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

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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 Yourcenars 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.
Yourcenars 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 M ans thought on irony and history, Benjamins writing on film and translation,
and Heideggers 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 Heideggers vision of national identity in Nazi
Germany. Yourcenars 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 Yourcenars 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

A cknowledgements..................................................................................................................7

A bbreviations............................................................................................................................ 8

INTRODUCTION..................................................................................................................9

CHAPTER ONE
Subjectivity, Politics and the Limits o f 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 o f A uthenticity.............................................. 75

Constructing and reconstructing......................................................................................76

Irony and authenticity........................................................................................................85

Time and difference........................................................................................................ 104

Medicine and m adness....................................................................................................115

4
 Table o f contents

CHAPTER THREE
Cultural Modernity and Narrative Authenticity: Yourcenar and Benjamin... 123

Yourcenar and cultural m odernity.................................................................................125

Authenticity and illusion................................................................................................ 136

Collecting fragm ents....................................................................................................... 141

The paradigm of translation...........................................................................................147

Life and afterlife......................................................................................................... 151

Translation, authentication............................................................................................. 159

CHAPTER FOUR
Space, Time and the Existential Subject: Yourcenar and H eidegger................. 165

Space and the existential subject...................................................................................169

Time and the existential subject.................................................................................... 180

Acceptance and guardianship........................................................................................ 189

Existence and h istory ......................................................................................................198

CHAPTER FIVE
Yourcenars Political Aestheticism and Ambivalent Discourse of Identity 210

The universality of G reece.............................................................................................213

Modernity and political aestheticism in Y ourcenar.................................................. 219

National aestheticism: Lacoue-Labarthe..................................................................... 222

Between existential authenticity and political aestheticism ..................................... 233

Beyond the political aesthetic: Lyotard and the jew s .............................................261

The persistence of the Other.......................................................................................... 269

5
 Table o f contents

C O N C L U S IO N ......................................................................................................................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 m ans 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 an effort to think man in non-essentialist,

non-objectivist and non-positivist terms, as an entity with no stable form or content.

In her published interviews with Patrick de Rosbo, Yourcenar uses the adjective

existentiel in a comparable way. She specifies that in her novel Memoires

d Hadrien (1951),

9
 Introduction

nous avons enfin un personnage dont je dirais que 1image que finalement nous
obtenons de lui est existentielle et non essentielle, pour parler le jargon philosophique
de notre temps (autant celui-la quun autre), c est-a-dire que nous avions un individu
unique com me nous tous, fait com me nous tous d elements fortuits assem bles un peu
au hasard, et quil s agit de retrouver dans leur com plexite.

Similarly, in the case of Zenon, the main character of her novel L CEuvre au noir

(1968), she writes that:

de nouveau j etais passee dune realite poetique, archetypale et aussi, disons-le,

conventionnelle, a une realite existentielle : la realite d un individu donne a un
moment donne.1

While Yourcenar is keen on distancing herself from the existentialists of her time,

she employs the distinction between essence and existence to underline the

contingency, facticity and spatio-temporal concreteness of two of her main narrative

characters. In the sense that Yourcenar gives to the word, and which I also intend to

follow in my analysis, existence is inherently differential, because it suffers an

incessant change, and refers to the actual or imagined path towards subjectivity and

selfhood.

If such concepts as existence, subjectivity and selfhood occupy a prominent

place in Yourcenars oeuvre, the same cannot be said about politics. Strictly speaking,

it is only in two of her novels, Denier du reve (1934, re-written in 1959) and

Memoires d Hadrien that politics, in the everyday sense of the word, plays an

important role. Even in these novels, the political as such is not discussed for its own

sake, but always supplements the existential, and its meaning depends on the way it

shapes, or is shaped by, the narrative characters. However, it is precisely the

confluence of the existential and the political in Yourcenar that interests me. As an

arrangement of the relationship between, on the one hand, individuals and

communities, and on the other, space and time, politics forms an aspect of

subjectivity. W hether in the guise of the politicized subject, of the subject of politics,

1 Patrick de R osbo, Entretiens radiophoniques avec M arguerite Yourcenar (Paris: Mercure de France,
1972), pp. 66-67.

10
 Introduction

or of the subject as an agent of politics, the political frequently determines the

existential parameters of the narrative. 2 It is certainly present in Yourcenars

historical fiction and affects the development of her characters within the historical

settings in which they act. Thus, even if Yourcenar is not consistently preoccupied

with politics in her work, the political emerges as the productive relationship between

man and world and as an important component of the subjects personal trajectory

and identity. As I shall endeavour to show, political subjectivity is also differential.

The individual or the community do not simply impose their presence on the world in

a linear and authoritative way, but are in a constant state of negotiation with space,

tradition and history. Politics is understood, at least in principle, as the acceptance

and management of the difference that separates man from the world.

However, it is in the realm of the aesthetic that difference manifests itself the

most clearly and the most persistently in the work of Yourcenar. The principal way in

which this happens is through the failure of the work of art fully to represent reality.

Yourcenars rich and idiosyncratic art criticism, as well as her numerous references

to art - modem or ancient, western or oriental - in her fiction, frequently revolve

around the theme of the impossibility of adequately depicting nature or the human

body in art. More generally, though, Yourcenar is concerned with arts fundamental

tendency to confer stable meanings to things, whereas, for her, meanings are

ephemeral, fleeting and historically constituted. In this sense, semantic and semiotic

difference does not affect only the visual arts, but every act of representation,

whether artistic or literary. Art and literature fail in their programmatic goal to

represent reality and experience, insofar as artistic and linguistic representations are

motivated by the impulse to originate new stabilizing significations.

2 The politicized subject is represented in Yourcenars work by such radical figures as Marcella in
D enier du reve, Remy in Souvenirs Pieux (1974), Mishima in M ishim a ou la vision du vide (1980);
the subject o f p olitics includes Rome in M em oires d H adrien and Europe in Yourcenars essay
Diagnostic de l Europe (1929); and the subject as an agent o f politics is best em bodied by Hadrien as
an emperor, in M em oires d Hadrien.
3 For exam ple, Zenon persecuted by the authorities in L CEuvre au noir.

11
 Introduction

The same is true with regard to other forms of writing, such as philosophy and

historiography. While Yourcenar was an ardent student of history and a

philosophically-minded writer, she also insisted on the abstract character of

philosophical and historical interpretation. For her, philosophers and historians risk

conceptualizing experience at least as much as artists, poets and novelists. As we

shall see, Yourcenar considers that every act of representation, whether properly

aesthetic or not, installs a conceptual distance between a signifier - a work of art, a

piece of writing - and a set of factual referents which belong to reality or life.

Precisely because representation is understood as a process of giving form and

meaning to what is in itself amorphous and without permanent content, art is the

privileged space where difference is the most acutely felt.

As I mentioned above, that which is primarily without stable form or content is

human existence itself. If representation in all its guises fails to capture what is

changeable and disorderly in the world, then a fortiori it fails to convey the unsettled

reality of the self and the contingency of experience. This situation complicates all

aspects of the effort to understand oneself, because, as I shall be discussing in

Chapter 1, representation is the principal way of accessing the self as well as the

world. It is the indispensable means of self-knowledge and of cognizance of the

world, while at the same time it introduces difference and transforms both the world

and the self into objects, concepts and symbols. This problem is central in Memoires

d Hadrien, where the chief issue is to make sense of ones life, and in L CEuvre au

noir, where knowledge of the world is the main stake. In both these novels, the quest

for authenticity is to be understood in terms of the struggle to transcend the impasse

of representation. In my thesis I shall be using such categories as the aestheticization

of experience, the conceptualization of reality and the rhetorical constitution of

selfhood to refer to the problematic of representation.

The aesthetic or representational character of m ans relationship with the world

is even more evident when it comes to politics. I just referred to politics in the

12
 Introduction

Yourcenarian text as an arrangement and a management of space and time. Man

structures and allocates meaning to the world in such a way that the polis is already

an aesthetic-political representation. I shall discuss this point in more detail in

Chapter 2, with reference to Memoires d Hadrien and to the cities that Hadrien

founds during his reign.4 As we shall see, the political meets the aesthetic in a

fundamental way in this novel. The model for the organization of the state and for the

formation of political subjectivity is the work of art. The basic notions of

representation, beauty, order and difference are at work in Yourcenars definition of

both the state and the task of the statesman. It is in this context that I use the term

the political aesthetic in the title of my thesis. I shall be arguing that, especially in

Memoires d Hadrien, politics emerges as a form of aesthetics, while the political

leader is an arch-artist who undertakes to negotiate the impasse of representation.

In this way, the existential and the political parameters constitute aspects of the

problematic of aesthetic representation in the work of Marguerite Yourcenar.

Existential authenticity and political authenticity are interrelated in as much as they

depend on the possibility of authentic representation. If authentic representation were

possible, if m ans artistic, literary, etc., creations could indeed convey the variability

and multiformity of life, then man would be able to recognize himself existentially

and politically in his works. However, following a line of reflection that brings

Yourcenar close to Heidegger, as well as to some of his poststructural epigones, she

insists that such a representation is beyond our capacity. How is it then that

Yourcenar persists in the search for authenticity in her novels and criticism? Before

attempting to answer this question in the chapters that follow, I propose to examine

briefly here the ways in which Yourcenar employs the term authenticity, and the

4 M em oires d Hadrien is the imaginary memoirs o f Roman emperor Hadrian. In my thesis, I shall be
using the name Hadrien, with an e \ to refer to the main character o f this novel; in the few cases in
which I shall be referring to the Roman emperor (117-138 CE), I shall be writing Hadrian, with an
a.

13
 Introduction

various contexts in which it has been used in twentieth century literature and

criticism in the West.

Readers of Yourcenar will notice that she does not use the term authenticite in

the existential and political sense that I am attaching to it in my thesis. This word and

its derivatives appear not infrequently in the Yourcenarian text to mean genuine,

proper or exact. For example, in Les Visages de lHistoire dans l Histoire

Auguste (1962), Yourcenar distinguishes between the dubious authenticity of the

Historia Augusta as a document (presumably written in the 4th Century CE) and the -

equally uncertain - truthfulness and veracity of its content. She argues that modem

historians suspect this text of being une quasi totale im posture, and then notes:

L authenticite est une chose, la veracite en est une autre.5 Authenticity is here

understood in the sense of correct attribution to an author. The distinction between

authenticite, as the truth of the object, and veracite, as the truth of its content, is, of

course, fundamental to philology and to artistic connoisseurship. Both authenticity

and veracity are understood in this context as forms of correspondence. Veracity

clearly involves a correspondence between the actual facts, e.g. the historical facts

mentioned in Historia Augusta, and their narrative exposition. But authenticity is

also a form of correspondence. As Geoffrey Hartman notes, the authenticity of the

artist matters as a guarantee of a direct correspondence between the mind of the

maker and the attributed w ork.6 In this sense, authenticity denotes an undisputed

correspondence and continuity between author and work, and it is opposed to

artificiality and forgery.7

5 EM, p. 6. Les V isages de l histoire dans l Histoire Auguste , is included in Yourcenars

collection o f essays Sous benefice d inventaire (Paris: Gallimard, 1962).
6 Geoffrey H. Hartmann, Scars o f the Spirit: The Struggle again st Inauthenticity (N ew York:
Macmillan, 2002), p. 9.
7 In her essay Le Chainon manquant de lecriture, May Chehab discusses the same passage from
Yourcenars Les V isages de lhistoire and hints at the idea o f authenticity as a form o f
correspondence. In May Chehab, Le Chainon manquant de lecriture, in (ed.), M argu erite Yourcenar
entre litterature et science (Clermont-Ferrand: SIEY, 2007), pp. 157-174, (pp. 172-73).

14
 Introduction

We find this understanding of authenticity in other parts of Yourcenars work. In

the Carnets de notes de Memoires d Hadrien (written in 1952), a series of

fragmentary reflections on the composition of this novel, Yourcenar complains about

the loss of authenticity suffered by the ruins of the Villa Adriana, emperor Hadrians

final residence in Tivoli, as a result of bad restoration. La moindre restauration

imprudente infligee aux pierres, la moindre route macadamisee entamant un champ

ou lherbe croissait en paix depuis des siecles, creent a jam ais 1irreparable. La beaute

seloigne ; lauthenticite aussi.8 In this passage, authenticity has again the meaning

of continuity between an original and its current form. Authenticity is also associated

with beauty, implying that the correspondence between the original artefact and its

ruins is what makes it beautiful for us today.

Nevertheless, continuity and correspondence between the authentic object and its

origin are not linear and unproblematic. In her essay Voyages dans lespace et

voyages dans le tem ps (1982), Yourcenar refers to the process of abstraction to

which the contemporary visitor to ancient monuments has to take recourse in order to

visualize them as they originally stood. For example, she argues that the protective

rope surrounding Stonehenge nous empeche efficacement de faire un saut de trente

siecles. Then she makes an extraordinary statement about the authenticity of the

Parthenon in Athens:

Pour voir le Parthenon, com m e l ont vu non seulement Pericles, qui le connut
surcharge d omements multicolores et de boucliers d or qui nous gateraient sans
doute la purete de son architecture, ou Byron, qui le vit authentiquement en ruine,
mais encore nous-memes il y a une trentaine d annees, il faut eliminer en pensee la
pollution d Athenes.9

According to Yourcenar, it is not Pericles, its commissioner, but Byron who saw

Parthenon in its authentic form, that is, authentiquement en ruine. For her,

8 OR, p. 540.
9 This and the previous quotation, EM, p. 699. V oyages dans lespace et voyages dans le tem ps was
included in Yourcenars posthumous collection o f essays, Le Tour d e la prison (Paris: Gallimard,
1991).

15
 Introduction

authenticity is a quality pertaining to the ruin, in its purity, simplicity and

suggestiveness. The authentic ruin is continuous with its origin, the ancient temple,

in a paradoxical and troublesome fashion: not only is this continuity difficult to

discern through the pollution of the modem city, but the origin to which the ruin

corresponds is, we are told, inauthentic and impure. It follows that, for Yourcenar,

authenticity and originality are two distinct concepts. Authenticity is a quality which

remains hidden and which reveals itself to the observer once a process of almost

random transformations occurs (e.g. transformations effected in time).

The word authenticite is used by Yourcenar in an analogous way with reference

to concepts and ideas. In a footnote to her essay on the poet Constantin Cavafy,

Yourcenar distinguishes between authentic and inauthentic Hellenism. II importe

pourtant de distinguer chez [Cavafy] entre les belles pieces d un hellenisme

authentique, et celles ou il lui arrive de ceder a un gout [...] pour une Grece

d etagere.10 Authenticity is again considered as a quality which remains hidden,

although it is available to those - artists or spectators, writers or readers - who look

for it. At a different point in this essay, Yourcenar is even more explicit as regards

the hidden character of authenticity. Discussing Cavafys mysticism, she observes

that it never transforms into linguistic and literary hermeticism; then she adds a

footnote in which she remarks: C est ce qui lui donne son etrange caractere

d esoterisme authentique, c est-a-dire bien cache.11 Cavafys esotericism remains

hidden behind the clarity of expression and the neatness of poetic form. This is what

makes it authentic.

From this discussion, a pattern begins to emerge as to the way Yourcenar

understands and uses the word authenticite and its derivatives. Authenticity is

opposed to the artificial and the pastiche. It implies a continuity with an origin, but

10 EM, p. 138. From Presentation critique de Constantin C avafy (written 1939, revised 1953), an
essay included in Sous benefice d inventaire.
11 EM, p. 158n.

16
 Introduction

this continuity is not untroubled. The authentic tends to blend with the inauthentic or

to remain concealed behind it. Thus, when we read in the work of Yourcenar that an

object or an idea is authentic, we are not in the presence of something original. On

the contrary, Yourcenar suggests that we are at a distance from the self-sufficiency of

the original object or idea, while the authentic is in fact an authentic representation.

Even before its tasteless restoration, the Villa Adriana was not identical to the

original Villa built by Hadrian, but a set of authentic ruins. Similarly, in the realm

of ideas, Cavafy cannot express his Hellenism and esotericism in an immediate

manner; he has to re-iterate these original notions cautiously, to re-present them in

such a way that their meaning does not figure autonomously or plainly in his poetry.

His Hellenism is a poetical transformation of the original, plain idea of Hellenism.

Finally, Yourcenar goes as far as to suggest that the origin with which authentic

representations are associated may not actually exist. If, in antiquity, the Parthenon

was burdened with needless embellishments, it is Byron who saw it authentiquement

en ruine. The original to which Byrons Parthenon corresponds exists only in our

imagination.

The difference between originality and authenticity is crucial for Yourcenar, as it

is for my study. If the terms authenticity and inauthenticity pertain principally to

representations, then it is also true that they describe two forms of difference from an

origin. Authentic difference is exemplified by the untouched ruins (such as

Yourcenar saw them in Piranesis etchings, for instance), while inauthentic difference
19
is exemplified by the artificial and the pastiche. It is therefore not an exaggeration

to claim that Yourcenars artistic, literary and cultural criticism constitutes a tireless

search for authentic representations. Her work in general can be considered as an

effort to distinguish between the authentic and the artificial, and as an exploration of

the obscure ways in which the authentic differs from a hypothetical origin.

12 I am referring here to Yourcenars essay Le Cerveau noir de Piranese (1 9 5 9 -1 9 6 1 ), in Sous

benefice d inventaire.

17
 Introduction

Following Yourcenar, in this thesis, I employ the term authenticity principally

as an aesthetic term which implies simultaneously a continuity with, and a difference

from, an origin. Nonetheless, my interest is not primarily in artistic authenticity, but

in the possibility of authentic existence and authentic politics as they emerge in

Yourcenars writings. The criterion of authenticity applies both to existence and to

politics: each is thoroughly affected by the problematic of representation.

Occasionally, Yourcenar comes close to associating explicitly the idea of

authenticity with the question of existence. For example in Les Yeux ouverts, her

book of interviews with Matthieu Galey, she expresses her opinion on the

recreational use of drugs as follows: Je suis contre tout ce qui est artificiel. Je trouve

que lesprit doit agir d apres soi-meme, d apres ses propres lois, sans bequilles et en
1T
tout cas sans echasses. It is significant that Yourcenar locates the problem in the

artificiality of the experience that drugs incite. She aestheticizes the issue of drugs, by

suggesting that this experience is fake, inauthentic. More generally, though, it must

be recognized that she did not use the term authenticite to define existential self-

fulfilment and self-realization.

The reason for this may be that Yourcenar kept herself consciously at a distance

from the existentialist tradition of the twentieth century. I discuss this topic in more

detail in Chapter 4, with reference to Heideggers existentialism. However, the ideal

of authentic selfhood has been central to philosophy long before European

existentialism. Marshall Berman locates the beginning of the search for authenticity

at the dawn of the Christian era, which, let us not forget, is also the historical setting

of Memoires d Hadrien. Berman argues that it was after the disintegration of the

Platonic polis, albeit after a gap of several centuries, that man looked for ways to

affirm his individuality:

13 Marguerite Yourcenar, Les Yeux ouverts: Entretiens a vec M atthieu G aley (Paris: Le Centurion,
1980), p. 112.

18
 Introduction

It was only long after the disintegration o f this ancient po lis that the basis o f personal
identity was questioned system atically and the search for authenticity was formally
begun. The Stoics o f N eros age found them selves in a world governed by chance,
contingency and arbitrary power [...]. Personal identity had to be fought for and
wrested from such a w orld.14

The search for authenticity is associated by Berman with the beginnings of

individualism and the formation of individual political identity. Berman goes on to

document the re-emergence of the quest of authenticity in Montesquieu and

Rousseau, while trying to put forth a new-Leftist agenda for the achievement of

authentic morality and citizenship.

Both these aspects, the moral and the political, stress the interplay between the

individual and the community which characterizes the concept of authenticity, as we

still understand it today. In as much as the call for authenticity is also the call for self-

realization, the individual finds herself opposed to social norms and moral demands.

In his book The Ethics o f Authenticity, Charles Taylor gives the individualistic

interpretation of authenticity:

Being true to m yself means being true to my own originality, and that is something
only I can articulate and discover. In articulating it, I am also defining myself. I am
realizing a potentiality that is properly my own. This is the background understanding
to the modem ideal o f authenticity and to the goals o f self-fulfilm ent or self-
realization in which it is usually couched.15

Taylor recognizes the political and social dangers involved in this interpretation, and

dismisses the resulting instrumentalism and the culture of narcissism from which,

he thinks, modernity and postmodemity suffer.16 However, he suggests that we can

resist further fragmentation, both internal and societal, and understand authenticity in

an intersubjective or dialogicaf context.17 He proposes that we should rethink

14 Marshall Berman, The P olitics o f Authenticity: R adical Individualism an d the Em ergence o f

M odern Society (N ew York: Atheneum, 1970), p. xx. In Chapter 2 o f my thesis, I shall investigate the
ways in which Hadrien attempts to differentiate his approach to authenticity from that o f his
contemporary Stoics.
15 Charles Taylor, The Ethics o f A uthenticity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), p.
29.
16 See Taylor, p. 55.
17 Taylor, p. 33.

19
 Introduction

authenticity as a normative ideal involving creation and construction as well as

discovery, originality, and self-definition in dialogue.18

The normative and intersubjective characteristics of authenticity have been

emphasized more recently by Alessandro Ferrara in his 1998 book, Reflective

Authenticity: Rethinking the Project o f Modernity. He claims that

the category o f authenticity, broadly understood as the congruity o f the self or o f a

collective identity with itself - a congruity not reducible to consistency - [...] can
help us to account even better than autonomy and difference for what it is that cultural
rights, multiculturalism and the right to privacy are meant to protect, for what we
understand today by human dignity.19

Ferraras argument is too refined to summarize here, but it may be read as an effort to

re-institute a universal horizon of reference which is appropriate to a

postmetaphysical standpoint.20 What I would like to stress at this point is that

Ferraras definition of authenticity relies on a principle of congruity which is not

reducible to consistency. This definition is close to Yourcenars perception of

authenticity. As I discussed above, she understands authenticity in terms of a troubled

continuity with an origin. Authenticity is, for her, a criterion for assessing

representations on the basis of an aesthetic model. The same applies to Ferraras

concept of authenticity.21

This aesthetic approach to authenticity is amply used by the existentialist

philosophers, according to Jacob Golomb. In his book In Search o f Authenticity:

From Kierkegaard to Camus, he examines the development of the notion of

authenticity in five existentialist philosophers, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger,

Sartre and Camus, and finds that at least the last four understand this notion in terms

of the authentic individual who individualizes and creates himself. In this act of

18 Taylor, p. 66.
19 Alessandro Ferrara, Reflective Authenticity: Rethinking the P ro ject o f M odernity (London:
Routledge, 1998), p. 52, my emphasis.
20 Ferrara, p. 10.
21 See, for instance, Ferrara, p. 10, where he writes o f the well-form ed work o f art as a model for
authenticity.

20
 Introduction

creation, creator and creation merge.22 Man forms himself existentially as a work of

art.

Golomb argues that authenticity defines itself as lacking any definition. All the

same, a few paragraphs further down, Golomb offers a definition of authenticity as

the authentic response of being true to the project of forming ones own self, which

entails reluctance to conform to any existential is or ought or to seek some

transcendental ought.23 This passage implies that authenticity is a possibility of the

self that transcends ethics, conceptuality and difference. For Golomb, to be authentic

means to produce a full and solid representation of oneself that leaves no part of

oneself unaccounted for. W riting on Sartres aesthetic model of authenticity in La

Nausee, Golomb remarks:

Sartres conclusion is that one is saved by music, more generally, by art. In creating
ones self, one may becom e both a genuine artist and a work o f art. B y becom ing and
living like a saxophone note, like a m elody, one can achieve justification o f on es
existence. The metaphor o f music and the aesthetic model o f authenticity transform
this gloom y and nauseating novel into an optimistic literary manifesto o f the viability
o f the search for authenticity within the anonymous crowd.

The idea of redemption through the stability, fullness and meaningfulness of a single

note suggests that the existentialist model of authenticity, as Golomb perceives it, is

linear, harmonious and self-sufficient. This model is very far indeed from

Yourcenars understanding of authenticity as a troubled and differential continuity

with an uncertain origin. While both Golomb and Yourcenar employ aesthetic

models of authenticity, Golom bs model stresses the hope of absolute self-creation,

while Yourcenars model underlines the impossibility of total representation.

I cannot examine the different existentialist approaches to authenticity in further

detail here, but I shall be comparing Heideggers analysis of authentic being with

22 Jacob Golomb, In Search o f Authenticity: From K ierkegaard to Camus (London: Routledge, 1995),
p. 71. The quotation refers specifically to N ietzsches concept o f authenticity in The Birth o f Tragedy,
but it describes succinctly the aesthetic approach to existential authenticity in general.
23 Golomb, p. 13.
24 Golomb, p. 145-146. The quotations within the quotation are from Jean-Paul Sartre, N ausea, trans.
by R. Baldick (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982).

21
 Introduction

Yourcenars perception of authenticity in Chapters 4 and 5. One of my arguments

will be that, for both Yourcenar and Heidegger, the concepts of unity, identity and

authenticity are equally complex and problematic. Not only does Yourcenars

approach to authenticity have little in common with such one-dimensional aesthetic

models as Taylors and Golom bs, but it challenges the metaphysics underpinning the

very concepts of creating and constructing.

To give but one example here, in her introduction to her play Qui n a pas son

Minotaure ?, Yourcenar explains that she re-wrote this work several times over a

period of thirty years, experimenting with different operatic, comedic, grotesque and

farcical representations of the central character, Thesee. Then she links the gradual

and fragmentary creation of the figure of Thesee with that of her more famous

character, Hadrien.

Quelques annees plus tard, j allais essayer de decrire dans Hadrien un homme qui peu
a peu se construit a l aide de ses actes et du meme coup organise un monde. Je crois
bien que je naurais pas reussi a en donner meme l idee la plus inadequate, si je
n avais pas d abord tente cette entreprise de comique disintegration.25

Yourcenar wants us to know that it was the disintegration of the character of Thesee

which allowed for the narrative re-constitution of the character of Hadrien. Although

an aesthetic model of existential and political self-authentication is followed in

Memoires ( un homme qui [...] se construit et [...] organise un monde), this model

is not spontaneous or undisturbed. It provides for the conscious deconstruction of the

narrative subject, and for its subsequent reconstruction on the basis of individual

fragments. At a narrative level, the figure of Hadrien is authenticated by virtue of its

being explicitly a repetition of fragments rather than an original unified creation of

the authors mind. This point will be developed further in Chapter 3.

25 Introduction to Qui n a p a s son M inotaure ?, in Marguerite Yourcenar, Theatre, 2 vols (Paris:

Gallimard, 1971), II, p. 179. This play was first published in Marguerite Yourcenar, Le m ystere
d Alceste, suivi de: Qui n'a p a s son M inotaure, (Paris: Plon, 1963).

22
 Introduction

Can we therefore argue that Yourcenar was a step ahead of her time in terms of

how she understood and attempted to ensure the authenticity of her novels and

narrative characters? In one sense, this is not true, since novelists have always looked

for innovative ways to ensure authenticity in their work. A prime example is Stendhal

who, as Ann Jefferson argues, uses realism, repetition and, more scandalously,

plagiarism, in a way that heightens the authenticity of the narrative. With reference to

realism, Jefferson remarks that, for Stendhal, the proper use of language requires the

same naturel that is indispensable to authentic forms of passion.26 The implication

is that the expression of true passion requires conventional narrative means. But if

passion, where the demands of authenticity are just as great as they are in fiction, if

passion can accommodate and even flourish on a repetition of the already written,

then what about the novel?27 Jefferson maintains that it is not originality or repetition

as such that assert the authenticity of the novel. The important thing is that [...]

there is a deliberate sounding of more than one voice, and a careful positioning of the

desired reader to enable her to hear all the voices at work in the texts.28 W hile I agree

with Jefferson that repetition in itself is neither positive nor negative, neither vulgar

nor sublime, I shall be arguing that, by foregrounding the instance of repetition,

Yourcenar attempts to revive the cause of authenticity, narrative or otherwise.29 I

shall also re-examine the issue of realism and whether it precludes or, on the

contrary, helps to affirm the possibility of authenticity in writing. In any case, it is

safe to conclude that Yourcenar does not stand out among other writers specifically

for problematizing the issue of narrative authenticity in her novels.

Rather, I believe that the singularity of Yourcenars approach becomes manifest

when examined in the specific literary and cultural context in which it is inscribed.

On the one hand, she attempts to narrate the struggle for authenticity, while avoiding

26 Ann Jefferson, Reading Realism in Stendhal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 93.
27 Jefferson, p. 217.
28 Jefferson, p. 217.
29 Jefferson, p. 217.

23
 Introduction

the existentialist tendency of using fiction to illustrate a philosophical point. On the

other hand, she thematizes the problematic of authenticity in narrative but, unlike her

contemporary nouveau-romanciers, she sees the novel primarily as the writing of

adventure, rather than the adventure of writing. I am borrowing these phrases from

Fran^oise van Rossum-Guyon, who writes:

En s affirmant com me aventure d une ecriture au lieu de lecriture dune aventure

[...], en passant de 1autorepresentation a 1antirepresentation, le Nouveau Roman
[...] se constitue en theorie du roman puisquil met a nu sa condition de possibility
selon laquelle c est la narration qui constitue la fiction et non 1inverse.

For Yourcenar, focusing on ecriture as such does not teach us anything new about the

representational character of either writing or experience. It is not necessarily the

breaking of textual continuity, but the mise-en-scene and the practice itself of

writing which show the theoretical and therefore artful and artificial character of the

novel. As Michel de Certeau has stressed with reference to Freuds not

unconventional roman fam ilial Moses and Monotheism, La pratique productrice

du texte est la theorie' The text contains and narrates the theory that makes it

possible. In Chapter 1, I shall argue further that, for Yourcenar, it is through the

rigorous use and inevitable failure of realism that the limits of representation become

visible. Authenticity arises paradoxically on the limits of realist narrative as that

obscure truth of the self that does not lend itself to representation.

In this sense, already with Memoires d Hadrien, Yourcenar enters into a

dialogue with the critique of authenticity and representation which is a key aspect of

the postmodern theory of writing (and) the self. In her Poetics o f Postmodernism,

30 Frarujoise van Rossum-Guyon, Le Nouveau Roman com m e critique du roman, in Jean Ricardou
and F. Rossum-Guyon (eds), N ouveau roman : hier, a u jo u rd hui (Paris: Union Generale d Editions,
1974), pp. 215-254, (p. 229).
31 M ichel de Certeau, L Ecriture de Ihistoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), p. 339. Roman fam ilial is
how de Certeau describes Freuds 1939 historico-psychoanalytical study M oses an d M onotheism . De
Certeau italicizes the phrases quoted here to stress that ideas and concepts can be articulated more
convincingly through the rhetorical processes and semiotic structures which constitute the text, rather
than through the analytical language o f science, historiography, criticism and so on. I am not using this
argument against the nouveau rom an, but I believe it is even better illustrated by realist narrative such
as Yourcenars.

24
 Introduction

Linda Hutcheon sums up this critique in terms of the decentring of the subject in

literature as in thought:

In postmodern psychoanalytic, philosophical and literary theory, the further

decentering o f the subject and its pursuit o f individuality and authenticity has had
significant repercussions on everything from our concepts o f rationality to our view o f
the possibilities o f genre.
[...] The move to rethink margins and borders is clearly a move away from
centralization with its associated concerns o f origin, oneness and monumentality that
work to link the concept o f the center to those o f the eternal and universal. The local,
the regional, the non-totalizing are re-asserted as the center becom es a fiction -
necessary, desired, but a fiction nonetheless.32

Following Hutcheons claim, emphasis on the periphery works to challenge the

autonomy of the centre and therefore to delegitimize the struggle for existential,

political and narrative authenticity. As we shall see, Yourcenars pre-emptive answer

is that, even in the traditional context of literary realism, the subject has never been

an autonomous entity preoccupied with consolidating its centrality, but has always

constituted itself in dislocation, with no place to call its own. Because the subject

has no place, it has never been possible to focus on it, whatever the reservations with

regard to the realist novel in postmodernist thought. On the contrary, as I shall

discuss in Chapter 1, realism is seen by Yourcenar as a technique of focusing on the

trivial, the phenomenal and the repetitive, with an aim of closing in on the shifting

and obscure area of the subject, without even attempting to represent it centrally.

Furthermore, while Yourcenar would readily agree that the systematic discourses of

science and ideology often presume the presence of the subject, she would also add

that the way to deconstruct these discourses is not necessarily by consciously

dismantling the narrative and decentring the subject. One cannot decentre what is

already decentred. My reading of Yourcenar will suggest that, for her at the very

least, the purportedly solid and unitary context to which the realist novel is said to

32 Linda Hutcheon, A P oetics o f Postm odernism : History, Theory, Fiction (London: R outledge, 1988),
p. 58.

25
 Introduction

appeal lends itself excellently to demonstrating the constitutive dislocation of the

subject.

By explicitly recognizing this state of affairs Yourcenars characters claim their

authenticity. Recognition does not restore the stability of the self, but situates it in the

interplay between purity and impurity, between the desire for order and the certainty

of disorder. In this sense, for Yourcenar, authenticity does not consist in a dialectical

transcendence of irony, but in accepting what I shall designate, following Heidegger,

as the facticity of the self, that is, the fact that the self always exists in a concrete and

finite spatio-temporality that refuses synthesis and redemption. Authenticity emerges

in Yourcenars fiction as the acceptance of the selfs constitutive inauthenticity or,

better, as the swinging back and forth between revolt and acceptance, between the

impulse to create something original and the knowledge that pure creativity is beyond

our capacities. I believe that this dramatic oscillation between extreme existential

states is described in Memoires d Hadrien more explicitly, intensely and

convincingly than in any other work by Yourcenar. This is one of the reasons why I

shall be reading this novel more closely than the rest of Yourcenars literature. My

study will also engage, nonetheless, with the rest of Yourcenars fiction especially

after the Second W orld War, as well as with her literary and artistic criticism. I shall

not, with some exceptions, focus on Yourcenars autobiography and theatre, for

reasons of space, and because this would require different critical and interpretative

approaches.

Yourcenar is not alone in suggesting that authenticity is not a synonym of purity,

but involves the ability to understand what is at stake in the opposition between

purity and impurity. The purity/impurity dichotomy has been a central issue in

twentieth-century art, as Mozaffar Qizilbash discusses in a 1998 essay with the title

Impurity, Authenticity, Humanity.33 Qizilbash asks: Is it distinctively, even

33 Mozaffar Qizilbash, Impurity, Authenticity, Humanity, in Angelaki: Journal o f Theoretical

H umanities, Volum e 3, N o 1 (Oxford: Carfax, 1998), pp. 1-7.

26
 Introduction

authentically, human to be, in some sense, impure?.34 He compares the work of

Mondrian with that of Pollock, and concludes that, with regard to the pure/impure

opposition, Mondrian was the foremost purist in abstract painting and Jackson

Pollocks work is exemplary of the impure.35 Can we therefore claim that Pollock

represents the human more truthfully than Mondrian, asks Qizilbash. Or is the

opposite also arguable, namely, that Mondrian expresses a very human desire for

purity, while Pollock offers a demonic, almost inhuman, representation of impurity?

Drawing from the work of another abstract painter, Barnett Newman, and reflecting

on the imprecisions and imperfections of his paintings, Qizilbash concludes that

the impure is not simply human, nor the pure inhuman. Rather, [...] it is in the

opposition between the pure and the impure that the human shows itself. Further

down, he stresses again that it is [...] in the interplay between the pure and the

impure that the human emerges.36 In Newmans paintings, as in Yourcenars

narrative, authenticity is understood as the drama of impurity over the background of

the quest for purity.

At this point, however, a risk emerges, and it is one which I think was not fully

taken into account in Yourcenars thinking of authenticity. In inverting the meaning

of authenticity, so as to reckon with the fundamental inauthenticity of the self, one

might be tempted to imagine a new universal form of subjectivity whose

characteristic is precisely its instability and decentredness. If impurity is a

constitutive aspect of being human, then one might surmise that humanity can finally

be defined on the basis of its infirmity and inauthenticity. In this sense, self-

realization would lead to the creation of a new identity which, although based on the

acknowledgement of fleetingness and contingency, would itself be ontologically self-

sufficient and secure. It would be a new, negative essence. I believe that this

34 Qizilbash, p. 2.
35 Qizilbash, p. 3.
36 Qizilbash, p. 3.

27
 Introduction

unacknowledged risk lurks in Q izilbashs perception of what it means to be human.

Humanity is depicted by him as a new universal referent. I also believe that this

danger is present in Yourcenars writing, and especially in her determination of

political authenticity.

Political authenticity constitutes one of the structural themes of Memoires

d Hadrien - and this is the other reason why I have chosen to focus mostly on this

novel. As we shall see, the issue of political authenticity has a double reference.

Firstly, it concerns the political identity of the community over which Hadrien rules,

namely the Roman Empire. Secondly, it refers to the political identity of the

community which Yourcenar addresses in principle, namely Europe in the wake of

the Second W orld War. These two communities, with Hadrien as the exemplary

leader and arch-artist, constitute two political subjects that are distinct in time, but

which share the same space, history and, as I shall argue in Chapter 5, the same

geopolitics and geopoetics.

In Memoires d Hadrien, both the individual and the political subjects follow the

same aesthetic model of self-authentication. Just as Hadrien - the individual subject -

constructs himself as an artefact made of pre-existing fragments, so the empire - the

political subject - is organized as a work of art, assimilating and promoting its own

history. Yourcenar clearly hopes that the search for political authenticity in Memoires

will resonate with her contemporary European readers. The novels phenomenal

success in the 1950s suggests that she was justified in that hope.

Yet the transition from the individual to the political and from the existential to

the historical is not so smooth. While, to a certain extent, Memoires d Hadrien

avoids reducing individual existence to a stable identity with immutable

characteristics, the empire is ultimately defined as a entity with a fixed historical and

political content. Put differently, while from an existential viewpoint, the figure of

Hadrien maintains its idiosyncrasy and corresponds only to itself, from a political

28
 Introduction

perspective, the empire and, by inference, Europe, acquire a universal meaning that

exceeds their factical limits. They become pure identities.

The reason for this is, I believe, that the political subject (the em pire, Europe)

is given a concrete geopolitical space in the novel, despite Yourcenars insistence

that the subject is fleeting, mysteriously drifting away from its expected course, and

never inhabiting its proper space. The political subject ceases to be a differential

representation, and becomes a symbol with a concrete referent. Europe and Rome

become signifiers of humanity, beauty and freedom, ideals which draw their

validity from Greece, and in the process exclude other forms of subjectivity which do

not have the same character of universality. In the last chapter of my thesis, I shall be

examining some of the strategies of exclusion deployed in Memoires by looking into

H adriens relationship with his silent lover, Antinoiis, and into Hadriens aggressive

wars against the Jews. Overall, there is room to argue that politics in Memoires is

anchored in the idea of the universality of Greece, and that Greek aesthetic thought

constitutes the missing space of the subject. In this way, the political articulation of

authenticity in Memoires will be shown to preserve those very traditional essentialist

and metaphysical determinations which the individual subject of this novel struggles

to shake off.

Although the last chapter of my thesis will be dedicated to the issue of political

aestheticism and the exclusion of otherness in M emoires, my concern overall is not to

be critical of Yourcenar. Nor do I seek, in the first four chapters, to reclaim

Yourcenar for postmodemity. In addition to studying the adventures of the notion of

authenticity in general, I am interested in helping to establish the specifically modem

character of Yourcenars fiction, criticism and thought. For that purpose, I will be

reading her work in the light of the analyses of authenticity by Benjamin and

Heidegger, two different, but in certain ways compatible, thinkers of modernity. In

29
 Introduction

my investigation, I shall also be consulting selected studies on political and

philosophical modernity by de Man, Lacoue-Labarthe and Lyotard.

O f these thinkers, it is with Martin Heideggers existentialism that Yourcenars

thought on subjectivity, existence and authenticity can be compared the most

fruitfully. This might come as a surprise, given these two writers manifestly

different styles of writing, and also their seemingly diverging attitudes towards a

number of individual themes. Yourcenars balanced, readerly narrative contrasts

sharply with Heideggers unruly poetical-philosophical prose. Moreover,

Yourcenars fiction, however inclined to philosophical meditation, has little to offer

by way of rigorous analysis and conclusive statements. From a different perspective,

Yourcenars work bears the stamp of cosmopolitanism; it opens itself to a variety of

traditions, cultures, languages, arts and literatures, old and new alike. Conversely,

Heideggers life and philosophical attitude seem provincial, almost oblivious of

anything that is not related to his Greco-Germanic references, and suggestively

rooted in the land around Freiburg which he rarely left.37

Yet these differences are not so extreme as they initially appear. Yourcenars

cosmopolitanism seems less assured when considered from the vantage point of

Diagnostic de lEurope, one of her early and most conservative essays, as I shall

discuss in Chapter 3. On the other hand, Heidegger is the philosopher who taught us

about the homelessness of Being - a notion close to the dislocated subject to which I

referred above. There is an element of irony in calling provincial a philosopher

deeply concerned with the ideas of exile and wandering. As Derrida writes,

comment accuser cette pensee [i.e. la pensee de Heidegger] de Terrance

37 See A dornos critique o f H eideggers provincialism, in Theodor W. Adorno, The Jargon o f

Authenticity, trans. by Knut Tarnowski and Frederic W ill (London: Routledge, 1986), especially pp.
53-57. Adorno stresses the falsity o f rootedness in Heidegger (p. 57). With reference to a 1933 radio
broadcast by Heidegger, entitled Why D o W e Stay in the Provinces, Adorno observes that With
wily strategy [Heidegger] disarms the charge that he is provincial; he uses the term provincialism in
a positive sense (p. 53). See Martin Heidegger, Creative Landscape: W hy D o W e Stay in the
Provinces, in Anton Kaes et al. (eds), The W eimar R epublic Sourcebook (Berkeley: University o f
California Press, 1994), pp. 426-428.

30
 Introduction

interminable d etre un nouveau paganisme du Lieu, un culte complaisant du

Sedentaire ? La requete du Lieu et de la Terre n a rien ici [...] du provincialisme ou

du particularisme.38 Furthermore, it may be argued that Yourcenars philosophically

minded literature reflects, rather than resists, Heideggers literary-minded

philosophy.

In my analysis, I shall attempt to trace the similarities between Yourcenars and

Heideggers approaches to existence and subjectivity. I shall place especial emphasis

on their respective accounts of the non-conceptual unity between man, space and

time. I shall also argue that both Heidegger and Yourcenar encourage us to think

unity in terms of difference rather than identity. For both thinkers, unity rests,

paradoxically, on accepting the difference that separates man from the world, and

refuses harmony and identification. Self-authentication will thus be distinguished

from the simplistic view of the existentialist project of creating a meaning for ones

life. Rather, authenticity will be associated with the constant repetition of previous

fragments of meaning, and with the perpetual re-assertion of difference.

In a more critical spirit, I shall point out that Yourcenars and Heideggers

respective accounts of subjectivity are equally affected by the risk of universality. As

I discussed above, this is the risk involved in stabilizing the site of the subject by

considering impurity and differentiality as the subjects immutable and universal

characteristics. I shall argue that, like Yourcenar, Heidegger also looked in Greek

poetics and aesthetics to find a universal site for the subject, and suggested that it was

possible to implement a Greek-inspired aesthetic model of authenticity in modernity.

While for Yourcenar this model serves to create a new political identity for post-war

Europe, in Heideggers political thought, this model is used to inspire a new political

identity for pre-war Germany. This discussion will eventually refer to Heideggers

involvement with the Nazi party in the 1930s, and to the way this involvement is

38 '
Jacques Derrida, V iolence et m etaphysique, L Ecriture et la difference (Seuil: Paris, 1967), pp.
213-14.

31
 Introduction

linked with his philosophy. I will suggest that the same perception of political

authenticity underpins Yourcenars and Heideggers political thought, despite the fact

that Yourcenars approach was much less radical as a result of the then recent war.

Yourcenars existential and political thought will thus be associated with

political modernity, albeit with its darker side. Unlike some of Yourcenars most

vociferous critics, I shall not be quick to decry her putative collaborationist strategy,

nor shall I consider at length here charges of anti-Semitism which, I believe, do not

do justice to the complexity of her thought.39 Still, I shall raise the issue of the

representation of the Jews in Memoires, not to point out the presence of racial

prejudice in Yourcenars writings - 1 do not think there is any - , but to show how her

thought is allied to an understanding of subjectivity and authenticity which also

makes racism and fascism possible. I will suggest that this is not a particularity of

Yourcenars or Heideggers thought, but a sign of a specific strand in political

modernity which of course both authors chose to follow. Especially with regard to

Yourcenar, I wish to examine how the simultaneous quest for authenticity and

exemplarity, for uniqueness and universality, expresses itself in her work as a

particular feature of modernity. Yourcenars work will thus appear to be rooted in

modernity not only in that it opens itself to a series of new and radical questions,

including those of subjectivity and representation, but also in that it seems to exclude

certain forms of alterity which modernity, in some of its guises, refuses to think.

Paradoxically, studies investigating the presence of modernity in Yourcenars

work are scarce. This suggests that Yourcenars tactics of keeping equal distance

39 In his essay Coup de G race as M ale Fantasy: On the Sexual Politics o f Fascism , M ichael Rothberg
writes suggestively o f Yourcenars collaborationist strategy (p. 141), but fails, in my opinion, to
provide any evidence, literary or otherwise, supporting his claim. This essay is in J. H. Sarnecki and I.
Majer O Sickey (eds), Subversive Subjects: Reading M arguerite Yourcenar (M adison, N.J.: Fairleigh
Dickinson University Press, 2004), pp. 125-147. Elaine Marks castigates Yourcenars antisemitism,
racism, classism (p. 86), in her chapter on Yourcenar, entitled Getting Away with Murd(h)er,
Authors Preface and Narrators Text: Reading Marguerite Yourcenars Coup de g ra ce after
Auschwitz , in Elaine Marks, M arrano as M etaphor: The Jewish Presence in French Writing (New
York: Columbia UP, 1996), pp. 85-95.

32
 Introduction

from most literary, philosophical and cultural movements of her time has so far been

successful. As Margaret Elisabeth Colvin wrote not long ago,

while in recent years there has been a steady output o f excellent critical studies,
recordings from numerous colloquiums, and so on, all attesting to the interest
[Yourcenars] work continues to evoke, most o f these critics themes tend to reinforce
her classicism: ethics, history, and universality, to cite only three. Yet strikingly few
studies in recent years have extensively or deepW questioned cultural biases or probed
other premises upon which her reputation rests.

Colvins assessment is especially valid with respect to the dearth of studies aiming to

contextualize Yourcenars corpus in terms of the historical, political and cultural

conjuncture at which it was produced.

To be sure, there have been sporadic efforts to assert Yourcenars literary

modernism or even postmodernism. For instance, in a 1993 essay entitled Yourcenar

postmodeme ?, Luc Rasson compares the lack of any sense of finality in

Yourcenars novel Un homme obscur (1982) with what he perceives to be

Tindifference postmodeme .41 Catherine Golieth, on the other hand, identifies

distinct features of literary and artistic modernity, including fragmentariness, self-

referentiality, loss of meaning, lack of closure and the quest for being-in-itself, in the

key metaphor of alchemy in L CEuvre au noir. Golieth argues that alchemy emerges

in this novel as the absolutely modem art. She writes that T alchim ie aurait realise en

acte ce que les poetes modemes n ont que pense.42 Finally, Colvin also discusses

Yourcenars modernism in an extremely perceptive fashion. She writes that

Yourcenar was undeniably a modernist writer in some respects: for example, in

certain earlier works use of avant-garde expressionism, of myth, and of a classical

40 Margaret Elisabeth Colvin, B aroque Fictions: Revisioning the C lassical in M arguerite Yourcenar
(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005), p. 13. Recent critical approaches to Yourcenars work and persona tend
to com e from the areas o f feminist criticism and psychoanalysis. Such works include Pascal Dore,
Yourcenar ou le fem inin insoutenable (Geneve: Droz, 1999); Carole Allamand, M arguerite Yourcenar
ou Iecriture en m al de m ere (Paris: Imago 2004); and J. H. Sarnecki and I. Majer O Sickey (eds),
Subversive Subjects, to which I referred in the previous note.
41 Luc Rasson, Yourcenar postm odem e ?, in Bulletin de la Societe Internationale d Etudes
Yourcenariennes, N o 12, Tours, Decem ber 1993, pp. 1-6, (p. 6).
42 Catherine Golieth, Au sujet de la modernite de L CEuvre au n o ir, in Bulletin d e la Societe
Internationale d Etudes Yourcenariennes, N o 20, Tours, Decem ber 1999, pp. 123-141, (p. 136).

33
 Introduction

style imitating the recit gidien\ 43 At the same time, Colvin stresses the numerous

contradictions in the work of Yourcenar who, despite her modernism, appeared to

follow an almost reactionary trend in literature.44 These contradictions refer to the

simultaneous instance of classical and modem themes in the work of Yourcenar, such

as unity and plurality, mastery and chaos, authorial presence and absence 45 Colvin

argues that this instability obliges us to re-examine Yourcenars work in the light of

the rules governing the reception and canonization of modem writers, and to study

the way in which modem societies manage their cultural productions.46

In line with this imperative, the present thesis proposes to highlight some of the

specifically modem characteristics of Yourcenars thought and literature. While, in

the examples given, Colvin, Rasson and Golieth are principally concerned with

literary and artistic modernism, I shall be focusing on political, cultural and

philosophical modernity in Yourcenar. Taking into account the current paradoxical

situation in Yourcenarian criticism, whereby the modernity of a 20th-Century writer

needs to be argued and confirmed, I shall pursue an immanent approach for the best

part of my thesis. This means that, rather than identifying the ways in which

Yourcenars work satisfies definitions of modernity that are external to it (as Golieth

does), I shall try to follow its internal dynamic and logic, or lack thereof. Certainly,

the critical terms which I shall be employing - authenticity, subjectivity,

representation, fragmentation, alterity, and so on - carry an independent semantic

charge, a fact which complicates the task of immanent criticism. However, I shall be

adjusting these terms to Yourcenars thought and discourse, so that, for instance,

authenticity will be confounded with its opposite (Chapter 2) and fragmentation will

imply the possibility of totality (Chapter 3). Moreover, I shall single out and

prioritize other terms which are peculiar to Yourcenars vocabulary and thought - for

43 Colvin, p. 17.
44 Colvin, p. 30 and p. 18, respectively, emphasis by the author.
45 Colvin, p. 13.
46 Colvin, p. 30.

34
 Introduction

example, hiatus, disorder, revolt, freedom, acceptance, guardianship, life and eternity.

Finally, my intention is to probe, rather than repress, the unexpected twists and

contradictions of Yourcenars writings. By drawing principally from the resources of

the Yourcenarian text, I hope to highlight the ways in which it articulates, and

responds to, the call of modernity.

Nevertheless, external critique will also be necessary - and I will come to this in

the last chapter of my thesis - when the contradictions and ambiguities of Memoires

d Hadrien will prove impossible to interrogate in their own terms. The issue in that

final chapter will be the possibility of imagining a subject which is free from

ontological determinations and which resists reduction to a stable identity with a

solid home - Greece, Germany or Europe - and a projected future. Since my

argument will be that Yourcenars text shrinks from imagining this subject - a

subject for which she nonetheless persistently searched - , I will take recourse to the

poststructuralist critique of subjectivity and aesthetics and to what might be called a

post-ontological thinking of alterity. The limits of the way authentic subjectivity is

thought in Yourcenar will thus prove to overlap with the limits of philosophical and

political modernity which she embraced as a writer.

Consequently, the present thesis can be broadly divided into two parts which

supplement each other. Chapters 1 to 4 will underscore the intricate and

uncompromising character of the concept of authenticity in Yourcenars existential

and political thought. Chapter 5, on the other hand, will focus on the critique of

authenticity in general and on the limits that the quest for authenticity imposes on

Yourcenars perception of the subject.

More specifically, in Chapters 1 and 2, I shall look in Memoires d Hadrien, in

Yourcenars monographs on Thomas Mann and Constantin Cavafy and, to a lesser

extent, in L CEuvre au noir and Un homme obscur, to see how the quest for

authenticity relates to the impasse of representation. I shall underline the implications

of this impasse with regard to the notion of selfhood, the quest for freedom, and the

35
 Introduction

scope of realism. Finally, I shall bring together her essay Le Temps, ce grand

sculpteur (1954) with Paul de M ans The Rhetoric of Temporality (1969), to

establish Yourcenars answer to the problem of authenticity and, more generally, to

that of semiotic referentiality.

In Chapter 3, I shall open up the discussion to consider the wider cultural and

aesthetic parameters of the quest for authenticity in modernity. Yourcenar will

emerge as an uncommonly astute, if conservative by disposition, critic of modernity,

through a reading of her essay Diagnostic de lEurope in dialogue with Walter

Benjamins The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936).

Further, based on Benjamins insights on translation and the notion of totality, I shall

argue that Yourcenar ensures the narrative authenticity of her works and fictional

characters by treating them as literary fragments existing finitely in time.

Spatiality, temporality and subjectivity in Yourcenar and in Heidegger will

constitute the main themes of Chapter 4 . 1 shall initiate a dialogue between Being and

Time (1927) as well as other works by Heidegger, one the one hand, and various parts

of Yourcenars corpus, from Pindare (1931) to Un homme obscur (1982) on the

other. In the process, I hope to show that Yourcenar develops an unsystematic but

pervasive existential-ontological perception of the subject which, like Dasein, exists

in a state of constant tension between its own past and future and remains in a state of

difference from the world it inhabits finitely. This is the definition of existential

authenticity. However, at the end of this chapter, the aporias of Yourcenars and

Heideggers existentialism will start becoming evident, when the issue of history is

raised. This chapter will ask a series of questions which can be summarized as

follows: How can the authentic hero of Yourcenars fiction, in his solitary union with

his private world, understand and account for the infinite variety, concreteness and

depth of collective history?

The modem subjects confrontation with history will be discussed in the last

chapter of my thesis. Reading Lacoue-Labarthes La Fiction du politique (1987) and

36
 Introduction

Lyotards Heidegger et les juifs (with a lower case j \ 1988), I shall argue that

politics in modernity has generally been perceived in terms of the self constitution of

peoples and nations as works of art. Inspired by a Greek model of aesthetics, this

political aestheticism culminated historically in national aestheticism in the form of

Nazism. I shall claim that, especially in M emoires, Yourcenar embraces an analogous

Greek-inspired perception of politics, and suggests that it is still appropriate for the

purpose of Europes political reconstruction in the aftermath of the Second World

War. Despite the unambiguous rejection of barbarism in Memoires, violence and

exclusion as a result of the aestheticist perception of politics are dominant in this

novel. I shall be tracing and examining instances of otherness which do not

conform to Hadriens Hellenocentric model. More particularly, I shall be focusing on

the cases of Antinoiis and the Jews, who suffer directly or indirectly from Hadriens

actions and remain voiceless or badly understood.

Yourcenars work will thus be shown to participate knowingly in various aspects

of the debate on modernity. Her work incorporates, processes and reflects

modernitys concerns and contradictions, and attempts to provide literary, aesthetic

and political solutions to them. In my opinion, it fails precisely to the extent that

modernity itself failed to confront one of the issues that it so persistently

thematized, namely, the issue of difference in representation. But this failure can

easily and legitimately be rephrased in terms of success. The work of Yourcenar

illustrates exceptionally well the paradoxical state of writing in modernity: it points

to the impasse of representation, but attempts to bypass it; it articulates the political

and historical intertext to which it belongs, but hopes to transcend it; it makes us

aware of the futility of the search for authenticity, but still strives to achieve it.

37
 CHAPTER ONE

S u b j e c t iv it y , P o l it ic s
a n d the L im it s of R e p r e s e n t a t io n

In Memoires d Hadrien, Yourcenar establishes a relationship between subjectivity

and politics on the basis of the problematics of representation. Although the rest of

her fiction often revolves around similar issues, it is in the figure of Hadrien that the

personal and the political are entwined and explored more consistently. The main

narrative device of the novel, the memoirs of emperor Hadrian, serves precisely that

purpose, as does the idea that these memoirs are addressed as a letter to Hadriens

future successor, Marc (Marcus Aurelius). As m emoirs, the novel raises issues of

selfhood, subjectivity and identity; as a long autobiographical letter to the future

emperor, it presents Hadriens political thought and describes his political vision and

activity. Both subjectivity and politics are considered by Yourcenar as forms of

representation of the self and the community which the novel sets out to articulate;

and both are submitted to a constant critique as categories of conceptual abstraction.

This critique is distinctly modem in character and can be thematically connected with

the existential thought of the first half of the twentieth century, on the one hand, and

with poststructuralist theories of representation, on the other. In this chapter, I shall

attempt to identify the particular terms of Yourcenars critique of conceptuality as it

emerges in Memoires d Hadrien, but also in her essays and other works of fiction. I

shall first focus on questions of existence and subjectivity and then on Yourcenars

38
 Chapter 1 - Subjectivity, Politics
and the Limits o f Representation

perception of politics and freedom. This discussion will give rise to a parallel

investigation of Yourcenars narrative realism which, more than a stylistic

preference, constitutes a choice based on her implicit theories on subjectivity and

representation.

The impossibility of the subject

The first chapter of M emoires, Animula vagula blandula, introduces the chief

question of the novel, that of the subject and its relationship with the world. In a

series of philosophical meditations, Hadrien explores the subjects inability to define

itself in relation to a reality which it tends to conceptualize. The issue here is to

understand human existence and Hadrien notes that there are three ways of doing

so, T etude du soi, Tobservation des autres and ie s livres.1 None of these ways is

found to be sufficiently effective, as none offers unmediated insight into the truth of

being. I shall discuss briefly this part of the novel as it forms its theoretical backbone

and defines the conditions of the quest for authentic subjectivity.

The overdetermination of reality through conceptual and artistic manipulation is

succinctly confirmed in Hadriens commentary on les livres: La lettre ecrite m a

enseigne a ecouter la voix humaine, tout comme les grandes attitudes immobiles des

statues m ont appris a apprecier les gestes. Par contre, et dans la suite, la vie m a

eclairci les livres. In retrospect, this assertion seems to anticipate the

poststructuralist claim that experience is always already mediated by language and

that the simplicity and naturalness of life are in fact constructs of the mind.

However, as the second part of the above passage also implies ( la vie m a eclairci

1 OR, p. 302. Marguerite Yourcenar, M em oires d Hadrien (Paris: Plon, 1951), for the first edition.
2 OR, p. 302.

39
 Chapter 1 - Subjectivity, Politics
and the Limits o f Representation

les livres), the possibility of immediacy is not excluded by Yourcenar. On the

contrary, it constitutes the existential goal of her main narrative characters who

struggle to penetrate different layers of interpretation towards the indecipherable core

of life. As we shall see later, these layers of interpretation, as they accumulate over

time, constitute nothing less than history. Already at the time of Hadrien, such

interpretations, necessary as they are, are perceived as obstacles to m ans quest for

immediate contact with himself and with nature:

Les poetes nous transportent dans un monde plus vaste ou plus beau, plus ardent ou
plus doux que celui qui nous est donne, different par la meme, et en pratique presque
inhabitable. Les philosophes font subir a la realite, pour pouvoir letudier pure, a peu
pres les memes transformations que le feu ou le pilon font subir au corps : rien d un
etre ou d un fait, tels que nous les avons connus, ne parait subsister dans ces cristaux
ou dans cette cendre. Les historiens nous proposent du passe des system es trop
complets, des series de causes et deffets trop exacts et trop clairs pour avoir jamais
ete entierement vrais ; ils rearrangent cette docile matiere morte, et je sais que meme a
Plutarque echappera toujours Alexandre.3

Yourcenar discerns three techniques of appropriation, namely, idealisation (poetry),

purification (philosophy) and oversystematization (historiography). Strictly speaking,

there is nothing particularly original in this critique; but it leaves Hadrien, as much as

Yourcenars reader, at a loss before the necessity and the impossibility of

representation. There is undoubtedly an element of oversimplification in Yourcenars

cursory assessment of these three disciplines, especially if we think that she refers to

the perceived intellectual decline of her time as much as of that of Hadrien. In an

interview with Patrick de Rosbo, Yourcenar would make the following statement:

Toutes les ideologies durcissent le passe, lepurent, le systematisent a faux. Cela est
vrai des notres : on peut aligner les faits historiques sur une ideologic marxiste,
structuraliste, ou toute autre ; on peut reorganiser toute l histoire dans le sens des
progres du capitalisme ou de la technologie. [...] Mais ce durcissement, ce
dessechement du vecu au profit d ideologies regnantes nest pas particulier a notre
epoque. L Histoire universelle de Bossuet represente une meme tentative pour faire
entrer bon gre mal gre le vecu dans le cadre du dogmatisme chretien du XVIF siecle.4

3 OR, pp. 302-3.

4 Patrick de Rosbo, Entretiens radiophoniques avec M arguerite Yourcenar (Paris: Mercure de France,
1972), p. 56.

40
 Chapter 1 - Subjectivity, Politics
and the Limits o f Representation

To the techniques of appropriation mentioned above, Yourcenar adds another one,

namely ideological reduction. This quotation echoes the previous one in terms of the

rejection of systematic thought as a means of capturing life in its mobility and

malleability. While one admires Yourcenar for being instinctively sceptical vis-a-vis

ideology and dogma, one is also surprised to find addressed pell-mell under these

rubrics such different methods of analysis and approaches to existence as Marxism,

structuralism, capitalism, technocracy and Christianity. Clearly, Yourcenar is not

immune to her own critique of the different techniques of reduction and

appropriation. At this point, however, I should place emphasis on what she

understands as the incompatibility between the self and i e monde tel quil nous est

donne, la realite, T e tre , i e corps, i e passe, i e vecu. These terms refer to a

fleeting and chaotic reality with which the subject must establish a stable relationship

in order to understand itself.

W hile the world is given to us as fact, our inauthentic relationship with it

extends to our dealings with other people. With reference to T observation des

hommes, the second way of understanding existence mentioned in Animula vagula

blandula, Hadrien points out that presque tout ce que nous savons d autrui est de

seconde main.5 In addition to the lack of immediacy, the inadequacy of available

methods of interpretation means that our relationship with others is inconclusive.

Hadrien notes that he used to read police reports on his subjects in an effort to

understand their acts, and then adds: Mais ces rapports si nai'vement circonstancies

s ajoutent a la pile de mes dossiers sans m aider le moins du monde a rendre le

verdict final.6 The inability to make judgements reflects the absence of any valid

frame of reference which would authenticate the relationship between human beings.

This comment may also be read as a defence of Yourcenars choice to approach

her narrative subject using intuition as much as scholarship. This is confirmed in the

5 O R, p. 303.
6 O R, p. 303.

41
 Chapter 1 - Subjectivity, Politics
and the Limits o f Representation

Carnets de notes de Memoires d 'H adrien \ Yourcenars 1952 appendix to this novel,

where she notes that, in search of the figure of Hadrien, she had un pied dans

F erudition, lautre dans la magie.7 In Ton et langage dans le roman historique, an

essay to which I shall return, Yourcenar explains her way of transcending the barriers

of interpretation that separated her from her chief narrative characters, and more

specifically from their voice.8 Every step of her critique of representation in

Animula vagula blandula can be related to her perception of subjectivity and

implicit narrative theory.

This also applies to the third way of evaluating human existence, letude de soi.

Yourcenar shows how the non-representability of the world affects the subject by

bringing about a schism at its core, pre-empting its autonomy, and forcing it to

internalize alienation.

Quant a Fobservation de moi-meme, je m y oblige, ne fut-ce que pour entrer en

com position avec cet individu aupres de qui je serai jusquau bout force de vivre,
mais une familiarite de pres de soixante ans comporte encore bien des chances
derreur. Au plus profond, ma connaissance de moi-meme est obscure, interieure,
informulee, secrete comme une com plicite. Au plus impersonnel, elle est aussi glacee
que les theories que je puis elaborer sur les nombres : j em ploie ce que j ai
dintelligence a voir de loin et de plus haut ma vie qui devient alorsla vie d unautre.
Mais ces deux procedes de connaissance sont difficiles, et demandent, Fun, une
descente en soi, F autre, une sortie hors de soi-meme.9

The subjects aporetic relationship with reality is reflected in the way it attempts to

understand itself. The aspect of the self which is recognizably as chaotic and mobile

as nature escapes the intellects capacity for figuration and leaves it frustrated.

Consequently, at stake here is nothing less than the unity and self-sufficiency of the

subject. This will be the constitutive question of the novel, both for Hadrien, as the

suffering hero, and for Yourcenar, as the writer who tries to portray him. She is

aware that this attempt at self-identification, which she calls in the above passage

composition, and which is in essence the projected reconciliation between the self

7 OR, p. 526. In Chapter 3 , 1 shall discuss further this comment by Yourcenar.

8 Ton et langage dans le roman historique, EM, pp. 289-311.
9 OR, p. 304.

42
 Chapter 1 - Subjectivity, Politics
and the Limits o f Representation

and the world, has the opposite from the desired effect. Rather than eliminating the

distance between the subject and itself, it establishes this distance. On the one hand,

as Hadrien points out, the theoretical attitude displaces the subject further from itself.

