Borders of a Lip: Romanticism, Language, History, Politics

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Romanticism, Language, History, Politics

Jan Plug

Borders of a Lip FM

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BORDERS OF A LIP

Romanticism, Language, History, Politics

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Jan Plug

STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS

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Cover image: David Rumsey Map Collection, www.davidrumsey.com

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany © 2003 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. For information, address State University of New York Press, 90 State Street, Suite 700, Albany, NY 12207 Production by Judith Block Marketing by Anne Valentine Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Plug, Jan. Borders of a lip : Romanticism, language, history, politics / Jan Plug. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0–7914–5929–2 (alk. paper) 1. Romanticism—Europe. 2. European literature—19th century—History and criticism. I. Title. PN751.P58 2003 809⬘.9145⬘094—dc21 2002044773 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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In Memoriam Pat Plug

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CONTENTS

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Acknowledgments

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Introduction

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Part I. The Sign of History: Kant and Lyotard, Wordsworth Chapter 1.

“As if ” History—Kant, Then and Now

17

Chapter 2.

Naming History: Wordsworth

45

Part II. Bordering the Political: Kleist Chapter 3.

Legal Matter: Der zerbrochne Krug

Chapter 4.

Borders, Crossing: Die Hermannsschlacht

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Part III. The Debts of History: Shelley and Yeats Chapter 5.

Crossing Culture: The Last Man

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Chapter 6.

A Specular Nation: Yeats’s Myth of the Irish

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Threats, Responses: An Afterword

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Notes

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Index

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A C K N OW L E D G M E N T S

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hapter 4 first appeared in somewhat different form in Studies in Romanticism 36 (fall 1997): 391–425, and is reprinted here by permission of the Trustees of Boston University. Chapters 1 and 6 originally appeared in slightly different form in The Centennial Review 41, no. 2 (spring 1997): 385–414 and 43, no. 1 (winter 1999): 135–158, respectively, published by Michigan State University Press. I would also like to express my sincere gratitude to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for doctoral and postdoctoral fellowships that supported the writing of this book. In chapter 5, I discuss a kind of debt that it is impossible to repay. I am plagued by that impossibility now, overwhelmed by the generosity of teachers, colleagues, and friends. Rodolphe Gasché and Henry Sussman read an early version of the manuscript with their customary insight and have supported it and me ever since. Tilottama Rajan provided crucial commentary on the Shelley chapter and even more crucially has been a model of intellectual friendship. Most of all, I wish to thank Carol Jacobs, whose criticism, teaching, and professionalism remain the very best examples, and J. Douglas Kneale, who introduced me to Romanticism and theory in the knowledge that what he had loved others would love, and he taught me how. Luis Madureira believed in me and this book when I no longer did. And Yaël Bratzlavsky was always there, coaxing, encouraging, my all in all. My mother died some months before I learned that this book would be published, my father by her side until the end. When the news of its acceptance came, however, I thought first of her, as I have always done throughout accomplishments and disappointments. I dedicate these pages to her, the anchor of my purer being.

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Borders of a Lip Intro

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I N T RO D U C T I O N

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orders of a lip? How are we to understand this conjunction of the figure of an edge or boundary and a part of the body, though not just any part, admittedly, but the site of language, that which crosses our lips? Although coined from a reading of Heinrich von Kleist’s Die Hermannsschlacht, in which the river Lippe brings together these and more senses of both border and lip, the phrase is emblematic of just such a meeting place in a number of works that either situate themselves in the Romantic tradition or comment upon it. But while speaking of a crossing of the edges or contours of the lip in figures of the movement of voice has become a critical commonplace, the articulation of the lip in terms of borders gives that figure a decidedly political valency. Among the meanings of the word border, after all, is the demarcation of a boundary, especially that between nations. To speak of the borders of a lip, then, is to articulate a figure or trope, perhaps even the “master trope of poetic discourse,”1 in political terms. Better yet, it is to register the politicality of (figurative) language itself. What this phrase would suggest is not merely that language has a number of possible meanings, one of which would be political, but rather that if language can be said to have borders, then its very relation to both its own boundaries and what lies beyond them is conceptualized in terms that will always be political. It might at this point be argued, however, that the very figure of a lip with borders is an aberration, the misguided workings of an overindulged fancy (not even imagination). After all, not only is the troping of the lip in terms of borders capricious, to say the least, but literary criticism and theory would seem to have done nothing over the last quarter of a century or so if they have not eradicated the boundaries between language and history. Still, it is by no means clear

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that the absence of a delimiting figure such as the border would radically alter the historical, critical, linguistic, and literary stakes invoked by my figure. For if language has no borders, then we would seem to be left with two possibilities. On the one hand, language must succumb to reality, history, politics, or however we might like to think of this “outside,” what is conventionally considered the nonlinguistic. In this case, language loses all independence and integrity as such, as language. Language is no longer language so much as it stands in for, takes the place of, something else, history, say, and is thus characterized as the sign of that something else, the sign of history, for instance. Conceived as such a sign, language could always be carried back to its determining instance, and its point of inception, its origin or cause, found, at which point it itself ultimately dissolves, sublated by and in this instance. The intentional structure of language as a relation to appears to be maintained, but this intentionality can always be resolved (and dissolved), if only ideally, since any resistance to complete transparency that language might maintain is still part of its historical moment. Language might very well never be fully sublated in and by history, but the very possibility of such resolution remains as the constitutive limit of a good deal of historicist and materialist criticism, including many of their “new” forms. Historicist criticism as such has a great deal, indeed its very founding presupposition, invested in its conception of language as in some way or other the sign of history. The erasure of the boundary between language and what lies beyond it could, on the other hand, leave us with a conception of language that inversely usurps reality and history. In this case, it is not that a given (historical) reality is the (however hidden) prime cause of language, but language that ultimately subsumes that reality to itself. What this might mean, at the very least, is that not merely the unconscious, as in Lacan’s famous phrase, but reality itself is structured like (a) language, which still leaves the possibility for something like a content that is to be structured and that could ultimately be nonlinguistic. Even more radically, the erasure of any border between language and reality would mean that reality is language. Whether this is understood to mean that language is now the prime mover and cause of reality (“In the beginning was the word”) or that there is nothing but language, that everything is language, the end result is much the same: now it is language rather than “reality” that has lost its independence and identity as such.2 The attempted erasure of what I call the borders of the lip has taken place, in much literary theory, according to the logic of these two poles, through a textualization of history that, it is argued, reduces the historical to a merely linguistic status, or through a reverse movement that would have language carrying history in it as its determining cause and, often, immanent form and meaning.


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Still, it is quite rare that criticism is truly committed to either of these poles. In fact, even that criticism and theory that would seem to lead us to one of these positions often stops short, sometimes out of critical prudence and pragmatics, sometimes out of simple modesty and good common sense, but also, no doubt, because of the difficulty of conceptualizing such a radical proposition as the total erasure of the borders of the lip. The common sense (and often implicit) commitment to these borders, however, should not necessarily lead us to an acquiescing acceptance of their inevitability. If, as my title suggests, I maintain these borders, it is neither for these reasons nor to maintain an absolute and infrangible limit. Rather, Kant and Lyotard, Wordsworth, Kleist, Shelley, and Yeats will demand a rethinking of the figure of the border, now not as limit but as the very figure for the possibility of movement between, as a figure for crossing, even transgression, that allows for a certain rethinking of language, history, the political, and their relation. As I hinted above, it is not by chance that I have selected the title Borders of a Lip. There was, and is, a very specific lip, and one with borders no less, that was central to at least one Romantic text, however marginal. The action of much of Kleist’s little-read play Die Hermannsschlacht is situated precisely along the borders of the river Lippe, which also happens to be the German word for lip. It may seem a mere historical coincidence that this word, which in Kleist, if it does not signify the site of language in the first instance, always borders on the linguistic, should mark the coincidence of language, nature (a river), and the political (the river as border between one principality and another). And it will no doubt appear a sign of critical opportunism to take this coincidence as the figure for the elaboration of a theory of a political criticism and the politicality of literature in the pages that follow. Still, coincidence, however happy or unhappy, is precisely what is at stake in an investigation of history: if we speak of a historical coincidence, it is not only to imply that something else could have happened, but that something else did not happen, and that history sometimes has an unsettlingly ironic way of making things coincidental. This taking place at the same time, or in the same place, I want to argue, is not merely something that takes place in history, but, at least in the texts I read here, is what takes place as history. The historical coincidence Kleist makes clear for us along the borders of the Lippe is the coincidence of language, nature, and politics, and the crossing of the borders of that lip will forever serve to mark that coincidence and render any borders between each of the terms it circumscribes indeterminate. A determination of the historical and political context of literature or a rereading of literary texts with an eye to their ideological repression of history and politics, to the history they refuse to speak of directly, a reading that makes


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history the determining instance for the literary work, does not respond to the kind of coincidence with which Kleist’s Lippe presents us. In Kleist’s figure, as in similar figures in Kant and Lyotard, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Yeats, we are much closer to what one prominent scholar of Romanticism has termed the “historical element in language”: “an integral part of the medium, and an inescapable part of its meaning.”3 It is not just that language always bears the historical weight of the moment and circumstances (the coincidents) of its production. It is the coincidence of language and history or the crossing between them that actually (re)defines history and politics in the works I will read, such that they can no longer be thought of in terms of a simple opposition, not even those oppositions still at work in historicist and materialist readings intent on restoring the political meaning to a text.4 In one of the most sophisticated and influential elaborations of a materialist model of interpretation, Fredric Jameson still speaks of the exteriority of history and the necessity of a movement of internalization: Rightly or wrongly, a totalizing criticism has been felt to be transcendent in the bad sense, or in other words to make appeal, for its interpretive content, to spheres and levels outside the text proper. We have seen that such apparently extrinsic operations are then drawn back into the dialectical framework as the latter expands and is systematically totalized. Thus, it can be argued that this type of interpretation, while containing a transcendent moment, foresees that moment as merely provisionally extrinsic, and requires for its completion a movement to the point at which that apparently external content (political attitudes, ideological materials, juridical categories, the raw materials of history, the economic processes) is then at length drawn back within the process of reading.5

How are we to understand this movement from the exterior to the interior, from outside to inside, from a “transcendent moment” back into “the process of reading”? The very description of a materialist reading in terms of internalization signals that history is distinct from and external to literature and language, even if only provisionally. Here we have history, and there language, and if the twain are to meet, then it will be in the process of reading. In fact, what Jameson describes is not how history is to be recuperated for literature but for the very Marxian “process of reading” he describes. A Marxian reading as it is elaborated here would not recover history to reinscribe it in the text, where it could be read as part of the historicity of that text, but rather restores the transcendent moment that is history to the critical encounter with the text. While the process described does in fact trace a dialectic in which the process of reading, now conscious of the “outside” of the work, can mark its own difference from the historical, political, and ideological engagements of the work, no real mediation


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between language and its outside (history, politics) has taken place. The process of reading described here, Marxian reading, would appear to undertake that task, but it has only mediated between history and reading, history and itself, and not between history and literature. Elsewhere, Jameson rethinks the relation between language and “external reality” in terms that would seem not only to provide the mediating moment but to theorize the historicity of language. The type of interpretation here proposed is more satisfactorily grasped as the rewriting of the literary text in such a way that the latter may itself be seen as the rewriting or restructuration of a prior historical or ideological subtext, it being always understood that that “subtext” is not immediately present as such, not some common-sense external reality, nor even the conventional narratives of history manuals, but rather must itself always be (re)constructed after the fact. The literary or aesthetic act therefore always entertains some active relationship with the Real; yet in order to do so, it cannot simply allow “reality” to persevere inertly in its own being, outside the text and at a distance. It must rather draw the Real into its own texture, and the ultimate paradoxes and false problems of linguistics, and most notably of semantics, are to be traced back to this process, whereby language manages to carry the Real within itself as its own intrinsic or immanent subtext. (81)

Again, what is described here is a kind of internalization. And for that very reason, we are left with a narrative that, no matter how much it tries to incorporate history into language, to make language historical in a way that would not be merely referential, maintains the priority (“a prior historical or ideological subtext”) of history over language. In effect, then, Jameson describes a history in which language becomes more than mere language, in which language enters into an intimate relation with history. But his history supposes that language once had an existence independent of the “Real” and that it once offered (almost) no “paradoxes” or linguistic problems. According to this history, a prior historical or ideological subtext is rewritten by literature in such a way that not only is history restructured but the “Real” is made the intrinsic or immanent subtext of language. Jameson’s language could be played with for some time before its own ultimate paradoxes and problems, false or otherwise, would be exhausted. We need only note, for instance, that despite his most ardent wish to free history from the textualization that it has suffered in some (no doubt poststructuralist) criticism, history subsists as a subtext in his own description of it. In order for history, ideology, the “Real” to maintain their priority over literature and language, as Jameson will have it, he must describe the encounter of language and literature in terms of


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a history. And the very necessity of this history means that history, ideology, and the “Real” cannot constitute any intrinsic or immanent part of language if language does something like “draw the real into its own texture.” I might be accused of dwelling on “false problems of linguistics, and most notably of semantics,” here. But it is the question of the “world” as the “content” of literature (81), after all, the question, then, of a certain semantics, that Jameson is concerned with. The very fact that Jameson’s language runs into these paradoxes and problems in its attempt to articulate a history in which such problems could be traced back to history and the “Real” might just as well suggest that no history will ever be able to resolve these problems, that history, in other words, cannot free itself of linguistic and semantic problems that must remain irreducible to it. What leads Jameson to the articulation of such histories is his positing of the ultimate priority of Marxian interpretation and of history, class struggle, and so forth, as the “untranscendable horizon” (10) of literature and its interpretation. His desire to provide that first (and final) instance itself needs to be read precisely as desire and thus as part of the ideological struggle he describes. Much the way his own rhetoric is open to the most unsettling of readings, a deconstruction of Jameson’s interpretive assumptions, including the assumption that all interpretations find their ultimate resting place and meaning in the fold of a Marxian understanding of literature, is no doubt possible and perhaps even necessary.6 To proceed in this way, however, might be misunderstood as merely reversing his position and positing its openness to deconstruction as proving deconstruction’s priority over all forms of historical and materialist readings. (A rigorous deconstruction could never make such a claim for itself, of course, but that it would be charged with doing so seems inevitable.) The ideological commitments of this deconstruction might then be pointed out, effectively returning the crown of critical priority to materialist criticism. And the process could continue ad infinitum. What needs to be read, however, is the very positing and presupposition of the historicist and Marxist imperative (“Always historicize!”), which must be put into question if something like a rigorous political criticism is to be thought. It is the very elaboration of a hermeneutic model from the willed “ground” of such a positing, which as such always remains self-justifying and circular, that must be questioned if any adequate notion of the political is to emerge. Rather than merely following this historical and political imperative, however justified and intuitively satisfying it may seem, what is necessary is a determination of the necessity and conditions of possibility of a political criticism. A turn to Kant at this point might well seem inevitable, especially given the necessity of a sounding out of these conditions of possibility. But this apparent


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inevitability, if it is not to fall back into the status of an uncritical presupposition, must itself be legitimated. This is precisely the opportunity offered by a reading of Kant for the elaboration of a political criticism that would take neither its critical nor its political status for granted as a presupposed ground. In order to legitimate its political status in this way, criticism must in the first place mark its own limits. In order to determine its political status and whether or not this status has any kind of apriority, criticism would at once have to determine precisely what constitutes the political and think its relation to that conception of the political. If Kant allows for such a determination of the political and of a political criticism, it is in his thinking of critical philosophy, of criticism itself. As Lyotard points out, to legitimate its own political status, criticism cannot assume that it knows itself to be political, nor can it assume it knows what is and is not political. This self-limitation is at once what marks the limits of criticism, severing it in the first instance from history and politics in the most common sense, and what will allow it to legitimate itself as political. In fact, it turns out that philosophy will have to be political as well in order to legitimate itself. In order to account for its own critical status, critical philosophy must submit its very Idea to an act of critical judgment. This means judging that Idea against an intuitive presentation of it. But even as an Idea, the Idea of critical philosophy cannot have an intuitable referent. For the entire founding legitimation of critical philosophy to be saved from running aground upon this limitation, another referent must be supplied. A referent that would be that of the Idea of critical philosophy if it had an intuitable referent, a symbol or as if referent, is substituted for that absent referent. Thus, critical philosophy can be legitimated as if it had a referent through a symbolic substitution. And what permits this act of legitimation that allows criticism to call itself critical, what serves as the symbol for critical philosophy, is nothing less than the political. For something to function as the symbol or analogy for the critical, permitting its (self-)legitimation, it must share the form of the critical, must itself be critical in that it questions its own conditions of possibility. Thus, the political must be conceived as the system of political knowledge and like the critical cannot have an intuitable referent. What this means is that the critical legitimates itself by taking the political as its symbol in a structure that reciprocally demands that the political have critical status. In this way, criticism can legitimate its own politicality rigorously, but in so doing must renounce all claims upon history and politics in the most common intuitive and intuitable senses. A political criticism that seeks to legitimate itself as such will always act as if political. Unlike much of what we currently call political and historical criticism, its


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engagement in history and politics must remain suspended. But unlike the political criticism enabled by a reading of Kant’s and Lyotard’s thought, that criticism wins its political and historical knowledge at the price of never knowing its own political status. To think its own politicality, criticism must remain in the realm of the “as if,” symbolizing itself as if political, which means being irreducible to any determinate politics. This does not mean, however, that such a criticism would remain ineffectual if faced with political or historical phenomena, be they literary texts or what they “represent.” Rather, one of the effects of this determination of the limits of a criticism of the political would be to reconceptualize and rephrase the historical imperative. To follow a critical reading of Kant, it is no longer the imperative “Always historicize!” that we must follow, nor even Kant’s own categorical imperative as it has traditionally been understood. In fact, the historical and political imperative is hardly an imperative at all, for it is no longer articulated in the (implicit or explicit) form of a must, the form in which even an “ethics of reading” is still elaborated,7 but in that of the “as if.” If what is presented in the following pages can be understood as political criticism in these terms, then, it is not because an investigation of Kleist’s or Yeats’s nationalism, of the relation between naming and history in Wordsworth, of Mary Shelley’s tale of the ends of community, or even the conception of the political in Kant and Lyotard is self-evidently political. Rather, it is because the political and historical claims of these works, no matter how manifest or suppressed, are read along with and against their very claim to being political, their conception of the political as such. What emerges is a group of works that, at the very moment they make their most forceful statements about a determinate historical condition, and even, as is most obvious in the cases of Kleist and Yeats, at the moment of their attempted intervention in history, also reflect on precisely what such intervention signifies, what it means for literature to draw history into itself or to be drawn into history—what it means, then, to cross the borders of the lip. This reflection on the historicality of literature and language by no means asserts the impossibility of such a crossing. Rather, it shows it to take place as an interruption of those claims, one that renders them and their (intentional) effects radically indeterminate, a double-crossing of sorts. These works therefore enact the collision of determinate political and historical claims with their indetermination by the work’s own conception of politics and history. As a result, they also demand a rethinking of the very concept and possibility of a more of less consequential, linear, causal movement between literature and the historical world that is presupposed by some recent criticism and that also often characterizes this criticism’s attempted historical interven-


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tions. A criticism that would follow this movement and that in so doing might be deemed political, then, would take this understanding of history as its symbol. Reading the political (in the most common sense) terms of the works at the same time that this very conception of the political is put into question, and in fact disrupted, the readings that follow will always be as if political, will always be interrupted precisely at the point at which they would try to assert their claim on history. The reader will also be confronted with another kind of disruption of a unified notion of history in the very trajectory of the chapters that follow. For the works I discuss here are drawn from various national literary and critical traditions (German, French, English, Irish), as from different periods, ranging from the roots of Romanticism in Enlightenment thought (Kant) to Romanticism proper (Wordsworth) to the barely Romantic (Kleist, Shelley) and later reflections on these traditions (Yeats, Lyotard). A kind of history might still be discerned did the pages that follow take the form of reflections on relatively unrelated “major” authors or works or on a given genre or mode of discourse.8 Even that, alas, is nowhere to be found. But there is a history told here, at least if one is willing to think history differently. In fact, the very crossing of genres, discourses, periods, and national literatures speaks to a notion of history that would no longer be the thinking of a more or less unified or consequential movement through time, space, and language, but rather emerges from their crossing. At the very least, this would mean that a similar conception of history emerges from disparate works loosely adhering to the Romantic tradition or commenting upon it. Even more importantly, though, it suggests a history that literally traverses these differences and forms itself precisely as that crossing, that difference. While the first part of this study, “The Sign of History,” moves from Kant and Lyotard to the poetry and poetics of naming in Wordsworth, and more specifically his “Poems on the Naming of Places,” it is nonetheless by no means obvious how Wordsworth could be accommodated to such a notion of history. Not only does the retrospective nature of much of his poetry apparently imply a recording and thus representation, no matter how complex, of history and social relations, but his poetics, as it is articulated throughout his prose works, would have language and poetry the expression of consciousness, maintaining a conventional historical scheme grounded upon a subject and its (historical) experience. Wordsworth’s description of the origin of the “Poems on the Naming of Places” in fact begins with the conventional narrative that would make language and poetry the recording of events. No one is more aware of what is at stake here than Wordsworth, who insists that the events that are said


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to have occasioned first the giving of names to places and then their poetic commemoration must have occurred. This is indeed a, perhaps the, historical imperative. If language is to maintain its traditional historical structure, and if, moreover, history is to maintain its traditional status as the ultimate ground of all linguistic and poetic acts, then for every poem, for every speech act, for every occurrence of language, there must be a prior determining instance. This is so in the relatively straightforward case of commemorative verse, of course, but also every time language is understood in terms of the intentionality of consciousness. Yet Wordsworth’s constant shifting of the place of the “Poems on the Naming of Places” in his classifications of his poems refuses to subsume them under any function of consciousness. What is more, that very historical imperative describes the desire to have history ground language as much as it does a historical precedence, not least because in the poems themselves the logic guaranteeing the movement from event to language, naming, is by no means evident. Far from being revealed, any potential motivation for the naming of a place and the writing of poetry to commemorate that naming is lost in an interruption such as death, or in the interruption of the poem’s narrative itself. The “Poems on the Naming of Places” thus reconceptualize the passage between history and language and at the same time rethink the status of intentionality, in particular the intentional structure of the image. What is more, the historical sequence or “consequence,” as the Advertisement to the poems would have it, traced in the poems is that of the interruption that takes place in the passage from the determining historical event to its representation in language. The place of poems on the naming of places in history, then, would be that of describing a nonintentional structure that rethinks not only the relationship between language and consciousness but of historical consequence as such. While Wordsworth’s topography of history and language never takes up the figure of the border in a literal way, his location of history in a determinate space lends itself easily to a thinking of a more politically charged space, even a national one. This was also already the case in Kant’s thinking of the political, where the French Revolution is on center stage. Turning to Kleist, Shelley, and Yeats, I engage works in which bordering the historical will turn to the question of borders, national and other. Even in the case of Der zerbrochne Krug, the point of departure for the second part of my study, “Bordering the Political,” it will be a question of how a simple pitcher renders the fragmenting of these and other borders. The play takes up this problematic by repeatedly marking the boundary between aesthetics and something external to it (the law, history), and by then


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breaking or disrupting this very boundary. It follows the story of Frau Marthe, a peasant woman who comes to Judge Adam’s court seeking restitution for her pitcher, broken the previous evening by her daughter’s suitor, Ruprecht, or so she believes. Marthe insists that it is the beauty of her pitcher that is crucial to the case, making it clear that this is not least a case about aesthetics. It is not so much the aesthetic itself that is in question here, however, as it is what happens when the aesthetic object is fragmented. Occasioning the case of the broken pitcher, the break in the aesthetic object marks the movement from aesthetics to the law, opening up a relationship between two apparently independent forms of judgement (Urteil )—legal and aesthetic—both of which will be thoroughly fragmented. The play thus traces the law’s inability to mark itself off as independent from some “outside-the-law.” And the break in the pitcher does not stop at bringing the law into relation with the beautiful. For the beauty of the pitcher is determined in large part by the image represented on it, that of a scene derived from a historical text, Schiller’s Geschichte des Abfalls der vereinigten Niederlande. The break introducing the pitcher into the formalized social relations of the law, then, represents nothing less than the break into history. The pitcher enters history through the breaking of the image, the text of history, and the aesthetic. And the coincidence of the breaking of the aesthetic and a political act (the fall of the Dutch from the Spanish empire, also a kind of break) would seem to suggest that only in its fragmentation does the pitcher give history its due. Yet since the break in the pitcher is equally the break in the image and in the text of history, it also marks the disruption of any attempt to reduce history to an image or a simple linear narrative, such as Schiller’s history of the Dutch. It is not only that history remains irreducible to its aesthetic representation, though, but that the fall from empire cannot be represented by a traditional aesthetics of the finished, perfected work of art. Whether or not this can still be called an aesthetics is by no means certain, for it would involve a disruption at the very heart of the aesthetic, the fracturing of not only the work of art but its theorization. Nowhere are the political stakes of literature clearer than in Kleist’s Die Hermannsschlacht. Nor are these stakes limited to what happens at the borders of the lip and of the river Lippe. Kleist’s attempts to have the play produced in his day speak of the attempt to realize a literature that would not remain “merely literary.” Referring to the famous Battle of Arminius in which the Romans were defeated in their attempt to invade Germany, Kleist describes the French occupation of Prussia as a repetition of the Roman occupation of Germany. Making this historical repetition clear by bringing it not to the political but the theatrical stage, Kleist brings the two stages together in the hopes of stirring the German people to resist French occupation. His metaphor,


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however, does not assert a simple continuity between the political, historical stage and the stage of literature. Rather, the staging of Die Hermannsschlacht is intended as the disruption of what is about to take place on the political stage. The goal of Kleist’s staging is to interrupt any possible continuity between past and present, so that theatre would banish any recurrence or coming to the stage once again of the foreign occupation of Germany, which would reassume its proper place, its place in history. Clearly, it is a question of a certain concept of the nation, nationalism, national literature, and their relation to language. Of course, the implications of Kleist’s deployment of the multiple significations of the Lippe, that unsettling site at which nature, the nation, and language come together in their mutual crossing, already suggested as much. Yet such crossings cannot be contained by the play itself. In a prose text on the state of German theatre, Kleist speaks of a national theatre as the inheritor of the duties of the church he sees as losing its social status. In this text, as in Die Hermannsschlacht, the nation is what grounds the crossing of borders. Such a steadfast instance is necessary not only for the particular political goals of Kleist’s theatre, but for any conception of literature as political intervention. For the intervention of literature into history depends upon an understanding of a meaningful unit that is subject to a controlled movement into history to achieve its aims there, much the way troops can cross a river named Lippe, or language can be subject to the control of its speakers. Kleist, however, speaks (of) a language that escapes intentional control and the break between aesthetic perception and what is viewed, a sort of rupture that would not render literature ineffectual, but that would put into question a meaning or intervention that would be undisturbed and controllable, rendering the effects of such a movement indeterminate. This interruption of the movement of meaning rethinks not only the nation but political literature as well. The final part of my study, “The Debts of History,” undertakes a reading of two writers from decidedly different historical periods and situations, both of whom nonetheless try to come to terms with their debt to Romanticism. If both Mary Shelley and William Butler Yeats remain indebted to Romanticism, it is because that period has yet to be paid off, finished, put in the past, made history. Shelley’s encounter with a Romantic heritage is all the more charged as it is not least her debt to her father that is at stake in The Last Man. The novel takes up the central question of the status of the (Romantic) subject and its political implications, the history of its narrator, in many ways the heir to Godwin’s St. Leon, tracing nothing less than the birth of consciousness, which simultaneously marks the subject’s introduction into English culture. The Last Man is the story


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of the battle to maintain that culture, or rather Western culture in general, as it traces a war between the Greeks and the Turks whose bizarre end will put not only war but the idea of nationalism into question. And it is the story of the end of that culture, the story of the movement toward the end of culture itself, for it traces the destruction of all of mankind by a plague. All of mankind except the last man, of course. The political stakes of the novel cannot be limited to its portrayal of culture wars, therefore, but rather extend to the unsettling repercussions of the coming into subjectivity. After all, Lionel, the novel’s narrator and the radical realization of the Romantic solitary, is the one character in the novel to contract the plague and survive it. Does the acquirement of subjectivity and a certain culture therefore constitute a kind of immunity that allows one to survive the plague? Lionel will, at any rate, find himself alone, the last man, but even this does not put an end to history or the historical stakes of the novel. For Lionel will write, will write the story of his life, which is also the story of an entire culture. And he will write this story, at the end of humanity, but for an audience, for us, no doubt. Where are we then? What kind of history does the reading of The Last Man describe? If there is to be a reading of the last man and The Last Man, if that reading describes a certain survival of the last man, is it merely by chance that this (Romantic) subject’s gender is by no means simple, that Lionel is clearly Shelley’s rendering of herself, is, then, at once man and woman? Shelley’s novel apparently engages a thinking of the end of the human, but its invocation of a human readership can never follow that thinking to its logical ends. The narrative’s engagement with history folds the exposure of the limits of a Romantic humanism back upon itself, creating a temporal structure in which the end (of Romanticism) will be radically inverted and transvalued. At the end of Romanticism, a history will be written, but that history might not be the end of Romanticism. His famous self-characterization as among the “last of the Romantics” clearly locates Yeats in this same history. Yet his early prose works, especially his collections of Irish folk and faery tales and his own additions to these, would seem quite removed from such reflections on language and its relation to the political. The very fact of collecting these tales in the effort to raise the consciousness of an Irish tradition and culture, to bring the Irish to self-consciousness as a people, already suggests a certain meeting between literature and politics. From the beginning, however, such a recuperative project is at odds with the tales comprising it, for in them the Irish are linked not to memory but to forgetting. Moreover, the moments of spiritual insight that befall the Irish, especially Irish women, entail the fragmentation of the self. If the goal of The


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Celtic Twilight is to lead the Irish into a new day, this project is founded on concepts of the self and self-consciousness that are radically at odds with what that very tradition would teach the Irish about what is most characteristic about themselves. Yeats’s characterization of the Irish therefore rethinks consciousness, knowledge, and the self in a way that would demand a similar rethinking of the very concept of Irish national character. For the Irish are represented as a medium of representation, the very possibility for self-reflection that always and absolutely gives way to that reflective process in which the other appears to itself. The Irish offer the possibility of rethinking the political, then, in that even as a people they represent the refusal or inability ever to reflect upon themselves. Their withdrawal into the very medium of reflection will not only never produce a determinate image of them but means that they will never be sublated by anything else, be it a subject, a people, whatever. That the refiguration of the political should coincide with a reflection on the status of representation is far from being indifferent. As is the case with all the writers read here, it suggests rather that it is precisely the reflection on reflection, the symbol, naming, witnessing, intentionality, that will disclose a history and politics that will cross the borders of language, representation, art—a reflection, then, on the history of the crossing of the borders of a lip.

Borders of a Lip Pt. I Chap.1

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PART I

鵽鵾

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The Sign of History Kant and Lyotard, Wordsworth


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CHAPTER ONE

鵽鵾

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L’enthousiasme multiplie ces paysans —Stendhal, Le Rouge et le noir

he possibilities offered by a reading of Kant for a deepened understanding of the history of Romanticism, its (self-) conception, and its major themes has long been recognized. One could, according to conventional wisdom, count Kant among a handful of philosophical forefathers who from the camp of systematic thought provided some of the impetus for the Romantic movement. In what might amount to little more than a mere historical accident, it is no less true that Kantian philosophy has played a decisive role in the conceptualization of our current historical situation, what, for better or worse, has come to be called postmodernism. The apparent complicity between these two historical epochs, the postmodern and the Enlightenment, however, could be reduced to the status of an accident only at the risk of nullifying the principle of their unity and its role in both defining and determining their history and historicity, Kantian philosophy itself.

T

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If, however, we take this coincidence seriously as itself a historical repetition, this would mean, not that there is no difference between then and now, between Enlightenment philosophy and its more or less immediate aftermath and the postmodern, but rather that Kant could provide a means of thinking that very difference. In this case, the repetition is not historical in the common sense (the historical situation of the Enlightenment and its aftermath is radically different from contemporary historical conditions), but rather in that the understanding of those distinct conditions, their conceptualization, is similar. The recourse to similar concepts, such as the sublime, for the self-definition of Romanticism as well as a certain postmodernism as historical discourses, that is, marks the relation between these periods as that of an analogy. The repetition at issue here, then, is not so much that of historical events as it is the repetition of the relation between history and its thinking, the repetition of the relation between an event and its conceptualization and representation in language.1 This structure underlines what is at stake every time we speak of historical cycles or historical repetition as it is expressed, for instance, in that famous adage claiming that if we forget or fail to understand history it will repeat itself. Perhaps it does not go without saying, then, that what history has never done and can never do is repeat itself. The historical event, however world historical or seemingly trivial, is radically singular. When we say that history repeats itself, this can only be in the sense of that relation between distinct situations understood analogously. Historical repetition is in fact the repetition of our understanding of history. Every attempt to understand a historical event or situation in terms of a previous conceptual model or representation put forth, in turn, as the explication of a previous event or situation operates by way of a certain mediation. The representation is not a direct rendering of history but the re-presentation of a previous representation of history. A critical account of the structure of historical representation thus offers the possibility of an understanding of our present historico-political situation and its relation to the past, this relation itself describing a history. Moreover, to the extent that a conceptualization and representation seeks not only to understand its object, a historical given, as the repetition of a past situation, but itself as the repetition of the representation of that given, historical repetition offers the unique possibility of dramatizing historical representation, representing historical representation. Historical repetition opens an access to the gap between history and its conceptualization. Such an investigation into the conditions of historical representation is precisely what is at stake in Lyotard’s description of a Kantian critique of history, which for Lyotard comes the closest to his own understanding of the postmodern.2 But the explication of Kant’s critique of history and the political immedi-


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ately encounters a major obstacle: Kant never wrote a Critique of Political Reason. While there is nothing new about this statement (it has, in fact, become something of a commonplace, even a cliché), it is by no means clear whether the absence of such a Critique signals a lack in the Kantian philosophical system, for instance, or whether something like political reason does not exist or could not be subject to the exigencies of critique (and a Critique). A determination of precisely what has left us without a Critique of Political Reason is therefore crucial, for it is a matter of distinguishing between a lapse or failure in the philosopher and/or his system, on the one hand, and the resistance of what might be described in terms of a field of possible knowledge, that offered by political reason, to philosophy, on the other. The burden presented by the historical fact that no Critique of Political Reason has been written, that is, would be to question the very possibility of such a Critique. Rephrasing the sentence “Kant never wrote a Critique of Political Reason” slightly, one might begin to account for the absence of a Kantian Critique of history and the political: “Les textes historico-politiques de Kant sont dispersés, grosso modo, entre les trois Critiques et une dixaine d’Opuscules. La critique de la raison politique n’a pas été écrite” [Kant’s historico-political texts are dispersed, grosso modo, among the three Critiques and about ten opuscules. The critique of political reason has not been written.]3 Apparently, little has changed here, though the assertion (obvious though it be) that Kant wrote “historicopolitical texts” would at least suggest that the philosopher did not merely overlook history and politics. Things take on quite a different aspect, however, when we locate this citation in a book by Lyotard entitled L’Enthousiasme: La critique kantienne de l’histoire. If Kant did not write a Critique of Political Reason, he nonetheless subjected history to critique, or so Lyotard’s subtitle would suggest. Or perhaps we could read the title somewhat differently, shifting the emphasis on the colon separating “Enthusiasm” and “The Kantian Critique of History.” Thus, we might read, “Enthusiasm, that is, the Kantian Critique of History.” This would mean that Enthusiasm, not the sentiment so much as the book, is the Kantian Critique of History. Lyotard can thus be seen as extending the Kantian project, filling in the gap, writing what might be called the fourth Critique. In order to lay claim to such a title, he cannot simply restate Kant or elaborate upon what Kant might have said had he written such a text, but must critique, must occupy the place of the philosopher-critic, the only position from which any Critique can be written. In order to write the fourth Critique, Lyotard must occupy the chair of the philosopher, must transplant himself to Königsberg, as it were. This would suggest that a Critique of Political Reason is not only possible but has been realized


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as such, and also that such a Critique will never fully be Lyotard’s but will always take place under the aegis of Kant, forever displacing the question of originality. Lyotard will write the original, the Critique that has yet to be written, and yet he will write it not merely as Lyotard but as the repetition of Kant, as Kant’s Critique by Lyotard.4 To become the writer of a Critique of Political Reason, Lyotard must critique the gesture upon which the political is founded by the writer of critiques. To undertake such a project is, Lyotard himself acknowledges, a “political decision” (16). Even more radically, it might be called the decision of the political. For what the critique of the gesture founding the political achieves is to put into question just what is and what is not political (15). Lyotard’s critique is the decision of the political in that it will establish the criteria according to which the political is to be deemed truly political. Thus, Lyotard must begin with a critique of the analogy founding the political as such: “La phrase philosophique selon Kant est un analogue de la phrase politique selon Kant” [The philosophical phrase according to Kant is an analogue of the political phrase according to Kant] (16). What must not be lost in the repetition of the phrase “according to Kant” is that this analogy, whatever its validity, is never made explicitly by Kant. For this to be the case, one would have to add another “according to Kant,” to give: “According to Kant, the philosophical phrase according to Kant . . .” Rather, the analogy is according to Lyotard. According to Lyotard, the philosophical phrase according to Kant is an analogue of the political phrase according to Kant. When he critiques the implications of this analogical relation, then, Lyotard is not merely critiquing a Kantian statement, what would be a description of the political according to Kant, but rather critiques the Kantian conception of the political according to Lyotard, yet as if it were Kant’s. As it is performed here, criticism is double, in fact reflexive: it critiques the analogy that makes any consideration of the political in a Kantian sense (“according to Kant”) possible, while with the same gesture submitting criticism’s own understanding of the political to a rigorous critique. Such a reflexive structure is essential for any understanding of the political articulated as an analogue of philosophy in a Kantian sense. If there is to be any possibility of a fourth Critique, the political must be compatible with criticism, critique itself. The analogical relation between the political and philosophy means that no criteria upon which the political could be judged (political) is presupposed. As soon as the political is understood as analogous to critical philosophy, it must be critical and not doctrinal; that is, the political like the philo-


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sophical cannot have its rule outside itself in a doctrine or system that could judge once and for all that the political is legitimated. Rather, even because the political is an analogue of the philosophical, it must itself be critical (or else the analogy would dissolve) and that means that it must itself be the judge. Just as a critique of pure reason (and thus the first Critique) does not form a part of philosophy conceived of as the system of rational knowledge but rather questions its very possibility, so too a critique of political reason, were it to exist, could not form a part of either this philosophical system or of the political conceived as the system of political knowledge, but would question its possibility.5 A critique of political reason, that is, merits the name to the extent that it questions the conditions of possibility of the political itself; it determines the possibility of any philosophy of the political. Such a conception of criticism, were its reign to spread, would have broad consequences for what currently passes under the name of “critical theory”— even that theory that has recourse to Kant and Lyotard. It would put in question, at the very least, any attempt to read a text, a concept, or even a historical situation in terms of an already elaborated rule or theory, although this would equally be the case for studies that in no way understand themselves as theoretical. What is more, any attempt merely to “apply” (the word is Lyotard’s [18] but is pervasive enough in critical theory) a theory could no longer be called “critical”—perhaps not even “theory”—with any rigor. In order to earn the name, such critical theory would itself have to be the object of its critique, would have to legitimate itself as truly critical. In Kant’s system, objects in nature are essential to such a criticism, since every presentation must be capable of encountering an object against which the presentation could judge its validity, its pretension to having made an accurate judgement. This condition proves somewhat embarrassing for critical philosophy, since, functioning on the level of Ideas, which by their very definition can have no intuitable object, no natural referent,6 it is apparently left without an object that would allow it to validate itself (as critical philosophy). Philosophy therefore runs the risk of being cut off from the world and remaining relegated to the task of system building, which would deny it its place as philosophy “in the world,” as philosophical in the most rigorous sense. It is therefore crucial that Kant find a way for judgements of presentations in the realm of Ideas to be made despite their lack of an intuitable referent. Not only given Ideas, but the very Idea of critical philosophy, the entire Kantian system, is at stake. That the ostensible answer to this difficulty should be found in the Critique of Judgement, already given the task of making the passage from the first to the second Critique,


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from pure to practical reason, and therefore of unifying philosophy, should come as no surprise. Indeed what comes to the rescue is the symbol: Alle Anschauungen, die man Begriffen a priori unterlegt, sind also entweder Schemata oder Symbole, wovon die erstern direkte, die zweiten indirekte Darstellungen des Begriffs enthalten. Die erstern tun dieses demonstrativ, die zweiten vermittelst einer Analogie (zu welcher man sich auch empirischer Anschauungen bedient), in welcher die Urteilskraft ein doppeltes Geschäft verrichtet, erstlich den Begriff auf den Gegenstand einer sinnlichen Anschauung, und dann zweitens die bloße Regel der Reflexion über jene Anschauung auf einen ganz andern Gegenstand, von dem der erstere nur das Symbol ist, anzuwenden. [All intuitions which we apply to concepts a priori are therefore either schemata or symbols, of which the former contain direct, the latter indirect, presentations of the concept. The former do this demonstratively; the latter by means of an analogy (for which we avail ourselves even of empirical intuitions), in which the judgement exercises a double function, first applying the concept to the object of a sensible intuition, and then applying the mere rule of reflection made upon that intuition to a quite different object of which the first is only the symbol.]7

The very possibility of not only the judgement of Ideas but of a philosophy of the political in a rigorously Kantian sense resides upon a reading of the symbol. To live up to its name, to fulfill its mandate and achieve what can only be conceived of as its teleological destiny, philosophy must overcome what by its very definition is a certain distance between it and the world (as witnessed by its lack of an intuitable referent) and impose itself, intervene in the world. Rather than an internal contradiction in the very definition of philosophy, this means that the intervention signified by a philosophy in the world, what we might prematurely call the political, will be of another order than the intuitable. The symbolic intervenes to allow philosophy at once to maintain its critical distance from the empirical world and to engage with that world and assert its philosophical claim to practicality.8 Lyotard’s gloss is particularly revealing here, for not only does it capture the structure of symbolic substitutions, it elicits the paradox of absence that inhabits them: On dégage la forme de présentation, qui est celle du mode intuitif (le schème), du contenu intuitionable, puisqu’il est absent, et l’on place sous cette forme une autre intuition, “également empirique,” qui en somme permettrait de valider l’Idée si elle était un concept de l’entendement. Autrement dit, on présente à la phrase non cognitive (descriptive, mais dialectique) un “comme si” référent, un référent qui serait le sien si la phrase était cognitive. Cette présentation indirecte est appelée symbolique, ou par symbole.


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[The form of presentation, which is that of the intuitive mode (the scheme), is extricated from its intuitable content, since it is absent, and another, “equally empirical” intuition that in sum would permit a validation of the Idea if it were a concept of understanding is placed under this form. In other words, an “as if ” referent, a referent that would belong to it if the phrase were cognitive, is presented to the noncognitive (descriptive, but dialectical) phrase. This indirect presentation is called symbolic, or by way of the symbol.] (25)

According to its Kantian formulation, critical philosophy engages itself in the world, in the first place, through an act of disengagement, a dislocation of “intuitable content” from the “form” of its “presentation,” this content then being replaced by another. This substitution is called symbolic by Kant. The initial disengagement is ultimately the dislocation of philosophy from the world, which should lead to philosophy’s reengagement in the world. But, as we have seen, such a reengagement appears impossible, for it supposes philosophy to have been engaged before the fact. This double bind cannot be recuperated (as something like an oversight, an accident, an imprecision in terminology), for the argument in fact depends upon it. The analogical operation of presentation, after all, is the disengagement of content from form, permitting the symbolic or analogical substitution of a new content.9 But the intuitable content that is dislocated (before the fact, actually) is “absent.” This is no slip, no mere error on Lyotard’s part; rather, he follows the Kantian conception of the symbolic with precision here. How, then, does one dislocate an absence, that which has no locale, that which can never be located, and that which, to borrow from Kant’s description of the ideal, is nowhere in particular but everywhere? What happens, what is left, when an absent content is subtracted from form? The passage raises all the conventional problems of the relation of form and content in (re)presentation, of their separability or inseparability. Lyotard’s summary of symbolic substitution not only follows in the spirit of Kant’s system by clearly stating the possibility and necessity of such a separability but is in fact already contained and controlled by Kant’s own argument. The very possibility of philosophy in the world, that is, of a truly critical philosophy, in fact depends upon such an understanding of form and content and of an engagement in the world that is already a disengagement from the world. Kant at once articulates the practical engagements of philosophy and of philosophy’s knowledge of its difference from the practical and political, and he does so in the symbolic mode as the “as if ” engagement in the world. Since what is separated from form is an absence, content itself as absence, the very concept of separability resides upon an absence. The thinking of the separability of content from form that grounds


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symbolism and critical philosophy, then, depends upon the absence of the term to be subtracted, dislocated, in order for separation to take place. The symbolic substitution that takes the place of this subtracted absence in no way recuperates the originary loss (already lost before the loss) of content, however. The twice-absent intuition is replaced, so to speak, form given content once again. Yet this new intuition is “equally empirical,” just as empirical as the intuition or content already subtracted from form. Just as empirical, that is, as an absence. The quotation marks Lyotard places around the phrase “equally empirical,” apparent signs that the difficulty of replacing an absence by an intuition that shares the empirical status of an absence has not escaped him, by no means alleviate the difficulty faced here. Even if we read those quotation marks as a kind of phenomenological epoche¯, putting in parentheses or quotation marks the status of the empirical, the “natural attitude,” little has changed. The Kantian symbolic is still the substitution of one absence (of content) for another. The substitution that should permit judgement to take place, the substitution that would allow philosophy to overcome the gap between it and the world and to engage itself in the world as a truly critical philosophy and thus become political in a readily apparent way, is denied both object and its symbolic substitute. The symbolic, far from overcoming philosophy’s lack, replaces that lack with another. The symbolic would deny philosophy its title as critical philosophy rather than making such a philosophy possible. Thus, the conditional form that closes Lyotard’s analysis: “another, ‘equally empirical’ intuition which in sum would permit a validation of the Idea if it were a concept of understanding.” This other intuition, then, would permit a validation, would permit judgement, if it were a concept of understanding. But, perhaps it does not go without saying, it is not. Lyotard’s rephrasing of what appears little more than an explication or elaboration of Kant’s understanding shifts the terms of that explication, in fact conforming more closely to what would be a traditional economy of the symbol that would make judgement possible: “Autrement dit, on présente à la phrase non cognitive (descriptive, mais dialectique) un ‘comme si’ référent, un référent qui serait le sien si la phrase était cognitive.” [In other words, an “as if ” referent, a referent that would belong to it if the phrase were cognitive, is presented to the noncognitive (descriptive, but dialectical) phrase]. Thus, Lyotard seemingly gets the Kantian symbolic right, says what he had wanted to say in the previous sentence but, despite ironic quotation marks, somehow could not, that is, that critical philosophy continues to judge even in the absence of an empirical case by acting as if that empirical case existed. If we substitute this sentence for the previous one, all is apparently remedied, the lack


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or absence in the symbolic system recuperated by another substitution, signalled by “in other words,” in which one sentence could take the place of another, overcome its lack of, or faulty, content, in short, function as a symbol. The initial difficulty of such a gesture is clear from the fact that such a purportedly symbolic substitution could never lay claim to that title, for the “content” of the “referents” being exchanged are radically at odds, such that one could never be the symbol for the other in the sense described by the passage. It is as if Lyotard could not adequately describe (we might say “symbolize”) symbolic substitution, and only finds an adequate description (symbol) when he turns to the “‘as if ’ referent.” The difficulty is not only his, however, since the argument he puts forth is faithful to the resources offered by Kant’s thought. The conception of the “as if ” is Kantian, to be sure, but it intervenes here as an “in other words,” as another way of saying the same thing, which is to say as the same that is, however, already other. If we follow Kant’s thought, however, and understand the symbol as representing the means by which philosophy can become truly critical, then it would be a mistake to read the substitution of one absence for another as the failure of symbolic economy or of critical philosophy. Philosophy’s lack of an empirical case that could be presented directly, that is, its very separation from “the world,” is transformed into an engagement “in the world” by means of the analogical substitution. The analogy or symbol does not facilitate this transformation, making philosophy properly philosophical for the first time, however, by overcoming the lack of an empirical referent. Rather, it substitutes one absence for another (“another, ‘equally empirical’ intuition”), or an “as if ” referent for an absent referent, one referent that is “as if ” a referent for another that is not a referent at all. Since this symbolic movement is the necessary condition of critical philosophy, the only means by which philosophy can conform to its Idea, we might describe the “as if ” as the minimal condition of all philosophy, but also of the political, as such. What this means is that the nature of critical philosophy’s engagement in the world must be other than one that could be validated by an intuitable referent. Philosophy’s referent must be something other than an empirical referent that could be grasped in an act of intuition. It is here that the constitutive role of the political in the Kantian system becomes evident. For critical philosophy, lacking an empirical referent to validate itself, must still provide an analogy that would permit such a validating judgement. Thus, the phrase that presides over what Lyotard presents as the political according to Kant, that might define the possibility of a philosophy of the political: “The philosophical phrase according to Kant is an analogue of the political phrase according to Kant.” The analogical relation between philosophy


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and the political would thus make the political the fulfilment of philosophy.10 In order for philosophy to earn its title, it must have recourse to a symbol of itself, and that symbol is the political. As the “as if ” referent of philosophy, the political allows philosophy to enter the world, to operate “like an external critique” rather than “confining itself miserably to internal critique” (25).11 According to the logic of this substitution, we might expect the political to function as the empirical case the philosophical lacks, so that philosophy can continue to make judgements. This can hardly be the case, however, not only because of all we have seen concerning the nature of this symbolic economy, but because the political, even as analogue of philosophy, must itself be critical. The political, that is, is an analogue of philosophy in that both in their respective domains establish the condition of possibility of knowledge. Like philosophy, the political is the domain of critical phrases that, according to their definition, cannot have an intuitable object. In short, the entire development concerning philosophy’s need of an “as if ” referent to become truly philosophical holds for the political as well. What might have appeared to be a lapse in the Kantian conception of symbolic substitution (or at least Lyotard’s reading of it), the replacement of one absent content by another, is hardly that, therefore, but rather the logical development of the analogy that opened and guides Kant’s thought. Philosophy finds a symbol for itself in the political, we might say, because the political is as lacking in an empirical referent that could be subject to an act of presentation as is philosophy. Philosophy acts as if it were political in order to become philosophy in the first place, which is to say, in order to become philosophy in the world. Reciprocally, the political acts as if it were philosophical, and thus critical, such that it can provide the analogy for the philosophical in the first place. On the most fundamental level, then, philosophy always depends upon something “outside” itself that can act as if it were philosophy for philosophy, in turn, to act as something other than an internal critique. The acting as if that permits the movement from inside to outside, from philosophy to the political (and from the political to philosophy), thus describes the analogous relation that constitutes a mutual pretension to the status of criticism. Cathy Caruth’s contention that in the Kantian conception of the symbolic “what remains after the symbol has symbolized itself is always another term that is not contained within the symbolic structure” is born out here in exemplary fashion.12 For the “as if ” must precede both critical philosophy and the political. In this case, the term not contained in the symbolic structure is the symbol itself; the “as if ” will always precede and exceed particular relations. At this point, this may simply mean that the conception of symbolic analogy must


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be larger than the individual terms to be symbolized within its structure. However, it is not that two modes of potentially critical inquiry, each capable of being represented, find their symbol in each other and thereby achieve truly critical status. Rather, symbolic analogy, the “as if,” is an originary mode of presentation that grounds all subsequent symbolic substitutions as well as the political and philosophy as such. A mode of presentation (présentation, Darstellung), it operates as an originary setting or placing there, a literal Dar-stellung, that inaugurates, creates the opening for, posits critical philosophy and the political. The excessive nature of the symbolic relation between philosophy and the political will in fact be worked out in terms that correspond with some precision to Caruth’s description of the Kantian symbolic in other texts. For Caruth writes that as a result of the term that cannot be contained within the symbolic structure, examples are generated, “not ‘empirical’ examples, but examples in the argument, linguistic examples, which would always eventually take the form of a narrative” (83). Indeed, as long as the political is conceived of as the “as if” referent of philosophy it can never be an empirical example, but must remain, strictly speaking, an example in the argument, linguistic. The political, then, might be called the fiction of philosophy, but given their analogical relation, philosophy must also be the fiction of the political.13 This is not to deny either philosophy or the political its reality. Conventional distinctions between the real and fiction no longer hold here, for the “as if” can be reduced to neither one nor the other.14 Critical philosophy as such will be constituted by the necessary fiction that it is political and this fiction is what will in fact allow it to become political. Fictioning, the “as if,” permits the self-affirmation and self-fulfilment of philosophy as such. Philosophy becomes political, philosophy-in-the-world, if at all, by means of the fiction that it is political. The linguistic example this relation represents does not fail to become a narrative, as Caruth predicts. In fact, this may well be part of the import of that now-famous story told by Kant in the opening pages of the Critique of Pure Reason. There, Kant tells of how the dogmatism that once reigned in metaphysics gave way to Lockean empiricism, which, in turn, was overtaken by the Enlightenment. What separates this final stage from the previous ones in the history of metaphysics and what keeps it from itself becoming a dogmatism is that there reason seeks self-knowledge, notably through the institution of a tribunal that assures it of the legitimacy of its own pretensions to knowledge. This tribunal is nothing other than the Critique of Pure Reason.15 Lyotard rightly states that Kant “symbolise souvent l’activité critique comme celle d’un tribunal ou d’un juge” [often symbolizes critical activity as that of a tribunal or a judge] (17). Yet if this is true, it cannot be in that the


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narrative Kant relates would be the symbolic content that renders “l’événement de la critique . . . présentable” [the event of critique . . . presentable] (29).16 For this would be an understanding of the symbol and of the event of critique foreign to what actually takes place in Kant’s text. Rather, if Kant symbolizes critical activity as that of a judge in this narrative, it is because the “as if ” is always understood as a kind of fiction. The symbol becomes fiction, récit; conceived of as an “as if ” referent, the symbol is the nascent form of narrative. Thus, what is told in this symbol of critical activity is how the law at once works according to the law and institutes the law itself.17 This is the story of the selfinstitution of the law; and as such it is the story of the activity of the symbol itself no less than it is of critical activity. For in telling the story of this institution of the law by the law (we might just as well say of the political by the political), the narrative retells what the story of the “as if ” referent, the story of how the symbol performs the originary positing or Darstellung of critical philosophy and the political.18 Still, it is by no means clear that a full development of what kind of an understanding of philosophy and the political this analogy produces is ever worked out, in Kant’s oeuvre, to be sure, but no less so in Lyotard’s reading of it. Nor has the linguistic nature of the relation been adequately accounted for. The beginning of an answer might well be presented in the Argument that opens Enthusiasm. (L)’un et l’autre ont à juger sans avoir la règle du jugement, à la différence du juridico-politique. . . . Autrement dit: de même que le critique, chez Kant, ne doit pas prêter à doctrine (mais à critique), de même il ne doit pas avoir de doctrine de l’historico-politique. La relation est même peut-être plus qu’une affinité, une analogie: le critique (toujours au sens kantien) est peut-être le politique dans l’univers des phrases philosophiques, et le politique peut-être (au sens kantien) le critique dans l’univers des phrases socio-historiques. [(D)iffering from the juridico-political, both have to judge without having the rule of judgment. . . . In other words, just as the critical, in Kant, must not give rise to doctrine (but to critique), so too there must be no doctrine of the historico-political. The relation is perhaps even more than an affinity, an analogy: the critical (still in the Kantian sense) is perhaps the political in the universe of philosophical phrases, and the political (in the Kantian sense) perhaps the critical in the universe of socio-historical phrases.](11, emphasis added)

The insistence upon the word analogy in the first chapter should preclude any naive use of the term here. The relation between philosophy and the political is thus presented as a relation that is more than analogy. This “more” seemingly


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designates a more intimate relation than that signified by a mere analogy, a relation in which criticism not only acts as if it were the political but is the political within a certain domain (and vice versa). Understood in these terms, analogy takes the form of, or can be represented by, a system of representation. Analogy, that is, could be expressed in terms of simile, such that the political and the critical operate like one another, judging without a rule. Now, however, “more” describes the functioning of analogy as more than an analogical thinking in terms of similarity, which might do little to change the system of representation. The simile is deepened, we might say, so that it can now be expressed in the form of metaphor: “the critical is the political.” Lyotard’s representation of the relation is at odds with the description of analogy that functions precisely because the relation between the political and the critical in a Kantian sense reformulates the terms of a traditional understanding of representation. There, analogy is no longer understood in terms of proximity in which judgments of Ideas, lacking intuitable object, seek an intuitable symbol for their Ideas, which they reflect upon as if it were the Idea itself in order to reach a judgment. Moreover, the thinking of the excess of the relation here must also mean that this particular relation cannot be contained by relational, analogical thinking. The relation between philosophy and the political must always exceed the thinking of analogy, such that their relation can no longer be represented symbolically. The relation between them will at once presuppose and be represented by the “as if,” by the symbolic, on one hand, and exceed that very presupposition and representation, never be fully explained or represented by its symbol, on the other. According to the logic of this “more,” the analogy is both a deepened, intensified relation, a more intimate relation, and more than an analogy. The very movement toward a more intimate relation signalled by the “more” also breaks out of that relation. It is precisely in becoming more of a relation, an intensified relation, that the relation becomes more than a relation, exceeds the thinking of the relation. As long as the relation between the critical and the political is understood as a kind of hyperanalogy, a relation more than analogy in that it is more of the same, more similar than analogy expresses, the politicality of the critical will always refer the critical back to itself: the critical is the political, that is, a certain kind of critique.19 It would seem that Lyotard’s characterization of the political here can respond neither to his own development in the pages that follow nor to what would be a Kantian conception of the political. For the political, in order to judge Ideas, which by definition can have no presentable empirical case, must have recourse to an “as if” referent, a symbolic analogy. And since its own Idea, the Idea of the political, is included among these Ideas, the political must find


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its analogy in philosophy or the critical. The Idea of the political (or the critical) will always be the Idea that cannot be accounted for in a hyper-analogical relation in which the critical is the political, the political the critical. As the “as if,” however, analogy will always be in excess of a conception of analogy as an affinity between two terms. Thus, the analogy at issue here is always more than an analogy, more than one analogy, producing a multiplicity of possible symbols, analogies, and so forth. This begins to explain why for Lyotard there is no longer a single end toward which humanity is oriented but a multiplicity of ends. The relation between the political and philosophy is therefore more than an analogy not least because an understanding of representation as simile and metaphor can no longer represent that relation. This relation will always exceed such an understanding of representation, precisely because the political can never be accounted for in it. For while the analogical relation between the political and philosophy as we have seen it described apparently binds the two in a self-closing and self-fulfilling relation, within that relation philosophy always depends upon the political as its symbol, that as which philosophy can act. In order for philosophy to find its symbol and become critical, it depends upon the political, which must reciprocally act as if it were philosophy. What at once grounds and allows the ostensible closure of the relation, then, is this acting “as if” of symbolic analogy. This analogy must always be more than, exceed, the analogical terms it brings into relation, and must exceed the relation between them that takes the form of a self-fulfilling, closed relation. Analogy is thus what at once gives the relation the appearance of closure and what will never be fully contained by that relation or representable in terms of a traditional understanding of representation as expressed by a casual use of the term analogy. The conception of the political as the “as if” referent of philosophy, as a fiction, that is, as linguistic, means that the political can never be reduced to a determinate politics of any description, for the political can never have an intuitable, empirical referent, not even a set of concepts that could be put into practice and that could be called “politics.” It is the very linguistic nature of the political that resists all (mis)appropriation by a political program that could somehow claim fidelity to the essence or Idea of politics, the political itself.20 But this is not simply to reduce the political to a mere play of language either. For it is precisely in becoming fully symbolic that the relation between the political and philosophy can no longer be contained by symbolic structure or representation. This is where Lyotard’s deployment of the resources offered by Kant’s thought, however faithful to that thought, offers the possibility of a reconceptualized political. It is by no means evident, however, that Lyotard himself fully explores the implications of that rethinking, in Enthusiasm at


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least.21 For it is in the description of the relation between philosophy and the political as more than an affinity, that point at which the political is said to be philosophy, philosophy the political, that the political acquires its peculiar power. If the fictionality of the political refused its appropriation to any politics, here that same linguistic status, just where it is intensified to express a fully symbolic interlacing, is in excess of the symbol. Since it is the symbol that will always be more than a symbol, the “as if,” the fictionality of the political, ensures that the political can also never be reduced to or appropriated for a system of representation, even the very symbolic structure that provides its founding moment or definition. This, then, would be a conception of the political that would resist the intentional control of political subjects and their programs by means of its fictionality or linguisticality, but that also resists the intentionality of a linguistic structure such as the symbol. The political will therefore be radically indeterminate, exploding the very structure in which it is postulated. Defined as a symbol, but a symbol that is more than a symbol, exceeding its own definition, the concept of the political would necessarily include the rupturing of its own conceptuality. This is why it is by no means certain that there could ever be either a concept or a philosophy of the political. The political would be not only the symbol of philosophy but the resistance to the attempt to philosophize—the political itself.

