Anonymous Life: Romanticism and Dispossession 9780804779685

Citation preview

Anonymous Life

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Anonymous Life romanticism and dispossession

Jacques Khalip

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Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2009 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. This book has been published with the assistance of Brown University “I’m nobody! Who are you?” by Emily Dickinson: Reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition, Ralph W. Franklin, ed., Cambridge, Mass., The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1998 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. “This Scribe, My Hand,” by Ben Belitt: Reprinted by permission of Louisiana State University Press from This Scribe, My Hand: The Complete Poems of Ben Belitt, by Ben Belitt. Copyright © 1998 by Ben Belitt. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Khalip, Jacques, 1975Anonymous life : Romanticism and dispossession / Jacques Khalip. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8047-5840-6 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. English literature--18th century--History and criticism. 2. English literature--19th century--History and criticism. 3. Subjectivity in literature. 4. Romanticism--Great Britain. I. Title. PR447.K48 2009 820.9--dc22 2008018554 Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in }}/}k Adobe Garamond

For my parents, Yury Khalip and Hava Fisher, and in memory of my grandparents

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If thou hast nature in thee, bear it not. the ghost to hamlet What remains, then, except an anonymous life that shows up only when it clashes with power, argues with it, exchanges “brief and strident words,” and then fades back into the night? g i l l e s d e l e u z e , Foucault

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Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction 1 2 3 4 Coda

“Rien Faire Comme une Bête”: Of Anonymity and Obligation

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1

Virtual Ruin: Disinterested Agency in Hazlitt and Keats

25

Fugitive Letters: Tracking the Anonymous in Godwin’s Caleb Williams

67

Feeling for the Future: The Ends of Sympathy

97

The Art of Knowing Nothing: Feminine Melancholy and Skeptical Dispossession

133

What Remains: Romanticism and the Negative

173

Notes

187

Index

231

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Acknowledgments

My greatest debt is to David Clark, who as colleague and dear friend went out of his way to look after this book from start to finish. I am grateful for his care and insight, and I hope that in some way I have been able to repay him for his innumerable kindnesses. I am happy to acknowledge several people who have responded to versions of this book over the last few years. Thomas Pfau, Robert Mitchell, and Carolyn Williams have been generously reading my writing ever since Duke, and I am grateful for their critical judgment and wisdom. Conversations with David Collings, Joel Faflak, and Karen Weisman helped to further define what was at stake between the lines. Jerry Hogle and Tres Pyle were inspiring readers, and I owe a great deal to them for their sustained interest and formidable acuity. At Stanford, Norris Pope and Emily-Jane Cohen have been enthusiastic and exemplary editors throughout. Thanks also to Emily Smith and Andrew Frisardi for help at the production and copyediting stages, as well as Julia Shaw for preparing the index. At my new home at Brown, I have found a number of extraordinary friends and colleagues who were involved in making my transition a happy and stimulating one: Nancy Armstrong, Tim Bewes, Mutlu Blasing, Stuart Burrows, Coppélia Kahn, Tamar Katz, Bill Keach, Daniel Kim, Kevin McLaughlin, Rolland Murray, Deak Nabers, Thangam Ravindranathan, Ravit Reichman, Ralph Rodriguez, Vanessa Ryan, Pierre Saint-Amand, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, and Len Tennenhouse. A grant from the Office of the Vice President for Research also greatly assisted in the preparation of this book. Antoinette Somo and Aurelia Gatto provided warm company and administrative support early on. For their close friendships and goodwill, I want to thank Monique Allewaert, Renu Bora, Nancy Johnston, Julie Chun Kim, Alix Mazuet, Jeff McNairn, Julie Park, Stéphane Robolin, Nadine Rossy,

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David Woodard, and the inimitable Tracy Wynne. With their typical forbearance, my parents and Dylan Duke Morse have lovingly put up with me. Finally, my thanks to Jimmy Richardson, who knows almost everything. A much shorter version of Chapter 1 appeared as “Virtual Conduct: Disinterested Agency in Hazlitt and Keats,” ELH 73.4 (2006): 885–912; and a portion of Chapter 4 was published as “A Disappearance in the World: Wollstonecraft and Melancholy Skepticism,” Criticism 47.1 (2005): 85–106. “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” is reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition, Ralph W. Franklin, ed., Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard College. Copyright © 1998 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. “This Scribe, My Hand” is reprinted by permission of Louisiana State University Press from This Scribe, My Hand: The Complete Poems of Ben Belitt, by Ben Belitt. Copyright © 1998 by Ben Belitt. Thanks also to Krista Berga for graciously granting permission to use her piece, “Encounter,” for the cover. The image is reproduced courtesy of the collection of Louise Martin-Chew.

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“Rien Faire Comme une Bête”: Of Anonymity and Obligation How does one arrive at this anonymous whose only mode of approach is haunting intimacy, uncertain obsession that always dispossesses. — m a u r i c e b l a n c h o t , The Step Not Beyond I’m Nobody! Who are you? Are you—Nobody—Too? Then there’s a pair of us! Don’t tell! They’d advertise—you know! How dreary—to be—Somebody! How public—like a Frog— To tell one’s name—the livelong June— To an admiring Bog! — e m i l y d i c k i n s o n , no. 288

This book takes as one of its starting points Keats’s well-known remarks on what he calls in his letters, “Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.”1 What man is capable of being, however, once identity is forfeited and actions are neither empirically demonstrable nor conceived to be intentional, is a central concern of Keats’s writings, and the focus of the chapters that follow. When Keats anxiously describes the “Poetical Character” as “not itself—it has no self—it is every thing and nothing—It has no character. . . . A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity—he is continually in for—and filling some other Body” (1: 387), he summons it as a species of unmoored subjectivity, encountering

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other identities and bodies while remaining irreducible to either. This residual figure traces an errant path between “he” and “is,” personal and neuter, self and other, poetry and origin (“that sort of which, if I am any thing, I am a Member” [1: 386]). What the “Poet” is thus remains suspended in the gap between subject and object, with “Character” manifesting itself as a seemingly passive, transitive, and involuntary force—“he” or “it” is, after all, “continually in for—and filling” another (1: 387). The “I” doesn’t stand outside of experience, but rather appears, for lack of a better word, as the effect of a substitution: its relation to others is an obligation it is compelled to honor in spite of its impoverishment—“an experience of anonymity,” writes Thomas Wall in a gloss on Levinas, “(an experience in the absence of there being anyone there to have the experience),” or an experience of oneself that remains singularly unpresentable.2 The anonymity of the poetical character is thus an aesthetic and ethical concern for Keats: his dissatisfaction with identity registers as a retreat from or unwriting of the self-designating features of poetic work, as well as one’s relations with other persons. In this sense, “subjectivity” revolves as a numinous concept that fails to secure any lasting ballast, tainted by a destructiveness it cannot abandon. Anonymous Life reconsiders romanticism through the concept of anonymity in order to claim that, not only have we yet to fully account for the theoretical complexity of the period’s explorations of subjectivity, but the notion of anonymity is a pervasive topic of romanticism: it provokes profound engagements with the ethics and aesthetics of alterity; it rethinks political questions and theories of action that emerge once the romantic subject loses its privileged locus as a “will to power”; and it becomes a site of discord and difference.3 “The words I, and you and they,” states Shelley in A Defence of Poetry, “are grammatical devices invented simply for arrangement and totally devoid of the intense and exclusive sense usually attached to them.”4 The rhetorical errancy of personal address here economizes anonymity as something that cannot be resolved into individuation, and is neither the preserve of negative freedom, nor a mystification of selfhood. What remains for Shelley is something like an “anonymous life”—a life that evokes a decidedly immanent approach to the poetics and politics of the romantic subject, one whose pronominal negligence, moreover, shares much with Deleuze’s own thoughts on the “indefinite” article: We will say of pure immanence that it is a life, and nothing else. It is not immanence to life, but the immanent that is in nothing is itself a life. . . . The indefinite aspects in a life lose all indetermination to the degree that they fill

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out a plane of immanence or, what amounts to the same thing, to the degree that they constitute the elements of a transcendental field (individual life, on the other hand, remains inseparable from empirical determinations).5

To speak of the indefiniteness of “a life . . .” is to signal an anonymity that resembles what Hazlitt calls “living to one’s-self [as] living in the world, as in it, not of it: it is as if no one knew there was such a person, and you wished no one to know it”—a life seemingly undiscovered and yet, at the same time, cannily resistant to the slightest difference that a claim of identity would otherwise make.6 The romantic predicament of anonymous life, then, reflects this kind of ontological dispossession or indetermination; it throws into sharper relief the philosophical, political, and cultural crises that contextualize emerging definitions of identity and agency in the period. The present book thus approaches romantic subjectivity through its fascination with anonymity as an ethics of engaged withdrawal or strategic reticence. The social relations I trace conceive how romantic subjectivity, even as it negotiates with others in the social sphere, is radically impersonal and dispossessed. Rather than failing to claim solidarity, such a subjectivity stubbornly resists the requirement to inhabit a social category and remains open to change and redescription. Through close readings of romantic-era philosophical texts, novels, poems, and occasional essays, this book takes seriously the diverse arguments made for nonidentity and situates such arguments according to important cultural changes witnessed by the late eighteenth century: changing definitions of authorship and the literary marketplace; the development of radical politics in Britain; the politics of sympathetic identification; and the significance of gender in relation to skeptical knowledge. To begin thinking of romanticism and anonymity in this way might at first seem a wholly counterintuitive project, and an especially abstract one at that. After all, can an era that is too often popularly identified with a boundless enthusiasm for the autonomy of the self undergo a critical revision under the auspices of anonymity?7 Moreover, is anonymity truly a historical category or condition? Is it a concept addressed univocally by romantic writers? And precisely what does anonymity define? What is the difference, for example, between concepts like impersonality or depersonalization as they appear in the writings of modernists like T. S. Eliot or Virginia Woolf, and my use of anonymity as a historically specific notion cultivated by writers as diverse as William Godwin and Jane Austen? From a lexical perspective, the OED describes anonymity principally in terms of the categories of writing

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or authorship: “nameless, having no name; of unknown name”; “a person whose name is not given, or is unknown”; “bearing no author’s name; of an unknown or unavowed authorship”; “unacknowledged, illegitimate, rare.” “Anonymity” shuttles between revelation and concealment—“an attempt was made,” reads one entry, “to fasten anonymity on Blackwood’s Magazine.” Anne Ferry has noted that anonymity only came to prominence as a noun in the mid- to late nineteenth century out of its more ancient adjectival form, anonymous, or anon, which designated a nameless piece of writing. It subsequently came to describe a writing freed of personality, as well as the conditions of urban life.8 At the very least, “anonymity” is caught between the page and the street, the authorless work and the selfless crowds, and at first glance, it seems to be best explored in terms of the socio-historical materialities that produced it as a powerful cultural concept. Like a covering or disguise—for example, Rousseau’s ring of Gyges, Wordsworth’s Coat of Darkness—anonymity spreads imperceptibly; it is always a discursive affair, and thus risks being defined at those moments when it wishes to stealthily evade conceptual detection. Anonymity gestures to a fugitive, orphaned life: it abjects and disowns all persons, places, and things it qualifies. While my book recognizes these approaches, it also emphasizes another line of thinking that is irreducible to sociological inquiry. I argue throughout that romantic literature, culture, and philosophy were invested in forms of anonymity that released one from the duty to “make an appearance in the world,”9 as Mary Wollstonecraft called it—that is, romantic constructions of impoverished subjects, absented from social recognition and self-display, became instances of new potentialities that found ethical and aesthetic value in projects that maintained the anonymous as anonymous, in stark opposition to the logic of personhood. Because my own deployments of anonymity throughout the book are guided not only by the terms under which romantic writers imagine, construct, and espouse anonymity, but the insights of contemporary theorists and philosophers who value the impersonal as an ethical art, I use the term with necessary suppleness, and often interchangeably with other terms like impersonality, nonidentity, or depersonalization. For example, as Sharon Cameron has brilliantly argued in her book, Impersonality: “One way of approaching impersonality is to say it is not the negation of the person, but rather a penetration through or a falling outside of the boundary of the particular. Impersonality disrupts the elementary categories we suppose to be fundamental to specifying human distinctiveness. Or rather, we don’t know what the im of impersonality means.”10 Cameron

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demonstrates that impersonality conceptually works to undermine the very criteria used to define what we take a person to mean, represent, and do. While I fully endorse her theorizations, anonymity provides for me an added terminological advantage: it is sufficiently capacious to include not only philosophical paradigms (disinterest), affective states (sympathy and melancholy), and forms of writing (impersonal narrative, the nonconfessional lyric) that intimate nonidentity, but it can also gesture to an experience of being-in-the-world that is renunciatory in varying degrees, but not paradigmatically ascetic in the way in which impersonality can appear, tending often toward a disciplined eradication of the personal. Additionally, anonymity evokes different types of social prevarication—hiddenness, secrecy, deceit, theatricality—and thus implies that the ethics of disclosure and concealment are of a piece: they involve wider cultural, philosophical, and political claims about the ways in which the permeable “I” or “nonself ” withdraws from the transparency of the public sphere, as well as continues to live and feel such withdrawals. Thus, instead of conceiving the subject in terms of a putative depth model, whose avowed confessionalism sustains the self through recourse to an inalienable plenitude, anonymity serves to remind us of a disruption of ontological certainty, and thus provokes insight into the troubling ethical bonds of subjectivity. And yet, before leaping to valorize such ungrounding as a newfound freedom, what should be understood is that the anonymous subject precisely enacts its erasure in a scene of self-address that never can be overcome. As Judith Butler remarks, the act of speaking about oneself is defined by a formal impossibility that underscores the self ’s utter nothingness: “The ‘I’ cannot give a final or adequate account of itself because it is unable to return to the scene of address by which it is inaugurated, and thus cannot narrate all of the rhetorical dimensions of the structure of address in which the account itself takes place.”11 The “I” cannot “know itself ” because the discursive patterns of its thought are neither continuous with nor a direct result of any one scene of address that univocally inaugurates it. To think of such an “I” as self-contained or intellectually replete might risk positing an overdetermined presence of mind, or more drastically, a paranoid self-awareness. Indeed, in the section “On Observing Oneself ” from the Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, Kant warns “against occupying ourselves with spying out the involuntary course of our thoughts and feelings and, so to speak, carefully recording its interior history. This is the most direct route to Illuminism and Terrorism, by way of the confusion caused

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by alleged inspirations from on high and powers flowing into us, by none of our doing, from some unknown source.”12 Kant is mindful here of the subtle distinction between critically turning the self in upon itself, and the terrors of an interiority so rigorously policed that it materializes as the effect of those supposedly external terrors meant to obliterate it through the forces of spectacle and self-disclosure. Echoing countless late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century reflections on subjectivity which attempt to describe the subject in ways that countervene philosophies of causation, Kant’s point is that to ascribe cause to subjectivity would not only constrain thought: it would materialize it as the instrument of a brutal determinism. What I refer to as the anonymous life of romantic subjectivity specifically seeks to counter mildly secularized or logical accounts of personal action and responsibility that deem the subject to be visible through a chain of evidentiary facts and events. As Hazlitt scrupulously remarks, the “self which we project before us into it . . . is but a shadow of ourselves . . . a body that falls in pieces at the touch of reason or the approach of inquiry.”13 This shattered self of the Enlightenment is a temporal figure that betrays its own virtuality—in other words, “self ” is a projection of being that dubiously authorizes itself as it falls apart in the very act of authorization. The galvanizing force of enlightenment in this case blasts the figure meant to embody and enable those effects, and it is in this dizzying convergence of illumination and shadow, self and other, epistemology and ontology, ethics and aesthetics, that subjectivity “takes place,” in what Thomas Pfau describes as the “fundamental hiatus separating self-consciousness as a synthetic construct of purely positional value from a consciousness-of-self that could effectively know and recognize the synthetic unity implied by the former.”14 The subject’s inability to claim a proper knowledge of itself renders it a belated remainder of historical cognition, or that form of light or illumination that comes to cast identity as but a “shadow of ourselves.” In this case, the anonymous subject doesn’t merely embody reflexive consciousness tout court; rather, it figures for the problem of identity’s (im)possibility of ever fully coinciding with its conceptions of itself.15 For Hazlitt, the self isn’t spun out to represent the accumulative product of endless metaphoric substitutions—it is but a particular of the more general “ourselves,” lost in a crowd of other selves to which it bears an ethical obligation. In other words, there can be no self without selves, no sense of the one without the many, of the individual outside the group, or of a subjectivity without a heterogeneity. This is why Hazlitt conceives subjectivity

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as fundamentally unknown or yet-to-be-known. According to this argument, the subject is unable to ground itself through its recollections because the past represents an imperfect index of the subject: the latter is the residue left behind by the conclusion of events, and thus is distinct from the risks of the future. However, it is precisely because we cannot claim to control or be in full possession of our actions toward others, because what we do or say in relation to other persons cannot fully determine us as active agents, that Hazlitt evokes subjectivity as virtual in all the richness of the word: at once simulated and ethical.16 In this sense, anonymous agency might be conceived as an anachronism, as Jerome Christensen has described it—“the potent icon of the past’s incapacity to coincide with itself, to seal itself off as a period or epoch or episode with no or necessary consequences for our time. Anachronism is the herald of the future yet unknown.”17 Anonymous being is anachronistic because it evokes an existence whose untapped power keeps it, as it were, always temporally unfinished and suspended, not knowing what it is, and what it will be. To begin thinking of romantic subjectivity in this way is, to be sure, substantially different from the critical traditions that support the kind of paradigmatic model of self-sufficient and protectively enclosed expressivity that rings true in certain instances (for example) of Wordsworth, who writes in the prospectus to The Recluse that his voice proclaims How exquisitely the individual Mind (And the progressive powers perhaps no less Of the whole species) to the external World Is fitted:—and how exquisitely, too— Theme this but little heard of among men— The external World is fitted to the Mind. (62–68)18

The plot is certainly a familiar one: “Mind” and “World” form a complicity that enables the kinds of articulations of selfhood, autonomy, and interiority that The Prelude prescriptively instantiates as its project—a project that reorganizes and recognizes poetry (baldly alluded to in the “fits” that resonate with the act of fitting) as confessional, systematic, and obliquely referential. As Charles Rzepka has argued, our traditional formulation of romantic subjectivity is the “self as mind,” with consciousness ever expanding in proportion to identity’s gradual interiorization.19 To think of identity as wholly “inside,” then, defines it as (a) mystical, perfectly immune to

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empirical verifiability; and (b) essential in the sense that the regulation of affective expression corresponds to an interiority of fathomless depth.20 And yet, it isn’t difficult to perceive the faults with such a standard account of the periodization of romantic subjectivity. At the very least, one can hear the extent to which Wordsworth does, in fact, reveal in critical detail his own profound affiliations with the philosophical understandings of anonymity that were to emerge with a distinct tenor and force in the later writings of Keats, the Shelleys, Austen, and Hazlitt. “A tranquilising spirit presses now / On my corporeal frame,” confesses Wordsworth in The Prelude, so wide appears The vacancy between me and those days Which yet have such self-presence in my mind, That musing on them, often do I seem Two consciousnesses, conscious of myself And of some other Being. (2.28–33)21

The disinterested gaze of the poet hovers here between an empirical attentiveness and an anxious selflessness, and reflects over the perplexities of somehow inhabiting an attenuated form of “Being” that cannot quite be reassembled or authored. My own readings of anonymity acknowledge this singular fault line or crisis point in romantic thought, and rather than hinting at an uninterrupted sense of development from first- to second-generation romanticism, I explore the possibility that writers like Hazlitt, Keats, and the Shelleys begin to ponder the possibilities that already inscribed a certain kind of radical romanticism that was earlier at work, but with the significant difference that, for them, the spooky vastness of interiority is by no means to be treated anymore as a testament to self-empowerment and autonomy. Strikingly, late romantics perceive the subject to be as vacant as Wordsworthian being: an illusion or ideology of heroism in a post-Waterloo society that is all too aware of its historical distance from and loss of an individualism that is at its core deeply inauthentic, one that is bankrupt and seems to hang onto power with an atrophied grasp that resembles Regency politics in Shelley’s “England in 1819”: An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying King; Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow Through public scorn,—mud from a muddy spring; Rulers who neither see nor feel nor know, But leechlike to their fainting country cling Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow. (1–6)

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In this poem, the court is blighted by its adherence to a self-governing right of might, a right that self-destroys in the same instant as the court in turn systematically inflicts a horrifying violence on the populace, “starved and stabbed in th’ untilled field” (7). Shelley’s sonnet forcefully exposes what Leo Bersani has critiqued as the redemptive spirit of modernity, “the sacrosanct value of selfhood, a value that may account for human beings’ extraordinary willingness to kill in order to protect the seriousness of their statements.”22 The illusion of self-mastery presumes that the self is to be upheld through the violence of a perpetual sacrifice, and in so doing, it denies the existence of different modes of being that might forestall or simply abstain from the kinds of acts of self-appropriation that define the ethics of otherness in the age of Empire. One of the subarguments of this book is that second-generation romanticism cultivated projects that involve radical aesthetic, political, and ethical breaks with the traditional theories of identity and agency we have erroneously ascribed to the romantic subject. I also suggest throughout that the sophistication of these late romantic critiques of agency evidences their anticipation of and enduring dialogue with contemporary theories of alterity, which often employ anonymity in ways that evoke a romantic provenance. For writers like Levinas and Blanchot, for example, subjectivity is obliged to attend to the ontological losses that precede and upset all identitarian claims—an otherness that obliges subjectivity to ethically respond despite its experience of what Levinas will describe as “a positing of the self as a deposing of the ego, less than nothing as uniqueness, difference with respect to the other as non-indifference.”23 If there is a pressing critical need to continue rethinking romanticism as a project that is something more than a skeptical extension and subsequent critique of Enlightenment thought, and certainly more than an era marked by economic, political, and social transitions that reach well into the Victorian and twentieth centuries—in other words, if our interest in romanticism is to be something more than a documentary curiosity, it is important to take fuller account of the ways in which our own theoretical pursuits of identity continue to be shaped by ideas that are provocatively and strangely romantic. As Julie Ellison has noted, the eighteenth-century culture of sensibility was profoundly informed by a cosmopolitan awareness of the global expansion of ethical and political responsibilities, and writings on alterity frequently recognized the subject’s complicity in the very systems of power it had massively developed.24 By returning to anonymity as a heuristic that allows us to explore the different forms of relationality

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in the romantic era, we might be better equipped to attend to “identity” as the vanishing point or “nexus” for diverse aesthetic, political, and ethical languages that aim to emphasize the value of dispossession. And, in the process, we might also discover the romantic “prehistory,” as it were, of our contemporary discourses of otherness. In the standard New Historicist critiques of romanticism, however, “otherness” has often been claimed as the guilty shadow cast by the romantic self, and the shape of that guilt and that self have been ascribed to what Jerome McGann has called the “scandal of referentiality,” or the deliberate occlusion of historical and material knowledge by the ideology of selfhood.25 As the story goes, the “I” that speaks in Keats’s odes or Wordsworth’s Prelude is a construct that stands opposed to historical cognition—it can only perform and think of itself if it evades precisely those contingencies that have brought it into being.26 “The artistic reproduction of ideology in literary works,” McGann argues, “has this general effect: it historicizes the ideological materials, gives a local habitation and a name to various kinds of abstractions. When ideology thus acquires a human face, it draws the reader’s consciousness to sympathy with the attitudes and forms of thought being advanced.”27 For McGann, each poem is the record of a person or a “human face” that has been left behind as a result of the onslaught of the romantic ideology— itself a figure for a form of understanding McGann defines as repressive. To perceive poetry as reflecting a “human face,” however, does nothing more than echo Wordsworth’s desire in the 1802 preface to the Lyrical Ballads to write poetry in the “language really used by men.”28 Humanizing literature becomes a way, not only of individuating it, but of assuming that texts can be thought to contain knowledge only if they are presented as breathing, embodied, and personal things that lie in wait for critics’ excavations.29 Moreover, the theory of poetry as personification, in McGann’s sense, must necessarily hold onto the same repressive hypothesis of romantic selfhood it perpetually seeks to disown because it is underwritten by the belief that in order for history to be transparent and recognizable, it has to be conceived as a palpable and personal source of confessional power. This source, however, is nevertheless only a figure for bodily power—a “voice assumes mouth, eye, and finally face,” remarks Paul de Man on prosopopeia, “a chain that is manifest in the etymology of the trope’s name, prosopon poien, to confer a mask or face (prosopon).”30 As a figure of speech, personification seeks to endow the unseen with properties of resemblance—to give it life—but in so doing, it reveals the structural artifice of its own figurality. “History” isn’t so much

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canceled out; it is rethought as the effect of a complex negotiation between rhetorical expressions and their social forms. In this sense, the “otherness” of reference that personification evokes contradicts historicism’s own simplified tropes, which claim that romanticism’s rescue depends on corroborating the empirical and personal reality of its “others.” By reducing alterity to the immediate and the personal, historicism impoverishes our understanding of how alterity in fact disturbs subjectivity and reveals its self-projections to be proximate and misrepresentative. McGann’s emphasis on alterity in positivist terms encourages the belief that when we readers confront romantic texts, we meet bodies that lie buried beneath the text: “Human beings are not angels. Part of what it means to be human is to have a body, to occupy physical space, and to move in real time. In the same way, the products of literature, which are in all cases human products, are not disembodied processes.”31 The problem with McGann’s analogy of humans to texts is that the logic of the comparison depends upon obscuring the terms that sustain the analogy as a relation of resemblance. The effect of this blurring humanizes texts in such a way that one cannot tell whether it is the text that walks and talks or the human that is read and written. As I demonstrate in Chapter 3, traces of Shelley’s residual body not only haunt his critical reception (most memorably in de Man’s seminal essay “Shelley Disfigured”), they also support the illusion of an unvanquished subjectivity that persists well into our contemporary understanding of the poet’s politics and aesthetics—an illusion whose “veil” Shelley will expose in his reformulation of political agency as something impersonal, asystematic, and nonintentional. Because McGann’s critique recycles the same stock language of romanticism he wants to oppose—a language that privileges personality, autonomy, and self-sufficient consciousness—textuality for him is saturated through and through with a remainder of selfhood that can never be fully expunged or assimilated to discourse. For this reason, the romantic text is made to seem hostile to the historical body that underwrites it. Indeed, McGann dramatizes the scandal of romantic ideology as transpiring between jousting selves—the self-as-text against the buried self-as-history. What then ensues is a melancholic drama of perpetual disavowal and irretrievable loss, one that succeeds insofar as it hallucinates the text as a person whose historical consciousness can never fully coincide with itself.32 Paradoxically, personification becomes in McGann’s historicist maneuvers a form of redemption that unwittingly brings up the problem of dispossession (recall Wordsworth’s remark in The Prelude, “I seem / Two

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consciousnesses—conscious of myself, / And of some other being”), only to repress it entirely. To return to the lost body of history thus invokes a theoretical model of historical closure that Pfau has described as resembling the Hegelian concept of totality: Where Hegel’s narrative affirms the power of the idea (and thereby, indirectly, its own narrative authority), the New Historicist inescapably traces all heterogeneous matter back to an equally monolithic idea of power as a nonintentional yet ubiquitous (or structural) effectivity. . . . Hegel’s oppressively holistic narrative of the becoming of freedom is effectively inverted by postmodernity’s specious liberation of the individual through the knowledge of its inescapable extrinsic determinacy.33

McGann’s texts-as-persons are thus liberated as historical persons at the very moment that they are reduced to nothing more than the static nature of their empirical realities. The noncoincidence or nonidentity of the romantic text with itself speaks to a crisis that historicism tries to overcome through a holistic union of text with history—a union that refigures the “problem” of romanticism as the quasi-biographical dilemma of a personalized self that can only be redeemed or saved if it is coerced into recalling its past. “The dark ground which defines Wordsworth’s poetry is,” writes Marjorie Levinson, “first or finally, that sense of lost things which engenders all human creation, but the form which those losses assume through the language of the poetry and of the age is deeply specific.” The task of criticism lies in describing the contexts of historical loss, but in so doing, it therapeutically reinscribes a lost past as the evidentiary ground for a seemingly more “authentic,” contemporary, and healed consciousness. It is no wonder, then, that Levinson’s words suggest a postmortem redistribution of personal effects: “The death of John Wordsworth was, to the poet, a class loss, containing a collection of losses and betrayals, many of them drawn from what we might call, the public sector. The poet does not speak these things; he does not draw the arrow leading from private grief to public critique, because he does not, he cannot know this connection.”34 To consider what “Wordsworth” could or could not have known construes historical cognition in terms of a spurious ontology: the self becomes a site of cultural capital, the index of plenitudes it must divulge and consequently confess in order to prove itself, all the while subscribing to a progressivist narrative whose classical liberalism espouses self-assertion, self-empowerment, and linear development. Moreover, Levinson’s critique

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conceives otherness as an artifact of sorts that is preserved in the past as a record of the aesthetic’s guilty cover-up. What McGann and Levinson both imply is that the critical trajectory of historicism (seemingly possessed by a revelatory spirit of enlightenment that sees historical narration as forward moving) is coterminous with a certain ideology of productivity that characterizes sociality as nothing but the realization of consumerist drives, materializing to appease and endlessly stimulate activities of want—an argument powerfully ironized by Adorno in the section “Sur L’Eau” from Minima Moralia : It is not man’s lapse into luxurious indolence that is to be feared, but the savage spread of the social under the mask of universal nature, the collective as a blind fury of activity. The naïve supposition of an unambiguous development towards increased production is itself a piece of that bourgeois outlook which permits development in only one direction because, integrated into a totality, dominated by quantification, it is hostile to qualitative difference. If we imagine emancipated society as emancipation from precisely such totality, then vanishing-lines come into view. . . . Perhaps the true society will grow tired of development and, out of freedom, leave possibilities unused, instead of storming under a confused compulsion to the conquest of strange stars. A mankind which no longer knows want will begin to have an inkling of the delusory, futile nature of all arrangements hitherto made in order to escape want, which used wealth to reproduce want on a larger scale. Enjoyment would be affected, just as its present framework is inseparable from operating, planning, having one’s way, subjugating. Rien faire comme une bête [sic], lying on water and looking peacefully at the sky, “being, nothing else, without any further definition and fulfilment,” might take the place of process, act, satisfaction, and so truly keep the promise of dialectical logic that it would culminate in its origin.35

The perpetual peace of lying on water and being submerged in the sheer givenness of the world poignantly recalls Wordsworth’s London, which now doth, like a garment, wear The beauty of the morning; silent, bare, Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie Open unto the fields, and to the sky.36

The city in these lines, exposed and singularly anonymous, is anything but a picture of docile complacency; rather, it intimates a striking immanence that is irreducible to the content or thematics of “identity”—a negative capability or “nothingness of the will,” to borrow a phrase from Deleuze, that

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abstains from any “irritable reaching” for a reconciliation with its already impoverished selfhood and agency.37 What Wordsworth’s sonnet idealizes, however briefly, is a newly relational attitude to the world that leaves behind unspent the fetishized myth of things and the impositional subject of ceaseless activity. Indeed, what is lost in historicist accounts is precisely the insight that nothing is lost or left behind in the subject, because it doesn’t stand apart from the world; its relation to otherness is not one of subjugation, but of anonymous saturation in the world. To think of subjectivity in this way is to reconceive the literary text as the site of abstentions that evoke “identity” as always an unmade and undone “thing.” “A lack of fit between my self-description as a social subject and my presence as political subject,” writes Denise Riley, “is not disappointing but benevolent, insofar as the subject of political language actually requires a certain impersonality, or a nonidentity, to be able to circulate productively at all. In this sense, my awkward navigations to become, coupled with my constitutional failure to fully be, are what actually enable political thinking and language, rather than marking some lamentable shortcoming in my ‘politicisation.’ ”38 Although anonymity seems to slyly evoke a “backdoor” solution to problems of identity, Riley points out that the breathing space afforded the anonymous subject between the social and political actually helps to situate it in time and place, and inevitably implies it in the material conditions of its (con)texts. The subject’s “lack of fit,” then, suggests that it can never fully fold into the language of an exceptionalism that often popularly colors the poetics and politics of identity. In abstaining from selfdescription or “awkward navigations to become,” romantic writing on anonymity provides us with a glimpse of what kinds of aesthetic, ethical, and political projects can be imagined in the wake of the subject’s withdrawal from public revelation and recognition. The romantic insistence on such projects depends precisely upon imagining what anonymous action might be; given the tenor of my argument, it is obvious that what is needed is a better sense of what I mean when I speak of “agency,” especially if nonidentity promises (at least ideally) a suspension from prescriptive doing. William Jewett has surmised that the postmodern critique of the subject “may have originated in a similar reaction against eighteenth-century materialism: the eighteenth-century fear that we are (only) our bodies has been replaced with the postmodern fear that we are (only) our words.”39 The substance of the fear of the body transposing into the fear of words can be understood as the self ’s reaction against a certain

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kind of humanistic necessity which mandates that demonstrative performativity—the imperative to referentially act—must coincide with embodiment, and that it is also prior to volition. In other words, identity can only be perceived if it is understood to be the material residue of a series of temporal actions that define the self according to the poeisis of what is “made.” Like Muybridge’s photographic studies of the active body, identity is thought to materialize through the effect of its own movement, and it is in this sense that the “scandal of referentiality” that smears the historical knowledge of romanticism indelibly requires that the self continue to be posited as a fully formed human agent that is responsible for itself and others. Romanticism thus produces an agent that is intellectually continuous with its own will—it is guided by the duty not only to endlessly self-reproduce but to announce itself according to past actions it either did or did not perform.40 And yet, as Alan Liu has noted in a stunning paper that rethinks in part the complex interweaving of creativity and destructivity in romantic thought, the notion of an agency that is diffuse, nonintentional, and without ascription (what he elsewhere in the essay develops as the nondominative logic of prestation) might serve as a powerful alternative to humanistic versions of romantic creation that have long characterized the era’s critical terrain. Liu takes as one of his guiding texts a passage from Wordsworth’s The Prelude, where the poet speaks of his first creative sensibility, That by the regular action of the world My soul was unsubdued. A plastic power Abode with me, a forming hand, at times Rebellious, acting in a devious mood, A local spirit of its own, at war With general tendency, but for the most Subservient strictly to external things With which it communed.41

Liu rereads Wordsworth’s attention to the figure of the “forming hand . . . A local spirit of its own” as a profoundly impersonal evocation of an unwished and locally received gift of creative agency (“A local spirit of its own, at war / With general tendency”) that abides by the motives of “recent creativity theories that amorally, even destructively, alter the valence of creation without conceding any privilege to the motive of identity, whether confessional (‘forgive me, . . . for I have sinned’) or otherwise.”42 Although localism might spell a weak kind of power, “a paltry, detached mechanism like

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an automaton’s hand acting by itself . . . what the romantics called ‘fancy,’ ” over and against agency defined as “the force field of identity whose postEnlightenment personality is the liberal individual, rebel, and/or deviant (or, in any case, exceptional) soul” (8), Liu considers a critical rapprochement of these terms in order to throw into relief a spirit of alert passivity or dispossession that considers the world as an ambient extension of itself rather than the object or manifestation of its own will—an extensiveness, moreover, Liu relates to the notion of “local agency” as an unfixed, creative process that retreats from overdetermined pride of presentation or mastery: Imagine, then, a universe of truly local agency in which . . . there is no there there in the mind—no center or unity that is coherent identity, or even any central split of the sort that psychoanalysis identifies. Instead, we are all like stickleback fish [an example he takes from Marvin Minsky’s The Society of the Mind]. . . . In such a fish, there are multiple reflex circuits of agency that separately trigger the actions (for example) of eating, nest-building, mating, territory-defending, and so on. But there is no central controller for those circuits. Rather, identity is a shifting configuration of whatever local reflexes agency happen to be switched on, or off, at any time in conjunction with other local reflexes—the whole ensemble self-organizing into the fluctuating networks of distributed dependency and feedback that we call identity. There is agency, nothing but agency, in other words, but no one at the control stick that could be identified as the agent. Agency is a cascade of local agencies. (18–19)

In this bizarrely outrageous stickleback universe of “agency, nothing but agency,” woven through and through with “fluctuating networks of distributed dependency and feedback that we call identity,” nothing is ever truly done because there is no differentiation between subject and object, no subjectivity to link up with a “forming hand.” Actions are never accomplished; rather, they are always about to happen because they just as well might not happen at all. The core of creation-as-self-origination is thus displaced by the infinitely contaminating flows of indistinct relays that occur without any teleological purpose, and leave no account of themselves. When Steven Cole notes that for Coleridge, “personhood is itself constituted by first, the capacity to recognize others as agents capable of having their behavior motivated by ends, and second, the belief that others are similarly capable of recognizing my own motivation by ends rather than means,”43 he at once defines the pragmatics and the limits of conceiving personhood in terms of legible ascriptions of agency. For the second-generation

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romantic writers I study, the difficult connection between the problem of other minds and the question of active selfhood marks a post-Cartesian, historical shift in thought regarding the ethical implications of considering personhood as imaginary. Of course, this shift is prominent in the moral philosophies of Rousseau, Hume, and Adam Smith, who variously claim the imagination as the faculty that not only facilitates intersubjective communication but also provokes moral action. However, what is already submerged, albeit in muted form, in their writings, and what will reveal itself in a radically new tenor in Godwin, Hazlitt, Keats, Shelley, and Austen, is an understanding of how the humanistic imperative to conceive others as like subjects—an imperative specific to a sentimental politics of recognition— fails precisely because the self can no longer be assumed a priori as the enshrined origin for sympathetic reciprocity. In the post-Waterloo British culture that these writers inhabit, “compassionate conservatism” is perceived as a corrosive project that is all too keen to foist its own resemblance onto other societies and cultures. Neither the source of charitable donation to the other, nor the site of a lack that must be filled and rendered identifiable, subjectivity is already other in that its self-projections are dissimulations of a nothingness or anonymity that fails to guarantee any lasting ground. Moreover, this failure of recognition (one that also marks a shift from classical accounts of recognition as a structure of discovery or regained knowledge of something intrinsic to someone, to Hegel’s description of the agonistic relationship between Self and Other) has the effect of rethinking subjectivity as awkwardly faltering:44 since Utilitarian claims about means and ends are no longer viable for attributing identity or recognition to others, our ethical obligations to other persons cannot be thought of in proprietary terms. We cease to be able to empirically measure the “gains” of our interactions because there are no existing identities in such an economy to begin with.45 In “The Avoidance of Love,” Stanley Cavell crucially meditates on this condition of being lost, and conceptually reverses the eighteenth-century topos of the theater as a model for intersubjectivity (central in Hume and Smith). As he reflects on the impossibility of acknowledging or making known and present the life of another, he traces out a particular ethical project that emerges out of tragic self-disownment: What I reveal is what I share with everyone else present with me at what is happening: that I am hidden and silent and fixed. In a word, that there is a point at which I am helpless before the acting and the suffering of others. But I know the true point of my helplessness only if I have acknowledged

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totally the fact and the true cause of their suffering. Otherwise I am not emptied of help, but withholding of it. . . . My immobility, my transfixing, rightly attained, is expressed by the sense of awe, always recognized as the response to tragedy. In a word, what is revealed is my separateness from what is happening to them; that I am I, and here. It is only in this perception of them as separate from me that I make them present. That I make them other, and face them.46

The inability to help others, to intercede on their behalf, echoes, on the one hand, the sense of global moral responsibility that eighteenth-century thinkers like Smith at once fearfully recognized and sought to forestall; on the other hand, it conceives inaction as the condition of our relation to others, because for Cavell the presumption that one can act for another constitutes an arrogance and ignorance of the other’s separateness or epistemological inscrutability. In other words, Cavell does not simply believe that not helping others is a legitimate ethical stance; rather, our obligations to other persons resembles the kind of rapt attention we bring to characters on the stage: our physical separation from them as fictional characters more broadly defines our similarity to and difference from them, as well as our inability to possessively know others in the world. The “being” of others, for Cavell, is at once temporally distinct and vividly present in the sense that they make an involuntary demand on us: We are not in their presence. . . . They are in our presence. This means, again, not simply that we are seeing and hearing them, but that we are acknowledging them (or specifically failing to). . . . Tragedy shows that we are responsible for the death of others even when we have not murdered them. . . . And acknowledgment in a theater shows what acknowledgment in actuality is. For what is the difference between tragedy in a theater and tragedy in actuality? In both, people in pain are in our presence. But in actuality acknowledgment is incomplete, in actuality there is no acknowledgment, unless we put ourselves in their presence, reveal ourselves to them. (332–33)

Cavell’s use of acknowledgment evokes the homelessness or deracinated quality of subjectivity; in other words, the utter humility of an anonymous dispossession: We are not in, and cannot put ourselves in, the presence of the characters; but we are in, or can put ourselves in, their present. It is in making their present ours, their moments as they occur, that we complete our acknowledgment of them. But this requires making their present theirs. And that requires us to face not only the porousness of our knowledge (of, for example,

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the motives of their actions and the consequences they care about) but the repudiation of our perception altogether. (337)

For Cavell, “selfhood” misnames what he alludes to as the sheer poverty of being, or what Levinas calls in Existence and Existents the “anonymous, yet inextinguishable ‘consummation’ of being, which murmurs in the depths of nothingness itself we shall designate by the term there is. The there is, inasmuch as it resists a personal form, is ‘being in general.’ ”47 Levinas conceives the murmur of the there is as the terror of the given, the minimal value out of which the subject emerges as an ethically attuned substance that deserves attention precisely because it can be neither helped nor ignored. And like Cavell’s ethics of disownment, the there is or the anonymous must be attended to (despite its horrors for Levinas) because it demands the very sense of impossible attendance with which or without which it cannot abide. The paradox Cavell and Levinas offer us—a compulsive interest in and visceral helplessness before the other that recalls the relationship between Coleridge’s Wedding Guest and the Ancient Mariner—recursively illuminates romanticism as similarly troubled by ethical and aesthetic horizons whose ambivalences were but stillborn in writers like Coleridge (or “still to be born” in Tilottama Rajan’s wonderful sense),48 for whom anonymity at times summoned the ontological terrors of failed knowledge, or what the poem “Limbo” calls “Naught-at-all”: ’Tis a strange place, this Limbo!—not a Place, Yet name it so;—where Time and weary Space Fettered from flight, with night-mare sense of feeling, Strive for their last crepuscular half-being . . . . . . No such sweet sights doth Limbo den immure, Wall’d round, and made a spirit-jail secure, By the mere horror of blank Naught-at-all, Whose circumambience doth these ghosts enthral. A lurid thought is growthless, dull Privation, Yet that is but a Purgatory curse; Hell knows a fear far worse, A fear—a future state;—’tis positive Negation! (11–14, 31–38)49

Despite the poem’s nightmarish tone, the Dantean self that experiences the predations of this limbic state is fully conscious of itself as an attenuated and yet nevertheless palpably integral entity that collides with time and space (“Wall’d round, and made a spirit-jail secure, / By the mere horror of blank

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Naught-at-all, / Whose circumambience doth these ghosts enthral”). The almost Poe-like suffocation of constrained subjectivity ironically elaborates itself through the harmonious opening couplets, which deteriorate into the final, rhyming enclosure of “Privation/Negation,” where the melancholy and fear of annihilation actually foreground a lyric subject that can recognize itself to be quite unlike the “horror of blank Naught-at-all.” As Coleridge writes in a passage from The Friend, “The very words, There is nothing! or, There was a time, when there was nothing! are self-contradictory. There is that within us which repels the proposition with as full and instantaneous a light, as if it bore evidence against the fact in the right of its own eternity. Not to be, then, is impossible: to be, incomprehensible.”50 For Coleridge, the self is produced through a resistance to the linguistic contradictions it uses, not only to evoke the incomprehensibility of being, but also to secure evidence of its own reflective consciousness. As one instance of sublime subjective terror, “Limbo” names a heightened state of awareness that is not dissimilar from the kind of self-presentation Coleridge equates with moral intelligence. And yet, his rescue of subjectivity here seems an ambiguous one if we consider the kinds of pressures he brings to bear on other works that are singularly concerned with anonymity and disownment. For example, in “Constancy to an Ideal Object,” Coleridge describes the “yearning Thought! that liv’st but in the brain” as the imperfect reminder of a beloved image that may or may not live outside of him: She is not thou, and only thou art she, Still, still as though some dear embodied Good, Some living Love before my eyes there stood With answering look a ready ear to lend. (12–15)

“Who” she may be is less a question here than it is a problem that, under the forces of extreme thoughtfulness, upsets the binary opposition of subject and object. Indeed, the complexity of the poem lies in its need to formally grasp the ineffability of an otherness (and thus preserve its romantic rhetoric of autonomous affect) while at the same time conceding that the subject’s demands for cohesion are at best tenuous: And art thou nothing? Such thou art, as when The woodman winding westward up the glen At wintry dawn, where o’er the sheep-track’s maze The viewless snow-mist weaves a glist’ning haze, Sees full before him, gliding without tread,

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An image with a glory round its head; The enamoured rustic worships its fair hues, Nor knows he makes the shadow, he pursues! (25–32)

While the famous epic simile that concludes the poem attempts to turn the unknowability of the other into the subjective projection of the woodman, the figure of that “image with a glory rounds its head” changes the origin and substance of knowledge into an empty visualization that hallucinates, but doesn’t ground, the very question of its production. The image thus becomes an organizing focal point that ostensibly aligns the diverse perspectives generated by the poem—the speaker, the woodman, the reader—but it is also quite strikingly an anonymous simulacrum that dissolves them in the affect of its “worship.” Enlightenment functions here as neither mirror nor lamp, but as the false optimism or a shattering that confronts the helpless subject through the very figurations it unsuccessfully seeks to dominate through desire. Between “Limbo” and “Constancy to an Ideal Object,” Coleridge’s anxious wrestlings with the philosophical implications of anonymity turn upon a profoundly nuanced and complex understanding of the ethical impossibilities that are at stake for the romantic subject, and much of what surfaces between these two poems points to an impoverishment that is inscribed in aesthetic contemplation—what Shelley famously intuited as the noninstrumental and “unacknowledged” legislation of poetry that cleaves critical reflection and experience. Cavell’s point that the necessary helplessness of the ethical imagination is tied to its aesthetic performances draws attention to a wider lesson of romanticism: the aesthetic always stands for a category of thought that destroys as well as it creates. The apparent interchangeability of “aesthetics” with “romanticism” for critics of all stripes in the field reminds us that the relation of these terms has always been a contentious one. For the kinds of texts I study—novels, political pamphlets, philosophical treatises, lyric poetry—questions of identity are formal concerns insofar as form evokes the process through which the yet-to-bedefined subject dynamically participates in and produces the aesthetic as an index of its own culturally situated, sensual responsiveness. “Romanticism implies something entirely new, the production of something entirely new,” write Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy in The Literary Absolute. “The romantics never really succeed in naming this something. . . . Beyond all divisions and all de-finition, this genre is thus programmed in romanticism as the genre of literature: the genericity, so to speak, and the generativity of

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literature, grasping and producing themselves in an entirely new, infinitely new Work.”51 This new genre of literature doesn’t simply represent the end product of romanticism, but rather a mode of relation through which subjectivity is negotiated as an unknown possibility, always seeming to recede from revelation like a “body in pieces.” In this sense, the aesthetic might be perceived as a challenge to the subject in the form of what Giorgio Agamben has described as an “annihilating entity that traverses all its contents without ever being able to attain a positive work, because it cannot identify with any content.”52 The aesthetic exceeds empirical reality only in the sense that it enables the estrangement or “othering” of subjectivity in relation to “the contents” it confronts in the work of art. Insofar as the aesthetic represents a form of judgment that bridges and destabilizes the gap between the subject and the world, it will inevitably evoke political, social, and ethical pressures that challenge subjectivity’s all too easily held belief that it can “find itself ” in art through merely mimetic, that is, referential representations.53 The aesthetic might be better thought of in terms of a reluctance of positive affirmation, which is not simply a negative revalorization of the unseen, the unspoken, the unheard, but precisely the anonymous as indiscernible—an insistence on the difficulty of recognizing unforseeable consequences and nondemonstrable identities. Throughout this book, I emphasize that the literary constitutes for the writers I study a mode of cognition through which being is formally rethought as that which it is not. As Shelley intuits, art isn’t simply a narcissistic confirmation of oneself but rather a project of (re)figuration that can only confirm the subject as a circulating element in a wider nexus. To say this also goes further than historicist arguments about context or certain poststructuralist critiques of the subject as the residue of discursive systems. While my book is in part shaped by the important insights of these critiques, I want to suggest that an attentiveness to the self ’s linguistic dispersal—the predicament that Coleridge’s “Limbo” and “Constancy to an Ideal Object” present—might better reveal a romanticism that dematerializes the “I” as a condition of its own ethical impossibility—what Blanchot hypnotically calls the demands launched in the “space of literature”: When to write is to discover the interminable, the writer who enters this region does not leave himself behind in order to approach the universal. He does not move toward a surer world, a finer or better justified world where everything would be ordered according to the clarity of the impartial light of day. He does not discover the admirable language which speaks honorably

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for all. What speaks in him is the fact that, in one way or another, he is no longer himself; he isn’t anyone anymore. The third person substituting for the “I”: such is the solitude that comes to the writer on account of the work. It does not denote objective disinterestedness, creative detachment. It does not glorify conviviality which, in the imaginary space of the work of art, would retain the freedom to say “I.” The third person is myself become no one, my interlocutor turned alien; it is my no longer being able, where I am, to address myself and the inability of whoever addresses me to say “I”; it is his not being himself.54

For Blanchot, the space of literature or its by-products like the “interminable,” “the neuter,” or the “outside,” is singularly motiveless and withdrawn. It haunts rather than merely exists, and the phenomenon of its aesthetics tends toward the “third person” or the alterity of the writing “I.” That said, however, this alterity should not be taken to be reducible to difference. Rather, it is within the nonrelational relation—the rapport sans rapport or the very inability to think of oneself as a divided subject—that the “I” approaches the interminable status of nothingness or anonymity that derealizes its capacity to address itself as “I.”55 Thus the Blanchotian paradox: at the very moment subjectivity proves unable to speak for itself and others, its ethical obligation is made most vivid—an obligation not simply to itself, to you, to us, but to the impersonal space of literature or writing that desists from sure recognitions. Such a space, as Foucault understood it in Blanchot, expresses the errant relationality between words that bear no attachment to subject and object— a “thought from the outside” that “stands at the threshold of all positivity, not in order to grasp its foundation or justification but in order to regain the space of its unfolding, the void serving as its site.”56 Put in this way, literature is less a bubblelike refuge than the name that Blanchot gives to a radical aestheticization of subjectivity—a being-with-out that is conceptually estranged from all tangible contexts. If the anonymous is the modern in this case, it evokes a modernity that also recalls and anticipates a romanticism whose work hasn’t finished. Questions that address who or what acts or thinks once the subject is no longer asserted as a self-willing agent, or how and why we should conceive nonidentity as politically and ethically viable, open up onto a romanticism that recedes into the “space of literature” where the subject is unmoored from easy solidarities, habits of thoughts, and categorizations. 57 It is in fact this very argument that E. M. Forster was to anticipate in his essay,

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“Anonymity,” where romanticism stands for a particular kind of exemplary reading: While we are reading The Ancient Mariner we forget our astronomy and geography and daily ethics. Do we not also forget the author? Does not Samuel Taylor Coleridge, lecturer, opium eater, and dragoon, disappear with the rest of the world of information? We remember him before we begin the poem and after we finish it, but during the poem nothing exists but the poem. Consequently while we read The Ancient Mariner a change takes place in it. It becomes anonymous, like the Ballad of Sir Patrick Spens. And here is the point I would support: that all literature tends towards a condition of anonymity, and that, so far as words are creative, a signature merely distracts us from their true signification.58

Although Forster is on the one hand superficially making a plea for the autonomy of the aesthetic—it cannot provide us with information like other texts, such as road signs or directions—it would be wrong to reduce his words to mere quietism. Faintly echoing de Quincey’s distinction between a literature of power that is nonpropositional and affective, and a literature of knowledge that is empirical and denotative, Forster evokes the subject’s confrontation with its own otherness through art—a confrontation that defamiliarizes subjectivity from its prosaic conditions in order for it to radically reassess its relation to those conditions themselves. For what is ethically, aesthetically, and politically at stake in the concept of anonymity as I have been describing it is the productive power of conceiving the self as other, and Forster’s inclusion of his essay in his collection Two Cheers for Democracy should sharpen our attention to the deeper, romantic sort of ethics and politics of withdrawal practiced by the great modernist acolyte.59 By turning us back to the “modernity” of romantic anonymity and the imagination, Forster also moves us forward and helps us see that romantic aesthetics and ethics are by no means over, and that the broadly anti-identificatory strain in romantic thought testifies to the possibility that our inscrutability to ourselves precedes our relationship to others—something perhaps most deeply felt at the moment when we feel porous and stubbornly unavailable to the rules of evidence.

5= 8•3*

Virtual Ruin Disinterested Agency in Hazlitt and Keats I stood and watched [Keats], fading away, fading away, along the pavement, and could hardly tell whether he were an actual man, or a thought that had slipped out of my mind, and clothed itself in human form and habilments, merely to beguile me. — n a t h a n i e l h a w t h o r n e , “P’s Correspondence” You are here on the underside of the page, writing in water, anachronist, showing your head with its delicate fuses, its fatal telemetry, a moundful of triggers and gunpowder like a field-mine, your sixty-one inches and your gem-cutter’s fingers, anonymous, taking the weight of a “roomful of people” but making no mark, pressing the page as I write . . . — b e n b e l i t t , “This Scribe, My Hand”

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chapter one

The general ambition of Hazlitt’s Essay on the Principles of Human Action (1805) is to develop an ethical theory of agency that is predicated on the belief that “the human mind is naturally disinterested . . . that it is naturally interested in the welfare of others in the same way, and from the same direct motives, by which we are impelled to the pursuit of our own interest.”1 The remark demonstrates the degree to which the key term disinterest, retaining its Kantian flavor and gesturing to diverse aesthetic, social, and political structures of critical detachment and objectivity derived from the Enlightenment, had become successfully incorporated into much late eighteenth-century philosophical thought.2 Hazlitt’s definition and use of the term partly falls within this tradition, but the Essay far from attempts merely to apply the inherited terminology.3 Indeed, the difference lies in the kinds of pressures exerted by the ethical in Hazlitt’s writings—pressures that reveal the radical implication that the disinterested imagination is the mechanism through which identity is perceived as a limitation or a distortion of an otherwise anonymous subjectivity that anticipates it. Paradoxically, for Hazlitt it is as a result of this kind of estrangement at the core of the self that sociality is at all possible, and it will be the work of the Essay to demonstrate why an aversion to the self leads to an extra-individual concern for ethics, politics, and alterity. Disinterest evokes a profoundly renunciatory force in the face of a colonizing desire to appropriate the other. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, disinterest in part means “contrary to interest or advantage; disadvantage, prejudice, injury,” and certainly the rhetorically injurious or wounding effect of disinterest is intrinsic to its meaning as an austere self-fashioning or ascesis of the subject. Disinterest cultivates a condition of resolute unselfishness, but it does so with a violence that eviscerates the subject’s foothold. It promotes an ostensibly balanced and panoptic survey of other persons and things at the expense of a break with personal interest or advantage. David Bromwich has remarked that the disinterested man is still looking at what he judges; the uninterested one has gone to something else. . . . A disinterested investigator, a disinterested judge, a disinterested historian, need not be detached. He may be immersed in a question and, having started on one side, conclude his engagement on the opposite one—or even on the same. What is unimaginable is that he should remain strictly neutral (human nature being what it is) except when treating a question in which he is also uninterested.4

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In Bromwich’s description of the “disinterested man,” disinterest evokes a formal principle through which consciousness can represent both itself and others by claiming theoretical detachment. It fully implicates itself in the representations it conceives by virtue of the fact that it alienates itself and others through its own mediating structures. Disinterest, then, does not signal a withdrawal from presence for the sake of transcendent knowledge. For Hazlitt, it is the crucial term for divesting ourselves of the premise that we are fully self-possessed individuals. Disinterest avows personal involvement only insofar as it dynamically negotiates “the personal” against outside evaluation. What Bromwich’s reading of Hazlitt neglects, however, is something that operates on another level in the Essay: the possibility that an impersonal attitude toward ethical judgment and action refracts back onto the agent and puts into question the humanistic reliance on individual motivation. With such a break, Hazlitt evokes a telling emptiness in the judging subject—an emptiness, moreover, that propels the Essay’s startling claims about the necessity of ethical thought in the wake of the self ’s disarticulation.5 The anonymity of identity thus raises the question of whether ethics might be conceived as dependent on the imaginary. It is in this sense that Hazlitt’s moral philosophy is radically disinterested: it moves beyond a superficial, skeptical quandary that recycles the self through critique, and finds the difficulty of ethical action to lie, not in any objective strategy of reasoning, but in the dubious primacy of personhood in the first place. The Essay uniquely argues that the intersubjectivity of ethical obligations depends upon the impersonality of social relations themselves, and that this impersonality finds justification in an essential disinterest that is common to all of us. Put another way, Hazlitt wants to argue that the very lack of personal knowledge between individuals not only should motivate us to intercede on behalf of one another and share a mutual commitment to each other’s welfare, but it should also lead us to profoundly question the belief that the self ’s relation to itself is one of privileged knowledge. Hazlitt thus counters the mundane Utilitarian belief that the interests of others can be made viable to us only if we construe them as mere extensions of an essential selfishness. In this chapter, I want to explore Hazlitt’s belief that a concern for the imaginative capacities of ethical debate turns us to the virtuality of social relations, and it is precisely in the dynamic between self-constitution and differentiation that an ethically charged social inquiry is formed. Indeed, it is by insisting on the tenuousness of our

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various conceptualizations of “self,” “subject,” “individuality,” and “reality” that Hazlitt comes to claim the most negating effects of the imagination (its tendencies toward evacuating reference and fictionalizing the social) as its most forceful facets. Deborah Elise White has pointed out that romantic disinterest posits “the eruption or interruption of sheer being among beings even as it exposes the impossibility of arriving at any oneness with ‘Being’ itself. The disinterested imagination does not transcend—it defines the limits of what radicals of the 1790s sardonically termed ‘things as they are.’ It is less an evasion of social, political, and economic interests, therefore, than an interrogation of their posit(ion)ing as such.”6 White’s echo of the Jacobin significance of disinterest helps to amplify the cultural and political resonances of Hazlitt’s moral philosophy. In order to further pursue its modulations, in the concluding portion of this chapter I turn to a discussion of Keats’s lushly negative poetics of self-dissolution. Although the relationship between Hazlitt and Keats is a well-known subject of romantic criticism, I want to illuminate the connections between an ethics of disinterest or impersonal self-divestiture with an aesthetics of lyrical anonymity—what Keats will famously call “negative capability.” If disinterest signals for Hazlitt a gradual depersonalization of the self in favor of a communal binding of individuals together through their shared virtual existence, Keats anxiously meditates on poetry’s capacity to generate culturally and affectively productive experiences of connectedness and relationality.

