Abstract

This dissertation examines the representation of the couple in post World War I French literature and thought. Its premise is to assess the paroxysm of the amatory relation that reaches crisis proportions in the literary, psychoanalytic and philosophical discourses of this period. Hermeneutic practices built on a psychoanalytic paradigm interpret amorous disorder and the impossible couple as the incompatibility between the sexual and social. In contrast, readings of the couple in Georges Bataille, Colette Peignot, Marguerite Duras, Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Blanchot, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Luce Irigaray offer another apparatus for assessing the fracture in the symbolic order declared by the amatory relation. A genealogy from Bataille to Irigaray argues that the unhinging represented by the couple paradoxically represents an exemplary form of sociality. The couple emerges as a symbolic construct that contains the potential to re-vision the instability of the social; it deploys a model of the social bond responding to a resurgent imperative for community. The dissertation traces this reinvestment of the scene of the couple throughout post World War I French cultural history. An elucidation of Freud and Lacan's "contracts" that bind the couple provides a point of departure for establishing its symbolic frames. The representational modality of the couple migrates beyond psychoanalysis to the political avant-garde. Georges Bataille's radical economy of the couple emerges in the context of his interrogations on the question of community. The form of sociality envisioned by this paradoxical, dissymmetrical couple affirms the fecundity of the Bataillean erotic and uncovers the ethico-political impetus of this concept. Analyses of Bataille's Le bleu du ciel and the Laure-Bataille exchange demonstrate that the sovereign bond of the "human" couple proves more viable than collectivities of both left and right wing orientation. Sovereignty emerges as a paradigm for reading Duras' Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein, and advancing feminist-bound and non-reifying conceptions of subjectivity and experience. In Irigaray's writings, the sociality of the couple becomes constituted as a form civil identity: the immanent community of the couple acquires its own capital, eschewing the reifying power of the State