphilosophie ». So later, the « Theosophy » of Madame Blavatsky and Joséphin
Péladan (the Rosiacrucian priest and his book Le Vice Suprême published in 1884); the
« Anthroposophy » of Rudolf Steiner exposed in his six thousand conferences and source
of inspiration for great artists and thinkers such as Piet Mondrian and Henri Bergson; the
astrologist Aleister Crowley whose disappearance at Boca do Inferno (Cascais, Lisboa)
produced an occultist atmosphere of the avant-garde in Portugal, particularly related to
Fernando Pessoa50.
During the last decades of the twentieth century, confronted with an Industrial
Revolution which had enthroned the power of the bourgeoisie, Romanticism took on an
extreme form: Decadence. From 1860 to 1920 the myth of Decadence, through its
heterological figures related to aristocracy, anarchism, the bohemian, feminism and
orientalism replaced the myth of Prometheus which praised the figure of labor and
progress. In brief, whether all « dissident » movements can be considered as processes of
substituting one myth for another in an organic cycle according to Durand51, Decadence
could be interpreted as a notable stage in a long term simultaneous process of decline of
Prometheus and a resurgence of Dionysus during the last two centuries52.

50
Charbonnier, Jean Michel, « La tentation de l’invisible », In Connaissance des Arts, Paris, n. 360. p. 14.
This special issue is completely dedicated to « Traces du Sacré », an exhibition of the relationship between
modern art and spirituality presented at the Centre Georges Pompidou (07/05/08 – 11/08/08).
URL: http://traces-du-sacre.centrepompidou.fr
51
Durand, Gilbert, Mito e sociedade, a mitanálise e a sociologia das profundezas, Op. cit., pp. 12-21.
52
Maffesoli, Michel, L’ombre de Dionysos, contribution à une sociologie de l’orgie, Paris, Librairie des
Méridiens-Klincksieck, Le Livre de Poche, 1985 (1982).

27
 In his study of the mythical and legendary themes recuperated by many artists during
the last decades of the nineteenth century such as Victor Hugo, Gustave Flaubert, Charles
Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, Stéphane Mallarmé, Karl Joris Huysmans,
Oscar Wilde and Edgar Allan Poe, Jean Pierrot quotes George Rodenbach as he argues that
at this period, art was seen as an activity dedicated « to complicate sensations53 ».
In this sense, and if « fiction is the procedure of the human mind » as Mallarmé
states; if « one of the fictional functions consists in the knowledge of chaos »; and if
« imagination is always at the end of an age54 », we suppose that « fin de siècle
mythologies » have to do with a brutal transition period of cognitive sensibility where
excess and heterological behaviors were not only an expression of an apocalyptical
sensibility, but also a hope for renovation of social boundaries, a thirst for new
multisensory living experiences.
Based on the idea of « neuroplasticity55 » that postulates a progressive adaptation of
the mind and its underlying brain processes to environmental changes, we propose that
those heterological aesthetical manifestations such as Symbolism and Decadence illustrate
the void existing between external and internal worlds, but above all, the exorcism of the
mind to heal and adapt to the new external social conditions. From a neurobiological point
of view, this extreme curiosity due to an excess of new stimuli speaks of a possible increase
in dopamine brain circuit activity as a fundamental characteristic of this period56.

53
« Jamais le cerveau humain n’a été plus compliqué, aussi sensibilisé, fouillé par toutes les curiosités de la
sensation. L’abus du cerveau est la grande maladie. Le cerveau modern, si surmené, en arrive à souffrir pour
les détails, à raffiner sur de subtils ennuis ». Rodenbach, Georges, quoted by Maes, Pierre, Notes sur le
Pessimisme, Paris, Figuière, 1926, p. 85, in Pierrot, Jean, L’imaginaire décadent (1880-1900), Paris, PUF,
1977.
54
Kermode, Frank, A sensibilidade apocalíptica, Lisboa: Século XXI. p. 46. Translated by Melo Furtado from
The Sense of an Ending (1967). An exemplary literary study devoted to the relationship between fiction
narratives and the metaphysical crisis.
55
Cf. GómezMont, F; Chao, J., Prado, J.; Vega, J., « Neurohumanidades », in Ciencia y Desarrollo, México,
Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología, No, 1., enero 2007.
56
« Pour la rue diabolique de sa dissimulation, le sexe transforme l’apparence de la femme et assure la
pérennité du désir sur lequel se construisent les grands travaux du cerveau : technique, art et écriture ».
Didier, Jean Vincent, La chair et le diable, Op. cit. p. 87. Cocaine which increases dopamine function in the
human brain was introduced into Europe during the decadent period. It was used widely by artists and by
intellectuals such as Sigmund Freud.

28
 The intensified « life of the nerves » that Georg Simmel described as a corollary of
urban life refers to the increase of stimuli that derive from living in a city full of different
people doing and thinking different things. The brain circuits that communicate with
dopamine are activated by novelty and thus, we claim that at the decadent period there was
an amplifying feedback between the new worlds of mass media, fashion, world commerce
and the neurobiological mechanisms that permit the brain to adapt to increase
environmental variety. Artists, the « antennas of the race », were some of the first to modify
these brain circuits one hundred and fifty years ago starting with Petrus Borel, Charles
Baudelaire and Théophile Gauthier. One hundred and fifty years later and as Maffesoli well
describes, that intensified « life of the nerves » is becoming widely disseminated among the
population in postmodernity57.
Heaven and Hell are « wired » in our brains through hormones production and other
complex biological mechanisms. For us, these poles of the human imaginary and its
narratives could constitute the wisdom historically symbolized through our aesthetical
inheritance that moves from the biological and evolutional functions of our beings to the
deepest metaphysical yearnings never resolved, eternal fountain of imaginary thirst, never
satisfied, always recreated, always new and always ancient, unknown, heterological. From
the wild time of the forest life where passions constituted the key to survival to the most
contemporary technological life, « evil » could be understood as a synonym for empathic
passions revealed for the continuity of culture, that is, the only one contribution from the
human species to the completeness of the physical and metaphysical order of existence.
Towards a possible utility of the heterological processes, the neurohumanistic approach
conceives an evolutionary function of violence, of that Evil’s Part explored by the artists of
the late nineteenth century, and recuperated by many others during the twentieth century
such as the Surrealists, Georges Bataille, Denis de Rougemont, Jean Didier Vincent and
Michel Maffesoli.

57
From this concrete example we can begin to visualize the way the neurohumanities might link historical
information with speculative inferences about the ecology of brain circuits and the way different historical
moments inhibit or stimulate one or another neurocognitive mechanism, beginning with some creative
pioneers and disseminating through amplifying feedback mechanisms. This approach correlates with the
theory of the social life of myths proposed by Gilbert Durand and followed by Maffesoli’s sociological idea
of the return of Dionysus in postmodernity.

29
 CHAPTER II
The Notion of Heterology:
Towards a Science of Excess?

In a letter to his close friend Bataille, the poet René Char wrote: « An entire and important
region of human life today depends on you. Yesterday I said this to André Breton who shared
my opinion. In a time in which treasures fail…it seems almost miraculous to me that you
should exist58».

La philosophie a été jusqu’ici, aussi bien que la science une expression de la subordination
humaine et lorsque l’homme cherche à se représenter non plus comme moment d’un
processus homogène -d’un processus nécessiteux et pitoyable-, mais comme un déchirement
nouveau à l’intérieur d’une nature déchirée, ce n’est plus la phraséologie nivelant qui lui
sort de l’entendement qui peut l’aider ; il ne peut plus se reconnaître dans les chaînes
dégradantes de la logique, et il se reconnaît au contraire Ŕ non seulement avec colère mais
59
dans un tourment extatique Ŕ dans la virulence de ses fantasmes .

Je crois qu’il est essentiel pour nous d’affronter le danger que représente la littérature. (…)
on n’est vraiment homme qu’en affrontant le danger ; et je crois que c’est dans la littérature
que nous apercevons les perspectives humaines restituées sous le jour le plus entier, parce
que la littérature ne nous laisse pas vivre sans apercevoir les choses humaines dans la
perspective la plus violente. Que l’on songe à la tragédie, à Shakespeare, c’est tout de même
la littérature qui nous permet de voir le pire et de savoir lui faire face, de savoir le
surmonter et, somme toute, cet homme qui joue, trouve dans le jeu la force de surmonter ce
que le jeu entraîne d’horreur60.

L’expérience cognitive chez Bataille, ce qui la rend aujourd’hui encore inacceptable, dérive
en grande partie des impulsions affectives, des trames du désir qui ourdissent son univers
fantasmatique et de l’urgence d’explorer avec lucidité et rigueur ses constellations
enchevêtrées61.

58
Kendall, Stuart, « Between Surrealism and Existentialism », Georges Bataille, London, Reaktion Books,
2007. p. 174.
59
Bataille, Georges, Dossier de l’œil pinéal, Œuvres Complètes, Paris, Gallimard, 1970, Tome II. Écrits
posthumes, 1922-1940. p. 22. (Anthropologie scientifique et anthropologie mythologique).
60
The only TV broadcast in which Bataille participated was devoted to his book La littérature et le mal. An
unabridged transcription of this interview has been published in Bataille, Georges, « Lecture pour tous,
entretien avec Pierre Dumayet, 21/05/1958 », Une liberté souveraine, Op. cit., pp. 133-138. Textes et
entretiens réunis et présentés par Michel Surya. We quoted the concluding reflection of Bataille.
61
Pasi, Carlo, « L’Hétérologie et Acéphale. Du fantasme au mythe », dans Revue de Sciences Humaines, 206,
Tome LXXVII, avril-juin, 1987. p. 143.

30
 Inspired by Georges Bataille’s writings on the notion of « Heterology », the group H3
composed by Paul Carmignani, Jonathan Pollock and Didier Girard proposes that, in
opposition to an exhausted positivism, new « heterological methodologies » are possible
through the useful appropriation of the residues that the dry academic approach has
traditionally thrown away62. In accordance with this point of view, we suggest a lecture of
Maffesoli’s essays as an innovative « heterological sociology » that recuperates mythology,
literature and poetry, historically repudiated by the homogeneous theories of sociologists.
The sociology of Marcel Mauss, Émile Durkheim, Max Weber as well as the study
of collective phenomena suggested by the « Collège de Sociologie » integrated in part by
« dissident surrealists » as George Bataille, Roger Caillois, Pierre Klossowski and Michel
Leiris, constitute an argumentative inspiration to Maffesoli’s work in which images,
symbols, emotions and sentiments are considered fundamental to social bonding63.
Bataille’s work melds Mauss, Freud, Hegel, Nietzsche and Sade to forge new ways of
thinking about culture. For Bataille, « the heterogeneous » is expelled from the
homogeneous body, both individual and social, either real or imaginary.
The symbol of Acéphale proposed by Bataille constitutes a symbolical inversion of
vertical patriarchal ordering values into the chalice of free community. Its bonding is
founded in the murder of the Father through decapitation (révolte du fils). This shared
complicity originates a Kinderland instead of a Vaterland. Evil is related to a downward
movement into the depth of cavernous femininity. Maffesoli refers to a generalized
atmosphere of feminization which can be read in terms of the return of pagan goddesses
connected with the values of vitality and abundance64. In the way « Heterology » leads to a
reversal methodology, which ceases to be the instrument of « appropriation » and now
serves « excretion » (two basic polarized human impulses), it introduces the demand for
what we call « the nocturnal imaginary of social life ».

62
Groupe H3 (Carmignani, Paul; Girard, Didier and Pollock, Jonathan), Hétérologies, Pour une dé-
neutralisation de la critique littéraire et artistique, Presses Universitaires de Perpignan, Col. Études, 2006.
63
Also, the ideas of Mikhail Bakunin, Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Bergson and Guy Debord are present in his
vitalistic sociology. Evans, David, « Maffesoli’s Sociology of Modernity and Postmodernity: an Introduction
and Critical Assessment », The Editorial Board of the Sociological Review, Oxford, Blackwell Publishers,
1997. pp. 221-243.
64
Cf. Maffesoli, Michel, « La fusion féminine », L’Instant éternel, le retour du tragique dans les sociétés
postmodernes, Paris, Denoël, 2000. pp. 207-221.

31
 Alexandre Kojève’s reading of The Phenomenology of Mind in the 1930’s at the
Sorbonne constituted a decisive moment for the development of a theoretical counter-
tradition in France65. Kojeve’s understanding of Hegel, indebted to Heidegger, played a key
role in the thought of Bataille. Both Heidegger and Bataille have inspired Maffesoli’s idea
of the presence of excess in everyday life. Bataille’s notions of « expenditure » and
« transgression » are conceptual keys for an understanding of Maffesoli’s sociology.
The author of The Inner Experience underlined that Hegel decided to close his
philosophical system passing the rest of his life repeating the same lessons and playing
cards when he realized the risk of driving mad as nothingness was springing to his mind 66.
For this reason, Bataille considered Hegelian philosophy as an incomplete system of
knowledge in which « the Outside » of « Divine Reason » was neglected. He decided to go
even further, exploring what he called the « non-savoir ».
For this purpose and according to some preliminary notes that remained unknown
until their publication as a posthumous preface to Dossier de l’œil, Bataille claimed the
urgent necessity of a mythological anthropology nourished by « the phantom » as a
substitute for « the concept ». Through a cognitive pulsation, « the insurrection of
phantoms » allows other ways of thinking that philosophy has historically denied67. Thus,
violence, excess, and madness result from breaking the laws of homogeneity. While
homogeneous reality presents itself with the abstract and neutral aspect of strictly defined
and identified objects (as those studied by Hegel), « the heterogeneous world is that of a
force or shock, it presents itself as a charge68 ».

65
Kojeve’s audience was composed of a future generation of French thinkers such as Georges Bataille, Jean
Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jacques Lacan and Raymond Queneau. Cf. Pefanis, Julian, Heterology
and the Postmodern: Bataille, Baudrillard and Lyotard, Durham and London, Duke University Press, 1991.
66
« Vers la fin de sa vie, Hegel ne se posa plus le problème: il répétait ses cours et jouait aux cartes ». Bataille,
Georges, « De l´existentialisme au primat de l´économie », Œuvres Complètes, Gallimard, NRF, t. XI, p.
282. Quoted by Fonseca Lazcano, Luis, Georges Bataille: ontología y alteridad, México, Facultad de
Filosofía y Letras, 2005. p. 164, 187 (Ch. IV, Fuerza de negatividad: posibilidad e imposibilidad).
67
Pasi, Carlo, « L’Hétérologie et Acéphale, du fantasme au mythe », Revue de Sciences Humaines, 206, Tome
LXXVII, avril-juin, 1987. pp. 143-162. Pasi considers these notes as the indispensable underground matter for
a deeper understanding of Bataille’s work.
68
Bataille, Georges, « La Structure psychologique du fascisme ». Phrase quoted, underlined and explained by
Carmignani, P, « Archéologie du tout autre : L’Hétérologie selon saint Bataille », Groupe H3, Hétérologies.
Pour une dé-neutralisation de la critique littéraire et artistique, Op. cit. p. 96.