#:#*=8:=•'# [Man’s] nature is originally and essentially disinterested, that as a voluntary agent, he must be a disinterested one; that he could neither desire, nor will, nor pursue his own happiness but for the possession of faculties which necessarily give him an interest out of himself in the happiness of others; that personal identity neither does, nor can imply any positive communication between a man’s future, and present self, that it does not give him a mechanical interest in his future being, that man when he acts is always absolutely independent of, uninfluenced by the feelings of the being for whom he acts, whether this be himself, or another; lastly, that all morality, all rational, and voluntary action, every thing undertaken with a distinct reference to ourselves or others must relate to the future, that is, must have those things for its object which can only act upon the mind by means of the imagination,

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and must naturally affect it in the same manner, whether they are thought of in connection with our own future being, or that of others. — h a z l i t t , Essay 7

This concise summary of the Essay’s central polemic exposes a series of contradictions Hazlitt tries to think through: voluntary agency is by definition disinterested; pursuit of personal happiness consists in promoting the happiness of others; actions are determined neither by personal identity nor by the person for whom one acts; all present actions are oriented toward and conditioned by the future. Although all of these positions can be said to hinge upon Hazlitt’s theoretical demystification of the self, it would be wrong to characterize the Essay’s concerns as uniquely ontological. Hazlitt wants to demonstrate that the “essentially disinterested” status of the self is first and foremost an ethical problem that addresses the duplicitous primacy of personal identity. Hazlitt’s inquiry uncovers a more elaborately heterogeneous description of subjective moral action, one that recoils from the premise that “authentic” identity is a matter of pure self-assertion. He wants to ask: Why should we think that our lives solely belong to us and are not shared entirely with others? Why must one act as if all our actions mean to privilege our own concerns and not those of another? In a deliberate distortion of identity-based models of action, Hazlitt’s paradigm of thought emerges out of a series of temporal substitutions and deferrals that simulate resemblance and continuity, representing consciousness as precisely that which does not entirely belong to any one of us. What is most striking about Hazlitt’s arguments is how different they are from the prevailing moral philosophies based in self-interest; he wants to challenge the Utilitarian claim that ethical considerations are grounded in a maximized egocentrism that credits and energizes the self with vainglorious accumulations. According to these philosophies, which turn upon cost-benefit analyses of ethical quandaries, we take an interest in the lives of others only insofar as we can appreciate the greater good or happiness that will come to us as a consequence of our sympathetic identifications with them. Because human feelings and interests are theoretically distinct and unique to the person who experiences them, our ability to sympathize with other individuals emerges as a result of our capacity to imagine becoming or substituting ourselves for them. By believing in a self-possessed subject as the condition of possibility for ethical agency, Utilitarians reify human subjectivity not only as hegemonic but as impervious to change.8 It is through the illusion

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of self-mastery, then, that processes of specular identification between actual persons are thought to be possible: Now I can conceive that a man must be necessarily interested in his own actual feelings, whatever these may be, merely because he feels them. He cannot help receiving pain from what gives him pain, or pleasure from what gives him pleasure. But I cannot conceive how he can have the same necessary, absolute interest in whatever relates to himself, or in his own pleasures and pains, generally speaking, whether he feels them, or not. (Essay, 5–6)

Through a system of emotional prediction, Utilitarians believe that we can know how each one of us will be affected by certain things in the future, or how we would have been affected in the past, because feelings merely extend a continuity already uniquely inscribed in the self. In Hazlitt’s words, however, we must abandon ourselves to the idea that “a man’s particular successive interests [are] all bound up in one general feeling of self-interest as they are all comprehended under the same word, self, [as if ] a man on the rack really felt no more than he must have done from the apprehension of the same punishment a year before” (Essay, 7). Hazlitt’s rejection of this model suggests that we have confused a linguistic convenience—the self—with a conceptual essence. Our feelings only seemingly express our true selves because we idealize a priori the personal as the authentic core of our being. In fact, the personal can never be properly possessed, Hazlitt maintains, because what we are is always a momentary distortion along an otherwise temporal fluctuation to which we cannot lay claim.9 Following Hume’s property-based argument that self-worth (vanity) is always generated through the appraisals of people around us, Hazlitt posits that the personal hasn’t any inalienable properties: its “essence,” in fact, names properties that might as well actually “belong” to many others as well. To better understand this claim, however, we have to examine more carefully Hazlitt’s temporalization of the self: The objects in which the mind is interested may be either past or present, or future. These last alone can be the objects of rational or voluntary pursuit; for neither the past, nor present can be altered for the better, or worse by any efforts of the will. It is only from the interest excited in him by future objects that man becomes a moral agent, or is denominated selfish, or the contrary, according to the manner in which he is affected by what relates to his own future interest, or that of others. (Essay, 1–2)

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Although Hazlitt applies Locke’s argument in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding that identity is constituted through consciousness of its own time,10 he also transforms it to support his critique of the Utilitarian neglect of temporal change. According to the new account, subjectivity “binds” our past and present acts together to achieve a semblance of an empirically continuous and distinct self-identity. With the past, memory retains certain experiences as indelibly our own because only we could have participated in them in the first place—only we could remember those experiences precisely because the past consists of completed actions we recognize as having ourselves completed. As for the present, our awareness of present experiences affirms our contemporary continuity with current events, sensations, and actions. According to this argument, selfhood is conceived as something quite different from what Charles Taylor, with reference to Locke, has called the “punctual self,” “defined in abstraction [and disengagement] from any constitutive concerns”;11 it doesn’t stand apart from time but rather is saturated amid a network of interlacing, temporal strands which fantasize the concept of “personhood” into being. In this way, the past and present construct an ideology of selfhood that both recognizes and misrecognizes through acts of fantasy—acts which Slavoj Žižek identifies as producing social reality: “What we call ‘social reality’ is in the last resort an ethical construction; it is supported by a certain as if. . . . As soon as the belief . . . is lost, the very texture of the social field disintegrates.”12 The injunction to “know thyself,” then, is part and parcel of the illusion of self-possession: knowledge regarding oneself can only be provisionally accounted for since the contingency of selfhood exposes the fact that one cannot ever be “oneself ” at any one time. The self disavows any referential stability and can view certain memories or experiences only tentatively as representative of it. It follows that the future cannot be accounted for because it evokes actions or experiences that haven’t occurred, haven’t been completed, or have yet to be determined. Indeed, futurity represents the outermost bounds or limit of Utilitarian empiricism because it exceeds rational prediction and plotting: No one, I should think, will be disposed seriously to maintain that this future imaginary self is, by a kind of metaphysical transubstantiation, virtually embodied in his present being, so that his future impressions are indirectly communicated to him before-hand. . . . The changes which [consciousness] has to undergo at any time can have no possible effect on those which it has

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previously undergone. . . . In this sense, the individual is never the same for two moments together. What is true of him at one time is never (that we know of ) exactly and particularly true of him at any other time. (Essay, 84–85)

Instead of proposing a messianic theory of knowledge that holds the future as the revelatory key or telos of our lives, Hazlitt maintains the utter self-division of identity, and forecloses holding out faith in the ultimacy of postponed self-knowledge. It would seem that such buoyant and trenchant demystifications of the self might delegitimize its virtual potential; however, Hazlitt’s “future imaginary self ” in fact evokes the very possibility of ethical agency and judgment. For now, however, I want to underscore Hazlitt’s point that futurity is necessarily linked to action: “The feelings of desire, aversion, &c. connected with voluntary action must always be excited by the idea of the object before it exists, and must be totally inconsistent with any such interest as belongs to actual suffering or enjoyment” (Essay, 90–91). At first, it seems strange to think that our voluntary actions can be excited by persons or things we have yet to see or feel; after all, why would there be any desire to act in the absence of any apparent object or person? In a certain sense, one might describe Hazlitt’s thinking here as denarrativizing; whereas Utilitarianism posits a homogeneous description of a self moving through social reality, Hazlitt considers being as an anonymous, virtual semblance that is always dissolving at the very point of asserting itself, interrupting progress and plot.13 The self ’s dispossession in Hazlitt’s philosophy testifies to a temporal complexity that cannot be easily “plotted.” Of course, the I ’s call to action is motivated by a probabilistic investment in futurity, but it is one that promises no actual returns: we act in spite of not knowing, and we do not expect guarantees.14 Hazlitt argues that our desire for things or persons we can imagine but cannot physically actualize is the precise reason why we would want to act in the first place. Put in this way, desire is less the expressive correlate of a lack than it is a nonintentional affect that contagiously expresses and extends our singularity while impoverishing our wish to satisfy that desire in the first place—desire for the sake of desire itself. As Jean-Luc Nancy remarks, “The presence of the other does not constitute a boundary that would limit the unleashing of ‘my’ passions. Whereas the individual can know another individual, juxtaposed to him both as identical to him and as a thing . . . the singular being does not know, but rather experiences his like (son semblable). . . . This is the passion. Singularity is the passion of being.”15

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Ethics thus proceeds as the result of an endless postponement of desires or passions for difference, and is quickened by a singularizing love of the same. Hazlitt writes: The world of action then, of business or pleasure, of self-love or benevolence, is not made up of solid materials, moved by downright, solid springs; it is essentially a void, an unreal mockery, both in regard to ourselves and others, except as it is filled up, animated, and set in motion by human thoughts and purposes. The ingredients of passion, action, and properly of interest are never positive, palpable matters-of-fact, concrete existences, but symbolical representations of events lodged in the bosom of futurity, and teaching us, by timely anticipation and watchful zeal, to build up the fabric of our own or others’ future weal. (“Self-Love and Benevolence,” 20: 178)

In sharp contrast with empiricist logic, Hazlitt posits our passions, actions, and interests as imaginary or figurative: they provoke and bring about (rather than simply fill in) the void represented by future time. Feelings and actions constitute fictional leaps that describe being through “symbolic representations” that are fleeting likenesses of ourselves. The “world of action then, of business or pleasure, of self-love or benevolence” evokes economic, erotic, and charitable investments as figurative and futuristic phenomena that reconceive the public sphere as a virtual community. The inscrutableness of the future opens up the self to a speculative social reality that refracts it through an interminable series of projections and transferences. The anonymity of the subject hinges upon our willingness to imagine the shape of the void in such a way as to allow its identity to always expand in proportion to our growing aspirations for imagining it.16 An imaginative “poetics of ethics,” then, becomes the enabling condition for a radical reconstitution of identity. In orienting itself toward the future, the self cannot claim any essential privileges to secure it: “The imagination, by means of which alone I can anticipate future objects, or be interested in them, must carry me out of myself into the feelings of others by one and the same process by which I am thrown forward as it were into my future being, and interested in it. I could not love myself, if I were not capable of loving others” (Essay, 3). The anonymous self can come to experience itself only through others; it is not enclosed by its own interests, but rather negotiates with a broader plurality even though what it negotiates cannot be easily specified. “The only reason for my preferring my future interest to that of others,” Hazlitt writes in “Self-Love and Benevolence,” “must arise from my anticipating it with greater warmth of present imagination” (20: 185).

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Self-interest does play a part in ethical agency insofar as one can say that we have a more immediate and intimate awareness of those ideas and things we ourselves imagine. Indeed, the self is always treated as having value, but instead of thinking of value exclusively in terms of the reductive economy of social transactions, Hazlitt’s philosophy considers evaluation as a strikingly dispossessing, will-less activity: the self recognizes, reappropriates, and transfers “identity” among many others because it occurs without any focal point of action, and what it does possess doesn’t properly belong to it at all: All voluntary action, that is all action proceeding from a will, or effort of the mind to produce a certain event must relate to the future, or to those things, the existence of which is problematical, undetermined, and therefore capable of being affected by the means made use of with a view to their production, or the contrary. But that which is future, which does not yet exist, can excite no interest in itself, nor act upon the mind in any way but by means of the imagination. The direct primary motive, or impulse which determines the mind to the volition of any thing must therefore in all cases depend on the idea of that thing as conceived of by the imagination, and on the idea solely. For the thing itself is a non-entity. By the very act of it’s [sic] being willed, it is supposed not to exist. (Essay, 21–22)

Hazlitt intuits that the intersubjectivity of social relations invokes an anonymous community of nonpersons. One might compare his position to the impersonalist philosophy of Derek Parfit, who argues that we have to resist describing persons as “existing entities, distinct from their brains and bodies, and their experiences,” because we invariably end up ascribing importance to personal motivations, privileges, and desires while neglecting our collective commitments to others. Our duty to others should be based upon a sense that there is indeed nothing that can be exclusively called either “ours” or “theirs.”17 “Commonness,” then, is in effect a compensatory move that endlessly deflects and relativizes alterity. Of course, Hazlitt’s Essay in many ways grows out of the eighteenth-century discourses on sympathy, principally the writings of Adam Smith and David Hume, both of whom promote sympathy as the key term for humanism, emotional reciprocity, and moral conduct.18 Hazlitt’s concept of anonymous subjectivity, however, seems to theoretically minister against the easy flow of sympathetic communication that the earlier writers described. For example, whereas for Hume sympathy evokes a dynamic of mutual exchange and reconfirmation, Hazlitt discounts the argument that the self can properly confer legibility on the other through interpersonal relations: “The visible impression of a

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man’s own form does not convey to him the idea of personality any more than that of any one else; because as objects of sight they are both equally obvious and make the same direct impression on the eye; and the internal perception is in both cases equally incommunicable to any other being” (Essay, 106). The point for Hazlitt isn’t so much that sympathetic identifications themselves are not immune to contingency, but that the desire to approximate identity, however nebulous it may be, precludes the more unsettling belief in the subject’s nothingness. Being does not simply seek confirmation or mutual support in another; rather, being for Hazlitt is by definition altered—it cannot surpass itself by knowing another because it is utterly finite.19 As Deborah Elise White notes, “Otherness, therefore, refers to something other than other selves, and the interests of ‘an’ other may well be something other than interests—that is, something other than what lies between beings or the community (however admirable) of sympathy.”20 Sympathetic identifications only partly help to describe Hazlitt’s theory of disinterest because they depend upon an illusory notion of what kinds of identities or selves are being communicated with and sought out for mutual (re)confirmation.21 Indeed, the matter of the fictionality of sympathetic relations, which Catherine Gallagher has examined as involving bodies that are necessarily anonymous and porously subject to emotional identifications and exchanges, posits the self as interchangeable.22 Such identifications transform difference into the site of compromise between agents. But as we have seen, every imaginative projection simultaneously dissolves a semblance of being in the very instant that it seemingly (re)presents it; identity is never posited without erasure. For Hazlitt, the theatricality of moral action (most apparent in Smith’s and Hume’s models of sympathy) intimates the degree to which performance shores up the utter nothingness of the self—its actions can never be entirely intentional, despite one’s best efforts at voluntarism, because it literally stands apart from itself.23 “Under laws of theatricality,” writes Rei Terada, “objects of emotions are not necessarily fictive, yet the entire experience of emotion takes place in the domain of imagination . . . we don’t feel to the extent that our experience seems immediate, but to the extent that it doesn’t—not to the extent that other experiences remind us of our own, but to the extent that our own seem like someone else’s.”24 By disarticulating the self from its own feelings and identity, subjectivity is conceived of as interchangeable with its other, but we shouldn’t confuse this with a certain naive freedom: anonymity escapes colonizing and colonization because its

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multiple contingencies always implicate another within its own constitution. Colonization cannot be ethically sanctioned because it speaks to an ideological error—it presumes an ability to appropriate a version of otherness that is in effect a specular distortion of a personal lack. Being is always other insofar as the other is always heterogeneous. In this sense, otherness cannot be construed as intrinsically incommunicable since alterity is a feature that is in advance of, indeed anticipates, the self ’s actions. The Essay’s complex theorization of the futurity of benevolent actions suggests that the intentions of personal agency, once cast forward into an unknown future, are invariably up for grabs; thus an anonymous concept of human action is necessary. We cannot rely upon identity and human as foundational terms for social agency (as humanism might have it); instead, we learn what it means to be someone through the very actions we take to help and understand others. This process of acculturation, however, shouldn’t be thought of as ascribing us with a capacity to confer or bestow “identity” or “humanity” upon one another as a sign of our free ethical agency. Rather, as Anthony Appiah has pointed out, “in understanding people as intentional systems—as having the beliefs, desires, intentions, and other propositional attitudes of common sense psychology—we make a certain projection of rationality. We ascribe beliefs and desires to people in such a way as to ‘makerational’ their acts.”25 The social production of agency doesn’t disqualify subjective action; rather, it is contingent upon it. The interdependence of these terms recognizes the ideological structure of the humanist dynamic of “common knowledge,” which all too readily assumes such knowledge as the grounds for decision making. In the occasional essay “On the Knowledge of Character,” Hazlitt echoes some of these ambiguities surrounding easy ascriptions of identity and action when he details the various cultural ignorances surrounding matters of identity. Some of his examples are nationalistic (“Some minds have a greater facility of throwing off impressions, and are, as it were, more transparent or porous than others. Thus the French present a marked contrast to the English in this respect”); class-based (“Persons, for instance, in a higher or middle rank of life know little or nothing of the characters of those below them, as servants, country people, &c.”); and gendered (“Women, according to Mrs. Peachum, are ‘bitter bad judges’ of the characters of men; and men are not much better of theirs”) (8: 306, 307, 308). But some of his best remarks are directed at familial relations. Hazlitt portrays the family as the site of various misrecognitions bred as a result of close intimacies: “Familiar-

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ity confounds all traits of distinction: interest and prejudice take away the power of judging” (8: 311). Unlike Hume, however, Hazlitt eschews the logic of property in his discussion of why relatives remain strangers to one another in spite of their familial bonds. Self-alienation doesn’t incite social mobility; rather, social mobility provokes the sense of alienation in the first place: The greatest misfortune that can happen among relations is a different way of bringing up, so as to set one another’s opinions and characters in an entirely new point of view. This often lets in an unwelcome day-light on the subject and breeds schisms, coldness, and incurable heart-burnings in families. . . . The young man may talk with enthusiasm of his “Rembrandts, Correggios, and stuff:” it is all Hebrew to the elder; and whatever satisfaction he may feel in hearing of his son’s progress, or good wishes for his success, he is never reconciled to the new pursuit, he still hankers after the first object that he had set his mind upon. (8: 312)

The formalization of class ideology within the family can turn familiar friends and relatives into utter strangers. As the self acquires grandeur through aesthetic education, it misrecognizes the fact that it is artificially bestowed with qualities of distinction, qualities which, like gifts, are evaluative and conferred by persons or social systems. The notion of self-induced Bildung is an inspired fantasy—it is ephemeral not simply because it is a privilege of intellect but because each apparent move forward in status involves a simultaneous dissolving of identity. In this sense, subjectivity isn’t so much produced by the social as the social itself is conceived of as multiply layered and phantasmatic. The individual and the collective, then, necessarily inform one another as ethical desires.26 However idealized Hazlitt’s remarks on the anonymous workings of ethical intersubjectivity may be, he also intuitively unmasks the presumptuous attitudes of the late eighteenth-century romantic subject, who on the surface champions inwardness as radical chic. For this reason, the Essay can be compared with Hazlitt’s later occasional and satirical writings, which often expose styles of self-fashioning as insincere and delusional or, at best, freighted with anxieties over whether to live in the world “as in it” or “of it” (“On Living to One’s Self,” 8: 91). In “On Reason and Imagination,” Hazlitt writes that the cumbersomely inflated styles and abstract strokes of thinking of contemporary philosophers and writers often neglect concrete perceptions: “Modern tragedy, in particular, is no longer like a vessel making the voyage of life, and tossed about by the winds and waves of passion, but is converted into a handsomely-constructed steam-boat, that is moved by the

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sole expansive power of words” (12: 53). The sleekness of contemporary literature attests to the ornamental superficialities of literary style, as the case of Byron reveals: “Lord Byron has launched several of these ventures lately (if ventures they may be called) and may continue in the same strain as long as he pleases. We have not now a number of dramatis personae affected by particular incidents and speaking according to their feelings, or as the occasion suggests, but each mounting the rostrum, and delivering his opinion on fate, fortune, and the entire consummation of things” (12: 53). Hazlitt’s observation that writers often practice a self-serving, dissimulating rhetoric is quite commonplace, but the broader implication of his examples is that what passes for identity in the public sphere is often a commodified invention of an extraordinary egocentrism. In “On Personal Identity” Hazlitt further muses upon self-interest as a dangerous reflection of possession and property: We may often find ourselves envying the possessions of others, and sometimes inadvertently indulging a wish to change places with them altogether; but our self-love soon discovers some excuse to be off the bargain we were ready to strike, and retracts “vows made in haste, as violent and void.” We might make up our minds to the alteration in every other particular; but, when it comes to the point, there is sure to be some trait or feature of character in the object of our admiration to which we cannot reconcile ourselves— some favorite quality or darling foible of our own, with which we can by no means resolve to part. The more enviable the situation of another, the more entirely to our taste, the more reluctant we are to leave any part of ourselves behind that would be so fully capable of appreciating all the exquisiteness of its new situation, or not to enter into the possession of such an imaginary reversion of good fortune with all our previous inclinations and sentiments. (17: 266–67)

In this passage, sympathy reads like a narcissistic form of jealousy since an interest in others seems to preclude a sustained interest in oneself. The sympathizer’s benevolent desire to literally become another person runs the risk of losing the particularities of his or her own self-possessed identity: “In the range of ideal excellence, we are distracted by variety and repelled by differences. . . . Habit alone is blind and tenacious of the most homely advantages; and after running the tempting round of nature, fame, and fortune, we wrap ourselves up in our familiar recollections and humble pretensions” (17: 273–74). Self-interest maintains otherness so as to entertain the appeal of social difference as the “exquisiteness of [a] new situation.” Comment-

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ing on the eighteenth-century curiosity for the impersonality of character, Deidre Lynch has suggested that “to play with nobody, with nobody’s unrecognizable facelessness especially, is to begin to renegotiate the identity of the gentleman and to begin to reconsider the particular forms of inequality that authorized this figure.”27 Self-interest is deployed as the avaricious and unsympathetic opposite of disinterest—it covetously conceals and preserves identity, as if in anxious response to the self ’s felt vulnerabilities amid its diverse social exchanges. But implicit in Hazlitt’s analysis is the view that “interest” is itself an insubstantial term, a fiction that permits the fantasies of wealth, property, and grandeur to take shape. As Jan Mieszkowski has cogently argued, interest “makes a difference,” as the Latin root would have it, since it always points toward something not yet realized: a wish, an objective, an endpoint with which no particular interest can coincide. . . . Interest is always bound up with the possibility of things being other than what they are now. As selfinterest, interest is always interest in the other-than-self, which is to say, the self-interested self is by definition “other-interested.”28

Etymologically, interest evokes a risk that portends an absence or loss already inscribed into its very definition. It thus “makes a difference” precisely by steering the self not toward itself, but outward to possibilities that confront it with ambiguities it cannot account for. What is most remarkable about the style of Hazlitt’s occasional essays— wandering, allusive, self-doubting, and endlessly meditative—is that it gestures toward a mode of thought that is profoundly extroverted in its concerns, testifying freely to the sociable and exchangeable nature— indeed, the fluidity—of subjectivity. Moreover, personality arises, Hazlitt writes in the Essay, from “the peculiar connection which subsists between the different faculties and perceptions of the same conscious being, constituted as mass is, so that as the subject of his own reflection or consciousness the same things impressed any of his faculties produce a quite different effect upon him from what they would do if they were impressed in the same way on any other being” (Essay, 105). Personality is a convenient term for maintaining social integrity—it fearfully internalizes heterogeneity and projects it outward as a fantasy of agonizing otherness: “Personality seems to be nothing more than conscious individuality” (Essay, 105). Whereas self-interest inspires a careful protectionism over one’s identity, the shifting nuances of Hazlitt’s argument intimate a nonantagonistic acceptance of

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the epistemological emptiness of identity as such. By this, I do not mean that the self is essentially aporetic for Hazlitt, but that it is theorized almost pragmatically as a structure through which one can provisionally organize data about oneself and others:29 If I had no idea of what passes in the minds of others, if my ideas of their feelings and perceptions were perfect representations, i.e. mere conscious repetitions of them, all proper personal distinction would be lost either in pure self-love, or in perfect universal sympathy. In the one case it would be impossible for me to prefer myself to others as I should be the sole object of my own consciousness; and in the other case I must love all others as myself, because I should then be nothing more than part of a whole, of which others would be equally members with myself. (Essay, 108–9)

Knowledge of others appears related to knowledge of oneself, but since the self is already thought of as a necessary fiction, Hazlitt posits disinterest as the expression of a subjectivity that is always temporally unfastened—what Derrida calls the “non-contemporaneity with itself of the living present,” and which presumes that the “question” of justice for oneself and others depends upon interrogating the alterity of the self.30 Subjectivity’s crisscrossings of past and present—its projections further afield into an unclaimed future— inspire its strongest ethical urgings to act with and on behalf of others, and to question its movements at every turn. Disinterest is thus buoyed by the belief that otherness represents an inaccessibility that is already a condition of subjectivity’s anonymous constitution.

C#8=B'•#:558* A persistent question about Hazlitt’s Essay on the Principles of Human Action centers on the efficacy of disinterested moral action in light of the dissolution of identity. Does the anonymous subject evoke endless possibilities for ethical interactions and identifications? Or does it merely weaken our faith in ethics by disrupting our conceptual investment in interiority, rendering it mystical, illusory, and impotent? Does the alterity that Hazlitt ascribes to subjectivity strand it indefinitely in abstraction, eliminating its capacities to act altogether?31 More than any other romantic writer, Keats’s poetry responds to these facets of Hazlitt’s thinking with fascination and anxiety. In so doing, he undermines the organic myth of romantic aesthetics and poetry’s capacity to resemble a consciousness that reproduces positive hu-

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manistic values: “A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity—he is continually in for—and filling some other Body—The Sun, the Moon, the Sea and Men and Women who are creatures of impulse are poetical and have about them an unchangeable attribute— the poet has none; no identity—he is certainly the most unpoetical of all God’s Creatures.”32 This famous remark from the letters demonstrates the extent to which Hazlitt’s notion of a disinterested, anonymous subjectivity had become burdensome for Keats in the wake of the conceptual disintegration of the self. The morality that guides the poetical character depends upon an almost lifeless series of attachments, and despite Hazlitt’s observation that it is through the imagination that one is “thrown forward as it were into [our] future being, and interested in it” (Essay, 3), the Keatsian poet is seemingly represented as beyond interest and action altogether. How can poetic sympathy be accomplished, Keats seems to ask, when persons no longer exist? Indeed, poetry and poethood come to find their fullest expression in a profound retreat from action and self-presentation; it is with this in mind that Keats ponders the ethico-aesthetic problem of how to formulate representations of ethical agency once the self is done away with. Keats takes from Hazlitt the understanding that the self can only come to be appreciated through benevolent action. The temporalized self, at once dissolving and disowning any notion of mastery, is suggestively nondominative: “We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us. . . . Poetry should be great & unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself but with its subject” (1: 224). The notion, however, that ethical action always endorses someone or something other than the self also implies that consciousness can only ever conceive of the effectiveness of its own actions in the third person. That is to say, being can only take for certain those events or actions which do not directly benefit it. The Keatsian self is notoriously rid of content: it is a negative realization of Hazlitt’s model of moral action, which ironically depends upon the involuntary consequences of moral agency. Writing at a time when the literary market’s imperative to produce had only seemed to further the obliteration of the poet in the crowd, Keats acutely represents the ethical and aesthetic ironies of the poet and the lyric in the public sphere: “I have altered, not from a Chrysalis into a butterfly, but the Contrary, having two little loopholes, whence I may look out into the stage of the world”; “my imagination is a Monastery and I am its Monk” (2: 128, 323). The doubling of solitude in these remarks suggests an enclosed setting for poetry as the preserve of high

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concentration and withdrawal, but it also does away with poetry’s public face and capacity for action. Can poetry still insist on being the medium for a disinterested ethics if there is already something inherently imperiling about the craft itself? Can the aspirations of the disinterested imagination actually contribute moral knowledge in light of poetry’s “virtual” disappearance? The Keatsian problem of knowing what poetry is about is of a piece with the problem of understanding what kinds of knowledge poetry is capable of offering in the first place. Such frustrations have become the focus of various critical revisions of romantic thought, targeting what Jerome McGann has called, after Hans Enzenberger, “ ‘The Consciousness Industry’—a light industry . . . which [the Romantics] sought to preserve free of cultural contamination.”33 Most prominent has been Marjorie Levinson’s convincing description of Keats’s “life of allegory” as a “social-ego enterprise” imbibing the conflicts of the rising middle class’s search for legitimacy through everchanging forms of self-identification. In this vein, Keats’s escapism looks less like another version of romantic solitude and more like a recycling of literary inheritances, generating power exponentially out of a poetry that materially submerges the self in the trappings of its cultural baggage: “I call this power ‘virtual,’ ” writes Levinson, “to bring out its parodic relation to authorized forms of power, ‘virtuoso’ to suggest its professional, technically preoccupied character, and ‘virtuous’ by reference to its imposed and contrived limitations.” These multiple senses of Keats’s virtues render lyric writing an affair of careful plundering and formal bricolage, turning negative capability into a project of becoming “by (mis)acquiring; to become by his writing at once authorized (properly derivative) and authorial (original); to turn his suffered objectivity into a sign of his self-estranged psyche, and to wield that sign as a shield and an ornament.”34 In Levinson’s terms, negative capability evokes the poet as a virtual sleight-of-hand man, his identity constantly producing and reproducing itself according to artful trickery. If this careful historicism attempts to explain Keatsian disinterest alongside his earlier poetry’s socially mobile aspirations, it does so at the expense of ignoring the sophistication of Keats’s own insights regarding poetry’s uneasy “misacquirings.” Although the consolidating narratives of cultural capital in part account for the marginalization of the poet and his craft, the ethics of disinterest also conspire to potentially imperil the Keatsian project of aesthetic redemption. What is most distressing for Keats is the possibility that the cultural disenfranchisement of the poet is indicative of a conceptual

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shift in the definition of poetry from an art that is discursive and representational to one that is formally self-negating, and it is the ethical implications of this formalism, I want to argue, that Keats inaugurates. The problem with the appearance/disappearance of agency, however, reflects a theoretical debate surrounding the ability of what is often designated “the literary” to constitute a mode of practical and historical action. “Do literary or even historical subjects do anything?” Alan Liu asks in an article examining the analytical models of New Historicism. “Does the plural movement of a carnival or a satire, for example, truly subvert dominant authority?”35 Liu’s impatience with historicist theorizations centers upon their impoverished understandings of how the literary can be thought of as formally “possessing” agency. Historicism ignores the historical subject’s capacity to act, and compensates this by replacing agency with rhetorical flourish: The issue, of course, is not that action is a more “real” ground of explanation than subjective representation, but rather that action—freed of its old chains of casual explanation—is a hermeneutics necessary to complement interpretations of representations. . . . History, in sum, must be studied not just as an expressive action of self-, monarch-, or hegemonic state-display . . . but also as action qua action—as action, that is, seen as an alternate ground of explanation definitive of what we mean by identities and their coercive representations.

The crux of this debate, according to Liu, emerges in the romantic era, when historicism theoretically arose parallel to a growing sense of literature’s own categorical autonomy: Caught in the flux of such historicist and literary transition, the very notion of the Subject had to be rethought in the shape of that strangely unmotivated or unconsciously motivated being haunting both literary and historiographical Romanticism: the Folk with its post-Hegelian Spirit. So, too . . . action had to be rethought. Action, as Michelet, Burckhardt and other historicists demonstrated, occurred on many quieter, social fronts flanking the point of obvious political or military event.36

The historicist inability to address agency is reflected in Keats’s anxieties about how to represent thoughts and actions through the literary, where the agentless subject is supreme. After all, how to speak about what one can do with texts that profess: “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter”?37 In the wake of disinterestedness, poetry is left having to explain what it can possibly provide if it doesn’t apparently serve anyone.

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Throughout his writings, Keats aspires to enlarge moral consciousness through affective models of subjective truth—sympathetic models that “transmit” a kind of knowing through poetry: “The great end / Of poesy,” he writes in Sleep and Poetry, is “that it should be a friend / To soothe the cares, and lift the thoughts of man” (245–47). This characterization of the Keatsian Work has long been supported by a critical tradition that has located an essentially redemptive theme in his art, and has also endorsed a quest for authoritative cultural identity.38 Indeed, the Keatsian desire for literary legitimation structures as well as marks the endpoint of a career singularly caught between a luxurious, textual sensualism and a desperate dissatisfaction with discourses of conspicuous consumption. And yet, even if the poetic artifact approaches fetishism for Keats, it is also the site for a devastating exploration of the loss of the self amid its creations. 39 The burden of his poetry lies in specifying what are the personal creations of a subjectivity so utterly dispossessed that it can have neither an occupation nor any sense of belonging. When Hazlitt exclaims near the beginning of “On Living To One’s-Self ” that “he who lives wisely to himself . . . does not fret himself to death with trying to be what he is not, or to do what he cannot. He hardly knows what he is capable of, and is not in the least concerned whether he shall ever make a figure in the world” (8: 91), it isn’t hard to hear murmurings of a version of Keatsian negative capability, pushed to the limits of contemplative desistance.40 Indeed, some of that backing away from action is vividly captured in Keats’s letter to his friend Richard Woodhouse, where the poet’s disappearance under the pressures of Wordsworthian egotism ends up compelling him to confront the anxieties (surpassed by Shakespeare) of “capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason” (1: 193): As to the Poetical Character itself, (I mean that sort of which, if I am any thing, I am a Member; that sort distinguished from the wordsworthian or egotistical sublime; which is a thing per se and stands alone) it is not itself— it has no self—it is every thing and nothing—It has no character. . . . A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity—he is continually in for—and filling some other Body—The Sun, the Moon, the Sea and Men and Women who are creatures of impulse are poetical and have about them an unchangeable attribute—the poet has none; no identity—he is certainly the most unpoetical of all God’s Creatures. If then he has no self, and if I am a Poet, where is the Wonder that I should say I would—right—write no more? . . . It is a wretched thing to confess; but

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is a very fact that not one word I ever utter can be taken for granted as an opinion growing out of my identical nature—how can it, when I have no nature? When I am in a room with People if I am ever free from speculating on creations of my own brain, then not myself goes home to myself: but the identity of every one in the room begins to press upon me that, I am in a very little time annihilated—not only among Men; it would be the same in a Nursery of children: I know not whether I make myself wholly understood: I hope enough so to let you see that no dependence is to be placed on what I said that day. (1: 386–87)

The “Poetical Character” stands apart from those bodies and identities he imaginatively fills and refills while at the same time evoking a detritus of existence that is passively recorded. Indeed, the paradox lies in the fact that even though bodies and identities like “the Sun, the Moon, the Sea and Men and Women” serve as examples of a deeply poetical impulsiveness (they represent vessels the poet can enter and inhabit), the “Poetical Character” claims no substance at all since he has “no nature”—“we can have no more of a cat than her skin,” writes Hazlitt in “On Personality Identity,” “nor of an author than his brains” (17: 274). Indeed, for Hazlitt, this evisceration of inwardness further ironizes the bleak fate of artistic inspiration, whose desires for canonicity are exposed as mere confusions of the literal with the figural: “By becoming Shakespeare in reality, we cut ourselves out of reading Milton, Pope, Dryden, and a thousand more—all of whom we have in our possession, enjoy, and are, by turns, in the best part of them, their thoughts, without metamorphosis or miracle at all” (17: 274). On the one hand, the atemporal fantasy of becoming Shakespeare destroys the English canon by mocking its laws of succession, but on the other, it commits the graver ethical error of assuming that the self is utterly interchangeable and fluid, that its aesthetic sensibility is nothing more than a symptom of its own rabid self-interestedness. For Keats, the despotic elitism of cultural taste similarly disrupts the apparent source of inspiration (the poet) from the objects of his desire: because consciousness can only conceive of its own intelligibility through others, the poet’s projection outward doesn’t simply evoke a form of sympathetic identification, but rather a compulsive need to originate oneself through others. Keats is anxious about the ethics of cross-identifications because they suggest a model of thinking that is always discharging and divesting itself in the presence of persons. The poet is, to paraphrase Rimbaud, always another, but rather than claim an endless, ghostly circulation of that poetic genius, Keats intimates the

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coldness, the strange detachment of inspiration: “When I am in a room with People if I am ever free from speculating on creations of my own brain, then not myself goes home to myself: but the identity of every one in the room begins to press upon me that, I am in a very little time annihilated.” As if anticipating Blanchot’s statement that “a being is either alone or knows itself to be alone when it is not,”41 Keats’s annihilation speaks to an aloneness that is experienced not when he goes away or lets go of others, but happens with the “identity of every one in the room”—thinking of oneself alone only in relation to another. Keats’s differentiation of the “Poetical Character” from the poetics of the Wordsworthian or “egotistical sublime” depends upon the capacity of others to embody, respond to, and recognize his art and poetic identity for him. In other words, since the poet cedes his identity to those around him, it is only through his expropriated creations that he can be known. But since “Poetical Character” is generated by Keats through a series of deferrals (“The Sun, the Moon, the Sea and Men and Women” are not conscious of being the vessels of the “Poetical Character”), “inwardness” is conceived as a sign of an impoverished and negated consciousness, one that suspends questions of identity and reputation. This is a far more radical formulation of poetic Bildung than the developmental narrative offered in an earlier letter: The first [chamber] we step into is what we call the infant or thoughtless Chamber, in which we remain as long as we do not think—We remain there a long while and notwithstanding the doors of the second Chamber remain wide open, showing a bright appearance, we care not to hasten to it; but are at length imperceptibly impelled by the awakening of the thinking principle—we no sooner get into the second Chamber, which I shall call the Chamber of Maiden-Thought, than we become intoxicated with the light and the atmosphere, we see nothing but pleasant wonders, and think of delaying there for ever in delight: However among the effects this breathing is father of is that tremendous one of sharpening one’s vision into the heart and nature of Man. (1: 280–81)

The poet’s apparently disinterested sensibility is here imagined as an architectural plan, anticipating and structuring an intellectual project that is at once pragmatic and yet determined by a path already set. Although such a poetic consciousness is seemingly oblivious to its own progress, it is nevertheless led toward an ultimate enlightenment beyond the “Chamber of Maiden-Thought,” where creativity is synonymous with “intoxication” and “pleasant wonders.” The passage offers a massive incentive, couched in a

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lyrical metaphysics: consider negative capability as a way into (an inauguration of ) bourgeois identity, rather than a dismissal of that very process which seeks to install such identitarianism as a necessary prerequisite to cultural and social entitlement.42 On the one hand, then, Keats’s lyrical dissimulations suggest a powerfully affective dynamic between self-presentation and benevolent withdrawal. On the other hand, Keats’s “self-annihilating” sensibility expresses concerns that the aesthetic and social effects of such affective models of subjectivity are hampered by contradictions internal to lyric writing itself. For if the Keatsian poet aspires to fill “some other Body—The Sun, the Moon, the Sea and Men and Women,” the result of these heteropathic gestures is a repressive paralysis of the self ’s ability to conserve both itself and others. With its contours eroded by the very sympathies it projects, it gives up even the most provisional securities of “fact & reason.” Keats’s exaggerated vulnerability confronts the difficulties of discriminating between becoming another and being suffocated by one’s absorption of the perceived values of others. The anxieties of the letters stir up a negative fame or empty celebrity that is famously echoed in the virtuoso sonnet “When I Have Fears.” On a small scale, the poem’s strain of chastening inwardness reflects upon missed opportunities and premature death: When I have fears that I may cease to be Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain, Before high-piled books, in charactery, Hold like rich garners the full-ripened grain; When I behold, upon the night’s starred face, Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance, And think that I may never live to trace Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance; And when I feel, fair creature of an hour! That I shall never look upon thee more, Never have relish in the faery power Of unreflecting love!—then on the shore Of the wide world I stand alone, and think Till love and fame to nothingness do sink. (1–14)

Forecasting a reputation that also precedes and outweighs him, Keats judges himself to be lacking according to the very standards of traditional authority that prove to be so fascinating and monumental. The poem’s melodramatic resonances stage the emptying out of love and fame, extinguished alongside

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the sinking star of Keats’s dying enthusiasm. Shadowed by the prospect of a fatal prematurity whose tenor resonates uppermost in the poem, Keatsian negativity here upsets the transcendental claims of poetic reputation in the very instant that it acknowledges the richness of its impoverishment. It is a critical commonplace that the sonnet performs its own undoing through its self-conscious representations of (and fascinations for) writerly materials: Keats’s pen as a thresh passing over his mind; books legibly steeped in thoughtful “charactery”; the sky composed of “huge cloudy symbols of a high romance” whose shapes Keats cannot trace, and whose brilliance fails to positively influence or console. The stubbornness of the elegiac sonnet verges on an extended farewell that fails to reach a finale because it cannot ever properly write/right its own shipwreck in the shallows of characterless disappointment. But what makes the illegibility of the Keatsian character more pressing is that it is often equated with a kind of textual death: the grave is the same as that which is engraved. The figure calls to mind Samuel Johnson’s dread that epitaphs are inadequate commemorations of persons because, like the peasantry of Gray’s “Elegy,” they have “no character at all.”43 Closer in time, however, it also recalls Wordsworth’s thoughts, in “Essays upon Epitaphs,” on the instability of inscriptions: If words be not (returning to a metaphor before used) an incarnation of the thought but only a clothing for it, then surely will they prove an ill gift; such a one as those poisoned vestments, read of in the stories of super-stitious times, which had power to consume and to alienate from his right mind the victim who put them on. Language, if it do not uphold, and feed, and leave in quiet, like the power of gravitation and the air we breathe, is a counterspirit, unremittingly and noiselessly at work to derange, to subvert, to lay waste, to vitiate and to dissolve.44

Cynthia Chase has noted that the compensatory effects of language in this passage unsettle the claims for Wordsworthian autobiography: the words— the vestments—of that ventriloquized identity represent the debilitating curse of self-articulation.45 Keats’s empty “character” rehearses the Johnsonian and Wordsworthian dread of inscription by turning the fullness of “high-piled books” writ large in “charactery” into the grave of fame—an impoverishment of the “the full-ripened grain” whose harvest deadens the life it is meant to fill. Fame is thus envisioned as inseparable from the lifelessness of commodity culture, apparently replete but notably free of humanity. In the Essay on the Principles of Human Action, we saw Hazlitt argue that our desires

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for certain imagined objects or persons cannot be grounded in self-interest because, by definition, they simply do not exist as property; for this reason, they are not immediately ours, and it is conceivable that they might be imagined by someone else.46 Ironically for Keats, this theory of benevolence founders precisely because he has lost, to paraphrase Blanchot, the ability to say “I”: poetry no longer seems a viable mode of ethical action because the sense of its alterity runs deep and negates any sense of active relationality. “I had no relations to the state,” dreams Hazlitt, “no duty to perform, no ties to bind me to others: I had neither friend nor mistress, wife or child” (8: 92). The strange landscape of Keats’s poetry, its reluctance to foreground a dutifully normative subject, testifies to a larger concern over the aesthetic’s incessant reduction to meanings that can only be gleaned through appeals to “sympathy,” “intersubjectivity,” “feeling,” or “humanity.” This inability at personalization marks a point of discernment in Keats’s work regarding the aesthetic’s refusal to be thought of as a mere reflection of human agency, as if art’s content depended upon humanization for its “effects” to take shape. As Theodor Adorno reminds us in his essay on “committed” art, “interwoven in the veil of personification is the idea that human beings are in control and decide, not anonymous machinery, and that there is life on the commanding heights of society.”47 To graft agency onto art means to elevate a certain historical concept of humanism that is part of the “consciousness industry,” and thus repeat the oppression of the dominant classes by personifying their power in the authorial ability to “control and decide.” According to such thought, the aesthetic can only “speak” insofar as it becomes the mouthpiece for a figural act of personification that erroneously replicates individual power. The identity of art thus becomes synonymous with its oppression, all the while ignoring the “anonymous machinery” that circulates around its faltering “I.” Keats struggles with the issue of poetry as a mode of anonymous agency throughout his career, and strong echoes of that struggle are carried through the odes, which distinctly explore themes of self-cancellation and despair alongside more luxurious possibilities of renewal and knowledge of otherness. In “Ode on Indolence,” for example, Keats describes not simply the passiveness of poetry, but its almost inhuman detachment and indifference to the poet’s consciousness. In a state of dreamlike reverie, the speaker evokes three figures who one learns in the third stanza represent Love, Ambition, and the “demon Poesy,” passing before him “like figures on a marble urn, / When shifted round to see the other side” (5–6). These

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three personifications do not so much beguile the speaker as represent an eerily mobile death-in-life he can only approximate in his dreams. The inability of the speaker to achieve full consciousness of them signals both his attachment to and entanglement in the ode’s dreamlike fabric: How is it, Shadows, that I knew ye not? How came ye muffled in so hush a masque? Was it a silent deep-disguised plot To steal away, and leave without a task My idle days? Ripe was the drowsy hour; The blissful cloud of summer indolence Benumbed my eyes; my pulse grew less and less; Pain had no sting, and pleasure’s wreath no flower; Oh, why did yet not melt, and leave my sense Unhaunted quite of all but—nothingness? (11–20)

Keats allegorizes the speaker’s desire for aesthetic splendor through the gliding figures, but by deliberately portraying them as elements from without, he turns the speaker’s aspirations into deeply impersonal things. Indeed, the speaker’s feelings of indolence seem entirely alien to him—as his “pulse [grows] less and less” the ode negatively measures its success in proportion to the speaker’s own leave-taking. The ode’s perpetual questionings and suspensions of personal feeling or revelation suggest the sheer emptiness of consciousness: “Unhaunted quite of all but—nothingness.” All the poem can testify to are the various affective registers of the speaker’s tangential hold on the world: like the artifact in the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” which suspends narrative and judgment in favor of a sensation-based model of interpretation, the allegorical figures in “Ode on Indolence” tease a consciousness forever craving to disappear into the art it imagines and wants, nearing a liminal midpoint between cultural longing and selfdestroying desire. Unlike the later ode “To Autumn,” “Ode on Indolence” represents an abundance the speaker interprets as a burden partly of his own creation— a “sleep . . . embroidered with dim dreams” (42)—and partly something over which he cannot claim total responsibility since the ode’s luxuries are described as gesturing well beyond his reach. Against the speaker’s best efforts, the poem-dream cannot be perceived as the projected fulfillment of an internal, emotional possibility because the ode “invents” a formal structure that, like the three allegorical figures, seems to pass the speaker by. “Ode on

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Indolence” richly demolishes self-fulfillment, not only by thematizing indolence but by suggesting that it represents an ephemeral cultural capital—a thing of the speaker’s mind that can never be properly possessed (“Farewell! I yet have visions for the night, / And for the day faint visions there is store” [57–58]). Basking the disinterested speaker in a temporal limbo, Keats seems to immerse the “I” in a sphere of pure contemplation and eroded consciousness: A third time came they by. Alas, wherefore? My sleep had been embroidered with dim dreams; My soul had been a lawn besprinkled o’er With flowers, and stirring shades, and baffled beams. The morn was clouded, but no shower fell, Though in her lids hung the sweet tears of May; The open casement pressed a new-leaved vine, Let in the budding warmth and throstle’s lay; O Shadows, ’twas a time to bid farewell! Upon your skirts had fallen no tears of mine. (41–50)

The extraordinary externality of this vision neither compensates nor animates the speaker: “Upon your skirts had fallen no tears of mine.” Unlike Hazlitt’s progressive temporalization of the self which awakens the subject into ethical awareness, the dissolution of being(s) in Keats fails to organize a plan for ethico-aesthetic action. The pulsing negativity of Keatsian indolence conceives subjectivity in terms of a nonpositivistic “nothingness,” oddly approachable only through the proximate presences of other artifacts, persons, and things. If there is, however, a compelling reason to rescue poetry for a project of ethical action, Keats suggests that a negatively charged lyrical consciousness can externalize “experience” for the sake of another—a sacrificial gift of the self that is particularly relevant in terms of contemporary theories of the lyric.48 For example, in Adorno’s classic essay “Lyric and Society,” lyric’s status of “unrestrained individuation” is defined as “social in nature,” and it represents a unique formal strategy on the part of lyric poetry to withstand reified culture: This demand, however, the demand that the lyric word be virginal, is itself social in nature. It implies a protest against a social situation that every individual experiences as hostile, alien, cold, oppressive, and this situation is imprinted in reverse on the poetic work: the more heavily the situation weighs upon it, the more firmly the work resists it by refusing to submit

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to anything heteronomous and constituting itself solely in accordance with its own laws. . . . The lyric spirit’s idiosyncratic opposition to the superior power of material things is a form of reaction to the reification of the world, to the domination of human beings by commodities that has developed since the beginning of the modern area, since the industrial revolution became the dominant force in life.49

The lyric survives within a formal shell that helps it oppose those forces of reification that can potentially disintegrate it. Lyrical resistance, however, aims not to preserve its fragile individualism but to release itself into the visionary collectivity promised by language. In Stefan George’s poetry, for example, the transformation of an individuality intensified to an extreme into self-annihilation . . . was necessary in creating the phantasmagoria of the folksong, something the German language had been groping for in vain in its greatest masters. Only by virtue of a differentiation taken so far that it can no longer bear its own difference, can no longer bear anything but the universal, freed from the humiliation of isolation, in the particular does lyrical language represent language’s intrinsic being as opposed to its service in the realm of ends. (53)

The redemptive theme notwithstanding, Adorno describes the exfoliation of a provisional lyrical insularity into the social community—an exfoliation arrived at through a lyrical self-sacrifice at the altars of the social. 50 Indeed, what Adorno uncovers implicitly is a spirit of negation at odds with the transcendental affirmations of the aesthetic, which in its seemingly blithe flight from the ordinary perilously disavows anything that smacks of the common, familiar, and quotidian. The lyric thus practices “a form of skeptical restraint,” as Marshall Brown describes it, “that underlies and impels lyric negation. The negatives reflect, so to speak, the prosaic sobriety that makes lyric effusion possible.”51 The lyric’s self-destroying confrontation with a collectivity clearly resonates in the archaisms of “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” in which Keats’s attempts to produce a ballad narrative that ends up being undercut by disruptions specific to the ballad form. Susan Stewart has read “La Belle Dame” as deeply haunted by several preceding literary works—a haunting that is patterned into both the structure and the content of Keats’s ballad.52 Keats’s “dissociated ventriloquism,” as Stewart calls it (127), achieves a layering effect that presses competing narrative strains and speakers against one other,

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in turn amplifying the poem’s suggestive fragmentariness and upsetting its temporal scheme through a series of dreamlike echoes: I. Oh, what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, Alone and palely loitering? The sedge has withered from the lake, And no birds sing! II. Oh, what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, So haggard and so woe-begone? The squirrel’s granary is full, And the harvest’s done. (1–8)

The questioning narrative “I” at the beginning of the first two stanzas at first seems to lend a certain narrative coherence to the poem, which opens onto a barrenness so inhospitable that it almost seems to resist human intervention altogether. But this abstract voice, whose faint lyricism weakly trails the knight-at-arms like a ghostly resonance, is soon replaced by the supposedly subjective “I” that continues the ballad’s central dream sequence. Although that “I” appears to resemble the voice of the previous stanzas, it is difficult to ascribe to it any identity. It melts into the “I” that subsequently takes over the rest of the poem, functioning like a structural device that, in Stewart’s view, doesn’t so much cue a progressive narrative momentum as signal an anterior echoing of possible ballads and their speakers—an echoing that makes spectral the knight’s dramatic meeting with the magical lady, and whose soporific spell erodes his memory: VIII. She took me to her elfin grot, And there she wept, and sighed full sore, And there I shut her wild wild eyes With kisses four. IX. And there she lulled me asleep, And there I dreamed—Ah! woe betide!— The latest dream I ever dreamed On the cold hill side. (29–36)

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Despite the unreliability of the knight’s insistence on the place of his enchantment and reverie, his loss of consciousness—or, at the very least, his temporary slumber—informs the ballad form’s almost pathologically compulsive need to record, repeat, and recycle meaning through metrical and thematic structures. This compulsion, however, doesn’t so much undo the poem as characterize an anxious consciousness that, following Adorno, “can no longer bear its difference.” Verbal and metrical repetitions in the ballad winnow away any trace of an existing locus or origin for a story, detaching the lyrical consciousness from any referentiality. Whatever the poem tries to articulate amounts to a further frustration of its own capacity to externalize or prospectively project a “core” that isn’t there to begin with. “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” however, does not dehistoricize the poetic mind in favor of a kind of mise en abîme; rather, the poem suggests that the impossibility of acknowledging the other—an impossibility plaintively intimated throughout Keats’s erotic rhetoric of desire and despair—exemplifies what Stanley Cavell has described as the skeptic’s recital of taking “certain among his experiences to represent his own mind—certain particular sins or shames or surprises of joy—and then take his mind (his self ) to be unknown so far as those experiences are unknown.”53 An epistemological lack, projected onto the other, reflects back onto the self as a denial of knowing. The magic lady in the ballad becomes, of course, an enticingly gendered figuration for such otherness—a figuration echoed in the masculinist voice of “pale kings, and princes too, / Pale warriors,” who seem to cry out to the knight that “ ‘La Belle Dame sans merci / Hath thee in thrall!’ ” (37–40).54 But Keats apparently suggests that this projection of otherness—volleyed back by the male community of pale kings, princes, and warriors who themselves take the magic lady for a figuration of dreadful enchantment— mires the poem in a temporal quicksand that moves the knight neither forward nor backward in time. The ballad records a dream within which the speaker is assigned a place, and in this sense, his (or her) consciousness repeats the disoriented status of the dreamer who is led along by a poetic form already established for him. The succulent imagery of the knight being fed “roots of relish sweet, / And honey wild, and manna dew” (25–26) baits the poem’s logic by deliberately producing an unfulfilled “language strange” (27) through which the speaker can never be sated (the knight awakens on a “cold hill side” where “the sedge has withered from the lake”), and which cannot ultimately bear such self-confirming declarations as “ ‘I love thee true,’ ” since the identity of that “I” has been altogether abandoned.

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The final barrenness of the poetic landscape in “La Belle Dame sans Merci” testifies to an evacuation of personal agency in the face of the ballad’s alienating (and othering) formalism, or what Mutlu Blasing has perceptively described as the complex “experience of the nothingness of the human” in the face of the inhumanity of a poetic language that works as “a foreign mechanism and an intimate, constitutive history at the same time.”55 Similarly, in “To Autumn” the pungent depiction of a season of “mellow fruitfulness” filled “with ripeness to the core” (1, 6) betrays the traces of a consciousness that remains undetectable amid the depopulated landscape of its representations: III. Where are the songs of spring? Aye, where are they? Think not of them, thou hast thy music too— While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day, And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue. Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn Among the river sallows, borne aloft Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies; And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn; Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft; And gathering swallows twitter in the skies. (23–33)

The faint sonority of this concluding stanza has been much remarked upon as a sign of the ode’s sensual redemption through a nonsignifying poetics.56 Abjuring its own aesthetic harvests, such a consciousness has released itself willingly to the negative rewards of a species of thought spared from accumulation and material waste. But this hopefulness eludes what Tilottama Rajan has interestingly identified as the condition of Blanchotian désoeuvrement, or worklessness, at the heart of Keats’s cultural vision.57 The second stanza’s almost lazy regard for the personification of Autumn, “sitting careless on a granary floor” with “hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind; / Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep” (14–16), anticipates a Pre-Raphaelite lugubriousness, watching “the last oozings hours by hours” (22); more to the point, it exaggerates the sheer emptiness of the personification as an indicator of emotional mood, seasonal change, or allegorical wisdom. The poem’s concluding nothingness, like its initial abundance, cannot be properly accounted for by anyone; its splendid evocation of material desires, softened by trust in temporal change, absolves the speaker of any responsibility to

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acknowledge the poem’s designs. Geoffrey Hartman has noted that “once we see that what is being satisfied is empathy or in-feeling, and that to satisfy it Keats (like Autumn) fills outside with more and more inside, the structure of the poem as a progressive surmise becomes clear. In-feeling in Keats is always on the point of overidentifying; and even here it demands more than the first stanza’s dream of truth.”58 But what is so eerie about “To Autumn” is its reluctance—indeed, its disinterest—in filling out a capacious interiority. Indeed, the poem represents a structural shift from a confessional (read Wordsworthian) paradigm to a constructivist one of inwardness: it isn’t inflated by its benevolent investments and overidentifications, but rather deflated by them, resembling the condition of the “Poetical Character,” who confesses: “in a room with People if I am ever free from speculating on creations of my own brain, then not myself goes home to myself: but the identity of every one in the room begins to press upon me that, I am in a very little time annihilated.” The speaker of “To Autumn” relinquishes a hold upon reality, but only because the essentially charitable nature of the Keatsian self is conceived of as involuntarily sympathetic—it overidentifies not because it wants to, but because it cannot stop, and thus can only think of its agency in terms of something that occurs almost sporadically from without.59 In this sense, the evocation in “To Autumn” of personal action as something that always occurs by someone other than oneself is quite different from the starry breathlessness that concludes the “Ode to Psyche”: Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane In some untrodden region of my mind, Where branched thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain, Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind: Far, far around shall those dark-clustered trees Fledge the wild-ridged mountains steep by steep . . . . . . And there shall be for thee all soft delight That shadowy thought can win, A bright torch, and a casement ope at night, To let the warm Love in! (50–67)

The hope for final enlightenment through erotic satisfaction intimates a confidence in subjectivity’s projections, and the ode seems to paradigmatically reinforce a kind of fully formed identitarianism that the Keats of the “negative capability” letters had apparently disavowed.

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In the “Ode to a Nightingale,” however, Keats runs up against a materialism that preempts the wide-eyed awareness that typifies the “Ode to Psyche”:60 That I might drink, and leave the world unseen, And with thee fade away into the forest dim— III. Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget What thou among the leaves hast never known, The weariness, the fever, and the fret Here, where men sit and hear each other groan; Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs, Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies; Where but to think is to be full of sorrow And leaden-eyed despairs; Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes, Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow. (19–30)

The consolations of flying off on the “viewless wings of Poesy” (33) are described within the same rhythms as the “leaden-eyed despairs” which plague the speaker on earth. Because of the ode’s trancelike delivery (“Fled is that music . . . do I wake or sleep?”), it is impossible to differentiate here between idealism and the dreaminess of a seemingly drowned-out voice. The state of rich “nothingness” somehow manages to offer experiences that are quite palpable; in fact, Keats appears to achieve a poetry in spite of a dying away of consciousness:61 VII. Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird! No hungry generations treade thee down; The voice I hear this passing night was heard In ancient days by emperor and clown; Perhaps the self-same song that found a path Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home, She stood in tears amid the alien corn; The same that oft-times hath Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam Of perilous seas in fairy lands forlorn.

