Abstract

My dissertation is a comparative study of the Belgium-born French poet, Henri Michaux and the Romanian-born French essayist Emil Cioran. Combining an ontological insight with close textual analyses, the study defines the "irrealise" , the founding cogito common to both authors. The questions of the self and "ecriture" are asked in terms of their relationship to the constitutive categories of being. ;I show that Michaux and Cioran challenge the Western intellectual discourse based on the hegemony of making and achieving. According to Michaux and Cioran, Western civilization is governed by an untamed will to make, to produce and to turn everything into an "achievement". Making and achieving assume primacy both in the traditional systems of representations and in the postmodern world of simulation and "hyperreality". ;Cioran and Michaux consider that the historical response to the suffering and pain engendered by the will to achieve has been totally inadequate; to the will to achieve Western civilization has opposed the will to unmake, to undo and to destroy. According to Michaux and Cioran, the obsession of the twentieth century avant-garde with "unmaking" is just another manifestation of the same producer mentality. ;In my dissertation, I explore how the two authors go beyond the nefarious circuit of making/unmaking, create/nullify and the dualisms force/objectivization, creation/destruction, They posit the "irrealise" as a viable alternative to the constant, obsessive practice of making and unmaking. ;I argue that Michaux and Cioran set out to consider a mode of self-development based on the practice of the "unrealized". The will to achieve has shaped a self limited to its social roles and socially adaptive practices. The "unrealized" self, however, is not limited to its social identifications. It is always open to the new and further structuring because it does not rest in the full realization of its potentialities. Due to its capacity to disengage itself from the restraints of any fixed identity, the "unrealized" self assumes a new mode of existence and an original contestatory stance