Aestheticism and the Philosophy of Death: Walter Pater and Post-Hegelianism (Legenda Studies in Comparative Literature) [1 ed.] 1906540640, 9781906540647

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STUDIES IN COMPARATIVE LITERATURE 20

Aestheticism and the Philosophy of Death Walter Pater and Post-Hegelianism Giles Whiteley

Modern Humanities Research Association and 3PVUMFEHF

Aestheticism and the Philosophy of Death Walter Pater and Post-Hegelianism

LEGENDA legenda , founded in 1995 by the European Humanities Research Centre of the University of Oxford, is now a joint imprint of the Modern Humanities Research Association and 3PVUMFEHF. Titles range from medieval texts to contemporary cinema and form a widely comparative view of the modern humanities, including works on Arabic, Catalan, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Yiddish literature. An Editorial Board of distinguished academic specialists works in collaboration with leading scholarly bodies such as the Society for French Studies and the British Comparative Literature Association.

The Modern Humanities Research Association (mhra ) encourages and promotes advanced study and research in the field of the modern humanities, especially modern European languages and literature, including English, and also cinema. It also aims to break down the barriers between scholars working in different disciplines and to maintain the unity of humanistic scholarship in the face of increasing specialization. The Association fulfils this purpose primarily through the publication of journals, bibliographies, monographs and other aids to research.

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EDITORIAL BOARD Chairman Professor Colin Davis, Royal Holloway, University of London Professor Malcolm Cook, University of Exeter (French) Professor Robin Fiddian, Wadham College, Oxford (Spanish) Professor Paul Garner, University of Leeds (Spanish) Professor Andrew Hadfield, University of Sussex (English) Professor Marian Hobson Jeanneret, Queen Mary University of London (French) Professor Catriona Kelly, New College, Oxford (Russian) Professor Martin McLaughlin, Magdalen College, Oxford (Italian) Professor Martin Maiden, Trinity College, Oxford (Linguistics) Professor Peter Matthews, St John’s College, Cambridge (Linguistics) Dr Stephen Parkinson, Linacre College, Oxford (Portuguese) Professor Suzanne Raitt, William and Mary College, Virginia (English) Professor Ritchie Robertson, St John’s College, Oxford (German) Professor Lesley Sharpe, University of Exeter (German) Professor David Shepherd, Keele University (Russian) Professor Michael Sheringham, All Souls College, Oxford (French) Professor Alison Sinclair, Clare College, Cambridge (Spanish) Professor David Treece, King’s College London (Portuguese) Managing Editor Dr Graham Nelson 41 Wellington Square, Oxford ox1 2jf, UK [email protected] www.legenda.mhra.org.uk

Studies in Comparative Literature Editorial Committee Professor Stephen Bann, University of Bristol (Chairman) Professor Duncan Large, University of Swansea Dr Elinor Shaffer, School of Advanced Study, London Studies in Comparative Literature are produced in close collaboration with the British Comparative Literature Association, and range widely across comparative and theoretical topics in literary and translation studies, accommodating research at the interface between different artistic media and between the humanities and the sciences.

published in this series 1. Breeches and Metaphysics: Thackeray’s German Discourse, by S. S. Prawer 2. Hölderlin and the Dynamics of Translation, by Charlie Louth 3. Aeneas Takes the Metro: The Presence of Virgil in Twentieth-Century French Literature, by Fiona Cox 4. Metaphor and Materiality: German Literature and the World-View of Science 1780–1955, by Peter D. Smith 5. Marguerite Yourcenar: Reading the Visual, by Nigel Saint 6. Treny: The Laments of Kochanowski, translated by Adam Czerniawski and with an introduction by Donald Davie 7. Neither a Borrower: Forging Traditions in French, Chinese and Arabic Poetry, by Richard Serrano 8. The Anatomy of Laughter, edited by Toby Garfitt, Edith McMorran and Jane Taylor 9. Dilettantism and its Values: From Weimar Classicism to the fin de siècle, by Richard Hibbitt 10. The Fantastic in France and Russia in the Nineteenth Century: In Pursuit of Hesitation, by Claire Whitehead 11. Singing Poets: Literature and Popular Music in France and Greece, by Dimitris Papanikolaou 12. Wanderers Across Language: Exile in Irish and Polish Literature of the Twentieth Century, by Kinga Olszewska 13. Moving Scenes: The Aesthetics of German Travel Writing on England 1783–1830, by Alison E. Martin 14. Henry James and the Second Empire, by Angus Wrenn 15. Platonic Coleridge, by James Vigus 16. Imagining Jewish Art, by Aaron Rosen 17. Alienation and Theatricality: Diderot after Brecht, by Phoebe von Held 18. Turning into Sterne: Viktor Shklovskii and Literary Reception, by Emily Finer 19. Yeats and Pessoa: Parallel Poetic Styles, by Patricia McNeill 20. Aestheticism and the Philosophy of Death: Walter Pater and Post-Hegelianism, by Giles Whiteley 21. Blake, Lavater, and Physiognomy, by Sibylle Erle 22. Rethinking the Concept of the Grotesque: Crashaw, Baudelaire, Magritte, by Shun-Liang Chao

Aestheticism and the Philosophy of Death Walter Pater and Post-Hegelianism ❖ Giles Whiteley

Studies in Comparative Literature 20 Modern Humanities Research Association and 3PVUMFEHF 2010

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CONTENTS ❖

Acknowledgements

ix

Abbreviations

x

Introduction: Pater’s Reading and Rereading of Hegel

1

Reading and Rereading Hegel: ‘Reconsideration’ and Ressentiment Rereading the Rereading: Hegel’s ‘Radical Dualism’ and the Philosophy of Death Rereading the Readings of Pater: Christianity and the Oedipus Complex Pater’s Post-Hegelianism and the Question of Method

1 The Hegelian Structure of Pater’s ‘Reconsidered’ Aestheticism Idealism and Subject–Object Identity Phenomenology The Sensible Appearance of the Idea and the Death of Art The Unpublished Manuscript on Moral Philosophy Pater’s Sittlich Aestheticism and Francis Herbert Bradley’s Ethical Studies Mutual Recognition and the Greater Reason The Structure of Pater’s Aestheticism Aestheticism and Semiology Pater’s Architectural Analogy and Aesthetic Structuralism Aestheticism as the Death of Art

2 The Philosophy of (the Impossibility of) Death The Life of Spirit and the Philosophy of Death Sacrifice and the Master–Slave Dialectic Hegel’s Speculation Subjective Immortality and the ‘Dialectical Overcoming’ of Death Absolute Negativity and Abstract Negativity Hegel’s ‘Radical Dualism’ Pater against the Dialectic The Moment and Instant of Death

3 The Imaginary Portraits Pater, Emerson, Nietzsche The Genre of the Imaginary Portrait ‘The Child in the House’: Homeliness, Nostalgia, and the Hegelian Pyramid ‘A Prince of Court Painters’: The Idea against Life ‘Sebastian van Storck’: Schopenhauer as the Truth of Hegel ‘Denys L’Auxerrois’: The Dionysian as the Affirmation of Difference ‘Duke Carl of Rosenmold’: The Restricted Economy and the Culture of Death The Imaginary Portraits and the Genealogy

2 5 8 11

21 22 23 24 27 30 31 34 36 40 42

49 50 53 56 58 60 62 64 68

77 77 79 81 85 89 93 101 103

viii

Contents

4 Autobiography and the Writing Of Death Hegelian Autobiography and Literary Immortality Pater and Benjamin on the Task of the Translator The Limits of Autobiography and the Hegelian Subject Autobiography as Thanatography Aborted Narratives ‘Emerald Uthwart’: The Instant of Death ‘Apollo in Picardy’: Madness and the Failure of Hegelian Semiology The History of Writing Deconstructively

Conclusion: The Ideology of Aestheticism Hegelianism and Ideology The New Aestheticism Aestheticism and Fascism The Diaphaneitè and Difference

117 118 119 121 124 125 126 130 134

141 142 145 147 148

Bibliography

155

Index

169

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ❖

The present book arose out of my doctoral research, which was undertaken at the University of Manchester and was funded by the A.H.R.C. A number of people have assisted my study and I am deeply indebted to the guidance of Jeremy Tambling and Terry Eagleton. I would also like to thank Stephen Bann, Howard Booth, Harry Lesser, Robert Spencer, and, particularly, Malcolm Hicks, who first introduced me to Pater and supported my research throughout. At Legenda, I wish to thank my editor, Graham Nelson, my copy-editor, Nigel Hope, an extremely helpful anonymous reader, Elinor Shaffer, and Duncan Large. Needless to say, any remaining errors are my own. I would also like to thank John, Ros, Anne and Bosse. Most of all, I wish to thank my wife, Cecilia, without whom none of this would have been possible.

ABBREVIATIONS ❖

Quotations from Pater’s works, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the tenvolume Library Edition (London: Macmillan, 1910), abbreviated as follows: AP GL GS IP ME MS PP R

Appreciations with an Essay on ‘Style’ Gaston de Latour Greek Studies Imaginary Portraits Marius the Epicurean: His Sensations and Ideas (2 vols) Miscellaneous Studies Plato and Platonism Studies in the History of the Renaissance

In addition, I have quoted extensively from two of Pater’s unpublished manuscripts, held at the Houghton Library: HP MP

‘History of Philosophy’, bMS Eng 1150 (3) ‘Moral Philosophy’, bMS Eng 1150 (17)

I am grateful to the Houghton Library, Harvard University, for permission to quote from Pater’s unpublished manuscripts. When dealing with Pater’s unpublished work, I have adopted the referencing technique of William Shuter in his Rereading Walter Pater (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) for the sake of consistency. Pater often severely re-edited his work without necessarily erasing any of his earlier versions, with two or three alternate phrases coexisting on lines one above the other. Accordingly, Pater’s marginalia are indicated by triangular brackets. My own additions, which I have kept to a minimum, are indicated by square brackets. Quotations from Hegel’s works, unless otherwise indicated, are to the standard English translations and, wherever possible, to the German editions that Pater borrowed from the Queen’s College Library from 1861 onwards, abbreviated as follows: A E

Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. by T. M. Knox, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975); Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, ed. by Karl Ludwig Michelet, in Werke, 20 vols (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1832–45), x Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, in 3 vols: Logic, Being Part One of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, trans. by William Wallace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975) Philosophy of Nature, Being Part Two of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, trans. by A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970) Philosophy of Mind, Being Part Three of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, trans. by William Wallace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971)

Abbreviations

PS PR SL

xi

Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften, ed. by Leopold von Henning, in Werke, 20 vols (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1832–45), vi–vii Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. by A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977); Phänomenologie des Geistes, ed. by D. Johann Schulze, in Werke, 20 vols (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1832–45), ii The Philosophy of Right, trans. by T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967); Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, ed. by Eduard Gans, in Werke, 20 vols (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1832–45), ix The Science of Logic, trans. by A. V. Miller (Amherst: Prometheus, 2005); Wissenschaft der Logik, ed. by Leopold von Henning, in Werke, 20 vols (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1832–45), iii–v

Quotations from Kant’s works, unless otherwise indicated, are to the following translations and to the standard German editions: CJ

Critique of Judgement, trans. by Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987); Kritik der Urteilskraft, in Gesammelte Schriften, 23 vols (Berlin: Akademie-Ausgabe, 1902–66), v CR Critique of Pure Reason, trans. by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Kritik der reinen Vernunft, in Gesammelte Schriften, 23 vols (Berlin: Akademie-Ausgabe, 1902–66), iii GW Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. by J. W. Ellington (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1981); Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, in Gesammelte Schriften, 23 vols (Berlin: Akademie-Ausgabe, 1902–66), iv Quotations from Nietzsche’s works, unless otherwise indicated, are to the following translations and to the standard German editions: AC

The Anti-Christ, in The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols and Other Writings, trans. by Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Der Antichrist, in Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: de Gruyter 1967–77), vi BT The Birth of Tragedy, trans. by Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik, in Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: de Gruyter 1967–77), i EH Ecce Homo, in The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols and Other Writings, trans. by Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Ecce Homo, in Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: de Gruyter 1967–77), vi GM On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. by Carol Diethe, rev. edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Zur Genealogie der Moral, in Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: de Gruyter 1967–77), v GSc The Gay Science, trans. by Josephine Nauckhoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, in Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: de Gruyter 1967–77), iii

xii

Abbreviations

N

Writings from the Late Notebooks, trans. by Kate Sturge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Nachlass, in Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: de Gruyter 1967–77), viii Twilight of the Idols, in The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols and Other Writings, trans. by Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Götzen-Dämmerung, in Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: de Gruyter 1967–77), vi Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. by Adrian Del Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Also sprach Zarathustra, in Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: de Gruyter 1967–77), iv

TI

Z

Wherever possible when dealing with philosophical or translated works, I have indicated paragraph or section number, for ease of reference between editions. Where page numbers are unavoidable, the first number refers to the English translation, the second to the German original.

INTRODUCTION ❖

Pater’s Reading and Rereading of Hegel What we have to do is to be for ever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions, never acquiescing in a facile orthodoxy of Comte, or of Hegel, or of our own. (R, pp. 236–38)

J. Hillis Miller has argued that part of Pater’s importance to literary history revolves around his position as ‘one of the most important “translators” into Victorian England of Hegelian thought’.1 Hillis Miller’s term ‘translator’ is useful in helping us to think about Pater’s relationship to Hegel. What does it mean to say that Pater ‘translated’ Hegel into Britain? Pater did not literally translate Hegel’s German texts into English. But he did incorporate Hegelian themes into his own work, particularly the concept of the Idea and Hegel’s teleological history of art. As Billie Andrew Inman has argued, ‘no single work had a more profound inf luence’ on Pater’s thinking ‘than Hegel’s Ästhetik’.2 Pater may also be said to be ‘translating’ Hegel in the form of his writing, in his critical method. All of Hegel’s speculative projects, whether aesthetic, ethical or logical, rely on the formal movement of the Aufhebung, Hegel’s famous dialectical method, in which the abstraction is negated by the work of the understanding (the negatively rational moment) and sublated into a higher form (the positively rational moment). Pater’s foregrounding of the unity of opposites (subject–object identity) and his definition of ‘good’ art as the unification of form (subject) and matter (object), makes his method dialectical, and constitutes another example of his ‘translation’ of Hegel. It is true that this receptivity to Hegel’s concepts and methodology in the early Pater goes hand-in-hand with a reaction against Hegel, a distancing from the ‘facile orthodoxy’ of philosophical idealism (R, p. 237). Here, then, Pater might be said to be selectively ‘translating’ Hegel, taking only those aspects of Hegel’s thought which he deemed relevant to his own work.3 But this reaction against Hegel is, as we shall see, itself retracted by the later Pater. And it is important to note from the outset that Pater’s rereading of Hegel in the 1880s was also at the same time a rereading of his own philosophy, a self-ref lexive self-criticism.4 Broadly speaking, then, Pater undertakes two readings of Hegel. Initially, Pater’s response is negative or reactionary. In the period corresponding to the youthful Pater, author of the Renaissance, his aestheticism is defined against Hegelian totalization. But there is also the mature or ‘reconsidered’ approach to Hegel, which embraces Hegel precisely insofar as he is totalizing. This is the Pater of the unpublished manuscript on moral philosophy, written some time during the

2

Introduction

early 1880s, in which he reconfigured his aestheticism into a Hegelian framework through the concept of the ‘greater reason’ (Hegel’s ‘Geist’) (MP, p. 16v).5 And although Pater never published this reading, the idea of the greater reason clearly informs his 1885 novel Marius the Epicurean, and the majority of the rest of his published critical and theoretical work. So far it is these two readings of Hegel that have concerned the many critical treatments of Pater’s reading of Hegel.6 The second reading of Hegel corresponds to what Inman has called Pater’s ‘reconsideration’ of his aestheticism.7 Indeed, to go further than Inman, Pater’s ‘reconsideration’ of his aestheticism relies upon his rereading of Hegel. In his ‘reconsidered’ aestheticism, the act of appreciating the aesthetic artefact takes on a necessary and a structural role within a wider system, a necessity and a structure which themselves constitute Hegelianism. Reading and Rereading Hegel: ‘Reconsideration’ and Ressentiment But what relates the first to the second readings of Hegel? What prompted Pater’s ‘reconsideration’? In the past, this reconsideration has been put down to the savage criticism to which the Renaissance was subjected on publication,8 and it is thus that critics have explained Pater’s famous omission of the ‘hedonistic’ conclusion in the text’s second edition. However, perhaps the more convincing motivations for his ‘reconsideration’ lie in the psychological impact of the events of 1874. In the last twenty years Pater has been ‘smoked out and uncloseted’, in John Colon’s words.9 We know now that in 1874 Pater was engaged in an erotic attachment with a Balliol undergraduate named William Money Hardinge.10 Regarding Hardinge, Alfred Milner, another Balliol undergraduate, tells us the following: When a man confesses to lying in another man’s arms kissing him & having been found doing it, as there is strongest evidence to prove [. . .] what hope can you have that a criminal act, if not committed already [. . .] may not be committed any day.11

Somehow, according to the diary entries of A. C. Benson (recording a story he had been told by Edmund Gosse), certain documents proving Pater’s culpability fell into the hands of Benjamin Jowett, who proceeded to blackmail Pater: ‘Jowett was said to have some mysterious letters, which he vowed he would produce if Pater ever thought of standing for university office’.12 The Hardinge affair can thus be considered as something of a turning point — perhaps the turning point — in Pater’s life. It must be considered first and foremost as an event, for it comes to us in the form of a narrative.13 And whilst the affair itself probably had little to do with the change in Pater’s thinking, the professional and personal implications most certainly did. We are told by Gosse that Pater was called in to see Jowett, and that the impact of this interview was both immediate and seismic: ‘Pater’s whole nature changed under the strain, after the dreadful interview with Jowett. He became old, crushed, despairing, and this dreadful weight lasted for years’.14 Pater’s ‘whole nature changed’: a man embracing life (at least to a degree) became instantly changed. The vital, youthful, affirmative Pater was replaced by an ‘old, crushed, despairing’ one.

Introduction

3

The terms used by Gosse (Benson) here are reminiscent of those used by Friedrich Nietzsche to designate ressentiment: The beginning of the slaves’ revolt in morality occurs when ressentiment itself turns creative and gives birth to values: the ressentiment of those beings who, denied the proper response of action, compensate for it only with imaginary revenge. Whereas all noble morality grows out of triumphant saying ‘yes’ to itself, slave morality says ‘no’ on principle to everything that is ‘outside’, ‘other’, ‘non-self ’: and this ‘no’ is its creative deed. This reversal of the evaluating glance — this essential orientation to the outside instead of back onto itself — is a feature of ressentiment: [. . .] — its action is basically a reaction. (GM, I § 10)

As Gosse’s summary puts it, after the interview with Jowett, Pater’s ‘whole nature changed’ and affirmation became negation. Jowett’s conservative attack prompted a ressentiment which said ‘ “no” on principle to everything that is “outside”, “other”, “non-self ” ’: a ressentiment which reacted against the ‘other’ constitutive of Pater’s own self — his sexuality.15 And this ressentiment against sexuality is in essence Christ ian (which is to say, Hegelian), as Nietzsche would later make clear: ‘It was Christ ianity with its fundamental ressentiment against life that first made sexuality into something unclean’ (TI, ‘What I Owe the Ancients’, § 4). Christianity denies the heterogeneity of sexual desire by regulating it within the institution of marriage and by making sexuality subservient to an end: procreation. Sexuality is then turned into ‘love’, is ‘spiritualized’ in and as Spirit (the Holy Spirit, the Hegelian Geist, Pater’s greater reason).16 And Pater’s ‘reconsideration’ of his aestheticism runs parallel both chronologically and epistemologically to his own reaction against his homosexuality prompted by the Hardinge affair. In turning to Hegel, Pater internalized Jowett’s criticism. In this narrative, Jowett plays the role of Pater’s ascetic priest (GM, III § 15), who personalized Pater’s ressentiment. Insofar as Pater reconsiders his entire philosophy after this interview with Jowett, both Pater’s ‘reconsideration’ of his aestheticism and his rereading of Hegel are themselves indicative of ressentiment.17 Why term Pater’s turn towards Hegel ressentiment, rather than merely ‘denial’, ‘negation’, or ‘repression’ of his homosexuality?18 Ressentiment is ‘the spirit of revenge’. In it, revenge is internalized in such a way as it does not act; it becomes passive. And Pater’s later career, after the interview with Jowett, can be seen as this kind of passivity.19 Whereas the anti-Hegelian philosophy of his conclusion to the Renaissance advocates burning with a hard gem-like f lame, this immediacy of experience becomes subordinated in the mature Pater’s thought, forever deferred. Ressentiment has two essential moments: one topological and one typological. The topology of ressentiment is the displacement of reactive forces, the becoming-reactive of forces that can no longer act; the typology of ressentiment is the reversal of values. Both factors are seen at work in Pater’s turn towards Hegelianism. Hegelianism is the philosophical mask which, in Gilles Deleuze’s summary, seeks to ‘hide an extraordinary hatred, a hatred for life, a hatred for all that is active and affirmative in life’.20 Pater’s ressentiment thus reacted against the ‘other’ within, the difference which was his own sexuality. In this sense, it is unsurprising that he would turn to Hegel, for Hegelianism, as Deleuze argues, is the philosophy of the slave.21 The slave — who

4

Introduction

cannot act — equates action and the active type with ‘evil’, and his own reaction with ‘good’ (Nietzsche, GM, I § 4). And Pater’s ressentiment is indicative of an enslavement which then turns for its philosophical justification to that most servile of philosophies, the Hegelian dialectic, the ‘ideology of ressentiment’.22 Moreover, as Nietzsche has shown, the result of the Aufhebung is the denial of eroticism, the denial of the body.23 Because the emphasis in Hegel was on the Aufhebung that was ever-moving, consummation (action, affirmation) need never be approached: Pater could defer indefinitely (the topology of ressentiment). Pater was held, like the lovers portrayed on Keats’s Grecian Urn, frozen into a position of anticipation. In this sense, the Ideal(ized) figures of classical sculpture described in his essay on ‘The Age of Athletic Prizemen’ (1894) become emblematic of Pater’s entire mature aestheticism,24 for Pater petrified the body in the very process of its idealization.25 In translating the world into a system of signs, the Aufhebung disinherited the body at the same time as it negated the world; Pater repressed his sexuality through his aesthetic idealism.26 The Aufhebung sublates, which is to say ‘lifts up’ (the Aufhebung as la relève),27 the animal within man, denies it, and translates it into something ‘pure’: into Spirit. It reacts against the ‘other’ within itself. Hegelianism as ressentiment then permitted nothing less than the dialectical effacement of Pater’s own sexuality and the denial of his body.28 Here, when we refer to Pater’s Hegelianism, we refer less to Hegel himself than to what Hegelianism as a philosophy represents. We refer to ‘Hegel’ as a name. Hegelianism is, by definition, a totalizing philosophy, a philosophy which through a progressive series of dialectical Aufhebungs represents the completion of the speculative project.29 Hegelianism is in this sense the Enlightenment philosophy: the philosophy of modernity. As Slavoj Žižek’s puts it, postmodernism has reacted so virulently against Hegelianism because in this view Hegel is deemed ‘the incarnate monster of “panlogicism” (the total dialectical mediation of reality, the complete dissolution of reality in the self-movement of the Idea)’.30 Hegel’s appeal to Pater lay precisely in this totalization. Pater’s initial reaction against Hegel of 1862–74 was indeed a reaction against Hegelian totalization, an attempt to move beyond his Hegelian inspiration, as indicated in Pater’s very first essay, ‘Diaphaneitè’ (1864), in which he describes his aesthetic hero in terms which evoke the Hegelian triad of art–religion–philosophy — ‘the saint, the artist, the speculative thinker’ (MS, p. 247) — but goes beyond this trinity, postulating the diaphanous type as a further final species. But nevertheless, it is to this same totalizing Hegel which Pater returns in his ‘reconsideration’. Pater’s concept of the greater reason, formulated in the manuscript on moral philosophy, appeals to him precisely insofar as it functions as Geist, an ‘absolute metanarrative of the historical unfolding of an always unitary reason’.31 Everything is accounted for in Pater’s ‘reconsidered’ aestheticism, in Hegel’s totalizing metaphysics, everything is necessary. Pater’s rereading of Hegel, which brought with it a ‘reconsideration’ of his aestheticism, is galvanized by the desire to turn aestheticism into a necessary moment within the Hegelian whole. From the early 1880s onwards, then, Hegelianism becomes structural (formal) to Pater’s thinking:

Introduction

5

(1). The phenomenology of the initial aesthetic apprehension (as set forth in the preface to the Renaissance) functions as a transcendental unity of apperception in Pater’s thought. Here, subject (the self ) and object (the self ) are united in a moment of self-consciousness of the ‘little reason of man’. (2). The lesser reason achieves this self-consciousness through the power of human understanding in a semiological deployment of signs: it is only thus, through wielding the power of death (which is to say, the power of the Aufhebung, the power of negation), that the lesser reason comes to self-consciousness. (3). As such, the moment of aesthetic appreciation becomes an intrinsic moment towards the coming to self-consciousness of the greater reason or Geist (this is Hegel’s own structuralism). It is only in negating the world through the power of the understanding that the lesser reason achieves its self-consciousness, and thereby constitutes the greater reason over and above it. (4). And thus, far from legitimating a hedonistic doctrine, aestheticism becomes a highly ethical activity. Insofar as the aesthete comes to know his own impression as it really is, he achieves a measure of self-knowledge, and thereby serves to make the greater reason sensible. In this way, Pater converts the famous relativistic doctrine of the conclusion to the Renaissance into an ethical and metaphysical philosophy; through the activity of the free and self-determining Hegelian consciousness, aestheticism serves to make manifest the greater reason. Rereading the Rereading: Hegel’s ‘Radical Dualism’ and the Philosophy of Death As we have indicated, Pater’s critics have thus far only identified two readings of Hegel undertaken by Pater: one initial reading, broadly corresponding to the youthful Pater, and one rereading, corresponding to the period of Pater’s ‘reconsideration’. But what has been overlooked is a third, distinct reading of Hegel undertaken by Pater. Pater undertook extensive reading in preparation for Marius between 1880 and 1885 and two unpublished manuscripts of note survive from this period. In the first one, the manuscript on moral philosophy, Pater explicitly formulates his theory of the greater reason, and the importance of this manuscript in Pater’s philosophical development has long been acknowledged.32 But in the other manuscript, the manuscript on the history of philosophy, Pater offers up another reading of Hegel, a reading which does not conform to either of the two critically described versions. Here, Pater illuminates the counter-Hegelian turn within Hegel himself: Hegel, who brings to its highest level of completeness the metaphysical reconstruction of all experience as a realisation of the creative Logic, must yet rank in his actual though indirect inf luence on many minds, as an essentially sceptical writer, though the impression he leaves upon them, of a very imperfect reciprocity between the exacting reasonableness of the ideal he supposes, and the confused, imperfect, haphazard character of man’s actual experience in nature and history — a radical dualism in his system, as to the extent of which he was perhaps not always quite candid, even with himself. (HP, pp. 5v–6)

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It is this image of the ‘radical dualism’ of Hegel which would haunt Pater’s writings, because in this manuscript Pater was not merely critically rereading Hegel but (in a typically autobiographical turn) critically rereading his own aestheticism. In other words, insofar as he identified a ‘radical dualism’ underwriting Hegel’s system, at the same time and by the same logic Pater identified a ‘radical dualism’ underwriting his own ‘reconsidered’ aestheticism. Precisely what Pater means by Hegel’s ‘radical dualism’ is ambiguous. The train of thought is interrupted at this very point, Pater beginning a new notebook and beginning afresh with a new set of thoughts. In the only significant discussion of this passage published in Paterean criticism, William Shuter has sought to elucidate the role of scepticism in the Hegelian economy, regarding Pater’s diagnosis of Hegel’s ‘radical dualism’ as what Hegel described as dialectical scepticism.33 In so doing, however, Shuter’s reading effaces precisely what it is that is so ‘radical’ about Hegel’s ‘dualism’, effaces this dualism in precisely the same dialectical sublation that was at work in Hegel himself. In Shuter’s treatment, the subtlety of Pater’s reading, a subtlety which far outstrips those of his illustrious Oxford contemporaries, is lost.34 It is in the French post-structuralist tradition that we find the ‘toolkit’ for discussing the complexities of Pater’s response to Hegel.35 Of particular importance to this tradition were the lectures on Hegel delivered by Alexandre Kojève at the École Pratique des Hautes Études between 1933 and 1939.36 The impact of these lectures on French intellectual life cannot be overestimated. According to Kojève, ‘the “dialectical” or anthropological philosophy of Hegel is in the final analysis a philosophy of death’.37 In his preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel writes: The activity of dissolution is the power and work of the Understanding, the most astonishing and mightiest of powers, or rather the absolute power. [. . .] This is the tremendous power of the negative; it is the energy of thought, of the pure ‘I’. Death, if that is what we want to call this non-actuality, is of all things the most dreadful, and to hold fast to what is dead requires the greatest strength. Lacking strength, Beauty hates the Understanding for asking of her what it cannot do. But the life of Spirit is not the life which shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself. [. . .] Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power which converts it into being. (§ 32)

Through the speculative form of the Aufhebung, the understanding negates the particularity of the abstraction, and in so doing wields the power of death. In Hegel’s terms, then, the understanding is itself the power of death. As Jacques Derrida writes: Hegel’s ‘immense revolution consisted — it is almost tempting to say consisted simply — in taking the negative seriously’.38 However, it is questionable just to what extent the negative is being tarried with in Hegel’s system. In harnessing the power of death through the power of the understanding, Hegel’s system seeks to bypass that other death, the real death, to efface it from the system by binding it within. The movement is indicative of a ‘restricted economy’, in Georges Bataille’s terminology; one which constantly seeks to reign in excess value.39 Death, or what Hegel terms ‘abstract negativity’, is

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exactly such an excess, which is why Hegel immediately sublates it in the form of ‘absolute negation’. Negativity, which is to say the power of death, is put to work in the system, is enslaved for the procedure of Geist (the greater reason). The Hegelian system is thus the most restricted of economies, ‘par excellence the expression endlessly repeated by tradition’.40 Yet, insofar as Hegelianism is a philosophy of death, it is also and at the same time the philosophy of the impossibility of death. Through harnessing the power of death in the understanding, nothing dies. Everything negated in the particularity of the abstraction is gathered up afresh, continually redeployed within the system. And thus, when Pater turned to Hegel in his synthesizing idea of the greater reason, he turned to this restricted economy precisely owing to its restrictedness. Paterean aestheticism too is a philosophy of death. It too rests upon the work of the understanding; as he writes in the preface to the Renaissance, ‘the first step towards seeing one’s object as it really is, is to know one’s impression as it really is, to discriminate it, to realise it distinctly’ (R, p. xxix). It is only by harnessing the power of the negative through the understanding that the ‘little reason’ of man comes to its particular self-consciousness, and thereby precipitates the coming-toself-consciousness of the greater reason over and above it. Insofar as Hegelianism in its restrictiveness is at the same time both a philosophy of death and a philosophy of the impossibility of death, so too Pater’s aestheticism is itself a philosophy of the impossibility of death. It too is a restricted economy which seeks to efface the excess from the system. As Linda Dowling has shown, in the mid-1870s (which is to say, during the period in which Pater’s Hegelian ‘reconsideration’ took hold), Pater turned to contemporary anthropology in order to understand culture better. In an etymological movement, Pater came to conceive of ‘culture’ as ‘the turning over of the earth’.41 Culture, then, is perceived by Pater to be the remains of the dead, a restricted economy which — in a perfect Aufhebung — gathers up discarded matter and reworks it. Death is made to work by Pater in precisely the same fashion as Hegel enslaves the negative. Is it the doubleness of death to which Pater refers when he speaks of a ‘radical dualism’ in Hegel’s system? Both yes and no. It is unlikely that Pater explicitly locates the ‘blind spot’ of Hegelianism in death, as the post-structuralist tradition, following in Kojève’s footsteps, has done. Nevertheless, what he discerns is a ‘radical dualism’ which undoes the Hegelian system, unravels the entire edifice of the Hegelian speculation. The ‘radical dualism’ is the brissure which opens up Hegel’s restricted economy into a general one.42 The brissure is an aporia within the text, a joint which forms a necessary and integral part of the text’s epistemological structure, that essential moment without which the system would disintegrate, but which also and at the same time already deconstructs that system. And, as Derrida has argued, in the Hegelian system it is death which constitutes this brissure: The blind spot of Hegelianism, around which can be organized the representation of meaning, is the point at which destruction, suppression, death and sacrifice constitute so irreversible an expenditure, so radical a negativity — here we would have to say a negativity without reserve — that they can no longer be determined as negativity in a process or system.43

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Introduction

What Pater means when he speaks of a ‘radical dualism’ in Hegel’s system is not dialectical scepticism (as Shuter has suggested), but something non-dialectical: something which escapes the panlogicizing pretensions of the Aufhebung. This identification of Hegel’s ‘radical dualism’ constitutes a third, and distinct, reading of Hegel on Pater’s part. For while Shuter cannot escape a dialectical reading of the passage in question, Pater’s reference points precisely to something which escapes dialectics: an aporia which cannot be sublated. Rereading the Readings of Pater: Christianity and the Oedipus Complex What is to be gained by reading Pater’s career in terms of a series of readings and rereadings of Hegel? The stakes of this proposed complication of Pater’s thinking are of the utmost importance to Pater studies. In identifying only two readings of Hegel undertaken by Pater, the received critical vision of Pater has tended to overlook the radical and transgressive elements of his later thought. Indeed, it is this study’s contention that the transgressive Pater is to be found not so much in the philosophy of the conclusion to the Renaissance, not so much in Pater’s anti-Hegelianism, but in the ‘radical dualism’ and in the series of imaginary portraits Pater composed across his later years: Pater’s post-Hegelianism. Moreover, in treating Pater’s ‘reconsideration’ of his aestheticism according to its structural properties as a form of Hegelianism, we can also discern a kind of Hegelianism underwriting the major discussions of Pater studies over the past fifty years. Pater criticism has been dominated by issues (his supposed conversion to Christianity, his oedipal crisis) which in themselves amount to merely so many variations upon Hegelian themes. These dominant discourses of Pater criticism reproduce Pater’s structural Hegelianism in their own arguments (what Derrida describes as the ‘respectful doubling of commentary’).44 However, identifying that ‘radical dualism’ which Pater himself acknowledged allows us to sidestep those irreconcilable questions which have dominated critical debate. A conversion-hypothesis has been present in Paterean criticism ever since Marius was first published in 1885. At the novel’s conclusion, Marius is given the last rites on his deathbed: ‘In the moments of his extreme helplessness their mystic bread had been placed, had descended like a snow-f lake from the sky, between his lips’ (ME, ii, 224). As David DeLaura has rightly argued, however, ‘the ending of Marius is both too passive and too deliberately inconclusive’ to suggest that Pater had been ‘converted’ to Christianity.45 Marius is by this point already ‘helpless’, and his conversion forced upon him. Still, some three years later Pater’s conservative philosophy would find an even more explicit Christian pronunciation in his essay on ‘Style’ (1888). Speaking of the final paragraph of the essay, in which Pater distinguishes between (formally) ‘good’ and (substantially) ‘great’ art, A. C. Benson, Pater’s first biographer, writes: He of all men, at the very crisis of the enunciation of his creed, could never have used such an expression unless it contained for him an essential truth; and this single phrase bears eloquent testimony to the fact that, below the aesthetic

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doctrine which he enunciated, lay an ethical base of temperament, a moral foundation of duty and obedience to the creator and Father of men.46

Benson’s Christian inf lection may be overstating the case and in a sense he has come to play the role of those Christians who force their faith upon Marius. He forces a Christian orthodoxy onto Pater which cannot be supported by any external evidence. Nevertheless, insofar as Pater’s philosophy became more Hegelian, so too did it become more Christian, because Christianity is itself Hegelianism. Since his death in 1831, Hegel’s religious persuasion has been the subject of disagreement.47 But Hegelian philosophy, in that it is a philosophy of Geist above and beyond the individual consciousness, is clearly consonant with the spirit of Christianity, if not always with its letter. The Christian trinity may be quite easily read in Hegelian terms: God the father as the abstraction, Christ the son as the negatively rational moment who, in his death — his sacrifice — gives way to God the Holy Ghost, the positively rational whole (E, §§ 564–71). It is thus the very completeness of his economy that makes Hegel so characteristically Christian; death, negativity, constantly being reinscribed into a restricted whole, nothing escaping the mediation of spirit.48 Indeed, with reference to Christianity as a restricted economy, it is important to note that Marius is not mourned on his death as there is nothing to mourn: ‘It was the same people who [. . .] took up his remains, and buried them secretly, with their accustomed prayers; but with joy also, holding his death, according to their generous view in this matter, to have been of the nature of martyrdom.’ (ME, ii, 224) As Deleuze has shown, Hegelianism is, in terms of its form, identical to Christianity: ‘What has been discovered in Hegel’s early writings is in fact the final truth of the dialectic: modern dialectic is truly Christian ideology’.49 Hegel’s youthful philosophy of the Jena years (1801–07) focused on Christianity and even if he later moved away from this explicit religiosity, the basic structure of his philosophy was formed during this period. In the fragment on ‘Love’ (1798), the Aufhebung is first formulated according to its mature structure of self-externalization in the other and subsequent reintegration into the positively rational whole.50 And it is in this very structure of the Aufhebung that Christianity is so characteristically Hegelian. In the Aufhebung, the abstractions of the (animal) world are raised up (la relève) into the world of spirit. And in this, life itself (and indeed death) is denied in a ressentiment, value placed in the world beyond. Hegel’s philosophy is at root theological. In this sense, not only is the ‘unhappy consciousness’ of the Phenomenology an integral moment of the Hegelian system: it is the system. By reading Pater’s ressentiment as Hegelian, we see that his supposed struggle between Hellenism and Hebraism misses the point entirely. It has long been assumed that Pater’s Renaissance attempts to mediate between the Hellenic and Hebraic worlds, and that the Hebraic world of morality and law inevitably loses out to the Hellenic world of beauty.51 It is also assumed that, faced by the criticism of the clergy, Pater’s mature philosophy reconfigures the balance of his philosophy so as to allow the Hebraic to dominate at the expense of the Hellenic. This is, as it were, another version of the conversion-hypothesis. But such a conception of Pater’s

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spiritual journey ignores the way in which Pater obviates the supposed choice which he had to make, by uniting Hellenism and Hebraism in Hegelianism. In an early article dating from 1802, Hegel writes: The new religion [. . .] is a return to the first mystery of Christianity, and a fulfilment of it. It will be discerned in the rebirth of nature as the symbol of eternal unity. The first reconciliation and resolution of the age old discord [between Hellenism and Hebraism] must be celebrated in the philosophy whose sense and significance is only grasped by those who recognize in it the life of the divinity newly arisen from the dead.52

This unification of Hellenism and Hebraism in the ‘new religion’, Hegel’s own absolute idealism, is a basic historical and conceptual structure which he never relinquishes. It reappears in the movement from the Classical (Hellenic) to the Romantic (Hebraic) realms of art in his Aesthetics and in the movement from the realm of art (Hellenic) through religion (Hebraic) and resolved in philosophy (Hegelianism) in the Encyclopaedia. Furthermore, by reading Paterean aestheticism as a negotiation between Hellenism and Hebraism, criticism misses the fact that Christianity is itself an outgrowth of Hellenic concepts, founded on the same systems of representation (being as presence, identity in/of the concept).53 Thus the advantage of reading Pater’s ressentiment as Hegelian is that it shows that both the question of Pater’s supposed Christian conversion and the choice between Hebraism and Hellenism are alike of no importance; either way, Pater is still a Hegelian. The same situation is repeated by those critics who read Pater’s ‘reconsideration’ as galvanized by an oedipal crisis.54 According to this view, the youthful Pater’s supposedly ‘radical’ and ‘transgressive’ attacks on Christian orthodoxy and Victorian ideologies are indicative of a kind of murder of the father (the Law of the Father). Pater had to attack this conceptual patriarch because his own father had been killed in 1842, when Pater was only three, and so a standard (Freudian) resolution had been denied him. The ‘reconsideration’ of his aestheticism was then the ‘resolution’ of his oedipal crisis by the mature Pater. But in so reading Pater’s ‘reconsideration’, critics miss that which remains unresolved in this narrative, that which sidesteps dialectical sublation — namely, Hegel’s (Pater’s own) ‘radical dualism’. For in either position, whether Pater be the youthful radical out to kill the father, or the mature patriarch who has himself become the father (the proper name ‘Pater’ here itself translating as the father),55 this kind of criticism remains trapped in an eternal return of Oedipus.56 And this eternal return of Oedipus is itself the eternal return of Hegel. As Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have argued, Oedipus marks the ‘idealist turning point’ of psychoanalysis.57 Freud was, in other words, not Freudian enough: having opened up the passage towards a general economy, he immediately reacted against this transgression. He re-closed the economy, restricting it, through the Oedipus complex, by imprisoning the unconscious within a framework, within a structure.58 Oedipus is ‘idealist’ insofar as Freud makes Oedipus into a (Hegelian) Ideal: ‘Everybody knows what psychoanalysis means by resolving Oedipus: internalizing it so as to better rediscover it on the outside, in social authority, where it is made to proliferate and be passed on to the children’.59 To ‘resolve’ Oedipus is to have

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already accepted it. Far from releasing repression, the Oedipus complex recodifies it and reinforces it, institutionalizing it: Oedipus as bourgeois ideology. And in this sense, the Oedipus complex is itself another ressentiment, an institutionalized and cultural ressentiment.60 Oedipus is made both personal and absolute: everyone is marked by the oedipal crisis, resolved or not. Oedipus is imperialistic, ingrained in the very image of thought. As such, Freud’s ‘Oedipus-as-structure’ constitutes the Hegelian dialectic as psychoanalysis. And thus, in describing Pater’s biography as the relationship between two contrasting mindsets, one youthful and radical and one mature and reconsidered, criticism does not progress us beyond the question of Oedipus, beyond the question of Hegel. In other words, criticism has again failed to notice Pater’s ‘radical dualism’. The Oedipal reading is merely a refrain upon the Christian one. What is lost are those aspects which do not fit into these neat narratives, namely the transgressive moves of Pater’s later work: his identification of Hegel’s ‘radical dualism’ and his later imaginary portraits. What these readings of Pater’s ‘reconsideration’ of his aestheticism do is to take Pater on his (published) word. But what I want to suggest is that this published word is highly disingenuous, highly selective. In editing out of his own literary history the concept of Hegel’s ‘radical dualism’ as such, in not publishing it, and in responding to it only covertly through the fictional voice of his imaginary portraits, Pater wants posterity to read him as a Hegelian. It constitutes a conscious and calculated act. And criticism thus far has been content to follow Pater to the end in this respect, to portray him precisely as he wished to be portrayed. The advantage then in speaking of Pater’s Hegelianism as structural to his thought is that we can begin to take Pater’s texts into new critical directions. Rather than being content to reproduce this Hegelian structure in criticism, in the form of Christian or Oedipal readings, we can open up new avenues of enquiry. Pater’s Post-Hegelianism and the Question of Method The current study then has two initial imperatives: to describe both Pater’s Hegelianism and his post-Hegelianism. It must begin by describing Pater’s Hegelianism — the structure of his ‘reconsidered’ aestheticism — because, whilst Pater criticism has so far been content merely to illuminate correspondences between Pater’s thought and Hegel’s, what has been missed is the deeper relationship between his thought and Hegel’s: the structural relationship. The issue has thus been skirted around, but never made explicit: Pater did not merely borrow ideas from Hegel but he reproduced Hegelianism in and as the very structure of his mature aestheticism. The first chapter will be devoted to this structural interdependence. We will see that a number of concepts taken directly from Pater’s reading of Hegel and adopted during his early period (which is to say, a number of Hegelian ideas that survive amidst Pater’s anti-Hegelianism) are returned to by the mature Pater as structural fulcrums through which the ‘reconsideration’ of his aestheticism back into a Hegelian framework is ensured. In this sense, Pater’s initial anti-Hegelianism,

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Introduction

insofar as it was still dependent on a dialectical methodology, never really broke with Hegel; Pater’s initial anti-Hegelianism was itself a variation of Hegelianism. And these nodal points through which Pater’s ‘reconsideration’ of his aestheticism were achieved were, namely, the initial phenomenological reduction, the subject– object identity, and his adoption of the Hegelian Idea. These nodal points are returned to by the mature Pater in his ‘reconsideration’ of his aestheticism, and repositioned into the realms of ethics and metaphysics (most explicitly discussed in the manuscript on moral philosophy, and published as the ‘reconsideration’ described in the third book of Marius). The aesthetic, and Paterean aestheticism, are thereby made ethical and metaphysical. Aestheticism here is the term for the philosophy of art for art’s sake, but also (according to the same logic) of art for the sake of the Hegelian Idea and the comingto-self-consciousness of the greater reason.61 As the doctrine of self-cultivation, aestheticism allows the individual lesser reason to seek its own self-consciousness and thereby its own completion, its own perfection, through the act of appreciating the aesthetic artefact. The aesthetic act is thus made structural within a wider system beyond it, is itself made into an ethical act. And it is only by first illuminating this structure, by understanding precisely how implicated Hegelianism is in the very form of Pater’s aestheticism — how implicated Hegelianism is in the very structures of thought itself — that we can truly appreciate just what an achievement his later identification of Hegel’s ‘radical dualism’ was.62 The second chapter will examine Hegel’s philosophy of death. By contextualizing Pater’s aestheticism alongside Kojève’s and Bataille’s readings of Hegelianism, it will be seen that Pater’s aestheticism constitutes both a philosophy of death and at the same time a philosophy of the impossibility of death. Furthermore, by offering a more nuanced reading of the manuscript on the history of philosophy than any that has so far been published, it will be shown that, in identifying Hegel’s ‘radical dualism’, Pater achieves the considerable feat of thinking beyond Hegel in a way that none of his contemporaries — with the exception of Nietzsche — had dreamed of. This chapter will offer a radical new reading of Pater’s aestheticism, one which will not take Pater’s ‘reconsidered’ aestheticism at face value. Having illuminated the structure of Pater’s Hegelianism in the first chapter, in the second chapter we will show how this structure has always already deconstructed itself, and how Pater himself had already seen this fact. We will show how Pater, as Nietzsche during the same period, broke with the dialectic as a method.63 The passage in which Pater identifies Hegel’s ‘radical dualism’ is not only anti-Hegelian, but post-Hegelian. Thus this study will view Pater as a radical and transgressive thinker in his own right, a thinker who responded to Hegel with significantly more subtlety than is currently recognized. By illuminating that aporia which Hegel himself could not see, the impossibility which grounds every possibility within the Hegelian speculation, Pater suggests the (im)possibility of non-dialectical thought: general economy. The third and fourth chapters will read Pater’s imaginary portraits alongside his identification of Hegel’s ‘radical dualism’. It is the contention that, just as Pater identified an aspect of Hegel’s thought about which Hegel could not be ‘candid, even with himself ’, so too Pater found it impossible to be candid with himself about the same ‘radical dualism’ underwriting his own speculation. Consequently,

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Pater never committed his reading of Hegel’s ‘radical dualism’ to print. But the idea resurfaces covertly, in a form of textual displacement, as the argumentative strategy of his later imaginary portraits. As such, we propose a major rereading of Pater’s imaginary portraits.64 These short fictional texts come to take on the role of representing Hegel’s ‘radical dualism’, offering a self-ref lexive criticism of Pater’s own Hegelianism, of his own aestheticism.65 In the third chapter, the primary concern will be the collected Imaginary Portraits of 1887. Composed during the same period as Pater’s Marius (1885), they offer a postHegelian critique of that longer fictional work. Pater’s Marius, the fictional counterpoint to the manuscript on moral philosophy, and in which Pater makes explicit his theory of the greater reason, constitutes, along with the essay on ‘Style’, his most explicit ‘reconsideration’ of his aestheticism. But the Imaginary Portraits, the fictional counter-point to the manuscript on the history of philosophy, represent a critical attack on the basis of the ‘reconsideration’ of his aestheticism set out in Marius. Pater criticism has never really approached his imaginary portraits for the radical texts that they are. It has always been assumed that they represent a continuation of his ‘reconsideration’ set forth in Marius. But, in fact, they break with both Marius and with Hegelianism entirely. The four texts collected in his 1887 Imaginary Portraits together form a Nietzschean attack on Hegelianism, proceeding according to the argumentative strategy of Nietzsche’s most sustained polemic and probing work, the Genealogy of Morality, also published in 1887. Pater’s aim in these stories is to attack Hegelianism owing to the very restrictedness of the economy which he found so appealing in his theory of the greater reason: to attack Hegelianism owing to the way in which it represses difference and restricts life. And like Nietzsche’s Genealogy, Pater’s Imaginary Portraits attack Hegelianism for its ressentiment, bad conscience, ascesis, and nihilism. In the fourth and final chapter, our attention will turn to Pater’s final two imaginary portraits, ‘Emerald Uthwart’ (1892) and ‘Apollo in Picardy’ (1893). In the spirit of Derrida, who famously claims that ‘all that Hegel thought [. . .] may be reread as a meditation on writing’,66 these two final imaginary portraits will themselves be reread as Pater’s own meditation on writing. In these two texts, Pater attacks the theory that writing affords the ‘deferral’ and ‘economy of death’.67 The attack is on Hegelian semiology, in which the restricted economy reproduces itself through the movement of signs — Hegel’s philosophy of death as the philosophy of the impossibility of death. And again, Pater’s aim is self-critical here, for he had reproduced this theory of writing in his Hegelian concept of ‘subjective immortality’ (literary immortality, immortality in the sign), the subject of his first paper presented to the Oxford Old Mortality Society on 20 February 1864.68 At root, then, Pater’s final two imaginary portraits are both stories about the instability of the sign. And this instability of the sign is itself that ‘radical dualism’ which undoes the Hegelian speculation from within: the ‘radical dualism’ which is language. In terms of method, the current study is, broadly speaking, post-structuralist. It begins by showing the implicit structure underwriting Pater’s mature ‘reconsidered’ aestheticism and then proceeds to show how Pater had himself identified that which deconstructed it from within. In this sense, it takes seriously Hillis Miller’s contention that Pater anticipates ‘deconstructive’ criticism.69 But it is also aware

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Introduction

that this methodology is itself eminently deconstructable. As Hillis Miller argues elsewhere, there is ‘some necessity in the deconstructive enterprise which means that it is always open in its turn to deconstruction’.70 It may be (rightly) questioned whether the current study in its turn might be criticized for treating Hegel too symbolically, for treating Hegel as a proper name, ‘Hegel’ standing in as a kind of transcendental signified outside of or beyond Pater’s texts. It may also be objected that parallel to this ‘Hegel’ is a transcendental ‘Pater’, described in the first chapter, who is something of a fictive creation on my part, functioning as a straw-horse whose only purpose is to be deconstructed. The argument of this text might be said to be guilty of deconstructing those very methods which it then relies upon for its force, unable to ‘reach a clarity which is not vulnerable to being deconstructed in its turn’.71 It may finally be objected that this study privileges certain of Pater’s texts at the expense of others (the unpublished manuscripts, Marius and the imaginary portraits), thus producing a necessarily partial portrait of Pater’s career. I do not presume to answer these criticisms; they are unanswerable. The only evidence I can bring to my defence is textual. This is not to say that my reading is ahistorical: in fact, it hinges on the history of Pater’s composition.72 It is my contention that Pater’s reading of Hegel in the manuscript on the history of philosophy, the reading in which he identifies Hegel’s ‘radical dualism’, insofar as it is composed during the same period as Pater was also composing his theory of the greater reason in the manuscript on moral philosophy, is a moment of selfcriticism on Pater’s part of his own ‘reconsidered’ aestheticism.73 The content of the manuscript on the history of philosophy is a direct response to the content of the manuscript on moral philosophy. My aim is to apply Pater’s own terms to his own texts, following the lead which he himself had given in the manuscript on the history of philosophy. As Hillis Miller puts it, ‘the text performs on itself the act of deconstruction without any help from the critic’.74 And insofar as Pater claims that Hegel had himself anticipated this kind of a ‘destructive’ writing (HP, p. 20v), which undoes the architectural or structural pretensions of metaphysical system-builders, he also anticipates Derrida’s situation of post-structuralism in relation to its Hegelian precursor. Post-structuralism is itself post-Hegelianism, as Derrida argues: We will never be finished with the reading or rereading of Hegel, and, in a certain way, I do nothing other than attempt to explain myself on this point. In effect I believe that Hegel’s text is necessarily fissured; that it is something more and other than the closed circle of its representation.75

Pater’s identification of the ‘radical dualism’ of the Hegelian speculation is the identification of that fissure which disrupts Hegel’s totalizing pretensions. Nevertheless, as Michel Foucualt has argued, we must be careful in pronouncing ourselves post-Hegelians: To truly escape Hegel [. . .] assumes that we are aware of the extent to which Hegel, insidiously perhaps, is close to us [. . .]. We have to determine the extent to which our anti-Hegelianism is possibly one of his tricks directed against us, at the end of which he stands, motionless, waiting for us.76

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15

It is in this sense that Pater’s initial anti-Hegelianism cannot be considered postHegelian, for his anti-Hegelianism was precisely such a Hegelian ‘trick’, and his subsequent reintegration of his thought into a Hegelian framework thus unsurprising. Post-Hegelianism is necessarily related to Hegelianism. As Jean-François Lyotard argues, the ‘post modern would have to be understood according to the paradox of the future (post) anterior (modo)’.77 The same is true of post-Hegelianism, as Derrida claims: [Post-structuralism], although maintaining relations of profound affinity with Hegelian discourse (such as it must be read), is also, up to a certain point, unable to break with that discourse (which has no kind of meaning or chance); but it can operate a kind of infinitesimal and radical displacement of it.78

Post-structuralism constitutes a repositioning of Hegel which emphasizes not the closed circle of representation but that which escapes the Aufhebung, the general economy which ruptures the restricted one. Derrida’s ‘radical displacement’ is a kind of ‘radical dualism’. And although Hegelianism represents the restricted economy par excellence, what we turn to in Hegel in the twenty-first century is not this totalizing philosophy but that which escapes the pretensions of the Aufhebung. The same should be true of Pater. Pater’s relevance to twenty-first-century debates should revolve around those aspects of his thought which are resistant to this discourse of totalization. For Hegelianism is the ideology which denies and negates individuality, sexuality, and difference. As Emmanuel Levinas argues, Hegelianism might be said to constitute ‘the concept of totality, which dominates Western philosophy’; in it, ‘individuals are reduced to being bearers of forces that command them unbeknown to themselves. The meaning of individuals (indivisible outside of this totality) is derived from the totality’.79 And it is precisely Hegelianism as totality that Pater reproduces in his theory of the greater reason, his restricted economy of death and death deferred. But such a Hegelianism constitutes an ‘imperialism of the same’.80 Post-Hegelianism, on the contrary, is a relationship with the other which does not reduce it to the same (neither a metaphysics of desire nor an ontology of power); it does not dialectically negate the other but affirms the other in its alterity. Pater’s movement beyond the restricted economy and opening up of general economy, glimpsed in his reading of Hegel’s ‘radical dualism’, is thus itself radical, for it is a completely original way of thinking, of thinking what Levinas calls infinity. Pater’s identification of Hegel’s ‘radical dualism’ is then not merely anti-Hegelian but post-Hegelian in the sense of the term used by Derrida.81 As Derrida asks, ‘what [. . .] remain(s), today, for us, here, now, of a Hegel’?82 The question Derrida poses of Hegel is the same question that we must pose of Pater: given that Pater is (or at least becomes) Hegelian, what remains of Pater today? And the answer is that ‘radical dualism’ which he identifies as disrupting Hegel’s closed circle of representation: Pater as a post-Hegelian. For here, in the manuscript on the history of philosophy, and across his later imaginary portraits, Pater becomes conceivable as a transgressive thinker, anticipating the radical critiques of ideology of both his contemporary Nietzsche, and the post-Hegelian traditions of thinkers as diverse as Bataille, Benjamin, Blanchot, Deleuze, Derrida, and Foucault.83

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Notes to the Introduction 1. J. Hillis Miller, ‘Walter Pater: A Partial Portrait’, in Walter Pater: Modern Critical Views, ed. by Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1985), pp. 75–95. 2. Billie Andrew Inman, Walter Pater’s Reading: A Bibliography of his Library Borrowings and Literary References, 1858–1873 (London: Garland, 1981), p. 49. 3. Of course, all translation is selective, any act of translation at the same time a rewriting, a modification. These are themes we will come to discuss at length in Chapter 4. 4. I refer implicitly here to the argument of William Shuter’s Rereading Walter Pater (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Shuter, however, discerns only two readings of Hegel at work in Pater, whereas, as we shall shortly see, there are three distinct readings of Hegel undertaken by Pater. 5. There are two significant published discussions of Pater’s unpublished theory of the greater reason: Shuter, Rereading, pp. 61–77, and Anthony Ward, Walter Pater: The Idea in Nature (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1966), pp. 59–67. 6. See particularly Wolfgang Iser, Walter Pater: The Aesthetic Moment, trans. by David Henry Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 71–81; F. C. McGrath, The Sensible Spirit: Walter Pater and the Modernist Paradigm (Tampa: University of South Florida Press, 1986), pp. 118–39; William Shuter, ‘History as Palingenesis in Pater and Hegel’, PMLA 86.3 (1971), 411–21; Shuter, Rereading Walter Pater, pp. 61–77; and Ward, pp. 53–77. 7. See Billie Andrew Inman, ‘The Emergence of Pater’s Marius Mentality: 1874–75’, ELT 27 (1984), 100–23. 8. See the selection of responses gathered by R. M. Seiler in Walter Pater: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1980), pp. 47–112. 9. John J. Colon, ‘Brasenose Revisited: Pater in the 80s’, ELT 32 (1989), 27–32 (p. 30). 10. See Billie Andrew Inman, ‘Estrangement and Connection: Walter Pater, Benjamin Jowett, and William M. Hardinge’, in Pater in the 1990s, ed. by Laurel Brake and Ian Small (Greensboro: ELT Press, 1991), pp. 1–20. 11. Alfred Milner, letter to Philip Gell, 1 March 1874, quoted by Inman, ‘Estrangement and Connection’, p. 8. Whether indeed there is the ‘strongest evidence to prove’ this fact is more open to debate than this would suggest, since Hardinge was known to have given different stories to different individuals: see William Shuter, ‘The “Outing” of Walter Pater’, Nineteenth Century Literature, 48.4 (1994), 480–506. 12. A. C. Benson, quoted in Walter Pater: A Life Remembered, ed. by R. M. Seiler (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1987), p. 254. 13. See Shuter, ‘The “Outing” ’, pp. 480–91. 14. Benson, quoted by Seiler, A Life Remembered, p. 258. 15. For a reading of Nietzsche’s philosophy as a philosophy of action as opposed to (Hegelian) reaction, see Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson (London: Continuum, 2006), pp. 36–67. 16. See TI, ‘Morality as Anti-Nature’, § 3. 17. All of this is to read Pater somewhat against the dominant critical opinion, which has sought to reappraise him as something of a homosexual martyr. See Laurel Brake, ‘The Entangling Dance: Pater after Marius, 1885–1891’, in Walter Pater: Transparencies of Desire, ed. by Laurel Brake, Lesley Higgins, and Carolyn Williams (Greensboro: ELT Press, 2002), pp. 24–36; Michael F. Davis, ‘Walter Pater’s “Latent Intelligence” and the Conception of Queer “Theory” ’, in Transparencies of Desire, ed. by Brake, Higgins, and Williams, pp. 261–85; Richard Dellamora, Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), pp. 58–68; and Linda Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), pp. 92–103. 18. As Sigmund Freud has shown (although without reference to Hegel), negation is intimately related to repression, in ‘Negation’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. by James Strachey, 24 vols (London: Hogarth Press, 1999), xix, 235–42. 19. It is worth pointing out that whilst Pater’s philosophy was almost instantaneously altered by

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17

the interview with Jowett (his ‘reconsideration’ of his aestheticism beginning in earnest with the publication of ‘The Myth of Demeter and Persephone’ and ‘A Study of Dionysus’ in 1876), his personal sexual activities may not have been. In a diary entry of 5 May 1878, Mark Pattison wrote that ‘presently Walter Pater, who, I had been told was “upstairs” appeared, attended by two [. . .] feminine looking youths” ’ (Pattison, quoted by Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988), p. 81). 20. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, p. 114. 21. See Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, pp. 8–10. Compare GM, I §§ 9–10. 22. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, p. 113. 23. See Nietzsche’s comments in GM, III § 8, and compare TI, ‘ “Reason” in Philosophy’ § 1: ‘Be a philosopher [. . . and] get rid of the body, this miserable idée fixe of the senses!’. 24. The living youth [was] fixed [. . .] imperishably in that moment of rest which lies between two opposed motions, the backward swing of the right arm, the movement forwards on which the left foot is in the very act of starting. (GS, p. 287) Whilst there is no doubt an element of homoeroticism present in the description, Pater, as Hegel had before him, effectively sidesteps this concept by mortifying the body into its Ideal(ized) form (see A, ii, 738–42). For an alternative reading of the text, see James Eli Adams, ‘Pater’s Muscular Aestheticism’, in Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age, ed. by Donald E. Hall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 215–38. 25. See particularly Pater’s discussion of Aurelius as a ‘despiser of the body’ (ME, ii, 53–56). For whilst Pater seeks to distinguish between his own ‘reconsidered’ aestheticism and Aurelius’ Stoicism here on the issue of the body, insofar as Marius (and Pater) follow Cornelius in holding the body as ‘the one true temple in the world’, they idealize the body and, in so doing, deny it. Cornelius’ term is explicitly related to those of ‘a later seer’, namely St Paul, thereby anticipating Christian discourse in making the body into God’s temple: ‘He that commiteth fornication sinneth against his own body. | What? Know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost, which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own?’ (i Corinthians 6. 18–19). The body is, in this sense, itself the unheimlich place. 26. I take Michel Foucault’s point in The History of Sexuality, Volume One: The Will to Knowledge, trans. by Robert Hurley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998), that the Victorian age was not as ‘repressive’ as is commonly thought, particularly with reference to the ‘homosexual’, which emerged ‘as a species’ during the period (p. 43). And yet, Foucault himself makes clear that the ‘transforming sex into discourse’ did not preclude the ‘repression’ or ‘prohibition’ of desire (p. 20). Indeed, Foucault’s thesis appears in perhaps his most Nietzschean text, whose celebrated theory of power, which is immanent, variable, and polyvalent (pp. 98–102), functions as a Nietzschean attack on the fundamental negativity of Hegelianism, ‘a power that only has the force of the negative on its side, a power to say no’ (p. 85). On this Nietzscheanism of Foucault, see Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. by Seán Hand (London: Continuum, 2006), pp. 59–60. 27. The term la relève is Jacques Derrida’s translation (which is to say, his Aufhebung) of Hegel’s term Aufhebung, as Alan Bass glosses: The word comes from the verb relever, which means to lift up, as does Aufheben. But relever also means to relay, to relieve, as when one soldier on duty relieves another. Thus the conservingand-negating lift has become la relève, a ‘lift’ in which is inscribed an effect of substitution and difference inscribed in the double meaning of Aufhebung. (Translator’s note to Jacques Derrida, ‘Différance’, in Margins of Philosophy, trans. by Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 1–27 (p. 20 n. 23)) For Hegel’s definition of the Aufhebung, compare PS, § 113: ‘Supercession exhibits its true twofold meaning which we have seen in the negative: it is at once a negating and a preserving’. 28. For a reading of Pater’s attitude to the body, see Jacques Khalip, ‘Pater’s Body of Work’, in Transparencies of Desire, ed. by Brake, Higgins, and Williams, pp. 236–49. 29. Indeed, this question of totalization is precisely the issue against which Theodor Adorno, a thinker in the main sympathetic to Hegel, reacts. When Adorno inverts the founding thesis of Hegel’s Phenomenology, ‘The whole is the true’ (§ 20), to ‘The whole is the false’ (Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, trans. by E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 2005), § 29, p. 50), he

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Introduction

does so in an attempt to negotiate a non-totalitarian legacy for Hegel. Adorno’s methodology of ‘negative dialectics’, in which he pits Hegel’s dialectic against Hegel himself, thereby making the dialectic the tool of ‘the dismantling of systems’, is the practical result of this reversal: Negative Dialectics, trans. by E. B. Ashton (London: Continuum, 2007), p. 33. On negative dialectics, see Susan Buck-Morss, The Origins of Negative Dialectics (London: Macmillan, 1977), and Frederic Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno or the Persistence of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 2007), pp. 15–120. 30. Slavoj Žižek, Interrogating the Real, rev. edn (London: Continuum, 2006), p. 26. The idea that Hegelianism represents a totalizing philosophy is perhaps more open to debate than is commonly thought, as Žižek shows by characterizing this image of the ‘totalizing’ Hegel as a kind of Lacanian ‘Real’, ‘a point which effectively does not exist (a monster with no relation to Hegel himself ), but which, nonetheless, must be presupposed in order to justify our negative reference to the other’ (p. 27). 31. Stuart Barnett, ‘Hegel before Derrida’, in Hegel after Derrida, ed. by Barnett (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 1–37 (p. 2). 32. At least since Ward’s Idea in Nature, published in 1966. 33. See Shuter, Rereading, pp. 66–77. 34. Ward goes even further, claiming that ‘Pater’s misfortune is that he fails to appreciate the subtlety of the version of Hegel his contemporaries had given him’ (p. 76). This is entirely wrong, Pater’s version of Hegel being significantly more subtle than that of his contemporaries, and rests upon Ward’s own idealistic take on Hegel. 35. On the theoretical ‘toolkit’, see Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, ‘Intellectuals and Power’, in Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, trans. by Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Oxford: Blackwells, 1977), pp. 205–17 (p. 208). 36. Collected as Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’, trans. by James H. Nichols (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980). 37. Alexandre Kojève, ‘The Idea of Death in the Philosophy of Hegel’, trans. by Joseph J. Carpino, Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy, 3.1 (1972): 114–56 (p. 124). 38. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. by Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 327–28. 39. See Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, trans. by Robert Hurley, 2 vols (New York: Zone Books, 1991), i, 19–41. 40. Georges Bataille, ‘Hegel, Death and Sacrifice’, trans. by Jonathan Strauss, Yale French Studies, 78 (1990), 9–28 (pp. 20–21). 41. Linda Dowling, ‘Walter Pater and Archaeology: The Reconciliation with the Earth’, Victorian Studies, 31.2 (1988), 209–31 (p. 220). 42. In a letter to Jacques Derrida, Roger Laporte defines the brissure as follows: A single word for designating difference and articulation. [. . .] This word is brissure [ joint, break] ‘— broken, cracked part. Cf. breach, crack, fracture, fault, split, fragment, — Hinged articulation of two parts of wood- or metal-work. The hinge, the brissure [folding-joint] of a shutter. Cf. joint.’ (quoted in Of Grammatology, trans. by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, rev. edn (London: John Hopkins University Press, 1997), p. 65) 43. Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 327. 44. Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 158. 45. David J. DeLaura, Hebrew and Hellene in Victorian England: Newman, Arnold and Pater (London: University of Texas Press, 1969), p. 337. The conversion hypothesis is put forward by Martha Salmon Vogeler, ‘The Religious Meaning of Marius the Epicurean’, Nineteenth Century Fiction, 19 (1964), 287–99. 46. A. C. Benson, Walter Pater (London: Macmillan, 1906), p. 153. 47. For a summary of the debate which immediately followed Hegel’s death, see Walter Jaeschke, Reason in Religion: The Foundations of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Religion’, trans. by J. M. Stewart and Peter Hodgson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 349–421. (Marxist) leftHegelianism (Kojève) holds Hegelian thought as an areligious immanent metaphysics describing the coming revolution. Hegel himself, however, claimed to be a Lutheran, a position discussed

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by Stephen Houlgate in An Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Freedom, Truth and History, 2nd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), pp. 242–75. 48. See Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. by Ann Smock (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), p. 63: ‘Granted, Hegel is the mortal enemy of Christianity, but this is the case exactly to the extent that he is Christian: far from being satisfied with a single Mediation (Christ), he makes everything into mediation’. 49. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, p. 17. 50. G. W. F. Hegel, ‘Love’, in Early Theological Writings, trans. by T. M. Knox (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), pp. 302–08. For the German text, see Theologische Jugendschriften, ed. by Herman Nohl (Tübingen: Mohr, 1907), pp. 378–82. On this point, see Frederick Beiser, Hegel (London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 112–23. 51. The standard treatment of Pater’s Hellenism is DeLaura’s Hebrew and Hellene, pp. 165–302. See also the period-long studies by Richard Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), esp. pp. 157–74, and Frank M. Turner, The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain (London: Yale University Press, 1981), esp. pp. 68–76, 406–13. 52. G. W. F. Hegel, ‘On the Relationship of the Philosophy of Nature to Philosophy in General’, trans. by George di Giovanni and H. S. Harris, in Between Kant and Hegel (Albany: SUNY Press, 1985), pp. 363–82 (p. 377). The German text, ‘Über das Verhältniß der Naturphilosophie zur Philosophie überhaupt’, is to be found in Gesammelte Werke, ed. by E. Moldenhauer and K. M. Michel, 20 vols (Hamburg: Suhrkamp, 1969–71), iv, 265–76, not in any of the volumes with which Pater was familiar. It seems highly unlikely that he could have known about this article. It is also worth noting that the authorship of this paper is debated: Schelling maintained that ‘there is not a single letter from Hegel’s pen in the essay’. However, there can be no doubt that Hegel wanted history to regard the essay as his, vehemently protesting this fact to Karl Ludwig Michelet; as such, it seems a moot point as to who wrote it, for Hegel clearly identified his mature philosophy with this text. 53. On the Hellenic and Hebraic kinship of philosophemes, see Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 100. 54. This is the reading proposed by both Perry Meisel, The Absent Father: Virginia Woolf and Walter Pater (London: Yale University Press, 1980), and Gerald Monsman, Walter Pater’s Art of Autobiography (London: Yale University Press: 1980). 55. Pater himself played upon this fact: see Thomas Wright, The Life of Walter Pater, 2 vols (New York: Haskell, 1907), ii, 87. On this theme of paternity, see Monsman, Art of Autobiography, pp. 79–105. 56. The idea that the Oedipus complex ref lects a kind of negative misunderstanding of Nietzsche’s eternal return is suggested by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 91: ‘As a famous predecessor said to these creatures, you’ve already made this into an old refrain’. The reference is to Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, whose animals repeat to him his theory of the eternal return incorrectly and are admonished (Z, III ‘The Convalescent’, § 2). 57. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 62. 58. On Freud’s restricted economy, see Derrida, Writing and Difference, pp. 246–91. 59. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 87. 60. On the relationship between Oedipus and ressentiment, see Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, pp. 232–37. 61. For a historical survey of l’art pour l’art, see John Wilcox, ‘The Beginnings of l’Art Pour l’Art’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 11.4 (1953), 360–77. 62. I refer here to the way in which Hegelianism might be said to constitute what Deleuze calls ‘the image of thought’. See Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. by Paul Patton (London: Continuum, 2007), pp. 164–213. 63. For Nietzsche’s break with the dialectic, see TI, ‘The Problem of Socrates’, §§ 5–7, and see Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, pp. 139–82. 64. Indeed, there remains surprisingly little written on Pater’s imaginary portraits. Gerald Monsman’s Pater’s Portraits: Mythic Pattern in the Fiction of Walter Pater (Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1967) is the only monograph entirely devoted to the genre.

