At Gallimard, Philippe Sollers still had an office and a secretary, whose job was increasingly focused on handling inquiries from all over the world. On the 700th anniversary of Dante's death, the writer did not have the time to write about the "Divine Comedy", which he loved. But he had by no means finished with the letter. In 2021, one of his last works was published, a rather enraptured treatise on Western civilization. For the first time in his life, an avant-garde was alien to him: the fight against cancel culture and triumphant moralism, not only in literature, was his penultimate. But he had long since expanded his horizons to eternity.

Jürg Altwegg

Freelance writer in the feuilleton.

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Philippe Sollers was born in 1936. The Gaullist Nobel laureate François Mauriac and the communist Louis Aragon were enthusiastic about his first novel "Une curieuse solitude" (1958), the classic Bildungsroman of a precocious genius. By joining the "Tel Quel" collective, he became a symbolic figure of the French avant-garde. He shared their aesthetic leaps and ideological contortions. Sollers went from Stalinism and Marxism to Maoism and from Maoism back to the Catholicism of his childhood.

Avant-gardists of blindness

The fact that Sollers survived the political errors better than others and relatively unscathed has to do with his admirable ability to change. But also with his gift of always finding a theoretical justification. He succeeded most convincingly with the fascists Pound and Céline: he declared them avant-gardists of the blindness of an epoch. Thus, the vanguard was no longer the ideological shock troop on the campaign to the bright future.

When the left came to power with Mitterrand, the promises of the revolution finally fell apart. Sollers dissolved "Tel Quel" and founded the magazine "L'Infini". He wrote his best novel, "Femmes", which also became his most spectacular bestseller. It is the ironic autobiography of a vain Parisian intellectual and the key novel of an era whose fate is "decided in bed". The "brainwashing of libido" has replaced ideologies. From Roland Barthes to Louis Althusser, contemporaries appear – they are all long dead.

Private Pope Audience

Philippe Sollers, who died in Paris on Saturday, remained closer to them than to the zeitgeist of his last present. Literary scholars will still have to classify his extensive, diverse and undogmatic work for posterity. But they will not justify his departure from the avant-gardes with Mitterrand, but will undoubtedly date it to the resignation of Benedict XVI. The German Pope had received him for a private audience. The devout Catholic and writer Philippe Sollers venerated the head of the Catholics and glorified Benedict's resignation as the end of the Church, it made his own death more bearable. Sollers castigated the Church's handling of homosexuality and its criminal negligence towards pedophilia. He described the circles that advocate priestly marriage as "the most reactionary of all": "The church, like the LGTB movement, wants equal sexuality for all."

With his wife, the writer and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva, who was recently suspected of being an agent, Philippe Sollers has had a relationship like Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre since their arrival from Bulgaria. At the age of eighty, he published his love letters to his late Belgian lover, the writer Dominique Rolin. In "Légende" (also 2021), he confessed that he had a sculpture made for his grave entitled "The Rose of Reason for the Cross of the Present". In his very last critique of Western civilization, there is talk of the destruction of metaphysics and the Last Judgment. She was given the title "Graal". For 86 years, Philippe Sollers searched for him in this world.