Cette thèse porte sur une édition commentée du Livre-oreiller (Makura no sôshi枕草子 ; c. 1000), réalisée par Kitamura Kigin 北村季吟 en 1674 et intitulée Commentaire de l’aurore au printemps (Shunshoshô 春曙抄). Le Livre-oreiller est atypique et hétérogène. Atypique, il ne ressemble à aucune autre œuvre japonaise de la même époque. Hétérogène, il est difficile d’enfermer la diversité de ce qui le compose dans une définition unique, ou de caractériser ce qui pourrait assurer sa cohérence. La biographie de son auteur, désignée par le surnom de « Sei Shônagon » 清少納言, est incertaine. Enfin, les différents manuscrits présentent entre eux des différences profondes.L’objectif de ce travail est de reconstituer la trajectoire qu’a suivie Le Livre-oreiller pour passer du texte — objet écrit se manifestant comme multiple, instable, indéterminé, non interprété — à l’œuvre — entité unique, stable, signifiante et interprétable. Notre postulat est que le Commentaire de l’aurore au printemps constitue un moment décisif dans cette évolution. Le poète Kitamura Kigin, auteur de cette édition commentée, fut un influent commentateur de textes anciens, à une époque caractérisée par le développement du livre imprimé et la démocratisation de l’accès à la connaissance lettrée. Notre travail se situe à la croisée de l’étude littéraire, des études de la réception, et de l’histoire matérielle du livre. / This research is about The Spring Dawn Commentary, a commentary edition of The Pillow Book (Makura no sôshi 枕草子 ; c. 1000), written by Kitamura Kigin 北村季吟 in 1674.The Pillow Book is both atypical and heterogeneous. Atypical in that it is not readily comparable to other texts of the same era. Being heterogeneous, it evades attempts to characterize in one single definition all what it is composed of. The life of the author, known as “Sei Shônagon” 清少納言, remains obscure, and ancient manuscripts are extremely diverse in the text they present. The purpose of this study is to observe the course by which The Pillow Book has changed from “text” to “ literary work”. That is, how what was plural, inconstant and uncertain in its meaning became one, constant, meaningful and thus suitable for interpretation. The argument of this research is that The Spring Dawn Commentary played a major role in this process.17th century in Japan was characterized by a rapid development in book printing technology and the book trade, thus enabling the spread of knowledge. In this context, the poet Kitamura Kigin was one of the most respected commentators of ancient literature.

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This study explores the nature of writing and the sorts of presence that writing gives us access to. This understanding of writing includes not only all speaking and all writing in the narrow sense of marks on a page, but goes beyond this to include the sense in which Derrida uses the term ‘writing’ in Of Grammatology, to mean a broad and complex process of the construction of textual traces or presences necessarily brought about through the structural mechanism of difference inherent in the writing process (Derrida, 1997). This study argues that writing is a system that creates Subjects or selves as the writing happens. It suggests that writing is a remarkable site from which to explore the construction of selves, because it gives us access to (partially) identifiable presences, in the apparent absence of the writer. It goes on to demonstrate that this identity can be distinguished through written traces of difference left for the reader to decipher, by analysing different aspects of the plot and writing devices in Peter Greenaway’s film The Pillow Book and in Kafka’s short story In the Penal Colony. These two texts are considered particularly relevant to this study, in that they both explicitly deal with the contradictory nature of writing and how it relates to the Being (there or the contextualised Being of Dasein) and being (in general), the life and death, the empowerment and destruction of the Subjects that writing sets up. Both texts explore salient aspects of writing on the human body. The study uses these texts as a platform for speculation about the kind of presence that can be traced through writing, and proposes that the written Subject is multiple, contradictory and reflexive, connected and related, and that it is impermanent and has a deferred presence. Finally, this written Subject is also explored in the context of Foucault’s expositions of the self in texts such as Technologies of the self (Foucault, 1994) and ‘What is an Author?’ (Foucault, 1977) in answer to his question Who are we in the present, what is this fragile moment from which we can’t detach our identity and which will carry our identity away with itself? (Foucault, 1994:xviii) Copyright / Dissertation (MA)--University of Pretoria, 2010. / Philosophy / unrestricted