Signed, Malraux

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by Jean-Francois Lyotard,

Translated by Robert Harvey

University of Minnesota Press

Due/Published June 2001, 336 pages, paper

ISBN 0816631077

New in paper (S01)

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 life and thought, exploring Malraux's major themes: art, the Far East, women, politics, communism, and anti-fascism.

"Lyotard's Malraux is replete with flesh, bones, wives, liquor, and children. He is at the same time exemplary not of individual experience, but of a human condition." Boston Book Review

"In this unconventional biography, French philosopher Lyotard does not conceal his deep affinity with, and admiration for, the famous French existentialist. The seventeen chapters of the book provide not only incisive accounts of this celebrated personality but also an outstanding analysis of his life and a thoughtful reading of his work. Demonstrating that biography is an act of inference, Lyotard's book audaciously and successfully creates a new Malraux, that of the post-World War II era, symbolized by freedom of thought and renewed faith in existentialism." Library Journal

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 writers' lives actually match up to the Byronic image 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 original 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."