OVERCOMING THE INFLUENCE OF BERGSON AND HUSSERL ON THE THINKING OF CAMIL PETRESCU AND JOSÉ RÉGIO
OVERCOMING THE INFLUENCE OF BERGSON AND HUSSERL ON THE THINKING OF CAMIL PETRESCU AND JOSÉ RÉGIO

Summary/Abstract: The Romanian Camil Petrescu (1894-1957) and the Portuguese José Régio (1901-1969) are contemporary writers, representative of European interwar modernism. Without having known each other, they wrote exceptional novels (The Last Night of Love, The First Night of War; The Bed of Procrustes; Jogo da cabra-cega), where they in no way imitate Proustianism, but participate in the creation of the radical modernist spirit of European urban culture in the first part of the 20th century, precisely anticipating the major crisis of aestheticphilosophical modernity and its obvious failure in the current forms of posthumanism. It is particularly significant for all modernist novel thinking to observe in their novels the way in which they expressed the nihilism of their European generation. Both, in novels as different in narrative detail as they are similar in their ultimate messages, revealed, from pure artistic intuition, the anti-human energy of the humanisms of modernity. Camil Petrescu and José Régio start from Bergsonian theses and then from those of Husserl’s phenomenology – nuclear theses of the modernism of the time – but they do not remain anchored in them, but quickly come to see their limits, while they project, even through the prism of this philosophical meditation moved into the field of literature, another inner man than the Christian one, different or opposite to the pre-Christian one – Socratic or Platonic. Camil Petrescu and José Régio situate themselves, like the entire generation, in the middle of a serious philosophical-aesthetic contradiction, which best describes the crisis of artistic modernity in the first half of the 20th century. Camil Petrescu and José Régio are part of the generation of post-1919 Proustian writers decisively influenced by the Bergsonian position on the subject. Literature and philosophy are placed at the service, if not subordinated, of a unitary problematic, arising from psychology, affectivity, emotivity, sensation – therefore from the internal dynamics of the subject. As Bergson suggests as early as 1889, the social self – the exteriority of the subject – is seen only as a projection of the deep, interior self.

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