The enigma of sexuality and desire is one of Pascal Quignard’s great hobbies. At 76, and since “all study is a joy”, the French writer is back on track, questioning and deepening his fascination for the eternal and insurmountable enigma of desire and origins, for this moving and natural sacrament that is what he calls “the fabulous embrace”.
He aligns, as he says, the notes and reflections accumulated over several years in Supplements to sexual and love theory. Reflections, taken as a whole, which constitute, by the writer’s admission, “a certain form of step aside”. Even though the era is turning a little away from these questions, Quignard insists: “The cursed reality is the marvel itself.”
In the end, “to ridicule passion is perhaps evil.” Why put one hand over one’s eyes, another over one’s mouth? Why prefer unhappiness? This is one of the enigmas that keeps the author of All the mornings of the worldwho practices the essay as an intellectual gymnastics.
He does so here in the wake of his “three black organ books”: Sex and Fear (Gallimard, 1994), The sexual night (Flammarion, 2007), Anguish and Beauty (Seuil, 2018). Drawing on the sources of psychoanalysis – his notes are nourished by the reflections of Freud and Ferenczi -, of Greek and Latin Antiquity, sometimes also crossed by personal memories, Supplements to sexual and love theory is a book of shadow and light.
“Whatever religions, philosophy, education, parental affection, the attentions of those close to us, modesty say, Quignard believes, no one can rise above their genesis.” No one can “banish the affiliation of different flesh”, coitus, deny our fundamental animality, recalling that “the night is never chaste”. “At the bottom of life everything comes from the burning scene”, and each body is in reality the fruit of this fire.
In the same way, all those “who subordinate their abandonment to the blessing of religion, all those who lock it in the bonds of marriage, of interest, of genealogy, of inheritance, of community, of the State, hurl insults against the insubordinate passion of love.”
Drawing on images – remains of Lascaux, Titian, crude drawings by Jean-Jacques Lequeu, canvas by Courbet -, even allowing himself a detour via Taoism, the author of Small treatises and of Terrace in Rome also questions language, striving to sweep away the obvious. Here again, we find his obsession with origins: “There is no consciousness prior to speech.” In his eyes, eros and creation go hand in hand.
There are even a few sallies, rare in Quignard, that one would dare to call “political”. Like this one: “Speaking in the name of all drives individuals crazy.” A sort of program of individual freedom, a few clues to becoming “lord of oneself” in the heart of our increasingly stifling societies.
A dense, fragmented but coherent book, never easy, but which, for the reader who seeks it, contains its share of pearls and open windows.