253. Zakir Paul, Disarming Intelligence. Proust, Valéry, and Modern French Criticism

Chiara Nifosi

In his book Disarming Intelligence. Proust, Valéry, and Modern French Criticism, Zakir Paul circumscribes very clearly and since the very beginning of the volume the object of his investigation: the concept of intelligence and its malleability in the works of such writers as Marcel Proust, Paul Valéry, and the critics of the Nouvelle Revue Française, namely Jacques Rivière. In a detour that also puts the essay in conversation with German thinkers, Paul contends that intelligence is so malleable that it gradually vanishes “from critical theory and literary criticism” (p. 1), in its displacement from center to margin especially due to its difficult linguistic formulation. The questioning of the unity and primacy of intelligence coincides with its analytical reassessment in a variety of contexts that Paul explores in his essay. The title chosen for the book opens the path to this compelling critical project and is drawn from Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve’s comparison of two aspects of intelligence, reflection and action, to a shield (or mirror) and a sword, standing for a “more or less armed” attitude: one that is more defensive, or reflexive, and one that entails the use of intelligence on the battlefield to change its surroundings. Sainte-Beuve’s remark, then, introduces the idea that intelligence is not a stable nor a neutral notion, whose determination is primarily ideological and cultural.

In a far-reaching analysis that spans over a long period of time, stretching all over and from the Third Republic (1870-1940) to contemporary times, which are referred to in the conclusion, Paul attempts to weave a modern history of intelligence into the complex fabric of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century France. The Third Republic, born in the immediate aftermath of the “défaite de Sedan” and the loss of the Franco-Prussian War, is not only marked by the amputation of national territory imposed by the Treaty of Frankfurt (1871), whose condition included the annexation of the Alsace-Lorraine to Germany; the history of the Third Republic also stages political turmoil, with the clash of competing political doctrines, reform in the fields of education, media and information, as well as the redefinition of the relationships binding the State and the Church; these are the years of Boulangisme, of the Dreyfus affair, and of colonial expansion, while the country also witnesses the first mass strikes. This complex landscape constitutes the perfect background to retrace the history of intelligence, a notion that naturally finds numerous applications in a transition that also testifies to the development of social and medical sciences, as well as the consolidation of public opinion through the press, thus being enriched by the development of discourses that necessarily accompany literature in the argument laid out by Paul. It is on this background that the main issue tackled by the Author emerges, namely the “epistemic shift in which intelligence was used to transform the world of things into the world of signs” (p. 12). While this formulation allows to incorporate (and to a certain extent attack) common assumptions on modernism into the debate by hinting at the collapse of reality into the subject’s psychic life, these words announce the status of literature as a “critical activity” that “makes it possible to track not only how preconceived notions of intelligence are disarmed in literary figuration, but also how literature bears its own disarming notion of intelligence” (p. 14).

In the first chapter, “Gathering Intelligence: From Taine to Bergson”, Paul reconstructs the complex history of intelligence starting with its disjunction from knowledge, seen as a relevant turning point that sets itself as “a response to a wider transformation of the grounds of philosophical, scientific, and critical inquiry” (p. 27). An important role in this shift is played by Hippolyte Taine’s empirical approach, which opens to further research aiming at reducing intelligence to its measurable variables, as in Alfred Binet’s and Théodore Simon’s scale (1905-1911). The critique of intelligence as a spiritual faculty, which characterizes Taine’s rationalism, also affects the perception of literature and the arts as mere “case studies” (p. 43), thus countering the Romantic cult of genius and contentions about the transcendent nature of aesthetic experience. In Paul’s argument, it is principally (and quite paradoxically) Henri Bergson’s philosophy that will rehabilitate intelligence. The insufficiency of the quantitative methods in psychological research highlighted by Bergson in his Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (1889) allows Paul to reopen the debate concerning the opposition between intuition and intelligence in his philosophy, a point that certainly constitutes the most compelling argument of the chapter in question. Countering received ideas on Bergson’s critical take on intelligence and building upon previous scholarship (namely Suzanne Guerlac’s seminal study Thinking in Time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson, from 2006), the Author shows that the philosopher works against this dualistic opposition and sees intelligence as a “plastic” and “protean tool meant to enable adaptation” to surrounding reality. What Bergson stigmatizes according to Paul is the tendency of intelligence to “exceed its limits” (p. 47) and become the sovereign faculty.