Theory as the possibility of vision entails the element of objectification, which

restores the opposition in terms of the gap between the observer and the thing

observed. On the other hand, if unsystematic, non-speculative approaches are

employed, then, according to the above passage, we come face to face with obscurity,

interiority and formlessness. Both the rational and the mystical methods fail to efface

the subjects difference from itself. They are, as Hadrien notes, outils plus ou moins

emousses : mais je n en ai pas d autres.10

Trapped between the necessity of form and the inadequacy of the techniques of

representation, Hadrien is overwhelmed with fear: Quand je considere ma vie, je

suis epouvante de la trouver informe.11 It is not the obscurity as such of the self that

Hadrien fears (on the contrary, he feels com plied in it), but the disorder and

diversity of existence which render it unsuitable for aesthetic manipulation. Hadrien

describes how his effort to delineate his own profile and thus delimit his identity

perpetuates the difference from his true self, as it were, and ends in a blurred

reflection of it: Je persois bien dans cette diversite, dans ce desordre, la presence

d une personne, mais sa forme semble presque toujours tracee par la pression des

circonstances ; ses traits se brouillent comme une image refletee sur leau.12 The

theme of the gap between form and chaos, order and disorder, is here re-iterated in

terms of the opposition between stable presence and contingency.

At the same time, this passage can also be read as a reference to Yourcenars

effort to stabilize the elusive image of Hadrien. She perceives well his presence, but

his various dissonant traits and acts, as they have survived in historical and artistic

10 OR, p. 304.
11 OR, p. 304.
12 OR, p. 305.

43
 Chapter 1 - Subjectivity, Politics
and the Limits o f Representation

sources, do not form a continuum. Thus, the difference within the subject is

reproduced at the level of the relationship between author and narrative character.

This is especially true in the case of the historical novel, understood as a literary form

that attempts to lend meaning and represent the segmented and intrinsically

unrepresentable material of the past. In the Carnets de notes, Yourcenar writes:

Tout nous echappe, et tous, et nous-memes. La vie de mon pere m est plus inconnue
que celle d Hadrien. Ma propre existence, si j avais a l ecrire, serait reconstitute par
moi du dehors, peniblement, comme celle d un autre ; j aurais a madresser a des
lettres, aux souvenirs d autrui, pour fixer ces flottantes memoires. Ce ne sont jamais
que murs ecroules, pans d ombre. S arranger pour que les lacunes de nos textes, en ce
qui concem e la vie d Hadrien, coincident avec ce queussent ete ses propres oublis.13

Yourcenar perceives simultaneously within herself, within Hadrien, and between

herself and her narrative character the indefinable difference that costs the subject its

history and identity. In this context, the last sentence of the above passage should not

only refer to the way Yourcenar left a margin for pragmatic omissions in M emoires,

but also to a subtler arrangement. Along with these omissions of what she did not

know about Hadrien, Yourcenar implies that she arranged for the non-representation

of what Hadrien did not know, or no longer knew, about himself. Non-representation

means here the refusal to aestheticize and speculate on what she calls murs ecroules,

pans d ombres. Rather than interpreting or illuminating - literarily, critically,

philosophically - these obscure areas and ruins, which form a separate thematics in

her fiction and criticism, Yourcenar leaves them untouched. This essentially negative

narrative attitude is a result of her acceptance that these areas of the self can never be

represented, yet representation is the only available means for approaching them.

Yourcenar uses conventional methods of narration, such as realism, in order to

demonstrate not the unrepresentable itself, but its outer limits. As she remarks again

in the Carnets de notes des Memoires d'Hadrien , ces notes ne cement qu une

lacune.14 More than the contour of Hadriens face, the novel sets out to trace the

13 OR, p. 527-28.
14 OR, p. 523.

44
 Chapter 1 - Subjectivity, Politics
and the Limits o f Representation

outer limits of what is described in Animula vagula blandula as an hiatus

indefinissable within the self. 15 I shall now argue that the recording of the distance

between the thinking self and its internalized lacunae is one of the key significations

of Yourcenars realism.

The perspective o f realism

As a technique of representation, Yourcenars realism operates in a negative mode.

Its purpose is to emphasize the insufficiency of the subject as well as the

insufficiency of the act of representation. In so far as the intention of the narrative is

to demonstrate a lack, an originary schism that gives birth to a subject, realism

fulfils this intention through its very inappropriateness to deal with that lack. One of

realisms purposes in Memoires is to describe the exterior aspect of things, to provide

an inventory of the life and the thoughts of Hadrien, without reducing the gap within

the self into a theory or an aesthetics. So much is suggested at the beginning of the

book, where, in a direct address to Marc, his future successor, Hadrien remarks: Je

toffre ici comme correctif un recit depourvu d idees preconc^ues et de principes

abstraits, tire de lexperience d un seul homme qui est moi-meme.16

Yourcenar compared realism to an inventory of the sensible in a footnote to her

interviews with Patrick de Rosbo which refers to Sainte-Beuves suggestion that the

description of the exterior aspect of things goes without saying (va de soi).

[Les] maitres du roman realiste [...] ne trouvaient pas necessairement que l aspect
exterieur de la vie allait de so i. La description du repas de noces d Emma Bovary et
des vehicules qui y ont amene les convives nest ni moins minutieuse ni moins
exhaustive que celle des appartements de Salammbo ; elle est seulement, il faut bien

15 OR, p. 305.
16 OR, p. 302.

45
 Chapter 1 - Subjectivity, Politics
and the Limits o f Representation

le dire, plus authentique. L enumeration et la peinture des objets dont s encombre une
civilisation peut devenir un inventaire, ou une satire de celle-ci.17

The reason why Flauberts realism in Madame Bovary is more authentic than that in

Salammbo is evidently that in the first case he had actually witnessed a similar event

or spectacle to the one he described. But if realism in general is more authentic than

other forms of fictional representation, it is because it only aspires to inventory the

representable aspects of reality. Paradoxically, its immediate referent is not the entire

realm of the real, which is too fleeting a notion to lend itself to representation, but

only the sensible and the intelligible. In her interviews with Matthieu Galey,

Yourcenar explains:

Je sais que je tombe dans 1inexplicable, quand j affirme que la realite - cette notion
si flottante -, la connaissance la plus exacte possible des etres est notre point de
contact, et notre voie d acces aux choses qui depassent la realite. Le jour ou nous
sortons de certaines realites tres simples, nous fabulons, nous tombons dans la
18
rhetorique ou dans lintellectualisme mort.

As Yourcenar distinguishes between simple reality and things that lie beyond it, so

she imagines a meticulous and exhaustive realism which brings the narrative to the

outer limits of what exceeds the phenomenal. The dark area that remains untouched

by realist depiction constitutes the negative focus of reference. That we should only

have access to the hidden truth of our being through the literary or artistic

manipulation of its phenomenal aspects is a situation which Yourcenar calls presque

un scandale pour lesprit.19 She explains it further in her monograph on Thomas

Mann, when she attempts to interpret his meticulous and obsessive realism:

Le meticuleux realisme de Mann, ce realisme obsede qui caracterise si souvent la

vision allemande, sert d eau mere aux structures cristallines de l allegorie ; il sert
aussi de lit a la coulee quasi souterraine du mythe et du songe. La M ort a Venise, qui
s ouvre par le recit realiste d une promenade dans la banlieue de Munich, ne nous
epargne rien des horaires de trains et de paquebots, des bavardages d un barbier et des
tons voyants d une cravate, organise les deboires et les contretemps d un voyage en
une allegorique danse des morts ; tout en dessous coule, inepuisable et brulante,

17 Rosbo, pp. 48-49.

18 Marguerite Yourcenar, Les Yeux ouverts: Entretiens avec M atthieu G aley (Paris: Le Centurion,
1980), p. 60.
19 Les Yeux ou verts, p. 59.

46
 Chapter 1 - Subjectivity, Politics
and the Limits o f Representation

secretement issue d un symbolism e plus antique, la grande reverie d un homme en

proie a sa propre fin, tirant de son fonds la mort et 1amour.20

This passage says as much about the way Yourcenar understands realism in her own

writings as it does about M anns narrative technique. Realism remains this side of the

prosaic, and indeed records obsessively and meticulously the phenomenal aspect of

reality, but its true referent lies beyond its own supposedly self-contained structure.

As Yourcenar suggests, realism needs to be supplemented by such erratic and

differential narrative techniques as allegory and myth, so as to approach its final

referent, which is again confirmed in this essay as le gouffre interieur. Realite,

allegorie et mythe se fondent les uns dans les autres.21

In the following chapter, I will return to the notion of allegory and the way it

authenticates the narrative. In the present context, I would argue that Yourcenar

interprets realism in a manner which acknowledges and builds upon its failures as a

technique of representation, for example, in conventional historical narrative.

Historiographic realism, as Barthes has shown, is tautological; it signifies nothing but

itself: c est la categorie du reel (et non ses contenus contingents) qui est alors

signifiee ; autrement dit, la carence meme du signifie au profit du seul referant

devient le signifiant meme du realism e.22 Barthes claims convincingly that realist

narrative purports to ignore the linguistic constitution of m ans relationship with the

world by confusing the signified with the semiotic referent. Realisms narrative and

normative agency depends on creating the illusion that the representational sign

refers to reality, where in fact it refers only to itself. This is a situation which

Yourcenar accepts, while attempting to turn it to the profit of the truth of the

narrative.

20 EM, p. 166-67. From Humanisme et hermetisme chez Thomas Mann, in Sous benefice
d inventaire.
21 EM, p. 167.
22 Roland Barthes, L effet de reel, in R. Barthes et al., L itterature et realite (Paris: Seuil, 1982), pp.
81-90, (p. 89).

47
 Chapter 1 - Subjectivity, Politics
and the Lim its o f Representation

The difference between realist representation and that to which it refers is the

very difference that Yourcenar discerns within the subject. The impossibility of self-

contained subjectivity is reflected by the ineffectiveness of the narrative. If realism

always fails to refer to the reality it targets, then it should be the privileged method to

employ in search of a reality which is always fleeting and deferred. Thus,

paradoxically, the final referent of Yourcenars (and Thomas M anns) realism is not a

believable fictional space-time, nor is it the category of the real, as Barthes writes.

It is the reality that realism fails to represent. In contrast to modernist methods of

fictional representation which frequently disrupt the narrative thus tending to

schematize what does not lend itself to figuration and interpretation, realism closes in

on a gap without attempting to verbalize it. When it does verbalize it, the result is

poor, grotesque, thus proving further the insufficiency of the act of representation.

In her essay on Thomas Mann, Yourcenar wonders whether Naphta and Settembrini,

the two philosophers of The Magic Mountain, sont d enormes porte-voix par

lesquels senonce grotesquement, puisquil passe par les mots, un probleme trop

vaste pour qui les mots ne sont pas faits. Whether it stays within the limits of the

phenomenology of the real or it becomes self-consciously grotesque, Yourcenars

realism has little to do with positivism or the belief that entities exist independently

of language or consciousness. On the contrary, Yourcenars realism seeks to

demonstrate the limits of representation and thus to map negatively the indefinable

hiatus inside the self and between the self and the world.24

23 EM, p. 167.
24 May Chehab argues that Yourcenar used a similar strategy o f closing in on the absent subject
(T ab sen ce du m oi) in her autobiography Le Labyrinthe du monde (in EM ), in which Yourcenar
herself is hardly present. Chehab asks:
Alors, en quoi consiste exactement le moi de Yourcenar ?
Sa caracteristique majeur est quil est construit du dehors. En effet, lorsque les contours de la personne
ne peuvent plus etre definis a partir de son activite ou de son affectivite propres [ ...] , il ne reste que
lobservation indirecte spatiale ou temporelle, qui a dicte au X X e siecle un grand nombre de quetes
ontologiques detournees. C est pourquoi Andre Breton cherche son visage dans ceux quil hante, et
Saint-John Perse adopte la deambulation circulaire de la Strophe plotinienne dans Am ers com m e voie
d approche d un Etre insaisissable. C est pourquoi Yourcenar, elle, choisit la quete genealogique.

48
 Chapter 1 - Subjectivity, P olitics
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In my analysis, I will pursue further the question of realism in fiction, and

whether, in spite of the structuralist critique, it actively explores the limits of

narrative and points to what lies beyond its competence. My intention and method

will be to identify and follow in good faith Yourcenars claims with respect to artistic

and narrative representation and to test these claims not against a specific theory, but

against the Yourcenarian text itself. I shall discuss the theoretical consistency of these

claims, for instance with regard to the question of referentiality, and shall confirm

their relevance to their immediate cultural and historical context, that of modernity.

Ultimately, the strength of Yourcenars interpretation of realism will be proportional

to the validity of her theory of representation, a theory which itself originates in the

problematics of existence, subjectivity and politics. Understanding Yourcenars

realism is therefore part of the process of examining her perception of the subject, its

existential and political identity (or lack thereof) and the nature of the

unrepresentable hiatus that Yourcenar discerns within this subject.

From this introductory discussion of Yourcenars realism and from the analysis

of Animula vagula blandula, two themes emerge with clarity. The first concerns the

link that Yourcenar establishes between existential identity and the act of

representation. The failure of the subject fully to schematize its relationship with the

world leads to a permanent state of internalized difference. The existential is

transferred from the start to the level of the aesthetic. It is the formlessness and

disorder of reality which begets self-alienation. The second theme has to do with

Yourcenars conviction that authentic subjectivity is still possible, despite the

debilitating pressure of the aesthetic on the existential. We know this because, after

all, Hadrien goes on to write his memoirs. The book will be a realist representation of

Hadriens life through which we expect him to emerge as the authentic subject.

May Chehab, La Deduction du moi et 1im possible autobiologie, in Remy Poignault et al. (eds),
L Ecriture du moi dans Vceuvre de M arguerite Yourcenar (Clermont-Ferrand: SIEY, 2004), pp. 75-
88, (p. 76, emphasis by the author).

49
 Chapter 1 - Subjectivity, Politics
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Authentic, because through the narrative Hadrien will restore a meaningful continuity

between himself and the world, without attempting to effect a transcendental,

mystical or ideological reconciliation of the two. The promise of the novel is that

authenticity is still possible within the impasse of referentiality and within the

context of nihilism. This is also the promise of other works by Yourcenar, including

L'CEuvre au noir and Un homme obscur, as I will point out on various occasions.

Having these two themes in mind, I shall now shift the focus of the investigation to

Yourcenars perception of politics and freedom.

Freedom as a form of accepting

Even though the subject understands itself inadequately by means of the conceptual

manipulation of reality, freedom, in Yourcenar, can never be freedom from

representation. As I mentioned above, she frequently thinks of history as a series of

interpretations of reality, superimposed on each other and never quite reaching their

mark. In her novella of 1982 Un homme obscur, she returned to this question. One of

the emblematic figures of the book, the philosopher Leo Belmonte, explains to

Nathanael, the main character, who has come to visit him on his death bed, that the

ongoing difference between ideas and things reveals our incessant desire for order:

Oui, il en est des choses et des idees comme dun corps qui se decham e [...] mais
leurs rapports demeurent neanmoins inchanges. D autres chairs et d autres notions
prennent la place de celles qui pourrissent... Ces myriades de lignes, ces milliers, ces
millions de courbes par lesquelles, depuis quil y a des hommes, l esprit a passe, pour
donner au chaos au moins l apparence d un ordre...25

25 OR, p. 1009. Un homme obscur was first published as part o f a trilogy, Com me Ieau qui coule,
which included two novellas, Anna S oror... and Un homme obscur, and a short story, Une belle
matinee. Marguerite Yourcenar, Com me Ieau qui coule (Paris: Gallimard, 1982).

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Belmonte perceives history as a sequence of more and more sophisticated attempts to

re-write chaos in terms of order. Sick and cynical, he himself is the embodiment and

the result of mans constitutive imprisonment within ideational structures. His entire

work has been an effort to define freedom and identity in terms of order and beauty.

At the end of his life, he realizes that this philosophical attitude (by which

Yourcenar, more often than not, understands a purist attitude) leads nowhere: Les

passerelles des theoremes et les ponts-levis des syllogismes ne menent nulle part, et

ce quils rejoignent est peut-etre Rien. Mais cest beau.26 Beauty of the mind

contrasts sharply in these pages of Un homme obscur with Belmontes decomposing

body, but it is in the latter that he will seek a definition of God.

[...] trouver un trou par lequel descendre vers je ne sais quels antipodes divins...
Encore faudrait-il que [...] ce trou fut au centre, fut un centre... Mais du moment que
le monde ( aut D e u s ) est une sphere dont le centre est partout [...], il suffirait de
creuser nimporte ou pour amener Dieu, comme au bord de la mer on amene l eau
quand on creuse le sable... Creuser des doigts, des dents et du groin, dans cette
profondeur qui est Dieu... ( Aut Nihil, aut fo rte Ego. ) Car le secret, c est que je creuse
en moi, puisquen ce moment je suis au centre.27

Belmonte has to accept that there is no universal order of things, only a pattern in the

way disorder manifests itself as the difference between things and ideas. Through a

complex reasoning, he locates within the self the divine element, the nothingness

which escapes representation. He concludes that there is no unique truth in the centre

of the universe; rather, the diffusion of truth is revealed every time that the desire for

identity is frustrated. Everyone and everything is a centre to their world, and in every

case the primordial difference between representation and what lies beyond it is

attested.

While Belmonte never frees himself from the longing for beauty and identity, he

points to a direction that other characters in Yourcenars work have followed in their

pursuit of freedom. This direction involves accepting the failure or representation and

26 OR, p. 1011.
27 OR, p. 1011-12.

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integrating this failure in a new definition of authenticity. Even at this moment of

intellectual honesty, Belmonte remains above all a philosopher, and his account can

at best be grotesque, as I have already suggested. On the contrary, Hadrien is above

all a statesman and must translate this theory into a pragmatic political project.

In Les Yeux ouverts, Yourcenar stresses Hadriens pragmatism: Dans le cas

JQ

dHadrien, je pense que le pragmatisme la emporte . In her interviews with Rosbo,

she also discusses Hadriens pragmatism in conjunction with the political and

existential imperative to act. She explains that Hadriens sagesse consists in his

ability to move beyond the chaos of existence towards a constructive relation with

the material world. Cette sagesse humaniste est aussi eminemment pragmatique, une

fa 9 on d accepter les faits et de partir d eux pour construire. Like Belmontes

philosophy, Hadriens pragmatism involves accepting the disorder of the world and

the concomitant deficiency of the subject. Pragmatisms particular meaning,

however, lies in Hadriens resolution to find a practical way to salvage humanism

and the possibility of existential and political freedom.

Thus, an opposition develops in Memoires between Hadriens pragmatism and

accepting attitude, on the one hand, and the predominant philosophy of his time, late

Stoicism, on the other. Epictetus was the most famous proponent of Stoicism at that

time, and he advocated the renouncement of bodily feelings and earthly attachments.

Hadrien stresses that this old philosopher, who lived a pure life in voluntary poverty,

had seemed to him en possession d une liberte quasi divine. He then specifies that

this divine freedom is not the kind of freedom that he himself is after.

Mais Epictete renon 9 ait a trop de choses, et je m etais vite rendu compte que rien,
pour moi, netait plus dangereusement facile que de renoncer. [...] Ces sages
seffo^ aien t de retrouver leur dieu par-dela 1ocean des formes, de le reduire a cette
qualite dunique, dintangible, d incorporel, a laquelle il a renonce le jour ou il s est
voulu univers.30

28
Les Yeux ouverts, p. 156.
29 Rosbo, p. 100.
30 OR, p. 398.

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Philosophy is again put to the test for not taking into account the facticity of the

world and for attempting to reduce contingent forms into ideas. The difficult freedom

which comes from accepting is thus opposed to the philosophical freedom which

comes from renouncing. This message is specifically targeted at Marcus Aurelius, the

addressee of the novel, who was of course himself an important Stoic philosopher.

Pour moi, j ai cherche la liberte plus que la puissance, et la puissance seulement parce
que, en partie, elle favorisait la liberte. Ce qui m interessait netait pas une
philosophic de l homme libre (tous ceux qui sy essayent m ennuyerent) mais une
technique ; je voulais trouver la chamiere ou notre volonte s articule au destin, ou la
discipline seconde, au lieu de la freiner, la nature. Comprends bien quil ne s agit pas
ici de la dure volonte du stoique, dont tu texageres le pouvoir, ni de je ne sais quel
choix ou quel refus abstrait, qui insulte aux conditions de notre monde plein, continu,
forme d objets et de corps.31

If there are some anti-Sartrean undertones in this passage, especially in the phrase je

ne sais quel choix ou quel refus abstrait, they can be attributed to Yourcenars

sceptical attitude towards existentialism as a philosophy which dominated the post

war cultural scene in France and which she found too abstract.32 Indeed the interest

of this passage lies in the key oppositions between philosophie and technique, and

between volonte and destin. These two oppositions are intimately linked to each other

and form the semantic axis along which Yourcenars perception of freedom and her

political and aesthetic thought as expressed in Memoires are structured. The

metaphor of la chamiere transfers the problem of the existential discrepancy between

desire - volonte - and its frustration - destin - onto a practical-technical level.

With this metaphor Yourcenar intimates her conviction that the transition from

thought to action, as far as both existence and politics are concerned, entails a shift in

ones mode of thinking for which philosophy cannot prepare the subject. Inasmuch as

31 OR, p. 318.
32 In a 1987 interview for RAI, the Italian state television channel, Yourcenar was asked by Francesca
Sanvitale whether she were in contact with the French existentialists, for exam ple Sartre, Camus,
Blanchot. She answered: Pas enormement, parce que je trouve toute cette litterature beaucoup trop
intellectualiste, beaucoup trop dialectique ; et dans un moment ou il serait si important de voir de pres
et de s interesser a la realite des choses, elle tourne le dos aux ch oses. Maurice D elcroix (ed.),
M arguerite Yourcenar: P ortrait d une voix (Paris: Gallimard, 2002), p. 366.

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philosophy constitutes a closed, self-referential systematization of reality, it resists

translation into action. In the work of Yourcenar, the example of Leo Belmonte, the

extreme philosopher who cannot provide a legitimate account for what remains

incommunicable to thinking, illustrates the theme of the failures of conceptual

thought even when it tries to radicalize itself. At the same time, Hadriens quest for a

technique constitutes a call for a post-philosophical and at the same time more

original understanding of the relationship between the self and the world. La

chamiere is the emblematic metaphor for this new relationship, for it implies that

this relationship must be articulated - in art, literature, politics, and so on - on a

pragmatic, that is, non-conceptual basis.

Yourcenar also juxtaposes discipline with nature, which helps us understand the

opposition between volonte and destin with reference to the problematics of

representation. Volonte expresses the desire for the production of meaning through

the disciplined effort to discover order in nature, or to impose order on it,

depending on ones critical and political stance. Therefore, volonte is the will for

signification through art, language, as well as politics; it is the artistic intention

which, as Yourcenar implies in the above passage, usually manifests itself in the

effort to immobilize nature. On the other hand, destin is a more puzzling term, but

it should not be construed as connoting a teleological design of existence.33 It rather

signifies the natural necessity which frustrates desire, refuses artistic intention and

confirms the distance between the work of man and the inaccessibility of nature.

Claude Foucart has interpreted in analogous terms the notion of destinee d homme,

which is mentioned in Animula vagula blandula.34 Foucart points out that by

destinee we may understand the inevitable hiatus within the subject, which

33 Elsewhere, Yourcenar explains that she does not favour the idea o f predetermination and fate.
During her interviews with Matthieu Galey, she remarks: Je dirais que la vie ne me sem ble pas avoir
de dessin (de dessein) defini. (Ou, si elle en a un, c est a des profondeurs que nous ne pouvons pas
atteindre.) [...] Je ne crois pas a un destin irrevocablement present. Les Yeux ou verts, p. 315.
34 OR, p. 304.

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precludes the possibility of identity. Cet hiatus trouve son reflet immediat dans

laspect informe de la vie. [...] La est un element capital dans ce jaugeage de la

distance consideree comme image de la destinee d homme. Thus destin refers

to the formlessness of life and to the suspension of every project of representation. In

this context, trouver la cham iere announces Hadriens project to coordinate the will

for immediacy that drives creativity and the destiny of difference that awaits the work

of art as well as political action.

These ideas and their impact on Yourcenars existential and political thought

will be discussed further in this and the following chapter. With regard to the

question of freedom, it is clear that its existential and political dimensions largely

coincide and are envisioned by Yourcenar from an aesthetic perspective. From my

discussion so far it follows that the definition of freedom must involve awareness of

mans entanglement within representational structures and must also account for the

necessary frustration of any claim to original creativity. So, exactly how does

Yourcenar understand the concept of technique de liberte and how does it

authenticate mans actions? In the pages that follow the passage quoted above (pp.

318-19), Hadrien gives a number of examples of the ways he implemented this

technique with an aim to mould his personality. These examples function mostly as

practical advice to his addressee, Marc, yet also lead gradually to the blurring of the

boundary between freedom and its opposite: J ai reve d un plus secret

acquiescement ou d une plus souple volonte; and further on, je m effor^ais

d atteindre par degre cet etat de liberte, ou de soumission, presque pur. Finally,

Hadrien offers the paradoxical idea of liberte d acquiescement: Mais c est encore a

la liberte d acquiescement, la plus ardue de toutes, que je me suis le plus

rigoureusement applique. Je voulais letat ou j etais.36 The perception of a form of

35 Claude Foucart, Marguerite Yourcenar, L Exil et la distance, in Berengere Deprez and Ana de
Medeiros (eds), M arguerite Yourcenar: Ecritures de I exil (Louvain-la-Neuve: Academ ia Bruylant,
1998), pp. 267-276, (p. 269).
36 All quotations from OR, pp. 318-319.

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 Chapter 1 - Subjectivity, Politics
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freedom which consists in acquiescing to the state in which one happens to be merits

further elaboration, not only because of its apparent absurdity, but also because it

constitutes one of the key ideas that infiltrate Yourcenars critical thought.

There is no doubt that the liberte d acquiescement is at odds with mainstream

Western perceptions of freedom. A comparison of i a liberte d acquiescement with

the forms of freedom examined by Isaiah Berlin in his seminal essay Two Concepts

of Freedom is telling. Berlin accepts that there are more that two hundred senses of

[the] protean word freedom, but examines no more than two of these senses - but
37
those central ones, with a great deal of human history behind them . He first

discusses negative freedom, that is, the liberal conception of freedom from

constraint (physical, social, moral and so on). Then, he makes a separate case for

positive freedom, the radical freedom to rule oneself and realize ones potential. He

takes his discussion far enough to suggest that these two concepts of freedom are

based on two historically distinct ideals of authentic selfhood. A negative one, which

is pursued through self-abnegation in order to attain independence; and a positive

one which aims at self-realization, or total self-identification with a specific

principle or ideal in order to attain the selfsame end.39 It is not difficult to trace

evidence, in Memoires d Hadrien, of Yourcenars scepticism with regard to the

actual possibility of achieving either of these two types of liberty.

As far as negative freedom is concerned, Yourcenars critique of abnegation as a

method of self-liberation is at its strongest in the passages where Hadrien argues

against the ascetics and the Stoics, of whom Berlin also makes frequent mention.

Berlin associates the search for independence, that is, negative liberty, with a

strategic retreat into an inner citadel - my reason, my soul, my noumenal s e lf and

37 Isaiah Berlin, Two Concepts o f Liberty, in Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1969), pp. 118-172, (p. 121).
38 T h is is liberty as it has been conceived by liberals in the modern world from the days o f Erasmus
[...] to our ow n , Berlin, pp. 127-28.
39 Berlin, p. 134.

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 Chapter 1 - Subjectivity, P olitics
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adds that this is the traditional self-emancipation of ascetics and quietists, of stoics

or Buddhist sages.40 In Memoires, criticism of asceticism takes the form of a

Brahman whom Hadrien met on the bank of the Euphrates and whom he described in

similar terms as the Stoics: Ce brahmane etait arrive a letat ou rien, sauf son corps,

ne le separait plus du dieu intangible, sans substance et sans form e.41 Both Epictetus

and the Brahman are judged by Hadrien as ces purs fanatiques.42

Yourcenars scepticism extends also to freedom of the positive kind, that is, the

possibility of self-identification with specific principles. While existential

identification between the self and the world remains Hadriens goal, he

acknowledges that the principles which are supposed to provide the base for

achieving it are transitory and reductive. The chapter Animula vagula blandula can

indeed be read as a treatise on the relativity of principles and ideals - philosophical,

ethical, aesthetic. Hadrien is convinced that principles have only conceptual value

and, therefore, do not reflect reality as it appears to the observer and as it is lived by

the self. Principles per se are useless to the seeker of truth. As I will discuss in

Chapter 2, for Yourcenar, the political leader ought to manipulate principles and

ideals, rather than abide by them, as they only belong to ephemeral historical

realities.

The difference between these historically recognizable types of freedom and

Yourcenars liberte d acquiescement will be further underscored, if we consider the

forms of relationship between man and the world that these types of freedom entail.

Despite their differences, both the radical and the liberal approaches promote the idea

of mastery over the self and the environment, whether in an aggressive, or in a

defensive way. Berlin identifies positive liberty as a form of mastery: The positive

sense of the word liberty derives from the wish on the part of the individual to be

40 Berlin, p. 135.
41 OR, p. 397.
42 OR, p. 398.

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his own master.43 But negative freedom is a form of mastery as well. W ith reference

to Berlins distinction, Leslie Paul Thiele makes the following statement:

Negative liberty signals the individuals control of his or her immediate environment,
of his or her private space and time. [...] Negative liberty [...] pertains to sovereign
control of a personal realm. This is the realm of private property, which includes,
following John Lockes formulation, the property of ones self. [...] Positive
libertarians advocate a transcendent, socially defined self that achieves mastery over
itself and its world by way of self-given law. Negative libertarians advocate an
empirical, atomic self that achieves mastery over a private domain through the
expression of will.44

The typically Western qualification of freedom as mastery contrasts with the form of

freedom that Hadrien pursues. Yourcenars commentary on Hadriens imperial title

of Maitre de tout, bestowed on him by the Athenians, is characteristic in this

respect. The reader is asked to understand this title not as a confirmation of Hadriens

authority but as a reward for his collaboration with the people and, more

metaphorically, with the spirit of his time. J avais collabore avec les ages, avec la

vie grecque elle-meme ; lautorite que j exer9 ais etait moins un pouvoir quune

mysterieuse puissance, superieure a lhomme, mais qui n agit efficacement qua

travers lintermediaire d une personne humaine.45 This is a richly ambiguous

statement, to which I shall return in Chapter 5. But as far as the notion of mastery is

concerned, it suggests that Hadrien has found the cham iere that coordinates

volonte and destin. The implication here is that, if Hadrien is a maitre, it is

because, in his quality as the head of state, he has submitted the will for

representation and creativity to a higher truth, which could be construed as m ans

true being, God, or nature. Paradoxically, in this context, liberte is a synonym of

soumission, and maitrise is a synonym of collaboration. These are two of a series of

semantic inversions that Yourcenar effects in Memoires and elsewhere, and which I

propose to identify and interpret in the course of my thesis.

43 Berlin, p. 131.
44 Leslie Paul Thiele, Timely M editations: M artin H eidegger and Postm odern P olitics (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 68-69.
45 OR, p. 4 2 2 .

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During her interviews with Matthieu Galey, Yourcenar argued that m ans

freedom to master and mould his existence is, in reality, only a half-freedom: she

referred to Thom m e maitre, ordinateur et sculpteur de soi-meme, libre de choisir

entre le mal et le bien, entre la folie et la sagesse, don et liberte que 1animal n a pas.

Mais precisement cette quasi-liberte (car qui la dira complete ?) nous rend

responsables.46 Freedom of choice, mastery of the world and the self - the common

targets of both the liberal and radical approaches - are not authentic forms of liberty.

A dedicated ecologist and animal lover, Yourcenar believes that animals are in a

position to enjoy true freedom: II y a cette immense liberte de 1animal, enferme

certes dans les limites de son espece, mais vivant sans plus sa realite d'etre, sans tout

le faux que nous ajoutons a la sensation d exister.47 The freedom of animals is at the

antipodes of human liberty as mastery and freedom of choice. Because for animals

there is no defining divide between will and destiny, they experience no

difference with themselves. They offer humans the spectacle of unquestioning

acceptance of time and space.

This primordial state of being is also hinted at by Yourcenar in her essay Qui

sait si 1ame des betes va en bas. In this essay, she challenges the common

interpretation of the biblical injunction for man to be maitre et seigneur [du] peuple

des animaux. Yourcenar refers to the Jewish-Christian myth of creation to suggest

that Adam could have understood freedom differently:

Cet Adam, encore intouche par la chute, aurait aussi bien pu se sentir promu au rang
de protecteur, darbitre, de moderateur de la creation tout entiere, utilisant les dons
qui lui avaient ete faits en surplus, ou differemment, de ceux octroyes aux animaux,
pour parachever et maintenir le bel equilibre du monde, dont Dieu lavait fait non le
tyran, mais lintendant.48

46 Les Yeux ouverts, p. 319.

47 Les Yeux ouverts, p. 318, Yourcenars emphasis.
48 All quotations from EM, p. 374. Qui sait si l ame des betes va en bas (written in 1981) is included
in the collection o f essays Le Temps, ce gran d sculpteur (Paris: Gallimard, 1983).

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Here, the meaning of mastery and freedom is subverted and understood,

paradoxically, in terms of mediation and administration. Yourcenar imagines a

prelapsarian functional relationship between man and nature, which has been lost

because of misuse of mans gifts ( dons). These gifts, which distinguish man from

animals, are precisely that to which Yourcenar referred as volonte, the desire for

representation or the possibility of art and politics in the broad sense, through which,

when used appropriately, the worlds beautiful balance is manifested. This state of

authenticity is contrasted with freedom as mastery and tyranny, which corresponds to

conventional socio-political approaches to liberty in the West, and is based on a

misconception of mans creative impulse and power. The ecological definition of

freedom as a form of acquiescement presupposes the recognition that the gift of art

is a surplus, a supplement to nature, and it installs a permanent difference between

man and nature which man has to accept. Accepting and acquiescing are therefore

key words in Yourcenars thinking on politics and existence because they imply that

freedom and authentic selfhood should come as a result of an art (a language, a

representation) which consciously preserves, rather than effaces the difference

between man and the world.

To understand the concept of liberte d acquiescement, it is important to raise the

question as to what or whom one acquiesces. There is undoubtedly an apparent

paradox in Yourcenars political position on freedom. If i a liberte d acquiescement

differs fundamentally from common revolutionary or libertarian conceptions of

freedom, then it must eventually lead to the subjects renunciation of any claim to

mastery over not only other peoples destin, but also its own. Is there not a risk,

then, to understand the formula Je voulais letat ou j etais as a gratuitous defence of

the status quo? In her essay Presentation critique de Constantin Cavafy, Yourcenar

explains herself: il importe toujours de savoir si, en demiere analyse, loeuvre d un

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poete sinscrit en faveur de la re volte ou de 1acceptation.49 In the context of her

assessment of Cavafys poetry, she puts forward an interpretation of acquiescement

as a condition that contains revolt: On peut dire sans paradoxe que la revolte ici se

place a linterieur de 1acquiescement, fait inevitablement partie de la condition

humaine que le poete reconnait pour sienne. What is more, she traces the presence of

revolt in the origin of every act of true acceptance.

Les tres beaux vers inspires par un passage de Dante, Che fece... il grand rifiuto,
poeme du raidissement et du refus, demeurent neanmoins situes au plus profond de
1acceptation, formulent le cas extreme et personnel ou il y aurait re volte a ne pas se
revolter. Cest quune vue completement acceptante ne peut guere se baser que sur le
sentiment tres fort de ce quil y a dunique, dirreductible, et finalement de valable,
dans chaque temperament et dans chaque destin.50

Yourcenar conflates the meanings of revolte and acceptation, in the same way that

she blurs the border between liberte and soummission. The poem by Cavafy,

which she quotes in French in her own and C. Dimarass translation, is about saying

le grand OUI ou le grand N O N , and assuming the responsibility for this choice.

Cavafy is equally vague as Yourcenar with regard to what it is that one accepts of

refuses. His poem, however, finishes by identifying refusing as an unambiguous and

conscious choice by the individual: Celui qui a refuse ne regrette rien : si on

linterrogeait de nouveau, il repeterait NO N - et cependant ce NON, ce juste NON,

laccable pendant toute sa vie.51 Yourcenar interprets this non as part of a greater

oui that does justice to the uniqueness of the individual. In her assessment, she does

not side with the person who has to choose, but with the poet, whose function is to

express what is at stake in that choice. The poets a priori accepting attitude allows

him to see that existential, ideological, ethical or other choices are always about

historically specific ways of systematizing and conceptualizing reality, which one

may embrace or reject. Such choices, however right (justes) or devastating

49 EM, p. 156.
50 EM, p. 156.
51 EM, p. 157, emphasis in the original.

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(iaccablants), are always between concepts and systems of interpretation. It is only

the poet who, by recognizing and accepting this state of affairs, places himself

beyond such choices and demonstrates the gap that defines mans relationship with

nature and with himself. By doing so, the poet refuses to reduce individuals into

types or identities defined by the systems of interpretation which they accept or

reject. Thus, according to Yourcenar (though, I suspect, not necessarily according to

this specific poem by Cavafy), the poets acquiescement contains revolte in the

sense that he resists the temptation to standardize individuality and does so by

accepting the impossibility of self-identity. The poets privileged vantage point

ensures his liberte d acquiescement, through which the uniqueness of every

individual and their irreducibility to a prescribed identity is attested.

Acceptance and revolt remain central in Yourcenars thought, as the frequency

with which she returns to these themes attests. For example, writing about Thomas

M anns The Magic Mountain in 1956, she notes: A partir de cette vision de lhorreur
intrinseque, toutes les avenues de lesprit pourraient s ouvrir pour Hans, celle de la

saintete ou celle du crime, celle de la revolte ou celle de 1acceptation.52 Yourcenars

1972 essay on Andre Gide also contains a reference to revolte et acceptation, in the

context of i e drame du choix perpetuel entre le refus du soi et labandon a soi.53 In a

more political vein, in a footnote to her published interviews with Rosbo, she

specified that accepting is a noble act when it concerns the self, but not when it

concerns the suffering of others: trop de chretiens [...] ont accepte sans difficulte les

malheurs d autrui, attribues a la volonte de Dieu.54 Thus, for Yourcenar, the terms

acceptance and revolt resonate with both political and existential significance. In her

essay on Cavafy, Yourcenar brought together all these elements in such a way that

the opposition between revolte and acceptation was transcended.

52 EM, p. 173.
53 Marguerite Yourcenar, Andre Gide revisited, in Cahiers A ndre G ide, 3, Le Centenaire (Paris:
Gallimard, 1972), pp. 21-44, (p. 32).
54 Rosbo, p. 137.

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The paradoxical understanding of revolt as part of acceptance is further

supported by Yourcenars rejection of the conventional idea of revolt in politics,

ideology or even art and literature - a rejection repeated on different occasions. With

regard to historical revolutions, she pointed out to Matthieu Galey: Je n idolatre pas

les revolutions. Elies produisent finalement leurs reactions, plus virulentes encore, et

presque inevitablement elles senlisent aussi dans des societes fonctionnarisees,

hierarchisees, et pour finir dans des goulags.55 Yourcenar clearly believes that

revolt against a system of ideas or a mechanism of production of meaning inevitably

reproduces new systems of representation which are based on analogous structures

and hierarchies. This idea tallies with her perception of history as a series of

(mis)representations of reality. What remains stable is the impulse and the ability for

representation, which Yourcenar suggests that we should accept as a constitutive

attribute of our being, rather than renounce in the search for identity.

Yourcenars idiosyncratic reading of Cavafys poem Che fece... il grand rifiuto

may not be sufficiently backed by evidence in that particular poem, but does convey

well Cavafys general poetic and intellectual stance. Like E.M. Forster, who once

described Cavafy as a gentleman standing motionless at a slight angle to the

universe, Yourcenar looks at the Greek poet as being partly outside the world and its

representations and partly absorbed by them.56 With reference to the presence of

religion in Cavafys poetry, she remarks:

La meme absence de revolte permet a Cavafy de se mouvoir avec aisance au sein de

son heredite orthodoxe, et fait de lui, en definitive, un chretien. Chretien aussi eloigne
que possible du tourment, de 1effusion de cceur, ou de la rigueur ascetique, mais
chretien pourtant, puisque religio, au sens antique du terme, aussi bien que mystica, se
trouve faire partie de 1uni vers du christianisme.57

55 Les Yeux ouverts, p. 309-10.

56 Mentioned in Judith Scherer Herz, The Remaking o f the Past in Forster's N on-Fiction, Twentieth
Century Literature, Vol. 31, No. 2/3, E. M. Forster Issue (Summer 1985), pp. 287-296, (p. 291).
57 EM, p. 157.

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The absence of revolt leads to what Yourcenar specified above as le cas extreme et

personnel ou il y aurait revolte a ne pas se revolter. This is because through a poetic

negotiation with Christianity, Cavafy replaces dogma and emotional sublimation with

the mystical element of religio au sense antique du term e. Yourcenar made a

similar comment in Les Yeux ouverts, referring to the Shinto religion:

Cest justement la splendeur des ceremonies, le rite, le sentiment du sacre qui est
important, parce quil [...] montre dans toute leur beaute les gestes de la vie. [...] Je
crois que [fuir cette beaute] cest meconnaitre le sens des religions, cest-a-dire ce
qui relie, comme nous lavons deja dit. II sagit de relier lhomme a tout ce qui est, a
ete, et sera.58

Yourcenar suggests here that access to ourselves and the world is possible through

the ceremony and the rite, that is, through acts of representation. While art evidently

does not ensure unmediated unity between the subject and the world, it establishes a

relationship ( relier) between them, which, as I have argued, is differential in

character. To refuse representation ( fuir cette beaute) would constitute an act of

revolt against aesthetic mediation. This, Yourcenar stresses in the above passage,

would be a misapprehension of our relationship with being ( tout ce qui est, a ete, et

sera) - a relationship which is not to be understood in terms of absolute identity, but

in terms of a difference, a link ( relier, religio).

Cavafys poetry and Shinto ceremonies share a common understanding of

representation and the mission of art. Art fails in its main objective to structure and

systematize the world (which is also the objective of philosophy, historiography and

politics, as we saw). Through this failure, art reveals the limits of the subject, the

fleetingness of the world and the perpetual difference that separates the two. If the

world manifests itself through this failure and this difference, then the artist must

accept this state of affairs and use art in order to delineate better the nature of this

difference. In this sense, Cavafys poetry is, for Yourcenar, both an act of liberation

58 Les Yeux ouverts, pp. 38-39.

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and une maniere de soumission a la nature de choses.59 The main benefit from

adopting the attitude of accepting is the recovery of an original relationship between

man and world, confirmed by the return to the original signification of words

{religio, mystica). This does not involve returning to a paradisiacal state of

immediacy; quite to the contrary, it involves recognizing the permanent displacement

of the subject in relation to the world and itself.

The restorative function of accepting is illustrated by Yourcenar in her short

essay Sur un reve de Diirer. This essay is about a watercolour by Diirer called T h e

Vision which depicts an apocalyptic dream he had during a night of June 1525, with

terrible columns of water falling ponderously from the heavens and flooding the

earth. Diirer accompanied his watercolour with an explanatory text, which intrigues

Yourcenars imagination. The point that interests me here is Yourcenars

commentary on the final sentence of Diirers text - a sentence which is not

semantically connected with the rest of the writing: Dieu toume pour le mieux toutes

choses.60 Yourcenar stresses Diirers religiousness and then meditates on this

formule pieuse:

Elle peut au choix sinterpreter comme une formule propitiatoire quasi machinale,
assertion plus ou moins sincere dun optimisme fonde sur la bienveillance divine,
aussi peu concluante quun distrait signe de croix, ou, au contraire, comme un acte de
soumission tres reflechi a lordre des choses, partout caracteristique de tout grand
esprit authentiquement religieux, Marc Aurele acceptant ce que veut 1uni vers, Lao-
tseu daccord avec le vide et Confucius avec le Ciel. 1

Yourcenar wonders whether Diirers declaration of faith originates in his candid,

ingenuous affirmation of religion or, au contraire, in his thoughtful, philosophical

acceptance of it. Authentic religiosity, Yourcenar notes, consists in the ability to

submit oneself to the order of things. However, if, for Yourcenar, religio means

above all relation, as I just suggested, then to be authentiquement religieux is to

59 EM, p. 157.
60 EM, p. 318. Sur un reve de Diirer (written in 1977) is included in Marguerite Yourcenar, Le
Temps, ce gran d sculpteur.
61 EM, p. 320.

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have an authentic relationship with the world. Therefore, their ability to submit to the

order of things makes it possible for Marcus Aurelius, Lao-Tzu and Confucius to

enjoy an authentic relationship with them. In this context, Yourcenar concedes that

there is in fact no contrast between sophisticated and candid acceptance:

Mais cet au contraire est de trop. Nous devinons que la confiance ingenue et
1adhesion impersonnelle se rejoignent quelque part, a des profondeurs de la nature
humaine ou le principe de la contradiction ne penetre pas. Telle quelle, cette mantra
chretienne a sans doute aide Diirer a emerger indemne de son terrible songe.

Diirer was saved from his terrible dream thanks to his accepting attitude, whose

nature is not exclusively Christian, as the expression mantra chretienne intimates.

Yourcenar claims that Diirers authentic acceptance is more deeply-seated and

original than the contradictions which cost him a night terror. These contradictions

are not reconciled by him, but continue to torment him. Yet, to the extent that he

accepts these contradictions, he manages to place himself beyond them and emerge

undamaged from this adventure. As in the case of Cavafy, to accept means to reclaim
62
a position of authenticity which does not cancel contradiction and conflict.

Significantly, Yourcenar stresses the realism of Diirers sketch and textual

annotation to it. Ce reve frappa par une absence totale de symboles. Le visionnaire

est un realiste [...]. Sa precision est d un physicien. Des le choc de la premiere

trombe d eau, il a essaye de mesurer a quelle distance il se trouvait du point de

frappe. Indeed, Diirer mentions in his text that he was at a distance of four leagues

from the point of the first downpour, and this is also how he painted it. Yourcenar

considers this as a sign of an exquisite humanism: i e meilleur de la notion

dhumanisme [est] inclu dans cette capacite, meme en reve et au sein d une sorte

62 Writing on Yourcenars Sur un reve de Diirer, N igel Saint proposes to look at this image and text
by Diirer as one work. The torrent o f water threatens to dissolve not only the land on which it falls, but
also Diirers watercolour itself, as well as Diirers writing, placed right underneath the image. Saint
observes: Water and colour pigment in the watercolour are the substances now undergoing
dissolution. [...] The writing stands in an ambiguous spatial relationship to the wash [...]; [it] is about
to receive the impact o f the water. In this sense, Durers accepting attitude does not only save the
artist him self from terror; it also protects his work from dissolution. N igel Saint, M arguerite
Yourcenar, Reading the Visual (Oxford: Legenda, 2000), p. 40.

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 Chapter 1 - Subjectivity, Politics
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d angoisse ontologique, de continuer de jauger.63 Now this gauging of the distance

between Diirer and the downpour is precisely what Yourcenar describes as the

pragmatism and realism at the heart of the existential experience. Diirer stands in fear

and anxiety in front of a world which remains incomprehensible and with which he

cannot identify. His task as an artist is not to repress or interpret this spectacle, but to

accept it and measure the distance that separates him from it. Measuring the

distance is similar to Yourcenars narrative technique of closing in on the gap

(cemer la lacune) which separates man from the world and from his own being.64 In

both painting and writing, realism aims at gauging the distance between the self and

the world. It confirms the alienating gap within the self and resists the temptation of

conceptual reduction and rationalization. According to Yourcenar, this is what

Cavafy does by embracing Christianity (but also other, ostensibly contradictory,

schematizations of reality, such as Greek hedonism and even nihilism).65 This is also

what Thomas Mann and Flaubert do, when they describe, the first, the Munich station

timetables, and the second, Madame Bovarys wedding dinner. According to

Yourcenar, Piranesi and Mishima also share a similar perception of the function of

realism.66 These writers and artists do not understand themselves as original creators

or thinkers but as craftsmen:

La position du poete reste celle dun artisan exquis ; sa fonction se limite a donner a
la plus brulante et a la plus chaotique des matieres la plus nette et la plus lisse des
formes. Nulle part lart nest considere comme plus reel ou plus noble que la realite.
[...] Art et vie sentraident lun lautre.67

63 These passages from EM, p. 319-20.

64 Claude Foucart makes a similar point with reference to Yourcenars essay on Diirer: Saisir
Iauthenticite [...], c est d abord apprecier tres precisement cette distance qui separe les etres. Foucart
focuses on the distance that separates the writer from her fictional characters, whereas I am interested
in the existential-ontological distance between the self and the world. Foucart, p. 267.
65 Cf. EM, p. 157.
66 I am referring here to Yourcenars monographs Le Cerveau noir de Piranese (written in 1959-61,
in Sous benefice d inventaire) and Mishima ou la Vision du vide (Paris: Gallimard, 1980), also
included in EM.
67 EM, p. 158

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The mission of art, as this passage from Yourcenars essay on Cavafy suggests, is to

set up a context in and through which reality in its chaotic consistency may manifest

itself. It is clear that the artist as craftsman is better placed than the philosopher to

achieve this goal - although we should always bear in mind Yourcenars own

preconceptions against philosophy and critical thought. It is further suggested that

pure artistic originality, whether as sublimation or as suppression of the disorder or

things, is beyond the scope of art and has nothing true to say about reality.

While Cavafy, along with Piranesi, Diirer and Thomas Mann are characteristic

cases of the artist as craftsman, perhaps the most graphic portrait of the artist as

original creator in Yourcenars work is that of a fictional character, Wang-Fo, in her

short story Comment Wang-Fo fut sauve. This is the story of a painter who aimait

limage des choses, et non les choses elles-memes.68 The emperor of the land of

Han, who grew up surrounded only by Wang-Fos paintings, believing that his

empire would be as beautiful as them, arrests him one day and accuses him of lying:

Tu m as menti, Wang-Fo, vieux imposteur : le monde n est quun amas de taches

confuses, jetees sur le vide par un peintre insense, sans cesse effacees par nos

larmes.69 Wang-Fo may have been arrested, but he is the one who holds the emperor

hostage in his representations: [Tes] sortileges, says the emperor, m ont degoute de

ce que je possede, et donne le desir de ce que je ne possederai pas.70 W ang-Fos

punishment is to have his eyes burnt and his hands cut off, so as not to deceive

through his art any longer. Yourcenar implies that there is an element of justice in

this punishment, although she saves Wang-Fo at the end. He escapes in his imaginary

world, inside one of his paintings. This enigmatic tale is as much about the power of

art to generate its own space and create the illusion of redemption, as it is about the

68 OR, p. 1171. Written in 1936, Comment W ang-Fo fut sauve opens Yourcenars N ouvelles
O rientates (Paris: Gallimard, 1963), a collection o f short stories.
69 OR, p. 1177.
70 OR, p. 1178.

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 Chapter 1 - Subjectivity, Politics
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failure of pure creativity to demonstrate the ways in which man is related to the

world.

Imprisoned within the confines of a sublimated reality, the emperor of the land

of Han contrasts sharply with Hadrien, the emperor of M emoires, whose freedom is

summed up in the phrase je voulais letat ou j etais. The liberte d acquiescement

is above all the existential freedom which comes from acknowledging that our access

to reality passes necessarily through art in the broad sense of representation and that

this art is doomed to fail in its constitutive goal to depict the world. The art of

realism, a humbler art, as it were, whose aspiration is not to reflect reality, but to

reproduce its distortions in the artistic or literary work, is one of Hadriens tools in

the search for self-authentication, a technique de liberte.

It is significant that this is a technique and not a philosophy or a system of

analysis. Like Diirer and Cavafy, Hadrien is depicted by Yourcenar as a consummate

craftsman, a physicien, gauging the distance between what he writes and what he

experiences, sees or imagines. As Yourcenar writes with regard to narrative in the

first person, une telle forme litteraire [...] oblige [le lecteur] a redresser les

evenements et les etres vus a travers le personnage qui dit je comme des objets vus a

travers leau.71 This passage explains among other things that there is no pretension

of immediacy in the realist text. On the contrary, by deflecting ie s etres et les

evenements, the realist narrative points to its failure and, at the same time, to the

presence of an obscure area (a gap, a distance) that can only be depicted in terms of

distortion or refraction. Yourcenar hopes that this process authenticates both the

realist work of art and the artist. It authenticates Memoires as a novel by Yourcenar,

but also as a text supposedly narrated by Hadrien. At the same time, as a technique de

71 Preface o f Le Coup de grace, OR, p. 81, Yourcenars emphasis. The preface was written in 1962.
Marguerite Yourcenar, Le Coup de grace (Paris: Gallimard, 1939), for the first edition in a separate
volume.

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 Chapter 1 - Subjectivity, Politics
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liberte, realist narrative authenticates the narrator himself, who closes in on the gap

within the self, thus confirming this gap and acknowledging its unrepresentability.

Politics as a technique of authentication

If individual existence is freed and authenticated through realist art, then freedom and

authenticity should also be possible to achieve at the level of politics. This is

Hadriens assumption in his political and cultural work, to which I will refer in more

detail in the next chapter. Yourcenars understanding of freedom and the aesthetic

character of our personal relationship with the world already allows some preliminary

thoughts with regard to her perception of politics. Politics is a form of representation

par excellence, because it organizes our relationship with reality according to

concrete structures, plans and visions. Inasmuch as this relationship is always

mediated by concepts, it is also mediated by politics as the art of managing and

manipulating these concepts. Like any form of mediation, politics not only

establishes, but also distorts the relationship between the subject or the community

and the world. Yourcenars critique of oversystematization, ideology, dogma and so

forth extends to those political systems which are based on extreme interpretations of

reality. As she points out in Les Yeux ouverts:

Aucun reve de perfection nest a jamais realise sans entrainer aussi la violence et
lerreur. [...] Un communiste ideal serait divin. Mais un monarque eclaire, comme le
souhaite Voltaire, serait egalement divin. Seulement ou sont-ils ? [... Les monarchistes
fran^ais] ne voient pas que leur roi ferait aussitot appel a 1equivalent de M. Giscard
dEstaing ou de M. Mitterrand a la tete de son ministere, et que le bureau de poste
serait tenu par le meme employe, ou son sosie. Le capitaliste technocrate qui pretend
etablir le bonheur sur la terre par ses moyens dapprenti sorcier me parait dailleurs du
meme ordre.72

72
Les Yeux ouverts, p. 120.

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 Chapter 1 - Subjectivity, Politics
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This criticism reproduces at the level of politics many elements of Yourcenars

perception of art. She claims that, in principle, she would not object to an ideal form

of political representation, only such a form is not possible. Every political mediation

between man and the world inevitably leaves behind a trail of error and violence.

This is particularly true of systems intending to establish a relationship of total

equivalence between man and the world, namely, totalitarian systems, such as

communism and monarchy. Interestingly, Yourcenar asserts that technocratic

capitalism is also such a system: its sorcery is of the same order. All these systems

miscalculate the constitutive non-ideality of the subject, symbolized in the above

passage - rightly or wrongly - by Mitterrand and the post office employee. These

systems attempt to impose an identity between man and the world, which is always

proved fictional and wrong. Memoires d Hadrien provides Yourcenars answer to

the question of leadership and politics. She imagines a poetic-political re

arrangement of reality which takes into account the unavoidable distortions brought

about by political representation. Hadriens goal is not to create a new and original

political system, but to accept and maintain the existing political order and pacify the

empire, without imposing speculative interpretations of political or existential

subjectivity. As we saw, Hadriens idea of liberty is based not on a philosophy, but

on a technique. His politics is one way of implementing this technique. It aspires to

be a pragmatic and realist politics of accepting the differential and incomplete

relationship between the subject and the world.

Hadriens technique de lhomme libre invites various types of interpretation,

several of which will be attempted in my thesis. Apart from questions of internal

theoretical consistency, this aesthetic determination of freedom will be interrogated

73 The same views are expressed in Mishima ou la Vision du vide, where Yourcenar writes: L erreur
grave du Mishima de quarante-trois ans [...] est de navoir pas vu que, meme si le visage de Sa
Majeste resplendissait de nouveau dans le soleil levant, le monde des ventres pleins , du plaisir
6vente et de l innocence vendue resterait le meme ou se reformerait, et que meme Zaibatsu, sans
lequel un Etat moderne ne saurait subsister, y reprendrait sa place preponderate, sous le m eme nom,
ou d autres nom s. EM, pp. 257-58.

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 Chapter 1 - Subjectivity, Politics
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in relation to the context of its enunciation, to wit, the immediate post-war period.

The possibility of freedom is indeed historicized by Yourcenar, but in relation to the

context of its reference, the Roman Empire. Early in the Carnets de notes de

Memoires d Hadrien , she notes:

Retrouve dans un volume de la correspondance de Flaubert, fort lu et fort souligne par

moi vers 1927, la phrase inoubliable : Les dieux netant plus, et le Christ netant pas
encore, il y a eu, de Ciceron a Marc Aurele, un moment unique oil 1homme seul a
ete.74

M ans solitude is also m ans freedom. The quotation from Flaubert has a strongly

negative and a strongly positive connotation. It suggests that there was a period of

nihilism in antiquity, where man was unaided by the divine element and therefore

had no point of reference or standard of validity. But this period is also one of

freedom, in the sense of the development of a humanist conscience which allowed

man to question his representations and, as I argued, to manipulate them towards the

goal of self-authentication. Thus, the choice of the narrative subject of Memoires has

to do with this unique historical conjuncture where, as Yourcenars readers have

noticed, the divine and the human elements coincide.75 W hat is at stake in the novel

is precisely mans ability to resist the temptation to play god, to reject the idea of

filling the historical-ontological gap with new representations and to use this

occasion to assert humanity in terms of difference and incompleteness. Further, there

is no doubt that Yourcenar establishes a link between, on the one hand, nihilism and

the possibility of freedom which Flaubert discerned in the period of the Pax Romana,

and on the other, the historical and cultural conditions that prevailed in Europe after

the Second World War.

The choice of historical time has yet another implication. As I pointed out

already, Yourcenar understands history as a palimpsest of interpretations and

74 OR, p. 519.
75 See, for instance, C. Frederick Farrell, Jr and Edith R. Farrell, Un lien entre l humain et le sacre :
Le nom de dieu, in Remy Poignault (ed.), Le Sacre dans Voeuvre de M arguerite Yourcenar (Tours:
SIEY, 1993), pp. 163-173, (especially pp. 171-72).

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 Chapter 1 - Subjectivity, Politics
and the Limits o f Representation

conceptualizations of le vecu. On this topic and with reference to the historical

setting of Denier du reve, Yourcenars novel on fascist Italy, Nadia Harris makes the

following remark: Nous sommes dans un univers ou les mediations symboliques

sont devenues le relais incontoumable du sens et d ou limmediatete, lintuition ont

disparu, balayees par une culture millenaire qui ne contjoit de relation au monde que

fondee sur lintelligibilite et la raison [...].76 Harris posits an original state of

immediacy that precedes temporally the millenary process of rationalization and

rhetorization of experience. I do not think that this assumption is fully justified,

since, for Yourcenar, art has always mediated and intellectualized m ans relationship

with the world. This aside, Harriss comment successfully highlights Yourcenars

conviction that the quest for freedom is more and more encumbered by imaginary

representations, as history builds upon itself. This means that existential and political

freedom is a possibility for Hadrien more than it is for modem man. If we take into

account Flauberts comment above, it becomes clear that Hadrien represents a

narrative subject which is ideally placed before an exceptional historical situation: he

has a unique chance of uncovering the layers of interpretation which conceal his true

relationship with the world. The novel suggests strongly that Hadrien insisted on the

instability and inconclusiveness of this relationship and thus managed to reclaim his

personal liberty and authenticity.

In this chapter I argued that Yourcenar associates the problematics of existence

and that of politics with the question of aesthetics and representation. Beginning with

a reading of the first chapter of Memoires d Hadrien, and drawing evidence from

other fictional and critical works by Yourcenar, I attempted to show how the

representational character of the subjects relationship with the world affects its sense

76 Nadia Harris, Representations de lAutre dans l oeuvre de Marguerite Yourcenar, in Jean-Philippe

Beaulieu, et al. (eds), M arguerite Yourcenar, Ecritures de Vautre (Quebec: XYZ, 1997), pp. 45-52,
(p. 46).

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 Chapter 1 - Subjectivity, Politics
and the Limits o f Representation

of selfhood and denies its autonomy. I proposed that Yourcenar considers the

subjects entrapment within conceptual structures as both an impasse which frustrates

the search for identity and an opening through which to reclaim freedom and

authenticity on the basis of difference. While the subject cannot, and should not

attempt to, rid itself from art and representation, Yourcenar suggests that it can

arrange these representations in such a way as to acknowledge and accept its

permanent lack of identity with the world and itself. Realism in narrative and

pragmatism in politics are the two forms this arrangement assumes. Whatever

Yourcenars reservations vis-a-vis philosophy in general, this is undoubtedly a

complex philosophical task. It is also one which brings her close to 20th-Century

existentialism and poststructuralism, as I will discuss in the chapters that follow.

The human and the political subjects which we expect to emerge from Memoires

d Hadrien challenge the conventional perception of subjectivity as full and unfailing

presence to oneself. We expect Hadrien as an individual and as a political subject to

emerge free from the quest for identity, and accepting his constitutive insufficiency

as part of his authenticity. The same should be true of the novel, Memoires

d Hadrien, whose narrative authenticity depends on whether it indeed acknowledges

the limits of the realism it employs. In the following chapters, I shall examine the

ways in which Yourcenar determines this fragmented, differential subjectivity and

whether she succeeds in the existential as well as the political arena.

74
 CHAPTER TWO

T e m p o r a l it y , Ir o n y
a n d the I n v e r s io n of A u t h e n t ic it y

In the 1990 conference Roman, histoire et mythe dans Voeuvre de Marguerite

Yourcenar, Antoine Wyss underlined succinctly the relationship between H addens

guiding rule of acquiescement (Wyss writes: accueil) and his technique of

manipulation of symbols and other mechanisms of representation:

La lucidite dHadrien [...] est une lucidite daccueil, qui accepte toutes les paroles,
toutes les pensees, tous les symboles, qui leur reconnait un sens ou une valeur, mais
en meme temps regarde au-dela, leur refusant la qualite dabsolu [...]. Hadrien
apparait ainsi comme un grand manipulateur de symboles, au sens large de tout ce
qui, dans la culture humaine, engendre des significations et sert de support aux
valeurs, de reference aux pensees. II peut sagir de mots, de concepts, de systemes,
dentites sumaturelles, de mythes et de dieux, il peut sagir aussi de lois, dusages,
dinstitutions ou de batiments, en tant quils representent quelque chose de plus
queux-memes. Toutes ces puissances [...] a partir desquelles la plupart des hommes
pensent, et auxquelles leur pensee sarrete ou retoume, Hadrien les considere pour
elles-memes et les unes par rapport aux autres, il pense a elles et a travers elles.1

This comment is valid as far as both Hadriens politics and his perception of

subjectivity are concerned. It points to the nihilism that permeates Memoires, in the

sense of the absence of a point of reference for the systems of values and ideas

employed by Hadrien in his role as emperor and cultural reformer. It also supports

1 Antoine W yss, Auteur, narrateur, personnage : Quelle historiographie pour M em oires d H a d rien T ,
in Simone et Maurice Delcroix (eds), Roman, histoire et mythe dans Voeuvre de M arguerite Yourcenar
(Tours: SIEY, 1995), pp. 483-491, (p. 488).

75
 Chapter 2 - Temporality, Irony
and the Inversion o f Authenticity

the idea that, for Yourcenar, the subjects relationship with the world is always

overdetermined by various systems of signification. Wyss groups all these systems

under the term symbols, thus implying that the mediation between the self and the

world is rhetorical in character. This idea will be further pursued in this chapter.

Manipulation of symbols, as a political and existential technique, implies the

possibility of authenticity. As I have already suggested, authenticity in Memoires

should not be construed as the return to an original state of unity before any rhetorical

mediation; it should rather be understood as a form of engagement with the world in

which the impossibility of identity is taken into account. Man and the world may

belong factically together, but from the point of view of the self, which is that of

Memoires d'Hadrien, the gap separating them cannot be bridged. As I will argue in

this and the following chapters, Yourcenar subverts the semantics of authenticity,

purity and, to an extend, humanism, in such a way that these terms assume the

opposite to their conventional meaning. The ideas of man and humanity are to be

understood in terms of m ans particularity among other entities to exist in a

differential relationship with the world. To be sure, the way Yourcenar subverts the

semantic content of metaphysically charged words must be investigated and the

philosophical meaning and consequences of this semantic subversion must be

questioned. I propose to begin this investigation in the present chapter by examining

first how Hadriens technique of manipulation of rhetoric is implemented, how it is

associated with his cultural work and in what sense it can be said that it authenticates

his politics.

