The figure of Don Juan as a cultural concept from the perspective of critical theory (with special focus on G.G. Byron's "Don Juan")

The object of study of this dissertation is the fictional figure of the ‘archetypal seducer’ Don Juan, a character that emerged in Western European culture at the time of the Spanish Baroque and has remained of cultural interest ever since. The aim of the investigation is to provide a definition of the figure of Don Juan as a cultural concept, and to suggest an explanation for the apparent decline in interest from the second half of the 20th century. The first, theoretical part introduces the aspects of critical theory that are used to outline the general framework of the thesis. The main analytical tool of the dissertation is a combination of several postmodernist theoretical approaches, i.e. the theory of the concept by Deleuze and Guattari; Habermas’s theory of communicative action; Foucault’s theory of power; the theory of transgression by Bataille and Foucault; Baudrillard’s theory of ‘cold’ seduction by the mass media, and the theory of one-dimensional society by Marcuse. The second, historical part reviews the genesis of the Don Juan concept on the three planes of reference as indicated by Deleuze and Guattari: the psychosocial, the aesthetic, and the philosophical. The third, analytical part, deals with the constituent parts of the Don Juan concept: power/ domination, transgression, and seduction, thereby providing a definition of Don Juan as a cultural concept and of the cultural message that the concept transmits to members of a given culture. The final part attempts to explain why the cultural interest in the Don Juan figure diminished in the second half of the 20th century. It is suggested that after the removal of the prohibition on sexual freedom (the very prohibition on which the Don Juan concept is based), the conceptualisation re-surfaced in the form of a pop culture hero, the cinematic character James Bond. Comparative analysis of the two figures on the conceptual level shows that it is possible to explain James Bond as a postmodern Don Juan figure, yet the cultural messages of the two figures differ importantly in terms of their transgressive aspect