32
 Since its inception, Bataille’s work revealed an interest in heterological aspects of
culture, and his ideas were related to the intellectual ambiance of the early twentieth
century. On the one hand, Marcel Mauss, considered as one of the founders of modern
anthropology, discovered « the Gift » in archaic societies as a principle of exchange based
on the frenetic consumption of wealth that denies the logic of capitalistic economy where
desire for recognition and mastery generates the free circulation of gifts replacing the
capitalistic system of sale and purchase. On the other hand, the founder of modern French
sociology Émile Durkheim (Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse,) and Rudolph
Otto (Das Heilige) refer to « heterogeneity » as the feature of spiritual life related to the
inapprehensible aspect of the sacred which is manifested through violence and rupture69.
At first, Bataille wrote a short article entitled « Extinct America » which was
published in the Cahiers de la République des Lettres (1928) as a contribution to a volume
commemorating the first major European exhibition of pre-Columbian artefacts. In this
paper, the author contrasted the essentially bureaucratic culture of the Inca State with the
Aztecs who were a vitalistic people as they worshipped war and death through sumptuous
theatrical sacrifices70. This early study on pre-Hispanic cultures was a point of departure to
develop his notion of « dépense » as the cornerstone of a general economy of the Universe.
According to Bataille, capitalistic economy and its ethics restrict excessive expenses
by the delay of consumption and the reinvestment of the surplus in the means of production
while unproductive expenditure is considered as evil. In 1949 and after two decades of
preliminary work, Bataille finally published a systematization of physical and cultural
manifestations of excess entitled La part maudite71.

69
Otto, Rudolph, Lo Santo, lo racional y lo irracional en la idea de Dios, Madrid, Alianza, 2007. pp. 36-44.
Cap. V. « El misterio ». Tanslated by Fernando Vela from Das Heilige, München, Oskar Beck, 1963.
70
Kendall, Stuart, « Heterology », Georges Bataille, London, Reaktion Books, 2007. pp. 66-69.
71
Bataille developed his study on expenditure in Aztec sacrifice but also in potlatch, Buddhism, Islam and
Protestant Christianity, in modern capitalism, Soviet Communism and the Marshall Plan. It is interesting to
note that Bataille had a physicist friend called Georges Ambrosino who was supposed to write one volume of
the study covering the physics of expenditure. Even though Bataille wrote the book himself mostly in 1948,
he thanked him in the first pages of the published work.

33
 In the introduction to The Accursed Share, Bataille claimed that organisms from
single cells to societies, and the cosmic order, produce more energy than they need. While
some of this energy can be consumed in a useful manner, the remainder is wasted, either
gloriously or catastrophically. The equilibrium and survival of organisms and societies has
apparently to do with the proper (ritual) use of such exceeding energy.
After Bataille, and as Maffesoli also asserts, the problem of modern States with all
their institutions (law, economy, family, religion, and science) has historically denied the
reality of excess. If science is only a fragmentary activity, then the science that envisages
the heterological processes cannot attain its object (excess) if that object, becomes the
negation of the principles of a political community (prohibition)72.
Bataille noted that, since the structure of knowledge for a homogeneous reality is that
of science, the knowledge of a heterogeneous reality is to be found in the mystical thinking
of « primitives » and in dreams: it is identical to the structure of the unconscious73.
Opposed to any homogeneous system of knowledge, Heterology studies everything
rejected by homogeneous appropriation (either physiological, psychological or social), and
resulting from unproductive expenditure, taking into account only « the waste » of human
activity, including the nonproductive expenditure of sacrificial, erotic and symbolic
experiences. Thus, imagination, irrationality, infinity, eroticism or mysticism can only be
the object of a heterological knowledge.
In this sense, Heterology is not properly a science of the heterogeneous, because the
heterogeneous is resolutely placed outside the reach of any theoretical approach. Even
though in heterogeneous reality, the symbols charged with affective value have the same
importance as the fundamental elements, and the part can have the same value as the whole,
Bataille’s point of view aims to preserve the difference of « Otherness », resisting the
totalizing tendency of Hegelian philosophy and Western « Weltanschauung » expansion74.

72
Baudry, Jean Louis, « Bataille and Science: Introduction to Inner Experience », Boldt-Irons, Leslie A. (ed.),
On Bataille, Critical Essays, Albany, State University of New York, 1995. p. 271.
73
For Bataille, the term of Agiology would perhaps be more precise, but one would have to catch the double
meaning of agios (analogous to the double meaning of sacer, soiled as well as holly). But it is above all the
term scatology (the science of excrement and the expelled sacred) that retains an incontestable expressive
value as the doublet of an abstract term such as Heterology.
74
Heterology is also related to physiological phenomena such as laughter, tears and orgasm, lying beyond
rational discourse, excess firmly rooted in authentic affective instants which resist interpretation.

34
 Excess and Literature: the forces of Evil

La valeur d’usage de D. A. F. de Sade is the first text where Bataille formulated the
principles for a new science called « Heterology » with « Otherness » as object of study.
Bataille conceived of Sade’s writings as the heterological work par excellence whose
philosophical relevance was misunderstood by the self-appointed pope of Surrealism.
Sade’s work represents an absolute transgression or negation of the world as circumscribed
within the ethical premises of literature75.
According to Bataille, heterological literature could be interpreted as a symbolical
sacrifice composed of heterogeneous elements torn from human society76. Fiction
integrates tragedy within a narrative since sacrifice is a story illustrated in a bloody way77.
Eroticism, death and extreme existential situations are related to a language that says « the
excess of life ». Bataille asserts that literature and poetry might pave the way for « inner
experiences » of the heterogeneous, negating the dialectic movement as they transgress
common metaphorical order. This could explain Breton’s hostility to Bataille’s formulation
of language as « non-communication » or « symbolic sacrifice » rather than a moment for
illumination, a transcendent point of revelation. In this context, heterological languages can
be considered as meeting-points between thought and feeling which replace rationality and
individuality with a pure symbolic expenditure.
Thus, literature and evil are extremely linked. If evil is not present in a story it
becomes immediately boring. Readers show an interest in a literary text only when its plot
creates a tension, even though it takes them to the realm of anguish. Many writers quoted
by Maffesoli were aware that their work had to do with evil. Charles Baudelaire and Franz
Kafka felt guilty about their vocation since their literary activity was considered as the
opposite of a serious activity. Both literature and eroticism seem child’s games far away
from the ethics of work and progress, just revealing the twilight of our deepest regions.

75
Bataille, Georges, « La valeur d’usage de D. A. F. de Sade », Œuvres Complètes, Paris, Gallimard, 1970,
Tome II. pp. 54-56 (Écrites posthumes, 1922-1940).
76
Cf. Bataille, Georges, « La notion de dépense », in La Critique sociale, Paris, Vol.7, January, 1933. p. 302.
77
« Le sacrifice est un roman, c’est un conte, illustré de manière sanglante ». Bataille, Georges, L’érotisme,
Œuvres Complètes, Op. cit. Tome I. p. 307 (1947).

35
 The Apocalyptical Return of Dionysus in Maffesoli’s « Sociolorgy»

Maffesoli has given sociologists an insight into the importance of remaining forms of
excess in our contemporary societies. Compared to everyday life, heterogeneous existence
can be represented as something other, incommensurate, by charging these words with the
positive value they have in affective experience. Maffesoli seems to agree with Bataille that
social life includes aspects that rationality cannot explain. Both authors have developed a
heterological reflection on society, La part maudite and La part du diable78.
Maffesoli has made no secret of his interest in Bataille’s Heterology. Nevertheless, in
opposition to Bataille and as a sociologist of everyday life, Maffesoli gives more
importance to the social phenomenology of the Sacred in daily conviviality than to its more
violent and exceptional manifestations. Even though the Sacred has a heterological aspect
as Otto explained, for Maffesoli and as the Surrealists proposed, « significative details »
reveal its refracted social presence, e. g. sharing a glass of wine with friends.
Similar again to Bataille, Maffesoli claims that the shadow of Dionysus can only be
expressed through an « impressionist writing », not far from the negative method in which
God is approached through negative discursive means. The complex relations between the
manifest and the latent contents (Freud) of sociality also exceed the limited field of Ratio
and its scientific discourse. During his conferences, Maffesoli usually refers to the negative
theology and to Bataille’s system of « non-savoir » as a key model for thinking society.
Hence, instead of studying « the diurnal circulation of merchandises », as social
scientists normally do, Maffesoli proposes to reflect upon « the nocturnal circulation of
bodies and images » as a primal structural component of sociality. Passions, shared
emotions and communal feelings vitalize the social body in our contemporary everyday
life. Maffesoli has devoted three decades of his work to reflect on this affective dimension
of social existence historically denied or depreciated by intellectuals. We find an affinity
between Maffesoli’s studies on violence and the social function of orgy, as those on
postmodern sociality and the imaginary everyday life, with Bataille’s Heterology and the
Dionysian paradigm revealed since Romanticism to Postmodernity.

78
Maffesoli, Michel, La Part du diable, précis de subversion postmoderne, Paris, Flammarion, 2002.

36
 In The Shadow of Dionysus, Towards a Sociology of the Orgy (1982), Maffesoli
studied the sociological value of the « orgiastic ». The Dionysian impulse pervades
everyday conviviality in our contemporary societies. As the rules, codes, and laws
governing social behaviour multiply, the pleasure that is gotten from breaking rules
proliferates and thus, both real and imaginary violence emerge. Media and consumerism
have excessively profited from this « postmodern condition » (Lyotard). Since his first
books, Maffesoli argues that social dissidence is simultaneously destructive and
foundational: « Tout pars destruens conduit à une pars construens79 ».
As Bataille did in his books L’Érotisme (1957) and Les larmes d’Éros (1961),
Maffesoli invites us to reflect on the figure of Dionysus as the god of excess and the
importance of his role for the equilibrium of social forces and the survival of societies.
As we can read through the pages of The Bacchae, destruction always gives rise to a
new order. Maffesoli analyzes the tragedy of Euripides in which the return of the god to his
birth place triggers social effervescence among the women of the city. The divine and
exiled son of Thebes arrives with his tribe to impose his cult and to be recognized as a god.
His anger and violent indignation is complicated by the fact that his mother was made fun
by the populace and even her own sisters did not accept the divine origin of the secret seeds
that gave birth to her apparently bastard but truly divine son.
Both Dionysus and Pentheus are grandsons of Cadmus. While Pentheus’ name means
« the one who grieves », Dionysus is not only the orgiastic god associated with wine,
dance, rapture, laughter, revel and ecstasy, but the divinity that brings peace after orgasmic
or violent discharges of excitation. Furthermore, he is the Orphic godhead of immortality.
Dionysus’ violence is directed only toward those who deny his divinity. Psychoanalytically,
Pentheus’ fruitless attempt to imprison the splinter group and his consequent sacrifice can
be read as the danger for mankind of repressing libidinal impulses. Hence, « the sanity he
(Dionysus) gives is the opposite of insanity, neurosis, which results from repression80 ».

79
Maffesoli, Michel, « Saturation de la modernité », Après la modernité ? Préface à la réédition de Logique de
la domination, La violence totalitaire, La conquête du présent, Op. cit. p. XIII.
80
Rogers, Robert, The Double in Literature, Detroit, Wayne University Press, 1970. p. 65.

37
 Life and violence: genesis and destruction. Dionysus’ mother is fulminated by the
sheer divinity of Zeus. Nietzsche suggested that tragedy was created to reveal the god
Dionysus as we cannot really see the true nature of things because such experience could
instantly destroy us as it happened to the princess of Thebes.
Both Nietzsche and Bataille conceived of the birth of a new life as a process of
violence. So does modern medicine as it understands at a molecular level the way the
fertilized ovum invades the maternal uterus. This is literally an invasion by a set of fast
growing cells into the established order of the endometrium of the maternal womb. Just as
Pentheus invaded his mother as a foetus with violence to be born, so this same violence is
expressed in his dismemberment as a symmetrical but unnatural retribution of cruelty
against a patriarchal order that negates the divine origin of he who has the blood of gods.
With these two considerations we see the convergence between the oldest of mythical
truths with recent philosophical reflections and scientific discoveries. From a
neurohumanistic point of view, there can only be convergence between millenarian human
wisdom, aesthetics and young scientific theories. One must not forget that science, in the
modern sense of the word, is only less than five hundred years old. Mythical, philosophical
and scientific narratives are networks of meanings, produced by human nature and
elaborated by cultural forces. One should not be surprised to learn that there are striking
similarities between mythical symbolism, philosophy and scientific explanations.
Maffesoli also refers to Shiva as a divine personification of the forces of violent
excess : « La jouissance et la mort, figures archétypales de toute existence, sont ainsi
conjointes et se mettent en scène pour rappeler- ce que le mythe de Dionysus, Osiris et
Shiva illustrent de multiples façons - le cycle de l'éternel retour du même81 ».
In his classical study, Alain Daniélou identified the common features between Orphic
Dionysus and Shiva: both suffer dismemberment, both are nomadic, both are followed by a
feminine tribe and wild beasts, both are androgynous, both are related to the forces of
generation and degeneration, construction and destruction, crystallization and dissolution,

81
Maffesoli, Michel, L’ombre de Dionysos. Contribution à une sociologie de l’orgie, Paris, Méridiens, Livre de
Poche, 1985. p. 19, 59.

38
 La légende du passage de Dionysos en Inde c’est une métaphore de la similarité du dieu
grec avec le dieu Shiva. (…) Ces vases communicants : le sacrifice humain (celui-ci après
substitué par le sacrifice d’un taureau), (…) les compagnons et les adeptes fidèles et errants
de leurs rites extatiques (un thyase composé de silènes, satyres et bacchantes -bacchaï- pour
Bacchos et un kula de Maruts et Ganas, kaulas et bhaktas pour Shiva), (…) la victoire des
jeunes dieux sur les anciens (Olympiens sur Titans et Dévas sur Asuras), (…) le culte de la
fertilité agricole et sexuelle (phallus et Linga), (…) le liaison entre le lieu mythique de Nysa
(soit une ville, une île, une montagne) et les mots Nisah (épithète de Shiva qui signifie
suprême), nisam (béatitude) et nisâ (joie). Résonances conséquences de l’origine commune
de la religion védique aryenne et l’Hindouisme ultérieur avec la religion mycénienne et
grecque. Aussi même, les préceptes de la vie orphiques inspirés par les Jaïnas82.

The god generates the Universe by the vibrations of his movements. In this sense,
Shiva seems to be related to the astrophysical discourse of « String Theory » which
postulates the constitution of matter and energy as a set of vibrating strings in different
modes83. As the hidden Shiva, the strings are theoretical constructs that cannot be seen but
whose existence is inferred from physical experiments and mathematical models.
Nowadays there are no experiments that could prove or disprove String Theory. This
resonates with the old cosmogonical idea that approach the sacred only through its
manifestations (e.g. theophany) and never directly.
Thus, the dialectic between life and death, pleasure and suffering, eternity and
immediate existence, has constituted the cornerstone of the imaginary of excess for
generations. Eastern philosophies and Dionysian religions have always dealt with the tragic
sense of life. So later, it was not entirely fortuitous that the birth of glorious modern State
and that of Romantic sensibility happened at the same time. In a shared bedroom at
Tubingen, Hegel, Schelling and Hölderlin realized the emergence of something completely
new, but also, a lack of divinity. As Hölderlin looked to Antiquity for answers to the flight
of gods, so did Nietzsche for answers to the death of God. Furthermore, the Decadents
adapted Sade’s virulent nihilism to a far more lethargic epoch, when the Enlightenment was
beginning to dim and a postmodern eroticized apocalypse came into being.

82
Daniélou, Alain, Shiva et Dionysos. La religion de la Nature et de l'Eros, de la préhistoire à l’avenir, Paris,
Fayard, 1979. p. 31, 36, 129, 134, 170, 213, 222.
83
Greene, Brian, El universo elegante, supercuerdas, dimensiones ocultas y la búsqueda de una teoría final,
Barcelona, Planeta, 2001. Translated by Mercedes García from The Elegant Universe, New York, 1999.