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VIII. Forlorn! The very word is like a bell To toll me back from thee to my sole self ! Adieu! The fancy cannot cheat so well As she is famed to do, deceiving elf. Adieu! adieu! Thy plaintive anthem fades Past the near meadows, over the still stream, Up the hill-side; and now ’tis buried deep In the next valley-glades: Was it a vision, or a waking dream? Fled is that music . . . Do I wake or sleep? (61–80)62

The nightingale’s voice tolls back the speaker/poet to his “sole self,” exposing the multitudes of its preexisting lives in stark contrast to his own plaintive self-enclosure. The tolling effect, emphasized by the self-negating adieus, sonorously imbues the process of deindividuation with a lush palpability and attentiveness. This concrete abundance in the face of the speaker’s own death of consciousness all too obviously dramatizes the high incompatibility between the nightingale’s splendor and the speaker’s self-annulling reverie. More powerfully however, Keats’s poetics of nothingness succeeds in promoting a sensibility that distinctly foresakes any guiding presence. The sensuousness of the poetry evokes a lyricism that doesn’t rely on propositional thought; as an evolved mode of cognition, it expresses aesthetic experience as something mediated and ever unfurling in opposition to reification.63 In tracking the voice’s history from “ancient days” when it found “a path / Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home, / She stood in tears amid the alien corn,” or when it wafted in from “charmed magic casements, opening on the foam / Of perilous seas in fairy lands forlorn,” Keats’s nightingale is buoyed simply by the extra-individual charms of its voice. The voice, moreover, is not recovered “past the near meadows, over the still stream, / Up the hill-side,” but buried “deep / In the next valley-glades” as an unknowable secret that the poem’s final lines dreamily recall: “Was it a vision, or a waking dream? / Fled is that music . . . Do I wake or sleep?” The “I” has not so much assimilated the nightingale as confronted what the speaker in the “Ode on Indolence” experiences: the scripting of its identity by the very poetry meant to reflect and reveal it. I have been trying to suggest thus far that the Hazlittian flavor of Keats’s negative capability induces a defamiliarization in the lyric form, and that the anxieties surrounding the “otherness” of lyric voice are tied to attempts

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to reimagine poetry as a site for benevolent action. The cultural resonances, however, that arise from the problem of knowing when and where the self ’s responsibilities begin and end foreground Keats’s encounter with the ethical aspect of the aesthetic. Indeed, earlier poems such as “Sleep and Poetry” or “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” provide a fanciful glimpse of alterity as something that orients the nostalgic longings of an ever unsated subject, caught between the sense of one’s nothingness amid the flotsam and jetsam of the past, and an immediate, hopeful sense of cultural plenitude that such nostalgia fosters. The abundant classical images and themes, signposts of an artifactual otherness, overload these poems with an all-too-conscious mandate to elevate the poet into a pantheon the codes and idioms of which have to be mastered first. Such an emphasis on an aestheticized culture of alterity, however, lends proof to Lionel Trilling’s sobering observation (with regard to “Sleep and Poetry”) that this Keatsian shift toward a pleasurable poetry “strict in its avoidance of ugly themes” and free of “those distressing matters which are referred to as ‘the burrs and thorns of life,’ ” baldly represents “the essence of Philistinism”: it rids art of any social import, reducing the complexity of its pleasures to a kind of blithe embarkation on personal affluence and desire.64 Under such conditions, the self is literally depleted under the weight of its own delusive declarations. The pressures of producing a type of poetry that enshrines the lures of cultural heritage escalate to a stunning violence, perpetrated by the self upon others and itself as it appears seemingly freed of ethical obligations. And yet, pace Trilling, Keats’s classical cobblings already cite and ventriloquize the monumentalized past in such a way as to evoke it as a calcified museum of recyclable words, images, characters, and phrases—a museum whose greatness delays poetry’s growing marginalization at the beginning of the nineteenth century.65 Keats’s plunderings suggest a nervous, class-induced awkwardness vis-à-vis the institutions of learning from which he ordinarily would have been excluded.66 His endless literary imitations and pastiches intimate that what is “classical” is indeed nothing but a series of recycled, impersonal echoes and intangible borrowings that might or might not serve the present as voices of memorable otherness. Keats’s poetics thus exemplify an adept technique of instant reproducibility; since the poetry is seemingly devoid of a governing author, it might have been written by anyone at any time—a fear that lurks behind John Lockhart’s famous attack on Keats in Blackwood’s: “our very footmen compose tragedies, and there is scarcely a superannuated governess in the island that does not leave a roll of lyrics behind her in her bandbox.”67

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By deprivileging and depersonalizing the institutionalized category of authorship, Keats questions the primacy of a cultural knowledge that is transmitted through individual authority, and which secures the subject’s potential for self-mastery and self-possession. The irreducibility of the aesthetic to empirical or artifactual reference in this case shores up the cognitive limitations of a culture of fashionable alterity, and it is to this last point that Keats’s late poetry troublingly addresses itself: Who alive can say, “Thou art no poet; may’st not tell thy dreams”? Since every man whose soul is not a clod Hath visions, and would speak, if he had loved And been well nurtured in his mother tongue. Whether the dream now purposed to rehearse Be poet’s or fanatic’s will be known When this warm scribe my hand is in the grave. (1.11–18)

In these lines from the incomplete epic, The Fall of Hyperion, Keats intimates that poetry’s meaning might very well be a posthumous affair.68 In turn, the aesthetic is conceived as the basis for a scene of confrontation (rather than glowing affiliation) between the poet/quester and the detached figure of the muselike goddess Moneta, who entertains no redemptive desires nor keeps any promises regarding cultural longevity: Then the tall shade, in drooping linens veiled, Spoke out, so much more earnest that her breath Stirred the thin folds of gauze that drooping hung About a golden censer from her hand Pendent . . . (1.216–20)

Moneta acts like an anonymous power that resists the humanizing flow of sympathetic attachments: Even so that lofty sacrificial fire, Sending forth Maian incense, spread around Forgetfulness of everything but bliss, And clouded all the altar with soft smoke, From whose white fragrant curtains thus I heard Language pronounced. (}.102–7)

And although she seems to orient the poet’s thoughts in a haze of protective aesthesis, she does so through a gradual withdrawal of presence: her

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“language” emerges out of a “lofty sacrificial fire” that incinerates it in the very moment that it accomplishes illumination. “Then saw I a wan face,” exclaims the poet after Moneta parts her veils, Not pined by human sorrows, but bright-blanched By an immortal sickness which kills not. It works a constant change, which happy death Can put no end to; deathwards progressing To no death was that visage; it had passed The lily and the snow; and beyond these I must not think now, though I saw that face— But for her eyes I should have fled away. They held me back, with a benignant light, Soft-mitigated by divinest lids Half-closed, and visionless entire they seemed Of all external things—they saw me not, But in blank splendour beamed like the mild moon, Who comforts those she sees not, who knows not What eyes are upward cast. (1.256–71)

Moneta’s hollowness testifies to a negativity more profound than that of the goddess in “The Ode to Melancholy,” one that fails to vividly allegorize any kind of cognitive certainty behind her wan stare. And although Moneta’s face absorbs the negativity Hegel counsels us to tarry with and behold, it is one that is not quite recuperable under “the magic power [of Spirit] that converts [the negative] into being.”69 She does not belong to this life or the next, but rather figures for a dispossession that remains immune to all solicitations. As Rajan has noted, Moneta doesn’t so much govern the mysterious scene of The Fall of Hyperion as serve as its “curator”: she presides over a space of self-divestiture and impoverished authority that signifies cultural impotence—true misery for the accumulating self.70 It is on this stage, then, that the poem explores a version of the aesthetic that denies the narcissistic concentrations of persons who literally envisage their culture as a personified manifestation of their own selves.71 By this I do not mean that Moneta is an opposing force to multiculturalism; rather, she warns against the illusory promises of a culture of sympathetic investments that produces identities out of apparently aimless commitments to otherness.72 If the work of art, for Hegel, “has no feeling in itself, and is not through and through a living thing, but, regarded as an external object, is dead” (33), then Moneta curates artworks that are lifeless

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burial plots where no easy recognition of ourselves as self-conscious beings is ever to be secured or afforded. Put another way, Moneta’s deathly figure invokes the inanimate signification of culture as a defensive exploration of the (im)mortal limits of the self through art,73 something the poet runs up against when he tries (but fails) to perceive a vision of totality behind her eyes: I ached to see what things the hollow brain Behind enwombed; what high tragedy In the dark secret chambers of her skull Was acting, that could give so dread a stress To her cold lips, and fill with such a light Her planetary eyes. (1.276–81)

Moneta fascinates in Blanchot’s sense of the word—she “robs us of our power to give sense” and provokes the “dead gaze” of “the incessant and interminable . . . impossibility of seeing.”74 The deathly, vertiginous space attracts but cancels all entreaties, containing the wrecked archives of a disappearing culture (The Fall of Hyperion being a “recycling” of the earlier Hyperion), where fallen Saturn and his mythical entourage are lulled into a dreadful torpor. In this way, the aesthetic in Keats fails to originate a culture by mimetically offering representations of what we are; instead, it is inscribed with the dissolution of the dream of an easily appropriable otherness. The aesthetic mourns a loss that cannot be overcome: it buries culture as something precisely insensate and unrecognizable to all those redemptive means put forth to reacquire it—an endless dying away or self-destroying impulse aimed at the very content it seeks to preserve.75 When Moneta says that she “humanizes” her “sayings to [the poet’s] ear, / Making comparisons of earthly things” (2.2–3), the inaccuracies of her mortal speech evoke a nondominative and disinterested cultural work, one that radically contrasts with Frank Kermode’s negative assessment of Moneta as a decadent, nonproductive representative of what he calls the “Romantic image.”76 In fact, there is a stunning generosity to Moneta’s gruff selflessness: when she chastizes the poet for being “less than” one of those who are “no visionaries,” “dreamers weak, [who] seek no wonder but the human face; / No music but a happy-noted voice— / They come not here, they have no thought to come” (1.161–65), she implies not only a distinction between the ethical and the aesthetic, as Pyle notes,77 but a crisis precipitated by a form of cultural attentiveness that reckons with a difficult, nonhumanistic

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approach to alterity—something Ben Belitt’s poem (this chapter’s epigraph) addresses in turn with stunning insight. Admitting to a belief in writing’s utter futility at grasping knowledge— You are there on the underside of the page, a blue flower in my Baedeker, writing on water. I know it. The paper pulls under my pen peaks into waves running strongly into the horizon. (65)—

Belitt recalls Keats as a haunting, inaccessible specter that his poem fails to properly materialize: . . . I slip on the blood and the ink toward the exigent bed of a poet. All is precarious. A maniac waits on the streets. Nobody listens. What must I do? I am writing on water, blazing with failures, ascending, descending among lovers and trippers. You are pressing me hard under the paper.78

Belitt’s encounter with Keats evokes a potent stubbornness: the need to grasp Keats, to write to and about him, fights with the poem’s memorializing attempts at giving the poet a canonical entombment. But the illegible inscriptions that fail to encrypt Keats leave the page unwritten, unfinished, and unworked (désoeuvré)—the space of a mournful unwriting that is the condition of writing’s anonymity in the first place. Belitt’s poem thus points to an alternative form of remembering that is decidedly on the side of negativity and negligence. When he says that he feels Keats “under the paper” and not under the page, he means that the paper figures for something that remains resistant to inscription while at the same time acting as the very condition of print—as the sheet, the underside of writing, it doesn’t record for posterity but rather forestalls something from being read, written, and circulated altogether as substantial value.79 In this instance, the paper denatures the ideology of the aesthetic to the point where any choice

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regarding its value cannot be elevated beyond the media of its publication and transmission. The “value” of Keats, then, depends upon his perpetual cultural inscription, but it operates according to a principle of amnesia: it forgets and then forgets to remember that value—a negativity that refuses to be brought to consciousness. To feel so poignantly a history that cannot be returned to thought but still lingers as “something” requires us to participate in an act of forgetting, one which precariously borders on destroying the text altogether as we excavate it for an otherness that is neither here nor there. Indeed, what The Fall of Hyperion dramatically suggests is that “art” doesn’t simply belong to another, but it is always a belonging-with-out, a demand or insistence that cannot be properly assimilated to one’s needs. The claims that surround the Keatsian aesthetic thus cultivate a taste that berates itself retrospectively for not coinciding with the objects of its taste because they are never fully present or available to begin with—what Gregg M. Horowitz perceptively defines as “the trauma of the inadequacy of artistic form to the task to which it is appointed. In this light, the belief that art is a wish-fulfillment stands revealed as itself a wish-fulfillment. Art—to interpret, or perhaps parody, the idealist dream of it—is the perfect disunity of form and content. And that hurts.”80 What hurts is the felt dislocation that governs our relation to the alterity of art, whose remains, in the world of The Fall of Hyperion, evoke an intransmissible lifelessness that halts all expectations of redemption and subjective transcendence. It is to the ethics of this project that Keats endlessly returns, finding in the themes of a disappearing identity and culture a drama of the self ’s efforts to honor its obligations to others amid the ruins of its inwardness, while resisting impulses to accumulate alterity as a mere reflection of an arid self-interest. “By destroying the transmissibility of the past,” writes Giorgio Agamben, after Benjamin, “aesthetics recuperates it negatively and makes intransmissibility a value in itself in the image of aesthetic beauty, in this way opening for man a space between past and future in which he can found his action and his knowledge.”81 Agamben’s qualified valorization of the intransmissible—a valorization, moreover, that rests upon the “beauty” of its untranscended nature—speaks to the limits of the subject’s capacity to recall and channel the other; certainly an element of that ethical project informs the Keatsian need to envision nonproprietary relationships with art and persons. The bargain here, if there is one, might lead us to find community precisely with those “others” one cannot see or solicit, challenging the

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idea that our identification with others should be based on a cultural incentive to know the other only through colonizing absolutism. Nobody answers: what is gained or lost in this nonsolicitous silence is endlessly explored by Keats, and by doing so, he loses us in a negative space of endless appreciations that generate few affiliations.

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Fugitive Letters Tracking the Anonymous in Godwin’s Caleb Williams Just as we need thieves to catch thieves, we need impersonal principles to avoid the bad effects of impersonality. —d e r e k p a r f i t , Reasons and Persons What, do you imagine that I would take so much trouble and so much pleasure in writing, do you think that I would keep so persistently to my task, if I were not preparing—with a rather shaky hand—a labyrinth into which I can venture, in which I can move my discourse, opening up underground passages. . . . I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face. Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write. —m i c h e l f o u c a u l t , The Archaeology of Knowledge

Toward the end of the “Première Promenade,” in the Rêveries du promeneur solitaire (Reveries of the Solitary Walker), where Rousseau virulently renounces society and its obligations, he also begins to meditate on a new kind of “personal” identity that is emerging as a result of the persecutorial forces that ostensibly seek control over him: I have no more reason to praise than to blame myself: I am henceforth nothing among men, and that is all I can be, no longer having any real relations or true society with them. No longer able to do any good which does not turn to evil, no longer able to act without harming another or myself, to abstain has become my sole duty and I fulfill it as much as it is in me to do

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so. But despite this desuetude of my body, my soul is still active; it produces feelings and thoughts; and its internal and moral life seems to have grown even more with the death of every earthly and temporal interest. My body is no longer anything to me but an encumbrance, an obstacle, and I disengage myself from it beforehand as much as I can.1

In claiming wishful disembodiment, Rousseau doesn’t so much search for purification as idealize the disownment of the body as a burdensome social property. Ridding himself of this false asset, Rousseau envisions the flight of the soul as the exfoliation of his being’s true intellectual kernel and its source of “authentic” response. And yet, the flight from the body doesn’t simply instigate the (re)birth of cognition as a new form of spirituality; rather, it serves to conceptualize “feelings and thoughts” as nonsubjective and nonintentional states of cognition.2 If the body’s desuetude marks the coming to a halt of all its expectations, resistances, and drives to a motiveless torpor conditioned from without, then the argument behind Rousseau’s rage lies precisely in his desire to come alive as a de-animated, anonymous being. The “new” language of the soul contends as a rival discourse of openness and receptivity, but paradoxically, it develops as a result of a carefully choreographed public disappearance and escape into the network of letters—a disappearance, moreover, whose virtue lies in its apparent dismissal of any readily identifiable, narrating subject. As Rousseau relates this story of lament at the end of the “Sixième Promenade,” he turns a complaint about his inability to be justly recognized by his community into a fantasy on invisibility: If my face and my features were as perfectly unknown to men as my character and natural temperament are, I would still live in the midst of them without difficulty. Even association with them could please me as long as I were a complete stranger to them. Unrestrainedly indulging in my natural inclinations, I would still love them even if they never took any interest in me. I would practice a universal and perfectly disinterested benevolence toward them; but without ever forming any individual attachment and without bearing the yoke of duty, I would do unto them—freely and of myself—everything which, moved by their self-love and constrained by all their laws, they have so much difficulty doing. If I had remained free, obscure, and isolated as I was made to be, I would have done only good; I do not have the seed of any harmful passion in my heart. If I had been invisible and all-powerful like God, I would have been beneficent and good like Him. It is strength and freedom which make excellent men. Weakness and slavery have never made anything but wicked ones. If I had been the possessor of the ring

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of Gyges, it would have freed me from dependence on men and made them dependent on me. In my castles in Spain, I have often asked myself what use I would have made of this ring; for it is surely here that the temptation to abuse would be close to the power to do so. Master of contenting my desires, able to do anything without anybody being able to fool me, what could I have reasonably desired? One thing alone: that would have been to see every heart content. . . . On one point alone the ability to penetrate everywhere invisibly might have made me seek temptations I would have poorly resisted; and once straying onto these paths of aberration, where would I not have been led by them? To flatter myself that these advantages would not have seduced me or that reason would have stopped me from this fatal bent would be to understand nature and myself quite poorly. (81–83)

As indices of a surfeit inwardness, “character and natural temperament” are precisely all too visible to society, Rousseau intimates, because we falsely presume that the exteriority of the self must hide an illusory, innermost core. It is for this reason that literally losing face for Rousseau becomes a deeper sort of evasion of selfhood—a form of disfigurement or defacement, in the sense defined by Michael Taussig as a form of enlightenment that “brings insides outside, unearthing knowledge, and revealing mystery. As it does this, however, as it spoliates and tears at tegument, it may also animate the thing defaced and the mystery revealed may become more mysterious, indicating the curious magic upon which Enlightenment, in its elimination of magic, depends.”3 Pushed out of his own body and into anonymity, Rousseau isn’t simply empowered by the same ominously impersonal forces that seek to divest him of what seems most personally his; rather, the notion of an invisible network of power oppressively underwriting the social is the very fantasy that conceives “sociality” as necessarily transparent, open, and speciously benevolent.4 It is for this reason that Rousseau can mockingly claim that he would “love [his fellow citizens] even if they never took any interest” in him, “practic[ing] a universal and perfectly disinterested benevolence toward them”: personal attachment to others reduces sociality to a self-serving series of exchanges and niceties that are symptomatic of a love of a void that goes by the name of “interiority.” After all, as Rousseau maintains: “If I had remained free, obscure, and isolated as I was made to be, I would have done only good; I do not have the seed of any harmful passion in my heart. If I had been invisible and allpowerful like God, I would have been beneficent and good like Him.” A Rousseauian state of anonymity thus promises an impersonal ethics that is concerned with an unconditional attentiveness, eschewing the recognitions afforded by face-to-face encounters. Of course, the desire to pass

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seamlessly between persons, crowds, and communities, to “penetrate everywhere invisibly,” is very much a revenge plot that Rousseau hatches to counter a degraded world—a plot that also subsequently transmutes into a more promiscuous desire to discover more virtual (and ghostly) forms of agency. The apparent sensuousness of this project, despite its rhetoric of virulent defiance, asks us to consider whether subjectivity can ever be reducible to historical or sociological determinations. By disengaging acting and being from the ideological pragmatics of social approbation—that is, by erasing the reasons for which certain actions can or cannot be sanctioned—Rousseau converts his fantasy of the anonymous life into an unhindered power to see, act, and be without having to intend—the possibility that action might be disarticulated from identity. What might such an omniscient, virtual, yet strangely self-conscious and nonreciprocal kind of entity be, if not God? Rousseau is nothing if not all too conscious of the confessional shape of his fantasy; its very impossibility throws into relief the degree to which sociality manipulates individuals and communities into false motivations and desires vis-à-vis each other, forcing persons, fully visible to one another, into acts of colonization through recognition. Cynthia Chase has noted that this fantasy of the invisible also corresponds to a certain “condition of [Rousseau’s] writing . . . a conception of the condition of his own writing as fiction.”5 Rousseau’s apparently “unseen life” of fiction cultivates a new discursive form through which the self-inlanguage is posited as silently read and unseen, both inside and outside the parameters of revelation. In other words, Rousseau seems to find a language of the self that nonetheless refuses to reveal and publicize its speaker. By identifying the self ’s greatest freedom as lying in its apparent disappearance, Rousseau elaborates a lifestyle whose practices are decidedly not everyday insofar as they privilege and liberate an anonymous subjectivity that is seemingly depleted yet vibrantly enclosed and inviolate. The power of invisibility thus registers for Rousseau as an absence of interest in the existence of other persons. More important, however, it suggests a recovery, albeit kept at the level of wish fulfillment, of the self ’s capacity to withstand the near paralysis of socialization through a nonsubjective language of feeling and pleasure. This language, in addition, seeks neither to repersonalize Rousseau’s writings nor to achieve a truthful intimacy. Rather, Rousseau’s Reveries upsets the reliance on the apparent referentiality of autobiographical content, not by casting the philosopher’s life deeper into doubt and exposing it to further historical critique and archival scholarship, but by

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undoing the form of that writing itself and rendering referentiality a questionable enterprise. As Stanley Corngold has argued in connection with the Confessions, “The cognitive intent of self-recognition serves the confessional purpose of procuring the subject’s integrity. Rousseau converts to selfhood on the basis of the exemplary visionary power of his own prophesying.”6 What Rousseau wishes to construct is a subjectivity that is not obliged to represent itself as a fully integrated entity, according to neither the scripts of social design nor the nightmares of misreading and misinterpretation. It would appear, then, that such a subjectivity is synonymous with a rhetorical mysticism, but it is more to the point that Rousseau’s confessional outpouring works to undo the epistemological values that govern ontological thought. As Paul de Man has remarked on Rousseau’s project, “the entire construction of drives, substitutions, repressions, and representations is the aberrant, metaphorical correlative of the absolute randomness of language, prior to any figuration or meaning.”7 One might add that there is in fact no “prior” here, since the randomness that de Man identifies is itself a figure effected through the aesthetics of Rousseau’s language, which produces versions of interiority only to further obliterate them through the self-negations that are characteristic of his impersonal narrative. It is in this formal mobility that the anonymous subject begins to develop a distinctly content-less life: by casting off the gaze of others, Rousseau abandons himself to an anonymity that seems beyond surveillance, even as he arrogates to himself the same power of ghostly intrusion he otherwise excoriates. The force of Rousseau’s fantasy should thus bring into focus the extent to which anonymity alters our familiar sense of agency as something that is representable and quantifiable, and shifts it toward a consideration of actions and selves that move far beyond any elaborate account of their “actual” content. Put another way, Rousseau’s fantasy of invisibility reconceives his responsibilities in terms of an attachment to the otherness of pleasures and feelings, and depicts subjectivity as something that is much more than purely interiorized description. The ability to convey the sense of an identity, an action, or a belief through the mechanics of narrative form consequently comes to absolve the author from potential incrimination because alterity is perceived as an epiphenomenon of subjectivity in the first place, with the text regenerating itself as something entirely altered and impersonal: My morning exercise and the good temper of which is inseparable from it made the pause for lunch very enjoyable. But when it took too long and good weather beckoned, I could not wait so long. While they were still at the

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table, I would slip away and go throw myself alone into a boat that I rowed to the middle of the lake when the water was calm; and there, stretching myself out full-length in the boat, my eyes turned to heaven, I let myself slowly drift back and forth with the water, sometimes for several hours, plunged in a thousand confused, but delightful, reveries which, even without having any well-determined or constant object, were in my opinion a hundred times preferable to the sweetest things I had found in what are called the pleasures of the life. (66)

Rousseau’s retirement off St. Peter’s Island after his stoning at Môtiers precipitates a stunning embarkation on the pleasures conjured up by the barely visible self. The resilience of such a self is folded into the outline of waves “drifting back and forth,” images which transform and seemingly emerge out of Rousseau’s body: “delightful, reveries which, even without having any-well-determined or constant object, were in my opinion a hundred times preferable to the sweetest things I had found in what are called the pleasures of the life.” These reveries trace the fine calibrations of a desire to prolong, through the gentle abstractions of the sky and the waves, an attentiveness to a body gradually turned into a mere remainder of a materiality that haunts thought. Additionally, the emphasis on such an anonymous body, one that is figurally conceived as eluding subservience to any power by virtue of its abstention from materialization, evokes what Nancy Armstrong has persuasively described as Rousseau’s desire to imagine a state in which free subjectivity and political subjection were indeed one and the same. . . . The individual can preserve his freedom, in Rousseau’s view, only if that individual consents to be governed by no one other than himself. To perform this grand equivocation, Rousseau comes up with a political body to which the individual’s subjection is not subjection so much as the guarantee of his freedom, because that political body forms only as the individual himself acquires the very authority to which he submits.8

Thus the waters off St. Peter’s Island, which both contain and buoy Rousseau’s floating self, do the task of aestheticizing this dream of an equivocally poised subjectivity: while intensely alert to the form of his transformation and gradual anonymity in the waters off St. Peter’s, the Rousseauian subjectivity of the Reveries cannot properly (re)turn to a positional self as the source for those transformations since they have already relocated subjectivity to even further points in time. For Rousseau, figurality avows and simultaneously renounces referentiality because what reference is is precisely the question that the waves endlessly rock and transport. As Armstrong notes,

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“the entirely new kind of individual” in Rousseau merges into “Althusser’s notion of the bad subject, an individual who simply does not fit any available social category. . . . The modern individual is not only a novelistic rendering of Rousseau’s new man, by nature inclined to self-government, but also the embodiment of Althusser’s bad subject, by nature incapable of being ‘hailed’ ” (30–31). In this sense, the stylistic frictions inherent in the text—a shifting between, on the one hand, the self as a fortified entity that exceeds the detriments of the social order, and on the other, an anonymous being extended into the rhythms of language—might be conceived less as an implacable conceptual paradox in Rousseau’s writing than as an attempt to think of subjectivity in terms of Blanchot’s statement that “a being is either alone or knows itself to be alone only when it is not”: in other words, being alone as a condition of relationality and dispossession that secures the subject as socially intelligible only insofar as its intelligibility exceeds or refuses recognition or display.9 In this way, the Reveries far from announce an unmediated, confessional project: Rousseau’s embarkations map out the way in which the representation of self-representation manifests the self ’s invariable mediation through an aesthetic project that conceals and discloses the promise of an ethical horizon that Rousseau could but dimly imagine. I want to take this prefatory excursion through Rousseau as a jumpingoff point for considering the poetics and politics of anonymity in William Godwin’s Caleb Williams, a text that strongly contrasts with Rousseau’s work and yet elaborates similar concerns for the ideology of personhood and the amplification of feeling through narrative form. I am interested in Godwin’s novel because, whereas Rousseau’s anonymous fantasies temporarily entertain a move into the realm of the imaginary, Godwin develops a political strategy out of the aesthetic abstractions first alluded to in the Reveries, imbibing Rousseau’s fugitive experiments into his own singular praxis. Indeed, it is by turning the concept of anonymity into a full-scale political theory in Caleb Williams that Godwin makes his mark: narrative uncertainties and character unravelings intimate that subjectivity is politically viable because it is easily substituted, mobile, and betrayable. When Caleb Williams famously confesses at the end of his narrative that “I began these memoirs with the idea of vindicating my character. I have now no character that I wish to vindicate,”10 the encryption of his own sense of self into the very tale that disowns him evokes his profound victimization at the hands of Godwin’s narrative. But Godwin also succeeds in depicting a character whose permeability (albeit seemingly tragic) is the effect of deliberate prevarication—a

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technique that is similar to Rousseau’s own revengeful wish against his falsely benevolent, fellow citizens. Of course, the privileges of self-disownment that are afforded Rousseau in the boat ride off St. Peter’s Island are not available to Caleb, but the difference between liberation and incarceration is precisely what drives Godwin’s aesthetic and political project. He takes up the Rousseauian interest in anonymity in order to organize a novel that effectively regulates character, and for this reason, psychology for Godwin becomes a tactic of subverting the social and narrative contexts. In just this way, then, Godwin pushes the mystifying regime of Rousseau’s anonymous subjectivity to its politically explosive breaking point. To say, however, that the novel’s designs at once promote and intensely disavow the anonymous mobility that Caleb both seeks and dreads is to reiterate a critical commonplace that has always surrounded the novel. And the recurrence of this commonplace further reminds us that it is a question as numinous as the life of Caleb, who fails to supply the necessary interpretations about himself in order to serve as both an exemplary character and narrator. Indeed, Caleb’s ambiguities qualify him as an unintelligible or false guide, attracting our critical expertise at the expense of his signifying porousness. In what follows, I want to consider his opacity as a reflection of the ideological pragmatics evoked by the novel’s rhetorical and formal capacities, which both represent and undercut the kind of self-privileging narratives that prevail in the early romantic era. As Thomas Pfau has remarked in a study on the relationship between critical and conspiratorial thought, it is through the structuring and interpretation of such narratives that individuals invariably generate identities as results of the narratives that precede them, and in so doing, they leave the possibility open for their erasure and further rewriting: “The formal-rhetorical structure of these accounts is their historical content, which is to say, it is the mode of appearance of the consciousnesses produced by historical change.”11 Understanding the irony of Caleb’s situation—his evacuation of character at the very moment of its most intensely affective performance—helps us appreciate the Godwinian novel’s strategy of insistently shoring up the mechanisms of the personal in close connection with the impersonal language of formal structure. It is the discreet insight of Caleb Williams that all professions of identity cannot be taken for granted because identity undoes by fits and starts—subjectivity (r)evolves, as it were, around the sites of its (dis)placements, and it also revolts. After all, Godwin’s novel was written as a companion piece of sorts to his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793),12

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and served as a stinging response to the Pittite repressions of the 1790s, particularly the Treason Trials of 1794 (the year of Caleb Williams’s publication), when friends of Godwin were arrested for political conspiracy.13 And while the Enquiry, seemingly more so than the novel, is singularly concerned with elucidating a responsible politics of identity that is wholly transparent and defiantly public—a politics that is anything but anonymous—I want to push the point that reading Godwin’s fictional work alongside his social and political philosophy will help to better understand the ways in which “identity” for him is defined as that which must be rigorously deindividuated and diffused.14 The extent to which Godwin’s form of political fiction was virtually unheard of until the publication of Caleb Williams deserves some brief comparisons. For example, in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s late story “My Cousin’s Corner Window” (1822),15 in which the narrator joins his bedridden cousin to observe and evaluate the various persons that are visible from the market square outside his window, the attempt to render psychological depth through a protorealist narrative is accomplished through a “dramatic” dialogue oscillating between inductive descriptions of what is actually seen, and the apparent fixity of the narrator and his cousin, who are urbanely detached from the environment and privileged with “the window of a tiny room [where they] can overlook the entire panorama of the splendid square at a single glance” (378). The contingencies of other lives barely touch the pristine formalism of the narrative itself; they only serve to compensate for the narrator’s spatial withdrawal above street level, far from the flow of events. Hoffmann’s story thus tries to envision a reciprocity between narrator and narrative, between subject and object, a reciprocity that is fractured by competing perspectives: the speakers and the market square; the permanence of “external,” mobile representations and “internal,” unattainable personhood; the low-ceiling corner room “in the most attractive part of our capital city” and the anonymous throngs on market-day—a scene that is picturesquely composed of “magnificent buildings and has the colossal theatre, a work of genius, adorning its centre” (378). By contrast, Godwin’s achievement lies in the development of a style of writing that revises the viability of the central narrator’s psychological viewpoint, and creates a narrative form that effectively offers representations of “dense” interiorities that are organized through seemingly detached and formal techniques. In this sense, Godwin transforms the Rousseauian project of anonymous selfhood into a fugitive art that is sharpened by the dissolution of identities, and such

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dissolution is in turn made even more anxious by the impersonal persecution of the narrative’s own apparent forthrightness. The lure of anonymity hovers over Caleb’s struggles for justice and disclosure, moving between the shock of full knowledge generated by a need for evidence and proof, and the lifesaving wish to be carefully discreet, shadowed, and unknown. What constitutes disclosure, however, once acts and professions of the self are no longer ascribed to the “secrets” of a single, univocal identity? And exactly what is disclosed, if we take disclosure to be, like enlightenment in Taussig’s sense, nothing more than a complication of subjectivity in the first place? The novel, penned as it were by Caleb himself, becomes an odd object: at once the confession of “things as they are” (the Jacobin slogan and subtitle of Godwin’s book), and a type of evasion and revision of the guilt and recrimination that such a confession could render its fugitive author. It is a source for one narrative history of events, but a history that ultimately serves Caleb’s singularly dubious perspective. But apart from such an obvious tension on the level of plot and character, it foregrounds Caleb’s anonymity as something that speaks to the riskiness of subjectivity—a riskiness that is indissociable from ethical and political quandaries. “I began these memoirs with the idea of vindicating my character. I have now no character that I wish to vindicate: but I will finish them that thy story may be fully understood, and that if those errors of thy life be known, which thou so ardently desiredst to conceal, the world may at least not hear and repeat a half-told and mangled tale” (337). In this moment of despondency, Caleb brings us full circle to consider an emotional intensity that is deliberate and cued. The ending ostensibly reconciles the motives of the beginning, conservatively rounding out the memoirs as “a life,” but the owner of that life remains potentially unknown, or at the very least recalcitrant and out of phase with the arc of the narrative. Caleb asserts that he now has no character to vindicate but will finish the story only in order to provide a history for Falkland, whose own existence is dubiously elegized as posthumous by his apprentice and apparent victim. The desire behind such a writing would be to give evidence against Falkland, whose wickedness, so ardently concealed, must be exposed so that “the world may at least not hear and repeat a half-told and mangled tale.” Falkland’s exposure, however, doesn’t manage to mute his voice; rather, Caleb’s self-sacrifice attempts a form of narrative capable of projecting his own story through Falkland’s. This would not be a literary impersonation or ventriloquism, but rather a retelling of the life of the oppressor through the

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oppressed—what Jerrold Hogle describes as the dissolution of the “moral world” of the novel “into the self as an always-desired and never-completed construct of language.”16 Caleb thus erases the silence of the victim by depriving victimhood of its specificity: by weaving his story into Falkland’s and turning calamity into survival. Caleb’s anonymous perspective beyond the particularities of the events themselves succeeds in melting back into the voice of the novel’s frame narrative, which has been judging and evaluating events all along.17 This patterning effect (a discrete maze of identities fusing and recoiling, foregrounded at times and yet disappearing into apparent obscurity) is rehearsed in the initial story of Falkland’s own victimization at the hands of Tyrrel—the narrative that not only sets about justifying and anticipating Falkland’s personality and behavior but also serves as the “prototype” for Caleb’s relationship to Falkland. Told as a story within a story by Falkland’s steward, Mr. Collins, it is freighted with a considerable narrative burden that afflicts Caleb’s imagination. We might say that Caleb’s own attitude toward Falkland is derived from his initial fascination with the tale of his master’s persecutions at the hands of another, and in part his neuroses can be read as driven by a distinct literary precedent. In listening to and adapting Collins’s narrative, Caleb not only turns the shape of that story into his own in order to possess it all the more fully, but he is made to seem incapable and desperate beneath the wheels of a derivative narrative that undercuts the “authenticity” of his own experiences: The intention of my friend in this communication was to give me ease; but he in reality added to my embarrassment. Hitherto I had had no intercourse with the world and its passions; and, though I was not totally unacquainted with them as they appear in books, this provided of little service to me when I came to witness them myself. The case seemed entirely altered, when the subject of those passions was continually before my eyes, and the events had happened the other day as it were, in the very neighbourhood where I lived. (111)

The innocence of this passage evokes the tactics Caleb employs to justify his indemnity: though “totally unacquainted” with the “world and its passions” except through reading, the contagion of hearing Collins’s tale bestirs the very fears Caleb seeks to disown. The passions serve throughout the novel both to embitter and to fascinate him, and most importantly, the passions’ galvanizing and withdrawing effects permit him to claim a strategic naiveté in the first place. On the one hand, Caleb can write himself off as but a

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pawn in the emotional maelstrom that has seized him, but on the other, his affecting of subjective fracture and discontinuity allows him to trump narrative rhetoric and claim an anonymous, forceful expressivity, one that lurks in the novel’s indeterminacies: “I am incited to the penning of these memoirs, only by a desire to divert my mind from the deplorableness of my situation, and a faint idea that posterity may by their means be induced to render me a justice, which my contemporaries refuse. My story will at least appear to have that consistency, which is seldom attendant but upon truth” (5). Like Rousseau, who considers the moment of the self ’s abstraction in the motion of the waves off St. Peter’s Island a confirmation of his presumed inviolability, Caleb’s endless emotional paroxysms suggest a sly awareness of “identity” as the manufactured effect of a series of deviously constructed misunderstandings, trepidations, and ecstasies that add up to what seems to be a regime of emotions: “The suspicion,” writes Charles Lamb in a letter to Godwin concerning one of his stage plays, “generated from slight and forgotten circumstances, coming at last to act as Instinct, and so to be mistaken for Instinct.”18 The continual emphasis, throughout the novel, on instinct as a tactical forswearing of subjectivity’s full disclosure succeeds in maintaining the secrecy of selfhood as an always anticipated premium. To vindicate character means to rescue a self that was already there, but the beginning of Caleb Williams offers us a description of consciousness whose authority isn’t so much in jeopardy as it is displaced and beyond substantial characterization. “My life has for several years been a theatre of calamity. I have been a mark for the vigilance of tyranny, and I could not escape. My fairest prospects have been blasted. My enemy has shown himself inaccessible to intreaties and untired in persecution. My fame, as well as my happiness, has become victim” (5). The figure of the theater offers a telling trope for appreciating Caleb’s life as a travesty of sorts: a deliberate distortion of sentimental models of emotional reciprocity and recognition—models often based on theatricality—Caleb’s words emphasize the transferability of subjectivity insofar as his address to the reader, like a solicitation to an audience, asks for a willing suspension of disbelief.19 Again, the final paragraph of the novel: “I began these memoirs with the idea of vindicating my character. I have now no character that I wish to vindicate: but I will finish them that thy story may be fully understood”: the mild slippage of the first person in the final paragraph of the novel—the “I” that “began these memoirs” and substitutes its right-to-life for their completion with the purpose of telling another story, Falkland’s story—evokes a specious servitude that rehearses

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in its appeasements the very shrinkage from responsibility that it accuses its pursuer as performing until the end. The motives behind Caleb’s shifting identity strongly echo in remarks made by Godwin in his account of the composition of the novel (originally included in the preface to the 1832 Standard Novels edition of his Fleetwood ): When I had determined on the main purpose of my story, it was ever my method to get about me any productions of former authors that seemed to bear on my subject. I never entertained the fear, that in this way of proceeding I should be in danger of servilely copying my predecessors. I imagined that I had a vein of thinking that was properly my own, which would always preserve me from plagiarism. I had read other authors that I might see what they had done, or more properly, that I might forcibly hold my mind and occupy my thoughts in a particular train, I and my predecessors travelling in some sense to the same goal, at the same time that I struck out a path of my own, without ultimately heeding the direction they pursued, and disdaining to enquire whether by any chance it for a few steps coincided or did not coincide with mine.20

Godwin’s anxiety of influence conjures a system of writing that is carefully navigated: his literary method stakes its claim on presenting “originality” as the common “goal” adhered to by all involved literary participants, both past and present. And yet, in “disdaining to enquire whether by any chance it for a few steps coincided or did not coincide with” his own method, Godwin undercuts the quest for literary uniqueness by suggesting that writing is a combined (albeit uncertain) group process that positions the novel within a field of intentions structured by unseen agents. Thus Godwin’s narrative will take on the shape of a competitive pursuit against others’ intentions, constantly measuring its own exertions against rivals (or pursuers, for that matter), but doing so at a distance from them. In this way, Godwin conceives a writing tactic that deliberately chooses to hide its tracks: at once directed and yet deeply conscious of its own borrowings, echoes, and quotations, authorial identity is depicted as a numinous and collective creation. Godwin essentially defines his trajectory by construing a cartographical template, positing literary form (the novel) as the terrain of travel, one where plot and characters progress at the expense of covering their traces. This is not to suggest that Caleb Williams is beyond generic form altogether; rather, the book’s critical reception has constantly represented it as a uniquely manufactured work that, in spite of its various derivations and influences, incarnates and

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anticipates late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century narratives that are told by withdrawn, liminal narrators.21 The sense of literary guilt haunts Godwin’s remarks on the writing of Caleb Williams, and suggestively informs his modus operandi. In his account of writing the novel, Godwin evokes an odd similarity with his troubled main character: I invented first the third volume of my tale, then the second, and last of all the first. I bent myself to the conception of a series of adventures of flight and pursuit; the fugitive in perpetual apprehension of a being overwhelmed with the worst calamities, and the pursuer, by his ingenuity and resources, keeping his victim in a state of the most fearful alarm. This was the project of my third volume. I was next called upon to conceive a dramatic and impressive situation adequate to account for the impulse that the pursuer should feel, incessantly to alarm and harass his victim, with an inextinguishable resolution never to allow him the least interval of peace and security. . . . This constituted the outline of my second volume. The subject of the first volume was still to be invented. To account for the fearful events of the third it was necessary that the pursuer should be invested with every advantage of fortune, with a resolution that nothing could defeat or baffle, and with the extraordinary resources of intellect. . . . Here were ample materials for a first volume. (349)

Godwin’s backward crawl into narrative beginnings is especially suggestive here since he appears to “impersonate” Caleb in his maneuverings in order to withdraw from the obligations of writerly authority. Literary “mastery” thus reveals itself, not in the plotting of all avenues at once, but in the farreaching insight of charting a fiction from the point of view of the unknowable future (here the third volume): Nor could my purpose of giving an overpowering interest to my tale be answered, without [the pursuer] appearing to have been originally endowed with a mighty store of amiable dispositions and virtues, so that his being driven to the first act of murder should be judged worthy of the deepest regret, and should be seen in some measure to have arisen out of his virtues themselves. It was necessary to make him, so to speak, the tenant of an atmosphere of romance, so that every reader should feel prompted almost to worship him for his high qualities. Here were ample materials for a first volume. (349)

For Godwin, the act of plotting involves a type of subterfuge, an act of deception that should not be traced back to him but distributed equally

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among “every reader [who] should feel prompted almost to worship” Falkland as if they were Caleb. In terms of the question of genre, Godwin’s nefarious writing strategy builds upon the short-lived tradition of the English Jacobin novel, which Gary Kelly has described as a form whose stealthy, heightened affects are directly attributable to its concerns for effecting change in the reader through narrative manipulation.22 Indeed, the kind of “revolutionary” tactics employed by Godwin in Caleb Williams also seem to respond to broader, contemporary arguments made vis-à-vis the emerging novel form: “Modern writers use the word Romance, to signify a fictitious history of detached and independent adventures,” writes Thomas Holcroft in the preface to his novel Alwyn. A Novel is another kind of work. Unity of design is its character. In a Romance, if the incidents be well marked and related with spirit, the intention is answered; and adventures pass before the view for no other purpose than to amuse by their peculiarity, without, perhaps, affecting the main story, if there should be one. But in a Novel, a combination of incidents, entertaining themselves, are made to form a whole; and an unnecessary circumstance becomes a blemish, by detaching from the simplicity which is requisite to exhibit that whole to advantage.23

The novel’s ostensible “unity of design” technically manipulates the reader in ways that are neither better nor worse than the romance’s own brand of organicism, although Holcroft promotes the novel for its intellectual complexity and precision. The despised chivalric trappings of the romance not only taint it as an outrageous archaism,24 but the allures of “fictitious history” produce the kind of noxious effects that succumb the reader to historical misrepresentation—elisions performed in order to elevate reverie at the expense of conversation and reasoning, the latter ostensibly constituting the primary modes of enlightened rhetorical revolt.25 While Holcroft’s nascent theory of the novel envisions a generic equivalency to democratic representation, Godwin’s writings suggest that the process of rational design is motivated by concerns that cannot be necessarily known by all the participants involved, and in this way, the novel’s resistance to disclosure suggests that what it has to say or show is always a possibility kept in suspension. For example, in the essay “Of History and Romance,” Godwin posits a transformation in the category of literature when he suggests that the particular superiority of the romancer consists in his sense of the uncertainty governing the circumstances, contexts, and consequences

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that compose “true history”: it “consists in a delineation of consistent, human character, in a display of the manner in which such a character acts under successive circumstances, in showing how character increases and assimilates new substances to its own, and how it decays, together with the catastrophe into which by its own gravity it naturally declines.” 26 Though Godwin’s controversial dismissal of the efficacy of romance over history in the conclusion of the essay seems to invalidate his prior argument—“to write romance is a task too great for the powers of man. . . . [It] requires a sagacity scarcely less than divine” (372)—his withdrawal from a model of totalizing authorial control radically pushes his remarks in the direction of what Jon Klancher has explored as “Godwin’s rhetoric of possibility [which] is the more polite and wishful form of that harder thing, contingency properly so called.”27 The notion of Godwin mobilizing himself to write such a fiction of possibility or contingency seems almost to trump his idealist politics, and in numerous critical studies this point has been misread as covertly hegemonic. Clifford Siskin, reading Caleb Williams in the context of eighteenth-century publication history, remarks that Godwin’s methods participate in “the formation of a field into which the novel could rise: Literature,” which not only privileged a certain literary form and content, but more importantly produced the “Romantic Author,” whose force of originality distinguished him over and above the various anonymous writers of the period responsible for the upsurge in literary publications at the end of the eighteenth century.28 If Godwin, on the one hand, seems to uphold the category of the author, what is equally interesting is that the function of the author is defined as entangled in a mode of composition that deceives and obscures while also proving to be subtly revelatory. The Godwinian author, exposed to encounters with other authors, cannot reduce himself to a version of them nor claim to be utterly different; rather, like the Keatsian poet, his identity is a deft replication of the forms, styles, and ideas that these others take, without being reduced to any one of them.29 Indeed, Godwin intimates a kind of historical writing that finds in its inability to totalize a sign of the radical undecidability of narrative itself. “Naturalists tell us,” writes Godwin in the conclusion to his essay, “that a single grain of sand more or less on the surface of the earth, would have altered its motion, and in process of ages, have diversified its events. We have no reason to suppose in this respect that what is true in matter, is false in morals” (372). Borrowing his language from natural history, the unpredictable quality of historical unraveling opens the imagination to an

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anonymous welter of experiences that can be neither controlled nor factually ascertained because they in part reflect the imagination’s conceptual mobility. Godwin posits an anonymous agency in place of a strong, guiding hand: “It is as though the modern narrative universe is divided into halves,” writes Klancher, “ ‘character’ and ‘action,’ which cannot add up, or as if the division of intellectual labor has now sundered the ancient historian’s unification of enlightened agency into the rival and mutually negating narrative modes of historiography and fiction writing in the epoch of modernity” (85). Although the Godwinian novel elaborates a type of writing that seems to be tightly controlled, and austerely intentional, it is one that nevertheless lessens immediate responsibilities in favor of a subjectless writing that, by virtue of its organization, remains permeable and receptive to new historical engagements and receptions. The chain of substitutions between author(s)—a play between selves— shows how an apparently textual “objectivity” is based upon insinuating, intersubjective exchanges that negate any single identity from taking shape. In Godwin’s work, multiple perspectives generate a variety of authorial selves, mapping out a strategy that allows for a text to be safely disowned and freed from incriminations while also standing on its own merit—a strategy invaluable for Godwin during the late 1790s. In fact, this sense of the dissolution of character as both a literary and a social possibility surfaces in Political Justice as a meditation on the revolutionary contingency of personal identity. There Godwin posits an antihereditary theory of human character, one that tends in the direction of contradicting all essentialist definitions of the mind. In contemplating that we should rid ourselves of the false belief that we are structured by certain innate privileges and talents, Godwin suggests that we do away with theories of predetermination which oppressively install hierarchies between persons, and concentrate on our circumstantial make-up: “The actions and dispositions of men are not the offspring of any original bias that they bring into the world in favour of one sentiment or character rather than another, but flow entirely from the operation of circumstances and events acting upon a faculty of receiving sensible impressions” (1: 98). The familiar romantic model of consciousness as an Aeolian harp—a “wise passivity” that receives the world as a series of impressions rather than willed perceptions—is taken further by Godwin to suggest a nameless blank in place of engraved identity; by virtue of its formless anonymity, such a subject is open to the possibility of being “remade” by other persons and things in the world. The “flow . . . from the

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operation of circumstances and events” suggests both forming and corrosive effects: social contextualization constructs, confirms, and disperses our impressions. Godwin’s emphasis on a de-essentialized notion of subjectivity turns the category of personhood into an anxiously revolutionary, unknowable entity that is freed from genealogical determinations and is caught up in new types of experiences that are made possible once hereditary biases are disavowed. “What is born into the world is an unfinished sketch, without character or decisive feature impressed upon it. In the sequel there is a correspondence between the physiognomy and the intellectual and moral qualities of the mind” (1: 105). To leave identity open as such establishes persons as metamorphic, or better, metaphoric, in that subjectivity is conceptualized as the formal effect of an ostensibly protean and anonymous mass, jostling and redescribing itself against its own participants as it establishes and bears away identities with the same force that defines its construction in the first place: “The whole mass is in a perpetual flux; nothing is stable and permanent; after the lapse of a given period not a single particle probably remains the same. Who knows not that in the course of a human life the character of the individual frequently undergoes two or three revolutions of its fundamental stamina?” (1: 104).30 This kind of revolutionary anonymity is promoted not as a cloak or secret password to protect the self against society, but rather defines a vacancy within subjectivity’s “stamina” that cannot be subsumed: the mass isn’t so much integrated as it is used to define a collective subjectivity that invokes the postrevolutionary citizen-subject. Doubtless, this model of revolutionary hope can be heard to reverberate in the triple promise of the French Revolution, “liberté, égalité, fraternité,” where the transferential concept of identity doesn’t (in theory) reduce responsibility to a free-floating cipher but intimates that it is a slogan that cannot be intentionally ascribed to any one person. Anonymous responsibility elides the category of personhood in order to stress an orientation toward the other, the future unknown that lies beyond calculation.31 The topos of the mass thus foregrounds the uncertainty rather than plentiful diversity that might characterize a historical and political moment Godwin conceives as resolutely anti-aristocratic: “Who is there in the present state of scientifical improvement that will believe that this vast chain of perceptions and notions is something that we bring into the world with us, a mystical magazine, shut up in the human embryo, whose treasures are to be gradually unfolded as circumstances shall require?” (1: 100–101).

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Godwin’s interest in a revolutionary kind of anonymity, however, is compromised by his ultimate conviction in private thinking and individualism as saving graces that justify “a meritocracy founded on one’s powers of independent and even oppositional reflection.”32 Indeed, Godwin’s continual insistence on the value of reflection and judgment throws into relief the extent to which a negatively capable self might signal a grim force, despite its potential for change. It would seem, then, that Godwin’s contradictory remarks make it impossible to convincingly explore anonymity in his work, especially since he frequently appears to criticize any projects that frustrate full self-exposure. That said, what interests me is the extent to which Godwin is both attracted to and repelled by concepts of anonymous subjectivity—an ambivalence he shares with Rousseau, whose own vexed escape to St. Peter’s Island initiates a style of writing that struggles between denying interiority and self-consciously revealing such a denial as a wishful fantasy. Godwin’s philosophical and literary anonymity anticipates the writings of Shelley and Keats, who imbibe Godwin’s anti-identitarian formalism as the impetus for a deeply negating, interventionist program of political, ethical, and aesthetic reform. I want to more fully illuminate Godwin’s manipulations of anonymity by turning briefly to David Hume’s descriptions of sympathy in A Treatise of Human Nature, where the strategic usefulness of considering persons as utterly unknowable to one another emerges out of a socially useful moral psychology. Hume defines sympathy in the section “Of Love of Fame” as the theory that makes possible intersubjectivity. He writes: “Our reputation, our character, our name are considerations of vast weight and importance; and even the other causes of pride; virtue, beauty and riches; have little influence, when not seconded by the opinions and sentiments of others”— thus conveying personhood as a property that is posited through others’ evaluations of us.33 The sense of personal worth thus depends on social scrutiny, and in this sense, self-representation must be cultivated with conscientious attention to those for whom and to whom one is representing oneself.34 For Hume, the self is steeped in value like any other property, and can only be aggrandized and diminished through the perceptions of others. Although there is a sense in which we can cue others to respond to us in certain favorable ways, the self can never entirely exceed the powers afforded it because “selfhood” is effectively a value determined through social negotiations. For this reason, experiences such as pride and humility are connected to sympathy: they suggest that we can only know our selves if we can measure our

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reflection through others’ acknowledgments. Family ties and close friends thus become examples for Hume of resemblances or blood relations that provide immediate intimacies and exert instant sympathy—a sympathy of close bonds, as it were. However, Hume goes on to point out that these relationships must themselves be carefully evaluated for the sake of just appraisals: “We are not only better pleas’d with the approbation of a wise man than with a fool, but receive an additional satisfaction from the former, when ’tis obtain’d after a long and intimate acquaintance. This is accounted for after the same manner” (209). We have to search out those we deem capable of judging us because in so doing, their judgments validate us: “The praises of others never give us much pleasure, unless they concur with our own opinion, and extol us for those qualities, in which we chiefly excel” (209). Having established the parameters of sympathetic identification, Hume goes on to consider a stranger possibility in the final paragraphs of the section—the value of relations between persons that are anonymous to one another: “Nothing is more usual than for men of good families, but narrow circumstances, to leave their friends and country, and rather seek their livelihood by mean and mechanical employments among strangers, than among those, who are acquainted with their birth and education. We shall be unknown, say they, where we go. No body will suspect from what family we are sprung” (209). Although familial relations define a closeness that yields immediate sympathies, the need to break away from them suggests that the pain of being condemned by others is felt to be greatest when it comes from those we know all too well—“related to us by blood, and contiguous in place.” It is for this reason that sympathy often can prove to be debilitating: instead of simply withdrawing into a state like extreme solitude or loneliness, where sympathy seems impossible, Hume intimates that it is important to lessen and rechannel the forces of sympathetic identifications by moving away from the family and “placing ourselves in a contiguity to strangers, and at a distance from relations” (210).35 In unfamiliar circumstances, it becomes almost necessary that the self seek protection by fictionalizing itself to the point of turning into somebody else and eluding detection in the company of others. The imagination, in such cases, becomes the faculty of the most intense kind of subterfuge: Suppose I am plac’d in a poor condition among strangers, and consequently am but lightly treated; I yet find myself easier in that situation, than when I was every day expos’d to the contempt of my kindred and countrymen. Here I feel a double contempt; from my relations, but they are absent; from

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those about me, but they are strangers. This double contempt is likewise strengthen’d by the two relations of kindred and contiguity. But as the persons are not the same, who are connected with me by those two relations, this difference of ideas separates the impressions arising from the contempt, and keeps them from running into each other. (210)

Lying about oneself becomes an important imaginative act. A person among strangers in an unaccustomed setting will “naturally” hide the truth of his reputation and class status so as to prevent any envy or anger that might arise because of his true identity. “Every thing in this world is judg’d of by comparison. What is an immense fortune for a private gentleman is beggary for a prince. A peasant wou’d think himself happy in what cannot afford necessaries for a gentleman” (210). A rich person who comes to live in an impoverished environment feels the effects of his pain considerably, and it is for this reason that he chooses not to reveal himself, since acknowledgment in the eyes of others would not only painfully remind him of what he is, but would also inspire resentment in those around him. For Hume, monitoring our relations with other persons becomes an important component for preserving the self against the potentially disruptive and corrosive effects of close interactions. That this philosophy is told in the form of a small fable is especially interesting: sympathy becomes tied to an aesthetic form that depends less on one’s own capacity to engineer such an education and more on one’s willingness to listen to and imitate a narrative told by another. That is to say, Hume’s story means to orient us within a narrative genre that formalizes our sense of how to react and respond to the philosophical knowledge contained within the genre itself.36 In this sense, narrative interpellation resembles the theatricality of social relations: being judged and perceived by others evokes a social pragmatics that is also represented on the level of the highly stylized Humean text. Through his careful moral psychology, Hume fictionalizes the self in order to preserve it, and by relating it as a quasi story, he endorses his own theories through the very form of their telling. In the context of these few passages from “Of the Love of Fame,” it appears that Hume’s sense of the anonymity of persons arrives at a conclusion that is different from the one Catherine Gallagher interprets in her own reading of Hume’s fiction of sympathy. For her, Hume’s fictionalizations actually serve to promote more fluid social sympathies: The body of the other person, although it conveys the original sense data and serves as the basis for all modes of relationship that supposedly allow

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sympathetic identification, is also paradoxically imagined to be a barrier . . . by representing feelings that belong to no other body, fiction actually facilitates the process of sympathy. It bypasses the stage at which the sentiments perceived in other bodies are mere matters of fact and gives us the illusion of immediately appropriable sentiments, free sentiments belonging to nobody and therefore identifiable with ourselves.37

As my own discussion has just suggested, however, Hume values a far more devious project of dissimulation, one that deliberately manipulates, not only the quality of sympathetic identification, but also our sense of who we are sympathizing with. In his view, not entirely knowing who we are in sympathy with contributes to a more advantageous form of self-fashioning. It preserves us from a debilitating contempt at the hands of those who know us too well, and thus allows us to seek a greater personal mobility among those we don’t know at all. Hume offers a deft theory of anonymous intersubjectivity that gives the individual all the confirmation he needs, without some of the potentially bad effects that can arise from sympathy. Rather than insist that our social interactions must necessarily reveal us as fully transparent subjects in the public sphere, Hume evokes a system of mutual awareness that cultivates the unknowability of personhood, and this sort of pragmatism surfaces in Godwin’s own theories and fictions on contemporary social relations. Like Hume, he finds in the mechanics of his narrative a way in which identities can be both exposed and contained. At the same time, too much anonymity threatens to obliterate the individual entirely. Some of these contradictions in Godwin’s thought emerge fruitfully in passages from Political Justice where he persistently declares the necessity of foregrounding the truth in order to spectacularly expose one’s person to speculation and critique. This incitement to exposure, however, also corresponds to an intensely regulated system of human action that leaves little room for privacy: If a veil of partial favour is to be drawn over the indiscretions and faults of mankind, it is easy to perceive whether virtue or vice will be the gainer. There is no terror that comes home to the heart of vice, like the terror of being exhibited to the public eye. On the contrary, there is no reward worthy to be bestowed upon eminent virtue, but this one, the plain, unvarnished proclamation of its excellence in the face of the world. (2: 274)

Godwin’s program of rational thought before a community of like-minded persons suggests that the presentation and articulation of truth statements

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derived from private judgment must be one and the same; in other words, to speak the truth means to expose and reveal one’s virtuousness at the same time. Such simultaneity assumes that the essential importance of the transcendence of truth always coincides with the desire to personally expose it. Within such a framework, anonymity would seem to be wholly out of place: being transparent to one another cancels out the possibility of deception and dissimulation. Godwin’s view of complete political and judicial exposure seems a more demanding version of the kind of abstract virtuousness Habermas has described as operating in the eighteenth-century public sphere, where men came together to debate ideas as rational, but almost disembodied, individuals.38 More than merely granting a “democratizing” impersonality vis-à-vis each other, the Godwinian public sphere verges on a paranoid management of that transparency by bodying forth every participant into stark reality. And yet, by placing such a tremendous emphasis on unraveling private sensibility into a system of self-conscious (and self-aware) debate, Godwin precludes the possibility of a horded interiority: his notion of a transcendent public justice that mandates self-consciousness and exposure also invariably envisages a society propelled by secrecy and confession.39 Although he obviously promotes a concept of ambitious self-aggrandizement over and against the community, Godwin’s version of romantic Bildung becomes an oppressive and paranoid standard of measurement, achieving an almost impersonal, coercive force. In the chapter “On Political Associations” in Political Justice, Godwin rejects the clandestine operations of “combinations” or conspiratorial groups precisely because they fail to account for the individualism of personal expression—a failure that nevertheless reveals certain paradoxes in Godwin’s thought:40 A number of persons, sometimes greater and sometimes less, combine together. The tendency of their combination, often avowed, but always unavoidable, is to give to their opinion a weight and operation, which the opinion of unconnected individuals cannot have. A greater number, some from the urgency of their private affairs, some from a temper averse to scenes of concourse and contention, and others from a conscientious disapprobation of the measures pursued, withhold themselves from such combinations. The acrimonious, the intemperate, and the artful, will generally be found among the most forward in matters of this kind. The prudent, the sober, the sceptical, and the contemplative, those who have no resentments to gratify, and no selfish purposes to promote, will be overborne and lost in the progress. What justification can be advanced, for a few persons who thus, from mere impetuosity and incontinence of temper, occupy a post, the

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very principle of which is the passing them for something greater and more important in the community than they are? (1: 286–87)

For Godwin, such associations/combinations have the negative “tendency to make a part stand for the whole” (1: 286), thereby erasing the contributions of those less impassioned individuals of the political group who are more “prudent,” “sober,” “skeptical,” and “contemplative.” Interestingly, what Godwin fears most in such associations is that thought processes that seem relatively unrepresentable and seemingly anonymous because they evoke a greater degree of introjection are threatened by the dynamic visibility of participants who are notoriously riotous and violent. The form, then, of combinations, of tightly knit groupings, threatens to upset the uniqueness of each person since he or she appears to be ontologically selfcontained. Additionally, because “in political associations, the object of each man, is to identify his creed with that of his neighbour” (1: 288), contagious belief lubricates the “breathing spaces” between men. It is as if the proximity of people to one another not only dissolves discrete, individual thought, but also renders bodies and personalities malleable, easily influenced (perhaps even seduced) by close words and intimacies:41 We learn the Shibboleth of a party. We dare not leave our minds at large in the field of enquiry, lest we should arrive at some tenet disrelished by our party. We have no temptation to enquire. Party has a more powerful tendency, than perhaps any other circumstance in human affairs, to render the mind quiescent and stationary. Instead of making each man an individual, which the interest of the whole requires, it resolves all understandings into one common mass, and subtracts from each the varieties, that could alone distinguish him from a brute machine. Having learned the creed of our party, we have no longer any employment for those faculties, which might lead us to detect its errors. (1: 288–89)

Associations lead to too much transparency between individuals. The lack of a critical opacity, a “secrecy” that defines the contours of the object of interest as well as the kind of theoretical language used for its installation in the first place, is dissolved and gives way to unself-conscious communication. Godwin’s true “indefatigable votary of justice and truth,” however, will (or perhaps should ) “fear to attach himself in his intercourse to any particular set of men, lest his thoughts should become insensibly warped, and he should make himself a world of petty dimensions, instead of that liberal and various scene in which nature has permitted him to expatiate” (1: 289).

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Wideness of space corresponds to infinite prospect and visibility, whereas narrowness of mind gives way to corridors of gothic obscurity and dank avenues of dispossession. It isn’t hard to hear in Godwin’s remarks about feelings and combinations Caleb’s own feverish admiration and desire for his master. Indeed, Caleb’s frequently heightened emotional state seems to suggest, on the one hand, that what he experiences as “inwardness” is a spontaneous overflow of emotion that frees the self from the shackles of reason. On the other hand, we have already seen in Rousseau’s Reveries that the intensification of emotions emerges as the unconscious regulatory system through which individuality is produced as an apparently free-floating concept. For Godwin, the rhetorical sophistication of this affective spontaneity precisely measures the extent to which the personal is irrevocably generated through narrative discipline and adjustment. That love itself becomes the vehicle of doubt and subterfuge in Godwin’s novel should come as no surprise: as Alex Gold has suggested, Caleb Williams mounts a critique of what Godwin had already identified as the speciousness of contemporary political and social theories involving utopian concepts of love.42 The proximity created by combinations intensifies feelings better kept in check, and one of the novel’s singular moves is to foreground the ways in which love becomes an intricate effect of novelistic production, stimulating both characters and readers into the belief that what attracts and disturbs them is nothing short of an aesthetic that cues “intimacy” and “interiority” to appear as impersonal states of affective response, seemingly subjective and yet entirely detached and anonymous. Consider in the following passage the careful reluctance on the part of Godwin to describe which love it is that dares to speak its name: While I thus proceeded with hasty steps along the most secret paths of the garden, and from time to time gave vent to the tumult of my thoughts in involuntary exclamations, I felt as if my animal system had undergone a total revolution. My blood boiled within me. I was conscious to a kind of rapture for which I could not account. I was solemn, yet full of rapid emotion, burning with indignation and energy. In the very tempest and hurricane of the passions, I seemed to enjoy the most soul-ravishing calm. I cannot better express the then state of my mind, than by saying I was never so perfectly alive as at that moment. (135)

This famous passage incites everything and nothing at once: expressing the rapture that contains his love for Falkland, but also disguising it as the love that lasts for just one moment, Caleb is able to conceal the full extent of

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his love, which here subsequently dissolves into the generality of a “tumult of . . . thoughts in involuntary exclamations.” The closeness between men upsets their respective discrepancies and blurs the lines between personal space and private emotions. The ephemerality of Caleb’s thoughts is inextricable from the contingencies of the physiological systems that support it, and much like the novel’s own detailed descriptions of such processes, Caleb’s feelings are always caught between enjoying “the most soul-ravishing calm” and being at the mercy of such choreographed ravishments. Caleb’s self has paradoxically become both still and vigorously active; serenity here is only the surface expression of an inner tempest that cannot express itself because its visible manifestation would rid the self of precisely that air of containment that it seeks (however tenuously) to maintain. Love and fear coalesce in this scene to evoke expressions of a type of self-alienation Caleb experiences throughout the novel. Unlike Hume’s highly manipulative strangers, however, who purposely hide their true natures, Caleb is ill at ease when he must resort to disguise and deception. In his various incarnations as a beggar, Jew, writer, and Irishman, Caleb is detached and distressed by his need for obfuscation. His desire to become part of the crowd is mixed with an anxiety surrounding potential assimilation; in Freudian terms, he exhibits a paranoia that is almost world-shattering in the sense that in order to articulate as best as possible his subaltern existence, Caleb must first make his readers aware of how truly shattered his identity is. As Freud writes: The patient has withdrawn from the persons in his environment and from the external world generally the libidinal cathexis which he has hitherto directed on to them. Thus all things have become indifferent and irrelevant to him, and have to be explained by means of a secondary rationalization as being “miracled up, cursory contraptions.” The end of the world is the projection of this internal catastrophe; for his subjective world has come to an end since he has withdrawn his love from it.43

The difference with Caleb would be that anonymity is not necessarily the price of a libidinal disinvestment, but is also the manifestation of an excess and extension of a love for the sociality of the world. The enforcement of that anonymity skirts between the possibility of locating Caleb anywhere and knowing that the novel serves as a type of safehouse that protects him even as it elaborates and plots his story. It is this hovering between seeing and not seeing, a type of playful fort-da, that troubles the narrative, and foregrounds anonymity as a tactic for surveillance and protection.