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65. I say that they came to take on this role because ‘The Child in the House’, the first of Pater’s imaginary portraits, was published in 1878, thus preceding the manuscript on the history of philosophy. We will discuss this text’s relationship to Pater’s Hegelianism in Chapter 3. 66. Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 26. 67. Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 127. 68. On the Old Mortality Society, see Gerald Monsman, ‘Old Mortality at Oxford’, Studies in Philology, 67.3 (1970), 359–89, and on Pater’s paper on ‘subjective immortality’, see ‘Pater’s Aesthetic Hero’, University of Toronto Quarterly, 40.2 (1971), 136–51, and ‘Pater, Hopkins, and Fichte’s Ideal Student’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 70.3 (1971), 365–76. 69. Hillis Miller, ‘A Partial Portrait’, p. 76. See also Harold Bloom, ‘The Place of Pater: “Marius the Epicurean” ’, in Walter Pater: Modern Critical Views, ed. by Bloom, pp. 31–40 (p. 32), and Jonathan Loesberg, Aestheticism and Deconstruction: Pater, Derrida, and De Man (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). 70. J. Hillis Miller, ‘Deconstructing the Deconstructers’, Diacritics, 5.2 (1975), 24–31 (p. 29). 71. Hillis Miller, ‘Deconstructing the Deconstructers’, p. 30. 72. As a general methodological statement, see Derrida’s Of Grammatology, pp. 155–64. Ahistoricism is the explicit criticism of the post-structuralist readings of Pater levelled by Shuter in Rereading Walter Pater, p. 134 n. 37: ‘Like most deconstructive readings, Perry Meisel’s reading of Pater disregards chronology’. My reading is pointedly not ahistorical, although it will, on occasion, seek to reread Pater’s earlier texts in the light of his later identification of Hegel’s ’radical dualism’. 73. For the dating of the manuscripts in question, see Shuter, Rereading, p. 135 n. 12. 74. Hillis Miller, ‘Deconstructing the Deconstructers’, p. 31. 75. Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. by Alan Bass (London: Continuum, 2002), p. 77. On the formative role played by the reading of Hegel in Derrida’s early years, see Christopher Norris, Derrida (London: Fontana, 1987), pp. 69–77. 76. Michel Foucault, ‘The Discourse on Language’, in The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. by A. M. Sheridan (New York: Pantheon, 1972), pp. 215–37 (p. 235). See also Derrida, Writing and Difference, pp. 316–17: ‘Misconstrued, treated lightly, Hegelianism only extends its historical domination, finally unfolding its immense enveloping resources without obstacle’. 77. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 81. 78. Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, p. 14. 79. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. by Alfonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), pp. 21–22. 80. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 39. In a recent book on the subject, Philip J. Kain argues precisely the opposite: Hegel and the Other: A Study of the ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’ (Albany: SUNY Press, 2005). 81. See Derrida, Positions, p. 79. 82. Jacques Derrida, Glas, trans. by John P. Leavey Jr. and Richard Rand (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), p. 1. 83. Why these post-Hegelians rather than others? The list is, indeed, somewhat arbitrary, and focuses merely on those post-Hegelians with whom, to my mind, Pater has most in common: Bataille, Blanchot, and Derrida insofar as they are indebted to Kojève’s reading of Hegel’s philosophy of death; Benjamin insofar as he and Pater share certain post-Hegelian concepts of the radical potential of the artefact; Deleuze and Foucault insofar as they respond to the ethical and political imperialism of Hegel. In the main, I have found it productive to follow a lineage from Kojève through to French post-structuralism which has proved instrumental to the rereading of Pater’s works and particularly his identification of Hegel’s ‘radical dualism’. But we could easily add to this list other figures that feature more peripherally in our discussion, such as Adorno, de Man, Irigaray, Klossowski, Lacan, Levinas, Lyotard, or Žižek.

CHAPTER 1

❖

The Hegelian Structure of Pater’s ‘Reconsidered’ Aestheticism We will never be finished with the reading or rereading of Hegel.1

Pater’s early reputation at Oxford was founded on his expertise in German idealist philosophy, Thomas Wright claiming that Pater’s elevation to a fellowship at Brasenose in 1864 was ‘thanks chief ly [. . .] to his knowledge of German philosophy, and especially [. . .] Hegel’.2 Pater had first read Hegel during the summer of 1862, his final year as an undergraduate, beginning with the Phenomenology of Spirit; indeed, Ingram Bywater claims that Pater learnt German specifically in order to read this text.3 During the same summer, Pater also read Hegel’s History of Philosophy and the Science of Logic. In April 1863, after his graduation, Pater read Hegel’s Aesthetics, and in March 1864 he returned to Hegel’s Logic in its Encyclopaedia form. And whilst we have no direct date for his studying The Philosophy of Right, a reference in ‘Coleridge’s Writings’ (AP, p. 76) suggests that he must have done so by the early summer of 1865, the probable composition date for the essay.4 Pater’s interest in German idealism was opportune and caught the Zeitgeist. His aesthetic project, whilst seeking to maintain distance from Hegelian ‘orthodoxy’, was generally sympathetic to certain Hegelian themes and carried out in an Oxford whose climate was becoming gradually more sympathetic to German idealism. Whilst Britain had not been accommodating to Hegel in the first half of the nineteenth century,5 idealism began to form a bastion in Oxford during Pater’s tenure there. By the end of Pater’s life, Oxford was generally deemed to have been Hegelianized, R. B. Haldane claiming in 1895 that ‘Oxford has been the cradle of a Hegelian movement’.6 Pater’s project of aestheticism then was pursued in the same climate of philosophical enquiry at Oxford which fostered the idealisms of T. H. Green, Edward Caird, and William Wallace.7 All three of these philosophers were, along with Pater, students of Benjamin Jowett (who himself did much to popularize Hegel in Britain),8 and all three, again along with Pater, were members of Oxford’s Old Mortality Society.9 Thus Pater’s reputation was initially founded on his comprehension of idealism and his aesthetic project ran concurrent with the philosophical movement of Oxford Hegelianism. But while the Hegelian inheritance underlying Pater’s thought has long been recognized,10 what has not yet been shown is how Pater’s mature ‘reconsidered’ aestheticism relied, not on one or other of Hegel’s philosophies or doctrines, but on itself taking on Hegel’s structure and method to such a degree that Hegelianism became structural to Pater’s aestheticism.

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The Hegelian Structure of Aestheticism

To repeat: the stakes of Pater’s Hegelianism cannot be deemed purely a question of inf luence. There is, of course, no question that Pater was inf luenced by Hegel, nor that Harold Bloom’s concept of the ‘anxiety of inf luence’ may productively be applied to Pater. Bloom himself has indeed done something similar with reference to Ruskin, arguing that whilst ‘Ruskin is ignored by name’ in Pater’s texts, ‘he hovers everywhere in them’.11 But Pater’s response to Hegel is not merely to his texts, but takes the form of a total Hegelianization of his aestheticism. And it is Pater’s Hegelian structure which we will examine in this chapter, for without first appreciating the deep structural implications of Pater’s Hegelianism we will not recognize Pater’s identification of Hegel’s ‘radical dualism’ for the transgressive act it was. Idealism and Subject–Object Identity What do we mean when we say that Pater’s thought becomes Hegelian? We have already pointed out that we are speaking of Hegel as a name, and Hegelianism as a brand. But just what constitutes Hegelianism? Speaking broadly, Hegel’s philosophy can be characterized as idealist. In an idealism the perceived world is considered an ens rationis, a thing of the mind. Such a basic conception of idealism, what might be called a subjective idealism, is clearly concurrent with Pater’s project right from its earliest stages. As he writes in Marius, in an autobiographical ref lection on his own youthful philosophy: Already he lived much in the realm of the imagination, and became betimes, as he was to continue all his life, something of an idealist, constructing the world for himself in great measure from within, by the exercise of his meditative power. (ME, i, 24)

But Hegel is an objective idealist and when we say that Pater’s aestheticism became Hegelian we mean that his subjective idealism gave way to an objective one. In an objective idealism such as Hegel’s, the essence of material reality lies in mind or spirit (Geist). This is not to say that an objective idealism renounces the doctrine that the world is an ens rationis; it remains so. But an objective idealism holds that this ens rationis is also and at the same time an ens reale, a thing of the world. The world, constructed by the activity of the human consciousness, does not only have a subjective existence but also, insofar as this construct itself constitutes the world, an objective existence. In other words, the movement of thought which constitutes the subjective idealism, insofar as it manifests Geist, manifests the world, and thus constitutes at one and the same time an objective idealism.12 Objective idealism rests upon subject–object identity. This is acknowledged by Hegel in his defence of his fellow idealist and friend, Friedrich Schelling, against the philosophy of Johann Gottlieb Fichte.13 This same logic of subject–object identity rests at the cornerstone of Pater’s aesthetic project. As he famously writes: All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music. For while in all other kinds of art it is possible to distinguish the matter from the form, and the understanding can always make this distinction, yet it is the constant effort of art to obliterate it. (R, p. 125)

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The condition of music is then the state in which matter (object) and form (subject) are united. It is the aim of art to obliterate the distinction between subject and object, subject and object here standing in for negatively rational moment (subject) and abstraction (object), unified in the positively rational moment (art). Phenomenology Hegel is aware that the subject–object identity which lies at the cornerstone of his idealism is a philosophical ‘truth’ which is not immediately apparent to the average reader, in that it appears to contradict the basic philosophical laws of identity and non-identity. Thus, in 1807, he published the Phenomenology of Spirit, the aim of which was to prove to the ordinary (non-philosophical) consciousness that ‘truth’ lay in subject–object identity, to raise the consciousness up into a position of self-consciousness and thereby to prepare it for the activity of philosophy: ‘It is this coming-to-be of Science as such or of knowledge, that is described in this Phenomenology of Spirit’ (§ 27). This elevation (the Aufhebung as la relève) of consciousness to self-consciousness is achieved in what Immanuel Kant terms the transcendental apperception, which Hegel categorizes as ‘authentic idealism’.14 It is idealist in that in the apperception the self (as subject) is conscious of the self (as object) in the moment of selfconsciousness. In the preface to the Phenomenology, Hegel puts it as follows: ‘the goal is necessarily fixed for knowledge as [. . .] the point where knowledge no longer needs to go beyond itself, where knowledge finds itself, where Notion corresponds to object and object to Notion’ (§ 80). The ‘goal’ of knowledge is to achieve a unity of subject and object; the ‘goal’ of philosophy is thus one and the same as the ‘goal’ of art in Pater’s formulation. However, philosophical thinking, according to Hegel, requires training. This is the theme of Bildung, or education, which is so cardinal to both Hegel’s philosophy and Pater’s aestheticism. Pater’s Marius the Epicurean itself constitutes a Bildungsroman, as indeed, it might be argued, does Hegel’s Phenomenology, which sets itself ‘the task of leading the individual from his uneducated standpoint to knowledge’ (§ 28).15 This initial ref lection preliminary to philosophical enquiry is the process of phenomenology.16 Broadly defined as the study of phenomena as phenomena, of the objects of subjective perception as perceptions, rather than as things-in-themselves, phenomenology constitutes ‘a form of methodological idealism’, as Terry Eagleton notes.17 And Pater’s famous methodological preface to his Renaissance constitutes the same phenomenological reduction: ‘To see the object as in itself it really is’, has been justly said to be the aim of all true criticism whatever, and in aesthetic criticism the first step towards seeing one’s object as it really is, is to know one’s own impression as it really is, to discriminate it, to realise it distinctly. (R, p. viii)

The quotation with which Pater begins this, the second paragraph of the text, is from Matthew Arnold, and, as Isobel Armstrong has argued, it is ‘Kant’s category of the aesthetic’ that lies ‘behind Arnold’s grand style’.18 Indeed, in Arnold’s formulation of an ‘object in itself ’ we can hear a clear echo of Kant’s Ding-an-sich and the

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noumena which he opposes to phenomena (CR, A249–260, B294–315). But Pater’s movement from Arnold’s position to a form of phenomenological enquiry marks an appreciation that the Arnoldian–Kantian thing-in-itself leads to a critical and philosophical cul-de-sac. Kant’s Ding-an-sich is a fetish object as far as Hegel is concerned. As Eagleton puts it, ‘Hegel will have none of this effeminate cringing before the thing-in-itself, this timid last-minute withdrawal of thought from its full penetration of the object’.19 So too with Pater, who in moving towards knowing ‘one’s own impression as it really is’, conceives of this movement not as a renunciation of knowledge of thing-in-itself, but, in typical idealist ref lection, as being constitutive of it. Note that Pater at no point dismisses Arnold’s category, his definition of criticism ‘justly’ said to be its aim. For Hegel, Kant’s unknowable thing-in-itself became knowable in phenomenology: subjectively mediated experience itself constitutes the thing-in-itself. In the identity of the subject and the object, in the way that knowledge of ‘one’s impression as it really is’ precipitates knowledge of the thing-in-itself, the Paterean aesthetic method certainly appears phenomenological. Pater’s phenomenology, even though framed as a methodological statement in the preface to the Renaissance, constitutes a transcendental rather than a hermeneutic phenomenology. As such, it is more Husserlian than Heideggerean.20 Defining transcendental phenomenology, Dermot Moran argues that, for Husserl, the essence of the eidetic reduction lies in ‘the a priori structure of object-constituting subjectivity’.21 The object is constituted in the process of its apprehension (or, in Pater’s terms, its ‘appreciation’). And indeed, whilst Pater mirrors Hegel in appealing to phenomenology, the nature of his phenomenology at this early stage of his development is more Husserlian than Hegelian. The distinction between Hegelian and Husserlian phenomenology is an important one. For Husserl, as opposed to Hegel, phenomenology is not a preliminary stage (or, as Kant says, a ‘negative science’)22 in preparation for philosophy proper, but it is itself philosophy, because it provides all knowable answers.23 Similarly, Pater’s contention in the preface to the Renaissance that the appreciation is constitutive of the thing-in-itself makes his phenomenology transcendental: the subject–object identity here being the unity of the noemic (conscious subject) and noetic (sensible object).24 The Sensible Appearance of the Idea and the Death of Art Insofar as beauty is only appreciable phenomenally, Pater’s aestheticism takes as cardinal the founding proposition of Hegel’s Aesthetics, namely that beauty is ‘the pure appearance of the Idea to sense’ (i, 111). This concept of the Hegelian ‘Idea’ was formative on the early Pater, as he makes clear in ‘Winckelmann’: ‘Ideal’ is one of those terms which through a pretended culture have become tarnished and edgeless. How great then is the charm when in Hegel’s writings we find it attached to a fresh, clear-cut apprehension! With him the ideal is a Versinnlichen of the idea — the idea turned into an object of the sense. By the idea, stripped of its technical phraseology, he means man’s knowledge about himself and his relation to the world, in its most rectified and concentrated form.25

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Beauty, as the sensible appearance of the Idea, exists only at the moment of its own effacement. Insofar as the Idea is made sensible in the world in the artefact, this artefact owes its existence to those finite materials out of which it is constructed. Beauty is thus dependent upon finitude, is dependent upon death, for whatever power it has. Here Pater, Hegel, and Freud form a sort of triumvirate in locating the value of the art-work not in its eternal quality (as Hegelian abstraction) but rather in its very transience. As Freud writes, ‘transience value is scarcity value in time. Limitation in the possibility of an enjoyment raises the value of enjoyment’.26 Beauty and death go hand-in-hand, imply one another. Theodor Adorno, in a passage heavily inf luenced by Hegel, puts it as follows: ‘Artworks have the immanent sense of being an act, even if they are carved in stone, and this endows them with the quality of being something momentary and sudden’.27 Here Adorno is also in dialogue with Walter Benjamin, whose theory of the ‘revolutionary’ potential of the aesthetic moment — the fragment, the ruin, the, constellation — underwrites the treatment of Hegelian themes.28 In other words, the moment of the sensible appearance of the artefact is that same instant which is also always already the moment of its disappearance: That instant — which is what artworks are — crystallized [. . .] at the point where out of their particular elements they became a totality. The pregnant moment of their objectivation is the moment that concentrates them as appearance.

The artwork then is impossible, ‘the appearance of the non-existent as if it existed’.29 On the republication of ‘Winckelmann’, Pater omitted the passage quoted above explaining the Hegelian Idea. However, we should not take this to mean that he had renounced the doctrine, for when ‘Winckelmann’ was collected among the Renaissance essays, the parallel thesis of the development of the arts remained; a teleology which depends for its force upon Hegel’s theory of the Idea. Insofar as beauty is the sensible appearance of the Idea, this Idea is made manifest spatially and temporally at an instant. The Idea is thus made sensible in direct proportion to the suitability of its medium for its expression: As the mind itself has had an historical development, one form of art, by the very limitations of its material, may be more adequate than another for the expression of any one phase of that development. Different attitudes of the imagination have a native affinity with different types of sensuous form, so that they combine together, with completeness and ease. (R, p. 210)

Again, this suitability of the sensuous form for the delivery of content is that subject– object identity which rests at the fulcrum of Pater’s aestheticism. Furthermore, it presupposes a developmental history of art: The arts may thus be ranged in a series, which corresponds to a series of developments in the human mind itself. Architecture, which begins in a practical need, can only express by vague hint or symbol the spirit or mind of the artist. [. . .] Again, painting, music, and poetry, with their endless power of complexity, are the special arts of the romantic and modern ages. [. . .] Between architecture

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The Hegelian Structure of Aestheticism and those romantic arts of painting, music, and poetry, comes sculpture, which, unlike architecture, deals immediately with man, while it contrasts with the romantic arts, because it is not self-analytical. It has to do more exclusively than any other art with the human form, itself one entire medium of spiritual expression. (R, pp. 210–11)

In this series of the symbolic, classical and romantic arts Hegel’s history of art follows the logic of the Aufhebung, the three stages corresponding to universality, particularity, and individuality.30 Notably, however, Pater does not here discuss Hegel’s theory of the death of art, which is the logical extension of his progressive conception of the history of the Idea. Whilst Hegel at no point explicitly uses the phrase ‘death of art’, it seems difficult to read his theory as anything less than final.31 What Hegel means is not that art can no longer be produced, but rather that it can no longer take for itself that role that it once had, namely as making sensible the Idea. ‘The peculiar nature of artistic production and of works of art no longer fills our highest need’, Hegel writes, because ‘art no longer affords that satisfaction of spiritual needs which earlier ages and nations sought in it, and found in it alone’ (A, i, 10). ‘Considered in its highest vocation’, art ‘is and remains for us a thing of the past’ (i, 11). In other words, insofar as art is no longer a sufficient vehicle through which spirit can come to self-consciousness, and insofar as the Idea can no longer be made sensible in the artefact, Hegel’s theory of the Idea and his theory of the progressive development require that art be dead. Pater’s omission of the death of art thesis is perhaps even more striking in that it occurs in an essay ostensibly discussing the aesthetic of Winckelmann, for the key difference between Hegel’s and Winckelmann’s aesthetics centres on whether modern art might recapture the Greek artistic Ideal.32 Both Hegel and Winckelmann located the ideal of art in the unification of form and content witnessed in classical sculpture, an idea which Pater follows both in his essay on ‘Winckelmann’ and in his later essay on ‘The Age of Aesthetic Prizemen’. Yet, as Frederick Beiser writes, ‘unlike Winckelmann and the neo-classicists, Hegel did not believe that it was possible to imitate Greek art’.33 In an implicit critique of Winckelmann, Hegel writes that ‘the beautiful days of Greek art, like the golden age of the later Middle Ages, are gone’ (A, i, 10); to reproduce classical art was impossible for Hegel, owing to the progressive impetus of the Idea. Precisely where Pater sits on this issue is unclear. Billie Andrew Inman, for instance, seems to take it for granted that Pater could not have held to Hegel’s death-of-art thesis.34 But her comments are related to the Pater of 1863 who first read Hegel’s Aesthetics and not to the mature Pater. William Shuter likewise suggests that it is as though Pater is editing Hegel at this point in his career: ‘Hegelian at some points, anti-Hegelian at others, the author of the Renaissance hints at some parts of Hegel’s philosophy that have lost all value and those that are still of use’.35 This is certainly true of the author of the Renaissance, but what of the later Pater? For whilst the younger Pater seeks to distance himself from not only Hegelian ‘orthodoxy’ but the logical outcome of this orthodoxy, the later Pater came to accept not only Hegelian aesthetics, but also Hegelian logic and metaphysics. As such, and given

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that Hegel’s aesthetics itself constituted a metaphysics, he would have had to have come to accept that art would lose its privileged position as a mediator between the Idea and the individual consciousness: Hegel’s death of art thesis. The Unpublished Manuscript on Moral Philosophy In the opening sentence of his unpublished manuscript on ‘Moral Philosophy’, composed some time during the early 1880s, Pater makes it clear that ethics (and, by extension, aesthetics) cannot be considered in isolation from metaphysics: Theories of the nature of moral ideas of the origin of the feeling of responsibility of the true meaning of the word duty derive for the most part from more general theories concerning the nature of man and his relation to the world around him. (MP, p. 2v)

The importance of this manuscript to Pater’s philosophical development should not be underestimated. At the end of the manuscript, Pater appends a note to say that the idea of the greater reason ‘belongs to Marius’ (MP, p. 26). That he should do so should come as no surprise, for the text itself dates from the five-year period in which Pater was reading extensively in preparation for his historical novel. But what published discussions of this manuscript have thus far passed over is the close textual similarities between the manuscript and Marius.36 Pater clearly reworked a number of passages from this manuscript directly into the text of Marius, particularly into the chapters ‘Stoicism at Court’ and ‘Second Thoughts’. Marius is designed by Pater to offer a ‘reconsideration’ of his youthful aestheticism (as he himself admits when, in reintroducing the text of the conclusion to the Renaissance in its third edition, he remarks that he had ‘dealt more fully in Marius the Epicurean with the thoughts suggested in it’: R, p. 233 n.) and the passages in which this reconsideration are most clearly explained all derive from this manuscript on moral philosophy. If we are to understand Pater’s ‘reconsideration’ of his aestheticism, if we are to grasp precisely how Pater goes about rereading his aestheticism without (as he thinks) falling into self-contradiction, then we must follow closely the argument of this manuscript. Taking as his starting point moral philosophy as opposed to aesthetics, Pater characterizes the position of the subjective idealist as nihilistic: A certain nihilism even as it is called is latent at least in all modern speculation; from the limited impressions of the individual consciousness there seems to exist no open passage to things as they are in themselves, to absolute realities. (MP, p. 4r)

Here Pater’s critique is clearly aimed at Kant’s Ding-an-sich (Arnold’s critical in-itself ) and follows essentially Hegelian lines.37 As we have seen, Pater holds that Kant’s unknowable thing-in-itself becomes knowable in phenomenology; but when he says this, the thing-in-itself to which he refers is not Kantian but rather Hegelian. Here, then, when Pater complains that ‘there seems to exist no open passage to things as they are in themselves’, he is referring to Kant’s Ding-an-sich, to an ‘absolute’ reality; whereas when he claims that the thing-in-itself is knowable in and through phenomenology, what he means to say (a la Husserl) is precisely that there is no ‘absolute’ reality beyond phenomenology.

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Pater’s appeal in this manuscript is to ‘common sense’, that which bridges the gap between theory and practice: In spite of all theoretical doubts we act, we actually do this or that, we assume the unproveable existence of an outer world the unproved future the unproved personality of our neighbour the unproved uniformity of nature and philosophy tells us that this act of common sense may be regarded from a certain point as an act of faith a certain walking by faith. (MP, pp. 11r–v)

The term ‘common sense’ used by Pater is knowingly ambiguous, and is meant to indicate both a sense of community and a sort of basic instinct.38 Insofar as ‘common sense’ is communitarian, Pater’s move is to socialize Kantian philosophy along Hegelian lines.39 ‘Common sense’ is also termed ‘custom’ by Pater: ‘we concede a far larger part of right conduct than might at first sight be supposed to custom’ (MP, pp. 10r–v). Pater acknowledges that the motives for this concession may be questioned: ‘To do or abstain from doing a thing in deference to custom might seem the leading trait of a weak character’ (MP, 10v). In a sense, Pater here anticipates Nietzsche’s critique of the ‘slave’ morality which is ressentiment. But insofar as he anticipates this critique, Pater here offers no reply, as indeed we might expect given our previous suggestion that his Hegelianism was symptom of Pater’s own ressentiment, a turning away from his body and his sexuality. Instead, Pater’s appeal to custom and ‘common sense’ constitutes an appeal to Hegel’s concept of Sittlichkeit, an appeal which none of the published readings of this manuscript have noted. In his Philosophy of Right (1821), Hegel divides ethics into three dialectical moments: abstract right (Recht), morality (Moralität), and ethical life (Sittlichkeit). Abstract rights are independent of morality both because they are rights and because they are claimed by the conscience as free and self-determining. The moral will, by contrast, realizes that the right to freedom is also a responsibility. Here Hegel is both close to and far from Kant. For Hegel, self-determining freedom shapes itself through action and takes responsibility for this action (PR, § 117). As in Kant’s categorical imperative, then, the demand is that ‘I should never act except in such a way that I can also will that my maxim should become a universal law’ (GW, p. 14; p. 421). Pater has already alluded to the categorical imperative earlier in the manuscript, speaking of Kant’s ‘obligatory law resting on no basis but its own imperative and arbitrary character in relation to the human will’ (MP, p. 5v).40 But like Hegel, Pater deems the categorical imperative insufficient grounds for the ethical life. Kant’s maxim is an ‘empty formalism’ as Stephen Houlgate puts it; a system of ‘duty for duty’s sake’ in Hegel’s terms (PR, § 133).41 As Hegel points out, Kant’s system of duty at no point defines what duty is: duty is, as it were, yet another Ding-an-sich, another unknowable thing-in-itself (PR, § 135 n.). As a consequence, Hegel chose to ground his self-determining freedom within conscience: Conscience is the expression of the absolute title of subjective self-consciousness to know in itself and from within itself what is right and obligatory, to give recognition only to what it knows as good, and at the same time to maintain that whatever in this way it knows and wills is in truth right and obligatory. (PR, § 137 n.)

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Still, conscience is not sufficient grounds for Pater’s moral philosophy. Hegel’s idea of conscience, the foundation of his Moralität, is in danger of falling into the same pitfall as Kant’s categorical imperative: it too is a realization only on a subjective level and seems irreconcilable with wider laws outside of itself. Pater clarifies the dilemma as follows: What we are looking for is a common or abstract principle of morals wide enough to include all right motions subtle enough to include expressively the most exceptional of those motives and with sanction with selfevidence enough to take from moral life as realised by the individual its caprice and subjectivity. (MP, p. 11r)

We seek, then, something more than subjective Moralität, the ‘moral life as realised by the individual’: we are looking for a ‘common or abstract principle of morals’, objective Sittlichkeit. That Pater’s appeal is to custom is fitting in this context, for it is custom (Sitte) which is the substance of Hegel’s Sittlichkeit: In an ethical community, it is easy to say what a man must do, what are the duties he has to fulfil in order to be virtuous: he simply has to follow the well-known and explicit rules of his own situation. Rectitude is the general character which may be demanded of him by law or custom. (PR, § 150 n.)

Pater’s discussion of custom perhaps misses some of the subtlety of Hegel’s here, for Hegel is quite clear that it is only in ‘an ethical community’ that customs are guaranteed to be the benchmark of ethical life. Hegel does not suggest that he himself is living in such a community, or indeed that such a community does or ever has existed. Nevertheless, the general thrust of Pater’s idea of the ‘common sense’ of the manuscript on moral philosophy is encompassed by Hegel’s Sittlichkeit. And Pater’s terms are repeated in the key chapter ‘Stoicism at Court’ of Marius, in such a way as to suggest that this passage represents a direct reworking of his earlier discussion of moral philosophy: [Cornelius was] in search after some principle of conduct [. . .] which might give unity of motive to an actual rectitude, a cleanness and probity of life, determined partly by natural affection, partly by enlightened self-interest or the feeling of honour, due in part even to the mere fear of penalties. (ME, ii, 7)

Cornelius continues his speech, as related by Marius, again in terms directly taken from the manuscript on moral philosophy: He may notice that there is a remnant of right conduct, what he does, still more what he abstains from doing, not so much through his own free election, as from a deference, an ‘assent’, entire, habitual, unconscious, to custom. (ME, ii, 9)

The terms Pater uses in both the third book of Marius and in the manuscript on moral philosophy are ‘assent’ and ‘concession’ to ‘custom’. Indeed, if Marius is meant to be a statement of Pater’s ‘reconsidered’ aestheticism, so too, one might argue, is Gaston de Latour. In 1888, three years after Marius, five chapters of Gaston were published in MacMillan’s Magazine and another in the Fortnightly Review under the title ‘Giordano Bruno’. From a letter that Pater wrote to

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Carl William Ernst, we know that Gaston was intended to be a sequel to Marius.42 Unsurprisingly, then, we find that the term ‘common sense’ returns in Gaston: A certain finally authoritative common sense upon the quiet experience of things — the oldest, the most authentic, of all voices, audible always, if one stepped aside for a moment and got one’s ears into what might after all be their normal condition. It might be heard, it would seem, in proportion as men were in touch with the Earth itself, in country life, in manual work upon it, above all by the open grave, as if, reminiscent of some older, deeper, more permanent ground of fact, it whispered then oracularly a certain secret to those who came into such close contact with it. Persistent after-thought! Would it always survive, amid the indifference of others, amid the world, amid a thousand doubts? (GL, p. 42)

We note here in passing the way in which Pater’s concept of ‘common sense’ is related in this passage to the (proximate, present) spoken voice (the logos), to the earth (‘culture’ as the ‘turning over of the earth’), to mankind’s labour (Hegelian Bildung), to ‘survival’ as living-on and as after-thought, and to a ‘secret’ revealed in and around death. (The ‘open grave’ echoes the events of ‘The Child in the House’ in which Florian comes ‘upon an open grave for a child — a dark space on the brilliant grass’ (MS, p. 190).) These are themes we will come to deal with more explicitly in the following chapters. For the moment, let us draw attention to the fact that the terms of Gaston’s ‘reconsideration’, just as the terms of Marius’s ‘reconsideration’, are anticipated in this unpublished manuscript on moral philosophy. Pater’s Sittlich Aestheticism and Francis Herbert Bradley’s Ethical Studies In the manuscript on moral philosophy and his discussion of the sittlich community, Pater’s closeness to Hegel is in keeping with the general tenor of Oxford Hegelianism. It was the Philosophy of Right that proved the most inf luential of Hegel’s texts on British Idealism.43 In particular, Pater’s discussion of the sittlich community corresponds to the discussion undertaken in Francis Herbert Bradley’s Ethical Studies.44 And these similarities between Pater’s and Bradley’s texts are all the more striking given the fact that Bradley’s Ethical Studies, published in 1876, might themselves be characterized as constituting an ethical riposte to Pater’s conclusion to the Renaissance, published some three years earlier. Whilst Pater is never explicitly named in the text, the third essay of Bradley’s Ethical Studies, taking as its subject the doctrine of pleasure for pleasure’s sake, is clearly aimed at that brand of Oxford decadence which Pater’s critics believed he advocated.45 Bradley’s essential critique is that the doctrine of pleasure for pleasure’s sake postulates pleasure as both the means and the ends of the same equation, but that the ends of this equation are unattainable: The sum, or the All of pleasures is a self-contradiction, and therefore the search for it is futile. A series which has no beginning, or, if a beginning, yet no end, cannot be summed; there is no All, and yet the All is postulated, and the series is to be summed.46

In place of the doctrine of pleasure for pleasure’s sake Bradley would institute

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something more akin to the Hegelian Idea: ‘the end is not the realisation of an abstract idea’, it is ‘not a “thing-in-itself ” [. . .] but is the end for us as men’, and ‘the self-evolution of ourselves and of humanity is the end’.47 Again, Bradley is claiming that the doctrine of pleasure for pleasure’s sake (and by extension aestheticism), in making ‘the Sum, or the All of pleasures’ into its end, constitutes a ‘false universal’.48 In a sense, Bradley’s Ethical Studies anticipates the direction Pater was going to take a few years later in his ‘reconsideration’ of his aestheticism. But what Bradley does not anticipate is the way in which Pater would turn Hegel’s own arguments against him. In the fourth essay of his Ethical Studies, on duty for duty’s sake, Bradley criticizes the idea of the categorical imperative according to a precisely correspondent argument to his criticism of ‘the sum, or All of pleasures’. It is again deemed a ‘false universal’, an ‘empty formalism’, Bradley holding Kant’s ethical philosophy to have been ‘annihilated by Hegel’s criticism [. . .] to which I owe most of the following’.49 In other words, Bradley pairs the doctrine of pleasure for pleasure’s sake alongside the doctrine of duty or duty’s sake: pleasure for pleasure sake is duty for duty’s sake. As such, Pater’s reading of the categorical imperative and his socialization of Kant along Hegelian lines in the manuscript on moral philosophy takes on added significance. It indicates not only a socialization of Kantian Moralität (Hegel’s Sittlichkeit) but a socialization of aestheticism. And what Bradley fails to anticipate is that Pater will turn his aestheticism not into the moral life (Moralität) as he had suggested the hedonist would (‘Hedonism [. . .] puts itself forward as moral, as the one and only account of morality’),50 but into the ethical life (Sittlichkeit). Pater’s doctrine of aestheticism was not a doctrine of pleasure for pleasure’s sake, because that too would constitute an ‘empty formalism’. Rather, his doctrine was art for art’s sake, insofar as art serves to make the Hegelian Idea sensible, and aestheticism for aestheticism’s sake, insofar as the act of appreciating the aesthetic artefact served to make the greater reason comes to its own self-consciousness. Pater, like Bradley, identified ‘self-realisation’ as the end of his own (ethical) philosophy: ‘To realise means to translate an ideal content into existence’. Or again: ‘ “Realise” asserts the concrete identity of matter and form which “formal will” denies’.51 Art is the means through which the consciousness could realize itself (come to its own selfconsciousness) and art is the ends, in that art is the manifestation of the (Hegelian) Idea. It was as though Bradley’s Ethical Studies, itself conceived of in response to Oxford aestheticism, became the text to which Pater in turn responded in his own discussion of moral philosophy.52 Mutual Recognition and the Greater Reason When Pater speaks of moral philosophy, then, what he seeks is Sittlichkeit. And, as in Hegel’s system, Sittlichkeit is to be found in the idea of Geist. In the manuscript on moral philosophy, Pater defines Geist, or what he calls the greater reason, as follows: That great ever-progressing spirit is indeed but the communion of individuals here or there yesterday and today, though working indeed according to laws of its own determined by the interaction of the units which compose it over and above the laws which determine each of those units by himself. (MP, pp. 13v–14r)

The greater reason is then a progressive edifice which constitutes a (sittlich) community (unification) of a series of individuals (particularities). Together these individuals, or what Pater calls ‘lesser reasons’, through the process of their interaction with one another, interactions guided by the ‘laws’ of Reason, substantiate the greater reason over and above themselves. As Hegel puts it in his preface to the Philosophy of Right, in a phrase quoted by Pater as early as 1865 in his essay on ‘Coleridge’ (although then somewhat dismissively), ‘what is rational is actual and what is actual is rational’ (PR, pp. 10, 17; AP, p. 76). Geist is objective self-conscious Reason immanent in the world: it is consciousness that knows itself to be conscious through its own activity and according to its own self-determined and rational laws. In the Philosophy of Right, Hegel shows that Geist is based upon the sittlich community and made concrete in ‘custom’: When individuals are simply identified with the actual order, ethical life (das Sittliche) appears as their general mode of conduct, i.e. as custom (Sitte), while the habitual practice of ethical living appears as a second nature which, put in the place of the initial, purely natural will, is the soul of custom permeating it through and through, the significance and the actuality of its existence. It is mind living and present as a world, and the substance of mind thus exists now and for the first time as mind. (PR, § 151)

The ethical community then respects the free and self-determining nature of all constituent individuals within it: it recognizes them. This aspect of ‘recognition’ is vital to Hegel’s scheme, and is mentioned by Pater in his discussion of moral philosophy (MP, p. 13r). For Hegel, the consciousness is only able to move outside of its own boundaries, only able to objectify itself in self-consciousness, by recognizing that its absolute independence requires an acknowledgement of the identity of identity and non-identity. In the Phenomenology, Hegel dramatizes the consciousness discovering this fact through the dialectic of desire, where the ego comes to the recognition that ‘self-consciousness achieves its satisfaction only in another self-consciousness’ (§ 175). Essentially, the consciousness realizes that self-consciousness as spirit requires mutual identification: it involves the double recognition of itself in the other and of the other in itself, in a single unified moment that is (becoming) self-conscious. As he famously puts it, Spirit is the ‘ “I” that is “We” and the “We” that is “I” ’ (PS, § 177). Self-consciousness is only achievable through an externalization into the other, but it cannot be true self-consciousness if the other is not also acknowledged as concrete. Both subject and object must be of equal standing for true identityin-difference to occur and self-consciousness to be achieved. The principle at work, then, is what Pater calls ‘sympathy’: ‘that concession to custom becomes [. . .] assent and that vague body to which we in thought defer becomes incorporate as humanity’ (MP, pp. 10v–11r). Again, these are terms which are closely repeated in the text of Marius, in which Cornelius speaks of ‘the idea of Humanity — of a universal commonwealth of mind’ (ME, ii, 9), the greater reason. Pater continues his discussion of the greater reason by highlighting philosophical

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precedent and seeking to justify his own moral philosophy within a philosophical canon. He argues, in terms to be repeated almost ad verbatim in both Marius (i, 144) and Plato and Platonism (p. 5), that: In reading the history of philosophy we may notice the [. . .] recurrence from age to age of certain persistent tendencies of speculation resulting in fixed hypotheses or ideas. [. . .] Expressing thus certain permanent aspects of thought or directions of mind in dealing with experience form a sort of tradition in speculative philosophy which however much it may seem to vary from age to age varies only as the pieces of the kaleidoscope and has really as definitely limited an apparatus as the mind it ref lects. (MP, pp. 15r–16r)

In this history of philosophy, it is the idea of Geist which constitutes its ‘central subject’ (MP, p. 19v), as that ‘ between what we may call the greater and the lesser reason, [. . .] between the minor reason of the finite, and transient individual, and some greater system of reason’ (MP, p. 16v). Here Pater explicitly locates Hegel as his direct philosophical predecessor: it is Hegel who ‘brings to its most purged and concentrated form the tradition of the [. . .] the greater reason, over against the little reason of man’ (MP, pp. 21r–v). In Hegel’s identity of identity and non-identity, in his sittlich com munity of custom and common sense, man’s subjective self-determination and freedom becomes the very essence of the objective world. As Pater writes, the greater reason is objectified in the idea of ‘collective humanity’: The idea of a sleepless reason wh[ich] assists and rounds our sleepy intermittent intelligence in wh[ich] the eternal [. . .] ideas of things have a durable permanent fine independent existence lending itself and lifting for a little time our transient individual intelligence, for us actually translates into that conception of collective humanity. (MP, p. 19r)53

Collective humanity is itself the ‘common sense’, constructed upon the laws of Reason and objectified in the customs of the sittlich community. This ethical community is clearly consonant with Christianity. Inman has suggested that one of the main thrusts of Pater’s ‘reconsideration’ of his aestheticism during the mid-1870s was his recognition of the institution of marriage, by which Pater had hoped to show ‘that unlike certain other writers who were known to be hedonistic, he firmly supported the institution of the family, the central institution of Victorian culture’.54 And it is the family which lies at the first moment of the three moments of Hegel’s Sittlichkeit, the second being bourgeois society (bürgerliche Gesellschaft) and the third being the State (Staatsverfassung). The ethical community, the community guaranteed by custom and the ‘common sense’, is the society built upon the hierarchy and patriarchal values of the (Christian) family unit: In a family, one’s frame of mind is to have self-consciousness of one’s individuality within this unity as the absolute essence of oneself, with the result that one is in it not as an independent person but as a member. (PR, § 158)

And the family (the first moment of the third moment of Hegel’s ethical philosophy) is further subdivided into three moments: marriage, family capital, and the

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education of the children (which functions as the dissolution of the family unity in bourgeois society). Marriage, as the immediate type of ethical relationship, contains first, the moment of physical life; and [. . .] secondly, in self-consciousness the natural sexual union — a union purely inward or implicit and for that reason existent as purely external — is changed into a union on the level of mind, into selfconscious love. (PR, § 161)

Needless to say, Pater’s turn to marriage, the species of sexual union which, in Hegel’s terms, is ‘natural’, is indicative of a ressentiment against his homosexuality. And this same turn towards marriage occurs twice in the manuscript on moral philosophy, the first speaking of ‘custom’ as asserting its preference on ‘Xtn marriage’ (MP, p. 15r), and the second explicitly relating the first and the second moments of the Sittlichkeit with one another, Pater writing dismissively of the way in which ‘humanity from time to time is led to reconsider its experience [. . .] of for instance [. . .] ’ (MP, p. 24v). The Structure of Pater’s Aestheticism This coming-to-self-consciousness through the other requires an act of ‘faith’ on the part of the Paterean (Hegelian) consciousness (MP, p. 11v).55 It is first and foremost a ‘concession’: We assent then to custom [. . .] and actually this assent on our part is met from without us by a great fact or great idea which at once rationalises expands and elevates the nature of that act. (MP, pp. 13r–v)

In the greater reason, manifest objectively in collective humanity, we may ‘be rid of our capricious [. . .] subjectivity’, and ‘we may find an actual authority’ (MP, p. 13v). As in the movements of Hegel’s Aufhebung, congress with the greater reason involves sacrifice. All of this, then, seems a far cry from Pater’s conclusion to the Renaissance in which he claimed that ‘the theory or idea or system which requires of us the sacrifice of any part of this experience [. . .] has no real claim upon us’ (pp. 237–38) and where he criticizes the ‘failure’ of modern human society as the forming of ‘habits’ (p. 236). Notions of duty for duty’s sake would seem to be totally counter to the tenor of Pater’s aestheticism. What has the idea of duty or moral philosophy got to do with the doctrine of art for art’s sake? And if Pater’s ‘reconsideration’ of his aestheticism revolves around sittlich responsibility, how can Pater successfully ‘reconsider’ his aestheticism without falling into self-contradiction? With this question we get to the crux of Pater’s mature aestheticism, to its structural properties, to the structural necessity which is his Hegelianism. For it is only through adopting the Hegelian model, not in fragments, but in its totality, that he can reintegrate aestheticism into the scheme of moral philosophy. We have already seen how, right from the earliest formulations of his aestheticism, two cardinal Hegelian concepts are adopted into Pater’s own philosophy: the initial phenomenological reduction and the (progressivist) notion of the Idea. Now, in the manuscript on moral philosophy, the notion of the Idea reappears precisely

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at the moment of the consciousness’s sacrifice: our ‘assent’ is ‘met from without us by a great fact or great idea which at once rationalises expands and elevates the nature of that act’ (MP, pp. 13r–v). And, as we have also seen, this ‘idea’ is the greater reason, Hegel’s Geist. We are presented with that Idea which art in its beauty and substantiality makes concrete as sensible appearance in the world. And, by reintroducing the Hegelian Idea which he had omitted from the essay on Winckelmann back into his philosophy here in the discussion of moral philosophy, Pater ensures that his ethical philosophy cannot be separated from his aestheticism. For now, by bringing out of the concept of the Idea (first cited for its aesthetic properties) its ethical and metaphysical implications (ethical and metaphysical implications which, it should be noted, are inherent in Hegel’s own discussions of aesthetics and not merely implicit therein), Pater can explicitly Hegelianize his aestheticism: (1). Through the initial phenomenological reduction, Pater’s aesthete, in the very process of appreciating the artefact, himself engages in a moment of self-discovery (R, p. viii). The aim of Pater’s phenomenological reduction is then the same aim as in Kant’s transcendental apperception: to come to selfconsciousness, to attain ‘some knowledge of ourselves some inward sympathetic identification with ourselves’ (MP, p. 23r). (2). Through this process of self-discovery, precipitated through the act of perceiving the idea made sensible (the beautiful artefact), the individual consciousness himself serves to make the greater reason self-conscious: the ‘little reason’ in its self-awareness constituting the greater reason above and beyond it. Therefore, not only is Pater’s philosophy not licensing hedonism, as many of the critics of his Renaissance had charged, but it constitutes an ethical activity. For the aim of Pater’s Hegelian ethics is one and the same as the aim of his ‘reconsidered’ aestheticism: namely, to serve to precipitate the coming-to-self-consciousness of the greater reason. This last point, the ethical nature of the aesthetic appreciation, is again repeated in Marius. We are told that Marius’s preoccupation with aesthetic matters is not selfish: He has a strong apprehension, also, of the beauty of the visible things around him [. . .] not so much because those aspects of them yield him the largest amount of enjoyment, as because to be occupied, in this way, with the aesthetic or imaginative side of things, is to be in real contact with those elements of his own nature, and of theirs, which, for him at least, are matter of the most real kind of apprehension. As other men are concentrated upon truths of number, for instance, or on business, or it may be on the pleasures of appetite, so he is wholly bent on living in that full stream of refined sensation. (ME, ii, 25–26)

The aesthetic act is itself considered by Pater to constitute Bildung. It too finds its structural place within that wider human metanarrative which is the greater reason. In other words, if the early Pater had f lirted with a series of Hegelian concepts, and had built his reputation at Oxford on his knowledge of idealist philosophy, by the time of the composition of Marius Pater reintegrates these disparate fragments and reworks them within a Hegelian whole. During the early 1880s Hegelianism itself (rather than this or that Hegelian idea) became structural to his thought. No longer

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was Pater offering up aestheticism as a critique of or alternative to Hegel’s system: Pater’s aestheticism had become Hegelianism. Aestheticism and Semiology The structural necessity which underwrites the Hegelianism of Pater’s later aestheticism comes to its most explicit published expression in the essay on ‘Style’ (1888). In a key passage from the middle of the essay, Pater claims that: All the technical laws of logic are but means of securing, in each and all of its apprehensions, the unity, the strict identity with itself, of the apprehending mind. All the laws of good writing aim at a similar unity or identity of the mind in all the processes by which the word is associated to its import. The term is right, and has its essential beauty, when it becomes, in a manner, what it signifies, as with the names of simple sensations. To give the phrase, the sentence, the structural member, the entire composition, song, or essay, a similar unity with its subject and with itself: — style is in the right way when it tends towards that. (AP, pp. 21–22)

Style is then the ‘right’ way, style is ‘good’, when it too achieves that subject–object identity which lies at the cornerstone of Hegelian idealism. Later in the essay, Pater defines ‘good’ style as ‘the absolute correspondence of the term to its import’ (AP, p. 37); which is to say that ‘good’ style is occasioned by the correspondence of signifier and signified, as guided and legitimated by the ‘laws’ of style (the laws of Reason). In other words, aestheticism constitutes a semiology. This first statement, that ‘all the technical laws of logic are but means of securing, in each and all of its apprehensions, the unity, the strict identity with itself, of the apprehending mind’, is attributed by Pater to Henry Longueville Mansel, but it is clearly a Hegelian idea.56 Indeed, it constitutes the narrative strategy of Hegel’s Phenomenology. More specifically, the self-identity of the apprehending mind, in which the consciousness comes to self-consciousness through the other, is indicative of a kind of Hegelian as opposed to Aristotelian logic: subject–object identity founded upon the identity of identity and non-identity. Insofar as Hegel’s is a Romantic philosophy, which privileges the self-determining freedom of the individual consciousness above all else, the cardinal tenet of Aristotelian logic, namely that ‘a thing cannot at the same time be and not be’ (from which are derived the two central fulcrums of logic, namely that ‘A = A’ and that ‘A ≠ not-A’), is suspended at the outset of Hegel’s Logic, a text which Pater had read in both its lesser and greater formats.57 Hegel begins by attempting to think purely indeterminate thought, thought which has not been given. He concludes that such an indeterminate thought must be the thought of being, Sein: Pure Being makes the beginning: because it is on the one hand pure thought, and on the other immediacy itself, simple and indeterminate; and the first beginning cannot be mediated by anything, or be further determined. (E, § 86)

However, if the thought of ‘pure’ being is truly indeterminate, it amounts to the thought of nothing, Nichts, thought without content: ‘this mere Being, as it is mere abstraction, is therefore the absolutely negative: which, in a similarly immediate

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aspect, is just Nothing’ (E, § 87). The thought of pure being turns into its opposite, pure nothing, and vice versa. The indeterminate thought which is the thought of pure being thus becomes the thought of pure becoming, Werden: Nothing, if it be thus immediate and equal to itself, is also conversely the same as Being is. The truth of Being and of Nothing is accordingly the unity of the two: and this unity is Becoming. (E, § 88)

It is here then that the radical break with Aristotelian logic is institutionalized: In Becoming the Being which is one with Nothing, and the Nothing which is one with Being, are only vanishing factors; they are and they are not. Thus by its inherent contradiction Becoming collapses into the unity in which the two elements are absorbed. This result is accordingly Being Determinate (Being there and so). (E, § 89)

Insofar as the thought of nothing is (is being), Hegel’s consciousness has arrived at its first determinate thought. This then is what leads Hegel to the thought of becoming as determinate difference. And this movement of being into nothing, this becoming nothing of being and becoming being of nothing, is precisely the speculative form of the Aufhebung. To return to Pater, how is it then that the mind can apprehend itself? As subject (the one apprehending) it cannot at one and the same time be object (the one apprehended), if one is to adhere to Aristotle’s laws of logic. The apprehending mind apprehends something, the subject is conscious of an object, which is an object only to the extent in which it is not the subject. However, as Hegel’s Logic shows, precisely insofar as the subject conceives of itself, it must conceive of itself as an object. The subject is then both subject and object (Kant’s transcendental apperception): it is this law of logic, a Hegelian logic of subject–object identity, which determines Pater’s assertion that logic secures ‘the unity, the strict identity with itself, of the apprehending mind’. In the passage from the essay on ‘Style’, Pater continues by claiming that ‘all the laws of good writing aim at a similar unity or identity of the mind in all the processes by which the word is associated to its import’ (AP, p. 22). From this sentence we can draw the following conclusions: (1). That there are ‘laws’ of writing; laws which may be likened to the laws of logic; and thus, by extension, given that the laws of logic to which he refers are Hegelian as opposed to Aristotelian, what might be called ‘Hegelian laws’ of writing (which is to say, the laws of ‘absolute correspondence’ (AP, p. 37), the laws of the Absolute or Reason).58 (2). That these are laws of ‘good’ writing. Here the term ‘good’, whilst obviously implying a whole swath of value-judgements, should not be confused with a moral concept. What Pater means by ‘good’ writing is formally good writing — he is not (as yet) making claims as to the content of the writing.59 (3). That the identity of the mind with itself (secured through the movement of Hegelian immanent logic) is to be likened to writing. As such, the ‘aim’ of writing is akin to the ‘aim’ of consciousness (and likewise the ‘aim’ of both aestheticism and philosophy): namely to achieve self-consciousness. The appre-

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hending mind comes into self-consciousness through the process of writing (this is, of course, idealistic on Pater’s part, itself symptomatic of philosophical idealism). (4). That the ‘word is associated to its import’; here much remains uncertain, but the movement of the phrase and the positioning of the copula suggests, at least, that Pater holds that the writer is active in this procedure: the writer is the one doing the associating. (5). That this association of word to import is akin to the apprehension by the mind of itself. This is the case, presumably, not only because writing is presenting the self to itself, and thus is the writing of self-consciousness, but because writing obeys the ‘technical laws of logic’, the aim of which is to bring the consciousness to free and self-determining self-consciousness. In associating word to import, the mind apprehends itself in its own self-identity. The moment of conceiving of the object is also the moment when the subject discovers itself. Now Pater seems to imply that the process of signification is (or, at least, ‘aims’ to be) a precisely correspondent activity. It is, then, in the attribution of meaning that the subject attains self-consciousness. Again, this is a clearly Hegelian theme. The Hegelian consciousness is the one which is self-determining and free; which, through the act of signification, comes to recognize itself as such, presents itself to itself as such. The very possibility of philosophy relies upon the primacy afforded the actus signatus by Hegel: Thought, regarded as an activity, may be accordingly described as the active universal, and, since the deed, its product, is the universal once more, may be called the self-actualising universal. Thought conceived as a subject (agent) is a thinker, and the subject existing as a thinker is simply denoted by the term ‘I’. (E, § 20)

Thought, which Hegel makes clear is to be regarded as an activity, presupposes an active party. This active party is denoted by the term ‘I’. Hegel as yet will not make any judgments regarding the ‘I’: the ‘I’ is, as it were, arbitrary.60 Nevertheless, insofar as thought is necessarily informed by the actus signatus, thought presupposes an ‘I’ to do the thinking. Thus Hegelian semiology (which is to say, the entirety of Hegel’s speculative project) ‘touches upon the question of the relationship between subject and predicate in any declarative sentence’, as Paul de Man has argued.61 As soon as a thought is made into a sentence, is formed and enunciated, it is presented by an (as yet unnamed) ‘I’ who forms the sentence, who authorizes it, in the terms both of the author as creator of the thought and of the author as authority, guaranteeing the validity of that thought. Hegel’s entire philosophical project thus rests, first, upon the activity of thought, the way in which thought requires an actus signatus, and, secondly, upon the arbitrariness of the sign. It is only insofar as the sign is arbitrary that it can be the tool for the coming-to-self-consciousness of the individual lesser reason. Indeed, from a certain perspective, the entire Hegelian speculation is semiological.62 The abstraction, which has a ‘subsistence and being of its own’ (E, § 80), is outside thought: it is the signified. The negatively rational moment, in which

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the abstraction is superseded, is an ‘empty and abstract nothing’ beyond thought (§ 82): it is the signifier. The positively rational moment, the ‘unity of terms and their opposition’ (§ 82), is the mediation of signified and signifier: it is the sign. As Jacques Derrida writes: The thing (the referent) is relieved (relevée, aufgehoben) in the sign: raised, elevated, spiritualized, magnified, embalmed, interiorized, idealized, named since the name accomplishes the sign. In the sign, the (exterior) signifier is relieved by signification, by the (ideal [idéel]) signified sense, Bedeutung, the concept. The concept relieves the sign that relieves the referent.63

The sign preserves the signified and its negation in a new higher form beyond ‘reality’. Signification, the creation of the sign, is the meaning of the Aufhebung. It is not surprising therefore that, in a seemingly insubstantial note to a discussion of Gedächtnis, the faculty of memory, Hegel criticizes previous philosophical systems for not paying attention to the role played by the sign in logic: ‘In logic and psychology, signs and language are usually foisted in somewhere as an appendix, without any trouble being taken to display their necessity and systematic place in the economy of intelligence’ (E, § 458). As Derrida concludes, if ‘the right place for the sign is that just given’ by Hegel, ‘despite appearances, then, the place of semiology is really at the center, and not in the margins or appendix, of Hegel’s Logic’.64 In Hegel’s system, the sign belongs to Gedächtnis, the faculty of memory,65 which permits the highest type of thought: The sign-creating activity may be distinctively named ‘productive’ Memory (the primarily abstract ‘Mnemosyne’); since memory, which in ordinary life is often used as interchangeable and synonymous with remembrance (recollection), and even with conception and imagination, has always to do with signs only. (E, § 458)

Here what one might call the standard definition of the sign as mediation between signifier and signified is made explicit: The name, combining the intuition (an intellectual production) with its signification, is primarily a single transient product; and conjunction of the idea (which is inward) with the intuition (which is outward) is itself outward. The reduction of this outwardness to inwardness is (verbal) Memory. (E, § 460)66

Now Gedächtnis (memory) is not Erinnerung (recollection). Whereas Erinnerung needs ‘an actual intuition’ to associate to an idea (E, § 454), Gedächtnis ‘needs no aids to intuition’ (§ 457). It has withdrawn into itself and now creates the idea itself through its own movement: it no longer perceives the idea becoming sensible, but rather it itself makes the idea sensible. Where the Erinnerung deals in images, the Gedächtnis deals with words; specifically, names. ‘We think in names’, Hegel asserts (§ 462). Productive memory (Gedächtnis) is the repetition of words without content — signs. It is only when the words have become signs, which is to say, it is only when the signs are wholly arbitrary, are signs pure-and-simple (as opposed to symbols), that they are known as thought (Denken).67 As such, memory (Gedächtnis) ceases to have any relationship to either recollection (Erinnerung) or to the sensible world (the referents). In its wholly arbitrary nature, Gedächtnis relates only by means of its own signs (§ 462).