39
 The works of Sade, Nietzsche and Bataille as an orgiastic rhetoric proclaims the link
between transgression and transcendence, « the rapture of rupture » through the isomorphic
relationship between sexuality (Eros) and end-time scenarios (Thanatos): Sade’s death of
84
God, Bataille’s eroticism, and Nietzsche’s Dionysus .

According to Dominic Pettman, « the Dionysian impulse » has been further

aggravated by the dynamic, reciprocal, and symbiotic connections of millenarianism. « The
Dionysian » is paradoxically the desire to invoke the Sacred while simultaneously
embracing the nihilistic license of the Free Spirit in the face of imminent extinction.
« There is no future ». The sensibility of « belatedness » (ontological post festum as
Heidegger stated referring to Hölderlin’s poetry), so explicitly rendered by the nineteenth-
century decadents, imaginaries of apocalyptic anticipation (apokalupsis, apocalyptein:
« uncover », « reveal », « unveil »), salvation, redemption, renovation and revenge have
emerged during the second half of the twentieth century as manifestations of an utopian
exhaustion and of a libidinal millenarianism85.
Since the nineteenth century, the combination of accelerated communication
technologies with the increased mobility has produced a paradoxical tendency towards
stasis. This « mal du fin du siècle » revealed by the decadent writers and Nordau related to
the wide field of sexual imaginary from which vital forces emerge with an inverse
proportion to velocity. We can consider Huysmans’ Au rebours as an attempt to create an
imaginary Temporary Autonomous Zone86 in response to the cognitive exigencies of the
accelerated technological development of the nineteenth century: not-moving, and
travelling through the senses as Des Esseintes. For Nordau, the degenerate spirit has to do
in some way with the neomystic impulse to sublimate sexuality through « artificiality87 »,

84
Pettman, Dominic, After the Orgy, towards a Politics of Exhaustion, State University of New York Press,
2002. p. 37. This book explores the millenarian figure of transcendence. Pettman argues that boredom and a
chronic fatigue syndrome are fundamental notions in response to modernity directly linked with the
exhaustion of the notion of progress.
85
Furthermore, the author assumes that copulation is a logical, or at least possible, consequence of striptease
and/or Revelation. Ibid. p. 15.
86
Bey, Hakim, « La Zona Temporalmente Autónoma ».URL: http://www.lahaine.org/pensamiento/bey.htm
87
Pettman, Dominic, After the Orgy, towards a Politics of Exhaustion, Op. cit., p. 108.

40
 Especially to those mushrooming affinity groups that make up the social fabric of the fin de
millennium, from populist subcultures to elitist secret societies. Stressing the kinship between
proximity and promiscuity, Maffesoli claims that such allegiances are at root erotic, and
nurtured by a shared space or territory, whether real or symbolic. Technology is thus one of
the key vectors of Maffesoli’s orgy, encouraging new articulations of the social divine. Only
those who have not witnessed the ecstatic ritual of a rave could dismiss Maffesoli’s prophecy
that « the confusion of the Dionysian myth has product significant effects of civilization »,
88
and that perhaps « our megalopolises are the site of their rebirth ».

Referring to Maffesoli’s « sociolorgy », Pettman evokes artificiality as the principle

of exalted experience through natural elements recreated through art and technology89. For
Maffesoli, postmodernity is a synergy between archaism and technology. In connection to
this idea of a dialectic between past and future, Maffesoli quotes Saul Bellow who writes
that at a certain level, there are places in our minds that belong to the medieval period or to
the age of pyramid building or to the age of the legendary city of Ur90. This view can be
reinterpreted in the light of evolutionary neuropsychology by considering the possibility
that the different circuits of the human brain can operate in diverse structural modes and
that, sometimes, they can simulate the predominant way of functioning (structures of
feeling and cognition) of the different historical periods, be they of the hunter stage, or the
early agricultural stage or the deeply religious medieval stage.
As a young student, Maffesoli lived in Montpellier, home city of an important
vitalistic school of medicine two hundred years before founded by Boissier de Sauvages
(1707-1777). Although far removed from the positivist practices of modern medicine,
Maffesoli’s work is a postmodern vitalistic manifesto implicit in the idea he quotes from
D. H. Lawrence where « true science » is derived in a holistic way from the totality of our
body, not only from the brain, but also from the womb and the penis91

88
Ibid. p. 33 (Ch. I. Panic Merchants).
89
Cf. Perniola, Mario, Il Sex appeal dell'inorganico, Torino, Giulio Einaudi Editore, 1994.
90
« Mais, à un certain niveau, il y avait des endroits de votre psyché qui appartenaient toujours au Moyen Âge.
Ou même à l’âge des Pyramides ou à l’Ur des Chaldéens ». S. Bellow, Ravelstein, quoted by Maffesoli,
Michel, Le rythme de la vie, variations sur l'imaginaire postmoderne, Paris, La Table Ronde, 2004.
(Epigraph to chapter II, La communauté localisée, p. 61).
91
« La vraie science vient de tout l’ensemble de votre être conscient, de votre ventre et de votre pénis autant
que de votre cerveau et de votre esprit ». Lawrence, D. H., L’Amant de Lady Chatterley, Ibid. (Epigraph to
chapter IV, Présentation des choses, p. 177).

41
 CHAPTER III
Excess and Heterological Processes in Society:
Archetypes, myths, literature and poetry quoted by Michel Maffesoli

Rien ne nous est plus étranger que l’idée de système clos, replié sur lui-même,
immédiatement déchiffrable dans sa cohérence formelle (…) L’idée provient de leur
constellation, non d’une succession. C’est par une telle constellation que l’on espère
exprimer ce point nodal qu’est le devenir social. (…) On pourrait se référer à l’image du
talmudiste. Son originalité tient au fait que, d’une manière paradoxale, c’est ne pas un
commentaire, une interprétation qu’il fait, il utilise, use et abuse d’un mot, d’une idée, d’une
citation pour permettre l’envol d’une pensée qui lui échappe. En brusquant la logique d’une
pensée, c’est quelque chose comme la déconstruction qui s’opère. Par là est pointé l’instant
obscur du possible. Naturellement un tel procédé peut paraître étale, peu problématique ou
encore uniquement exégétique. En fait, l’utilisation de telle ou telle citation ou plus
généralement la procédure globale de ce travail en refusant ce qui nous paraît être le danger
d’une pensée constituée se veut avant tout essentiellement questionnante. À un premier
niveau, il s’agît presque d’un compendium heuristique, ouvrant tout une série de pistes,
indiquant quelque questions, et que l’on voudrait utilisable en tant que tel. D’autre part, il
s’agît de mettre à l’œuvre la force d’irruption de ce que R. Barthes appelle la distance d’une
citation, c’est-à-dire, encore une fois, moins rentrer dans la logique d’une œuvre que d’en
exporter des formules qui se confrontent à la logique de l’argumentation en cours, qui
viennent frapper de l’extérieur dans le but d’infirmer ou d’éprouver la solidité de la
construction. La lecture du fait social ainsi entreprise pourrait être appelée insolent ou
naïve, triviale par certains aspects et elle se veut telle. Les interstices créés par cette
insolence naïve ménagent un site inconfortable mais qui dans son essai de dépasser la
clôture a déjà atteint une brèche. (…) Ce qui ce dégage peu à peu de notre étude, c’est
l’étroite connexion qui existe entre histoire et nature, ou encore entre ce que Freud appelait
archaïsme phylogénétique et développement historique92.

* Note: In order to fit the extension requirements for this dissertation, we have chosen six
representative books of Maffesoli’s work, trying to exemplify the ideas above developed, and at the
same time, aiming to quote the essays not directly cited in the corpus of our reflection. The analysis
of his whole work could be amplified in further studies.

92
Maffesoli, Michel, Logique de la domination (1976). Réédition dans Après la modernité? Paris, CNRS
Collection Compendium, 2008. pp. 7-13 (Introduction).

42
La Violence fondatrice,
Paris, Champ Urbain, 1978.
I. Dynamique de la violence
1. Le phénomène de dissidence
La dissidence sociale s’inscrit dans un double
mouvement de destruction et de fondation, ou
encore qu’elle est la révélatrice d’une
déstructuration sociale plus ou moins
prononcée, et qu’elle en appelle à une
fondation nouvelle. (19)
Il faut avoir un chaos en soi-même pour
accoucher d’une étoile qui danse.
NIETZSCHE (Épigraphe)
La faillite de la vertu était due à la fin de
l’empire.
SAINT EXUPÉRY,
Citadelle (21)
L’excès et la frénésie, les pratiques aimables
ou si terrifiantes qu’ils impulsent,
commémorent la violence originelle mais en
même temps l’expient, négocient avec elle :
c’est cette fonction cathartique qui explique
sa positivité. Fêtes de fous, carnavals, rites
d’inversion. (25)
« La violence constructive est anticipatrice,
de Sade à Artaud, de Nietzsche à Bataille, de
Luther à Marx ou de Babeuf à Bakounine,
légion sont figures anomiques, les
personnages honnis qui sont devenus modèles
canoniques ».
DUVIGNAUD, L’anomie (25)
« Souveraineté ». BATAILLE (21)
Les Bacchants. EURIPIDE (24)
2. La destruction utile
Nous sommes menés par des forces
invisibles auxquelles les criminels
obéissent sans le savoir.
J. A. SCHADE (Épigraphe)
« L’essence de la société est le refoulement
de l’individu et l’essence de l’individu est le
refoulement de lui-même ».
Norman BROWN,
Eros et Thanathos (38)
3. Quelques aspects de la violence
Du Phénix à Dionysos en passant par Osiris,
toutes les mythologies nous montrent
comment la destruction est fondement de la
structuration, mais ce que l’on peut dire a
posteriori est ressenti sur le moment comme
une intolérable agression. (49)
Invente, et tu mourras persécuté comme un
criminel. Copie, et tu vivras heureux comme
un sot.
BALZAC (Épigraphe)
Abjuré (…) le trouble des bas-fonds, dénoncé
toute sympathie avec les abîmes, réprouve le
répréhensible, que le Gustav Aschenbach de
Thomas MANN sombre dans la langueur et la
mort dès qu’il est confronté à cet élément
d’irrationnel qui dérange profondément son
plan de vie. (52)
43
*Le présent dans le mythe dionysiaque : *Le Rire et la Connaissance dionysiaque :

Il est une sagesse qui est une folie

Les penseurs qui dépassent l’humain Rendre un sens plus pur aux mots de la
accourcissent la vie, tribu.
Car qui vise trop haut perd le fruit de MALLARMÉ (74)
l’instant.
C’est, je pense, ou délire ou erreur
Que d’agir de la sorte De toutes les laves que jette la bouche
tiens à l’écart de pensées ambitieuse humaine, ce cratère, la plus corrosive est la
Ton cœur prudent et ton esprit joie.
Ce que croit et pratique la foule des
VICTOR HUGO,
modestes
Je l’accepte pour moi. L’Homme qui rit (81)

EURIPIDE,
Les Bacchants (59) Le proche de l’Absolu se signale par le rire.

« Malaise dans la civilisation ».

Michel TOURNIER,
FREUD, (49)
Le vent paraclet (84)
La part maudite.
BATAILLE (66)
C’est faux de dire je pense. On devrait dire
« Mal d’infini » : on me pense.
DURKHEIM, Faust. RIMBAUD (93)
GOETHE, Don Juan.
MUSSET (67)
Dionysos, Histoire du culte du Bacchus.

4. La parole et l’orgie JEANMAIRE (89)

La parole est interruption dangereuse qui Gilles De Rais.

rompt la sécurité de l’institué (…) Tout BATAILLE (94)
l’échange humain soit économique, amoureux
ou intellectuelle se médiatise par la parole.
(69,73) (…) RILKE disait en substance que « Osiris et Dionysos dieux de la mort et de la
l’homme libérait le mot qui à son tour libérait fécondité ». (95)
l’homme. Nous lisons cette remarque comme
la manifestation de la force poétique de
l’apparent non-sens. La parole incontrôlée « Ptolémée Philopator. Fondateur des fêtes
rappelle la fondation, d’où la crainte qu’on d’ivresse en Egypte ». (95)
les systèmes quels qu’ils soient les endroits
est des situations où la parole est libre. (75)

44
 5. Le désir du collectif

L’excès qui cherche l’intensité permet l’accès

à une forme renouvelée. Rapport antagonique
dont nous avons parlé et dont la violence
sociale est le paradigme achevé. (119)

Telle fut, ô Actéon,

la leçon la plus heureuse de mon aventureux
débordement :
le désir se résout dans l’évanouissement de
la forme à la quelle il s’attachait.

KLOSSOWSKI,
Le Bain de Diane (Épigraphe)

Le combat est le père de toutes les choses.

HERACLITE (118)

Deux principes gouvernent le

monde: l’amitié (philia) et le conflit (neikos)

EMPEDOCLE (118)

*Logique contradictorielle :

La fête, le jeu et le sacré.

WUNENBURGER (118)