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Godwin’s utopian insistence on individuality comes into conflict with the kinds of anonymous insinuations that a self-possessed identity brings up by way of the feelings in Caleb Williams, even though the novel itself technically engineers the production of those feelings in the first place. Indeed, despite Godwin’s protests, it appears that for desires, emotions, and identities to fully emerge, anonymity might be the condition of possibility. Godwin’s more insistent claim, however, that dissimulation breeds injustice, falls into line with the principles of many British eighteenth- and nineteenth-century reformers who rejected secrecy in favour of open protest.44 To promote a fully exposed, rational identity in the public realm during the 1790s meant furnishing individuals with rhetorical skills crucial for accomplishing political and cultural change. The persistent attention given over to the aesthetic education of the self during this period suggests that experimenting with inwardness can spill over into revolutionary unrest: if Godwin’s novelistic experiments in part evoke such revolutionary programs through the very same literary techniques that are also so disquieting, one can ascribe the contradictions, less to inconsistencies and impossible paradoxes, and more to crucial formal ambivalences in Godwin’s philosophy, hovering at the border between full awareness of the implications of his experiments in the politics and poetics of anonymity and the incriminations that such formalisms tend to involve. Although Godwin at times favors and engineers a depleted theory of the subject, it is also clear that he desires to withstand such formal annihilations and in turn find a language of revolution capable of fully embracing the urgency of his politics, thus transforming the poetics of anonymity into a viable form of radical dissent. John Bender has noted, for example, that the aesthetic project of Caleb Williams suggestively contradicts the anarchism of Political Justice in that the novel’s style of intrusive, impersonal narration inevitably participates in a detached violence that assails the novel’s characters.45 But instead of conceiving Godwin’s project as forestalled by its own anxieties, one might consider his writings as evoking the anxiety of the aesthetically and politically provisional—in this case, the anonymous subject, which seems to bode forth as nightmare and radical insight, both the content of a future modernity and the figuration for a new political aesthetic that is disruptive, creative, and anticipatory of even greater permutations.46 In many ways, the anonymous becomes a point of tremendous contention in the 1790s and casts a powerful shadow over the romantic era in that it comes to challenge various modes of Enlightenment agency that sought to promote atomistic projects of self-fashioning and social change. The

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Godwinian experiment breaks through with a style that recasts the subject, not as a record of unmediated expression or historical mimesis, but as the virtual cypher for a mode of common implication, one that absorbs and takes responsibility for identities that were, are, and will be. In the criticism surrounding Caleb Williams, Caleb’s life is often described as dramatizing an exemplary scene of instruction that either ends up confirming the life of the eighteenth-century novel or dissolving its politics altogether. In Robert Kiely’s survey of English romantic fiction he says that “the history of Caleb Williams may be an object lesson in the corrigible faults of government, but it is also something more than that—a tragedy of the incorrigible division in the human mind.”47 What is taken to be “incorrigible” in this case, however, diverts attention from the displacement of a term like government by the more romantic topos of the human mind; in a most un-Godwinian fashion, the aesthetic mind is liquidated of any complexity, and the novel cedes its place to a transcendental tragedy upon whose dark stages the value of Godwin’s work is significantly decreased, turning the potentia of an anonymous life into the site of psychological degradation and loss. “No words can enable me to do justice to the sensations which this circumstance produced in me,” writes Caleb toward the end of the novel as he is pursued by Falkland’s hired man, Gines. “It was like what has been described of the eye of Omniscience pursuing the guilty sinner, and darting a ray that awakens him to new sensibility at the very moment that, otherwise, exhausted nature would lull him into a temporary oblivion of the reproaches of his conscience” (316). Caleb comes to introject in part something that Gines embodies—the hypervigilance of the anonymous, which recasts the familiarity of identity politics under the burning scrutiny of an “eye of Omniscience.” Such an eye dangerously bats for the anonymous character who is aroused into shock by the revelation that his “temporary oblivion” is not merely natural, but is formally controlled by another. Despite Caleb’s protestations, I suggest that something like an unconscious ecstasy infuses these moments of disturbing awareness—an opening up of character into the multitude, stripping it of individuality and extending the voice further afield. Can such knowledge be truly liberating? Charting the significance of the author function in his famous essay “What Is an Author?” Michel Foucault opens by ventriloquizing Samuel Beckett: “What does it matter who is speaking,” someone said, “what does matter who is speaking.” In this indifference appears one of the fundamental ethical principles of contemporary writing. I say “ethical” because this indifference

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is not really a trait characterizing the manner in which one speaks and writes, but rather a kind of immanent rule, taken up over and over again, never fully applied, not designating writing as something completed, but dominating it as a practice.48

The perpetual replication of voices that Foucault hears also summons subjectivity beyond the propositional and formal qualities of discursivity, moving it toward a new level of inquiry in which the tumult of agentless masses might figure for new kinds of “talking subjects,” potentially disrupting any illusions we still have regarding our abilities to own ourselves exclusively and to lead naively self-interested and self-enclosed existences. Anonymity in this sense intimates a state of being that remains radically open and resilient in that it cannot be appropriated easily by others, especially since “otherness” is already an integral element of subjectivity. Godwin, then, in the delineation of a character without properties and a novel without a reliable narrator, effectively suspends judgment over the very events and persons he seeks to dramatize, turning the stage of novel writing into the architectural laboratory for an exploration of a revolutionary romantic subjectivity. How can self-expression be guaranteed over and against the presence of broader social authorities? And more pressingly, should we give up the notion of such privacy for the sake of embracing a radically diffused subject? What Godwin allows us to conceive, albeit with serious qualifications, is the extent to which the slippery between-ness of the private/public distinction more evocatively points to an unavowable condition or itinerant “labyrinth” of anonymity (in allusion to my epigraph from Foucault) that refuses to be properly displayed and characterized. The cultivation of anonymity in Godwin’s writings thus mounts a critique of transcendental personhood, forcing us to consider how an aesthetic and political form of writing might stealthily unfold the ever thickening plot of the anonymous character.

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Feeling for the Future The Ends of Sympathy Neither the eye nor the mind can see itself, unless reflected upon that which it resembles. — p e r c y b y s s h e s h e l l e y , A Defence of Poetry The fact that must constitute the point of departure for any discourse on ethics is that there is no essence, no historical or spiritual vocation, no biological destiny that humans must enact or realize. This is the only reason why something like an ethics can exist, because it is clear that if humans were or had to be this or that substance, this or that destiny, no ethical experience would be possible—there would be only tasks to be done. — g i o r g i o a g a m b e n , The Coming Community

In Chapter 1, I explored Keats’s vision of an aesthetic culture profoundly irreducible to empirical representations of alterity. Shaped by the principles of disinterest, the anonymous subject is refracted through the objects and persons it benevolently runs up against, and finds itself hampered in its desire to properly recognize and internalize others as versions of itself. As Keats repeatedly remarks upon in his letters and poetry, a “negatively capable” anonymity enacts and prescribes difficult constraints: while the subject is involuntarily compelled to excessively sympathize with others and multiply its ethical encounters, its actions come to appear as never its own, performed as they are outside the orbit of the subject’s own capacities. In this way, subjectivity is perceived as perpetually deconstituting, becoming almost irresponsible as a consequence of its inability to cling to any stable sense of self-knowledge. And yet, what does remain is the sense of

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benevolent obligation, of an impossible attendance and anticipation. Why and how do alterity and the politics of recognition continue to structure a relation with the anonymous subject? And in what ways is “sympathy” not merely a mechanism for social welfare but a risky summoning or calling of futurity? As Paul de Man has lucidly remarked, “The pattern of Keats’s work is prospective rather than retrospective; it consists of hopeful preparations, anticipations of future power rather than meditative reflections on past moments of insight or harmony.”1 The “present” tense of the anonymous subject can thus be characterized as a gap or suspension between forgetting the past and being pulled along by the flux of futurity. What Keats’s poetry gestures toward, I believe, and what Shelley will considerably develop, is a project of social renovation that evokes “sympathy” as neither a conduit between sense and understanding nor a binding principle between different individuals, but as an ethically complex relation to otherness. “Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration, the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present,” writes Shelley in the Defence of Poetry, and I want to keep these words in mind throughout this chapter as I build on their crucial insights.2 Because otherness signifies that which cannot be readily grasped except as a promise or a call that disarticulates identity from action, Shelley intimates that the ethical actions of subjectivity are inevitably provisional in that they work as judgments upon things and experiences that have yet to come into being. In this way, he plainly echoes Hazlitt’s rebuke to Utilitarian thought in the Essay on the Principles of Human Action, where the anonymous subject’s failure to demonstrably apply itself in the present moment gives way to a new kind of ethical orientation.3 What Shelley will thus recognize throughout his writings, in spite of his belief in the imagination as “the great instrument of moral good” (488), is that the inability to produce functional or “instrumental” models of sympathy actually initiates an ethico-political stance that emerges out of the subject’s incapacity to find solidarity with itself. In what follows, I want to explore these Shelleyan predicaments by first tracing the terminological complexity of sympathy as it appears in several texts that helped establish its currency in eighteenth-century moral and aesthetic theory: David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature, Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, and Adam Smith’s A Theory of Moral Sentiments. The concluding portion of the chapter concentrates on reading Shelley’s Defence of Poetry and Prometheus Unbound as texts that reimagine traditional sympathy as a struc-

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ture through which subjectivity is derealized by the “call” of an otherness it can neither anticipate nor adequately know. I thus propose a certain developmental trajectory for sympathy that will reach a nearly unique pitch in Shelley, for whom the “nothingness” of the relation between self and other, identity and agency, knowing and not knowing, is exposed and given new bearings. Such “nothingness,” I argue, also haunts, albeit in nascent form, the writings of Hume, Burke, and Smith, who gesture to the kinds of ethical, political, and aesthetic difficulties that Shelley will considerably amplify. Sympathy, according to David Marshall, is “already an aesthetic experience” that can “take place within the realm of fiction, mimesis, representation, and reproduction”;4 in the context of the present study, it is liable to take on a radicalism that is in excess of the intentions of the authors I consider. After all, if the virtue of the anonymous yet benevolent subject lies in its failure to be and to possess itself, we might very well ask what kinds of ethical and political responsibilities does such a sympathetic “non-self ” adhere to in the total absence of any sense of personhood? Furthermore, if sympathy is indeed a technology as Marc Redfield defines it,5 it is deployed in the writings of Hume, Burke, and Smith to generate a foundation for ethico-political debate, and in this sense, it doesn’t so much reiterate as authorize subjectivity to emerge as either the “effect” of the logic of exchangeable property (Hume); the participatory spectator whose benevolences are subject to the binding pressures of sublime spectacle (Burke); or the noninvolved yet judgmental self whose responsibilities are temporally limited and insular (Smith). For all three thinkers, sympathy supports ethical models of intersubjectivity that solicit alterity through mutual recognition or likeness, while keeping the self intact. At the same time, sympathy operates with profoundly disturbing consequences: while it allows Hume to envision selfhood as potentially appropriable by those who hold power over it, in Burke and Smith it respectively regulates and redeems community through violence and promotes self-interest through global indifference. Sympathy thus precariously positions the self on the brink of otherness; for this reason Smith will choose to limit its ethical and civic activity to more local circulations and responsibilities: The administration of the great system of the universe, however, the care of the universal happiness of all rational and sensible beings, is the business of God and not of man. To man is allotted a much humbler department, but one much more suitable to the weakness of his powers and the narrowness

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of his comprehension; the care of his own happiness, of that of his family, his friends, his country: that he is occupied in contemplating the more sublime, can never be an excuse for his neglecting the more humble department. . . . The most sublime speculation of the contemplative philosopher can scarce compensate the neglect of the smallest active duty.6

In this passage Smith intuits that sympathy can be misdirected: it can turn the discourse of recognition into a disavowal of ethical reciprocity with the other, or it can cultivate it as a more prurient and intrusively professionalized form of critique that lies at the service of those same hegemonic forces it initially meant to resist. When Shelley remarks in the essay “On Life” that “the words I, and you and they are grammatical devices invented simply for arrangement and totally devoid of the intense and exclusive sense usually attached to them” (478), he intimates that attempts to linguistically legitimate the self are spurious in that they naturalize affective modes of power like sympathy which construe “identity” to be an ineffable or unmediated property.7 If what Shelley proposes as an alternative is on the surface an equally mystified version of subjectivity perched “on that verge where words abandon us, and what wonder if we grow dizzy to look down the dark abyss)” (478), how can one appreciate his recasting of sympathy as something more than what Hume, Burke, and Smith propose? And moreover, if our aspirations are essentially guided by “a spirit within [us] at enmity with nothingness and dissolution,” a spirit, moreover, that returns us to a void we are equally “incapable of imagining” (476), can our aspirations generate any productive sympathies at all?8

D  B ' •  B = B 8 # = #  : Of the many terms from the romantic era that continue to exert an influence on contemporary political, ethical, and aesthetic debates, sympathy doubtless holds an important conceptual puissance.9 “No quality of human nature is more remarkable, both in itself and on its consequences, than that propensity we have to sympathize with others,” writes Hume in A Treatise of Human Nature.10 Even though sympathy is seemingly deployed to promote a humanistic epistemology and ethics, it also generates a slippery rhetoric of interpersonal communication that is in turn indebted to the eighteenth-century cult of sentimentalism. The willingness to feel and receive the “inclinations and sentiments” of others suggests that identity’s “nature,”

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paradoxically, is porous and subject to the disruptive contingencies of circulating feelings. In this sense, the difference between external influence and inner integrity becomes murky, and notions like “self-identity” and “otherness” in Hume’s account appear unstable and approximate. Indeed, selfhood is never entirely one’s own because it depends on sympathy as a navigating tool or a principle of “emotion management”:11 “The sentiments of others can never affect us, but by becoming, in some measure, our own; in which case they operate upon us, by opposing and encreasing [sic] our passions, in the very same manner, as if they had been originally deriv’d from our own temper and disposition” (378). Thus while sympathy is instrumental in enabling apparently anonymous subjects to communicate with one another in the social sphere, it also throws into relief the problem that knowing and feeling for others is often symptomatic of subjectivity’s insecure grounding. This problem, however, recast in the Treatise’s economic terminology, comes to define a form of sociality for which sympathy works as an ideological adhesive. As J. G. A. Pocock has argued, the dispossessed subject is the subject of eighteenth-century liberalism, acting as a new “material anchor in the form of property.” Since “property—the material foundation of both personality and government—has ceased to be real and has become not merely mobile but imaginary,” the virtuous and virtual self is defined as speculative and prospective in its concerns, at once debtor and creditor; institutions and phenomenal categories such as “government” and “society,” which take the self as their normative value, become probabilistic in their orientations, pursuing an unknown future of potential gain or loss.12 The self ’s language of sympathy tends toward investment: it casts the problem of other minds as an opportunity for reconceiving “self ” and “other” as categories subject to affective postponements and future advantages. Their volatility, moreover, is made possible by a historical transformation of probability into a form of evaluative knowing: instead of merely assenting to the empirical data of knowledge, probability implies a consideration of the conditions of and outcomes raised by the data. Because, as Ian Hacking has persuasively argued, by Hume’s time the notion of causation had come to be associated with induction and not the category of knowledge,13 the sympathetic imagination was valorized as a faculty operating according to its own causality, especially adept at conjuring plausible cultural narratives:14 For besides the relation of cause and effect, by which we are convinc’d of the reality of the passion, with which we sympathize; besides this, I say, we must be assisted by the relations of resemblance and contiguity, in order to feel the

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sympathy in its full perfection. And since these relations can entirely convert an idea into an impression, and convey the vivacity of the latter into the former, so perfectly as to lose nothing of it in the transition, we may easily conceive how the relation of cause and effect alone, may serve to strengthen and enliven an idea. (208)

Sympathy thus doesn’t confirm but rather anticipates or (re)presents identity as the consequence of affective inductions that gesture beyond experience—“causality is a relation,” writes Deleuze, “according to which I go beyond the given; I say more than what is given or giveable—in short, I infer and I believe, I expect that . . .”15 And insofar as the culture of sentimentalism is implicitly probabilistic, to feel for another becomes, in Annette Baier’s words, “a matter of the relationship between a person and what is hers, in all the ‘hundred’ senses of the personal possessive pronoun.”16 Sympathy binds persons together precisely on the basis of the provisionality of their imaginative, “virtual” obligations to one another, which are a priori and a fortiori informed by a logic of property that equates personality with self-possession.17 Because our identifications with one another are ultimately self-interested ones, property signifies the material evidence of wealth as a stabilizing force for identity; the self ’s property or possession, however, is relational in that it can only be appraised by the judgments of others, and while property can be individualized, the category of the self becomes vulnerable to dispersal: “Sympathy is theft,” remarks Jerome Christensen. “Or [it] would be theft were it not that every feeling occurs in a ‘kind of theatre’. . . . The theater, like sympathy at large, works as an implicit guarantor of property rights because appropriation conventionalized is not the theft of property but its transfer.”18 “Indirect passions” like pride and humility are linked to sympathy because they effectively suspend the self between the promise of being judged and the actual judgments made on the basis of induction: “No person is ever prais’d by another for any quality,” writes Hume, “which wou’d not, if real, produce, of itself, a pride in the person possest of it. The elogiums either turn upon his power, or riches, or family, or virtue; all of which are subjects of vanity” (208). Read in this way, sympathy dissimulates identity: it converts others’ external evaluations of us into impressions that we then unconsciously introject as self-induced passions, making it difficult to distinguish between feelings we have and those we take in from others. Feeling becomes a category of mediated experience, despite its claims to autonomy, and to the extent that

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inwardness is a false or alienable property in Hume, sympathy posits feeling as something imaginary. Subjectivity is steeped in a sense of wealth that it feels belongs to it, but which at the same time it cannot have because of its dispossession. What appears to be “personal” in this regard turns out to be entirely virtual, since identity is conceived as a tangled nexus of competing claims, opinions, and speculations, all of which invoke probabilistic outcomes rather than points of origin. Thus the related skeptical problems of knowing the self and knowing the other yield an incomplete knowledge of the self ’s progress, whose futurity remains in advance of any selective and temporary determinations. If thoughtfully sympathizing for other selves resembles a kind of ethical probabilism that anticipates what may yet happen to persons, or what they may do or become in the future, Hume also suggests that the circumstantial limitations placed upon such probabilistic sympathies perform a necessary function. Instead of experiencing probability as a freedom of the self-sufficient mind to judge and confer meaning upon others, the self ’s capacity to imagine other persons is bound by the contingencies of “some circumstance in the present” that keeps it from wildly misapplying its inductions. Though we think we can help and act on behalf of another because we have imagined not only what the “other” might be but also all possible situations that might befall him, such imaginings are only meaningful in relation to a consideration of the circumstances in which they occur. For this reason, personal agency isn’t simply a matter of choosing what to do for another—it is a limitation derived from a probabilistic account of ever shifting events. In Hume’s “spectatorial morality,” as Blakey Vermeule calls it, self and other constantly exchange places and are equally subject to perpetual reassessment.19 One volatile issue, however, in Hume’s system of ethics is the question of the subject’s anonymity: if our sympathy for others causes us to be indebted to others, then we leave ourselves open to appropriation and a potentially conservative politics wherein identity is easily manipulated and redrawn by authoritarian regimes. As Theodor Adorno notes in Minima Moralia, the “removal of the ideology of ‘personality’ ” in Hume makes it “all the easier to dominate,” because personality is replaced by vulnerable, subjectless behaviorism.20 Nonidentity is thus easily led to absorb those impersonations of “selfhood” that hegemonic forces foist upon it. Such an anxious predicament echoes in Edmund Burke’s brief description of sympathy in the context of his aesthetic and physiological treatise A Philosophical

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Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, where the transferability of selfhood is linked to a social regulation produced through sublimity: “For sympathy must be considered as a sort of substitution, by which we are put into the place of another man, and affected in many respects as he is affected.”21 To the extent that the aesthetics of the sublime involves acts of self-substitution and refiguration, Burke defines sympathy as the hinge that manages and domesticates sublimity as an affective phenomenon and in turn gives relief to the social community. Burke wants to make the claim that the sublime, through sympathy, becomes a rival form of social authority that opens the self to a pressing otherness. But in order to make this point, first we have to disentangle some of Burke’s theoretical linkages. Sympathy represents for him one of the passions of society (along with imitation and ambition), which he then breaks down to include “the society of the sexes, which answers the purposes of propagation; and next, that more general society, which we have with men and with other animals, and which we may in some sort be said to have even with the inanimate world” (40). Although the social passions differ from those of self-preservation (the latter employ pleasure and pain and are related to the phenomenon of the sublime), they are nevertheless interdependent because the health of the individual is bound to the maintenance of a healthy social body. Sympathy serves as one of three terms (the others being imitation and ambition) used to accomplish this health, and it operates in a manner that Burke relates to aesthetic judgment: “It is by this principle chiefly that poetry, painting, and other affecting arts, transfuse their passions from one breast to another, and are often capable of grafting a delight on wretchedness, misery, and death itself ” (44). Burke here intimates that the social relevance of the various arts lies in their capacity to replenish the subject’s concept of itself as an apparently autonomous, judgmental being. Indeed, the notion that artistic “content” can be affectively transmitted from one person to another suggests that private judgment, on a multiplied scale, contributes to a larger, collective experience of sympathetic identification. If each one of us is subjectively affected by an artwork, that feeling is conveyed to others who then absorb it into their own judgments, and so forth. In other words, the health of the social group is regulated by the sympathetic transfusion of “passions from one breast to another.”22 “Pleasure is no longer the product of representation or mimesis per se,” observes Redfield, “but of the occurrence of ‘sympathy’ structured like representation or, more precisely, like metaphor.”23 The metaphoricity

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of sympathy thus enables selfhood to be thought of as a trope that can be, needless to say, infinitely—and infectiously—troped: The truth is, all verbal description, merely as naked description, though never so exact, conveys so poor and insufficient an idea of the thing described, that it could scarcely have the smallest effect, if the speaker did not call in to his aid those modes of speech that mark a strong and lively feeling in himself. Then, by the contagion of our passions, we catch a fire already kindled in another, which probably might never have been struck out by the object described. (175–76)

Sympathy produces group thought because affect is contagious—pathology, in other words, is the pathos of sympathetic identification. The social community is thus bound together by its aesthetic responses, and sublimity in Burke’s scheme requires a significant kind of response (he references Milton and Shakespeare as two authors of sublime magnitude) through which self and community can be dynamically aligned. Defined as “whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects,” the sublime produces delight in the spectator, or what Burke calls the experience of “an idea of pain and danger, without being actually in such circumstances” (51). As an external phenomenon that nevertheless is subjectively felt, the sublime materializes into being the relation between the self ’s cultural, political, and aesthetic anxieties and its “personal” experience of an ostensibly autonomous inwardness. For this reason, sublimity fascinates and compels, but in order to maintain that fascination, it has to be aesthetically tempered or else the “reality” of the terror it represents would drive people away. Delight names the feeling of emotionally attending a scene of disaster without participating in it, and in this sense, the sublime is a mediated—and mediating—experience: the self registers the event belatedly, and sympathy acts as the prophylactic mechanism through which the sublime is engineered to inspire a disruptive awe without inducing any paralyzing terror:24 As our Creator has designed we should be united by the bond of sympathy, he has strengthened that bond by a proportionable delight; and there most where our sympathy is most wanted, in the distresses of others. If this passion was simply painful, we would shun with the greatest care all persons and places that could excite such a passion; as some who are so far gone in indolence as not to endure any strong impression actually do. But the case is widely different with the greater part of mankind; there is no spectacle

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we so eagerly pursue, as that of some uncommon and grievous calamity; so that whether the misfortune is before our eyes, or whether they are turned back to it in history, it always touches with delight. This is not an unmixed delight, but blended with no small uneasiness. The delight we have in such things, hinders us from shunning scenes of misery; and the pain we feel, prompts us to relieve ourselves in relieving those who suffer; and all this antecedent to any reasoning, by an instinct that works us to its own purposes, without our concurrence. (46)

It is important to note here that Burke is keen to employ the sublime as an aesthetic category that includes not only certain awesome works of art or terrifying natural and historical phenomena but also social depictions of human suffering and mass calamities. Indeed, the kind of dreadful fascination that social sublimity evokes also induces the necessary “delight” that prevents us from “shunning scenes of misery” and compels us to act for others. By identifying the sublime with events that occur in the social, Burke suggests that our ethical responsibility toward one another derives from a sense of the alterity or sublime otherness of human suffering, and it is precisely this otherness which sympathy seeks to mediate. Luke Gibbons has recently explored this dimension of Burke’s “sympathetic sublime,” describing it as an “interventionist” form of cross-identification that compels the self to move out of its recessive confines by virtue of its fascination or interest in others.25 His reading suggests that scenes of sublime suffering quicken the self ’s ethical engagement because, in apprehending its own destabilization and dispossession, the self is politicized by a sense of involuntary implication in those very scenes it contemplates. Otherness thus evokes an ethical “possibility” that subjectivity imagines as both a source of and a response to sublimity. Insofar as judgment is an act of representation or framing that brings the subject into contact with its formal identity, sublimity evokes that which lies outside of the frame of subjectivity. The subject cannot appropriate otherness under such conditions because the scene of sympathetic sublimity in Burke, unlike instances of imitation or ambition, throws the subject up against the limits of its own representations. Thus, by enlarging Hume’s social theory of sympathetic identification into a full-fledged aesthetics, Burke’s model implies that the quest for selfrepresentation doesn’t proceed according to the notion that subjectivity must be experienced in terms of a resemblance to others; instead, the possibility of individual dispersal through sympathetic sublimity becomes, paradoxically, the difficult condition of every member of the discursive public

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sphere—one reason, moreover, why Burke will describe the arts of poetry and rhetoric, in contrast with the pictorial arts, as capable of “display[ing] rather the effect of things on the mind of the speaker, or of others, than to present a clear idea of the things themselves” (172). “Burke is levelling his criticism here not just at imitation or representation,” continues Gibbons, “but at the optical basis of spectacle which . . . treats reality itself as a representation, giving the illusion of presence without participation” (109). Sympathetic sublimity thus undoes the kind of suspension of disbelief that aesthetics require, engendering a more rigorously speculative and cosmopolitan activism: The logic of Burke’s position . . . extend[s] the ethical basis of the Enlightenment, bringing the imaginative reach of sympathy to regions excluded from mainstream Enlightenment thought. For Burke, this involved a profound, troubled engagement with the plight of colonized peoples whether in Ireland, India, or America, an extension of cross-cultural solidarity to those cultures that were doomed, according to Enlightenment theories of progress, to the dustbin of history. (113)

In reclaiming Burke from standard critiques which read him within the context of his conservative politics, Gibbons theorizes his brand of sympathy as a force that animates individuals’ ethical imaginations by having them feel for either immediate sublime scenes of suffering or distant and obscure cultures they might only have heard about or read. While I do not entirely disagree with Gibbons’s argument, we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that sympathy doesn’t compel the individual to necessarily act either for, like, or against another; in fact, it often serves to relieve the subject from action altogether, pushing it back, as it were, into dispossession or anonymity through which the sublime establishes its monopoly of infinite power. By positing a passive spectator who stands at a distance from scenes of violence and suffering and practices self-regulation and self-judgment, sublimity coordinates spectators to experience its otherness as a quality that is intrinsic to the hygienic and aesthetic necessity of those practices in the first place. Burke writes: The nearer [tragedy] approaches the reality, and the further it removes us from all idea of fiction, the more perfect is its power. But be its power of what kind it will, it never approaches to what it represents. Chuse a day on which to represent the most sublime and affecting tragedy we have; appoint the most favourite actors; spare no cost upon the scenes and decorations;

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unite the greatest efforts of poetry, painting and music; and when you have collected your audience, just at the moment when their minds are erect with expectation, let it be reported that a state criminal of high rank is on the point of being executed in the adjoining square; in a moment the emptiness of the theatre would demonstrate the comparative weakness of the imitative arts, and proclaim the triumph of real sympathy. (47)

“Real sympathy” defines an absolute identification between subjective response and external representation, but instead of arguing that we are merely duped into accepting “real” versus “fictional” identifications, Burke suggests that our responses are based on the fact that “we do not sufficiently distinguish what we would by no means chuse to do, from what we should be eager enough to see if it was once done. We delight in seeing things, which so far from doing, our heartiest wishes would be to see redressed,” such as the destruction of London by fire or earthquake which would inevitably draw many to “croud to behold the ruins”(47–48). Burke intuits that the volatility of our emotions frequently corresponds to an ethical dilemma that the sublime brings into focus. The examples of the public execution and the destruction of the capital city, which doubtlessly compel attention because of our concern for human suffering, also foreground the degree to which the cultural regime of the sublime has instantiated within us a predilection for the autonomy of affect as an index of subject formation.26 Because the sublime is theoretically irreducible to mere representation or imitation, it is a “feeling” that not only passes from one spectator to another, it also signifies a rule of law that regulates our relation to a system of power that confers upon us the illusion of mastery as a consequence of our passive subjection to its authority.27 The sublime spectacle of violence, whether it be a natural disaster or the execution of a criminal, assembles subjects into a sentimental community that is in turn sustained by each member’s illusory participation in such scenes. Group identity is thus wholly dependent upon sympathetic transfusion. Thus Burke’s notion of subjectivity, although seemingly more vulnerable to experiences of otherness and anonymity, is undone by sympathies that indenture it to a local, cohesive community, one that is justified by mass violence or other traumatically sublime moments.28 Subjectivity seeks to conform to the group through a process Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen has perceptively described as “the catharsis of mimesis by mimesis”: instead of trying to consciously imitate the reactions or behaviors of others, subjectivity is coordinated with the normative values of a particular group.29 Indeed, in a re-

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view in the Annual Register of another treatise on sympathy, Adam Smith’s A Theory of Moral Sentiments, Burke lauded Smith’s attempts to establish “the foundation of the just, the fit, the proper, the decent, in our most common and most allowed passions.”30 This interest in “the just, the fit, the proper, the decent” precisely quickens Adam Smith’s construal of “fellow-feeling” as a principle of constraint over the relationship between self and other, a principle he cultivates in order to guard against, not only the possibility of sublime anonymity that Burke had raised, but also the self ’s uneasy appropriation by another person or group. While Smith rehearses many of Hume’s points concerning the self ’s makeup in relation to the logic of property,31 he additionally amplifies them through his own Utilitarian, cost-benefit analyses. For example, since kindness and happiness are necessary for the individual’s well-being, sympathy helps orient us toward others in such a way as to treat the “other” as the source of an invaluably reciprocal, emotional gain that replenishes the subject’s private and proprietary ends. Indeed, Smith will use sympathy as the theory that overrides our physical incapacity to help others in order to fiscally gain an emotional and moral reward from scenes in which we are unable to participate: Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers. They never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person, and it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations. Neither can that faculty help us to this in any way, than by representing to us what would be our own, if we were in his case. It is the impressions of our senses only, not those of his, which our imaginations copy. By the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations, and even feel something which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike them. (9)

The physiological distance between our senses and those of another is compensated by the imagination’s capacity for sympathy; at the same time, however, the imagination is the faculty through which our difference from others is necessarily established as a sign of self-possession, or what John Mullan calls “spectatorial aloofness . . . the condition of the operation of sympathy.”32 The imagination accomplishes cohesion through separation, cautiously limiting sympathy’s infectious effect of having self and other exchange places in a Burkean drama of endless similitude and resemblance.

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For Smith, anonymity is synonymous with an empowered form of selfabstraction; he perceives the practical activity of the sentiments to be regulatory, preventive, and self-privileging: since they aren’t especially motivated toward specific ends per se, the sentiments can be employed to manage our ethical obligations to others. The fact that the sufferer’s emotions cannot be commensurable with those of the sympathetic spectator mandates that compassion be strictly regulated in the face of unreasonable grief. For example, in order to convince the spectator of the truth value of his sympathies, the sufferer must lower “his passion to that pitch,” writes Smith, “in which the spectators are capable of going along with him. He must flatten, if I may be allowed to say so, the sharpness of its natural tone, in order to reduce it to harmony and concord with the emotions of those who are about him” (22). Smith’s strongest innovation in the theory of sympathy, however, lies in the concept of the “impartial spectator” who polices and supervises our encounters with others, acting as “an imagined man within” who is a substitute figure of judgment: When we are always so much more deeply affected by whatever concerns ourselves, than by whatever concerns other men; what is it which prompts the generous, upon all occasions, and the mean upon many, to sacrifice their own interests to the greater interests of others? . . . It is reason, principle, conscience, the inhabitant of the breast, the man within, the great judge and arbiter of our conduct. It is he who, whenever a voice capable of astonishing the most presumptuous of our passions, that we are but one of the multitude, in no respect better than any other in it; and that when we prefer ourselves so shamefully and so blindly to others, we become the proper objects of resentment, abhorrence, and execration. It is from him only that we learn the real littleness of ourselves, and of whatever relates to ourselves, and the natural misrepresentations of self-love can be corrected only by the eye of this impartial spectator. (137)

The impartial spectator functions as a figure for the self ’s dialectical shifts between subjective expression and social obligation. The voice that calls us into an awareness of ourselves as “but one of the multitude, in no respect better than any other in it,” remarkably echoes the crowding urbanization of society, both shocking and acclimatizing the Enlightenment subject to its surroundings over and above the unavowable spaces of pure inwardness. But the impartial spectator also calls to the self in order to help it secure composure and self-command over and against the crowd. Ironically, the self is empowered by its potential dispossession in the public sphere: for

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example, while intimacies with friends and family frequently lead us to let our guard down (“We are immediately put in mind of the light in which he will view our situation, and we begin to view it ourselves in the same light; for the effect of sympathy is instantaneous” [22–23]), the presence of strangers compels us to interact with them with a greater degree of care and abstraction since we “always endeavour to bring down our passion to that pitch, which the particular company we are in may be expected to go along with” (23). The impartial spectator thus mitigates against excessive feeling, either impetuous and reckless benevolence toward others or violent and unreasonable strife. Expanding his theory toward global politics, Smith remarks that during times of war, “neutral nations are the only indifferent and impartial spectators” (154), because they are recessive and unseen and thus maintain fidelity to the laws of justice, while warring nations disregard laws and democratic discourse and try as much as possible to gain power and foster blind allegiances: In a nation distracted by faction, there are, no doubt, always a few, though commonly but a few, who preserve their judgment untainted by the general contagion. They seldom amount to more than, here and there, a solitary individual, without any influence, excluded, by his own candour, from the confidence of either party, and who, though he may be one of the wisest, is necessarily, upon that very account, one of the most insignificant men in the society. (155)

Marshall has noted that the “impartial spectator” evokes a “dèdoublement,” in Smith’s logic, one that defines the self to be “theatricalized in its relation to others and in its self-conscious relation to itself ”: Ironically, after founding his Theory Of Moral Sentiments on a supposedly universal principle of sympathy, and then structuring the act of sympathy around the epistemological void that prevents people from sharing each other’s feelings, Smith seems to separate the self from the one self it could reasonably claim to know: itself. In order to sympathize with ourselves, we must imagine ourselves as an other who looks upon us as an other and tries to imagine us. . . . Identity is itself undermined by the theatrical model which pictures the self as an actor who stands beside himself and represents the characters of both spectator and spectacle.33

Although the slipperiness of Smith’s language throughout The Theory of Moral Sentiments does invite the kind of decentering speculations that Marshall describes, it would be wrong to conceive this move as entirely mistaken on

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Smith’s part, since his arguments are precisely grounded in a dialectic of selfdissolution and reconstitution.34 The anonymous, judgmental subject embodies and resolutely practices the art of self-command: because consciousness is not hermetically sealed off but rather overtly social and intersubjective, its experiences of introversion and extroversion help its efforts at corrective selfmanagement. To reflect upon oneself sympathetically means to assume a disinterested point of view toward oneself as an uninvolved, impartial spectator whose anonymous passivity before the “stage” of actions exemplifies a kind of politics of stoic retirement.35 On this point, Gibbons has suggested that Smith’s theory of sympathy emerges out of Scottish Enlightenment social theory, which “derives from a profound cultural experience of displacement and a lived experience of the continual presence of another within one’s own sphere of existence. The Act of Union of 1707, and the devastation of Highland culture after the Battle of Culloden in 1746, are the main political factors which presided over this renegotiation of cultural identity in Scotland.” The impartial spectator thus emerges as a figure that promotes sympathy as the ideological tool for Scottish assimilation into the colonial fabric of English power: “There is a certain irony in the fact that the discourse of sympathy,” continues Gibbons, “which presents itself initially as an ideal medium of cross-cultural dialogue, ends up through the distancing device of the impartial spectator erasing the identity of one, if not both, parties in transition. . . . In bringing about this apparently felicitous concord between both parties to the Union, the role of ‘impartial spectator’ merges imperceptibly with Britishness, in its colonial guise as a synonym for progress, civility, and humanity itself.”36 Insofar as Smith’s Theory aspires to establish a theory of agency—“though the intentions of any person,” writes Smith, “should be ever so proper and beneficent, on the one hand, or even so improper and malevolent, on the other, yet, if they fail in producing their effects, his merit seems imperfect in the one case, and his demerit incomplete in the other” (97)—the noninvolved self ’s disappearance into the reserved fortunes of its own capacious and anonymous consciousness ends up simplifying its relation to otherness: it can only respond to the miseries of other persons if they further enhance its own plenitude. In a famously gothic passage, for example, Smith’s elegy for the historical dead inspires a selfish melancholy that parasitically depends on the emotional life of other persons: We sympathize even with the dead, and overlooking what is of real importance in their situation, that awful futurity which awaits them, we are chiefly affected by those circumstances which strike our senses, but can have no influ-

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ence upon their happiness. It is miserable, we think, to be deprived of the light of the sun; to be shut out from life and conversation; to be laid in the cold grave, a prey to corruption and the reptiles of the earth; to be no more thought of in this world, but to be obliterated, in a little time, from the affections, and almost from the memory, of their dearest friends and relations. Surely, we imagine, we can never feel too much for those who have suffered so dreadful a calamity. The tribute of our fellow-feeling seems doubly due to them now, when they are in danger of being forgot by every body; and, by the vain honours which we pay to their memory, we endeavour, for our own misery, artificially to keep alive our melancholy remembrance of their misfortune. (12–13)

Although concerned with the “awful futurity” of the dead, Smith’s compensatory homage can only remember them as anonymous corpses.37 The “pastness” of the dead bodies intuits a radically limited view of the future, in which what counts as or passes for the other is entirely vaporized as a possibility. The fear of death in Smith thus evokes and yet ultimately curtails any consideration of what he calls “futurity” or the afterlife because the latter is conflated with the haunting specter of an unseen otherness that turns the imagination against itself, proliferating more of what cannot, and should not, be seen. Smith imagines only to disavow imagining the future situation of the dead because he perceives it to be a miserable kind of dispossession, one that explicitly echoes the self ’s own fearful interest in its own impending demise. Indeed, the future for Smith becomes the limit-point that empties out the moral imagination and consigns otherness to an unseen “evermore” that is like a sealed crypt, somewhere beyond ethical reach. The force of this kind of thinking also implicitly underwrites Smith’s uncharitable attack on liberal thinkers, or those “whining and melancholy moralists,” who are perpetually reproaching us with our happiness, while so many of our brethren are in misery, who regard as impious the natural joy of prosperity, which does not think of the many wretches that are at every instant labouring under all sorts of calamities, in the languor of poverty, in the agony of disease, in the horrors of death, under the insults and oppression of their enemies. Commiseration for those miseries which we never saw, which we never heard of, but which we may be assured are at all times infesting such numbers of our fellow-creatures, ought, they think, to damp the pleasures of the fortunate, and to render a certain melancholy dejection habitual to all men. (139–40)

In a reading of this passage in the context of the eighteenth century’s masculine politics of recognition, Julie Ellison remarks that Smith’s rebuke to

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“guilty liberal” thinkers makes clear that “statistical inclusion can be used against emotional inclusion. . . . For the guilty liberal, being consciously included in systematic formations is the basis for the sense of implication or responsibility. For Smith, however, this productive virtue inherent in the system frees its knowing participants from having to share everyone else’s unhappiness.”38 Taking Smith’s claims at face value, guilt over one’s inability to participate in and respond to all sorts of global situations is profoundly irrational: it overproduces sympathy and demeans the self ’s corrective principle of judgment by preventing it from perceiving the other as an empirically verifiable entity. Additionally, Smith believes that self-interest diminishes once the imagination begins to fantasize (not sympathize) independently of any actual persons or things.39 Since “sympathetic sentiment is, in the last analysis, ‘imaginary,’ ” reminds Peter de Bolla,40 Smith wants to keep fact and value identical with each other in order to properly define selfhood; otherwise, selfhood would be rendered anonymous through its own nonmimetic projections. Why Smith is so willing, however, to sympathize with the dead (“It is from this very illusion of the imagination, that the foresight of our own dissolution is so terrible to us, and that idea of those circumstances, which undoubtedly can give us no pain when we are dead, makes us miserable when we are alive” [13]), who are as invisible as the millions of global sufferers he passes over, might have something to do with what Esther Schor has analyzed as his “sense of an unpayable debt to the dead. . . . [They] provide the gold standard for the endlessly circulating currency of sympathy which constitutes a normative morality. For Smith, the moral authority of the dead, not of a transcendental God nor of the individual human body, ‘guarantees’ the social circulation of sympathy, pity, compassion, approbation, and censure by which the living regulate their actions.”41 Furthering Schor’s insights on the economic premium of death, I would argue that the dead also represent unfulfilled, past speculations that the contemporary mourner accumulates as proof of his historical continuity, while worldwide “fellow creatures” represent unseen risks that are without precedence, and thus draw us into future exchanges that may or may not prove dangerous. Interest in the dead brings to the fore the complexities in what it means to take an “interest,” a word, as I described in Chapter 1, that is inscribed with risky uncertainty. To take interest means to understand it as what Mieszkowski calls “a figure of appropriation and delay. On the one hand, to take an interest in something is to mobilize it for some ulterior motive.

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On the other hand, interest ‘makes a difference,’ as the Latin root would have it, since it always points toward something not yet realized: a wish, an objective, an endpoint with which no particular interest can coincide.” Interest or interesse thus figures for a state of “between-being” or an uncertainty on the level of decisive action and ontological speculation. As Smith looks backward to the dead as “the subject of liberal capitalism,” he “discovers that he . . . will reap the benefits of a commitment to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—tomorrow. The self-interested agent lives a life of eternal deferral.”42 Such deferral, however, is synonymous with a profound tribute to the dead that mourns them in the spirit of an inconsolable anxiety, one that muses over the unpredictability of what their deaths might mean for a subject that knows itself probabilistically and sees its life as a matter of chance and disruption. While the past has a cultural claim over us, the future mobilizes the ghosts of the dead as portending figures for the ambiguities of living and being in a state of between-ness that challenges the very continuity of those claims, rendering them inadequate or unfinished. Put another way, the ghosts of the dead remind us that our ambitions are on shaky ground, nothing more than open graves. For Smith, the future inevitably is the haunt of past deaths, deaths that are ultimately the confirming remainders of a continuity with the past.43 But the dead certainly do more than console the living with fantasies of eternal return: rather, the ghosts of the future compel our time and attention because they are unburied, ambivalent possibilities, gratifying us precisely by mortifying our desires: they call to us through voices that have an interest in us, despite our unwillingness to hear them.

#)#*#*•=•C3# By the time the concept of sympathy presents itself to Shelley after 1813 (the period which marks the publication of his first important work, Queen Mab), what is at stake is a reconceptualization of basic assumptions about what sympathy is, which, as we have seen in Hume, Burke, and Smith, amounts to an anxious reiteration of subjective power over the other. Shelley’s indifference to defining subjectivity as a concrete entity that is socially and politically impervious to change is loudly heard, for example, in the essay “On Life,” where he remarks that the staleness of

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materialist philosophies is due to their failure to account for the kinds of temporal contingencies that buoy subjectivity: Man is a being of high aspirations “looking both before and after,” whose “thoughts that wander through eternity,” disclaim alliance with transience and decay, incapable of imagining to himself annihilation, existing but in the future and the past, being, not what he is, but what he has been, and shall be. Whatever may be his true and final destination, there is a spirit within him at enmity with nothingness and dissolution (change and extinction). This is the character of all life and being.—Each is at once the centre and the circumference; the point to which all things are referred, and the line in which all things are contained.—Such contemplations as these materialism and the popular philosophy of mind and matter, alike forbid; they are consistent only with the intellectual system. (476)

On the surface, this passage reverberates with the kind of high inspirational rhetoric that has popularly characterized Shelley as the poet-seer. Although the language does indeed appear to raise the subject beyond potential entropy, it would be wrong to assume that Shelley’s argument is merely idealistic. The scene of annihilation or “nothingness” that subjectivity aspires to deny or evade is in fact constitutive of subjectivity’s dialectical relation to the very aporia that underwrites it, pulling it into the projected voids of “the future and the past, being, not what [it] is, but what [it] has been, and shall be.”44 Thus, for Shelley, the self is pointedly recast as that which it is not: Let it not be supposed that this doctrine conducts to the monstrous presumption, that I, the person who now write and think, am that one mind. I am but a portion of it. The words I, and you and they are grammatical devices invented simply for arrangement and totally devoid of the intense and exclusive sense usually attached to them. It is difficult to find terms adequately to express so subtle a conception as that to which the intellectual philosophy has conducted us. We are on that verge where words abandon us, and what wonder if we grow dizzy to look down the dark abyss of—how little we know. (478)

Provocatively declaring in Defence of Poetry with Humean zeal that “we know no more of cause and effect than a constant conjunction of events” (489), Shelley follows Hazlitt in positing identity as a linguistic contrivance, formed and reformed as the effect rather than the cause of self-description. 45 Similarly, he argues that the ethico-political urgency of disavowing causation allows us to loosen the subject from the pitfalls of referentiality and

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expose it to the question of posterity.46 Oddly enough, Hazlitt criticized Shelley specifically on these very points, complaining that he “gives up, for representations of things, rhapsodies of words”: “He does not lend colours of imagination and the ornaments of style to the objects of nature, but paints gaudy, flimsy, allegorical pictures on gauze, on the cobwebs of his own brain, ‘Gorgons and Hydras, and Chimeras dire.’ He assumes certain doubtful speculative notions, and proceeds to prove their truth by describing them in detail as matters of fact.”47 Anticipating by more than a century F. R. Leavis’s well-known remark that Shelley had “a weak grasp upon the actual,”48 Hazlitt accuses Shelley of offering sheer “allegorical pictures on gauze” that fantastically imbue his philosophical rhetoric, while also lacking any empirical solidity as proper objects of inquiry. In other words, the consequences of Shelley’s words run in excess of their content. The imagination artfully works to create “speculative notions” that fail to ground the self in thoughts and things it can appreciate in the here and now. In this way, Hazlitt inadvertently interprets Shelley’s imagination as disruptive and nonsympathetic: it appears to speciously create objects of thought that dispossess subjectivity of its powers, instead of serving to represent a referential world that precedes and evidences the act of imaginative acknowledgment. Shelley’s fictions, “Gorgons and Hydras, and Chimeras dire,” frantically spin and envision alternate worlds with a dreadful force that spurns reality. Hazlitt’s comments are especially suggestive because he at once gets everything right and everything wrong in Shelley. In his unwillingness to “lend colours of imagination and the ornaments of style to the objects of nature,” Shelley refuses entirely the kind of linkage between sympathy and the mimetic principle that moralizing aesthetics install. The disfigurations of “gaudy, flimsy, allegorical pictures on gauze, on the cobwebs of his own brain,” evince projections that prove to be unsettling, not because they are simply vacuous and consigned to an unknowable future, but because the archaic myths of “Gorgons and Hydras, and Chimeras dire” tear apart the apparently fluid causality of consciousness. As Jerrold Hogle notes in a reading of the passage in the Defence concerning the mind as a “fading coal which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness,” “a repeated passage between mental positions urges the psyche to project an impetus within or behind the shift. A ‘cause’ for this poet must now be quite blatantly one effect of its own effects, a projection into the immediate past by transformations that later seem to be its results.”49 Shelley’s projections interrupt the subject’s developmental passage from what it was

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then to what it is now; within this kind of temporal play, the future cannot be used to underwrite the self ’s avowed presentism because its progressivist logic has been completely unwritten.50 This kind of Shelleyan uncertainty is, to a certain degree, of a piece with our popular view of the poet as an indefatigable humanist and revolutionary, given over to contingency and ripe with enthusiasm. As Redfield has noted, the legacy of this reception has had broad cultural effects, turning Shelley into an idealized figure for a historically diverse number of political groups: “from the varieties of ‘red Shelley’ championed by Spencean socialists, Chartists, and subsequent working-class and socialist movements, to the hyper-aestheticized, otherworldly naif of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literary scholarship and criticism.”51 But we should also remember that it is often truer to the point that Shelley’s politics disclose a powerful resistance to what he calls in a letter “self—that burr that will stick to one.”52 Indeed, the extent to which a politics of solidarity conflicts with the problems of subject formation is addressed in the essay “On Love,” where subjectivity can only barely lay claim to a socially responsible, affective core: I know not the internal constitution of other men, or even of thine whom I now address. I see that in some external attributes they resemble me, but when misled by that appearance I have thought to appeal to something in common and unburthen my inmost soul to them, I have found my language misunderstood like one in a distant and savage land. The more opportunities they have afforded me for experience, the wider has appeared the interval between us, and to a greater distance have the points of sympathy been withdrawn. (473)

The sense of inner vacuity, according to Shelley, is the precise reason why our desire to seek out others like us is always impoverishing. Such a desire suspends the ideal of likeness and perpetually deflects the self through a transferential logic whereby resemblances are always imagined as effects of endless refractions and dissimulations. Love withdraws the self from any formative recognitions, since it covers over (rather than overcomes) the “chasm of an insufficient void” through which the “community with what we experience within ourselves” (473) is only at best approximiated.53 As Jean-Luc Nancy remarks, “Love re-presents I to itself broken. . . . It presents this to it: he, this subject, was touched, broken into, in his subjectivity, and he is from then on, for the time of love, opened by this slice, broken or fractured, even if only slightly.” The violence that the subject endures in what

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Nancy calls “the time of love” throws into relief the degree to which subjectivity isn’t re-presented or fulfilled through love, but rather persists in a state of incompleteness, “the excess or the lack of this completion, which is represented as the truth of love.”54 For Shelley, the emotional life of the self is equally characterized by a crucial uneasiness with sociality. Other selves only further exacerbate the friction he feels among others because, as figures of otherness, they only tenuously resemble, rather than authentically embody, sameness. Sympathy, then, is a profoundly dissimulating and specular process; even the Platonic concept of recognizing “a miniature as it were of our entire self . . . an assemblage of the minutest particulars of which our name is composed: a mirror whose surface reflects only the forms of purity and brightness” (474), affirms (only to subsequently deny) subjectivity through a slippery logic of substitution and dispersal. The radical negativity of Shelley’s poetics, however, which overhauls its own figures with a kind of unforgiving savage grace, has perhaps found its strongest receptions in deconstructionist readings, which, ever since Paul de Man, have pointed to the cognitive irreparability of the Shelleyan text.55 In “Shelley Disfigured,” de Man classically argues that the desired recovery of Shelley’s canonicity enacts a process of monumentalization that misreads, repeats, and capitalizes upon the epistemological, political, and ethical errors of the text: Attempts to define, to understand, or to circumscribe romanticism in relation to ourselves and in relation to other literary movements are all part of this naïve belief [in pursuing deconstruction as a valuable, humanistic strategy when it in fact only shores up “the madness of words”]. The Triumph of Life warns us that nothing, whether deed, word, thought, or text, ever happens in relation, positive or negative, to anything that precedes, follows, or exists elsewhere, but only as a random event whose power, like the power of death, is due to the randomness of its occurrence. It also warns us why and how these events then have to be reintegrated in a historical and aesthetic system of recuperation that repeats itself regardless of the exposure of its fallacy.56

The notoriety of this passage, which has not softened in the years since it was written, evokes a kind of ultimacy that circularly establishes, as Jonathan Culler has observed, “the identification of what texts say about language, texts, articulation, order, and power as truths about language, texts, articulation, order and power.” Culler then goes on to ask rhetorically: “if The Triumph of Life does in fact warn us that nothing ever happens in any relation to anything else, what reason have we for thinking this true?”57 The

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spiraling logic of de Man’s essay thus occasions (rather than preempts) the question of how ethics can emerge out of the troubling dissolution of all recognizable themes of signification or points of origin.58 The force of his argument, which famously conjures the drowned body of Shelley off the coast of Lerici as the material corpse of our readerly disfigurings of the Shelleyan corpus, also stirs up what Neil Hertz has identified as “the pathos of uncertain agency” in the de Manian writing style—a pathos that directly bears upon my discussion of the politics and poetics of sympathy:59 This defaced body is present in the margin of the last manuscript page and has become an inseparable part of the poem. . . . In Shelley’s absence, the task of thus reinscribing the disfiguration now devolves entirely on the reader. The final test of reading, in The Triumph of Life, depends on how one reads the textuality of this event, how one disposes of Shelley’s body. . . . For what we have done with the dead Shelley, and with all the other dead bodies that appear in romantic literature . . . is simply to bury them, to bury them in their own texts made into epitaphs and monumental graves.60

De Man’s eerie imagery offers up Shelley as a sacrifice on the high altars of critical reading, but the way in which he announces this act as a communal recognition of responsibility toward the past—“For what we have done with the dead Shelley, and with all the other dead bodies . . . is simply to bury them”—repeats the dynamics of sympathy we first analyzed in Smith and Burke, with the difference that the “awful futurity” of the dead amounts to an inherited embarrassment of tradition for de Man, a mournful debt that precisely fails to animate the interests of the text and Shelley’s body. Indeed, the figural instability of the body is obtained out of the uncertainty between text and meaning—an uncertainty that more pointedly draws attention to a labor of negativity that will not resolve itself into the forced logic of cultural transmission. It is to the limits of a certain nostalgic form of theorizing that de Man’s inquiry addresses itself, particularly a species of historicism that perceives literature to be (in McGann’s words) “a continuing set of finite relationships that develop in a valley of Dry Bones between author, printers, publishers, readers of various sorts, reviewers, academicians, and—ultimately—society at all its levels, and perhaps even international society.”61 Like Frankenstein’s desecrated crypts, McGann’s historicist “valley of Dry Bones” is the site for a powerful necromancy, far from the drowning pool of linguistic dissolution. However, McGann’s mortuary imagery stumbles upon an optimism that de Man critically blocks, namely by reminding us that the sacrifice of the Shelleyan body fails to redeem us as readers

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because our sympathetic identification with such a body depends upon an idealized act of figuration that is, put bluntly, purged of any reference. It can only channel literary history as an “as if ” rather than a verifiable “it was.”62 Shelley’s notion of history as an “as if ” possibility rather than a concrete fact also finds reflection in the early essay “A Refutation of Deism,” where he criticizes the prophetic impulse in historiography on the grounds that it evokes a vision of the future that is inconceivably transcendental, beyond experience: “Prophecies, however circumstantial, are liable to the same objection as direct miracles; it is more agreeable to experience that the historical evidence of the prediction really having preceded the event pretended to be foretold should be false, or that a luck conjuncture of events should have justified the conjecture of the prophet, than that God should communicate to a man the discernment of future events.”63 The problem with traditional prophecy is that, like classical accounts of sympathy, it posits a future alterity that seemingly precedes its articulation (here figured in God’s revelation or “discernment of future events”), thereby confirming and anticipating the subject at every turn. Inadequate prophecies aspire to describe a relationship to a determined world that paradoxically permits subjectivity to exercise its “freedom” from all political and ethical responsibilities because it thinks of itself as ordained. When Shelley returns to the question of prophecy several years later in A Defence of Poetry, however, his reassessment of it depends upon a dense argument about the kinds of knowledge that poetry can provide as a medium for latent sympathies. In brief, sympathy doesn’t simply solicit a nonreferential “object” of otherness; it awakens the subject to the summoning call or prophecy of an alterity that makes preparation impossible.64 In the first pages of the Defence, Shelley exclaims that, despite the poet being likened to a prophet—“he not only beholds intensely the present as it is, and discovers those laws according to which present things ought to be ordered, but he beholds the future in the present, and his thoughts are the germs of the flower and the fruit of latest time” (482–83)—the poet is incapable of foretelling events because of his strangely vatic insertion in “the eternal, the infinite, and the one; as far as related to his conceptions, time and place and number are not” (483). The poet is prevented from delivering prophetic promises because he is vulnerable to what Shelley later refers to in oracular terms as “evanescent visitations of thought and feeling sometimes associated with place or person, sometimes regarding our own mind alone, and always arising unforeseen and departing unbidden” (504). These

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“evanescent visitations” strangely enlighten subjectivity as a temporary way station, or what W. V. Quine would call a “twilight half-entity,” an abstraction without secure attributes that cannot be linguistically objectified and is thus resistant to identity.65 Indeed, this twilight quality wonderfully backlights Shelley’s poet as an hospitable figure that suffers from an inscriptive amnesia, and for whom these visitations, in their alien form, fail to confer upon him any sense of authenticity. In other words, these visitations abduct the mind just as much as they are welcomed by it. It is for this reason that “in the infancy of the world, neither poets themselves nor their auditors are fully aware of the excellence of poetry” (486), because poetry refers to an otherness that comes from elsewhere: Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will. A man cannot say, “I will compose poetry.” The greatest poet even cannot say it: for the mind in creation is as a fading coal which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness: this power arises from within, like the colour of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure. Could this influence be durable in its original purity and force, it is impossible to predict the greatness of the results: but when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conception of the poet. (503–4)

Poetry takes place in the interstices between “power,” “will,” and “influences”; although its growth is implicitly evolutionary and prospective, it is in the involuntary falling away from principles of causality and “composition” that poetry occurs just in the same way as subjectivity flutters and fades in Lacan’s account of its split or unconscious nature.66 After all, as Shelley writes, “poets are the hierophants of an apprehended inspiration, the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present, the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire: the influence which is moved not, but moves” (508). Poets are not simply mediums or aeolian harps, but figures for the misdirection of power through poetry, and the posterity of the poem depends upon an abridgment of its means and ends, thus postponing the full import of its inscription.67 Shelley’s poets reflect a darker light that rearranges the direction of meaning away from legibility and throws it toward a haunting encounter with judicious error. Poetry cannot sympathetically

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confirm subjectivity as an effect of cultural or material inscription, since what it recognizes as Self and Other amounts to a second-order projection or “feeble shadow of the original conception” that eludes the will. In strong contrast with the Smithian demand for visualizing and ascertaining sympathetic interactions, Shelley describes the poet as engaged with an otherness he can neither fully see nor know, but to whose future possibility or potentiality he remains responsibly in attendance. Elsewhere in the Defence, Shelley describes the poet’s uncertainties in terms of a redemptive poetics, conjuring a vision of “the chaos of the cyclical poem” (482) that seems to contain all possible world interpreters and interpretations. The poet’s language is a strain which distends, and then bursts the circumference of the hearer’s mind, and pours itself forth together with it into the universal element with which it has perpetual sympathy. All the authors of revolutions in opinion are not only necessarily poets as they are inventors, nor even as their words unveil the permanent analogy of things by images which participate in the life of truth; but as their periods are harmonious and rhythmical and contain in themselves the elements of verse; being the echo of the eternal music. (485)

Because poetry is later idealistically defined as “the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds” (504), Shelley’s protoArnoldian definition temptingly leads us to read his program of social renovation as synonymous with a world-making “perpetual sympathy,” one that is wonderfully transparent and channels the cultural past as an acquired good or a form of cultural capital. According to this argument, the future inscribes the present with a faith in the immortal pantheon of learning, one where the “jury which sits in judgment upon a poet, belonging as he does to all time, must be composed of his peers: it must be impanelled by Time from the selectest of the wise of many generations” (486). As Dawson and Kaufman have respectively argued, however, Shelley’s notion of sympathy is deployed with cultural and historic precision: it opposes the Enlightenment spirit of accumulative calculation (“Poetry, and the principle of Self, of which money is the visible incarnation, are the God and the Mammon of the world” [503]), which the Defence initially recognizes and then ultimately rejects as an empiricist falsehood, relating this rejection to the subject’s anonymous openness to ethical obligations that have yet to summon it.68 Responding directly to his friend Thomas Love Peacock’s Four Ages of Poetry, and more subtly to the writings of Godwin, Paine, Burke, and Wollstonecraft, Shelley proposes

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in the Defence that the calculative principle of the cultural imagination has reached its course, only to be superseded by a subjectivity that is creatively prophetic, anonymous, and resistant to rationalist reductions. Shelley offers a rival “progress” of poetry whose nondominative formalism and prophetic sympathies evocatively deplete subjectivity. Thus in the long descriptions where he posits cultural formation in terms of an anxiety of influence (“The age immediately succeeding to that of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, was characterized by a revival of painting, sculpture, music, and architecture. Chaucer caught the sacred inspiration, and the superstructure of English literature is based upon the materials of Italian invention” [500]), Shelley describes the endless series of affective transferences between writers throughout the ages in words that call to mind a veritably Burkean “contagion of [the] passions,” which diffuses the self at the very moment that it cathects onto the other. The “impossibility to feel [poetry] without becoming a portion of the beauty we contemplate” (497) suggests that the intended unity of self and other is irrevocably fractured by its own idealisms, dispersing and enlarging subjectivity by multiplying the number of subjectivities capable of displacing what Adorno describes as the imperious, “transcendent critique of “the expression ‘as a . . . , I . . .’, in which one can insert any orientation, from dialectical materialism to Protestantism,” and which is inadvertently in league with hegemony.69 It is for this reason that Dante and Milton emerge as exemplary poetic figures—they represent a kind of poetic (un)knowing that is open to change and can never fully coincide with the poet’s original intentions: The poetry of Dante may be considered as the bridge thrown over the stream of time, which unites the modern and antient world. The distorted notions of invisible things which Dante and his rival Milton have idealized, are merely the mask and the mantle in which these great poets walk through eternity enveloped and disguised. It is a difficult question to determine how far they were conscious of the distinction which must have subsisted in their minds between their own creeds and that of the people. (498–99)

Both Dante and Milton are vulnerable to the “distorted notions of invisible things,” and like actors, they wear “the mask and the mantle . . . enveloped and disguised,” expressing their poetry through dissimulation. Who speaks in these situations, and to whom, and for whom? With Dante, whose words “are instinct with spirit; each is as a spark, a burning atom of inextinguishable thought; and many yet lie covered in the ashes of their birth, and preg-

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nant with a lightning which has yet found no conductor” (500), prophesying amounts to a sympathetic acknowledgment of the nonmanifestation of identity and knowledge, what Derrida calls the “value of incalculable and exceptional singularity” without which “no thing and no one, nothing other and thus nothing, arrives or happens . . . a thought of the event that awakens or is awakened before distinguishing or conjoining the ‘what’ and the ‘who.’ ”70 To keep the “what” and the “who” separate from one another is to begin thinking of subjectivity as a term drawn into a future that may yet require someone to speak and act on its behalf.71 It is for this reason, in fact, that Shelley describes the ignition of Dante’s words in the present tense— “each is as a spark, a burning atom of inextinguishable thought” because each has yet to fully express its purported content. Lying in ash, the unceasing renewal of the words hinges upon a recognition of their sterility: though they depend upon a future “conductor” to provide them with momentary voice, any recuperation here accomplishes nothing less than their galvanizing incineration.72

“B*J•B53*•*•:5'::” “The past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption. There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that precedes us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim.”73 In the “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Walter Benjamin warns against the false prophecies of traditional historiography, which ascribe history with a force wrongly capable of redeeming the naive self. The “power” that informs such a historiography purports to read the past as foretelling a present that is temporally continuous with it, but what Benjamin understands, like Shelley, is that “we” cannot be vindicated by a history whose “sense” has yet to summon us. “To prophesy the present is, typically, to cite the past,” notes Ian Balfour. “Prophecy is a call and a claim much more than it is a prediction, a call oriented toward a present that is not present.”74 To be a responsible, historical subject implies dispossession, and the inability to fully coincide with oneself is the beginning for a progressive politics and critique. “The cloud of mind is discharging its collected lightning,” writes Shelley in the preface to Prometheus Unbound, “and the equilibrium between institutions and opinions is now restoring,

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and is about to be restored” (134). The undetermined power of the “cloud of mind,” however, which aspires to restore future “institutions and opinions,” can only performatively profess rather than concretely act as a restorative agent, and in this way, Prometheus Unbound ’s dramatic struggle to conceive a prospective liberation centers on its eponymous main character’s anxious sense of nonidentity. “Susceptible of being described as exempt from the taints of ambition, envy, revenge, and a desire for personal aggrandisement, which in the Hero of Paradise Lost, interfere with the interest” (133), Prometheus suffers from an estrangement from his own actions and words which have consigned him to a terrible fate. In attempting to recall the phantasm of Jupiter so as to repeat and repeal the curse that has enslaved him, Prometheus is told by his mother, the Earth, that the impersonal meanings of his words reside somewhere in an afterlife “underneath the grave, where do inhabit / The shadows of all forms that think and live / Till death unite them, and they part no more”: Dreams and the light imaginings of men And all that faith creates, or love desires, Terrible, strange, sublime and beauteous shapes. There thou art, and dost hang, a writhing shade ’Mid whirlwind-peopled mountains; all the Gods Are there, and all the Powers of nameless worlds, Vast, sceptred phantoms; heroes, men, and beasts; And Demogorgon, a tremendous Gloom . . . (1.1.197–207)

The “nameless worlds” of the dead aren’t merely the deposits of some collective unconscious; rather, the trace of meaning “underneath the grave” suggests that the afterlife underwrites the present as if it were its past. Like a palimpsest, subjectivity is conceived to be endlessly written and unwritten by a past that hasn’t yet come to light. In this way, Prometheus’s difficulty lies in trying to sympathetically recall his own self to himself, and he can only try to do so by calling upon mediating phantasms like Jupiter, who only barely seems to recognize the thoughts and deeds he is meant to embody: Why have the secret powers of this world Driven me, a frail and empty phantom, hither On direst storms? What unaccustomed sounds Are hovering on my lips, unlike the voice With which our pallid race hold ghastly talk In darkness? And proud Sufferer, who art thou? (1.1.240–45)

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The “unaccustomed sounds” that the phantasm dares to utter remain on the level of undeveloped, prophetic whispers of a past speaking to a present. In addressing Prometheus as a sufferer, the phantasm also performs a subtle but powerful reversal of the poles of spectator and sufferer that were crucial to Smith’s account of sympathy: it is now Prometheus’s role to judge and evaluate the spectator, rather than be subject to his scrutiny and moral imperatives. The “frail and empty phantom” is so utterly disoriented by its own conjuring that Prometheus must now work to experience his difference from the past in spite of his all too present sense of a shattered identity: “Grief for awhile is blind, and so was mine. / I wish no living thing to suffer pain” (1.1.304–5). Citing these lines, Karen A. Weisman has described Prometheus as caught between “transport as progressive continuity and transcendence as a radical departure”: The pain of Prometheus’s moment of recall is the pain of noting a thematic appropriateness in his response to provocation which yet exists outside of his normative mode of being: to recall what he recalls requires not simply that he feel better about Jupiter’s wrongdoing, but rather that he in fact has been made wise by misery. . . . His words once had power to curse, and curse he did, but he understands himself in his redeemed state to be changed, altered, utterly different in kind from the person who acted under the conditions of provocation.”75

By “unsaying his high language,” as Shelley puts it in the preface (133), Prometheus is led to rethink himself and the content of the phantasm’s curse, whose instability and troubled reception is also echoed by the drama’s other characters: for example, Ione claims: My wings are folded o’er mine ears, My wings are crossed over mine eyes, Yet through their silver shade appears And through their lulling plumes arise A Shape, a throng of sounds . . . (1.1.222–26),

while Panthea eloquently describes the phantasm’s sonic “Shape” as something . . . awful like the sound, Clothed in dark purple, star-inwoven. A sceptre of pale gold To stay steps proud, o’er the slow cloud His veined hand doth hold.