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Here we return to Pater’s essay on ‘Style’. As we have seen, there the process of the coming into self-consciousness relies upon the representation of the consciousness to itself. And this process of representation is also the process of the sign. ‘The term is right’, claims Pater, and ‘has its essential beauty, when it becomes, in a manner, what it signifies’ (AP, p. 22). The key term here is ‘becomes’ (Hegel’s ‘Werden’). The term is not ‘right’ or ‘beautiful’ when it is what it signifies. Pater’s aestheticism is philosophical in Hegel’s sense — it rests on the Aufhebung which is the attribution of meaning in the sign. There is no essential relationship here which demands that a certain signified necessarily be paired with a corresponding signifier.68 It is the actus signatus which makes the Idea sensible through the attribution of significance. It is the very arbitrariness of the sign which ensures the coming-to-self-consciousness of the individual consciousness. And, just as was the case in Hegel’s speculation, this same primacy is afforded the actus signatus in Pater’s aestheticism, and is afforded this significance for precisely the same reasons. For it is only through the arbitrariness of the sign, an arbitrariness which guarantees the validity of the actus signatus, that the consciousness can secure, ‘in each and all of its apprehensions, the unity, the strict identity with itself, of the apprehending mind’ (AP, p. 22). Insofar as the Hegelian philosophy constitutes semiology, so too does Paterean aestheticism. Pater’s Architectural Analogy and Aesthetic Structuralism And insofar as aestheticism constitutes semiology, it also constitutes a structuralism. According to Pater, the written composition is to be considered a structural whole: ‘To give the phrase, the sentence, the structural member, the entire composition, song, or essay, a similar unity with its subject and with itself: — style is in the right way when it tends towards that’ (AP, p. 22). Here Pater considers the process of writing to be an Aufhebung, and the finished product, the piece written, the positively rational result. And insofar as both the ‘technical laws of logic’ and the process of signification secure self-identity through the Hegelian logic, so too does the composition gain a unity of its own. The finished composition is thus analogous to Geist, to the greater reason. That Pater considers the greater reason to be itself a form of language becomes evident in the manuscript on moral philosophy: That [. . .] reason [. . .] which assists the individual in his simplest act of thought and round[s] his incompleteness is really palpable to our experience mainly in the form of language that great gift of the ages to the individual. (MP, p. 14r)

The individual units, the lesser reasons, are themselves functioning as structural members. In linguistics, these basic structural units are called phonemes. Each structural member, each phoneme, each lesser reason, is seeking its own self-consciousness, and through the communion of these self-conscious lesser reasons, the greater reason too attains its self-consciousness. This structuralism of Pater’s later aestheticism is made explicit in his architectural analogy.69 In the passage of the essay on ‘Style’ immediately preceding his discussion of semiology, Pater writes:

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In literary as in all other art, structure is all-important [. . .] — that architectural conception of work, which foresees the end in the beginning and never loses sight of it, and in every part is conscious of all the rest, till the last sentence does but, with undiminished vigour, unfold and justify the first. (AP, p. 21)

The activity of writing is analogous to the work of the architect, the writer building a structure. And this ‘literary architecture’ itself forms a part of a wider architectural project, ‘the great structure of human life’, as is made clear at the conclusion to the essay (AP, p. 38). The written composition functions as a ‘structural member’ within the larger design of the greater reason. And the greater reason too is explicitly cited for its architectural qualities, Pater speaking of it as ‘ a more complete architecture’ in comparison to the lesser reason (MP, p. 16v). In a sense, Pater’s architectural analogy could not have been more predictable. As Derrida has argued, philosophy is ‘an art of architecture’.70 It is a conception of structure, an understanding of the world in terms of architectural forms, in which ‘the edifice of metaphysics’, as Mark Wigley writes, is ‘understood as a grounded structure’.71 Philosophy would not be philosophy, would not be able to function, without this grounding point. And in the Hegelian speculation, this grounding point is architecture itself.72 In his Aesthetics, Hegel argues that ‘architecture corresponds to the symbolic form of art’ (ii, 632). As such, ‘by making its content emerge into determinate existence in the real world, art becomes a particular art’, and so architecture constitutes ‘the actual beginning of art’ (ii, 630). And as we have already seen, Pater reproduces Hegel’s history of art in his essay on Winckelmann, speaking of architecture, ‘according to Hegel’s beautiful comparison, [as] a Memnon waiting for the day, the day of the Greek spirit, the humanistic spirit, with its power of speech’ (R, p. 211). Indeed, Pater appears to recognize not only the role played by architecture in Hegel’s system, but that his system is itself architecture, calling Hegel’s speculative exercise ‘the metaphysical reconstruction of all experience as a realisation of the creative Logic’ (HP, p. 6; my emphasis). And perhaps it should come as no surprise in this context to discover that a pair of essays on architecture, conceived to be part of a longer survey of ‘Some Great Churches in France’, were Pater’s last published work.73 However, when speaking of Pater’s aestheticism as a structuralism we must be careful. To discuss Pater’s semiology (just as to discuss Hegel’s semiology) as a form of structuralism is clearly in a sense anachronistic. Semiology as a term was coined by Saussure at the earliest some time after 1906; which is to say, some ten years after Pater’s death.74 Furthermore, to assert that Pater’s semiology is also a structuralism is little more than tautologous: semiology is a particular form of structuralism. Still, let us, for the sake of argument, and for the sake of Pater’s explicit structural analogy, continue and limit the field of enquiry to what might be called ‘classical’ structuralism (Saussurean structuralism, if you will), which may be defined according to the following cardinal tenets: (1). All texts are structural; which is to say that all texts are made up of a tissue of codes which interrelate in order to produce the palimpsest of the whole. (2). Any sign within a structural system attains its meaning from its position within

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the system — it means what it means owing to its relationships with other terms within the structural system; within a structuralism, all meaning is contextual. (3). Insofar as all meaning is contextual, meaning is produced by difference. This point, namely ‘the thesis of difference as the source of linguistic value’, as Derrida points out, is implied by Saussure’s (and indeed Hegel’s) definition of the sign as arbitrary.75 (4). Because all meaning is contextual within the structure, any sign within that system has no inherent meaning outside of that system. Its meaning is solely contextual: it has no meaning ‘in itself ’, to borrow the Kantian terminology. Thus structuralism is only structuralism as long as the sign remains arbitrary, just as semiology is only semiology according to the same remit. Now, neither structuralism nor semiology is conceivable without Hegel. As Stuart Barnett writes, the Encyclopaedia reads as though ‘all of humanity and its practices form one coherent, signifying system’. Structuralism was then conceived of as ‘a variant of Hegelianism’.76 The only difference between a structuralism and Hegelianism — a difference which also holds for Pater — is that in a structuralism there is no essential necessity underwriting the system, whereas Hegelianism is based upon the necessity which is Reason. But insofar as both alike are closed systems (restricted economies) which are produced only in and through those differences, differences maintaining the distinction between units and their relations, Hegelianism is itself a structuralism, structuralism another branch of Hegelianism. With reference to Hegel’s philosophy, it is the concept of Geist which is considered the complete structure. This is what might be called the structuralism of Hegel’s Encyclopaedia, a text which, in its three volumes, itself seeks to present a closed and complete system of philosophy.77 Owing to the interdependence of the organic system, each and every individual consciousness achieves its selfconsciousness only in relation to another (Hegel’s ‘mutual dependence’, Levinas’s critique of ‘totality’).78 The individual consciousness has no meaning outside of Geist: it is defined as a consciousness only insofar as it is defined within Geist; it cannot differentiate itself and thus cannot be conscious of itself outside of the workings of Geist. And the same is equally true of Pater’s concept of the greater reason, in which each individual member, each lesser reason, attains its meaning only within the structural whole, according to differences between these structural members, and according to a coherent design (the greater reason). Aestheticism as the Death of Art We have seen how Hegelianism became structural to Pater’s thought in the development of his philosophy in the early 1880s. Pater’s aestheticism, which had been initially formulated as an anti-Hegelian philosophy, came to become identi fied not only with certain of Hegel’s doctrines, but with the overall form of Hegel’s philosophy. And indeed, if we turn to his Aesthetics, we find that Hegel had in many ways anticipated Pater’s aestheticism. In a famous passage, Hegel argues that the birth of aesthetics will be the direct result of the death of art:

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Art, considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past. Thereby it has lost for us genuine truth and life, and has been transferred into our ideas instead of maintaining its earlier necessity in reality and occupying its higher place. What is now aroused in works of art is not just immediate enjoyment but our judgment also, since we subject to our intellectual consideration (i) the content of art, and (ii) the work of art’s means of presentation, and the appropriateness or inappropriateness of both to one another. The philosophy of art is therefore a greater need in our day than it was in the days when art by itself as art yielded full satisfaction. Art invites us to intellectual consideration, and that not for the purpose of creating art again, but knowing philosophically what art is. (A, I, 111)

Aesthetics is then necessary in Hegel’s system: aesthetics relieves (la relève) art, according to the formal laws of the Aufhebung. And in Pater’s philosophy, aestheticism takes on the role of art in a movement that precisely corresponds to Hegel’s. No longer made sensible in the beautiful artefact, the (Hegelian) Idea is now made sensible through the appreciation of the artefact. As the consciousness attains self-consciousness in and through this process of appreciation, the consciousness, rather than the artefact, becomes the Idea made sensible.79 This is the Hegelian logic which underwrites Pater’s aestheticism, as he makes clear in the essay on ‘Wordsworth’ (1874): That the end of life is not action but contemplation — being as distinct from doing — a certain disposition of the mind: is, in some shape or other, the principle of all the higher morality [. . .]. To treat life in the spirit of art, is to make life a thing in which means and ends are identified: to encourage such treatment, the true moral significance of art and poetry. (AP, p. 62)

The identification of means and ends is, once again, that Hegelian subject–object identity which Pater had made foundational to his aestheticism. In other words, Pater’s Hegelianism demands that he ‘treat life in the spirit of art’; this is its own internal necessity. Because art is beautiful and because beauty is the sensible appearance of the Idea, so too life must be treated as art in that it too is an example of the Idea made sensible. The lesser reason makes the greater reason sensible over and above it. Life is then art, the Idea made sensible, and thus the very substance of morality (namely Reason). ‘To treat life in the spirit of art’ is therefore Pater’s own formulation of Hegel’s death-of-art thesis. Notes to Chapter 1 1. Derrida, Positions, p. 77. 2. Wright, i, 211. See also Edward Thomas, Walter Pater: A Critical Study (London: M. Secker, 1913), p. 24. 3. W. W. Jackson, Ingram Bywater: The Memoir of an Oxford Scholar, 1840–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1915), p. 79. 4. See Inman, Walter Pater’s Reading, pp. 34, 37, 49, 72, 87. 5. For general studies of the coming of Hegel to Britain, see Peter Robbins, The British Hegelians, 1875–1925 (London: Garland, 1982), and Sandra den Otter, British Idealism and Social Explanation: A Study in Late Victorian Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), esp. pp. 23–44. 6. R. B. Haldane, ‘Hegel’, Contemporary Review, 67 (1895), 232–45 (p. 233). 7. Green (1836–82) was made Whyte Professor of Moral Philosophy in 1877. Caird (1835–1908),

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author of the inf luential Hegel (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1883), was Green’s classmate under Jowett and succeeded Jowett as Master of Balliol in 1893. Wallace (1843–97) succeeded Green to the Whyte Professorship in 1882. The most clearly Hegelian of the three idealists, Wallace translated The Logic of Hegel (1874) and Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind (1894). 8. Benjamin Jowett (1817–93) was elected Regius Professor of Greek in 1855. Whilst in his notebooks Jowett attacks Hegel for his lack of philosophical rigour, claiming that ‘any possible association by which he can pass from one abstraction to another is enough for him’ ( Jowett, quoted by Robbins, p. 31), he did maintain that ‘tho’ not a Hegelian, I think I have gained more from Hegel than from any other philosopher’ ( Jowett, quoted by A. Quinton, ‘Absolute Idealism’, in Rationalism, Empiricism and Idealism: British Academy Lectures on the History of Philosophy, ed. by Anthony Kenny (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), pp. 124–50, at p. 141). 9. See Monsman, ‘Old Mortality’, pp. 359–89. It is worth noting that S. R. Brooke, another Old Mortality member, claims that of his contemporaries Pater was regarded as ‘the best philosopher in Oxford’ (Brooke, quoted in Monsman, ‘Pater’s Aesthetic Hero’, p. 140). 10. See Iser, pp. 71–81; Loesberg, pp. 66–73; McGrath, pp. 118–39; Shuter, Rereading, pp. 61–77; Ward, pp. 53–77; and Carolyn Williams, Transfigured World: Walter Pater’s Aesthetic Historicism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), pp. 72–74, 149–51. 11. Harold Bloom, introduction to Walter Pater: Modern Critical Views, pp. 1–21 (p. 8). For the theory itself, see The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973). On Pater and Ruskin, see Kenneth Daley, The Rescue of Romanticism: Walter Pater and John Ruskin (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2001). 12. See Beiser, pp. 57–61, and Houlgate, p. 21. 13. See G. W. F. Hegel, The Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy, trans. by H. S. Harris and Walter Cerf (Albany: SUNY Press, 1977), pp. 79–80; Differenz des Fichteschen und Schellingschen Systems der Philosophie, in Gesammelte Werke, ed. by Moldenhauer and Michel, ii, 9–10. 14. Hegel, Difference, p. 79; Differenz, p. 9. For the transcendental apperception, see CR, A103–30, B130–42. On the topography of this Aufhebung as la relève, see Gilles Deleuze’s characterization of the philosopher, from Plato to Hegel, as ‘a being of ascents’, in The Logic of Sense, trans. by Mark Lester (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 145. 15. On Marius as Bildungsroman, see Clyde de L. Ryles, ‘The Concept of Becoming in Marius the Epicurean’, Nineteenth Century Literature, 43.2 (1988), 157–74; and for the suggestion that, whilst Marius is a Bildungsroman, it is a transgressive one, see Matthew Kaiser, ‘Marius at Oxford: Paterean Pedagogy and the Ethics of Seduction’, in Transparencies of Desire, ed. Brake, Higgins, and Williams, pp. 189–201. On Hegel’s Phenomenology as Bildungsroman, see Walter Kaufmann, Hegel: Reinterpretation, Texts and Commentary (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1966), pp. 158–62. For a general treatment of the role of Bildung in Hegel’s philosophy, see John H. Smith, The Spirit and its Letter: Traces of Rhetoric in Hegel’s Philosophy of ‘Bildung’ (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), pp. 174–238. 16. Whilst Hillis Miller (‘A Partial Portrait’, p. 76), Monsman (‘Pater’s Aesthetic Hero’, p. 151 n. 14) and Loesberg (pp. 76–79) all touch brief ly on the subject of Pater’s phenomenology, none of them explore it explicitly or relate it to his idealism. 17. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory, 2nd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), p. 49. 18. Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 211. Pater’s reference is to Matthew Arnold, ‘On Translating Homer’, in The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. by R. H. Super, 11 vols (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1960–78), xi, 97–216 (p. 215). 19. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), p. 120. 20. On the distinction between transcendental (Husserlian) and hermeneutic (Heideggerean) phenomenology, see Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. by John McQuarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper Row, 1962), § 7, pp. 49–62. The question as to whether Pater’s phenomenology is primarily transcendental or hermeneutic is complicated by the fact that Pater seems to change with respects to this phenomenological method as he grows older. Here, in the methodological statement which constitutes the preface to the Renaissance (a relatively early text, written in 1873), Pater’s phenomenology is primarily transcendental, since he reduces

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everything to (treats everything as a correlate of ) the consciousness, in a manner reminiscent of (or rather anticipating) Husserl’s eidetic reduction. But in his last published book, Plato and Platonism (1893), Pater might be said to be moving towards a more hermeneutic phenomenology, in the emphasis placed upon the ‘historic method’ (p. 9). For the eidetic reduction, see Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book, trans. by F. Kersten (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1983), §§ 1–17, pp. 5–32. 21. Dermot Moran, ‘Introduction’ to The Phenomenology Reader, ed. by Dermot Moran and Timothy Mooney (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 1–26 (p. 3). 22. Kant’s comment comes in a letter to Johann Heinrich Lambert, 2 September 1770, quoted in Michael Inwood, A Hegel Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 214. Indeed, Hegel attacks Kant in his Encyclopaedia, precisely in that Kant fails to transcend this ‘negative science’: ‘The Kantian philosophy may be most accurately described [. . .] as containing the propositions only of a phenomenology (not of a philosophy) of mind’ (§ 451). 23. On the distinction between Hegelian and Husserlian phenomenologies, see Jean-François Lyotard, Phenomenology, trans. by Brian Beakley (Albany: SUNY Press, 1991), pp. 65–69. 24. See Husserl, §§ 87–96, pp. 211–35. We do not have time to pursue this line of enquiry further, since my interest here is primarily upon the relationship between Pater’s phenomenology and his Hegelianism. Nevertheless, a fruitful enquiry might read Pater alongside the art-criticism of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (particularly since Merelau-Ponty was an attendee at Kojève’s lectures on Hegel, which we will come to discuss at length in the next chapter). See, for instance, his essay on ‘Cézanne’s Doubt’, in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, ed. by Galen A. Johnson and Michael B. Smith (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993), pp. 59–75. Indeed, Anthony Ward goes someway toward this approach in his Idea in Nature, quoting the essay on Cézanne, but then reducing Merleau-Ponty to nothing more than ‘a French neo-Hegelian’ (p. 76). 25. Walter Pater, ‘Winckelmann’, Westminster Review, 31 (1867), 80–110 (p. 94). 26. Sigmund Freud, ‘On Transience’, in Standard Edition, ed. by Strachey, xiv, 303–07 (p. 305). 27. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. by Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 105. 28. Benjamin was, along with Bataille, Kojève, and Klossowski (three figures who will come to be important to our discussions of Pater’s philosophy of death), a regular attendee at the College of Sociology (1937–39), and when he f led Paris to escape the Nazis in May 1940, he left his papers with Bataille. 29. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, pp. 107, 109. 30. See Stephen Bungay, Beauty and Truth: A Study of Hegel’s Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 31–32. 31. Beiser argues that the term is derived from the inf luential reading of Hegel by Croce (p. 332 n. 26). See Benedetto Croce, Aesthetic: As Science of Expression and General Linguistic, trans. by Douglas Ainslee (London: Peter Owen, 1967), pp. 302–03: [Hegel] refused to evade the logical exigencies of his system and proclaimed the mortality, nay, the very death, of art. [. . .] The Aesthetic of Hegel is thus a funeral oration: he passes in review the progressive steps of internal consumption and lays the whole in its grave, leaving Philosophy to write its epitaph. 32. On Pater’s reading of Winkelmann, see Alex Potts, Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History (London: Yale University Press, 1994), pp. 238–53. 33. Beiser, p. 303. 34. See Inman, Walter Pater’s Reading, p. 55. 35. Shuter, Rereading, p. 64. 36. For published discussions of the manuscript, see Shuter, Rereading, pp. 64–65, and Ward, pp. 59–66. 37. See also the opening to the essay on ‘Prosper Mérimée’: In the mental world [. . .] a great outlook had lately been cut off. After Kant’s criticism of the mind, its pretensions to pass beyond the limits of individual experience seemed as dead as those of the old French royalty. (MS, p. 11)

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38. For a phenomenological reading of this ‘common sense’, see Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. by Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 240–82. 39. On Hegel’s socialization of Kant, see Beiser, p. 177. 40. Pater read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason during the same trip to Heidelberg in which he first read Hegel’s Phenomenology, in the summer of 1860. He read the Groundwork in February 1861. See Inman, Walter Pater’s Reading, pp. 21–23. 41. Houlgate, p. 192. On this moral formalism, see Gilles Deleuze’s reading of Kant alongside Kaf ka, in Kant’s Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the Faculties, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London: Continuum, 2008), pp. ix–x. 42. See Pater, letter to Carl William Ernst, 28 January 1886, in The Letters of Walter Pater, ed. by Lawrence Evans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 65. When Gaston was published posthumously in 1896, edited by Charles Shadwell, a further chapter was included from Pater’s unpublished manuscripts. 43. See den Otter, p. 27. 44. Francis Herbert Bradley (1846–1924) was made fellow of Merton in 1870, a position he held until his death. 45. On Pater and decadence, see Linda Dowling, Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de Siècle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 140–70, and Richard Jenkyns, Dignity and Decadence: Victorian Art and the Classical Inheritance (London: Harper Collins, 1992), pp. 251–62. 46. F. H. Bradley, Ethical Studies (London: Henry King, 1876), p. 88. 47. Bradley, pp. 113–14. 48. See Bradley, p. 89: ‘The true universal, which unconsciously he [the aesthete] seeks, is infinite, for it is a concrete whole concluded within itself, and complete; but the false universal is infinite in the sense of a process ad infinitum’. Here Bradley’s distinction between the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ infinites is canonically Hegelian: The image of the progress to infinity [bad infinity] is the straight line, at the two limits of which alone the infinite is, and always only is where the line — which is determinate being — is not, and which goes out beyond to this negation of its determinate being, that is, to the indeterminate; the image of true infinity, bent back upon itself, becomes the circle, the line which has reached itself, which is closed and wholly present, without beginning or end. (Hegel, SL, § 302) 49. Bradley, p. 134 n. See also p. 143: ‘ “Duty for duty’s sake”, says only, “do the right for the sake of right”; it does not tell us what right is [. . .]. It tells us to act for the sake of a form’. 50. Bradley, p. 81. 51. Bradley, pp. 134, 136. 52. We should note also that other current in Oxford Idealism from which Pater borrowed: its coincidence with Darwinism, a link which Pater makes explicit (PP, p. 19). The history of Hegel’s assimilation into British intellectual life suggests that the reputation of the two thinkers went to some extent hand-in-hand: see den Otter, pp. 93–96. In the manuscript on moral philosophy, Pater refers more than once to this fellowship, indicating that he was well aware of contemporary developments in Oxford Hegelianism. He writes of ‘the theory of some more recent writers which finds the binding force of men’s moral ideas in [. . .] the utility of certain courses of action transformed by long inheritance into a sort of physical instinct’ (MP, p. 5v). Furthermore, it is not unimportant that Pater’s consideration of Hegel and Darwin in the same breath in Plato and Platonism was published by the same publisher and in the same year as D. G. Richie’s Darwin and Hegel (London: Macmillan, 1893). Ritchie (1853–1903) was appointed fellow of Jesus College in 1878, and was tutor at Balliol between 1882 and 1886. 53. On this insomnia of the Hegelian Reason, compare Bataille, The Accursed Share, ii, 370: ‘ “Absolute knowledge” closes, whereas the movement I speak of opens up. Starting from “absolute knowledge”, Hegel could not prevent discourse from dissolving, but it dissolved into sleep’. See also Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 318: ‘The slumber of reason is not, perhaps, reason put to sleep, but slumber in the form of reason, the vigilance of the Hegelian logos. Reason keeps watch over a deep slumber in which it has an interest’. Alternatively, see Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 122: ‘It is not the slumber of reason that engenders monsters, but vigilant insomniac rationality’.

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54. Inman, ‘Pater’s Marius Mentality’, p. 119. 55. For Søren Kierkegaard, ‘faith’ is exactly what Hegel lacks. Hegel’s Aufhebung, translated by Kierkegaard as ‘mediation’, permits no room for the leap of faith, his philosophy of reason no room for the absurd. See, for example, Kierkegaard’s attack on Hegel in Fear and Trembling/ Repetition, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton. Princeton University Press, 1983), pp. 32–33. We may similarly question Pater’s concept of faith as it appears here in the manuscript on moral philosophy, or later in his essay on ‘Pascal’ (1894): ‘It is no mere calm supercession [Aufhebung] of a state of doubt by a state of faith; the doubts never die, they are only just kept down in a perpetual agonia’ (MS, p. 77). But is not Pascal’s famous wager the very definition of a Hegelian speculation in the Derridean sense (discussed in Chapter 2): not faith at all, but an economic exchange? 56. Henry Longueville Mansel (1820–71) was appointed Waynf lete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy in 1859. Speaking of this passage, Billie Andrew Inman speculates that Pater is referring either to Mansel’s Prologema Logica (1851) or his Metaphysics (1860), and concludes, concerning Mansel’s inf luence, that ‘if he [Pater] read a book by Mansel before reading Hegel’s Ästhetik, Mansel could have inf luenced him considerably; if he read Mansel later, he was able to meet him more than half way’ (Walter Pater and his Reading: With a Bibliography of his Library Borrowings, 1874–1877 (London: Garland, 1990), p. 69). Inman’s conclusions seem somewhat curious, however, given Mansel’s virulent anti-Hegelianism: see his essays ‘On the Philosophy of Kant’, ‘Modern German Philosophy’, and his unfinished drama ‘Phrontisterion; or Oxford in the Nineteenth Century’, in Letters, Lectures and Reviews, including the Phrontisterion, ed. by Henry Chandler (London: John Murray, 1873), pp. 155–85, 187–211, 393–408. 57. Aristotle, Metaphysics, trans. by W. D. Ross, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. by Jonathan Barnes, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), ii, 1552–1728 (996b29–30, p. 1575). Pater read the Science of Logic (the Greater Logic) in December 1862 and the Encyclopaedia Logic (the Lesser Logic) between March and April 1864: see Inman, Walter Pater’s Reading, pp. 34–35, 72. 58. This is another theological — which is to say, Hegelian — motif at work in Pater. As Nietzsche argues, ‘we have not got rid of God because we still have faith in grammar . . .’ (TI, ‘ “Reason” in Philosophy’, § 5). 59. Pater makes explicit his distinction between (formally) ‘good’ art and (substantially) ‘great’ art in the conclusion to his essay on ‘Style’: ‘Good art, but not necessarily great art; the distinction between great art and good art depending immediately [. . .] not on its form, but on the matter’ (AP, p. 38). Here, Pater’s distinction is reminiscent of Derrida’s reading of Plato: According to a pattern that will dominate all of Western philosophy, good writing (natural, living, knowledgeable, intelligible, internal, speaking) is opposed to bad writing (a moribund, ignorant, external, mute artifice for the senses). [. . .] Philosophy is played out in the play between two kinds of writing. (Dissemination, trans. by Barbara Johnson (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 149) 60. On the arbitrariness of the sign, see Hegel’s discussions of sign and symbol in his Aesthetics, ii, 303–05, and his Encyclopaedia, § 458. 61. Paul de Man, ‘Sign and Symbol in Hegel’s Aesthetics’, in Aesthetic Ideology, ed. by Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), pp. 91–104 (p. 97). 62. On Hegelian semiology, see Kojève, ‘Death in the Philosophy of Hegel’, p. 130: ‘Negativity is “the energy of thought”, which disengages meaning from Being by separating essence from existence’. 63. Derrida, Glas, p. 8. 64. Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, p. 71. 65. Hegel subdivides Vorstellung (representation) into three separate phases: Erinnerung (recollection), Einbildungskraft (imagination), and Gedächtnis (memory). 66. Compare Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. by Wade Baskin (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), p. 67: ‘I propose to retain the word sign to designate the whole and to replace concept and sound-image respectively by signified and signifier’. 67. Here Hegel and Saussure once again concur:

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Signs that are wholly arbitrary realize better than the others the ideal of the semiological process. [. . .] One characteristic of the symbol is that it is never wholly arbitrary; it is not empty, for there is the rudiment of a natural bond between the signifier and the signified. (p. 68) 68. Pater is not entirely consistent on this point. In two separate passages, he seems to suggest an essential correspondence. In Marius, Marius speculates that ‘what was necessary, first of all, was to re-establish the natural and direct relationship between thought and expression, between the sensation and the term, and restore to words their primitive power’ (ME, i, 96). And in the essay on ‘Style’: ‘One seems to detect the inf luence of a philosophic idea there, the idea of a natural economy, of some pre-existent adaptation, between a relative, somewhere in the world of thought, and its correlative, somewhere in the world of language’ (AP, p. 30). However, Inman (in what must be said to constitute essentially the only published discussion of Pater’s semiology) has rightly argued that ‘behind this statement on the relationship between words and thoughts/ feelings lies [. . .] the assumption that any language grows with the experience of the people among whom it grows and that words in context mean what they mean in context’ (Pater and his Reading, p. 67). 69. On Pater’s use of the architectural analogy, see Eve Ellen Frank, Literary Architecture: Essays Toward a Tradition (London: University of California Press, 1979), pp. 17–49, and Anthony Vidler in The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (London: MIT Press, 1992), pp. 57–62. 70. Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. by Geoffrey Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 41. 71. Mark Wigley, The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida’s Haunt (London: MIT Press, 1993), p. 7. 72. On the role played by architecture in Hegel’s Aesthetics, see Denis Hollier, Against Architecture: The Writings of George Bataille, trans. by Betsy Wing (London: MIT Press, 1989), pp. 3–13. 73. ‘Notre-Dame D’Amiens’ and ‘Vélezay’ were published in the Nineteenth Century, in March and April 1894 respectively. A third study, entitled ‘Notre Dame de Troyes’, survives among Pater’s unpublished manuscripts: bMS Eng 1150 (20). 74. See Saussure, p. 16: A science that studies the life of signs within society is conceivable; it would be part of social psychology, and consequently of general psychology; I shall call it semiology (from the Greek sēmeion, ‘sign’). Semiology would show what constitutes signs and what laws govern them. Since the science does not yet exist, no one can say what it will be; but it has a right to exist, a place staked out in advance. Linguistics is only a part of the general science of semiology. Saussure’s lectures on semiology at the University of Geneva began in 1906, but it was not until 1916 (a year after his death) that they were published. 75. Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 52. Compare Saussure, p. 118: ‘Arbitrary and differential are two correlative qualities’. 76. Barnett, p. 21. 77. See Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, pp. 33–34: ‘Hegel’s Encyclopedia (1817–27) attempts to realize this project of totalization’. 78. On Hegel’s organicism, see Beiser, pp. 79–109, and Houlgate, pp. 106–21. Regarding Pater’s use of this organicism, see Ward, pp. 67–77. 79. We see something similar argued in the so-called ‘Oldest System Programme of German Idealism’ (1796), trans. by H. S. Harris, in The Hegel Reader, ed. by Stephen Houlgate (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 28–29: ‘The Idea which unites all the rest, the Idea of beauty [. . .]. I am now convinced that the highest act of Reason, the one through which it encompasses all Ideas, is an aesthetic act’ (p. 29).

CHAPTER 2

❖

The Philosophy of (the Impossibility of ) Death Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power which converts it into being. (PS, § 32)

What we have seen so far is how Pater’s initial reaction against Hegelian totalization, the ‘facile orthodoxy’, is supplanted in his mature philosophy by his theory of the greater reason, in which aestheticism is bound into a systematization where the appreciation of the aesthetic artefact becomes an ethical part of the whole, a necessary step towards the coming-to-self-consciousness of the greater reason. In other words, in his movement from a subjective to an objective idealism, Pater seeks to reintegrate aestheticism into a metaphysical structure. And this structure is by definition total: it is complete in and of itself. Thus Pater’s theory of the greater reason constitutes, in its totalization, what Georges Bataille would call the restriction of the economy. Defining an economy as any system in which value is produced and used, a restricted economy is one which accounts for all this utilized energy. However, as Bataille points out: The living organism, in a situation determined by the play of energy on the surface of the globe, ordinarily receives more energy than is necessary for maintaining life; the excess energy (wealth) can be used for the growth of a system (e.g., an organism); if the system can no longer grow, or if the excess cannot be completely absorbed in its growth, it must necessarily be lost without profit; it must be spent, willingly or not, gloriously and catastrophically.1

In a restricted economy, the system seeks to reintegrate any excess value (energy) produced back into that system. The ‘ideal’ economy, as traditionally conceived, is one defined by its restrictedness. And this is why the Hegelian system in its totalization is precisely so ideal, constituting the system in Bataille’s terms.2 In his dialectical method of the Aufhebung, Hegel claims to account for all parts of the system; the abstraction is negated in the positively rational moment, which contains all that was in the initial abstraction in a sublated form. In other words, nothing is lost in the Hegelian system.

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The Life of Spirit and the Philosophy of Death As Hegel himself makes clear in § 32 of the Phenomenology, it is death, harnessed in the power of the Aufhebung, that is the motor of his restricted economy and it is this passage which led Alexandre Kojève to conclude that Hegel’s philosophy constitutes ‘a philosophy of death’.3 The importance of Kojève’s reading of Hegel as the philosopher of death to postHegelian thought cannot be overemphasized. Kojève ran a series of lectures at the École Pratique des Hautes Études on Hegel between 1933 and 1939 which shaped the philosophical return to Hegel.4 In attendance at Kojève’s lectures were Georges Bataille, Jacques Lacan, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Paul Sartre, amongst others, all of whose writings maintain the traces of Kojève’s reading of Hegel.5 Hegel himself considers the Aufhebung to be the work of death: ‘The activity of dissolution is the power and work of the Understanding, the most astonishing and mightiest of powers, or rather the absolute power’ (§ 32). Hegel calls this ‘nonactuality’ ‘death’, in that the understanding destroys the abstraction through its dialectical movement. The ‘life of Spirit’ is, according to Hegel, ‘not the life which shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it’. Spirit finds itself only in death.6 Nevertheless, and despite Hegel’s protestations to the contrary, it is debateable just to what extent the negative is being tarried with in Hegel’s restricted economy. Death is the name of a process in Hegel’s system. The negated particularity of the abstraction is maintained and preserved in its substantiality within the new universality, the positively rational moment. Death thus becomes a stage within a wider process (in another structural or architectural movement); all life proceeds from death, is built upon the death of one thing which produces another. There is no loss in Hegel’s system, no excess in Bataille’s terms.7 As Maurice Blanchot writes: ‘In the Hegelian system (that is in all systems), death is constantly in operation, and nothing dies, nothing can die’.8 In Pater’s restricted economy, just as in Hegelian philosophy, the motor of the system is death.9 As Linda Dowling has shown, Pater turned to anthropology in the mid-1870s, the period of his Hegelian ‘reconsideration’. Pater became fascinated with the idea of cultural rebirth and the monuments built upon the legacy of death. Indeed, the idea of the greater reason is indivisible from such a conception of culture. According to Dowling, ‘Matthew Arnold’s “Culture” [. . .] begins for Pater as culture, the turning over of the earth’.10 Cultural production (the ‘custom’ of the sittlich community) is built upon death. Pater had been reading the anthropological studies of Andrew Lang, his personal friend, Charles Newton, Edward Burnett Tylor, and, most importantly, Ludwig Preller.11 As Dowling argues, this German source in particular was formative, ‘since the German word for both culture and agriculture — Kultur — was spelled, as it often was in the nineteenth century before German orthography became fixed, with a “C”: Cultur’.12 Culture is for Pater the culture of death. We see this theme of culture as cultivation from the very beginnings of Marius:

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His actual interest in the cultivation of the earth [. . .] had brought him, at least, intimately near to those elementary conditions of life, a reverence for which [. . . is] held to be the ground of primitive Roman religion, as of primitive morals. (ME, i, 15)

Culture is thus perceived by Pater to be the remains of the dead, all of whom to some extent live on in the modern states.13 As Denis Donoghue writes, Pater’s interest in archaeology ‘allowed him to believe that nothing is ever lost’.14 Culture is that ‘increasing majority’ of the dead, ‘working out its affirmations’ and ‘asserting its preferences’ (MP, p. 15r), the Aufhebung having preserved each and every particular within the movement of the greater reason. And it is this culture of death which Marius’s experiences at the ancestral home of the Cecilii make clear to him: A narrow opening cut in its steep side, like a solid blackness there, admitted Marius and his gleaming leader into a hollow cavern or crypt, neither more nor less in fact than the family burial-place of the Cecilii, to whom this residence belonged, brought thus, after an arrangement then becoming not unusual, into immediate connexion with the abode of the living, in bold assertion of that instinct of family life, which the sanction of the Holy Family was, hereafter, more and more to reinforce. (ME, ii, 98)

Here, then, the family is itself the culture of death. And that Marius’s ‘reconsideration’ of his aestheticism should ultimately rest on the idea of the family is hardly surprising, given that the family constitutes the first of the three moments of Hegel’s Sittlichkeit, and that it was to the idea of the family that Pater turned during his initial ‘reconsideration’ of his aestheticism between 1874 and 1875. Pater continues by describing the familial necropolis which underwrites the House of the Cecilii: Originally a family sepulchre, it was growing to a vast necropolis, a whole township of the deceased, by means of some free expansion of the family interest beyond its amplest natural limits. That air of venerable beauty which characterised the house and its precincts above, was maintained also here. It was certainly with a great outlay of labour that these long, apparently endless, yet elaborately designed galleries, were increasing so rapidly. (ME, ii, 98–99)

It is this labyrinth which maintains the ‘immediate connexion’ between the living culture above and the dead culture below. The House of the Cecilii thus constitutes a kind of Hegelian pyramid (an image which will come to prove important to our discussions of Pater’s imaginary portraits). In his Aesthetics, in his preliminary discussion of the symbolic form of art, Hegel draws attention to the subterranean world which supports the monuments of culture: If we ask further for a symbolical art-form to express this idea [the immortality of the soul], we have to look for it in the chief structures built by the Egyptians. Here we have before us a double architecture, one above ground, the other subterranean: labyrinths under the soil, magnificent vast excavations, passages half a mile long, chambers adorned with hieroglyphics, everything worked out with the maximum of care; then above ground there are built in addition those amazing constructions amongst which the pyramids are to be counted the chief. (A, i, 356)

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Again, then, Pater’s concept of culture as a culture of death is anticipated by Hegel. That the family is ultimately the culture of the dead is a point which Hegel expands upon in his Phenomenology, where he argues that the consciousness only attains universality in its own death, preserved in the positively rational moment of the family: This universality which the individual as such attains is pure being, death [. . .]. The duty of a member of a Family is on that account to add this aspect [. . .]. Death is the fulfilment and the supreme ‘work’ which the individual as such undertakes on its behalf. (PS, § 452)15

Death is Bildung and the family exists to honour the dead. The dead are protected from death (annihilation, total loss, without reserve) by being placed within the family: The Family thereby makes him [the dead person] a member of a community which prevails over and holds under control the forces of particular material elements and the lower forms of life, which sought to unloose themselves against him and to destroy him. (PS, § 452)16

The living owe a debt to the dead.17 In recompense, they see to it that the dead are not left for dead but live on in the family. And here again, Marius’s experiences of the House of the Cecilii are important, for they prompt him to return to his own ancestral home: The place he was now about to visit, especially as the resting-place of his dead, had never been forgotten. [. . .] Dreaming now only of the dead before him, he journeyed on rapidly through the night; the thought of them increasing on him, in the darkness. It was as if they had been waiting for him there through all those years. (ME, ii, 204–05)

But arriving there, Marius discovers that his youthful aesthetic philosophy had caused him to forget this duty owed to the dead: He was struck, not however without a touch of remorse thereupon, chief ly by an odd air of neglect, the neglect of a place allowed to remain as when it was last used, and left in a hurry, till long years had covered all alike with thick dust. (ME, ii, 205)

‘Duty’ — that term which proved so vital to the ‘reconsideration’ of Pater’s aestheticism proposed in the manuscript on moral philosophy (MP, p. 2v) — is itself defined for Marius in relation to the family and to the ‘pious, systematic commemoration of the dead’ (ME, ii, 101). Marius’s ‘reconsideration’ of his aestheticism, and Pater’s likewise, also rests upon reconsidering the relationship to culture as the culture of death. In this sense, Pater’s entire ‘reconsideration’ of his aestheticism constitutes what he describes in his essay on ‘Demeter and Persephone’ (1876) as an attempt ‘to make men in love, or at least at peace, with death’ (GS, p. 149).

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Sacrifice and the Master–Slave Dialectic As Billie Andrew Inman has argued, Marius’s own ‘reconsideration’ is prompted by the scenes of death witnessed at the Colosseum.18 But what discussions of this passage have so far passed over is the critical role played by the concept of sacrifice in Marius’s reconsideration. And it is only in grasping this concept that we can truly understand Pater’s ‘reconsideration’. As Marius rightly notes, the Colosseum, as the centre of Roman life, offers a paradoxical image of the Empire as a whole. The Roman economy is substantiated on war, imperialism, slavery and sacrifice. The religious history of the gladiatorial games is not lost on Marius: ‘For the spectacle of the amphitheatre was, after all, a religious occasion. To its grim acts of bloodletting a kind of sacrificial character still belonged in the view of certain religious casuists.’ (ME, i, 237) The sacrifice is, however, something which is beyond Marius’s taste, and he is moved to a definite moral stance in response to this spectacle: ‘Surely evil was a real thing, and the wise man wanting in the sense of it [. . .] was to have failed in life’ (i, 243). But what is most important in Marius’s reaction is not that he does not deem the sacrificial quality of the events of the Colosseum religious, but that he does not deem them to be justified. His consideration is utilitarian: ‘The humanities [. . .] were all forgotten to-day in the excitement of a show, in which mere cruelty to animals, their useless suffering and death, formed the main point of interest’ (ME, i, 237–38). The sacrifice must not be wasteful, must not be excessive in Bataille’s terminology. Marius’s disgust at the spectacle of the Colosseum is indicative of the restricted economy of Pater’s concept of the greater reason, a concept formulated during the period of the text’s composition. In other words, if Rome (here symbolizing culture) is built upon a foundation of sacrifice, Marius does not doubt the importance of such sacrifices. All he requires is that the sacrifice be proportionate to the reward. And such a concept of sacrifice, one in which accounts are balanced, is the very definition of Hegel’s restricted economy, in which ‘everything is useful’ (PS, § 560). And, insofar as everything must be useful (for utility is the very definition of reason, and reason the definition of the world), sacrifice too must be useful. We have already alluded to the way in which the mature Pater thereby appears to recant upon his youthful claim that ‘the theory or idea or system which requires of us the sacrifice of any part of [. . .] experience [. . .] has no real claim upon us’ (R, pp. 237–38). However, with the notion of utilitarian sacrifice, through which the excess (non-productive expenditure) is reabsorbed back into the whole (is made productive), sacrifice ceases to represent a loss and, as a concept, plays an integral part in the mature aestheticism of Pater. As in Hegel’s system, its role is structural in Pater’s philosophy, and is structural precisely according to its utility, to the way in which the philosophy of death seeks to harness the power of death, to use it to drive the economy. According to Kojève, Hegel’s entire system is summarized in the sacrificial crisis of the fourth chapter of the Phenomenology, in which the consciousness enters into the life-and-death struggle, both in order to defend itself from the other and to preserve its independence:

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The Philosophy of Death They must engage in this struggle, for they must raise their certainty of being for themselves to truth [. . .]. And it is only through staking one’s life that freedom is won [. . .]. The individual who has not risked his life may well be recognized as a person, but he has not attained to the truth of this recognition as an independent self-consciousness. Similarly, just as each stakes his own life, so must each seek the other’s death, for it values the other no more than itself; its essential being is present to it in the form of an ‘other’, it is outside of itself and must rid itself of its self-externality. (PS, § 187)

The ego must risk its life in order to be acknowledged as independent. It must ‘look death in the face’ in order to attain its worth (§ 32). And — this is key — the consciousness must be willing to sacrifice itself. As Kojève rightly points out, whilst ‘at first glance, it seems that the Master realizes the peak of human existence’, somewhat perversely, the opposite is true. In the life-and-death-struggle, the two competing egos become master and slave. The master is the one who ‘prefers death to slavish recognition of another’s superiority’ and the slave the one who prefers servitude to death: The Master never succeeds in realizing his end, the end for which he risks his very life. The Master can be satisfied only in and by death, his death or the death of his adversary. But one cannot be befriedigt (fully satisfied) by what is, by what one is, in and by death. For death is not, the dead man is not. And what is, what lives, is only a Slave.19

In other words, ‘Mastery is an existential impasse’. Thus, paradoxically, it is to the slave we must turn in order for history to progress: To be sure, the Slave, like the Master, like Man in general, is determined by the real World. But since this World has been changed, he changes as well. And since it was he who changed the World, it is he who changes himself, whereas the Master changes only through the Slave. Therefore, the historical process, the historical becoming of the human being, is the product of the working Slave.20

Hegel’s narrative of the master–slave dialectic, a narrative which, as he argues in § 32 of the preface to his Phenomenology, is the narrative of the coming-to-selfconsciousness through the harnessing of the power of death, is thus co-opted into a Marxist narrative by Kojève.21 For if ‘universal history’ is, as Kojève claims, ‘nothing but the history of the dialectical — i.e. active — relation between Mastery and Slavery’, the dialectical action of death is only available to Hegel’s slave: Through animal fear of death (Angst) the slave experiences the dread or the Terror (Furcht) of Nothingness, of his nothingness. He caught a glimpse of himself as nothingness, he understood that his whole existence was but a ‘surpassed’, ‘overcome’ (aufgehoben) death — a Nothingness maintained in Being.22

Death is overcome (the Aufhebung as la relève) by harnessing death through the power of the understanding. To come-to-self-consciousness is only possible through such a dialectical activity, through the negation which is itself work (Bildung).23 And it is only the slave who works. All of which is to say that coming-to-self-consciousness, the ultimate aim of Hegel’s philosophical project, is only available to the slave: only in a moment of self-sacrifice.

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And this master–slave dialectic, which Nietzsche would later diagnose as the quintessential movement of Hegelian dialectics, the epitome of ressentiment, is openly admired by Pater in his last published book, Plato and Platonism. There, Pater describes the Spartan ascesis in terms reminiscent of Kojève’s description of the ‘existential impasse’ of Hegel’s master.24 In ‘a land of slavery, far more relentlessly organised according to law than anywhere else in Greece’ (PP, p. 203), these slaves come to relish their servility: ‘whatever rigours these slaves [. . .] were subjected to, they enjoyed that kind of well-being which comes from organisation, from the order and regularity of system’ (pp. 203–04). In other words, what they relish is precisely their position within the total system, their situation as lesser reason within the greater reason as a whole. And in a typical reversion of ressentiment, their slavery is revalued as a kind of nobility.25 ‘These slaves were Greeks’ (p. 204), Pater’s narrator remarks with some surprise. Theirs is a ‘sort of slavery’ that makes the slave ‘strong and beautiful’ and which inverts the hierarchical determination of master and slave in a fashion which precisely imitates the movement of Hegel’s Phenomenology, so that ‘his masters are in fact jealous’ of their slaves (PP, p. 205). Theirs is ‘a noble slavery’ (p. 207). Slavery is ‘one of the natural relationships between man and man’ within this Hegelian order: ‘idealised, or aesthetically right, pleasant and proper’ (pp. 216–17). In the terms of Pater’s aesthetic philosophy itself, this sacrificial crisis so vital to the movement of the Hegelian dialectic is mirrored in the moment of ‘assent’ constitutive of the movement from Moralität to Sittlichkeit in his ethical philosophy: We may easily suppose a situation occurring [. . .] when one man has the power of inf luencing another [. . . where] he concedes to custom when morality might almost seem to be indifferent[:] he sacrifices that possible advantage to the f lawless integrity of a general rule. (MP, p. 12v; my emphasis)

Only through this kind of sacrifice can a subjective idealism give way to an objective one. And such a sacrifice is patently utilitarian in its tenor. It comes as no surprise, then, to find that Pater repeats the (Hegelian) logic of the restricted economy in Marius. There, Marius (Pater) explicitly reconsiders his aestheticism on the basis of ‘economic’ motives: It had been a theory, avowedly, of loss and gain (so to call it) of an economy. If, therefore, it missed something in the commerce of life, [. . .] if it made a needless sacrifice, then it must be, in a manner, inconsistent with itself, and lack theoretic completeness. (ME, ii, 15)

To ‘lack theoretic completeness’ — completeness of vision, or theoria (PP, p. 140) — to be incomplete (not total) is itself inconsistent according to Pater’s Hegelian logic. In requiring ‘a needless sacrifice’, general economy is discounted precisely insofar as it is not restricted, precisely insofar as the sacrifice cannot be accounted for.

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Hegel’s Speculation In an essay on Kojève’s reading of Hegel, Bataille argued that Hegel had misunderstood the sacrificial crisis which he had himself laid bare in the movements of the master–slave dialectic: One cannot say that Hegel was unaware of the ‘moment’ of sacrifice; this ‘moment’ is included, implicated in the whole movement of the Phenomenology [. . .]. But because he did not see that sacrifice itself bore witness to the entire movement of death [. . .] he did not know to what extent he was right — with what precision he described the intimate movement of Negativity.26

There is little question that the sacrificial crisis of Hegel’s Phenomenology is something of a ‘sleight of hand’, to use Blanchot’s terminology.27 Insofar as the master and the slave are defined by their constitutive roles in the life-and-death-struggle, neither risks anything. The master, who is the one willing to look death in the face, is not able to, because the slave turns away from death in order to preserve himself, and it is the slave, the individual who prefers servility to death, who succeeds in driving human history. Derrida explains: Burst of laughter from Bataille. Through a ruse of life, that is, of reason, life has stayed alive. Another concept of life had been surreptitiously put into its place, to remain there, never to be exceeded, any more than reason is ever exceeded.28

In other words, Hegel’s man of sacrifice engages in no sacrifice at all: he is at all times guided by (greater) reason, before which he is a slave even before he enters into the life-and-death-struggle.29 What occurs in Hegel’s life-and-death-struggle is speculative in all senses of the word. In a speculation, something is sacrificed with a view to future gain. So too in Hegel’s Phenomenology, in which the consciousness risks death speculatively, for it is only through risking life now (animal, non-conscious life) that life in the future (self-conscious life) can be attained. Punning on this speculative nature of the Aufhebung, Bataille speaks of § 32 of the Phenomenology as being of ‘capital importance’.30 And, as we have already seen, Hegel’s speculative dialectics serve to reinforce the economic superstructures of bourgeois society — the sittlich community being the one built upon the laws of patriarchy and the corresponding movements of capital. Indeed, it is, as Louis Althusser has pointed out, the very drama of Hegel’s ‘mutual recognition’, a drama which is repeated in Pater’s own moral philosophy, that operates at the foundations of the ideological state.31 As in economic speculations, however, the Hegelian speculation is not without reserve. Bataille notes that what is risked in Hegel’s life-and-death-struggle is not life itself. As in classical speculative economies, in order to make the speculation worthwhile, the risks must be acceptable and the rewards commensurate. And in the Hegelian speculation, in order to attain self-consciousness, man must negate the non-conscious non-human within himself; as Hegel says, ‘the death of the animal is the becoming of consciousness’.32 What is risked then is not man at all, nor life (if life is, as Hegel states, consciousness), but the animal within man, and what is

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given up is in no real fashion valued. Hegel’s speculation is thus perfectly reserved: a sacrifice is required, a life must be risked, in a struggle in which nothing is actually risked, and nothing which is valued is actually sacrificed. According to Bataille, such a sacrificial crisis obscures the very essence of sacrifice. In a classical speculative economy such as Hegel’s, ‘humanity recognizes the right to acquire, to conserve, and to consume rationally, but it excludes in principle non-productive expenditure’.33 Culture, cultivation, economy, are all opposed to this excessive moment.34 That which is expended in the Hegelian system, the energy released through the movements of the Aufhebung, is redeployed within the restricted economy.35 There is no absolute loss in the Hegelian system, no expenditure which is non-productive. And so too in Pater’s restricted economy, nothing is lost, nothing is sacrificed. Here Hegel’s speculation, which Pater makes his own in the theory of the greater reason, takes us close to Freud. Freud begins Beyond the Pleasure Principle by explicitly placing the pleasure principle into ‘economic’ terms: The course taken by mental events [. . .] is invariably set in motion by an unpleasurable tension, and that it takes a direction such that its final outcome coincides with a lowering of that tension — that is, with an avoidance of unpleasure or a production of pleasure.36

The economy of the pleasure principle is then a restricted economy, following the laws of (Hegelian) reason. Against this theory of the pleasure principle, Freud was led to offer ‘speculation, often far-fetched speculation’ as to something beyond the pleasure principle: the death-drive.37 Here we may suspect that, if the pleasure principle is restricted economy, in going beyond the pleasure principle Freud might move towards general economy. But, insofar as what follows is speculative, it is invested and interested in its own answers. Freud’s speculation, despite Derrida’s protestations to the contrary, is in essence Hegelian.38 Again, as in Hegel’s restricted economy, nothing is really gambled. What may be risked in the speculation (the pleasure principle, the reality principle) is never got beyond, despite the text’s title. The death-drive is in essence constitutive of the pleasure principle, is its precondition, as Bataille himself so often points out.39 There is no beyond (of ) the pleasure principle in Freud’s text, speculative or otherwise. Indeed, the death-drive is defined by repetition. It repeats the pleasure principle and allows the pleasure principle to repeat itself. Again, there is no absolute loss in this system, which is why Freud’s speculative death-drive must be thought of within the conceptual system of the classical restricted economy. In the fifth chapter of the text, Freud argues that ‘the compulsion to repeat’ is in essence ‘instinctual’. Life is a ‘complicated détour’ before death,40 a detour that itself constitutes animate death (as Kojève explicates, with reference to Hegel, ‘if Man is Action, and if Action is Negativity “appearing” as Death, [then] Man is, in his human or speaking existence, only a death [. . .] more or less deferred, and conscious of itself ’).41 The death-drive is thus the motor of Freud’s own restricted economy and (animate, conscious) life the detour which constitutes the harnessing of death. And it does not take much of a leap to reread that famous scene of the fort–da game which first prompts Freud’s initial speculation as to the beyond (of ) the pleasure principle in

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Hegelian terms. Witnessing a child throw a reel out of his cot, enunciating the German word ‘ fort’, and pulling the reel back in, hailing its reappearance ‘with a joyful “da” ’, Freud reads this scene as indicative of ‘the child’s great cultural achievement’.42 Compensating for the loss of the object (in Freud’s reading, the [m]other) with the enunciation of a word, the child engages in a kind of Hegelian semiology. The object is the referent negated in its particularity, and the enunciated term the mastery of the world through the substituted presence of the sign. The symbol is ‘the murder of the thing’, in Lacan’s (Hegelian) rereading of Freud’s fort– da game.43 The cultural achievement is thus linguistic, in precisely the same way as culture (the greater reason) becomes ‘really palpable to our experience mainly in the form of language’ in Pater’s Hegelian formulation (MP, p. 14r). And is not this kind of speculative activity, common to both the Freudian and Hegelian economies, precisely the movement of Pater’s greater reason? In treating culture as the ‘turning over of the earth’, in treating the greater reason as the ‘cultus of the dead’, Freud, Hegel, and Pater all restrict the economy, ensuring that loss is reinscribed into the system. Death drives the system as the precondition of the system. And here, the implications of Pater’s ‘aesthetic historicism’ (the borrowing from Hegel for which he is best known) become clear.44 For man is nothing but death incarnate in Hegel’s philosophy, and history, driven teleologically as the coming-to-self-consciousness of Geist, is nothing but the history of death and death deferred. As Kojève writes: History is transcendence [. . .]. It is the ‘dialectical-suppression’ of Man, who ‘negates’ himself (as given) by ‘conserving’ himself (as a human being) and is ‘sublimated’ (= progress) through his conservative self-negation. And this ‘dialectical-movement’ implies and presupposes the finitude of what is ‘moved’, that is, the death of the men who create History. As finitude or temporality and as negativity or freedom, death is therefore doubly the ultimate basis and the first mover of History.45

It is only by incarnating itself that death actualizes itself. And the greater reason, Pater’s realm of ‘custom’, which is itself historical at root, realized as that ‘great everprogressing spirit’, is a culture built upon death (MP, pp. 13v–14r). It is a culture which is ‘working’ towards its own coming-to-self-consciousness (which is to say, in Kojève’s words, that it is constituted by ‘the action of Labour’). History then begins and ends with death. It is the negativity of (which is) man that ‘creates the cultural world, outside of which Man is only a pure Nothingness, and in which he differs from Nothingness only for a certain time’.46 Subjective Immortality and the ‘Dialectical Overcoming’ of Death In the manuscript on ‘Moral Philosophy’, Pater makes clear the intimate relationship between the idea of the greater reason and the culture of death: In each age the number of the dead that dark society acts on the living with the force of an increasing majority working out its affirmations assenting its preferences [. . .] ever more and more distinctly and with more completely universal assent. (MP, p. 15r)

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The ‘common sense’ is a cumulative authority, a progressive community of the dead. The ‘customs’ which legitimize the sittlich community are themselves the remnants of this culture of death. As such, the dead live on in and as the greater reason. Insofar as the little reason of man becomes self-conscious in the greater reason, it survives its own (corporeal) death and becomes subjectively immortal. The idea of ‘subjective immortality’ had formed the subject of Pater’s first paper delivered to Oxford’s Old Mortality Society. An unsympathetic reaction to the paper of 20 February 1864 was recorded by S. R. Brooke, another society member who was clearly unimpressed with Pater’s philosophy: He talks of ‘Subjective Immortality’ as something different from Annihilation. In the case of Subjective Immortality the dead man is indeed without corporeal existence, but lives as it were in the memory of his friends. In the case of Annihilation the man lives in no way. This apparently subtle distinction means no more than that all men undergo Annihilation, but that in some cases they leave friends behind them, in other cases they do not.47

Although no copy of Pater’s original paper has survived, enough can be gleaned from Brooke’s brief explanation to consider it the formative basis of his later notion of the ‘increasing majority’ of the dead.48 In Pater’s formulation, life is not the life of the body, but the life of Spirit, Geist. Here again Pater’s Hegelianism may usefully permit us to sidestep the question of his Christian orthodoxy. In this sense, Brooke’s attack on Pater’s concept, which he interpreted as denying ‘a future existence’, could not have been further from the mark. True, Pater’s idea of ‘subjective immortality’ lacks the kind of subjectivity promised to a Christian, but there is no question that a ‘future existence’, a ‘pledge of something further to come’ (ME, ii, 220), is exactly what Pater is proposing. As Inman has argued, Pater’s (Hegelian) ‘reconsideration’ of his aestheticism took as foundational the ‘hope of immortality’.49 This hope is made explicit in Pater’s ‘Study of Dionysus’ (1876) (a text which Inman has argued corresponds to the beginnings of Pater’s ‘reconsideration’): A type of second birth, from first to last, [Dionysus] opens, in his series of annual changes, for minds on the look-out for it, the hope of a possible analogy, between the resurrection of nature, and something else, as yet unrealised, reserved for human souls. (GS, p. 49)

Such a resurrection is delivered through the negation of the particularity in the universality in the Hegelian system. Insofar as the lesser reason has attained selfconsciousness through its externalization in the other, it lives-on, survives its own death, as a part of the culture which outlasts it.50 Here then we must read Hegel (and, by extension, Pater) against Kojève. Kojève’s Marxism led him to conclude that Hegel’s philosophy was in essence areligious, which in turn led him to conclude that the dialectical overcoming of death could not be read as a theory of immortality: What is at issue cannot, for Hegel, be an ‘afterlife’ for man after his death; this ‘afterlife’, which would eternally maintain him in given-Being, is incompatible with the essential finiteness of every dialectical being. In and by his death, man is completely and definitely annihilated; he becomes pure Nothingness

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The Philosophy of Death (Nichts), if it can be said, by ceasing to be given-Being (Sein). The ‘dialectical overcoming’ of and by death, therefore, is something completely different from immortality.51

Placing Hegel somewhere between Heidegger and Marx, Kojève denies the transcendentalism of this transcendental idealism. But even here, in Kojève’s own distinction between ‘annihilation’ and the ‘dialectical overcoming’ of death, we hear the echoes of Pater’s paper on subjective immortality as described by Brooke; subjective immortality is then precisely this dialectical overcoming of death. Needless to say, such a concept is another example of Pater’s restricted economy. Pater holds that animal matter (corporeal life) can be overcome (the Aufhebung as la relève) in and as the life of Spirit. And the requirement which underwrites Pater’s theory of subjective immortality is that the movement of the Hegelian Aufhebung be perfect. It assumes that the entirety of the particularity of the abstraction is preserved in the positively rational moment, and that, in this moment, particularity gives way to universality. In other words, it is another example of that ‘act of faith’ which Pater claims as the cardinal moment of his own ‘reconsideration’ (MP, p. 11v and ME, ii, 24). As Dowling writes, Pater sought ‘the presence of the past in the present’, ‘its “trace” or, as he liked to call it, [. . .] its “survival” ’.52 As Derrida has shown, the notion of ‘sur-vival’, living-on, is another example of the Aufhebung as supercession.53 The abstraction survives in the superseded form, negated and preserved in the higher realm of Spirit. Nothing dies, because nothing can die. In the death of the animal (the becoming of the human), the (organic) matter returns to the earth, to be redeployed in the economy. Life is created out of dead matter and creates itself thus as death incarnate. Death incarnate holds death at bay by deploying the power of death. Aestheticism, then, is both a philosophy of death and, at the same time, and by the same remit, a philosophy of the impossibility of death. It is a philosophy of death in that Pater’s theory of the greater reason faithfully reproduces Hegel’s restricted economy. The initial phenomenological reduction is the wielding of the power of death by the appreciating consciousness; it is the (making) animate (of ) death. And in attaining self-consciousness, the lesser reason, who has become death incarnate, sur-vives, externalizing itself in and as the other, living-on beyond its own (animal) death in the ‘dark society’ of the dead which is the greater reason. Death is not death but resurrection, death its own perpetual deferment. Absolute Negativity and Abstract Negativity As Bataille has argued, the restricted economy functions by repressing the concept of excess: Changing from the perspectives of restricted economy to those of general economy actually accomplishes a Copernican transformation: a reversal of thinking — and of ethics. [. . .] Woe to those who, to the very end, insist on regulating the movement that exceeds them.54

Hegel was precisely such a thinker who sought desperately to restrict an economy

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which at all times exceeded him. But, as Bataille’s critique of the Hegelian notion of sacrifice demonstrated, Hegel’s economy is not as perfect as he claims. Writing in a letter to Kojève, Bataille announced that ‘I imagine that my life — or better yet, its aborting, the open wound that is my life — constitutes all by itself the refutation of Hegel’s closed system’.55 Hegel’s ‘closed system’ cannot totally obscure the general economy which it seeks to efface, the excess which it seeks to write out of history, in this speculation which is the very writing of history. In general economy, the excess is not reworked but is gloried in as non-productive expenditure. And so when Bataille points to ‘the very minimal (and even inevitable) part of failure’ in Hegel’s system,56 he pointed to the general economy which erupts from the restricted framework, in spite of it. Again, the lead of Kojève is vital to Bataille’s reading here, for it is the idea of death which provides the brissure through which this Copernican transformation of restricted to general economy was to be achieved. If we return to § 32 of the preface to the Phenomenology, the passage in which Hegel first announces his philosophy as a philosophy of death, it becomes apparent that the text must be read against itself. For, in spite of his protestations that ‘the life of Spirit is not the life which shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it’, it is clear that Hegel’s philosophy, in making the negative work, in actively restricting the economy, at no point ‘tarries with the negative’. The moment in which the self is willingly given up to death, a moment which is necessary and vital to Hegel’s system, a moment without which the entire Hegelian architecture comes tumbling to the ground, never takes place, because at all times this moment of sacrifice is speculative. As Derrida argues: ‘To rush headlong into death pure and simple is thus to risk the absolute loss of meaning [. . .]. One risks losing the effect and profit of meaning which were the very stakes one hoped to win’.57 Negativity is absolute in Hegel’s philosophy: indeed, he says as much in § 32 of the Phenomenology, in which he calls death the ‘absolute power’. But what Hegel means by the absolute is that negativity resolves itself. It is negativity which produces, rather than non-productive expenditure. The kind of negativity which is non-productive is termed by Hegel ‘abstract negativity’. In the Encyclopaedia, he puts it as follows: The negative of the negative is, as something, only the beginning of the subject — being-within-self, only as yet quite indeterminate. It determines itself further on, first, as a being-for-self and so on, until in the Notion it first attains the concrete intensity of the subject. At the base of all these determinations lies the negative unity with itself. But in all this, care must be taken to distinguish between the first negation as negation in general, and the second negation, the negation of the negation: the latter is concrete, absolute negativity, just as the former on the contrary is only abstract negativity. (§ 210)

Here, abstract negativity is contextualized alongside absolute negation. Absolute negation negates the negation in a movement which mirrors the opening propositions of Hegel’s Logic. And as we have seen, it is this same logic of the identity of identity and non-identity reproduced in Pater’s own system. Pater’s aestheticism similarly rests upon the guarantee of absolute negation. Absolute negation achieves

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‘the negative unity with itself ’, as the positively rational moment. But even here Hegel admits that there is a necessity ‘to distinguish between the first negation as negation in general, and the second negation, the negation of the negation’, to distinguish between abstract negativity and absolute negation. The latter is, he claims, ‘concrete’ (which is to say, manifested in the real, made present), whereas the former is only ‘abstract’, merely a theoretical construct. Abstract negativity, in that it is not produced as such, is, as Derrida writes, a ‘mute and non-productive death’, ‘death pure and simple’. In terming negativity ‘absolute negativity’, ‘Hegel, through precipitation, blinded himself to that which he had laid bare under the rubric of negativity’.58 It is this that leads Bataille to claim that Hegel ‘did not know to what extent he was right — with what precision he described the intimate movement of negativity’.59 Hegel’s ‘Radical Dualism’ In Bataille’s terms, abstract negativity, negativity which does not determine itself, represents precisely that non-productive expenditure which is the excess and which opens the general economy. As Derrida writes: Hegel saw this without seeing it, showed it while concealing it. Thus, he must be followed to the end, without reserve, to the point of agreeing with himself against himself and of wresting his discovery away from the too conscientious interpretation he gave of it.60

The same is true of Pater; Pater too saw this without seeing it, showed it while concealing it. And in a sense, Pater did indeed follow Hegel to the end, without reserve, to the point of agreeing with Hegel against Hegel, to the point of agreeing with Hegel against himself, in the unpublished manuscript on the history of philosophy. Thus, just as there is an ‘official’ Hegelian position (the perfection of the Aufhebung, the completion of the speculative project, the restricted economy) and a ‘counter’ Hegelianism implied within it, so too we find two competing Hegels in the manuscripts of the early 1880s which date to the period in which Pater sought to systematize his aestheticism, to restrict the economy once and for all. In the manuscript on moral philosophy, we have the ‘official’ position of the idea of the greater reason. But in the manuscript on the history of philosophy, Pater offers a very different reading of Hegel from the Hegel of the restricted economy. Here, Pater broaches an alternative reading, a ‘counter’ Hegel, whose project (if not his pretensions) was less than totalizing: Hegel, who brings to its highest level of completeness the metaphysical reconstruction of all experience as a realisation of the creative Logic, must yet rank in his actual though indirect inf luence on many minds, as an essentially sceptical writer, though the impression he leaves upon them, of a very imperfect reciprocity between the exacting reasonableness of the ideal he supposes, and the confused, imperfect, haphazard character of man’s actual experience in nature and history — a radical dualism in his system, as to the extent of which he was perhaps not always quite candid, even with himself. (HP, pp. 5v–6)

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Whilst Pater’s meaning in this passage is not entirely clear, the importance of this reading of Hegel’s ‘radical dualism’ should not be underestimated. For if Pater’s theory of the greater reason represents a somewhat standard form of Hegelianism on his part, the reading of Hegel glimpsed in the manuscript on the history of philosophy is itself significantly more radical than any of those undertaken by his contemporaries (with the possible exception of Nietzsche) and represents the beginnings of a general economy. In the only significant published discussion of this passage, William Shuter describes it less as a history of philosophy than a history of scepticism and it is true that the manuscript revolves around a discussion of philosophical scepticism. According to Shuter, the development in Pater’s thought from his early antiHegelianism to his ‘reconsidered’ vision of Hegel constitutes the movement ‘from the skepticism that Hegel thought dogmatic to the skepticism that he described as dialectical’.61 For Shuter, by extension, the ‘radical dualism’ to which Pater here refers must be read as Hegel’s dialectical scepticism. In spite of Shuter’s comments, however, it seems unlikely that Pater is merely referring to Hegel’s dialectical scepticism when he speaks of his ‘radical dualism’. In the Phenomenology, Hegel had discussed scepticism at length: Scepticism is the realisation of that of which Stoicism was only the Notion, and is the actual experience of what the freedom of thought is. This is in itself the negative and must exhibit itself as such [. . .]. In scepticism [. . .] the wholly unessential and non-independent character of this ‘other’ becomes explicit for consciousness; the [abstract] thought becomes the concrete thinking which annihilates the being of the world in all its manifold determinateness, and the negativity of free self-consciousness comes to know itself in the many and varied forms of life as a real negativity. (PS, § 202)

This kind of scepticism ‘exhibits the dialectical movement’ (§ 203), is itself the movement of negation and understanding, the movement which is the harnessing of death through the power of the Aufhebung. However, the moment of dialectical scepticism is precisely that: the dialectical moment, which is to say, the negative moment. And in the logic of the Aufhebung, the dialectical moment necessarily gives way to the positively rational moment which is absolute negation. Dualism by definition is never radical in Hegel’s system. Or rather, in that it is ‘radical’, it is never unbridgeable. Insofar as the difference is ‘radical’, it is difference at the root (radix). It is total difference; which is to say, contradiction.62 And, as Gilles Deleuze has shown, according to Hegel, ‘ “contradiction” poses very few problems’.63 As Hegel argues in the Logic: Difference as such is already implicitly contradiction. [. . .] Only when the manifold terms have been driven to the point of contradiction do they become active and lively towards one another, receiving in contradiction the negativity which is the indwelling pulsation of self-movement and spontaneous activity. (SL, § 934)

Difference is simply contradiction; and, as the opening movements of Hegel’s Logic demonstrate, contradiction (Being and Nothing) resolves itself into the unity of becoming which is being-determinate.