45
Eloge de la raison sensible,
Paris, Grasset, 1996.
I. Déontologie
*Urgence de rénovation des paradigmes :
Il convient d’élaborer un savoir dionysien qui
soit au plus proche de son objet. Un savoir
étant à même intégrer le chaos, ou a tout le
moins lui accordant la place qui est la sienne.
Un savoir sachant, aussi paradoxal que cela
puisse paraître, dresser la topographie de la
incertitude et de l’aléa, celle du désordre et
de la effervescence, celle du tragique et du
non-rationnelle. Toutes les choses qui sont
incontrôlables, imprévisibles, mais qui n’en
sont pas moins humaines. Toutes choses qui,
à degrés divers, traversent les histoires
individuelles et collectives. (14)
Le réel n’est pas vrai, il se contente d’être.
Henri ATLAN (Épigraphe)
Un monde en agonie qui ignore son agonie
et se mystifie, car il s’obstine à parer son
crépuscule des teintes de l’aube de l’âge
d’or.
René CHAR (14)
Faire de la connaissance la plus puissante
des passions.
NIETZSCHE, Gai savoir (28)
*Sur la littérature des créateurs :
Critique de gaillard d’avant (…) d’avances
sur les nouveaux mondes.
Julien GRACQ (18)
« La subversion la plus profonde ne consiste
pas forcement à dire ce qui choque à
l’opinion, la loi, la police, mais à inventer un
discours paradoxal ».
Roland BARTHES (14)
Les trois cultures. W. LEPENIES (20)
« L’imaginaire ». G. DURAND (24)
II. La raison abstraite
1. Critique de l’abstraction
C’est toujours en son début qu’une époque
est vraiment pensée, c'est-à-dire, que l’on en
prévoit l’accomplissement. Ainsi GOETHE,
dans sa rigueur classique tout en participant
à l’inauguration de la modernité, ne manque
pas d’en prévoir la fin. Son œuvre poétique
qu’en témoigne. Johann Valentin ANDREAE,
un de ses précurseurs, dans son Faust
raconte l’histoire d’un homme de science,
déçu de celle-ci, et qui trouve son salut dans
la contemplation. Il s’agit là d’un thème
récurrent, dès le XVIIe siècle, méritant
attention : au moment même ou se fonde, le
rationalisme pose ses propres problèmes. (…)
VALERY dans Mon Faust parle de la force
brute du concept. (31, 34)
46
 2. La raison séparée
Passant de la philosophie à l’art, on peut
rapprocher la manie classificatoire de ce que
Paul KLEE dit du formalisme : la forme sans
fonction. Lou Andreas-SALOMÉ, dans le type
d’approche écologique dont j’ai parlé,
propose une démarche intellectuelle moins
agressive, plus respectueuse de la globalité
humaine et naturelle. Cela revient à mettre en
œuvre une connaissance intuitive. En se
référant à l’étymologie : une naissance avec
(cum nascere), à partir d’une vision de
l’intérieur (intuire). En nommant, trop
précisément, cela même que l’on appréhende,
l’on tue ce qui est nommé. Les poètes nous
ont rendus attentif à un tel processus (37, 51,
60).
« Écologie de l’esprit ». MORIN (45)
« Assassination through definition ».
BERGER (60)
Modernité viennoise et crise de l’identité,
RIDLER (51)
III. La raison interne
1. Le ratio-vitalisme
À l’opposé d’une vision simplement
sociologiste, psychologiste ou économiste,
qui fut celle de la modernité, une telle
perspective implique une prise de position
cosmologique et anthropologique, c’est-à-
dire concernant la globalité du donné
mondain, et impliquant des mécanismes de
correspondances, d’analogies, des secrètes
synchronicités. Ce tout cela qui nous
enseigne une rationalité ouverte au pluriel. À
l’image du poème baudelairien les sons, les
couleurs, les odeurs se répondent. De même
la nature et la culture entrent en interaction,
le microcosme et le macrocosme se
répondent, et à l’intérieur du monde social
chacun, selon ses titres et ses qualités, trouve
sa place dans la symphonie humaine. (…)
Une telle logique de l’instant n’a plus rien à
voir avec la volonté rationaliste pensant
pouvoir agir sur les choses et les gens. Elle
est beaucoup plus tributaire du hasard, d’un
hasard étant en même temps nécessaire.
Proche de cela que les surréalistes appelaient
le hasard objectif. En fin, une logique qui doit
moins à l’Histoire qu’au Destin. (…) La
saisie de la raison interne permet nous de
comprendre l’existence en son
développement, et pas seulement son
squelette. Ce que BENJAMIN dit à propos de
Wilhelm Meister ou des Affinités électives
peut s’appliquer à toutes ces relations dont
on recommence à voir la charge esthétique
qui est la leur. (72, 73, 75)
Expliquer chaque chose par sa nature
propre, et l’exposer comme elle est.
HERACLITE (Épigraphe)
47
Par la matière en chacun de nous, c’est
partiellement l’histoire entière du Monde
qui se répercute. Si autonome qui soit notre
âme, elle hérite d’une existence
prodigieusement travaillée, avant elle, par
l’ensemble de toutes les énergies terrestres.
TEILHARD DE CHARDIN,
Le milieu divin (82)
« Science créatrice ».
SCHELLING (69)
« Néologisme de ratioïde ».
MUSIL (71)
« Ration vitale ».
ORTEGA Y GASSET (75)
Comme les longs échos qui de loin se
confondent
Dans une ténébreuse et profonde unité,
Vaste comme la nuit et la clarté,
Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se
répondent.
BAUDELAIRE
*Liaison entre le social et la nature :
« Bassin sémantique, trajet anthropologique ».
DURAND (84)
« Corps non organique versus corps vivant ».
SIMMEL (83)
IV. Du formisme

« Organisation interne d’un œuvre littéraire ». 1. Approche du formisme

W. BENJAMIN (75)
*L’esthétique, le quotidien et le
2. La pensée organique communicationnel:

*Sur le phénomène de la synesthésie : La forme permet d’avoir une idée de

l’ensemble, celle de l’organicité qui unit,
Philosophes, poètes et romanciers ont souterrainement, tous les fragments de
pressenti ce que la science contemporaine est l’hétérogène. Dans le mouvement cyclique
en train de découvrir à nouveau. Le fameux des histoires humaines la domination du fond
quatrain de BAUDELAIRE, dont il n’est pas s’est saturée, et laisse la place à
inutile de se souvenir. (…) La poésie de l’effervescence de la forme. (102, 108)
Hölderlin relie des choses tout à fait
éloignées, et par la fait sens ». (88, 94)

48
La richesse, ce qui est moralement possible,
est représentée intérieurement dans des
formes, non pas des concepts. C’est par là
que ce distingue celui qui a pénétré dans le
temple de la formation de celui qui en
demeure sur le parvis.
Hugo Von HOFMANNSTHAL (Épigraphe)
2. La forme, force d’attraction
La forme (Bildung) nous incite à penser à
partir du paroxysme ou de l’excès. (116)
La beauté est toujours la forme
d’éléments qui sont eux-mêmes étrangers à la
beauté.
SIMMEL (117)
3. La forme sociale
Nous sommes saisis par les mythes plus que
nous ne les faisons. Ils nous dépassent et nous
devancent. (…) il y a des résidus archaïques,
des images primordiales qui font que la vie
sociale est celle qu’elle est. (…) Le rêve le
mythe ou l’archétype sont rien moins que
rationnels, et s’adressent essentiellement à
l’émotion collective. (133, 136)
J. W. GOETHE,
Wilhelm Meister (137)
Montagne magique.
Thomas MANN (137)
« Surréalisme ». (144)
V. Phénoménologie
On peut dire que la violence prométhéenne,
dont le concept est l’instrument privilégié,
cède la place à une posture dionysiaque
employant l’analogie, la métaphore et autres
procédures caressants, qui n’entend pas
réduire le réel, lui indiquer la bonne
direction, mais se contente de le mettre en
valeur, de l’épiphaniser. (…) Flaubert
appelait la rage de vouloir conclure. (150,
159, 161).
Il convient créer une œuvre qui concurrence
le monde, qui n’en soit pas le reflet, mais le
double.
CIORAN,
Exercices d’admiration (161)
Le poète comme le sage dans la cité qui est
capable de conseiller, d’indiquer ce qui est
juste, et de rendre compte du sens des
choses.
Werner JAEGER (168)
49
 3. La métaphore VI. L’expérience

1. Le sens commun
C’est en s’appuyant sur l’imagination des
métaphores que le sage pourra redevenir
Le sens commun participe, pour une bonne
surprenant, c’est-à-dire qu’il sera à même de
part, du régime nocturne. C’est-à-dire qu’il
comprendre, d’une manière incarnée, ce qu’il
intègre ce que, de diverses manières, on a pu
en est de la vie concrète, toujours la même et
appeler la part de l’ombre, l’instant obscur
toujours nouvelle, trouvant dans la sagesse
(Ernst BLOCH), la part maudite (Georges
du sens commun sa force de résistance, et le
BATAILLE), dont est pétrie l’humaine
principe même de sa vitalité. (…) Fascination
nature (221).
de FREUD pour la mythologie grecque, les
œuvres de GOETHE et de SCHILLER. (204,
Ce livre eût justifie l’idée que la langue des
211)
simples est porteuse d’une certaine sagesse.

Certaines métaphores sont plus réelles que

Umberto ECO,
les gens qu’on voit marcher dans la rue.
Le Nom de la Rose (Épigraphe).
Certaines images, au détour de certaines
livres, vivent avec plus de netteté que bien
Sage est celui qui monotonise la vie, car le
des hommes et des femmes.
plus petit incident acquiert alors la faculté
d’émerveiller.
Fernando PESSOA,
Fernando PESSOA (233)
O Livro do desassossego (210)

2. Le vécu
La méthode la plus sur pour juger une
peinture c’est de n’y rien reconnaître
De NIETZSCHE à SCHUTZ, en passant par
d’abord et de faire pas à pas la série
SIMMEL et BERGSON la philosophie ou la
d’inductions que nécessite une présence
sociologie de la vie a produit une réflexion
simultanée de taches colorées sur un champ
d’importance. Ainsi que le signale ce dernier,
limité pour s’élever des métaphores en
celle-ci est fondée sur une grande attention à
métaphores, de suppositions en suppositions,
la vie présente. (240)
à l’intelligence du sujet.

Les uns gouvernent le monde, les autres

Paul VALÉRY (200)
sont le monde.
PESSOA (238)

50
C’est en vivant les problèmes que l’on rentre « Vouloir vivre esthétique (Kunstwollen) ».
insensiblement dans leurs solutions. A. RIEGL (260)

R. M. RILKE (243) « Jouissance accompagne de conscience »

(Genuss mit Bewusstsein)
« Je m’en tiens au point du vue GOETHE (267)
phénoménologique ».
C. G. JUNG (242)

« Mise en forme du vécu ».

Oscar KOKOSCHKA (246)

VII. L’illumination par le sens

La fonction que Platon attribuait au

philosophe était de faire des mythes et non
seulement des discours (…) les discours et les
mythologies ne sont que des manières
complémentaires d’exprimer une même
chose : le retour d’une conception globale de
l’homme dans son environnement naturel et
social. (255)

S’ensuivait-il que les phrases subséquentes

de l’aventure alchimique fussent autre chose
que des songes, et qu’un jour il connaîtrait
aussi la pureté ascétique de l’œuvre au
blanc, puis le triomphe conjugué de l’esprit
et des sens qui caractérise l’Œuvre au
rouge.

Marguerite YOURCENAR (Épigraphe)

51
Du Nomadisme. Vagabondes initiatiques, hédonisme relatif vécu au jour le jour, qui
Paris, Le Livre de Poche, 1997. caractérise au mieux cette forme d’intensité
sociale et individuelle, cette fièvre, diront
L’errance est du nombre qui, outre son aspect certains, délimitant bien l’étrange
fondateur de tout ensemble social, traduit bien atmosphère du moment. (21, 26)
la pluralité de la personne, et la duplicité de
Imprimer au devenir le caractère de l’être,
l’existence. Elle exprime, également, la révolte,
c’est une preuve suprême de la puissance.
violente ou discrète, contre l’ordre établi, et
donne une bonne clef pour comprendre l’état de
NIETZSCHE (Épigraphe)
rébellion latente dans les jeunes générations
don on commence, à peine, à entrevoir
l’ampleur, et dont on commence à peine, à « Le flâneur ».
entrevoir l’ampleur, et dont on n’a pas fini de BENJAMIN (30)
mesurer les effets. Le mal de infini dont parlait
Durkheim taraude, de plus en plus, l’esprit de « La pierre que roule ».
tout un chacun et le corps social en son WATERS, DYLAN, JAGGER.
ensemble. (…) l’anomique de aujourd’hui, en
sa force libertaire, et cela même qui, souvent, « Le prix de choses sans prix ».
fonde le canonique de demain. (…) De même il DUVIGNAUD (21)
est temps de prendre au sérieux le regain de la
pulsion d’errance qui, dans tous les domaines, « Généalogie de la domestication ».
en une sorte de matérialisme mystique, rappelle FOUCAULT (21)
l’impermanence de toute chose. (13, 15)
II. Le nomadisme fondateur

I. La pulsion d’errance 1. La peur de l’état naissant

Quel que soit le nom qu’on puisse lui donner,

Le nomadisme est antithétique à la forme de
l’errance, le nomadisme est inscrit dans le
l’État moderne (…) Le propre de la
structure même de l’humaine nature : que
modernité a été de tout vouloir faire rentrer
celle-ci soit individuelle ou qu’elle soit
dans le rang, de codifier et, stricto sensu,
sociale. (…) Retour aux formes archaïques
d’identifier. (…) Une protection en échange
que l’on avait crues dépassées, mais qui,
de la soumission » (…) L’errance (…)
d’une manière plus ou moins consciente,
expression d’un autre rapport à l’autre et au
continuent à tarauder les imaginaires et les
monde, moins offensif, plus caressant,
manières d’être collectifs. Parfois ce regrès
quelque peu ludique, et bien sur tragique,
n’est pas seulement nostalgique ou
reposant sur l’intuition de l’impermanence
simplement commémoratif. Il va s’exprimer
des choses, des êtres et de leurs relations.
sous forme paroxystique. Les divers
Sentiment tragique de la vie qui s’emploiera
mouvements millénaristes sont, de ce point de
à jouir, dans le présent, de ce qui se donne à
vue, instructifs. (…) Et les fanatismes
voir, et de ce qui se donne à vivre au
contemporains, les divers vagabondages et
quotidien, et qui trouvera son sens dans une
les multiples anomies sont, qu’ils se soient ou
succession d’instants, précieux de par leur
non conscients, des rappels plus ou moins
fugacité même. Il est possible que ce soit cet
violentes d’un idéal communautaire. (36, 38)

