Being and Notness
Being and Notness
This chapter provides, principally through a study of Pierre Bergounioux’s recent novel La Casse, a counter-argument to the book’s defense of connectedness. Bergounioux’s narrator desperately and unsuccessfully seeks to connect to his orphaned and solitary father. He fails to convince his father that they communicate within the Cartesian universal community of “thinking things.” The narrator attempts to escape from his human aloneness through disappearing into nonhuman matter (trees and junk metal). Does the father, the novel implicitly asks, provide a unique, indispensable path into a human community? Bergounioux’s work suggests but does not exploit the possibility of a more productive connection through the mother.
Keywords: Pierre Bergounioux, La Casse, orphanhood, Rene Descartes, thinking thing, Arboreal being, metallic being, maternity
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