Conclusion

Amy E. Varela

pp. 219-226

in: Tudor Balinisteanu, Violence, narrative and myth in Joyce and Yeats, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013

Abstract

For Ernesto Laclau, the Sorelian conception of myth implies that the social world is not in itself an objective world. The world of action is revealed as a social world in the mythical reconstitution of identities and relations through the violent confrontation of groups (Laclau, 2003, p. 70). However, Georges Sorel's concept of social myth also allows us to see the social world as an objective one to the extent that it is the shape taken by the material world reconstructed as an art text. Sorel distinguishes between the violence of creation and "creative hatred": social agents wield words as tools or weapons to make contradictions material in various forms of social action, but these are always governed by an aesthetic (Sorel, 2004, pp. 275–6).