Possibility of Sublimation in the Works of Samuel Beckett and Marguerite Duras

Facing The Music: The (Im)Possibility of Sublimation in the Works of Samuel Beckett and Marguerite Duras A Dissertation SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY François-Nicolas Vozel IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Co-Advisers: Mária Brewer and Bruno Chaouat December 2016 © François-Nicolas Vozel, 2016 i Acknowledgments: During the long process involved in finishing a dissertation there are many people whose invaluable support and friendship helped me more than I can express with words. First and foremost, I would like to thank my two advisers, Dr. Mària Brewer and Dr. Bruno Chaouat, for the help, support, and guidance that they have given me over the years. I have had the privilege to work closely with them throughout the M.A. and the Ph.D. and they have set an example of excellence as researchers, mentors, and instructors. They have offered many insightful comments and suggestions through their careful readings of my chapters and articles. I am very grateful to them for giving me the opportunity to carry out this project and experiment with a wide range of literary, philosophical, psychoanalytic, and political problems. I would like to thank the chair of my committee, Dr. Daniel Brewer, who has been a kind and generous mentor. His high standards and commitment to excellence were a constant source of inspiration and working with him was a real pleasure. Dan also provided many insightful readings of my chapters and devoted a lot of time to help me with scholarship and job applications. I would like to thank Cesare Casarino who has served has the external member of my committee since the M.A. Cesare has always been available to me and offered unfailing support and intellectual guidance over the past eight years. I would also like to thank my dear friends Justin Butler, Andrea Gyenge, Deborah, Evan and Hugo Lee-Ferrand, Florence Loubière, Brendan McGillicuddy, Niels Niessen, and Agnès Schaffauser for their support, encouragement, friendship, and patience throughout the years. Last but not least, I would like to thank my family for their generosity and support. Special thanks to Jo Bertiaux, Patrick Vozel, Emilia Bertiaux, Stephanie Vozel, Toni Judez, Laurine Vozel, Emma, Melina, Noham and Lakhdar Benbelkacem. Support for the research and writing of this project came from many sources, for which I am deeply grateful. The University of Minnesota’s Department of French and Italian, College of Liberal Arts, Institute for Advanced Study, Center for German and European Studies, and Graduate School each provided assistance in the form of fellowships. Through her generous giving to the University, Hella Mears also made possible significant summer research that allowed me the time to make important progress on my research. ii Table of Contents Introduction: Reinventing the Tragic in the Era of Consumer Culture 1 Part I: Samuel Beckett’s Reinvention of the Tragic, Sublimation or Destruction? 85 Chapter I: Sound as a Bell: Samuel Beckett’s Musical Destruction of Aristotelian 86 Tragic Drama Chapter II: Understanding Beckett’s (Absolutely Modern) Revival of Tragedy 127 Part II: “Musicalize She Said”: Marguerite Duras’ Deconstruction of the Realist Novel 203 Chapter III: Moderato Cantabile, or Music as the Last Veil that Hides the Monstrous 218 Chapter IV: Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein: When the Music Stops… 266 Conclusion: The (Im)Possibility of Sublimation, an “aesthethics” 305 Bibliography 316 1 Introduction: Reinventing the Tragic in the Era of Consumer Culture Jacques Lacan’s 1959-1960 seminar, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, opens a new stage of political and ethical thought for psychoanalysis. The whole seminar consists in Lacan’s effort to devise a radically modern conception of the tragic that is to be articulated “from the point of view of the location of man (sic) in relation to the real” (11), the “real” being that which is left out in the formation of the subject of knowledge (symbolic) and narcissistic identification (imaginary). Lacan looks to tragedy to unearth an ethics more older, more original, even more important than the philosophical ethics that has dominated Western morality since the time of Plato and Aristotle, which may be broadly described as an ethics of the Good. In Seminar VII one of Lacan’s objects of criticism is Aristotle’s Poetics, the text that laid the foundations for subsequent interpretations of tragic drama. Tragedy literally means “goat song” (from τράγος “goat” + ωδή “song”). The connection may be via satyric drama, from which tragedy later developed, in which actors or singers were dressed in goatskins to represent satyrs. Some theories advance that a goat was to be sacrificed during representations or that singers competed for a goat 2 as a prize. Yet, another interpretation comes from the idea of tragedy as a ritual of purification, the goat being the embodiment of Dionysus, the god of excessiveness and intemperance. This reading is, in all likelihood, the one