# La Lyrosophie

## Introduction

Epstein's La Lyrosophie (1922) is a companion piece to his La Poésie d'aujourd'hui, un nouvel état d'intelligence (1921). Although La Lyrosophie only skirts the question of the cinema, its philosophical speculations serve as the armature upon which he constructs his film theory. In La Lyrosophie, Epstein claims that the general intellectual fatigue that follows from the speed and telescoping of space in modern life, and a concomitant increase in the speed of thought, contributes to a mode of subjectivity he calls lyrosophie. In the lyrosophical mode, the enervation of the control of reason over the subconscious elicits the projection of subconscious sentiment onto the conscious intellectual plane. As aesthetic pleasure is a function of – and analogous to – the stimulation of subconscious emotional associations, themselves ineffable, what is elaborated is a theory of poetic language in which the sign, independent of the reader's wholly subjective projection of beauty upon it, is aesthetically inexpressive. But in poetry, in which fresh, disjunctive metaphors reign, and in play, in which words also function as autonomous sounds, thus destabilizing language itself, the aesthetic becomes a genuine possibility. Epstein conceives of the aesthetic effect of cinematic representation in terms analogous to that produced and experienced in the lyrosophical mode: it is a function of the investment of objects with an intensified sense of life via their position in an atemporal nexus of the viewer's subconscious emotional associations.

– Katie Kirtland

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## Excerpts from La Lyrosophie [1922]

Translated by Christophe Wall-Romana

[Jean Epstein, La Lyrosophie, 4th ed. (Paris: Éditions de La Sirène, 1922), pp. 16-20, 31-35, 45-46, 74-77, and 181-182.]
The Scientific Order Opposed to Feeling
[...]

All the sciences thus endeavor to constitute for themselves a proper domain
from which feeling and its logic are banned. The more exact the science, the
stricter the banishment. The reasons for this rigorous exclusion are easily under-
standable. Any science, any logic, any knowledge rests in the last analysis on the
evidence [évidence].¹ Any proof at its crucial point appeals to the evidence. General
geometry rests on Euclid's postulate, which is evidence incarnate. Evidence, it
stands to reason and almost by definition, is indemonstrable. To demonstrate it
would mean to state an argument more evident yet, which would consequently be
singularly obvious [évident]; and this would therefore destroy evidence. Hence evi-
dence is indispensable and ineffable. Hence evidence is a feeling. And it is a pure
feeling, a feeling that is its own species, such as those we take hold of in dream-
life, for example. All of traditional logic thus has for its unique and indispensable
linchpin what it most despises: an affirmative feeling. This feeling of evidence:
sciences are neither able to, nor do they want to, exclude it; yet, drawing their life
from its pure integrity, they must necessarily ensure its complete isolation. The
same way one refines sulfur, sciences refine their postulates of evidence. How-
ever, we know how rare pure, generic feelings are, that they take place only in
special intellectual or almost a-intellectual states, that they more than easily com-
bine with each other, and that from these combinations there result the mixed
and rough feelings – hatred, pride, lust – that animate us. It is therefore incum-
bent upon the sciences, so as to mine this pure ore, this invaluable radium of the
feeling of evidence, that they should cultivate it in a zone from which all other
feelings are absent. Hence order is foremost the sacrifice of passion. This non-
feeling and pure intellectual state, self-conscious to the utmost degree, is quite
rarefied. While all sciences aspire to it, few truly reach it, and many remain mid-
way in intermediary states – half-feeling, half-reason. And around this part of the
island that has laboriously emerged, this island of pure reason, there lies truly an
immensity of feeling, graspable and thought-dependent at its surface; and lower,
subconscious and unsayable; and lower still, unconscious, unknown, but fecund.
From the depths of this confusion, where everything and nothing can be imag-
ined – nothing, as before the world was created – there gushes to the summit the
most systematized of pure intellectual states, retaining like a geyser the heat-feel-
ing of its depths: the feeling of evidence. But only this feeling, single and pure.
Because if evidence is corrupted, it becomes analogy. Then at a lower depth, ana-
logy becomes metaphor. At this point, science enters a lyrical state. Science is
dead. Lyrosophy is born.
## Particulars of Love

[...]

