DÉFILIATION, DÉ-GÉNÉRATION: LE «JADIS» SELON QUIGNARD
UNDOING THE THREAD: THE "DAYS OF OLD" ACCORDING TO QUIGNARD

Summary/Abstract: Undoing the Thread: The "Days of Old" According to Quignard. The work of the French novelist and essayist Pascal Quignard is entirely devoted to the question of time and involves directly the intergenerational topic. However, his conception of time (“le jadis”) does not fit with a simple pattern of chronologic relation between ages and generations and is not based on remembering or chronology. On the contrary, Quignard designs in his work a deconstructive conceiving of origin, deeply involved in sexuality, but far away from the psychoanalytical idea of unconcious. This radically new conception of existential origin does not fit either with Freud’s “primal scene” or with Heidegger’s concept of true as aletheia and is just as well far from any kind of idealistic substitute. It is only thinkable in his wholly sexual, sensitive and hedonistic dimension, literally as generation, arising as event before the time of live and selfness as well as existential event and as secrete source of art and sensitivity, undoing and twisting the thread of ages, linking together generations and overcoming their difference.

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