52
Peut être notre véritable destin est-il d’être
essentiellement en chemin, sans cesse
regrettant et désirant avec nostalgie,
toujours assoiffés de repos et toujours
errants. N’est sacrée en effet que la route
dont on ne connaît pas le but et qu’on
s’obstine néanmoins à suivre, telle notre
marche en ce moment à travers l’obscurité
et les dangers sans savoir ce qui nous
attend.
Stefan ZWEIG,
Le Chandelier enterré. (Épigraphe)
« La fuite ». (37)
« Jeunesse archétypale ». (37)
« Amour transgressif ». (37)
« Le chevalier errant ». (38)
« Les vacances ». (38)
« Le barbare ». (41)
« Variations saisonnières des sociétés ».
DURKHEIM (28)
« Vénération du voyageur errant ». A.
DANIÉLOU (28)
« Caractère inquiétant du voyageur ».
PLATON (40).
« La nostalgie du nomadisme ».J.
DUVIGNAUD (38)
2. Historique du nomadisme
Le nomadisme n’est pas uniquement
déterminé par le besoin économique ou la
simple fonctionnalité. Son mobile est tout
autre : le désir d’évasion. (…) Luis
CAMOENS (Lusiades) chante l’importance
de l’errance, sur le vaste monde, et la
fonction dynamique de l’exploration. Il
souligne ainsi que le génie du peuple y trouve
sa réalisation. On sait également le rôle joué,
dans l’épopée nationale par le
sébastianisme : nom d’un prince disparu,
dont on attend toujours le retour, et qui incita
à maintes aventures et expéditions dans les
pays lointains. Le sébastianisme anima en
profondeur l’imaginaire collectif, et (…) F.
PESSOA, lui-même, y trouva motif
d’inspiration lorsqu’il célébra le cinquième
empire, à venir, au cours duquel le peuple
portugais sera, en quelque sorte, exalté. La
fameuse saudade, propre au pays et à ses
habitants trouve, peut être, son origine dans
un tel amour du lointain. (48)
« Le poète voyageur ». RIMBAUD (43)
3. Nomadisme communautaire
Toutes choses mettent l’accent sur la
dimension émotionnelle et affectuelle de la
structuration sociale. (…) Charge érotique de
ces rencontres sans suite qui, par
sédimentations successives et d’une manière
non consciente, élabore même la trame de la
socialité. (…) C’est cela même qui constitue
l’essence d’être ensemble. (59, 67)
« Regressio ad uterum ». (59)
« Satán, fils errant de Dieu ».
C. G. JUNG (59)
« Dionysos, mythe incarné de notre époque ».
G. DURAND (62)
53
La rue assourdissante autour de moi hurlait
Longue, mince, en grand deuil, douleur
majestueuse,
Une femme passa, d’une manière fastueuse
Soulevant, balançant le feston et l’ourlet.
Agile, noble, avec sa jambe de statue.
Moi, je buvais, crispé comme un
extravagant,
Dans son œil, le ciel livide où germe
l’ouragan,
La douceur qui fascine et le plaisir qui tue.
Un éclair…puis la nuit ! Fugitive beauté
Dont le regard m’a fait subitement renaître,
Ne te verras-je plus que dans l’éternité ?
Ailleurs, bien loin d’ici ! trop tard ! jamais
peut-être !
Car j’ignore où tu fuis, tu ne sais où je vais,
Ô toi que j’eusse aimée, ô toi qui le savais !
BAUDELAIRE,
« À une passante »,
Les fleurs du mal. (67)
III. Le territoire flottant
1. L’art de la dérive
On s’emploie, tout d’abord, à enfermer
l’errant, le déviant, le marginal, l’étranger,
puis à domestiquer, à assigner à résidence
l’homme sans qualité qu’on prive
d’aventures. (76)
La ville, comme espace plein, lui offre ainsi,
paradoxalement, des moments, des lieux,
totalement vacants où son esprit et son corps
pourront être en vacance complète : la
possibilité de vivre la multiplicité des êtres
qui l’habitent. (83)
Ils sont bornés par manque de clôture.
René CHAR (Épigraphe)
L’homme sédentaire envie l’existence des
nomades.
T. ADORNO. (72)
« Bipolarité nomadisme-sédentarisme ».
L. STRAUSS (73)
« Le voyage comme déterritorialisation ».
BAUDRILLARD (86)
2. La vie double
En tant que ville mythique, Venise fait
ressortir la dialectique sans conciliation
entre la sédentarité et l’errance, ou encore ce
que j’appelle le enracinement dynamique,
c’est-à-dire la nécessité d’un lieu matriciel, et
là non moins fort est nécessité de son au-delà.
(91)
« La prison heureuse ». DURAND (76
« Hermes, le dieu voyageur ». (88)
« Voyage immobile ». (92)
« Analyse de Venise ».
SIMMEL (87)
« Sur les villes italiennes ».
D. FERNANDEZ (92)
IV. Sociologie de l’aventure
1. Pluralité de la personne
Sentiment de las vie comme aventure pouvant
être vécue de manière multiple : le vagabond,
le routard, le touriste, l’aventurier. Il s’agit
là de modulations diverses d’un même
archétype. Ce que des romanciers comme
GOETHE ou HESSE, et plus généralement
toute une tradition romanesque allemande,
avaient bien décrit dans le Bildungsroman
54
tend à se exprimer dans le roman de gare, la
science-fiction, la bande dessinée, ou dans la
production musicale. (…) déperdition de soi
dans l’altérité, dans l’autre de la rencontre
occasionnelle ou dans le rencontre avec le
Grand Autre (naturel ou divin) que l’on
poursuit ». (107, 108)
Seule la fiction ne mente pas, elle entrouvre
sur la vie d’un homme une part dérobée par
où se glisse, en dehors de tout contrôle, son
âme inconnue.
F. MAURIAC (104)
Rien n’est plus cher à l’éclosion que le
retrait.
HÉRACLITE (123)
« Empathie (Einfühlung) ».
SCHELLING (100)
« Désir d’ailleurs ».
DON QUICHOTTE,
ROLLING STONES
(110)
2. L’éternel présent du plaisir
On n’insistera jamais assez sur la liaison
entre le polythéisme des valeurs, le
paganisme quotidien et l’accentuation du
présent dont il convient de vivre toutes les
potentialités (…) Ciment social constitué à
partir des émotions communes ou des plaisirs
partagés. (111, 116)
On the Road.
KEROUAC (114)
« Soif du voyage ».
G. SIMMEL (112)
« Le régime nocturne et l’escapisme ».
DURAND (118)
3. Le « mal de l’infini »
L’évasion devient une nécessité lorsque tout
se sclérose ou se codifie. (…) Les années
d’errance juvénile sont de tradition dans
toutes les cultures et toutes les sociétés. (…)
En s’appuyant sur HEIDEGGER, on peut
faire un parallèle entre cette ex-istence et ce
qu’exprime le mot destin : Ge-schick. L’être
n’est pas fondement, principe, il est Ge-
schick , envoi, devenir, je dirai pour ma part
errance. (…) On peut se demander s’il n y a
pas une secrète appétence pour cet « envoi »,
cette sortie de soi auquel on est confronté.
N’est-ce pas cela que se demande Rilke ?
(133, 134)
L étranger était devenu mon dieu.
CIORAN,
Exercices d’admiration (131)
Warum dann Menschliches müssen und,
Schicksal vermeiden sich sehnen nach
Schicksal?
R. M. RILKE
(9ème Élégie, 134)
« L’aventure ».
SIMMEL (129)
« La mobilité anomique du célibataire ».
DURKHEIM (129)
V. Exil et réintégration
1. L’archétype de l’exode
« Homo viator ». (138)
55
Pour trouver Dieu il faut être heureux car
ceux qui par détresse l’inventent vont trop
vite et cherchent trop peu l’intimité de son
absence ardente.
R. M. RILKE
2. L’échappée belle
Luther lutte, en fait, contre les possibles
réjouissances, beuveries et orgies que ne
manquent pas de susciter l’errance
existentielle, religieuse, quotidienne. Il n’a
pas tort, l’échappée belle est toujours
synonyme d’excès. (154)
Chaque artiste semble le citoyen d’une
patrie inconnue.
M. PROUST (162)
A quoi bon poètes en temps de détresse, mais
ils sont, dis-tu, comme les prêtes sacrés qui
de pays en pays errent dans la nuit sainte.
HÖLDERLIN, „Brot und Wein“,
Elegien, 7 (163)
« Aventure amoureuse, mystique ».
CIORAN, La tentation d’exister. (141)
« Recherche des orients mythiques » (163)
« La patrie inconnue de l’artiste » (163)
« Nomades: Nietzsche, Kleist et Hölderlin ».
ZWEIG. (161)
« Puer aeternus ». (172)
« Épistémologie contradictorielle ».
LUPASCO, DURAND (178)
3. L’absence ardente
Le désenchantement politique favorise le
réenchantement spirituel. (…)C’est le
cheminement qui sauve et non le
l’enracinement. (…) On a pu dire du poète R.
M. RILKE que c’était son apatridie qui lui
fait célébrer la Terre avec l’intensité qu’on
sait. (…) Cette absence ardente et pleine
d’intensité, c’est cela même qui marque
l’esprit du temps, où tout à la fois on sait
jouir des biens du monde, et où on peut les
abandonner, sans coup férir, tout aussi
immédiatement. C’est cela, en particulière
qui rend les jeunes générations si
attachantes : pleins du souci hédoniste du
jouir le présent, et en même temps capables
des générosités, des formes de solidarité
étonnantes, d’altruismes indéniables. « Le
non-savoir, dont on trouve des traces dans la
docte ignorance de Nicolas de Cuse, pu, plus
généralement, dans la démarche
apophatique, peut-être une forme de
vigilance, l’expression épistémologique du
nomadisme. (165, 172, 173)
Wandern und Warten ist meines.
R. M. RILKE (177)
Sometimes you hear / As epitaph / He
chucked up everything /And just cleared off.
LARKIN,
On the road again. (167)
« Voyage initiatique et bourreau de soi même
chez Baudelaire et Camus ».
G. DURAND (168)
« The sage is an enlightened child ». (179)
56
Le Mystère de la conjonction,
Montpellier, Fata Morgana, 1998.
I. L’éthique de l’esthétique
Rassemblant d’articles sur la thématique
dionysiaque. (…) vision de la logique du
vivant, logique érotique qui repose sur
l’attraction, les affinités, les processus
émotionnelles et affectuels dont on voit
l’importance contemporaine- ment.
L’aisthesis rend à la connaissance intuitive
ses droits, contre le privilège accordé
traditionnellement à la connaissance
conceptuelle. (…) (9, 10).
La poésie et l’amour sont les ingrédients
majeurs de la connaissance.
R. ABELLIO (10)
Élaborer un système de connaissance
humaine basé sur l’érotique, une théorie
du contact.
YOURCENAR,
Mémoires d’Hadrien (23)
Esthétique de la réception.
JAUSS (11)
« Kunstwollen ».
NIETZSCHE (17)
II. La prostitution comme socialité
La sociologie était avant tout l’étude de la
sexualité. Alain DANIÉLOU montre que la
prostitution sacrée permettait, sans but
procréatif, l’extase érotique à l’errant, au
pauvre, au moine ou à l’homme marié. (…) le
caractère sacré de la prostitution a bien une
fonction des harmonies des contraires. (35,
37)
(…)
Qu’est ce que l’amour ?
Le besoin de sortir de soi.
L’homme est un animal adorateur.
Adorer, c’est se sacrifier et se prostituer
Aussi tout amour est-il prostitution.
BAUDELAIRE,
Mon cœur mis à nu (37)
Les lois de l’hospitalité,
KLOSSOWSKI (54)
III. Ludisme et socialité
Dès le moment où le devoir-être ou les
arrière-mondes n’ont pas l’impact qu’ils
s’attribuent, dès le moment où le présent et sa
précarité constituent le substrat de la vie
courante, l’excès ou le jeu ne sont pas des
exceptions, mais plutôt une manière naturelle
de vivre la poésie de l’existence, que se
capillarise dans l’ensemble des pratiques et
des situations de tous les jours. (65)
57
 « Le vert arbre d’or de la vie ». À coté d’un savoir purement intellectuel, il y
GOETHE (65) a une connaissance qui intègre aussi une
dimension sensible, une connaissance qui, au
CAILLOIS (59) plus proche de son étymologie, permet de
naître avec. (111)
HUIZINGA (61)

Donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la

IV. Tuer le temps :
tribu.
De la disponibilité sociale
MALLARMÉ (103)

Une partie de la tradition occidentale, qui

sert de fondement à la rationalisation dont il
Ombres des dieux antiques, tels qu’ils
vient d’être question, établit une étroite
furent, visitent à nouveau la terre.
liaison entre la connaissance et l’introduction
du mal, plus précisément, entre l’arbre de la
HÖLDERLIN (113)
connaissance et l’érotisme source de
dépravation. Les poètes nous rappellent une
sensibilité alternative. (77, 97)
Aujourd’hui solitaires, vous que vivez
séparés, vous serez un jour un peuple.
BAUDELAIRE,
Les fleurs du mal (97)
NIETZSCHE (113)

La curée, ZOLA (97)

V. Centralité de la marginalité tribale et

coutumière

Le dionysiaque renvoie bien sûr à la

promiscuité sexuelle, et autres effervescences
affectuelles ou festives, mais il permet
également de comprendre l’élaboration
d’opinions communes, des croyances
collectives ou de la doxa communes (…)

58
La Part du Diable. I. Petite épistémologie du Mal
Précis de subversion postmoderne,
Paris, Flammarion, 2002. « Nicht’raus, sondern durch ».

A ce prométhéisme moderne est en train de (JUNG (Épigraphe)

succéder la figure plus complexe de
Dionysos. Hédonisme ambiant, Sauvagerie L’esprit animal
latente. Animalité sereine. (…) « L’excès, le
Il y a retour en force du mal. J’entends par
démonisme, les multiples effervescences de
là la face obscure de notre nature. Cet esprit
divers ordres, sont là, qui affirment que
animal revient sur le devant de la scène
Dionysos est le roi clandestin de l’époque.
sociale. Non pas comme une simple
(…) Par là on peut comprendre que la part
régression, mais selon une attitude de
destructrice, celle de l’excès ou de
régrédience, celle de l’implication intégrant
l’effervescence, est cela même qui toujours,
l’archaïque, le primitif, l’animal dans
précède une harmonie nouvelle. (…)
l’humain, et ne dépassant tout cela. (31, 43)
Reconnaître la part du diable, savoir en faire
bon usage, à fin qu’elle ne submerge le corps
social. Il est nécessaire d’élaborer une Voici venir le temps des assassins.
pensée du ventre. (…) Penser le sensible en
RIMBAUD (63)
toutes ses manifestations. (…) La pensée du
mal fut, durablement, évincée ou cantonnée
« Dieu sépara la lumière des ténèbres ».
dans l’art, la poésie ou quelques auteur
« Spaltung ».
maudits. Maudits en leur temps. Car si l’on
FREUD (45)
se souvient de Schopenhauer, de Nietzsche,
de Baudelaire, de Rimbaud ou de Simmel ou
« Docte ignorance ».
encore de M. Weber (ô combien contestés a
Nicolas de CUSE (35)
leur époque), qui en a mémoire le nom de
leurs détracteurs ? (…) Ce livre veut indiquer
« Coincidentia oppositorum ».
une tendance de fond de la vie postmoderne :
LUPASCO (35)
la liaison organique du bien et du mal, du
tragique et de la jubilation (16, 20-21, 22,
« Effervescence et anomie ».
23)
DURKHEIM, GUYAU (42)

Le poète se fait voyant par un long, immense

« Part maudite ».
et raisonné dérèglement de tous les sens.
BATAILLE (42)
Toutes les formes d’amour, de souffrance,
de folie ; il cherche lui-même, il épuise en
« Instant obscur ».
lui tous les poisons, pour n’en garder que
BLOCH (42)
les quintessences. Ineffable torture.
« Esprit des bêtes ».
A. RIMBAUD,
FOURIER (43)
Lettre à Demeny. (18)
« Ombre ».
JUNG (98)

