1 «It was as if he had walked under the millimetre of haze just above the inked fibres of a map, that pure zone between land and chart between distances and legend between nature and the storyteller» [EP 246].

2 «I felt that at last I had reached the way to the South, and all the glorious East; Greece, Carthage, Egypt, Tyre, Syria, Italy, Spain, Sicily, Crete... They were all there, and within reach of... me. (...) Oh I must get down here, – farther out – again!» M. Brown ed., The Letters of T. E. Lawrence, lettre à sa mère, 15.

3 Vladimir Jankélévitch, L’aventure, l’ennui, le sérieux (Paris : Aubier Montaigne, 1963) 10.

4 «He was looking for just this strangeness of life» [SPW 353].

5 «Pray God that men reading the story will not, for love of the glamour of strangeness, go out ot prostitute themselves and their talents in serving another race» [SPW 29].

6 André Gide, Journal 1889-1939, 27 août 1935 (Paris : NRF, La Pléiade, n° 54) 1236.

7 «A blissful and surpassing spectacle» [AD II 330], «a dream-like spectacle», «pageant» [AD II 339].

8 «I was staggered, fascinated» [LC 174].

9 Pour les modalités du pictural, voir Liliane Louvel, Texte / Image. Images à lire, textes à voir (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2002).

10 «The Arabs and the Druzes were lying asleep round the cold hearth; a couple of mares stood peacefully by the tent pole [...] and beyond them a camel lay chumping among the black stones. The strange and silent beauty of a scene as old as the world caught at the heart and spurred the fancy even after sleep had fallen upon it again» [DS 120].

11 «You want apparently some vivid colouring of an Arab’s costume, or of a flying Turk, and we have it all, for that is part of the mise en scène of the successful raider, and hitherto I am that». The Letters of T. E. Lawrence, lettre à Vyvyan Richards, 15 juillet 1918, 151.

12 Clark Institute, Williamstown, Massachussetts.

13 Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

14 «That rosy sequence of association, desert, moon, pyramids, palms, sphinx, camels, oasis, priest in high minaret chanting the evening prayer, Allah, Hichens, Mrs Sheridan, all delicately point the way to sheik, rape and harem». Evelyn Waugh, When the Going was Good (Londres: Duckworth, 1946. Penguin books, 1951) 17-18 (ma traduction).

15 Roland Barthes, Mythologies, 206.

16 «The great picture book of nomad life» [IAD 27].

17 Michel Korinman, Maurice Ronai, «Le désert-mode d’emploi. Aide-mémoire pour une épistémologie de l’aride», dans Traverses 19, Revue trimestrielle du Centre de Création Industrielle (Centre George Pompidou, 1980) 81.

18 «And from hence appeared a dream-like spectacle! a great clay town built in this waste sand with enclosing walls and towers and streets and houses! (...) This is Boreyda!... I saw, as it were, Jerusalem in the desert! [as we look down from the Mount of Olives]; the last upshot sun-beams enlightened the dim clay city in glorious manner, and pierced into that dull pageant of tamarisk tress» [AD II 339].

19 Michel Korinman et Maurice Ronai, «Le désert-mode d’emploi», 81.

20 Ibid., 84.

21 «It is all guesswork; the desert may give up its secrets, the history of the Safa and the Ruhbeh may be pieced together from the lettered rock, but much travel must be accomplished first...» [DS 127].

22 «No doubt there is more to be found still; the desert knows many a story that has not yet been told» [DS 84].

23 «An evil spirit sowed in him the seeds of dissolution» [AD I 520].

24 «(I mused) how there fled many wilfully from the troublesome waves of the world, devising in themselves to retrieve the first Adam in their souls, and coveting a sinless habitation with the elements, whither, saving themselves out of the common calamities, they might (...) depart to a better life» [AD I 520-21].

25 «Fairyland of religion to build themselves a stair to heaven» [AD I 521].

26 «It is an art to examine the Beduins of these countries» [AD I 469].

