Marguerite Yourcenar

Marguerite Yourcenar: authenticity, modernity and the political aesthetic Dionysios Kapsaskis Thesis submitted for the degree of Ph.D. University College London 2008 UMI Number: U591515 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Dissertation Publishing UMI U591515 Published by ProQuest LLC 2013. Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 I certify that this thesis is entirely my own work Dionysios Kapsaskis 2 ABSTRACT This thesis explores the notion of authenticity and its existential, aesthetic and political determinations in the work of Marguerite Yourcenar. It aims to trace the desire for authenticity in Yourcenar’s fiction and criticism and to assess the strategies employed to preserve the possibility of authentic representation. The investigation focuses on two aspects of the problematic of authenticity: subjectivity and politics. Both are discussed by Yourcenar in predominantly aesthetic terms. She argues that individual existence cannot be understood in its own uniqueness because it is entrapped within representational structures. The impasse of representation also affects the political self-constitution of nations and communities. Yourcenar’s response to this problem is developed through her meditation on art and time. She observes that authenticity is not a question of original creativity, but one of accepting the perishing of all representations in time. She also understands realism as a critically aware choice to accept the limits of narrative representation. Yourcenar attempts to rescue the notion of authenticity for modernity by foregrounding difference and repetition. The thesis discusses this strategy in relation to de Man’s thought on irony and history, Benjamin’s writing on film and translation, and Heidegger’s analysis of spatio-temporality. The last part of the thesis focuses on poststructuralist interpretations of Heidegger by Lacoue-Labarthe and Lyotard. It is argued that the model of political self-realization which Yourcenar proposes for post war Europe can be associated with Heidegger’s vision of national identity in Nazi Germany. Yourcenar’s Memoires d ’Hadrien is used as a case study showing the ambivalence of her discourse on authenticity, a discourse which hovers uncomfortably between modem political aestheticism and the desire to overcome aestheticism at large. This conclusion helps to contextualize Yourcenar’s work in relation to political and philosophical modernity. It also highlights the vicissitudes of the search for authenticity in twentieth-century Europe. 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements..................................................................................................................7 Abbreviations ............................................................................................................................8 INTRODUCTION..................................................................................................................9 CHAPTER ONE Subjectivity, Politics and the Limits of Representation.............................................38 The impossibility of the subject ......................................................................................39 The perspective of realism ...............................................................................................45 Freedom as a form of accepting ......................................................................................50 Politics as a technique of authentication ....................................................................... 70 CHAPTER TWO Temporality, Irony and the Inversion of Authenticity.............................................. 75 Constructing and reconstructing......................................................................................76 Irony and authenticity ........................................................................................................85 Time and difference........................................................................................................ 104 Medicine and madness....................................................................................................115 4 Table of contents CHAPTER THREE Cultural Modernity and Narrative Authenticity: Yourcenar and Benjamin...123 Yourcenar and cultural modernity .................................................................................125 Authenticity and illusion ................................................................................................ 136 Collecting fragments.......................................................................................................141 The paradigm of translation ...........................................................................................147 ‘Life’ and ‘afterlife’......................................................................................................... 151 Translation, authentication .............................................................................................159 CHAPTER FOUR Space, Time and the Existential Subject: Yourcenar and Heidegger................. 165 Space and the existential subject ...................................................................................169 Time and the existential subject ....................................................................................180 Acceptance and guardianship ........................................................................................ 189 Existence and history ......................................................................................................198 CHAPTER FIVE Yourcenar’s Political Aestheticism and Ambivalent Discourse of Identity 210 The universality of Greece .............................................................................................213 Modernity and political aestheticism in Yourcenar .................................................. 219 National aestheticism: Lacoue-Labarthe ..................................................................... 222 Between existential authenticity and political aestheticism .....................................233 Beyond the political aesthetic: Lyotard and the ‘jews’ .............................................261 The persistence of the Other .......................................................................................... 269 5 Table of contents CO NCLUSION ......................................................................................................................274 Bibliography.............................................................................................................................283 6 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Firstly, I must thank Professor Timothy Mathews, my Ph.D. supervisor, for his invaluable suggestions, guidance and patience. Special thanks to Pedro Estrela for his unfailing support and affection; to Mata Dimakopoulou for her perceptive comments and generous friendship; to Ayman Salem for our inspiring conversations and for giving me a wake-up call; and to Despina Lambrou, for listening, suggesting, and caring. Last but not least, thanks to my father, Kostas, and mother, Pigi, for their dedication and unreserved encouragement. I am indebted to the Greek State Scholarships Foundation for partly funding this thesis. I acknowledge the UCL Graduate School for providing financial assistance to attend a conference in Thessaloniki in 2000. Finally, I extend my thanks to the ‘Centre international de documentation Marguerite Yourcenar’ (Cidmy) in Brussels for their help and enthusiastic work. 7 ABBREVIATIONS OR: Marguerite Yourcenar, CEuvres romanesques, (Paris: Gallimard, 1991; repr. 2000), Bibliotheque de la Pleiade, 303. EM: Marguerite Yourcenar, Essais et memoires (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), Bibliotheque de la Pleiade, 378. 8 INTRODUCTION In her fiction and criticism, Marguerite Yourcenar strongly suggests that it is possible for man to develop an authentic relationship with the world. Yet for all its positive connotations, this authentic relationship is seldom understood as the unproblematic coordination of the self and what lies beyond it. The difference between interiority and exteriority is itself so persistent, that authenticity never takes the form of reconciliation. Rather, for Yourcenar, authenticity designates a paradoxical achievement on man’s part, which consists in recognizing, accepting and preserving the separation of self and world. This thesis proposes to investigate the notion of authenticity and its existential, aesthetic and political parameters in the work of Yourcenar. These three parameters, existence, aesthetics and politics, define key forms of involvement with the world and describe specific ways in which difference manifests itself. Drawing from the existentialist tradition of the twentieth century, I shall use the term existence to designate the plain fact of being in the world. This definition of existence shall be further clarified (and tested) in my thesis. Nonetheless, it must be stated at the outset that ‘existence’ denotes

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