Œuvres II (Pléiade)

Author(s): Paul Valéry (1871–1945) Year: 1960 (Pléiade composite; constituent works span 1894–1946) Type: book (Pléiade composite volume of dialogues, Cahier recueils, prose pieces, and essays) Editor: Jean Hytier Edition: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, vol. 148, Gallimard

The second of the two Pléiade volumes of Valéry's Œuvres. Tome II collects the dialogues (Eupalinos, L'Âme et la Danse, Dialogue de l'Arbre, L'Idée fixe, « Mon Faust »), the Tel quel I-II aphoristic recueils, Mauvaises pensées et autres, Histoires brisées, Regards sur le monde actuel, and Pièces sur l'art (including Degas Danse Dessin, La Conquête de l'ubiquité, and Le Problème des musées). It is the wiki's primary witness for the Valéry-side of the chiasm-implex-déformation philological cluster that Merleau-Ponty cites in his 1953 lectures, in Signs (1951 essay "Man and Adversity"), and in the late ontology.

Core Arguments

The volume is composite, not a unified argument. The Core Arguments below are propositional reconstructions of recurring theses across genres; the Argumentative Movement section below tracks the meditative-recursive structure that propositional form does not capture.

Claim: The implex is capacity, not activity — the body's eventual range of response, not a hidden agent acting from below. Because: The interlocutor in L'Idée fixe refuses the equation implex = unconscious. The unconscious posits "ressorts cachés"; the implex has none. Examples are anatomical (the muscle's binary range; the retina's closed group of light/colour) and operational (the memory-implex; the intellectual implex). The implex is "ce en quoi et par quoi nous sommes éventuels" (raw 5144). Against: Freudian / Surrealist (Breton-style) unconscious as agent.
Claim: The exchange of gazes between two beings is structurally a chiasmus — a réciproque limitation simultanée in which each takes the other's image while lacking the self-image only the other can give. The structure is reflexive ("can be applied de soi à soi-même") as well as intersubjective. Because: "Tu n'es pas moi, puisque tu me vois et que je ne me vois pas. Ce qui me manque c'est ce moi que tu vois. Et à toi, ce qui manque, c'est toi que je vois" (raw 12613). Valéry adds: "Cette espèce d'analyse peut s'appliquer de soi à soi-même" (raw 12621). Against: One-direction transmission of impression; any picture in which the self-other relation joins two complete subjects.
Claim: Artistic creation is a body's becoming-organ. The artist brings his body, recoils, places, removes; behaves de tout son être as his eye behaves; becomes tout entier un organe that accommodates and deforms itself in pursuit of "le point unique" virtually belonging to the work. Because: The verbs are reflexive: s'accommode, se déforme, cherche. The work is "profondément cherchée — qui n'est pas toujours celle que l'on cherche": the body's deformation locates the aim because the aim is not transparently given. Against: The artisan picture (body as instrument of separately conceived idea) and the inspiration picture (work descends; body merely receives).
Claim: Dance is the body's reaching after a "possession entière de soi-même" through pure movement, and at the limit, the body's transmutation of substance. Because: Athikté's whirl: "elle tourne, et tout ce qui est visible, se détache de son âme." Socrates: "Un corps, par sa simple force, et par son acte, est assez puissant pour altérer plus profondément la nature des choses que jamais l'esprit dans ses spéculations et dans ses songes n'y parvint." Éryximaque (chiasmically): "L'instant engendre la forme, et la forme fait voir l'instant." Against: Dance as decorative; body and soul as separable substances.
Claim: Architecture is the construction of an artisan who has constructed himself through construction. Eupalinos addresses his body: body and intelligence find "leur véritable relation, leur acte" only in matter. Because: "A force de construire, je crois bien que je me suis construit moi-même" (raw 335). The workmen are "comme ses membres" (raw 124); the temple's stones receive the architect's bodily attention as if "il s'agissait de son propre corps" (raw 190). Against: Cartesian severance of body and intelligence; the architect-as-pure-intellect.
Claim: In the age of technical reproduction, art-works will lose their place: "Les œuvres acquerront une sorte d'ubiquité." Sensory excitation will be transmitted point-to-point like water, gas, electrical current. Because: Causal-prospective inference. The "système d'excitations" is the tractable invariant; what can be transmitted will be transmitted; music first, vision later. Against: The aura-bound work; aesthetics for which the work's place of production is metaphysically irreducible.
Claim: The museum is somatic-attentional disorder masquerading as aesthetic preservation. Painting and sculpture, separated from their architectural mother, are abandoned children. Because: The body's "point vivant qui entraîne toute la machine du corps vers ce qui l'attire" (raw 27849) is affolé by the simultaneity of incompatible visual orders. The eye is forced to admit, in a single gaze, portrait and marine, cuisine and triomphe. The harm is somatic, not categorial. Against: The encyclopedic-conservatory self-justification of the museum.

