“Perpetual Euphoria”: Pascal Bruckner’s "Lunes de Fiel" and the Failure of Living Together

Abstract

Pascal Bruckner interrogates the evolution of passionate relationships, married life, desire and different aspects of happiness in the Western world. He questions the happiness of conjugal relations in his novel Lunes de Fiel, where he draws up a critique of conjugality in the eighties. Bruckner examines the conception of happiness in married life by exposing the opposite of its principle: by exhibiting the bankruptcy of the couple, he constantly questions the relations of domination, humiliation and destruction in monogamy. Is there a possibility to achieve happiness within married life? This article will insist on these questions by analyzing the manner in which Bruckner handles his literary text already in the eighties, in order to elaborate in a fictional way, the philosophical ideas which will be put forward some twenty years later in his essays.