Manipularea Metafizică a Identității În Romanul Adam Și Eva De Liviu Rebreanu

This study proposes an interdisciplinary reading of Liviu Rebreanu’s novel Adam and Eve (1925), organised around the central concept of metaphysical manipulation of identity — a concept constructed through the declared extension of Robert Noggle’s (2018/2022) distinction between ordinary manipulation and global manipulation in analytic philosophy of action, and incorporating two structural modifications: the absence of an intentional manipulating agent and the displacement of the object of constraint from the subject’s contingent mental states to their trans-temporal ontological identity. The central hypothesis argues that Toma Novac’s identity is subject to a double manipulation: one of a metaphysical-cosmic order, exercised by the impersonal forces of metempsychosis, trans-individual eros and the Jungian collective unconscious, and one of a discursive-imaginary order, exercised by the character Tudor Aleman and by the omniscient narrator as an instituting instance in the Castoriadian sense. The theoretical framework integrates four complementary axes: analytic philosophy of action (Noggle, 2022), the science of the imaginary (Durand, 1960/1998), social ontology (Castoriadis, 1975/2005) and analytical psychology (Jung, 1959/2003). The analysis reveals that Adam and Eve constructs a literary model of ontologically heteronomous identity — externally determined, trans-temporally sedimented and never fully possessed by the subject who bears it — anticipating, decades before their theoretical systematisation, post-structuralist philosophy’s concerns regarding the decentring of the subject and the impossibility of full autonomy. From the perspective of Gilbert Durand’s science of the imaginary, the novel is read as belonging to the nocturnal regime of the imaginary, structured around cyclicity, descent and the euphemisation of death: each death of the male character is followed by a new existence, while the symbols of deep waters, the cave and the night as a space of revelation organise the erotic recognition between the protagonists. The archetypal feminine occupies, within this reading grid, the symbolic centre of the nocturnal regime, being associated with the depths, the maternal matrix and regeneration. The study also draws on Cornelius Castoriadis’s social ontology, mobilising the concepts of instituting imaginary and magma in order to explain how the seven existences of the Adam–Eve couple function as temporary manifestations of the same identitarian magma, while the omniscient narrator is identified as an instituting instance external to the text, complementary to the discursive manipulation exercised by Tudor Aleman from within the narrated world. A distinct section of the analysis is devoted to the myth of the androgyne, as it appears in Plato’s Symposium and in Mircea Eliade’s commentaries, a myth that provides an explanatory framework for the repeated erotic recognition between Toma Novac and Ileana’s feminine hypostases, read as an ontological nostalgia for a lost totality. Finally, the study integrates Jungian analytical psychology — the concepts of collective unconscious, archetype, anima and individuation — in order to show that the novel’s female characters function, from this perspective, as projections of the man’s anima, and that the impossibility of complete individuation explains, at the psychological level, the perpetual deferral of full erotic fulfilment in the novel. The study concludes that Adam and Eve develops an irreducible tension between the experience of eros as a free choice and its deep structure as absolute ontological necessity, a tension that remains unresolved within any individual existence of the character, yet one that lends the novel a philosophical relevance exceeding its initial critical reception as a minor experiment within Rebreanu’s oeuvre.