The Dandy and the Commissar: Notes on the History of Culture

Author(s): Marc Blanchard

Source: MLN, Vol. 115, No. 4, French Issue (Sep., 2000), pp. 662-689
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 The Dandy and the Commissar:
Notes on the History of Culture

Marc Blanchard

There is no doubt that in the future-and

the farther we go, the more true it will be-
such monumental tasks as the planning of
city gardens, of model houses, of railroads
and of ports, will interest vitally not only
engineering architects, participators in
competitions, but the large popular masses
as well.
-Leon Trotsky, Literatureand Revolution
(Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan, 1971), 249.

To those who admire him as the last French public intellectual and
those who denounce him as another Gallic fraud perpetrated on the
hoipolloi, Malraux is the personage (manque) of the latter-day philosophe,
who publicizes ideas, identifies causes and defends culture. To
anthropologists and cultural historians, however, Malraux is worth
more than a partisan fight. As a significant presence in the arts,
politics, and government from the twenties to the end of the sixties,
he illuminates what we understand today by cultural history: the study
of fields of practices, memories and schooling, which we identify as
the places of formation, encounter and contest for individuals,
communities and nations-states. Though he joined de Gaulle's cabi-
net twice (once at the end of WWII and again from 1958 to 1969),
and in the exercise of his official functions sought to promote a
universal French culture, Malraux is best remembered today as the
maverick enfant-terribleof French letters: a twentieth-century Rimbaud

MLN 115 (2000): 662-689 ? 2000 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

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 MLN 663

who went East but returned unchastened.' In the end, the evaluation
of Malraux's unique contribution to twentieth-century thought may
be more a matter of style than of substance, more of form than of
content. Not that this should prejudice us against him. As someone
who combined the anarchistic and revolutionary zest of intemperate
youth with high-minded engagement in each of his several lives, as a
writer, an art critic and a public man, Malraux never parted with an
occasionally pompous yet always distinctive Nietzschean discourse
whose cryptic irony annoyed his critics. They theorized that Malraux
was a shaman with a good sense of timing and a knack for masking a
lack of formal education with the dazzle of a mock erudition.
To be sure, Malraux made things hard even for people who
admired him. As a dandy who teased the public with his aloofness, he
never seemed to want to do anything that might cause him to become
lost in the blended mass of an unthinking populace and a vile
bourgeoisie. One of the characters in Man's Hope states the overall
importance of style in war as anywhere:
"It's unthinkable," Lopez broke out, "that given people who have some-
thing to say and people who are willing to listen, we won't create a style.
Just give them a free hand, give 'em all the air-brushes and spray-guns, all
the modern contraptions they can want and, after that, a chunk of
modelling-clay-and then you will see!"2
Even his grand attempt at a formal autobiography, Malraux called
Antimemoires, in a gesture that demonstrated yet once more that he
needed the sort of drama that would blur the distinction between
reality and fiction and thus cast doubt on what otherwise passed for
history. He had learned best from Nietzsche, who, in his time, had
roundly criticized the vaunted professors of philology and politicians
of his day who didn't realize that all of truth is masked by knowledge
and that history is but a contest between competing voices, each
seeking its proper register in a discourse of power and manipulation.
One couldn't discuss ideas, Nietzsche argued, without becoming
aware that they were part of a show, a spectacle, and thus, that art,

' Even as his health was

failing him, Malraux was still looking for adventure and
commitment. In 1974, two years before his death, he traveled to the newly minted state
of Bangladesh to be in Chittagong for the end of what had until then been East
Pakistan, and with panache offered his services to Indira Gandhi, who promptly turned
him down.
2 Man s Hope,tr. Stuart Gilbert and Alastair MacDonald (New York: Modern Library,
1983[1938]), 86.

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664 MARC BLANCHARD

even more than literature or philosophy, and within art, sculpture

more than drawing or painting, was a privileged site of inquiry for the
essayist, because there he could sense that, in the controversy over the
works of deceased authors and artists whom he would never know, a
drama was unfolding whose importance he couldn't doubt, though
the significance of it continued to remain mysterious to him and the
majority of his readers.
About this loss of meaning and the need to redefine absolutes,
both the old Hegel and the young Marx had speculated. But their
theories had not led to an understanding of the place of an art
historical discourse in systematic philosophy, because they were not
particularly interested in art objects or were not looking to theorize
the history of those objects. Later, Marx and Engels simply subsumed
art history under a general history of production: the concentration
of artistic talent in particular individuals was merely the result of an
ancient division of labor, and in the new economy, people would
instead do what they wanted without being cast in a role by society,
the government or the state.3 After Marx, any speculation on the
historical meaning of art is tied to a meditation on styles, schools and
the problems of issuing from their periodization. Nietzsche, for
instance, explains in the Birth of Tragedyhow the old art history, mired
in metaphor and connotation, has confused physical forms with the
myths constructed to interpret them (e.g., Michelangelo's works are
part of our reconstruction of the Italian Renaissance), while a
modern history will be aware of how art forms call into question all
ideological constructions of the object (e.g., it will understand how
Michelangelo's statues represent a subversion of the Christian reli-
gion they are supposed to serve), and, by mixing genres, the comic
with the serious, the sublime with the petty, will also be able to
communicate the substance of life as an experiment.4 Following
Nietzsche closely, Malraux says that the idea of a new history of art
came to him upon realizing that a national history could no longer be
understood once the bonds that had made that nation possible had
dissolved: a modern discourse on culture, though it accepts the fact
that all cultures breed in specific historical and geographic environ-
ments, treats them in a comparative and transnational perspective.

3 The German
Ideology,vol I, pt.I, sect. A 1.
4 On this, see: Matthew Rampley, "Laughter and Sublimity" in Nietzsche,Aestheticsand
Modernity(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 78-109.

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 M LN 665

Over time, each culture carries with it symbols which make it similar
to and different from others, and in the modern context of reproduc-
tion, display, and now of archives and instant retrieval, national traits
are subsumed under broad, we say today, global, notions of identity
(who are we and whom or what do we belong to?), place (where are
we located?), and memory (how do we reconstruct our past?). Never
mind that in his later incarnation as minister of culture under de
Gaulle, Malraux, in a curious paradox of return to the models he had
sought to transcend, continued to advocate cultural transnationalism,
while with renewed vigor he defended a nationalist brand of
culturalism.
Writing in an age of extensive reproduction, Malraux is the first
before Benjamin to confront the meaning for an art-historical and
cultural discourse of the loss of aura of specific art objects. Benjamin
sees the loss of aura as the consequence of a generalized disenchant-
ment of the consumer, captivated by the miniaturization and the
mechanization made possible by machines, yet nostalgic for an
authentic relation with a human presence behind industrial copies
and reproductions. According to Benjamin, not only does this loss
pose a challenge to the philosopher, because, from now on, the
thought of a syncretic relation between a specific work of art and the
Work of Art in general is called into question by a reproduction
which, to the extent that it is virtually unlimited, undermines the
possibility of maintaining a relation to an original. It also raises the
issue whether a disappearance of aura is not the necessary first step
toward a renewed historical consciousness of an unrequited past and
a more promising present.5 For example, it could be argued that, for
an intellectual of the twenties and thirties like Malraux, the collective
memory of the 1848 revolutions, the Paris Commune, the anti-war
movements of 1913, were but an encouraging background for, say,
the rise of the League Against Fascism and Antisemitism, or the
engagement on the side of the Spanish Republic in its struggle
against Franco.
Much of this, however, Malraux has already understood in 1926 by
the time Grasset publishes his Temptationof the West.To be sure, the
book's reception was disappointing (there were a few reviews of it in
Belgium, none in Paris, as critics were confused by what they saw as a

5 "To seize hold of a

memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger," in "Theses on
the Philosophy of History," Illuminations,(London: Fontana, 1973 [1940]).

