Long literary director at Gallimard, where he directed the collection and the magazine The Infinitenovelist (The park, Women, Player portrait, Secret agent), partisan biographer (Casanova, Mozart), Philippe Sollers – born Philippe Joyaux in Bordeaux in 1936 – had become a sort of “godfather” of Parisian letters, surrounded by veneration and whispers.
After his death in May 2023, greetings were not long in coming, as evidenced by a Tribute to Philippe Sollers published a few months later (Gallimard, Paris, 2023, 144 pages). Colette Fellous, Jean-Jacques Schuhl, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Chantal Thomas, Arnaud Viviant or Josyane Savigneau, who, in turn, among the thirty people who contribute, celebrate the friend, the editor, the writer.
“You never missed an opportunity to remind people that literature and poetry were a war. An essential war, a war of position, a war of love,” writes his friend and publisher Antoine Gallimard.
The essayist of The war of taste (1994) recited to us by heart and for a long time the lessons learned from Proust, from Nietzsche and from Céline, always a little smeared with this XVIIIe century that he loved so much. In 2007, in A real novel, memoirs carried out at a rapid pace, he summed up well the place that literature occupied in his life, that which he read as much as that which he did: “It is for me the living form of my metaphysical commitment. »
And nothing happened, so to speak, in Sollers’ last novels, but everything passed through him: time, books, music, love. Between textual explanation and social commentary, he could make quiet charges against contemporary obscene puritanism, a permanent eulogy of true love, music and play mixed with snippets of his childhood.
Ultimate book, snub to death and haters, The second life, a short unfinished novel written and dictated in the hospital, is his last hurray. In this book, shot through with “fierce irony or bittersweet self-deprecation, humor is never far away,” writes his wife since 1967, the philosopher and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva, in a short afterword.
A meditative, slightly stoic fugue through which Venice, Rimbaud, Picasso and death (“eternal condemnation to boredom”) pass. Scales played and replayed, his “fixed passions”, which make him a sort of Sollersian concentrate open to eternity, the other side of things: “In the Second Life, each day is granted as one more day, this which changes the color of every minute. » A life program that could well come from Juliette de Sade: “The past encourages me, the present electrifies me, I have little fear of the future. »
With a few slightly coded swipes at the times and its morality that oozes everywhere, the writer once again tells us his fear of seeing society swallowed up by the spectacle into a “set of massive aggregates of illusions” .
“Life is a tango and anyone who doesn’t dance it is an idiot,” believed Concha, a major character inA curious solitude, his first novel published in 1959. All Sollers is in this sentence. Deliberate, playful, constant.