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Being and Suffering: Toward an Existentialist Understanding of Memory, Suffering, and Violence

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Being and Suffering: Toward an Existentialist Understanding of Memory, Suffering, and Violence BEING AND SUFFERING: TOWARD AN EXISTENTIALIST UNDERSTANDING OF MEMORY, SUFFERING, AND VIOLENCE BY OKLA ELLIOTT DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2015 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Professor Brett Ashley Kaplan, Chair Professor Nancy Blake Professor Michael Rothberg Associate Professor George Gasyna ABSTRACT This is an application of existentialist and phenomenological philosophy to the psychology and ethical concerns of memory, suffering, and violence. The primary goal is to take up the recent resurgence of existentialist/phenomenological thought and apply it to the fields of memory studies and trauma studies, broadly conceived. The methodology blends those of literary studies and philosophy, given that the subjects of the current investigation themselves blur the lines between literature and philosophical production. This work likewise explores the role of violence and counter-violence as formative of identity among marginalized groups and asks what the psychological and ethical consequences of such violence are. Finally, via a theorizing of limit-experiences, a sketch for a kind of existentialist ethics is sought. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………….1 CHAPTER TWO: SUFFERING AND AUTHENTICITY IN THE WORK OF JEAN-PAUL SARTRE…………………………………………………………………………………….16 CHAPTER THREE: THE EFFECTS AND ETHICS OF VIOLENCE: A PRACTICAL INVESTIGATION………………………………………………………………………....46 CHAPTER FOUR: TOWARD AN EXISTENTIALIST ANALYSIS OF KNOTS OF MEMORY…………………………………………………………………………………..74 CHAPTER FIVE: THE 10,000 EVIL VISIONS: TRANSGRESSION, VIOLENCE, AND IDENTITY FORMATION IN THE WORK OF JOYCE CAROL OATES…………….100 CHAPTER SIX: EXISTENTIAL COURAGE: VIOLENCE, LIMIT-EXPERIENCES, AND ETHICS IN THE WORK OF NORMAN MAILER…………………………………….136 CHAPTER SEVEN: THE NEW UNIVERSALISM AND WILLIAM T. VOLLMANN’S RISING UP AND RISING DOWN…………………………………………………….....162 CHAPTER EIGHT: CONCLUSION……………………………………………………..195 BIBLIOGRAPHY…………………………………………………………………………..198 iii CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION i. A New Direction for Existentialism The recent resurgence of interest in existentialism has already taken several paths in various fields, and I predict it will take many more before this wave completes its journey from trough to crest. My own project here is an analysis of existentialism’s roles in the way we might theorize memory, suffering, and violence. I describe what existentialist philosophy and literature offers us when theorizing individual and collective experiences of suffering and the attendant issues of memory, collective and personal. The question of how suffering, transgression, and violence form, deform, and reform the very self that experiences and enacts violence is likewise central to my investigations here. And, finally, the scope of my inquiry includes the problem of constructing an existentialist ethics in the face of suffering and violence. The aforementioned resurgence in interest in existentialism is evidenced by the recent translations or re-releases of Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason (Verso, 2004), The Imaginary (Routledge, 2010), Existentialism is a Humanism (Yale, 2011), Saint Genet (Minnesota, 2012), The Freud Scenario (Verso, 2013); of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (Vintage, 2012), and several new works on Beauvoir such as The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir: Critical Essays (Routledge, 2011); of Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (SUNY 2010), and Indiana University Press has undertaken a massive translation and 1 scholarly project concerning Heidegger’s work, with over thirty new translations of his works having appeared in this series, as well as several scholarly monographs on his work. Likewise, between 2012 and 2015, nearly all of Norman Mailer’s books will have been re-released, and a new major biography of Mailer was published in 2013, as were his Selected Letters in late 2014. And the list goes on. This pronounced renewal of interest in existentialism does not have a singly defined direction, but the appearance of these books promises a wave of scholarly responses in the coming years. It is my hope that my intervention here will offer some of the directions this research might take. Already, there have been several studies on the nature of violence in the Sartre’s work. Just to mention a few: James Dodd’s Violence and Phenomenology (2009) explores Sartre’s Notebooks for an Ethics and Critique of Dialectical Reason in fruitful juxtaposition with Hannah Arendt’s On Violence; Ronald E. Santoni’s Sartre on Violence: Curiously