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666 MARC BLANCHARD

self-serving blend of anticolonialism and narcissism).6 And yet, for

someone reading between the lines today, the Temptationsuggests that
although Malraux is uninterested in the sort of formal argument
Benjamin will elaborate in his Theses,his perception of a crisis in
Western epistemology is not unlike Benjamin's belated liquidationof
art through a critique of disenchantment.7 Benjamin's purpose was to
find new, stronger terms for a history of philosophy that might also
play a part in producing social movements. Infusing his study of the
Paris Arcades with a utopian amalgamation of the historical material-
ism of Marx and the Jewish mysticism of Sholem, he argues that out-
of-fashion pieces of bric-a-bractempting the occasional passerby hold
palpable revolutionary potential, as the historian uses them to
rekindle from his archives the bittersweet memory of failed social
experiments and manages to whip up from the mix of dashed hopes
and nostalgic souvenirs the lovely excitement of the new. The
Malraux of the Temptation,on the other hand, anticipates the analects
of the flineur, though he casts his net wider. Using the classical format
of the open letter inaugurated by Montesquieu in his Persian Letters,
he presents the dilemma of Western intellectuals challenged, from
the outside as it were, by the awesome contest of ideology and empire
unfolding at the end of five thousand years of Chinese culture, while
close-by in Europe a sesquicentennial of revolutions appears only to
have dimmed the prospects for meaningful change: "Our own is a
dream world, a golden chain of victories. A few moments of solitude

what
Only an interview in the Nouvelles litteraires(August 31, 1926) explained
6

Malraux's intentions had been: "The entire nineteenth century, passionately linked to
man, blossomed forth in a vehement affirmation of the pre-eminence of the Me. Well,
this Man and this Me, erected on such ruins and which, whether we like or not,
dominate us still, do not interest us. Furthermore, we are determined to pay no heed
to the summons of our weakness, which proposes a doctrine or a faith. It has been said
that no one can act without faith. I believe that the absence of conviction, like
conviction itself, incites some men to passivity,and others to extreme action" (quoted
in Curtis Cate, Andre Malraux: A Biography[New York: Fromm International, 1995],
111).
7The terms used by Benjamin ("verkfimmern" [to atrophy] and "Liquidierung"
152-
[liquidation] in Illuminationen,AusgewiihlteSchriften[Munich: Suhrkamp, 1961],
53) point to the sort of radical critique he has in mind. Malraux, too, seeks to radicalize
the European malaise:"That special joy one takes in discovering unknown arts ceases
with their discovery, and is then far from being transformed into love. Let there be
other forms to move us, even if we will not love them, sick kings that we are, to whom
each morning brings the most beautiful gifts of the realm, each evening returns that
the
ever-present and desperate eagerness...Our European malaise is caused, alas! By
discoveries of our most sophisticated minds." (The Temptationof the West,tr. Robert
Hollander [New York:Jubilee Books, 1974], 77.)

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 M LN 667

and boredom suffice to make us find again, in ourselves, the distant

memory of shining armor: the highest glory of dramas of history and
art is that they are relived each day in the depths of numberless,
obscure, consciousnesses. For the Western soul is to be found in the
commotion of dreams . . ."8 Malraux will argue that, in addition to
creating a nostalgia for the real, the acceptance of loss of aura (less
Romantic, perhaps, than Benjamin, he calls it "a delicate framework
of negation"9) makes possible, indeed necessary, a new environment
where references, models and original presences are erased and
copies and montages test the limits of an imaginary constructed with
fragments of a past experience. In this process, "the delicate frame-
work of negation" creates a new social relation where the individual,
deprived of the possibility of identifying with a past presence behind
the image, now imagines new, future relations with the work, to which
he now accords new privileges that an old tradition seemed to
preclude.
Now let us examine how the perception of discrepancy can help
mobilize the past in the panoply of culture. The phenomenon of art,
where an object is produced for contemplation, as distinct from an
art practice, comes full blown only after the Industrial Revolution. It
follows that a discourse on art takes for its reference an object (a
painting, a sculpture, a monument) whose function is to be utilitarian
but which the thinker attempts to think as carrying more than a
reference to its lost practice. The practice is a lost practice because
the question of the aims to which the art object testifies is no longer
meaningful. Malraux explains it well in the Voicesof Silence,and even
better, in the Metamorphosis of the Gods,when he clarifies what a critical
modernism abstracts, and falsifies, from the past. Cathedrals, for
instance, must be revisited, from the inside:
The word "architecture" bringsto mind, almost automatically,facadesor
buildings situated in the open, doubtless because classical pillars and
pedimentsare as familiarto us as our citystreets.But the cathedralmaster-
buildersdid not give the facadeof the cathedral(whichwasoften as not in
the heart of a town) the same pre-eminenceas we assign to it. As strictly
regulated as Greek architecture, the structure of the cathedrals was
determinedfromwiithinoutwards.'0

8
Malraux, The Temptationof the West,50.
9 Malraux, The Temptationof the West,76.
The Metamorphosisof the Gods, tr. Stuart Gilbert (London: Secker and Warburg,
7'
1960), 7.

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668 MARC BLANCHARD

Anticipating both the claims of a modernist anthropology and those

of existentialism, he keeps insisting that the social realm is heavily
invested in symbols and that the main import of those symbols is
metaphysical. For Malraux, culture is defined by the terms under
which a particular humanity happens to present itself to future
generations. And to properly understand this spectacle, he suggests
one only has to remain aware of the changing, subversive relation
between form and content in the play of representation." For the
critic, that means eschewing the traps of both scientific and creative
discourse; the former, because it believes in the possibility of objective
knowledge, and the latter, because it suggests that authenticity and
value are worth more than objectivity and proof. In this quandary,
only one possibility offers itself: irony, as a new discourse, equidistant
from science and art. Indeed, for Malraux, something that couldn't
be said in irony better not be said. However, part of the ironic thrill is
that the ironist, by dismissing known alternatives, calls attention, less
to an alternative relation, than to his own daring challenge. And yet
because this dismissal also implicates the messenger's own precarious
situation (who can speak for others? how can the fact that one cares
to write at all mean that one's message is more than of egocentric
interest?), he can use it to highlight his move with the mark of his
own estrangement, a signature, without incurring the bane of all
philosophers since Socrates made fun of Callicles: to be taken
seriously and thus to lose the benefits of provocation. After all, to
sign, first, dubiously, in blood, then, more likely, in writing, by a
cliche, as Lyotard well showed in his Signe Malraux, is to make clear, in
these our days of disengagement, our only remaining privilege: that
of being witnesses to a time, a period.12 Certainly, throughout a

" Long before Goffman and Sartre would redefine the link between communication
and existence, Malraux already suggested in the Temptationof the Westthat the play of
imaginary forms is central to the interpretation of social relations. By extension, a
culture is recognized as whole only after it has been perceived as setting new
parameters for asking the same fundamental, albeit unanswered, questions.
12"II ne fut pas le conseiller du General, mais le temoin, que la langue grecque
nomme martyr. Car il y a du risque et de la douleur a mimer le prophete pour
propager son message et pour 1'accrediter .... Ceci seul, mon general, vaut la peine
d'ecrire: devenir son nom. 'II serait temps, disait de Gaulle, d'analyser un facteur
decisive de l'histoire: le moment ou le courant passe. Pour nous ou contre nous: la
Wehrmacht de 40 et celle de 44, la Liberation et Mai 68. Parfois, il s'en va aussi
rapidement qu'il est venu. Je parle de ce qui donne une ame a un peuple, comme a
une armte.' Malraux transpose: 'En art aussi, le caractere mysterieux du courant
existe: quand Baudelaire devient Baudelaire."' Jean-Francois Lyotard, Signe Malraux:
Biographie,(Paris: Grasset, 1996), 325-26.

