Abstract :
[en] This thesis aims to demonstrate that the literary milieu alone is not able to provide a sufficient overview of the reasons for which the blind gradually departs from a status deemed animal, close to the object, degrading to that of subject, human and even didactician of our societies.
Philosophy, like theology or sociology, has frequently approached the figure of the blind as a non-being, an outcast or a deeply sinful individual. Relegated to any artistic, religious or expressive form, the blind, victim of the ambient oculocentrism, is not considered as a subject, at least when the writings inherent in sight and its absence deign to evoke it. However, it is not because a body affected by blindness is, most of the time, absent from commentaries ranging from Antiquity to the Enlightenment and because of a primacy of sight deeply anchored in the minds, it struggles to impose itself in a thought that does not come from Disability Studies, that it is hardly possible to formulate hypotheses on its reception. From what sight, transformed into vision, teaches us, there is born an instructive part of the invisible. Nourished by this didactics of the non-visual domain and the wealth of philosophical writings, modern and contemporary authors – from Victor Hugo to François Emmanuel or even from Shakespeare to Wells – will turn to these beings evoked as subjects thanks, among other things, to the Molyneux's problem, to Diderot's Letter, to a desire to rehabilitate touch and to attempt to annihilate any sensory hierarchy. From the blind Cartesian to the Blind Maeterlinckians, would it be conceivable to witness the idea that not only does blindness teach us, but that it is not frozen in a corporality exposed as incomplete? Materializing low appetites in the ancient period (Diels; Milner), vector of a religious cause in medieval society (Dufournet), revealing something beyond the sensible (Merleau-Ponty; Balzac), catalyst for ambiguous relations with others (Levinas; Dickens), harbinger of a world in perdition (Deleuze; Beckett) which seeks to renew itself from a social (Foucault; Saramago) but also literary (Bakhtine; Green) point of view, the blind would incarnate, in our view, a protean being who reveals all the complexity and the paradoxical attitude of human behavior.
The multidisciplinarity of the studies of thought opens us to an understanding of blindness where the real lack transposed from the scientific world to the fictional framework instructs us on our being, our conduct, our life in society in relation to others. We have therefore deduced a series of data, from the praise of sight emitted by seers, on the way in which the description of the visual could bring us information inherent to the non-visual.
Composed of two parts, this thesis must be read as a continuous whole which operates, above all chronologically, but also – in the context of literary blind groups – thematically, a demonstration of the considerable impact of the blind both in the psychoanalytical, philosophical or even narratological domain. Indeed, the blind man is to be understood as a prism that reflects our polymorphic humanity. The blind man is more a guide, a concentrate of all the anxieties and attitudes specific to man than a grotesque and condemnable being.
