Victor Hugo – Hernani

• Theme: Romantic rebellion, love, honor, and the aesthetic confrontation with fate.

Thinking Through Michel Foucault (1926-1984)’s Philosophy on the Art Essence

Victor Hugo’s Hernani represents more than a theatrical plot of love and revenge—it stages a rupture in the regime of representation, a Foucauldian breach in the “episteme” of classical decorum. With its anti-classical structure, radical hero, and emotional excess, Hernani aligns with Foucault’s notion that history does not progress in a straight line, but through epistemic breaks, where new ways of knowing and being suddenly rupture old regimes of truth.

Hugo’s protagonist Hernani is not just a romantic outlaw—he is a self-fashioning subject, enacting a tragic aesthetics of life. According to The Care of the Self, ethics is no longer about conforming to rules but about the craft of existence, a heroic style of being. Hernani chooses death over submission to dishonor or corrupted loyalty. In this sense, he performs what Foucault might describe as an ethical stylization of one’s own destiny—a kind of existential authorship forged in the crucible of choice.

The play’s famously rebellious opening night sparked riots not merely because of its stylistic choices, but because it questioned the power-discourse nexus at the heart of classical theatre. Foucault notes how discourses (like those of aesthetics and morality) do not float freely; they are regulated by institutions, norms, and exclusions. Hernani disrupts these regulating structures—both in its unorthodox dramaturgy and in its Romantic vision of a subject who refuses the constraints of inherited power.

King Don Carlos—who will become Emperor Charles V—represents an emerging sovereign subject, torn between political ascension and erotic longing. He embodies a transitional form of governmentality, oscillating between the old juridico-political logic and the new rationalizing forces of the modern state. His interactions with Hernani and Doña Sol reveal Foucault’s notion of subjection: to become sovereign is also to internalize discipline, to split oneself.

Doña Sol, caught between the passions of three men, does not passively accept her fate. She instead embraces death with Hernani, enacting Foucault’s notion of resistance through care—a conscious refusal to live according to the power scripts imposed on her body and desire. Her decision is not submission, but a final act of parrhesiastic selfhood.

The final suicide pact is no longer a tragic inevitability, but a deliberate aesthetic culmination of life as art. In Foucault’s words, “Life must become a work of art.” In Hernani, it does—violently, beautifully, and irrevocably.