Patrizia Lombardo | : Stendhal et Musil sont les deux écrivains par excellence qui se sont interrogés sur le type de connaissance qui vient de la littérature. Avant Musil et comme Musil, Stendhal répond à cette question fondamentale en montrant que le roman offre une connaissance des émotions humaines et de leur lien avec les valeurs. Il s’agit à la fois de valeurs éthiques — les situations morales dans lesquelles se trouvent les personnages — et des valeurs esthétiques (...) et proprement littéraires — le tragique, le comique, le tragi-comique, le sublime, etc. Surtout, le roman n’est pas simple représentation du réel, mais aussi du possible. L’analyse de quelques phrases hypothétiques, conjectures et expériences de pensée dans Le Rouge et le Noir, confirme la thèse que la littérature propose une connaissance du possible à travers le travail de l’imagination. | : Stendhal and Musil are deeply concerned with the question of theknowledge value of literature. Like Musil and before him, Stendhalanswered this question by showing the potential of the novel :this literary form presents human emotions and their connection tovalues. The characters deal with various situations, therefore conveyethical values, while aesthetic values —such as the comic, thetragic, the tragic-comic, the sublime- emerge from the way in whichhuman actions and emotions are represented. All these values arebrought about by the style of Stendhal, which is both form and content,both ethical and aesthetic. The analysis of some hypotheticalsentences, conjectures and thought experiments in The Red and the Blackconfirms the thesis later endorsed by Musil, that literature allows forthe knowledge of the possible, thanks to the exercise of theimagination. (shrink)

Imagination and memory are often distinguished as fiction and reality, but classical authors, such as Hobbes, have been well aware of their similitudes. And the French writer Stendhal (acknowledging his debt to Hobbes, whose works he read in his youth) is perhaps the novelist to have shown most accurately how, from the moment love became amour passion in the beginning of the 19th century, the power of imagination inside memory began to grow – until it was able to undermine (...) and even cut the link between memory and reality. But the emergence of passionate love creates a new challenge: can we control the powers of passion that we have identified? How can we accept the ideal of freeing the emotions, and simultaneously aim to control them, in order to attain a better life than human beings have had until now? (shrink)

L’ironie est une valeur esthétique, et donc affective, chez Stendhal. Les phénomènes affectifs varient en nature et en intensité. L’ironie implique une gamme complexe d’aspects et de degrés : elle peut être satirique, comique, tragique, nihiliste, paradoxale, etc. Stendhal s’éloigne à la fois de la satire tragique de Chateaubriand et de l’ironie romantique nihiliste. Il pratique, certes, la satire sociale ; le roman doit atteindre l’idéal de l’ opéra-bouffe, où le comique est « un mélange de gaieté et (...) de tendresse ». L’ironie cache enfin la pudeur de l’écrivain qui masque ainsi sa tendresse et sa sympathie pour les âmes sublimes de ses personnages majeurs. (shrink)

This article discusses irony as an aesthetic, therefore affective, value, as exemplified in Stendhal’s irony. Affective phenomena vary in nature and intensity, and one same emotion can be coloured differently (adjectives indicate its nuances, as, for example, in “sweet nostalgia” or “desperate nostalgia” etc.). Irony involves a very complex gamut of aspects and degrees: it can be satiric, comic, tragic, nihilistic, paradoxical etc. I first consider what kinds of irony Stendhal avoided. He discarded both the tragic satire of (...) Chateaubriand and Romantic nihilistic irony. Then I look at Stendhal’s theory of laughter, as hinted at in several of his writings where he reflects upon various forms of comedy while developing his own ideal of comedy as it will appear in his major novels (see Journal littéraire, Histoire de la peinture en Italie, Racine et Shakespeare, and Correspondance). Dissatisfied with Hobbes’ definition of laughter as involving a feeling of superiority, he considered two conditions for the comic effect: clarity and suddenness. Both become fundamental in his literary style. At the same time Stendhal was convinced of the affective superiority of the moderns over the Ancients: only the moderns, forged by Christian sensitivity, experienced tender emotions. Tenderness should color everything: the novel should aim at the ideal of opera-bouffe, where comedy is “a mixture of gaiety and tenderness,” while the writer masks his tenderness by using a “sweet” (douce) irony towards his favourite characters. (shrink)