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Cruel he looks but calm and strong Like one who does, not suffers wrong. (1.1.233–39)

Like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, the highly aestheticized figure or “Shape” of the phantasm dramatically ironizes its own apparent figuration for a kind of revelatory truth the poem ostensibly is meant to disclose. It points to the historical persistence of a violent dislocation between words and the actions prompted by them, but it does so by disavowing any trace of embodiment—or at the very least, it stands for a haunting materialism that cannot quite be brought into line with the effects of its rhetorical force. Despite its archaic regal attire, the phantasm is, on the one hand, a form of impersonal and charismatic (although empty) political power that is conceivable only in the third person: it commits rather than suffers wrong because it is utterly plenary, incapable of any receptivity.76 On the other hand, however, the “frail and empty phantom” precisely illustrates the sheer disempowerment of a gaudily resplendent past that Prometheus vainly seeks to recall and identify with. The phantasm is, we should remember, a simulacrum for Jupiter: he is a haunting representative of a representational power, a figural residue for the citational pastness of power which the Earth succinctly calls in act 4 “Sceptred Curse” (4.1.338). It is for this reason that Shelley believes that the ability to recollect the curse lies in a kind of group sympathy, and unlike the sort of sympathetic bonding Burke promotes in order to prop up the cohesiveness of the local community, sympathy in Prometheus Unbound becomes a disrupting consequence of the curse’s violent effects: Fiend, I defy thee! with a calm, fixed mind, All that thou canst inflict I bid thee do; Foul Tyrant both of Gods and Humankind, One only being shalt thou not subdue. Rain then thy plagues upon me here, Ghastly disease and frenzying fear; And let alternate frost and fire Eat into me, and be thine ire Lightning and cutting hail and legioned forms Of furies, driving by upon the wounding storms. Aye, do thy worst. Thou art Omnipotent, O’er all things but thyself I gave thee power, And my own will. Be thy swift mischiefs sent To blast mankind, from yon etherial tower.

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Let thy malignant spirit move Its darkness over those I love: On me and mine I imprecate The utmost torture of thy hate And thus devote to sleepless agony This undeclining head while thou must reign on high. (1.1.262–81)

“Were these my words, O Parent?” (302), asks Prometheus of the Earth, barely recognizing them since their power has been transmuted into the alienating rhythms of deep loss: “Grief for awhile is blind, and so was mine. / I wish no living thing to suffer pain.” The citation of the curse, which, Claus Westermann reminds us, characterizes one form among many others of prophecy, 77 scatters the Promethean subject amid its uncertain remembrances, not simply because it has grown apart from what it has or hasn’t said or done, but because the power of language to confirm a fully integrated subjectivity has been discredited by the traumatic foreclosures of immediate experience that the curse brought about. Indeed, the labored recollection of the curse, much like the self-incinerating process of historical transmission proposed in the Defence, defines the past’s endurance in terms of devastated survival, and in this sense, prophecy bears a striking structural resemblance to the category of trauma: both open the possibility for a further, worse catastrophe to occur in the absence of any preemptive knowledge. As Derrida remarks, “Traumatism is produced by the future, by the to come, by the threat of the worst to come, rather than by an aggression that is ‘over and done with,’ ” thus precluding the possibility of ever overcoming and temporally integrating the event of the catastrophe into the present.78 Prometheus’s turn and return to the curse tries to relive its performative power in order to “unsay” and ultimately do away with the idealized compulsion to produce futurity as the conceptual telos of existence. It is for this reason, then, that Prometheus will dispatch Asia in act 2 to the world of Demogorgon, “whence the oracular vapour is hurled up” (2.3.4), in order to more fully understand freedom and self-determination as delusive concepts that falsely construe subjectivity as an ever refillable plenitude. Indeed, Demogorgon is evoked as mighty Darkness Filling the seat of power, and rays of gloom Dart round, as light from the meridian Sun, Ungazed upon and shapeless—neither limb

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Nor form—nor outline; yet we feel it is A living Spirit. (2.4.3–8)

“Mighty Darkness” resembles a powerfully negative version of the charismatic emptiness ironized by Jupiter’s phantasm: Demogorgon’s Oz-like nothingness discloses the critically productive “nothingness” of political ideology, or what Slavoj Žižek calls “an embodiment of lack, of a chasm of nonsense gaping in the midst of ideological meaning.”79 If Demogorgon’s majesty lies in his withdrawal of presence, he doesn’t so much enforce as distort the kinds of identifications we commit with institutions. His own nothingness, far from being a metaphysical black hole, invites (as it simultaneously resists) easy recognitions; as the lack or chasm that permits hermeneutical exchange, Demogorgon’s negativity engages others to perceive themselves as misrecognized or reduced to naught in his nonreflective pull.80 After initially naming God as the source of the world-making process that Asia seeks to interrogate, Demogorgon continues to reply to her questions concerning causation with the refrain, “He reigns,” frustrating Asia to the point where she demands that Demogorgon “Utter his name—a world pining in pain / Asks but his name; curses shall drag him down” (2.4.30–31). The refrain of “He reigns,” however, suggests that the words’ hollow power is (re)produced by the subject who repeats and internalizes them, thereby enacting its own discursive subjection—much like the Gods in the versedrama who themselves are subservient to the ideological emptiness that ensnares both masters and slaves: The painted veil, by those who were, called life, Which mimicked, as with colours idly spread, All men believed and hoped, is torn aside— The loathsome mask has fallen, the man remains Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed—but man: Equal, unclassed, tribeless and nationless, Exempt from awe, worship, degree,—the King Over himself; just, gentle, wise—but man: Passionless? no—yet free from guilt or pain Which were, for his will made, or suffered them, Nor yet exempt, though ruling them like slaves, From chance and death and mutability, The clogs of that which else might oversoar The loftiest star of unascended Heaven Pinnacled dim in the intense inane. (3.4.190–204)

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The rent “painted veil” of life or man’s “loathsome mask,” much like the “gaudy, flimsy, allegorical pictures on gauze” Hazlitt saw in Shelley’s art, disclose a background of nothingness onto which our hopes and beliefs are vainly projected. If the new freedom of “man” is to be defined as “Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed . . . / Equal, unclassed, tribeless and nationless,” these negations evoke a subject whose experience of “freedom” lies on the other side of his wounded loathsomeness: that is to say, such a subject’s anonymity marks an exposure, a sheer exteriority of identity—the self in destitution.81 As Shelley writes in the Defence, “the drama, so long as it continues to express poetry, is as a prismatic and many-sided mirror, which collects the brightest rays of human nature and divides and reproduces them from the simplicity of these elementary forms, and touches them with majesty and beauty, and multiplies all that it reflects, and endows it with the power of propogating its like wherever it may fall” (491). In collecting “the brightest rays of human nature” and shattering them, the sympathetic work of drama inevitably illuminates whatever it refracts back with a power that is not entirely continuous with it, liberally “propogating its like wherever it may fall.” Sympathy thus potentially disrupts our best intentions because it performs a failed mimesis—something that the preface to Prometheus Unbound implies: As to imitation; Poetry is a mimetic art. It creates, but it creates by combination and representation. Poetical abstractions are beautiful and new, not because the portions of which they are composed had no previous existence in the mind of man or in nature, but because the whole produced by their combination has some intelligible and beautiful analogy with those sources of emotion and thought, and with the contemporary condition of them. . . . Every man’s mind is in this respect modified by all objects of nature and art, by every word and suggestion which he ever admitted to act upon his consciousness; it is the mirror upon which all forms are reflected, and in which they compose one form. (134–35)

Although the poet’s mind mirrors those “objects of nature and art” that in turn influence its “poetical abstractions,” poetry depends on a certain imitative activity that errantly reproduces or defamiliarizes the subject in those objects “ever admitted to act upon [its] consciousness.” Poetry thus describes a dialectic between subjectivity and the objects it contemplates, and in just this way, the blank uncertainty of the hierophantic legislator-poet is less a failure of that dialectic than its aesthetic, ethical, and political apogee. Critique emerges out of the margins, out of a place that is decidedly not

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here, and it responds to the prophetic call of what the poet Michael Palmer, in a reading of Shelley’s complex contemporary relevance, has referred to as a “present-now or a present-to-come.”82 Sympathy is the experience of an otherness that (mis)represents itself to the subject—it is an obligation to otherness that cannot be properly defined, but to which the subject remains critically open.

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The Art of Knowing Nothing Feminine Melancholy and Skeptical Dispossession There is nothing I shrink from more fearfully than publicity—I have too much of it—& what is worse I am forced by my hard situation to meet it in a thousand ways—Could you write my husband’s life, without naming me it were something—but even then I should be terrified at the rouzing the slumbering voice of the public—each critique, each mention of your work, might drag me forward. . . . Now that I am alone in the world, [I] have but the desire to wrap night and the obscurity of insignificance around me. This is weakness—but I cannot help it—to be in print—the subject of men’s observations—of the bitter hard world’s commentaries, to be attacked or defended!—this ill becomes one who knows how little she possesses worthy to attract attention—and whose chief merit—if it be one—is a love of that privacy, which no woman can emerge from without regret. . . . But remember, I pray for omission— for it is not that you will not be too kind too eager to do me more than justice—But I only seek to be forgotten. — m a r y s h e l l e y , letter to Edward Trelawny (April 1829)

As she shrinks away from the glare of the public sphere, how do we characterize Shelley’s refusal of recognition in this letter?1 On the one hand, there are palpable fears and terrors of involuntary exposure, of being dragged forward into the light and having one’s agency wrested away as a condition of forced submission to the will of another. There are also longings here of

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a more domestic kind, longings for the securities of seclusion that banally translate into privacy and retirement. On the other hand, Shelley’s refusal testifies to something more profound—a wish for disengagement, for an anonymity or invisibility of self beyond “the bitter hard world’s commentaries,” where personal intimacies and strategies are given room to maneuver despite their apparent “insignificance,” far afield from prying eyes. Are these wishes, however, as Shelley maintains, signs of weakness? Her resistance to the “slumbering voice of the public” doesn’t so much reject social participation altogether as intimate an alternative social presence. It thus comes as no surprise that by backing away from the writing of her husband’s life, Mary Shelley wants a different history for herself, one that radically disavows the kind of fellowship and narrative plenitude her husband’s biography promises: “I only seek to be forgotten.” On one level, Shelley’s disavowal might be read as symptomatic of what Julie Ellison has persuasively identified as a gendered vanishing point within traditional critical narratives of romanticism: The invention of the romantic subject as the hero of desire is therefore wholly bound up with the feminine. At the same time, romantic writers suspect that desire may be a form of power, understanding a form of science, and woman a form of sabotage. Objects of desire are lost or violated in ambivalent allegories of the domestic and the maternal. Ultimately, the feminine becomes, first, wholly figurative or non-referential and then invisible.2

Building upon the work of several critics who have pointed to tensions between feminist thought and romantic ideology,3 Ellison seeks to return women as the absent causes to a philosophical tradition they had already partly inaugurated, taking the “language of mood” (of intuition) to describe one kind of romantic hermeneutic that can be “marked as a feminine quality.”4 A suggestive implication of her argument is that the receding or lost figure of the feminine signifies the crucial object of loss or aporia at the core of romanticism’s epistemological and ethical concerns, and in this sense, femininity throws into sharper relief the melancholic structure of the romantic enlightenment of which it is a constitutive part. However, if the representation of women is bound to a volatile series of tropological substitutions through which women are initially rendered “wholly figurative or nonreferential and then invisible,” it would appear that the nonrecognition Shelley longs for staunchly resists all progressive attempts at her critical rescue. After all, by refusing publicity and its attending conferrals of meaning

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and reputation, Shelley’s wish for anonymity seems to resemble an act of bereavement: falling away from memory and representation, she embodies the loss that cannot ever be thought of or recuperated as loss—“the loss of loss,” as Alan Liu diagnoses the critical fears of a suggestively “romantic” postmodernism.5 And yet, what would it mean to read Shelley’s refusal here as a radical negativity that takes loss as the condition of possibility (rather than failure) of subjectivity? In other words, loss would be the constitutive expression of a dispossessed relation to the world, one that assumes the absent character of the “unmemorable” female melancholic as its rising yet recessive star, forfeiting identification. So far, this book has been arguing that romantic culture approaches subjectivity as dispossessed and anonymous: whether it is protectively erased through political narratives, lyrically negated, or rendered virtual as a result of its sympathetic identifications, anonymity is less a mystic and embryonic state of being than it is a predicament that broadly testifies to certain affects or modes of cognition that challenge the tidiness of claiming an autonomous “I” as the core to our moral actions. What the subject is remains a permanently suspended question for romanticism, and this toleration for the self ’s apartness—its reluctance to accede to categorization and display— inaugurates an ethics of engaged withdrawal or strategic reticence. In this final chapter, I want to consider how the figure of the female melancholic, as she appears in Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, Mary Shelley’s Matilda, and Jane Austen’s Persuasion, dramatizes multiple concerns about the problems of skepticism in relation to selfhood, agency, and knowledge. I interpret melancholy less as an affective pathology than as an extension of skeptical thought, or, to borrow Tilottama Rajan’s phrase, a “figure of understanding” that characterizes the feminine self as intelligible at the very point at which she appears most alienated from her own thoughts and actions.6 For Wollstonecraft, Shelley, and Austen, the female melancholic is perceived as ambivalently participating in and challenging what Wollstonecraft will call “making an appearance in the world,”7 or the project of developing the social terms under which one makes oneself known and available to others. I argue that the female melancholic rethinks this incentive to declare oneself, to make oneself known as a properly civic subject, and finds in loss a state of being that lends itself to an ethics of dispossession, one that fundamentally disarticulates personal fulfillment from self-presentation and self-assertion. For the writers I study, how and what one thinks about is inextricable from

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questions of social embodiment and knowledge, and the challenges of (re) presenting the anonymous female subject foreground the degree to which a kind of negativity is at work in the structure of melancholy itself, one that Mary Jacobus has described as typifying a certain feminine refusal of masculinist structures of Enlightenment revelation: “The science of herself,” or knowing (about) women, can even be read as a special form of the negativity that is implicit in the resistance of Romanticism to the imperialism of enlightenment thought. This is not to associate women with incurable irrationality (or, for that matter, to associate Romanticism with resurrecting romance, or celebrating affect). Rather, it suggests that in the novel of female education, the woman who refuses enlightenment, or who insists—however wilfully or wishfully—on what we might now call women’s ways of knowing, signals both a representational and a political resistance to the empire of Reason.8

Building on Kristeva’s recuperation of Freudian melancholy as a form of resistance to the monumentalizing imperatives of patriarchal culture,9 Jacobus reads the negativity of female melancholy as part of a wider claim launched by writers like Inchbald, Radcliffe, Wollstonecraft, and Edgeworth to produce, not simply a rival discourse of feminine subjectivity, but a discourse that measures “the Enlightenment’s refusal to accommodate the very discourse of sexual difference that its inquiries into the nature and rights of personhood, bodies, and passions had seemed to initiate.” In claiming that the negativity of melancholy marks a “limit of [enlightenment] discourse,”10 femininity comes to figure for an obstacle or interruption in certain linear narratives of the “empire of Reason” that promote progressivist ideologies of the self. What Jacobus doesn’t notice, however, is the way in which her recasting of feminine negation comes to mark a cognitive plenitude: as a categorical limit of sorts, femininity assumes a special self-privileging knowledge to itself in the very instant that it contests “Reason,” thus reaffirming (instead of redefining) the transparent autonomy of Enlightenment thought. In contrast, I want to argue that Wollstonecraft, Shelley, and Austen conceive the female melancholic as a recessive and complex character who explores, practices, and displaces various anxieties about alterity, moral obligation, and self-determination—anxieties that evoke a toleration for the subject’s apartness and the ethical aspect of dispossession.11 As a “structure of feeling,”12 melancholy in its eighteenth-century incarnation evolves out of Enlightenment discourses of the sentiments, conflat-

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ing social, aesthetic, and philosophical factors. To the extent that it partakes of the language of sensibility, it rhetorically manages a subject whose experiences of loss are related to a wider public culture that values sentiment as a “transaction, not a character type.”13 Melancholy represents (as it did for earlier writers of the Renaissance and Baroque periods) a surplus of knowing that seemingly fails to provide enlightenment; in this sense it defines a self-consciousness that repudiates discursive systems even as it finds itself to be implicated in them—an “unhappy consciousness,” as Hegel intuited, that in its alienation acquires a critical renunciatory force. 14 Antedating Hegel, the degree to which sadness and philosophizing are often of a piece is eloquently exemplified in the section “On Personal Identity” in Hume’s Treatise Of Human Nature, where Hume famously amends the fantasy of self-motivated Bildung by intimating that the self can only come into its own if it can be taught to remember and reexperience its identity by deliberately standing away from itself. Hume demonstrates that what we consider to be “intimate” in fact marks our strongest estrangement from both ourselves and others, because self-consciousness is by definition permeated by otherness: “When I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception.”15 The mind’s sense of its own vertigo soon gives rise to the deep melancholy at the conclusion of “On Personal Identity”: Where am I, or what? From what causes do I derive my existence, and to what condition shall I return? Whose favour shall I court, and whose anger must I dread? What beings surround me? and on whom have I any influence, or who have any influence on me? I am confounded with all these questions, and begin to fancy myself in the most deplorable condition imaginable, inviron’d with the deepest darkness, and utterly depriv’d of the use of every member and faculty. (175)

Hume’s melancholic exhortation reads like an embedded soliloquy, occasioned by the conflagrating pressures of his reflections. Indeed, the profundity of his crisis evokes a powerful, idealistic remainder that retains the governing presence of mind in the wake of disembodiment. In this sense, Hume doesn’t so much obliterate the self as dramatically rethink it as a consequence of a spiraling skepticism, one that construes identity to be distributed along various possible points in time.16

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In just this way, Hume is able to emphasize the cognitive value of dispossession, and in turn, his work of mourning redeems dispossession as a viable subjectivity-effect: the self (re)appears as an impersonal, reflexive entity that is subject to exchange and transfer, and its melancholic bent becomes a symptom of a probabilistic culture that forever depends on loss—a point Hume subsequently amplifies in the second part of the Treatise, where he describes anonymity as an effect of the public sphere’s economy of virtual mobility and exchange. For writers such as Wollstonecraft, Shelley, and Austen, however, the problem of melancholic skepticism is gendered: experienced by female characters who deal with loss as the experience of their social marginalization but also as an agonistic refusal (rather than a Humean reaffirmation) of specific kinds of participatory identity. “Many of them cannot tell how to expresse themselves in wordes,” remarks Robert Burton in the “Symptomes of Maides, Nunnes, and Widowes Melancholy” section of Anatomy of Melancholy, “or how it holds them, what ailes them, you cannot understand them, or well tell what to make of their sayings; so farre gone sometimes, so stupified and distracted, they think themselves bewitched, they are in despaire.”17 Implicitly absorbing Burton’s skewed logic, Wollstonecraft perceives the melancholic female subject as cultivating a being-in-the-world that evokes an ontological and cognitive “failure” of enlightenment, but ironically, it is precisely this failure which characterizes the historical predicament of melancholy subjectivity tout court: at once the subject and the object of self-bereavement over which it claims reflective agency, such a subjectivity figures for the (im)possibility of an Enlightenment culture of skepticism as well as the cause of that culture’s precarious instabilities.18 Because skepticism, in a fundamentally Hegelian sense, is embedded in the very operation of reflection—it is the affective correlate of self-awareness that can never be expunged or otherwise overcome—it dramatically destabilizes the self through the act of reflection meant to announce its presence in the discursive public sphere. This latter point echoes in Freud’s theory of melancholy (itself deeply resonant with Burton’s) as the affect of a grieving subject who, in her unwillingness to absorb the termination of loss, becomes the site of self-cancellation: “The inhibition of the melancholic seems puzzling to us because we cannot see what it is that is absorbing [her] so entirely.”19 For Wollstonecraft, it is precisely the unintelligibility of the female melancholic that imperils her, casting self-reflection as a potential indulgence that violates the female subject’s claims to knowledge and social participation. By the time, however, that Anne Elliot in Persuasion will speak of

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“the art of knowing nothing beyond our circle” as the leitmotif of an astute form of social awareness, melancholic skepticism looks less like the problem that menaces the intelligibility of femininity and more like an ethics of reluctant affirmation that is cultivated or “performed” by a female character who experiences loss as a condition of her being—a social anonymity that contests the Enlightenment pressure to resolutely be and act. What is significant about the “performances” of the female melancholics described by Wollstonecraft, Shelley, and Austen is the manner in which femininity becomes for them in varying ways the productive site of lack; in this sense, their notions of dispossessed femininity resemble Judith Butler’s theorization of the performativity of “gender melancholy.” Arguing that gender “produces retroactively the illusion that there is an inner gender core” through imitation, Butler aligns this point with the Freudian account of melancholy as “allegoriz[ing] a loss it cannot grieve, allegoriz[ing] the incorporative fantasy of melancholia whereby an object is phantasmatically taken in or on as a way of refusing to let it go. Gender itself might be understood in part as the ‘acting out’ of unresolved grief.”20 Gender identity is melancholic for Butler, insofar as melancholy thematizes the noncoincidence of the subject’s gender and sexual identities; subjectivity, then, is “produced” through a series of disavowals and losses. Although Butler’s remarks are brought to bear on the homosexual prohibitions of heterosexual identity, her theory allows us to understand gender as an embodied, skeptical performance of identification, one that testifies to the “nothingness” of the subject.21 In this way, gender as an epistemological category becomes inscribed with a sense of dispossession that is thought and felt to be an ethical imperative—“the recognition,” as Stanley Cavell observes in connection with his meditations on the “philosophical” genre of the “melodrama of the unknown woman,” “that the terms of one’s intelligibility are not welcome to others,” and that such a recognition entails a consideration of the pressures of an ethico-intellectual disposition that goes by the name of skepticism.22 Critical explorations of romantic femininity in terms of dispossession have often misunderstood the epistemological and ethical implications of this latter point, conceiving self-loss either as the basis for a reaffirmation of interpersonal agency or as the total, paralyzing evacuation of agency and identity.23 Wollstonecraft, Shelley, and Austen see the anonymous effects of skeptical melancholy as sustaining specific engagements with agency and identity; they conceive the dispossessed self ’s moral obligations in terms that are deeply critical of self-presence and demonstrable action. Furthermore,

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the epistemic and ethical shape of the projects of self-description for Wollstonecraft, Shelley, and Austen depend on the different narrative forms they use to explore the anonymity of melancholy. The movement from political treatise (A Vindication), epistolary memoirs (A Short Residence), “novella” (Matilda), and novel (Persuasion) evokes in each case a formal experiment for depicting melancholic subjectivity; for this reason, it is important to attend to the ways in which aesthetic representations maneuver presumably essentializing acts of identification.24 By concluding the chapter with Austen and the novel, I suggest that we might begin to catch a glimpse of the modernity of that genre and its melancholic affect, one that resonates in the persona of the female melancholic who figures for this book’s final recasting of romantic anonymity.

#:553#*=)*=•#*•=#:•D38' “Most women, and men too, have no character at all,” writes Wollstonecraft in the essay “The Benefits Which Arise from Disappointments,” from her early work Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787). “Just opinions and virtuous passions appear by starts. . . . It is reflection which forms habits, and fixes principles indelibly on the heart; without it, the mind is like a wreck drifted about by every squall.”25 Wollstonecraft organizes her defense of rationalism by emphasizing its formative value on female character— thinking shapes, renders habitual, and fixes certain “principles to our minds and hearts” that eventually contribute to self-presence and appearance. And yet, as Wollstonecraft concedes in the same essay, reflection can very well evoke losses of a unique kind that cannot be simply recuperated by the intellect alone: “when a person is disappointed in this world, they turn to the next. Nothing can be more natural than the transition; and it seems to me the scheme of Providence, that our finding things unsatisfactory here, should force us to think of the better country to which we are going” (117). In this instant, the force of thought disavows the putative materiality of the empirical world: by conceiving it as insufficient, the female thinker is reoriented or turned away by her sadness from present surroundings and made to solicit a providential world that promises an end to loss altogether. In this sense, melancholy, like Percy Shelley’s brand of sympathy, corresponds to a mode of self-consciousness that promises unknown, future hope, yet it also throws into relief a predicament in which the female subject can only

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achieve self-consciousness through renunciation. It is the substance of that turn from the empirical world that concerns me here since it defines Wollstonecraft’s understanding of melancholy as linked to the question of one’s being-in-the-world, and the kinds of abstractions and alienations that it is subject to. What will emerge in the Vindication of the Rights of Woman is a critique of melancholy as both the calcification and the abandonment of identity: “Women have seldom sufficient serious employment to silence their feelings,” she writes in the Vindication; “a round of little cares, or vain pursuits frittering away all strength of mind and organs, they become naturally only objects of sense.—In short, the whole tenour of female education (the education of society) tends to render the best disposed romantic and inconstant; and the remainder vain and mean” (153). For Wollstonecraft, feeling threatens to monopolize the female self because it absorbs her in an experience that has no apparent “object of sense” and thus forecloses the possibility of subject formation. Thus, in the Vindication melancholy names one kind of sentimental experience (along with romantic love, for example) that deprives female subjectivity of its rational self-ownership. Despite her arguments against melancholy, however, Wollstonecraft’s most significant difficulties emerge out of her attempts to discriminate a certain pensive skepticism that abstracts the female subject into a virtual, civic-minded identity from the more damagingly excluding (and possibly fatal) effects of unreflective melancholy: “The passions which have been celebrated for their durability have always been unfortunate. They have acquired strength of absence and constitutional melancholy.—The fancy has hovered round a form of beauty dimly seen—but familiarity might have turned admiration into disgust; or, at least, into indifference, and allowed the imagination leisure to start fresh game” (101). The cultural stereotype of women as emotionally (and thoughtlessly) absorbed in reveries that spirit them away into nothingness brings to mind Hume’s descriptions of the kinds of losses that buoy identity through skeptical negation. For Wollstonecraft, however, it is precisely the self-differentiating turn of melancholy that ends up alienating female consciousness from itself. The pernicious effects of that turn register in the chapter in the Vindication “The Effect Which an Early Association of Ideas Has upon the Character,” where Wollstonecraft seeks to demonstrate how the “determinate effect an early association of ideas has on the character” unravels female consciousness in a way that structurally resembles loss. According to the logic of associationism, proper reflection consists in storing and acquiring knowledge by linking sense

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impressions and memories—in other words, it appears serial. At the same time, associationism threatens to enslave women by literally stranding them in an unhealthy attachment to their own thoughts: “When the ideas, and matters of fact, are once taken in, they lie by for use, till some fortuitous circumstance makes the information dart into the mind with illustrative force, that has been received at very different periods of our lives. Like lightning’s flash are many recollections; one idea assimilating and explaining another, with astonishing rapidity” (200). Associationism theoretically presumes that we are never fully in possession of our thoughts because we can only know ourselves in proportion to the expansion and linkage of proximate ideas and impressions. Mental self-possession, then, like financial inheritance, accrues to us in fits and starts by means of thoughtful recollections through time. As Wollstonecraft herself remarks, it is only in “glowing minds” that the full force of these associations is felt: “Education thus only supplies the man of genius with knowledge to give variety and contrast to his associations,” and “when the intellectual powers are not employed to cool our sensations, [the mind] retraces them with mechanical exactness” (201). What Wollstonecraft seeks to discern is the point at which reflection can fail the self and derealize it. For her, the problem of women’s “habitual slavery, to first impressions” underscores the fact that improper reflection is irrevocably tied to the loss of self-presence and freedom: “Business and other dry employments of the understanding, tend to deaden the feelings and break associations that do violence to reason. But females, who are made women of when they are mere children, and brought back to childhood when they ought to leave the go-cart for ever, have no sufficient strength of mind to efface the superinductions of art that have smothered nature” (201). Women’s arrested or interrupted development—“made women of when they are mere children, and brought back to childhood when they ought to leave the gocart for ever”—is evidence of a certain self-estranging temporal process that never fully reaches maturity as a result of the irreparable effects of broken associations. It is this attachment to broken associations that characterizes, for Wollstonecraft, an alienated and melancholic female character who is steeped, as it were, in lost time. Indeed, as Locke and Hartley had shown, such a predicament was a consequence of associationist psychology in general, for men no less than for women: “And in some [minds], where they are set on with care and repeated impressions, either through the temper of the Body or some other default, the Memory is very weak: In all these cases, Ideas in the Mind quickly fade, and often vanish quite of the Understand-

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ing, leaving no more footsteps or remaining Characters of themselves, than Shadows do flying over Fields of Corn; and the Mind is as void of them, as if they never had been there.”26 Although initially ascribing memory loss to the body, Locke concludes that the mind is to blame—it is incapable of holding onto “repeated impressions” because of an implicit failure to retain such repetitions. Loss, however, is not simply the failed result of inadequate reflection, but rather a term intrinsic to the associationist model: in order to think of one idea, others must be either sloughed off or substituted in the chain of progressive, mental concatenations. Wollstonecraft will argue that the inability to advance in one’s reflections ends up negatively hyperrealizing the female body as the physical materialization of a cognitive regression: “Every thing that they see or hear serves to fix impressions, call forth emotions, and associate ideas, that give a sexual character to the mind. False notions of beauty and delicacy stop the growth of their limbs and produce a sickly soreness, rather than delicacy of organs” (201–2). The crude deterioriation of the female subject is the gross physical equivalent of her passive intellectual absorption of a culturally prescribed and calcified discourse of femininity. As Wollstonecraft implies, the melancholic female subject absorbs the masculine gaze as a form of self-regulation, her “femininity” less an actual condition than what Judith Butler has described as “a process of reiteration by which both ‘subjects’ and ‘acts’ come to appear at all . . . a process of materialization that stabilizes over time to produce the effect of boundary, fixity, and surface we call matter.”27 Being is the belated manifestation of a self-knowledge it has never been able to completely assimilate, and melancholy forcefully gives a name to that experience of belatedness and marginalization. Tethered to sense impressions, the female body is thus the symptom of an excess of materiality or signification that can be rescued only through a “revolution in time” (204). Oddly enough, self-loss or anonymity for Wollstonecraft typifies the excessive visibility of the female body: being is imprisoned within a belated body that is the melancholic site of temporal accumulation; left behind, it is consigned to the anonymous life of a forgotten relic. The kind of revolution in time, however, that Wollstonecraft longs for—a revolution that evokes a desire for change, deracination, and becoming—suggests a longing for longing that structurally resembles melancholy insofar as both longing and loss figure for the plenitude of an ideal self-identity that forever eludes each as an originary lack. The providential futurity that Wollstonecraft evokes in the Education of Daughters precisely defines such an unattainable ideal, and it initiates

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a certain self-berating longing that persists indefinitely. This ideal, moreover, echoes in the pages of the Vindication as a withering hope on the horizon: She who can discern the dawn of immortality, in the streaks that shoot athwart the misty night of ignorance, promising a clearer day, will respect, as a sacred temple, the body that enshrines such an improvable soul. True love, likewise, spreads this kind of mysterious sanctity round the beloved object, making the lover most modest when in her presence. So reserved is affection that, receiving or returning personal endearments, it wishes, not only to shun the human eye, as a kind of profanation; but to diffuse an encircling cloudy obscurity to shut out even the saucy sparkling sunbeams. Yet, that affection does not deserve the epithet of chaste, which does not receive a sublime gloom of tender melancholy, that allows the mind for a moment to stand still and enjoy the present satisfaction, when a consciousness of the Divine presence is felt—for this must be the food of joy! (210)

Wollstonecraft anticipates and loquaciously exaggerates the futurity of female being by conceptualizing it as poised on the brink of self-revelation and discovery, but her logic mandates that the “future time” of women be indissociable from their abstraction: the “encircling cloudy obscurity” that keeps them within the parameters of gender norms precisely works to regulate their pure ascension in the world.28 At best, Wollstonecraft wants to spiritualize and abstract the female subject at the expense of the mind’s apogee—a complex ethical position which suggests that a trace of the lost body always haunts reason as a specter of its own renunciations. As Claudia L. Johnson has observed, because “Wollstonecraft’s political writings insist again and again that virtue has no sex,” the female body becomes a “strategic non-issue” in the Vindication, ultimately suppressed as a result of severe social surveillance.29 Johnson is correct to point out the virtuality of gender in Wollstonecraft’s thought, and I want to further suggest that the thematic (dis)embodiment of the female body in her writings is tied to a desire to equate reflection with self-abstraction and remasculinization—a point she presses home in the following passage from the Vindication, where the impersonalizing effects of melancholy are recast as the privileges of masculine mobility and abstraction: For though moralists have agreed that the tenor of life seems to prove that man is prepared by various circumstances for a future state, they constantly concur in advising woman only to provide for the present. Gentleness, docility, and a spaniel-like affection are, on this ground, consistently recommended as the cardinal virtues of the sex; and, disregarding the arbitrary economy of

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nature, one writer declared that it is masculine for a woman to be melancholy. She was created to be the toy of man, his rattle, and it must jingle in his ears whenever, dismissing reason, he chooses to be amused. (103–4)30

The arrested development of women’s presentness is contrasted with the futurity of men’s perfectibility. Feminine “being” is slighted with regard to masculine “becoming,” underscoring the degree to which the moodiness of skeptical reflection often characterizes the elite and mobile masculine mind—the intellect on holiday from the body or dispersed into an aggrandized omniscience.31 Mary Jacobus has argued that Wollstonecraft’s ambivalence about the masculinization of melancholy resulted in attempts to appropriate it for a “feminine counter-culture—a contestatory position from which to vindicate the rights of woman—while at the same time providing the basis for the (de)formation of Romantic feminine subjectivity in the face of enlightenment sexual indifference.”32 Thus Wollstonecraft’s half-hearted reclamation of melancholy aims at a cross-wiring of gender privileges: if “making an appearance in the world is the first wish of the majority of mankind” (153), appropriating melancholy for women means short-circuiting the paths of social and psychic identifications through which gender identities are constructed, thereby reclaiming skepticism for a radically different kind of “female” character.33 In answer to her own question, “When do we hear of women who, starting out of obscurity, boldly claim respect on account of their great abilities or daring virtues? Where are they to be found?” (133), Wollstonecraft draws upon Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, in order to amplify her argument in the Vindication that solitary reflection lends itself to an intersubjective mode of self-fashioning or becoming. Thinking about oneself and others demonstrates an ability to participate in social and public forums, and consequently gain mutual confirmation and recognition in the eyes of others. Following Smith, the kind of “reasonable” sympathy that Wollstonecraft promotes for women implies a powerful, cognitive straining beyond the limitations of the self—an extension of female consciousness outside of its set boundaries and toward an imaginative communion with others. Reflection promises a much sought-after social privacy that enables intersubjectivity and works as an antidote to the kind of oppressive crowding the female subject frequently experiences: Women, commonly called Ladies, are not to be contradicted in company, are not allowed to exert any manual strength; and from them the negative

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virtues only are expected, when any virtues are expected, patience, docility, good-humour, and flexibility; virtues incompatible with any vigorous exertion of intellect. Besides, by living more with each other, and being seldom absolutely alone, they are more under the influence of sentiments than passions. Solitude and reflection are necessary to give to wishes the force of passions, and to enable the imagination to enlarge the object, and make it the most desirable. The same may be said of the rich; they do not sufficiently deal in general ideas, collected by impassioned thinking, or calm investigation, to acquire the strength of character on which great resolves are built. (133)

Close company breeds improper sympathies: it forecloses personal motivation at the expense of spurious group welfare. Thus the supposedly protective atmospheres of social circles circulate a negatively contagious form of sympathetic energy that culturally disables women.34 Wollstonecraft’s referencing of Smith’s own complex reflections on sympathy demonstrates her attentiveness to the ways in which fantasies of pure communication through transparently sympathetic bodies are accomplished at the expense of denying the complex disavowals and coercions through which social attachments manipulate and produce selfhood in the first place. But as we have already seen, Smith’s model of sympathy precisely abstracts the self, a maneuver that echoes in Wollstonecraft’s melancholic spiritualization of the female subject. On the one hand, Wollstonecraft’s appropriation and amendment of sympathy furthers the broader ideological critique in the Vindication against the impostures of false modesty and chastity, which spuriously regulate the visibility of the female self. On the other hand, her argument continues to characterize subjectivity as the site of irreparable loss or anonymity, straining toward an originary wholeness it cannot ever fully gain. For Wollstonecraft, the difference between a brooding, skeptical reflectiveness and a paralyzing melancholy rests in what each takes to be its object of longing: “I own it frequently happens that women who have fostered a romantic unnatural delicacy of feeling, waste their lives in imagining how happy they should have been with a husband who could love them with a fervid increasing affection every day, and all day” (102). Whereas skepticism is marked by a “healthy” attention to lack as the incentive for intellectual agility and social mobility, melancholy fosters a love for the void. Marriage, for example, is a dispossessing symptom of a romanticized imagination that imperils the female subject because it denotes an ideological fantasy or il-

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lusion which, as Žižek notes, “consists in overlooking the illusion which is structuring our real, effective relationship to reality.”35 The imagination engenders the kinds of demoralizing abandonments of identity that are part and parcel of numerous ecstatic myths of romantic love: “Love, such as the glowing pen of genius has traced, exists not on earth, or only resides in those exalted, fervid imaginations that have sketched such dangerous pictures. Dangerous because they not only afford a plausible excuse, to the voluptuary who disguises sheer sensuality under a sentimental veil; but as they spread affectation, and take from the dignity of virtue” (151). The attending sorrows of love mark the unreasonableness of the imagination’s impoverished fantasies: produced by enfeebled minds that imitate the cultural discourses of female emotional dispossession and devastation, love constrains women to an unreflective form of unhappy thought, one that buoys them on vaporizing sentiments. So far, I have been attending to the arguments of the Vindication; but the kinds of vacillations that Wollstonecraft experiences in her reflections on unhappy reason also powerfully resonate in her Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796), where the undoing effects of her crises, tinged with feelings over her failed love for Gilbert Imlay, express a hope that dispossession might signal a more pensive and acute form of (dis)appearance in the world, one that recognizes the belatedness of female identity as the condition for a revisionary form of social critique. This possibility in large part is due to the form of Wollstonecraft’s Letters, which Mary Poovey has described as “enabl[ing] her to objectify her tumultuous emotions in a form that does not demand an integrated persona. In such a form, writing can become an act of self-creation rather than self-assertion, the uninhibited revelation of the process of seeking inner equilibrium.”36 The generic “hybridity” of the Letters, then, mixing autobiography with fiction, attests to the epistolary mode’s capacity to critique, evaluate, and reposition the female self in time.37 Reflecting on the vagaries of the self in the context of her sojourn in Tønsberg, during which time internal disquiet is almost cinematically projected into “the soft freshness of the western gales,” soon to die away leaving “the aspen leaves [trembling] into stillness,” Wollstonecraft expresses a tellingly Wordsworthian attachment to the seasonal cycles: “If a light shower has chanced to fall with the sun, the juniper the underwood of the forest exhales a wild perfume, mixed with a thousand nameless sweets,

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that, soothing the heart, leave images in the memory which the imagination will ever hold dear” (99). These thoughts, however, also intimate the subtle way in which personal identity is imagined, recalled, and then lost as it embarks upon the drift of its own sensory impressions. Wollstonecraft follows her description of nature by remarking on “what misery, as well as rapture, is produced by quick perception of the beautiful and sublime, when it is exercised in observing animated nature, when every beauteous feeling and emotion excites responsive sympathy, and the harmonized soul sinks into melancholy, or rises to extasy, just as the chords are touched like the aeolian harp agitated by the changing wind” (99). Recasting in a more pensive and agreeable tone her earlier disparagements of the female melancholic’s bereft and petrified body, Wollstonecraft identifies herself as affectively vulnerable to the felt disturbances of her environment, and she positions herself as courting the very danger of “foster[ing] these sentiments in such an imperfect state of existence” (99)—imperfect because reflection might well expose the self to the corroding, temporal risks of sentimentality: When a warm heart has received strong impressions, they are not to be effaced. Emotions become sentiments; and the imagination renders even transient sensations permanent, by fondly retracing them. I cannot, without a thrill of delight, recollect views I have seen, which are not to be forgotten,— nor looks I have felt in every nerve which I shall never more meet. The grave has closed over a dear friend, the friend of my youth; still she is present within me, and I hear her soft voice warbling as I stray over the heath. Fate has separated me from another, the fire of whose eyes, tempered by infantine tenderness, still warms my breast; even when gazing on these tremendous cliffs, sublime emotions absorb my soul. (99–100)

Wollstonecraft’s melancholic reminiscences point to a loss at the core of thought itself, as she retreads the “grounds” of her consciousness, recalling her dead friend Fanny Blood who is like a stand-in for a Wordsworthian “Lucy” character. On the one hand, Fanny awakens Wollstonecraft to the depths of her own “personal” reflections, but more subtly, the memory of her provokes a difference within the melancholic mind between the deeply individualistic authority Wollstonecraft seeks, and the apparently “private,” anonymous, and belated (yet no less public) form of her passing memories. The tug between retained, accumulating memories and their evanescence into perturbing feelings perplexes Wollstonecraft throughout the writing of the Letters, where the self isn’t so much resolutely abstracted as it is granted

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a temporary reprieve from presence and publicity—temporary because (as shown in the following passage where she comes across several embalmed bodies in a church in Tønsberg), Wollstonecraft can never fully relinquish her embodied sense of identity: The contemplation of noble ruins produces a melancholy that exalts the mind.—We take a retrospect of the exertions of man, the fate of empires and their rulers; and marking the grand destruction of ages, it seems the necessary change of time leading to improvement.—Our very soul expands, and we forget our littleness; how painfully brought to our recollection by such vain attempts to snatch from decay what is destined so soon to perish. Life, what art thou? Where goes this breath? this I, so much alive? In what element will it mix, giving or receiving fresh energy?—What will break the enchantment of animation? (109)

Here melancholy seems to counterintuitively evoke the self as the site of a productive, cultural enrichment, recalling “the exertions of man, the fate of empires and their rulers.” Wollstonecraft harks back to the providential tone of the Vindication, where the liberated life of the female skeptic is projected into a noble and immortalizing futurity. But the profound anxieties implicit in this scene of mourning also bring to mind the disturbing effects of unhappy thought for Wollstonecraft: the ruins which disavow life and animation, “this I, so much alive,” return to reason the ghosts it wishes to dispense with, ghosts that haunt subjectivity by pointing to its frailty and spectrality. The preserved bodies horrify Wollstonecraft as remnants of hollowed-out selves: “When I was shewn these human petrifications, I shrunk back with disgust and horror. ‘Ashes to ashes!’ thought I—‘Dust to dust!’—If this be not dissolution, it is something worse than natural decay. It is treason against humanity, thus to lift up the awful veil which would fain hide its weakness” (108–9). Throughout the Letters, Wollstonecraft struggles to turn the melancholic belatedness of subjective experience into a stance of principled selfhood, despite its threat to personal integrity. For example, in a subsequent passage that is strongly reminiscent of the boat scene in Rousseau’s Reveries of the Solitary Walker, Wollstonecraft consciously reacts to the impersonalizing effects of sentimental reflection in a way that violently contrasts with the Rousseauian mood of anonymous contemplation. Having decided to take up the oars and row out to sea off Tønsberg with a female companion, Wollstonecraft abandons her “train of thinking” to the lulling rhythms of the oars, suffering “the boat to be carried along by the current, indulging a pleasing forgetfulness, or fallacious

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hopes.” The drift of the current, however, fails to indulge Wollstonecraft for too long: How fallacious! yet, without hope, what is to sustain life, but the fear of annihilation—the only thing of which I have ever felt a dread—I cannot bear to think of being no more—of losing myself—though existence is often but a painful consciousness of misery; nay, it appears to me impossible that I should cease to exist, or that this active, restless spirit, equally alive to joy and sorrow, should only be organized dust—ready to fly abroad the moment the spring snaps, or the spark goes out, which kept it together. Surely something resides in this heart that is not perishable—and life is more than a dream. (112)

Selfless reflection in this passage fails to incite the anonymous pleasures of a body singularly detached from all debts and obligations. The drift of thoughts signals fears of an overpowering self-loss, turning the scene of solitary reflection into one of uneasy containment and oppression. The flow of impressions and ideas evokes the “annihilating” associationist logic that Wollstonecraft critiqued in the Vindication, and which she now perilously experiences herself: “but the fear of annihilation—the only thing of which I have ever felt a dread—I cannot bear to think of being no more—of losing myself—though existence is often but a painful consciousness of misery.” Wollstonecraft here performs her identity as an effect of skeptical reflection—after all, reflection can only proceed through loss, despite the painful knowledge that one might lose oneself entirely. Jacobus has pointed out that Wollstonecraft’s misery in the Letters signals a revisionary outlook on her part, singularly aware of the ideological failures of the French Revolution that sought to install revolutionary time through carnage and violent warfare.38 Conflating the revolution’s masculinist onslaught with Imlay’s own manipulative love for her, Wollstonecraft’s “complaint” demonstrates how the positional “powerlessness” of anonymous witnessing can amount to reflection on (rather than an outright assumption of ) historical agency:39 An ardent affection for the human race makes enthusiastic characters eager to produce alteration in laws and governments prematurely. To render them useful and permanent, they must be the growth of each particular soil, and the gradual fruit of the ripening understanding of the nation, matured by time, not forced by an unnatural fermentation. And, to convince me that such a change is gaining ground, with accelerating pace, the view I have had of society, during my northern journey, would have been sufficient, had I

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not previously considered the grand causes which combine to carry mankind forward, and diminish the sum of human misery. (198)

The prematurity of revolutionary hope is exposed as a naive faith in a violent, vindicatory future—a faith that, like longing, resembles loss in its appeal to an impossibly authentic wholeness that can be recuperated only in the most apocalyptic of tones. If Wollstonecraft arrives at the belief that it is in fact the seemingly unforced record of unacknowledged change that achieves the most effective political momentum, she does so by also recognizing the extent to which dispossession itself, or one’s withdrawal from the stages of the world, can amount to a kind of historical intervention. For the Letters, in tracing the relationship between personal misery and public declaration, have us consider what kind of history can now be imagined in the absence of any “great” events and characters. The feminine self evoked in the Letters defends itself precisely by remaining defenseless in its evocative, melancholic suspension.40 Wollstonecraft’s epistolary cultivation of her anonymity intimates a subtle hermeneutical identification for her readers: by refusing to define herself according to the terms of a historical progressivism that threatens to annul the desisting feminine self, Wollstonecraft provides an ethical meditation on the extent to which melancholic subjectivity expresses a being-in-the-world that disengages from the status quo only to better conceptualize it, and finds itself rhetorically caught between social insertion and desertion.

“ # •  C  • # = •  ' ' •  H •    8=S •  3 8 • # •  ) •   : 5 # 8 ” If there is, in Wollstonecraft’s writings, a time for women to look forward to, then futurity promises the self that its prospective identity depends on its openness to possibility, each forward motion marking an abandonment of the self ’s prior states. This revolutionary hope exemplifies the process Denise Riley has described as the timeline of potentiality for the political self-realization of women in the nineteenth century: Both this “social” and “women” lean forward, as concepts, into a future which is believed to sustain them. It is as if “women,” who have been erroneously or ignorantly represented, might yet, reconstructed, come into their own. In many later-nineteenth and indeed early-twentieth century addresses on the Woman Question, they are caught up not in being, where they are

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massively misunderstood, but in becoming. If “women” can be credited with having a tense, then it is a future tense.41

As the Vindication of the Rights of Woman and the Letters demonstrate, however, futurity also orients the reflective self toward a lack that is no different from a melancholic attachment to loss. Stepping back, we might recall Hazlitt’s observation that the future is “a dull blank, opaque, impervious to sense as an object close to the eye of the blind, did not the ray of reason and reflection enlighten it”; the future time of self-knowledge thus ironically coincides with a spectacle that promises a loss of awareness: “We can never say to its fleeting, painted essence, ‘Come, let me clutch thee!’ it is a thing of air, a phantom that flies before us, and we follow it . . . and we totter on the brink of nothing. That self which we project before us into it . . . is but a shadow of ourselves . . . a body that falls in pieces at the touch of reason or the approach of inquiry.”42 Enlightenment exceeds self-consciousness by figuring as a misrecognized or misnamed recognition: the moment it is inferred as something that comes from outside, a “fleeting, painted essence,” the “enlightened” self is confronted by its own “shadowy” projections which in turn briefly substantialize (only to destroy) “a body that falls in pieces.” Mary Shelley’s Matilda seems to formally and thematically represent just such a devastated body. Although the work appears to fall prey to the very failures of reason that Wollstonecraft feared, the novella (for lack of a better term) soberly contests the latter’s “progressive” feminism by exploring how loss can constitute a resistance to the declarative posturings of knowingness that surface in Wollstonecraft’s models of civic responsibility and public engagement—models Shelley will discount as coercive rather than strengthening.43 Julie Carlson has remarked that melancholy is not only one of Wollstonecraft’s “bequests” to her daughter but it also informs the ethical and aesthetic dimensions of the “mortalizing challenge of the work” to bring to life the “coldness” of the past.44 Indeed, Matilda marks the extremity of Shelley’s ethical and aesthetic thought: it refuses to reveal its eponymous heroine as a gloriously sympathetic and legible agent, and it critiques the falsely humanistic paradigms of agency and self-presentation that underwrite sentimental thought. If we take as a starting point Paul Ricoeur’s remark that “time becomes human to the extent that it is articulated through a narrative mode, and narrative attains its full meaning when it becomes a condition of temporal existence,”45 Matilda might be said to undo the compulsive humanism of time and narrative by substituting a melancholic “woman’s time”

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that evokes the heroine’s opposition to self-disclosure. For Matilda, much more so than for Wollstonecraft, identity is exposed as a forced illusion, fluttering on the threshold of a pure presentness or mystical inwardness that is as oppressive as it is seemingly free. Although Matilda is written in the first person and ostensibly evokes an immediacy usually associated with lyrical confession, the sincerity of the novella’s claims are cast into doubt by the posthumous and haunting otherness life of Matilda’s narrative voice, which melancholically presides over her own story: “I am in a strange state of mind,” writes Matilda in the first beats of the novel. “I am alone—quite alone—in the world—the blight of misfortune has passed over me and withered me; I know that I am about to die and I feel happy—joyous” (5). The joy of this death evokes Matilda’s own withering individualism, but even more so, it darkly underscores the limits of decreation and animation—a dynamic that forces the female self either to come alive out of history or to die into it. For what Matilda’s antisympathetic stance invokes is an incompatibility between the feminine self and the cultural logic that underwrites her supposed edification or “enlightenment.” One might consider Matilda, then, as a reproof to the violence of “becoming” that resonates in William Godwin’s essay “Of History and Romance,” where “the study of individual history” is described as an obsessive regime of self-monitoring and character building: “We go forth into the world; we see what man is; we enquire what he was; and when we return home to engage in the solemn act of self-investigation, our most useful employment is to produce the materials we have collected abroad, and, by a sort of magnetism, cause those particulars to start out to view in ourselves, which might otherwise have lain for ever undetected.”46 What Godwin calls “magnetism” or sympathy, however, Shelley in her narrative will call “superstition,” “haunting,” or “influence” (61)—all baleful words for what amounts to a violation of subjectivity through transpersonal identification. In another passage from the same essay, Godwin interestingly defines history as the cure to melancholy insofar as it replenishes the very cultural losses it ostensibly represents: If a man were condemned to perfect solitude, he would probably sink into the deepest and most invariable lethargy of soul. If he only associate, as most individuals are destined to do, with ordinary men, he will be in danger of becoming such as they are. It is the contemplation of illustrious men, such as we find scattered through the long succession of ages, that kindles into a flame the hidden fire within us. The excellence indeed of sages, of patriots

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and poets, as we find it exhibited at the end of their maturity, is too apt to overwhelm and discourage us with its lustre. But history takes away the cause of our depression. It enables us to view minutely and in detail what to the uninstructed eye was too powerful to be gazed at; and, by tracing the progress of the virtuous and the wise from its first dawn to its meridian lustre, shows us that they were composed of materials merely human. (361–62)

In his attempt to rouse the unhappy soul out of its solitude, Godwin’s romanticism of history discloses a more profound solitude than the one he actually decries: the imagined plenitude and “illustriousness” of the past appears to be more alive than the proximity of the present, “[kindling] into a flame the hidden fire within us.” Godwin’s notion of perfectibility depends on aggrandizing the self, rendering it more extravagant in proportion to the objects it chooses to admire as indices of its own excellence. The self ’s apparent belatedness is transformed into a boon as it takes part in an imaginative communion with history. For Shelley, however, the discouraging “excellence indeed of sages, of patriots and poets, as we find it exhibited at the end of their maturity,” is a procession of the walking dead. Matilda’s own lonely upbringing shores up the delusions behind this kind of character building, one that brings up the hollowness of a fictional past: I was a solitary being, and from my infant years, ever since my dear nurse left me, I had been a dreamer. I brought Rosalind and Miranda and the lady of Comus to life to be my companions, or on my isle acted over their parts imagining myself to be in their situations. Then I wandered from the fancies of others and formed affections and intimacies with the aerial creations of my own brain—but still clinging to reality I gave a name to these conceptions and nursed them in the hope of realization. I clung to the memory of my parents; my mother I should never see, she was dead: but the idea of [my] unhappy, wandering father was the idol of my imagination. I bestowed on him all my affections. . . . My imagination hung upon the scene of recognition; his miniature, which I should continually wear exposed on my breast, would be the means and I imaged the moment to my mind a thousand and a thousand times, perpetually varying the circumstances. (13–14)

Matilda’s disillusioning childhood memories are of a piece with her projected fantasies: both are underwritten by the empty pursuit of a coherent, vexed self. As Andrea K. Henderson has argued, Matilda’s self-fashioning is evoked through the competing languages of dramatic and poetic genres: for example, Shelley’s ambivalence about the depth model of romantic lyric subjectivity contributes to her depiction of Matilda’s inwardness in terms

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of theatrical representations, thus equating her sense of self with surface and exteriority.47 But apart from this, Matilda’s nostalgic retrievals of lost persons and things only further estrange her in that the memories she tries to recollect echo with the same hollowness as those she otherwise tries to replace. For her, literature is a tenuous source of identifications: it dissociates and deanimates subjectivity in the very instant that it fantastically conjures it. As her voice posthumously oversees the narrative of her own life, Matilda haunts the text as an unusable and fallen remainder—a Kristevan abject, as Rajan argues, that contests her father’s notion of the historical past as instructive and guiding.48 And even though her voice appears to structure the story uniquely—almost to the point of excluding all other characters from it—her tale is never in fact her own: the “pastness” of the posthumous voice often seems more alive than the “presentness” of her own tainted, narrative self. In Derrida’s sense, Matilda’s voice resonates as a “bereaved memory” of an otherness that can never be properly ascertained, and which “will never allow itself to be reanimated in the interiority of consciousness.”49 In the novel’s climactic moment, where her father reveals his incestuous secret to her, Matilda undercuts the logic of self-perfection that is carefully developed in Godwin and Wollstonecraft. She intimates that the female subject’s demands for knowledge resemble an interminable mourning for a false enlightenment that cannot be easily known or revealed—what Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok call the secret of the phantom’s tomb:50 Alas! You have a secret grief that destroys us both: but you must permit me to win this secret from you. Tell me, can I do nothing? You well know that on the whole earth there is no sacrifice that I would not make, no labour that I would not undergo with the mere hope that I might bring you ease. But if no endeavour on my part can contribute to your happiness, let me at least know your sorrow, and surely my earnest love and deep sympathy must soothe your despair. (26)

Although she ostensibly tries to quell her father’s sorrow through understanding and selfless intercession, Matilda’s extravagantly sympathetic demands prove to be ethically worrisome because they become indistinguishable from the kinds of obsessive confessional pursuits we first saw in Caleb Williams. Matilda’s pleas in fact betray her fear that her identity is utterly incomplete without an acknowledgment (indeed, a possession) of her father as her necessary “other”; indeed, she can only begin to think of herself in relation to her father in terms of personal lack.

