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7 Being Authentic The Ambition to Recycle Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht What we call “authentic” presents itself as something primordial and elemental . “Primordial” in the sense of the German Ursprung,1 that is, as something that participates in (or is at least in touch with) an absolute beginning, “elemental ” because what appears as belonging to an absolute beginning is expected to possess the powerful beauty of neatness and transparency, without lacking complexity . Due to this double implication of being primordial and elemental, the authentic has the authority of what is pertinent.2 Hardly ever do we attribute authenticity to an experience without wanting to suggest that its content or object of reference substitute what the mere belief in the presence of the authentic has always already defined as inauthentic. This is exactly how the specific value and function of the authentic become manifest, in that it has the authority of something that imposes itself as immediately pertinent. The perception of the authentic as being primordial (and, with it, its specific value and potential function) results from the impression that it has been superseded by cultural materials that are less primordial (whatever this may precisely mean in each individual case) and that therefore do not carry an authority-claim. The most appropriate (if not the only) way to make appear as primordial, elemental , and authoritative whatever we call authentic is to stage its discovery as a cultural 121 A translation appears in the French companion volume to this book, La mémoire des déchets: Essais sur la culture et la valeur du passé, edited by Johanne Villeneuve, Brian Neville, and Claude Dionne (Québec: Nota Bene, 1999). recycling. Thus the experience of the authentic becomes one that seems to impose itself against things that look more recent, more superficial, and less neat. So close indeed is the relationship between authenticity and cultural recycling that we are tempted to describe cultural recycling not only as leading to the authentic but as the very production of authenticity. At the same time, it is true that, in the present intellectual climate, we have become skeptical about the status of phenomena that claim to be part of an absolute beginning—even if we do not subscribe to the repertoire of concepts staging our contemporary moment as “postmodern” (and hence as ursprungs-los). Our present is, to say the least, a bad moment for the acceptance of the authentic as pertinent. It also is a bad moment for the belief that what the truly authentic needs in order to impose itself is recycling, that is, a being rediscovered under layers of posterior materials and debris that had caused its oblivion . The more skeptical approach to cultural recycling as the production of authenticity is the theory that by merely pretending for something to be old, to have been forgotten, and to need rediscovery, one produces effects of authenticity. Seen from this second perspective, authenticity would no longer be the result of a recycling but rather the result of a gesture that produces effects of primordiality, that is, a reality-illusion for something that cannot exist in reality. It is difficult for us to avoid the conclusion that the production of authenticity is fake recycling.3 Before the end of the nineteenth century, the use of the words “authenticity ”and “authentic”was remarkably (not to say dramatically) different from what we have so far tried to analyze.4 They then referred to situations of authorship and ownership, to particularly close relations between human subjects and (mostly) material objects. Today this meaning has only survived on the art market and within the legal system. Here the word “authentic” still points to the status of an artwork or a text whose attribution to a certain artist/author has been confirmed . In a similar sense, “authentic reading” can be a synonymous expression for “literal reading,”that is, for a reading that tries to stay close to the author’s intention and marks a distance vis-à-vis all kinds of interpretation conceding large amounts of freedom to the interpreter. The profound change in the meaning of “authentic”and “authenticity”took place in the context of the so-called “Conservative Revolution.”5 As the Conservative Revolution was the reaction to a crisis of those (often broadly institutionalized ) thought-patterns that had shaped early Modernity, in particular the age of Enlightenment, its impact makes plausible the specific transformations that the concept of “authenticity”underwent.6 The point of convergence for a number of changes...

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