Les cas du casuiste. Valéry préfacier

Valéry likes to think in terms of cases. His many critical texts are proof of this. It is preferably in the preface—an ideal and far from neutral paratextual space—that Valéry chooses to explain himself. This contribution aims to examine several prefaces in order to see how Valéry isolates and turns into a “case” what had previously seemed to be mere elements of literary history, seemingly unproblematic. A machine for creating cases, Valéry reads the history of literature (or the various literary histories produced in his time) only as a series of misunderstandings, a heap of useless anecdotes, a haphazard chain of events whose links must be undone—any attempt at constructing coherence falls into artificiality. For Valéry, the “case” appears as a meta-notion within his system, in that it is never truly defined. It appears sporadically as a word he frequently uses—a sort of median term, operative in his efforts toward precision, refinement, and singularization, whether on metaphysical, ontological, or epistemological levels.