The reader is now ready to tackle the second chapter, “Abdicating Intelligence: Proust and the Narrative Form”, which opens the literary analysis embedded in Paul’s larger argument on ever-shifting notions of intelligence. Here, the Author reconfigures Proust’s novel À la recherche du temps perdu as the story of a vocation based on the gradual realization “that intelligence must abdicate its place as the primary faculty to create works of literature” (p. 53). Drawing on Deleuze’s reading of the novel as a system of signs subject to interpretation and on Barthes’ contentions about the logic of reversal that dominates the narrator’s experience, Paul argues that intelligence too should be included in this “deciphering quest”, more specifically as an intelligence that “disarms itself” (p. 55). In other words, intelligence must constantly negotiate its relationship with perception, so that signs can make themselves visible and allow the narrator to take further steps in the deciphering quest. What intelligence discovers about itself structurally (i.e., a necessary tension towards its own disarming) has repercussions on the content of what is being discovered. The most interesting insight of the chapter may thus be related to what Paul advances about the last volume of the novel, Le Temps retrouvé, a remark that increases the distance between Proust and his character: if the disarming of intelligence is part of a meta-narrative path, “rather than seeing the end of the novel as a belated effort at systematicity, we can consider it a lure for reading that seeks to stabilize the meaning of intelligence” (p. 67), a meaning defined by the central place of experience as the site of reversals, which constantly limits intelligence itself. In fact, “Proust never abdicates [intelligence] entirely, or never stops abdicating it, since there would be no way of doing so, once and for all. It is the very incompleteness of this movement that affords intelligence its role in his novel, as a point from which he is forever parting” (p. 73). According to Paul, then, Proustian intelligence is constantly subordinated to “perspective and expressive powers” in order to make room for a first moment of productive hallucination.

Further aspects of a disarming intelligence are analyzed in the third chapter, “Testing Intelligence: Valéry reconfigured”, which revolves around Monsieur Teste, the Cahiers, and Histoires brisées. The chapter moves from the status of Paul Valéry as a “poet-critic” (p. 88) that has never shown any particular interest in the narrative genre. As a genre that is meant to convey a story, for Valéry narrative prose is the opposite of poetry, i.e., a text that disappears once it has performed its function. To clarify this point, Paul includes a very interesting example drawn from the text “Propos sur la poésie”, where Valéry mentions a comparison of prose and poetry respectively to walking and dancing, the first one being subject to “intention and determination”, the second one being “an end in itself that involves no real displacement” (p. 103). According to Paul, Valéry has consistently opposed novel writing through his own prose. The key example brought up in the text is Monsieur Teste, a work that strays away from diegesis and mimesis in a ceaseless attempt to undermine representation, normally associated with prose, through the endeavors of a character that gives up his intellectual powers. Thus, the work experiments at once with counterrealism in its form, and inhumanism in Teste’s refutation of intelligence intended as accepted ideas (“idées reçues”). In so doing, Teste dwells in the realm of possibility, as he refuses to find any sort of intellectual closure to his main activity, which Valéry encompassed in the famous description of Teste as “a guy who thinks”. In the Cahiers, the topic of intelligence is tackled in terms of reflexivity and in the relationship between reflex actions and mental functions, the reflex being the “nascent state” of what is thoroughly reflected. To express this state of possibility or virtuality, Valéry adopts the term “implexe”, i.e., “a sedimented habit that never rises to consciousness” (p. 113). Through the description of this sort of tropism detected in the Cahiers, Paul creates a further, unexpected bridge between Valéry and the Nouveau Roman, which he had already mentioned with respects to the former’s anti-novelistic prose writing (p. 99). This project is further developed in Histoires brisées, where counterrealism is achieved through “shifting perspectives, inconsistent narrative voices, temporal uncertainties” (p. 121). Finally, the crisis of intelligence is explored by Valéry through the lens of the relationship between the human and technology, with the latter imposing new distinctions between fungible and nonfungible forms of intelligence that also determine a class crisis. In fact, the term intelligentsia ends up alienating “a class with indefinite function” that has no say as a social category (p. 124).