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Ignorant of her role in her father’s miseries (“Dearest, dearest father, pity me and pardon me: I entreat you do not drive me to despair; indeed I must not be repulsed; there is one thing that which although it may torture me to know, yet that you must tell me. I demand, and most solemnly I demand if in any way I am the cause of your unhappiness” [26–27]), Matilda repeats what Cavell calls the skeptic’s fantasy of unknownness, or the willingness to “take certain among his experiences to represent his own mind—certain particular sins or shames or surprises of joy—and then take his mind (his self ) to be unknown so far as those experiences are unknown.”51 The problem with conceiving the “truth” of the self as a discoverable secret, Cavell argues, is that it presumes that our relationship to others depends upon a sense of inner lack. Matilda’s predicament reveals that the demand to know others and believe that certain experiences can be and must be mutually shared turns sympathy against itself: “What do you mean? You know not what you mean. Why do you bring me out, and torture me, and tempt me, and kill me” (27), says Matilda’s father in his attempt to thwart her. As AnneLise François and Daniel Mozes have suggested, his desire to hold onto his secret “may be his one attempt, however feeble, to continue to address her as a subject, to preserve her autonomy from his intruding desires.”52 In this way, the father’s own melancholy for his secret might be said to transfer onto her: I, foolish and presumtuous [sic] wretch! hurried him on until there was no recall, no hope. My rashness gave the victory in this dreadful fight to the enemy who triumphed over him as he lay fallen and vanquished. I! I alone was the cause of his defeat and justly did I pay the fearful penalty. I said to myself, let him receive sympathy and these struggles will cease. Let him confide his misery to another heart and half the weight of it will be lightened. I will win him to me; he shall not deny his grief to me and when I know his secret then will I pour a balm into his soul and again I shall enjoy the ravishing delight of beholding his smile, and of again seeing his eyes beam if not with pleasure at least with gentle love and thankfulness. This will I do, I said. Half I accomplished; I gained his secret and we were both lost for ever. (24–26)

The “I” that surfaces in this passage concedes its own defeat in the very language meant to support it. Matilda’s posthumous voice recollects the preemptive strike against her, but the recollection of that strike is also an act of revision and atonement, one that retreads the story’s traumatic ground without seeking to edify or enshrine memories as animating spots in time:

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“Is it not strange that grief should quickly follow so divine a happiness? I drank of an enchanted cup but gall was at the bottom of its long drawn sweetness” (17). The revisionary power of Matilda’s skepticism doesn’t equate disillusionment with independence, but rather exposes the unsettling effects that knowingness has upon a self corrupted by its own tenuous beliefs. Her dispossession shouldn’t be confused with an atomistic concept of fallen inwardness, since the pressure of skeptical thought compels her to return to a past that fails to resurrect her as an autonomous subject. Following Rajan’s cogent remarks, one might relate this oppressive interiority to the text’s own generic melancholia: We can refer to the text for convenience’s sake as a “novella” or perhaps as an extended short story. But these terms are simply place-holders for something that is neither narrative nor lyric: something that discards by its brevity the participation in kinship structures and the belief in “bildung,” or in time, as cognitive progress implicit in narrative, without projecting instead an instantaneous, non-temporal self affectively defined in relation to itself.53

Matilda’s melancholy evokes a recalcitrant type of temporalized identity that unsettles the implicitly developmental elements of narrative production— what Freud defines as melancholy’s refusal (unlike the work of mourning) to be “overcome after a certain lapse of time.”54 As Philip Fisher has argued, one of Freud’s central insights about melancholy is the almost economic sense of the endless duration of the passion,55 and one might thus read Matilda’s shattered story as a felt disruption between past and future time. Instead of merely positing the self as a belated construction that is incontrovertibly attached to its inheritances, Matilda dramatizes the ways in which the melancholic subject’s profound recessiveness and negativity impeach the revelatory “presentness” of consciousness. It is for this reason that Matilda longs for a sympathy that paradoxically denies communality: “For the sympathy that I desired must be so pure, so divested of influence from outward circumstances that in the world I could not fail of being balked by the gross materials that perpetually mingle even with its best feelings. Believe me, I was then less fitted for any communion with my fellow creatures than before” (46). Melancholy does not so much express the true “essence” of Matilda as it exposes the self as supplemental and residual. Such dissonances also characterize the differences between Matilda and her Shelleyan lover, Woodville, who not only serves as her perplexed

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interlocutor in the narrative, but also inadequately idealizes sympathetic identification: His own mind was [constitutionally] bent to a firmer belief in good than in evil and this feeling which must even exhilarate the hopeless ever shone forth in his words. He would talk of the wonderful powers of man; of their present state and of their hopes: of what they had been and what they were, and when reason could no longer guide him, his imagination as if inspired shed light on the obscurity that veils the past and the future. (52)

Woodville’s exhilarating sense of perfectibility through the powers of imagination evokes a hopefulness that is reminiscent of Wollstonecraft’s immortalizing rhetoric, and it is one that Matilda briefly admires: The poetry of his language and ideas which my words ill convey held me enchained to his discourses. It was a melancholy pleasure to me to listen to his inspired words; to catch for a moment the light of his eyes to feel a transient sympathy and then to awaken from the delusion, again to know that all this was nothing,—a dream—a shadow for that there was no reality for me; my father had for ever deserted me, leaving me only memories which set an eternal barrier between me and my fellow creatures. I was indeed fellow to none. (52)

In a reversal of the coerced scene of sympathy with her father, Matilda’s “enchained,” almost hypnotic, inattention to the content of Woodville’s reveries belies the delusiveness of his idealism. When Woodville attempts to console Matilda by pleading that “we are both unhappy. . . . I have told you my melancholy tale and we have wept together the loss of that lovely spirit that has so cruelly deserted me,” the blankness behind her “expressive eyes that seems to separate [her] from [her] kind” (53) evokes an unintelligibility that Woodville vainly strives to pierce, each of his solicitations running up against an unbreachable void. Moreover, the fact that he figures as a quotable character within Matilda’s posthumous story points to his own ephemerality as a subject—something she also experiences toward the end, when, in addressing Woodville as a ghostly entity, her voice absents itself and cedes speech to a quoted passage from Spenser’s Faerie Queene: What if some little payne the passage have That makes frayle flesh to fear the bitter wave? Is not short payne well borne that brings long ease, And lays the soul to sleep in quiet grave?

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“Do you mark my words; I have learned the language of despair: I have it all by heart, for I am Despair; and a strange being am I, joyous, triumphant Despair. But those words are false, for the wave may be dark but it is not bitter. We lie down, and close our eyes with a gentle good night, and when we wake, we are free . . .” (58)

The “learned” language of despair undoes Matilda by collapsing her identity into the allegorical personification of a feeling (Despair), and it is indeed telling that near her narrative’s end, Matilda is reduced to a quotable, lyrical entity.56 Sitting alone by a fire and learning from her physician that she is dying, she intones: “ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I see how this is, and it is strange that I should have deceived myself so long; I am about to die an innocent death, and it will be sweeter even than that which the opium promised.’ ”: “I salute thee, beautiful Sun, and thou, white Earth, fair and cold! Perhaps I shall never see thee again covered with green, and the sweet flowers of the coming spring will blossom on my grave. I am about to leave thee; soon this living spirit which is ever busy among strange shapes and ideas, which belong not to thee, soon it will have flown to other regions and this emaciated body will rest insensate on thy bosom. Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course. With rocks, and stones, and trees. (64)

With this mawkish farewell to the self—a farewell that is a citation of a farewell—Matilda’s “being” appears somewhere between an indefinite (and implicitly sacrificial) future, and a bleakly poignant death. The anonymous female body, now literally transformed by and folded into the Wordsworth quote, brings to the fore the possibility that Matilda has now come to literalize the predicament of her own narrative in that she figures for a loss that cannot be textually or affectively recovered—an expropriation from the text and by the text.57 Matilda’s anonymity thus evokes a radical disavowal of any social recognition or revelation—her “right to be” in the world and of the world takes the shape of an absence that resists the apparent plenitude the world seems to offer.

'#C#*•58= I have been arguing thus far that we should read the status of the female melancholic in terms of a radical skepticism that undoes the “I” in the very instant that it claims to speak for itself. While Wollstonecraft ambivalently

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construes melancholy as both a sign of cognitive failure and a site of selfdifferentiating potential, her attentiveness to unhappy reason depends upon a careful abstraction of the female body as it petitions for social enfranchisement. Mary Shelley, on the other hand, responds to Wollstonecraft’s models of reason by conceiving melancholy as the condition of a defiantly recalcitrant female subject who extends and critiques the Enlightenment tradition of transparency and self-assertion. What emerges from Shelley is a sense of melancholy as a way of life or a practice. In Jane Austen’s most autumnal of novels, Persuasion, questions about what kinds of ethical and epistemological pressures such a practice might begin to offer resurface. Anne Elliot, although similarly staving off the public face of enlightenment, seems to cast an almost exemplary, anonymous figure in a narrative singularly concerned with following and endorsing her insightfully sad and invisible consciousness. Indeed, the plenitude of Anne’s intellectual presence in the novel makes her a vivid contrast with Matilda’s own expressive losses. Anne Elliot appears moored in a recessive pensiveness that presents her as most rare and present at those moments when she has succumbed to the most intractable of privations. The privileges of melancholy aren’t lost, of course, on Anne, who throughout the novel tirelessly “performs” her sadness with cautious deliberateness. For example, in the famous conversation at the end of the novel, where Anne and Captain Harville debate the relative pains of memory for men and women, Anne remarks, “We certainly do not forget you so soon as you forget us. It is, perhaps, our fate rather than our merit. We cannot help ourselves. We live at home, quiet, confined, and our feelings prey upon us. You are forced on exertion. You have always a profession, pursuits, business of some sort or other, to take you back into the world immediately, and continual occupation and change soon weaken impressions.”58 Despite her insistence on ethical selflessness in the realms of female privacy and consciousness, Anne’s declaration is audibly made within earshot of Wentworth, with the intent of assuring us that her dispossession will be heard and felt as a sign of her exemplarity, as well as an intimation of her secret love for him. Like Fanny Price in Mansfield Park, who in declaring, “No indeed, I cannot act,” casts doubt on the theatrics of public display and the social scripting to which inwardness also conforms, Anne’s alert skepticism distinguishes her as a rare moral compass. Her absences from the novel’s social scenes draw attention to her peripheral yet keen engagement with them in spite of her reluctance to show anything for herself.59

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This characterization of Anne Elliot as an invisible yet vital moralist who sympathetically solicits our attention permeates the critical reception of Persuasion, which has often equated her characteristic melancholy with the novel’s ethico-aesthetics.60 According to this line of argument, the “privateness” of the novel comes to promote a readerly experience of isolated yet transcendentally attentive knowing—an experience common to what Benedict Anderson has called the “imagined community” of readers who interpret “fiction [as seeping] quietly and continuously into reality, creating that remarkable confidence of community in anonymity” that underwrites the broadly sympathetic and remotely atomistic acts of readerly identifications.61 Thus Anne’s melancholic character ideally embodies and enacts a “deprived” sensibility, perfectly participating in the anonymous yet vividly affective forms of transpersonal communication that the novel comes to valorize. What often goes unsaid in such appraisals of Persuasion, however, is the extent to which Austen’s characterization of female melancholy underscores the fundamentally irrecuperable quality of disillusionment and loss, something the novel takes on as its most important ethical and aesthetic challenge. In other words, Anne Elliot’s vexations are the result of her troubling inability to properly know others, much less herself: Soon, however, she began to reason with herself, and try to be feeling less. Eight years, almost eight years had passed, since all had been given up. How absurd to be resuming the agitation which such an interval had banished into distance and indistinctness! What might not eight years do? Events of every description, changes, alienations, removals—all, all must be comprised in it, and oblivion of the past—how natural, how certain too! It included nearly a third part of her own life. Alas! with all her reasonings she found that to retentive feelings eight years may be little more than nothing. (44)

Anne’s skepticism regarding the personal continuity of feelings and memories intimates her stark resignation to the contingent losses of “events of every description, changes, alienations, removals” that spirit away the self even as it contemplates their passage. Wondering “how were [Wentworth’s] sentiments to be read? Was this like wishing to avoid her? And the next moment she was hating herself for the folly which asked the question” (44), Anne’s “psychological” inquiries into the characters of other persons shore up doubts that profoundly unsettle the integrity of her reflections: “ ‘Altered beyond his knowledge.’ Anne fully submitted, in silent, deep mortification. Doubtless it was so, and she could take no revenge, for he was not altered,

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or not for the worse. She had already acknowledged it to herself, and she could not think differently, let him think of her as he would” (44). Not knowing whether Wentworth has “altered” his esteem of her or not, Anne’s skepticism is of a piece with her melancholic attachment to the loss of him. Her reflections intimate that the desire or longing to know others ends up betraying the provisionality or half-emptiness of one’s own inwardness. In other words, doubts about Wentworth corrode Anne’s own self-assurances because they undo her reliance on the supposedly indemnified sanctity of her own experiences. Thus, throughout Persuasion, the problems of shared sympathies and mutual awareness present themselves as cognitive obstacles to self-possession. The muted, self-absenting quality of Anne’s melancholy represents an inability on the part of the reflective mind to understand or properly “own” itself—a lesson brought home to Anne during one of her early meetings with Wentworth: Whether former feelings were to be renewed must be brought to the proof; former times must undoubtedly be brought to the recollection of each; they could not but be reverted to; the year of their engagement could not but be named by him, in the little narratives or descriptions which conversation called forth. His profession qualified him, his disposition led him to talk; “That was in the year six”; “That happened before I went to sea, in the year six,” occurred in the course of the first evening they spent together; and though his voice did not falter, and though she had no reason to suppose his eye wandering towards her while he spoke, Anne felt the utter impossibility, from her knowledge of his mind, that he could be unvisited by remembrance any more than herself. There must be the same immediate association of thought, though she was very far from conceiving it to be of equal pain. (46)

Anne mourns the impermanence of the other’s presence and thoughts— an impermanence she in turn registers within. And although she is convinced that Wentworth could not be “unvisited by remembrance any more than herself,” her estimates of him derail rather than confirm any shared affection. Anne’s disinterestedness—one as strong as Keats’s negatively capable poet who similarly feels the weight of others crowding in and taking up excessive room in his thoughts—captures the melancholic spirit of silent yet watchful deliberation (a rare ethical capacity experienced exclusively by Anne and Wentworth) that Austen bitingly opposes to the novel’s more spuriously

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mournful characters, whose losses only serve to justify their own immodesty. For example, Anne’s disagreeable father is presented as a man whose melancholy is nothing but self-interested pathology: Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch Hall, in Somersetshire, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but for the Baronetage; there he found occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one; there his faculties were roused into admiration and respect by contemplating the limited remnant of the earliest parents; there any unwelcome sensations arising from domestic affairs changed naturally into pity and contempt as he turned over the almost endless creations of the last century; and there, if every other leaf were powerless, he could read his own history with an interest which never failed. (3)

The Baronetage evokes the apogee of Sir Walter’s nostalgic and edifying attachment to the past, despite his financial bankruptcy; distress and its consolations are thus equated with a narcissistic love for a past that was never quite exactly what it seemed. Writing in a post-Waterloo culture that repudiated the trappings of usurping authority and revolutionary time, Austen depicts Sir Walter as the perfect example of a subject born out of ressentiment, affectively retreading the ground of the past with an impotent self-beration that props up his calcified sense of prestige. Moreover, this attitude also informs Sir Walter’s withering inattentiveness to others, namely Anne: “He had never indulged much hope, he had now none, of ever reading her name in any other page of his favourite work” (5). Sir Walter’s conceited absorption in the past influences his scornful and mindless attitude toward his own daughter and promotes his own illusory self-aggrandizement. Similarly, in the famous passage where Mrs. Musgrove woefully laments the death of her son Richard, the narrative voice of the novel traduces her melancholy by pointing out that her story is only partially true: The real circumstances of this pathetic piece of family history were, that the Musgroves had had the ill fortune of a very troublesome, hopeless son; and the good fortune to lose him before he reached his twentieth year; that he had been sent to sea, because he was stupid and unmanageable on shore; that he had been very little cared for at any time by his family, though quite as much as he deserved; seldom heard of, and scarcely at all regretted, when the intelligence of his death abroad had worked its way to Uppercross, two years before. (37)

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The sternly corrective, narrative voice (as demanding as Anne’s own consciousness) demolishes any hint of melancholic sympathies by divulging the hollowness of Mrs. Musgrove’s recollections. As Nicholas Dames has noted, “Dick Musgrove is found unworthy of elegy, and elegy is found unacceptable to the world of Persuasion.”62 The false melancholies of Sir William and Mrs. Musgrove, in contrast to Anne’s, draw little interest (despite their professions of selfinterest) because they represent illegitimate, self-authorizing “fellow-feelings”: both of them experience their attachments to the past in terms of a specious selfishness, and their most plangent pleas remain hopelessly anecdotal. Insofar as Persuasion meditates on Anne’s awareness of a future that seemingly repeats the missed opportunities and experiences of the past, the novel presents her as stunningly disciplined against the forgetful posturings and forward-moving momentums of other characters, who, despite their grievances and sadnesses, seem altogether ignorant of their own temporal dispossessions. And yet, there is also the possibility that what is indeed “past” in Austen constitutes less an anterior world that prohibits the present and future from ever freely evolving, than a sense that such a “freedom” from temporal movement might in fact mark a narrative enslavement to the imperatives of chronological progress that dictate that the “missed opportunity” must never be neglected, never be forgotten, and never be unyielding to historical recuperation. As William Galperin has argued, “The missed opportunity in Austen figures an alternative history: a history that, while unfulfilled and unwritable, does not lack a material sanction, which proves the sanction, in turn, for something that lingers in the face of disappointment or even in the felicity of marital closure.”63 The lingering of “something” might account for the manner in which Anne characteristically never appears to armor herself against the recollections of injuries, which bitingly jab into her thought; in fact, blessed with a trusting sensibility, she leaves herself open to experiencing the “shocks” of anonymity. Appropriating Walter Benjamin’s remarks on the shock of modernity in relation to nineteenth-century lyric poetry, Adela Pinch has described Anne’s mind as “simultaneously highlighting how thoroughly consciousness is conditioned by the presence of others, and representing a kind of consciousness that is constituted as resistance to outside influence.”64 More than any other character in the novel, Anne suffers from an unease over capturing or holding onto experiences in such a way as to make them permanently meaningful and unique. Her unease, however, doesn’t so much evoke a cognitive failure on her part as underscore the dubious transmissivity of “personal” thoughts—in other words, the unbridgeable

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conditions of knowing, or what Mary Favret has powerfully described as the traumatic everydayness of Austen’s world, which registers the unavowable features of a violent, past knowledge.65 Sympathetic identifications in Persuasion thus always appear to work indirectly; for example, in the famous scene where Wentworth displays a hazelnut to Anne’s sister Louisa as an emblem of feminine permanence, Anne overhears him while still remaining invisible behind a hedgerow, thus suggesting that it is precisely because of her absence—one that mirrors our own as readers—that the conversation is able to produce any meaningful description of inwardness:66 The sounds were retreating, and Anne distinguished no more. Her own emotions still kept her fixed. She had much to recover from before she could move. The listener’s proverbial fate was not absolutely hers: she had heard no evil of herself, but she had heard a great deal of very painful import. She saw how her own character was considered by Captain Wentworth, and there had been just that degree of feeling and curiosity about her in his manner which must give her extreme agitation. (65)

Knowledge about others circulates as a form of overhearing or ambient attention that alerts us more to the characters’ felt absences from one another than to their attainments of intimacy or face-to-face encounters. Prior to this scene, we encounter Anne walking and deeply engrossed in the thought that [her] object was, not to be in the way of anybody. . . . Her pleasure in the walk must arise from the exercise and the day, from the view of the last smiles of the year upon the tawny leaves and withered hedges, and from repeating to herself some few of the thousand poetical descriptions extant of autumn, that season of peculiar and inexhaustible influence on the mind of taste and tenderness, that season which has drawn from every poet, worthy of being read, some attempt at description, or some lines of feeling. (61)

Literature, however, doesn’t prove to be consolatory for Anne; rather, her thoughts in this passage, mildly reminiscent of Keats’s “To Autumn,” almost generically reproduce her scenic walk as an occasion for the spiriting away of her own sense of self into the literary landscape. Her escape into herself thus ironically reveals the hollow echo and futility of inwardness as a guard against the shocks of the world. Insofar as Anne’s melancholy characterizes her as opaque and unavailable, she exemplifies Freud’s observation that the melancholic “is aware of the loss which had given rise to [her] melancholia, but only in the sense

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that [she] knows whom [she] has lost but not what [she] last lost in [her],” and that there is “the presence in [her] of an almost opposite trait of insistent communicativeness which finds satisfaction in self-exposure.”67 The unknowable thoughts of the melancholic and her empty self-assertions underscore the ego’s decreased self-regard and willingness to perform itself in terms of an utter negativity or meaninglessness. But Anne’s melancholic “performances” are especially mindful of their nothingness: she contests the apparent “worthlessness” of the melancholic’s speech (“neither verdictive nor declarative,” Butler notes) with the nonacquisitive nature of her own skepticism.68 In other words, rather than holding out for a revelatory future that will productively redeem and individualize her, Anne’s melancholy discreetly accepts loss as the condition of all personal attachments and persuasions—that is to say, her relationships to others do not depend on personal gain, but rather are qualified by an awareness of an estrangement that is constitutive of relationality in the first place. Anne’s retiring art thus acutely ponders the relation between our own psychic self-estrangement and the wide delay we experience with others. In this light, melancholy seems like a mode of ethical thought that instructs us to accept the “art of knowing our own nothingness beyond our circle” as a necessary basis for the kind of recessive vigilance Anne Elliot practices in spite of knowing “her advantage in seeing how unknown, or unconsidered there, were the affairs which at Kellynch Hall were treated as of such general publicity and pervading interest” (31). Anne’s advantage reads like a defaulted talent she reserves without any personal satisfaction, a talent close to a sad dutifulness. Indeed, by indenturing herself to the routines of society and family, Anne appears to deepen her melancholic isolation by installing herself into contexts that only further exacerbate her social dissonance and dissidence (an argument perfectly in line, for example, with Wollstonecraft’s critiques of feminine modesty). However, Anne’s empty performances of duty also suggest a way of discretely “giving” herself a powerfully anonymous mobility in the world—a way of exploiting the generic inconsequentiality of social positions in the first place. “While Persuasion sets itself up as a cure for melancholy by engendering a tutelary identification with its heroine and by educating the reader in the vicissitudes of melancholy narrative,” remarks Anita Sokolsky, “the novel mortifies the reader’s appetite for such identification by forcing it with a self-effacing heroine whose refusal to set forth her own claims makes her an increasingly elusive source of performative identification.”69 In contrast to a Sartrean blind

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faith, for example, Anne’s anonymity actually preserves her: by melancholically going unnoticed, Anne is afforded the ability of somehow escaping social situations while always being fully implicated in them—the quality, in other words, of “also remain[ing] elsewhere,” as Luce Irigaray puts it, of undoing through quiet mimicry or imitation the very societal prescriptions meant to subordinate her in the first place.70 Anne’s being-elsewhere, however, does not necessarily characterize the stance of the Austenian narrator, who might represent far darker possibilities of omniscience and control. As Lionel Trilling has argued in a classic essay on Mansfield Park, the tone of Austen’s novels often betrays an intolerably moralistic mind whose effects are as sharp as a skinning blade: “We are likely to feel that this place of personality, of the quality of being, at the center of the moral life is a chief glory of spirit in its modern manifestation. . . . Yet we at times become aware of the terrible strain it imposes upon us, of the exhausting effort which the concept of personality requires us to make and of the pain of exacerbated sensitivity to others, leading to the disgust which is endemic in our culture.”71 Trilling hints that the frequently unbearable power of moralizing in Austen, ruthlessly subjecting others to ubiquitous observation and leveling critique, might signal a fissure in the unwavering disciplinary gaze of her novels. But whereas for Trilling this vicious dimension of Austen’s writing (exemplified in the comic attack on Mrs. Musgrove’s fatness) nevertheless reveals her as “an agent of the Terror—we learn from her what our lives should be and by what subtle and fierce criteria they will be judged, and how to pass upon the lives of our friends and fellows,”72 I want to suggest that this “terrorism” of the self is in fact allayed by Austen’s own corrective impulses, which work like melancholic refusals of self-interest and self-assurance—refusals that dissolve and diffuse the anonymous “powers” of the narrative terror into a literary form singularly capable of endorsing the “art of our own nothingness” as its most pressing ethical position.73 Although the narrative voice of Persuasion takes part in what Dorrit Cohn has called “psycho-narration,” or the process whereby the narrator claims to have “superior knowledge of the character’s inner life and his superior ability to present it and assess it,”74 it is through this mode that the voice announces its own absence and evacuation as a fully formed self (much like the cocky voice of The Spectator pieces), suspending its personality in favor of insinuating into the lives of others. And it is just this point, I believe, which defines Persuasion’s contribution to the novel form: its unique insistence on maintaining an ethical interest in the lives of others in spite of their absence, their nothingness—their anonymity to us.75

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In concentrating on characters whose lives and thoughts are belated or simply unknown to one another, we might begin to consider Persuasion’s novelistic melancholy as countering simple narratives of character conversion and development.76 If the novel form, according to Peter Brooks, has traditionally been thought to be motivated by an impulse “inherently totalizing, figuring the self ’s tendency to appropriation and aggrandizement, moving forward through the encompassment of more, striving to have, to do, and be more,”77 Austen cuts this vindicatory temporal momentum by representing a character who persuades us to take interest in her inability to leave no mark, one who, on the social plane of the book, perpetually fails to count. By derealizing the self to the point of evacuating it of any pretensions of self-interest or possessiveness, Austen’s literary melancholy suggests that the refusals of self-disclosure might evoke an alternate kind of moral watchfulness that attends to emptiness and disappearance. The extent to which such watchfulness proves to be an excruciatingly difficult form of ethical attention surfaces in the pivotal scene toward the end of the novel, where Anne sits down to read Wentworth’s letter to her—a letter in which he pleads for her to accept his love despite his sense that she is mute to him. It is during the reading that Anne at once “experiences” herself through Wentworth’s words (she literally sits down in the same seat where he wrote the letter), as well as fully loses herself in their meaning: “I can listen no longer in silence. I must speak to you by such means as are within my reach. You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own than when you almost broke it, eight years and a half ago. Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you. Unjust I may have been, weak and resentful I have been, but never inconstant. You alone have brought me to Bath. For you alone, I think and plan. Have you not seen this? Can you fail to have understood my wishes? I had not waited even these ten days, could I have read your feelings, as I think you must have penetrated mine. I can hardly write. I am every instant hearing something which overpowers me. You sink your voice, but I can distinguish the tones of that voice when they would be lost on others. Too good, too excellent creature! You do us justice, indeed. You do believe that there is true attachment and constancy among men. Believe it to be most fervent, most undeviating, in “F.W.

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“I must go, uncertain of my fate; but I shall return hither, or follow your party, as soon, as possible. A word, a look, will be enough to decide whether I enter your father’s house this evening or never.” (173)

Wentworth’s melancholy is thematized in the activity of letter writing, which separates him physically from Anne while also serving as the medium through which he can think himself through and to her. Not knowing whether Anne does in fact think and feel like him, or if she is beyond his reach altogether, Wentworth is confronted with the obligation to attend to Anne in spite of her apparent anonymity. Because both Anne and Wentworth “under-represent” themselves to those around them in the novel and are perpetually engaged in “reading” one another, they appear as the most fascinating characters, evaluating others and themselves in the same way as we train our lens upon their ever receding figures. The irony, however, of the couple’s deprived situation is not lost on Austen: even though it was during the walk down Union Street that Anne and Wentworth “exchanged again those feelings and those promises which had once before seemed to secure everything, but which had been followed by so many years of division and estrangement,” their relationship remains unknown to the social world depicted in Persuasion. The last pages of Persuasion acknowledge this by describing Anne’s and Wentworth’s lives, not from the point of view of other characters (whose interests in their “togetherness” are utterly minimal), but from that of the novel’s absent, narrative voice. As the bustle around Union Street drowns out Anne and Wentworth’s thoughts and feelings, they are themselves absorbed, almost imperceptibly, into the margins and pulses of the novelistic everyday—a momentum Benedict Anderson (borrowing from Walter Benjamin) calls the “empty, homogeneous time” of the imagined community,78 and which is also a symptom of the novel form’s “technology,” simultaneously engendering and corroding the identities of readers in the same way as it creates within its pages characters that are seemingly real yet completely imaginary and anonymous.79 Indeed, as Benjamin observed in his seminal essay “The Storyteller,” the novel is defined by a generic and ideological estrangement that is profoundly nonrecuperative: “No one,” Pascal said, “dies so poor that he does not leave something behind.” Surely it is the same with memories too—although these do not always find an heir. The novelist takes charge of this bequest, and seldom without profound melancholy. For what Arnold Bennett says about a dead woman in one of his novels—that she had had almost nothing in the way of real life—is usually true of the sum total of the estate which the novelist

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administers. Regarding this aspect of the matter we owe the most important elucidation to Georg Lukàcs, who sees in the novel “the form of transcendental homelessness.” According to Lukàcs, the novel is at the same time the only art form which includes time among its constitutive principles.80

The novel’s vagrancy, as it were, is of a piece with its troubled modernity, instituting loss at the center of its aesthetic, socio-political, and ethical universe.81 “The sense of isolation, followed by the sense of menace and of fear,” writes D. H. Lawrence in an essay on Austen, “is bound to arise as the feeling of individualism and personality, which is existence in isolation, increases.” Synoptically noting that the increase in “class hate and class-consciousness are only a sign that the old togetherness, the old blood-warmth has collapsed” and given way to “civil strike [becoming] a necessary condition of self-assertion,” Lawrence identifies “in the mean Jane Austen . . . the sharp knowing in apartness instead of knowing in togetherness.”82 Although Lawrence crudely misreads Austen’s evaluative conscience as a sign of frigidity, his mythic description of civil hostility arising in tandem with the aesthetics of the “modern” novel throws into greater relief the kinds of social and ethical energies in which Persuasion participates, where the strifes of “personality” burden Anne so powerfully that “apartness” becomes less a form of withdrawal than a carefully cultivated detachment and sign of anonymous togetherness—a being-without cherished by two that cannot but be without the other.83 For if the novel’s conclusion has traditionally seemed to suggest that remembrance can coincide with therapeutic renewal, and that thwarted desires can be resolved, it is equally evident that Persuasion accomplishes this surface optimism with lackluster finish. The impulse to anticipate the fulfillment of our memories and feelings in the near future misses Austen’s harder insight that her novel only “progresses” at the expense of absenting its most moving characters. Anne’s melancholic anonymity, much like Austen’s own impersonal and disembodied hand throughout her novels, has a great deal to say about what Andrew Miller has called the “ethical desperation” implicit in the novel’s formalism—a desperation that isn’t simply a basic sympathy for marginalized characters, but rather a melancholic disinterestedness brought to bear on the worlds of others, one that Anne enacts and induces in us as a condition of our own reading. One of the startling effects of Anne’s dispossession is that by the end of Persuasion, the reasonableness of her melancholy is almost denatured or detraumatized to the point where it feels like a way of being. In fact, her aloneness comes to figure for a rejection of the social obligations that come

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along with individualism—what Denise Riley eloquently calls a “right to be lonely”84—all the while remaining tellingly social but unseen and decidedly far from the banners of anything so oppressively normative as “marriage” or “family.” If Anne seems to be the only person in the novel that suffers for herself as she does for others, it is also true that she resiliently refuses to ever “come out” as a character; it is as a figure of anonymous life that she endures amid all desertions, leaving no mark at all.

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What Remains: Romanticism and the Negative All look and likeness caught from earth All accident of kin and birth, Had pass’d away. There was no trace Of aught on that illumined face, Uprais’d beneath the rifted stone But of one spirit all her own;— She, she herself, and only she, Shone through her body visibly. —s a m u e l t a y l o r c o l e r i d g e , “Phantom”

In an essay on Blanchot entitled “The Poet’s Vision,” Levinas describes what could only be called a poetics of refusal that takes as its singular watchword, “this veil of the ‘no,’ this inessential character of the ultimate essence of the work. This no is unlike the Hegelian and Marxist negativity: the labor that changes nature, the political activity that changes society. Being, revealed by the work—brought to self-expression—is beyond all possibility, like death, which one cannot assume despite the eloquence of suicide, for I never die, one always dies.”1 What is the nature of this negative “being” that Levinas identifies, one that will not be bereaved and disclosed after the death of the “I,” but nevertheless immanently surfaces as the remainder of an unyielding labor? Like the worklessness at the heart of Keats’s vision of aesthetics and culture, or the gentle reticences that typify Anne Elliot’s melancholy, Blanchot’s “no” sounds the note of a mournfully romantic form of censure that keeps “being” always a matter of the afterlife, of dying into a life that is fundamentally allergic to the glories of individuality and self-description. One possible question arises here: who says “no,” and to whom, and for whom? As Levinas reminds us, to think of a speaker behind such renunciations is to wholly misunderstand the negativity of the “errancy of being”: the “I” never

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dies, after all, because it is always one who dies, a minimal acknowledgment of being that is rid of revelatory stance, and like Deleuze’s “a life,” one remains as the no-more-no-less, the indefinite or anonymous that represents the barest eloquence of the subject. Throughout this book, the force of this bareness has arisen as the leitmotif of a profound negativity infusing anonymous life, and the romanticism of this Blanchotian “no” should alert us to the ways in which anonymity conceptually evokes forms of ontological impoverishment or indefiniteness that are profoundly antihumanistic. One aspect of this revisionist critique I have wanted to emphasize is the irrecuperable dimension of anonymous subjectivity—that is to say, its resistance to any momentum that would resuscitate it as the apogee of enlightenment. In this sense, anonymity would evoke a peculiar being-in-the-world that fails to adequately reflect welcome and greeting, although its negative ordeal keeps it alive to the sociality it ostensibly abjures. “Ordeal” is in fact Jean-Luc Nancy’s word, which he uses in his book Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative: “ ‘Self ’ means being unto the ordeal of being. Being that has nothing to found itself, to sustain itself, or to fulfill itself is being posited naked in its identity with the logos. . . . ‘Self ’ is therefore first of all what finds itself in nothingness. Rigorously: self is what does not find itself.”2 Nancy’s reappraisal of Hegelian negativity counterintuitively theorizes that the philosopher’s momentous “discovery” of the subject is utterly opposed to such notions as the “individual” or the “self,” and reaffirms it as “what (or the one who) dissolves all substance—every instance already given, supposed first or last, founding or final, capable of coming to rest in itself and taking undivided enjoyment in its mastery and property” (5). If we take from Hegel the understanding that negativity is inextricable from the movement of the dialectic—it authorizes something like the “self” to occur in relation to that which it is not—then Nancy rereads negativity as a persistence that cannot be readily overcome, an endless overturning of manifest existence in favor of a subjectivity immersed in a “consciousness of the negativity of the substance” or the “restlessness of sense” (5)—an experience, moreover, that cannot conceptually coincide with something like an origin or category of thought. What interests me in these last few pages is just how such a restless—and relentless—negativity is brought to bear on romantic theorizations of anonymity, and how it extends and complicates the kinds of aversions to recognition and sociality already mapped out in the previous pages. In Negative Dialectics, Adorno assesses our beleaguered inability to “think without identifying.” While consciousness might be able to see through the

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“identity principle,” “nonidentity is the secret telos of identification. It is the part that can be salvaged; the mistake in traditional thinking is that identity is taken for the goal”: Dialectically, cognition of nonidentity lies also in the fact that this very cognition identifies—that it identifies to a greater extent, and in other ways, than identitarian thinking. . . . The more relentlessly our identitarian thinking besets its object, the farther will it take us from the identity of the object. Under its critique, identity does not vanish but undergoes a qualitative change. Elements of affinity—of the object itself to the thought of it—come to live in identity.3

The governing formalism of identity thinking works to assimilate synthetically the object under universal criteria or rubrics, with the effect that the nonidentity of the object ironically becomes identifiable with “that which has been pushed out of it. In that sense, the nonidentical would be the thing’s own identity against its identifications” (161). More importantly, however, Adorno intuits that this dialectic never fully achieves completion: as Sue Golding remarks, “there must always exist some kind of ‘excess’ which slips past the mirrored reflection of a positivity netted point-forpoint against its oppositional distinction,” which is to say that what escapes is less a residual identity-form—what Coleridge calls in “Limbo” a “positive Negation”—than “something” that cannot be subsumed and reposited under the logic of difference.4 Such an excessive remainder thus comes to represent the problem of articulating a form or a thought of being that is at once contained in and repudiated by the force of negation. As Adorno states, “To negate a negation does not bring about its reversal; it proves, rather, that the negation was not negative enough. . . . What is negated is negative until it has passed” (159–60). To begin asking, “What remains?” in remembrance of these things past is to reorient our discussion to the ethico-aesthetic framework of a darker kind of romanticism, one whose formalizations frequently produce excesses that unsettle the conceptual distinctions they apparently are meant to conserve. And like the phantom spirit in Coleridge’s poem that erases the sense of embodiment it nonetheless means to evoke as the “trace” of something like a “self,” anonymity becomes just such a concept that signifies a negative excess or melancholic obstinacy from within the paradigms of knowledge. At the risk of recapitulation, I want to return to Keats and Shelley in order to throw into greater relief just how both poets explore “negatively capable”

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models of subjectivity that oppose the kind of “identity-thinking” Adorno warns us against. Indeed, the negativity that runs in their work draws attention to the complex relations through which the dispossessed subject comes to bear no (re)productive possibility, no referential positivities that might announce it as a pivot point for ethical and aesthetic reflection. Turning again to a passage from The Fall of Hyperion, I want to remark on the poet’s determination to see, to behold what needs to be impossibly seen as the unseen: But yet I had a terror of her robes, And chiefly of the veils, that from her brow Hung pale, and curtained her in mysteries, That made my heart too small to hold its blood. This saw that Goddess, and with sacred hand Parted the veils. Then saw I a wan face, Not pined by human sorrows, but bright-blanched By an immortal sickness which kills not. It works a constant change, which happy death Can put no end to; deathwards progressing To no death was that visage; it had passed The lily and the snow; and beyond these I must not think now, though I saw that face— But for her eyes I should have fled away. They held me back, with a benignant light, Soft-mitigated by divinest lids Half-closed, and visionless entire they seemed Of all external things—they saw me not, But in blank splendour beamed like the mild moon, Who comforts those she sees not, who knows not What eyes are upward cast.5

The mentoring, “visionless” stare of Moneta wants not and cares not, and the “immortal sickness” that blanches her visage abstracts just as easily as it compels the very figure of her materiality. This “sickness” eternally decays and exposes the contradictions of Moneta’s own physiognomic selfnegativity, but the poem complicates our sense of what moves the face—that is to say, whether it expresses itself autonomously or is the medium of affective forces that lie beyond it. Rather than be destroyed by its own “deathward progressing” pull, however, the face’s singularity is conveyed in its seemingly denatured expression; indeed, it doesn’t move toward any sense of death: it is a “progressing” without progress, a restless “purposiveness without purpose”

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that fails to provide a “telos of identification” for Moneta’s adorers—a movement that is carved out, moreover, in the poem’s spatial poetics: The embossed roof, the silent massy range Of columns north and south, ending in mist Of nothing, then to eastward, where black gates Were shut against the sunrise evermore. (1.83–86)

The careful design that governs the impossible perspectives here, culminating in a “view” of what Keats wonderfully calls a “mist of nothing,” turns our eyes not away but indeed to a nothingness that cannot be focally penetrated because there is nothing there to begin with. All that might remain is what Levinas calls the “impersonal, non-substantive event of the night and the there is” that whispers the most neutral kind of nothingness, a sheer “density of the void” or a flatlining of being to the point where the “there is” is “empty even of void, whatever be the power of negation applied to itself.”6 Responding initially to Bergson’s positive reclaiming of negation, one can almost hear in the pitch of Levinas’s descriptions of nonaffirmed being a desire to luxuriate in the nocturnal sounds of a displaced subjectivity he so strenuously denies, as if to move the eye away from what the ear now retains as the soundscape of a there is that seduces just as well as it blinds. Something of that synaesthetic confusion haunts Keats’s Fall, to be sure, where to look upon the “mist of nothing” would amount to being fascinated (in Blanchot’s sense of the word) by the impropriety of envisioning Moneta’s graven image as anything but a smoky vapor, evocatively twisting out of her altar like the scent of a death to come. To refocus our fascination on Moneta’s abject image is to turn away from those humanizing gestures that seek to represent her; indeed, her image is the alienated entity of a life that cannot be embodied, an anonymous life that guarantees no affirmative glances nor promises any hopeful ends. The poet’s encounter with her turns upon a self-destroying figurality that evacuates the compulsive rigor of sympathetic attachment underwriting the social. However, to acknowledge the impossibility of rescuing such “visionless” recognitions doesn’t simply halt motives for solidarity, community, or sociality; rather, as writers such as Keats, the Shelleys, and Hazlitt intuit, these latter terms are rethought in the context of an anonymous relationality that negates all conciliatory gestures: If we reason, we would be understood; if we imagine, we would that the airy children of our brain were born anew within another’s; if we feel, we

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would that another’s nerves should vibrate to our own, that the beams of their eyes should kindle at once and mix and melt into ours, that lips of motionless ice should not reply to lips quivering and burning with the heart’s best blood. This is Love.7

Although Shelley here describes the self ’s relation to the other as an affective project always bordering on what William Keach calls a “splendid blankness” or “blank splendor,”8 “love” remains an “as if ” possibility—a wish of the mind that works intermittently in order to allay fears over the subject’s own constitutive nothingness—a nothingness, moreover, that also provokes the subject to remain intolerant to any forms of attachment that threaten to reify the self by offering it easy forms of stability and foundation. In Shelley’s contrasting sense, love marks the absence of, or at least a waning regard for, the appeals of identification; it effects what R. Clifton Spargo has defined as a “negative anagnorisis” or recognition that “would involve an element of irony, an inversion or suspension of any compensating recognition, while at the same time intimating an ethical recognition that might yet occur . . . a structure of compassion that, although unrealized, might refuse contrived identification or dialectical incorporation.”9 Spargo’s revaluing of compassion is complex here, since it depends in part on underlining the rhetorical force of “negative anagnorisis” as a trope, or an ironic “inversion or suspension” of the temporal immediacy that idealistically sustains the self-evidence of fellow feeling. Spargo’s anagnorisis introduces a retrospective delay that reveals the illegibility of contrived affect: in other words, compassion is a transmuted suspension of belief that upsets the ascriptive and inscriptive effects of a liberal ethics of recognition. I want to suggest that it is just these moments of anagnorisis in Keats and Shelley which tend to produce a negativity that ruins the gap between the self and other and short-circuits the dialectic’s appeal to the counterfactual—to make good on the promised appearance of the other. The ethical and social violence of such negativity cannot help but reframe Keatsian and Shelleyan aestheticism, despite their particular divergences, as deeply ambivalent to the kinds of assurances that a politicization of culture can provide. I would say that the endurance, however fragmentary, of this strain of nonidentity appears in a variety of contemporary theoretical projects that are quickened by the negative romanticisms of self, sociality, and otherness. For example, Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive offers perhaps the most galvanizing exploration of the pitfalls

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of liberal forms of recognition. Edelman argues that liberalism is singularly incapable of confronting the negativity that haunts its ends, and in this sense, the antagonistic portrayal of the queer as the insistent figure for the “death drive” that disrupts the reproductive hopes of the social, extends the kind of purposeless abjection of Keats’s Moneta, whose own queerness (to adapt Edelman’s words) “sever[s] us from ourselves, from the assurance, that is, of knowing ourselves and hence of knowing our ‘good.’ Such queerness proposes, in place of the good, something I want to call ‘better,’ though it promises, in more than one sense of the phrase, absolutely nothing.”10 The brilliance of Edelman’s point lies in returning us to the romantic blankness of the “absolutely nothing” or anonymity of subjectivity—the fantasy of a fantasy of “reproductive futurism” that construes the heteronormative subject as always reborn on the brink of a brighter, ideological horizon. In revising de Manian theory in the service of unraveling the devotional claims of certain forms of gay and lesbian identity politics, Edelman believes that queerness must structurally embrace the death drive as the “force of mechanistic compulsion whose formal excess supersedes any end toward which it might seem to be aimed. . . . [The] death drive refuses identity or the absolute privilege of any goal. Such a goal, such an end, could never be ‘it’; achieved, it could never satisfy” (22). I cannot do justice in these pages to the density of Edelman’s reading of the death drive, but suffice to say that as a corrosively ironic force, the “inarticulable surplus that dismantles the subject from within . . . the negativity opposed to every form of social viability” (9), the death drive renders asunder those social and political complacencies that define “life” as something needfully tied to the identitarian project of undertaking a certain “appearance in the world” (to recall Wollstonecraft here), a project that Moneta shatters in her “deathward progressing” figurality. What Edelman helps to bring into view is the queer arc of a romantic negativity that casts aspersions on the viability of community and sociality, which are often too quickly offered as balms for the incoherence and nonproductivity of the subject. A question that arises in light of Edelman’s work, however, is: how and why should the negative stay negative without recuperating itself? In other words, how might a poetics of the negative avoid being translated into a politics of negativity? Remember that for the poet in The Fall, the promise of looking beyond Moneta’s undead form gestures toward a relationship with something that seemingly exists beyond the other, something that compels a sphere of interpersonal

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communication to occur and thus establish the subject in terms of the extraneous “secret” of an alterity it cannot have but must solicit as the telos of its life. As David Collings notes, Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment aesthetics frequently “designate the precipitates of a transformation in symbolic exchange, whereby the subject, once located in an interplay of high and low, is now the scene for a battle between reason and the unconscious, the living and the undead body.”11 And yet, the Keatsian wager lies in imagining a path of interaction that finds no relief through the other, no mutual satisfaction in an interplay that would anoint the subject at the very moment it encounters the visionless vision its own “nature” opposes. Romanticism certainly brings us to the limits of such recognitions, or at the very least, it economizes that desire for revelation by rethinking “the social” as a name for the imaginary space that perpetually withholds the very figure of subjectivity it briefly enables. The gravity of this predicament powerfully emerges in Shelley’s “The Triumph of Life,” where the poem’s engagement with the criteria for what constitutes a viable historical subject is endlessly abandoned, debated, and buoyed by a conversation that takes place within a figural pageantry that seeks no assurances. Perhaps here, more than in Keats’s Fall, we witness an exhaustion of sociality, or that error to compulsively (dis)identify with the attenuated and “spent vision of the times that were / And scarce have ceased to be” (233–34). Like the “benignant light” of Moneta’s “half-closed” eyes that fascinate the would-be poet, Shelley’s “Triumph” plays in light and darkness, presence and absence, sights and sounds that corrode “enlightenment,” and express the negativity of an apocalyptic vision that makes itself lyrically interpretable as a force that destroys, like Edelman’s death drive, the meaningfulness it ostensibly seeks to derive. As a vision within a vision, “so transparent that the scene came through / As clear as when a veil of light is drawn / O’er evening hills they glimmer,” (31–33), the poem “begins,” as it were, in a blinding illumination that is far from any optical transparency. Yet it self-negates into this textual, proto-impressionism as the poet announces how “then a Vision on my brain was rolled . . .” (40)—a vision which is set off, as Forest Pyle remarks, by a “typographical cut” that proceeds with a “backward turn described in the lines [that] is not conducted by the poet, who remains stationary, but by the poem, which uses the temporarily stable position of the poet to shift its own axis.”12 Similar to the hermeneutical structure of “The Mask of Anarchy,” Shelley’s poet is less a substitute figure than he is a figure for substitution—for an image or metaphor of “place”

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from where to originate and at once repress the claims of those sightless “Visions” that violently arise throughout the poem: Struck to the heart by this sad pageantry, Half to myself I said, “And what is this? Whose shape is that within the car? & why”— I would have added—“is all here amiss?” But a voice answered . . . “Life” . . . I turned and knew (O Heaven have mercy on such wretchedness!) That what I thought was an old root which grew To strange distortion out of the hill side Was indeed one of that deluded crew, And that the grass which methought hung so wide And white, was but his thin discoloured hair, And that the holes it vainly sought to hide Were or had been eyes.—“If thou canst forbear To join the dance, which I had well forborne,” Said the grim Feature, of my thought aware, “I will tell all that which to this deep scorn Led me and my companions, and relate The progress of the pageant since the morn; “If thirst of knowledge doth not thus abate, Follow it even to the night, but I Am weary” . . . (176–96)

As the most frustrating and forceful of words in the poem, “Life” is apparently spoken by a disembodied voice, later revealed to be Rousseau’s; but Shelley bookends the word between ellipses so as to distract attention away from figuring out which or whose life is being spoken about. And like Deleuze, Shelley captures the indefiniteness of a mode of existence that differs from the transcendental mystifications of the pageant that shortly comes into view. The passage gives credence to de Man’s famous characterization of the poem’s “trajectory from erased self-knowledge to disfiguration,”13 a trajectory that finds its most compelling shape in Rousseau, who appears as an “old root which grew / To strange distortion,” and like Moneta’s “wan face,” arises as a marker or point of recognition and prohibition. As Rousseau instructs: “If thou canst forbear To join the dance, which I had well forborne,” Said the grim Feature, of my thought aware,

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“I will tell all that which to this deep scorn Led me and my companions, and relate The progress of the pageant since the morn.” (188–93)

But the “choice” offered here, if it is a choice at all, is a pedagogically coercive one that delineates a special pact between philosophe and poet that transforms into an encounter without an exchange: —“Let them pass”— I cried—“the world and its mysterious doom “Is not so much more glorious than it was That I desire to worship those who drew New figures on its false and fragile glass “As the old faded.”—“Figures ever new Rise on the bubble, paint them how you may; We have but thrown, as those before us threw, “Our shadows on it as it past away . . . (243–51)

Shelley’s virtuoso deployments of figure, glass, and shadow suggestively dislocate the referential claims of the historical “triumph” he paints. Indeed, the ebb and flow of his materialist vision reabsorbs Rousseau’s narrative of disillusionment within the sphere of the poet’s own lyrical narration. These involutions of language and points of view establish a strange, dissolving scene of instruction that unsettles both poet and Rousseau as dialectical punctums in the conversation. Like “those spoilers spoiled, Voltaire, / Frederic, and Kant, Catherine, and Leopold” (235–36), the poet and Rousseau are mere simulacra or “new figures on [the world’s] false and fragile glass” that cannot sustain the staging of the sociality they apparently seek to reconstruct. Arguably, the most destructive effect of “The Triumph of Life” lies in its halting of the substantialization of that endless optimism (exhaustively hinted at in the poem’s terza rima form) that links inscriptions to materialities—that is to say, figures to “worlds.” If the poet can no more turn to Rousseau for guidance than to the pageant of historical personages, then his disorientation is due less to his insertion into the theater or “Triumph” of the poem’s fantasy than to the precariousness of that ideology that compels his subjectivity to be manifest in a dialogic space. And it is for this very reason that “Life” emerges for Shelley as the word that cannot be properly assigned to any one person, nor rendered meaningful through constant evocation: it starkly signifies the remains of a thought that cannot properly assemble

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the various characters of the poem together. “Life,” then, provocatively misnames that excess of negativity and positivity that keeps subjectivity outside of the dance which we had all best forebear—the “thought from outside” Rousseau invokes later on in the poem where he recounts his meeting with a “shape all light” (352) that offers no reciprocating hospitality: “I rose; and, bending at her sweet command, Touched with faint lips the cup she raised, And suddenly my brain became as sand “Where the first wave had more than half erased The track of deer on desert Labrador, Whilst the fierce wolf from which they fled amazed “Leaves his stamp visibly upon the shore Until the second bursts—so on my sight Burst a new Vision never seen before. (403–11)

Like the death-driven stare of Moneta’s eyes, the burst of a “new Vision” forecloses the possibility of acknowledgment by blinding Rousseau’s perception to any perspective from which he might properly constitute himself in the other—that is to say, the vision of enlightenment is a figure for the violence of that figuration (the deer replaced by the wolf ), further pushing Rousseau into the “earth . . . grey with phantoms” (482), where “. . . the air Was peopled with dim forms, as when there hovers “A flock of vampire-bats before the glare Of the tropic sun, bringing ere evening Strange night upon some Indian isle,—thus were “Phantoms diffused around, and some did fling Shadows of shadows, yet unlike themselves, Behind them, some like eaglets on the wing “Were lost in the white blaze . . .” (482–90)

What the poem forestalls, as critics since de Man have noted, is a certain process of monumentalization that would naively seek to enshrine and embody history in self-dissolving figures that relate “to nothing that comes before or after, [and] become inscribed in a sequential narrative” that erroneously forces us to read, to understand, and to perceive these figures as representatives of a phantom community to which they simply do not

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belong, and whose conversations promise no easy answers and disclosures.14 The persistence of this aporetic claim, which for de Man underscores the arbitrary performativity of language, “having a strength that cannot be reduced to necessity, and entirely inexorable in that there is no alternative to it” (116), is inscribed with pressing critical dimensions that we face in trying to interpret the ungraspable inconsistencies of the poem’s linguistic turns. For what de Man opens up (along with Rousseau and the poet) is an ethical collocation around the “nothing that comes before or after”—a “nothing” that hallucinates the social as the obscure term that loses its justifications between the poetic lines. Indeed, a central question that immediately emerges out of the “Triumph’s” grim tableau vivant is: what language do the poet and Rousseau speak in this strangely asocial meeting? After all, in the beats of their first encounter, we are not simply reading a conversation that takes place in a universalizing poetic idiom, nor one that promotes an early nineteenth-century national English that blithely trumps the Swiss philosophe’s French. More powerfully, “The Triumph of Life” surfaces the problem of translation, of encountering the language of the other as a discourse of nonrelational relationality that surely needs to be spoken, with compromise, in a single language, but is at once irreducibly singular and an excess that cannot be completely understood in an absolute idiom—a negativity that cannot be fully translated and yet cannot not be translated, that compulsively must and must not resist its idiomatic inscriptions.15 To pause, then, and listen to the lyric pitch of the conversation between the poet and Rousseau is to conceive of the “as if ” (im)possibility of a language for this anonymous community of two that repudiates the stale speech of a certain dubious version or “deluded crew” (“Triumph,” 184) of the Enlightenment, and the kinds of established aesthetic, political, and ethical spaces it promotes as settings to sustain itself. Moreover, the poem requires that we listen to a language that tarries with the “nothing that comes before and after,” or the Blanchotian “space of literature” that maps no topography, no society, no community, no personalities within or without its own interminability.16 I have tried to show that, by way of refusing or, at the very least, circumspectly challenging the languages of reified identities, romanticism hovers around an anonymity that is as visionless as the uncertainties that haunt liberal hopes for transparency, reciprocity, and acknowledgment. To consider the poverty of such visions is to admit the incoherences of a life that claims an excess “nothing” as its nonprovidential form of justification

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and reward—the anonymous as the negation of a certain poetics of identity whose narratives of self-development are but phantoms that know no bounds, circling around a dispossession or state of desertion where the other cannot presume to speak for and with us. It remains to reason whether what we cannot see, know, or become can help to discern the contours of an anonymity whose “unswerving negation” (writes Adorno) “lies in its refusal to lend itself to sanctioning things as they are.”17 Perhaps these are the romantic remains of a modernity that defines itself in the claims it cannot reflect, and which it also cannot bury.

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Notes

Introduction: “Rien Faire Comme une Bête” 1. John Keats, The Letters of John Keats, 1814–1821, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958), 1: 193. All further citations will appear parenthetically in the text. 2. Thomas Carl Wall, Radical Passivity: Levinas, Blanchot, and Agamben (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 55. 3. An invaluable starting point in this regard is Laurence S. Lockridge, The Ethics of Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 4. Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York: Norton, 1977), 478. All references, unless otherwise noted, are to this edition and will be given parenthetically in the text. 5. Gilles Deleuze, “Immanence: A Life,” Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life, trans. Anne Boyman (New York: Zone, 2001), 27, 30. Additionally, see “Literature and Life,” Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 1–6. Glossing Deleuze’s remarks on “Immanence: A Life,” Giorgio Agamben states “a life . . . , as the figure of absolute immanence, is precisely what can never be attributed to a subject, being instead the matrix of infinite desubjectification” (“Absolute Immanence,” Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999, 232–33]). 6. “On Living to One’s-Self,” The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols. (London: Dent and Sons, 1931), 8: 91. 7. For a revisionary interpretation of romantic theories of autonomy, see Nancy Yousef, Isolated Cases: The Anxieties of Autonomy in Enlightenment Philosophy and Romantic Literature (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004). 8. Anne Ferry, “Anonymity: The Literary History of a Word,” New Literary History 33.2 (2002): 193–214. Additionally, see Robert J. Griffin, “Anonymity and Authorship,” New Literary History 30.4 (1999): 877–95; Robert J. Griffin, ed., The Faces of Anonymity: Anonymous and Pseudonymous Publication from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century (New York: Palgrave, 2003); Lee Erickson, “ ‘Unboastful Bard’:

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Originally Anonymous English Romantic Poetry Book Publication, 1770–1835,” New Literary History 33.2 (2002): 247–78. 9. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Men and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Sylvana Tomaselli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 153. 10. Sharon Cameron, Impersonality: Seven Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), ix. 11. Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 67. 12. Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. Mary J. Gregor (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1974), 14–15. 13. Complete Works of William Hazlitt, 20: 179. 14. Thomas Pfau, “Tropes of Desire: Figuring the ‘Insufficient Void’ of SelfConsciousness in Shelley’s Epipsychidion,” Keats-Shelley Journal 40 (1991): 100. 15. See Ian Balfour’s discussion of subjecticity as a term that evokes a “subjectivity beyond the subject”—that is, one that proves to be asymmetrical with psychologizing models of the subject. “Subjecticity (On Kant and the Texture of Romanticism),” Romanticism and the Insistence of the Aesthetic, ed. Forest Pyle, Romantic Circles Web site, University of Maryland, Romantic Circles Praxis Series page (February 2005), www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/aesthetic/balfour/balfour.html. 16. In Life in Fragments: Essays in Postmodern Morality (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), Zygmunt Bauman suggests that the “fragmentary, or episodic” nature of our “forms of togetherness” are characterized by three kinds of modality: “being-aside,” which denotes encounters that “lack of consequences—encounters tend to be inconsequential in the sense of not leaving a lasting legacy of mutual rights and/or obligations in their wake”; “being-with,” which evokes “a meeting of incomplete beings . . . [where the] intermittence of revelation and secrecy is, as a matter of fact, the major building technique”; and “being-for,” most similar to Hazlitt’s thought, which is “a leap from isolation to unity; yet not towards a fusion, that mystics’ dream of shedding the burden of identity, but to an alloy whose precious qualities depend fully on the preservation of its ingredients’ alterity and identity” (50, 51). 17. Jerome Christensen, Romanticism at the End of History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 3. The strength of Christensen’s argument lies in his sense of the productive yet unknowable potential of romantic ethics—a position, as he states, that clashes with “the historicist’s preferred technology [of sympathy] for channeling the past”: “History is what happened, not what had or has to happen. Unlike the historicist, dead set on decoding the iron logic of past events, the Romantic fully credits the possibility of accidents and readies himself or herself to take advantage of swerves or lapses from the norm as opportunities for change” (2). 18. William Wordsworth, preface to The Excursion, The Poems, ed. John O. Hayden, 2 vols. (London: Penguin, 1977), 2: 39. 19. Charles Rzepka, The Self as Mind: Vision and Identity in Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986).

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20. Andrea K. Henderson has shown this to be but one of several competing identity models during the romantic era. See Romantic Identities: Varieties of Subjectivity, 1774–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 21. William Wordsworth, The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850, eds. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill (New York: Norton, 1979), 67. 22. Leo Bersani, The Culture of Redemption (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), 4. 23. Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1981), 58. In Against Ethics: Contributions to a Poetics of Obligation with Constant Reference to Deconstruction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), John D. Caputo echoes Levinas’s notion of the “hostage” when he describes the experience of obligation as one of being “taken hold of from without, seized by something else, something other, je ne sais quoi. The otherness of this something other, the heteronomic force of the other, is the dislocating locus or site—I do not say the origin—of obligation. It is the alterity or otherness of the other, the heteronomy, that disrupts me, that is visited upon me, that knocks me out of orbit” (8). 24. See Julie Ellison, Cato’s Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). See also Ian Baucom’s reflections on the “modernity” of romanticism in “A ‘Stranger’s Near Approach’: Afterlives of Romanticism,” South Atlantic Quarterly 102 (Winter 2003): 1–23, as well as his book, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005). For a cogent discussion of empire in the era, see Saree Makdisi, Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 25. Jerome McGann, “The Text, the Poem, and the Problem of Historical Method,” New Literary History 12 (Winter 1981): 269–88. 26. See Alan Liu’s similar (and early) comments that “Wordsworth revolves in his mind a counter-Spirit whose anonymity at once mimes and denies the shuffling mob that first authorized his emergence as poet. The signature of this latter Spirit is ‘I’ (‘For I have learned,’ ‘And I have felt’). It is the ‘I’—the great impersonator of history able to be anyone at any time—that makes reference inconsequential” (Wordsworth: The Sense of History [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1989], 217). 27. Jerome McGann, The Romantic Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983),11. 28. The Oxford Authors: William Wordsworth, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 597. 29. My argument here follows Frances Ferguson’s critique of New Historicism and personification in Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation (New York: Routledge, 1992), 146–69. 30. Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 76.