27 Michel Korinman et Maurice Ronai, « Le désert-mode d’emploi », 81.

28 «You shall have also their wily crooked answers, yielded with little willingness by these free-born wretches, jealous of their wandering grounds and waters» [AD I 469].

29 «The Oriental is like a very old child. He is unacquainted with many branches of knowledge which we have come to regard as of elementary necessity. [...] He is not practical in our acceptation of the word, any more than a child is practical, and his utility is not ours» [DS ix].

30 Introduction à Voyages dans l’Arabie déserte, 28 : «while bearing towards them a full sympathy which persuaded them to show him their inmost ideas» [IAD 23].

31 «And for this reason he will be the wiser if he does not seek to ingratiate himself with Orientals by trying to ape their habits, unless he is so skilful that he can pass as one of themselves» [DS x].

32 «The third was a Druze, a big shambling man, incurably lazy, a rogue in his modest way, though he could always disarm my just indignation in the matter of stolen sugar or missing piastres with an appealing, lustrous eye that looked forth unblinking like the eye of a dog. He was greedy and rather stupid, defects that must be difficult to avoid on a diet of dry bread, rice and rancid butter» [DS 3].

33 Frantz Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs (Paris : Seuil, 1952).

34 «I was determined to live as they live, to face the hardships of the desert on equal terms with them» [LC 398].

35 Introduction à Voyages dans l’Arabie déserte, 23 : «He had become history in the desert [...] They tell tales of him, making something of a legend of the tall and impressive figure, very wise and gentle, who came to them like a herald of the outside world» [IAD 19].

36 Frantz Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs, 79.

37 Introduction à Voyages dans l’Arabie déserte, 31 : «they took a chivalrous part in the war as the allies of Great Britain and with our help» [IAD 26].

38 «The irresistible chivalry of the desert» [DS 134].

39 Marthe Robert, Roman des origines et origines du roman (Paris : Gallimard, Tel, 1972) 60.

40 «In order to be effective mimicry must continually produce its slippage, its excess, its difference. The authority of that mode of colonial discourse that I have called mimicry is therefore stricken by an indeterminacy : mimicry emerges as the representation of a difference that is itself a process of disavowal. Mimicry is thus the sign of a double articulation; a complex strategy of reform, regulation and discipline, which ‘appropriates’ the Other as it visualizes power. Mimicry is also the sign of the inappropriate, however, a difference or recalcitrance which coheres the dominant strategic function of colonial power, intensifies surveillance, and poses an immanent threat to both ‘normalized’ knowledges and disciplinary powers». Homi Bhabha, «Of Mimicry and Man», dans The Location of Culture (Londres, New York : Routledge, 1994) 86. (ma traduction)

41 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Londres: Penguin Books, 1990) 34.

42 «Posturing in alien dress» [SPW 514], «my mantle of fraud in the East [SPW 515].

43 Edward Morgan Forster, Abinger Harvest, 147. (ma traduction)

44 «My graven image» [SPW 567]. Cf. note 2 page 854 de l’édition française.

45 «I exploited their highest ideals» [SPW 560].

46 «For all sakes try and clear up this show before it goes further. We are calling them to fight for us on a lie, and I can’t stand it», «I am not going to last out this game much longer», The Letters of T. E. Lawrence, lettres à Clayton (111) et à Leeds (124).

47 «Englishmen being sure of their own absolute excellence (...) that feeling of individual obligation to push struggling humanity up its road» [SPW 93].

48 «Their hunger for desolate lands, to build them up» [SPW 103].

49 «The ends of the earth are never the points on a map that colonists push against, enlarging their sphere of influence. On one side servants and slaves and tides of power and correspondence with the Geographical Society. On the other the first step by a white man across a great river, the first sight (by a white eye) of a mountain that has been there forever» [EP 141].

50 La vie que j’ai choisie, 337. «the distances between the wells, the different types of terrain, the productivity of the various oases, the distribution of the tribes, their relations with each other and with the French, the French methods of administration, the location and composition of their forces with diagrams of all the forts I visited» [LC 295].

51 «A military text-book [which] helped to guide us to victory in the East» [IAD 27].

