Buffet, Thomas <br/><br/>
Klingemann’s idealist and nihilist Don Juan 

 -  2025.<br/>							 
<br/><br/> 60 
<br/><br/> In the Nightwatches of Bonaventura by August Klingemann (1804), the narrator draws his inspiration from Don Juan’s myth, celebrating the ideals of Beauty and Love, systematically denounced with nihilism in a great satire that alternately unmasks the illusion of Literature, Reason and Subjectivity, leading to an allegiance to universal hate. The dialectical tenseness of idealism and nihilism finds its solution in an idealistic conception perverted with immorality. Don Juan’s myth, reviewed by the Romantic, perfectly brings together Life and Death through the Absolute of Love, transcended in death, and let coexist the ideal and its ironical denunciation.