This dissertation identifies and analyzes a tension between self-creation and decreation-the unmaking of self-within literary texts by three modern French authors: Charles Baudelaire, Colette, and Simone Weil. The tension I propose to...
moreThis dissertation identifies and analyzes a tension between self-creation and decreation-the unmaking of self-within literary texts by three modern French authors: Charles Baudelaire, Colette, and Simone Weil. The tension I propose to focus on is symptomatic of a larger trend in modern art, literature, and thought. I will argue that each of these authors treats the body as a site of self-distancing and a surface on which subjectivity can be made and unmade through a manipulation of its space, shape, and dimensions. In particular, non-consummation, unfulfillment, and willful hunger, metaphorical or literal, figured as a reach toward non-being within life, marks an aesthetic, bodily language of plasticity in each that allows for an imagining of the self outside the bounds of the socially given. Each gestures toward the transcendence of bodily form, suggesting alternative acts of self-shaping within the conditions of modernity, directly engaging with the alienation, objectification, and deadening of the human senses, and the abjection of the body in the face of commodified existence and restrictive social norms. In taking distance from the body and its needs as material givens, each of these authors identifies non-being within life as a response to the conditions of subject formation in their world and as an opening onto other ways of being. Hunger and unfulfillment, the flattening and unfleshing of the body, non-consummation and selfconsummation map the body as the location of self-undoing in the act of self-and worldmaking for each. There is no right, or quiet, time in life in which to pursue a doctorate. I embarked on the project mid-life, with at times more on my plate than I thought humanly possible, but I never forgot how privileged I was to have landed where I did. The Rhetoric department at Berkeley, along with the Program in Critical Theory, has been a home for many years now, an extended family of colleagues, coworkers, mentors, and friends. My time there has been nothing less than a gift. I am enormously grateful to my committee for their support of my work at every step of the way, and for their care and understanding as I navigated vicissitudes of life, loss, and sometimes overwhelming responsibilities along the way. Ramona you became a good friend and I am honored to be your colleague. Learning from you and teaching with you were highlights of my time at Berkeley. Suzanne your reflections on aesthetics, photography, and the sublime inspired so many of my own. I wish we had had more time. Tony, the talks in your office were some of the best. I always left with new questions, and excitement for next steps in my project. And Judith, you most of all, thank you. To have had the chance to work with you was a dream come true, and I discovered not only a great scholar, but an astonishingly generous human being. You took me by the hand more than once, and I pushed through at the end in large part thanks to you. I have enjoyed your humor, understanding, friendship, and example in kindness, compassion, and commitment -intellectual and political. Thank you to my parents, Beatrice and Immanuel, for their incredible support and enthusiasm for my doctoral work. I grew up in the best of all possible worlds, one of books and ideas, intellectuals and movements, cultures and travel. Being the daughter of a scholar of great stature has nonetheless been a double-edged sword. Finding my own way has been both trickier, and more rewarding, than I ever imagined. My father left us barely four months ago, too soon to see me complete my degree, but close enough to know there would be cause for celebration. Thank you to Pablo for endlessly encouraging me, always believing in me, and standing by my side. Thank you to Patrick for his flexibility with childcare, schedules, and so much else. Thank you to my many wonderful friends, near and far, old and new, who lived and laughed with me along the way. Above and beyond all, thank you to my daughter Layla, who grew up with my books, papers, angst, and aspirations, and somehow turned out perfectly despite all. Layla you are my sunshine and my hope for the world. You can do anything, and will do everything better than I. You are my inspiration in every way. of consumptive beauty, to nineteenth and twentieth century tropes of the "starving artist" or "starving poet," to abjected, anorexic fashion models of the present day, 2 "hunger artistry" has persisted, with much complexity, as a theme in occidental culture. This dissertation aims to tease out of some of the powerful resonances of this mode of aesthetic self-presentation, and mode of being, in the context of some of the selfalienating, abjecting, and deadening conditions of modernity responded to by each of the authors in my study. It is one theme among several, but the one that, as a vital selfunmaking within the context of self-and world-making, unites the rest. Each of my authors identifies a subjectivity, articulated in relation to a version of modernity, that must be accessed through a withdrawal of bodily form; a self-negation as the location of existence. As a site of self-distancing, the body in these works is both a manifestation of critical thought and a work of art. As a site of self-dissolution, the body functions as a visual remnant of a self announcing its disappearance. And as an articulated shape, the body parodies the process of subject formation in reverse, insisting that we not look beyond the surface to find its depth. Together these modes of bodily being/non-being comprise an aesthetic that marks the self as a site of multiple distances, both inherent to self-consciousness and amplified by the historical, cultural, and economic developments of modernity. The impossibility of full self-presence, of fulfillment, shows the self as always at some distance from coinciding with itself. Of course, this formulation takes on different meanings in different historical periods. For instance, Marx describes alienation in a way that calls attention to the impossibility of consumption under property relations and, later, commodification. Marx writes about this deadened state of humankind: "So much does labor's realization appear as a loss of reality that the worker loses reality to the point of starving to death." 3 The commodity takes on a life that the worker does not have, but the commodity, or the object, becomes the vehicle of life. Whereas Marx in the early work would call for a return to a nonalienated subject, alienation becomes the critical mode for these modernist writers to explore available conditions of desire. For Jean-Luc Nancy, the very enunciation of the "I" requires a distancing of the self from the self, a distance at the heart of presence. My argument is that this distance is manifest in the spectacle of consumer culture that is a scene of consumption and the impossibility of consumption at once. Transposed in these works, to desire is to desire something that cannot fulfill, and thus to desire unfulfillment. As Oscar Wilde remarked, "A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied." 4 Desiring nothingness is a form of consumption. In this way, an engagement with hunger is an engagement with, and a making visible of, the abjection and the objectification of the human subject. In laying claim to selfestrangement as a location of the self by treating the body as that which can be flattened, voided, and denied, this aesthetic move also underscores what Jean-Luc Nancy points to as the "ex" in existence that is articulated in bodily spatial organization. The body is always ex-static, outside of itself, a mode of vital self-alienation. My first chapter, "Ascetic Elaborations," concerns Baudelaire's writings on the "hero of modern life," in particular his representation and interpretation of the dandy of his day, an urban man with aristocratic affinities and affects whose presentation of self as 8 Baudelaire, "In Praise of Cosmetics," The Painter, 33. 9 From "Form and its Spirit" ("La Forme et son esprit" in La Forme en jeu), quoted in Nancy, The Pleasure in Drawing, 58. 10 Baudelaire, Mon coeur mis à nu. 11 Le Decadent, Anatole Bajou, editor, 1888. 12 The term modern, as I am using it here, suggests an urban, literary and artistic class of individuals conscious of and reflecting in their works the times they live in. The modernity I am referencing refers to Western Europe, for which Paris, as Walter Benjamin and later David Harvey have argued, was an epicenter. See for instance Benjamin, Paris: Capital of the Nineteenth Century, and Harvey, Paris: Capital of Modernity. My dissertation situates itself within a European, and particularly French, modernist literary, cultural, artistic, and intellectual lineage. 100 Colette is both author and character in her book, and the line between the two is not necessarily clear, as the book is presented to the reader as a kind of journalistic reporting, and Colette herself calls it something close to an autobiography. Yet, it is ultimately a creative work, and so, unless otherwise specified, when I write of Colette while discussing the text I am referring to her as a character within it, and not as author.