鵽鵾 One of the effects of the rethinking of the political as analogous to critical philosophy, we have seen, is to withdraw it from any grounds outside of itself. Any political action, indeed any action in general, cannot be judged on the basis of an empirical model, for instance, nor can it be founded on a notion of the subject as the ground for judgement itself. Thus, what the rethinking of history and the political in terms of the “as if” will ultimately demand is a rethinking and re-translation of the imperative that for Kant governs the possibility of just action. Yet such a rethinking leads not to an abandonment of political and ethical responsibility, but rather to a radicalized understanding of it. As Thomas Keenan puts it, “[R]esponsibility is not a moment of security or of cognitive certainty. Quite to the contrary: the only responsibility worthy of the name comes with the removal of grounds, the withdrawal of the rules or the knowledge on which we might rely to make our decisions for us. No grounds means no alibis, no elsewhere to which we might refer the instance of our decision.”22 It follows, then, that Lyotard’s reading of Kant will refigure not only the political but his most important thinking on ethics, as well as his consideration


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of history. This will mean, to be sure, rethinking nothing less than that imperative that rules over Kant’s ethical thought. In the Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, for example, Kant describes how an imperative, if it is to be universal and categorical, must not be contingent upon anything like a goal to be reached if the imperative is followed (“Do unto others as you would have others do unto you” would not qualify). Rather than being intended towards a determinate end, the imperative expresses a relation of Gesetzmäßigkeit, an accordance to the law. If an action that is apparently motivated by the laws of nature is also possible according to one’s will, to freedom, the conditions of the categorical imperative have been met. Rather than the law itself, then, rather than a rule, it is this thinking of relation, the accordance to the law, that makes the passage from theory to practice and from nature to freedom possible. Translating this rule will amount to retranslating the very status of history.23 C’est le type de la législation qui guide formellement la maxime de la volonté dans la formulation de l’impératif catégorique, et aussi dans l’évaluation de l’action juste. Il faut donc bien entendre le so daß du Handelt so daß de l’impératif catégorique comme un comme si plutôt que comme un de sorte que: car l’universalité ne peut pas être effectivement conclue de la maxime, mais seulement présentée indirectement à l’évaluation qui en est faite. [The type of legislation formally guides the maxim of the will in the formulation of the categorical imperative and also in the evaluation of just action. We must therefore understand the so daß [so that] of the Handelt so daß [Act so that] of the categorical imperative as an as if more than as a so that. For universality cannot actually be concluded from the maxim, but only presented indirectly to the evaluation that is made of it.] (39–40)

How are we to understand this rereading of the very cornerstone of the practical in Kant’s philosophy? Lyotard’s argument reads like the statement of a truth too long overlooked, like an assertion that Kant’s text means “as if” and not “so that” and that this meaning is unavoidable. But this appearance of merely stating, asserting, describing what should follow naturally from his exposition of the passage made by judgement is not the least of what is disconcerting in Lyotard’s argument. For he does not merely state that the “so that” is really an “as if,” but demands an understanding of it as such: “We must therefore understand . . .” It would at this point be quite easy, and perhaps altogether legitimate, to accuse Lyotard of mixing different kinds of phrases in precisely the manner that he says one must not mix language genres: he slides here from the descriptive into the prescriptive, prescribing a reading of the categorical imperative that takes on the appearance of a description.24 Lyotard’s reading is


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actually an imperative, the imperative of the categorical imperative. Yet even as an imperative, its force is to put into question the categorical imperative, for it reformulates the universality of the relation expressed in the so that, making it an utterly contingent and indeterminate “as if.” Like the political, this imperative is thoroughly linguistic, and not merely because it mixes language genres, or because it dictates what amounts to a retranslation of Kant, but because it is as imperative that it seeks to disrupt the imperative. Now, it is as if there could be a link between the individual and the universal, between nature and liberty. Lyotard’s retranslation of Kant does not simply overcome the imperative mode but rather disrupts what in Kant appears to be a determined relation between the distinct realms. Lyotard, however, calls not for the necessity of just action, not for what clearly could be seen as a historical event; rather, his is an injunction for a reading of that imperative. Lyotard’s imperative calls for a reading and even a retranslation of Kant that would render that determinate relation indeterminate. According to Lyotard’s reading, Kant’s imperative says one thing but must mean another. What it says, in Kant’s own words and their translation into French and English, is: Handle so, daß die Maxime deines Willens jederzeit zugleich als Prinzip einer allgemeinen Gesetzgebung gelten könne.25 Agis de telle sorte que la maxime de ta volonté puisse toujours valoir en même temps comme principe d’une législation universelle.26 Act so that the maxim of your will can always at the same time be valid as a universal legislation.

But what the categorical imperative must mean, according to Lyotard, is: Agis comme si la maxime de ta volonté puisse toujours valoir en même temps comme principe d’une législation universelle. Handle als ob die Maxime deines Willens jederzeit zugleich als Prinzip einer allgemeinen Gesetzgebung gelten könne. Act as if the maxim of your will can always at the same time be valid as a universal legislation.

If I invert the order of the passages here, it is because, following Lyotard, Kant’s own German would have to be retranslated into German (perhaps Kant should have written in French) in order to say what his own thought means. If Lyotard feels obliged to phrase his reading of Kant in the form of an imperative, it is clearly because Kant criticism has not read the “so daß” as a “comme si.” Lyotard’s imperative is enunciated precisely because it has been, and can continue to be, broken.27 His imperative seeks to rewrite the history of Kant


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criticism, which is to rewrite the history of a certain understanding of history. He is not the first to propose such a retranslation, the very kind of translation that no self-respecting translator would undertake, however. Kant’s own multiple phrasings and rephrasings of the categorical imperative attest to much the same practice. Lyotard does not, however, remove the grounds for an evaluation of just action.28 Rather, he makes the relation that controls that action indeterminate. His reading of Kant leaves the possibility of a relation between the individual and universal, but now the link is a “comme si” rather than a “so daß.” In order for the categorical imperative as Lyotard understands it to be respected, one cannot act so that there is an adherence to the universal law, but rather as if such an adherence were taking place. This acting “as if,” this acting that defines the possibility of just acting, then, posits the universal. In fact, this positing might already be read in Kant’s formulation of reflective judgement as the derivative of a rule or universal for a particular case according to the structure of purposiveness. The determined relation Lyotard disrupts, then, was never fully that. More important, though, Lyotard’s formulation highlights how a continual acting as if there were a possibility of a relation to the universal in fact posits the universal. What is not accounted for in this conception of history is the imperative that makes the rereading of history and thus also the rethinking of the relation to the universal possible. Lyotard’s own imperative (“We must therefore understand”) cannot be accounted for in such a conception of history, for it dictates a determined linguistic relation, a relation between two sets of signifiers (“so that” and “as if”) linked by understanding (entendre). Lyotard’s imperative, that is, calls for the absolute necessity of reading the “so that” as an “as if” if the history of Kant criticism is to be interrupted and rewritten, if a conception of history is to be rethought in terms of a continual production of a history oriented toward an indeterminate future and a positing of a relation to the universal. Lyotard’s imperative seeks to determine an indeterminate relation and as such remains radically at odds with the (conception of) history he would inaugurate. What would appear to be a merely linguistic relation, the relation between two languages and between possible translations of a single term (“so daß” read as “comme si” or “de sorte que”) thus acquires the status of historical revision— the revision of the writing of a certain history and of a conception of history. The relation between history and the (interpretable, translatable) sign is not simply that of the anteriority and priority of the historical, then; rather, it describes a relation in which a modification of that which is secondary, later (representation, the sign) has the unforeseen and unconventional effect of modifying that which is prior and primary (history, the concept).


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This is precisely what takes place in Kant’s understanding of history as the continual progression of the human species toward the best, in fact, toward nothing less than perpetual peace. Given this understanding of history in terms of an orientation toward the future, no direct presentation of a history of progress is possible. Rather than something that is given to intuition (ein Gegebenes), an indication of progress is called for. The Begebenheit that fulfills this requirement is characterized by an indeterminate temporal relation: [C]ette Begebenheit qui se livre dans l’histoire humaine indique une cause dont l’occurrence de l’effet reste non déterminée (unbestimmt) à l’égard du temps (in Ansehung der Zeit): on reconnaît la clause d’indépendence de la causalité par liberté par rapport aux séries diachroniques du monde mécanique. Cette causalité peut intervenir n’importe quand. . . . Car c’est à ce prix qu’on pourrait alors étendre la possibilité d’intervention de cette cause aussi au passé et au futur. [(T)his Begebenheit that is given in human history indicates a cause the occurrence of whose effect remains undetermined (unbestimmt) in relation to time (in Ansehung der Zeit): we recognize the clause of the independence of causality through freedom in relation to the diachronic series of the mechanical world. This causality can intervene at any time. . . . For it is at this price that the possibility of the intervention of this cause could be extended to the past as well as the future.] (55–6)

A Begebenheit, as sign of history, liberates the historical from diachronic causality. Historical causality, for Kant, emerges less as a matter of a series of events arranged in a temporal sequence, such that one leads to the other as its author or cause, than it does as a question of intervention. The Begebenheit opens up the possibility that the cause of progress many intervene from either the past or the future. It opens up a temporal relation in which history is no longer limited to a conventional conception of causality, but rather in which the cause may be as yet to come. The Begebenheit is thus that which comes between as a sort of mediation, though not in any conventionally dialectical sense. Rather, the intervention of the Begebenheit is the entering-into, the coming-to, history itself ; it is historical intervention in the strictest sense. For historical intervention is not merely the intervention (of an agent, for example) in history, but rather the intervention of history into history, history coming to historical status. Kant’s conception of history thus discloses the very conditions according to which history becomes historical. This takes place only when historical causality is made a field open to intervention from past, present, and future. While Lyotard’s reading of Kant traces how, as a result of the reformulation of history in terms of indeterminate temporal relations, the cause is simply an


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intervention into time, either past or future (56), he continues to outline a much more literal intervention or coming-between: “[L]a Begebenheit ne doit pas être elle-même la cause du progrès, mais seulement l’indice du progrès, un Geschichtszeichen” [(T)he Begebenheit must not itself be the cause of progress, but only the sign of progress, a Geschichtszeichen (sign of history)] (56). What intervenes is not the cause itself, then, but its sign (Zeichen). The Begebenheit functions as the sign rather than the cause of progress, presenting as well as remembering and prognosticating history. As the sign of history, the Begebenheit comes between (without endangering the movement between) cause and progress and between history and its perception. The cause is an intervention into indeterminate temporal relations, but here it is clear that while the Begebenheit is distinguished from the cause, it nonetheless partakes of a far more literal intervention, an inter-venir, a coming-between that allows both cause and progress to be perceived as such. The Begebenheit, as the sign of history, therefore represents a nondialectical form of mediation or coming-between. It allows the crossing of the abyss separating cause and progress without sublating it. And even as a sign of history, the Begebenheit determines the status of that of which it is a sign—history—thus reformulating what amounts to a conventional understanding of the sign, representation, history, and their relation. The historico-political “n’a pas de réalité, en tant que tel” [has no reality as such] (45), is a “‘comme si ’ objet” (57). It is derealized, an “‘as if ’ object,” because that which has a reality, that is, “[c]e pour le concept de quoi l’on peut présenter des intuitions, ce sont seulement les phénomènes, tous conditionnés et conditionnants, dont la série, qui n’est ellemême jamais donnée, constitue l’histoire, même pas naturelle, mais seulement cosmologique, de l’humanité” [(t)hat for which intuitions can be presented are simply phenomena, all conditioned and conditioning, whose series, which itself is never given, constitutes the history of humanity, which is not even natural but only cosmological] (45). The “as if” is thus disclosed as what might be termed the minimal condition of history. History is an open-ended, undetermined series which by definition must remain not only untotalized (and untotalizable) but unavailable to intuition, an analogue to the sublime. The undetermined and derealized status of the historical as fixed by a Begebenheit does not, however, render it a mere fiction in any conventional sense. Rather, the derealization of history as a possible object of intuition demands the intervention of the Begebenheit, the sign of history. The very possibility of any recognition, not to mention judgement, of history entails its coming into relation with a sign, with (re)presentation. The effect of this relation is to displace the place of history, to relocate history, so that it rests not only on the historical scene, but also in the “sentiment


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des spectateurs obscurs et lointains (la salle de l’histoire) qui les regardent, les entendent, et qui distinguent dans le bruit et la fureur des res gestae ce qui est juste et ce qui ne l’est pas” [feeling of the obscure and distant spectators (the theatre of history) who watch [historical events], hear them, and who distinguish in the noise and furor of the res gestae what is and is not just] (59). For Kant the enthusiasm of the spectators of the French Revolution, though they are not immediately implicated in it, constitutes just such a sign.29 What determines this enthusiasm as a sign of history is its status as a “modality of the feeling of the sublime” (59). The feeling of the sublime results from the inability to supply a presentation for an object, thus causing the experience of powerlessness and marking the turn to the Idea of humanity. The enthusiasm of those witnessing the French Revolution from a somewhat comfortable distance (a necessary condition of the sublime) as a sign of history thus equally marks the shift from the given object to the Idea of humanity in an exemplary fashion. For while the view of Mont Blanc or crossing the Alps, to take two off-hand examples, may occasion the feeling of the sublime, the French Revolution, turning us toward the still, sad music of humanity, would seem even more likely to stir such a sentiment: its goals, after all, were ostensibly intended toward such an Idea as expressed in the ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity. And yet to follow Kant’s conception of the sublime closely, neither the supposed goals of the Revolution nor the Revolution itself can be credited with the qualities that are ultimately placed not on the historical scene but in the audience. That is, the purported goals of the Revolution (which are in some sense humanitarian or humanist) are not the source of the feeling turned toward the Idea of humanity. The exemplarity of the French Revolution as an object producing the feeling of the sublime thus cannot be located in its adherence to the idea of humanity. If the Revolution is the source of the feeling of the sublime, it is rather because both it and its guiding principles are the objects before which presentation fails. The Revolution can be the source of a sublime sentiment only on this condition, meaning that the turn to the Idea of humanity that takes place in the feeling of the sublime arises from a failure to present that same Idea. The unstated similarity between Kant’s conception of the French Revolution and Lyotard’s conception of postmodernity thus lies in the asymmetric positioning of the Idea of humanity. It is the Idea for which an adequate presentation cannot be found and which nevertheless leads to the feeling for that same Idea. Consequently, an incommensurability, an asymmetry, exists not only within this idea but in the very possibility of presentation. Enthusiasm, the sign of history, discloses a fundamental incommensurability in all presentation


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as well as the destination/determination (Bestimmung) of the subject. Our Bestimmung (this “our” needing to be put into question30) is to have to produce a presentation of the unpresentable; it is to be subject to an excess, to exceed all that can be presented, this excess acting as if presentation of the unpresentable were possible. The apparent failure of presentation, however, is what we have seen lead to the turn to the feeling of the Idea of humanity. Enthusiasm thus discloses a certain universality, that of humanity. This is also why the positioning of the sign of history not on the historical scene but in the audience is crucial: in this way the historical is freed not only from the (potentially dangerous) passions of the historical actors, but from an overly determinate and limited scope with the potential to become truly international and cosmopolitan (weltbürgerlich). The status of the sign of history, however, the Begebenheit that is the enthusiasm of the “spectators” of the Revolution, is not determined by the fact or even the possibility of such a universality in itself. Rather, what makes a sign a sign of history for Kant is its affirmation that humanity is progressing toward the best. The sign of history is therefore already determined, perhaps even overdetermined: it is any such affirmation of progress. All that is now needed is a sign of this sign. The enthusiasm of the spectators of the Revolution fulfills this criterion because, Lyotard insists, it is an extreme, even excessive, form of the sublime: [L]e sublime constitue une “comme si” présentation . . . de l’Idée de moralité, là où pourtant elle ne peut être présentée, dans l’expérience. C’est ainsi que le sublime est un signe. Ce signe n’est qu’indicateur d’une causalité libre, mais il a pourtant valeur de “preuve” pour la phrase qui affirme le progrès, puisqu’il faut que l’humanité spectatrice ait déjà progressé dans la culture pour pouvoir faire ce signe, par sa “manière de penser” la Révolution. Ce signe est le progrès dans son état présent . . . alors que les sociétés civiles ne sont pas, tant s’en faut, proches du régime républicain ni les Etats de leur fedération mondiale. [(T)he sublime constitutes an “as if ” presentation . . . of the Idea of morality where, however, it cannot be presented, in experience. It is thus that the sublime is a sign. This sign is only an indication of a free causality; however, it has the value of “proof ” for the phrase that affirms progress, since the spectating humanity must already have progressed in culture, through its “manner of thinking” the Revolution, in order to be able to make this sign. This sign is progress in its present state . . . while civil societies are not close (far from it) to either the republican regime or the States of their world federation.] (75)

What ultimately takes place in Kant is a displacement not merely of the sign of history from the historical scene, from world-historical events and their


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agents to their perception by an audience, but a displacement of history itself from one to the other. This displacement takes place here because of a change in the status of the sign. At first, the sublime, enthusiasm, is a mere indication that nonetheless carries all the force of a proof that the spectators have progressed in their way of thinking the Revolution. This sign, however, then quickly becomes this progress in the mode of the present (“This sign is progress in its present state”). This sign as indication of progress becomes a modality of that progress itself and as such is no longer a sign of history so much as it is history itself. Thus, the enthusiasm that serves as an “as if” presentation of the Idea of civil and even cosmopolitan society also undergoes a transformation. It is no longer an “as if ” presentation that enthusiasm supplies, no longer an indication of progress, no longer as if progress, historicity, could be affirmed. Rather, following the logic of the progression in Lyotard’s passage, the “as if” history becomes the “is” history. The sublime, enthusiasm, the salle, the spectators, are already history and not “merely” its sign, because the sign of history has become history itself. It therefore follows naturally that one of these spectators, an apparent commentator and nothing more, must also change in status to become a component of the sign and of history itself: “Si ce signe peut être discerné par la pensée kantienne, c’est qu’elle même n’en est pas seulement une lecture, mais une composante” [If this sign can be discerned by Kant’s thought, it is because it itself is not only a reading of the sign but a component] (75). What can it mean that the distinction between history, its sign, and the reading of that sign is collapsed here? This is, to be sure, a necessary consequence of a reflexive understanding of history in terms of an aesthetic that shifts the scene of history from the scene to the audience, opening the way for a further displacement in which the reading of the sign is also a component of that sign. Kant doubles, repeats, reflects the enthusiasm of the spectators of the Revolution, his assertion that progress is on its inevitable march reflecting their own belief in such progress. Not only the reading but the very perception of the sign of history as a sign collapses all difference between the reading of the sign and the sign itself, between the sign and that of which it is the sign. Such a view of spectating is hardly surprising, given that we are dealing with Kant. Who better than Kant, after all, to speak for the historical significance of a certain mode of perception, Kant, who could, if one is to believe him, see everything from home? Eine große Stadt, der Mittelpunkt eines Reichs, in welchem sich die Landescollegia der Regierung desselben befinden, die eine Universität (zur Kultur der Wissenschaften) und dabei noch die Lage zum Teehandel hat, welche durch Flüsse aus dem Inneren des Landes sowohl, als auch mit


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Borders of a Lip angränzenden entlegenen Ländern von verschiedenen Sprachen and Sitten einen Verkehr begünstigt,—eine solche Stadt, wie etwa Königsberg am Pregelflusse, kann schon für einen schicklichen Platz zu Erweiterung sowohl der Menschenkenntniß als auch der Weltkenntniß genommen werden, wo diese, auch ohne zu reifen, erworben werden kann. A large city like Königsberg on the river Pregel, the capital of a state, where the representative National Assembly of the government resides, a city with a university (for the cultivation of the sciences), a city also favored by its location for maritime commerce, and which, by way of rivers, has the advantages of commerce both with the interior of the country as well as with neighboring countries of different languages and customs, can well be taken as an appropriate place for enlarging one’s knowledge of people as well as of the world at large, where such knowledge can be acquired even without travel.31

As much as he would displace history from the stage of historical events to the sentiment of those viewing them, Kant would relocate it precisely in Königsberg, in Kant’s residence, from where, needless to say, one can see everything. Kant need never leave Königsberg, then, from where his views on humankind can emerge as a sign of cultural progress insofar as they are that very progress. As long as history is understood in terms of an orientation toward an end, something like progress, and as long as the aptitude for this end (what Kant calls “culture”) is itself a sign of history, that is, as long as history is understood reflexively, the perception of the sign must itself always be a sign. The very recognition of the sign (the spectators’ enthusiasm at the prospect of progress) must always be a sign (of the commentator’s ability to discern progress). And the sign is itself progress (in the aptitude for progress). Accordingly, the perception of the sign of history is a sign (of itself ), which is history. What Lyotard has called Kant’s critique of history can no longer be considered merely as a critique but is itself the sign of history, which is to say, is history. In the terms he develops, displacing the sign of history to a kind of aesthetic of reception and then making that sign itself a component of history, commentary, the critique of history, will itself always be historical. A reflexive understanding of history carries with it the privilege and burden of implicating itself in history, of requiring that it account for its own history in a rigorous way, of historicizing itself. An excessive, an extreme form of the sublime; an “as if” history that becomes history itself: in Lyotard’s reading of Kant symbolic substitution presides over the entire thinking of history and the political. Given the nature of this excess, it should come as no surprise that the “as if ” will reach beyond Kant to take up a determinative role in Lyotard’s work, will reach beyond the Enlighten-


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ment to provide the definition of a certain postmodernism: “[L]e politique kantien me paraît au plus près de ce qu’aujourd’hui nous pouvons entendre par, je dirais tout bêtement, le politique” [(T)he Kantian political seems to me closest to what, today, we can understand by, to put it quite simply, the political] (105). But the difference between then and now is precisely a kind of excess. The sign of history, now, is stirred not by a single end, but by the Idea of several ends or even by the heterogeneous Ideas of ends (108). The sign of history, now as opposed to then, is a “new kind of sublime.” This new sublime, this excessive Begebenheit intended toward numerous ends, means that the political, today, is the “as if” referent of the Kantian political, with all that this analogical relation supposes. Today’s conception of the political will always be “as if” an Enlightenment conception of the political. It is the beyond, the more than, the excess that serves as the referent that the Enlightenment conception of the political lacked, and which is necessary if that conception is to assume its critical rigor. But this also means that the postmodern must exceed the Kantian political, must never be fully contained by it: [C]ette histoire politique, il faudrait désormais la juger comme si elle avait fait un pas de plus dans le progrès, c’est-à-dire dans la culture de l’habilité et de la volonté. Car ce n’est pas seulement l’Idée d’une fin qui s’indiquerait dans notre sentiment, mais déjà l’Idée que cette fin consiste dans la formation et l’exploration libre des Idées, que cette fin est le commencement de l’infini des finalités hétérogènes. Tout ce qui ne satisfait pas à cette fission de la fin, tout ce qui se présente comme “réalisation” d’une fin unique, ce qui est le cas de la phrase de la politique, est senti comme n’étant pas à la mesure de, angemessen, pas “affine avec,” abgezielt, la capacité infinie des phrases qui se livre dans le sentiment qui suscite cette fission. [(F)rom now on we would have to judge this political history as if it had made another step in progress, that is, in the culture of aptitude and will. For it is not only the Idea of an end that would be indicated in our feeling, but already the Idea that this end consists in the formation and free exploration of Ideas, that this end is the beginning of the infinity of heterogeneous finalities. Everything that does not satisfy the fission of the end, everything that presents itself as the “realization” of a single end, which is the case of the phrase of politics [la politique], is felt as not being suited to, angemessen, not “in accordance with,” abgezielt, the infinite capacity of phrases that is given in the feeling that arouses this fission.] (109)

We might suspect that, in accordance with the structure of historical repetition, that is, the repetition of a conceptualization of history, Lyotard here repeats Kant’s gesture, remarking the postmodern as a sign of progress and thus as a sign of history. The only difference between now and then, between Lyotard


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and Kant, between the postmodern and the Enlightenment, would then be that the progress the postmodern signals is not a determinate and totalizing end such as a conception of humanity or freedom, but rather the recognition that the end is but the beginning of an infinity of ends. The end would thus be exploded, divided, and multiplied. It would interrupt the totalizing movement toward a telos. Such a conception of the postmodern and the political would conform more or less to both Lyotard’s apparent intentions and much criticism of his work.32 What is somewhat disconcerting in such a reading, however, is nothing less than the “as if” and the sign of history. A new Lyotardian imperative can hardly escape notice here: “We would have to judge this political history as if it had made another step in progress.” While there is something intuitively appealing (with all the attendant difficulties of the appeal of and to intuition) in the multiplication of ends and the rupture of totalization and the promise of a certain pluralism, just precisely why postmodern political history would have to be judged as if it were a step in the right direction ought, perhaps, to be considered. Why does Lyotard feel obliged to oblige us to see the postmodern, his conception of the political, thus? What does it mean that without this final imperative the very conception of the postmodern and of the political as Lyotard develops them might lose all their force? Why the insistence upon progress and teleology, be it a teleology whose telos is multiplied? Given this insistence, have things changed all that much between then and now, between the Enlightenment and the postmodern? And finally, how are we to read the “as if” here? For this much seems clear: we must read the “as if.” Lyotard justifies his “imperative” with all the simplicity and authority of the word car, “for.” One must read postmodern political history in terms of progress, for it opens up an infinity of heterogeneous ends. Thus, despite the disruption of the totalizing movement toward a single end by the multiplication of ends, Lyotard’s own argument moves toward an ineluctable end. What we cannot avoid, and what his argument never accounts for, is the necessity of this end, the multiplication of ends. Lyotard’s conception of the political, that is, is no less determined by an end, which is in effect the idea of heterogeneity, infinity, multiplicity. This end presides over his conception of the political from beginning to end and effectively condemns all that does not conform to it to a corrupted and inferior status. Thus, all mere politics, historical practices in the most common sense, which intend themselves toward a single potentially realizable end rather than to an indeterminable multiplicity of ends that cannot be submitted to the control of any intention, are seen by Lyotard as perversions of the political both in Enthusiasm and elsewhere. His end is now the end of the


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(single, unified, totalizing) end, an end in the structure and movement of his argument, but no longer an end conceived as a final conceptual resolution. An end that is not the end. A simple conception of the multiplication of the telos, a kind of conceptual pluralism, can never adequately describe this end. Again, what is troubling about this end is that it is willed rather than legitimated or derived from the analysis of the political that precedes it. The end is, in effect, placed there (dar-gestellt), and it is placed there, posited, as that which will justify a reading of the postmodern political condition as if it were a step in progress. The infinity of ends is the given, the Gegebenes, that makes a reading of the postmodern and the political as history possible. It is not only as if the political history related signalled some form of progress, but as if an infinity of ends could be read as progress. This final “as if,” which Lyotard does not write, is the “as if” he must not write. For in the place of this “as if,” he would place a for, with all the appearance of a self-evident logical argument it carries. Lyotard, that is, tries to argue for the necessity of the multiplication of ends (“we would have to . . . for . . .”), but within the terms of his own argument there is no necessity, no imperative, but rather an “as if ” . . . As in the case of Kant, Lyotard’s own argument is a sign of history, which is to say that it is history insofar as history conceived as progress can only be as if . . . history. This does not weaken Lyotard’s conception of the political or simply catch him in a contradiction so much as it bears out the constitutive force of the “as if.” Lyotard’s oversight, if it is one, is to attempt to escape the “as if ” that put his very argument into motion, to attempt to transform the indeterminacy of an “as if” into an is or a for. As if . . . For Lyotard’s criticism to live up to its name, for it to be political in the full sense that Kant’s text makes available to him, and to us, it would have to follow this “as if” rigorously. A political criticism would be that mode of questioning that, whether or not it moves toward a determinate end, can never take that end, even if it is the multiplication of ends, as its end. The relation between the particular and the universal, between the phenomenal and its rule, between the text and its theorization, would now be that of an indeterminate, though constitutive, fiction—the “as if.” This is the nonimperative, the fictional, critical imperative, that articulates the necessity that criticism follow its object in the mode of the “as if” rather than that of a determined and determining rule. Following this (non)imperative throughout the chapters that follow will mean reading historical imperatives that will be played out, again and again, as their own transgression, as the imperative interruption of the very mode of the imperative, and as the transgressive crossings that will emerge as the borders of history and language.


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CHAPTER TWO

鵽鵾

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i t a crucial juncture in the second section of his Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant enumerates a number of scenarios meant to explore the possibility of an imperative of duty. The second of these tells the hypothetical story of a liar:

A

Ein anderer sieht sich durch die Not gedrungen, Geld zu borgen. Er weiß wohl, daß er nicht wird bezahlen können, sieht aber auch, daß ihm nichts geliehen werden wird, wenn er nicht festiglich verspricht, es zu einer betimmten Zeit zu bezahlen. Er hat Lust, ein solches Versprechen zu tun; noch aber hat er so viel Gewissen, sich zu fragen: ist es nicht unerlaubt und pflichtwidrig, sich auf solche Art aus Not zu helfen? Gesetzt, er beschlösse es doch, so würde seine Maxime der Handlung so lauten: wenn ich mich in Geldnot zu sein glaube, so will ich Geld borgen, und versprechen, es zu bezahlen, ob ich gleich weiß, es werde niemals geschehen. Nun ist dieses Prinzip der Selbstliebe, oder der eigenen Zuträglichkeit, mit meinem ganzen künftigen Wohlbefinden vielleicht wohl zu vereinigen, allein jetzt ist die Frage: ob es recht sei? Ich verwandle also die Zumutung der Selbstliebe in ein allgemeines Gesetz, und richte die Frage so ein: wie es dann stehen würde, wenn meine Maxime ein allgemeines Gesetz würde. Da sehe ich nun sogleich, daß sie niemals als allgemeines Naturgesetz gelten und mit sich selbst zusammen stimmen könne, sondern sich notwendig wider-

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Borders of a Lip sprechen müsse. Denn die Allgemeinheit eines Gesetzes, daß jeder, nachdem er in Not zu sein glaubt, versprechen könne, was ihm einfällt, mit dem Vorsatz, es nicht zu halten, würde das Versprechen und den Zweck, den man damit haben mag, selbst unmöglich machen, indem niemand glauben würde, daß ihm was versprochen sei, sondern über all solche Äußerungen, als eitles Vorgeben, lachen würde. [Another man in need finds himself forced to borrow money. He knows very well that he won’t be able to repay it, but he sees also that he will not get any loan unless he firmly promises to repay it within a fixed time. He wants to make such a promise, but he still has conscience enough to ask himself whether it is not permissible and is contrary to duty to get out of difficulty in this way. Suppose, however, that he decides to do so. The maxim of his action would then be expressed as follows: when I believe myself to be in need of money, I will borrow money and promise to pay it back, although I know that I never can do so. Now this principle of selflove or personal advantage may perhaps be quite compatible with one’s entire future welfare, but the question is now whether it is right. I then transform the requirement of self-love into a universal law and put the question thus: how would things stand if my maxim were to become a universal law? I then see at once that such a maxim could never hold as a universal law of nature and be consistent with itself, but must necessarily be self-contradictory. For the universality of a law which says that anyone believing himself to be in difficulty could promise whatever he pleases with the intention of not keeping it would make promising itself and the end to be attained thereby quite impossible, inasmuch as no one would believe what was promised him but would merely laugh at all such utterances as being vain pretenses.]1

Kant invokes this and other similar scenarios in the name of a formulation of duty that has in turn been derived from the categorical imperative we have been considering. It is a question, then, of a certain passage: Der kategorische Imperative ist also nur ein einziger, und zwar dieser: handle nur nach derjenigen Maxime, durch die du zugleich wollen kannst, daß sie ein allgemeines Gesetz werde. . . . [D]er allgemeine Imperative der Pflicht [könnte] . . . so lauten: handle so, als ob die Maxime deiner Handlung durch deinen Willen zum allgemeinen Naturgesetze werden sollte. (51) [(T)here is only one categorical imperative and it is this: Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law. . . . (T)he universal imperative of duty may be expressed thus: Act as if the maxim of your action were to become through your will a universal law of nature.] (30)

The transition, if not translation, from the categorical imperative to the universal imperative of duty is assured by a now familiar figure. Whereas the categori-


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cal imperative legislates an action that would be ethical to the extent that it can be willed to be universal law, the imperative of duty legislates the relation between action and the universal (now formulated as a law of nature) as an “as if.” A limited case of all ethical action, actions according to duty do not describe a kind of bad faith, acting as if one were willing a universal all the while knowing that in fact this is not the case or perhaps is not even possible. Rather, dutiful action must take place in the mode of the “as if,” must take place, that is, both as an individual action and the possibility of becoming a universal law of nature. The “as if,” then, can be termed a fiction or fictioning only insofar as fiction is no longer simply charged with falsity as it has been throughout the Western tradition and is refigured as the potentiality of becoming universal. It postulates a future that it can no more foresee than it can determine, the future that could act as the fulfillment of dutiful action. It figures the universal as the future fulfillment of a present possibility. As such, in the imperative of duty, the historical event of actions is legislated as a figurative potential in which actions are the figure of what they might become. Clearly, it is not simply a matter of a linguistic rendering or representation of future historical events, but of history as the fulfillment of a figurative potentiality, of the fulfillment of figure itself. At stake in the imperative of duty is therefore the articulation together of two modes of language, the imperative and a certain prefiguration. It can hardly be an accident, then, that the scenario we are reading should involve a promise. For what that particular, and particularly vexed, speech act describes is precisely a mode of language whose historicality involves a disjuncture between the present of historical action (the promise itself as act) and the future fulfillment of the promise of that action. The promise is always the promise of history. It might not legislate its future fulfillment but it does promise it. It promises, in fact, its own fulfillment as a history adequate to itself. After all, what happens in the case where the promise is not kept? What happens when a man promises to pay back a loan, for instance, but does so believing he will not be able to keep his promise? The risk, if one can put it that way, of the promise is that its failure, the inability or refusal to fulfill it, might deny its historical status. For if making the promise constitutes an event and thus is historical, it also implies a future moment at which that history will be made good. The event of the promise, that is, does not merely describe the punctuality of its happening but also the fulfillment of its meaning in another, later event. The promise is always split, its history divided between a present (act) and a future (meaning), such that its meaning as history will always be given in a future. The historical status of such a speech act will never be embodied in a present event, will never adhere to the mode of presence. This is not to say that the act will be made historical in a


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future fulfillment, which would merely relocate the historical status of the promise definitively and unproblematically in another present displaced to the future. Rather, the promise is historical precisely to the extent that its meaning can never be fulfilled in its happening as event but rather depends upon its reflexive relation to itself. It is historical insofar as it takes place as the prefiguration of a meaning still to come, insofar as its happening now is always to come. The promise is the historical event that takes place now as a future fulfillment. The case of the man who borrows money knowing that he will not be able to pay it back is a special case of this historical situation. Knowing that he cannot repay his debts, the man makes a promise in bad faith. But this is only possible to the extent that the promise is divided between the present of its performance and the future of its fulfillment. If it were self-identical, if it took place uniquely in the moment of performance, no such bad faith would be possible: the promise would be made as uttered (or written) and could not be belied by any intent, knowledge, or future. But the bad conscience here might better be described as that of the assumed knowledge of the future. The liar, if he is one, speaks an untruth to the extent that he “knows” that he will not be able to pay back the debt and yet promises to do so: he promises to do that which he “knows” he will not be able to do. In so doing, however, he supposes a knowledge of a future about which he can have no certain knowledge. Any attempt to formalize such a scenario into a universal law, Kant points out, must fail since “it would make promising itself and the end to be attained thereby quite impossible.” Promising is impossible, however, not only “inasmuch as no one would believe what was promised him but would merely laugh at all such utterances as being vain pretenses.” Even more profound, the impossibility extends beyond the problem of bad faith to the event of promising inasmuch as any promise is grounded upon a future meaning which cannot be assured in the present. The promise always promises that which it cannot assure precisely because, as Kant himself puts it, it is not “consistent with itself ” but necessarily “self-contradictory.” One can, of course, never be sure of being able to keep one’s promises. Promising is impossible and self-contradictory, therefore, insofar as the meaning of the promise cannot be fulfilled in the act of the promise itself. As a result, it is entirely possible, when it comes to making promises, that one can never be a liar, or, which amounts to much the same thing, that one can only ever be a liar. Thus, any categorical imperative of such a speech act will also be impossible to the extent that it will always be characterized by bad faith: no promise can pretend to will that it should become a universal law, since it knows that it might not be able to uphold the promise of universality and therefore already has not done so.


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The statement of such a categorical imperative, in other words, would necessarily belie its status as such. A promise could only ever be “as if” it could become a universal law, which is to say that the universal imperative of duty is the imperative of the promise. Such an imperative, which rules over historical actions in nature, demands that historical events take place in the figurative mode of being at once what they are and something else, figures for the potential fulfillment of a universal that would be their ultimate meaning. One might say that there must be historical events or ethical actions; but the imperative that governs these takes the form of an “as if” that can never legislate their universality or assure their fulfillment of their own historical status. The figurative mode of historical events would forever render problematic our conventional and deceptively reassuring understanding of the relation between language and history, the priority that history assumes in preceding and grounding language. Speech acts, and the promise in particular, would therefore not figure a special case of language, one in which language is uniquely historical, so much as they disclose the figurality of history as a reflexive structure of the fulfillment of meaning. ii Nowhere, perhaps, has the demand for history and away from such apparently obscure notions of language been more clearly registered than in recent Wordsworth criticism, if not in Wordsworth himself. Indeed, to turn at this point to the place of names and naming in selected passages and poems by Wordsworth would seem to be to destine oneself to privileging, once again, language, to repeat what is often represented, at least, as a poststructuralist preoccupation that comes at the price of history. Yet no matter how concerned they are with language, no work would seem more committed to the imperative of history than those poems most concerned with names and naming, the “Poems on the Naming of Places.” This is a group of poems whose Advertisement, after all, narrates the emergence of language from a certain history: “By Persons resident in the country and attached to rural objects, many places will be found unnamed or of unknown names, where little Incidents must have occurred, or feelings been experienced, which will have given to such places a private and peculiar interest. From a wish to give some sort of record to such Incidents, and renew the gratification of such Feelings, Names have been given to Places by the Author and some of his Friends, and the following Poems written in consequence.” 2 Wordsworth’s poetry of naming traces, in the first place, that process whereby “literary intervention . . . moves the commonplace from indeterminate to determinate and meaningful status,” as Hartman puts it.3 What is in Wordsworth’s as in Hartman’s terms a “common-place” of merely “private and


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peculiar interest”—for instance, the “narrow girdle of rough stones” of the fourth poem—becomes more than commonplace, is moved from indeterminate to determinate and meaningful status, once it is given a name and commemorated in poetry. Historical status is achieved, then, in the movement from the event to its representation in language and follows a causal and temporal scheme that the Advertisement names “consequence.” The poems thus literalize the process of the conferral of meaning, localize in topographical space what is a linguistic process, tracing the manner in which history takes place as the fulfillment of the promise of meaning. The Advertisement therefore amounts to nothing less than a theory not merely of the “Poems on the Naming of Places” but of poetry and even literature tout court. It articulates what one might term the categorical imperative of history, the absolute necessity that historical events, “Incidents,” no matter how “little,” “must have occurred.”4 The imperative intervenes to articulate the necessity of maintaining a traditional historical scheme that would ground first language (naming) and then poetry in events and feelings that precede and occasion them. It effectively seeks to foreclose the argument that these poems are insignificant, unremarkable, inconsequential because of the private and peculiar nature of the interest they record, the same argument that a certain historical reading of Wordsworth makes as it implicitly or explicitly reimposes the same imperative of history the poet puts forth: Under the sign of history, Wordsworth offers the growth of a poet’s mind: a privatized, self-generative, and causally perspicuous sequence. So smooth, sealed, and, in the language of “Tintern Abbey,” purified a history does the poem develop, that history in the commoner sense, the conditions of Wordsworth’s historiography, have no room to surface.5 [W]hat shocks us is not so much the fact of the self-absorption [of the “Poems on the Naming of Places”] as the audacity of their self-enclosure. Simultaneously demanding and refusing contextualization, the poems defy us to make sense of their self-conscious nonrelations with the social world. They seem to be engaged in an attempt to transcend their own material pretexts.6

A preemptive strike against a (new) historical demand for history in a common sense, or perhaps better, for a common sense of history, Wordsworth’s imperative seeks to circumvent complaints about the absence of an immediate engagement with history by conforming to, and in fact articulating, precisely that demand: “[T]here must have occurred . . .” To the extent that they remain committed to such an imperative, the Advertisement and the poems do nothing to


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come to terms with the necessity they posit but can never ensure or to rethink the ideology that continues to haunt them. Seeking to legislate the necessity of incidents, however, the imperative articulates history in a grammar that dictates rather than describes it. It in effect imposes the presupposition of history, as if to say (as is often said) that since there is no escaping history, there must have occurred . . . The Advertisement thus does not (re)confirm our most dearly held beliefs about the priority and precedence of history so much as it demands or claims the necessity of such a notion in a precritical fashion. The imperative seeks to circumvent any consideration of a different history, one that would not adhere to the (chrono)logic of precedence. This is not to suggest that there is in fact a way out of history or that history cannot be known, but that the surest way to avoid history is to follow such an imperative, which effectively forecloses any possibility for historical investigation or knowledge to take place. If it is not to fall prey to charges of false consciousness or historical aberration, therefore, the must of Wordsworth’s Advertisement must be read as something other than a straightforward imperative. Thus, “little Incidents must have occurred” in the same sense that one says “I must have forgotten” without actually being certain that one has forgotten something, or even in order to hide the fact that one has not forgotten at all. One says, “I must have forgotten” or “there must have occurred” precisely because one cannot remember whether or not one has forgotten, or because one does not know whether or not something occurred. The imperative demands that one forget that one cannot remember whether or not one has forgotten, or that something occur when its occurrence is precisely what remains in question. In other words, there must have occurred must be read not in the grammatical mode of the imperative but as a figure for incidents that have occurred although their occurrence cannot in fact be verified. Read thus, Wordsworth’s Advertisement obscures a break in historical consciousness by constructing a history in which names are “attached” to places by virtue of a historical event. Still, a more straightforward reading would show that the poems that follow do indeed provide a narrative of events that seem to lead to acts of naming. Yet even such a reading in effect discloses how the historical imperative obscures history, obscures, in effect, the history of naming, the relation, now, not of names to places, but of language to itself, of one name to another. Indeed, the blind spot of historical knowledge is not simply the difficulty of an incident that must have taken place but of a name that might equally be said to have “occurred.” For these are places “unnamed or of unknown name.” What we, and presumably Wordsworth, can never know, then, is first of all whether or not the place


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being named already has a name. Much like the historical imperative, the conjunction here obscures a crucial difference. It refuses to tell the difference between the act of naming that which has no name, a catachresis that creates monstrous entities such as peaks or mountains with (human) names, on the one hand, and renamings on the other.7 Refusing to tell the difference or even if there is a difference, the phrase in effect renders every naming a catachresis. Naming as such becomes monstrous. The history of places and their names could never be approached adequately by something like a reconstruction or contextualization, then, unless these also imply a rhetorical reading in which the historical effects of catachresis and other figures would be taken into account, in which one would account, to put it in the language of the third poem in the series, for how such monstrous figures are born. There is an Eminence,–of these our hills The last that parleys with the setting sun. We can behold it from our Orchard-seat, And, when at evening we pursue our walk Along the public way, this Cliff, so high Above us, and so distant in its height, Is visible, and often seems to send Its own deep quiet to restore our hearts. The meteors make of it a favorite haunt: The star of Jove, so beautiful and large In the mid heav’ns, is never half so fair As when he shines above it. ’Tis in truth The loneliest place we have among the clouds. (1–13) The characterization of the speaker here creates the sense of a gap between name and place that is significant in every sense. For this man claims to feel such a sense of communion with “She who dwells with [him]” (14) that “no place on earth / Can ever be a solitude” to him (15–16), and yet his name is given to a place “distant in its height” (6) that is the “loneliest place we have among the clouds” (13). The name thus emerges the locus of a contrast between sky and earth and between solitude and communion that would seem to be irresolvable. Yet at the same time, there is something particularly right about a Wordsworth poem narrated by the “I” in which an unmistakably phallic eminence, Wordsworthian in its solitude, is named after the poet. Place and name are here the site of a contrast in which an identification is made between the


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solitary place and a man who can feel no solitude, a contrast that reveals the poem’s unique status in the series: here the narrator does not repeat an act of naming he has already performed but retells the giving of his own name by another, an act to whose motivation he can have only limited access at best. And she who dwells with me, whom I have lov’d With such communion, that no place on earth Can ever be a solitude to me, Hath said, this lonesome Peak shall bear my Name. (14–17) Yet, just what shall be the name? And how shall it arise? The peak, the poet says, will bear his name.8 But does this act of bearing a name describe how the eminence will “carry” the poet’s name, or is this a bearing more akin to giving birth? In this case, the name would certainly be a heavy load to bear, for this would be a case of a natural peak giving birth to a name, rather than being given one. And we are still left with the question of just how a name can be said to be “born.” And then what could be said of a phallic eminence capable of name bearing, if not child bearing, and of the man whose identity is so entwined with this peak that his name is to be born by it? As far removed as the poem might seem from the questions of history raised by the Advertisement, what is called “bearing” in the poem is thoroughly historical in that it describes a speech act, perhaps the clearest one in all the “Poems on the Naming of Places.” While the other poems repeat a performance of naming in the act of describing it, they do so in the attempt to assert the coincidence of name and place. No matter what the connection between the “incidents” leading to the naming (and often the relation between incident and name is troubled, to say the least), that naming takes place, as a singular act in its own right. As J. Hillis Miller puts it, “The naming of places is one of the most important performatives.”9 To reduce it to a sign of (previous) events, therefore, would be to reduce its historical status as an event, which is what must be read. Poems on the naming (and not on the names10) of places therefore do not narrate a history of names as signs or as a mode of representation; they tell of namings by which a historical articulation between the event of naming, a place, and both past and future events is forged. Naming takes place as the linguistic performance, that is, often, the imposition, even in the absence of an event that would account for it, of a relation of consequence between incident and name, between history and language. As such, it describes the passage, something like a crossing of borders (of a lip), by which history assumes its meaning.


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To fail to recognize this process or this crossing would be to confuse name with place, language with reference, and thus to succumb to ideology. This is why it is so crucial that one read the gaps between the narratives of the giving of names and the actual names, that one read, in other words, the performance of giving names, or, in the case of the poem we are reading, of the withholding of names. Thus, in this, the third poem, once again, the very bearing of names that would stabilize a humanizing identity for the remote point, paradoxically endowing a phallic eminence with the ability to bear a name and thus perhaps describing the invagination and self-penetration of the phallic, is left unspoken. Since what we read is “my Name” and not the proper name, the poem performs not the giving of a name, but the withholding of it, a kind of stillbirth. The name withheld (and it is withheld from the eminence to a certain extent as well, since it remains “my Name”) may well be “Wordsworth” or “William,” but the performance of its naming at the same time withholds that name and thus makes it impossible to assert its coincidence with either the summit or Wordsworth’s own name. Wordsworth, even while he narrates the giving of names, and whether this is his intent or not, never quite allows name and place to coincide, to be reducible to one another, and all the less so when his might be the name involved. The poems therefore disclose a critical difference—between name and naming, name and place, and, ultimately, and perhaps most importantly, between the human and nature, thought and materiality. Thus, even as a poem (here the first in the group) stages how the act of naming takes place in the attempt to bridge a gap between nature and the human, the bridge itself is what emerges as determinative. The speaker recalls an April morning in which he roamed up a brook until “at length” coming upon a “sudden turning” (20). Green leaves were here, But ’twas the foliage of the rocks, the birch, The yew, the holly, and the bright green thorn, With hanging islands of resplendent furze: And on a summit, distant a short space, By any who should look beyond the dell, A single mountain Cottage might be seen. I gaz’d and gaz’d, and to myself I said, “Our thoughts at least are ours; and this wild nook, My EMMA, I will dedicate to thee.” (30-9)


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The dedication of the spot is uttered in the attempt to overcome the foreignness of a landscape “distant” and exterior (“Our thoughts at least are ours”). Naming attempts to domesticate nature, to make it “another home” (40), perhaps not incidentally by giving it the name of a woman.11 Yet if thought remains “ours” in a way that nature, wild or other, never can be, then the domestication of nature will necessarily come at a price. As we will see, not unlike the trivial discourse of “To Joanna,” the speaker’s idle talk could be said to be more than idle to the extent that it makes something more than thoughts ours and does so insofar as it is perpetuated to rededicate the spot when, after he and Emma are dead, shephards call the place “Emma’s Dell.” Idle talk becomes more than idle, becomes meaningful, that is, not in its transcendence or sublation, but in its repetition. Thus, it asserts a continuity between past, present, and future, indeed the very continuity that would secure the historical status of the event of the naming insofar as it continually renames the dell “Emma’s Dell” and thus resists any (re)naming that would erase this history. The poem must therefore inscribe death (the speaker’s own and Emma’s) in the very act of naming if it is ever to be historically significant, as though in order for something more than thoughts to be ours one must die, as though death were the necessary condition of a bond between human life and nature’s life. As though for the repetition of idle talk to be more than a repetition and reconfirmation of its idleness, for it to become meaningful, the name had always to be death.12 That such an attachment is never a matter of knowledge for those “experiencing” it suggests that making nature, and not merely our thoughts, ours will always be but another thought: an undetermined and undeterminable future event that as such can never be known, historically or otherwise, but only thought as and across the gap of death. Such attachments are thus rather more dire than a cliched proximity or return to nature, as becomes evident in the third poem in the group. And if a man should plant his cottage near, Should sleep beneath the shelter of its trees, And blend its waters with his daily meal, He would so love it that in his death-hour Its image would survive among his thoughts, And, therefore, my sweet MARY, this still nook With all its beeches we have named from You. (18–24)


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How are we to understand an image that would survive among the thoughts of a man in his death hour? Is it simply that among the man’s last thoughts would be, first perhaps, the image of this place? Or is this an image that survives thought, continues after it, in effect surviving life itself? Whatever the case, the poem describes a surviving that as such crosses the borderline between a certain life and a certain death. And the giving of the name functions in the same terms of the crossing of borders as the survival of the image. It does not take place according to an event linking a person to a place but rather imposes a relation that links name and place according to a therefore that articulates them analogically. Thus, Mary’s name can be taken for this place not only because her beauty might be like the beauty of the spot (“The spot was made by Nature for herself: / The travellers know it not, and ’twill remain / Unknown to them; but it is beautiful”) but to the extent that such a taking of the name, the naming itself, repeats the crossing of borders named survival in the poem. Naming thus emerges as a crossing, a process that as such no longer takes place on the basis of a proximity to nature that could, by way of metaphor or metonymy, be literalized in the form of inscription. It is, rather, that crossing that precedes any such resemblance or attachment and that allows them to appear in the first place. It is the crossing of survival: by naming the nook “from” Mary according to such an analogy, the poet projects not only that her image will survive in the death hour; he projects his own death. The analogy allows him too to survive his own death—to write about it proleptically. Naming allows for a narrative of survival not in the cliched sense that it immortalizes or memorializes the person’s name but in that it allows the poet to speak of his own death. What these poems and the Advertisement insist upon, then, is not the priority of a historical event, which at any rate always risks forgetting, so much as the interruption in historical consciousness: Something must have happened, or will surely happen, but that something, its occurrence, and the resultant name, is what Wordsworth can never be assured of, for it takes place in some undetermined future, or on the other side of the grave, or in a past about which he knows nothing. Consequently, naming marks at once the gap in historical knowledge (of whether or not other names and histories exist, of whether his own histories and namings will persist) and the knowledge of that very gap. It suggests that names and naming do not give access to any determining and determinative historical incident that could be the object of (new) historical reconstruction. Rather, they allow one to “know” the epistemological crisis they themselves create. Such a model of history effectively refuses to reduce the “Poems on the Naming of Places” to the “merely” linguistic status of the adequacy of names or


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to the seemingly minor status of the poems themselves.13 In fact, the problem they pose might be considered the fundamental problem of Wordsworth’s poetry, and even of Romanticism more generally, and finds perhaps its clearest articulation in the famous lament opening the poet’s most extensive poetic consideration of the status of texts in book 5 of The Prelude: Oh! Why hath not the Mind Some element to stamp her image on In nature somewhat nearer to her own? Why, gifted with such powers to send abroad Her spirit, must it lodge in shrines so frail? (1850 Prelude 5, 45–49)14 It is entirely possible that as long as literature is conceived in these terms, essentially those of inscription, it will be, as it is here, the source of a certain pathos. It is not simply a question here, as it will be in book 6 of The Prelude, of the “sad incompetence of human speech,” of the inadequacy of language. What is at issue, rather, is a fundamental ontological asymmetry between mind and its shrines. An element nearer to that of the mind, a monument that would share the ontological status of consciousness, would avoid frailty precisely insofar as it would not be subject to the effects of history. Its stability would not be the ontological stability of natural objects but rather of a radically other nature, one withdrawn from any susceptibility to time.15 The image in this passage, then, is the image of the mind that could stamp itself in something very much like itself and in so doing be phenomenalized without becoming subject to history, say, thus hedging against death as it is witnessed in key figures in book 5, the Boy of Winander and the drowned man. Such an inscription could only ever take place figuratively, therefore, indeed as the figure of inscription. In this passage, the image of the mind stamping its image on something like itself produces the realization of the very monument Wordsworth seeks, a linguistic shrine that foregoes materialization and the frailty attendant upon it. The narratives of giving names, both in the Advertisement to the “Poems on the Naming of Places” and in the poems themselves, in fact constitute just such a figuration of what is essentially a process of textualization, of a figurative inscription by which names would become as “attached” to places as are the people giving them. This history they tell, then, is textual through and through, and as such marks its place in history. As Kevin Newmark puts it, “it is only by achieving the status of a text—that is, through the capacity to refer beyond itself to empirical experiences and/or ideal meanings not purely and simply exhausted


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in it—that any so-called ‘event’ could ever be prevented from disappearing without a trace from history.”16 Wordsworth’s poems on naming thus seek to establish a connection or attachment to places in the effort to acquire an ontological status for names that would also guarantee their history. But at the same time they seek to avoid or to overcome the fundamental incompatibility between consciousness and the elements of nature that still plagues inscription. Naming, that is, constitutes a kind of figurative inscription by means of which the attachment (of mind, for example) to nature can still be established but without materializing, literalizing, or inscribing itself in nature. Accordingly, language no longer simply has its origin in consciousness, necessitating a rereading of Wordsworth’s own practice of classifying his poems, which he describes in the 1815 preface to his poems as an attempt to arrange “apparently miscellaneous” poems with “reference to the powers of mind predominant in the production of them; or to the mold in which they are cast; or, lastly, to the subjects to which they relate.”17 Even when Wordsworth explores language in the preface, he does so in the effort to justify his classification of his poems and especially to distinguish between Fancy and Imagination, thereby appropriating, again, language for the faculties of the mind. Any such appropriation necessarily comes at the cost of a radical reduction of the force of language and the sense of history it can open.18 Like the Inscriptions, the “Poems on the Naming of Places” resist any such reduction in that they are assimilable to neither consciousness nor any other function of language. Included in the “Poems Proceeding from Sentiment and Reflection” in 1815, the poems subsequently either form their own classification or are grouped under the “Poems of the Imagination.” Constantly “spun outward,” as Liu puts it,19 they tend to form a classification independent of all faculties, even the Imagination, and move toward a status independent, and on the margins, of the faculties of mind. Naming, and particularly naming places, is continually placed outside consciousness and then recuperated for consciousness, placed outside a theorization of genre based on models of consciousness and then recuperated for such generic constructs. Even while the poems themselves might be said to represent different modes of consciousness, regardless of their place in Wordsworth’s classifications, their shifting position continually displaces that representation, effectively moving it between consciousness and a specific linguistic function. Far from constituting the simple expression of a subject or the representation of a historical event, naming thus remains fundamentally irreducible to all conventional conceptions—Romantic and other—of consciousness and the models of history that follow from them. To the extent that it remains unknown, naming here names history as that which remains irrecuper-


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able even to representation. It names its own inability, in the absence of some form of attachment (like, though not reducible to, inscription or narrative) to do anything but name over history, previous incidents, and namings, and thus to repeat the process of forgetting. iii While it has been argued that an attachment to nature signifies a conflicted relation to property and appropriation,20 Wordsworth’s poetry of naming, both in the “Poems on the Naming of Places” and beyond, engages in the question of its status as poetry and its relation to inscription, the literal or literalized version of such an attachment. It is not merely a question of the status of what might be thought of as an independent genre of poetry that might take the name, for want of a better one, of “Poems on the Naming of Places,” although any such genre would have to extend beyond these poems.21 It is, rather, the very question of literature that is being taken up here, of “when and how . . . an inscription becomes literature,” and of “what takes place when it does.”22 Self-consciously taking up a literal inscription, and at the same time articulating it with a narrative of naming, “To Joanna” will figure in more obvious and thematic terms a, perhaps the, central concern of all of Wordsworth’s poetry of naming: that very passage between inscription and literature, between a mark and its becoming meaningful. What is more, the poem self-consciously works out what is always also at stake in the other poems: it seeks to mark out a space for names and naming and to justify its own status as meaningful to the extent that it can assert its historical and social relevance. Here and throughout Wordsworth’s poems on naming, language is apparently submitted to the historical imperative only to put that imperative into question and to disclose the history that was always at work in it. “To Joanna” will thus take up the question of history by reflecting on its own status as poetry and its relation to a certain inscription. Thus, the opening verse paragraph of the poem addresses Joanna as one attached not to places, as the Advertisement puts it, but to a sense of community: Amid the smoke of cities did you pass The time of early youth; and there you learned From years of quiet industry, to love The living Beings by your own fire-side, With such strong devotion, that your heart Is slow towards the sympathies of them


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“To Joanna” offers itself as a kind of apologia for the “discourse, / However trivial” (14–15) that it itself constitutes, justifying this discourse to the extent that it will teach that these lovers of nature speak familiarly of Joanna. As in Wordsworth’s experiences in London, names are the sign of a specific mode of social interaction, a kind of community: one thought Baffled my understanding: how men lived Even next-door neighbours, as we say, yet still Strangers, nor knowing each the other’s name. (1850 Prelude 7, 115–18) Clearly, names are anything but trivial. Their absence signifies in a way that they themselves never could; or rather, their absence is at the source of a thought that provokes an epistemological crisis, baffling the understanding with that which it should be able to accommodate—thought. Names are essential to meaning, then, not because they themselves mean, but because their absence marks the threat of a social relation that turns the mind against itself. Similarly, in “To Joanna,” trivial discourse will achieve the status of meaningful language insofar as it asserts a continuity between the present and the past, overcoming Joanna’s two-year absence, reestablishing her familiarity, and reintegrating her into her community: Yet we, who are transgressors in this kind, Dwelling retired in our simplicity Among the woods and fields, we love you well, Joanna! And I guess, since you have been So distant from us now for two long years, That you will gladly listen to discourse, However trivial, if you thence be taught That they, with whom you once were happy, talk Familiarly of you and of old times. (9–17) The poem is thus truly dedicated “To Joanna” in a way the rock named after her can never be. It attempts to justify not the act of naming, nor even the name, but rather itself as potentially “trivial discourse.” Doing so only to the


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extent that it establishes temporal and social continuity, poetry here submits to the imperative that it mean, a status granted only once language can be said to have a content (“talk of ”) that could be identified as social and historical (“you and of old times”). Language, then, adheres to a dialectical model according to which triviality, the meaningless, is sublated by the meaning of history, although, as dialectical reversals are wont to turn things, language even thereby reasserts its claim, justifying not its historical content but itself as language. Yet what such a discourse would mean is not only establishing a relation to the past but subordinating the attachment to nature to the attachment to humanity, community. In order to become meaningful, or at least to be recognized as such, then, “To Joanna” must not allow itself to be reduced to the status of an inscription.23 To read it as such would in effect be to literalize a figurative attachment to nature, to misread figure as letter, to allow the attachment to nature to obscure a different connection, that of history and community, the relation to the past and to Joanna. It would, in short, be to repeat an error enacted in the poem itself when the Vicar greets the speaker and, after asking for news of the absent Joanna, turns his gaze to the name the speaker has chiselled in a rock: He with grave looks demanded, for what cause, Reviving obsolete Idolatry, I like a Runic Priest, in characters Of formidable size, had chisel’d out Some uncouth name upon the native rock, Above the Rotha, by the forest side. (26–31) It is not so much that the Vicar is the figure of an error or failure that could be overcome once these formidable characters are made clear to him. If this writing remains “uncouth”24 and thus unreadable in a sense, merely “some name,” it is precisely because its characters are so formidable, because they are writ large, as characters. The negativity of an inability to read is thus not overcome on the dialectical path toward knowledge so much as inscription itself, the inscription of a name, necessarily figures an unreadability that cannot be resolved without reference beyond itself.25 Even if one could make out the letters chiselled in the rock, even if one could discern the name Joanna, how is one to read a name? For the name to become readable it must assume a meaning that neither it nor the act of inscription can assure. The charge of idolatry, then, arises to the extent that the Vicar, like the reader, remains captive of the letter, formidable


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as it is. Thus, the speaker’s attempt is to (re)establish a figurative status for the name, to refer the mark beyond itself that it might become more than inscription. The name must be referred beyond itself to a history that it itself can never tell, thus becoming a moment in a history or narrative that emerges as the necessary condition for meaning. This, it turns out, is precisely the gesture Wordsworth’s poem makes. For just as the poem narrates the necessity of historical narrative, the story of how the inscription came to be made, Wordsworth appends a note to the poem that translates potentially unreadable, Runic letters into Roman ones: “In Cumberland and Westmoreland are several Inscriptions upon the native rock which from the wasting of Time and the rudeness of the Workmanship have been mistaken for Runic. They are without doubt Roman” (222). It is not simply a question, here, of the poem repeating or performing on a textual level what takes place in its narrative, referring beyond itself to a note that explains (away) the problem of reading. This is also the case, but even in so doing, the poem calls out the inability of the narrative ever to make the move toward a meaning that would make any such note superfluous. What is more, a gesture outside the narrative that is already a gesture beyond the name, the note attributes the confusion of letters precisely to history—“the wasting of Time.” In the note, the poem gestures toward a stable world beyond representation and standing as its ground, the empirical world, the historical, as the means for clarifying a textual impasse and the failure of reading. The reassuring gesture, however, could put at ease only those who have not read the note, since while it offers an empirical and historical ground for the text, what it says is that this very ground, this history, is in fact the source of the problem. History is what makes texts unreadable, what requires notes that set things straight, if at all, only by means of an authoritarian imposition that goes without substantiation—“They are without doubt Roman.” The text gestures outside itself, then, to an extratextual history that would resolve its undecidability or unreadability only to disclose that history is precisely the process of wasting, of making letters unreadable. As the narrative continues in the apparent attempt to reassert a connection not with nature, literalized in the inscription, but with the past and between Joanna and her community, it in effect repeats the process it is ostensibly moving beyond. For the speaker tells how, with Joanna at his side, he is halted precisely by a certain tracing and impression: I there stopp’d short—and stood Tracing the lofty barrier with my eye From base to summit; such delight I found


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To note in shrub and tree, in stone and flower, That intermixture of delicious hues, Along so vast a surface, by connecting force Of their own beauty, imaged in the heart. (43–50) “Tracing” with the eye leads to an “impression” of nature on the heart. This inscription is interrupted, however, by Joanna’s voice. Seeing the speaker’s “ravishment” (53) in the sight, Joanna breaks into a laughter that, like the Boy of Winander’s hootings, is picked up by the rocks, which “laugh’d again” (55), causing a series of echoes. Now whether (said I to our cordial Friend Who in the hey-day of astonishment Smiled in my face) this were in simple truth A work accomplished by the brotherhood Of ancient mountains, or my ear was touched With dreams and visionary impulses To me alone imparted, sure I am That there was a loud uproar in the hills. And, while we both were listening, to my side The fair Joanna drew, as if she wished To shelter from some object of her fear. (66–76) Joanna’s fear, significantly, is of her own voice, returned to her from all directions, as though a chastisement for interrupting a connection with nature figured in terms of inscription. The very voice that disrupts the speaker’s ravishment occasions the transference of that ravishment to Joanna.26 What the narrative relates, then, is a tale of how a figurative inscription, impressions and traces, are ultimately literalized as the inscription of Joanna’s name in the rock. Joanna does indeed have every reason to remain suspicious of this poem ostensibly dedicated to her, and not only because of the overtly antagonistic and even violent language to which numerous critics have pointed.27 That violence is in effect the acting out or symptom of the violence of inscription. Joanna’s laughter interrupts a figurative inscription and is ultimately redoubled, its power amplified, until it forces her to seek shelter from itself. “And hence,” the speaker concludes, “long afterwards, when eighteen moons / Were wasted” (77–78), he ultimately inscribes Joanna’s name in the rock. While voice initially interrupts writing or inscription, then, Joanna is ultimately reinscribed in the landscape.


