Modernism & the Philosophy of Egoism
Jean-Michel Rabat�© profile
R 12-3
The aim of the 700 seminar, "Modernism and the Philosophy of Egoism", will be to link the specific historical moment known as "Modernism" to a longer debate hinged around the claims of the individual subject fighting against all repressive systems, claims that were often refused as being either "egoistic" or "anarchistic". From Pascal's critique of the "Ego's self-love" to Max Nordau's wholesale attack on the ideology of "egomania" (in Degeneration), we'll see how the negative space carved for the subject provides an a contrario definition of modernist re-evaluations of the self. Starting from Lacan's rereading of Cartesian subjectivity and Nietzsche's dramatization of the artist as creator of values, we'll focus on Max Stirner's The Ego and His Own, seen both as a text-book for later anarchism and as Marx's and Engels's most subtle enemy (in the German Ideology). Stirner leads to Meredith's famous novel, The Egoist, whose ethos in its turn underpins the feminist project of a Dora Marsden who chose to rename the radical magazine the New Free Woman as The Egoist. We'll read Joyce, Pound and Eliot in the context of the philosophy set forward by The Egoist, and then launch into a discussion of "impersonality" (Rimbaud, Mallarm�, Eliot) and of "masks" or poetic "heteronyms" (Pessoa, Pound, Yeats). We'll conclude with Beckett's last texts, especially Not-I, so as to return to Blanchot's meditation on the third person as a "step beyond" in the "writing of the disaster".
updated 2006-10-17