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31. Jerome McGann, “Shall These Bones Live?” The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations and Historical Method and Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 95. 32. For an intriguing meditation on this theme in romantic criticism, see Alan Liu, “The New Historicism and the Work of Mourning,” Studies in Romanticism 35.4 (1996): 553–62. 33. Thomas Pfau, “Reading Beyond Redemption: Historicism, Irony, and the Lessons of Romanticism,” introduction to Lessons of Romanticism, ed. Thomas Pfau and Robert F. Gleckner (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998), 8, 9. 34. Marjorie Levinson, Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 12. 35. Theodor Adorno, “Sur L’Eau,” Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: NLB, 1974), 156–57. 36. Wordsworth, “Composed upon Westminster Bridge, Sept. 3, 1802,” Poems, 1: 574–75. For a reading of the radical thematic of passivity in romantic thought, see Anne-Lise François, Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008). I came to François’s study only after having completed my book, and I can only gesture here to my general agreement with her own critical concerns. 37. Gilles Deleuze, “Bartleby; or, The Formula,” Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 68–90. 38. Denise Riley, The Words of Selves: Identification, Solidarity, Irony (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000), 5. 39. William Jewett, Fatal Autonomy: Romantic Drama and the Rhetoric of Agency (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997), xiii. 40. In “Romantic Memory,” Studies in Romanticism 35 (Winter 1996): 509–33, Frances Ferguson counters these claims by exploring (post-Locke) a forensic model of memory in Wordsworth. Such a model emphasizes the role of circumstantial evidence in complicating the self ’s capacity to recall, forget, or misremember its past actions, thoughts, and behaviors, and it also no longer demands that we understand the self ’s accounts of itself in any kind of deliberately voluntaristic manner. 41. Wordsworth, Prelude (1805), 2.360–68. 42. Alan Liu, “ ‘A Forming Hand’: Creativity and Destruction from Romanticism to Emergence Theory,” workshop on “Development, Creativity, and Agency: New Approaches,” North American Society for the Study of Romanticism, Montreal, August 16, 2005, 17. Thus part of Liu’s analysis of the passage from The Prelude reads: The anomalousness of the formative hand that mindlessly manages Wordsworth’s creativity without any fixed commitment to his creativity suggests that we have not yet really learned to read local agency in romanticism—and so have failed to follow up one of the alternative genealogies that lead from romanticism to our contemporary moment. Understood to be about “the Growth of the Poet’s Mind,” Wordsworth’s autobiographical epic has contributed signally to the definition of romanticism as

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the period that synonymized growth with creativity and made that synonymy the very meaning of identity. But alternatively, a radical localism or autonomy of creativity—of creativity without agency, and (for that reason) perhaps without meaningful agency—may finally be more interesting to us in an age of global creative destruction when we need a new understanding not just of romanticism but of the modernity and postmodernity it helped prepare. (17)

43. Steven E. Cole, “The Logic of Personhood: Coleridge and the Social Production of Agency,” Studies in Romanticism 30.1 (1991): 101–2. 44. For example, Barry B. Adams offers this succinct description of the classical model of recognition: “A recognition of personal identity is also a discovery of fact. Considered as an act of cognition, the personal recognition differs from other discoveries only with respect to the nature of its object. Coming to know a human person is in all its noetic essentials no different from coming to know something nonhuman or non-animate. . . . In other words, latent or covert knowledge is, as a result of the process of knowing, discovering, or recognizing, either actualized or made manifest” (Coming-to-Know: Recognition and the Complex Plot in Shakespeare [New York: Peter Lang, 2000], 37). The contemporary reception of the Hegelian model of recognition is traceable to Alexandre Kojève’s Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (New York: Basic, 1969). For Hegel’s influence on contemporary critical theory, see Judith Butler, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987). 45. For an interesting consideration of the productive force of this notion of the self as the site of otherness rather than lack, see Jeffrey T. Nealon, Alterity Politics: Ethics and Performative Subjectivity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998). 46. Stanley Cavell, “The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear,” Must We Mean What We Say? (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 338. For a brilliant application of Cavell’s thinking to an ethics of reading, see Andrew Miller, “Perfectly Helpless,” Modern Language Quarterly 63 (March 2002): 65–88. 47. Emmanuel Levinas, Existence and Existents, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1978), 57. 48. Tilottama Rajan, “Dis-Figuring Reproduction: Natural History, Community, and the 1790s Novel,” New Centennial Review 2.3 (2002): 231. 49. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Poetical Works, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 430–31. All citations are from this edition, and will be noted parenthetically within the text. 50. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Friend, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Barbara E. Rooke, 2 vols. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1969), 2: 514. For a discussion of Coleridge’s fraught struggle with defining a stable subjectivity, see Rajan’s essay, “Coleridge, Wordsworth, and the Textual Abject,” South Atlantic Quarterly 95 (Summer 1996): 797–820. 51. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature of German Romanticism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), 11.

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52. Giorgio Agamben, The Man Without Content (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), 57. 53. As Theodor Adorno argues in Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), the artwork’s lack of instrumentality endows it with a sense of “powerlessness and superfluity in the empirical world” (104) that is remarkably political because such powerlessness withstands the monopolizing, idealistic claims of a culture that would expropriate the artwork for its own ends. 54. Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 28. 55. See Gerald Bruns’s description of a subject in terms of a “relation without context” in his Maurice Blanchot: The Refusal of Philosophy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). 56. Michel Foucault, “Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from Outside,” trans. Brian Massumi, Foucault/Blanchot (New York: Zone, 1990), 17. 57. For more on this argument, see John D. Caputo, More Radical Hermeneutics: On Not Knowing Who We Are (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), and Thomas Keenan, Fables of Responsibility: Aberrations and Predicaments in Ethics and Politics (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997). 58. E. M. Forster, “Anonymity: An Enquiry,” Two Cheers for Democracy (London: Penguin, 1965), 90. See also Virginia Woolf ’s essay “Anon,” Twentieth Century Literature 25.3–4 (Fall–Winter 1979): 382–98, which describes anonymity as a “possession” of earlier eras that liberated subjectivity from the predations of contemporary print culture: Anonymity was a great possession. It gave the early writing an impersonality, a generality. It gave us the ballads; it gave us the songs. It allowed us to know nothing of the writer: and so to concentrate upon his song. Anon had great privileges. He was not responsible. He was not self-conscious. He is not self conscious. He can borrow. He can repeat. He can say what every one feels. No one tries to stamp his own name, to discover his own experience, in his work. He keeps at a distance from the present moment. (397)

In an interview entitled “The Masked Philosopher” (Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954–1984, vol. 1, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow [New York: New Press, 1997, 321–28]), one where he remained anonymous in the original published version, Michel Foucault says the following: “Why did I suggest that we use anonymity? Out of nostalgia for a time when, being quite unknown, what I said had some chance of being heard. With the potential reader, the surface of contact was unrippled. The effects of the book might land in unexpected places and form shapes that I had never thought of. A name makes reading too easy” (321). 59. One might compare Forster’s anonymity with T. S. Eliot’s definition of impersonality in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” The Sacred Wood (London: Methuen, 1972), 47–59, as an “extinction of personality” or an “escape” from emotion—a definition, moreover, that struggles to sustain the poet’s relation to culture while at the same time intuiting his radical attenuation.

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Chapter One: Virtual Ruin 1. William Hazlitt, An Essay on the Principles of Human Action (Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1969), 1. All subsequent citations, marked Essay in the text, refer to this edition. All other references to Hazlitt’s writings are from The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols. (London: Dent and Sons, 1931). 2. For a recent consideration of the contemporary reception of these issues (albeit in a Victorian context), see Amanda Anderson, The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001). Also see Jan Mieszkowski’s analysis of interest and disinterest, in Labors of Imagination: Aesthetics and Political Economy from Kant to Althusser (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), esp. chaps. 1 and 4. 3. See Kathleen Coburn, “Hazlitt on the Disinterested Imagination,” Some British Romantics: A Collection of Essays, ed. James Logan, John Jordan, and Northrop Frye (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1966), 169–88. 4. David Bromwich, “The Genealogy of Disinterestedness,” Raritan 1 (Spring 1982): 64. 5. See James Everett Richardson, “Lucid Dreaming: Emptiness, Reality, and Isak Dinesen’s ‘The Dreamers’ ” (master’s thesis, Duke University, 2002), for an elaboration of this notion of emptying out or kenosis. 6. Deborah Elise White, Romantic Returns: Superstition, Imagination, History (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000), 65. 7. Hazlitt, Essay, 17–20. 8. Coleridge describes this circumstance perfectly in the brief fragment “On SelfInterest”: “For the You and the They will stand in different occasions for a thousand different persons, while the I is one only and recurs in every calculation” (Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. H. J. Jackson and J. R. de J. Jackson, 16 vols. [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995], 11: 864). 9. As Laurence S. Lockridge argues, Hazlitt’s major “discovery” in the Essay “is made by linking the concept of sympathy . . . to a temporal schema” (The Ethics of Romanticism [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989]), 342). 10. As Locke writes: For it being the same consciousness that makes a Man be himself to himself, personal Identity depends on that only, whether it be annexed only to one individual Substance, or can be continued in a succession of several Substances. For as far as any intelligent Being can repeat the Idea of any past Action with the same consciousness it had of it at first, and with the same consciousness it has of any present Action; so far it is the same personal self. For it is by the consciousness it has of its present Thoughts and Actions, that it is self to it self now, and so will be the same self as far as the same consciousness can extend to Actions past or to come. (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch [Oxford: Clarendon, 1975], 336)

11. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 49; see also 159–76.

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12. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1999), 36. 13. One might again compare Hazlitt’s thinking here with that of Charles Taylor’s: The issue of our condition can never be exhausted for us by what we are, because we are always also changing and becoming . . . in order to make minimal sense of our lives, in order to have an identity, we need an orientation to the good. . . . We see that this sense of the good has to be woven into my understanding of my life as an unfolding story. But this is to state another basic condition of making sense of ourselves, that we grasp our lives in a narrative. (Sources of the Self, 47–48)

Taylor’s own emphasis on narrative is profoundly anti-Utilitarian, and like Hazlitt, he idealizes a desired—and desirable—orientation toward the good as the telos for an ethical care of the self. However, Taylor’s reflection of a narrative trend in ethical deliberation is regarded more skeptically by Hazlitt. For another contemporary reading that has much in common with Hazlitt’s Essay, see Richard Wolheim, “On Persons and Their Lives,” in Explaining Emotions, ed. Amelie Oksenberg Rorty (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980), 299–321. 14. For an excellent discussion of the philosophical dimensions of probabilistic thinking, see Ian Hacking, The Emergence Of Probability (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975). 15. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, trans. Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 32–33. 16. In Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), J. G. A. Pocock has explored this virtuality as the condition of a new propertybased liberalism in the eighteenth century, one that dissolves the citizen’s person as he or she literally becomes a creditor or debtor living on endless postponement and promise: Government stock is a promise to repay at a future date; from the inception and development of the National Debt, it is known that this date will in reality never be reached, but the tokens of repayment are exchangeable at a market price in the present. . . . Property—the material foundation of both personality and government— has ceased to be real and has become not merely mobile but imaginary. Specialized, acquisitive and post-civic man has ceased to be virtuous, not only in the formal sense that he has become the creature of his own hopes and fears; he does not even live in the present, except as constituted by his fantasies concerning a future. (112)

The momentum of Pocock’s remarks captures the extent to which speculative identities seek secular forms of redemption in an uncertain future that doesn’t leave anyone uncounted or unobserved. One of the questions indirectly brought to mind by Pocock is whether or not a liberal theory of personhood can withstand more radical attempts to do away with the need to define actions, motives, thoughts, and being in terms of measurable consequences. 17. Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 445. What is interesting about Parfit’s writing is how much his sober yet still

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brightly fictional accounts of the anonymity of personhood (his examples of identity-evacuation include space travel) rely on the imagination as the prime faculty for change. The imagination’s capacity (its sympathetic will) to project or confer being(s) is also indicative of its ability to reflect upon its own misrecognitions. Although it is Parfit’s aim to point out that imaginative thought itself cannot withstand self-privileging, one nevertheless cannot help but hear a waning romanticism in Parfit’s radical ascesis: Most of us now live in large communities. The bad effects of our acts can now be dispersed over thousands or millions of people. Our false beliefs are now serious mistakes. The falsity of these beliefs is clear in my imagined case of the Harmless Torturers. Each of these torturers knowingly but imperceptibly affects the pain suffered by each of a thousand victims. These torturers act very wrongly. They know that, though each affects none of the victims in a perceptible way, they together inflict on the victims severe pain. As I argued, there are countless actual cases of this kind. In these cases it is true, of the act of each, that its effects on others are trivial or imperceptible. We mistakenly believe that, because this is true, the effects of our acts cannot make them wrong. But, though each act has trivial effects, it is often true that we together impose great harm on ourselves or others. Some examples are pollution, congestion, depletion, inflation, unemployment, a recession, over-fishing, over-farming, soil-erosion, famine, and overpopulation. (444)

18. See Roy E. Cain, “Hume and Adam Smith as Sources of the Concept of Sympathy in Hazlitt,” Papers on English Language and Literature (Spring 1965): 133–40; L. M. Trawick, “Sources of Hazlitt’s ‘Metaphysical Discovery,’ ” Philological Quarterly 42 (April 1963): 277–82. 19. Emmanuel Levinas captures this predicament in the interview “Responsibility and Substitution,” in Is It Righteous To Be? Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas, ed. Jill Robbins (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001): For me, the notion of substitution is tied to the notion of responsibility. To substitute oneself does not amount to putting oneself in the place of the other man in order to feel what he feels; it does not involve becoming the other nor, if he be destitute and desperate, the courage of such a trial. Rather, substitution entails bringing comfort by associating ourselves with the essential weakness and finitude of the other; it is to bear his weight while sacrificing one’s interestedness and complacency-in-being which then turns into responsibility for the other. (228)

20. White, Romantic Returns, 76. For a Lacanian formulation of this view, see Tim Dean, “Two Kinds of Otherness and Their Consequences,” Critical Inquiry 23 (Summer 1997): 910–20. 21. R. Clifton Spargo has noted that “according to a strictly utilitarian rationale, sympathy and antipathy are already by definition aberrant states of mind, symptomatic of a resistance to reason because they refer to strictly private states and so unrealistically convert the ordinary relation to the world of real things into an interior, affective state” (The Ethics of Mourning: Grief and Responsibility in Elegiac Literature [Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004], 21). In a certain sense, then, Hazlitt might be said to share such a rationale, although for him, the “aberration”

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of sympathy lies precisely in the fact that “strictly private states” are conceived in Utilitarianism as the inconceivable remainders of a reason that forever cannot reject its tenuous purchase on the world of things. 22. See Catherine Gallagher’s Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670–1820 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), where she specifically discusses Hume’s moral theory of transparently fictional (hence readily sympathetic) identities (167–74). For an extended application of Gallagher’s arguments, see Audrey Jaffe, Scenes of Sympathy: Identity and Representation in Victorian Fiction (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000). 23. On the subject of theatricality in Adam Smith, see David Marshall, The Figure of Theater: Shaftesbury, Defoe, Adam Smith, and George Eliot (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). On Hume, see Blakey Vermeule, The Party of Humanity: Writing Moral Psychology in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 154–82. 24. Rei Terada, “Imaginary Seductions: Derrida and Emotion Theory,” Comparative Literature 51 (Summer 1999): 197. Additionally, see her Feeling in Theory: Emotion After the “Death of the Subject” (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001). 25. Anthony Appiah, “Tolerable Falsehoods: Agency and the Interests of Theory,” Consequences of Theory, ed. Jonathan Arac and Barbara Johnson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 75. See also Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), for a lucid and challenging exploration of the ethics of agentless action. 26. There is much here that can be compared with Deleuze and Guattari’s theories of desiring machines in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), which evokes a decidedly romantic provenance in its insistence on de-individuation, nonintentionalism, and aesthetic exploration. Their discussion of the contingency of social and phantasmatic productions posits individual and collective desires passing through “machinelike” psychic and social structures that represent both the subject and the collective. Subjectivity is a residual effect of psychic and material work: The truth of the matter is that social production is purely and simply desiring-production itself under determinate conditions. We maintain that the social field is immediately invested by desire, that it is the historically determined product of desire, and that libido has no need of any transformation, in order to invade and invest the productive forces and the relations of production. There is only desire and the social and nothing else. (29)

27. Deidre Shauna Lynch, The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 94. 28. Mieszkowski, Labors of Imagination, 113, 114. 29. For pragmatist readings of Hazlitt, see David Bromwich, Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983); and John Kinnaird, William Hazlitt: Critic of Power (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978). 30. “This question arrives, if it arrives, but it questions with regard to what will

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come to the future-to-come. Turned toward the future, going toward it, it also comes from it, it proceeds from [provient de] the future. It must therefore exceed any presence to itself. At least it has to make this presence possible only on the basis of the movement of some disjointing, disjunction, or disproportion: in the inadequation to self ” (Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf [New York: Routledge, 1994], xix). 31. For a discussion of the problems with Hazlitt’s philosophical interest in abstraction, see Tim Milnes, Knowledge and Indifference in English Romantic Prose (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 105–43. 32. John Keats, The Letters of John Keats, 1814–1821, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958), 1: 387. Citations will be given parenthetically in the text. 33. Jerome McGann, The Romantic Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 91. 34. Marjorie Levinson, Keats’s Life of Allegory: The Origins of a Style (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), 6. 35. Alan Liu, “The Power of Formalism: The New Historicism,” ELH 56 (Winter 1989): 734. 36. Ibid., 734–35, 738. For the historical connections between romanticism and the rise of historicism, see James Chandler’s England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). On the subject of action, see Steven E. Cole, “The Logic of Personhood: Coleridge and the Social Production of Agency,” Studies in Romanticism 30 (Spring 1991): 85–111; and William Jewett, Fatal Autonomy: Romantic Drama and the Rhetoric of Agency (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997). 37. “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” The Poems of John Keats, ed. Miriam Allott (London: Longman, 1970), 11–12. All poetry quotations refer to this edition, with line numbers given parenthetically. 38. One might cite as examples Walter Jackson Bate’s magisterial biography, John Keats (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966); and Helen Vendler, The Odes of John Keats (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983). 39. For a classic discussion of the impersonal qualities of Keats’s poetic language, see Paul de Man, “Introduction to the Poetry of John Keats,” Critical Writings, 1953–1978, ed. Lindsay Waters (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 179–97. 40. William Godwin, Caleb Williams, ed. and intro. Maurice Hindle (London: Penguin, 1988), 337. For a discussion of Godwin’s influence on Keats, see Nicholas Roe, John Keats and the Culture of Dissent (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 242–47. 41. Blanchot, The Unavowable Community, trans. Pierre Joris (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill, 1988), 5. 42. In a related context, Angus Fletcher makes use of this threshold theme in his spooky essay “Threshold, Sequence, and Personification in Coleridge,” Colors of the

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Mind: Conjectures on Thinking in Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), 166–88. 43. Samuel Johnson, The Works of Samuel Johnson, 9 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1925), 2: 56. 44. William Wordsworth, “Essays upon Epitaphs,” The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. B. J. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974), 84. 45. Cynthia Chase, “The Ring of Gyges and the Coat of Darkness: Reading Rousseau and Wordsworth,” in Romanticism and Language, ed. Arden Reed (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984), 83–84. 46. For an interesting examination of these issues in the context of copyright laws, see Susan Eilenberg, “Copyright’s Rhetoric and the Problem of Analogy in the Eighteenth-Century British Debates,” Romanticism and the Law, ed. Michael Macovski and John Morillo, Romantic Circles Web site, University of Maryland, Romantic Circles Praxis Series page (March 1999), www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/law/ eilenberg/sebg.htm. 47. Theodor Adorno, “Commitment,” The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (New York: Continuum, 1982), 306. 48. One could conceive Keats as undertaking the giving away of nothing—a paradoxical giving where there is nothing to give of the self. This absence of a gift signals a liberating negativity for the indebted self. See Jacques Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), where Derrida argues that if there is a gift, the given of the gift (that which one gives, that which is given, the gift as given thing or as act of donation) must not come back to the giving (let us not already say to the subject, to the donor). It must not circulate, it must not be exchanged, it must not in any case be exhausted, as a gift, by the process of exchange, by the movement of circulation of the circle in the form of return to the point of departure. (7)

49. Theodor Adorno, “On Lyric Poetry and Society,” Notes to Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 39–40. 50. One consequence of Adorno’s insights regarding the lyric’s self-destructiveness is that they compel us to imagine what a new theory of the lyric might look like in the wake of the demise of conventional formalisms. In “Romanticism and the Death of Lyric Consciousness” (Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism, ed. Chaviva Hosek and Patricia Parker [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985], 194–207), Tilottama Rajan posits the crisis of lyrical singularity as the central debacle of romantic lyric; but in struggling against its own historical insulation, Rajan does away with the lyric entirely by suggesting that it is replaced by the historical openness of narrative. This problem of describing what the afterlife of the lyric might be, in opposition to narrative resolution, is also at the center of Richard Halpern, “The Lyric in the Field of Information: Autopoiesis and History in Donne’s Songs and Sonnets,” Yale Journal of Criticism 6.1 (1993): 185–215, where Halpern uses an autopoetic model to reclaim lyrical insularity; Paul Fry, A Defense of Poetry: Reflections on the Occasion

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of Writing (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995), where the moment of “ostension” or epistemological suspension/interruption is explored as specific to poetry; Kevin Hart, “The Experience of Poetry,” Boxkite 2 (1998): 285–304, which describes poetry and poetry making in terms of a radical phenomenology; Mutlu Blasing, Lyric Poetry: The Pain and The Pleasure of Words (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007), which explores the various theoretical instabilities of lyric subjectivity; and finally, Daniel Tiffany’s exploration of lyrical obscurity and communicability, in “Fugitive Lyric: The Rhymes of the Canting Crew,” PMLA 120 (January 2005): 82–96. 51. Marshall Brown, “Negative Poetics: On Skepticism and the Lyric Voice,” Representations 86 (Spring 2004): 123. 52. Stewart cites the preexisting sources: Alain Chartier’s dialogue “La Belle Dame sans Mercy”; the Paolo and Francesca episode from the fifth canto of Dante’s Inferno; the Cymochles and Phaedria episode and the Rock of Vile Reproach in Book II and the adventure of Britomartis in the Castle of Busirane in Book III of The Faerie Queene; a passage in Shakespeare’s Pericles; and Keats’s rereading of his own poems Endymion and The Eve of St. Agnes, where the song Porphyro sings to Madeline in stanza 33 is “La belle dame sans mercy”. . . . Sometimes mentioned, but without specific evidence of Keats’s coming into contact with the source, is the link between “La Belle Dame” and the ballad and legend of Thomas Rymer or True Thomas, a ballad whose narrative maps closely on that of “La Belle Dame” and which Keats could have known through reading Robert Jamieson’s Popular Ballads and Songs or Sir Walter Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. (Susan Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002], 126)

For another interesting reading of the “ghostliness” of form—a ghostliness that denatures form to the point of eerily alienating it from the poem itself—see William Flesch, “Quoting Poetry,” Critical Inquiry 18 (Autumn 1991): 42–63. For an excellent study of romantic formalism, see Susan J. Wolfson, Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997). 53. Stanley Cavell, “Knowing and Acknowledging,” Must We Mean What We Say? (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 265. See also the section “Between Acknowledgment and Avoidance,” in The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality and Tragedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 329–496. 54. Indeed, the kind of fascination she invokes recalls Keats’s confused letter to Benjamin Bailey, where he concedes, When I was a Schoolboy I though[t] a fair Woman a pure Goddess, my mind was a soft nest in which some one of them slept though she knew it not—I have no right to expect more than their reality. . . . When among Men I have no evil thoughts, no malice, no spleen—I feel free to speak or to be silent—I can listen and from every one I can learn—my hands are in my pockets I am free from all suspicion and comfortable. When I am among Women I have evil thoughts, malice spleen—I cannot

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speak or be silent—I am full of Suspicions and therefore listen to no thing—I am in a hurry to be gone. (1: 341)

For significant critical discussions of gender in “La Belle Dame” see Karen Swann, “Harassing the Muse,” Romanticism and Feminism, ed. Anne K. Mellor (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 81–92. For feminist approaches to Keats, see Margaret Homans’s “Women Reading Keats: Keats Reading Women,” Studies in Romanticism 29.3 (1990): 341–70; Susan J. Wolfson, “Feminising Keats,” Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley, ed. Peter J. Kitson (New York: St. Martin’s, 1996), 92–133; and Wolfson, “Keats and the Manhood of the Poet,” European Romantic Review 6 (Summer 1995): 1–37. 55. Blasing, Lyric Poetry, 9. I cite more from the same passage: We are never at home in poetry, for we experience at once the foreignness of the familiar language and the intimacy of the alien code. . . . A subject produced in language can only mean by means of an inhuman code, which it has had to master in order to be “human”—that is, a medium to pass on the linguistic code, along with the genetic code. The subject of poetry, the “I,” is “human” only insofar as she is able to maintain and communicate an intimacy with the inhuman linguistic code by which she became “human.” This is why the subject in language is not “human” in any ordinary sense of the term, and we need to think poetry outside humanism. (9)

56. This classic formulation of the poem’s gain is the subject of Fry’s chapter “Nil Reconsidered: Criticism, Actuality, and ‘To Autumn,’ ” Defense of Poetry, 108–32. See also Stuart Curran, Poetic Form and British Romanticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 83–84. 57. Tilottama Rajan, “Keats, Poetry, and ‘The Absence of Work,’ ” Modern Philology 95 (February 1998): 334–51. See also James Chandler, “Hallam, Tennyson, and the Poetry of Sensation: Aestheticist Allegories of a Counter-Public Sphere,” Studies in Romanticism 33.4 (Winter 1994): 527–37, where he suggests that Keats’s poetics intimate a rival, sensuous countersphere that resists the capitalist imperatives of the dominant public sphere. For another interesting meditation on the production aspects of romanticism (already discussed in the introduction), see Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988). 58. Geoffrey Hartman, The Fate of Reading and Other Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 131. 59. See William Flesch, “The Ambivalence of Generosity: Keats Reading Shakespeare,” ELH 62.1 (1995): 149–69, for a reading of the poem in terms of an aesthetics of impoverishment. 60. On the subject of Keats’s “materialism,” see Forest Pyle, The Ideology of Imagination: Subject and Society in the Discourse of Romanticism (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995), 129–46. 61. In a reading of Keats alongside Adorno that has greatly influenced my own thinking, Robert Kaufman notes that “an exploratory but nondominative subjectivity—willing to suspend itself in defamiliarization or doubt—and an achieved con-

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struction are mutually constitutive (though they still do not guarantee any specific ethical or political subjectivity). . . . The monumental construction [of the ode] exists to be energized, put into motion—even to be disassembled or dissolved—by the negatively capable subjects who exist in relation to it” (“Negatively Capable Dialectics: Keats, Vendler, Adorno, and the Theory of the Avant-Garde,” Critical Inquiry 27 [Winter 2001]: 371). 62. Cleanth Brooks remarks that the repetition of forlorn suggests that it “is being used primarily in its archaic sense of the first instance, ‘utterly lost.’ The faery lands are those of a past which is remote and far away. But the meaning of ‘forlorn’ is definitely shifted as the poet repeats the word . . . its meaning ‘pitiable; left desolate’ . . . describes the poet’s own state” (Modern Poetry and the Tradition [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1948], 40; cited in Allott, Poems of John Keats, 531). 63. “Could our thoughts be pitched as the lyric’s,” notes Sharon Cameron, in Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), “we might in fact shatter time with the determined voice of our musings” (208). See her book for an original discussion of the theoretical dimensions of lyrical voice, history, and temporality. 64. Lionel Trilling, “The Fate of Pleasure,” Romanticism Reconsidered, ed. Northrop Frye (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), 85. 65. See Jonah Siegel, Desire and Excess: The Nineteenth-Century Culture of Art (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), esp. 130–64. 66. See John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 67. John Gibson Lockhart, “Cockney School of Poetry,” British Literature, 1780–1830, ed. Anne K. Mellor and Richard E. Matlak (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1996), 159. 68. On this topic, see Andrew Bennett, Keats, Narrative, and Audience: The Posthumous Life of Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), and Romantic Poets and the Culture of Posterity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 139–57. For a brief consideration of the culture of mourning that seems to surround Keats and the other romantics, see Karen Swann, “The Strange Time of Reading,” European Romantic Review 9 (Spring 1998): 275–82. 69. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 19. 70. Rajan, “Keats, Poetry,” 350. I concur with her analysis, my own emphasizing primarily the ethical dimensions of the Keatsian project. 71. Following Forest Pyle in his article “Kindling and Ash: Radical Aestheticism in Keats and Shelley,” Studies in Romanticism 42 (Winter 2003): 427–59, one might also identify this moment as a “limit of culture” (459) that “confronts us with the material sites of culture’s own unredeemability and achieves, if it achieves anything at all, the experience of a sheer and repeated negation, closest perhaps to Bataille’s notion of ‘non-productive expenditure’ ” (458; see Georges Bataille, “The Notion of Expenditure,” Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–39, ed. and trans. Allan Stoekl [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985], 116–29).

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72. See Allen Grossman’s meditations on poetry’s complex “person-making power of evoking the disposition to honor selves”—to recognize or acknowledge the humanity of the other—in The Sighted Singer: Two Works on Poetry for Readers and Writers, with Mark Halliday (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 20. 73. I take this insight from Louise O. Fradenburg, “ ‘My Worldes Blisse’: Chaucer’s Tragedy of Fortune,” South Atlantic Quarterly 98 (Summer 1999): 563–92, where she argues that signification is a fundamental defense against life. One defends against life, and against all objects, by re-placing them—incorporating them, for example—thus giving oneself the option of getting rid of them. . . . The “work” is ethically troubling because we enjoy the deadness of the artifact. . . . However, this is not all bad because the very insentience of the signifier that is other to my aliveness makes it attractive as a means of designing images that will defend against my aliveness and the world into which it throws me. (566)

74. Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 32. 75. One might compare this Keatsian negativity with the aesthetic impersonality theorized by Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, in Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Resnais (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993): To be lost or disseminated in a space that cannot be dominated, and to register attentively how relations are affected by a shattered ego’s displacements within that space, may at least begin to reverse or arrest the devastating effects of a view of space as an appropriable collection of objects and human subjects. Without an authoritative center, the impoverished and dispersed self may become an unlocatable target. This is difficult to think about, even more difficult to imagine in concrete political terms. But there is nothing to be lost in our foundering with the notion of getting lost, and there is even something exhilarating in the idea of a joyful self-dismissal giving birth to a new kind of power. (9)

76. “She is immortal; her face is the emblem of the cost as well as of the benefits of knowledge and immortality. . . . The face is alive only in a chill and inhuman way. The knowledge it represents is not malign, but it is unrelated to ‘external things’; the eyes express nothing, looking inward to the ‘high tragedy In [sic] the dark secret chambers of the skull’. To prostrate himself before this figure is the privilege of the artist’s joy and the reward of his suffering” (Frank Kermode, Romantic Image [London: Routledge, 1957], 9–10). 77. Pyle, “Kindling and Ash,” 451–52. 78. Ben Belitt, “This Scribe, My Hand,” This Scribe, My Hand: The Complete Poems of Ben Belitt (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998), 65. 79. For a careful reflection on the issue of substantial and virtual aesthetic value, see Kevin McLaughlin, “The Coming of Paper: Aesthetic Value from Ruskin to Benjamin,” Modern Language Notes 114.5 (December 1999): 962–99. 80. Gregg M. Horowitz, Sustaining Loss: Art and Mournful Life (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001), 127.

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81. Giorgio Agamben, The Man Without Content, trans. Georgia Albert (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994), 110. See also Horowitz’s marvelous account of the intransmissibility of art, in Sustaining Loss, particularly his discussion of Kant who recognizes that “the future of art thus becomes not the preservation of cultural achievement, but the sustaining of the endless dying of nature at culture’s hands” (50).

Chapter Two: Fugitive Letters 1. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Reveries of the Solitary Walker, trans. Charles E. Butterworth (New York: New York University Press, 1979), 6–7. 2. I am indebted to Stanley Corngold’s discussion of Rousseau in The Fate of the Self: German Writers and French Theory (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994), 222–25. 3. Michael Taussig, Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), 3–4. 4. Slavoj Žižek remarks that the Master is an “imposter . . . whose whole consistency hinges upon the deferral, the keeping-in-reserve, of a force that he falsely claims to possess” (Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology [Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993], 160). 5. Cynthia Chase, “The Ring of Gyges and the Coat of Darkness,” Romanticism and Language, ed. Arden Reed (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984), 53, 54. 6. Corngold, Fate of the Self, 225. 7. Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979), 299. 8. Nancy Armstrong, How Novels Think: British Fiction and the Limits of Individualism from 1719–1900 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 30. 9. Maurice Blanchot, The Unavowable Community, trans. Pierre Joris (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill, 1988), 5. 10. William Godwin, Caleb Williams, ed. and intro. Maurice Hindle (London: Penguin, 1988), 337. 11. Thomas Pfau, “Paranoia Historicized: Legal Fantasy, Social Change, and Satiric Meta-Commentary in the 1794 Treason Trials,” Romanticism, Radicalism, and the Press, ed. Stephen C. Behrendt (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997), 32. 12. William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on Morals and Happiness, ed. F. E. L. Priestley, 3 vols. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969). All further citations will appear parenthetically in the text. 13. For a reading that foregrounds these issues, see Ian Ousby, “My Servant Caleb,” University of Toronto Quarterly 44 (Fall 1974): 47–55. For an important discussion of the theoretical ramifications of the treason trials, see John Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death: Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide, 1793–1796 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

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14. See Julie Carlson’s “Enlightened Secrets: At the Heart of William Godwin’s Enquiries,” Zeitsprunge: Forschungen-zur-Fruhen-Neuzeit 6.1–4 (2002): 270–82, for a similar reading of Godwin’s aesthetic and political concerns. 15. E. T. A. Hoffmann, “My Cousin’s Corner Window,” The Golden Pot and Other Tales (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 377–401. 16. Jerrold E. Hogle, “The Texture of the Self in Godwin’s Things as They Are,” boundary 27.2 (1979): 262. 17. Audrey Jaffe remarks that “omniscient narration thus serves both ‘personal’ and ‘impersonal’ functions and projects both individual and collective fantasies. A subject’s self-effacement enables his or her participation in a larger, cultural gaze, while the construction of others as subjects enables a narrator to imagine, at least temporarily, eluding that gaze” (Scenes of Sympathy: Identity and Representation in Victorian Fiction [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000], 9). 18. Charles Lamb, “To William Godwin,” September 8, 1801, letter 98 of The Complete Works and Letters of Charles Lamb (New York: Modern Library, 1935), 703. 19. For a discussion of theatricality in Caleb Williams in relation to its Shakespearean echoes and, more prominently, to issues of genre and selfhood in the context of the sublime, see Robert Kaufman, “The Sublime as Super-Genre of the Modern; or, Hamlet in Revolution: Caleb Williams and His Problems,” Studies in Romanticism 36 (Winter 1997): 541–74. 20. Reprinted as appendix 2 in Hindle’s edition of Caleb Williams, 351–52. 21. For example, see John Bender’s “Impersonal Violence: The Penetrating Gaze and the Field of Narration in Caleb Williams,” Vision and Textuality, ed. Stephen Melville and Bill Readings (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), 256–81. 22. Gary Kelly, The English Jacobin Novel, 1780–1805 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 19. 23. Quoted in ibid., 14–15. 24. On the issue of chivalry, see Marilyn Butler, “Godwin, Burke, and Caleb Williams,” Essays in Criticism 32(July 1982): 237–57; and Gregory Dart, Rousseau, Robespierre, and English Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 76–98. 25. See Clifford Siskin, “Eighteenth-Century Periodicals and the Romantic Rise of the Novel,” Studies in the Novel 26 (Summer 1994): 26–42, for an incisive discussion of eighteenth-century reading culture and the role of conversation as a device in fiction. See also David McCracken, “Godwin’s Literary Theory: The Alliance Between Fiction and Political Philosophy,” Philological Quarterly 49 (January 1970): 113–33. 26. William Godwin, “Of History and Romance,” reprinted in Hindle, ed., Caleb Williams, 372. 27. Jon Klancher, “Godwin and the Republican Romance,” Eighteenth-Century Literary History: An MLQ Reader, ed. Marshall Brown (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999), 83. 28. Siskin, “Eighteenth-Century Periodicals,” 28. For statistical evidence of this

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phenomenon, see James Raven, The English Novel, 1770–1829: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). One might also note that the Godwinian model of this author category surfaces as the object of critique in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. 29. One might juxtapose Godwin’s remarks with Wordsworth’s on the role of the author in his “Essay, Supplementary to the Preface to Poems (1815)”: Of genius the only proof is, the act of doing well what is worthy to be done, and what was never done before: Of genius in the fine arts, the only infallible sign is the widening the sphere of human sensibility, for the delight, honor, and benefit of human nature. Genius is the introduction of a new element into the intellectual universe: or, if that be not allowed, it is the application of powers to objects on which they had not before been exercised, or the employment of them in such a manner as to produce effects hitherto unknown. (The Oxford Authors: William Wordsworth, ed. Stephen Gill [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989], 659)

30. For a reading of the “mass” in Godwin’s work, see Carl Fisher, “The Crowd and the Public in Godwin’s Caleb Williams,” Women, Revolution, and the Novels of the 1790s, ed. Linda Lang-Peralta (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1999), 47–67. 31. One here might follow Etienne Balibar’s response, in his article “Citizen Subject,” to the question put forth in the title of the volume Who Comes After the Subject? ed. Eduardo Cadava et al. (New York: Routledge, 1991): “After the subject comes the citizen” (38; italics in the original). 32. Andrea K. Henderson, Romantic Identities: Varieties of Subjectivity, 1774–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 63. 33. David Hume, “Of the Love of Fame,” A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 206. 34. The theatrical metaphors that run throughout Hume’s philosophy have been endlessly remarked upon. One especially valuable work is Jerome Christensen’s Practicing Enlightenment: Hume and the Formation of a Literary Career (Madison: Wisconsin University Press, 1987). It is worth noting, however, that Christensen greatly overemphasizes the importance of Hume’s reliance on spectatorial/theatrical models. For more nuanced readings of spectatorship, see Adela Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996), 17–50; and Blakey Vermeule, The Party of Humanity: Writing Moral Psychology in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 154–82. 35. In Cato’s Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), Julie Ellison argues that many male characters throughout eighteenth-century narratives of sensibility come to experience their own subject positions through fanciful stories of global wanderings: “Conspiracy and paranoia induce a particular geography, a subset of the literature of wandering. Mobility takes the form not only of transatlantic displacement and the appropriation of native lands on the frontier, but also of repetitive, obsessive pacing back and forth over the same ground” (153).

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36. My thanks to Julie Chun Kim for this point. 37. Catherine Gallagher, Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670–1820 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), 171. 38. See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989). For a critique of the public sphere’s logic of abstraction and disembodiment, see Michael Warner, “The Mass Public and the Mass Subject,” The Phantom Public Sphere, ed. Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 234–56. 39. In his classic essay “Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in The Eighteenth Century,” William and Mary Quarterly 39 (July 1982): 401–41, Gordon S. Wood has identified conspiratorial belief as the dark side of Enlightenment thought: “Far from being symptomatic of irrationality, this conspiratorial mode of explanation represented an enlightened stage in Western man’s long struggle to comprehend his social reality. It flowed from the scientific promise of the Enlightenment and represented an effort, perhaps in retrospect a last desperate effort, to hold men personally and morally responsible for their actions” (411). In “Secrets and Narrative Sequence,” Critical Inquiry 7 (Autumn 1980): 83–101, Frank Kermode has noted that secrecy serves as a critical tool of indeterminacy in that the sense of a story withholding meaning becomes the essential component for accessing it with each successive retelling. See also The Genesis of Secrecy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979). For more on secrecy in literature, see D. A. Miller, “Secret Subjects, Open Secrets,” The Novel and the Police (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), 192–220; and Sissela Bok, Secrets (New York: Pantheon, 1982). On intersections of paranoia and critical disciplinarity, see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s introductory essay “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction Is About You,” Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction, ed. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997), 1–37. Similarly, in The Culture of Redemption (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), Leo Bersani aligns paranoia with a kind of epistemological violence. For romantic contextualizations, see Thomas Pfau, “Paranoia Historicized”; and Randa Helfield, “Constructive Treason and Godwin’s Treasonous Constructions,” Mosaic 28 (June 1995): 43–62. 40. For the history of “combinations,” see John V. Orth, Combination and Conspiracy: A Legal History of Trade Unionism, 1721–1906 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991). 41. See Jerome Christensen’s suggestive remarks in Romanticism at the End of History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). 42. Alex Gold, “It’s Only Love: The Politics of Passion in Godwin’s Caleb Williams,” Texas Studies in Language and Literature 19.1 (1977): 135–60. 43. Sigmund Freud, “On the Mechanisms of Paranoia,” Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth, 1953), 12: 70.

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44. See Kevin Gilmartin, Print Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition in Early Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 35–36. 45. Bender, “Impersonal Violence,” 256–81. 46. See Kaufman’s “The Sublime as Super-Genre of the Modern” for an interesting consideration of this point. 47. Robert Kiely, The Romantic Novel in England (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972), 95. 48. Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” Modern Criticism and Theory, ed. David Lodge (London: Longman, 1988), 197. In addition, see Foucault’s explorations of “unknowable” subjectivities in Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954–1984, vol. 1, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1997). Foucault offers a series of powerful reflections on the political, aesthetic, and ethical implications of the care of the self.

Chapter Three: Feeling for the Future 1. Paul de Man, “Introduction to the Poetry of John Keats,” Critical Writings, ed. Lindsay Waters (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 181. 2. Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York: Norton, 1977), 507. All further citations from Shelley, unless noted otherwise, refer to this edition and are cited parenthentically in the text. 3. For a brief discussion of Shelley’s debt to Hazlitt’s Essay, see P. M. S. Dawson, The Unacknowledged Legislator: Shelley and Politics (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980), 230–37. 4. David Marshall, The Surprising Effects of Sympathy: Marivaux, Diderot, Rousseau, and Mary Shelley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 21. 5. Marc Redfield, Phantom Formations: Aesthetic Ideology and the Bildungsroman (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996), 134–70. 6. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1984), 237. All references are to this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text. 7. The emphasis throughout Shelley’s writings on the ethically productive vagaries of language finds reflection in Richard Rorty’s self-consciously romantic writings, particularly Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), where he promotes the “liberal ironist” as a kind of poet who mediates between inner fulfillment and external obligations. Rorty, however, too readily falls back on traditional romantic models of subject formation and action, and ends up subscribing to pietistic notions of sympathy. 8. I echo Thomas Keenan’s point in Fables of Responsibility: Aberrations and Predicaments in Ethics and Politics (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997), where, in considering the political responsibilities of the anonymous, poststructuralist “I,” he remarks that “the subject is still in question, in more than one question, but without the security of a present (position) from which to respond.” He

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goes on to ask, quoting Michel Foucault, “If ‘the language [we] speak . . . even the fables [we] were told in childhood, obey rules not entirely given to [our] consciousness,’ what speaks and signs, what comes after the subject? What responds without me when I respond, and from where and when, if I no longer control the position from which I respond?” (137). 9. Although sympathy has been almost evacuated altogether as a term from the contemporary theoretical landscape, it has been replaced in part by the concepts of “identification” and “recognition,” which are central to many theories of gender, class, sexuality, and race. The psychoanalytic inflection of identification, however, seems to dominate many of these discussions. See Robert Mitchell, Sympathy and the State in the Romantic Era: Systems, State Finance, and the Shadows of Futurity (New York: Routledge, 2007), for a study of the eighteenth-century and romantic provenance of “identification” and its structural difference from sympathy. 10. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. David Norton and Mary J. Norton (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 206. All references are to this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text. 11. This is Arlie Russel Hochschild’s term in The Managed Heart (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983). 12. J. G. A. Pocock, “The Mobility of Property and the Rise of EighteenthCentury Sociology,” Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 111, 112. For literary considerations of Pocock’s theories, see Sandra Sherman, Finance and Fictionality in the Early Eighteenth Century: Accounting for Defoe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); and James Thompson, Models of Value: Eighteenth-Century Political Economy and the Novel (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996). For an imaginative reading of the romantic casting of dispossessed liberalism, see Celeste Langan, Romantic Vagrancy: Wordsworth and the Simulation of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 13. Ian Hacking, The Emergence of Probability (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), esp. 176–85. Also see The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 14. See Irene Tucker, A Probable State: The Novel, the Contract, and the Jews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), for more along the same line of argument. 15. Gilles Deleuze, “Hume,” Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life, trans. Anne Boyman (New York: Zone, 2001), 40. See also Deleuze’s discussion of sympathy in Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature, trans. Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 37–54. 16. Annette Baier, A Progress of Sentiments: Reflections on Hume’s Treatise (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), 136. For an argument that owes much to Baier’s insights, see Blakey Vermeule, The Party of Humanity: Writing Moral Psychology in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), esp. chap. 6. 17. For a lucid discussion of “personality” in relation to eighteenth-century de-

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bates regarding property and copyright, see Mark Rose, Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 113–29. 18. Jerome Christensen, Practicing Enlightenment: Hume and the Formation of a Literary Career (Milwaukee: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 72. See also David Marshall, The Figure of Theater: Shaftesbury, Defoe, Adam Smith, and George Eliot (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), and The Surprising Effects of Sympathy. 19. Vermeule, Party of Humanity, 154–82. 20. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1978), 64. I quote the passage in full: Hume, whose work bears witness in every sentence to his real humanism, yet who dismisses the self as a prejudice, expresses in this contradiction the nature of psychology as such. In this he even has truth on his side, for that which posits itself as “I” is indeed mere prejudice, an ideological hypostatization of the abstract centers of domination, criticism of which demands the removal of the ideology of “personality.” But its removal also makes the residue all the easier to dominate.

See also Carol Kay, Political Constructions: Defoe, Richardson, and Sterne in Relation to Hobbes, Hume, and Burke (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988), for considerations of the potentially conservative implications of Hume’s philosophy. 21. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. James T. Boulton (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1968), 44. All references are to this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text. 22. In a perceptive article on the role of mimesis in Burke’s arguments on taste, Tom Huhn has noted that since Burke takes the power of imitation to be a version of the power of sympathy, imitation must be understood not only as the capacity for substitution but also as the enactment, enhancement, and extension of our affinity to, and “affection” for, one another. . . . The pleasure we take in artworks is but a species of the pleasure we take in society. . . . Mimesis functions for Burke as the principle of reproductive kinship. While sympathy is the term that describes our affinity or kinship as well as the means for feeling that kinship, imitation is thus the active production—or reproduction—of kinship. (“Burke’s Sympathy for Taste,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 35.3 [2002]: 387)

See also his book Imitation and Society: The Persistence of Mimesis in the Aesthetics of Burke, Hogarth, and Kant (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004). 23. Redfield, Phantom Formations, 137. 24. Although Tom Furniss is partly right when he states, in Edmund Burke’s Aesthetic Ideology: Language, Gender, and Political Economy in Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), that “the sublime, then, is experienced not through sympathy with, but in competition against, and at the expense of, other human beings” (33), he elides the possibility that the sublime and sympathy work jointly to mask a violence that underwrites attempts to coordinate subjective judgment with group identification.

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25. Luke Gibbons, Edmund Burke and Ireland: Aesthetics, Politics, and the Colonial Sublime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 98. Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text. 26. “Sensation is clearly put into conflict,” remarks Frances Ferguson, “with the notion of a cause outside the frame of a mimeticism that takes the individual body, human or animal, as its appropriate unit . . . sensation [becomes] adept at imitating itself ” (Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation [New York: Routledge, 1992], 61–62). Although Ferguson makes this point in connection with an argument about self-individuation, I want to emphasize that subjective experience in Burke is always a subjected one. 27. Peter Cosgrove has provocatively argued that this passive nonresistance to sublimity evokes “masochism [as] the deep structure of the futility of escaping determinism and therefore at the same time represents the power of desire to be free while acknowledging the necessity for submission” (“Edmund Burke, Gilles Deleuze, and the Subversive Masochism of the Image,” ELH 66.2 [1999]: 434). 28. In The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), Terry Eagleton sheds light on the mimetic requirements of group identity in his discussion of imitation as the ultimate principle of social cohesion: To mime is to submit to a law, but one so gratifying that freedom lies in such servitude. . . . The only problem is where all the imitating ends: social life for Burke would appear a kind of infinite chain of representations of representations, without ground or origin. If we do as others do, who do the same, then all of these copies would seem to lack a transcendental original, and society is shattered to a wilderness of mirrors. (53)

More interestingly, however, Cosgrove argues that there is evidence to suggest that Burke’s interest in maintaining group identity is linked to his party politics: religiously divided between Roman Catholicism on his mother’s side and the Church of Ireland on his father’s, Burke “underwent the experience of a cultural mulatto with regard to the religious situation in Ireland at the time and chose to conform to the dominant culture in order to further his political career.” The example of the execution in the Enquiry might echo Burke’s sympathy for Lord Lovat, who was beheaded for his “support of the Jacobite Catholic forces of the Young Pretender in 1745, and many of Burke’s Irish connections were in sympathy with the restoration of the Stuarts” (“Edmund Burke, Gilles Deleuze,” 419, 418). 29. Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, “Mimetic Efficacity: From Trance to Transference,” Stanford Literature Review 8 (Spring–Fall 1991): 115. 30. Quoted in Raphael and Macfie, introduction to Theory of Moral Sentiments, 28. For useful analyses of sympathy in Smith, see John Dwyer, The Age of Passions: An Interpretation of Adam Smith and Scottish Enlightenment Culture (East Linton, Scotland: Tuckwell, 1998), and J. Ralph Lindgren, The Social Philosophy of Adam Smith (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973). 31. See Raphael and Macfie, introduction to Theory of Moral Sentiments, 15–20,

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for a discussion of Smith’s revisions to editions 2 and 6 of his work, specifically his response to Hume’s critiques. 32. John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), 43. See the entire chapter “Sympathy and the Production of Society,” 18–56. 33. Marshall, Figure of Theater, 176. 34. In Scenes of Sympathy: Identity and Representation in Victorian Fiction (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000), Audrey Jaffe has described “the scene of sympathy” as a drama that draws on the language of negotiation and compromise in order to allow the subject to make sense of its felt dislocations in the presence of others: “Sympathy is the name for a self engaged in an act of self-definition and self-identification, and the middle-class self is the self that is repeatedly and paradigmatically called upon to perform this act. . . . The threat encoded in the sympathetic exchange is that on which a capitalist economy relies: the possibility that the spectator ‘at ease’ and the beggar might indeed, someday, change places” (6–7). 35. As Luc Boltanski remarks in Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), “This is a fundamental political question [in Smith] since it concerns the possibility of an agreement between unequally affected or unequally concerned persons which does not rely on force. . . . The moral mechanism must be established within the limitations imposed by a society formed from a collection of separate individuals and without recourse to notions of tribal solidarity or emotional community” (36, 38). 36. Gibbons, Edmund Burke and Ireland, 89, 97–98. 37. For a discussion of the gothic element in Smith’s moral and economic writings, see Stefan Andriopoulos, “The Invisible Hand: Supernatural Agency in Political Economy and the Gothic Novel,” ELH 66.3 (1999): 739–58. 38. Julie Ellison, Cato’s Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 11, 12. 39. In this sense, Tzvetan Todorov’s reading of recognition in Smith too easily depends on accepting its dubiously humanistic structure. See Life in Common: An Essay in General Anthropology, trans. Katherine Golsan and Lucy Golsan (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), 14–20. 40. Peter de Bolla, “The Visibility of Visuality,” Visions in Context, ed. Teresa Brennan and Martin Jay (New York: Routledge, 1996), 75. 41. Esther Schor, Bearing the Dead: The British Culture of Mourning from the Enlightenment to Victoria (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), 36, 37. See also David A. Collings’s “Bentham’s Auto-Icon: Utilitarianism and the Evisceration of the Common Body,” Prose Studies 23.3 (2000): 95–127, and Warren Montag, “Necro-Economics: Adam Smith and Death in the Life of the Universal,” Radical Philosophy 134 (November–December 2005): 7–17. 42. Jan Mieszkowski, Labors of Imagination: Aesthetics and Political Economy from Kant to Althusser (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 113, 114. See esp. chap. 4, “Economics Beyond Interest,” 111–46. 43. David Collings notes a unique fear of the future in Edmund Burke, who

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fearing a possible Jacobin rule, chose to be buried in an unmarked grave on his estate. However, Burke’s choice forces an “absolute disjuncture between the dead and the living”: by making it impossible to visit his grave, bless his memory, and implicitly receive in turn his legacy, he ghosts himself; as one who did not receive a proper internment, he haunts the estate and the continuing tradition as an unblest spirit, one who must ever reproach, rather than bestow himself upon, the living. He has broken that contract with the unborn, forcing the living, in turn, to fail in their attempt to keep faith with the dead. The body of tradition, no longer handed down in unbroken continuity, descends into oblivion at his unmarked grave, as if he himself brings about the disaster that he foresaw. (David Collings, Monstrous Society: Reciprocity, Discipline, and the Political Uncanny, c. 1780–1848 (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, forthcoming).