Argumentative Movement

The volume's effective unit of advance is the figure, not the proposition. Across forty years of writing, Valéry returns again and again to a small constellation: body / mind / intelligence; act and capacity; silence and creation; dance and architecture as figures of the body's productive limit; the artist's deformation as the only mode in which the work locates itself. The dialogues stage these meditations dialectically (Socrates / Phèdre / Éryximaque; the doctor and his interlocutor in L'Idée fixe; Lucrèce / Tityre); the Cahier fragments restate them aphoristically; Mauvaises pensées compresses them.

MP's reading of Valéry is calibrated to this register. He takes from Valéry the figures and the body's role in their work, not "doctrines." The chiasma de deux destinées is figural; the implex is figural; se déforme is figural; Athikté's whirl is figural. Each enters MP's ontology not as a position to be defended but as a name for an operation he locates phenomenologically.

Key Findings

The chiasm-source is in Tel quel I, Choses tues §VI, Regards (raw 12613). MP's "le mot est bon" citation in Signs (S, 294/231) is verbatim from this passage. The chiasmus is reflexive ("de soi à soi-même") as well as intersubjective at its origin in Valéry — not only on MP's late re-reading.
The implex is theorized in L'Idée fixe (1932), not in the 1953 Recherches sur l'usage littéraire du langage lectures. The 1953 lectures are MP's redeployment; the canonical muscle/retina examples and the explicit definition implex = capacity (not activity) are Valéry's, two decades earlier. (See claims#valery-implex-genealogy (live).)
The reflexive se déforme is in Mauvaises pensées et autres (1942) at raw 23403, in the artist passage MP cites in Eye and Mind §I as "dit Valéry." The full fragment: "L'artiste apporte son corps, recule, place et ôte quelque chose, se comporte de tout son être comme son œil, et devient tout entier un organe qui s'accommode, se déforme, cherche le point, le point unique qui appartient virtuellement à l'œuvre profondément cherchée — qui n'est pas toujours celle que l'on cherche." (See claims#valery-mauvaises-pensees-attribution.)
Dance, in L'Âme et la Danse, is the body's transmutation through pure movement, not metaphor. Athikté's whirl ("Asile, asile, ô mon asile, ô Tourbillon!") is the volume's exhibit of the body reaching what the soul reaches — the body's surnaturel possession of itself.
Eupalinos addresses his body as a coordinate partner of intelligence, with the work as their joint child. This is the volume's most explicit staging of the body-intelligence non-hierarchy that MP will inherit.
La Conquête de l'ubiquité (1928) is Walter Benjamin's spur for "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." Valéry does not theorise aura; he predicts the dispossession of the work from its place. The text is conceptually thinner than Benjamin's later development but is the prospective-genealogical anchor.
Le Problème des musées (1923) treats the museum as the body's overload — somatic-phenomenological, not aesthetic-categorial.

Methodology

Valéry's writing methodology is Cahiers-driven: a half-century of daily morning notebooks (the Cahiers, 1894–1945) supplied the material from which the Tel quel recueils were assembled. The Cahiers themselves are not in this volume; they fill twenty-nine separate volumes (CNRS, 1957–61) and a Pléiade edition. The dialogues are deliberate compositions — Eupalinos (1921), L'Âme et la Danse (1923), L'Idée fixe (1932) — but they reuse Cahier material. The aphoristic recueils make Cahier material public in lightly edited form.

The methodological consequence for MP's reading: the figures Valéry returns to are Cahier-forged, refined over decades, deployed in multiple registers without architectonic unification. MP's appropriation is therefore not citation of a doctrine but recognition of figures — the chiasm, the implex, the se déforme — that have been shaped by long use. (Cf. Lefort's foreword to I&P on Valéry's "body of the mind.")

