A l'ecart du visible: Anachronisme et imaginaires de l'archeologique a partir de Barthes, Bataille, Lacan et Quignard

The concept of anachronism in postwar French literature has caught little attention in contemporary scholarship. Among the scattered criticism which touches upon this question, anachronism has always been thought of within the confines of the “modern vs. anti-modern” dichotomy. My dissertation attempts to move beyond such binaries. I propose to think about anachronism not in relation to time, but to space, or more specifically, to the lack or invention of space in a late capitalist society in which literature and arts have been marginalized. I argue that archaism and the motif of heterogeneity go hand in hand in forming a critical negative apparatus which resists the homogenizing structure of society: both attempt to represent the irrepresentable, the invisible and the silent, that is, the “remainders left out by the standardizing process of civilization.;Such an operation is by definition a paradoxical one, for it points not only to a vision of nature exempt from the ravages of history, but also to an imagined nascent human community in which language has not yet become power. How are we to represent such an origin obscured by living civilizations, yet active as a hidden force with regenerative or transformative potential? The archaeological imagination provides a space that calls for exhumation of the buried and the repressed, while conserving the unknown for future inventions. By studying the relationship between anachronism and the archaeological “imaginary,” I try to detach the former from its usual association to linear historical representation and to provide it with an operational autonomy linked to space.;Anachronism, I argue, is linked to the figure of exclusion, but it transforms itself into a generative force which leads to the construction of utopian spaces. The imaginary communities and the literary spaces in Barthes’ late Collège de France public lectures, Lacan’s Écrits and his seminars, Georges Bataille and Pascal Quignard’s unclassifiable non-fictional writings allow us to see how these spaces move away from the social contract, providing a silent resistance to the “global society, a society in which technological progress and communicational transparency advocate the deletion of any forms of secrecy, obscurity and ambiguity.