Abstract
This article argues for the relevance of what Paul Valéry called the “implex”, to philosophical areas of interest like potentiality and virtuality, and scientific areas of interest like developmental psychology and theories of learning. It offers an exposition of the wider context of Valéry’s coinage, by delving into his extensive notebooks, in addition to its immediate place of introduction, Idée fixe. As a majority of Valéry’s comments and reflections on the concept are suggestive and provisional, the article attempts to piece together a background that must have been generative for it. The implex is traced to its larger context of emergence through an engagement with several anticipatory or accompanying models like organs, machines and faculties.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
For a range of examples: The philosopher David Morris’ important work on Merleau-Ponty; Deleuze’s various references to learning throughout Proust and Signs and Difference and Repetition, as well as the psychologist Lev Vygotsky’s recently rediscovered professional interest in the poetry of Khlebnikov as an illustrative case of “supernormal” development (as discussed by Zavershneva 2015).
By the same token, Teste also represents one of the early points of reference for the questioning of the imperatives of autonomous work for the writers that came to favor an overdetermined concept of worklessness (as a dismantling of control, of subjective self-presence, of the tyranny of the productive/useful and of a dialectical ideal of work as human/humanistic act of negation).
We can legitimately situate this swing as devolving on the distinction between the transcendental and the empirical, given implex's subtle resonances with a problematics of the transcendental: in that case the condition of possibility indicated in capacity of transformation would enter a reciprocal constitution with the more empirical trajectory of a capacity in transformation.
In addition to his attention to the lived body itself—crystallized in his famous image of the 3 bodies— Valéry always tended to attribute an analogically corporeal and physical character to thought: “Just as any curve described by a point of the hand or arm is fixed in relation to the body, so […] there is a finite elongation and amplitude,—a distance from something that I might call the Body of the mind” (Ibid., 230).
This functional closure is the main reason this ability in transformation offers an image of freedom for Valéry, a freedom occurring precisely as a suspension of the reflex structure. As he writes, “freedom exists. It's a phase or depends upon a phase. It's the aspect of a possible plurality of acts…What allows for it is the principle of delay-inhibited reflexes which appears to me ever more extensive. — In many areas, and diverse ones, I see the plurality of solutions—possibility of temporization — procrastination — lack of imperative force or invariable constraint in what is transmitted” (2001 Vol. 5, 132).
As the origin of a significant part of Western philosophical treatments of habit, “hexis” finds its most influential formulation in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics where it underlies the exercise of virtue or excellence. Claire Carlisle writes, “the noun hexis derives from the verb ekhein, 'to have': as an enduring 'having,' the process by which a hexis develops is one of acquisition, appropriation, assimilation” (Carlisle 2013).
Note that the word Kant uses—Vermögen— for faculties would support the connection presented here between faculties and the implex insofar as both belong to the register of potentiality.
Take the following thought experiment: “Imagine a person whose entire experience were changed into functions. He would be the scientific being par excellence. Would he not be troubled by these innumerable functions? A person who would not forget the cards already played and would deduce the opponent's play. Intellect is simply the activity which substitutes for this infinity, the use and organization of a limited number of functions. Or rather which transforms experiences into functions” (2001, Vol. 3, 111–12). The scenario laid out in the passage depends on the assumption of a disparity between the multiplicity that composes experience, and the intrinsic finitude of the functions that can be carried out by human psychophysiology. This way the commutability introduced between experience and function works first to position the innumerably diverse and relational experiences as potentially permanent acquisitions for an individual. One can take this as a creative metabolization of experience, which finds itself incorporated and to have taken the path from relation to possession/predicate.
It is not a coincidence that the juncture where development proper and pathology touch on each other finds a certain relevance for Valéry in the context of his first foray into implex in Idée fixe: “The sense of fitness is the tropism of the Implex… I believe that alongside the development of so-called morbid symptoms, we have to envisage the development of another kind, perhaps even rarer… A development of the latter kind might be called a deviation, or harmonic excursus” (1965, 88).
For another recent debate relevant to this subject Catherine Malabou's discussion on how Kant limits the role of genesis in the constitution of rationality deserves particular mention. In her discussion Malabou shows how Kant insists on leaving “a first base, in the sense of a natural given without origin” in warding off the hypothesis of a complete epigenesis of pure reason, which he nevertheless seems to have entertained. See Before tomorrow: epigenesis and rationality, Carolyn Shread (tr.), Polity (2016). I believe this share of the “preformed” as Malabou calls it, is something Valéry genuinely tries to limit through his implex, making implex a matter of not only onto- but also epigenesis, properly speaking. In his parlance we can speak of a generation of invariants out of “self-variance,” a term he often uses in English.