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The narrative that is meant to provide a history for inscription and the name, to give them meaning, thus traces the history of inscription from tracing, to impression, to literal inscription. Before inscription there was—inscription. And the interruption of that history is recuperated, voice reinscribed in nature. To be sure, the speaker is not trying to suggest that he “wasted” eighteen months before inscribing Joanna’s name, but rather that time is a process of wasting, of laying waste, of decay: the decay of letters, for instance, that would make a name unreadable. It can hardly be an accident that the phrase “When eighteen moons / Were wasted” should recall the “wasting of time” from the note (“In Cumberland and Westmoreland are several Inscriptions upon the native rock which from the wasting of Time and the rudeness of the Workmanship have been mistaken for Runic”). While the note claims that the wasting of time makes the characters unrecognizable, the Vicar confronts the speaker about his inscription as though he has just caught him in the act, in which case his inscription has from the start, always already, been “wasted.” Even if one were to construct an alternative time line, even if the characters have in fact suffered the effects of time, the repetition of a certain “wasting” suggests that the inscription becomes illegible not only after but before the inscription is performed, during the wasting of eighteen moons. In other words, history goes to work even before the actual inscription takes place, perhaps (as a thematic reading might have it) because the passage of time signifies a lapse in the feeling of community, a certain distance from Joanna that is materialized and literalized in letters that are unrecognizable. But more generally, and in keeping with the poem’s insistence upon the letter, inscription is inscribed in language as the wasting of letters, as a textual process even before the writing of language. To put this in more overtly Derridean terms, even before the name is written, inscribed, it suffers the wasting of inscription, the wasting of time. To say that the name is always already written (as Joanna’s voice is in a sense reinscribed in the landscape in the form of her name) in this context is not only to repeat the understanding of writing as the deconstruction of the phonocentrism of voice and all the metaphysical notions (of presence, above all) that go with it; it is also to question any notion of writing as language’s hedge against time, for writing is here articulated inextricably with wasting. History here is therefore not simply something that happens to language, wasting it. Language, specifically naming, takes place, is performed, here in an inscription, but insofar as that inscription is haunted by the wasting of time, the present performance of naming already has a history. Not only does the performance depend upon a subsequent narrative for its meaning, such that its performance is never simply that of the present, but even in the moment of that


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performance it enacts its own wasting, the repetition of the process of history. Names are historical in that they remain unable to guarantee their meaning and thus await a future (narrative) or an extratextual event, a historical event, that will finally allow them to mean. The history that names, or better, naming, the performance of giving a name, describes is that of the structure of a reflexive relation to itself as writing and the projection towards a future fulfillment of meaning. Far from denying the force of history, this is in fact to radicalize it. To pay heed to the textual nature of history is indeed to recognize that history cannot be escaped because it is at work even before it goes to work in the “common sense,” as Levinson would have it. As such, this is the history that will always elude historical (re)construction, all the narratives, such as those in the “Poems on the Naming of Places,” that come to account for it; this, we might say, is the history that demands to be read. That the trajectory of history should be toward the future and that historical knowledge should remain possible only as a future event is already testified to in the Advertisement. For rather than speaking of incidents that “must have occurred,” it originally read, “By Persons resident in the country and attached to rural objects, many places will be found unnamed or of unknown names, where little Incidents will have occurred, or feelings been experienced. . . . ” (217 emphasis added). Literally speaking (and it is a question, above all, of letters here), the historical link between names and incidents cannot be known because those events that give places their peculiar and particular interest have yet to occur. The historical event is not an imperative, therefore, so much as it is the promise of meaning, interest. It is not a historical imperative that is at question, so much as it is a matter of naming as the promise of a future event or feeling that will have given meaning, and a history, to place. Describing how naming and poetry arise subsequent, and in order, to give meaning to these incidents, the Advertisement remains absolutely faithful to this model of history. The names given by the author and his friends and the poems the author has written are what will have occurred to give interest to these places. What this means, though, is that the incidents that confer interest are not historical events traditionally conceived, are not in the past, but are the future, linguistic events of naming and poetry. Even a less stubbornly literal reading of the phrase confirms this: Wordsworth suggests that one will find places where incidents will have occurred and which, therefore, have been given names, apparently so that the overwriting of names that he must be performing is not repeated and the places maintain the historical meaning he and his friends give them. But even so, finding these places is inscribed in the Advertisement as something that will happen, something that has to be renewed, “something evermore about to


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be.” This means that historical knowledge remains possible only as an indeterminate future event.28 As such, it can never be made present in the mode of an empirical event or as the object of representation but rather lies ahead as the possibility and promise that language and poetry will be made meaningful and that with them history will acquire its determinate and meaningful status as such. Names, one might therefore say, are waiting. They await a meaning that poetry gives them. And in “To Joanna,” they await yet more names. For the history that is language’s failure or refusal to coincide with itself even in its performance is witnessed in the poem by the duplicity or doubleness of the name. While the speaker tells how he “chisel’d out in these rude characters / Joanna’s name,” he concludes, And I, and all who dwell by my fireside, Have called the lovely rock, JOANNA’S ROCK. (84–85) Two names, two acts of naming: the genealogy of the one, the chiselling of Joanna’s name, we are now, at the end of the poem, to have followed. But the other constitutes a metonymic displacement of that name, whereby the rock is not Joanna, as its inscription reads, but in some sense rendered hers. The rock, that is, is made hers, becomes Joanna’s, only by means of a metonymy that, no matter how satisfying, the narrative leading to this second naming can never account for. Yet this narrative failure of sorts constitutes its success at telling the difference between the event (of naming or inscription) and the history meant to account for it: it is that difference that makes the event eventful; it is in that unbridgeable difference that meaning arises as a singularity that can never be narrated. As we have seen, the narrative ostensibly arises in the attempt to account for an inscription and only thus will give the poem meaning as at once “familiar talk” and more than “discourse . . . trivial.” Yet its failure to account for that inscription, its failure to coincide or make itself congruous with it, is in fact what secures its meaningful status. For inscription here literalizes an attachment to nature viewed as suspicious and dangerous by Joanna, so that the incongruity between the poem itself, as an account of the conditions of inscription, and the inscription becomes, in its failure, the very familiar talk that could reintegrate Joanna into the community. Figuring inscription thus, the poem also figures its own difference from inscription and thus marks more generally its fulfillment of its meaningful status by refusing any reduction to the form of inscription. If the acts of naming in the poems signal an appropriation of nature, they equally


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mark a process of disappropriation or dispossession, a fundamental gap or rupture between nature and the human agency that would possess it. This asymmetry is signalled not only by the various names given throughout the poems but by others—violence, memory, death—and is none other than the difference, once again, of time, history. “To Joanna” not only presents us with the difference between the inscription in the rock and the name given the rock. It inscribes a difference perhaps even more fundamental, for the note to the poem goes on to read, “On Helm-Crag, that impressive single Mountain at the head of the Vale of Grasmere, is a Rock which from most points of view bears a striking resemblance to an Old Woman cowering” (222). Granted, we are never told whether this is the rock in which the name Joanna is inscribed. But the connection, for the reader and no doubt for Joanna as well, between a woman “cowering” and Joanna seeking “shelter from some object of her fear” is unmistakable. Since this is one of the rocks that sent her voice back to her, Joanna in effect sought shelter from the image of her own cowering. Inscribing her name in the rock would seem appropriate enough, were it not for the fact that the rock is said to resemble an “old woman cowering.” It is perhaps no accident, then, that Joanna is in effect silenced at the end of the poem, her approval or disapproval of the “discourse . . . trivial” that the poem constitutes never given: Joanna would have every reason to disapprove of having her name attached to such an old woman, as though it were not being named Joanna, but she old and cowering. What Joanna shrinks from when hearing her voice echoed back to her, therefore, but also in what one can hypothesize to be her disapproval at the inscription as her attachment to nature, is age, time, wasting, the approach of death. Her disapproval would represent a significant threat to the poem, the threat, in fact, that it remains merely trivial discourse. At the same time, identifying her with an image of an old woman cowering would make the friends’ talk of her truly “familiar,” not merely asserting intimacy, but in the sense of unduly familiar. But inasmuch as it arises from her disease at the image of her own (premature) aging in the old woman cowering, it would also belie itself and suggest that it finds its source in her resistance to time, history. In this case, Joanna’s disapproval would again reassert, differently, the familiarity of the poem’s discourse and thus assert its meaningfulness, just as it would reassert her distance from nature (the rock) and reiterate the difference between the poem’s narrative of inscription and the name inscribed, between the poem itself, therefore, and inscription. To the extent that the poem, like the other “Poems on the Naming of Places,” and even the Lyrical Ballads more


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generally, depends upon a notion of familiarity, its meaningfulness remains assured: Joanna’s approval and disapproval both mark a familiarity. Meaning is asserted not as a dialectical sublation of the meaningless, say, mere inscription, but as difference, from inscription, irreducibility to nature, and so on. As in the fourth poem (“A narrow girdle of rough stones”), then, it is the question of the possibility of a language that would be adequate not by corresponding to a natural site but to the extent that it gives precedence to community over any such attachment to nature. The fourth poem explores the community of naming by refusing, in a sense, to name nature. The narrator tells how he and some friends “Saunter’d” (9) through a “narrow girdle of rough stones and crags” (1), watching the various forms of nature as they passed and “Play’d with [their] time” (11). It is not long, however, before they hear the industrious sounds of “busy mirth / Of Reapers, Men and Women, Boys and Girls” (42–3), and, advancing to hear the sounds more clearly, spy a lone man “Angling beside the margin of the lake” (52): That way we turn’d our steps; nor was it long, Ere making ready comments on the sight Which then we saw, with one and the same voice We all cried out, that he must be indeed An idle man, who thus could lose a day Of the mid harvest, when the labourer’s hire Is ample, and some little might be stor’d Wherewith to chear him in the winter time. (53–60) Of course, the friends describe not the man, but themselves, or nearly themselves. They would be improvident and reckless, wasting their time, had they any need to be met in wintertime. They do not, however, and it soon becomes obvious that such characterization can be made only when “privilege [is] / Alike indulged to all” (28–9). For the friends realize upon coming closer to him that the man is too ill to harvest, and therefore “was using his best skill to gain / A pittance from the dead unfeeling lake / That knew not of his wants” (70–2). The friends, however, rather than deferring from such moralizing from experience, internalize that moralizing, naming not the improvidence of the man, but their own lack of charity: —Therefore, unwilling to forget that day, My Friend, Myself, and She who then receiv’d The same admonishment, have call’d the place


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By a memorial name, uncouth indeed As e’er by mariner was giv’n to Bay Or Foreland, on a new-discover’d coast, And, POINT RASH-JUDGMENT is the Name it bears. (80–6) The recognition of the need to be “reserv’d in speech” (78) that is arrived at through “serious musing” and “self-reproach” (76) leads to the naming of the misnaming of the man as “idle.” The poem would seem at this point to offer the possibility of speaking aright: to speak a language that recognizes economic and social realities would be to avoid the error of misnaming and rash judgment. But the poem posits such adequate speech only through an act of reading and naming that recognizes and names a previous error: “Point Rash-Judgment” names the place only by naming another (faulty) naming. Thus, it in a sense refuses to name: it is the one name given in the poems that is not a proper name traditionally conceived and the only one not derived from the name of “the Poet and a few of his Friends.” As a result, it will never name the place but rather only the history of misnaming. “Point Rash-Judgment” is the name of misnaming and as such can itself only ever name adequately insofar as it is equally a misnaming: a name that does not correspond to a place or even articulate the connection between place and the incident that led to the naming in any other than contingent terms, the accident of rash judgment having taken place here while it could (and indeed does) take place anywhere, indeed everywhere; and always also as a transgression of the imperative to be “reserv’d in speech,” the imperative, perhaps, not to name, or at least not to name that which is beyond the reach of words, say “Imagination—here the power socalled/Through sad incompetence of human speech.” 29 Each naming and reading can always give way to a reading of itself as error, marking the impossibility of a completely adequate language, of a naming without error, no matter how well founded in local social, material conditions.30 iv Marking the coincidence of the error of naming and the social, even class differences, the “Poems on the Naming of Places” shift the terms of recent considerations of the material conditions of literature. While they are clearly concerned with social conditions, the passage from those conditions to language and poetry is of no less importance. What results in the figuration of these conditions, however, is no relegation of history to the position of an “elsewhere”


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(Liu 5),31 no attempt to transcend the human, material conditions that determine their very composition. The poems’ engagement with history and materiality may be shocking, but hardly because they attempt to flee either. The poems relate materiality (in the sense of given historical conditions) to a materiality of another order, the materiality of language. Put otherwise, the “Poems on the Naming of Places” do not attempt to suppress the historical, social, or material, but attempt to account for them in narratives that form another history, the history of the passage from history to language. To the extent that the poems tell their own history, they tell of the conditions of their own production in both the material world and in the materiality of language. However, the poems continually locate the event or conditions that occasion name and naming, the conditions of their own production, in a disruption. Between the conditions narrated to describe how a name is given and the actual giving of the name there is an interruption caused by the withholding of the actual name, for instance, or the denial of the possibility of a fully adequate language, or the articulation of naming with death. This is the interruption in the very passage from the conditions of the production of poetry in the social and historical world to language. In the terms of the Advertisement to the poems, this would mean that the poems never fully narrate a history of “consequence,” at least not conceived of as temporal and causal development from event to language. What may have appeared idle linguistic speculation on the status of events that “must have occurred,” then, can now be seen to coincide with the poems’ practice of locating history in a cognitive disruption. This means that the integration of material conditions as constituents of a history of naming cannot be recovered unproblematically by a New Historicist recuperation of the material conditions of literature. For such an approach seeks to posit a literal referent on a historical and material place, while these poems suggest that the literal may be a figure abusively, catachretically, disguising itself. In other words, what appears a mere sign of history, an indication pointing to an event or set of past conditions, may actually be a sign that is itself historical and determines the status of history precisely because its status as sign remains undetermined, refusing any immediate, uninterrupted passage to that more conventional or commonplace view of history. The poems on naming put such a conventional view of history into question with the very gesture that has provoked the accusation that Wordsworth evades history–by reflecting upon the conditions of their own production. By reflecting upon not only social and material conditions, nor simply upon poetry’s own linguistic status, but upon both, and especially the possibility of


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crossing the borders of the lip, of a passage from history to language, the poems formulate the relation of history to language in a rigorous way. They narrate their own history as irreducible to a simple notion of (mimetic) correspondence or literalistic (mis)representation. But at the same time they are far from occulting literature and language as independent and ultimately unrelated to the social, historical world. Rather, the poems present the relation of history to language as a passage which is always the site of interruption. This characteristic may well describe what sets the poems apart from other literary forms and what, were one prepared to make room for such a thing, would constitute a genre called, for lack of a better name, “Poems on the Naming of Places.” The same figuration of the disruption of the movement from history to language or from language to history differentiates the poems from inscriptions, the poems they most resemble. In his seminal essay, “Inscriptions and Romantic Nature Poetry,”32 Hartman traces the history of the inscription as it becomes “a free-standing poem, able to commemorate any feeling for nature or the spot that aroused . . . feeling” in the poet (32). The description of the inscription as “any verse conscious of the place on which it was written” (32) may well seem to account for the consciousness of place in the “Poems on the Naming of Places” as well, such that Hartman’s pronouncement on Wordsworth’s innovation could apply equally to them: “What Wordsworth did is clear: he transformed the inscription into an independent nature poem, and in so doing created a principal form of the Romantic and modern lyric. One step in this transformation has already been described. When fugitive feelings are taken seriously, when every sight and sound calls to the passing poet—‘Nay, Traveller! rest’; ‘Stay, Passenger, why goest thou by soe fast?’—then the Romantic nature lyric is born” (39-40). Yet the “Poems on the Naming of Places,” whatever their consciousness of the site of their production, cannot be described adequately by Hartman’s history, precisely because they are not conscious of the place on which they are written in the same manner as inscription. The result of this difference may be an alternative literary history that has yet to be written. Cynthia Chase has begun to formulate such a view of both the history of the development of inscription into lyric and of inscription’s figuration of history, suggesting that rather than acting as a step in a developmental history from the inscription to Romantic nature poetry, the inscription interrupts such a history and remains an inscription: “Epitaphs and inscriptions, as a genre, incorporate in their content a representation of how they perform as texts: of their interruption, their stilling of the reader. It is not surprising that a Wordsworth poem that titles itself an inscription should perform in this way. But this is to say that a poem of Wordsworth may well ‘incorporate’ in its evoked setting ‘the


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very process of inscribing,’ as Hartman wrote, without thereby developing from an inscription into the ‘free-standing form,’ the Wordsworthian nature lyric. Rather, by incorporating the process of inscription, the poem remains an inscription, and I suggest that this is Wordsworth’s distinctive transmutation of lyric poetry.”33 For Chase, then, the distinctiveness of the Wordsworthian inscription in literary history derives from the coincidence of the poem’s material and semantic elements, the fact that the poem is literally “on” or inscribed in a place and “on” that place inasmuch as the same place is also the poem’s subject. It is this characteristic that lends the inscription a structure independent of the Romantic image. As described by Paul de Man, the Romantic image is characterized by its intention toward an external object, its search to acquire the ontological stability of the natural world, as Hölderlin’s lines from Brot und Wein intimate: “Nun . . . müssen . . . Worte, wie Blumen, entstehen” [Now must words, like flowers, originate]. The plight of the Romantic image, however, is never to achieve such an ontological status, never to originate in the manner of a natural object. Chase describes the inscription in contrasting terms. Because the Wordsworthian inscription often begins with an injunction, especially demanding that the reader “Stay” or “Read,” that he or she pay heed to the inscription, the “performance of the inscription,” the situation of the reader, is “not asserted as knowledge” (67). The inscription is therefore a nonintentional act that cannot be assimilated to cognition or an intention of consciousness. Moreover, “incorporating the process of inscription,” that is, always “on” or intended toward the very process of its composition rather than toward an ontologically stable object, the inscription does not develop into the free-standing lyric but remains an inscription. Chase therefore describes the inscription as a nonintentional structure that does not attempt to originate like flowers but rather remains: “Nun müssen Steine, wie Worte, bleiben” [Now must stones remain, like words].34 The “Poems on the Naming of Places” remain distinct from both inscriptions and the Romantic nature lyric that Hartman sees the inscription becoming and thereby refigure the relation between language and history. They do so because in these poems the material and semantic elements of language never coincide. The materiality of the name as sound or inscription never coincides with its place or with the conditions of naming that occasion it. The consciousness of place of the “Poems on the Naming of Places” is also a precarious consciousness (if it can be called that at all), the negative knowledge that the place may have a name, but that the name remains beyond consciousness, unknown. The poems therefore never achieve the status of an inscription, resisting any return or literalization of their language, the language actually spoken by men,


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in the “great and permanent forms of nature” (Prose 1, 124) from which that language arises. As in “To Joanna,” where the name given (“Joanna’s Rock”) is markedly different from the inscription in that rock (“Joanna”), this noncoincidence makes it impossible to tell if language has in fact moved from “trivial discourse” of a language about hills, streams, and groves to familiar talk that is meaningful to the extent that it asserts community and the social. The “Poems on the Naming of Places” therefore strictly conform to neither the intentional structure of the Romantic image nor the nonintentional structure of the inscription. This is so, first, because the name is attached to the place, somewhat in the manner that words attempt to originate like flowers perhaps, but with the difference at least that the act of naming is itself determined by an “external” event or incident. While naming may attempt to assert some coincidence between name and place, the determining conditions of the coincidence can only be found in an incident, in history itself. And since the poems, even while they narrate that incident or history, never fully assert the connection between it and the name, locating naming instead in a kind of lyric moment whose logic remains withheld from us, there is an interruption between narrative and lyric, incident and name, history and language. The “Poems on the Naming of Places” arise “in consequence” of this interruption, and this notion describes what I will call the nonintentional structure of naming. Never fully assimilated by consciousness, but rather repeating the interruption or disruption that takes place between history and language, their structure is not so much a matter of either origination or remaining as it is of “consequence.” And while consequence could well merit no less a title than that of “sign of history,” here this very sign is refigured to signify not temporal and causal progression but their interruption. Now, then, must words arise in consequence—of history, but with all the indeterminacy such consequence must signify. It may well be that the question of names and naming in Wordsworth’s work is never far from questions of the relation between language, its production, and the empirical, material, and social world. He would return to these questions in “To the Torrent at the Devil’s Bridge, North Wales, 1824,” if only to pose the question, “How art thou named?”35 This is by no means a merely rhetorical question to a place whose name he already knows. The poet’s “capable negativity,” as Hartman has revised Keats’s famous self-characterization in reference to Wordsworth,36 here lies in withholding the name, in not renaming by refusing to confer a new name, or to rename, to (utter the) name, once again. Even more, this negativity is capable because the refusal to name engenders a question no longer rhetorical (“How art thou named?”) that is also a questioning of how the name is produced, implicitly demanding not only the name but


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the conditions of naming, nothing short of the place’s history. This may be, after all, the question the “Poems on the Naming of Places,” even as they name and rename, pose, and the question one cannot but pose of them—How art thou named, again?

Borders of a Lip Pt. II Chap.3

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PART II

鵽鵾

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Bordering the Political Kleist


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CHAPTER THREE

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Ein Ding ist der Krug. —Heidegger, “Das Ding”

Breaking History In he gulf separating Wordsworth and Kleist is not merely that of national boundaries or geographical space. Even to deal with Kleist in the context of Romanticism, no matter how broadly conceived, is already questionable, to say the least, for as every Germanicist knows, Romanticism cannot accommodate Kleist without some difficulty. To register the dissonance of such a figure, one need look no further than the role of Kant, who for Kleist becomes the source of a certain crisis rather than the figure for the imaginative potential of a consciousness sublimely freed of the constraints of empiricism. Like Hölderlin or Austen, Kleist stands on the margins of Romanticism even by virtue of being at the heart of its chronology. To read him here is not to step outside of, and introduce a foreign element into, the period, then; rather, it is to read an uncloseable rupture within the very history of Romanticism, not

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a simple disruption of what would otherwise be an uninterrupted continuum, but a break that in part delimits that history. Yet if Kleist represents a unique opportunity to read history differently, to read the break that is history, this is also because his work is constantly confronted and troubled by the force of such rupturing. This is already the case throughout his first major success as a playwright, Der zerbrochne Krug, and even in the foreword to that play, which speaks precisely to historical facts and a certain disruptive power they exercise. Diesem Lustspiel liegt wahrscheinlich ein historisches Faktum, worüber ich jedoch keine nähere Auskunft habe auffinden können, zum Grunde. Ich nahm die Veranlassung dazu aus einem Kupferstich, den ich vor mehreren Jahren in der Schweiz sah. Man bemerkte darauf—zuerst einen Richter, der gravitätisch auf dem Richterstuhl saß: vor ihm stand eine alte Frau, die einen zerbrochenen Krug hielt, sie schien das Unrecht, das ihm widerfahren war, zu demonstrieren: Beklagter, ein junger Bauerkerl, den der Richter, als überwiesen, andonnerte, verteidigte sich noch, aber schwach: ein Mädchen, das wahrscheinlich in dieser Sache gezeugt hatte (denn wer weiß, bei welcher Gelegenheit das Deliktum geschehen war) spielte sich, in der Mitte zwischen Mutter and Bräutigam, an der Schürze; wer ein falsches Zeugnis abgelegt hätte, könnte nicht zerknirschter dastehn: und der Gerichtsschreiber sah (er hatte vielleicht kurz vorher das Mädchen angesehen) jetzt den Richter mißtrauisch zur Seite an, wie Kreon, bei einer ähnlichen Gelegenheit, den Ödip. Darunter stand: der zerbrochene Krug. —Das Original war, wenn ich nicht irre, von einem niederländischen Meister. [This comedy is probably based on a historical fact, although I could find no further information about it. I took the occasion for it from a copper engraving that I saw several years ago in Switzerland. On it is portrayed, first, a judge, sitting solemnly at the bench: before him stand an old woman, holding a broken pitcher; she appears to be showing the injustice that has befallen it. The accused, a young peasant boy, who the judge is shouting at, defends himself, but weakly. A girl, who had probably testified in the matter (for who knows what occasioned the crime) is playing, in the middle between mother and fiancé, with her apron. Someone who had given false testimony could not be more remorseful. And the court clerk (he had perhaps seen the girl shortly before) now looks distrustfully at the judge, as Creon, in a similar situation, looked at Oedipus. At the bottom of the engraving is written: the broken pitcher.—The original, if I am not mistaken, was by a Dutch master.]1

Not unlike Wordsworth’s historical imperative, that incidents must have occurred, Kleist’s account of the origins of his play locates it in a historical gap, the gap in historical consciousness: he could not find any more information


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about the historical fact that is, however, probably at the basis of the play. Kleist, then, writes a play based in history, but a history about which he can know nothing more. Or to put it differently, he knows nothing about the basis of his own play other than that it is located in history, which certainly raises serious questions about the origins of Der zerbrochne Krug, not to mention the competence of its writer. The lack of historical information as a basis for understanding the emergence of the play cannot be reduced to Kleist’s ignorance about a given court case in a relatively remote past, however. To read it thus would be to adhere to a traditional and unproblematic version of a gap in historical consciousness that is always potentially recuperable: one could always, in principle, overcome this gap, through historical reconstruction, for instance. What Kleist describes, however, is a more radical break, for he does not merely suggest that there is a fact in history about which he can know nothing more. He does, after all, know about the historical fact that serves as the ground (zu Grunde . . . liegt) of the play, since he goes on to relate precisely that ground: it is not some historical event or situation, but a copper engraving on which is etched a scene very much like the one he goes on to develop upon in his comedy. And not only does Kleist know this much about the origin of the play, he also knows that it lies in the game of interpretation as much as it does in historical fact: Die ausdrucksvolle Zeichnung belustigte und verlockte zu mancherlei Deutungen des Inhalts. Im Scherz gelobten die drei, jeder wolle seine eigentümliche Ansicht schriftlich ausführen. Ludwig Wieland verhieß eine Satire, Heinrich von Kleist entwarf ein Lustspiel und der Verfasser der gegenwärtigen Erzählung [Zschokke] das, was hier gegeben wird. [The expressive portrayal amused and elicited a number of interpretations of its content. As a joke, the three vowed that each would execute his view in writing. Ludwig Wieland promised a satire, Heinrich von Kleist outlined a comedy, and the writer of the present tale (Zschokke) that which is presented here.] (1. 925)

The play, then, is not only about the history Kleist can know nothing more about; it is about the nothing that Kleist knows—a certain nichts that will circumscribe the space of much of its action. And this nothing, the historical fact that stands at the origin of this comedy, is a work of art and its interpretation. Kleist tells the origin of his play as that gap in knowledge that is art and its interpretation, a cognitive interruption—and he knows no more about the origin of his work than that. It is perhaps no accident, then, that Der zerbrochne Krug should seem removed from historical and political concerns, relying as it does in no small


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part upon the insignificance of its action and the ludicrousness of its characters for its comic effect. Yet even here politics, gender politics and the politics of (colonial) war, will find their place, although it will be aesthetic as much as it is geographical, as much the space of a pitcher as that of nations vying for supremacy. And it is surely no accident that the history it both represents and enacts will be placed and take place in a break, a fissure, a gap, the fragmentation of borders and the crossing between aesthetics and history. The play opens early one morning with Adam, the judge in a provincial Dutch court, being questioned by his court secretary about a number of suspicious wounds on his head. Adam is soon informed that his court is to receive a visit from Judge Walter, sent from Utrecht on a round of inspections. Unable to conceal his wounds because he cannot find his wig and thus rather out of sorts, Adam no sooner welcomes Walter than he is informed that an anxious group awaits the opening of the court. He reluctantly relents, opening his doors to an angry mob consisting of Frau Marthe, holding a broken pitcher, her daughter Eve, Eve’s fiancé Ruprecht, and Ruprecht’s father Veit. Despite their rowdy behavior, the group has assembled over a mere triviality. As Licht puts it, this is much ado about nothing: “Lärm um nichts / . . . Es ist ein Krug zerbrochen worden, hör ich” [Much ado about nothing / . . . A pitcher has been broken, I hear] (504–5). Eve similarly at once delimits the scope of the case and seemingly defines the relative inconsequence of the pitcher: “Ja, der zerbrochene Krug nur” [Yes, only the broken pitcher] (526). It is not long, however, before Frau Marthe will belie this statement. She begins her testimony with a lengthy description of the pitcher, pointing out its features to the two judges, only to be interrupted and told to get to the matter (“zur Sache”), her narrative broken off like so many pieces of the pitcher itself. If for the moment at least we are to take her at her word and to follow that word in the manner of a good judge, which may well be the manner of a good critic as well, we might turn to her description of the pitcher in order to get to the matter: Nichts seht ihr, mit Verlaub, die Scherben seht ihr; Der Krüge schönster ist entzwei geschlagen. Hier grade auf dem Loch, wo jetzo nichts, Sind die gesamten niederländischen Provinzen Dem span’schen Philipp übergeben worden. Hier im Ornat stand Kaiser Karl der fünfte: Von dem seht ihr nur noch die Beine stehn. Hier kniete Philipp, und empfing die Krone:


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Der liegt im Topf, bis auf den Hinterteil, Und auch noch der hat seinen Stoß empfangen. [Nothing is what you see, if you’ll permit; you see the fragments; The most beautiful of pitchers is shattered. Just here, on the hole, where there is nothing now, The entire Provinces of the Netherlands Were handed over to the Spaniard Philip. Here in regal robes stood Charles the Fifth: Of him you see only the legs left standing. Here knelt Philip, and received the crown: He lies in the pot up to his rear And it also has taken a blow.] (646–55) The image on the pitcher represents at once a particular historical situation, what Kleist’s headnote would call a historical Faktum, and an attempt to reduce history to a model of representation. It depicts the handing down of power over the Dutch provinces from the Spanish Karl V to his son Philip II, an act that seeks to transmit imperial rule from generation to generation and that would thus maintain not only that imperial control but a history of patriarchal and familial continuity. But it does so by reducing history to a sort of still life, the stilling of a moment of historical passage into a static image whose mimetic claims are evident. History, however, would have it otherwise. As Schiller, not least, relates this point of passage in European history, far from assuring such a continuity, the change in power that the pitcher depicts represented a critical moment in a certain fall, the Dutch fall from Spanish rule.2 What perhaps amounts to nothing less than decolonization is not, however, rendered by the pitcher’s representation of history, for the pitcher can only depict the royal act and not its unforeseen and uncontrollable results. Since the handing of the Dutch provinces from Karl to Philip signifies not the passage of power over the Dutch but the passage from Spanish to Dutch rule of the Netherlands, the image on the pitcher in effect no longer corresponds even to itself. If the fall from imperial control is rendered by the pitcher, then, it is only through the breaking of the representation of history when the pitcher is broken. Can it be an accident that what history would lead to is a Protestant campaign against churches that would bring stern reaction from none other than Philip II, instigating further revolt, a significant episode in the fall of the Netherlands? Can it be an accident that this campaign should be referred to as “the breaking of the images”? The pitcher


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registers not only the scene of a determinate history, and not only the break in that scene, which might signify the disruption of one regime and the emergence of a new political order just as firmly in place. Rather, it registers history inasmuch as its breaking marks the rupture in a history of succession and the rupture between history and its representation, indeed history as the rupture in representation and with all the revolutionary potential of such a breaking of the image. This rendering of history is traced once again by the very history of the pitcher itself, which until its breaking resists precisely the forces of history. The pitcher traces and repeats European history, passing from Spanish to Dutch hands and thus marking the passage of political power, finally falling into the hands of a grave digger, in whose possession it will celebrate a rather different familial history. Hierauf vererbte Der Krug auf Fürchtegott, den Totengräber; Der trank zu dreimal nur, der Nüchterne, Und stets vermischt mit Wasser aus dem Krug. Das erstemal, als er im Sechzigsten Ein junges Weib sich nahm; drei Jahre drauf, Als sie noch glücklich ihn zum Vater machte; Und als sie jetzt noch funfzehn Kinder zeugte; Trank er zum dritten Male, als sie starb. [The pitcher next passed on to Fürchtegott, the grave digger; He drank from it but thrice, the sober man, And each time its contents mixed with water. The first time when, in his sixtieth year, He took a young wife; three years later When she made him a happy father; And after she had borne him fifteen more children, He drank for the third time, when she died.] (688–96) The pitcher traces a double genealogy: it follows the movement of political power from the Spanish to the Dutch and also celebrates the grave digger Fürchtegott’s procreative potency, of nearly Biblical proportions, Fürchtegott, whose name, given his profession, aptly suggests a fear of God. All the while tracing this history, the pitcher itself would seem to resist a certain conception of history.


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Drauf fiel der Krug An den Zachäus, Schneider in Tirlemont, Der meinem sel’gen Mann, was ich euch jetzt Berichten will, mit eignem Mund erzählt. Der warf, als die Franzosen plünderten, Den Krug, samt allem Hausrat, aus dem Fenster, Sprang selbst, und brach den Hals, der Ungeschickte, Und dieser irdne Krug, der Krug von Ton, Aufs Bein kam er zu stehen, und blieb ganz. [Then the pitcher fell To Zachäus, the tailor from Tirlemont, Who with his own mouth told my dead husband, What I now desire to tell you. As the French were plundering, he threw The pitcher and his household goods out the window, Jumped himself and broke his neck, the klutz. And this earthen pitcher, this pitcher of clay, Landed on its feet, and remained whole.] (697–704) The pitcher has managed to do, here, what its owner, not to mention Karl, could not. Not only does it appear resistant to the laws of nature, surviving a fall severe enough to break a man’s neck, it lands firmly upright in the midst of foreign invasion, in clear contrast to Philip, who has received a spanking from history (“Der liegt im Topf, bis auf den Hinterteil, / Und auch noch der hat seinen Stoß empfangen”), and to Karl, who has his legs severed from his body, at least on the pitcher. And this is not all. The pitcher also proves resistant to a certain fire: Nichts ist dem Krug, ich bitt euch sehr, ihr Herren, Nichts Anno sechsundsechzig ihm geschehen. Ganz blieb der Krug, ganz in der Flammen Mitte, Und aus des Hauses Asche zog ich ihn Hervor, glasiert, am andern Morgen, glänzend, Als käm er eben aus dem Töpferofen. [Nothing, begging your pardon gentlemen, Nothing befell the pitcher in sixty-six. The pitcher remained whole in the middle of the flames And I pulled it out of the ashes of the house


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Borders of a Lip Glazed and shining, the morning after, As if it came straight from the potter’s oven.] (724-29)

Celebrating male potency and a history of patriarchal continuity, defying nature and war, the pitcher comes out of a fire that here, as elsewhere in Kleist’s oeuvre, has clear apocalyptic overtones–not destroyed but as though reborn.3 If Zachäus was ungeschickt, uncoordinated, clumsy, in breaking his neck, then the pitcher is ungeschichtlich, unhistorical, in not breaking when it falls to the ground. It resists natural and political history on the most world-historical scale, and even the (symbolically) apocalyptic destruction of the historical. The pitcher emerges as though fresh from the oven of its original creation, a kind of mythical phoenix, only finally to adhere to the mandates of physical law with its breaking at the hands of “jener Schlingel” (739), the scoundrel who broke it, and who Frau Marthe believes to be Ruprecht. The break that occasions the case of the broken pitcher and that introduces the pitcher into the law is also nothing less than the break into history. The pitcher enters history, itself becomes historical, through its own breaking, which also corresponds to the rupture of the image of history.4 If Frau Marthe fails to distinguish between the historical event of the abdication of the Dutch provinces as represented on the pitcher from that event as historical, located in a distinct geographical space and irrecuperable past (“Hier grade auf dem Loch . . . / Sind die gesamten niederländischen Provinzen / Dem span’schen Philipp übergeben worden”), then, it is not least because rather than merely representing history, the pitcher, or rather the breaking of the pitcher, emerges as the site of history itself. Only history can give history its due. The rendering of history, what makes the history of the jug something more than a mere representation of a historical moment, only takes place through the intervention of another historical event, for what this historical moment testifies to in the first place is the impossibility of submitting history to intentional control. The breaking of the pitcher is thus the accident that registers its coincidence with the history of Dutch liberation from Spanish monarchical control. If the pitcher is able to render history, that is, it is only in its breaking, which alone performs the historical break that interrupts the attempt at the intentional control of the movement of history represented on the pitcher itself. Refusing to locate history on the pitcher, in its more or less faithful portrayal of a historical scene, the play registers history as the history of the pitcher, as the uncloseable gap between history and representation that is rendered precisely by the intervention of the historical, the breaking of


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the pitcher, to disrupt the claims of the representation of history. The breaking of the pitcher is therefore not least the break in this image, the break in the very model of representation that would make history an intention of consciousness either in the form of the representation of history (the image on the pitcher or historical narration in the mode of Schiller) or history understood as the enactment and realization of the idea of national superiority (of the Spanish over the Dutch, for instance). Like Lyotard’s reading of the symbol in Kant, such an interruption, which demands a thorough rethinking of history and the political, suggests that history and historical representation take place as the interruption of intentionality and thus of a politics of policies that would control the movement of history, subsuming it to the rule of an idea. The readings and nonreadings the pitcher will receive throughout the play will sketch out just such a project. Decisions The history traced by Marthe’s narrative is precisely the history the men of law do not want to hear, the matter that, they maintain, has nothing to do with the matter of the broken pitcher. What, after all, does the history of the pitcher, not to mention the history represented on it, have to do with how the pitcher was actually broken the previous evening? Marthe protests, however, that the pitcher is pertinent, belongs to the matter: “der Krug . . . gehört zur Sache!” (679). In a figure whose utter banality should by no means mask its pertinence, the always literal-minded Frau Marthe articulates the admissibility of the description of the pitcher and the pertinence of her testimony as a matter of matter (Sache). And the men of law proceed likewise. Insisting that she get on with her testimony, that she speak only of what is essential to the trial (was zur Sache gehört), they apparently wish to break off all talk of the material being of the pitcher and get down to the matter, the essence of the case. Marthe’s statement may have rather shattering implications for the law, for it is nothing less than the materiality of the pitcher that makes it a matter relevant to the law. Her response may be a rather banal statement asserting that the pitcher must be of relevance here, since it is only the breaking of the pitcher that has made the case necessary. But more importantly, the breaking of the pitcher renders it relevant to the law at the same time that it reduces it to the property of an uncompromising materiality that Adam and Walter continually attempt to exclude from the law. Adam at once articulates the domain of the law, what is pertinent or relevant to it, in terms of matter and materiality and denies the materiality of the pitcher as mattering to the court. A good metaphysician, from


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the beginning he insists that it is not the whole pitcher, and certainly not the whole of its history or of the history represented on it, that matters to the law, but that it is, rather, the hole in the pitcher that is pertinent, thus gesturing toward a thinking of absence and interruption: “Uns geht das Loch–nichts die Provinzen an, / Die darauf übergeben worden sind” (677–78) [It is the hole–and not the provinces / Thereon given over–that concerns us].5 Adam’s exclamation follows immediately upon his first demand that Frau Marthe get to the matter (“Frau Marthe! Erlaßt uns das zerscherbte Paktum, / Wenn es zur Sache nicht gehört” [Frau Marthe! Spare us the broken treaty, / Unless it is pertinent to the case] (675–6). He calls in the first place for a movement toward matter and thus away from the description of the pitcher, and yet no sooner articulates the province of this particular court of law in terms of a certain materiality (that of history and the material support of its representation, the jug) rather than its breaking than he apparently goes back on his word and claims not matter and materiality but their break, negation, and absence as the law’s concern.6 Here already, Adam locates the law in a gap or absence that is never merely that and unwittingly reveals the breaking of the jurisdiction of the law. For what is always at stake in these lines is a determination of what is admissible to the law, what belongs to the law. The law’s ability to mark its own boundaries therefore depends upon a figurative understanding of materiality, an understanding of pertinence articulated as a matter of matter. The disruption of that materiality ultimately and necessarily threatens the law’s ability to articulate its own boundaries, to create a diction that might define its jurisdiction.7 Frau Marthe’s insistence that her narration does matter thus asserts the relevance of her pitcher to the law by fracturing the very grounds of admissibility itself. For, now broken, it might be said that the pitcher is nothing but Sache, nothing but a bunch of pieces, no longer a pitcher at all, and thus that it quite literally gehört zur Sache, belongs to, is rendered the property of, matter.8 Faced with a case in which matter, materiality, and their rupture are what is to be judged, the law is faced with nothing less than its inability to define its own borders other than in terms of their own rupture, nothing less than its determination of the pertinence of the law in terms of its inability to determine its pertinence. The law defines itself, marks its borders, in terms of what can never belong to it. The break that renders the pitcher pertinent, even essential, to the law is also the break that reduces that same pitcher to the property of a strict materiality that refuses its adherence to the law. This is the break, then, that delimits the boundaries of the law and the break in this very act of delimitation. Even before the case proper has been opened, Marthe, half-wittingly perhaps, but never half-wittedly, speaks precisely the rupture in the material, that


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rupture which will expose the limits of the law. In an exchange with Ruprecht’s father, Veit, she makes clear her distrust of all attempts to restore the pitcher: Veit:

Sei Sie nur ruhig, Frau Marth! Es wird sich alles hier entscheiden. Frau Marthe: O ja. Entscheiden. Seht doch. Den Klugschwätzer. Den Krug mir, den zerbrochenen, entscheiden. Wer wird mir den geschiednen Krug entscheiden? Hier wird entschieden werden, daß geschieden Der Krug mir bleiben soll. Für so’n Schiedsurteil Geb ich noch die geschiednen Scherben nicht. [Veit:

Now just be calm, Frau Marth! Everything will be decided here. Frau Marthe: Oh yes. Decided. See here. The wisecracker. My pitcher, the broken one, is to be unbroken (entscheiden). Who will unbreak (entscheiden) the broken pitcher for me? Here it will be decided (entschieden) that the pitcher Will remain broken (geschieden). For such a settlement I’ll not give the broken fragments.] (415–22) Marthe accuses Veit of being a wisecracker, a Klugschwätzer, though the term would seem to apply better to herself. In fact, she is not only a Klugschwätzer but a Krugschwätzer: here and throughout the scene, she takes up the words (entscheiden, entsetzen, entschädigen) that might describe the possibility of justice. She takes up these words and breaks them somewhat like a pitcher. In a rhetorical question that makes her skepticism in such matters only all too evident, she asks, in effect, who will un-break (ent-scheiden) the pitcher. Here, in the court of law, something will be decided (“Hier wird entschieden werden”), though not that her pitcher will be returned to her in its unbroken state, but rather that it will remain broken (geschieden). And for such a decision, Frau Marthe would not give all the broken pieces, which makes sense, after all, since that would mean giving all she will ever have of the pitcher. No maker of pitchers (“Meint Er, daß die Justiz ein Töpfer ist?” [Does he think justice is a potter?] (435), the law can never overcome this scission, can never ent-schädigen, nor can it replace, place or position once again, er-setzen.9 Marthe’s language does much to belie the insignificance earlier attributed to the pitcher, for it insists upon nothing less than the law living up to its own


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definition. If the law is indeed a process of deciding (entscheiden), of reaching a just and founded decision, what it can never do is de-scission (ent-scheiden) that which has been divided by a scission, that which is ge-schieden. Marthe refuses to admit the possibility of a descission of the damage that has been done not only to her pitcher but to language, such that the law emerges here as unable to literalize its very constitutive definition, to materialize itself, and thus remains confined to the realm of the cognitive.10 Unable to reach a decision to descission, the law in effect decides its own inability to decide, to decide upon itself as a process of decision in all senses. It remains internally divided, divided from itself, and most of all by its very definition as a process of decision. Such a radical conception of not only Sache and Sachlichkeit but of the law is registered when the materiality of language interrupts the process of cognition that carries from the word entscheiden to its customary meaning as the cognitive process of decision that word customarily signifies and forces us instead to recognize the disjunction between that decision and a more literal understanding of the word, one that would speak of interrupting interruption, unbreaking a break. The interruption and suspension of cognition by the material, language in Kleist no longer allows us to locate decision, understanding, judgement, the law, and, therefore, the possibility of justice in the undisturbed movement from language to meaning. Not only are we forced to acknowledge that the law cannot unbreak pitchers or undo history (the splitting up of an empire, for instance), but, in a much more profound sense that in fact grounds these, that it cannot overcome the split between mind and matter, cognition and experience. A conventional conception of the law as a process of decision is therefore supplanted by another, the recognition that cognition and the law will always be broken off from the experience they are meant to be a rendering of or intervention in. Such a conception of the law is in fact rigorously reflexive inasmuch as it constitutes the law’s understanding of its own limits. Now, understanding and the law, if they are to live up to their names, would have to render not only a decision but one that has reflected upon the very limits of decision, one that acknowledges that fundamental break. One of the possible forms such a judgement might take would be a rethinking of (legal) decision in terms different from the binary logic that rules over the law as it is traditionally conceived, a conception of the law according to which deciding might mean “de-siding,” not taking a side, not at least, as we usually think the side. The law would thus emerge as a radical undecidability, and to that extent would be opposed to the image of the law the play puts forth, a legal system capable only of what this very scene names a kind of breaking judgement, a Schiedsurteil. Kleist criticism seems a long way


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indeed from being able to respond to such a conception of (critical) judgement, for it remains committed to the taking of sides, trying, for instance, to decide whether or not the pitcher is of any real importance to the play. Swearing A reconceptualization of the cognitive claims of language would also necessitate a rethinking of the nature of (legal) witnessing. For the law depends upon a conception of the intentionality of language according to which testimony, which leads to judgement, is precisely the self-conscious rendering of oneself and one’s actions, as well as those of others. It depends, then, upon our being able to say what we mean and upon our knowing that we said it and meant it. While the interruption of the movement of decision enacted by the very language of decision would put the possibility of an adequate judgement by the law into question, Eve’s own testimony is perfectly in accordance with the radical questioning of the law in Kleist’s language, for it equally questions the conception of intentionality that grounds witnessing. In her own continued testimony, Frau Marthe tells how she was awoken by loud voices the evening previous to the trial and rushed to her daughter’s room only to find pieces of her pitcher strewn throughout the room in which stood Eve and Ruprecht (747–60). Questioning Ruprecht, Marthe is told that despite appearances neither he nor Eve but rather a third party is responsible for the broken pitcher. Eve, however, has something else to say: Frau Marthe: Auf dies Wort Seh ich das Mädchen fragend an; die steht Gleich einer Leiche da, ich sage: Eve!— Sie setzt sich; ists ein anderer gewesen, Frag ich? Und Joseph und Maria, ruft sie, Was denkt Ihr Mutter auch?—So sprich! Wer wars? Wer sonst, sagt sie,—und wer auch konnt es anders? Und schwört mir zu, daß ers gewesen ist. Eve: Was schwor ich Euch? Was hab ich Euch geschworen? Nichts schwor ich, nichts Euch. [Frau Marthe: Upon this word, I look inquiringly at my girl, who stands There like a corpse. I say, “Eve!”— She sits down. “Was it another then?,” I ask. And she calls out, “By Joseph and Mary,


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Borders of a Lip What do you think mother?”—“So speak! Who was it?” “Who else,” says she—“and who else could it be?” And she swears to me that it was him. Eve: What did I swear? What did I swear to you? Nothing did I swear, nothing to you.] (773–82)

Despite appearances, Eve does not deny the naming of Ruprecht as the guilty party but only the authority lent her testimony. Eve:

Nein, Mutter! Dies verfälscht Ihr. Seht, leid tuts in der Tat mir tief zur Seele, Daß ich es öffentlich erklären muß: Doch nichts schwor ich, nichts, nichts hab ich geschworen. ................................. Frau Marthe: Du hättest mir, o Eve, nich versichert–? Nicht Joseph und Maria angerufen? Eve: Beim Schwur nicht! Schwörend nicht! Seht, dies jetzt schwör ich, Und Joseph und Maria ruf ich an. [Eve:

No, mother! This you are falsifying. See here, it pains me to the depths of my soul, That I must declare it publicly: But I swore nothing, nothing have I sworn. ................................. Frau Marthe: You didn’t assure me, oh Eve? Didn’t call upon Joseph and Mary? Eve: Not as an oath! Not swearing! This I do swear, And call upon Joseph and Mary.] (786–94) Amid all this swearing, it can be difficult to tell exactly what is and was said. Eve does not deny Ruprecht’s guilt here, nor does she deny having testified to his guilt to her mother. Rather, she first simply asserts and then swears that what she did not do the previous evening was swear as to his guilt, call Joseph and Mary as witnesses to the truth of her words. To follow Eve’s word by no means jeopardizes the status of such witnessing. For if her present oath is valid and thus warrants the legitimacy lent it by the invocation of these witnesses, then all she has done is deny a previous statement (that Ruprecht is guilty) whose own lack of legitimacy is now clear and thus unthreatening. In such a case, Eve is to be taken at her word, but much more so when she invokes Mary


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and Joseph. However, if Eve did in fact swear to Ruprecht’s guilt the previous evening, then her present oath would in effect amount to an oath that the previous oath never took place. What this oath would assert, therefore, is not that Ruprecht is not guilty so much as that the previous assertion of his guilt was not guaranteed by an oath. Eve’s oath in court is troubling because it opens a gap between itself and the previous oath, which was never witnessed by the court. It represents a challenge to the law, because the law depends upon an understanding of speech acts, the correspondence of language and social, historical action in the form of an oath (“I swear . . .”) as the guarantee of truth. Eve’s testimony, however, introduces a break into the legal and performative status of the oath, a discontinuity between swearing and what is sworn, between the oath itself (“I swear”) and what the oath continues to describe (“. . . that Ruprecht broke the pitcher”), since this oath is belied by another oath (“I swear that I did not swear”). The discontinuity between two successive speech acts in effect amounts to a refiguration of the historical model implicit in the legal and performative conception of the oath. It opens up a gap between language and the historical event, such that language is no longer an event itself, is not itself historical, so much as it is a representation of a historical event. As long as language does not coincide with the historical there is always the possibility of a subsequent speech act that would negate the previous one and represent it in turn as an inaccurate representation of the facts. The case of the broken pitcher would seem to avoid this difficulty because Eve’s oath in court is witnessed, while testimony over her first oath is still in question. Eve’s very words demand the legitimacy lent them by witnesses—Joseph and Mary. And yet, what Joseph and Mary are to witness is their own absence from another scene—the fact that a previous witnessing never took place, that they were not invoked as witnesses in the first (non) oath. Yet how is one to witness an absence, that which by definition can never be witnessed? If anyone could perform such a witnessing, it is surely Joseph and Mary, whose role as the parents of Christianity depends upon just such testimony: according to Christian tradition, after all, Mary’s “immaculate” conception of Jesus testifies to the absence of intercourse between her and Joseph.11 Eve’s invocation of Joseph and Mary is all the more pertinent, therefore, since it is not only the oath that never took place to which they attest, but also that Eve was never seduced by Ruprecht. And while the breaking of the pitcher clearly represents Eve’s losing of her virginity, the invocation of Joseph and Mary seeks to confirm just the opposite, thus opening a fissure between a symbolic reading of the breaking of the pitcher and the history the pitcher represents, what actually happened the previous evening. Eve’s oath (that she did not previously


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swear an oath) thus opens the fissure between language and history in such a way that the oath, language, emerges as the representation of an event that never took place, the representation of an absence. This fissure is doubled by the break in the pitcher, a break that signifies the asymmetry between the symbolic and history, what the breaking of the pitcher apparently symbolizes and what in fact took place in its breaking. So radical is the breaking that takes place in Der zerbrochne Krug that it registers the break even from the signification of breaking. Throughout the play it is therefore a question of how language might stand as the guarantee for such concepts as truth, witnessing, or an accurate representation of the past, all of which are crucial to any possibility of justice. In a recapitulation of this scene in the variant version of the final act, Eve gives an even more precarious account that will call all testimony into doubt: Eve:

Die Mutter stellt sich vor mich, Blaß, ihre Lippe zuckt, sie stemmt die Arme. “Ists,” fragt sie, “ists ein anderer gewesen?” Und: Joseph, sag ich, und Maria, Mutter; Was denkt ihr auch?—“Und was noch fragt Ihr sie,” Schreit Muhme Sus’ und Leise: “Ruprecht wars!” Und alle schrein: “Der Schändliche! Der Lügner!” Und ich—ich schwieg, ihr Herrn; ich log, ich weiß, Doch log ich anders nicht, ich shwörs, als schweigend.