" Pourquoi inventa Poppaea de masquer les beautés de son visage, que pour les renchérir à ses amants? " demande Montaigne. Le caché fascine. Voir, regarder, c'est désirer saisir, pénétrer, posséder. Devenir " œil vivant " : tel est le vœu formulé par Rousseau. Interrogeant quelques grandes œuvres - Corneille, Racine, La Bruyère, Rousseau, Stendhal, Jean Starobinski montre comment, dans la création littéraire, l'exigence du regard, dépassant et détruisant la réalité visible, entraîne dans le monde de l'imaginaire ; comment (...) aussi, aiguisée par l'obstacle et la déception, elle incite à toutes les perversions : exhibitionnisme, voyeurisme, sadisme, refus de la réflexion. (shrink)

Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America is one of the most celebrated 19th-century explorations of the rise of democracy as a social condition. However, Tocqueville is not the only political thinker of his immediate era to raise questions about the costs and benefits of democracy. This article will consider Stendhal’s novel The Red and the Black as an immediate precursor to Tocqueville’s criticisms of tyrannical public opinion and other ambivalent features of democracy. Like Tocqueville, Stendhal ponders the breakdown (...) of aristocratic standards of politeness and the equally oppressive sway of democratic public opinion that replaces them. Despite their shared assumptions about the challenges of democracy, however, Stendhal’s vision of freedom seems decidedly bleaker than Tocqueville’s. (shrink)

O artigo é uma reflexão sobre o modo como, na "Genealogia da Moral", Nietzsche repensa "o problema estético" a partir da oposição entre a concepção kantiana do belo como predicado de um juízo "desinteressado" e a concepção stendhaliana do belo como efeito de uma "cristalização" e uma "promessa de felicidade". A chave do pensamento de Nietzsche neste contexto está no conceito de "embriaguez" , por um lado, como termo-chave para designar a "pré-condição fisiológica" da arte, mas, por outro, como um (...) processo de espiritualização dos instintos ou das pulsões que as interioriza e intensifica. Esta espiritualização distingue-se da contemplação desinteressada porque não nos des-afecta e porque é, em grande medida, uma espiritualização da sexualidade, mas não deixa, por isso, de implicar uma reavaliação dos valores e uma ampliação do horizonte do humano. É por isso que a arte pode ser pensada como um "contra-movimento" que afirma a vida e combate o "ideal ascético" e o "niilismo europeu". The present article is a reflection on the way how, in "Genealogy of Morals", Nietzsche rethinks "the aesthetic issue" based on the opposition between Kant's conception of beauty as a predicate of a "disinterested" judgment and the stendhaliana conception of beauty as the effect of a "crystallization" and a "promise of happiness". The key to the thought of Nietzsche's in this context resides on the concept of "intoxication" on the one hand, as a key-term to designate the "pre-physiological condition" of art, but on the other hand, as a process of spiritualisation of the instincts or of the drives, which internalizes and intensifies them. This spiritualization is distinguished from disinterested contemplation for it does not dis-affects us, and because it is by large a spiritualization of sexuality, without renouncing to imply a revaluation of the values and a widening on the horizon of the human. That is why art can be thought of as a "counter-movement" that affirms life and fights the "ascetic ideal" and the "European nihilism". (shrink)

Se negli ultimi anni sempre di più si è posta l’emergenza per l’estetica di stabilire interazioni con altri ambiti di ricerca scientifica, è pur vero che rari sono i casi di autori capaci di sviluppare la propria indagine su terreni eterogenei. Tra questi c’è Jean Petitot che con originalità conduce il proprio lavoro incrociando le due linee sulle quali si è formato: Thom e Greimas. Proseguendo nella direzione di Morfogenesi del Senso e Fisica del Senso, Morphologie et Estbétique, che rielabo...

The ‘Happy Few’ of Stendhal's dedications are certainly readers, but they do not cohere into a community, and are vigilant and suspicious around the use of the first-person plural pronoun. This already sets them apart from the proponents of ‘surface reading’, who, moreover, have a historically questionable and conceptually feeble understanding of the intimate relationship between deconstruction and reading-and indeed of what thinking in terms of ‘surface’ entails.

I explore what and when hypocrisy is a moral wrong by interrogating the case of hypocrisy of Julien in Stendhal's The Red and The Black. I conclude hypocrisy is most morally vexed in those sphere where sincerity is required.