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 M LN 669

Protean career that spans genres, disciplines and continents, Malraux

remains obsessed with the need to leave, as a personal challenge to
death and oblivion, an uncontestable signature on the Zeitgeist.
In his obsession, the author of Royaume-Farfelu and Lunes de papier
was very much a dandy: someone who no longer seeks to approximate
a universal Truth but, instead, who tries to leave his mark on a world
of short-lived appearances where death is the only certainty. It is not
fortuitous that Malraux liked to pronounce and write funeral eulo-
gies of fallen heroes. His public tribute to Jean Moulin, the head of
the French Resistance, as the latter's ashes are reburied in the crypt of
the Pantheon, shows how Malraux was able to conflate in his
description of the French underground the sense of national epic
carrying the Resisters forward, with the premonition that the indi-
vidual acts of sabotage by which they chipped at German hegemony
would be remembered as central episodes in the unfolding of a
global tragedy. He had learned from the Ancients that the lesson of a
life well-led was that it could, after death, be made into a story for a
few. Plutarch's saying that writing and reading about heroes was
essential to conducting one's own life in the face of death helps us see
Malraux as one who raised the question of what remains of individual
history in the collective memory of one's culture and that of others.
Culture, in other words, is constituted by individual acts transformed
into collective memories at the cost of excising the subject or subjects
first implicated in it. If only for this, we are in his debt. Though a
European senior white male, a member of the establishment and an
unwitting contributor to de Gaulle's imperial design, Malraux reap-
pears today as one of our first modern nomads: landless, exile,
theatrical.13

13It is worth
noting that his whole life, Malraux remained interested in the cultures
of Central Asia, and he is one of the first to have made part of a world history of art the
works of a region that never resigned itself to being Western (Greek) or Asian
(Chinese). Soon this remote region becomes symbolic of the deterritorialization
endured by all art objects, as their symbolic significance grows in direct proportion to
their vanished reference, suggesting in the end that art in general, and plastic art in
particular, derives its value from an ongoing reconstruction of the reality which
appears at various times, to have been its illusory substrate. A picture representative of
the Art of the Steppesis thus pitched as one of the first products of the ongoing
transferring and translating process to which Malraux intends Voicesof Silenceto bear
testimony. Soon, however, it is clear that this translating process, far from isolating
likely references, moves the form of an artwork through a dizzying maelstrom of
successive receptions, each of which uses the work in question to start anew a ritual of
stage-setting and world-viewing in whose new perspective the work can be recast. This
is what a reference to the art of Central Asia produces in the text of the Voicesof Silence:

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670 MARC BLANCHARD

But who was he, really?-A writer, he received the Prix Goncourt in
1933 and, from 1920 until his death in 1976, he remained a major
literary presence in Paris; a man of action, he led a bomb squadron in
the Spanish Civil War and a maquis during the Resistance and ended
as minister of information in de Gaulle's postwar cabinet; an art
collector and critic, he was France's first minister of culture in de
Gaulle's fifth republic cabinet.14 Of this tenure as culture minister,
there are three things people most remember: he cleaned up the gray
sooted monuments of Paris and made them look new; he sent the
Mona Lisa on a special exhibit to the Metropolitan Museum; he
created France's new Maisons de la culture and, through the use of
staged exhibits, forums, plays and performances, he made the French
see their country not only as the repository but also as the creative
agent for a vibrant transnational heritage. Of these three facets of his
life, however, the one that Malraux himself valued most was his
ongoing commitment to the discovery, preservation and analysis of
works of art, especially of non-Western art. When he was barely
twenty, he started collecting and trading art for profit. And then, in a
scheme where he and his first wife Clara would come to quick riches
by trading art for gold, he convinced her to travel to South East Asia
and explore the hallowed temples of Cambodia. But, in Indochina,
caught red-handed with statues he and his wife Clara had stolen, he
was arrested and tried by the colonial authorities. However, well-
connected that he already was, he rallied Gide and the Parisian
intelligentsia to his side and thus managed to escape a long prison
term.
His Saigon trial was for the young Malraux the occasion to confront
the realities of colonialism as, through the experience of his brief

"There is another, more insidious, effect of reproduction. In an album or art book the
illustrations tend to be of much the same size. Thus works of art lose their relative
proportions; a miniature bulks as large as a full-size picture, a tapestry or a stained glass
window. The art of the Steppes was a highly specialized art; yet, if a bronze or a gold
plaque from the Steppes be shown above a Romanesque bas-relief, in the same format,
it becomes a bas-relief." (Voicesof Silence,tr. Stuart Gilbert (New York:Doubleday, 1953),
21-22.
14 Until de Gaulle's second term, France had already had a long history of

ministering to culture. Lebovics and others make clear the tradition, extant since
Richelieu, of minding national treasures (it actually goes back to Charles V-except
that the most precious of treasures remains the French language. The Direction des
Arts et Lettres, which preceded the Ministry of Culture, continued to favor literature at
the expense of the arts. Malraux, a writer who believed in the supremacy of art,
changed all that.

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 M LN 671

incarceration, he was also moved to reflect on the relations between

petty art theft and the larger issues of the heritage, transmission and
reproduction of cultures. Following his Indochinese adventure,
Malraux experimented with the novel. He wrote two novels, in which
he began to sketch a move from a narrative of adventure (The Royal
Way) to one of political involvement (The Conquerors). Finally, he
received the Goncourt for The Human Condition, a novel fictionalizing
the events of his time. Malraux had never really participated in the
uprisings of mainland China and to some, it seemed as though he was
using revolutionary causes as a pretext to advance, at best, a
sociopolitical agenda, and at worst a personal plea for recognition
from a public still hungry for dandies or Ubermenschen.Perken, one of
the heroes of The Royal Way, manages to see it from both sides:

Perken, too, was haunted by a face-his own tomorrow. He saw the lids
drawn tight over his eyes ... for ever. But-a man could always put up a
fight. And-kill! That jungle yonder was not merely a ferment of virulent
malignity; it had trees and thickets from behind which a man could not
shoot. Or starve to death. The pangs of hunger - he had experience of
them, he knew their frenzied agony; but that was nothing, nothing beside
the death-in-life of the slave strapped to the slowly turning grindstone day
after day. And then, in the jungle, a man can kill himself, without fear or
flurry.'5

Through a subtle use of new formal techniques inspired by cinema-

tography and especially, of a new, hybrid narrative, spanning East and
West and combining fast-paced action and dialogue and slow philo-
sophical reflection in situ, Malraux had become one of France's most
famous and respected writers, and Andre Gide's likely successor.
Critics, Gide, first among them, had remarked that Malraux had done
for the novel what revolutions had done for bourgeois intellectuals: it
had given them a taste of engagement and commitment, without
forcing them to sacrifice their belief in individual creativity.'6 Gide's
comment dates back to the period when he was flirting with Commu-
nism and feared that what most attracted the bourgeois in literature
and art was that the freedom of the individual was purchased at the
expense of the masses. The artist as free entrepreneur was tied to a
world where his success was limited. He was free to engage in his
work, as long as he understood that "art" always existed as a paradox.

'5 TheRoyal Way,205.

16
Gianfranco Rubino, "Malraux e l'eredita di Gide," Annali della Facolta di Letteree
Iilosofia dell'Universitadi Macerata(1971) 3-4:301-339.