Concepts Developed

Concepts on which this source does original work — Valéry's own theorisation, not MP's redeployment:

implex — Valéry's coinage. L'Idée fixe (1932) raw 5074–5188, with the muscle and retina examples and the explicit equation implex = capacity (not activity). Also raw 6056 (A-propos as tropism of the implex), 6094 (apprivoiser the implex), 6118 (the eye's deformable lens), 5144 (éventuel as the implex's distinctive mode). Also Histoires brisées raw 11083 (implex as method of explication: "ce qu'il faut pour que telle chose soit").
chiasm — the chiasma de deux destinées in Tel quel I, Choses tues §VI, Regards, raw 12613. Valéry's contribution is the rhetorical-existential structure of the exchanged gaze, reflexive and intersubjective.
coherent-deformation — the reflexive se déforme in Mauvaises pensées et autres raw 23403; the déformations successives of invention in Tel quel I raw 15426. Valéry's contribution is the body of the deformation: the artist's body becoming a single accommodating organ.

Concepts Referenced

silence — extensively figured (especially in Eupalinos and L'Idée fixe) but not theorised as such; the figural silence is what MP later distinguishes from biographical silence.
institution / stiftung — Eupalinos's "se construire" (raw 335) is figurally analogous but is not an MP-genealogical source for institution; recorded as false-friend caution on institution.
passivity — Valéry's writings on attente and creative incubation are figurally near MP's lateral passivity; the slogan "passivité de notre activité" Lefort attributes to Valéry is not located in tome II (likely Cahiers).
fundamental-thought-in-art — the dialogues stage thought-in-art (architecture, dance, dialogue itself) but the wiki concept is MP-formulated.
arche-screen — La Conquête de l'ubiquité prefigures media-aesthetic concerns developed by Carbone; not a concept-source but a topic-anchor.

Terminology (bilingual key terms)

French (original)	English (standard rendering)	Attestation locations	Translation notes
implex / l'implexe	implex	L'Idée fixe raw 5074, 5156, 5168, 5188, 6056, 6094	Valéry's coinage; not translated. MP retains the French.
éventuel / éventualité	eventual / eventuality	L'Idée fixe raw 5144	Distinguish from potentiel and virtuel; the implex's distinctive mode.
apprivoiser	to tame, to domesticate	L'Idée fixe raw 6094	The verb of the implex's rare attainment; not "control" or "express."
chiasma de deux destinées	chiasma of two destinies	Tel quel I raw 12613	MP cites as "le mot est bon" (S, 294/231).
réciproque limitation simultanée	simultaneous reciprocal limitation	Tel quel I raw 12613	The structural definition of the chiasma.
se déforme	(it) deforms itself	Mauvaises pensées raw 23403; cognates throughout	Reflexive form is philologically critical for claims#valery-mauvaises-pensees-attribution.
s'accommode	(it) accommodates itself	L'Idée fixe raw 6118 (eye); Mauvaises pensées raw 23403 (artist)	Pairs with se déforme; both reflexive.
point unique	unique point	Mauvaises pensées raw 23403	Names the work's virtual presence the body deforms-toward.
implexe rétinien / implexe d'un muscle	retinal implex / muscular implex	L'Idée fixe raw 5156, 5168	The canonical examples.
Tourbillon	whirlpool, whirl	L'Âme et la Danse raw 3448	Athikté's invocation: "Asile, asile, ô mon asile, ô Tourbillon!"

Concept pages for terms above carry the French original-language attestation in their aliases frontmatter where applicable.