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It is inconceivable that so attentive a reader of Hegel as Pater would have missed the way in which, by determining difference as contradiction, the Hegelian Aufhebung succeeds in sublating difference, particularly given the fact that, as we have seen, he repeats this determination in his own logic of the unity of opposites. And so when Pater speaks of the ‘radical dualism’ of Hegel’s system, he cannot be merely referring to Hegel’s dialectical scepticism. Pater against the Dialectic What then is Pater referring to when he speaks of that ‘radical dualism’ in Hegel’s system, ‘as to the extent of which he was perhaps not always quite candid, even with himself ’? As it is unlikely that he is referring to a dialectical dualism, it follows that he must be speaking of something which escapes the dialectic. But, as we have already said, the Aufhebung is, by (its Hegelian) definition, perfect. Nothing escapes the dialectic. This is the very foundation of the restricted economy: the greater reason cannot come to self-consciousness if the operation of the Aufhebung is not total. Pater’s restricted economy of death incarnated and death deferred must not allow anything to escape the system; everything must be redeployed within the economy in this culture of death. It is for this reason that Lacan (another of Kojève’s audience) has been so suspicious of the Hegelian dialectic: ‘When one gives rise to two, there is never a return. They don’t revert to making one again, even if it is a new one. Aufhebung is one of philosophy’s pretty little dreams’.64 In the manuscript on the history of philosophy, Pater describes Hegel’s ‘radical dualism’ in a remarkably similar light: And it [the negation] is a step which can never be retraced. The mind which has once broken the smooth surface of what seemed its self-evident principles can never again be as natural as a child’s, nor perhaps will it ever find an equivalent for its earlier untouched healthfulness in that rationalised conception of experience, and man’s relation to it, by which it is the ambition of philosophy to replace it. (HP, p. 3v)

In other words, Pater’s understanding of what he terms Hegel’s ‘radical dualism’ is non-dialectical.65 He sees instead within the Hegelian system a radical alterity, an alterity upon which it is founded and which it needs to exclude in order to preserve itself as such. Here Pater fore-echoes Derrida, for whom Hegel is a ‘thinker of irreducible difference’.66 When Pater identifies a ‘radical dualism’ in the system, he identifies a f law in Hegel’s logic; he identifies something which escapes the Aufhebung, an excessive moment of non-productive expenditure, in Bataille’s terms. If the Aufhebung is itself negation — which is to say, activity — which is to say, work — then Pater’s identification of Hegel’s ‘radical dualism’ must be indicative of what Derrida would call a ‘Hegelianism without reserve’.67 In support of this reading of Pater’s manuscript — which takes us well away from Shuter’s understanding of the text, from Pater’s restricted form of Hegelianism, and, indeed, from the entire history of Pater’s critical reception — we can point both to external facts and internal structural evidence. Externally, the manuscript in question is never published (nor, indeed, is there any concrete evidence to

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suggest that Pater taught this material).68 The significance of this non-publication is comparative. As we have already seen, during the early 1880s, the period when he was formulating this non-dialectical reading of Hegel, Pater was also making explicit his theory of the greater reason in the manuscript on moral philosophy.69 Whilst neither manuscript was published as such, the substance of the manuscript on moral philosophy reappears in published form as the ‘reconsideration’ undertaken in the third book of Marius. In comparison, Hegel’s ‘radical dualism’ does not reappear as such in Pater’s published work. As we will come to see, we can divine traces of this kind of non-dialectical thought in both the form and subject matter of Pater’s imaginary portraits. But as a theoretical construct, the term is never published, nor even approached again on a philosophical level. In other words, of the two readings of Hegel undertaken during the same period, apparently Pater commits himself to only one in his published work.70 Why would Pater not publish his comments regarding the ‘radical dualism’ of Hegel’s system? Here the proximity of the date of the composition of the two manuscripts becomes important. Given that both manuscripts were written during roughly the same period, and both deal with a number of similar issues, it seems reasonable to assume that the reading of Hegel in the manuscript on the history of philosophy is also and at the same time a reading of that Hegelianism which Pater was making the substance of his ‘reconsidered’ aestheticism. As such, when Pater identified a ‘radical dualism’ in Hegel’s system, Pater was also identifying a ‘radical dualism’ in his own system. And if it was the case that Hegel could not be ‘candid’ as to this ‘radical dualism’, so too it appears that Pater only really acknowledged this radical dualism in his own system covertly. Pater could only be honest as to the impossibility of (that is) the Hegelian Aufhebung, upon which his entire reconsideration of aestheticism rested, in his portrait of Hegel. The reading of Hegel’s ‘radical dualism’ thus takes on added importance as a moment of critical self-ref lection on Pater’s part. Here external and internal evidence come together, for the non-publication of this reading of Hegel is mirrored within the internal structure of the piece, the situation of the passage within the manuscript. With its final words, the suggestion of a ‘radical dualism’ in Hegel’s system, Pater concludes both a page and a notebook. And instead of picking up where he left off, he begins the next book with a fresh set of thoughts, charting what he later calls ‘the history of philosophy as constructively written’ (HP, p. 20v). Essentially, the characterization of Hegel’s ‘radical dualism’ is left hanging by its position in the text. Indeed, this conception of a deferral of judgement on Pater’s part is buttressed by the fact that it is the other vision of Hegel to which we are introduced when Hegel returns to the text, the Hegel whose ‘metaphysic system’ functions as a ‘replenisher’ of the human spirit (HP, p. 8r). This vision is of Hegel the totalizer, of the progressivist edifice which is the greater reason; which is to say, of Hegel the dialectician. It is as though Pater considers that, having left the vision of Hegel’s ‘radical dualism’ behind, this non-dialectical moment has been sublated in spite of itself. This structural disjunction is indicative of a thematic one and explains precisely why it is that the vision of Hegel’s ‘radical dualism’ should remain unpublished.

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For if we are correct in asserting that what is proffered here is a non-dialectical vision of Hegel, then this ‘thought’ is precisely beyond thought. As we have seen, thought is dialectical in Hegel’s philosophy: in thought the human harnesses the power of death and is led to its self-consciousness, thereby contributing to the coming-to-self-consciousness of Geist. There is nothing beyond thought in Hegel’s system, because Hegel’s system is itself thought and the thought of thought. And so, in thinking that which by definition cannot be thought, it is unsurprising that Pater’s train of thought should end at the moment of ‘radical dualism’, at the thought which disrupts thought: because the ‘radical dualism’, the thought which is nondialectical, is precisely unthinkable. This unthinkable thought is what Maurice Blanchot terms ‘le pas au-delà’. Lycette Nelson translates Blanchot’s title Le pas au-delà as The Step Not Beyond,71 but what this English rendition obscures is the doubleness of Blanchot’s ‘pas’. In Le pas au-delà the ‘pas’ is at once both the step and the (non-)step, both the movement and the negation. The title of the text is then either The Step Beyond or The Not Beyond; or rather the step beyond which is the not beyond, the step beyond which is impossible. It is the impossibility which is beyond the pleasure principle, beyond the restricted economy, beyond good and evil.72 In ‘le pas au-delà’, Blanchot is referring to that space, that step beyond, which implies at its very conception its own effacement, insisting in spite of itself that it not be: for the step beyond is impossible, as the Hegelian economy in its mighty totalizing restriction has shown. And indeed, the step (not) beyond represents precisely that movement from restricted to general economy which Bataille attempted to describe.73 Furthermore, insofar as this step beyond is beyond ‘reason’, the step beyond is the movement into madness, that excessive space which operates beyond the Aufhebung. As Michel Foucault argues, madness is ‘the absence of work’ — work here being the Aufhebung.74 That the step beyond is beyond reason is explicitly acknowledged by Hegel in the Phenomenology: His [man’s] individuality has also its beyond within it, can go beyond itself and destroy itself. To counter this, Reason is for him a useful instrument for keeping this excess within bounds, or rather for preserving himself when he oversteps his limit; for this is the power of consciousness. (§ 560)

Reason keeps the beyond at bay; consciousness prevents itself from overstepping its limit, from taking the step (not) beyond. As Pater writes in the manuscript on moral philosophy, the (Hegelian) logos is ‘a common intelligence to remove from wh[ich] [. . .] is insanity and death’ (MP, p. 17r). To remove oneself (as lesser reason) from the logos (which constitutes the greater reason) is both insanity, because reason is itself incarnated as this logos, the move being from restricted to general economy, and it is death, in that it is without reserve. It is not death in the Hegelian sense, not death as subjective immortality, but death in the non-dialectical sense: it is the moment of excess, loss, non-productive expenditure. And indeed, further, Pater’s thought is itself the thought (of ) death. Speaking of the step (not) beyond, Blanchot writes of its complicated similarity to death, not in the Hegelian sense (thought as that death which is the negation of the signified in the positively rational moment of the sign), but in the sense implied by Bataille:

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To think the way one dies: without purpose, without power, without unity, and precisely, without ‘the way’. Whence the effacement of this formulation as soon as it is thought — as soon as it is thought, that is, both on the side of thinking and dying, in disequilibrium, in an excess of meaning and in excess of meaning. No sooner is it thought that it has departed; it is gone, outside.75

To think with the ‘way’ is to think according to the logic of the Aufhebung, to obey those (Hegelian) laws of ‘reason’ which actively restricted the economy. To think is to work, to labour in the Hegelian scheme. ‘To think the way one dies’ is thus to escape Hegel’s restricted economy and open up a general one. But such a thought defies thought: ‘whence the effacement of this formulation as soon as it is thought’. The thought (of ) (which is) death constitutes both ‘an excess of meaning’ and a moment ‘in excess of meaning’, a moment beyond the Aufhebung and reason, a moment which necessarily defies itself. Here we may also understand why it is that Pater (who in the main is scrupulously diligent in getting his meaning across to the reader) is so unclear as to precisely what it is that he is referring to when he speaks of Hegel’s ‘radical dualism’. Because the thought is not — could never be — clear, in that to clarify the thought would be to think it in the Hegelian sense, to restrict it. We cannot be surprised then that Pater finds himself — here, at this very moment at which he reveals, not only Hegel’s speculative dialectics, but (by extension) his own entire philosophy, to be founded upon its own impossibility — halting at this impossible thought, unable to commit fully. To return once again to that passage in the preface of the Phenomenology which has proved so vital to our understanding of Pater’s Hegelianism, we find that Pater’s fault is the same as Hegel’s, and for the same reasons. He too is unable to ‘tarry with the negative’, to ‘look the negative in the face’ (PS, § 32). But here, in identifying that ‘radical dualism’ in Hegel’s system, Pater thinks the unthinkable. And thus, in thinking this thought, it is to be expected that Pater would fail to publish it, would retreat as soon as it is thought. Therefore, both the situation of the reading within the manuscript and its subsequent non-publication as a whole are entirely in keeping with precisely how radical this (non-) thought is: its situation at the end of a notebook, as a hanging and (in many ways) unclear coda — thought but not thought, thought but not formulated, ‘no sooner thought than it is departed’ — and its non-publication — ‘the effacement of this formulation as soon as it is thought’.76 Pater’s identification of Hegel’s ‘radical dualism’ is post-Hegelian rather than merely anti-Hegelian. The ‘unthinkable thought’, ‘le pas au-delà’, is not reducible to the movements of the Aufhebung and cannot be dialectically reintegrated. It is beyond dialectics, and beyond Hegel’s restricted economy. It is for this reason that Pater’s identification of Hegel’s ‘radical dualism’ cannot be reduced to either his initial reading or to his ‘reconsideration’ of Hegel, for both of those readings were dialectical. In identifying the f law in Hegel’s panlogicizing logic, Pater, as Nietzsche during the same period, breaks with the dialectic as a method.

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The Moment and Instant of Death Armed with Pater’s identification of the ‘radical dualism’ which undoes the Hegelian dialectic from within, we can productively reread his earlier texts.77 In particular, it allows us to interrogate an aporia which is described in Pater’s famous conclusion to his Renaissance — an aporia which is itself (the thought of ) death. For Pater’s conclusion too might be productively reread as describing Blanchot’s step (not) beyond, be reread not as a meditation on life, but as a meditation on death. As we have seen, Hegel’s philosophy is in essence historical. It is both a philosophy of history (in the sense that it explains history) and a history of philosophy (in the sense that it sums up that which precedes it). But it is also historical in that the dialectic constitutes time: time is the Aufhebung of space. As Hegel writes: Space [. . .] is only this inner negation of itself, the self-sublating of its moments is its truth. Now time is precisely the existence of this self-sublation; in time, therefore, the point has actuality. Difference has stepped out of space; [. . . it] is no longer paralysed. [. . .] Time [. . .] is the negation of the negation, the selfrelating negation. (E, § 257 n.)

Each individual Hegelian ‘moment’ of the Aufhebung takes place in and as moments in and as time.78 Death, the moment of negation, is thus one moment amongst many in the procession of time. That this ‘moment’ is then instantly effaced, absolute negation restricting the economy once again, is again a function of time and history as the Aufhebung: Everything, it is said, comes to be and passes away in time. [. . .] But it is not in time that everything comes to be and passes away, rather time itself is the becoming, this coming-to-be and passing away, the actually existent abstraction, Chronos, from which everything is born and by whom its offspring is destroyed. (E, § 258 n.)

For Hegel, then, time is ‘Chronos’, according to which, as Deleuze writes, ‘only the present exists in time’, so that past and future are conceived of merely as ‘two dimensions relative to the present in time’.79 Hegel himself says as much: The dimensions of time, present, future and past, are the becoming of externality as such [. . .]. The immediate vanishing of these differences into singularity is the present as Now which, as singularity, is exclusive of the other moments, and at the same time completely continuous in them. (E, § 259)

And it is this same image of time as Chronos, an image which is in itself the image of the restricted economy,80 which Pater himself attempts to recreate as the eternal present of his aestheticism, the time of ‘the ideal now’ as he puts it in Plato and Platonism (p. 48). Yet in Pater’s concept of the ‘radical dualism’, an alternative vision of time is broached. In Chronos, all time is present in the ideal Now. But what is implied by the ‘radical dualism’, what is implied by this non-dialectical (non) step beyond which can never be present, can never make itself present as such, is an alternative vision of time. There is an impossible space opened up between the two poles of the dualism, what Blanchot terms the ‘impossible necessary’ space: impossible in that it

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is by definition unbridgeable, but impossible also because ‘reason’ (Hegel) suggests that it cannot exist, because its existence would rupture the panlogicizing restricted economy.81 What Pater opens up in that (non) space between these two poles is a ‘moment’ which itself constitutes death, not in the Hegelian–Paterean sense of subjective immortality, but in Bataille’s sense of the without reserve. It is this instant of death, the moment without reserve, which Pater had first described in his conclusion to the Renaissance, although he may have remained unaware of this fact. The conclusion itself is constructed as a series of ‘moments’, both in the narrative sense (each paragraph an individual ‘portrait’ of an ‘exquisite interval’ (R, p. 233)) and in the Hegelian sense (which, insofar as the Aufhebung is itself the structure of narrative, is the same thing). And, as far as the language of Pater’s conclusion is concerned, the reader also cannot help but be struck by Pater’s use of the word ‘moment’, which occurs some thirteen times in the space of five paragraphs. But whilst the term ‘moment’ is clearly accentuated, the logic which underwrites Pater’s conclusion (we might say, which undoes it) is far more subtle. For whilst the term ‘moment’ is fore-grounded, the division between the terms ‘moment’ and ‘interval’, a division upon which the entire Hegelian logic of the Aufhebung rests, is not always made apparent. And in the sliding of the terms into one another, Pater’s thought in a sense anticipates the ‘radical dualism’ he would later come to identify underwriting Hegel’s speculation. Pater’s first use of ‘moment’ quite clearly refers to an instant: Fix upon it in one of its more exquisite intervals, the moment, for instance, of delicious recoil from the f lood of water in summer heat. What is the whole physical life in that moment but a combination of natural elements to which science gives their names? (R, p. 233)

Here ‘interval’ and ‘moment’ are syntactically paralleled: ‘one of its [life’s] more exquisite intervals’ itself constitutes a ‘moment’. Yet an ‘interval’ is not a ‘moment’, but precisely the opposite phenomenon: the ‘interval’ is the space between the ‘moments’. In Hegelian terms, the two ‘moments’ are the abstraction and the positively rational moment, and the ‘interval’, representing the space between two moments, therefore the movement of negativity (in this sense, the negatively rational moment is not a ‘moment’ at all but an ‘interval’ between the two ‘moments’). The Aufhebung then relies upon the ‘interval’ which is itself negation in order to link the two ‘moments’. But here Pater suggests that the ‘interval’ is itself constitutive of a ‘moment’. The interval — which is to say, the movement of negativity — becomes realized in the real as itself an ‘instant’, a ‘moment’ within time. It is manifested not merely within the understanding but in the world. The question implied, although not addressed here by Pater, is what connects the two ‘moments’, abstraction and positively rational moment? In the second paragraph, Pater makes explicit the fact that the ‘interval’ which is meant to bridge the two Hegelian ‘moments’ is itself a conceptual impossibility. Insofar as it takes place in and as time, it too is subject to its own division into another series of (Hegelian) moments: ‘Analysis [. . .] assures us [. . .] that each of them [the moments] is limited by time, and that as time is infinitely divisible, each of them is infinitely divisible also’ (R, p. 235). The infinite division of time is thus a

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division of a series of ‘moments’ (implying spatiality and thus a concurrent series of intervals) into its constitutive Hegelian ‘moments’.82 Each of these also constitutes a collection of moments, always further divisible. Here then Pater shows that the ‘interval’ which was meant to bridge the ‘moments’ fails to do so, because this ‘interval’ is itself a ‘moment’. In the final paragraph of the conclusion, Pater makes clear the relationship between the terms ‘moment’ and ‘interval’ on the one hand and the concept of death on the other. Here, he mentions Rousseau, who, believing himself ‘smitten by mortal disease [. . .] asked himself how he might make as much as possible of the interval that remained’ (R, p. 238; my emphasis). The term interval is used here to separate two particular moments: the moment right now and the moment of death. But this latter moment, the moment of death, cannot be termed a ‘moment’. The ‘moment’ of death is not a ‘moment’ in any traditional sense, for a ‘moment’ must be present, proximate, in order to have taken place. The instant of death is impossible.83 This is a point which Blanchot makes: It is the fact of dying that includes a radical reversal, through which the death that was the extreme form of my power not only becomes what loosens my hold upon myself [. . .], but also becomes that without any relation to me [. . .]. I cannot represent this reversal to myself, I cannot even conceive of it as definitive. It is not the irreversible step beyond which there would be no return, for it is that which is not accomplished, the interminable and the incessant.84

The ‘death that was the extreme form of my power’ is a reference to Hegel’s philosophy of the harnessing of the power of death through the Aufhebung. And certainly Hegel tries to make the impossible instant which is death into a ‘moment’ within his system; his entire philosophy relies upon it. Hegel tries to make ‘death’ present, to present death to itself as such. In so doing, the non-moment of nonproductive expenditure which Bataille terms the excess, death without reserve, is denied by Hegel in and by turning death into a moment. But such a ‘moment’ of death is that ‘interval’, that movement, which constitutes the step (not) beyond: it is ‘le pas au-delà’.85 What is described here is, then, not time as Chronos, but time as Aion, ‘the becoming which divides itself infinitely in past and future and always eludes the present’. As Deleuze puts it, this is ‘the present without thickness’, ‘the pure perverse “moment” ’.86 A present without presence, what Pater is describing is precisely what escapes the dialectic, something by definition non-dialectical: ‘It is with this movement, with the passage and dissolution of impressions, images, sensations, that analysis leaves off — that continual vanishing away, that strange, perpetual weaving and unweaving of ourselves’ (R, p. 236). Faced with this ‘movement’, a movement which is itself the movement of the Aufhebung, Hegel’s ‘absolute power’ (human consciousness, understanding) finds itself powerless. The work of negativity, which is the attribution of meaning through signification, cannot resolve this paradox. As Blanchot writes, this is the ‘time when the negative falls silent’, when ‘the Aufhebung turns inoperable’.87 And insofar as the Aufhebung turns impossible at this moment, insofar as ‘analysis leaves off ’, the death which is the negatively rational moment is not reinscribed, is not made to work, but expends itself in an excessive force which

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is by definition non-productive. Death is itself that ‘radical dualism’ which Pater identified as underwriting the Hegelian speculation, that which undoes it from within. Notes to Chapter 2 1. Bataille, The Accursed Share, i, 21. 2. Slavoj Žižek would disagree with Bataille here, particularly since this criticism of Hegel also lies at the root of Derrida’s critique of Lacan: ‘The reproach, according to which the Hegelian dialectical process implies a “closed economy” where every loss is in advance recompensed, “sublated” into a moment of self-mediation, [. . .] results from a misreading’ (Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel and the Critique of Ideology (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 25). On Derrida, Lacan and Hegel, see Žižek’s comments in Interrogating the Real, pp. 190–202. 3. Kojève, ‘Death in the Philosophy of Hegel’, p. 124. 4. On Kojève’s inf luence on modern French philosophy, see Michael Kelly, Hegel in France (Birmingham: Birmingham Modern Languages Publications, 1992), pp. 37–44. 5. See, for instance, the master–slave dialectic of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, p. 193, and Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. by Hazel E. Barnes (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 257–75. Both Bataille and Lacan will be discussed at length. 6. For a general history of the philosophical treatment of death, which has chapters on Hegel, Kojève, and Bataille, see Jonathan Dollimore, Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture (London: Routledge, 1998). 7. Death is precisely that which cannot be exchanged, as Jean Baudrillard argues in Symbolic Exchange and Death, trans. by Iain Hamilton Grant (London: Sage, 1993), pp. 125–94. 8. Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, p. 45. 9. For treatments of Pater’s understanding of death, see Jay Fellows, Tombs, Despoiled and Haunted: ‘Under-Textures’ and ‘After-Thoughts’ in Walter Pater (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), pp. 130–35; Shuter, Rereading, pp. 92–108; and Jeffrey Wallen, ‘Alive in the Grave: Walter Pater’s Renaissance’, ELH 66.4 (1999), 1033–51. 10. Dowling, ‘Pater and Archaeology’, p. 220. 11. See Inman, Walter Pater and his Reading, pp. 132–48, 150–53, 191–92. Regarding Pater’s relationship with Lang, see Robert Crawford, ‘Pater’s Renaissance, Andrew Lang, and Anthropological Romanticism’, ELH 53 (1986), 849–79. 12. Dowling, ‘Pater and Archaeology’, p. 220. 13. See Jacques Derrida, Aporias, trans. by Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 43: Culture itself, culture in general, is essentially, before anything else, even a priori, the culture of death. [. . .] There is no culture without a cult of ancestors, a ritualization of mourning and sacrifice, institutional places and modes of burial. 14. Denis Donoghue, Walter Pater: Lover of Strange Souls (New York: Random House, 1998), p. 135. 15. See Derrida, Glas, p. 12: ‘Mortality is experienced in Sittlichkeit as a freedom-effect’. On the role of family in Hegel and Derrida’s Glas, see Simon Critchley, ‘A Commentary upon Derrida’s Reading of Hegel in Glas’, in Hegel after Derrida, ed. by Barnett, pp. 197–226 (esp. pp. 201–02). 16. There is a clear echo of this idea in Pater’s description of Florian’s ‘physical horror of death, with its wholly selfish recoil from the association of lower forms of life, and the suffocating weight above’ (MS, p. 191). 17. Nietzsche argues that this creditor–debtor relationship is itself at the root of ressentiment (GM, II § 19). 18. Inman, ‘Pater’s Marius Mentality’, p. 100. 19. Kojève, Introduction, p. 46. 20. Kojève, Introduction, p. 52.

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21. On Kojève’s reading of Marx, see Patrick Riley, ‘Introduction to the Reading of Alexandre Kojève’, Political Theory, 9.1 (1981), 5–48. For Marx’s own reading of the Hegelian dialectic, see Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. by David Fernbach, 3 vols (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993), i, 29, which should be compared with his Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State and the ‘Critique of Hegel’s Dialectic and General Philosophy’ of the Economic and Political Manuscripts of 1844, in Early Writings, trans. by Rosney Livingston and Gregor Benton (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), pp. 57–198, 379–400. On Marx’s break with Hegel, see Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans. by Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 1997), pp. 87–128, and Reading Capital, trans. by Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 1997), pp. 92–105. 22. Kojève, Introduction, pp. 44, 47–48. 23. See Kojève, Introduction, p. 51. 24. It is telling that Billie Andrew Inman, in a review of Robert and Janice A. Keefe’s Walter Pater and the Gods of Disorder (Athens, Oh.: Ohio University Press, 1988), discounts the Nietzschean narrative put forward in this book partly on the basis of Pater’s ‘Lacedæmon’ (later included as this chapter of Plato and Platonism): If one were expected to think the Keefes were trying to explain the real Pater, this account of his intellectual development would be laughable. [. . .] My Pater did some serious thinking about the slavish devotion of some men to other men and to extremely orderly systems, about the kind of self-discipline that defies self-interest, in any received sense. (Nineteenth-Century Literature, 43.4 (1989), 539–42, at p. 542) I do not, generally speaking, disagree with Inman’s criticisms of the Keefes, but what Inman does not make clear is precisely what kind of ‘serious thinking’ Pater did on this matter, nor where he eventually came down on this question. Perhaps, as I will suggest in the next chapters, one way to deal with this question is to divide Pater’s works up not so much chronologically as generically. 25. See GM, I §§ 7–11. 26. Bataille, ‘Hegel, Death and Sacrifice’, pp. 21–22. 27. Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, p. 68. 28. Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 323. 29. This would be ‘Death’ itself as Hegel’s ‘Absolute master’, as suggestively discussed by Jacques Lacan (another of Kojève’s audience) in ‘The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious’, in Écrits: A Selection, trans. by Alan Sheridan (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 323–60 (p. 341), and The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, trans. by Dennis Porter (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 205–17. 30. Bataille, ‘Hegel, Death and Sacrifice’, p. 14. On this speculative nature of Hegel’s dialectic, see Jean-François Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, trans. by Iain Hamilton Grant (London: Continuum, 2004), pp. 216–23. 31. See Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. by Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), pp. 127–93 (pp. 180–81): ‘The duplicate mirror-structure of ideology ensures [. . .] the mutual recognition of subjects and Subject, the subjects’ recognition of each other, and finally the subject’s recognition of himself ’. 32. A phrase from the Jena Lectures of 1805–06, quoted by both Bataille (‘Hegel, Death and Sacrifice’, p. 9) and Kojève (‘Death in the Philosophy of Hegel’, p. 138). For a development of this point, see Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death: The Place of Negativity, trans. by Karen E. Pinkus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), pp. 41–48, esp. p. 45: In dying, the animal finds its voice [. . .] and in this act, expresses and preserves itself as dead. Thus the animal voice is the voice of death. Here the genitive should be understood in both an objective and a subjective sense. ‘Voice (and memory) of death’ means: the voice is death which preserves and recalls the living as death, and it is, at the same time, an immediate trace and memory of death, pure negativity. 33. Georges Bataille, ‘The Notion of Expenditure’, in Visions of Excess, Selected Writings, 1927–1939, trans. by Alan Stoekl (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), pp. 116–29 (p. 117). 34. Compare Derrida, Dissemination, p. 150: ‘On the one hand cultivation, agri-culture, knowledge, economy; on the other, art, enjoyment and unreserved spending’.

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35. This is a point not lost on Marx who, in discussing the transformation of surplus-value into profit, characterizes capitalism as essentially Hegelian: We might say in the Hegelian fashion that the excess is ref lected back into itself from the rate of profit, or else that the excess, which is characterized more specifically by the rate of profit, appears as an excess which capital produces over and above its own value. (Capital, III, 139) 36. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in Standard Edition, ed. by Strachey, xviii, 1–64 (p. 7). 37. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, p. 24. 38. See Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. by Alan Bass (London: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 277: ‘The speculation which is in question in this text cannot purely and simply refer to the speculative of the Hegelian type, at least in its dominant determination’. 39. See Georges Bataille, Eroticism, trans. by Mary Dalwood (London: Marion Boyars, 2006), pp. 94–108, and The Accursed Share, ii, 79–86. 40. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, pp. 36, 39. 41. Kojève, ‘Death in the Philosophy of Hegel’, p. 132. See also Bataille ‘Hegel, Death and Sacrifice’, p. 10: ‘for Hegel, Action is Negativity, and Negativity Action’. 42. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, p. 15. 43. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, p. 114. On Lacan’s reading of Hegel, see Malcolm Bowie, Freud, Proust and Lacan: Theory as Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 146–49, and Žižek, Interrogating the Real, pp. 26–36, 328–55. 44. Pater admits his debt to Hegel’s historical method most explicitly in Plato and Platonism, p. 9, although it is a constant in his thinking at least from ‘Winckelmann’ (1867) onwards. On Pater’s borrowing from Hegelian historicism, see Peter Allan Dale, The Victorian Critic and the Idea of History: Carlyle, Arnold and Pater (London: Harvard University Press, 1977), pp. 179–89; Ward, pp. 52–55; and Williams, pp. 72–74, 149–51. 45. Kojève, ‘Death in the Philosophy of Hegel’, p. 142. 46. Kojève, ‘Death in the Philosophy of Hegel’, p. 156. 47. S. R. Brooke, diary entry of 29 February 1864, held at Corpus Christie College, Oxford. Brooke’s diary entries are reproduced in Monsman, ‘Pater’s Aesthetic Hero’, pp. 136–51, and ‘Pater, Hopkins, and Fichte, pp. 365–76. 48. Monsman suggests that ‘Diaphaneitè’ may itself be the remnants of this paper in ‘Pater, Hopkins, and Fichte’, p. 372: Since the Old Mortality met only during term time and since ‘Diaphaneitè’ could not have been read when dated, the inference is suggested that it is the substance of the 20 February essay, probably reworked to avoid direct reference to the sensitive subject of immortality. 49. Inman, ‘Pater’s Marius Mentality’, p. 114. 50. See also Marius’s preference for burial to cremation, prompted again by his visit to the tombs of the Cecilii: Clearly, these people, concurring in this with the special sympathies of Marius himself, had adopted the practice of burial from some peculiar feeling of hope they entertained concerning the body; a feeling which, in no irreverent curiosity, he would fain have penetrated. The complete and irreparable disappearance of the dead in the funeral fire, so crushing to the spirits, as he for one had found it, had long since induced in him a preference for that other mode of settlement to the last sleep, as having something about it more home-like and hopeful, at least in outward seeming. (ME, ii, 100) Death is then ‘home-like’ (heimlich), a topic to which we will return in the next chapter. 51. Kojève, Introduction, p. 254. 52. Dowling, ‘Walter Pater and Archaeology’, p. 215. 53. See Jacques Derrida, ‘Living On/Border Lines’, trans. by James Hulbert, in Deconstruction and Criticism, ed. by Harold Bloom (London: Routledge, 1979), pp. 75–176. 54. Bataille, The Accursed Share, i, 25–26. 55. Georges Bataille, letter to Alexandre Kojève, 6 December 1937, in The College of Sociology (1937–39), trans. by Betsy Wing and ed. by Denis Hollier (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), pp. 89–93 (p. 90).

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56. Bataille, ‘Hegel, Death and Sacrifice’, p. 27. 57. Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 322. 58. Derrida, Writing and Difference, pp. 322, 328. 59. Bataille, ‘Hegel, Death and Sacrifice’, p. 22. 60. Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 328. 61. Shuter, Rereading, p. 69. 62. Is this to make too much of Pater’s single word, ‘radical’? Suffice it to recall Derrida: ‘the choice of word is first an ensemble [. . .] of exclusions’ (Writing and Difference, p. 380 n. 2). The term ‘radical’ is then present in Pater’s manuscript at the exclusion of all others but at the same time implies them through this very exclusion: ‘Certain forces of association unite [. . .] the words “actually present” in a discourse with all the other words in the lexical system, whether or not they appear as “words” ’ (Dissemination, p. 132). 63. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 54. See also Derrida, Positions, p. 44. 64. Jacques Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge, trans. by Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 1999), p. 86. 65. I do not make this claim lightly. It may be objected that an identification of a f law in Hegel’s dialectical methodology does not, necessarily, signify a break with dialectics as such. This view is, indeed, the one held by Theodor Adorno. ‘Negative dialectics’ is Adorno’s new name for a dialectics which takes as its principle not the principle of identity but non-identity. Indeed, it is perhaps telling that Pater uses the term ‘negative’ in conjunction with the concept of dialetics well before Adorno (PP, p. 113). According to Adorno, such a negative dialectic ‘is no longer reconcilable with Hegel. Its motion does not tend to the identity in the difference between each object and its concept; instead, it is suspicious of all identity. Its logic is one of disintegration’ (Negative Dialectics, p. 145). I take Adorno’s point, but would argue that while Adorno’s negative dialectics remains married to the principle of contradiction (p. 5), Pater’s ‘radical dualism’, precisely insofar as it is radical, eschews this principle. 66. Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 26. 67. Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 327. Bataille’s concept of excess or non-productive expenditure is also the theory of the gift, which precedes the system of exchange, the ‘impossible’ act which is irreducible to the restricted economy. Taking up Bataille, Derrida reads this gift alongside Heidegger’s ‘es gibt Zeit’ (see On Time and Being, trans. by Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper Row, 1972), p. 5) and Levinas’s ‘il y a’ (see Existence and Existents, trans. by Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1978), pp. 51–60), in Given Time: I Counterfeit Money, trans. by Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 1–33. Here, Derrida opposes this figure to Lacan’s supposedly Hegelian (restricted) economy (pp. 2–3, n. 2), a move which Žižek has attacked in terms important to the current discussion of Pater. According to Žižek, this gift which ‘founds the symbolic order’ might itself be reread as the Lacanian Real (see The Metastases of Enjoyment: On Women and Causality (London: Verso, 2005), pp. 194–96). If what Pater approaches in identifying a ‘radical dualism’ in Hegel’s system amounts to a non-dialectical thought, this thought is precisely that kind of ‘non-present presence’ which is Žižek’s Lacanian Real, which can never be made present as such (Hegel’s ‘blind spot’), and yet is necessarily supposed in order for any symbolic exchange to be effected. 68. In his discussion of the passage in question, Shuter argues that this concept of the ‘radical dualism’ does indeed reappear in Pater’s published corpus in Plato and Platonism (Rereading, p. 69). But, again, this supposition rests upon Shuter’s reading of the ‘radical dualism’ as dialectical scepticism. Indeed, Plato and Platonism, Pater’s last published book, is perhaps his most Hegelian. The inf luence of Jowett’s Hegelian reading of Plato is clear throughout: compare, for instance, Jowett’s ‘Introduction’ to the Sophist, in The Dialogues of Plato, trans. by Benjamin Jowett, 3rd edn, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1892), iv, 295–98. With respect to Jowett’s reading of Plato, see Leslie Higgins, ‘Jowett and Pater: Trafficking in Platonic Wares’, Victorian Studies (1993), 50–72. Higgins argues that Pater offers a subtly transgressive portrait of Plato in Plato and Platonism in comparison to Jowett, translating certain passages in order to emphasize homoerotic undertones and the male body. For my part, however, Plato and Platonism ranks amongst Pater’s least transgressive texts. Here, Pater conf lates the Platonic and Hegelian dialectics in precisely the same way as Hegel himself had done in his own reading of the history of philosophy.

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Throughout the text, Pater is absolutely wedded to the dialectic as a method, ‘the journey or pilgrimage, the method [. . .] towards the truth’ (PP, p. 181). In this sense, it is clear that Plato and Platonism never approaches this vision of the ‘radical dualism’ which disrupts the Aufhebung. It is another statement of Pater’s ‘reconsideration’, Plato reread as a Christian (p. 85). Nor is the ‘radical dualism’ merely the much-discussed distinction drawn by Pater between the ‘centripetal’ and ‘centrifugal’ (PP, p. 103), since here Pater dialectically relates the two in a manner reminiscent of his earlier (and quintessentially Hegelian) reading of Heraclitus (p. 17). 69. For the dating of the manuscripts, see Shuter, Rereading, p. 135 n. 12. 70. There is, perhaps, one moment in his published work which approaches this impossible thought, which occurs in the essay on ‘Giordano Bruno’ (1889), later reworked and inserted into the text of Gaston as the chapter on ‘The Lower Pantheon’, in which Pater speaks (à la Nietzsche) of ‘some deeper and more radical antagonism, between two tendencies of men’s minds. [. . .] Between Christ and the world, say! — Christ and the f lesh!’ (GL, p. 159). 71. See Maurice Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond, trans. by Lycette Nelson (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992). Again, there is a clear link to Kojève’s lectures here. Blanchot refers to Kojève explicitly in his essay on ‘Literature and the Right to Death’, trans. by Lydia Davis, in The Station Hill Blanchot Reader, ed. by George Quasha (New York: Station Hill, 1999), pp. 359–99 (pp. 371 n. 5, 379 n. 7). On Blanchot’s reading of Hegel, see Andrzej Warminski, ‘Dreadful Reading: Blanchot on Hegel’, Yale French Studies, 69 (1985), 267–75, and with respect to their respective interpretations of death, see Joseph Libertson, Proximity: Levinas, Blanchot, Bataille and Communication (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982), pp. 69–79. 72. On Blanchot’s reading of Freud, see Alan Bourassa, ‘Blanchot and Freud: The Step/Not Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, SubStance, 78 (1995), 105–20. With respect to Nietzsche, Bataille seeks to take precisely such a step beyond good and evil with his excessive philosophy, as discussed in his Literature and Evil, trans. by Alastair Hamilton (London: Marion Boyars, 1985), which includes a chapter on Baudelaire (pp. 31–61). When Gaston speaks of his aestheticism as containing ‘ “f lowers of evil”, among the rest’ (GL, p. 71), he is clearly referring to Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal (1857), a text which, as Monsman has argued (Art of Autobiography, p. 137), might be seen to have played the same role for an eighteen-year-old Pater as Apuleius’ ‘golden book’ for Marius (ME, i, 55) or Ronsard’s Odes for Gaston (GL, p. 51). 73. Blanchot and Bataille met in 1940 and formed a lifelong friendship: see Leslie Hill, Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 227 n. 5. 74. See Michel Foucault, ‘Madness, the Absence of Work’, trans. by Peter Stastny and Deniz Sengel, Critical Enquiry, 21.2 (1995), 290–98, and Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. by Richard Howard (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 42–60. Jay Fellows offers a reading of Pater’s portrait of madness in ‘Apollo in Picardy’ alongside Foucault in Tombs, Despoiled and Haunted, pp. 143–65. 75. Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, p. 39. 76. Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, p. 39. 77. Methodologically speaking, I am close here to Shuter, who contends that Pater’s texts ask ‘to be reread, as it were, in the inverse order, the later work serving paradoxically as the necessary introduction to the earlier’ (Rereading, p. xi). 78. The ‘moments’ of time, here, are parallel to the ‘points’ in space, which, according to Hegel, determine themselves as such. The ‘point’ is ‘the negation of space’, but also, insofar as it is ‘a negation which is posited in space’, the point divides itself: ‘the point, as essentially this relation, i.e. as sublating itself, is the line’. The ‘line’, as the self-negation of the point, is itself negated (the resolution which is absolute negation, the ‘negation of the negation’) into three-dimensional space as such. See E, §§ 254 n., 256 n. 79. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 186. 80. See Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 186: ‘Chronos is an encasement, a coiling up of relative presents, with God as the extreme circle or the external envelope’. 81. I refer here to Martin Heidegger’s definition of death, in Being and Time, § 51, p. 294, as ‘the possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein’, and to Blanchot’s reversal of the formula into ‘the impossibility of every possibility’ (The Writing of the Disaster, p. 70). On Heidegger’s treatment of death, see Derrida, Aporias, pp. 50–72. And on Heidegger’s treatment of time, explicitly

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compared to Hegel’s, see Derrida’s comments in ‘Ousia and Grammē: Note on a Note from Being and Time’, in Margins of Philosophy, pp. 29–68. 82. Pater would have been familiar with this paradox through Plato’s Parmenides, 156d, to which he refers in Plato and Platonism, p. 29, and again, later, when the Hegelianism of Parmenides is stressed: ‘ “Parmenides,” says one, “had stumbled upon the modern thesis that thought and being are the same” ’ (pp. 37–38). 83. I am thinking here of Blanchot’s use of the terms ‘instant’ and the ‘instant of death’ in The Instant of My Death, trans. by Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), where he describes ‘l’instant de ma mort désormais toujours en instance’ (p. 10) (‘the instant of my death henceforth always in abeyance’, p. 11). See also Derrida’s comments on the text: [An instant constitutes] an indivisible moment, that is [. . .] a moment assembled at the tip of an instantaneousness which must resist division [. . . But] repetition carries the instant outside of itself. Consequently the instant is instantaneously, at this very instant, divided, destroyed by what it nonetheless makes possible. (‘Demeure: Fiction and Testimony’, trans. by Elizabeth Rottenberg, in Blanchot, The Instant of My Death, pp. 13–114, at pp. 32–33) 84. Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. by Ann Smock (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), p. 106. 85. In a passage redolent of both Blanchot and Bataille, Jacques Derrida makes a pertinent parallel to Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling (an extended critique of Hegelianism) with respect to this impossibility of the instant in The Gift of Death, trans. by David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 65: The paradox [of the instant] cannot be grasped in time and through mediation [. . .]. Understanding and reason cannot seize, conceive, understand or mediate it; neither can they negate or deny it, implicate it in the work of negation, make it work; in the act of giving death, sacrifice suspends both the work of negation and work itself. See also Derrida’s comments in Given Time, p. 9. 86. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, pp. 8, 192. Deleuze argues that the distinction between Chronos as ‘now’ and Aion as ‘instant’ constitutes the difference between the second and the third theses of Plato’s Parmenides (pp. 187–88). 87. Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, p. 40.

CHAPTER 3

❖

The Imaginary Portraits Pater [. . .] is the nearest thing to Nietzsche England has, as Emerson is Nietzsche’s nearest match in America. This could be put less invidiously by saying that Nietzsche is the Pater of the German-speaking world, Emerson the Pater of America. The three together form a constellation, with many consonances and dissonances among the three stars.1

What we have seen so far is that Pater undertook two distinct readings of Hegel during the early 1880s. Although it is the reading of the greater reason that predominates of the two, this is not to say that the thought of Hegel’s ‘radical dualism’ disappears completely from Pater’s corpus. Indeed, the imaginary portraits composed from the 1880s onwards return to the idea of Hegel’s ‘radical dualism’. And the radical nature of Pater’s Imaginary Portraits has not yet been recognized by his critics: composed during the same period as Pater was writing Marius,2 the Imaginary Portraits represent a critical attack on the ‘reconsideration’ of Pater’s own aestheticism represented in that novel. Just as his critics have not yet appreciated that Pater aimed the criticism of his Imaginary Portraits not at decadence (the Imaginary Portraits as yet another example of his ‘reconsideration’) but at his own ‘reconsidered’ aestheticism, so too the precise methodology through which this attack was realized has not been discussed. For in his Imaginary Portraits, Pater takes his criticism of Hegel’s ‘radical dualism’ into the realm of a Nietzschean attack on philosophical idealism. In the 1887 Imaginary Portraits, published the same year as Nietzsche’s Genealogy, Pater attacks Hegelianism for amounting to a negation and a denial of life. He attacks its ressentiment, its bad conscience, its ascesis, and its nihilism — which is to say, according to the same strategies as Nietzsche’s Genealogy.3 And perhaps, just as Pater could only be candid as to the ‘radical dualism’ which disrupted his own attempted systematization of his aestheticism covertly in his portrait of Hegel, so too he could only publish this nondialectical idea, a non-thought which by definition cannot be expressed explicitly, covertly through his fiction. Pater, Emerson, Nietzsche When J. Hillis Miller spoke of Walter Pater, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Friedrich Nietzsche as constituting a ‘constellation’, he went some way towards altering the direction of Pater studies.4 This is not to say that Hillis Miller’s statement, coming in 1976, was the first to associate Pater and Nietzsche; it was not.5 Nevertheless, in speaking of Pater alongside Nietzsche, Hillis Miller opens up for us new ways of thinking about Pater.

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Whilst the pairing of Pater and Emerson has not, to my knowledge, been pursued,6 and the pairing of Nietzsche and Pater only pursued fitfully, the pairing of Emerson and Nietzsche is more of a critical commonplace.7 Emerson is one of Nietzsche’s ‘untimely’ men, as he makes clear in the Twilight of the Idols: Emerson. [. . .] The sort of person who instinctively lives only on ambrosia and leaves behind anything indigestible. [. . .] Emerson has the sort of kind and witty cheerfulness that discourages any seriousness; he just does not know how old he already is and how young he still will be. (TI, ‘Skirmishes of an Untimely Man’, § 13)

If, as Deleuze and Guattari have argued, Nietzsche is a precursor of the ‘AntiOedipus’, it should come as no surprise that Emerson’s quality lies in the fact that he is characterized as being his own successor.8 Emerson is a man who, in Nietzsche’s estimation, is completely free from ressentiment.9 Nietzsche’s praise of Emerson comes directly after a criticism of Thomas Carlyle, significant because Emerson himself was heavily indebted to Carlyle: I finished reading the life of Thomas Carlyle, that unconscious and involuntary farce, that heroic-moral interpretation of dyspeptic states. — Carlyle, a man of strong words and attitudes, a rhetorician out of necessity who is constantly harassed by a yearning for a strong faith and the feeling that he is not up to the task. [. . .] A constant, ardent dishonesty towards himself — that is his proprium, that is what makes and keeps him interesting. (TI, ‘Skirmishes of an Untimely Man’, § 12)

Whereas Emerson is praised for being free from ressentiment, Carlyle is criticized for what Nietzsche terms his dyspepsia.10 As Jeremy Tambling writes, for Nietzsche ‘Carlyle is marked by obsession about the past, and cannot find the insouciance (the serenity, the hope, the pride) to live in the present’.11 Nietzsche’s attack on Carlyle is also an attack on his ‘Englishness’: In England, of course, it is his honesty that people admire . . . Well, that is English; and in keeping in mind that the English are the people of perfect cant, it is not only comprehensible, it is even quite fair. Carlyle is basically an English atheist who stakes his honour on not being one. (TI, ‘Skirmishes of an Untimely Man’, § 12)

Carlyle’s honesty is in this sense itself ressentiment, for it requires a series of epistemological assumptions (the unity of the subject, the potential accessibility of ‘truth’ by the subject, the recognition of this truth as truth by the subject) which all serve to negate the self in its difference. Nietzsche’s last comment, that Carlyle is ‘an English atheist who stakes his honour on not being one’, might justifiably be applied to Pater. Pater, too, is, according to the majority of his published statements, an English atheist, but insofar as he is a Hegelian, and insofar as he ‘stakes his honour’ on his Hegelianism, he falls back on an essentially Christian bedrock. And this fact might justifiably lead us to question Hillis Miller’s uniting of Emerson, Nietzsche, and Pater in a critical ‘constellation’. Nietzsche himself shows no knowledge of Pater (and Pater no knowledge of Nietzsche),12 but had he read Pater one would suspect that his reaction to Pater’s aestheticism — at least, Pater’s ‘reconsidered’ aestheticism — would have been in

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the main negative; one can think of few less Nietzschean works than Pater’s essay on ‘Style’. If Hillis Miller’s ‘constellation’ is useful, then, its value lies in where it can take criticism today. For whilst Hillis Miller’s statement comes before a reading of Pater’s Marius (one of his most Hegelian, and therefore one of his most conservative, texts), Pater had indeed come to a series of Nietzschean conclusions in his Imaginary Portraits.13 The Genre of the Imaginary Portrait Before discussing Pater’s portraits in detail, we should first brief ly consider what constitutes an imaginary portrait.14 In April 1878, Pater wrote to the magazine editor George Grove explaining ‘The Child in the House’: I send you by this post a M.S. entitled The House and the Child, and should be pleased if you should like to have it for Macmillans’ Magazine. It is not, as you may perhaps fancy, the first part of a work of fiction, but is meant to be complete in itself; though the first of a series, as I hope, with some real kind of sequence in them, and which I should be glad to send to you. I call the M.S. a portrait, and mean readers, as they might do on seeing a portrait, to begin speculating — what came of him?15

This remains the only methodological statement about the genre of the imaginary portrait which Pater left us, and from it we must piece together what we can about what makes a text into an imaginary portrait, what distinguishes it from a novella or a short-story. That the text is meant, first and foremost, to be a portrait is important. As Eliza Bizzotto has argued, Pater thereby places his short fiction into a continuum with his art-criticism, as an outgrowth of it.16 In this vein, Gerald Monsman records that Pater tended to refer to all of his work (fictional and non-fictional) as portraiture.17 And wherever the title for the genre came from,18 there is little doubt that the texts are centred on a single character and his view of the world, representing a portrait of him. In a sense, then, Pater’s imaginary portraits constitute a kind of prose counterpoint to Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues,19 assuming, that is, that Browning’s poetry was not, as Wilde quipped, itself constitutive of prose.20 What, however, is it about the imaginary portrait as a genre that Pater found so accommodating to his attacks on (his own) Hegelianism? We have not time to discuss this question in depth (which would require a sociology of literary forms) but, in general terms, it is clearly the case that a shorter work is less constrained by narrative tradition.21 As Franco Moretti has argued, the European novel has been defined either as a Bildungsroman or in relation to the Bildungsroman since the eighteenth century: ‘the Bildungsroman as the “symbolic form” of modernity’.22 Pater’s longer fiction — Marius and the unfinished Gaston — fits neatly into this description, both constituting Bildungsromans. And it should come as no surprise therefore that Pater’s ‘reconsideration’ of his aestheticism, which was undertaken along Hegelian lines, should take as its form the novel which is itself the counterpoint to Hegelian discourse, the Bildungsroman’s ‘teleological rhetoric’ constituting ‘the narrative equivalent of Hegelian thought, with which it shares a strong normative

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vocation’.23 Nor should it come as a surprise that, when Pater came to attempt to represent a critique of Hegel’s system and the ‘radical dualism’ which underwrites his dialectical speculation, he should turn not to the novel, the quintessentially Hegelian form, but to something shorter and more fragmentary.24 In terms of parallels between Pater’s genre of the imaginary portrait and other forms of the short story, the closest is probably the récits of Maurice Blanchot.25 Blanchot argues that the roman and the récit are distinguished not in terms of what they narrate, but in how they narrate: ‘The tale [récit] is not the narration of an event, but that event itself, the approach to that event, the place where that event is made to happen — an event which is yet to come’.26 Whereas the roman narrates an event, the récit constitutes it.27 In the roman, narrative ‘takes place within the framework of human time’ (Hegelian progressive teleology).28 But the récit, in contrast, is ‘a movement towards a point, a point which is not only unknown, obscure, foreign, but such that apart from this movement it does not seem to have any sort of real prior existence’.29 To be sure, in its ‘form the tale [récit] seems to continue to fulfil its ordinary vocation as a narrative’,30 and the same is true of the form of the imaginary portrait in Pater’s collected 1887 volume.31 But nevertheless both the récit and the imaginary portrait function to disrupt the kind of progressive and teleological movement of history which defines Hegel’s and Pater’s restricted economies. As Blanchot writes: Always still to come, always in the past already, always present [. . .] this is the nature of the event for which the tale [récit] is the approach. This event upsets relations in time, and yet affirms time, the particular way time happens, the tale’s own time which enters the narrator’s duration in such a way as to transform it.32

And this ‘event’ is itself the impossible ‘instant’ of death.33 In all of his mature imaginary portraits, this is invariably the point towards which Pater approaches. But unlike Marius, which also has at its horizon its protagonist’s death, there is, in Pater’s imaginary portraits, no ‘pledge of something further to come’ (ME, ii, 220). The absolute horizon of Pater’s imaginary portraits is the impossibility which concludes Blanchot’s récits, the death which is not the necessary ‘moment’ of the Hegelian narrative, but that which disrupts this narrative: death as absolute loss, as non-productive expenditure.34 It is for this reason that the form of the imaginary portrait becomes responsible for attacking Hegel’s ‘radical dualism’ in Pater’s published work. For the thought of Hegel’s ‘radical dualism’ is not a thought as such (insofar as thought is dialectical), but a thought beyond thought, an impossible thought: the thought itself is fragmentary. And these fragments do not recombine or refer back to some totality or unity.35 A recombinative set of fragments would be the Hegelian ‘moments’, the totality the greater reason. There is no such nostalgia in Pater’s imaginary portraits or in his idea of Hegel’s ‘radical dualism’.36 Blanchot’s récits are fragmentary in this sense and so are Pater’s imaginary portraits.37 An imaginary portrait is ‘meant to be complete in itself ’, but not restricted, not closed.38 To return to the discussion of Pater and Nietzsche, Pater’s imaginary portraits are ‘aphoristic’ in Nietzsche’s sense. As Deleuze puts it, ‘understood

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formally, an aphorism is present as a fragment’.39 As fragments, they do not refer back to one intended meaning (in the case of Pater’s ‘reconsidered’ aestheticism: the greater reason), but to that which disrupts meaning, that which makes the very possibility of meaning impossible. The ‘radical dualism’ is the fragmentary thought expressed in these fragments; it returns throughout as a kind of refrain, as the thought which disrupts Hegel’s restricted economy and opens up the general one.40 ‘The Child in the House’: Homeliness, Nostalgia, and the Hegelian Pyramid Before we relate Pater’s collected Imaginary Portraits to his identification of Hegel’s ‘radical dualism’, we must consider ‘The Child in the House’ (1878). Pater convinced George Grove to publish this text as ‘the first of a series’, but this proposed series never manifested itself.41 The second portrait, entitled ‘An English Poet’, was not published during Pater’s lifetime,42 and when Pater returned to the genre seven years later with ‘A Prince of Court Painters’ in 1885, the tone of the portraits is markedly different. As such, however, the genre of the imaginary portrait pre-dates Pater’s identification of Hegel’s ‘radical dualism’, although it would later come to provide a means of exploring this notion from 1885 onwards. Pater’s autobiographical project — the coming-to-self-consciousness of the lesser reason — began in ‘The Child in the House’, the story of Pater’s own childhood home and ‘that process of brain-building by which we are, each one of us, what we are’ (MS, p. 173). Its theme of the return home is archetypally Hegelian.43 As Hegel writes in the preface to the Phenomenology, his philosophy is the ‘self-restoring sameness’, ‘the process of its own becoming, the circle that presupposes its end as its goal, having its end also as its beginning’ (§ 18), a teleology which Pater was to adopt wholesale in his structural definition of ‘Style’, ‘that architectural conception of work, which foresees the end in the beginning and never loses sight of it’ (AP, p. 21). The trajectory of ‘The Child in the House’ is itself clearly nostalgic;44 it is not only the return home, but the return to the first home. Indeed, it is doubly nostalgic, for the return home of Florian is also the return home of Pater. It is not surprising, then, that this home should have a quality of the more-than-homely: ‘With Florian then the sense of home became singularly intense, his good fortune being that the special character of his home was in itself so essentially home-like’ (MS, p. 179). In the space of a single sentence, the word ‘home’ is used three times, the second time tautologically. And this homely house is situated in a place itself homely, the English Home Counties (‘some parts of Surrey and Kent are, for Englishmen, the true landscape, true home-counties’ (p. 179)), the narrator speaking of the area’s ‘homely colour and form’ (p. 173) and ‘very homely buildings’ (p. 175). Through this repetition, the heimlich becomes unheimlich.45 This inversion is one of the uncanny’s principle characteristics. In his essay on ‘The “Uncanny” ’ (published in 1919, over forty years after Pater’s ‘The Child in the House’), Freud dismisses the idea that ‘what is “uncanny” is frightening precisely because it is not known and familiar’,46 preferring a definition from Schelling (Hegel’s friend, roommate and fellow-idealist): ‘“Unheimlich” is the name for everything that ought to

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have remained [. . .] secret and hidden but has come to light’.47 Insofar as the unheimlich is produced by repression, it must have already been heimlich. This turning of heimlich into unheimlich in Pater’s ‘The Child in the House’ is significant, not only because it belies Freud’s claim that the ‘subject of the “uncanny” ’ has been ‘neglected in the specialist literature of aesthetics’,48 but because of the relationship drawn between the unheimlich and the death-drive.49 In ‘The Child in the House’, Florian’s heimlich sensibility is intertwined with Pater’s restricted economy of the greater reason by its association with archaeology and then explicitly with the idea of death: Florian [. . . had] a peculiarly strong sense of home — so forcible a motive with all of us — prompting to us our customary love of the earth, and the larger part of our fear of death, that revulsion we have from it, as from something strange, untried, unfriendly. (MS, p. 178)

Death is placed into opposition with the home: where the home is heimlich, death is ‘strange, untried, unfriendly’ — all themselves definitions of the unheimlich.50 But death is also unheimlich insofar as it is heimlich. Florian’s (Pater’s own) ‘customary love of the earth’ is itself a function of a death-drive (the ‘customary love of the earth’ the power of ‘custom’). The ‘revulsion’ from death as the unheimlich is the revulsion from the death-in-life: ‘the physical horror of death, with its wholly selfish recoil from the association of lower forms of life, and the suffocating weigh above’ (MS, p. 191). This explains the morbid fascination which underwrites Pater’s aestheticism: ‘For with this desire of physical beauty mingled itself early the fear of death — the fear of death intensified by the desire of beauty’ (MS, pp. 189–90).51 Because the fear of death ‘intensified’ Florian’s (Pater’s) aesthetic sensibilities, and because Florian (Pater) is an aesthete, he must seek out such situations. Thus, Florian’s desire of beauty becomes inseparable from a desire of/for death. The pleasure principle (the pleasurable appreciation of beautiful artefacts) is thus combined with the deathdrive in an archetypal Freudian fashion: what is termed by Freud as beyond (of ) the pleasure principle is inextricable from this principle. And this Freudianism is, as Bataille has argued, entirely Hegelian: ‘The idea of death helps [. . .] to multiply the pleasures of the senses [. . .]. The feeling of sin is connected in lucid consciousness to the idea of death, and in the same manner the feeling of sin is connected with pleasure’.52 Needless to say, this relationship between death and desire drawn in ‘The Child in the House’ is another indication of Pater’s Hegelianism.53 In the Phenomenology, Hegel holds that the phenomenon of desire is indicative of lack (§§ 175–77), an idea which has filtered through Freud, and — importantly — Kojève, straight into modern psychoanalytic theory with Lacan.54 For Lacan, as for Hegel, desire is inextricable from the death-drive. The symbol which is ‘the murder of the thing’ ‘constitutes in the subject the externalization of his desire’.55 Desire is then a product of the symbolic order — and here it is not unimportant that Pater’s (Hegelian) concept of the greater reason is said to become ‘palpable to our experience mainly in the form of language’ (MP, p. 14r) — and the desired object (the objet petit a) forever inadequate to the satisfaction of that desire.56 Desire thus takes the form of negation and assimilation in precisely the same fashion as in Hegel’s Phenomenology.

