From the margins: Paul Valéry’s thought in progress

Abstract

The Leonardo Project shows us that, according to Valéry, the limits that exist between text and paratext are indeed porous. Concerned with the power of renovation of his own way of thinking, Valéry returns again and again to that figure to which he dedicates articles, essays, notes, and digressions. Between 1929 and 1930, he also puts auto-commentary into practice, and decides to publish his writings on Leonardo once again, this time including marginal notes. It seems likely that the marginal comments were influenced by Edgar Allan Poe’s Marginalia, fragments of which Valéry translated or wrote something about in 1927. However, acknowledging the enormous potential of these same margins —a place for dialogue and a passage that could lead to action— Valéry did not continue using this type of gloss and, day after day, would go back to his Cahiers, in order to encourage his own spirit’s functioning, in this way disrupting both the hierarchy and the value placed amongst published works and private notes.