[Eve:

Mother stands before me, pale, lip trembling, arms Akimbo. “Was it, then,” she asks, “another?” And “Joseph,” I say, “and Mary, Mother,” What are you thinking?”—“And what more need you ask?” Aunty Sus’ and Leise scream: “It was Ruprecht!” And they all shout: “The wretch! The liar!” And I—I kept silent, sirs. I lied, I know, But only lied, I swear, by keeping silent.] (2269–77)

Surely, all this swearing is getting somewhat tiresome, not to mention hard to believe. Eve swears again, though this time to her own guilt. Her silence is understood here as a kind of language, the equivalent of a statement that could be belied. Ruprecht: Mein Seel, sie sprach kein Wort, das muß ich sagen. Frau Marthe: Sie sprach nicht, nein, sie nickte dem Kopf bloß, Wenn man sie, obs Ruprecht war, befragte.


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Ruprecht: Ja, nicken. Gut. Eve: Ich nickte? Mutter! Ruprecht: Nicht? Auch gut. Eve: Wann hätt ich—? Frau Marthe: Nun? Du hättest nicht, Als Muhme Suse vor dir stand, und fragte: Nicht, Evchen, Ruprecht war es? Ja genickt? Eve: Wie? Mutter? Wirklich? Nickt ich? Seht— Ruprecht: Beim Schnauben, Beim Schnauben, Evchen! Laß die Sache gut sein. Du hielst das Tuch, und schneuztest heftig drein; Mein Seel, es schien, als ob du ’n bissel nicktest. Eve verwirrt: Es muß unmerklich nur gewesen sein. Frau Marthe: Es war zum Merken just genug. Walter: Zum Schluß jetzt—? [Ruprecht: My soul, that’s true. She didn’t say a word. Frau Marthe: She said nothing, no; but only nodded When asked if it was Ruprecht. Ruprecht: Yes. Nodded. Right. Eve: I nodded? Mother? Ruprecht: No? That’s good too. Eve: When did I— Frau Marthe: No? Did you not When Aunt Suse came up close and asked: It was Ruprecht, no? Did you not nod yes? Eve: What? Mother? Truly? I nodded, did I? See here— Ruprecht: When you were blowing your nose, Eve! Let the matter rest. You held your handkerchief and blew your nose. By my soul, it seemed you sort of nodded. Eve bewildered: It must have been too slight to notice. Frau Marthe: It was just enough to notice. Walter: Can we finish this up now?] (2278–90) Walter mercifully calls for the end of testimony that continually is no sooner uttered than it is put into question. No doubt there is a consensus now as to the


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fact that Eve did not speak, did not name Ruprecht as the guilty party. Instead, it is now the much more surreptitious question of a sign and its perceptibility. Frau Marthe maintains that with a nod of her head Eve testifies to Ruprecht’s guilt. For his part, to Ruprecht it’s all the same (“Ja, nicken. Gut”; “Nicht? / Auch gut.”), since it has never been his own guilt so much as Eve’s chastity that has concerned him, and of this he is now reassured. Eve, however, remains uncertain, unconvinced. She not only calls for repeated testimony but, in a gesture that seems but an off-hand interjection (“Nickte ich? Seht”), for the certainty of sense perception to confirm her own witnessing. She states that she herself had not perceived a gesture that was perceptible to others, which is understandable, since she was then, as she is now, verwirrt. Eve is thrown back into this state of bewilderment because what she perceives now, what she hears, is that testimony, her own testimony, has become a matter of a sign freed of intentional status and made subject instead to perceptual verification by others. That the perception of this sign is articulated as a process of marking (“unmerklich,” “Merken”) is no accident, for the perception, the re-marking, of Eve’s nodding of her head is what marks it as mark in the first place. And here it is the reading of that mark as a sign for Eve’s assent that marks the possibility of testimony guaranteed by an oath. The comic play on the repetition of the various conjugated forms of the verb nicken, to nod, and the negative particle nicht threatens to negate that very testimony. The verb is never uttered in the scene without a quick turn to the negative, so that the sign is no sooner expressed than it is negated, the near assonance of the words making any difference between the sign (nodding) and its negation almost imperceptible. What is at stake here is whether Eve could have sworn without knowing it, whether her oath could have been nonintentional, and whether, therefore, it remains an oath. Eve, while witness to a crime, cannot bear witness to whether or not she provided testimony about that crime. She cannot bear witness to her own witnessing. Freed of its intentional status, witnessing, testimony, and the oath are no longer subsumed to the control of a subject, are no longer intentions of consciousness, which would mean that one could swear an oath or provide testimony without knowing it. Such a conception of language would demand a rethinking of the law, for it would mean that the law would no longer rely upon a conception of the subject as the agent generating and thus responsible for its actions, including its speech acts.12 Reigning in the Law The play will ultimately testify, if not to this conception of the law, then at least to the limits of testimony. Eve refuses to say anything other than that


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Ruprecht broke the pitcher, the other incidents of the previous day weaving a fabric (Garnstück) that remains foreign to the case and about which she therefore cannot be interrogated (1260–1272). Adam eagerly accepts this logic that would save him, accepts it as reigning in the law: “Die Jungfer weiß, wo unsre Zäume hängen” (The maiden knows where our reigns hang, 1275). Given Adam’s figure for the limits of the law, it can be no accident that there is a least one horse that has escaped Eve’s grasp. Much later in the trial, Frau Brigitte testifies as to how she saw someone jump from Eve’s window the night of the breaking of the pitcher. Investigating the snow beneath Eve’s window, she finds a trail (Spur) that, Licht confirms, leads directly to the courthouse. But what is most revealing, the trail is formed by a normal, well-formed foot on the left and, on the right, a monstrous horse’s foot. The trail leads directly to that in the law which Eve could not reign in, then, for Adam, while no cavalier in any sense of the word, no horseman, and thus in no need of spurs (Sporen), is nonetheless something of a horse-man, with one normal foot and one that resembles a hoof. Eve can perhaps reign in Adam’s desire for her by refusing his advances, but knowing where to find the reigns also means knowing how to reign in the law, stop it short, forbid it from entering a territory over which it has no rights: Adam: Ihr Herrn, wenn hier der Anschein mich verdammt: Ihr übereilt euch nicht, bitt ich. Es gilt Mir Ehre oder Prostitution. Solang die Jungfer schweigt, begreif ich nicht, Mit welchem Recht ihr mich beschuldiget. [Adam: Gentlemen, if appearances condemn me here: I beg you, do not act rashly. For me It means either honor or disgrace. So long as the maiden remains silent, I don’t understand With what right you find me guilty.] (1850–4) Much better than Eve, Adam understands where his reigns, like those of the law, are to be found. He knows that it is impossible to prove his disgrace (Prostitution), his literal attempt to prostitute Eve, in the absence of her testimony; he knows he can call upon Eve’s silence as imposing the limits of the rights of the law. Yet why this insistent return to the question of the limits of the law? Why does a case dealing with the breaking of a pitcher return, seemingly inevitably, not to the pitcher or even its breaking so much as to the question of law itself?


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How are we to read that break that opens up a gap, to be sure, but a gap, it would seem, in the law? And what kind of judgement is one to expect from such a case, or is anything like judgement even possible now, in a court of law in which the very definition of decision has been so radically put into question? Much earlier in the play, Adam himself makes an attempt at a judgment, but in so doing reveals not only his utter ineptitude but what in fact has grounded the law from the beginning. Adam: —Wenn ich freimütig reden darf, Ihr Gnaden, Die Sache eignet gut sich zum Vergleich. Walter: Sich zum Vergleich? Das ist nicht klar, Herr Richter. Vernünftge Leute können sich vergleichen; Doch wie Ihr den Vergleich schon wollt bewirken, Da noch durchaus die Sache nicht entworren, Das hätt ich wohl von Euch zu hören Lust. Wie denkt Ihrs anzustellen, sagt mir an? Habt Ihr ein Urteil schon gefaßt? [Adam: —If I may speak freely, Your Grace, The matter is ready to be settled. Walter: To be settled? That is not clear, Your Honor. Reasonable people settle things; But how you would reach a settlement already, Since the case is not yet fully sorted out, I would very much like to hear from you. Tell me, how do you plan to arrange it? Have you already made a judgement?] (1072–80) Adam would no doubt like to settle matters here, but as Walter points out it is by no means clear how he could ever arrive at a judgement. For the settlement Adam would reach is always also a comparison (Vergleich), which in turn is always already a metaphor. And according to the Western tradition since Aristotle,13 both comparison and metaphor require a certain faculty: only reasonable people (“Vernünftge Leute”) can make comparisons or metaphors, and in Adam’s head science and error are so intimately interwoven that one never appears without the other: “In Eurem Kopf liegt Wissenschaft und Irrtum / Geknetet, innig, wie ein Teig zusammen; / Mit jedem Schnitte gebt Ihr mir von beidem.” The implications of this mixture are clear: Adam’s lack of reason (Vernunft) puts into question his ability to form either a comparison or a metaphor (Vergleich) and thus to reach a judgement (Urteil).


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If the passage from Vernunft to Urteil at once postulated and negated here has a familiar philosophical ring to it, Adam’s response similarly traces a certain philosophical trajectory, though now it is precisely the trajectory from the law to philosophy: Adam: Mein Seel! Wenn ich, da das Gesetz im Stich mich läßt, Philosophie zu Hülfe nehmen soll, So wars—der Leberecht— Walter: Wer? Adam: Oder Ruprecht— Walter: Wer? Adam: Oder Lebrecht, der den Krug zerschlug. Walter: Wer also wars? Der Lebrecht oder Ruprecht? Ihr greift, ich seh, mit Eurem Urteil ein, Wie eine Hand in einen Sack voll Erbsen. [Adam: My soul! If I, since the law leaves me in the lurch, Should call philosophy to my aid, Then it was—that Leberecht— Walter: Who? Adam: Or Ruprecht— Walter: Who? Adam: Or Lebrecht, who smashed the pitcher. Walter: Who was it then? Lebrecht or Ruprecht? You grasp with your judgement, I see, Like a hand in a sack full of peas.] (1081–1087) Adam’s inability to form a metaphor reveals that while he might well be a judge, he is no philosopher: the closest he ever comes to making a comparison or a metaphor, not to mention a judgement, is in asserting that faced with the inadequacy of the law he takes refuge in philosophy. He suggests that philosophy enters the scene only as a kind of supplement for the law’s inadequacy, so that the passage from law to philosophy is founded on the absence of the law. Rather than making a connection or passage between them, as Kant does when he describes his Critique of Pure Reason as a tribunal for all philosophical claims,14 Adam’s attempted Vergleich indicates an incompatibility between philosophy and the law. Yet this, it would seem entirely obvious, is not because the


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law is somehow inadequate when faced with contrasting accounts, but because to follow the dictates of the law would be to convict himself and perhaps the law itself. Seeking to divest himself of guilt by placing it on Leberecht, he reveals his misplaced judgement and his inability to read, for Leberecht is, according to his name, he who lives what is right (Lebe-recht) and thus could not possibly have committed the crime. If Ruprecht’s name equally suggests a certain righteousness, Walter’s astonishment (“Wer? . . .Wer?”) is fully justified. In fact, Walter does what Adam never can, form a comparison, produce a metaphor: “Ihr greift, ich seh, mit Eurem Urteil ein, / Wie eine Hand in einen Sack voll Erbsen.” What here takes the name philosophy, then, represents not the possibility of overcoming the deficiency of the law and imposing justice so much as a refuge from the law itself. Philosophy can come to the aid (“Philosophie zu Hülfe nehmen”) of he who would be convicted by the law, but this means that it does not fill the void left by the law but itself threatens to evacuate the law (of any possibility of justice, for instance). Philosophy would therefore be that which opens the possibility for a rupture between what actually happened in the breaking of the pitcher and the legal judgement that does not reflect that act. Breaking the law now means something closer to introducing the break between legal judgement and an (illegal) action than it does to the actual committing of an act that is against the prescriptions of the law. As the recourse, the shelter, from the law, “philosophy” is the metaphor (Vergleich) for precisely that gap between act or experience and legal settlement (Vergleich). The case of the broken pitcher has perhaps never been about anything other than this break, nothing other than the break between the law and philosophy. For while Frau Marthe always seems to be insisting upon the relevance of her pitcher to the law, she in fact says something quite different: “Erlaubt! Wie schön der Krug, gehört zur Sache!” What defines the importance and relevance of the pitcher to the law, then, is its beauty. Clearly, the case of the broken pitcher is a case of aesthetics.15 The break in the pitcher’s beauty, in the aesthetic object, renders it strictly material, and it is precisely that rendering material of the aesthetic that marks the entrance into history and the law. History, or more precisely, the entrance into history, is indeed a matter of materiality, as contemporary criticism will not let us forget. But the terms of that matter and materiality have been altered, fragmented even. It is not simply that the aesthetic is determined by material conditions but that the fragmenting of the aesthetic, its becoming material, discloses a fabric of relations, what Heidegger would call a totality of involvements, in which the relation between the pitcher’s history, the history represented on it, and contemporary Dutch history is disclosed. History emerges not as a determinate or determining materiality or sociality so much as it does as a relationality, not least that between the (histori-


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cal) event, the social, and their representation. Again, the nature of that relation can be reduced to the status of a mimesis only at the expense of neutralizing the radical effects of the break, which makes the pitcher’s history and its break into history the very rupture of such a conception of representation. While both Adam and Walter avoid aesthetic judgement in the strict sense, foregoing any discussion as to whether or not the pitcher is or ever was beautiful, a mere utensil, or a heap of fragments, and never speculating as to what it might mean to say that something is “beautiful” in the first place, they even thereby render the judgement that beauty, aesthetics, has nothing to do with the law. Despite appearances, this is nothing less than a case of aesthetic ideology. For although their (non)judgement does not attempt to mask ideology by aestheticizing it, it nonetheless attempts to marginalize the aesthetic as insignificant in terms of the interest in the pitcher’s breaking, without any critical investigation of the possibility of a relation between that beauty and its breaking or of beauty on its own terms.16 Frau Marthe’s insistence upon the pitcher’s beauty, however, read in conjunction with the similar insistence upon the terms Vernunft and Urteil in the description of the passage from law to philosophy, might well suggest that a certain philosophy is in fact at play here, a philosophy different from Adam’s, but that would nonetheless attempt to think the relation between itself and the law. For not only does Kant, whose critical terms Kleist’s play picks up, repeatedly image philosophy in terms of a tribunal or court of law, as Lyotard points out,17 but his Kritik der Urteilskraft, his critique of the faculty of judgement, establishes the conditions of possibility for judgement through a consideration of beauty and the aesthetic. The refusal of the judges to consider the pitcher’s beauty, then, is indeed a critical lapse and shows at the very least that neither Adam nor Walter is up to the task of criticism or critique. As Marthe’s speech suggests, the pitcher’s beauty does indeed function as the unacknowledged ground for the case to the extent that the image on the pitcher, the image that at least in part assures its beauty, has everything to do with what has taken place in the breaking of the pitcher, but also to the extent that an understanding of the aesthetic (and thus the reading of that image) is the necessary condition for any possibility of judgement, the possibility, then, of the law as a rendering of judgement—and justice. Facing the Law This may begin to explain why there is never anything like an adequate judgement rendered in the case. Adam’s attempted judgement is aborted by Walter, who, when he has later understood that Adam is in fact guilty, summarily


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closes the case. Concerned for the honor of the court (1838–41), Walter allows Adam to maintain his position and even prompts him to deliver a sentence which, he indicates to Eve and Ruprecht, he will later rectify (“Spart eure Sorgen, Kinder” [1880]). Ruprecht is thus convicted and sentenced, and the session closed. It is only now, that is after the trial has officially been called to an end, after the wrong man has been convicted, that Eve, apparently outraged by the injustice, finally names Adam as the guilty party. Justice, if there is any in the play, is thus achieved beyond the limits of the law, after the court has been closed, its borders seemingly set in place.18 There is no longer any question of Adam having recourse to philosophy, nor is Eve’s word any longer in doubt. Upon her indication that Adam had been in her room, Ruprecht, another good metaphysician who has characterized himself as someone who believes what he can grasp, takes hold of Adam and promptly pummels him. Thus, all would seem set right again, comic unity restored: Walter assures Eve that Adam had falsified a letter stating that Ruprecht was to be sent to the Far East, the lovers are reunited and set to be married, and Adam is suspended from office. This apparent (comic) harmony, imposed by Walter, a representative of the law, to be sure, has nonetheless been established outside the law. At this point, we might turn, as though to underscore this recourse to a governing body outside the law, to the variant version of the twelfth scene,19 where Eve’s narration of a history of military as much as of personal politics will do much to destabilize this harmony. Denn der Hispanier Versöhnt sich mit dem Niederländer nicht, Und die Tyrannenrute will er wieder Sich, die zerbrochene, zusammenbinden. [For the Spaniard Does not reconcile himself with the Dutchman, And the tyrant’s rod, once broken, He seeks to bind together and wield again.] (1962–5) The Spanish have not made peace with the Dutch and thus seek to restore their previous “unfragmented” state, to reestablish what they understand to be the integrity of their nation. Ruprecht is thus called upon for military duty to defend his country and the marriage plans between him and Eve are indefinitely deferred. This would be the end of the story had Marthe not sent Eve on some meaningless business to Adam’s office. Adam, no stickler for the letter of the law, offers to have a false document drawn up that would free Ruprecht from military


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duty. But upon Eve’s refusal, he produces a document of his own, a letter stating that the Dutch troops will be sent to the East Indies to fight in a colonial war. Eve can testify to the truth of such orders, for she has seen the letter. Walter: Das in dem Brief selbst hättest du gelesen? Eve: Ich nicht. Ich las es nicht. Ich kann nicht lesen. Doch er, der Richter, las den Brief mir vor. Walter: So. Er, der Richter. Eve: Ja. Und Wort vor Wort. [Walter: You read that in a letter yourself ? Eve: Not me. I didn’t read it. I can’t read. But he, the judge, read the letter to me. Walter: So. He, the judge. Eve: Yes. And word for word.] (2077–80) How does one read “word for word”? If this would seem the question of an illiterate, someone not yet initiated into the practice of reading, this is just the point: Eve cannot read a word and yet claims that Adam read the letter word for word. She believes the word (for word), fears for Ruprecht’s life, and so agrees to accept the falsified documents. Delivering the letter to Eve late in the evening, Adam tries to have his way with her when Ruprecht, who believes his fiancée is being unfaithful, breaks in. In the ensuing scramble, Adam breaks the pitcher. If Eve is dupe to Adam, it is because she has no recourse to any other text that might prove or disprove him. She must, in effect, take his word for it that he has read word for word. Thus she can never assert any correspondence between one word (the letter Adam reads) and another (the letter as written) that would verify Adam’s promise, his word. Eve understands not so much word for word as word for something outside it, in fact, outside language—a historical situation, truth, or honesty. She understands language in this manner precisely because she cannot judge Adam’s words against a written text, because language cannot be judged against itself, word for word. The reflexive relation of language to itself expressed by this phrase erases neither the possibility nor the necessity of historical reference. But as long as that self-relation is denied, as long as the written word cannot be judged against the spoken word, word for word, or as long as the rhetorical claims of language, for instance, are not subjected to a rigorous reading, in every sense, as long as a word is taken for something other than a word, in other words, language gives way to ideology, referentiality is mistaken for a natural or historical phenomenon.20


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Adam’s letter, authentic or not, testifies precisely to the deployment of ideology. Not only does it disclose his manipulation of power and privilege, of knowledge, and the social stratification of gender relations to impose male domination in the form of his attempted “seduction” of Eve, but even more, it testifies to a historical situation that precisely because it cannot be experienced (here, by Eve) remains accessible only to reading. To be illiterate, then, is to be denied even this access to the event of a past or future history that cannot be experienced as such. Eve’s inability to read thus in turn testifies not only to that first gap between an event that is never experienced and the cognition or knowledge of that event but also to a kind of supplemental loss or lack, that of the reading of that event. To read Kleist’s play as in part a plea for a certain kind of literacy program would be simplistic only to the extent that we ourselves remain unable to read, word for word, to read a word like entscheiden (which we have not yet finished reading), for example.21 The ability to read would by no means close the gap between language and history, history and experience, experience and cognition, justice and the law, law and language, language and itself, but it might make possible the recognition of the ideological aberrations that take place in those gaps. Given all that has happened, it should come as no surprise that Eve is reluctant when faced with Walter’s offer of his word as guarantee that Ruprecht will remain in the Netherlands. Still not fully convinced, Eve insists that she and Ruprecht must take their final leave of each other, when Walter interrupts all talk of, and by, the word: Walter: Sieh da! So arm dein Busen an Vertrauen? Eve: O Gott! Gott! Daß ich jetzt nicht schwieg. Walter: Dir glaubt ich Wort vor Wort, was du mir sagtest. Ich fürchte fast, daß ich mich übereilt. Eve: Ich glaub Euch ja, Ihr hörts, so wie Ihrs meint. .................................... Walter: Bleib. Mein Versprechen will ich lösen. Du hast mir deines Angesichtes Züge Bewährt, ich will die meinen dir bewähren, Müßt ich auf andre Art dir den Beweis Auch führen, als du mir. Nimm diesen Beutel. .................................... Den Beutel hier, mit zwanzig Gulden! Mit so viel Geld kaufst du den Ruprecht los.


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................................. Ja, befreist du ganz vom Dienst ihn. Doch so. Schifft die Miliz nach Asien ein, So ist der Beutel ein Geschenk, ist dein. Bleibt sie im Land, wie ichs vorher dir sagte, So trägst du deines bösen Mißtrauns Strafe, Und zahlst, wie billig, Beutel, samt Intressen, Vom Hundert vier, terminlich mir zurück. [Walter: See there! Is your breast so devoid of trust? Eve: Oh God! God! I should have held my tongue. Walter: I believed word for word what you told me; I am nearly afraid that I acted rashly. Eve: I do believe you, you hear what you want to hear. ................................. Walter: Stay. I wish to make good my promise. You have proven those qualities Your countenance reveals; I wish to prove mine to you, Although I must employ another Means of proof than you. Take this purse. ................................ Here take this purse with twenty guilders. With this sum you can buy Ruprecht free. ................................ Yes, you free him completely from service. But hold: should the militia sail for Asia, The purse is a gift, it’s yours. But should It remain at home, as I assured you, Then you carry the penalty of your wrongful mistrust, And pay, as is fair, the purse plus interest, Four percent, punctually back to me.] (2340–59) Eve seems incapable of taking Walter’s word at face value, and as a result, Walter himself begins to lose confidence in the “word for word,” in all Eve has told him. It is not so much that Eve does not believe Walter (“Ich glaub Euch, ja, Ihr horts, so wie Ihrs meint”) as it is that she is now uncertain that the intentional structure of meaning (meinen) corresponds to a (historical) reality. Far


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from remaining indefinitely suspended, hung, like a jury, by the inability to lend any credence to the word, Walter breaks off this irresolvable uncertainty by moving away from the word and toward an economy of the face. While Adam’s face, marked by the wounds he received from Ruprecht, might have been a sign indicating his guilt, and while Walter claims to have read the truth of Eve’s statement in her face, Walter must prove himself to Eve through other means. Though Eve has learned to read enough to distinguish meinen from some reality, intention from meaning, this education makes her stop short of trusting what Walter believes she can read in his face. Eve is assured, reintegrated into the law, but only through the intervention of an economy that allows Walter to capitalize on her poverty, not only her material poverty, but also her spiritual poverty, her lack of faith (“So arm dein Busen an Vertrauen”). Eve now has a material sign, in fact the very sign of materiality itself, money, to guarantee Ruprecht’s freedom. The Münzen stand for Walter’s honesty, however, surely not because there is a correspondence between money and honesty, a correspondence which would at the very least require a reading to be recognized as such. Rather, they stand for his honesty because they circulate in an economy of exchange and can do what Walter’s face cannot—buy Ruprecht out of the army. It is this possibility, if anything, that assuages Eve’s fears. Eve, it would seem, is no longer poor in terms of faith not so much because her faith has been restored as because she no longer needs faith. She makes a gesture toward a traditional Christian faith in her final words in the play (“Ob Ihr mir Wahrheit gabt? O schaftgeprägte, / Und Gottes leuchtend Antlitz drauf. O Jesus! / Daß ich nicht solche Münze mehr erkenne!” [Did you tell me the truth? O sharply minted / And God’s enlightening face upon it. / O Heavens. Not to recognize such coins!] 2375–77), but there too a certain asymmetry remains, since the coins Walter offers hardly seem appropriate proof that Ruprecht will not be sent to the East Indies to fight in a colonial war, for the image on these coins represents, for the Dutch at least, the very face of colonialism: the king of Spain. Eve offers not a nod of her head, not her word, and certainly not her “word for word,” as witness to her belief.22 Nor are the traits of her face invoked. Rather, it is the luminous face of God that will shine light on the state of her soul. But it is God’s face geprägt, as though stamped upon a coin. Eve’s apparent expression of her recognition of Walter’s truthfulness takes the form of a misrecognition or displacement, that of the king of Spain’s face, which is fully visible on the coin, by God’s. If Caesar is deployed by Walter to secure a state of the soul, faith, then God is here rendered somewhat material, even monetary. Eve inverts Walter’s metaphor, but only to complete it. Together they have apparently rendered up to Caesar what is God’s and to


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God what is Caesar’s. The interest in this economy (there is interest) would be, at the very least, in the possibility of trading faith, for example, for material goods, or money for people.23 Eve seems to have given herself fully and freely, without interest, to Walter’s economic exchange and to the economy of the law; she seems to have been assimilated into this economy not only because of her apparent expression of faith but also because that faith is expressed in the minting of a new coin (“o Scharfgeprägte / Und Gottes leuchtend Antlitz drauf”), a coin that in fact promises the very possibility of exchange between materiality and spirituality. But by minting a coin with that which can never be represented, God’s luminous face, even the face of light itself, Eve in fact shifts the grounds upon which the case proceeds, allows for its closure, and exposes the terms that have been presiding over it from the beginning, the terms incarnated, not least, in Adam and Walter, both of whom, after all, try to buy Eve (off) in one way or another. Adam produces a Schein, a certificate that he says will free Ruprecht, a Schein that as far as Eve, who cannot read it, is concerned is all appearance (Schein).24 Walter equally presents her with the appearance of his word or honesty in the form of the appearance of the Spanish king on the coins he offers her. Eve now satisfies Walter by producing not the appearance of something, but appearance itself, even the appearance of appearance. Whether or not she has found her faith, whether or not she believes Walter, Eve invokes God’s luminous face, which functions as “the guarantor of absolute representability and the luminous truth of transparency,”25 thereby suggesting that she has learned to read well enough to decipher that the gestures of the men of law operate according to the laws of representation and appearance. But the light of God’s face blinds. Here it blinds Walter and any number of critics who take Eve’s new found faith at face value. It blinds precisely because it guarantees the values the court has been trying to maintain, especially the necessity that an event be subject to representation in language (the conventional terms governing testimony and witnessing) and that language in turn be transparent, its relation to the historical one of immanence. Eve’s coin, however, precisely because it is minted by that which cannot be seen even while it guarantees all sight, remains withdrawn from the very rules presiding over the law. It satisfies the court by apparently fulfilling its demand for presence, invoking the image of absolute immanence and transparency, the perfect coincidence of language and meaning, truth, and history. Yet the coin Eve mints can never be called to present itself, and thus to represent anything else, in the court of law that, however, demands direct testimony and witnessing, signs of history. Eve’s coin, such as it is, cannot be subsumed to the law’s demand for presence and


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representation and thus in effect rejoins the pitcher this case is ostensibly about inasmuch as both the break, the hole, in the pitcher and this coin can never be seen as such. Nonphenomenal and nonphenomenalizable, the absence in the law, they at once reinscribe the limits of the law and gesture toward a rethinking of it in terms that could no longer rest upon the solid grounds of the visible, intention, or presence.26 Inversions Der zerbrochne Krug is about nothing if not this absence and this break, an absence that can never be subsumed to the mode of presence, a break that can never be made whole again, such that the play produces an image of the law that registers and repeats both figures, figures of which Adam is the incarnation. The wounds on Adam’s face and the traces of his clubfoot lead clearly to him as the breaker of the pitcher; they trace the breaking of the law back to the site of the law itself and in doing so figure the law once again as the necessarily reflexive act of self-judgement. Adam, we know, is chased from Eve’s room by Ruprecht and is literally left hanging outside her window. Whether or not his clubfoot, literally his horsefoot (Pferdefuß ), indicates that he is equally hung like a horse, as the saying goes, is perhaps beside the point, for like that other swellfoot, Oedipus, he is clearly a figure for the misplaced desire that makes this comedy a literal Lustspiel, a play on and about desire, even lust. Adam, the representative of the law, therefore also represents the “powerful but empty phallus,”27 the phallus that is necessarily emptied of its seminal power, symbolically castrated, in the comic mode as he is thrown from Eve’s bedroom, the site of his attempted seduction, by the younger, more virile Ruprecht. The signs leading toward Adam thus point to a symbolic, in fact, to the symbolic itself, to the phallus as the symbol of the symbol, symbolic potency, and the potency of the symbol. The law is traced back to this figure of phallic (im)potency, which has everything to do with this trial being, first and last, a case concerning the perversions of power regarding gender relations and sexual difference. At the same time, the law is traced back to its own absent center: Adam, the presiding authority in the court of law and the name that Eve can never pronounce during the trial, that can never be pronounced if he is to continue to preside over the law. Adam is at once present in the court as judge and absent from all testimony about the pitcher he broke. He is the absent presence around which the law organizes itself, the phallic eminence that, like his clubfoot, can never rise up from under the desk, that can never expose itself as such, for to do so would be to expose precisely the absence presiding over the law.


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Throughout the play, the court of law has turned around the conventional terms of language and representation, witnessing and testimony, economics, exchange, and history. But the break that opens the case has already inverted all of these and opened the crack of sexual difference that in fact rules over the law and that by definition could never appear as such, but which rather testifies only through such a fissure. For the breaking of the pitcher is also always on the verge of calling that pitcher something quite different, the broken (geschieden) pitcher that cannot be unbroken (entschieden) always on the verge of naming itself Scheide, vagina.28 A kind of verbal foreplay, the breaking of the pitcher comes one inversion, one involution, the addition of a suffix and the difference between an -ei and an -ie (and sometimes not even that), from articulating the invagination of the pitcher, even the pitcher as invagination. The breaking of the pitcher registers the thematics of gender, in the first place, inasmuch as it functions as a symbol for Eve’s lost virginity—which has not been lost, at least not to Adam and not the evening of the breaking of the pitcher. What I have described as the break between the order of signification (what the breaking of the pitcher apparently stands for) and history (what happened in the breaking of the pitcher) is now what the breaking of the pitcher registers and what might be called invagination. But while the play puts on trial a certain history of gender relations by bringing them before the law, the very arbiter of the social, at the same time it presents the opening of sexual difference as such, which no court could ever pretend to preside over, not least because it functions as the circumscription of the jurisdiction of the law. Since the breaking of the pitcher that describes the invagination of the law marks the entrance into history as well as the breaking of the image of history, this is also the invagination of history, invagination as the very entrance into history. Accordingly, the history of the pitcher, both the history represented on it and its own history, might now be read not only as one of progression but also repetition, and as the interruption of both. If the image on the pitcher represents the patriarchal transmission of political power from father to son, and if the pitcher is used to celebrate male potency (that of Fürchtegott), then the breaking of the pitcher interrupts this history and traces, now, a genealogy in which the phallic pretenses of a male history are interrupted and invaginated. While Adam, like Walter, continually tries to fill the law up, to make it solid, to give it the ontological stability of the material by insisting upon what belongs to the matter of the law, matter is also the figure for the ineffable itself, essence. The attempt to determine the borders of the law in terms of materiality turns that materiality upon itself, involutes it, hollows it out into an essence and essentiality that can never be grasped. Not only are the borders of the law


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broken in the attempt to localize the matter of the pitcher and of the law itself, but even more, the matter of the law is folded upon itself simultaneously to describe its essence. In its very breaking, the borders of the law (that which circumscribes the matter of the law) are folded inside themselves to create a pocket that exceeds these borders, and here that pocket is essence. The delimitation of the matter of the law thus expresses at the same time an essence that, far from giving the law an ontological stability that would form the grounds for judgement (Urteil) and decision (Entscheidung), invaginates the matter of the law into a Scheide that describes the very structuring, or perhaps better the destructuring, of the law and that forces us to locate the law elsewhere than on such grounds. It is not that the concepts of truth and justice, in the name of which language and history are invoked, are denied. Rather, their very possibility depends upon a thinking of the law that would expose its attempt to ground itself in the solidity of matter and presence. Displacing both into a fold, this, in the end, is the thinking that the broken pitcher and Der zerbrochne Krug make possible.

Borders of a Lip Chap. 4

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CHAPTER FOUR

鵽鵾

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Every nation wants to see represented on stage only its own average and superficial aspects; unless you provide it with heroes, music, or fools. —Friedrich Schlegel, Critical Fragment 2

s removed as Der zerbrochne Krug might at first seem from questions of nationalism, the crucial, if understated, role of the Dutch movement toward independence from Spanish rule articulates the aesthetic concerns of the play with the possibility of national integrity. To be or become a nation implies a certain fragmentation, one that is enacted not only politically but upon aesthetics and the matter of representation. Yet even more than Der zerbrochne Krug, Kleist’s most notoriously nationalistic work, Die Hermannsschlacht, written in 1808 in the midst of growing resistance to the French occupation of Prussia, would seem bound to the historical and political conditions of its production. Throughout his attempts to see the play to the stage, Kleist himself understood nothing if not this. For this play, he writes, is “mehr, als irgendein

A

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anderes, für den Augenblick berechnet” [more than any other, calculated for the moment];1 or even more forcefully, it is “einzig und allein auf diesen Augenblick berechnet” [singly and alone calculated at this moment] (2.824). Die Hermannsschlacht is a text clearly determined for and by a specific moment, a moment whose articulation by the German Augenblick—the glance of an eye— makes it all the more appropriate for the urgency of theatrical production these letters intimate. Kleist determines the moment of his writing and a determinate set of historical and political conditions for which the play is calculated, yet the very determining factor—diesen—guarantees these conditions only partially (which conditions?), and even then only because of its location in a letter with date and signature. The very articulation of historical conditions as determinate both negates and preserves them (negates by preserving, preserves by negating) in all their historical specificity at the same time—diesen Augenblick. The negation and preservation unfolded here thus forms a dialectical movement in which this moment not only refers to a (never completely determinable) set of conditions of the conception and writing of the play, but refuses to stand still as a single definable moment, sliding to refer to this moment as well, a changing set of conditions of its reading or viewing. The movement thus corresponds to the dialectical history formed by the production of the work and its critical reception. Accordingly, the task of criticism would seem to be to delineate the dialectical relation of these moments as its own and literature’s history. As willfully aberrant as such a reading of the simple pronoun diesen may be, it does have a certain historical legitimacy in the most common sense of being verifiable by a series of past events. For it is precisely the embeddedness of Kleist’s drama in a determinate historical situation that has accounted for its (very occasional and short-lived) periods of popularity2 and that has engendered a history of criticism that has been inclined to read the play as much in terms of criticism’s historical and ideological preoccupations as of those apparently represented in the play itself. Thus, what is often expressed as the nationalism of Kleist’s late drama has been taken, whether implicitly or explicitly, as an occasion to damn the play for its absorption in a nationalist ideology3 or to find that ideology of secondary and momentary importance,4 to write the play off as merely occasional and thus of limited meaning and importance5 or to discern in it the very necessity of historical reconstruction for the recuperation of meaning.6 Even those wishing to distance themselves from the play’s passions or ideology have at times been tempted to a more or less impassioned response to that ideology, especially at those points where passion—hate, revenge—is most at stake. The effect is to recuperate and reappropriate any historical or ideological mediation by means of an emotional immediacy that


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recapitulates, however negatively, the ideological assumptions of the passions of the text and its characters.7 Thus, even a reading that seeks to distance itself from the Die Hermannsschlacht does not guarantee freedom from a certain contamination by the play’s own ideological claims. To follow the dialectical movement of diesen Augenblick rigorously, the possibility of such contamination must itself be reflected upon. The task of historical criticism would then be understood as the demarcation of its own historical position from that of its (literary-historical) object, this demarcation itself enabling the demystification of the work’s historical immersion, its ideology. By the same token, the historically distinct object, precisely because its historical specificity frees it of the ideology of its criticism, can demystify the ideological presumptions of its criticism. According to such a conception of the historical object, the past by virtue of its pastness may be capable of demystifying the ideological presumptions of criticism, but this demystification (and thus criticism’s ideological contamination) is itself reappropriated by criticism as a heightened self-consciousness. Despite all the appearances of an exchange of critical knowledge between past and present, then, the movement is decidedly sequential and linear, as criticism recuperates its own ideological contamination in the form of a movement toward the limit of total self-consciousness, whether or not such a totalizing knowledge is conceived of as a real possibility.8 Die Hermannsschlacht may throw something of a curve at such a practice of historical criticism, despite, or perhaps even because of, its immersion in a historical situation and the apparent call for dialectical differentiation in diesen Augenblick. The nature of its immersion in the historical is, at the very least, rather more complicated than the relation of drama to a historical and political context, more problematic than a simple model of representation in which literature puts on stage only a more or less refigured version of the historical. For Die Hermannsschlacht depends upon a set of substitutions in which the French invasion of Prussia is likened to the Roman invasion of ancient Germany, an invasion thwarted by the German hero Hermann. These are the substitutions that determine any consideration of the play as historical drama and without which its interventionist aspirations, not to mention its intelligibility, would remain indefinitely in question: “The Romans stand for the French, the Cheruskans for the Prussians, the Suebens for the Austrians, and the allies of Varus for the united Rhein princes.”9 Die Hermannsschlacht achieves intervention in a historical present, then, only through the intervention or mediation of a historically distinct and distant standpoint, the resemblance of the battle at Teutoburg to the French occupation of Prussia.10 This gesture cannot be written off as the dressing up of a


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wolfish attempt at political intervention through the representation of contemporary events in the sheep’s clothing of a distant past, since it is precisely the wolfishness of these substitutions, their transparency, that guarantees their effectiveness and that would seem to have kept the play from making it to the stage in Kleist’s lifetime.11 Kleist himself writes of the potential of his theatre as performance to have performative effects in the sphere of the political in terms of temporality and a certain falling: Schon aus dem Titel sehen Sie, daß dies Drama auf keinem so entfernten Standpunkt gedichtet ist, als ein früheres, das jetzt daselbst auf die Bühne kommt. Und wenn der Tag uns nur völlig erscheint, von welchem Sie uns die Morgenröte heraufführen, so will ich lauter Werke schreiben, die in die Mitte der Zeit hineinfallen. [Already from the title you see that this drama is not written from such a distant standpoint as an earlier one that now itself is coming upon the stage. And when the day, the dawn of which you are leading us up to, fully appears, I will write nothing but works that fall into the middle of time.] (2.820)

If Kleist here collapses what is in fact a temporal and historical differentiation of some magnitude and thus opens the way for his critics to repeat the gesture, it is in the name of an immediacy traversing that gap and understood as the relation of two stages. The immediacy of Die Hermannsschlacht and the urgency of its staging is determined less by its relation to its historical source in an ancient battle than it is by the repetition of those circumstances in a much more immediate present (a present that achieves its temporal quality through a metaphor of spatial proximity [Standpunkt]), by their coming to the stage once again. Kleist’s figure of the political stage articulates this repetition as a radical alteration of temporal relations, the movement of an ancient battle to a standpoint not so distant after all. Staging, as a certain historical repetition, collapses historical relations, so that another staging—that of Die Hermannsschlacht—becomes necessary to set them right again, to reassert the ultimate anteriority of the past and interrupt history’s repetition compulsion through the assertion of the past’s imminence. If political theatre, and not least Die Hermannsschlacht, is to usher in a new temporal relation, the dawning of a new day whose incompletion makes the history of political theatre a matter of an as yet unrealized future, it must do so through the interruption of a repetition signified by a coming to the stage, again. The figure of a political stage in Kleist’s letter is not merely ornamental, then, nor does it assert a simple continuity between the political, historical stage


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and the stage of literature. For Kleist’s stage, the staging of Die Hermannsschlacht, is intended toward the disruption of what is about to take place on that other stage, the political stage. Staging is to take place as the radical disruption and interruption of any possible continuity between past and present, as what is said to be coming to the stage again would be banished from it (through the intervention of another stage) to reassume its proper place in an ultimate, because irrecuperable, anteriority—in history. Political theatre, that is, would not simply achieve its goal of intervention in history by putting the distinction between the political and historical, on one hand, and literature and language, on the other, into question—as the figure of the political stage has already done. Rather, it would activate the disruption of any clear distinction between the political and the literary in order to remove a certain set of political, historical circumstances from the stage and reassign them their place in history. Kleist’s theatre would activate the disruption of a demarcation of history from literature with the decidedly political intention of reinstating that demarcation, once and for all. This represents a rather different historicization of literature from that afforded by contextualization or the dialectical movement of diesen Augenblick between the time of literary production and its reception. To follow this historicization, criticism’s and literature’s history would no longer be defined as the relation of moments in a dialectic that could be appropriated for critical consciousness, but rather as the disruption of such a genetic conception of history. Literature mobilizes the indetermination of any demarcation of an opposition between literature and history as the necessary condition of its own assumption of a place in history. The specific and momentary nature of the interventionist aspirations of Kleist’s drama thus functions as a disruption and interruption which would no longer permit an undisturbed movement between past, present, and future, whether the movement be distinctly historical, such as the repetition of historical events signified by the figure of the political stage, or the movement of knowledge and self-consciousness.12 This theatre marks, that is, the disruption of the dialectical history of production and reception, the disruption, not least, of criticism’s claims to demystification and its ability to appropriate a knowledge from theatre. The effect of this interruption would be, on the most clearly historical level, the banishing of the French or Romans from Germany; it assumes the figural weight of a banishing of the foreign, and not least, since this expulsion is articulated in terms of the political stage, of banishing what is foreign to the stage itself. The return to the historical past of what appears on the political stage, a stage that now must be seen as both Kleist’s theatre and its contemporary political circumstances, thus can be read as figural for a banishing of the


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political from the stage.13 In this case, a successful defense against the French, like the Romans, would leave the stage free of any intrusion by the foreign, would make it a stage freed of the political. Such a banishment of the foreign is the mark of a historical event because German national integrity (fragmented though it be) is maintained, to be sure, but also because it makes possible the production of works of literature that are said to be falling: “And when the day, the dawn of which you are leading us up to, fully appears, I will write nothing but works that fall into the middle of time.” Kleist understands his own theatre, and especially Die Hermannsschlacht, as the point of inception of a new literary history as much as of a new historical era. What remains uncertain in this literary history, however, is the role of literary works that fall into the middle of time: for according to a reading that would understand time as a figure for history, these works would appear to be engaged in history and the political as a series of discrete and discontinuous moments, each putting history in its place—in history. And yet the very effects Die Hermannsschlacht should have, introducing a new day, might suggest that such an intervention is neither possible nor necessary after that play, that falling into the middle of time is rather a detachment from the political and historical, a free fall, and that these works are nothing but literature. The dawning of this new history with all its connotations of literary-historical renewal would seem incommensurate with a fall and all the traditional implications of decline it carries, especially as articulated by the Sündenfall. Rather than marking the fall from a paradisal timelessness that describes the inauguration of history, then, Die Hermannsschlacht marks the possibility of a fall in which a transfiguration and transvaluation of literature, of time and history, and of the fall itself could take place. Depending on the reading of the fall into the middle of time, literature can be read as falling into history or falling from it to reinscribe a certain border between literature and history. In either case (and precisely because of the mutual interference of the two possible readings), this falling into the middle of time takes place in a newly restored literaryhistorical epoch which would lend it the value of a traditional ascent, were it not for the fact that its very articulation as fall makes it impossible to determine which way is up, or perhaps better, because it puts into question how the figure of a spatial movement of falling or rising acquires ethical, metaphysical, theological, and literary values. The movement, now, is as much a fall from history as into it, as much a fall into a renewed history as from it.14 As a result, the time that had appeared as a figure for history, so that falling into the middle of time could be figural for political intervention, can no longer


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be substituted for history without a remainder. What is left over in the figural substitution of time for history when the fall has been thus transfigured is beginning and end. For Die Hermannsschlacht ushers in a new history and a new conception of history radically severed from its origin—in Die Hermannsschlacht. History is now capable of overcoming its boundedness by and to a temporal development from its own point of inception (in theatre and its relation to the political). Literature cannot but fall into the middle of time, the high noon of the day it has itself inaugurated, since there is no longer a beginning, no dawn, to which this time could be linked, nor is there any conceivable end or dusk to it. The play poses the question of how it might perform rather than merely represent the interruption of historical repetition, in the first place, through the deployment of those substitutions we have already seen at work. The claims of such relations or bonds are by no means extrinsic to Die Hermannsschlacht, either between the play and its own literary and historical past or between it and its criticism. The most casual look at the play’s list of characters confronts the reader with those who are bound to or in alliance with Hermann (Marbod) and those in alliance with Varus (Fust, Gueltar, Aristan). And as the first act opens, these are the bonds that are in question. Thuiskomar has agreed not to join the side of the Friesians against the Romans and in return the Romans have promised not to disturb his land. He opens the scene, however, with the imperative that Hermann read a letter disclosing the deceit of the Romans, who now occupy his land, in the hope that this disclosure will produce a renewed alliance to fight the Romans (21–39). The possibility of forming such an alliance, however, is by no means certain; its realization hinges upon an agreement concerning that which lies along a certain border. DAGOBERT. Freund Thuiskomar! Ob ich dem Bündnis mich, Das diese Fremdlinge aus Deutschland soll verjagen, Anschließen werd, ob nicht: darüber, weißt du, Entscheidet hier ein Wort aus Selgars Munde! ................................... Doch der hier, Selgar, soll, der Fürst der Brukterer, Den Strich mir, der mein Eigentum, An dem Gestad der Lippe überlassen; Wir lagen längst im Streit darum. Und wenn er mir Gerechtigkeit verweigert, Selbst jetzt noch, da er meiner Großmut braucht, So werd ich mich in euren Krieg nicht mischen.


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Borders of a Lip [DAGOBERT. Friend Thuiskomar! Whether or not I join the alliance That should chase these foreigners out of Germany, A word from Selgar’s mouth, you know, will decide here. ........................................... Yet he, Selgar, prince of the Brukters, Should leave me the strip of land On the strand of the Lippe that is my property. We have long fought over it, And if he refuses me justice, Even now, when he needs my generosity, I will not mix in your war.] (40–57)

Dagobert’s participation in a war against the Romans, even the possibility of his going over to their side, depends upon what he hears from Selgar’s mouth concerning the strip of land that lies along he borders of the river Lippe. Selgar, however, doubts not only the accuracy of Dagobert’s claim, but the timeliness of its utterance. Ist jetzt der würdge Augenblick, Zur Sprache solche Zwistigkeit zu bringen? Eh ich, Unedelmütgem, dir Den Strich am Lippgestade überlasse, Eh will an Augusts Heere ich Mein ganzes Reich, mit Haus und Hof verlieren! [Is now the right moment To discuss such a dispute? I would sooner lose my entire empire, House and home, to Augustus’s army Than leave the stretch of land on the strand of the Lippe To you, ignoble wretch!] (62–7) If the German princes are to bond together to form a troop that would reestablish the integrity of German borders by expelling the Romans from them, they must, in the words of Thuiskomar, “Laßt den Strich, . . . / Ruhn, an der Lippe” [let the strip along the Lippe rest] (69–70), must leave this particular strife unarticulated, for the moment at any rate. This is not so much, as Thuiskomar continues to say, because it must first be decided to whom all of


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Germany belongs before it can be repartitioned, as it is because to consider the Lippe part of Germany, to speak of the entire German realm (“das gesamte Reich Germaniens” [71]) in the first place, is already to have articulated the integrity of those borders, to have expelled, if only linguistically, the Romans from the borders of the Lippe. In fact, it is only such a gesture, only the practiced turns of political phrase, that have held the Romans at a distance to this point. The boundaries of this language, however, would seem to have been reached, for the Romans are pressing upon that other boundary. Nur allzuklar ließ er die Absicht sehn, Den Adler auch im Land Cheruskas aufzupflanzen; Den schlausten Wendungen der Staatskunst nur Gelang es, bis auf diesen Tag, Dir den bösartgen Gast entfernt zu halten. Nun ist er bis zur Lippe vorgerückt. [Only all too clearly does he let his intention To plant the eagle in Cheruskan land as well be seen. Only the most clever turns of statecraft Have succeeded up to this day In holding the malicious guest at a distance from you. Now he has advanced to the Lippe.] (183–88) Hermann’s position is precarious: as Varus moves forward to the Lippe, which marks a certain border in German territory,15 and as he is no longer to be kept at a distance with the rhetorical arts of the statesman, Marbod, the prince of Suevens and only alternative ally capable of fending off the Romans, has made clear his intention to conquer all of Germany. As Ventidius, Varus’s spokesman, is later to tell Hermann, he no longer has the option of remaining independent; his position is reduced to one of choosing with whom he will enter into an alliance. That he chooses to take Varus into his borders (“Und wenn er noch darauf besteht, / So nehm ich ihn in meinen Grenzen auf ” [And if he still insists upon it, / I will take him up into my borders], 211–12) denies any possibility that he and the other German Fürsten might reestablish German boundaries: HERMANN. Ihr Freund’, ich bitt euch, kümmert euch Um meine Wohlfahrt nicht! Bei Wodan, meinem hohen Herrn! .............................


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Borders of a Lip Erstreb ich und bezweck ich nichts, Als jenem Römerkaiser zu erliegen. Das aber möcht ich gern mit Ruhm, ihr Brüder, Wies einem deutschen Fürsten ziemt: Und daß ich das vermög, im ganzen vollen Maße, Wie sichs die freie Seele glorreich denkt— Will ich allein stehn, und mit euch mich— ................................... In dieser wichtgen Sache nicht verbinden. [HERMANN. You, friends, I bid you, do not worry yourselves About my welfare! By Wodan, my distinguished sirs! ................................... I strive and aim for nothing But to succumb to that Roman emperor. But I would like to do it with glory, brothers, As befits a German prince: That I might be capable of that, in its full, entire measure, As the free soul gloriously imagines it– I wish to stand alone, and do not wish ................................... To unite with you in this important matter.] (226–238)

If it was turns of phrase (“Wendungen der Staatskunst”) that had kept Varus at the edge of the Lippe, no less does taking him into Cheruskan borders involve a certain turn. Hermann, if we are to take him at his word, and nothing to this point has indicated that we should do otherwise,16 accepts Varus into his borders not to enter into a pact with him that might save the prince of Cheruska something of his kingdom. This is no pact that will unify its members, but rather one in which everything is to be forfeited, though in the manner proper to a German prince; this is a bond, that is, that disavows, cuts, other bonds and permits Hermann to stand alone. It is not, therefore, as Wolf suspects, that Hermann is displeased with his German cohorts themselves more than with the idea of entering into an agreement with them (255–7), so much as it is a specific kind of relation that he seeks, one whose apparently paradoxical nature defines Hermann’s relation to his nation, his God, and his own language:


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Wollt ich auf Erden irgendwas erringen, Ich würde glücklich sein, könnt ich mit Männern mich, Wie hier um mich versammelt sind, verbinden; Jedoch, weil alles zu verlieren bloß Die Absicht ist—so läßt, begreift ihr, Solch ein Entschluß nicht wohl ein Bündnis zu: Allein muß ich, in solchem Kriege, stehn, Verknüpft mit niemand, als nur meinem Gott. [If I wanted to achieve something on earth, I would be happy were I able to join forces With men such as those gathered around me here. Yet, because the intention is merely to lose everything, Such a decision, you understand, does not admit an alliance: I must stand alone in such a war, Bound to no one, but only to my God.] (264–71) In a sense the movement of the entire play hinges upon these words. Like Michael Kohlhaas,17 Hermann seeks a relation to transcendence, a bond with his God that severs all other relations. His nationalism claims a relation of immediacy, not for the nation or a Volk, but for himself alone, and thus remains a nationalism only through a logic and rhetoric of representation in which his immediate relation to transcendence can be substituted for that of his nation.18 Perhaps this begins to explain Hermann’s language, a language based upon a sense of inversion, of paradox, and upon the thwarting of expectation. For Hermann wishes to admit the enemy not to conquer him, but rather to lose to him; his goal is no goal in any conventional sense, no goal of triumph or victory (erringen), but rather the goal of defeat and loss (verlieren). Why the insistence upon the necessity of defeat? Why, in the words of Dagobert, does Hermann rise up like an enraged lion only to crawl backwards like a crab (“Gleich einem Löwen grimmig steht er auf, / Warum? Um, wie ein Krebs, zurückzugehn” [363–4])? We might better locate the logic of Hermann’s thought and of his language in his own related figure of the lion, and say that he is like that bear that must surely be defeated by the slender lion—if, that is, the battle takes place in the field: . . . so gewiß der Bär dem schlanken Löwen Im Kampf erliegt, so sicherlich Erliegt ihr, in der Feldschlacht, diesen Römern. [. . . as surely as the bear surrenders to the slender lion


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Borders of a Lip In battle, so certainly Will you surrender to these Romans in the battle field.] (297–9)

But very little of Kleist’s play takes place on the battlefield. And Hermann’s Schlacht is less the attack upon the Romans in Teutoburg than it is that which clears the ground for that attack—his own language. To be sure, throughout this first scene the language Hermann directs toward his fellow Fürsten has the appearance of the same practiced rhetoric that keeps Varus at bay. It is a language that continually states its utterer’s intent by stating its opposite, a language that rises up like a lion in offering the possibility of a winnable war, only to retreat from that possibility. And it is also language clearly rhetorical in the sense of being used to persuade, using its apparently paradoxical and even contradictory figures in order to convince the German Fürsten (who hardly need convincing to form an alliance or to go to war) of the logic of those figures and the relation to transcendence they secure. Only when Hermann’s language is understood as persuasion, it would seem, does the long final scene of the opening act make sense. What takes place there is, after all, not the convincing of Hermann by the other Fürsten to gird up his loins, as the biblical metaphor has it, and join them in going to war. For Hermann’s intention throughout the scene has been less to lose or surrender to the Romans, less to retreat, than to advance to Rome, if only mediately in the form of his progeny: SELGAR. Das gestehst du, Vetter, Auf diesem Weg nicht kömmst du eben weit. ..................................... HERMANN. Nicht weit? Hm!—Seht, das möcht ich just nicht sagen. Nach Rom—ihr Herren, Dagobert und Selgar! Wenn mir das Glück ein wenig günstig ist. Und wenn nicht ich, wie ich fast zweifeln muß, Der Enkel einer doch, wag ich zu hoffen, Die hier in diesem Paar der Lenden ruhn! [SELGAR. This you will admit, cousin: You would not get far on this path. ..................................... HERMANN. Not far? Hm!—See here, I wouldn’t say exactly that.