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672 MARC BLANCHARD

Art was there to stimulate a desire for something remote or superficial

that derived its value from the fact that, while it strove to appeal to the
public-at-large, it also invested in a new symbolic capital: the hidden,
albeit non-speculative value of something soon to be recognized and
appreciated.'7 But Gide's comment was also revelatory of another,
existentialist, dilemma. In a world devoid of God and challenged by
the material, the intellectual has the duty to think new ways of
understanding tradition, history and the workings of technology and
the market beyond the world of his fiction, his poetry, his drama.
Philosophy, which used to be the business of the individual inventing
systems within the compass of either language or metaphysics, that is,
by relying on formal rules of logic and grammar, or on teleology and
final causes, is now (at the time Malraux comes on the scene)
confronted with the reflection of its own decay in the hugely
successful work of Oswald Spengler.
A great deal has been made of the influence of Spengler on the
Europe of the twenties and on Malraux in particular, and it has been
suggested that only someone superficially acquainted, like Malraux,
with the details of the history of Western philosophy, could have been
impressed with Spengler's broad brush and his penchant for simplify-
ing complex processes of cultural transmissions.18 Spengler's work
resonates with those who have reflected on the consequences of the
Great War. Everywhere in Europe horrid killings have depleted the
male population and undermined the concept of nation, as borders
are arbitrarilyredrawn and France and England expand their empire.
Moreover, Spengler deplores a modernity where the tribe, the nation
is atomized into affinity groups, clubs, fraternities, parties, economic
concerns. Extending to the whole of the Western world primary
considerations on the institutional development of Germany, France
and England, Spengler saw industrial expansion and intra-European
conflicts as the mark of a loss of Hegelian spirit. But what he had to
say was not entirely new. Gibbon had already speculated that the

17In this, Malraux seems to agree with Lukacs that the artist can never be the
spokesman of a society which recognizes him only by excluding him.
18 The
rejection of Spengler was as broad as his success was unexpected. Many
denounced his facile scholarship. The issue, however, is less whether Spengler was
wrong, but how and why he was generally thought to wield such influence as he did.
His work, facile as it was, enjoyed a favorable reception because it appeared in the
context of a generalized disenchantment with the early phases of Modernism. Malraux,
who never read any German, had access to Spengler's original German text through
his wife, Clara.

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 M LN 673

cause of the decline of the Roman Empire was the dissipation of

traditional Roman virtues by the greed and lust for power of the
freedmen. When their ventures soured, the age old Roman ideals of
an empire protected by the rule of Law and guaranteed by force of
arms vanished quickly. What could be done to reverse this trend? The
answer was to re-create, through an educational process taking
advantage of new forms of reproduction (photography, the museum,
the cinema), to reconstitute internationally and intraculturally the
symbolic capital that had once belonged to cultures now vanished or
simply erased from all forms of modern memory. Such is the project
that The Temptationof the Westpresents as a hopeful sketch, which
Malraux's art criticism will then showcase to advantage.
However, the progressive shift from cultural essay to art history is
not merely, as Nietzsche would have argued, a change of register in
the writer's discourse. From the beginning, even as he begins to write,
first his Surrealist tales and soon, his novels of action and revolution,
Malraux's fiction shows growing symptoms of an ongoing preoccupa-
tion with cultural translation. The process whereby occurrences
acquire visibility in the historical continuum, and representation, the
business of turning an abstract sign into a concrete signified, be-
comes less an issue of narrative logic than of aesthetic appreciation, as
the critic, looking for continuity yet challenged by the nameless
perceptions with which the simplest photography and film compli-
cate his narrative, struggles for a new phenomenology. How to
account for these disruptions? Can it be that in addition to holding
value in the world of replicas and fetishes now displayed in galleries
and playing in theaters, mechanical processes of reproduction pres-
ently have the power to produce history for us? More than ever, a
picture could now represent the event, and a good writer would be
one that knew how to set the stage for such a representation. In The
Human Condition,for instance, the suggestive use of cinematographic
techniques illustrates how anecdotes can readily become plausible
stories of life and death, of revolution and restoration, as the text
depicting them allows us to understand them, in an aesthetic mode,
as the doubles or the simulacra of art objects. In the following quote
from the Condition, a Marxist critic might see the triumph of
alienation, as a fetishized cat is made to shoulder lightly, as through a
genreallusion, the burden of an unbearable, unprocessed, unanalyzed,
history:

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674 MARC BLANCHARD

The only light came from the neighboring building-a great rectangle of
wan electric light cut by windowbars, one of which streaked the bed just
below the foot as if to stress its solidity and life. Four or five klaxons
screamed at once. Was he discovered? Oh, what a relief to fight, to fight
enemies who defend themselves, enemies who are awake! The wave of
uproar subsided: some trafficjam (there were still trafficjams out there in
the world of men-). He found himself again facing the great smudge of
gauze and the rectangle of light, both motionless in this night in which
time no longer existed. He repeated to himself that this man must die-
stupidly, for he knew that he would kill him. Whether he was caught or not,
executed or not, did not matter. Nothing existed but this foot, this man
whom he must strike without letting him defend himself-for if he
defended himself, he would cry out.... In his pockets, his fumbling right
hand clutched a folded razor, his left a short dagger.... He raised his right
arm slightly, petrified by the continued silence that surrounded him, as
though he expected some unseen thing to topple over. But no, nothing
happened: it was still up to him to act. That foot lived like a sleeping
animal. Was it attached to a body? "Am I going mad?" He had to see that
body- see it, see that head. In order to do that-enter the area of light, let
his squat shadow fall upon the bed.'9
In this instance, however, we might ask whether the use of the
cinematic reference is not a precieux motif by which the skillful writer
retrieves a technique going back to Greuze and the eighteenth-
century painters that Diderot so admired. Only now, the motif is less
a matter of pure aesthetic appreciation, which, according to Diderot,
is supposed to mobilize the senses in support of reason, than of
tactical awareness. The Condition's hero, Kyo, states that the true
revolutionary is the one capable of making politics mesh with art, as
he fortifies his analysis of historical conditions with references to
objects not yet understood. From this example one could extrapolate
that a new, properly modern philosophy of history derives its main
support from an aesthetic critique whose main objective is to make
tangible, precisely the (collective) representations through which
societies articulate a changing relation to the past, each one in turn
asking a question successive generations are no longer able to
formulate. The question is no longer, as in Kant, one of the distinct,
transcendental validity of aesthetic judgement, nor as in Hegel and
Marxism, of the historicity of works of arts, but of their performativity:

19Man s Fate, tr. Haakon M. Chevalier (New York: Harrison Smith and Robert Haas,
1934), 10.

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 M LN 675

how, now that works of art can be endlessly reproduced, they trigger
in us, each time we deal with them, an acknowledgement of a
difference more radical than that postulated by realism, the ideology
under which all representation is the illustration of a stable principle,
larger than the anecdote it recounts. This difference now manifests
itself in new, virtual space, detached, not simply as in the stable
reference of the gallery or the museum, from the daily context from
which it is presumed to have derived its original relevance, but
moveable, instead, as in photographic montages, to practically any
site to which meaning can now be reassigned and there acquire a
new, seemingly incontrovertible legitimacy. In short, all art is now
Modern-not because the Classic has disappeared, but rather be-
cause we are now in a position to see how non-Classical works
interrupt our sense of being part of an ongoing story we imagined
they told so well. Art works do not merely interest us; they arrest us,
because we can no longer interpret them within the confines of one
single tradition, and are therefore unable to claim in our interpreta-
tion of each one the sort of philosophical exception by which Western
theory, from Longinus to Kant, has tried to rationalize the sublime:
that which exceeds the expressive realm of reason itself.
One of the effects of this pan-Modern perspective made possible by
a space withoutwalls is that the new is not the opposite of the old but
anything that seems to exceed systematic interpretation. However,
because, this time, the excess cannot be contained within a special
category-something like a surplus-of reason which would govern
it, albeit without explaining it, an art-historical discourse must
undergo a radical transformation. It must account for both the
conditions of a changing historical consciousness and the instabilities
resulting from the application of this new consciousness to the
reinterpretation of known stereotypes.20It must cut across cultures,
time and space; it must bring together works from different tradi-
tions; in comparing heterogeneous objects, it cannot presume a
continuity which even artists and writers working in the same region
at the same time would have in fact rejected. Whether in the spirit of

20Many people have commented that the translation of "musee imaginaire" into
"museum without walls" is inaccurate. However, while not literal, the translation is
faithful to the spirit of the Malraux endeavor: the advent of photography, and of more
modern media detracts from the physicality of the museum space. Malraux's point was
that with photography, the appreciation of art becomes eminently Modern, as a
comparison across cultures is no longer bound by the constraints of a predetermined
space.