The political repercussions of renewed perspectives on the crisis of intelligence, especially in relation to interwar nationalism, is at the center of the fourth chapter, “Mobilizing Intelligence: Critical Neutrality at the Nouvelle Revue Française”. The argument advanced by Paul in this section is announced in the first page, where the Author contends that “the disinterested critical idiom and aesthetic program associated with the Nouvelle Revue Française—namely ‘modern classicism’ (…)—emerged as a response to the conflation of aesthetics and politics by Maurrasian nationalists” (p. 129). The chapter effectively introduces the main tenets of Maurras’ anti-Romantic crusade carried out in L’Avenir de l’intelligence, a text from 1905 where the decline of the letters is mostly ascribed to mass literacy and industrialization. Especially during the nineteenth century, the attitude of writers was that of absolute “demarcation” (p. 134) between themselves and the literary marketplace, in a progressive movement of singularization of literary outcomes that no longer reflected “a unitary linguistic, national, or ethical model” (p. 135), what Maurras considers as a relevant political problem. This is the point in time where, for him, intelligence becomes a dangerous agent of disorder, which causes, from his part, a retreat into the defense of classicism. A classicism of a different kind—a modern classicism—is the one promoted by the Nouvelle Revue Française after World War I, namely by Jacques Rivière. The “demobilization of intelligence” that makes him proclaim, tautologically, that “literature is literature, art is art” is seen by Paul as an affirmation of the principle of identity, not only in the logical sense, but also in terms of national identity. It is to preserve French spiritual leadership that Maurras’ nationalistic scheme must be rejected, as it would imply subordinating intelligence “to an institution or to a cause” (p. 150). This is when intelligence enters the political arena and becomes itself a “political category” (p. 152).

After the discussion of Maurras’ and Rivière’s political attitudes, in the chapter “Situating Intelligence: Walter Benjamin and Political Technique”, Paul recontextualizes the engagement with intelligence in the German philosophical tradition by taking into account such philosophers as Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Walter Benjamin, who also worked on a significant number of French authors. The discussion revolves around the term Intelligenz, a Latinate term that “sets it apart in the German philosophical idiom” (p. 154). Its negative connotation becomes evident in Heidegger’s critique of intellectualism as a degradation of Geist (spirit) and Dichtung (poetry), a degradation that carries with it political implications related to the instrumentalization of the highest human powers as well as to the dangerous positioning of the German spirit, stuck between Soviet Russia’s Marxism and America’s capitalist mindset. The problem is tackled by Benjamin from a different perspective, stemming from his study of French poets such as Apollinaire, for instance, for whom poetry and prophecy are equivalent. This equivalence allows language to affect reality without passing through the actual realm of the political. This conflation of form and content, identified by Benjamin with “highly political style”, situates the political dimension of Dichtung into “technical innovations” (p. 170). This faith in the “magical” power of language to find its correspondence into an immediate event does not have the effect, then, of erasing intelligence from the picture, but of recognizing the latter as part of the artistic endeavor without falling into the stereotypical association that sees intelligence as bourgeois “cunning”, as in Nietzsche’s reading, or in the degradation of the spirit, as it was for Heidegger. For Paul, it is relevant that this acknowledgment is the result of Benjamin’s long-term commitment to French literature.

Paul moves to the conclusion, where he retraces the metamorphoses of intelligence as follows: a first metamorphosis that transformed intelligence into a measurable item; a second metamorphosis that insisted on the environmental factors affecting (if not determining) intelligence; a third metamorphosis connected with artificial intelligence and its still unmeasured potential. Artificial intelligence, in fact, requires a reassessment of human intelligence based on its confrontation with it, which reveals the crucial role of “disorganization and unpredictability” (p. 191; quote from David Bates included in the text) as the very constituents of the latter. In other words, the human disorder that stimulates and requires the intervention of human intelligence seems to be erased by the infallibility of computational calculations, thus setting AI as an inherently non-intelligent tool. While constituting a significant argumentative leap, this conclusive reflection manages to delineate the boundaries of literature’s future challenges, as the artistic quest must constantly redefine itself in conjunction with the fluctuating fortunes and misfortunes of intelligence.

Overall, Zakir Paul’s book is a fascinating tool that renews the felicitous critical endeavor of establishing a solid interdisciplinary dialogue between literature and social sciences, whose contribution is witnessed, in the book, by the use of an impressive secondary bibliography. The choice of such a productively ambiguous topic as intelligence—carrying at once aesthetic, philosophical, physiological, and psychological connotations—is particularly apt to highlight still overlooked aspects of well-known works, such as Proust’s and Valéry’s writings, which tend to benefit from the plastic manipulation of key concepts in light of rigorous historical analysis. While the reframing of Proust’s “dismissal” of intelligence provides significant nuances that enrich our understanding of his novel without affecting its core, the analysis of Valéry’s diverse corpus illuminates the full scope of the poet’s discourse on intelligence, whose reverberations reach any level of interpretation of his texts, from the linguistic to the philosophical to the political. For anybody who is interested in the history of French thought, this book certainly constitutes a precious source of information and ideas, as it enhances yet another transformation of intelligence into a fundamental hermeneutic grid through which literature reflects on its own limits, challenges, and infinite possibilities.

REFERÊNCIA:

Paul, Zakir. Disarming Intelligence. Proust, Valéry, and Modern French Criticism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024.