Paul Valéry’s interest in the life sciences is an important yet little-studied aspect of his work. Although Valéry was known primarily as a reader of mathematics and physics, his fascination with the life sciences has often been ignored or regarded as mere curiosity. This article examines Valéry’s writing on the subject of biology by focusing on the unique status he accords to the notion of life. In both his theoretical and poetic writings, Valéry addresses the notion of life as a category endowed with distinct ontological attributes — as a phenomenon that encompasses a distinct type of order. Life, as an independent force, is capable of resisting and even reversing the principle of entropy, which Valéry regards as a universal tendency towards degradation and dispersion that affects all inanimate matter. Valéry’s thought thus exhibits a complicated yet clear affinity with the intellectual tradition known as vitalism. The article discusses this affinity by analysing the presence of vitalist ideas and imagery in Valéry’s corpus, giving special attention to his most expressly ‘biological’ work, the essay ‘L’Homme et la coquille’ (‘The Man and the Seashell’).

中文翻译：

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保罗·瓦莱里（PaulValéry）的《生命主义：生命与熵》

保罗·瓦莱里（PaulValéry）对生命科学的兴趣是他工作中一个重要但未被研究的方面。尽管瓦雷里最初以数学和物理学的读者而著称，但他对生命科学的迷恋却常常被忽略或仅仅是出于好奇。本文通过关注瓦莱里关于生命这一概念的独特地位，来考察瓦莱里关于生物学的著作。瓦莱里（Valéry）在理论和诗歌作品中都将生命这一概念归为具有独特的本体论属性的一类-这是一种包含了独特的秩序类型的现象。生命作为一种独立的力量，能够抵抗甚至逆转熵原理，瓦莱里认为熵原理是影响所有无生命物质的普遍退化和分散趋势。因此，瓦雷里的思想与被称为生命主义的知识传统有着复杂而又清晰的联系。本文通过分析Valéry语料库中生命主义思想和意象的存在来探讨这种亲和力，并特别关注他最明确的“生物学”著作，即“ L'Homme et la coquille”（“人与贝壳”）。