Abstract
A German bullet broke French poet and writer Joë Bousquet’s spine during World War I, and he spent the rest of his life writing in bed, paralyzed. His literary legacy demonstrates an experimental approach to Cartesianism. Whereas Descartes seeks to explain the human mind, Bousquet’s aphorisms argue that a commitment to ethics is fundamental to knowledge and creation. Bousquet interpreted his wound as his destiny. Drawing on Pierre Hadot’s work on the Stoics, I compare the notes that Bousquet wrote to himself with Marcus Aurelius’ journals. In this article, I decipher Bousquet’s meditations as spiritual exercises influenced by ancient philosophy that conceived ethics as a daily praxis rather than as a theory. I examine meditation as a reconfiguring of the body in an ethical gesture, just as Deleuze reads Spinoza in his last seminars at Vincennes.
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