Philosophy, Literature, and the Dissolution of the Subject: Nietzsche, Musil, Atay (Studies in Social Sciences, Philosophy and History of Ideas)
Zeynep Talay-Turner
Language: English
Pages: 284
ISBN: 2:00326347
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
If philosophy has limits, what lies beyond them? One answer is literature. In this study, rather than seeing literature as a source of illustrations of philosophical themes, the author considers both philosophy and literature as sometimes competing but often complementary ways of making sense of and conveying the character of ethical experience. She does so through an analysis of ideas about language, experience and ethics in the philosophy of Nietzsche, and of the way in which these themes are worked out and elaborated in the writings of Robert Musil and the Turkish novelist Oğuz Atay.
The Gay Science: But we, we others who thirst after reason, are determined to scrutinize our experiences as severely as a scientific experiment – hour after hour, day after day. We ourselves wish to be our experiments and guinea pigs.291 Now, the term ‘Versucher’ has the double meaning of ‘experimenter’ and ‘tempter’. To be a Versucher requires the ability to create: ‘Every creator is at once someone who tempts others and who experiments on (tempts) himself and others in order to create
deed’ is a fiction in order to experiment with the idea of a life of pure imitation; if the doer is a fiction then can one become anyone by imitating the deeds of others? In The Disconnected the subjecthood of the main characters gives way to a state in which each of them is everyone and no-one, in which neither self-oriented nor other-oriented ethics seems to apply. Atay’s subjects suffer from radical groundlessness, and as such the novel contains a problematisation of the Cartesian account of
‘dissolution of the subject’, of the Ego or ‘form’, is an important theme of early twentieth century avant-garde literature, and it is no accident that Vattimo refers to Robert Musil as an example. Musil, born in Klagenfurt in 1880, is one of the great figures in German literature and one of the most remarkable in the history of the modern novel.30 His major work The Man without Qualities was begun early in the nineteen-twenties, and the first volume was published in 1930. Although Musil died
novels. Thus, it may be not an exaggeration to claim that The Man without Qualities is, in fact, an anti-Bildungsroman, or that some features of it are a parody of a Bildungsroman: Ulrich attempts to develop himself before his flight from life, whereas after his journey he is, far from being mature, without qualities; there is not even a home to turn back to. And this idea is conveyed with a rather ingenious analogy: ‘Modern man is born in a hospital and dies in a hospital, so he should make his
workings of psyches, Robbe-Grillet attempts to present objects that do not have any function in narration at all. See Richard Creese, ‘Objects in Novels and the Fringe of Culture: Graham Greene and Alain Robbe-Grillet,’ Comparative Literature, Vol. 39, No. 1 (Winter, 1987), pp. 58-73; Roland Barthes, ‘Objective Literature’, in Critical Essays, trans. Richard Howard (Evanston: North-western University Press, 1972). 182 At first, he does try to continue with his life as it was before Selim’s