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676 MARC BLANCHARD

reconstructing a Zeitgeistunifying interpretation of works or in the

attempt to clarify dissentions between artists (e.g., that between
Manet and Courbet as to the question of the artist's embrace of, or
distance from, the politically subversive), all manner of periodization
becomes problematic. Customary notions of progress and decadence
are fraught with unverified presuppositions.
Let us take, for instance, the concept of decadence. "Decadence" is
used to characterize certain formal aspects by which a specific period
stands out from the continuum of an art-historical discourse, though
not exactly in opposition to it. It extends the limits of the represent-
able under the previous regime to a new regime, without, however,
having to take into considerations the changes in consciousness that
make a distinction between regimes necessary. Thus decadence
applies, in France, to the period spanning Baudelaire's death and the
poets and painters of early Cubism, and in Germany, to the period
extending from Fontane's death to the beginnings of Expressionism.
The concept is useful to explain how an art form (e.g., symbolism)
survives changes in the expression of the artist's relation to his work
(e.g., Baudelaire's rage at not being recognized by the crowds
becomes Mallarme's pride in enjoying and manipulating a restricted
audience of the 'happy few'). However, the concept may have lost its
theoretical force, as it becomes clear that to postulate a decadence is
to seek an exception to the rule under which historical differences in
reception are constituted. For instance, to interpret Mallarme's
historical significance as predetermined by Baudelaire's work, while
at the same time to claim, as most Mallarmean critics do, that
Mallarm6's poetics is immune to post-Romantic disillusionment, falls
short, as Blanchot and Derrida have shown, of accounting for a
revolution in aesthetics. The revolution begins with the foregrounding,
in Mallarme's work, of literary perceptions as constitutive of the
abstract, theoretic theater on which the modern life intuited by
Baudelaire eventually plays itself out.
While Baudelaire's presentation of his Poemesen proseattempts to
combine a Romantic belief in the self with the poet's disenchanted
perception of the industrial world, Mallarme's deconstruction in his
poems (he resisted the temptation to collect them into the volumes of
an aeuvre)of a prose which, in Baudelaire's Petits poemes,had been
experienced by its author as highlighting the clever use of populist
motifs borrowed from mainstream writers like Eugene Sue or Gaspard
Hauser, no longer purports to rehearse a variation on a literature of
circumstance which, in Mallarme's poems, has demonstrably lost its

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 M LN 677

populist appeal. From Mallarme on, Decadence seems to mesh with

Modernism and the question of how to assess their respective field of
application becomes more difficult. For instance, what makes us say
that Duchamp is a modern and Mallarm6, simply a decadent? Why is
not Duchamp decadent? Today, the question strikes one as odd, if not
perhaps, even reactionary. But why?
While Spengler's decadence may be only one among the many
associations brought by the end of WWI (though the book itself was
known as soon as it got published in 1911); while the perception of a
decadence in whose time, no action, nothing, seems to be able to
make a difference, is one to which bourgeois intellectuals, writers and
poets, remain attached from the end of the nineteenth century to the
present time, in order the better to justify the long maturing of an
endlessly postponed historical consciousness, this vision of decadence
is no longer sustainable, because the conditions of artistic production
have changed. Instead of reflecting the continuing hope for an
unmediated relation between the artist, his work and his audience,
the work of art now (from the nineteen twenties to the present)
constitutes itself in a period of generalized Modernism, when it falls
to someone, neither an audience-at-large nor a reflection of the artist
himself, to reconstruct a history of thought that makes the art object
integral with the political engagement of the intellectual.
The young Kojeve, who in the thirties draws Bataille and his friends
to his seminars, puts it well:
Indeed, if I say I can pass through this wall, the wall by no means resists
whatI sayor think:as far as it is concerned,I can sayso as long as I please.
It begins to resistonly if I wantto realizemy thought by Action-that is, if
I actuallyhurl myselfagainstthe wall.And such is alwaysthe case.*
However, Kojeve's own reflection on the need to reconstruct a
Hegelian ideology at a time when people with a more artistic or
literary ability continue to flirt with symbolism and decadence, does
not account for the mental space in which that reconstruction can
take place. In fact, it is only now, many decades after Kojeve started
teaching, that we have begun to comment on his moves, likely
because those moves seem now in an eerie reverse way to replicate
ours. By the same token, if there is now, admittedly, a resurgence of

21 Alexandre
Kojeve, Introductionto theReadingof Hegel:Lectureson thePhenomenology
of
the Spirit,assembled by Raymond Queneau, ed. Allan Bloom, tr.James H. Nichols, Jr.
(New York: Basic Books, 1969), 156 n.

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678 MARC BLANCHARD

interest in Malraux, we must ask why. Lyotard argues that Malraux's

awareness of his inevitable role-playing posture is what makes him a
figure for our age. Others, shocked that a pre-postmodern author
doesn't remain within the parameters of an idealist universe com-
plete with ontological subject and transcendence, are unhappy with
the form of Malraux's writing: they criticize his fondness for
Nietzschean aphorisms, his unrestrained use of metaphor and point
to his hypotactic style, which, in the end, has more in common with
the periods of French classicism than with a Modernist regime where
no contract of understanding binds the writer and his audience. In
the end, Malraux remains a complex figure: either a dandy cultivat-
ing his highly developed sense of timing and theater in the midst of
an otherwise amorphous global history or an intellectual wrestling
with his responsibility to propose and to make public his view of the
interpretive tradition.
In retrospect, pace our dismissals of a Malraussian theater in which
we frown on the intellectual-as-performer, one of the paradoxes of
the Voicesof Silenceor the Metamorphosis of the Godsis that we may find,
in the narrative which Malraux educes from contemplating the
images that he has assembled, a representation, a mimesis,as if en
abysme,of the process by which we canonize all the other stories which
we already know and take for granted (the story of Genesisin the Bible
and that of the battle between kings as explained to Krishna by Prince
Arjuna in the Baghavat). As we strain to reconstruct in our own
fashion a narrative for which we have no clues, reproductions of art
objects, because they are severed in the Museum WithoutWallsfrom
the public for whom they were originally created and because the
stages of their elaboration remain unknown, are fitted with a story of
origins which artificially reaches to us, the modern spectators. How-
ever, as soon as we reflect on the fact that this image we are gazing at
is but a copy, it also confirms our exclusion from a historical process
in which we understand we have no part. How do we deal with this
estrangement? We cannot call those works "Modern," except by in-
dulging in an anachronism, nor can we place them entirely out of our
realm of interpretation, because we usually try to juxtapose to those
works whose story we don't know others whose story is already
familiar. In the long run, the art historian's function is not to mediate
between the artist and the public, but to question the sort of
collecting that has made our interpretation possible in the first place.
The signs of this critical instability are many in the pre-war period.