Constructing and reconstructing

It was Yourcenar herself who defined politics as an art of manipulation in Les Yeux

ouverts. During her interviews with Galey, she stressed that a good statesman-leader

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is a manipulateur de genie. She also called Hadrien un grand metteur en scene

and, metaphorically, un joueur de poker.2 As these analogies intimate, Yourcenar

understands statesmanship as the re-casting of pre-existing values and symbols in an

effort to form new and more functional representations. Strictly speaking, there is no

element of pure creativity in this process; rather, there is the determination to remain

consciously under the sign of representation. This is evident in Hadriens work as a

founder and co-designer of temples and cities. These are conceived as artefacts

through which mans relationship with nature is both confirmed and mediated. Thus,

on the one hand, Hadrien considers these cities as an intentional reproduction of

natural order:

Plotinopolis, Adrinople, Antinoe, Hadrianotheres... Jai multiplie le plus possible ces

ruches de labeille humaine.

And further down:

La ville : le cadre, la construction humaine, monotone si Ton veut, mais comme sont
monotones les cellules de cire bourrees de miel, le lieu des contacts et des echanges,
lendroit ou les pay sans viennent pour vendre leurs produits et sattardent pour
regarder bouche bee les peintures dun portique...3

The analogy with the beehive suggests that Hadriens cities are modelled on nature.

They constitute organic extensions of it, and in this sense they conform to the novels

programmatic injunction, as it were, that discipline should assist nature in its work.

The image of the peasant who comes to the city and is impressed by urban art and

architecture illustrates the historical movement from nature to the representation of

nature. The city is the scene on which the meaning of nature is revealed to man.

Hadrien, as the founder of cities is the metteur en scene.

Yet on the other hand, in the same paragraph, Yourcenar writes that the city is

aesthetically opposed to nature:

2
Les Yeux ouverts, pp. 158, 162 and 155 respectively.
3 OR, p. 386.

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Dans un monde encore plus qua demi domine par les bois, le desert, la plaine en
friche, cest un beau spectacle quune rue dallee, un temple a nimporte quel dieu, des
bains et des latrines publiques, la boutique ou le barbier discute avec ses clients les
nouvelles de Rome.4

While this statement does not contradict the previous argument about the city as an

image of nature, it shows that there is no identity between the human and the natural.

The city mediates and therefore establishes the connection between the two, but at

the same time, as an image and a construction, it refuses it. The aesthetic

representation - whether it is a painting on a portico, a temple or the city itself -

confirms the link and determines the distance between man and nature.

Importantly, this link is characterized by Yourcenar as beautiful, un beau

spectacle. Beauty is never without concrete meaning in Yourcenar and it is worth

tracing its presence in her text as a direct reference to the fundamentally aesthetic,

and therefore un-natural, relationship between man and world. In the above passage

Yourcenar asserts that beauty defines the difference between the human and the

natural. This is a conclusion that also Leo Belmonte draws in Un homme obscur,

when he notes that man has exhausted himself in the effort to represent conceptually

the world. As we saw in Chapter 1, he concludes by saying, Mais c est beau. In

Belmontes philosophical world, the encounter with beauty has no practical value.

On the contrary, for Hadrien, beauty is a way of implementing a politics that

recognizes difference. One of his emblematic statements in the novel reads as

follows: Je me sentais responsable de la beaute du m onde. 5 More than a simple

declaration of love for beauty, this phrase summarizes the way Hadrien understands

politics and indeed subjectivity. The pursuit of beauty, harmony and order, reveals

the mutual belonging of man and nature not in terms of identity but in terms of

difference. Further, to be responsible for beauty means to be a master artist who re

4 OR, p. 386.
5 OR, p. 390.

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arranges and manipulates symbolic and aesthetic values with an aim to demonstrate

this incommensurability.

The most important way in which difference becomes apparent to Hadrien is

through the gradual undoing of the work of art in time and in history. The work of art

has to be understood in the broadest possible sense of la construction humaine,

which includes the aesthetic object, but also cities and the Roman Empire itself. As

the work of art changes or perishes with time, it transforms into a new representation,

an image of difference produced by both man and nature. For example, the city of

Rome is not considered in the novel as an objective aesthetic reflection of a stable

historical and political reality, but as the representation of historical change: Rome :

[...] la preuve visible des changements et des recommencements de lhistoire.6 In

this sense, the city slowly becomes the work of time, rather than that of poetic fiction.

It slips into a different temporality from that which it was initially meant to embody,

and transforms into a complete presentation of reality.

Hadriens goal as a manipulator of symbols and representations is to include in

the production of art the thought of time which is the agent of disintegration. Thus,

with reference to building materials, he notes:

A Rome, j utilisais de preference la brique etemelle, qui ne retoume que tres

lentement a la terre dont elle est nee, et dont le tassement, ou leffritement
imperceptible, se fait de telle maniere que ledifice reste montagne alors meme quil a
cesse detre visiblement une forteresse, un cirque, ou une tombe. En Grece, en Asie,
j employais le marbre natal, la belle substance qui une fois taillee demeure fidele a la
mesure humaine, si bien que le plan du temple tout entier reste contenu dans chaque
fragment de tambour brise.7

This is an example of Hadriens technique of manipulation through which desire for

order co-exists with the certainty of natural decay. The choice of building materials is

ultimately based on the prospect of the destruction of art. Evidently, this contradicts

the logic of the symbol and that of representation. This does not mean that the

6 OR, p. 418.
7 OR, p. 385.

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symbolic function of the edifices that Hadrien builds - for example, their reference to

divine or institutional authority - is refused or subverted. As I stressed above,

Hadrien is not a rebel, but a statesman who accepts symbols and conventional

significations. This is why he becomes founder, patron and designer of temples and

cities. However, after being delivered to time, as it were, these symbols serve to

reveal a broader ironic context, in which their insufficiency as representations is

made evident. Symbolic value and ironic awareness of difference share the same

space and time. By combining the two, Hadrien remains constant to his programme

to coordinate volonte and destin, representation and its undoing.

In Memoires d Hadrien there are many references to Hadriens activity as a

manipulator of the symbolic value of artworks and institutions, several of which will

be discussed in my thesis. In the present context, I shall discuss one more example,

that of the erection of the Olympeion in Athens. In the novel, this temple is

considered an architectural success, and it is charged with religious and cultural

meaning. In addition to its function as a place of worship of Zeus, for Hadrien, it

symbolizes le mariage de Rome et d Athenes and the rebirth of Greece after a long

period of decline. Soon after its dedication, however, Hadrien recontextualizes this

temple by seeing it from the perspective of its future decline: Ce fut alors quune

melancolie d un instant me serra le cceur : je songeais que les mots d achevement, de

perfection, contiennent en eux le mot de fin : peut-etre n avais-je fait quoffrir une
Q

proie de plus au Temps devorateur. The ironic effect of time is here contemplated

with sadness, as Hadrien remembers that pure creativity and the establishment of

stable symbolic values are not possible. In fact, in Memoires, Hadrien is neither a

pure manipulator nor a pure creator of art and symbols, but oscillates often violently

between the two. His impurity is part of Yourcenars definition of what it is to be

human. In the passage quoted above, he suggests that the relationship between the

8 OR, pp. 422-23.

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two stages through which the artefact passes, that of its making and that of its

unmaking, is not dialectical. The first stage is that of creation, stabilization, and the

quest for identity, while the second stage is that of fragmentation, contingency and

the affirmation of difference. The final authentication of the work of art is not a

synthesis of the two stages, but the manifestation of difference in the spectacle of

ruins. If the fragmented work of art represents authentically the relationship between

man and nature, it nevertheless does not ensure a place for the subject, which will

always remain deficient. At a different part of the novel, but in a similar mood,

Yourcenar makes the following remark:

La ou un tisserand rapiecerait sa toile, ou un calculateur habile corrigerait ses erreurs,

ou 1artiste retoucherait son chef-doeuvre encore imparfait ou endommage a peine, la
nature prefere repartir a meme largile, a meme le chaos, et ce gaspillage est ce quon
nomme lordre des choses.9

According to Yourcenar, to the extent that artistic intention is intention for beauty

and meaning, it will always be frustrated. What is at stake in the novel is the

discovery of a form of order that contains disorder and even of a form of (non-

)identity which contains conflict. Through his work as a cultural and political

reformer, Hadrien investigates the possibility of this new post-metaphysical form of

identity for a permanently dislocated subject - whether this is the individual subject

or, as we shall see, the political subject, to wit, the Roman Empire.

Now while the primary goal of this chapter is to highlight the sophistication of

Yourcenars unorthodox idea of authentic subjectivity, the risks involved in its

definition are not underestimated. Yourcenar attempts to wrest such key terms as

beauty, order, humanity and eternity out of their metaphysical context, but the risk of

falling back into essentialism, or indeed of never emerging from it, is certainly high.

Yourcenars love for classical beauty and her profound confidence in the possibility

of order can only with difficulty be reconciled with what she sees with equal clarity

9 OR, pp. 475-76.

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as mans shapeless facticity in a chaotic world. On the other hand, her fascination

with ruins and the idea of decline over time implies an inverted essentialism, that of

the decadent, the fleeting and the impure. Of course, there is no reason to question

Yourcenars frankness as she sets out to reach the outer limits of the unutterable

(T inform ule). However, as this thesis will be unravelling the characteristically

modem complexity of the notion of authentic subjectivity in Yourcenar, the stakes

inevitably will become higher. Particular ideas, such as the inversion of the meaning

of concepts, Hadriens technique of accepting and his manipulation of symbols

will have to prove to be operative in the context of the narrative but also in that of

modernity in general. The form of subjectivity which Yourcenar puts forward, and

which is supposed to transcend the conventional categories of type and identity will

also have to be described with some precision. Finally, this new subject, whose very

insufficiency becomes apparent with time and authenticates it, must avoid the

character of universality - another of Yourcenars favourite terms. As we shall see in

the last chapter of the thesis, it is the political subject, as Yourcenar imagines it

especially in Memoires d'Hadrien, and as she projects it upon post-war Europe, that

resists almost entirely the manipulation that she proposes. W hatever its degree of

failure or success, Yourcenars paradoxical existential and political thought, which

combines conservatism and radicalism, acceptation and revolte, merits detailed

analysis and historical contextualization, which is what I shall be doing in the rest of

this chapter and the subsequent ones.

Yourcenar defines positively mans relationship with the world as a

collaboration expressed in two forms of action: construire and reconstruire. Her

definitions of these two essentially poetic tasks, well-known among her readers and

critics, read as follows:

Construire, cest collaborer avec la terre : cest mettre une marque humaine sur un
pay sage qui en sera modifie a jamais ; cest contribuer aussi a ce lent changement qui
est la vie des villes.

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Jai beaucoup reconstruit: cest collaborer avec le temps sous son aspect du passe, en
saisir ou en modifier lesprit, lui servir de relais vers un plus long avenir ; cest
retrouver sous les pierres le secret des sources.10

Hadrien situates the task of politics and that of aesthetics within the framework of

accepting. Constructing and reconstructing are determined as forms of collaboration

with what is already given to man, namely, la terre and le temps, understood sensu

lato as the inherited natural and historical space-time. Nevertheless, different

aesthetic assumptions and aspirations underlie each of these two forms of action.

The definition of construire implies the ideas of originality and permanence,

which are nonetheless constantly challenged in this novel and elsewhere in

Yourcenars work. Especially the phrase mettre une marque humaine sur un paysage

qui en sera modifie a jam ais situates man in opposition to earth, in a way which

questions the possibility of collaboration. Yourcenar sexualizes the notion of

construire, by writing in the same paragraph: Creuser des ports, c etait feconder la

beaute des golfes. Thus, the idea of construire can be linked with a phallocentric

perception of nature, whereby man leaves a permanent mark on the virgin body of the

earth. By the same token, construire can also be linked with a logocentric

understanding of artistic intention, as the desire to defy and objectify what is

perceived as natures transience and changeability. In a different context in

Memoires, Yourcenar suggests that construire is indeed an act of opposition to time

as the agent of difference. In an imaginary but richly nuanced anecdote, she writes

that, during a visit to the Egyptian city of Thebes, Hadrien scratched his name on the

feet of the Colossus of Memnon. He then realized the frivolousness of this act, and

remarked:

Lempereur [...] egratigna dans cette pierre dure quelques lettres grecques, une forme
abregee et familiere de son nom : AAPIANO. Cetait encore sopposer au temps : un
nom, une somme de vie dont personne ne computerait les elements innombrables, une
marque laissee par un homme egare dans cette succession de siecles.11

10 Both quotations in OR, p. 384.

11 OR, p. 445, my emphasis.

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Construire as laisser une marque constitutes an act of opposition to time or, to use

another of Yourcenars terms, an act of revolt. As such, the notion of constructing is

related to a violent aesthetic act through which man claims a proper identity for

himself. By writing a proper name, A A P IA N O , Hadrien expresses symbolically his

desire for absolute coincidence between a unique sign, his name, and a unique

referent, his self. Soon, however, this propemess is proved to be illusory and the

desire for identity is replaced by the certainty of displacement: Hadrien recognizes

his situation as that of un homme egare. In the strict aesthetic sense of creating, the

notion of constructing is thus impossible. Indeed, Hadrien admits elsewhere that

meme la ou j innovais, j aimais a me sentir avant tout un continuateur.12 As a form

of collaboration, constructing signifies merely an intention, rather than an aesthetic or

political act of pure creativity. Through the disintegration of the artwork, the artist

becomes aware of the inauthenticity of this intention and enters the space of irony.

On the other hand, reconstruire is free from metaphysical intention and consists

in asserting the repetitive movement of irony. Unlike construire, it does not refer to

an initial mark, a point of origin, but to the endless succession of mystification and

demystification. To reconstruct signifies to acknowledge impermanence and change.

As Yourcenar implies, reconstruire is authentically temporal in the sense that it

prolongs the future and uncovers the past. While in the course of the novel Hadrien

struggles between the two roles of constructeur and reconstructed, it is the latter

role which is always depicted as most fitting to his task as emperor and cultural

reformer. It would be useful at this point to re-quote Hadriens statement after the

reconstruction of the Temple of Olympian Zeus in Athens: J avais collabore avec les

ages, avec la vie grecque elle-meme ; [...] le passe retrouvait un visage d avenir.

Reconstructing is here confirmed again as a form of collaboration with time. Through

this collaboration, Hadrien discovers the unity of time in the constancy of difference.

12 OR, p. 4 1 5 .

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As the celebratory tone of this passage suggests, Yourcenar considers that political

and existential identity can be successfully re-defined on the basis of this constancy.

According to this analysis, reconstruire is not the antithesis of construire,

even if these two terms refer to completely different attitudes towards the world and

the self. It is clear that Yourcenar does not see any contradiction between them. As

the intention of pure ex nihilo creativity, construire pertains to the first stage of the

history of the work of art, that of a necessary illusion. This stage involves a degree of

mystification and belief in the possibility of re-unification with nature. It is a moment

of inauthentic consciousness, which Yourcenar has associated with the notion of

volonte, the will for identity. This moment is followed by the second stage, the

inevitable return of destin, which is confirmed in the ironic spectacle of ruins.

While the context of irony cannot be transcended, it is possible for man to emerge

from it as reconstructeur. This is not the role of the meta-ironist who resigns to the

inevitability of decay, or who attempts to prevent it from happening again. The

reconstructeur remains within the confines of inauthenticity. Only, as I have

suggested, Yourcenar inverts the meaning of authenticity in order to redeem art and

politics from within the context of irony. Reconstructing is understood not as the

creation, but as the manipulation of symbols; not as an original representation, but

as the mise en scene of established values. The succession of construire and

reconstruire defines the aesthetic and political task and engenders a specific

temporality on which I now propose to focus more closely.

Irony and authenticity

Paul de M ans influential essay The Rhetoric of Temporality provides a useful

frame for understanding better the the artistic or philosophical m ans transition

from a mistaken, mystified assumption of unity with nature to a wiser stage,

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where a distance between the self and what is not a s e lf, is established. He calls

this transition a fall, a word whose theological undertones he recognizes, and which

he links to the moment of absolute irony.

The element of falling introduces the specifically comical and ultimately ironical
ingredient. [...] The Fall, in the literal as well as the theological sense, reminds [man]
of the purely instrumental, reified character of his relationship to nature. Nature can at
all times treat him as if he were a thing and remind him of his factitiousness, whereas
he is quite powerless to convert even the smallest particle of nature into something
human.13

De Man states with clarity what in Memoires d Hadrien is hidden behind the

ambivalent definition of construire: namely, that it is impossible to leave an

inaugural marque humaine on the earth. In de M ans essay, the poet-philosopher is

not in a state of ambivalence. On the contrary, he is constantly the victim of his own

false feeling of pride.14 Not unlike Yourcenar, de Man defines this feeling as mans

inauthentic reaction to the irreversible effect of time, in a postlapsarian framework,

where the distance between the self and the world constitutes the source of the

subjects lack of self-identity. In the context of his argument on the prevalence of

allegory in early romantic literature, de Man associates the figure of the symbol with

the inauthentic sense of time, as a result of the desire for spatial coincidence between

the individual symbol and its referent. Further, allegory is linked with the unveiling

of an authentically temporal destiny, since it confirms the arbitrariness and

illegitimacy of the symbol. The distinct temporalities defined by these two figurative

modes correspond to the temporalities pertaining to the acts of construire and

reconstruire. Evidence supporting this point comes from several key passages from

de M ans essay:

The unveiling of an authentically temporal destiny [...] takes place in a subject that
has sought refuge against the impact of time in a natural world, to which, in truth, it
bears no resemblance. The secularized thought of the pre-romantic period no longer
allows the transcendence of the antinomies between the created world and the act of

13 The Rhetoric o f Temporality, in Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the R hetoric o f
Contem porary Criticism (London: Methuen, 1983). All quotations from pp. 213-14.
14 D e Man, The Rhetoric o f Temporality, p. 214.

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creation by means of a positive recourse to the notion of divine will; the failure of the
attempt to conceive of a language that would be symbolical as well as allegorical, the
suppression in the allegory of the anagogical and the analogical levels is one of the
ways in which this impossibility becomes manifest.15

De Man points out that the possibility of transcending the antinomies between the

created world and the act of creation depends on accepting an origin of positive

reference. Indeed, the possibility of making an original and permanent marque

humaine would depend on some form of divine authorization. Were G ods

authorization granted to the poet, every individual creation - every construction or

symbol - would coincide with its meaning through a process of reduction (anagoge)

or correspondence (analogia). However, both de Man, with regard to romanticism,

and Yourcenar, with regard to Rome at the time of Hadrian, assert that the divine will

has lost its effectiveness. As I mentioned in the previous chapter, at the beginning of

the Carnets de notes, Yourcenar quotes a passage by Flaubert which emphasizes

mans existential solitude in Hadrians time. Further evidence of mans abandonment

by God comes from a powerful and ironic remark by Hadrien apropos of a criticism

by his architect, Apollodore. The latter had remarked that the colossal statues of

seated gods which Hadrien liked to place inside temples would not be able to stand

up, if they so wanted, without breaking the vault. Hadrien had his architect killed:

sotte critique [...] Mais les dieux ne se levent pas ; ils ne se levent ni pour nous

avertir, ni pour nous proteger, ni pour nous recompense^ ni pour nous punir. Ils ne se

leverent pas cette nuit-la pour sauver Apollodore.16

Thus abandoned by the gods, man - according to de Man - has to resort to a

secular process of naming, based on the negative agency of allegory, the rhetorical

figure by which time is introduced in consciousness:

In the world of the symbol [the] relationship [between the image and the substance] is
one of simultaneity, which, in truth, is spatial in kind, and in which the intervention of
time is merely a matter of contingency, whereas, in the world of allegory, time is the
originary constitutive category. The relationship between the allegorical sign and its

15 D e Man, T h e Rhetoric o f Temporality, pp. 206-7.

16 OR, p. 4 9 0 -1 .

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meaning (signifie) is not decreed by dogma. [...] We have instead a relationship

between signs [which] necessarily contains a constitutive temporal element; it
remains necessary, if there is to be allegory, that the allegorical sign refer to another
sign that precedes it. The meaning constituted by the allegorical sign can then consist
only in the repetition (in the Kierkegaardian sense of the term) of a previous sign with
which it can never coincide, since it is of the essence of this previous sign to be pure
anteriority. The secularized allegory of the early romantics thus necessarily contains
[a] negative moment.17

For de Man, allegorical meaning is produced as the authentically temporal difference

between consecutive signs that no longer perform any symbolic function per se. In

this difference lies the negativity of allegorical language. In the secularized world of

Memoires d Hadrien, the negative moment is that of reconstruction, since it

presupposes the destruction of the symbol which is about to be re-built, and therefore

the renouncement of the hope to unite the symbolic image with the substance that it

is supposed to represent. For Hadrien, the repetitive movement of reconstruction does

not apply only in the literal sense of re-erecting older edifices and reforming

institutions. As we have seen in the examples mentioned thus far, the new temples

that he builds and the cities that he founds contain a negative moment too. They

belong to time as much as they belong to particular locations. These cities and

institutions draw their meaning from previous and future constructions of a similar

kind. As Antoine Wyss underlines, all of Hadriens initiatives in the areas of

architecture, city planning, state institutions and cultural values remain puissances

[... quHadrien] considere pour elles-memes et les unes par rapport aux autres.

Although temples are dedicated to gods, and cities bear the names of their patrons,

these symbolical significations prove to be temporary, as the constructions

themselves collapse in time, literally or metaphorically. For this reason, Hadrien

considers these values syntagmatically, les unes par rapport aux autres, thus

allowing for their allegorical meaning to appear.

Yourcenar also presents the Roman Empire in terms of repetition in a large

historical scale. As an institution, the Empire is not the absolute embodiment of

17 D e Man, The Rhetoric o f Temporality, p. 207.

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temporally fixed abstract values, but the differential representation of these values as

they change over time. More specifically, for Yourcenar, Rome is a historical

formation which draws its signification from a previous historical formation, namely,

Greece. In the last chapter of my thesis, I shall discuss the way this complicates the

concepts of accepting and reconstructing and makes it necessary to re-evaluate the

notion of the authentic. In the present context, I wish to underline Romes

heteronomy, as it is understood in Memoires d Hadrien. Its signification as historical

formation and political subject lies in the fact that it re-iterates a representation

which is prior to it, a sign which precedes it.

Arguably, then, Hadriens authority to attribute political and cultural

significations in a language that has lost its symbolic power relies on the allegorical

(in de M ans sense) management of values. This is a way to understand Yourcenars

characterization of Hadrien as a manipulateur de genie. He does not seek to

discredit individual values and institutions, despite the loss of their legitimacy. If

acceptance contains revolt and reconstructing contains constructing, then it is also

true that allegory contains the symbol. This is not a fact the de Man emphasizes

sufficiently. However, his argument entails the idea of the fall of symbolic

representations, which means that allegory contains, albeit in inverted or demystified

form, the metaphysics of identity in the symbol. In the following passage, de Man

draws a fundamental distinction between symbol and allegory:

Whereas the symbol postulates the possibility of an identity or identification, allegory

designates primarily a distance in relation to its own origin, and, renouncing the
nostalgia and the desire to coincide, it establishes its language in the void of this
temporal difference. In so doing, it prevents the self from an illusory identification
with the non-self, which is now fully, though painfully, recognized as a non-self.18

De Man is keen to translate the rhetorical difference between symbol and allegory

into the existential difference between illusory conceptualization and demystified

recognition of the self. Hence, perhaps, his reluctance to discuss extensively the role

18 D e Man, The Rhetoric o f Temporality, p. 207.

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of the desire for unity during the production of allegorical meaning. Still, his analysis

of allegory is clearly based on a negotiation between the positive act of creation and

the negative work of repetition. By designating allegory as a movement of distancing

and renunciation, he acknowledges indirectly that the fall of the symbols, and,

consequently, the nostalgia for identity, are the conditions for the production of

allegorical meaning. It follows that existential self-definition is the result of a

repetitive process that begins with the desire for coincidence with the world and

passes through the secular experience of frustration. Now, this is a process that

Hadrien experiences frequently in Memoires. On the basis of it, he pursues existential

freedom by accepting, rather than revolting against, the mechanisms of representation

that hinder the work of self-definition. In the previous chapter I stressed that the

notion of acceptation is inherently paradoxical. This is evident in the present context,

where the recognition and acceptance of symbolic values are the conditions for the

advent of the negative moment of renunciation, and the establishment of the

demystifying language of allegory. Yourcenars paradoxical dialectic, according to

which reconstruire contains the illusion of the possibility of construire, coincides

with the dialectic between allegory and symbol. It is through the blindness of

accepting that Cavafy and Hadrien acquire the insight of authentic revolt.

A new definition of authenticity, beyond the nostalgia and the desire to

coincide, arises from de M ans theory of allegory and irony. In the following

paragraphs, I shall compare the metaphysical definitions of authenticity and purity

with their ironic re-determination in de M ans and Yourcenars texts. While de Man

does not discuss the idea of authenticity in a straightforward manner, its importance

for his thesis is demonstrated by the frequency with which he uses this word and its

derivatives and synonyms. He writes that the prevalence of allegory [in early

romantic literature] always corresponds to the unveiling of an authentically temporal

destiny. A few pagesfurther down, he draws a similar conclusion with regard to

irony: Both [allegory and irony] are determined by an authentic experience of

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temporality.19 These arguments are based on de M ans remark that time is

constitutive of allegory and irony, as opposed to the world of the symbol, where

time is not the originary constitutive category. In the symbol, temporality intervenes

merely contingently, in a way that - one is tempted to say - does not harass the self-

sufficient mechanism of the production of symbolic meaning. However, when

temporality is introduced as a constitutive factor in the representation, then the

symbol is destabilized and loses its autonomy. It becomes a sign among past and

future signs. As de Man suggests: it is of the essence of the previous sign to be pure

anteriority. By being purely anterior, the sign itself loses its identity and ceases to

exist purely as itself: the temporal sign becomes impure. To conclude, when the

temporality of the representation is only contingent, then the sign is stable and pure;

but when there is pure temporality, as in the cases of allegory and irony, the sign

loses its purity.

Yourcenar referred to a similar paradox when she noted that the Historia

Augusta, one of her historical sources for Memoires, brings the contemporary reader

into almost unmediated contact with the fleeting, unofficial jugements [du Romain]

de la rue [...] sur lhistoire qui passe. Nous avons ici, she added, Topinion a letat

pur, c est-a-dire impur.20 An analogous moment occurs in the last part of

Yourcenars autobiography, Quoi? L etemite. She imagines her father talking to

Egon, the real person on whom the main character of Alexis was modelled, on the

subject of homosexuality: Et je ne te dirai pas non plus quil y a la je ne sais quelle

voie rapide pour atteindre a la realite chamelle pure et simple, ou impure et simple. 21

These examples may not refer to temporality as such, but they describe states of

facticity and fleetingness which cannot be idealized and conceptualized: the hearsay

on the street, the instability of the flesh. As in the case of rhetorical figures, we are

19 D e Man, T h e Rhetoric o f Temporality, pp. 206 and 226.

20 Yourcenar, Les Visages de lhistoire dans l Histoire auguste , in EM, p. 12.
21 EM, p. 1283, my emphasis. Marguerite Yourcenar, Quoi ? L etem ite (Paris: Gallimard, 1988). Quoi
? L etem ite is the last part o f Yourcenars autobiographical trilogy Le Labyrinthe du monde.

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dealing with two different forms of purity: the purity of the existential and the purity

of the conceptual. The pure facticity of existence fouls, as it were, the concept of

being. In Yourcenars thought, purity and impurity interchange positions.

In de M ans essay, temporality is the element that contaminates conceptual

thought with the result that concepts cease to be pure. This paradox affects the notion

of authenticity as well. There are two contradictory definitions of authenticity,

depending on whether time is seen as simultaneity or anteriority.

- In the domain of the symbol, authenticity designates a state of identity between

essence and appearance, upon which the autonomy of the individual sign rests. From

a theological point of view, the authenticity of the name is guaranteed by dogma,

which decrees the a priori presence of God in his creations, and therefore the unity

between the self and the non-self. In this state of primordial authenticity - evidently

a prelapsarian world - time is reduced to eternity, or, as de Man notes, to

simultaneity and spatiality.

- In the domains of allegory and irony, this metaphysical interpretation of authenticity

is profoundly challenged by the introduction - de Man writes: the discovery - of time

in the process of representation.22 Using persistently negative terms and expressions,

de Man describes the temporalities that structure each of these rhetorical figures:

Allegory exists entirely within an ideal time that is never here and now, but always a
past or an endless future.23

The act of irony [...] reveals the existence of atemporality that is definitely not
organic, in that it relates to its source onlyinterms ofdistance and difference and
allows for no end, for no totality. Irony divides the flow of temporal experience into a
past that is pure mystification and a future that remains harassed for ever by a relapse
within the inauthentic.24

For the purposes of my analysis, these temporalities coincide and complicate the

meaning of authenticity in the same way. What is considered to be authentic in a

22 D e Man writes that allegory and irony are linked in their common discovery o f a truly temporal
predicament, de Man, p. 222.
23 D e Man, The Rhetoric o f Temporality, p. 226.
24 D e Man, The Rhetoric o f Temporality, p. 222.

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constitutively temporal environment is essentially inauthentic from the point of view

of the timeless tautological sign. The temporality of allegory and irony can be

considered inauthentic, inasmuch as neither allows for the establishment of a present

in which signifier and signified constitute an organic whole; yet the same temporality

is authentic, since it allows time to appear not as static presence, but as dynamic

absence in the sense of the past and the future. Similarly, in theological terms,

allegorical and ironic time is inauthentic, for it does not emanate immediately from a

divine authority; still, considering that the divine will has lost its effectiveness, this

time is authentic, because in its context this loss is recognized and accepted.

Therefore any argument on authenticity depends on whether one perseveres in

the faith in the metaphysical unity between surface and depth, or perceives a break

( distance and difference) at the heart of the semi otic representation. De Man, who

certainly belongs to the second category, inverts the meaning of authenticity and uses

it to qualify such concepts as temporality, experience and being, that no longer refer

to a transcendental origin, but which describe the current secular state of affairs in

terms of loss.25 In the context of de M ans essay, to be authentic means to affirm the

discontinuity or troubled continuity between being and the source of signification,

and to accept that meaning dwells negatively in the language of irony.

It is worth adding that, according to Frank Lentricchia, de Man receives his

concept of authenticity from Sartre. In his After the New Criticism, Lentricchia

explains:

Sartres attempt to evade his intellectual progenitor [i.e. Heidegger] lies in his
insistence that what Heidegger thought primally integrated was, in actuality, primally
divorced; hence the antithesis of the for-itself and the in-itself. In his revision of
romantic poetic de Man follows Sartre.

And elsewhere in the same chapter he adds:

25 In The Rhetoric o f Temporality, apart from the expressions authentically temporal, truly
temporal and authentic experience, for which references have already been given, de Man uses the
expressions authentic being (p. 216), actual s e lf (p. 219) and good poetic con scien ce (p. 208).

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From Being and Nothingness de Man picks up and accommodates to romantic literary
contexts pour soi and en soi, the key terms of Sartres phenomenological ontology,
and the relations of these terms to both good and bad faith, authentic and inauthentic
existence.26

Lentricchia is not entirely convincing in his evaluation of identity and difference in

Heidegger. In Chapters 4 and 5 , 1 shall be discussing the Heideggerian theme of unity

that includes difference without cancelling it, and its relationship with Yourcenars

perception of order and disorder. Still, Lentricchias comments are helpful in that

they emphasize the irreducible gap that de Man perceives between the self and the

world. Further, the connection which Lentricchia establishes between Sartre and de

Man emphasizes the existential implications of de M ans analysis of the temporality

of rhetoric.

Indeed, de Man pays particular attention to the existential implications of

authenticity, especially in the framework of his discussion of the temporality of irony.

Drawing principally from Baudelaires idea of le comique absolu in his essay De

lessence du rire, de Man suggests that irony brings about the division of the subject

into a multiple consciousness.27 In his essay, Baudelaire defines this subject as un

philosophe, un homme qui ait acquis, par habitude, la force de se dedoubler

rapidement et d assister comme spectateur desinteresse aux phenomenes de son

moi . This dedoublement is the beginning of a permanent split within the subject.

After the fall into irony, illusory identification with nature gives way to the

realization of the rhetorical constitution of the self. At the moment of irony, de Man

writes, the innocence or authenticity of our sense of being in the world is put into
29
question. De Man explains that inasmuch as ironic language places the subject at a

distance from which it can reflect on itself, it transforms it into a sign. Language

26 Frank Lentricchia, After the N ew Criticism (Chicago: The University o f Chicago Press, 1980), pp.
287 and 285.
27 D e Man, The Rhetoric o f Temporality, p. 213.
28 Charles Baudelaire, D e l essence du rire, in Curiosites esthetiques: L a rt rom antique et autres
oeuvres critiqu es, ed. by H. Lemaitre (Paris: Gamier, 1962), pp. 241-263, (p. 251), emphasis in the
original.
29 D e Man, The Rhetoric o f Temporality, p. 215.

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divides the subject into an empirical self, immersed in the world, and a self that

becomes like a sign in its attempt at differentiation and self-definition. This

semiotic make-up of the subject has devastating effects on human existence. On the

one hand, there is an inaccessible self which remains part of an undifferentiated

empirical world. On the other hand, there is a phantasmatic, rhetorical self who can at

best ruminate lucidly or mournfully upon this internal gap. In de M ans words, the

ironic language splits the subject into an empirical self that exists in a state of

inauthenticity and a self that exists only in the form of a language that asserts the

knowledge of this inauthenticity.31 The ironic fall of the philosopher-poet leads to

the realization that what the self perceives as a natural or unselfconscious state of

being is in fact an inauthentic one. After the fall into irony, which Baudelaire also

associates with the separation between man and god, man exists in a consciously

unnatural and permanently insecure state, in an unstable relationship with a world

that no one m asters.32

This is the same problematic that informs Yourcenars major novels and her

autobiographical trilogy. Despite their particularities, Alexis, Eric von Lhomond,

Hadrien, Zenon, Nathanael, as well as some of the central characters of Le

Labyrinthe du monde, Yourcenars autobiographical trilogy, share a common interest

in locating authentic subjectivity beyond the level of socio-political, cultural or

ideological identity, in a solitary, mysterious self that is negated by both the rhetorical

I and the empirical world. Among Yourcenars characters - fictional or otherwise - it

is possible to distinguish those who are overwhelmed by this sad existential

predicament (Leo Belmonte and Nathanael in Un homme obscur, Octave in

Souvenirs pieux)', those who continue the effort towards self-determination by

30 D e Man, The Rhetoric o f Temporality, p. 213.

31 D e Man, The Rhetoric o f Temporality, p. 214.
32
In D e lessence du rire, Baudelaire describes the moment o f irony interms o f fall: le spectacle
dun homme qui trebuche au bout du trottoir, (p. 248). He establishes a clear link between laughing
and falling, in the theological sense o f the word: II est certain [ ...] que le rire humain est intimement
lie a l accident d une chute ancienne, d une degradation physique et m orale, (p. 245).

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acknowledging, and investing in, the ironic split within the self (most notably Zenon,

but also Alexis in Alexis ou le traite du vain combat, Eric in Le Coup de grace,

Michel in Archives du nord)\ and those who suffer the consequences of this split, but

cannot help rationalizing and ideologizing it, with the result that they resort to

political violence in the hope of reversing it (Marcella in Denier du reve, Sophie in

Le Coup de grace, Remy in Souvenirs pieux, but also Electre in Yourcenars play

Electre ou la chute des masques). Unsurprisingly, none of these characters achieve

their objectives, unless of course we take their defeat - almost invariably sublimated

into the desire for death, and typically underscored by its advent - as a proof of the

authenticity of their attitude. The longed-for demise of these anti-heroes, brought

about by abandonment to sorrow, ironic manipulation of fate or, a fortiori,

ideologization and violence, signifies the recognition of the subjects original

alienation from itself and corroborates its constitutive inability to establish its

identity.

Notably, Hadrien is the only one among these characters who does not belong

exclusively to any of these categories. He is certainly not a rebel, but his violent

suppression of the revolt of the Jews testifies to gross ideological prejudice to which

both he and - to some extent at least - Yourcenar are blind, as I will discuss

subsequently. He is not wrecked by pessimism, but his initial hysteria at the idea of

his imminent death contrasts unfavourably with the dignity with which Nathanael,

the main character of Un homme obscur, lets himself die in sadness. He is a great

ironist in that he has no faith in the symbols that he institutes, but he is not marked by

Zenons fundamental atheism and, at a crucial turn of the plot, he sees himself as the

god and creator ex nihilo of Antinoiis, his lover and perfect work of art. Through

his failures, which are largely due to the force and allure of the promise of identity,

Hadrien appears as one of the most authentic of the novelistic characters that

Yourcenar has proposed as figures of authenticity. In Memoires d Hadrien, the path

towards recognition of the fragmented ontological status of the self does not involve

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asceticism and does not finish with the implementation of Hadriens technique of

liberation through manipulation of ironic fate: it also entails falling into impurity.

Hadrien looks at his fallen self and realizes that both his political and his existential

projects are undermined by his repeated failure truly to anticipate the moment of

irony. Yourcenar strongly suggests that he is saved - authenticated - by dint of being

aware of his inauthenticity.

De Man understands the meaning and the necessity of individual falling in a

different way:

The mere falling of others does not suffice; he [i.e. the language-determined man] has
to go down himself. The ironic, twofold self that the writer or philosopher constitutes
by his language seems able to come into being only at the expense of his empirical
self, falling (or rising) from a stage of mystified adjustment into the knowledge of his
mystification.33

Here is where de M ans and Yourcenars perceptions of irony differ most strongly.

De Man stresses that falling is by no means the preamble of a return to unity between

the rhetorical self and the world. For him, irony and the consciousness of irony do not

have any redemptive effect. He criticizes Starobinski for claiming that irony in

Hoffmanns Prinzessin Brambilla is a means of reconciliation of the spirit and the

world.34 De Man comments that true irony [states] the continued impossibility of

reconciling the world of fiction with the actual world.35 In the same vein, he is

sceptical of Peter Szondis utopian projection of a new positivity that comes as a

result of the negative knowledge of irony. According to Szondi, irony, or the

conscious establishment of a distance between finite achievement and infinite

longing, allows for a prefiguration of a future unity. De Man considers this view

33 D e Man, The Rhetoric o f Temporality, p. 214.

34 Jean Starobinski, Ironie et melancolie: G ozzi, Hoffmann, Kierkegaard, in E stratto da Sensibilita e
Razionalita nel Settecento (Florence: Sansoni, 1967), p. 459, quoted in English by de Man, The
Rhetoric o f Temporality, p. 217.
35 D e Man, The Rhetoric o f Temporality, p. 218.
36 Peter Szondi, Friedrich Schlegel und die Romantische Ironie, Satz und G egensatz: Sechs Essays
(Frankfurt: Insel-Verlag, 1964), pp 5-24, (p. 17); quoted in English by de Man, The Rhetoric o f
Temporality, p. 219.

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as wrong from the point of view of the ironist, who is aware that conceptual

manipulation of experience precludes any hope for reconciliation. In a remark that

amounts to a critique of traditional Hegelianism, de Man adds: The dialectic of self-

destruction and self-invention which [...] characterizes the ironic mind is an endless

process that leads to no synthesis.37 It follows that there is no possibility of

permanent self-definition and, rather than synthesis and restoration, the best one can

expect is a constantly renewed confirmation of ones inauthenticity. But, as de Man

puts it, to know inauthenticity is not the same as to be authentic.38

In view of this argument, Yourcenars position with regard to Hadriens

authenticity and the significance of individual falling has to be re-examined. It is

important to know whether she is drawn into the epistemological error or even the

state of existential bad faith for which de Man essentially reprimands Szondi and

Starobinski. As I have suggested already, for Yourcenar, irony is not the catalyst for

the dialectical development of the self. Nowhere in her work does it lead to a new

synthesis of experience and the intellect. As regards the temporality of irony, we may

safely assume that she would endorse de M ans assertion that irony is not temporary
5 39
[...] but repetitive, the recurrence of a self-escalating act of consciousness.

Otherwise, irony would be a mere intellectual stage in her narrative characters

progress towards self-definition, followed by the invention of an authentic language

that would be capable of articulating pragmatic expectations of redemption. But the

closest these characters get to such a state of post-ironic bliss is the moment of their

death, a moment shrouded in silence (Hadrien, Zenon, Belmonte, Nathanael) and

completely devoid of hope. In M emoires, where the imminent death of the emperor

constitutes an instance of irony which envelops the entire novel, the impossibility of

establishing a sense of self-identity becomes more and more evident as he approaches

37 D e Man, The Rhetoric o f Temporality, p. 220.

38 De Man, The Rhetoric o f Temporality, p. 214.
39 D e Man, The Rhetoric o f Temporality, p. 220.

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the end. A short phrase near the end of the book, when Hadrien is struggling with the

idea of dying, echoes de M ans assertion that to know inauthenticity is not the same

as to be authentic. Hadrien says, La meditation de la mort n apprend pas a mourir,

thus intimating that, till the very end, the knowledge of the ironic fall does not

prepare one for the reality of falling. 40 Consequently, the question arises as to how

one is to understand Hadriens authenticity. In what way can one be authentic, when,

as both Yourcenar and de Man acknowledge, this would imply the impossible

reconciliation between language and experience?

To understand the discrepancy between these two writers who, otherwise, start

from similar assumptions and follow similar lines of thought, I propose to look

further back at de M ans idea of the a-historicity of the subject. It is necessary to do

so, since, unlike Yourcenar, de Man associates the nostalgia for authenticity with the

arbitrary expectation of redemption through the consummation of history. He defies

conventionally understood Hegelian historiography by suggesting that history does

not unfold according to a plan of fulfilment, and that our knowledge of this fact does

not compensate for the inconsequence of history. Inasmuch as we understand

authenticity as the telos and the overcoming of history, the subject can never be

authentic, because it is fundamentally incapable of being historical. This means that

the subject and history are articulated along such an un-natural, a-historical and

eccentric structure as language. Arguably, the central point made in The Rhetoric of

Temporality is that temporality in its subjective and historical dimensions is a

rhetorical scheme, precisely because what is felt as time is nothing more than the

experience of the repetition of a failure to signify. In the following passage from this

essay, de Man stresses that a-historicity is the result of a shortcoming, a lack which is

constitutive of the subject.

40 OR, p. 510 .

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It is a historical fact that irony becomes increasingly conscious of itself in the course
of demonstrating the impossibility of our being historical. In speaking of irony we are
dealing not with the history of an error but with a problem that exists within the self.41

At the heart of the matter lies de M ans conviction that history is not a serial,

organic, or dialectical progress that intends a prescribed end. History is not natural,

it is not phenomenal and it is not really temporal, insists de Man in his essay on

Walter Benjamins The Task of the Translator, in an effort to challenge the

organicist, the hermeneutical, but also the Marxist interpretations of history. In that

essay, he famously refers to history as the errancy of language, a permanent

disjunction, a linguistic complication.42 De Man is not claiming that history is an

accident of immaterial consequence. His point is rather that the dominant

historiographies of the 19th and the 20th centuries are characterized by a

programmatic perception of history and fail to distinguish between the political and

the apocalyptic. Thus, the romantic and more generally the modem subject continues

to imagine itself as the agent of a history that contains its transcendence. De M ans

thesis calls for a complete dissociation of the philosophy of history from theology

and for a sustained discrimination between politics and the extra-linguistic or

sacred categories of totality and identity. In Conclusions: W alter Benjamins The

Task of the Translator , Paul de Man cites approvingly Benjamins thesis that the

messianic dissolution of history cannot come from within history. Benjamin writes:

Only the messiah himself puts an end to history, in the sense that it frees, completely
fulfils the relationship of history to the messianic. [...] Therefore the kingdom of God
is not the telos of the dynamics of history, it cannot be posited as its aim; [...] seen
historically it is not its aim, but its end, its termination.43

41 D e Man, The Rhetoric o f Temporality, p. 211.

42 All quotations from Paul de Man, Conclusions: Walter Benjam ins The Task o f the Translator ,
in The Resistance to Theory, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), pp. 73-93, (p. 92).
43 Quoted and translated by de Man in C onclusions, p. 93. An English translation o f Benjam ins
Theologico-Political Fragment is in Peter Demetz (ed.), Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms,
A utobiographical Writings, trans. by Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), pp. 312-
313.

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In Benjamins comment de Man sees a confirmation of his claim that history cannot

be properly historical, in the sense that it is not an intentional process and has no

teleological design. The self, according to de Man, is a-historical, because it can

never hope to coincide with nature: such a coincidence could never be the result of a

historical process, but only of an extra-historical agency, that of God. If history is not

possible, then there cannot be any politics either, at least not in the sense of a

collective project which aims at creating a communal identity. On the contrary,

politics as it is applied in a secular age can only be a form of poetics. Politics

confirms, rather than challenges, the linguistic constitution of history, and does not

contain the promise of authentication. De Man concludes this essay by arguing contra

Gadamer that, properly speaking, there is no modernity, if modernity is understood as

a dialectical achievement, an essentially theological notion.44 Critical negation and

ironic distance, even if they are considered as particular features of modernity - a

claim with which de Man disagrees anyway - , do not trigger off the political process

of historical fulfilment and do not signal the end of the schism between empirical and

linguistic self. Authenticity is not possible, de Man would claim, because the self is

not designed to be part of a historical plan of redemption.

The relationship between authenticity and modernity will be further discussed in

the next chapter of my thesis. At this point, however, I would like to question de

M ans claim that poetics and history have no room for certain historical notions such

as the notion of modernity.45 With this statement, de Man equates the promise of

authenticity with the putative dialectical accomplishment of the work of history in

modernity. However, is the equation between modernity as a theological notion and

authenticity as exclusive and necessary as de Man suggests? Despite de M ans

assertions, we have witnessed instances of authenticity - however ephemeral and

isolated - in modem art and in political thought, as a reaction to the concept of the

44 D e Man, C onclusions, p. 93.

45 D e Man, C onclusions, p. 93

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unified self. Presumably, one of de M ans goals is to discredit such violent

metaphysical visions of modernity as Nazism and Stalinism, where authenticity is

measured in terms of the subjects adaptability to total and teleological perceptions of

history. Nevertheless, de M ans unconditional identification of authenticity with

totality does not do justice to those typically modem and essentially political

approaches to representation where emphasis is laid on the impure and the profane.

In terms of artistic modernism, it would be useful to mention here Peter Burgers

distinction between a work-centered modernism which is characterized by a

peculiar pathos of purity (he names particularly functionalist architecture, abstract

painting and the nouveau roman), and the radical avant-garde (for example ecriture

automatique, Magrittes painting and the Dadaists). According to Burger, the

avant-garde breaks the boundary with the external world through audacious

borrowings and provocative vulgarizations.46 Given this distinction, it can be argued

that the avant-garde paves the way for an understanding of selfhood and politics

beyond the longing for identity, and therefore announces a new form of authenticity

that is characteristically modem. Tellingly, in Conclusions, de Man quotes

Benjamins praise of Blochs The Spirit o f Utopia to support his argum ent47 By

taking recourse to Benjamin and Bloch, he implicitly accepts that distinct

configurations of modem political thought which take into account the linguistic

constitution of subjectivity are possible. Thus we may legitimately understand

modernity as the context in which no illusions about the limits of politics and

representation can be sustained any longer. It is by no means self-evident that this

approach to modernity will lead to the error of historical immanentism, for which de

Man reproves Gadamer, but also, implicitly, Starobinski and Szondi.

46 Peter Burger, The Disappearance o f Meaning: Essay at a Postmodern Reading o f M ichel Tournier,
Botho Strauss and Peter Handke, in Scott Lash and Jonathan Friedman (eds), M odernity an d Identity
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), pp. 94-111. See especially pp. 97-98.
47 D e Man, C onclusions, p. 93.

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The similarities and differences between Yourcenar and de Man as regards the

elusive path of authenticity and the dead end of irony can now be summarized. De

M ans distinction between the actual and the fictional self helps us understand

Yourcenars emphasis on the split between the self and the world. Moreover,

Yourcenar is aware, at least as much as de Man, of the fact that sophistication and the

consciousness of irony do not suffice to reconcile the semiotically determined man

with himself and realise the vision of transcendence. However, while these

conclusions allow de Man to pronounce the end of the hope for authenticity,

Yourcenar maintains that not everything is lost, because authenticity does not have to

be understood in the strict sense of redemption and reconciliation through the

fulfilment of history. Modernity reveals the aesthetic/poetic character of our

relationship with nature, thus presenting us with a unique opportunity to claim a new

form of authenticity. The theme of m ans solitude in a secular era, which Yourcenar

borrows from Flaubert, resonates again at this point. Free from the injunction to

author his own history, man has the option to recognize himself negatively in the

constancy of difference that is installed within the self. This negative recognition,

which modernity makes possible, is what Yourcenar proposes to understand as a new

form of purity and authenticity. As we have seen already, in Yourcenars work, the

constancy of difference manifests itself predominantly as the experience of time. One

of the central theses of her oeuvre is that time narrates man through the demise of his

works, while man fails to narrate himself by means of poetic language (in de M ans

sense). Nowhere is this thesis expressed more succinctly than in Yourcenars short

essay Le Temps, ce grand sculpteur.48

48 Le Temps, ce grand sculpteur is the title essay o f Yourcenars collection o f essays Le Temps, ce
grand sculpteur (Paris: Gallimard, 1983); included in EM.

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Time and difference

One of the most striking characteristics of Le Temps, ce grand sculpteur is the

unapologetic fashion in which Yourcenar informs us that true authorship and the

fulfilment of artistic intention reside in time, rather than in man. Time authenticates

the works of art, by leaving the marks of wear and those of lived history on them.

Yourcenar begins this essay with a simple statement: Le jour ou une statue est

terminee, sa vie, en un sens, commence.49 This almost prosaic hypothesis, upon

which Yourcenar intends to meditate rather than reason, challenges the conventional

perception of the work of art as a static and finished representation. She goes on to

explore various forms of change ( modifications) suffered by statues: some of these

changes are due to natural wear, some have been occasioned by human violence and

some are the effect of different trends in conservation and restoration. Her summary

examination ends with an ironic remark. Yourcenar points out that the most striking

transformations occur to statues lost in the sea. After centuries of ongoing

decomposition sans agonie, [ces statues] ne nous appartiennent plus:

Elies ont subi un changement oceanique, aussi riche quetrange. Le Neptune [...]
destine a omer le quai dune petite ville [...] est descendu au royaume de Neptune. La
Venus celeste est de venue 1Aphrodite des mers.50

There is a twofold reconciliation at play here, but it is, in both cases, ironic. Firstly,

there is an ironic reconciliation with the sacred. Neptune, the god of the sea, and

Venus, who, as Aphrodite, was bom from the foam of the sea, re-assume their

original state, they finally return to the sea where they belong. However, this happens

at the expense of their symbolic value. The union with the divine element is achieved

precisely when god abandons man (ces statues ne nous appartiennent plus).

49 EM, p. 312.
50 EM, p. 316.

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Secondly, there is an ironic reconciliation of the signified with the artistic signifier:

these statues become authentic only after they escape the various historically specific

processes of signification. Neptune returns to his kingdom, Venus becomes

Aphrodite, when they are free from the intention of the artist-creator. These are

extreme and controversial instances of reconciliation. They introduce, as I mentioned

above, a new concept of authenticity, that has more to do with the perception of a

world that fulfils itself through the temporal process of waste, than with mans

potential for authorship and creativity.

In Le Temps, ce grand sculpteur Yourcenar remains descriptive and suggestive

rather than overtly argumentative. Nonetheless, her contemplative, self-assured style

is at odds with the violent theme of the essay, namely, destruction and waste in and

of art. The suspicion that Yourcenar is pushing forward a specific theoretical agenda

becomes stronger when we take into account the timing of the essay, originally

drafted in 1954, a few years after the Second World War. Indeed, the essays full

power and meaning emerges when it is read under the light of a specifically modem

and politically urgent discussion of representation. Rather than a random collection

of images and thoughts relating to the bizarre effect of the passage of time on

sculpture, Le Temps is an essay on violence in aesthetics, and on the aesthetics of

violence in history. It is based on the assumption that the work of man (art, war,

destruction and restoration) is animated by the ambition to refer to some original

ideal. As far as this ambition is concerned, Yourcenar does not discriminate between

the artist, whose work is supposed to represent truth, the rebel, who decapitates

statues of false idols, and the restorer, who re-assembles fragments of ancient marble

according to the prevailing taste of his or her time. These three categories of artistic

agency are united in the common goal to reclaim a state of lost authenticity in the

conventional sense of the word, by forcing a static correspondence between the work

of art and what it is supposed to represent. While Yourcenar accepts that the

aspiration for authenticity is legitimate and indeed proper to man, she shows that the

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methods used to fulfil it, creation and destruction, are fruitless and wrong. They are

based - and it is here that Paul de M ans analysis is most useful - on the misleading

idea that progress in knowledge and the subversion of aesthetic, political or religious

traditions can lead to the recovery of truth. Creation and destruction rely on the

hypothesis that the creative subject is the author of history and that this history will

eventually come to its fulfilment. Simply by pointing to the ruined statues of the past,

Yourcenar leads us to a similar conclusion to that which de Man would also draw a

few years later: namely, that the ironic effect of time is a sign of the impossibility of

self-identity.

However, despite de M ans reservations, in Yourcenars case, the knowledge of

irony does not bring about the renewal of the aspiration to authenticity in its

metaphysical guise. Nothing in Le Temps indicates that manipulation of ironic time

may yield better results than the centuries-long fight against it. On the contrary, she

considers violence and the desire for identity in art as constitutive elements of life

and nature - elements which are as indisputable as the natural forces that transform

slowly the statues of ancient divinities. For Yourcenar, the metaphysics of the

symbol, ineffective as it is p er se, remains deeply engraved in the human psyche. If

her essay belongs to a new era, it is because she decides to search for beauty and truth

not in the symbol and its subversion, but in the symbols ironic fall over a long

period of time. From the statues exposure to the hazards of nature and history, a

higher form of beauty is begotten that incorporates ambition and frustration:

A la beaute telle que la voulue un cerveau humain, une epoque, une forme
particuliere de societe, [les modifications des statues] ajoutent une beaute
involontaire, associee aux hasards de lhistoire, due aux effets des causes naturelles et
du temps. Statues si bien brisees que de ce debris nait une ceuvre nouvelle, parfaite
par sa segmentation meme.51

In this passage, the criterion of perfection follows the same rules as the criterion of

authenticity in the two essays of de Man that I discussed above: what is considered as

51 EM, p. 313.

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perfect from the point of view of ironic time is considered as imperfect from the

point of view of the artist and vice versa. Ultimately, the work of art is authenticated

by [sa] decomposition sans agonie, [sa] perte sans mort, [sa] survie sans

resurrection52. This amounts to saying that the bridging of the gap between intention

and meaning, between the empirical and the linguistic self, is not conditional upon

death and resurrection, over which the artist, the a-historical subject, has no power.

The hope for the messianic solution, which gives rise to the aesthetics of the symbol,

is but a necessary first step. The passage of time transforms works of art into

authentic representations. The observer of ruins may then realise that there is no need

to persist in this initial desire for identity as a coincidence between artistic intention

and the work of art.

In Le Temps, ce grand sculpteur, as in Memoires, the reconstructeur can

estimate better than the artist the significance of the transformations suffered by

ancient statues. Yourcenar writes that their fragmented members convey better than

the original work of art such notions as grace, love, movement and the awe of death,

and that some of these statues are so ruined that they are indiscernible from pebbles

found in the seashores of the Aegean Sea. She then continues as follows:

Lexpert pourtant nhesite pas : cette ligne effacee, cette courbe ici perdue et la
retrouvee ne peut provenir que dune main humaine, et dune main grecque, ayant
travaille en tel endroit au cours de tel siecle. Tout lhomme est la, sa collaboration
intelligente avec lunivers, sa lutte contre lui, et cette defaite finale ou lesprit et la
matiere qui lui sert de support perissent a peu pres ensemble. Son intention saffirme
jusquau bout dans la ruine des choses.53

This passage encapsulates Yourcenars theory of authentic representation. Unlike de

Man, but also unlike the structuralists who associate the dead end of representation

with the death of meaning, she sees the failure of western aesthetics as the triumph of

artistic intention. To be sure, she does not argue for the rehabilitation of the author.

She rather points out that authorial intention is ultimately fulfilled in spite o f the

52 EM, p. 316.
53 EM, p. 313.

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author. This sounds like a paradox; but, in Le Temps, ce grand sculpteur,

Yourcenar shows that the identification of intention and meaning is achieved

( s affirme) in ways that the artist could never imagine. It follows that, in principle,

artistic intention is not wholly present in the artists consciousness. The western artist

entertains an immodest concept of authenticity. He attempts to materialize this

concept by mastering both matter and spirit, an act which is little short of hybris. As

de Man shows, not even the Baudelairean philosophe, for all his awareness of

irony, can escape mystification, the illusion that the empirical self and the semiotic

self are unified in the artefact. However, once the work of art is delivered over to

nature and history, the artists conscious intention fades away. As Yourcenar

suggests, an old work of art no longer belongs to man. Fragmented, unrecognizable,

it serves the overall intention of the act of representing, which is to state the true

differential relationship between man and nature, between the concept and the thing,

between language and experience.

These ideas have been present in less refined form in earlier works by

Yourcenar. Sixtine, a series of short imagined monologues spoken by Michelangelo

and other people related to him, written in 1931, is a prime example. In the following

passage, the M aster meditates about nature, the limits of creativity and the

inevitable perishing of the work of art. Time is described as Tetem elle mobilite de

1uni vers:

Vouloir immobiliser la vie, cest la damnation du sculpteur. Cest en quoi, peut-etre,

toute mon oeuvre est contre nature. Le marbre, ou nous croyons fixer une forme de la
vie perissable, reprend a tout instant sa place dans la nature, par 1erosion, la patine, et
les jeux de la lumiere et de 1ombre sur des plans qui se crurent abstraits, mais ne sont
cependant que la surface dune pierre. Ainsi, letemelle mobilite de lunivers fait sans
doute letonnement du Createur.54

It is worth noticing that Createur stands for the artist as much as for God: they both

witness the instance of irony. Time is the great sculptor, for it hands back to nature

54 EM, p. 286; Sixtine belongs to Yourcenars collection o f essays Le Temps, ce gra n d sculpteur.

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and to history what is due to them, and thus restores an original state of affairs that

involves no salvation. The demise and belated authentication of art - and, by

extension, of all human constructions exposed to time - corroborate the primordial

difference that exists between man and nature. However, in so far as Yourcenar sees

beauty in ruins in an affirmative, rather than a romantic way, she points to a new

aesthetics, based on a modest perception of authenticity. When, in the sight of a

fragment, Yourcenar exclaims Tout lhomme est la, she intimates her conviction

that man is there identical to himself: an entity split between materiality and ideality,

yet an inextricable part of nature and history. This is not an achievement on mans

part, for he never consciously intends his works to end in ruins. Nevertheless, this is

the beautiful conclusion of his efforts, a disillusionment that serves as an answer to

the question of referentiality. Yourcenar suggests simultaneously that authentic

representation is beyond m ans possibilities and that it is always already an

accomplished fact. For all his inauthenticity, man is fundamentally authentic, in that

he exists temporally.

A few years after the publication of Le Temps, ce grand sculpteur, Yourcenar

returned, with a twist, to the theme of the slow disintegration and re-authentication of

the work of art. In Le Cerveau noir de Piranese, a long essay written between 1959

and 1961, she wrote about the characteristically modem attitude of Piranesi who took

ancient ruins as his artistic subject matter and, not unlike Yourcenar, offered a

representation (his etchings) of the failures of representation (the ruins). Piranesi acts

as a reconstructeur, whose task is to remind us of the pragmatic (that is, non-

essential, non-metaphysical) character of things, disclosed to us in and by time.

Yourcenar writes:

1image de la ruine ne declenche pas chez Piranese une amplification sur la grandeur
et la decadence des empires et linstabilite des affaires humaines, mais une meditation
sur la duree des choses ou leur lente usure, sur 1opaque identite du bloc continuant a
linterieur du monument sa longue existence de pierre.55

55 EM, p. 84.

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It is worth noting Yourcenars insistence that the work of art has no symbolic power:

there is no amplification, no analogical or anagogical relationship between the

monument depicted and what it was supposed to stand for, or between Piranesis

engravings and any abstract ideas. Instead, there is the affirmation of the self-identity

of matter. Yourcenar goes on to re-instate the relationship between the linguistically

determined self (artistic intention, volonte) and nature (la pierre), by introducing

the parameter of time: L edifice se suffit ; il est a la fois le drame et le decor du

drame, le lieu d un dialogue entre la volonte humaine encore inscrite dans ces

ma 9 onneries enormes, linerte energie minerale, et lirrevocable Tem ps.56 As in Le

Temps, ce grand sculpteur, the intention of the artist (in this case the Roman

architect whose construction Piranesi depicts) is affirmed in the temporal process of

the undoing of the artefact. It is only during and because of this process that the work

of art, as the negative representation of what the artist wishes to repress

(disintegration in time), becomes authentic, that is, identical to itself. As Yourcenar

puts it: L edifice se suffit.

The ideas which I propose to read in these essays relate closely to the familiar

theme of acceptation. In Le Temps, Yourcenar invites indirectly the reader to

acknowledge that there is no need to take resort to the hope of return to a state of

authentic union with nature or the divine element. The failure of the symbol to

advance history towards a putative messianic solution confirms m ans inability to

manipulate his destiny, let alone prepare himself for redemption. The examples of

wrecked statues that Yourcenar offers in Le Temps, stretching from classical

antiquity to the modem times, indicate that she perceives western aesthetics as a long

epic battle, a revolt against temporality. This battle culminates in, and concludes

historically with, the Second W orld W ar - a focal point of reference for Yourcenars

aesthetics and politics, as I will discuss in the last chapter of my thesis. For her, the

56 EM, pp. 84-85.

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early post-war period, when both Memoires and Le Temps, ce grand sculpteur were

written, is the time when man has finally the chance to develop a different aesthetics

that involves seeing, rather than conceptualizing, and accepting, rather than revolting:

seeing the ironic effects of time on human constructions and developing a form of

realism that is free from the pretension of totality in the aesthetic representation;

accepting that authenticity neither precedes nor follows the difference between the

natural and the linguistic self, but designates the state of temporality and non

identity in which man finds himself historically. The possibility of an aesthetics of

accepting, as Yourcenar figures it, is meant as a chance for man to reclaim his

position in nature and in history - not as auteur, but as c o lla b o ra tes and

reconstructed.

The possibility of accepting constitutes the basic difference between Yourcenars

theory of representation and de M ans poststructuralism. These two thinkers follow

similar tracks in their analyses of the metaphysics of the symbol and its existential

import on the fragmented subject. Neither of them considers that the knowledge of

irony is the catalyst for re-directing history to its telos, as it were. They also agree

that history as a political/poetical process has nothing to do with the projected union

with the sacred, which is why man is doomed to exist in permanent inauthenticity.

However, while Yourcenar moves on from this point to discover a new form of

authenticity that does not restitute man to his former authority, de Man stops short of

exploring an alternative place for man in the world. While The Rhetoric of

Temporality focuses on m ans ironic fall and destitution, one might still detect a

reverse anthropocentrism in this essay. De Man is content with inventing an aporetic,

yet intensely dramatic world which revolves around the gap that was left by the fallen

subject. However chaotic, this world still draws its metaphysical signification from

man, who lies shattered in a conscious state of a-historicity. To a certain extent, these

exclusively negative valorisations intimate de M ans reluctance to free himself from

the conceptual framework of the quest for authenticity. One suspects de Man for

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being too negative, in that he takes the absence of content in history as a proof of the

a-historicity of the self.

This hard-line approach contrasts with Yourcenars more pragmatic spirit.

Although both writers agree that we should dismiss the idea that we partake in a

historical process, Yourcenars thought and writing are motivated by the experience

of being historical. For her, the adventure of metaphysics, in which western man has

found himself entangled, does not change the reality that we live in history. The

conclusion that historical necessity does not possess a form conceivable by man

(history is not organic, it is not dialectical, and so on) does not discredit the

experience of this necessity. Thus it is not surprising that Yourcenars understanding

of historicity, as inferred from her literature, is akin to that of the post-Marxist critic

Fredric Jameson, who writes in The Political Unconscious that [o]ne does not have

to argue the reality of history: necessity, like Dr. Johnsons stone, does that for us.57

He defines history as the experience of Necessity and explains:

Necessity is not [...] a type of content, but rather the inexorable form of events; it is
therefore [...] a retextualisation of history which does not propose the latter as some
new representation or vision, some new content, but as the formal effects of what
Althusser, following Spinoza, calls an absent cause. History is what hurts, it is what
refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis,
which its ruses turn into grisly and ironic reversals of their overt intention.58

To be sure, the comparison between Yourcenar, the liberal realist, and Jameson, the

critic of the revisionist left, should not be taken too far, lest we lose from view the

difference in their respective intellectual origins, vocabularies and goals. I am

quoting Fredric Jameson as an example of a writer who wishes to distance himself

from both the textualizing and the totalizing versions of historiography, by which I

mean the structuralist interpretation of history as a self-reflective narrative and

certain Marxist analyses which are heavily based on historical determinism. Like

Yourcenar, he is aware of the ideological parameters involved in such conceptual

57 Fredric Jameson, The P olitical Unconscious (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 82.
58 Jameson, p. 102.

