UC Berkeley

This dissertation identifies and analyzes a tension between self-creation and decreation—the unmaking of self—within literary texts by three modern French authors: Charles Baudelaire, Colette, and Simone Weil. The tension I propose to focus on is symptomatic of a larger trend in modern art, literature, and thought. I will argue that each of these authors treats the body as a site of self-distancing and a surface on which subjectivity can be made and unmade through a manipulation of its space, shape, and dimensions. In particular, non-consummation, unfulfillment, and willful hunger, metaphorical or literal, figured as a reach toward non-being within life, marks an aesthetic, bodily language of plasticity in each that allows for an imagining of the self outside the bounds of the socially given. Each gestures toward the transcendence of bodily form, suggesting alternative acts of self-shaping within the conditions of modernity, directly engaging with the alienation, objectification, and deadening of the human senses, and the abjection of the body in the face of commodified existence and restrictive social norms. In taking distance from the body and its needs as material givens, each of these authors identifies non-being within life as a response to the conditions of subject formation in their world and as an opening onto other ways of being. Hunger and unfulfillment, the flattening and unfleshing of the body, non-consummation and self-consummation map the body as the location of self-undoing in the act of self- and world-making for each.