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 M LN 679

First, Malraux must, like any other French or European intellectual in

the first part of the twentieth century, deal with Nietzsche's legacy and
remember the latter's mockery of metalanguage as the ultimate
scholarly fantasy, since reflexiveness is built into the language pro-
cess. Second, as a writer for whom the world of art objects eventually
displaces that of literary characters, he must figure how to loosen the
interpretation of those objects from the strictures of a story-telling
which privileges well-formed episodes and fully developed characters.
Until this century, this narrative is available from the books that
always seem to precede the picture, and until Modernism, pictures
are subject to the regime of title, legend and document. In the age of
the Museum Without Walls, however, these written texts have been
displaced by pictures which only the knowledge, intuition or fantasy
of the collector or the cultural historian, constructing a mostly virtual
narrative, have made possible. Now the assemblage or montage of
works, whose function is no longer to illustrate but to authorize a
narrative to an author and a reader whose sensibilities are being
confronted by an unwritten history, calls in question a tradition
whereby the visual has remained until now but the handmaiden to
the written.
Third, though Malraux never seems to have had the patience to
reflect on the intrusion of the political into the philosophical, he
must also, like others in his time, reconsider how technology has
changed the political landscape and how this fact now presents
philosophy with an unavoidable (the French say, incontournable)
challenge, which mandates, among other things, a reconstruction of
the history of knowledge, less as a sociological double to an history of
events, than as a series of moments articulated by different logics. For
instance, with Kant and Hegel, the existence of the work of art is
made possible by a subject perceiving beauty under a special category,
not subsumed under the rule of identity and exclusion: a work of art
may be deemed beautiful though there may be contrary opinions as
to what it represents. With Nietzsche, the question of beauty is
subsumed under a logic of exclusion: a work of art requires of its
spectator that he be aware of its illusory essence-it posits a reference
(truth, beauty) that can be ascertained only to the extent that it can
itself be represented. Malraux will take the notion one step further by
arguing that the question of truth in art is one that cannot be
answered. It is a question that only poses itself today, no longer in
relation to a universal subject cognizant of all references, but to one

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680 MARC BLANCHARD

unable to articulate how works construct those references, and

therefore incapable of moral certainty, deprived of the possibility of
irony, and searching for transcendence. Before we proceed, let me
suggest how this text from the Voicesfrom Silence articulates this new
logic.

The liberation of art from narrative assured that mastery of the visible
world which every great painter was henceforth to exercise. Never before
in the history of art had one and the same impulse given rise to works so
diverse as those of Daumier and Manet; of Renoir, Monet, Rodin and
Cezanne; of Gauguin, van Gogh and Seurat; of Rouault, Matisse, Braque
and Picasso. And this very diversity served to throw light on many other
forms of art, from such resuscitated artists as Piero della Francesca and
Vermeer to the Romanesque frescoes and to Crete;just as, from Polynesian
art to the great periods of China and India, it is throwing light on the long
record of successive conquests that make art history. Michelangelo had a
collection of antiques, and Rembrandt (as he used to say) of coats-of-mail
and rags-and-tatters;in Picasso's studio-whence day after day he looses on
the world those strange works in which the conflict between the artist and
life's forms moves to a climax-the show-cases look like a miniature
museum of "barbarian" art. This multifariousness of forms in modern
individualist art has made it easier for us to accept the infinite variety of the
artist, at long last resuscitated. The Masters of Villeneuve and Nouans,
Gruenewald, El Greco, Georges de Latour, Uccello, Masaccio, Tura, Le
Nain, Chardin, Goya and Daumier have been either hailed revelations or
promoted to the front rank; while a host of other arts have come to the
fore: from Pheidias to the Koreof Euthydikos,then the Cretans; from the
Assyrians to Babylon; then, yet further back, to the Sumerians. And all are
seemingly united by virtue of the metamorphosis they undergo in this new
realm of art which has replaced that of beauty; as though our excavations
were revealing to us not so much the world's past as our own future.22

This passage illustrates rather well how well the continuity which had
been taken for granted since Lessing's Laocoon and Hegel's Aesthetics
can no longer be maintained, and that the idea that a picture can
only be understood by raising the question of how it is art-historical-
that it makes sense by being inserted into a continuum of production
and valuation-is no longer tenable, mainly for three reasons.
First, as European art history constituted itself into a coherent
narrative of origins and progress, this narrative became captive to

22 The Voicesof Silence,126-27.

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 MLN 681

museums, within whose space art objects became constructs of

national identity (the Egyptian Antiquities in the Louvre or the
British Museum symbolized the capacity of colonial powers to recon-
struct on their own territory plausible versions of national develop-
ments which had taken place elsewhere). However, in the Museum
Without Walls, Malraux quickly reasoned that by combining two
techniques for displaying art works, the museum and photography,
he could help mitigate the hegemonic tendencies in the former with
the displacements encouraged by the latter. Art objects must, in order
to be appreciated, be placed in a common locale dedicated to
reinforcing the notion that art's function is, primarily, to replicate the
social formations which have made it autonomous in the first place. A
photograph, on the other hand, can be viewed anywhere and it
challenges the viewer to derive a semiosis from the possibility that the
being in the picture is not the original for it, but, were that being
immediately available, literally at hand-as when we look at past
pictures of ourselves-rather another, degraded replication of itself,
to which the photograph could only be compared.
In any case, the melding in the new art-historical discourse of
photography and the museum made sense. As an autodidact himself,
someone who had had but superficial contact with a canonical
tradition (both Lacouture and Malraux make much of Malraux's self-
assurance, the fact that he was able to make sweeping statements
about things it seemed he knew rather little about), Malraux was in
fact procuring the Museum WithoutWallsas a site of convenience, a
place where, freed from the conventions of bookish knowledge, he
was able to compare works that had never been placed together.
Focussing on the idea that the museum had now evolved from a real
space where a specific history could be authenticated by objects
recalling it (the "kouros" paving the way for the "Elgin Marbles" in
the rendition of the Classicism of Greek art), into a virtual space
where the complex mediations made necessary by unpremeditated
juxtapositions would test new, interhistorical arrangements of objects
never before been put together, Malraux embarked on the task of
rethinking the development of painting, and of sculpture for a post-
industrial world. In contradistinction with other intellectuals of his
time (Camus or Sartre, for instance), who saw no reason to privilege
art in their discussion of ideology, he insisted that from now on a
description of art objects must entail a review of technological
advances, as he was convinced that the appreciation of art was in the
end a function of modes of displaying the objects, and that this

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682 MARC BLANCHARD

display was central to developing a closer understanding of the role of

art as part of culture, and of the role of culture in social formations.23
Second, with his convocation of the museum and of photography
as virtual sites for moveable displays, Malraux addressed early on-
long before it had become clear that political options would be
drastically reduced in a world shaped almost exclusively by modes of
consumption-a new relation between collecting and consuming art,
one in which the end of patronage, concomitant in the nineteenth
century with the beginning of civic and national museums, made it
possible to think, soon thereafter (e.g., in Paris, with the Musee de
l'homme,the Museed'ArtModernede la VilledeParis, in the U.S., with the
various MOMA's), a new formation where display, collecting and
consumption worked together to produce a specular, civic theater for
an amateur citizenry.24Casting himself as an intermediary between
the market and the artists, Malraux, later functioning as a part of de
Gaulle's cabinet, theorized a new configuration of the art work,
where, by supporting the idea of the state as provider and collector of
art, he could in effect bypass the two most important arbiters of the
artwork's value : the intellectuals, amongst whom he always insisted
on being counted, but also the private collectors, into the ranks of

