Boston Book Review
Lyotard's Malraux is replete with flesh, bones, wives, liqueur, and children. He is at the same time exemplary not of such individual experience, but of a human condition confronted and subsumed by the intractable: 'Your life doesn't need you to construct itself.'
Choice
Any book about a famous artistic and intellectual genius by another famous intellectual is going to be of literary interest. But this, French philosopher Lyotard's latest book before his death in 1998, is a singular work. As a meditation on a monumental life by an incomparable postmodern thinker, it is an accomplished convergence of intellectual gifts.
L'Humanite
This unique biography provides a valuable look at Malraux and his milieu and is a penetrating homage to his greatest work-his life.
La Croix
Lyotard has recovered—in the gestures, in the writings, in the signature of Malraux—the mark of an amazing life.
Le Monde
In Signed, Malraux, Lyotard illuminates the contrast between the man, his work, and the primordial struggle between belief and action.... This book gives us two imcomparable figures—a genius of our chaotic century as seen by the philosopher of our time.
Liberation
Signed, Malraux is a true work of literature. . . . In this book, Lyotard gives us a portrait of a man who carved his own place in a bewildering world despite being haunted by death.
Publishers Weekly
Working a typically playful vein, French philosopher Lyotard (d. 1998), one of the foremost theorists of postmodernism, has written an idiosyncratic depreciation of Andr Malraux (1901-1976), the self-publicizing professional intellectual who was enshrined in the Pantheon in 1996 as a hero of culture. Beginning as an anarchist and then a Communist-leaning adventurer, Malraux became an esteemed novelist (Man's Fate, Man's Hope) and ended up as Charles de Gaulle's minister of culture. Lyotard's ambiguous attitude toward his subject is captured in the term farfelu--he uses it dozens of times, but it is left untranslated--an all-purpose term for harebrained, eccentric or even senseless. Lyotard, no respecter of mere chronology, whipsaws the reader in time from one decade to another, granting Malraux his grudging admiration for creating a personal "fantasy machine" and for "signing his life as if it were one of his works" (hence the title). The Malraux he presents is, in a series of farfelu images, "a bit of a punk" and an "odd bird" who "loathed himself as a little boy whose diurnal stupidities would by evening be absolved by the leniency of women." The translation--in attempting to capture Lyotard's self-consciously "pomo" style--veers between triteness ("rubbed shoulders"; "beaten track"; "happy camper") and opacity ("ubuesque"; "acephalous"; "paraph"). While Lyotard's disciples may enjoy his gambols, those seeking a straightforward introduction to the subject will be better served by Curtis Cate's more workmanlike--and balanced--Andr Malraux (Forecasts, Jan. 27, 1997). (Apr.)
Library Journal
The highest honor bestowed on Andr Malraux was, arguably, the transfer of his remains to the Pantheon, France's famous place of honor, in November 1996 amid a solemn ceremony. That belated recognition is significant in that it shows how far an individual of humble origins had come to emerge as his nation's cultural icon. The celebrated French writer, art critic, political activist, and adventurer used his writings, and especially his novels, to express what became the existentialist view that people can give significance to their life through engagement and dedication to a cause. He wrote about revolution, but when needed he joined the French Resistance and fought in the Spanish Civil War. In this unconventional biography, French philosopher Lyotard does not conceal his deep affinity with, and admiration for, the famous French existentialist. The 17 chapters of the book provide not only incisive accounts of this celebrated personality but also an outstanding analysis of his life and a thoughtful reading of his work. Demonstrating that biography is an act of inference, Lyotard's book audaciously and successfully creates a new Malraux, that of the post-World War II era, symbolized by freedom of thought and renewed faith in existentialism. Highly recommended for all larger libraries and essential for those with serious literary collections.--Ali Houissa, Cornell Univ., Ithaca, NY