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And the same is surely true of Pater’s aestheticism, at least here in ‘The Child in the House’. The object (the artefact) is consumed and negated through the phenomenological process of aesthetic enquiry — a process which, as we have seen, rests as the founding moment of transcendental apperception in Pater’s own structural Hegelianism.57 As Emmanuel Levinas has argued, a Hegelian concept of desire is inextricable from a certain form of nostalgia: ‘As commonly interpreted need would be at the basis of desire [. . .]. It would coincide with consciousness of what has been lost; it would be essentially a nostalgia, a longing for return’.58 Pater’s nostalgia in ‘The Child in the House’ is indicative of just such a Hegelian concept of desire. The return home is the return to the heimlich place, to the prelapsarian state, the conceptual return to the womb. As Freud writes: ‘This unheimlich place [the womb] is the entrance to the former Heim [home] of all human beings, to the place where each one of us lived once upon a time and in the beginning’.59 ‘The Child in the House’ is conceivable as indicative of precisely the same nostalgic movement. Indeed, as Luce Irigaray has argued, this patriarchal ‘nostalgia for the mother-womb entity’ is also at the same time, and by the same logic, Hegelian: ‘Love of the self would seemingly take the form of a long return to and through the other. A unique female other, who is forever lost and must be sought in many others’.60 The return to the first home is thus the retreating from life — from death — back into the ideal, as the denial of death: another (Hegelian) restricted economy. That the heimlich place becomes unheimlich in Pater’s ‘The Child in the House’ therefore takes on added significance. The place to which Florian (Pater) seeks to return is the prelapsarian state of the Hegelian Idea(l), but this heimlich place is revealed to be unheimlich. If the overall theme of this, his first imaginary portrait, is nostalgic (which is to say, Hegelian), then in showing the becoming-unheimlich of the Hegelian Idea(l), ‘The Child in the House’ might justifiably be read as the first tentative steps taken by Pater towards his appreciation of the ‘radical dualism’ of the Hegelian speculation. For the homely place in its very heimlichkeit is revealed not only to be a home, a safe-haven, fortified — ‘the sense of security could hardly have been deeper, the quiet of the child’s soul being one with the quiet of its home, a place “inclosed” and “sealed” ’ (MS, pp. 180–81) — but also and by the same token a tomb. In turning away from the world, in denying it in the name of the Hegelian Idea, Pater recognizes that his aestheticism amounts to the negation of life.61 We should not be surprised then that we find the sōma/sēma pairing at work in Paterean aestheticism, as it is in all idealisms.62 As Derrida has argued, such a figure is inextricable from Hegelian semiology, a semiology which, as we have seen, Pater adopts as his own in the essay on ‘Style’.63 In the Encyclopaedia, Hegel argues that: ‘The sign is some immediate intuition, representing a totally different import from what naturally belongs to it; it is the pyramid into which a foreign soul has been conveyed, and where it is conserved’ (E, § 458). To sublate the world into signs is to restrict it, to bind it into significations (prison, sōma) which can be repeated and relayed; the entire stakes of Hegel’s metaphysical architecture rest upon this incarceration of meaning, this restriction of the economy, which constitutes his philosophy of (the impossibility of ) death. Derrida comments:

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The Imaginary Portraits Hegel knew that this proper and animated body of the signifier was also a tomb. [. . .] The tomb is the life of the body as the sign of death, the body as the other of the soul, the other of the animate psyche, of the living breath. But the tomb shelters, maintains in reserve, capitalizes on life by marking that life continues elsewhere. The family crypt: oikēsis. It consecrates the disappearance of life by attesting to the perseverance of life. Thus, the tomb also shelters life from death. It warns the soul of possible death, warns (of ) death of the soul, turns away (from) death.64

The death which is the prison (sōma) of the soul (sēma), which sublates the animal world (itself a world of death and of f lux) into signs which resist this death, which resist time itself, repeating themselves, reproducing themselves, is the Hegelian pyramid. The sign — in which the world which can die is prevented from dying by the death in which it is conserved, embalmed, entombed — is then absolute negation which seeks to inter the without reserve which is abstract negativity. In a sense, this sōma/sēma pairing at work in Paterean aestheticism is anticipated in the first descriptions of Florian’s house: The old-fashioned, low wainscoting went round the rooms, and up the staircase with carved balusters and shadowy angles, landing half-way up at a broad window [. . .]. At the next turning came the closet [. . . and then] the children’s room. And on the top of the house, above the large attic [. . .] an infinite, unexplored wonderland of childish treasures [. . .] a f lat space of roof, railed round, gave a view of the neighbouring steeples. (MS, pp. 174–75)

The topography of the narration (beginning at the base of the house, travelling up the staircase, on into the attic, which is ‘large’ and spacious, ‘an infinite, unexplored wonderland’, and then finally up onto the rooftop and thus outside) is, as Eve Ellen Frank argues, ‘pyramidal, as if it were graphing spiritualization in space’.65 It is pyramidal insofar as Pater’s homely house — the body which houses the soul, as Pater argues in the essay on ‘Style’ (AP, p. 24) — is a tomb in which the soul is imprisoned, but which the soul seeks to escape, upward through the equivalent of the pyramid’s ascension chamber.66 In this sense, Pater’s use of this analogy is critical of Hegelianism in the same way as Nietzsche and Bataille would be, in that Hegelianism seeks to deny the body, the body as the home deemed an unheimlich (animal) place. But it is also complicit with Hegelianism by the same measure, complicit with Hegelian negation and assimilation and thereby of ontological violence, complicit with the establishment of the Hegelian Ideal. In this sense it stands apart from his other imaginary portraits, between it and which lay Pater’s manuscript on the history of philosophy; which is to say, his discovery of Hegel’s ‘radical dualism’. ‘The Child in the House’ is thus an uneasy first imaginary portrait by Pater. As a text it is double: both Hegelian and anti-Hegelian, but not yet post-Hegelian. In this sense, Pater’s estimation of ‘The Child in the House’, found in his unpublished manuscripts amongst passages intended for Gaston, is accurate: ‘Child in the House: voilà, the germinatory, original, source, specimen, of all my imaginative work’.67 ‘The Child in the House’ truly is the source of both Pater’s Hegelian fiction (Marius and Gaston), as the writing of his coming-to-self-consciousness, and his postHegelian fiction, the imaginary portraits.

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‘A Prince of Court Painters’: The Idea against Life We now turn to Pater’s collected Imaginary Portraits, which offer up a different reading of that Hegelianism which he had made structural to his ‘reconsidered’ aestheticism.68 In ‘A Prince of Court Painters’, the first of his collected imaginary portraits, Pater takes as his subject the relationship between the painter Jean Antoine (Anthony) Watteau and his apprentice Jean-Baptiste Pater (that the author does not reveal the surname of the protagonist is not without note),69 as told through the journal entries of Jean-Baptiste’s sister, Marie-Marguerite. But whilst the story comes from real-life characters, it is the theme of the piece, the relationship between art and life, that is Pater’s central concern. Here he attacks Hegelianism at its root: namely in its idealism, as a manifestation of a ‘radical dualism’ which it cannot admit to and which it seeks to efface in order to constitute itself as it is. In this criticism of his own idealism, Pater is close to Nietzsche. Nietzsche is not an idealist. As he writes in The Gay Science, ‘all philosophical idealism until now is something like an illness’ (§ 372). We will come on to see how Pater’s critics have often made Nietzsche into an idealist, but the fact remains that idealism is considered by Nietzsche to be the greatest of errors: The whole attitude of ‘man against the world’, of man as a ‘world-negating’ principle, of man [. . .] as judge of the world who finally places existence itself on his scales and finds it too light — the monstrous stupidity of this attitude has finally dawned on us and we are sick of it. (GSc, § 346)

In man as ‘world-negating’ we hear a clear criticism of Hegel. Hegel judges life by the standards of his own Idea and finds it wanting precisely insofar as it is not Ideal. And it is the same operation which Pater criticizes in ‘A Prince of Court Painters’, the ressentiment against life in the name of the Idea. From Watteau’s first introduction in the portrait, we see instantaneously that his idealization of life in art amounts to the denial of life: Anthony was found, hoisted into one of those empty niches of the old Hôtel de Ville, sketching the scene to the life, but with a kind of grace — a marvellous tact of omission, as my father pointed out to us, in dealing with the vulgar reality seen from one’s own window. (IP, pp. 5–6)

‘Vulgar reality’ is effaced from the ideal, sublated in a Hegelian Aufhebung. This kind of ‘tact of omission’ Pater would later laud in his essay on ‘Style’: ‘the otiose, the facile, surplusage’ are ‘abhorrent to the true literary artist’ (AP, p. 21). Or again: ‘Surplusage! he will dread that [. . .] For in truth all art does but consist in the removal of surplusage’ (p. 19). To use Bataille’s terms: it is the excess (abstract negativity) which Pater seeks to deny (sublate) in a kind of perfect Hegelian dialectic. Indeed, later in the portrait Pater will return to this selective ideal in terms strongly reminiscent of his first essay, ‘Diaphaneitè’, in which he speaks of his aesthetic hero as constituting a ‘colourless, unclassified purity of life’ (MS, p. 248): I can understand through this, at last, what it is he enjoys, what he selects by preference, from all that various world we pass our lives in. I am struck by the purity [of his art . . .] a sort of moral purity [. . .]. Is the actual life of Paris, to

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The Imaginary Portraits which he will soon return, equally pure, that it relishes this kind of thing so strongly? (IP, p. 23)

That Pater is so critical of this ‘tact of omission’ in ‘A Prince of Court Painters’, and yet some three years later in the essay on ‘Style’ would speak so highly of this same faculty, is once again indicative of the two distinct trains in his thought. That ‘reality’ remains unsatisfying is also emphasized in the character of JeanBaptiste, who is introduced as ‘a child of ten who cares only to save and possess, to hoard his tiny savings [. . .] like a little miser’ (IP, p. 12). He is characterized, even in his infancy, in terms reminiscent of Hegel’s ‘unhappy consciousness’. As Frederick Beiser has argued, Hegel aims the critique of the unhappy consciousness section of the Phenomenology squarely at Augustinian Christianity.70 The unhappy consciousness, aware of its own self-contradictory nature, holds itself in contrast to ‘the simple Unchangeable, [who] it takes to be the essential Being’ (PS, § 207), and in comparison to which it deems itself unworthy. Stuck in the ‘real’ world, it is unhappy with its lot precisely because the ‘real’ world is not the ‘ideal’ one. And in suggesting that the young Jean-Baptiste is already an unhappy consciousness, Pater seemingly puts forward the idea that art, precisely in its idealization, may resolve the unhappy consciousness. But the events of the narrative prove otherwise. JeanBaptiste and Watteau both find Paris unsatisfying in spite of their relative success: ‘A life, agitated, exigent, unsatisfying!’ (IP, p. 18). Both remain unhappy. And again, this unhappiness is not resolved by, but is produced by, the (Hegelian) ideal. It comes as no surprise then that Marie-Marguerite Pater explicitly places Watteau’s work into the framework of the Enlightenment: People talk of a new era now dawning upon the world, of fraternity, liberty, humanity, of a novel sort of social freedom in which men’s natural goodness of heart will blossom at a thousand points hitherto repressed, of wars disappearing from the world in an infinite benevolent ease of life — yes! perhaps infinite littleness also. And it is the outward manner of that, which, partly by anticipation, and through pure intellectual power, Anthony Watteau has caught. (IP, p. 33)

Anticipating the French revolutionary motto of ‘liberté, égalité, fraternité’ (MarieMarguerite’s journal entry is dated July 1717), Watteau’s ideal is explicitly related to Enlightenment emancipation.71 Here it is worth noting that Hegel’s philosophy of the Idea (and, by extension, Watteau’s and Pater’s Ideal) is intimately caught up with the French Revolution. As Jean Hyppolite argues, ‘what better example can one find of the activity of the Idea than the Revolution of 1793’?72 Given that Hegel’s philosophy privileges the self-determining freedom of the individual above all else, it comes as no surprise to find him so impressed with Napoleon: I saw the Emperor — this spirit of the world — leave the city to go on reconnaissance; it is indeed a wonderful sensation to see such an individual who, concentrated in a single point, [. . .] extends over the world and dominates it.73

Napoleon is the Idea made incarnate (as man is death incarnate), the worldhistorical individual through whose actions Reason comes to realize itself.74 And in

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the manuscript on moral philosophy, Pater had himself explicitly referred to Hegel’s world-historical individuals, the way in which ‘humanity [. . .] actually “finds itself ” in great men, in single, special, gifted persons [. . .] whose importance indeed is that they give utterance to that great consensus though they also partly lead it’ (MP, p. 23v). Themes of the Enlightenment Idea(l) and the French Revolution are returned to time and again by Pater, particularly in his imaginary portraits: Duke Carl of Rosenmold has an ‘Aufklärung’ (IP, p. 152), Prior Saint-Jean’s manuscripts are discovered during the storming of ‘an old monastic library in France at the Revolution’ in ‘Apollo in Picardy’ (MS, p. 143), and a ‘sudden outbreak of war’ leads to Emerald Uthwart and his friend James Stokes joining the army (presumably on 17 March 1815, when the Seventh Coalition declared Napoleon an outlaw) (MS, p. 225).75 But if the Hegelian Idea, which Watteau and Pater seem to share, is in essence an embodiment of the Enlightenment, Marie-Marguerite’s reference to the revolutionary motto of ‘liberté, égalité, fraternité’ cannot help but implicate this Idea in the less palatable elements of the French Revolution. Whilst Marie-Marguerite expresses the common hope that the Enlightenment would precipitate a ‘novel sort of social freedom in which men’s natural goodness of heart will blossom at a thousand points’ (IP, p. 33), the reality was somewhat different. As soon as the Idea is opposed to life, as an Ideal to which life should be made to adhere, it seeks to replace life, to negate life. In this sense, it is telling that Hegel dramatizes the Reign of Terror as one of the vital moments of his Phenomenology. Having disbanded the old regime, absolute freedom turns inward and negates the very individuality out of which it had been composed: ‘there is left for it only negative action; it is merely the fury of destruction’ (§ 589). The echo is again of that key passage (§ 32) in which Hegel formulates his thought as a philosophy of death: The sole work and deed of universal freedom is therefore death, a death too which has no inner significance or filling, for what is negated is the empty point of the absolutely free self. It is thus the coldest and meanest of all deaths, with no more significance than cutting off a head of a cabbage or swallowing a mouthful of water. (§ 590)

This kind of death is, Hegel claims, desired by the advocates of the Hegelian Idea, because they realize that the Idea cannot be made into law without the establishment of government, but that, in speaking for the people, this government stands against them. ‘The universal will maintains that what the government has actually done is a crime against it’, because the government negates individuality: ‘this reality [. . .] consists in the cold matter-of-fact annihilation of this existent self, from which nothing else can be taken away but its mere being’ (§ 591). And thus Hegel seems to acknowledge, unrepentantly, that the Reign of Terror is the logical consequence of his Idea; for the Idea sets as standard a bar so far removed from reality that everyone must fall before it, and thus the outcome must be the negation of that very thing which the Idea was meant to preserve: the individual in and as its freedom. This polarity between the idea and reality lies at the root of Watteau’s art and his success, ‘his dream of a better world than the real one’ (IP, pp. 34–35). Again, in dreaming of a world beyond the world, in setting up the idea against life, Watteau

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(as his apprentice Jean-Baptiste) is in essence an unhappy consciousness. And to a certain extent, Hegel’s philosophy never transcends this unhappy consciousness. As Deleuze argues, ‘the unhappy consciousness is the subject of the whole dialectic’.76 Speaking of its resolution, Hegel claims that the unhappy consciousness cannot be resolved in and through itself, but only through the intervention of a third party, who ‘presents the two extremes to one another, and ministers to each in its dealings with the other’ (PS, § 227). However, whilst the mediator permits the unhappy consciousness to transcend its individuality, the situation has only altered ‘in principle’: ‘But for itself, action and its own actual doing remain pitiable, its enjoyment remains pain, and the overcoming of these in a positive sense remains a beyond’ (§ 230). For itself, the overcoming remains a beyond, and it is only ‘the idea of Reason’ (§ 230) which permits the dialectical sublation of the unhappy consciousness. In this sense, the unhappy consciousness is the slave of Hegel’s master–slave dialectic by another name.77 In Hegel’s critique of Augustinian Christianity, it is only the mediator (in this case, the Catholic priest) who permits the unhappy consciousness to attain communication with the Idea, through its intervention. But in his own system, it is only ‘the idea of Reason’ (the greater reason, the Hegelian Idea), itself functioning as a mediating third party, which resolves the unhappy consciousness, a consciousness which was unhappy precisely because of the Idea. Hegel’s philosophy of the Idea amounts to a hatred of life. In this sense, MarieMarguerite’s story of having watched ‘a small bird which had f lown into the church but could find no way out again’ is allegorical not only of her status as a spinster (an unhappy consciousness seeking the ideal of Christian union with the unattainable Watteau), and of Pater’s status as a homosexual (Marie-Marguerite as Pater (her surname, after all), unable to reproduce sexually, under a ‘sentence of death’, as he puts it in the Renaissance, p. 238), but also of the entire philosophy of the Hegelian Idea: ‘The bird, taken captive by the ill-luck of the moment, re-tracing its issueless circle till it expires within the close vaulting of that great stone church: — human life may be like that bird too!’ (IP, pp. 14–15). The consciousness — ‘captive by the illluck of the moment’ — striving ever upward towards the point of escape, is striving towards the unattainable Ideal, which remains for it (without the intervention of a third party) a beyond, imprisoned. In this sense, Marie-Marguerite’s story repeats the sōma/sēma pairing of ‘The Child in the House’, but here with the difference that Pater is unreservedly critical of this logical outcome of the Hegelian Idea, and thereby of his own aestheticism. Given this opposition of the Idea to life, Gerald Monsman’s reading of the story’s conclusion seems debatable. According to Monsman, the ultimate significance of the portrait rests on the crucifix upon which Watteau was working at the moment of his death. Reading Watteau’s death-scene like Marius’s, Monsman, like MarieMarguerite, concludes from the fact that Watteau ‘dies with all the sentiment of religion’ (IP, p. 44) that his unhappy consciousness has indeed been resolved in and through his art: ‘Watteau’s victory lay precisely in this world, for in the hour of his death he gave visible expression to that ideal religion, art and love for which he had striven all his life’.78 Needless to say, given Pater’s constant highlighting of the inadequacy of the world to the idea, this is too idealistic a reading of the passage

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in question (it is, one suspects, and as we will see later in our discussion of ‘Denys L’Auxerrois’, dependent upon Monsman’s essentially Hegelian understanding of Nietzsche’s Apollo-Dionysus pairing). It assumes, as indeed Hegel does in the Phenomenology, that ‘the idea of Reason’ could successfully mediate between the (unhappy) consciousness of Watteau and the (Christian) God beyond. And it assumes that this resolution is affected in the sensible appearance of the idea (the Cross the idea not only of God, but the ideal of God’s love, and of God’s sacrifice of his son): art once again facilitating the resolution of the unhappy consciousness. But there is no evidence in the portrait of anything of the sort. Indeed, in the final paragraph of the text, Marie-Marguerite offers her most pertinent comment on Watteau: ‘He had been a sick man all his life. He was always a seeker after something in the world that is there in no satisfying measure, or not at all’ (IP, p. 44). Watteau was ‘sick’ all his life; even — indeed, especially — in the moment of his death. Even then, he seeks something beyond the world, an idea and ideal unrealized and unrealizable in the world, of which there is ‘no satisfying measure’. ‘Sebastian van Storck’: Schopenhauer as the Truth of Hegel In the Genealogy, Nietzsche memorably attacks ‘bad conscience’ (his version of Hegel’s unhappy consciousness)79 in terms reminiscent of Marie-Marguerite’s final estimation of Watteau’s life as a form of ‘sickness’: We have here a sort of madness of the will showing itself in mental cruelty which is absolutely unparalleled: man’s will to find himself guilty and condemned without hope of reprieve, his will to think of himself as punished, without the punishment ever being equivalent to the level of guilt, his will to infect and poison the fundamentals of things with the problem of punishment and guilt in order to cut himself off, once and for all, from the way out of this labyrinth of ‘fixed ideas’, this will to set up an ideal — that of a ‘holy God’ — in order to be palpably convinced of his own absolute worthlessness in the face of this ideal. [. . .] Here is sickness, without a doubt, the most terrible sickness to ever rage in man. (II § 22)

Here then is that ‘radical dualism’ of which Pater speaks with reference to Hegel: ‘a very imperfect reciprocity between the exacting reasonableness of the ideal he supposes, and the confused, imperfect, haphazard character of man’s actual experience in nature and history’ (HP, pp. 5v–6). It is a dualism established between life and the idea which is ‘radical’ insofar as it is unbridgeable. And this kind of attack on the ‘sickness’ which is Hegel’s ‘radical dualism’ was intensified by Pater the following year with the publication of ‘Sebastian van Storck’. The clue to approaching ‘Sebastian van Storck’ is given, obliquely, by two separate critical comments on the text by Billie Andrew Inman. First, speaking of Pater’s reading of Hegel’s Logic, and — wrongly — dismissing the text’s inf luence upon him, Inman opines that ‘only on the assumption that Pater at twenty-three bore a strong resemblance to his Sebastian van Storck can one assume that he was much taken with this book’.80 We have already seen how Pater at forty-two, if not at twenty-three, was sufficiently taken by Hegelian logic to adopt it wholesale in his essay on ‘Style’. But the comparison made between Sebastian, Pater, and Hegel

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is not idle, for what Pater criticizes in the character of Sebastian is precisely what we have been following as his (Pater’s own) ‘Hegelianism’. Secondly, in an essay directly addressing ‘Sebastian van Storck’, Inman argues that ‘even allowing for some unconscious misinterpretation of Spinoza’s ideas, Pater must have known that Sebastian’s philosophy was more like Schopenhauer’s than Spinoza’s’.81 There is no doubt that Schopenhauerian concepts feature throughout ‘Sebastian van Storck’ (although what is more questionable is whether Pater himself knew Schopenhauer’s philosophy as Inman seems to suggest),82 but it is the implications of the parallel that are more striking. For what comments on the text have so far missed is that, if Sebastian’s Hegelianism is Schopenhauerian, Pater’s attack on Hegelian thought in ‘Sebastian van Storck’ takes his attack on nihilism into the realm of Nietzsche’s. To begin with, the pairing of Hegel and Schopenhauer seems bizarre. Both figures taught at the University of Berlin, where Schopenhauer’s dislike for Hegel led him in 1820 to schedule his lectures in order to clash with Hegel’s. In his published work, Schopenhauer was scathing of Hegel: The greatest effrontery in serving up sheer nonsense, in scrabbling together senseless and maddening webs of words, such as previously only been heard of in madhouses, finally appeared in Hegel. It became the instrument of the most ponderous and general mystification that has ever existed, with a result which will seem incredible to posterity, and be a lasting monument to German stupidity.83

Put simply, Schopenhauer’s philosophy sought to invert Hegelianism step-by-step. Hegel had posited a rational world governed by the logic of the rational Idea. Schopenhauer, on the other hand, began from the position that the world was irrational and that the rationality deemed inherent to it (the ‘logic’ of Geist) was purely a surface semblance. This rational world was the world of representation, created and maintained by humanity. What then links Hegel’s and Schopenhauer’s philosophies? And what leads us to suggest that Pater’s attack on ‘pessimism’ in ‘Sebastian van Storck’ is at the same time a nuanced and insightful critique of Hegelianism? Sebastian’s philosophy begins with a metaphysical affirmation of a (Hegelian) Absolute, a monism which holds that all matter is but One: ‘And what pure reason affirmed in the first place, as the ‘beginning of wisdom’, was that the world is but a thought, or a series of thoughts: that it exists, therefore, solely in mind’ (IP, pp. 104–05). Here, Sebastian is already close to Hegel. For both Hegel and Pater’s ‘reconsidered’ aestheticism, the lesser reason constitutes that ‘series of thoughts’ out of which the greater reason comes to its self-consciousness. Sebastian’s position is characteristically idealist, in the same way as the young Marius’s was, in that he comes to regard ‘the universe as actually the product, so far as he really knew it, of his own lonely thinking power — of himself, there, thinking: as being zero without him’ (IP, p. 105). (The ‘as far as he really knew it’ here plays the role of the Hegelian-Paterean corrective to the Kantian-Arnoldian unknowable Ding-an-sich.) The world is then an ens rationis: ‘To pure reason things discovered themselves as being, in their essence, thoughts: — all things, even the most opposite things, mere transmutations of a single power, the power of thought. All was but conscious mind’ (IP, p. 105). His ‘mental process’ is thus co-opted into a Hegelian metanarrative

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(just as Pater, during the same period of composition, was at work ‘reconsidering’ his aestheticism): ‘to him that process was nothing less than the apprehension, the revelation, of the greatest substance of all things’ (p. 106). In a series of theorems and corollaries, Sebastian proves to himself his metaphysical propositions: There can be only one substance: (corollary) it is the greatest of errors to think that the non-existent, the world of finite things seen and felt, really is: (theorem) for, whatever is, is but that: (practical corollary) one’s wisdom, therefore, consists in hastening, so far as may be, the action of those forces which tend to the restoration of equilibrium, the calm surface of the absolute, untroubled mind, to tabula rasa, by the extinction of one’s self of all that is but correlative of ourselves to the finite illusion — by the suppression of ourselves. (pp. 106–07)

From his Hegelian propositions, then, Sebastian comes to a series of Schopenhauerean conclusions (his phrasing reminiscent of Hegel’s famous ‘whatever is according to reason, that is’ (PR, p. 10), quoted by Pater in ‘Coleridge’s Writings’, AP, p. 76). Each of these canonically Hegelian themes which are expounded by Sebastian is returned to by Schopenhauer but with its pessimistic conclusion highlighted.84 In this sense, and whilst neither of them would have admitted it, Schopenhauer is the truth of Hegel. As the narrator notes in ‘Sebastian van Storck’, ‘the conclusion was there, and might have been foreseen, in the premises’ (p. 109). The (Schopenhauerean) conclusion was there in the (Hegelian) premises: and from the opposition of the Idea to life, there can be no other conclusion than Sebastian’s, that what is desirable is ‘the suppression of ourselves’ (p. 107), because the individual self cannot ever attain the heights of the Idea. In short, Sebastian comes to hold the position, along with Schopenhauer, that ‘human life must be some kind of mistake’.85 In rectifying the ‘mistake’ which is life, we return to the theme of the restricted economy, and specifically to Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, because, in speaking of ‘forces which tend towards the restoration of equilibrium’ (IP, p. 107), Sebastian is speaking precisely of the restricted economy which is the pleasure principle. The ‘economic point of view’ which Freud introduces holds that ‘an instinct is an urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things’.86 This ‘earlier state of things’ is that ‘inanimate’ state which Sebastian so cherishes over and above conscious life, because, as Freud argues, ‘inanimate things existed before living ones’.87 And this theme of the restricted economy, the life which is built upon death as animate death (in Kojève’s reading of Hegel), and which proved so appealing to Pater in his ‘reconsideration’ of his aestheticism precisely insofar as it is restricted, is a theme returned to throughout the portrait: ‘He found it pleasant to think [. . .] of the remains of a certain ancient town, which within men’s memory had lost its few remaining inhabitants, and, with its already empty tombs, dissolved and disappeared in the f lood’ (IP, p. 93). Or again, thinking of the tomb of an ancient hero or king, Sebastian finds himself wishing that ‘he himself would like to have been dead and gone as long ago, with a kind of envy of those whose deceasing was so long since over’ (p. 94). Indeed, the very setting of the portrait in Holland reinforces this motif, for as the narrator notes, ‘the country itself shared the uncertainty of the individual human life’ (p. 93): the land reclaimed (from the sea) as life reclaimed

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from death, animate from inanimate matter. As Freud argues, the logical conclusion of this kind of philosophy is that ‘the aim of all life is death’.88 The same conclusion is drawn by Schopenhauer: ‘Dying is certainly to be regarded as the real aim of life’.89 And we see in Sebastian’s Schopenhauerean logic this conclusion repeated: ‘every incident of its hypothetical existence it had protested that its proper function was to die’ (IP, p. 109). Insofar as the end of life is death in both Hegel’s and Freud’s restricted economy, and insofar as this end is manifested as the logical conclusion of Sebastian’s philosophy, Pater’s genius in ‘Sebastian van Storck’ lies in making the Nietzschean leap which connects Hegelianism (as premise) with Schopenhauereanism as its logical conclusion. For whilst the young Nietzsche (the Nietzsche of The Birth of Tragedy) was a disciple of Schopenhauer, the older Nietzsche came to be more and more critical of his pessimism, precisely because it became for Nietzsche indistinguishable from Hegelianism.90 As Nietzsche writes: Schopenhauer [. . .] is a viciously ingenious attempt to use the great selfaffirmation of the ‘will to live’, the exuberant forms of life, in the service of their opposite, a nihilistic, total depreciation of the value of life. (TI, ‘Skirmishes of an Untimely Man’, § 21)

And, as he makes clear, it is in response to Schopenhauer’s asceticism that Nietzsche launches his attack on ressentiment: [In] Schopenhauer [. . .] the instincts of compassion, self-denial, self-sacrifice [. . . were] gilded, deified and transcendentalized until he was finally left with them as those ‘values as such’ on the basis of which he said ‘no’ to life. (GM, Preface, § 5)

Again, Nietzsche’s attack on Schopenhauer’s ‘sickness’ echoes Marie-Marguerite’s diagnosis of Watteau’s own ‘sickness’, a diagnosis which seems equally applicable to Sebastian. As Gilles Deleuze has argued, whilst ‘Schopenhauer made the question of existence or justice reverberate like never before, [. . .] he found, in suffering, a way of denying life and, in the negation of life, the only way of justifying it’.91 This is what Nietzsche would call the nihilism of Schopenhauer. And when the narrator speaks of the ‘pride’ Sebastian feels in his ‘curious, well-reasoned nihilism’ (IP, p. 110), Pater means precisely the same kind of nihilism. He means that kind of nihilism which is the result of Hegel’s ‘radical dualism’; which results from the opposition of the Idea to life, and before which life is forever found inadequate. ‘In the word nihilism’, as Deleuze argues, ‘nihil does not signify non-being but primarily a value of nil. Life takes on a value of nil insofar as it is denied and depreciated’.92 And thus, when Nietzsche demonstrates that Schopenhauer’s nihilism is in essence identical with the nihilism of (which is) Christianity (TI, ‘Skirmishes of an Untimely Man’, § 21), this nihilism is demonstrated to be in essence Hegelian, as Nietzsche diagnoses Hegelianism as the truth of Christianity.93 Who can therefore interpret the conclusion of ‘Sebastian van Storck’ as heroism? We are told that ‘it was in the saving of [a] child’ from f lood-water ‘that Sebastian had lost his life’ (IP, p. 114), Sebastian sacrificing himself for another. But can we really call this a sacrifice, given Sebastian’s hatred of life? His parents, we are told,

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‘were almost glad to find him thus’, both because they believed ‘him bent on selfdestruction’ (p. 114) (suicide prohibiting his Christian survival),94 and because he had desired that death. And so Sebastian’s sacrifice is mimetic of those various sacrificial crises which structure Hegel’s Phenomenology, in that what he gives up — his life — is in no way valued. In other words, Sebastian’s sacrifice is speculative: no kind of sacrifice at all. ‘Denys L’Auxerrois’: The Dionysian as the Affirmation of Difference If Sebastian’s sacrifice is Hegelian, the sacrifice described in ‘Denys L’Auxerrois’, published six months later, is indicative of what Bataille would term non-productive expenditure. Considered thus, ‘Denys’ must be starkly contrasted with Pater’s ‘Study of Dionysus’. Published in 1876, Pater’s essentially Hegelian reading of the Dionysus myth in his ‘Study of Dionysus’ may be said to mark the beginning of his ‘reconsideration’ of his aestheticism, as Inman has convincingly argued.95 But some ten years later, in 1886’s ‘Denys’, Pater radically reread the Dionysus myth, substituting his Hegelian reading of Dionysus for a Nietzschean one. Of all of Pater’s imaginary portraits, ‘Denys L’Auxerrois’ has been the most commented upon and here the connection between Pater and Nietzsche has often been made.96 Both were professional philologists who, at roughly similar times, although with no direct inf luence, wrote works (Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy and Pater’s ‘Denys L’Auxerrois’ and ‘Study of Dionysus’ respectively) which emphasized the reciprocal relationships between the Greek Gods Apollo and Dionysus, where Apollo represented the values of order, singularity, and individuality and Dionysus the values of disorder, multiplicity, and excess.97 The association of Pater and Nietzsche is, no doubt, enticing, drawing both upon Pater’s explicit association of Apollo to the Dorian Greeks and to the rule of order (PP, p. 36), and to a more implicit contrast created with respect to the chthonian Dionysus: A certain darker side of the double god of nature, obscured behind the brighter episodes of Thebes and Naxos, but never quite forgotten, something corresponding to this deeper, more refined idea, really existed — the conception of Dionysus Zagreus. (GS, pp. 42–43)

This conception of Dionysus Zagreus is perhaps most explicitly dramatized in ‘Denys L’Auxerrois’, at the moment when Denys (as Dionysus) leaves the first winter, to return (as Dionysus Zagreus) the following year: It was on his sudden return after a long journey (one of many inexplicable disappearances), coming back changed somewhat, that he ate f lesh for the first time, tearing the hot, red morsels with his delicate fingers in a kind of wild greed. (IP, pp. 64–65)

And insofar as Apollo and Dionysus are unified in music in The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche here following Schopenhauer’s lead, music constitutes the (Hegelian) unity of the subjective (Apollonian) and objective (Dionysian) in precisely the same way as it had in Pater’s aestheticism.98 Nietzsche’s text also repeats Pater’s call to ‘treat life in the spirit of art’ (AP, p. 62), stating that it is ‘only as an aesthetic phenomenon’ that ‘existence and the world’ are ‘justified’ (BT, § 5).99

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However, while there are certainly points of contact between the two writers in these texts, and while Pater’s ‘Denys L’Auxerrois’ is indeed Nietzschean, it is not Nietzschean in the way in which it has been popularly thought. Critics who have read ‘Denys’ alongside Nietzsche have generally fallen into three errors: (1). Misunderstanding the nature of Nietzsche’s Apollo–Dionysus pairing as it appears in The Birth of Tragedy. (2). Misunderstanding the place of The Birth of Tragedy within Nietzsche’s oeuvre as a whole, and thereby misunderstanding the role Dionysus came to play in the later Nietzsche’s thought. (3). Misunderstanding the relationship between the Dionysus of Pater’s ‘Denys’ and that of the philological ‘Study of Dionysus’, and thereby misreading the conclusion of ‘Denys’. The first error is, in essence, inconsequential as far as this argument goes. Its starting claim is that Paterean aestheticism, in marrying form (which is to say style, subjectivity) and content (which is to say matter, objectivity), functions as precisely the kind of unification of the Apollonian (subjectivity) and Dionysian (objectivity) of Nietzsche’s attic tragedy. But in making this claim, both Gerald Monsman and (following him) Patrick Bridgwater misread Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, making the Apollonian into the objective drive and the Dionysian into the subjective; which is to say, they invert the drives.100 Perhaps the fact that this misreading is inconsequential — and has not yet been noted by Pater’s critics — is indicative of the fact that the overall form of The Birth of Tragedy remains uncomplicated by this critical error. In its formal structure, in which thesis (Apollo) and antithesis (Dionysus) are resolved in synthesis (Attic Tragedy or Aestheticism), we can see the underlying Hegelianism of Nietzsche’s argument. As Nietzsche himself writes in Ecce Homo (1888): ‘It smells offensively Hegelian [. . .]. One ‘idea’ — the opposition between Dionysian and Apollonian — translated into meta-physics; history itself as the development of this ‘idea’; the opposition sublated into a unity in tragedy’ (‘The Birth of Tragedy’, § 1).101 According to Nietzsche’s mature rereading of The Birth of Tragedy, then, the argument of the text constitutes Hegelianism by another name. That it should do so should come as no great surprise, for the 28-year-old Nietzsche who wrote The Birth of Tragedy (1872) was himself a Schopenhauerean.102 And just as the later Nietzsche came to be critical of Schopenhauer, so too he would criticize The Birth of Tragedy. This is where we find the second error of Paterean criticism, in the failure to contextualize The Birth of Tragedy within Nietzsche’s corpus. Whilst Monsman and Bridgwater misread The Birth of Tragedy, they do so on its own terms, maintaining the Hegelian structure of the text. The importance of this misreading, therefore, lies not so much in its precise error (the inversion of the drives), but in the very inconsequentiality of this error to the form of Nietzsche’s argument; the (implied) recognition of the Hegelianism of The Birth of Tragedy. In reading Nietzsche as a Hegelian, Monsman and Bridgwater’s misunderstand Nietzsche’s mature philosophy. Thus, neither critic appreciates precisely how un-Nietzschean a text The Birth of Tragedy is.103 Such readings of Paterean aestheticism through Nietzsche’s Apollo–Dionysus pairing as its appears in The Birth of Tragedy in essence amounts

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to another reading of Pater’s Hegelianism; what is identified is that Hegelianism which, as we have seen, became structural to Pater’s project of aestheticism.104 The failure to see that The Birth of Tragedy is Hegelian rather than Nietzschean means that Pater’s critics have yet to comprehend fully the role Dionysus came to play in the later Nietzsche’s thought. When Billie Andrew Inman attacks the Keefes’ Walter Pater and the Gods of Disorder for its association of Pater’s aestheticism with Nietzsche’s Dionysus, and argues that whilst Pater did ‘not oppose Dionysus to Apollo’ ‘Nietzsche did, and we all do now; but Pater did not’,105 her error is with reference not to Pater but to Nietzsche: for while Nietzsche opposed Apollo and Dionysus according to the logic of the Aufhebung in The Birth of Tragedy, the later Nietzsche replaced this opposition with an unsublatable one between Dionysus and Socrates (EH, ‘The Birth of Tragedy’, §§ 1–2). As Nietzsche puts it, Socrates is ‘the archetype of theoretical man’ (BT, § 15). His decadence is his nihilism, his turning away from the world: ‘A profound delusion [. . .] first appeared in the person of Socrates, namely the imperturbable belief that thought [. . .] is capable, not simply of understanding existence, but even of correcting it’ (BT, § 15).106 Speaking of this opposition, Deleuze writes: Socrates is the first genius of decadence. He opposes the idea to life, he judges life in terms of the idea, he posits life as something which should be judged, justified and redeemed by the idea. He asks us to feel that life, crushed by the weight of the negative, is unworthy of being desired for itself, experienced in itself.107

We can hear in Deleuze’s summary the evolution that Nietzsche’s thought is about to take. For if Socrates is the first decadent in opposing the idea to life, there will come after him one who will take this decadence to its zenith: Christ. In this sense, it is Pater’s reading of Dionysus in his ‘Study of Dionysus’, rather than that of ‘Denys’, which is more in keeping with Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy. Inman argues that, during the period of this essay’s composition, Pater not only ‘identified with the suffering god’, as he himself was under attack during 1874–75 both professionally (the negative reviews of his Renaissance) and personally (over the Hardinge affair), but that Pater also ‘saw the possibility of a parallel to the experiences of Jesus in the sequence suffering-death-resurrection’.108 In his ‘Study of Dionysus’, Pater makes this parallel: The beautiful, weeping creature, vexed by the wind, suffering, torn to pieces, and rejuvenated again at last, like a tender shoot of living green out of the hardness and stony darkness of the earth becomes an emblem or ideal of chastening and purification, and of final victory through suffering. (GS, pp. 49–50)

Pater’s ‘Denys’ retains these similarities, characterized as ‘a suffering, tortured figure’: ‘With all the regular beauty of a pagan god, he has suffered in a manner of which we must suppose pagan gods incapable’ (IP, p. 54). This pairing of Dionysus and Christ which Inman sees underwriting Pater’s study of Dionysus’ constitutes a Hegelian reading of Dionysus on his part, one similar to that described in The Birth of Tragedy. But, as Nietzsche argues in his unpublished notebooks of 1888, his mature vision of Dionysus is incompatible with Christian parallel and, by extension, with the characterization drawn in Pater’s ‘Study of Dionysus’:

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The terms used by Nietzsche are reminiscent of those used in the Genealogy to diagnose ressentiment. Insofar as ‘the Christian says No’, Christianity is reactive: ‘slave’s morality’ (GM, I § 10).109 It is a ressentiment against the world in the name of the Idea. Nietzsche’s Dionysus is not Hegelian then — or at least not Dionysus as Nietzsche came to understand him. It is for this reason that Nietzsche is so critical of the ‘Hegelianism’ of The Birth of Tragedy when he reconsiders the text in Ecce Homo. Dionysus cannot be explained in and through Hegelianism; his suffering and pain cannot be ‘resolved’ (dialectically); his death is not his (Christian) ‘redemption’. Deleuze comments: The opposition of Dionysus and Christ is developed point by point as that of the affirmation of life (its extreme valuation) and the negation of life (its extreme deprecation). Dionysian mania is opposed to Christian mania; Dionysian intoxication to Christian intoxication; Dionysian laceration to crucifixion; Dionysian resurrection to Christian resurrection; Dionysian revaluation to Christian transubstantiation.110

And Dionysus’s sacrifice is pointedly not Hegelian. Christ’s sacrifice, on the other hand, most certainly is; as in Hegel’s life-and-death-struggle of the Phenomenology, Christ’s looking death in the face is resolved in his after-life, his living-on in and as Spirit. In comparison, Dionysus’ death is truly sacrificial in Bataille’s sense: without reserve. Clearly aware that this opposition would be misread, Nietzsche reiterated this, the most important of his insights, consistently through his writings of 1888, the final year of his productive life: ‘Have I been understood? — Dionysus versus the crucified . . .’ (EH, ‘Why I am Destiny’, § 9). 111 The (Christian) resolution offered by a Hegelian Dionysus, as described in both Pater’s ‘Study of Dionysus’ and Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, is markedly not the one described in ‘Denys L’Auxerrois’. Here then lies the third error of the readings of Pater’s ‘Denys’ which have paired the text alongside The Birth of Tragedy. In the ‘Study of Dionysus’, Dionysus is characterized as ‘twofold then — a Döppelganger’ (GS, p. 44), and this dualism is explicitly bridged in that Dionysus (thesis) and Dionysus Zagreus (antithesis) are revealed to be one and the same in another Hegelian unity of opposites, ‘a tradition really primitive, and harmonious with the original motive of the idea of Dionysus’ (GS, p. 43). But in the imaginary portrait, when Denys’s only friend, the monk Hermes, considers the relationship between Denys and Dionysus, he concludes that Dionysus ‘was like a double creature, of two natures, difficult or impossible to harmonise’ (IP, p. 66). Whereas harmony (dialectical sublation) is achieved in Pater’s ‘Study of Dionysus’, this resolution is deliberately withheld in ‘Denys L’Auxerrois’. Just as Nietzsche had, the later Pater moved away from this neat solution; as in the manuscript on the history of philosophy, we have in ‘Denys L’Auxerrois’ a form of non-dialectics.

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Internal evidence suggests a close parallel between ‘Denys’ and the manuscript on the history of philosophy, in which Pater first approaches the non-dialectical theory of Hegel’s ‘radical dualism’. The narrator opens the portrait with a discussion of the way in which man is an ‘aspiring, never quite contented being’: And yet in truth, since we are no longer children, we might well question the advantage of the return to us of a [previous] condition of life [. . .] unless we could regain also the childish consciousness, or rather unconsciousness, in ourselves. (IP, p. 47)

The theme and the language here ref lect the opening statements of the manuscript on the history of philosophy: The idea of what is called an ‘unconscious’ period of human mind, a period in which, though with full enjoyment of their reception and active powers, men were as unsuspicious as children as to any abstract question of what might be beneath their immediate experience [. . .] has often been contrasted, sometimes in right and never quite unfavourably, with the actual temper of the European mind. (HP, p. 1r)

The contrast has never been ‘quite unfavourable’. This period is defined by Pater as being ‘unconscious of even the simplest philosophical abstractions’ (HP, p. 1v). The passage continues: Could they have anticipated the history of thought as it has really been, few perhaps would have wished to change, for themselves or others, that unconscious state, so natural, so harmonious with itself, and it must be added so simple in its faith, for the endless pathway of that conscious speculation, of which, whatever sense it may give one of mental superiority and a sort of intellectual high-breeding, the actual results have been in the main negative. (HP, pp. 2r–v)

The ‘unconscious state’ is ‘natural’ and ‘harmonious with itself ’. Again, the Hegelian echoes are clear: this prelapsarian realm is characterized in its own self-identity. The stated aim here, the return to this ‘natural’ relationship, is, as Derrida has shown, an archaeology which is common to all ‘sciences’, which is to say, all ‘metaphysics’, not least semiology.112 Here difference is not (has not been) sublated precisely because there is no difference conceived at its inception. This prelapsarian existence does not need to resolve difference into a positively rational whole because it is wholly one with itself. It is then Hegel’s ‘horizon of absolute knowledge’ presented to itself as (at its) origin.113 Denys embodies precisely the kind of non-productive expenditure which Hegel seeks to excise from his restricted economy, which is why ‘Denys’ is, ultimately, anything but nostalgic. Denys is himself the ‘radical dualism’ which undoes the Hegelian speculation. That his sacrifice is without reserve is perhaps best demonstrated by the implicit contrast between his sacrifice and that of the anonymous child at the bridge of the Yonne: It was as if the disturbing of that time-worn masonry let out the dark spectres of departed times. Deep down, at the core of the central pile, a painful object was exposed — the skeleton of a child, placed there alive, it was rightly surmised, in the superstitious belief that, by way of vicarious substitution, its death would secure the safety of all those who should pass over. (IP, p. 73)

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Such sacrificial substitution is the mechanic of Hegel’s life-and-death-struggle, but there is no substitution in the case of Denys, nor in the case of Dionysus (in spite of René Girard’s protestations to the contrary).114 Such a (Hegelian) sacrificial substitution is the very stuff of Christianity, Christ dying for the sins of mankind, but it is not present in ‘Denys’. There is nothing speculative about Denys’s sacrifice: It was as if the sight of blood transported the spectators with a kind of mad rage, and suddenly revealed to them the truth. The pretended hunting of the unholy creature became a real one, which brought out, in rapid increase, men’s evil passions. The soul of Denys was already at rest, as his body, now borne along in front of the crowd, was tossed hither and thither, torn at last from limb to limb. (IP, p. 76)

Thus, the Dionysus of ‘Denys L’Auxerrois’ does not promise Christian or Hegelian rebirth, a living-on or an after-life, in and as the greater reason in what Pater would call subjective immortality, as the tortured figure of his ‘Study of Dionysus’ had done ten years previously. His death is final, and his life the ultimate yea-saying. As Nietzsche would later write: Saying yes to life, even in its strangest and harshest problems; the will to life rejoicing in its own inexhaustibility through the sacrifice of its highest types — that is what I called Dionysian [. . .]. Not to escape horror and pity, not cleanse yourself of a dangerous affect by violent discharge — as Aristotle thought — : but rather, over and above all joy and pity, so that you yourself may be the eternal joy in becoming. (TI, ‘What I Owe the Ancients’, § 5)

Denys’s very life figures as that ‘open wound’ which Bataille speaks of as constituting ‘all by itself the refutation of Hegel’s closed system’.115 Denys is himself an embodiment of the Dionysian power which the later Nietzsche would make foundational to his philosophy, the affirmation of difference. Bataille’s definition of ‘eroticism’ as ‘assenting to life up to the point of death’ serves as a good characterization of Denys,116 for eroticism is nothing other than the Dionysian: ‘sexual life considered [. . .] almost entirely as excess — a savage eruption toward an inaccessible summit — exuberance as essential opposition to concerns for the time to come’.117 Nietzsche’s term is ‘Rausch’, Dionysian mania. It is this kind of mania, the ‘orgy of limitless coupling’, which is described so famously by Thomas Mann in Death in Venice (1912), in which Gustav von Aschenbach (a man who might himself be read as a portrait of Pater), aroused and disturbed by his desire for the boy Tadzio, has ‘a terrible dream’: His heart throbbed to the drumbeats, his brain whirled, a fury seized him, a blindness, a dizzying lust, and his soul craved to join the round-dance of the god. The obscene symbol, wooden and gigantic, was uncovered and raised aloft: and still more unbridled grew the howling of the rallying-cry. With foaming mouths they raged, they roused each other with lewd gestures and licentious hands, laughing and moaning they thrust prods into each other’s f lesh and licked the blood from each other’s limbs. But the dreamer was now with them and in them, he belonged to the stranger-god. Yes, they were himself as they f lung themselves, tearing and slaying, on the animals and devoured steaming gobbets of f lesh, they were as an orgy of limitless coupling, in homage to the

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god, began on the trampled, mossy ground. And his very soul savoured the lascivious delirium of annihilation.118

The relation between this scene of Dionysian mania and the final movement of Pater’s ‘Denys’ is obvious. And, as Mann’s description makes clear, the follower of Dionysus does not make clear-cut distinctions on the basis of gender. Dionysian intoxication — the type of sexual exuberance defined by Bataille as ‘eroticism’, the kind of sexuality which itself opens up the general economy — is, in this sense, bisexual (multivalent).119 To be sure, this bisexuality is not something which Nietzsche makes explicit. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick argues, Nietzsche’s entire discourse, and his entire philosophical language, could be deemed reactionary and homophobic in the extreme.120 Indeed, Nietzsche’s reliance on a vocabulary full of reproductive metaphors easily fits into this conceptual matrix: The word ‘Dionysus’ means all this [. . .]. It gives religious expression to the most profound instinct of life, directed towards the future of life, the eternity of life, — the pathway to life, procreation, the holy path [. . .] It was Christianity with its fundamental ressentiment against life that first made sexuality into something unclean, it threw filth on the origin, the presupposition of our life . . . (TI, ‘What I Owe the Ancients’, § 4)

As such, the Dionysian affirmation of life, which Deleuze rightly claims to be the central feature of Nietzsche’s mature philosophy, might very easily find itself (re)deployed within homophobic discourse, homosexuality being ‘contra naturam’, ‘against nature’, à rebours.121 But this would be to simplify Nietzsche. As Sedgwick also argues, the fact that he ‘associates instance after instance of homoerotic desire, though never named as such, with the precious virility of Dionysiac initiates or of ancient warrior classes’ indicates something more complex at work.122 Dionysus affirms differences, affirms alterity (even, and especially, that ‘other’ within, that difference constitutive of the self ); Dionysus is by definition affirmative of all sexuality, all eroticism. For Hegel, of course, sexuality is only ever affirmed negatively, within strict limits.123 Sexual difference is definite and determined, which is to say, restricted. As the fragment on ‘Love’ indicates, the immutability of sexual difference rests at the cornerstone of Hegel’s entire dialectical method. For therein, whilst Hegel argues that ‘true love, or love proper, exists only between living beings who are alike in power’ — which is to say that this early fragment anticipates the drama of mutual recognition — this love is only conceived of as a congress between man and woman.124 The possibility of homosexual love is never contemplated by Hegel, for whom the ‘resolution’ of love, the positively rational whole, would always have to be the child.125 Hegel’s philosophy, then, even in this early manuscript on ‘Love’, already anticipates his Sittlichkeit, his philosophy of the impossibility of death (the restricted economy reproducing itself in and through the child) and the correspondent buttressing of heterosexuality and the institution of marriage. This determination of sexual difference is indicative of Hegel’s entire philosophy, for it is difference determined as contradiction. But in thus (over-)determining difference, Hegel has always already deconstructed himself, a point which is not lost

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on Derrida when writing on Nietzsche: At the moment that sexual difference is determined as an opposition, the image of each term is inverted into the other. Thus the machinery of contradiction is a proposition whose two x are at once subject and predicate and whose copula is a mirror.126

Here Derrida’s reading of sexual difference clearly echoes the opening propositions of Hegel’s Logic, reproduced by Pater in his theory of ‘Style’, in which the determination of difference rests upon the unity of opposites. What is implied here by Derrida, an implication as significant to Hegel’s discourse as to Nietzsche’s, is that, in Hegel’s determination of sexual difference as contradiction, his determination of masculine in opposition to feminine, and his correspondent valorization of heterosexuality over and above homosexuality, his own logic has undone itself from within. Once again, we return to that ‘radical dualism’ which Pater identifies as underwriting the Hegelian speculation. For the ‘radical dualism’, which we have previously related to the kind of non-dialectical thought which ruptures the restricted economy and opens up the general one, the excessive force Hegel terms ‘abstract negativity’, is itself indicative of a kind of sexuality without reserve. All of this relates to the kind of genealogical criticism described in Nietzsche’s Genealogy. As Michel Foucault has shown, the affirmation of difference is itself the rejection of the idea of the ‘origin’. Nietzschean genealogy ‘rejects the metahistorical deployment of ideal significations and indefinite teleologies. It opposes itself to the search for “origins” ’.127 The origin would, in this case, be that archaeological identity which the Hegelian speculation seeks to return to (the horizon of absolute knowledge): ‘the attempt to capture the exact essence of things, their purest possibilities, and their carefully protected identities’.128 For if there is no ‘origin’, no ‘one’ upon which metaphysics can be founded, no architectural grounding point, there can be no ‘other’ constructed in opposition to it. There is thus nothing ‘normal’ which has not been ideologically created, nothing singular or identical which has not had its difference repressed; as Adorno argues, this kind of identity metaphysics (dialectics, idealism, Hegelianism) is ‘itself an ideological principle’.129 And instead of repressing sexuality, what Dionysus offers is a sexuality which is affirmative rather than negative: a Nietzschean as opposed to a Hegelian sexuality. Pater’s Denys — as Nietzsche’s later Dionysus — is the very definition of that which opens up the restricted economy into the general one. Because of their three underlying misconceptions, because they regard Pater’s Denys of 1886 as an outgrowth of his Dionysus of 1876, Pater’s critics have failed to recognize the real relationship between Pater’s Denys and Nietzsche’s Dionysus, and this radical nature of Denys. Insofar as Denys, as Dionysus, does not keep within the bounds of ‘reason’, he is affirmative of his desire, whatever its object might be. Denys as abstract negativity is the will to power as the force without reserve, the force or the play of forces which constitutes non-productive expenditure: abstract negativity as Nietzschean affirmation.

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‘Duke Carl of Rosenmold’: The Restricted Economy and the Culture of Death In ‘Duke Carl of Rosenmold’, the last of his collected Imaginary Portraits, Pater follows the eponymous young German duke in his quest for ‘national poesy, national art, German philosophy’ (IP, 145), his own pre-emptive Aufklärung. But from a series of characteristically Paterean premises — the Enlightenment as the coming-to-selfconsciousness of the lesser reason, the role of the appreciation of the artefact in this coming-to-self-consciousness — what follows is, as in ‘A Prince of Court Painters’, a damning indictment of the attempt to impress the (Hegelian) Idea onto life. ‘Duke Carl of Rosenmold’ thus represents the culmination of Pater’s reading of Hegel and his attack on the ‘radical dualism’ which undoes dialectics from within. Here, Pater’s post-Hegelianism takes as its target the restricted economy itself, precisely that closed and totalizing system which had in Marius, published merely two years previously, constituted the very substance of his theory of the greater reason and his systematization of aestheticism into a formal Hegelian framework. The narrative begins with the unearthing of two bodies (presumably those of Duke Carl and his fiancée); it begins — like Pater’s entire concept of culture — with the turning over of the earth. The town of Rosenmold is characterized by its age, the architecture remaining ‘always the same, beyond people’s memories’ (IP, p. 121), and by its history, houses being distinguished by ‘an immense heraldry’ (p. 122). The social economy of the town is likewise ancient, patriarchal, and hierarchical: ‘Half of the male inhabitants were big or little State functionaries [. . .] each with his deputies and assistants, maintaining a sleepy ceremonial, to make the hours just noticeable as they slipped away’ (p. 123). As in Hegel’s Sittlichkeit and Pater’s moral philosophy, it is death which motivates this restricted economy: The whole body of Carl’s relations [. . .] already lay buried beneath their expansive heraldries: at times the whole world almost seemed buried thus — its entire fabric of politics, or art, of custom, being essentially heraldic ‘achievements’, dead men’s mementoes. (p. 136)

Death is, then, as in the manuscript on moral philosophy, the substance of ‘custom’. Death is, we are told, ‘the last degree of court etiquette’ (p. 137). Duke Carl reacts to this restricted economy by cultivating the aesthetic moment, as Jean-Baptiste had done in ‘A Prince of Court Painters’. Yet again, the theme of the Enlightenment is coterminous with its philosophical refrain: the quest for self-consciousness (IP, p. 130). Anticipating to a certain degree ‘Apollo in Picardy’ of 1893, and casting an eye back to the previous year’s ‘Denys’, Pater has Duke Carl characterize himself as Apollo reincarnated, as ‘the god of light, coming to Germany from some more favoured world beyond it, [. . .] like a gleam of real day amid that hyperborean German darkness’ (IP, p. 123).130 But whereas Denys is Dionysus reborn and Apollyon Apollo, Carl appropriates the moniker for himself; in other words, Carl turns himself into his own Idea(l). Clearly Carl’s life has always been to some degree at a remove from the real world, his privileged social position ensuring that he is beyond ‘vulgar reality’ (p. 6). But in turning to art,

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Carl’s mind was occupied ‘wholly, amid the vexing preoccupations of an age of war, upon embellishment and the softer things of life’ (p. 125), and thus further removed from his subjects. Musing upon the difference between real and artificial roses, for instance, their artificiality could not ‘disprove [. . .] for Carl his ideal’ (p. 129). And, in an ironic attack on Pater’s own phenomenological method, the nar rator continues: In art, as in all other things of the mind, [. . .] much depends on the receiver; and the highest informing capacity, if it exist within, will mould an unpromising matter to itself, will realise it by selection. (p. 129)

The coming-to-self-consciousness so prized by Carl, that which, as we have seen, forms the cornerstone of Pater’s ‘reconsideration’ of his aestheticism, is attained only at the expense of his individuality, the very thing he had hoped to attain, so that his ‘intellectual radiance had ceased to mean warmth or animation for himself ’ (p. 133). Carl is, in this sense, as ‘sick’ as Sebastian. And, as was the case in ‘A Prince of Court Painters’, Carl, as Watteau before him, is plagued by the inability of the world to match up to the Hegelian Idea: He had fits of the gloom of other people — their dull passage through and exit from the world, the threadbare incidents of their lives, their dismal funerals — which, unless he drove them away immediately by strenuous exercise, settled into a gloom more properly his own. (p. 134)

Given that ‘people were prosaic, and their lives threadbare’, the increasing realization that his ideal was not to be discovered in the real world, Carl’s ‘fits [came] somewhat more frequently’ (p. 135). In a parody of the life-and-death-struggle which Hegel had made the cornerstone of his philosophy, Carl devised a ‘trick played upon the court, upon all Europe’ (p. 135), and determined upon a ‘fantastic experiment’: Had not it been said by a wise man that after all the offence of death was in its trappings? Well! he would, as far as might be, try the thing, while, presumably, a large reversionary interest in life was still his. He would purchase his freedom, at least of those gloomy ‘trappings’, and listen while he was spoken of as dead. (p. 137)

What follows is then a speculative death: Carl undergoes ‘death’, in order to ‘purchase his freedom’. As in Hegel’s Phenomenology, freedom is attained by giving oneself up for dead and, as in Hegel’s speculation, what is given up is in no real way risked. This is Hegel’s ‘ruse of life’, as Derrida puts it,131 in which death is harnessed in order to reproduce itself within and as the restricted economy. Duke Carl, Christ, and Hegel’s phenomenological consciousness: all three rely upon ‘the trick of the burial and [the] still greater enormity in coming back to life again’ (IP, p. 140). It might be argued that, on the surface of things, Carl’s speculation pays off. We are told that after his ‘death’ he travelled towards France but upon reaching the border turned back: ‘the conviction had come, “For you, France, Italy, Hellas, is here!” ’, and so Carl ‘transferred the ideal land out of space beyond the Alps or the Rhine, into a future time’ (p. 143).132 But nevertheless, all that Carl ends up doing is substituting one form of Hegelianism for another — one ressentiment for

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another (orthodox Christian for Kojèvean Marxist-Hegelianism). It is true that the ideal is no longer a beyond for Carl in the sense in which it is for Hegel’s unhappy consciousness, and that therefore Carl’s life-and-death-struggle and his Aufklärung are by his own terms — by Hegel’s terms — complete, in that he attains congress with the Idea. But whilst Carl’s ‘new poetic code’ says ‘Go straight to life!’ (p. 149), in practice this code once again amounts to the substitution of life with the Idea. Here again Pater is, by association, bitingly self-critical of his own aestheticism. The Hegelian Idea returns to Carl in terms which Pater’s own aestheticism had adopted in the living-on of the lesser reason in and as the greater reason: ‘Surely, past ages, could one get at the historic soul of them, were not dead but living, rich in company, for the entertainment, the expansion, of the present’ (p. 145). That the conclusion to the portrait returns us to the theme of Pater’s first imaginary portrait, ‘The Child in the House’, is in this sense entirely fitting. For Carl’s placing of the Idea over life, Carl’s Hegelian ressentiment, is once again as Freudian as it is Hegelian. The constant image in the last few pages is that of the nostos: the canonically Hegelian narrative. Carl was ‘already on his way home’ (p. 147): ‘The homeliness of true old Germany! He too felt it, and yearned towards his home’ (p. 148). It is the heimlich journey towards death. And if Carl is really a changed man, perhaps it is fitting that his epiphany is aborted by his death, crushed — in another irony — by ‘the storm of the victorious army, like some disturbance of the earth dead set upon them’ (p. 152), an army which constitutes the death of Carl’s own family name, his patrimony (insofar as Carl — by now the Duke — dies without heir); which is to say, the (impossible, by its own — restricted — definition) death of the sittlich community, the restricted economy. The Imaginary Portraits and the Genealogy It is, no doubt, a chronological felicity that Pater published his collected Imaginary Portraits in 1887, the same year that Nietzsche published the Genealogy. There is no question of inf luence here either way. But what cannot be doubted is that both Pater and Nietzsche come to a series of very similar conclusions concerning the inherent contradictions which underwrite Hegelianism. Pater’s Imaginary Portraits might well be characterized as something of a fictional counterpart to Nietzsche’s philosophical investigation. The key concepts are the same in both the Imaginary Portraits and the Genealogy: Hegelianism constitutes ressentiment, bad conscience, ascesis, decadence, and nihilism. As argued in the Genealogy, ressentiment is indicative of ‘slave’s morality’ in which an ideal is created in a reaction against life (thus the etymological inversions of ‘good’ into ‘bad’ and ‘evil’ out of ‘bad’).133 It is this ‘sickness’ which is characterized most explicitly in Sebastian, although it is also a feature of Duke Carl’s Aufklärung and, as Marie-Marguerite rightly notes, Watteau’s idealized art. ‘Bad conscience’, on the other hand, is this ressentiment turned inwards. Given that in ressentiment the active force is essentially reactive, it has no other option than to interiorize: All instincts that are not discharged outwardly turn inwards — this is what I call the internalization of man [. . .] all those instincts of the wild, free, roving

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That ressentiment as bad conscience is explicitly drawn as an economic figure (‘the contractual relationship between creditor and debtor’ [GM, II § 4]) is here important, in that the restriction of the economy, in which accounts must be balanced (in Hegel, in and through death), is itself this kind of ressentiment: There is a prevailing conception that the tribe exists only because of the sacrifices and the deeds of the forefathers, — and that these have to be paid back with sacrifices and deeds: people recognize an indebtedness which continually increases. (GM, II § 19)

