As Jacob Golomb notices in his book In Search of Authenticity
(1995):
The principle aim of writers on authenticity was to evoke in their readers the
pathos of authenticity. They hoped to restore a personal mental power and sense
of selfhood that modernity had diminished [Ö] literature is particularly helpful
in engaging the readerís attention and provoking her to action, since it tempts
the reader to follow the path of authenticity without making this explicit, and
more importantly, without defining authenticity.^20Golomb reads Jean-Paul Sartre to argue that the quest for authenticity
presupposes salvation where none is available.^21 Golomb argues: ëThe
state will aggressively attempt to own each Daseinís Being, regarding
it as an object to be used, instead of allowing each Dasein to realize its
individual aim of owning its own Being.í^22 Here, the word ëowningí is
appropriate: the Greek sense of authenticity is ëhaving auctoritasí or
possessing inherent authority. In this way, the Greek makes a
connection between authenticity and authority. ëAuctoritasí involves a
will to power and an imperialist mode of subjectivity akin to that
criticized by Luce Irigaray in Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche
(1991) where she calls for no master territories. It is precisely this
ëauctoritasí from which the poets under discussion flee with a poetry
that disrupts authority, place-logic and the pathos for authentic models
of identification. As we have seen in Berkeleyís poems, such a meta-
physics of presence or at homeness is impossible, and is constantly
infiltrated by alterity and the unheimlich as she presents us with a man
who ëhardly seemed/ at home in his set of bonesí.^23
Within an Irish context, whereby part of the country is dis-
possessed from the nation or colonized by the British, the national
20 Jacob Golomb, In Search of Authenticity: From Kierkegaard to Camus,
Problems of Modern European Thought (London: Routledge, 1995), p.19.
21 Ibid., p.149.
22 Ibid., p.117. Cf. Thus Spake Zarathustra, First Part: ‘On The New Idol’, The
Portable Nietzsche, ed. & trans., W. Kaufmann (New York: Viking, 1954),
p.160.
23 Sara Berkeley, ‘Facts About Water’, Facts About Water (Newcastle: Bloodaxe,
1994), p.60.