59
 La puissance du mal
L’excès, fut-ce dans ses aspects les plus
obscurs est, aussi, un élément structurant de
notre nature. La violence liée à l’animalité
comme une constante anthropologique. (…)
L’Ombre de Dionysos. (100, 104)
*Duplicité et la mort comme double :
L’individu est avant tout fragmenté. La
fragmentation est chose quotidienne. (…)
Intranquillité de l’être (…) Fondement de
l’état de guerre permanent propre à cette
perpétuelle tension entre ce qu’est tout en
chacun et ce qu’il aimerait, ou rêverait,
d’être. Le paroxysme poétique dit bellement
et en majeur ce qui de plus en plus constitue
les aspects les plus communs de la vie
quotidienne. (144, 148)
« Inquietum est cor nostrum ».
San Agustin (148)
* Combat contres soi-même :
Gauvain Ŕ Perceval, Gilgamesh ŔEnkidu.
(151)
« L’Univers archaïque des doubles fantômes
et leur aspect envoûtant vivant en nous ».
MORIN,
Sur le cinéma. (155)
« La profondeur se cachait à la surface des
choses ».
SIMMEL,
La tragédie de la culture. (232)
« La contradiction : essence de l’Univers».
DURAND (161)
*Transcendantalisme panthéiste :
Qui ai en moi trop de ce qui est plus
Grand que moi
Trop de ce que je ne peux pas appeler
Moi
PESSOA (148)
Transmutation du Mal
Vivre plus d’une vie en y intégrant les défis
du risque, du mal, voire même de la mort
assumée, voilà bine l’enjeu d’une vie ardente,
qui est bien moins exceptionnelle qu’on ne
croit. On peut voir l’essence « dionyso-
héraclitienne de la vie ». Paradoxe de la
dépense : qui perd gagne. (210).
Séjour balsamique et douillet, un havre
tiède. Là bas.
HUYSMANS (Épigraphe)
Tout entier il n’est rien qu’un gouffre dans
son être.
PESSOA (197-198)
« Don Juan ». (192)
Verlaine qualifiait Rimbaud de Satan
adolescent. On peut se demander si la
créativité démoniaque du poète, quelque peu
marginale dans le monde bourgeois du XIXe
siècle, ne s’est pas répandue dans l’ensemble
du corps social. Les Saisons en enfer se
banalisent et soulignent que le désir du
risque, de la jouissance de la dépense, le
plaisir de vibrer ensemble ne peuvent être,
durablement, étouffés. (…) On a canonise
bien des penseurs et des poètes maudits.
(207)
60
 La thématique de la domination résulte de la
dénégation de la mort. (…) À cote de la loi
d’airain de la petite économie moderne, il
existe une loi non mois contraignante de
l’économie générale intégrant, comme l’a
bien vue G. BATAILLE, la dépense, la perte
et la mort. L’intensité érotique, qui ne s’y pas
trompée, est à ce prix en ce qu’elle lie eros et
thanatos. Petite mort de la jouissance qui, au
plus haut désir, se souvient de tout ce qui unit
à la mort. (…) Organicité du bonheur et
malheur. (165, 174)
Je suis parvenu à la satiété du néant, à la
plénitude du rien absolu.
PESSOA (172)
For he who lives more life than one / more
death than one must die.
WILDE (183)
La crypte sociale
Frémissements de la mode, les hystéries
sportives et musicales pourraient être
considérés comme des épreuves initiatiques
propres à tous les chemins ver un plus-être.
Echo de la vision dantesque. (163)
« Dionysos : flirt avec la mort ».
NIETZSCHE (163)
« Gefühlkultur dans la Vienne fin de siècle ».
KLIMT, SCHNITZLER, SCHIELE. (163)
„Geworfenheit“ et « sentiment tragique ».
HEIDEGGER, NIETZSCHE (217)
« NIETZSCHE, BAUDELAIRE, DE
QUINCEY, MICHAUX ». (210)
* « Le lieu fait lien » et l’importance des
objets :
Panthéisme objectal rendant attentif à ce que
j’ai nomme la « fonction communielle » de
ces artifices que sont les objets. Centre
spirituelle de la ville, dans le monde
souterrain, dans l’intériorisation poétique :
exister à partir du creux. (225, 231).
Les choses sont, je l’affirme,
plus que le temps où elles semblent changer,
plus que l’espace qui semble les contenir.
PESSOA
Objets inanimés avez-vous donc une âme.
LAMARTINE
* Sagesse de la nuit et tendance à valoriser
l’ombre :
« L’archétype du contenant ».
DURAND (228)
« Orients mythiques ».
DURAND (239)
« Grand-Mère ».
(239)
« Méphistophélès ».
(241)
« Björk, Eminem, Sex Pistols, Madonna ».
(241)
61
L’Instant Éternel. Le retour du tragique
dans les sociétés postmodernes,
Paris, Denoël, 2000.
La vitesse (…) fut la marque du drame
moderne. Le développement scientifique,
technologique ou économique en est la
conséquence la plus visible. Par contre, l’on
voit poindre un éloge de la lenteur, voire de
la paresse. La vie n’étant plus qu’une
concaténation d’instants immobiles,
d’instants éternels dont il faut pouvoir tirer le
maximum de jouissance. (…) Très souvent les
périodes tragiques sont celles de la
jubilation, des moments d’effervescence, des
hymnes à la joie et à la vie. (10, 11)
Ici l’on pourrait vivre puisque l’on y vit.
NIETZSCHE (Épigraphe)
I. Une vie sans but
Les sociétés traditionnelles privilégient le
passé. La modernité, comme toutes les
époques progressistes, privilégie le futur. La
décadence romaine ou la Renaissance,
accentuèrent plutôt le présent. Immanentisme
s’opposant à transcendantalisme. (21, 22)
On pourrait encore dire que celui-là
parvient au but de l’existence qui n’a plus
besoin de but hors de la vie.
WITTGENSTEIN (Épigraphe)
On ne peut échapper à une vie que nous
devons finalement vivre.
Oskar KOKOSCHKA (27)

La mesure de l’amour est d’aimer sans

Une philosophie où l’on n’entend pas entre mesure.
lignes les pleurs et les grincements de dents SAN AGUSTIN (51)
et le terrible vacarme du meurtre général
réciproque, n’est pas une philosophie.
« Amor fati ».
SCHOPENHAUER VIRGILE, ESCHYLE (30, 32)
(Épigraphe)

« Attraction passionnée ». V. L’organicité des choses

FOURIER (15)
*Vitalisme sauvage, la force des choses :
« Intensification de la vie des nerfs ».
SIMMEL (16)
Connaissance ineffable du diamant
désespéré : la vie.

R. CHAR (Épigraphe)

62
VI. La viscosité sociale

*Empathie, la fusion féminine :

Retour de la nature, tension vers l’androgyne

mythique, accentuation de l’imaginaire. (…)
L’artiste a le courage de dire oui, tout de
même à la vie. (207, 234)

Oh! Que ne sommes-nous

Nos tout premiers aïeux !
Un petit tas visqueux dans un chaud
marécage.
Vivre et mourir, et féconder
et procréer
Seraient le pur effet des
nos humeurs muettes.

G. BENN (Épigraphe)

I hear the flowers growing over me.

KEATS (210)

« L’éternel féminin ».
GOETHE (209)

« Puer aeternus ». (211)

« L’androgyne divine ».
ÉLIADE (212)

« Lebensphilosophie ». (221)

63
 CONCLUSION

Since its inception, sociology has oscillated between a scientific orientation which has led it
to ape the natural sciences, and a hermeneutic attitude which has shifted the discipline
towards the realm of literature. Actually, sociology has always been in a continuous
dilemma. Signs of this crisis may be seen nowadays in the closing down of departments at
many universities around the world. Nevertheless, this epistemological difficulty of the
discipline can be read as an advantage over other social sciences that depreciated the
sociological value of aesthetical sociality. In the sense that sociology bridges science and
the humanities, in the time of transdisciplinary approaches, a renewal of sociological
methodologies seems to have real possibilities.
Quoting literary items in sociological contexts is interesting, since in that case we
have to inquire not only about the sociological value of literature, but also the possibility of
a more literary sociology. Further, exploring the literary imaginary related to excessive and
heterological processes might open a new debate among the intellectuals from a wide range
of different disciplines. This has been our main purpose studying Michel Maffesoli’s work.
For both Durand and Maffesoli, it is always interesting to be attentive to what poets
and novelists have to say as their creations illuminate the paths taken by social phenomena.
The prophet word is said always before the events it describes. Ancient mythical figures of
excess and decadent protagonists share a potential of freedom with the postmodern
sensibility. This relationship is well described in Maffesoli’s essays.
Further, Maffesoli’s work might also be considered with respect to its literary
qualities. No one could possible understand the global sense of his work without taking into
account its relation to other areas of study far from sociology. We all know that nowadays,
sciences and arts are witnessing the genesis of a new field of knowledge exploring the
human nature which integrates their methodologies. In the next years, humanities, social
sciences, neurobiology will be natural companions. Maffesoli’s essays constitute an
example of such pioneer hybridization. Nowadays we cannot find fulfillment in modern
ideologies, their methodologies and their promises.

64
 During the nineteenth-century, literature and science established a dialogue. The
notions on natural selection and degeneration appeared, nourishing the idea of necessity of
death for the regeneration of life for a natural history of human culture and a cultural
history of nature. Species’ disappearance, decadent art and social exhaustion were related
notions to the spirit of the times. Deviant themes of the Decadent literature resisted the
dominant moral, expressing the failure of an ideal world based on science and progress.
Science and literature developed together and modern societies gave born to the
culture of appearance and spectacle. The new way of life simultaneously produced both a
feeling of progress and a feeling of crisis, our cultural inheritance. The intellectuals and the
artists of the late nineteenth-century explored the kind of life-experience which only much
later was to become the lot of us all. Many of them were not recognized as the leading
intelligentsia of their own times. Only their posthumous triumph allowed them enter
contemporary sociological thought as its most profound prophets and founding minds.
During that time, journalists, prophets, novelists and poets used to work with the same
intellectual tools. Balzac conceived of the scientific value of his writing, Zola claimed to be
the voice of scientific realism, and Wilde personified the aesthetic hedonism of the epoch.
The fin-de-siècle phenomenon of Decadence also revealed a post-orgiastic
millenarianism that animated those who felt a terrible exhaustion in response to the modern
society and to its foundational myths of progress and morality. Morbidity, artificiality,
exoticism and sexuality constitute a compendium of heterological processes produced by
the excesses of scientific positivism.
As tragic heroes, decadents accept the dictates of fate. Maffesoli’s sociology
accentuates the Greek tragedy, the Decadence of the Roman Empire, the late nineteenth-
century and the postmodern societies as examples of certain epochs in which the collective
unconscious is constituted by a tragic immanentism which accepts destiny and
acknowledges existence for what it is: precarious, finite, always submitted to the inexorable
law of mortality, the finitude of everything and everyone. As paradoxical as it may seem,
the accentuation of the present is simply a way of recognizing death as an integral part of
life. Maffesoli traces a series of connections between vitalistic thinkers and everyday life,
rejecting the temporality of the modern drama and celebrating the tragic present.

65
 Arriving « after the orgy » and just prior to annihilation, from the Marquis de Sade
and the Romantics such as Hölderlin, to the late nineteenth-century aesthetics, and then to
our postmodern societies, the Dionysian thread has manifested itself in orgiastic and
decadent expressions. The symbolic imagination of the late nineteenth-century authors
constitutes a legacy for insight into our current heterogeneous sociality: light atheism,
millennial cults, ecstatic parties, death fashion, etc. In this sense, Decadent literature might
be interpreted as a symbolic display based on a reflection of the decline of the Western
culture that had been rising since Rousseau and Montesquieu and that were to follow in
Friedrich Nietzsche and Oswald Spengler, all essential for the glorification of the vital
forces after their radical negation.
Following the late nineteenth-century aesthetic sensibility, for both Bataille and
Maffesoli, civilization is not limited to utility. Both seek to overpass the reduction of
Enlightenment. Traditionally, anthropology and ethnology had the monopoly on
researching the other, just as theology was supposed to be interested in the absolute Other.
Under Kojeve’s influence, Bataille’s unemployed negativity was related to the end of
history. As the modern narratives were exhausted, heterogeneity, which could not be
domesticated by rational thought, came into light. Maffesoli proposes that heterological
discourses run counter to the narratives that legimitized the Modern State. Modernity
separated individuals from nature and the others while postmodernity recuperates the sense
of community and elective affinities. The disillusionment and the extreme skepticism make
people do not worry about how the world should be, but just enjoy it.
Maffesoli promotes the poetry of everyday existence inspired by Benjamin’s
empirical mysticism and the notion of messianic time, the tragic vitalism of Nietzsche and
Bergson’s concept of time in terms of duration, rejecting the dramatic temporality of
modernism and celebrating the tragic instant related to the expenditure without reserve in
which time stands still and intensified in a vital flow as Bergson, Nietzsche, Simmel, and
Bataille suggested. For Maffesoli, Sensualism, which was heightened by the decadent artist
has such a powerful meaning, that only the setting up of a Dionysian knowledge could help
us to grasp the deep reasons and consequences of postmodern vitalism. The Sensory has an
essential role as factor of sociality. Hölderlin, Nietzsche and Bataille put forward the fact
that Dionysus’ emblematic shadow is over our contemporary megalopolis.

66
 For authors such as Gilbert Durand, Georges Bataille and Michel Maffesoli, biology
is the basis of the symbolic imagination. Darkness is associated with evil, while light with
comprehension and enlightenment. Both appear as central reference points for scientific
and metaphysical theories. The nocturnal regime of the image, the accused share, and the
Devil’s part are linked to the physiological impulses that govern human action and escape
to its rationalization. Connections between sex, nourishment and death have been well
described by these authors. Symbolic imagination, from the ancient fertility rites to the
decadent myth of the fatal women, manifests the instinctual impulses repressed by our
rationality. In this sense, the imaginary of excess has nothing to do with the arbitrariness of
the sign as it traduces aesthetically the vital forces that govern life (e.g. the mating habits of
the mantis according to Remy de Gourmont, Roger Caillois).
Evolutionary psychology and cognitive neuroscience have advanced during the last
decades for an understanding of the neurobiological phenomenology of the emotional,
intellectual an imaginative life. Literary Darwinists claim that narratives are universals
reflecting our common underlying biology. The neurobiological bases of both telling
stories and enjoying them are probably tied to essential elements of our social cognition.
Fiction appeals to our emotions and capacity for empathy. It engages us through
psychological realism. Brain-imaging studies (functional magnetic resonance) reveal
similar activity during viewing of real people and animated characters. Verbal arts as
fiction and poetry reflect our species’ features. They are means of exploring human nature.
Homo Sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest with passion and
authority, and then forgets that symbols are inventions.
There is a significant difference between verbal art and ordinary communication
speech: the primary aims of verbal art are not actional but emotional and regulative. From
this feature derives the existence of universal triggers for emotion and universal rules for
generating such triggers. Universals may result from emergent properties of mind.
Universals of verbal arts result from the interactions among cognitive systems. Some of
their features are adaptations, while others are by-products or the result of random genetic
drift and the interaction of these systems with different aspects of the environment93.

93
Hogan, Patrick Colm, « Of Literary Universals: ninety-five theses », in Philosophy and Literature, 2008, 32:
145-160.

67
 The construction of the Self and the Identity as a primal value of modernity is overall
a web of narratives. Selfness provides not only a solution to disunities of mind, but
something else, as John Teske suggests, « a solution that is likely to be accomplished with
widely varying degrees of success, and may include a range of fictionalization and self-
deception in all of us94 ». Many literary and poetical quotations of Maffesoli describe the
dissolution of the Self in a context of amorality and libertarian search. We should
remember that for both Maffesoli and Bataille, society is torn between authority and
anarchy. Neo-tribalism refers to a resurgence of group identities in response to a liberal
universalism that tends to homogenization.
Neuroplasticity, one of the key principles to think about the cognitive link to
literature has to do with the role of social interaction for adaptive capacity. This means that
excess is related to positive feedback into our imaginaries. There are two divisions of the
brain that are involved with subjectivity or objectivity. If Selfness has to do with alterity as
Paul Ricoeur suggests, these two neurobiological systems must be in an interaction.
Internally-focused cognition refers to mental processes that focus on one’s own or another’s
mental interior (e. g. thoughts, feelings, experiences), whereas externally-focused cognition
refers to mental processes that focus on one’s own or another physical and visible features
and actions that are perceived through sensory modalities and are experienced as part of the
material world95. There are authors and poets more attentive to one of these neurobiological
systems: Balzac to externally-focused cognition and Pessoa to internally-focused cognition.
Traditionally, positivism has been related with the more controlled and rational
behaviour that is related to the left hemisphere brain function. Heterological languages and
new paradigms have to do with the limbic system, that is to say, the main locus of
mammalian affective experience and the right hemisphere as the primal sites for affective,
intuitive, subjective and sensual behaviour96.

94
Stories let us expand our being through the fictional process which includes memory, attention, emotional
and temporal sequencing as higher cognitive functions. The moral meaning we construct emerges from a
complex neural activity. Teske, John, « Neuromythology: Brains and Stories », In Science and Religion:
Global Perspectives, Philadelphia, June 4-8, 2005 in USA. A Program of Metanexus Institute.
95
Cf. Lieberman, MD, « Social Cognitive Neuroscience », Annual Review of Psychology, 2007. pp. 260-280.
96
Carroll, Joseph, Evolution and Literary Theory, University of Missouri Press, 1995. p. 173.