23Justice has recently been done to Malraux's endeavors, significantly, by the likes of
Regis Debray. See his "Andr6 Malraux: Perdant magnifique," Le Monde,November 23,
1999. There are fuirther notes of Malrussian interest in the Cahiersde mediologie,edited
by Regis Debray and friends. As noted by Herman Lebovics in his Mona Lisa's Escort
(238), Malraux is going through a process of reevaluation. From this, it might be
possible to argue that Malraux's work is essential to understanding the shift from a
culture articulating the notion of intellectual from a purely philosophical and literary
point of view, to a broader notion of the intellectual, informed by a reference to mass
culture and entertainment. It is in this shift from the written work, from the book, for
which Malraux never had much patience, to the work of art and culture not as canon
but as diffusion, that Malraux's art criticism, his work on cinema, and finally, his
interest in bringing culture to the masses, that a new figure of the modernist
intellectual can be constructed. On this, it is also worth remembering that Malraux,
though he was unashamedly a member of de Gaulle's cabinet, supported vanguard
work that was considered by the rest of the cabinet and much of the French public to
be antirevolutionary and antinationalist. Malraux made the case for not cutting funds
to the Theatre de l'Od6on, where Les Paravents, a play on the consequences of
atrocities in Algeria only two years after the war had ended, was being performed.
24The new situation is defined by the possibility of collecting, and the need to
consume, art. Art collecting has a long history and it cannot be said that Malraux was
the first to ponder the importance of collecting. The controversy goes back to the end
of the nineteenth century, when confronted by the excesses of the market, artists begin
to think that that they would be protected by a democratically elected government.
Positioning himself as the commissar of the artists, Malraux attempted to fulfill that
part of a democratic culture.

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 M LN 683

whom he had so desired to be admitted when he and Clara set sail for
Indochina. From both, and especially from the former, he also
wished, however, to remain autonomous, if only because he believed
that to privilege the symbolic (writing) over the visual (painting,
sculpture) was to lose the shock value by which form and color
conquer the imagination and he wanted to put an end to a traditional
philosophical discourse that made a work of art ancillary to the
systematic description of it. Malraux would not, like Sartre, write a
book on a relatively classical (Renaissance) painter, like Tintoretto,
only to make a philosophical argument about Tintoretto's existential
choice of subjects and situations, if only because in this Tintoretto
first loses his specificity as an Italian painter of the French and Italian
Renaissance. For Sartre, the discussion of the art of any period in
existential terms implies the possibility of considering both classic
and modern art within the unexamined parameters of conservation
and display: the museum or the gallery, and the photographs which
mediate any physical interaction with the painting. Situation, deci-
sion and personal identification remain central themes in a Sartrean
problematic. However, the discussion of situations and choices, with
which Sartre abstracts Tintoretto's life from the paintings which had
made that life problematic in the first place, is tenable only to the
extent that the paintings which explain the life remain part of an
aeuvre,whose own historical construction doesn't particularly interest
Sartre anyway. Malraux, on the other hand, is interested in the fact
that any discussion of art is conditioned by an unexamined reference
to a place not of architectural design, but of the mind in the
photographic reproductions to which any interpretative text anchors
itself.
The question has often been posed whether Malraux is a true
intellectual or a poseur. But even assuming that the question needs to
be resolved once and for all for the sake of the coherence of an art-
historical discourse, it is far less interesting than the other question:
how an amateurish hero in search of riches and fame articulates his
gesture in a new context where the fundamental questions of
philosophy (Who are we? What do we know?) are now to be posed as
questions of cultural understanding (How do we understand the
works of other people and other countries which, as Europeans, we
used to dominate, and which now resist us?) and politics (How, in a
new specular universe, made possible by technologies of reproduc-
tion, works of art represent a new class of concepts, not entirely
abstract nor completely concrete, that enable us to play with multiple

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684 MARC BLANCHARD

notions of the real?). In this respect, Malraux's work shows how in the
West literature and philosophy have always enjoyed a special status,
due to the preeminence of theory over practice. But, following the
wreckage of the Great War and the rise of transnational ideologies of
revolution and liberation which had emerged before the war itself
(anarchism, for instance, by which Malraux was not untouched), the
question of the separation between theory and practice, of the
distinction between beauty and truth, becomes moot. Coming on
Malraux's heels, some philosophers will soon be asking whether
philosophy is not at stake when rational subjects see themselves as
separate from history. Only a few years past the time when Malraux
reflects on the intersection of thought and culture, academic philoso-
phers also ask the question of culture in relation to the rise of
Fascism. The first papers of the Frankfurt School evidence the
necessity of coming to terms with the way history is constituted by the
ongoing relationship between the subject and the objects in his
environment. Both Malraux's Temptationof the Westand some of the
first papers of the Frankfurt School's Institute for Social Research are
cast in the same mold: that of a metaphysical discourse opening itself
up to the social, as abstract systems are tested for their power to
generate new projects, and found to be inadequate. Each philoso-
pher is not subject to a systematic critique but sifted for fragments or
elements which might help construct a provisional, albeit not system-
atic, relation to the world. Thus Heidegger sketches his relation to
Nietzsche as one of pragmatic revision; his own system is but a path
forking off of the critique of rhetoric in Nietzsche. Beside the
problem of producing new discourses on the ruins of philosophy,
Modernist thought in the twenties and thirties must also deal with the
emergence of new constructions from the realm of the social sci-
ences. Sociology, anthropology and psychoanalysis present a chal-
lenge to abstract thought by reinserting into philosophical and
historical discourse the question of the location of the abstract itself.
For Marx, Freud, Durkheim, and the fledgling anthropologists of the
between-the-wars period, asking a question about subject and action
is first to reflect on the conditions under which the question can be
asked. For instance, positing a social field beyond the individual
subject means to admit that all discourse about cause and effect is
beyond affect: it is only by becoming aware of the inevitable fictitious-
ness of his own situation (trying to be objective while remaining a
subject in the field he studies) that the investigator conducts a
rational discourse.

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 M LN 685

However, all these are considerations of a certain professional

interest, stimulated by the emergence of the social sciences. It
remains that, despite the new focus of a socially oriented thought, the
question of how an individual or social imaginary intrudes on any
discourse is one left unresolved by philosophers. The Surrealists
attracted Malraux for a while with their appreciation of the uncanny.
He adopted their style in his narrative fantasy Le Royaumefarfelu.
Malraux, however, had more pressing preoccupations than breaking
the molds of formal discourse. He was concerned that in searching
for purely formal renovations in his discourse, the intellectual was
remaining captive to a superficial aesthetics, devoid of social content.
Sartre explains how it is in Le Mur. One of the stories is about a
character who can't be a hero because being a hero would fulfill the
bourgeoisie's desire to shine at the expense of the working class and
thus get in the way of viable social action. On the other hand,
committing to a cause without the metaphoric value that one's
engagement gives the cause, a value without which the cause couldn't
be understood, much less propagated, is problematic. The question
becomes the following: how to commit to an individual course of
action in the context of an analysis which redeems the individual only
because it can claim social value. In the revolutions of the thirties,
there isn't too much distance between the dandy and the revolution-
ary. Malraux quickly understood that one element was left out of the
equation whereby political engagement in the present was the key to
bringing about a new society: art and the accumulation of art objects
as a part of the accumulation of symbolic capital left unresolved the
question of how consciousness, any consciousness, whether aesthetic
or social, was shaped by national or transnational accumulations of
art objects in the world of industrial and global capitalism. Those
accumulations, whether through siting the work of art in a museum
or reproducing it through increasingly refined technological means,
are part of a world of exchange to which all historical interpretation
is now captive. It is no longer possible to contemplate a work of art
merely in its reference to imitative practices (Aristotelian rules of
audience, internal coherence and style) in a history where events
singled out by an authoritative discourse appear symbolized by
discrete objects. If anything, in the thirties, interpretative historical
discourse is confronted by its failure to comprehend new social
formations resulting precisely from the fragmentation and decompo-
sition of systematic narrative histories. Europe is a place of drift, all
the more interesting because, drained by a global war and reeling