Let's take cinema as [an] example. Like mathematics and like the knowledge that comes from love, cinema is essentially subjective.² The same way the mathematician demonstrates on paper properties that are not intrinsic to the paper, on screen you see what is not and cannot be on the screen. Moreover, you see this unreality specifically and feelingly, with all the particularities of real life. A movie shows you a man who betrays. You know full well first of all that there is no such man, and secondly that there is no such betrayal. Yet the movie addressed the ever-wakeful knowledge that comes to you from love. It created, through the ghost of a thing, a feeling; and since this feeling cannot live without the thing for which it was made, and since this feeling too obeys the law of preservation, the false thing will come alive for you. Or rather there will come to life a thing-feeling, and you will believe in more than a traitor – you will believe in a betrayal. You now need this very betrayal, since you have the feeling of it – and such a particular feeling that no other betrayal than this imaginary one will satisfy it.

## Experimental Science and the Experience of Feeling

Science is experimental. Feeling is experience [éxperience] itself.³ Nothing in the knowledge that comes from love can be acquired other than through personal trial. Such knowledge is therefore closer to the thing and to the object than scientific knowledge, which, as we know, is often indirect, even bookish. Science recognizes a certain faith: even if the experiment fails, you still believe that hydrogen can combine with chlorine. That's because the conclusion is here outside of the experience, and the conclusion is general, while the experience is particular, and in order to reach a conclusion you can very well replace one try by another. For love, the experience, just like the conclusion, are in the realm of the individual. Experience is its own conclusion. Nothing is truly general. There are as many conclusions as experiences, and if the experience fails, there is no conclusion. Hence while science demonstrates, feeling is itself the essence of the demonstration, that is to say, the pure affirmative. And if it does not succeed in being this complete affirmation, it is but an absurdity, a nullity. Science progresses; feeling is immediately everything or nothing.

The knowledge of feeling is a passion. Lyricism takes sides with everything, and nothing of what it knows leaves it indifferent, for as soon as there is knowledge in a lyrical state, instantly this knowledge is perfect – that is, it becomes love, passion, possession, and self-forgetting.

Science looks for causes through the study of effects. Lyricism creates causes in proportion to effect, that is, it invents them.
## The Rule of The Kabbalah Is Such That It Espouses Passion Rather than Opposing It

The mystical principle is that intelligence, or more precisely spirit, or more precisely yet, the soul, penetrates things. Representation thereby becomes a phenomenon. To a fact there answers within man an indelible philosophy with which this fact fuses. The word, the exterior sign of representation and the interior sign of the thing, is identical with the representation and the thing. Thus there are no longer representations of things, but thing-representations. To designate means to create. Because the universe is the verb, the verb is the universe. Abstraction is a general matter. Reality and its metaphysics have the same value for the soul, because the soul takes hold of the fact and interprets it; interpretation is a second fact, inseparable from the former, its Siamese twin.

In short, the Kabbalist never considers the world as exterior, located outside of himself, but considers it always after he has absorbed it within himself. Everything to him is introspection. He does not differentiate between two categories of phenomena: objective and subjective. All are located for him on a unified plane of consideration, a subjective plane – that is to say, that of feeling. And in this unified plane, this network of feelings, the most varied equivalences, associations, equalities, and correspondences take place. The suppleness of the logic of feeling allows these to occur while rational logic brutally forbade them to reason. Through the operation of the soul, the object passes into the state of feeling and, having become feeling, henceforth lives like one, that is, by associating itself. If, as the Kabbalist writes, “Twelve letters – he, vav, zain, chet, tet, jod, lamed, nun, samek, ayin, zade, kaf – he has founded, he has traced, engraved, combined, weighed, and permuted, and he has made with them the twelve constellations, the twelve months of the year, the twelve directors of the soul,” it is, in terms of pure logic, even less than an absurdity: an incomprehensible and null nonsense.⁴ But in the logic of feeling, such associations between the letters of an alphabet and constellations or months of the year are perfectly normal and, in terms of feelings, justifiable by contiguity or similitude (but the similitude of feeling). Hence a child who sees, while learning her alphabet, as is common, the image of an angel next to the letter A, might her entire life conserve a feeling of equivalence between the letter A and the representation of an angel, a feeling repressed by reason, half-forgotten within the subconscious, but capable at any moment, if the circumstances arise, to emerge within consciousness.⁵