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representations of reality, and reminds us that history is something to be endured,

rather than comprehended. The subject is historically situated, because it is always a

human being experiencing history, regardless of her (in)ability to articulate its

content and to recognize herself in it. De Man is certainly right to criticize traditional

Marxist and theological accounts which claim that history is a process culminating in

the consummation of human praxis or divine will. However, the conclusion that

humans are hostages of their representations is only half of the story. This awareness

can help us re-organise our relationship with reality, seen as a newly identified

elusive referent.

In so far as there is an analogy between Jamesons and Yourcenars respective

understandings of history, there is also a parallel between their ideas on artistic

intention. As I discussed above, Yourcenar suggests that the intention of the artist

does not find its fulfilment in the autonomous work of art, but, paradoxically, in the

process of waste to which it is exposed. The reconciliation intended by the artist

between nature and the semiotically structured self is achieved only through the

destructive agency of time. While, strictly speaking, no one really intends the

destruction of the work of art, when it loses its symbolic value it slowly recovers its

authentic temporality. It is then a realistic depiction of the truth that the artist

intends to convey; an authentic representation that does not involve the moment of

transcendence of the self. Now, from a certain point of view, what Yourcenar

contends with regard to artistic intention, Jameson also implies with regard to

historical agency. Indeed, in the above passage Jameson argues that history affects us

by ironically reversing the overt intentions of individual and collective action.

However, this reversal does not possess a coherent meaning in itself. The ruses of

history are not part of an underlying narrative (a la Hegel), and the undoing of human

labour is an unmediated process on which man has no authority. It is during and

because of these reversals that the historicity of human action becomes manifest. Our

failure to act as agents of history discloses the latter as something that we necessarily

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experience but can never appropriate. A further thesis is now possible. If the true

face of history is revealed to us through the reversal of our intentions, then we

depend on this repetitive process of mystification and disillusionment, desire and

frustration, oblivion and memory, to become aware of our historicity. Unlike

Yourcenar, Jameson does not take this argument so far as to suggest that the intention

of the acting subject is affirmed dans la ruine des choses. Nonetheless, he performs

a similar technique of inversion of significations. He condemns the conventional

perception of history as the product of inauthentic historical conscience; conversely,

he perceives, and affirms, history as the effect of an enigmatic and unrepresentable

force, which has been traditionally assigned to the domain of the unreal. If, for

Marguerite Yourcenar, authenticity is identified as the state of impurity in which we

always already dwell, for Jameson, historicity is affirmed through recourse to a state

of un-reality that penetrates and determines our actions.

So far in my thesis, I have tried to articulate in critical terms Yourcenars

perception of the stakes involved in the modem crisis of representation. Her

preoccupation with questions of authenticity both in life and in art is not of

epistemological - and even less of ethical - order; it rather has to do with the need to

understand the self from an existential perspective, in a way that takes into account

the aesthetic and semiotic constitution of subjectivity. To this effect, Yourcenar

proposes - at least after the Second World War - to employ a technique of observing

and accepting reality in its phenomenological aspect, which is that of disorder and

difference. She further proposes to redefine existential identity in terms of the

constancy of this difference, and to rethink politics according to the aesthetic

principle of reconstructing rather than that of creating. These ideas permeate the

thoughts and actions of her principal narrative characters and are further analysed in

Yourcenars critical writings. At the level of narrative representation, these ideas are

also illustrated by the choice of historical fiction and that of realism as the main

genre and the main narrative style of her novels.

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Reading Memoires d Hadrien, I have come close to identifying political man as

a post-humanist who no longer intends to act as the agent of history, but assumes the

role of the guardian of cultural achievement and that of the manipulator of symbols

and meanings. He is described as a reconstructeur, rather than a creator ex nihilo,

and his task is to maintain and record the difference between conceptuality and

experience, measurability and fluidity, and ultimately representability and what lies

beyond it. Although Memoires remains the principal reference when it comes to

locating the instance of the political in the work of Marguerite Yourcenar, the rest of

her fiction is rich in characters who function as pragmatists and mediators between

such oppositions, without intending to reconcile them. One thinks especially of the

figure of the medecin, a mediator between the body and the intellect, which, though

important as a metaphor in M emoires, constitutes one of the central devices of

L GEuvre au noir. I shall finish this chapter with a reference to the idea of medicine in

these two novels and I shall discuss briefly its political and existential implications.

Medicine and madness

Zenon, the principal character of L CEuvre au noir, is a 16th-Century physician,

philosopher and alchemist, entirely dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge, at the

expense of his freedom and, finally, his life. As his three qualities suggest,

knowledge is equally understood in this novel in terms of concrete science, abstract

thinking and magic. Each of these elements contributes to the definition of a

philosophical and aesthetic realism which is even more rigorous than that of

Memoires. As a philosopher and an alchemist, Zenon realizes that truth as such is not

available directly to the intellect, but must be understood non-rationally and non-

speculatively. In one of the key moments in the novel, where he is asked whether he

finds taking care or patients tiring, he answers:

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Chaque nuit passee au chevet d un quidam malade me replasait en face de questions

laissees sans reponse : la douleur et ses fins, la benignite de la nature ou son
indifference, et si lame survit au naufrage du corps. Les explications analogiques qui
m avaient jadis paru elucider les secrets de 1uni vers me semblaient pulluler a leur
tour de nouvelles possibilites d erreur en ce quelles tendent a preter a cette obscure
Nature ce plan preetabli que d autres pretent a Dieu. Je ne dis pas que je doutais :
douter c est different ; je poursuivais 1investigation jusquau point ou chaque notion
ployait dans mes mains comme un ressort quon fausse ; des que je grimpais a
lechelle dune hypothese, je sentais se casser sous mon poids 1indispensable s i...59

Unlike Hadrien, Zenon does not fall into irony in a dramatic manner. His repetitive

fall from the ladder (T ech elle) refers to his scholarly investigations, rather to

accidents of his life.60 However, the result is the same. In the error of les

explications analogiques - which Paul de Man associates with the metaphysical logic

of the symbol, as we saw above - Zenon sees a confirmation of the fact that man is

not part of a preestablished natural or divine plan. Nonetheless, defying de M ans

logic, Zenon does not conclude that the self is essentially un-natural, just because it

does not knowingly partake in any natural project of redemption. As a physician,

Zenon is well-placed to know the inexorable corporeality of the self, even at the

moment of fall, where nature seems obscure, and the split between the self and the

world seems most assured. The meaning of medicine in L CEuvre au noir is that it

offers a vantage point from which neither the inscrutability of nature nor the facticity

of the subject can be mistaken.

In Michel Breulets words: Parce quils sont indissociables, Zenon passe ainsi

de lanxiete metaphysique a langoisse du corps.61 The body, which triggers Zenons

metaphysical anxiety and gives rise to questions about the intentionality of nature, is

also the object on which he implements his medical technique. This technique is part

of his attempt to approach truth scientifically, by measuring the distance that

59 OR, p. 646; Marguerite Yourcenar, L CEuvre au noir (Paris: Gallimard, 1968).

60 Cf. Marguerite Yourcenar in Les Yeux ouverts: II y a des chutes verticales dans la vie d Hadrien. II
ny en a pas chez Zenon ; on le sent indestructible, p. 190.
61 Michel Breulet and M. Delcroix, La figure du medecin dans loeuvre de Marguerite Yourcenar, in
Bulletin de la Societe Internationale d'Etudes Yourcenariennes, N o 21 (decembre 2000), (Tours:
SIEY, 2000), pp. 161-82, (p. 180). This essay consists o f two distinct parts each o f which is written by
one o f the two authors.

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separates him from it, just as Diirer measures the distance that separates him from the

source of his anxiety, as we saw in the previous chapter. In the following passage,

Zenon describes the relationship between the inquiring self and the world, and

stresses the abilities and the failures of the human spirit:

Jen sais les limites [i.e. de Fesprit], et que le temps lui manquera pour aller plus loin,
et la force, si par hasard lui etait accorde le temps. Mais il est, et, en ce moment, il est
Celui qui Est. Je sais quil se trompe, erre, interprete souvent a tort les legons que lui
dispense le monde, mais je sais aussi quil a en lui de quoi connaitre et parfois
rectifier ses propres erreurs. [...] Jai observe les astres et examine linterieur des
corps. [...] Je sais que je ne sais pas ce que je ne sais pas ; j envie ceux qui sauront
davantage, mais je sais quils auront tout comme moi a mesurer, peser, deduire et se
mefier des deductions produites.62

What may sound like Zenons positivist attitude towards knowledge is in reality an

expression of his modesty with regard to the limits of scientific mind. As a humanist,

Zenon is confident in the power of the human mind and in future progress; at the

same moment, however, he knows that a great deal of error is always mixed in

scientific truth, and that the latter deals only with the accessible, the representable

part of a greater truth which remains elusive. As he remarks a few lines further down:

Je me suis garde de faire de la verite une idole, preferant lui laisser son nom plus
fCX
humble d exactitude. This line sums up marvellously the negative humanism of

L CEuvre au noir, as well as Yourcenars appreciation of realism as the negative

representation of truth. Zenons reluctance to idolize truth mirrors Yourcenars

refusal to ideologize those aspects of reality which do not lend themselves to

semiotic interpretation. Further, Zenons almost obsessive interest in scientific

accuracy is due to his decision to remain within the limits of representation and apply

its rules rigorously. Like the realist writer, Zenon is above all an artisan. This is most

evident when we think that medicine is for him a technique for bringing the self to

the outer limits of the unreal and the unrepresentable, without ever transcending

them. Writing about Zenon as a physician, Michel Breulet made a similar point:

62 OR, p. 653.
63 OR, p. 654.

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S abimant en son corps, Zenon resorbe ainsi 1abTme ou langoisse le precipite ; etre
en corps, c est encore etre ; c est s inscrire dans l espace et la duree. Done l homme
est a la fois machine et machiniste. Voila, sans doute, comment, chez Zenon, se revele
la vocation medicale. II s agit pour lui de decouvrir le machinisme du vivant, afin de
le maitriser. Passionnement, mais sans apparente passion, son desir est bien de
pouvoir enfin conduire la machine, la faire ralentir ou accelerer, jusqua l ultime
immobilite.64

Breulet, who comes from the area of neuroscience rather than that of literature,

stresses the reflexivity of the experience of being a medical doctor. Zenon studies his

own body, and verifies its facticity, its being-there spatially and temporally: etre en

corps, cest encore etre. From this point of view, the body can be thought of as a

machine, and the physician as a machinist, someone who employs a technique.

Clearly, neither Yourcenar nor Breulet argue that the body is a machine before

anything else. But in so far as it exists factically, the body is measurable. In this

sense, the physician is an artisan whose task is to master a technique, as the above

passage also confirms. The knowledge that comes from measuring the body allows

the physician to manipulate it jusqua lultime immobilite, which in L CEuvre au

noir has the concrete meaning of Zenons suicide. In the context of the problematic

of representation, Zenons suicide thus marks the end of measuring and the

borderline between the sensible and what lies beyond it. By the same token, Zenons

suicide marks the end of realism. This point is made with dry precision in the final

phrase of the novel, where Zenon lies dying in his prison cell, losing his senses one

by one. Yourcenar then concludes by writing, Et c est aussi loin qu on peut aller

dans la fin de Zenon.65 Just like medicine, writing explores the limits of the

representable but refuses to go any further.

In a sense, what Zenon does in relation to the human body Hadrien does in

relationship to the empire. To be sure, Hadriens method is not scientific, but his

decision to remain within the representational context and to work on a technique

rather than a philosophy is based on the same principles as those of medicine.

64 Breulet, p. 181.
65 OR, p. 833.

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Hadrien reserves the highest praise for the Athenian physician Leothicyde, who is

described in the novel as an homme universel: Esprit sec, il m appris a preferer les

choses aux mots, a me mefier des formules, a observer plutot qua juger. Ce Grec

amer m a enseigne la methode.66 It is therefore in medicine, and specifically through

this Greek physician, who is described by Maurice Delcroix as un Zenon avant la

lettre, that Hadrien first identified some of the basic notions which he then used in

politics.67 As in L CEuvre au noir, these notions include the facticity of things (les

choses), as an expansion of the medical idea of the facticity of the body; the

relativity of words and abstractions ( les mots, les formules); and finally the notion

of the method which, in so far as it is opposed to the concepts of interpretation and

judgement (juger), is a synonym for technique. The relationship between medicine

and politics is openly recognized by Hadrien:

La profession de medecin m aurait plu : son esprit ne differe pas essentiellem ent de
celui dans lequel j ai essaye de prendre mon metier dempereur. Je me passionnai
pour cette science trop proche de nous pour netre pas incertaine, sujette a
lengouement et a lerreur, mais rectifiee sans cesse par le contact de l immediat et du
nu.

Metaphorically speaking, in Memoires d Hadrien, politics is understood as a form of

medicine applied to each subject and to the empire as a whole. Like medicine,

politics is neither pure science nor an expression of pure creativity, but a negotiation,

without reconciliation, between man and nature. Both disciplines are therapeutic, as

it were, because, unlike other forms of representation, they only operate within

concrete spatio-temporal contexts. The political leader plays a rectifying role,

because he understands the difference between facticity and representation. He can

recognize the impulse and the error of representation (Tengouem ent et lerreur),

although he cannot prevent errors from occurring. He becomes an arch-ironist and, to

that extent, he also becomes a therapist.

66 OR, p. 313.
67 Breulet, p. 168.
68 OR, p. 313.

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As we saw, in The Rhetoric of Temporality, Paul de Man is sceptical of the

idea of the therapeutic agency of irony. Still, before he rejects this idea, he discusses

it in a way which is relevant to my present argument. With reference to Baudelaires

essay De lessence du rire, he establishes a relationship between irony and madness,

and more specifically between laughing at ones fall and being possessed by a folie

lucide after falling. He quotes Baudelaires statement, Le rire est generalement

1apanage des fous, and explains that irony is unrelieved vertige, dizziness to the

point of madness.69 Irony is madness because it originates in the internalized schism

between the self and its representation. The dizziness of irony seizes everyone:

Quest-ce que le vertige ? C est le comique absolu ; il sest empare de chaque etre,

writes Baudelaire.70 We may therefore argue, with Paul de Man, that madness is a

constitutive characteristic of the self, in so far as the latter possesses (or is possessed

by) a language. In this scheme of things, the arch-ironist can play the role of the

therapist. Baudelaire wonders whether Hoffmann, whom he sees as a master of the

comique absolu and an arch-ironist, is indeed a medecin de fous:

Cest a croire quon a affaire a un physiologiste ou a un medecin de fous des plus

profonds, et qui s amuserait a revetir cette profonde science de formes poetiques,
comme un savant qui parlerait par apologues et paraboles.71

The ironist invests the profonde science of medicine with formes poetiques. This

means that he cures madness with language; he does not simply explain what is

wrong with representation, but uses apologues et paraboles, narration and

fabulation, to demonstrate the difference that is installed within the subject.

Consequently, irony is no cure in the sense of the re-authentication of the subject and

the restoration of lost identity, as de Man surmises. Rather, the ironic tale could

function as a repetitive confirmation of difference, a poetic and constantly deferred

69 De Man, The Rhetoric o f Temporality, p. 214 and 215. The quotation from Baudelaire is from D e
lessence du rire, p. 245.
70 Baudelaire, p. 260.
71 Baudelaire, p. 261. This phrase is also partly quoted in de Man, The Rhetoric o f Temporality, p.
216.

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exposition of what Baudelaire and de Man call the dedoublement of the self. By the

same token, politics, itself a form of poetics, could also be a form of therapy.

Hadriens politics of reconstruction is analogous to the ironic tale which

reproduces the difference that causes madness. A political leader and ironist par

excellence, Hadrien is a medecin de fous. In Memoires, he is indeed presented as

the empereur-medecin who implements a politics of difference to cure a m ad

population and a mad empire. We saw how, in the last passage from Memoires

quoted above, Hadrien pointed out the broad analogies between his m etier and that

of the physician. With reference to his extensive tours in the empire, he remarks: je

pensais au medecin ambulant guerissant les gens de porte en porte.72 We are invited

to think of the empire as a suffering subject with Hadrien as the emperor-healer.

As we saw, de Man stresses that irony can be considered as a folie lucide. On

at least two occasions, Yourcenar uses similar expressions to describe Hadriens

mental state. She describes Hadriens experience of a quasi-mystical night which he

spent alone in the desert as an extase lucide.73 Further down, she writes that, after

Antinoiiss death, Hadrien designed and founded a new city, Antinopolis, soutenu

dune ivresse lucide.74 At the beginning of this chapter, I quoted W ysss comment

that la lucidite d Hadrien est une luddite d accueil. We now see that Hadriens

lucidity consists in his extremely sharp sense of irony, his understanding of the error

and inevitability of representations, and the paradoxical possibilities of authenticity

and freedom that are thus offered to man. Hadrien explains this almost unique

lucidity among his contemporaries as follows: II n y a quun seul point sur lequel je

me sens superieur au commun des hommes : je suis tout ensemble plus libre et plus

soumis quils n osent letre. Presque tous meconnaissent egalement leur juste liberte

et leur vraie servitude.75 Hadrien is presented as one of the few people of his time

72 OR, p. 382.
73 OR, p. 4 0 2 .1 shall return to this point in Chapter 4.
74 OR, p. 441.
75 OR, pp. 317-18.

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who did not misconstrue ( meconnaitre) the meaning of freedom and submission. As

empereur-medecin, he rectifies the erroneous perception of freedom as freedom from

inauthenticity, and offers his subjects a new understanding of authenticity as the

knowing acceptance of difference.

As I stressed earlier, the conclusions that I am exposing here remain provisional

until Hadriens political vision is examined in more detail in the last chapter of my

thesis. Paul de M ans caution that to know inauthenticity is not the same as to be

authentic will prove to be useful in that context. However, I feel that the theoretical

possibilities opened up by Yourcenars re-examination of such ideas as purity,

acceptance and freedom remain largely valid, whatever the way they are implemented

in Memoires d Hadrien and other works by her. In addition to highlighting the

significance of these ideas in Yourcenars work, I would emphasize the relevance of

Yourcenars preoccupation with existence, aesthetics and politics in the context of

modernity. My aim, in the next chapter, shall be to demonstrate that Yourcenars

thought and writing are profoundly embedded in philosophical, cultural and literary

modernity and that they frequently manage to shed unexpected light on it.

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 CHAPTER THREE

C u l t u r a l M o d e r n it y and N a r r a t iv e
A u t h e n t ic it y :
Y ourcenar and B e n j a m in

In 2000, an international conference was organized by the University of Thessaloniki

and the Societe Internationale d Etudes Yourcenariennes to discuss the question:

Marguerite Yourcenar: Ecrivain du XIXe siecle ? That this question was asked about

an author who was bom and died in the twentieth century shows how Yourcenars

effort to dissociate herself from most literary and philosophical movements of her

time left her susceptible to the criticism of being out of touch with the century in

which she lived. By way of example, May Chehab, one of the participants in the

conference, referred to various philosophies which are present in Yourcenars work,

including les philosophies presocratiques, [...] les religions orientales, [...] le

neoplatonisme et Plotin en particulier, before asking: L oeuvre de Marguerite

Yourcenar portant lempreinte plus ou moins profonde de toutes ces philosophies, il

est legitime de se demander si son eclectisme a premiere vue passeiste ne desservirait

pas, lui aussi, les options de la modemite.1 Chehab went on to suggest that the

renewal of interest in these philosophies at the end of the 19th Century reflected a

1 May Chehab, Cerner l etre, une figure de la modemite ?, in Georges Freris and R. Poignault (eds),
M arguerite Yourcenar: Ecrivain du XIXe siecle ? (Clermont-Ferrand: SIEY, 2004), pp. 75-83, (p. 76).

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specifically modem tendency to delegitimize the subject of classicism. This tendency,

argued Chehab, found a forceful expression in Nietzsche, whom Yourcenar had read

well. Yourcenar was also an assiduous reader of pre-Socratic and oriental

philosophies. Like many of her contemporaries, she looked in these philosophies for

ways of interrogating essentialist approaches to subjectivity which, according to

Chehab, were more persistent in France than in the rest of Europe in the first half of

the twentieth century.2 Yourcenars effort to understand the self non-essentially led to

the development by her of a technique of closing in on being ( cem er letre), as

opposed to representing it directly. Chehab sees this technique as a sign of

Yourcenars modernity and gives her paper the title Cemer letre, une figure de la

modemite ?. She claims that Yourcenars autobiographical trilogy Le Labyrinthe du

monde, whose subject is in fact Yourcenars family rather than herself, can be

understood in terms of the particularly modem consciousness of the

unrepresentability of the T : Dans Le Labyrithe du monde, limpossible adequation

entre lobserve et lobservant sous-tend limpossible reflexivite du discours du moi

.3 Chehabs interpretation is not far from my understanding of the fleetingness and

unrepresentability of the self in Memoires and other novels by Yourcenar. But it has

the merit of emphasizing the modernity of Yourcenars approach.

I shall now begin to explore aspects of Yourcenars specifically modem

approach to the poetics of subjectivity and the problematic of representation. I shall

be looking in her political thought and cultural criticism to see how they were

informed by the new realities with which the West was faced, especially in the

interwar years. I shall suggest that it was the specific cultural and philosophical

context of modernity, as understood by Yourcenar, which enabled her to raise the

interrelated issues of existential and narrative authenticity. Furthermore I shall argue

that her answer to this problem, analysed in abstract terms in the previous chapters,

2 Chehab, Cerner letre, p. 81.

3 Chehab, Cemer letre, p. 81.

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can be directly associated with specific aspects of early 20th-century aesthetic and

literary theory. Modernity will thus appear simultaneously as the problematic

landscape of inauthenticity and as a privileged topos where the question of

authenticity could be addressed and new approaches to politics, art and existence

could be initiated. One of the thinkers that have studied modernity in similar terms is

Walter Benjamin. In what follows, two of his essays will serve as pointers of a

specifically modem sensitivity in relation to which Yourcenars poetics and

aesthetics will be appreciated.

Yourcenar and cultural modernity

In her 1929 essay Diagnostic de lEurope, Yourcenar used the metaphor of sickness

to expose the wounds of un monde pret a mourir.4 Based on an organic perception

of history, this short essay re-iterates the rhetoric of decline which was typical of the

interwar period. Europe is represented as a chronic patient threatened by imminent

death. While Yourcenar writes in the name of Europe rather than that of a specific

nation, her judgement is characterized by provincialism and inwardness. This

exclusively European cosmopolitanism, which is in mortal danger of losing its

virility and which resorts, desperate for help, to a semi-unconscious state of

mystique and hyperesthesie, is at the antipodes of the universalism that is

assumed by many critics to infiltrate her work. She emphasizes the antithesis

between classical European values - L intelligence a letat pur [...] entre la Baltique

et la mer Egee - and what she sees as the degeneration of these values in Europe

from the Romantics onwards. On the one hand there is Tintelligence objective, i a

4 Marguerite Yourcenar, Diagnostic de lEurope, EM , pp. 1649-1655 (p. 1651). The 1991 Pleiade
edition contains an annotation o f 1982 by Yourcenar. First published in B ibliotheque universelle et
revue de G eneve, N o 18, juin 1929, pp. 745-52.

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pensee logique, la raison europeenne, i a connaissance; on the other hand there is

[le] moi souffrant, and the predominance of le sentiment, i a morale, i a

sensation and i a femme.5 The crescendo of Europes agony of death is conveyed

by the sweeping vocabulary of the Diagnostic: aboulie, ataxie, individualisme,

simplisme, vulgarisation, barbarisme, desespoir, passivite, flechissement,

deformation, fatigue, maladie, mort. The metaphor of Europes pathology is

the product of a conservative and traditionalist mind in the metaphysical sense of

these terms: it surmises the existence of a state of originality from which Europe has

fallen, and reduces post-Enlightenment European history to a slow and fatal process

of decomposition. Yourcenars critique reaches a climax in the following passage,

where an interesting allusion is made to the failure of industrialization and

technology to fulfil their promises:

L economie traditionnelle n a pas disparu seule dans le desastre fin an cier; la

civilisation toute entiere s est apergu quelle cessait detre. Etrange spectacle que
celui dune machine dont les rouages fausses par la catastrophe s arretent ou toument
a vide. L expression populaire est la plus juste : toument fou .6

This feeling of insanity, this fear of the new, and the unease that technology

engenders in the young Yourcenar cannot be easily reconciled with her contemplative

admiration, twenty years on, for Hadrien, the innovator and cosmopolitan. Without

wishing to place disproportionate emphasis on these early conclusions over

Yourcenars more sophisticated criticism in later life, one cannot help but wonder

how the traumatic experience of modernity shaped her perception of politics and

aesthetics.

Diagnostic de lEurope conveys a strong sense of loss of authenticity which

infiltrates Yourcenars entire work. In this essay, authenticity is threatened by

fragmentation and decay. As I discussed in the previous chapter, these are the very

concepts which, because of the introduction of the parameter of time, make possible

5 All quotations from Diagnostic de l Europe, pp. 1649-50.

6 EM, p. 1651.

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authentic representation and the paradoxical fulfilment of artistic intention, as

Yourcenar suggests in her 1954 essay Le Temps, ce grand sculpteur. In 1929, by

contrast, the spectre of fragmentation as a specific aesthetic feature of modernity

engenders panic. In the following passage, it is worth noticing the intricate parallel

that Yourcenar draws between technology and fragmentation in art and literature.

La dissociation croissante du style nest quun aspect de la dissociation des pensees,

l incapacite du cerveau a retablir la suite logique des images. E lies sautent et
sechappent par saccades, comme les etincelles du moteur detraque qui va cesser sa
marche. Ce qui disparait de l art, c est surtout la composition. Le style de Proust,
subdivise a lextreme, confus a force dabondance, deborde sans cesse par les pensees
subies et non dirigees, le style de Breton, spasmodique et sec, tout en detentes et en
tensions, altement comme la prostration et lexcitation nerveuses.7

The convulsive body, the paroxysmal text and the dysfunctional machine combine to

produce the monstrous image of modernity. The technological age has lost all

dynamic for synthetic thinking and - at least in the case of Western Europe - has

even abandoned the ambition for totalising narratives. The form of aesthetic

representation that sets the tone and the rhythm of the new era is film. Yourcenar

writes:

On toume. Le cinematographe a enseigne la decomposition du mouvement : les

romanciers lim iten t; la vie tournee par l un au ralenti, saccelere dans les mains d un
autre operateur. [...] L esprit regie son rythme sur celui d une vie de plus en plus
agitee ; il travaille au milliem e de seconde. L art, jadis lent elaborateur, se specialise
dans linstantane. On peut dire que lesprit europeen acquit, dans les dem ieres annees
du XIXe siecle, la sensibilite dune pellicule photographique.8

Film and photography as the forms of art par excellence that befit a mechanical

and fragmented age are the themes of the celebrated 1936 essay by W alter Benjamin

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.9 In this essay, Benjamin

notices that technical reproducibility has cost the aesthetic artefact its aura, and

therefore its authenticity, within the cultural context to which it belongs. He writes:

7 EM, p. 1653.
8 EM, p. 1654.
9 Walter Benjamin, The Work o f Art in the A ge o f Mechanical Reproduction, in Walter Benjamin,
Illuminations, ed. by Hannah Arendt, trans. by Harry Zorn (London: Fontana Press, 1992), pp. 211-44.

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the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of

tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a

unique existence.10 The loss of authenticity, the assumption by art and culture of the

formal characteristics of the machine, and the centrality of film in the cultural

analysis of modernity constitute some of the startling similarities between

Yourcenars and Benjamins essays.

These similarities go further and touch the sensitive issue of the political

meaning of the loss of the aura / authenticity of the work of art. This is the part of the

analysis where one would expect these two thinkers to differ mostly - as indeed they

do in many ways. Nonetheless, implicit in both essays is the need to account for the

blurring of the distinction between high and low art as a result of social emancipation

and the expansion of mass culture. For Benjamin, the transitoriness and

reproducibility of aesthetic artefacts testify to an extremely heightened sense of the

universal equality of things among the masses. The adjustment of reality to the

masses and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope, he notes.11

Further down, he contrasts the traditional cult value of works of art to their

specifically modem exhibition value. He points out that there is a quantitative

shift from the former to the latter polar type, whereby emphasis is now placed not

on the works existence but on their being on view. Not only has this situation

affected the standards of aesthetic evaluation, it has also effected a qualitative

transformation of [the works] nature.12 The aesthetic object is changing to

accommodate the new social norms of public accessibility - a movement that

demonstrates modem arts diminished power to signify. In a similar vein, Benjamin

stresses the involvement of the masses in the process of weakening of writerly

authority.

10 Walter Benjamin, T h e Work o f Art, p. 219.

11 Walter Benjamin, T h e Work o f Art, p. 217.
12 Walter Benjamin, T h e Work o f Art, p. 218-19.

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With the increasing extension o f the press which kept placing new political, religious,
scientific, professional, and local organs before the readers, an increasing number o f
readers became writers. [...] Thus the distinction between author and public is about
to lose its basic character. [...] Literary licence [...] thus becom es common
property.13

Just as artistic originality is undermined by artistic plurality so literary authorship

suffers from the common m ans rise to the level of writer. In a more didactic manner,

Yourcenar makes a very similar point. She remarks that in the (classical) past, a few

venerated texts were all that was required for good education.14 On the contrary,

Aujourdhui, le prodigieux effort vulgarisateur du livre et du journal, hatif toujours,

maladroit souvent, permet a 1inexperience du plus grand nombre 1illusion de

luniversel savoir.15 As in The Work of Art, we learn that quantitative parameters

have affected the type and quality of cultural production. Returning to the metaphor

of the machine, Yourcenar compares modem culture to a workshop that is open for

anyone to use and abuse. She refers to Ta masse, ruee dans ce laboratoire ouvert,

and this idea of openness is strongly reminiscent of Benjamins reference to the

desire of contemporary masses to bring things closer spatially and humanly.16

Yourcenar attempts to specify the historical period when the masses gained free

access to this workshop for the first time. She writes that after the relative

equilibrium of the 17th Century se produisit ladmirable poussee de libre

intellectualisme qui preceda et amena la Revolution. C est vers ce moment que

lesprit humain, trop charge, flechit.17 This statement is based on an unmistakably

deterministic view of history. It maintains that when the historical moment was ripe,

as it were, for the masses to be allowed into the sphere of the intellect, guarded till

then by the select few, the first working-class revolution in history took place. If the

13 Walter Benjamin, The Work o f Art, p. 225.

14 Yourcenars precise expression is des textes peu nombreux, veneres, EM , p. 1651. These
adjectives encapsulate two main characteristics o f the pre-modern artefact according to Benjamin,
namely uniqueness and aura; both these characteristics, we are told, have vanished in modernity.
15 EM, p. 1651.
16 Walter Benjamin, The Work o f Art, p. 216-17.
17 EM, p. 1650.

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French Revolution was the early political expression of modernity, the first cultural

expression of modernity was sickness of the mind due to intellectual congestion. The

human spirit snaps, like the overburdened branch of a tree.18

At the point when Yourcenars deterministic view of history enters into play, the

differences between her essay and Benjamins become palpable. As the metaphor of

the overburdened branch already intimates, modernity is not an accident, nor is it a

radical turning away from tradition. On the contrary, for Yourcenar, tradition is

contained in the modem, and its tremendous duration and weight are the reasons

behind contemporary neurosis. She writes:

la seule maladie dont une civilisation finisse par mourir, c est sa duree. La notre est
vieillie. Des vieilles civilisations elle a les aspects disparates et comme rapieces
d histoire, le materialisme lourd du plus grand nombre oppose au fol idealisme du
plus petit [. .. ]. 19

Conversely, for Benjamin modernity represents the potential for a tremendous

shattering of tradition which is the obverse of the contemporary crisis and renewal of

mankind.20 Mechanical reproducibility initiates a radical departure from the tradition

of the auratic object. Thus the social significance of film - the prototypically modem

artefact - is inconceivable without its destructive, cathartic aspect, that is the

liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage.21 The advent of the new

brings about the elimination of the traditional. Destruction, catharsis, liquidation

18 Yourcenars vision o f the end o f European civilization is also reminiscent o f Oswald Spenglers
polemical 1918 study D ecline o f the West', Oswald Spengler, The D ecline o f the West, trans. by
Charles Francis Atkinson (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1926). As Bruno Tritsmans notes:
L apparentement du regard historique a celui du visionnaire semble faire echo aux theses d Oswald
Spengler du D eclin de IO ccident en 1918. [...] Tout se passe com m e si Yourcenar sen souvenait [...]
quand elle stigmatise dans TEurope des annees 20 une decheance, une maladie - la metaphore
spenglerienne par excellence - dont elle se veut temoinV Bruno Tritsmans, Opposition et esquive
dans Alexis et la N ouvelle E u rydice', Bulletin de la Societe Internationale d'Etudes Yourcenariennes,
N o 5, septembre 1989, pp. 1-14, (p. 2).
< http://www.yourcenariana.org/pdf/bull05/02Tritsmans.pdf>, [accessed on 29/08/2007].
19 EM, p. 1654.
20 Walter Benjamin, The Work o f Art, p. 215.
21 Walter Benjamin, The Work o f Art, p. 215.

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leave no doubt that the new is not a degeneration of the traditional and is not even

generated from it. It contains nothing of it.

While an analysis of Benjamins long-debated relation to tradition lies beneath

the scope of my thesis, it is worth pursuing the search for affinities and differences

between The Work of A rt and Diagnostic de lEurope a little further. Comparative

examination of these two essays will help elucidate Yourcenars perception of the

aesthetic and philosophical stakes of modernity. The question arises as to whether

Benjamin in the Work of A rt is implicitly critical of the idea of traditions

obliteration, the abolition of the aura, and the rise of the masses as Yourcenar clearly

is in her essay. Benjamin is certainly ironic about the pseudo-expertise of the movie

goer and the newspaper reader.22 In a more serious vein, he clarifies that he does not

think of cinema as an inherently revolutionary medium. More specifically, Benjamin

writes: So long as the movie makers capital sets the fashion, as a rule no other

revolutionary merit can be accredited to todays film than the promotion of a

revolutionary criticism of traditional concepts of art. 23 While by its very structure

film challenges traditional aesthetic theory and practice, it does not necessarily

harbour a socially subversive potential.24 Furthermore, Benjamin places particular

emphasis on that oppression, that new anxiety which, according to Pirandello, grips

the actor before the camera.25

Interestingly, Yourcenar also mentions Pirandello in Diagnostic, although, for

her, he is, together with Rilke and Gide, a good representative of the end of an era:
1f\
[ils] represented assez bien ce point d aboutissement. But there is another, even

22 The relevant point is made in Walter Benjamin, The Work o f Art, p. 225.
23 Benjamin, The Work o f Art, p. 224.
24 On this point, see Susan Buck-M orsss comment: Clearly, in a world where mass media was being
used for anything but critical enlightenment, Benjamins affirmation o f film and other forms o f
mechanical reproduction was addressed to the cognitive potential o f such media, not their present
practice. In Susan Buck-M orss, Benjam ins Passagen-Werk: Redeeming Mass Culture for the
R evolution, New German Critique, N o 29 (Spring Semester, 1983), pp. 211-240, (p. 214, note 8).
25 Walter Benjamin, The Work o f Art, p. 224.
26 EM, p. 1655.

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more intriguing link between Yourcenar and Benjamin, with regard to Pirandellos

comment on the anxiety felt by the film actor. There is an episode in Yourcenars

1934 novel Denier du reve, in which the fictional screen actress Angiola Fides

watches one of her films in a Roman movie theatre and experiences a feeling of

alienation before her own image. Incapable of identifying with her phantom-double

on screen, which is both more real and less real than herself, Angiola feels comme

devant un miroir27. Benjamin uses the same analogy, albeit with reference not to the

movie screen but to the movie camera, as part of the process of film production: The

feeling of strangeness that overcomes the actor before the camera, as Pirandello

describes it, is basically of the same kind as the estrangement felt before ones image

in the mirror.28

To a certain extent at least, Benjamin and Yourcenar share the same reservations

with regard to the loss of aura and its historical and existential implications.

Nonetheless, at various points in the Artwork essay Benjamin is markedly more

radical than Yourcenar. As we saw already, he suggests that the contemporary crisis

promises the renewal of mankind. He writes: in permitting the reproduction to

meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, [the technique of

reproduction] reactivates the object reproduced.29 This can be taken as a criticism of

the traditional distance, that is, the aura surrounding the aesthetic artefact; by

implication, the aura de-activates the work of art, neutralizes its dynamic for

interaction, transforms it into an object of cult. Commenting on this point, Howard

Caygill notes: the object is reactivated when the qualities of distance and uniqueness

are removed from it; it becomes something different, something which need no

27 OR, p. 240. D enier du reve was originally published in 1934: D enier du reve (Paris: Grasset, 1934).
It was thoroughly reworked by Yourcenar in 1958-59: D enier du reve (Paris: Plon, 1959). This more
recent edition is included in OR. The m ovie theatre scene has been analyzed in similar terms to those
o f the present dissertation in Erin G. Carlston, Thinking Fascism: Sapphic M odernism an d Fascist
M odernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), pp. 103-107.
28 Walter Benjamin, The Work o f Art, p. 224.
29 Walter Benjamin, The Work o f Art, p. 215.

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-2 A

longer be experienced in terms of presence and absence. For Caygill, in The Work

of A rt, Benjamin is unequivocally critical of the cult value of the traditional artefact

and celebrates the destruction of tradition and the attendant loss of authenticity in art.

Caygill writes: This ability to distance its viewer marks the authenticity of the work
*2 1

of art, and is what Benjamin described critically as its cult value . Therefore,

despite his reservations, Benjamin placed emphasis on the emancipatory potential of

the modem work of art, while Yourcenar diagnosed in modernity an irreversible

process of decay. This is why the central concept of the Work of Art is

reproducibility, while that of Diagnostic is its flip side, namely, fragmentation.

In the Artwork essay, Benjamin contrasts painting and film, and points out that

there is a tremendous difference between the pictures they obtain. That of the painter

is a total one, that of the cameraman consists of multiple fragments which are

assembled under a new law .32 The specifically modem possibility of a new

assemblage, governed by a law whose relevance I will discuss further down, is

altogether lacking from Diagnostic. What we see instead in Yourcenars essay is a

lament for the contemporary impossibility of the total work of art, compounded by

the apocalyptic intuition of the telos of aesthetics. Indeed, in the last sentence of

Diagnostic de lEurope, Yourcenar summarizes her diagnosis of the aesthetics of

her time and her prognosis of the non-aesthetics of the future as follows: resignes

d avance aux tenebres qui vont suivre, assistons [...] au bouquet final du feu
2 -2

d artifice d un monde. The final sparks of a luminous era, that of the

Enlightenment, will be followed by darkness. As I discussed above, the death of

European culture and art is a deterministic and organicist notion; it implies that art

and culture as products of reason contain the seeds of their undoing.

30 Howard Caygill, Benjamin, Heidegger and the Destruction o f Tradition, in Andrew Benjamin and
Peter Osborne (eds), Walter B enjam in s Philosophy, D estruction and Experience (Manchester:
Clinamen Press, 2000), 1-30, (p. 24).
31 Caygill p. 24, emphasis added by the author.
32 Walter Benjamin, The Work o f Art, p. 227, my emphasis.
33 EM, p. 1655.

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It is of especial significance that Yourcenar sees the end of culture as brought

about by cultural diversity, and the demise of tradition as a consequence of an excess

of traditions. She writes: Les cervaux mal prepares ploient sur la diversite des

connaissances ; les cadres de la culture, a force de s elargir, se sont brises.34 It is

difficult to resist the criticism of provinciality and narrowness of perspective, even as

Yourcenar explains the process by which the legacy of the past lost its functionality

and became a burden on man:

Toute conception philosophique de la vie est un legs lentement accru par lhistoire.
[...] De nos jours, ces legs depoques differentes, objets d interminables controverses,
accablent par leur multiplicity. Dans cette Europe qui s organise peniblement en Etat
unique, le passe est un immense heritage en litige.35

In principle, this summary statement on tradition and history is in agreement with

Yourcenars perception of history, later in life, as an interminable process of

representations by philosophical, political or artistic means. However, in Memoires,

Hadrien, who is keenly aware of this state of affairs, considers the historical

predicament of his time as a unique opportunity to redefine authentic subjectivity. To

this effect, he attempts to develop a technique de liberte which, as I discussed in

Chapter 1, consists in acquiescing to this mode of creation and attribution of

meaning, in order to point out its lacunae. In terms of my analysis, this means that

between Diagnostic and M emoires, Yourcenars perception of modem aesthetics

and politics underwent an important transformation. In 1949, modernity was no

longer understood by her as the quasi-Nietzschean, quasi-nihilistic moment of

intellectual aphasia, but as a moment of metaphysical solitude and potential freedom.

Already in Diagnostic there are signs of this subsequent development. In a final

twist in this essay, when Yourcenar announces the agonising consummation of the

drama of representation, she also celebrates the beauty of the time she lives in. Je

n ai tant dit que notre epoque est malade que pour me reserver de dire a la fin quelle

M EM, p. 1651.
35 EM, p. 1652.

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est belle.36 To be sure, she refers to the ironic phantasmagoria of the firework

display, not to the ironic beauty of the ruins, as in Le Temps, ce grand sculpteur.

The fact remains that already at the time of Diagnostic she is in search of a new

aesthetics that originates from within the end of all aesthetics. She writes: Mais le

prix dument acquitte nous donne le droit de jouir d un spectacle si divers. N assiste

pas qui veut a celui d un achievement. Acheve : fini - le mot contient a la fois le sens

de la perfection et celui de 1arret. The beauty of decay that follows classical

perfection is, of course, a central theme in Yourcenars work. But in 1929, this theme

is still too closely tied to the concept of ongoing fragmentation that prefigures the end

of all culture. At that time she still fails to see how multiple fragments can be

assembled under a new law, as Benjamin would claim a few years later. By 1954, in

Le Temps, ce grand sculpteur, Yourcenar has found a way out of the symbolics of

the fragment as a prefiguration of death. In the latter essay she discusses a new law

according to which time re-authenticates the work of art by submitting it to an

irrevocable process of destruction. As I discussed in the previous chapter, this

process deconstructs the symbolic content of the work of art and restores its

representational value in an unexpected way. The decaying work of art represents

reality authentically, while the freshly made work of art conceals its inauthenticity -

the arbitrariness of the codes of signification which made its creation possible.

During this process, the traditional meaning of authenticity is reversed; what was

previously considered as original and authentic is now proved to be a copy, while

authenticity is found in the scattered ruins and is designated as a state of

fragmentation. I would now submit that already in 1936, in The Work of Art in the

Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Benjamin alluded to the same process of reversal

of significations as a characteristic of modernity.

36 EM, p. 1655
37 EM, p. 1655.

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Authenticity and illusion

Part XI of The Work of A rt, where Benjamin compares the staging of plays to the

shooting of films, is one of the most widely debated of this essay. His analysis of the

illusory character of the cinematic medium has been variously criticized as

theoretically inconsistent and hailed as a refined moment of synthesis of his politics

and his messianic preoccupation. As in my previous comments on Benjamin, my aim

here is not so much to contribute to that discussion as to identify elements in his

theory that help locate Yourcenars work squarely in the context of aesthetic

modernity. More specifically, in Benjamins analysis of modernity I expect to discern

novel determinations of authenticity which may also be central to Yourcenars

writing and implicit theory of representation.

Benjamin observes that while theatre involves some effort on the part of the

viewer to produce the illusion of reality, cinema as a medium presents a view of

reality that is completely free from apparatus; as such, it requires a lower level of

concentration and delivers a spectacle of higher verisimilitude. Benjamin brings into

sharp focus this paradox which he takes to be a major development in aesthetics:

The equipment-free aspect of reality here has become the height of artifice; the sight

of immediate reality has become an orchid in the land of technology.38 This amounts

to saying that the technological age creates new ways of re-instating authenticity in

representation. It does so, not by avoiding, or avoiding to acknowledge, the processes

of mediation employed in aesthetic production, but by making the most of these

processes. Immediacy is here the result of the inevitable excess of mediation ( the

height of the artifice) in very much the same way that authenticity, in Yourcenars

work, is the paradoxical outcome of the irrevocable fall into inauthenticity.

38 Walter Benjamin, The Work o f Art, p. 226.

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Notably, the sight of immediate reality achieved in film possesses the principal

attribute of the canonically authentic object: namely, aura. In her essay Benjamin,

Cinema and Experience: The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology , Miriam

Hansen points out that the orchid of the quotation above translates in an

unconvincing way the proverbial blue flower of German Romanticism, Novalis

blaue Blume . She continues by asking: Why did Benjamin choose, albeit with a

shade of irony, the highly auratic metaphor of the Blue Flower - the unattainable

object of the romantic quest, the incarnation of desire?39 This question continues to

puzzle critics, some of whom have taken Benjamins statement at face value -

perhaps rightfully so - and have thus accused him of intellectual shortsightedness:

He does not see that, independent of the genesis of cinematic images - in which

artifice, tricks and manipulation play an important role - the completed film presents

a more convincing illusion of reality than does any other art form .40 This is the

conclusion which Rainer Rochlitz thinks that Benjamin should have drawn from the

blaue Blume passage. However, as we saw above, Benjamin does criticize the

technically empowered process of emotional and ideological manipulation that has

characterized film production in the West from the start. At a different part of the

Artwork essay, he writes: In Western Europe the capitalistic exploitation of the film

denies consideration to modem m ans legitimate claim to being reproduced. Under

these circumstances the film industry is trying hard to spur the interest of the masses

through illusion-promoting spectacles and dubious speculations. 41 Beyond the

context of film theory, some critics have tried to understand the metaphor of the

blaue Blume in the broader terms of the relation between illusion and reality under

modernity. Far from a belated call for the return of the auratic element, Susan Buck-

39 Both quotations from Miriam Hansen, Benjamin, Cinema and Experience: The Blue Flower in the
Land o f T echnology, in New German Critique, N o 40, Special Issue on Weimar Film Theory
(Winter, 1987), pp. 179-224, (p. 204).
40 Rainer Rochlitz, The D isenchantm ent o f Art: The Philosophy o f W alter Benjamin, trans. by Jane
Marie Todd (London: The Guildford Press, 1996), p. 177.
41 Benjamin, The Work o f Art, p. 226.

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Morss reads T h e Work of A rt as an attempt at setting the tone for a modem analysis

of the social function of mechanically reproduced illusion. In her essay Benjamins

Passagen-Werk: Redeeming Mass Culture for the Revolution, she suggests that

Benjamins artwork essay argues theoretically for the transformation of art from

illusory representation into an analysis of illusions. As a politicized art form, film s

function is not to duplicate illusion as real, but to interpret reality as itself illusion.42

In other words, the evocation of the blue flower does not signify Benjamins putative

attachment to a primordial state of authenticity but illustrates the idea that such a

state is an imaginary construct. Furthermore, the image of the blue flower in the land

of technology implies that modernity is a privileged framework for examining the

social and aesthetic forces at work in the configuration of this construct. Modernity is

not a context within which illusion replaces reality; it rather is the condition under

which all reality can see itself historically as illusion.

It is this specifically modem awareness of the swapping of roles between reality

and illusion that I find sufficiently close to the reversal of meanings between

authenticity and its opposite in the work of Marguerite Yourcenar. In the same way

that the fragments of old statues are eloquent testimony to the inauthenticity of the

original sculpture, the fragmentary character of film can reveal the illusory

character of reality. Conversely, for Yourcenar, modernity allows us to redefine

authenticity as a series of cracks and scars left on the aesthetic body which at the

moment of its coming into being was considered pure; in the same vein, for

Benjamin, modernity allows us to understand reality as a process of mediations,

distortions and falsifications which had hitherto been assigned to a supposedly

separate domain, that of illusion or representation.

42 All quotations from Susan Buck-M orss, p. 214. Buck-M orsss argument, which I summarize here,
refers primarily to Benjamins P assagen-W erk; however she clarifies that it applies equally to The
Work o f Art.

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Discussing Benjamins remark that the movie scenes illusionary nature is that

of the second degree43, Hansen suggests that film reclaims a truthful representation

of reality by further distorting realitys already distorted image. The redeeming

agency of film is based on a logic of double negation.44 In Part XI of T h e Work of

Art, and more specifically in the reference to the blue flower, Hansen perceives

an echo o f the distortion o f distortion that Benjamin traces in the work o f Proust
[...] Accordingly, the equipment-free aspect o f reality [...] seems to me linked in
whatever alienated and refracted manner, to that homesickness for the world
distorted in the state o f resemblance which Prousts writing pursued to the point o f
asphyxiation. Such film practice, however, would have to [...] lend its mimetic
capability to a world in which the true surrealist face o f existence breaks through.45

This is a legitimate hypothesis about the way certain forms of art and writing in

modernity manipulate established mechanisms of representation in order to produce

newly valid images of reality: images which are authentic insofar as they are products

of a second degree of artistic mediation and distortion.

The convoluted technique of re-authentication of image/narrative to which

Hansen refers here is by no means alien to the Yourcenarian idea of the technique de

liberte. Hadriens way of dealing with such mechanisms of conceptualization of

experience as religion, philosophy and poetry ( Animula vagula blandula) is to adopt

and counter-manipulate these mechanisms with the aim of demonstrating their

estranging effect at both an existential and a political level. With reference to

Yourcenars literary criticism, the same applies to Cavafys (but also Thomas M anns

and Andre Gides) choice of acceptation over revo lted Acceptation signifies

appropriation of institutionalized forms of abstraction and schematization of le vecu

- e.g. in the case of Cavafy, Christian Orthodoxy - in order to produce versions of

reality that do justice to the uniqueness of the individual. It is because of the

43 Walter Benjamin, The Work o f Art, p. 226.

44 Miriam Hansen, p. 203.
45 Miriam Hansen, pp. 204-205. Hansen quotes here from Benjamins essay on Proust: The Image o f
Proust, in Illuminations, pp. 197-210, (p. 200).
46 I am referring here to Yourcenars essays on Constantin Cavafy, Thomas Mann and Andre Gide,
which I have discussed previously in the present thesis.

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emancipatory effect achieved by means of the acceptance and twisting of canonical

concepts, symbols and norms that Yourcenar can write in her monograph on Cavafy

that i a revolte se pose ici a linterieur de 1acquiescement.47

Finally, Yourcenars narrative technique can also be considered as an alternative

application of the modernist device of distortion of distortion. As has already been

noted, Yourcenar is aware of the way linguistic representation tends to standardise

meaning and superimpose metaphysical and ideological interpretations to experience.

At a time when literature responds to this by revolutionising narrative, e.g. in the

nouveau roman, Yourcenar insists on realism as the properly and fundamentally

distortive fictionalising mechanism. She strives for extreme control over the

linguistic medium and dissimulates authorial presence in the same way that the

camera operates as an instrument of extreme censorship banning all apparatus out of

the image. As I wrote previously, Yourcenars realism does not, in principle, aim at

the interpretation of the sensible and le vecu, but at its phenomenological recording;

one critic has pointed out that the camera in Benjamins Artwork essay plays

essentially the same role: The web of circumstances into which the camera
48
penetrates [...] salvages phenomenological immediacy as the telos of artifice.

Thus, the effect of double mediation is the loss of the metaphysical identity, the aura,

of the object, which lends itself to the senses as a mere signifier. In Yourcenars

narrative as well as in cinematic representation according to Benjamin, realism loses

its ontological implications. Nothing in the artefact denotes the autonomous

existence of the depicted image, while numerous elements indicate its strictly

phenomenological nature.

47 See note 50, Chapter 1.

48 Gertrud Koch, Cosm os in Film: On the Concept o f Space in Walter Benjam ins Work o f Art
Essay, trans. by Nancy Rotero, in Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne (eds), W alter B enjam ins
Philosophy, D estruction and E xperience (Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2000), pp. 202-11, (p. 209).

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Collecting fragments

In the context of my parallel discussion of Benjamins and Yourcenars aesthetics

and poetics it is important to ask what world the process of controlled distortion

makes it possible to see. Contrary to Benjamins expectation, it is not the true

surrealist face of existence that Yourcenars narrative ultimately unveils - at least

not in the strict sense understood by the surrealists themselves, of whose work she

did not think very highly. By way of example, in her essay on Roger Caillois, whom

she succeeded in the Academie Frangaise, she identifies surrealism with the literature

of fantasy, which, for her, is artificial and ficticious. [Le] surrealisme la

profondement marque [i.e. Caillois] [...]. Mais la rigueur obstinee qui le distingua

toujours lui a vite fait sentir la difference entre le fantastique d ordre litteraire,

toujours si proche du factice et du fabrique, et letrange ou linexplique veritables.49

For Yourcenar, fragmentation is not a device employed impressionistically to ensure

narrative authenticity, but a necessary existential state to which language can only

refer in a negative way. Yourcenars narrative constructions may have the elegance of

neoclassical architecture, but they are consciously made of what she perceives to be

the ruins of classicism. Her realist narratives refer directly to these ruins as the

apparent signifieds which operate as allegories (in de M ans sense) of the fragmented

relationship between man and the world. Therefore the world that Yourcenars

realism makes it possible to see resists semiotic representation: it cannot be reduced

to the narrative fragments which make it up and which cannot be synthesized into a

49 EM, p. 538, emphasis in the original. Yourcenars essay on Caillois, L homme qui aimait les
pierres, is included in her posthumous collection o f essays En pelerin et en etranger (Paris:
Gallimard, 1989). On Yourcenar and surrealism, see also her letter to N icolas Calas (18 February
1962), in which Yourcenar writes, [je] nai jamais ete entramee dans l orbite du surrealisme, et [je]
tends a le considerer com m e un mouvement etrangement fausse des son origine. M arguerite
Yourcenar: Lettres a ses am is et quelques autres, ed. by M ichele Sarde et al (Paris: Gallimard, 1995),
pp. 200-204, (p. 202). In another letter o f the same collection she refers to Breton as a magicien pris
au p iege; (Letter to Gisele Freund, 30 August 1977, pp. 728-729, p. 728).

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total image. A fundamental similarity can be established between this world and the

one captured by the cameraman in The Work of A rt. To examine it, I will now turn

to Benjamins suggestion that the image obtained by the cameraman consists of

multiple fragments which are assembled under a new law .50

As it is made clear from Benjamins comparison between painting and shooting,

this new law contrasts with that of traditional pictorial representation in that it

imposes no distance between the work of art and the artist or the viewer, and

therefore refuses to deliver the totality of the object. This law governs a

representation of reality which offers, precisely because of the thoroughgoing

permeation of reality with mechanical equipment, an aspect of reality which is free of

all equipment. And that, writes Benjamin, is what one is entitled to ask from a work

of art.51 Here, we are invited to ask what this law might be that makes possible a

non-total assemblage of fragments, but does not fail to satisfy the modem viewers

desire for authenticity in the image.

Another celebrated essay by Benjamin, already mentioned in Chapter 2, The

Task of the Translator, can help us furnish a preliminary answer to that question by

opening a new perspective. In this essay, written in 1923, Benjamin discusses

translation as a type of philosophical work whose aim is to let the primordial

relationship between the language of the original and that of the translation appear as

a kinship that encompasses all languages and is therefore situated beyond history.

He writes:

All suprahistorical kinship o f languages rests in the intention underlying each

language as a whole - an intention, however, which no single language can attain by
itself but which is realized only by the totality o f their intentions supplementing each
other: pure language. W hile all individual elements o f foreign languages - words,
sentences, structure - are mutually exclusive, these languages supplement one another
in their intentions. Without distinguishing the intended object from the mode o f
intention, no firm grasp o f this basic law o f a philosophy o f language can be
achieved.52

50 See n. 32, this chapter.

51 Walter Benjamin, The Work o f Art, p. 227.
52 Walter Benjamin, The Task o f the Translator, in Illuminations, pp. 70-82, (p. 74-75).

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The law of a philosophy of language is relevant to the law under which multiple

fragments are assembled by the cameraman in the W ork of A rt essay. To be sure,

translation as an intralinguistic, or even metalinguistic, activity is essentially different

from the act of literary or artistic representation. Nonetheless, Benjamin considers

translation as a special form of reproduction, during which a new fragment, the

translation, is created alongside, and owing to, another fragment, namely, the original

piece of literature. It follows from the passage quoted above that these fragments can

be assembled into a new entity, the greater or pure language, die reine Sprache,

which is now described as the totality of the intentions of all languages. Benjamin

explains what this process of assembling consists of, using the well-known analogy

of the vessel:

Fragments o f a vessel which are to be articulated together must follow one another in
the smallest details, although they need not be like one another. In the same way a
translation, instead o f making itself similar to the meaning o f the original, must
lovingly and in detail, in its own language, form itself according to the manner of
meaning o f the original, to make both recognisable as the broken parts o f the greater
language, just as fragments are the broken parts o f a vessel.53

A number of issues may be raised with regard to this aspect of Benjamins theory of

language, not least of all the question of its theological provenance and undertones.

In his essay on Benjamins Task of the Translator, Paul de Man, drawing from an

book by Gershom Scholem and an article by Carl Jacobs, points out that the image of

the broken vessel originates from the Lurianic Kabbalah.54 The theological question

and its specific Judaic parameters will inevitably permeate my discussion about the

law that governs the assemblage of fragments into a new primordial entity, but they

will have to remain outside my immediate context of reference. Besides, the

importance of de M ans commentary on the analogy of the vessel can be

53 I am using here Andrew Benjam ins translation - slightly amended to maintain syntactical
consistency - for reasons that will becom e clear immediately. Andrew Benjamin, Translation and the
Nature o f Philosophy (Routledge: London, 1989), p. 100.
54 De Man, C onclusions, p. 90. De Man refers to: Gershom Scholem, The M essianic Idea in Judaism
(New York: Shocken Books, 1971); and Carol Jacobs, The Monstrosity o f Translation, Modern
Language N otes, Vol. 90, N o 6, (D ec., 1975), pp. 755-766, (p. 763).

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demonstrated in philosophical terms alone. De Man sees through the totalistic

impulse which led to errors in the English translation of Benjamins essay, a

translation which suggests that the vessel is fully re-constructible and thus affirms the

concept of pre-lapsarian unity of language (the Babel myth). He points out some of

translator Harry Zohns slips and then argues that the analogy of the vessel serves the

idea of an original and perpetual dislocation of language:

What we have here is an initial fragmentation; any work is totally fragmented in

relation to this reine Sprache, with which it has nothing in common, and every
translation is a fragment, is breaking the fragment - so the vessel keeps breaking,
constantly - and never reconstitutes it; there was no vessel in the first place, or we
have no knowledge o f the vessel, or no awareness, no access to it, so for all intents
and purposes there has never been one.55

De M ans attempt to inscribe Benjam ins philosophy of language into the context of

poststructuralist linguistic theory is convincing. He explains that The Task of the

Translator by no means establishes the existence of a (natural, rational or dialectic)

relationship between the linguistic fragment and pure language. On the contrary,

despite what he calls tropological errors in Benjamins essay (by which he means

figures of speech implying a closure of meaning - including the simile of the vessel

itself), the German original text explains beyond any doubt the discrepancy between

Gemeinte and Art des M einens.56 This means that language as such is essentially

different from its topical instantiations in actual writing and cannot be reduced to

them. Writing is a process of reproduction of fragments whose assemblage does not

amount to any totality.

This conclusion answers to some extent my question regarding the nature of the

law that governs a non-total assemblage of fragments. This law is specific to the

work of the translator, whose task is lovingly and in detail to maintain the

differential relationship that exists between linguistic fragments and language in its

pure, formal state. Benjamin suggests that the translator processes the original text in

55 D e Man, C onclusions, p. 91.

56 De Man, C onclusions, p. 87.

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57
such a way that it retains its quality as logos, but loses its capacity to mean. He

gives the example of Holderlins translations of Sophocles which, de Man writes,

are absolutely literal, word by word, and which are therefore totally unintelligible;
5 58
what comes out is completely incomprehensible, completely undoes the sentence.

Literal translation is therefore a form of distortion of the original, which is already

distorted in relation to pure language, since it is contaminated with intentionality.

Following the logic of this argument, it is plausible to say that translation is a

corrective distortion, for it calls our attention to language p er se - a movement which

is missing from the original text with its disproportionate emphasis on meaning. In

that respect, translation resembles camera work which, as we saw, effects an illusion

of second degree: by distorting an already distorted representation it produces an

image of pure reality which, like the always broken vessel, is itself an illusion. Just as

pure reality depends on the cinematic image so that it may exist only as its missing

signified, so pure language needs translation so that it may be posited as the illusion

of the unity of languages.

The world that this double distortion makes it possible to see is one where the

aporia between the specific contaminated fragment and totality in its pure state

becomes evident. Paul de Man describes this world and its existential and historical

dimensions in poignant terms: Now it is this motion, this errancy of language that

never reaches the mark, which is always displaced in relation to what it meant to

reach, it is this errancy of language, this illusion of life that is only an afterlife, that

Benjamin calls history.59 I have already referred to this controversial passage, in the

context of my discussion on authenticity and history, in the previous chapter. I then

expressed reservations with respect to de M ans concept of the a-historicity of the

57 Benjamin writes: In the realm o f translation, too, the words ev apxr] rjv o Xoyoq (in the beginning
was the word) apply. The logos corresponds to language proper which Benjamin sharply distinguishes
here from the expressive / communicative function o f language. Benjamin, The Task o f the
Translator, p. 79.
58 D e Man, Conclusions, p. 88.
59 D e Man, Conclusions, p. 92.

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subject and I explained why I thought there was a discrepancy between his and

Yourcenars perceptions of authenticity. This important point aside, it is now

possible to understand better the affinity between Benjamins analogy of the vessel,

de M ans interpretation of it, and Yourcenars realism. Yourcenars narrative

conforms to the same law of assembling fragments to which Benjamin first referred

in relation to the cinematic technique and of which de Man also was aware in his

reading of Benjamins translation essay. In the case of Yourcenar, this law applies

both at the level of writerly technique and at the level of the topics she chose to

explore, insofar as her narrative can be metaphorized as a process of collection of

ruins. Whether they may be the ruins of personal or historical past or the ruins of

realism itself, they constitute fragments whose assemblage does not amount to any

form of reality or authenticity in the traditional sense.

Following the simile of the fragmented vessel, we may choose to read

Yourcenars fiction negatively, as an inventory of ruins, that is, of idle, nonfunctional

signs pointing to a putatively original state that has existed only in peoples

imagination. The harmonious proportions of this inventory - namely, the classical

structure of Yourcenars narratives, for which she has been many times praised and

sometimes derided - simply convey the idea that, in modernity, there is still only one

way to write or make art: representation cannot rid itself from the mimetic principle

and can at best refer to what cannot be represented in a negative way. However, it is

also possible to read Yourcenars fiction positively, following the paradigm of the

movie camera. Like the invisible cameraman, she strives to achieve the effect of

absolute realism and thus to rectify the readers vision by demonstrating realitys

illusory character. Devoid of nostalgia or hope of re-instating the putative

authenticity of the real, she contends herself with describing the traces of a past

which can only be hypothesized or posited. In that, her work is comparable to

Cavafys poetic transformation of the ruins of Hellenistic Alexandria and Piranesis

depiction of the ruins of Rome. She also shares with them the ambition of

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pinpointing the existence of the original work of art in the ruin and that of the ruin in

the original work of art. Thus, as I explained in the previous chapter, she establishes a

new, authentically referential relationship, not between the work of art and what it is

supposed to symbolize, but between the ruins and the forces (tim e, the absent

cause, initial fragmentation...) that produce these ruins.

The paradigm of translation

It is no coincidence that both Yourcenar and Benjamin use the imagery of Greek and

Roman antiquities to evoke a difference of ontological nature. It is the difference

between, on the one hand, fragments, which are available to us as promises of a

totality that they never deliver, and on the other, the totality itself that exceeds the

sum of these fragments. Benjamins broken vessel certainly constitutes the

paradigmatic image illustrating this difference, especially in the context of the theory

of translation and its philosophical expansions. But Yourcenar as a writer of

historical fiction has enacted this difference, by working with fragments of the past

(e.g. in a literal sense, the little that remains from emperor Hadrians writings) and

producing new works that are themselves fragments. The originarily fragmentary

character of Yourcenars fiction is especially pronounced in the case of Memoires, a

novel that never aspires to the unifying narrative of history and which owes part of its

authenticity to additional narrative elements and references that cannot be proven

scientifically to be authentic. It could be argued that in writing historical fiction,

Yourcenar acts not as an original writer - for such a role would not be consistent with

the primacy of reconstruire over construire, as I have discussed, - but as a translator,

in Benjamins sense; rather than interpreting the remains of the past in such a way as

to create a new historical narrative (which would be the equivalent of creative

translation, the translation of meanings and authorial intentions, rejected by

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Benjamin), she offers new fragmented narratives alongside the older ones. She thus

manages to make visible the difference that exists between these individual stories

and the grand narratives that serve as the basis of historical interpretation.

