La Sicile de Maupassant, la sémio-anthropologie des incipit et le nomadisme de la pensée

Abstract

A reflection on a travel to Sicily by Maupassant becomes an occasion to discuss the category continuous/discontinuous and the symmetric notion of beginning. The starting question is: how can we define a beginning? To answer this question, I adopt a double strategy: on the one side, I resort to some specialists in this field (Lotman, Said, Aragon and Gracq) who allow me – by deferring to some other concepts, authors and theories – to focus on the notion of existence itself and on the nomadism of thinking developed by Deleuze; on the other hand, I concentrate more analytically on a beginning by Maupassant and on a beginning by Malinowski in order to underline the importance of interdisciplinary comparison for an epistemology of literary and ethnographic genres. A basic goal of my essay lies in the displacement of the notion of beginning as a written text towards its larger existential dimension. A complementary goal can also be found on in the emphasis given to the semantic deferral of concepts such as travel, literature, culture, translation, existence. From this point of view, references to various authors (Augé, Balandier, Bateson, Clifford, Lévi-Strauss, Van Gennep) prove useful to show the significance of a reflection on the beginning.