CONCEPTION OF LITERATURE

This article addresses the relation between existence, language and communication from the perspective of Simone de Beauvoir‘s philosophical distinction between conceptual and literary expression. I argue that the background to this distinction is found in Søren Kierkegaard‘s critique of the philosophical system, especially in his claim that conceptual language cannot express the paradox of subjectivity. I also show that Beauvoir‘s more general conception of language and communication draw on the tradition of Husserlian phenomenology, and is systematically close to Maurice Merleau-Ponty‘s philosophy of language and subjectivity. On the basis of Beauvoir‘s essays on philosophy and literature, I then reconstruct a position according to which literary expression — because of its indirect mode of communication—is able to describe and mediate the subjective aspects of existence. Whereas conceptual language can only communicate what is universal, and thereby fails to account for the ambiguity of existence, literature, expresses the universal in its singular