In T h e Task of the Translator, Benjamin specifies that translators enact, rather

than produce, the differential relationship between linguistic fragment and language

proper: [Translation] cannot possibly reveal or establish this hidden relationship

itself; but it can represent it by realizing it in embryonic or intensive form.60

Yourcenar, on the other hand, describes clearly the process of writing Memoires

d Hadrien as an exercise in a form of translation that is very close to Benjamins

definition. In Ton et langage dans le roman historique, an essay in which she

examined questions of authenticity in the reproduction of the voice of a historical

period, she asked:

Mais en quelle langue avais-je suppose quHadrien, bilingue, me dictait ses

M em oires ? Tantot en latin, sans doute, et tantot en grec, ce qui m offrait un certain
jeu. II y a pourtant des moments oii, par inadvertance, je lui ai fait parler le fran^ais de
mon temps.61

To write that Hadrien was dictating his memoirs to Yourcenar, and in Latin too, is

perhaps for her to exaggerate the idea of empathetic identification between writer and

main fictional character, so subtly explored in the Carnets de notes de Memoires

d Hadrien . Nevertheless, this is still a metaphor of considerable theoretical interest.

Yourcenar implies that her novel can be seen as a translation from Greek and Latin

into French, with only sporadic bits of what we would conventionally recognize as

original literature. As a device to promote the idea of the genuineness of M emoires,

this would be too obvious and naive. Besides, Yourcenar clarifies in just the

paragraph that follows the above quotation that she would not object to the

description of her novel as ''memoires imaginaires,62 The point of presenting

60 Benjamin, The Task o f the Translator, p. 73.

61 EM, p. 296. Ton et langage dans le roman historique (written 1972), is included in Le Temps, ce
grand sculpteur.
62 EM, p. 297.

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Memoires as a translation and indeed as a play with languages ( un certain je u ), is to

recognize it as a supplement to the literary and scholarly bibliography which

Yourcenar meticulously appended at the end of the book - a rare and significant

move for a work of fiction. The novel thus stands self-consciously as a fragment

among other linguistic fragments, as the outcome of a metalinguistic play whose

essence is not located only in its meaning but also in its structure and process.

As if to prove the fundamentally unoriginal and essentially linguistic character of

her text as translation, Yourcenar puts it to the ultimate translation test, namely back

translation. She writes:

Jeus loccasion de verifier com m e a l aide dune pierre de touche l authenticite dun
autre passage. Un professeur demanda a ses eleves de traduire en grec (jaimerais
pouvoir dire retraduire) la page de l empereur qui decrit letat datonie qui suivit chez
lui la mort dAntinoiis. Je m obligeais a faire de meme. Immediatement, des addenda
d un ton plus modem e devinrent aussi visibles que le platre qui rejointoie deux
fragments de statue.63

The similarity between the images that Yourcenar and Benjamin use to illustrate the

work of translation, namely, the fragments of a statue and the fragments of a vessel,

is indeed striking. As a writer, Yourcenar pieces together fragments of the source

languages and fragments of the target language, in a manner which is very similar to

that of what Benjamin calls a genuine translator.64 The experiment of back

translation serves to make visible the difference between languages, as the metaphor

of the platre clearly shows. Just like the plaster used by the archaeologist helps

identify broken pieces of a statue as parts of a larger whole, so the French addenda

used by Yourcenar in the process of translation are essential in making all linguistic

fragments recognizable as parts of language as such. The metaphor of the platre

brings Yourcenar as a translator very close to Benjamins injunction that both the

63 EM, p. 296, emphasis in the original.

64 This expression is in Benjamin, The Task o f the Translator, p. 76.

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original and the translation must be made recognisable as the broken parts of the

greater language.65

In line with my argument so far, Andrew Benjamin has attached especial

importance to the recognizability as such of the fragments of the vessel in Walter

Benjamins analogy. In his essay W alter Benjamin and the Translators Task, he

argued that the totality to which the different linguistic fragments (including the

translation itself) refer in order to make themselves recognizable as parts of it is not

one that precedes them, but one that is posited by them and which is futural in its

essence.66 The translators task consists in showing that present in both the source

and the target texts is the greater language, the possibility of a totality which

contains difference and the promise of a harmony which is the belonging together of

differences.67

The pure language [...] is not a language. It is language. It marks the sameness of
languages while allowing for their differences. What com es to be released by the
translator is the language inhering in a language. However it is a language that itself
cannot be translated, that cannot be put into words. It is the expressionless and
creative Word, that was in the beginning.68

The messianic underpinning of this idea is unmistakable, but its significance for

contemporary critical thought is also made clear by Andrew Benjamin. For my

current discussion, this idea would mean that the statue which Yourcenar attempts

to assemble with fragments of the past and supplementary parts of the present (le

platre, les addenda) will not necessarily resemble anything that has existed in the

past; it will not represent emperor Hadrian or his time, but it will show how that time

and Yourcenars are equally parts and manifestations of a deeper, more permanent

65 See note 53, this chapter, my em phasis here.

66 Andrew Benjamin draws this conclusion after examining the totality o f the greater language in
relation to the kabbalistic doctrine o f Tikkum, the projected harmony o f the world (Andrew Benjamin,
pp. 99-100). With reference to the totality to which linguistic fragments refer, he concludes that The
posited reality does not refer back to an archaic reality (Andrew Benjamin, p. 101). Further down, he
refers to the postulated and hence futural vessel (Andrew Benjamin, p. 101).
67 Andrew Benjamin, p. 102.
68 Andrew Benjamin, p. 103, emphasis in the original.

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reality which, as I have discussed, is rhetorical and linguistic in nature. Further down,

I will argue that it is this particular vantage point, which Yourcenar has reached by

acting as a translator rather than a creative writer, that allowed her to (re)claim the

authenticity of the voice of Hadrien. Prior to that, I shall attempt a comparison

between Yourcenars concept of time and W alter Benjamins concept of the afterlife

of the literary work. My purpose is to find out whether it is true for Benjamin, as it is

for Yourcenar, that time, which undoes the literary or aesthetic object, also

paradoxically creates the possibility of its authentication.

L ife and afterlife

A step further than Paul de Man, who showed that the temporality disclosed by

translation has nothing to do with the one-dimensional myth of Babel, Andrew

Benjamin distinguishes between two concepts of time operative within Walter

Benjamins theory of translation. One of them corresponds to natural languages while

the other pertains to the pure or prim ordial language. For his discussion he draws

from W alter Benjamins distinction between the life and the afterlife (leben and

Uberleben IFortleben lAufleberi) of the literary work in the Task of the Translator,

and from a parallel distinction between information and story in the latters essay

The Storyteller. Here is how Andrew Benjamin describes these two temporal

schemes:

The first is the temporality o f the instant. Information, Benjamin states, lives only at
the moment. Information com es into being and passes away. It does not survive. It
has no after-life. The story however is not closed. It has an after-life because there is
never a final and fixed interpretation [...] It survives.69

69 Andrew Benjamin, p. 106. The quotation within the quotation is from The Storyteller, in Walter
Benjamin, Illuminations, pp. 83-107.

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While in The Task of the Translator genuine translation has already been

explicitly linked with the afterlife of the literary work, Andrew Benjamin specifies

that the concept of afterlife pertains to a utopian reality in which, as we saw,

difference survives within sameness and totality is possible beyond essentialism. This

reality presupposes that there is no original language, no original moment of creation

and identity. Thus, it cannot be reduced to the domain of meaning, of artistic

intention and of the autonomy of the text, which correspond, in Andrew Benjamins

distinction, to the linear temporality of the instant. This utopian reality, which is not

about the triumph of reconciliation over conflict, in effect depends on fragmentation

and contains it. This is the reason why the translator is charged with the task of

making visible both the similarities and the discrepancies between languages.

Bringing together the interrelated issues of the recognizability of the fragment and the

ontology and temporality of language, Andrew Benjamin concludes with the

following statement:

The belonging together o f languages, the fragments o f the vessel, posit that which
makes them recognizable as broken parts o f the same language. A recognition which
itself depends upon the im possibility o f reducing, either temporally or ontologically,
the primordial to the simple instant. In other words it depends upon maintaining the
distinction between the pragmatic use o f language - language instantiated - and the
greater language.70

Expanding on the concept of the afterlife of the literary work, Andrew Benjamin is

concerned here with the delineation of a new area and a new possibility of

interpretation, which he calls the prim ordial. By stressing that the primordial is not

reducible to the instant, he marks the difference between the object of interpretation

and the domain of reference. In the context of Western metaphysics, the object of

interpretation has been approached tautologically with reference to an original

moment of identity. This is the world of fixed meanings and fulfilled intentions,

which, as we know, has proved to be devoid of authenticity. Nevertheless, Andrew

70 Andrew Benjamin, p. 107.

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Benjamin implies, the object of interpretation can also be approached differentially,

with reference to a linguistic totality that allows for the objects fragmentariness.

This possibility of interpretation is revealed through the process of translation, which

can now be thought either literally, as it is by W alter Benjamin, or metaphorically, in

the context of poststructural criticism.

The philosophical strength of Andrew Benjamins argument lies not so much in

questioning essentialism (this is rather the premise of his theory) as in trying to think

an alternative platform for valid interpretation, based on the temporality of the story

and the afterlife of the literary work. This is a bold effort and Andrew Benjamin is

keen to emphasize its significance for European philosophy. He goes as far as to

claim that Walter Benjamins work opens up the possibility of thinking philosophy

and translation [...] in terms, on the one hand of the overcoming of Platonism and on

the other within the wake of the critique of the Enlightenment project.71 The quest

for a valid frame of reference and its implications for contemporary criticism is of

course central to my thesis. I will now turn to Yourcenars concept of time to

examine whether she, acting as a translator, has attempted to think the temporality of

the literary or artistic work in terms analogous to those of W alter Benjamin and

Andrew Benjamin.

Yourcenar comes close to the notion of the afterlife in Le Temps, ce grand

sculpteur. Let me quote here the opening paragraph of this essay:

Le jour ou une statue est terminee, sa vie, en un sens, commence. La premiere etape
est franchie, qui, par les soins du sculpteur, la menee du bloc a la forme humaine ;
une seconde etape, au cours des siecles, a travers des alternatives d adoration,
d admiration, damour, de mepris ou d indifference, par degres successifs d erosion et
d usure, le ramenera peu a peu a l etat de mineral informe auquel l avait soustrait son
sculpteur.72

The first thing to note is that Yourcenar refers to the aesthetic object, not to the

literary work. But there is no reason why the notion of afterlife should not apply to

71 Andrew Benjamin, p. 107.

72 EM, p. 312.

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any form of cultural production. If every form of artistic representation has its

grammar and syntax, then all artefacts have an afterlife during which, just like
9 73
literary works, they become more and more expressive of a greater language.

More importantly, Yourcenar does not refer to the afterlife but, simply, to the life

of the statue. Does this discrepancy involve a different form of temporality from that

of the afterlife of the literary work? W alter Benjamins text implies that it does not.

In The Task of the Translator, he uses the terms continued life and afterlife of

works of art to describe a very similar idea to what Yourcenar in her essay has termed

life - la vie. The history of the great works of art tells us about their antecedents,

their realization in the age of the artist, their potentially eternal afterlife in succeeding

generations. Where this last manifests itself, it is called fame.74 It may be still

objected that, while for Yourcenar the life of a statue begins at the moment of its

completion, for Benjamin the afterlife of a work of art is only experienced by future

generations of viewers. In fact, Benjamin insists that only when a literary work has
nc
reached the age of its fame is its translation possible. However, it follows from

Yourcenars formulation above ( au cours des siecles) that her concept of the life of

a work of art also extends over a long time perspective. It also becomes abundantly

clear in the course of her essay that she is interested in the slow or abrupt

transformations through which works of art go after they have reached their age of

fame - to use Benjamins term. The question therefore remains to what extent

Yourcenars concept of life coincides with Benjamins concept of afterlife.

If Walter Benjamin distinguishes between the life and the afterlife of the work of

art, Yourcenar distinguishes between the creation of the artefact and its life. There is

a parallel between the two earlier stages and between the two later stages, although it

73 In The Task o f the Translator, Walter Benjamin concedes that non-linguistic modes o f
representation also convey a hidden significance relevant to the expression o f the nature o f life itself.
He writes that non-linguistic life, in its analogies andsymbols, can draw on other ways o f suggesting
meaning than intensive - that is, anticipative, intimating - realization, (p.73).
74 Benjamin, The Task o f the Translator, p. 72.
75 Benjamin, The Task o f the Translator, p. 72.

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is not exact, as we just saw. To avoid a confusion of terms, especially since life

means a different thing for Benjamin and for Yourcenar, I shall approach this issue

schematically.

a) The co n c e p t o f life in B en ja m in a n d th a t o f th e c re a tio n o f the w o rk o f a r t in

Y ourcenar.

For Walter Benjamin, the life of a work of art is the period of its realization.

Andrew Benjamin links it with the temporality of the instant and with that of the

information. As such, life is characterized by closure of meaning and finitude of

interpretation. It refers to a primordial moment of ex n ih ilo creation, which affirms

the self-identity of life. Time emanates as a linear phenomenon from the moment of

creation, always asserting the latters primacy. But in reality life can only postulate

that primordial moment, thus undermining the legitimacy of the authority that it

draws from it.

On the other hand, for Yourcenar, the creation of the work of art follows the

logic and the temporality of the symbol, as I pointed out in the previous chapter.

Always necessarily a hostage to meaning, to artistic intention and interpretation, the

work of art aspires to impose order over chaos and stabilize time. The temporality of

the symbol is that of the linguistic sign: the eternal repetition of the same origin of

signification.

Benjamins concept of life as well as Yourcenars concept of the creation of the

work of art are equally characterized by inauthentic temporality, in de M ans sense of

the term. In these concepts, time exists only as simultaneity (the eternal repetition of

the same) or spatiality (a line, excluding all other dimensions). Moreover, from an

ontological perspective, both Yourcenars and Benjamins concepts bear the mark of

essentialism. For Benjamin, meaning is supposed to be essentially present in the

original literary work for as long as the latter is alive, that is, not susceptible to

genuine translation. Similarly, in Yourcenars scheme, at the moment of the creation

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of the work of art, an essential relationship is arbitrarily assumed to exist between the

work and that which it intends to represent.

b) The co n c e p t o f a fterlife in B en ja m in a n d th a t o f th e life o f the w o rk o f a rt in

Y ourcenar.

For Walter Benjamin, the afterlife of a literary work is the open-ended period when

the work is less charged with semantic associations and is delivered to history as a

linguistic fragment among others. It is then that a literary work becomes really

translatable. Benjamin stressed that the translatability of a literary work at the age of

its afterlife is a manifestation of the essence of language. In his commentary,

Andrew Benjamin added that essence should not be understood as identity, but as the

belonging together of differences. This is not a metaphysical state that precedes the

literary work, but the actual state in which it is always already thrown. If this is so,

then every piece of literature, including translations, draws its authority and

authenticity solely from other pieces of literature. This, we may recall, is the

function of allegory, in de M ans essay The Rhetoric of Temporality. Every

fragment of language exists in an authentically temporal relationship with other

fragments, and meaning is constantly (re-)produced and denied within a state of

differential plurality.77

Walter Benjamins concept of afterlife thus proves to be similar to Yourcenars

concept of the life of the work of art. Indeed, in the previous chapter we saw that,

76 This is the meaning o f Walter Benjam ins statement that translations o f works which have reached
the age o f their fame do not so much serve the [original] work as ow e their existence to it. Benjamin,
The Task o f the Translator, p. 72.
77 Benjamins perception o f the temporality o f the symbol and the allegory is therefore not
fundamentally different from de M ans. According to Menninghaus, for [...] Benjamin the sym bols
temporal form is momentary totality; the temporal form o f allegory is progression in a series of
moments or, to use another term, history. Winfried Menninghaus, Walter Benjam ins Theory of
M yth, in Gary Smith (ed.), On W alter Benjamin: C ritical Essays and R ecollections (Cambridge, MA:
M.I.T. Press, 1988), p. 292-325, (p. 313). Menninghaus quotes from Benjam ins Trauerspiel (1928),
published in English as Walter Benjamin, The Origin o f the German Tragic D ram a, trans. by John
Osborne (London: Verso 2003).

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once delivered to time and history, the work of art lives an authentically temporal

existence. Only then does it begin to be free from its symbolic content and, thanks to

its successive transformations in time, it lends itself to an unstable, open-ended

process of interpretations. Through these transformations, the work of art

progressively loses its original semantic charge and comes to represent the

differential and temporal state in which it exists. Left to time, it expresses a

primordial state of non-identity in the same way that the linguistic fragment

expresses the greater language.

It is no surprise that Yourcenar looks no further than the word life to name that

stage in the existence of the work of art which Benjamin calls afterlife. We know that

she used the term le vecu to describe the fleeting and sinuous aspects of existence

that escape systematization and ideology.78 Because le vecu cannot be categorized in

terms of identity, it is devoid of essence. Therefore it cannot be accepted as a valid

term by essentialist philosophy for which only entities that are identical to themselves

actually live.79 Walter Benjamin, who is certainly not an essentialist, has nevertheless

followed this traditional definition when he used life to describe only the early,

more rigid stages of the existence of the literary work. Yourcenar does not make the

same concession. Following a process of inversion of values, she assigns life to

entities that were previously thought to be ontologically dead, such as the decaying

sculpture with its constant leakage of meaning. By the same token, she discerns the

78
For instance, in Chapter 1 o f my thesis, I quoted Yourcenars critique against ce durcissement, ce
dessechement du vecu au profit d ideologies regnantes, in her interviews with de Rosbo (see Chapter
1, n. 4 o f the present thesis).
79 The priority o f life over essence, and o f becoming over being is, o f course, a typically Nietzschean
theme. While this is not the place to examine Yourcenars Nietzschean roots, her concept o f vie and le
vecu can still be linked with N ietzsch es philosophy. If indeed, as I am arguing here, Yourcenars
concept o f life corresponds in many respects to Benjamins afterlife, then it can be understood as
an ontology not o f stasis but o f becom ing, as Andrew Benjamin writes. Andrew Benjamin explicitly
discusses this non-essentialist ontology in terms o f the Nietzschean project o f overcom ing Platonism
(Andrew Benjamin, pp. 105, 107).

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lack of life there where previously it was thought that life was encapsulated, that is,

in the freshly created work of art, with its excess of symbolic value.

This re-definition of life certainly mirrors Yourcenars heroic attempt to save

the possibility of authenticity in literature, in art as well as in the terms of actual

existence. However, if life and authenticity mark a departure from essentialist

philosophy, they do not indicate that an end should be put to the quest for the

essential. On the contrary, thinking in terms of life and authenticity enables

Yourcenar to search for the essential not as perennial truth, but as something that is

transformed, constantly translated over time. At a more abstract level, the inversion

of the semantic content of life and authenticity in the context of irony allows us to

redefine the essential as the possibility of translation. As Andrew Benjamin pointed

out - and this is equally valid for Yourcenar as it is for W alter Benjamin - the

introduction of the parameter of time through the practice of translation works to

redefine the essential nature of the object of interpretation [...] The essential is re

expressed in terms o f translatability' .80 This means that artistic or literary

representation does not, in itself, contain any degree of truth, and exists always in

reference to other artefacts that precede it or follow it. But it also means that truth

inheres in successive ephemeral representations, just as language inheres in

individual literary works and their translations. It is this last point that makes

authentic representation possible for both Walter Benjamin and Yourcenar, despite

the inaccessibility of truth.

80 Andrew Benjamin, p. 90, my emphasis.

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Translation, authentication

This positive moment in the quest for authenticity accounts for Yourcenars

confidence when she attempts to identify Hadriens voice among the many voices

or fragments that she collects from the past and the present. To achieve this, she

begins by rejecting the injunction of approximating the historical character as he

really was, and of offering the resulting work as a true representation. This means

that she does not set herself the impossible task of the historian, which is to depict

accurately a historical era; neither does she take up the role of the historical

biographer, which is to bring back to life a personality. By occupying the vantage

point of a translator, her aim is to bring together past representations - including

those by historians, biographers, visual artists and so on - and to create a new portrait

which is authenticated by the very recognizability of its heterogeneous constitutive

parts. To these parts, Yourcenar adds distinct elements of her own time and mentality

and creates an image that is less the true reflection of a historical person than a

version of his portrait, consciously situated in the present among other similar past

and future projects. The validity of this portrait depends equally on factual accuracy

and the ability to refer to the essential, variously defined according to modem

sensitivity as le vecu, time, greater language, anoriginal difference or that which lies

beyond representation.

Yourcenars aphoristic description of her method: Un pied dans lerudition,

lautre dans la magie may be understood along these lines.81 Magie implies the

imagined absence of mediation between author and fictional character. This

immediacy is only explicable with reference to that other essential reality, which

cannot be captured in isolated literary texts, but has to be searched intertextually. The

81
In the Carnets de notes de M em oires d HadrierC, OR, p. 526.

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Yourcenarian intertext does not only consist of the corpus of original sources and

historical, biographical, literary, etc. texts which are relevant thematically and

linguistically to her historical fiction; it also includes the large amount of paratextual

material that accompanies her work - prefaces, postfaces, carefully edited interviews,

notes, commentaries as well as the annotations written by Yourcenar for the Pleiade

edition. It is in these segments, such as the passage on erudition and magie quoted

above, that we find her most direct analyses of her discursive techniques and

rhetorical strategies, and they consciously work to disrupt the compactness of her
82
realist fiction.

It has been argued that Yourcenars empathetic identification with her fictional

or historical characters stems from her quasi-mystical ability to transcend and

reconcile differences between the self and the Other on an ethical basis. By way of

example, Edith Marcq, in her essay L Empathie ou une maniere d ecriture

yourcenarienne, claimed that Yourcenar approached her fictional characters through

a psychomental process of identification. M arcqs well-researched study is structured

along the ethical opposition between le Moi and VAutre. Her ethical viewpoint

accounts, in my opinion, for her papers failure to explain how the gap between the

two is actually bridged, except by evoking Yourcenars compassion and an ill-

defined concept of mystique supposedly at work in the act of narrating.83 I am

suggesting instead that this process of identification is neither ethical, nor of course

mystical, but existential in character. Identification is rather the result of a knowing

82 It is therefore more useful to read Yourcenars paratext as part o f her work rather than against it.
The latter approach has unfortunately been adopted in Beatrice N esss 1991 essay Le succes
Yourcenar: verite et mystification. Compelled to answer the implied dilemma o f her essays title,
N ess interprets paratextual information in the traditional Genettian sense o f a - dishonest (?) - attempt
to manipulate readerly reception and ensure the fulfilment o f authorial intention. I suggest that the
answer lies rather in the narrative interplay between truth and mystification as legitimate devices
for conveying the complexity o f both the represented situations and the act o f writing itself. Beatrice
N ess, Le succes Yourcenar: verite et mystification, in The French Review, Vol. 64, N o 5. (Apr.
1991), pp. 794-803.
83 Edith Marcq, L empathie ou une maniere d ecriture yourcenarienne, in Jean Philippe Beaulieu et
al. (eds), M arguerite Yourcenar, Ecritures de Vautre (Quebec: XYZ, 1997), pp. 265-277.

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acceptation of what already exists - in this case, the sources cited by Yourcenar, from

the Historia Augusta, to Hadrians statue at the British Museum, to Piranesis

drawings of the Villa Adriana to more recent iconography and bibliography available

to her. Acceptation, in the sense that Yourcenar gives to the term, implies identifying

and embracing the existent source texts despite their incompleteness and failures,

and manipulating them in such a way as to produce a historically updated target text

where differences continue to survive. By that token, acceptation is a form of

translation and translation is a form of acceptation. They both describe a writerly

technique of appropriating and re-working the past with the aim of identifying what

exists authentically in time. We have seen how Yourcenar has recognized this

technique in various artists and writers, from Piranesi to Thomas Mann. I have also

discussed how she imagined Hadrien implementing this technique at the level of

politics but also at that of subjectivity and existence. By comparing her own method

of writing to translation, Yourcenar intimates that she considers herself as a member

of that pantheon of artists, writers, poets and fictional characters, united in their

ability to locate authenticity in the acceptance of difference.

The example which I mentioned above of the back translation of an excerpt

from Memoires d Hadrien is most illuminating as to how Yourcenar would decide on

the authenticity of a characters voice. We saw that she realized that some of her text

could not have been spoken by Hadrien, especially not in Greek. In this particular

example, the untranslatable text is an emotionally charged phrase consisting of seven

words: d un mouvement sauvage, insense et doux\ Properly speaking, the inclusion

of these words should undermine the authenticity of the novel, insofar as the latter

purports to be spoken by the emperor himself. Thus, Yourcenar writes,

Le lecteur demandera alors pourquoi je ne les fais pas enlever. Parce que
1impression, sinon lexpression, me semble authentique, et parce que je pense de
1inexactitude a peu pres ce que lempereur, d apres moi, pensait du risque, c est-a-
dire que, toutes precautions prises, il convient de lui faire sa part.84

84 EM, p. 297, emphasis by the author.

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The authenticity of Memoires is therefore affirmed, rather than challenged, by the

inclusion of that small inaccuracy. Aware that her account can never be fully

legitimate, Yourcenar reclaims part of the lost authenticity by being explicit about her

texts foreignness. She does not do so within the realist text, which, like film at

Benjamins time, must be seamless in order to operate as complete distortion of

reality, in the sense that I discussed above. But in her essays and paratext, Yourcenar

is keen to scratch the surface and let the artificiality of her realist constructions

appear. In the case in question, she wants us to be aware that the seven-word phrase

constitutes an addition to the original message of the novel, and that other criteria

than exactitude and imitation have been employed. The foreignness of these seven

words challenges the putative nativeness of the narrators voice. This modem

supplement to the translation of the voice of Hadrien disrupts the spatiotemporal

unity of the narrative and affirms its fragmentary character. Thus, Yourcenar engages,

rather than constructs, the readers complicity by presenting the literary text as a

translation of an imagined monologue which comprises a number of foreign textual

elements. If the novel can no longer purport to be authentic as original representation,

it can nevertheless claim to be authentic as translation. As such, it has no unique

origin, it is open to interpretation and itself constitutes one possible interpretation

among many. Because foreignness is an integral part of it, the novel as translation

inhabits more than one place; moreover, it exists properly in time, being by its nature

finite and posterior to its source text. Thus, through a process of controlled

distortions that can best be paralleled with the process of translation, Yourcenar

manages to create an authentic space and time for Memoires d Hadrien.

Before concluding, it must be mentioned that in the autobiographical trilogy Le

Labyrinthe du monde, where the conventions of realism are more loosely

implemented, Yourcenar occasionally interrupts the narrative and exposes her

method of reconstructing the past, thus knowingly undermining the authenticity of

her narrative from inside the text. An example is at the beginning of the chapter Rue

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Marais, in Archives du Nord, where Yourcenar admits that she does not know what

kind of people the villagers around her family chateau in Flandre were. She

nevertheless proceeds to visualize one of them, Frangoise Leroux, a force de

sympathie imaginative.85 As in the case of Hadrien, the universal referent that

enables this identification is a reality that lies beyond representation, in which all

people participate: Elle [i.e. Frant^oise Leroux] est comme nous tous dans

1inextricable et 1ineluctable.86

Yourcenar questions her method more profoundly in Quoi? V e te m ite , the last

part of the trilogy, when she discusses the authenticity of the portrait that she creates

of Jeanne, a family friend and the central female character of the book. She accepts

that the biographical material about Jeanne that she managed to collect from third

parties is incomplete.

Mais les propos plus ou moins incomplets ou desultoires de tiers, les recits faits
distraitement au cours d une promenade, ou les coudes sur une table desservie, nous
laissent toujours a court : il faut boucher les trous de la tapisserie, ou rejointoyer les
fragments de verre brise.87

It is worth noticing how often the analogy with the broken or worn artefact surfaces

when Yourcenar examines the issue of the validity of representation. In this case, the

similarity extends to the verb rejointoyer which she also uses in the example of

back-translation from Ton et langage dans le roman historique, quoted above.

This analogy is always reminiscent of Benjamins broken vessel. Exactly like the

act of translation, the reconstruction of the past consists in collecting fragments and

85 EM, p. 1050. Archives du N ord is the second part o f Yourcenars autobiographical trilogy Le
Labyrinthe du monde. Marguerite Yourcenar, A rchives du N ord (Paris: Gallimard, 1977).
86 This passage appears to be inaccurately printed in the Pleiade edition (Essais et M emoires,
Gallimard, 1991), as follows: Elle est com m e nous tous dans Vextricable et lineluctable (p. 1051,
my emphasis: extricable instead o f inextricable). For this reason I chose to quote from the original
Gallimard edition o f A rchives du N ord which seems to be more accurate at this point. (See previous
note, p. 168).
87 EM, p. 1238.

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treating them in such a way as to produce a visibly segmented totality. The tapestry is

forever worn out and the glass will always look broken.

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 CHAPTER FOUR

S p a c e , T im e a n d the E x is t e n t ia l S u b j e c t :
Y ourcenar and H e id e g g e r

Studying Marguerite Yourcenars work from the perspective of the contemporary

critique of representation shows how thoroughly her fiction and criticism are

infiltrated by a variety of specifically modem themes and preoccupations. This is by

no means a surprising fact, but, as I pointed out in my introduction, it is one which

has not been sufficiently stressed by critics so far. This is possibly due to Yourcenars

insistence that her narrative idiom and strongly philosophical concerns do not relate

directly to any trend either in literature or in philosophy. What is more, her fiction

and persona have been shrouded in an aura of universality which tends to eclipse

subtler and, to my mind, more significant aspects of her work, including its topicality

and historical relevance. Paradoxically, the one element that contributed more

drastically to this situation is Yourcenars resistance to the dominant perception of

the self as a subject situated opposite the world. It can be argued that her existential

consideration of the self as an irreducible entity firmly placed in the world should

have made her wary of the temptation of universality. In this chapter I shall claim that

Yourcenars approach to subjectivity - which accounts for her refusal to commit to

any particular political or ideological cause - is inextricably linked, theoretically and

historically, with the existentialist tradition and more specifically with the quest for

authentic selfhood in the twentieth century.

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Arguably, one thing that philosophers of existence, from Kierkegaard to

Heidegger, Sartre and Camus, have in common is their unwillingness to use the

subject-object bipolar opposition in order to make epistemological, historiographical

and ontological claims. Their rejection of the bodiless and timeless Cartesian ego -

and, to a qualified extent, of its Platonic origins and Kantian and Hegelian

transformations - is indirectly reflected in some major themes in Yourcenars work.

These include the non-ideality of the self, the inability of thought adequately to

represent the world and the differential effect of time on any attempt to define human

essence. Other themes, such as the identification with nature especially expressed in

the writings about animals, the finality of physical death and the adjacent theme of

bodily desire also show how Yourcenar challenged the putative autonomy of the

subject to the extent that the very notion of subjectivity becomes difficult to define.

The reversal of the semantics of authenticity in her work is authorized by the

privileging of spatio-temporality over ideality and of the existential over the essential

aspects of selfhood. This is, of course, a typically existentialist move with very

different meanings for different thinkers.

My purpose in stressing the existentialist implications in Yourcenars

renegotiation of the question of subjectivity is not to categorize her under the

existentialist tag. Rather, I believe that the historical and intellectual developments of

the 1920s, 30s and 40s led to the prioritization of the problematic of existence in

Yourcenars fiction and criticism, as they did in the work of many other literary

figures and, of course, philosophers. In the previous chapter, I suggested that the

paradoxical concept of narrative and existential authenticity in Yourcenar is closely

associated with her critique of cultural fragmentation in modernity - a critique which

dates as early as 1929, the year of Diagnostic de lEurope. I would like now to

focus on a more specific issue. Like the existentialists, Yourcenar went beyond the

essentialist definition of the subject and attempted to re-think existence in terms of its

spatial and temporal specificity and unrepeatability. However, this new determination

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of existence is always at risk of being objectified as a new version of a hypothetical

essential structure of being. The question is therefore whether such existential

characteristics as temporality, locality, contingency and irreducibility, which are

present in Yourcenars work, contribute to a new definition of the supposedly eternal

essence of man. In terms of the specific discussion which I am undertaking here, the

question is whether the paradoxical definition of authenticity as an inescapable state

of impurity and worldliness truly deconstructs the nostalgia for the authentic as it is

conventionally understood, or is itself based on it. Despite Yourcenars refined use of

literature as a privileged area for the presentation of non-categorical attributes of

existence, her contemplative and philosophical stance often invites this question. But

above all, it is the presumption of universality in her fiction and criticism which

authorizes not simply this question, but the suspicion that existence remains too

coherent, too conceptual and too generic a figure in her work. By proposing to

investigate this possibility, my principal aim is not to show that the problematic of

subjectivity is only external to Yourcenars oeuvre and that deep down this

problematic remains captive to some metaphysical impulse or pattern. I do not doubt

her sincerity and insight when she writes that le moi est une commodite

grammaticale, philosophique, psychologique, and that it is not la personne in its

integrity, but the individual in its inconsistency that she is interested in.1 On the

contrary, my intention is to examine the ways in which she negotiated with the

persistence of the metaphysical determination of selfhood in language and in thought,

and thus to capture a moment in the history of thought as well as in the history of

French and European literature.

In his 1989 book Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, Richard Rorty is concerned

with the contemporary moral and political dimensions of the clash between

1 See her interview with Claude Servan-Schreiber for L ire, July 1976, reprinted in Maurice Delcroix
(ed.), M arguerite Yourcenar, P ortrait d une voix (Paris: Gallimard, 2002), especially pp. 181-82
where the above quotations are to be found.

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universality and contingency. He uses that opposition to bring about a sharp

distinction between the public and the private spheres which is, I believe, difficult to

sustain to the extent that he does. However, on the basis of that opposition, he

discerns correctly a tension between an effort to achieve self-creation by the

recognition of contingency and an effort to achieve universality by the transcendence

of contingency.2 Throughout the twentieth century, this tension has been operative in

the area of philosophy, in the sense that philosophers abandoned the quest for

timeless truths and turned their attention to the sheer contingency of individual

existence.3 According to Rorty, this tension has dominated philosophy since Plato,

in whose writings it takes the form of the quarrel between philosophy and poetry:

Post-Nietzschean philosophers like W ittgenstein and Heidegger write philosophy in

order to exhibit the universality and necessity o f the individual and the contingent.
Both philosophers became caught up in the quarrel between philosophy and poetry
which Plato began, and both ended by trying to work out honorable terms on which
philosophy might surrender to poetry.

Here Rorty sums up the still ongoing shift from philosophy to literature, and points

out the paradox of an un-philosophical philosophy that seeks to establish the

universality of the contingent.

Rorty elaborates this paradox further in a separate chapter of his book where he

compares Heideggers effort to inaugurate a non-conceptual way of philosophizing to

Prousts use of narrative to explore concepts and terms which do not lay claim to

universal validity. He concludes that Heidegger failed where Proust succeeded,

because Proust was under no illusion that the terms which he used - that is, names

such as Guermantes, Combray, Gilberte - had any autonomous, universal value.5

Heidegger, on the other hand, was quite wrong in thinking that there could be a

universal poem - something which combined the best features of philosophy and

2 Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony an d Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989),
p. 25.
3 Rorty, p. 25.
4 Rorty, p. 26.
5 Rorty, p. 118.

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poetry, something which lay beyond both metaphysics and ironism.6 This criticism

conveys in broad terms the aporetic aspects of the relationship between literature and

philosophy and takes into account the continuous temptation to sublimate contingent

experiences and meanings. In this chapter I shall refine this criticism with especial

reference to Heidegger and his elaboration of a form of subjectivity with universal

pretensions, the Dasein. It is in the wider context of this discussion that a comparison

between Yourcenar and Heidegger becomes possible. In their different capacities,

they approached literature and philosophy from opposite ends, they were both

determined to let their work be infiltrated by disciplines which were not homologous

with their own - speculative thought, for Yourcenar; poetry, for Heidegger - , and yet

they reached some surprisingly compatible conclusions, as I shall attempt to show.

Space and the existential subject

In Being and Time, the most comprehensive account of Heideggers early

philosophy, the element of contingency is discussed through the existential analytic

of Dasein. Thoroughly subverting the traditional Cartesian notion of subjectivity,

Dasein is principally distinguished from that notion by the fact that it is not an

objectively present entity. Heideggers criticism of the Cartesian subject is articulated

in terms of his distinction between the ontological and the various ontic enquiries

into existence. He writes that Descartes investigates the cogitare of the ego, at

least within certain limits. On the other hand, he leaves the sum completely

undiscussed, even though it is regarded as no less primordial than the cogito\

Against the failure on the part of Descartes to investigate existence as such,

Heidegger then formulates his task as follows:

6 Rorty, p. 119.

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One o f our first tasks will be to prove that if we posit an I or subject as such that is
proximally given, we shall com pletely miss the phenomenal content of Dasein.
Ontologically, every idea o f a subject [...] still posits the subjectum {vnoKeipevov)
along with it, no matter how vigorous ones ontical protestations against the soul
substance or the reification o f consciousness.7

Heidegger is keen to distinguish between the ontological approach to existence and

the various ontic approaches to subjectivity, such as the Cartesian ego or soul

substance, and the critique of the reification of consciousness in sociology. This

distinction is central to Being and Time and it is based on what Heidegger called the

ontological difference, that is, the difference between Being and beings. The

importance of the prioritization by Heidegger of Being over beings is that it opens up

a space for the study of existence not as a timeless type, but as absolute individuality.

Heidegger thus wishes to equip philosophy with a new tool on the basis of which

universally valid statements can be made on contingent states and situations in which

man can be found.

Being, as the basic theme o f philosophy, is no class or genus o f entities; yet it pertains
to every entity. Its universality is to be sought higher up. Being and the structure of
Being lie beyond every entity and every possible character which an entity may
possess. Being is the tra n scen d en s pure and simple. And the transcendence of
Daseins being is distinctive in that it implies the possibility and the necessity o f the
most radical individuation.9

By the doubly emphasized term transcendens Heidegger implies that Being

transcends rationalist, empiricist and materialist categorizations. Being is

transcendental in that it is the condition for the possibility of any classification of

beings and the condition for the existence of these beings.10 In this way, Heidegger

7 Martin Heidegger, Being an d Time, trans. by John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1988), pp. 71 and 72, emphasis by the author.
8 Lucien Goldmann has proposed that H eideggers use o f the phrase reification o f consciousness is
borrowed directly from Lukacs, to w hose socio-philosophy, according to Goldmann, Being and Time
responds. See Lucien Goldmann, Lukacs et H eidegger (Paris: Denoel, 1973), especially pp. 72-73:
Sans nommer Lukacs, [Heidegger] critique son analyse de la reification en nous disant quelle a un
statut socio-historique qui a besoin d etre fonde ontologiquement (p. 73).
9 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 62, emphasis by the author.
10 Cf. O. C. Thomas, Transcendens is H eideggers term for the scholastic transcendia or universally
applicable characters, Being and Som e Theologians, The H arvard Theological Review, Vol. 70, No.
1/2. (Jan. - Apr., 1977), pp. 137-160, (p. 149).

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stresses the paradox of the particular Being of Dasein whose universal attribute is

spatio-temporal uniqueness. In the first sections of Part I of Being and Time,

Heidegger is mostly concerned with the spatial parameters of Daseins structure, that

is, with Daseins Being-in-the-world, before tackling the issue of Daseins

temporality. I shall first focus on selected aspects of this analysis, with a view to

drawing specific parallels between it and Yourcenars critique of subjectivity and

conceptual thinking.

Being-in-the-world is, according to Heidegger, one of the most basic states of

Being and it signifies simply the fact that no entity is encountered on its own, but it

always exists in a context. Beings, including human beings, do not possess an

essence that exists autonomously before coming into contact with other entities.

Heideggers discussion of the way in which Dasein exists alongside, and gets to

know, other beings is of particular importance here, as it reflects to a certain extent

Yourcenars critique of conceptuality. Heidegger is wary of classical epistemology

which is based on the idea of truth as equation. He regrets the procedure [...] of

setting up knowing as a relation between subject and Object - a procedure in which

there is as much truth as vacuity.11 It is tempting already to compare this statement

with the following passage from Memoires d Hadrien:

Sur bien des points, d ailleurs, la pensee de nos philosophes me semblait elle aussi
bomee, confuse, ou sterile. Les trois quarts de nos exercices intellectuels ne sont plus
que broderies sur le vide ; je me demandais si cette vacuite croissante etait due a un
abaissement de 1intelligence ou a un declin du caractere.12

In both Yourcenars and Heideggers statements, there is awareness that the quest for

truth is predicated upon abstract terms ( subject, Object, broderies sur le vide)

with no foundation in the world, thus leaving the questioning being, Dasein, in an

emotional and intellectual state of vacuity. This basic critique of the spatio-temporal

11 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 87.

12 OR, p. 458.

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vacuum in which philosophical research is generally conducted is further elaborated

not only by Heidegger but also by Yourcenar, as we shall see further on.

In Being and Time, Heidegger develops a deconstruction of the subject and the

object of philosophy before establishing the relationship between Dasein and the

world on his own terms. Firstly, he is determined to avoid the reductive

representation of the enquiring self as a pure, contemplative, disembodied being. His

way of doing so is to consider Dasein as it is usually to be found, namely, Heidegger

thinks, in the state of average everydayness. Dasein is thus not abstracted as a

scientific, psychological, moral, etc., subject, nor is it extracted from life and isolated

as a phenomenological subject a la Husserl. It is when Dasein is examined in this

casual state that any ontological interpretation may claim any validity, as Heidegger

makes clear:

W e must [...] choose such a way o f access and such kind o f interpretation that this
entity can show itself in itself and from itself [...]. And this means that [Dasein] has
to be shown as it is proxim ally and f o r the m ost p a rt - in its average everydayness,13

Secondly, with regard to D aseins Being-in-the-world, Heidegger explains that it

is characterised by concern for all beings including itself. Concern designates an a

priori interest in the world, a fundamental fascination with it, which goes beyond the

subject-object antithesis.14 In its usual mode of average everydayness, Dasein is not

concerned with other entities by reaching out of itself towards objects that exist

autonomously. Neither does getting to know something involve a process of

returning with ones booty to the cabinet of consciousness after one has gone out

and grasped it.15 Heidegger suggests that the world is first disclosed to us through a

non-aggressive and non-possessive kind of concern, which is activated every time we

use something for practical purposes. Such practical relationship with entities in the

13 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 37-38, emphasis by the author.

14 Being-in-the-world, as concern, is fascin a ted by the world with which it is concerned. Heidegger,
Being and Time, p. 88, emphasis by the author.
15 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 89.

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world - entities that are used as tools or, as the term Zeug was translated, as

equipment - is emphatically non-theoretical. Theory, with its etymological root in

the Greek horan, to see, posits a distance between the spectator and the item which is

looked at, by dint of which this item is thematized and objectified. On the contrary,

equipment used in Daseins average everyday dealings is not seen, in the strong

sense of it being observed by Dasein. The type of sight most usually employed by

Dasein is called by Heidegger circumspection and the type of Being which is

immediately available to Dasein in this way is called readiness-to-hand. Heidegger

draws a sharp line between, on the one hand, centuries of philosophical reductionism

and abstract speculation, and on the other, his own phenomenology which is

contaminated, as it were, by authentic existence in the world: If we look at Things

just theoretically, we can get along without understanding readiness-to-hand.16

Then, Heidegger explains further:

The ready-to-hand is not grasped theoretically at all, nor is it itself the sort o f thing
that circumspection takes proximally as a circumspective theme. The peculiarity o f
what is proximally ready-to-hand is that, in its readiness-to-hand, it must, as it were,
withdraw [zurtickzuziehen] in order to be ready-to-hand quite authentically.17

Entities which are ready-to-hand withdraw from Daseins interpretative gaze. They

are not thematically present while Dasein is using, manipulating or producing them.

It is only when immediate familiarity with equipment ready-to-hand is interrupted -

because of an accident, loss and so on - that a subsequent intentional act of

inspection transforms it into something which is present-at-hand, that is, of pure

theoretical interest {Being and Time, 16.) While Heidegger is keen to emphasize

that presence-at-hand is not a less authentic state of Being, he is adamant that

readiness-to-hand is the primary mode in which Dasein finds itself in its dealing with

entities in the world. He stresses that readiness-to-hand is the way in which entities

16 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 98.

17 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 99.

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as they are in themselves are defined ontologico-categorially.18 Thus, Dasein is

practically engaged in a non-explicit, non-representational relationship with other

entities. In examining and getting to understand these entities in themselves, Dasein

does not conceptualize them by stripping them from the relational context in which

they are ordinarily encountered.

This is clearly not just a methodological point to be taken on board in

epistemological research. Heideggers idea of the embeddedness of beings in real

environments problematized the relationship between existence and space in

European philosophy. It marked a shift of focus away from objectified three-

dimensional space, but also from Husserls phenomenal space - perceived by an ego

that suspends other sensory data -, and towards a perception of dynamic existential

space.19 While it is beyond the present context to pursue this analysis any further, it

must be mentioned that Heideggers re-working of the relationship between subject

and space anticipated his later turn from philosophy to poetry and contributed to his

questioning of the space that is traditionally allocated to philosophy in relation to

literature.

In her work, Yourcenar investigated the relationship between subjectivity and

space less systematically but along very similar lines. As early as in 1932, the

difference between immediate contact with things and the theoretical gaze towards

them is illustrated perfectly in a passage of her monograph on Pindar, which

describes the trip that the Greek poet made as a young man from his native Boeotia to

Athens to further his education. Yourcenar writes about the sober Attican landscape

as it is revealed to Pindar, and takes the opportunity to remind us of the archaic

18 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 101.

19 The notion o f existential space is further developed in Being and Time and in H eideggers later
writings. See especially Being and Time 24, and H eideggers essays Building D w elling Thinking
and The Thing, in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. by Albert Hofstadter (N ew York: Harper
Perennial, 1975).

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understanding of beauty as a sufficient and necessary relationship between man and

physical environment.

Ce netait plus la grasse plaine beotienne ni les massifs du Citheron ou toumait la

ronde echevelee des menades ; une terre plus maigre, aux montagnes seches, qui
naccorde aux hommes que le necessaire, et leur donne par sa sobriete la le^on du
parfait. Les contemporains de Pindare ne cherchaient pas comme nous a comprendre
ces paysages ; ils y v iv a ien t; ils en vivaient.20

This passage refers to a non-cognitive and non-aesthetic understanding of beauty, in

decidedly positive terms. The accent here is on the signification of le parfait.

According to Yourcenar, Greeks did not define perfection through a conscious

process of perception and appreciation. Le parfait qualifies their economy, ecology,

and practical dealing with the world. This economy pertains to a more archaic state of

being for which the world was m ans functional extension. To put Yourcenars

argument in specifically Heideggerian terms, Greeks at the time of Pindar had a

relationship of readiness-to-hand with their environment; we, on the other hand, have

lost this relationship of vital necessity and try to compensate for this loss through our

efforts to comprehend the world as something present-at-hand. The archaic simplicity

is underlined by Yourcenar further down in the same paragraph, when she draws

attention to cette extreme simplicity d impression, quil ne faut jamais oublier quand

il sagit des anciens Hellenes.21 Yourcenar refers here to the original admiration

which she believes that the Greeks felt for basic things, such as Pentelic marble and

olive trees, a feeling that is reminiscent of Daseins fundamental fascination with the

world. This admiration having been replaced in our times by comprehension, we tend

now to dwell not in a world of equipment, but in a world of concepts.

20 EM, p. 1452. Marguerite Yourcenar, Pindare (Paris: Gallimard, 1932).

21 EM, p. 1452.
22 Yourcenars point about pre-classical innocence is certainly worth taking seriously, although there is
a risk o f falling into cliche when one argues, as she appears to do in Pindare, that archaic cultures
were somehow simpler than ours. There is a more serious risk o f falling into metaphysical speculation
in the assumption that mans identification with the world was, or could be, a possibility actualized
historically by entire civilizations. Yourcenar soon became aware o f the precariousness o f her
statements in Pindare, a book which she later described as ce tres mediocre ouvrage de jeu nesse,
where la peinture de la Grece y reste exterieure et superficielle (Letter to Simon Sautier, 8 October

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Yourcenars criticism of the tendency to conceptualize our relationship with the

world parallels to some extent Heideggers idea of readiness-to-hand as the primary

mode in which Being is revealed to Dasein. In chapter 2 especially, I showed how the

critique of conceptuality becomes in Yourcenar a critique of spatiality, in the sense

that the suppression of time, for instance in art, is precisely what authorizes the

projection of reality onto an immobilized mental space. Clearly, no account of mans

understanding relationship with the world in the work of Yourcenar is valid without

reference to this relationships temporal dimension. I shall return to this discussion

shortly. Before that, further instances should be mentioned of the way that

Heideggers distinction between the ready-to-hand and the present-at-hand appears in

Yourcenars work.

A prime example comes in the lecture Andre Gide Revisited which Yourcenar

delivered in 1970 at Smith College in Massachusetts for the 100th anniversary of

Gides birth. Discussing G ides Les Nourritures terrestres, a novel which changeait

le sens et le gout de la vie, Yourcenar develops the antithesis between abstraction

and life:

Le Nourritures terrestres nous montrent un personnage jouissant des formes du

monde, des couleurs du monde, des aventures, des differents aspects, des differentes
possibilites variees de la vie.
Et il y a la, il y avait la dans une litterature qui [...] tend parfois un peu, a chaque
generation, a s eloigner de la vie pour s enfermer dans des concepts, dans une sorte
dabstraction presque ideologique, et dans des problemes de pure forme, il y avait la
le desir passionne de contact avec la vie qui etait, de nouveau, pour d innombrables
jeunes gens en train de faire sagement leurs universites, bouleversant.23

The difference between readiness-to-hand and presence-at-hand is here expressed in

terms of the opposition between jouissance des form es du monde and problemes de

pure forme. The issue of authentic spatiality is addressed negatively, through a

1970, in Lettres a ses am is et quelques au tres, pp. 461-478, pp. 464-65). Nonetheless, her biographer
Josyane Savigneau points out that Pindare contains beaucoup [...] de traces de ce qui sera lunivers
de Marguerite Yourcenar, sa pensee, et meme son style. In Josyane Savigneau, M arguerite
Yourcenar: L Invention d une vie (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), p. 100.
23 Marguerite Yourcenar, Andre Gide R evisited, in Cahiers Andre G ide 3, Le Centenaire (Paris:
Gallimard, 1972), pp. 21-44, p. 30.

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critique of distance, abstraction and ideology. Every generation, writes Yourcenar,

tends to distance itself from life. This distance is what allows for conceptual

representation of forms, colours, aspects of life, and so on. Les Nourritures

terrestres, her argument goes, is a book about the possibility of ecstatic union with

the world - a book which deeply moved young readers as it revealed precisely the

distance that separated them from a more inclusive state of being. Yourcenar implies

that an authentic relationship with the world can indeed be reclaimed within the

context of representation and conceptualization. To that extend, her argument

parallels Heideggers theory that readiness-to-hand is an authentic possibility for

Dasein within the dominant metaphysics of presence-at-hand.

I have already discussed other aspects of Yourcenars critique of conceptuality,

particularly during my examination of Animula vagula blandula in Chapter 1. As in

her essay on Andre Gide, Yourcenars approach is centred, negatively, on the lure

and the limits of ideology and systematic thought, without offering a strong positive

paradigm of the way our non-cognitive, non-representational relationship with Being

may be revealed to us. This is certainly not surprising, for Yourcenar is as

overwhelmed by the impasse of representation as any modernist writer. The mental

and psychological space of her novels is overdetermined by presence-at-hand. To use

her own words from the last quotation above, Yourcenar is also inescapably

enfermee dans des concepts. However, she came closer to a positive definition of

that non-theoretical immediacy implied by readiness-to-hand in her later novels,

UCEuvre au noir and, especially, Un homme obscur. Both Zenon, on the way to his

prison cell, and Nathanael, sailing to his final insular abode, carry out an experiment

which could boldly be described as the fictional equivalent of phenomenological

reduction: progressively, they exclude chronological and even historical time in order

to sink into space and become one with it. Indeed, time is excluded already in the

first lines of the final section of Un homme obscur, where Nathanaels figure slowly

pales away into the darkness of the island before he dies:

17 7
 Chapter 4 - Space, Time
and the Existential Subject

Alors, le temps cessa d exister. C etait comme si on avait efface les chiffres dun
cadran, et le cadran lui-meme palissait comme la lune au ciel en plein jour. Sans
horloge (celle de la maisonnette ne fonctionnait plus), sans montre (il n en avait
jamais possede), sans calendrier des bergers pendu au mur, le temps passait comme
l eclair ou durait toujours.24

What is eliminated here is not time as such, but the objectivity of time. Time as a

calculable quantity gives its place to existential time. With the cessation of calendar

time, Nathanael is able to free himself from the tyranny of the concept and, in an

ecstatic union with the world, to transcend all ontic categories, including age,

gender and even the quality of being human. As Nadia Harris writes in her essay

Representations de 1Autre dans 1oeuvre de Marguerite Yourcenar, L espace

insulaire devient le lieu privilegie ou cet emigre de la culture [i.e. Nathanael] fait
25
lexperience du lien profond qui lunit au monde. She goes on to quote this

passage from Un homme obscur:

Meme les ages, les sexes, et jusquaux especes, lui paraissaient plus proches quon ne
croit les uns des autres : enfant ou vieillard, homme ou femme, animal ou bipede qui
parle et travaille de ses mains, tous communiaient dans 1infortune et la douceur
dexister.26

In her essay, Harris has explicitly in mind Levinass idea of radical exteriority. This

makes her sensitive to the way Yourcenar avoids the process of conceptual

appropriation of otherness in Un homme obscur. Harris draws our attention to

Nathanaels final act of liberation, the burning of the Bible - the last book which he

has with him in the island. The destruction of the Bible has nothing symbolic for

Nathanael, in whose hands the book becomes a piece of equipment, in the

Heideggerian sense of the word: une Bible quil brula par poignees un jour ou le

poele prenait mal.27 Nathanael is then free to dedicate himself fully to the study of

the world around him: il pensait en tout cas quil eut ete mal de ne pas sabsorber

24 OR, p. 1032.
25 Nadia Harris, Representations de 1Autre dans l ceuvre de Marguerite Yourcenar, in Jean-Philippe
Beaulieu, et al. (eds), M arguerite Yourcenar, Ecritures de Iautre (Quebec: XYZ, 1997), pp. 45-52, p.
51.
26 OR, p. 1036.
27 OR, p. 1034.

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98
exclusivement dans la lecture du monde. But the meaning of the destruction of the

Bible is underlined still further by Yourcenar. In so far as the concept of books is

used at this part of the novel to signify abstraction and reductive representation, it is

at the antipodes of life. She writes: Lire les livres, comme lamper de 1eau-de-vie,
29
eut ete une maniere de setourdir pour ne pas etre la. This is an extraordinary

statement to which the expression pour ne pas etre la adds a specific ontological

dimension. In the context of the narrative, etre la refers to the island where

Nathanael has come to be united with nature and finish his life. Therefore, from an

ontological perspective, etre la signifies being there where one belongs, immersed

in ones facticity, absorbed exclusively (as Yourcenar writes) by the world. This is

what Da-sein is. The verbal noun etre-la is of course an established translation of

Dasein, emphasizing the worldliness of being-there. We may interpret the above

phrase from Un homme obscur as follows: conceptual appropriation of the world is

but a way of intoxicating oneself as a substitute for not being where one belongs

authentically. Here, Yourcenar reaches exactly the same point as Heidegger, when

he discusses conceptual representation ( understanding everything, all

possibilities of explanation, characterologies, typologies) as an attempt by Dasein

to tranquillize itself - an attempt that ends in inauthenticity and alienation:

When Dasein, tranquillized, and understanding everything, thus compares itself with
everything, it drifts along towards an alienation [Entfremdung] in which its ownmost
potentiality-for-Being is hidden from it. Falling Being-in-the-world is not only
tempting and tranquillizing; it is at the same time alienating.30

The passage of Un homme obscur which I discussed above is followed by a

comment on Nathanaels disintegrating body and on the anticipation of death. Plus

ses sensations corporelles devenaient penibles, plus il lui semblait necessaire, a force

d attention, d essayer plutot de suivre, sinon de comprendre, ce qui se faisait ou se

28 OR, p. 1034-35
29 OR, p. 1035, my emphasis
30 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 222.

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defaisait en lui.31 Again, it is worth noticing how Yourcenar arrives from a different

direction at the Heideggerian idea that ontological awareness is not a question of

cognition but one of attention and heeding. The difference between comprendre and

suivre is the same as that between conceptualization of the world and concentration

on the world - in this case, ones body - in such a way as to let the world reveal itself

to the questioning self. In contrast to the theoretical attitude implicit in comprendre,

there is purely a technique involved in the process of suivre, which, in the case of

Nathanael, consists in paying close attention to physical pain.

For Hadrien, on the other hand, this technique entails a necessary political

dimension. It provides for two forms of active collaboration, avec la terre and avec le

temps, which are translated into the dual enterprise of construire and re-construire

(OR, pp. 384 ff.). As it is explained through the examples of collaboration provided

in Memoires d Hadrien, and as I stressed in Chapter 2, this way of understanding

political activity originates in Hadriens conviction that people belong to concrete

spatiotemporal (and therefore historical) contexts. Yourcenar suggests that Hadriens

political planning is inspired by a strong sense of worldliness centred on humanity.

For that reason, it is interesting to study Hadriens politics in relation to Heideggers

existential analysis. This will be one of my goals in the next chapter. Prior to that, I

shall try to establish a relationship between Yourcenars and Heideggers perceptions

of time.

Time and the existential subject

The centrality of the agency of time in both Heidegger and Yourcenar hardly needs

emphasizing. Time is the element on which both thinkers meditation on existence,

31 OR, p. 1035.

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and the Existential Subject

their respective theories of representation and their philosophies of history are

anchored. More fundamentally, time is for both the inherently differential

phenomenon which makes it possible to think existence at all, to introduce the

question of authenticity and to explain the bearing of history on the present.

There are certainly deep-seated differences in the way Yourcenar and Heidegger

think time. For instance, Heidegger does not deal systematically with cosmic or

astronomical time, which plays an important role in Yourcenars idea of the

fundamental order of things, their objective duree. Nonetheless there are striking

similarities between them as regards the way they consider existential and historical

time and the way these two relate to each other. Further, by thematizing time in their

work, they both exemplify the shift of focus in European thought from essence to

existence. With equal urgency, they move from the quest for static truth to the

possibility of dynamic authenticity, by temporalizing the site of the self with a view

to placing the latter firmly within the world. We just saw how pressingly the

temporal question emerged at every turn in the above discussion of Yourcenars

critique of spatiality. Time is the element which constantly disturbs the possibility of

spatial order, but which also, through destruction and irony, discloses the constitutive

worldliness of the self. By complicating the act of representation, while being

unrepresentable itself, time defines the thereness of Being.

These arguments are valid for both Heidegger and Yourcenar, but it is in Being

and Time that they aspire to universal meaning as part of the analysis of the ecstatic

structure of Dasein. Heideggers main point is that time is not an entity or a context

in which things occur, but a process fuelled by Dasein itself in the course of which

Dasein projects itself onto its unique possibilities. This means that the human being,

whether authentic or inauthentic, is never equal to itself. It does not arise from

itself but from its Being towards which it tends. Dasein is always ahead of itself

striving to become explicitly the Being-in-the-world which it originally is. Existence

is therefore differential, and this difference - in effect the difference between Being

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and the Existential Subject

and beings - manifests itself dynamically as a tension, a projection towards

something. This tension is time. Levinas summarizes this point neatly: On pourrait

dire que le temps c est lelan par lequel lhomme sinscrit dans letre, par lequel il

1assume.32 As this dynamic absence, time makes it possible for man to assume his

Being, that is, to understand non-conceptually himself as a finite being in the world.

Daseins return to itself is actualized through the phenomena of the future, the

present and the past, which Heidegger calls ecstases. While the traditional triadic

structure of temporality is retained, the ecstases do not designate ordinary perceptions

of objective or psychological time. Heidegger insists on the differential and thereby

non-essential character of temporality:

Temporality is the primordial outside-of-itself in and for itself. W e therefore call the
phenomena o f the future, the character o f having been, and the Present, the ecstases
o f temporality. Temporality is not, prior to this, an entity which first emerges from
itself, its essence is a process o f temporalizing in the unity o f the ecstases.33

There are two aspects of this definition that are directly relevant to my argument on

Yourcenar. Firstly, the unity of the three ecstases of time relates to Yourcenars

discovery of a unifying order which emerges through the disorder of mans

existential predicament. Secondly, and following from the previous point, the

Heideggerian theme of the unity of primordial time can be linked to the prevalence,

in Yourcenar, of acceptation over revolte. I shall summarize Heideggers thesis on

the unity of the ecstases, before I attempt to associate it with Yourcenars arguments

on order and acceptance.

If time has always been felt as a continuum of difference, Heidegger transferred

the site of the difference from the objective world to Being, or rather, to Being-in-

the-world. The unity of ecstatic time is possible because Dasein is not a stable

essence in a changing world but is itself temporal. In this way, in its unity, ecstatic

32 Emmanuel Levinas, En decouvrant Iexistence avec Husserl et H eidegger (Paris: J. Vrin, 1994), p.
88.
33
Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 377, emphasis by the author.

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and the Existential Subject

time remains plural. The three dimensions of Daseins time, futurity, pastness and

presence, assume their meaning only in relation to each other and they all point to

Daseins instability and dislocation.

- Futurity is not a quality assigned to events towards which Dasein is supposed to

lead, but the coming of Dasein towards its own possibilities. The future is produced

by the self in resolute anticipation of its own death. Heidegger writes: We have in

view the coming in which Dasein, in its ownmost potentiality-for-Being, comes

toward itself. Anticipation makes Dasein authentically futural.34 Dasein is always

already outside itself. It is not, but it ex-sists.35 Existence is this perpetual tension

between Dasein and its ownmost potentiality which is nothingness, literally death.36

- Similarly, the past is defined non-objectively as an attribute of the self, rather than

as something anterior to the present. In seeking to retrieve itself from the past, Dasein

looks in itself. As Dasein oscillates between its thrownness in the world and its

future fulfilment, its past is defined as this thrownness, which involves inauthenticity

as well we the desire for authenticity. Heidegger writes that Dasein never finds

itself except as a thrown Fact.

- Finally, for Heidegger, the present is not the now-moment of ordinary time. The

present is also ecstatic, because Dasein steps beyond itself and defines itself in

relation to other entities. Heidegger calls this motion Falling into the everydayness,

and considers that it entails an original moment of inauthenticity. From there, Dasein

must spring forward into authentic futurity.

Undoubtedly, Heideggers most enduring insight into time is the determination

of temporality as part of m ans constitution, prior to any segmentation between

34 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 373, emphasis by the author.

35 Michael Inwood points out that Heidegger often writes Ex-sistenz or Ek-sistenz to stress stepping
forth. In Michael Inwood, A H eidegger D ictionary (London: Blackwell, 1999), p. 60.
36 It is tempting to add that this perception o f death and futurity, resolution and anticipation, is
perfectly illustrated in one o f Yourcenars plays, Qui n a p a s son M inotaure ?. Just before Thesee
enters the labyrinth to face the Minotaur, he says: Je marcherai vers la mort doucement engage dans
lavenir. Marguerite Yourcenar, Theatre, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), II, p. 205.
37
Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 376.

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and the Existential Subject

subjective and objective time. The human being emerges from this discussion as a

solitary figure, free to assume the contingency of his or her existence. The unity of

time reflects the unity of Heideggers analysis of temporality which is made possible

by the horizon of individual death. The prospect of nothingness frustrates in advance

any ambition to understand oneself as eternal essence living in the present. This is

why Heidegger insists that man is not settled in the hypothetical identity of eternal

present but lives differentially, ecstatically, in a future which is his own. As Paul

Ricceur has pointed out, Cette differentiation est intrinsequement impliquee par la

temporalisation, en tant que celle-ci est un proces qui rassemble en dispersant. Le

passage du futur au passe et au present est a la fois unification et diversification.38

This unity that comprises difference defines m ans factical situation, thus

rounding up and universalizing contingency. This does not mean that there is a

pattern underlying contingent phenomena - the only pattern being finiteness -, but

that contingency is a structural part of existence. It means that we are thrown in a

world where scientific principles, ethical values and so on change constantly and

where different manifestations of nature and history are ultimately unpredictable.

What persists is thrownness, a difference which affects all beings but to which only

the human being is privy. W hether or not Heideggers account of temporality

manages to overturn metaphysics, it certainly overturns the terms of the question of

Being. Heidegger redefines the task of philosophy as the effort to record the tensions

which keep Being away from itself in a world determined by finiteness.

Let me now return to the work of Yourcenar to see how aspects of the

problematic of time as discussed above can be related to her thinking of contingency

and the worldliness of existence. Certainly, Yourcenars work is no illustration of any

given version of existentialism. Rather, it is concerned in an original way with the

38 Paul Ricceur, Temps et recit, tome III, Le tem ps raconte (Paris: Seuil, 1985), p. 130.

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and the Existential Subject

stakes involved in the modem determination of selfhood, and represents at the level

of narrative mans struggle to come to terms with the implications of difference.

In Le Temps, ce grand sculpteur, Yourcenar shows how time acquires various

meanings depending on its relationship with the act of (aesthetic) representation. She

argues that time is neither the context in which representation takes place nor simply

the force against which representation is set. Time is rather the sculpteur, the agent

of representation which ultimately fulfils artistic intention in the sense that the final

product, the ruin, is as fragmented as its creator. In the ontic world, the artists

intention expresses itself as the drive for identity, but from the existential perspective

which Yourcenar adopts, the intention is to repeat difference and fragmentation.

