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Perhaps my view of life is too cynical but it seems to me that a lot of this talk about love is nonsense. A woman’s love is always maternal and egoistic. A man, on the contrary, side by side with his extraordinary cerebral sexualism and bodily fervour (from which women are normally free) possesses a fund of genuine affection for the “beloved” or “once beloved” object. (LII, ) The reemergence of the concept of egoism in a less guarded context suggests that the young Joyce would have been shocked by the fervent advocacy of the term by Dora Marsden and her feminist friends.

17 Both Renan and Joyce are attentive to the risks implied in this notion, above all the risk of a sentimentalism seen as the exaggeration or perversion of this legitimate sentiment. How can one distinguish between a genuine national sentiment and its perversion? This is a question to which we will return in chapter , when discussing what Meredith calls “sentimentalism” or the denial of the links between the subject’s position and the acknowledgment of a collective debt (since most nations constitute themselves by managing a real or symbolical debt).

As we can see, this tenet is not very far from Nordau’s basic idea that the ego is one with the universe (by which he means society and nature). But whereas Nordau reaches for complete agreement and subjugation, for Marsden the main question is to ascertain when “I” and “Ego” coincide and when they diverge. Her conceptual language is informed by Berkeley and Hume, and she reprinted a philosophical paper by Professor Morgan on “Berkeley’s Doctrine of Esse” in The Egoist of October . Her drift would in fact lead her toward the post-Fichtean discussions one finds in the early texts of Hegel, or to a neo-Hegelian position similar to that of Francis Bradley – thus putting her in close proximity to T.