52 Introduction à Voyages dans l’Arabie déserte, 31 : «The Arabs who had allowed Doughty to wander in the forbidden provinces were making a good investment for their sons and grandsons» [IAD 27].

53 «The tale of Jauf may help our estimation of the value in the field of Arabian numbers, against troops under Turkish command, armed with rifles» [AD II 48].

54 Jacques Lacan, Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse (Paris : Seuil, 1973) 93.

55 Gilles Deleuze et Félix Guattari, Mille plateaux, 17.

56 «A wanderer after sensations», The Letters of T. E. Lawrence, lettre à sa mère du 11 avril 1911, 34.

57 «To those bred under an elaborate social order few such moments of exhilaration can come as that which stands at the threshold of wild travel... The gates of the enclosed garden are thrown open, the chain at the entrance of the sanctuary is lowered, with a wary glance to right and left you step forth, and, behold! the immeasurable world» [DS 1].

58 «The path that stretches across the rounded shoulder of the earth» [DS 2].

59 «Plunging single-handed into its chilling depths» [PN I 16].

60 «But the East is wherever one sees the lateen sail – that shark’s fin of a rig which for hundred of years has dogged all white bathers round the Mediterranean.», Rudyard Kipling, Letters of Travel, dans The Works of Rudyard Kipling, vol. 24 (Londres: Macmillan, 1920; 1938) 261 (ma traduction).

61 «When men leave that exquisite lake, whether through the Bosphorus or the Pillars of Hercules, they approach the monstrous and extraordinary; and the southern exit leads to the strangest experiences of all» E. M. Forster, A Passage to India (Londres: Penguin Books, 1974) 275. (ma traduction)

62 «The canal Company’s garden (...) happens to mark a certain dreadful and exact division between East and West (...) At Suez one must face things ... then the black hour of homesickness, vain regrets, foolish promises, and weak despair shuts down with the smell of strange earth and the cadence of strange tongues». R. Kipling, Letters of Travel, 263 (ma traduction).

63 «From between these trees, in hidden crannies of the rock, issued strange cries; the echoes, turned into music, of the voices of the Arabs watering camels at the springs (...)» [SPW 360].

64 «Now we are sitting silent and still, listening to the monotonous melody of the East – the soft night-breeze wandering through starlit skies and tufted trees, with a voice of melancholy meaning» [PN I 9].

65 «Historical, quasi-natural artifacts created out of the interaction of nous à tous. Moreover they are limited in number, so economic is the imagination and so powerful their range: Orient, Occident, community, the human, the Origin, the divine. Among themselves they form a matrix that generates cultural romance and adventure, expressed as ideas in conflict or in concert with each other», Edward W. Saïd, The World, the Text, and the Critic, 254 (ma traduction).

66 Raymond Schwab, La renaissance orientale (Paris : Payot, 1950) 12.

67 Ibid., 445.

68 Ibid., 445.

69 Mikhaïl Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination. Four Essays. trad. Michael Holquist (University of Texas Press, 1996).

70 Edward W. Saïd, The World, the Text and the Critic, 259.

71 «A penance for too rich and full a life», The Letters of T. E. Lawrence, lettre à W. F. Sterling, 15 octobre 1924, 276.

72 «To eat dirt, till its taste is normal to me», ibid., lettre à Robert Graves, 18 janvier 1923, 221.

73 «Free-will I’ve tried, and rejected: authority I’ve rejected (not obedience, for that is my present effort, to find equality only in subordination (...): action I’ve rejected: and the intellectual life: and the receptive senses: and the battle of wits. They were all failures», ibid., lettre à Lionel Curtis, 30 mai 1923, 240.

74 «Then at once I knew how much I was sorry» [SPW 683].

75 Introduction à Voyages dans l’Arabie déserte, 27 : «In his life he has air and winds, sun and light, open spaces and great emptiness. There is no human effort, no fecundity in Nature; just heaven above and unspotted earth beneath» [IAD 23].