Following a Heideggerian logic, we may therefore suggest that the artists intention is

indeed a tension between identity and difference. Artistic intention is a movement of

stepping ahead of oneself toward authentic futurity, which is the definition of ecstatic

time.

In the previous chapter I also referred to the question of temporality in terms of

the life (or afterlife) of the aesthetic/literary artefact. With reference to Walter

Benjamin, time was understood metaphorically as a relation between linguistic

fragments, especially literary works and their translations. It was recognized that this

temporality depended on a tension of a more fundamental order, that between

languages of the world and pure language as a unified site of differential plurality.

Although in that discussion there was no immediate reference to existentiality,

literary works were discussed in terms of their life, as they pass from a state of

originality to one of translatability. They, too, were considered to be thrown into

factical world and to exist in a tension between two types of temporality, the

temporality of the instant and that of the primordial. Under the light of the present

discussion, these temporalities correspond, to a certain extent, to ordinary and

ecstatic temporality respectively. Just as Dasein exists in a state of permanent tension

in relation to Being, so literary fragments exist in a state of tension in relationship to

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and the Existential Subject

pure language.39 As I showed, Yourcenar took this difference implicitly into

account. She situated Memoires d Hadrien within the tension between essentialism

and translatability by defining her novel as a translation. She embraced and

demonstrated the difference between, on the one hand, essentialism and the

temporality of the instant, and on the other, translatability and the temporality of the

primordial. By considering her novel as a fragment in a series of fragments (in

Benjamins and de M ans sense), she temporalized and thus authenticated it in the

same sense that Dasein claims an authentic relationship with Being by temporalizing

itself.

In addition to the metaphor of translation, Yourcenar uses other analogies in her

fiction to highlight the tension between the ordinary time of presence and the

primordial time of existence. In chapter 1 I showed how this tension is expressed in

Memoires as Hadriens nostalgia for order and desire for representation (chapter

Animula vagula blandula). Hadrien is frustrated by the fact that no system of ideas

has eternal value, a state of affairs which is evident to him from his privileged

standpoint as a manipulator of symbols. I would like to focus on a point of the novel

where this key problem seems to Hadrien to be resolved, if only for a moment.

Structurally, this point corresponds exactly to the centre of the novel and

represents the moment of Hadriens absolute personal and political fulfilment.40 Two

themes are used simultaneously to bring together the issues of contingency,

phenomenal time and death. The first is that of the Eleusinian Mysteries, to which

Hadrien was initiated, and about which he says: Ces grands rites ne font que

symboliser les evenements de la vie humaine.41 The second theme is the study of the

39 I am aware o f the differences between H eideggers and Benjamins accounts o f temporality.

Notably, as Caygill writes: It is the distinction between fulfilment in historical time and the fulfilment
o/historical time which marks the difference between Heidegger and Benjamin (Caygill, p. 10). At this
point, I am interested in Yourcenars perception o f time not as presence, but as difference and tension
- a perception that, I believe, Benjamin and Heidegger share.
40 Cf. Les Yeux ouverts, p. 101, where Yourcenar discusses the structure o f M em oires d Hadrien as
une espece de construction pyramidale.
41 OR, p. 400.

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and the Existential Subject

sky, in the forms of astrology, cette etrange refraction de lhumain sur la voute

stellaire, and astronomy.42 In the following passage, Hadrien considers astronomy as

an equally legitimate method of representation of humanity as the rituals of Eleusis:

l esprit humain revelait ici sa participation a lunivers par l etablissement dexactes

theoremes comme a Eleusis par des cris rituels et des danses. L homme qui contemple
et les astres contemples roulaient inevitablement vers leur fin, marquee quelque part
au ciel. Mais chaque moment de cette chute etait un temps d arret, un repere, un
segment d une courbe aussi solide quune chame d or. Chaque glissem ent nous
ramenait a ce point qui, parce que par hasard nous nous y sommes trouves, nous parait
un centre.43

The relationship between man and the world transcends such oppositions as subject

and object, inferiority and exteriority. It is significant that Yourcenar uses the verb

contempler instead of the more appropriate - when it comes to astronomy - observer.

It allows us to think that the stars are not seen here as objects which are present-at-

hand, but belong together with the onlooker to a greater spatiotemporal whole,

Vunivers. This passage tells us that the structural unity of space-time is not of a

spiritual and metaphysical order and does not have a central stable point of reference,

although it may appear to do so. The last sentence of the quotation above explains

how phenomenal space-time, though contingent in itself, creates the illusion of a

centre - and, one might add, the desire or the nostalgia for one. However, the unity of

the universe is existential in that it is only understood through the occurrence of

falling and death. Yourcenar is explicit about i a chute [de 1homme et des astres]

vers leur fin. The overall message is reminiscent of the adventure of Dasein in

Being and Time. Man can only make sense of himself and the world by recognizing

the possibility of his own end. What is then revealed is mans participation in the

spatiotemporal unity of Being {Vunivers) - a unity which precedes any statement

about the disorder of existence and the order of the world. Indeed, this revelation is

encapsulated in Hadriens statement Le desordre sintegrait a lordre.44

42 OR, p. 401.
43 OR, p. 402.
44 OR, p. 401.

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In the paragraph that follows the above quotation, Yourcenar gives a vivid image

of mans active participation in the universe. Hadrien recalls a night when he was

younger which he had spent lying on the Syrian desert, contemplating the stars:

couche sur le dos, les yeux bien ouverts.45 His posture, touching the earth and

looking above to the sky is symbolic of both thrownness and futurity. His experience

of union with what is imagined as the divine element is described as an extase lucide

- an ecstatic unity of time which, in Heideggerian parlance, could be termed as being

ahead of oneself while being already in the world.46

The theme of a unity that precedes and includes difference is further illuminated

in Un homme obscur, in the discussion between the philosopher Leo Belmonte and

Nathanael, which I also examined in Chapter 1. Belmonte refers to the same process

which Heideggers existential phenomenology describes as the ontic reduction of

existence and temporality into their inauthentic counterparts, namely, non

corporeality and eternity: Ces volitions, ces puissances, ces nivaux d existence de

moins en moins corporalises, ces temps de plus en plus etemels [...] quest-ce, sinon

ce que ceux qui ne savent pas ce dont ils parlent appellent grossierement des

Anges?47 Thirty years after Memoires, the impasse of conceptual representation in

philosophy and in science is here dramatized with even more poignancy. Yourcenar

gives us the dark image of a thinker who, having always been sceptical of the abstract

beauty of his findings, only comes to discern the possibility of truth in the ugly

corporeality of his own imminent death. In my earlier analysis I discussed the

opposition between les choses et les idees, as well as Belmontes despair in mans

endless intellectual effort pour donner au chaos au moins lapparence d un

48
ordre... While these issues reproduce Yourcenars problematic of the impossibility

45 OR, p. 402.
46 Hadrien says, [J]ai connu plus d une extase [...] Celle de la nuit syrienne fut etrangement lucide.
OR, p. 402.
47 OR, p. 1009-10.
48 OR, p. 1009.

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 Chapter 4 - Space, Time
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of existential order in Memoires d Hadrien, they are here tackled from the point of

view of negative theology. Belmonte is looking for a divine point of reference from

which the opposition between order and chaos can be transcended. God emerges

from his discussion as the missing centre of things. It is what remains unaccounted

for after representation has exhausted itself. Belmonte argues that Gods nothingness

is to be found everywhere, like water is found wherever one digs in the sand on a

seashore. Then he concludes, Car le secret, c est que je creuse en moi, puisquen ce

moment je suis au centre : ma toux, cette boule d eau et de boue qui monte et

descend dans ma poitrine, mon devoiement d entrailles, nous sommes au centre...49

As in the case of Hadrien contemplating the stars, the contingency of what we feel as

the present of phenomenal time is here re-affirmed. Belmontes meditations deal

with such fundamental notions of existential phenomenology as the necessity of

falling into phenomenal time, the physicality of existence, the privacy of death and

the search inside the self for a unified Being that escapes representation.

Acceptance and guardianship

The key statement le desordre sintegrait a lordre reflects another discovery which

Yourcenar formulated as succinctly at about the same time, namely, that i a re volte se

place a linterieur de 1acquiescement.50 In the previous chapters I studied the

political and aesthetic implications of this assertion. In Yourcenar, revolte signifies a

rebellion against a system of principles, ideas, religious or literary traditions, which

eventually leads to the establishment of new a system of principles, ideas and so on.

This situation gives rise to un understanding of modem history as a process of

49 OR, p. 1012.
50 This phrase (EM, p. 156) from Presentation critique de Constantin Cavafy, an essay finished in
1953, was one o f the focal ideas o f Chapter 1 o f my thesis.

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conceptual overdetermination of le vecu, a thesis which encompasses Yourcenars

entire work.51

At a more fundamental level, revolte is addressed against this progressively

rhetorical elaboration of experience and is therefore based on the assumption that

such transcendence is possible. It is not simply because Yourcenar rejects this

assumption that she always tends to side with acceptation or acquiescement.

Accepting is for her a more comprehensive and more humble, as it were, attitude

towards the past. Accepting contains revolt in the sense that the illusion of creation

always precedes the explicitness of frustration and irony. Revolt is thus a necessary

dialectical moment before the illusory and fragmented character of reality is revealed.

However, this moment does not lead to synthesis, for irony is not transcended.

Instead, irony forces us to completely revise our attitude towards the idea of

creativity. The issue is no longer how to create something original, but how to re-

assume what has been handed down to us from the past, including fragmentation and

conceptual overdetermination. The meaning of accepting is to be found in

reconstruire, defined by Yourcenar in the phrase: collaborer avec le temps sous son

aspect de passe [...] vers un plus long avenir. As this statement suggests, accepting

is a temporal act which is directed towards the future.

Thus, in Memoires, when Hadrien completes the construction of the temple of

the Olympeion - a project begun seven centuries earlier - he is able to say i e passe

retrouvait un visage d avenir. This fusion of the dimensions of historical time is

possible thanks to an accepting attitude towards temporality that goes beyond the

dilemma between revolt or acceptance.

In the following passage, which summarizes Hadriens existential politics and

sense of history, it is made clear that that which he accepts is time itself.

51 As we saw, this idea was already central to Yourcenars 1929 essay Diagnostic de lEurope and
still present in Leo Belm ontes philosophy in Un homme obscur, published in 1982.
52 OR, p. 422.

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Cet esprit des temps, j aurais peut-etre ete le premier a y subordonner consciemment
tous mes actes, a en faire autre chose que le reve fumeux dun philosophe ou
1aspiration un peu vague d un bon prince. Et je remerciais les dieux, puisquils
mavaient accorde de vivre a une epoque ou la tache qui m etait echue consistait a
reorganiser prudemment un monde, et non a extraire du chaos une matiere encore
informe. [...] Je me felicitais que notre passe fut assez long pour nous foumir
d exemples, et pas assez lourd pour nous en ecraser.53

It is worth noticing again the perception of history as the accumulation of legacies

that would potentially overwhelm culture - which takes us back to the analogy of the

branch of a tree that snaps under its own weight, in Diagnostic de lEurope

(Chapter 3). Yourcenar suggests that Hadrien lived at a time when accepting the

legacy of the past was not so heavy a task as it is today. But beyond its concrete

political meaning (reorganiser le monde) and in both the ancient and the modem

historical contexts, order has an original existential significance. To accept time is

above all to be able to envisage a totality, an order, which incorporates and even

necessitates disorder, multiplicity, conflict and revolt. While in Memoires the divine

element as such plays only a secondary role, it is often evoked when Yourcenar

wishes to direct our attention to that order that dispenses the multiformity of factical

life. In the passage that follows, in which Hadrien explains his relationship with the

divine element, this quasi-mystical order is described remarkably as cette force

unique engagee dans la multiplicity des choses.

Je m imaginais secondant [le divin] dans son effort d informer et d ordonner un

monde, den developper et den multiplier les circonvolutions, les ramifications, les
detours. Jetais lun des segments de la roue, lun des aspects de cette force unique
engagee dans la multiplicity des choses.54

My suggestion now is that Yourcenars constitutive notion of accepting the past, and

with it the possibility of a futural order that integrates disorder, shares many

characteristics with Heideggers idea of accepting and responding to the unity of

Being.

53 OR, p. 372.
54 OR, p. 398-99.

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I have already mentioned the original fascination which, according to Heidegger,

Dasein experiences towards Being. This pre-ontological attitude, already a form of

primitive acceptance of Being, becomes explicit in D aseins authentic solicitude

towards Being, which Heidegger calls Care. Care is a form of acceptance, in the

fundamental sense that authentic selfhood involves accepting D aseins thrownness

into the world and embracing Daseins finiteness. As in the case of Yourcenar,

accepting in Heidegger is not an ethical or rational choice, but a recognition of the

existential state in which entities already are. This is why, in both authors, the

meaning of authenticity is not originally ethical, but existential. Indeed, to be thrown

is not a state to which Dasein has to give its consent, but one that it has to accept

authentically as a fact. Heidegger is unambiguous about it: As Being, Dasein is

something that has been thrown; it has been brought into its there, but not of its

own accord.55

At the same time, accepting is also an attitude that encompasses inauthenticity,

in a sense which is very close to Yourcenars idea of acquiescement as the

transcendence of revolte. There is room in Being and Time to hypothesize that

inauthenticity as fear and alienation is a necessary step towards the realization of the

homelessness of the self. Heidegger has called Falling that state in which Dasein

interprets itself in terms of ontic categories - a state which may involve the choice

between revolt and accepting in the common sense of these words. Falling is thus

associated with inauthenticity and the present. Dasein must have fallen so as to be

able to reclaim itself resolutely. Heidegger writes that falling is existentially

determinative and adds that In falling, nothing other than our potentiality-for-

Being-in-the-world is the issue, even if in the mode of inauthenticity.56 George

Steiner makes the following comment on this topic:

55 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 329, emphasis by the author.

56 Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 223-24.

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But fallenness is positive in [a] deeper sense. There must be inauthenticity and
theyness, talk and Neugier, so that Dasein, thus made aware o f its loss o f self, can
strive to return to authentic being. At no point in his work is H eidegger more
dialectical, more intent on the dynamics o f an argument which springs from internal
contradiction. Verfall becom es the absolutely necessary precondition for that struggle
toward true Dasein, toward possession or, rather, repossession o f self, which defines
mans exposure to the challenge o f the ontological.57

Falling is thus an integral part of Daseins acceptance of Being in the same way that

revolte, in Yourcenar, belongs to acceptation and is not opposed to it.

I am not suggesting here that Falling and revolte define exactly the same attitude

or mode of being, although both terms connote a degree of misinterpretation of mans

possibilities and both lead to the necessary moment of irony. The point I rather wish

to emphasize is that the notion of accepting marks an equally profound existential

disposition for Heidegger and Yourcenar, beyond any immediate political, ethical or

anthropological evaluations and beyond any negative or positive judgements. Writing

about the call of Being, Jacques Derrida pointed out that there is in Heidegger un

oui avant toute opposition du oui et du n o n \ In a relevant footnote he makes this

comment: Je ne traduirai pas le mot Zusage parce quil rassemble des significations

que nous dissocions en general, celles de la promesse et de 1acquiescement ou du

co
consentement, de 1abandon originaire a ce qui se donne dans la promesse meme.

In context, Derridas remark means (among other things) that, to formulate the

ontological question, one has to be open to Being and therefore to have accepted it

already in a relationship of co-belonging. Because Dasein and Being belong together,

Dasein cannot be a creator, in the proper sense that it cannot by itself create Being, it

cannot give meaning to Being. Daseins role is precisely to accept Being, to let Being

be through Dasein.

57 George Steiner, H eidegger (London: Fontana Press, 1992), pp. 98-99, italics by the author.
58
Jacques Derrida, H eidegger et la question (Paris: Galilee, 1987), pp. 114-15, em phasis by Derrida.

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Heidegger has famously asserted m ans role with regard to Being in the

apophthegm Man is the shepherd of Being.59 J. Glenn Grey, who co-translated the

Letter on Humanism, from where I quote the above phrase, annotates as follows:

Like that o f the shepherd, mans true dignity consists in his function o f taking care of,
o f being a protector and a guardian. His being is care (Sorge) in the comprehensive
sense of the term. Man does not create Being, but he is responsible for it since,
without his thinking and remembering, Being has no illumination, no voice, no
word.60

Gray is not necessarily moralizing when he writes about m ans true dignity. This

expression occurs in Letter on Humanism (p. 233), when Heidegger wants to make

the point that Western humanism is still an evaluative criterion that does not do

justice to the humanity of man. Humanism (especially in its Sartrean version which

Heideggers Letter on Humanism set out to deconstruct) is pregnant with the idea of

absolute self-creation, whereas, from an ontological perspective, being human

involves only the distinction in relation to other entities of being able to respond to

Being.

After Being and Time, the idea that creating is fundamentally an exercise in

custodianship and preservation of Being became stronger in Heideggers thought. In

his essay Building Dwelling Thinking, first published in German in 1954 as Bauen

Wohnen Denken, Heidegger takes recourse to etymology to interpret bauen not as

to build, but as to dwell, to which he then gives the sense of to preserve. He

writes: as long as we do not bear in mind that all building is in itself a dwelling, we

cannot even adequately ask, let alone properly decide, what the building of buildings

might be in its nature. He then concludes with a new aphorism: The fundamental

character o f dwelling is [...] sparing and preserving.61 Thus the humanist

59 Letter on Humanism, in David Farrell Krell (ed.), Martin H eidegger: Basic Writings (London:
Routledge, 1973), p. 234.
60 J. Glenn Gray , Heidegger's B eing, The Journal o f Philosophy, Vol. 49, No. 12 (Jun., 1952), pp.
415-422, (p. 416).
61 Building Dwelling Thinking, in Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, pp. 148-49,
emphasis in the original.

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representations of man as a master of his own being, and of creation as the ability to

confer meaning to entities are shown to be inadequate. The meaning of accepting is

in the custodianship and preservation of that which has been handed over to man,

namely access to his own Being.

The relationship between creating and preserving in Heidegger mirrors the

relationship between construire and reconstruire in Yourcenar. Heideggers and

Yourcenars comparable attitudes with regard to accepting also extend to the idea of

custodianship. The idea that man is the shepherd of Being finds its equivalent in

Yourcenars remark that Adam aurait [...] pu se sentir promu au rang de protecteur,

d arbitre, de moderateur de la creation, because he was meant to be non le tyran,

mais lintendant [du m onde].62 W hile Yourcenar and Heidegger use theological

terms, they both try to make a point that goes beyond theology: namely, that man is

not a subject who gets to know the objective truth of existence but the only being

who participates knowingly in the truth of Being. It is therefore m ans prerogative to

remember and safeguard this knowledge.

I have already discussed this passage from Yourcenars essay Qui sait si l'ame

des betes va en bas in Chapter 1, in the context of my analysis of her idea of freedom

as a form of acceptance. There I mentioned the ecological implications of

Yourcenars argument. Similarly, it comes as no surprise that Heideggers

interpretation of the quality of being human as a form of preserving has given rise

to ecological interpretations of his thought. On this topic, Leslie Paul Thiele writes:

Celebrating the unique capacities o f human being to disclose in a way that preserves
best ensures humanitys caretaking o f the earth and the world. The fostering o f human

62 From Yourcenars essay Qui sait si l'ame des betes va en bas (1981), EM, p. 374. It is not
accidental that in the same essay Yourcenar rejects the conventional concept o f humanism for
promoting the idea o f the superiority o f man over other beings: un mouvement suppose rationaliste et
lai'que, lhumanisme, au sens recent et abusif du mot, qui pretend naccorder d interet quaux
realisations humaines, herite directement de ce christianisme appauvri, auquel la connaissance et
lamour du reste des etres ont ete retires, (EM, p. 374). As in Heidegger, Yourcenars critique o f the
autonomy o f the rationalist subject and her perception o f man as the custodian o f existence makes her
sceptical towards the idea o f humanism. Moreover, la connaissance et lamour des etres is an idea
that carries the same Christian undertones as H eideggers notion o f Care.

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freedom, understood as a disclosive letting-be rather than a sovereign control, is

precisely the measure that will best safeguard the earths ecological diversity and
health.6

This comes as further proof that Yourcenars and Heideggers independent

trajectories of thought indeed meet in some unexpected if consistent ways.

Yourcenar has revisited the idea of guardianship several times in her work.

Already in Diagnostic de lEurope, she wrote of ie s poetes, gardiens des

disciplines hereditaires de la pensee.64 According to this essay, 20th-Century poets

attempt to emancipate themselves from the role of guardians, as a result of which

leur liberation a les aspects d une decheance. True freedom, Yourcenar implies as

early as in 1929, is in guardianship and acceptance of the past.

In Memoires, Yourcenar conflated the role of gardien with that of maitre in

the following statement by Hadrien: La Grece comptait sur nous pour etre ses

gardiens, puisquenfin nous nous pretendons ses maitres.65 The point here is not

simply that Rome would protect Greece from external military threat, but that it

would maintain the conditions for Greeks to continue and perfect their cultural work

(pour laissez aux Grecs le temps de continuer, et de parfaire, leur oeuvre).66 There is

much to be said about the work of the Greeks as the limit of representation for both

Yourcenar and Heidegger. As I will discuss in the next chapter, to be guardian of

Greece would mean to preserve and safeguard the possibility for man to assign name

and meaning to things and therefore to have exclusive access to their truth. However,

within the context of my present argument, I suggest approaching this phrase as an

63 Thiele, 186. Another Heideggerian, M ichael Zimmerman, takes H eideggers ecological injunction
even more literally: Already in the 1930s, Heidegger was speaking in a way very congenial to
contemporary ecological thinkers: both believe that human beings becom e healthy and whole only
when they learn how to dwell within the natural world, not when they attempt to subjugate it. Michael
Zimmerman, Eclipse o f the Self: The D evelopm ent o f H eid eg g ers C oncept o f A uthenticity (Athens:
Ohio University Press, 1981), p. 168.
64 EM, p. 1654.
65 OR, p. 344.
66 OR, p. 344.

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additional piece of evidence for Yourcenars thesis that authentic mastery and

freedom lies in accepting the legacy of the past.

This point can be further supported by the references to gardiens and garde in

the Carnets de notes de Memoires d fHadrien'. For example, thinking of some

historians and artists whose work was related to the life and reign of Hadrian,

Yourcenar notes: Sentiment d appartenir a une espece de Gens /.Elia, de faire partie

de la foule des secretaires du grand homme, de participer a cette releve de la garde

imperiale que montent les humanistes et les poetes se relayant autour d un grand

souvenir.67 Behind Yourcenars grandiloquence lies a holistic perception of

temporality which attempts to go beyond simple scholarly respect for history.

Yourcenar pinpoints the feeling of belonging to a past which has become almost

personal: it has become a souvenir which defies the objectivity of temporal

distance. It is even implied that the literary work is the actualization of a writers

acceptance of the past. Memoires d'Hadrien would then be not an interpretation of

emperor Hadrians life, but a letting-be of that souvenir, as it recites itself through its

recipient, the author. This of course brings us back to the idea of Memoires being not

an original novel but the translation of Hadriens dictation to Yourcenar, a central

metaphor examined in the previous chapter.

The lofty attitude of this passage is counterbalanced by a more subtle comment,

a few notes down in the same Carnets de notes. After a visit to the Villa Adriana,

the emperor Hadrians residence in Tivoli, Yourcenar thinks of the thousands of

silent lives of beggars, idlers even looters who have lived or passed by the Villa

since Hadrians time. Interestingly, she writes that she happened to see the personal

items of a shepherd, left at a spot which he had apparently appropriated for himself

among the ruins. The shepherd is an emblematic reference, and is mentioned again in

the next note of the Carnets. Yourcenars response to the discovery of the

67 OR, p. 538.

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shepherds spot is exactly the same as in the last quotation above: Sensation

d humble intimite a peu pres pareille a celle quon eprouve au Louvre, apres la

fermeture, a lheure ou les lits de sangle des gardiens surgissent au milieu des

statues.68 Here, gardiens has a metaphorical as well as a literal meaning. The

shepherd living and working amidst the ruins of the Villa Adriana is compared to the

museum guards whose job is to protect similar vestiges. Both have a factual, un-

theoretical relationship with the past and Yourcenar participates in this feeling. It is

not a question of being reconciled with nature and history: accepting the past is

described as a humble way of being, whereby what has already happened is part of

what is happening. Similarly, to be a guardian and a shepherd is not about protecting

tradition from change and contamination but about understanding oneself as part of

the past and the past as part of ones life.

Existence and history

For both Yourcenar and Heidegger, the fusion of inner life with external history is

possible thanks to the perception of the self as a dynamic entity which extends

temporally. In the same way that the self never lives simply in an objective now but

in its own future and past, it also lives in a collective future and past, as Memoires

d Hadrien, perhaps more than any other book by Yourcenar, tries to establish.

Historically, Hadrien understands himself as a receiver and a deliverer of a heritage.

On the narrative level, the most obvious way in which this is actualized is the

epistolary form of the novel. That Memoires is a letter attenuates the solipsism to

which the notion of authentic selfhood is vulnerable. This is not so much because as

a letter it is addressed to someone else, but because it communicates a sense of

68 OR, p. 53 9 .

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handing down on a historical level. The novel reaches considerable depth and

sophistication because the stress is equally placed on what is handed down - the

historical heritage of Greece and Rome - and on the existential attitude per se of

accepting this heritage.

Nonetheless, the passage from the existential to the historical and from the

individual to the collective is not without complications, for both Heidegger and

Yourcenar. In the rest of this chapter, I shall pursue the dialogue between these two

thinkers in a more critical spirit. I shall first discuss the relationship between personal

and collective history in Heidegger and then I shall begin to question Yourcenars

perception of the historico-political subject as it is embodied principally in the figure

of Hadrien.

The unity of life and history is a central theme of Being and Time, where it is

interpreted in terms of the derivation of historical time from the temporality of

Dasein (Division II, Chapter V.) In a manner characteristic of his analytical method,

Heidegger takes a step beyond the opposition between the inner time of the self and

the external time of history. The question is not for him to reconcile the two, but to

re-define historicity in terms of what affects Dasein, anything else being beyond the

scope of the phenomenological premise. He claims that it is Dasein which affects

itself, as it exists ecstatically. Dasein extends beyond itself, dwelling in its own future

and past, and coming back to itself to assume different possible historical meanings.

In this way, Heidegger attempts to transcend the categories of interiority and

exteriority. There is nothing external or internal to Dasein, because it always already

exists in a world. Heidegger can then assert that what is primarily historical is

Dasein.69 Dasein does not live within history as it does not live within time. It rather

exists historically, simply by virtue of existing temporally. In a sense, if existing

generally means being open to possibilities, each human being as a unique and

69 Heidegger, Being an d Time, p. 433, emphasis in the original.

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concrete existence chooses to assume a number of concrete possibilities, thus

expressing himself or herself historically.

Dasein assigns historical meaning to its own Being by assuming such

possibilities of existence as come down to it in terms of a heritage that it accepts.

Acceptance of tradition and the past - the notion in which I am chiefly interested here

- is an act and an attitude substantiated in and by the self. The possibilities offered to

the self through what Heidegger calls heritage - Erbe - belong to the self and not to a

putative past which is over and done with. By accepting tradition and the past, Dasein

essentially accepts itself. This is the first movement in the process of self-

historicizing of Dasein, which determines Daseins fate. Fate (Schicksal) defines

paradoxically mans freedom to negotiate with those aspects of tradition which

maintain their relevance and urgency with regard to the finiteness of existence.

Heidegger defines fate as D aseins primordial historizing, which lies in authentic

resoluteness and in which Dasein hands itself down to itself, free for death, in a

possibility which it has inherited and yet has chosen.70

Heideggers discussion of the historicity of individual Dasein in Being and Time

is followed by an analysis of the historicity of communities and peoples. This is the

second movement in D aseins effort to understand history as part of its own structure.

Communities and peoples are considered as collective entities which exist

historically and project their own history in the same way that Dasein historicizes

itself. However, the projection of individual to collective history and of existential to

historical time is not entirely convincing. In what follows, I shall discuss briefly the

problems involved in Heideggers attempt to understand history on the basis,

ultimately, of individual Dasein. Subsequently, I shall establish a parallel between

Dasein as the fundamental agent of history and the figure of Hadrien, the authentic

hero and leader of Memoires d'Hadrien. I shall thus begin to challenge the subtle

70 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 435, emphasis in the original.

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coordination of the existential and the political in Yourcenars text. In the present

context, this interrogation will take the form of a number of questions, which will be

further addressed and answered in the following chapter.

If fate designates the primordial historizing of Dasein, and does so in a manner

which is directly and explicitly linked to Daseins self-temporalization, things are not

equally clear in Heideggers account of co-historizing as the historizing of the

community, of a people.71 He calls this process destiny (Geschick, a word which is

etymologically linked with both Schicksal and Geschichte, history). He specifies that

the destiny of a people does not consist of the sum of individual fates, but is a form

of historizing of Dasein as Being-with-Others. Paul Ricceur summarized and

criticized this point as follows:

Tout indique que Heidegger s est borne ici a suggerer lidee d une hom ologie entre
destinee communautaire et destin individuel, et a esquisser le transfert des memes
notations dun plan a l autre : heritage dun fonds de potentialites, resolutions, etc., -
quitte a marquer la place en creux de categories plus specifiquement appropriees a
letre-en-commun : lutte, obeissance combattante, loyaute.72

There is certainly not much in Being and Time that refutes Ricceurs suggestion. The

transition from fate to destiny is not adequately described, while the notion of co-

historizing indeed seems to designate the historical self-affection of a community,

understood as collective Dasein.

In a footnote to the passage quoted above, Ricceur suggests that Heideggers

failure to account for history on a collective level can be linked to his one-time pro-

Nazi affiliation. More specifically, Ricceur identifies the problem in the transfer to

the sphere of the community of the existential theme of Being-for-death. As a result

of this transfer, Heidegger thinks of the community, and specifically of the German

Volk, as an entity envisaging its own dissolution in the same way that individual

Dasein envisages its death. The community is thus understood in terms of its desire

71 Heidegger, Being an d Time, p. 436.

72 Paul Ricceur, p. 138. Ricceur uses the established translations in French o f Schicksal as destin
(individuel) and o f G eschick as destinee (com m unautaire).

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for heroic and fateful self-becoming, which, Ricceur implies, brings Heidegger closer

to the National Socialists.

The case of Heideggers engagement with the Nazi party is of particular interest

for my study because it reveals the aporias and risks involved in attempting to

understand history in terms of individual existence. Paradoxically, when Dasein is

taken out of in its proper existential context and transferred to the level of politics

and history, it transforms from a dynamic absence to a violent and appropriative

presence. Commenting on one of Heideggers strongest pronouncements in favour of

the Nazis, his 1933 Rectoral Address, Jiirgen Habermas made a similar point to that

of R icceur:

If [Heidegger] had hitherto used D asein in an unmistakable way for the existentially
isolated individual on his course toward Death, now he substitutes for this in-each-
case-m ine Dasein the collective Dasein o f a fatefully existing and in-each-case-our
people [Volk]. All the existential categories stay the same and yet with one stroke they
change their very meaning - and not just the horizon o f their expressive
significance.73

Thus, Heideggers claim that collective history can be understood on the basis of

individual existence is a bold but not entirely consistent interpretation. As a result of

this interpretation, individual Dasein assumes the character of the Fiihrer, or

transforms into the German Volk.

As I shall discuss in the following chapter, there are elements in Memoires

suggesting that Yourcenar also attempted to translate the existential into the historical

in a way that parallels the historicization of Dasein in Being and Time. It is possible

to establish an analogy between the historico-political subject in Heidegger and that

in Yourcenar. There is an existential kinship between, on the one hand, Heideggers

Fiihrer and Volk, and on the other, the leader (Hadrien) and the community (the

Roman Empire) which define the historical and political context of Memoires.

73 Jiirgen Habermas, The P hilosophical D iscourse o f M odernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. by Frederick
G. Lawrence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987), p. 157.

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The overall consequences of this situation for the existential-historical fiction of

Marguerite Yourcenar are crucial. The intersection between existence and history

proves to be the point of origin of the authentic hero of the narrative. Could it be that

this hero is blind to the way history is not only determined by the self but also

determinative of it, in a way that transcends the distinction between authentic and

inauthentic selfhood? Does Hadrien, the most historical, heroic and fateful figure in

Yourcenars fiction, fail to suspect the otherness of history, namely, the fact that it

cannot be entirely grasped by the self - whether or not the self is understood as

Dasein? Consequently, does Yourcenars powerful perception of authenticity, much

as it does justice to the impurity and disorder of factical existence, apply after all only

to a universalized humanist subject? This perception of subjectivity would risk the

exclusion of other non-anthropocentric, non-Westem cultures, other approaches to

life, such as animality and irrationality, that the subject cannot adequately represent

in and for itself. To that extent, there may be totalitarian aspects to the Yourcenarian

political subject which warrant further investigation. While I am not implying that

this subject should be interpreted in exclusively Heideggerian terms as the Fiihrer

and heroic leader of the community, the character of Hadrien could represent aspects

of selfhood that are less authentic than the Yourcenarian text initially suggests.

In the same critical spirit, it may be asked whether the notions of accepting and

guarding ones heritage intimate ones exclusive commitment to ones culture and

history in such a way that elements that are not part of ones heritage remain foreign

and forgotten. By accepting what is handed down to one, for example, the art,

literature and philosophy that belong to ones language and culture, one is bound to

repeat only those possibilities of existence that are already available to one and can

therefore be measured against the criterion of existential authenticity. These

questions concern equally Heidegger and Yourcenar, for they both insisted on the

possibility of authenticity as the commitment to accepting, repeating and re

constructing the past.

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The discussion on the historicity of Dasein in Being and Time concludes with the

concept of repetition, which defines how Dasein becomes engaged in a discussion

with the historical past. Repetition establishes the continuity of history through the

succession of interpretations and re-evaluations of structures of meaning that have

reached each thinking subject from the past. Every Dasein has to come to terms with

these structures, and repeat them in such a way as to test their solidity in relation to

the bare facticity of its own there. Repetition thus contains a moment of reclaiming,

explicitly appropriating, the past for the purpose of asking every time more

concretely the question of existence. Therefore, repetition is the Heideggerian

concept that comes closest of all to Yourcenars idea of acceptation / acquiescement.

Authentic repetition is the process by which Dasein accepts and questions the past as

representation. Through repetition the self understands the past as something new,

something to be actively reclaimed from the future.

Heideggers intricate logic leads Ricceur to write that the concept of repetition

rouvre le passe en direction de la-venir.74 This remark mirrors accurately Hadriens

thought after the consecration of the Olympeion, as quoted above: le passe retrouvait

un visage d avenir. In its simplicity and metaphoricity, this phrase can be interpreted

more generally than we attempted earlier. It is possible to formulate Yourcenars

implication as follows: Rome led by Hadrien initiates a renegotiation with classical

Greece through the consecration of the Olympeion and other works of cultural re

construction by Hadrien. Rome appropriates for itself the Greek past which is not

historically its own, but which belongs to it now, insofar as only it, Rome, can see

through the layers of representations because of which Greece appears to recede to

distant history. By doing so, Rome enters into a conversation with a unique culture

which is based on things themselves, rather than on representations of things. Rome

74 Ricceur, p. 139.

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is ready to re-enact Greece, and its future is announced by Hadrien in terms of its

commitment to do so.

With this hypothesis, which I shall elaborate and support further in the next

chapter, I do not seek to articulate a historical argument on Roman history. I am

rather attempting to reproduce an assumption, perhaps also a conviction, held by

Yourcenar at the time of the writing of Memoires d Hadrien. This assumption is not

limited to the way Yourcenar may have understood Rome and Greece, but is relevant

to her philosophical and cultural analysis of contemporary Europe. As I have already

suggested, Yourcenar wishes to initiate an un-mediated debate with Rome and

Greece, beyond any sentiment of nostalgia for the past or vague passion for antiquity.

This is conveyed by the metaphor of Memoires being a dictation which was then

translated by Yourcenar. W orking on the basis of an analogy between contemporary

Europe and ancient Rome, Yourcenar invites the (Western) reader to retrieve the

Greek past and make it her own again, in the same way that Hadrien reclaims

Greece for Rome. Yet the question remains as to whether the existential framework

of this operation does in fact allow for the retrieval of the past and ensure access to

things themselves, as Yourcenar hoped.

In one of her very few references to Heidegger, Yourcenar points accurately to the

element which links her thought with that of the German philosopher: the

construction and deconstruction of representation in time. In a short letter to Jean

Beaufret, who had sent her a copy of Questions IV, a collection of essays and

seminars by Heidegger translated into French by Beaufret and others, she praises the

noyau brulant de la philosophic de Heidegger, which she contrasts to popular

versions of existentialism, then still dominant in French intellectual life. The letter is

dated 17 October 1976, that is, a few months after Heideggers death. Yourcenar

continues as follows:

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and the Existential Subject

Jai ete tres sensible, chez le philosophe, a la recherche d une sorte de perception
originelle a travers l etym ologie [...]. Ay ant un peu - tres peu - approche du Sanscrit,
je me rends mieux compte de cette fascination du mot originel, tel que Heidegger le
rencontre chez les pre-socratiques, oil le mot est encore tout pres dune part de l acte,
et de 1autre des choses. Un peu traductrice moi-meme, je puis me rendre compte de la
reussite quil y a a faire passer ces notions de base dans une langue aussi
intellectualisee que la notre.75

This paragraph brings together some of the major themes driving the thought of both

Yourcenar and Heidegger: the need to return to the things themselves; the abstractive

character of linguistic representation; the inquiry into the poietic function of words;

the identification of Greece as the topos of linguistic and cultural originality; the

perception of contemporary culture as a palimpsest of conceptual interpretations; and

finally the mediatory role of translation in the recovery of original meanings.76

These themes lie behind Yourcenars next comment, or rather, her expression of

surprise in finding how relevant to her thought the Heideggerian notion of destruction

is. Yourcenar writes: J ai ete frappee, p. 271, par une remarque de Heidegger qui

recoupe L CEuvre au noir alchimique, prise par moi comme metaphore centrale d un

de mes livres. The editors of Yourcenars Lettres quote the relevant remark from

Questions IV, in which Heidegger explains that destruction has to be understood in

the sense of de-faire and not of devaster. The French text that impressed Yourcenar

reads as follows: Mais quest-ce qui se defait ? Reponse : ce qui recouvre le sens de

letre, les structures accumulees les unes sur les autres et qui masquent le sens de

letre. La Destruction vise alors la decouverte du sens initial de letre.77 Destruction

is a moment in the dialogue with the past which involves the de-construction of

ontological concepts which have reached us historically, in the express effort to

uncover the truth of Being.78 Destruction is thus related with Heideggers

75 Letter to Jean Beaufret, 17 October, 1976, pp. 661-662, in Lettres a ses am is et quelques autres, p.
660.
76 On the function o f translation in Heidegger, see Andrew Benjamin, Translation an d the Nature o f
Philosophy, Chapter 1, T h e Literal and the Figural Translated, pp. 9-38.
77 Lettres a ses am is et quelques autres, p. 660-61 and 6 6 In. The quotation is from Beaufrets
recapitulation o f H eideggers Seminaire du Thor o f 1969, now in Martin Heidegger, Q uestions III et
IV, trans. by Jean Beaufret et al. (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), p. 426.
78 The concept o f Destruktion is discussed in Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 44f.

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and the Existential Subject

understanding of truth as unconcealment (a-letheia), an idea which evidently

presupposes that there is a truth waiting to be unconcealed. On the other hand,

destruction is connected with repetition in the sense that it brings again to the

attention of Dasein hidden meanings and manifestations of Being in older

philosophical traditions which may have passed unnoticed by their authors. Thus

destruction does not in fact destroy anything else than the perception of Being in the

present. It is this positive dimension of destruction that Yourcenar appreciates in

Heidegger, because it agrees with her concept of acceptation.

One must embrace not only the idea of the hiddenness of Being - the existential-

phenomenological assumption -, but also the accumulated structures of signification

behind which the meaning of Being lies hidden. The metaphorical meaning of

destruction as it dissolves into acceptance is emphasized by Yourcenar more than it is

by Heidegger. Indeed, L CEuvre au noir, to which Yourcenar refers in her letter to

Beaufret, is based on the metaphor of alchemy, a practice involving different stages

of negative and positive work, in search of the philosophers stone. In the novel, this
79
process is summed up by the expression Solve et coagula. Alchemy stands for the

process of removing superimposed layers of interpretation, until a primordial truth -

le sens de letre - is finally exposed. It becomes evident that Yourcenar understood

Questions IV in a way which touches basic questions of being, meaning and

representation. Her letter to Beaufret suggests an unexpectedly profound and

conscious kinship of thought between her and Heidegger.

It must be emphasized that Yourcenars recovery of truth in her fiction can

never be reduced to a simple essentialist thesis on sexuality, ethnicity, race and so on.

Significantly, no philosophers stone is ever found in L CEuvre au noir. This most

enigmatic of Yourcenars novels finishes with Zenons suicide, an act of self-

knowledge, for sure, but not one of definite (dis)closure of meaning. The alchemical

79 OR, p. 702.

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 Chapter 4 - Space, Time
and the Existential Subject

80
process never goes further than its first stage, Voeuvre au noir. This serves as a

further reminder that when we suspect the presence of a universalized subject in

Yourcenar, we should not look for any essence neatly enveloped within layers of

cultural meaning. The self-authentication of the hero does not add meaning to his

existence, but resides in his reconciliation with his impurity, his facticity, which is

devoid of ethical, psychological or other content. At the end of Memoires d Hadrien,

of L CEuvre au noir and of Un homme obscur, the principal character dies alone

having recovered no sense of identity, cultural, political, sexual, and so on, but an

elementary sense of belonging to a factical world. The dying hero has the paradoxical

beauty that Yourcenar noticed in ruins, in that he represents allegorically mans

belonging to the world, but symbolizes nothing.

There is no surplus meaning to be derived from the image of the dying hero other

than the self-evidence - on which Heidegger above all insisted - that one dies ones

own death. Yet Yourcenar clearly admires her heroes and invites her readers to

participate in her admiration. This much is clear from her interviews, the Carnets de

notes which supplement M emoires d Hadrien, and the Carnets de notes at the end

of L CEuvre au noir*1 This admiration that culminates in the death of the hero has

inspired the following remark from Carnets de notes de L CEuvre au noir :

Rien de plus secret ni de plus difficile a atteindre que la notion authentique dun Dieu
personnel (ou personnalise) qui setale un peu partout sous ses formes stereotypees.
(L'Isvara des yogis hindous.) Zenon y arrive (ou en tout cas arrive a lentrevoir en
tant quhypothese) deux ou trois heures avant sa mort.82

In spite of the parentheses, used to denote Yourcenars reservations and protect her

thesis from too literal an interpretation, the positive goal of self-authentication in the

80 The alchemical process involves two further stages, Ioeuvre au blanc and Voeuvre au rouge. See
OR, p. 702-703.
81 Yourcenar has spoken and written with admiration especially about Hadrien and Zenon on numerous
occasions. By way o f example, see her interview with Bernard Pivot, when she talks about La
grandeur d Hadrien (p. 239), and says about Zenon, On a limpression d un temperament presque
indestructible, (p. 245). Maurice D elcroix (ed.), M arguerite Yourcenar: P ortrait d une voix.
82 OR, p. 863. The Carnets de notes de L CEuvre au noir was first published posthumously in La
N ouvelle Revue Franqaise, in two parts: N o 452 (sept. 90), p. 38-53; and N o 453 (oct. 90), p. 54-67.

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face of death is at the heart of Yourcenars existentialism. The same theme is

fundamental to Heideggers existential anthropology. Critical and more specifically

deconstructive evaluations of Heideggers concepts of truth and authenticity can thus

contribute to our appreciation of the same concepts in Yourcenar.

This final part of my thesis can take different forms. For example, it would now

be possible to focus more intensely on the question of temporality and see how the

problem of reconciling existential and historical time, a weak point of Being and

Time, affects Yourcenars historiography, her method of re-capturing the past as a

writer and her strategy for ensuring narrative authenticity in the historical novel.

Alternatively, it is possible to trace and record in more detail than we have done so

far certain typical Heideggerian themes in the development of Yourcenars main

fictional characters, namely, their sense of the inauthenticity of philosophical, ethical,

psychological and religious interpretations of life, their dealing with the past and

their coming to terms with the idea of death, on the way to authentic selfhood. Within

the contours of my thesis, I propose instead to evaluate the aesthetic and political

ramifications of existential authenticity in Yourcenar, having in mind the cultural

context of modernity in which she and Heidegger are placed, and choosing as

principal work of reference Memoires d Hadrien. I shall approach more critically

Heideggers and Yourcenars direct or indirect claims that authentic selfhood

transcends representation while always remaining a hostage to it. Based on

deconstructive criticism of Heidegger by Lacoue-Labarthe and Lyotard, I shall

attempt to show that the definition of existential and political authenticity

necessitates the arbitrary marginalization and exclusion of elements which refuse, or

are not able, to conform to the vision of authentic subjectivity in Memoires

d Hadrien.

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 CHAPTER FIVE

Y o u r c e n a r s P o l it ic a l A e s t h e t ic is m
and A m b i v a l e n t D is c o u r s e o f I d e n t it y

In Memoires d Hadrien, the narrative of the search for authenticity has a double

focus. On the one hand it concentrates on the human subject, Hadrien, and his

struggle for self-formation. One of the major challenges to Hadriens sense of

identity comes from personal biography, in the form of his doomed love for

Antinoiis. An even more demanding arena is that of statesmanship. In Hadriens

effort to re-structure the state through legislation, in his cultural policy, centred on

the revival of the Greek spirit, and even in his defensive military action, which aims

at pacifying the world, we may discern the signs of a strategy of existential self

containment and authentication. Within the internal logic of the novel, the Roman

Empire and the city of Rome in particular can be considered as projections of the self

which define the phenomenal limits of consciousness. Moreover, if Antinoiis

constitutes a challenge, it is because he presents Hadrien with an opportunity -

entirely missed, as we shall see - to perceive the human subject in its absolute and

irreducible otherness, beyond the project of authentication.

On the other hand, the narrative of Memoires d Hadrien focuses on the political

subject which, in the framework of the novel, takes the form of Rome. In addition to

their function as metaphors for the psyche and the self in general, the empire and its

capital are represented as historical and geopolitical formations which also tend

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towards self-authentication. The meaning of authenticity at the level of the state is

less well defined by Yourcenar and more difficult to establish, but its importance in

the novel cannot be overstated. In the opening chapter of Memoires, it is made clear

that Rome is in a state of crisis which affects above all the possibility of making valid

statements. In the absence of any standard metaphysical referent and with the gods of

antiquity unable to guarantee the veracity of any judgement, Rome has to look in

itself and strive to realize its inherent potential. Indeed, the triptych proposed by

Hadrien, Humanitas, Felicitas, Libertas, defines the political objective in an

immanent way.1 As I mentioned already (e.g. in Chapter 2, with reference to the

temple of the Olympeion in Athens), the model which Hadriens Rome is invited to

follow in its path to authenticity is Greece. Memoires describes Romes re

negotiation with its Hellenic heritage under Hadrien, as well as its effort to retrieve

its political identity without having recourse to imaginary or symbolic

representations. This is also a wager that Hadrien ultimately loses. However, as

Yourcenar has suggested in her interviews and as the immediate success of the novel

arguably confirms, this challenge was still very relevant to Europe as a newly

ambitious geopolitical formation in the years after the Second World War.

The human subject and the political subject are brought together in the character

of Hadrien in a way which implies that they are in any case inseparable. Still, the

pursuit of authenticity at the level of the state is modelled on the pursuit of

authenticity at the level of individual existence. I came to this view in Chapter 1,

while examining the perception of freedom that infiltrates Memoires. My conclusion

there was that freedom for Hadrien means above all freedom to accept that we only

have access to the world through a process of conceptual representation. Moreover, I

suggested that the best way to understand the paradoxical form of freedom proposed

1 H um anitas, Felicitas, Libertas : ces beaux mots qui figurent sur les monnaies de mon regne, je ne
les ai pas inventes. N importe quel philosophe grec, presque tout Romain cultive se propose du monde
la meme image que m oi (OR, p. 372).

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by Yourcenar is through the aesthetic theory that infiltrates her fiction and criticism.

Yourcenar recognizes that politics (just as philosophy, historiography and poetry) has

generally been based on the erroneous assumption that artistic creation is possible,

despite the evidence to the contrary offered by the spectacle of ruins. Because politics

uses the paradigm of artistic creation and because art as creativity is necessarily

doomed to fail its stated purpose, Hadrien envisages a new kind of politics which

does not oppose this (dis)order of things. This politics does not aspire to the

construction and mastery of a new world but to reconstruction and collaboration with

the past.

However, this chapter will argue that there is a marked disparity between the

philosophy of politics announced in Memoires d Hadrien and Hadriens political

programme and actions as they are narrated in this novel. The politics of acceptance

and recognition of difference appears to be theoretically consistent, and indeed

operates well in certain privileged contexts, including that of the relationship

between Rome and Greece. Yet this politics is strenuously tested and ultimately fails

when Hadrien attempts to implement it on cultures and peoples located at or beyond

the margins of the empire, such as the barbarian populations and especially the

Jews. This failure has a metaphorical sense. It suggests that the idea of difference

on which political authenticity rests is still defined in an essentialist way, and

excludes incompatible, wholly irreconcilable versions of subjectivity. The Jews

introduce an element of absolute alterity with which, I shall submit, the novel does

not fully come to terms. The narrative of Hadriens Jewish wars distances itself from

the cause of the Jews and highlights instead the drama of Hadrien as he reluctantly

inflicts violence on them. Despite this violence, the novel insists that Hadriens

politics celebrates difference and helps ensure personal and political authenticity.

In the present chapter, I shall stress the ambivalence of Yourcenars discourse of

difference and political identity. I shall locate and discuss instances of alterity that the

narrative of Memoires d Hadrien refuses to recognize as such. The political

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aestheticism that infiltrates this novel will be interrogated in the context of the

aesthetic perception of politics in the West, a perception inspired by a

characteristically modem understanding of Greek art and philosophy. I shall begin by

examining the idea of the universality of Greece in Yourcenar.

The universality of Greece

In the following passage from M emoires, Hadrien refers to the Greek origin of his

political ambition.

II me semblait parfois que lesprit grec navait pas pousse jusqua leurs extremes
conclusions les premisses de son propre genie : les moissons restaient a faire ; les epis
murs au soleil et deja coupes etaient peu de chose a cote de la promesse eleusinienne
du grain cache dans cette belle terre. M eme chez mes sauvages ennemis sarmates,
j avais trouve des vases au pur profil, un miroir om e d une image d Apollon, des
lueurs grecques com me un pale soleil sur la neige. Jentrevoyais la possibility
d helleniser les barbares, d atticiser Rome, dimposer doucement au monde la seule
culture qui se soit un jour separee du monstrueux, de 1informe, de 1immobile, qui ait
invente une definition de la methode, une theorie de la politique et de la beaute.2

While this passage speaks for itself in terms of Hadriens aspiration to spread the

Greek culture to the world, two specific points have to be stressed. Firstly, further

evidence is offered here to support the claim that Yourcenar understands politics

through aesthetics. This idea is implied by the references to works of art ( des vases

au pur profil, un miroir) in the context of politics and war; by the suggested

identification of the barbarians with disorder and the lack of art {le monstrueux,

I informe, V immobile)', and finally by the bringing together of politique and beaute in

the last phrase of the quotation. Secondly and more to the point, Rome is not simply

inspired by the paradigm of Greece, it also understands itself as Greeces organic heir

and the political enforcer of its spirit. If Greece defined the theory and the method,

2 OR, p. 344.

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Rome has the historical mission to universalize the subject of Greek aesthetics and to

implement it, even impose it, on the known world. To use Yourcenars metaphor of

light ( le soleil, ie s lueurs), we may put forward that Hadriens dream is to shed the

Greek light to all dark comers of the world, so that everything comes into form and

consciousness.

The aesthetico-political role of Rome is also attested in other parts of the novel.

At a subsequent point, Yourcenar specifies how Rome understands itself as the

institutional force that transforms the Greek aesthetic spirit into political praxis:

[...] il marrivait de me dire que le serieux un peu lourd de Rome, son sens de la
continuite, son gout du concret, avaient ete necessaires pour transformer en realite ce
qui restait en Grece une admirable vue de 1esprit, un bel elan de Fame. Platon avait
ecrit La Republique et glorifie l idee du juste, mais c est nous qui, instruits par nos
propres erreurs, nous efforcions peniblement de faire de l Etat une machine apte a
servir les hommes, et risquant le moins possible de les broyer.3

Hadrien continues with several further examples of the way in which Rome

decidedly transformed the Greek intention into action. It is always worth noticing the

presence of the aesthetic parameter in Yourcenars discourse about the State: here,

she describes Greek thought as une admirable vue de lesprit, un bel elan de Fam e.

This eminently aesthetic view lies behind Hadriens next remark in the same

paragraph. Deliberating on the importance of the different cultures that were under

Roman sovereignty (Spain, Africa, [les] gouttes de sang celte, ibere, punique), he

points out: La Grece m avait aide a evaluer ces elements, qui n etaient pas grecs. II

en allait de meme d Antinoiis ; j avais fait de lui limage meme de ce pays passionne

de beaute ; e en serait peut-etre le dernier dieu.4 This statement expresses clearly

what has hitherto been a suspicion in the novel, namely that Greece does not simply

define the values and assessment standards of the Roman political project, but it does

so in an exclusive manner. Foreign peoples and cultures are appreciated by Hadrien

and accepted in the universal Roman family to the extent that they are compatible

3 OR, p. 459.
4 OR, p. 459-60.

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with, and comprehensible by, the Greek spirit. To be sure, the Greek paradigm is here

chosen because of its supposed receptivity and inclusiveness of barbarian elements.

However, one cannot help but discern in Hadriens principles a colonial attitude of

appropriation and therefore of forgetfulness or indifference towards what remains

alien.

These remarks do not necessarily suggest that Yourcenars own perception of

Greece coincides with the one expressed in Memoires d Hadrien. Emperor Hadrians

philhellenism and his dedication to the revival and spreading of Greek culture are

historical facts which had to be emphasized and interpreted in the novel. Moreover,

we know that Yourcenar studied and valued other cultures, notably the Japanese and

the Chinese, which are not originally related with the Greek vision of the world. This

certainly indicates that Yourcenar was able to distance herself from what I am

discussing here as Greek aesthetics, however formative her classical European

background was. What is more, she was a persistent critic of the (still problematic)

reduction of the manifold faces of ancient Greece into one idealized version of the

Greek miracle. In her introduction to La Couronne et la lyre, her book of

translations of Greek lyric poetry, she discusses the reasons for this phenomenon,

particularly in France:

Les querelles entre partisans des Anciens (categorie ou Ton fourrait pele-mele
Hesiode et Menandre, sans parler d Horace et de Lucain) et sectateurs des M odemes,
suivies du long debat Classiques-Romantiques, vain partout et interminable en France,
puis d affrontements ideologiques et scolaires ou l hellenisme etait mis en cause, ont
contribue a creer une serie de stereotypes de la Grece [...].

Yourcenar enumerates some of these stereotypes and concludes as follows:

En faite, l etonnante richesse de la Grece, et de la poesie que la Grece nous a laissee,

est que les experiences les plus diverses y ont ete tentees, et que ses poetes en on
enregistre une bonne part.5

5 Marguerite Yourcenar, La Couronne et la lyre: Anthologie de la p o esie grecque ancienne (Paris:

Gallimard, 1979), pp. 14-15. In the same introduction, Yourcenar also rejects the thesis o f the
superiority o f Greek culture in relation to other literary traditions, including that o f modern Europe.
See especially pp. 38-40. Vue dans ces perspectives, la poesie grecque a cesse de pouvoir etre
consideree com m e Pun des aspects d un unique et inexplicable miracle grec , p. 40.

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Emphasis is placed on the diversity of the ways that Greeks experienced life and

represented it artistically and poetically. It is because of this diversity and richness

that Yourcenar can write in Memoires that Hadrien could understand and appreciate

other cultures on the basis of Greek values. Nevertheless, it is also true that because

of its admirable inclusiveness, Greek thought assumes for Yourcenar the specific

character of universality. The result is that this thought does not simply relegate those

incomprehensible cultures, experiences or forms of aesthetics to the category of

barbarian, but it also suppresses them and renders them invisible.

This point will become more evident in my discussion of Memoires o f Hadrien

in the present chapter. But it is interesting to see how in other parts of her work as

well Yourcenar stresses both the diversity and the exclusive universality of Greece.

For example, in her short 1936 essay A quelquun qui me demandait si la pensee

grecque vaut encore pour nous, which was re-published, and therefore re-endorsed,

in 1970, she compares Greece with China, a parallel system of universal values.

[De] meme que la Grece, [la Chine] a su formuler au cours des siecles toutes les vues
possibles sur la metaphysique et la vie, le social et le sacre, et offrir aux problemes de
la condition humaine des solutions variees, convergeantes ou paralleles, ou souvent
diametralement opposees, entre lesquelles 1esprit peut choisir. Grecques comme
chinoises, leur valeur, comme celle d une equation algebrique, demeure inchangee,
quelles que soient les realites particulieres auxquelles chaque generation 1applique.6

Here the paradoxical meaning of diversity is revealed in all its philosophical breadth

and historical narrowness. As it becomes clear from the italicized parts, Yourcenar

thinks that each of the Greek and the Chinese perspectives covers sufficiently all

possible areas of experience and offers interpretations which can be applied in all

historical situations with invariable effectiveness. As always, Yourcenars point

should not be misconstrued as the expression of a simple nostalgia for the antiquity

or even as an underestimation of the complexity and the mystery of the human

condition. If anything, it is the outcome of her extensive study and knowledge of

6 EM, p. 431, my emphasis. This essay appears as part o f a larger essay which Yourcenar entitled
Grece et S icile, and which is included in her collection En pelerin et en etranger { 1989).

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Greek poetry and art. Nevertheless, even allowing for the broadest interpretation, this

approach betrays her reluctance or inability to consider situations that remain at the

margin of these universal frames of reference, or wholly outside them.

Once more, I would like to discuss the aesthetic references in the above passage,

as I believe that it is the aesthetic factor which gives such breadth to Yourcenars

perspective, while at the same time enclosing and limiting it. In her effort to

emphasize the diversity of the Greek and Chinese solutions available to modem man,

Yourcenar uses the example of different geometrical figures - parallel and convergent

lines and the circle, conveying the ideas of sequence, identity and opposition. These

aesthetic analogies suggest and determine an imaginary area within which ideas may

only be part of comprehensible structures, even if things themselves are not. This

eminently Greek representation leaves one wondering as to whether all possible

problems or situations accept such interpretations, as Yourcenar seems to suggest.

If we now return to Memoires d Hadrien, we shall see that the discourse of the

universality and vast inclusiveness of Greek thinking is here reiterated in terms of

Greek art. In the chapter entitled Tellus stabilita, where the discussion of construire

and reconstruire is also to be found, we read Hadriens meditation on the visual arts

of his time. It is specified that by the word art Hadrien means Greek art: notre art

(jentends celui des Grecs).8 In the following passage, the domain of the arts is

represented as a sphere, another geometrical shape, which draws attention to its

perfection and inclusiveness, while at the same time excluding all that lies outside of

it:

7 Yourcenar makes a similar point in Souvenirs pieux (EM, p. 875): Jai cru vers ma vingtieme annee
[...] que la reponse grecque aux questions humaines etait la meilleure, sinon la seule. Jai compris plus
tard quil ny avait pas de reponse grecque, mais une serie de reponses venues des Grecs entre
lesquelles il fa u t choisir.' N otice how Yourcenar radicalizes here, as in the passage quoted above, an
otherwise perfectly acceptable argument, by adding the last phrase which I have emphasized.
Souvenirs Pieux is the first part o f Yourcenars autobiographical trilogy, Le Labyrinthe du monde.
Marguerite Yourcenar, Souvenirs Pieux (Paris: Gallimard, 1974).
8 OR, p. 388.

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Notre art est parfait, c est-a-dire accompli, mais sa perfection est susceptible de
modulations aussi variees que celles d une voix pure : a nous de jouer ce jeu habile
qui consiste a se rapprocher ou a s eloigner perpetuellement de cette solution trouvee
une fois pour toutes, daller jusquau bout de la rigueur ou de l exces, denfermer
d innombrables constructions nouvelles a l interieur de cette belle sphere.9

This is a problematic assertion regardless of whether emperor Hadrian, the historical

subject of the book, had a similar view of art and the future of art. What needs to be

interrogated is rather a perception of Greek art which is also present in Yourcenars

critical essays and which is here expressed through Hadriens reduction of all

possible artistic diversity into an original Greek archetype. The ideas of artistic

rigueur and exces may be construed as specific references, respectively, to 17th/ l8 th-

Century European art, and to aspects of modem art, especially surrealism. Whether

this is so or not, Greek art and thought appears to be for Yourcenar the archetype of

universality and the measure of all originality, at least as far as Western culture is

concerned.

This situation has major implications for the principle of reconstruire, which

sums up Yourcenars innovative determination of representation. While she spends a

large part of her criticism and fictional work arguing that true art can only be

reconstruction and acceptance of the past, her argument seems to be anchored in a

more fundamental concept of artistic originality that escapes philosophical and

aesthetic revisionism. Even if we accept that Greek art and thought bear the mark of

authenticity, in that they offer us a comprehensive report of the human condition in

all its facticity and finiteness, does it follow that this art and thought represent the

human subject in an exclusive and inevitable way? Would this not amount to saying

that total representation has been possible at least once in history and that it is only

we, the descendants of this classicism (including Hadrien), who suffer the ironic

effect of time? The philosophical inferences of these questions are indeed easy to

draw. Greek thought and art are here represented not as the absolute answer to the

9 OR, p. 388.

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question of existence, but as the sum of all possible formulations of this question.

The thought of Being is possible not through metaphysical reduction but through the

different and exhaustive ways in which the Greek people opened themselves up to

the question of existence. It certainly seems that the thought of Being which always

escapes modem man has been identified by Yourcenar specifically with Greek

thought and aesthetics.

Modernity and political aestheticism in Yourcenar

Keeping this conclusion in mind, let us now turn to Yourcenars political

aestheticism in its relation to contemporary perceptions of politics and aesthetics in

the West. This question has been tackled with some subtlety by Erin G. Carlston in

Thinking Fascism: Sapphic Modernism and Fascist Modernity, to which I referred in

Chapter 3. Carlstons argument is that, while speaking as a political and cultural

liberalist, Yourcenar used reactionary ideological categories in a way that aligns her

with the antimodemist writings of Spengler, Barres and Maurras, and even with the

flawed (in the writers opinion) analysis of fascism by Croce and Arendt.10 To

support her claim, Carlston examines especially Diagnostic de 1Europe and Denier

du reve, and exposes some conservative-elitist aspects of Yourcenars attitude

towards gender, sexuality, ethnicity, politics and culture.

While I believe that Carlston is too quick to accuse Yourcenar of serious

political and ethical failures, including sexism and racism, her general conclusion and

some of her specific insights are not without interest. They show how the conflict

between universality and irreducible individuality in Yourcenar, as it has been

10 Erin G. Carlston, Thinking Fascism : Sapphic M odernism and F ascist M odernity (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1998), p. 87.

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 Chapter 5 - Political Aestheticism

identified in the present thesis, can be perceived as deep-seated intellectual hesitation

or, even worse, as a form of duplicity, symptomatic of the crisis of political

liberalism. Carlston touches the heart of the matter when she identifies Yourcenars

commitment to the Hellenic and Enlightenment traditions as the root of what comes

out as an ambivalent discourse of totality and humanism.11 Her overall conclusion

refers to both Yourcenar and Arendt:

[T]heir uncritical commitment to the Enlightenments aesthetic, ethical, and political

values in turn allies them bon gre m al gre with the ethnocentric and ultimately racist
concept o f European culture that also subtends certain fascist ideologies.1"

As far as Yourcenar is concerned, this is a fascinating statement in need of more

detailed investigation. In line with my research here, I would highlight the

relationship which Carlston points out between Yourcenars aestheticism and the

aesthetic ideology of fascism.

Carlston quotes (in English) from Les Yeux ouverts Yourcenars response to

M ussolinis fascism, which she had witnessed during her visits to Rome in 1932-33,

and which led to the first version of Denier du reve, in 1934. Le fascisme me

paraissait grotesque ; j avais vu la marche sur Rome : des messieurs de bonne

famille , suants sous leurs chemises noires, et des gens sur lesquels on tapait, parce
1^
quils n etaient pas d accord. Cela ne m avait pas paru beau. Carlston is surprised

that Yourcenars immediate reaction to the oppressive regime is summarized in an

aesthetic judgement ( grotesque, beau). She writes that Yourcenars resistance to

fascisms coercive, totalitarian aspect is an afterthought, something de plus.14

11 Carlston, p. 125.
12 Carlston, p. 134.
13 Les Yeux ouverts, p. 87, quoted in English in Carlston, p. 111.
14 Carlston, p. 111. Strictly speaking, it is not fascism, but politics in general, that Yourcenar sees with
primarily aesthetic criteria, as I have been arguing in the present thesis. Thus, in Le Coup de grace
(1939), Yourcenars next novel after D enier du reve, communism is also depicted as an aesthetic
choice. The reason why Sophie, the aristocrat main female character o f the novel, is a communist
sympathizer is specified primarily in aesthetic terms: Sophie cachait a peine ses sympathies pour les
rouges : pour un coeur com m e le sien, Ielegance suprem e etait evidemment de donner raison a
lennem i. OR, p. 107, my emphasis.

