L'esthétique du double chez Franz Hellens et David Lynch

Details

Supervisors

Piret, Pierre

Faculty

Faculté de philosophie, arts et lettres

Degree label

Master [60] en langues et lettres françaises et romanes, orientation générale

Abstract

enThis thesis explores how the aesthetic of the double in the works of Franz Hellens and David Lynch reshapes our relationship with reality. The first section analyzes the mirror-like relationship that links the character to his architectural and topographical environment. The protagonist’s psychological fracture is physically projected onto the setting, while, in turn, the external space influences the subject. This phenomenon, conceptualized as “legendary psychasthenia” by Roger Caillois, dissolves the boundaries of bodily individuality. Faced with this threat of collapse, the second section examines the emergence of the double as a survival strategy of the ego. The subject initially employs splitting as a narcissistic bulwark to deny death (Rank) or as an ideal projection (Lacan). Nevertheless, this defense mechanism inevitably fails once the double becomes autonomous and persecutes the original, leading the character into psychogenic fugue, paranoid alienation, or total obliteration through vampirism. Finally, the last chapter examines the ontological consequences of this duplication on the represented world. By comparing Clément Rosset’s ontology with Jean Bessière’s poetics, this dissertation demonstrates that Hellens and Lynch assign equal ontic weight to the original and the copy, thereby abolishing the traditional asymmetry in favor of structural undecidability. The double does not create parallel worlds but disrupts, from within, the criteria for exclusion in the sensible world, thereby marking the transition to an “expanded realism” that fully incorporates the dreamlike and the invisible.