What I became for myself? The man without qualities, and predatory character of late modernity / O que eu me tornei para mim mesmo? o homem sem qualidades, e o caráter predatório da modernidade tardia
AUTOR(ES)
Maria Thereza Waisberg
DATA DE PUBLICAÇÃO
2009
RESUMO
This thesis is meant as a study of the notion of narrative identity in Robert Musil, especially as concentrated in The man without qualities (O homem sem qualidades). With this in mind, the starting point are Musils writings, published as his collected works. The aim is to recognize in the dissolution of the character´s identity the emblematic contribution to the question of mans changing identity, since the dawn of modernity. If we understand the place of represented ethical identity as the preservation of the self, we realize that the absence of qualities deprives it of all support. The drama of the dissolution of identity in Musils character leaves open the question: can the nonsubject remain a figure of the subject, even though in a kind of negative way? As one searches for a definition of identity, Musils negative fiction operates in a twofold way, both as a definition of the condition of ipsidity (ipsidité) and as a return to life. From this analysis one gathers that the self represented in the narrative is confronted with its own nothingness. Of course this nothingness is not the nothingness about which there is nothing to say. On the contrary, there is a great deal to be said about that hypothesis, as witnessed by the immensity of the work here analyzed. From this analysis one acknowledges that the hypothesis does not lack existential evidence about the transformations of a personal identity which is proof against the nothingness which, in moments of uprooting, shows up as an extreme emptying of cultural values, offering a negative answer to the question What am I? which is no longer exposed to the nullity of the real mans own condition but to the nakedness of the question itself. The case analysis of a man without qualities leads to the conclusion that personal identity is not what matters; it leads to the erasure not only of the identity of the same, but of the identity of the self. As he exposes the negation of himself, the man without qualities discloses the passage from Who am I? to what am I? as the loss of his belonging to the values of culture. Such a loss is what character consists in, that is, the blend of acquired dispositions and of identifications consolidated by culture. The character lays bare the present impossibility of recognizing any one without a durable way of thinking, feeling, behaving, which, otherwise, would prove unthinkable. If in the changing flux of present-day society there is such a thing as identity, it is only feasible in the failure of an indefinite succession of attempts at identification which make up the material of narratives with an interpretive value about the contraction of the self. To keep on an ethical plane a self which, in the narrative plane, can erase itself, is the challenge and a limit to find, in an individual, the distance between narrative identity and moral narrative for the sake of a living dialectics between the two. Hence one can see how this opposition can be metamorphosed into a fruitful tension.
ASSUNTO(S)
war modernidade identidade aesthetics guerra estética Ética identity modernity ethics