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 Chapter 5 - Political Aestheticism

Further down, she quotes the following phrase from Yourcenars most openly anti

fascist essay, Forces du passe et forces de lavenir: Et certes, nul ne conteste qu il

y ait de la beaute dans lexaltation passionnee de tel jeune nazi et dans son sacrifice

total a son chef bien-aime.15 According to Carlston, the fact that Yourcenar has an

eye for the beauty of the Nazi sentiment is a sign not so much of her susceptibility to

Nazi ideology, but of her inability entirely to divorce her criticism of fascism from

the categories of fascist thought.16 Carlston criticizes Yourcenar for failing to see not

only that aesthetics is a basic category of fascist politics, but also that the Greek

aesthetic ideal, which she embraces unconditionally as the source reference of all

representation, is in fact at the origin of National-Socialist aestheticism.

The implication, in much o f [Yourcenars] work, that Greece is the centre and the
source o f civilization reminds us o f Winckelmanns argument that only the Greek or
European type achieves beauty, and that countries distant from Greece, in their
climate and soil as w ell as their culture, produce human and natural deviations from
the aesthetic ideal. That idea helped [...] to support both homosexual aestheticism and
Nazism s racist aesthetic id eology.17

These conclusions, tentative as they remain in Carlstons essay, help to lend

concrete historical context to the problematic relationship between politics, aesthetics

and the Greek paradigm in the work of Yourcenar, and especially in Memoires

d Hadrien. Having suggested that Hadriens politics is an act of representation with

Rome as its subject and Greece as its model, the question is how this political

aestheticism relates to political modernity of which fascism is a symptom and

possibility. It would of course be pointless to ask whether Hadrien is a fascist figure

or, for that matter, whether Yourcenar espouses too many fascist ideologemes, pace

Carlstons aphorisms.18 Rather, I would ask in what ways the rebirth and political

15 EM, p. 463, quoted in English in Carlston, p. 114. Carlston does not quote the end o f this phrase:
...m em e si cette exaltation et ce sacrifice portent en eux leur poison. Forces du passe et forces de
lavenir was included in Yourcenars posthumous collection En pelerin et en etranger (Paris:
Gallimard, 1989).
16 Carlston, p. 111.
17 Carlston, p. 121.
18 Carlston does not shrink from calling Yourcenar a racist and an anti-Semite, which she certainly was
not either as a writer or as a person (see especially Carlston, 1 14ff.) This certainly weakens the grip o f

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fulfilment of Rome, which Yourcenar envisions in Memoires, follows a specifically

Western aesthetic model of self-creation which represses, rather than respects,

difference. Beyond the tags of racism, and sexism, I would also propose to identify

those forms of humanity or subjectivity in this novel which remain foreign to this

aesthetic model and are therefore perceived as less human.

National aestheticism: Lacoue-Labarthe

One of the most enlightening studies on the philosophical and historical implications

of modem political aestheticism is Philippe Lacoue-Labarthes La Fiction du

politique ,19 Lacoue-Labarthe begins by questioning Heideggers involvement with

the Nazi regime and examines his political thought to see how it allowed for such an

eventuality. In the process, he draws some interesting conclusions about the nature of

fascism and Nazism, their historical origins and emblematic manifestation in

Germany, and their relationship with Greek politics and art. Thus La Fiction du

politique is relevant to my thesis in two interconnected ways. First, it will help

illuminate the historical and philosophical context in which the dominant idea of

politics as representation in Memoires d Hadrien has its roots. Second, it will show

whether the affinity of existential thought between Yourcenar and Heidegger extends

to their aesthetico-political theories as well.

Like Carlston, Lacoue-Labarthe traces the European ideal of the aesthetic

formation of the community back to W inckelmanns re-discovery of Greece.20 The

Carlstons otherwise valid argument that the concepts o f race and Jewishness in Yourcenars work are
problematic. I shall expand on this issue at a subsequent point o f this chapter.
19 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, La Fiction du politique : Heidegger, Vart et la p o litiq u e (Strasbourg:
Association des Publications pres les Universites de Strasbourg, 1987). In my analysis I have also been
using the English translation o f this book, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, A rt an d Politics: The
Fiction o f the P olitical, trans. by Chris Turner (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990).
20 Lacoue-Labarthe, La Fiction du politique, pp. 58 and 59.

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 Chapter 5 - Political Aestheticism

Greek idea of beautiful corporeality is equated in Winckelmann with that of

spirituality. This equation is then taken over by Hegel who translates it into the unity
21
of nature and spirit, of subject and object, in the total work of art which is the State.

Lacoue-Labarthe argues that this idea was central to the quest for a unique national

and spiritual identity by the German Romantics and Idealists alike and is still strongly

present in Nietzsche. Despite the profound differences between Hegels and

Nietzsches determinations of the political,

lun comme lautre, s agissant des Grecs, ont identifie le politique a Festhetique et
[...] une telle identification est au depart de I agon mimetique ou Fun comme lautre
(mais beaucoup d autres avec eux, et a vrai dire pratiquement tous jusqua Heidegger
compris) ont vu lunique chance pour FAllemagne de pouvoir s identifier et de
parvenir a F existence."

Some of the main themes of Lacoue-Labarthes thesis are present in this statement.

They include the historical need felt by the German people for the formation of a

national identity; the choice of Greece as not simply the historical source of the

values that could inspire this process, but the model according to which the formation

of national identity could be achieved; and, consequently, the adoption by Germany

up to the Second World W ar of a mimetic logic which, as Lacoue-Labarthe explains,

led to exhaustion and disaster. The other basic claims that inform his study are,

firstly, that Heideggers philosophy was the only one capable of seeing through this

dialectic of identity, while at the same time Heidegger himself enigmatically

submitted his political thought to it and allied with the Nazi party; and secondly and

most relevantly to my thesis, that aestheticism, transposed to the level of the political,

led to the outbreak of violence and extermination. I will discuss very briefly Lacoue-

Labarthes notion of national aestheticism, as it concerns my research on Yourcenars

political aestheticism and highlights the difficulties involved in thinking the political

subject (for Yourcenar: Europe; for Heidegger: the Volk) in terms of the work of art.

21 Lacoue-Labarthe, La Fiction du politique, pp. 59-60.

22 Lacoue-Labarthe, La Fiction du po litiq u e, p. 59.

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 Chapter 5 - Political Aestheticism

For Lacoue-Labarthe, the Romantic and modem notion of politics as a form of

plastic art derives from the German reception of Greece as the topos of art par

excellence. Central to the Greek perception of art, of education and of the formation

of the City is the concept of mimesis and its Platonic and Aristotelian determinations.

According to Lacoue-Labarthes reading of Heidegger, mimesis in ancient Greece is

defined as mimesis of physis, a process by which nature reveals itself to man. This

process is techne, art and technique, understood not as autonomous creation, but as

the organic development and extension of physis. In this sense, human artefacts,

including the City itself, are not original creations, but manifestations of the natural

and organic relationship between nature and man. In terms of the political, this means

that nature reveals itself as knowledge to the community through art, including in the

broadest sense of linguistic representation. According to Lacoue-Labarthe, this

process is still fundamental to the definition of the modem political subject, the

nation.

L organicite essentielle du politique est [...] l organicite du peuple, du V olkstu m , que

notre concept de nation , si on le restitue a son sens premier, rend assez bien en ce
quil fait signe vers une determination naturelle ou physique de la communaute
que seule peut accomplir et reveler a elle-meme une tech n e, - si ce n est la tech n e
elle-meme, Fart, a com mencer par le langage (la langue). Si la te c h n e peut se definir
comme le sur-croit de la p h u s is , par lequel la p h u s is se decrypte et se presente - si
done on peut dire la te c h n e com m e a p o p h a n tiq u e , au sens aristotelico-heideggerien du
terme -, V o r g a n ic ite politique est le surcroit necessaire a la presentation et a la
reconnaissance de soi d une nation. Et telle est la fonction politique de Fart.23

Techne is apophantic in that it shows forth ( apo-phainein) physis in itself, and

defines the polis not as une formation artificielle ou conventionnelle, but as la

belle formation spontanement jaillie du genie d un peuple (le genie grec).24

However, the Greek perception of art as mimesis is complicated by the Platonic

determination of Being as Idea. The Idea serves as the axiomatic paradeigma, that is,

as the model of the mimetic process. In the Platonic scheme, mimesis is no longer

23 Lacoue-Labarthe, La Fiction du politiqu e, p. 60.

24 Lacoue-Labarthe, La Fiction du politique, p. 58.

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 Chapter 5 - Political Aestheticism

mimesis of nature, but of a posited single origin devoid of any facticity. In art, the

quest for truth - for what Heidegger called aletheia, unconcealment of physis - is

supplanted by the quest for identity between the Idea and the thing, the work of art

and what it represents. Techne is no longer thought as a supplement to nature. In

seeking to efface its difference from physis, the work of art claims its autonomy and

art becomes the domain of pure creativity. As a result, the subject, itself understood

as a work of art, also loses its mimetic (and, consequently, differential) relation to

physis and obeys to what Lacoue-Labarthe calls a typology of being. The subject

becomes a type and belongs to a race, a nation and so on. Lacoue-Labarthe calls this

process i e fictionnement des etres et des communautes. On the basis of this

understanding of mimesis as original creativity and of the political subject as a

fictionalized copy of an ideal Form, Romantic Germany entered into a mimetic agon,

whose objective, Lacoue-Labarthe argues, was the formation of a unique and

authentic national and political identity.

Importantly for my thesis, Lacoue-Labarthe clarifies that, while the aesthetic

constitution of the political was revealed to us through the vicissitudes of German

history, the historical process of the mimetic reproduction of the Greek paradigm is

common to the rest of W estern European nations.

La rivalite agonistique (et par consequent mimetique) avec lAncien nest

evidemment pas reservee a la seule Allemagne. Elle est en general fondatrice du
politique modeme, etant tout simplement 1invention du M odem e meme, c est-a-dire
de ce qui surgit dans lepoque de la delegitimation des theocraties chretiennes.
Depuis la Rennaissance, l Europe tout entiere est la proie de lAntique et c est
Yim itatio qui regie la construction du M odem e.26

Entering an era of delegitimatation, Western Europe sought a model of self-grounded

identity in Greek aesthetics and emphasized the political function of art. This

situation made historically possible what Benjamin in the Artwork essay and Brecht

25 Lacoue-Labarthe, La Fiction du politique, p. 71, emphasis in the original.

26 Lacoue-Labarthe, La Fiction du politiqu e, p. 68.

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 Chapter 5 - Political Aestheticism

97
called the aestheticization of politics in fascism. Fascism is here explained as the

radicalization of the Western misinterpretation of mimesis as the imitatio of a single

origin. It is an attempt at reproducing not simply the Greek example of the political

aesthetic, but the hypothetical Greek awakening of man into history. Lacoue-

Labarthe argues convincingly that ce que cherche Yimitatio allemande dans la Grece

cest le modele [...] d un pur surgissement, d une pure originalite : le modele d une

auto-formation.28 In this sense, Nazism aspired to establish a totally new mythical

beginning for itself, and exhausted itself - together with the entire aesthetico-political

project of classical imitatio - in the effort to mould the Nazi Volk into the total work

of art. In effect, the aesthetic moulding of the people - a word which translates the

Greek plassein (whence plastic arts) and relates semantically to the Latin fingere -

gives Lacoue-Labarthes study its title and main thesis: La fiction du politique.

Fascism, he argues, is the absolute fictionalizing of the political subject as the all-

embracing work of art. And this total fiction, Lacoue-Labarthe points out, is film. 29

Film as the total artefact is an idea that Benjamin understood very well, and which

Yourcenar also sensed to a considerable extent, as we saw in Chapter 3.

In this context, to define fascism and Nazism as forms of national aestheticism is

to suggest that they are the consummation and not the temporary abandonment or

negation of modem European politics. Indeed, Lacoue-Labarthe specifies that the

extermination of the Jews est a legard de lOccident la terrible revelation de son

30
essence. Even more controversially, he also claims that i e nazisme est un

humanisme, in so far as man is at its centre as the self-created transcendental

31
subject. These bold statements do not reduce modem politics to variations of

27 Lacoue-Labarthe, La Fiction du politiqu e, p. 53. See also Benjamin, The Work o f Art in the A ge of
Mechanical Reproduction, p. 235.
28 Lacoue-Labarthe, La Fiction du politiqu e, p. 69.
29 On the issue o f film as the total artwork, see especially Lacoue-Labarthe, pp. 54-58.
30 Lacoue-Labarthe, La Fiction du politique, p. 38. I will return to the issue o f the extermination
further down in the chapter.
31 Lacoue-Labarthe, La Fiction du politique, p. 81.

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 Chapter 5 - Political Aestheticism

fascism, but they do mean that the political in the West is essentially metaphysical.

Political aestheticism posits both the possibility of absolute beginning, supposedly

initiated by the Greeks, and the possibility of (national) identity, which was pursued

by the Modems.

From an ontological point of view, the metaphysical character of the political

aesthetic, as Lacoue-Labarthe discusses, is asserted by the fact that a subject is

always anterior to the modem mimetic process, rather than its result. The identity of

the self, the political identity of Europe or that of the Volk are always represented in

advance, rather than produced in the course of mimesis. In an anti-Hegelian

statement, Lacoue-Labarthe writes that the dialectics of mimesis thus understood is

une eschatologie de lidentique ; et tant que cette logique [...] sous-tendra

1interpretation de la mimesis, on ne pourra quindefiniment circuler du meme a

F autre - sous F autorite du m em e.32 If this self-posited identity pre-conceives Being

as the unique subject of a violent and exclusive humanism, it also creates the

stereotypes that lead to racism and extermination.

Lacoue-Labarthe proceeds to imagine a new mimetologic which takes into

account the originary secondarity of the subject or, to recall the term that Derrida

coined for Lacoue-Labarthes use, its desistance. This mimetologic avoids the

classical interpretation of mimesis as imitatio, that is, thepursuit of identity on the

basis of a single model or origin. The interesting thing about thisnew mimetologic is

that it proposes a subject which bears expressly the characteristics of Dasein, with

the sole difference that its infirmity and impropriety are emphasized. Having

described the ex-static, improper and open character of this subject, Lacoue-Labarthe

concludes:

C est bien ce qu est le Da-sein heideggerien. Mais cette (de)constitution

extatique est a penser elle-m em e comme defaut ou comme insuffisance - selon une

32 Lacoue-Labarthe, La Fiction du politique, pp. 70-71.

33 Lacoue-Labarthe, La Fiction du p o litiq u e, pp. 72-73.

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 Chapter 5 - Political Aestheticism

pensee stride de la finitude. Le sujet est originairement l infirmite du sujet, et cette

infirmite est son intimite meme, en dehiscence.34

Here, Lacoue-Labarthe pushes the economy of Heideggers argument to its limits,

suggesting at the same time that Heidegger had not done so sufficiently - and in any

case, not when it mostly mattered. Perhaps because he has the benefit of hindsight, by

which I mean the knowledge of the extermination, Lacoue-Labarthe emphasizes the

infirmity of the subject in a way that Heidegger, with his idea of the authentically

resolute Dasein, did not manage to do. At the same time, Lacoue-Labarthe stresses

that the impropriety of the subject should not in turn be considered comme un sujet

ou un suppot, an error which Yourcenar, due to her universalizing tendency, has not

always managed to avoid.35

Lacoue-Labarthes mimetologic is thoroughly indebted to Heidegger, as is his

entire analysis of the aestheticization of politics, even as Heideggers political

thought is criticized forcefully for not being consistent with his philosophy. It is in

Heideggers philosophy that Lacoue-Labarthe finds the beginning of an

understanding of the subject that avoids the perilous reduction of subjectivity into

imaginary types and identities: the German, the Greek, the Jew. This subject, claims

Lacoue-Labarthe, was already richly delineated as Dasein in Being and Time. But

when it came to situating this subject within the German historico-political context,

as in Introduction to Metaphysics and his infamous 1933 Rectoral Address, then

Heidegger decided to concretize and reduce this subject along the lines of the

mythicized self-creation of the German Volk,36 Let us recall here Paul Ricoeurs

34 Lacoue-Labarthe, La Fiction du politiqu e, pp. 71-72.

35 Lacoue-Labarthe, La Fiction du politiqu e, p. 71.
36 Martin Heidegger, Introduction to M etaphysics, trans. by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt, (New
Haven & London: Yale Nota Bene, 2000). Introduction to M etaphysics was first published as
Einfiihrung in die M etaphysik in 1953, on the basis o f lectures o f 1935.
The historical specifics o f H eideggers political involvement need not interest us here. For a
thoroughly researched biographical account, see Hugo Otts Martin H eidegger: A P olitical Life, trans.
by Allan Blunden, (Fontana Press: London, 1994). Among the many reference books in English on the
Heidegger affair, Richard W olin (ed.), The H eidegger Controversy: A C ritical R eader (Cambridge:
The MIT Press, 1993) contains key texts by Heidegger, including The Self-Assertion o f the German
University, as well as testimonies and interpretations by H eideggers colleagues and pupils, including

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accurate diagnosis of the difficulties facing the attempt to project individual fate onto

historical destiny, to which I referred in Chapter 4.

For his part, Lacoue-Labarthe locates the problem in Heideggers idea, during

his Nazi years, that the work of art is not the differential representation of nature, but

the means by which Being (physis or nature) manifests itself beyond difference and

representation. Lacoue-Labarthe highlights Heideggers unexpected Platonic

condemnation of m im esis:37 by excluding mimesis, that is, difference in

representation, as if physis could be fully present in m ans works, Heidegger

hypothesized a state of original unity between man and nature, in much the same way

as Plato did. Heideggers political thought thus authorized the search for a new

political identity, which, he believed, found its historical actualization in Nazi

Germany. As we shall see, this way of arriving at a concept of identity which

transcends difference presents certain similarities with the idea that the acceptance of

difference and contingency may lead to the formation of the universal subject of

humanism. For this reason, it is worth pursuing Heideggers thinking on art and

representation a little further.

In his idiosyncratic interpretation of the first choral ode from Sophocles

Antigone ( polla ta deina kouden anthrdpou deinoteron p e le i...\ lines 332-275),

Heidegger states that Art is knowing and hence is techne' .38 This idea, which

Lacoue-Labarthe considers as central to both German Idealism and Romanticism,

assumes a specific meaning in Heidegger. If nature reveals itself as knowledge to

man, it is not because the work of art reflects or simply resembles nature. It is rather

because through the inexorable undoing of human constructions, nature reveals itself

Karl Lowith and Jurgen Habermas. For a comprehensive approach which takes into account the
interaction between the poetic, the historical, the political and the philosophical elements in
Heidegger, see M iguel de Beistegui, H eidegger and the P olitical (London: Routledge, 1998). Lacoue-
Labarthes La Fiction du p o litiq u e, which I am discussing here, is also a good, if unsystematic, source
o f information on this issue.
37 Lacoue-Labarthe, La Fiction du p o litiq u e , p. 67-68.
38
Heidegger, Introduction to M etaphysics, p. 170.

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 Chapter 5 - Political Aestheticism

in its overwhelming power. In this schema of things, the artist exerts violence over

nature in full awareness and expectation of the eventual destruction of his works.

History is then defined as the confirmation of the overwhelming - the catastrophic

outcome of the conflict between man and nature. Concluding his commentary,

Heidegger writes:

In [artistic success], the violence-doer as creator sees only a seeming fulfillment,

which is to be despised. In willing the unprecedented, the violence-doer casts aside all
help. For such a one, disaster is the deepest and broadest Yes to the overwhelming. In
the shattering o f the wrought work, in knowing that the work is un-fit and sarma
(dungheap), the violence doer leaves the overwhelming to its fittingness. [...] The
overwhelming, Being, confirms itself in works as history.39

In this passage, it is noteworthy that the violence-doer as creator acknowledges and

accepts disaster, thus cooperating with the overwhelming, even at the cost of the

permanence of his creation. Leaving aside (if at all possible) the vehemence and

masculine ardour of Heideggers expression, we notice that art contains the deepest

and broadest Yes, an act of knowing cooperation with nature, of embracing and

prolonging the conflict through which the truth of Being becomes manifest.

However, what is still not acceptable in Heideggers thinking of art is the hybris of

willing the unprecedented, that is, the call to initiate and master this process. It is

for his political belief in the possibility of a totally new and autonomous beginning

which repeats the genius of Greek techne that Lacoue-Labarthe mostly criticizes

Heidegger.

The extreme language of Introduction to Metaphysics and the concomitant desire

for mastery are softened in another essay on techne, The Question Concerning

Technology.40 In this essay, Heidegger is concerned with the modem shift from art

39 Heidegger, Introduction to M etaph ysics, p. 174.

40 Introduction to M etaphysics is based on lectures given in 1935, that is, at the apex o f H eideggers
Nazi years. The Question Concerning Technology is based on a lecture o f 1953, that is, after the war
and the dissolution o f the Nazi party (it was published in 1954, as D ie Frage nach der Technik). The
difference in tone between these two works reflects both the dramatic change o f scenery in German
history in the space o f ten years, and H eideggers fall from grace in post-war German academic circles.
Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning T echnology, in Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, ed.
by David Farrell Krell (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 311-341.

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to technology (a central theme in both Benjamins T h e Work of A rt essay and

Yourcenars Diagnostic de lEurope), and attempts to clarify the distinct ontological

status of each of these terms. His aim is no longer to awaken Germany into a spiritual

beginning, although he still draws from the Greek perception of art as a way of

bringing forth the truth of Being (aletheuein). His overall point in this essay is that

modem technology disturbs the original unity between man and nature, which was

traditionally expressed through art, and prevents Being from manifesting itself in

mans artefacts.

Heidegger observes that in Greek the word techne covers both technology and

art. Like art, Technology is a mode of revealing. Technology comes to presence in

the realm where revealing and unconcealment take place, where aletheia, truth,

happens.41 This means that, for the Greeks, technology (e.g. building construction) is

not an effort to give form to nature, but an expression of cooperation between man

and nature. Man gives form to his constructions, but that which endures, Heidegger

writes, is what is granted to man. Permanence is not in the form, but in the way

constructions hold sway, administer themselves, develop, and decay - the way they

essentially unfold.42 The artist does not impose any conceptual description on

nature; he rather opens the way for nature to disclose itself in the artwork or the

construction.

The discourse in Introduction to Metaphysics of an originary and indefinite

manifestation of nature beyond any representation is repeated here. Heidegger writes

that It is as revealing, and not as manufacturing, that techne is bringing-forth.43 In

other words, art is a way for Being unreservedly to manifest itself in the artefact, as

the collaboration between nature and man; technology, in the modem sense of

41 Heidegger, The Question Concerning T echnology, p. 319.

42 Heidegger, The Question Concerning T echnology, pp. 335, 336.
43 Heidegger, The Question Concerning T echnology, p. 319.

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manufacturing, attempts to disturb this relationship with the result that nothing is

revealed, apart from m ans desire for mastery.

Modem technology, according to Heidegger, attempts to impose permanence on

nature. If the essence of technology in the traditional sense is in revealing, its essence

in the modem sense is in Ge-stell, that is, in enframing, ordering and quantifying

nature. In modernity, creation is no longer co-operation, but manipulation and

objectification of physis, which now recedes behind subjective representations.

Enframing, Heidegger writes, blocks the shining forth and holding sway of

truth.44 This is why modem technology is mysterious and what it reveals is

danger: the danger of Beings definite concealment. With reference to this essay by

Heidegger and in the context of her commentary on La Fiction du politique, Joan

Brandt writes:

Modem technology and its mode of revealing, which is Enframing, thus become a
debased form of techne, a decline into subjectness and representationality. [...] For
Heidegger, then, technology in its original sense as a primordial belonging together of
man and Being, or of techne and physis, has not yet been contaminated by the
mimetic.45

Echoing Lacoue-Labarthe, Brandt questions Heideggers hypothesis of an original

purity in the relationship between man and Being, prior to any representation. All the

more so, as it was Heidegger who first pointed out that it is of the essence of Being

not to be full presence but self-concealment. We may recall at this point that ecstatic

Dasein was described by Heidegger as the Lichtung, the clearing, in which Being

shows itself not as presence, but as dynamic absence.46 Beings concealment is

therefore not a consequence of modem technology, but the way Being confirms itself

through all techne, ancient or modem. Modem technology does not deny Being, as

Heidegger believes in his writing on techne', on the contrary, by foregrounding the

44 Heidegger, The Question Concerning T echnology, p. 333.

45 Joan Brandt, G eopoetics: The P olitics o f M im esis in P oststructuralist French P oetry and Theory,
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), p. 193.
46 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 171.

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mimetic character of representation, technology makes us aware of the illusory

character of art. Let us remember here that Benjamin had reached this conclusion

already in T h e Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, showing how

film deprives the traditional artefact from its aura (Chapter 3 of the present thesis).

It is therefore untenable to suggest, as Heidegger does in his writing on techne,

that Greece represented an original unity between Being and man, and that a new

beginning towards that unity is possible, either for Nazi Germany or for post-war

Western Europe. Lacoue-Labarthe claims that the effort to ground philosophically the

possibility of a new beginning was not abandoned by Heidegger even after the war,

when he concentrated on H olderlins poetry and on language in general. Heideggers

exclusion brutale de la mimesis lavait laisse a son insu prisonnier dune

mimetologie au font traditionnelle, c est-a-dire platonicienne.47 By excluding

difference in representation in the same way as Plato did, it became possible for

Heidegger to subscribe to a form of political aestheticism embraced also by the

Nazis, and to envision together with them a fictional future for Germany as the total

work of art.

Between existential authenticity and political aestheticism

Let us now return to Memoires d Hadrien and attempt to re-think Yourcenars quest

for authenticity in relation to her aesthetic perception of politics. Lacoue-Labarthes

problematization of the relationship between the two helps understand Yourcenars

political aestheticism in its characteristically modem dimensions. For it appears that,

not unlike Heidegger, she also believed that the formation of a new authentic

European identity was possible beyond mimesis and difference; this identity was also

47 Lacoue-Labarthe, La Fiction du politique, p. 74.

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thoroughly inspired by the example of Greek aesthetics and philosophy; and finally,

this identity was based on an imaginary configuration of the political subject, Rome,

as something that could develop into the absolute work of art, as I will attempt to

demonstrate. Thus Yourcenar would appear to use the same ambivalent political

discourse as Heidegger. On the one hand she insists that it is not possible to escape

representational structures, which is why she constantly suggests that the subject be

thought authentically in its original difference and infirmity. On the other hand, she

refers to Greece to support the idea that Europe can be moulded into a total work of

art which transcends representation, thus reverting to the traditional concept of

authenticity as original creativity.

To be sure, there is no underestimating the differences between Yourcenars and

Heideggers approaches to political subjectivity and their respective perceptions of

art (let alone the fact that these perceptions and approaches varied, at least for

Yourcenar, through the years). To begin with, Yourcenar would never call for a

violent political beginning, as Heidegger did in the Introduction to Metaphysics.

Indeed the political objective of Hadrien in Memoires is the pacification of the

empire. This may reflect the fact that the writing of Memoires began in earnest four

years after the war, while the Introduction to Metaphysics was first presented as a

lecture course four years before it. In pre-war Nazi Germany it was more possible for

Heidegger to express in violent terms the idea of destruction as a manifestation of

Being than it was in his later essays on language and poetry. Nonetheless, one cannot

help noticing how well Yourcenars idea of the relationship between the artist, the

authentic work of art and time - an idea illustrated in Memoires and further explained

in Le Temps, ce grand sculpteur - is served by Heideggers statement: disaster is

the deepest and broadest Yes to the overwhelming. Only the unsavoury register of

Heideggers patriotic flair separates this statement from Yourcenars theory that the

artist should accept the inevitable dismantling of his constructions and thus accept

time itself ( the overwhelming). The artist - 1 refer here to the type of artist, poet or

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 Chapter 5 - Political Aestheticism

writer whom Yourcenar has in mind in her essays on Piranesi, Cavafy and Thomas

Mann48 - is aware of the inadequacy and inauthenticity of representations and knows

that time authenticates human constructions by ruining them. This is very close to

what Heidegger intimates by writing that in knowing that the work is un-fit and

sarma (dungheap), the violence doer leaves the overwhelming to its fittingness.

Finally, when Yourcenar suggests that authenticity is not in the stability but in the

impermanence of the creation, she mirrors Heideggers claim in The Question

Concerning Technology that the essence of human constructions is in the way they

hold sway, administer themselves, develop, and decay - the way they essentially

unfold. Especially in the realm of the political aesthetic, the proximity between

Heideggers and Yourcenars ideas is a strong indication that she also tended to

translate the notion of authenticity into essentialist terms. Even as it was clear to her

that politics is a techne and a technique of accepting difference, I suggest that she

saw in modernity an opportunity for Europe, clearly supported by the nihilistic

conjecture at the end of the war, finally to reclaim its identity and fulfil its historical

role.

In Memoires d Hadrien this would mean that Hadrien does not content himself

with re-structuring the empire, as it is often repeated at those parts of the novel where

his political methods and strategies are described. If we look at the paragraphs where

his actual political vision for the State is presented, we shall see that the discourse of

re-construction, acceptance and repetition develops alongside a parallel and

contradictory discourse of permanence, stability and eternity. There is much evidence

in the book supporting this claim. I will focus first on Yourcenars discussion of the

political determinations pertaining to the city of Rome and the abstraction of its role

under Hadrien.

48 Le Cerveau noir de Piranese, Presentation critique de Constantin Cavafy, and Humanisme et

hermetisme chez Thomas M ann, are included in Yourcenars collection Sous benefice d inventaire
(1962, also in EM). I referred to these essays in Chapters 1 and 2.

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 Chapter 5 - Political Aestheticism

Yourcenar observes that, at Hadriens time, Rome was no longer a city, but the

expansion of a geopolitical representation over half the world: Rome n est plus dans

Rome : elle doit perir, ou segaler desormais a la moitie du m onde.49 The

macropolitical relationship between Rome and Greece is then summarized in an

interesting passage which I quote here at length:

Chaque fois que j ai regarde de loin, au detour de quelque route ensoleillee, une
acropole grecque, et sa ville parfaite comme une fleur, reliee a sa colline comme le
calice a sa tige, je sentais que cette plante incomparable etait limitee par sa perfection
meme, accomplie sur un point de lespace et dans un segment du temps. Sa seule
chance dexpansion, comme celle des plantes, etait sa graine : la semence didees dont
la Grece a feconde le monde. Mais Rome plus lourde, plus informe, plus vaguement
etalee dans sa plaine au bord de son fleuve, sorganisait vers des developpements plus
vastes : la cite est devenue lEtat. Jaurais voulu que lEtat selargit encore, devint
ordre du monde, ordre des choses.50

In this passage, Yourcenar explains pithily the transition from City to State as the

organic development of the political subject which produces its own identity - an

idea which, Lacoue-Labarthe claims, propelled Romantic Germany into political

modernity, and then culminated in Nazism. It is true that, referring to Jean-Luc

Nancys idea of la communaute desceuvree, Lacoue-Labarthe identifies the political

subject with the basic (infra-)political unit of the community, rather than with that of

the State, which allows him to approach better the category of Volkstum.51 However,

in the example of Rom es spatial and temporal enlargement, it is the very abstraction

of the State that shows the aesthetic character of the political. In relation to nature,

the State is further removed towards metaphoricity than the City, and constitutes

natures absolute conceptual representation. It is ordre du monde, ordre des choses.

In the same example, let us also notice that perfection by way of the political

aesthetic was already reached, according to Yourcenar, in the Greek City. The City

49 OR, p. 370.
50 OR, pp. 370-31.
51 Lacoue-Labarthe, La Fiction du politique, pp. 61-62. Lacoue-Labarthe refers to Jean-Luc Nancy, La
Communaute desceuvree (Paris: Christian Bourgeois, 1986).

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 Chapter 5 - Political Aestheticism

was a miniature manifestation of the belonging together of techne and physis in the

sense that the perfection of physis was revealed through the Greek flower.

Now Hadrien is calling - and I suggest hearing in this Yourcenars own call for a

new beginning for Europe - for a repetition of the same authentic happening. Only

this time, the political subject will find its identity through the processes of

abstraction, spatial enlargement and futural projection. Imagining Romes prospect as

a political entity free from material concreteness, Yourcenar writes that Rome

echapperait a son corps de pierre ; elle se composerait du mot d Etat, du mot de

cy
citoyennete, du mot de republique, une plus sure immortalite. Rome would

become a political identity which transcends time and space and bears such

ideological characteristics as would be still desirable in the years after the Second

World W ar and to this day. O f course, immortality is a word that Yourcenar never

used with such conviction with reference to individual existence. However, in the

context of political subjectivity, immortality assumes its traditional metaphysical

content of the possibility of absolute presence. The political subject is immortal not

because it escapes the rule of representation, but because, as State, it becomes total

representation. As with Heideggers violence doer, difference is eclipsed not because

it is ignored but because it is transcended, provided for in advance.

The ways difference is provided for and, consequently, done away with are

clearly mentioned in the text: First, spatial difference:

Des vertus qui suffisaient pour la petite ville des sept collines auraient a sassouplir, a
se diversifier, pour convenir a toute la terre.

Then, temporal difference:

Mais toute creation humaine qui pretend a letemite doit sadapter au rythme
changeant des grands objets naturels, saccorder au temps des astres.53

52 OR, p. 371.
53 Both quotations in OR, p. 371.

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 Chapter 5 - Political Aestheticism

An unmistakeable movement from the self-sufficiency of the City (Rome, i a petite

ville des sept collines) to the self-sufficiency of the State (Rome, [une] creation

humaine qui pretend a letem ite) is described here. But if the identity of the City is

local, factical and mortal, the identity of the State is universal, abstract and eternal.

Hadrien can thus qualify Rome as the eternal city ( Rome, que j osai le premier

qualifier d etem elle).54 His hope is that the political subject can expand temporally

and spatially to cover the entire field of possible reference. In this way, the State

becomes a proper name and a dream of absolute political presence. The political

subject retains its uniqueness and at the same time aspires to universality.

This is the paradoxical situation which the text narrates with precision and

which, I maintain, it does not sufficiently recognize as such. While Yourcenar

considers Hadriens failure fully to represent his existence as a token of his

authenticity, she also suggests that his post-ironic grasp of the possibility of total

representation authenticates the political subject that he constructs.

The leaders ability to account for the totality of space and pre-empt the agency

of time is illustrated well in the references to Hadriens architectural work. For

example, the Pantheon in Rome both represents the universe and incorporates the

differential factor of time in its design:

Javais voulu que ce sanctuaire de Tous les Dieux reproduisit la forme du globe
terrestre et de la sphere stellaire, du globe ou se renferment les semences du feu
etemel, de la sphere creuse qui contient tout. [...] Ce temple ouvert et secret etait
con$u comme un cadran solaire. Les heures toumeraient en rond sur des caissons
soigneusement polis par des artisans grecs.55

The Pantheon represents the synthesis of eternity and the moment, disaster and

creation, nature and art. In the novel, this dialectics is further emphasized by

Hadriens comments on the disastrous effects of time after the presentation of each of

his successful architectural projects. Thus, a few paragraphs after the narrative of the

54 OR, p. 371.
55 OR, p. 416.

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 Chapter 5 - Political Aestheticism

inauguration of the Pantheon, Hadrien thinks of the future vicissitudes of Rome: Je

songeais aussi, avec une sorte de terreur sacree, aux embrasements de l avenir. Ces

millions de vies passees, presentes et futures, ces edifices recents nes d edifices

anciens et suivis eux-memes d edifices a naitre, me semblaient se succeder dans le

temps comme des vagues.56 In the same vein, after the consecration of the

Olympeion, he invokes the Temps devorateur, as I noted in Chapter 2.

Yourcenar does not suggest that Hadrien wills the disaster, therefore it is not

right to say that he defies physis in exactly the same way as Heideggers violence-

doer. If there is hybris in H adriens politics, it has to be sought in the presumption

that the knowledge of the anticipated disaster can be used to establish a permanent

political order. Knowledge of the instability and the non-representability of the

subject can lead to the acceptance of the past, to acts of repetition and re-construction

and to the re-evaluation of selfhood and otherness beyond the logic of essentialism.

However, this knowledge cannot be used to support the invention of any identity,

existential or political, for this would constitute a relapse to the traditional,

metaphysical definition of authenticity as pureness and originality. As we saw, in his

essay The Rhetoric of Temporality, Paul de Man warned against the dialectical

formation of authenticity on the basis of the knowledge of irony. And yet, this is the
cn
lapse (faute) with which Lacoue-Labarthe charges Heidegger, as a political thinker.

In Chapter 2, I argued that, from an existential perspective, Yourcenars fictional

characters avoid this lapse, inasmuch as they never reclaim a stable identity, despite

their awareness of irony. This is also true for Hadrien, as an individual character. We

must now recognize that, from a political perspective, Memoires d Hadrien is not

immune to this charge. In this novel, awareness of irony is used as a tool for effacing

difference and for consolidating a total and exclusive political identity for the empire.

56 OR, p. 418.
57 See chapter Faute in Lacoue-Labarthe, La Fiction du politique, pp. 33-40.

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 Chapter 5 - Political Aestheticism

This ambivalence extends to the meaning of the word gardien, which, as I

discussed in Chapter 4, is important to the novel. I suggested that, by calling Hadrien

guardian of the Greeks, Yourcenar wishes to emphasize his humility and accepting

attitude towards the past. This phrase intimates the idea that his authenticity and

existential freedom lie not in his mastery over tradition, but in his submission to it

and the repetition of its paradigm. However, in so far as Greece does not constitute

simply the legacy of the past but the limit of all tradition and the site of all truth, to

be guardian involves a unique privilege which undermines the interpretation of

guardianship suggested by the novel. This privilege consists in having immediate

access to the truth of Being, in being able to safeguard meanings and also in

assigning names to entities. There is a hubristic element in the definition of this role

and this is evident throughout the novel in the prevalence of the title of master, or

similar names, over that of guardian. Hadrien is called Maitre de Tout, although it

is clarified that he prefers the title of Philellene; 58 he accepts the title Pere de la

Patrie, but only after years of refusing it;59 finally, he thinks of himself as God, but

hastens to add that J etais dieu, tout simplement, parce que j etais homme.60 It is

clear that Yourcenar takes pains to undermine the principal meaning of Hadriens

titles, so as to render them compatible with the way existential authenticity is

understood in the novel. However, such terms as maitre, pere, and dieu derive from a

fundamentalist logic of unity and originality and cannot be reconciled with the

elusive human subject of Memoires d Hadrien. As such, they serve as further

evidence of the double discourse of guardianship and mastery, difference and

identity, uniqueness and universality that characterizes this novel.

58 OR, p. 422.
59 OR, p. 414.
60 OR, p. 399.

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 Chapter 5 - Political Aestheticism

The sub-plot of Hadriens relationship with his lover Antinoiis contains the most

evident case of hybris in the novel. This is because Hadrien thinks of himself as the

sad master of Antinoiis fate, a mastery which he assumes to the extent that he

creates a god out of the dead eromenos.61 This amorous relationship is certainly

significant in terms of its fictional content, that is, as a story of love and loss. In

addition to this, however, it acquires a specific meaning in the context of the present

discussion on Yourcenars political aestheticism. This is because Antinoiis represents

in the novel the type of subject which Hadrien aspires to mould according to his

aesthetico-political vision, and therefore constitutes the measure against which

Hadriens political aestheticism will be tested. Politics is understood here in its

relationship with the concept of paideia, which involves, as Lacoue-Labarthe also

underlines, an aesthetic education and aims at the formation of an identity.

Hadriens pederastic love for Antinoiis has a strong paternal dimension and

symbolizes to a certain extent the almost obsessive interest that a leader nourishes in

his subjects.63 But we should also understand this moulding literally, in the context

of Hadriens compulsive representation of the figure of Antinoiis, especially in

sculpture. Je reclamais un fini parfait, une perfection pure, ce dieu quest pour ceux

qui lont aime tout etre mort a vingt ans, et aussi la ressemblance exacte, la presence

familiere, chaque irregularite d un visage plus chere que la beaute.64 The narrative of

this love affair - though the word love loses its ethical and emotional content in the

present framework - is in fact the narrative of the sustained and even paranoid effort

on the part of the master to achieve authenticity and eliminate difference through

61 [J]etais jusquau bout le triste maitre de son destin. OR, p. 420.

62 Lacoue-Labarthe, La Fiction du p olitiqu e, p. 70.
63 The mixture o f the pederastic and the paternal elements is felt in many parts o f the novel, when
Yourcenar refers to Hadriens feelings for Antinoiis. It becomes more pronounced after the death o f
the latter. When Hadrien sees a father mourning the death o f his son, paternity and erotic friendship
are amalgamated in the expression o f his feelings: Javais le sentiment de prendre sur moi cette
douleur de pere comme j avais pris celle d Hercule, celle d Alexandre, celle de Platon, pleurant leurs
amis morts. OR, p. 448.
64 OR, p. 389.

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 Chapter 5 - Political Aestheticism

aesthetic manipulation. This is certainly at the antipodes of the perception of

authenticity as acceptance of difference. Yourcenar describes some of the statues of

Antinoiis which Hadrien had ordered and links Hadriens political vision for the

empire with one of them: Et ces petites statuettes d argile a un sou qui ont servi a la

propagande imperiale : Tellus stabilita, le genie de la Terre pacifiee, sous 1aspect

dun jeune homme couche qui tient des fruits et des fleurs.65

Antinoiis is chosen because he is beautiful, submissive and silent, but also

because he is Greek.66 However, his Greekness is attractively blemished by the fact

that he comes from Asia Minor: Mais lAsie avait produit sur ce sang un peu acre

leffet de la goutte de miel qui trouble et parfume un vin pur.67 Antinoiis animality

and submissiveness, in short, the un-Greek parts of his personality, are attributed to

this Asian connection. In fact, he is likened to a young dog, un jeune chien, un

beau levrier.68 In the logic of the novel, Antinoiis figure contains both physis and

techne, both the Orient and Greece, in raw form. For Hadrien, the oriental and animal

part of Antinoiis represents a mystery to be brought into the Greek light,

rationalized, represented and cleansed. He treats the young lover as a work of art in

the making. For instance, remembering how Antinoiis face changed with time,

Hadrien remarks: ce visage changeait comme si nuit et jour je lavais sculpte.69

Antinoiis suicide remains an enigma for Hadrien till the end, but the answer implied

by Yourcenar is that the young lover died because no aesthetic construction can resist

the agency of time. His death perfects him in the same fashion that decay

authenticates the work of art and affirms the artistic intention of its creator.

To be sure, Antinoiis is also seen as a human being by Yourcenar. Thinking of

his lovers death, Hadrien says: il etait mort seul. 70 Nonetheless, this is a rare

65 OR, p. 390.
66 See Yourcenars portrait o f Antinoiis through the eyes o f Hadrien in OR, pp. 405-6.
67 OR, p. 405.
68 OR, p. 405.
69 OR, p. 406.
70 OR, p. 446.

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 Chapter 5 - Political Aestheticism

moment in the novel. Antinoiis is mainly treated as the aesthetico-political subject

whose death, perfection and authentication were constantly desired by Hadrien. The

death of the young lover is presented as an artistic masterpiece: i e singulier chef-

d oeuvre que fut son depart.71 His body suffers in the novel even as it lies dead. We

learn that while it was being prepared for embalming, Hadrien could literally hold the

lovers heart in his hands. Even then, Yourcenar uses the aesthetic criterion and

characterizes the dead body as un atroce chef-doeuvre.72

It was by no means the necessity to be historically precise that guided Yourcenar

to the extreme aestheticization of the figure of Antinoiis. The opposite is rather the

case: the story of emperor Hadrians relationship with Antinoiis lends itself

excellently to the fictional representation of an idea that Yourcenar had already

formed earlier in her work. In Feux, written in 1935, she referred in analogous terms

to another legendary erotic friendship, that of Achilles and Patroclus, and to the

feelings of the former with regard to the death of the latter:

La haine inavouee qui dort au fond de 1amour predisposait Achille a la tache de

sculpteur : il enviait Hector davoir acheve ce chef-doeuvre; lui seul aurait du
arracher les demiers voiles que la pensee, le geste, le fait meme detre en vie
interposaient entre eux, pour decouvrir Patrocle dans sa sublime nudite de mort.73

Like the relationship between Hadrien and Antinoiis, the myth of Achilles and

Patroclus is interpreted by Yourcenar in terms of longing for authenticity through the

effacement of difference. Like Hadrien, Achilles wishes for the death of his

companion, as a means of achieving beauty and perfection. In Patroclus alive,

Achilles hates (la haine) the difference between idea and reality, form and matter

- a difference which is explained in unambiguous terms as etre en vie. The same

difference is conveyed in Memoires d Hadrien in terms of Antinoiis oriental

animality. The deaths of Patroclus and Antinoiis are more authentic than their lives,

71 OR, p. 420.
72 OR, p. 441.
73
OR, p. 1102. Marguerite Yourcenar, Feux (Paris: Grasset, 1936), for the first edition.

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 Chapter 5 - Political Aestheticism

because both figures, as works of art, are completed at the moment of their demise.

Hadriens political-aesthetic dream is realised in the absolute immediacy of that

moment. This is made perfectly clear in the phrase that Yourcenar uses as Hadrien

holds his friends heart in his hands: Toutes les metaphores retrouvaient un sens.74

Language achieves referentiality at the moment when death ensures identity.

Although the death of Antinoiis forms an integral part of Hadriens aesthetic

project, it also fills him with unbearable sorrow. This is the sorrow of the artist who

sees his creation crumble under the impact of time, physis, or, as Heidegger put it in
nc
Introduction to Metaphysics, the Overwhelming. However, Hadrien is not a

common artist whose works are pitted against time and impermanence (though he is

also that - for instance, as a narrator of his memoirs). As a statesman and a leader,

Hadrien is the arch-artist whose project of political authentication provides in

advance for difference, death and impermanence, with an aim of transcending them.

Thus Antinoiis death does not call a halt to Hadriens project of total representation,

however deep his sorrow. On the contrary, it signals a new phase in Hadriens

determination to aestheticize and immortalize the figure of his lover. Freed from his

semi-barbarous, quasi-bestial alterity, Antinoiis image can now be totally purified

and hellenized through art.

Earlier in the present chapter, I quoted the phrase in Memoires d Hadrien where

the interconnectedness between beauty, identity, death and Greece is acknowledged:

j avais fait [dAntinoiis] limage meme de ce pays passionne de beaute; e en serait

peut-etre le dernier dieu.76 The hellenization of the political subject continues with

renewed strength after its death. Yourcenar refers extensively to Hadriens obsessive

reproduction of the effigy of Antinoiis after his death in statues, busts, medals and

coins, to the erection of temples for his worship and to Antinoe, the city founded at

74 OR, p. 441.
75 See n. 39, this chapter.
76 OR, p. 460.

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 Chapter 5 - Political Aestheticism

the site of his death. The deification and idealization of Antinoiis is an extravagant
77
project which cannot be dismissed as a simple act of sadness or madness. This

project contradicts the apparent claim of the novel that freedom is to be found in

godlessness, facticity and the abandonment of the quest for identity. As Hadrien

becomes creator of names and attributor of meanings, freedom resumes its

conventional significance as mastery, which the novel programmatically tried to

subvert. Longing for truth and authenticity, but dominated by the ideas of beauty and

perfection within the Greek premise, Yourcenars political thought hovers between

the acceptance of difference and the obsession with identity.

In the novel, Hadrien becomes more and more fixated on effacing the difference

which accrues as time passes since Antinoiis death: comme un ouvrier

consciencieux sepuise a copier un chef-doeuvre, je m achamais a exiger de ma

memoire une exactitude insensee.78 This passage implies that identity is to be

reached through appropriation of difference, a process effected through an excess of

art. Hadrien says: j exigeais un modele plus exact des joues, la oii elles se creusent

insensiblement sous la tempe, un penchement plus doux du coup sur lepaule. [...]

Les plus ressemblantes de ces images m ont accompagne partout ; il ne m importe

meme plus quelles soient belles ou non.79 Not only is the aesthetico-political

subject beyond life, it is also beyond beauty: Hadriens objective is identity through

total representation.

As a novel, Memoires d Hadrien both is and is not aware of its ambivalent

discourse on identity and difference. Yourcenar certainly recognizes that the erotic

relationship of Hadrien and Antinoiis is aesthetico-political in its character and is

77 Consistent with the device o f subverting the meaning o f words carrying a metaphysical charge, such
as m aitre and dieu, Yourcenar attempts to belittle the importance o f Antinoiis deification. Hadrien
says: Le culte dAntinoiis semblait la plus folle de mes entreprises, le debordement d une douleur qui
ne concernait que moi seul (OR, p. 508). However, this act cannot be dismissed as a simple fo lie, in
so far as it involves the creation and attribution by Hadrien o f a new essence, the deity o f Antinoiis.
Hadrien is no longer a manipulator o f symbols but a creator o f eternal values.
78 OR, p. 446.
79 OR, p. 464.

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 Chapter 5 - Political Aestheticism

linked with Hadriens project to hellenize the Barbarians. Further, it is also

acknowledged that Hadriens obsessive reproduction of the effigy of Antinoiis is a

form of resistance to time, which is not consonant with the critique of conceptuality

in other parts of the book. The contradiction that is inherent in Hadriens pursuit of

beauty is made forcefully clear in his devastating sense of failure as difference

persists, beauty loses its significance and identity is never reached. Would it then be

the case that Yourcenar is not ambivalent in her thesis, as I claim here, but represents

in fiction the uncertainty that always accompanies the quest for truth; the forward and

backward movement of the self between authenticity and its opposite; the impulse to

resist chaotic time, even as one knows that the subject exists temporally?

There is no doubt that the expression of ambivalence in existential, philosophical

and historical terms is one of Yourcenars principal objectives. However, I would

also maintain that while she succeeds in presenting Hadriens different states of mind

and the different stages of authenticity and inauthenticity through which he passes,

the discourse that she uses is itself ambivalent and often self-contradictory. Let us

recapitulate some of the signs of this ambivalence. Much as Yourcenar tries to

minimize or qualify the significance of Hadriens imperial titles of maitre and dieu,

they retain their metaphysical character and convey an aura of self-aggrandizement

that transcends universal disorder and historical nihilism. While the Pantheon as an

edifice negotiates with, rather than negates, time and space, it still represents a

concept of universality that sublimates both this building and its builder, beyond the

notion of contingency. The eventual demise of the city of Rome is predicted, but only

for the purpose of confirming its essential eternity as a concept. Finally, the death of

Antinoiis does not lead to the re-evaluation of Hadriens project to re-model the

empire according to the Greek archetype, but is used as a token of the greatness,

authenticity and humanity of a man who is prey to passion.

Yourcenar stresses the tragic dimension of Hadriens situation and, by extension,

the tragic nature of existence and art in modernity. But she does not seriously

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question the premise of her thought - the essentially Greek thought of the possibility

of total representation. Contradiction, failure and decay are perceived in terms of

distance from the Greek ideal. The alternative idea that European art and politics

have not distanced themselves from Greece, but re-interpreted the Greek project for

their own purposes is absent from the novel. In the most pessimistic passage of

Memoires, known as i a nuit palestinienne, Hadrien accounts for his failures by

arguing that the genius of Greece has been lost and the masses cannot measure up to

the nobility of his project:

Nos lettres sepuisent ; nos arts sendorment ; Pancrates nest pas Homere ; Arrien
nest pas Xenophon ; quand j ai essaye dimmortaliser dans la pierre la forme
dAntinoiis, je nai pas trouve de Praxitele. Nos sciences pietinent depuis Aristote et
Archimede [...j. Ladoucissement des mceurs, lavancement des idees au cours du
demier siecle sont loeuvre dune infime minorite de bons esprits ; la masse demeure
ignare, feroce quand elle le peut, en tous cas egoi'ste et bomee, et il y a fort a parier
quelle restera toujours telle. 0

In this passage it is interesting to note how Yourcenar places the problem of decay in

its appropriate context, that of Greece and Greek techne and episteme, but fails to

resolve it in terms of the same context. Instead, she has recourse to general

statements about the human nature and to an elitism which remains problematic in

her work, since its first public expression in Diagnostic de lEurope. In Memoires,

Hadrien understands the reasons of his failure only to the extent that the novels

equivocal discourse on existence, art and politics allows him to do so. There is

another, more complex aspect of his failure which Hadrien is incapable of

understanding and whose existential and political implications the novel refuses to

acknowledge in full. This is the failure of Rome under Hadriens rule to hellenize the

Jews.

It is not accidental that the so-called nuit palestinienne - the moment in the

novel where Yourcenar loses her faith in humanity in a way seldom seen in her

80 OR, p. 4 7 5 .

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 Chapter 5 - Political Aestheticism

work - occurs immediately after the account of the failure of the war in Judea. It is

equally fitting that the beginning and the end of Hadriens career as army

administrator are marked by two Jewish uprisings, a signal of the peripheral but

determinative role of the Jews in the novel. The second of these uprisings (132-135

CE) led by two historical figures who are mentioned in the book, Bar Kochba and

Rabbi Akiba, constitutes a key moment in Jewish history, which ended in devastation

for both sides and the death of hundreds of thousands. In Memoires, the effects of

this war are described gruesomely from the point of view of Hadrien. 81 Here, as in

other parts of the novel, there are repeated comments on the Jewish people and their

relationship with Rome. Apart from the Greeks and the Romans, no other constituent

people of the empire is discussed so persistently in the novel.

Judgements on the Jewish people as a whole are invariably stem, as are those

referring to specific Jewish personalities, with the exception of those called by

Yourcenar Juifs eclaires, that is, Romanized or hellenized Jews.82 The Jews

represent an anomaly and the risk of contagious illness for Rome. With reference to

Jewish fanaticism, Yourcenar writes the phrase i a contagion zelote and adds:

Tabces juif restait localise dans laride region qui setend entre le Jourdain et la mer
RT
; on pouvait sans danger cauteriser ce doigt malade. Elsewhere, the Jews are

described as peuple meprise et persecute (p. 430), desherites (p. 430), and

aveugles (p. 479). The question arises whether these comments and

characterizations, written just after the Second World War and with public awareness

of the Nazi extermination of the Jews rising, can be taken as safe signs of anti-

Semitism in the author. There is no doubt that the rhetoric of the Jewish peoples

misery and of the danger of spiritual and political sickness which they are supposed

to embody reproduces an age-old prejudice in Europe. However, nothing in the text

81 OR, pp. 471-480 passim.

82 OR, p. 467.
83 OR, p. 472.

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 Chapter 5 - Political Aestheticism

amounts to specific evidence of the authors personal antipathy towards the Jewish

people. If there is antipathy in this rhetoric, it concerns, in my opinion, a deeper and

equally ancient misconception which is of aesthetic-political, rather than cultural-

anthropological order. This misconception does not concern primarily the Jews but

the idea of representation. It bears upon the Jewish prohibition to represent God in

art, and by extension upon the non-aesthetic attitude of the Jews - an attitude which

is referred to, but not sufficiently comprehended in Memoires d Hadrien.

By emphasizing the aesthetic dimension in Yourcenars appreciation of

Jewishness, I am not referring to the strategy of physiological misrepresentation

through which anti-Jewish feeling was expressed, for instance, by the Nazis.

Negative physical depictions of Jewish people are absent in this novel, and in one

occasion the Jewish defenders are described as beautiful: je vis sortir un a un les

demiers defenseurs de la forteresse, haves, dechames, hideux, beaux pourtant comme

tout ce qui est indomptable.84 Beyond the inconclusive criteria of physical and

characteriological depiction, one must rather focus on the difference in mental

attitude between Hadrien, who sees beauty even in the fighters emaciated bodies,

and the Jewish people, for whom beauty and aesthetics are categories of no relevance

to the Mosaic law. Hadrien is incapable of empathizing with such a radically

different view of things:

La Dixieme Legion Expeditionnaire a pour embleme un sanglier ; on en plaga

lenseigne aux portes de la ville, comme cest 1usage ; la populace, peu habituee aux
simulacres peints ou sculptes dont la prive depuis des siecles une superstition fort
defavorable au progres des arts, prit cette image pour celle dun pore, et vit dans ce
petit fait une insulte aux moeurs dlsrael.85

From his vantage point, Hadrien can only rationalize the prohibition of artistic

representation as a superstition and, consequently, reduce those who respect it to the

status of populace. If Hadrien has no way of understanding the Jewish mentality,

84 OR, p. 479.
85 OR, pp. 466-467.

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the novel implies that it is mostly the Jews who do not make an effort to understand

him. In the paragraph referring to Akibas visit to Hadrien for negotiations in

Alexandria, the old rabbi is described in terms of pensee forcenee, esprit sec. It is

specifically mentioned that he did not speak Greek.

Assiste par des interpretes, j eus avec lui plusieurs entretiens, qui ne furent de sa part
quun pretexte au monologue. En moins dune heure, je me sentis capable de definir
exactement sa pensee, sinon dy souscrire ; il ne fit pas le meme effort en ce qui
concemait la mienne. Ce fanatique ne se doutait meme pas quon put raisonner sur
dautres premisses que les siennes ; j offrais a ce peuple meprise une place parmi les
autres dans la communaute romaine : Jerusalem, par la bouche dAkiba, me signifiait
sa volonte de rester jusquau bout la forteresse dune race et dun dieu isoles du genre
humain. [...] Lignorance dAkiba, son refus daccepter tout ce qui netait pas ses
livres saints et son peuple, lui conferaient une sorte detroite innocence.86

Taking into account Hadriens affirmation, mentioned earlier in this chapter, that he

learned to evaluate foreign elements on the basis of Greek values, it is not difficult to

understand why he would be perplexed by the Jewish exception. The novel is

touching upon the question of the incompatibility between Greeks and Jews, two

peoples which organized their history around two different ideas, representation and
07

its impossibility. Les Grecs et les Juifs, incompatibles etem els, writes Yourcenar.

But even as the novel recognizes that the Jewish and the Greek mentalities are

irreconcilable, Jewishness is strictly approached from within the Greek perspective.

In the process the novel contradicts itself and the limits of Greek thought when it

comes to notions and cultures which lie beyond its scope and influence become

evident.

Signs of this contradiction are present in the above quotation on Akibas visit.

Hadrien uses reason and dialogue to appeal to Akibas humanity with a view to

integrating the Jews into the Roman community. The possibility that Akibas apathy

might be due to the fact that reason, dialogue, humanity and community constitute

conceptual abstractions of no value for a people refusing representation as such is not

86 OR, p. 435.
87 OR, p. 360.

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 Chapter 5 - Political Aestheticism

considered in the novel. Instead, Hadrien attributes the failure of the negotiations to

Akibas ignorance and, significantly, son refus d accepter. Now, acceptation is for

Hadrien a necessary moment in the effort to understand the world. He thinks of his

project of dialogue, pacification and re-construction of the empire as an outcome of

his accepting attitude. Consequently, Akibas refusal to accept makes him a fanatic,

in the eyes of the emperor. Akiba is represented as a revolte, someone who is

motivated by a stubborn belief in the superiority of his own representations. This

conclusion clashes with the recognition in the novel that the Jews are a people

without representations. Thus, in Memoires d Hadrien the Jews are depicted as both

the disinherited and blind people who hate progress and resist conceptualization and

aesthetic representation and, simultaneously, as the arrogant people with a profound

sense of the superiority and purity of their own representations. The novel is at a loss

to explain why the Jews are insensitive to the Greek light, and the result is violence

brought upon them. There is physical brutality against the population, to which, it is

stressed, Jews respond with more brutality. The Jews are banished from Jerusalem (p.

480), circumcision is outlawed (p. 467) and the study of the Law is prohibited (p.

479).

As in the case of H adriens doomed love affair with Antinoiis, the novel

orientates the reader towards an aesthetico-political interpretation of Hadriens

failure to hellenize the Jews, but stops short of articulating and endorsing such an

interpretation. By refusing to go beyond the Greek ideals of beauty and order, the

novel misconceives the Jewish problem and problematic. One of the key aporetic

themes in the narrative of the war in Judea is that of the proposed re-building of

Jerusalem as a new city with the name of Tdia Capitolina and the renaming of Judea

as Palestine. As part of his programme of reconstruction, itself built on the

existential-political imperative of acceptance and collaboration with time, Hadrien

intends to extend his unified aesthetic vision to the land of the Jews.

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 Chapter 5 - Political Aestheticism

Je previs la capitale romaine habituelle : JElia Capitolina aurait ses temples, ses
marches, ses bains publics, son sanctuaire de la Venus romaine. [...] Ces projets
indignerent la populace juive : ces desherites preferaient leur mines a une grande ville
ou soffriraient toutes les aubaines du gain, du savoir et du plaisir.88

Hadriens almost provocative description of the city he imagines provides the answer

to the question why the Jews would not accept the habitual plan of a Roman capital.

Their stubborn attachment to their ruins and their rejection of Greco-Roman politics

of the City are related to the fact that they, as a people, are dedicated to a law of non-

representability rather than to an idea of beauty. Hadrien is aware of that difference

but not of the way it undercuts his argument. After Akiba interrupts his negotiation

with Hadrien, the latter observes: II parait quil mourut plus tard en heros pour la
OQ

cause de son peuple, ou plutot de sa loi. Therefore, it is a law, not the desire for

freedom and for the peoples well-being, which motivates the Jewish rebellion.

Despite his awareness, Hadrien collapses that difference by having recourse to the

vague opposition between fanaticism and common sense: Je n en tenais que

davantage a faire de Jerusalem une ville comme les autres, ou plusieurs races et

plusieurs cultes pourraient exister en paix ; j oubliais trop que dans tout combat entre

le fanatisme et le sens commun, ce dernier a rarement le dessus.90

Hadriens homogenizing plan for the empire incorporates a particular

understanding of difference and variety based on the all-embracing Greek paradigm.

However, there is no room in this plan for the incompatible case of the Jews, whose

difference has to be eclipsed. This is why Jerusalem must be i a capitale romaine

habituelle, une ville comme les autres. This is also why the Jewish god, exclusive

as he is, must be worshipped in peace together with the other deities, as the last

quotation above asserts. Hadriens perception of the god of the Jews constitutes

another aporetic theme in the novel. He realizes that this gods radical difference ( un

dieu isole du genre hum ain) lies in the fact that this god must not be represented in

88 OR, p. 430.
89 OR, p. 435.
90 OR, p. 468.

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 Chapter 5 - Political Aestheticism

aesthetic artefacts but studied as a text. To this he responds by prohibiting the study

of the Law in Judea, thus acknowledging indirectly the political importance of the

difference between representation and its lack. Yet the uniqueness of the Jewish god

is peremptorily denied in the novel, in the name of the Greek perception of the

universality of the divine:

En principe, le judai'sme a sa place parmi les religions de 1empire ; en fait, Israel se

refuse depuis des siecles a netre quun peuple parmi les peuples, possedant un dieu
parmi les dieux. [...] Aucun peuple, sauf Israel, na larrogance denfermer la verite
tout entiere dans les limites etroites dune seule conception divine, insultant ainsi a la
multiplicity du Dieu qui contient to u t; aucun autre dieu na inspire a ses adorateurs le
mepris et la haine de ceux qui prient a des differents autels.91

As soon as it is guessed at, the singularity of the Jewish god is dismissed for

transgressing the limit of acceptable difference. It may be claimed that the novel

boldly underscores, but coyly shrinks from affirming, the incommensurable otherness

represented by Judaism. Faced with it, Hadrien invokes the Greek conception of

difference in harmony, order in disorder, which allows no possibility of absolute

incompatibility. Unable to interpret Jewish monotheism in other terms than his own,

Hadrien blames the Jews for having the arrogance to think of god as a unique totality.

Thus he misconceives the basic quality of non-representability of the Jewish God.

Hadrien insists on the multiplicity of a god who contains everything, whereas the

Jews remain devoted to the singularity of a god who contains nothing.

In La Fiction du politique, Lacoue-Labarthe considers the significance of the

Jewish god for the West in terms which are similar to those investigated in my thesis.

His principal concern is with the Nazi extermination of the Jews, which he sees as

the W ests ultimate attempt to eliminate its elusive other, thus coming face-to-face

with its own essence.