76 La vie que j’ai choisie, 244. «I was exhilarated by the sense of space, the silence and the crisp cleanness of the sand» [LC 212].

77 «Bare of all things of which there is no need, the days of our mortality are so easy and become a long quiescence» [AD I 490].

78 Introduction à Voyages dans l’Arabie déserte, 25 : «a life too hard, too empty, too denying for all but the strongest and most determined men» [IAD 21].

79 «The effect of continued excitement on the mind, stimulating its powers to their pitch» [PN I 151].

80 «Your lungs are lightened, your sight brightens, your memory recovers its tone, and your spirit becomes exuberant; your fancy and your imagination are powerfully aroused, and the wildness and sublimity of the scenes around you stir up all the energies of your soul – whether for exertion, danger or strife» [PN I 150].

81 «The soul that would rid herself out of all perplexed ways, desireth in her anger even the undoing of this hostile body, only ground of her disease» [AD I 521].

82 «The unattainable we are all feeling after», The Letters of T. E. Lawrence, lettre à sa mère, 11 avril 1911, 34.

83 «I drew these tides of men into my hands» (épigraphe), «On such a wave (...) I raised and rolled before the breath of an idea, till it reached its crest, and toppled over and fell at Damascus» [SPW 41].

84 «I have become a monomaniac about the job», The Letters of T. E. Lawrence, lettre à sa mère, 25 février 1917, 106.

85 «He found luxury in abnegation, renunciation, self restraint» [SPW 40].

86 «The practice of our revolt fortified the nihilist attitude in me. During it, we often saw men push themselves or be driven to a cruel extreme of endurance; yet never was there an intimation of physical break. Collapse rose always from a moral weakness eating into the body, which of itself, without traitors from within, had no power over the will. While we rode we were disbodied, unconscious of flesh or feeling» [SPW 477].

87 «Gusts of cruelty, perversions, lusts ran lighty over the surface without troubling us» [SPW 27].

88 «It was a real beast, and this book its mangy skin, dried, stuffed and set up squarely for men to stare at» [SPW 581].

89 André Malraux, « N’était-ce donc que cela? », Saisons n° 3 (hiver 1946-47) 17.

90 «I had strung myself to learn all pain until I died» [SPW 454].

91 «Better to seek some mental death, some slow wasting of the brain to sink it below these puzzlements» [SPW 561].

92 «Our youths began indifferently to slake one another’s few needs in their own clean bodies – a cold convenience that, by comparison seemed sexless and even pure. Later, some began to justify this sterile process, and swore that friends quivering together in the yielding sand with intimate hot limbs in supreme embrace, found there hidden in the darkness a sensual co-efficient of the mental passion which was welding our souls and spirits in one flaming effort. Several, thirsting to punish appetites they could not wholly prevent, took a savage pride in degrading the body, and offered themselves fiercely in any habit which promised physical pain and filth» [SPW 28].

93 «A stress on the emptiness of the world and the fullness of God» [SPW 39].

94 «My notebooks were full of states of mind, the reveries and self-questioning induced or educed by our situations, expressed in abstract words to the dotted rhythm of the camels’ marching» [SPW 580].

95 «The strongest motive thoughout had been a personal one, not mentioned here» (épilogue), «the history is not of the Arab movement, but of me in it» [SPW 22].

96 effrey Meyers, The Wounded Spirit, A Study of Seven Pillars of Wisdom (Londres: Martin Brian and O’Keefe, 1973) 104.

97 «We had learned that there were pangs too sharp, griefs too deep, ecstasies too high for our finite selves to register. When emotion reached this pitch the mind choked; and memory went white till the circumstances were humdrum once more» [SPW 28].

98 «The bones from which some day a man may make history» [SPW 22].

99 Paul Veyne, Comment on écrit l’histoire (Paris: Seuil, 1971) 14.

100 «We glozed our fraud by conducting their necessary war purely and cheaply. But now this gloss had gone from me. Chargeable against my conceit were the causeless, ineffectual deaths of Hesa. My will had gone and I feared to be alone, lest the winds of circumstances, or power, or lust, blow my empty soul away» [SPW 514].

