In this work, the author proposes the reading of the works of Francis Ponge, Jean-Luc Godard, Georges Perec and Michel Houellebecq as manifests of the late humanism in the French culture of the last century. The literary and film texts by these authors are, on the one hand, involved in the materialist offensive and the fiasco of the twentieth-century Marxism (Marx, Lukács, Brecht, situationists etc.). On the other hand, they dynamically respond to the subsequent stages of anthropological disputes in philosophy (Schopenhauer, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre etc.), for which the turning points are The Order of Things by Michel Foucualt and The Ends of Man by Jacques Derrida.The title „testaments” and „thingologies” refer to the literary and cinematic reflection on man and his material adjacencies, which enable man to define his own position in the world and society of the late modernity. The cautious but sometimes radically revolutionary diagnoses of Ponge, Godard, and Perec are contrasted here with the tradition of pessimism represented by Houellebecq. The gesture of „collecting” repeated by the first three authors in the hope of liberating things from their functional entanglements, loses its power in Houellebecq’s fictional world, in which Benjamin’s and Derrida’a diagnosis has been fulfilled: capitalism has indeed become a „natural” phenomenon and deconstruction „has had already happened”.The langueage of the Nouveau Roman and the New Wave cinema centered around things, formulate precise, yet difficult diagnoses about our plastic, late-modern humanity.
In this work, the author proposes to read the works of Francs Ponge, Jean-Luc Godard, Georges Perec and Michel Houellebecq as manifestations of late humanism in the French culture of the last century. The literary and film texts by these authors are, on the one hand, involved in the materialist offensive and the fiasco of the twentieth-century Marxism (Marx, Lukács, Brecht, situationists, etc.), and on the other hand, they dynamically respond to the subsequent stages of anthropological disputes in philosophy (Schopenhauer, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre etc.), for which the turning points are The Order of Things by Michel Foucualt and The Ends of Man by Jacques Derrida.The title „testaments” and „thingologies” refer to the literary and cinematic reflection on man and his material adjacencies, which enable man to define his own position in the world and society of late modernity. The cautious but sometimes radically revolutionary diagnoses of Ponge, Godard and Perec are contrasted here with the tradition of pessimism represented by Houellebecq. The gesture of „collecting” repeated by the first three in the hope of liberating things from their functional disturbances loses its power in Houellebecq’s fictional world, in which Benjamin’s and Derrida’a diagnosis has been fulfilled: capitalism has indeed become a „natural” phenomenon and deconstruction „has had already happened”.The langueage of the Nouveau Roman and the New Wave cinema centered around things formulate precise, yet difficult diagnoses about our plastic, late modern humanity.
