Death-Based Subjectivity in the Creation of Nerval’s Lyric Self

Death-Based Subjectivity in the Creation of Nerval’s Lyric Self Jonathan Strauss I N THIS ARTICLE I argue that the impenetrable obscurity of the sonnet “ El Desdichado” by the French romantic poet Gérard de Nerval was both the intentional culmination of a long and extremely complex working-through of the possibilities and limitations of literary self-representation and, as such, an important critique of other deathpremised models of individual subjectivity, models elaborated not within a poetic but a philosophical tradition and exemplified by Hegel, in the nineteenth century, and Heidegger in the twentieth. In all three cases, death is not merely taken as the starting point and ground of individual subjectivity, it is also theorized in that role as indissociable from ques­ tions of language and discourse. It is for that very reason that a poet, indeed a poet troubled by periods of alienation and schizophrenic epi­ sodes, could have set forth a document, which, though of a lapidary con­ cision and for the most part largely incomprehensible, nonetheless con­ stitutes a significant objection to the premises of the dialectical system in Hegel and to the grounds for the authenticity of Dasein in Heidegger. And it is precisely by construing the relationship between death, finitude, and language differently, by construing them in a poetic rather than a representational mode, that Nerval is able to construct such an alternate subject. In an 1839 issue of the Parisian newspaper La Presse, the young Nerval wrote a drama review for a play, entitled “ Le Mort-Vivant,” which apparently existed only in his imagination and in the few brief excerpts which he cited as evidence for his argument.1The non-existent play depicted, according to its critic, the story of a desperate young poet who believed himself witness to a series of events after his death, which, at the play’s conclusion, turned out to be no more than the opiuminduced illusions provoked by his attempted suicide. Before poisoning himself, the protagonist is said to utter the following lines: “ Qu’est-ce done que la mort?/La mort, nom sans objet, qu’on la craigne ou la désire/C’est pure abstraction [...].” 2 Death is conceived of here as a linguistic operation—“ non sans objet”—a pure sign without referent and, moreover, as an act of abstraction—“ e’est pure abstraction.” Con­ VOL. XXXV, No. 4 83 L ’E sprit C réateur versely, it can be inferred from these lines that linguistic abstraction, if taken to the point that a word (or name) loses its object if it become pure abstraction, constitutes a kind of death. The pseudo-drama turns on the possibility of being able to experience one’s own death, which is to say, within the review’s economy of abstrac­ tion and denomination, the possibility of experiencing one’s own an­ nihilation as individual subject in the pure positional onomastics instan­ tiated in the empty word “ Death.” Somewhat crudely, somewhat deriva­ tively (of Berlioz’s 1830 Symphonie Fantastique), this early critical piece sketches out the parameters of a densely interlocked nexus of death, language, and subjectivity that Nerval would return to in his writings throughout the rest of his life. It also demonstrates Nerval’s concern for what one could call the lin­ guistic sublime, a convergence of Kantian aesthetic theory with Hegelian linguistics that has gone unremarked by scholars, although it seems to have been an essential, if never explicitly articulated, characteristic of Romantic aesthetic ideology. The sublime was understood by authors such as Kant and Schiller to be the confrontation between an individual and the absolute—whether that be God, the boundless forces of nature, eternal life, or the infinite in a mathematical sense—in which the indi­ vidual was forced to recognize that his longing for merger with the in­ finite would necessarily entail his annihilation as finite particular indi­ vidual. Hegel, on the other hand, had contended in the “Sense Cer­ tainty” chapter of the Phenomenology o f Spirit that language is by its very nature universalizing, that is, instead of representing individuals it gives abstract universals. In attempting to speak of the finite, individual particulars of sensual existence, he wrote, “ we do...