Conclusion

tarrying with the negative

Amy E. Varela

pp. 189-195

in: Colin Davis, Ethical issues in twentieth-century French fiction, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2000

Abstract

Lacking strength, Beauty hates the Understanding for asking of her what it cannot do. But the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself…. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being.1