The Disappearance of the Self: The Image of Man in French Art, Literature and Philosophy around 1960

Theorists such as Jacques Lacan and Claude Lévi-Strauss, artists such as Yves Klein and Niki de Saint Phalle, and writers such as Alain Robbe-Grillet and Claude Simon: around 1960, they all contributed to a provocative change in the image of man in French art, literature, and philosophy. In her interdisciplinary study, Dorothee Wimmer shows the fundamental change that was announced around 1960 in the works of these theorists, artists, and writers in Paris: the image of the intellectually centered ego of modernity, which can make conscious and free decisions, began to give way to the idea of ​​a heterogeneous ego of postmodernity, which can only become aware of itself in the "magical" moment of the performative. The author makes it clear that this "disappearance" of the ego is not just a phenomenon of French philosophy. Rather, she illustrates it with pointed examples from painting and fiction: Yves Klein and Niki de Saint Phalle used human bodies and firearms as "brushes" to create universal color energies far removed from the self. Alain Robbe-Grillet and Claude Simon exposed the reader to a constantly transforming novel language. In her study, Dorothee Wimmer is thus able to convincingly demonstrate the emergence of French art into postmodernism.