The status of implex as a concept that has certain affinities as well as rivalries with a Freudian unconscious is a problem that deserves much more than I can devote to it here. It is clear that Valéry felt he had to distinguish his own invention sharply from Freud's on various accounts: “What I call Implex is not to be confused with what is called the Unconscious or the Subconscious (active form of the Unconscious?)” (2001, Vol. 3, 221); “no, the Implex is not an activity. Quite the contrary. It’s a capacity: our capacity for feeling, reacting, doing, and understanding… individual, inconstant, more or less known to us, but always imperfectly and indirectly” (1965, 56). Valéry thus attempts to distinguish his implex through an emphasis on basic inherent potentiality, and its known—although imperfectly—nature that arguably abolishes his need to rely on any supposition of repression. As for many important writers whose attitudes to psychoanalysis were more or less hostile or showily indifferent, Valéry's conclusions may also depend on some level of willed misinformation about Freud's work. However the very text where Valéry seems to give the freest rein to his distaste with psychoanalysis, Idée fixe, finds a point of departure in Pierre Janet's work, thus a deliberately more Pre-Freudian treatment of matters that would later fall under the domain of a study of the unconscious.
Cf. The way Valéry envisions a “machine for Creating” (2001, Vol. 1, 291).
In the manner of what Félix Guattari calls the “machinic” for instance, which is not necessarily exclusive of the biological.
Also see 254.
Paul Valéry, Cahiers = Notebooks, vol. 3, 100.
As Canguilhem also registers, the liver seems to take the prize here, with the mind-boggling number of distinct functions it carries out for the organism.
As in Joshua Landy's proposal to understand some fictions as training ground for “fine-tuning disparate capacities via disparate formal devices” (2014, 17) or Adorno's reference to the attempt of art “to do justice to all that falls victim to the ongoing domination of nature […] extending to the infinite abilities of humans themselves […]” (2018).
References
Adorno, T. (2018). Aesthetics (W. Hoban, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Polity Press.
Benveniste, É. (1971). Subjectivity in language. In Problems in general linguistics. Miami: University of Miami Press.
Canguilhem, G. (2008). Machine and organism. In Paola Marrati & Todd Meyers (Eds.), Knowledge of life (pp. 75–98). New York: Fordham University Press.
Carlisle, C. (2013). The question of habit in theology and philosophy: From hexis to plasticity. Body & Society,19(2&3), 30–57.
Deleuze, G. (1995). Difference and repetition. New York: Columbia University Press.
Fedrigo, G. (2007). Gladiator, l’atleta del possibile: Valéry e lo «sport della mente». Rome: Qui Edit.
Gauchet, M. (1992). Un réflexologue inconnu: Valéry. In L’inconscient cérébral (pp. 153–170). Paris: Seuil.
Landy, J. (2014). How to do things with fictions. New York: Oxford University Press.
Malabou, C. (2008). Addiction and grace: Preface to Félix Ravaisson’s Of habit. In F. Ravaisson, Of habit (C. Carlisle & M. Sinclair, Trans.) (pp. VII–XX). London: Continuum.
Malabou, C. (2016). Before tomorrow: Epigenesis and rationality. Oxford: Wiley.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1963). The structure of behavior. Boston: Beacon Press.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (2010). Child Psychology and pedagogy: The Sorbonne lectures 1949–1952. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. (2001). Beyond good and evil. London: Cambridge University Press.
Thelen, E., & Smith, L. B. (1994). A dynamic systems approach to the development of cognition and action. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Valéry, P. (1965). Idée fixe: A dialogue by the sea. New York: Bollingen Foundation.
Valéry, P. (1989). Monsieur teste. New Jersey: Princeton University Press
Valéry, P. (1970). Occasions. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Valéry, P. (2001). Cahiers = Notebooks (Ed. B. Stimpson, P. Gifford, R. Pickering & N. Rinsler), Vols. 1–5. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
Weatherby, L. (2016). Transplanting the metaphysical organ. New York: Fordham University Press.
Zaccarello, B., Rey, J.-M. & Desideri, F. (2012). Paul Valéry: strategie del sensibile. Aisthesis1(1), 3–7.
Zavershneva, E. (2015). Vygotsky the unpublished: An overview of the personal archive (1912–1934). In A. Yasnitsky & R. Van der Veer (Eds.), Revisionist revolution in Vygotsky studies: The state of the art (pp. 94–127). London: Routledge.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Ustun, B. Paul Valéry’s implex, or that by which we remain contingent, conditional. Neohelicon 46, 623–644 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-019-00488-z
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-019-00488-z