Olivier Tonnerre: « Édouard et Ourika: esclaves de la noblesse »

Claire de Duras is most famous for Ourika, the tragic story of an African woman adopted by a noble family when she was a small child. This novella has been widely examined because of its relevance to questions pertaining to colonial and post-colonial studies. However, considered in light of Édouard, Ourika gains a new significance.  Both works mirror one another in plot: a bourgeois man suffers the same fate of rejection as a woman whose skin color is just too different for her time and place.  Ourika and Édouard carry a reminder that the nobility is still a group that does not want to mix its blood: for the nobility, both eponymous characters are of a different race than they are.  I thus propose to read Ourika as a social allegory, in addition to (or rather than) an indictment of racism. 

Karen Turman: “The Codependency and Mutual Exclusivity of Love and Art in Balzac’s Short Stories”

This paper deals with the artist’s model as key in the production of a masterpiece. How does she affect the oeuvre, how does the oeuvre affect her, how do the opposing roles of the artist as lover and genius intersect those of the model as lover and artistic inspiration?  In the short stories, Le Chef-d’oeuvre inconnu, Pierre Grassou and La Maison du Chat-qui-pelote Balzac shows how artistic genius and true love are evolving entities, art is dependent on love, yet love is destroyed by art. Le Chef-d’oeuvre inconnu focuses on the conversion of two artists, the debutant and the aged master.  The former begins as lover and converts the passion for his model to a passion for art, therefore abandoning his real life “Venus” for future masterpieces.  The latter has created a masterpiece, but has such a high standard of beauty for the female subject that he cannot find any earthly inspiration to perfect his work.  Thus his passion for art is converted to an unfulfilled love for his own creation, in a classic Pygmalion analogy, driving him to insanity.  In Pierre Grassou we meet an artist who will never be a master, yet he does find love. However, this love, calculated in its manifestation, is nothing more than a bourgeois convenience, founded on money and practicality, revealing the artist’s complacency in his mediocre talent.  Finally, La Maison du Chat-qui-pelote tells the burning passion between the artist and his muse.  The innocent girl is sublimated, compared to a “bright morning star” and “the sublime compositions of Raphael."  The artist’s painting of her achieves great success, as is expected with such passionate inspiration, however this passion changes after their marriage.  We find yet again the paradox of the relationship between true love and genius: a codependency exists between the two, yet the two can never ultimately coexist.  The conversion of artist to master depends upon his  folle passion for his model, yet this same genius in turn causes the rupture of this love in the artist-model relationship.

Pierre Bras:  « La propriété privée est-elle arrivée ?  L'inscription d'une philosophie du droit dans l'œuvre de Simone de Beauvoir »

In this paper I argue that Simone de Beauvoir’s autobiographical and philosophical essays  shed a new light on legal questions, and even forges a truly original philosophy of Law, which is still relevant to this day.  Rereading The Second Sex (1949), I study the ways in which Beauvoir addresses the right to private property with an existentialist perspective, thus offering a new understanding of the ties between property and freedom.  Whereas modern philosophy considers the right to private property as a  guarantee for freedom, Beauvoir, even if she agrees that being  deprived of the right to private property might affect freedom, warns that a person enjoying this right may become trapped in immanence, which is to say, will no longer be encouraged to surpass  himself or herself, a desire that, according to Existentialist  philosophy, provides the justification for human existence. In addition, Beauvoir’s interest in this matter comes  from her own experience. The first volume of  Beauvoir’s autobiographical works, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter  (1958), testifies that the author faced the ambiguity of the right to private property quite early in her childhood. By relating anecdotes drawn from her own personal existence, Beauvoir takes advantage of her experience to forge her philosophy on the  issue in a very accessible form.