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686 MARC BLANCHARD

under the weight of its colonial empires, it raises the question of who
speaks for her. The infatuation with Spengler's view of a decayed or
fin-de-siecle history and the resistance to it (Toynbee) is a byproduct
of this realization. Not even the new technologies of retrieval,
archeology, and physical anthropology which appear at the time can
calm this anxiety. Only a different type of narrative can account for
these discontinuities, a narrative which can show how philosophical
inquiry is shaped by cultural memories, and how those memories are
shaped by our need to understand history through art. In his memoir
relating his epic search for the ruins of Sheba, Malraux recalls how he
took to the epic flight with his friend Corniglion-Molinier because he
wanted to prove that "the legends by which we live have a history and
that this history is understandable mostly through the monuments we
have identified. I wanted to know how thought emerges from ruins."25
The Mona Lisa's voyage to New York, arranged by Malraux's
Cultural Ministry in 1962, is an attempt to give this philosophical
debate on the distinction between history and aesthetics a practical,
administrative and managerial turn. It should represent the best of
cultural exchange at a time when the Cold War impedes the free flow
of culture and ideas and makes cultural nationalism irrelevant. The
activities of a minister of culture at a time when France is coming to
grips with the loss of its empire should make it easier to imagine the
man of letters as the one who, by integrating the best of Romantic
individualism with the high ideals of a social imagination, has
survived the disappointments of class struggle and revolution. Yet the
true lesson of the life well led is not that it procures a Boethian solace
to the reader in need of consolation but that it teaches that there is
no recourse. From that experience many things may come. With
Malraux, the most important thing is an understanding of the
tragically limited scope of an individual consciousness. Malraux also
had not one but three lives as he moved from one destiny to the next;
but, though each of those lives appears different on the outside (the
writer indulging in his private realm with no public charge, the man
of letters and action making public news, the minister-humanist
fulfilling Goethe's ideal of the new purveyor of culture), they are all
marked by an obsession with death. In a famous passage of the Royal
Way,the main character, Perken, a truculent rendition of the young

25The
Queen of Sheba episode was related in two different venues: first in the
Antimemoires,and then in a separate volume, published later.

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 ML N 687

Malraux foraging the Cambodian jungle, meets his death without

having found what he was looking for. The narrator explains that,
while desire for the unknown is what gives meaning to an existence
conceived as quest, the quest itself remains a mystery because it is
conceivable only within an ongoing confrontation with death. This is
where the Arnoldian definition of culture as the best that has been
thought is unsettled by a perspective on death. By factoring the past
into the configuration of culture, Matthew Arnold proposed a
distinction between culture and knowledge, between morality and
education, the effect of which is to break the atemporal continuum in
which abstract notions are usually discussed. If culture is located in
the past, the question arises whether this past is simply alwayspresent
because in the process of acquiring meaning it has lost the specific
meaning that made it comprehensible only to a few and acquired
another, quite different meaning, which makes it understandable to
many more people, but deprives the event of its specificity. For
instance, the taking of the Bastille was a spontaneous reaction to the
dismissal by the King of his very popular minister, Necker. It was never
perceived at the time to be the beginning of what we call today the
Revolution. In fact, the word "revolution" was not yet understood in
its political meaning; it had not yet been invented. In another words,
it is generally by foreshortening the interpretation of the event and
taking it out of context that we do history. In the case of the French
Revolution, the event of Bastille Day is now foreshortened and
understood in the broader context of the Revolution and its after-
math. However, the events that led to the death of Louis XVI, now
clearly reconstructed in sequence, each had its own rhythm, its mode
of presentation, its way of unwinding and becoming, of being
unknown. It is thus perhaps ironic that we continue to insist that
there is no such thing as revolutionary literature. Though we have
begun to discover the performative possibilities in the theater of the
French revolution, we still do not think much of the discourses of the
orators of the French revolution, who made it possible for their
colleagues, their readers and their live audience, to receive their
education as readers of politics after having been trained in the
appreciation of a pure aesthetics, unrelated to historical develop-
ments and the consciousness of death.

The example of the French Revolution is fundamental. The man of

letters doesn't only promote ideas; he also understands that in an age
of democracy, which goes back to the Enlightenment, the force of art

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688 MARC BLANCHARD

is that it places the beholder in the most democratic situation of all:

an existential relation with death that all can understand. This is
expressed in another way in "Saint-Just,"where Malraux suggests that
the young revolutionary's genius is to have grasped the link between
revolution, the king's regicide, and his own life, soon to be cut short
in 1794 by the guillotine. The repeated theme of Voicesof Silenceisthat
the museum, a token of the integration of the economic with the
political and the cultural, shows that, although the enjoyment of
artistic products is now a feature of the national and bourgeois state,
what the work of art in a museum communicates is the possibility that
all-artists, onlookers and critics-are subjected to the same regime.
In his introduction to the Voicesof Silence,Malraux states that one of
the consequences of the age of the Museum is that it allows modern
man, through a compression of time and space, to consider together
art objects that would otherwise never have been thought to have
anything to do with one another, and to experience the discontinuities
of human cultures, without the thread usually retrieved by the
interpreter or the historian. Precisely because they are thrown
together into a showspace and cut off from their context, works of art
elicit from the spectator a certain terror. Malraux tells the story of this
apophantic art in his art history. Reformulating Lessing's argument in
Laocoon that sculpture is more powerful than poetry because it
challenges us to understand what is difficult to put into words, he
suggests that this dialectic must now be left behind, since, thanks to
technology, the modes of visuality have expanded, but not the modes
of reading the book. Now, in an age when we have become sensitized
to the consequences of tourism and realized that the power of empire
is abetted by modes of address and forms of discourse, Malraux's
prescription for an imaginary museum may look dated and hege-
monic. After all, a syncretic vision of works of art all thrown together
in the room of a museum depends on who's doing the collecting in
the first place. However, the question raised by the management of
culture is not simply that of how to better the representation of the
nation, but how to think different cultures in the same conceptual,
transnational, transcultural space. Initially, "maisons de la culture" or
"houses of culture" were part of the postMarxist heritage, when it was
realized, in the 1920s, that the failure of successive revolutions,
together with the unexpected rise in Fascism, was due to unsuccessful
formulations of the link between an abstract economic system and
local instances of oppression. It was not enough to theorize on the
mechanisms of production and exchange, as Adam Smith, Condorcet,

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 M LN 689

Turgot and the physiocrateshad done on the eve of the French

Revolution. If one was interested in bringing about the sort of rise in
consciousness that would permit change, it was necessary to rethink
the relation of the economic and the social through cultural produc-
tion. From Marx, to Gramsci, to the Frankfurt School, to Althusser
and Postcolonialism, theorists have tried for the last hundred and
twenty years, to uncover the methods by which individual discourses
are a part of ideology. In this scheme, art is almost always seen as the
expression of an internal contradiction on the part of the class that
produces it. However, Malraux's activity as the first minister of culture
offered an attractive alternative. Starting from Nietzsche rather than
from Marx, Malraux sought to combine the Romantic necessity of
leaving one's "signature," of "making a difference," with the other,
unselfish, ethical or moral necessity of contributing to the under-
standing of history something that would ultimately transcend the
representation of an individual act. In the museum, the dandy has
finally joined with the manager.
The Universityof California,Davis

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