Gorz and the Moral Conversion

Abstract

The problem of authenticity had a personal significance for the young Gorz, whose divided background was a source of considerable uncertainty in his childhood. When Hitler invaded Austria, and the world around him fragmented violently into opposing camps, his mixed heritage offered him no firm means of identification and solidarity with others. Spending the war years exiled in Switzerland, then settling in Paris with his English wife, and finally embarking on a writing career disguised by a repertoire of pseudonyms, Gorz trod a path that at each stage seemed to perpetuate the discontinuities and disintegrative terms of his youth. Belonging wholly to no nation, class, culture or religion, bereft of the capacity to identify himself with or against other social groups, he entered adulthood faced with the daunting task of reconstructing himself in the absence of any values, attachments, or intuitive certainties that could serve as an unquestioned point of departure.