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To Rome, sirs Dagobert and Selgar!, If luck favors me somewhat. And if not me, as I must almost doubt, Then, I dare to hope, the descendent of one, Who lies here in this pair of loins!] (361–70) If Hermann had up to this point spoken a language that was incomprehensible (“unbegreiflich bist du, Vetter” [you are incomprehensible, cousin], 336), if affective, because rhetorical, now it would seem to be quite otherwise. The first act progresses toward a point at which Hermann’s true intentions are disclosed in a language not of the practiced turns of phrase of the statesman, but a language, we might say, of the loins—of his own progeny, and of a Volk restored to its proper place. While speaking of a present that is no less doubtful than that of which he has spoken throughout the scene, Hermann is now understandable to his compatriots because he projects a future which would overcome the present, because his previous language of paradox is now given a meaning that grounds that language as rhetoric, as mere persuasion and the turning from a literal meaning—the real possibility of a German victory–rather than as paradox or utter nonsense that indefinitely disrupts the promise of intelligibility. This is the first blow, and a blow that does indeed clear the ground for those that follow. Now convinced of Hermann’s renunciation of his previous refusal to enter into a pact with them—Wolf, as the stage direction suggestively says, “umarmt” (embraces) Hermann (546)—and of his identity as he who will free Germany, the other princes are instructed to slaughter their herds, burn their homes, and destroy all their possessions. As the following stage direction makes clear—“sich losmachend” (freeing himself, 546)—Hermann has bound himself to the other German Fürsten and revealed his language as a transcendence through negation of a previous language that declares its intent through its opposite less than he has disclosed his language as the realization of that rhetoric. For the Germans do indeed lose everything, and it is this loss and the hatred it arouses in those within the borders of their land that allows them to defeat the Romans. The cancellation and transcendence of a previous language of paradox and nonintelligibility is here achieved in a rhetoric whose persuasive effects are the realization or literalization of those paradoxical figures. Thus, Hermann’s own rhetoric in these lines, even as it projects a future that makes him finally understandable, shows that it can guarantee a ground of meaning only through the intervention of another figure. Looking ahead in the play, one is confronted with a scene that might have given the other princes


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pause, had they any means of foreseeing it. Hermann, who apparently understands his own language well enough to know that others cannot understand it, or at least that they cannot know what it intends, sends a written declaration of his intent to betray Varus to Marbod, and with it, if not the “Enkel einer . . . / Die hier in diesem Paar der Lenden ruhn!” (369–70), then his own sons and the dagger that is to be used to kill them should anything false be found in his letter. The figures (of descendants) that earlier, by asserting a relation to the future (the German invasion of Rome), finally made Hermann comprehensible and secured a ground of literal meaning for his rhetoric here function quite otherwise. Perhaps the nature of that temporal shift, the securing of a present meaning and comprehensibility by a future that cannot be known and that as such is radically at odds with that comprehensibility, already hints at as much. In that earlier scene, the Fürsten understand Hermann’s language as truly nationalistic for the first time because they now understand the reference to his descendants to mean that everything he had previously said (that the war was unwinnable; that his only desire was to lose, in the manner proper to him) he had not meant, and that what he now says (that he does in fact wish to win) is what he means, literally. This understanding of Hermann’s language produces a conception of the nation and of nationalism as bound up with a theory of language that may partake of paradox or even slip into the meaningless, but that is always guaranteed by a (transcendent) meaning that ultimately recuperates paradox and meaninglessness. Such a theory of language and the nation is essentially dialectical: the paradoxical and nonmeaningful are moments sublated in a movement toward meaning. In Die Hermannsschlacht, it is not only that a transcendent meaning (of something like freedom, for example) guarantees the ultimate priority and meaningfulness of the German state, not to mention Hermann’s language, but that the nation is identified as that meaning. The nation is articulated as a meaning that could free itself from the operations of language and that as such is not contaminated by figure, syntax, grammar, and so forth.19 Hermann’s figures for his commitment to this conception of the nation, however, themselves mark the possibility of the disruption of such a conception. For the gesture of sending the literalized embodiments of those figures to Marbod may mean not only that Hermann literally says what he means but also that he can never say what he means without literalizing that meaning, here in the figures of his sons and the dagger. In both scenes, these are the figures of a nationalist discourse, the figures that bind Hermann to his fellow princes and to a common future more than they do to his God. The ostensible security lent the linguistic (Hermann’s language) and its meaning through the intervention of


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the nonlinguistic, the apparently purely historical and material (Hermann’s sons and the dagger), becomes somewhat more questionable when one remembers that the letter for whose veracity these figures are to vouch must itself clarify the meaning of children and dagger. The result is a language that cannot guarantee its own meaning yet must guarantee the meaning of historical and material signs that are in turn to guarantee its meaning. The difficulty of this double bind was already present in the fact that these material signs were always understood as just that—signs whose historical and material existence may disguise but can never overcome their essentially linguistic mode. In fact, the signs guarantee, if anything, precisely that the historical and material will remain indistinguishable from the linguistic throughout the play. And what is more, they are also, should they be misunderstood (and their very necessity, it should now be clear, makes this a real possibility),20 should the dagger be thrust, the figures of the death of a discourse of nationalism and the literal meaning toward which it continually gestures. But the dagger is not thrust. Rather, it is broken and thus rendered harmless, at least as a dagger, by Marbod just as the accompanying letter is torn and rendered unreadable as a paradoxical sign of his understanding of and trust in Hermann’s words. Varus and the Romans, then, would seem to have nothing to fear from such a weapon: VARUS zu Ventidius. Was also, sag mir an, was hab ich Von jenem Hermann dort mir zu versehn? VENTIDIUS. Quintilius! Das faß ich in zwei Worten! Er ist ein Deutscher. In einem Hämmling ist, der an der Tiber graset, Mehr Lug und Trug, muß ich dir sagen, Als in dem ganzen Volk, dem er gehört.— VARUS. So kann ich, meinst du, dreist der Sueven Fürsten Entgegenrücken? Habe nichts von diesem, Bleibt er in meinem Rücken, zu befürchten? VENTIDIUS. So wenig, wiederhol ich dir, Als hier von diesem Dolch in meinem Gurt. [VARUS to Ventidius. What then, tell me, What do I have to expect from that Hermann?21 VENTIDIUS . Quintilius! I will summarize it for you in two words. He is a German. There are more lies and betrayal, I tell you, In a sheep grazing along the Tiber,


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Borders of a Lip Than in the entire people to which he belongs. VARUS. So, you think I can boldly advance Toward the Sueven prince? I have nothing to fear from him If he remains at my back? VENTIDIUS . As little, I repeat, As from this dagger here in my belt.] (1247–58)

Varus has nothing to fear from the dagger in his spokesman’s belt, just as he has nothing to fear from the weapons Hermann might deploy from behind his back as the Cheruskans move toward Sueven territory. For the weapon that poses a threat to the Romans has already been thrust by Hermann and Marbod—it is the broken dagger that can no longer kill in any literal sense, but that by apparently guaranteeing a literal sense to Hermann’s language functions as the weapon that will ultimately destroy Varus. Hermann says something rather different, something, we must believe, he does not mean, to the Romans. For just previous to sending this message to Marbod, he has declared, now with his own mouth, his desire to be nothing more than the ruler of Germany (460–7), and his willingness to admit the Romans into Cheruska to achieve this: HERMANN vom Thron herabsteigend. Nun denn, Legat der römischen Cäsaren, So werf ich, was auch säum ich länger, Mit Thron und Reich, in deine Arme mich! Cheruskas ganze Macht leg ich, Als ein Vasall, zu Augusts Füßen nieder. Laß Varus kommen, mit den Legionen; Ich will fortan, auf Schutz und Trutz Mich wider König Marbod ihm verbinden! VENTIDIUS. Nun, bei den Uraniden! Dieser Tag, Er ist der schönste meines Lebens! Ich eile dem August, o Herr, dein Wort zu melden. ......................... —Wann darf Quintilius jetzt die Lippe überschreiten? HERMANN. Wann es sein Vorteil will. [HERMANN climbing down from his throne. Now then, legate of the Roman Caesars, Why do I tarry any longer; I throw myself


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Into your arms with throne and kingdom. I lay all of Cheruska’s force At Augustus’s feet as his vassal. Let Varus come with his legions, I will henceforth stand together with him, In defense and defiance, against king Marbod. VENTIDIUS. Now, by the Uranidens, This is the most beautiful day of my life! I hurry to Augustus, sir, to deliver your word. ................................. When may Quintilius now cross the Lippe? HERMANN. When it is to his advantage.] (483–98) Earlier, when apparently maintaining the futility of any resistance to the Romans, Hermann had articulated a sense of the dangers of disputing the borders of the Lippe. For Selgar and Dagobert to do so, he said, would be to open themselves, like a couple of spiders, to his attack: “So dürft er dir nur, Dagobert, / Selgar, dein Lippgestad verbindlich schenken: . . . Den Römer laßt ihr beid im Stich, / Und fallt euch, wie zwei Spinnen, selber an” [Dagobert, Selgar, he would only / Give you the stretch along the Lippe . . . The Romans would leave you in the lurch / And come down upon you like a couple of spiders (250–4)]. Hermann’s pact with the Romans is not along the Lippe but across it; the pact permits a crossing of the Lippe, a stepping across (überschreiten) a natural space whose articulation as a political boundary also makes this crossing a transgression (überschreiten). Ventidius’s choice of words here suggests, no doubt against his will, that the understanding of the Lippe in terms of such a border will always mark its crossing as a transgression. This crossing is never only that of a natural or political space, but the transgressive crossing that takes place whenever the articulation of a political space (as in this metaphor itself) in terms of the natural seeks to naturalize what adheres to the realm of the political–social organization according, not least, to language. Can it be a mere accident, then, that with the interruption of only two very brief scenes, Ventidius should bring another lip to the scene as the site of yet another transgression? It is here that he, believing he has saved her from a wild beast, desires to hear from Thusnelda’s lip how she has passed the night: “Von deiner Lippe hört ich gern, / Wie du die Nacht, nach jenem Schreck, der gestern / Dein junges Herz erschütterte, geschlummert” [I would like to hear from your lips / How you slept after that fright / That shook your young heart


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yesterday (533–6)]. Representing the possibility of having his passion for her reciprocated, the lips are also the place to which Ventidius wishes to bring the trophies of his own passion. For he is, as he puts it, blessed to have elicited a feeling from Thusnelda (“Wie selig bin ich, Königin, / Dir ein Gefühl entlockt zu haben” [547–8; emphasis added]) and desires nothing more than a sign (Zeichen [559]) of that feeling, though not just any sign, but “let it be a lock” (“eine Locke laß es sein” [565]). Kleist’s tale of the rape of the lock cuts in many directions. In order for Ventidius to press the lock he has stolen from Thusnelda to his lips, as the stage directions put it (“Er hat, während dessen, unbemerkt eine Locke von Thusneldens Haar geschnitten, wendet sich ab, und drückt sie leidenschaftlich an seine Lippe” [He has, in the meantime, cut a lock of Thesnelda’s hair unnoticed, turns away, and presses it passionately to his lips, 554]), he must transgress Thusnelda’s own words of refusal, uttered by her own lips. And he must perform this transgression also as a linguistic crossing of sorts, a realization of his own rhetoric: since he has not, as he believes, coaxed or elicited (entlockt) any feeling other than pity from Thusnelda, the lock (Locke) is withheld from him, and so must be taken secretly, stolen, literally “delocked” (entlockt). The performance or literalization of what would itself be a literal understanding of the word entlockt moves a “coaxing” or “teasing from” in the direction of a much more violent act of cutting and severance which is also performed on language as the word entlockt is itself cut into its constitutive prefix and stem to give the word a meaning that can only be coaxed from it through its own severance.22 If here and in that earlier scene in which Hermann complies with the entrance of Roman troops onto German territory Ventidius defines the lip and the Lippe in terms of the crossing and transgression of his own words, especially when to cross (überschreiten) is one of them, no less is this the case in Penthesilea. Just as Ventidius’s literalization of his own language here leads ultimately to his own destruction (in a scene which has a clear analogue in Penthesilea), the Amazon queen too realizes a metaphor not so far from the Lippe that destroys both self and other. Like those girls who love so deeply that they could eat their lovers (“sie lieb ihn, o so sehr, / Daß sie vor Liebe gleich ihn essen könnte” [1. 426]), Penthesilea bends over the body of Achilles, the body she has torn to pieces with her own mouth: PENTHESILEA. Küßt ich ihn tot? DIE ERSTE PRIESTERIN. O Himmel! PENTHESILEA. Nicht? Küßt ich nicht? Zerrissen wirklich? Sprecht!


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DIE OBERPRIESTERIN. Weh! Wehe! ruf ich dir. Verberge dich! Laß fürder ewge Mitternacht dich decken! PENTHESILEA. —So war es ein Versehen. Küsse, Bisse, Das reimt sich, und wer recht von Herzen liebt, Kann schon das eine für das andre greifen. ............................... Ich habe mich, bei Diana, bloß versprochen, Weil ich der raschen Lippe Herr nicht bin. [PENTHESILEA. Did I kiss him dead? FIRST PRIESTESS. O Heavens! PENTHESILEA. No? Did I not kiss him? Torn to pieces, really? Speak! HIGH PRIESTESS. Woe! Woe! I call to you. Hide thyself! Let eternal midnight cover thee henceforth! PENTHESILEA. —Then it was an oversight. Kisses, bites, That rhymes/makes sense, and whoever loves directly from the heart Can easily grasp the one for the other. ............................... I simply, by Diana, misspoke myself, Because I am not master of the rash lip.]23 (1.425–6) If Penthesilea is not master of the rash lip, and if this lack of mastery causes her to destroy both Achilles and herself, quite the opposite would seem to be the case for Hermann.24 For Hermann’s very identity as ruler (Herr) of Cheruska and ultimately of all of Germany and its army (Heer) depends upon his ability to control the Lippe, to keep the Romans on the border of that river and also on the borders of German territory, and then to allow them to cross this border, as well as upon his control of the lip, of the turns of phrase that keep the enemy at bay and that control the crossings between figurative and literal meaning.25 This is why, despite the fact that the actual attack takes place on the shores of another river, the Lippe and the lip are the actual site(s) of Hermann’s Schlacht and of Die Hermannsschlacht. It is, after all, Hermann’s and his troops’ skill with, or confusion in, language (it is difficult to distinguish the two) that allows them to mislead Varus. They lead him astray by substituting “Pfiffikon” for “Iphikon,” two names, as one of the Germans puts it, whose meanings are as different as night and day, and yet which are differentiated


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phonetically by a single sound. It is this property of language, the interference of meanings caused by the slightest disturbance of the material, of sound, or even, as in the different significations of the Lippe, the interference of meaning that takes place even when sound is left undisturbed, that makes one believe the attack is taking place someplace where it is not (the Weser rather than the Lippe, or the Lippe rather than the lip), or that one is being led somewhere other than to one’s own slaughter. Kleist seems to have understood something of the military consequences of the mastery of language when in “Über die Allmähliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden” (“On the Gradual Completion of Thought by Speaking”) he writes of the necessity of a swift and easy transfer from thought to expression: Aber der plötzliche Geschäftswechsel, der Übergang ihres Geistes vom Denken zum Ausdrücken, schlug die ganze Erregung desselben, die zur Festhaltung des Gedankens notwendig, wie zum Hervorbringen erforderlich war, wieder nieder. In solchen Fällen ist es um so unerläßlicher, daß uns die Sprache mit Leichtigkeit zur Hand sei, um dasjenige, was wir gleichzeitig gedacht haben, und doch nicht gleichzeitig von uns geben können, wenigstens so schnell, als möglich, auf einander folgen zu lassen. Und überhaupt wird jeder, der, bei gleicher Deutlichkeit, geschwinder als sein Gegner spricht, einen Vorteil über ihn haben, weil er gleichsam mehr Truppen als er ins Feld führt. [But the sudden change of operation, the crossing of their spirit from thought to expression, put down again the entire agitation of the same [that is, spirit] that is necessary to the holding fast of thought as it is desirable to its production/expression. In such cases, it is all the more indispensable for us that speech be lightly at hand in order to let that which we thought and could not simultaneously express at least follow one another as quickly as possible. And on the whole he who, with the same clarity, speaks more quickly than his opponent will have an advantage over him, because he leads more troops to the field.] (2. 323)

Oddly, speech must come lightly to the hand—rather than to the lip—in order to effectuate the movement from thought to language, a movement whose speed, in the case of debate, will ensure victory, because it means having more rhetorical weapons at hand, more troops in the field. Alone, this rhetoric of rhetoric as battle might merely indicate that Hermann, having fewer troops in the field that can be brought to the Lippe, must instead bring more troops to the lip (Lippe). This characterization of Hermann’s attack, however accurate it may be, leads too easily to an understanding of his language as mere deception that is recuperated by the meaningfulness of its performative intentions.26 “Über


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die Allmähliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden” denies any such recuperative possibility by refiguring the intentional movement of language: “Vielleicht, daß es auf diese Art zuletzt das Zucken einer Oberlippe war, oder ein zweideutiges Spiel an der Manschette, was in Frankreich den Umsturz der Ordnung der Dinge bewirkte.” [Perhaps it was, after all, in this way that the quiver of an upper lip or an ambiguous play of the cuff produced the overthrow of the order of things in France] (2. 321).27 If speech is to complete and control thought, then the slightest movement across the upper lip (Oberlippe) could topple the entire order of things—philosophically, theologically, politically, even militarily. This is so, not least, because the order of things depends upon a conception of language as the expression of consciousness. Reversing the intentionality of language, to the extent that the play of a cuff not only acquires meaning but ambiguity (Zweideutigkeit), would result in an understanding of the subject and language in which the trembling of the lip can have unforeseen effects in France, effects that are by no means inconsequential for a reading of Die Hermannsschlacht. For in this essay, Kleist refers to a discourse on the status of the French nation given by Mirabeau on 23 June 1789. Indeed, one can never foresee the outcome of the quivering of a lip, either in political discourse or across the oeuvre of a writer such as Kleist, if the movement of the lip produces rather than expressing thought, or especially if the quivering of the lip is caused by the movement of troops (say, of French troops into Germany), a movement whose meaning can never be a matter of the intentional control of consciousness. As unintentional as the play on and across the Lippe must be, it is in fact its very nonintentional nature that makes it significant for a theory of language, the nation, and nationalist discourse. Hermann, not unlike Kleist, inherits a proper name that is historical in the most common sense and that therefore cannot be subject to the intentional control of consciousness. Kleist, who throughout Die Hermannsschlacht and his other works has his way with historical and literary precedents, and who at least once fabricated a crucial name,28 here has no need of such a gesture. In fact, this is just the point. For what this historical name marks is a point of convergence—of the natural and the political, but also of the natural and the linguistic, of the political and the linguistic, of all of these and more. The river Lippe, a natural phenomenon that only through the imposition of a certain meaning, an imposition, that is, of the linguistic, is articulated as a boundary that renders the natural political. It thereby becomes the site of a certain crossing (überschreiten): the crossing of the Lippe by Roman troops, the crossing from a geographical to a political space, the crossing from a language of passion uttered by the lips to its realization in a kiss at the lips, the crossings between figural and


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literal meanings that define language as metaphorical (metaphora) or between languages (of the Germans and Romans, for example, or of geography and politics) that defines translation (translatio) as a crossing, but also the transgression (überschreiten) of each of these senses by the other.29 The movement of and across the Lippe, then, cannot be reduced to the linguistic, the natural, the political, passion, and so on. It marks the mutual interference and indetermination of each by the other, so that these crossings can never be assimilated to consciousness or knowledge. This is what makes Hermann’s language, everything that crosses his lips, a double-crossing—at least. The Verrat the text insists upon in referring to Varus and Marbod holds for Hermann as well; it is a going back on one’s word, on what has crossed one’s lip(s) (the Romans, the promise to enter into a pact with them, or more generally, saying one will do or not do something—for example, not raise taxes—and then performing the opposite). But even more radically, every crossing of the lip and Lippe in Die Hermannsschlacht is a crossing of its multiple significations and of the very process of signification, the process by which the Lippe, upon the material identity of the word, can never achieve a determinate signification (that could be called historical and that could localize the play historically). Thus, when the geographical space is crossed, so too is a linguistic and political boundary. Or similarly, the crossing of the geographical space becomes metaphorical for going back on one’s word. Die Hermannsschlacht, then, situates itself along the borders of a geographical, political, and linguistic space which produces an imperative that might be stated—read my lip(s) (Lippe[n]).30 A reading of Die Hermannsschlacht or, for example, Prinz Friedrich von Homburg or Michael Kohlhaas, to remain within the realm of Kleist’s most obviously historical work, that would respond to such an imperative could not take for granted a reduction of the work of art to a reproduction of (a historical) reality in the name of certain claims for representation, whether they take the form of a straightforward reproduction of the historical and political or that of an understanding of art as the negation of the historical. For while the utter clarity of just how a crossing from history to language that grounds the conventional claims of representation is to be made is what the imperative “read my lips” apparently asserts, the call to reading there transforms its own assertion and the claims of representation from imperative into interrogative. The very form of such an imperative, which in Die Hermannsschlacht takes the form of the necessity of an understanding of Hermann’s language as secured by a truth and literal meaning uninterrupted by the crossings between history and the linguistic, would then be the indication that what criticism should not do, if the claims of ideology are to remain undisturbed, is actually read the lip, or the Lippe, read


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the crossing in which the interference of history and literature takes place. More often than not, Kleist’s critics have heeded this imperative. One of the effects of the interference of the linguistic and the historical is to produce a passion that would seem wholly incommensurate with apparently linguistic constructs, a passion not only a matter of representation in the works themselves, but reproduced in their criticism. No scene in Die Hermannsschlacht has done more to arouse such passion than Thusnelda’s notorious feeding of the bear. The scene has assumed a position alongside Penthesilea’s devouring of Achilles as evidence of Kleist’s pathological tendency to the grotesque, a tendency here all the more threatening for its embodiment of the threats of nationalist ideology. If I neglected this scene until this point in the discussion of that ideology and the possibility of reading it, it is because, while no doubt partaking of it, it is somewhat more difficult to locate in the economy of the lip. It is not, after all, so much lips that play a determining role in this scene as it is hair and teeth. Learning of Ventidius’s theft of a lock of Thusnelda’s hair, Hermann attempts to convince his wife that the Romans have in fact crossed the Lippe less for the sake of national or territorial conquest than for the hair and teeth of the women of Cheruska: Wenn Marbod erst geschlagen ist, So läuft kein Mond ins Land, beim Himmel! Sie scheren dich so kahl wie eine Ratze. Die schmutzgen Haare schneiden sie sich ab, Und hängen unsre trocknen um die Platte! Die Zähne reißen sie, die schwarzen, aus, Und stecken unsre weißen in die Lücken! [When Marbod is finally struck down, Not a single moon will enter the land, by heavens! They will shave you as bald as a rat.] (998–1000) [They will cut off their dirty hair And hang our dry hair on the bare patch. They will pull out their black teeth And stick our white ones in the holes!] (1049–1552) Rather than a complete overcoming or domination, the Romans, in Hermann’s terms, seek the integration of the German; what is properly German is to


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replace the defective in the Roman, to fill a certain gap that will effectively give the Romans something of a (however stereotypical) German appearance. Hermann’s success in convincing Thusnelda of the veracity of this replacement, however, leads her to refigure herself in terms apparently incompatible with being shaved bald and having her teeth pulled. Ventidius has made her, she says, not into a rat, but rather a “Bärin,” a female bear: “Er hat zur Bärin mich gemacht! / Arminius’ will ich wieder würdig werden!” [He has made me into a she-bear. / I wish to become worthy of Arminius once again] (2321–2). Thusnelda makes herself worthy of her husband once again by exercising his passion, his hatred and revenge, and by doing so in precisely his terms—by producing the literalized embodiment of her own figure of speech in the form of a Bärin, unfed for twelve hours. Penthesilea tears apart her potential lover, Achilles, with her own mouth and in so doing realizes the figure of girls who would consume their lovers out of passion. Thusnelda, on the other hand, realizes her own figure in order to consume her potential lover out of hatred. The fencing that takes place between Thusnelda and Ventidius would seem, then, to displace that most famous of Kleist’s bears. For in “Über das Marionettentheater,” the renowned dancer C. tells of a bear whose mastery of the art of fencing allows him to counter perfectly all the thrusts of his opponent; what is more amazing, the bear never reacts to mere feints; and it itself never attacks, but in its perfect countering nonetheless makes a significant thrust inasmuch as it makes any distinction between self and other imperceptible.31 The Bärin that devours Ventidius, however, does not merely counter the lover’s thrust, unless passion is conceived of as a thrust whose defense can be realized only as the thrust of appetite, hatred, destruction. Unlike Penthesilea, Thusnelda does not destroy herself in destroying her potential lover. Though she falls temporarily powerless (“Sie wirft den Schlüssel weg und fällt in Ohnmacht” [She throws away the key and falls in a swoon, 620]), she is not consumed by the realized figure of her own language (though the presence of the Bärin should prove that she too is capable of such a gesture) as the other heroine forges a dagger of her own words from her own passion to thrust it murderously into her breast. Rather, Thusnelda is reunited with Hermann at the play’s end. Once again worthy of him because she has exercised his revenge, she is recuperated in the name of Hermann and a different dagger, the broken dagger that established him as the embodiment of a discourse of meaning and truth. The reconciliation is effective because it corresponds with Hermann’s assumption of the role of ruler of a united Germany symbolized by a rather different relation to the body. One of the young women of Cheruska, Hally, has been the victim of a rape far more literal than that which is exercised upon


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Thusnelda and subsequently suffers death at the hands of her own father. Her body is divided into fifteen pieces and disseminated among the fifteen branches of Germany, a symbol of the dismembering of the German about to take place at the hands of the Romans.32 HERMANN. Wie stehts, ihr deutschen Herrn! Was bringt ihr mir? WOLF. Uns selbst, mit allem jetzt, was wir besitzen! Hally, die Jungfrau, die geschändete, Die du, des Vaterlandes grauses Sinnbild, Zerstückt in alle Stämme hast geschickt, Hat unsrer Völker Langmut aufgezehrt. In Waffen siehst du ganz Germanien lodern, Den Greul zu strafen. [HERMANN. How goes it you German princes! What do you bring me? WOLF. Ourselves with everything we now possess. Hally, the violated virgin, Who you, as the horrible symbol of the fatherland, Cut into pieces and sent to all branches [of Germany] Exhausted our people’s patience. You see all of Germany flame up in arms To punish the atrocity.] (2546–53) The political and nationalistic passion exercised on the Romans is made possible by the transfiguration of the body into a sign. The meeting of the different German tribes acquires all the force of a re-membering of the integrity of the German body politic, because the body as site of life has been evacuated (Hally’s death assured this) to become the locus of signification which, as such, can be disseminated. And the remembrance and reintegration (a remembrance before that which is remembered and a reintegration before integration itself) correspond to the disintegration of the Roman as Ventidius is dismembered by the Bärin. In both these scenes, as well as in Hermann’s literalization of his own figure of progeny, the literal embodiment of the linguistic or the investment of the body with a linguistic function marks the coincidence of the body with a system of signification in which the linguistic assumes a phenomenal and natural appearance that lends it all the passion of a natural or historical event. In each case, however, the body cannot be appropriated for a system of signification


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without the threat or realization of a certain violence. Its function as sign depends upon the possibility of death and especially dismemberment, the integrity of the body resisting assimilation to a system of signification and, here, especially the political. The disruptive force of the body to such a signifying system thus remains precisely in the bodily remains. Not only does the fragmentation of the body question any attempt (which must remain incomplete) at remembering it as a symbol of national unity, but its very dismemberment remains the force of disruption within the signifying system known as the political. The possibility of overcoming this disruptive force would define not only the control of the body and its assimilation into a signifying system but that system’s ability to stabilize all disruption and secure its own signifying process. In such a scenario, the body as locus of the human and thus the potential for human interaction, the social, would correspond to the political and social signifying system at work in Die Hermannsschlacht. Hermann’s first act as ruler of Germany, however, confirms rather than overcomes the disruptive force of the body. The play closes, to be sure, with his victory over Varus and his assumption of the leadership of Germany. Nonetheless, he is confronted here with an uncanny logic and language that he must cut off at the source. HERMANN zu Aristan.—Du hattest, du Unseliger, vielleicht Den Ruf, den ich den deutschen Völkern, Am Tag der Schlacht erlassen, nicht gelesen? ARISTAN keck. Ich las, mich dünkt, ein Blatt von deiner Hand, Das für Germanien in den Kampf mich rief! Jedoch was galt Germanien mir? Der Fürst bin ich der Ubier, Beherrscher eines freien Staats, In Fug und Recht, mich jedem, wer es sei, Und also auch dem Varus zu verbinden! HERMANN. Ich weiß, Aristan. Diese Denkart kenn ich. Du bist imstand und treibst mich in die Enge, Fragst, wo und wann Germanien gewesen? Ob in dem Mond? Und zu der Riesen Zeiten? Und was der Witz sonst an die Hand dir gibt; Doch jetzo, ich versichre dich, jetzt wirst du Mich schnell begreifen, wie ich es gemeint: Führt ihn hinweg und werft das Haupt ihm nieder! [HERMANN to Aristan.—You, ignoble wretch, had perhaps Not read the call I issued to the German people


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On the day of the attack? ARISTAN bold. I read, it seems to me, a sheet from your hand That called me to battle for Germany. Yet of what matter is Germany to me? I am prince of Ubier, Ruler of a free state, With full right to unite with anyone, whoever it might be, And thus also with Varus! HERMANN. I know, Aristan. I am familiar with this manner of thinking. You are capable and drive me into a corner. Ask where and when Germany existed? Whether on the moon or in the time of giants? And whatever else the joke puts in your hand. Yet now I assure you, Now you will quickly understand how I meant it: Take him away and make his head fall!] (2601–18) When confronted with Cicero’s concept of duty and lawfulness by the captured and defenseless Septimius, Hermann refuses the imperative to read and obey a certain writing, the feeling of righteousness written out in the leaves of the breast (2208–2226). In rejecting this imperative, he makes no gesture toward a reading of those pages in even the most naive sense, but rather demands the death of Septimius, who claims to have been able to read them, not to mention Cicero, and thus to understand law and righteousness, and yet still invaded Germany. Hermann’s more literal writing, though, produces an imperative to read that is more than merely linguistic, since reading there demands the performative stance of going to war. Hermann knows Aristan’s manner of thinking, the logic that finds no basis for a German state in any natural, political, or historical circumstance and that thereby allows him to consider himself and his Fürstentum independent and free to form bonds when and with whom they choose. He knows this manner of thinking all too well, knows it intimately, as his own logic, the same logic that located the German state not in a geographical space or a historical epoch, but in himself as the embodiment of victory and the German nation. Hermann suggests in a rhetorical question that Aristan can say nothing that he does not already know: “Was kann er sagen, das ich nicht schon weiß?” (2624). That same question, however, might just as well mean that Hermann cannot know


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his own knowledge. He orders Aristan’s execution, his beheading, to make him understand (“jetzt wirst du / Mich schnell begreifen”) another logic, the logic that will not dislocate Germany from any natural or historical existence, but rather that dislocates the possibility of that knowledge, cutting it off at the head. Hermann decapitates the form of knowledge that had previously established himself as the German nation and with the same gesture appropriates that knowledge for a nationalism that would locate the German nation geographically and historically. Consequently, this is a nationalism that cannot know its own hero or the knowledge that it appropriates in grounding itself through him. Clearing its ground of all that is foreign to it would entail a self-evacuation, the clearing of itself and its hero from its own ground. This is, not least, why the Germans set out for Rome, in search of new ground and the reappropriation of the knowledge that they have expelled from (grounding) their own ground. And this is the point at which Die Hermannsschlacht continually halts, the point at which its own figures could turn on themselves, the point at which the bear might consume its own figures, making the play something of a bear of a text: it echoes and prefigures the terms and scenes of Kleist’s other works, only somehow to invert them, to counter them with a defense that makes it impossible to determine which is thrust and which mere defense, which the proper meaning of Kleist’s work and which its disruption.33 Hermann is thus the German hero representing the logic that would restore German national integrity, a logic, however, that remains incompatible with that nation. In a text whose echoes of the final scene of Die Hermannsschlacht are unmistakable, the mere existence of a German hero itself implies the restoration of Germany: Frage. . . . Wo find ich es, dies Deutschland, von dem du sprichst, und wo liegt es? Antwort. Hier, mein Vater.—Verwirre mich nicht. Frage. Wo? Antwort. Auf der Karte. Frage. Ja, auf der Karte!—Diese Karte ist vom Jahr 1805.—Weißt du nicht, was geschehn ist, im Jahr 1805, da der Friede von Preßburg abgeschlossen war? Antwort. Napoleon, der korsische Kaiser, hat es, nach dem Frieden, durch eine Gewalttat zertrümmert. Frage. Nun? Und gleichwohl wäre es noch vorhanden? Antwort. Gewiß!—Was fragst du mich doch. Frage. Seit wann?


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Antwort. Seit Franz der Zweite, der alte Kaiser der Deutschen, wieder aufgestanden ist, um es herzustellen, und der tapfre Feldherr, den er bestellte, das Volk aufgerufen hat, sich an die Heere, die er anführt, zur Befreiung des Landes, anzuschließen. [Question: . . . Where do I find it, this Germany of which you speak, and where does it lie? Answer: Here, my father.—Don’t confuse me. Question: Where? Answer: On the map. Question: Yes, on the map!—This map is from 1805.—Don’t you know what happened in 1805, when the peace of Preßburg was concluded? Answer: Napoleon, the Corsican emperor, shattered it, after the peace, with an act of violence. Question: So? And all the same it would still be at hand? Answer: Certainly!—What are you asking me? Question: Since when? Answer: Since Franz the Second, the old kaiser of the Germans, arose once again to restore it, and the valiant field chief he appointed called the people up to join the army he led to the freeing of the land.] (2. 350-1) Here and throughout the “Katechismus der Deutschen,” the text proceeds to an aporia whose logical consequence would be doubt or skepticism, if not in the idea of Germany, which is ultimately the subject of each chapter, then in the reasoning which seeks to establish a ground for that idea. The aporia, however, leads to no self-reflection upon the conditions that produced it, upon the irreconcilable logics of its propositions—here, the demand for an empirically verifiable state and the recognition that the state is not subject to empirical verification. Rather, the text moves toward the recuperation of the aporia in a knowledge that refuses to reflect upon itself and that rather asserts its own selfevidence as a matter of faith. Nothing less would permit an understanding of the theatre as the proper inheritor of the functions of the church: Zu einer Zeit, dünkt uns, da alles wankt, ist is um so nötiger, daß irgend was fest stehe: und wenn es der Kirche . . . bestimmt wäre, im Strom der Zeiten unterzugehen, so wüßten wir nicht, was geschickter wäre, an ihre


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Borders of a Lip Stelle gesetzt zu werden, als ein Nationaltheater, ein Institut, dem das Geschäft der Nationalbildung und Entwickelung und Entfaltung aller ihrer höhern und niedern Anlagen, Eigentümlichkeiten und Tugenden, vorzugsweise vor allen andern Anstalten, übertragen ist. [In a time, it seems to us, when everything is swaying, it is all the more important that something stand fast: and if it were determined that the church . . . should go under in the stream of time, then we do not know what would be more appropriate to be set in its place than a national theatre, an institution to which the business of national education and development and expansion, in all their higher and lower structures, features, and virtues, before all other institutions, is carried over.]34

If the figure of the political stage as Kleist deploys it in his letters implies that the political is already somehow dramatic, literary, it should be no surprise that he also considers theatre the worthy successor of the church he sees being drowned in the stream of time. As in those letters that try to see Die Hermannsschlacht to the stage, theatre’s political intervention will lead ultimately to a new day in which works can fall “into the middle of time,” a time still considered unstable, trembling. Theatre’s interventionist aspirations thus begin with the securing of that time by providing something steadfast, something that stands still (fest stehe). The fluctuations of and in time are to be countered by a theatre whose defining characteristic will be an atemporal and ahistorical standing fast counter to that flux, a stance, what is more, that allows it to intervene in time as an institution that undertakes national education, development, and expansion—all of which are decidedly temporal and historical processes (as their nominalized forms reveal—“Nationalbildung und Entwickelung und Entfaltung”). If in the thematics of this passage theatre seems to be endowed with a paradoxical quality of standing fast (of ahistoricity) which grants it a privileged historical and political role, it nonetheless participates in a certain movement. Theatre assumes its role through the literal carrying across (übertragen) of duties from church to theatre, from religion to literature, a movement that also translates the carrying across of meaning to a figural sense (übertragener Sinn). That the passage should figure the transfer in latently linguistic terms is entirely appropriate, considering all we have seen take place in Die Hermannsschlacht, but even more generally, because the transfer moves toward the essentially linguistic realm of literature. In its search for something that stands fast, then, this passage has not found its candidate in theatre, since theatre too is the site of the movement of duties and of language. But it has disclosed that which has never moved, even in the movement of its own figure, the signified that remains constant even in the conversion between religious and secular languages—the


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nation. The nation is here that which stands fast even as it and its subjects are being formed, even as its functions are being developed, because it is itself always conceived as meaning that can be carried across between political, historical, and literary signifying systems without remainder and without damage to itself or those systems. To watch or read such theatre would mean being subject to a certain type of Bildung, Entwickelung, and Entfaltung, education, development, and expansion/unfolding, to be subject to theatre’s political intervention and to perpetuate it, but only to the extent that meaning, especially the nation as meaning, and the ability of language to translate between religion and literature or even more radically between literature and (its) political intervention, remain unquestioned. Kleist writes of this translation in very different terms in a text whose pretensions are not in the least political, a text moreover, which can hardly be considered as representing his own viewpoint, since it is a reworking of material not his own. It does, however, reflect upon the movements and displacements that take place in the reception of the work of art: Herrlich ist es, in einer unendlichen Einsamkeit am Merresufer, unter trübem Himmel, auf eine unbegrenzte Wasserwüste, hinauszuschauen. Dazu gehört gleichwohl, daß man dahin gegangen sei, daß man zurück muß, daß man hinüber möchte, daß man es nicht kann, daß man alles zum Leben vermißt, und die Stimme des Lebens dennoch im Rauschen der Flut, im Wehen der Luft, im Ziehen der Wolken, dem einsamen Geschrei der Vögel, vernimmt. Dazu gehört ein Anspruch, den das Herz macht, und ein Abbruch, um mich so auszudrücken, den einem die Natur tut. Dies aber ist vor dem Bilde unmöglich, und das, was ich in dem Bilde selbst finden sollte, fand ich erst zwischen mir and dem Bilde, nämlich einen Anspruch, den mein Herz an das Bilde machte, und einen Abbruch, den mir das Bild tat; und so ward ich selbst der Kapuziner, das Bild ward die Düne, das aber, wo hinaus ich mit Sehnsucht blicken sollte, die See, fehlte ganz. Nichts kann trauriger und unbehaglicher sein, als diese Stellung in der Welt: der einzige Lebensfunke im weiten Reiche des Todes, der einsame Mittelpunkt im einsamen Kreis. Das Bild liegt, mit seinem zwei oder drei geheimnisvollen Gegenständen, wie die Apokalypse da, als ob es Youngs Nachtgedanken hätte, und da es, in seiner Einförmigkeit und Uferlosigkeit, nichts, als den Rahm, zum Vordergrund hat, so ist es, wenn man es betrachtet, als ob einem die Augenlider wegschnitten wären. [Glorious is it to look out on an unbounded waste of water in an unending solitariness at the seashore. Part of that experience is also that we have gone there, that we must return; that we would like to go over, that we cannot do so; that we are missing everything for life and nonetheless hear the voice of life in the roaring of the tide, in the blowing of the wind, in the movement


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Borders of a Lip of the clouds, and the solitary cry of birds. There is also a demand that the heart makes and a breaking-off, so to speak, that nature performs on us. But this is impossible before the image, and that which I should have found in the image itself, namely a demand that my heart made of the image, and a breaking-off that the image performed on me, I found first between myself and the image. And so, I became the Capuchin, the image became the dunes. But what I should have looked out upon with yearning was completely lacking. Nothing can be sadder and more uncomfortable than this position in the world: the single spark of life in the wide empire of death, the solitary middle point in the solitary circle. The image lies there with its two or three secretive objects like the Apocalypse, as though it had Young’s night thoughts. And since in its uniformity and shorelessness it has nothing other than the frame as a foreground, when we regard it, it is as though our eyelids had been cut away.]35

Perception, both of nature and of art, is characterized by a series of oppositions or inversions: a going out with the necessity of returning; the desire to cross over and the inability to do so; a missing of everything for life and the perception of the voice of life in nature itself. All of these oppositions are encompassed in a final relation, a relation that ultimately extends to the relation between the artwork and the perceiver: the heart makes a demand, and nature performs, so to speak, a breaking-off, a rupture upon the individual (“ein Abbruch, um mich so auszudrücken, den einem die Natur tut”). Perception of the painting, of the image, however, is structured by the inability of the image to perform this break or rupture within itself (“was ich in dem Bilde selbst . . .”). The result is the displacement of the rupture between perception and its demands and desires and an empirical world that thwarts those demands and desires to a position between perception and image. The relocation of the break takes place, then, as a function of representation, though not as a result of some form of technical inadequacy, not because the representation somehow fails—the text ends with a testimony to the reproductive skill of the artist, his ability to paint as though with the instruments of the landscape itself and of his ability to dupe foxes and wolves with this accuracy. Human perception, however, is structured rather differently. For now the sea is entirely absent. The image here is not mistaken for that which it represents, but instead is the locale from which a view of the sea might be won. The displacement of the break between desire and its denial to a position between art or the image and its perception describes the total obliteration of the empirical world. And the result, appropriately, is a feeling analogous to that experienced in nature (the lack of everything for life, the awareness of isolation), but now lack and isolation assume a more threatening role without the compen-


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satory knowledge that one has come to a place from which one must return, and especially without the recompense of perceiving in the voice of nature all that one lacks for life. There is no return from this perception, no perception in the image of all that is missing, since the image itself is the thief. If the image lies there with its two or three mysterious objects like the Apocalypse, it is not because of its scarcity, not because it is somehow like the Apocalypse, and not, certainly, because it represents something like what is represented in Young’s Night Thoughts. Rather it is because in its uniformity and shorelessness it provides no foreground but the frame. The frame assumes the position that should have been occupied by the shore and allowed a view of the sea. Instead, it opens out onto the denial of the sea and thus produces a perception, now in another sense, of a lack, a perception of the complete overcoming of the sea, of the empirical world. The image produces what for Kleist as for Benjamin is a Zerstreuung, both the distraction and the tearing apart of the perceiver in aesthetic perception. It is as if the eyelids were cut away because perception is no longer a simple matter of sense perception, of looking at an image and then potentially looking away. Once the glance has been cast, it can never be taken back; one cannot return from here, because here has become nowhere, the voided apocalyptic space of a perception of the world’s and one’s own obliteration. This may seem rather remote from Die Hermannsschlacht, which ends, after all, not with a denial of the world, but with an assertion of the Germans’ ability to conquer more and more of it. Still, what kind of claims does a drama whose intentions toward political intervention are manifest make, if not a displacement from claims of representation in which what appears on stage reproduces a preexistent world to the performative (in every sense) claims between the stage and its audience? What takes place in that displacement is equally a voiding or refiguring of the empirical world that might be the object of representation in the name of the creation of a new relation to the world through intervention. Thus, just as any reading of the play depends upon a series of substitutions that bind it in a relation to a literary and historical past, so too do its performative claims, while unbinding those relations, form a relation to a present and future history. Political intervention, both in art and its criticism, attempts to control such relations, to translate from the aesthetic to the political in such a way that the effects can be measured and directed, if not precisely in determinate actions like the stirring of a Volk to resist foreign intrusion, as in Die Hermannsschlacht, then at the very least to the extent that intervention rather than, say, apathy is the result.36 What takes place in aesthetic perception as Kleist describes it in the piece on Friedrich’s seascape, however, is the rupture between perception and


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the image. Any continuity between nature or history and its representation, no matter how exact, is thus the site of a disruption, as is that between the image and its perception, that is, between the work of art and an empirical and political reality. The translation from the aesthetic to an empirical and political world that constitutes political intervention, however, demands an understanding of a meaningful unit that can be subject to a controlled movement in which meaning remains fundamentally undisturbed, much the way troops can cross a river named Lippe, or the meaning of the Lippe can be determined and controlled in its movement. A drama intended toward political intervention, then, would of necessity locate its energies on the rupture that dislocates the aesthetic from the historical and empirical and would mobilize a rupture whose movement and effects can never be subject to intentional control. What political intervention might mean, that is, is a recognition of the breaking-off (Abbruch) of itself from its intentional claims upon the historical and empirical, a break that does not necessarily render it ineffectual, but whose effects are the indeterminate dislocations of its own meaning. Because of the radical nature of this disruption, the very concept and possibility of a political literature would need to be rethought. This is why one might say that Die Hermannsschlacht, in the terms of the text on Friedrich, is apocalyptic as much as it is historically determined and demands historical determination. Not only does it end with a view toward the complete overcoming of the Romans and with them a certain (notion of ) history. Even more, it seeks to mobilize another, a proper history through a controlled movement of meaning, especially the meaning of the German nation, across aesthetic and natural borders. In so doing, however, it mobilizes the rupture and indetermination of that movement.

Borders of a Lip Pt. III Chap.5

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PART III

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The Debts of History Shelley and Yeats


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CHAPTER FIVE

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Il ne fallait pas qu’il se dédoublât. C’est la grande tentation de ceux qui finissent. —Maurice Blanchot, Le dernier homme

iterary debt clearly adheres to an economy of its own. Far from adding up to a reimbursement, citations or allusions, the invocation of generic conventions, to pick just a few of the most obvious forms of installments on that debt, only serve to draw attention to and increase it. The more one tries to pay off one’s literary debts, whether to a specific predecessor, a genre, a literary movement, or literature, history, or culture itself, the more that debt adds up. Even attempts to avoid one’s debts and thus to forego paying them back cannot avoid this unforgiving economy, such avoidance constituting perhaps the surest sign of indebtedness. What the structure of indebtedness implies, then, is always a history. But the excessiveness of this debt that can never be paid off refuses all location in, and therefore containment by, the past. This is a debt that clearly exceeds all parties in the exchange, that exceeds even the historical scheme it apparently falls into, so that debt stands not merely as a sign of a place in literary

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history but rather as the opening of history by and as a structure of excess. To speak of the debts of Romanticism, then, is to invoke those debts owed this literary-historical period, but also the debts it has run up even as a period, however defined. Figures such as Mary Shelley and William Butler Yeats might be seen as exemplary in their relation to the debts of Romanticism precisely to the extent that they write on the borders of a Romantic discourse. At once inside and outside that discourse, they figure Romanticism’s debt to itself and the continuation of that debt beyond the limits of Romanticism “proper.” They allow for a thinking of Romanticism and its debts, a thinking of history, inasmuch as they trace a debt whose payment is its very prolongation, a Romanticism that crosses its own borders, like those of a lip, precisely by being paid off, made history. They articulate a history constituted by its very transgression. For some time now, scholars of Romanticism would have had little difficulty situating Mary Shelley in such a historical and economic scheme, for her one great success as a novelist, Frankenstein, is nothing, according to traditional as well as more recent, theoretical readings, if not a commentary upon a certain strain of Romantic thought and writing. And even if Shelley criticism is beginning to question the (economic) presuppositions of criticism that declares that novel major at the cost of relegating her other work to a minor status, such recuperative attempts, however laudable, risk falling prey to a similar, if not the same, economic structure. Shelley’s intervention into this structure may well come, rather, in the form of a questioning of how the debts of history are accumulated, a questioning of the very structure of indebtedness as the force of history. From the beginning, The Last Man does nothing if not pose that question and the question of how one acknowledges one’s debts without being bought out by them in the process. The novel cannot avoid this problematic, nor does it try to. Rather it runs headlong at it, literalizing the trope of indebtedness. For The Last Man is, first of all, precisely the story of its narrator’s “inheritance.”1 Lionel Verney’s father, we are told, lacked the “rudder” of reason, so that his excessive imagination led to debts he could not pay without the intervention of his friend, the king. Accepting a sum of money with the good intentions of putting aside his reckless behavior in favor of nobler pursuits, he instead loses “the whole sum, and its amount doubled” (9) at the gambling table. He thus incurs a debt he is unable to repay and banishes himself to solitude in a Cumberland whose Romantic overtones can hardly be missed. So extensive, even radical, are his debts that they are visited upon his children, but especially his son, who takes over from his father not only shame and dire poverty, but a sense of rejection by the king and thus a hatred of authority and civilization. Even more, he inherits a certain identity, a title, or nearly so. He inherits an identity


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that can be reduced to none of these, for his father is described, rightly it seems, as “under a cloud, a lost man” (11–12, emphasis added). Such a characterization, in a novel entitled The Last Man, can hardly be an accident, or if it is one, then it is the accident of genealogy, of a certain gamble, and of language. In the near homonyms lost man / last man the mistaking or substitution of one for the other, of last for lost, will always be accidental, arbitrary, random. The mutual interference of the words describes the narrator’s genealogy in precisely the terms of the inheritance of a gambling debt. For this randomness of language is the same kind of accident that could take place in a gamble, a simple throw of the dice, or, even more, a Coup de dés.2 In this case, the connection between Lionel’s place as last man and his father’s gambling loss would be merely arbitrary, but the arbitrary is precisely what is at stake in that connection. Still, if this process seems accidental, Lionel being only one of any number of people, his own sister included, who could have inherited such a loss, the narrative of The Last Man would seem to suggest something else. For it is the history, by and large, of Lionel’s life and times, a history that will tell over and over again of how Lionel’s being the last man is not a matter of chance and loss so much as it is of being saved and even selected—in the first instance as the only character in the novel to contract the plague and survive it. If the selection of the last man is, as such, not merely accidental, then the passage from a lost man, his father, to the last man must be understood as the determination of the indeterminate or merely contingent. Lionel’s genealogy therefore describes the way in which a lost man, one of a number, bequeaths his loss to his son, the last man, the way in which a loss can pass from generation to generation and in the process become more than a simple loss, become the loss of all losses—last. Given the nature of Lionel’s inheritance, can it be a mere accident that so much criticism of The Last Man should go looking for predecessors, models, figurative (fore)fathers of the story, whether in the popular genre of the “last man” poetry3 of the period, revolutionary politics,4 or most commonly, Mary Shelley’s biography? 5 By turning to another such figure here, a very literal father to whom that criticism has failed to turn in any systematic way, I do not intend merely to repeat the gesture of the search for an origin with all its repercussions, but rather to trace and question the figure of genealogy itself. Genealogy is precisely what is at question in the figure of economy even before this novel, in fact in Shelley’s first novel, Frankenstein, where family relations are already figured in terms of a certain economy and where Victor’s birth can be understood as the product of an economy of substitution. For Caroline Beaufort’s father, we know, dies in, even of, bankruptcy, of a failed economy, then, though not without leaving a beneficiary: Victor’s father, who becomes Caroline’s protector, a


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substitute father of sorts, but also, ultimately, more than just a father, a husband as well. It should hardly be surprising, then, that Victor’s parents should adopt a child of their own who is similarly the product of a failed economy: Elizabeth’s natural father has his property confiscated and as a result she is placed with a family to be nursed. When that family equally comes under hardship, they are only too willing to have her taken from them by Victor’s parents, who then give her to Victor as a “present.” But the bottom line of the successive failed economies is nothing less than an excess, since Elizabeth, who Victor takes as his possession, becomes not only a cousin or a sister, but, he will repeat, his “more than sister.” And as every reader of the novel knows she does indeed become more than a sister, also a wife. All of these exchanges, then, do not simply move a character from one position to another but always inevitably produce excesses, even these characters as an excess that ultimately must be done away with: Victor’s mother is in a sense killed by Elizabeth, from whom she contracts scarlet fever, and Elizabeth, of course, dies as the creature’s ultimate revenge. Such excesses, it seems, know no limits, not even the limit separating one work of literature from another. For if, in The Last Man, Lionel’s father’s inability to control his lavish lifestyle and gambling lead his friend the king to come to his financial rescue, no less so does the title character of William Godwin’s St. Leon find himself indebted because of a penchant for a lifestyle beyond even his aristocratic means, a lifestyle that includes, not least, a taste for gambling. If Verney’s father is thus saved from financial ruin, St. Leon will equally be saved not once but twice, though not by the king but by his wife’s father, who first in the form of a dowry and then in that of an inheritance upon his death bails St. Leon out of his debts. And if, finally, Verney’s father tries his luck at gambling one last time only to lose everything, St. Leon will also turn to the gambling table once more, similarly doubling the stakes and losing all he has, throwing his children into a debt from which they will in a certain sense never recover. In fact so severe is this debt that it can be transmitted not only from father to son but from novel to novel. This, it will turn out, is nothing less than the debt of literature and of authorship. The effects of such losses are not to be underestimated. The story of St. Leon and his family, it appears, will be that of one hardship after another, a life of miserable and unending poverty. After removing to Switzerland to spend the rest of their lives in total, if honorable, obscurity, they lose nearly all of their few remaining possessions in a violent hail storm, only to have what remains of them swindled by their neighbor’s unscrupulous son. Expelled from Switzerland to Konstanz, St. Leon earns a meagre living as a gardener until falling ill, his


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convalescence bringing his family to the brink of starvation. It is only then that he feels haunted enough, not by his own illness but by another imminent and more powerful one, that he and his story will be transformed: “From this moment, the whole set of my feelings was changed. Avarice descended, and took possession of my soul. Haunted, as I perpetually was, by images of the plague of famine, nothing appeared to me so valuable as wealth; nothing so desirable as to be placed at the utmost possible distance from want. An appetite of this kind is insatiable; no distance seems sufficiently great; no obstacles, mountains on mountains of gold, appear an adequate security to bar us from the approach of the monster we dread.”6 Insatiate, St. Leon does not yet seek mountains on mountains of gold, but merely payment from his former Swiss neighbor. That won, his appetite for wealth seems forever replaced by a simpler security, that of a life of pastoral retreat whose Romantic rusticity would seem to keep him and his family forever safe from the approach of any monster whatsoever, even the monster of a certain plague. What interrupts this scene of rural domestic simplicity appears by no means so threatening. It is, in fact, a simple stranger come in search of St. Leon in order to convey a secret to him. St. Leon at first refuses the terms of the stranger’s agreement, which would give him the secret of the philosopher’s stone in return for hiding the stranger until his death and then burying him in utmost secrecy, because it would destroy the state of perfect community, even communion, in which he lives with his wife and family: “My wife is part of myself; for the last six years at least I have had no thought in which she has not participated” (126). The stranger’s secret, however, will admit of no such arrangement. Its transmission demands a more singular stance, that of a radical and thoroughly gendered individuation:7 “Was ever gallant action achieved by him who was incapable of separating himself from a woman? Was ever a great discovery prosecuted, or an important benefit conferred upon the human race, by him who was incapable of standing, and thinking, and feeling, alone? . . . In vain might honour, worth, and immortal renown proffer their favours to him who has made himself a puppet of a woman, the plaything of her pleasure, wasting an inglorious life in the gratification of her wishes and the performance of her commands!” (126). While never adopting the misogynist tone of the stranger’s response, St. Leon’s ingestion of the fear of the plague of famine and poverty, along with his nostalgia for the splendor of his former lavish life, convince him he can accept the secret of endless wealth and “still, and always, be master” of himself (129).