Dieu est effectivement mort a Auschwitz, en tout cas le Dieu de 1Occident greco-
chretien, et ce nest par aucune sorte de hasard que ceux que lon voulait aneantir
etaient les temoins, dans cet Occident-la, dune autre origine du Dieu qui y avait ete
venere et pense - si ce nest meme, peut-etre, dun autre Dieu, reste libre de sa

91 OR, pp. 4 6 7 -6 8 .

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 Chapter 5 - Political Aestheticism

captation hellenistique et romaine et entravant par la-meme le programme de

1accomplissement.9

The absolute alterity of the Jews is related to their thinking of a god who is

irreducible to the Hellenistic and Roman traditions. The presence of this wholly

different thought within the boundaries of a European conscience which tries to

realize and re-invent itself prompts the persecutions of the Jews and leads, in

modernity, to the plan of their extermination. It is in this sense that the Jews

constitute, in Yourcenars terms, un abces, un doigt malade, in the metaphorical

body of an empire - and, by extension, in the aesthetico-political construction that is

the W est - looking to Greece in search of an identity. As I discussed earlier,

Lacoue-Labarthe understands the programme of accomplishment as the terrible

culmination of the W ests metaphysical project which involved the self-production of

a political identity on the basis of the Greek prototype. Even though the differences

remain palpable, this project can be broadly paralleled to Hadriens attempt to

hellenize the world, while the presence of the Jews symbolically compels both the

West, in Lacoue-Labarthes account, and the Roman Empire, in Yourcenars one, to

release their potential for violence. The sheer scale of violence is proportional to the

absolute refusal by the Jews to participate in the Western aesthetic construction of the

political. This refusal does not betray stubbornness, neither does it imply that the

Jews adhere to a different representation. If anything, it signifies the modesty of a

way of existing outside the intellectual confines of European humanism and without

a dream of identity:

Les juifs nappartiennent pas a Yhumanitas ainsi definie parce quils nont ni reves ni
mythes. Maurice Blanchot a raison decrire que les juifs incament (...) le rejet des
mythes, le renoncement aux idoles, la reconnaissance dun ordre ethique qui se
manifeste par le respect de la loi. Dans le juif, dans le mythe du j u i f c e que veut
aneantir Hitler cest precisement lhomme libere des mythes . [...] Cest un peuple
informe, inesthetique, qui par definition ne peut entrer dans le proces de lauto-
fictionnement et ne peut pas faire un sujet. Cest-a-dire un etre propre. [...] En somme
les juifs sont des etres indefiniment mimetiques, cest-a-dire le lieu dune mimesis

92 Lacoue-Labarthe, La Fiction du p o litiq u e, p. 38.

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sans fin, a la fois interminable et inorganique, ne produisant aucun art et naboutissant

a aucune appropriation. La destabilisation meme.

Lacoue-Labarthe attempts to explain here why the Jewish prohibition on

representation situates the Jews beyond the scope of the Greco-Roman determination

of subjectivity. In so far as this determination of subjectivity presupposes the self-

identity of the individual in the present, it also introduces the idea of the propemess

of the subject. Propemess, the coincidence of sign and referent which makes each

subject unique and autonomous, is at the root of European humanism. Extreme forms

of political modernity, such as Nazism, radicalize the humanist myth of propemess

with regard to such ideas as nation and race. However the Jews, Lacoue-Labarthe

claims, can be no part of this myth. Their im-propemess is fundamentally a

question of their reluctance to recognize the category of the proper name. The

prohibition on representing god marks the Jew s distance from the aesthetico-

political logic of the West and its idea of humanitas. It means that the Jews do not

serve the longing for identity; rather, they abide to a Law. According to Lacoue-

Labarthe, this distinction highlights the particularity of the Jews as people of endless

mimesis, that is, people of perpetual difference, for whom a stable subjectivity is not

only impossible but, strictly speaking, not even desirable.

This interpretation offers a way to understand how Memoires d Hadrien is

embedded in its immediate post-war context as well as how it encapsulates, exposes

and reproduces modernitys ambivalent discourse on (political) identity. With regard

to Heidegger, Lacoue-Labarthe goes further than the charge of ambivalence, and

states that Heideggers appreciation of the political was incorrect and his silence after

the extermination unpardonable. For Lacoue-Labarthe, Heideggers failure is all the

more puzzling, as he was better placed than any thinker to perceive the W ests

violent effort to efface difference through the technological suppression of mimesis,

93 Lacoue-Labarthe, La Fiction du politique, pp. 81-82, emphasis by the author. The quotation from
Blanchot is from Maurice Blanchot, Les Intellectuels en question, Le D ebat, N o 33 (29 May 1984).

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itself reflected on the technological annihilation of the Jews. Mutatis mutandis, and

accepting in advance that there is no question of ethical lapse on the part of

Yourcenar, one may make an analogous claim about her. It is inconsistent with

Yourcenars profound and refined scepticism vis-a-vis any kind of conceptual

abstraction that she did not discuss anywhere the implications of the political

aesthetic. Especially Memoires d Hadrien, a political novel in many ways, which

begins with a uniquely powerful statement on the impossibility of representation,

could offer a privileged platform for exposing Europes nostalgia for the self-

sufficient political subject. In the wake of the Second World War, Yourcenar could

see how Europes loyalty to the struggle for a stable universal subject led to racism

and brutality. Indeed Memoires can be read partly as a statement of Yourcenars

awareness of the fundamentally aesthetic character of politics in the West and of its

essentially Greek origins. The novel also shows how this politics is responsible for

sublimating and petrifying the individual (the case of Antinotis) and suppressing all

difference (the case of the Jews). And yet, these failures are not allowed to affect the

predominant political thesis expressed in it. This thesis still supports the possibility

of a new aesthetico-political beginning for Europe after the war, a new universal

representation which would allow the self-authentication of the individual, just as

Hadrien prepares to die as the archetype of humanitas at the end of the novel. The

empire, with Hadrien as its spirit, thus risks becoming a signifier of universalized

difference, of a totality which contains pluralism but only at the cost of silencing the

incompatible subjects of absolute alterity, Antinotis and the Jews. Yourcenars

courageous effort to subvert the semantics of authenticity by introducing

impropemess to the notion of propemess and impurity to the notion of purity,

functions here as a simple device for rescuing the essentialist politics of identity

which emerged traumatized after the war. Thus, while in her meditations on

existence and in her literary and art criticism she re-discovers the lost subject in its

infirmity and inadequacy, her political thought is ultimately tied to a conventionally

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Greek (Lacoue-Labarthe would say: Platonic) perception of authenticity. In all this,

the Jews remain repressed, and the memory of their un-aestheticism is largely

ignored.

It is worth pointing out that a number of scholars have questioned the central but

ambivalent place of Jewish figures in Yourcenars fiction, without necessarily

portraying her as an anti-Semite. One of these scholars, Michele Sarde, traces

references to Jews in Yourcenars work, interviews and letters, and attempts to

contextualise these references in relation to other writers whom Yourcenar read.

Sarde concludes that le Juif reste pour Yourcenar letranger par nature quil etait

exemplairement pour elle et les romanciers de sa generation.94 Further, Sarde claims

that Yourcenar attempts to conflate the otherness that Jews represent for her by

evoking a general idea of universality and humanism which is supposed to transcend

that otherness:

[Cet] humanisme niveleur [...], dans sa visee a se mettre a la place de letre evoque
, detour par lequel on atteint le mieux lhumain et luniversel , finirait par
deboucher sur une tolerance de 1intolerance et sur un amalgame de tous les malheurs
et persecutions universels, dont la generalite finirait par les frapper de nullite.95

It is this idea of humanism, whose Greek origins I have emphasized in my thesis, that

Yourcenar evokes in M emoires, to ensure the readers tolerance of Hadriens

intolerance (to paraphrase Sarde). This universal humanism is accurately juxtaposed

by Sarde to the otherness of the Jews who, at least in Memoires d Hadrien, remain

etrangers par nature.

Like Sarde, Alexandre Temeuil has had access to unpublished manuscripts and

letters by Yourcenar, now in Marguerite Yourcenar Papers, Houghton Library,

Harvard, and has written on i a question juive in her work. Temeuil shows how

Yourcenars writings temoignent de son attention certaine et constante face a

94 M ichele Sarde, Representations des Juifs chez Marguerite Yourcenar, in Camillo Faverzani (ed.),
M arguerite Yourcenar et la M editerranee (Clermont-Ferrand: Association des Publications de la
Faculte des Lettres et Sciences Humaines de Clermont-Ferrand, 1995), pp. 71-82, (p. 78).
95 Sarde, p. 79. The quotations within the quotation are from Les Yeux ouverts, p. 62.

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 Chapter 5 - Political Aestheticism

lantisemitisme, and stresses that Yourcenar re-wrote and edited her work so as to

avoid charges of racism.96 Moreover, Temeuil mentions that in the first edition of

Jean Blots monograph Marguerite Yourcenar in 1971, there was a reference to

Hadriens anti-Semitism which was omitted in the 1980 edition of that book. This

reference reads as follows.

Toumons les pages relatives aux guerres de Judee et faisons vite pour navoir pas a
nous demander dou vient a lempereur cet antisemitisme si modeme dans le bon ton
digne du XVIe arrondissement de Paris ou de la banlieue correspondante de Bruxelles
et qui se resume en ceci quon na rien contre ces gens impossibles si ce nest
lentetement malseyant quils mettent a vivre ou a refuser de disparaitre.

Reading Yourcenars unpublished letters, Temeuil gives evidence that this charge of

anti-Semitism was taken personally by Yourcenar, a fact which confirms my

98
argument that she identified with Hadriens politics to a large extent. It was after

the 1971 publication of Jean B lots book that Yourcenar began adopting a defensive

attitude in her interviews with regard to her supposed anti-Semitism.99

To return to Memoires d Hadrien, one must certainly acknowledge that this

novel does not have to be read as an oblique reference to the then recent war, neither

does Hadriens Rome stand exclusively for modem Europe, let alone Nazi Germany.

Nonetheless, the historical relevance of this novel cannot be underestimated.

Memoires treats historically and narratively such topical political themes as the

96 Alexandre Terneuil, R eflections sur la question juive chez Marguerite Yourcenar, in Francesca
Counihan and Berangere Deprez (eds), Ecriture du pouvoir, p ou voir de Vecriture : La realite sociale
et politique dans Ieeuvre de M arguerite Yourcenar (Bruxelles: Peter Lang, 2006), pp. 107-117, (p.
113).
97 Terneuil, p. 112, quoting Blot, in Jean Blot, M arguerite Yourcenar, coll. Ecrivains dhier et
d aujourdhui , Seghers, N o 38, 1971, p. 149.
98 Terneuil, p. 113. On this topic, see also Josyane Savigneau, M arguerite Yourcenar: L Invention
d une vie (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), pp. 339-340.
99 See, for instance, Les Yeux ouverts, p. 280, where Yourcenar embraces again, in 1980, the idea of
Tintrasigeance ju ive.
Scholars who have written on the presence o f the Jews in M em oires include Thomas Gergely, La
Memoire suspecte d'Hadrien, in Revue de I'Universite de Bruxelles 3-4 (1988), pp. 45-50; and Janet
Whatley, M emoires d Hadrien'. A Manual for Princes, University o f Toronto Q uarterly, Volume 50,
No 2, (Winter 1980/81), pp. 221-237, who writes: [Hadrian] is the possessor o f a marvelous formula
for the balanced life [...]. That there can be other formulas o f competitive com pleteness barely com es
into Hadrians consciousness. What is there that does not welcome the Graeco-Roman? W ell, there is
Judaea. (p. 233.)

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creation of a vision for Europe, the consolidation of peace and the perceived need for

charismatic leadership, over the background of the failure of philosophy,

historiography and the arts to provide a functional field of reference for political

action. It should not be forgotten that Yourcenar invited the allegorical reading of her

novel in her interviews. For example, in her 1976 interview with Claude Servan-

Schreiber, she observes:

Quand j ai ecrit M em oires d H adrien, entre 1948 et 1951, la raison qui ma ramenee a
ce sujet, auquel je pensais depuis longtemps, etait la preoccupation du Prince. Dans
un monde qui se defaisait, etait-il encore possible (avait-il jamais ete possible ?)
quun homme soit assez fort ou assez subtil pour retenir entre ses mains ce qui
risquait de crouler? 100

But Yourcenar is already clear about the contemporary political significance of

Memoires in the Carnets de notes de Memoires d Hadrien1 (written in 1952), at the

point where she describes the chronicle of the genesis of the novel. She writes that, in

1948, she received in the USA, where she lived, a trunk from Europe, containing her

old copies of Dio Cassius Roman History, and the Historia Augusta, among other

books and notes. Here are her comments:

Cette nuit-la, je rouvris deux volumes parmi ceux qui venaient aussi de metre rendus,
debris dune bibliotheque dispersee. Cetaient Dion Cassius dans la belle impression
dHenri Estienne, et un tome dune edition quelconque de L H istoire Auguste, les
deux principales sources de la vie dHadrien, achetes a lepoque ou je me proposais
decrire ce livre. Tout ce que le monde et moi avions traverse a Vintervalle
enrichissait ces chroniques d un temps revolu, projetait sur cette existence imperiale
dautres lumieres, dautres ombres. Naguere, j avais surtout pense au lettre, au
voyageur, au poete, a lamant ; rien de tout cela ne seffa^ait, mais je voyais pour la
premiere fois se dessiner avec une nettete extreme, parmi toutes ces figures, la plus
officielle a la fois et la plus secrete, celle de lempereur. A voir vecu dans un monde
qui se defait m enseignait Tim portance du prin ce} 1

100 M arguerite Yourcenar: P ortrait d une voix, ed. by Maurice Delcroix (Paris: Gallimard, 2002), p.
178.
101 OR, p. 525, my emphasis.
On the same topic, see also Yourcenars interview with Rosbo, in Patrick de Rosbo, Entretiens
radiophoniques avec M arguerite Yourcenar (Paris: Mercure de France, 1972), especially pp. 64-66.
Yourcenars readers have not failed to notice the historical relevance o f M emoires. For example,
George Freris writes o f Yourcenars double reference to the past and to the present: Sous le souci
d Hadrien, preoccupe de laisser ses traces dans lhistoire, il faut discerner la ruse d ecriture de M.
Yourcenar, soucieuse de nous livrer ses pensees sur le monde actuel. Si Hadrien pense a l avenir de la
Pax Romana, M. Yourcenar, partant de letat actuel du monde, songe a son avenir. Georges Freris
L Esprit decadent du XIX e siecle et l angoisse du X X Ie siecle dans M em oires d Hadrien , in Georges

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It becomes clear especially in the italicized phrases that Yourcenar wished her

readers to relate closely Memoires d Hadrien to the historical context in which it was

written. This relation is indeed vital to the understanding of the novel, even as

individual interpretations, including the present thesis, deviate from those suggested

by Yourcenar. Rome, as portrayed in the novel, constitutes an allegory of Europe in

so far as it bears some of the characteristics of Western political modernity,

prominent among which is the search for a stable political identity at an age deprived

of religious and humanist references. Hadriens failure to secure such an identity,

much as it is ascribed to the bad faith of the masses and the natural tendency of

things for disorder, allegorizes the persistence of difference in representation and the

structural inadequacy of the political subject. Elevated to the state of master and god

and being responsible for mental and physical violence on his subjects, Hadrien

incarnates inevitably the absolute leader of the politics of essentialism and

aestheticism.

In this context, and probably going against Yourcenars intentions more than at

any other point, I suggest that the Jews, who are the principal victims of this politics,

be seen as an allegory of those forms of subjectivity that resist Europes radically

appropriative attitude. It would of course be inaccurate to contend that the Jews of

Memoires d Hadrien represent the Jews as victims of Nazism and, even less, the

actual Jewish people. On the other hand, it is not a coincidence that their presence

destabilizes the novel more subtly and more substantially than any character, episode,

movement or situation. At an allegorical level, the Jews stand for the W ests

knowledge, whether conscious or not, of the metaphysical and therefore unreal

foundations of the empire - a term now resonating with diverse significations,

including Rome, Europe, the European spirit, the Europeans psyche, the Western

political subject and the subject tout court. The allegorization of the name the Jew s

Freris and Remy Poignault, (eds), M arguerite Yourcenar, Ecrivain du XIXe siecle ? (Clermont-
Ferrand: SIEY, 2004), pp. 183-191 (pp. 189-90).

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is the principal narrative device of Jean-Fransois Lyotards study Heidegger et les

juifs .102 I shall now turn to this book to examine how the presence of the Jew s

points to the limits of ontological thinking and also enframes Yourcenars

apprehension of difference.

Beyond the political aesthetic: Lyotard and the jew s

Heidegger et les juifs is a less rigorous but more ambitious work than La Fiction

du politique, to which it is indebted. Lyotard studies carefully Lacoue-Labarthes

deconstructive demonstration of European totalitarianism as a consequence of

modem political aestheticism. He agrees that Heideggers thought was as finely

attuned as any thinkers to detect the shortcomings of the politics with which he

collaborated. Finally, he echoes Lacoue-Labarthes question as to why Heidegger was

so inexcusably reticent in acknowledging the victims of Nazism. Lyotards answer is

broadly that Heideggers silence cannot be reduced to a fault within his thought, but

to deconstructions inability fully to examine its dependence on the context in which

it operates.103 For Lyotard, there is something in the thought of the Jew s that will

escape even the most rigorous deconstructive operation. To designate it, he begins his

essay by divesting the word Jews from its propemess as a noun:

Jecris ainsi les juifs , ce nest pas prudence ni faute de mieux. Minuscule pour dire
que ce nest pas a une nation que je pense. Pluriel pour signifier que ce nest pas une
figure ou un sujet politique (le sionisme), religieux (le judaisme), ni philosophique (la
pensee hebraique) que j allegue sous ce nom. Guillemets pour eviter la confusion de
ces juifs avec les juifs reels.104

102 Jean-Fran 9ois Lyotard, H eidegger et les ju ifs (Paris: Galilee, 1988).
103 Le silence sur lextermination nest pas un lapsus deconstructioniste. Ou s il Test, c est la
deconstruction elle-m em e qui est au moins le lapsus. Lyotard, H eidegger, p. 122.
104 Lyotard, Heidegger , p. 13.

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By allegorizing the jew s, Lyotard releases a signifier which cannot coincide with a

specific referent, thus introducing the idea of the heterogeneity of a non-appropriable

subject.105 The jew s signify the people and peoples who have resisted the W ests

spirit of creativity and the impulse to establish identity-forming institutions, because

they lead a life of intellectual and geographical homelessness. Lyotard includes in

this account Jewish and non-Jewish modernists alike, such as Celan, Kafka, Joyce,

Proust, Beckett, Freud, Adorno and even Celine, among others. What these artists,

thinkers and writers have in common is that they lent their voice to those excluded

from modem political and philosophical discourse, those whom Lyotard and Lacoue-

Labarthe call le dechet, the industrial waste of modem geo-politics and geo

philosophy.106 The following passage from Lyotards book carries echoes from the

phraseology of La Fiction du politique. Through the references to the Western

empire which tries to found itself to the detriment of the jew s, it also supports my

reading of Memoires d Hadrien.

II me semble que [...] les juifs sont dans l esprit de lOccident, occupe a se
fonder, ce qui resiste a cet esprit ; dans sa volonte, la volonte de vouloir, ce qui
entrave la volonte ; dans son accomplissement, projet et progres, ce qui ne cesse de
rouvrir la plaie de linaccompli. Quils sont lirremissible dans son mouvement de
remission et de remise. Quils sont le non-domesticable dans lobsession de dominer,
dans la compulsion a lemprise domaniale, dans la passion de lempire recurrente
depuis la Grece hellenistique et la Rome chretienne, les juifs jamais chez eux la ou
ils se trouvent, inintegrables, inconvertibles, inexpulsables.107

105 In his book A R adical Jew: P aul an d the Politics o f Identity (Berkeley: University o f California
Press, 1997), Daniel Boyarin questions Lyotards freedom to allegorize real, upper-case Jew s. He
writes:
The critical text which has gone furthest in em ploying the je w as an allegorical trope for otherness is
Lyotards recent H eidegger an d the j e w s . [...] But why does Lyotard feel free to appropriate the
name the jew s? [...] I want to insist in response to Lyotard that there is a loss and a danger either in
allegorizing away real, upper-case Jews or in regarding them primarily as a problem for Europe, (p.
220 .)
While I cannot go here into the details o f Boyarins argument, I would point out that I see nothing
wrong with the freedom o f any writer to use allegory (of any name, proper or otherwise) as he or she
wishes. Besides, as I discussed in Chapter 2, allegory is a way o f dislocating the sign rather than
repressing its polysemy. It is only to a preconception o f properness and a desire for constancy of
meaning that allegory can do any harm.
106 Lyotard, Heidegger, p. 151, Lacoue-L abarthe, La Fiction du politique, p. 38.
107 Lyotard, H eidegger, p. 45.

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Obliquely present in this passage is a critique of Heideggers voluntarism, ( la

volonte de vouloir), expressed politically through Heideggers collaboration with the

Nazi regime, and philosophically through Daseins resolution to found itself

authentically. Moreover, the phrase T esprit de lOccident hints to De Vesprit,

Derridas deconstruction of the term spirit and its demarcations in Heideggers

writings.108 Further in his book, Lyotard applauds Derridas conclusion that

Heideggers thought needed a metaphysical supplement, the projection of Europes

spirit, so as to be politically functional and have an impact on his audience.

However, Derridas deconstruction, as that of Lacoue-Labarthe, are still deemed too

nihilistic or too much attracted by the demon of philosophizing to capture the

incommensurability of the thought of the jew s.109 What is, then, that Heidegger

could not think about the jew s and in what principal ways did he fail to transcend

the Western philosophical tradition, according to Lyotard? It is worth giving a brief

account of the principal argument of Heidegger and the je w s , as it opens a way to

understand how Yourcenar failed to respond to the alterity of the Jews in Memoires

d'Hadrien, a novel written to celebrate difference and irreducibility.

Lyotard resumes here his controversial reading of the Kantian sublime, in order

to establish a radical difference between the sense of beauty and the indeterminate

feeling of the sublime. Rather than delve into Lyotards commentary on Kant, I will

concentrate here on the way the difference between the beautiful and the sublime

complicates the history of the W est.110

The sublime is a feeling of pleasure and pain, une motion a la fois attractive et

repulsive, comme une sorte de spasme. This feeling exceeds by far the potential of

the minds faculties, including the imagination, to apprehend, structure and represent

108
Jacques Derrida, H eidegger et la question (Paris: Galilee, 1987).
109 Lyotard, H eidegger, pp. 121 and 136.
110 On this subject, see especially Lyotards Legons sur Vanalytique du sublim e (Paris: Galilee, 1991).
Other essays on the Kantian sublime by Lyotard include Reponse a la question : Qu'est-ce que le
postmoderne ?, Critique, N o 419 (avril 1982), and Le sublime et 1avant-garde, in Lyotard,
L Inhumain: Causeries sur le tem ps (Paris: Galilee, 1988), 101-118.

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sensory experience. It does not lend itself to structural or dialectical analysis and

cannot be tamed by any aesthetics of beauty. Ce sentiment temoigne que du trop

a touche lesprit, trop pour ce quil peut en faire. C est pourquoi le sublime n a

nulle consideration pour la forme, est informe . Contrary to the beautiful, this

feeling of the mind does not give rise to a linear temporalization of experience:

sentiment incompatible au temps, comme lest la mort.111 The temporality of the

sublime can best be approached, according to Lyotard, with reference to the Freudian

idea of Nachtraglichkeit, deferred action. The sublime feeling is akin to the belated

response of the psychic apparatus to a shock for which it was unprepared and which

has left it in a state of permanent infancy. In psychoanalysis, this shock stems from

the paradoxical timing of sexuality, which registers in the psyche both too soon and

too late, thus stalling its development. Being at a loss to figure out, that is, to

structure and represent, that which has affected it, the psyche fails to temporalize the

sexual event.

It is this failure to temporalize that Lyotard compares with the W ests failure to

historicize itself. He considers Western thought as a psychic apparatus under a

permanent shock which it can neither fully narrativize nor totally repress and forget.

Since the event which occasioned this shock is non-representable, Lyotard does not

have a specific name for it, although it certainly revolves around the metaphor of

sexuality. In any case, the historical effect of this event is unmistakable. Lyotard

thinks of the Western tradition as an effort to repress the memory of the unthinkable

event, through the various mises en scene proposed by speculative thought. This

tradition begins with Greek aesthetics, philosophy and rhetoric, and it is constantly

challenged by the problematic of the unpresentable which emerges with the

question of the sublime:

On essaie evidemment, les Romantiques notamment, la pensee speculative, de

refermer [la problematique de limpresentable], de refouler secondairement la chose,

111 A ll the last quotations from Lyotard, Heidegger, p. 61.

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en en faisant une esthetique (dialectique, ironique, humoristique, dandy). Alors

quavec cette etrange notion, qui par Longin et Boileau, nous vient non des Grecs
mais des juifs et des chretiens, cest la these, la position meme, de Vaisthesis qui est
mise en jeu, la possibility et la pertinence du beau et par consequent la poetique
classique, tragedie incluse, au sens dAristote.112

As far as Christianity is concerned, Lyotard specifies that although it partakes in the

perpetual promise of a closure that would allow the naming of the event, it has

already confirmed the presentation of the Other, the Messiah, on earth, and it keeps
11 0

confirming it every day in church. It is only the jew s who are hostages to a

promise that is never fulfilled, and which must remain a promise: On se rappelle

tout le temps que ga arrivera, et ce qui arrive est seulement quon doit se le rappeler

[...] Doit suffire a sauver linterminable et la promesse.114 The task of contemporary

art and writing is defined along these lines as the effort to save this promise, to repeat

the impossibility of an end and a closure.

Ce que lart peut faire, cest se porter temoin non du sublime, mais de cette aporie de
lart et de sa douleur. II ne dit pas lindicible, il dit quil ne peut pas le dire. [...] Tout
ce que je sais faire, cest de raconter que je ne sais plus raconter cette histoire. Et cela
devrait suffire.115

Following Adorno, Lyotard writes that, especially after Auschwitz, art can no longer

be concerned with beauty and taste. Art cannot be mimesis, because absolute

otherness has no form and does not lend itself to aesthesis, to sense perception.

Writing and art must be anaesthetic so as to resist the effacement of the difference

between rerpesentability and the sublime - an effacement attempted by the Nazis, but

continued in the contemporary managerial or late capitalist world. C est de cette

resistance extreme que lecriture et lart contemporains peuvent nourrir leur

resistance au tout est possible , et d elle seulement. L anesthesie pour lutter contre

lamnesie.116

112 Lyotard, H eidegger, p. 65.

113 Lyotard, H eidegger, p. 68-69.
114 Lyotard, H eidegger, p. 68.
115 Lyotard, H eidegger, p. 81.
116 Lyotard, H eidegger, p. 84.

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According to Lyotard, the extermination camps were the site of the W ests - and

not only Nazi Germanys - most concerted effort to obliterate the memory of the

unsayable. The Jews were not seen by the Nazis as an enemy in any immediately

political or military way. But they constituted a threat in that they were the bearers of

a Law which provides that the promise of total representation, the W ests Greek

dream, shall remain unfulfilled. Consequently, exterminating the Jews was a

prerequisite for the accomplishment of the W ests aesthetic project.

It is at this point that Lyotard begins to diverge from Lacoue-Labarthes account.

Lyotard cites Lacoue-Labarthes claim, which I quoted earlier, that the Jews were the

principal victims of the extermination because they remained the witnesses in the

West of another origin of God, of another God.117 In this perception of another

God, Lyotard discerns the persistence of onto-theology, of the thought of Being,

which deconstruction cannot articulate. Si ce Dieu est autre, ce n est pas comme un

autre Dieu, mais comme autre que ce que lOccident greco-chretien nomme Dieu.

Autrement que Dieu, parce qu autrement quetre (Levinas).118 In a similar vein,

Lyotard discusses the claim that God died in Auschwitz, which is repeated in La

Fiction du politique. He writes: Dieu ne peut pas etre mort puisquil n est pas

une vie (esthetique). II est un nom de rien, le sans-nom, une loi seulement

inapprochable qui ne se signifie pas dans la nature en chiffres, mais se raconte dans

un livre.119 This notion of the singularity of the Jewish god, foreign to Christian

monotheism and, generally, to the Western perception of the divine, is one that is not

adequately accounted for in Memoires d Hadrien, as I showed above. I will return to

this point shortly.

Heidegger et les juifs defines a differend between on the one hand beauty and

representability, descending from the tragic and archaic Greek tradition, and on the

117 See n. 92, this chapter.

118 Lyotard, H eidegger, p. 131.
119 Lyotard, H eidegger, p. 129.

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other, the art and writing of the sublime and the thought of the anaesthetic, as they

have been monotonously re-iterated by the allegorized jew s. The result of this

incompatibility is the silencing and the misery which the jew s suffer. In terms of

this differend, Lyotard attempts to demarcate the limits of deconstruction, as

practiced by Heidegger as well as by his post-structuralist followers, which certainly

does not authorize this silencing, but has nevertheless nothing to say about it.

[Demeurant] etablie dans la pensee de letre, dans le prejuge occidental que

lAutre est letre, [la deconstruction] na rien a dire dune pensee de qui lAutre est la
Loi. Elle nen predit rien, assurement: elle nen dit rien. Son silence trahit la me^rise
par laquelle tout savoir sen prend a 1Autre sous le nom de la verite de letre. 0

This passage also explains why, unlike Lacoue-Labarthe, Lyotard does not find

Heideggers silence after the Holocaust enigmatic. From his point of view, the

thought of the jew s is as incommensurable with Heideggers ontology as it is with

recent deconstruction. For Lyotard, neither Heidegger nor Lacoue-Labarthe or other

deconstructionists can approach the thought of radical otherness, in so far as

otherness is still determined by them in terms of Being, or its negation or

modification. Since Being is always related to aesthetic representation (and more

specifically to techne, the authentic representation of physis by man), ontology

cannot come to terms with the otherness of the anaesthetic of which the jew s are a

fitting allegory.

In the same vein, Lyotard challenges Lacoue-Labarthes judgement that

TExtermination est, a legard de lOccident la terrible revelation de son essence.121

For Lyotard, nothing is revealed by the extermination, in so far as the thought of the

Other, the thought of the jew s was both known and repressed before, during and

after the War. That which the extermination made plain, according to Lyotard, was

not the essence of the W est, but that there is no essence, no Being. Consequently,

the art and writing of the sublime aim not at revealing or revolutionizing Europes

120 Lyotard, H eidegger, p. 145.

121
Lyotard, Heidegger, pp. 136 and 144. S e e n. 3 0 in this chapter.

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essence, but at using representation in order to signify the impossibility of

representing.

To be sure the above brief foray into what is arguably a set of meditations by

Lyotard, rather than a philosophical thesis, touches only tangentially on the issue of

the margins of philosophy and the beginning of the thought of the Other. Still, I

suggest that it shows a direction for evaluating further Yourcenars attempt to

reconcile difference and authenticity in representation.

In the light of Lyotards book, Memoires d Hadrien appears to be very close and

yet very far from the thought of the Other. Very close, because the persistence of

difference is the main theoretical theme of the novel, and the consistency with which

this theme is treated is its main characteristic. The endless deferral of the referent in

art, philosophy and poetry haunts Hadrien at the opening chapter of the novel and

qualifies from the start its two central questions, that of existence and that of politics.

The love affair with Antinoiis introduces the problematic of the heteronomy of the

subject while his death underlines the distance between the self and other human

beings. The theme of the Jews, underexplored and stifled as it may be, is still strongly

present in the novel, as if Yourcenar were toying with an idea which could challenge

radically her proposal for a new beginning for Europe. Questions of difference are

also shaping narrative choices concerning the genre of the historical novel, from

history to fiction and vice versa, and more generally the way to re-capture the past

in the present- a topic which remains sufficiently relevant to the present thesis.

At the same time, Memoires d Hadrien stands very far from the thought of the

Other, due to Yourcenars persistent suggestion that authenticity - existential, artistic,

literary and political - is still possible after the War and perhaps then more than ever

before. This belief led her to re-negotiate the notions of authenticity, purity and

originality in such a way as to reconcile them with the fact of difference.

Inauthenticity becomes for her a new form of authenticity, repetition a new form of

originality; disorder is integrated in order, and finally difference ends in identity. As I

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have tried to show, this reworking of conventional metaphysical themes leads to a

fascinating, if peculiar, existentialism. However, it fails to support a theoretically

solid understanding of the political. When transposed to the level of politics,

authenticity and identity prove to be entirely dependent on a traditional perception of

aesthetics. Politics, however expanded as a notion to include impurity, temporality

and polyphony, proves immediately to be a form of shaping and projecting: shaping

the people into a cohesive community and projecting a sense of identity onto this

community.

Thus Yourcenar proposes a spatio-temporal project which remains within the

logic of aestheticism, while insisting that this project is based on difference and the

overcoming of aestheticism. Lacoue-Labarthes and Lyotards commentaries show

that Heideggers spatio-temporal project is similarly aesthetico-political in its

constitution, as Heideggers writings of his more openly political period manifestly

show. Especially Lyotards Heidegger et les juifs points to a way of thinking

difference that cuts across the Greek determinations of the natural and the beautiful,

and attempts to go beyond the thought of Being. In Memoires, the episode of

Antinotis and, principally, the narrative of Hadriens Jewish wars touch the limit of

the ontological, before the novel recoils back to the safer discourse of authenticity.

To paraphrase Lyotard, in Memoires d Hadrien, the nostalgia for the authentic

suppresses the promise of nothing.122

The persistence of the Other

Marguerite Yourcenar remained constant in her belief that authentic subjectivity is

possible within a universal aesthetic premise which is never seriously put under

122 Lyotard, Heidegger , p. 129.

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question in her work. To this universalism, I have opposed Lyotards and Lacoue-

Labarthes searches for the subject of a radical difference which has never been

seduced by the aesthetico-political humanism invented in Europe. This subject is also

undoubtedly sought by Heidegger (in Being and Time, in Letter on Humanism and

elsewhere), as both the above thinkers concede, despite what they see as his failures,

which they recognize as the failures of philosophy as such. It is now the moment to

add that this other subject is also sought by Yourcenar, despite her obsession with

the idea of universality, Greco-Roman or oriental.

The thought of the Other, of the improper and the unoriginally different, survives

almost in spite of itself and almost inconspicuously, in various parts of her criticism.

Some of the best examples, I suggest, come from Humanisme et hermetisme chez

Thomas M ann, an essay which is never very far from the thought of the unsayable

and the inexplicable. It contains a phrase which would sound strange coming from

any conventional humanist: La verite demiere est une verite d epouvantement.123

Starting from her own humanist viewpoint, Yourcenar has to accept M anns dark

humanism whose referent is not m an or nature, but something more enigmatic

which cannot be represented. Yourcenar refers to the famous quote from Hamlet,

What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties

[...],124 and then she rem arks:

Mais deja la phrase de Shakespeare sur les infinies facultes humaines ouvre la porte a
une autre forme dhumanisme aux aguets de tout ce qui, en nous, depasse les
ressources et les aptitudes ordinaires ; elle debouche quoi quon fasse sur 1immense
arriere-plan peuple de forces plus etranges que ne le veut une philosophic pour qui la
nature aussi est une entite simple. Cet humanisme toume vers linexplique, le
tenebreux, voire locculte, semble de prime abord sopposer a Fhumanisme
traditionnel: il en est bien plutot lextreme pointe et laile gauche.125

Although Yourcenar is characteristically keen to rescue the idea of humanism, and

even to reduce M anns hermeticism to a form of traditional humanism, she

123 EM, p. 173.

124 Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act II, Scene II.
125 EM, p. 193.

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certainly looks here to a direction beyond the aesthetic. She stands sur le bord de

linformule et de 1ineffable [ou] les mots et les concepts se taisent, as she writes in

another essay.126 All that a writer can do at this point is state that she can go no

further by means of representation.

However, the voice of the Other, of the inhuman subject which remains

forgotten, without ambition and without authenticity, can also be heard occasionally

in Yourcenars fiction. It is not so much specific fictional characters that convey this

state of dissolution, as individual moments in the text. An example comes from the

concluding paragraphs of the novella Anna, soror.... Anna, the incestuous sister,

lives in a kind of tortured apathy, where even i a consolation des larmes lui etait
i 7 7

refusee. She is beyond pain and even beyond mourning for the dead brother-lover:

Comme d autres se fouettent pour renflammer leurs sens, Anna se flagellait de ses

pensees pour raviver son deuil, mais sa douleur epuisee n etait plus quune lassitude.

Ce coeur mortifie se refusait a saigner.128 Anna lives in excess of her own humanity

and her mourning is without content. In the convent where she withdraws towards the

end of her life, she resumes the reading of the Catholic mystics, but not for the

meaning their texts contain.

Le livre restait ouvert sur le regard de la croisee ; Anna, assise sous le pale soleil de
lautomne, posait de temps en temps sur une ligne ses yeux fatigues. Elle ne cherchait
pas a suivre le sens, mais ces grandes phrases ardentes faisaient partie de la musique
amoureuse et funebre qui avait accompagne sa vie.129

Structurally, the function of this passage is to prefigure Annas imminent death as a

resolution to the drama of her life. Nonetheless, it also points to an interpretation

which does not involve reconciliation and closure. As Anna reads, looking not for the

meaning of the text, but for the musicality of the phrases, we are invited to think of

her as an old woman who is free from the narrative of her life. Free, not because she

126 In Ton et langage dans le roman historique, EM, p. 305.

127 OR, p. 927. Marguerite Yourcenar, Anna Soror...(Paris: Gallimard, 1981), for the first edition.
128 OR, p. 928.
129 OR, p. 929.

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has found redemption, but because she can now be silent, outside all discourse. To be

sure, Yourcenar quickly discounts this interpretation and implies that Anna was

reunited with her brother cum lover cum Messiah at her deathbed. Still, Anna in her

final years and days remains a powerful image of a woman who knows that no

mythicization or representation can alleviate her pain.

The final quotation where the thought of the Other appears comes from Denier

du reve, Yourcenars most openly political novel, although not also her most

resourceful, in my opinion. It contains a passage which comes very close to an

understanding of those whom Lyotard allegorically called the jew s. Indeed, it is a

young Jewish character, Massimo Iakovleff, who talks to Marcella Sarte, an Italian

communist, determined to shoot Mussolini that same evening.

Sais-tu, reprit-il a voix basse, il marrive de penser que cest nous, nous qui ne
sommes pas purs, nous qui avons ete humilies, depouilles, salis, nous qui sans jamais
rien avoir avons tout perdu, nous qui navons ni pays, ni parti (non! non! ne proteste
pas), qui pourrions etre ceux par lesquels le regne arrive... Nous, quon ne corrompra
plus, quon ne peut pas tromper... Commencer tout de suite... a nous seuls...130

The voice of the Other is here unmistakable. Yourcenar draws from a traditional

discourse of exile and deprivation, which is neither necessarily nor exclusively that

of the Jews, and transforms it into a state of the mind and the soul that is totally

incommensurable with political aestheticism. This discourse cannot be cheated or

corrupted because it is not susceptible to the seduction of purity - it is already

impure. Moreover, it cannot be appropriated by any geopolitics or geo-philosophy

because it belongs nowhere, it has no home. It is not the discourse of a people, but

that of the alienated and the dispossessed who never possessed anything: nous qui

sans jamais rien avoir avons tout perdu. M assimos call to Marcella to start

immediately aims at dissuading her from her plan to kill the dictator. From her

answer, it is clear that she is not listening:

130 OR, p. 233.

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 Chapter 5 - Political Aestheticism

Tu es comme un enfant , dit-elle doucement sans pretendre 1avoir ecoute ou

entendu. Si je te fais confiance, cest parce que tu as lair dun enfant.

Marcellas answer typifies Yourcenars attitude towards the discourse of otherness.

Massimos voice is lost, neither audible nor comprehensible, in the midst of the fight

between conflicting systems of representation. By calling him un enfant, Marcella

excludes him from her system of concepts and ideas, which opposes fascism, but is

not its other.

Yet Marcella understands perfectly well. By calling Massimo un enfant, she

recognizes in him that state of the psyche which Lyotard, drawing from Freud, calls

its permanent infancy. She sees that even though Massimo lives the same existential

anxiety and historical terror as herself, he does not have the means to represent it and

wishes no dramatic catharsis for it. M arcellas simultaneous deafness and profound

attention to M assimos voice marks an extraordinary moment of awareness of

Yourcenars ambivalence towards existence and the political-aesthetic.

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 CONCLUSION

This thesis was motivated by a desire to understand the notion of authentic selfhood

in Marguerite Yourcenars fiction and criticism. Her implicit but persistent

suggestion that an authentic relationship with the world was still possible in late

modernity seemed to me difficult to accept and yet well supported in her work. From

Alexis (1929) to Quoi? L etem ite (1988), Yourcenar made clear that such a

relationship must be achieved les yeux ouverts, that is, in the hie et nunc of

individual, political and historical existence.1 This uncompromising attitude meant

that she had to negotiate with the main obstacle on the way to authenticity, namely,

the lack of immediacy in the selfs dealings with the world. It also meant that she had

to take into account the knowledge of this lack as a key feature of modernity.

My research was focused primarily on Memoires d Hadrien, as this novel

allowed me to approach the authentic hero of Yourcenars narrative from a dual

perspective, that of existence and that of politics. In the character of Hadrien, the

existential and the political subject are articulated as a function of each other and are

examined by Yourcenar in the context of history, considered as a progressive

aestheticization of experience. I have tried to show that Yourcenars attempt to define

the existential and the political subject in a uniform manner was based on the idea

that conceptual representation complicates both of these aspects of subjectivity in the

1 Les yeux ouverts is the last phrase o f M em oires d Hadrien (1951), and the title o f Yourcenars
published interviews with Matthieu Galey. See also n. 45, Chapter 4.

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 Conclusion

same manner. Beyond Memoires, I relied on other novels, essays on culture, literature

and art, as well as paratextual material by Yourcenar, to further support my claim that

the subject is perceived by her in terms of its fleetingness and differentiality.

It is this understanding of the differentiality of the subject which situates

Yourcenars thought at the heart of the modem problematic of subjectivity. In my

analysis, I highlighted the specifically modem parameters of Yourcenars perception

of the self, but also of language, culture, spatio-temporality and narrative. Given her

reluctance to contextualize these themes with reference to cultural and philosophical

modernity, as well as the relative dearth of relevant studies, it seemed to me

important to compare her views with those of some of her contemporary thinkers

who were preoccupied with similar concerns. I tried to show that there are consistent

analogies between Yourcenar and Paul de M ans idea of the rhetoricity of selfhood,

Walter Benjamins critique of aesthetic and cultural modernity, and Martin

Heideggers analysis of spatio-temporality. Beyond thematic kinship, these analogies

extend to the interpretative paths followed and, in certain cases, to the solutions

found.

With reference to Paul de M ans thinking on rhetoric, time and history, I

attempted to show how deeply Yourcenars thought is marked by the ironic

knowledge of inauthenticity. Her idea of the gradual re-authentication of the work of

art as it slowly disintegrates in the course of its life provides a vital clue for

understanding the mechanism by which she attempts to rescue the possibility of

authenticity in the modem context. Through a semantic inversion of concepts, she

locates authenticity within the repetitive and the inauthentic, purity within the factical

and the impure, and subjectivity within the impossibility of the subject.

The semantic inversion of authenticity was further paralleled with Benjamins

idea that modem art opens up the possibility of interpreting reality as illusion and

vice versa. In modernity, what was previously considered as real loses its aura and

is revealed as a representation. On the other hand, modem representations, especially

275
 Conclusion

film, are shown to contain the real in distorted form. One such representation is

translation, which reveals the source texts true fragmentary character. Yourcenar

understands Memoires d Hadrien as a literary and aesthetic fragment, deprives it

from its aura, and re-authenticates it by designating this novel as a translation.

But it is with Heideggers existential phenomenology that Yourcenars

perception of selfhood and art presents the most extensive analogies. There is a

sustained commonality of thought between these two thinkers concerning their

understanding of facticity, their critique of conceptuality, and their perception of

tradition and history. In Chapter 4, I claimed that Yourcenar follows Heidegger in

underlining the role of the self in producing its own space and time. For both

thinkers, man exists always in a state of spatio-temporal difference in relation to the

world, but this permanent difference defines the paradoxical authenticity of the

existential subject. This subject becomes authentic by accepting difference. I tried to

show how the idea of acceptance led both thinkers to develop a similar understanding

of mans role as guardian of the world / shepherd of Being, a position which

originates in a non-anthropocentric humanism whose basic principles are also

common to both.

The analogies between Yourcenar and Heidegger extend further, to what their

theories of existence and history knowingly exclude or do not manage to think

adequately. In exploring these negative analogies, the thesis moved on from

investigating the notion of authenticity in Yourcenar and identifying its modem

features to criticizing the desire for authenticity and demonstrating its philosophical

limits. In Chapter 5 , 1 tried to show that Yourcenars inverted concept of authenticity

is in fact anchored on a model of universality which she associates with ancient

Greece. Furthermore, I tried to trace the marks of an incompatible difference between

this Greek aesthetico-political model and the anaesthetic people of the jew s - a

term coined by Lyotard to refer to all the people, whether Jews or not, who suffer the

violent repercussions of the W ests quest for identity. Re-reading Memoires under the

276
 Conclusion

light of these definitions, I found evidence that the vision of European identity

promoted in the novel was in fact not free from the metaphysics of modem political

aestheticism. As the figure of Hadrien suggests, it is not possible to imagine a non-

totalitarian political subject as long as subjectivity is evaluated in terms of identity

and authenticity, whether inverted or not.

Two sets of issues arise from this discussion. The first has to do with a possible

re-evaluation of Yourcenars work after the discrediting of the idea of authentic

subjectivity. The second set of issues concerns the possibility of the subject, its

political and existential identity and its continuing significance in the broader

historico-political context of postmodemity.

As regards the first set of issues, I would like to raise four points which may also

be read as suggestions for further research.

a. This thesis suggests that the modernity as such of Yourcenar should no longer

be a topic of debate. Rather, the question now is to study further the ways in which

Yourcenar perceives and processes specifically modem themes and sensibilities. In

my thesis, I highlighted some of these themes, including fragmentariness, the

awareness of irony and the facticity of the self. I also suggested that Yourcenars

relationship with modernity is so formative in her work that it extends to what the

modem, in some of its manifestations, excludes and forgets - most markedly, the

thought of the Other, beyond ontology, aestheticism and humanism. Comparative

studies of Yourcenars work in relation to other approaches to existence and

subjectivity, such as those by Nietzsche, Sartre and Camus, could further support

these arguments. Moreover, Yourcenars theatre and autobiography constitute

particularly interesting sources for investigating the presence of modernity and even

postmodemity in her work.2

2 There have already been studies examining the specifically modern features o f Yourcenars theatre
and autobiography. For example, see Andre B lancs essay Marguerite Yourcenar et la tentation

277
 Conclusion

b. Further, in my thesis I found evidence that the notion of authentic subjectivity

in Yourcenar is based on an exclusive concept of totality and universality and can

only be pursued at the expense of what the West rejects as a non-subject (the

voiceless figure of Antinoiis, the jew s). Consequently, the question arises as to

whether we now must understand the Yourcenarian subject as an ideological and

potentially violent formation, a projected or imagined identity between man and

world, and therefore the very thing against which it is supposed to stand. I certainly

do not think so. In the first four chapters of my thesis I tried to show that Yourcenar

makes no concessions in her attempt to think the subject in terms of the rupture

which separates it from itself and precludes the possibility of identity. This is the

point of re-interpreting identity as the constancy of difference, and authenticity as

repetition and re-construction. This subject cannot be reduced to the autonomous,

self-sufficient subject of metaphysics, even if its metaphysical or even totalitarian

aspects are revealed, once it is projected onto the level of history and politics. It may

well be, as I claimed, that Hadrien is not the liberated and post-ironic political subject

that Memoires suggests - as does Yourcenar herself in her interviews and Carnets de

notes. Still, he represents, in my opinion, a consciously modem moment in the

ongoing quest for a subject which tries to comes to terms with its infirmity and

heteronomy.

Like any interpretation which claims to be critically solid and objective, my

argument that the figure of Hadrien gives in to the impulse of the metaphysical and to

the illusion of representability necessarily contains an element of generalization. It

must be stressed that Yourcenars work articulates more than one form of

theatrale : raisons d un ech ec, in Maria Capusan et al. (eds), M arguerite Yourcenar: Citoyenne du
monde (Clermont-Ferrand: SIEY, 2006), pp. 63-73. Blanc compares Yourcenars efforts as a
playwright to the theatre o f Giraudoux, Sartre, Anouilh and Cocteau. With regard to Yourcenars
autobiography, I already mentioned May Chehabs Cerner letre, une figure de la modernite ?, at the
beginning o f Chapter 3. Anna Elizabeth Snymans L Autorepresentation dans le Labyrinthe du monde
de M arguerite Yourcenar (2003), constitutes a more extensive investigation o f Yourcenars dialogue
with the modern and the postmodern in her autobiography. Unpublished thesis,
<http://etd.rau.ac.za/theses/available/etd-03292004-100448/> [accessed on 27/08/07].

278
 Conclusion

subjectivity, and in fact culminates in the quasi-total absence of the subject (the

writer herself) in her autobiography. For that reason, I finished Chapter 5 by giving

some examples of how the presence of a different subject, which is not thoroughly

thought in Memoires, persists in the Yourcenarian text. Future research would be

able to trace more instances of that irreducible otherness in Yourcenars work.

c. One question that needs to be addressed further is that of realism as a

technique of authentication of the text, and as a distortion of distortion of reality. In

chapters 1 and 2 of my thesis, I examined the idea that realism in Yourcenar is not

the arbitrary identification of a linguistic sign with a referent but a narrative strategy

for leaving in obscurity what cannot or must not be represented. Realism was proven

to be intimately linked with Yourcenars thought on existence and art, and it was

understood in the context of accepting difference in representation. Should this

definition of realism be re-evaluated in the light of my later conclusions? If it is true

that Yourcenars narrative is partly motivated by a desire for identity, then is it also

arguable that realism is used in her work to intimate that identity is indeed possible,

after all? For instance, if, as I argued in Chapter 5, Memoires d Hadrien suggests that

a new identity based on the Greek archetype is possible for Europe in the wake of the

Second World War, is the realism of the novel one way of supporting this

suggestion? These questions relate to the broader issue of whether realism

necessarily serves the desire for narrative unity, for the effacement of difference, and

for the self-sufficiency of fictional representation.

However, realism means different things at different times for different writers

and readers. As Buck-Morss argued with reference to The Work of Art in the Age of

Mechanical Reproduction, even film, the most faithful representation of reality,

can be used for the purpose of critical enlightenment or its opposite.3 A further

discussion of realism remains beyond the purview of my thesis. At the same time, I

3 See Chapter 3, n. 24.

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 Conclusion

believe that realism as such does not relate to the controversial discourse of

authenticity and political identity in a necessary way. Let us remember that Proust

used realism for his extensive deconstitution of the subject in A la recherche du

temps perdu, while on the other hand Heideggers re-constitution of Dasein in Being

and Time is far from realist. I think that Yourcenars effort to reclaim realism for the

20th-Century novel remains valid. It enabled her to read Thomas M anns fiction and

Cavafys poetry in an original way, as I discussed in Chapter 1. Even more

importantly, it allowed her to approach narratively what she called i informule et

[...] lineffable, and to access negatively what she thought that lied beyond the

limits of language.4

d. Finally, Yourcenars theory of history and especially of the writing of history

could be researched further along the lines of the present thesis. W hile I did not focus

especially on historiography and the relationship between history and fiction, I have

been discussing a number of themes that would be central to such a study. These

include: Yourcenars perception of history as an accumulation of traditions and

representations; the perception of the past as being essentially of the same substance

as the present; the ensuing possibility of empathetic identification with the past

through the projection of the self in time; and the representability of history in

writing, in so far as all existence, including the past, can be depicted in terms of its

simultaneous presence and absence. While there has been much scholarly interest in

Yourcenars understanding of history and in her technique as a writer of historical

novels, the study I am envisioning would seek to investigate these topics in relation

to modernity and the way it figures in Yourcenars perception and philosophy of

history.5

4 EM, p. 305, from Ton et langage dans le roman historique.

5 Prominent among other publications on Yourcenars relationship on history is Maurice Delcroix
(ed.), Roman, histoire et mythe dans Vceuvre de M arguerite Yourcenar (Tours: SIEY, 1995).

280
 Conclusion

With regard to the second set of issues, those that bear upon the concept of

subjectivity and its vicissitudes, my thesis has referred to some key moments in the

deconstruction of authenticity in modernity and beyond. Heideggers critique of the

autonomy of the Cartesian ego, Benjamins account of the loss of aura, and de M ans

rejection of the possibility of authenticity are complemented by Lacoue-Labarthes

suggestion that the subject can be approached in terms of its inherent infirmity.

This, as I explained, is a subject which desists, which is nothing in and of itself,

and which, under different guises, we have always invested with the desire for a

stable essence and a self.6 Although this thesis does not seek to offer conclusive

assertions about the state of the contemporary discussion on subjectivity, it endorses

Lacoue-Labarthes assessment. Heideggers effort to preserve the possibility of

existential and historical fulfilment ended in failure and demonstrated the limits of

philosophy and the perils of the discourse of authenticity. Lacoue-Labarthes infirm

subject (or rather, infirm subject) constitutes an effort to re-think subjectivity

beyond the measure of authenticity / creativity / identity and their opposites. As

Lyotard explains further, this subject cannot be evaluated in terms of the authenticity

or otherwise of its relationship with the world. This subject, Lyotard insists, should

be the Other, not simply the structural opposite, of the authentic subject of onto-

theology.

Thus understood, the thought of absolute alterity is only contingently present in

Yourcenar. Still, we must remember that she brought together Hadrien, the

philhellenist emperor-poet, and Rabbi Akiba to the negotiation table. At a crucial

moment in Memoires she juxtaposed allegorically the Greek thinking of subjectivity

and representability with the Jewish experience of infinite otherness which resists

representation. My point remains that the negotiation table as the scene of this

meeting favours Hadriens voice and his skills in dialogue and reasoning, to which

6 Lacoue-Labarthe, La Fiction du politique, pp. 71-72.

281
 Conclusion

the Rabbi can only respond with a monotonous and monologous repetition of his

alterity. The more the Rabbis voice is stifled, the more we realize that the dialogue

and the peace of which Yourcenar is dreaming are not possible. This impossibility is

stressed by Derrida, who, in his essay Violence et metaphysique, asks himself:

Sommes-nous des Grecs? Sommes-nous des Juifs? Mais qui, nous? Sommes-nous
(question non-chronologique, question pre-logique) d abord des Juifs ou d abord des
Grecs? Et letrange dialogue entre le Juif et le Grec, la paix elle-meme, [...ont-ils] la
forme de la separation infinie et de la transcendance impensable, indicible, de
1autre?7

This thesis has explored this transcendance impensable, indicible in relation to

Yourcenars thinking of i informule et [...] 1ineffable. It has attempted to show

that Yourcenar developed a characteristically modem understanding of difference

and alterity. In many ways, the concepts of representation, identity, subjectivity, and

authenticity in Yourcenars writing touch, and press on, the limits of philosophy in

European modernity, as they appear to us today. Thus, her fiction and criticism stand

at a critical juncture in the history of modem European thought where literature and

philosophy negotiate their limits, and the narrative subject comes face to face with its

Other.

7 Jacques Derrida, V iolence et metaphysique, L Ecriture et la difference (Seuil: Paris, 1967), pp.
117-228, (pp. 227-28), emphasis by the author.

282
 BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Works by Yourcenar
This section of the bibliography contains the editions of Yourcenars works used in
this thesis. Each of the Pleiade editions, OR and EM, is followed by a list of the
works included in it.

Fiction

(Euvres romanesques, 3rd edn (Paris: Gallimard, 1991; repr. 2000), Bibliotheque de
la Pleiade, 303.
Alexis ou le Traite du vain combat
Le Coup de grace.
Denier du reve.
Memoires d Hadrien.
Carnets de notes des Memoires d Hadrien'.
L (Euvre au Noir.
Carnets de notes de L'CEuvre au Noir .
Anna, Soror....
Un homme obscur.
Une belle matinee.
Feux.
Nouvelles Orientales.
La Nouvelle Eurydice

Theatre, autobiography, criticism, translations

Essais et Memoires (Paris: Gallimard, 1991) Bibliotheque de la Pleiade, 378.

Sous benefice d inventaire.

283
 Bibliography

Mishima ou la Vision du vide.

Le Temps, ce grand sculpteur.
En pelerin et en etranger.
Le Tour de la prison.
Le Labyrinthe du monde I: Souvenirs pieux.
Le Labyrinthe du monde II: Archives du Nord.
Le Labyrinthe du monde III: Quoi? L etemite.
Pindare.
Les Songes et les sorts
Diagnostic de lEurope.
La Symphonie heroique.
Le Chargeur d or.
Essai de genealogie du saint.

Andre Gide revisited, in Cahiers Andre Gide, 3, Le Centenaire (Paris: Gallimard,

1972), pp. 21-44.
Archives du Nord (Paris: Gallimard, 1977).
La Couronne et la lyre: Anthologie de la poesie grecque ancienne (Paris: Gallimard,
1979).
Theatre, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1971).

Interviews and correspondence

Entretiens radiophoniques avec Marguerite Yourcenar, ed. by Patrick de Rosbo

(Paris: Mercure de France, 1972).
Les Yeux ouverts: Entretiens avec Matthieu Galey (Paris: Le Centurion, 1980).
Lettres a ses amis et quelques autres, ed. by Michele Sarde et al. (Paris: Gallimard,
1995).
Marguerite Yourcenar: Portrait d une voix, ed. by Maurice Delcroix (Paris:
Gallimard, 2002).

284
 Bibliography

II. Critical studies on Yourcenar

Allamand, Carole, Marguerite Yourcenar ou Tecriture en mal de mere (Paris: Imago

2004).
Blanc, Andre, Marguerite Yourcenar et la tentation theatrale : raisons d un echec, in
Maria Capusan et al. (eds), Marguerite Yourcenar: Citoyenne du monde
(Clermont-Ferrand: SIEY, 2006), pp. 63-73.
Blot, Jean, Marguerite Yourcenar, coll. Ecrivains d hier et d aujourdhui ,
Seghers, No 38, 1971.
Breulet, Michel and Delcroix, M., La figure du medecin dans 1oeuvre de Marguerite
Yourcenar, in Bulletin de la Societe Internationale d'Etudes Yourcenariennes,
No 21 (decembre 2000), pp. 161-182.
Carlston, Erin G., Thinking Fascism: Sapphic Modernism and Fascist Modernity
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).
Chehab, May, Cemer letre, une figure de la modemite ?, in Georges Freris and R.
Poignault (eds), Marguerite Yourcenar, Ecrivain du XIXe siecle? (Clermont-
Ferrand: SIEY, 2004).
La Deduction du moi et limpossible autobiologie, in Remy Poignault et
al. (eds), L Ecriture du moi dans Toeuvre de Marguerite Yourcenar (Clermont-
Ferrand: SIEY, 2004), pp. 75-88.
Le Chainon manquant de lecriture, in May Chehab (ed.), Marguerite
Yourcenar entre litterature et science (Clermont-Ferrand: SIEY, 2007), pp. 157-
174.
Colvin, Margaret Elisabeth, Baroque Fictions: Revisioning the Classical in
Marguerite Yourcenar (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005).
Delcroix, Simone and Delcroix, Maurice (eds), Roman, histoire et mythe dans
Toeuvre de Marguerite Yourcenar {Tours: SEEY, 1995).
Dore, Pascal, Yourcenar ou lefem inin insoutenable (Geneve: Droz, 1999).
Farrell, C. Frederick, Jr and Farrell, Edith R., Un lien entre lhumain et le sacre : Le
nom de dieu, in Poignault, Remy (ed.), Le Sacre dans I oeuvre de Marguerite
Yourcenar (Tours: SIEY, 1993), pp. 163-173.
Foucart, Claude, Marguerite Yourcenar, L Exil et la distance, in Berengere Deprez
and Ana de Medeiros (eds), Marguerite Yourcenar, Ecritures de Texil (Louvain-
la-Neuve: Academia Bruylant, 1998), pp. 267-276.
Freris, Georges, L Esprit decadent du XIXe siecle et langoisse du XXIe siecle dans
Memoires d Hadrien, in Freris, Georges and Poignault, Remy (eds), Marguerite
Yourcenar, Ecrivain du XIXe siecle ? (Clermont-Ferrand: SIEY, 2004), pp. 183-
191.
Gergely, Thomas, La Memoire suspecte d'Hadrien, in Revue de VUniversite de
Bruxelles 3-4 (1988), pp. 45-50.

285
 Bibliography

Golieth, Catherine, Au sujet de la modemite de L CEuvre au noir', in Bulletin de la

Societe Internationale d Etudes Yourcenariennes, n 20, Tours, decembre 1999,
pp. 123-141.
Goslar, Michele, Yourcenar, biographie: Q uil eut ete fade d'etre heureux
(Bruxelles: Racine, 1998).
Harris, Nadia, Representations de 1Autre dans 1oeuvre de Marguerite Yourcenar, in
Jean-Philippe Beaulieu et al. (eds), Marguerite Yourcenar, Ecritures de Vautre
(Quebec: XYZ, 1997), pp. 45-52.
Marcq, Edith, L empathie ou une maniere d ecriture yourcenarienne, in Jean-
Philippe Beaulieu et al. (eds), Marguerite Yourcenar, Ecritures de Vautre
(Quebec: XYZ, 1997), pp. 265-277.
Marks, Elaine, Marrano as Metaphor: The Jewish Presence in French Writing (New
York: Columbia UP, 1996).
Ness, Beatrice, Le succes Yourcenar: verite et mystification, The French Review,
Vol. 64, No 5. (Apr. 1991), pp. 794-803.
Rasson, Luc, Yourcenar postmodeme ? in Bulletin de la Societe Internationale
d Etudes Yourcenariennes, No 12, Tours, decembre 1993, pp. 1-6.
Rothberg, Michael, Coup de Grace as Male Fantasy: On the Sexual Politics of
Fascism, in Samecki, J. H. and O Sickey, I. Majer (eds), Subversive Subjects:
Reading Marguerite Yourcenar (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University
Press, 2004), pp. 125-147.
Saint, Nigel, Marguerite Yourcenar, Reading the Visual (Oxford: Legenda, 2000).
Sarde, Michele, Representations des Juifs chez Marguerite Yourcenar, in Camillo
Faverzani (ed.), Marguerite Yourcenar et la Mediterranee (Clermont-Ferrand:
Association des Publications de la Faculte des Ixttres et Sciences Humaines de
Clermont-Ferrand, 1995), pp. 71-82.
Savigneau, Josyane, Marguerite Yourcenar: LTnvention d une vie (Paris: Gallimard,
1990).
Snyman, Anna Elisabeth, L Autorepresentation dans le Labyrinthe du monde de
Marguerite Yourcenar, (doctoral thesis, University of Johannesburg, 2003),
<http://etd.rau.ac.za/theses/available/etd-03292004-100448/> [accessed on 27
August 2007].
Temeuil, Alexandre, Reflections sur la question juive chez Marguerite Yourcenar,
in Francesca Counihan and Berangere Deprez (eds), Ecriture du pouvoir, pouvoir
de Vecriture : La realite sociale et politique dans Voeuvre de Marguerite
Yourcenar (Bruxelles: Peter Lang, 2006), 107-117.
Tritsmans, Bruno, Opposition et esquive dans Alexis et la Nouvelle Eurydice,
Bulletin de Societe Internationale d Etudes Yourcenariennes, No 5, septembre
1989, pp. 1-14, <http://www.yourcenariana.org/pdf/bull05/02Tritsmans.pdf>,
[29/08/2007].
Whatley, Janet, Memoires d Hadrien: A Manual for Princes, University o f Toronto
Quarterly, Volume 50, No 2, (Winter 1980/81), pp. 221-237.

286
 Bibliography

Wyss, Antoine, Auteur, narrateur, personnage : Quelle historiographie pour

Memoires d Hadrien ?, in Delcroix, Simone and Delcroix, Maurice (eds),
Roman, histoire et mythe dans Voeuvre de Marguerite Yourcenar (Tours: SIEY,
1995), pp. 483-491.

III. Other works cited or consulted

Adorno, Theodor W., The Jargon o f Authenticity, trans. by Knut Tamowski and
Frederic Will (London: Routledge, 1986).
et a l, Aesthetics and Politics (London: Verso, 2007).
Barthes, Roland, Leffet de reel, in Barthes, R. et al., Litterature et realite (Paris:
Seuil, 1982).
Baudelaire, Charles, Curiosites esthetiques: L art romantique et autres oeuvres
critiques, ed. by H. Lemaitre (Paris: Gamier, 1962).
Beistegui, Miguel de, Heidegger and the Political (London: Routledge, 1998).
Benjamin, Andrew, Translation and the Nature o f Philosophy (Routledge: London,
1989).
Benjamin, Walter, Illuminations, ed. by Hannah Arendt, trans. by Harry Zom
(London: Fontana Press, 1992).
Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. by Peter
Demetz, trans. by Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken Books, 1986).
The Origin o f the German Tragic Drama, trans. by John Osborne (London:
Verso 2003).
Berlin, Isaiah, Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969).
Berman, Marshall, The Politics o f Authenticity: Radical Individualism and the
Emergence o f M odem Society (New York: Atheneum, 1970).
Blanchot, Maurice, Les Intellectuels en question, Le Debat, No 33 (29 May 1984).
Boyarin, Daniel, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics o f Identity (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1997).
Brandt, Joan, Geopoetics: The Politics o f Mimesis in Poststructuralist French Poetry
and Theory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).
Buck-Morss, Susan, Benjamins Passagen-Werk: Redeeming Mass Culture for the
Revolution, New German Critique, No 29 (Spring Semester, 1983), pp. 211-240.
Burger, Peter, The Disappearance of Meaning: Essay at a Postmodern Reading of
Michel Toumier, Botho Strauss and Peter Handke, in Scott Lash and J. Friedman
(eds), Modernity and Identity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), pp. 94-111.

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