Tirso de Molina, Molière, Lenau: three variations on the theme of Don Juan.

This book is born of a suspicion, in whose light we have tried to revise, in three major versions of the legend, the process to which Don Juan finds death. Don Juan is perhaps not in the first place a seducer, perhaps he is just a mocker: and if his attitude towards women, towards his father, toward religion, was only the consequence of rejection of a debt that nothing, however , you can pay? Is not Don Juan the emancipator of women more than the one who mocks them? And beyond your own debt, is not your rejection of any contract in general?

Something nonetheless, always, prevents him from going to the end of that rejection and being a true Promethean hero. As if the debt system could finally only lead to comedy.

Sarah Kofman / Jean-Yves Masson