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Such self-mastery is, in fact, the minimal condition for the transmission of the secret. For what is continually referred to as the “communication” of the secret demands the disruption of the full and perfect communication that characterizes St. Leon’s family. Accepting the secret demands and sets in motion a process of individuation that will mark St. Leon off from his family irrevocably: “A man can never be respectable in the eyes of the world or in his own, except so far as he stands by himself and is truly independent. He may have friends; he may have domestic connections; but he must not in these connections lose his individuality” (138). The force of St. Leon’s thinking, even if it is largely selfjustification, depends upon an understanding of individuality as prior to community and maintainable within it. What his history shows, however, is rather different. The state of community, here of familial harmony, is interrupted by the process of individuation. St. Leon, in order to receive the secret, must differentiate himself from his family, first, but ultimately from all of mankind. Achieving immortality, even more than infinite wealth, dramatizes the effects of a radical individualization (“I was another creature” [161]) that is experienced as the loss of community: “[W]hen I felt that I also was mortal, I was capable of a community of sentiments and a going forth of the heart” (165). If ever there was a definition of the Romantic condition, not to mention something like the “Byronic hero” (which might just as easily have been labelled “Godwinian”), it is the experience of solitude and isolation, an alienation from what is now understood as an often in every sense foreign society realized because community and communication have been interrupted. The secret of the philosopher’s stone, the secret of immortality, does not lie in an alchemical operation so much as it does in the logic of the secret itself. St. Leon himself invokes this logic when he says that he is bound not only to hide his secret but to conceal that he has any to hide in the first place (161). Secrecy (re)turns upon itself here, but in such a way that it effectively negates itself as well. For what kind of secret is this that is so secret that its very secrecy remains unknown? If the secret as such depends upon a kind of epistemological situation according to which something must remain unknown for the secret to exist in the first place, then the keeping secret of the secrecy of the secret has the effect of negating that very secrecy. The secrecy of the secret is removed, leaving a secret that can still carry the name only from the perspective of the person keeping it. To be sure, this is the condition of secrecy that St. Leon cannot keep, not least from his wife and family, but also from the reader. It may well be the secret that fiction can never keep. What causes St. Leon’s individuation, like his alienation, then, is not the content of the secret, but the fact of the secret’s not being secret. The secret to individuation as the


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division of the family or community and their reduction to individual units, then, is a secrecy that fails to close upon its own secrecy. That the content of that secret should end in something just short of the deification of the individual, the individual rendered immortal, only serves to dramatize this logic of the secret. While this secret confers infinite wealth and thus forever shields St. Leon from the plague of hunger, it would also seem to protect him from all disease (“[T]his complicated but brittle frame, shall last for ever! No disease shall attack it” [163]), even a much more literal plague. It does so, however, by displacing the plague itself: “The talent he [the stranger] possessed was one upon which the fate of nations and of the human species might be made to depend. God had given it for the best and highest purposes; and the vessel in which it was deposited must be purified from the alloy of human frailty. It might be abused and applied to the most atrocious designs. It might blind the understanding of the wisest, and corrupt the integrity of the noblest. It might overturn kingdoms, and change the whole order of human society into anarchy and barbarism. It might render its possessor the universal plague or the universal tyrant of mankind” (135). The stranger’s scrupulousness concerning the communication of the secret speaks to nothing if not to a certain humanism and politics, as to heritage and inheritance. The purity demanded by the secret is the same purity that forces St. Leon’s individuation through the expelling of his wife from being “part of” himself, a purification, then, of the male from all contamination by the female. This is the same purity that will demand a certain transformation and displacement, not from Godwin, but from his heir, Mary Shelley. And it is the purity of the human, the purity of the individual who is to receive the gift, from all that is human, if we, like Godwin, understand the human as inextricably mixed with frailty. But it demands this act of purification in the name of a political conservatism, that is, in order not to change or overturn existing political and social structures, everything associated, here, with the human—things as they are. This is a purity, finally, that would ensure not only that the holder of the secret not be beset by plague, but that he not become it himself. And yet, St. Leon’s story heaps one misfortune upon another. It tells not of the freedom he hoped to gain through the acquisition of the secret, but of a series of very literal imprisonments. It tells not of gain or increase, but of losses, the first of which, after having received the secret, is not least. Accosted by young noblemen to explain his family’s sudden change in fortune, St. Leon’s son can provide no adequate answer. When St. Leon refuses to reveal the secret to him, his son feels compelled to quit his family definitively in order to seek to reestablish an honorable name for himself. In St. Leon’s mind, and in his wife’s,


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the very word son will repeatedly be accompanied by a sense of loss: “having lost my son” (198, 213); “the loss of my son” (205); “My son is lost” (207); “[Y]ou have lost your son” (209); “Now my son is lost” (213). What, then, is St. Leon’s legacy if it is not that of a gambling loss that is passed on to his son, not so much in the form of a (financial) debt as in being or becoming lost? What is his legacy if it is not that of a gambling loss which leads to a “plague of hunger” that St. Leon would chase away by accepting the secret and thus running the risk of himself becoming the plague of mankind? What, finally, is St. Leon’s legacy, if it is not that of a process of individuation that demands the interruption of communication in, and the community of, his family? His legacy, it would appear, is nothing if it is not the convergence of all these legacies: a loss he seeks to transform into excess itself (infinite wealth) in fact leads to his transformation through a process of individuation, if not into a certain plague (of mankind)—but perhaps into that too—then into he who loses his son. It is just such a loss inflicted by immortality that could very well make St. Leon not only a lost man but the last man. For who could survive him? Who could effect his loss and become, in his place, the last man? As narrator of The Last Man, Lionel assumes the heritage of his father’s gambling losses, first of all, in the form of the poverty that deprives him of anything that might be classified under the title of “culture.” In “danger of degenerating into that which informs brute nature” (18), he is more than nature and yet constantly verging upon being reduced to it. Thus, he has no respect for the laws of property and propriety, stealing game from Adrian’s grounds in the misplaced attempt to recuperate a loss—his father’s loss of the court and his closest friend, the king, Adrian’s father, and Lionel’s own inheritance of that loss. But the result of this attempted recuperation is far from realizing its aim: Lionel is caught repeatedly and feels temporary revenge at having injured his adversary, but his release immediately after being arrested in turn steals that satisfaction back from him. The meeting of Lionel and Adrian marks the beginning of a process not unlike the individuation undergone by St. Leon, a process of what I will simply call subjection, which renders any such recuperation impossible. For Adrian professes nothing but love for Lionel, maintaining that they were “born to be friends” and have a “hereditary bond of friendship” (26). Despite his father’s voluntary abdication of the throne, Adrian clearly never fully renounces the claims of heredity. Perhaps it should come as no surprise, then, that upon conversing with this son of the former king, Lionel “felt subject to him” (27) and that this feeling culminates in nothing less than a process of acculturation and nationalization: “The trim and demesne of civilization, which I had before


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regarded from my wild jungle as inaccessible, had its wicket opened by him; I stepped within, and felt, as I entered, that I trod my native soil” (27). Adrian effects the civilization of Lionel, a process marked by all the values of cultural signifiers in the Western tradition: a movement from outside to inside, from the wild to the domestic or cultural, and, somewhat more ambiguously, a belonging to the “native soil.”8 Read literally, this would mean that being English is not merely a question of being born in England, and perhaps the rejection of Lionel’s father from the court and the logic of inheritance the novel invokes should have prepared us for this figuration of nationality and nationalism. Lionel, an Englishman by right and by birth, only becomes fully English, only feels himself to be English, through a process of acculturation that takes place in the form of his recuperation, not into the court itself, since it has been formally dissolved, but by Adrian, the hereditary link to the king. This process fulfils the (conservative) dictates of inheritance and heritage doubly, since it reestablishes the “hereditary bond of friendship” that binds the two families while also restoring Lionel to his rightful place in the substitute court represented by Adrian. The bond between the families takes the form of a symmetry that is no less marked than that between Lionel’s father and St. Leon. Lionel’s father dies leaving two children, Lionel and his younger sister Perdita (whose name tellingly speaks of loss as well), precisely as the former king dies leaving a male heir, Adrian, and his younger sister, Idris. The symmetry of these families might well lead us to expect the bonds between them to go beyond that of friendship. And in fact Lionel, at least, does not disappoint here, eventually falling in love with and marrying Idris. He thus begins to formalize the family bonds in such a way that a certain crossing is sketched out: Lionel

Adrian

Perdita

Idris

The potential chiasmic bond between the two families would marry them not only figuratively but literally, thus also coupling the royal with the peasant, culture with nature, forming a self-sufficient and self-enclosed totality. But The Last Man is not least the story of missed crossings, the story of the interruption of any such totality. This chiasmus is never formed. Adrian and Perdita never marry, in fact, never even fall in love, and the symmetrical relationship between the two families, a relationship that might form a minimal or microcommunity, is never fully realized in the form of a social and legal bond. It remains unfulfilled


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because it is Lord Raymond who will ultimately marry Perdita, introducing another, an extra, element that will cause the failure of the chiasmic crossing. Lionel

Adrian Raymond

Perdita

Idris

Lord Raymond therefore functions as the asymmetry in the chiasmic relationship that would marry the families. Himself an excess in that relationship, his marriage to Perdita recovers him for it, but rather than closing the chiasmus off without remainder produces another excess—Adrian. What is customarily called naturalization, the integration of a foreigner into the national body (politic), takes place for Lionel as the movement away from a purely natural state and is fully realized through his marriage into a kind of substitute court. But it also takes place by listening to Adrian speak—“of the old Greek sages, and of the power which they had acquired over the minds of men, through the force of love and wisdom only” (27). To be (or become) English, then, is to be—Greek, to be(come) Westernized, it would seem, the English being assimilated here to what is most originally Greek in the Greeks.9 But as much as Lionel would seem to be reappropriated for England and for a certain aristocracy through his marriage to Idris, Adrian no less seeks to marry the English with the Greek in a much more literal sense than what he speaks of to his friend. Adrian is, after all, in love with Evadne, the daughter of the Greek embassador to England. Again, a significant crossing marked by marriage appears to be forming, for at the same time that Adrian falls in love with Evadne, Lord Raymond, who was also born in Greece and who at this point in the novel wants to reestablish monarchy in England with himself as king, is rumoured to be advancing his claim by seeking to marry Adrian’s sister, Idris. Both Lord Raymond and Evadne therefore represent the possibility of a crossing whose form is by now all too familiar: Adrian Idris

Lord Raymond Evadne

But once again, the crossing is missed. Idris falls in love with Lionel, Evadne with Raymond. But Raymond ultimately marries Perdita, his choice signifying that of the private over the public, domestic bliss over political power. This marriage ultimately fails because Raymond, who will always be defined in terms of either excess or self-division, self-division because of excess, is also in love with Evadne. Raymond causes a kind of excess in the “happy


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circle”(90) that the five principal characters in the novel now constitute: Adrian, Idris, and Lionel at Windsor Castle, and Lord Raymond and Perdita in a house on the borders of the adjoining park. This circle, it turns out, is less a circle than it is a chiasmus, or rather a missed chiasmus, the missed crossings that ensure that the circle will never close, never be closed upon itself to form an ideal community—Adrian and Idris with Perdita and Lionel, or Lionel and Evadne with Raymond and Idris. Raymond is doubled, in a sense, with two lovers, and thus causes a kind of internal division or halving, that between Perdita and Evadne, private and public, Raymond and himself. And this doubling causes another excess, which is also a shortage or lack, Adrian displaced by Raymond from his position in both missed crossings, the fifth wheel in the happy circle, or perhaps better, the absent center who refuses, as much as Raymond, to allow the circle to close. This division or doubling shows that it is not a simple question of England adopting the Greek as its model, for instance, of the Occident (re)appropriating Greece as its origin, or of a return of Ulysses-Raymond to the originary homeland in order to (re)assert his identity precisely as he who makes the return to the homeland and to the self as the very constitution of identity. It is not, therefore, that Raymond marries the Greek and the English, what is considered the origin of Western civilization with what the novel represents as its ultimate fulfilment. A born Greek, Raymond is indeed married to England, or at least to an English woman. His love for the Greek, however, rather than closing that circle of the voyage of the return to a self-enclosed and totalizing (self)identity, constitutes an internal division. The return to the origin, rather than fulfilling or closing it off, causes a division in self-identity and self-identification, not least those of the West. What characterizes the Greek, in Adrian’s speech, is a doctrine of the power of and over the mind, a power Adrian, whose “slight frame was overinformed by the soul that dwelt within,” such that he is “all mind” (26–7), illustrates amply as his speech makes Lionel “subject to him.” What is it to be English, then? Not only to belong to English culture, that is, to come in from the wild, that is, to recognize the wisdom of the Greeks, that is, the supremacy of the mind. It is, above all, to be subject. To be subject in every sense and in all the forms of subjection that this process of nationalization, acculturation, and Westernization implies. But also to become a subject in the strongest philosophical (that is, Greek?) sense of the word: not only to recognize the mind as “lord and master,” but as the very source of the self-production of the self. The subject is conceived here in terms of a certain subjection, understood as a political condition, but also of subjection understood as becoming-subject, the recognition of the presence of the self to the self, of the immanence of the self as “all mind.”10


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Perhaps inevitably, the process of acculturation does more than render Lionel a subject; it makes him fully human for the first time: “I now began to be human. I was admitted within that sacred boundary which divides the intellectual and moral nature of man from that which characterizes animals” (29). That Lionel’s acculturation and nationalization are also figured as a humanization is hardly an accident. The process of humanization repeats the rhetoric of inside and outside, as it does that of nature and culture. Here again, human nature is defined as that nature that cannot be reduced to nature (the merely animal), that nature that is not fully natural. If the human is what is more than nature, the boundary that marks this division is the sacred. Humanism, in The Last Man and the culture it seeks to embody, is always more than humanism. For what separates human nature from nature, what makes this nature more than nature, is the sacred. The equation of the human and the sacred, whether it expresses an orthodox Christian belief in man’s privileged relation to God or a more Romantic notion of something like the human form divine, the divination of the human, ensures that humanism will always be governed by a nonhuman element as its very definition. Humanism, then, is not only a relation of the human to the human, understood either as the essence of the human or a certain moral or social attitude, but is the relation of the human to the sacred, even of the human to the human as sacred. While even Adrian, who seeks to diminish the role of the aristocracy and effect a more equal distribution of wealth and privilege, effects a certain kind of subjection through his discourse, Raymond, to this point still his rival in matters of politics, as of the heart, represents a monarchism that speaks to a much more clearly political sense of the subject: “The half extinct spirit of royalty roused itself in the minds of men; and they, willing slaves, self-constituted subjects, were ready to bend their necks to the yoke” (58–9). The phrase “self-constituted subjects” in fact describes a political tendency that reaches beyond the relatively narrow focus of the monarchy and monarchism that it designates here to include all of mankind. The half-extinct spirit of monarchism can rouse itself in the minds of men, in the human in general, as long as “men” are thought of in terms of a model of subjectivity, as subjects, that is, as self-constituted. What appears here, and no doubt to Shelley herself, as a near contradiction or oxymoron, at the very least a paradox, that is, that men would willingly, freely, let themselves be subjected, become subjects, to a royal or any other power, that they would constitute themselves as subjects, is only apparently so. A reading of the phrase according to which subjection can only be voluntary, self-constituted, because only through an act of will can “the minds of man” be made slaves, presupposes an originary freedom of the mind, which amounts to a


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model of consciousness as always capable of transcending any historical, ideological, and cultural conditioning. But such an interpretation, already dialectical inasmuch as it sees the subject as both subjected (object, slave) and consenting to its subjection (free, subject, master), still does not deploy the full force of a “self-constituted subject.” As soon as we speak of self-constitution, we are in fact speaking of a subject, whether singular or collective. What is revealing here is that this self-constitution is the term for freedom, even the freedom to renounce freedom. The subject constitutes itself through an act of freedom, in fact as the very act of the freedom of self-constitution. That the content, if you will, of that act is the renunciation of freedom changes nothing in the logic of the subject. The subject will always be thought in terms of such an act of originary freedom, not least to constitute itself as unfree. It is in this sense only that the subject, in fact subject formation, can also be subjection, and this concept will be indispensable for the remainder of the novel. For if The Last Man, in its inexorable movement toward the isolation of Lionel as the last man, would seem to mark the questioning of the mastery of the subject, which in criticism of the novel is often presented as a criticism of Romantic universalism,11 if it would seem to mark the disappearance of the subject, it might also be read in rather different terms. The novel in fact never tells of, can never tell of, the disappearance of the subject. It does, however, question the possibility of a political structure or a community that would take part in the same logic as the subject, for both succumb to the plague. More accurately, tracing Lionel’s autobiography, which is to say, the story of the process of subjection, it will trace the impossibility of any such community, and especially of community understood as a self-fulfilling totality, and mark, in its place, the becomingabsolute of the subject: a lost man, the last man. The relation between such a conception of the subject and humanism, and not only the humanism of the characters in the novel, is hardly accidental. In fact, the war between the Greeks and the Turks does more than pit the West against the East, or, as the West would have it, civilization against barbarity. That this war should cease just when the Greeks would seem to be taking hold of Constantinople is, of course, no accident. The Turks, scared off by the plague that has ravaged the city, have fled, evacuating the Greek victory of all meaning, which is also to say, evacuating what was to become the capital of Greece, hollowing Greece out at its would-be center. Plague takes over from war, here, showing the limits of war, war’s inability to achieve its ends, only because the plague can fulfill the logic that it shares with the conception of war the novel presents, the logic of a certain humanism. Adrian’s attitude toward the war reveals the Greek lesson, which is also the lesson of that humanism: “I am


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content to die. I have learned in Greece that one man, more or less, is of small import, while human bodies remain to fill up the thinned ranks of the soldiery; and that the identity of an individual may be overlooked, so that the master roll contains its full numbers” (162). According to such a humanist ideology, individual identity, even identity as such, goes uncounted that the count might remain “full.” This is the logic of a certain economics, the economics of humanism, the language and logic of exchange in which a death, in fact death in general, can be recuperated and one human body substituted for another without loss or excess, without remainder. It also follows that this is the language and logic of sacrifice in which individual loss will always be meaningless, “of small import,” when overcome, transcended, sublated, in the dialectical progress of a larger “body” of full numbers, humanity conceived as the ultimate meaning grounding sacrifice, conceived, then, as meaning itself. Humanity is always “full,” never leaving even a trace of a remainder, because it registers no loss, precisely because it is not conceived as adhering in its composite parts (individuals, human beings), but is rather a “full number,” transcendent, even transcendence. Those fighting for the Greeks are fighting a war grounded upon a notion of society ruled by the logic of negativity, a negativity so radical that it must ultimately lead to a society of absence. Little wonder that the final, the last, realization of that war and its logic in the form of the plague should in turn take the form of the absence of any society or community: the city this (Greek) humanism takes as its ultimate goal is found empty, devoid of any human occupants. Death has no other function here than to reconfirm the dialectical power of humanism to subsume all loss or negativity to its own fullness. While the plague has made it impossible for Greek humanism to lay hold of anything but the hollowed out capital of its own dialectical negations, that humanism will, initially at least, display a similar logic: What are we, the inhabitants of the globe, least among the many that people infinite space? Our minds embrace infinity; the visible mechanism of our being is subject of merest accident. Day by day we are forced to believe this. He whom a scratch has disorganized, he who disappears from apparent life under the influence of the hostile agency at work around us, had the same powers as I—I also am subject to the same laws. In the face of all this we call ourselves lords of the creation, wielders of the elements, masters of life and death, and we allege in excuse of this arrogance, that though the individual is destroyed, man continues for ever. Thus, losing our identity, that of which we are chiefly conscious, we glory in the continuity of our species, and learn to regard death without terror. But when any whole nation becomes the victim of the destructive


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powers of exterior agents, then indeed man shrinks into insignificance, he feels his tenure of life insecure, his inheritance on earth cut off. (230)

Not surprisingly, perhaps, the thinking of the subject, of subjection, and of nationalism converges with that of humanism elaborated in terms of the logic of sacrifice, which, permitting one to “regard death without terror,” opens itself up to Terror. As in the case of war, the glorying in the continuity of the species here can sublate the loss of identity, more specifically, of self-identity, “that of which we are chiefly conscious.” In fact, it even demands that loss. But the loss does not stop here. Once the sacrificial logic is set in motion, the powers of negation cannot be stopped. The loss of “our identity” gives way to the loss of our identity, our identity as a we. The very loss of identity that enables the loss of an individual to be recuperated in the name of a larger (“full”) unity, such as that of the nation, the West, humanity, and so forth, is the loss that in turn permits that unit to be lost—irrevocably. It is not simply that the plague shows the limits of the humanist logic of the Greeks and the English; it points out their limits in that it is the fulfilment of that very logic, and the interruption of inheritance. The plague first realizes that logic to some extent through the levelling of social and economic distinctions. A kind of radical reign of terror, the plague fulfils the goals of diminishing or eradicating such distinctions, thus throwing down “the boundaries of private possession” (317), because supply far outstrips the demand of the diminished number of survivors. It is not merely that “[p]oor and rich were now equal,” but “rather the poor were superior” (309), since they can perform the manual tasks the rich have never learned to discharge. Yet while this reversal of fortunes puts the last first and the first last, it even thereby simply maintains the hierarchical social structure it confronts. The repeated assertion “we are all equal now” (317) might ring somewhat false, then, were it not for the knowledge of the imminence of “an equality still more levelling, a state where beauty and strength, and wisdom, would be as vain as riches and birth” (317). If the plague is the ultimate equalizer because it promises the imminence of death, if it therefore marks the end of a certain conception of society understood precisely in terms of exchange, class distinction, and class struggle, if, that is, the plague marks the end of society and the possibility for the emergence of a renewed community, the end of the novel will move even more dramatically to that same end.12 At this point, it appears that the plague will spare no one, such that the sacrificial logic of humanism is suspended. But even insofar as the plague is to kill everyone, that same humanist logic is still at work, for the death to be mourned is not someone’s death, a singular death, but death itself, infinite death, the death of humanity. It is still humanity that gives death its meaning.


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And however Shelley wants to understand it, the plague may well represent not the disease born in the East and that attacks the West, but the East’s defensive reaction against a foreign, invading body. The plague, which is said not to be contagious, spreads by a kind of touching at a distance. Like the rumor about its very existence, it spreads through the air; the literalization of its own rumor, it is in the air. It therefore represents not illness so much as it does the antibody produced in reaction to, and in the effort to ward off, the illness, the contagion even, that the Greek humanism that would eradicate the Turks represents.13 If there is to be another logic from that of sacrifice, a logic that would also set in motion another politics, it would have to take place through a different thinking of disease and death, a thinking of the interruption of the dialectical movement that subsumes death to a transcendent meaning. The Last Man presents this possibility inasmuch as it takes the form of a narrative of immunity and survival. The novel does not simply put forth a critique of a certain ideology, therefore, does not simply mark certain limits; it offers itself as the narrative of what it might mean to pass beyond those limits and that ideology, what it might mean, in short, to survive. This is, not least, what Lionel Verney represents in the novel. Lionel shows the essential finitude of the plague. His survival is important not because he is the last representative of the human race so much as because he interrupts the totalizing movement of the plague, for he is the only character to contract the plague and survive it. He survives this literalized black death after having a black man, in his dying moments, breath the plague on, or perhaps better, into him. Lionel’s recovery from the plague therefore takes place as a kind of immunoreaction in which he inhales and integrates the antibody that the plague has perhaps always been, even more than it is a disease in the conventional sense. His recovery, then, takes place as the incorporation and embodiment of this immune system. Lionel thus becomes the embodiment of the antibody, and if he does not die in the novel (and it remains uncertain that he ever would die), it is not least because he represents immunity itself. Standing as an antibody, his resistance to death, whose totalizing force seems to leave no one immune from its touch, the touching at a distance that defines this disease that is not contagious but nonetheless spreads through the air,14 representing, that is, a literal antibody because he is never reduced to the irreducible materiality of a corpse, Lionel’s position as last man would seem to be anything but an accident.15 On first view, it would seem that Verney is the last man precisely because he alone contracts the plague and survives it. We should expect nothing less from the heir of St. Leon, possessor of the elixir of life. And yet Verney’s position as the last man is in fact little more than chance. Strictly speaking, it is Verney’s family that escapes dying from the plague.16


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What is more, Lionel, Adrian, Lionel’s son Evelyn, and his niece Clara all witness the end of the plague, and Lionel is left alone not by the plague but by a boating accident. The plague destroyed social barriers and even society itself to leave one family, a microcosmic community that could repeople the earth and install perfectly egalitarian ideals. In so doing, it shows that amidst the equality it brings about, some are more equal than others. There are others who die of something other than plague in the novel, but the seeming immunity of Lionel’s entire circle represents a rather singular case of selection. As much as the plague figures the limits of subjectivity and of the humanist ideology inextricably linked to it, Verney and his circle figure the limits of the plague.17 While the plague would seem to move toward the extinction of all subjectivity and society, then, it stops just short of fulfilling this threat, leaving open the possibility for a very different history, one whose potentially incestuous overtones, however hard they might be to swallow, are not foreign to Mary Shelley’s writing.18 We are thus brought back, and once again not accidentally, to the question of the relation of Mary Shelley to her father, Godwin, which from the beginning has been circumscribed in the question of debt and indebtedness. If St. Leon functions as (figurative fore)father for the narrator of Mary Shelley’s novel, if Lionel can in a certain way usurp this (fore)father’s position, rendering him merely lost and thus in his place assume the title of last man, then we are dealing here with a radical conception of heritage and genealogy, in short, the heritage of the subject, individuation, and culture. Whether or not Shelley intentionally rewrote the tale of loss written by her father is of little import here, for it is precisely the interference of intentionality and contingency, St. Leon’s inability to master or determine the course of history (his own and the world’s) in a gamble, that is played out in and as that very history. The effect of Shelley’s rewriting is therefore to take up the heritage of a debt so radical that it not only passes from father to son but cannot even be contained by the boundaries of literature, the well-marked borders of the book, which in this case also means that it is passed along from father to daughter. This is a debt that is passed on from one novel to another, from narrator to narrator, from St. Leon to his near namesake, Lionel, or perhaps better, now, Leon-el. Inheriting this debt is by no means indifferent. If St. Leon is the figurative (fore)father of Lionel, then Mary Shelley, who, it is more or less universally accepted in criticism of the novel, represents her recently deceased husband as Adrian and herself as Lionel, has enacted a crucial transformation. Taking up the narratorial legacy of St. Leon, she represents herself as a man. For Lionel, rather than the immortal St. Leon, to be the last man, and thus narrator of The Last Man, St. Leon must die. What that also means is that for Shelley to assume


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authorship of a novel entitled The Last Man, for her to assert herself as writer in the terms of the heritage she is encountering, that is, in the terms of St. Leon and St. Leon, where the gift of being last entails purifying oneself of the female, she must perform a self-transformation into a male narrator. Even if nineteenthcentury literary culture was to some extent ready to accept women novelists and narrators, the heritage Shelley is confronting was not. Lionel speaks precisely of this when, late in the novel, he describes his emotional reaction to Adrian’s apparently imminent death: “[H]e stood surrounded by a crowd, whose eyes turned in wonder on me, reminded me that on the stage of the world a man must repress such girlish tendencies” (404). The necessity of the repression of what is here called “girlish” on the “stage of the world,” the repression of a gendered sentimentality, speaks to a literary culture that might well not have been prepared to accept a woman narrator in a novel that does nothing less than trace a history of culture and in which that narrator figures as the sole heir of culture itself. In effecting her self-transformation, Mary does indeed engender (literary) history, which is not something that is passed from generation to generation, accepted or refused, (dis)placed or misprisioned19 so much as it is the confrontation with this very conception of history, with what it means to inherit, to inherit the status of subject and author, and the questioning of how one writes oneself as the survivor of that legacy, a legacy understood and experienced as plague. Shelley’s self-figuration as male narrator is far from being indifferent to the narrative and structure of The Last Man. For the novel moves not only toward the increasing isolation of Lionel as the last man, but to his assumption of the role of author and narrator, the narrator of what he self-consciously expands from a tale of the plague and its destruction of mankind into a tale of himself, a true autobiography. Early in the novel Lionel is civilized, introduced into culture, the human; he in effect repeats this same trajectory when he finally assumes his titular role, finding himself alone, the last man. It is then, perhaps inevitably, that the full implications of the assumption of subjectivity become evident. I entered one of the palaces, and opened the door of a magnificent saloon. I started—I looked again with renewed wonder. What wild-looking, unkempt, half-naked savage was that before me? The surprise was momentary. I perceived that it was myself whom I beheld in a large mirror at the end of the hall. No wonder that the lover of the princely Idris should fail to recognize himself in the miserable object there portrayed. (455)


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In Lionel’s mirror stage his failure to recognize himself as savage gives way to the specular moment of self-reflection, self-recognition, what he himself will soon call “self-knowledge” (463), and his recuperation for the “princely” claims of the substitute court of which he is the final representative. Lionel thus dresses himself in the garb of civilized society in order not to frighten anyone he might meet, completing his re-cognition of himself as subject and a potentially social being. To assume the plague of authorship, for Lionel, who soon turns to writing his story, is thus to assume the authorship of this self, self-authoring. And it is to assume this as the narration of a process of becoming-self, what takes place in both St. Leon and The Last Man as individuation and subjection. Perhaps only a narrator such as Shelley’s could adequately tell such a tale of the self-production of the subject in an act of originary freedom. Perhaps only a MaryLionel could tell of the engendering of the subject from and by itself, the birth of the subject through and by itself. Even more, perhaps only such a narrator could tell the tale of, and be, the last “man.” Lionel’s assumption of humanity here differs from his first movement from nature to culture in that subjectivity and the self have become absolute. Once he is alone, Lionel’s consciousness is the only consciousness, is in effect consciousness itself, and is now not that which he seeks to attain as the sign and guarantee of his entrance into civilization, but what he seeks to escape: “I . . . sought to escape from my miserable self ” (460); “I endeavoured to conceal me from myself ” (465). Yet how to escape the self? How to escape oneself when the last man? How, in the absence of another, of an other, to experience the finitude of the self? “It is I only that am alone—I, on this little hill top, gazing on plain and mountain recess . . . I only cannot express to any companion my many thoughts, nor lay my throbbing head on beloved bosom, nor drink from meeting eyes an intoxicating dew, that transcends the fabulous nectar of the gods” (459). Lionel is alone with his loneliness. His solitude is absolute. Yet if there is something of a logical contradiction to this state (Lionel cannot be the only person not to be able to express himself to another; no one else can either, because they are dead), it speaks to the necessary limits of the human, of consciousness and the self, to all of these as necessarily and by definition describing a relation to a constitutive outside, an other. This necessity is what constitutes the community that even Lionel cannot escape, no more so that he can escape himself, his self. Lionel will indeed express his many thoughts, and it is nothing less than this self-expression that will promise the possibility of a companion— and a community. Yet how are we to think this community in a narrative written at the end of humanity?


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This is, as Barbara Johnson has pointed out, an impossible experience.20 According to Johnson’s stubbornly literal, but no less impeccable, logic we cannot be reading The Last Man, for to do so would be to survive the last man and the writing of his novel. A reading of the novel would therefore inscribe us as dead readers, perversely inverting all the clichés about gaining immortality through literature. And in fact, Lionel would seem to write of nothing if not this precisely in addressing his readers: DEDICATION TO THE ILLUSTRIOUS DEAD. SHADOWS, ARISE, AND READ YOUR FALL! BEHOLD THE HISTORY OF THE LAST MAN. (466) This is but one of the numerous apostrophes to the reader in the closing chapters of the novel, but it is the only one that addresses the reader as dead. Even as such, the apostrophe inverts its usual effect, for, closely linked with prosopopoeia, it tends to animate the inanimate, to give a face and voice to nature, to bring to life, rather than to kill off, that which it apostrophizes. Yet even here, such (re)animation is not lacking, since reading is invoked as the motivation for the rising of shadows from the dead. Reading The Last Man might not be so different from what takes place in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, then, the (re)animation from dead remains, the only difference being that this time it is the reader who turns out to be monstrous. Despite his self-identification and naming as the last man, Lionel can never abandon the idea of the possibility that others remain, as the lines following immediately upon his dedication testify: “Yet, will not this world be re-peopled, and the children of a saved pair of lovers, in some to me unknown and unattainable seclusion, wandering to these prodigious relics of the ante-pestilential race, seek to learn how beings so wondrous . . . had departed from their home to an unknown country” (466). Thus, his first act of writing, when he finds himself alone at the end of the novel, is in the form of announcements on the edifices of public buildings of his existence and whereabouts. He writes, that is, in the name of the possibility of establishing a new community. But even when he has lost this hope, he still writes within a certain conception of community, a community still to come, and both writing and reading already represent just such a community inasmuch as they are what allow Lionel to escape himself, to experience his own finitude. Whether sprung from the loins of some unknown couple or originating he knows not how, Lionel cannot write without the idea of being read.


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“Patience, oh reader! Whoever thou art, wherever thou dwellest, whether of race spiritual, or, sprung from some surviving pair, thy nature will be human, thy habitation earth; thou wilt here read of the acts of the extinct race, and wilt ask wonderingly, if they, who suffered what thy foundest recorded, were of frail flesh and soft organization like thyself. Most true, they were—weep therefore; for surely, solitary being, thou wilt be of gentle disposition; shed compassionate tears; but the wile lend thy attention to the tale, and learn the deeds and sufferings of thy predecessors” (399).21 Between the two apostrophes Lionel indeed animates a monstrous reader and thus creates something of a monstrous community. He at one moment apostrophizes the reader as dead, imploring him or her to rise up and read, making the reading of the last man the at least figurative resuscitation from the dead. To read this book is not only to be inscribed as dead, then, but to survive death, to return from the dead. Reading, reading The Last Man, makes us the living dead. But in addition to invoking the past, these dead readers, Lionel also turns to the future readership of this apostrophe, that of the survivor of “some surviving pair,” a spiritualized humanity, though a humanity nonetheless. To read this novel, whether that means being brought back from the dead or simply surviving Lionel, is necessarily to belie the novel’s title, and not least because this reading is always figured as a human activity, perhaps even the act of humanizing that as such animates or reanimates.22 These two apostrophes therefore place the reader both before and after the writing of the novel, and both at the same time. If we are to take Lionel seriously and remain just as stubbornly literalistic as Johnson, assuming that the narrator will be read (and indeed he will), and if we are also to accept that he is, in fact, the last man, which is necessary if the narrative is to assume all its theoretical and, especially, historical weight, then the historical engendering of the narrator as a process in which a real woman becomes a fictional man is no accident and has everything to do with the logic of Lionel’s apostrophes to the reader.23 For only such a narrator could in turn engender his own readers, his own future, in short, what Lionel himself, speaking of his writing earlier in the novel, calls “posterity.” The last man/woman gives birth to his/her own future, to the future plain and simple, in fact, which also means giving birth to literary history. Nor need we understand such a birth merely figuratively.24 The temporal structure of The Last Man, which is to say the temporal structure of the novel and its writing and not merely that of its narrative, is not simply the projection or prophecy of a future. Mary Shelley may have tried to reduce it to this in appending a foreword in which she tells of having found the pages of a manuscript in the Sybil’s cave, from which she reconstructed the


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narrative of the last man. But this tale merely belies the reductive conception of time and history of a simple futurism. What emerges from the novel, however, is the temporal structure of what we might call the invagination of history. According to the simplest and most literalistic reading of the novel, the narrator tells his story, a conventional narrative in the past tense, to an audience still to come. This most pedantic reading of the novel, however, also confronts us with a more profound and much more telling paradox that shows the novel’s history to be structured precisely in the terms according to which Lionel’s apostrophes function. There is, after all, and has been for some time, an audience for The Last Man. For we read the novel, we read it now. This paradox, that the future audience of the novel is reading it now, might simply push us outside the confines of the narrative to note the more complex temporal structure ruling the novel: Mary Shelley published a novel in 1826 in which she projected (herself not least) into the twenty-first century and told a tale of the future, but which is read in the meantime, in the interval between its conception and writing, on the one hand, and the narrative it relates, on the other. Just as much as Verney and Shelley try to write beyond the ending, they equally posit a reading beyond the ending, but one that also describes the history of the novel from its writing up to the point its narrative takes place. We the readers of The Last Man are inscribed in this interval between the history of its production and the history it relates. We thus find ourselves in a rather singular situation, not so much because we or others still to come could potentially witness the possible truth of the narrative as the end of the twenty-first century approaches, such verifiability always being operative in futuristic fiction,25 but because we are also inscribed in the novel as its future readers after the last man. We are inscribed as the future readers of the novel.26 The outer edge of the novel, already hardly an edge, describing as it does the passage from novel to reader, a certain history, which the novel ultimately rethinks as the relation between the text and its reading, the outer edge, then, folds back upon the novel, making its future its own past.27 This does not mean, however, that the future is simply bound to repeat the past in a sort of historical repetition compulsion. Rather, the novel’s history describes a kind of future past, a future anterior, in which the reader is still to come in the future, but as the past. It creates a temporal pocket between the writing of the novel and the future story it narrates. This is the pocket in which we are inscribed, the time span from 1826 to 2100. But since we are apostrophized as the future readers of the novel, after Verney’s death, this pocket folds the novel’s future back over the temporal gap between writing and narrative. This first crossing thus forms a temporal pocket that exceeds the border that apparently marks off and contains


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the narrative. Even if we insist upon a difference in temporal registers between what we might call real and narrative time, this structure remains operative, though now it would describe the history formed by that difference, between phenomenon and inscription, our experience of history and our inscription—as readers of the last man. At the other “end” of the novel, there is another crossing equally formed by what is apparently a continual movement “outside” the novel’s boundaries. Verney relates his tale, one, however, that we know to be in many ways a figurative version of the same tale in Mary Shelley’s life. Just as Verney’s story relates back to a previous prefiguration in Shelley’s life, the novel’s introduction stands outside the narrative proper to account for its appearance, apparently explaining it away as a prophecy reconstructed from the leaves of a manuscript found in the Sybil’s cave. This ultimate move back to a mythic time, then, also folds back upon the narrative, for the Sybil’s tale is a foreknowing of the future, and Shelley’s own story functions as a historical prefiguration of the end of history.28 The past already contains the future, even the ostensible end of all futurity, within itself, and, since it is the fore-knowledge of the entire narrative, including Lionel’s apostrophes to his future readers, similarly creates a pocket engulfing the narrative that gives place to it.29 This crossing that takes over where the failed (chiasmic) crossings of the novel left off, this double invagination of narrative, which, the narrative we are concerned with being the narrative of history and its writing itself, is also the invagination of history, engenders not only its narrator, the transsexual Mary/Verney, but us, as readers, within its very invaginated space.30 What this implies is that invagination is operative, if only implicitly, not only when selfgeneration, say that of the subject, is at stake, but here also as the possibility of relation, the relation to an “outside,” an other. We are therefore both before and after the novel. If we survive the last man, if humanity continues beyond the borders of the novel and the narrative of the end of history that it relates, it will be as readers. This too is a very different kind of survival from a clichéd attempt at immortality through the permanence offered by literature and might be construed as a no less clichéd version of humanity continuing beyond Verney because it has learned to read its own mistakes and thus to change the course of history. But there is nothing so optimistic in Shelley’s novel. The novel not only apparently insists upon narrating the end of the human but refuses to postulate any definite form that the humanity its narrative still gestures toward as surviving Lionel might take other than as some sort of instantiation of intellectual beauty. The future is described merely as readers of Verney and of the monuments of Western culture, ethnocentrism not least among them. We are therefore quite


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literally Verney’s future inasmuch as we already read him. This is indeed an impossible experience, as Johnson points out, the impossible experience that describes reading as an event that cannot be phenomenalized and that locates it only in that ambiguous and perhaps equally impossible space of the invagination of narrative and even narrator. The novel does, then, move to a rethinking of community after the end of community it narrates,31 which, in the difficult logic of this invaginated temporality, is also before that end. It is crucial that this community be both before and after, for only in that way does it avoid any utopian foreshadowing or nostalgic gesturing toward a lost past. The community the novel narrates is the community of reading, not in the sense of some kind of more or less unified social field of readers, but the community formed by the very act of reading, the history of the communication that takes place between reader and text,32 like that between future and the past that it always already is, describing, in The Last Man, nothing less than history itself. This is a community that can be named such only to the extent that it no longer depends upon the logic of death and sacrifice in the novel, a thinking of absence and presence in the conventional terms of the Western tradition. The reader is neither absent nor present from the narrative, is absent from the impossible reading of The Last Man inasmuch as it is narrated by the last man, and yet always reads the novel, both before and after its writing. At once the condition of possibility and impossibility of the novel and its writing, reading constitutes the impossible community of The Last Man.


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CHAPTER SIX

鵽鵾

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etween two of Yeats’s best known pronouncements upon what he understood under the title of the romantic, there would seem to be an irreducible contradiction. For how are we to reconcile the assertion that “Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone” with the contrasting contention that he is among the “last Romantics”? The assertion of the passing of a “Romantic Ireland,” whether read as an embryonic elegy or a kind of death certificate, amounts to the narrative of a history as the relation of two points in time, two epochs: a (past) Romantic age set over against another era, one that might tentatively be qualified as modern.1 The continuity between these two distinct periods, the principle of their unity, and that which survives a certain death, is Ireland itself. For if “Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,” then what is in a certain way alive and present is another, a transformed Ireland, no longer romantic, but Ireland nonetheless. In order for Ireland to survive in a present and implied future, a distinct and determinate Ireland must be pronounced dead, gone, irrecuperably past. In short, for Ireland to have a present and the possibility of a future, it must be given, or give itself, a past, nothing less than a history. Yeats’s early work ostensibly collecting and recording Irish folk tales2 attempts precisely to give Ireland a past, to construct for it a history by establishing

B

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a distinct national (literary) heritage.3 Amidst this work, The Celtic Twilight shares with the literary movement by the same name “delicate impressionism, . . . shadowy themes, other-worldly longings and subtle wavering rhythms”4 and names the ongoing attempt to renew interest in distinctly Celtic themes, to identify a mythology as Celtic, all the while placing this period on both the far and near sides of the full realization of a cultural identity that would characterize the specificity of the Irish people. Yeats is not as far from the Mary Shelley of The Last Man as he might first appear, then, for implicit in this endeavor is a notion of the Irish as a community to be constructed imaginatively. Not unlike the utopian community Shelley’s novel moves toward but never achieves as its chiasmic crossings are missed and as the plague first makes a classless community possible and then destroys it, and not unlike the ideal of a rural community celebrated in the naming of places in Wordsworth, or the nationalistic fervor of Kleist’s conception of a unified German nation, or indeed the common destination of humanity in its progression toward the best in Kant, Yeats’s Ireland is defined in terms of the common. Not only is Ireland identified in terms of that cultural heritage that the Irish are said to share, but the Irish themselves, the truly Irish will be identified as common, commoners.5 For Shelley, Kant, Wordsworth, Kleist, and Yeats community is the basis for a thinking of both a particular social organization and, more importantly perhaps, the very possibility of history and culture itself. For not unlike Shelley, again, what will perhaps emerge as Yeats’s strongest statement of community and the history it instantiates will come not in the form of a writing of a common mythic and cultural heritage but in that of its transgression, a history that reaches beyond the borders of that heritage and reflects upon the very possibility of community conceived as a culture of commonality. As part of the attempt to realize that identity, to usher it into the light of day, the title The Celtic Twilight already puts its own project into question, for it also names itself as the very inability to do so, as the receding of that identity into a certain darkness. The Celtic Twilight in fact names the Celtic as not fully visible or, for that matter, invisible, neither light nor darkness, but as a kind of boundary condition, a passage and not what the passage either leads to or leaves behind.6 Similarly, although there can be little doubt about the existence of Ireland before it is labeled “Romantic,” whether that term is understood as describing a literary period or Yeats’s conception of what characterized a certain epoch of Irish (literary) history, a Romantic Ireland can now be understood in part as the name given to the attempt to realize the full self-consciousness of the Irish people. In the cultural and historical practice of collecting and recording folk tales, this takes the form of establishing a tradition in which


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common (in all senses) tales express a national identity. The realization of what would be an Irish cultural identity takes the form of a passage from a tradition of predominantly oral literature to its writing and recording in the effort to secure its permanence. The stakes of such a gesture are perhaps only too apparent: the trouble Yeats takes to record Irish folk tales for posterity and his express concern that they become the material for a distinctly Irish literature disclose an anxiety that these same tales, if they are not recorded, will play no part in a future history, will themselves be history, as it were, as dead and gone as Romantic Ireland, but without the commemorative verse. Like Hegel, Yeats’s gesture implies that the Irish might have no history without writing, no history without a narrative that would record that history, no history without the recording of narratives, tales, of the Irish folk. The collecting of tales and the term Romantic Ireland are thus the forms in which Ireland, as nation, can come to recognize itself as such. It is a question, then, of a certain conception of the subject, a movement, or at least an attempted movement, toward self-consciousness. In this case, what is at stake is the (heightened) self-consciousness of a nation with a distinct literary history, a history that will stretch into the future and eclipse other literatures.7 How, then, are we to reconcile the assertion of the passing of a Romantic Ireland with Yeats’s identification of himself as among the “last Romantics”? Can the discrepancy between these two statements be accounted for by an understanding of Yeats as a man out of his time, belated? And just what would it mean to be belated in this way, to continue to be identified in terms of the name of a literary-historical era now dead and gone? Rather than explaining the relation between these two pronouncements upon a Romantic Ireland (away) through the elaboration of a literary history in which Yeats recognized and overcame the early mystification of an idealized and romanticized view of Ireland, the phrases can be read as reconceptualizing the history of the nation in terms of the relation between it and a subject. And this remains the case even if both of Yeats’s statements (“we were the last Romantics”; “Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone”) refer to the same period, that is, if Yeats refers to his own Romanticism, like a Romantic Ireland, as something belonging to the past. For what this would mean is no longer that Yeats the Romantic survives the death of Romantic Ireland, but that Yeats survives Romanticism, is a Romantic and not one, is a Romantic and then no longer one. Considered in this way, Yeats’s pronouncements formulate a national history, though perhaps neither the one we might expect from him nor the one we are accustomed to hearing. What such a history would describe is how the nation has emerged on the far side of an era that is now past, irrecuperable, in short, history (“Romantic


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Ireland’s dead and gone”), while at least some of its subjects (Yeats included) continue to be very much a part of that same era (the “last Romantics”). Yeats’s Romanticism, then, would elaborate itself in terms of a subject that could actually survive and overcome the death of the national epoch that characterizes the subject, now, as much as it did when that epoch was still alive and present. This would mean that the Romantic subject has survived the historically determined field defined as “Romanticism” or a “Romantic Ireland.” Such a phenomenon should in no way surprise us, given that we are constantly reminded that even our own modernity (or postmodernity) is the heir of Romanticism. Still, what may well be an utterly conventional development of a literary history should by no means mask the claims made in its name. For such a conception of the subject and its relation to the nation would also mean that, even if constituted, given its very determining characterization, by a certain Romanticism, the Romantic subject is in excess of that constitution, survives and surpasses it. That this understanding of the subject as in some manner transcending its historical determination by the nation is explicitly formulated as Romantic is no accident. In fact, this very transcendence conforms more or less precisely to what has come to be called the Romantic ideology.8 The coincidence of Yeats’s conception of his own Romanticism, nationalism, and this ideology might easily be invoked with a view of extending the notion of the Romantic ideology to a certain conception of nationalism. Yet this description of Yeats’s Romanticism might just as well call such a conception of ideology into question, for if a purported characterization of the historical specificity of Romanticism could also describe a period of his career, then the characterization of the historical determinateness of Romanticism, a certain ideology, loses its historical power. The Celtic Twilight is of particular importance for a consideration of Yeats’s understanding of the Irish nation and the possibility of a distinct Irish literature in part because in that work he undertakes a description of the Irish, what he considers to be the Irish national character, in terms that are not strictly historical. His attempts to identify this character indeed appear historical in the first instance, for these tales, whatever their own mystical, supernatural, or metaphysical claims, are thoroughly historical inasmuch as they themselves define, at least in part, Irish culture. Yet the tales cannot be reduced to the status of documents whose sole interest is to offer the possibility of defining Irish character because they themselves form part of Irish history, because they are a definitive common point in Irish culture.9 After all, the very fact of their crucial position for any possibility of an understanding of what is called the “Irish nation” arises thanks to their role in retaining Irish culture by “keeping awake its conscious-


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ness of metaphysical questions.”10 History and national identity are here articulated inextricably with metaphysics, which necessarily puts into question the common understanding of the turn to metaphysical questions as a flight from history, and puts this view into question as itself not adequately historical. Here the history of a people is in no small part the history of its relation to the nonhistorical, to metaphysics.11 In The Celtic Twilight, it is the relationship between the Irish peasantry and the Sidhe that most clearly expresses this questioning. Still, despite their prominent place in the work of Yeats and others, and despite the preoccupation of criticism of Yeats’s early prose work with his conception of the Sidhe,12 it is by no means evident that the Sidhe could give direct access to the Irish national character. They do so, to be sure, by expressing the concern of the Irish for metaphysical questions of the afterlife, of good and evil, and so forth. But were their only role in Irish culture that of making possible the exploration of metaphysical questions, the Sidhe themselves might be of secondary importance, for the same questioning could be achieved through any number of other means and would merely transcend or sublate the Sidhe in its dialectical trajectory. In fact, their role in defining a specifically Irish culture or character because of their place in something of an Irish collective memory would seem rather tenuous, and it is this very precariousness, however paradoxical this may seem, that secures their importance for any understanding of the Irish. For to turn to the Sidhe, or the “Forgetful People, as the faery people are sometimes called” (54), in the attempt to fix an Irish identity is to turn to what is already a forgetting of the past, a forgetting, moreover, that can hardly be beside the point, the collection closing as it does with a meditation on the role of memory in returning the author to “forgotten mythologies.” Still, the particularities of the Sidhe are not indifferent to the description and definition of an Irish national character. Belonging neither here nor there, neither to an earthly nor a decidedly otherworldly realm, they are nonetheless qualified as a “nation,” and perhaps in that alone exhibit a certain affinity with the Irish. What the Sidhe and the Irish will have in common, what the Sidhe will in fact make possible for the Irish, is the crossing of borders, in particular that between life and death. The very characterization of the Sidhe in terms of a relation to the human will in a certain sense liberate the Irish from conventional epistemological paradigms through which character is conceptualized: “I have been told, too, that the people of Faery cannot even play at hurley unless they have on either side some mortal, whose body—or whatever has been put in its place, as the story-teller would say—is asleep at home. Without mortal help they are shadowy and cannot even strike the balls” (9).13


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It is a question, here, of a certain habeas corpus, the question of the body being laid to sleep or of something being put in its place. Shadowy, the Sidhe do nothing if they do not suspend that legal figure, “charming” humans as they do, imprisoning them in their spells, and embodying themselves through the Irish. Their own lack of a material existence is compensated for by their host. It remains uncertain, however, whether these periods of enchantment in which the Sidhe occupy the Irish recuperate or overcome the lack the Sidhe represent or whether the Irish become the material embodiment of a lack. But what is sure is that it is principally through the Sidhe that the Irish not only communicate with the supernatural but even transgress the limits of the natural to enter the realm of faery and, sometimes, return from that realm. Whether the Irish overcome or merely embody the lack the Sidhe represent, the negativity of this lack would need to be rethought. This is so because negativity itself, death, becomes for Yeats intimately bound up with wisdom, power, and beauty. And the Sidhe share with those Irish who experience wisdom, power, and beauty the dissolution of the self and knowledge, this dissolution constituting the foundation of vision. What else can death be but the beginning of wisdom and power and beauty? and foolishness may be a kind of death. I cannot think it wonderful that many should see a fool with a shining vessel of some enchantment or wisdom or dream too powerful for mortal brains in “every household of them.” It is natural, too, that there should be a queen to every household of them, and that one should hear little of the kings, for women come more easily than men to that wisdom which ancient peoples, and all wild peoples even now, think the only wisdom. The self, which is the foundation of our knowledge, is broken in pieces by foolishness, and is forgotten in the sudden emotions of women, and therefore fools may get, and women do of certainty, glimpses of much that sanctity finds at the end of its painful journey. The man who was the while fool said of a certain woman, not a peasant woman, “If I had her power of vision I would know all the wisdom of the gods, and her visions do not interest her.” And I know of another woman, also not a peasant woman, who would pass in sleep into countries of an unearthly beauty, and who never cared for anything but to be busy about her house and her children; and presently a herb doctor cured her as he called it. Wisdom and beauty and power may sometimes, as I think, come to those who die every day they live, though their dying may not be like the dying Shakespeare spoke of. There is a war between the living and the dead, and the Irish stories keep harping on it. (115–6)

What can be said with certainty of women is that they not only resemble fools, but even thereby are linked to the supernatural, to vision, and to wisdom. To be sure, there is a certain doubleness, and even duplicity, in Yeats’s representation of women. He at once links them to visionary wisdom that is largely


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unavailable to men and discredits them as fools (in the most common sense) for not having the wisdom to recognize their own gift. Yeats naturalizes (“It is natural . . .”) and types women as those who have a more frequent and direct access to wisdom, at the same time lending them all the pedigree of an association with “ancient peoples” that, later in the collection, will even more clearly come to signify that which is properly “aristocratic.” Yet no sooner is this privilege granted than it is articulated as the wisdom of “wild peoples” as well. If women are somehow linked to an ancient tradition with all its overtones of a validating civilization, then, no less are they linked to the wild, the savage, even the uncivilized. This is not by chance, since women’s access to wisdom takes the route of “sudden emotions” which represent, as with the Sidhe, a forgetting—the forgetting of the “self, which is the foundation of our knowledge.” The oppositions at work here are clear: on the one hand are vision and a certain wisdom, to which women and, perhaps, fools have relatively easy access and whose value as “the only wisdom” is recognized by both “ancient” and “wild” peoples; and on the other hand are men, who can find sanctity only at the end of a long journey. As the tale progresses to relate the anecdotes of two visionary women, these oppositions are radicalized as men are implicitly identified with the self and knowledge. In fact, what the two anecdotes of women who had the power of wisdom but did not appreciate it imply is that men are, in a certain way, wiser than those women partaking of “the only wisdom.” While Voltaire’s Candide might recognize the necessity of cultivating one’s garden at the end of the long and painful process of acquiring philosophical wisdom, a woman with the power of vision and yet concerned with nothing but the domestic cares of her house and children is clearly a fool. Her hysterics, her “sudden emotions,” may link her to the fool in leading her to the only wisdom, but ultimately she is too foolish to recognize the wisdom of her foolishness. The domestic is not only left to women, but it is left to women because they are too foolish to recognize that the domestic is of no real value, not, at least, when compared to wisdom and vision. This characterization of women not only relegates them to the merely domestic but denies them any possibility of recognizing the consequences of choosing to remain there. According to this text, women in effect choose their own suppression: they choose the inferior (the domestic) and do not even realize its inferiority. They thereby guarantee that they will never recognize their suppression and thus will never seek any way out of it. The narrator and the man whose story he relates, however, would, it is implied, know better. They would have their wisdom and know it too: “If I had her power of vision I would know all the wisdom of the gods.” This knowledge of wisdom is essentially self-reflexive in that it depends upon a kind of wisdom


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(knowledge) that could recognize and “know” wisdom. And yet, perhaps all that the man who would have (in the full sense of the conditional as a desire for) such a wisdom expresses is his utter lack of any wisdom whatsoever. For if he did in fact have this woman’s “power of vision,” he, like she, would be the site of the rupture that breaks the “self, which is the foundation of our knowledge,” into pieces. This man and the narrator are thus identified with the unified self and knowledge. They know what wisdom is, that women have easier access to it, and what that wisdom would mean, but they can never know that wisdom, can never be wise and know it too. The tale would seem to seek to relieve women of the wisdom of their wisdom by denying that disinterest in visions and preoccupation with the domestic might actually constitute an essential part of wisdom. But ultimately the tale tells not that the “foolishness” that gives women wisdom is foolish, but rather that their very foolishness marks the fracturing of a unified self that could be wise and know it. Women thus fracture a conception of the self-conscious subject as the foundation of knowledge and open the way for a wisdom that could no longer be described by such a model.14 Still, Yeats does not abandon a model of reflection in his attempts to account for the place of vision and the supernatural in defining the Irish character. Far from that, reflection itself is what defines the Irish as such, though the nature of this definition will ultimately put itself into question: Some French writer that I read when I was a boy said that the desert went into the heart of the Jews in their wanderings and made them what they are. . . . I am all but sure that the water, the water of the seas and of lakes and of mist and rain, has all but made the Irish after its image. Images form themselves in our minds perpetually as if they were reflected in some pool. We gave ourselves up in old times to mythology, and saw the gods everywhere. We talked to them face to face, and the stories of that communion are so many that I think they outnumber all the like stories of all the rest of Europe. Even to-day our country people speak with the dead and with some who perhaps have never died as we understand death; and even our educated people pass without great difficulty into the condition of quiet that is the condition of vision. We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet. (80)

If there is an explicit statement of the nature of the Irish character in The Celtic Twilight, it is here. Yeats’s contribution to a recording of Irish culture, then, goes beyond the historical practice of collecting, recording, and editing tales. He makes the crucial, if often overlooked, gesture of defining the Irish in terms that are not, strictly speaking, historical, not even in the sense of constituting a his-


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torical account of beliefs. Just as much as they contribute to the effort to join the Irish to their past (and prolong that past connection to myth into an indefinite future), making history the basis of an Irish literature and nation, then, no less do Yeats’s tales define the Irish national character and through it the possibility of an Irish literature in decidedly unhistorical terms. What has often been called Yeats’s “invention” of an Irish national character is thus situated in a work that in many respects has the appearance of being a mere collection of tales circulating among the rural Irish. Part of the difficulty of The Celtic Twilight is the difficulty, perhaps even the impossibility, of knowing what to attribute to Yeats. This is only all too clear when we consider that the opening tale of the collection, entitled “A Teller of Tales,” takes up an episode Yeats already related in his introduction to the collection Fairy and Folk Tales of Ireland (3–6). The difference between that work and A Celtic Twilight is as simple as it is telling. Yeats’s name appears as that of the editor of Fairy and Folk Tales, in which tales are often assigned an author,15 while he is presented as the author of The Celtic Twilight. And from its place in the introduction to the collection of tales, the story of Paddy Flynn, from whom Yeats claims to have collected much of his material, becomes itself a tale, the tale of the teller of tales. The change in status means not least that the very telling of tales, which had previously secured the authoritative status of a historical source seeking to appropriate a kind of ethnographic authenticity for the earlier work, is itself presented as a tale written by Yeats in The Celtic Twilight. Yeats’s own insistence that the tales in The Celtic Twilight are “literally true,” except for what he added “by way of commentary,” rather than simply being “founded upon fact,” by no means resolves the issue.16 This is so, first, because in what way the tales are “literally true” itself needs to be read, this truth not being fully self-evident; and, second, because the distinction between tale and commentary also demands critical intervention. Other than the change in the status of the author (or editor), from one text to the other, from historical source in a historical and cultural work to tale, the actual content of the tales has changed little indeed. This may be precisely to the point. Nothing changes in the tale, which changes everything, once its status in a work changes. In the midst of tales attributed mostly to Paddy Flynn, then, Yeats would seem to have added the myth of an Irish subject. The myth of a distinct national character finds its place in the tales (themselves myths in the full sense) collected from the Irish, thereby winning for itself an apparent historical validity and marking the indetermination of any distinction between the myth of a national character and the (historical) myths. The definition of a nation, a national literature, or a national character in terms of a common mythical heritage will always be susceptible to such a manipulation.


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Yet to call this characterization of the Irish either “Irish” or “national” would be, strictly speaking, misleading. While the Irish are defined as Irish, that is, as a culturally specific group, just what makes them Irish, the way in which they form images and reflections, in effect belies that specificity. First, the Irish are made “after the image” of “water, the water of the seas and of lakes and of mist and rain.” And this making “after the image” of water in turn means images form themselves in the minds of the Irish “as if they were reflected in some pool.” Being made after the image of water, then, entails imaging the medium of the image. Consequently, the Irish are in a sense nothing but the reflection of and upon what takes place in the process of reflection. Just as in the description of the visionary powers of women, the process of self-reflection as the basis of the subject and knowledge is disrupted. Here, water does not form a narcissistic image of the self meeting itself face to face, or face to image (of face), but rather of absolute reflection. The Irish themselves, even as Irish, in no way appear in the moment of reflection except to let others “see their own images,” to let others see the Irish as themselves, and even as more themselves than they have ever known (others “live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life . . .”). What is described as distinctly Irish and what is, moreover, described as the role of their visionary character, is never to appear as Irish but rather as reflection, as that which allows appearing to the self, selfreflection, to take place. If there can be said to be an Irish character, then, it would be described as the appearance of the other. The Irish are thus the condition of possibility of all reflection, that which allows the other to exist fully, and especially to know itself as such, the very possibility of the emergence of the subject through self-reflection. In this rethinking of the subject and of self-consciousness divergences from self-presence are decidedly different from the conception of plenitude and lack that seemed to determine the characterization of the Sidhe. Yeats’s understanding of a national character shares with other nationalisms the description of a group in terms of a model of subjectivity. What is more, his historical work in collecting Irish folklore for publication, I have said, can be understood in terms of the effort to realize the full self-consciousness of the Irish as Irish. How, then, are we to reconcile this historical practice with Yeats’s own “invention” of an Irish national character in The Celtic Twilight? For the force of Yeats’s description of the Irish there lies not so much in an understanding of the Irish as a group in terms of a unified, self-conscious subject as it does in the reflection upon such a conception of the subject and its experience of itself and the other. And therein lies the possibility of a truly radical politics as well.