## The Lyrosophical Misunderstanding

The lyrosophy of language thus leads to bestowing a double meaning or rather a double series of meanings to each verbal expression.⁶ One of these series contains reasonable, logical, and stable meanings whose individual variations are rather limited. The other series is formed by affective meanings coming in the wake of logical meanings. These affective meanings are infinitely more complex,
more precise – and precise otherwise – and more changing. With them, the
word is plainly much richer and more broadly expressive; it says more things
and, by way of feeling, says them poetically. At the same time, it is exposed to
being fuzzy and favoring misunderstandings. It is more intelligent since it offers
the possibility of having more things be understood, but it runs the risk of not
succeeding in communicating the one thing it most intends, among the things it
can say.

It behooves us to propose here an apology of misunderstanding. To misunderstand means to become aware of a meaning until then virtual within the sentence, which, once corrected, still possesses both meanings. To misunderstand certainly means first to miss understanding, but also to understand something else, hence more, since this other thing is in excess of the meaning strictly intended.

## Notes

1. Epstein plays on the concept of *évidence/l'évident* throughout this section. Although translated as "evidence" or "evident" in all but one case (noted in the text), we should read in every use of this word both the sense of proof and of the obvious. See note 3 below.

2. In the preceding section, Epstein describes both mathematics and the knowledge of love as subjective but precise states of being; they negotiate subjectivity and objectivity at once. For example, in the field of mathematics, Epstein writes: "...other marks of subjectivism: these figures that have no value other than the subjective. It is subjectively that the line is straight, the circle round, and the angle right; objectively it doesn't matter what the line, circle, and angle are." *La Lyrosophie*, p. 32.

3. See note 1, above. Epstein here may be speaking equally of human experience and scientific experiment, as well as possibly a combination of the evidence of the senses and the (apparent) rules obvious in the world's natural order (editors' note).

4. This citation is from the *Sefer Yetzirah* [Short version], 5:2. The "directors of the soul" are parts of the human body.

5. Later in the text, Epstein draws an explicit analogy between Kabbalah and cinema: "The cinema names things visually: as spectator I do not doubt for a second that they exist, and I link this whole drama and so much love to a few signs made of light and shadow. Never, even in the Kabbalah, was designation so thoroughly the same as creation. And, after this creation, I conserve the feeling of a second singular reality, *sui generis* and cinematographic." *La Lyrosophie*, p. 93.

6. Epstein provides a discussion on the "lyrosophy of language" in the chapter preceding this one:

> If lyrosophy appears in contemporary thought, we can anticipate that it likewise appears in language. Similarly, the fact is that if today the modification of language is the most lyrosophical thing we've seen for a hundred years, nevertheless, because there has always been language, it has always lived lyrosophically. Just as Kabbalah is the intensification of a mysticism which for many a long age already
contained its rudiments, the germ of lyrosophy, this other kabbalah, which is going
to blossom tomorrow, already exists.

Each word in its adult form possesses two sides: it is intelligible on one hand and
moving on the other. These two qualities generally depend on each other and are
therefore, in this way, contradictory. Furthermore, they are variable, because if the
emotion conferred by a word increases, its intelligibility decreases and vice versa. La
Lyrosophie, pp. 167-168.