44. For an interesting reading of the scene of annihilation in Shelley, see chapter 4, “Apocalypse and Politics: Percy Bysshe Shelley’s 1819,” in Steven Goldsmith, Unbuilding Jerusalem: Apocalypse and Romantic Representation (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993), 209–60. 45. I follow Forest Pyle’s remark in The Ideology of Imagination: Subject and Society in the Discourse of Romanticism (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995) that “when we attribute to the self the source of truth and agency, according to Shelley, we replicate the metaleptic confusion of cause and effect: the subject is an effect that our theologies and philosophies habitually mistake for a cause. The imagination is a force that, like magnetism and the wind and, perhaps, like history, remains always ‘immanent in its effects’ ” (96). 46. See Andrew Bennett, Romantic Poets and the Culture of Posterity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), where he mounts an argument around posterity as “a call to the future determined by the past and received in the present” (170). 47. William Hazlitt, The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols. (London: Dent and Sons, 1931), 12: 245–46. 48. F. R. Leavis, “Shelley,” English Romantic Poets: Modern Essays in Criticism (New York: Galaxy, 1960), 270. For a contrast, see Karen A. Weisman, Imageless Truths: Shelley’s Poetic Fictions (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), for a nuanced reading of the interrelated metaphysical and quotidian (or actual) concerns of Shelley’s “fiction making.” 49. Jerrold E. Hogle, Shelley’s Process: Radical Transference and the Development of His Major Work (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 11. 50. In Romantic Returns: Superstition, Imagination, History (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000), Deborah Elise White has noted that “the very unknowability of the future brings one up against the problem of the referentiality of any language claiming to be” since the “temporal difference that poetry articulates occurs in the form of a language that compels one to ask not only what it is about but whether or not it can ever be about anything” (103). 51. Marc Redfield, The Politics of Aesthetics: Nationalism, Gender, Romanticism (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003), 150. I have greatly benefited

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from Redfield’s sophisticated reading of the principle of “undecidability” (150) in Shelley’s writings. For another consideration of Shelley’s usefulness for diverse political groups, see Bouthaina Shaaban, “Shelley and the Chartists,” Shelley: Poet and Legislator of the World, ed. Betty T. Bennett and Stuart Curran (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 114–25. 52. To Leigh Hunt, August 15, 1819. The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Frederick L. Jones, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1964), 2: 109. 53. For an interesting discussion of the cognitive complexities of Shelleyan love, see Adela Pinch, “Thinking About the Other in Romantic Love,” Romantic Passions, ed. Elizabeth Fay, Romantic Circles Web site, University of Maryland, Romantic Circles Praxis Series page (April 1998), www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/passions/pinch/ pinch.html. 54. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, trans. Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 96, 93. 55. See Lloyd Abbey, Destroyer and Preserver: Shelley’s Poetic Skepticism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979); C. E. Pulos, The Deep Truth: A Study of Shelley’s Skepticism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1962); Earl R. Wasserman, Shelley: A Critical Reading (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971). 56. Paul de Man, “Shelley Disfigured,” Deconstruction and Criticism, Harold Bloom et al. (New York: Continuum, 1985), 68–69. Additionally, in the same volume, see Jacques Derrida’s discussion of Shelley, in “Living On/Border Lines,” 75–176; and J. Hillis Miller, “The Critic as Host,” 217–53. See also Tilottama Rajan’s important readings of Shelley in Dark Interpreter: The Discourse of Romanticism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1980), and The Supplement of Reading: Figures of Understanding in Romantic Theory and Practice (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990). In Literary Power and the Criteria of Truth (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1995), Laura Quinney relates the earlier critics of Shelleyan skepticism to the de Manian school by pointing out their shared commitment to what attracted Shelley himself—the “austerity” and oddly autonomous sublimity of literariness (87–144, esp. 88–89). 57. Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism After Structuralism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982), 279. 58. See Pyle, Ideology of Imagination, 100 ff. 59. Neil Hertz, “Lurid Figures,” Reading de Man Reading, ed. Lindsay Waters and Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 86. 60. De Man, “Shelley Disfigured,” 67. 61. Jerome McGann, “Shall These Bones Live?” The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations and Historical Method and Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 96–97. 62. It isn’t hard to hear resonances of this critical model of idealized self-creation in a range of early New Historicist criticism. For example, in the polemical essay “New Historicism: Back to the Future,” in Levinson et al., Rethinking Historicism: Critical Readings in Romantic History (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), Marjorie Levinson

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theorizes the perspective of historicist thought in terms of an ethical orientation toward the past, one that depends upon seeing it as the site of an as-yet unfulfilled, epistemological promise. Believing that “there are moments when two ages call to each other in powerful ways,” she goes on to ask, “are we, or could we make ourselves the consciousness of the Romantic movement produced as a moment in the accomplishment of that action? To ask this is to wonder who we are that we produce the Romantics in just this way. It is also to inquire who they are, to have produced us in just this way. Once again, we go back to the future” (51). Historicism here works to confirm (rather than unsettle) the relationship between “ourselves” and the “they” of the past. In a brief but suggestive reflection that repeats de Man’s critical move, Jerome McGann conjures Shelley when he declares, in The Romantic Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), that “our own forms of thought thereby begin to enter our consciousness via the critique developed out of certain past forms of feeling. Like Trelawney at the cremation of Shelley, we shall reach for the unconsumed heart of the poem only if we are prepared to suffer a genuine change through its possession” (13). For a perceptive reading of the canonical fascination with Shelley’s presence, alive and dead, in romantic criticism, see Karen Swann, “Shelley’s Pod People,” Romanticism and the Insistence of the Aesthetic, ed. Forest Pyle, Romantic Circles Praxis Series (February 2005), www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/aesthetic/swann/swann.html. 63. “Refutation of Deism,” Shelley’s Prose, ed. David Lee Clark (New York: New Amsterdam, 1988), 126–27. 64. The notion of the call surfaces prominently throughout Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), where the caller is definable in a “worldly” way by nothing at all. The caller is Dasein in its uncanniness: a primordial, thrown Being-in-the-world as the “not-at-home”—the bare “that it is” in the “nothing” of the world. The caller is unfamiliar to the everyday they-self; it is something like an alien voice. What could be more alien to the “they,” lost in the manifold “world” of its concern, than the Self which has been individualized down to itself in uncanniness and been thrown into the “nothing”? (321–22)

See also Jean-Luc Marion, Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002), where the call is related to the experience of the gift, as well as Avital Ronell’s use of the Heideggerian call in The Telephone Book (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 47 ff. 65. See W. V. Quine, “Speaking of Objects,” “Ontological Relativity” and Other Essays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), and Word and Object (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1960). 66. Jacques Lacan, “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious,” Ecrits, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 292–324. 67. “The more that greatness, creative force, indubitable truth present themselves in a name,” remarks Blanchot, “the more it is ready to denounce itself as the error or the injustice which has thrived at the expense of the nameless.” Blanchot,

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The Step Not Beyond, trans. Lycette Nelson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 37. 68. Dawson, Unacknowledged Legislator, 229–30; Robert Kaufman, “Legislators of the Post-Everything World: Shelley’s Defence of Adorno,” ELH 63.3 (1996): 707–33. Kaufman suggests that the “inspirational” models for poetry employ traditional Enlightenment definitions of sympathy as prophecy—definitions Shelley had already begun to reformulate considerably: “Prophecy, while dependent on auditors, viewers, or readers to receive its messages, involves primarily those who ‘create’ or ‘make’ art. Sympathy, on the other hand, concerns in the most basic sense the aesthetic experience of people who are not literally ‘makers’ of art, but rather, respondents to it” (708). Shelley’s notion of sympathy proposes “an alternative or supplement to a primary account of art as inspirational and utopian model of freedom” (708), one that foregrounds the productive value of aesthetic sympathy as a mode of critical thinking that “charts no endpoint to the going-out of self, no ultimate identification of self and other. Hence ‘identification’ is what the subject at once seeks and, in respect for otherness or non-identity, seeks also to short-circuit or complicate” (725). 69. Theodor Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, trans. Shierry Weber (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), 194. See also Robert Kaufman, “Aura, Still,” October (Winter 2002): 49 ff. 70. Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005), 148. 71. “Posterity is a force-field of reception,” notes Bennett, “which displaces and disturbs the very production of poetry. The final lack or absence denoted by the term ‘posterity’—the absence of the author at the moment of reception and, differently, the absence of the audience as a function of the endless deferral which posterity in this sense truly predicates—produces a kind of theoretical and practical dislocation, an aporia, at and as the origin of inscription” (Romantic Poets, 201). Also see John B. Pierce, “ ‘Mont Blanc and Prometheus Unbound: Shelley’s Use of the Rhetoric of Silence,” Keats-Shelley Journal 38 (1989), 103–26. 72. One might call to mind Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind,” where the poet beckons the “Wild Spirit” to “Drive my dead thoughts over the universe / Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth! / And, by the incantation of this verse, / Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth/Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!” (63–67). Citing these lines in his article “Kindling and Ash: Radical Aestheticism in Keats and Shelley,” Studies in Romanticism 42 (Winter 2003): 427–69, Forest Pyle reads the “embers” of such moments as evoking an aesthetic that resists cultural recuperation and salvation, either humanist or historicist—an argument that resonates with my own throughout this book. See Derrida’s remarks (in the context of a reading of Paul Celan) that “Ash . . . annihilates or threatens to annihilate even the possibility of bearing witness to annihilation,” in that “ash” speaks for the very unavailability of an immediate, uninterrupted testimony of the past (Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan, ed. Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen [New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 69). One should also add Derrida’s Cinders,

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trans. Ned Lukacher (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991). Additionally, see Maureen N. McLane’s reading of the image of the urn in The Revolt of Islam as Shelley’s remaking of the discourse of futurity (Romanticism and the Human Sciences: Poetry, Population, and the Discourse of the Species [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000], 122–26). A similar gesture—and a distinctly Shelleyan one— which links critique with renunciation, echoes in Michel Foucault’s interview “The Masked Philosopher” (Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954–1984, vol. 1, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow [New York: New Press, 1997, 321–28]), where he states: I can’t help but dream about a kind of criticism that would try not to judge but to bring an oeuvre, a book, a sentence, an idea to life; it would light fires, watch the grass grow, listen to the wind, and catch the sea foam in the breeze and scatter it. It would multiply not judgments but signs of existence; it would summon them, drag them from their sleep. Perhaps it would invent them sometimes—all the better. All the better. Criticism that hands down sentences sends me to sleep; I’d like a criticism of scintillating leaps of the imagination. It would not be sovereign or dressed in red. It would bear the lightning of possible storms. (323)

73. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1992), 246–47. 74. Ian Balfour, The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002), 16, 18. In his reading of the “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Balfour points out that in his drafts, “Benjamin took as his point of departure Friedrich Schlegel’s much cited dictum: ‘The historian is a prophet turned backward,’ ” which has often been interpreted as sanctioning a suspect historicism that “lies first in the political tendencies usually associated with it—the empathy of official historiography which is almost always on the side of the victors . . . and second in that its task is an infinite one, with the goal of history assured as an ideal but indefinitely postponed—the worst of both worlds” (15). Benjamin, according to Balfour, offers an alternate reading of Schlegel: “The paradoxical task of politics, then, as of history generally, is to prophesy the present. And to make matters more complex, one achieves this visionary perspective on the present by turning one’s back from one’s own time to the past, not unlike the stance of Klee’s Angelus Novus, whose back is to the future” (16). The theoretical assimilation of Frankfurt School politics and aesthetics to Shelley’s writings has been a particularly invigorating recent development. See Mark Kipperman, “Shelley, Adorno, and the Scandal of Committed Art,” Reading Shelley’s Interventionist Poetry, 1819–1820, ed. Michael Scrivener, Romantic Circles Praxis Series (May 2001), www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/interventionist. Additionally, see Horst Hohne, “Shelley’s ‘Socialism’ Revisited,” Shelley: Poet and Legislator of the World, ed. Betty T. Bennett and Stuart Curran (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 200–212, where Hohne discusses romantic identity alongside contemporary socialism, although his argument is premised on a humanistic reclamation of the socialized self, rather than its radical dispersal into community; Steven Jones, “Shelley’s Satire of Succession and Brecht’s Anatomy of Regression: ‘The Mask of

*3=:•=3•5:•127–130

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Anarchy’ and Der anachronistische Zug oder Freiheit und Democracy,” also in Bennett and Curran, 193–200; Kaufman, “Aura, Still,” 61 ff., and “Legislators of the PostEverything World”; Forest Pyle, “ ‘Frail Spells’: Shelley and the Ironies of Exile,” Irony and Clerisy, ed. Deborath Elise White, Romantic Circles Praxis Series (August 1999), www. rc.umd.edu/praxis/irony/pyle/frail.html, esp. 6. For earlier works that have sought to develop a “Leftist Shelley,” see Paul Foot’s Red Shelley (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1980), and Scrivener, Radical Shelley (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982). 75. Karen A. Weisman, “Provocation and Person-hood: Romanticism in Extremis,” European Romantic Review 9 (Spring 1998): 180. 76. William Flesch defines this kind of charismatic power as “inconceivable as a first-person experience, because the notion of experience already presupposes the receptivity of the person experiencing. Charisma consists in giving the impression of a self-sufficiency inconceivable for the first-person experience: charismatic authority always belongs to the other” (“The Ambivalence of Generosity: Keats Reading Shakespeare,” ELH 62.1 [1995]: 149). 77. Claus Westermann, Basic Forms of Prophetic Speech, trans. H. C. White (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1967). 78. In Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 97. The prophetic concept of historical knowledge seems to evoke the other side of the kind of traumatic historical recovery Cathy Caruth has theorized. For her, approaching a text as “a listening to the address of another, an address that remains enigmatic yet demands a listening and a response,” allows one “to recognize the possibility of a history that is no longer straight-forwardly referential . . . that a rethinking of reference is aimed not at eliminating history but at resituating it in our understanding, that is, at precisely permitting history to arise where immediate understanding may not” (Unclaimed Experience [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996], 9, 11). Although I agree with Caruth’s argument, I want to suggest that prophecy suggests a history that might yet occur, without specifying a traumatic event as its catalyst. 79. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1999), 100. 80. In a reading of Prometheus Unbound, Rajan notes that the cave of Demogorgon represents the site where “the philosophical foundations of traditional hermeneutics are eroded. . . . The reader’s potentially negating presence emerges from the gaps and silences where the dialogue within the text fails to become a meeting of minds and thus reflects back on reading as dialogue” (Supplement of Reading, 310). In Unbuilding Jerusalem, Goldsmith has provocatively remarked that Demogorgon represents “the disinterestedness we associate with Kant’s third Critique . . . a source of pure negativity, an originary worldlessness unencumbered by the determinants of place or circumstance and free from the weight of a particular body” (221). He goes on to posit Asia and Demogorgon as representing a dialectic between presence and negation that characterizes aesthetic thought in Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man. In addition, see William Jewett’s consideration of Shelley’s ethics of (dis)

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embodiment in verse drama and lyric, in “History’s Lethean Song: Charles the First and The Triumph of Life,” chapter 6 of his Fatal Autonomy: Romantic Drama and the Rhetoric of Agency (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997), 205–53. 81. On the use of negation in Shelley, see Dawson, Unacknowledged Legislator: The language of negation is the natural language of Perfectibility. In the final analysis Perfectibility does not offer any final goals, for it insists on continual change, and distrusts fixed goals as attempts to limit progress. . . . To be man-and-nothing-but is not to be limited by human nature or the human condition, but to be in a state of boundless potentiality, a state only to be defined in negatives, for to ascribe positive attributes would be to limit it. (120–21)

In addition, see Timothy Webb, “The Unascended Heaven: Negatives in Prometheus Unbound,” Shelley Revalued: Essays from the Gregynog Conference, ed. Kelvin Everest (Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1983), 37–62. It is interesting also to note that in the treatise “A Philosophical View of Reform,” Shelley provocatively describes the uniqueness of the newly established United States in terms of a series of political and social negations: It has no king; that is, it has no officer to whom wealth and from whom corruption flows. It has no hereditary oligarchy; that is, it acknowledges no order of men privileged to cheat and insult the rest of the members of the state and who inherit a right of legislating and judging which the principles of human nature compel them to exercise to their own profit and to the detriment of those not included within their peculiar class. It has no established church; that is, it has no system of opinions respecting the abstrusest questions which can be topics of human thought founded in an age of error and fanaticism and opposed by law to all other opinions. . . . It has no false representation, whose consequences are captivity, confiscation, infamy, and ruin, but a true representation. The will of the many is represented by the few in the assemblies of legislation and by the officers of the executive entrusted with the administration of the executive power almost as directly as the will of one person can be represented by the will of another. . . . Lastly, it has an institution by which it is honorably distinguished from all other governments which ever existed. It constitutionally acknowledges the progress of human improvement and is framed under the limitation of the probability of more simple views of political science being rendered applicable to human life. There is a law by which the constitution is reserved for revision every ten years. (Shelley’s Prose, 234)

For a discussion of the nuances of Shelley’s ideas of “law” and “legislation” in connection with his (factually erroneous) belief in the revisionary status of the American constitution, see William Keach, “Shelley and the Constitution of Political Authority,” Shelley: Poet and Legislator of the World, ed. Betty T. Bennett and Stuart Curran (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 39–48. 82. Michael Palmer, “Some Notes on Shelley, Poetics, and the Present,” KeatsShelley Journal 42 (1993): [Shelley] represents a poetry of critique and renewal, rather than of passive representation, a poetry that risks speaking to the central human and social occasions of its time, yet speaks from a decentered and largely invisible place. It exploits the mar-

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gins to speak as it will, out of difference, rather than as it is always importuned and rewarded, out of sameness. This “other voice of poetry,” as Octavio Paz has noted, speaks to the present from a unique (or at least singularly focussed) relation to past and future derived from the exigencies of art. It speaks to the present, whether a present-now or a present-to-come (or, indeed, one never to be) much as do poets as apparently diverse as Dickinson and Akhmatova, Mandelstam, and Holan. (46–47)

Chapter Four: The Art of Knowing Nothing 1. Mary Shelley to Edward Trelawny, April 1829, The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, ed. Betty T. Bennett, 2 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 2: 72. 2. Julie Ellison, Delicate Subjects: Romanticism, Gender, and the Ethics of Understanding (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990), 11. 3. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979); Margaret Homans, Women Writers and Poetic Identity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980); Cora Kaplan, Sea Changes (London: Verso, 1986); Jan Montefiore, Feminism and Poetry (London: Pandora, 1987). 4. Ellison, Delicate Subjects, 10, 11. 5. Alan Liu, “The New Historicism and the Work of Mourning,” Studies in Romanticism 35.4 (1996): 553–62. 6. Tilottama Rajan, The Supplement of Reading: Figures of Understanding in Romantic Theory and Practice (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990). 7. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Men and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Sylvana Tomaselli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 153. 8. Mary Jacobus, “ ‘The Science of Herself ’: Scenes of Female Enlightenment,” Romanticism, History, and the Possibilities of Genre: Re-forming Literature, 1789–1837, ed. Tilottama Rajan and Julia M. Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 241. 9. See Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989). Also of interest are New Maladies of the Soul, trans. Ross Mitchell Guberman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), and Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). 10. Jacobus, “ ‘Science of Herself,’ ” 242. 11. Amanda Anderson has used the term aggrandized agency to describe the way in which some feminist critics conceive certain female subjects in literature and history as unusually attuned to and performing those acts of systematic resistance to which they are otherwise utterly bound. See The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), 36–46.

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12. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 129 ff. 13. Julie Ellison, Cato’s Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 98. 14. As Thomas Pfau notes, melancholy has had this definition since at least the sixteenth century: Beginning with Albrecht Durer’s and Lorenzo Lott’s depictions of melancholia as the distinctive affective undercurrent of modern knowing, itself temporarily refigured as the Protestant indictment of the humanist’s sinful aspirations in the popular chapbook versions of Doctor Faustus (1587) and Marlowe’s eponymous tragedy, and finally writ large in Robert Burton’s formally and methodologically sprawling Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), a new feature is added to modernity—namely, the experience of thinking as a process accompanied by a feeling of disorientation at once integral to and hence uncontainable by thought. (Romantic Moods: Paranoia, Trauma, and Melancholy, 1794–1840 [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005], 315–16)

15. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 165. 16. In The Party of Humanity: Writing Moral Psychology in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), Blakey Vermeule remarks that the mind, as Hume describes it, depends on the periodic spacing and succession of impressions and ideas deriving directly from the world. When Hume turns from the mind’s working to its relationship to actual features of the world, he dabbles with extreme skepticism and so becomes subject to frequent bouts of melancholy. Yet naturalism is not Hume’s alternative to absorptive melancholy; if anything, it is its predecessor, for his melancholy simply inherits the periodicity formerly associated with naturalistic spacing of perceptions. (190)

Similarly commenting on Hume’s literary strategies, John J. Richetti has noted “the displacement of philosophy by philosophical writing, which is not truly skeptical as such but is a literary deployment of skepticism to place thought in psychological and moral reality” (Philosophical Writing: Locke, Berkeley, Hume [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983], 228). 17. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Thomas C. Faulkner, Nicolas K. Kiessling, Rhonda L. Blair, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), 1: 415. 18. See Wolf Lepenies, Melancholy and Society, trans. Jeremy Gaines and Doris Jones (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), where he elucidates melancholy as a historical and class-based phenomenon that arose parallel to the ascendancy of the (German) bourgeoisie in the late-eighteenth century. See esp. chap. 4, “On the Origins of Bourgeois Melancholy: Germany in the Eighteenth Century,” 55–86. 19. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth, 1957), 14: 245–46. 20. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford,

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Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997), 144, 145–46. In addition, see Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 57–72. 21. “As a mode of relation,” writes Butler, “neither gender nor sexuality is precisely a possession, but, rather, is a mode of being dispossessed, a way of being for another or by virtue of another” (Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence [London: Verso, 2004], 24). 22. Stanley Cavell, Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 12. For Cavell, contemplating the “feminine difference in subjectivity” in relation to skepticism evokes a complicated consideration of the desire for self-revelation and social exposure. As he himself acknowledges, the melodrama of the unknown woman derives yet differs from his earlier work, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981). For commentary on the intersection of gender with skepticism in Cavell, see Karen Hanson, “Being Doubted, Being Assured,” The Senses of Stanley Cavell, ed. Richard Fleming and Michael Payne (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1989), 214–29. Self-loss characterizes a difficult, counterintuitive strain of humanism that treats identity as realizable only at the point of utter deracination or nomadism. As Cary Wolfe has noted, Cavell is concerned with bringing “to light not an unchanging human essence but rather a dynamic, ‘homeless’ self of ‘transience’ and ‘onwardness,’ a self that consists (or maybe ‘subsists’) in always leaving itself behind” (Critical Environments: Postmodern Theory and the Pragmatics of the “Outside” [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998], 23). See “Coming to Terms: Stanley Cavell and the Ethics of Skepticism” (22–39), which forms the final part of the larger section “Pragmatism: Rorty, Cavell, and Others.” Finally, see Tammy Clewell, “Cavell and the Endless Mourning of Skepticism,” Angelaki 9.3 (2004): 75–87, for a sustained reflection on the subject of loss in Cavell’s thought. 23. In Romanticism and Gender (New York: Routledge, 1993), Anne K. Mellor has considered a “feminine Romanticism” that resists the dominative themes of masculine, poetic identity in favor of “a subjectivity constructed in relation to other subjectivities,” itself defined as “fluid, absorptive, responsive, with permeable ego boundaries” (209). Stuart Curran has suggested, by contrast, that the marginalized tradition of sentimental women’s poetry is a cultural response to the social and aesthetic predations of the masculine sphere: “the void at the center of sensibility should alert us to a profound awareness among these poets of being themselves dispossessed, figured through details they do not control, uniting an unstructurable longing of sensibility with the hard-earned sense of thingness” (“The I Altered,” Romanticism and Feminism, ed. Anne K. Mellor [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988], 205). My own argument, however, follows Susan J. Wolfson’s in “Dorothy Wordsworth in Conversation with William” (in the same volume), that the deindividualizing aesthetic of Dorothy Wordsworth testifies to an “otherness” in her imagination whose “impulses” “may not so much be the imperatives of an alienating masculine tradition, as an ‘otherness’ in the mind itself ” (163). Expanding on the same line of argument, Andrew Bennett and Yopie Prins (the latter in

   

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a Victorian context) have respectively described the generic dimensions of dispossession by focusing on the nineteenth-century female poet, who performatively acknowledges her own social and cultural disenfranchisement. Divested from literary cultures that fail to assimilate them, female poets conceptualized their posterity as a projected repetition of the losses suffered in the present, thus envisioning an anonymous counterculture of feminine dispossession that is generationally repeated. See Bennett, Romantic Poets and the Culture of Posterity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 65–91; and Prins, Victorian Sappho (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), esp. 174–245. Greg Kucich has argued that the dispossessive model of feminine identity precludes critical attention to the nuances of romantic masculinity. See “ ‘This Horrid Theatre of Human Sufferings’: Gendering the Stages of History in Catharine Macaulay and Percy Bysshe Shelley,” Lessons of Romanticism, ed. Thomas Pfau and Robert F. Gleckner (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998), 448–65. Finally, see Barbara Johnson’s argument in A World of Difference (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), where she considers “whether there is a simple incompatability between the depersonalization of deconstruction and the repersonalization of feminism, or whether each is not in reality haunted by the ghost of the other” (144). She notes that both are ideologically dependent on moments of abstraction and personalization, thus foregrounding the rhetorical historicity of gender. 24. In “ ‘Christabel’: The Wandering Mother and the Enigma of Form,” Studies in Romanticism 23(Winter 1984): 533–53, Karen Swann argues that “female bodies ‘naturally’ seem to figure an ungraspable truth: that form, habitually viewed as the arbitrary, contingent vessel of more enduring meanings, is yet the source and determinant of all meanings, whether the subject’s or the world’s” (544). See also “Suffering and Sensation in The Ruined Cottage,” PMLA 106.1 (1991): 83–95, where she analyzes the anonymous figure of Margaret as a gothic element informing Wordsworthian aesthetics. For another consideration of the relationship between form, gender, and dispossession, see Karen A. Weisman, “Form and Loss in Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets,” Wordsworth Circle 33.1 (2002): 23–27. 25. Mary Wollstonecraft, Thoughts on The Education of Daughters (New York: Woodstock, 1994), 111. 26. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), 150–51. 27. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), 9 (italics in original). The discussion of the temporality of sedimentation appears in an extended footnote, 244–46. 28. See John Krapp, “Female Romanticism at the End of History,” Texas Studies in Language and Literature 46.1 (Spring 2004): 73–91, which considers the anachronistic potential of romantic women’s poetry as a challenge to progressive movements in masculinist narratives. On the subject of female impersonality as a symbol of philosophical purity, see Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, “The Unrepresentable,” The Subject of Philosophy, ed. Thomas Trezise (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 116–57, which centers around discussions of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right

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and Schlegel’s Lucinde. For an interesting discussion of Lacoue-Labarthe’s text, see Marc Redfield, The Politics of Aesthetics: Nationalism, Gender, Romanticism (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003), 128–33. 29. Claudia L. Johnson, Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s: Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, Burney, Austen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 48, 49. 30. In Cato’s Tears, Julie Ellison discusses the connections between the privileges of male sentimentalism and geographical mobility in the chapter “Walkers, Stalkers, Captives, Slaves,” 148–70. In the context of contemporary theory, Rosa Braidotti has remarked on the ways in which the “feminine” has been appropriated as a sign of radicalism by many male theorists. Taking into account “Derrida’s injunction that in so far as it cannot be said the ‘feminine’ functions as the most pervasive signifier; Foucault’s bland assertion that the absence of women from the philosophical scene is constitutive of the rules of the philosophical game, to Deleuze’s notion of the ‘becoming-woman’ marking a qualitative transformation in human consciousness—the feminization of thought seems to be prescribed as a fundamental step in the general program of anti-humanism that marks our era” (Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory [New York: Columbia University Press, 1984], 140). 31. See Juliana Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992), for a consideration of this argument. In The Male Malady: Fictions of Impotence in the French Romantic Novel (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1993), Margaret Waller similarly ties the anxieties of masculinity to melancholy, and in “Romantic Exile and the Melancholia of Identification,” differences 7.2 (1995): 111–26, Kari Weil suggests that the male hero’s deployment of melancholia forms his identity by recuperating a colonial past that elides otherness and difference. 32. Jacobus, “ ‘Science of Herself,’ ” 258. 33. Frances Ferguson makes this argument in her essay, “Wollstonecraft Our Contemporary,” Gender and Theory: Dialogues on Feminist Criticism, ed. Linda Kauffman (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 51–57. The piece responds to Timothy Reiss’s in the same volume, “Revolution in Bounds: Wollstonecraft, Women, and Reason,” 11–50, where he critiques the regressiveness of Wollstonecraft’s views. Wollstonecraft’s negative assessment of femininity extends to her critique of property as the basis for a degenerate “effeminacy” of the unthinking body (23 ff.). Indeed, her arguments for a masculine kind of reason verge on homophobic harangues of “equivocal beings,” which Johnson cogently examines in her book. 34. For a study of the history of privacy, see Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (New York: Harper and Row, 1977). 35. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1999), 32–33. 36. Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 91.

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*3=:•=3•5:•147–152

37. Tilottama Rajan has analyzed this experimental formalism in Mary Hays’s epistolary novel Memoirs of Emma Courtney, coining the term autonarration to refer to a kind of writing that “puts under erasure the assumption made in autobiography that the subject can tell her own story. It is not autobiography because it is still fiction, but it is not just fiction because of its genesis in the life of a real individual. . . . Autonarration therefore involves a double textualization of both the narrative and the life on which it is based” (“Autonarration and Genotext in Mary Hays’ Memoirs of Emma Courtney,” Romanticism, History, and the Possibilities of Genre, ed. Rajan and Wright, 223). 38. Mary Jacobus, “In Love with a Cold Climate: Travelling with Wollstonecraft,” First Things: The Maternal Imaginary in Literature, Art, and Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1995), 63–82. Additionally, see Alan Liu, Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1989), 568–69, where Liu discusses the element of violent, temporal change implicit in the historical revisionism of the French Revolution. 39. For a discussion of the “female complaint” as the site of a productive social critique, see Lauren Berlant, “The Female Complaint,” Social Text (Fall 1988): 237–59. 40. For another interesting meditation on the ethical aspect of Wollstonecraft’s writings, see Nancy Yousef, “Wollstonecraft, Rousseau, and the Revision of Romantic Subjectivity,” Studies in Romanticism 38 (Winter 1999): 537–57. 41. Denise Riley, “Am I That Name?” Feminism and the Category of “Women” in History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 47. She points out that the “futurity” of women was already echoed in contemporary social theory such as Millar’s Origin of the Distinction of Ranks (1771), but it was precisely this rhetoric which helped reconceive the “social” as that which could transform supposedly less ambiguous spiritual capacities of “women to fresh ends”. . . . It could deal with the tarnished associations of “women” by affecting a bland redistribution and dilution of the sexual onto the familial. Or it could settle the irresistibly sexualised elements of “women” onto new categories of immiseration and delinquency, which then became sociological problems. This new production of “the social” offered a magnificent occasion for the rehabilitation of “women.” (48)

42. The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols. (London: Dent and Sons, 1931), 20: 179. 43. Mary Shelley, Matilda, The Novels and Selected Works of Mary Shelley, ed. Pamela Clemit, 8 vols. (London: Pickering, 1996), 2: 1–67. All further citations will appear parenthetically in the text. 44. Julie Carlson, “Coming After: Shelley’s Proserpine,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 41 (Winter 1999): 353–54. See also “Characters: Mary Wollstonecraft and Germaine de Staël,” Modern Philology 98 (November 2000): 320–38. Other articles that explore the influences of Wollstonecraft’s melancholy on Mary Shelley are Graham Allen, “Beyond Biographism: Mary Shelley’s Matilda, Intertextuality, and the Wandering Subject,” Romanticism 3.2 (1997): 170–84; Mary Jacobus, “Guilt That Wants a Name: Mary Shelley’s Unreadability,” Psychoanalysis and the Scene of

*3=:•=3•5:•152–159

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Reading (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999): 165–201; and Tilottama Rajan, “Mary Shelley’s Mathilda, Melancholy, and the Political Economy of Romanticism,” Studies in the Novel 26.2 (1994): 43–68. 45. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 3 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 1: 52. 46. William Godwin, “Of History and Romance,” Caleb Williams, ed. and intro. Maurice Hindle (London: Penguin, 1988), 361. Further references will be given in parentheses in the text. 47. Andrea K. Henderson, Romantic Identities: Versions of Subjectivity, 1774–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 120–29. 48. See Rajan, “Mary Shelley’s Mathilda.” 49. Jacques Derrida, Mémoires for Paul de Man, trans. Cecile Lindsay, Jonathan Culler, Eduardo Cadava, and Peggy Kamuf (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 65. 50. Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, “Notes on the Phantom: A Complement to Freud’s Metapsychology,” The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis, ed. and trans. Nicholas T. Rand (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 171–76. 51. Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 265. 52. Anne-Lise François and Daniel Mozes, “Don’t Say ‘I Love You’: Agency, Gender and Romanticism in Mary Shelley’s Matilda,” Mary Shelley’s Fictions: From Frankenstein to Falkner, ed. Michael Eberle-Sinatra (London: Macmillan, 2000), 61. 53. Rajan, “Mary Shelley’s Mathilda,” 47–48. Henderson also notes that Shelley dispenses with the fanciful qualities of interiority because, unlike her husband, “she does not construct subjectivity along an axis of depth but along an axis of time. Since for her life is composed of alternate periods of (poetic) static and (dramatic) action, character can only be understood as the sum and the history of those moments” (Romantic Identities, 127). Henderson’s description, however, nevertheless ascribes a developmental narrative to Matilda, who in railing against “the hazards of feminine passivity” (128), comes to personify and enable the kind of oppressive subjectivity she ostensibly resists. 54. Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 244. 55. Philip Fisher, The Vehement Passions (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002), 89–90. See the entire chapter on “Time,” 71–92. 56. For a discussion of the psychic implications of quotation in the narrative of Matilda, see Jacobus, “Guilt That Wants a Name.” 57. Butler remarks on this kind of expropriation in Bodies That Matter: It is one of the ambivalent implications of the decentering of the subject to have one’s writing be the site of a necessary and inevitable expropriation. But this yielding of ownership over what one writes has an important set of political corollaries, for the taking up, reforming, deforming of one’s words does open up a difficult future terrain of community, one in which the hope of ever fully recognizing oneself in the terms by which one signifies is sure to be disappointed. This not owning of one’s words is there from the start, however, since speaking is always in some ways the speaking of

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*3=:•=3•5:•159–164

a stranger through and as oneself, the melancholic reiteration of a language that one never chose, that one does not find as an instrument to be used, but that one is, as it were, used by, expropriated in, as the unstable and continuing condition of the “one” and the “we,” the ambivalent condition of the power that binds. (241–42)

58. Jane Austen, Persuasion (New York: Modern Library, 2001), 169. All further citations will appear parenthetically in the text. 59. Mansfield Park (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 131. Fanny Price’s famous declaration of inaction is of interest here since, like Anne, Fanny is similarly characterized as effective in her reserve and withdrawal—in her refusal to participate in the theatricality that is thematized throughout Mansfield Park. For interesting discussions of this subject, see William Galperin, “What Happens When Jane Austen and Frances Burney Enter the Romantic Canon?” Lessons of Romanticism, ed. Pfau and Gleckner, 378–82; David Marshall, “True Acting and the Language of Real Feeling: Mansfield Park,” Yale Journal of Criticism 3.1 (1989): 87–106; Joseph Litvak, “Theatricality in Mansfield Park,” ELH 53.2 (1986): 331–55. 60. For example, Stuart M. Tave remarks that “nobody hears Anne, nobody sees her, but it is she who is ever at the center. It is through her ears, eyes, and mind that we know most of what we know and that we are made to care for what is happening. If nobody is much aware of her, she is very much aware of everyone else and she perceives what is happening to them when they are ignorant of themselves” (Some Words of Jane Austen [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973], 256). For Ian Watt, Austen successfully represents the relationship between self and society: Jane Austen’s novels, in short, must be seen as the most successful solutions of the two general narrative problems for which Richardson and Fielding had provided only partial answers. She was able to combine into a harmonious unity the advantages both of realism of presentation and realism of assessment, of the internal and of the external approaches to character; her novels have authenticity without diffuseness or trickery, wisdom of social comment without a garrulous essayist, and a sense of the social order which is not achieved at the expense of the individuality and autonomy of the characters. (The Rise of the Novel [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001], 297)

61. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), 40. 62. Nicholas Dames, Amnesiac Selves: Nostalgia, Forgetting, and British Fiction, 1810–1870 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 68. 63. William Galperin, “Describing What Never Happened”: Jane Austen and the History of Missed Opportunities,” ELH 73 (Summer 2006): 357. Galperin goes on to remark perceptively that despite their frequent disaffection with things as they are, Austen’s narratives, with their remarkable attention to the vagaries of quotidian life, appear generally wedded to a probabilistic (as against a romantic or visionary) orientation in which any real apart from what has already happened is generally out of bounds. I am arguing, however, that this sense of the past is less an endorsement of precedent, or a subscription to the empirical logic of probability, than an orientation that inclines toward roman-

*3=:•=3•5:•164–167

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ticism in the way the past, as an index of what was also possible, operates alternately if all too briefly as a site of opportunity. (363)

See also See Claudia J. Brodsky’s remarks on the retrograde temporality of Persuasion, in The Imposition of Form: Studies in Narrative Representation and Knowledge (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987), 82–87. 64. Adela Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), 154. 65. Mary Favret, “Everyday War,” ELH 72 (Fall 2005): 605–33. 66. On this point, see Ann Gaylin, Eavesdropping in the Novel from Austen to Proust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 67. Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 245, 247. 68. Butler, Psychic Life, 186. 69. Anita Sokolsky, “The Melancholy Persuasion,” Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism, ed. Maud Ellmann (London: Longman, 1994), 141. I agree with much of Sokolsky’s essay, to which I am greatly indebted. 70. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter, with Carolyn Burke (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), 76. 71. Lionel Trilling, The Opposing Self: Nine Essays in Criticism (London: Secker and Warburg, 1955), 230. See also Leo Bersani’s brief discussion of Fanny Price, in “Realism and the Fear of Desire,” A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976), where he similarly notes that “Fanny is little more than an observant stillness [in opposition to the novel form’s libidinal movements], but because of that she is an excellent judge, and in this deceptively mild novel the structures of self and of society are so dangerously menaced that only the most vigilant judgment and sentencing of others can testify to the continued existence of moral principle” (77). In Terrible Sociability: The Text of Manners in Laclos, Goethe, and James (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993), Susan Winnett argues that the secularized problems of authority which arise in Austen’s narrative worlds underscore the degree to which a system of manners is incapable of regulating the world and enforcing a general morality that can tolerate minor infractions as the exceptions that prove the rule. In an economy of manners, conflicts and disruptions can be trusted to turn out relatively well for all concerned; the world always conspicuously and aggressively survives the calamities that afflict its members. In the economy of Austen’s novels, conflicts and disruptions can be made to turn out relatively well for any given protagonist, but they bespeak serious problems with the organization of the world that persist beyond the resolution of any personal dilemma. (33)

72. Trilling, Opposing Self, 228. 73. My argument amends the Foucauldian reading offered in Casey Finch and Peter Bowen, “ ‘The Tittle-Tattle of Highbury’: Gossip and Free Indirect Style in Emma,” Representations 31 (Summer 1990): 1–18, which suggests that the power of gossip as a discursive mode lies not so much in its reputation-building aspects as in its broader, more suggestive effects of turning narrative itself into the formal deployment of anonymous power: “almost total authority—a near epistemological

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*3=:•=3•5:•167–168

hegemony—is staged and enacted because its agency is either elided altogether or spread so thinly that it cannot ever be named as such. Ultimately, the irresistible force of public opinion expresses itself by anonymity, but an authority that is everywhere apparent but whose source is nowhere to be found” (15). I want to suggest that the anonymous authority of Persuasion, by contrast, is neither hegemonic nor powerfully controlling, but rather ethically supple and evaluative. To subscribe to such a model of abstract, hegemonic construction in the novel not only limits the content of what is being said but ignores the specificity of individual characters. As Frances Ferguson has remarked, Finch and Bowen’s argument depicts a superstructure that determines individuals at the expense of making “all the individuals who are part of [the social collective] look as if they ought to be relatively interchangeable.” The shift from a characterization of anonymous communication (gossip) between persons, to the explicit features of a theory of discourse that assimilates those persons’ actions to wider, more numinous forms of power, fails to account for the means of that shift: “What public psychology lacks is the ability to be self-conscious, which is not so much the ability to be accurate about one’s own statements and assessments . . . as the ability to see oneself as an interconnected whole” (“Jane Austen, Emma, and the Impact of Form,” Modern Language Quarterly 61 [March 2000]: 162, 163–64). In addition, see D. A. Miller, “Austen’s Attitude,” Yale Journal of Criticism 8.1 (1995): 1–5, where Miller argues that the demanding, anonymous voice of Austen’s fictions—a voice often equated with her epigrammatic moralizing—testifies to a culturally specific experience of social marginalization, one that Austen exposes and throws back upon her readers as a sign of her intelligence and disempowerment: Austen must be absent from her style as she is from her representation. Thus, even in posing her authorial body against a representation that literally has no room for it, she sacrifices the display of whatever quirks of desire or cathexis might specify this body as such. Only the tone-deaf (or the preternaturally attentive) would call Austen’s style a defense, when the defense is so much more thorough than it needs to be that it practically eliminates the category of someone to defend, and along with it, the category of something to defend him against. (4)

See Miller’s Jane Austen; or, The Secret of Style (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005), 68–74, for an incisive reflection on the “person” of Anne. 74. Dorrit Cohn, Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978), 29. 75. Deidre Lynch has pointed out that the novel’s central narrative—Anne and Wentworth’s courtship eight years ago—is something that remains narratively unrepresented: “This ‘little history of sorrowful interest’ is, in effect, off the record . . . participating in Anne’s point of view means being privy to another, secret story in a way that generates a constant awareness of the lacunae in what is being narrated” (The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998], 214). 76. As Andrew Miller has put it in “Perfectly Helpless,” Modern Language Quarterly 63 (March 2002): 65–88, Anne comes to us as “finished” in the sense that her

*3=:•=3•5:•168–175

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life is not so much developmentally produced by the novel as it is lost in the novel’s past—a circumstance that typifies a certain alienating effect on the part of literature to represent characters that are seemingly alive and legible while at the same time evoking them as merely disembodied, invisible inscriptions on the page. 77. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), 39. 78. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 31. 79. I follow here Redfield’s reading of Anderson, in Politics of Aesthetics, 53 ff. Although Anderson applies his remarks to a discussion of nationalism, one might also expand them in the direction of critiques of cross-cultural and international sympathies which are fostered by practices of novel reading. For the gendered implications of Anderson’s argument, see Margaret Cohen, “Sentimental Communities,” 106–32, and April Alliston, “Transnational Sympathies, Imaginary Communities,” 133–48, in The Literary Channel: The Inter-National Invention of the Novel, ed. Margaret Cohen and Carolyn Dever (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002). 80. Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt and trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1992), 97–98. 81. The novel, in other words, inaugurates “a new horizon of nostalgia,” as Dames calls it, which produces a “leavetaking of home [spurring] a series of further leavetakings; a trauma rooted in the memory is ameliorated, judged, and left behind; former mistakes are canceled, former times periodized and then ended, stopped with a mental period” (Amnesiac Selves, 71). 82. D. H. Lawrence, “A Propos of ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover,’ ” Lady Chatterley’s Lover, ed. Michael Squires, The Cambridge Edition of the Letters and Works of D. H. Lawrence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 332, 333. 83. See William Deresiewicz, “Community and Cognition in Pride and Prejudice,” ELH 64.2 (1997): 503–35, where he discusses how Elizabeth Bennett’s marriage, which affords her “the privilege of no longer having to live as a social among her intellectual (and now, moral) inferiors” (530), is achieved through Austen’s revision of the notion of community. 84. Denise Riley, “The Right to Be Lonely,” Impersonal Passion (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005), 49–58.

Coda: What Remains 1. Emmanuel Levinas, “The Poet’s Vision,” Proper Names, trans. Michael B. Smith (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), 134. 2. Jean-Luc Nancy, Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative, trans. Jason Smith and Steven Miller (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 55, 56. 3. Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), 149. 4. Sue Golding, “Curiosity,” The Eight Technologies of Otherness, ed. Sue Golding (New York: Routledge, 1997), 13.

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5. The Poems of John Keats, ed. Miriam Allott (London: Longman, 1970), 1.256– 71. 6. Emmanuel Levinas, Existence and Existents, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1978), 63, 64. 7. Percy Bysshe Shelley, “On Love,” Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York: Norton, 1977), 473. All further citations refer to this edition. 8. Personal communication, September 18, 2007. 9. R. Clifton Spargo, “Begging the Question of Responsibility: The Vagrant Poor in Wordsworth’s ‘Beggars’ and ‘Resolution and Independence,’ ” Studies in Romanticism 39 (Spring 2000): 79. 10. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004), 5. See also Edelman’s contribution to the roundtable debate on “The Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory” in PMLA 121.3 (May 2006): 819–28. 11. See David Collings, “The Ghost of Revolution: The Politics of the Uncanny in The Monk,” unpublished ms., English Department, Bowdoin College (2007), 14. This piece forms a chapter of his forthcoming study, itself a reflection on the power of the negative: Monstrous Society: Reciprocity, Discipline, and the Political Uncanny, c. 1780–1848 (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, forthcoming). 12. Forest Pyle, The Ideology of Imagination: Subject and Society in the Discourse of Romanticism (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995), 109, 110. 13. Paul de Man, “Shelley Disfigured,” The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 100. 14. Ibid., 117. For an incisive reading of de Man’s essay, see Orrin N. C. Wang, “Disfiguring Monuments: History in Paul de Man’s ‘Shelley Disfigured’ and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘The Triumph of Life,’ ” ELH 58.3 (Autumn 1991): 633–55. 15. On the question of romanticism and translation, see David L. Clark, “Lost and Found in Translation,” a special issue on “Romanticism and the Legacies of Jacques Derrida,” ed. David L. Clark, Studies in Romanticism 46 (Summer–Fall 2007): 161–82. 16. Referring to Rousseau’s account of the procession, Rajan notes that “as he speaks, Rousseau creates a space in which he can think and in which he can unravel not only his earlier radicalisms but also his present condemnation of himself for having entered life. It is specifically the diacritical nature of dialogue which causes it to unsettle and generate penumbrial positions, for the presence of the other person makes us recognize that we are other than what we are, and yet that we are not the other or the other’s perception of us” (The Supplement of Reading: Figures of Understanding in Romantic Theory and Practice [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990], 331). 17. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 159.

Index

Abraham, Nicolas, 155 Adams, Barry B., 191n44 Adorno, Theodor, 13, 49, 51–52, 54, 103, 124, 174–76, 185, 192n53, 198n50, 200–201n61, 209n20; Minima Moralia and, 13, 103; Negative Dialectics and, 174–75 aesthetics, 2, 6, 9–11, 14, 19, 21–24, 85, 99, 131, 175–76, 178, 180, 184; Burke and, 104, 106– 107; community and, 105; disinterest and, 26; Godwin and, 74, 93, 95; Keats and, 40–42, 47, 49, 58–64, 97; negation and, 52; the novel and, 170; Persuasion and, 161; Rousseau and, 71–73; Shelley and, 117, 119; Shelley (Mary) and, 152; sympathy and, 87, 100 Agamben, Giorgio, 22, 64, 97, 187n5 agency, 2–3, 7, 9, 11, 14–16, 23, 103, 135, 139; Godwin and, 83; Hazlitt and, 26, 29, 32, 34, 36; Keats and, 41, 49, 55–56; the literary and, 43; Rousseau and, 70–71; Shelley and, 99; Shelley (Mary) and, 152; Smith and, 112 Alighieri, Dante, 19, 124–25 alterity, 2, 9, 11, 23, 36, 40, 98, 106, 180; female melancholic and, 136; Keats and, 59–60, 63–64, 97; poetry and, 49; Rousseau and, 71; subjectivity and, 26; sympathy and, 99, 121. See also “otherness” Anderson, Amanda, 219n11 Anderson, Benedict, 161, 169, 229n79 anonymity, 2–9, 14, 17–24, 99, 108, 138–40, 174– 75, 177, 179, 184–85, 192nn58–59; aesthetics of, 28; Austen and, 164, 167, 170–71; colonization and, 35; community and, 34; disinterest and, 26; female subject and, 136, 139, 143, 159; Godwin and, 73–74, 76–78, 83–85, 89, 92–95; Hazlitt and, 32–34, 36–37, 40–41; Hume and, 87–88, 103; imagination and, 33; Keats and, 49; Matilda and, 159; melancholy and, 140; Persuasion and, 160–61, 164, 166–67, 169–71; Rousseau and, 68–73; Shelley and, 124; Shelley (Mary) and, 134–35; Smith and, 110, 114; sublime and, 109; sympathy and, 101;

Wollstonecraft and, 143, 146, 149–51; writing and, 63 Appiah, Anthony, 36 Armstrong, Nancy, 72–73 associationism, 141–43, 150 Austen, Jane, 3, 8, 17, 135–36, 138–40, 160–70, 226nn59–60, 227n71, 228n73; Mansfield Park and, 160, 167; Persuasion and, 135, 138, 140, 160–70 Baier, Annette, 102 Balfour, Ian, 125, 188n15, 216n74 Bauman, Zygmunt, 188n16 Belitt, Ben, 25, 63 Bender, John, 93 Benjamin, Walter, 64, 125, 164, 169–70 Bennett, Andrew, 212n46, 215n71, 221–22n23 Bergson, Henri, 177 Bersani, Leo, 9, 202n75, 227n71 Bildung, 37, 46, 89, 137 Blanchot, Maurice, 1, 9, 22–23, 46, 49, 55, 62, 73, 173–74, 177, 184, 214–15n67 Blasing, Mutlu, 55, 199n50, 200n55 Boltanski, Luc, 211n35 Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel, 108 Bowen, Peter, 227–28n73 Braidotti, Rosa, 223n30 Bromwich, David, 26–27 Brooks, Cleanth, 201n62 Brooks, Peter, 168 Brown, Marshall, 52 Burke, Edmund, 98–100, 103–109, 115, 120, 123– 24, 128, 209n22, 210n26, 210n28, 211–12n43; A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful and, 98, 103–108 Burton, Robert, 138 Butler, Judith, 5, 139, 143, 166, 221n21, 225–26n57 Cameron, Sharon, 4, 201n63 Caputo, John D., 189n23

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#*E

Carlson, Julie, 152 Caruth, Cathy, 217n78 Cavell, Stanley, 17–19, 21, 54, 139, 156, 221n22 character, 153–54, 168; female, 140, 145; Godwin and, 74, 76, 78, 83, 94–95; impersonality of, 39; Keats and, 48; poetical, 1–2, 41, 45–46, 56 Chase, Cynthia, 48, 70 Christensen, Jerome, 7, 102, 188n17, 205n34, 206n41 Clark, David L., 230n15 Cohn, Dorrit, 167 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 16, 19–22, 173, 175, 193n8; “Constancy to an Ideal Object” and, 20–22; The Friend and, 20; “Limbo” and, 19–22, 175 Cole, Steven E., 16 Collings, David A., 180, 211–12n43 consciousness, 6–7, 11–12, 20, 27, 41, 112, 157, 174; female, 141, 145, 160; Godwin and, 78; Hazlitt and, 29; industry and, 49; Keats and, 45–46, 50–51, 54–55, 57–58; poetry and, 40; romantic model of, 83; Shelley and, 117; selfconsciousness, 137 Corngold, Stanley, 71 Cosgrove, Peter, 210nn27–28 Culler, Jonathan, 119 Curran, Stuart, 221n23 Dames, Nicholas, 164, 229n81 Dawson, P.M.S., 123, 218n81 dead, the, 112–15, 126, 173–74, 176; Keats and, 62; Matilda and, 153–54, 159; Shelley and, 120; Smith and, 113–15; textual death, 48 De Bolla, Peter, 114 Deleuze, Gilles, 2, 13, 102, 174, 181, 196n26 delight, 105–106 De Man, Paul, 10–11, 71, 98, 119–20, 179–81, 183–84, 214n62 depersonalization, 3–4, 28 De Quincey, Thomas, 24 Deresiewicz, William, 229n83 Derrida, Jacques, 40, 125, 129, 155, 196–97n30, 198n48, 215–16n72 Dickinson, Emily, 1 disinterest, 5, 8, 39–43, 97, 112, 170, 193n2; ethics and, 42; Hazlitt and, 27, 29, 35, 40–41; Keats and, 51, 56; Persuasion and, 162; the poet and, 46; politics of, 26. See also interest dispossession, 3, 10–11, 16, 18, 103, 106–107, 125, 138, 176, 185; ethics of, 135–36, 139; female, 147; Godwin and, 90–91; Hazlitt and, 32; Keats and, 44, 61; Matilda and, 157; Persuasion and, 160, 164, 170; Rousseau and, 73; Smith and, 113; Wollstonecraft and, 151 Dutoit, Ulysse, 202n75 Dwyer, John, 210n30 Eagleton, Terry, 210n28 Edelman, Lee, 178–80

Edgeworth, Maria, 136 Eliot, T.S., 3, 192n59 Ellison, Julie, 9, 113, 134, 205n35, 223n30 Enlightenment, 6, 9, 26, 69, 93, 110, 123, 136, 138–39, 160, 180, 184 Enzenberger, Hans, 42 ethics, 2–7, 9–10, 14, 17–19, 21–24, 85, 99, 121, 131, 175–76, 178, 184, 188n17, 191n46; anonymity and, 40; Burke and, 106; disinterest and, 28–29, 42; dispossession and, 135–36, 139; Godwin and, 76; Hazlitt and, 26–27, 32, 37; Hume and, 103; Keats and, 41, 45, 59, 62, 64; lyric and, 51; melancholy and, 166; nothingness and, 167; the novel and, 170; poetics of, 33; Persuasion and, 160–61, 168; Rousseau and, 69, 73; sentiments and, 110; Shelley and, 120; Shelley (Mary) and, 152; subjectivity and, 26; sublimity and, 108; sympathy and, 100, 107; Wollstonecraft and, 151 Favret, Mary, 165 feeling, 35, 49, 70–71, 73, 91, 102–103, 108, 111 Ferguson, Frances, 190n40, 210n26, 223n33, 228n73 Ferry, Anne, 4 figurality, 72 Finch, Casey, 227–28n73 Fisher, Philip, 157 Flesch, William, 199n52, 217n76 formalism, 43, 74–75, 79, 85, 93 Forster, E.M., 23–24 Foucault, Michel, 23, 67, 94–95, 192n58, 208n8, 216n72 Fradenburg, Louise O., 202n73 François, Anne-Lise, 156, 190n36 French Revolution, 84, 150 Freud, Sigmund, 92, 136, 138–39, 157, 165–66 Fry, Paul, 198–99n50 Furniss, Tom, 209n24 future, 98, 103, 114–15, 118, 122–23, 125, 149, 151–52, 211n43; female subject and, 143–44; Hazlitt and, 32, 36; Persuasion and, 164, 166; Shelley and, 120–21, 129; Smith and, 113; subjectivity and, 33, 40; Utilitarianism and, 31. See also temporality Gallagher, Catherine, 35, 87–88 Galperin, William, 164, 226–27n63 gender, 3, 113, 134, 144, 200n54, 221–22nn21–24, 222–23nn28–33, 229n79; femininity and, 136, 139, 144; Hazlitt and, 36; Keats and, 54; melancholic skepticism and, 138–39; Wollstonecraft’s feminism, 152 George, Stefan, 52 Gibbons, Luke, 106, 112 Godwin, William, 3, 17, 67, 73–85 passim, 88–95 passim, 122, 153–55, 204n19, 205n29; Caleb Williams and, 73–82 passim, 91–94, 155, 204n19; Enquiry Concerning Political Justice

#*E (1793) and, 74–75, 83, 88–90, 93; “Of History and Romance” and, 81–82, 153–54 Gold, Alex, 91 Golding, Sue, 175 Goldsmith, Steven, 217n80 Grossman, Allen, 202n72 Guattari, Félix, 196n26 Habermas, Jürgen, 89 Hacking, Ian, 101 Halliday, Mark, 202n72 Halpern, Richard, 198n50 Hart, Kevin, 199n50 Hartley, David, 142 Hartman, Geoffrey, 56 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 25 Hazlitt, William, 3, 6–8, 17, 26–41 passim, 44–45, 48–49, 51, 58, 98, 116–17, 131, 152, 177, 193n9, 194n13, 195–96n21; Essay on the Principles of Human Action and, 26–37 passim, 39–41, 48–49, 98, 193n9; “On the Knowledge of Character” and, 36–37; “On Living To One’sSelf ” and, 44; “On Personal Identity” and, 38, 45–46; “On Reason and Imagination” and, 37–38; “Self-Love and Benevolence” and, 33 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 12, 17, 61, 137, 174 Heidegger, Martin, 214n64 Henderson, Andrea K., 154, 225n53 Hertz, Neil, 120 history, 10–14, 22, 121, 125, 183; Godwin and, 153–55; Persuasion and, 164. See also New Historicism Hoffmann, E.T.A., 75 Hogle, Jerrold E., 77, 117 Hohne, Horst, 216n74 Holcroft, Thomas, 81 Horowitz, Gregg M., 64, 203n81 Huhn, Tom, 209n22 Hume, David, 17, 30, 34–35, 37, 85–88, 92, 98– 103, 106, 109, 115, 137–38, 141, 205n34; Treatise of Human Nature and, 98, 100–102, 137–38 identity, 3, 6–7, 9–10, 13–15, 17, 21–22, 47, 84, 100–103, 139, 176; anonymity of, 27; disinterest and, 26; Godwin and, 74–75, 78, 82–83; Hazlitt and, 29, 31–32, 34–36, 38, 40, 45; Keats and, 45–46, 54, 56, 64; Matilda and, 153; melancholy and, 141; novels and, 169; poetics of, 185; politics of, 75, 94, 179; Rousseau and, 67; self-interest and, 39; Shelley and, 99, 116; skepticism and, 150; temporality of, 157; Wollstonecraft and, 149. See also nonidentity imagination, 17, 24, 27, 33, 101, 109, 147; Hazlitt and, 28, 41; Hume and, 86–87; Matilda and, 158; Shelley and, 98, 117; Smith and, 113–14; Utilitarianism and, 29 Imlay, Gilbert, 147, 150 impartial spectator, 110–12

 ™™

impersonality, 3–5, 14, 27, 39, 89, 192n59, 202n75 Inchbald, Elizabeth, 136 interest, 32, 113, 115, 193n2; Hazlitt and, 38–39; self-interest, 29, 34, 38–39, 49, 99, 102, 114, 167–68. See also disinterest interiority, 6–8, 37, 40, 46, 56, 69, 71, 89, 103, 105, 157, 165 Irigaray, Luce, 167 Jacobus, Mary, 136, 145, 150 Jaffe, Audrey, 204n17, 211n34 Jewett, William, 14 Johnson, Barbara, 222n23 Johnson, Claudia L., 144 Johnson, Samuel, 48 Kant, Immanuel, 5–6, 26 Kaufman, Robert, 123, 200–201n61, 215n68 Keach, William, 178 Keats, John, 1–2, 8, 10, 17, 28, 40–65 passim, 82, 85, 97, 162, 165, 173, 175–80, 198n48, 199– 200n54, 200–201n61; “La Belle Dame sans Merci” and, 52–55; The Fall of Hyperion and, 60–62, 64, 176–77, 179–80; “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” and, 59; Letters and, 1–2, 41, 44–46, 56, 199–200n54; “Ode on Indolence” and, 49–51, 58; “The Ode to Melancholy” and, 61; “Ode to a Nightingale” and, 57–58; “Ode to Psyche” and, 56–57; Sleep and Poetry and, 44; “Sleep and Poetry” and, 59; “To Autumn” and, 50, 55–56, 165; “When I Have Fears” and, 47–48 Keenan, Thomas, 207–208n8 Kelly, Gary, 81 Kermode, Frank, 62, 202n76, 206n39 Kiely, Robert, 94 Klancher, Jon, 82–83 Krapp, John, 222n28 Kristeva, Julia, 136, 155 Kuchich, Greg, 222n23 Lacan, Jacques, 122 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 21, 222–23n28 Lamb, Charles, 78 Lawrence, D.H., 170 Leavis, F.R., 117 Lepenies, Wolf, 220n18 Levinas, Emmanuel, 2, 9, 19, 173, 177, 189n23, 195n19 Levinson, Marjorie, 12–13, 42, 213–14n62 Liu, Alan, 15–16, 43, 135, 189n26, 190–91n42, 224n38 Locke, John, 31, 142–43, 193n10 Lockhart, John Gibson, 59 Lockridge, Laurence S., 193n9 love, 91–92, 118–19, 147, 178 Lynch, Deidre Shauna, 39, 228n75 lyric, 20, 42, 47, 51–52, 58, 164, 184, 198n50; and Matilda, 159

 ™k

#*E

Marshall, David, 99, 111 McGann, Jerome, 10–13, 42, 120, 214n62 melancholy, 5, 11, 20, 112, 134–46 passim, 148–53, 156–70 passim, 175, 220n14, 220n18, 224n44; anonymity and, 140; female melancholic, 135–36, 138–40, 142–43, 148, 159, 161; gender and, 139; masculinity and, 144–45; Matilda and, 152, 156–58; Persuasion and, 161–70; skeptical thought and, 135, 138–39; Wollstonecraft and, 152 Mellor, Anne K., 221n23 Mieszkowski, Jan, 39, 114 Miller, Andrew, 170, 228–29n76 Miller, D.A., 228n73 Milton, John, 105, 124 modernity, 9, 23–24, 93, 140, 164, 170, 185, 189n24 Mozes, Daniel, 156 Mullan, John, 109 Muybridge, Eadweard, 15 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 21, 32, 118–19, 174 “negative capability,” 1, 13, 28, 42, 44, 47, 56, 58, 85, 97, 162, 175 negativity, 120, 135–36, 166, 173–76, 178–80, 183–84, 198n48, 202n75; Keats and, 48, 51, 61, 62–64; melancholy and, 157; Shelley and, 119, 130 New Historicism, 10–14, 22, 42–43, 120, 189n29, 213–14n62. See also history nonidentity, 3–5, 12, 14, 23, 103, 126, 175, 178. See also identity “nothingness,” 5, 17, 23, 116, 139, 177–78, 184; ethics and, 167; Hazlitt and, 35; Keats and, 51, 55, 57–59; Persuasion and, 166; Shelley and, 99, 130–31 novel, the, 81, 140, 167–70 “otherness,” 9–11, 14, 20, 24, 36, 40, 95, 98, 104, 106, 108, 112, 132, 137, 178, 191n45; Hazlitt and, 39; Hume and, 101; Keats and, 49, 54, 59, 61–62; lyric and, 58; Matilda and, 155; poetry and, 122; Shelley and, 99, 123; Smith and, 113. See also alterity Paine, Thomas, 123 Palmer, Michael, 132, 218–19n82 paranoia, 5, 89, 92, 206n39 Parfit, Derek, 34, 67, 194–95n17 passivity, 16, 49, 107, 112 Peacock, Thomas Love, 123 periodization, 8 personification, 10–11, 49–50, 55, 189n29 Pfau, Thomas, 6, 12, 74, 220n14 Pinch, Adela, 164, 205n34 Pocock, J.G.A., 101, 194n16 “poet,” 1–2, 8, 49, 98, 118, 121, 131, 180, 182, 184; Keats and, 41, 45–47, 82, 162; negative capability and, 42; Shelley and, 122–23

politics, 2–3, 5, 9–11, 14, 22–24, 85, 98–99, 112, 121, 125, 131, 184; disinterest and, 26; Godwin and, 73–76, 93–95; the novel and, 170; Shelley and, 118–19; subjectivity and, 26; sympathy and, 100 Poovey, Mary, 147 Prins, Yopie, 221–22n23 property, 30, 37–39, 49, 68, 85, 99–103, 109, 208–209n17, 223n33 prophecy, 121, 124–25, 129, 215n68 Pyle, Forest, 62, 180, 201n71, 212n45, 215n72 queer, 179 Quine, W.V., 122 Quinney, Laura, 213n56 Radcliffe, Ann, 136 Rajan, Tilottama, 19, 55, 61, 135, 155, 157, 198n50, 217n80, 224n37, 230n16 Redfield, Marc, 99, 104, 118, 209n23, 212–13n51, 229n79 Reiss, Timothy, 223n33 relationality, 3, 9, 14, 18, 22–23, 49, 73, 166, 177–78, 184 representation, 22, 73 Richardson, James Everett, 193n5 Richetti, John J., 220n16 Ricoeur, Paul, 152 Riley, Denise, 14, 151, 171, 224n41 Rimbaud, Arthur, 45 Rorty, Richard, 207n7 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 4, 17, 67–75 passim, 78, 85, 91, 149, 181–84, 230n16; Reveries of the Solitary Walker and, 67–73 passim, 91, 149; Shelley and, 181–84 Rzepka, Charles, 7 Schor, Esther, 114 sentimentalism, 100, 102, 108, 110, 136, 148, 152 Shakespeare, William, 45, 105 Shelley, Mary, 8, 133–36, 138–40, 152–60, 177; Matilda and, 135, 140, 152–60 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 2, 8–9, 11, 17, 21–22, 85, 98–100, 115–32 passim, 140, 175, 177–78, 180–84; A Defence of Poetry and, 2, 97–98, 116–117, 121–124, 129, 131; “England in 1819” and, 8–9; “On Life” and, 100, 115; “On Love” and, 118, 177–78; Prometheus Unbound and, 98, 125–31; “A Refutation of Deism” and, 121; “The Triumph of Life” and, 180–84 Siskin, Clifford, 82 skepticism, 3, 135, 137–39, 141, 145–46, 159; female, 149; Matilda and, 156–57; performance of identity and, 150; Persuasion and, 160–62, 166 Smith, Adam, 17–18, 34–35, 98–100, 109–15, 120, 123, 127, 145–46, 211n39; and A Theory of Moral Sentiments, 98, 109–12, 145 sociality, 13, 26, 52, 69–70, 92, 101, 119, 174, 177–80, 182

#*E Sokolsky, Anita, 166, 227n69 Spargo, R. Clifton, 178, 195n21 Spenser, Edmund, 158 Stewart, Susan, 52–53, 199n52 subjectivity, 1–3, 6–11, 14, 16–20, 22–24, 41, 84, 95, 97, 103, 122–26, 174, 176–77, 179–80, 182–83, 188n15, 196n26; belatedness of, 149, 154, 157; Burke and, 108; constitution of, 37; depth model of, 154; disinterest and, 26; dispossession of, 101; female, 135–36, 140–47, 151, 153, 155, 160; Godwin and, 74, 76, 78, 84, 93; Hazlitt and, 31, 34, 39–40; Keats and, 44, 51, 56; Matilda and, 155; melancholic, 138, 140, 149; poetry and, 131; Rousseau and, 70–73; Shelley and, 98–100, 115–16, 118, 124, 129; sublimity and, 106; Utilitarianism and, 29 sublime, 20, 99, 104–109, 204n19, 209n24 Swann, Karen, 214n62, 222n24 sympathy, 5, 34–35, 114–15, 119–23, 131–32, 140, 145–58 passim, 208n9, 209n24, 211n34, 215n68; Burke and, 104, 106–108; alterity and, 121; ethics and, 107; Godwin and, 153; Hazlitt and, 38; Hume and, 85–88, 106; Keats and, 41, 44, 47, 49; Matilda and, 156–58; Persuasion and, 162, 165; politics and, 120; Shelley and, 98–100, 117, 123, 128; Smith and, 99–100, 109–110, 112, 114, 127, 145–46; sublimity and, 107; Utilitarianism and, 29; Wollstonecraft and, 145–46 Taussig, Michael, 69, 76 Tave, Stuart M., 226n60 Taylor, Charles, 31, 194n13 temporality, 125–26; anachronism and, 7; identity and, 157; Persuasion and, 164, 168; subjectivity and, 6, 15, 30–31, 41, 51, 143. See also future Terada, Rei, 35

 ™g

Tiffany, Daniel, 199n50 Todorov, Tzvetan, 211n39 Torok, Maria, 155 translation, 184 trauma, 108, 129, 165 Trilling, Lionel, 59, 167 Utilitarianism, 17, 27, 29–32, 98, 109, 195–96n21 Vermeule, Blakey, 103, 205n34, 220n16 virtuality, 27, 33, 42, 101 Wall, Thomas, 2 Watt, Ian, 226n60 Weisman, Karen A., 127 Westermann, Claus, 129 White, Deborah Elise, 28, 35, 212n50 Winnett, Susan, 227n71 Wolfe, Cary, 221n22 Wolfson, Susan J., 199n52, 221n23 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 4, 123, 135–36, 138–53 passim, 155, 158–60, 166, 179, 223n33; A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark and, 135, 140, 147–52; Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787) and, 140, 143; A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and, 135, 140–41, 144–47, 149–50, 152 Wood, Gordon S., 206n39 Woolf, Virginia, 3, 192n58 Wordsworth, William, 4, 7–8, 10–15, 48, 56, 147–48, 159, 205n29; egotism and, 44, 46; “Essays Upon Epitaphs” and, 48; Lyrical Ballads and, 10; The Prelude and, 7–8, 10–12, 15; The Recluse and, 7 worklessness, 55, 173 Žižek, Slavoj, 31, 130, 147, 203n4