journalistfrench-literatureinterviewernovelist
Madeleine Chapsal
French journalist and novelist (b. 1925); interviewer, sometime editor at L'Express. Author of Les Écrivains en personne (Julliard, 1960), a collection of interviews with major French intellectuals of her time. The Chapsal-conducted 1960 interview with MP ("Merleau-Ponty en Personne") is the lead piece of Texts and Dialogues (Chapter 1), reprinted in merleau-ponty-1992-texts-and-dialogues.
Key Points
- The 1960 interview is MP's most accessible non-academic self-summary of his late ontology and political position. Chapsal's questions are pitched to a general literary-intellectual audience (not to professional philosophers); MP's responses are correspondingly broad and confessional.
- Topics covered: the role of the philosopher in society; political non-Manicheanism (yes-no rhythm); the crisis of philosophy; ontology — the polemic against "ens realissimum" and "ontology of the object," the program of "philosophy of brute being" (cardinal anchor for wild-being and ontology-of-the-object); the philosophy-of-science situation post-Laplace; the limits of Marxist anti-philosophy; politics and the renewal of inquiry.
- Significance for the wiki: The Chapsal interview contains MP's strongest public, first-person attestation of ontology of the object / ens realissimum / brute being — the polemical category Saint Aubert reconstructs archivally from NMS 1957. The 1960 attestation is non-derivative of any of MP's published philosophical works (PhP, Signs, V&I) but is a separate genre of exposition.
- The Chapsal-Five-Notes connection: Five Notes #3 (November 1960) refers to "Madeleine" — probably Chapsal — in the context of an L'Express interview with Claude Simon (cf. merleau-ponty-1992-texts-and-dialogues p. 166, translator's footnote 3). The cross-reference confirms MP's continuing relation to Chapsal-as-mediator-to-the-public in late 1960.
Connections
- interviewed MP in 1960 — Chapter 1 of merleau-ponty-1992-texts-and-dialogues
- is the cardinal interviewer-anchor for MP's late-ontology programmatic — brute being, ontology-of-the-object
- appears as "Madeleine" in Five Notes on Claude Simon #3 (November 1960)
Sources
- merleau-ponty-1992-texts-and-dialogues — Chapter 1 ("Merleau-Ponty in Person, An Interview with Madeleine Chapsal, 1960"; original "Merleau-Ponty en Personne" Les Écrivains en personne Julliard 1960), pp. 26–37. Translation by James Barry Jr.