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This paper is based on an interview with Philippe Sollers addressing his response to his Prix Médicis. It tries to identify the conditions of a particular kind of authorial identity, which consists in constructing and maintaining, in one’s person as well as in one’s work, an “avant-gardist” position, both in a decentered and (increasingly) central way. In this perspective, being recognized with a prize is a very problematic experience, as it goes against the writer’s necessary marginality. Beyond this paradox, proper to the modern condition of authors and artists, we encounter the issue of recognition, and the reasons why it remained so little addressed by the sociology of art and, more generally, by the social sciences.