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If the political aims of Yeats’s project can be termed emancipatory, if his nationalism can be seen as mobilizing resistance to a foreign occupation (either literal or in other, perhaps more surreptitious, forms) that could ultimately contribute to decolonization,17 it cannot be in the sense of liberating the Irish as a group to experience themselves as Irish, to experience their own cultural, political, and geographical specificity as a first step toward such decolonization. The implications of such cultural specificity are manifold. On the one hand, a nationalism based on these terms easily turns into a form of provincialism that, for Yeats at the very least, might never be overcome.18 On the contrary, the experience of this particularity, this nationalism, might be the very historical, political, material practice that could render nationalism obsolete because unnecessary. The Irish, in other words, given the material conditions to experience themselves as Irish, could move beyond this stage to the ultimate goal of each experiencing their “concrete particularity.”19 This, Eagleton’s purportedly “ironic” scenario, in which “emancipatory politics exist to bring about the material conditions that will spell their own demise,” however, runs the risk of being reappropriated by, or becoming complicit in, the material conditions that make this politics necessary. Do the Irish, in this case, seeking to experience themselves as Irish, “play into the hand of the oppressor”20 by submitting to reified and essentialized characterizations that are invoked in the name of justifications for their oppression? This is not to advocate foregoing cultural specificity, however, but simply to recall that the very movement from a common geography and, to some extent, culture to the construction of a national character needs to be interrogated.21 As improbable as this may seem, the nationalism implied in Yeats’s collecting of Irish folk tales, read in conjunction with his description of the Irish national character, may offer an alternative conception of the possibility of an emancipatory politics and a national literature. Conceived as made in the image of waters whose defining characteristic is a stillness that allows them to produce images, the particularity of the Irish, for Yeats, is to eschew their own particularity. As a group, they refuse to reflect upon themselves as a group, but rather withdraw in a certain sense into a reflective medium that allows those who look at them (and there is no reason why these others could not be other national groups) to realize themselves more fully. This withdrawal before and for the benefit of the other may appear to be the ultimate instantiation of oppression, the form in which the Irish are denied not only their cultural and geographic specificity but any sense of self whatsoever. Read in these terms, this description of an Irish national character would necessarily be at odds with the political


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goals of the project of realizing a full self-consciousness for the Irish through the recording of their folklore. If, however, the characterization of the Irish here is to be thought as something other than a neutralizing contradiction of the larger historical and cultural claims of The Celtic Twilight, then Yeats (whether he likes it or not, and whatever the realities of his later politics) presents us with a nationalism that could no longer be termed “nationalist” in any conventional sense. For while there is an indisputable concern for a national character here, the reconceptualization of the subject in non–Romantic and nondialectical terms as a reflection on the becoming-subject permits no realization of an Irish subject as such. If the Irish are exemplary national subjects, it is because their specificity is never to be a subject, and thus never to be an example. The allowing to appear of the other as other, the Irish allow themselves to appear only as other, as difference. The Irish perform a kind of mimesis, to be sure, but what they imitate is imitation; themselves defined in terms of creating images, they are made in the image of the making of images.22 Their becoming the very medium of reflection, instead of giving them over to an oppressor, in whatever manifestation, allows them never to be made in the image of anything not themselves, but also never to be made in the image of themselves. Their identity, though it can no doubt no longer be termed that strictly speaking, is to be made in the image of nothing other than the making of images.23 Perhaps it should come as no surprise, then, that a certain conception of Irish art will return to this same image of waters. While Yeats’s preoccupation with the possibility of a national literature during the period of his early prose writings is manifest, what has gone with little or no commentary is that even in The Celtic Twilight he sketches the genealogy of such an art. Indeed, there can be little question of the pedigree of an art that carries one to the beginning of human history. Having described a man who sang so beautifully that horses cocked their ears to listen to his song, the tale moves on to other voices: “Then some of the other men stood up and began to dance, while another lilted the measure they danced to, and then somebody sang Eiblin a Rúin, that glad song of meeting which has always moved me more than other songs, because the lover who made it sang it to his sweetheart under the shadow of a mountain I looked at every day through my childhood. The voices melted into the twilight, and were mixed into the trees, and when I thought of the words they too melted away, and were mixed with the generations of men. Now it was a phrase, now it was an attitude of mind, an emotional form, that had carried my memory to older verses, or even to forgotten mythologies” (138). Here and throughout Yeats’s tale of “Irish songs” (138), song and language are constantly on the move, no sooner mentioned than they dissolve or carry us


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beyond themselves. The movement traced is double. The song is dear because of its connection with the narrator’s childhood. The voices singing the song appear to coincide perfectly with nature as they melt into the twilight and are mixed with trees. The material basis of language, of song, is dissolved, liquified, but liquified to become, first, not water, but a certain light (“melted into twilight”) that has already been associated, in the title of the collection, with the larger cultural project of the volume, and to become utterly indistinguishable from nature (“mixed into the trees”). Even with this dissolution and mixing of song, its mental representation, a “thought of words” remains—only itself to melt and mix. Now, however, it is not a case of language becoming naturalized, for the words melt away and mix with the “generations of men.”24 Thus, faced with the dissolution of the materiality of language in the form of song, thought would seem to offer the possibility of salvaging at least a mental representation. Instead, the thinking of language ends up making language melt and mix, makes language no longer language, but something other, a hybrid with “generations of men.” It is not simply that this song reminds one of a certain history, with all the sense of tradition and heritage implied by “generations.” Rather, language crosses a kind of border, the border into history that marks its politicality, its ideology. Language becomes Irish history, melts away and mixes into the generations to the point that it becomes indistinguishable from an Irish heritage that will ultimately be identified as the proper heritage. The very thought of language, what we would normally think of in terms of representation, dissolves the representational claims of language to render it generation—history, that which is passed on from parent to child. The movement initiated by the song is thus unmistakably temporal. It permits the narrator to remember his childhood, rebinding him to his own personal history, then moves to even earlier histories in the form of “generations of men,” linking the narrator and his own childhood inextricably to the tradition implied by these generations.25 Finally, the song proceeds to a temporally indeterminate and ostensibly “forgotten” point, what we might qualify in terms of prehistory—mythology. The implications of this movement in time are clear. If the narrator is linked to his childhood and through it to previous generations by song and language, then these ultimately link him to “forgotten mythologies.” In fact, this process might well detail how the cultural project of The Celtic Twilight is to be realized on individuals to reestablish the coherence of the legacy of the Irish. Thus, the narrator is made part of a tradition and heritage defined in terms of an ancient history and mythology. Song and language, then, function principally to recuperate what was forgotten, though not utterly, it


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would seem, for the “forgotten mythologies” are arrived at here through the movement of memory. What Yeats here describes as the mixing and melting of language into nature and generations, he elsewhere speaks of as an even more explicit relation between “thought” and the “life of the people” made possible by a specific language. In the note to Mythologies, however, it is a question of a somewhat different language: “[The Red Hanrahan stories] were, as first published, written in that artificial, elaborate English so many of us played with in the ’nineties, and I had come to hate them. When I was changing the first story in the light of a Sligo tale about a ‘wild old man in flannel’ who could change a pack of cards into the likeness of a pack of hounds, I asked Lady Gregory’s help.”26 Is the timing of Yeats’s turn to Lady Gregory a mere accident? Is it by chance that he should seek her help when faced with a tale in which one “pack” can be changed into the “likeness” of another pack? Despite the fact that we are dealing out packs of cards here, perhaps something more than the luck of the draw, pure chance, is at work. Yeats’s turn to Lady Gregory at this specific point may in fact have something to do with the recognition that, as long as both dogs and cards travel in packs, a pack of cards might be passed off as a pack of dogs. What this very singular card trick would accomplish is giving the set of relations and significations governing the pack of cards the appearance of natural objects. What is controlled by the arbitrary rules of a game or of the relations between a number of signifiers when dealing with cards would thus appear to be naturalized, this naturalization of a linguistic system characterizing a kind of sleight of hand. And all this takes place based upon the similarity, not in the appearance of the two packs, but simply that conventional similarity delineated by their naming—as packs. Thus, if Yeats’s recognition of his need for help comes in rewriting this particular story, there is something more than an acknowledgment of linguistic incompetence at stake. The fact that the adequate style achieved in the collaboration with Lady Gregory results in rewriting the tales in “that simple English she had learned from her Galway countrymen” that made the “thought come closer to the life of the people” is hardly beside the point. Nor is Yeats’s own admission of incompetence with dialects.27 We are not far, here, from a questioning of the consequences of writing tales of a specific people (the Irish) in a language (English) that is not solely theirs. Put differently, it is a question of calling a spade a spade, or of calling the Irish Irish—but in a language not specifically Irish. The approach of the thought of these stories to the life of the people, then, takes place thanks to a certain simple English. In the terms governing the substi-


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tution of packs, this would mean that this simplicity, this more natural appearance that brings one closer to life (just as cards can appear to be dogs), is achieved through a substitution of one set of signifiers (a pack of cards, elaborate English) for another (a pack of hounds, simple English). The principle of unity permitting these substitutions, however, and what remains constant despite all of the “translations” is English—both in that the word pack governs the first substitution and in the form of the English language itself, as such, in the case of the collaboration between Yeats and Lady Gregory. English is at once what allows the substitutions to appear to bring us closer to life (dogs, the life of the people) and that which disappears behind that appearance. As soon as a certain English achieves a lifelike or natural appearance, and perhaps even the appearance of being the natural language for the writing of Irish tales, its very status as a specific language disappears behind this appearance. Yeats would refuse such a characterization, no doubt; but his turn to Lady Gregory, while seeking a culturally specific language, nonetheless neutralizes that specificity by characterizing it as natural. Although Yeats’s note does not refer to his writing of The Celtic Twilight, the mixing of language into trees there has everything to do with the naturalization of language. At stake in those tales, however, is the perhaps even more crucial role of language in tracing a path to history and mythology. Throughout the tale, the melting of language has given way to a movement, as though language had become a liquid that could transport. Yeats thus continues to describe himself as carried on waters, his own metaphor for the remembrance of myth through song literalized in the form of his being carried to what in this tale is described as nothing less than the first myth: “I was carried so far that it was as though I came to one of the four rivers and followed it under the wall of paradise to the roots of the Tree of Knowledge and of Life” (138). What Irish song leads to is not only a personal or national past, not merely the remembrance of an ancient (Irish) mythology, but an ultimately prior mythology. Irish mythology gives way to an even more ancient, a more totalizing, mythology in such a way that one might see here a mixing of the Irish into the very origins of the Judeo-Christian tradition. This gesture secures for Irish art an ultimate precedence and priority. Irish art alone is identified here as capable of retracing the line that leads directly from the present to the ultimate point of inception of history. And it is not only a specific Irish art or specific works in the Irish tradition that trace this history, but any “song or story handed down [and thus itself already ancient in a certain way] among the cottages.” Indeed, although we can know little of the ascent of this art, we know enough, in fact, its origin—that the tales “ascend like ancient genealogies


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through unbroken dignities to the beginning of the world.” The melting and mixing of song and word into the “generations of men” thus means that Irish folk art not only traces or recounts a genealogy, it is, arises in the manner of, that genealogy that links the Irish to the beginning of the world. Such a genealogy ensures an unbroken link to that which is most ancient, most dignified, leading, not surprisingly perhaps, to an unsettling characterization of folk art as “the oldest of the aristocracies of thought” (139). The privileging of the Irish, or at least of certain Irish, the privileging of the folk and their art, both in this tale and in the political goals motivating the project as a whole, leads not to a reevaluation or reconsideration of either the folk or their art, but to the revelation that they in fact constitute a more originary aristocracy. Folk art is no sooner mentioned than it converges with, “mixes with,” to use the terms of the tale, a certain aristocracy. The political consequences of this mixing and convergence are manifest: nothing in the hierarchical system governing the terms has changed. One aristocracy is merely exchanged for another.28 Folk art has not only recaptured its “rightful” and “proper” position as the arche-aristocracy, but, as the “oldest aristocracy of thought” has recuperated its own dissolution in waters that allowed it to trace a genealogy to the beginning of the world.29 For what song and the thought of words had undergone to this point was a melting that allowed for the progressive movement back from a personal to a generational, cultural history, and finally to the memory of “forgotten mythologies.” Folk art thus becomes the thought of the thought of words, the thought of its own melting. It permits a transvaluation of negative characterizations of itself (the list of its qualities includes a number of traits that could well have been cited against it—it “refuses what is passing and trivial”; it is never “vulgar”). Consequently, it also recuperates its own forgetting as the “forgotten mythology” and “gathers into itself the simplest and most unforgettable thoughts of the generations.” No longer melted, no longer mixed with trees, it is now itself soil, the “soil where all great art is rooted.” Perhaps it is no mistake, then, that this same art led to roots of a certain tree—the roots of the Trees of Knowledge and of Life. For what would it mean for folk art to be at once that which leads us to these trees and the soil in which they are rooted? While the narrative of the melting of song leading to the most ancient of mythologies might be read as a simple allegory for rebinding the Irish to their past and disclosing their ultimate origin as well as that of their art, this narrative equally leads back to the point of a crucial choice. Within the terms of the tale, however, it is not so much the human desire to put on God’s knowledge that is in question as it is the much more limited knowledge of the history of the Irish, of “forgotten generations,” and their art. To know Irish folk art and


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to transform “forgotten mythologies” into “unforgettable thoughts” necessarily means choosing death, for that mythology is repeatedly characterized as a conversation with the dead and even as a crossing into death. To have memory and history, then, is to open oneself up to death. In this tale it also implies, however obliquely, the planting of a new tree. For folk art is the “soil where all great art is rooted” and no longer merely that which mixes with natural trees or carries one to the trees at the inception of mythology. Itself not yet great art, folk art is the ground and nutrient for all art that deserves the title “great.” The apparent priority given folk art is thus moderated as it is rendered the preparation for another art that will surpass it. Through the transport of folk art, Yeats therefore ascends to Paradise, in effect crossing through the very origin of death by returning to the Trees of Knowledge and of Life, and chooses the knowledge of Irish art’s history. This choice, this knowledge, leaves that tree behind, makes it part of both myth and history, and makes possible the planting of another tree in the soil of memory and knowledge won in the choice of the Tree of Knowledge. In this way, Yeats’s tale functions not merely as the myth of the origins of Irish art, but the tale of making the choice for the knowledge of that history rather than for life. This is the tale, then, of choosing death to procure the soil of an Irish folk art, mythology, and history.30 The emphasis Yeats places upon the greatness of the art rooted in folk art, the restoration of folk art to its rightful place as aristocracy, culminates in his conception of those who attempt to keep this tradition alive as truly understanding its place in society. They are few (“three or four thousand out of millions” [139]) and, as the trajectory that the tale follows to the roots of JudeoChristian tradition already implies, share the destiny of certain Jews: “And so it has always seemed to me that we, who would re-awaken imaginative tradition by making old songs live again, or by gathering old stories into books, take part in the quarrel of Galilee. Those who are Irish and would spread foreign ways, which, for all but a few, are ways of spiritual poverty, take part also. Their part is with those who were of Jewry, and yet cried out, ‘If thou let this man go thou art not Caesar’s friend’” (139–40). If earlier the Irish would seem to have shared, or perhaps even usurped, the position of the Jews at the inception of Judeo-Christian tradition through the tracing of their mythology even to the origin of that same tradition, here that is changed slightly. The Irish are like the Jews, to be sure; they take part in the same battle. But the Irish “who would spread foreign ways,” who do not watch over a certain “purity” in Irish art and tradition, are like the Jews who condemned Jesus. Despite the apparent favorable identification of the Irish with the Jews, then, the Jews are here doubly stigmatized. Those who call for Jesus’ death


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have betrayed him and thus are like those Irish suffering from “spiritual poverty”; they are Caesar’s friends and not God’s. On the other hand, those Jews who do not abandon Jesus are in effect no longer Jews. The tale effectively takes the form of a conversion narrative and places itself decidedly on the side of the converted: recognizing Jesus for the son of God, those Jews who show themselves the friends of God can be seen as among the first converts to Christianity. According to this characterization, there can be no Jew strictly speaking who is not spiritually impoverished. The journey back to the Trees of Knowledge and of Life thus establishes Irish folk art, and hence all great art, as decidedly Christian, perhaps not surprisingly either absorbing Jewish tradition or relegating it to the inferior position of having foregone the occasion of joining the only worthy, proper, history and tradition. Those “who were of Jewry, and yet cried out, ‘If thou let this man go thou art not Caesar’s friend,’” are like the visionary women who are not wise enough to know their wisdom. Given the identification of the Irish with the Jews, or at least those who “have understanding of imaginative things” and keep Irish tradition free of “foreign ways,” a certain Irish tradition in effect occupies the place left vacant by the Jews. Those Irish who keep their myths and culture pure—Yeats not least among them—at once do not betray their tradition (do not turn Irish culture over to Caesar—perhaps England, for them) and yet remain Christians. They thereby achieve what neither women nor the Jews managed—to maintain a tradition whose roots can be traced to the “beginning of the world” and that, unlike those of the Jews, are “unbroken” by the intervention of Christianity.31 There is perhaps no other place to end this collection of tales. God is in his heaven, the Irish in their rightful place, and all is right in the world. And yet there is another even more final ending related in The Celtic Twilight. In relating the tale of Paddy Flynn above, I have (with an ironic smile, no doubt) intentionally left one of his tales in reserve. It is the tale of a judge, of the ultimate judge, who is remarkable for his disquieting habit of smiling alike at the saved and the damned: “He was fond too of telling how the Judge smiles at the Last Day alike when he rewards the good and condemns the lost to unceasing flames” (5–6). Paddy Flynn is said to be cheerful despite, or perhaps even because of, a certain melancholy. Even though pestered by children, and suffering much that might depress him, he recommends “mirth and hopefulness.” And so he is repeatedly said to be “fond . . . of telling,” as though his hopefulness could be situated in his tales. Yet where is the hope to be found in this tale? What is there to smile about in a tale in which judgement is handed down to the damned and


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the saved with the same smile? How is one to read this smile? How to read the signs of the apocalypse? Yeats’s smile in putting first things last is no easier to read than is that of the Judge. He places the figure of apocalypse at the point of inception of his tales, tales that, according to the final tale, are meant not least to be the beginning of a recognition of the origins of Irish culture and the beginning of a great art, a great national literature. Indeed, in Yeats’s tales, and significantly in the tales in which he tells of the telling of tales, the first are last and the last are first. Yeats closes his tales at the beginning and reinscribes the Irish in that origin. And he begins at the end, where the damned and the saved are distinguished as such, but where that distinction is withheld from the judged and from Yeats’s reader alike. And therein, perhaps, lies the source of that smile, a smile no longer the sign of cheerfulness, but whose irony may well be directed at Yeats as well. For in all Yeats’s concern to retrace genealogies to an origin, in all his concern to recuperate forgetting and transform it into memory and the unforgettable, he may well have forgotten his own beginning. Yeats’s concern for beginnings (both of the Irish and of his role in providing the foundation for a future Irish national literature) would secure a certain status for the Irish (even as “chosen”), yet the very source of his tales, Paddy Flynn, and the first tale he tells, would suggest that the search for origins might be for naught, that the crucial orientation is toward the end. This is only reinforced by the emphasis on death throughout the tales. If the visionary power and unique character of the Irish derives from their relationship with and orientation toward death, then this tale would demand a rethinking of the search for origins. The last may be first and the first last, but in the end we cannot tell the difference. Whatever status the Irish might have acquired by being retraced to the roots of Christianity and myth, they are relieved of here, and greeted with a smile. Irony, in the end, has a certain equalizing force, though not because it puts all on the same level, but rather by refusing to tell exactly what direction we are headed in. In this, it is not unlike the plague in Shelley’s novel. And like the telos of history in Lyotard’s reading of Kant, it refuses to make the end an end. Like the narrative of the relation of names and naming to history in Wordsworth, it disrupts narrative consequence. Like language in Kleist, it refuses to tell us whether the battle has been won, or even where it is taking place. And it does so with a smile.


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Borders of a Lip Afterword

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Threats, Responses: An Afterword La politique, reprend l’auteur, est une pierre attachée au cou de la littérature, et qui, en moins de six mois, la submerge. . . . C’est un coup de pistolet au milieu d’un concert. . . . Cette politique va offenser mortellement une moitié les lecteurs, et ennuyer l’autre. [L’éditeur:] Si vos personnages ne parlent pas politique . . . votre livre n’est plus un miroir. —Stendhal, Le Rouge et le noir

iven the pervasiveness of historical, political, and cultural approaches to literature today, one might easily forget that our current critical climate has a history and that it has emerged in no small part as a reaction to what have been seen by many as disturbing trends in literary theory and criticism. Stendhal serves as a reminder of what has ushered that criticism in, his portrayal of postRevolutionary France, his understanding of what it means to chronicle the political, his presentation, that is, of what amounts to a succinct theory of political writing, recalling the stakes of a political literature and even criticism. Stendhal’s editor articulates the ethical and historical imperative of literature, an imperative that achieves its force as such by placing itself in opposition to the dictates of aesthetic pleasure. For him, any book that is not a mirror, mimetic, the representation and even reproduction of a politics, is clearly a threat that must be headed off, even if this means transgressing the aesthetic that would privilege the reader over historical accuracy. My intention in this volume has been to respond to that threat, perceived or real, in works which would appear to embody its aesthetic, as to the critical

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encounter that figures that aesthetic precisely as threat. Yet I have also taken up works with an apparently very different aesthetic, works in which history plays an obvious and central role, but where a (linguistic) self-consciousness not unlike that of texts often charged with historical irresponsibility is also at work. In reading such disparate works together, then, I have tried to respond to the charge of irresponsibility, to challenge the figure of this threat. For if an overtly political text, no matter how questionable its politics, partakes in the same reflexive gestures as a text charged with the forgetting of history (and it matters little here whether that text be critical or literary), then the threat can hardly be located in the language of self-consciousness or the self-consciousness of language. Attempting therefore to localize and characterize that threat, I have resituated it in neither of the poles traditionally laid out for us as critical tendencies in readings of history’s relation to literature, both of which are recalled by Stendhal: an aesthetic purism that would occult history from the (literary or critical) work, or a politicism that would reduce the work to a mimeticism, however complex. Resituating the threat of language and history means rethinking both in terms of their relation, and it is this very notion that radically alters the stakes of what I have called the “borders of a lip.” As we have seen, it is perhaps Wordsworth who articulates this threat most clearly in his construction of a scheme in which language and literature must be the effects of a prior historical event, no matter how seemingly inconsequential. Wordsworth’s historical imperative intimates the threat of freeing language from history, the danger, perhaps, that in the absence of a historical origin poetry may cease to be, or at least that it will no longer be grounded in events which would justify its very claims to existence. To the extent that poetry establishes the coincidence of place and name, it lends language a kind of natural necessity. A historical origin is imperative, then, in that it assimilates language to both nature and history, thus avoiding charges of historical irresponsibility, but also reinscribing history and community, the community of naming, in the life of nature, in effect naturalizing history. The articulation of the stakes of the threat of language and the necessity of history in an ethical imperative evident in Wordsworth is no less important in Kant’s linking of the individual with the universal in his categorical imperative, but also of the general necessity that his critical philosophy be practical and, therefore, that it engage with referents. Kant’s philosophy, like the conception of the postmodern it makes possible, demands that criticism, if it is to be rigorous, take the political as its referent and itself emerges as the sign of history insofar as it discerns the cultural progression toward history. Kleist’s Der zerbrochne Krug could equally be read in terms of the necessity that language, a letter from a judge, for


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instance, correspond to a given (in this case military) history, or that witnessing testify accurately to the events of a crime. In each of these instances—and similar examples could be drawn from the other works I have read here—a very conventional notion of history’s claims upon language, of language’s claims to a history, and of language as the intention of consciousness serve as the secure and securing ground for the possibility of knowledge, justice, poetry, the ethical. The threat of a language that might subvert these conventional claims, then, would appear clear: it is the threat of irresponsibility, incomprehension, of a fundamental breakdown in the system of philosophy, in literature, the law, and ethics. And yet, these same texts, like the others I have read here, at the same time they argue for such historical and ethical schemes and imperatives, also enact another history—with startling consequences. The history of Wordsworth’s practice of classifying his poetry refuses to subsume the “Poems on the Naming of Places” to consciousness, so that language can no longer be described simply in terms of intentionality. What is more, the poems themselves relate a scheme of historical consequence less than they figure the interruption of that scheme, an interruption, however, that ensures their place in (literary) history—as a distinct form of lyric poetry. In Der zerbrochne Krug, it is the fragmenting of the pitcher as aesthetic object, along with the fracturing of the language of testimony, which marks the limits of the law. The possibility of justice no longer depends upon an uninterrupted relation between language or the work of art and history, then, for history only emerges in all its historical truth when language, itself fragmented into its constitutive parts, or referring back to itself “word for word” rather than directly to a historical situation, is apparently rendered meaningless, its claim upon history forever in jeopardy. Lyotard similarly shows how Kant’s theorizing of critical philosophy as by definition at once irreducibly removed from intuition and demanding an engagement with the world ultimately depends upon a particular conception of the symbol. The symbol allows critical philosophy to articulate itself as such, as a practical, ethical discourse, by means of a mode of presentation that at the same time maintains philosophy’s independence from the world. In each of these chapters, the thematics of language as name, symbol, or speech act, while it would seem to guarantee the status of history, politics, ethics, or justice in the most conventional terms, is countered by the rhetorical, semantic, and performative claims of language. What emerges from this encounter is not a negation or denial of either side of the encounter or of the metaphysical categories it guarantees. Rather, what makes each of these possible is no longer a language of referentiality, a direct and uninterrupted link between language and the world, but the disruption of that link. The interruption of the mirror of lit-


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erature and criticism that posed the threat of (an aesthetics of ) language in fact emerges as language’s response to that threat, the promise of the possibility of responsibility, justice, the ethical, and a history and politics that would not succumb to the rhetorical ploys of decrying language and self-consciousness as a threat, a history and politics that would be rigorously critical. The disruption of the mirror, far from relegating literature to the realm of an inoffensive and amusing pleasure that no longer speaks politics, figures the promise of a political literature and criticism. It is no doubt crucial in this context that the most obviously political texts I have read make just such direct claims upon history in the clearest and most forceful terms. This is the case, to be sure, of Kleist’s attempt to stir the Germans to oust Napoleon from their territory by means of the deployment of the borders of the lip. But it is no less evident in Yeats’s cultural and nationalist project of realizing the self-consciousness of the Irish as a people with a mythic and literary heritage recorded in his own work, or in Shelley’s representation of an England that, marrying itself with the very origin of Western culture in Greece, would assert its ascendancy over the barbity of the East, ensuring that the last man and The Last Man are English. Each of these works relates differently a politics that is enacted, often in the most violent fashion imaginable, when a particular conception of culture or the nation works directly upon a given historical situation. Yet history is never experienced simply in terms of the immediacy of what is taking place, an event, nor is it simply a set of material conditions, however complex, in these political works. Rather, it is always understood as a repetition of the past or prefiguration of the future, sometimes as both, which is to say that it is mediated by another history—the history that has been or that is yet to come. Die Hermannsschlacht calls upon an ancient battle as the model for an intervention in a nationalist struggle, its gesture to the past binding the present political situation with the future as well inasmuch as it is not only to usher in an era of freedom and German national unity but to lead to further literary production, the writing of works in celebration of that unity. The Last Man similarly turns to the French Revolution and the Romantic conception of the subject in its construction of the future destruction of the human race. More important yet, it gestures to a readership outside the very history it narrates, the history of human history, as the possibility of its own reading and of another history. And Yeats’s turn to the forgotten roots of great literature in folk art equally posits a mythic and literary past as the grounds for a present political intervention in the form of a realization of an Irish national identity. The history of each these texts, then, is never simply an immediate referential reality but rather the experience of that world in terms of a temporally remote instance


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that alone gives the experience of history its meaning. And what comes to mediate historical experience is not only a temporal difference but the difference made by language, story, literature: the history being repeated is not simply an event but that event made legend or myth; and the history prefigured can as such equally only be fiction. The history told here, then, is always and already the repetition or prefiguration of a temporal and linguistic difference, the history of its own relation to, and difference from, another history, another story. Nor, in a sense, do these histories ever claim to be anything else. Those moments at which they make claims of immediacy upon an empirical and historical reality are belied by their understanding of themselves also and at the same time as being a past or future linguistic event. Their own naive referential claims, where they occur, are thus exposed as an epistemological and linguistic error. Tellingly, in the most obviously political texts I have discussed, those of Yeats and Kleist, but no doubt in Shelley as well, this error takes place precisely where these writers would stake their clearest, not to mention most troubling, claims upon a political contemporaneity. And something similar could be shown of Wordsworth’s narrative of a consequential history of his poetry and of Lyotard’s reformulation of a postmodern imperative. To emphasize the mediation of history by a linguistic instance irreducible to it is not simply a threat to history, then, for it saves history, the history to come as much as the history that has been, from the aberrations of language— understood as rhetoric, persuasion, no less—just as much as it marks the difference of language from history. The coincidence of the error of a naive referentiality with what must now appear a troubled politics is perhaps fortuitous (we might be able to imagine a highly laudable politics that would make similar claims), but it might equally suggest that the failure of these texts is not simply their politics but rather the understanding that they could intervene directly into the political sphere and control the effects of their interventions. This stance is the very politics, a politics of language, that will always have committed the epistemological and referential error whose exposure these texts themselves enable. And demand. For the coincidence of two competing notions of history and language, a historical coincidence in the profoundest and most rigorous sense, demands critical intervention if the works are not to be read simply as maintaining a given historical scheme or as subverting it. It is to this critical imperative that I have attempted to respond here. As I have read them, the works by Kant and Lyotard, Wordsworth, Kleist, Shelley, and Yeats demand a criticism that begins to account for the encounter of these two moments, like that of language and history. They demand a criticism that will begin to articulate that


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encounter. Which does not mean sitting on the fence between language and history, but rather reading that meeting place as the possibility for a different conception of both language and history—and of criticism. A language that at once makes claims upon history and denies the very possibility of its own claims. A history that declares its independence from, and priority over, language by marking its own borders, borders, however, that are inevitably crossed or fragmented. And a criticism that whose rigor is to disclose those borders without negating them or reducing the encounter that takes place there. A criticism, then, that reads the borders of the lip.

Borders of a Lip Notes

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Notes to Introduction 1. For Paul de Man’s famous characterization of prosopopoeia, see The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 48. While the phrase “borders of a lip” does not immediately constitute a prosopopoeia, it does conform to a figuration of nature (the river Lippe) in terms that can lead ultimately to this master figure. As de Man and others have pointed out, as soon as nature is granted a voice or, in this case, a mouth that might be capable of speaking, a larger figural movement is set in motion, according to which the voice or, here, lip supposes a face and thus prosopopoeia. 2. My consideration of the relation between language and history or reality in general here is indebted to Werner Hamacher’s brilliant exploration of that between language and objectivity. His argument deserves to be quoted at length. Under the sign of its semantic function, to which classical (Aristotelian) doctrine expects language—in its only truthful, that is, its predicative statements—to reduce itself, language appears caught in an aporia that itself admits only of aporetic solution: either it is explained away as an empty gesturing which must evanesce before the power of the factual, or it is granted all the weight of the only certain reality, whose forms [Typen] are stamped upon the entire realm of the objective and which alone first constitutes the status of objectivity itself. In the first case, language is destined to be extinguished before the presence of the world of things and their movements; for itself it is nothing, a mere instrument, in the crudest instance one of deixis, a means of reference which is to disappear where the things themselves appear. In the other case, once language is exalted into a schema for all reality, it can confront in reality only itself once again; it employs objects to attest to the efficacy of its figures, straying into a virtually endless process of repeating, without resistance, the forms prestabilized in itself. If in the one case language points to a reality to which it cedes all rights, only to step back from its light as its shadowy reproduction, in the other case reality retains only the rights of language in whose image it is created. The infinitude in the one model stands confronted with the infinitude of language in the other. In both cases, language and its inherent epistemological structures are denied the power of being a reality with its own rights and its own structure, a reality which

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Notes to Introduction could not be exhausted by any relationship of analogy, of representation, or of characterizing [Typisierung] other realities. Accordingly, both accounts of language, defining it essentially in terms of its functions as signification and reference, must fall into the paradox that when language finally reaches its destination, it is no longer either signified or referred to. There it would either give way to what it intends, or else it would remain only itself within that which is modelled after it. At the end of any semantic theory of language and of its truth stands the aporetic verdict: language does not speak; it has nothing to signify, being only itself or its disappearance. But this aporia arises only if we grant that reality shows itself merely as objectivity; that this objectivity materializes in its presence; and that, under the condition of its absence, projected in the image of such present objectivity, language is to step in, either as substitute or as prototype, to maintain or to guarantee the possibility of the objective. According to this ideal of a transcendental semantics—which organizes not just classical philosophical systems but even the most unreflective linguistic theories of language—language would stand as the proper place of origin for any reality cast as objectivity. (“The Second of Inversion: Movements of a Figure through Celan’s Poetry,” The Lesson of Paul de Man, Yale French Studies 69 (1985): 276-311, 276-77.)

3. David Simpson, Wordsworth’s Historical Imagination: The Poetry of Displacement (New York: Methuen, 1987), pp. 10–11. Whether or not Simpson’s criticism, even in this book, conforms to his promising characterization of language is uncertain, for what is enacted there is the more familiar scene of a returning of poetry to its historical instance, where language is left as the sign of that instance. 4. A number of different historicist approaches, but especially the “New Historicism” of Levinson, McGann, and other critics of Romanticism will be taken up in the chapters that follow. 5. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 57. Subsequent references will be made parenthetically in the text. 6. For a particularly insightful reading of Jameson’s claims for the unique status of a Marxian reading of literature, see Samuel Weber, “Capitalizing History: The Political Unconscious,” in Institution and Interpretation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), pp. 40–59. 7. “In what I call ‘the ethical moment’ there is a claim made on the author writing the work, on the narrator telling the story within the fiction of the novel, on the characters within the story at decisive moments of their lives, and on the reader, teacher, or critic responding to the work. This ethical ‘I must’ cannot, I propose to show, be accounted for by the social and historical forces that impinge upon it. In fact the ethical moment contests these forces or is subversive of them. The ethical moment, in all four of its dimensions, is genuinely productive and inaugural in its effects on history, though in ways that are by no means reassuring or predictably benign . . .” (J. Hillis Miller, The Ethics of Reading: Kant, de Man, Eliot, Trollope, James, and Benjamin [New York: Columbia University Press, 1987], pp. 8–10). Although I will also trace a subversive


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force in the pages that follow, I will argue that the imperative will have to be rearticulated in terms of a certain “as if.” 8. An argument against reading “major” and “minor” authors or works together in a study like this clearly adheres to a historical scheme, even the schematization that makes the writing of history the history of major works and authors. Not only does it privilege major over minor even by separating them off from one another and therefore guaranteeing that the minor will remain precisely that, even in the attempt to recuperate it, such recuperation itself being the surest sign of this secondary status. What I am suggesting here, then, is a notion of history that no longer conforms to such marginalizing tendencies and that emerges as the history of a difference that also cannot be explained fully in terms of the suppression of the minor.

Notes to Chapter One 1. For a perceptive account of this relation in the context of Kant’s work, see Cathy Caruth, Empirical Truths and Critical Fictions (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), pp. 82–3. 2. There has been no shortage of ink spilled over the titles postmodern and postmodernism. The confusion and difficulty of the terms is by no means diminished when dealing specifically with Lyotard, for he will at different times offer definitions of the postmodern that differ enough to make any amalgamation of them risky at best. I therefore content myself with Lyotard’s opening sentence to the final chapter of L’Enthousiasme, which, since it identifies the political with the postmodern, will also serve as a provisional definition of the postmodern: “[L]e politique kantien me paraît au plus près de ce qu’aujourd’hui nous pouvons entendre par . . . le politique” [The Kantian political seems to me the closest to what we can today understand by . . . the political] (105). We will return to this definition of the political toward the end of the chapter. 3. Jean-François Lyotard, L’Enthousiasme: La critique kantienne de l’histoire (Paris: Galilée, 1986), p. 31. All further references will be made in the text. Translations are my own. 4. Fenves’s complaints about Lyotard’s claims to originality in his reading of Kant fail to come to terms with this dynamic, for they rely upon a conventional and unproblematized notion of the original and its repetition: “Lyotard’s essay . . . not only suffers from an equally surprising inattention to the intricacies and disruptions of the text; its gesture toward ‘originality’ covers over an entirely unacknowledged debt to Jasperian readings of Kant” (A Peculiar Fate: Metaphysics and World-History in Kant [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991], p. 171). According to the structure of Lyotard’s positioning in relation to Kant, the repetition of the original is already implied in its very originality. 5. In the opening sentence of the first introduction to the Critique of Judgement (to which Lyotard refers in a note), Kant clearly points out the stakes of such a critique: “Wenn Philosophie das System der Vernunfterkenntnis durch Begriffe ist, so wird sie schon dadurch von einer Kritik der reinen Vernunft hinreichend unterschieden, als welche zwar eine philosophische Untersuchung der Möglichkeit einer dergleichen Erken-


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ntnis enthält, aber nicht als Teil zu einem solchem System gehört, sondern so gar die Idee desselben allererst entwirft und prüfet” (Kritik der Urteilskraft, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel, vol. 10 of Werkausgabe Immanuel Kant [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1968], p. 9). [If philosophy is the system of rational knowledge through concepts, it will be sufficiently differentiated from a critique of pure reason, as that which contains a philosophical examination of the possibility of such knowledge, while not belonging to such a system, but in the first place only outlining and testing the very Idea of this knowledge.] All further references to the Critique of Judgement are to this edition. 6. See Kant’s Critique of Judgement, tr. J. H. Bernard (New York: Macmillan, 1951), pp. 196–97. 7. Kritik der Urteilskraft, pp. 295–6, Critique of Judgement, pp. 197–98. 8. Cathy Caruth describes Kant’s project in precisely these terms: “Kant might be said to represent, in the history of philosophy, the attempt to deal rigorously with the referential problem by founding his theory on the very knowledge of its independence from empirical referents” (Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996], p. 77). 9. Françoise Proust gives a thorough account of the symbol and a Kantian conception of history in Kant, le ton de l’histoire (Paris: Payot, 1991), p. 227–31. 10. Kimberly Hutchings points out that, at least at a certain point in his thinking, Lyotard declared himself to be against critique (Kant, Critique, and Politics [London: Routledge, 1996], pp. 126–29). What would need to be explored, however, is not only the relationship between this notion of critique and Kant’s own, but what happens between this statement in Libidinal Economy and the understanding of critique put forward in Enthusiasm. 11. Fenves objects to a contradiction in Lyotard’s presentation of his own project. Lyotard claims that one must stick to internal critique and yet immediately turns to Wittgenstein to formulate his reading of Kant (Peculiar Fate, p. 172). What appears to be a simple, and damning, contradiction, however, might be read in Lyotard’s own terms as the way in which criticism must appear to be external while it in effect sticks to its own internal structure. 12. Cathy Caruth, Empirical Truths, p. 82. Further references will be made in the text. 13. I take the phrase from Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s La fiction du politique: Heidegger, l’art et la politique (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1987). Before entering prematurely into comparisons of Lacoue-Labarthe’s considerations of the political, one would need to consider that a discussion of Heidegger’s politics, as well as his view of the political, will necessarily differ greatly from a discussion of a Kantian critique of the political. Nonetheless, the fictionality (for Lacoue-Labarthe, the mythic nature even) of the political is worked out in different ways by both thinkers. A more detailed reading of Lacoue-Labarthe would show that not only is there fictioning involved in the political, but that philosophy itself is something of a fiction, since there is no longer any possibility for philosophy. Lyotard, however, calls us to begin to philosophize. 14. An understanding of the symbol or the “as if ” in Kant’s work was crucial to the development of what Hans Vaihinger’s monumental work has named the Philosophie des als ob.


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15. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel, vol. 3 of Werkausgabe Immanuel Kant (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1968), pp. 11–13. Lyotard also summarizes the passage in L’Enthousiasme (26–7). 16. Lyotard’s own narrative movement in Enthusiasm also traces a path from symbol to narrative, rendering in a narrative form the operation of the “as if.” In an essay on Lyotard (though not specifically on Enthusiasm) Nancy writes very intelligently of the role of fictioning and of the type. What perhaps limits his discussion slightly, however, is that he remains on the level of the concept (even if this concept is the concept of a fiction, for example) and never follows the actual narrative elaborated in Lyotard’s works. Whether or not such an approach would have produced an alternative reading would have to be shown. See “Dies Irae,” in La Faculté de juger, ed. Jacques Derrida et al., (Paris: Minuit, 1985). 17. This characterization of Kant’s text is more or less that offered by Jean-Luc Nancy in L’Impératif catégorique (Paris: Flammarion, 1983), p. 49. In a note, Lyotard expresses his reservations about Nancy’s reading, particularly concerning the role Nancy sees played by “fictioning.” If I seem to take the side of Nancy, then, it is because Lyotard’s own text will develop a certain fiction without which his argument could not support itself. 18. On the relation between the symbol and this kind of positing in Kant, see Caruth, Empirical Truths. A fuller account of the implications of the relation between symbol and narrative here would have to take into account Lyotard’s more explicit account of the role of narrative in legitimization. Critical readings of this conception are given by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe in “Où en étions-nous?,” in Derrida et al., La Faculté de juger, pp. 165-193; and Stuart Sim, Beyond Aesthetics: Confrontations with Poststructuralism and Postmodernism (New York: Harvester, 1992), pp. 83–100. For a fuller account of the relation between narrative and politics, see Bill Readings, Introducing Lyotard: Art and Politics (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 74–79. 19. “Lyotard’s thought is fundamentally political. . . . This is, to be sure, not a politics of programmes and prescriptions, and could almost be described as a systematic frustration of politics, through its refusal of the transcendental illusion which pretends to present in the real what can only, or at best, be an Idea of reason acting regulatively on political judgment. To the extent that this type of insistence appears also to be identified by Lyotard with the task of philosophy itself, then philosophy would be politics in this description” (Geoffrey Bennington, Lyotard: Writing the Event [Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988], p. 175). Since Bennington’s main concern in this book is to remain as faithful to Lyotard’s thought as possible, the implications of this identification of politics and philosophy are not explored, especially not in the relation to the “as if ” which also receives consideration there. As a result, exactly how philosophy would be politics and what kind of “politics” this would be is not immediately evident. 20. It might well be argued that this is the claim made by Heidegger’s politics in the 30s. It is, at any rate, in these terms that Lacoue-Labarthe describes National Socialism. See La fiction du politique, pp. 114-15. 21. The case could be made, however, that he does so in The Differend, especially given the lengthy development of the political effects of different language genres.


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22. Thomas Keenan, Fables of Responsibility: Aberrations and Predicaments in Ethics and Politics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), p.1. 23. Lyotard’s reading of a Kantian theory of the historical thus shifts the terms upon which just action and judgement are made from the law to what might be called lawfulness. The shift thus takes the same form as aesthetic judgement in the third Critique, that judgement that acts according to an end or purpose (Zweckmäßigkeit) without ever having an end (Zweck). Just as this is a judgement according to a purposefulness without a purpose (Zweckmäßigkeit ohne Zweck), the type of lawfulness allows a passage that takes place in lawfulness without a law (Gesetzmäßkeit ohne Gesetz). The form that guides the passage in fact guides all passages inasmuch as they are all made possible by the “faculty” of judgement and thus takes the form of judgement: the passage is always according to the rule (Zweck, Gesetz, and so on) that is denied its place as totalizing rule. We could easily extend this structure to the writing of Lyotard’s text itself, the writing of a fourth Critique in the absence of the writer of the previous three, and say that the Critique of Political Reason, Lyotard’s own critique, is Kantmäßig ohne Kant. 24. A good description of the dangers of passing one language genre off for another, especially when it is a prescription in the guise of description, is given by Bill Readings in “The Deconstruction of Politics” in Reading de Man Reading, ed. Lindsay Waters and Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), pp. 223–43. 25. Immanuel Kant Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel, vol. 7 of Werkausgabe Immanuel Kant (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1968), p. 140. 26. Critique de la raison pure, tr. François Picavet (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1983), p. 30. 27. For readings of how the categorical imperative in Kant always presupposes that it has and will be broken, see Gerold Prauss, Kant über Freiheit als Autonomie (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1983), pp. 103–4, and Nancy, L’impératif catégorique, pp. 13–14. 28. The charge has often been laid against Lyotard or deconstruction, or, for that matter, any thought or work that puts conventional understandings of the subject into question. The presupposition, explicit or not, is that without a self-identical subject the grounds for anything like a political decision (all deciding being political) or judgement becomes impossible. Lyotard’s work, however, puts precisely such overly schematic views of the subject and judgement into question, presenting a radical politicality based precisely upon the necessity of judgement. For an overview of such attacks on deconstruction, see Readings, “Deconstruction of Politics.” 29. For a useful gloss of the sign of history in both Kant and Lyotard, see Bennington, Lyotard (162–9). 30. The need to rethink the “we” is especially evident in a work such as Heidegger et les “juifs,” where it is precisely the question of a specific group (“les ‘juifs’”) who are denied their specificity as a group: Jews represent, for Lyotard, all repressed groups. And the status of the “we” is no less at issue when dealing with a “differend,” for the differend, as Avital Ronnell has argued, would put the very conception of the “we” into question: “Is


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the articulation of a ‘we’ possible where there is a real differend ? Or doesn’t the differend precisely disarticulate the ‘we,’ undermining the stability of the other?” (“The Differends of Man,” Diacritics 19 [1989]: 63–75). We might rearticulate the question to ask, doesn’t the “we” disarticulate the differend? 31. Kant’s Gessammelte Schriften, ed. Königlich Preußischen Akademie der Nissanschaften, vol. 7 (Berlin: Verlag von Georg Reimer, 1917), 120–1. Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. Victor Lyle Dowdell (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois Univeristy Press, 1978), pp. 4–5. 32. See, for example, Bennington, Lyotard (162–9).

Notes to Chapter 2 1. Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals: On a Supposed Right to Lie Because of Philanthropic Concerns, trans. James W. Ellington (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), p. 31. Werkausgabe Immanuel Kant, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel, vol. 7 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1968), pp. 52–3. All further references are to this edition and will be noted parenthetically. 2. “Lyrical Ballads”: Wordsworth and Coleridge, ed. R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones (London: Methuen, 1963), p. 217. Unless otherwise noted, all further references to the “Poems on the Naming of Places” are from this edition and are to line number only. Wordsworth’s notes to the poems are followed by a page number. Two poems were later added to the series—“When, to the attractions of the busy world” in 1815, and “Forth from a jutting ridge” in 1845. 3. Geoffrey Hartman, “The Unremarkable Poet,” in The Unremarkable Wordsworth (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1987), p. 213. 4. Levinson tellingly suggests that there is history and then there is History, that the grandiosity of the historical is crucial, when in a note to her essay on “Tintern Abbey” she quotes the Advertisement to the poems and writes, “It is one thing thus to distinguish spots of strictly local renown or those entirely undesignated, quite another to reduce an object of national consequence to a condition of anonymity” (Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986], p.140n.5). This sense that history, to be consequential, must occur on a grand scale may issue from Levinson’s interest in the “conditions experienced as an epoch as its given Real” (2–3). On the tendency in political criticism to turn history and the real into proper names and transcendentals, see Samuel Weber, “Capitalizing History: Notes on The Political Unconscious,” Diacritics 14 (1983): 14–28, and Geoff Bennington and Robert Young’s introduction to Post-structuralism and the Question of History ed. Derek Attridge, Geoff Bennington, and Robert Young (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 5. Levinson, Period Poems, p. 2. 6. Susan Eilenberg, Strange Power of Speech: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Literary Possession (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 65. Eilenberg distinguishes her work


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from that of the new historicists (xiii–xiv), but the argument here fits those of Levinson and McGann. What her excellent reading of the poems shows, however, is that given a less restrictive sense of the term, the “social power” (64) of language is not occluded in these poems but in fact asserts itself in the giving of names. 7. On catachresis, see Gérard Genette, Figures of Literary Discourse, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), pp. 50–1; Barbara Johnson, “A Hound, a Bay Horse, and a Turtle Dove: Obscurity in Walden,” in A World of Difference (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), pp. 49–56; Paul de Man, “Hypogram and Inscription” in Resistance to Theory, p. 44; and, Andrzej Warminski, Readings in Interpretation: Hölderlin, Hegel, Heidegger (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1987), xxxiii, liii–lxi. On the figure’s effect of producing monstrous figures, see de Man, “The Epistemology of Metaphor,” in On Metaphor, ed. Sheldon Sacks, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 18; and Caruth, Empirical Truths, pp. 39–41. 8. I am indebted to J. Douglas Kneale for bringing the somewhat surprising use of the word to my attention. 9. J. Hillis Miller, “Naming, Doing, Placing: Hopkins,” in Topographies (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 150. 10. This is to emphasize, as does Bialostosky, the importance of the conditions of the production of utterances. Bialostosky’s insistence upon the distinction of the literal and the figural (Making Tales: The Poetics of Wordsworth’s Narrative Experiments [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984]), however, is one the poems will not maintain. Jarvis’s argument that the “Disarticulation of place-name into place and name is . . . the symptom of a more general disjunction of signifier and signified, sign and referent, text and interpretation” is exactly to the point here (“Shades of Milton: Wordsworth at Vallombrosa,” Studies in Romanticism 25 [1986]: 484–504, 504). The emphasis upon the giving and taking of names in the Advertisement and throughout the poems might lead us to extend Jarvis’s “jokingly” classified poems as “Poems on the Placing of Names” to these poems as well. 11. One of the issues for a consideration of the series, and especially for a consideration of its claims to the title of an independent genre that I have only begun to sketch here, would have to be the role gender plays in the poems. Repeatedly in the poems this discontinuity is played out not only as a difference between nature and the human, language and consciousness, or even (as we shall see) experience and history, but as the difference imposed by, and perhaps even named, gender. For as a series the poems impose a relationship between naming, places, and gender: three of the names derive from women known by the speaker and in another a woman names a place after the speaker of that poem. Still, this relationship cannot simply be expressed in the most habitual historical terms according to which the development of literary genres can be traced to the roles of women authors and readers, for instance. Nor is it simply a matter of the representation of women as a distinct social group here, as in the more comprehensive case of the “low and rustic,” since there is very little representation at all of the women whose names are used. Much more, it would seem that the giving of a man’s or woman’s name raises questions of identity in such a way that naming continually


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emerges as inseparable from issues of gender, that in fact imposes gendered identities. On the question of the relation of gender to genre in the Romantic period, see, for instance, Anne K. Mellor, Romanticism and Gender (New York: Routledge, 1995). 12. See Heather Glen’s description of otherness in the poems (“Names and Signs: The Poems of Grasmere” in Vision and Disenchantment: Blake’s “Songs” and Wordsworth’s “Lyrical Ballads” [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983], pp. 303–38) and Geoffrey Hartman’s Saving the Text: Literature / Derrida / Philosophy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981): “[N]aming . . . is an anticipation of death, a formal and often fixating recognition of self or other” (19). Given this relation, it is somewhat difficult to see the poems as presenting a harmonious understanding of naming and death as do Eilenberg (Strange Power, 85) and Glen (320). 13. The minor status is attested to by the fact that they have been largely overlooked in Wordsworth criticism, especially as forming a group addressing specific poetic and linguistic problems, by standard studies on Lyrical Ballads such as those by Roger Murray (Wordsworth’s Style: Figures and Themes in the “Lyrical Ballads” of 1800 [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1967]); Stephen Parrish (The Art of the “Lyrical Ballads” [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973]); and Don Bialostosky (Making Tales). They have received much more attention recently, especially from David Simpson (especially Wordsworth and the Figurings of the Real [London: Macmillan, 1982], pp. 1–68), Jonathan Bate (The Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition [London: Routledge, 1991], pp. 85-115), and Susan Eilenberg (Strange Power of Speech, pp. 60–86). 14. William Wordsworth, The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill (New York: Norton, 1979). 15. See Paul de Man, “The Intentional Structure of the Romantic Image,” in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia, 1984). 16. Kevin Newmark, Beyond Symbolism: Textual History and the Future of Reading (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), p.7. 17. The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and J. W. Smyser, vol. 3, (Oxford: Clarenden, 1974), p. 28. 18. Frances Ferguson, for instance, effectively argues that language remains little more than an expression of consciousness, “its various forms . . . manifestations of the human mind.” Wordsworth: Language as Counter-Spirit (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), p. 41. 19. Alan Liu, Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Stanford; Stanford University Press, 1989), p. 494. Liu also provides tables that give an overview of the history of the classifications (505–8). From these tables one can easily see, for example, that the inscriptions and the “Poems on the Naming of Places” follow the same history in terms of their classification as an independent group or as a subset of another group. 20. See Eilenberg’s discussion in Strange Power of Speech, pp. 60–86.


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21. Any such classification would also have to take into account the acts of naming that take place throughout Wordsworth’s work. Some have noticed similarities between these poems and others in the Wordsworth corpus. J. Douglas Kneale, for instance, refers to the first spot of time in The Prelude as a variation on the theme of the naming of a place (Monumental Writing: Aspects of Rhetoric in Wordsworth’s Poetry [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988], p. 146). 22. Jacques Derrida, “The Time of a Thesis: Punctuations,” in Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy 2 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, forthcoming). 23. Tilottama Rajan, for example, has suggested that the poems never accomplish their goal: “Abstract as they are, the poems do not accomplish their project of carving out a place for themselves in regional literature, but rather name, in a circular way, the inscriptive function itself” (The Supplement of Reading: Figures of Understanding in Romantic Theory and Practice [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990], pp. 146–7). Eilenberg’s discussion of the poems’ property claims would suggest a rather more significant role for them, even beyond the boundaries of the strictly literary. 24. Of facts or matters of knowledge: Unknown; also, not certainly known, uncertain. 2. With which one is not acquainted or familiar, unaccustomed, strange. 5. Of places: Not commonly known or frequented; solitary, desolate, wild, rugged, rough. 6. Of an unfamiliar or strange appearance or form; having an odd, uncomely, awkward, or clumsy shape or bearing. 6b. Of persons: Awkward and uncultured in appearance and manners. 7. Unknowing, ignorant. (Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., vol. 18, “Uncouth”). 25. De Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979). 26. In contrast, Jonathan Bate reads the inscription as an unproblematic reintegration of Joanna and her name into nature (Romantic Ecology, p. 98). 27. See, for example, Thomas H. Schmid, “Strained Tenderness: Wordsworth, Joanna Hutchinson, and the Anxiety of Sisterly Resistance in ‘To Joanna,’” in Studies in Romanticism 40.3 (fall 2001): 401–425. 28. Thus, while it is undeniable that the poems are concerned with the recording of history, as Bate argues, their very figuration of history refuses to relegate it to the past, loss, memory, and their recovery: “In the Advertisement to the ‘Poems on the Naming of Places,’ Wordsworth also speaks of renewing the gratification of the feelings associated with particular moments in particular places. There is a central paradox here: recording is associated with history, with the past, with that which is lost. But the act of recording is an act of renewal. The ‘Poems on the Naming of Places’ have a profound doubleness: they register loss—the moment recorded in the poem . . . is irredeemably past—but they simultaneously serve as acts of recovery, in that the moment recurs as it is written about and imagined by the reader” (Romantic Ecology, 92–3).


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29. “Imagination” may be the most significant misnaming in all of Romanticism. On the problems of naming the imagination as they relate to history see David Ferris, Theory and the Evasion of History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), pp. 135–82; and Kneale, Monumental Writing, pp. 148–185. 30. David Simpson reads the scene similarly: “The gesture of self-correction is . . . surreptitiously implicated in the same problems as determined the initial crime. . . . The meta-comment which appears to consist in the naming of the place . . . comes to seem something of an act of transgression. There is no privileged language, and the moment of correction must itself involve an occluded repetition of egotism and self-satisfaction” (Irony and Authority in Romantic Poetry [Totowa, N.J.: Towman, 1979], pp. 74–75). 31. It may be somewhat rash to group Liu in the New Historicism without qualifications. His characterization of history as an “elsewhere” or a kind of “depth,” and his views of textuality and language do nonetheless have much in common with the prevailing view of the New Historicism. J. Douglas Kneale gives an excellent reading of these aspects of Liu’s work, calling into question the very terms of Liu’s project in a way not incompatible with the present essay, in “Symptom and Scene in Wordsworth and Freud,” in New Romanticisms: Theory and Critical Practice, ed. David L. Clark and Donald D. Goellnicht (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994). For Liu’s own reading of the New Historicism, see his article, “The Power of Formalism: The New Historicism,” ELH 56.4 (1989): 721–71. 32. In The Unremarkable Wordsworth (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1987). 33. Cynthia Chase, “Monument and Inscription: Wordsworth’s ‘Rude Embryo’ and the Remaining of History,” in Romantic Revolutions: Criticism and Theory, ed. Kenneth R. Johnston et al. (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990), p. 66. 34. Chase, “Monument and Inscription,” p. 73. Chase’s development of an understanding of the inscription’s place in literary history as well as of its figuration of history demands a reconsideration of the prevalent view that deconstruction has not come to terms with history. Far from that, Chase’s formulation of the structure of inscriptions shows how Wordsworth’s poem opens “a fissure which makes the work in another sense historical. It combines the historiographical with the unpredictability of a nonintentional act” (“Monument and Inscription,” 67). A fuller reading would be necessary to explicate this other sense of history and its reworking of more traditional views fully. I will only attempt a beginning of a reading of how Chase thinks of history as unassimilable to consciousness and representation (68). The poem she reads narrates its own history or historiography, telling how it came to be written, but makes part of that history an imperative to the reader to read the inscription itself. The poem’s history is thus not only left incomplete by its writing (it always depends upon a reading for its completion), it is left indeterminate, since an injunction to read makes it impossible for us to know if we are in fact reading. The poem’s own representation of its history is therefore at odds with a model of history as something that could be assimilated to consciousness, historical knowledge, or the representation of the act of reading. 35. In The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, rev. Helen Darbishire, vol. 3 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1952–63), p. 43.


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36. Geoffrey Hartman, “Blessing the Torrent” (in The Unremarkable Wordsworth, pp. 75–89; p. 83) is an extended meditation on the poem. His “Words, Wish, Worth” (in The Unremarkable Wordsworth, pp. 90–119) is also relevant to many of the issues raised here.

Notes to Chapter 3 1. Heinrich von Kleist, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, ed. Helmut Sembdner, 7th ed., 2 vols (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1984) vol. 2, p. 176. All references to Kleist’s work are to this edition and are to the appropriate page or line number. Translations are my own, but in consultation with Kleist’s Plays (New York: Continuum, 1982 ). 2. See Schiller’s Geschichte des Abfalls der vereinigten Niederlande. The same text is key to Kleist’s short prose piece Unwahrscheinliche Wahrhaftigkeiten, where, as is the case somewhat differently in both Der zerbrochne Krug and Die Hermannsschlacht, it is a matter of the crossing of bridges from one domain to another. On Unwahrscheinliche Wahrhaftigkeiten, see Carol Jacobs’superb essay, “The Style of Kleist,” in Uncontainable Romanticism: Shelley, Brontë, Kleist (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). 3. See the description of the fire in “Der Findling”in Sämtliche Werke, vol. 2, pp. 199–215. 4. Many critics have read the image on the jug as one representing harmony and the breaking of that image as the disruption of that harmony. See, for instance, Lilian Hoverland, “Adam und Frau Marthe: polare Verfahrensweisen in Kleists Der zerbrochne Krug,” in Heinrich von Kleist Studien, ed. Alexej Ugrinsky (Berlin: Eric Schmidt Verlag, 1980), pp. 59–65. Oskar Seidlin reads the political ceremony as an act of coming together or unity that is not unlike that of marriage in his article, “What the Bell Tolls in Kleists Der zerbrochne Krug,” Deutsche Vierteljahrschrift 51 (1977): 88. See also the excellent reading by Robert Labhardt, who claims that the break represents the breaking up of the feudal world order, in Metapher und Geschichte: Kleists dramatische Metaphorik bis zur “Penthesilea” als Widerspiegelung seiner geschichtlichen Position (Kronberg: Scriptor Verlag, 1976), pp. 185–88, and Bettina Schulte, whose reading corresponds to mine on a number of points, but draws very different conclusions (Unmittelbarkeit und Vermittlung im Werk Heinrich von Kleists [Göttingen and Zürich: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1988], pp. 96–130). Robert E. Helbling reads the pitcher as a symbol for the truth coming together, falling into place, which seems odd, since the pitcher remains decidedly apart, broken. (The Major Works of Heinrich von Kleist [N.Y.: New Directions, 1975], p. 128). 5. This clumsy translation is meant to show how Adam, as much as Frau Marthe, confuses the distinction between the image on the pitcher and the historical moment it represents, both representation itself and the act of abdication being rendered by a giving over, übergeben. 6. Among the many considerations of Kleist and the law, see Hansgerd Delbrück, “Zur dramentypologischen Funktion von Sündenfall und Rechtfertigkeit in Kleists ‘Zerbrochnem Krug,’” DVLG 45 (1971): 706–56; Lilian Hoverland, “Adam und Frau Marthe”; and Walter Hettche, “‘Ein Eignes Blatt’: Der Schreiber Licht und der Prozeß


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um den zerbrochnen Krug,” in Heinrich von Kleist, ed. Heinz Ludwig Arnold, Text und Kritik Sonderband (1993): 84–99. 7. On the relation of language and the law as jurisdiction, see the perception discussion by Jean-Luc Nancy in L’impératif catégorique. 8. Ilse Graham, though never drawing on a reading of the word Sache, also sees the question of matter as central to an understanding of the pitcher. Insisting upon Marthe’s stupidity, however, Graham never fully explores the implications of her statements, in particular for a conception of the law. According to Graham’s reading, in fact, an attentive reading of the stupid Marthe’s words can only open the critic up to laughter. But what if Marthe’s foolishness is of a Shakespearean kind? Who would have the last laugh then? See Heinrich von Kleist, Word Into Flesh: A Poet’s Quest for the Symbol (Berlin: DeGruyter, 1977). 9. The scene goes on to develop the play on the German words entschädigen and ersetzen, undamage and replace, in much the same way that it deploys the word entscheiden. Veit: Wenn Sie sich Recht erstreiten kann, Sie hört’s, Ersetz ich [den Krug]. Frau Marthe: Er mir den Krug ersetzen. Wenn ich mir Recht erstreiten kann, ersetzen. Setz Er den Krug mal hin, versuch Ers mal, Setz Er ’n mal hin auf das Gesims! Ersetzen! Den Krug, der kein Bein zum Stehen hat, Zum Liegen oder Sitzen hat, ersetzen! [Veit: If you can prove your case, you hear, I will replace [the pitcher]. Frau Marthe:Replace my pitcher? Replace, you say, if I can prove my case. You place the pitcher there, you try it, You place it there on the shelf! Replace it! The pitcher, that has no leg to stand, To lie or to sit on, replace it!] (423–30) Graham was the first to draw attention both to the importance of the pitcher as the “titular hero” of the play and to the play on the words that would express the possibility of replacing or repairing it. Once again, reading Marthe’s language as the manifestation of her stupidity, Graham never reflects on the possibility of a rethinking of the law it might present, even despite this lack of intelligence. 10. Frau Marthe can point out the law’s inability to literalize its own constitutive definition here only through her own play on the literal and material—the literal meaning of the word arrived at through its severance, as material sound, into prefix and stem. This is not to say, as has been claimed, that the figural meaning of the decisive terms is circumvented, that metaphor has been in some way “demetaphorized,” as Bettina Schulte characterizes Kleist’s handling of metaphor in the play (Unmittelbarkeit, p. 120). For


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Marthe’s complaint gains its theoretical weight not because of the literalization of the metaphorical value of the word entscheiden so much as because what her language, even as it cuts the definition of the law into its constitutive parts, refuses to do is decide. Frau Marthe does not simply understand the possibility of Entschädigung in the literal terms of a potential restitution of her pitcher, but always also as the definition of the law. 11. The invocation of Joseph and Mary at this point does more than lend them the validity of the origins of Christianity. The figures themselves might well contribute to the play’s rethinking of history, since as historical figures they are Eve’s ancestors, while in the mythological framework lent by the names of Kleist’s characters—Adam and Eve—Joseph and Mary are Eve’s descendants. They thus figure at least as the potential reversal of genealogical relations that takes place depending upon whether the play is read historically or mythologically. 12. A rigorous thinking of the nonintentionality of language would also have to extend beyond a conception of language as revealing unconscious thoughts, desires, and so forth against the speaker’s will, the terms that rule over much criticism of the play and of Kleist’s work in general. See, for instance, Peter Horn, “Das erschrockene Gelächter über die Entlarvung einer korrupten Obrigkeit: Kleists zwiespältige Komödie ‘Der zerbrochne Krug,’” in Heinrich von Kleist: Studien zu Werk und Wirkung, ed. Dirk Grathoff (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1988), pp. 149–162, p. 151; Hans Heinz Holz, Macht und Ohnmacht der Sprache: Untersuchungen zum Sprachverständnis und Stil Heinrich von Kleists (Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum, 1962), p. 74; and Labhardt, Metapher und Geschichte, p. 180. 13. On this tradition, see Derrida’s essay “White Mythology,” in Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). 14. See Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel. vol. 3 of the Werkausgabe Immanuel Kant (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1968), pp. 11–13. 15. Michelsen has similarly noted that “what is broken with the pitcher is thus . . . nothing less than the beautiful” (“Das Lügen Adams und Evas Fall: Heinrich von Kleists Der zerbrochne Krug,” in Geist und Zeichen: Festschrift für Arthur Henkel, ed. Herbert Aton et al. [Heidelberg: Winter, 1977], pp. 268–304, 303). Schulte effectively negates any importance of the aesthetic or the beautiful as such in claiming that the pitcher’s value is not determined by its status as a work of art but as a single and unique thing. This claim for originality would have to come to terms with similar claims for the work of art throughout the tradition of aesthetics if it is to justify itself. Moreover, both critics read the aesthetic in distinctly Hegelian terms and never consider the perhaps more obvious role of Kant. Despite its promising title, Mark G. Ward’s Laughter, Comedy and Aesthetics: Kleist’s “Der zerbrochne Krug” (Durham, U.K.: University of Durham Press, 1989) never undertakes a reading of the pitcher’s beauty. 16. Kant, for instance, maintains that aesthetic perception remains impossible whenever we attach interest to the object to be judged. See Kritik der Urteilskraft, vol. 10 of the Werkausgabe, pp. 116–17. 17. See ch. 1, p. 27 in this book.


