The Life Intense by Tristan Garcia

Author:Tristan Garcia
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

The romantic, person of storms

The libertine’s nerves soon branched out beyond her body to take root in the whole of nature. In some ways, the romantic is a libertine who, having deserted cities and salons, discovers outside of her body a sort of nervosity belonging to all of nature. The nervosity of nature is often revealed by storms, which is why the romantic is the poet of storms and passions, of Sturm und Drang. The intense person of the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century upholds an ideal of natural intensity that resonates in the same way throughout the nerves of the body and the vault of the sky. We see this evoked in the stanzas that Lord Byron composed in the midst of a violent storm: ‘Clouds burst, skies flash, oh, dreadful hour!’5 ‘Rise quickly, longed-for storms!’ René exclaims.6 ‘The storm comes tomorrow’, Hugo seems to respond.7

The romantic poet’s revelation is often accompanied by a first love. Like the sudden revelation of electricity in nature, the thunder and lightning of that amorous shock to the system recharge the romantic’s own internal electricity.

Libertines and romantics end up embodying two models of the moral ideal that Jean Deprun refers to as ‘intensivism’.8 According to him, intensivism simultaneously joins together a conception of time, happiness, and personhood, and at this point we can already see the traces of Rousseau and Sade. This conception stems from the discovery of a self-identity that is no longer substantial. This kind of self-identity instead arises from the joint movement of the nerves and the soul, and gives expression to profound fluctuations of personality. This movement is akin to the roiling currents found in the depths of the ocean. The doctor of Sèze notes the following in his physiological and philosophical research on animal sensitivity and life, ‘By this sensation at the root of all others [. . .] one is thus assured that one exists, not only because one knows it, but because one feels it. This feeling, strong in childhood, is lost, or rather, confused in the soul’s tumultuous movements following adulthood.’9 From Maine de Biran to Cabanis, seventeenth-century thinkers were obsessed with this feeling of self. Biran located the absolute feeling of self in the intensity of effort. A person on the verge of drowning acquires a lively and incontestable feeling of existing and being herself. Abstract thought can never account for such a feeling with any certainty.

How can we be sure that we are really ourselves? The libertine and romantic models of intense humanity respond to this crucial question through action. For them, pure thought cannot provide any assurances regarding our identity or our correspondence with ourselves for this reason: identity is no longer substantial; identity is intensive. I have to deal with the fact that my social life makes me less myself. It distances me from the maximal sensation of myself. Only a vigorous interior movement, an effort on the part of a whole being, can resist this torpor and restore the self’s most profound meaning and highest degree of actualisation.

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