Abstract

The critique of modernity that this dissertation explores comes about as the result of the contact between European and non-European cultures. The writings of Carl Einstein and Victor Segalen at the beginning of the twentieth century constitute a conscious challenge to Western practices of primitivism and exoticism as well as a fundamental critique of the epistemological preconditions that made them possible. These writers thus expose the limitations of Western conceptions and mappings of other cultures. ;Against primitivist perceptions, Carl Einstein's Negerplastik argues that African sculpture represents a solution to problems of sculpture that far exceeds the attempts of contemporary European artists, thus toppling the hierarchy of civilized vs. prehistoric art that Europe had been accustomed to take for a fact. ;Victor Segalen's work is directed against the tradition of literary exoticism of his time. His novel, Les Immemoriaux, is neither in the genre of the travelogue, nor in that of an eighteenth century philosophical treatise. In his book, an indigenous narrator recounts the demise of the Maori culture in contact with European explorers, merchants and missionaries. ;Fueling these critiques of primitivism and exoticism is a concern with the foundations of Western thought underwriting such practices. In the course of this inquiry, Segalen and Einstein indict modernity and its conceptual premises as a geo-political tool predicated on a dialectics that ultimately relies on a thought of sameness and oneness. ;Influenced by Nietzsche, their writings reject the tenets of Western idealism, of science and of the possibility of objective knowledge. Their 'aesthetic' critiques destabilize the subject of knowledge in favor of a subject of experience. In this critique, a redefined notion of aesthetics enables the conceptualization of cultural otherness of the 'ground' of difference rather than sameness. Their inquiries thus fissure the European philosophical project and announce the end of metaphysics