Hasard et orient au XXe siecle. Les controverses artistiques Boulez / Cage et Queneau / Breton

  • Sébastien Wit Université dé Picardie Jules Verne

Abstract

This paper proposes to return to the way in which the artistic chance of the 20th century is constructed by a set of discourses, through which artists elaborate conceptions of the artistic subject, and make art a space of norm of the subjectivity of individuals. Thought as a device, following the work of Giorgio Agamben, the aesthetic experience is no longer a place of pure freedom, of free exercise of a formal game. On the contrary, it becomes a matrix producing determinations through which modes of subjectivity are shaped. We will focus on this side of chance, in order to get away from a purely mystical reading, as well as from the simple dualism between reason and chance. We will see that in the 20th century chance constitutes a discursive tool, a field operator, a vector of relations of knowledge and power. Several recent works on artistic chance have considered it in its heteronomous character, and not only from the point of view of aesthetic autonomy. Intending to contribute to this formalization of an epistemic approach of chance, this article analyses two major quarrels about chance in the 20th century in which the Orient serves as a point of reference for the elaboration of a post-rational artistic subjectivity: the Boulez/Cage quarrel, and the Queneau/Breton one.

Biografia autore

Sébastien Wit, Université dé Picardie Jules Verne

Professore Agrégé di Lettere moderne, e dottore di ricerca in Letterature comparate. Attualmente assegnista di ricerca presso l’Università di Picardie, segue e coordina le attività della rete scientifica ALEA. Ha pubblicato nel 2019 una monografia dal titolo Romans du hasard: Italo Calvino, Julio Cortázar, Philip K. Dick, Marc Saporta (Presses universitaires de Rennes). La sua ricerca verte sulla crisi della cultura del libro nel XX secolo (intesa sia come crisi della forma dell’oggetto “libro” che come crisi del logos in quanto facoltà di comprendere il mondo).

Pubblicato
2021-03-15
Come citare
Wit, S. (2021). Hasard et orient au XXe siecle. Les controverses artistiques Boulez / Cage et Queneau / Breton. Philosophy Kitchen - Rivista Di Filosofia Contemporanea, (14), 185-195. https://doi.org/10.13135/2385-1945/5882
Sezione
III. Scritture contingenti - caso e letteratura nel Novecento