APOPHATIC ANIMALITY: lautréamont, bachelard, and the bliss of metamorphosis

Abstract

This essay examines animality through an analysis of Les Chants de Maldoror, an obscure but influential nineteenth-century text by the Comte de Lautréamont. Drawing upon the work of Gaston Bachelard as well as the apophatic tradition in Christian mysticism, Les Chants de Maldoror can be read as a text that complicates the boundary between animality and spirituality, producing an “apophatic animality” that ultimately impacts the poetics of the text itself.

Keywords:

• Maldoror
• Lautréamont
• Bachelard
• animality
• apophaticism
• mysticism

Notes

The review was published in La Jeunesse 5 (Sept. 1868), and is reprinted in Maldoror: The Complete Works of the Comte de Lautréamont.

From a letter to Poulet-Malassis, 23 Oct. 1869, reprinted in Maldoror: The Complete Works of the Comte de Lautréamont.

This is also the approach adopted by works associated with the journal Tel Quel, the most notable example of which is Julia Kristeva's Revolution in Poetic Language.

Bachelard also goes on to contrast Maldoror to Kafka's “Metamorphosis,” Kipling's The Jungle Book, and Wells's The Island of Dr. Moreau.

Lautréamont is not the first to suggest this intersection – arguably it can be found in early modern bestiaries and teratologies, where the language of science and fable intermingle. More importantly, it is a point taken up in the contemporary theory, in Deleuze and Guattari's discussion of animality in Kafka, and in Akira Lippit's notion of “animetaphor,” developed in his book Electric Animal.

Although the term anamorphosis has a double meaning – in art history to describe a visual illusion, and in biology to describe the development of embryonic life forms – I am using the term to describe a breaking-down of form and the forming capacity. Thus ana-morphosis is, in this case, a literal layering of negative form (ana- “back,” “reversion,” “again”) on top of existing form (morphē, “shape,” “form”).

The appropriation of this passage is pointed out in a still-useful 1952 article by Maurice Viroux, “Lautréamont et le Dr. Chenu” (published in the Mercure de France), where Viroux traces it to an almost verbatim passage in the volume Oiseaux of Chenu's Encyclopédie.

I borrow this phrase, with slight changes, from Laruelle. In his book Mystique non-philosophique à l'usage des contemporains, Laruelle discusses the immanent type of mysticism represented in the works of Eckhart, described as a “Vécu-sans-Vie” (Lived-without-Life).