Abstract
In the eighteenth century, the Faustian attitude to autonomous representation and the objectification of the subject moves decisively into the realm of the erotic. Even in Spies and Marlowe, the erotic power exerted by the animate image of Helen of Troy marks the stage at which the distinction between illusion and reality breaks down. This condition is known to postmodern philosophers as “hyper-reality,” and thinkers like Jean Baudrillard have argued convincingly that the displacement of the referent by the sign is the definitive characteristic of contemporary consciousness. In Baudrillard’s work, however, hyper-reality loses some of the ethical stigma that his former Situationist colleague Guy Debord attached to the “spectacle.” While both Debord and Baudrillard trace a direct link between the spectacle and the imposition of imaginary exchange-value on an object, Debord emphasizes the fact that exchange-value is objectified labor-power, and this give his critique a moralistic tone that has largely disappeared from postmodernist accounts of the hyper-real.
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Notes
See Georg Lukacs, “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” in History and Class-Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971).
Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Anchor Books, 1977), 136.
Susan Griffin, Pornography and Silence: Culture’s Revenge Against Nature (New York: Harper and Row, 1981), 36.
Anthony Munday, A Second and Third Blast of Retrait from Plaies and Theaters (London: 1580; New York: Johnson Reprint Corp., 1972), 66, 89.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, trans. James Harle Bell, John Richard von Sturmer, and Rodney Needham, ed. Rodney Needham (Boston: Beacon, 1969), 496.
Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic of Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex,” in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), 157–210, quotation from 204–205.
Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women (New York: Putnam, 1981), 115.
John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. David Hawkes (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2004).
Cited in E. M. Butler, The Fortunes of Faust (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1989), 72.
Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, The Rover and Other Works, ed. Janet Todd (New York: Penguin Books, 1992), 237.
See Ian Watt, Myths of Modern Individualism: Faust, Don Quixote, Don Juan, Robinson Crusoe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
Shoshona Felman, The Literary Speech Act: Don Juan with J.L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983).
John D. Caputo, ed., with commentary, Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida. (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997), 22.
Moliere, Don Juan and Other Plays, trans. George Graveley and Ian MacLean (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). 61. Subsequent references are to this edition.
John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, Complete Poems, ed. David Veith (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002).
J. W. von Goethe, Faust Parts I and II trans. Stuart Atkins (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). Subsequent references are to this edition.
Jerome J. McGann, ed., Lord Byron: The Major Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Subsequent references are to this edition. Fred Parker, in “Between Satan and Mephistopheles: Byron and the Devil,” Cambridge Quarterly 35.1, 1–29 reads Manfred and Cain as transitionary points between Milton and Goethe in the developing depiction of the “alienated ego” (16).
In “This gloom … which can avail thee nothing: Cain and Skepticism,” Criticism (Spring 1999), Leonard S. Goldberg argues that even the iconoclasm that leads Cain to tear down Abel’s sacrificial altar arises from an economic supposition of false equivalence: “Such rituals are, for Cain, always modes of economic expression: one trades the life of an animal in order to have a life of one’s own.” See also Anya Taylor, Magic and English Romanticism (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1979).
For an alternative view, which argues that Byron’s Don Juan remains in the tradition of de Molina and Moliere, see Moyra Haslett, Byron’s Don Juan and the Don Juan Legend (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).
George Sand, The Seven Strings of the Lyre: A Woman’s Version of the Laust Legend, trans. George A. Kennedy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 40.
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© 2007 David Hawkes
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Hawkes, D. (2007). Faust and Don Juan. In: The Faust Myth. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230603424_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230603424_5
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