Le Souterrain Sarrautien

• Main Author: Rolland Caignard
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Kaiak Edizioni 2015-02-01
• Series: Kaiak
• Online Access: http://www.kaiak-pj.it/images/PDF/rivista/kaiak-1-sottosuoli/souterrain.pdf

Theme: study of "tropisms" and their implications in language and in the vision of Existentialism. Nathalie Sarraute continued the work of the « underground » of Dostoevsky, describing, with literary technique, the "tropisms" which she defined as "inner movements" whose symbolic speech is their counterparties. Intrigued, Jean-Paul Sartre considered Sarraute's novels as "anti- novels", even if he glimpsed in tropisms schemes of existential organization, thinking that the speaker feels the words as his body. But, how could he accept the force of the drive when Existentialism is a philosophy of the outside, of the being-in-itself, of the existence which precedes essence? Now, these "movements", related to the semiotic chora of Julia Kristeva and of the pictograms of Piera Aulagnier, make us question about the role of emotions in the brain, from the definitions of Antonio R. Damasio. Suddenly a splitting in language occurs; the transformation of the speech, the explosion of communication, the emergence of an underground magma energy into the conversation. The common idea of Existentialism is disrupted by this protest of the "beautiful maxims" which are only clichés (from outside), hiding the authenticity of the inside. So the speech normed, closed, stereotyped, sometimes terrifying, often corresponding to a reality hypocritical of surface, to absolute power and dictatorial, is reconsidered. The "outside" of the being is confronted with his "inside" to exist authentically. This leads to a renewal of the vision of Existentialism, as philosophy of being, in the light of internal forces that are the "tropisms" and gives the possibility to consider a revolt of the intimate against the ossified structures of language and its symbolic violence.