1. The Impassibly Fleshly, the Statue of the Impossible

Abstract

According to phenomenology, existence is an incarnate subjectivation which frees, by perceiving and imagining, the ‘Self’ from its petrification. Autobiography is a fiction pretending to repair this vitality, to represent the irrevocable future instant of death by images and words and to record the past as an irremediable destiny. To write the singular own existence is thus to make up a monumentalisation of the living being, fixed as a statue and fascinating as an idol, a death mask or a mummy. In the 1940s, Sartre, Lévinas, Blanchot and Bataille discussed Baudelaire, Proust and Leiris to challenge Heidegger’s existentialism and ontology of art. The essay examines this crucial debate—interdisciplinary, intertextual and intermedial—about literature and philosophy, picture, magic and death.