Casanova, the appeal of possibilities (agrégation 2021)

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Stéphane Lojkine

Aix-Marseille Université, CIELAM

Portrait of Casanova at 63 (Icosameron, Prague, 1787) - Johann Berka

Presentation

After a life of adventure, Casanova at the age of 60 is recruited by the Count of Waldstein as librarian at Dux Castle, some 100 kilometers northeast of Prague. There he embarks on an autobiographical project that will occupy him until his death in 1798.

The 3,700-page manuscript making up the History of My Life would not be published until after his death, not without cuts, rewrites and re-chapters. In fact, the project, with its distinctive French and Italianisms, with its rewrites, erasures, unfinished cuts, is pretty much unpublishable. The aim of this course will be to restore precisely its originality as a projet, i.e. something other than a book, something other than a confession, something other even than a testamentary work.

Casanova writes to live once more, one last time. It's a project to make life possible. How? Through the cunning leverage of an incredible seduction enterprise...

Required edition for the course

Casanova, Histoire de ma vie, ed. J.-Ch. Igalens and E. Leborgne, Laffont, Bouquins, 2013, volume I — Casanova, *Histoire de ma vie*, ed. J.-Ch. Igalens and E. Leborgne, Laffont, Bouquins, 2013, volume I.

Please note that there is another Laffont edition, compiled by Francis Lacassin and published in 2009, whose pagination and chaptering are entirely different.

The text on the program is, in volume 1 of the Igalens-Leborgne edition, that of "tome III", p. 681-1313.

Up to p. 929, the Igalens-Leborgne edition presents two versions of the text face to face. It is the longer, later version, on the right-hand page, that is on the program.