• Available eBook version
Le Bonheur d’avoir une âme
Bertrand Leclair

In a reified world that has tossed out the notion of the soul with the religious bath water, Bertrand Leclair bids us to rediscover this breath of life, by separating its acceptation from Judeo-Christian presuppositions. For the soul not only has transcendent meaning, it can also be a state of immanence. In much the same way, the word soul is applied not only to human beings, but is also used as a metaphor for the most vital and essential part of artistic, musical and other creations…, allowing us to wander beneath the traditional historical and religious uses of the words.
Having established these distinctions, readers will be able to stroll through Proust and Artaud, searching for the soul of the text, a notion almost impossible to define, yet without which no work of art could exist. Bertrand Leclair incites us to encounter this air shaft of immaterial life force and to comprehend it as the articulation of the body and the spirit. Thus, in the wake of his meditation, he develops an entire reflection about the contemporary world, a calm and lucid reflection in which humans, cut off from their divine nature as beings endowed with speech, wallow between heaven and earth, caught in a horizontality with no escape. Unless, perhaps, they can find once more the path of their soul, and through a romantic encounter or the solitude of writing, the pages of their lives are animated with a long-forgotten breath.

Written with an erudite, but light pen The Happiness of Looking for One's Soul traces an initiatory path leading to the re-appropriation of the self, and underlines the magical character of existence.    

How can we preserve our souls, the divine nature of beings endowed with speech, from beneath the tranquilizing mountain of communication in today’s world?

Le Bonheur d’avoir une âme -
  • Available material :
    Finished copy

  • Buchet/Chastel
  • Libella-Maren Sell essais-documents
  • Publication date : 21/10/2005
  • 142 p., 14,20 EUR €
  • ISBN 978-2-35004-037-0
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  • Une guerre sans fin -
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