Marguerite Yourcenar reading Nietzsche

Abstract

Nietzsche’s deconstruction of the philosophy of the subject runs through Marguerite Yourcenar’s work: by a constant doubt as to the philosophical validity of the Western tradition of the ‘I’; by the conviction that the ‘I’ is a fact of language and one of the great errors of intellectualist understanding in the face of the intuitionism of Eastern philosophies; by the substitution of a constellation of the subject for the realm of the unique. To be born to oneself is no longer religious submission, but a personal demand for moral elevation, the fulfillment of which requires acquiescence to one’s destiny - the only freedom accessible to humankind. Christian transcendence is replaced by an aesthetic immanence that gives shape to the Yourcenarian project of self-knowledge.