Key Passages

"J'appelle tout ce virtuel dont nous parlions, l'IMPLEXE. […] Non, l'lmplexe n'est pas activité. Tout le contraire. Il est capacité. Notre capacité de sentir, de réagir, de faire, de comprendre, — individuelle, variable, plus ou moins perçue par nous, — et toujours imparfaitement, et sous des formes indirectes, (comme la sensation de fatigue), — et souvent trompeuses. Il faut y ajouter notre capacité de résistance…" (L'Idée fixe, raw 5074, 5078–5080)

"Son implexe est très limité. […] Et la rétine… Elle n'a pour implexe qu'un certain groupe fermé de lueurs et couleurs… Tout ce qui lui advient n'en tire que lumière. […] Et la mémoire? Voilà un fameux implexe, il me semble?" (L'Idée fixe, raw 5156, 5168, 5170)

"Tenez, supposez que nous ayons conscience de tout le travail effectué par notre œil quand il s'accommode. Il s'agit d'arriver à la vision nette. Vous disposez de plusieurs organes variables. Une lentille déformable; un diaphragme contractile…" (L'Idée fixe, raw 6118)

"Cet échange, le mot est bon, réalise dans un temps très petit, une transposition, une métathèse, un chiasma de deux 'destinées', de deux points de vue. Il se fait par là une sorte de réciproque limitation simultanée. Tu prends mon image, mon apparence, je prends la tienne. Tu n'es pas moi, puisque tu me vois et que je ne me vois pas. Ce qui me manque c'est ce moi que tu vois. Et à toi, ce qui manque, c'est toi que je vois. […] Cette espèce d'analyse peut s'appliquer de soi à soi-même." (Tel quel I, Choses tues §VI, Regards, raw 12613, 12621)

"L'artiste apporte son corps, recule, place et ôte quelque chose, se comporte de tout son être comme son œil, et devient tout entier un organe qui s'accommode, se déforme, cherche le point, le point unique qui appartient virtuellement à l'œuvre profondément cherchée — qui n'est pas toujours celle que l'on cherche." (Mauvaises pensées et autres, raw 23403)

"Un corps, par sa simple force, et par son acte, est assez puissant pour altérer plus profondément la nature des choses que jamais l'esprit dans ses spéculations et dans ses songes n'y parvint!" (L'Âme et la Danse, raw 3348)

"L'instant engendre la forme, et la forme fait voir l'instant." (L'Âme et la Danse, raw 3308)

"Asile, asile, ô mon asile, ô Tourbillon! — J'étais en toi, ô mouvement, en dehors de toutes les choses…" (L'Âme et la Danse, raw 3448)

"Mon intelligence mieux inspirée ne cessera, cher corps, de vous appeler à soi désormais; ni vous, je l'espère, de la fournir de vos présences, de vos instances, de vos attaches locales. Car nous trouvâmes enfin, vous et moi, le moyen de nous joindre, et le nœud indissoluble de nos différences: c'est une œuvre qui soit fille de nous." (Eupalinos, raw 423)

"A force de construire, je crois bien que je me suis construit moi-même." (Eupalinos, raw 335)

"Les œuvres acquerront une sorte d'ubiquité. […] Comme l'eau, comme le gaz, comme le courant électrique viennent de loin dans nos demeures répondre à nos besoins moyennant un effort quasi nul, ainsi serons-nous alimentés d'images visuelles ou auditives." (La Conquête de l'ubiquité, raw 27775)

"Elles affolent le point vivant qui entraîne toute la machine du corps vers ce qui l'attire…" (Le Problème des musées, raw 27849)

"Au bout de l'esprit, le corps. Mais au bout du corps, l'esprit." (Monsieur Teste, Quelques pensées, raw 1031)

"Sa méthode consistera à expliciter, à développer l'implexe. — Ce qu'il faut pour que telle chose soit." (Histoires brisées, raw 11083)

What's Not Obvious

Three things about this volume that would not appear in a conventional summary:

