The following assignement presents the central theme of the work from modern French writer Pascal Quignard. The work mainly speaks about love but is very elusive regarding its form and content. Because of the form that is udefineable and due to the properties of the content, Secret life functions as something special, a work impossible to pin down in terms of literary species and genres. The work presents itself as a kind of poetical autobiographical text that is strongly connected to the field of philosophy. It uses several references from the world of classical, medieval and modern art, mostly literature and music. The differentiation between the narrator and the author is questionable. Quignard undertakes an ambitious journey: to describe and define the ontology of experience of love, from its origins before the speech, language, logos, to its two poles, fascination as the moment of confrontation between the sexes and desire as a kind of disarmament of this paralyzing state of being. The author constantly revolves around the connection between love and death, the critics of speech as enslaving and disguising property of society and the worship of love’s beauty and dissapearance. Even though Secret life can be denoted as a beautiful hommage to this life-giving force that is fundamentally unspeakable, it still seems that the writer never achieves the ultimate goal ‒ Unity.
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