68
 Heterological narratives might be a kind of thought experiment. If traditional stories
are supposed to bond the community, heterological arts might have no adaptive function for
the present, but a clairvoyant insight. Avant-gardes define themselves in opposition to the
culture of the period, encouraging certain ideas to survive the emerging social conditions.
Literary narratives are considered as a product of the evolved human mind that
satisfies a need for cognitive order97. While it is undoubtedly true that our complex mental
architecture is involved in verbal arts, scholars disagree about whether they may have an
evolutionary function and, if they do, what that function might be. We suggest that myths,
literature and poetry related to excessive and heterological processes have a sociological
value and thus, a vital function even to be thought and described. In the world of
heterogeneity, transcending the antithesis of nature and culture constitutes a primal need.
Rather than maintain the distinction between mind and matter, poetical and real, Maffesoli’s
sociology, following the Surrealistic manifesto and similar to the new neurohumanistic
approach, tends to evoke communicating vessels between them.
In our opinion, neurocognitive sciences and evolutionary psychology will be a
determining factor in the development of the humanities. Natural sciences begin to study the
Cartesian subject with their own methodologies. For many specialists, this advent will write
the following pages of the history of science, both exact and humanistic98. Someday, the
Artificial Intelligence researches might consult literary scholars for insight into how to make
computers smarter by exploring hypothetical worlds the way people do 99. Different from
traditional academic humanities for which the primacy of the superior cognitive functions of
the brain has always been professed, Maffesoli’s notion of everyday life does not imply an
abstract idea of society, but an immanent transcendence constituted by shared passion and
affectiveness. This emotional cognition is the content of verbal arts. Hence, Maffesoli reads
myths, literature and poetry as a source of sociological knowledge and we celebrate his
methodology as a source of inspiration for further neurohumanistic approaches.

97
Coe, Kathryn, et. al., « Once upon a Time. Ancestors and the Evolutionary Significance of Stories », in
Anthropological Forum. Vol. 16, n. 1, march 2006.
98
Cf. Molino, Jean, « Le Cave se rebiffe, réflexions sur l’histoire des relations entre littérature et sciences
humaines », La recherche du meilleur des mondes, Op. cit. p, 57-58.

99
Pinker,Steven, « Toward a Consilient Study of Literature », Philosophy and Literature, 2007, 31: p. 175.

69
 ANNEX
The Paradigm Shift:
The Complexity and the Psychology of Narratives

At the end of the nineteenth century physics was considered as complete knowledge with
not much more to find (Claude Bernard, 1868). Nonetheless, during the twentieth century
Max Planck (1858-1947) discovered quantum physics, a completely different knowledge
of matter and energy constituting the Universe. Furthermore, discoveries of subatomic
particles behavior demonstrated a dynamic organizing principle that replaced a static
vision, the notion of « system » emerged replacing that of « structure ». Since then, in
science all is considered relative and now the value of « disorder » is seen positively100.
In the past five decades, non-linear dynamical mathematics, chaos and complex
systems theory have shaken science to its foundation with the realization that very simple
dynamical rules can give rise to extraordinarily intricate behaviors: witness the endlessly
beauty of fractals or the foaming turbulence of a river101. Even though chaos and
emergence do not explain the vitalism of the self organizing cohesiveness, with such
revelations, traditional cosmogonies that had opposed « Cosmos » to « Chaos » or «
rationality » to « passion » were surpassed and those which had always integrated the two
principles became relevant in Western epistemology, « Au début c’était la complexité102 ».
Eastern philosophies had never seen the world as anything else but a complex system in
which there is no duality between man and nature or between life and death. Stéphane
Lupasco has talked about this « generator conflict » in terms of a logic of antagonisms103.

100
« Nous savons que la vie suit une évolution dont les lois, probabilistes, ont été formulées voici un siècle et
demi par Darwin. Mais nous avons appris aujourd’hui que la matière n’est pas si inerte qu’on pensait : elle
peut, sous certaines conditions de non équilibre, s’organiser en structures complexes. Cela ne signifie pas que
les énoncés classiques soient faux ». Prigogine, Ilya (ed.), L’homme devant l’incertain, Paris, Odile Jacob,
2001. p.14.
101
Waldrop, Mitchell M., Complexity, The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos, London,
Penguin Books, 1992. p. 12
102
Morin, Edgar, « La nature de la nature », La Méthode, Paris, Seuil, 1977. p. 149, « L’intégration des
réalités expulsées par la science classique », Introduction à la pensée complexe, Paris, Seuil, 2005. p. 70.

70
 Fascinating is the way in which the « Zeitgeist » of the nineteenth century expressed
this connexity. Authors such as Heraclitus, Lucretius and Ovid, who emphasized the
wavelike flow of energies, inspired many philosophical and literary works 104. For example,
the aesthetical circulation of forces represented by Apollo and Dionysus according to
Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy (1886) constituted for western philosophy a renaissance
writing in considering disorder as a primal source for life and art. Through psychoanalysis,
Sigmund Freud (1900) revealed the impossibility of controlling passions, demonstrating
mental functioning as an organizing dynamism in which a multiplicity of realities emerges
from antagonistic forces. Dreaming and myths permits the mind to nurture the
heterological processes of the mind. Bergson’s vitalism considered evolution and
movement as features of consciousness (1907).
The fact that everything is connected as in living organisms opened the possibility of
knowledge exchanges. From the point of view of the sciences of complexity, myths, poetry
and literature emerge as self-organizing adaptive systems where everything is connected in
a symbolical fabric. Lévi-Strauss described the complementarity between logos and mythos
for understanding the complexity of Cosmos105. According to professor Joël Thomas,
during Antiquity people realized the impossibility of only one system of knowledge for
apprehending reality. Greeks and Romans were double-minded: one mind for rational
thinking and one mind for mythical cognition. This duplicity is far from the current single-
mindedness where rationality reigns supreme106.

103
Random, Michel (ed.), O Pensamento Transdisciplinar e o Real, São Paulo, Triom, 2000. pp. 15-16, 25-25.
For Lupasco, every structure is the result of the conflict between two opposite attractors. Emergence comes
from a polarized organization that overpasses the addition of initial components: 1 + 1 = 2 but also = 3.
104
Cf. Beer, Gillian, «Wave Theory and the Rise of Literary Modernism », Open Fields, Science in Cultural
Encounter, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1996.
105
« Lévi-Strauss décrira ainsi la capacité bipolaire et complémentaire des Grecs : Une tête pour le discours
rationnel, une autre pour le discours mythique, et cela contrairement à ce que nous observons dans nos
sociétés européennes sans tensions ni conflits ». Thomas, Joël and Monneyron, Frédéric, Mythes et
littérature, Paris, PUF, Que sais-je, 2002. p. 11.
106
« Les Grecs et les Romains ont-ils eu l’intelligence de comprendre que l’appréhension de la réalité du
cosmos était d’une telle complexité que plusieurs systèmes de représentation n’étaient pas de trop pour la
cerner et l’exprimer; c’est un vrai exemple de tolérance et de vrai esprit scientifique ». Thomas, Joël,
« L’imaginaire de l’homme romain. Dualité et complexité », Latomus, Bruxelles, Volume 299, 2006. p. 13.

71
 Neurosciences and the Evolutionary Psychology of Narratives

Inspired by evolutionary psychology and the neurosciences, the neurohumanistic

approach to myths, poetry and literature conceives of mind as a complex narrative
organism. Narratives emerge from complex mental processes, both conscious and
unconscious. Narratives when articulated become a means of understanding that which
shaped them. Belonging to the mysterious hinterland of existence, narratives emerge from
the nocturnal imaginary at times of most heightened consciousness of their creators,
revealing those underlying neurobiological processes that permit their symbolical advent.
After The Naked Ape published by the zoologist Desmond Morris (1967) which
revealed the biological principles of human behavior, Jonathan Gotschall and David Sloan
Wilson speculated about the biological nature of narrative. The notion of « literary animal »
is related to the idea of a Darwinian function of fiction, that is to say, the way evolution, by
means of mythology and literature, configures our brain for adaptive purposes107.
Far from traditional literary criticism, « Darwinian » critics in particular and the
neurohumanistic approach in general, conceive knowledge as a whole not fragmented by
divisions between the great branches of disciplinarity: natural sciences, social sciences and
humanities. Rather, their principal purpose consists in understanding our mental
configuration through some evidence from the neurosciences and evolutionary biology.
This scientific perspective emphasizes the fact that the human brain is intricately
wired from birth. Human behavior is determined by neither genes nor culture, but by a
complex interaction of these two prescribing forces. Biology guides and environment
specifies in the sense that genes prescribe epigenetic rules, which are the regularities of
sensory perception and mental development that animate and channel the growth of culture.

107
Gottschall, J. and Wilson, D. S. (eds.), The Literary Animal, Evolution and the Nature of Narrative,
Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 2005. For Jonathan Gottschall, Morris’ study was useful for
proposing an interpretation of the Iliad as a drama of « naked apes ». At first, as he presented his project to
study male conflict in Homer from a Darwinian perspective, it was neglected by his professors at Binghamton
University’s English department. Finally, a committee entirely formed by professors outside the department (a
classicist, an economist and a well-known evolutionary biologist, David Sloan Wilson) approved his doctoral
thesis (Introduction, p. xvii and Jon’s Story, p. xviii).

72
 On the other hand, culture helps to determine which of the prescribing genes survive
and multiply from one generation to the next. Thus, one might think of myths, poetry and
literature as encoding both our cultural and genetic inheritance and having an adaptive
function as a means of understanding our human nature. Humberto Maturana and Francisco
Varela have established that knowledge is a biological phenomenon.
« Literature must be our anthropology ». For Joseph Carroll, a prominent literary
critic, literature is elaborated by human neuroemotional cognition and, when read, is also
interpreted by human neuroemotional cognition108. In the pages of Evolution and Literary
Theory (1995), Carroll extends the idea of Maturana and Varela by saying that literary
representations as cognitive mappings are a form of knowledge and that, therefore,
literature is a biological phenomenon109. Thus, the primary purpose of literature is to
represent the subjective quality of experience as the mechanisms of its evolutionary
psychology are reflected in myths, dramas, tales, novels and poems110.
For Carroll, literary representation correlates closely with dream activity and in this
sense, Jung was correct in supposing that the psychological function of dreaming is to
restore the integrity of personality. Dreams permit the limbic system to assert its affective
and preverbal memories and activate the right hemisphere. He quotes David B. Cohen,

It is true, as many have suggested…that information about early childhood experience is lost
to waking memory because it was largely coded in spatial or analogical forms (forms
believed to underlie right hemisphere coding in the adult and expressed consciously in the
form of imagery), then the dominance of the right hemisphere during REM dreaming would
be associated with a higher probability of re-experiencing the quality and content of early
experience (i.e. regression) 111.

108
Carroll, Joseph, « Human Nature and Literary Meaning: A Theoretical Model Illustrated with a Critique of
Pride and Prejudice », in Ibid. p. 78.
109
Carroll, Joseph, Evolution and Literary Theory, Op cit. p.15 (Introduction)
110
When Ian McEwan, a successful contemporary English novelist, reads about our closest primate relatives,
the bonobo chimpanzees, « one sees rehearsed all the major themes of English nineteenth-century novel:
alliances made and broken, individuals rising while others fall, plots hatched, revenge, gratitude, injured
pride, successful and unsuccessful courtship, bereavement and mourning ». McEwan, Ian, « Literature,
science and Human Nature » in The Literary Animal, Op. cit. p. 11.
111
Cohen, David B, Sleep and Dreaming: Origins, Nature and Function, Oxford, Pergamon, 1979. p. 143, 145,
224, quoted by Carroll, Joseph, Evolution and Literary Theory, Op. cit. p. 174.

73
 Life flowing through literature

The literary artist has an evolutionary function as he acts with shamanistic power
bringing the nocturnal imaginary112 into the diurnal presence of the world through writing.
« Les beaux livres sont écrits dans une sorte de langue étrangère113 ». In one of his works
devoted to literature, the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze quotes Marcel Proust’s idea
about the great writers as innovators of their own language. Following Proust, Deleuze
proposes that the great writer actualizes his own language as he introduces grammatical,
syntactical and semantic uses never realized before. In this sense, writing implies a kind of
transfiguration from one’s experience in the world to the objective sphere of language.
Many times, such innovative activity of the great writer has been interpreted by his
contemporaries as a mental disorder. As we have seen, in the nineteenth century,
psychiatrists such as Moreau and Maudsley, as well as pseudoscientific ideas by Lombroso
and Nordau, viewed the pioneering aesthetical creativity of their time as « degeneration ».
Contrary to such judgement, Deleuze proposes to take into account the healing force of
verbal arts, considering that literature is not only an experimental, heterogeneous or
« delirious activity », but a trade through which both the writer and the world recover their
mental health114. He paraphrases Le Clézio as he quotes the following view: « Un jour, on
saura peut-être qu’il n’avait pas d’art, mais seulement de la médecine115 ». Literature
consists in either creating health or inventing an imagined community, originating in both
situations a possibility of life. Its highest aim is to take the passage of life into writing116.

112
Cf. Foucault, Michel. El pensamiento del afuera. Valencia, Pre-textos, 5ta. edición, 2000. Translation by
Manuel Arranz Lázaro from La pensée du dehors.
113
« Great books are written in a kind of foreign language ». Deleuze, Gilles, Critique et clinique, Paris,
Éditions de Minuit, Paradoxes, 1993. (Epigraph to chapter I, La littérature et la vie).
114
« Aussi, l’écrivain comme tel n’est-il pas malade, mais plutôt médecin, médecin de soi-même et du
monde (…) La littérature apparaît comme une entreprise de santé : non pas que l’écrivain ait forcement une
grande santé, mais il jouit d’une irrésistible petite santé qui vient de ce qu’il a vu et entendu des choses trop
grandes dont le passage l’épuise, en lui donnant pourtant des devenirs qu’une grosse santé dominante
rendrait impossibles ». Ibid., p.14.
115
« One day we might know that there was not art but only medicine ». Ibid. p.15.
116
« But ultime de la littérature, dégager dans le délire cette création d’une santé, ou cette invention d’un
peuple, c’est-à-dire une possibilité de vie ». Ibidem. p.15. « L’écrivain comme voyant et entendant, but de la
littérature : c’est le passage de la vie dans le langage qui constitue les Idées ». Ibid. p.16.

74
 Actually, humanities are linked, for better or worse, to the sciences of the brain. This
is an idea well developed by the work of Jean-Pierre Changeux as he denounces what he
call the « decerebration » (décérébralisation) of the humanities in France,

L’extrême spécialisation, dictée sans doute par une exigence nécessaire de rigueur dans
l’analyse, allait jusqu’à mettre en cause l’unité de la Science. Les historiens élucideront les
causes du succès de cette décérébralisation progressive des sciences de l’homme dans notre
pays. (…) Les sciences de l’homme et de la société sont désormais unies, pour le meilleur et
pour le pire, aux sciences du cerveau117.

Archetypal figures have always existed in myth, literature and painting given that
these aesthetic manifestations can be considered the fantastic mirror of real life. From times
immemorial, poetry and prophecy have been considered as linked. Divinity is present in
both the poet and the prophet as verbal art emanates from two opposite but complementary
forces represented by the gods Dionysus and Apollo: poetic creativity emerges from the
forces of divine inspiration and the technical work of the artist. Gods give the content while
the artist gives the form. The poet might not be conscious of such inspiration, but his
technique orders the language and its images118.

Quoi ! mes chants sont-ils téméraires ?

Faut-il donc, en ces jours d’effroi,
Rester sourd aux cris de ses frères !
Ne jamais souffrir que pour soi. (…)

Peuples ! écoutez le poète !

Écoutez le rêveur sacré !
Dans votre nuit, sans lui complète,
Lui seul a le front éclairé ! (…)119

117
Changeux, Jean-Pierre, Raison et Plaisir, Paris, Odile Jacob, 2002 (1994), p.16. (Art et neuroscience,
Introduction). His studies linked with those of Stanislas Dehaene and Alain Berthoz make the Collège de
France one of the pioneering centers of Neurohumanities in the European Union.
118
« On sait que le duende est, dans le monde de la tauromachie et dans celui du flamenco, cet état d’inspiration
qui conduit le toréador ou le chanteur à improviser, à être créateur. Cette irruption du duende n’est toutefois
possible que sur un terrain technique très solide ». Thomas, Joël, « Passer la limite: le duende, un rencontre
entre les mythes gréco-romains et notre imaginaire contemporain », in Latomus, Revue d’études latines,
Tome 66, Fascicule 3, juillet-septembre, 2007.
119
Hugo, Victor, « Le Poète dans les révolutions » (1821), « Les Rayons et les ombres » (1839).

