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Signed, Malraux
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by Jean-Francois Lyotard,
Translated by Robert Harvey
University of Minnesota Press
Due/Published
April 1999, 272 pages,
cloth
ISBN
0816631069
As a self-invented adventurer, onetime smuggler of artifacts, fighter in the Spanish Civil War and then the French Resistance, and as an artist and thinker, Andre Malraux (1901-1976) has come to epitomize the committed writer. Malraux was haunted by the certainty that we are all destined to die. Believing that only art endures, he concluded that we should turn our lives into works of art. Here, Lyotard provides an account of Malraux's vivid life and thought, exploring Malraux's major themes: art, the Far East, women, politics, communism, and anti-fascism. |
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Review
“...the least one can say is that Malraux’s pen goes at full gallop, banging into the thousands of names for presence, like a mastless ship tossed about by violent weather or drifting with the winds, driven from the shores of one island to another in the archipelago of creations.”
Few writer’s lives actually match up to the Byronic imgae of the profession. However, Malraux’s life characterized by passionate action and thought comes pretty close. This extraordinary biography from the late Lyotard, one of the most original thinkers in contemporary philosophy, describes Malraux’s life -- childhood; adventures as a smuggler; time spent in Asia, fighting in the Spanish Civil War and for the French Resistance; and of course his work as a writer. Lyotard explores the various intellectual and emotional issues that Malraux confronted in his life and work. As Lyotard demonstrates, Malraux’s life, propensity for self-analysis, and constant questioning shaped a body of work that is some of the most powerful and origninal of this century. In a review of the book Denis Hollier writes, “Signed, Malraux, the last and probably most unanticipated book of the late French philosopher Lyotard, is also the most unexpected biopsy of Andre Malraux, the man who thought he could sign his own life. The result is dazzling. It constitutes the first substantial attempt by a thinker of the postmodern age to come to grips with one of the towering literary figures of the generation that had just preceded him.”
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