Pater’s concept of custom, his restricted economy of the greater reason, is indicative of precisely such an indebtedness. Again, in this sense, Pater’s aestheticism, as Hegel’s metaphysics, is indistinguishable from Christianity: ‘This man of bad conscience has seized on religious presupposition in order to provide his self-torture with its most horrific hardness and sharpness. Debt towards God: this thought becomes an instrument of torture’ (GM, II § 22). Pater’s lesser reason then owes the greater reason a debt which it repays through coming-to-self-consciousness. The very freedom which this coming-to-self-consciousness, this attaining (of ) reason was meant to ensure is no longer a freedom but an obligation.134 And one cannot help but suspect that all of this ressentiment that is Pater’s Hegelianism, which began in earnest during 1874, comes about in response to the Hardinge affair of the same year, to his ‘bad conscience’, his (Christian) guilt over his homosexuality.135 It is in this sense both a ressentiment against ‘everything that is “outside”, “other”, “non-self ” ’ (GM, I § 10), and an internalized ressentiment (bad conscience) against ‘everything that is “outside”, “other”, “non-self ” ’ inside himself, which, just as Hegel’s radical dualism, must be denied (negated) in order for self-consciousness (self-identity) to be attained. Ascesis is the logical progression of ressentiment and ‘bad conscience’. Faced with the ‘imperfect reciprocity’ between the Ideal (itself a creation of ressentiment)136 and life, the priest, ‘this real artist in feelings of guilt’, converts ressentiment into sin itself: ‘Sin’ — for that is the name of the priestly interpretation of the animal ‘bad conscience’ (cruelty turned back on itself ) — has been the greatest event in the history of the sick soul up till now [. . .]. Man, suffering from himself in some way, [. . .] finally consults someone who knows the hidden things too — and lo and behold! from this magician, the ascetic priest, he receives the first tip as to the ‘cause’ of his suffering: he should look for it within himself, in guilt, in a piece of the past, he should understand his suffering as a condition of punishment. (GM, III § 20)

In Pater’s nostalgic Hegelianism (the narrative substance of ‘The Child in the House’ and the critical aim of ‘Duke Carl of Rosenmold’), such a punishment is the alienation from God (the original unity) which is the condition of Hegel’s unhappy consciousness. And in Hegel’s Phenomenology, we also find that it is in the unbridgeable space opened up between reality and the (Hegelian) Ideal of the unhappy consciousness that the concept of ‘sin’ is produced:

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Consciousness is aware of itself as this actual individual in the animal functions. These are no longer performed naturally and without embarrassment, as matters trif ling in themselves which cannot possess any importance or essential significance for the Spirit [. . .]. Consciousness [. . .] forever sees itself as defiled. (PS, § 225)

As we have already seen, it is this unhappy consciousness which Pater criticizes in the characters of Watteau and Jean-Baptiste. And whereas both Nietzsche’s Dionysus and Pater’s Denys are beyond ascesis, the Hegelian is ascetic through and through. For in Paterean aestheticism, the moment of aesthetic appreciation is indivisible from a certain ascetic renunciation — the appreciation of the Ideal the renunciation of the real world, as most clearly demonstrated in the character of Sebastian. In Marius, on the other hand, Pater explicitly lauds ‘unworldliness’, ‘the sort of mystic enjoyment he had in the abstinence, the strenuous self-control and ascêsis’ (ME, i, 25), an ascetic denial of the world in the name of the idea which reappears as the very definition of ‘Style’ (in Bataille’s terms, the sublation of the excess): ‘Self-restraint, a skilful economy of means, ascêsis, that too has a beauty of its own’ (AP, p. 17).137 Again, Pater’s aestheticism is revealed to be Christian at root, and his Christianity Hegelian. It is unsurprising then that Christ is explicitly drawn as ascetic by Pater (‘the sword in the world, the right eye plucked out, the right hand cut off, the spirit of reproach which those images express, and of which monasticism is the fulfilment’ (ME, II, 114)) in terms reminiscent of Nietzsche: The enticing, intoxicating, benumbing, corrupting power of that symbol of the ‘holy cross’, to equal the horrible paradox of a ‘God on the Cross’, to equal that mystery of an unthinkable final act of extreme cruelty and self-crucifixion of God for the salvation of mankind? (GM, I § 8)

Once again: Dionysus versus the Crucified, Dionysus versus Hegelianism. And as Nietzsche explicitly acknowledges, ressentiment manifested in the ascetic ideal itself constitutes a kind of philosophy of (the impossibility of ) death: ‘in it and through it, life struggles with death and against death, the ascetic ideal is a trick for the preservation of life’ (GM, III § 13). It is this Hegelianism which Nietzsche terms decadence. According to the mature Nietzsche rereading The Birth of Tragedy, the decadence of Socrates is his nihilism:138 An ‘altruistic’ morality, a morality in which selfishness fades away — is always a bad sign [. . .]. To choose instinctively what is harmful for yourself, to be tempted by ‘disinterested’ motives, this is practically the formula for decadence [. . .]. Instead of naïvely saying ‘I am not worth anything any more’, the moral lie in the decadent’s mouth says ‘nothing is worth anything, — life isn’t worth anything’. (TI, ‘Skirmishes of an Untimely Man’, § 35)

Pater’s Hegelianism is clearly decadent in this sense. Pater as a Hegelian is proud of his ‘curious, well-reasoned nihilism’ (IP, p. 110) in the same way as Sebastian is. But Pater as a post-Hegelian sees this pride for what it is: an ascetic renunciation of the body and his sexuality. That Sebastian’s nihilism is explicitly reasoned from supposedly ‘disinterested’ premises (‘the ideal of an intellectual disinterestedness, of a domain of unimpassioned mind, with the desire to put one’s subjective side

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out of the way, and let pure reason speak’, p. 104) is vitally important, because it is to this same disinterestedness that Pater, following Hegel following Kant, would appeal, both in his essay on ‘Style’ and in his phenomenological preface to the Renaissance.139 Such disinterestedness is already ressentiment, a reaction against the self as other, the difference within the self (Hegel’s ‘radical dualism’). As Nietzsche argues then, aestheticism is already in the claim of ‘disinterestedness’ positing the idea against life, judging life by the standard of the idea.140 In Pater’s Hegelian hands l’art pour l’art becomes art for the sake of beauty and beauty for the sake of the Idea, for the sake of reason and Sittlichkeit, founded upon the movements of capital and the heteronormative institutions of marriage and the family. As Deleuze has convincingly argued, then, in spite of the fact that Nietzsche rarely quotes Hegel or refers to his thought explicitly, ‘anti-Hegelianism runs through Nietzsche’s work as its cutting edge’.141 Deleuze is here speaking, as we have been, of Hegel as a symbol and Hegelianism as a brand.142 And similarly, just as Nietzsche’s Genealogy is an attack on the ressentiment which is Hegelianism, so too Pater’s Imaginary Portraits constitute a Nietzschean attack on that very Hegelianism which, during the same period of composition, Pater had made structural to his own aestheticism. In the Imaginary Portraits, as in the Genealogy, Hegel is never named, but anti-Hegelianism runs through Pater’s text as its cutting edge. In this sense, the Pater who writes his Imaginary Portraits is like the protagonist of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground (1864), recognizing that his ‘sickness’ — a sickness which is the same as Sebastian’s, Watteau’s, and Carl’s — is at root his Hegelianism.143 Those critics such as Monsman who would like to find some sort of balance between the Nietzschean and the Hegelian in Pater’s thought misunderstand what Nietzsche’s philosophy constitutes. Nietzsche is not only anti-Hegelian but postHegelian. The difference between Hegel and Nietzsche is the difference between dialectics and pluralism.144 In place of Hegel’s dialectical negation, the ressentiment which is the creation of the Idea, Nietzsche substitutes pluralist affirmation. It is in this sense that Blanchot can argue that Nietzsche comes both before and after Hegel: Nietzsche (if his name serves to name the law of the Eternal Return) and Hegel (if his name invites us to think presence as all and the all as presence) allow us to sketch a mythology: Nietzsche can only come after Hegel, but it is always before and always after Hegel that he comes and comes again.145

Hegel — in seeking to sublate difference, to restrict the economy — reacts against difference, whereas Nietzsche — in glorying in difference — actively affirms this difference. Hegelian dialectics, then, in (over-)determining difference as contradiction, is a ressentiment of Nietzschean pluralism, and Nietzschean pluralism an active transvaluation of Hegelian dialectics. Deleuze comments: For the affirmation of difference as such it [Hegelianism] substitutes the negation of that which differs; for the affirmation of self it substitutes the negation of the other, and for the affirmation of affirmation it substitutes the famous negation of negation. [. . .] The dialectic expresses every combination of reactive forces and nihilism.146

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And in thinking the non-dialectical thought, in taking that step (not) beyond the pleasure principle, beyond morality as the restricted economy (beyond good and evil in Nietzsche’s terms), in thinking a thought — that of the ‘radical dualism’ — which is not reducible to contradiction (is not sublatable in Hegelian terms), Pater’s Imaginary Portraits, constituting a fictional rejection of Hegel’s restricted economy, are not Hegelian but post-Hegelian: Nietzschean. Notes to Chapter 3 1. Hillis Miller, ‘A Partial Portrait’, p. 75. 2. In October 1885, the same year in which Marius first appeared, Pater published ‘A Prince of Court Painters’ in MacMillan’s Magazine. And we know from a letter of 22 July 1883 to Violet Paget that by the middle of 1883 Pater had already in his mind ‘many smaller pieces of work’, the Imaginary Portraits: see Letters, pp. 49–50. 3. The reading of Nietzsche’s Genealogy most inf luential on the reading of Pater’s Imaginary Portraits proposed in this chapter is chapter 4 of Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy, pp. 104–38. 4. Hillis Miller, ‘A Partial Portrait’, p. 75. 5. For readings of Pater and Nietzsche, see Patrick Bridgwater, Nietzsche in Anglosaxony: A Study of Nietzsche’s Impact on English and American Literature (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1972), pp. 21–26, Albert Heinrichs, ‘Loss of Self, Suffering, Violence: The Modern View of Dionysus from Nietzsche to Girard’, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 88 (1984), 205–40; Iser, pp. 126–27; Keefe and Keefe, and Monsman, Pater’s Portraits, pp. 19–22. 6. Although there is no direct evidence that Pater had read Emerson, there is an affinity of subjectmatter and philosophy between the two writers. One could certainly imagine Emerson’s essay on ‘History’, in which he opens with a description of his version of the greater reason, having been written by Pater: ‘There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. [. . .] This universal mind [. . .] is the only and sovereign agent’. Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘History’, in Essays, ed. by Irwin Edman (New York: Harper Row, 1951), pp. 1–30 (p. 1). Pater’s Oxford milieu was receptive to Emerson, and Matthew Arnold gave a lecture on him during his tour of America in 1883–84 (‘Emerson’, in Prose Works, ed. by Super, x, 165–86). 7. See, for instance, George J. Stack, Nietzsche and Emerson: An Elective Affinity (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1993). 8. See Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 116: Nietzsche is not the kind to ruminate over the death of the father [. . .]. On the contrary, Nietzsche is exceedingly tired of all these stories revolving around the death of the father, the death of God [. . .]. God dead or not dead, the father dead or not dead, it amounts to the same thing, since the same psychic repression continues unabated, here in the name of the God or a living father, there in the name of man or the dead father. 9. That Nietzsche claims that Emerson ‘does not know how old he already is and how young he still will be’ is in this sense highly significant, for it suggests that Emerson is free from memory, that he has learnt how to forget. As Nietzsche argues in the Genealogy, memory was forced onto man in order to establish culture, ‘to breed an animal with the prerogative to promise’ (II § 1). 10. ‘Dyspepsia’ is indigestion, but ‘dyspeptic’ is more broadly defined by the OED as ‘showing depression of spirits’. Carlyle did indeed suffer from indigestion (see Jeremy Tambling, ‘Carlyle through Nietzsche: Reading Sartor Resartus’, Modern Language Review, 102.2 (2007), 326–40, at p. 327 n. 7), but in its figurative use the term suggests ressentiment as the ‘return of the negative’, discussed by Deleuze in Difference and Repetition, pp. 370–74, where he also disambiguates it from Nietzsche’s eternal return. 11. Tambling, ‘Carlyle through Nietzsche’, p. 327. On the difference between Nietzsche’s and Emerson’s readings of Carlyle, see J. Hillis Miller, ‘ “Hieroglyphical Truth” in Sartor Resartus: Carlyle and the Language of Parable’, in Victorian Perspectives, ed. by John Clubbe and Jerome Meckier (London: Macmillan, 1989), pp. 1–20 (pp. 6–7):

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Friedrich Nietzsche’s view of Carlyle was very different [from Emerson’s], so different as to raise the question of whether they could be speaking of the same person. [. . .] Which judgement is the correct one: Emerson’s, which sees Carlyle as the type of the honest or sincere man, or Nietzsche’s, which sees Carlyle’s propriety as the impropriety of a constant passionate dishonesty against himself? 12. On the coming of Nietzsche to England, see Bridgwater, pp. 9–20, and David S. Thatcher, Nietzsche in England, 1890–1914: The Growth of a Reputation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970), pp. 17–52. On the question of inf luence, see Bridgwater, p. 26, and Monsman, Pater’s Portraits, p. 19. For the sake of curiosity, it is worth noting that Nietzsche was known to at least one member of the Oxford Hegelians. William Wallace wrote two articles on Nietzsche, part of a proposed book on the author (which never materialized), although not until after 1896, which is to say, not until after Pater’s death. There is no evidence to suggest that Wallace was familiar with Nietzsche during Pater’s lifetime, although there is no evidence to suggest otherwise either. See ‘Nietzsche’s Criticism of Morality’ and ‘Thus Spake Zarathustra’, in Lectures and Essays on Natural Theology and Ethics, ed. by Edward Caird (Oxford: Clarendon, 1898), pp. 509–29, 530–41. 13. I acknowledge Laurel Brake’s point in ‘The Entangling Dance’ in attempting to read the relationship between Marius and the Imaginary Portraits in the terms of the Criminal Law Amendment Act, which was passed by parliament in August 1885, between Marius (March) and ‘A Prince of Court Painters’ (October). But it seems to me that the implications of Brake’s argument are that his Imaginary Portraits is the more circumspect text, at least on the surface, and, by extension, that Marius is the more radical text — a conclusion to which I cannot subscribe. 14. For general studies of the genre, see Eliza Bizzotto, ‘The Imaginary Portrait: Pater’s Contribution to a Literary Genre’, in Transparencies of Desire, ed. by Brake, Higgins, and Williams, pp. 213–23, and Monsman, Pater’s Portraits, pp. 31–40. 15. Pater, letter to George Grove, 17 April 1878, in Letters, pp. 29–30. 16. See Bizzotto, p. 214. 17. See Monsman, Pater’s Portraits, pp. 36–37. 18. Thomas Wright speculates that the ‘Imaginary’ comes from Walter Savage Landor’s Imaginary Conversations (1824–29), a title alluded to in Marius in the chapter ‘A Conversation Not Imaginary’ (Life of Pater, ii, 91). Monsman suggests that the ‘Portraits’ comes from Saint-Beuve’s Portraits Litéraires (1844) (Pater’s Portraits, p. 36). 19. See Laurel Brake, Walter Pater (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1994), p. 45: Pater’s imaginary portraits ‘are comparable to Browning’s array of speakers in his dramatic monologues: they stand solidly between the writer and his audience, substituting their first person “I” for his’. It is worth noting that Browning’s dramatic monologues are a genre which are themselves often regarded as a kind of Hegelian fiction: see particularly Warwick Slinn, ‘Browning and Hegel’, Studies in Browning and his Circle, 17 (1989), 91–98, and W. David Shaw, The Lucid Veil: Poetic Truth in the Victorian Age (London: Athlone, 1987), pp. 231–38, who also writes on Pater’s debt to Hegel (pp. 236–39). 20. See Oscar Wilde, ‘The Critic as Artist’, in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. by Mervin Holland, 5th edn (London: Harper Collins, 2003), pp. 1108–55 (p. 1111): ‘Meredith is a prose Browning, and so is Browning’. 21. On the sociology of literary forms, see Franco Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders: On the Sociology of Literary Forms (London: Verso, 2005), pp. 2–41. 22. Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: The ‘Bildungsroman’ in European Culture (London: Verso, 1987), p. 5. 23. Moretti, The Way of the World, p. 7. 24. Pater himself affirms that form is a vital in the delivery of content when speaking of the Platonic dialogue: ‘the very form belongs to, is of an organism of, the matter which it embodies’ (PP, p. 176). 25. Monsman claims that Pater’s ‘shorter portraits’ are sometimes called ‘récits’, but he does not indicate by whom, or what would constitute a récit (Pater’s Portraits, p. 33). 26. Maurice Blanchot, ‘The Song of the Sirens’, trans. by Lydia Davis, in The Station Hill Blanchot Reader, ed. by Quasha, pp. 443–50 (p. 447).

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27. Leslie Hill notes that ‘among the most inf luential of earlier proponents of this distinction between roman and récit in France was André Gide’ (p. 254 n. 2). As Stephen Bann has shown, Gide’s reading of Pater, along with that of Charles Du Bos, marks the beginnings of Pater’s posthumous reputation in France in the generation following his own: see Stephen Bann, ‘Pater’s Reception in France: A Provisional Account’, in Transparencies of Desire, ed. by Brake, Higgins, and Williams, pp. 55–62. See also Bann’s introduction to The Reception of Walter Pater in Europe (London: Continuum, 2004), pp. 1–18. Via Gide, we may speculate on a refracted inf luence of Pater on French post-Hegelianism. Gide was mentor to and a strong inf luence on the young Pierre Klossowski, contributor to the College of Sociology, where he would have met Bataille, Blanchot, and Kojève, and where he may have met Benjamin and Lacan. Later, Klossowski also formed close friendships with Foucault and Deleuze. Presumably referring to Gide, Hillis Miller asserts Pater’s inf luence on ‘the critics of the Nouvelle Revue Française’ (‘A Partial Portrait’, p. 76), which was founded by Gide in 1908, and included contributions from Bataille, Blanchot, and Klossowski. 28. Blanchot, ‘The Song of the Sirens’, p. 445. 29. Blanchot, ‘The Song of the Sirens’, p. 447. 30. Blanchot, ‘The Song of the Sirens’, p. 446. 31. The situation is more debatable in Pater’s last two published imaginary portraits. In ‘Emerald Uthwart’, Emerald experiences a near-death-experience which disrupts the narrative sequence of the portrait and in ‘Apollo in Picardy’ Prior Saint-Jean goes insane. We could also characterize Pater’s conclusion to the Renaissance (as reread armed with his later identification of Hegel’s ‘radical dualism’) as a kind of récit, a disrupting of the Hegelian narrative of history. 32. Blanchot, ‘The Song of the Sirens’, p. 450. 33. On the ‘event’, explicitly related to both the Aion and to Blanchot’s reading of death, see Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, pp. 169–74. Deleuze’s definition of the Aion as ‘always already passed and eternally yet to come’ could itself define the récit as Blanchot understands it (p. 189). 34. We could point to numerous textual echoes between Blanchot’s récits and Pater’s imaginary portraits, particularly between ‘Apollo in Picardy’, and the ‘f lashes of blindness’ which aff lict Prior Saint-Jean (MS, p. 165), and the play of madness, light, death, and blindness of Blanchot’s The Madness of the Day, trans. by George Quasha, in The Station Hill Blanchot Reader, pp. 189–99 (p. 194): ‘I nearly lost my sight, because someone crushed glass in my eye. [. . .] The worst thing was the sudden, shocking cruelty of the day; I could not look, but I could not help looking’. Even more striking would be the parallels to be drawn between Blanchot’s The Instant of My Death and Pater’s ‘Emerald Uthwart’, in which both protagonists, Uthwart and Blanchot himself, survive firing squads during wartime. 35. On the fragment against Hegelian totalization, see Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans. by Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 307–13, and The Writing of the Disaster, pp. 60–61. 36. Lyotard would see things differently, arguing that while the ‘essay [. . .] is post-modern’, ‘the fragment [. . .] is modern’ precisely insofar as it is nostalgic (The Postmodern Condition, p. 81). 37. On the récit and the fragment, see Jeremy Tambling, Becoming Posthumous: Life and Death in Literary and Cultural Studies (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001), p. 19. 38. Pater, letter to George Grove, 17 April 1878, in Letters, pp. 29–30. 39. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, p. 29. As Nietzsche writes in the Genealogy, ‘an aphorism, properly stamped and moulded, has not been “deciphered” just because it has been read out; on the contrary, this is just the beginning of its proper interpretation’ (‘Preface’, § 8). 40. With respect to the refrain, the protagonists of Pater’s imaginary portraits become conceivable as akin to the ‘rhythmic characters’ described by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. by Brian Massumi (London: Continuum, 2004), pp. 351–53. 41. Pater, letter to George Grove, 17 April 1878, in Letters, pp. 29–30. 42. See Walter Pater, ‘An English Poet’, ed. by May Ottley, Fortnightly Review, 129 (1931), 434–48. 43. On the relationship between the nostos and Hegelian narrative, see Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 412 n. 92.

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44. For readings of Pater’s nostalgia, see Anne C. Colley, Nostalgia and Recollection in Victorian Culture (London: Macmillan, 1998), pp. 130–34, and Jacques Khalip, ‘Pater’s Sadness’, Raritan, 20.2 (2000), 136–58. 45. See Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny, p. 58. 46. Sigmund Freud, ‘The “Uncanny” ’, in Standard Edition, ed. by Strachey, xvii, 217–56 (p. 221). 47. Schelling, quoted in Freud, ‘The “Uncanny” ’, p. 224. 48. Freud, ‘The “Uncanny” ’, p. 219. Hegel is precisely the sort of aesthetician Freud has in mind: see his Aesthetics, i, 242–43. And if Freud shows no awareness of Pater’s ‘The Child in the House’, he was, at least, aware of Pater’s Renaissance. In a letter to Ernest Jones, he thanks him for ‘the page from Pater, I knew it and had quoted some lines out of the fine passage’. See Sigmund Freud, letter to Ernest Jones, 15 April 1910, in The Complete Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Ernest Jones, 1908–1939, ed. by R. Andrew Paskauskas (London: Belknap Press, 1993), pp. 51–52, and Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood, in Standard Edition, ed. by Strachey, xi, 57–137 (p. 68). 49. The association of the unheimlich with the death-drive is, perhaps surprisingly, a point not expanded upon by Freud in his essay on ‘The “Uncanny” ’. 50. See Freud, ‘The “Uncanny” ’, pp. 222–24. 51. Compare also the following from the essay on ‘Style’: ‘This is contrasted with the bloom of the world, and gives new seduction to it — the sense of death and the desire of beauty: the desire of beauty quickened with the sense of death’ (AP, p. 198). 52. Bataille, ‘Hegel, Death and Sacrifice’, p. 23. 53. For post-Hegelian readings of desire, see Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, pp. 26–29; Derrida, Writing and Difference, pp. 114–15; and Levinas, Totality and Infinity, pp. 50–51. 54. See particularly Lacan, Écrits, p. 333. 55. Lacan, Écrits, p. 114. 56. See Lacan, Écrits, p. 335. 57. That this desire is primarily visual is also important. It is ‘the lust of the eye’, as Pater puts it in ‘The Child in the House’ (MS, p. 181), which should be read alongside Lacan’s comments on the relationship between the gaze and the objet petit a in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. by Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), pp. 267–90. 58. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 33. Compare, however, the distinctions drawn by Lacan between desire, need and demand in Écrits, p. 344. 59. Freud, ‘The “Uncanny” ’, p. 245. 60. Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. by Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 52. 61. Here, Wilde’s reaction to Pater’s death is telling: ‘Was he ever alive?’ (Quoted by Ellmann, p. 50) It suggests that Wilde saw the intimate relationship between the Hegelian Idea(l) Pater preached, the denial of life this entailed, and the philosophy of death it sustained. 62. Most notably, Plato’s discussion of Cratylus, trans. by Benjamin Jowett, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), pp. 421–74 (400c, pp. 437–38): For some say that the body (sōma) is the grave (sōma) of the soul (sēma) which may be thought to be buried in our present life, or again the index of the soul, because the soul (sēmainei) gives indications to (sēmainei) the body. [. . .] The body is an enclosure or prison (sōma) in which the soul is incarcerated, kept safe (sōma, sōzētai), as the name sōma implies. Pater refers to this passage in Marius, ii, 85. 63. See Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, p. 82. 64. Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, p. 82. Hegel discusses the pyramids non-metaphorically twice in his Aesthetics (i, 356 and ii, 651–52). On Hegel’s use of the figure of the pyramid, see Mark C. Taylor, ‘The Archetexture of Pyramids’, Assemblage, 5 (1988), 16–27. 65. Frank, Literary Architecture, p. 41. That the house is both the dream-house and Pater’s first house is also important, for the topography anticipates Gaston Bachelard’s description of the oneiric house: see his Poetics of Space, trans. by Maria Jolas, in Rethinking Architecture, ed. by Neil Leach (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 86–97 (p. 94). 66. The ascension chamber was a feature of Egyptian pyramids from the time of the construction of the great Pyramid of Cheops (c. 2560 bc) onwards. Its purpose was to assist the ba (the soul) in its

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journey into the afterlife. See I. A. S. Edwards, The Pyramids of Egypt, 2nd edn (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993), pp. 102–11. 67. bMS Eng 1150 (4), p. 32, quoted by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University. 68. I read Pater’s Imaginary Portraits in the order of their periodical publication rather than the order in which they were later collected by Pater in book form (in which ‘Denys L’Auxerrois’ comes second and ‘Sebastian van Storck’ third). It seems to me that, conceptually speaking, ‘Denys L’Auxerrois’ can only come after ‘Sebastian van Storck’ (which is to say, in the order in which they were originally published), since Pater must first make the Nietzschean link between Schopenhauer and Hegel on negation (as he does in ‘Sebastian van Storck’) before he can fully understand the affirmative nature of the Dionysian (the subject of ‘Denys’). 69. See Wright, ii, 95, and Monsman, Pater’s Portraits, p. 100. 70. Beiser, p. 136. 71. On the revolutionary origins of the concept and on the concept of freedom in the Articles of 1789, see Georges Lefebvre, The French Revolution, trans. by Elizabeth Moss Evanson (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 140–47. 72. Jean Hyppolite, ‘The Significance of the French Revolution in Hegel’s Phenomenology’, in Studies on Marx and Hegel, trans. by John O’Neill (London: Heinmann, 1969), pp. 35–69 (p. 51). See also Joachim Ritter, Hegel and the French Revolution, trans. by Richard Dean Winfield (London: MIT Press, 1984). The French Revolution began in 1789 but Hyppolite is referring to the passage of Hegel’s Phenomenology which focuses on the Reign of Terror of 5 September 1793 to 28 July 1794. 73. Hegel, letter to Niethammer, 13 October 1806, in Hegel: The Letters, trans. by Clark Butler and Christine Seiler (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), pp. 114–15. 74. Hegel discusses world-historical individuals in his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, trans. by H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), pp. 82–89; Die Vernunft in der Geschichte, ed. by J. Hoffmeister (Hamburg: Meiner, 1955), pp. 97–103. 75. It is worth also noting in passing that class is a vital consideration throughout Pater’s imaginary portraits (perhaps somewhat surprisingly for those Marxist critics who approach aestheticism as a bourgeois justification for an art that amounts to little more than ideology). In ‘A Prince of Court Painters’, Watteau’s alienation (a key Hegelian term) from that Parisian life which he depicts, is constantly highlighted, Marie-Marguerite speaking of ‘that impossible or forbidden world which the mason’s boy saw through the closed gateways of the enchanted garden’ (IP, p. 34); Denys of ‘Denys L’Auxerroise’ is the illegitimate son of the Count of Auxerre (as Dionysus is the son of Zeus and a mortal woman); Duke Carl of Rosenmold marries a ‘beggar maid’ (IP, p. 148), well below his social standing; and the fall from grace of Emerald Uthwart, who finds himself ‘lingering for morsels of food at some shattered farmstead, or assisted by others almost as wretched as himself, sometimes without his asking’ (MS, pp. 238–39). 76. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, p. 185. 77. Houlgate would disagree: in the act of letting go of oneself [. . .] the unhappy consciousness does not (as one might imagine) revert to the standpoint of the slave, who submits himself to the will of the master that is wholly alien to his own. For the unhappy consciousness unites itself with another will — that of the Unchangeable — that it understands to be not only the will of another, but also the true and essential will, indeed the universal will of all truly free self-consciousness. (p. 76) This distinction is true enough in principle, but the understanding of the principle is precisely not yet the understanding in itself; is precisely not yet Reason (see PS, §§ 231–32). 78. Monsman, Pater’s Portraits, p. 107. 79. On Nietzsche’s ‘bad conscience’ as Hegel’s ‘unhappy consciousness’, see Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, p. 18. 80. Inman, Walter Pater’s Reading, p. 34. 81. Billie Andrew Inman, ‘ “Sebastian van Storck”: Pater’s Exploration into Nihilism’, NineteenthCentury Fiction, 30.4 (1976), 457–76 (pp. 457–58). Regarding Spinoza, Beiser reads Hegel’s philosophy as an attempt to mediate between Spinozan monistic naturalism and Fichtean idealism (pp. 71–75). 82. There is no firm evidence to suggest that Pater was definitely aware of Schopenhauer, let alone

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had read him. The World as Will and Representation (1819) was available in English from 1883, some three years before ‘Sebastian van Storck’ was published, translated by Richard Haldane (The World as Will and Idea, trans. by R. B. Haldane and J. Kemp, 3 vols (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1883)), which suggests that British Hegelians were coming to appreciate Schopenhauer’s counter-Hegelian turn. 83. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. by E. F. J. Payne, 2 vols (New York: Dover, 1966), i, 429; Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, in Sämmtliche Werke, ed. by Julius Frauenstädt, 6 vols (Leipzig: J. A. Brodhaus, 1873), ii, 508. 84. Idealism and phenomenology: ‘everything that in any way belongs and can belong in the world is inevitably associated with this being-conditioned by the subject, and it exists only for the subject. The world is representation’ (Will and Representation, Bk. 1 § 1, I, 3; Wille und Vorstellung, p. 4); subject–object identity: ‘everyone finds himself to be this will, in which the inner nature of the world consists’ (Bk. 2 § 29, I, 162; p. 193); art as the sensible appearance of the Idea: ‘what kind of knowledge is it that considers what continues to exist outside and independently of all relations, but which alone is really essential to the world [. . .]? It is art’ (Bk. 2 § 36, I, 184; p. 217). 85. Arthur Schopenhauer, ‘On the Vanity of Existence’, in Essays and Aphorisms, trans. by R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), pp. 51–54 (p. 53); ‘Nachträge zur Lehre von der Nichtigkeit des Daseyns’, in Parerga und Paralipomena, in Sämmtliche Werke, ed. by Frauenstädt, vi, 303–08 (p. 307). 86. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, p. 36. 87. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, p. 37. 88. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, p. 37. Freud acknowledges certain similarities between his psychoanalysis and Schopenhauer’s philosophy in his Autobiographical Study, in Standard Edition, ed. by Strachey, xx, 1–74 (pp. 59–60): The large extent to which psycho-analysis coincides with the philosophy of Schopenhauer — not only did he assert the dominance of the emotions and the supreme importance of sexuality but he was even more aware of the mechanism of repression — is not to be traced to an acquaintance with his teaching. I read Schopenhauer very late in my life. Nietzsche, another philosopher whose guesses and intuitions often agree in the most astonishing way with the laborious findings of psycho-analysis, was for a long time avoided by me on that very account. On this triumvirate of Freud, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, see Derrida, The Post Card, pp. 266–73. Freud’s reading of Nietzsche is a misreading, evidenced in both ‘The “Uncanny” ’ (p. 234) and Beyond the Pleasure Principle (p. 22), which, insofar as they read the eternal return as restricted economy, completely misconstrues Nietzsche. 89. Schopenhauer, Will and Representation, ii, 637; Wille und Vorstellung, p. 746. 90. See Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, p. 18. 91. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, p. 18. 92. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, p. 139. In ‘Sebastian van Storck’, then, we have a very different kind of nihilism from the type with which Pater identifies subjective idealisms in the manuscript on moral philosophy (MP, p. 4r). There, nihilism meant the belief in nothing, nihilism in essence being an extreme form of solipsism, and Pater’s attempt to transcend (the Aufhebung as la relève) this solipsism mirrors Hegel’s similar attack on the nihilism of Fichte (see for instance Hegel’s comments in the introduction to the Phenomenology, § 73). But here, the nihilism is not that of a subjective idealism but, far more radically, that of an objective idealism, which is nihilistic precisely insofar as it devalues the entirety of existence by association to its own Absolute Idea. 93. See AC, § 10: ‘Germans understand me immediately when I say that philosophy has been corrupted by theologian blood. [. . .] You only need to say “Tübingen seminary” to understand just what German philosophy really is — an underhand theology’. 94. Somewhat curiously, Schopenhauer also prohibits suicide in ‘On Suicide’, in Essays and Aphorisms, pp. 77–79; ‘Über den Selbstmord’, in Parerga und Paralipomena, in Sämmtliche Werke, ed. by Frauenstädt, vi, 328–33. And whilst Marius is critical of Aurelius’ suicidal nature (‘some f law of vision, thought Marius, must be involved in the philosopher’s contempt for it [life] —

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some diseased point of thought, or moral dullness, leading logically to what seemed to him the strangest of all the emperor’s inhumanities, the temper of the suicide’ [ME, ii, 54]), Pater himself realizes that his entire Hegelian philosophy might be characterized as suicidal. As he writes in the manuscript on the history of philosophy, Hegelian nostalgia constitutes ‘an artificial act of ref lection, in which, by a sort of suicide, an all-accomplished philosophy, completing the trick, is to put one back into the state it had originally suspended’ (HP, p. 2r). It is worth noting also that, for Maurice Blanchot, it is suicide which most obviously reveals the inadequacies of Hegel’s philosophy of death: It is possible that suicide is the way in which the unconscious . . . warns us that something rings false in the dialectic, [. . .] in suicide — what we call suicide — nothing happens at all. [. . .] The enigma is precisely that in killing myself, ‘I’ do not kill ‘me’. (The Writing of the Disaster, p. 69) 95. See Inman, ‘Pater’s Marius Mentality’, p. 114. 96. See particularly the readings of Bridgwater, pp. 21–26, Keefe and Keefe, and Monsman, Pater’s Portraits, pp. 19–22. 97. For Nietzsche’s explicit formulation of Apollo contra Dionysus, see BT, § 1. 98. See BT, § 6. Compare Schopenhauer, Will and Representation, § 52, i, 255–57: As our world is nothing but the phenomenon or appearance of the Ideas in plurality through entrance into the principium individuationis (the form of knowledge possible to the individual as such), music, since it passes over the Ideas, is also quite independent of the phenomenal world [. . .]. Music is as immediate an objectification and copy of the whole will as the world itself is [. . .]. Music is by no means like the other arts, namely a copy of the Ideas, but a copy of the will itself, the objectivity of which are the Ideas. 99. For a Marxist critique of the underlying ‘aestheticism’ of Nietzsche’s argument, see Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. by John Osborne (London: Verso, 1998), pp. 102–04. 100. See Monsman, Pater’s Portraits, p. 18, and Bridgwater, p. 24, and compare BT, § 1. Perhaps this misreading originated in ‘Denys L’Auxerrois’ itself, where the coming of Denys to Auxerre is explicitly linked to the growing emancipation of the burghers and (in another Hegelian theme) their coming-to-self-consciousness. Dionysus is thus ‘closely connected [. . .] with the assertion of individual freedom’ (IP, p. 55), which is to say, with that principium individuationis which Nietzsche explicitly locates within the Apollonian: ‘One might even describe Apollo as the magnificent divine image of the principium individuationis, whose gestures and gaze speak to us of all the intense pleasure, wisdom and beauty of “semblance” ’ (BT, § 1). 101. On this underlying Hegelianism of The Birth of Tragedy, see Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke and Proust (London: Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 103–18. 102. On Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, see M. S. Silk and J. P. Stern, Nietzsche on Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 17–21, 326–31 (see also the useful comparison between Nietzsche’s theory of tragedy and Hegel’s, pp. 312–26). 103. As Nietzsche writes, ‘anyone who thinks they have understood me has made me into something after their own image, — often enough, to make me into my opposite, an “idealist” ’ (EH, ‘Why I Write Such Good Books’ § 1). 104. In this sense, it is unsurprising that, when Monsman returned to Pater in a second monograph some twelve years after Pater’s Portraits, the result was again a Hegelianism by another name: the oedipal crisis of Walter Pater’s Art of Autobiography. 105. Inman, review of Keefe and Keefe’s Walter Pater and the Gods of Disorder, p. 540. It is, incidentally, not entirely true to say that Pater never opposes Apollo and Dionysus: see IP, p. 72. 106. See also TI, ‘The Problem of Socrates’. 107. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, p. 13. 108. Inman, ‘Pater’s Marius Mentality’, p. 116. 109. The echo is of Hegel’s master–slave dialectic: see Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, pp. 9–10. That Nietzsche misread Hegel’s Phenomenology has been argued by Pierre Klossowski in Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, trans. by Daniel W. Smith (London: Continuum, 2005), pp. 8–9.

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110. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, p. 15. 111. Nietzsche would succumb to madness in 1889. For a reading of Nietzsche’s philosophy as a symptom of his f luctuating mental health, see Klossowski’s Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle. 112. See Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 28. Compare Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, p. 25. 113. On the ‘horizon of absolute knowledge’, see Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 26. 114. See René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. by Patrick Gregory (London: Continuum, 2005), pp. 127–51. In the same text (p. 320), Girard makes an interesting use of Pater’s description of the ‘inverted rite’ (AP, p. 205) of Shakespeare’s Richard II. 115. Bataille, letter to Kojève, 6 December 1937, in The College of Sociology (1937–39), ed. by Hollier, p. 90. 116. Bataille, Eroticism, p. 11. 117. Georges Bataille, On Nietzsche, trans. by Bruce Boone (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 28. 118. Thomas Mann, Death in Venice, in Death in Venice and Other Stories, trans. by David Luke (London: Vintage, 1998), pp. 197–267 (pp. 260–61). 119. On Dionysus’s bisexuality, see David Farrell Krell, Postponements: Women, Sensuality and Death in Nietzsche (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), pp. 35–38. 120. See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosexual Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), pp. 131–81: Nietzsche’s writing is full and overfull of what were just in the process of becoming [. . .] the most pointed and contested signifiers of precisely a minoritized, taxonomic male homosexual identity [. . . such as] ‘inversion’, ‘contrary instincts’, the contra naturam, the effeminate, the ‘hard’, the sick, the hyper-virile, the ‘décadent’, the neuter, the ‘intermediate type’. (pp. 133–34) Sedwick’s point is Foucauldian; namely that Nietzsche’s discourse on sex during the period ‘also made possible the formation of a “reverse” discourse’ (History of Sexuality, p. 101). 121. Huysmans’s À Rebours, in which it is implied that Des Esseintes, the novel’s protagonist, has a homosexual affair — ‘never had he experienced a more alluring liaison or one that laid a more imperious spell on his senses’ ( Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against the Grain (New York: Dover, 1969), p. 104) — was published in 1884. As Richard Ellman notes, À Rebours became for Wilde in the 1880s what Pater’s Renaissance had been in the 1870s (p. 237). We have no evidence to suggest that Pater read À Rebours, but given its notoriety it seems inconceivable that he would not have known of it. 122. Sedgwick, p. 134. We should here note those recent readings which have suggested that Pater also goes some way towards an affirmative masculinity: see James Eli Adams, ‘Gentleman, Dandy, Priest: Manliness and Social Authority in Pater’s Aestheticism’, ELH 59.2 (1992), 441–66, and ‘Pater’s Muscular Aestheticism’, pp. 215–38; and Herbert Sussman, Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculine Poetics in Early Victorian Literature and Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 173–202. 123. On negative affirmation, see Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, pp. 165–70. 124. Hegel, ‘Love’, p. 304; p. 379. Moreover, given the obvious parallels between this fragment and his mature arguments, the implication is that, by reading the Phenomenology back into this early fragment, this positively rational whole is only achieved after first having gone through a master–slave relationship. Needless to say, it is the man who is to be considered the master and the woman the servant, and the positively rational congress will only ever be achieved under the conditions of the master: according to the patriarchal law. For a critique of this position, see Irigaray, pp. 57–58. 125. See Hegel, ‘Love’, p. 307; p. 381. 126. Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles, trans. by Barbara Harlow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), pp. 150–51 n. 10. 127. Michel Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. by Bouchard and Simon, pp. 139–64 (p. 140). As Bouchard and Simon write in a note to their translation, ‘this essay represents Foucault’s attempt to explain his relationship to those sources which are fundamental to his development. Its importance, in terms of understanding Foucault’s objectives, cannot be exaggerated’ (p. 139 n.). 128. Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, p. 142. Here we should distinguish between Nietzsche’s genealogical rejection of the ‘origin’ and Pater’s:

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With the world of intellectual production, as with that of organic generation, nature makes no sudden starts [. . .] and in the history of philosophy there are no absolute beginnings. Fix where we may the origin of this or that doctrine or idea [. . .] the specialist will still be able to find us some earlier anticipation of that doctrine, that mental tendency. (PP, p. 5) What Pater rejects here is not so much an ‘origin’, as any origin which is not Hegelian; which is to say, any origin which is not, in itself, always already historical. Pater’s rejection of the ‘origin’ is thus the (dialectical) determination of the ‘origin’ as Hegelian. 129. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 155. 130. A narrative ploy Pater borrowed from Heine: see John Smith Harrison, ‘Pater, Heine, and the Old Gods of Greece’, PMLA 39.3 (1924), 655–86. 131. Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 323. 132. Moreover, this conversion is once again canonically Hegelian, insofar as time is the Aufhebung of space (E, §§ 254–57). 133. See GM, I §§ 4, 11. 134. Hegel’s concept of freedom is what Isaiah Berlin would call a theory of ‘positive’ rather than ‘negative’ liberty. According to Berlin, ‘you lack political liberty or freedom only if you are prevented from attaining a goal by human beings. Mere incapacity to attain a goal is not a lack of political freedom’ (‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, in Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. 118–72, at p. 169). This is ‘negative liberty’: the right to attain any goal without interference from another party. In contrast, Hegel’s sittlich community constitutes a system of ‘positive liberty’, where the individual has the right only to engage in certain courses of action. Hegel acknowledges no practical distinction between the two ideas, regarding ‘negative liberty’ as disingenuous; ‘negative liberty’ implies ‘(a) free ref lection, abstracting from everything, and (b) dependence on a content and material given’, and as such is self-referentially inconsistent (PR, § 15). Berlin explicitly attacks Hegel along these lines in Freedom and its Betrayal (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), pp. 74–104. 135. The irony of Pater’s turning to the Aufhebung as a denial of his homosexuality would not have been lost on Nietzsche: Philosophy à la Plato is more accurately defined as an erotic contest, as the further development and internalization of the ancient agonistic gymnastics and its presuppositions . . . What ultimately grew out of Plato’s philosophical erotics? A new, artistic form of the Greek agon, dialectics. (TI, ‘Skirmishes of an Untimely Man’, § 23) Is there not, incidentally, some curious paradox in the ‘relieving’ Aufhebung (la relève) and its relationship to the Platonic ‘ladder’ of the Symposium ‘by which alone we can ascend into the entirely reasonable world’ (PP, p. 182) — an idealization of homosexuality (the man as the most ‘ideal’ ‘form’ of humanity and therefore the most desirable) which at the same time and by the same logic denies precisely the same thing that it idealizes? 136. See GM, II § 22. 137. For further discussions of ascesis in Pater, see R, p. xiii; ME, i, 79, 83, 200, ii, 120–21; PP, pp. 58, 222; and GS, pp. 51, 254. 138. See EH, ‘The Birth of Tragedy’ § 1. 139. See Renaissance, pp. ix–x: the aesthetic critic’s ‘end is reached when he has disengaged that virtue, and noted it, as a chemist notes some natural element, for himself and others’. For the thesis of disinterestedness, see CJ, I.i.1 § 2. 140. See TI, ‘Skirmishes of an Untimely Man’, § 24: L’art pour l’art. — The struggle against purpose in art is always the struggle against the moralizing tendency in art, against its subordination to morality. L’art pour l’art means: ‘morality can go to hell!’ — but even this hostility reveals the overpowering force of prejudice. Once you exclude the purposes of sermonizing and improving people from art, it does not follow even remotely that art is totally purposeless, aimless, senseless, in short, l’art pour l’art — a worm swallowing its own tail. 141. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, p. 8. 142. Deleuze’s motives here must come under some kind of scrutiny. He claims that ‘there is no possible compromize between Hegel and Nietzsche’ (Nietzsche and Philosophy, p. 184), but this is

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surely in part owing to the fact that Deleuze himself could not find anything of value in Hegel’s system. As he has famously admitted, ‘what I detested more than anything else was Hegelianism and the Dialectic’ (‘Letter to a Harsh Critic’, in Negotiations: 1972–1990, trans. by Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), pp. 3–12, at p. 6). For an examination of Deleuze from this perspective, see Judith Butler, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), pp. 205–17. 143. See Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground, trans. by Jane Kentish (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 10–11. 144. See Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, pp. 8–10, 147–55. 145. Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond, p. 22. 146. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, p. 185.

CHAPTER 4

❖

Autobiography and the Writing of Death To write one’s autobiography, in order to engage in self-analysis, or in order to expose oneself to the gaze of all, is perhaps to seek to survive, but through a perpetual suicide [. . .]. To write (of ) oneself is to cease to be, in order to confide [. . .] nothing but your inexistence.1

Ever since Mary Ward praised the autobiographical element of Pater’s Marius in her review of the book, critics have looked to Pater’s texts to explain the man.2 This critical tradition no doubt begins in Pater himself; speaking of Charles Lamb, Pater claims that ‘with him, as with Montaigne, the desire of self-portraiture is, below all more superficial tendencies, the real motive in writing at all’ (AP, p. 117). The portrait of Lamb is assumed to be autobiographical, Lamb’s real motive in writing the same as Pater’s. And here the autobiographical in Pater is indistinguishable from his Hegelianism. It is only through the coming-to-self-consciousness of the lesser reason — a coming-to-self-consciousness which, as Pater argues in his essay on ‘Style’, is itself achieved through the act of writing the self (AP, p. 22) — that the greater reason comes to its own self-identity. At the same time, Pater’s post-Hegelian writings are also autobiographical. For, as we saw in the second chapter, when Pater identified that ‘radical dualism’ in Hegel’s system, he was engaged in an autobiographical rereading of his own aestheticism, a moment in his own system about which he could only be candid through a form of textual displacement in his reading of Hegel. And all Pater’s post-Hegelian texts are autobiographical in this sense, in that they constitute an extended criticism of his Hegelianism. Most interesting with respect to his autobiography are ‘Emerald Uthwart’ (1892) and ‘Apollo in Picardy’ (1893), Pater’s last two imaginary portraits. In these texts, Pater attacks not only the ‘radical dualism’ of Hegel’s idealism, and thereby of his own ‘reconsidered’ aestheticism, but also the very autobiographical tendency which underwrites the restricted economy, the very possibility of the lesser reason’s coming-to-self-consciousness. In the spirit of Derrida, who has argued that ‘all that Hegel thought [. . .] may be reread as a meditation on writing’,3 we will reread these two final portraits as Pater’s own meditation on writing, for here he deconstructs the genre of autobiography. Pater’s critical aim is at his own concept of ‘subjective immortality’ — his philosophy of (the impossibility of ) death — which he had made cardinal to his aestheticism in its most structural of Hegelian statements: the essay on ‘Style’.

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Hegelian Autobiography and Literary Immortality As Pater argues in his essay on ‘Style’, ‘good writing’ repeats the coming-to-selfconsciousness of the lesser reason insofar as it attains its own self-identity in the ‘architecture’ of the composition (AP, p. 22), in the ‘absolute correspondence of the term to its import’ (p. 37). To be more specific, what Pater here claims is that writing repeats logic in its transcendental apperception. The consciousness, through the act of signification, presents itself to itself as such. And it does this (in something of a diversion from Hegel), not in speech, but through writing.4 Given that the consciousness can attain its self-consciousness through writing, according to Pater’s semiology, the autobiographical in Pater corresponds exactly to his structural Hegelianism. The autobiographical is the writing of the self in which the self is presented to itself as such. It is the coming-to-self-consciousness of the lesser reason through the semiological deployment of signs. Such a theory of writing is essentially coterminous with that Romantic philosophy of subjectivity of which the autobiographical is emblematic; as Linda Anderson has shown, autobiography ‘gets drawn seamlessly into supporting the beliefs and values of a [. . .] Romantic notion of self hood’.5 In Pater’s hands there is ‘little apparent difference [. . .] between realizing the self and representing the self ’.6 In Pater’s semiology, autobiography captures the self in its self-identity: captures the self at that very moment when it attains its self-identity through presenting itself to itself in the written word. In the written text, the self survives, lives on, subjectively immortal. As Derrida writes, ‘living on can mean a reprieve or an afterlife, “life after life” or life after death, more life or more than life, and better’.7 The written text is thus an Aufhebung of the subject: the subject is raised up (la relève), sublated in the sign. We have already seen that Pater seeks to survive (corporeal) death in and through the greater reason in ‘subjective immortality’. In Marius, he makes clear that ‘subjective immortality’ is literary immortality: For words, after all, words manipulated with all his delicate force, were to be the apparatus of a war for himself. To [. . .] find the means of making visible to others that which was vividly apparent, delightful, of lively interest to himself, to the exclusion of all that was but middling, tame, or only half-true even to him — this scrupulousness of literary art actually awoke in Flavian, for the first time, a sort of chivalrous conscience. What care for style! [. . .] What stately and regular word-building [. . .]. He should seek in literature deliverance from mortality. (ME, i, 96–97)

Whilst it is unclear from the passage whether the ‘deliverance from mortality’ to which Pater refers means immortality in the moment of the appreciation of literary artefact or immortality in the moment of writing itself, the difference as far as Pater’s overall theory is slight, for either way it is the structural underpinning of this theory (a structuralism anticipating the essay on ‘Style’) which is important. It is through perfect subject–object identity that literary immortality is attained. Such a theory of literary immortality, as Emmanuel Levinas has shown, corresponds with the (Hegelian) notion of totality.8 The judgement of history, as Hegel maintains, is the judgement of the negativity which is man on the basis

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of works and deeds: his texts. It is precisely this restricted economy which drives Pater’s publication history. Aware that upon his (corporeal) death all that would remain of him would be (in) his texts,9 Pater decided that he wished history to remember a ‘constructive’ rather than a ‘destructive’ thinker (HP, p. 20v). Pater’s ‘reconsideration’ of his aestheticism was also a thinking forward to the collective memory of the future, his non-publication of his theory of Hegel’s ‘radical dualism’ not only indicative of the fact that this non-dialectical post-Hegelian non-thought could not be expressed, but that Pater did not want to express it. Pater did not want to be remembered for it; he was editing himself. Pater and Benjamin on the Task of the Translator The passage from mortality to immortality, which is the passage of the sign, is the Aufhebung as translation.10 First and foremost (in) the province of language, the Aufhebung translates the world into signs to be used and consumed; as Pater writes, ‘all language involves translation from inward to outward’ (AP, p. 34). This translation is an Aufhebung from inward — the power of the understanding as the power of signification as the power of death — to outward — enunciated, written, and, in being produced, disseminated. Here we should brief ly indicate the role of translation in Pater’s philosophy. In the essay on ‘Style’, Pater argues that: Translators have not invariably seen how all-important [the right vocabulary] is in the work of translation, driving for the most part at idiom or construction; whereas, if the original be first-rate, one’s first care should be with its elementary particles, Plato, for instance, being often reproducible by an exact following, with no variation in structure, of word after word. (AP, p. 15)

In this explicit formulation, Pater makes it clear that he holds an idealistic theory of translation, a series of signifiers as they appear in an original being translated exactly into another series of signifiers. The signifier relates exactly to the signified (‘the absolute correspondence of the term to its import’: AP, p. 37), and, in this gradual and systematic substitution, translation becomes the action of metaphor, as described in the semiology of Roman Jakobson.11 In Pater’s theory of translation, language accurately sums up the world: the signs are aufgehoben into their meaning in the world. Needless to say, such a linguistic idealism requires a stable structuralist coherence of signifiers and signifieds, as Derrida has shown with reference to Freud: ‘Translation, a system of translation, is possible only if a permanent code allows the substitution or transformation of signifiers while retaining the same signified, always present, despite the absence of any specific signifier’.12 With reference to Hegel, it is Geist which functions as this permanent code and it is thus unsurprising that it is to the same metalanguage (the greater reason) that Pater turns in order to justify his own theory of translation: That living authority which language needs lies, in truth, in its scholars, who recognizing always that every language possesses a genius, a very fastidious genius, of its own, expand at once and purify its very elements, which must needs change along with the changing thoughts of living people. (AP, p. 15)

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Given that this theory of translation is based upon the completion of the Aufhebung, its total sublation and restriction of the economy, it should come as no surprise that Pater himself could not live up to the (impossible) standards which he had set. Samuel Chew was the first of Pater’s critics to note that Pater’s use of quotations related ‘to the fundamental elements of his temperament and manner of composition’, and did not accurately ref lect ‘the object as in itself it really is’, but that they were rather reworked by Pater in order to ref lect his ‘own impression’. Whilst the situation is not quite as clear cut as Chew would have us believe (Helen Law pointing out that Pater’s use of Greek as opposed to modern-language quotations was relatively accurate), we cannot be surprised that Pater’s own practice of translation fell short of the Ideal.13 Pater’s thoughts on translation, as suggested by Chew’s invocation of the preface to the Renaissance, have as their most obvious inspiration Matthew Arnold’s ‘On Translating Homer’ (1861), a text itself embedded within Victorian debates about criticism and translation. But perhaps the more relevant comparison is with Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘The Task of the Translator’ (1923). Harry Zorn’s English translation has Benjamin making the following analogy: A translation, instead of resembling the meaning of the original, must lovingly and in detail incorporate the original’s mode of signification, thus making both the original and the translation recognizable as fragments of a greater language, just as fragments are part of a vessel.14

Here Benjamin’s ‘greater language’ sounds a lot like Pater’s greater reason, composed out of ‘fragments’ (lesser reasons) which constitute that metalanguage guaranteeing their discourse. Hence, Derrida has argued that Benjamin’s ‘scheme [. . .] appears Hegelian’.15 But what is effaced in Zorn’s translation is the fact that Benjamin is pointedly not saying that the ‘fragments are part of a vessel’. Paul de Man translates the passage differently: So instead of making itself similar to the meaning, to the Sinn of the original, the translation must rather, lovingly and in detail, in its own language, form itself according to the manner of meaning of the original, to make both recognizable as the broken parts of the greater language, just as fragments are the broken parts of a vessel.16

As de Man argues, Zorn ‘made this difficult passage very clear’, but ‘in the process of making it clear made it say something completely different’: ‘Just as fragments are part of a vessel’ is a synecdoche; ‘just as fragments’, says Benjamin, ‘are the broken parts of a vessel’; and as such he is not saying that the fragments constitute a totality, he says the fragments are fragments, and that they remain essentially fragmentary. They follow each other up, metonymically, and they will never constitute a totality.17

Zorn made Benjamin into a Hegelian, but what Benjamin was trying to say was precisely the opposite. The translation as Aufhebung is not total — there always remains a trace resistant to codification. The same metonymy, one might argue, is at work in Pater’s theory of translation. Whilst at first glance it certainly seems ideal istic, Pater might be read against himself. The signifier does not say what it is supposed to say, but always something else; the ‘radical dualism’ which is language has disseminated it, scattered it abroad.

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The Limits of Autobiography and the Hegelian Subject As we can read Pater’s theory of translation against itself, so too can we read Hegel’s autobiographical narrative against itself, for the Hegelian subject (on paper precisely the subject of Romantic self hood; which is to say, precisely the subject of autobiography), upon whom the entire stakes of Hegel’s metaphysical speculation rests, is precarious at best. Hegel’s philosophy becomes paradoxical at the very moment when the subject emerges. In the preliminary remarks to his Encyclopaedia, Hegel writes: Thought, regarded as an activity, may be accordingly described as an active universal, and, since the deed, its product, is the universal once more, may be called a self-actualizing universal. Thought conceived as a subject (agent) is a thinker, and the subject existing as a thinker is simply denoted by the term ‘I’. (§ 20)

This is familiar: the Hegelian consciousness is self-determining and free, determining itself through the deployment of signs. Nevertheless, in speaking itself as subject — in announcing itself as an ‘I’ — the Hegelian consciousness is engaged in something more than semiology: Now language is the work of thought: and hence all that is expressed in language is universal. What I only mean or suppose is mine: it belongs to me — this particular individual. But language expresses nothing but universality; and so I cannot say what I merely mean. [. . .] If I say ‘the individual’, ‘this individual’, ‘here’, ‘now’, all these are universal terms. Everything and anything is an individual, a ‘this’, and if it be sensible, is here and now. Similarly when I say ‘I’, I mean my single self to the exclusion of all others; but what I say, viz. ‘I’, is just every ‘I’. (E, § 20)18

In the first passage, the sign ‘I’ was a sign true and proper, an arbitrary sign. In the second, however, the particularity of the sign is transformed in and through its enunciation into universality: it becomes a symbol. In other words, the very thing which makes an ‘I’ into an ‘I’ — its particularity (‘when I say “I”, I mean my single self to the exclusion of all others’) — is effaced (becomes a universality) as soon as that ‘I’ announces itself to itself: as soon as the ‘I’ recognizes itself. The situation becomes even more complicated when we appreciate that, in the phrase ‘I cannot say what I merely mean’, the German verb meinen also connotes possession, to make mine (unsurprising given that in Hegel’s semiology thought is the active making-mine of the world). But, as Paul de Man has argued, taken in the context of this statement about language as universality, meinen as making-mine counteracts meinen as meaning: ‘Ich kann nicht sagen was ich (nur) meine’ then means ‘I cannot say what I make mine’ or, since to think is to make mine, ‘I cannot say what I think’, and, since to think is fully contained in and defined by the I, [. . .] what the sentence actually says is ‘I cannot say I’ — a disturbing proposition in Hegel’s own terms since the very possibility of thought depends on the possibility of saying ‘I’.19

The ‘I’ is then a logical and formal construct in Hegel’s speculation: it is formal in that it is the form of thought and logical because it is the presupposition of this

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thought. But at the same time it is radically unknowable, in precisely the same way as the Kantian Ding-an-sich. The relationship drawn here with Kant is neither allegorical nor accidental, for in the same paragraph of the Encyclopaedia Hegel makes it clear that he is describing Kant’s transcendental apperception: In an awkward expression which Kant used, he said that I accompany all my conceptions. [. . .] ‘I’, in the abstract, as such, is the mere act of self-concentration or self-relation, in which we make abstraction from all conception and feeling. (E, § 20)

As we have already seen, whilst Hegel adopts Kant’s apperception as ‘authentic idealism’, he is critical of it (Kant ‘grasps the principle of subject–object identity’ on ‘a subordinate stage’),20 precisely because it is only formal and subjective, which is to say, precisely insofar as the apperception constitutes another unknowable thingin-itself.21 In this context, we see that Slavoj Žižek’s claim, that the subject of Kant’s transcendental apperception is the barred subject of Lacanianism, has in a sense been anticipated by Hegel. As Lacan argues, ‘the I as signifier [. . .] designates the subject of the enunciation, but it does not signify it’. In order to signify itself — in order to present itself to itself as such — it must fill in this empty signification with content, according to the formula of fantasy: ‘the phantasy is really the “stuff ” of the “I” ’.22 As Žižek argues, the ‘I’ of Kant’s transcendental apperception thus ‘constitutively lacks its own place’.23 The subject of the transcendental apperception is, according to Hegel in his Encyclopaedia, radically unknowable. We have already seen how Pater’s Hegelian ‘reconsideration’ of his aestheticism centred upon this moment of subjectivity, and how his answer to the barred subject mirrors exactly Hegel’s response: namely, to socialize Kant in the drama of mutual recognition. But it is precisely this aspect of recognition which proves so difficult for Hegel. According to Hegel, the ‘great question of modern times’ is ‘whether true knowledge or the knowledge of truth is possible — which, if answered in the negative, must lead to abandoning the effort’ (E, § 445). Hegel’s term here is Erkenntnis, recognition, and so the question is whether truth can be recognized. This is again implied by Hegel’s semiology: insofar as the consciousness can only attain self-consciousness through mastering the world through the deployment of signs (the philosophy of death), and insofar as the sign belongs to the realm of Gedächtnis, ‘productive memory’, it follows that truth must be recognized from within the consciousness. But since such a recognition implies that the subject to do the recognizing (the ‘I’) recognize itself in the act of recognizing the truth (since the truth resides within it), and since, in the very act of recognizing itself (of vocalizing itself as an ‘I’ in the apperception), it ceases to be an ‘I’ (a particularity), but rather becomes a universality (Hegel, E, § 20: ‘language expresses nothing but universality’), such a recognition is impossible from the outset, because in such a recognition the ‘I’ would cease to be an ‘I’ and hence would become unrecognizable. As Lacan has shown, the recognition of the self (the stabilization of the ‘I’) is for the barred subject always a function of méconaissance (misrecognition). Having been led by his theory of the ‘mirror stage’ (in which an infant between six and eighteen

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months catches upon a specular image, the Gestalt, which functions as an ‘ideal’ one) ‘to oppose any philosophy directly issuing from the Cogito’,24 Lacan argues that ‘a failure to recognize [. . .] is essential to knowing myself ’: ‘The transcendental ego itself is relativized, implicated as it is in the méconaissance in which the ego’s identifications take root’.25 The entry into the symbolic order (an entry into the social order which in Lacan plays the role of the sittlich community in Hegel and Pater), an entry which is itself responsible for the split in the subject, is concurrent with the establishment of the retroactive loop of signification, in which meaning is established by arresting the metonymic slide of signification at what Lacan calls the point de capiton.26 Here again Lacan has been anticipated by Hegel. As de Man has shown, the only way Hegel can get past the aporia which is Kant’s transcendental apperception is to speculate: The proof of thought [in Hegel] is possible only if we postulate that what has to be proven (namely that thought is possible) is indeed the case. The figure of this circularity is time. Thought is proleptic: it projects the hypothesis of its possibility into a future in the hyperbolic expectation that the process that made thought possible will eventually catch up with this projection.27

Hegel then sets up a speculative loop, venturing that thought is possible in order to make possible thought, in a movement which anticipates the speculations of the life-and-death-struggle. And in Lacan, too, meaning is only produced speculatively, anticipating itself and arriving too late. The stable subject is, in this sense, a product which Hegel stabilizes after the fact. As Lacan writes: ‘There where it was just now, there where it was for a while, between an extinction that is still glowing and a birth that is retarded, “I” can come into being and disappear from what I say’.28 Here Lacan’s description of the barred subject is redolent of Pater’s conclusion: ‘It is with this movement, with the passage and dissolution of impressions, images, sensations, that analysis leaves off — that continual vanishing away, that strange, perpetual weaving and unweaving of ourselves’. (R, p. 236). Pater’s description of a subject which constitutively lacks its own place is precisely Lacan’s barred subject. The ‘I’ is, in this sense, purely speculative: it comes to take the place of the originally barred subject, according to the formula of fantasy. Its recognition, the possibility of which constitutes the ‘great question of modern times’, is by definition méconaissance. If the subject is originally barred and hence unrecognizable, it follows that Hegel’s entire philosophical project, which is based upon the possibility of such a recognition, is aborted before it even begins. And further, it follows that a Romantic conception of autobiography such as Pater’s, based upon Hegelian principles of recognition and subjectivity, is doomed to failure. In this sense, Monsman’s claim that Pater’s autobiography functions as a sort of displacement does not go far enough: Pater’s overriding strategy is to reveal himself covertly by deploying through critical or fictionalized critical utterances ‘a self not himself ’. The ref lexive text is thus a mirror in which Pater causes his own image, inscribed within the textual apparatus, to turn back [. . .] upon the author’s life.29

Pater reveals himself neither overtly nor covertly, since the textual mirror is forever determined by méconaissance. Paterean autobiography constitutes misrecognition.