Ambivalent (2004) compares Sartre’s and Camus’s differing views on the uses of violence. Likewise, Sara Heinämaa’s Toward a Phenomenology of Sexual Difference: Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir has begun a fruitful discussion of existentialist-phenomenology in the field of Body Studies. And the intersections of existentialism and postcolonialism are likewise garnering renewed interest—e.g., the work of Yoav Di-Capua, concerning the Arab world, and that of Jonathan Judaken concerning race and postcolonialism vis-à-vis Sartre. Given that much of the work in Memory Studies and in discussions of violence overlap with the 2 postcolonial world, there are already others beginning to channel this surge in existentialist thought in similar directions to those I propose to take it. ii. Why Existentialism? Existentialism was born from the triple violence of the First World War, the Second World War, and the more diffuse violence of modern alienation. Due to this gestation in suffering, I argue, existentialism is the philosophy of suffering and violence par excellence. It should also be noted that Arthur Schopenhauer is frequently cited as one of the progenitors of modern existentialism—in fact, philosopher Richard Schacht names him the primary forefather of existentialism, not Kierkegaard as many claim. Given that suffering serves as the bedrock of Schopenhauer’s philosophy, we can say that even before 20th-century existentialism emerged from the above-mentioned triple violence, its roots were already firmly planted in a philosophical consideration of suffering. In my dissertation, I attempt to rejuvenate discussion on some of the twentieth and twenty-first century’s greatest thinkers and writers—Franz Fanon, Martin Heidegger, Norman Mailer, Joyce Carol Oates, Jean-Paul Sartre, and William T. Vollmann. Most of the authors I cover lived through the Second World War. I therefore place them within this historical context. The traumatic effects of the war are particularly salient for Beauvoir, Camus, and Sartre, who lived in occupied France and engaged in varying degrees of resistance, including Sartre’s time as a soldier and as a 3 prisoner of war. Emmanuel Levinas was likewise a POW when he drafted his first notable existentialist work, Existents and Existence (1947). And regarding American existentialists covered here, Norman Mailer fought in the Second World War, on the Pacific Front, and wrote The Naked and the Dead (1948) about his experiences there. He also wrote several other books on various forms of violence—ranging from boxing matches to the Vietnam Conflict—from an existentialist viewpoint. The details of these authors’ individual traumas and how the overall trauma of the Second World War affected them will be enumerated later, but I would briefly add here that their thinking was forged in the suffering and violence of these world events, and they each placed these events at the center of their literary and philosophical efforts. Joyce Carol Oates and William T. Vollmann did not experience the Second World War, but they have made it either the central or peripheral subject for several of their works, and Vollmann has worked as a war journalist during recent conflicts around the globe, thus making the experience of suffering and violence key to his writerly output. Another salient similarity between all of these authors is that they blur the distinctions between literature and philosophy. My efforts here will therefore likewise blur the distinctions between philosophy and literary studies. As Sara Heinämaa writes, [The philosopher’s] inquiry may be advanced more by a close inspection of a fictitious case than by a survey of actual instances […] Beauvoir’s rejection of systematic philosophy is inspired by Kierkegaard’s mockery of the Hegelian system. But Beauvoir was also influenced by Husserl’s 4 idea of philosophy as a radical inquiry that proceeds with the help of the imagination and fiction. Both these sources give literature a philosophical task and encouraged Beauvoir to experiment with her own writing. (Heinämaa 13-15) And a similar claim can be made about all of the authors I investigate in this project. For existentialist writers, literature is often the linguistic laboratory where philosophical notions are dramatized and tested, explored and expanded; and literary language holds a particularly important place in the philosophy of Heidegger and Mailer. iii. Chapter Two: Authenticity and Suffering This chapter focuses on the relationship between authenticity and suffering in the works of Jean-Paul Sartre, with occasional references to Heidegger, Lacan, and Levinas. An aspect of Jean-Paul Sartre’s thinking on authenticity that has been left largely untheorized is the question of how the experience of suffering can be a path to Sartrean authenticity. My contention is that the suffering of the subject
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