Penser l’amitié avec Pascal Quignard. De “Petits traités” à “Leçons de solfège et de piano”

Abstract

Since Petits traités, there has been an evolution in Quignard’s thought about friendship, which moved from a memory-based to an ontology-based approach. Initially, the concept of virtus plays a significant role in shifting the focus from pathos to ethos in his vision of the friendly link. Through this Roman concept, friendship is, for Quignard, closely related to the original dash of the jadis rather than to the individual memory. Through the etymological relation between philia and physis, friendship reconnects with a pre-Socratic physis that hosts the harmony of the opposites. Unbound by the linear human time, it is also withdrawn from the system of symbolic exchanges so much so that friends, according to the author of Leçons de solfège et de piano, «partag[ent] la position sujet en amont du dialogue». However, the anchoring of friendship in the alogos push of physis leads to an ontological denial and returns back to an otherness, so difficult to conceive that we run up against the question of death while raising that of friendship. That’s why it is more appropriate to include the thought of friendship in the movement of the “search”. Indeed, being held prior to various theorizations, Quignard places friendship at the centre of an experience of limits.