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Autobiography as Thanatography Any attempt at autobiography on Pater’s part is then an active attempt at the restriction of the economy. As Robert Smith has argued, in terms of the philosophy of autobiography, Hegel can be juxtaposed with Derrida,30 for what Derrida’s post-Hegelian rereadings of Hegel have focused upon — in the same fashion and according to the same logic as Pater’s identification of Hegel’s ‘radical dualism’ — is the way in which this supposed totalization masks something non-dialectical, something which slips past the dialectic. And what slips past the dialectic is the same thing as that which eludes autobiographical stabilization. Actively to restrict the economy is, in this sense, to entomb the self. The image is again that of the sōma/sēma pairing of Hegelian semiology, the pyramid. It is for this same reason that Maurice Blanchot speaks of autobiography as a form of ‘suicide’.31 To seek to survive, subjectively immortal, in the sign, as is Pater’s express aim in his autobiography in his philosophy of (the impossibility of ) death, is at one and the same time a form of murder: a murder of the self it (re)presents. Again, with Blanchot’s reading of autobiography, we return to Lacan’s rereading of Kojève. Autobiography is the murder of the very thing which it seeks to preserve (the self ), sublated in the Hegelian sign. Autobiography is the writing of death. It is thanatography.32 Roland Barthes has famously claimed that it is only when ‘the author enters into his own death’ that ‘writing begins’.33 Barthes is here repeating the terms of Blanchot’s ‘Literature and the Right to Death’ (1949), published nearly twenty years earlier. As Blanchot makes clear, referring to another speculative loop in Hegel’s system, that moment at which the Hegelian consciousness, which has thus far been content to think, first begins to act (PS, § 401), the act of writing is negativity: ‘[Hegel] describes the way in which [. . .] a person who wishes to write is stopped by a contradiction: [. . .] he has no talent until he has written, but he needs talent to write’.34 Here again, the inf luence of Kojève’s reading of Hegel as the philosopher of death is palpable, for insofar as writing constitutes the semiological deployment of signs it is the ‘work of death’. Referring to Hegelian semiology, Blanchot describes the paradox as follows: The word gives me being, but it gives it to me deprived of being. The word is the absence of that being, its nothingness, what is left when it has lost being — the very fact that it does not exist. [. . .] Of course my language does not kill anyone. And yet: when I say, ‘This woman’, real death has been announced and is already present in my language.35

Conceptualization in the word is a form of ‘ideal negation’ — ideal not only insofar as it is idealist (Hegelian), nor merely because it is complete (the totalizing Aufhebung), but because it negates the (sensible) thing in the creation of the Ideal. To ‘survive’ in autobiography is thus a kind of ‘perpetual suicide’, both because it seeks to stabilize the ‘I’ in the autobiographical text, but also because, in the very act of writing, this self is destroyed by the workings of its own negativity. As Blanchot argues, writing turns negativity inward: ‘I separate myself from myself, I am no longer either my presence or my reality, but an objective, impersonal presence,

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the presence of my name, which goes beyond me’.36 It is owing to this same thanatographical aspect to autobiography that Blanchot opposes the canonization of a ‘life’s works’ such as his friend Bataille’s: I know there are books. The books remain [after their author’s death], temporarily, [. . .]. The books themselves refer to an existence. [. . .] This is the moment of complete works. One wants to publish ‘everything’, one wants to say ‘everything’, as if one were anxious about only one thing: that everything be said.37

It is this kind of canonization of the ‘great men’ of history which autobiography is designed specifically to ensure.38 And it is precisely this same form of canonization which Pater himself attempted to secure in his Hegelian ‘reconsideration’ of his aestheticism (his ‘subjective immortality’) and in his pre-emptive editing of his literary remains (the non-publication of the manuscript on the history of philosophy). Aborted Narratives By 1892–93 we can see from ‘Emerald Uthwart’ and ‘Apollo in Picardy’ that Pater had begun to question his theory of ‘subjective immortality’. For these two portraits, besides being narratives about death and death deferred, are stories whose primary focus is writing. And in this sense, just as Pater’s collected Imaginary Portraits represent a post-Hegelian attack on Hegel’s ‘radical dualism’ which replaces life with the idea and restricts the economy, his final two imaginary portraits constitute an attack on the Hegelian semiology of his ‘reconsidered’ aestheticism. Why was it that Pater had lost faith in ‘subjective immortality’ by 1892? The answer may lie in his inability to complete Gaston de Latour (1888). Speaking in a letter to Ernst, Pater outlined his projected schedule: I may add that ‘Marius’ is designed to be the first of a kind of trilogy, or triplet, of works of a similar character; dealing with the same problems, under altered historical conditions. The period of the second of the series would be at the end of the 16th century, and the place France: of the third, the time, probably the end of the last century — and the scene, England.39

Of this schedule, only seven chapters of the second text, Gaston, were written, and only a few pages of the third.40 Precisely why Pater failed to complete Gaston is uncertain. Evans speculates that professional ‘overcommitment’ was to blame; Monsman gives more psychological reasons.41 We do know that Pater was still working on it as late as 1890.42 This same abortive pattern belies Pater’s initial intentions for the imaginary portrait as a genre, the prospective series to follow ‘The Child in the House’ never materializing.43 One may even suspect that Pater knew on some unconscious level that Gaston was going to remain incomplete. In the opening description of the ‘abode [. . .] of the family Latour’, we are told that this auspicious house had itself been begun only to be aborted: ‘The work, in large measure, of Gaston de Latour, it was left unfinished at his death, some time about the year 1594’ (GL, pp. 1–2). Gaston de Latour thus builds a ‘monument’, which remains unfinished. And the title of the text, Gaston de Latour, is Gaston of the Tower, a tower which is incomplete, and

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thus already implicated with the figure of the Tower of Babel, the great unfinished monument.44 In his Aesthetics, Hegel had spoken of the Tower of Babel as the first example of monumental architecture (ii, 638). But that Hegel would choose this example upon which to base his whole Aesthetics (the first symbolic architectural work, architecture being the first symbolic art form, which constitutes the first of the three movements of art — symbolic, classical, romantic — which in its turn constitutes the first of the three phases of the manifestation of spirit: art, religion, philosophy) is dangerous, precisely insofar as the Tower of Babel was never completed. As Derrida writes: ‘The “tower of Babel” does not merely figure the irreducible multiplicity of tongues; it exhibits an incompletion, the impossibility of finishing, of totalizing, of saturating, of completing something on the order of edification, architectural construction, system and architectonics’.45 Since the Hegelian economy is by definition a complete system, to found the entire edifice of one’s philosophical construction upon an architectural feature which emblematizes the very impossibility of construction must be deemed something of a gamble.46 Precisely the same kind of gamble is undertaken by Pater in naming his protagonist Gaston de Latour and in beginning the narrative with a description of the unfinished monument which he built (what Derrida would call ‘the monumentof-life-in-death, the monument-of-death-in-life’, another Hegelian pyramid).47 For insofar as Gaston is Gaston of the Tower of Babel his story could never be completed. Insofar as autobiography is the fixing of the self in its own self-identity, Pater’s failure to complete Gaston is indicative of the fact that all recognition of the self is misrecognition. And insofar as Gaston’s story is correspondent to Pater’s own narrative, another description of his ‘reconsideration’ of his aestheticism, Pater’s inability to complete Gaston’s story testifies to the impossibility which is autobiography, to the impossibility of ‘subjective immortality’, to the impossibility which is Hegelianism. It testifies to the ‘radical dualism’ which disrupts the Hegelian speculation. ‘Emerald Uthwart’: The Instant of Death ‘Emerald Uthwart’ (1892) undeniably has an autobiographical element. The portrait was composed immediately following a trip Pater took, returning to the King’s School Canterbury where he had been educated, and which became the model for Uthwart’s school. But after this extended discussion of Uthwart’s (Pater’s) childhood, the portrait moves into more clearly fictional territory, with Emerald and his friend James Stokes entering into the army. Having deserted their posts, the two friends are court-martialled and marched to their execution: At a given signal, but without a word of command, the muskets were levelled, a volley was fired, and the body of the unfortunate man sprang up, falling again on his back. One shot had been reserved; and as the presiding officer thought he was not quite dead a musket was placed close to his head and fired. (MS, p. 237)

Dead, but ‘not quite dead’: ‘Uthwart, as being the younger of the two offenders, “by the mercy of the court” had his sentence commuted to dismissal from the army with disgrace’ (p. 237).

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Pater’s ‘Emerald Uthwart’ is one of his least discussed works, partly owing to the style of the piece. As William Shuter has argued, ‘the story of Uthwart himself has trouble getting told. Through a series of circular movements and proleptic gestures the progress of the narrative is repeatedly forced to turn back upon itself or is arrested before it can begin’. This is then what Shuter terms the ‘arrested narrative’ of ‘Emerald Uthwart’.48 And this narrative ploy, repeated throughout the text, returns us to the familiar Hegelian theme of the restricted economy, for this arresting of the narrative is also the arresting of death. Quoting Pater’s essay on ‘Style’, in which he puns that ‘to the grave reader words too are grave’ (AP, p. 18), Linda Dowling argues that Pater’s own style constitutes an ‘aesthetic of delay’. Pater’s syntax ‘delay[s] the “death to thought”, that is, the moment of cognitive closure’, a moment which is itself ‘a little emblematic death’.49 And thus Pater’s sometimes labyrinthine syntax is indicative not only of a repression of his sexuality but of a repression of life. Pater’s style itself is symbolic of his philosophy of (the impossibility of ) death, the harnessing of death in the written word the deferral of the death in the real world. That the ‘arrested narrative’ of ‘Emerald Uthwart’ specifically is indicative of Pater’s philosophy of (the impossibility of ) death is perhaps best summed up by Uthwart’s (Pater’s) school which ‘through centuries has been forming to receive him’: ‘Centuries of almost “still life” — of birth, death, and the rest’ (MS, pp. 203– 04). Uthwart’s school is then emblematic of Hegel’s restricted economy, as is the nostalgic autobiographical Bildung it presupposes. It is then indicative that, just as the Hegelian consciousness can only come to self-consciousness (its Bildung) through a sleight of hand, through speculation, so too Uthwart’s is a life which proleptically anticipates itself: ‘they tell him, he knows already, he would “do for the army” ’ (p. 222; my emphasis). What is arrested in this portrait then is death itself — death constantly being deferred. The central event of the narrative, Uthwart’s aborted execution (an execution which uncannily anticipates the events that would haunt the post-Hegelian writings of Blanchot),50 thus becomes the narrative counterpoint to both Duke Carl’s faked death and to Hegel’s life-and-death struggle. Uthwart looks death in the face and survives. But what is at the same time clear is that this living-on, this second life, is not life at all, but — reminiscent of Kojève’s reading of Hegel — animate death. As far as the arrested narrative of the portrait is concerned, the role of testimony is vital. Testimony, as autobiography, appeals to a stable ‘I’ to testify to the events. Testimony is thus impossible, just as autobiography is undone by this same appeal. In order to be testimony, testimony must not be fictive (must not be literary); (even if it is perjurious) it should purport to be the truth. And yet, in testifying, the person must recall those events and re-present them, all authorized under the sign of the stable ‘I’ who testifies. If the ‘I’ is not stable, if it can never recognize itself, then its testimony cannot be relied upon.51 In ‘Emerald Uthwart’, the catalyst of the entire narrative, namely the reasons for and events during Uthwart and Stokes’s desertion, are never related. As the narrator writes, ‘the full details of what had happened could have been told only by one or other of themselves’ (MS, p. 231). Since Stokes is dead, that leaves only Uthwart.

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But Uthwart is not a reliable witness. While some of the testimony we receive is from Uthwart’s journal, this cannot be accepted as reliable testimony. A journal is autobiographical, and given the destabilization of Hegelian autobiography, we cannot but conclude that a journal, much as it aspires to the status of fact, in reality sits much closer to fiction. This is because a ‘journal’ is edited (by the witness): it assumes things — secrets — that only the author could ever know, and decides what is relevant.52 This particular journal has edited out the cardinal incident (the desertion of their posts) almost without comment and, at the vital moment when the description is almost precipitated, the narrator arrests the testimony once more: ‘Themselves only could have told the details’ (p. 234). One cannot help but conclude that a similar narrative ploy — knowingly or unknowingly — is implicated in Pater’s own practice of self-editing, his non-publication of precisely that aspect of his thought which this study has sought to illuminate: his postHegelian identification of Hegel’s ‘radical dualism’. Testimony (irreplaceable or not) is noticeably lacking at Uthwart and Stokes’s trial: ‘Martial courts exist not for consideration, but for the vivid exemplary effect and prompt punishment’ (p. 234). The martial court then does not exist to listen to testimony; it deems words untrustworthy. Here it is not unimportant that it was the instability of the sign which permitted the breach of law in the first place, Stokes and Uthwart taking advantage ‘of a vague phrase in their instructions’ (p. 234). But it seems strange that having been explicitly informed twice in the preceding three paragraphs that no-one can testify for the witness, the witnesses are apparently not allowed to testify for themselves. We are told that they ‘appealed’ but not that they testified. Instead, the story continues with another testimony which, like Uthwart’s journal, has uncertain status, the unnamed diarist not even getting Uthwart’s name correct: ‘Lieutenant (I think Edward) Uthwart’ (p. 237). The story then passes over the cardinal events: ‘To tell what followed would be to accompany him on a roundabout and really aimless journey, the details of which he could never afterwards recall’ (p. 238). Following this is a journey that is neither ‘really’ ‘aimless’ nor ‘really aimless’, Uthwart returning both ‘to the scene of his disgrace’ and thereafter to his Sussex home. However, it is Uthwart’s inability to recall these significant events that is cardinal here. Successfully to recall the story would imply its recognition. The lack of testimony is thus a hidden trace, a silent testimony to the singularity of these events, their untestifiability. After the events, they can never be (re)called, which is to say (re)presented. Pater, of course, knew personally of the problems of testimony, knew first hand the power of the word, the oath, which, after the Hardinge incident, and in the hands of Benjamin Jowett, effectively ended his Oxford career. However, this having been said, the testimony upon which Pater was convicted is speculative at best. As William Shuter has argued, ‘for the knowledge of this episode in Pater’s life we rely on the testimony of two persons, one of whom [Hardinge] was known to be untruthful and the other of whom [Edmund Gosse], it would seem, knew what he knew from hearsay’.53 This is not to say that Pater was not having an affair with Hardinge, merely that the evidence which has survived is precarious. It is at least plausible that had Pater not been Pater — which is to say, had he not been

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the very person who had published, only a year previously, the conclusion to the Renaissance which appeared to license homosexual practices — he may not have been so easily discredited. Pater’s life was judged by his writings. Indeed, the ways in which the fictive word could be used to testify to life would be demonstrated even more clearly at the Wilde trial of 1895 (attorney Edward Carson using Wilde’s preface to Dorian Gray as evidence of the author’s moral corruption).54 In the Wilde trial art and life, fiction and autobiography, osmotically interrelate, in a fashion that justifies de Man’s deconstruction of the genre of autobiography: ‘We assume that life produces the autobiography as an act produces its consequences, but can we not suggest, with equal justice, that the autobiographical project may itself produce and determine the life?’ 55 Insofar as autobiography produces the life, testimony not only testifying to the life but constituting it, we return to the familiar territory of Hegelian semiology. In this sense, the entire question of testimony in ‘Emerald Uthwart’ represents another criticism of this semiology, so intrinsic to his ‘reconsideration’ of Pater’s aestheticism in the essay on ‘Style’. Thus it is vital that the portrait begins and ends with two different types of written text, two testimonies, both of which deal with death. ‘Emerald Uthwart’ opens with a discussion of the epitaph: ‘We smile at epitaphs — at those recent enough to be read easily; smile, for the most part, at what is an unreal and often vulgar branch of literature’ (MS, p. 197). The epitaph, the word coming from the Greek epitaphios, is an inscription upon a tomb, above a grave. Epi-, the Greek prefix, corresponds to the French prefix sur-, as in sur-vival: to live-on. In other words, the epitaph is a form of living-on, or a form of writing on living. Written on the grave, the text is written over life; the animal world of death is overcome (another living on, another sur-, another Aufhebung), or is rather overwritten, in an ever-never-dying signification. Yet again, we see the Hegelian pyramid, ‘the hard text of stones covered with inscription’.56 With the epitaph, we are in the world of Pater’s ‘subjective immortality’. The portrait concludes with a ‘Postscript, from the Diary of a Surgeon’: The cause of death is held to have been some kind of distress of mind, concurrent with the effects of an old gun-shot wound [. . .]. I have known cases of this kind, where anxiety has caused incurable cardiac derangement (the deceased seems to have actually been sentenced to death for some military offence when on service in Flanders), and such a mental strain would of course have been aggravated by the presence of a foreign object. (MS, pp. 243–44)

How then had Uthwart died? The cause of death, the coroner had been told, was the gunshot wound, suffered before the instant of his death; he was, as it were, already living-on, surviving his death with every moment.57 But, would this wound have killed him had he not been previously sentenced to death? According to the coroner, Uthwart’s ‘anxiety’ may well have been the cause of death. At what instant then had Uthwart died? And, a not unrelated question, at what instant had Uthwart survived?58 At least one critic has drawn the inference of necrophilia from this postscript,59 in which the surgeon writes that, ‘though I believed myself to be acting by his express wish, I felt like a criminal’ (MS, pp. 245–46). But given the opening of the text with

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the discussion of the epitaph, surely the passage could rather be read allegorically: the dead body is the (‘subjectively immortal’) corpus of the author, the penetration by the surgeon the criticism of the text. Criticism functions as an invasion, even when welcomed. And if the text is supposed to be autobiographical, to stabilize the ‘I’ for all eternity, in its very textuality this ‘I’ has not, as lesser reason, become one with the greater reason, but has been disseminated. In surviving the author, the text has necessarily become alienated from itself; the ‘I’ which the autobiographical signification sought to relay and (re)present is scattered abroad. Rereading the opening movement of the portrait, we see that even in the supposedly clear image of subjective immortality drawn by the epitaph, Pater already undercuts this idealism: Note one [epitaph] in particular! Loving parents and elder brother meant to record carefully the very days of the lad’s poor life — annos, menses, dies; sent the order, doubtless, from the distant old castle in the Fatherland, but not quite explicitly; the spaces for the numbers remain still unfilled; and they never came to see. After two centuries the omission is not to be rectified; and the young man’s memorial has perhaps its propriety as it stands, with those unnumbered, or numberless, days. (MS, pp. 197–98)

The ‘I’ which the epitaph sought to preserve is now lost to itself, never adequately summed up by that trace in which it is supposed to remain, but which it forever eludes. From these two framing sections to the portrait, then, we can reread ‘Emerald Uthwart’ as a story about writing, as an autobiographical ref lection regarding Pater’s own (Hegelian) semiology, taking as its target the essay on ‘Style’, published merely five years previously. Once again, the ‘radical dualism’ has undone the Hegelian speculation from within. ‘Apollo in Picardy’: Madness and the Failure of Hegelian Semiology ‘Apollo in Picardy’ (1893), the last imaginary portrait published during Pater’s lifetime, is the story of Prior Saint-Jean’s descent into madness. Leaving the monastery which had been his home all his adult life for a period of recuperation in the country, the Prior comes under the inf luence of Apollyon, who, much like Denys is Dionysus, is the Greek God Apollo reborn in medieval France. Having unearthed an ancient discus, Apollyon (inadvertently) kills Hyacinthus, the young monk who had accompanied the Prior: ‘Apollyon throws it for the last time [. . .] till it sinks edgewise, sawing through the boy’s face, uplifted in the dark to trace it, crushing the tender skull upon the brain’ (MS, p. 168). Apollyon, ‘fulfilling his annual custom’, departs for the north the next morning, ‘without a word of farewell to Prior Saint-Jean, whom he leaves in fact under suspicion of murder’ (p. 169). We can recognize instantly a number of familiar Paterean themes at work in ‘Apollo in Picardy’ which, as the last of his imaginary portraits, in a sense recapitulates the previous ones. After two separate introductory passages (parerga),60 the narrative begins in earnest with a description of the Prior’s monastery: He had been brought to the monastery as a little child; was bred there; had never left it, busy and satisfied through youth and early manhood; was grown

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almost a necessary part of the community as the stones of its material abode [. . .]. The structure of a fortified medieval town barred in those who belonged to it very effectively. High monastic walls intrenched the monk still further. (MS, p. 145)

Allegorical of, amongst other things, Oxford, the walls of the medieval city protect the inhabitants inside from the f lux without.61 But if the structure is fortified, it is also something of a prison, the Prior’s ‘inner cell’ playing upon the word’s double meaning. In other words, the text is once again implicated in the sōma/sēma pairing of Pater’s (Hegelian) semiology: the monastery is the Hegelian pyramid.62 Once the Prior has moved to the country, the narrative turns around the conceit of the unearthing of the discus which will kill Hyacinthus — which is to say, Pater’s conception of culture as the ‘turning over of the earth’: But it happened about this time that a grave was dug, a grave of unusual depth [. . .]. In the drowsy afternoon Hyacinth awakes Apollyon, to see the strange thing he has found at the grave-side, among the gravel and yellow bones cast up there. (MS, p. 166)

Here the fact that it is a discus which is unearthed is not unimportant, for it explicitly relates the portrait to Pater’s essay on ‘The Age of Athletic Prizemen’, published the following year (an essay which is, as we have seen, in a sense emblematic of Pater’s Hegelian ressentiment, his philosophy of (the impossibility of ) death, homoeroticism petrified in the sculpted images in order that this sexuality might not be approached, might be ‘sublated’ or negated within the Hegelian Ideal). In a pre-emptive echo, we have in the person of Apollyon the image of motion petrified for a perfect moment: On the moonlit turf there, crouching, right foot foremost, and with face turned backwards to the disk in his right hand, his whole body, in that moment of rest, full of the circular motion he is about to commit to. (MS, p. 167)

But the difference between the narratives of ‘Apollo in Picardy’ and ‘The Age of Athletic Prizemen’ is that this ‘ideal’ moment is not preserved for all eternity as an ideal, but gives way (la relève), so that the discus is released and Hyacinthus killed: the ‘ideal’ is itself murderous. It is thus important that the grave out of which the discus was unearthed was of ‘unusual depth’. Pater’s concept of culture as the ‘turning over of the earth’ is, as it were, a sanitized form of archaeology (as Dowling writes, Pater’s purpose was to ‘purge’ the ‘graves [. . .] of any morbidity, bathing them instead in the “dry light” of science’),63 whereas this unearthing, far from stimulating life, brings death. But, if ‘Apollo in Picardy’ plays like a refrain upon Pater’s previous themes — the sōma/sēma pairing, the Hegelian Idea(l), culture as the ‘turning over of the earth’, the philosophy of (the impossibility of ) death — the real interest in the imaginary portrait is once again textual: ‘Devilry, devil’s work: — traces of such you might fancy were to be found in a certain manuscript volume taken from an old monastic library in France at the Revolution’ (MS, p. 143).64 That Prior SaintJean’s manuscript should be introduced at the time of revolution is important, for the manuscript is thereby put at risk. In a time of civil upheaval, the survival of the

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manuscript (the living-on of the author, ‘subjectively immortal’) is threatened with effacement. Here again the echo is of Hegel who, in the same letter as he describes Napoleon as the ‘spirit of the world’, speaks of his fears that the manuscript of the Phenomenology might go missing.65 We are explicitly told that Prior Saint-Jean’s manuscript constitutes his living-on: ‘Indirectly the volume was the record of an episode, an interlude, an interpolated page of life’ (MS, p. 144). But what survives the Prior in his manuscript is pointedly not the stable subject of autobiography, for what the Prior’s text preserves is not the moment of the coming-to-self-consciousness but precisely the opposite: the moment of the Prior’s descent into madness. We are told that the Prior’s sabbatical in the country was determined by the aged Abbot because his body’s health had been impaired ‘by long intellectual effort, yet so invaluable to the community’ (MS, p. 146). The Prior is then someone who has prioritized the brain at the expense of the body. In this sense, the Prior — even before he leaves the supposedly protective confines of the monastery — is already aff licted with the same sort of ‘sickness’ as Sebastian, the ressentiment which turns away from the world and the body in the name of the Idea. The parallel between this early convalescent Prior and Sebastian is striking, for Sebastian too came (momentarily) to the conclusion that the predomination of mind over body was at root his ‘sickness’: Is it only the result of disease? he would ask himself sometimes with a sudden suspicion of intellectual cogency — this persuasion that myself, and all that surrounds me, are but a diminution of that which really is? — this unkindly melancholy? (IP, p. 112)

Again, the resonance is to Nietzsche who, as Pierre Klossowski has shown, himself came to the conclusion that it was a series of fundamental errors which had caused the ‘most fragile organ’ the body had developed, the brain, ‘to dominate the body[. . .] because of its very fragility’.66 The Prior’s convalescence away from the monastery in the country is thus akin to Nietzsche’s prescribed summers at Sils-Maria. This is not to say that the Prior’s madness is the same as Nietzsche’s. Indeed, Nietzsche’s madness was completely the opposite phenomenon: The agonising migraines, which Nietzsche experienced periodically as an aggression which suspended his thought, were not an external aggression; the root of the evil was in himself, in his own organism: his own physical self was attacking in order to defend itself against its own dissolution.67

In other words, the brain — and therefore the self, the ‘I’ insofar as that ‘I’ is the product and representative of the brain — was attacking Nietzsche’s body precisely because it realized that the path which Nietzsche was beginning to take would eradicate its imperialism over the body irrevocably: The identity of the self [. . .] seems to depend on the irreversible history of the body, a linkage of causes and effects. But this linkage is pure appearance. [. . .] The body is the same body only insofar as a single self is able to and wills to be merged with it, with all its vicissitudes. The cohesion of the body is that of the self; the body produces this self, and hence its own cohesion. But for itself, this body dies and is reborn numerous times — deaths and rebirths that the self pretends to survive in its illusory cohesion.68

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The identity of the self then depends upon the identity of the body, but this identity is illusion. What Klossowski is describing here is Nietzsche’s ‘eternal return’. The eternal return is not a cosmological speculation as generally thought.69 Such an eternal return of the same amounts to Hegelianism: a restricted economy of the philosophy of (the impossibility of ) death. It is true that Nietzsche certainly seems to imply a cosmological interpretation of the eternal return twice in the third book of Zarathustra. In ‘On the Vision and the Riddle’, Zarathustra meets a dwarf who first introduces to him the idea of the eternal return, a concept which Zarathustra brief ly entertains (although the thought makes him ill) (Z, III ‘On the Vision and the Riddle’, § 1). But by the time that he encounters the idea for a second time, in ‘The Convalescent’, he replies to the animals who follow him mockingly. Referring to his experiences in ‘On the Vision and the Riddle’, Zarathustra realizes that the cosmological interpretation of the eternal return is a fallacy, and that whilst ‘that monster crawled into my throat’, ‘I bit off its head and spat it away from me’ (Z, III ‘The Convalescent’, § 2). The eternal return is not the eternal return of the same, is not reducible to Hegel’s restricted economy. As Deleuze argues: ‘How could the reader believe that Nietzsche, who was the greatest critic of these categories, implicated Everything, the Same, the Identical, the Similar, the Equal, the I and the Self in the eternal return?’70 The eternal return is the return of difference. It is, as Klossowski argues, essentially affirmative, ‘a necessity that must be willed’.71And indeed, Nietzsche’s eventual madness can thus be read as his victory over his brain, Nietzsche himself taking Blanchot’s ‘le pas au-delà’.72 The migraines, far from being indicative of the coming of madness, were the opposite phenomena, the indication of the brain fighting against its own dissolution, a dissolution which would itself lead to madness. The Prior’s madness, on the other hand, is a more clearly Hegelian phenomenon. Indeed, it is, we are told explicitly, a textual product. Inspired by his meeting with Apollyon, the Prior experiences an epiphany which completes the argument of his manuscript; in other words, what is described here is the precise moment which Pater’s mature ‘reconsidered’ aestheticism attempts to capture (the moment at which the consciousness comes-to-self-consciousness), and what the Prior experiences is death in the Hegelian sense (the lesser reason attaining congress with the greater reason over and above it). And yet, it is the failure of the Prior to express this epiphany textually — the failure of the sign to capture its intended signified — that causes his madness: Could one but arrest it for one’s self, for final transference to others, on the written or printed page — this beam of insight, or of inspiration! Alas! one result of its coming was that it encouraged delay. If he set hand to the page, the firm halo, here a moment since, was gone. (MS, p. 164)

As Pater writes in the manuscript on moral philosophy, to remove oneself from the greater reason is ‘insanity and death’ (MP, p. 17r). And this is precisely what happens to Prior Saint-Jean, the greater reason eluding him at the very moment of its closest proximity. Here we approach ‘radical dualism’ again. Far from stabilizing the self autobiographically in the written text, the very moment of self-consciousness is deferred.

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What the sign captures is not the moment, but something which escapes it. And it is this, the Prior’s moment of madness, which his text preserves of him for posterity: Soft wintry auroras seemed to play behind whole pages of crabbed textual writing, line and figure bending, breathing, f laming, into lovely ‘arrangements’ that were like music made visible; till writing and writer changed suddenly, ‘to one thing constant never’, after the known manner of madmen in such work. Finally, the whole matter broke off with an unfinished word, as later hand testified, adding the date of the author’s death, ‘deliquio animi’. (MS, pp. 144–45)

The ‘unfinished word’ testifies to the impossibility of ‘subjective immortality’, because what Prior Saint-Jean had sought to write was the work (an adequate and autobiographical expression of the author’s intention) but what survived him was the text, as the trace which is always already the trace of the other.73 And that it was left to a ‘later hand’ to testify to the ‘unfinished word’ is not unimportant, for it is always a ‘later hand’ which testifies, after the fact, to a singular event, which it claims (appeals to its word) to be able to testify to. There is no recognition, no autobiography. The failure is the failure of Hegelian semiology. The History of Writing Deconstructively With the deconstruction of autobiography — and thereby the entire Hegelian speculation upon which it is based and which it supports — undertaken by Pater in his final two imaginary portraits, we return to the ‘radical dualism’ which undoes the Hegelian speculation. For here we appreciate that, if Pater’s Hegelianism is semiological, the ‘radical dualism’ is that which undoes this semiology from within: it is itself the instability of the sign. In the manuscript on the history of philosophy in which he first identified Hegel’s ‘radical dualism’, Pater again highlights the structural properties of writing which would dominate his thinking in his later essay on ‘Style’, but in so doing at the same time discerns something else at work in the history of philosophy, something of which the ‘radical dualism’ of Hegel’s speculation is indicative: They [Kant’s three ideals] are the three fixed subjects of the older moral or metaphysical science[;] their development is the continuous subject of the history of philosophy as constructively written. But the history of philosophy may be and has been brilliantly written in a destructive spirit and as the history of a certain failure. (HP, p. 20v)

There are then two types of philosophy which correspond to two methods of writing. The first is ‘constructive’: the greater reason as a form of architecture. The second is, in contrast, ‘destructive’. And it is this kind of writing, Pater’s own ‘destructive’ spirit, which identifies Hegel’s ‘radical dualism’. After Derrida we cannot help but think that Pater’s nomenclature is slightly amiss here, for what Pater is referring to is not ‘destructive’ writing but deconstructive writing. Pater’s ‘destructive’ philosophy does not, in essence, destroy anything. It decentres and displaces discourse certainly. Or rather, it shows how discourse is itself decentred and displaced. But deconstruction does not destroy anything precisely because that which it engages is revealed through its movement to have always already deconstructed itself.

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It is this kind of operation which Pater’s manuscript on the history of philosophy undertakes: a deconstructive rather than a destructive operation. For when Pater speaks of that ‘radical dualism’ underwriting the Hegelian speculation, he destroys nothing, he merely shows that Hegelianism had always already deconstructed itself beforehand. And further, when Pater discerns the ‘radical dualism’ in the Hegelian system, he at the same time discerns the ‘radical dualism’ in his own project of aestheticism. When he deconstructs the Hegelian speculative exercise, he at the same time deconstructs his own aestheticism. Here in the manuscript on the history of philosophy it becomes clear that Pater’s reading of Hegel’s ‘radical dualism’ anticipates Derrida’s famous estimation of Hegel: ‘All that Hegel thought [. . .] may be reread as a meditation on writing. Hegel is also the thinker of irreducible difference. He rehabilitated thought as the memory productive of signs’.74 Hegel, the ultimate thinker of totalization, the thinker whose entire philosophy seeks to return to the self-proximity of the logos through the enunciated voice, is also the thinker of the disseminating sign. It is this Hegel as the ‘thinker of irreducible difference’ whom Pater identifies in the ‘radical dualism’ of his speculation. And it is this Hegel who remains pertinent for post-Hegelians. In this sense, Pater’s thought of Hegel’s ‘radical dualism’ is itself radical and transgressive, anticipating post-Hegelian discourse, anticipating post-structuralism and Derrida himself. When we pair Pater’s transgressive thought of Hegel’s ‘radical dualism’ with post-structuralist discourse, when we associate his ‘destructive’ writing with deconstruction, we do so according to Derrida’s own terms. For Derrida as for Pater, then, the question is the ‘radical’ thing which undoes the Hegelian metaphysics from within.75 And this deconstructive method of writing is brought into play by Pater, not only conceptually in his Nietzschean Imaginary Portraits, but in terms of the very text itself in his deconstruction of the genre of autobiography in his final two imaginary portraits. Pater, then, in identifying the ‘radical dualism’, the impossibility which grounds every possibility of the Hegelian speculation, is himself radical, a deconstructive thinker anticipating poststructuralist critiques of not only Hegel, but everything summed up under his name: an affirmative and transgressive thinker. Notes to Chapter 4 1. Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, p. 64. 2. Mrs Humphrey Ward, review of Marius, in The Critical Heritage, ed. by Seiler, pp. 127–38. See particularly Monsman, Art of Autobiography and Pater’s Portraits, and Ira B. Nadal, ‘Autobiography as Fiction: the Example of Pater’s Marius’, ELT 27.1 (1984), 34–40. This approach has appealed not least owing to Pater’s long-presumed homosexuality (unsubstantiated until Inman’s research in the 1980s), for as long as Pater’s homosexuality was merely presumed, the texts offered the only ‘proof ’ as to Pater’s sexual persuasion. The implications of this predomination of text over biography was not lost on Henry James, who, in a letter to Edmund Gosse of 13 December 1894, in The Critical Heritage, ed. by Seiler, p. 293, writes: [Pater] will have had — the most exquisite literary fortune: i.e. to have taken it out all, wholly, exclusively, with the pen (the style, the genius), and absolutely not at all with the person. He is the mask without the face [. . .] faint, pale, embarrassed, exquisite Pater! 3. Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 26.

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4. The Hegelian consciousness achieves its self-consciousness through signification only at the point when the sign is presented to itself verbally: ‘it aims at making itself be and be a fact. Acting on this view it is self-uttering, intuition-producing: the imagination which creates signs’ (E, § 457). Here the presence of the moment, the proximity of the self to its voice, is cardinal: ‘This institution of the natural is the vocal note, where the inward idea manifests itself in adequate utterance.’ (§ 459) This vocalization of the sign has been criticized by Derrida as an important repression in the history of phonologocentricism in Of Grammatology, pp. 24–26. 5. Linda Anderson, Autobiography (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 4–5. 6. Anderson, p. 4. 7. Derrida, ‘Living On’, p. 77. 8. See Levinas, Totality and Infinity, pp. 243–45. 9. On this survival of the author, see Georges Gusdorf, ‘Conditions and Limits of Autobiography’, trans. by James Olney, in Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. by James Olney (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 28–48 (pp. 30–31). 10. Translation is thus survival, as Derrida notes in ‘Living On’, p. 87: ‘the sur [. . .] also designates the figure of a passage by trans-lation’. 11. See Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle, Fundamentals of Language (The Hague: Mouton, 1971), pp. 90–91. The terms metaphor and metonymy are described in a psychoanalytic context by Lacan in Écrits, pp. 170–75. 12. Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 263. 13. See Samuel Chew, ‘Pater’s Quotations’, The Nation, 99 (1914), 404–05, and Helen H. Law, ‘Pater’s Use of Greek Quotations’, Modern Language Notes, 58.8 (1943), 575–85. On Pater’s misquotation, see also Christopher Ricks, ‘Pater, Arnold and Misquotation’, Times Literary Supplement, 25 (1977), 183–85. It is worth also noting that Pater is here in the essay on ‘Style’ speaking of translating Plato, an author who, as Derrida has shown with reference to Plato’s term ‘pharmakon’, is open to contradictory readings within the same translation: see Dissemination, esp. p. 77. Ironically, when Pater himself comes to translate the key term ‘pharmakon’ in Plato and Platonism, he praises the ‘simplicity’ of Plato’s words (p. 87). 14. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Task of the Translator’, in Illuminations, trans. by Harry Zorn (London: Pimlico, 1999), pp. 70–82 (p. 79). The German reads: Wie nämlich Scherben eines Gefäßes, um sich zusammenfügen zu lassen, in den kleinsten Einzelheiten einander zu folgen, doch nicht so zu gleichen haben, so muss, anstatt dem Sinn des Originals sich ähnlich zu machen, die Übersetzung liebend vielmehr und bis ins Einzelne hinein dessen Art des Meinens in der eigenen Sprache sich anbilden, um so beide wie Scherben als Bruchstück eines Gefäßes, als Bruchstück einer größeren Sprache erkennbar zu machen. (‘Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers’, in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. by Theodor W. Adorno and others, 7 vols (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1972–99), iv/1, 9–21 (p. 18)) 15. Jacques Derrida, ‘Des Tours de Babel’, trans. by Joseph F. Graham, in Acts of Religion, ed. by Gil Midgar (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 104–34 (p. 114). 16. Paul de Man, ‘Conclusions: Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator” ’, in The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), pp. 73–105 (p. 91). 17. de Man, ‘Conclusions’, pp. 90–91. In this sense, Benjamin’s theory of translation is kabbalistic, as de Man rightly notes. Interestingly, Pater is paired with Kabbalah by Harold Bloom in Kabbalah and Criticism (London: Continuum, 2005), p. 23. 18. The German passage reads: Indem die Sprache das Werk des Gedankens ist, so kann auch in ihr nichts gesagt werden, was nicht allgemein ist. Was ich nur meine, ist mein, gehört mir als diesem besonderen Individuum an; wenn aber die Sprache nur Allgemeines ausdrückt, so kann ich nicht sagen, was ich nur meine. [. . .] Wenn ich sage: ‘das Einzelne’, ‘dieses Einzelne’, ‘Hier’, ‘Jetzt’, so sind dies alles Allgemeinheiten; Alles und Jedes ist ein Einzelnes, Dieses, auch wenn es sinnlich ist, Hier, Jetzt. Ebenso wenn ich sage: ‘Ich’, meine ich Mich als diesen alle anderen Ausschließenden; aber was ich sage, Ich, ist eben jeder; Ich, der alle anderen von sich ausschließt. 19. de Man, ‘Sign and Symbol’, p. 98. 20. Hegel, The Difference Between Fichte and Schelling, p. 81; Differenz, p. 10.

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21. See Beiser, p. 63. 22. Lacan, Écrits, pp. 332, 347. 23. Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative, p. 12. 24. Lacan, Écrits, pp. 1–9 (p. 1). 25. Lacan, Écrits, p. 340. 26. In the terms of Lacan’s graphs and mathemes, the point de capiton is represented by the point s(O), and the retroactive vector, the line passing from s(O) to (O) and back again, the slide of signification (Écrits, p. 339). 27. de Man, ‘Sign and Symbol’, p. 99. 28. Lacan, Écrits, p. 332. 29. Monsman, Art of Autobiography, p. 7. 30. Robert Smith, Derrida and Autobiography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 13–23. 31. Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, p. 64. 32. In an article on Marius, Michael Ryan tentatively suggests this fact, saying ‘perhaps the imaginary portrait is not after all pseudo-autobiography but instead what Philippe Sollers calls “thanatography” ’, in ‘Narcissus Autobiographer: Marius the Epicurean’, ELH 43.2 (1976), 184–208 (p. 206). But what Ryan does not do is make any distinction between Pater’s longer and shorter fiction, between Marius and the imaginary portraits. If Marius is thanatography, it seems to me that it is not conceived by Pater as such, that Pater is not attempting to theorize autobiography as thanatography in Marius, as — it is my contention — he does in his final two imaginary portraits, ‘Emerald Uthwart’ and ‘Apollo in Picardy’. 33. Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, in Image Music Text, trans. by Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977), pp. 142–48 (p. 142). 34. Blanchot, ‘Literature and the Right to Death’, p. 361. 35. Blanchot, ‘Literature and the Right to Death’, pp. 379–80. 36. Blanchot, ‘Literature and the Right to Death’, p. 380. Bataille comes to the same conclusions in ‘Hegel, Death and Sacrifice’, p. 15: ‘He [Hegel’s man as death-incarnate] is not merely a man who negates Nature, he is first of all an animal, that is to say the very thing he negates: he cannot therefore negate Nature without negating himself ’. 37. Maurice Blanchot, Friendship, trans. by Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), pp. 289–90. 38. See Gusdorf, p. 29: ‘In narrating my life, I give witness of myself even from beyond my death and so can preserve this special capital that ought not to disappear’. 39. Pater, letter to Ernst, 28 January 1886, in Letters, p. 65. 40. It seems that manuscript pages entitled ‘Thistle’ may be the remnants of this final text, which sketch an outline of Pater’s plan, in which, once again, we recognize the familiar refrain of the greater reason: In a sense he anticipates the 19th c. — finely, & anticipating it gives it as its best — first & last meeting — its perfect f lower — as if in memory — What he needs is a larger-souled life than his own — the working-out of the spiritualisations of what there is. In this way, might be indicated, the permanent tendency, strength, truth of the 19th c. He conceives it, as it is, in idea. (bMS Eng 1150 (31), p. 7, quoted by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University) 41. See Letters, ed. by Evans, p. xxxi, and Monsman, Art of Autobiography, p. 109. 42. See Monsman, Pater’s Portraits, p. 139. 43. I take it, then, that the imaginary portraits which eventually were collected in his Imaginary Portraits were not continuations of this series which was meant to begin with ‘The Child in the House’ and continue with ‘An English Poet’; that the role played by the imaginary portrait as a genre in Pater’s work changed in response to his identification of the ‘radical dualism’ of Hegel’s speculation. 44. It is interesting to note that Michael Oakeshott used Pater’s Gaston as a ‘model’ when composing his essay on ‘The Tower of Babel’, in On History and Other Essays (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1999), pp. 179–210. See Efraim Podoksik, ‘The Work of Michael Oakeshott’, Political Theory, 19.3 (1991), 326–33 (p. 328).

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45. Derrida, ‘Des Tours de Babel’, p. 104. 46. The phallic constitution of the Tower of Babel is seemingly lost on Hegel, as Denis Hollier writes: The pyramids were still hollow, like the house or the temple; they were inhabited by a dead being or by Death. Towers, on the other hand, are full [. . .]. The Tower of Babel has come to fill up the hole in the pyramid, a f law that would have risked ruining this tomb of death that the Hegelian structure in its entity is meant to be. (Against Architecture, p. 13; compare Hegel, A, i, 354–56) Hollier’s point is that for Hegel the origin must not be lacking: ‘The true beginnings sought by Hegel will have to be faultlessly exempt from this original lack; they will have to stop up this hole and fill this void’ (p. 9). But what Hollier’s discussion seems to miss is that the Tower of Babel — precisely inasmuch as it is not only a tower, but within it a city, which is to say, not a ‘full structure’, but a spacious one — cannot constitute this full (which is to say, present) locus. This facet is brought out spectacularly in Pieter Breugel’s painting The Tower of Babel (c. 1563), with its honeycomb construction of arches. As such, in its very openness inside, the phallic constitution of the Tower of Babel is indicative of a Lacanian as opposed to a Freudian phallus: a phallus as the signifier of lack. 47. Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, p. 83. 48. William Shuter, ‘The Arrested Narrative of “Emerald Uthwart” ’, Nineteenth Century Literature, 45.1 (1990), 1–25 (p. 1). 49. Dowling, Language and Decadence, pp. 129–30. 50. The Instant of My Death, published in French in 1994, relates the autobiographical events of 20 July 1944, where Blanchot was marched outside his family Château and placed before a Nazi firing-squad, only to be reprieved at the last moment. Dostoevsky had a similar experience on 22 December 1849. 51. On this theme of testimony, see Derrida, ‘Demeure’, pp. 32–33. 52. See Derrida, Aporias, p. 74: ‘Death is always the name for a secret, since it signs the irreplaceable singularity’. 53. Shuter, ‘The “Outing” ’, p. 489. Davis cites this essay as indicative of ‘a persistent strain of homophobia’ running through Pater criticism, labelling Shuter ‘a reactionary critic’ (‘Latent Intelligence’, pp. 261, 262). 54. See Ellmann, p. 422. I refer to the second trial of 1895, Wilde’s trial under section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, not to the libel trial of the previous month. 55. Paul de Man, ‘Autobiography as De-facement’, MLN 94 (1979), 919–30 (p. 920). 56. Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, p. 83. 57. As Derrida argues in ‘Demeure’, p. 67, ‘only someone who is dead is immortal’. 58. I am thinking comparatively here of the parallel ‘instant’ related by Blanchot in The Instant of My Death: ‘the instant of my death henceforth always in abeyance’ (p. 11). This is, then, the death sentence which is also the suspension of death of L’Arrêt de mort (1948) (both translations of the French title of Blanchot’s récit), the first half of which recounts the aborted death of one of its protagonists, named J. See Maurice Blanchot, Death Sentence, trans. by Lydia Davis, in The Station Hill Blanchot Reader, ed. by Quasha, pp. 129–87. 59. See Michael Levey, The Case of Walter Pater (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978), p. 194. Of course, insofar as all criticism comes after the text, and is thus, in a sense, posthumous, all criticism might be considered necrophiliac, including the current one. On the way in which ‘Pater seems to have encouraged critics to read him posthumously’, see Megan Becker-Leckrone, ‘Pater’s Critical Spirit’, in Transparencies of Desire, ed. by Brake, Higgins, and Williams, pp. 286–97 (p. 288). 60. The parergon is a concept investigated by Derrida in The Truth in Painting. It is a kind of supplement added to a text ‘without being a part of it and yet without being absolutely extrinsic to it’ (p. 55). In aesthetic terms, and the terms of Pater’s portraiture, it is the frame which often has this supplementary role (p. 63). A full investigation of this framing, which is absolutely key to Pater’s portraits, is not possible here, but it is worth noting that a number of Pater’s portraits possess parergonal marginalia: the ‘stained glass’ of ‘Denys’ (IP, p. 76); the ‘winter scene’ beginning ‘Sebastian van Storck’ (p. 81); the letter on Goethe which concludes ‘Duke Carl’

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(p. 140); the discussion of the epigraph which begins ‘Emerald Uthwart’ (MS, pp. 197–98), and the postscript from the surgeon which concludes it (pp. 243–46); and the two separate introductory frames of ‘Apollo in Picardy’ (pp. 142–45). Pater’s texts are in this sense clearly portraits, with their own frames, their own structures and ekphrasis. 61. As Foucault shows, in the Middle Ages, this encircling in the cities protected the population initially from leprosy, but it was madness that came to take on this social role: ‘In the margins of the community, at the gates of the cities, there stretched wastelands which sickness had ceased to haunt but had left sterile and long uninhabitable. For centuries, these reaches belonged to the non-human’ (Madness and Civilization, p. 1). 62. The image of the Hegelian pyramid also clearly repeats that of the sōma/sēma pairing of the second paragraph of the conclusion to the Renaissance: the whole scope of observation is dwarfed into the narrow chamber of the individual mind. Experience [. . .] is ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced [. . .] each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world. (p. 235) 63. Dowling, ‘Pater and Archaeology’, p. 211. 64. J. Hillis Miller takes this passage as an epitaph for his essay on ‘Ariadne’s Thread: Repetition and the Narrative Line’, Critical Enquiry, 3.1 (1976), 57–77, where it is deemed exemplary insofar as it resists any single interpretation. 65. Hegel, letter to Niethammer, 13 October 1806, in Hegel: The Letters, p. 114. 66. Klossowski, p. 21. 67. Klossowski, p. 19. 68. Klossowski, p. 23. On the impact of this concept on Nietzsche’s own autobiographical theories and especially his Ecce Homo, see Jacques Derrida, ‘Otobiographies: The Teaching of Nietzsche and the Politics of the Proper Name’, in Nietzsche: Critical Assessments, ed. by Daniel W. Conway with Peter S. Groff, 4 vols (London: Routledge, 1998), iv, 86–111. 69. There is no doubt that Nietzsche entertained this cosmological interpretation as we can see in his unpublished notebooks, but he never committed himself in his published work to this position. See N, 5 [ 54 ] and 38 [ 12 ], in which the world is characterized as ‘an economy without expenditure and losses’. For counter-cosmological readings, see Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, pp. 370–74, and Alexander Nehemas, ‘The Eternal Recurrence’, in Nietzsche: Critical Assessments, ed. by Conway, ii, 248–69. 70. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 372. 71. Klossowski, p. 45. Compare Nietzsche first description of the eternal return: Have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘If that thought gained power over you, as you are it would transform and possibly crush you; the question in each and every thing, “Do you want this again and innumerable times again?” would lie on your actions as the heaviest weight! (GSc, § 341) 72. A point to which Klossowski’s own writing also approaches. As Deleuze writes, ‘Klossowski’s entire work moves toward a single goal: to assure the loss of personal identity and to dissolve the self ’ (The Logic of Sense, p. 324). 73. See Maurice Blanchot, ‘The Absence of the Book’, in The Station Hill Blanchot Reader, ed. by Quasha, pp. 471–86: ‘the end of the act of writing does not lie in the book or in the work [. . .] we necessarily fall short of the work’ (p. 474). 74. Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 26. Derrida’s reference is to Hegel’s Gedächtnis, productive memory, discussed at length in Chapter 1. 75. See Derrida, Positions, p. 77.

CONCLUSION ❖

The Ideology of Aestheticism The nomads invented a war machine in opposition to the State apparatus. History has never comprehended nomadism [. . .]. The State as model for the book and for thought has a long history: logos, the philosopher-king, the transcendence of the Idea, the interiority of the concept, the republic of minds, the court of reason, the functionaries of thought, man as legislator and subject. The State’s pretensions to be a world order, and to root man.1

A number of Pater’s critics have sought in recent years to rehabilitate both the term ‘aestheticism’ and the category of the ‘aesthetic’ upon which it rests.2 Such commentators invariably seem to turn to Kant rather than Hegel as their philosophical mainstay, because Kant supposedly grants the aesthetic autonomy through his division of knowledge into the three categories of metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics.3 Nevertheless, the very fact that such rehabilitation is deemed necessary ref lects a deeply felt critical insecurity with reference to both aesthetics and the category of beauty. And despite rehabilitation attempts it remains incontrovertible that aestheticism is ideological, ref lecting the ideology of the aesthetic upon which it is based. As Terry Eagleton has argued, the category of the ‘aesthetic’ which Pater would inherit is ‘a bourgeois concept in the most literal historical sense, hatched and nurtured in the Enlightenment’: The emergence of the aesthetic as a theoretical category is closely bound up with the material process by which cultural production, at an early stage of bourgeois society, becomes ‘autonomous’ — autonomous, that is, of the various social functions which it has traditionally served. Once artefacts become commodities in the market place, they exist for nothing and nobody in particular, and can consequently be rationalized, ideologically speaking, as existing entirely and gloriously for themselves.4

Thus, aestheticism, as the doctrine of l’art pour l’art, is paradoxically the direct result of the commodification of the artefact. It is, in a precise Hegelian sense, the dialectical resolution of the category of the aesthetic, its historical self-determination; it is, as Peter Bürger argues, ‘the full unfolding of the phenomenon of art’.5 Indeed, we may further specify that aestheticism is thus directly related to Hegel’s death of art thesis: aestheticism is the result of that same Reflexionkultur which is responsible, according to Hegel, for art’s ‘dissolution’. It is the ‘autonomy’ of the artefact from the Idea which precipitates both aestheticism and the death of art. Nevertheless, if the category of the aesthetic is the construct of bourgeois ideology, it rigorously resists its ideological burden. As Eagleton has shown, the aesthetic is

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also ‘the implacable enemy of all dominative or instrumentalist thought’.6 Thus Adorno writes that ‘it is self-evident that nothing concerning art is self-evident anymore’.7 If the aesthetic is ideological, it also disrupts ideology, puts it into question. Its (relative) autonomy from the realms of politics, ethics, and metaphysics — in short, from the (Hegelian) Idea — ensures that it can criticize those ideologies from something of an exterior position. This is the kind of aestheticism which we may attribute to, for instance, Nietzsche, Bataille, or Blanchot; it is what Deleuze would call the ‘nomadic’ in Nietzsche, or Foucault the ‘transgressive’ in Bataille or Blanchot.8 All of this returns us to the central tension in Pater’s work, identified through the course of this study, between the idea of the greater reason and the ‘radical dualism’ of the Hegelian speculation. The greater reason, the idea which underwrites Pater’s ‘reconsideration’ of his aestheticism, the totalization of and by Hegel, and through which Pater sought to reintroduce his aestheticism into a Hegelian metaphysics and ethics, is both the product of ideology (the Idea), and its reproduction. As a system, it is underpinned by the ideological figure which is the Aufhebung, whose own selfdefinition ensures its completion, its perfection, its own narrative of totality. But the idea of Hegel’s ‘radical dualism’, that idea underwriting the Hegelian Aufhebung which the Aufhebung must repress in order to constitute itself as such, the idea which resists the Aufhebung and shows the dialectic to have always already deconstructed itself, rigorously resists its ideological burden. Hegel’s ‘radical dualism’ reveals the ideology of the ideology. Again, then, Pater’s critics are looking in the wrong places for the transgressive Pater. Pater himself cannot be ‘rehabilitated’ by the rehabilitation of aestheticism as he himself understood it, because aestheticism was, for Pater, indivisible from that form of Hegelianism which is itself the very definition of ideology. And so, if we turn to Pater now, we should turn not to the ideological Pater, but the Pater who identifies Hegel’s ‘radical dualism’ and affirms difference where Hegel only negates it. For the idea of the ‘radical dualism’ — the idea which deconstructs Hegelianism from within — is also the ‘nomadic’ or ‘transgressive’ thought which seeks to disrupt ideological coding or determination. Hegelianism and Ideology In his essay on ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, one of the most inf luential treatments of the subject, Louis Althusser defines ideology as the ‘representation of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence’.9 Humanity does not represent the ‘real’ relationship of individuals to the ‘real’ conditions of existence: it represents an ‘imaginary’ relationship to itself. In essence, Althusser holds that ideology functions as the Lacanian Imaginary, that it represents a Romantic image of self hood — which is to say, a unified, complete image of the subject as individual — back to itself: ‘ideology interpellates individuals as subjects’. Althusser continues by invoking the Lacanian rereading of the Hegelian subject as self-determining and free, insofar as the ideological recognition is ‘the function of misrecognition — méconnaissance’.10 Such (mis)recognition is, as we have shown, made intrinsic to Pater’s ‘reconsidered’ aestheticism in the mutual

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recognition described in the manuscript on moral philosophy, in which the subject (Pater’s lesser reason, Hegel’s free and self-determining consciousness) must recognize the ideological Subject (the State) in the same process as recognizing itself. Self-recognition, foundational to both Pater and Hegel, is only attained in and through recognition of the State, its power and authority: ‘The vast majority of (good) subjects work right ‘all by themselves’, i.e. by ideology (whose concrete forms are realized in the Ideological State Apparatuses). [. . .] They ‘recognize’ the existing state of affairs’. This ‘ideology of Absolute Knowledge’ is exactly the state of affairs which Hegel himself describes and makes possible in his Philosophy of Right.11 As Marx argues: Hegel’s true interest is not the philosophy of right but logic. The task of philosophy is not to understand how thought can be embodied in political determinations but to dissolve the existing political determinations into abstract ideas. [. . .] Logic does not provide a proof of the state but the state provides a proof of logic.12

Here, in this early article, Marx already identified the ideological nature of idealism. The Aufhebung itself is ideological, ‘mystifying’, as he would later write in Capital. Marx’s criticism is that Hegel’s logic is at all times teleological. It works backwards from the idea that ‘what is actual is rational’ making everything that is into the necessary result of the (greater) reason, legitimizing the status quo by seeking ‘to transfigure and to glorify the existing state of things’.13 The inevitable result of this is a restricted economy. As Althusser shows, ideology reproduces itself through the Ideological State Apparatuses. Numbered amongst such Apparatuses are not only the university — which is to say, the place where Pater made his career — but also the family and the church, the two institutions which Pater’s sittlich ‘reconsideration’ of his aestheticism sought to buttress. It is restricted economy in that it reproduces not only the means of production, but also the conditions of production and the relations of reproduction, thereby allowing itself to sustain itself, to repeat itself indefinitely.14 And again it does this in and through a philosophy of death, for whilst the particulars of the system (the lesser reasons) die, they are reborn as new ideological ‘subjects’, who take up their old places within the system and continue their work unabated. The restricted economy, in mastering death through the understanding, transmits ideology from one subject to another, reproducing itself indefinitely. Hegel is thus the very definition of a ‘State philosopher’. As Michel Foucault has shown, ‘there exists a system of power [. . .] that profoundly and subtly penetrates an entire social network’, a system of power which Hegel ratifies and makes possible.15 As Deleuze and Guattari argue, Hegelianism amounts to political quietism: ‘Always obey. The more you obey, the more you will be master, for you will only be obeying pure reason, in other words yourself ’.16 Hegel’s ‘cunning of reason’ catches itself in its own web: Ever since philosophy assigned itself the role of ground it has been giving the established powers its blessing, and tracing its doctrine of faculties onto the organs of State power. Common sense, the unity of the faculties at the centre constituted by the Cogito, is state consensus raised to the absolute. This

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Thus the architectural role played by philosophy, an architectural role which, as we have seen, is common to both Hegel and Pater, already implicates it within the dominating power structures which it ref lects and supports. And this architectural role is, at root, located in the subject itself, the Cogito, who in recognizing itself recognizes the State as absolute. Pater’s mature aestheticism adopts this function of recognition wholesale. Faced by the aporia which is the barred subject of the transcendental apperception, as described in the conclusion to the Renaissance, Pater’s response in the manuscript on moral philosophy was to socialize Kant along Hegelian lines. Pater’s appeal is to ‘common sense’, as that faculty which bridges the gap between theory and practice (MP, pp. 11r–v). As we have already said, Pater’s use of this term is knowingly ambiguous, the ‘common’ nature of this sense referring both to its social dimension and to its hereditary or ‘natural’ faculty. But it is also disingenuous. The term ‘common sense’ suggests that the faculty Pater has in mind is beyond or anterior to metaphysics, whereas it is in fact highly conditioned: ideological. As Deleuze has argued, such an appeal to ‘common sense’, which is by no means peculiar to Pater, is an appeal to something pre-ontological: Everybody knows, no one can deny, is the form of representation and the discourse of the representative. When philosophy rests its beginning upon such implicit or subjective presuppositions, it can claim innocence, since it has kept nothing back — except, of course, the essential — namely, the form of this discourse.18

That this appeal is itself always already ideological cannot be doubted: there is nothing ‘common’, nothing ‘natural’, about ‘common sense’. ‘Common sense’ is indivisible from a certain form of ‘recognition’, the fulcrum of both Hegel’s socialization of Kant (the identity of identity and non-identity) and Pater’s mature ‘reconsidered’ aestheticism. As Deleuze writes, recognition is ‘the common sense become philosophical’.19 That such recognition is ultimately used to extend the State and its power in and through thought — in and through ideology — is implied in the very concept, for ‘the form of recognition has never sanctioned anything but the recognisable and the recognised’.20 Pater’s ‘reconsidered’ aestheticism cannot therefore be characterized as transgressive. It is essentially conservative; which is to say, a restricted economy. Resting on and reinforcing Hegel’s Sittlichkeit, it is normative, denying — amongst other differences — Pater’s own sexuality. The ‘aesthetic’ underwriting Pater’s aestheticism is the Hegelian Idea, an Idea which, in determining being as presence, ‘sublates’ difference. In ‘recognizing’ difference, difference is negated and shackled into the law of identity. Pater’s ‘reconsidered’ aestheticism is, in this sense, itself the definition of ideology.

