Gheorghe Crăciun: The Ipseity and Alterity of the Body
Gheorghe Crăciun’s conception of the body and its relationship to literature has been the one that the author himself has placed at the very centre of his theoretical and aesthetic thought, and consequently among the most discussed aspects of his work. This article aims to situate this issue within the larger aesthetic and philosophical tradition of modernity and to trace its origins back to the late eighteenth-century discovery of subjectivity and its implications. The main argument is that the “body” can be best grasped in terms of self-knowledge and self-consciousness, with two possible interconnected developments: on the one hand, the idea that literary creation is to be conceived as introspection and as expressing the uniqueness of the self, and on the other, the affirmation of the consubstantiality of self and world, the “body” being described as intuition or responsiveness to a dimension of the world that is inaccessible to rational knowledge, but retrievable through aesthetic expression.
Keywords: contemporary Romanian literature, Gheorghe Crăciun, subjectivity, self, body, conceptual language