101 «Man’s heart bounds in his breast as the thought of measuring his puny force with Nature’s might, and of emerging triumphant from the trial» [PN I 149].

102 «There was another pilgrimage to be made from Antioch: it was to Daphne» [DS 326].

103 Jacques Lacan, Les écrits techniques de Freud. Le Séminaire, Livre I (Paris : Seuil, 1975) 162.

104 «The voice of the wind shall be heard instead of the persuasive voices of counsellors, the touch of the rain and the prick of the frost shall be spurs sharper than praise or blame» [DS 1].

105 «The time from the beginning is like one of those dreams, seeming to last for aeons, out of which you wake up with a start, and find it has left nothing in the mind. Only the different thing about this dream is that so many people do not wake up in life again», The letters of T. E. Lawrence, 15 juillet 1918, 150.

106 «The dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible. This I did» [SPW 23].

107 «We Westerners of this complex age, monks in our bodies’ cells, who searched for something to fill us beyond speech and sense, were, by the mere effort of the search, shut from it for ever» [SPW 521].

108 «Intact but unimproved for all ages» [IAD 23], «the unchanging desert» [IAD 24].

109 «As unchanging as the desert in which they live» [IAD 25].

110 «We racked ourselves with inherited remorse for the flesh-indulgence of our gross birth, striving to pay for it through a lifetime of misery» [SPW 521].

111 «The abstraction of the desert landscape cleansed me and rendered my mind vacant with its superflous greatness» [SPW 524].

112 Pierre Maxime Schühl, L’imagination et le merveilleux (Paris : Flammarion, 1969) 37.

113 «Better a thousand times the Arab untouched», The letters of T. E. Lawrence, lettre à sa mère, 24 juin 1911, 39.

114 «A frenetic and sanguinary population» [AD I 251].

115 «A delicious green grove of fruit-bearing wild fig-trees, hamâta» [AD I 488].

116 «Beautiful is the green pageant of the oasis, after the burning barren dust of the desert» [AD I 555].

117 «Small bright dragon-flies, azure, dun and vermilion, sported over the cistern water ruffled by a morning breath from the figgera, and hemmed in the solemn lava rock. The silver fishes glance beneath, and white shells lie at the bottom of this water world. I have watched there the young of the thób shining like scaly glass and speckled: this fairest of saurians lay sunning, at the brink, upon a stone» [AD II 220] thob : lézards, note 8 [VAD 993], figgera : « nom que porte le rebord du Harra autour de Kheybar » [VAD, glossaire p. 1405].

118 «Oh, what bliss to the thirsty soul is in that sweet light water, welling soft and warm as milk, [86° F] from the rock! and I heard the subtle harmony of Nature, which the profane cannot hear, in that happy stillness and solitude» [AD II 220].

119 «And this is the Arab’s Kayf. The savouring of animal existence; the passive enjoyment of mere sense; the pleasant languor, the dreamy tranquillity, the airy castle-building, which in Asia stand in lieu of the vigorous, intensive, passionate life of Europe. It argues a facility for voluptuousness unknown to northern regions, where happiness is placed in the exertion of mental and physical powers. In the East, man wants but rest and shade» [PN I 9].

120 «The fine air of the Desert, inspiriting as a cordial, when star-light and dew-mists diversified a scene, which, by day, is one broad sea of yellow loam with billows of chalk rock, thinly covered by a film-like spray of sand surging and floating in the fiery wind» [PN I 85].

121 «Waves of mountain air perfumed with flowers and coloured with the rays of the low sun» [DS 301].

122 «To wake in the desert at dawn was like waking in the heart of an opal» [DS 64].

123 «Men had come and gone, life had surged up the flanks of the hills and retreated again, leaving the old gods to resume their sway over rock and flowering thorn, in peace, loneliness and beauty» [DS 301].

124 La vie que j’ai choisie, 330. «The miniature valley, with crystal-clear water gushing from a cleft in the rocks, the green grass, the palms, the small gardens and clusters of houses shaded by tall acacias, symbolized for me the paradise for which desert-dwellers have always yearned» [LC 288].