75
 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Maffesoli’s main corpus

 Après la modernité ?
Paris, CNRS, Compendium, 2008. Réédition des livres :
Logique de la domination, PUF, 1976.
La Violence totalitaire, Essai d’anthropologie politique, PUF, 1979.
La Conquête du présent. Pour une sociologie de la vie quotidienne. PUF, 1979.

 La Violence fondatrice, Éditions du Champ Urbain, 1978. (En collaboration avec A. Pessin).

 L’Ombre de Dionysos. Contribution à une sociologie de l’orgie,

Librairie des Méridiens, 1985 (1982).

 Le Temps des tribus. Le déclin de l’individualisme dans les sociétés postmodernes,

La Table Ronde, 2000 (1988).

 Au Creux des apparences. Pour une éthique de l’esthétique,

Plon, 1990.

 La Transfiguration du politique. La tribalisation du monde postmoderne,

La Table Ronde, 2002 (1992).

 La Contemplation du Monde. Figures du style communautaire,

Grasset, 1993.

 Eloge de la raison sensible,

Grasset, 1996.

 Du Nomadisme. Vagabondages initiatiques,

Librairie Générale Française, 1997.

 Le Mystère de la conjonction,
Fata Morgana, 1998.

 L’Instant Eternel. Le retour du tragique dans les sociétés postmodernes, Denoël, 2000.

 La Part du Diable. Précis de subversion postmoderne, Flammarion, 2002.

 Le Rythme de la vie. Variations sur l'imaginaire postmoderne,

La Table Ronde, 2004.

 Le Réenchantement du monde. Une éthique pour notre temps,

La Table Ronde, 2007.

 Iconologies, nos idolâtries postmodernes,

Denoël, 2008.

76
Chapter I

 Augé, Marc, « Les trois pôles de l’imaginaire », La guerre des rêves, exercices d’ethno-
fiction, Paris, Seul, La Librairie du XXe siècle, 1997.

 Bataille, Georges, « Maurice Blanchot », Une liberté souveraine, Paris, Farrago, 2000
(Edited by Michel Surya).

 Belting, Hans, La vraie image, Paris, Gallimard, Le Temps des Images, 2007. Translated by
Jean Torrent from the original version published in 2005.

 Blanchot, Maurice, El espacio literario, Barcelona, Paidós, 1992. Translated by Vicky

Palant, Jorge Jinkins from L’espace littéraire, Paris, Gallimard, 1955.

 Bloom, Harold, Genius, A mosaic of one hundred exemplary creative minds, New York,
Warner Books, 2002.

 Campbell, Joseph, Myths to Live By. New York, The Viking Press, 1972.

 D’Alain, Guillemin (dir.), À la recherche du meilleur des mondes, littérature et sciences

sociales, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2006. (Ellena, Laurence, « La sociologie française
contemporaine et ses références littéraires », and Molino, Jean, « Le Cave se rebiffe,
réflexions sur l’histoire des relations entre littérature et sciences humaines »).

 Darwin, Charles, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the

Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1968
(1859).

 Darwin, Charles, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, London, John
Murray, 1901 (1871).

 Durand, Gilbert, Mito e sociedade, a mitanálise e a sociologia das profundezas, Lisboa, A

Regra do Jogo, 1983. Conferences translated by Nuno Júdice.

 Durand, Gilbert, A imaginação simbólica, São Paulo, Cultrix Editora da Universidade de

São Paulo, 1988. Translated by Liliane Fittipaldi from L’imagination symbolique, Paris, PUF,
1964.

 Ellena, Laurence, Sociologie et littérature, la référence à l’œuvre, Paris, Harmattan,

Logiques Sociales, 1998.

 Greenslade, William, Degeneration, Culture and the Novel (1880-1940), Cambridge

University, Press, 1994.

77
 Hauser, Arnold, The Social History of Art, New York, Vintage Books, 1951, Vol. IV.

 Houghton, Walter E., The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830-1870, New Haven, Yale
University Press, 1957.

 Kermode, Frank, A sensibilidade apocalíptica, Lisboa, Século XXI. Translated by Melo

Furtado from The Sense of an Ending (1967).

 Knapp, Bettina, Music, Archetype, and the Writer, a Jungian View, The Pennsylvania State
University Press, 1988.

 Lepenies, Wolf, Les trois cultures, entre sciences et littérature l’avènement de la

sociologie, Paris, Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1990. Translated by
Henri Plard from Die Drei Kulturen, Soziologie zwischen Literatur und Wissenschaft,
Munich, Hanser Verlag, 1985.

 Maffesoli, Michel, « Saturation de la modernité », Après la modernité ? Préface à la réédition

de Logique de la domination, La violence totalitaire, La conquête du présent, Paris, CNRS,
Compendium, 2008.

 Maffesoli, Michel, L’Ombre de Dionysos, contribution à une sociologie de l’orgie, Paris,

Librairie des Méridiens-Klincksieck, Le Livre de Poche, 1985 (1982).

 Maffesoli, Michel, La Part du diable, précis de subversion postmoderne, Flammarion, 2002.

 Maffesoli, Michel, Le Mystère de la conjonction, Paris, Fata Morgana, 1997.

 Micale, Mark S, « Discourses of Hysteria in Fin-de-Siècle France », Micale, Mark S. (ed.),

The Mind of Modernism. Medecine, Psychology, and the Cultural Arts in Europe and
America, 1880-1940. Stanford University Press, 2004.

 Pessoa, Fernando, Escritos sobre génio e loucura, Lisboa, Imprensa Nacional-Casa de

Moeda, 2006, Vol. VII, Tomos I-II. (Edição crítica de Jerónimo Pizarro).

 Pessoa, Fernando, Obras de Jean Seul de Méluret, Lisboa, Imprensa Nacional-Casa da

Moeda, 2006, Vol. III. (Edição e estudo de Rita Patrício e Jerónimo Pizarro).

 Pettman, Dominic, After the Orgy, Towards a Politics of Exhaustion, State University of
New York Press, 2002.

 Praz, Mario, The Romantic Agony, Oxford University Press, 1933. Translated by Angus
Davidson from La carne, la morte e il diavolo nella letteratura romantica (1930). French
version by Constance Thompson, La chair, la mort et le diable dans la littérature du XIXe
siècle. Le romantisme noir, Paris, Denöel, 1977.

78
 Ricoeur, Paul Temps et récit, Paris, Seul, 1983.

 Pierrot, Jean, L’imaginaire décadent (1880-1900), Paris, PUF, 1977.

 Rougemont, Denis de, La part du diable, Paris, Gallimard, 1946.

 Stonyk, Margaret, Nineteenth-Century English Literature, London, Macmillan History of

Literature, 1983.

 Vincent, Jean-Didier, La Chair et le diable, Paris, Odile Jacob, Sciences, 1996.

Articles

 Backès, Jean L, « Sur le mot continuité », and Lascault, Gilbert, « Elle est rouge la petite
fleur bleue. Autour de la psychanalyse du feu », in L’Arc, « Gaston Bachelard », No. 42.

 Brechon, Robert, « Fernando Pessoa et les Décadents français », in Arquivos do Centro

Cultural Português. Homenagem a Paul Teyssier, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisboa-
Paris, 1987.

 Charbonnier, Jean, « La tentation de l’invisible », in Connaissance des Arts, Paris, n. 360.

 Fisher, Helen, et. al., « Romantic love: a mammalian brain system for mate choice », in
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, London, 361, 2006. pp. 2173-2186.

 Freud, Sigmund, „ Der Dichter und das Phantasieren“, in Neue Revue, Berlin, 1908.

 Gómez-Mont, F; Chao, J., Prado, J.; Vega, J., « Neurohumanidades », in Ciencia y

Desarrollo, México, Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología, No, 1., enero 2007.

 Iser, Wolfgang, « The Reality of Fiction. A Functionalist Approach to Literature », in New

Literary History, The John Hopkins University Press, Vol. 7, No. 1, Critical Challenges: The
Bellagio Symposium (Autumn, 1975), pp. 7-38.

 Schmidt, S. J. and Hauptmeier, H, « The Fiction Is That Reality Exists. A Constructivist

Model of Reality, Fiction and Literature », in Poetics Today, Duke University Press, Vol. 5,
No. 2, The Construction of Reality in Fiction (1984), pp. 253-274.

 Zeki, Semir and Bartels, Andreas, « The neural correlates of maternal and romantic love », in
Neuroimage, London, 21, 2004. pp. 1115-1166.

79
Chapter II

 Bataille, Georges, Œuvres Complètes, Paris, Gallimard, NRF, 1970, Tomes I, II, X.

 Bataille, Georges, « Lecture pour tous, entretien avec Pierre Dumayet, 21/05/1958 », Une
liberté souveraine, Paris, Farrago, 2000. pp. 133-138 (Edited by Michel Surya).

 Boldt-Irons, Leslie A. (ed.), On Bataille, Critical Essays, Albany, State University of New
York, 1995.

 Daniélou, Alain, Shiva et Dionysos. La religion de la Nature et de l'Eros, de la préhistoire à

l’avenir, Paris, Fayard, 1979.

 Fonseca Lazcano, Luis, Georges Bataille: ontología y alteridad, México, Facultad de

Filosofía y Letras, 2005. (Master’s thesis).

 Greene, Brian, El universo elegante, supercuerdas, dimensiones ocultas y la búsqueda de

una teoría final, Barcelona, Planeta, 2001. Translated by Mercedes García from The Elegant
Universe, New York, 1999.

 Groupe H3 (Carmignani, Paul; Girard, Didier and Pollock, Jonathan), Hétérologies, Pour
une dé-neutralisation de la critique littéraire et artistique, Presses Universitaires de
Perpignan, Col. Études, 2006.

 Kendall, Stuart, Georges Bataille, London, Reaktion Books, 2007.

 Maffesoli, Michel, La Part du Diable, précis de subversion postmoderne, Paris, Flammarion,

2002.

 Maffesoli, Michel, Le Rythme de la vie, variations sur l'imaginaire postmoderne, Paris, La

Table Ronde, 2004.

 Maffesoli, Michel, L’Instant Éternel, le retour du tragique dans les sociétés postmodernes,
Paris, Denoël, 2000.

 Maffesoli, Michel, L’Ombre de Dionysos. Contribution à une sociologie de l’orgie, Paris,

Méridiens, Livre de Poche, 1985.

 Maffesoli, Michel, « Saturation de la modernité », Après la modernité ? Préface à la

réédition de Logique de la domination, La violence totalitaire, La conquête du présent, Paris,
CNRS, Compendium, 2008.

 Otto, Rudolph, Lo Santo, lo racional y lo irracional en la idea de Dios, Madrid, Alianza,

2007. pp. 36-44. Cap. V. « El misterio ». Tanslated by Fernando Vela from Das Heilige,
München, Oskar Beck, 1963

 Pefanis, Julian, Heterology and the Postmodern: Bataille, Baudrillard and Lyotard, Durham
and London, Duke University Press, 1991.

 Perniola, Mario, Il Sex appeal dell'inorganico, Torino, Giulio Einaudi Editore, 1994.

80
 Pettman, Dominic, After the Orgy, towards a Politics of Exhaustion, State University of
New York Press, 2002.

 Rogers, Robert, The Double in Literature, Detroit, Wayne University Press, 1970.

Articles

 Bataille, Georges, « La notion de dépense », in La Critique sociale, Paris, Vol.7, January,

1933.

 Bey, Hakim, « La Zona Temporalmente Autónoma ».

URL: http://www.lahaine.org/pensamiento/bey.htm

 Evans, David, « Maffesoli’s Sociology of Modernity and Postmodernity: an Introduction and

Critical Assessment », The Editorial Board of the Sociological Review, Oxford, Blackwell
Publishers, 1997.

 Pasi, Carlo, « L’Hétérologie et Acéphale. Du fantasme au mythe », dans Revue de Sciences

Humaines, 206, Tome LXXVII, avril-juin, 1987. pp. 143-162.

Conclusion

 Carroll, Joseph, Evolution and Literary Theory, University of Missouri Press, 1995.

 Molino, Jean, « Le Cave se rebiffe, réflexions sur l’histoire des relations entre littérature et
sciences humaines », À la recherche du meilleur des mondes, littérature et sciences sociales,
Paris, L’Harmattan, 2006.

Articles

 Coe, Kathryn, et. al., « Once upon a Time. Ancestors and the Evolutionary Significance of
Stories », in Anthropological Forum. Vol. 16, n. 1, March 2006.

 Hogan, Patrick Colm, « Of Literary Universals: ninety-five theses », in Philosophy and

Literature, 2008, 32: 145-160.

 Lieberman, MD, « Social Cognitive Neuroscience », Annual Review of Psychology, 2007.

 Teske, John, « Neuromythology: Brains and Stories », in Science and Religion: Global
Perspectives, Philadelphia, June 4-8, 2005 in USA. A Program of Metanexus Institute.

 Pinker, Steven, « Toward a Consilient Study of Literature », Philosophy and Literature,

2007, 31.

81
Annex

 Beer, Gillian, « Wave Theory and the Rise of Literary Modernism », Open Fields, Science in
Cultural Encounter, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1996.

 Carroll, Joseph, Evolution and Literary Theory, University of Missouri Press, 1995.

 Changeux, Jean-Pierre, « Art et neuroscience », Raison et Plaisir, Paris, Odile Jacob, 2002
(1994) (Introduction).

 Deleuze, Gilles, « La littérature et la vie », Critique et clinique, Paris, Éditions de Minuit,

Paradoxes, 1993. Ch. I.

 Foucault, Michel, El pensamiento del afuera, Valencia, Pre-textos, 5ta. edición, 2000.
Translated by Manuel Arranz Lázaro from La pensée du dehors.

 Gottschall, J. and Wilson, D. S. (eds.), The Literary Animal, Evolution and the Nature of
Narrative, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 2005.

 Morin, Edgar, La Méthode, la vie de la Vie, Paris, Seuil, 1977.

 Morin, Edgar, Introduction à la pensée complexe, Paris, Seuil, Essais, 2005.

 Prigogine, Ilya (ed.), L’homme devant l’incertain, Paris, Odile Jacob, 2001.

 Random, Michel (ed.), O Pensamento Transdisciplinar e o Real, São Paulo, Triom, 2000.

 Thomas, Joël and Monneyron, Frédéric, Mythes et littérature, Paris, PUF, Que sais-je, 2002.

 Waldrop, Mitchell M., Complexity, the Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos,
London, Penguin Books, 1992.

Articles

 Thomas, Joël, « L’imaginaire de l’homme romain, dualité et complexité », Collection

Latomus, Bruxelles, Volume 299, 2006 (Introduction).

 Thomas, Joël, « Mythologie classique et théories de la complexité : la notion de système

mythologique », Euphrosyne. Revista de filologia clássica, Lisboa, Centro de Estudos
Clássicos, Faculdade de Letras de Lisboa, Nova Serie, Vol. XXXV, 2007.

 Thomas, Joël, « Passer la limite: le duende, un rencontre entre les mythes gréco-romains et
notre imaginaire contemporaine », in Latomus, Revue d’études latines, Tome 66, Fascicule 3,
juillet-septembre, 2007.

82