The implex's locus classicus is L'Idée fixe (1932), not the 1953 Recherches sur l'usage littéraire du langage lectures the wiki has been citing. The wiki's implex page sources the muscle/retina examples through Johnson 2020's quotation — but Johnson is paraphrasing Valéry's 1932 dialogue. Reading L'Idée fixe directly reveals that what looked like Johnson's exegetical examples is Valéry's own theorisation, two decades older than the 1953 lectures. The wiki's downstream citation chain (Kaushik 2021 → Johnson 2020 → RUL 1953) had passed by the upstream source. (Anchors: L'Idée fixe raw 5074–5188; cf. extraction-note Pass 2b "Contrastive Notes." Connects to implex.)
The chiasm-attestation in Tel quel I is reflexive as well as intersubjective in Valéry's own text — the line "Cette espèce d'analyse peut s'appliquer de soi à soi-même" (raw 12621) is in the same paragraph as the chiasma de deux destinées. MP's later use of the chiasm for the body's reflexive seeing-seen (the touched touching, the seer seen) is therefore not a leap from Valéry's intersubjective figure; the reflexive register is in Valéry's text from the start. The secondary literature that takes MP's chiasm to be Valéry-intersubjective + MP-reflexive misses what is in Valéry himself. (Anchor: raw 12613–12621. Connects to chiasm.)
The reflexive se déforme in Mauvaises pensées (raw 23403) sits inside a verb-pair with s'accommode, and the same verb-pair appears ten years earlier in L'Idée fixe describing the eye that "s'accommode" with its "lentille déformable" (raw 6118). The artist's body becoming a deforming organ is therefore not a sudden 1942 image; it is a refiguring of an ocular-physiological register Valéry has been working since the implex dialogue. The body of the artist becomes "tout entier un organe" — and the model of that becoming is the eye's accommodation, with its deformable lens and contractile diaphragm. This re-grounds the coherent deformation genealogy: MP's "the painter lends his body to the world" is sourced not just to Mauvaises pensées but to a Valérian thread that runs from the eye's accommodation through the artist's whole-body becoming-organ. (Anchors: raw 6118 + raw 23403; connects to coherent-deformation and claims#valery-mauvaises-pensees-attribution.)

Critique / Limitations

Composite, not unified. The Pléiade volume juxtaposes texts written across fifty years without a unifying frame beyond editorial assembly. MP's reading is therefore necessarily figural — picking up figures across texts — and not "Valéry's argument" in the usual sense. Any cross-source synthesis must respect this: the volume does not have a thesis.
Cahier dependency. The aphoristic recueils (Tel quel I-II, Mauvaises pensées) are derivative of the Cahiers; the dialogues recycle Cahier material. The Cahiers themselves are not in this volume. For philological certainty about a passage's first formulation and its rewriting history, the Cahiers (CNRS 1957–61 facsimile or the Pléiade Cahiers edition) would be required.
Out-of-scope material. Regards sur le monde actuel (the political and regional essays) is largely not engaged in this ingest. It is unlikely to bear directly on MP's reading but contains material on European decline, dictatorship, and the function of culture that Sartre and Aron read in the 1940s–50s. A future targeted ingest might revisit specific essays (e.g., La Liberté de l'esprit, Notre destin et les Lettres) if MP's political writings are cross-referenced.
Single-volume coverage. Pléiade tome I (containing Charmes, La Pythie the poem, La Jeune Parque, and the early prose) is not in raw/. MP's V&I unattributed citation of "La Pythie" is in tome I; the wiki notes this gap on paul-valery but does not have a textual anchor for the poem itself.

Connections

supplies the philological origin for chiasm — chiasma de deux destinées in Tel quel I, the passage MP cites in Signs (1951) and the 1953 lectures
supplies the locus classicus for implex — L'Idée fixe (1932); muscle and retina implex; éventuel mode; apprivoiser
supplies the philological anchor for claims#valery-mauvaises-pensees-attribution — the reflexive se déforme in Mauvaises pensées (1942), with s'accommode in the same fragment cognate with L'Idée fixe (1932)
prefigures arche-screen / carbone-2019-philosophy-screens — La Conquête de l'ubiquité (1928) on the dispossession of the work via media transmission
is the source-text behind paul-valery — direct attestations now anchor the entity page beyond Kaushik / Johnson secondary citations
figurally neighbours but does not source institution / stiftung — Eupalinos's "se construire" is artisanal-architectural-self-cultivation, not Husserlian Stiftung; recorded as false-friend caution on institution
figurally neighbours but does not source MP's flesh / chiasm via dance — Athikté's whirl in L'Âme et la Danse prefigures the body's surnaturel possession of itself but is Platonic-Socratic in its dialogue framework, not phenomenological; recorded as false-friend caution on chiasm
is the spur for Walter Benjamin's "Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" — La Conquête de l'ubiquité

Sources

This is itself a primary source. The wiki's existing engagement with Valéry — through kaushik-2021-negation-implex, johnson-carbone-saintaubert-2020-poetic-of-the-world, and merleau-ponty-2010-institution-and-passivity — is now anchored to direct Valéry attestations rather than to secondary citations alone.