Balzac penseur ed. by Francesco Spandri

Abstract

Reviewed by: Balzac penseur ed. by Francesco Spandri Dorothy Kelly Francesco Spandri, ed. Balzac penseur. Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2019, 427 pp. This collection of essays brings together an international collection of scholars who write on Balzac as thinker. Thought is the element that unites the essays, which are in the main thematic approaches to this subject in a great variety of Balzac's works and from widely varying ideas about thought. The essays are divided into four main sections: introduction; scientific knowledge; the movement of thought in action; and finally, thought as a form that thinks. With a total of twenty-one essays of varying length, the authors provide a useful section at the end that contains short summaries of each essay. The introduction by Francesco Spandri emphasizes the importance of the idea of thought in Balzac's literary works, and how Balzac's fiction is "une fiction qui pense" (14). The work of thought is at times the actual subject of the telling, whose goal is ultimately to make the reader think. Although providing an accurate description of all of these substantial essays is an impossible task, what follows gives some sense of the topics. The first section on "scientific" knowledge and thought covers such subjects as the works of Cuvier and Geoffroy in Balzac's texts (Paolo Tortonese); two essays on the Balzacian representation of various fluids, such as electricity and magnetism (Francesca Pagani, Claire Barel-Moisan); and finally, how Balzac manages to animate ideas/thought by using metaphors of such things as generation (Anne-Marie Baron). The second section, which is by far the longest of the three, tackles the topic of thought in action. The first essay in this section deals with Balzac's idea of faith as a religion of sentiment in society and the political world (Vincent Bierce). The second essay deals with Balzac's non-religious conceptions of the historical process as signs that must be deciphered (Aude Déruelle). [End Page 177] Events that return are the subject of the third essay, such as that of soldiers returning home and the return of characters in multiple Balzacian works (Jean-Marie Roulin). The fourth essay deals with the metaphor of the social, political body, composed of a head as thought and the belly as the central bourgeois realm, which Balzac problematizes with the notion of disembodying (Chantal Massol). In the fifth essay, the idea of lying as shady financial practice and as the wiles of the imposter are examined (Fabrice Wilhelm). The sixth essay studies the idea of the gift in Balzac's world dominated by money. Positive gifts include those provided by the Cénacle in Illusions perdues; negative gifts would be Vautrin's advice and aid (Susi Pietri). In the seventh essay, Balzac's idea of the genius emerges as someone who must believe in oneself, who must have memory and imagination and be able to create and execute ideas, yet who must also suffer (Roland Le Huenen). Thinking painting is the topic of the eighth essay, centered on Balzac's Le Chef-d'oeuvre inconnu (Henri Scepi). Essay nine in this section takes on the idea of the book in Balzac, who began as a "spiritualist" philosopher yet had to live in the material world of writing for money, thus combining spiritualism and materialism (Takayuki Kamada). In essay ten, the subject of thought and knowledge is pursued in the realm of the conjugal in La Physiologie du mariage, (Boris Lyon-Caen). The penultimate essay takes on the idea of the Terror in Les Deux Rêves. Here the ethical and political question of using violence to ward of worse violence includes both the case of the Terror and the present of Balzac (Pierre Glaudes). The final essay takes up again the idea of the gift, this time in La Bourse, which is read in the light of Marcel Mauss (Patrizia Oppici). The third and final section begins with an examination of three of the texts in the Études philosophiques to examine how each is constructed around a particular idea or thought and presents a kind of unified world, however, the ends of the texts leave open a space for the...