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The New Aestheticism The ‘rehabilitation’ of Pater has also seen the tentative development of a so-called ‘New Aestheticism’. As Nicholas Shrimpton puts it, ‘an unfashionable body of artistic and philosophical assumptions is being rediscovered’, ‘both as a mode of historical study and as a mode of contemporary critical thought’.21 The term ‘new aestheticism’ was effectively coined by Rei Terada in a review of Jonathan Loesberg’s Aestheticism and Deconstruction (1993),22 as, in Shrimpton’s summary, ‘the appropriate term for the kind of hermeneutically suspicious aesthetics that [. . .] Loesberg had been hoping for’, a hermeneutically suspicious aesthetics which had its roots in Pater.23 In fact, Loesberg had not himself used the term ‘new aestheticism’ as such. Loesberg sought to defend aestheticism and deconstruction against those critics who argued that both modes of thought alike privileged ‘art and literature by making them irrelevant to any social, political, philosophical, or intellectual concerns’.24 Whilst Loesberg is right to point out that neither aestheticism nor deconstruction remove themselves from political debates,25 he goes too far in claiming that neither movement is interested in reading literature. Loesberg substantiates this claim with reference to aestheticism only through omission (referring only to Pater’s Renaissance and not to his Appreciations or any of his posthumously collected essays on literary subjects). Moreover, as Derrida argues in ‘White Mythology’, deconstruction must be understood simultaneously as a reading of the ‘literariness’ of the philosophical text, and of the metaphysical, ontological, and ethical presuppositions of the literary text.26 As J. Hillis Miller has argued, Loesberg’s ‘New Aestheticism’ amounts to the attempt to recuperate ‘aestheticism’, the category of the ‘aesthetic’ upon which it is based, and, correspondingly, literature in general, from the claws of deconstruction.27 The mechanism underwriting this ‘rehabilitation’ of aestheticism requires careful elucidation. According to Shrimpton, the ‘old aestheticism’ of which Pater represents the zenith, arose out of ‘a creative misunderstanding of Kant’: The aesthetic, in that nineteenth-century view, was not a half-way house: a Kantian bridge or a post-structuralist space. It was simply a distinct category of mental activity, an independent mode of knowledge. Logic, Ethics and Aesthetics were three separate areas of philosophical enquiry. [. . .] A work which is offered or received as ‘art’ has, in this view, an obligation to be beautiful [. . .]. It has no obligation to be either true or morally good, those being the distinctive concerns of logic and ethics.28

In other words, Shrimpton turns to Kant’s division of the mental world into the three categories, both as an explanation of the roots of ‘aestheticism’ (l’art pour l’art as the autonomous aesthetic, justified in its autonomy through Kant’s Critiques) and as a recommendation for a new path critical theory should adopt. The new aestheticism is then a neo-Kantianism: Critics can and should pay attention to the socially, morally and intellectually referential qualities of literary and painterly texts — as long as they retain their sense of priority. These are real but merely secondary characteristics of the distinctive mode of discourse which they have chosen to consider. Art for Art’s

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Kant relieves (la relève) Hegel, as Pater relieves Derrida. The aporia facing modern critical theory — the ‘dead end’ which is deconstruction — is thus negated in its own archaeological and nostalgic movement (its own Aufhebung).30 In returning to the Kantian category of the aesthetic, the new aestheticism (re)presents the ‘aesthetic’, makes the aesthetic (self-)present again. That this ‘return to Kant’ is undertaken in the name of Pater is doubly perverse given the fact that for Pater, as we have shown, aestheticism is indivisible from Hegelianism, is itself structural in the Hegelian sense. For Pater, as for Hegel, the category of the aesthetic is only autonomous insofar as it is the Idea made sensible, its ‘freedom’ thus constituting its necessity, its structural role. One can detect a kind of Habermasian thinking underwriting the entire movement summed up by ‘new aestheticism’. The ‘return to Kant’ is the return to the terms of the ‘project of modernity’. Jürgen Habermas defines the latter as that Enlightenment philosophy — codified by Kant’s three Critiques — which sought to institutionalize the three separate Kantian categories of metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics, and to allow each to develop ‘according to their inner logic’ autonomously from one another.31 And whilst initially there would seem to be little kinship between Habermas and the new aestheticism (Habermas explicitly arguing against what he perceives to be the ‘autonomy of the aesthetic sphere’ and the ‘aestheticist conception of art’), Habermas is of the opinion that ‘instead of giving up modernity [. . .] we should learn from the mistakes of those extravagant projects’ (such as the aestheticism) ‘which have tried to negate modernity’.32 We should return to the project precisely because, in Habermas’s opinion, ‘the project of modernity has not yet been fulfilled’. In misunderstanding Pater’s aestheticism as an extreme institutionalization of the Kantian categories, Shrimpton’s ‘new aestheticism’, which acknowledges Eagleton’s aesthetic materialism yet remains hermeneutically suspicious, is in effect this project of enlightenment resurrected. This ‘new aestheticism’ is not quite as autonomous as it claims. The ‘aesthetic’ is still just as ideological as it always has been. Furthermore, in turning away from the other two Kantian categories, in explicitly isolating itself, the ‘new aestheticism’ becomes even more prone to ideological redeployment. As Jean-François Lyotard argues, with specific reference to Habermas’s response to postmodernity: ‘Postmodern knowledge is not simply a tool of the authorities; it refines our sensitivities to differences and reinforces our ability to tolerate the incommensurable. Its principle is not the expert’s homology, but the inventor’s paralogy’.33 The new aestheticism, in its specialization, amounts to just such a selective resuscitation of the ‘expert’s homology’. It constitutes yet another Ideal, and consequently another ressentiment against life. The new aestheticism’s hermeneutic suspicion is only a dissension away from a radicalization, and this is a dissension which is in effect little more than a reinvigoration of the hegemonic. Moreover, in actively removing the category of the ‘aesthetic’ from the ideological discourse which presupposes it and which it presupposes, the ‘new aestheticism’ is one more philosophy of death. It is another Hegelian pyramid, another incarceration, another retreating from the

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world without, another harnessing of death, denying life, in a philosophy of (the impossibility of ) death. Aestheticism and Fascism The problem facing a Hegelian aestheticism such as Pater’s — and likewise, the problem facing any ‘new aestheticism’ — is ultimately political. For aestheticism, insofar as it is Hegelian, insofar as it constitutes a philosophy of death, risks legitimating a certain kind of fascism.34 When Pater argues ‘that the end of life is not action but contemplation’ and urges his readers ‘to treat life in the spirit of art’ (AP, p. 62), he seeks not only to turn aestheticism itself into metaphysics and ethics but to make metaphysics and ethics aesthetic, to ‘aesthetize’ life itself. As Eagleton notes, ‘it is this line of descent, in one of its tributaries, which will lead to the Third Reich’.35 This complicity between aestheticism and fascism is twofold. On the one hand, fascism makes use of aesthetics in order to glamorize itself — to turn death and destruction, terror and torture, into aesthetic objects: The wholesale aestheticization of society had found its grotesque apotheosis for a brief moment in fascism, with its panoply of myths, symbols and orgiastic spectacles, its repressive expressivity, its appeals to passion, racial intuition, instinctual judgement, the sublimity of self-sacrifice and the pulse of the blood.36

But the complicity goes further than this. For, in treating life in the spirit of art, life is negated in the name of art. The fascist implications of such an ‘aestheticization’ have been famously examined by Walter Benjamin in ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’: ‘Fiat ars — pereat mundus’, says Fascism [. . .]. This is evidently the consummation of ‘l’art pour l’art’. Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object for contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art.37

‘Fiat ars — pereat mundus’: let art be created — let the world perish. Aestheticism, insofar as it replaces the world with the Idea, negates the world, denies it, and asserts its power over it. A philosophy of death — a philosophy which denies life, denies death, in the name of an Idea, and before which life is judged — is itself fascism. As Foucault writes in his preface to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, both aesthetics and politics must vigorously resist ‘the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behaviour, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us’.38 Ideological interpellation is such that it instils a ‘libidinal investment’ on the part of the subject in its own domination by the Subject.39 This ‘libidinal investment’ is ultimately the Hegelian notion of desire itself, that movement which involves the assimilation and negation of the other, of difference itself, under the imperialist sign of identity. Desire — death; death as

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desire, desire of death, of the death of the self and of the death of the other, all in the name of the ‘aesthetic’, in the name of the Idea. These notions are all uncomfortably close to Pater’s aestheticism, in which the ‘desire of physical beauty’ is inextricable from a certain ‘death’ (MS, p. 189). The Diaphaneitè and Difference Thus Pater’s aestheticism, in both its old and new form, is entrenched in ideology and carries with it the seeds of dangerous ideas: repression of alterity, negation of the self and other and the Idea above all. If we really wish to challenge outdated images of Pater and form an understanding of his work, we should not shy away from this facet of it, but we must also recognize that which was resistant to this codification; namely, that thing he identified as the ‘radical dualism’, underwriting dialectics and undoing it from within. As Deleuze has shown, difference in itself is the impossible ground of philosophy, its repressed kernel: Difference is not and cannot be thought in itself, so long as it is subject to the requirements of representation. [. . .] It seems that it can become thinkable only when tamed — in other words, when subject to the four iron collars of representation: identity in the concept, opposition in the predicate, analogy in judgement and resemblance in perception.40

Hegelianism represents the zenith of this repression of difference, for in determining difference as contradiction Hegel reintegrates difference into identity. As Adorno argues, philosophy (insofar as it is dialectical, idealist, Hegelian) has ‘got into a rut, into the habit of thinking that without such a structure of identity there could be no philosophy’.41 And, as we have seen, it is the same operation which Pater makes structural to his ‘reconsidered’ aestheticism. He too relies upon subject–object identity as the fulcrum of his aestheticism, and he too necessarily determines difference as contradiction, in order that he might thereby deny that difference, deny even his own sexuality, and refashion himself as a proponent of a sittlich Hegelianism which was essentially Christian and conservative.42 Unsurprisingly, then, Pater’s use and negation of difference in his aestheticism (his harnessing of the power of death through the understanding) ultimately produced the same results as Hegel’s did, another conservative and restricted economy, another Hegelian pyramid, denying life and death in the name of an impossible Idea. Had Pater only had the courage of his convictions, had he taken Hegel’s advice to ‘tarry with the negative’ seriously (more seriously than Hegel), had he not sought in his reconsideration of his aestheticism merely to totalize, to acquiesce in ‘facile orthodoxy’ (R, p. 237), had he lingered with ‘the history of philosophy [. . .] written in a destructive spirit’ (HP, p. 20v), he would no doubt today occupy an even more important place in the history of British and European intellectual life than he currently enjoys. If only Pater had published the manuscript on the history of philosophy, and had more closely examined Hegel’s ‘radical dualism’, if only he had followed the path which he himself opened and pushed the dialectic through beyond its limit, he would no doubt be remembered today as being a

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significantly more radical and transgressive thinker. For Pater’s identification of a ‘radical dualism’ in Hegel’s system is the identification of the f law in the dialectic (a f law most obviously demonstrated at the point of death), that which ‘always already’ deconstructs the dialectic. The ‘radical dualism’ is a moment without reserve. Here then, in his post-Hegelian critique of Hegel and the dialectic, Pater achieves the impossible and breaks with the dialectic as a method. Each of the post-Hegelian thinkers to whom we have turned in order to elucidate Pater’s own post-Hegelianism has a different name for this thing which escapes dialectics, the ‘radical dualism’. For Nietzsche it is the ‘gay science’ (GSc, § 327). For Bataille it is the excess which opens up the general economy. For Foucault it is the transgressive. For Derrida it is différance or the trace. For Deleuze it is the rhizome, ‘nomad thought’, schizoanalysis. Blanchot has many names for it: it is the time of the disaster; it is ‘le pas au-delà’; it is the work of art as désoeuvrement; it is writing as the ‘neuter’.43 Rereading Pater’s early anti-Hegelianism in the light of his identification of Hegel’s ‘radical dualism’, we may detect the last of Blanchot’s terms, the ‘neuter’, underwriting Pater’s discussion of his ‘aesthetic hero’ in ‘Diaphaneitè’ (1864): ‘Here there is a kind of moral sexlessness, a kind of impotence, an ineffectual wholeness of nature, yet with a divine beauty and significance of its own’ (MS, p. 253). Postulating the diaphanous individual as a final term beyond the Hegelian trinity of ‘the saint, the artist, [. . .] the speculative thinker’ (p. 247), Pater in effect situated himself in this text firmly as an anti-Hegelian. But if the diaphaneitè is radical, it is perhaps not radical enough. Insofar as the diaphanous type was seen to relieve (la relève) the Hegelian philosopher, insofar as aesthetics relieves philosophy, and insofar as Pater himself relieves Hegel, this vision was still in essence dialectical, and thus Pater’s efforts to go ‘beyond’ Hegel in this essay must be deemed a failure. Pater’s ‘diaphaneitè’ is not yet immune to dialectical reappropriation; it is not yet post-Hegelian. It still clings tenaciously to certain key Hegelian themes, such as the concept of disinterestedness: ‘it seeks to value everything at its eternal worth, not adding to it, or taking from it, the amount of inf luence it may have for or against its own special scheme of life’ (MS, p. 248). It is still determined throughout by the Idea: The artist and he who has treated life in the spirit of art desires only to be shown to the world as he really is; as he becomes nearer and nearer to perfection, the veil of an outer life not simply expressive of the inward becomes thinner and thinner. (p. 249)

The diaphaneitè, as the Hegelian Idea made sensible, is still nihilistic in Nietzsche’s sense, still denying life. Edward Caird’s summary of the paper as a ‘hymn of praise to the Absolute’ in thus hardly surprising.44 Most problematically, Pater explicitly denies the revolutionary potential of the diaphaneitè: Revolution is often impious. They who prosecute revolution have to violate again and again the instinct of reverence. That is inevitable, since after all progress is a kind of violence. But in this nature revolutionism is softened, harmonised, subdued as by distance. [. . .] Doubtless the chief vein of the life

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Conclusion of humanity could hardly pass through it. Not by it could the progress of the world be achieved. (MS, pp. 252–53)

A certain elitisim underwrites Pater’s whole discussion. Whilst there is an echo of Marx — an echo indeed of a radical Hegel — in Pater’s criticism of Victorian alienation (‘our collective life, pressing equally on every part of every one of us, reduces nearly all of us to the level of a colourless uninteresting existence’ (p. 252)), and whilst we are told that ‘a majority’ of diaphaneitès would constitute ‘the regeneration of the world’ (p. 254), we are also told that the majority of humanity could never attain the status of the diaphaneitè, not least of all because the diaphaneitè is an evolutionary oddity, a naturally superior being: ‘The character we mean to indicate achieves this perfect life by a happy gift of nature, without any struggle at all’ (pp. 248–49). Pater’s diaphaneitè is in this sense reminiscent of Nietzsche’s Übermensch and of Deleuze and Guattari’s attempts to socialize this potentially radical figure in Anti-Oedipus.45 Nevertheless, and in spite of these reservations, if the text is reread in the light of Pater’s identification of Hegel’s ‘radical dualism’, we discover something more interesting at work. We are told that the diaphanous type cannot properly be considered a ‘type’, because the economy cannot make use of them, cannot rationalize them: It crosses rather than follows the main current of the world’s life. The world has no sense fine enough for those evanescent shades, which fill up the blanks between contrasted types of character — delicate provision in the organisation of the moral world for the transmission to every part of it of the life quickened at single points! For this nature there is no place ready in its affections. This colourless, unclassified purity of life it can neither use for its service, nor contemplate as an ideal. (MS, p. 248)

The economy’s restrictiveness cannot sublate the diaphaneitè because it is not useful: it is what Blanchot would call ‘désoeuvrement’ — workless, beyond work (dialectics, history, restricted economy).46 The diaphaneitè is essentially excessive, beyond the restricted economy.47 Insofar as the diaphaneitè does not have its place within the system, it does not exist as such. It cannot be named because to name it would always already be to restrict it, to make it present, to present itself to itself for itself as such. Needless to say, here we find ourselves a long way from Kant’s transcendental apperception, foundational to Pater’s ‘reconsidered’ aestheticism, and a long way from the structural understanding of the world as restricted economy in the essay on ‘Style’. Operating ‘beyond’ the restricted economy makes the diaphaneitè into a ghostly figure. As Gerald Monsman has shown, the members of the Old Mortality often discussed the topic of ghosts,48 and in Pater’s diaphaneitè this ghost attains a revolutionary quality. It is the kind of non-dialectical force which cannot be defined, the Derridean trace which constantly eludes Hegelian sublimation: One does not know what it is, what it is precisely. [. . .] One does not know: not out of ignorance, but because this non-object, this non-present present, this being-there of an absent or departed one no longer belongs to knowledge.49

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Derrida is speaking of the ‘spectre’ of Marx (both the ‘spectre’ of Marxism haunting nineteenth-century Europe and the ‘spectre’ of Marx haunting modern Europe), but the point is equally valid with reference to Pater’s diaphaneitè. Again, then, the figure of the ghost is also the figure of Blanchot’s ‘neuter’: The Neuter, [. . .] that which conceals itself in concealing and concealing even the act of concealing, with nothing of what disappears in this way appearing, an effect reduced to the absence of effect: the neuter, in the articulation of the visible-invisible, [. . .] a response that, immediately and unnoticeably, although appearing to welcome the question, modifies its structure by its refusal not only to choose, but to submit itself to the possibility of a choice between two terms.50

The ‘neuter’ is resistant to the Aufhebung.51 In its movement it does not resolve itself, does not determine itself as such, but remains resistant to categorization, to codification, to the law of identity. The ‘neuter’, as Pater’s diaphaneitè, is in this very real sense neutral; it is, as Pater says, ‘sexless’ (MS, p. 253), which is to say, neither masculine nor feminine, positive nor negative, one nor the other. It eschews hierarchical binaries as the root of ‘recognition’, of negation, of ideological interpellation. The ‘neuter’ is difference in itself, difference which is not determinable and does not determine itself but affirms itself in and as difference.52 In the way that the diaphaneitè ‘crosses rather than follows the main current of the world’s life’ (MS, p. 248), in the way that it resists the prevailing current (which is always already that current which seeks to negate difference in favour of identity, which is to say, on the side of the State), it has the power for very real revolutionary action. In this sense, Pater’s diaphaneitè has its counterpoint in Walter Benjamin’s messianism.53 Benjamin’s own post-Hegelianism came to identify Hegelian progressivism (a progressivism which, as we have seen, Pater’s ‘reconsidered’ aestheticism took as gospel) as the cause of ideological repression. Benjamin’s Arcades Project, which was left unfinished at the time of his death, was conceived as a retort to idealist progressivism, its aim being ‘to root out every trace of “development” from the image of history’.54 A developmental or progressivist conception of history — an essentially Hegelian vision of world-history as the gradual teleological evolution of humanity, which merely cements the power of the State — was deemed by Benjamin not to be historical, but rather mythological. Susan Buck-Morss explains: Within myth, the passage of time takes the form of predetermination [. . .]. Strictly speaking, myth and history are incompatible. The former dictates that [. . .] nothing truly new can happen, whilst the concept of history implies the possibility of human inf luence upon events, and with it, the moral and political responsibility of people as conscious agents to shape their own destiny.55

It is precisely the same operation, the disruption of myth and the making of history, which Pater’s description of the diaphaneitè opens up: namely, the passage to the general economy.56 This moment which disrupts the restricted economy, which resists ideological coding, which deterritorializes, this moment of ‘radical dualism’, is what Benjamin calls the ‘Jetztzeit’, the ‘time filled by the presence of the now’.57 The diaphaneitè who ‘crosses rather than follows the main current of the world’s

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life’ (MS, p. 248), far from remaining a disinterested spectator, as Pater argues here in ‘Diaphaneitè’, may in fact cause a rupture in that ‘current’. As Benjamin notes, if such a character ‘remains in control of his powers’, they may ‘blast open the continuum of history’.58 Pater deliberately eschews this revolutionary potential for his diaphaneitè. The young Pater had not yet grasped the ‘radical dualism’ which would permit the truly revolutionary nature of his diaphaneitè to be revealed, either to himself or to his audience. Pater was, in 1864, still a little too Hegelian, not revolutionary enough. But by the time of the manuscript on the history of philosophy and his identification of Hegel’s ‘radical dualism’ Pater had caught hold of the idea that would permit that passage beyond, that step (not) beyond, even if he was unable to take it. It is in the impossible space opened up by the ‘radical dualism’ (impossible insofar as the economy in its restrictiveness cannot account for it) that the revolution comes to be made. And ultimately, for Benjamin as for Pater, it is the aesthetic moment which offers this radical space. It is on this basis that we should turn to Pater today. We should turn to him for the same reasons as one turns to any post-Hegelian thinker. We should turn to his post-Hegelian writings (the manuscript on the history of philosophy, the imaginary portraits) in order to find ways to resist ideology, to resist interpellation. We should turn to his post-Hegelian writings in seeking to conceive of the world not as necessary, but as historically determined: a determination which can and must be changed. In short, we should turn to him for the same reasons as we turn to Hegel, not for the Aufhebung, but for that which escapes the Aufhebung. We should turn to Pater for his diagnosis of that ‘radical dualism’ which opens up a general economy where before there had been only a restricted one. We should turn to the Pater who does not deny difference, does not seek to negate it, to sublate it through the movements of the dialectic, but who affirms difference in itself and for itself. We should turn, not to the conservative or the negative thinker, but to the radical and affirmative Pater: Pater the ‘radical dualist’. Notes to the Conclusion 1. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 27. 2. See for instance Angela Leighton, ‘Aesthetic Conditions: Returning to Pater’, in Transparencies of Desire, ed. by Brake, Higgins, and Williams, pp. 12- 23. 3. That such a figure of an ‘autonomous aesthetic’ is itself an ideological construct, that it is in fact not even present in Kant as such, has been argued convincingly by Paul de Man in ‘Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant’, in Aesthetic Ideology, pp. 70–90. On the determining role of the third critique in Kant’s overall philosophy, see Deleuze, Kant’s Critical Philosophy, pp. 39–56. 4. Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, pp. 8–9. 5. Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. by Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 17. 6. Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, p. 9. 7. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 1. 8. See Gilles Deleuze, ‘Nomad Thought’, in Nietzsche: Critical Assessments, ed. by Conway, iv, 78–85, and Michel Foucault’s essays on Bataille and Blanchot: ‘A Preface to Transgression’, in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, pp. 29–52, and ‘Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from the Outside’, trans. by Brian Massumi, in Foucault/Blanchot (New York: Zone Books, 1990), pp. 7–58.

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9. Althusser, ‘Ideology’, p. 162. 10. Althusser, ‘Ideology’, pp. 170, 172 11. Althusser, ‘Ideology’, p. 181. 12. Marx, Early Writings, p. 73. 13. Marx, Capital, i, 29. 14. See Althusser, ‘Ideology’, pp. 128–62. 15. Foucault and Deleuze, ‘Intellectuals and Power’, p. 207. 16. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 414. 17. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 414–15. 18. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 165. On ‘common sense’ in Kant, see Kant’s Critical Philosophy, pp. 16–20, 30–32, 41–42. 19. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 167. See also The Logic of Sense, pp. 89–93. 20. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 170. 21. Nicholas Shrimpton, ‘The Old Aestheticism and the New’, Literature Compass, 2 (2005), 1–16 (p. 1). 22. Rei Terada, ‘The New Aestheticism’, Diacritics, 23.4 (1993), 42–61 (p. 43). 23. Shrimpton, p. 8. 24. Loesberg, p. 75. 25. See particularly Loesberg’s reading of Pater’s conclusion to the Renaissance as an ideological attack on empiricism in Aestheticism and Deconstruction, pp. 18–23. 26. See Jacques Derrida, ‘White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy’, in Margins of Philosophy, pp. 207–71. 27. See J. Hillis Miller, Topographies (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 291–94; ‘Is Deconstruction an Aestheticism?’, Nineteenth-Century Prose, 20.2 (1993), 23–41; and ‘Response to Jonathan Loesberg’, Victorian Studies, 37.1 (1993), 123–28. 28. Shrimpton, p. 13. 29. Shrimpton, p. 15. 30. For the view that deconstruction is a ‘dead end’ which necessarily justifies the emergence of a ‘new aestheticism’, see John Joughin and Simon Malpas’s introduction to The New Aestheticism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), pp. 1–19. 31. See Jürgen Habermas, ‘Modernity versus Postmodernity’, trans. by Seyla Ben-Habib, New German Critique, 22 (1981), 3–14 (pp. 8–9). This essay, delivered as the James Lecture of the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University on March 5 1981, is also known as ‘Modernity: An Unfinished Project’. 32. Habermas, pp. 8, 11. 33. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, p. xxv. 34. Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, insofar as it justifies the State as ideological Subject, may itself be argued to constitute the philosophical architecture of fascism: see H. C. Graef, ‘From Hegel to Hitler’, Contemporary Review, 158 (1940), 550–56, and the defence against this position by Houlgate in his Introduction to Hegel, pp. 181–210. 35. Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, p. 369. 36. Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, p. 373. 37. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations, pp. 211–44 (p. 35). Donoghue also reads Pater’s aestheticism alongside this passage in his Lover of Strange Souls, pp. 286–87. 38. Michel Foucault, preface to Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, pp. xiii–xvi (pp. xiv–xv). See also Georges Bataille, ‘The Psychological Structure of Fascism’, in Visions of Excess, pp. 137–60 (pp. 154–56). 39. On ‘libidinal investment’, see Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, pp. 94–102. Compare Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 31: After centuries of exploitation, why do people still tolerate being humiliated and enslaved, to such a point, indeed, that they actually want humiliation and slavery not only for others but for themselves? [. . . We need] an explanation of fascism [. . .] that will take their desires into account, an explanation formulated in terms of desire.

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40. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 330. 41. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 155. 42. Perhaps surprisingly, Eagleton defends Hegel’s idea of Sittlichkeit against a postmodernism which he deems politically unengaged: Concrete ethical life, Hegel’s Sittlichkeit, means negotiating and renegotiating, from one specific situation to another, [. . .] with all the intense political conf lict this entails. It also means critically scrutinizing the whole concept of ‘self realization’, based as it has historically been on a clearly inadequate productivism. (The Ideology of the Aesthetic, pp. 412–13) If the first sentence is Hegel’s Sittlichkeit, the second, somewhat charitable reading of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, is pure Eagleton. 43. On the ‘trace’, see ‘Living On’, p. 82, and Dissemination, p. 8: ‘the route which has been covered must cancel itself out. But this subtraction leaves a mark of erasure, a remainder which is added to the subsequent text and which cannot be completely summed up within it’. On the ‘rhizome’, see Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 3–28, and on ‘schizoanalysis’, see AntiOedipus, pp. 21–23. 44. Edward Caird, quoted by Monsman, ‘Old Mortality’, p. 385. 45. Nietzsche explicitly places Zarathustra’s discourse into the milieu of Darwinian theory in ‘Zarathustra’s Prologue’, § 3. See also EH, ‘Why I Write Such Good Books’, § 1, and TI, ‘Skirmishes of an Untimely Man’, § 14. In recent years, much critical attention has focused on Nietzsche’s (mis)reading of Darwin: see Keith Ansell Pearson, ‘Nietzsche contra Darwin’, in Nietzsche: Critical Assessments, ed. by Conway, iv, 7–31, and John Richardson, Nietzsche’s New Darwinism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 46. On Blanchot’s concept of ‘désoeuvrement’, see Paul Davies, ‘The Work and the Absence of the Work’, in Maurice Blanchot: The Demand of Writing, ed. by Carolyn Bailey Gill (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 91–107. 47. The diaphaneitè is in this sense often spoken of as being a code for Pater’s homosexuality: see Davis, pp. 266–71, and Dellamora, pp. 58–68. 48. See Monsman, ‘Old Mortality’, p. 388. Indeed, S. R. Brooke (the same Brooke who misunderstood Pater’s concept of ‘subjective immortality’ so completely) delivered a paper on ghosts on 6 June 1863. 49. Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx, trans. by Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 5. 50. Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond, p. 77. 51. See Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond, p. 75: ‘It neutralizes, neutralizes (itself ), thus evokes (does nothing but evoke) the movement of the Aufhebung, but if it suspends and retains, it retains only the movement of suspending’. 52. See also Blanchot’s essay on ‘The Narrative Voice’, trans. by Lydia Davis, in The Station Hill Blanchot Reader, ed. by Quasha, pp. 459–69. For an instructive comparison between Blanchot’s concept of the ‘neuter’ and Levinas’s ‘il y a’, see Simon Critchley, ‘Il y a — A Dying Stronger than Death (Blanchot with Levinas)’, Oxford Literary Review, 15 (1993), 81–131. 53. Kit Andrews has gone some way down this road in his essay on ‘Walter Pater and Walter Benjamin: The Diaphanous Collector and the Angel of History’, in Transparencies of Desire, ed. by Brake, Higgins, and Williams, pp. 150–60. 54. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (London: Harvard University Press, 2002), H˚ 16, p. 845. 55. Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (London: MIT Press, 1991), p. 78. 56. Precisely where Pater would sit on the question of myth is not entirely clear, Iser, for instance, arguing against the idea that Pater’s aestheticism might be considered a ‘resurrection’ of myth, in The Aesthetic Moment, pp. 105–27. 57. Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations, pp. 245–55 (pp. 252–53). 58. Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, p. 253.

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Secondary Literature Adams, James Eli, ‘Gentleman, Dandy, Priest: Manliness and Social Authority in Pater’s Aestheticism’, ELH 59.2 (1992), 441–66 —— ‘Pater’s Muscular Aestheticism’, in Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age, ed. by Donald E. Hall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 215–38 Adorno, Theodor, Aesthetic Theory, trans. by Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: Continuum, 2004) —— Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, trans. by E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 2005) —— Negative Dialectics, trans. by E. B. Ashton (London: Continuum, 2007) Agamben, Giorgio, Language and Death: The Place of Negativity, trans. by Karen E. Pinkus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991) Althusser, Louis, For Marx, trans. by Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 1997) —— ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. by Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), pp. 127–93 —— Reading Capital, trans. by Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 1997) Anderson, Linda, Autobiography (London: Routledge, 2001) Andrews, Kit, ‘Walter Pater and Walter Benjamin: The Diaphanous Collector and the Angel of History’, in Walter Pater: Transparencies of Desire, ed. by Laurel Brake, Lesley Higgins, and Carolyn Williams (Greensboro: ELT Press, 2002), pp. 150–60 Aristotle, Metaphysics, trans. by W. D. Ross, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. by Jonathan Barnes, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), ii, 1552–1728 Armstrong, Isobel, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (London: Routledge, 1993) Arnold, Matthew, ‘Emerson’, in The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. by R. H. Super, 11 vols (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1960–78), x, 165–86 —— ‘On Translating Homer’, in The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. by R. H. Super, 11 vols (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1960–78), xi, 97–216 Bachelard, Gaston, Poetics of Space, trans. by Maria Jolas, in Rethinking Architecture, ed. by Neil Leach (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 86–97 Bann, Stephen, ‘Pater’s Reception in France: A Provisional Account’, in Walter Pater: Transparencies of Desire, ed. by Laurel Brake, Lesley Higgins, and Carolyn Williams (Greensboro: ELT Press, 2002), pp. 55–62

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INDEX ❖

absolute negation 7, 61–62, 84 abstract negativity 6–7, 61–62, 84, 85, 100 actus signatus 38–40 see also semiology Adorno, Theodor 17 n. 29, 25, 74 n. 65, 100, 142, 148 aesthetic, the 12, 23, 25, 26–27, 42–43, 48 n. 79, 82, 93, 101–02, 141–42, 145–46, 147–48, 149, 152, 152 n. 3 aestheticism 4–5, 6, 7, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 21, 27, 29, 30–31, 33, 34–36, 37, 40, 41, 42–43, 52, 55, 60, 61–62, 65, 77, 78, 82, 83–84, 90, 91, 93–94, 95, 101, 102–03, 104, 105, 106, 111 n. 75, 113 n. 99, 115 n. 140, 125, 133, 135, 141–42, 144, 145–46, 147–48, 149, 150, 152 see also New Aestheticism affirmation 3, 80, 96, 98–100, 106, 111 n. 68, 133, 135, 142, 151, 152 see also negation Agamben, Giorgio 72 n. 32 Aion 70, 76 n. 86, 109 n. 33 alienation 111 n. 75, 147, 150 alterity 15, 20 n. 80, 64, 99, 100, 148 Althusser, Louis 56, 72 n. 31 ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus’ 142–43 Anderson, Linda 118 Andrews, Kit 154 n. 53 aphorism 80–81, 109 n. 39 Apollo, see Dionysus apperception, transcendental 5, 23, 35, 37, 44 n. 14, 83, 118, 122–23, 144, 150 archaeology 7, 50–51, 82, 97, 100, 131, 146 architecture 25–26, 40–41, 48 n. 69, 50, 61, 83, 101, 118, 126, 134 in Hegel’s system 25–26, 41, 125–26. in Pater’s aesthetics 25–26, 40–41 see also labyrinth, pyramid, symbolic art, tower of Babel Armstrong, Isobel 23 Arnold, Matthew 23–24, 27, 44 n. 18, 50, 90, 107 n. 6 ‘On Translating Homer’ 120 Aristotle 36, 37, 98 art 22–23, 25–27, 42–43, 79, 93, 112 n. 84, 126, 147, 149 ascesis 13, 55, 77, 103, 104–05, 115 n. 137 Aufhebung 1, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 11, 12, 15, 17 n. 27, 19 n. 63, 23, 26, 37, 39, 40, 43, 44 n. 14, 47 n. 55, 49, 51, 55, 56, 57, 60, 62, 63, 64–67, 68–70, 74 n. 65,

74 n. 68, 96, 99, 112 n. 94, 115 n. 132, 115 n. 135, 118, 119–20, 129, 142, 143, 146, 148–49, 151, 152 Aurelius, Marcus 17 n. 25, 112 n. 94 autobiography 81, 117, 118–25, 126, 127, 129, 130, 132, 133, 134, 135 n. 2, 139 n. 68 Bachelard, Gaston 110 n. 65 bad conscience (Nietzsche) 13, 77, 89, 103–04, 111 n. 79 Bann, Stephen 109 n. 27 Barnett, Stewart 42 barred subject (Lacan) 122–23 Barthes, Roland 124 Bass, Alan 17 n. 27 Bataille, Georges 6–7, 12, 15, 20 n. 83, 45 n. 28, 46 n. 53, 49, 50, 53, 56–57, 60–61, 62, 64, 66, 69, 70, 71 n. 2, 72 n. 32, 73 n. 41, 74 n. 67, 75 n. 72, 76 n. 85, 82, 84, 85, 93, 96, 98, 99, 105, 109 n. 27, 125, 137 n. 36, 141, 149 see also eroticism, excess, restricted economy Baudelaire, Charles 75 n. 72 Baudrillard, Jean 71 n. 7 beauty 2, 9, 24–25, 35, 43, 48 n. 79, 82, 105, 106, 110 n. 51, 141, 148 Becker-Leckrone, Megan 138 n. 59 Beiser, Frederick 26, 45 n. 31, 86, 111 n. 81, 141, 148 Benjamin, Walter 15, 20 n. 83, 25, 45 n. 28, 109 n. 27, 113 n. 99, 136 n. 17, 151–52, 154 n. 53 Arcades Project 151 ‘The Task of the Translator’ 120, 136 n. 14 ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ 147 Benson, A. C. 2–3, 8–9 Berlin, Isaiah 115 n. 134 Bildung 23, 30, 35, 44 n. 15, 52, 54, 58, 66, 67, 127 Bildungsroman 23, 44 n. 15, 79–80 Bizzzotto, Eliza 79 Blanchot, Maurice 15, 18 n. 48, 20 n. 83, 50, 56, 66–67, 68–69, 70, 75 n. 71, 75 n. 73, 75 n. 81, 76 n. 85, 80, 106, 109 n. 27, 109 n. 33, 109 n. 35, 112 n. 94, 124–25, 127, 133, 138 n. 50, 139 n. 73, 141, 144, 150–51, 154 n. 46, 154 n. 51, 154 n. 52 The Instant of my Death 76 n. 83, 109 n. 34, 138 n. 50, 138 n. 58 ‘Literature and the Right to Death’ 124 The Madness of the Day 109 n. 34 L’Arrêt de Mort 138 n. 58

170

Index

Le pas au-delà 66 see also désouvrement, le pas au-delà, neuter Bloom, Harold 22, 136 n. 17 body, the 4, 17 n. 23, 17 n. 24, 17 n. 25, 28, 74 n. 68, 84, 105, 110 n. 62, 130, 132–33 Bonaparte, Napoleon 86, 132 Bouchard, Donald F., and Sherry Simon 114 n. 127 bourgeoisie 11, 34, 56, 111 n. 75, 141 Bradley, Francis Herbert 30–31, 46 n. 44, 46 n. 48, 46 n. 49 Brake, Laurel 108 n. 13, 108 n. 19 Breugel, Pieter 138 n. 46 brissure (Derrida) 7, 18 n. 42 Bridgwater, Patrick 94 Brooke, S. R. 44 n. 9, 59, 60, 154 n. 48 Browning, Robert 79, 108 n. 19 Buck-Morss, Susan 151 Bürger, Peter 141 Bywater, Ingram 21 Caird, Edward 21, 43 n. 7, 149 capitalism 33–34, 56, 106, 141 see also speculation Carson, Edward 129 categorical imperative (Kant) 28–29, 31 centripetal and centrifugal 74 n. 68 Cezanne, Paul 45 n. 24 Chew, Samuel 120 Christianity 3, 8–10, 11, 17 n. 25, 18 n. 45, 18 n. 47, 18 n. 48, 33, 59, 74 n. 68, 75 n. 70, 78, 86, 88, 89, 92, 93, 95–96, 98, 99, 102, 103, 104–05, 112 n. 93, 143, 148 chronos 68, 70, 75 n. 80, 76 n. 86 class 111 n. 75 classical art 4, 26 see also sculpture cogito, see subjectivity College of Sociology, the 45 n. 28, 109 n. 27 Colon, John 2 common sense 28, 30, 33, 46 n. 38, 59, 153 n. 18 and recognition 143–44 see also custom conscience 28–29 contradiction 63, 99–100, 106–07, 148 culture 7, 30, 50–52, 53, 57, 58–59, 71 n. 13, 101, 107 n. 9 cunning of reason (Hegel) 143 custom 28–29, 32–34, 50, 59, 82, 101, 104 see also Sittlichkeit Criminal Law Amendment Act (1885) 108 n. 13, 138 n. 54 Croce, Benedetto 45 n. 31 darwinism 46 n. 52, 154 n. 45 Davis, Michael F. 138 n. 53 death 5, 6, 7, 15, 25, 50–52, 58–60, 63, 64, 66, 69, 70–71, 71 n. 7, 71 n. 9, 71 n. 15, 71 n. 16,

72 n. 29, 72 n. 32, 73 n. 50, 75 n. 81, 76 n. 83, 80, 82–84, 87, 88–89, 91–92, 98, 101–03, 105, 109 n. 33, 109 n. 34, 110 n. 51, 124, 127, 129–30, 133, 134, 138 n. 46, 138 n. 52, 138 n. 58, 147–48, 149 the instant of death 68–71, 129 see also death-drive, death of art, philosophy of death death-drive 57–58, 82, 110 n. 49 death of art 26–27, 42–43, 45 n. 31, 141 decadence 30, 46 n. 45, 77, 95, 103, 105, 114 n. 120 see also nihilism deconstruction, see poststructuralism DeLaura, David 8, 19 n. 51 Deleuze, Gilles 3, 8, 9, 15, 18 n. 62, 20 n. 83, 44 n. 14, 46 n. 41, 63, 68, 70, 75 n. 80, 76 n. 86, 80–81, 88, 92, 95, 96, 99, 106, 107 n. 3, 107 n. 10, 109 n. 27, 109 n. 33, 115 n. 142, 133, 139 n. 72, 141, 144, 148, 149, 152 n. 3, 153 n. 18 and Félix Guattari 10–11, 18 n. 56, 46 n. 53, 78, 107 n. 8, 109 n. 40, 143–44, 153 n. 39, 154 n. 43 Anti-Oedipus 147, 150 de Man, Paul 38, 120, 121, 123, 129, 136 n. 17, 152 n. 3 Derrida, Jacques 6, 7, 8, 13, 14, 15, 17 n. 27, 18 n. 42, 20 n. 76, 20 n. 83, 21, 41, 42, 46 n. 53, 47 n. 55, 47 n. 59, 56, 57, 60, 61, 62, 64, 71 n. 2, 71 n. 13, 71 n. 15, 72 n. 34, 73 n. 38, 74 n. 62, 74 n. 67, 76 n. 83, 76 n. 85, 83–84, 97, 100, 102, 117, 118, 119, 120, 124, 125, 134–35, 136 n. 4, 136 n. 10, 136 n. 13, 138 n. 52, 139 n. 68, 139 n. 74, 146, 149, 150–51, 154 n. 43 The Truth in Painting 138 n. 60 ‘White Mythology’ 145 see also brissure, parerga desire 15, 32, 82–83, 98, 100, 110 n. 51, 110 n. 53, 110 n. 57, 110 n. 58, 147–48, 153 n. 39 désouvrement (Blanchot) 149, 150, 154 n. 46 destructive writing 14, 119, 134–35, 148 dialectics, see Aufhebung difference 13, 15, 42, 63, 64, 68, 78, 97, 98–100, 106, 133, 142, 144, 148–52 Ding-an-sich, see things-in-themselves Dionysus 93–100, 105, 111 n. 68, 111 n. 75 and Apollo 89, 93–95, 101, 113 n. 100, 113 n. 105, 130 disinterestedness (Kant) 105–06, 115 n. 139, 149, 152 Donoghue, Denis 51, 153 n. 37 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 138 n. 50 Notes from the Underground 106 Dowling, Linda 7, 50, 60 dramatic monologue 79, 108 n. 19 Du Bos, Charles 109 n. 27 duty 27, 28, 34, 46 n. 49, 52 Eagleton, Terry 23, 24, 141–42, 146, 147, 154 n. 42 ekphrasis 138 n. 60 Ellman, Richard 114 n. 121

Index Emerson, Ralph Waldo 77–78, 107 n. 6, 107 n. 9, 107 n. 11 empiricism 153 n. 25 Englishness 78 Enlightenment, the 4, 86–88, 101–03, 141, 146 see also French Revolution, Reign of Terror, selfconsciousness epitaph 129–30 Erinnerung (recollection) 39, 47 n. 65 see also Gedächtnis Erkenntnis, see recognition Ernst, Carl William 30, 125 eroticism 98–99 eternal return 10, 19 n. 56, 106, 107 n. 10, 112 n. 88, 132–33, 139 n. 69, 139 n. 71 ethics 5, 12, 27, 34, 35, 141, 145, 147 see also morality, Sittlichkeit Evans, Lawrence 125 evil 4, 53, 66, 75 n. 72, 103, 107 excess 6-7, 49, 50, 53, 56-57, 62, 64, 66, 69, 70, 74 n. 67, 80, 85, 93, 96, 98, 100, 105, 149, 150 see also general economy faith 28, 34, 47 n. 55, 60 family 33, 51–52, 103, 106, 143 fascism 147–48, 153 n. 34, 153 n. 39 Fellows, Jay 75 n. 74 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 22, 111 n. 81, 112 n. 92 fort-da game 57–58 Foucault, Michel 14, 15, 17 n. 26, 20 n. 83, 66, 75 n. 74, 100, 109 n. 27, 114 n. 120, 114 n. 127, 139 n. 61, 141, 143, 147 see also madness fragment, fragmentary writing 80–81, 109 n. 35, 109 n. 36, 109 n. 37, 120 Frank, Eve Ellen 84 freedom 28, 36, 38, 87, 102, 104, 111 n. 71, 115 n. 134, 121 French Revolution 86–87, 111 n. 71, 111 n. 72 see also Bonaparte, Reign of Terror Freud, Sigmund 10, 16 n. 18, 25, 57–58, 81–82, 83, 91–92, 103, 110 n. 48, 110 n. 49, 112 n. 88, 119 see also death-drive, fort-da game, unheimlich Gedächtnis (productive memory) 39, 47 n. 65, 122, 135, 139 n. 74 see also memory Geist 2, 3, 4, 9, 22, 31–33, 40, 42, 58, 59, 60, 66, 90, 96, 119 see also greater reason genealogy 100, 114 n. 128 general economy 7, 10, 12, 15, 55, 57, 60–61, 62, 63, 99, 100, 151, 152 see also abstract negativity, excess, restricted economy ghosts 150–51, 154 n. 48 Gide, André 109 n. 27 Girard, René 98, 114 n. 114

171

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 138 n. 60 Gosse, Edmund 2–3, 135 n. 2 greater reason 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 12, 13, 14, 15, 32–35, 40–44, 51, 53, 55, 56, 58, 60, 62, 64, 65, 81, 90, 101, 103, 107 n. 6, 119, 120, 130, 137 n. 40, 142 defined 31–32 Greece 41, 55, 93, 115 n. 135, 130 see also classical art, Hellenism and Hebraism Green, T. H. 21, 43 n. 7 Grove, George 79, 81 Guattari, Félix, see Deleuze, Gilles Gusdorf, George 137 n. 38 Habermas, Jürgen 146 Haldane, R. B. 21, 111 n. 82 Hardinge, William Money 2–3, 16 n. 11, 95, 104, 128 see also homosexuality hedonism 31, 33, 35 Hegel, G. W. F. Aesthetics 1, 10, 17 n. 24, 21, 24–26, 41, 42–43, 51, 110 n. 48, 110 n. 64, 126, 138 n. 46 Encyclopaedia 9, 10, 21, 36–37, 38–40, 42, 45 n. 22, 48 n. 77, 61–62, 68, 75 n. 78, 83, 100, 115 n. 132, 121–22, 136 n. 18 History of Philosophy 21 Jena lectures 72 n. 32 ‘Love’ 9, 99–100, 114 n. 124 ‘Oldest System Programme of German Idealism’ 48 n. 79 ‘On the Relationship of the Philosophy of Nature to Philosophy in General’ 19 n. 52 Phenomenology of Spirit 6, 9, 17 n. 27, 17 n. 29, 21, 23, 36, 44 n. 15, 49, 50, 52, 53–54, 55, 56, 61, 63, 66, 67, 81, 82, 86, 87, 88, 89, 93, 96, 102, 104–05, 111 n. 72, 111 n. 77, 112 n. 92, 113 n. 109, 114 n. 124, 124, 132 Philosophy of Right 21, 28–29, 30, 32–34, 91, 115 n. 134, 143, 153 n. 34, 154 n. 42 Science of Logic 21, 36, 46 n. 48, 63, 89 see also Aufhebung, cunning of reason, desire, lifeand-death struggle, master-slave dialectic, Sittlichkeit, tarrying with the negative, unhappy consciousness, world-historical individual Heidegger, Martin 24, 44 n. 20, 60, 74 n. 67, 75 n. 81 heimlich, see unheimlich Heine, Heinrich 115 n. 130 Hellenism and Hebraism 9–10, 19 n. 51 Heraclitus 74 n. 68 Higgins, Leslie 74 n. 68 Hill, Leslie 109 n. 27 Hillis Miller, J. 1, 13–14, 77–79, 109 n. 27, 139 n. 64, 145 history 44 n. 20, 54, 61, 68, 73 n. 44, 80, 107 n. 11, 109 n. 31, 114 n. 128, 118–19, 151–52 of art 25–26 and the philosophy of death 58 homosexuality 2–4, 16 n. 17, 16 n. 19, 17 n. 24, 17 n. 26, 34, 74 n. 68, 88, 95, 98–100, 104,

172

Index

114 n. 120, 114 n. 121, 115 n. 135, 128–29, 131, 135 n. 2, 138 n. 53, 138 n. 54, 154 n. 47 Hollier, Denis 138 n. 46 Houlgate, Stephen 28, 111 n. 77, 153 n. 34 Husserl, Edmund 24, 27, 44 n. 20, 45 n. 23 Huysmans, Joris-Karl 114 n. 121 Hyppolite, Jean 86, 111 n. 72 Idea, the 12, 24–26, 31, 39, 43, 48 n. 79, 83, 85–89, 91, 92, 95–96, 101–03, 106, 110 n. 61, 112 n. 92, 124, 132, 141, 142, 144, 147, 148, 149 sensible appearance of 24–27, 34–35, 39, 43, 89, 106, 112 n. 84, 124 Ideal, the 10, 17 n. 24, 24, 26, 83, 84, 101–02, 104–05, 110 n. 61, 124, 131 idealism 10, 21–23, 30–31, 35, 36, 38, 46 n. 52, 49, 55, 60, 77, 83, 85, 90, 100, 111 n. 81, 112 n. 84, 112 n. 92, 113 n. 103, 117, 119, 124, 130, 143, 148 idealization 4, 17 n. 24, 115 n. 135 ideology 4, 11, 15, 56, 72 n. 31, 100, 111 n. 75, 141–44, 147, 148, 151, 152, 152 n. 3, 153 n. 34 il y a (Levinas) 74 n. 67, 154 n. 52 image of thought 11, 19 n. 62, 143–44 imaginary portrait 11, 13, 79–81, 108 n. 18, 108 n. 25, 152 Imaginary (Lacan) 142 see also Real, Symbolic Order Inman, Billie Andrew 1, 2, 26, 33, 47 n. 56, 53, 59, 72 n. 24, 89–90, 93, 95, 135 n. 2 instant, the 68–70, 76 n. 83, 76 n. 85, 76 n. 86, 80 Irigaray, Luce 83, 114 n. 124 Iser, Wolfgang 154 n. 56 Jakobson, Roman 119 James, Henry 135 n. 2 Jones, Ernest 110 n. 8 Jowett, Benjamin 2–3, 21, 43 n. 7, 44 n. 8, 74 n. 68, 128 Kafka, Franz 46 n. 41 Kain, Philip 20 n. 80 Kant, Immanuel 23–24, 27, 28–29, 31, 35, 37, 42, 44 n. 14, 45 n. 22, 45 n. 37, 46 n. 40, 90, 106, 115 n. 139, 122–23, 134, 141, 144, 145–46, 150, 152 n. 3, 153 n. 18 see also apperception, categorical imperative, disinterestedness, things-in-themselves Keats, John 4 Keefe, Robert and Janice A. Walter Pater and the Gods of Disorder 72 n. 24, 95 Kierkegaard, Søren 47 n. 55, 76 n. 85 Klossowski, Pierre 45 n. 28, 109 n. 27, 113 n. 109, 114 n. 111, 132–33, 139 n. 72 Kojève, Alexandre 6, 7, 12, 18 n. 47, 20 n. 83, 45 n. 24, 45 n. 28, 47 n. 62, 50, 53–54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59–60, 61, 64, 72 n. 21, 72 n. 29, 72 n. 32, 75 n. 71, 82, 91, 103, 109 n. 27, 124, 127

labour, see Bildung labyrinth 51, 127 Lacan, Jacques 18 n. 30, 50, 58, 64, 71 n. 2, 72 n. 29, 74 n. 67, 82, 110 n. 57, 110 n. 58, 122–23, 136 n. 11, 137 n. 26, 138 n. 46, 142 see also barred subject, Imaginary, méconaissance, mirror-stage, Real, Symbolic Order Lamb, Charles 117 Landor, Walter Savage 108 n. 18 Lang, Andrew 50 language 13, 39, 40, 48 n. 68, 58, 82, 119–20, 121–22, 124 Laporte, Roger 18 n. 42 Law, Helen 120 le pas au-delà (Blanchot) 66–67, 68, 70, 80, 107, 133, 149, 152 Levinas, Emmanuel 15, 42, 74 n. 67, 83, 118, 154 n. 52 see also il y a libidinal economy (libidinal investment) 147, 153 n. 39 life-and-death struggle 53–54, 56–57, 98, 102, 123, 127 see also master-slave dialectic literary immortality, see subjective immortality living-on, see survival Loesberg, Jonathan, Aestheticism and Deconstruction 145, 153 logic 26, 36–38, 40, 42, 61, 89, 143, 145 logos 30, 46 n. 53, 66, 135 love 3, 9, 34, 99 Lyotard, Jean-François 15, 48 n. 77, 109 n. 36, 146 madness 75 n. 74, 139 n. 61 the absence of work (Foucault) 66 in ‘Apollo in Picardy’ 133–34 in Nietzsche 114 n. 111, 132–33 Mann, Thomas, Death in Venice 98–99 Mansel, Henry Longueville 36, 47 n. 56 marriage 3, 33–34, 99, 106 Marx, Karl 72 n. 21, 73 n. 35, 143, 150, 151 Capital 143 Marxism 18 n. 47, 54, 59–60, 103, 111 n. 75, 113 n. 99, 146, 151 see also capitalism, revolution masculinity 114 n. 122 master-slave dialectic 53–55, 56–57, 71 n. 5, 72 n. 29, 88, 111 n. 77, 113 n. 109, 114 n. 124 méconaissance (Lacan) 122–23, 126, 142 Meisel, Perry 20 n. 72 Meleau-Ponty, Maurice 45 n. 24, 50 memory 107 n. 9 metanarrative 35, 90 metaphor and metonymy 119, 120, 123, 136 n. 11 metaphysics 5, 12, 26–27, 104, 141, 144, 147 Michelet, Karl Ludwig 19 n. 52 Milner, Alfred 2 mirror-stage (Lacan) 122–23 modernity 4, 79, 146 Monsman, Gerald 19 n. 64, 73 n. 48, 75 n. 72, 79, 88–89, 93, 106, 108 n. 18, 108 n. 25, 113 n. 104, 123, 125, 150

Index Montaigne, Michel de 117 Moran, Dermot 24 morality 28–29, 31, 55, 107 see also ethics, Sittlichkeit Moretti, Franco 79–80 music 22–23, 25, 93, 113 n. 98, 134 myth 151, 154 n. 56 necrophilia 129, 138 n. 59 negation 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 15, 16 n. 18, 17 n. 27, 50, 56, 58, 60, 61-62, 75 n. 78, 78, 83, 85, 87, 95-96, 142, 144, 146, 147, 151, 152 see also affirmation, Aufhebung, negativity negative affirmation 99, 114 n. 123 negative dialectics 17 n. 29, 74 n. 65 negativity 7, 17 n. 26, 56, 57, 61–62, 68–69, 70, 73 n. 41, 124 Nelson, Lycette 66 neuter (Blanchot) 149–51, 154 n. 51, 154 n. 52 New Aestheticism 145–47, 153 n. 30 Newton, Charles 50 Nietzsche, Friedrich 12, 13, 17 n. 26, 19 n. 63, 28, 55, 63, 67, 72 n. 24, 75 n. 70, 75 n. 72, 77–79, 80–81, 84, 89, 90, 92, 93–100, 103–07, 107 n. 8, 107 n. 10, 107 n. 11, 108 n. 12, 111 n. 68, 112 n. 88, 113 n. 99, 113 n. 109, 114 n. 111, 114 n. 120, 114 n. 128, 115 n. 142, 132–33, 135, 139 n. 68, 141, 149, 150, 154 n. 45 The Anti-Christ 112 n. 93 The Birth of Tragedy 92, 93–96, 105, 113 n. 100, 139 n. 68, 154 n. 45 Ecce Homo 94, 95, 96, 113 n. 103 Gay Science 85, 139 n. 71 Genealogy of Morality 3, 4, 13, 71 n. 17, 77, 89, 92, 96, 100, 103–07, 107 n. 9, 109 n. 39 Nachlass 95–96, 139 n. 69 Thus Spoke Zarathustra 19 n. 56, 133, 154 n. 45 Twilight of the Idols 17 n. 23, 47 n. 58, 78, 92, 98, 99, 105, 115 n. 135, 115 n. 140 see also ascesis, bad conscience, eternal return, nihilism, ressentiment, will to power nihilism 13, 27, 77, 90, 92, 95, 103, 105, 106, 112 n. 92, 149 Nouvelle Revue Français 109 n. 27 nostalgia 80, 81, 83, 97, 103, 104, 109 n. 36, 109 n. 43, 112 n. 94, 127, 146 Oakeshott, Michael 137 n. 44 oedipus complex 8, 10–11, 19 n. 56, 78, 107 n. 8, 113 n. 104 Old Mortality Society 13, 21, 44 n. 9, 59, 73 n. 48, 154 n. 48 organicism 42, 48 n. 78 origin 100, 114 n. 128 Oxford 13, 21, 30–31, 35, 43 n. 7, 44 n. 8, 44 n. 9, 46 n. 52, 59, 108 n. 12, 128, 131

173

Paget, Violet 107 n. 2 Pater, Walter ‘The Age of Athletic Prizemen’ 4, 17 n. 24, 26 ‘An English Poet’ 81 ‘Apollo in Picardy’ 13, 87, 101, 109 n. 31, 109 n. 34, 125 Appreciations 145 ‘Charles Lamb’ 117 ‘Coleridge’s Writings’ 21, 91 ‘Shakespeare’s English Kings’ 114 n. 114 ‘Style’ 8, 13, 36–38, 40–41, 47 n. 59, 48 n. 68, 79, 83, 84, 85–86, 89, 100, 105, 106, 110 n. 51, 117, 118, 119–20, 127, 129, 134, 150 ‘Wordsworth’ 43, 93, 147 bMS Eng 1150 (4) 84 ‘The Child in the House’ 20 n. 65, 30, 71 n. 16, 79, 81–84, 88, 103, 104, 110 n. 48, 110 n. 57, 125, 137 n. 43, 148 ‘Demeter and Persephone’ 52 ‘Diaphaneitè’ 4, 73 n. 48, 85, 149–52, 154 n. 47 ‘Emerald Uthwart’ 13, 87, 109 n. 31, 109 n. 34, 111 n. 75, 125, 126–30, 137 n. 32, 138 n. 60 Gaston de Latour 29–30, 46 n. 42, 75 n. 70, 75 n. 72, 79, 84, 125–26 ‘Giordano Bruno’ 75 n. 70 Imaginary Portraits 13, 77, 79, 80, 103–07, 108 n. 13, 111 n. 68, 125, 135, 137 n. 43 ‘Denys L’Auxerrois’ 89, 93–100, 101, 105, 111 n. 68, 111 n. 75, 113 n. 100, 113 n. 105, 130, 138 n. 60 ‘Duke Carl of Rosenmold’ 87, 101–03, 104, 106, 111 n. 75, 138 n. 60 ‘A Prince of Court Painters’ 85–89, 101, 102, 103, 106, 107 n. 2, 108 n. 13, 111 n. 75 ‘Sebastian van Storck’ 89–93, 102, 103, 105–06, 111 n. 68, 112 n. 92, 132, 138 n. 60 manuscript on moral philosophy 1, 2, 4, 5, 12, 13, 14, 27–30, 31–35, 40–42, 46 n. 52, 47 n. 55, 51, 52, 55, 58–59, 60, 62, 65, 66, 82, 87, 101, 112 n. 92, 144 manuscript on the history of philosophy 5, 12–13, 14, 20 n. 65, 41, 62–67, 84, 89, 96–97, 112 n. 94, 125, 134–35, 148, 152 Marius the Epicurean 2, 5, 8, 9, 12, 13, 14, 17 n. 25, 22, 23, 27, 29, 30, 32, 33, 35, 44 n. 15, 48 n. 68, 50–52, 53, 55, 59, 60, 65, 73 n. 50, 75 n. 72, 77, 79, 80, 84, 88, 90, 101, 105, 107 n. 2, 108 n. 13, 108 n. 18, 110 n. 62, 112 n. 94, 117, 118, 125, 137 n. 32 ‘Notre-Dame D’Amiens’ 41, 48 n. 73 ‘Notre-Dame de Troyes’ 41, 48 n. 73 ‘Pascal’ 47 n. 55 Plato and Platonism 33, 44 n. 20, 46 n. 52, 55, 68, 72 n. 24, 73 n. 44, 74 n. 65, 74 n. 68, 76 n. 82, 93, 108 n. 24, 114 n. 128, 115 n. 135, 136 n. 13 ‘Prosper Mérimee’ 45 n. 37 Studies in the History of the Renaissance 9, 26, 35, 95, 110 n. 48, 114 n. 121, 145

174

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conclusion 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 27, 30, 34, 53, 68–70, 88, 109 n. 31, 123, 129, 139 n. 62, 144, 153 n. 25 preface 5, 7, 23–24, 35, 44 n. 20, 106, 115 n. 139, 120, 148 ‘School of Georgione’ 22 ‘Winckelmann’ 24–26, 35, 41, 73 n. 44 ‘Study of Dionysus’ 59, 93, 94, 95, 96, 98, 100 ‘Thistle’ 137 n. 40 ‘Vélezay’ 41, 48 n. 73 parerga (Derrida) 130, 138 n. 60 Pattison, Mark 16 n. 19 pessimism 89–92 phenomenology 12, 23–24, 27, 32, 34–35, 44 n. 16, 44 n. 20, 45 n. 22, 45 n. 23, 45 n. 24, 46 n. 38, 60, 83, 102, 106, 112 n. 84 see also Heidegger, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty philosophy of death 6, 7, 12, 13, 50–52, 53, 60, 61, 83–84, 99, 105, 110 n. 61, 117, 119, 122, 127, 128, 135, 149, 152 and history and writing 124–25 phonologocentricism 118, 121–22, 135, 136 n. 4 Plato 47 n. 59, 74 n. 68, 108 n. 24, 115 n. 135, 119, 136 n. 13 Cratylus 110 n. 62 Parmenides 76 n. 82, 76 n. 86 Symposium 115 n. 135 pleasure principle 57, 66, 82, 107 pluralism 106 post-Hegelianism 8, 11, 12, 14–15, 20 n. 83, 50, 67, 84, 101, 105, 106–07, 109 n. 27, 117, 119, 124, 125, 127, 128, 135, 149, 152 postmodernism 4, 15, 109 n. 36, 146, 154 n. 42 post-structuralism 6, 7, 12, 13–15, 20 n. 72, 20 n. 83, 99–100, 117, 129, 134–35, 145–46, 149, 153 n. 30 see also destructive writing power 15, 17 n. 26, 143, 147 Preller, Ludwig 50 publication, publishing 11, 65, 67, 119, 125, 128, 129 pyramid 51, 83–84, 110 n. 64, 110 n. 66, 124, 126, 129, 131, 138 n. 46, 139 n. 52, 146, 148 radical dualism 5–6, 7–8, 10, 12–13, 14, 62–67, 68, 71, 74 n. 62, 74 n. 67, 74 n. 68, 77, 83, 89, 92, 97, 100, 106, 120, 126, 134–35, 142, 151–52 Real (Lacan) 18 n. 30, 74 n. 67 see also Imaginary, Symbolic Order Reason 32, 36, 37, 42, 43, 46 n. 53, 48 n. 79, 56, 66, 67, 69, 86, 87, 88, 100, 111 n. 77, 141 see also Idea, Geist, greater reason récit, see imaginary portrait recognition 38, 78, 127, 144, 151 in Hegel 32, 56, 99, 122 and autobiography 121–23, 134 and ideology 72 n. 31, 144 see also méconaissance repression 3, 16 n. 18, 82, 100, 127, 148, 151

Reign of Terror, the 87, 111 n. 72 Reflexionkultur 141 ressentiment 2–4, 9, 10, 13, 28, 34, 55, 71 n. 17, 78, 85, 92, 96, 99, 103, 104, 106, 107 n. 10, 131, 132, 146 restricted economy 6, 9, 10, 15, 42, 49, 53, 55, 57, 60–61, 62, 64, 66, 67, 69, 71 n. 2, 74 n. 67, 83, 91, 97, 99, 100, 101–03, 104, 107, 120, 124, 127, 143, 144, 150, 151 see also general economy revolution 131–32, 149–52 romanticism 26, 36, 118, 121, 123, 142 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 70 Richie, D. G. 46 n. 52 Ruskin, John 22 Ryan, Michael 137 n. 32 sacrifice 7, 34–35, 53–55, 56–57, 61, 89, 93, 96, 98 see also life-and-death struggle Saint-Beuve 108 n. 18 Sartre, Jean-Paul 50 Saussure, Ferdinand de 41–42, 47 n. 66, 47 n. 67, 48 n. 74, 48 n. 76 scepticism 5, 6, 8, 62–64 Schelling, Friedrich 19 n. 52, 22, 81–82 Schopenhauer, Arthur 89–93, 94, 111 n. 68, 111 n. 82, 112 n. 84, 112 n. 88, 112 n. 94, 113 n. 98 sculpture 4, 17 n. 24, 26 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 99, 114 n. 120 self-consciousness 5, 7, 12, 23, 26, 28, 31, 32, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 40, 43, 54, 57, 58, 59, 60, 64, 66, 70, 81, 90, 91, 102, 104, 117, 118, 122–23, 126, 127, 132, 133–34 semiology 13, 36–40, 41–42, 47 n. 62, 47 n. 67, 48 n. 68, 48 n. 74, 58, 70, 83–84, 97, 118–25, 128, 129–30, 131, 133–34 see also actus signatus, signs sexuality 15, 28, 98–100, 105, 127, 144, 148 Shadwell, Charles 46 n. 42 Shakespeare, William, Richard II 114 n. 114 Shrimpton, Nicholas 145–46 Shuter, William 6, 8, 16 n. 4, 20 n. 72, 26, 63, 64, 74 n. 68, 75 n. 77, 127, 128, 138 n. 53 sin 104–05 signs 4, 38–40, 47 n. 60, 47 n. 66, 47 n. 67, 48 n. 74, 58, 83–84, 119, 121, 124, 128, 133, 134–35, 136 n. 4 see also semiology, symbol Sittlichkeit 28–29, 30–34, 51, 55, 56, 59, 71 n. 15, 99, 101, 103, 106, 123, 143, 144, 148, 154 n. 42 slave morality 3–4, 28, 55, 96, 103 Smith, Robert 124 Socrates 95, 105 solipsism 112 n. 92 Soller, Philippe 137 n. 32 sōma / sēma pairing 83–84, 88, 110 n. 62, 124, 131, 139 n. 62 speculation 47 n. 55, 56–57, 61, 93, 98, 102, 123, 124 Spinoza, Baruch 90, 111 n. 81

Index State, the 33, 56, 141, 143–44, 151 stoicism 17 n. 25, 63 structuralism 5, 40–42, 118, 119 subjective immortality 13, 58–60, 69, 98, 117, 125–26, 129–30, 132, 134, 154 n. 48 as literary immortality 118–19, 124–25 subjectivity 6, 24, 38, 78, 118, 121–25, 124–25, 127, 132, 143–44 subject-object identity 1, 12, 22–23, 24, 25, 36, 37, 38, 43, 93, 112 n. 84, 148 suicide 93, 112 n. 94, 124–25 survival 30, 52, 59–60, 93, 96, 98, 109 n. 34, 124–25, 127, 129–30, 131, 132, 136 n. 10 see also subjective immortality symbol 39, 47 n. 60, 58, 82, 121 symbolic exchange 71 n. 7, 74 n. 67 Symbolic Order (Lacan) 58, 74 n. 67, 82, 123 see also Imaginary, Real symbolic art 26, 41, 51, 126 Tambling, Jeremy 78, 107 n. 10, 109 n. 37 tarrying with the negative 6, 49, 50, 61, 67, 148 Terada, Rei 145 testimony 127–29, 134 thanatography, see writing things-in-themselves 23–24, 27, 28, 31, 90, 120, 122 thought 6, 66–67, 80, 107, 121 time 68–70, 75 n. 78, 75 n. 81, 80, 102, 115 n. 132 totality, totalization 1, 4, 14–15, 17 n. 29, 18 n. 30, 42, 48 n. 77, 49, 65, 66, 80, 101, 118, 124, 126, 135 see also restricted economy

175

tower of Babel 126, 137 n. 44, 138 n. 46 trace 60, 120, 127, 130, 134, 149, 150–51, 154 n. 43 translation 1, 16 n. 3, 17 n. 27, 119–20, 136 n. 10 Tyler, Edward Burnett 50 uncanny, see unheimlich unhappy consciousness 9, 86, 88–89, 104, 111 n. 77, 111 n. 79 unheimlich 17 n. 25, 81–84, 103 utilitarianism 53, 55 Wallace, William 21, 43 n. 7, 108 n. 12 Ward, Anthony 18 n. 32, 18 n. 34 Ward, Mary 117 Wigley, Mark 41 Wilde, Oscar 79, 110 n. 61, 114 n. 121, 138 n. 54 Dorian Gray 129 will to power 100 Winckelmann, Johann 26 work, see Bildung worklessness, see désouvrement world-historical individual 86–87, 111 n. 74, 132 Wright, Thomas 21, 108 n. 18 writing 13, 37–38, 117, 118, 125, 127, 129–30, 131–32, 134–35, 139 n. 73 as thanatography 124–25 Zeitgeist 21 Zorn, Harry 120 Žižek, Slavoj 4, 18 n. 30, 74 n. 67