2023-05-06 11:31:54
He is one of the last sacred monsters of the world of letters who died on Saturday May 6, at the age of 86, after having occupied the front of the media scene for decades, a man of extraordinary energy. , able to say “all is well” until the old woman of her death, driven by an insatiable curiosity and a subversive spirit that the years have never affected.
Born November 28, 1936 into a bourgeois Bordeaux family, Philippe Joyaux is the younger of two sisters. His childhood memories mingle with the smells of the Ile de Ré, a refuge during the war, a place that will become his own and which he wanted to make his last home.
A first novel in 1958
His training, at first in line with his father’s expectations – he entered ESSEC – was very quickly interrupted by his attraction to the world of letters, his meeting with the poet Francis Ponge and the publication of his first novel. A curious loneliness, in 1958, which recounts the initiation of a teenager by a thirty-year-old woman. His classic and perfect writing, his maturity, were hailed by the great writers of the time, notably Louis Aragon.
His Latin pseudonym, Sollers, means “all in art”. Because if Philippe Sollers was an outstanding intellectual of the 1960s and 1970s, in particular through his activity at the head of the journal As is (Le Seuil), then to that of The infinite (Denoël then Gallimard), he was above all an aesthete, fascinated by the philosophy of the 18th century, the music of Scarlatti or Haydn, the history of art; a scholar, a great connoisseur of Antiquity, as much fascinated by Greece as by biblical texts; a man for whom joy was an art of living, a form of politeness.
invisible punctuation
Specialists will perhaps remember that, from a formal point of view, he began by making his writing evolve towards rigid structures to then release it, until making punctuation invisible. That, at the same time, committed to the Communist Party, he became a Maoist, inspired by Chinese culture. These things have passed. However, it is in this intellectual effervescence, that he frequented Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault or Jacques Lacan, married the Bulgarian psychoanalyst, Julia Kristeva, mother of his only son.
His great success Women, published in 1982, an autobiographical novel (full of very Celinian ellipsis), evokes the consequences of triumphant feminism. The narrator is at the center of a feminine nebula similar to that in which Sollers evolves. Because, the writer was also the passionate lover of Dominique Rolin, a woman of letters met when he was only 23 years old (and she, the double), and to whom he remained faithful until his death ( in 2012 at age ninety-nine). He wasn’t short of a paradox: shocking elegantly could have been his oxymoron.
And he shocked, in particular by supporting Gabriel Matzneff, or the reissue of Celine’s anti-Semitic texts. Not because he adhered to their content, but in the name of freedom of expression. A position that has become difficult to sustain in today’s society. With Sollers, a whole era disappears.
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