retained by Aristotle who puts forward a vision of tragedy as a process oriented towards the “catharsis” (purification) of dangerous excess. Indeed, tragedy for Aristotle should achieve a process of purification analogous to the one produced by Socratic persuasion; for the Stagyrite, tragic drama should stir up extreme affects so as to better mitigate and remove them. By allowing the spectator to briefly experience the perils of transgression, tragedy functions as a cautionary fable, which enables the citizen’s cultivation of αρετή [arête] (virtue, excellence) through the inculcation of φρόνησις [phronesis] (practical wisdom, prudence) and σωφροσύνη [sophrosune] (moderation). Purification occurs when the spectator feels έλεος [eleos] (pity) in her compassion for the hero undergoing pathos, or when she experiences φόβος [phobos] (fear) when she identifies with the hero undergoing dissolution. As in Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle encourages moderation in all things. As an expedient of homeopathic medicine, tragedy offers an arena wherein people can experience overwhelming emotions and learn to gain better control over them. In this light, the purpose of tragedy would be to lead the spectator to the aurea mediocritas, the middle path of virtuous life that, Lacan believes, only confirms socially accepted values and norms. In Seminar VII Lacan sets out to “demystify the Platonic and the Aristotelian view of the good, indeed of the Supreme Good” (216), which has plagued Western philosophy for more than two millenia. “The good as such,” which Lacan qualifies as “the eternal 3 object of the philosophical quest in the sphere of ethics” and “philosopher’s stone of all the moralists,” is “radically denied by Freud” (96). The overarching goal of Aristotelian ethics is εὐδαιµονία [eudaimonia] (happiness, well-being), the highest good and the end towards which all our activities should ultimately aim. Aristotle claims that the ἔργον [ergon] (function, work) of the ethicist consists in perfecting the activity of the rational part of the soul in accordance with virtue (Nichomachean Ethics 1097b22–1098a20). Whereas Aristotle depicts the ethical subject as consciously seeking pleasure in moderation, firmly linking εὐδαιµονία with conscious desire, Lacan articulates a concept of desire that is in constant synergy with the irrational force of the drives. Lacan advances that this “radical repudiation of a certain ideal of the good is necessary” because “the good erects a strong wall across the path of our desire” (Seminar VII 230). Ultimately, Aristotle’s vision leads the individual to give ground relative to her desire (319), that is, to the consolidation of neurotic symptoms.1 As Lacoue-Labarthe argues, Lacan’s choice of Greek tragedy and Antigone is not accidental, for tragedy is “the decisive test of philosophy […] tragedy lies ‘prior to’ philosophy; that is to say, prior to Plato who erects philosophy against it.”2 This interpretation is consistent with Lacan’s assertion in Seminar XIX that philosophy is “ontology,” that is, a systematic Weltanschauung founded on the presupposition that being is substance, an ultimately consistent, immutable, and unbroken One (...Ou pire, 1 For instance Lacan asks us to look at Aristotle to “consider how far that notion of nature is different from ours,” because Aristotle’s is one to support an ethics which believes it can legitimately involve “the exclusion of all bestial desires” from the field of morality, as if nature were innately inclined to foster “happiness” and “human fulfillment” (Seminar VII 13). 2 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, “On ethics: A propos of Antigone,” Journal of European Psychoanalysis 24 (2007), http://www.psychomedia.it/jep/number24/lacoue.htm 4 session of June 21st 1972). As Lacoue-Labarthe argues, Depending on the emphasis brought to bear on this “against” and the interpretation it is given, either tragedy potentially bears hidden in it the entire unfolding of philosophy (this being the dialectical version); or tragedy is a document more ancient or archaic than philosophy, before which the latter serves as a screen (ibid.). To be sure, Lacan follows the latter interpretation, elaborating on Heidegger’s idea that the object of philosophy’s primary repression is death. As he puts it unequivocally, tragedy displays the “triumph of death” (Seminar VII 313). The ethics of psychoanalysis critiques the metaphysical conception of death perpetuated by two metaphysical postures: first, the theological idea of death to be found in the belief in the afterlife, a life to be valued higher than that of being-in-the-world; second, the humanist conception of death, which regards death as an peripheral eventuality that is linked in a purely extrinsic way with existence. While Aristotle bases his ethics on experimentation and, to a certain extent, finitude, his rationalism led him to assume that happiness or well-being is not entirely vulnerable to the blows of fortune and, when reached, is “something permanent and by no means easily changed” (Nichomachean Ethics 1100b2-3).

Load more