Speech in Action: Language, Society, and Subject in Germaine de Staël's Corinne

Abstract

Speech in Action: Language, Society, and Subject in Germaine de Staël's Corinne Jennifer Birkett A central preoccupation in Germaine de Staël's Corinne, ou l'Italie (1807),1 and one which is returning to contemporary agendas with a political urgency equal to that of its feminist theme, is the problematic of the relation between the individual subject and the social and political community. In his influential collection of lectures, The Philosophical Discourse ofModernity (1985),2 Jürgen Habermas has renewed the debate with two fresh contributions: his concept of the "communication community," and his meditations on modernity's consciousness of time. In this essay, I use Habermas's insights to illuminate the modernity of Corinne, and in particular to explore the mechanics and the meaning of the heroine's improvisation exercises, which, I argue, are simultaneously improvisations of self and improvisations of society. At the same 1 Germaine de Staël, Corinne, ou l'Italie, éd. Claudine Herrmann, 2 vols (Paris: Editions des femmes, 1979). References are to this edition. I have modernized the spelling in all quotations. 2 Jürgen Habermas, Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne: Zwölf Vorlesungen (Frankfurt-amMain : Suhrkamp Verlag, 1985), trans. Frederick Lawrence, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987). References are to this edition. I am grateful to Lois McNay's book Foucault and Feminism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992) for first drawing my attention to Habermas's notion of a discourse ethics and its interest for "feminist and other attempts to understand the intersubjective dimension of social relations" (McNay, p. 182). As I complete this essay, I note the advertised appearance of a new collection of essays for January 1995 by Johanna Meehan (Habermas and Feminism, London: Routledge). EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, volume 7, numéro 4, juillet 1995 394 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION time, I want to maintain a feminist perspective (not one of Habermas's preoccupations) with a consideration of Staël's emphasis on the distinctive role of the ideal feminine voice in the improvisatory process. The "modernity" of Corinne, read in these selected perspectives, is twofold. It presents a dynamic model of the subject's founding in intersubjectivity , within a process of discursive exchange in which the individual is engaged both as an autonomous self-creating subject and as a representative of the groups of which society is constituted. It also presents a ground-breaking account of creative feminine voice as the fulcrum of the model, speaking a subject that is both open and receptive to otherness and resistant in its own right. The Modern Perspective i) Subject to Reason: Habermas and the Communication Community In its own context, Habermas's theory of the "communication community " addresses a different agenda from Madame de Staël's text, and it is important to avoid temptations to anachronism and opportunism in bringing the two together A short preliminary account of Habermas's position should bring out both the differences in their perspective and the areas of significant overlapping interest. In his preface to The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Habermas explains that his aim is to reconstruct the philosophical discourse of modernity in the light of the challenge from the neostructuralist critique of reason. The modern definition of modernity, he argues, arose in the course of the eighteenth century with the replacement of the Christian concept of the world of the future as a world still to come, a last day yet to dawn, by a secular concept which "expresses the conviction that the future has already begun. It is the epoch that lives for the future , that opens itself up to the novelty of the future."3 The concept of modernity implies the inauguration of a new historical-philosophical perspective , in which the present finds itself as it recognizes its status in history, but not as a carrier of the norms of the past; rather, it defines itself in terms of the radical break it has made with the past (pp. 67 ). Habermas evokes Walter Benjamin's productive characterization in his "Theses on the Philosophy of History" of the time-consciousness of modernity, a now-time (Jetztzeit) shot through with fragments of Messianic time: an authentic, startling awareness of...