Louise Bourgeois Essay Prize
A first-year PhD student in Philosophy, Van Steertegem has interests in Wittgenstein, Kant, and nineteenth-century French literature. Before coming to Stanford, she received a BA with honors in 2023 from Swarthmore College, with a major in Philosophy and a minor in French literature. In her prize-winning essay, Van Steertegem takes on a fundamental question: “What is it to be a self, and why should we attend to this question? If there is a kind of self-unity we can hope to achieve, what is it and how should we go about attaining it?” She examines two contrasting conceptions of a unified self in Albert Camus’s Le Mythe de Sisyphe and Honoré de Balzac’s Le Père Goriot. While Camus finds the foundation of self-unity in character, a set of identifying traits, Van Steertegem suggests, Balzac locates selfhood in narrative, by which characters continually struggle to make sense of themselves, stitching together life events and developments in time. She uses a juxtaposition of the two writers to suggest that certain aspects of selfhood can only be captured through a narrative mode of thinking, and that self-narrativizing is essential to constituting a self.