125 «The categories of reality in the forms of human desire», Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 141. Traduction Guy Durand, Anatomie de la critique (Paris : Gallimard, 1969) 173.

126 «Aba el Lissan’s rounded limestone breasts were covered with soil and heath, green, well-watered» [SPW 316].

127 «It is like the dream city which children create from themselves to dwell in between bedtime and sleeptime, building palace after palace down the shining ways of the imagination» [DS 249].

128 «Landscapes, in childhood’s dreams, were so vast and silent. We looked backward through our memory for the prototype up which all men had walked between such walls toward such an open square as that in front where this road semed to end» [SPW 81].

129 «The splendours of a pitiless blinding stare», «a sky terrible in its stainless beauty», «The Samun caresses you like a lion with flaming breath» [PN I 149].

130 «Titanic desolation» [AD I 426], «an hard-set face of nature without a smile», the lion-like sleep of cosmogonic forces» [AD I 452].

131 «Uncouth blackness», «a wilderness of burning and rusty horror of unformed matter», «the awe» [AD I 452], «stupendous», [AD I 465], «amazement» [AD I 466].

132 «A spectacle of the old vulcanic violencev» [AD I 465].

133 «The deep belly of the volcano» [AD I 466], «the vulcanic womb», «the hidden subterranean passions» [AD I 468].

134 «The demons of this wild waste earth» [AD I 46].

135 Introduction à Voyages dans l’Arabie déserte, 23 : «he has revealed himself to us in his pages indirectly (the book is never morbid, never introspective), almost unwillingly, for the way of telling is detached, making no parade of good and evil» [IAD 19].

136 «Wherefore should I macerate my life continually in the greatest jeaopardy? or suffer this distress of soul, to kick against the fanaticism of the whole Ishmaelite country?» [AD I 501]

137 «... Mecca, – where, I have heard it from credible Moslems, that nearly no Haj passes in which some unhappy persons are not put to death as intruded Christians» [AD II 68].

138 «The world of adventure and enterprise, dark with hurrying storms, glittering in raw sunlight, an unanswered question and an unanswerable doubt hidden in the fold of every hill. Into it you must go alone [...] roofless, defenceless, without possessions» [DS 1].

139 «The generations of the dead walk with you down the streets, you see them flitting across their balconies, gazing out of windows wreathed with white clematis, wandering in palisaded gardens that are still planted with olive and with wine and carpeted with iris, hyacinth and anemone. Yet you may search the chronicles for them in vain; they played no part in history» [DS 249].

140 «Men are short of vision, and they see but that for which they look... some are fortunate and they find always what they want» [DS 340].

141 «But it was long ago that a mighty hand had lifted the Gorgon’s head before the waves of the Tulul es Safa» [DS 121].

142 «A track almost as old as the hills themselves, a little thread of human history leading us straight through that forbidding land» [DS 122].

143 «Wide and formidable» [PN II 74].

144 «A haggard land infested with wild beasts, and wilder men... What can be more exciting? what more sublime?» [PN, I, 149].

145 «Man is by nature an animal of prey, educated by the complicated relations of society, but readily relapsing into his old habits. Ravenous and sanguinary propensities grow apace in the Desert...» [PN II 87].

146 Frantz Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs, 161.

147 Frantz Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs, 153.

148 «It was a strange, wild scene. The black basaltic field was dotted with the huge and doubtful forms of spongy-footed camels with silent tread, looming like phantoms in the midnight air; the hot wind moaned, and whirled from the torches flakes and sheets of flame and fiery smoke...» [PN II132].

149 Théodore Monod, Méharées (Arles: Actes sud, 1989) 230.

150 Jacques Lacan, L’ éthique de la psychanalyse, Le séminaire, Livre VII (Paris : Seuil, 1986) 169.

151 Ibid., 170.

152 Gilles Deleuze, Différence et répétition (Paris : PUF, 1972) 167-168.