Abstract

Philosophy has often appropriated the reflexive element of literature disembodying the sensible idea from the text, thus exercising a coercive violence against literature, reduced to a simple epiphenomenon of a meta-literary discourse. Philosophy tends to appropriate the sensitive content of literature as a raw material to be integrated into a broader conceptual framework dissolving, in fact, the tensional truth implicit in the novelistic structure as Lukács put it. Literary experience cannot be reduced to a mere conceptual structure, to a pure speculative form, but must be investigated as a possibility of grasping sensible ideas embodied in the literary space, following a path indicated by Merleau-Ponty. Sensible ideas as literary ideas are given thanks to the textual space as a deforming filter that allows them to be manifested as a singular incarnation, without ever exhausting them in a full manifestation. Literature allows to unsettle the prereflexive dimension thanks to an operative intentionality thus revealing those particular ideas incorporated into the sensible. Two works by Paul Valéry, La soirée avec M. Teste and L’introduction à la méthode de Léonard de Vinci will be examined to test the emergence, flexibility and irradiation of literary ideas in the writing space. In this way we will try to show the narrative modalities of elaboration of an implicit philosophy in literature as the embodiment of sensible ideas in the literary space and, in this way, as the manifestation of an aesthetic logos.