PARAIN (Brice). - Lot 177

PARAIN (Brice). Born in Courcelles-sous-Jouarre. 1897-1970. Philosopher, essayist. Great friend of Albert Camus. L.A.S. from his initials "BP" to "Cher Merleau-Ponty". S.l., May 15, 1945. 3 pp. 1/2 in-8. NRF letterhead. PASSIONATE LETTER FROM BRICE PARAIN TO PHILOSOPHER PHENOMENOLOGIST MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY ...I read your foreword last night and this morning. So it's best that I write to you right away. It confirms what I said to you yesterday, which was a little brutal. (A little brutally, because, as I realize more and more, my whole mission is to save France from phenomenology, and my joy is to achieve it, but I'm against time, events have to follow one another in order, and when you haven't even got to Hegel yet, you can't leap into the twentieth century. As far as you're concerned, you're right on the edge; all you need is a little Marxism. Cf p XI "The world is what we perceive". No. We are not that literary being, or rather we are not only that literary being, and literati only make sense when they are a very small minority, when they are immediately absorbed, when they have a social body, just as revolution only makes sense when it leads to a real word, i.e. a decision. The rest is silence. Phenomenology wants to transform silence into speech. This is the impossible. There is indeed a problem with intuition. Bergson was in the right place in history. And perhaps we need to talk about intuition for a long time, as the Germans did in the 19th century and as the Russians did to come to understand that it's only a means to speech and that speech is a sacrifice, just as we need to marinate in aestheticism for a long time, probably to come to understand that aesthetic feeling is indeed at the origin (what you say about it on p. XII and XIII is quite right) but at the service of logic... Anyway, here are my thoughts one after the other. Your foreword is excellent, clear, fair and strong. It's right on the verge of salvation. But if it's true that "philosophy is to re(e)learn how to see the world", it doesn't begin to be philosophy until it's seen again, when the draft has been discarded and the result written down. This is our condition (...). Otherwise (p. X) you breathe the dream of the golden age ("before any thematization"), you remain in the description, you forget the dialectic, the dialogue, the historical role of man, and your re-entry into history is only aesthetic, it is heroic, it is a re-entry of a victim, who sacrifices himself to sacrifice nothing, which is contradictory. We're paying for the Western interpretation of Christianity, in which there is no longer any resurrection... I'm going too fast. I've got to catch my train later. We'll talk about it later. And maybe my fragment on language and existence, then my novel, will explain better what I don't feel like saying again right now. What you need to understand now is that the body is a necessity, not a remedy (...) that, likewise, communion is a necessity (external, imposed), not a remedy, and that the remedy will only be valid when the body once again has what it needs to be a thinking body (...). Make one more effort and you'll see clearly (you almost say so yourself, on p. XII) that it's all in the mind. XII) that everything hangs together in German idealism and the critique of judgment in Husserl, Heidegger and today's literature, that our Western joy has not emerged from this problem of the axiomatization of its thought, but that an axiom has no meaning unless it is applied to a discovery, that its truth is precisely that it is not formulated, as in Archimedes' axiom of infinity, whereas it becomes empty when it is formulated, and that this formulation means that it must empty the place for another. Our Western joy must somehow emerge from its current Aristotelianism. We'll force it to do so...