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18. See Jacques Derrida, Force de loi (Paris: Galilée, 1990). 19. There has been a great deal of discussion of the variant’s place in the play, usually focused on its emergence after Goethe’s unsuccessful staging of the play, the excessive length of the final scene, it is said, unbalancing the play and causing its failure. For an extensive account of the variant, see Jochen Schmidt, Heinrich von Kleist: Studien zu seiner poetischen Verfarensweise (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1974), pp. 149–61. 20. “What we call ideology is precisely the confusion of linguistic with natural reality, of reference with phenomenalism. It follows that, more than any other mode of inquiry, including economics, the linguistics of literariness is a powerful and indispensable tool in the unmasking of ideological aberrations, as well as a determining factor in accounting for their occurrence,” (Paul de Man, “The Resistance to Theory,” in Resistance to Theory). 21. Ernst Ribbat reads this scene precisely in terms of the necessity of a reform that would extend beyond removing the corrupt Adam from his position to an introduction into written culture (143). See “Babylon in Huisum oder der Schein des Scheins: Sprach- und Rechtsprobleme in Heinrich von Kleists Lustspiel ‘Der zerbrochne Krug,’” in Heinrich von Kleist, ed. Dirk Grathoff, pp. 133–148. 22. Nonetheless, there is nary a critic to be found who will put this newfound faith seriously into question. Schulte, who does much to expand our sense of what is at stake in the scene, takes Eve at her word and reads the movement from language to the face, in both Walter’s and Eve’s speeches, as the sign of the invocation and acceptance of a personal relation to the law. Schmidt is also representative in his assertion that what is at stake in this scene is not an economy, the exchange between Caesar and God, for example, but nothing less than the truth (Heinrich von Kleist, 159). What remains to be read, however, is not least how Eve’s coin secures belief precisely in the truth (of her statement). Wolfgang Wittkowski perhaps goes the furthest in reading Eve’s gesture here as a submission to Walter; for him “her enthusiastic religious interpretation is entirely untroubled by empirical evidence or logic. The moment she mentions ‘erkennen,’ she takes leave of logic” (“Der zerbrochne Krug: Juggling of Authorities,” in Heinrich von Kleist Studien, ed. Alexej Ugrinsky [Berlin: Eric Schmidt Verlag, 1980], pp. 69–79, p.72). Finally, while pointing out nicely that it is Eve who is in control at the end of the play, Seán Allan also ultimately maintains the position that Eve trusts Walter (The Plays of Heinrich von Kleist: Ideals and Illusions [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996], pp. 81–95). 23. Wittkowski has commented that the “inspector, his money, the king, and God himself ” all represent “an authority one must and may want to trust. For Eve wants to trust. She can trust most easily in God and the life hereafter” (Heinrich von Kleist Studies, ed. Alexej Ugrinsky [New York: AMS, 1980], p. 72). My reading would suggest that something other than an identification between the diverse elements is involved. 24. Ribbat similarly draws attention to Adam’s use of appearance to manipulate Eve, but contrasts it with the visible fragments of the pitcher Babylon in Hisum, (144), a position I will put into question. On the question of appearance, see also Elmar Hoffmeister,


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Täuschung und Wirklichkeit bei Heinrich von Kleist (Bonn: H. Bouvier & Co., 1968), p. 26. 25. Avital Ronell, Finitude’s Score: Essays for the End of the Millenium (Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), p. 308. 26. Allan is perhaps the only critic to gesture in this direction, affirming that “Kleist highlights the absurdity of [the legal system’s] metaphysical pretentions.” Our readings depart rather radically, however, for Allan goes on to contrast this system with “the common sense understanding of human nature possessed by the likes of Walter” (Plays of Heinrich von Kleist, 95). 27. I take this phrase from Ronell’s brilliant reading of a contemporary case of sexual harassment, the Judge Clarence Thomas hearings (Finitude’s Score, p. 326). Despite the difference in historical and political context, there might well be more that brings these cases together than meets the eye. 28. James McGlathery points out the possibility of reading the German word Scheide in the description of the break in the pitcher in Desire’s Sway: The Plays and Stories of Heinrich von Kleist (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1983), pp. 59–60. McGlathery’s reading, however, stops at finding this an indication of Marthe’s slightly hidden sexual desire.

Notes to Chapter Four 1. Kleist, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, p. 821. All references to Kleist’s work are from this edition and are to volume and page number. References to Die Hermannsschlacht, in volume 1, are to the appropriate line numbers. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. 2. To claim that the play is limited by its attempt to engage in contemporary politics would need to consider the history of the play’s reception. Far from making it irrelevant shortly after Kleist wrote the play, the ideology of Die Hermannsschlacht (or better, its ideologies—depending upon the readers) is more often than not exactly what has attracted interest to the play, not least, to choose the most current example in Kleist criticism, in Hitler’s Germany. In an argument similar to mine, Peter Michelsen argues that the “reception history of the piece . . . is the history of actualization” (“‘Wehe, Mein Vaterland, Dir!’ Heinrich von Kleists Die Hermannsschlacht,” Kleist Jahrbuch [1987]: 115–135, 117). See also, Norbert Miller, “Verstörende Bilder in Kleists Hermannsschlacht.” Kleist-Jahrbuch (1984): 98–105. Miller argues that the play’s interest can be transposed over different periods, but only with a certain updating, in effect making it refer to “diesen Augenblick.” 3. Many a critic has damned the play, whether for its purported extremes of bestiality and hate, or for its apparent nationalism. The most oft-cited example of an attack on its excesses is Hermann Reske’s Traum und Wirklichkeit im Werk Heinrich von Kleists (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1969), p. 75. This approach to the play is also clearly expressed throughout Michelsen’s article. For a fuller consideration of the history of the reception of the play in Kleist criticism, see William C. Reeve, In Pursuit of Power: Heinrich von


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Kleist’s Machiavellian Protagonists (Toronto: University of Toronto University Press, 1987), pp. 23–5; Jeffrey L. Sammons, “Rethinking Kleist’s Hermannsschlacht,” Heinrich von Kleist Studies (New York: AMS Press, 1980), pp. 33–40; Siegfried Streller, Das dramatische Werk Heinrich von Kleists (Berlin: Rütten & Loening, 1966), p.183; and Rolf Busch, Imperialistische und faschistische Kleist-Rezeption 1890–1945: Eine ideologiekritische Untersuchung (Frankfurt am Main: Studienreihe Humanitas Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft, 1974), pp.134–155. 4. Many have placed the emphasis on something other than the play’s politics of nationalism, perhaps most notably in the line of inquiry arguing for Hermann and Kleist as fighting for a universal concept such as the existential self, freedom, or a Volk begun by Gerhard Fricke in Gefühl und Schicksal bei Heinrich von Kleist (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1929; 1963), pp.125, 162–3, 166. See also Clemens Lugowski, Wirklichkeit und Dichtung: Untersuchung zur Wirklichkeitsauffassung Heinrich von Kleists (Frankfurt: Moritz Diesterweg, 1936), pp.209–10. Lugowski, it should be noted, by no means remains on the level of an interpretation of the cause of freedom that would somehow justify the apparent nationalist ideology of the play. In fact, he notes how, after World War II, it is impossible to view the play from any such perspective. Another approach of note is that of Ruth G. Angress, who views the play in terms of antiimperialism in “Kleist’s Treatment of Imperialism: Die Hermannsschlacht and ‘Die Verlobung in St. Domingo,’” Monatshefte 69 (1977). See also Schmidt, Heinrich von Kleist, p. 222. 5. The contention that the play is of little consequence often takes the form of a refusal to comment upon it at all, often because it is seen as an aberration in Kleist’s career. See, for example, Elmar Hoffmeister, Täuschung und Wirklichkeit, p. 12; Walter MüllerSeidel, Versehen und Erkennen: Eine Studie über Heinrich von Kleist (Köln: Böhlau Verlag, 1961), pp. 51–2; John M. Ellis, who has done much to rethink the canonical reception of Kleist, nevertheless forgoes any reading of Die Hermannsschlacht because traditional wisdom has it that the play is not among Kleist’s best (Heinrich von Kleist: Studies in the Character and Meaning of his Writings [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979], p. xv); Schmidt also speaks of the unevenness of the play (26). 6. Perhaps the most thorough and oft-cited historical account is provided by Richard Samuel in “Kleists Hermannsschlacht und der Freiherr vom Stein,” Jahrbuch der Schillergesellschaft 5 (1961): 64–101. On the origin of Kleist’s nationalism, see Beda Allemann, “Der Nationalismus Heinrich von Kleists,” in Kleists Aktualität, ed. Walter Müller-Seidel (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1981), pp. 46–54. Important historical and literary-historical information can also be found in Gerhard Kluge, “Hermann und Fiesko—Kleists Auseinandersetzung mit Schillers Drama,” Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft 33 (1993): 248–70; and Lawrence Ryan, “Die ‘vaterländische Umkehr’ in der Hermannsschlacht,” in Kleists Dramen: Neue Interpretationen, ed. Walter Hinderer (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1981), pp. 188–212. Siegfried Streller is only one of those to maintain that the play is not truly historical: “Kleist’s Hermannsschlacht is no historical drama, but a political tendency piece, a drama with which Kleist, as with his political poems, wished to engage immediately in contemporary occurrences” in (Das dramatische Werk Heinrich von Kleists (Berlin: Rütten & Loening, 1966), p. 174.


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7. Reske, Traum und Wirklichkeit, p. 75. Perhaps the best example of this tendency is Michelsen’s fine article “Wehe, Mein Vaterland, Dir!.” Michelsen challenges not only the assumption that the meaning of the text can be reduced to biographical and historical determinants (117), but also readings that attempt to justify Hermann’s actions in terms of a desirable goal (122), putting into question whether his actions have any real motivation. Thus, he argues that Hermann’s hate is unnatural and arises from no experience (130–1), in effect damning the hero of Kleist’s play. While Michelsen also notes the tendency of Kleist criticism to use the drama as a projection screen for its own ideological concerns, he by no means reflects on the consequences of such a gesture, and thus effectively repeats it. 8. Although I do not have the space to adequately develop a reading of their strategies here, this is the basic model employed by Jerome McGann in The Romantic Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983) and Marjorie Levinson in her preface to Period Poems. Levinson develops a more rigorous understanding of the dialectical in her essay “Romanticism: The State of the Art” (MLQ 54.2 [1993]: 183–214). A very different understanding of the dialectical nature of Kleist’s drama, though not explicitly Die Hermannsschlacht, is put forward by Robert Labhardt in Metapher und Geschichte. 9. Heinrich von Kleist, Werke und Briefe in vier Bände, ed. Siegfried Streller et al., vol. 2 (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1986), p. 682. 10. Lawrence Ryan gives a succinct account of the historical Hermann (Arminius), of the historical situation of the battle at Teutoberg (9 A.D.), and of some of the discrepancies between the historical Hermann and Kleist’s literary character (“Vaterländische Umkehr,” 190–1). Other such divergences are discussed by Sammons (“Rethinking Kleist’s Hermannsschlacht,” 34-5) and Michelsen (“Wehe, Mein Vaterland”), who notes that, even in the definition of the ideal German elaborated in the play, Hermann is hardly a model German hero. 11. Not least, the French have been all too conscious of the fact that they were (and are?) the target of the play: the first French production was staged in 1995, at the Théâtre Nanterre-Amandiers. This fact might not be surprising (considering the relatively low esteem the play enjoys) were it not for the obvious fascination in France with Kleist’s other works. That production, using costumes that ranged from rough, “primitive” furs for the Germans to rather Napoleonic uniforms for the Romans, in some ways captured the nature of the relation between the two epochs, and beyond. 12. See Ryan, who argues that the play does not seek to bind itself to a tradition, but rather presents a break (Bruch) with such a tradition (“Vaterländische Umkehr,” 195). 13. Thus, while in a certain way the political intentions of the play can hardly be in question, one would need to reconsider the characterization of Die Hermannsschlacht as an “integration” of literature into time and society (Alleman “Der Nationalismus Heinrich von Kleists,” 47). 14. The figure of the fall is pervasive throughout Kleist’s work and has received outstanding commentary from Paul de Man in “Aesthetic Formalization: Kleist’s Über das Marionnettentheater,” in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University


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Press, 1984), pp. 263–90 and from Werner Hamacher in “Das Beben der Darstellung,” in Positionen der Literaturwissenschaft: Acht Modelleanalysen am Beispiel Kleists “Das Erdbeben in Chili”, ed. David Wellbery (Munich: Beck, 1985). 15. Historical accounts of the Battle of Teutoberg place the Cheruskan territory between the Weser and the Elbe (see, for example, Peter Rassow, ed. Deutsche Geschichte im Überblick 2nd ed. (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1962)]. One historian suggests that it is likely that Varus marched “toward the Rhine” (Wolfgang Menzel, Germany from the Earliest Period, trans. Mrs. George Horrocks, vol. I [New York: Cooperative Publication Soceity, 1899], pp. 100–101). The historical accuracy of Kleist’s depiction is hardly at issue, however, since the possibility that he relocated the sight of crossing to the Lippe would simply re-enforce the argument that Kleist is making something happen along the borders of a lip. It is not clear from the play either that Hermann’s land borders the Lippe, but again this is less important than the fact that it is he who masters all the crossings of it—in every sense. 16. As Reeve points out, many Kleist critics have taken Hermann at his word not only at this point, but throughout the play. Reeve, however, contends that Hermann does not mean what he says here (Pursuit of Power, 31–4), thus merely reversing the supposedly naïve position of those critics and assuming the same position as the other German princes, who later will also change their understanding of Hermann’s language. As should become apparent, neither position ever effectively questions how the difference between Hermann’s purportedly truthful and merely manipulative statements could be ascertained, nor how this difference produces a conception of the nation and nationalism. 17. Kohlhaas refers to himself as “einem Reichs- und Weltfreien, Gott allein unterworfenen Herrn” (2. 36), a “free lord of the realm and world, subject only to God.” 18. Ilse Graham would seem to have something like this in mind when writing of Hermann’s quest to establish a German nation as the symbol of himself in Heinrich von Kleist, Word into Flesh: A Poet’s Quest for the Symbol (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1977), p. 201–8. 19. Sigurd Burckhardt arrives at a very different understanding of the nation and of Kleist’s nationalism, suggesting that for Kleist the nation is no absolute and that German national pride is based for him on the fact that Germans are “stuck with” their nation (The Drama of Language: Essays on Goethe and Kleist [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970], pp. 121–2, 148, 150–1). 20. Despite his caution at taking him at his word, Reeve here accepts Hermann’s “word” as meaning what it says, though, perhaps tellingly, he characterizes Hermann’s gesture as the “surrender [of] his flesh and blood as proof and guarantee of his good faith” (Pursuit of Power, 61; emphasis added). 21. I translate, inadequately, versehen as “expect” to maintain some overall sense of the lines. It should be noted, however, that the word occurs with some regularity in Kleist’s work, as Müller-Seidel has shown, denoting a kind of error or oversight. Here then, Varus’s failure to continue to “look over” Hermann ultimately causes an oversight that will cost him his life.


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22. The wordplay can hardly be coincidental given the similar and even more obvious play upon the prefix ent- in the words entscheiden and entschädigen in Der zerbrochne Krug. See the discussion in chapter 3 above. 23. I take this translation from Carol Jacobs, Uncontainable Romanticism: Shelley, Brontë, Kleist (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), pp. 108–9. 24. See the discussion by Jacobs (Uncontainable Romanticism, 108–111) and by MüllerSeidel (Verschen und Erkennen, 142–3). Burckhardt also notes the similarities between the scenes, but finds them to underpin radical discrepancies (Drama of Language, 122). 25. And Hermann’s mastery of the Lippe is to no small extent located in the distinctly gendered nature of his Herrschaft. As Herr, he is of course always also a man whose mastery of the Lippe is exercised not least on his wife, the character whose apparent feelings for Ventidius pose perhaps the greatest threat to that mastery. Norbert Miller perhaps puts best what many critics of the play have thought when he says that Thusnelda is a Bärin, first of all, to Hermann, who acts as a kind of animal trainer (Verstörende Bilder, 104). James M. McGlathery finds an “element of erotic identification” in the scene, and continues to argue that it is Thusnelda’s “own repressed desire, not Ventidius’ insincere protestations of love, which has made her a foolish, amorous Bärin; her own attraction to Ventidius put him on the scent” (Desire’s Sway: The Plays and Stories of Heinrich von Kleist [Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1983], pp. 122–3). 26. Hans-Heinz Holz, for example, characterizes Hermann’s language in this way in Macht und Ohnmacht, p. 80. 27. For a more complete reading of this text, see the excellent essay on Kleist by J. Hillis Miller in Versions of Pygmalion (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), pp. 99–115. 28. Jacobs points out how in Prinz Friedrich von Hamburg Kleist fabricates the crucial name Hackelwitz amidst other historically valid names (Uncontainable Romanticism, 123). 29. Although I have already cited it in a note to the previous chapter, de Man’s formulation of ideology bears quoting once again: “What we call ideology is precisely the confusion of linguistic with natural reality, of reference with phenomenalism” (“Resistance to Theory,” p. 11). 30. George Bush’s famous imperative, “Read my lips: no new taxes” situates him in the fine line of rhetoricians in the tradition of Hermann. While the Savings and Loan scandal surely suggests that Bush was never willing to offer up his son and a dagger to authorize his words, Bush nonetheless insisted upon the comprehensibility and truth of his own statement in a figure (“read my lips”) that quite to the contrary states the necessity of a reading of that figure in terms of its own rhetorical claims to truth. 31. See “Über das Marionettentheater,” in Sämtliche Werke, vol. 2, pp. 344–5, and the excellent discussion of this scene by William Ray in “Suspended in the Mirror: Language and the Self in Kleists’s ‘Über das Marionettentheater,’” Studies in Romanticism 18 (1979): 521–46.


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32. The scene is adapted from Judges 19. 27–30, where the Levite from Ephraim similarly sends the body of his wife, cut into twelve pieces, to the tribes of Israel to incite them to revenge. The biblical scene figures prominently in the first chapter of Rousseau’s Essay on the Origin of Languages as an example of the energetic language in which the “sign has said everything before one speaks.” The same biblical story is the theme of Rousseau’s “Le lévite d’Ephraim.” 33. There is some debate as to whether the play represents a Kleistian Kehre toward the fatherland and as such is essentially a development, though in a new direction, of his previous work. Such is the opinion, for instance, of Lawrence Ryan (“Vaterländische Umkehr,” 209). Others see the play as a momentary aberration. See, for example, Schmidt (Heinrich von Kleist, 222). 34. “Schreiben eines redlichen Berliners, das hiesige Theater betreffend, an einen Freund in Ausland,” in Sämtliche Werke, vol. 2, pp. 415–17, 417. The text first appeared in Berliner Abendblätter in 1819. 35. “Empfindungen vor Friedrichs Seelandschaft,” in Sämtliche Werke, vol. 2, pp. 327–8. The text, which first appeared in Berliner Abendblätter, is an adaptation of a longer piece by Clemens Bretano. 36. Whether the objective of play and author are seen as worthy or not, this is the general critical consensus on the play. Michelsen perhaps puts it most succinctly when he notes that “the spectator should be drawn to a similar attitude” to the one represented in the play (“Wehe, Mein Vaterland, Dir” 132).

Notes to Chapter 5 1. Mary Shelley, The Last Man (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 9. All further references are to this edition and are to page number only. 2. See Stéphane Mallarmé, Un coup de dés, in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1945). 3. The fullest account of the poems taking up the theme of the last man is given by Steven Goldsmith, “Of Gender, Plague, and Apocalypse: Mary Shelley’s Last Man,” Yale Journal of Criticism 4 (1990): 129–73. 4. There is hardly a critic of the novel who has not engaged with the question of the French Revolution on some level. Lee Sterrenberg, for instance, writes of typical figurations of the Revolution in terms of disease (“The Last Man: Anatomy of Failed Revolutions,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 33 (1978): 324–47), and goes on to argue that in Shelley’s novel, the “plague is no longer revolutionary opinions, nor even simply revolutionary violence, but rather a real plague that cannot be censured or quarantined or fought or stopped” (331). 5. Perhaps the earliest and most influential argument along these lines is given by Walter E. Peck, “The Biographical Element in the Novels of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley,” PMLA 38 (1923): 196–219, but even the most recent criticism has not failed to


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pick up on the theme. See, for instance, William A. Walling, Mary Shelley (New York: Twayne, 1972), pp. 72–100; Walling’s chapter on The Last Man is one of the most extensive accounts of how Shelley’s reaction to Percy’s influence, both before and after his death, informs the novel. See also Goldsmith, although it should be noted here that Goldsmith’s essay, perhaps the most thorough and farthest-reaching account of the novel, eschews simplistic biographical accounts of the writing of the novel. 6. William Godwin, St. Leon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 119. All further references are to this edition and are to page number only. 7. My debt, throughout this chapter, to Jean-Luc Nancy’s La communauté désoeuvrée (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1986), and especially to its thinking of the human, sacrifice, and finitude, is profound. 8. Goldsmith has similarly noticed the tendency to express this entrance into culture in terms of dichotomy and hierarchy (“Of Gender, Plague, and Apocalypse,” 45). 9. And it is also, as Goldsmith points out, to be a man. 10. A number of critics have addressed the issue of the representation of the self in the novel. Giovanna Franci argues that the opening of the novel constitutes something of a “Bildungsroman which recounts the process of the production of a self” (“A Mirror of the Future: Vision and Apocalypse in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man,” in Mary Shelley, ed. Harold Bloom [New York: Chelsea House, 1985], pp.181-91, p. 184). In line with much subsequent criticism of the novel, Franci goes on to affirm that the novel “implies the end of the heroic affirmation of the individual” (p. 188). For Robert Lance Snyder, “consciousness is seen as contradictory, equivocal, and self-cancelling” (“Apocalypse and Indeterminacy in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man,” Studies in Romanticism 17 (1978): 435–452, 439). 11. See Barbara Johnson’s superb essay, “The Last Man,” in The Other Mary Shelley: Beyond Frankenstein, ed. Audrey A. Fisch, Anne K. Mellor, and Esther H. Schor (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 258–266; and Audrey A. Fisch’s extension of Johnson’s argument in “Plaguing Politics: AIDS, Deconstruction, and The Last Man,” also in The Other Mary Shelley (pp. 267–286). 12. Goldsmith and Jane Aaron, among others, have drawn attention to the fact that the plague is figured as female. Aaron’s argument is more or less representative of this line of criticism, arguing as it does that the plague “appears to symbolize the eruption of pentup female discontents, no longer affecting only the interior psychological balance of the individual, but exteriorised, on a vast scale, to threaten the continuity of the human race as a whole” (“The Return of the Repressed: Reading Mary Shelley’s The Last Man,” in Feminist Criticism: Theory and Practice, ed. Susan Sellers [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991], pp. 9–21, 17–18). 13. See the brilliant reading of the rapport between rumors and disease in Avital Ronell’s Finitude’s Score: Essays for the End of the Millenium (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994). 14. David Farrell Krell’s reading of disease in German Romanticism and Idealism traces the concept of contagion as precisely such a touching at a distance. Krell writes that the


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“apparent contradiction” of a simultaneous contact and separation (which would describe the nature of contagion in Shelley’s novel as well) “merely points to the problem of touching, which is the problem of contactless contact, the problem of contagion. . . . [T]ouching and being touched, activity and passivity, the elevated and the base, health and illness, good and evil—all these will no doubt be among the opposites that contaminate one another” (Contagion: Sexuality, Disease, and Death in German Idealism and Romanticism [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998], p. 56). 15. What I am arguing for here is the intervention of something like what Snyder calls indeterminacy or contingency. In doing so, however, I would want to rethink whether it is in fact the plague that represents “the radical contingency of existence” (“Apocalypse,” p. 445), since the plague clearly seems to have chosen certain survivors. This would therefore demand a thinking of a kind of determined contingency, however difficult and paradoxical that might appear. 16. The first of Lionel’s children to die may have been killed by the plague, but this is by no means certain, and Lionel himself speculates that his child might have survived had he been there to administer to its needs. 17. “With this last victim Plague vanished form the earth. Death had never wanted weapons wherewith to destroy life, and we, few and weak as we had become, were still exposed to every other shaft with which his full quiver teemed. . . . From this moment I saw plague no more” (426). 18. I refer, of course, to Shelley’s Matilda, in which the title character’s father develops a clearly incestuous love for his daughter. 19. See Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973). 20. Barbara Johnson, “The Last Man,” p. 265. 21. Lionel’s turn to writing has been read as the “higher ‘dream’” to which he turns once he becomes conscious of the “fallen dream of life” (Snyder, “Apocalypse,” p. 450). Morton Paley sees Shelley’s novel as representing the failed attempt of art to redeem the characters of the novel. See “The Last Man: Apocalypse Without Millennium,” in Fisch, Mellor, and Schor, The Other Mary Shelley, pp. 107–123, and Paley’s Introduction to the Oxford edition of the novel. 22. It is here that one might need to reopen the question of what Goldsmith calls the “imagining of representation beyond the conventional categories of subjectivity and authorship—a shadowing forth of conditions in which one is beyond the still-humanist assumptions of individual experience and intentionality”(“Of Gender, Plague, and Apocalypse,” 131–32) in order to think this questioning of the subject in terms of a certain conception of community. To claim that the novel “represents the end of the humanist subject,” as Goldsmith does (155), however, would have to be questioned, since just where the novel seems to go beyond the human, beyond Lionel, it recuperates that movement for a readership that is always understood as human. 23. See Stephen Goldsmith’s excellent account of the role of gender and of Mary Shelley’s narratorial transformation. Although in very different ways, both Goldsmith’s


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account and my own seek to rethink accounts of Shelley’s narrative that would simply have her succumbing to or hiding from the literary and cultural constraints of her time. Jane Aaron articulates just such a point of view: “On the one hand, she experiences herself as seen by others as representative of the monster figure of radicalism and the monstrous impropriety of the woman writer; on the other, she has taken upon herself, she has internalised, the limitations of her period’s prescribed feminine role, which, from our present-day perspective, and that of Mary Shelley’s own more radical acquaintance, in itself appears monstrous. Thus divided, she seeks to hide herself from the public gaze which has imposed such self-distortions upon her” (“Return of the Repressed,” p.14). 24. Something of this highly ambiguous temporal structure is what de Grainville’s novel Le dernier homme aims at, trying as it does to provide a memory of the last man before he is born. See Morton D. Paley, “Le dernier homme: The French Revolution as the Failure of Typology,” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, 24 (1991): 67-76, and A. J. Sambrook, Forum for Modern Language Studies 2 (1966): 25–33. 25. Many critics have noted that for a novel that many count among the first in the genre of science fiction there is remarkably little in the novel that is futuristic, in the sense of new technologies and so forth, save the mention of an air balloon. Perhaps it does not go without saying, then, that the novel also tells of a king who abdicates his crown in order to open the way for an English republic, an event that, while it might not constitute science fiction, indeed remains the stuff of fiction. On the relations between the novel and science fiction, see Johanna Smith, “Science Fiction: Short Stories, Frankenstein, and The Last Man,” in Mary Shelley (London: Twayne, 1996), and Franci, who calls the novel “a perfect realization of early science fiction” (“Mirror of the Future,” p. 186). 26. The double position of the reader as at once inside and outside the text would complicate Lynn Wells’s notion of Shelley’s narrative as casting “its desire forward to us as readers, looking ahead to an ideal audience that will not only listen sympathetically but interpret authoritatively, resolve its ambivalences, tell what it means” (“The Triumph of Death: Reading and Narrative in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man,” in Iconoclastic Departures: Mary Shelley after “Frankenstein” [Madison: Associated University Presses, 1997], p. 231). Reading, in Shelley’s novel, can hardly be configured as resolving ambiguities. Wells’s article, like my own, is indebted to Tilottama Rajan’s The Supplement of Reading. 27. By this, I do not mean to suggest that any distinction between past, present, and future is cancelled or surpassed in the novel, as Gregory O’Dea claims in “Prophetic History and Textuality in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man” Papers on Language and Literature: A Journal for Scholars and Critics of Language and Literature 28, no. 3 (1992 Summer), pp. 283–304. On the contrary, that distinction is absolutely necessary even as it is being crossed and folded. See also Hartley S. Spatt, “Mary Shelley’s Last Men: The Truth of Dreams,” Studies in the Novel 7 (1975): 526–37, 536. 28. It hardly seems adequate, then, to read the introduction as “illogical” because “the supposed finding of his written record” after his death removes all authenticity from Lionel’s claim to being the last man, as does Walling (Mary Shelley, 82–83). In the first place, this is not what the introduction tells of, for it is not Lionel’s record, but its


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prophecy that is at stake. More important yet, the discovery of the manuscript after the last man’s death would only reinforce the difficult logic of the narrative structure. 29. This temporal structure is considerably more complex than the “circular structure” suggested by Franci (“Mirror of the Future,” p. 182). Franci’s own assertion that “in The Last Man the ending remains unended in that all remains yet to be told; the real story has yet to begin” (p. 188) itself belies such a structure. 30. The figure of double invagination is developed by Derrida in “The Law of Genre,” in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge, 1990). For a brief but thorough explanation of the figure and what it represents for Derrida, see Rodolphe Gasché’s introduction to Andrzej Warminski’s Readings in Interpretation. This is perhaps the place to comment upon Fisch’s representation of deconstruction and the possibilities it offers for a thinking of politics. By representing deconstruction, in the guise of the plague, as the mere erasure of boundaries and borders, between the rich and the poor, the East and the West, for instance, and concluding that deconstruction works in the novel as mere destruction, Fisch conveniently sets up a straw man that will allow her to continue on to an alternative view. Thus, she ends with a version of what she terms “deconstruction” as offering the possibility for a “progressive politics.” But can a rigorous deconstruction really be thought of in terms of destruction? Does a representation of destruction in The Last Man, whether or not it can be shown to be at work, justify its assimilation for deconstruction? And how is one to assimilate the notion of the progressive and the implicit notion of progress it carries for deconstruction, which, it seems clear enough, would have to rethink both? 31. This runs against perhaps all criticism of the novel. Franci, for instance, asserts that “[t]he end of the world (and of the story of the Last Man) is also the end of a social relationship” (“Mirror of the Future,” 190), while Snyder claims that the plague “nullifies all hope of human relationship” (“Apocalypse,” 436), and Goldsmith maintains that the novel ends with Lionel “hopelessly in search of a community that no longer exists” (“Of Gender, Plague, and Apocalypse,” 168). I do not want to deny the novel’s radical questioning of the possibility and status of community, but rather to examine how it transfigures community and projects it into a beyond that is never only that. 32. For the notion of the finitude of the self as well as that of writing as the engagement of a community, I am indebted to Nancy’s La communauté désoeuvrée, and in particular the chapter on “literary communism.”

Notes to Chapter Six 1. The phrases “last Romantics” and “Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone” are from the poems “Coole and Ballylee” and “September 1913,” respectively (The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, vol. 1, ed. Richard J Finneran [New York: Macmillan, 1983]). As Michael North points out, Yeats is at once perhaps the most popular of modern poets and yet is not considered a modernist. In fact, it may well be that his own understanding of himself as not being modern in this sense, in fact of being antimodernist, is one of the prime reasons for his popularity. See The Political Aesthetic of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 21–22.


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2. Marjorie Howes notes that “it is generally acknowledged that Celticism invented the versions of Irish peasant culture it claimed to have discovered” (Yeats’s Nations: Gender, Class, and Irishness [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996], p. 32). Part of this invention, I will argue, takes place in the seemingly innocent act of collecting folk tales. 3. For a thorough summary of critical views of Yeats’s early work as well as a rethinking of many of these positions, see Frank Kinahan, Yeats, Folklore, and Occultism: Contexts of the Early Work and Thought (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1988), xii–xv. On the history of Yeats’s engagement with Irish folklore, see the very thorough account by Mary Helen Thuente, W. B. Yeats and Irish Folklore (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1980). 4. Austin Clarke, The Celtic Twilight and the Nineties (Dublin: Dolmen, 1969), p. 31. Somewhat surprisingly, considering the emphasis Clarke places on Yeats’s role in the movement, not to mention the fact that his book shares its name with The Celtic Twilight, Yeats’s tales are not examined in any detail there. North also gives an excellent account of Yeats’s place in the Irish Revival: “The Revival, with Yeats always very near its head, pushed Ireland on its way toward modern statehood while simultaneously pulling it back toward its primitive past. Ireland demanded from England both equality, which could have been granted within the Empire by economic and political concessions, and recognition of its distinct nationality, which could only come with a total break. Within its own society, Ireland had to decide between being a liberal state, citizenship based on abstract national right, and a nation, with a citizenship based on historical and cultural identity. A good deal of its political turmoil has occurred because of its inability to combine these two ideals” (21–2). 5. On Yeats’s representation of peasant culture and its relation to his Celticism, see Howes, Yeats’s Nations, chapter 2. 6. More often, the argument for the boundary status of this work, like most all of Yeats’s early prose works, comes in the form of a questioning of its ultimate literary value, whether in direct statements of its limited importance or in the tendency to read it merely as a stepping stone to his truly great work, his poetry. As I propose in the introduction, such arguments embody a notion of history, in this case a clearly teleological one (see page 9 and note 8 to the introduction). Since what is at stake in The Celtic Twilight is precisely a questioning of such notions of teleology, the work may well be its own best defense against the accusations against it. At any rate, the only way to begin to examine the presuppositions of these accusations is to resist them, in the first place, by reading. 7. Richard J. Finneran perhaps best summarizes this aspect of Yeats’s work when he writes, “A final purpose which Yeats had in mind when writing the collection was to provide a storehouse of Irish folk and fairy material. . . . It is clearly Yeats’s hope that future Irish writers would be able to draw upon The Celtic Twilight and similar collections and thereby create a truly national literature, avoiding what he termed the ‘poor babble’ of ‘cosmopolitan literature.’ Ireland was, Yeats thought, ‘a young nation with unexhausted material lying within us in our still unexpressed national character, about us in our scenery, and in the clearly marked outlines of our life, and behind us in the multitudes of our legends’ ” (“The Prose Fiction of W.B. Yeats: The Search for ‘Those Simple Forms,’”


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New Yeats Papers 4 [1973]: 14–15). While Finneran does an admirable job of raising the question of a national literature and a national character, he by no means explores the implications of his findings, especially inasmuch as he foregoes any reading of the workings of that national character in The Celtic Twilight. 8. See Jerome McGann, Romantic Ideology. 9. Clearly, I am arguing here that Yeats’s project, at least in its most overtly political aspects, engages in a struggle for cultural nationalism, which might then feed into more clearly political national goals. On the relation between these two nationalisms and Yeats’s shift from political to cultural nationalism, see North, Political Aesthetic, pp. 27–8, 29–30. 10. Cited in Edward Said, “Yeats and Decolonization,” in Terry Eagleton, et al., Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990). 11. This is the argument put forward by Edward Said, who expresses his views in a perfectly circular argument that may have much to tell us about such conceptions of the relation of history and metaphysics: “To leave the historical world for the metaphysics of essences like negritude, Irishness, Islam, and Catholicism is, in a word, to abandon history” (80). “To leave the historical world . . . is . . . to abandon history”: Said’s argument cannot but end where it begins, for he operates from the presupposition of a (dialectical?) opposition between metaphysics and history. What such an argument can never question is the historical claims of such a metaphysics or the metaphysical claims of such a history. Said approaches these questions to some extent, but almost inevitably by reducing metaphysics to an evasion or abandoning rather than a particular understanding of, and intervention in, history. See “Yeats and Decolonization,” pp. 69–95. 12. On the faeries and the Sidhe and questions of their characteristics, activities, and roles, see Kathleen Raine’s forward to Fairy and Folk Tales of Ireland, ed. W. B. Yeats (Letchworth: Colin Smythe, 1973) p. ix, and Kinahan (Yeats, Folklore, and Occultism, 43–76). See also Thuente, who makes the connection between the fairies and the dead, especially those who died suddenly or prematurely with Yeats’s doctrine of “universal moods,” as well as with the decline in popularity in fairy lore in Ireland (Irish Folklore, 133). 13. All citations are from Mythologies (New York: Macmillan, 1959) and will henceforth be made by page number. 14. Although the mediations would have to be worked out carefully, such a conception of the fragmentation of the self might be linked to North’s thesis that what Yeats, like Eliot and Pound, objected to in modern society was the individual as an absolute, selfcontained entity. Clearly, The Celtic Twilight works away from such a notion and toward that of community. Whether or not community is thought through in a fundamentally different way, however, is by no means evident, as I will try to show below. Marjorie Howes’s excellent study, Yeats’s Nations: Gender, Class, and Irishness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) traces the relation between gender and nationalism through a number of phases of Yeats’s career as well as through many important works. Howes also cites this passage in her very intelligent consideration of gender and a


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rethinking of the subject, but goes on to speak of the transcendence of the “boundaries of the self” (38). 15. Yeats’s contribution to the work, his poem “The Stolen Child,” speaks of one of the activities most commonly associated with the fairies. 16. “Art and Ideas,” in Essays and Introductions (London: Macmillan, 1961), p. 349. 16. “Nationalism is a word that has been used in all sorts of sloppy and undifferentiated ways, but it still serves quite adequately to identify the mobilizing force that coalesced into resistance against an alien and occupying empire on the part of peoples possessing a common history, religion, and language” (Said, “Yeats and Decolonization,” p. 74). Further references will be made parenthetically in the text. 18. Said, “Yeats and Decolonization,” p. 89. 19. Terry Eagleton describes this scenario as a “radical politics” in “Nationalism: Irony and Commitment,” in Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature, pp. 23–39. Despite his scepticism toward utopian politics in this essay, Eagleton’s own argument partakes of such a politics to no small extent: “If there are still political radicals on the scene in ten years’ time, it will be a grim prospect” (26). We no doubt need to be careful about reading such a statement overly literally in an essay on irony—but then again, just how one determines what is ironic and what is not is no small part of the difficulty. Nevertheless, Eagleton would seem to present us with two alternatives: either there will be no political radicals in ten years, which in the terms of his essay would mean that radical politics has put itself out of business by achieving its end—a utopian view (no need of political radicals in but ten years!) if ever there was one—or there will be no political radicals because they have all been coopted, exterminated, and so forth, which is a prospect even grimmer than that of a future in which political radicals continue their struggle. 20. Eagleton’s own phrase, though he uses it to characterize poststructuralism (“Nationalism” 23). 21. Moreover, it is by no means clear how, given the materialist description of the gradual (and dialectical) progression from oppression to the group’s experience of itself as group (the Irish as Irish, women as women, and so on) could lead to the individual’s experience of his or her “concrete particularity.” Eagleton’s commitment to “concrete particularity” is constantly interfered with by his own description of a kind of politics of groups. He claims that the “freedom in question is not the freedom to ‘be Irish’ or ‘be a woman,’ whatever that might mean, but simply the freedom now enjoyed by certain other groups to determine their identity as they may wish” (Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature, 30). But can we be so sure that this freedom exists for any group? This would assume, to adopt the terms of the day, that the identity of all groups is not already determined—culturally, materially, whatever. It would assume, in other words, that something like a group could still be the master of its own desire and identity, which is by no means certain. From the materialist point of view that produces this narrative of progress toward self-realization independent of any group, the very fact of belonging to a group will always be a constitutive part of the individual’s identity. For this experience of the self to take place, for the self to be liberated not only from an oppressive foreign


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power but from a group that as group remains equally foreign to it, a radical change away from developmental progress would have to take place. In fact, Eagleton’s analysis implies a long, slow progression that will ultimately lead to a point in time at which the Irish, for example, will no longer identify themselves as Irish because there will no longer be any need to do so. This would seem at once somewhat patronizing (“When all is said and done, you don’t—or won’t—really need to identify yourself as Irish, as a woman, and so on”) and to posit a subject that would no longer be defined in terms of a specific political, cultural, and geographic experience. The irony Eagleton invokes as offering the possibility of a liberation from group politics would have to make a departure from the materialist conception of history that presides over his own argument. And what might intervene to permit such a change and liberation is by no means clear. At the very least, it should be evident just how much the oppressor (especially if conceived in somewhat wider terms than a foreign power occupying one’s land or culture, if oppression operates according to a structure or mechanism—something like global capitalism or the fact of being identified with a group—no less restrictive than actual colonial presence) has to gain by such purportedly radical politics, for change and progress are slow indeed, and in the meantime . . . 22. On the political implications of such a model of mimesis, see Philippe LacoueLabarthe, La Fiction du politique, pp. 114–133. My development of the formation of images here owes a great deal to Lacoue-Labarthe’s discussion of similar issues. 23. In a very different way, Thuente also tries to show how Yeats attempts to represent Irish character by eliciting a sense of their humor, but also what is passionate and tragic in them (Irish Folklore, 112; 140–41). Although the characterization of the Irish I develop here does not in any way contradict Thuente’s argument, it would suggest a conception of the Irish in Yeats that cannot be reduced to character in its most conventional connotations. This could perhaps explain Thuente’s contention that “Yeats’s perspective in The Celtic Twilight is much less pointedly Irish” (132–33), although Thuente surely does not intend her comment in this sense. 24. On the important role of generation, genealogy, and aristocracy in Yeats, see Marjorie Howes, Yeats’s Nations, ch. 4. 25. Yeats wrote of his desire for a “symbolic language reaching far into the past and associated with familiar names and conspicuous hills that [he] might not be alone amid the obscure impression of the senses” (Uncollected Prose by W. B. Yeats, ed. John P. Frayne, vol. 1 [New York: Columbia University Press, 1970], p. 310). On this language, see Finneran (who also quotes this passage [Prose Fiction, 13]) and Raine (Fairy and Folk Tales, x). 26. On Yeats’s prose techniques, and in particular his relation to the short story genre, see William H. O’Donnell, A Guide to the Prose Fiction of W. B. Yeats (Ann Arbor: UMI, 1983), pp. 5–9. See also Finneran, who claims that Yeats was “either unable to develop a coherent theory of prose fiction or was not interested enough to do so” (Prose Fiction, 30). 27. On Yeats’s search for a proper style and his difficulty with dialects, see O’Donnell, Guide to Prose Fiction, pp. 40–1.


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28. On Yeats’s recourse to a conception of aristocracy to resolve tensions in his nationalism, see North (Political Aesthetic, 35). 29. North notes that the aristocracy serves Yeats as the means of reconciling tensions that his cultural nationalism had only served to perpetuate (Political Aesthetic, 35–37). Here, however, there is something perhaps even more troubling taking place, as Yeats assimilates the aristocracy within that nationalist project. Perhaps the view of the aristocracy, here, is merely the nascent form of that view Yeats would develop fully later; but in this tale, Yeats does not have to choose between “the people” (a folk) and the aristocracy, since the people are always already aristocratic, at least in the sphere of thought. Indeed, if it is a “freedom from material need” (37) that allows the aristocracy to stand for the whole Irish race, then the melting of language and the movement of thought here represent the means by which such freedom is won. 30. In a quite different reading, Thuente argues that for Yeats the “fairies will still be of occult insignificance but his literary hopes for Irish folklore obviously have come to focus on the human personalities and the narratives it offers him, on the peasants and ancient heroes who people legend, folktale, here tales and myth” (Irish Folklore, 154). 31. North’s description of Yeats’s subordination of race to the nation is exactly to the point here: “All his life, Yeats attempted to subordinate race to history, to argue that ‘certain native traditions’ as passed on from father to son and ‘mold the foreign settler after the national type in a few years.’ . . . Yeats created an even greater ambiguity in attempting to define a Celticism that is unified and yet not exclusive, even though it results from a mixture of races” (Political Aesthetic, 31).

Borders of a Lip Index

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INDEX

鵽鵾

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Aaron, Jane, 216n.12, 218n.23 aesthetics, 10–11, 98–99, 109, 189–90, 192 Allan, Seán, 209n.22, 210n.26 Allemann, Beda, 211n.6, 212n.13 Angress, Ruth G., 211n.4 “as if,” 7–8, 22–31, 31–34, 40–43, 47–49, 198n.14, 199n.11 Bate, Jonathan, 204n.26, 204n.28 Benjamin, Walter, 141 Bennington, Geoffrey, 199n.19, 200n.29, 201n.4, 201n.32 Biolostosky, Don, 202n.10, 203n.13 Bloom, Harold, 217n.19 borders, 43, 80, 146, 173 of law, 86–89 of Lippe, lip, language, 1–4, 8,14, 53, 116–19, 146, 190, 192–94 between literature and history, 112–15, 140–42, 181 See also Lippe, language Burckhardt, Sigurd, 213n.19 Busch, Rolf, 211n.3 Bush, George, 214n.30 Caruth, Cathy, 26–27, 197n.1, 198n.8, 198n.12, 199n.18 categorical imperative, 8, 32–34, 46–49, 50, 190

————————

Chase, Cynthia, 71–72, 205n.33, 205n.34 Clarke, Austin, 220n.4 community, 8, 60–68, 149–51, 153–55, 157, 159–68, 170, 190 consciousness, self–consciousness, see subject critique and politics, 7–8, 20–33 debt and literature, 145–46, 161–62 in The Last Man, see Shelley, Mary deconstruction, 6, 64, 200n.28, 219n.30 Delbrück, Hansgerd, 206n.6 de Man, Paul, 72–73, 195n.1, 202n.7, 203n.15, 204n.25, 209n.20, 212n.14, 214n.29 Derrida, Jacques, 64, 204n.22, 208n.13, 209n.18, 219n.30 Eagleton, Terry, 222n.19, 222n.20, 222–23n.21 Eilenberg, Susan, 201–2n.6, 203n.12, 203n.13, 203n.20, 203n.23 Eliot, T.S., 221n.14 Ellis, John M., 211n.5 Fenves, Peter, 197n.4, 198n.11

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Index

Ferguson, Frances, 203n.18 Ferris, David, 205n.29 Finneran, Richard J., 220–21n.7, 223n.25 Fisch, Audrey A., 216n.11, 219n.30 Franci, Giovanna, 216n.10, 219n.29, 219n.31 French Revolution, 10, 37–39 Fricke, Gerhard, 211n.4 Gasché, Rodolphe, 219n.30 Gennette, Gerard, 202n.7 Glen, Heather, 203n.12 Godwin, William, 12, 161–62 St. Leon, 12, 148–52, 161–62 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 209n.19 Goldsmith, Steven, 215n.3, 216n.8, 216n.9, 216n.12, 217n.22, 217n.23, 219n.31 Graham, Ilse, 207n.8, 207n.9, 213n.18 Hamacher, Werner, 195–96n.2, 213n.14 Hartman, Geoffrey, 49–50, 71–72, 73, 201n.3, 203n.12, 206n.36 Hegel, G.W.F., 171 Heidegger, Martin, 98, 198n.13, 199n.20 Helbling, Robert E., 206n.4 historicist reading, 3–6, 50–51, 70, 110–11, 113, 189–90, 205n.31 Hoffmeister, Elmar, 209–10n.24, 211n.5 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 72, 77 Holz, Hans Heinz, 208n.12, 214n.26 Horn, Peter, 208n.12 Hoverland, Lillian, 206n.4, 206n.6 Howes, Marjorie, 220n.2, 220n.5, 221n.14, 223n.24 Hutchings, Kimberly, 198n.10 ideology, 3–4, 6, 54, 99, 101–2, 110–11, 172, 181 inscription, 56, 57, 58, 59–68, 71–74 intentionality, 10, 12, 14, 72–74, 85, 89–94, 129–31, 191 invagination, 107–8 and history, 166–68

Jacobs, Carol, 206n.2, 214n.24, 214n.28 Jameson, Fredric, 4–6, 196n.5 Jarvis, Robin, 202n.10 Johnson, Barbara, 164, 165, 202n.7, 216n.11, 217n.20 Kant, Immanuel 3–4, 6–8, 9, 10, 17–43, 45–49, 77, 85, 170, 187, 190, 191, 193 and allegory or symbol. See symbol and categorical imperative. See categorical imperative and critique, 7–8, 18–31 Critique of Judgement, 21–22, 99 Critique of Pure Reason, 28 Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, 32, 45–49 and political criticism, 6–8, 18–31 See also “as if” Keats, John, 73 Keenan, Thomas, 31, 200n.22 Kinahan, Frank, 220n.3, 221n.12 Kleist, Heinrich von, 3–4, 8–9, 77–109, 170, 187, 190, 192 Der zerbrochne Krug, 10–11, 78–108, 190–91 Die Hermannsschlacht, 1, 3, 11–12, 109–36, 141–42, 192, 193 Friedrich seascape, 139–42 “Katechismus der Deutschen,” 136–37 Michael Kohlhaas, 199, 130, 213n.17 Penthesilea, 126–27, 132 Prinz Friedrich von Homburg, 130 “Über das Marrionettentheater,” 132 “Über die allmähliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden,” 128–29 Kluge, Gerhard, 211n.6 Kneale, J. Douglas, 202n.8, 204n.21, 205n.31 Krell, David Farrell, 216–17n.14 Labhardt, Robert, 206n.4, 208n.12, 212n.8


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Index Lacan, Jacques, 2 Lacoue–Labarthe, Philippe, 198n.13, 199n.13, 199n.18, 199n.20, 223n.22 language and borders, 1–4, 11–12, 14, 43, 117–19, 124–31, 138–42 and history, politics, 1–6, 8, 9–10, 26–28, 30–31, 47–49, 49–74, 81–85, 120–31, 138–42, 147, 181–83, 189–90, 194, 213n.15 and law, 80–108 sign of history, 2–3, 34–43, 70, 190 See also Lippe, symbol, naming law, 10–11, 80–108 and witnessing 89–94, 107, 191, 200n.23 See also language Levinson, Marjorie, 65, 196n.4, 201n.4, 201n.5, 202n.6, 212n.8 Lippe (lip), 1, 3–4, 11–12, 14, 53, 116–18 and borders. See borders as site of history, nature, language, 3, 11–12, 124–31 Liu, Alan, 58, 69–70, 203n.19, 205n.31 Lugowski, Clemens, 211n.4 Lyotard, Jean–François, 3–4, 7–9, 18–43, 85, 99, 187, 191, 193 Heidegger and “the jews,” 200–1n.30 L’enthousiasme, 19–43 The Differend, 199n.21 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 147, 215n.2 materiality, 54, 57, 69, 70–74, 85–89, 98–99, 105–8 McGann, Jerome, 196n.4, 202n.6, 212n.8, 221n.8 McGlathery, James, 210n.28, 214n.25 Michelsen, Peter, 208n.15, 210n.2, 210n.3, 212n.7, 212n.10, 215n.36 Miller, J. Hillis, 53, 196–97n.7, 202n.9, 214n.27 Miller, Norbert, 210n.2, 214n.25

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Müller-Seidel, Walter, 211n.5, 213n.21 Murray, Roger, 203n. 13 naming, 8, 9–10, 14, 49–74, 190 See also Wordsworth, William Nancy, Jean-Luc, 199n.16, 199n.17, 200n.27, 207n.7, 216n.7, 219n.32 nation, nationalism, 1, 8, 10, 12, 13 in Kleist, Heinrich von, 8, 12, 109–10, 114, 119, 122–23, 129–31, 133–41 in Shelley, Mary, 152–54, 155–56, 159 in Yeats, William Butler, 8, 169–73, 178–80 Newmark, Kevin, 57, 203n.16 North, Michael, 219n.1, 220n.4, 221n.9, 221n.14, 224n.28, 224n.29, 224n.31 Odea, Gregory, 218n.27 O’Donnell, William H., 223n.26, 223n.27 Paley, Morton, 217n.21, 218n.24 Parrish, Stephen, 203n.13 Peck, Walter E., 215n.5 politics, the political relation to criticism, critique, 18–31 See also language, history postmodernism, 17–18, 42–43, 193, 197n.2 Pound, Ezra, 221n.14 Pross, Gerald, 200n.27 Proust, Françoise, 198n.9 Raine, Kathleen, 221n.12, 223n.25 Rajan, Tilottama, 204n.23, 218n.26 Ray, William, 214n.31 Readings, Bill, 199n.18, 200n.24, 200n.28 Real, the, 5–6 Reeve, William C., 210–11n.3, 213n.16, 213n.20 Reske, Hermann, 210n.3, 212n.7


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Ribbat, Ernst, 209n.21, 209n.24 Romantic image, 72–74 Romanticism, 1, 9, 12–14, 17–18, 57, 77–78, 145–46, 150, 157 Ronell, Avital, 200–1n.30, 210n.25, 210n.27, 216n.13 Rousseau, Jean–Jacques, 215n.32 Ryan, Lawrence, 211n.6, 212n.10, 212n.12, 215n.33 Said, Edward, 221n.10, 221n.11, 222n.16 Sammons, Jeffrey L., 211n.3 Samuel, Richard, 211n.6 Schiller, Friedrich, 11, 81, 85, 206n.2 Schmid, Thomas H., 204n.27 Schmidt, Jochen, 209n.19, 209n.22, 211n.5, 215n.33 Schulte, Bettina, 206n.4, 207n.10, 208n.15, 209n.22 Seidlin, Oskar, 206n.4 Shelley, Mary, 3–4, 8–9, 10, 12, 146–68, 170, 187, 192, 193 and disease, 160–64 Frankenstein, 146, 147–48, 164 and gender, 13, 149–51, 161–68 and humanism, 156–60 The Last Man, 12–13, 146–68, 192 debt in, 146–48, 151–52, 170 temporal structure, 166–68 relation to Godwin, William, 148–52, 161–62 Sim, Stuart, 199n.18 Simpson, David, 196n.3, 203n.13, 205n.30 Smith, Johanna, 218n.25 Snyder, Robert Lance, 216n.10, 217n.15, 217n.21, 219n.31 Spat, Hartley S., 218n.27 Stendhal (Marie–Henri Beyle), 189–90 Sterrenberg, Lee, 215n.4 Streller, Seigfried, 211n.3, 211n.6

subject, subjectivity, 13, 14, 58, 94, 150–51, 152–53, 155–58, 159, 162–68, 171–72, 174–76, 178, 180, 192 symbol, 7–9, 18–19, 20–21, 22–31, 85, 106–8, 191 See also Kant, Immanuel Thuente, Mary Helen, 220n.3, 221n.12, 223n.23, 224n.30 Vaihinger, Hans, 198n.14 Walling, William A., 216n.5, 218n.28 Ward, Mark G., 208n.15 Warminski, Andrzej, 202n.7, 219n.30 Weber, Samuel, 196n.6, 201n.4 Wells, Lynn, 218n.26 Wittkowski, Wolfgang, 209n. 22, 210n.23 Wordsworth, William, 3–4, 8–9, 77, 170, 187, 191, 193 Lyrical Ballads, 67–68 “Poems on the Naming of Places,” 9–10, 49–74, 191 Preface to Poems (1815), 58 Prelude, 57, 60 See also naming Yeats, William Butler, 3–4, 8–9, 10, 12, 13–14, 146, 169–87, 192, 193 The Celtic Twilight, 14, 170–87 faery and folk tales, 13–14, 169–71 Fairy and Folk Tales of Ireland, 177 and Irish national character, 13–14, 172–73, 176–80 Mythologies, 182 relation to Romanticism, 13–14, 169–72 representation of women, 174–76 Young, Robert, 201n.4

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