Don Juan's Wager
Description:... Why is it that the myth of Don Juan has endured some three hundred years? And why has such an unlikely figure remained such a potent concept in a cultural economy constructed around notions of symmetry, balance, and democratic capitalism? Frangois Rachline uses Don Juanan antagonist in every way to the mechanisms of contemporary cultureto illuminate our present situation, offering him up as an antidote to the increasingly fragile sense of self that is left to us in the age of late capitalism. This remarkable study offers an original and incisive analysis of the economic, libidinal, and ethical dimensions of citizenship today. In this joyful essay, [Frangois Rachline] helps us to understand Don Juan as the negative and revealing agent of his timeas well as a prototype who foreshadows our own time. He refuses any economy of symmetry: no repentance to compensate for his crimes, no payments to reimburse his debts, not even submission to the fear of death, which could have redeemed the decadent pleasures of his life. His wager? The game. His choice? To enjoyrather than to possess. His rule? Disequilibriumyet he continues in perpetual motion. He never stops, and dies a loser; in that he is common. But he disappears without surrendering, and in that sense he is superb.Jean Pol Droit, Le Monde
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