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2. Affectation, or the Invention of the Self: A Modern Disorder
- Indiana University Press
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Introduction: Affectation Is Part of Modernity “Despite the fact that I certainly see in it the expression of significant intellectual strengths, I nevertheless cannot deny that it makes a generally unpleasant impression on me, particularly because of two things, both of which I detest: verbosity and affectation.”1 This was the judgment uttered by Hans Christian Ørsted, then Rector of the University of Copenhagen, on Kierkegaard’s dissertation On the Concept of Irony. Anyone who has read much Kierkegaard is certainly well acquainted with his “verbosity,”whichwasbothhisbesettingsinandanindispensablepartofhisstyle. But what was Kierkegaard’s relationship to “affectation?” The problem of affectation was in the air, so to speak. During the opening decades of the nineteenth century it was a hot topic for investigation. Affectation meant falsity, a dissimulation in which one simultaneously deceives both others and oneself by putting on a merely assumed self. Affectation, the assumption of a “false” self, is a peculiarly modern concept, and preoccupation with the dangers of affectation reveals a fear of something that became possible only after the breakup of traditional, late-medieval society in which individual roles had come preassigned , a society in which there was, as it were, no “self.” The self—which is in fact the invention of the self—had yet to be invented. Those societies which modernized2 first were the earliest to experience the fear of affectation. In the Italian Renaissance , the breakdown of the medieval “Great Chain of Being,” in which every existing thing had a preordained place and role, was noted by Pico [Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, 1463–1494], who celebrated man as “a creature of indeterminate nature . . . as though the maker and molder of thyself.”3 And already at this early date, Pico left the door of human autonomy ajar and susceptible of dual interpreta2 . Affectation, or the Invention of the Self: A Modern Disorder BruceH.Kirmmse Affectation, or the Invention of the Self · 25 tion when he wrote, a propos of the human race: “Who would not admire this our chameleon?”4 In Elizabethan times, just a few decades after Pico, “affectation” first made its way into the English language, first as a verb: to “affect” or “affectate” the appearance of something one is not. The fear of affectation became more widespread in the seventeenth century, notably in France, where fear (and ridicule) of affectation became a principal theme in Molière’s dramas depicting the bourgeois pretention of being a gentilhomme. Preoccupation with (and fear of) affectation can be found in Danish letters as early as the comedies of Holberg, who is often called the Danish Molière. In any event, by the mid-eighteenth century the problems and perils presented by the possibility of putting on a new self were widely acknowledged in the European world. At first, of course, the peculiar freedom to “affect” a self was open only to those inhabiting the uppermost echelons of the bourgeoisie. Eighteenth-centuryEuropewasasocietyofestates,albeitonethatwasrapidly unraveling. By the early nineteeenth century, with the cumulative effect of the growing market economy, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and the wars of Napoleon (who was widely, if misleadingly, portrayed as a social upstart, a Corsican corporal), the entire sympathetic/antipathetic problem-complex around “affectation” became an obsession.5 In a way, the modern novel itself— that is, the French novel—precisely because it was something “novel,” can be said to be about affectation and the search for the will-o’-the-wisp called authenticity. This certainly is the principal theme for the two greatest French novelists of the nineteenth (and any other) century, for what else are the characters of Julien Sorel (in Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir), Madame Bovary (in Flaubert’s novel of the same name), and Frédéric Moreau (in Flaubert’s L’Éducation sentimentale) but extended meditations on affectation and the (im)possibility of escaping from it? Indeed, in his novel Le Rouge et le Noir, which significantly bears the subtitle “Chronique du XIXe siècle,” Stendhal’s hero Julien Sorel finally finds rest (and as Sorel puts it “rest istherightword”forit)6 byrefusingtoseekclemencyandgoingquitecheerfullyto his execution, where, finally, “everything took place simply and properly, without the slightest affectation on his part.”7 Similar literary phenomena characterized the rest of the nineteenth century and on into the twentieth. Like a comet, the plasticity of the sympathetic/antipathetic feelings that constituted the affectationcomplex pushed ahead of itself an entire nebula of “dandies,” ranging from the prototypical Johnny Walker/New Yorker figure Beau Brummell,8 to Baudelaire...